Space Art

“The land of the heart is the land of the West.”

Catholic readers of American literature have always recognized that the difference between Eastern and Western fiction is the difference between New Canaan, Connecticut, and Tuba City, Arizona. A. Carl Bredahl’s book is a comprehensive as well as original attempt at defining the nature, of that difference, which has appeared so obvious as to require no definition at all.

Professor Bredahl states his thesis forthrightly: “[M]y argument . . . is that the effort to stretch language, subject, and form characterize many of the works created by America’s western writers. As individuals who value surface, these writers create works that offer a corrective and a balance to postmodern despair, ff we mistakenly assume that the traditional canon, as maintained in college reading lists and anthologies from the major eastern publishers, fully describes the American imagination, we miss a significant aspect of our culture”—as represented by such writers as Mary Austin, Sherwood Andersen, Ernest Hemingway, A.B. Guthrie, Jr., Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Harvey Fergusson, Wright Morris, and Ivan Deig. The extent to which these artists have been neglected or condescended to by the sodality exactly measures the degree to which American academics have yet to discover America.

The American literary tradition—”Edenic in the South, nationalistic in the North”—is signally concerned with questions of “enclosure”—that is to say, with “the problems and possibilities inherent in the act of intellectually enclosing wilderness.” Charles Olsen, in Call Me Ishmael (1947), began with the statement: “I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy.” In spite—or-perhaps because of—that fact, American writers (Bredahl claims) historically have been distrustful of space, made nervous by the continental wilderness lying about and beyond them. The act of literary enclosure has served as their defense against that wilderness, using mind to wall off ideas and social institutions transplanted from the Old World against threatening New World forces: “While a troubled fascination with enclosure generated many of America’s greatest works, its assumptions came so to dominate our expectations that we frequently fail to appreciate literary expressions that do not define themselves through enclosure. These other works, it seems to me, develop out of fascination rather than discomfort with space and therefore present significantly different narrative and structural demands.”

Although the Southern tradition in American letters has usually been regarded as the representation of physicality over intellect, and nature over urbanization, Bredahl makes the case for both Northern and Southern literature holding in common the idea of the New World as a “physical and spiritual haven” in which Old World ideas on the one hand, and gentility on the other, require defense against native chaos. It was only with the settlement of the Great Plains and, later, of the Far West that these habits of enclosure were broken by the new kind of writer which that settlement produced. “Confronting an environment of extravagant size, weather, and configuration, the western imagination had to discard assumptions of imposing self and enclosing landscape, efforts that in the West met inevitably with disaster.”

Having laid the theoretical ground of his argument, Bredahl proceeds to demonstrate how Midwestern and Western writers like Hemingway, Anderson, Hamlin Garland, Willa Gather, Gad Sandburg, and Ole Rolvaag display in their works their fascination with the space in which they grew up and which they do not therefore find intimidating: also how, like the writer and adventurer Lewis Garrard (Wahte-yah and the Taos Trail, 1850), they are open to the experience of a world that they are prepared to accept on its own terms, without the interposition of Old World perceptions. If Ernest Hemingway is sneered at in the purviews of contemporary Eastern criticism and of the academy, it is, Bredahl suggests, because he is (and has been for years) widely regarded as something he was not—namely, a writer of loss and of the Lost Generation—rather than recognized for what he was: a writer who explored, as Nick Adams does in In Our Time, the possibility for possibilities beyond the old cultural confines, and whose A Farewell to Arms may (perhaps should) be read as quite literally a pretext for the last paragraph, in which Frederic Henry walks away in the rain to begin a new life. In the works of Hemingway, as in these of his regional confrères, there is no tension between structure and wilderness, but a strong inclination to move away from, or beyond, that tension.

The chapter on Anderson and Mary Austin, followed immediately by that on Hemingway, triggered the question for me: are we talking about Westernism here, or about modernism? Did these Midwestern and Western writers of the early 20th century invent an approach to writing that seemed briefly to be the inevitable future way but that was shortly abandoned by their (mainly Eastern) successors in favor of a much more self-consciously intellectual, cosmopolitan, and politicized alternative?

It seems to me that there is much evidence to support this conclusion. An important component of literary modernism was the determination to cut through the artificialities and encumbrances of civilization to more primitive values and states of mind than had (presumably) prevailed in Western culture for some hundreds of years; and thus to liberate the artist from illusions of spirituality fostered by organized religion, while renewing his sense of himself as a creature wholly belonging to the natural world. Similarly, “In the western or midwestern imagination” (according to Bredahl) “one must begin with the physical because the body is not seen as a corpus, a container for an essential spirit, but as a locus, the matrix of life.” In his brilliant discussion of Green Hills of Africa, Bredahl invites us to observe how “[t]he narrator cuts loose from enclosures that separate an individual from his environment and seeks to grow with those patterns inherent in the natural world.” And, after noting that “It is finished” is the book’s first spoken line of text, Bredahl remarks significantly that these words are “general enough to permit reference to more than just the hunt or the engine of Kandinsky’s truck. Also finished is a way of life, one that is intellectual, European, and Christian.” (My italics).

Repeatedly in his explication of these selected Western stories, Bredahl insists upon their essential paganism, their uninterest in ideas, their essential materialism. “Breaking through artificial, enclosing constructs and establishing contact with the energy of” living processes is the story of western and mid-western writers,” he says. ” . . . An easterner might tell a similar story [similar, that is, to that of Guthrie’s The Big Sky] but his would be one of conflicting ideas. . . . [Doig] is not writing a history, trying to get his facts correct; nor is he trying to transcend the physical world through the symbol. Instead, Doig’s world has solidity, as conveyed by verbs that appeal to the senses . . . and by descriptions that make nature an’ active, physical force . . . ” while Harvey Fergusson’s The Conquest of Don Pedro is centrally informed by “the discovery that space and the rhythms of the natural world are more demanding than the desire to enclose and seek protection from change.”

Professor Bredahl, it seems to me, has done an admirable job in pointing up the tremendous strengths inherent in Western American literature, while paradoxically failing to recognize—and, therefore, to suggest—how it has yet to fulfill its potential. The South achieved letters after losing a war, and doubtless the future holds in store tragedies and dislocations for this newest, freshest, and most innocent portion of the Republic’s anatomy that will eventually instill in it a commensurate sense of loss and thus serve to deepen its literary expression. More importantly, though, it is necessary for Western literature to work itself out of that superficial naturalism inherited from its modernist infancy. The American West, whose immense and surreal landforms are the geologic approximation of eternity, provides the artist with the ideal backdrop to the puny but spiritually significant activities of its few and sparsely arranged human groupings. It is possessed of an as yet largely ignored poetic structure that recedes indefinitely before the viewer, as far and farther than the farthest-seeing eye can see. The South found its truest poet only decades ago, in the person of Flannery O’Connor; but then, as the old woman remarks of the monks of old to Mr. Shiftlet in “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,”. “They wasn’t as advanced as we are.” We in the West will find, I venture to guess, our own true poet soon enough.

[New Ground: Western American Narrative and the Literary Canon, by A. Carl Bredahl (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press) 192 pp., $24.95]