Scripting the Wilderness

Journal of American Studies of Turkey 30 (2009): 57-72 Scripting the Wilderness Wendy Harding The literature of place poses the problem of writing about what is beyond the self—and therefore beyond the immediate range of human experience— through the filter of human consciousness. This conundrum is most acutely felt in writing about wilderness, which, in the context of American culture, is generally conceived of as “an area where the earth and community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”1 The perplexity of the writer faced with the challenge of writing about a place where, by definition, he does not belong can be felt in the title of Don Scheese’s essay “The Inhabited Wilderness.” This brief text about a hike into Hammond Canyon in Utah shows how a particular writer responds to the challenge; at the same time, it challenges readers to find ways of responding to texts about place, a genre to which the usual critical methods are not adapted.2 The present study offers a close reading of Scheese’s “The Inhabited Wilderness” as an example of a new interpretative model designed to respond to the literature of place.3 Like others of its genre this text departs from a prior experience that is personal and irrecoverable and creates a new literary space made of words. The text is a montage of what I call “scripts” proposing different responses to and interpretations of the land. Scheese’s account of a solitary hike in the Manti-La Sal National Forest plunges readers into a time and place—an August afternoon in the Utah wilderness—in which quotidian concerns seem to be suspended. Is Scheese appealing to readerly fantasies of escape? This seems unlikely given the firmly stated terms of the text’s conclusion: “Ruins are the bones of the past, to which we return again and again, seeking answers to the most profound inquiries about human existence” (352). Unlike escapist travel literature, the essay 1 The definition comes from the Wilderness Act of 1964, Section 2 (c). 2 Scott Slovic considers this problem in Going Away to Think. Responding to Terry Tempest Williams’s question about what ecocritics do, he suggests that beyond specific narratives, critics can engage in the work of “contextualization and synthesis” (34). 3 I am indebted to Jacky Martin for his invaluable contribution to my investigation of these questions. Wendy Harding asks readers to consider weighty ontological issues. Still it does not feel like a philosophical meditation. On the contrary, it issues a compelling invitation to consider places, cultures and concepts as if they formed a coherent landscape to visit and contemplate vicariously. At the same time, the text is neither an anthropological nor a geographical study. Rather than recounting a systematic exploration of either space or time, the writer ranges freely through different moments, places, and cultures. Fragments or flights of thought, held together by idiosyncratic principles, cohere around a speaking subject. How does the text interest readers in the exploration of places that they have never visited, make them empathize with cultures long departed, and then acquiesce to a series of vaguely discordant concepts? To try to answer these questions by adopting a detached critical stance is to risk failing to understand the text’s particular aesthetic choices and its persuasive force. To follow the text’s development, to remain close enough to it to respect its particular continuity and coherence, this study adopts the hypothesis that, like numerous examples of the nonfictional literature of place, Scheese’s essay deploys various scripts that readers can trace and take up. The term “scripting” highlights the choices writers make, as well as the effect their selectivity has on readers. It offers an alternative to the concept of representation, which is problematic because it implies that the writer can observe external objects and in turn exhibit them to another observer, the reader, through the medium of words. Scripts organize in textual form a montage of events, places, people and ideas that have occurred or are imagined to occur in real-life circumstances. In the particular case of the literature of place,4 scripts trace mental geographies in which references to actual places are fertilized by a human response, and conversely, mental activity is fashioned by its inscription in non-human settings.5 Scripts are multi-faceted: they refer to the external world and the speaker’s internal experience; they straddle referential and textual space, pointing back to past events and creating new encounters for readers in the future. Rather than splitting the representing subject from the represented object, the notion of scripting emphasizes the interaction between inside and outside. Scripting place is very different from either mapping or narrating it, although these functions may be evoked in scripts. Maps evoke places through the application of orthogonal coordinates to an empirical simulation of a particular 4 The generalizations made in this study concern a corpus that has proved difficult to classify, as Lyon has shown in This Incomperable Land. 5 The origin of the notion of scripts as mental geographies is suggested by Alison Deming’s perception of her writings as “geographic and mental habitats located on the borders of change” (Deming 10). 58 Scripting the Wilderness terrain. Scripts may refer to traditional maps, but they gear that evocation to different objectives. Things that are important in maps—landmarks, routes, or topography—receive less attention than the uncharted spaces, the dead ends, the accidents, the encounters, or the epiphenomenal features that catch the observer’s eye but escape the cartographer’s notice. Scripts transform impersonal maps into humanized places. Scripts may also evoke stories; nevertheless, their relationship to narrative is far from being straightforward.6 Stories are fundamentally concerned with evolution in time, and conventionally they move from an initial situation toward a resolution. Scripts are less concerned with origins or closure; they develop in rhizomatic formations. Though they do not ignore the element of time, they often uncover the past in fragmentary form. In contrast to cartographers and storytellers, scriptors organize impressions about space and time into configurations of tension and interaction in order to produce concerted effects. One of the scripts in “The Inhabited Wilderness,” refers to the hike that the author took in the Utah backcountry, but it cannot be read as either a guide to the terrain or a simple description of events. The trajectory is endowed with its own empiric logic: a walker decides to explore a little-known canyon to discover an Anasazi cliff dwelling and eventually returns to the trailhead. Yet the scripts that start from this referential basis are not only multiple but also widely divergent in empirical terms. Their fu (...truncated)