The Spell Cast by Remains

The Myth of Wilderness in Modern American Literature

Patricia Ross

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781135505035
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

First published in 2006. Examining the constituting mechanism of the American wilderness myth in Modern American literature, Patricia Ross probes the various purposes for which 'wilderness' is constructed. Considering the work of Hemingway, Faulkner, and Cather, she states that the idea of wilderness is just that, an idea, and not a real entity or something that deserves to be wasted in the chasm of deconstruction. Discovering how literature can help us to understand how we can exert causative control of the myths we create about ourselves, this book is an important contribution to the field.

Part One

The Death of “Wilderness”

Chapter One

Lamenting the Last Good Country: The Hemingway Script of the American Wilderness

“Every word true!”

Buffalo Bill

By the time Ernest Hemingway published In Our Time in 1925, the material entity of the American wilderness was long gone. That fact, however, does not stop him from seeing the myth of wilderness as literal, something real and unquestioningly true. In Our Time is a collection of stories primarily about the horrors of World War I, both physical and psychological, but it represents Hemingway’s first expression of how important the idea of wilderness is. For Hemingway, “wilderness” is a perfect signification, a universalized, ahistorical idea through which his disillusioned war heroes are able to find some solace, make some sense of the chaos they have just experienced. It is a perfect signification because “wilderness” in Hemingway never simply represents a pastoral escape from the massive amounts of death at the hands of dehumanized killing machines. Part of the escape that nature offers is the ability to overcome it. It is the perfect signification because the “tragic” impulse to master nature is always working against the pastoral impulse to merge with it (Putnam 99). It is a timeless scenario that Hemingway uses again and again with an almost blind faith in the veracity of its claims. By surmounting the wild part of wilderness, Hemingway’s heroes are able to put some order back into chaos, and “wilderness” thus enables man to reassert the proper order of the universe.

That Hemingway is a huge proponent of “wilderness” is nowhere better expressed than in his infamous “code hero.”¹ Through this figure, Hemingway is able to imbue all the virtues inherent in the myth of wilderness. Hemingway’s heroes need wilderness, or something approximating it, in order to attempt the pinnacle of the Hemingway hero, the “grace under pressure” dictum when facing death. Hemingway unquestioningly orders his fiction through the myth of wilderness. Any and all mythic signifiers and forms which could be imbued with “wildernessity” in a Hemingway text are co-opted by the mythic concept. There are fishermen, matadors, and hunters who display a reverential love of wildness even as they seek to conquer it. No matter if it is a fiction of war or the true account of the Spanish bullfight, the idea of wilderness is present everywhere in Hemingway’s fiction, and it is an ideal that Hemingway clings to at all costs.

The ideal cracks, however, under the strain, for it cannot maintain itself. No matter how hard Hemingway tries to construct something that is somehow true and thus real in the physical universe, he remains blind to the otherwise obvious fact that what he is creating is not physically real. In his two great treatises on the subject, Death in the Afternoon and Green Hills of Africa, he seeks to write something “true.” But what these texts betray is that while he upholds the myth as “true,” he can only produce and reproduce the rhetorical entity that is the myth’s only ‘true’ existence. Myths, while they may offer a sort of checklist through which we can order our world, are at best fictive renderings of once real stories. Myths are nothing more than elaborately constructed webs of rhetoric that are made to appear as “true,” but their meaning is dependent upon the reader to construct it that way. There are no universals here, but the more Hemingway insists that it is true, that the myth of wilderness is universal, the more tortured he becomes. “Wilderness,” throughout Hemingway, is upheld as an ideal that is nonetheless physically and materially attainable. But that ideal becomes harder and harder to maintain because the façade of “pure” and “true” becomes more of a strain to maintain. By Green Hills of Africa, Hemingway writes the narrative to appear perfectly natural and “true” until the Hemingway-as-narrator figure starts pontificating about writing. At that point, we’re faced with the cynicism of someone who senses but never fully realizes—because it is necessary that he never does—the fact that the only “truth” he seeks is a mythic truth constructed in the very web of rhetoric that he so contentiously disparages.

Hemingway’s problem, what he so steadfastly refuses to acknowledge, is that the mythic forms of wilderness on which he relies—his code heroes, his wild untamed land—are all, in Barthian terms, parasitically empty. There is no specificity inherent in any of these forms, and so there are no ambiguities with which Hemingway can play. According to Barthes, when the form has emptied itself out of any meaning, there is no contingency, no distinct history to these forms; they are made to appear universal because “history evaporates” in an empty form (117). Once the form is voided of its history, it is able to appear “impoverished” and hungry. It is open to complete absorption by the mythic concept of “wildernessity.” According to Barthes, once a mythic form is emptied of its historical contingencies, “Its newly acquired penury calls for a signification to fill it”(118). But this is not without penalty. When a writer focuses on the empty signifier, as Hemingway does with more and more vehemence the longer he writes, the signification of the myth becomes increasingly literal. When the mythic signifier of whatever myth in question is “already complete”(117), as Hemingway presents his mythic forms, the myth has already postulated a “kind of knowledge” in which meaning has left its “contingency behind”(117). The more literal the mythic wilderness becomes, the more the mythic energy on which Hemingway so relies dies a slow, suffocating death.

These impoverished forms of the wilderness myth are no where better displayed than with Hemingway’s most enduring creation, Nick Adams.² “The Big Two-Hearted River,” the last two stories of In Our Time, has Nick Adams coming home from the war and ascribing to the form of wilderness that says wild open spaces will rejuvenate, make one new again, in a world that is burned down by negligence and bombed out by war. It is Hemingway’s first clear expression of “wilderness,” and just as the National Parks physically enclose the wide-open spaces of the remaining American wilderness, “Big Two-Hearted River” are stories that enclose the idea of wilderness in a very specific and very safe boundary. Nick Adams, the “rugged individual” type, embarks on his formulaic journey of pastoral healing in the fictive rendering of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, one of the more wild places left in the continental U.S. at that time. We first encounter Nick in the train station at Seney, or the place on the map that says a town was there. This marker of civilization, the town, has burned down, and the signification of this is somewhat ambiguous. It could be read as the devastation of the modern world.³ The town is gone except for the foundation of the hotel, and we’re told in the next sentence: “Even the surface had been burned off the ground”(133). This burned off land could also signify a new beginning, the earth reclaiming its own. From the opening paragraph, there is the paradoxical loss and regeneration that will haunt these two stories about fishing and forgetting.

What is certain is that while the fire that burned Seney has effaced the landscape of its known markers, Nick doesn’t really need these markers of civilization to indicate his point in space. Frank Svoboda argues that by making the land where Seney was now a wide open space, Nick, or rather the rhetoric of the text, is able to link his character to the frontier: “to a rougher yet purer American past”(18). Without any markers of civilization, Nick is clearly kin to the mountain-man guide of old. He uses nature’s map to find his way. The river and the sun, not a map, give him direction (136). In his journey to the river, through the burn line and the lush fauna to that marker, his wilderness nirvana, Nick knows what he is as well as where he is in this mythic space. It is in marked contrast to the outside “real” world that is full of contingency and never fixed in time or space. According to the dictates of the myth, that river must be fixed in space and time so that its meaning comes already prescribed.

The river as well as Nick’s journey to get there has often been read as archetypal, the journey to the Garden of Eden that is transcendent of both space and time.⁴ The markings of mankind are all but erased, and subsequently Nick allows himself to feel that “he had left everything behind, the need for thinking, the need to write, other needs”(134). All of civilization is out of the picture and with the space cleansed through fire, we are in a “true” textual wilderness and Nick can now begin his “wilderness” rituals.

Ritual imbues the two stories that comprise “Big Two-Hearted River,” from his first hike to the river, to making camp, eating canned food, and, most ritualistic of all, fishing the river expertly (Civello 5).⁵ All is done deliberately and reverently, for Nick is in the church of nature, there to receive his absolution from whatever unnamed sin haunts him. Nick is the Hemingway hero who has faced death, cheated death, and now must find some way to order the chaos of the world. For the entire world on the outside of this pastoral paradise of the river is chaos. The entire story is concerned with Nick ordering the space of wilderness, and the only “truth” he knows, the only order he can manage, is dictated by the wilderness myth.

“Wilderness” is safe because it is a very known and certain entity. Nature in Hemingway is undoubtedly made to be “unchanging and eternally nourishing” (Gurko 236). For Hemingway, “wilderness” comes ready made with order built in, so Nick’s every move, his every thought, is merely another performance of the wilderness myth.⁶ Once he gets to the river and finds the perfect camp, he quickly and expertly sets up his tent. He knows that his pack is too heavy when he starts because it is filled with canned goods, but he can eat this food the first night because he’s “got a right to eat this kind of stuff, if [he’s] willing to carry it”(139). Nick’s journey adheres to all the dictums of the myth. He is alone as he faces his demons, and nature, the river, is the “good place,” the Garden of Eden (139). Nick’s strict adherence to the unambiguous forms of “wilderness” is remarkable in that he never waivers. The text disallows even the fact that the river might not remain pristine forever because it calls on another more archetypal myth that says nothing in nature ever does. Like the grasshoppers that have turned black because they’ve eaten the ashes from the Seney fire, nature does change. Nature is cyclical, and in this very carefully arranged rendering of Nick’s rejuvenation, that fact is de facto co-opted by “wilderness.” In this carefully crafted mythic space, Nature endures all trauma, is able to adapt and heal itself, and that is why Nick is able to find his solace in the rites of “wilderness,” no matter how mundane they appear.

Nick, it is interesting to note, is actually the next generation of the Turnerian frontiersman. Turner, in his thesis, describes his form of frontiersman as a gentleman from the east who is irrevocably changed by his wilderness experience. Turner’s frontiersmen are the proverbial greenhorns, men who in the course of proving their manhood against nature are transformed by that experience. In “Big Two-Hearted River, “Nick is never more true to form. He is the seasoned wilderness man; he has long ago proved that he is nature’s worthy opponent. He takes pride in his knowledge that he knows how to do such things.⁷ In “Big Two-Hearted River” he’s not seeking to prove his manhood as is Turner’s form. Instead, Nick is looking for nature to revitalize that very thing that was somehow lost in the war. Nick knows how to shape the wilderness to fit his needs, and thus he is the experienced woodsman, as are all Hemingway’s characters experienced at their craft.

Here is it easy to see how the Hemingway “code hero” is one of the main forms of “wilderness.” Nick, Philip Young observed, is “the outdoor man who revels in the life of the senses” who loves to hunt and fish. (54). As Robert Penn Warren notes, these code heroes in Hemingway all represent “some notion of honor, that makes a man a man” and if they are to be defeated, “they are defeated upon their own terms”(35). Not only does this describe the infamous “code hero,” this is as good as description as any of the archetypal frontiersman or western hero; no matter what the name, he is still only the form waiting to be filled with “wildernessity” to make the mythic construction complete.

Because it has so often been co-opted by the wilderness myth, this code hero is also one of the most easily recognized figures in American mythology. Delmore Schwartz calls it the toughness and reticence that “derives from the American masculine ideal” with a long history that goes back to the pioneer on the frontier (64).⁸ As James Plath astutely points out, “there’s nothing uniquely Hemingwayesque about [this code hero] if one considers it alongside the archetypal Western hero (72). And of course, “wilderness” demands nothing more than a figure that is so familiar that he seems absolutely, unquestioningly natural. For this code and those who seek to live up to its standards is so pervasive that it, of course, offers a way to give meaning to the “confusion of living”(Penn Warren 37). Or so our myth would have us believe.

So we have Nick happily being revived by both the rhetoric of the pastoral and the conquering hero, living as close as he can to the ideal of the code. Like all good Hemingway heroes, he imagines himself alone (Fielder, “Men” 91). He has escaped from the horrors of the outside world to a world that he knows how to control. But living up to the code can only happen in a fictive world. “Wilderness” is an ideal and it can only be defined and maintained in a Hemingway text through an adherence to this code that is outlined, fleshed out, and maintained only in text. This is no-where better illustrated when Nick finally commences to fish, his one major action of the novel.⁹

Fishing in “Big Two-Hearted River” is the penultimate “dramatic ritualized event”(Lindsay 471). It is where the wilderness myth reaches its fullest expression in this text, for fishing, as Frank Scafella notes, is “sacred time” a time that is “neither changing nor exhaustible”(83). Fishing is the most important ritual in a text where even mundane tasks are imbued with significance. “Part Two” of the story begins, as all good fables begin, with the new day, a shiny symbol of rebirth after the vulgarities of death that precede it. There is no violent death in these two stories because that would violate the sanctity of this particular rendition of “wilderness.” But violent death surrounds the two stories that comprise “Big Two-Hearted River” In the vignette that precedes Part I, a matador dies a bloody death from a horn wound. The vignette that separates Part I and II, a man dies an ugly, literally shitty death, by hanging. We don’t know why he must die, which is symbolic of the chaos that Nick is so determined to keep from his pristine space. With the new day, Nick is ready to find and accept the “good feeling”(147) that this holiest of rituals can impart in the most elevated space of “wilderness.”

Moreover, Nick, as he dresses himself in his gear, becomes a high priest of “wilderness.” The narrator tells us that Nick felt “professionally happy” with all of his gear hanging off of him, and the first catch of the day is a small fish which he releases. Like a high priest of the ancient temples, the “professional” upholds the idea that in Hemingway’s wilderness, it is only the initiated who are able to correctly perform the rites of “wilderness.” Nick is also, like the ancient priests, the great teacher. In a wonderfully instructive ecological moment, Nick very carefully wets his hands to not damage the fish and in so doing remembers past fishing experiences in crowded streams with inexperienced fishermen ruining the experience. When a fish is improperly handled, we’re told, it grows a white fungus that eventually kills it. In these crowded and improperly fished streams, these abhorrent fishermen surround Nick, and the stream seems almost choked with white, furry, and very dead trout (149). Nick doesn’t like fishing with other men, and “unless they were of your party, they spoiled it”(149). The rhetoric is explicitly clear here. The wilderness experience should only be open to those who are capable and competent. Cool streams, clean air, the fresh smell of woodlands, and the hunger bred in the open air, is potentially ruined by the tens of thousands seeking the primal tug of the American wilderness, even though those tens of thousands annually seek it anyway (Moloney 181). This is undeniably a snotty elitism, but that is part of the carefully laid out plan of the “wilderness” manual that works very hard to conceal the fact that it is nothing more than carefully constructed rhetoric.

But it is just semantics. In Hemingway’s rendering of “wilderness,” with its literal signification, there are no costs to nature when nature is treated properly. Charles Lindsay, however, points out that “Nick’s pastoral renewal comes at some cost to nature”(472). This reminds Hemingway’s readers that Nick’s carefully fashioned Arcadia is exactly that, fashioned. There is always a cost to nature with pastoral renewal because in order to manufacture a pristine space, it has to be cleansed of its undesirable elements—whole towns, bad fishermen, other unmentionables. It is a fact that Hemingway consistently elides as he works to maintain the purity of place so that even the death that is suggested by the mishandled fish is co-opted by “wildernessity.”

So there is Death in our pastoral haven, Hemingway seems to scoff. Like the pastoral painters of old, Hemingway paints his rendition of the skull that reminds us that even in Arcadia, there is death.¹⁰ Death does not necessarily stand outside of the myth, and Hemingway seems to snare death into his mythic web. Heroes are measured by their ability to face death with grace, and thus death becomes part of the ritual, part of the code.¹¹ As ritual, death, whether it be of fish or bulls, kudu or whole tribes of people, doesn’t have any material cost. But Hemingway insists a little too much. “Big Two-Hearted River” is a text that vehemently insists that there is no “real” cost to nature because if there were, Hemingway would have to admit to the ravages of time and place, of history. But history is never so easily ignored. Because he blindly adheres to the mythology of wilderness, the ordered signification of wilderness slips ever so slightly and gives a faint outline of an unmentionable behemoth that Hemingway steadfastly refuses to even mention let alone acknowledge.

For you see, there’s a big elephant that sits in the middle of most Hemingway texts that most of the characters who people his stories refuse to see. Those who create the American “wilderness” and those who carry on its tradition must never remember that the very land on which they enact their attempt at wilderness, their recreation of the wilderness myth, comes with a prodigious price tag. It is an indisputable fact of history that vile overt acts of butchery were committed against a large number of people—all in the name of progress, of course—in order to clear the land for the wilderness of the now dominant and predominantly white American. In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway makes the analogy that writing is like an iceberg. One-eighth of an iceberg appears above water, and the writer’s job is to make sure that he knows the seven-eighths that isn’t showing (192). Seven-eighths is a lot of space to know about but not openly express, and like the ever present war that is not named, the unmentionable decimation of thousands of people called Native Americans is always present but not named. The way in which Hemingway constructs his version of the American wilderness seeks to deny what Philip Fisher calls the “hard fact” of American literature and culture. It is a large part of the lower unseen and unmentioned region of the iceberg.¹²

This is not to say that Hemingway does not put Natives into his texts. They appear in a number of short stories, but not with their full history intact as the displaced p...