Refiguring the Map of Sorrow

Nature Writing and Autobiography

Mark Allister

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2001
• ISBN:
  9780813921945
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik Geschichte & Theorie

Recent decades have witnessed an explosion of interest in both autobiography and environmental literature. In Refiguring the Map of Sorrow, Mark Allister brings these two genres together by examining a distinct form of grief narrative, in which the writers deal with mourning by standing explicitly both outside and inside the text: outside in writing about the natural world; inside in making that exposition part of the grieving process.

Building on Peter Fritzell's thesis in Nature Writing and America that the best American nature writing blends Aristotelian natural history and Augustinian confession, this work of literary interpretation draws on psychoanalytical narrative theory, studies of grieving, autobiography theory, and ecocriticism for its insights into how nature writing can become an autobiographical, healing act.

Allister examines works by Terry Tempest Williams, Sue Hubbell, Peter Matthiessen, Bill Barich, William Least Heat-Moon, and Gretel Ehrlich in order to demonstrate the difficulty of hearing nature speak, and of translating terrain and self into language and form. As he focuses on the many ways in which humans connect—often deeply and urgently—to animals or the land, Allister vastly extends our understanding of "relational" autobiography.

1 Writing the Self through Others

Each of the thirty-six chapter titles of Terry Tempest Williams's Refuge focuses on a particular species of bird. A naturalist by profession, Williams fills her book with careful descriptions of the numerous avian species that flock to Great Salt Lake or the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge for resting or nesting. For example, in her chapter “White Pelicans”:

Hundreds of white pelicans stand shoulder to shoulder on an asphalt spit that eventually disappears into Great Salt Lake. They do not look displaced as they engage in head-bobbing, bill-snapping, and panting; their large, orange gular sacs fanning back and forth act as a cooling device. Some preen. Some pump their wings. Others stand, take a few steps forward, tip their bodies down, and then slide into the water, popping up like corks. Their immaculate white forms with carrotlike bills render them surreal in a desert landscape.

…The pelicans of Gunnison Island must make daily pilgrimages to freshwater sites to forage on carp or chub. Many pelican colonies fly by day and forage by night, to take advantage of desert thermals. The isolation of Gunnison Island offers protection to young pelicans, because there are no predators aside from heat and relentless gulls. (98–99)

We might call this kind of detailed, elegant writing her “naturalist” talk, grounded in science and Williams's own observations. But because she sees and even interprets the human world in part through bird behaviors and relations, Williams juxtaposes such objective descriptions with a very different kind of writing in which the I supersedes the eye and invites reader interpretation.

In her chapter “Whistling Swan,” Williams describes walking the shore of Great Salt Lake after a storm and finding a recently dead swan. Dreading the loss of her mother from cancer, feeling depressed personally and professionally by the enormous loss of Great Salt Lake bird populations, Williams prepares its body as if for burial, an event that, for readers of the book and presumably for Terry herself, anticipates her mother's death. Williams untangles the long neck, straightens the wings, places two black stones over the eyes like coins, washes with her own saliva the swan's black bill and feet until they shine—and then she lies down next to the body and imagines herself a swan:

I have no idea of the amount of time that passed in the preparation of the swan. What I remember most is lying next to its body and imagining the great white bird in flight.

I imagined the great heart that propelled the bird forward day after day, night after night. Imagined the deep breaths taken as it lifted from the arctic tundra, the camaraderie within the flock. I imagined the stars seen and recognized on clear autumn nights as they navigated south. Imagined their silhouettes passing in front of the full face of the harvest moon. And I imagined the shimmering Great Salt Lake calling the swans down like a mother, the suddenness of the storm, the anguish of its separation.

And I tried to listen to the stillness of its body.

At dusk, I left the swan like a crucifix on the sand. I did not look back. (121–22)

In this passage, the details about swan migrations from the Arctic tundra to Great Salt Lake are certainly accurate, but their significance, I would maintain, is not that Williams is trying to teach us anything or to share biological information, as when she writes about the white pelicans. Instead, she is demonstrating the particulars of her own imaginings. Infusing this passage is the tension between a pastoral nature (camaraderie in the flock, clear nights and navigational stars, the harvest moon, the welcoming breast of the lake as a mother) and what, suddenly, that pastoral nature can become or do—the way, in other words, the pastoral contains destruction and death. The first tension leads to a second, one that Williams points to powerfully but rather enigmatically when she says that she “left the swan like a crucifix on the sand” and then “did not look back.” What kind of religious moment is this for her? Does not looking back imply that she has gotten out of this encounter all that is possible, a definiteness? Or does she not look back out of fear, perhaps unacknowledged insight that despite all her desire to have this encounter teach her about accepting death, she cannot really do so when she “returns” to her life that includes her dying mother?

In numerous ways this scene in Refuge is a common, though problematic, “figure in the carpet” to all the writers of this study, as they “write” themselves in human and nonhuman “others.” On one hand, the external world is available to be known, and each author will find language and structure to turn that world into nonfictional text; on the other hand, who and what each person is, and (in this case) their particular plunges into grieving, dictate how and what can be known of that world. While it is true that all writers of nonfiction face these difficult philosophical relationships between subject and object, mind and world, writer and text, a direct or even indirect examination of these issues rarely appears in nonfiction books. The “documentary” rendering of a nonfictional subject takes precedence over the self-construction. In most autobiographies, the reverse is true, in that the importance of the external world for author and reader lies primarily in how it contributes to evolution of selfhood. The books I discuss here inhabit a middle ground, where the relations between knower (author) and known (external world) in language become the vital subtext that invites reader interpretation.

In the chapters that follow, I focus on books that weave an autobiographical text of loss and recovery into description of and reflections upon an “other” subject. The books can serve readers as revitalizing stories of how absorption into other worlds, and the subsequent writing about it, helps the writer move through mourning, renewed and ready for a different life. By focusing on books structurally similar, I try to turn a sketch of a general pattern into a canvas that reveals details and specifics. But in this chapter I will follow a different impulse, situating these books in a broad conversation about autobiography studies, literary nonfiction studies, and ecocriticism.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY STUDIES

In his wide-ranging article summarizing autobiography studies, “Autobiography and the Cultural Moment” (1980), James Olney argues that autobiography was not considered interesting by critics (and writers) until they began looking more closely at the autos, the self, behind the autobiographical act and how that self shapes and is shaped by the act of writing. Attention to the I that half discovers, half creates itself, Olney says, “opened up the subject of autobiography specifically for literary discussion, for behind every work of literature there is an ‘I’ informing the whole and making its presence felt at every critical point, and without this ‘I’ stated or implied, the work would collapse into mere insignificance” (21). Interestingly, attention to the autos of autobiography created a new interest in graphe, because the self is not something there, finished and set in place, ready merely to be described, but something the writer is shaping. That shaping changes, in turn, the self that shapes the writing, in an ever-recursive act until pen is put down or computer turned off.

The last twenty years has seen exponential growth of autobiography studies, and many of literary criticism's insights and beliefs about self and narrative, gender and culture, and the referentiality of language have been shaped by this attention to life-writing, by brilliant readings of texts that at an earlier time would have had no place in the literary canon. But because of their near-exclusive concern with books focusing on individual identity—Augustine's Confessions, Rousseau's Confessions, Adams's The Education of Henry Adams, Richard Wright's Black Boy, Frank Conroy's Stop-Time, or Mary McCarthy's Memories of a Catholic Girlhood—critics attending to the complex act of “self writing life” have produced their own limited canon. The emphasis on texts that are not just autobiographical but that clearly announce themselves as “autobiographies”—focused on the writer's self-growth, on identity—is certainly understandable, in large part because critics have been intent on establishing principles and making categories. Representative titles of seminal early essays and books on autobiography show the emphasis on defining the field and asserting its singularity: Georges Gusdorf's “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography”; William L. Howarth's “Some Principles of Autobiography”; Louis A. Renza's “The Veto of the Imagination: A Theory of Autobiography”; William C. Spengemann's The Forms of Autobiography: Episodes in the History of a Literary Genre; and James Olney's Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography offer but a few examples.¹

In this, autobiography criticism has followed the path of any emerging field, and the similarities to the evolution of American literature criticism are striking. After World War II, as response, perhaps, to the United States shrugging off its sense of provincialism in cultural matters, ambitious and influential critical studies of American literature appeared, among them F. O. Matthiessen's American Renaissance, Charles Feidelson's Symbolism and American Literature, Richard Chase's The American Novel and Its Tradition, R. W. B. Lewis's The American Adam, and Leslie Fiedler's Love and Death in the American Novel. Such books both established American literature as worthy and attempted to codify a canon of texts by defining what was particularly “American,” New World—like, about them. It was not until the conflicts of the Vietnam War challenged assumptions about whether Americanness was necessarily good, not until the racial conflicts of the 1960s and the beginnings of the women's movement showed that American in this literature equated with male and white, that the literary canon opened up.² Marxist and feminist theory, in particular, posed different questions about the relation of literature to culture. To find evidence for their theories, such critics often went to texts that had not been understood as American literature, even if they had been written by United States citizens living in the United States.

As with American literature criticism, studies of women's autobiography have provided a useful challenge to assumptions about how identity is textually created and presented, feminist critics showing how the preoccupation with individual identity has been shaped by male models of self-development. Mary G. Mason, in an early essay, “The Other Voice: Autobiographies of Women Writers” (1980), argues that for women, unlike men, “the self-discovery of female identity seems to acknowledge the real presence and recognition of another consciousness, and the disclosure of female self is linked to the identification of some ‘other’” (210).

In numerous books and collections of essays that focus on gender in autobiography, feminist critics have elaborated and added to Mason's ideas on relational identity. Sidonie Smith, in A Poetics of Women's Autobiography, theorizes about “the ways in which the autobiographer's position as woman inflects the autobiographical project…the ways in which the autobiographer establishes the discursive authority to interpret herself publicly in a patriarchal culture and androcentric genre that have written stories of woman for her, thereby fictionalizing and effectively silencing her” (45). Domna Stanton and Susan Stanford Friedman problematize our notion of bios by showing the fluidity of “life” portrayed in noncanonical autobiographies of women. Following their leads, Julia Watson, in her essay “Toward an Anti-Metaphysics of Autobiography,” “politicizes” autobiography further by using women writers of color and the German writer Christa Wolf to destabilize Western, democratic, and middle-class notions of selfhood in their relation to constructing a life. Betty Bergland situates her work on autobiography in a matrix of post-modernism, feminism, and ethnic studies, and from the interweaving of these three prisms she argues for the recognition of a multiply situated subject, a subject socially and historically shaped. What unites all such inquiries is the strong desire to theorize the subject through gender, which results in both the broadening of the canon and a loosening up of the genre's principles. Texts such as Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas or Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior become representative of a women's autobiography that is defined, in large part, by the autobiographer's attempts to find new forms that subvert the traditional, Western, male narrative of the self-defining autobiographer-as-hero.³

Feminist critics often cite Nancy Chodorow's The Reproduction of Mothering and Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice for their work showing how women, unlike men, view their lives as relational. As Gilligan writes:

Relationships, and particularly issues of dependency, are experienced differently by women and men. For boys and men, separation and individuation are critically tied to gender identity since separation from the mother is essential for the development of masculinity. For girls and women, issues of femininity or feminine identity do not depend on the achievement of separation from the mother or on the progress of individuation. Since masculinity is defined through separation while femininity is defined through attachment, male gender identity is threatened by intimacy while female gender identity is threatened by separation. Thus males tend to have difficulty with relationships, while females tend to have problems with individuation (8).

While I agree with the general findings, Chodorow's and Gilligan's conclusions have often been overstated and oversimplified.⁴ The extent to which humans view themselves as having autonomy or being entwined in a network of relationships is a spectrum (not an either/or box), and individual men and women fall across this spectrum. The claim that women write relational autobiographies while men write autonomous autobiographies is too simplistic, because gender is only one of many crucial factors that contribute to a book's purpose and design.

At the National Conference on Autobiography in spring of 1994, Paul John Eakin, in his keynote address, argued that all selfhood (for men and women) is relational, that narrative “is the mode in which relational identity is transacted” (25), and therefore life-stories about “others”—mostly, for Eakin, other family members—should be a central concern of autobiography critics. Eakin's claims are not radical of course, particularly to feminist critics, as we have seen, but I note the importance of this address because it brought the term relational autobiography, unhooked from its sole connection to women's books, into the center of autobiography studies.⁵

This concept of relational identity-making brings into sharp focus the many superb biographies of the late twentieth century in which the writers compose a parent's life: Geoffrey Wolff's Duke of Deception, Vivian Gornick's Fierce Attachments, Carl Bernstein's Loyalties, John Edgar Wideman's Brothers and Keepers, Carolyn Kay Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives, Adam Hochschild's Half the Way Home, Philip Roth's Patrimony, Art Spiegelman's two Maus books, and Kim Chernin's In My Mother's House: A Daughter's Story. Biography and its study as a genre is closely tied to autobiography. Like the autobiographical act, in which a “past” narrative is given form by a “present” consciousness, the writing of biography is the self-creation of an other, as we see in this only partial list of biographies that finally become a kind of autobiography, wherein the authors show that telling another life can become a version of telling one's own.

For example, in Wolff's The Duke of Deception, Wolff's subject is his father (the father's given name is Duke), and for the son, telling the story of his father accurately means discovering what he did not know as a child and young man: his father's “real” past and therefore his own. In his essay on the craft of biography, “Minor Lives,” Wolff said that when he began writing biographies he had written three novels “and had an affection for the novelist's control of his world, the sense of a world poised to be made up whole and shaped” (60). What becomes important in this new try at writing about his father is that he is not writing a novel. He has to discover and then confront, as a biographer, the “facts” of his father's life. That is, he cannot invent, while sitting at his desk, what seems right to invent; instead, he must do research—interview those who had known his father, write schools and companies for information about Duke, look up records in old newspapers.

What makes the research necessary is that at the core of Duke's “life” was deception, and the core of the book must be the untangling of it. What makes The Duke of Deception so powerful is that we see, directly in the narrative, the struggles of Geoffrey to “construct” his father and then reshape his own past with that new knowledge. The autobiographical text that weaves through this biography comes to function for Wolff much like psychoanalysis, in that the fusing of his father's biography and his own autobiography demands that he use new knowledge, new beliefs about his father, to reconceive his own past. “Writing,” he says in “Minor Lives,” “can heal, translating vague, unarticulated pain into narrative” (71). And this is what writing the biography of his father has done, transforming the chaotic feelings and desires of the unconscious, and even the half-shaped memory, into narrative, into stories that show, explain, heal.

If autobiography critics shift the focus from “autonomous selves” to how humans change and grow “relationally,” then autobiography need not focus on the writer's “life.” The “self” of autos might well change to “self/others,” and the linear narrative of one person's life, as is typical in autobiography, might well be altered to include structures that are more ecological than chronological, figuratively more like an interconnected web. Nevertheless, all three emphases in autobiography studies—the early focus on the solitary self; the feminist critique that shows how culture encodes different models for women's identity formation; or Eakin's claims for relational autobiography—have rendered invisible, in a sense, books such as the ones in my study, for numerous reasons.

First, for Matthiessen, Ehrlich, Barich, Heat-Moon, Williams, and Hubbell there is no particular human “other” that shapes identity (at least in the text): the nonhuman world affects them equally (or more) and it is this world they also “write.” Second, these authors do not tell stories of their childhoods, describe a religious conversion experience, or sustain a dramatization of selfhood in a way that makes their books seem comparable to the many solitary-self autobiographies. Third, because these authors embed the act of self-creation in a text primarily about an “outside” subject, their books are classified, for example, as “natural history,” “travel,” or “sports writing,” and therefore are not autobiographies, understandably, for autobiography critics. And fourth, because Hubbell, Ehrlich, and Williams exemplify women who have made a satisfying life of outdoor work and write, in some sense, a version of a “masculine” narrative, their works have not fit well into theorizing about women's autobiography.

The philosopher David W. Hamlyn, in his essay “Self-Knowledge,” makes a distinction between knowledge about ourselves and self-knowledge, a distinction useful to our considerations about relational autobiography and these texts. Hamlyn calls the first (knowledge about ou...