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G E R A L D W . H A SL A M Sonoma State University California Writing and the West Is California literature western literature? Such persuasive and astute commentators as W. H. Hutchinson, Edward Abbey, Edna Fergusson, and John R. Milton all answer no. They argue, in essence, that the West was what one passed through to reach California during pioneer days, and that the Golden State remains at best a breed apart. But such judgments miss a central issue: California is not a single place but is instead a group of diverse places unnaturally gathered within one name and one set of boundaries; writing from this state reflects such diversity. Most commentators base their judgments on reactions to what James D. Houston calls “the narrow coastal strip.” In fact, no single region or style or mythos—least of all the suntanned, bleach-blond homog­ eneity that is the media’s favorite — adequately summarizes California’s complexity. If boasting the most varied terrain and population of any state isn’t enough, “California is in the throes of a massive eclecticism of culture that almost defies conceptual or symbolic understanding,” as Kevin Starr put it in Americans and the California Dream (1973). It is difficult for outsiders to understand — and more than a few natives are equally baffled by — the state’s sharp contrasts of styles and values that lead to initiatives seeking either to split California or to form new states within the existing boundaries. Explaining in Californians: Searching for the Golden State (1982) the antipathy many rural northern Californians feels toward the urban south state, Houston writes, “There are northerners who say water pipe is the only possible connection between these two dissimilar realms.” Little wonder such a domain produces not literature, but literatures. 210 Western American Literature Five major regions are reflected by California’s writers: the North Coast, extending from Big Sur north toward Mendocino, with San Fran­ cisco its core; Southern California, today dominated by the Los AngelesSan Diego freeway culture and also an increasingly rich source of bilingual literature; the Great Central Valley, a mini-Great Plains, to which the state’s other major ranching and agricultural areas may be conceptually appended; Wilderness California, its vast deserts, mountains, and forests, as well as its remaining unspoiled coastline, chronicled by a distinguished cadre including John Muir, Mary Austin, Robinson Jeffers, and Walter Van Tilburg Clark; finally, and equally important, Fantasy California, the state as aspiration and illusion as reflected in the work of writers such as Nathanael West, Ernest Callenbach, Cyra McFadden, and Evelyn Waugh. All are in part regions of the mind, but Fantasy California is principally only that. Each of California’s literary sections has produced distinct literature, and two of them — the Central Valley and Wilderness California — con­ tinue to generate what can only be called Western Writing in the best sense of that term, serious regional interpretations. Less certain isthe relationship of the other three regions to the American West. Fantasy California is a mental realm, a response to actual places and to writers’own expectations. Its seeds were sown, as Starr has documented, in the very first English-language writing from and about the state, early nineteenth-century travel literature: . . . an ideal California—a California of the mind—underwent composite definition: the elusive possibility of a new American alternative; the belief, the suggestion (or perhaps only the hope), that here on Pacific shores A.mericans might search out for them­ selves new values and ways of living. In this sense—as a concept and as an imaginative goal—California showed the beginnings of becoming the cutting edge of the American Dream. —Americans and the California Dream, p. 46. Fantasy California may, in fact, produce the most Californian of all writing in the view of many, both typical and prototypical. As Houston has pointed out, even those nineteenth-century travel journals were fore­ shadowed in a Spanish novel of the 16th century called The Adventures of Esplandian by Garcia Ordóñez de Montalvo, who sent his hero on a jour­ ney to Fantasy California: Gerald W. Haslam 211 . . . know then, that on the right hand of the Indies, there is an...

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