Running out of Space: Vanishing Landscapes in California Novels

D A V I D F I N E California State University, Long Beach Runningout ofSpace:Vanishing Landscapes in CaliforniaNovels Desire in America has always been linked to mobility, to the open road and the adventure along the highway that has no end. Travel through, and across, American space has been the national metaphor for freedom, both personal and social. Moving across the landscape into the undiscovered country to the west, we find our destiny. The past is left behind, in the East; the future lies before us, in the West. Leslie Fiedler has said that the West is “a stepping outside history.”Max Westbrook has written that the West is not a land one grows up in, but “a land one goes to.”Another critic ofwestern literature,John R. Milton, has attempted to define the literature of the West by contrasting itwith that of the East. The distinction is a radical one. Novels about the East, he says, are bound up with time, with chronology and change, with characters in society, engaged in social and economic ties with others. Novels about the Westare bound up with space. Man is shaped by the land and not by time or other people, and if he capitulates, it is not to others but to the land itself, timeless and enduring. The literature of the East is dramatic; that of the West is epic, mythic, archetypal. Freud belongs to the East, Jung to the West.1 Such formulas downplay the obvious fact that space has everything to do with time. We move through space in time. Time passes whether we are standing still or in motion. We change in time and landscapes change aswell, altered both by man and by natural forces, even though, in our short view, the changes are not apparent. Western landscapes diminish, transformed by population and culture, by need and greed. Rivers are dammed; mountains gouged and leveled. Western plains and desert become farms and orchards, and these in turn become subdivi­ sions and what we euphemistically call “industrial parks.”The beer can 210 Western American Literature along the highwayhas grown into abrewery, belching smoke in the air. The transformations are what we call progress. That original relationship with the universe Emerson asked us to enjoy is less and less obtainable. My concern here, though, is not so much with this literal transfor­ mation of open, natural space into closed, manmade space, as with the sense we get in much California fiction, stretching back a century, that one has come, at the edge of the West, to the end of the line. The open road has become the dead end, the culdesac. The farther and faster one runs, the more one realizes there is no place to go, no future to reach. While California has always held out to the migrant or adventurer the promise of the fresh start on the ultimate frontier, a recurring tension one finds in California fiction from Frank Norris to Thomas Pynchon is between that promise and the discovery of a landscape that confers limits, boundaries. The encounter with the land of new begin­ nings transforms itselfinto the experience ofrunning out ofboth space and time, and the California protagonist finds himselfrunning in place. LikeJoe Christmas in Faulkner’s Light in August, he finds himself, after his circular journey, back where he began. Or, like Jay Gatsby, Fitzgerald’s misplaced Westerner who believes he can sidestep time, he finds himself “borne back ceaselessly into the past.”We can, Gatsbylike, elbow clocks from the mantel, but they keep ticking and we can’t step outside the stream of time. California novels take their starting point from the act of entry, from the discovery and claiming ofthe landscape. California classics like Frank Norris’ The Octopus and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath remind usjust how short-lived and elusive this claiming can be. Califor­ nia is lost almost as soon as it’sfound. The land is owned, possessed; the protagonists are denied a place on the land by those who have prior claims. Norris’ earlier novel McTeague offers a case closer to the theme I want to develop in this essay. In the last chapters of...