The Language of Inquiry

The Quest for Knowledge in the Western Poem

The Quest for Knowledge in the Western Poem The somewhat sardonically titled “Quest for Knowledge in the Western Poem” was written in 1992 for presentation at the Naropa Institute’s Summer Writing Program. 1992 saw various quincentennial celebrations of Christopher Columbus’s “discovery of America,” and a large part of Naropa ’s summer program was devoted to a critique of the historiographic framing of that event. The essay was subsequently published in Disembodied Poetics, a collection of Naropa lectures edited by Anne Waldman and Andrew Schelling.1 The reference to the “West” is to be explained in part by the quincentennial context, but in its emphasis on the frontier (or on the notion of the West as a frontier), the essay bears a relation both to Oxota: A Short Russian Novel, which had been published the previous year, and to A Border Comedy, the ideas for which I was just beginning to develop. The “Russian novel” was about unsettlement and disorientation; its milieu, the Soviet Union, is for a Westerner perhaps exotic, but in the “novel” it is the narrator who becomes exoticized; she becomes estranged from the markers of 209 self and incapable of self-location. Curiously, though this theme of dislocation or disorientation might seem to be generic to “travel literature” and hence somewhat inevitable in Oxota, it is also very much a Russian theme, as is evident from its centrality in such works as Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground (as, indeed, in most of Dostoevsky’s work), Gogol’s “The Nose,” Andrei Bely’s Saint Petersburg, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Yury Olesha’s Envy, Boris Pilnyak’s The Naked Year, and in much of Nabokov ’s work. The issues that the Russian novel explored in a Russian context I wanted now to explore in the to me more familiar, and therefore far more vague and far less closely observed, context of “home.” Physical dislocation and hence geophysical unfamiliarity are familiar experiences in American life, but they seem to have produced a tendency toward a kind of bulldoggish simulacrum of stability of both locale and self. This has manifested itself through the reification of situation—for example, in the generic character of malls and the shops within them, in the replication of sites of all kinds, in the primacy granted to ownership and then to property rights, etc. Generally, I was growing increasingly interested in the ways in which notions of “home” and of “identity” were related and how those notions were tied to capital. What was obvious was that knowledge of the West took the form of situating oneself in it, of staking one’s claim—but one’s claim to what? Ultimately , I think it is oneself that is the preoccupation in the Western quest for knowledge; the “Westerner” seeks to establish him or herself; he or she wants to be knowable. In researching the theme of “knowledge in the West,” in addition to the works that are discussed in the essay, I read from a cluster of materials (Owen Wister’s classic cowboy story The Virginian; William James’s Essays in Radical Empiricism; Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans; Frank Norris ’s The Octopus; Jack London’s Call of the Wild, among others) all dating 210 / The Language of Inquiry from the first decade of the twentieth century, that is, approximately midway between the present and the so-called “opening of the West” as it was recorded in the journals (later referred to as “our national epic of exploration ” by Elliott Coues in his preface to the definitive 1893 edition) of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark during their expedition to explore and describe the West (May 1804–September 1806). I wanted to examine materials from the first decade of the twentieth century because generally they tend to look both ways, back at a certain milieu of achievement (highly compromised as it seemed even then) and forward to its implications and the working out of a complex of romantic and realist values colliding finally in American postmodernism, not only as an aesthetic but also as social reality and lived experience. In the essay I make an equation between “how knowledge works and how language works,” an equation that, if it holds at all, would hold specifically in writing, and it would mean that there is a grammar of knowledge just as there is one of language. But the term “language...