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CHAPTER ONE Burning Montana: Richard Ford’s Wildlife and Regional Crisis TAMAS DOBOZY CRITICAL REGIONS Richard Ford’s position on regionalism is well known to his scholars. In an interview with Gregory L. Morris, Ford denies region an essentialist impact on character and community; instead, he prefers to articulate human behavior in spite of geographic determinants: I shouldn’t say I have no relationship with landscape. But . . . saying I miss Montana is just expressing a feeling of need of mine in terms of place, likewise saying Mississippi is my home. I could express that need differently, but for some reason, something like instinct, I express it in terms of place, landscape. This is [why] I so strongly resist the notion of regionalism—in literature, in defining culture. My life has simply shown me that we’re more in the same boat wherever we are, and that recognizing that fact might enable us to adapt to our situations more successfully. (Morris 109) Here, Ford raises a number of key points for understanding landscape in his writing in general and in his novel Wildlife (1990) in particular. He does not deny a“relationship”with landscape, but qualifies this by disengaging the terms of region—“Montana,”“Mississippi”—from the need that expresses them. Region becomes an“instinctual”expression,verging on the arbitrary,since the need from which it originates could as easily find a different outlet. Region, rather than determining literature or culture—rather than forming the basis of the need that in turn articulates it—becomes, instead, not antecedent but ancillary to need. Region is simply one of the many options for voicing desire. At the same time, Ford complicates his notion of region by suggesting that our “situations,”their variable signification notwithstanding,require“adaptation,” 4 Does Place Matter? though the key to adaptation comes not with attachment to regional specifics but with the recognition that the universal character of human need is often obscured—and thus limited—by geographic reference. It is this“universal condition”(material need), as far as Wildlife and Ford’s depiction of Montana are concerned,that determines how region is signified in the discourse that enables our individual and communal existence.While Ford counters any notion of regionalism as“definitive,”Wildlife nonetheless enacts a drama of regionalism by commenting on the ways in which various“needs” find articulation via a landscape that is not exactly commensurable with either need or articulation, and which therefore continually exceeds, or burns away, the categories that structure it in communal myths and beliefs. By “burns away,” I am referring to the forest fire that consumes much of Montana in Wildlife, but which, by supposedly threatening to overcome Ford’s protagonist (48), also demonstrates how our categories of knowing are insuf- ficient for containing the volatility of the real: “[The fire] takes you outside yourself. . . . You see everything from outside. You’re up against so big a thing out there. . . . Everything seems arbitrary. . . . It’s probably hard to understand” (138).Outside our understanding is the fire,which is external to,and too vast to account for within,a system of ordering.The fire instantiates the arbitrary as an external condition we try to regulate with conceptual categories and systems. At the same time, the fire permits a realization of agency. The inability of Ford’s characters to sustain region as a fixed category—and thus a fixed sense of themselves within region—enables them to realize that any sense of ourselves is subject to alteration, not only by conditions in the real but by ourselves, in the way we discourse on those conditions. Because knowing occurs in relation to the real, we understand, as Joe Brinson does, that there are “no final answers” (171), only a set of provisional, shifting, and contingent “answers” whose source is not the real itself but our disposition to the displacements— such as wildfires—eventuated by it. The arbitrariness of such displacements demonstrates the inadequacy, over the long term, of any single definitive cultural or political (or regionalist) framework. There are answers, but no final ones, since alternating social relations are themselves determined by as well as determinants of the real. It is within this radical, two-way contingency that I situate Ford’s discourse on region. I am,of course,not the first critic to tackle Ford’s complex view of regionalism . Huey Guagliardo sees in Ford’s writing the “breakdown of such cultural institutions as marriage, family...

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