Refiguring the Map of Sorrow: Nature Writing and Autobiography

Notes

Introduction . Much of the interest in relational autobiography has been ideologically driven, with feminist and multicultural critics rightly showing that emphasis on the solitary self has implications for gender and race and has often excluded certain kinds of writing by women or people of color. . As quoted in the epigraph to Kathleen Norris’s Dakota. . On the title page of Blue Highways, the author is presented as William Least Heat Moon. The subsequent difficulty of knowing what were the middle and last names spawned, I believe, the official change to Heat-Moon (i.e., with a hyphen) as his last name—a practice I have followed even when referring to the author of Blue Highways. .The label spiritual geography comes from Kathleen Norris’s powerful meditation on rural life, Dakota. Popular beyond anyone’s expectations, filling a spiritual need for many readers, Norris’s book shows how spiritual geography transcends the maps and statistics of high-school geography to become a knowledge of the land that attaches itself to her personal history and common humanity. 1 Writing the Self through Others . Concomitant with the defining of the genre as a whole, critics began creating an early canon for American autobiography; see, in particular, Mutlu Blasing’s The Art of Life: Studies in American Autobiographical Literature; Thomas Couser’s American Autobiography: The Prophetic Mode; James Cox’s “Autobiography and America”; Daniel Shea’s Spiritual Autobiography in Early America; and Albert Stone’s Autobiographical Occasions and Original Acts: Notes upv.allister.000-000.cx2 8/9/01 2:10 PM Page 173 Versions of American Identity from Henry Adams to Nate Shaw—all dating from the late s to the early s. . For a fine overview of this history of American literature criticism, see Richard Brodhead’s essay “After the Opening: Problems and Prospects for a Reformed American Literature.” Brodhead also looks to the future, remarking on what the next stage of literary studies might look like. . For more on how women’s autobiographies challenge the norm of selfhood creation, begin with the collections of essays by Benstock; Brodzki and Schenck; Smith and Watson; and Ashley, Gilmore, and Peters; and articles by Hooten, Mason, and Smith. . For one example, Chodorow begins with the assumption that children are parented by their mothers. Although it is true that more mothers than fathers stay home with their children, and true that more mothers than fathers are the primary caretaker of children, most children in two-parent families are parented by both women and men, and, moreover, the effectiveness or influence of parenting is not always directly connected to the amount of time spent. Obviously, not all women are good at intimacy and relationships, and not all men are bad at them. . A revised and extended version of this address is chapter , “Relational Selves, Relational Lives: Autobiography and the Myth of Autonomy,” in Eakin’s recent How Our Lives Become Stories. . I am thinking here in particular, among numerous others, of arguments advanced by Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac, Roderick Frazier Nash in The Rights of Nature, and Lawrence Buell in The Environmental Imagination. Later in this chapter, I take up this issue in more depth. . The scope widens, in a sense, as the focus of these studies narrows. For instance, in  alone three books were published that pursue a particular line of life-writing (as I do here in Refiguring the Map of Sorrow), and by virtue of engaging new issues they take up noncanonical books. See Suzette Henke’s Shattered Subjects, Diane Bjorklund’s Interpreting the Self, and Carolyn A. Barros’s Autobiography: Narratives of Transformation. . I recognize the inherent problems of the term literary nonfiction but think it the best available. Generally, literary nonfiction is distinguished in two ways: one, it often has the strategies and techniques we usually associate with fiction; and two, it does more than just present information: it values structure, language, and style and asserts their connection to the information . For a fuller discussion, see Weber’s The Literature of Fact and the introduction to Anderson’s Literary Nonfiction: Theory, Criticism, Pedagogy. . Walker Evans’s famous photos of the sharecroppers open the book, of course, which does allow for Agee to “render” the sharecroppers in a medium that he believed more immediate and direct, though limited no less in its attempts to portray their lives. Notes to Chapter 1 174 upv.allister.000-000.cx2 8/9/01 2:10 PM Page 174 [3.135.213.214...