Bad Land Pastoralism in Great Plains Fiction

Introduction: Biocultural Change and Literary Pastoralism in Great Plains Fiction

Introduction Biocultural Change and Literary Pastoralism in Great Plains Fiction Pastoral Conversion and the Community Concept Within the realm of literary studies, the word pastoral is likely to conjure up a series of related experiences revolving around the process of escaping: retreat, renew, refresh, and—sometimes—return. Whether it is Huck Finn “lighting out for the territories” of the trans-Mississippi west, Nick Adams fishing the Two Hearted River in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula , or Jim Burden strolling the shaggy prairies beyond the town limits of Blackhawk, Nebraska, conventional pastorals in the North American tradition entail removal from a restrictive social community and a subsequent entry into an idealized rural sanctuary. In this sense, conventional pastoralism is tinged with a strain of misanthropy as it places nature and culture in an oppositional relationship in which the former is favored over the latter. The pastoral remove is almost always temporary and fleeting, a dream or fantasy with little long-term applicability in the “real” world (except, of course, if you are a shepherd!). A major contention of this book, however, is that pastoral experience, no matter how fleeting, can translate into pastoral practice. This is to say that literary pastoralism has the potential to support an alternative series of ideals based not on escape but on  2ҍ introduction stewardship: community, continuity, and commitment. A more mature, ecocentric pastoralism demands a dialogue between human culture and nonhuman nature. This more advanced pastoralism moves beyond fantasy and dream; instead, the pastoral event—the human encounter with nature in myriad forms—becomes the basis for a long-term relationship, a kind of conversion experience that solidifies the convert’s ethical obligation to the place(s) she inhabits. Take, for example, the case of Frederick Philip Grove’s Abe Spaulding, the protagonist of Fruits of the Earth (1933). Abe is a prototypical prairie pioneer who is determined to craft an agricultural empire out of the North American grasslands. Early on in the novel, Grove informs the reader that Abe is a man of “economic vision” who is “possessed by ‘land-hunger’” and who “dreams of a time when he would buy up the abandoned farms from which all buildings have been removed” (12). This dream of development consumes him to the point at which he begins to lose touch with his family and becomes emotionally distant from his wife—even though his initial ambition was rooted in a desire of building a comfortable home for her. Through cunning, manipulation, and hard work, Abe achieves his empire and even enlists his children in the work of the farm. Around the midpoint of the novel, Abe’s youngest son and protégé, Charlie, is killed when he is crushed beneath the wheel of the wagon he is using to deliver his father’s grain to town. Charlie’s death is precipitated by his father’s haste to get the grain to market, and the fatal accident thus forces Abe to confront his monomaniacal pursuit of a financially successful empire of wheat and subsequently instills in him a desire for escape. It is after his son is killed that Abe undergoes a sea change, as the novel transitions from a focus on his selfish ambition to conquer all that he surveys to a chronicle of his steady awakening to his place within a broader matrix of human and nonhuman communities. This awakening is manifest most profoundly in the opening chapter of the novel’s second half, where Abe takes stock after Charlie’s death and reorients himself to the farm he inhabits. Rather than seeing “the prairie only as a page to write the story of his life upon,” he instead reads the stories that have already been written on the landscape (173); that is, Abe provides what William Least Heat-Moon calls a deep map of his farmland, imagining its deep geological past and its former human and nonhuman inhabitants. He thereby begins to see his work as part of an ongoing exchange between the natural environment and introductionҏ 3 its human inhabitants. This deep mapping reveals to Abe the “mysteries of cosmic change” that demonstrate how he and his farm are mere interlopers in a great natural cycle of life and death. It is with this awareness that Abe reassesses his status as conqueror and moves toward a commitment to good citizenship. Grove explains: “[Abe] was changing his aim; that aim was now to...