Culture, Technology, and the Creation of America's National Parks, and: Landscape and Ideology in American Renaissance Literature (review)

Grusin interprets the coordination of cultural and technological forces in the creation of three national parks: Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Grand Canyon. In a brief conclusion, he considers three late-modern alternative parks: Cumberland Island National Seashore, which tries to recover the idea of wilderness prior to human intervention; Dinosaur National Monument as a prehistoric ecology; Robert Misrach's Bravo 20: The Bombing of the American West (1990), a virtual counter-monument memorializing the military destruction of the West (complete with Visitor's Center and Gift Shop). Grusin's book ranges historically from post-Civil War to our postmodern era, although its primary focus is from the late 1860s (Yellowstone was established in 1872) to 1911, when the Grand Canyon was finally authorized as a national park. Grusin stresses the historical specificities of the imbrication of culture and technology, but also identifies the continuities between nineteenth-century ideologies of Nature and the West with our contemporary attitudes. Thus the problem with Misrach's "anti-park" is not so much its political radicalism as its conventionality within the hermeneutic logics of modern U.S. efforts to appropriate the West for nationalist uses.

Grusin deploys a wide range of Continental theorists—Kant, Foucault, Derrida, Barthes, Zizek, and others—and visual studies theorists, like Rosalind Kraus and Jonathan Crary, to elevate his subject to the serious scholarly consideration it deserves. At times, these theories risk formalizing his objects of study. Yosemite recreates nature in textual terms, linking Olmsted and Muir with later semioticians. Yellowstone historicizes and narrativizes the West in ways resembling Derrida's trace-structure of the sign. From John Wesley Powell's first navigation of the Colorado River in 1869 to Lawrence Kasdan's 1991 film, the Grand Canyon has figured ideologically as "cognitively inaccessible," a sort of desert "differance." Used heuristically, Grusin's theoretical approaches enable us to understand the cultural uses of nature in the semiotics of the "national park system," but those same theories do scholarly work analogous to the national ideology he criticizes.

Grusin explains clearly how the national park system contributed to the Myth of the Vanishing American, but he does little to acknowledge how native people have criticized these monuments. Consider the American Indian Movement's Russell Means seizing the microphone at Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument during the 100th Anniversary of Custer's Last Stand to protest the military-industrial conspiracy to colonize Indians, arguing that the National Monument is as obscene as a memorial to Lieutenant Calley would be at the village of My Lai in Vietnam (Edward Tabor Linenthal, Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991], 43-144). Similarly, Grusin's focus on technology and science makes only passing references to the macro-economic forces behind such explorers, surveyors, and artists as Ferdinand Hayden, William Henry Jackson, Thomas Moran, John Wesley Powell, Clarence Dutton, and Jack Hillers.

But these are minor objections to a brilliant study of media as diverse and difficult to interpret as: landscape painting, scientific surveys (including their maps, charts, and photography), nature writing, popular western literature, philosophical aesthetics, film, and the World Wide Web. Anyone who doubts the formal difficulty and historical complexity of cultural study should read this book, as should anyone who claims expertise in American Studies and American literature.

Abrams's Landscape and Ideology in American Renaissance Literature promises a broader historical context for Grusin's study of the national parks, but Abrams's subtitle, Topographies of Skepticism, suggests that this book is not really about landscape or visuality, except as they mystify our textual senses. Canonical American Renaissance authors—Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville—deconstruct the Myth of America, especially as it unfolds in Manifest Destiny. Whereas visual media—maps, paintings, iconography, scientific and ethnographic illustration—help shape the national body, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville question the boundaries between Nature...