Preface

This book is about a mode of nature representation that abjures the sentimentality and humanization frequently found in nature writings. It is about a fascination with natural places that are unwelcoming, even unforgiving, to human presence: ocean, mountains, desert, the wilderness. Of course the books and, in one section, movies that depict such places cannot completely avoid humanizing them since it is humans doing the depicting. They do go as far as they can, using the rhetorical possibilities at their disposal to diminish if not completely deface the signs of human presence that mar what would ideally be pristine sites.

In the first section I examine some of these philosophical and rhetorical strategies. The theories and terms for such strategies mostly postdate the writings that use them, as is usually true for literary critiques. The strategies I find most relevant are the negative dialectics of Theodor Adorno, negative theology, Edmund Burke’s conception of the sublime, and variations on these conceptions in the emerging field of what is now called ecocriticism. I first explore the problem of representing the unrepresentable, a problem negative theology saw in any attempt to represent God and Adorno saw in any attempt to represent nature. Indeed, even the word “nature” turns out to be complex and inherently contradictory. Near the end of this section I show how Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Snow Man,” which contains the line that gives my book its title, plays out the paradoxes of attempting to write nature naturally. This section concludes with Robinson Jeffers’s proclamation of a conception of nature that he terms “inhumanist,” which explicitly rejects edenic and comforting fantasies of nature.

The next section is concerned with Thoreau’s quest for wildness, as shown especially in his journals and in “Ktaadn,” his account of Mount Ktaadn’s encounter with him, later posthumously incorporated in The Maine Woods. We shall see an explosion of paradoxy in Thoreau’s endeavor to write nature in as uncivilized a fashion as possible. Thoreau departs from his mentor, Emerson, whose conception of nature eventually folds it back into the subjective ego from which Thoreau, along with other artists in this study, was trying to escape. Indeed, a central motif of this study is the felt need to transcend personal ego and the ever-expanding cultural apparatus in order to rediscover something basic and primal. Whether this can be done, of course, is in question. Thoreau does make a determined attempt to identify with the wild in the form of a fox and a mountain (Ktaadn), though he is outfoxed by a loon.

Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat,” the subject of section 3, undermines notions of nature’s quasi-providential benevolence with lethal irony while also powerfully conveying its sublime power. Here, as with Ktaadn in Thoreau, the central agency is found in nature as opposed to human efforts. The men in the boat are at the mercy of nature, which has no mercy. The men would settle even for malevolence so they could have the solace of something if not someone to blame, but this too fails them. Nature is simply magnificently and dangerously there, while God is conspicuously not there. The story is as much about falsely comforting conventions of representing nature as it is about the natural world itself, a world that resists such representational conventions except for the one Crane himself employs, that of the sublime.

The focus of section 4 is the desert; I explore three encounters with the southwestern desert in Bill Broyles’s Sunshot, Charles Bowden’s Inferno, and Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire. These are wild books by wild authors about wild places, places all three love in direct ratio to how unforgiving they are. In Bowden and Abbey the unrepresentability of the desert world is a theme, as is its sublimity.

Section 5 takes up fictional and filmic representations of dangerous terrain: the Sahara in Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky; the harshness of the outback in the Australian film The Proposition; the high desert of Kekexili in the Chinese film Mountain Patrol: Kekexili; the desert seacoast of Brazil in House of Sand (Casa de...