Valuing Surface

A. C A R L B R E D A H L University of Florida Valuing Surface Three years ago I came to western literature frustrated by the implica­ tions ofself-perpetuation built into the idea ofa canon. After two Fulbrights in Pakistan and India where I was asked to focus on what was American about American literature, my perception of that literature together with the thrust of post-modern writing and criticism was beginning to depress me. Fortunately, I live at a time when feminist and ethnic critics have forced a general reexamination of assumptions about the canon. Today, reconstructing that canon has become a topic of major academic impor­ tance, one with both political and literary implications. While living in India, I could not help but become aware of the rich­ ness of that country’s regional diversity, a diversity reflected as well in its literature. On my return, therefore, I began to explore an area of American writing I knew little about. Guided by the discussions of John Milton and James Folsom, I soon realized that I was being introduced to some fine work—but, and this is the focus of my comments, I also realized that I was uncomfortable in not being able to define why I was so impressed. I had been publishing for years on the literature of the traditional canon, but what was I to make of books like Land of Little Rain, The Conquest of Don Pedro, Ceremony or This House of Sky? Clearly the fault was not Austin’s, Fergusson’s, Silko’s, or Doig’s. As a consequence, much of my recent work has been directed to reexamining my own critical assumptions. In that context, I would like to offer some thoughts on what seems to me a central difference in the way much canonical writing and much western writing (it goes without saying that I am not trying to be inclusive) view surface, the physical skin of the world of which we are all a part. I must add that my thoughts were rein­ 114 Western American Literature forced by Hal Simonson’s comments at the 1987 Western Literature Con­ vention in Lincoln regarding “place,” namely that location can and should be considered not only geographically but also vertically, where we locate ourselves socially and ecologically within our world. Charles Olson begins his 1947 Call Me Ishmael with these words: “I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now.”1I also take SPACE to be the central fact of the American imagination but wish to distinguish between those responses which funda­ mentally distrust Space and those which seek to embrace the demands of Space. “So if,” says Olson, “you want to know why Melville nailed us in Moby-Dick, consider whaling. Consider whaling as FRONTIER, and INDUSTRY. A product wanted, men got it: big business. The Pacific as sweatshop. . . . The whaleship as factory, the whaleboat the precision instrument” (23). A response to space which seeks to harpoon its vastness, cut off its blanket of warmth, and reduce it to candles and perfume is a frightening, physical instance of a commercial mentality which encloses wilderness and converts it to product. In his highly regarded A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature, Richard Poirier argues that “the most interesting American books” use style to create a world separate from the everyday, where, quoting Emerson, “Time and space, liberty and necessity, are left at large no longer.” In this enclosing, says Poirier, this acting on the belief that “only language can create the liberated place,” the individual is able to sustain and explore his imagination.2 Extending Poirier, another influ­ ential and equally Eastern-oriented critic, Tony Tanner, argues that when the American builds his house of style, he withdraws into it, separating himself from his neighbor.3And Alexis de Tocqueville made a similar point 130 years earlier: the American, he said, “shuts himself up tightly within himself and insists upon judging the world from there.”4Poirier, Tanner, and de Tocqueville are major names, and if there is truth in what they say, the implications of protectionism and provincialism are...