Traces of Gold: California’s Natural Resources and the Claim to Realism in Western American Literature by Nicolas S. Witschi (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 2 0 3 She quotes one worker lamenting “If we’re saving all this time [with personal digital assistants], why don’t we get enough sleep?” (75). The cultural structures and cultural conflicts described by English-Lueck will surely make up part of the context of new literature of the American West. It’s not difficult to see how this culture has already begun to spring up deep in the Intermountain West, where tech writers telecommute from old mining towns in Montana and programmers live in ski lodges in Utah. And cultural changes bring conflict—perhaps particularly from the way the new origin myths of Silicon Valley seem to erase prior history and look only forward. Cultures @ Silicon Valley does not offer any conclusions about whether Silicon Valley will be a successful model of the future for other communities, or even whether it will be successful in its own right. Most of it was composed before the latest downturn in the tech economy and so doesn’t take the consequences of the Internet bubble into account. Wisely, the book describes the valley as an experiment in technological saturation and a new kind of diversity. The consequences of this experiment, whatever they are, will have broad repercussions. Traces of Qold: California's Natural Resources and the Claim to Realism in Western American Literature. By Nicolas S. Witschi. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabam a Press, 2002. 240 pages, $39.95. Reviewed by Nathaniel Lewis St. M ichael’s College, Colchester, Vermont There are few ideas more vexed in western literary history than “realism,” and Nicolas S. Witschi takes on this elusive concept in his insightful study, Traces of Gold. Witschi sets out to examine how a set of western writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century— notably Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, John Muir, Frank Norris, Mary Austin, and Raymond Chandler— deployed the discourse of realism, in terms of both genre and representation. Early in the book, and with admirable clarity, Witschi explains his intentions: he will argue, first, that “there exists a heretofore unrecognized commitment to realism among writers in the American West” and that this commitment “bears directly on the canon of realism concurrently developing in New York and Boston”; second, that this “genealogy” of realism, “ostensibly founded on the rep­ resentation of the West’s natural beauty, is in fact keenly engaged with the West’s natural resources industries”; and third, “that this literary history ofnatural resources belies, or at the very least complicates, the possibility for realistic representations of unalloyed nature” (10-11). Witschi’s careful historicizing and reasoned tone play effectively against the dramatic suggestions of his argument, producing a book both subtle and ambitious. At first it seems odd that the subject needs examination at all. How can this writerly “commitment to realism” be critically “unrecognized” when, as Krista Comer has correctly pointed out in Landscapes of the New West (1999), “the bulk 2 0 4 WAL 3 8 .2 SUMMER 2 0 0 3 of critical opinion holds that if one can point to any general genre identity to characterize western literature, it would probably be realism” (2)? The answer, of course, lies in the elusive complexity of the term “realism,” and Witschi’s inves­ tigation of the dynamic interplay between western realists and the “real West” is both fresh and provocative. Indeed, it is rather astonishing to think that while western writing on the whole has been widely read in terms of its realism (and the concomitant play of myth and history), “the cultural and historical ties between the West and the movement known as literary realism have thus far gone largely unexamined” (69). Witschi’s book is therefore corrective in that it introduces a series of tensions where one might expect to find certainties— tensions between representation, genre, and region. Eschewing heavy-handed theory, Witschi focuses his attention on an impressive range of primary texts, including the rich vein of western magazine stories of the period. What he finds is that the traditional association of the “real West” with Edenic nature is not only inadequate, but ideologically and histori­ cally suspect— and, more to the point, that careful readings of...