Abbey's Pursuit of "God or Medusa" in Desert Solitaire: The Role of Predation

Critical commentary has long acknowledged Edward Abbey's engagement with philosophical inquiry. John S. Farnsworth classifies Abbey as "a philosopher, generally a philosopher with transcendental leanings" (108). In referring to Abbey's relationship to the Colorado River, Abbey's friend Katie Lee comments, "[Abbey] uses the river to do what he usually does. To philosophize" (274). Edward S. Twining sees Abbey as sharing kinship with "Spinoza, who saw Nature as God, God as Nature" and asserts that Abbey "mentally dueled with Spinoza through much of his life" (31). Through all the commentary, however, little attention is given to the role predation plays in one of Abbey's most important philosophical pursuits, a task he frames in Desert Solitaire as "meet[ing] God or Medusa face to face" (6), using the desert as his "medium" (xii). Predation's important place in this inquiry needs to be addressed because it relates to the nature or character of any cosmic force he might discover, potentially revealing whether it is positive or negative, "God or Medusa." Abbey targets the topic in three key passages: his rabbit "experiment" where he kills a rabbit with a rock; his hearing an owl's calling that triggers thoughts about forces drawing predator and prey together; and his speculation about how spadefoot toads attract predators. Beyond these literal accounts, Abbey offers a figurative one in the Billy-Joe story where nature becomes a type of predator preying on people and where Mrs. Husk, Billy-Joe's stepmother, emerges as a predatory Medusa figure. Analysis of these accounts casts light on the "God or Medusa" Abbey seeks.

In attempting to infer "God or Medusa" from nature, Abbey aligns with a literary tradition that relies on nature as a window into a higher world.¹ This approach assumes that phenomena can reveal answers to existential questions. Alexander Pope provides an early literary example in his "Essay on Man" when he states:

Say first, of God above, or man below,What can we reason, but from what we know?Of man, what see we but his station here,From which to reason, or to which refer?Thro' worlds unnumber'd tho' the God be known,'Tis ours to trace him in our own.

("Epistle I" 17–22)

Ralph Waldo Emerson's claim that "[e]very natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact" epitomizes the logic embedded in this approach (23). Drawing conclusions about a spiritual world based on the natural one worked well for many until they grappled with predation. One group that faced grave difficulty was the natural theologians of the 19th century. Because, as Stephen Jay Gould explains, they believed they could "infer God's essence from the products of creation" (605), they faced having to reconcile carnage in nature with their assumption of a benevolent creator. The bloodshed and suffering resulting from one organism preying upon another did not elegantly fit their ideology. With the publication of In Memoriam in 1850, Tennyson poses a similar existential question when trying to reconcile that "nature is red in tooth and claw" with the creative agency responsible for it:

[Man] trusted God was love indeedAnd love Creation's final law—Tho Nature, red in tooth and clawWith ravine, shriek'd against his creed—

(LVI 13–16)

A list of those engaging this topic could fill volumes. My purpose, however, is not to give an extensive survey, only to establish a literary tradition using the natural world as a guide to a supernatural one. Abbey's attempt to infer "God or Medusa" through the "medium" of the desert falls within this tradition, as Twining implies with his comment that "Abbey belongs in a line of philosophical American seekers of meaning in nature…stretching all the way from Emerson…." (30).

Unlike the above authors who base their arguments on their belief in a supernatural power, Abbey does not begin with a preconceived idea, or at least not in the same way. Like Rene Descartes trying to find some unassailable "first principle" for his philosophical platform (460), Abbey rejects all established...