Spirits of Place in American Literary Culture by John Gatta (review)

“What might it mean, existentially and spiritually, for human beings to inhabit a particular site or dwelling place on this earth?” John Gatta addresses this question in his thoughtful new book, published at a time when “prospects for sustaining rootedness in anything resembling a ‘home place’ are threatened … in Western culture as never before” (1). I say that Gatta addresses rather than answers this question, for his topic is a vast one; it has consumed volumes—even careers—and Gatta’s book does not so much colonize a niche of the field as much as range across a slightly larger expanse of it. Place, he says, represents “that bodily, dynamic interplay between human selves and their setting or dwelling” (3) that accords us a sense of belonging. Given “the fragmenting force of postmodernity,” fractiousness in our public spheres, and paralysis in the face of massive challenges like climate change, Gatta believes it “imperative to recover humanity’s connection with some form of sacred geography” (3) and to connect ourselves to “that something within or animating the material world [that] nonetheless transcends physical space and materiality” (7). What forms of genius loci, or spirits of place, move us in our present age? What forms of “sacramentality” do we embrace? What “outward and visible sign[s] of an inward and spiritual grace” might we find, “particularly as expressed through American literary culture?” (7)

These are large-minded, even soulful questions that are difficult to answer in their entirety. Rather than attempting exhaustive responses, Gatta’s approach is effectively to create dwelling places for their consideration, exploring various sites and their attendant concepts: with respectively, in its five chapters, houses, pilgrimages (to distinct places), imagination (as an emplaced “cast of mind”), sacred sites and geographies, and place-based education. These chapters themselves are sites for several noteworthy discussions. The first takes several pages to review the importance of houses to Harriet Beecher Stowe. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “the spiritual solace of a home place is the story’s point of departure” (34), a gesture that “encourages an emotional recognition, on the part of her mostly white readership, that commonplace familial and marital ties do indeed matter to African Americans. Such recognition was scarcely to be taken for granted at the time” (32). Or, for that matter, in ours, as Gatta remarks later that “Home rootedness and the once-venerated spiritual wellsprings of domestic life are qualities conspicuous by their absence in several contemporary novels” (49), including religiously-minded novels like Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. For this reason, “House structures, whenever they effectively embody our placement in a home, continue to figure as loci of meaning, as sites where spirits reside and memories are housed” (55).

Such tensions (between places we desire, places we lack, and places withheld from us) also surface in later chapters. The one on pilgrimage, for example, explores how “the classically integrated model of pilgrimage as shared with others and repeatable, as sacred journeying toward some well-defined and corporately venerated site”—think of the Camino de Santiago in Spain, or the Pilgrims’ Way in England—“is rarely seen in the United States.” Instead, “a spirituality of place is commonly associated either with the going there or veneration with what’s found upon getting there—but not with both” (77). Central here is Henry David Thoreau’s essay “Walking,” “the essential text for appreciating how the ideal of unconstrained, self-contained sauntering came to replace the traditional model of pilgrimage in American culture,” a text in which “the goal of sauntering is not to make one’s way speedily and directly to some fixed destination but rather to range widely, curiously, open in imagination to whatever may appear” (80). So it is with Huck and Jim as they meander down the Mississippi River in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or “Jack Kerouac’s hipster version of this story” in On the Road (75). A later chapter on sacred sites reflects movingly on...