Refiguring the Map of Sorrow: Nature Writing and Autobiography

Epilogue: “We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live”

Joan Didion, in a masterful essay about California culture, “The White Album,” juxtaposes fifteen vignettes to capture the bizarre qualities of the sixties, from the politics of the Black Panther Party to the nihilism of The Doors’ Jim Morrison. Her collage of snapshots attempts to make sense of a time that has become so senseless to her that she winds up in a psychiatric hospital, unable to cope with the effort to comprehend and then mediate reality. She is supposed to have a script, she says, a plot, but she has mislaid it. Life is not meant to be all improvisation, a succession of images with no meaning, a cast-off film on a cutting-room floor, mixed up and cut up. “I wanted still to believe in the narrative,” she writes, “and in the narrative’s intelligibility , but to know that one could change the sense with every cut was to begin to perceive the experience as rather more electrical than ethical” (). Her own condition mirrors society’s, she continually suggests. Neither one has a coherent script. And yet we go on, she concludes, because “we tell ourselves stories in order to live.” Hubbell, Williams, Barich, Heat-Moon, Matthiessen, and Ehrlich —all have come to feel, likewise, that because of trauma and loss they have incoherent scripts for the world as they have known it. Like Didion, they tell stories in order to live, stories of human and nonhuman others that might teach them how their script coheres. Peter Fritzell, in Nature Writing and America, calls such attempts to locate oneself “settling stories,” suggesting that the earliest stories Epilogue “We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live” upv.allister.000-000.cx2 8/9/01 2:10 PM Page 169 of people writing about place were literal attempts to map the territory and name its inhabitants, human and nonhuman. The best American nature writers, Fritzell proposes, have continued in this vein, and the drama of their writings “has thus mirrored one of the essential forms of American experience, both actual and mythic: the experience of a self-conscious human individual attempting to come to terms with what we far too innocently and unconsciously call ‘the land’” (). The result, for writers such as Thoreau, Leopold, Dillard, and Abbey, has been a combination of natural-history writing and spiritual autobiography, and a tension that comes from two extreme positions, egoistic self-celebration and self-deprecation. In considering Hubbell, Williams, Barich, Heat-Moon, Matthiessen , and Ehrlich as nature writers, we may refine Fritzell’s thesis. The stories they tell are a version of settling the country, but they write about the land and its inhabitants for a different purpose: their settling stories are attempts to locate themselves first within and then outside a story of trauma and loss. While they write directly about nature (including humans), their self-creation becomes spiritual autobiography because only in that form are they able to transcend their loss. The tension of their narratives—and the alternation of voice— concerns the psychological swings between grieving and a hope that grieving is coming to an end. These books are a psychological version of settling the country. In the introduction I suggested that the books I take up intersect at the edges of autobiography studies, environmental literature, and literary nonfiction. A Country Year, Refuge, Laughing in the Hills, Blue Highways, The Snow Leopard, and The Solace of Open Spaces all occupy that small area where those three genres overlap. On one hand, genre seems analogous to species in biology, a grouping for closely related objects with similar identifying characteristics. But for these writers, the term genre has more to do with three frameworks for “seeing ”—into the self, into humans and culture, and into nature. Collectively the books address a large number of related topics: sustainability, animal species, Western myths, women’s work, travel, Zen Buddhism, ecosystems, atomic testing, cancer, rural life, and friendship, to name just a few. But what unites the explorations of these subjects are the writers’ desires to explore the world and tell its stories as an attempt to make sense of their own lives. Hubbell talks about living the questions, Heat-Moon finding the places where men Refiguring the Map of Sorrow 170 upv.allister.000-000.cx2 8/9/01 2:10 PM Page 170 and time and deeds connect; Ehrlich quotes Brodsky to maintain that “geography blended / with time equals...