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7 Gateway Politics, Grief Poetics West Meets West in Kristjana Gunnars’s Zero Hour To write you this I have come to the Gateway to the West. Not because the West is intriguing. But because it is there: open, dry, with little culture and much politics. And beyond the West there is the ocean. The jungle. The rains. A place to long for. To think towards. — Kristjana Gunnars, Zero Hour Go west, young man, and grow up with the country. — John Soule, editorial, Terre Haute Express (attributed) The Elegiac West West as the space of opportunity, west as philosophical destination: the two quotations above suggest a dichotomy about ideas of the West as the great good place in North America and, more significantly, about the state of mind that accompanies the decision to travel west—into the sunset, towards the edge of the continent, and perhaps beyond everyday experience . Heading west in order to seek a new beginning—be that fresh start nationally inflected as John Soule asserts or spiritually aligned as Kristjana Gunnars implies—suggests an engagement with geography that is not limited to the physical act of traversing space, but also involves a choice to leave the centre for the relative wildness of the margins. Both Soule and Gunnars gesture to a preparatory moment before heading west, as though 1 7 1 1 7 2 D i f f e r e n t l y C o n c e i v e d Na t i o n s the West demands that the traveller transform into something other than the usual self. To stand at the “Gateway to the West” and prepare to enter the new frontier is to rethink the nature of being, selfhood, and change. The advice attributed to an 1851 editorial in the Terre Haute Express by John Babson Lane Soule exhorting expansion into the western territories as an American opportunity for both adventure and financial gain seems worlds away from Kristjana Gunnars’s allusive and genre-challenging non-fiction work Zero Hour. Soule’s utterance is often attributed to Horace Greeley, founder and editor of the New York Tribune, who made the aphorism famous in his 1865 editorial. Debate rages on as to the original authorship, and as well it might, for the differences between Greeley’s East Coast position and Soule’s more liminal “gateway” position in the MidWest are significant. The injunction to “go west” means something when uttered from the centre of the continent that it does not when uttered from the eastern seaboard. Soule’s position as editor of the Terre Haute Express in the mid-nineteenth century indicates that he was acquainted with a gateway view, and spoke from a place that could be described, as Gunnars describes Manitoba, as “open, dry, with little culture and much politics” (9). Beyond geography, the western edge of the continent is an effulgent symbol of freedom in both the American and Canadian imagination, and Soule’s masculinist advice can be read alongside Gunnars’s philosophical peregrinations as historically and geographically situated notions of paradise. Allan Pritchard’s survey of paradise motifs in British Columbia literature, working with texts from the 1840s to the 1970s, has made the point that the West Coast has been written as an earthly paradise since the early days of its European explorers, and the metaphor continues to be ubiquitous. However, Pritchard also points out that those who encounter earthly paradise live in fear of their dispossession of that same paradise : “the image of paradise cannot be used without the apprehension of paradise lost” (36). Considering the position that paradise occupies in an elegiac text such as Zero Hour, a text that thinks towards the West rather than actually occupying it, is to consider paradise as a goal of completion, something that we should regard with some suspicion. To read the West in Zero Hour as the locale of consolation means conflating consolation with paradise in a way that complicates the possibility of earthly consolation. In Zero Hour, as in “The Anthropology of Water,” a geographical journey becomes part of the elegist’s search for a mourning practice. While both Carson and Gunnars write daughter-protagonists who are driven by desperation, Gunnars’s text references the national dream of a cross-country journey and folds into the mourner’s journey a politics of peace that is larger than personal peace. The mourner’s sojourn [18.190.153.51] Project MUSE (2024-04-19 22:48...

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