Bad Land Pastoralism in Great Plains Fiction

4. Patches of Green and Fields of Dust: Dust Bowl Pastoralism in Olsen’s Yonnondio and Manfred’s The Golden Bowl

4 Patches of Green and Fields of Dust Dust Bowl Pastoralism in Olsen’s Yonnondio and Manfred’s The Golden Bowl Place where folks live is them folks. They ain’t whole, out lonely in a piled-up car. They ain’t alive no more.—John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 1939 Leaving, Staying, and the Tragedy of Dust The human and ecological catastrophe of the Dust Bowl as a land-eventthrowsintorelieftheambivalentheritageoflanduseontheGreat Plains and provides a catalyst for renewed and revised articulations of bad land pastoralism.1 In many ways, the Dust Bowl is the consummate “bad land” event. It is a dramatic human and environmental tragedy that simultaneously registers the dusty reality of what is there and exposes, through its loss, the romantic fantasy concerning what might have been. As attempts to rectify the gap between the reality and the fantasy, bad land pastorals dramatize moments of transition that beg questions about what it means to adapt to and inhabit a place. To this point, the transitional moments or land-events that I have looked at have crystallized around land-use frontiers, documenting the very process of transforming the landscape and recounting the tragicomic nature of the pioneer experience. As the previous chapter has shown, the ambivalence that characterizes Cather’s Nebraska novels emerges from the author’s doubts concerning the postfrontier moment.  136ҍ patches of green and fields of dust With the “original” prairie all but depleted, how does one sustain a multidimensionalconnectiontothelandscape ?Withoutthemagical,transformative effect of pioneering as a creative and spiritual act how does one achieve the kind of transcendent conversion that the early settlers achieved? The example of Ivy Peters seems to suggest that land use on the Plains can easily become one-dimensional and disintegrate into a purely economic engagement with the physical and social environment. This is the central paradox of frontier experience, one which Cather could not fully reconcile beyond embracing, like Jim Burden, the “immemorial past.” The Dust Bowl raises these same questions though the stakes are decidedly higher. That is, Dust Bowl narratives must more fully confront the meaning of the postfrontier Plains as well as resolve the negative effects of Euroamerican frontier experience. In this manner, Dust Bowl pastorals extend and build upon manifestations of bad land pastoralism that deal with thePlainsfrontier,evenasthecrisisofdustforcesareconsiderationofwhatit meanstoinhabittheregioninthewakeoftheclosedfrontier.Theconditions thatdefinetheDustBowl—depression,drought,anddepopulation—compel onetorecognizethatinapostfrontiercontextthecultivatedanduncultivated polesoftheconventionalpastoralarenolongerseparated.Thenaturalworld no longer provides an escape from the complexities of civilization, and the frontier is no longer a safety valve for the downtrodden. The problems of the city become the problems of the countryside.2 First, the malevolence of nature, in the form of drought and wind and dust, suggests that the environment is not only not a refuge, but part of the problem. Whether read as a judgment against “the plow that broke the Plains,” or as a tragic reminder of thebadlandqualityoftheenvironment,aneventliketheBlackBlizzardchallenges any attempt to romanticize the landscape; at the very least it demands a reassessment of former modes of romanticization. Second, the emergent proletariandiscourseduringtheDirtyThirtieshelpedtoemphasizehowthe natural world, like the laborer, is part and parcel of the matrix of exploitation perpetratedbythestructuresofindustrialcapitalism.Thestruggleofthetenantfarmerandsmallindependentfarmertoovercomethechallengesthrown up not only by the land but also by abstract entities like “the bank” and “the government,” as well as by competition from agribusiness conglomerates, servestoillustratehowvarioussocioeconomicforcesalignedtoundercutthe agrarian myth. Although the celebrated pioneers of the frontier era embody anethicofdevelopmentgroundedinthecapitalistenterprise,andareinmany patches of green and fields of dustҏ 137 instances,likeCaptainForrester,theforebearsofindustrialfarming,therawness of their supposedly direct experience with the native prairies redeems andspirituallytransformsthem.Largelystrippedofthisexperience,theDust Bowl and Depression era rural laborer must face alienation from nature as one more dimension of her suffering. The attempt to recover and renegotiate a connection to nature in the face of dystopian conditions is at the core of bad land pastorals that engage the Dust Bowl. The two fictional narratives I examine in this chapter, Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio: From the Thirties (1974) and Frederick Manfred’s The GoldenBowl(1944),approachthebioculturalcrisisoftheDustBowlfromtwo separate angles but posit strikingly similar imaginative visions that locate a renewed hope in the pastoral ideal even as they build upon and recognize the tragic failure of this ideal in a postfrontier context. In this way, the Dust Bowl narratives of Olsen and Manfred present a form of social and historiographical critique; in addition, they refashion the promise of pastoralism to fit the contours of a fallen and ruined biocultural landscape. As tragicomic narratives, that is, these representative Dust Bowl pastorals begin the work of...