Perspectives on Percival Everett

Chapter Four: The Preservationist Impulse in Percival Everett’s: “True Romance”

60 Chapter 4 The Preservationist Impulse in Percival Everett’s “True Romance” F R É D É R I C D U M A S Readers may easily relate to the geographical and imaginative landscapes depicted in Percival Everett’s 2004 short-story collection, Damned if I Do, which, on the whole, are set in locales in the southwestern United States. The story collection displays characters striving to reach an appropriate balance between the wildness of their environment and their largely unsettled lives. With its focus on a lonely hero determined to fight for the preservation of his land in New Mexico and the halcyon lifestyle the landscape would afford him against a planned urban development zone, “True Romance” stands out as the only story in the collection directly concerned with environmental activism. Everett’s poetic universe in “True Romance” and in longer narratives such as Watershed (1996), Grand Canyon, Inc (2001), American Desert (2004), Wounded (2005), and Assumption (2011) is grounded in an American literary tradition that extols the positive values of nature, particularly those of the West, which has often been endowed with a mythical dimension that paradoxically denies it a tangible existence. This process consists in an “aestheticization of landscape” through which the American wilderness was transformed, step by step, into “picturesque scenes,” an appropriation that “removed it from the realm of nature and designated it a legitimate object of artistic consumption.” [. . .] During the first part of the twentieth century, that aestheticization, which left a legacy of The Preservationist Impulse in “True Romance” 61 unreality, happened roundly around the West, a region where “nature’s text” would have to wait awhile before many would learn to read it “as something other than fiction.” (Johnson 220) The allusion to “romance” in the title orients the reception of the narrative in the context of a celebrated trend that includes masterpieces such as Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables (1850) and whose conventions are kept very much alive in contemporary literature that employs magic realism as an aesthetic device. The oxymoronic juxtaposition displayed in the expression “True Romance” draws attention to the conflicting relation between reality and its literary expression; it proves all the more telling since Rawley Tucker, the autodiegetic narrator, is to embark on a one-man preservationist crusade raising contradictory issues, notably between his romantic vision of nature and his burgeoning apprehension of the inherent financial realities of the encroachment of big business. Such contradictions lie at the heart of the founding of America, which was oriented toward the recovery of the Garden of Eden and yet was sustained by an irrepressible urge to acquire land that led to genocide, slavery , and the advent of monopolistic capitalism. For historical reasons, the utopian impulse survived the physical confrontation with the American environment: Nature not just in America but as America was a dream from the beginning . An unoccupied continent plus the young republic’s good fortune for having its “fathers” men of the enlightenment combined—as is written in the Declaration of Independence—to give authority to “the laws of nature and to Nature’s God.” (Kazin 7) American literature continues to probe the essence of an American nature in a fairly obsessive manner. In so doing, it is instrumental in shaping nature as a fantasy and keeping the natural environment at the heart of the concept. Nature writing is a crucial facet of the writing of America, and “True Romance” may be said to constitute the cornerstone of Everett’s ecological writing. It is in tune with the overall optimistic spirit of Damned if I Do, which oscillates between the two poles of the famed American “pastoral impulse”—viz., regression and vitality. F R É D É R I C D U M A S 62 I will begin by analyzing Rawley’s critical yet qualified approach to mercantilism in American society. His anachronistic lifestyle will appear only superficially regressive because, in reality, it stems from a strong system of values that he believes, in an environmentalist/preservationist American tradition, is worth fighting for; “True Romance” puts forward a doctrine of environmental activism that turns out to involve not only the question of the end and the means to achieve it, but also mostly that of the paradoxical price of utopia. The Pastoral Impulse and the Business Question “True Romance” remarkably fits the concept of the pastoral impulse put forward by Leo Marx in his...