UUnniivveerrssiittyy ooff KKeennttuucckkyy UUKKnnoowwlleeddggee Theses and Dissertations--English English 2018 WWIILLDD AABBAANNDDOONN:: PPOOSSTTWWAARR LLIITTEERRAATTUURREE BBEETTWWEEEENN EECCOOLLOOGGYY AANNDD AAUUTTHHEENNTTIICCIITTYY Alexander F. Menrisky University of Kentucky, [email protected] Author ORCID Identifier: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1241-8415 Digital Object Identifier: https://doi.org/10.13023/ETD.2018.150 RRiigghhtt cclliicckk ttoo ooppeenn aa ffeeeeddbbaacckk ffoorrmm iinn aa nneeww ttaabb ttoo lleett uuss kknnooww hhooww tthhiiss ddooccuummeenntt bbeenneefifittss yyoouu.. RReeccoommmmeennddeedd CCiittaattiioonn Menrisky, Alexander F., "WILD ABANDON: POSTWAR LITERATURE BETWEEN ECOLOGY AND AUTHENTICITY" (2018). Theses and Dissertations--English. 66. https://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/66 This Doctoral Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the English at UKnowledge. 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Menrisky, Student Dr. Michael Trask, Major Professor Dr. Jill Rappoport, Director of Graduate Studies WILD ABANDON: POSTWAR LITERATURE BETWEEN ECOLOGY AND AUTHENTICITY ________________________________________ DISSERTATION ________________________________________ A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Kentucky By Alexander Menrisky Lexington, Kentucky Director: Dr. Michael Trask, Professor of English Lexington, Kentucky 2018 Copyright © Alexander Menrisky 2018 ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION WILD ABANDON: POSTWAR LITERATURE BETWEEN ECOLOGY AND AUTHENTICITY Wild Abandon traces a literary and cultural history of late twentieth-century appeals to dissolution, the moment at which a text seems to erase its subject’s sense of selfhood in natural environs. I argue that such appeals arose in response to a prominent yet overlooked interaction between discourses of ecology and authenticity following the rise and fall of the American New Left in the 1960s and 70s. This conjunction inspired certain intellectuals and activists to celebrate the ecological concept of interconnectivity as the most authentic basis of subjectivity in political, philosophical, spiritual, and literary writings. As I argue, dissolution represents a universalist and essentialist impulse to reject self-identity in favor of an identification with the ecosystem writ large, a claim to authenticity that flattens distinctions among individuals and communities. But even as the self appears to disintegrate, an “I” always remains to testify to its disintegration. For this reason, dissolution performs a primarily critical function by foregrounding an unsurpassable representational tension between sense of self and ecosystem. Each chapter explores a different perspective on this tension as it conflicts with matters of gender and race in works by Edward Abbey, Peter Matthiessen, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, and Jon Krakauer. Assuming an anti-essentialist stance, all the texts I study acknowledge ecological interconnectivity as a universal condition but maintain the necessity of culturally mediated and individually constructed identity positions from which to recognize that condition. KEYWORDS: American literature, postwar literature, ecology, environmentalism, counterculture, authenticity Alexander Menrisky 13 April 2018 Date WILD ABANDON: POSTWAR LITERATURE BETWEEN ECOLOGY AND AUTHENTICITY By Alexander Menrisky Dr. Michael Trask Director of Dissertation Dr. Jill Rappoport Director of Graduate Studies 13 April 2018 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am indebted to superb mentors and the support of friends and family for the successful completion of this dissertation. First, and most enthusiastically, to my director Michael Trask, whose guidance has been foundational to this project, my scholarship, and my career. Second, to the diligent members of my committee, Virginia Blum, Randall Roorda, and Carol Mason. Each contributed to the project in ways unexpected and always heartily appreciated. Third, to professional mentors near and far and over time, including but not limited to Michelle Sizemore, Elizabeth Connors-Manke, Jill Rappoport, Alan Nadel, Jan Hodson, Thomas Hodson, Bernhard Debatin, and Jeremy Webster, whose frequent and freely offered advice has benefited my research, pedagogy, and professional development at large. I would also like to thank the wonderful community of fellow students who have offered feedback and—more importantly—made this process worth surviving, especially Katie Waddell, Kadee Whaley, Cate Gooch, Emily Handy, Brittany Sulzener, Tess Given, Deirdre Mikolajcik, Jenna Goldsmith, Matthew Bryant-Cheney, and Daniel Cockayne. Thanks also to friends near and far, especially Rachel Mihuta Grimm, Gina Edwards, Stephanie Fisk, Rachel Collins, Lainie Chrisman, Jaclyn Bakalarski, Erin Newell, and Alyssa Sciortino, for their ability to challenge me without restraint, intellectually and politically, and for their boundless love. To my mother and father, who offer encouragement when necessary and support frequently. To my sister, whose own pedagogical commitments are an inspiration. To Justin DeCamp and Katie Kalbacher for widening the circle of what counts as family. And to Vince Dominguez for all of this and literally everything else. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................. iii CHAPTER 1 Introduction: Between Ecology and Authenticity ........................................ 1 “The Subversive Science” ............................................................................................. 12 The Authentic Ego ........................................................................................................ 16 Politics of Ecological Consciousness............................................................................ 21 Narratives of Wilderness Retreat .................................................................................. 29 CHAPTER 2 The Ecological Alternative: Civilization and Selfhood in Desert Solitaire and The Snow Leopard...................................................................................................... 37 Abbey’s Alternative ...................................................................................................... 49 Feeling Like a River...................................................................................................... 57 The Psychedelics of Water, Wind, and Stone ............................................................... 66 CHAPTER 3 The Universal Wilderness: Song of Solomon’s Skeptical State of Nature . 79 Dissolution and Racial Identitarianism ......................................................................... 89 Pilate and the Pastoral ................................................................................................... 97 An Admission of Fabrication ...................................................................................... 106 CHAPTER 4 The Essential Ecosystem: Surfacing’s Identity Crises ............................. 115 “The First True Human” ............................................................................................. 128 Expectation, Essence, and Environment ..................................................................... 138 An Appeal to Obliteration ........................................................................................... 143 CHAPTER 5 The Death of Alexander Supertramp: Into the Wild’s Ambivalent Ecological Consciousness ............................................................................................... 152 The Ascetic Superhero’s Boast ................................................................................... 163 Narratives of Natural Identity ..................................................................................... 171 Fatal Dissolutions........................................................................................................ 183 CHAPTER 6 Coda: Against the Authentic Life ............................................................. 194 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 205 VITA ............................................................................................................................... 223 iv CHAPTER 1 Introduction: Between Ecology and Authenticity What does it mean to be a unique human individual? How can the individual self maintain and increase its uniqueness while also being an inseparable aspect of the whole system wherein there are no sharp breaks between self and other? Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology . . . nature loves the idea of the individual, if not the individual himself . . . Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek In a late chapter of Desert Solitaire (1968), Edward Abbey writes, “We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it the life of the cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis” (149). Elsewhere, he critiques “the Viennese quacks” who would suggest that defiance of authority “was in reality no more than the rebelliousness of an adolescent rejecting his father” (Down 31-2). We can read Abbey’s words regarding psychoanalysis two ways: as suggesting that wilderness retreat negates the possibility of neurosis or psychosis, or that wilderness retreat itself serves as an alternative to psychoanalysis, a “walking cure” that presumably includes Abbey’s own works, which he refers to as “antidotes to despair” (3). Twenty years later, in The Practice of the Wild (1990), Gary Snyder would write that “there is a problem with the self-seeking human ego. Is it a mirror of the wild and of nature? I think not: for civilization itself is ego gone to seed and institutionalized in the form of the State, both Eastern and Western” (Practice 92). Snyder projects an ecological and a psychoanalytic schema onto one another in this passage, aligning the ego with “civilization” and the unconscious with the wild aspects of “nature” as if taking his terms straight from Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). His understanding of each relationship (ego to unconscious, civilization to wilderness) determines and is determined by his interpretation of the other. 1 Abbey and Snyder are by no means the only ecologically minded writers to dip their toes into psychoanalysis. Murray Bookchin integrated psychoanalytic terminology into his eco-anarchist arguments over the course of forty years, lamenting the Western valuation of “intellectual experience over sensuousness, the ‘reality principle’ over the ‘pleasure principle’” (7) in The Ecology of Freedom (1982). In the field of ecocriticism, William Howarth begins his opening chapter of Reading the Earth (1998) with a judgment on the state of ecology in both the natural sciences and environmental literary criticism, writing that both disciplines, at the time, appeared “[m]ore ego- than ecocentric . . . unlikely to build rapport with other disciplines” (3). The ego and the possibility—or impossibility— of its undoing have long been the concern of many an ecological writer. Despite Abbey’s disavowal, wilderness retreat narratives of the postwar era are entangled within a radical cultural context in which psychoanalysis experienced a surge in popularity beyond its institutional uses in social theory influential to the New Left. This branch of psychoanalytic thought forms merely one facet of a larger cultural discourse surrounding the celebration of and anxiety about both coherent and autonomous selfhood and its potential fabrication, evacuation, fragmentation, or dismissal. These concerns circulated throughout the 1950s, 60s, and 70s within the academy and around both radical and mainstream conversations about ecology and the environment. In Wild Abandon: Postwar Literature Between Ecology and Authenticity, I argue that wilderness retreat narratives of the post-1945 era negotiate what they dramatize as a tension between coherent selfhood and ecological interconnectivity. Arising in the wake of New Left calls for liberation and the commitment to authenticity that became the cornerstone of countercultural politics, as well as the politics of the new social movements 2 that followed, this conflict manifests in moments during which a text seems to erase its characters’ sense of selfhood in natural environs. These moments of dissolution are paradoxical experiences, requiring an “I” to testify to the erasure the self undergoes. Such passages, in which an individual professes to feel his or her selfhood melt into holistic harmony with the environment before selfhood re-coheres, are always ambivalent. They illustrate the oscillation central to the conflict these texts foreground between authentic selfhood and ecological interconnectivity as the New Left faded into the counterculture. Wild Abandon’s title gestures toward both the almost capricious rejection of self-identity foregrounded in these texts and the wilderness locale to which literary figures retreat in an attempt to conceptualize and identify with the complexity of the ecosystem writ large. When I refer to authenticity, I mean an historically specific personal (and political) commitment to “a state of unity with the self” (Rossinow, Politics 4). As Michael Trask writes, if one Cold War liberal goal was to call the unity of self into question, then the New Left commitment was to “bring such a unity into being” (104). The notion of “unity” itself becomes troubling, however, for its inconsistency among various countercultural projects. Many radical ecological intellectuals have placed emphasis on “unity” in vastly disparate ways, from James Lovelock, who in 1975 broached the Gaia hypothesis to describe a holistic, “planet-sized entity” (10), to Bookchin, who proposed a utopian “ecological society” premised on what he refers to as primitive “organic societies” supplemented by modern technology (Ecology 3). For Bookchin, “it was the unity of my views—their ecological holism, not merely their individual components—that gave them a radical thrust.” 3