Now I Understand....Desert Solitaire. Hmm....  

3/11/2009 11:18 pm

Desert Solitaire Nietzsche: “Gaze not too long into the abyss, lest the abyss gaze into thee”--(1992a, 210) **************************************************************** Don Scheese claims that “Desert Solitaire represents the correspondence of man and environment, a kind of literary environmental determinism” (1996, 110). I argue that the book does not represent correspondence but is marked by a concurrent feeling of physicality and distinction. There is nothing deterministic about Abbey’s text; on the contrary, it is a celebration of the openness of signification. Scheese’s interpretation is biased by his romantic (he sees romanticism as exclusively re-contextualizing)preconceptions about nature, as when he describes... “Abbey’s passionate desire for sanctuary from civilization […] in which time and the forces of history float by, leaving him undisturbed during an idyllic retreat” (1996, 110). Abbey’s retreat is heterotopian, not idyllic, and his writing is marked by distinction, not by “the quest for oneness with the nonhuman world” (Scheese 1996, 111). Abbey’s notion of distinction also influences his aesthetic sense; therefore he often mentions “the abyss”–literally the abyss of canyons but metaphorically the abyss that distinguishes humanity. The main element of the abyss is the presence of death, as when Abbey speculates how the missed tourist may have disappeared: “It is not impossible that our man […] eased himself over, deliberately, in broad daylight,drawn into the void by the beauty and power of his own terror” (1992a, 210). Abbey then quotes Nietzsche: “Gaze not too long into the abyss, lest the abyss gaze into thee” (1992a,210) –which refers not to reconciliation with nature but to the second step of distinction,rebellion against death. The abyss, not correspondence, is the central metaphor in Desert Solitaire. A scene that parallels Abbey’s ambivalence towards merging with nature is found in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening. When Edna goes swimming in the ocean for the first time, she experiences both freedom and a premonition of her later death: She turned her face seaward to gather in an impression of space and solitude, which the vast expanse of water, meeting and melting with the moonlit sky, conveyed to her excited fancy. As she swam she seemed to be reaching out for the unlimited in which to lose herself. […] But to her unaccustomed vision the stretch of water behind her assumed the aspect of a barrier which her unaided strength would never be able to overcome. A quick vision of death smote her soul, and for a second of time appalled and enfeebled her senses. (1993, 46-47) Swimming in the ocean both heightens the sense of self and the sense of distinction and threatens its undoing through merging which results in death. It is the closeness of existential nature, symbolized through the “moonlit sky,” not the merging with it that allows freedom; coming too close does not provide freedom but “enfeebled her senses.” In his description of Delicate Arch Abbey reminds the reader that there is an external world, and that the desert (like Chopin’s ocean) is a space where its physicality can be experienced: “Delicate Arch has the curious ability to remind us–like rock and sunlight and wind and wilderness–that out there is a different world, older and greater and deeper by far than ours, a world which surrounds us and sustains the little world of men as sea and sky surround and sustain a ship” (1992a, 37, emphasis Abbey’s). The experience of external reality does not take the form of correspondence, rather it unsettles established notions of reality: “If Delicate Arch has any significance it lies […] in the power of the odd and unexpected to startle the senses and surprise the mind out of their ruts of habit, to compel us into a reawakened awareness of the wonderful–that which is full of wonder” (1992a, 36-37). "Only a few things are really important." -- Marie Dressler