University of Montana ScholarWorks at University of Montana Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Graduate School Professional Papers 2003 Stepping through the metaphor| Literary animism in Barry Lopez's short fiction Travis Dakota Burdick The University of Montana Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.edu/etd Let us know how access to this document benefits you. Recommended Citation Burdick, Travis Dakota, "Stepping through the metaphor| Literary animism in Barry Lopez's short fiction" (2003). Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers.edu/etd/3669 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at ScholarWorks at University of Montana. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at University of Montana.
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Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Burdick, Travis Dakota., 2003 English Stepping Through the Metaphor: Literary Animism in Barry Lopez's Short Fiction Thesis Chair: David L. Moore Barry Lopez is well known and much celebrated for his works of natural history writing and creative nonfiction, but his short fiction, a larger body of work than his nonfiction, is largely unnoticed by scholars. His five short story collections—Desert Notes: Reflections in the Eye of a Raven (1976), River Notes: The Dance of Herons (1979), Winter Count (1982), Field Notes: Grace Note of the Canyon Wren (1994), and Light Action in the Caribbean (2000)—all provide animistic atmospheres charged with the possibilities of, in ecologist David Abram's words, "a more-than-human world." Although Lopez does not refer to his work or worldview as animistic, I believe the term describes the subjectivity, agency, and character he recognizes in the natural world, particularly the transformative influence that animate nature has in contact with perceptive human characters in these stories. Animism, as I use the term, is the acknowledgment of a world full of lives and perceptions.
Our human perceptions, and thereby our minds, depend on the diversity of sensuous interaction with the lives of this world. Throughout my thesis, I develop and apply what I call "animist literary theory" to explore the implications of this animistic recognition of perception to literary narrative in Barry Lopez's short fiction. I intend this theory to be an articulation and application of what some philosophers have called the re- embodiment of Western thinking through my attention to the sensuous body's participation in cognition and metaphorical thought. Through the framework of animist literary theory and personal narrative, my thesis offers close readings of stories from all of Lopez's short story collections.
I map, following the techniques and theoretical models of David Abram, Mikhail Bakhtin, Paul Shepard, and Donna Haraway, the animist dimensions of the stories. I argue that Lopez's narratives follow a pattern, a repeated process of encountering mysterious otherness in animals, people, and landscapes that works to alter the reader's epistemology within a world filled with more-than-human perceptions. ii To have lost, wantonly, the ancient forests, the vast grasslands is our madness, the presence in our very bodies of our grief. -Wendell Berry, From Sabbath Poems 1988: II "If one is patient," he said, "if you are careful, I think there is probably nothing that cannot be retrieved." -Barry Lopez, "The Orrery" iii Stepping Through the Metaphor: Literary Animism in Barry Lopez's Short Fiction Table of Contents Acknowledgments v Chapter 1: The Disintegrating Borders of Self and Other in Barry Lopez's Short Fiction: Animist Literary Theory 21 Chapter 2: Listening to the Animate Earth: The Epistemology of Surrender 50 Chapter 3: Sensing Wisdom: Isumataq Narrative Style 83 Chapter 4: Imagining Beyond the Cartesian Divide: Restoring the Reader, Restoring the Earth 92 Coda: Restoration 100 Bibliography: 102 Acknowledgments In the woods, you know, you have this tremendous cerebral activity of working with these symbols on paper and your writing instrument, the pencil, actually in your hand.
And then, you look to the side and there will be a wolf spider making eye contact with you, and you're immediately brought into the world you inhabit as a creature, as a human being. —Barry Lopez On my literary journey in Lopez's animate fictional worlds I found aid and instruction from the writings of Paul Shepard, a "human ecologist" who wrote subversively and prolifically on the presence and importance of animals in human epistemology and culture. An ecologist with an interest in human sensuous perception and its roots in animism, David Abram introduced to me the notions of animism and its wild possibilities in story and language. Though there is little sustained criticism focused on Lopez's fiction, Scott Slovic, John Tallmadge, David Stevenson, William Ruekert, Jeffery Odefey, and Nicholas O'Connell provided many helpful interpretive and critical entrances into Lopez's large body of work.
The best critical writing I found on Lopez's fiction is Masami Yuki's doctoral dissertation, Towards a Literary Theory of Acoustic EcologySoundscapes in Contemporary Environmental Literature. Yuki's original and refreshing exploration of aural perception in Lopez's fiction was helpful to me in drawing out a theory of literary animism. Readings in Catholic thinkers Thomas Berry and Thomas Merton's work illuminated an unanticipated interpretation of Lopez's work for me. Anthropologists Hugh Raffles and Anna Tsing provided me with critical language for exploring Lopez's self-reflexive critiques of anthropology and science.
Keith Basso's ethnographic and linguistic work with the Western Apache helped to root my understanding of metaphor to V a specific epistemology of a people to a place. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's tireless critique of disembodiment in Western metaphysics was essential for my entrance into the various discussions revolving around embodiment. I am ever so thankful for the patience and thoughtfulness of my committee members Professors David Moore, John Glendening, and Phil Condon who pushed me toward sharper prose, clearer thing, and new directions on this expedition of words. My Dad, Jeff Burdick, discussed this thesis with me over coffee in the High Sierra, in the car around California's Central Valley, and over the telephone almost everyday.
He is a constant source of encouragement and inspiration for my writing. Sage Clegg-Haman not only challenged my interpretations of Lopez's stories, but pulled me away from my books and computer each day to touch, see, smell, taste, and hear the world where Lopez's stories originate. This thesis is dedicated to her. I agree with John Elder when he writes, "It seems important to acknowledge that natural scenes engender and inform meditations on literature as well as the other way around" (qtd.
The thinking for this thesis was largely done out-of-doors, whether in Lopez's animate story habitats or the pebbly banks of Rattlesnake Creek in Western Montana where I pen this now. Kingfishers, crows, and flickers have been constant companions to these ideas and have helped nourish my wilder words. I would be remiss not to mention the long walks I took in Northern California's Lost Coast and the Sierra foothills where I compared my readings on animism to my own experiences watching a spotted owl at dusk, harbor seals feeding on surf fish in the foamy breaks, and bats over a summer Sierra lake. I am indebted to the many helpful voices along the way.
v) Introduction: An Animistic Argument No longer cohering to a single vision of the world, we are, for better or worse, on our own in defining our relationship to the Others. We can rummage through the old myths, but we must make from the debris of history and nature our own story and our own ecology. Except for an obsolete notion of supremacy and domination, there is no thread between us and them in modern life. And so we must create afresh our idea of who we are in the context of the circle of animals.
—Paul Shepard, The Others Once I lay without moving for days until, mistaking me for driftwood, birds landed nearby and began speaking in murmurs of Pythagoras and winds that blew in the Himalayas. —Barry Lopez, "The Shallows" As I walk the wide, steep beach, I add my deep-waffled Vibram sole prints to wide black bear tracks, dainty raccoon prints, the meandering S canyons of rattlesnake tracks, the thin letter shapes of killdeer feet. Perhaps someone else, a seagull maybe, read my heavy-footed journey among the calligraphies left across the Usal beach in Northern California's Lost Coast. Perhaps the seagull read the tracks to find food, comfort, or warning; perhaps he read my footprints for story.
I don't know; I do know I return often to what Mary Oliver calls the "country of language"—the beach and books—to look for my place among the tracks of others. I comb the many-tracked, shell-littered beach to perceive in its shifting, squawking, and crashing narratives a story that draws me into a larger world. I walk the beach and admire the grace of brown pelicans floating over the tops of crashing waves. I am not alone; many human tracks weave through the bear's and seagull's paths amid piles of golden kelp.
Books, too, make trails into this world of other perceptions. 1 Ink and paper record the gaze of an osprey over bluegreen water or the satisfaction of turkey vultures perched on a dead gray whale. We beach- and book-combers search for narrative in pages that reflect and mimic the seeming coherence and certainty of lounging harbor seals. Nature writing, like the beach, is a shifting, many voiced landscape where we travel to interpret the tracks of others and add our own, finding comfort and challenge in the fact that others have walked here before: this edge of mystery between land and ocean and our language connect the self and the other.
Our language, nature writers seem to agree, can help us re-imagine our lives, instructed and enlarged by the lives and perceptions of others. The black bear, sand flea, and pigeon guillemot are different enough from and similar enough to us that they can carry in our habitat of language the connecting coherence of metaphor as well as the challenge of incongruity. Nature writers believe our lives may benefit from imaginative trips through other lives. The animistic travels of language, like the lively narrative expressed by tracks on a beach, enlarge the possibilities of storytelling by including, through acts of imagination and attentiveness, what David Abram calls a "more than human world" in our human perceptions.
Nature writing helps us to explore also the more-than-human nature in ourselves, ethnobotanical writer Gary Paul Nabhan speculates on the narrative possibilities of nature writing in our own bodies: Lynn Margulis has pointed out that there are myriad other lives inside each human "individual.