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LIBRARY 7
Michigan State r
University

 

 

This is to certify that the
thesis entitled
READING THE WAY HOME

LANDSCAPE AND LITERATURE IN THE WRITING 0F
BARRY LOPEZ

presented by

DAVID J . CARLSON

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for

M.A. degreeinLIT. IN ENGLISH

 

 

\D 9K7W

Major professor

 

Date asFflym

 

0-7639 MSU is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Institution

PLACE IN RETURN BOX to remove this checkout from your record.
TO AVOID FINES return on or before date due.
MAY BE RECALLED with earlier due date if requested.

 

DATE DUE

DATE DUE

DATE DUE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

6/01 c:/C|RC/DateDue.p65-p.15

 

. READING THE WAY HOME:
LANDSCAPE AND LITERATURE IN THE WRITING OF BARRY LOPEZ

BY

David J. Carlson

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Master of Arts

Department of English

2000

ABSTRACT

READING THE WAY HOME:
LANDSCAPE AND LITERATURE IN THE WRITING OF BARRY LOPEZ

By

David J. Carlson

Much has been written in recent years about the role
of literature, the state of the natural environment, and
the human relationships that develop and impact each of
these areas. Barry Lopez, in both his fiction and
nonfiction writing, explores these relationships in what
appears to be a new way. Lopez combines the influences and
roles of landscape and literature, arguing that recognition
of the interaction between these areas and the human sense
of belonging might provide a stabilizing sense of place or
understanding of home.

To map this development out, this paper explores the
voice with which Lopez endows the natural world, the
understanding of literature and reading within which Lopez
works, and how the combination of the similar roles that
Lopez sees both literature and landscape to possess might
provide to his reader’s a different sense of the world in

which they live.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION .............................................. 1
SECTION 1
A SENSE OF HOME ........................................... 5
SECTION 2
THE VOICE OF NATURE ...................................... 14
SECTION 3
READING THE LAND ......................................... 31
SECTION 4
REMAPPING OUR WORLD ...................................... 46
LITERATURE CITED ......................................... 49

iii

Introduction

 

“Where is your place?” asks the character only
identified as “the caretaker” in Barry Lopez’s short story

“Pearyland” (Field Notes 66). It seems a rather simple

 

question. Within the context of the story, it serves to
encompass, more or less, the usual introductory questions:
where are you from? where is your home? why are you here?
what do you want here? Really, it is a simple question, yet
it is one that Lopez seems to argue, in light of much of
the current sociological debate, might not be so easily
answered by many. Culture has, according to a recent
interview with Lopez, lost touch with the natural world,
and in doing so, it has “become solipsistic. It produces
too much self—referential material and loses a sense of
itself in the world because it creates too much of the
world in which it lives” (O'Connell 30). Lopez frequently
depicts individuals in his writing who have lost their
sense of place, and in doing so, he reflects the
characterization often attributed to the individual in
twentieth—century society.

One simply cannot read twentieth—century philosophical
or sociological texts without encountering some element of

inquiry into the twentieth-century “crisis” in western

pd

culture. From both the political left and right, from
socialists, feminists, Buddhists, the pope, poets, and news
anchormen, we hear that we are in a state of
uncenteredness, that as a culture we have become shiftless,
lost our sense of identity, community, or cultural
character. We hear that individuality has been lost to the
ever—growing technological and capitalistic “machine” that
once was culture. We hear that literature, and God, are
dead, and that the American mind has closed. Our
consolation in all this is that imminent doom is on the
horizon. None of it all will really concern us in a world,
if the conflicting and ever-changing assertions of science
are to be believed, that will soon be without ozone
protection and be in both an ice age and unprecedented
global warming at the same time. And, who knows, some of
this may well be true.

Invariably fingers are pointed, usually with overt and
partisan political motivation. Blame is ascribed, and books
are written. Of course, these lamentations do not lack the
voices of those in higher education, who in lengthy
treatises and with typical aplomb and citing each other,
reduce all the arguments to their basest elements and
determine that these elements are indeterminate and, thus,

void of any true or remarkable insight. Reassuringly, they

tell us that we create our own world, that meaning is
meaningless, and that words and literature are just another
technology, sociological tools by which our psyche is
shaped or misshaped.

The Nietzschean idea that when everything is permitted
nihilism is inevitable plays right along with the idea that
in destroying meaning we have rendered the idea of morals
or right action unfixable. Thus, many of the same thinkers
that wrestle with the dilemma of the modern cultural
malaise do so without regard to the fact that the post—
modern critical lens through which they see that world
disallows them any stable standard by which to judge it.
And while, indeed, little is without shades of uncertainty,
attempting to evaluate and measure the nature of that
uncertainty through admittedly or identifiably instable
means is simply a lesson in futility, and that seems
certain.

The literature that arises from and is positioned
within such a culture reflects the impact of the swirling
social and intellectual winds. Echoes of Eliot's hollow
men, who seek for something to suffice and who measure out
their lives with coffee spoons, haunt the literature of the
era. Frost’s questioning ovenbird asks what might well be

considered a theme in today’s literature, with its query of

“what to make of a diminished thing” (96). In both his
fiction and nonfiction Barry Lopez places himself and his
work among the voices in this conversation, both
representing and opposing many of the common themes in
today’s literary criticism. For him, there is determinable
right action, words still have meaning, and literature
plays a meaningful role; his voice seems to occupy a
position somewhere between the modern and the postmodern
encampments.

Lopez too recognizes the discenteredness so commonly
maligned in the modern individual. One sees in the work of
Barry Lopez a profoundly sincere concern for his fellow
humans and for the world in which they live. The human
relationship with its environment and the corresponding
impact of that relationship on both the people and the land
seems foremost among his concerns. While he recognizes that
one of the writer’s chief function is to entertain (Aton
9), Lopez demonstrates in his fiction the same focus that
is so much a part of his nonfiction and essay writing:
through the recognition of the natural world, its
landscape, and the literature into which we immerse
ourselves, we might achieve a sense of place in our world,

a centering sense of home.

A Sense of Home

 

Of course any such endeavor, approaching ideas of
nature, place, or some sense of stability, requires first a
bit of definition and qualification. The idea of place as
this paper depicts it does not assume or imagine that there
is but one place which each member of a given culture must
occupy in order to achieve some sense of comfort; instead,
and quite the opposite, the idea of place, as it is
depicted within this paper and, seemingly, within Lopez's
work is one which might incorporate wherever it is that one
might find oneself. Though the sense of place that Lopez
seems to be hoping for his reader is never quantified, it
would appear that it is not an exclusive term, but rather
an inclusive one. In fact, by presenting such diversity
within his writing, depicting mystical, spiritual,
philosophical, and geographic approaches to place, Lopez
seems to urge that place need not necessarily be a physical
place.

Vergil’s Aeneas, for instance, while forced to flee
from his home, is able to re—establish that sense upon
arriving in his new home, what would eventually become
Rome, for his sense of home relied not upon a specific
geographic place, but rather upon his community, his

family, and his penates, those household gods that

represented not just a religious foundation, but also a
physical sense of belonging.

In a similar fashion, the idea of a quarencia also
might shed light on the nature of Lopez's depiction of the
sense of stability that might be achieved through a sense
of place. Bulls, having become injured or weary, often
retreat to an area of perceived safety; they establish an
area within the bullring that is referred to as their
quarencia; this area, though no different than any other
area within the ring, allows a sense of security and
strength. The bullfighter, if able to determine the bull's
quarencia, typical attempts to prohibit the bull from
achieving it, as once the bull has, it becomes a much
greater force with which to be reckoned. Within this
arbitrarily determined place within the ring, the bull
often reestablishes a sense of advantage and power.

Place then might be a particular geographic location
within which one senses stability or it could well be some
entirely imagined or internal phenomena. Milton writes, for
instance, “The mind is its own place, and in itself/ Can
make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven” (Paradise Lost I.
254). Place relies largely upon perspective and
acknowledgement of one's surroundings and how those

surroundings lend themselves to a sense of place and not

merely the coordinates of some blip upon a Global
Positioning System.

Next, attempting to define “nature” as it is used
throughout this text requires a bit of exposition. Nailing
down the precise nature of “nature” is, of course, a
frustrating enterprise, and potentially endless. If we
consider that the naming of things or ideas is an attempt,
if not to fix something in order that it be mutually
intelligible, to at least establish some position which
might be recognized as stable enough for long enough to
serve the purpose of being understood, it seems apparent
that it is quite a dynamic process. Words do not name
things; people do, but they use words to express that
naming. There is, then, a bit of the subjective here.
Words, rather than fixing some idea at some interstice of
meaning, evoke, and they evoke through a process that is
inherently subjective: both the speaker and listener or
writer and reader play a role in the process. What
precisely is being evoked then when “nature” is used in
this text or in the texts approached through this one can
hardly be set in stone. To attempt to do so could well be
an endless process. “Nature,” as a word, denotes both an
idea and an infinite web of possibilities within a system

of possibilities.

For the purposes of this paper, nature is that
nonhuman landscape and the elements of that landscape by
which humans are surrounded throughout their lives. As
such, it is a place and a construct. And as Kittredge
notes, “constructs and actuality each qualify our sense of
the other” (57). Kittredge continues, urging that
narratives incite readers to create their own constructs
and responses to the experience of reading as it is
filtered through their own experiences, concluding, “In
this way narrative attempts to avoid coercion, which is of
course a political objective" (57). Nature then as a
construct and within a narrative cannot be anything but
subjective, and thus political. This is inherent, though
perhaps worthy of acknowledging, as both reader and writer
need recognize their own role in the uncertainty that
underlies it. Despite the instability of the particular
term, or terms in general, a sense of stasis is not
impossible. There can be stability within instability. As
anyone who has spent much time at sea or who has seen those
who have when they once again return to land can attest,
the “stable” earth is anything but that to legs long
accustomed to the “instability” of a ship. A sailor who
might one moment have darted up a precariously swaying line

with little pause, upon debarking to the dock might find it

troublesome to stay on her feet. The sense of stability too
seems to be dependent upon one's particular position.
Stability in this sense becomes not a system of certainty,
but rather simply a frame of reference. In a similar sense,
the inherent instability or uncertainty of the ideas of
nature, stability, or a sense of place need not compromise
an approach to them, provided that both reader and writer
acknowledge that any such approach is subject to condition.
Bearing all this in mind, Lopez’s writings might be
seen to act as a bridge to another world, a world with
which we have lost contact—our own. In the midst of a
literary culture that often regards literature as just
another technology, largely void of mystical or mythical
powers, Lopez reaffirms its potential. As McClintock notes,
Lopez “practices resurrection” (141). Lopez unites people,
politics, the landscape, and morality, seeking a
“redemptive wisdom” by which both the human and the non—
human worlds might co-exist in a dignified and ennobling
manner (McClintock 142). There is a sense of soul that
works through Lopez’s writing; it is a sense that, at
first, seems to unite the soul of humans, literature, and
nature, but that, in the end, is seen not to unite them,

but rather to reveal that they have always been of the same

\0

soul. It is a soul that cannot be separated without damage
to each of its parts.

One way to describe the View of the world found in
Lopez’s writing is through the idea of ecotones. The
ecotone is frequently a sphere of study in the ecological
sciences. Its derivation can be seen in its Greek
etymology: eco, or dwelling place, and tone, tension. An
ecotone, then, is the overlapping of divergent cultures or
locales; it is at the interstices formed of crossing
boundaries, and it is characterized by the tension that
arises from the clashing borders or interests of the two
cultures. Relating this back to the position of the modern
individual, the ecotone that separates the human and
nonhuman world, for Lopez, need not exist. Lopez’s
characters tend to break through the barrier that
distinguishes the two separate worlds, and in doing so,
they relieve themselves of the tension that would otherwise
be allowed to distance them from a sense of stability.

One encounters this sense of unity in the relationship
between divergent cultures throughout Lopez’s writing,
where Lopez’s extensive travel is reflected in his work
that is scattered across the genres. Among his fiction

works are Giving Birth to Thunder, Sleeping with his

 

Daughter: Coyote Builds North America (1977), in which

 

10

Lopez recounts many of the various coyote stories found
within the traditions of the early indigenous tribes of

North America; Desert Notes: Reflections in the Eye of a

 

Raven (1976), River Notes: The Dance of Herons (1979),

 

Field Notes: The Grace Note of the Canyon Wren (1994), a

 

trilogy of short fiction in which each collection of
stories is united in their exploration of a particular
place and the impact of the nonhuman elements there upon

people or their perception; Winter Count (1981), another

 

collection of short stories, differing in a focus just as

much upon thought and literature as place; Crow and Weasel

 

(1990), unlike Lopez’s other fiction, this is a book length
mythic tale in which two youths explore their boundaries,
grow up, and learn the value of story and place; and
finally, Lopez's most recent collection of short stories

Light Action in the Caribbean, which maintains similar

 

concerns to the above fiction works, though it is quite
diverse in its style and settings—its stories range from
action and adventure to lecture to personal epiphany and
are set from the far east to Quarain to the Northern
Pacific to the mid-west—as usual, however, Lopez retains
his focus on landscape and personal relationships, though

he does attempt a broader range of settings and action.

11

The nonfiction work of Lopez weaves personal
experience, travel, historical accounts, scientific
investigation and information, and, often, myth in an

intricate and captivating web. Of Wolves and Men (1978)

 

explores the human creation of wolf. Arctic Dreams:

 

Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (1986) is,

 

so far, Lopez’s most acclaimed book; it won the National
Book Award for nonfiction. Both these books probe the
Western View of the nonhuman world and evaluate the loss of
the relationship that preceding cultures enjoyed with that

world. About This Life (1998) is an autobiographical

 

collection of essays reflecting upon Lopez's life as a
writer and traveler; it probes into both the places that he
travels, as well as into the heart and mind of the
traveler.

Finally, Lopez's nonfiction work finds voice in many
journals and periodicals. While similar in element to the
writing expressed above-specifically in the focus upon the
human relationship with the nonhuman, these articles tend
to be more personal responses to experiences encountered
during travel. A number of his favorite essays have been

collected in Crossing Open Ground (1988), and he has also

 

had a lecture published, The Rediscovery of North America

 

(1990), both as an article and as an independent book.

12

Exploring Lopez’s collective work, we find that one of
Lopez’s central concerns is his fellow human and the plight
of the modern person, whom he presents as intricately and
inextricably connected to natural world, but who does not
necessary recognize or acknowledge that connection. By re-
establishing that connection, through personal experience
or through literature, by recognizing that an undignified
approach to what is not human inevitably compromises the
dignity of the human, Lopez’s writing creates an
understanding of the world that might provide the modern
individual some sense of home in that world.

The ability of Lopez’s writing to do all this depends
first upon the voice or role with which Lopez endows the
nonhuman world. Having endowed the nonhuman world with such
a role, Lopez’s writing then presents a written world in
which the human and nonhuman worlds might enter a
relationship that elevates both to more dignified
positions, one through which the reader, through
literature, attains a similarly dignified understanding of

his own position and role in the world.

13

The Voice of Nature

 

The other day, as a friend and I drove east, the sun
rose out of the highway in front of us, spreading one of
the most peculiar light and color phenomena that I have
ever encountered across the sky. I couldn’t come up with a
way to describe it, as it was precisely like nothing I had
seen before. Other cars had pulled over as well, and with
craned necks, we all were looking upward. The sky was no
longer merely something above us: it was movement and color
that surrounded us. Trying to capture the moment with an
apt description, the first word that my companion came up
with was “unnatural.” What strikes me is how perfectly
wrong that word actually was and what it might be saying
about the human position in the world when nature, of all
things, has become unnatural. These thoughts were
reinforced just recently when I watched a television
advertisement encouraging people to “get away from the
world for awhile.” It showed a couple doing just that-in a
line of cars as far as the camera could reveal, they were
leaving behind a cluttered background of skyscrapers.
Apparently, it is this most unnatural and constructed
setting that has become the representation of the “world.”

In today’s jargon, nature has increasingly become

marginalized. Our environment has become an “other.” The

14

landscape in which we live is one solely of our own
creation, not of an interdependent entity. The natural
landscape has ceased to be the place in which we live;
rather, it is that which we must separate ourselves from in
order to live most comfortably. The greater the separation,
the more comfortable we believe ourselves to be. To far too
many, in my more cynical moments, I suspect that the
natural landscape is merely the brief bit of dirty green
that occasionally flits past the tinted windows of their
air—conditioned cars as they rush to whatever it is that
waits for them on the other end of their cell phone. Or,
maybe, for the more cultured, landscape is that which is
captured and controlled and nicely framed in the marbled
museum, where on Tuesdays the admission is only half price.
This, admittedly subjective, response seems shared at times
by much within Lopez’s presentation of the modern
individual.

Of course, there are those who do recognize the value
of the natural world. I am not necessarily talking here
about those who see nature as a Charity case in need of
their salvation—an object to be pitied or rescued. They
call themselves environmentalists, but they are entirely
estranged from the environment around them. The

“environment” is thousands of miles away, physically and

15

spiritually, and theirs is the green party for no other
reason than the color of the money that is always being
sought. It is these that a character in Jim Harrison’s
latest collection of stories refers to as “the burgeoning
swarm of eco-ninnies” (60). There are others, however, who,
in the landscape around them, hear a voice that plays a
vital role in politics, society, literature, and in their
personal lives. It is a voice that might well be heard, and
it is a voice that is central to much of Lopez’s writing.

Lopez encourages the reader to recognize this voice of
the world around them, to listen to it, and to find comfort
in it, and in doing so, to find that they can attain a
sense of home within that world. As Glotfelty notes, the
setting in which Lopez’s fiction takes place, usually one
in nature, acts “not just as a stage upon which the human
story is acted out, but as an actor in the drama” (xxi).
Lopez does not cast the natural landscape in a minor role.
It is not merely the setting. It influences and is
influenced by nearly every action, making it one of the key
roles and allowing it to shape elements within the story
itself.

This relationship between the land and humankind is a

particular concern in Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire

 

in a Northern Landscape. After spending nearly five years

 

16

researching in the arctic and exploring its history and the
history of the people, animals, and plant life that dwell
there, Lopez focuses on the role of the land in the
imagination, in language, in politics, and in social
interaction in the region. Doing so, he demonstrates that,
like other issues that critics and theorists examine in
literature and society today and in accordance with some of
the ideas of recent postmodern critical thought, the
natural world is too, like language, literature, and
society, a construct that shapes and is shaped by the
people that interact with it.

Lopez argues that the way people understand nature
“depends upon what we know, what we imagine, and how we are
disposed; each of us puts together the information we have
differently, ‘according to his cultural predispositions and
his personality’” (Campbell 129). In other words, we read
the land just as we read texts, and these readings are from
politically, socially, and psychologically constructed
positions. If, as many post—structuralists argue, we create
meaning (individually and collectively) when we read, then
it follows that we influence the natural world in a similar
way when we interact with it—whether we realize it or not.
Lopez reveals the degree to which he sees this type of

interactive relationship acting, asserting that “we bring

17

our own worlds to bear in landscapes in order to clarify
them for ourselves. . . . The land urges us to come around

to an understanding of ourselves” (Arctic Dreams 247).

 

Examining Lopez’s whole body of work, it becomes
evident that he does not see the land merely to “urge” this
understanding, but rather he presents the land with the
means to attaining it. This can be seen most readily in the
three “notes” collections of Lopez's short stories. Each
collection of stories is a series of more or less
independent tales; the unity of each collection relies upon
a consistent focus on place. It is through this focus that
the nonhuman world is able to interact with the human
world. Returning, for instance, to “Pearyland,” we find
that what is of utmost importance is not the principle
characters, which really are not developed, but rather the
relationships that exist between the land and the animals
that dwell in it. Animals come to Pearyland to be
resurrected, to renew themselves. It is the land that
provides them with renewal. In the same collection of
stories, an open lot in the middle of an urban area becomes
a porthole to time and animal spirits; but more
importantly, it becomes “sort of [a] companion” to Jane
Weddell, the principle human character in the story (Lopez,

Field Notes 47). The relationship that exists between them,

 

18

the lot and Jane, is fragile; it is also no different than
her human relationships: “She didn’t press the
acquaintance, any more than she did those of her friends”
(47). In return, she achieved special insight and a
mystical understanding. In the end, it is not important
that the open lot is lost to construction or that Jane has
taken a serious setback at work. What is important is that
the relationship with the land allows Jane a sense of
belonging, a place that is her own.

The relationships that Lopez creates are not one
sided; we and the world around us shape each other. “The
contours of human subjectivity, as [Lopez] sees it, are
molded by the configurations of the landscape with which a
person has been deeply associated. Subjectivity is not a
mere function of landscape; but it is regulated somewhat by
landscape” (Buell 94). We position ourselves and nature
then by interacting with it, and we do so in a manner that
is regulated by our environment. To be negligent in this
recognition is to suffer an increased lack of stability and

I

sense of “home,’ which results from a loss of sense of
place.

McClintock, who includes in his conclusion of Nature’s

Kindred Spirits a brief discussion of Lopez’s work, notes,

 

“Lopez’s literary activity is, of course, a spiritual and

19

moral activity” (143). While this is true, it seems to stop
a bit short of acknowledging the understanding of nature
and the human relationship with it that appears to precede
and undergird Lopez’s writing. His writing is indeed
spiritual and moral; more importantly though, it is
necessarily so, because, for Lopez, nature helps shape
human understanding of spirituality and morality, which
like language, culture, and history are constructs
dependent, at least partially, upon interaction in the
natural world.

Noting that our positioning in the world can be
founded as a result of such a mutually reciprocating
process points to another aspect of the natural world that
plays out in the writing of Lopez. Lopez admits that he
writes with a dream in mind: that there might develop “a
dignity that might include all living things” (Arctic
Dreams 405). This dignity is founded upon what has come to
be known as the first law of ecology, that all things are
connected. This connection unites all in a web of
possibilities, much like the criss—crossings of Derridian
thinking, which posits a diacritical relationship between a
seemingly endless system of oppositions and mediations.
Lopez’s writing places the land within this web of factors

from which develops human understanding. Place, then, plays

20

 

a role in the determination of meaning or understanding, as
well as language. Lopez further elucidates Derridian
conceptualization of the play of language, which creates
potential for variations in understanding and meaning, by
noting that there are “no permanent landscapes . . . the

land is vigorous and alive” (Arctic Dreams 411). Nature,

 

like language, thus influences understanding even while it
itself is influenced by other factors and forces, creating
an ever-shifting and malleable force with which to
interact.

Depicting and permitting a nature with such a role
endows it with a voice that frequently goes unheard.
Reexamining nature in light of such a voice, brings to mind
the work of Foucault, which examines issues of power and
society through an evaluation of privileged and
unprivileged speakers. As nature in many cultures has not
been recognized to have a voice, any role which that voice
might play has been disregarded. The results of such
behavior is highlighted in Lopez's 1990 book—length essay

The Rediscovery of North America, which reveals, laments,

 

and seeks redemption for the historical actions of early
European explorers, who initiated an era of plundering from
North American landscapes. These men founded a civilization

based on extracting resources from the land. In doing so,

21

they set precedent for a culture that views the landscape
in which it lives as existing solely for human wealth
creation and recreation. Lopez writes, “What Columbus
began, then, what Pizarro and Cortez and Coronado
perpetuated, is not isolated in the past. We see a
continuance in the present of this brutal, avaricious
behavior, a profound abuse of the place during the course

of centuries of demand for material wealth” (Rediscovery 8—

 

9).

In Rediscovery, Lopez also approaches the role of

 

capitalism in the current relationship between the human
and the nonhuman worlds. Lopez asserts that the history of
exploration and development described above established a
vector to North American society that set a tone of lauding
wealth accumulation above nearly all else and of viewing
the land as merely a resource from which that wealth might
be extracted; the endeavor to extract this wealth
sublimated land in the North American consciousness and was
carried out under the supposition that these actions would
either be without consequence or that the consequence was
not a matter of much importance in comparison to the

potential accumulation of wealth (Rediscovery 7-9). Lopez

 

never provides or seeks some alternative system or scheme

to capitalism, but he does formulate his arguments within

22

the scope of the opportunities available within that pre-
existing system. He notes that, while it seems too late to
reverse the capitalistic impact of the past, it is not too
late to change the View of the landscape within which we
dwell. Interestingly, he founds his reasoning upon economic
terms of benefit, noting, “To acknowledge the
interdependence [of humans and land] is simply a good and
wise habit of mind” (16—17). Through a recognition of the
interdependence, human benefit is gained, even while the
“resource” nature is protected or preserved. Few better
than economists understand the value of protecting one's
resources to increase the potential for future benefit.
Lopez, while condemning the acts and the precedent
established by the view of the land as a resource to be
manipulated for capital gain, attempts his solution from
within a tradition that offers little recourse for
alternative. Lopez's position here seems somewhat
strengthened in that his approach accepts personal benefit
or gain in the end, but not as an end.

In doing so, Lopez, on the one hand, seems to
compromise his depiction of land as above that of mere
means to an end; yet, on the other hand, he seems to
provide an approach that might appeal across the spectrum

to many political, economic, and environmental thinkers.

23

And in doing that, he places his reader and the characters
in his stories back within a context that might easily be
seen in the world around them.

For many, the world in which we find ourselves is not
recognized as an intricate factor in the creation of self
and beliefs, but rather it is a limiting factor to be
overcome or a means to wealth through manipulation. For
still others, it is mere real estate—-if enough is accrued,
retirement might be made more comfortable. What these
people appear to bear in common is their characterization
of the natural world as an other, and not as a part of
themselves and their social, political, and psychological

identity. In Arctic Dreams Lopez allows the Inuit people to

 

strike home this point: he relates that, in reference to
themselves, they do not distinguish between their own human
life and the life that is plant or animal. In contrast, the
Inuit word for the non-indigenous people who have come to
the arctic translates as “the people who change nature”
(39). Lopez attributes this to a separation from the

natural world that has become too complete (Arctic Dreams

 

39).
Robbed of its voice, nature loses the seemed
subjectivity that many, such as Lopez, see it to possess.

It becomes a mere object, some inanimate other. The writing

t0
4>

 

of Lopez, who is of course not alone, seeks to return a
voice to the environment surrounding his readers. It should
be noted too that Lopez does not seek to speak for nature,
to provide it with a voice; rather, he presents us with a
world in which there is a voice to be heard. The nonhuman
world acts and speaks to the characters that take the time
to listen and acknowledge it. This often plays out in

I

mystical ways. In the Winter Count story “Buffalo,’ for

 

example, a mountaintop is used by buffalo to escape into
the clouds. It becomes a place of mystical powers, which is
occasionally brought up by people researching the loss of
western habitat for both Native Americans and for the
buffalo. In the end, the land offers a kind of redemption
to the buffalo that were forced from their place. Seeking
to research the phenomenon, the speaker spends the night
near the area only to wake with his legs broken—it seems

the land retains both power and judgment (Winter Count 35).

 

It is pertinent to mention here that Lopez is not
attempting to silence other voices, or to privilege the
voice of nature. He does not elevate the land and its
creatures to a position of greater importance than people
or their needs; rather he depicts a world that relies on

the mutual respect of all life. What follows is a rather

25

lengthy excerpt, but it does, I believe, voice precisely
what Lopez wishes to establish through much of his writing:
One of the oldest dreams of mankind is to find a
dignity that might include all living things. And one
of the greatest of human longings must be to bring
such dignity to one’s own dreams, for each to find his
or her own life exemplary in some way. . . . A way to

do this is to pay attention to what occurs in a land

 

not touched by human schemes, where an original order
prevails.

The dignity we seek is one beyond that
articulated by Enlightenment philosophers. A more
radical Enlightenment is necessary, in which a dignity
is understood as an innate quality, not as something
tendered by someone outside. And that common dignity
must include the land and its plants and creatures.
Otherwise it is only an invention, and not, as it
should be, a perception about the nature of living

matter. (Arctic Dreams 405)

 

The relationship that is sought here is one that is not
forced upon any of those within the relationship. It simply
celebrates the life that is common to all living things.

And it develops in part through what Lopez calls

26

“conversations with the land,” interacting ideas, images,

and perceptions (Arctic Dreams 226).

 

People, for Lopez, need not be subservient to the land
(the position seemingly sought by many political
activists), but he seems to doubt that people can ever be
at home in their world without recognizing its voice. His
is, in this sense, a rather Bakhtinian approach,
characterized by a dialogical representation of reality.
Bakhtin notes a diversity of voices achieve a beneficial
“interplay of social voices and a variety of relationships
among them” (McDowell 372). The inclusion of yet another
voice in the conversation of life or literature does not
necessarily detract from the other voices, but rather, it
might be a means to advancing the conversation with even
greater definition.

To ignore, then, the voice of nature is to increase
the likelihood of misconceiving the world. “The land is not
inert; and it is precisely because it is alive that it
eventually contradicts the imposition of a reality that
does not derive from it. . . . Language is not something
that man imposes on the language. It evolves in his

conversation with the land” (Arctic Dreams 277—78). As land

 

plays a role then that both constructs and is constructed

by human thought, a flawed sense of the world results

27

without recognition of this. There is in Lopez’s short
stories a frequently repeated juxtaposition, which compares
two characters—one in nature and characterized by his sense
of home and an awareness of deeper truths and insights, the
other outside it and unable to achieve a comfortable
position in the world that remains somehow out of his
grasp. “The Negro in the Kitchen,” for instance, another

short story in Field Notes, allows the examination of two

 

financial consultants, both of whom are well—educated,
financially secure, and privileged in general. One, the
Negro, is living off the land on a year long “walk” across
North America, driven by a desire “to see the breadth of
the land. To be in it. To hold it and be held by it” (Field
Ngtes 82). He becomes, as a result, rather than an
interloper in the America landscape, “a black man who
identifies with the American landscape, who fractures the
immorality of his heritage in this country so completely
that he finally gains a consoling intimacy with the place,
the very place that for so long had been unapproachable”
(82). The land, once controlled by the whites, had before
his walk been off—limits, but through his travels the Negro

II

feels, “exhilaration,” “transcendence, and “reconnected”
(80). The other man too lives in a natural setting, though

in distinct contrast to the traveling black man. He

28

 

believes himself to be interacting with nature through his
identification (often incorrectly, we find) of the
indigenous birds of the region—according to his Peterson’s
Field Guide, he has only nine birds left to find (82). The
two men talk. It becomes apparent to the white man that he
is lacking in something that the black man has, and yet he
never really does grasp the relationship with the land of
which the other speaks. Later, we find the white man
“annoyed” by this realization, which he never really seems
to understand. He “got his binoculars and put on another
cup of coffee . . . and got down Arthur Cleveland Bent’s
Thrushes, Kinglets, and Their Allies and began reading”
(88). Lopez earlier, in an article entitled “Narrative and

Landscape” that was republished in Crossing Open Ground,

 

provides what might be considered a final gloss to this
story, claiming, “One learns a landscape finally not by
knowing the name or identity of everything in it, but by
perceiving the relationships in it,” which is made
possible, at least in part, though stories (64). The white
man never sees or understands these relationships of which
the black man becomes a part.

The relationship that people develop with the
landscape surrounding them is of utmost importance to

LOpez. It is this relationship that provides a sense of

Ix)
\O

belonging, a sense of home, and it is a relationship that
requires the recognition of a nonhuman voice. This voice,
in the end, is what Lopez heard in the artic. The arctic
has long been seen as an inhospitable, desert wasteland
(except by oil drillers and fishing concerns). Lopez
traveled to the arctic to find a world with a voice,
despite recent actions in the area, still largely unmuddled
by those who would not recognize it. And at the end of it
all, Lopez describes what he did there as “listening.” He
relates that “the land is like poetry: it is inexplicably
coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning, and it has the
power to elevate a consideration of human life” (Arctic
Dreams 274).

The voice Lopez hears and recognizes in nature is a
voice that offers solace to a people feeling a lost sense
of belonging. It is a voice, Lopez reveals, that only waits
to be heard. Listening to it increases human understanding
of self and world and perhaps, if we listen long enough,
Lopez hopes that we might “find a place within the land, to
discover a way to dispel [our] sense of estrangement”

(Arctic Dreams xxiii). This loss is two—fold, for not only

 

does it deprive people of the “actual” voice of nature, it
also renders them incapable of recognizing the echoes of

that voice in landscape-centered narratives.

3O

Reading the Land

 

In Crow and Weasel Lopez pushes this idea of voice

 

beyond the mere allegorical, mystical, or metaphysical. The
story is a coming—of—age tale of sorts, centered upon a
crow and a weasel, two young members of an
anthropomorphized tribal culture that seeks to explore the
boundaries of its world. The narrative is one of self and
world exploration and discovery; it comprises a series of
experiences, through which an individual and cultural sense
of place is sought and established.

Among the lessons learned by the traveling pair is
that of the importance of story and storytelling. While
visiting with Badger, an aptly named friendly host whom
they encounter along the way, Crow and Weasel receive the
following instruction:

I

I would ask you to remember only this one thing,’ said
Badger. “The stories people tell have a way of taking
care of them. If stories come to you, care for them.
And learn to give them away where they are needed.
Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to
stay alive. That is why we put these stories in each

other’s memory. This is how people care for

themselves. One day you will be good storytellers.

31

Never forget these obligations. (Lopez, Crow and

Weasel 60)

There is here as elaborate a theory of literature as any.
Its seemed simplicity is intriguing, yet while seemingly
simple, these ideas of literature and its role submit as
elaborate a View of literature as many far more complex
modes of thought. Moreover, it is a theory of literature
expanded upon, yet never significantly changed, throughout
both the fiction and nonfiction of Lopez.

Lopez's view of literature is similar to his view of
nature, in that both act and interact with people and, in
doing so, help them come to an understanding of themselves
and their world. Though art, at times, has been cast as a
remove from nature, a mere reflection or degeneration; it
also, as Lopez demonstrates, might be seen as a means to
recognize or acknowledge an existing connection between the
human world and the nonhuman. As Buell points out, “the
emphasis on disjunction between text and world seems
overblown” (84). To understand fully how Lopez demonstrates
this through his writing, we first must examine how it is
that Lopez views literature and the acts of writing and
reading. In the end, Lopez draws all of them together into
an interconnecting moral matrix. In this, his effort seems

more one that seeks acknowledgement for a pre—existing

32

 

condition that has not been lost but that has merely ceased
to be recognized than it is an effort to introduce and
assert some kind of new conceit or philosophy.

Just as Lopez attributes an identity forming facet to
nature, he ascribes one as well to literature. Lopez, in
telling the kind of stories that Badger encouraged above,
acts in accordance with Ezra Pound’s descriptions:
“Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such
have a definite social function” (32). Admittedly, Pound
had his own problems with social function, but his ideas
here, as in much of his poetry, are worthy of note.

Pound’s view of literature and the author seems often
not to be shared by the modern reader. Frequently, I have
heard literature described by various critics, readers,
advertisers, or authors as a vehicle of escape from our
daily lives, our worlds. The tropes have become common: the
book as ship to another land, the reader as vicarious
traveler, etc. Lopez, on the other hand and like Pound,
sees literature as a means to refresh or maintain an
intricate knowledge of the world in which we live and to
renew a sense of the connection that already exists within
that world. This juxtaposition of literary views has been

dealt with at length in Gutenberg Elegies by Birkerts, who

 

notes, “fiction only retains its cultural vitality so long

33

as it can bring readers meaningful news about what it means
to live in the world of the present. Its other functions—
escapism, reassurance, entertainment—are ultimately
trivial” (204). Lopez reflects this idea in an interview
with Kay Bonetti, in which he claims that the value of
literature is in imparting a coherent understanding of the
world in which we live; to attain this understanding, he
continues, what we need is “words used well” (64,74). To
focus the value of literature away from the depiction
shared here creates a watered down literature, stripped of
its power or potential to empower.

Lopez attributes to literature nearly the same
interactive characterization that he does landscape. The
role that he sees them playing is a role that he describes
in much the same manner. Comparing his description of the
human relationship with the nonhuman world to his
characterization of the interaction between literature and
reader, we see that through both convergences the result is
nearly the same—the positioning of the human within the

world around him. In Arctic Dreams Lopez asserts, “we bring

 

our own worlds to bear in landscapes in order to clarify
them for ourselves. . . . The land urges us to come around
to an understanding of ourselves” (247). And in a 1986

interview he notes that what it is that readers and writers

34

 

are doing is “trying to understand ourselves here” (Aton
9). Two years later, in the Bonetti interview again, Lopez
completes this gloss of literature, relating, “We need to
have a coherent understanding of the world in which we are
living. If the best of thinking is in places where it is
not accessible to most people, then we run the risk of
leaving the people who, by virtue of their votes and
behavior, will decide where our country is going bereft of
good thought and good language” (64).

Literature then provides recourse to the same
positioning of the individual that Lopez attributes to
nature. He proposes the same value to the voice of
literature as he does that of landscape, urging, “writing
is not something to fool around with; the course of history
is changed by language. Evolution is affected by language.
In our culture we throw language around all the time. We
use it in the most indiscriminate and disrespectful ways.

. The language has the power to heal and to elevate and
to instill hope in the bleakest of circumstances” (Bonetti
62—63) Interestingly, Bonetti’s words apply equally well if
one should strike “language” and replace it with “nature.”

In both the description of these two worlds and the
value attributed to them, we see that Lopez believes that

through them individuals might realize the relationship

35

that they share with their culture and their world. The
realization that Lopez encourages is just that—a
realization. It is a recognition that by evaluating nature
and literature “in the same moral universe we occupy” we
“begin to . . . sense how to fit a place” (Lopez,

Rediscovery 35). What Lopez appears to seek is an

 

acknowledgment of what exists already; it is an
appreciation for one's place. This is not a mere attempt to

I

provide a means to “finding oneself,’ that common mantra of
the numerous group of apparently lost people that wander
about the self—help and mysticism sections of the
bookstores, walk across America searching for themselves,
or sit mindlessly in front of infommercialing spiritual
cult leaders; rather, Lopez forwards an acknowledgment of
our world and how it comprises relationships among its
diverse elements. And once that is understood, he submits
that we might attain the sense of belonging for which those
seeking themselves are searching. One of the unnamed

I

conversants in “The Rapids,’ a short story in the River

 

Notes collection, notes that despite losing his wife and
seeing seventeen people die in the rapids that he lives
near, “It’s easiest to live where you have an

understanding” (106).

36

Through capital “S” story, Lopez remythologizes both
nature and literature for the modern individual. Lopez’s
stories reconnect his readers to their own world. It is a
world that highlights relationships and landscape. Often in
Lopez’s stories, the reader never is allowed the names of
the characters; time is often measured by events (natural
or historic); place names frequently are left out. These
elements are merely ancillary to what is most important in
Lopez’s stories. Lopez stresses the relationships that
develop between the characters, landscapes, or ideas. In
“The Rapids,” for instance, multiple unnamed characters
carry on a conversation. It is not clear precisely who they
are or how many of them there are, yet in less than four
pages Lopez deals with curiosity about the meaning of life,
anger, blame, death, wisdom, understanding, history, and
the value of a sense of home. Lopez creates in this story,
through simple perspective on place, a picture of a
relationship with the world that is far more complex than
some a more fleshed out piece might have been. The story
has been pared down to its core, and at that core is a
concern with an individual and his relationship with the
world around him. The reader encounters throughout such
stories Lopez’s sense of myth and story. The stories we

choose to tell ourselves shape our worlds and how we

37

respond to them. Though writing pointedly about Native
American stories and culture, William Penn makes a
depiction that seems applicable to the possible functioning
of most stories in general and might well be applied here,
shedding light upon what seems to be a View shared by
Lopez; he writes, “stories combine over time, for the
listener who hears them again and again, into a kind of
epic of his community, her tribe, their family and the
relationship among them all. In that relationship they find
meaning, they find their value and worth as human beings”
(Penn 6). Lopez would likely corroborate this statement,
for similarly, reading Lopez is reading the story of human
positioning in the world. Narrative, for Lopez, has the
power “to nurture and heal, to repair a spirit in disarray”

(Crossing Open Ground 69).

 

Lopez’s stories respond to a need that Kittredge

describes eloquently at the end of Taking Care: Thoughts on

 

Storytelling and Belief. He writes,

 

What we need most urgently is a fresh dream of who we
are, which will tell us how we should act, stories
about taking care of what we’ve got, which is to say
life and our lives. . . . We need to inhabit stories
that will encourage us toward acts of the imagination,

which in turn will drive us to the arts of empathy,

38

for each other and the world. We need stories that
will encourage us to understand that we are part of
everything, that the world exists under our skins, and
that destroying it is a way of killing ourselves. We
need stories that will drive us to care for one
another, all the creatures, stories that will drive us
to take action. (Kittredge 77)

The stories that Lopez gives us stem from a recognition of

this need. They provide the same impact that he seeks from

a story—to renew a sense of purpose and personal context

(Lopez, Crossing Open Ground 63).

 

Lopez distinguishes himself from many other nature
writers, to include Kittredge, though, in his view of the
rightful role of the author. For Lopez, the author's
primary role is to entertain the reader, not, he asserts,
to make some specific point or further some personal
agenda. The point of the story is to be the story itself
(Aton 7). Far from the apparent understanding of many
nature writers, Lopez operates under the assumption that
didacticism has no place in writing stories. Stories, Lopez
writes, should be told “for their own sake, not forced to

serve merely as the vehicle for an idea” (Crossing Open

 

Ground 63). The author in this regard, Lopez relates in an

39

interview, “serves the reader” (fulfilling Pound’s “social
function”) (Gonzalez 9).

Speaking for himself, Lopez asserts that he, as an
author, is tasked with finding a way to impart a sense of
harmony to the individual. Lopez does not stipulate how
this must be done or restrict the author’s means to do so,
but he does provide a gloss to his own perspective. Just as
in nature the interconnection of things and events allows a
sense of place, story makes available a harmony of the
individual and its surrounding world. Lopez describes the
ability of literature to do this in, once again, “Landscape

I

and Narrative.’ First, he establishes two landscapes, the
interior and the exterior. The exterior landscape is every
element of the land, from the smell of pine to the
cricket's song to the mountains and ponds, and the
relationships that develop among them. The interior
landscape lies within the individual; it is everything that
works together to comprise each particular individual—
thoughts, morals, memories, political beliefs, etc. Having
set these two worlds up, he notes the tension that might
easily exist between the two. We return here to the ecotone
idea again; Lopez sees literature acting to unite the two

landscapes, providing resolution, overcoming the strain of

the clashing boundaries that so often separate the two.

40

Story, for Lopez, causes a working out of
relationships, an insight into one’s world. Having gained
this insight, the individual is that much more at home in
that world. This accord between the individual and its
world, asserts Lopez, is the purpose of storytelling

(Crossing Open Ground 68).

 

A story draws on relationships in the exterior
landscapes and projects them onto the interior
landscape. The purpose of storytelling is to achieve
harmony between the two landscapes, to use all the
elements of the story—syntax, mood, figures of speech—
in a harmonious way to reproduce the harmony of the
land in the individual’s interior. Inherent in story
is the power to reorder a state of psychological
confusion through contact with the pervasive truth of

those relationships we call ‘the land.’ (Crossing Open

 

Ground 68)

In The Environmental Imagination, Buell concludes his

 

segment “Representing the Environment” by noting that
Lopez's two—landscape model of thought “is far more
productive than a criterion based on the presupposition of
the inevitable dominance of constructedness alone
(Foucault’s theory of discursive formations)” (113). The

relationships that Lopez builds upon go beyond Foucault’s

41

ideas of constructedness alone, in order to incorporate
“the authority of external nonhuman reality as a criterion
of accuracy and value” (Buell 113).

Lopez maps out these relationships in his writing.
Landscape, though admittedly filtered through human
perception, is allowed to exert its voice. Also enjoying a
voice in Lopez's accounts are the sometimes hard to accept
explanations, reasonings, or stories of those who live in

an area. Often in Of Wolves and Men, Arctic Dreams, and his

 

 

journal essays, Lopez listens to accounts of those native
to the area he is researching. Frequently, these stories
provide just as much insight as the more scientific
investigation he encounters. They provide, if not an
empirical explanation, an understanding. What is understood
is an ethos. This understanding is not achieved through a
compromise of scientific knowledge or at the expense of
factual representation, for as Buell writes, for Lopez
“literature functions as science's less systematic but more
versatile complement. Both seek to make understandable a
puzzling world” (Buell 94). Romand Coles notes that Lopez’s
writing “emerges at the interstice between identity and
nonidentity” (240). The result, argues Coles, is a

dialogical ethos that emerges from Lopez's work (247). A

42

similar dialogical relationship is seen in Lopez's
interweaving of scientific inquiry and personal accounts.

The working out of such an ethos, the use of story to
magnify the relationships of nature that might permit the
reader insight and thus a sense of place plays out

throughout Lopez’s writing. In Arctic Dreams, for example,

 

Lopez relates a story about the frustration of European
explorers who were trying to get some Eskimos to create a
map. The Eskimos could not do it without including as well
stories of hunting and fishing and theatrical accounts of
past events in the area to be mapped. Lopez concludes the
anecdote with the following gloss: “There was no way for
them to separate the stories, the indigenous philOSOphy,

from the land” (Arctic Dreams 297). This overlap of myth

 

and landscape underlies much of the sense of connect

between story and land that Lopez creates and works with.
This is seen in Lopez’s fiction as well. In “Winter

Count 1973: Geese, They Flew Over in a Storm,” a story

within the Winter Count collection, a historian researching

 

early North American historical tribal accounts eventually
comes to the realization that multiple and possibly
contradicting interpretations of historical events do not
necessarily mean that one is flawed and the other accurate;

rather, he finds, “it is too dangerous for everyone to have

43

the same story. The same things do not happen to everyone"
(62).

The diversity of personal accounts out there is
reflected in Lopez’s most recent collection of short

stories. Light Action in the Caribbean is, with the

 

exception of two stories, a collection of first person
narratives. The diversity of the voices that Lopez employs
is both impressive and appropriate. Within the scope of the
book the reader encounters the first person accounts of a
horse thief, a landscaper, a Wenrit scribe, a Mexican
prisoner, a cabinet maker, a historian, a cartographer, a

lawyer, among still others. Light Action repeatedly returns

 

to a juxtaposition of those who lack and desire a sense of
peace, who like the nomadic cabinet maker of “In the Great
Bend of the Souris River,” do not feel that they “belong to
any particular place” to those who either possess or find
such a sense of place (Lopez 53).

In “The Mappist,” the final story in this most recent
collection, Lopez focuses on the shift that has occurred in
the societal relationship to its landscape. The mappist, a
cartographer working for the sake of those in the future
(for his own society, a “lost generation” has deemed him
and his work “not practical” (152, 161)) creates unique

maps. His maps incorporate historically accurate accounts

44

of the movement of birds and other animals, the
progressions of fence lines, the shifting patterns of human

populations and landscape features (Lopez, Light Action

 

160). Behind his efforts is his conviction that “this
information is what we need, you know. This shows history
and how people fit the places they occupy” (159).

Lopez work, fiction and nonfiction, like the

I

cartographer in “The Mappist,’ asks readers to re—approach
both language and literature, to redraw the boundaries
within which they find themselves, so that in doing so they

might come to acknowledge that their position within those

boundaries is one which might be considered home.

45

Remapping Our World

 

Returning then to the initial dilemma, the individual
and societal lack of sense of place, Lopez’s writing and
thought attributes this, at least in part, to the lack of
acknowledgment of our inseparable connection to the
landscape around us. We no longer acknowledge an accurate
ecological representation of our place and therefore cannot
justify a cultural or individual position within the world
around us. As Berkirts notes,

Fifty years ago the human environment was still more

or less the natural environment. We had central

heating and labor—saving devices and high—speed
travel, but these were still only partially
modifications of the natural given. It is the natural
given that is now gone. Now, for better or worse, we
move almost entirely within a regulated and mediated
environment. Our primary relation to the world has

been altered. (205)

Birkerts makes an important distinction here. It is not so
much that we have changed (though we have) or that the
environment itself has changed (though it too has), but
that the relationship between the two has changed.

Birkerts posits that this lack of acknowledgment is

recognized by modern authors as a remove from “reality” and

46

that, in turn, authors such as DeLillo, Pynchon, Auster,
Gaddis, and Faulkner make this “irreality of the present
part of the subject itself,” through satire, black humor,
and surrealistic touches (207). This, indeed, is one way
for the author to approach writing within a culture that
has lost touch with its world. Lopez, however, takes an
opposing tack, while maintaining what seems a meaningful
role within society and literature: rather than occupy the
void left between readers and their world, he attempts to
suture the fissure.

This, finally, is the importance of Lopez’s work:
after all is accounted for, ideas about language and
landscape and literature, Lopez cares deeply for the world
in which he lives. He sees and demonstrates through natural
history and fiction a means to make evident the connection
that exists between author and reader and individual and
landscape. It is not for him a connection that has been
broken; it is, however, a connection that goes
unacknowledged. His work encourages this realization. We
are, whether we realize it or not, in this relationship.
Not acknowledging it only frustrates efforts to feel at
home; acknowledging it permits the sense that throughout
history has been an aim of literature—the sense of a place

called home.

47

Lopez's literature is a literature that rests upon his
foundation of “ought.” It is a literature that is presented
as listening to the voices of both human and nonhuman
participants, acknowledging the dignity of both. In the
end, Lopez seeks to encourage through his literature the
same realization that Crow and Weasel discover at the
conclusion of their exploration of their boundaries.
“Weasel said very softly, ‘It is good to be alive. To have
friends, to have a family, to have children, to live in a
particular place. These relationships are sacred.’ ‘Yes,’
said Crow. ‘Yes, this is the way it should be’” (Lopez,

Crow and Weasel 79).

 

48

LITERATURE CITED

49

LITERATURE CITED

Aton, Jim. “An Interview with Barry Lopez.” Western
American Literature 21.1 (1986): 3—18.

 

Bergman, Charles. “The Curious Peach.” Green Culture:
Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary America. Eds.
Carl G Herndl and Stuart C. Brown. Madison: U of
Wisconsin P, 1996. 281—303.

 

 

Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies. New York: Ballantine
Books, 1994.

 

Bonetti, Kay. “An Interview with Barry Lopez.” The Missouri
Review 11.3 (1988): 59-77.

 

 

Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau,
Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995.

 

 

Campbell, SueEllen. “The Land and the Language of Desire:
Where Deep Ecology and Post—Structuralism Meet.” The
Ecocriticism Reader. Eds. Cheryll, Glotfelty and
Harold Fromm. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1996. 124—
136.

 

Coles, Romand. “Ecotones and Environmental Ethics: Adorno
and Lopez.” In the Nature of Things: Language,
Politics, and the Environment. U of Minnesota P, 1993.

 

 

Frost, Robert. Selected Poems. New York: Henry Holt and
Co., 1923

 

Glotfelty, Cheryll. “Barry Holstun Lopez.” Updating the
Literary West. Fort Worth: Texas Christian UP, 1977.
283—88.

 

II

--—. “Literary Studies in an Age of Environmental Crisis.
The Ecocriticism Reader. Eds. Cheryll Glotfelty and
Harold Fromm. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1996. xv-
xxvii.

 

Gonzalez, Ray. “The Literature of Hope: An Interview.” The
Bloomsbury Review 10:3 (1990): 8—9, 29.

50

Harrison, Jim. The Beast God Forgot To Invent. New York:
Atlantic Monthly, 2000.

 

Johnston, Gordon. “What to do about the Land: The Image of
Nature in Arctic Dreams.” The Image of Nature in
Literature, the Media, and in Society. Ed. Wright,
Will and Steven Kaplan. Pueblo, CO: U of South
Colorado P, 1993.

 

 

Kittredge, William. Taking Care. Minneapolis: Milkweed
Editions, 1999.

 

Lopez, Barry. About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of
Memory. New York: Knopf, 1998.

 

—-—. Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern
Landscape. New York: Scribner’s, 1986.

 

 

—-—. Apologia. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 1998.

-—-. Crow and Weasel. New York: HarperPerennial, 1993.

 

-—-. Crossing Open Ground. New York: Scribner's. 1988.

 

———. Desert Reservation. Copper Canyon, 1980.

 

-——. Light Action in the Caribbean. New York: Knopf, 2000.

 

---. Of Wolves and Men. New York: Scribner's, 1978.

 

---. The Rediscovery of North America. Lexington, KY: UP of
Kentucky, 1990.

 

———. Winter Count. New York: Vintage, 1976.
Mayberry, Rosalind Srb. “Voice in the Wilderness.” CEA
Critic 54 (1991):126-33.

 

McClintock, James I. Nature’s Kindred Spirits. Madison: U
of Wisconsin P, 1994.

 

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. New York: Penguin, 1981.
Nunnally, Patrick. “An Interview with Barry Lopez.” North
Dakota Quarterly 56.1 (1988): 98—107.

 

 

O’Connell, Nicholas. “On Sacred Ground.” Sierra 83.6
(1998): 58—61, 81.

51

Penn, W.S., ed. The Telling of the World: Native American
Stories and Art. New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang,
1996.

 

 

Pound, Ezra. ABC of Reading. New York: New Directions,
1960.

Ross, Daniel W. “Barry Lopez's Artic Dreams: Looking into a
New Heart of Darkness.” CEA Critic 54 (1991): 78—86.

 

 

Rueckert, William H. “Barry Lopez and the Search for a
Dignified and Honorable Relationship with Nature.”
Earthly Words: Essays on Contemporary American Nature
and Environmental Writers. Ed. John Cooley. Ann Arbor:
U of Michigan P, 1994. 137—165.

 

 

Sherman, Paul. For Love of the World. Iowa City: U of Iowa
P, 1992.

 

Slovic, Scott. “Politics in American Nature Writing." Green
Culture: Environmental Rhetoric in Contemporary
America. Eds. Carl G. Herndl and Stuart C. Brown.
Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1996. 82—110.

 

---. Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing: Henry
Thoreau, Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry,
Barry Lopez. Salt Lake City: U of Utah P, 1992.

 

 

 

Wild, Peter. Barry Lopez. Boise: Boise State U, 1984.

 

52

 

 

 

 

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