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Desert solitaire : Edward Abbey’s legacy to the american wilderness Marylin Rom

Desert solitaire : Edward Abbey’s legacy to the american wilderness Marylin Romeu To cite this version: Marylin Romeu. Desert solitaire : Edward Abbey’s legacy to the american wilderness. Litera- ture. 2010. <dumas-00710525> HAL Id: dumas-00710525 http://dumas.ccsd.cnrs.fr/dumas-00710525 Submitted on 21 Jun 2012 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- entiﬁc research documents, whether they are pub- lished or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destin´ ee au d´ epˆ ot et ` a la diﬀusion de documents scientiﬁques de niveau recherche, publi´ es ou non, ´ emanant des ´ etablissements d’enseignement et de recherche fran¸ cais ou ´ etrangers, des laboratoires publics ou priv´ es. 1 DESERT SOLITAIRE: EDWARD ABBEY'S LEGACY TO THE AMERICAN WILDERNESS Nom : Romeu Prénom : Marylin UFR Anglais Mémoire de master 1 recherche - 18 crédits – Mention Bien Spécialité ou Parcours : Littérature Américaine Sous la direction de Dumas Frederic Année universitaire 2009-2010 MOTS-CLÉS : Naturalité, Paradis, Ecologie, Sabotage, Edward Abbey, Henry David Thoreau. RÉSUMÉ Ce mémoire a pour but de faire connaître Edward Abbey et ses principes. Reconnu pour ses positions radicales envers la protection de l'environnement Edward Abbey a inspiré la création de groupes environnementalistes tel que EarthFirst!. Desert Solitaire est son œuvre la plus connue, c'est un journal au travers duquel il relate les différentes expériences vécues tandis qu'il travaillait comme garde dans le parc national des arches de l'Utah. Cette œuvre qui est donc non fictionelle et est très souvent comparée à Walden ou la vie dans les bois de Henry Thoreau. En raison de l'implication politique de Abbey dans ses écrits, il est souvent considéré comme un écrivain qui a radicalisé l'écriture de la nature et de l'environnement. Son œuvre fictionelle la plus connue; Le Retour du gang de la clef à molette est une véritable éloge au sabotage environnemental. KEYWORDS : Wilderness, Paradise, Ecology, Monkey Wrench, Edward Abbey, Henry David Thoreau ABSTRACT This dissertation is about Edward Abbey and his principles. Known to have radical positions towards environmental protection Edward Abbey inspired the creation of environmental groups such as Earth First! Desert Solitaire is most renowned work is a journal in which he relates his experiences as a park ranger in the Arches national park where he worked for 6 months. This work of non-fiction is often compared to Henry David Thoreau's Walden or life in the woods. Due to the political implication that Abbey has while writing he is often considered to have radicalized the nature writing genre. His most famous fiction: The Monkey Wrench gang is an authentic praise to environmental sabotage. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Mr.Dumas Frederic for his help and advices. I would also like to thank Mr. Lucarelli Mark for introducing me to the work of Edward Abbey. Noémie Tentillier, Josh Polchar and Florian Bousquet for their support and encouragements through the year. The works studied are Desert Solitaire, The Monkey Wrench Gang and Walden. Because the titles are often mentioned , Desert Solitaire will appear as DS and The Monkey Wrench Gang as The MWG; however the title of Walden does not change. 5 Table of contents Introduction............................................................................................................................7 Part I An atypical vision of the wilderness..................................................................................10 I) Paradise versus wilderness...............................................................................................12 A) The Pastoral ideal................................................................................................12 B) Sublimity in the wilderness.................................................................................15 II) Edward Abbey's true home..............................................................................................19 A) The Desert as an Island: Paradise on Earth.........................................................19 B) The Universal Truth.............................................................................................22 Part II Political features.................................................................................................................25 I) No man's land...................................................................................................................27 A) Loss of contact....................................................................................................27 B) The sickness of our society..................................................................................31 II) Use and abuse of nature..................................................................................................35 A) The literature of environmental apocalypse........................................................35 B) Inadequate behavior.............................................................................................38 C) The writer's duty..................................................................................................43 6 Part III From Realization to action …...........................................................................................47 I) Monkeywrenching............................................................................................................48 A) Resist much, Obey little......................................................................................48 B) Abbey's characters …...........................................................................................53 II) A response to Trancendentalism ….................................................................................56 A) The Thoreau of the West.....................................................................................56 B) Desert Solitaire as a Tribute to Walden...............................................................60 Conclusion...........................................................................................................................66 Bibliography.......................................................................................................................69 7 Introduction Ever since the American explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark reported in 1805 about the ―Great American Desert‖, the literature of the desert has proliferated. Abbey is a writer that inscribes himself in the canon of the literature of the American West. One of America's most prominent environmentalists and defenders of his country's wilderness, Abbey gained much praise with his first Best Seller in 1968: Desert Solitaire. Writer Russell Martin called this book a kind of catcher in the rye for the coming-of-age of the environmental movement. DS is a book that established Abbey as a desert expert and that made him ―the main figure responsible for the radicalization of nature writing‖ (Don Scheese, 35). Abbey at 17 hitchhiked through the states, sometimes riding with vagrants, encountered vast landscapes and became overwhelmed by their freedom and great openness. Abbey is someone who does not fit and does not follow. He called himself an environmentalist. Not in our current sense but in the fact that people are shaped by their social environment, the desert and the Grand Canyon shaped him. The wilderness cult had not yet begun when Abbey was already obsessed with the Southwestern desert. To him it was not a sterile place but a living one: it became his true home. Abbey's vision is particular because he writes about the desert of the American West and in it he found sublimity and solace even though it is not a pristine wilderness. He found the sublime sense of space that one feels while out in the open fields. Abbey wrote during the flowering of modern environmentalism and the peak of the counter-culture movement. He was someone that went through an endless oscillation between solitude and society: embodying thus a central conflict in American culture: the tension between Wilderness and Civilization. In Desert Solitaire Abbey evokes his sense of frustration at watching the southwest fall prey to greed and a contempt for the human species for our mindless ruining of the natural world as well as an urge to withdraw from civilization. For him it is a duty to preserve the desert, to him the face of God from politicians. It is a place broad enough to accommodate his soul and it needs to be defended for its own sake. What I wish to develop in this dissertation is how Desert Solitaire offers us a particular vision of the American wilderness. Even though it is a work of nonfiction, the narrative quality of it carries a clarity of meaning; the author is the narrator; it is non- ambiguous. What we read is what the author thinks. This dissertation is divided into three parts which deal with the different themes that are looked upon in DS. Since DS is non- fiction, the parts will focus mostly on the cultural aspect rather than the literary one. 8 The first part of this dissertation deals with the overarching idea of the wilderness. In reality the concept of the wilderness was created by the pioneers. By bringing 'civilization' they created a difference that did not exist in Indian cultures. I will expand on the representation of the wilderness in our Western societies, how and why it came to be seen such as it is. I will also consider a few concepts related to nature writing such as Pantheism and the sublime. The idea of the wilderness is subjective because of each one's personal meaning: it is not easy to define. Abbey's vision reflects an unusual point of view of what is usually considered the wilderness, a complex and even contradictory notion, a vision quite unexpected while one is writing about the desert. The second section will focus on the political aspect: this is one of the reasons why Abbey's writing is said to have radicalized nature writing; because of his assertion that humans should not meddle with the earth in any way, thus retrieving the primitive ideology. This idea of wilderness has evolved and the general attitude has altered as an awareness of the fragility our planet spread starting in the 60's. In 1970 the United States saw the rising of movements such as Civil Rights, the peace movement and the quietest one: 'the environmental movement', a new awareness that engendered new politics. How does Abbey use his vision to assess politicians and, more globally, the society in which he lives? How is the depiction he makes of the environment he lived in for several seasons used as a tool to create awareness among people? Finally, the third part will deal with another work of Edward Abbey, this time his most famous work of fiction: The Monkey Wrench Gang. How does this work constitute another step in Abbey's evolvement as a writer? This part will also emphasize the fact that even though more than a hundred years separate DS from Thoreau’s Walden, they have a lot in common. Both of them offer two visions that are not so radically different. Abbey in DS just like in The MWG develops a response to uploads/Litterature/ desert-solitaire.pdf