Driving by Memory by William Fox

Abstract

2 0 0 WAL 3 6 .1 S u m m e r 2 0 0 1 killer) first meeting with Crazy Horse. This account and flashes of realism in some of the dialogue suggest an author with unusual talent and a story inherently powerful. Unfortunately, both are undercut by the author’s writing style. Driving by Memory. By W illiam Fox. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. 165 pages, $18.95. Review ed by David Fine California State University, Long Beach Drawing on car journeys taken across the Southwest between 1996 and 1999, William Fox, an arts consultant and poet, offers in this book a series of thoughtful, lyric meditations on the meaning of land and landscape. In par­ ticular he reflects on the way land— both desert and urban— has been transformed (by everyone from highway builders to park engineers and commercial developers) into landscape, into the realm of the constructed and consumable. While he is constantly aware as he drives the Southwest of the relation­ ship between the windshield and the television screen— ways in which the land is framed and thus reduced— the act of driving nonetheless provides him a way of seeing the land, of being “in and part of it” (17). The act is a matter of constant attention, achieved in part by his habit of counting, naming, and measuring what he sees: overpasses, trucks, stalled cars, even road kill. The object is not to get there but to see what there is, to acknowledge the land, even as it rushes by across the windshield, and elicit narratives— and memo­ ries— from it. “It’s the driving, not the road, that wants to be a story,” he writes. “It’s not just about where the road goes. . . . It’s also about how we’ve literally and metaphorically constructed the road as a view of the world” (155). High­ speed interstates have been designed not to take us to but through the land, allowing drivers to negotiate vast spaces in the most efficient way. The land becomes “backdrop scenery,” and the highway “allows no point of view but that of progress along the road itself” (47). Even the scenic turnoffs Fox takes fail to give intimacy with the land but are a form of landscape consumption, offering an “invitation to a view unavoidably dictated by the highway engineers” (18). We encounter nature as vistas framed, defined, and shaped for consumption, as “prepackaged vacation moments” (27). He likens our encounters with the scenic here— and this is what to me is most interesting in his reflections— to the four-hundred-year tra­ dition in Western (i.e., Euroamerican) landscape painting that brought the landscape from the background (from behind mythical or human figures) into the foreground, giving us conventional notions of the “sublime” in nature (36). We have been conditioned to look at the land as we look at a painting— as constructed landscape that can be taken in from a single view, a fixed per­ spective. Nature has been organized as the picturesque, as aesthetic object, and we have been trained to see it as such, “based,” he asserts, “on the presump­ BOOK REVIEW S 2 0 1 tion that it was man’s divinely granted privilege to do so” (26). The history ofour parks has been bound up with all this. Thomas Moran’s paintings of the Grand Canyon and William Henry Jackson’s photographs of Yellowstone were instrumental in convincing Congress to set aside land for our first national parks. “The art framed the parks,” Fox tells us, and park engi­ neers in turn duplicated the art in selecting its trails and viewpoints (26). They established fixed points of view for tourists, defining the landscape we see. There are other, better ways of making art on the landscape, and, by way of alternatives, he describes some of the massive works of sculpture that have been appearing on the Nevada desert, works like John Turrell Roden’s cinder cone crater and Michael Heizer’s Double Negative, Complex One, and City, works that alter both the land and our view of it by resisting the single, fixed view and requiring us to walk around...