Literature, Growth, and Criticism in the New West

Abstract

L i t e r a t u r e , G r o w t h , a n d C r i t i c i s m in t h e N e w W e s t M a t t H e r m a n Today in the western United States, the rapid expansion of regional literary production and criticism parallels dazzling demographic changes— shifting regional economies, urban and suburban development, populations in transit— in a word, growth. These three phenomena— writing, growth, and criticism— are very much related. To date, careful study of this relationship remains neglected.1 But this is not for lack of evidence. Many cultural issues in the West would ben­ efit from finer-grained, interdisciplinary analyses.2 Without the aid of a broadened conceptual range, many questions simply go unnoticed. For instance, how might considerations of western American literary pro­ duction, reception, and criticism change when recast in light of devel­ opments in rural studies and theoretical geography? As a highly speculative attempt at an answer, this essay explores the relationship between western literary ideology, which often “exoticizes ” the West as a liberating place to live in, and growth: in particu­ lar, suburbanization, gentrification, and what western journalist Raye Ringholz has termed “Aspenization.”3 W hile the dynamics of regional demographic change cannot be attributed wholly to— or wholly account for— the ideological force of western literary production, each surely influences the other. Getting to know the nature and scope of this relationship is no easy matter. As a beginning, this essay takes up three separate but related cases. The first case— on the question of western literary ideology— highlights the support two canonical west­ ern regionalist texts, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Gretel Ehrlich’s The Solace of Open Spaces, extend to the vogue of western living. The second— on the question of demography— suggests frameworks for tracing causal horizons between western literary production, western literary ideology, and the social and economic geographies of today’s Intermountain West. And the third— on the question of regional crit­ icism— offers a few thoughts on the applications and limitations of cur­ rent “New West” critical practices.4 WAL 3 8 .1 S p r in g 2 0 0 3 B o h e m i a n D o m e s t i c E x o t i c i s m in O n t h e R o a d A n ideological project embedded within the acquisitive global vision of imperialism, exoticism focuses imperial desires and embodies key con­ tradictions. As literary critic Chris Bongie understands it, exoticism is the space of an Other, outside or beyond the confines of a “civ­ ilization” . . . that, by virtue of its modernity, was perceived by many writers as being incompatible with certain essential val­ ues— or, indeed, the realm of value itself. W hat modernity is in the process of obliterating “here” might still prove a present possibility in this alternative geopolitical space: such is the pri­ mary credo of the exoticist project. (4-5) On this count, the “exoticist project” is not synonymous with preservationism , the advocacy for unspoiled alternatives to a ruinous modernity. Instead, it is a way of thinking, feeling, and seeing that exaggerates per­ ceived difference. Bongie locates the project within a specific, late nine­ teenth-century European milieu, but Kerouac’s postwar American bohemianism, while not stemming directly from the same imperialist mood Bongie finds in the fin de siècle, expresses at times an exoticist impulse similar to the description above. It may be counterintuitive to link the Beats to Bongie. After all, the atmosphere surrounding Conrad’s imperialism is not precisely Kerouac’s. And it certainly can’t be said that they hold common cultural or political views. Yet, while Bongie has productively considered how the “space of an Other” and “a realm of value” have been rendered in international contexts, I contend that On the Road, which is mainly domestic in scope, also offers examples of how “exoticism” is constructed as a hallmark of American regional difference. Although the novel largely confirms Dean Moriarty’s notion that ‘“ I can...