On Sacred Ground: The Spirit of Place in Pacific Northwest Literature by Nicholas O’Connell

Abstract

2 3 6 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L i t e r a t u r e S u m m e r 2 0 0 4 good jobs, levels of population to sustain cultural and service infrastructure. As one of the many maps indicates, more and more counties are falling back into the census definition of “frontier,” fewer than six people per square mile. Family farms, which on the South Plains were always capitalist and capital-intensive and often existed as the result of corporate distribution, would never in recent years have been able to sustain farming without massive government subsidies. Various solutions and mitigations are offered: increased tourism through national and state parks (especially Palo Duro Canyon), “nature farming” and more responsible use of water resources, even variations on the Poppers’ vision of “Buffalo Commons.” Only the last, as various authors point out, seems, because of dwindling resources and decreases in population, to have any chance of happening, though by default rather than planning. On Sacred Qround: The Spirit of Place in Pacific Northwest Literature. By Nicholas O’Connell. S eattle: U n iversity o f W ashington Press, 2003. 224 pages, $24.95. Reviewed by Nancy Pagh W estern W ashington University, Bellingham Nicholas O’Connell’s gentle study On Sacred Ground: The Spirit of Place in Pacific Northwest Literature is a welcome addition to the growing canon of Pacific Northwest literary criticism. Arguing that “a distinctive Northwest literature does exist, that its primary subject is the relationship between people and place, and that its most important contribution to American literature lies in articulating a more spiritual relationship with landscape,” O’Connell offers a lively follow-up to At the Field’s End (1998), his useful collection of interviews with Northwest writers (xix). The text is organized into six thematic chapters: early Native American stories, journals of exploration and settlement, the Romantic movement, real­ istic writing, the Northwest school of poets, and “contemporary” Northwest literature (1970s and 1980s prose). These are augmented by an acknowledg­ ments section that also serves as an annotated bibliography of the major critical studies of Northwest literature and a preface that introduces us to some vaguely defining features of the region’s geography and history and to O’Connell’s per­ sonal connection with the subject matter. The book will be enjoyed by general readers curious to learn more about Northwest writers or intrigued by the appealing focus on environmentalism and place. It provides an excellent starting point for either of these ventures, and most of the chapters entice the reader by offering a unique scene that brings alive an author under consideration. “As the fog lifted on the morning of May 18, 1792, Capt. George Vancouver sailed the sloop Discovery into the calm and sunny waters of Puget Sound, becoming the first explorer ever to visit this comer of the North American continent,” begins chapter 2, and all but b o o k R e v ie w s 2 3 7 one chapter follow in similar fashion. As a scholarly examination of western American literature and environ­ ment, the text has the most to contribute with its linkage of work experience and imagination in chapter 4 and in showing, in chapter 6, how the contem­ porary writers “consider the split between the human and the nonhuman as a dangerous illusion [that] encourages the destruction of the environment and the spiritual impoverishment of human beings” (179). O’Connell offers useful overviews and nuanced readings of texts and contexts in the latter part of the book (especially with Theodore Roethke and Richard Hugo), but earlier chap­ ters are superficial. The entire chapter on Native stories inhabits eleven pages; a subcategory on Roethke in chapter five fills eighteen. In chapter 2, O’Connell compares Vancouver’s colonial view ofpastoral Whidbey Island with that of the Natives, whom he depicts as not having an agricultural outlook. But Richard White’s well-known study Land Use, Environment, and Social Change (1980) has shown that the Natives of Whidbey Island shaped their own environment. My point is not to quibble over depictions of Whidbey Island; rather...