Paradise Wild by David Oates

Abstract

3 0 2 WAL 3 8 . 3 F a l l 2 0 0 3 Paradise Wild. By David Oates. C orvallis: O regon State U n iversity Press, 2003. 312 pages, $21.95. Reviewed by Christopher Schaberg U niversity of C alifornia, D avis Given poststructural theories that challenge essential categorizations, how are we to write about and experience the culturally assembled subject of “nature”?This is the hovering problem that David Oates addresses throughout Paradise Wild. Oates’s answer to this question is complex, and he relies precisely on complexity for the applications and theoretical logic of his arguments. Oates explores ways that we might retain the pleasurable, humbling, and aesthetic aspects of wilderness while also sharpening our critical understand­ ing concerning what it is we are doing when we “go into” or “look at” such natural places. By demythologizing various standard perceptions of nature and wilderness (from Milton’s Paradise Lost to Bill McKibben’s End of Nature; from John Muir’s conflicted West to Ed Abbey’s solipsistic West), Oates leeches out the element that is most significant in these subtly similar tropes: wildness. The author’s own personal narratives are interspersed and interconnected through­ out the text as a way of balancing out the critiques of reoccurring themes tied to wilderness and nature in the American literary consciousness. What makes this book unique to nature writing (and to ecocriticism, for that matter) is that the author is always responding to cultural issues of funda­ mentalism, gender, and sexuality right alongside the primary subject of nature. As a gay writer coming from a strict Baptist upbringing, Oates makes provoca­ tive arguments challenging the cultural linkages between the ideas of nature, morality, and paradise. Oates develops a fresh myth that is also a thoroughly researched theory: an Eden that is not “lost” but instead constantly recurs because it is wild; it is continuously renewable not because it is other, but because it is involved with everything we do as we go about life, whether we are in the woods or shopping at Target. Oates effectively introduces cultural studies into the realm of nature writing— or rather, he suggests that these two theoretical strategies have always been linked or layered in interestingly concealed ways: “Both wilderness and gender are taken as givens, as reality, instead of being seen as the overlapping constructs they are” (138). His critiques of other nature writers thus become case studies of gender and sexuality as well as tight analyses of texts. For example, as Oates discusses the real life implications of Thoreau’s transcendental assertions, he also explores the queemess of the writer and how being queer becomes a coherent inward extension of Thoreau’s outward perspective on wildness. Oates takes his readers on a literary jaunt that is theoretically critical as well as phenomenologically personal; this dou­ ble method works to reveal his own complex interest in the subject. As a fan of nature writers who work at/from the margin of the genre (and thereby show how such liminal spaces are necessarily u/ild places), I appreci­ B o o k R e v i e w s 3 0 3 ated how Oates intermingled philosophical queries with personal storytelling in order to problematize the very subject that he so obviously loves. While this narrative tactic comes from a fairly extended lineage of American nature writ­ ers, Oates has made efforts to push beyond the intellectual constraints of liter­ alism, romanticism, and Deep Ecology— or more broadly, any approach that gets tangled up in the “Paradise Lost” mentality when it comes to nature. Instead, Oates wants to lead his readers to a place from which human beings might be able to appreciate the intricate layers of irony and textuality that are always embedded in the ways that we experience and make meaning out of life on a planet that is inevitably wild. Dripping Dry: Literature, Politics, and Water in the D esert Southwest. By David N . Cassuto. A n n A rbor: U n iversity of M ich igan Press, 2001. 173 pages, $49.50/$19.95. Reviewed by Joan E. Thompson G old en Valley, M innesota Dripping Dry traces...