Rising from the Plains by John McPhee

Abstract

250 Western American Literature Art and Geology: Expressive Aspects of the Desert. By Rita Deanin Abbey and G. William Fiero. (Layton, Utah: Gibbs M. Smith, 1986. 93 pages, $18.95.) In the artistic-geological tradition of John Wesley Powell, Rita Deanin Abbey and G. William Fiero have combined their intellectual curiosities to explicate the desert country of the American Southwest with its aesthetic and scientific meaning. The book is a visual delight, juxtaposing the geological photographs of Fiero with the artistic translations of Abbey in a format and quality of presentation publisher Gibbs M. Smith continues to certify. The reader is to be engaged and delighted on three points: format, text, and rhetorical effect. The book’s format considers mutual points of interest existing between the artist and geologist by considering their relationships “to desert environ­ ments, space, color, and form.” Interestingly, Abbey’s paintings and relief structures are not based on the geological photographs, as they might first appear; rather, according to the authors, the “photographs were selected because of their strong correspondence to the completed works of art.” The format, then, is about the correspondences that exist naturally between arche­ typal patterns, environmental patterns, and the perception needed to distin­ guish them. Likewise, the text has been written with both the informative and emotive in mind. Readers can learn about the physicality of the desert and still find themselves musing over the aesthetic underpinnings of this informa­ tion. Each textual area of interest is a discussion between the hemispheres of knowledge in a language that is technical and poetic. The rhetorical effect of this dialogue between art and geology is reflec­ tion. Fiero allows the reader to know the geological wonder of “bare land.” Abbey’s works reinforce the idea that active viewing makes or remakes an object, whether a geological formation or a painting. Both views align the perception and making of patterns to the human imagination. Abbey and Fiero have created a kaleidoscopic book. As the reader turns the pages, new patterns appear and vision is sharpened. PAMELA R. HOWELL Midland College Rising from the Plains. By John McPhee. (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1986. 214 pages, $15.95.) Eric Hoffer notes somewhere that a person cannot be truly literate until he learns to read the writing in his own heart. By extension, the inscriptions capable of adding to our store of wisdom lie all about us, in the natural world Reviews 251 as well as in the man-made. In his latest, John McPhee takes on the hiero­ glyphics of geology, and perhaps following Hoffer’s lead, interprets them for us as they (lying, he would argue, at the heart of any society), have molded Wyoming into what it is today. This makes Rising from the Plains sound like a fearsome tract on eco­ nomic geology. Except that the writer tries not to let us down here with his descriptions of rubbery tectonic plates and bubbling mud fields any more than he did with his joyful treatises on oranges, birch-bark canoes, and basketball. That is, he makes the general appealing through specifics, in this case studying how the shape of the earth in turn shaped one ranch family through the generations. In the course of things, then, he sweetens the medi­ cine, telling us not only how selenium in the soil can poison sheep as well as people, but gathering in tidbits of ranch lore. A road agent called Big Nose George, (who dapperly signs his name B. N. George), John Muir’s Wyoming connection, and encounters with Butch Cassidy have us forgetting what the book is supposed to be about to begin with. Yet after he’s given us our fun, McPhee steers us back to his rather longish geology lectures. The person with­ out interests in both areas is bound to be vexed by the alternating intrusions. Which is to say that the book’s parallel organization works better in theory than in practice. This occurs elsewhere in McPhee, whenever his passion for geology occasionally overwhelms the professional writer. Still, Coleridge thought of himself as more of a philosopher than a poet. And Arthur Conan Doyle escaped now and then from the...