Spirits of Place in American Literary Culture by John Gatta

Abstract

Reviewed by: Spirits of Place in American Literary Culture by John Gatta Lars Erik Larson (bio) Spirits of Place in American Literary Culture John Gatta Oxford University Press, 2018. vii + 286 pp. $36.95 hardcover. Conventional views oppose spirituality and materiality; to connect with the former, one must either withdraw to the mind’s monastery or enclose oneself in a world-eclipsing temple. But as John Gatta’s latest book aims to show, this dichotomy is false: material place (houses, rivers, paths, cemeteries, geological sites, university campuses, and even cities) can help us find a spiritual center. Creative literature, the book asserts, maps how religious encounters with such places are achieved. Studies of literary place-making have a long tradition, and theory’s spatial turn of the past few decades have led to richly interdisciplinary explorations of the urgencies of spatial considerations. Gatta’s niche within this ferment is the spiritual angle, which even the mature field of ecocriticism has not fully plumbed. Spirits of Place in American Literary Culture expands on the broad timespan of Gatta’s previous eco-focused study Making Nature Sacred: Literature, Religion, and Environment in American from the Puritans to the Present (2004), to incorporate more of the human-built environment in the making of the sacred. In Gatta’s aim to show that the literary imagination both describes and creates spiritual place, chapters move across types of topoi: spirituality in literature’s houses (Thoreau’s economic cabin, Stowe’s slave abodes, Hawthorne’s haunted seven-gabled house, Cather’s Anasazi cliffs); sites of mobility (Carolyn Servid’s Glacier Bay, Momaday’s nomadic re-tracings, Muir’s saunterings); imagined space (Whitman’s spatial transcendence, Marilyn Nelson’s palimpsestic Tuskegee, Alfredo Véa Jr.’s Southwest squatter community); and outdoor geographies (Hawthorne’s Niagara Falls, Melville’s seas, Edward Abbey’s deserts, Lincoln’s Gettysburg, and the New York City sidewalks of Kazin, Day, and Baldwin). The book then shifts to a concluding [End Page 225] pedagogy-based chapter, on using the site of the university to teach undergraduates the skills of spatial attention, contemplative learning, and place-making—which the previous chapters have exemplified. The book’s presentation is unabashedly personal: Gatta moves frequently from literary points to personal encounters with the literature’s eclectic spaces. At times, the logic of the places the book covers seems to arise from the happenstance of the author’s own connections with them, rather than offering a more deliberative system of selection. These personal asides in places derail from the book’s aims (as when Gatta’s following of the fate of Stowe’s birth-home gets treated far longer than the pages can justify). But the author remains unfazed by the sometimes-desultory drift of chapter structure. After all, the personalized tone models the humanist practice of what it preaches—which suits a book that concludes in a directly pedagogical emphasis. Spirits of Place is strongest when it mines the rich set of tensions at the heart of its subject: of topophilia’s mix of materialist and spiritual longings; how a place like Devil’s Tower/Bear’s Lodge in Wyoming exemplifies “how conflicting sacralizations can converge upon a relatively limited space of terrain” (142); Wendell Berry’s “globally engaged localism” (101) set in dialogue with Ursula Heise’s skepticism of localism; Edward Abbey’s atheistic anticlericalism set against his own ecospiritual proximity to “John Calvin’s sense of the nonhuman world as a theatre of divine glory” (172). Aside from a few points from thinkers like Husserl, Bachelard, Tuan, and Heise, the book does not draw significantly from the theoretical storehouse that the spatial turn has generated, while also avoiding much in the way of theological criticism. This absence enables the study to stay compact, straightforward, and lucid. But it also limits Gatta’s ability to take a critical stand beyond the series of humanist commonplaces it points to. The lack of a more specific theoretical framework also limits the book’s ability to break new ground in its specific area of spirituality, as the subject remains generalized. In categorizing the divine, Gatta aims to be admirably open-minded, encompassing such spiritual forms as the polytheistic...