Translating Southwestern Landscapes: The Making of an Anglo Literary Region by Audrey Goodman

Abstract

3 0 4 WAL 3 8 . 3 F a l l 2 0 0 3 “an absent signifier” (56). While agreeing with Donald Worster that Stein­ beck looks favorably on the myth of the yeoman, he argues that this nostalgia “does not detract from the book’s success in subverting the hydroindustrial paradigm” (57). Cassuto continues his look at the power inherent in the excesses of fed­ eral hydrologic projects by examining Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang through “faux potlatch," based on Georges Bataille’s theories. For Cassuto the monkey wrenchers’ plan to blow up Glen Canyon Dam represents “the ultimate potlatch” and a replacement of the faux potlatch of federal control (81). In examining Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal Dreams, Cassuto turns to sys­ tems theory to discuss “the difficulties inherent in the construction of a postReclamation era” (97). His analysis underscores the importance of differing definitions used by the characters on both sides of the dam dispute. As with Austin’s novel, Cassuto reads the novel’s positive ending as forced, suggesting the success of Kingsolver’s characters is a limited victory, one that offers little hope in terms of changing water policy. Throughout the book Cassuto, who now practices environmental law, gives a clear overview of a century of water politics, contributing to western American literature by showing the ways in which dominant cultural myths not only influence novelists, but also creators of water policy. Translating Southwestern Landscapes: The Making of an Anglo Literary Region. By Audrey Goodman. Tucson: U n iversity o f A rizona Press, 2002. 224 pages, $40.00. Reviewed by Maureen Salzer U niversity of W isconsin, Superior In this interdisciplinary study of the cultural forces that have constructed the American Southwest as a distinct region, Audrey Goodman draws upon cultural geography, borderland studies, postmodern ethnography, ethnocriticism , economic analysis, and theories of tourism to construct an analysis of the Southwest as a series of imagined translations. Goodman focuses on East Coast bourgeois writers and photographers who represented the Southwest to Englishspeaking , dominant-culture readers: Charles Lummis, Zane Grey, Mark Strand, Ansel Adams, Mary Austin, and Willa Cather. Goodman argues that defini­ tions of region are necessarily partial and contingent, that constructions of region are culturally and aesthetically specific, and that closure usefully eludes us in an imagined southwestern landscape. The book begins with popular writers Charles Lummis and Zane Grey. Goodman finds value in Lummis’s use of multiple written genres and his doc­ umentary photography, briefly discussing his 1892 A Tramp across the Continent and comparing his translations of Pueblo stories (1894’s The Man Who Married the Moon and Other Pueblo Indian Folk-Stories) to those of Frank Hamilton B o o k r e v i e w s 3 0 5 Cushing. Goodman rightly emphasizes the difficulties of intercultural transla­ tion. Next Goodman considers how Zane Grey’s early novels—The Heritage of the Desert (1910), The Riders of the Purple Sage (1912), Desert Gold (1913), and The Rainbow Trail (1915)— establish utopian visions of the Southwest within a network of social, political, and economic forces, including religion, eco­ nomic opportunity, gender roles, borderlands issues, and personal property rights. A sublime or enchanted landscape, free of history, coexists with cultural difference and lack of economic parity. Next, art photographers Mark Strand and Ansel Adams, both protégés of Alfred Stieglitz, are shown to have developed their work in relation to earlier documentary photographers Carleton Watkins and William Henry Jackson, who primarily produced landscapes, and to Ben Wittick, Lummis, and Edward Curtis, whose subjects included Native people and their communities. Their work is contrasted with the innovative work of contemporary photographer Alex Harris. Goodman’s chapter on Mary Austin and the modernist Southwest dis­ cusses the then current popularity of things Native, Mabel Dodge Luhan and her problematic participation in Native cultures, D. H. Lawrence’s visions of the American Southwest, and Boasian anthropology. Austin’s early regionalist work in Land of Little Rain (1903) is found to have clearly modernist narra­ tive structures that differentiate it from earlier local color writings. Austin’s later subjective and intuitive translations of Native verbal art are rightly seen as partial and...