Great Plains Studies, Center for

 

Date of this Version

Spring 1999

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 19, No. 2, Spring 1999, pp. 107-22.

Comments

Copyright 1999 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Abstract

In "Thought and Landscape," geographer Yi-Fu Tuan describes an essential double perspective required for any comprehensive understanding of rural landscape. A geographer studies landscape "from 'above,'" for example, but "The side view ... is personal, moral, and aesthetic. A person is in the landscape ... from a particular spot and not from an abstract point in space. If the essential character of landscape is that it combines these two views (objective and subjective), it is clear that the combination can take place only in the mind's eye. Landscape appears to us through an effort of the imagination .... It is an achievement of the human mind."

Tuan could be describing the overall descent into the land William Least Heat-Moon achieves in PrairyErth. His 622-page book, "three times the length I set out to write" (598), constitutes an enormous essay of place, a novel charting and evoking of a particular landscape: Chase County, Kansas, a county of 733 square miles and about 3,000 citizens located in the southeast quadrant of the state, a mostly rural piece of the lower forty-eight states' geographical center that becomes a centerpiece. Heat-Moon aptly subtitles his experiment "a deep map," for map making and map reading form the book's primary formal interests and epistemology. In "Writing in Place: The New American Regionalism," Michael Kowalewski singles out Heat-Moon's subtitle for particular praise: "Literary 'mappings' of American places have increasingly involved an interest in metaphors of depth, resonance, root systems, habitats, and interconnectedness-factors that together put places into motion, making them move within their own history, both human and nonhuman."

To put this Kansas county in motion, HeatMoon creates "a topographic map of words that would open inch by inch to show its long miles" (15). His unusual word map-whose "twO hundred thousand words are my nutshell" (615) of this epitome of Great Plainscontains several parables of cartography which critique certain traditions in mapping and narrate the writer's and reader's participation in map making and map reading. Furthermore, these parables continually probe points of intersection between cartographic and narrative epistemologies and practices, and locate Heat-Moon's voice in that chorus subverting the historical myth of the Great Plains' empty, oppressive, and peripheral status. PrairyErth provides one set of answers to questions about landscape of increasing interest in contemporary American literature: How does one best know a chosen landscape?

What are the radical and radial connections between landscape and self? And what are the environmental and ethical consequences of such connections? It treats these familiar questions in ways that expose new affinities between mapping and reading and writing as fundamental interpretive acts. Yet the book's parables show that these interpretive acts both converge and diverge: that they are both complementary and antithetical accesses to knowledge oflandscape. Beginning PrairyErth entails drawing both land contour and square survey maps, and implicating oneself in those diverse cartographic traditions. To map Chase County is to read and ultimately write it: these, of course, become aids to walking and knowing it, but are not the same. At the most, the "topographic map of words" constitutes an enormous set of directions for travel "by leg and butt," and directions, always a narrative act, both imitate and subvert the visual abstractions of the book's maps.

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