Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Fall 2001
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 21, No. 4, Fall 2001, pp. 287-308.
Abstract
Perhaps echoing Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach," Wright Morris begins his finest novel, Ceremony in Lone Tree (1960), with an invitation to the reader: "Come to the window," we are beckoned, and then we are told what is there to be seen: not much. But what is there is a view of the Great Plains that is highly conceptual and paradoxically suggestive in its emptiness. Outside the window, "[t]he view is to the west. There is no obstruction but the sky." With us inside the hotel is an old man, Tom Scanlon, who, soured on experience and addicted to nostalgia, has turned his back on the modern world: everything about him is withered. Scanlon's view is through a flaw in the glass, and what he sees is something like the sea-and like the sea, it offers "no place to hide." It is an inauspicious picture, but from these arid materials Morris created a concentrated metaphor of vision, his central argument for the significance of human imagination. "Is it a flaw in the eye, or in the window, that transforms a dry place into a wet one?" he asks, and of course the question is rhetorical.3 Morris's vision permits no argument for the physical beauty of the Plains; rather, his aesthetic is founded on a compensatory logic in which inhospitable elements conspire to haunt the imagination. (Fig. 1.).
As a novelist and photographer, Morris sought to position himself in meaningful relationship to the past, not so much looking for stories as for objects that had stories-and histories-imbedded in them. He wanted to reveal the ways in which profound experience becomes organically lodged in cultural effects (hence his interest in folkways, elderly people as custodians of disappearing culture, and frontal approaches in photography). His evocations of Nebraska and Great Plains places are almost always focused, filtered through actions of consciousness-through optical devices or deliberately placed frames. In his photographs this quality is often determined by central placement and the implications of borders, in prose by devices that highlight not so much the things seen as the acts of perception in seeing them. These images are given to us with such ceremony that one begins to believe each one, if properly understood, might hold the key to all his work. (See Fig. 2.).
As Morris had a photographer's eye, it follows that his narrative method is extraordinarily visual, precise, and terse. Reading Morris's novels is often like viewing a photographic sequence; for him narrative movement is of secondary importance to still-life presence. His scenes are closely observed, but the juices he squeezes from them are not nostalgically sweet. His propensity for just the right expression-one delicately and ambiguously poised between reverence and chagrin-requires irony and an appropriately dry sense of humor. He provides for some readers and viewers a welcome shock of recognition, a weathered authority in melancholy matters of the Great Plains heart.
Comments
Copyright 2001 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln