Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Winter 2005
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 25, No. 4, Winter 2005, pp. 7-27.
Abstract
In his influential review, "Deep Maps in Ecoliterature," scholar Randall Roorda argues that the deep map deserves status as an "incipient genre of environmental literature," noting its "ambitious ... self-reflexive" nature and its innovative narrative architecture. The term "deep map" itself is the invention of writer William Least Heat-Moon, whose extended essay PrairyErth (a deep map) has given definition to this form. Deep-map writing is marked by its intertextual, interdisciplinary, and multivocal nature. It is also self-consciously cartographic, presenting maps, following maps, and redrawing maps. Deep mappers "both distrust maps and rely on them," or as Heat-Moon puts it, they "test the grid." As he follows the twenty-five United States Geological Survey maps of Chase County, Kansas, Heat-Moon plumbs natural and human history, seeking the vestiges and expressions of this deep history in his walks around the county, but also seeking from others' published texts, scientific inquiry, and oral history an exhaustive accounting of place. Prompts from his own dreams and visions also inform his narrative. Heat-Moon's accomplishment in PrairyErth, reminiscent of Henry David Thoreau's Walden, has earned him much praise. Lawrence Buell proclaims PrairyErth "perhaps the most ambitious literary reconstruction of a small portion of America ever attempted in a single volume." This textual achievement has provided an emerging form of environmental writing, created an alignment among essayists experimenting with intercalated form, and inspired Heat-Moon's contemporaries to attempt their own deep maps.
Yet Heat-Moon did not invent the form. Another Plains writer, Wallace Stegner, prepared the ground for the deep-map years earlier with the 1962 publication of Wolf Willow, the urtext of all deep maps. In a sweeping narrative that encompasses geology, climatology, botany, political and settlement history, fiction, memoir, and myth, Stegner chronicles the Cypress Hills, fictional Whitemud, Saskatchewan (Eastend), and the Medicine Line. If the deep map is only now "incipient," it has had a long gestation, and its origins lie in the Great Plains straddling both sides of the forty-ninth parallel. Between 1962 and 1991, nonfiction writers were experimenting with the representation of place, and the deep map gave them both a new aesthetic and a land ethic. The significant features of this genre include its multivalent, cross-sectional understanding of history; its attention to the environment and advocacy of bioregionalism; its amalgamation of genres (e.g., Stegner's subtitle A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Plains Frontier); and its interest in a specific place, a particular biome, or a unique landscape. The deep-map genre claims practitioners from many disciplines-journalism, poetry, science, and ranching, for instancefor a reason: the flexibility of a cross-genre, cross-sectional narrative provides a format that revels in the nuances and variables of idiosyncratic experience, training, and appreciation of landscape. This form of literary stratigraphy shapes a distinctive kind of "articulated geography." That writers as diverse as Barry Lopez, John McPhee, and Sheila Nickerson, for instance, stand alongside Stegner and HeatMoon as deep mappers, signals the growing appeal of this genre. Buell has argued that environmental literature in general "increases our feel for both places previously unknown and places known but never so deeply felt." The deep map makes the "deeply felt" its forte.
Comments
Copyright 2005 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln