Department of English
Writing the Journey: June 1999
"Postmodern Desert or Comforting Space: Reading the American Landscape in Baudrillard and Ehrlich."
Thomas Argiro
University of Kansas
tmargiro@falcon.cc.ukans.edu
Jean Baudrillard and and Gretel Ehrlich have each generated extended travel narratives engaging the experience of the vastness of space in the American West. Coming from different national and intellectual backgrounds, and traveling for entirely different reasons, these writers present disparate, if idiosyncratic views on the social and cultural meanings of space, present in their respective travel narratives.
Baudrillard's America develops a fast-paced postmodern impressionistic commentary that takes the reader on a tour of America's highways, which Baudrillard describes as leading through a landscape covered with hyperreal simulacra. Uncomfortable with his experiences, Baudrillard launches a personalized critique of American culture, treating space as a wasteland filled in by empty signifiers, an incommensurable ontological desert. His literary effort falls into the travel writing legacy of Alexis de Tocqueville, who likewise explored the social discontinuity brought on by the evolving American experiment.
Ehrlich, by contrast, in The Solace of Open Spaces, dramatizes her experience of traveling to and residing in rural Wyoming in terms of a dialectical encounter between nature and culture, feeling and reason, alienation and self-discovery. Highlighting much of her very personal existential angst, Ehrlich's narrative is driven by her flight from the demands of modernity, which is juxtaposed to her desire for incorporating her encounter with the wide open spaces into an enlightened recovery of well-being. Her efforts recall the entire tradition of nature writing spawned by Emerson and Thoreau, and continuing in writers such as Annie Dillard and Barry Lopez.
On initial reflection, Jean Baudrillard's America and Gretel Ehrlich's The Solace of Open Spaces would seem to be texts devoted to very different social messages and personal expressions. However, their rhetorical purposes may have more in common than one might initially suppose, given that both essayists are profoundly concerned with a certain crisis in cultural intepretation, relative to the ways that Americans structure their social meanings of the vast, underpopulated regions and wilderness areas. Baudrillard is able to write that the American "deserts," a term he uses generically to mean unqualified spaces, "denote the emptiness, the radical nudity that is the background to every human institution." Ehrlich, in a similar rejection of the faith implied in having "conquered the wilderness," offers how "we have only to look at the houses we build to see how we build against space, the way we drink against pain and loneliness. We fill up space as if it were a pie shell, with things whose opacity further obstructs our ability to see what is already there." Both criticisms are relative to a certain loss of values, and both decry the lack of a more informed recognition of the subtle yet ever present oscillations of nature and culture.
What I want to do is read these two texts as disparate responses to very similar sets of concerns: cultural and personal alienation, attempts to redress the forces of modernity, and testimonies to the deeply personal ways that travel can alter our perceptions toward cultural and ethnic difference. Yet each writer ends in a separate relation to the topic that I want to consider, in terms of their individual personal and political sensibilities. Baudrillard maintains a carefully crafted preference for a certain otherness, rooted in his suspicions of American society, while Ehrlich's immersion narrative speaks to a need for realizing the common ground we may find among widely diverse subjects and their experiences. My investigation will launch an inquiry into how each view may both compliment and critique the other, in order to define an articulation between these writers' personal and the political views of space that is neither romantically naive, nor culturally cynical.
Thomas Argiro
University of Kansas
tmargiro@falcon.cc.ukans.edu
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