Department of English
Writing the Journey: June 1999
"The Inhabiting Imagination: Jonathan Raban's Discovery of America"
Dr. Jennifer J. Dellner
University of Houston; Honors College
jdellner@uh.edu
Jonathan Raban's Hunting Mr. Heartbreak and his later Bad Land: An American Romance, presents its subject through a steady and insistent inversion of the travel writer's usual narrative mode, asking of the reader to hear these as investigations of "more space than place" (BL: 85), discovered through the paradox not of travelling, but of settling. It is in the earlier Hunting Mr. Heartbreak that a new type of "travelling" becomes an inventive strategy for telling: though staying for a while is the basis of any writer's tale, renting ---and inhabiting --- a whole way of life is Raban's particular modus operandi. Moving from Manhattan to the South, to Seattle and the Florida Keys in three-for month stints, Raban's narrative courts the effects of geography, finding in those spaces the person he would become within its contours. Ever witty (in the South, he even rents a dog, as it goes with the life!) ever serious, Raban's project emerges as less of a travelogue than a story of his temporary residence within the imaginative space each permits, opening for us as it does for him, an examination of the psychic terrain which is "American." That Raban is British makes his absorption into (by ?) the territory all the more fascinating.
In Bad Land, Raban does not take up residence quite so literally or completely as his multiple identities did in the former book, although the former can now be read as exercises for the grander project of Bad Land: here is a sustained narrative of the landscape of the High Plains and its greatest yield: on this soil the "countersublime" (Bad Land: 66) of the American psyche is born. The majority of my paper will track this countersublime and Raban's articulation of it. From the first pages of the narrative in which the author asks his readers to imagine the potential immigrant imagining the New World ---already not the expected one of earlier settlers, but the one of the early 1900's with trains steaming out to the Dakotas and beyond---- and to imagine the contrast between the life on the plains suggested by the American propaganda sent abroad and that which the homesteaders actually found, his story highlights at once the limits of the imagination and the potential of the land to exert its power on the psyche.
That the countersublime can be glossed as An American Romance in the book's title again points to the role an emerging aesthetic (and by "aesthetic", I mean a mode of life and thinking about that life; the use of the term "aesthetic" will be taken up in more detail in the paper than here in this abstract) which triumphs over the literal fact that the badlands are bad land. From Campbell's Soil Culture Manual to Ginn & Co.'s grade school readers, Raban limns the constant reinvention of the plains. Raban's story of the photographic career of Evelyn Cameron contains the essence and paradox of this "romance," in which the activity of recomposition is necessary to "see" what is really there. Once recomposed, the badness of the "bad land" can find its place in the aesthetic proper; I will conclude by examining the tension Raban forges between this ongoing, cooptive aesthetic and the resistant land, which is "all periphery and no center" (70).
Dr. Jennifer J. Dellner
University of Houston; Honors College
Houston, TX 77004
jdellner@uh.edu
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