Alan Williamson is the author of numerous books of poetry and criticism. He is a Professor of English at UC Davis. He spoke with Bonnie Roy and Mike Clearwater of the Greenbelt Review.
Westernness is available from the University of Virginia Press.
GBR: Okay, so the first thing we’d like to hear about is the form this book takes. It is a sort of hybrid between criticism and personal essay. Perhaps you could tell us how you came to decide that this was the best way to approach the subject of Westernness: what are the advantages of this form? Did you find this approach limiting at all?
Alan Williamson: I think it was an evolution. Some of the parts of the book that I wrote earliest, like the Thiebaud essay, were in the personal essay genre and then when it came together as a whole book I wanted to write—I guess I was just tired of writing conventional literary criticism—I wanted to write in a livelier style. Then it seemed that so much of the book had to do with evoking landscapes and places— I found that I wanted to write some essays where literary criticism played a very secondary role, like the essay about driving around Northern New Mexico visiting the various churches, or the last one about Carmel Beach.
GBR: At the end of the book you talk about travel as a place for you as a child and your perspective as a transplant in California. You seem very conscious of place influencing your life growing up. Would you have written this book no matter where you were? Are you interested in how place affects art, or is it specifically the West? Is place your subject or is the West your subject?
AW: I think I do have acute reactions to places or landscapes. All the places in which I’ve spent a significant amount of time have very strong and different emotional auras for me. I think that in my childhood I certainly had a sense of not wanting to be in any one place or wanting to be in a lot of places. I was very attached to Chicago where I lived and went to school, but my father didn’t like having to live in Chicago at all, he preferred the West. My paternal grandparents were born in Europe and were very strongly European, so I always had a sense of belonging to too many places. I think that California was always sort of an ambivalent landscape for me because I had loved it as a small child, but then as an adolescent spending the summers isolated with my family, I found it very stifling. So when I came back here to teach at UC Davis I was delighted to be able to encounter again the landscapes that had been an important part of my early life, but I was also scared that I was going to be cut off from everything—that the feeling I’d had in adolescence was going to come back. I started reading a lot of Western literature and worrying at the question of what the spirit of what Western literature truly was in order to figure out my true feelings about this place.
GBR: These essays include a number of personal anecdotes about your own experience with Western landscapes and artists. Could you talk about how you picked these stories to include and how they function with the critical aspirations of these essays? In a lot of places they seem like very obvious in-roads to your subjects, such as your own encounters with the Berkeley poets in “China Trade (II),” but in other essays, such as “Highway 66,” the story about traveling in your youth seems much more personal, meditative and parallel to the criticism as opposed to connected to it. What was your method for selecting these specific stories?
AW: Actually, that one I put in very late and rather self consciously because I knew this was the method of the whole book; I didn’t want that essay to go back into the mode of a standard literary critical essay on Ceremony. I already had the juxtaposition with the Hopper painting and The Grapes of Wrath in my mind and I thought: “I’ll throw in a couple of childhood reminiscences just to keep that strain going through the book.” I think obviously I chose some very personal things that were relevant—the muffled feeling of my late adolescent summers and the irrational fear that it might come back—but for most of the book very personal things about me weren’t as relevant as myself as a witness: I was there, that was what I saw.
I really wanted to write a kind of literary criticism that was also a kind of entertainment—to have a human voice that was responding to the works in a way that Jarrell’s criticism does, but also, me as a traveler looking around and registering things.
GBR: To stay on that essay, you talk about Leslie Marmon Silko and the notion of the how her character, Tayo, inhabits some sort of a myth. How much of that myth is the very landscape itself, and how do you think, as the landscape becomes less, to use the word you use, less alien over time, does that myth fade? How much of that myth fading has to do with the notion of the West a place of hybridity? Does hybridity change with that myth?
AW: First I’ll talk about that in terms of Silko because I’m not sure other myths follow that pattern. Silko comes out of the Indian’s sense of being dispossessed and having the land taken away from them, but also the sense that the land is a companion. Tribal cultures and stories are about how you navigate the land—the mnemonic devices or the different landmarks that tell you have far you’ve got to travel, where you are, and in what direction you should go; but the stories also have a moral on how to live and that advice comes from the landscapes so that the landscapes become part of the sense of self. And the ceremony is the recovery of that mythic sense that you can have a relationship to the land even if the white man’s fences are laid down across it. But one can’t pretend that the white man’s fences aren’t there, and that's where you get Silko’s sense that one has to be able belong to both cultures at once. Silko was brutally treated by some other Indian writers because she took tribal stories that aren’t supposed to be told to the outside world, and made them part of a High Modernist novel with a sort of mythic structure. She definitely says within the novel that Tribal purism is, in a way, as much a part of the forces of evil as capitalist encroachment because if you try to preserve things exactly the way they were, things will die. That’s why she sees a need to create hybrid traditions which are embodied in the book itself. I also argue that High Modern novels are themselves not secular, they are, in fact, wisdom literature; and that Silko is trying to put together the wisdom, say, of T.S. Eliot with the wisdom of a Laguna Clan story.
GBR: Well, maybe there are two questions here, maybe sort of unrelated:
In terms of hybridity, you talk about the way that Mexicans in the west profoundly influence the culture. Do you feel that this notion of hybridity will perhaps change this idea of Westernness? Will it continue to make the West separate from but connected to the East, or will the West change to be something different all together?
AW: I'd have to think about that. I was trying, in a way, to be fair to all sides by acknowledging that the only constant thing is change. The Indians feel an incurable pain about being displaced by the Anglos; the Anglos don’t feel culturally secure either with all of these migrations between cultures.
GBR: You talk about the environmentalism of the west and of Berkeley and of poets like Robert Hass and Brenda Hillman. How does the Western sense of preservation compare to more Eastern or European ideas of preservation, considering everything is so much newer here? How does the West differ from places where space has already been decided?
AW: Lawrence has this wonderful essay about Tuscany where he says that Tuscany is proof that cultivation and wildness can live side by side and have for 2,000 years. There are wild boars and all sorts of creatures that come out when you go out walking, and it feels like a wild place. I’m very concerned about these things. I’m anti-development and am scared by the homogenization of the west and the world. What you’re asking, say, about Brenda Hillman’s poems-- there is a very odd stance in her work. The distance between how far away a tree feels and how far Disneyland feels, is less extreme for Brenda than it is for the rest of us. And that allows her to identify with all of these things that seem just surface, in a way that's almost mystical. I don’t see that as politically letting down the side of environmentalism, I see it as kind of like the hybridity that is found in Silko.
GBR: How do you see the idea of Westernness evolving? As the landscape becomes less alien and more familiar and as the West becomes more urban how do think this idea of Westernness will manifest itself? Will it still differentiate itself from the Eastern American tradition?
AW: In a way I don’t know. The last time I spent a long time in the East was 1992. I certainly at that point felt certain cultural differences that mattered. I’ve always felt, though, that those could be exaggerated. The point at the beginning of the “China Trade II” chapter was that all the stereotypes of a laid-back, anti-intellectual West simply weren’t true. The foci of interests were very different but the level of thought was very comparable. I’m not sure that there is a sharp East or West differentiation now, except in very petty political ways: you’re more likely to get published in New York if you live in New York.