Reviews for The Fall into Eden: Landscape and Imagination in California

The average rating for The Fall into Eden: Landscape and Imagination in California based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-11-02 00:00:00 Charles Madison INTRO-- Walter Channing is known for his blunt statement in 1815 about a perceived inadequacy in expression and writing: "If then we are now asked, why is this country deficient in literature? I would answer, in the first place, because it possesses the same language with a nation, totally unlike it in almost every relation." (1) Inexpressibility, as I will show, is traditionally founded in a combination of perfection and inadequacy: the human speaker falls forever short of meeting expectations demanded by the perfection of his or her chosen subject, whether God or a saint or inexplicable beauty. (2) Melville puts it well: "it is hard to be finite upon an infinite subject." (6) My aim has been to recover the context of a rhetoric of self-persuasion within which writers seek to distance one kind of English from another. (7) CH.1-- The linking of language, especially written, to the creation of nationhood, of course, has long roots. Tracing the formation of how language becomes a "language-of-power," Benedict Anderson singles out the printer-journalist (he uses the example of Benjamin Franklin) as creating an imagined community based on a written language. For Philip Spencer and Howard Wollman, "the spread of a written vernacular" is central to a conceit of nationhood: "When an ethnic group's language develops a wide literature of its own it can go on to develop into a nation; where it does not, it is likely to fail in such a development." (14) Edmund S. Morgan notes that George Washington's reputation is premised on his performance in reading and writing. He shows how Washington continually transforms "what looked in the historical record like shrotcomings" into triumphs through formal and written acts of "conscious creation" of character. (14) "National literature seems to be the product, the legitimate product, of a national language," Walter Channing has written in his now famous summary of 1815. (19) What does it mean exactly for desired language in the Preface to lie ahead of ("shall well night"), but already lie inside, its own and current body of expression, namely English--and suggest itself at the same moment as a "medium" for what it is not yet expressing? (19) Facts, framed as fiction, are replaced by claimed self-evident truths, such as the one that the nation's champions have arrived and are available. Time has been injected into the frame of the inexpressible; what at first appears a factual dead-end is transfroemd into a future as a dare. (24) CH.2-- This difficulty is articulated by St. Augustine: "not supposing we have found what we seek, but having found (as seekers do) the place in which to look. We have found, not the thing itself, but where it is to be sought." (34) Just as the eulogy relies on poetry and the humility topos relies on devotional formulas, so did the ineffability topos have a literary mode for its representation--framing. This strategy deals with the gap between what is expressed and what cannot be represented. (35) Some of the more common nodes of intersection fo the ineffable with religion and its characteristic self-contradiction include 1) the well-known writings of St. Augustine, named by Peter S. Hawkins as the "most influential interpreter of this rapture," that is, of unmediated and unrepresentable contact with God, in which God's language is paradoxically referred to as silence; 2) the work of fifth-century philosopher and grammarian Bhartrihari, for whom the idea of a supreme reality Brahman and word (shabda) transcended spoken and written language; and 3) Buddhist philosophy in which, as Ben-Ami Scharfstein explains, the "ability of words to capture (to 'name') the Tao in the sense of reality in itself" is attacked (Ineffability, 86). Each of these approaches names a major point of contact between religion and the ineffable. St. Augustine, for example, writes, ". . . God should not be said to be ineffable, for when this is said something is said. And a contradiction in terms is created, since if that is ineffable which canot be spoken, then that is not ineffable which can be called ineffable." (36) Of language such as this one cannot ask the question "what does it mean?" for in everyday terms it doesn't mean anything (as a statement it is self-consuming); in fact in its refusal to "mean" in those terms lies its value. A more fruitful question would be "what does it do?"; and what it does is alert the reader to its inability (which is also his inability) to contain, deal with,c apture, say anything about, its putative subject, Christ. (qtd on 38) Each word in this emerging inexpressible is not hard won, that is to say, not won at all, as traditionally determined. Instead, it is hard lost--a near-hit, obtruding with each utterance as just missing, if still missing. To say this in another way: inadequacy is being fundamentally measured not in terms of the more traditional forbidden territory of the Word, but through an excess of expression in the wrong directions. (40) CH.3-- By focusing the topos of the inexpressible on a perceived inadequacy of a language, rather than on the limitations of being human, Whitman's Preface adds complexity to a sophisticated rhetoric. (49) When the topos lends its infrastructure to fiction, the first part of the frame can be realized in a heroic character, the one who embodies a larger-than-life realism, such as Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. The second part of the frame, the inadequacy of human speech, is revealed in its choral characters, such as the servant Nelly Dean, who laments what she cannot bear to witness or express: "something," dreaded, as she says, from which she can "foresee a fearful catastrophe." Together these characters establish what lies outside the range of human limitations and expressibility, what Stephen Booth goes as fara s to call the human experience of "indefinition." (50) These frames relentlessly resist, or they enclose without ever naming, certain experiences of words. In poems or prose, such frames can begin with a perception of perfection or achievement, and they focus on human loss or inadequacy. They find roots in paradox, contradiction, and uncertainty of order, often refusing to draw a clear line between editing and authoring . . . (54) Richard Shryock explains that an essential role of a frame therefore "is to mediate." He continues that this is "an unusual tool in that it can bring about change not only to the receiver but also to the sender" (13). (54) To put it bluntly, the same words are local and foreign at the same time. They are both inadequate and (almost) adequate. Here, attempting to say-what-cannot-be-said is no longerbased on a division between the human and the larger-than-life. Instead it is based on a languaeg's overlap with itself, in which inadequacy and perfection are held in one and the same grip of the English language. Perfection is perceived in this compressed frame as lying not across an impenetrable line of eternity but inside its own expression of inadequacy. Impatience therefore comes to the surface. (55) A desired and failed representation of God or the divine, therefore, is replaced by super self-consciousness. Words cannot express--and yet are the only eligible means to express--what lies precisely within the same (English) words. (67) This kind of engagement with the topos of the ineffable, encouraged by a self-identifying community of settlers, a demand for perfectibility, and a perceived self-same language, produces framing that contributes to anticipating and predating patterns of discourse also associated even more self-consciously and more modernly with "not being about anything," anything, that is, teleological. Not surprisingly poets are those most interested in this topos explicitly, and speficially in the inexpressible "thing itself" (a good example is Wallace Stevens's "Not Ideas About the Thing but the Thing Itself"). (71) W.B. Yeats famously makes the distinction: "We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry." In a same-language English, these frames from the inexpressible make the quarrel with "others" as "ourselves," a self-conscious matter of rhetoric and poetry as one, if at all. (71) CH.4-- That is, even though it seems that the framework of such shaggy dogs might create insiders and outsiders (those who get "it" and those who do not), in this and no-point shaggy dogs generally, almost everyone ends up being included one way or the other since, in effect, there is nothing to get. It is an embodiment of "the exact opposite of what a joke . . . 'ought to be.'" (85) Similar to the inexpressible, metaphor in Aristotle's designation is improper naming, which suggests current inadequacy, or lack. (92)

Review # 2 was written on 2009-03-12 00:00:00 Lllautah Veil Our understanding of Sylvia Plath--an influence felt not only through my generation, whose mothers were born around the same time as she, i.e., 1932, but in the one following--has been greatly widened in recent years via *Birthday Letters*, Ted Hughes' best-selling poetic chronicle of his life with Plath; the woefully underrated feature film *Sylvia*, with superb performances both by Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig in the starring roles; the selling of Hughes' papers to Emory University; and the publication of his letters. Now there's the appearance of this volume, which juxtaposes well-known Plath scholars like Lydia Bundtzen and Kate Moses (whose best work on Plath remains her novel, *Wintering*)) with newer writers like Tracy Brain, whose focus is Plath's political and cultural concerns, and Kathleen Connors, co-editor of *Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath's Art of the Visual*. Thus we read *The Unraveling Archive* not as another collection of biographical takes on Plath's work, but as a series of new, and surprising, kaleidoscopic revelations. (originally printed in *The Tennesseean)