Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

Here is a summary of our conversations over the first week of our reading of Abbey’s Desert Solitaire. Remember, all page citations are to my edition (the 1991 printing). I have also given you chapter references.

Abbey's text proceeds with a very subjective, quietly delivered view. He observes, as if carefully plotting. He appears to hold nature to a much higher standard than he does humans, who he seems to judge, to observe influenced by political, regional, or cultural stereotypes or biases. At the outset of the novel, Abbey attempts to struggle with tendencies to anthropomorphize (he even says of snakes in the "Serpents of Paradise" chapter, "how can I descend to such anthropomorphism?") (23). But, we do come to know a central human figure: Abbey.

The Abbey about which we learn more and more over the first half of the book: who is he? Students suggested terms like "lunatic" and "hypocrite." Are there examples from the first half of the book that you can use to support such harsh assessments of your narrator? (And, a very literary question: how trustworthy is Abbey as a narrator?).

I introduced parallels between Sartre's central character (Antoine Roquetin) in his novel Nausea and Abbey as (self-)represented in Desert Solitaire. They both recognize phenomena (for Abbey, phenomena in nature) as just being. In the chapter "The First Morning," Abbey expressed his desire, his wish for his experience of contact in "the wilderness": "I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a non-human world and yet somehow survives intact, individual separate. Paradox and bedrock" (6). And, to jump ahead to a passage from the second half of the book that also supports this line of thinking, Abbey indicates that his experience of wildness, or people's experiences of the wilderness, might free them from artificial structures. He says of looking at a cottonwood in "Down the River" that he "half expect[s] to see not only the cottonwood tree rising over its tiny spring—the leafy god, the desert's liquid eye—but also a rainbow-colored corona of blazing light, pure spirit, pure being, pure disembodied intelligence . . ." (200).

What do we make of Abbey’s nostalgia for, as one student said, “people who aren’t there”? Cowboys, Indians? Why consign people to the past, indicating that any "present day" versions are contaminated, or weakened, versions of previous substantial or vital versions? We discussed Abbey's highly problematic descriptions of present-day Native communities (or "present-day" in the '60s). What do you make of such descriptions in light of his treatment of "natural" or "wild" places?

Does Abbey resent "systems"? How does he feel about "organized" societies (and systems of government, politics, religion, roads, etc.)? One student said that he is "not open-minded at all when it comes to human use" of "wild" places. He makes no concessions for disabled people or for the elderly or young, for example. His mentality, a student said, appears to be a "survival of the fittest" mentality. Abbey does use the possessive pronoun "my" to refer to the Arches country (as he says in the first paragraph of the "Rocks" chapter: " . . . I mean southeastern Utah: the canyonlands, Abbey's country"). Is Abbey an "environmentalist" (he addresses this further in the second half of the book)? He does, as students pointed out, kill a rabbit just for sport (in the "Cliffrose and Bayonets" chapter.) He feels no "guilt" for what he has done: "I examine my soul: white as snow . . . We are kindred all of us, killer and victim, predator and prey, me and the sly coyote . . . Long live diversity, long live the earth!" What kind of system does Abbey describe here?

We wondered as a class about the purpose of the story (of Husk and Mr. Graham) in the "Rocks" chapter. What is its "message"? Abbey begins this story with a loose end, as it were, when he seems to transition out of "fact"-type details concerning the history of mining, particularly uranium mining, in the area. Immediately before the beginning of the Husk/Graham story, Abbey writes “there is one question about this search for the radiant treasure—the hidden splendor—which nobody ever asked." What is that one question? He ostensibly uses the story to answer it. Our class suggested that the question might be "is it worth it?" Also, "what is the human cost?" We considered the ways in which Mrs. Husk benefits. We contended with the title, "Rocks," of the chapter. Mining, some suggested, brings out the worst in people, with catastrophic and crazy consequences. Does Husk sacrifice his son, in effect (there is a flood and a poison bush, a pursuit, various other obstacles). Billy-Jo is an "innocent" and, in the end, the "elements" cause his death (dehydration, extreme sunburn), but it is in the hospital, a domain of civilization, in which he dies. The hospital cannot save him.