Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain

Over three days in class, our discussion of The Land of Little Rain covered a wide array of topics, many of them incredibly provocative and tightly related to other themes we've examined so far this term. We asked many questions of the text and puzzled over possible answers. I will give an overview of those questions and of some of our "statements" below. In regard to the questions, I hope you will puzzle over these as you prepare to write Essay One and as you prepare for your midterm exam.

What does Mary Austin do to "the rules," as it were, in her written descriptions of "nature"? (And what might these "rules" be?) Does she take on an elegaic tone? Or a celebratory tone? Does she, conversely, take a man-versus-nature approach? What is her descriptive style? Many of you have said her style is straight-forward, or spare, or unspectacular. What would her point in employing such an even tone be?

Does Austin lean on conventions (such as references to God, or to Eden, or other varieties of prelapsarian reference)? In terms of her text's structure, how does it conform to or reject stylistic conventions of her time? It is a collection of meditations on nature, but it is also a collection of stories populated by plants, people, animals, a few towns, and many large geographical "locators" (like rivers, mountains, etc.).

We discussed how Austin's "local level" approach to discussing this land causes the reader to recallibrate his or her own vantage. There is a clear pronouncement by Austin on what she is asking the reader, or the traveler in this landscape, to do in regard to perspective. Can you remember where it is?

To follow up on Austin's tone, does she ever "judge"? If we think of her account of the Pocket Hunter, does she "finger-wag"? We discussed how she does not seem to begrudge the Pocket Hunter his humanity. What did we mean by this? For what kind of life does the Pocket Hunter hunt? Think of what kinds of "pockets" he is pursuing and what he did after one of his "big strikes" a few years before Austin met him. How did he spend his money? What does this tell us about the "narrative" of the PH's life, the string that ties his intellectual, physical, and geographic pursuits together?

I mentioned in class that this Land of Little Rain, as Austin calls it, might be the existential landscape par excellence. Any recollection of what I meant by that? If an existentialist (and feel free to read Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea for a developed picture of the existential "hero") disconnects him or herself from the definitional trappings of modern life (religion, government, Western morality, etc.) and lives in the blinding glare of absolute freedom, how might the Land of Little Rain be an "existential" landscape?

We wondered what to make of Austin's infrequent reference to political realities of her day (regarding Native land rights or Homesteading, for example). Is her text a-historical?

What is the human's role in this Land of Little Rain (not in the text as an artifact, but in the landscape she describes)?

Recall our discussions of the landscape/nature as an analogue for the "human sensorium." You had a blog prompt about this too. What are the tastes, touches, sights, and sounds that Austin describes? How does she collapse these senses together and not heirarchize them, because perhaps nature forces her (and us, by extension) to reconsider such heirarchization?

We discussed briefly the tension between ephemerality and permanence that the text forces us to face (the text, itself, is a permanent artifact that captures some of the ephemeralities of nature and, indeed, of human life as a part of the fleeting and dispassionate process of nature).

And to return to one of the first ideas I mentioned here, we discussed the "nothingness" of the writing in The Land of Little Rain. What did we mean by this?