Whitt, “The Redemption of Narrative: Terry Tempest Williams and her Vision of the West” (reviewed by Dennis Clark)

Review
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Title: The Redemption of Narrative: Terry Tempest Williams and her Vision of the West
Author: Jan Whitt
Publisher: Mercer University Press
Genre: Literary Criticism
Year Published: 2016
Number of pages: 254 p.
Binding: Hardback
ISBN13: 978-0-88146-388-0
Price: $29.00

Reviewed by Dennis Clark for the Association for Mormon Letters

WhittJan Whitt has produced a massive, if not comprehensive, guide to critical notices, studies and interviews of the subject of her book, the Mormon naturalist Terry Tempest Williams. She has also elucidates a coherent framework for reading Williams’s many books: T. S. Eliot’s *Four Quartets*, one of Williams’s own touchstones. And she has placed Williams squarely in the context of what she calls “American literary journalism.” For this service to Mormon letters she deserves applause.

Whitt understands the academic idiom well. She exemplifies the old axiom “First, tell them what you are going to tell them; second, tell them; third, tell them what you just told them” — so for the serious academic looking for a new approach to Terry Tempest Williams and her body of work, Whitt’s study is invaluable. The original contribution she makes, in tying Williams and Eliot together, begins in Part I, Chapter 1, on page 25. Before that, in the Acknowledgments, in the Preface, and in the Introduction, she is mostly telling the reader what she is going to tell her.

Whitt includes an e-mail interview with Williams as the final chapter of her study, and it is here that she elicits a coherent response from Williams on her devotion to T. S. Eliot. It is worth quoting extensively, as one of her contributions to the study of Williams. This exchange from p. 226 is particularly germane. Whitt asks:

“For reasons particular to *The Redemption of Narrative* and its reliance upon specific themes and the concept of quartets as an organizational device, I’m curious about your interest in essays and poems by T.S. Eliot. As you know, references to his work are scattered throughout your interviews and prose.”

Williams’’ answer is an enthusiastic endorsement, and I quote it here in full:

“T.S. Eliot speaks to the beauty and brokenness of the world as well as any writer I know. *Four Quartets* remains a seminal text for me. I read it frequently–not so much as a poem but a catalogue of sentences, beautiful, poignant, provocative, and true. ‘Turning shadow into transient beauty.’ I find these four poems, this litany of sentences and images, a meditation on what it means to be human, an inquiry into a relational world, written during a time of war. We are still at war with ourselves, with each other, and with the world. We are also in love with the world. This kind of paradox fuels my writing. How do we make peace with our own contradictory nature? Eliot is fearless in his inquiry and does not shy away from the spiritual, the mystical, the unknown.”

The “reasons particular to *The Redemption of Narrative*” are Whitt’s structuring of chapters 1-4 on a framework derived from the *Four Quartets*. She borrows partial or complete first lines from each of the quartets as chapter headings, and uses the theme of a given quartet as the theme of her examination of Williams’s works. Each chapter examines one or more of Williams’s books in light of Eliot’s theme. These are the first four chapters, as listed in the table of contents:

1: “Time present and time past are both perhaps present in time future”: *Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place*

2: “In my beginning is my end”: *An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field* and *When Women Were Birds: Fifty-Four Variations on Voice*

3: “I do not know much about gods”: *Desert Quartet: An Erotic Landscape*, *Pieces of White Shell: A Journey to Navajoland*, and *Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert*

4: “Midwinter spring is its own season”: *Leap* and *Finding Beauty in a Broken World*

As a general reader, a literary critic and a failed doctoral candidate, I find her work most convincing in these four chapters. For most other general readers, on the other hand, the greatest value of this book will be to send her back to Williams’’s many books for a second, third or nth reading. Whitt’s close reading is an invaluable prod to the harried reader to slow down, re-read Williams, and enjoy her wrestling with “the beauty and brokenness of the world” as she tries to preserve her own sense of family and place, and her quest for the transcendental. And, by tying Eliot and Williams together thematically, she suggests to me at least that Williams deserves the Nobel Prize for literature as fully as Eliot did.

Part 2 of Whitt’s study is less convincing. In chapter 5, “Terry Tempest Williams and American Literary Journalism,” she tries to place Williams in “the canon of great American literary nonfiction” (p. 180) represented by Capote, Davidson, Didion, Orlean and Wolfe. She argues for this canon by rejecting the obvious:

“If one resists the temptation to locate Williams exclusively with ‘nature writers,’ such as Annie Dillard and Henry David Thoreau, it becomes possible to link her work to that of literary journalists who write nonfiction and are deeply rooted in place, including Sara Davidson, Joan Didion, Jane Kramer, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Susan Orlean and Tom Wolfe, and to American writers who share her concern for wildlife and their habitats, including Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, and Roger Rosenblatt. Novels, short stories, and essays by Hemingway, Orwell, and Rosenblatt sometimes appear in collections about ecocriticism, but rarely. Hemingway’s devotion to hunting understandably calls into question his empathy for animals, although it does not invalidate his commitment to the survival of wildlife; in fact, his description of a wounded lion stalked by hunters is authentic precisely because of the time Hemingway spent pursuing African game” (p. 173).

That is her thesis statement for the chapter, and essentially her outline of it. First, she describes the genre of “literary nonfiction,” and then she describes how Hemingway, Orwell [who is *not* an American writer] and Rosenblatt belong in the same genre as Williams and the rest. This chapter reads like two different journal articles incompletely melded by an overarching concept, and only tangentially includes discussion of Williams’s writing. (Whitt’s next chapter, on Animal Rights Activism, is even more tangential). By this point in her book, Whitt has explored Williams’s corpus in delectable detail, and she could recap some of her findings in these two chapters to tie them in a little more. But the connection with American literary nonfiction is where Whitt locates the redemption of narrative in Williams’s work — the redemption of narrative from fiction, from the necessity of lying to speak the truth.

And in at least one way, this fifth chapter helps explain an odd feature of Whitt’s study. In at least three places in the book, Whitt refers to *Refuge* as a novel (I stopped counting after a while). It is as if Whitt had written a draft of the book asserting that *Refuge* is a non-fiction novel, on the order of *In Cold Blood* or *The Executioner’s Song*, and then thought better of it. This is the kind of thing an editor should normally catch, and since we are dealing with a university press book printed on “acid-free paper that meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences–Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials” (title-page verso), one would think that such a concern for permanence would engender a special care for accuracy as well. I regard this as the province of the publisher, not of the author. There’’s a good reason publishers employ editors — since authors are often too close to their work to see its blemishes.

Of even more enormity to me than that kind of blemish is Whitt’s problem with complete and comprehensively redundant repetition. She almost always refers to her book as *The Redemption of Narrative: Terry Tempest Williams and her vision of the West*, rather than as, say, “this book” or “the present study” or even *The Redemption of Narrative*, although she does sometimes use the shorter form. She almost always refers to Williams’s works by full title, as, for example, *Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place* instead of *Refuge*, as if there were more books under consideration with the short title of *Refuge*. But, and I may just be showing my age here, most annoying to me, she refers to the subject of her study almost invariably as Terry Tempest Williams, even twice or more in the same paragraph. Maybe things are changing, but I am used to referring to the subject of a study, when there is no chance of confusion, by the surname only, as, say, “Eliot” for Thomas Stearns Eliot when the subject of the paragraph, the chapter or the entire work is T. S. Eliot. I refer Whitt to Mark Twain’s joke that, if “and it came to pass” were removed from the *Book of Mormon*, it would reduce that tome to the size of a pamphlet.

I realize that the preceding two paragraphs make it seem that I am a grumpy codger searching to make Whitt an offender for a word. I do not mean to give that impression. As I said before, the book makes two strong contributions to the study of Williams’’s works: the tie to Eliot’s great poem, and her interview with Williams, which focuses on the core of each of her chapters. Both are well worth reading. And I found one of her examples, from *Refuge*, echoes (almost as prophecy) today’’s news. She quotes Williams’’s statement that “Wetlands are one more paradox of Great Salt Lake” in her discussion human encroachment. Williams continues:

“The marshes here are disappearing naturally. It’s not the harsh winter or yearly spillover that threatens Utah’’s wetland birds and animals. It is lack of land. In the normal cycle of a rising Great Salt Lake, the birds would simply move up. New habitat would be found. New habitat would be created. They don’t have those options today, as they find themselves flush against freeways, and a rapidly expanding airport” (*Refuge*, p. 112).

KUER, the radio station of the University of Utah, has been reporting all day as I write this, that “the Prison Relocation Commission decided last fall to build the new prison somewhere inside a 4,000-acre plot of land just west of the Salt Lake International Airport. On Friday, state building managers ruled out a more eastern parcel on that property because it’s adjacent to an old landfill. There is some concern about contamination at the site.” The prison is being relocated because land at the present site of the prison complex, just north of the Point of the Mountain, is too valuable to waste on prisoners and their guards, and the cost and logistics of rebuilding the prison there are said to be prohibitive. And no one in surrounding towns wanted the prison in their back yards.

But that’s only part of what caught my ear. The story ends with these sentences: “The prison is scheduled to be complete in 2020. Construction can’’t begin until the soggy soil is prepped and filled. That’’s expected to take at least a year.” (You can read, or hear, the story on the KUER website, at http://kuer.org/post/state-chooses-western-most-parcel-prison-site/.) Now, I’m no penologist, and no geologist, but I drive. Geologists tell us that the Wasatch Fault, which runs along the base of the Wasatch Mountains in Salt Lake Valley, is about 500 years overdue for a massive, catastrophic earthquake — the kind that liquefies the soil out in old lake beds, and shakes buildings on such soil to pieces. When I drive through basin and range country in Nevada, from Reno to Wendover, I pass at least two sets of signs warning me not to pick up hitchhikers, because they could be escapees from the prisons located in the remote reaches of the state — in the basins of that basin and range. So, when that earthquake hits, don’t pick up hitchhikers — especially near the airport, which is undergoing a massive expansion even as we speak.

I mention this only to underline how relevant Williams’s concerns still are, and how prophetic she has proven in her unnatural history. Read Whitt, yes, but go back and re-read Williams. She still speaks for the land, the lake and the birds.

I have Whitt to thank for pointing out a revision Williams made to the end of *Refuge*. My hardback is a first edition, published in 1991; it ends with a recounting of “an act of civil disobedience”:

“I crossed the line at the Nevada Test Site and was arrested with nine other Utahns for trespassing on military lands. They are still conducting nuclear tests in the desert. Ours was an act of civil disobedience. But as I walked toward the town of Mercury, it was more than a gesture of peace. It was a gesture on behalf of the Clan of One-Breasted Women.

“As one officer cinched the handcuffs around my wrists, another frisked my body. She did not find my scars.

“We were booked under an afternoon sun and bused to Tonopah, Nevada” (pp. 289-90).

But Whitt quotes Williams differently: “As one officer cinched the handcuffs around my wrists, another frisked my body. She found a pen and a pad of paper tucked inside my left boot.

“‘And these?’ she asked sternly.

“‘Weapons,’ I replied” (Whitt, p. 47, citing the same page numbers).

She is quoting the Vintage Books edition of 2001, and I like the revision. I don’t know if the rest of the incident was revised, but when I first read it, I cheered. The incident ends, and ends my hardcover book, thus:

“It was a two-hour ride. This was familiar country. The Joshua trees standing their ground had been named by my ancestors, who believed they looked like prophets pointing west to the Promised Land. These were the same trees that bloomed each spring, flowers appearing like white flames in the Mojave. And I recalled a full moon in May, when Mother and I had walked among them, flushing out mourning doves and owls.

“The bus stopped short of town. We were released.

“The officials thought it was a cruel joke to leave us stranded in the desert with no way to get home. What they didn’t realize was that we were home, soul-centered and strong, women who recognized the sweet smell of sage as fuel for our spirits” (p. 290).

And those readers who recognized the lyricism of that passage as fuel for our spirits.

So Whitt has given me reasons to re-read *Refuge*, and all the other books. But perhaps the most important gift I received from her is a measure of how controversial Williams is. Before reading Whitt’s study, I had no idea that Williams could be a controversial writer. Perhaps lulled by my own parochial eagerness to see a fellow Mormon writer succeed, I have welcomed each of her books — about half of them have been autographed by her, at various tables in various bookstores or speaking venues. Each has seemed to me to build on its predecessor, and represent progress for Williams. But in her chapter 3: “I do not know much about gods”, in which she looks at the reception of three books, *Desert Quartet: An Erotic Landscape*, *Pieces of White Shell: A Journey to Navajoland*, and *Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert*, Whitt gives an example of such controversy involving yet a fourth:

“Williams often is the object of criticism and personal attack…. The 7 October 2014 *Chronicle of Higher Education* published a story titled ‘Fearing Political Backlash, President of Florida Gulf Coast U. Disinvites a Campus Speaker.’ The speaker is Terry Tempest Williams” (124).

Whitt quotes extensively from that article, written by Michael Arnone. He cites the university president’s “fear that the invited speaker, Terry Tempest Williams, would turn the event into a political rally against President Bush.” Arnone wrote that the president “understood that the university could face repercussions from donors, lawmakers, and trustees for allowing a partisan speech attacking the president” (125). Arnone also quotes Williams saying that, far from attacking, she intended her speech to “overcome partisan contrariness and to better understand one another through civil dialogue.” Whitt explained that “FGCU had invited Williams to speak at a freshman convocation on 24 October 2004, in large part because her book *The Open Space of Democracy* had been selected as required reading for the 1,050 freshmen. On October 6, the FGCU president suggested postponing the talk” (125). Williams eventually spoke “at a student-organized event” (125).

Now, I am grateful for the report of that incident. Whitt does a fine job of summarizing (and I have compressed things even more). But it is in the next quote from Williams that Whitt demonstrates the depth of her scholarship and her understanding of Williams. She quotes Williams from an interview published online in January 2005 by *The Progressive*. I am grateful to Whitt for uncovering Wiliams’s response: “What was so upsetting about this situation is the fact that if our colleges and universities are no longer the champions and protectors of free speech, then no voice in this country is safe” (125). It is to the universities, and to scholars like Whitt, that I look for the protection of Williams’’s voice.

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