Westerners are always surprised to realize that
critics often dismiss the region’s art and literature as an
inferior, derivative part of the American canon. Luckily, we have
Alan Williamson, a poet and scholar with roots on both sides of the
country, to set the record straight. In Westernness: A
Meditation, he examines what it means to live in the West
through the region’s artists and writers.
The
American literary tradition began in New England, where authors
such as Nathaniel Hawthorne confronted the fears of the
country’s early years: What kind of society was needed to
survive in the “unpeopled landscape” of America? How would the
natural environment affect the country’s development? By the
time the West was settled, many Eastern artists and critics felt
that these questions had been settled too, and that the attempts of
Western artists and writers to address them were simply redundant.
Like their Eastern predecessors, Western writers and
painters wanted to understand their environment, but the
strangeness of the Western landscape provoked new forms of
expression, forcing them to “seek a relation to the landscape, not
simply human relation within the landscape.”
Georgia
O’Keeffe’s infatuation with New Mexico grounded her
already dramatic, individual style in a landscape that seemed
designed for her powerful brush. Willa Cather produced masterpieces
of prairie life that imbued an “alien landscape with the richness
of human emotion.” And Leslie Marmon Silko and other Native
American authors revealed the “superficiality and destructiveness
of Euro-American culture — a strip of speed, waste, and
glitter laid down across the ‘stolen’ land.”
As Williamson shows, the encounter with the West was transformative
for many artists. The works in this book show those of us who live
out here new ways to understand the landscape and ourselves.
Westernness: A Meditation
Alan Williamson
182 pages, hardcover: $33.95.
University of Virginia Press, 2006
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline The art of an alien landscape.
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