Over there...

This Blogspot site has served me well, but from now on, I will only update this transferred and ongoing blog at klynwurth.wordpress.com. See you there!

At Home in the Wild, Wild West

photo courtesy of Charles Staab

One of my all-time favorite novels is Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. I've watched this author with great interest since I trekked to Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, to attend the Western Literature Association Conference in 1989. Having grown up in Colorado, along the front range of the Rocky Mountains, I found the idea of a "western" point of view great with potential.

While blogging around last evening, I had the happy accident of finding the site for the Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest. There I found this essay by Robinson, "My Western Roots." This statement snagged my attention:

• But I think it was in fact peculiarly western to feel no tie of particularity to any one past or history, to experience that much underrated thing called deracination, the meditative, free appreciation of whatever comes under one's eye, without any need to make such tedious judgments as "mine" and "not mine." 

Robinson examines how society, as it always will, "precludes and forecloses the inherent domesticity, " the "loveliness and graciousness" to be found in a domestic culture, where only the barest of amenities draw people close together, into housekeeping.

• At a certain level housekeeping is a regime of small kindnesses, which together, make the world salubrious, savory, and warm. I think of the acts of comfort offered and received within a household as precisely sacramental. It is the sad tendency of domesticity—as of piety—to contract, and of grace to decay into rigor, and peace into tedium. Still it should be clear why I find the Homestead Act all in all the most poetical piece of legislation since Deuteronomy, which it resembles.

We wonder with Robinson whether or not the West and its regional spirit has any place in modern consciousness and society as a whole.

• I think it is fair to say that the West has lost its place in the national imagination, because by some sad evolution, the idea of human nature has become the opposite of what it was when the myth of the West began, and now people who are less shaped and constrained by society are assumed to be disabled and dangerous. This is bad news for the national psyche, a fearful and anti-democratic idea, which threatens to close down change. I think it would be a positively good thing for the West to assert itself in the most interesting terms, so that the whole country must hear, and be reanimated by dreams and passions it has too casually put aside and too readily forgotten.

Marilynne Robinson challenges her readers to consider the complexities of our individual, regional and national identities. In this essay, she also explains how her experience and education in Idaho is evident in her novel, Housekeeping, an elegant and deceptively simple story that echoes beyond regions to consider what it means to be human, at home.

An Authentic Place in History: More Thoughts on Writing it Then

Writing (historical) fiction--any fiction that isn't in the "now" -- complicates the attempt to connect with the cultures, land and languages of specific locations. As I currently write about European cities and villages in the early to mid-20th century, I encounter myriad uncertainties about occupancy, politics, languages and loyalties, through time.

In my American experience, I assume a relatively stable history--at least for the last two hundred years or so. After squelching the first people on this land we call "America" (one branch of my family tree, now untraceable), our State has occupied much of the same area, over time, with a few additions, here and there. 

So what or where is "there?"

"There" can be a shibboleth, a geographical feature, a style of architecture or a spice in food. It can be a pattern of emigration or the burden of political or religious persecution, tribal or global. It can be an experience of isolation or a hectic trampling under a thundering new civilization. I can be a fossil or a gigabyte. It can be general, but particularly in fiction, it is always personal.

Writing about history and attempting to capture an authentic sense of place can be risky and confusing. Exhilarating, if it works. Embarrassing, if it doesn't. Nobody wants to be caught with literary or historical "foot in mouth" by a sin of omission--a failure to steep the writing in more than just a "Wiki" or "Google" glance at the people and places we depict. On the other hand, the hyper-availability of information at our fingertips can glut and stall a writer's mind.

So we try to find a middle ground. As the late Tony Judt stated in his last work, Thinking the Twentieth Century, in conversations with Timothy Snyder, "The truth of authenticity is different from the truth of honesty. To be authentic is to live as one wishes others to live; to be honest is to admit that this is impossible." As novelists, we try to be authentic, but must admit that we live in a different time or place than what we depict. Imagination is not license and history is not a shackle, but we owe it to our readers to do our best, to be true to both.