135: Simon Schama's Landscape and Memory

In Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama argues that "even the landscapes that we suppose to be most free of our culture may turn out, on closer inspection, to be its product," and that this mutually constitutive relationship between nature and culture is "a cause not for guilt and sorrow but celebration."  Accordingly, while Landscape and Memory digs deep into the histories of a wide variety of landscapes, Schama's is an "archaeological" method rather than a critical one.  His goal is not to expose capitalist exploitation in the landscape but to dig deep "below our conventional sight-level to recover the veins of myth and memory that lie beneath the surface."  By situating landscape myths in their historical-cultural moments, Schama shows how socially-constructed meaning and memory become embedded in a landscape.

Schama applies his archaeological approach to a variety of landscapes: the primordial Bialowiez forest in Poland, which the Germans wanted to raze and replace with "a great, living laboratory of purely Teutonic species: eagles, elk, and wolves" (and bison) during WWII, because it was the symbolic and heart of Poland;   Gianlorenzo Bernini's Fountain of the Four Rivers in Rome as an embodiment and co=optation of the ancient obsession with circulation and flow; Mount Rushmore and sculptor Gutzon Borglum's obsession with dominating nature by carving human heads into stone; and "both kinds of arcadia, the idyllic as well as the wild," as escapist "landscapes of the urban imagination," responding to cities by providing pandemonium when cities are too ordered and bucolic countryside when cities are too chaotic.

Throughout, Schama relies on a narrative form to weave many disparate threads into each chapter's coherent whole.  This book is neither a call to action nor a complete history of particular places nor even a landscape study; it's more of a literary exploration into the layers of myth and memory that make up a landscape, arranged by a subjective narrator into layers of his own choosing.  While it's a lovely read, it does make me wonder whether Schama thinks the physical landscape needs to be there at all.

131: DW Meinig's Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes

The Interpretation of Everyday Landscapes: Geographical Essays is a collection of landscape studies edited by DW Meinig.  It represents a conscious effort to complicate the cultural landscape and reclaim it from the abstractions of science, in a way that both respects the visual nature of landscape and takes advantage of its discursive possibilities.

In his Intro, Meinig defines an ordinary landscape as a continuous surface created by and through the "routine lives of ordinary people."  But it's also not that simple: landscape is a coherent unity of physical, biological, and cultural features; it has both functional and aesthetic components; it is more visual and panoramic than an environment, but less subjective and experiential than a place; and it is both a geographical formation and a representation, a history and a text, a symbol and an accretion of meanings.  Landscape is both space and meaning; it doesn't exist without interpretation.

The essays in this collection generally support Meinig's rather complex definition of landscape as a field of study.  A few highlights:

130: JB Jackson's Landscape in Sight

Landscape in Sight: Looking at America is a career-spanning collection of Jackson's essays edited by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz.  From my notes from March 2012:

Horowitz writes in her introduction that Jackson’s two main purposes are to discover the American (cultural) landscape and to compare it with the landscapes of Europe.  She implicitly raises a host of questions that Jackson addresses in his work – is there a distinctly American landscape?  If there is, what makes it distinct, and why is it different?  What does this landscape say about American culture?  I like that she situates his work within the physical landscapes of Europe and America, but I suspect the ideological landscape (not that Jackson would like that use of the term) in which he was writing influenced him at least as much as the physical.  His work in landscapes belies a deep interest in culture and politics, showing him to be just as interested in ideas as he was in his physical surroundings. 

66: George Chauncey's Gay New York

George Chauncey's Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 uses archival and oral sources to debunk three myths about gay male culture in turn-of-the-century New York: the myth of isolation, the myth of invisibility, and the myth of internalization.  In doing so, he shows that a well-developed gay culture existed in New York long before Stonewall.  Further, by reconstructing the spaces, symbols, events and people that made up gay male culture from the turn of the century to WWII, he both establishes the social construction of a gay male identity and argues against any cultural analysis that posits linear progress or a liberation politics as a key component of this identity.

Chauncey studies the development of gay culture in four New York neighborhoods: the Bowery, Greenwich Village, Harlem, and Times Square, and tries to pinpoint the moments when a gay presence became visible in each.  He bases his argument on a huge quantity of primary materials, including police and trial records, diaries, documents from the District Attorney's office and the city magistrate, records of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, the Committee of Fourteen, and anti-prostitution organizations, and old gossip sheets like the Broadway Brevities.  And the worlds that he meticulously reconstructs from this mountain of empirical data reveal several unique cultural patterns: gay rituals and institutions that foster a collective identity, gay migration patterns that parallel ethnic migration patterns, a kind of semiotic ingenuity that allowed many men to lead double lives, and a consistent definition of homosexuality as the passive acceptance of penetration rather than as a desire for someone of the same sex.  This behavior-based definition allowed working-class and middle-class men in modernizing New York to treat "fairies" in the same way that they would female prostitutes, while the myriad spaces of New York's permissive sexual underworld (including the rooms at the YMCA) allowed for a flowering of gay sexualities and sexual expression, especially during Prohibition.  By the 1930s, pansy culture provided opportunities for voyeuristic escape from middle-class life, even as gay culture was increasingly seen as a threat to the post-Prohibition moral order.

 Throughout, Gay New York builds an interpretation of culture from empirical evidence about particular spaces, performances, people, and objects in New York.  Chauncey thus locates gay male culture in both a particular time and place and a particular social, economic, and cultural milieu: a modern New York grappling with the social upheaval of industrial capitalism.

56: Leo Marx' Machine in the Garden

Leo Marx' The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America is an American Studies classic.  Written in 1964, the book uses a myth-and-symbol strategy to examine the "pastoral ideal" as a "powerful metaphor of contradiction" between nature and technology/history.  Marx is also very keen to determine what, if anything, makes American culture exceptional.  After analyzing many, many canonical writers - Twain, Melville, Hawthorne, and Jefferson, but also Shakespeare (The Tempest), D.H. Lawrence, and others - he concludes that American culture is neither totally pastoral and nostalgic nor purely technological and Progress-driven, but a dialectical combination of the two, on a symbolic level.  Thus art, in the broad sense of human ingenuity, shapes the landscape.  And American culture, according to myth-and-symbol, can be accessed through art.

Marx also argues that symbolic landscapes are always part myth, part reality, and that Americans have a tendency to mix the two, which means that an interdisciplinary American Studies approach that merges history and literature is the perfect way to study American culture and American exceptionalism.  While he does stick to the canon, uses "we" uncritically in reference to American culture, and really does seem to think that literature can speak for all of America, his argument that the American landscape is both technologically and culturally constructed, and that it is at once pastoral and industrial, rings true in landscape studies today.  Further, he, like many other post-war Americans, is very much concerned with the apparent technological domination of the landscape, and he issues a veiled solution to this problem that plays on the double meaning of symbol as both artistic and political representation: "the machine's sudden entrance into the garden presents a problem that ultimately belongs not to art but to politics." Well then.  If anyone tries to argue that Leo Marx was pro-American exceptionalism, I might suggest they read his book more closely.