Reading Pilgrim at Tinker Creek has been a little of a letdown for me. After agonizing over having to push myself through each chapter, each paragraph, each sentence, each word, I have come to the conclusion that my inability to engage Dillard lies in my inability to understand her position.
What I mean by this is that so far my exposure to the narratives and the theory we have been reading has been inclusive, engaging, and ant-egotistical. I have appreciated being pulled into critical discussions about the world beyond my own self-centered existence and I think Lopez really set the stage for me to do this. Although he was self-referential and a constant presence in his stories, he allowed the scene, nature, the other actors, animals, noise and silence to transcend his authorial presence and let the most important factors of his stories take front and center stage. Dillard, in my opinion, simply does not achieve this. It is as if the anthropomorphism that Buell just got done teaching me about has manifested itself in Dillard’s novel. Now, I understand she is being self-concious and self-aware for the exact opposite reason…I get that…I am just saying I do not believe it.
For instance, in her retelling of the toad and the Giant Water Bug, she positions herself as an innocent bystander to this magnificent and horrifying act of nature. It is really a beautiful scene, the deflating toad and the subsequent description of the poison and the melting internally of the toad…but I am jarred from the scene by Dillard throwing around fancy terms and referencing the Koran. It all seems self-aggrandizing and unnecessary to me.
As I write this I continue to question my distaste for her style. Because I am an environmental rhetoric neophyte I realize I am working on very immature and ignorant grounds for criticism of her style and approach, but as an experienced reader I can only say I feel elitism coming through. So, why should any of this matter? Well, referentially referencing Buell, I think that environmental issues should transcend the environment as a concern of the white, leisured, well to do crowd and be made relevant to all stratas and all economic bases. Be provocative for those people who do not have time to lay by a stream and watch the clouds roll by or spend the day hunting for caddisfly cases. When the concern for the environment is so limited to become contry-clubbish, as in Tinker Creek, I feel positioned as an outsider and thus find it near to impossible to care about any of the possibly profound things that are being said.
Christine,
ReplyDeleteIt may seem completely contrary to a graduate level course but I think that in order to enjoy "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek," I shut the major reasoning, interpreting, and analyzing part of my brain off. I tried to enjoy it exactly as it came to me. Would you stand in the National Gallery and look at Rothko and say, "He should have gotten a job like the rest of us as opposed to spending all that time with his paints in the studio?"
Dilliard is learned but I don't think she references Goldman, the Koran, Einstein or Xerxes to belittle her reader. I think she is attempting to take her narrative out of its isolated Virginia and place it within the greater discourse of history, theology, science, and poetry.
Consider this excerpt: "Once I visited a great university and wandered, a stranger, in the subterranean halls of it famous biology department. I saw a sign on a door: ichthyology department. The door was open a crack, and as I walked past I glanced in. I saw just a flash. There were two white-coated men seated opposite each other on high lab stools at a hard-surfaced table. They bent over identical white enamel trays. On one side, one man, with a lancet, was just cutting into an enormous preserved fish he'd taken from a jar. On the other side, the other man, with a silver spoon, was eating a grapefruit. I laughed all the way back to Virginia" (85.) For all of Dilliard's formalness, she is also funny and irreverent and goofy.
Laurel