Gary Snyder and the American Unconscious: Inhabiting the Ground

by Tim Dean

"poetics of inhabitation"

Hardcover

First published October 1, 1990

About the author

Tim Dean joined the University Buffalo faculty in 2002, after several years teaching at University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) and University of Washington (Seattle). A former British civil servant, he was educated at University of East Anglia (BA in American Studies), Brandeis University (junior year abroad), and Johns Hopkins University (MA and PhD).
He wrote an undergraduate dissertation on Gary Snyder and a doctoral dissertation on Hart Crane. He also has been a Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center.

His research and teaching interests include Anglophone modernism, poetry and poetics, queer theory, gender theory, aesthetic theory, and psychoanalytic theory.

Reviews

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Prior to the Pilgrims, the Great Plains were aswarm with buffalo. On this land, as on the grasslands of every continent, prairie grasses flourished and fed herds that took days to graze past. The herds also passed copious amounts of manure, stomping it in to rich soil alive with microorganisms. Such soil was thick and dark with carbon the grasses had pulled down from the atmosphere over the millennia, sequestering it.

Overgrazing, chemical fertilizers and pesticides changed all that, leaving mere dirt and dust in the place of living soil and greatly hampering the land's carbon-sinking capacities. Thus the excess carbon now impacting the biosphere is as much a function our dominant agricultural ways as it is of fossil fuels.

A Brit reading Snyder's verse as Rorschach unveiling "the American unconscious," Dean argues that Snyder's longstanding insistence on humanity's interdependence with ground, land, and place forms that which America represses in order to constitute itself as normal. This fits in nicely with Snyder's concept that there are two economies: (a) those that rape places before moving on to the next place and (b) those situated tribal cultures that honor, respect, adore, and responsibly inhabit the ecologies in which they find themselves not only physically but mythically, spiritually, and economically.

Dean writes in a rather dense dialect of Lacan-leaning lit crit and views Snyder's verse through a lens that interprets, for instance, the poet's use of the term interpenetration ("with joyful interpenetration for all") in light of Wordsworth and Shelley while neglecting the sexual allusion and Buddhist roots in a doctrine that all realms and "things" within realms interpenetrate: as depicted in the metaphor of Indra's net.

Why should Snyder or I complain, however, if all realms truly do?

Thus, I'll close with Emily:

The spider holds a Silver Ball
In unperceived Hands--
And dancing softly to Himself
His Yarn of Pearl--unwinds--

He plies from Nought to Nought--
In unsubstantial Trade--
Supplants our Tapestries with His--
In half the period--

An Hour to rear supreme
His Continents of Light--
Then dangle from the Housewife's Broom--
His Boundaries--forgot--