The Territory Ahead

by Wright Morris

Book by Morris, Wright

245 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 1978

About the author

Wright Marion Morris was an American novelist, photographer, and essayist. He is known for his portrayals of the people and artifacts of the Great Plains in words and pictures, as well as for experimenting with narrative forms.
Morris won the National Book Award for The Field of Vision in 1956. His final novel, Plains Song won the American Book Award in 1981.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

A couple comments on Wright Morris’ The Territory Ahead. Suspect my response to the book is thoroughly colored by my experience in the Academy; this sort of “thematic criticism” is precisely the sort of thing that begins to be ruled out of court by the Academic disciplinary surveillance of close reading and deconstruction in the mid-Seventies in the U.S. Morris offers readers ten American writers and until the last chapter virtually no secondary criticism, as though the scholarship on these ten doesn’t really register, presumably because it’s biographical or because it devotes itself to some order that prevents it from being readable, in the very function of a “processing” style Morris concerns himself to treat thematically.

Over in rock criticism, this sort of book could still be written by Greil Marcus – i.e., Mystery Train -- as late as 1975. Marcus doesn’t credit Morris but he could. Instead, Marcus' models, as he tells us, are Leslie Fiedler, D.H. Lawrence and Pauline Kael. Morris’ book is inconceivable without Lawrence. What’s interesting is who both Morris, as well as Marcus, leave out: William Carlos Williams’ In the American Grain, as well as Charles Olson’s Call Me Ismael. Both do thematic criticism though both are concerned to recover primary archival documents. Morris isn’t involved in the archive, but he recovers a text he takes to be overlooked, James’ The American Scene. Part of the question asked throughout Morris’ argument is, what accounts for the difficulty in a book like The American Scene? why has its author never had the purchase among his country’s literary audience that was enjoyed by at least some of the other nine of his ten: Thoreau, Whitman, Melville, Twain, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Wolfe, and of course, finally, Lawrence?

I also want to emphasize that I’m in basic agreement with Morris’ argument as it hopes to overturn the prevailing critical orthodoxies [Eliot] in the Fifties . . . it’s quite interesting to me how he uses Laura Riding’s critique of Eliot in “The Shame of the Person,” from Contemporaries and Snobs (more thematic criticism – has it been passed by as “canonical”?). Riding may be the sole woman he cites in 248 pp. Did I not know about Morris’ book when I read the secondary criticism on Riding in preparing my dissertation? The Riding bibliographies are worth a look. One of them is in Delmar 8. Anyway, in that dissertation we find out why Fifties thematic criticism was so problematic for women writers like Laura Riding. Who were the exceptional male readers of her work, besides Wright Morris? John Ashbery. Robert Duncan. The queer in Morris is nowhere evident.

Morris keeps to his organic metaphor of "processing" raw material – the language comes, doesn't it, from Whitehead, and from Sherrington (whose picture of the neurological origins of the cell become useful to Morris in thinking about Jamesian complexity of sensibility), both cited, who were much part of that late Fifties history of science that, again, unsettled the affect in Eliotic orthodoxies. Morris' book is 1957. We're ten years from a feminism in which cells play a decisive role – once you can identify the Hexa sequence of DNA in parents of children with Tay Sachs, is it right for the state to decide that a woman must carry a so-marked embryo to term? But in 1957, the structure of DNA is in the news. That said, the use of Whitehead by Morris is among the most unsatisfying things in this text. One of Sherrington's insistences about that organic metaphor is that it must be acknowledged for its being inextricable from dead, or inorganic matter, that therefore we need a theory of the continuous cull that had occupied the critique of Darwin since the founding of genetic biology. So really it's only here I have to part company with Morris, as his account of this "processing" actually only mystifies matters.

Otherwise, the way to think of it is along lines I'm not entirely comfortable with – that to make an argument like Morris', once we've got our 10 writers in hand, is to have, ourselves, a feeling – the feeling of judgment. Who are the 10? Why not 11? Why not Riding? Again, there's a politiques to this that's not all that useful. Again, I get with the rejection of Orthodoxy, per se. But who needs to set up another.

[Paul Jellinek · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wright Morris's take on American literature is every bit as quirky, idiosyncratic and penetrating as his own fiction, which is precisely what you would expect and hope for if you're a Wright Morris aficionado (which I am). I was especially intrigued by his near-reverential take on Henry James's "The American Scene"--sufficiently so that I am carefully working my way through TAS again, illuminated as it now is for me by Morris's penetrating observations and insights into James's often near-impenetrable observations and insights.

[Thomas Baughman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the best studies of American literature that I have ever read.