[In the following essay, Rawlings surveys the essays in Coyote in the Maze, finding that the poststructuralist character of the pieces supports rather than undermines Abbey's work.]

Alone, we are close to nothing. … Through the art of language, most inevitable of arts—for what is more basic to our humanity than language?—we communicate to others what would be intolerable to bear alone.

—Edward Abbey, Abbey's Road

Peter Quigley, editor of a new collection of critical essays on Abbey, says that it “was inspired by the wholesale dismissal of Edward Abbey in the arena of ‘serious’ scholarship.” At conferences, he finds, Abbey is talked about “in corridors more so than on panels” (1). Clearly, Quigley's Coyote in the Maze: Tracking Edward Abbey in a World of Words will take a lot of flak from confirmed (corridor) Abbey readers who feel no need for critical commentary on the rugged and resonant voice that gave so many of us our most trusted legend of the Southwest, a legend full of loneliness, anger, and joy. What need of abstruse theory! (Theory, as Mark Twain would have huffed—theory that is not American, not even English, but F-r-r-ench, Russian, German, whatever!) Charles Bowden prophesied in “Hey, Who Was That Ornery Guy?” that “given the dimensions of the American university, an Abbey industry will grow up deconstructing the things he worked so hard to construct” (168). And, in truth, while trekking the sometimes thorny landscape of these largely poststructuralist essays, I winced now and then as the next obligatory reference to Foucault predictably topped into view on the ridge ahead. We might imagine the fun Abbey would have with poststructuralist jargon (and the fun he would have had with his own rhetorical excess). We need only remember the late-night argument between Elaine and Henry Lightcap (in The Fool's Progress) about standard usage:

[Women] don't “come” [Elaine insists]. We orgasm.

You what?

We orgasm. That's the proper word, since you don't seem to know.

Orgasm is not a verb. No. My anger was stirred again; this really roused me. Not a verb. Never was, never will be, not once.

It is now. Orgasming is a verb.

God's curse on such a verb. You can't do that to our noble American language. You shall not verbalize nouns. I hate that bastard jargon: She “orgasmed” all over the croutons. Mr. and Mrs. Turkeyballs “parented” three kids from birth to the Juvenile Detention Center. The critics “savaged” his latest masterpiece.

(35)

Should we problematize, foreground, or privilege any language here?

.....

But hold on there, folks: the news about this big book is mainly good, very good. Simply put, current theory informs a reading of Abbey, and Abbey informs ongoing dialogues about theory. Of the eighteen essays in the book, all solid and helpful, I will be able to discuss only a few, in an effort to show the kind of achievement Coyote in the Maze represents.

First of all, and a bit to my surprise, the poststructuralist strain in this criticism opens up a reading of Abbey's sentences better than anything we have seen before—and sentences are much to the point in acknowledging the power and precise modulation of his extraordinary voice. Bowden reminded us, in that same afterword to Black Sun, that it isn't easy to write sentences like Abbey's:

An Abbey draft was blitzkrieged with crossed out words, clauses and sentences moved, and had the general appearance of a bed of writhing serpents. Of course it read like he was talking to you, like he had just dashed it off. He wrote so well that a lot of people did not appreciate the craft in his work—you can crack his books open almost anywhere and just start reading out loud. But if you start looking closely, you'll find he makes every word work, every sentence, every paragraph. The stuff's as tight as the head of a drum.

(164)

The stuff of Abbey's sentences was tightly drawn because he allowed into their apparently easy nature such an alert play of the many and diverse voices he had taken unto his own uses—throughout a thinking and reading career driven by wide ranging and irrepressible intelectual curiosity. (Intertextuality makes sense here.) Another definitive desert writer, Terry Tempest Williams, told us in a 1993 interview that Abbey was actively—and always in his own fictive and dramatic way—doing philosophy. The “stuff” of Abbey is not intellectually fragile. Yes: first and last, read Abbey. But in between, let critical theory pose the questions that will sharpen those readings, open up the larger dialogues in which Abbey has a deserved and significant place, and increase our appreciation for his craft.

In one of the two essays provocatively placed as conflicting introductions to Coyote in the Maze, SueEllen Campbell raises a cluster of good questions that will lead to a more critical reading of Abbey. (Along with that essay, one should also read, for example, her excellent “The Land and Language of Desire: Where Deep Ecology and Post-Structuralism Meet,” which, nearly a decade ago, explored many of the issues pertinent to Coyote in the Maze.) However, when Campbell asks: “Is there any room in Abbey's country for community … ? Is there any room for a vision not of separation, but of connection?” (45), the question seems more than a little obtuse. “That loneliness is not enough,” Abbey reminded us again and again. “We must save the city” (The Journey Home 101). To be sure, Abbey's persistent desire for a communal conversation and human connection found satisfaction neither in our overpopulated swarming nor in any sentimental affirmation that seeks to deny that communal disaster. But most of the essays in Coyote in the Maze show how completely Abbey's concerns for human community interlace with his concerns for the nonhuman.

David J. Rothman's “‘I'm a Humanist’: The Poetic Past in Desert Solitaire,” for example, documents what many have sensed and enjoyed—the rich poetic heritage in Abbey's style, as he constantly integrates (often with wry distortion) voices from the past: “Abbey's vision of nature and society is grounded in and refracted through poetry, particularly English and American poetry of the 19th and early 20th centuries” (50). Through playfully complex but usually unobtrusive citation, those sentences that Abbey somehow made sound so easy carry on a steady conversation with earlier writers, a conversation whose communal and ethical drift is clear to Rothman:

The reason Desert Solitaire will endure is because of the quality of this conversation to which Abbey invites us. It is a fully human conversation about our relations with wilderness. As a result, it is also a conversation about what is not wild in our relations with each other and the past, particularly the imaginative past. Of course, things will change no matter what kinds of conversations we have. If we want to change them for the better, however, we must imagine being able to do so. The fact that the American conception of the desert has in fact changed, albeit slowly and not enough, is testimony to the philosophical and, particularly, the poetic imagination that Abbey knew so well and made the paradoxical bedrock of his own work as a writer of the natural world.

(68)

Steve Norwick's essay, “Nietzchean Themes in the Works of Edward Abbey,” does additional good service by showing how fully another voice from the past entered into this conversation. No wonder Abbey often showed frustration with his audience: finding his works initially so open and casual, many of his readers have felt no need to engage the broader, more problematic communal dialogue the essays offered.

Essays in Coyote in the Maze not only read more closely the intertextual conversation within Abbey's prose but also give us a clearer understanding of the constant shifting of ground, of stance, within those sentences. Abbey's signature as a writer (a trait that I assume is behind Quigley's choice of the trickster-in-the-maze title) is in the hard-to-define but deeply characteristic rhythm of his thought, the constant and ready turn of thought and mood—which is not (as Quigley himself nicely points out) a self-canceling stoic irony, but an irony fully tendentious and aggressive. Abbey's thinking is exuberant and then reflective, going somewhere, aggrandizing meaning, polyphonic, keeping ideas from getting locked up or factionalized—yet the rhythm is also self-corrective, barbed with critique, steadily self-testing, and thus profoundly moral without being dogmatic. The rhythm reflects Abbey en route, always on the move, purposeful.

Several of these essays help us to track more clearly Abbey's journey toward the bedrock geology of interlayered ethical and epistemological paradox that was his home country—and the ground tone of his style. They bring theory to bear (sometimes heavily) on segments of the Abbey canon. It is instructive to note, however, that the theorists also find themselves soundly questioned by and pressed into dialogue with Abbey's example. This is a mutually productive contact: breaking open new routes for academic discussion of a centrally important yet neglected writer, but also shedding light back onto the ongoing argument about the standing of nature in nature writing, ecocriticism, and poststructuralist theory. As long as the students read Abbey first, Coyote in the Maze would be the text of choice for a seminar on this argument. In one of the most elegantly sane essays in the book, David Copland Morris succinctly states the project: “one of my purposes here is to use Abbey to interrogate ‘theory’ as much as it is to use theory to interrogate ‘Abbey’” (249).

Making a case for the significance of Abbey's journals, Morris says that his own “two claims—that the journals exhibit a postmodern, self-reflexive surface or style, and that they reveal an ‘innermost’ self—sit uneasily together, yet I assert them both” (245). He gives fine attention to that self-reflexive (and also, yes, intimate) style:

In one journal entry Abbey says, “I'm so complicated a person I don't know what role to effect, and I'm not clever enough to pass myself off as what I truly am, a complicated person” [Confessions of a Barbarian 116]. This is a key passage, I believe, in understanding the journals and all of his work. It shows great self-knowledge. But the passage itself belies the complaint. The role he affected was, in fact, that of a complicated person because that is what he was—a person as complicated as the style and content of the quoted passage itself.

(245)

Morris goes on quite effectively to “interrogate” some of the ideas in current literary theory that have unfortunately been flattened too often in critical performance into unquestioned and tiresomely repeated absolutes oddly out of tune with the tenor of the theory. He quickly demonstrates, for example, that Foucault's own practice can dispense with neither the sense of an author behind the text nor a referent truth outside of it. While these arguments will not go away, Morris—at least for the moment—recovers for us their status as argument rather than shibboleth. (He “relativizes” poststructuralism, as it were).

Yet while interrogating current theory, Morris uses deconstructionist strategies (and finds Abbey using an equivalent) to show thought transcending factionalized language. In a passage from the journals

that satirizes sectarian criticism of his work, Abbey implies that the sectarians are too ready to accept and promulgate “agreed-upon truths” of any stripe. Another way of thinking about this issue is to suggest that Abbey faults the sectarians because they too easily (or smugly) accept their own situatedness—or are blind to it. He has earned, in my estimation, the right to criticize sectarian reading practices because in his own work … he rarely settles for a group-sanctioned truth. … And he is not simply mushy or comfortably in the middle of the road. No one has ever attacked him for the mildness of his beliefs or opinions. …

… His self-reflexive and self-questioning style allows him to get behind the received codes and use them for his own purposes. Or to put it another, perhaps less problematic way: what is so valuable about the style of Abbey's journal is precisely that it provides a powerful model for exploring the extent to which such a radical act is possible. In other words, we find out the extent to which the conventional determinations of language and culture can be transcended by reading such a writer as Abbey (or, for others, Foucault).

(257)

No doubt the idea that transcendence (even radical originality) might be centrally present in a body of writing will sit uneasily with modern critical theory, but this implication is (in a refreshing way) prominent in many of the readings in Coyote in the Maze, readings that use poststructuralist strategies to clarify the “situatedness” of language.

In ways that show promise for getting at what I have called the characteristic rhythm of Abbey's thought (down to the deft turns within his sentences), these readings often lead one to acknowledge that his writing typically moves back and forth between a stance compatible with poststructuralist theory and positions quite contradictory to it. In a challenging and effective essay, Werner Bigell sees that “by intermingling and alternating two strategies, biocentrism and existential nature, Abbey constantly deconstructs his own narrative” (285). The existential stance (which Bigell carefully distinguishes from the European existentialism Abbey attacked for its arid anthropocentrism) perceives nature as a void, the “nothingness” to which Abbey's thought about the desert often returned (and which he often celebrated): “the nature of the void questions cultural constructs, whereas the shared nature of existence contains an element of interconnectedness with a transitory world” (284). Leading into a reading of that moment in “Cape Solitude” when the narrator steps first to the rim of the abyss and then back into “defiance, delight, a roaring affirmation of our existence” (Abbey's Road 195), Bigell notes that the “biocentrist perspective is corroded with a cosmic outlook, and the bleakness of the existential outlook is counteracted by an affirmation of the importance of life” (285). The rhythm of thought, including recurrent deconstruction, allows Abbey to retain the biocentrist's profound desire to turn attention toward the nonhuman world “out there,” while rejecting any belief that we can contain (appropriate) that world in our language. “Paradoxically, it is the process of making nature cultural [the process of understanding that our language for nature is a cultural construct] that makes it possible for nature to maintain its otherness, to keep conflicting meanings that exceed a monologic conceptualization” (292). I think this is the sense of estrangement of nature of which Robert Pogue Harrison speaks so evocatively in his discussion of Thoreau in Forests—a sense which paradoxically sheds light on Abbey's difficult purpose of homing, in just those desert spaces that so often make him think of nothingness. “Nature is the setting of this exteriority,” Harrison says, “if only because it is that to which we remain external. It is only in our relation to what we are not that what we are may finally become the ground of our dwelling” (227). And again: “What nature cannot provide is an image for the longing that pervades human finitude. It is this longing that seeks an abode on the earth, but the only thing that can house it are the words in which it confesses its longing for closure” (228). If Abbey pursues his journey home in this way, I think it is by a twisting track: complex steps, like those taken on the rim at Cape Solitude, between the seemingly contradictory moments of critique (estrangement and deconstruction) and full-blooded participation.

Claire Lawrence is good at showing the nature of Abbey's critique, his recurrent questioning of the language he and others use:

I believe the nature of Abbey's project, the [contradictory] attempt to fit or to contain the natural world in words, compels him to address the problem of representation in an arguably postmodern manner. Abbey is very interested in troubling the connection between sign and referent, word and object, and like Derrida he sees this as a political act, a way to disrupt recalcitrant ideologies that are embedded in discourse.

(156)

Lawrence perhaps would be less likely to grant, however, that the integrity (finally, the honesty?) of Abbey's critique depends as much upon the imaginative fullness and range of his willingness to participate (as a writer, at least, and for the moment) in the same stances and affirmations that he will also question. It was not only Death Valley acid that Abbey felt he must try at least once. The strength of his participation in the range of human possibilities (and his willingness to own even the whims of his imagination) is what so often offends the fastidious and leads to the oddly divergent responses to Abbey's writing.

A case in point is Lawrence's reading of the rabbit killing in Desert Solitaire. She nicely suggests the ways Abbey satirizes his own willingness to manipulate language (the “cowardly” rabbit), which allow him to carry through his impulse to throw a stone. But then the analysis drifts into a residue of her considerable discomfort:

Language is implicated here in a misreading of the world; the reader recognizes that the rabbit is not “wicked” and that Abbey has just executed ultimate power over it only because he was able to call it “wicked.” Again, naming is dangerous. After the event Abbey says that killing the rabbit makes him more a part of the natural world: “No longer do I feel so isolated from the sparse and furtive life around me, a stranger from another world. I have entered into this one” [Desert Solitaire 41-42]. He says this makes him “rejoice” in his “innocence and power” [42]. I do not believe that the attempt to turn the scene into something about vitality and connectedness is completely successful. Something about the disruption is not contained and leaves a bad taste in the reader's mouth. Language—Abbey's attempt to structure the event (and insert himself into the natural world by partaking of its perceived violence)—fails. The reader can no longer see Abbey (the scientist) or what he says as innocent. He has transgressed a boundary; he is no longer a reliable narrator.

(163-64)

I admit I was puzzled when earlier in this discussion Lawrence said that the “death of the rabbit is a complete shock to the reader. … a part of Desert Solitaire that most readers are unable to incorporate even after they have finished reading” (163). (Bigell mentions something similar about the response of his students to this passage.) I take her point that Abbey is choosing to rupture the rather quiet surface of his narrative at this point by turning to this sudden and impulsive act. But I can from the distance of my easy chair follow without shock how a young Abbey (or I) might be caught up by the impulse to experiment in this way: “suppose … you were out here hungry” (Desert Solitaire 40). Immediately after the deed, Abbey himself was shocked with the result—and in writing about it later, he backs and fills with ironic self-satire, placing and contextualizing the moment. When Lawrence says, just before the passage quoted above, “that Abbey has just executed ultimate power over [the rabbit] because he was able to call it ‘wicked,’” I'm not sure how much self-directed irony she is granting the narrator at that point. Surely, she sees no satire in Abbey's dramatized self-congratulation at having “insert[ed] himself into the natural world by partaking of its perceived violence” (163). It may be beside the point that a writer like Paul Shepard would argue for Abbey's experiment and its questioning of what would now be labeled the animal rights concept of nature, a concept no less constructed and ideological than any other, which Shepard attacks for its abstract distance from the direct experience we must intelligently recover in order to mature responsibly in an eat-and-be-eaten world (not a world to be explained merely as violent). It is to the point, however, that Abbey closes this passage by placing and limiting a remembered impulsive act in which he had again for a moment wholly participated and which he then surrounded with critique and context. “The experiment was a complete success; it will never be necessary to perform it again” (Desert Solitaire 42).

And it is to the point that a reader might question the reliability and innocence of Abbey's narration. Abbey repeatedly forces just that question: my less Abbey-adapted students sometimes ask me whether he and his friends did “roll an old tire into the Grand Canyon. … watching the tire bounce over tall pine trees, tear hell out of a mule train and disappear with a final grand leap into the inner gorge” (Desert Solitaire 246). We usually have some fun trying to figure out exactly where in that sentence he loses reliability—or, rather, exactly to what he is being reliable: his pleasure in letting his imagination go? Before I can stop myself I am telling them that biographical evidence suggests he rolled or heaved a number of objects into canyons, but. …

In another sense, however, when questions like these arise, we see how reliable a narrator Abbey truly is. For in one way, Abbey is rather old-fashioned, back there in the mainstream of nineteenth-century American writing—not even a modernist, let alone a post-modernist. How else can we explain the remarkable irritation his writing has caused around issues of gender and sex (and, to a lesser extent, violence of the kind mentioned previously)—when, if compared to so much of the content of contemporary writing, his writing seems in this regard almost restrained, genteel? How else, unless we recognize that the irritation comes from an inescapable, strong presence of the author, the complicated self of Edward Abbey, right at the front of so much of his text? (Yes, of course, it is a crafted persona, but crafted to have just this effect.) Content that insults (an objective he often acknowledged), that hits sensitive nerves, that rejects even the most politically correct, factionalized thinking—such content in Abbey's writing is not objectified in a supposedly authorless text: he participates, owns it (at least while trying it on for size), lets it enter into the human dialogue to make its full case, absurd or enlightening, all the while testing and contextualizing. I don't think it is contradictory, again, to call this rhythm of participation and critique deeply moral, or to suggest at the same time that this old-fashioned aspect of Abbey fits nicely into Peter Quigley's own up-to-date Bakhtinian reading: “Abbey's concentration on the life of the body in all of its delights and smells and processes can be seen as a part of Bakhtin's definition of carnival” (9). Quigley emphasizes the Russian critic's assertions that carnival “brings together … the sacred and the profane, the lofty with the low, the great with the insignificant, the wise with the stupid” and that in carnival we find “blasphemies, a whole system of carnivalistic debasings and bringings down to earth, carnivalistic obscenities linked with the reproductive power of the earth and the body, carnivalistic parodies on sacred texts and sayings” (Bakhtin 123). Hayduke lives.

Abbey's deepest fear is the entrapment of solipsism: human beings trapped within a hardened human construct, physical or ideal (“the fury of men and women immured in engines” [The Brave Cowboy 277]). The poststructuralist will see solipsism as getting locked into a reified concept of nature we mistakenly take for reality. A skeptic will see solipsism in the poststructuralist's tendency to drift into a perverse denial that we can know any reality beyond language (a tendency largely resisted in Coyote in the Maze). I think that the attentive reader of Abbey will want to keep this dialogue open—and will not want “to rush too quickly by the contradictions,” as Quigley puts it (310). And for this reason, among others, I think that the attentive reader will return often to the first of the two introductory essays in the volume, Edward Twining's “The Roots of Abbey's Social Critique,” which runs counter to a number of directions taken by other critics here, but also arrives on common ground with many of them, having come by another route.

Twining doesn't hesitate to assert—eloquently—that for Abbey both the nonhuman and the human world are knowable, that both are being changed by us and are changing us, and that we have an inescapable responsibility to both:

Abbey never deviated from his rock-bottom certainty that such humanly created worlds share with nature the shaping of human destiny, and that they too are knowable. A corollary proposition persisting throughout Abbey's writing is that this reality and knowledge demand that we accept responsibility for our own affairs, that we come to grips with this world we inherit and at least potentially, at least partly, have control over. It is in this most basic of senses that Abbey was both a moralist and a thorough-going materialist. He never deviated from those three propositions: The world is real. We can know the world. We are responsible for it.

(24)

As one support for his claim of Abbey's “thorough-going materialism,” Twining indexes the passage so often noted by readers of Desert Solitaire, a passage also cited by others in Coyote in the Maze but with a different reading. Abbey says, “I must confess that I know nothing whatever about the true underlying reality, having never met any. … For my own part I am pleased enough with surfaces—in fact they alone seem to me to be of much importance. … What else is there? What else do we need?” (xi). Twining reads this as Abbey “throwing down a gauntlet that challenges us as much now as then. The world is real” (31). Lawrence, on the other hand, reads Abbey's claim that “he has never ‘met’ a true underlying reality” as evidence that “Abbey critiques the ideas of essence and truth by throwing them into the realm of the ridiculous. In a similar move, he questions the structure of representation by inverting ideas we might consider to be ‘deep’ and calling them ‘surface’” (160). The latter part of her statement is helpful in thinking about Abbey's strategy, but her interpretation becomes problematic when we stumble upon the following statement in Abbey's discussion of his favorite juniper, not too many pages further along in Desert Solitaire: “The essence of the juniper continues to elude me unless, as I presently suspect, its surface is also the essence” (32, italics added). While Abbey's choice of the word presently keeps this statement open to dialogue, the sentence hardly ridicules ideas of essence and truth. Finding essence and reality not underlying but on the surface (those endlessly diverse surfaces upon which Abbey found living both rich and sufficiently problematic) defines a materialism that would, as Abbey says elsewhere, turn Plato's idealism on its head. Quigley's placement of Twining's important essay at the beginning of the volume keeps the critical dialogue open—which will take us back to the books.

This, in turn, is the great service that Coyote in the Maze provides. We tend to forget that Professor Abbey found one of his homes in the academic world, teaching at the University of Arizona for many half-years, apparently with considerable success. It is appropriate that Quigley's collection welcomes Abbey's works more fully into the maze of academic discussion, as one of their homes. The book opens a lot of interesting tracks. Two neglected works are given perhaps their first really successful readings: Black Sun by Bigell and Hayduke Lives by Quigley. Morris makes a strong case for getting full publication of the journals. The many other essays here that I have not had space to mention demonstrate that the large body of thought in the essays has as yet only been touched by criticism, albeit in provocative ways. And challenges or leads regarding the other novels are enticingly sprinkled throughout Coyote in the Maze.

What astonishes at last is that Abbey's sentences have held so much together for us, that he held on to such a rich sense of the larger life beyond our precautions—out there beyond the attritional drift of our time's consciousness—that he made so much of his risky, happy adventures into the blessedly impure genre of what he sometimes called The Good Life.

Works Cited

Abbey, Edward. Abbey's Road. New York: Dutton, 1979.

———. Brave Cowboy: An Old Tale in a New Time. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1977.

———. Confessions of a Barbarian: Selections from the Journals of Edward Abbey, 1951-1989. Ed. David Petersen. Boston: Little, Brown, 1994.

———. Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness. 1968. Repr., New York: Ballantine, 1971.

———. The Fool's Progress: An Honest Novel. New York: Henry Holt, 1988.

———. The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West. New York: Dutton, 1977.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Trans. and ed. Caryl Emerson. Theory and History of Literature 8. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

Bowden, Charles. “Hey, Who Was That Ornery Guy?” Afterword to Black Sun, by Edward Abbey. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Capra, 1990.

Campbell, SueEllen. “The Land and Language of Desire: Where Deep Ecology and Post-Structuralism Meet.” Western American Literature 24.3 (Fall 1989): 199-211.

Harrison, Robert Pogue. Forests: The Shadow of Civilization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992.

Shepard, Paul. The Others: How Animals Made Us Human. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1996.

Williams, Terry Tempest. Interview. Edward Abbey: A Voice in the Wilderness. Dir. Eric Temple. Videocassette. Eric Temple Productions, 1993.