[In the following essay, Slovic finds the search for self-awareness to be the main theme of The Monkey Wrench Gang.]

[W]ith five published novels and three volumes, including this one, of personal history to my credit—or discredit if you prefer—why am I still classified by librarians and tagged by reviewers as a “nature writer”?

—Edward Abbey, Abbey's Road

Wilderness is above all an opportunity to heighten one's awareness, to locate the self against the nonself. It is a springboard for introspection. And the greatest words, those which illumine life as it is centrally lived and felt, intensify that process.

—Bruce Berger, The Telling Distance: Conversations with the American Desert

I. “A VOICE CRYING IN THE WILDERNESS, FOR THE WILDERNESS”?

Sharon Cameron has suggested that “to write about nature is to write about how the mind sees nature, and sometimes about how the mind sees itself” (44). I believe this statement holds true not only for Thoreau, to whom Cameron is referring, but also for many of Thoreau's followers in the tradition of American nature writing. Such writers as Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, and Edward Abbey are not merely, or even primarily, analysts of nature or appreciators of nature—rather, they are students of the human mind, literary psychologists. And their chief preoccupation, I would argue, is with the psychological phenomenon of awareness. “We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake,” wrote Thoreau in Walden (90). But to achieve heightened attentiveness to our place in the natural world, we must understand something about the workings of the mind. This is what Abbey is attempting to do, what he's playing with actually, in such works as Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (1968) and The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975).

For Edward Abbey, the literary description of nature was not simply an effort to explain and demystify his subject matter, to familiarize his readers with it. Much of what he wrote before his death in March 1989 was intended to alarm and disorient his readers—precisely the opposite of what a tour guide or an ordinary rhapsodic publicist would try to do. Now and then in Desert Solitaire, Abbey pauses to comment explicitly on “how the mind sees nature,” noting at one point “the power of the odd and unexpected to startle the senses and surprise the mind out of their ruts of habit, to compel us into a reawakened awareness of the wonderful—that which is full of wonder” (41). As we read Desert Solitaire, we come to realize that the book itself imitates the startling effect of nature; it “remind[s] us—like rock and sunlight and wind and wilderness—that out there is a different world, older and greater and deeper by far than ours, a world which surrounds and sustains the little world of men as sea and sky surround and sustain a ship” (41-42). Our encounters with the otherness of nature, and by extension with the unruliness of Abbey's text, result in what the author calls “[t]he shock of the real” (42)—a condition of elevated, though not altogether comfortable, awareness.

Desert Solitaire contains many examples of the harshness and unfamiliarity of the desert landscape. Even features of the desert that most of us would consider predictable and commonplace, such as the general lack of water and then the occasional, sudden, deadly, and nourishing return of water in the form of deluges and flash floods, are presented hyperbolically, sometimes nightmarishly, so that they become defamiliarized, alien. Near the end of Desert Solitaire, in the chapter called “Havasu,” Abbey recalls his own initial stay in the desert. I would liken this extravagantly wrought narrative about getting lost in a side canyon off of Havasu Canyon to the book as a whole in its bewildering conjunction of rapturous language and disconcerting subject matter. The final chapter, “Terra Incognita,” leads us into a region called “The Maze,” which is, in a sense, where we've been since opening the book. The emotions of fear, disorientation, and surprise are thus central to the heightening of environmental awareness that results from our reading of Desert Solitaire and many of Abbey's other collections of essays.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to distill a coherent moral argument from Desert Solitaire, an argument that could translate into new attitudes and new behavior—this, despite the fact that Abbey once told Judy Nolte Lensink in an interview, “I think that poets and writers, essayists and novelists, have a moral obligation to be the conscience of their society. I think it's the duty of a writer, as Samuel Johnson said, to try to make the world better, however futile that effort might be” (28). However, Abbey also told Lensink,

I write in a deliberately outrageous or provocative manner because I like to startle people. I hope to wake up people. I have no desire to simply soothe or please. I would rather risk making people angry than putting them to sleep. And I try to write in a style that's entertaining as well as provocative. It's hard for me to stay serious for more than half a page at a time.

(27)

Herein lies the key to Abbey's participation in the Thoreauvian tradition of consciousness raising. It is precisely this inability or unwillingness to smooth his beliefs into a neat package, to allow his readers to passively consume even his ideology, that stimulates readers' attentiveness to specific natural phenomena, to general regions of the earth (Abbey has written not only about the American Southwest but also about Australia in Abbey's Road), and to the more abstract concepts (such as freedom and individualism) that Abbey considers important. Diane Wakoski has written that “Abbey, like his Desert, presents riddles which have no answers,” but she found “his lack of doctrine or dogma … reassuring in itself” during the mid-1980s, “when we [were] aware of a very probably approaching nuclear holocaust” (106-7). Even Wendell Berry has stated in “A Few Words in Favor of Edward Abbey,”

I read him … for consolation, for the comfort of being told the truth. There is no longer any honest way to deny that a way of living that our leaders continue to praise is destroying all that our country is and all the best that it means. … For those who know this, Edward Abbey's books will remain an indispensable solace.

(47)

But it seems uncharacteristic for Abbey to be “reassuring,” for his works to provide “consolation,” “comfort,” and “solace.” Berry criticizes “some of [Abbey's] defenders, who have an uncontrollable itch to apologize for him: ‘Well, he did say that. But we mustn't take him altogether seriously. He is only trying to shock us into paying attention’” (36). The point of my argument is not to apologize for Abbey or to demean the truthfulness of his works but to explain his strategies for provoking attention, for this does seem an important goal of his writings. It is by way of such provocation that he compels his readers not to think a certain way but to think, period, to abandon secure mental ruts.

II. THE LOLITA OF ENVIRONMENTAL LITERATURE

Is it also a goal of Abbey's fiction to evoke in us some sort of fundamental disorientation that will pass for awareness—awareness, at least, of the difficulty of knowing the world? I believe this is precisely the aim of Abbey's best-known novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang (and Paul T. Bryant has made a similar argument concerning the novel's posthumous sequel, Hayduke Lives!). In fact, the 1975 novel, far from being overtly ideological, calls into question the very notion of allowing a static ideology, whether pro-environment or pro-development, to govern our behavior in the wilderness. The world Abbey depicts in The Monkey Wrench Gang is a pliant, elusive one, alternatingly secure and deceptive. As we read, we find our attention shifting incessantly from the real-world issues of wilderness use to the conspicuously artificial realm of Abbey's adventure story, and further to the purely aesthetic level of lavish description and exuberant wordplay, then promptly back to the clashing ideologies. Abbey, it seems, delights in luring us to make a commitment to one ideology or another, to one mode of reading or another, only to pull the rug out from under our feet suddenly. Suckered into the novel by the fast-moving narrative of environmental sabotage, we find ourselves unable to halt the roller coaster until the ride comes to its scheduled end.

Reading The Monkey Wrench Gang is like attempting a controlled “friction descent” down a thirty-foot rock wall with George Washington Hayduke, the novel's Green-Beret-turned-ecoterrorist. Both the world and himself are deceptive to Hayduke, and he, it turns out at the conclusion of the novel, is the grandest deceiver of all. He commits himself to the firm, cool contours of the wall, only to realize too late that the cliff has no visible bottom and offers no real friction. He can't prevent his hands from releasing their grip; nor does he know whether he has uttered an audible cry. He is in a situation beyond his control, subject to the frictionlessness of the rock, the pull of gravity, and the solidity of the ground where he'll eventually land, where he'll experience the full “shock of the real.” We don't actually see Hayduke hit the ground: Abbey cuts to a later scene as Hayduke and his three fellow saboteurs—Doc Sarvis, Bonnie Abbzug, and Seldom Seen Smith—continue their escape through the desert with Bishop Love's posse on their trail. But we do learn that he survives the fall, albeit with “bruised limbs and abraded hide [and] lacerated palms” (326).

We, too, are never quite sure what is real as we free-fall through the narrative, expecting one thing and often (but not always) getting another. Just what is the ideological bedrock of the novel? Abbey, perhaps more than any other recent nature writer, has been cursed by some readers and exalted by others as a left-wing ideologue, as a cantankerous gadfly of the military-industrial complex. Edwin Way Teale calls Desert Solitaire “a voice crying in the wilderness, for the wilderness” (7). And Grace Lichtenstein, reviewing The Monkey Wrench Gang for the New York Times, notes that Abbey “has been the most eloquent spokesman for angry nature-lovers”; “his message,” she continues, “that only a radical change in the American life-style or even more radical action will preserve the land for future generations—has become a watchword among the growing minority of those who call themselves ‘eco-freaks’” (24). Indeed, The Monkey Wrench Gang inspired the formation of Earth First!, the country's most visible and radical preservationist group. But what some readers have found to be the direct espousal of an extremist ideology has proven to be a more perplexing text for other readers—and rightly so. Ann Ronald points out in The New West of Edward Abbey that this work “has more ambition than an ordinary propaganda novel of eco-raiders and environmental protest and speaks more profoundly than a vulgar little fairy tale.” This novel, she continues, “broaden[s] the dimensions of romance” to “project Abbey's increasingly complex vision of what man [sic] can do to stop the twentieth century from cannibalizing its land and its humanity” (183). In keeping with her assessment of The Monkey Wrench Gang, Ronald also observes that Abbey uses “his sense of humor to pronounce a sobering message” (200). I suggest that the purely aesthetic element (including wordplay and other types of humor) in virtually all of Abbey's works is there not only to be entertaining, not only to make serious material more palatable, but chiefly to conflict with the moral strata of the texts. Rather than merging to “pronounce” Abbey's “sobering message” about the environment, the aesthetic and moral currents in The Monkey Wrench Gang strain to become separate, like oil and water; they produce a tense disjunction that forces us, as readers, to stay on our toes.

After calling The Monkey Wrench Gang a “violently … revolutionary novel” and a “long, extravagant, finely written tale of ecological sabotage in the American Southwest” in a 1976 New York Times review, Jim Harrison observes the “irony” that

Edward Abbey wrote the book in an atmosphere of political vacuum as a sort of soldier of the void when the only possible audience the book could truly resonate against, the New Left, had largely turned to more refined dope, natural foods, weird exercises, mail order consciousness programs, boutiques and Indians (jewelry). Surely a base of warhorses is left, a core of politically astute veterans who have changed their pace but not their intentions, but the sense of mass movement is deader than Janis Joplin.

(59)

The Monkey Wrench Gang, however, is not really designed to launch a mass movement or to strike home merely with a base of stalwart “warhorses” such as the Earth First! activists who have come to bear out the author's mock disclaimer on the copyright page of the novel: “This book, though fictional in form, is based strictly on historical fact. Everything in it is real and actually happened. And it all happened just one year from today” (vi). I think the goal of this novel is far more universal than Harrison and Lichtenstein suggest in their early reviews. That is, instead of merely presenting an environmental ideology or even a group of fictional role models for would-be activists, Abbey is trying to prompt a more basic kind of consciousness among his readers, to provoke not a singleminded political movement but rather an awareness on the individual level of the need to question moral and aesthetic assumptions. The Monkey Wrench Gang is less a clear-cut call to action than a call to feeling.¹

To the extent that the novel does bear a political message, it does so in the manner of Raymond Barrio's postmodern protest novel The Plum Plum Pickers, which first appeared in 1969. Rather than engaging us in individual migrant workers' frustrated quests for self-realization or for mere day-to-day security, Barrio presents a series of disjunctive vignettes, skipping from scene to scene with scant narrative continuity, describing even the foulest situations with incongruously lush prose, as if to emphasize tacitly the gap between the characters' dreams and their actual predicaments. In one scene, a group of rowdy farm workers, after leaving a bar, winds up in a garbage dump to enjoy “a good long heartfelt piss”:

They were floating in the midst of a sea of garbage, all lit up by the light of the romantic moon, lovingly delineating every scrap, every crump of used paper, every bent straw, every spent can of lucky, every piece of string, every spawn of stinking, decaying, moldy, barnacled banana peel. Mounds and mounds of pure useless garbage gently degenerating in the warm moonlight.

(51)

Abbey, too—beginning in the initial scene of his novel, the ceremonial opening of a bridge over the Colorado River between Utah and Arizona that becomes an opportunity for flamboyant monkey-wrenchery—makes a point of depicting morally charged situations in lovingly amoral language. After several tedious speeches, fireworks are exploded and the crowd at the bridge cheers, “thinking this the high point of the ceremonies.” “But it was not,” Abbey writes:

Not the highest high point. Suddenly the center of the bridge rose up, as if punched from beneath, and broke in two along a jagged zigzag line. Through this absurd fissure, crooked as lightning, a sheet of red flame streamed skyward, followed at once by the sound of a great cough, a thunderous shuddering high-explosive cough that shook the monolithic sandstone of the canyon walls. The bridge parted like a flower, its separate divisions no longer joined by any physical bond. Fragments and sections began to fold, sag, sink and fall, relaxing into the abyss. Loose objects—gilded scissors, a monkey wrench, a couple of empty Cadillacs—slid down the appalling gradient of the depressed roadway and launched themselves, turning slowly, into space. They took a long time going down and when they finally smashed on the rock and river far below, the sound of the impact, arriving much later, was barely heard by even the most attentive.

The bridge was gone. The wrinkled fragments at either end still clinging to their foundations in the bedrock dangled toward each other like pendant fingers, suggesting the thought but lacking the will to touch. As the compact plume of dust resulting from the catastrophe expanded upward over the rimrock, slabs of asphalt and cement and shreds and shards of steel and rebar continued to fall, in contrary motion from the sky, splashing seven hundred feet below into the stained but unhurried river.

(5-6)

The description of this event defines it as neither heroic nor criminal. The morally neutral language beguiles us into forgetting what this final explosion means to the human observers, those who want the new bridge and those who don't. Despite the use of the word “catastrophe” in the midst of this descriptive passage, we are not made to feel that we are witnessing a genuine catastrophe. In fact, after reading these exquisitely violent and seemingly inhuman paragraphs, it shocks us when the narrative perspective returns suddenly to the petty human level and we overhear various public officials plotting to catch the saboteurs once and for all; the effect is more comical than moving. Then, in the next breath, we return to the cosmic perspective, to the “ultimate farthest eye” of the vulture high above in the sky, “so far beyond all consequence of dust and blue [of land and water],” who “contemplat[es] the peaceful scene below” and derives no meaning from it (6-7). But this shifting perspective does not instill the narrative with a discernible moral imperative, either in this first scene or elsewhere. We feel a constant tension between the passions of the human characters and the passionless gaze of the cosmos, represented intermittently by a circling vulture.

The focus of The Plum Plum Pickers is ultimately more restricted than that of The Monkey Wrench Gang, stimulating, if we can bear with its plotlessness, our awareness of the farm workers' lot, but nothing broader or deeper. On the other hand, Abbey's novel, though it doesn't attach us firmly to a single perspective on the environment, helps us to become aware of the interplay (and frequently the opposition) between morality (a sense of right and wrong) and the amoral perception of phenomena (including the perception of beautiful objects and beautiful language). In this respect, The Monkey Wrench Gang reminds me of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita (1955); as a graduate student at Brown University, I occasionally taught them together in undergraduate courses to demonstrate this connection. In his 1980 interview with the Bloomsbury Review, Abbey mentioned his respect for Nabokov, “chiefly as a stylist, a master of the language” (Solheim and Levin 83). But I think The Monkey Wrench Gang betrays Abbey's deeper affinity with Nabokov's Rousseauvian novel about the wayward passion resulting from the narrator's obsessive yearning to recapture the innocence and beauty of childhood, particularly with the disjunctive use of lavish, punning language to tell such a violent and, to most readers, perverse story. In an early scene, the middle-aged Humbert Humbert recalls the “nymphet” Lolita sprawling innocently across his lap:

She was musical and apple-sweet. Her legs twitched a little as they lay across my live lap; I stroked them; there she lolled in the right-hand corner, almost asprawl, Lola the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice, losing her slipper, rubbing the heel of her slipperless foot in its sloppy anklet, against the pile of old magazines heaped on my left on the sofa—and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and to improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty—between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock.

(56-57)

When Lolita first appeared in the mid-1950s, American readers recoiled from it, crying “pornography!” In response, the author attached a few notes to the end of the book, explaining that he was “neither a reader nor a writer of didactic fiction,” that “Lolita has no moral in tow,” and that for him “a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords … aesthetic bliss” (286). But do most readers believe this? I've found that it requires considerable coaching to get student readers beyond the sexual surface of Lolita, to help them appreciate the tension between the playful language and the narrative of desire and remorse. Abbey himself refers similarly to “the sheer ecstasy of the creative moment” in his introduction to Abbey's Road: “It is this transient moment of bliss,” he writes, “which is for the artist, as it is for other lovers, the one ultimate, indescribable, perfectly sufficient justification for the sweat and pain and misery and humiliation and doubt that lead, if lucky, to the consummation we desire” (xxiii). It may seem out of character for Edward Abbey, whom many readers came to view as a rather traditional storyteller and environmental advocate in the wake of Desert Solitaire, to voice this postmodern devotion to rarefied “aesthetic bliss.” A few years ago, at a conference on postmodernism, I heard John Hawkes state that his goal as a writer is to enjoy the eroticism of language, to seek the never-quite-attainable aesthetic bliss of crafting the perfect sentence. But Abbey claimed in a 1977 interview at the University of Arizona Poetry Center and again in the Abbey's Road introduction (note the explicit Beatles' pun in the title) that he “never wanted to be an environmental crusader, an environmental journalist.” “I wanted to be a fiction writer,” he explained, “a novelist” (Hepworth 39).

Indeed, in The Monkey Wrench Gang Abbey creates a highly aestheticized fictional world, but it's a world in constant tension with the real American Southwest that his readers know, or at least know about. Ronald calls the novel “simply another Edward Abbey romance,” a book that “projects a fictive version of Edward Abbey's wildest nonfiction dreams. The Western formula circumscribes his exuberant imagination, inducing him to impose a nineteenth-century brand of frontier justice on the modern atrocities he sees everywhere” (183-84). But beyond the evocation of anachronistic “frontier justice” in response to twentieth-century environmental problems, The Monkey Wrench Gang never lets us forget, at least not for long, that it is an artifact, a work of the imagination. Abbey seems to take advantage of his readers' perception of him as “an environmental crusader” to defy facile wish fulfilment. His artifice is evident at nearly every level of the novel, and the seams are intentionally left showing. Similarly, Bryant remarks in his study of Hayduke Lives! (1990), after listing the novel's precise echoes of such disparate works as The Grapes of Wrath and Kipling's poem “The Betrothed,” that “[t]his is text calling attention to the literary nature of its own textuality” (317).

The first four chapters mechanically sketch the characters who will soon become the infamous gang of marauders, and although the characterizations are lively and, as Jim Harrison said, “convincing,” they are nonetheless caricatures, exaggerated character types. “A. K. Sarvis, M.D.,” the pollution-hating Albuquerque surgeon who underwrites the group's adventures, is immediately ascribed grotesque physical characteristics and a whimsical scholarly interest in the environment; Sarvis's “bald mottled dome and savage visage, grim and noble as Sibelius,” and his “tall and ponderous [frame], shaggy as a bear” (9), contrast strangely with his playful intellect and his actual inexperience in wild places. The first thing we learn about George Washington Hayduke is that he is an ex-Green Beret with a “grudge,” for he returned after three years in Vietnam “to the American Southwest he had been remembering only to find it no longer what he remembered, no longer the clear and classical desert, the pellucid sky he roamed in dreams” (15). Hayduke, “a short, broad, burly fellow, well-muscled, built like a wrestler,” whose “face is hairy, very hairy, with a wide mouth and good teeth, big cheekbones and a thick shock of blue-black hair” (17), represents the brawn of the Monkey Wrench Gang, his animal aspects emerging through ceaseless swearing, beer swilling, “pissing,” sexual impulses, and love of guns and violence (later in the novel, he is called an “anthropoid ape” [179]). Seldom Seen Smith, a maverick Mormon who makes his living as a river runner, is the gang's closest thing to a traditional environmentalist, but his earnest love of the Utah landscape is generally concealed beneath his eccentricities, which include his physical appearance; Abbey tells us early on that “Smith was a lanky man, lean as a rake, awkward to handle. His arms were long and wiry, his hands large, his feet big, flat and solid. He had a nose like a beak, a big Adam's apple, ears like the handles on a jug, sun-bleached hair like a rat's nest, and a wide and generous grin” (35). The fourth caricature is that of the New Age secretary and lover of Doc Sarvis (and later of Hayduke), “Ms. B. Abbzug,” whose witty feminism and splendid sexuality become her trademarks. The physical, verbal, and philosophical traits of these four characters become prominent motifs in the novel; the four are at once convincingly consistent and exaggeratedly stylized.

The structure of the work is neatly symmetrical, framing the bulk of the narrative within a prologue subtitled “The Aftermath” (the bridge scene already discussed) and an epilogue called “The New Beginning.” This conspicuously clever framing contributes to the reader's awareness of the work's fictionality. So, too, do the narrative's many premonitory moments—scenes such as Hayduke's previously discussed “friction descent” and his escape from Bishop Love's Search & Rescue Team early in the book by winching himself and his jeep down a cliff, scenes that foreshadow Hayduke's mysterious disappearance and presumed death at the edge of yet another cliff in the penultimate chapter of the book. The epilogue, of course, reveals semimysteriously that Hayduke has survived once again; indeed, as mentioned above, the title of the sequel to The Monkey Wrench Gang is Hayduke Lives!.

But the most prominent feature of Abbey's aestheticism in this novel—a feature in which the author indulges so freely as to obscure the real-life political issues of wilderness use and to jeopardize the plausibility of his narrative (even romances usually require a certain degree of internal coherence) and the credibility of his characters—is the ubiquitous, often outrageous, use of puns and other affectionate forms of language. Both the narrator and the characters demonstrate this love of language; sometimes the narrator puns on behalf of individual characters. Even the description of a cocktail waitress becomes an occasion for the narrator to indulge in homophones: “[She] came between [Bonnie and Doc], wearing only her barely there see-through flimsy, her barely anywhere expression. She too was weary of it all” (132). The only purpose of the words “anywhere” and “weary” is to play on the sound of “wearing,” a word that fits more naturally into the context of the scene. One of the more vulgar features of the novel is Hayduke's fecal obsession, a motif that becomes a gauge of his fear; everything is “structurally perfect” (93) when he's safe and “structurally imperfect” (370) when it looks as if the law finally has him pinned down near the end of the book. But even this motif becomes fodder for the narrator's punning mentality during an episode in which he reads Hayduke's fearful mind and asks, “Will the sphincter hold until I get out of here and free and clear? The riddle of the sphincter. That was the question” (265). Bonnie's consciousness of language is evident first in her critique of Hayduke's constant cursing—“That's a brilliant retort you've worked out, Hayduke. … Really brilliant. A real flash of wit for all occasions” (110)—and later, after she and Hayduke have become lovers, in her subtle adoption of his speech—“It's time to get fucking back to work!” she exclaims (137). In the final line of the novel, Doc Sarvis hints similarly at Hayduke's survival by winking at Bonnie and Smith during a card game and saying, “Deal me in … and don't forget to cut the fucking deck” (387). Hayduke, of course, is typically characterized as behemothic, and yet he, too, shows his own kind of love of language, shouting when he and Bonnie have captured a guard and a helicopter pilot, “Stay that way, please, or I'll blast both you cocksuckers into eternity.” “Hayduke liked that majestic phrase so much he repeated it,” the narrator tells us: “‘[B]last you cocksuckers—into eternity!’” (245). Seldom Seen Smith, whose earnest love of the canyon lands most closely resembles Abbey's attitude in Desert Solitaire (in the “Tukuhnikivats” chapter, the names of desert places are called “the folk poetry of the pioneers” [255]), gazes at the landscape and savors the convergence of places and their names. “He could see for a hundred miles,” the narrator tells us,

Though the sky was lidded with heavy clouds there was no wind. The air was clear. The stillness was impressive. Filtered sunlight lay on the strange land, and waves of heat, shimmering like water, floated above the canyons. Must be a hundred ten in the shade down there. He could see Shiprock, Ute Mountain, Monument Valley, Navajo Mountain, Kaiparowits, the red walls of Narrow Canyon, the dark gorge of the Dirty Devil River. He could see the five peaks of the Henrys—Ellsworth, Holmes, Hillers, Pennell and Ellen—rising behind the maze of canyons, beyond the sandstone domes and pinnacles of Glen Canyon.

Hell of a place to lose a cow. Hell of a place to lose your heart. Hell of a place, thought Seldom Seen, to lose. Period.

(285)

Strangely, the learned doctor's rebellious vulgarity, if not his precise taste in language, is more in line with Hayduke's: “Used to do this all night,” he says to Bonnie after spending the night with her. “Now it takes me all night to do it” (48). Another time, after Doc Sarvis charges a hated district attorney ＄500 for a ten-minute hemorrhoid operation, the narrator quips, “Prosecutors will be violated” (213). The language of the novel, not only the punning but the extravagant dialogue and the lush rhapsodies, is part of what makes this such an engaging book, despite occasional interference with the credibility of the narrative, the instances when the language seems to exist for its own sake.

The multiple layers of the work are particularly evident in a scene in which Hayduke and Bonnie are lying together near a campfire. Hayduke (alias “Rudolf the Red”) is awakened during the night by raindrops falling on his face. “‘What's the matter, Rudolf?’” Bonnie asks.

“It's raining.”

“You're nuts. It's not raining. Go to sleep.”

“It is. I felt it.”

She poked her head out of the hood of the bag. “Dark all right … but it's not raining.”

“Well it was a minute ago. I know it was.”

“You were dreaming.”

“Am I Rudolf the Red or ain't I?”

“So?”

“Well goddammit, Rudolf the Red knows rain, dear.”

“Say that again?”

(282-83)

End of scene. On one level, of course, this dialogue fits into the larger context of the narrative: The two characters are out in the wilderness and it starts to rain. But the main purpose of this scene is simply to set up the reindeer pun, which Hayduke supposedly utters unconsciously but which Bonnie, in her half-sleep, catches. Is Abbey merely having fun with language here? Is this why the novelist intrudes elsewhere with more or less explicit references to himself? In one scene, for instance, a ranger named “Edwin P. Abbot Jr.” (190) inspects a box of Bonnie's belongings and finds, among other things, a “personally autographed extremely valuable first-edition copy of Desert Solipsism” (196), an allusive echo of Abbey's original title for the book that became Desert Solitaire (the working title was actually Desert Solecism [Abbey, Abbey's Road xix]). It seems that Abbey had a great deal of fun writing this novel, but I don't think fun is the only reason for the work's many conspicuous aesthetic games and extravagances. All of these, I believe, are related to Abbey's exploration of the way our minds work, and to his discovery that we frequently become alert to things (including ourselves) not through harmony but through opposition, even antagonism.

In his article “Human Ecology: The Subversive, Conservative Science” (1984), the ecologist Garrett Hardin, drawing on Sigmund Freud's 1925 essay “Negation,” asserts, “There is something about a negative formulation that captures the human attention” (470). Indeed, such works as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), Wendell Berry's “Mayhem in the Industrial Paradise” (1972), and Abbey's own critique of “industrial tourism” in Desert Solitaire, to name only a few examples, show that American nature writers have made good use of the “jeremiad,” the “negative formulation,” in pricking the attention of their readers. However, in The Monkey Wrench Gang, Hayduke Lives!, and much of his nonfiction Abbey relies on a different kind of antagonism: the tense joining of aesthetics and ideology.

III. AWARENESS AND DISSONANCE: ABBEY'S LITERARY ANARCHISM

In Nature Writing and America: Essays upon a Cultural Type (1990), Peter Fritzell argues, “Witting or unwitting, paradoxes are the essence of American nature writing” (287). Commenting on the early passage in Desert Solitaire when the narrator “dream[s] of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with the nonhuman world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate” (6), Fritzell observes:

[T]he figure here in the approaching sunrise is no civil reformer, finally—no clear-minded, programmatic renovator of the world's ways—lamenting in some public and political forum the discord between nature and culture in the modern world. … No, this is a figure—a prototypical figure in American nature writing—who finds the discord between nature and culture very much, too much, within himself.

(289)

However, instead of reading Abbey's “lonely cries into the canyons against society” as “cries against himself, his human language, and his inherited dreams” as Fritzell suggests (289), I would argue that Abbey actually appreciated the value of such dissonance in prompting his own awareness, such stimulation being an end in itself. And the playfulness and ornateness of the prose in such works as The Monkey Wrench Gang, qualities that often seem to detract from narrative coherence and ideological dissemination, are part of an attempt to create textual paradoxes or incongruities that force readers to intensify their own attentiveness. The epistemologist Michael Polanyi suggests in his essay “The Structure of Consciousness” (1965) that there are “two levels of awareness: the lower one for the clues, the parts or other subsidiary elements and the higher one for the focally apprehended comprehensive entity to which these elements point.” He goes on to explain that “[t]he way we know a comprehensive entity by relying on our awareness of its parts for attending to its whole is the way we are aware of our body for attending to an external event. We may say therefore that we know a comprehensive entity by interiorizing its parts or by making ourselves dwell in them …” (214). The strain of trying to interiorize disparate elements—such as the self and nature or, perhaps, the divergent moral and aesthetic strata of a novel such as The Monkey Wrench Gang—lifts us to higher levels of awareness.

Edward Abbey was made into an environmental guru during his lifetime even though he had once said “it would be a fate worse than death to become a cult figure, especially among undergraduates” (Lichtenstein 24). A fuller sense of his “message” requires that we come to terms with the incongruities—the paradoxes and apparent rough edges—of his writings, that we not be too quick to ascribe an ideology to Abbey that we desire for ourselves, as if to give it legitimacy somehow by attributing it to a prophet, to “a voice crying in the wilderness, for the wilderness.” At the University of New Mexico, Abbey ended up writing his master's thesis in philosophy on the ethics of violence, but he told his interviewers from the Bloomsbury Review that he had originally planned to write a thesis called “General Theory of Anarchism” (Solheim and Levin 86). Indeed, a study of The Monkey Wrench Gang's conflicting “subsidiary elements” (to use one of Polanyi's phrases) suggests that the author's overarching message is closer to anarchism than to environmentalism: As Hayduke tells himself, “[F]reedom … is the highest good” (26). Abbey's goal is not to imbue us with a shared, placidly adopted ideology of environmental protection but to alert us to our essential wildness, to stir us out of the complacency that allows us to give up our own freedom. The wilderness of southern Utah is only one kind of useful wilderness, he suggests in a brief article called “On the Need for a Wilderness to Get Lost In,” which he published in the New York Times in 1972 (this later became part of “Freedom and Wilderness, Wilderness and Freedom,” collected in The Journey Home):

The reason we need wilderness is because we are wild animals. Every man needs a place where he can go crazy in peace. Every Boy Scout troop deserves a forest to get lost, miserable and starving in. Even the foulest murderer of the sweetest wife should get a chance for a run to the sanctuary of the hills. If only for the sport of it. For freedom and delirium.

Only then can we return to man's other life, to the other way, to the order and sanity and beauty of what will somewhere be, unless all visions are false, the human community.

(29)

The giddy aestheticism of The Monkey Wrench Gang, like the “decaying piers and abandoned warehouses” of Hoboken and the remote canyons of the Southwest, is just such a wilderness. And in attempting to appreciate this aspect of the novel, we get a little closer to appreciating and respecting not only the wild side of our own humanity but also the wildness of the nonhuman world.²

Notes

1. For a strong statement of Abbey's role as a political writer, even his endorsement of violence against machines (and, late in his career, against people) in defense of the earth, see Scheese.

2. I presented an earlier version of this essay at the 1990 College English Association Conference in Buffalo, New York. A portion of this study also appeared in my book Seeking Awareness in American Nature Writing: Henry Thoreau, Annie Dillard, Edward Abbey, Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez (1992), and it is reprinted here with permission of the University of Utah Press.

Works Cited

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

———. “Freedom and Wilderness, Wilderness and Freedom.” The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West. New York: Dutton, 1977.

———. The Monkey Wrench Gang. New York: Avon, 1975.

———. “On the Need for a Wilderness to Get Lost In.” New York Times 28 Aug. 1972: 29.

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———. “Mayhem in the Industrial Paradise.” A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural. New York: HBJ, 1972. 174-82.

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———, and Gregory McNamee, eds. Resist Much, Obey Little: Some Notes on Edward Abbey. Salt Lake City: Dream Garden, 1985.

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