Edward Abbey and Voice

ARTICLES, REVIEWS, ESSAYS, & PRESENTATIONS on TEACHING ENGLISH

Learning About Voice through Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire

By Edgar Herb Thompson

Three crucial elements affect voice in writing: a sense of self, a sense of audience, and a sense of place. These three factors work together to affect the selection of language choices--detail, rhythm, movement, and mechanics--which create voice. By examining sense of self, sense of audience, and sense of place, students can learn about voice in a systematic way and begin to become conscious of voice in their own writing.

Voice in Desert Solitaire

Certainly, one of the most significant qualities of Edward Abbey’s writing is his voice. Among all of his books in Desert Solitaire Abbey clearly defines and delineates a voice that is clear and sharp and unique and is one of the most distinctive voices I have ever "heard" in a piece of writing, non-fiction or fiction. Knowing how Abbey accomplished this feat is important, not only so we can better understand Abbey as a writer but also because a clearer understanding of how he created his voice might help us to strengthen the voices in our own writing and to help other writers who will follow. As I examine voice in Desert Solitaire, I will start with the most basic elements first and then work my way towards the broader factors that affect voice.

Language Choices

Mechanics are never really an issue regarding Abbey's voice. His mechanical use is as accurate as any professional writer, and there is no specific use of mechanical devices, e.g., e.e. cummings use of only lower-case letters, that affects voice in any way. However, rhythm, movement, and the use of details are significant factors in Abbey's voice. Consider the following passage from the opening of the book.

Arrival

This is the most beautiful place on earth.

There are many such places. Every man, every woman, carries in heart and mind the image of the ideal place, the right place, the one true home, known or unknown, actual or visionary. . . .

For myself I'll take Moab , Utah . I don't mean the town itself, of course, but the country which surrounds it--the canyonlands. The slickrock desert.

The red dust and the burnt cliffs and the lonely sky--all that which lies beyond the end of the roads.

The choice became apparent to me this morning when I stepped out of a Park Service housetrailer--my caravan--to watch for the first time in my life the sun come up over the hoodoo stone of Arches National Monument .

I wasn't able to see much of it last night. After driving all day from Albuquerque --450 miles--I reached Moab after dark in cold, windy, clouded weather. . . .

Leaving the headquarters area and the lights of Moab , I drove twelve miles farther north on the highway until I came to a dirt road on the right, where a small wooden sign pointed the way: Arches National Monument Eight Miles. I left the pavement, turned east into the howling wilderness. Wind roaring out of the northwest, black clouds across the stars--all I could see were clumps of brush and scattered junipers along the roadside. Then another modest signboard:

WARNING: QUICKSAND

DO NOT CROSS WASH

WHEN WATER IS RUNNING

The wash looked perfectly dry in my headlights, I drove down, across, up the other side and on into the night. Glimpses of weird humps of pale rock on either side, like petrified elephants, dinosaurs, stone-age hobgoblins. Now and then something alive scurried across the road: kangaroo mice, a jackrabbit, an animal that looked like a cross between a raccoon and a squirrel--the ringtail cat. . . .

Snow was swirling through the air when I crossed the unfenced line and passed the boundary marker of the park. A quarter-mile beyond I found the ranger station--a side place in the road, an informational display under a lean-to shelter, and fifty yards away the little tin government housetrailer where I would be living for the next six months. . . .

. . . . By flashlight I found the bed, unrolled my sleeping bad, pulled off my boots and crawled in and went to sleep at once. The last I knew was the shaking of the trailer in the wind and the sound from inside of hungry mice scampering around with the good news that their long lean lonesome winter was over--their friend and provider had finally arrived.

This morning I awake before sunrise, stick my head out of the sack, peer through a frosty window at a scene dim and vague with flowing mists, dark fantastic shapes looming beyond. An unlikely landscape. . . .

Well--the sun will be up in a few minutes and I haven't even begun to make coffee. . . . When the first rays of the sun strike the cliffs I fill a mug with steaming coffee and sit in the doorway facing the sunrise, hungry for the warmth.

Suddenly it comes, the flaming globe, blazing on the pinnacles and minarets and balanced rocks, on the canyon walls and through the windows in the sandstone fins. We greet each other, sun and I, across the black void of ninety-three million miles. The snow glitters between us, acres of diamonds almost painful to look at. . . . The ravens cry out in husky voices, blue-black wings flapping against the golden sky. Over my shoulder comes the sizzle and smell of frying bacon.

That's the way it was this morning. (1-7)

This excerpt, one of many I could cite in the text , illustrates how Abbey is able to move through space and time in language. The rhythm and detail all go towards creating a feeling of movement towards some goal, in this particular passage it's getting to the trailer located in a strange place that will be his home for the next six months. Once he has achieved his goal, you are able to stop and rest, as Abbey did, and contemplate the environment you find yourself in. We enter into Abbey's vision through the movement of his prose, and this movement gives us a feel for what his voice is. As we move with his words, we vicariously move with him, which makes us feel like we can hear him talking to us.

In addition to the rhythm, Abbey's use of detail is a particularly distinctive component of his voice. He tends to take that which is commonplace and juxtaposes it with an unexpected detail which causes us to come to view him as an playful, ornery, independent individual. For example, on Abbey's second day at Arches, the park superintendent and the chief ranger brief him on what his legal responsibilities are. You can tell quickly that Abbey will do what they say, but that he doesn't take it all too seriously:

Floyd lends me a park ranger shirt which he says he doesn't need anymore and which I am to wear in lieu of a uniform, so as to give me an official sort of aspect when meeting the tourists. Then there's this silver badge I'm supposed to pin to the shirt. The badge gives me the authority to arrest malefactor and evildoers, Floyd explains. Or anyone at all, for that matter.

I place both Floyd and Merle under arrest at once, urging them to stay and have supper with me. I've got a big pot of pinto beans simmering on the stove. But they won't stay, they have promises to keep and must leave . . . . (11).

Two things about this passage. Notice the wordy detail Abbey uses when he mocks the bureaucratic language that government officials often use: "so as to give me an official sort of aspect. . . ." This is a not so subtle barb aimed at his employer, the United States Government. Also, notice that when he realized that he can arrest anyone, he arrests the rangers. You don't expect him to do this, and thus a smile comes to your face when he does. We soon learn that he isn't serious, but he has surprised us by his juxtaposition of an unexpected act with straight-forward description.

This same use of detail can be found when Abbey records conversations he has with people. For example, he talked to a tourist from Ohio about the desert. Abbey's rendition of the conversation juxtaposes details to achieve the effect he wants, i.e., that these two men are not speaking the same language and will ultimately never convince one another of each other's opposing point of view:

"This would be good country," a tourist says to me, "If only you had some water." He's from Cleveland , Ohio .

"If we had water here," I reply, "this country would not be what it is. It would be like Ohio , wet and humid and hydrological, all covered with cabbage farms and golf courses. Instead of this lovely barren desert we would have only another blooming garden state, like New Jersey . You see what I mean?"

"If you had more water more people could live here."

"Yes sir. And where then would people go when they wanted to see something besides people?"

"I see what you mean. Still, I wouldn't want to live here. So dry and desolate. Nice for pictures but my God I'm glad I don't have to live here."

"I'm glad too, sir. We're in perfect agreement. You wouldn't want to live here, I wouldn't want to live in Cleveland . We're both satisfied with the arrangement as it is. Why change it?"

"Agreed." We shake hands and the tourist from Ohio goes away pleased, as I am pleased, each of us thinking he has taught the other something new. (112-113)

We see a certain playful, irreverence on Abbey's part here. He is not really making fun of the Ohio tourist, though it is possible to make a case for this, as much as he is making fun of a notion he absolutely doesn't agree with. His choice of detail, however, and how he juxtaposes elements of this recreated conversation together, e.g., "all covered with cabbage farms and golf courses," leaves us feeling again his orneriness and the quick, sharp wit of his language. We know this man is verbally quick on his feet, and we know that if we were to meet him, we might not agree with everything he said. But we also know that we would not be attacked. All of these inferences reveal an emerging persona for us as readers, a persona that is revealed as much as anything by the different facets of voice in Abbey's prose.

Structure/Form

A careful reading of Desert Solitaire reveals some interesting features regarding the structure or form Abbey uses in this book. He has a tendency to drop polemics into the middle of other kinds of passages. For example, in the chapter entitled "Polemic: Industrial Tourism and the National Parks," (39-59) Abbey drops a polemic into the middle of a narrative, descriptive sequence.

The chapter starts off with Abbey discussing how lucky he is to have found a sinecure that pays him good money to do little work. He then describes how he spends his time on the job and on Tuesday and Wednesday, his days off. One evening just before sunset, Abbey is relaxing outside his trailer. As he is sipping a tall, iced drink, watching his small fire and the deer quite near to him, he hears the sound of a jeep. Since motor vehicles are unlawful, he is upset. He wants to arrest these outrageous offenders. The jeep stops and two men get out and ask for water.

Abbey quickly finds out that the vehicle is a government jeep, and the men in it are surveyors plotting the route for a new, paved road into the park, which he feels is unnecessary. He then steps out of the action in the text and launches into a polemic that takes 14 of the 20 pages in this chapter on how national parks should be better run. He then enters back into the action where he left before he started his polemic and describes how after the surveyors left, he went back for five miles or so and pulled up all of their stakes. He knew it wouldn't really affect the final outcome, but it made him feel better.

This device of putting a polemic or some kind of reflective note in the middle of a narrative or action sequence is a pattern that Abbey uses often in the text, and I think this technique affects his voice. It gives us a feel for his reactions and thoughts as a human being, because most of us as thoughtful people, will experience something and then wonder about it's significance as we move on to our next experience. I know that as I get away from the distractions of modern life, I tend to become more at one with my surroundings and turn into myself for answers to nature's mysteries. I don't think that I'm alone in this pattern. Certainly, Abbey's internal reflections must not only approximate his own perceptions and thinking but also affect our view of him. Sometimes, there is an explicative/explanatory note where Abbey explains some necessary background information, but usually the pattern is Action-Reflection-Action-Reflection, etc., which is replicated for several pages (See Appendix A). This Action-Reflection pattern (with occasional Explication/Explanation) allows readers to enter into Abbey's persona or psyche. As we go with him though this back and forth motion, we come into a closer relationship to not only the geography he is describing--usually the desert--but also to his feelings about it. Abbey uses this structure, or minor variations of it, repeatedly throughout the Desert Solitaire.

Major Factors Affecting Voice

Of the three major factors that I believe affect voice--sense of self, sense of audience, and content or a sense of place, the first two are relatively easy to deal with in Abbey's writing. Abbey surely has a clear sense of who he is, and he appears to be comfortable with himself. Given the confidence with which he goes into a new situation [as illustrated in his behavior during his arrival] or his lack of fear of punishment or retribution [when he tears up the surveyor's stakes] does not portray a man who lacks confidence in himself. Abbey clearly has a strong sense of self.

Abbey's tone, the freedom with which he shares information, and the quality of the language he uses, which is the language of an educated person, e.g., sinecure, exultation, glissade, polemic, monolithic, anti-Kantian, doppelganger, etc., give evidence that he knows his audience, the second major factor affecting voice. Clearly, he assumes that his audience will speak his language, and the warm or intimate distance created by the combination of the features I've just mentioned suggests that he assumes that his audience is not hostile but more than likely sympathetic to his cause. If this weren't so, in some of his polemics he would soften the force and strength of the tone he uses, but he does not. Thus, he appears not to be afraid of offending his readers, so he must see them at least to some degree as allies.

The third major factor that affects voice--the importance or influence of content and/or place--is a little trickier. Place clearly affects the content of his writing, and therefore, it affects the voice in his writing. The desert has both a calming and a destablizing effect in that it tends to force humans to simplify their lives. Look at Abbey's progression from the time he enters the desert until he leaves. In the beginning he rushes in, finds where he is to go, gets there, goes to sleep, and the next morning begins to settle in. The very next day as the rangers Merle and Floyd leave, he realizes that he is alone, but as he does so, he doesn't fear being alone. He writes a letter to himself in the trailer, using the electric generator, which as the generator whines and the lights shine allows him to cut himself "off completely from the greater world which surround the man-made shell."

When he finishes his letter, however, things change as he again leaves his man-made environment and goes back to the natural one of the desert:

Finishing the letter I go outside and close the switch on the generator. The light bulbs dim and disappear, the furious gnashing of pistons whimpers to a halt. Standing by the inert and helpless engine, I hear its last vibrations die like ripples on a pool somewhere far out on the tranquil sea of desert, somewhere beyond Delicate Arch, beyond the Yellow Cat badlands, beyond the shadow line.

I wait. Now the night flows back, the mighty stillness embraces and includes me; I can see the starts again and the world of starlight. I am twenty miles or more from the nearest fellow human, but instead of loneliness I feel loveliness. Loveliness and a quiet exultation. (13-14)

This exultation does not exist at all times. After a couple of months and later in the book, he admits that things do get lonely, and he expresses his loneliness. Place, the desert, affects his thinking, and thus his writing. To survive the solitude, he must separate himself more and more from the artifacts of human civilization and move closer to nature and the desert, spending more of his time out of his trailer. He explains all of this in the following passage:

But how, you might ask, does living outdoors . . . enable me to escape that other form of isolation, the solitary confinement of the mind? For there are bad moments, or were, especially at the beginning of my life here, when I would sit down at the table for supper inside the housetrailor and discover with a sudden shock that I was alone. There was nobody, nobody at all, on the other side of the table. Alone-ness became loneliness and the sensation was strong enough to remind me (how could I have forgotten?) that the one thing better than solitude, the only thing better than solitude, is society. . . .

Strange as it might seem, I found that eating my supper out back made a difference. Inside the trailer, surrounded by the artifacture of America , I was reminded insistently of all that I had, for a season, left behind; the plywood walls and the dusty venetian blinds and the light bulbs and the smell of butane made me think of Albuquerque . But taking my meal outside by the burning juniper in the [outdoor] fireplace with more desert and mountains than I could explore in a lifetime open to view, I was invited to contemplate a far larger world, one which extends into a past and into a future without any limits known to the human kind. By taking off my shoes and digging my toes in the sand I made contact with that larger world--an exhilarating feeling which leads to equanimity. Certainly I was still by myself, so to speak--there were no other people around and there still are none--but in the midst of such a grand tableau it was impossible to give full and serious consideration to Albuquerque . All that is human melted with the sky and faded out beyond the mountains and I felt, as I feel--it is a paradox?--that a man can never find or need better companionship than that of himself. (95-96)

The more time Abbey spends in the desert, the more he comes to understand and not to understand it. In one of the last chapters in the book, "Episodes and Visions," he finally concludes that there is no way to put into words those qualities that constitute the desert. He admits that he is left with the trite phrase, "There is something about desert" (243). It "presents a riddle which has no answer" (243), or as he puts it more clearly:

This quality of strangeness in the desert remains undiminished. Transparent and intangible as sunlight, yet always and everywhere present, it lures a man on and on, from the red-walled canyons to the smoke-blue ranges beyond, in a futile but fascinating quest for the great, unimaginable treasure which the desert seems to promise. Once caught by this golden lure you become a prospector for life, condemned, doomed, exalted. (242)

By the end of the book, as his ranger friend is driving him up out of the basin where Moab and Arches National Monument is located, Abbey looks out the rear window of the car and tells his friend he wants to go back. His friend reminds him that he has a train to catch and then says something very simplistic and yet profound, "Don't worry . . . it'll all still be here next spring." The desert is forever.

The point of this is that Abbey's voice has stayed the same throughout the book, with one major exception. As he spent more time in the desert, he started reflecting more about his relationship to the desert. As a result, the content of his writing reflects the influence of this place. Actions, events, happenings, and the general business of living increasingly become interspersed with introspection. This introspection leads ultimately to issues that are impossible to define in words and yet are profoundly felt, not only by Abbey but also his readers. Abbey's voice, by the content of his writing--which is affected by place--in large part, manages to communicate something of this mystery to readers.

I remember the first time I read Desert Solitaire. When I "listened" to Abbey describing coming up and out of the canyon during his float trip with his friend Newcomb and when he talked about the quality of the desert, at that moment in the book I felt, not thought, that I understood the essence of the desert. I was able to feel this because Abbey had come into harmony and rhythm with the desert in the same way that Isak Dinesen began to live the rhythm of nature in Africa and in the same way Thomas Hardy described the importance of the land in the opening passage of The Return of the Native. As Abbey puts it, "there is something [in the desert] which the mountains, no matter how grand and beautiful, lack; which the sea, no matter how shining and vast and old, does not have" (243).

Abbey's voice in Desert Solitaire rings through so clearly because his sense of self was strong, because he knew who his audience was, and because he gradually gave into the power of place to shape what he wrote, thought, and therefore spoke to us. These three factors directly affect the language choices he made and the structure that resulted in his writing. The desert was never portrayed as silent, bleak, and desolate because Abbey gave himself up to its power. As the desert is powerful, so is Abbey's voice in Desert Solitaire.

ENDNOTES

. All subsequent references to Desert Solitaire will be to the edition specified in the references cited at the end of this paper. Also, to conserve space I have excerpted passages while still trying to capture their essence. Of course, these excerpts should in no way take the place of a thoughtful examination of the actual text. Finally, the titles given to these passages are mine and are meant only to provide functional reference points as I discuss the text. They do not appear in the published text of the book.

. For example, the passage where Abbey helps his friend Newcomb get out of the quicksand (122-123), the chapter entitled "Cowboy's and Indians: Part I" about Roy Scobie and his helper, Viviano (82-94), or the chapter entitled "The Moon-Eyed Horse" (137-150).

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