Abbey, Silko, and radical environmental consciousness

What is it about?

In this article, I consider how the radical novel, following the emergence of the modern environmentalist movement and the American Indian Movement, understands place, space, and habitat as grounds both of and for struggle. I compare Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead with Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang to explore how the Red Power and ecotage genres, in their visions of struggle over land rights, land use, and borders, disclose the competing conceptual frameworks through which we know and endanger the world. I interrelate Kenneth Burke’s dramatist ‘scene-act ratio’ (which accounts for the ways a scene yields particular motives and logics) and Martin Heidegger’s theory of technē (that modern technology, though it “enframes” the world and compels us to perceive it as a mere repository of resources, is vulnerable to intervention from the realm of art) to show how the radical novel teaches us to resist endangering worldviews, especially those imposed on territories by the technological apparatuses of westward expansion. At work is what I term a ‘technical imagination’: an aspect of what Lawrence Buell calls the ‘environmental imagination,’ making a specific appeal to narrative frames to re-describe scenes of degradation as sites of radical possibility. The task, ultimately, is to recuperate a sense of place beyond the instrumental and of action beyond the exploitative.

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