Palacký University Olomouc Place Analysis in Novels by Louis Owens

Palacký University Olomouc Faculty of Arts Department of English and American Studies Place Analysis in Novels by Louis Owens Doctoral Dissertation Author: Mgr. Hana Sobotková Supervisor: Prof. PhDr. Michal Peprník, Dr. Olomouc 2018 Declaration of Originality I herewith declare that the material contained in my dissertation entitled Place Analysis in Novels by Louis Owens is original work performed by me under the guidance and advice of my faculty supervisor. The literature and sources are all properly cited according to the Chicago Manual of Style. …………………….. …………………….. date signature Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor prof. Michal Peprník for his support and encouragement through the whole process of writing this dissertation. I am thankful especially for his patience, insightful comments, and his thoughtful guidance. I am also grateful to prof. Marcel Arbeit for his encouragement and his expert advice on academic writing and editing. Contents Introduction 5 Chapter 1: Defining Place 12 Place and Literature 13 Place and Placelessness 16 Space and Place 18 Sense of Place 19 Attachment to Place 20 Place and Stories 21 Topophilia 23 Chapter 2: Native American Literature and Place 25 Native American Literature 25 Place in Native American Literature 36 Chapter 3: Wolfsong 45 Washington, Forks 49 Stehemish Places in Forks 58 Santa Barbara, California 61 Wilderness 65 Chapter 4: The Sharpest Sight and Bone Game 79 Mississippi and California in Owens’s Autobiographical Writing 80 Mississippi and California in The Sharpest Sight and Bone Game 86 Chapter 5: Nightland 101 The Ranches 104 The West Reworked 114 Chapter 6: Dark River 123 Black Mountain 125 Mississippi 128 The Electric Sign 131 The Casino and the Hotel Resort 132 The Canyon of the Dark River 136 The Place of the Indian 142 Conclusion 150 Resumé 155 Works Cited 160 Anotace 169 4 To be human is to live in a world that is filled with significant places: to be human is to have to know your place. —Edward Relph, Place and Placelessness I try to tell stories built around characters that I admit have a lot in common with myself … they inhabit complex worlds in which the overwhelming questions are, Who am I? and How do I live in this place and time? —Louis Owens, Mixedblood Messages Introduction In the autumn of 2017 I was travelling home from a conference in Nitra. The bus that I decided to take was almost full and I was sitting in the aisle seat next to an old Slovak man. Shortly before the bus was going to stop at Trnava we started talking. He had spent the last three months at his daughter’s house in a distant part of Slovakia helping her with her children and he was excited to be home again. When the bus approached Trnava, his hometown, he asked me if I could smell the odor in the air. He explained that it comes from a sugar factory in the town. Whenever he smells the scent, he said, he is happy, because it means that he is home. For the man, the odor of the processed sugar beet was something that became bound to the place. It told him that he is in that particular place that he calls home, while I, a person in the same place at the same time saw through the bus window a strange town with narrow streets full of traffic. For the man the town was full of stories. It was familiar—he saw its transformations and knew people who lived and live there. The man knew that place and experienced a profound sense of place. Place and a sense of place are experiences that are natural for human beings. Critics of Native American literature claim that Native Americans have a special relationship to land and nature and that place is one of the strongest themes in their writings. Louis Owens, a Native American novelist and scholar, incorporated the places that he became familiar with during his life into his literary work from the very beginning of his writing career. His vast experience with sojourns in different environments became crucial to his writing and inspired fiction that is tightly bound to 5 place. In an interview with A. Robert Lee he said: “I cannot imagine a story without the physical, natural world of which the story is a part. … Stories, it seems to me, come out of the earth.”1 The understanding of place in my thesis derives from the study of human geography. I chose the approach that Tim Cresswell presents in his introduction to studies of place. In general, he speaks of places as of “all spaces that people made meaningful”2 and to which they are attached, but further he points out that “place is also a way of seeing, knowing and understanding the world.”3 I base my understanding of place on Edward Relph’s influential study Place and Placelessness (1976), on the works by Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia (1974) and Space and Place (1977), and on Kent C. Ryden’s Mapping the Invisible Landscape: Folklore, Writing, and the Sense of Place (1993). This perspective expresses the understanding of place as a space invested with meaning and created through experience. The aim of this thesis is to analyze the literary response to places and their portrayal in Owens’s novels. I focus on the specific characteristics and attributes that construct places: the physical descriptions of the environment and their significance, its specific features, the inhabitants, and the social relationships that spring from living in a place. Owens also discusses the concept of home and tries to locate it in a specific material area. Home is approached as a place that generates a strong sense of belonging and where the inhabitants are “relatively free to forge their own identities.”4 Both attachment to place and its impact on personal identity are crucial concepts in his writing. Owens was of Choctaw, Cherokee, Irish, Welsh, and Cajun origin. He was born in Lompoc, California, in 1948 and died in 2002 in New Mexico. He spent his early childhood in the Yazoo region in Mississippi, but his family soon moved to California. Owens worked as a professor of American literature, Native American literature, and creative writing at several universities: the California State University, Northridge, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and mainly the University of New Mexico where he settled with his wife and two daughters. He also spent seven years working seasonally for the U.S. Forest Service: as a sawyer in a forest firefighting crew in 1 A. Robert Lee, “Outside Shadow: A Conversation with Louis Owens,” in Louis Owens: Literary Reflections on His Life and Work, ed. Jacquelyn Kilpatrick (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 39. 2 Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 7. 3 Cresswell, Place, 11. 4 Cresswell, Place, 26. 6 Arizona, California, and Washington, and as a wilderness ranger in the North Cascades National Park in Washington. All of those places figure prominently in his writing. Speaking about his novels, Owens said: “Each one arises out of the places I know, out of the feelings and smells and sounds and tastes of specific landscapes.”5 The descriptions of places in his writing are very definite and particular; as he admits, each of his novels “begins and ends with place itself.”6 Owens wrote five novels: Wolfsong (1991) set in the state of Washington, The Sharpest Sight (1992) and its sequel Bone Game (1994) both set in California and Mississippi, Nightland (1996) placed to New Mexico, and Dark River (1999) set in Arizona. Apart from the five novels, Owens wrote two collections of essays, memoirs, and criticism, Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place (2001) and I Hear the Train: Reflection, Inventions, Refractions (2001). He also authored a critical study of Native American novels Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel (1992), and two critical volumes on the novels of John Steinbeck. The places that influenced his writing the most are Mississippi and California, which he calls the “two primary places that frame my life in black and white.”7 He also admitted that nearly all of the stories he tells “move on an axis between Mississippi and California”8 as his family frequently moved between these places. The continuous changing of places is a feature that is often connected with Native American literature. Owens admits that motion is “an image associated profoundly with Indian people.”9 As he also points out, it seems like a paradox, as the importance of place and the strong ties that bind people to it are equally characteristic of Native American life and literature. On the one hand, there is the motion and instability of the marginal culture of those who were forced to leave their homeland by the forces of colonialism, a culture that finds itself in a constant process of redefinition and a need to be redefined. On the other hand, there is the personal experiencing of place that comes from living in certain area and a connection to land. The two forces come together, emphasizing the constant change and movement, yet stressing the importance of place for an individual as well as a community. The existence of the paradox creates tensions that call to be dealt with. 5 Louis Owens, Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001), 164–65. 6 Louis Owens, Mixedblood Messages, 181. 7 Louis Owens, “Louis Owens,” in Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Volume 24, ed. Shelly Andrews (Detroit: Gale Research, 1996), 283. 8 Owens, Mixedblood Messages, 164. 9 Owens, Mixedblood Messages, 150.

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