The Hydropolitics of American Literature and Film, 1960-1980
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HAUNTED BY WATERS: THE HYDROPOLITICS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE AND FILM, 1960-1980 Zackary Vernon A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. Chapel Hill 2014 Approved by: Fred Hobson Florence Dore Michael Grimwood Minrose Gwin Randall Kenan © 2014 Zackary Vernon ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT ZACKARY VERNON: Haunted by Waters: The Hydropolitics of American Literature and Film, 1960-1980 (Under the direction of Fred Hobson) Roman Polanski’s 1974 film Chinatown characterizes the chief engineer of L.A.’s Department of Water and Power as having “water on the brain.” During the 1960s and 1970s numerous Americans shared a similar preoccupation with water as they were inundated with everything from floods to droughts, rivers dammed to rivers on fire, oceanic radiation to lunar seas. Such events quickly became a cultural obsession that coincided with an era of water-related political debates about the preservation of the nation’s aquatic ecosystems. I contend that these hydropolitical concerns had far-ranging implications; in an era when unease over damming and industrial contamination converged with a larger Cold War culture of containment and conformity, many postwar Americans were attracted to and identified with neo-romantic images of “wild,” “natural” water. However, the irreconcilable gap between these images and the unprecedented water crises of the period gave rise to crises of the self. Such existential fears were amplified as nuclear societies confronted the all-too-real prospect of an end of nature and the corresponding end of humanity. Out of this milieu emerged a subgenre of American environmental literature and film that was both a manifestation and an index of posthuman apprehension. Consisting of canonical and non-canonical figures in the environmentalist tradition—including Pare Lorentz, Rachel Carson, Kurt Vonnegut, Elia Kazan, Robert Penn iii Warren, John Cheever, James Dickey, Roman Polanski, Edward Abbey, and Leslie Marmon Silko—this subgenre deploys hydrocentric metaphors of fluidity, containment, and contagion as a way to discuss broader Cold War concerns over the status of American culture, nature, and the increasingly indistinct boundaries between the two. In addition to literary texts and films, this project draws on a wide variety of materials—including legal documents and governmental propaganda—that previously have fallen outside the purview of ecocritical scholarship. Considered in conversation, these hydrocentric texts illustrate a historical trajectory from the birth of postwar American environmentalism to the apogee of radical ecological philosophy and activism. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my dissertation committee—Fred Hobson, Florence Dore, Michael Grimwood, Minrose Gwin, and Randall Kenan—for all of the time and energy they have devoted to my development as a scholar. As I planned and drafted this dissertation, my committee has given me invaluable feedback, and without their thoughtful guidance, I would not have been able to complete this project. I am also deeply grateful for the support I’ve received from my family, particularly my parents, Karen and Dwayne Vernon. In times both good and bad, they have been endlessly encouraging. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Jessica. Throughout every stage of graduate school, she has been my collaborator, confidant, and adviser. More importantly, though, Jess has been my dearest friend and she has shown me unfaltering love and devotion, which has inspired this project from beginning to end. v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION— American Hydropolitics…………………………………….…..….….1-30 CHAPTER I—Deep Hydrologies in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle………………………………..……………………….….….31-80 CHAPTER II—A Yearning for the Mud: Metafiction, Metafilm, and Exile in Robert Penn Warren’s Flood…………………………………………………………..…81-130 CHAPTER III—“Some Sort of Conflict”: Hydrological Containment and Cultures of Repression in John Cheever’s “The Swimmer” and James Dickey’s Deliverance……………………………………………………………….131-188 CHAPTER IV—Between Anarchy and Activism: Edward Abbey and Radical Environmental Philosophy…………………………………………………….….189-241 CODA—Environmental Justice and the Globalization of Hydropolitics………………....242-265 WORKS CITED…………………………………………………………………………..266-281 Extended List of Hydrocentric and Hydropolitical Texts and Films…………………...….282-285 vi INTRODUCTION American Hydropolitics “The guy’s got water on the brain.” - Robert Towne and Roman Polanski, Chinatown (1974) “Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters.” - Norman Maclean, A River Runs through It (1976) Dissertation Overview On the day of the 1981 Spring Equinox, members of the newly-formed radical environmental group Earth First! arrived at the Glen Canyon Dam. In order to demonstrate their opposition to the damming of the Colorado River, Earth First! planned to unroll a three-hundred- foot plastic banner down the surface of the dam that would look eerily like a large crack. As the 1 “crack” unfurled down the surface of the dam, and as police and park rangers moved in on the protesters, the group’s “guru,” environmental writer Edward Abbey, addressed the enthusiastic crowd: “Earth first. How can we create a civilization fit for the dignity of free men and women if the globe itself is ravaged, polluted, defiled, and insulted?” (qtd. in Philippon, “Edward Abbey’s Remarks” 165). Abbey’s comments resonate with my dissertation’s broader investigation of the profound connection between American identity and perceptions of “wild” nature. In order to demonstrate how the “cracking” of the Glen Canyon Dam is representative of larger cultural phenomena of the period, I examine literary texts and films in conjunction with hydropolitics—the intense water-related political debates of the 1960s and 1970s. Each chapter of my dissertation focuses on a hydrological metaphor of fluidity, containment, or contagion used by postwar writers and filmmakers to explore Cold War anxieties related to gender, sexuality, (post)humanism, and cultural heterogeneity.1 Such tropes transfigure historic ecological events—such as widespread aquatic contamination from DDT or massive Tennessee Valley Authority flood projects—and my research reveals the extent to which individual and national identities were influenced by the ontological and epistemological connections among nature, culture, and subjectivity. While the connections between human communities and water are cultural, they are also necessarily biological, as we rely physiologically on clean, potable water. Moreover, our concern for water purity is often psychological and ontological, as we are drawn to water because we are 1 Daniel J. Philippon argues, “Metaphors enact this cultural work because they enable narratives that in turn convey our values. In an environmental context, we might say that our environmental values are embodied in the metaphors we use to represent ‘nature,’ because these metaphors imply particular stories about how we relate to the ‘nature’ they describe. Furthermore, because these metaphors and their accompanying narratives are socially constructed, they serve as the agents of social change (or social maintenance, as the case may be)” (Conserving Words 5-6). Furthermore, Victoria Strang contends that water is a particularly powerful metaphor across cultures and histories because it can signify so many different ideas: “Its characteristics of transmutability and fluidity make it the perfect analogue for describing complex ideas about change, transformation, mood and movement… Of all the elements in the environment, it is the most suited to convey meaning in every aspect of life” (61). 2 quite literally made up of it.2 In a recent issue of PMLA devoted to Oceanic Studies (2010), Patricia Yaeger asks, How liquid are we? While human bodies seem substantial and geocentric and while many creation myths insist that our fundament is clay or earth, we are mostly made out of water: not geo- but aquacentric. Science explains that we emerged from the sea—our blood a tide of oceanic ions. The chemical formula for blood is very like the formula for seawater. Since cells evolved in oceans, when animals clambered out of the sea evolutionary processes took the simplest route—ensuring that the material outside cell walls resembled this early creaturely environment. (524-5) Because the elemental composition of the body mirrors that of the ocean, cultural anthropologist Veronica Strang argues that water is the essential substance for all life, including human life, and thus the importance of water, both physiologically and culturally, has been a prominent commonality among civilizations throughout history. Strang also notes that water evinces the interconnections between the human and natural worlds: “The meanings encoded in [water] are not imposed from a distance, but emerge from an intimate interaction involving ingestion and expulsion, contact and immersion. Engagement with water is the perfect example of a recursive relationship in which nature and culture literally flow into each other” (5). The disruption of seemingly natural