Haunted California(s)
Karlstad, June 15-18, 2006: Space Haunting
Discourse
Proposed by Bent
Sørensen, Aalborg
University, Denmark
This
workshop aims to investigate a number of
ways in which place and writing can meet. The textualized location of
choice is
California, with a specific bias
towards
representations of haunted California(s)
of the past, present and future. The genres of writing presented may
include
fiction; poetry/song lyrics; and creative non-fiction in the form of
nature
writing, travel writing, anthropology texts, memoirs and (auto)
biographies
etc. Writers might include Richard Brautigan, Henry Miller, Jack
Kerouac, Gary
Snyder, John Muir, Barry Lopez, Alfred and Theodora Kroeber, Ursula
LeGuin,
Andrei Codrescu, Walt Whitman, Woody Guthrie, Joni Mitchell, Brian
Wilson,
a.m.o. The theoretical background for the workshop will be provided by
discussions of place and setting in literary theory, as well as a
general
discussion of representation/mimesis and identity as currently employed
in
cultural and literary studies.
Individual papers:
Representations
of Big
Sur in Late Modernist and Early Postmodernist American Writing
(Bent Sørensen,
Dept. of Languages and Intercultural Studies, Aalborg U., Denmark)
i12bent@hum.aau.dk
Henry
Miller, Jack Kerouac and Richard
Brautigan all wrote prose about Big
Sur, California.
This
locus haunts these writings in three
different ways: To Miller (Big Sur and
the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, 1957) the potential of Big Sur as a true artists’ commune was
lost to
progress and
materialism. He is haunted by the unrealised potential of a Romantic locus amoenus. To Kerouac (Big Sur, 1962)
the California coast he
had loved to explore with Gary Snyder as his Buddhist mountain goat
guru in the
1950s (the subject of Dharma
Bums,
1958) was becoming a site of horror and delirium (tremens)
by the early 1960s when he revisited Big Sur and Rainbow
Canyon in search of peace of mind and inspiration for a ‘sea-poem’. He
is
haunted by the loss of self and connection to a genius loci
in the potentially sublime coastal vistas. To Brautigan
(A Confederate General
from Big Sur,
1964) the locus of Big Sur
has already become a fully textualized topos which can
only serve as a vehicle for pastiche and postmodern
parody of his modernist precursors’ anxieties. His text is haunted by
intertextual ghosts of Kerouac and Miller’s gender and racial values,
which are
spoofed and sent up by Brautigan’s unlikely crew of beatnik womanisers
and exploiters
of both land and native American (and Confederate!) heritages.
San
Francisco as a Road
Scholar’s Beginning and
End (Camelia Elias, Department of Languages and Intercultural Studies, Aalborg
University, Denmark) camelia@hum.aau.dk
Andrei Codrescu’s writing about California is a
mixture
of nostalgia, irony and a contextualization of place from the point of
view of
the born commentator. Having been involved in and now often looking
back at the
70s counterculture, Codrescu uses California,
and particularly San Francisco
to pass judgment on the state of American culture at large. Commenting
with
regularity on National Public Radio’s program “All Things Considered”,
Codrescu’s insights about the West Coast, often delivered in a deadpan
voice,
both haunt the places he describes and are themselves, in turn, haunted
by
these places. This paper examines the significance of place for a
writer such
as Codrescu, for whom detachment and closeness work simultaneously
towards
identifying what constitutes the literariness of place. Codrescu’s
eclectic
interests – editing influential poetry and fiction collections such the
series
“Exquisite Corpse”, appearing in the media, giving lectures in likely
and
unlikely places, making documentaries – and versatile writing – poetry,
fiction,
essays – form a reflection on the kind of eclecticism he sees
represented even
in places which experience a multicultural abandonment. This paper
argues that San Francisco,
for
Codrescu, constitutes the literariness of a place represented by
abundance and
abandonment in its intersections with “literal and metaphorical exiles
from the
status quos of society”.
Surfin’ California with
Whitman and The Beach Boys (Søren
Hattesen Balle, Department of Languages and Intercultural Studies, Aalborg University, Denmark) shb@hum.aau.dk
While
Whitman only wrote one poem about California in 1860, The
Beach Boys wrote and produced several songs about it in the years
between 1962
and 1966. Apart from the hundred years separating Whitman and The Beach
boys, a
cultural gap also exists between them. Whitman represents the high point of
American literary Romanticism,
whereas The Beach Boys became the sixties’ most well-known pop icon of
surf
music and surf culture. Nevertheless, their common interest in California as a
particular topographic image of the American West invites comparison
and
further study.
This paper aims
to make an intertextual reading of
Whitman’s “Facing West from California’s
Shores” and selected songs by The Beach Boys, arguing that the
Californian
beach functions as a cultural topos of an American locus
amoenus in the texts of
both Whitman and The Beach Boys.
Significantly, the belatedness with which The Beach Boys are haunted by
and
pick up on Whitman’s image of the Californian beach results in a kind
of
Bloomean misprision, in the sense that they (re)inscribe it in a
sixties’
context of youth and consumer culture. To Whitman, the shores of the
American
West coast incarnate the home of perennial homelessness, dislocating
any
conventional sense of home as a place of resting. One hundred years
later The
Beach Boys seem to invest the West coast with similar cultural values.
The
Californian beach is still a homely site for constantly being on the
move; only
this time it is invested with the ambience of youth and surf cultural
phenomena
such as leisure, Woody cars, surf boards, fast sex, dancing, etc. And
to top it
all, in a utopian vision of mass cultural imperialism the Californian
surf
culture is even imaged as extending itself transcontinentally and
transglobally, thus transplanting its home of eternal movement and time
off
worldwide.
Imagining
the California Native : a ghost in French travel accounts (1854-1915)
(Pierre-Louis Verron, Université
Paris-Sorbonne Paris IV and University of Ottawa)
plverron@hotmail.com
Representations
of California Indians in French travel accounts are one of the best
examples of
how travelers describe the elusive Other through their own cultural
references.
These natives were an enigma for the travelers who tried to figure out
their
true identity : were they actually Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew,
Polynesian,
Basque or descendants of Atlantis ?
Most
of the time, travelers just took a glimpse of
a few drunk Indian beggars on inner California
roads and extrapolated their experience. Whether it was because of
extinction
(Indian genocide by Anglo-Saxon Gold Rush pionners) or of assimilation
(Indians
becoming “civilized” or being perverted by white civilization and
disappearing
as “Indians”), there were no more “true” Indians in California for
them. Consequently, travelers
mostly wrote about this California Indian, who was no more, as an
imaginary and
often idealized relic of the Spanish missions era, recreating a
Californian
catholic utopia in their accounts.