Attitudes of regard: Dignity, mystery, and desire in Barry Lopez, Edward Abbey, and Annie Dillard.

• Main Author: Mallory, Kevin D.
• Other Authors: Jarraway, David
• Format: Thesis
• Language: unknown
• Published: University of Ottawa (Canada) 2000
• Subjects: Literature; American; Arctic; Lopez
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10393/9228; https://doi.org/10.20381/ruor-16209

In Arctic Dreams (1986), Barry Lopez explores the natural history as well as the human history of the Arctic. Using a Lacanian framework, my dissertation theorizes Lopez's "attitude of regard" and suggests that his imperative is to follow one's desire to discover new places, new scientific data, or new theories with vigilant awareness of the desire for finite understanding. The land is "mysterious," he argues, and if we approach it with an "uncalculating mind," we will recognize in our designs "stains" that render the familiar unfamiliar: animals behaving uncharacteristically, plants growing outside their microhabitats, people with inscrutable worldviews. Our ethical obligation is to give rein to our desire but also to regard the object of that desire, the land, with alertness, to see it as uncanny. The very source of the land's dignity is its "fundamental strangeness" which can never be exhausted by our desire. Within the framework of desire and dignity, therefore, my dissertation moves to a detailed analysis of Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire (1968) and Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1975), showing how each author comes to an ethic similar to Lopez's: Abbey through audacious adventure and anarchist polemics; Dillard through a lyrical and rapturous exploration of a world of fecundity, death, and mystery. Abbey calls for us to live within paradox, trying to comprehend a strange, beautiful, and dangerous earth despite the impossibility of ever knowing it. Dillard's narrator is traumatized by the realization that there are aspects of the world she inhabits that are beyond the understanding of science and language. She faces the world with openness, waiting for what could be rapture or terror. My dissertation concludes with a study of the interconnections of the ethic of this literature with the theoretical use of the term love by writers such as Frye, Kristeva, and Adorno. I then trace the affinity of this ethic with several contemporary movements in environmental thought: postmodern science, environmental pragmatism, and ecofeminism. The final section is an exploration of the potential contribution of contemporary nature writing to radical democracy as described by Z˘iz˘ek, Laclau and Mouffe, Rorty, and Connolley.