Literary soundscapes of the American West

Influenced by the continued growth of the interdisciplinary field of sound studies, my dissertation examines sounds and soundscapes in several prose works of Western American literature. Literary Soundscapes of the American West examines literary sounds-the collective, but varied, representations of sound, silence, and voice in literature-that represent intimate, affective, and always-changing relationships between people and places in the contemporary American West. I argue that Sherman Alexie, Cormac McCarthy, Terry Tempest Williams, and Charles Bowden use literary sounds to encourage-and potentially activate-what I call an audile mode of attention, which underscores sound as fundamental to people's understanding of place as well as their relationship to space generally. My analysis examines literary sounds that resonate in representations of specific Western locales: a Northwestern metropolis, the Southwestern redrock desert, and the U.S.-Mexican borderlands. Literary sounds do not operate identically in each of my primary texts. In fiction, such as Alexie's Indian Killer and McCarthy's The Crossing, representations of sound occupy an understated and subordinate position in the text. In contrast to these fictional works, Williams' Red and Bowden's Murder City demand that readers attend to sound because it represents local knowledge about pressing ethical concerns. In my analysis of contemporary Western literature, I employ critical regionalism, sound studies, and affect theory and argue that Alexie, McCarthy, Williams, and Bowden produce literary sounds that represent the tensions between various spatial scales (the personal, the local, the regional, and the global) in twentieth- and twenty-first century Western places. By combining the overlapping concerns of these three critical paradigms with my interest in representations of place in contemporary Western American literature, my dissertation evaluates the productive potential of excess in a selected body of literature. The particular excess that I consider here is made up of a relatively immaterial and transient form, sound and, to be more specific, sounds produced in literature. To say that sound, in everyday life or in literature, constitutes excess is not to suggest that it is not necessary to or always already resonant in our interpretations of and experiences with place and space. Rather, I argue that sounds produce excess by activating untapped potential and calling upon readers and listeners to identify in place those contingent truths and realities that escape our notice when we view place as a closed and contained form.

LITERARY SOUNDSCAPES OF THE AMERICAN WEST by Matthew William Driscoll A dissertation submitted to the faculty of The University of Utah in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English The University of Utah August 2014 Copyright © Matthew William Driscoll 2014 All Rights Reserved T h e Un i v e r s i t y o f Ut a h Gr a d u a t e S c h o o l STATEMENT OF DISSERTATION APPROVAL The dissertation of Matthew William Driscoll has been approved by the following supervisory committee members: Robert S. Tatum , Chair 1 May 2014 Date Approved Howard Horwitz , Member 1 May 2014 Date Approved Stuart Culver , Member 1 May 2014 Date Approved Lourdes Alberto , Member 1 May 2014 Date Approved Joseph Metz , Member 1 May 2014 Date Approved and by Barry Weller , Chair of the Department of English and by David Kieda, Dean of The Graduate School. ABSTRACT Influenced by the continued growth of the interdisciplinary field of sound studies, my dissertation examines sounds and soundscapes in several prose works of Western American literature. Literary Soundscapes of the American West examines literary sounds-the collective, but varied, representations of sound, silence, and voice in literature-that represent intimate, affective, and always-changing relationships between people and places in the contemporary American West. I argue that Sherman Alexie, Cormac McCarthy, Terry Tempest Williams, and Charles Bowden use literary sounds to encourage-and potentially activate-what I call an audile mode of attention, which underscores sound as fundamental to people's understanding of place as well as their relationship to space generally. My analysis examines literary sounds that resonate in representations of specific Western locales: a Northwestern metropolis, the Southwestern redrock desert, and the U.S.-Mexican borderlands. Literary sounds do not operate identically in each of my primary texts. In fiction, such as Alexie's Indian Killer and McCarthy's The Crossing, representations of sound occupy an understated and subordinate position in the text. In contrast to these fictional works, Williams' Red and Bowden's Murder City demand that readers attend to sound because it represents local knowledge about pressing ethical concerns. In my analysis of contemporary Western literature, I employ critical regionalism, iv sound studies, and affect theory and argue that Alexie, McCarthy, Williams, and Bowden produce literary sounds that represent the tensions between various spatial scales (the personal, the local, the regional, and the global) in twentieth- and twenty-first century Western places. By combining the overlapping concerns of these three critical paradigms with my interest in representations of place in contemporary Western American literature, my dissertation evaluates the productive potential of excess in a selected body of literature. The particular excess that I consider here is made up of a relatively immaterial and transient form, sound and, to be more specific, sounds produced in literature. To say that sound, in everyday life or in literature, constitutes excess is not to suggest that it is not necessary to or always already resonant in our interpretations of and experiences with place and space. Rather, I argue that sounds produce excess by activating untapped potential and calling upon readers and listeners to identify in place those contingent truths and realities that escape our notice when we view place as a closed and contained form. TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT....................................................................................................................... iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.............................................................................................. vii Chapters 1 INTRODUCTION: SOUND, SILENCE, AND LITERATURE OF SOUNDFUL PLACE ..........................................................................................................1 Re-Visioning a Global West by Listening................................................................... 6 Place, Space, and Critical Regionalism that Listens ................................................. 12 Literary Sounds and Soundscapes Defined ............................................................... 15 Sound Affects ............................................................................................................ 20 The Sounds of Silence in Print Literature ................................................................. 24 The Soundful West .................................................................................................... 26 2 DRUMBEATS: URBAN SPACE, NATIVE PLACE, AND TRANSNATIONAL HUB-MAKING IN SHERMAN ALEXIE'S INDIAN KILLER................................................................................................................36 Traditional Songs....................................................................................................... 39 The Sensuous Production of Place ............................................................................ 47 Absolutely Sweet Marie ............................................................................................ 52 The Internalized Noise of Imperialism...................................................................... 61 3 "A KNOWING THAT WAS ELECTRIC IN THE AIR": THE WOLF'S HOWL IN MCCARTHY'S THE CROSSING...................................................................70 The Discursive Construction of Howling Wolves..................................................... 75 Electric Wolf-Land .................................................................................................... 82 Boundaries "Without Regard"................................................................................... 86 The Shortsightedness of Ocular Ground ................................................................... 94 Minding the Gap........................................................................................................ 99 4 TERRY TEMPEST WILLIAMS' ORAL LITERATURE: "A SECRET PARTNERSHIP OF POSSIBILITY"..............................................................................107 Spurring Conversation through Story...................................................................... 107 Oral Reading and "The Reader's Sensorium"......................................................... 114 vi Grasping the Voice of the Land............................................................................... 121 The Potential of an Oral Aesthetic .......................................................................... 127 5 MAKING NOISE: BOWDEN'S NARRATIVE CHALLENGE TO THE SILENCE OF JUÁREZ ..........................................................................................135 The Syntax of Silence.............................................................................................. 140 A Different Kind of Show ....................................................................................... 146 Skittering and Flapping ........................................................................................... 151 Getting in the Car .................................................................................................... 157 To Act and Be Acted Upon ..................................................................................... 160 6 MODULATING KEYNOTES: THE INTENSIFICATION OF PLACE IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY...........................................................................164 Echoes of Local Place in Global Space ................................................................... 164 Sound the Alarm...................................................................................................... 167 The Dynamism of Sound in the Twenty-First Century West.................................. 170 WORKS CITED ..............................................................................................................178 vii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This dissertation's completion would not have been possible without the considerable time and attention provided by the members of my committee: Stephen Tatum, Howard Horwitz, Stuart Culver, Lourdes Alberto, and Joe Metz. I am indebted to each of you for sharing criticism and encouragement during various stages of this project. I am lucky to have you all at the table. I'd specifically like to thank Howard, whose attention to well-written prose has made me a better writer, and my dissertation chair Steve, who guided me on "a long, strange trip" through Western American literature and critical theory. I would also like to thank the Writing Program and the Department of English for funding my doctoral studies and providing me with the opportunity to teach courses at the university. On numerous occasions, the English department and the Graduate School funded my travel to conferences, and I am grateful for their support. The administrative staff in both the Department of English and the Writing Program deserves special mention. To Gerri Mackey, Janet Hough, Gail Sitton, Marc Hoenig, Polly Light, and Lisa Shaw, thanks for all that you do, both in and behind the scenes. The American West Center, Matt Basso, and Gregory Thompson provided me with an exciting opportunity to conduct oral history as part of the Special Collections' Outdoor Recreation Oral History project. I am grateful to Matt and Greg for their support viii and wisdom. During the 2011-12 academic year, I was awarded the Floyd O'Neil Scholarship in Western American Studies, and the research I performed as part of this scholarship contributed significantly to the thought in this dissertation. I have worked with a number of young scholars-and great people!-at the University of Utah who have left their mark on me and my work. First among them is Joshua Lenart, my first friend in Utah, who, intrigued by my grizzly beard, took it upon himself to introduce me to a few different Wests. Our conversations and adventures have been a valuable source of information and inspiration, and your technical expertise is etched into these pages. To April Wilder, thank you for your smooth wisdom and sharp wit, which taken together kept me thinking and smiling. Finally, Adele Bealer, Paul Wilson, and Matt Heimburger-my Western Literature Association companions- deserve special mention for engaging me in challenging conversations about our wide-ranging, shared areas of interest. I owe special thanks to a number of friends outside of the university, particularly Mike Wellman and Chris Cox, with whom I have ascended mountain cliffs and descended desert canyons. These physical outlets provided much-needed respite from my intellectual work, and I could not have asked for better company than yours. To Kima, your purrs and chirps are the most reassuring sounds I know. You were always beside me at the kitchen counter as I typed away at the keyboard. I'm not sure that I know how to write without you there. Finally, I am eternally grateful to my parents, who have supported me in countless ways. I doubted myself at various stages in this process, but you seemed never to doubt me. Your kindness, generosity, and love overwhelm me. CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: SOUND, SILENCE, AND LITERATURE OF SOUNDFUL PLACE None of the arts is entirely mute, many are unusually soundful despite their apparent silence… ~Douglas Kahn, Noise Water Meat1 He hurried on across the Los Muertos ranch, almost running, even putting his hands over his ears till he was out of hearing distance of that all but human distress. Not until he was beyond earshot did he pause, looking back, listening. The night had shut down again. For a moment the silence was profound, unbroken. ~Frank Norris, The Octopus2 Silence does not eliminate differences. Rather, it makes it possible not only for differences to emerge, but also for a universal identification in difference to take place. Silence is the site on which alterity and universality converge. ~María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, "Reading a Silence"3 Walking through the hills dividing the Quien Sabe and the Los Muertos ranches in California's San Joaquin Valley, Presley, an aspiring poet and the central character in Frank Norris' turn-of-the-century novel The Octopus: A Story of California (1901), observes a herd of sheep on the valley floor. From above, he sees the herd as "a compact, 2 solid, slowly moving mass, huge without form, like a thick-pressed growth of mushrooms, spreading out in all directions over the earth" (28). The mass is "without form," but Presley nonetheless perceives it as "compact" and "solid." His consolidation of a dispersed herd is an aesthetic gesture, Presley's attempt to conceptualize "hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of grey, rounded backs" as a unified, singular form (28). After consolidating the herd by sight, he listens to its "vague murmur," which is "confused, inarticulate, like the sound of very distant surf" (28).4 Although Presley groups the individual voices of sheep into a single "murmur," the "vague," "confused," and "inarticulate" sound is clearly anything but "solid" (28). More importantly, he lacks the skill or craftsmanship, as a listener and poet, to articulate-that is, to distinguish and particularize-the surf-like, flow of sound. At first glance, the passage seems to set up a dichotomy between sight and sound, wherein the latter troubles Presley's anthropomorphic aesthetic, his intent to meld disparate nonhuman parts into a form-a pastoral landscape-familiar to the westward-moving Euro-American settlers of the nineteenth century.5 Though Presley listens closely, sound contributes little to his conscious efforts to formalize the landscape. To his ears, the vocalizations of sheep create sound without form rather than communicating meaning. Moreover, the murmur confuses his sense of distance from the sheep, as it seems "like the sound of very distant surf" (28). Sound is not only less informative than sight, but it also disorients Presley, interfering with his attempt to locate himself in relation to the landscape and the forms that occupy it. The "murmur" of the herd should be neither more nor less "vague," "confused," or "inarticulate" to Presley's ears than the formless mass of sheep bodies is to his eyes, yet Norris' descriptions suggest that Presley 3 attributes intelligibility to sight that he does not afford sound (28). Troubling this apparent dichotomy, however, Norris employs similes in his descriptions of both sight and sound that indicate the persistence of Presley's struggle to organize the scene. The herd spreads before his eyes "like a thick-pressed growth of mushrooms," this simile implying the unpredictable, rhizomatic movement and expansion of fungus (the herd) that appears "thick-pressed," consolidated, on the surface of the ground (28). The possibility of microscopic and indecipherable movement troubles Presley's interpretation of the herd as "compact" and "solid," and he concedes that the mass is "without form" even as he assigns it formal distinction (28). The murmur is similarly formless, but Presley suspects that he cannot systematize the fluid sounding. The sound of the herd, "like the sound of very distant surf," is repetitious, a stream of vocalizations that he can neither dissect nor contain, prompting him to interpret sound as not only formless but also "inarticulate" (28). With its attention to that which escapes articulation, this passage from the opening chapter of The Octopus bears significantly on some of the central tensions present in works of American literature that represent place on the local and regional scales. To articulate place as local or regional, most writers (Norris certainly among them) attempt to draw relations or establish connections between heterogeneous elements in place, constructing form through creative labor. Through such efforts, some writers contain the differences and still the dynamic and unpredictable interactions that occur within lived-in places. Indeed, they appear to do so for Presley, who desires the bodies and vocalizations of sheep to produce a cohesive form and communicate a singular message. Yet, the passage's account of inarticulate sheep sounding highlights the rupture to formal 4 singularity that transpires when a writer, Presley or Norris, represents a dynamic place, already overflowing with meaning prior to human mediation. This sounding, perceived by Presley as distant, introduces a stream of data (here acoustic information) unaccounted for by vision that unsettles "his West," a local and regional place he plans to articulate in verse (44). In recent years, western studies scholars have adopted critical regionalism to examine, as Neil Campbell suggests, "westness as a multifaceted, evolving discursive formation constantly spilling out, reforming, splitting, and connecting" (22).6 According to Campbell, the practice of critical regionalism in western studies requires readers to attend closely to the "outside" because it provides "a strategy for opening up and scrutinizing established ideologies and languages, canonical practices and texts, resilient and official mythologies" (14). In my dissertation, the collective, but varied, representations of sound, silence, and voice that I call literary sounds "open up" and connect representations of the West as local or regional to that which is outside writers', or their characters', more rooted visions of place (14). The western writers I examine in this dissertation represent sounds that flow into local and regional places from the outside as well as sounds that spill over from the inside. Using literary sounds, these writers examine, and entice their readers to examine, the mobile and transformative relationships between people and place in several distinctive western places: Sherman Alexie's Seattle (an urban West), Cormac McCarthy's U.S.-Mexican borderlands (a borderlands West), Terry Tempest Williams' redrock desert (an erotic natural West), and Charles Bowden's Juárez (a violent, urban borderlands West).7 Transformative relationships with and in place begin on the most local scale, the body and consciousness of a single person (or 5 animal), where experience with sound engenders the acceleration or stagnation of affective bonds between people and place. As Mary Pat Brady explains in Extinct Lands, Temporal Geographies, Interactions with space are not merely schematic but also highly affective; places are felt and experienced, and the processes producing space therefore also shape feelings and experiences. (8) Literary Soundscapes of the American West listens to and interprets literary sounds from texts set in the contemporary West, and produced nearly a century after Norris' novel in order to argue that sound is not, as Presley perceives, "inarticulate" (Norris 28). When we listen closely, literary sounds communicate much about the tensions between various spatial scales in western writers' representations of place. Most writers, particularly those who I address in the pages that follow, are adept at interrogating the often-ambiguous contents of sound, its potential at turns to situate people in place and disorient them. I dispute the commonly held belief that, as sound theorists Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter put it, "the language for describing sounds is weak and inadequate" (6). Their claim is based on the argument that "modern culture" is "fundamentally oriented toward visual communications" and, as a consequence, "has little appreciation for the emotional importance of hearing, and thus attaches little value to the art of auditory spatial awareness" (6). As my reading of the opening chapter of The Octopus indicates, vision performs a fundamental and primary, albeit somewhat imperialistic, role in Presley's attempt to conceptualize place, while sound disturbs his efforts. The primacy of vision does not, however, necessitate the ineffectuality of sound, or the inadequacy of language to describe it.8 In recent decades, in the interdisciplinary field of sound studies, scholars have 6 developed an increasingly proficient and artful vocabulary to discuss the ways people and animals use sound to sense and navigate space. Equally important for my purposes, writers have long used sound to imagine, create, and represent relationships between people and places. The lack of "appreciation" for sound and its important role in spatial awareness, when it exists, is not a consequence of "weak and inadequate" language but rather the potential of sound to interrupt or disturb particular visions of place (Blesser and Salter 6). Here, my understanding of sound's unsettling potential contrasts with Roland Barthes' argument that "listening is that preliminary attention which permits intercepting whatever might disturb the territorial system; it is a mode of defense against surprise" (247). Sound often surprises listeners, rather than providing them with "a mode of defense" against it (247). By producing surprise, sound provokes revision-a process that requires people to amend continuously their visions of and relationships with places. Re-Visioning a Global West by Listening Western writers encounter a number of "established ideologies," "canonical practices," and "resilient and official mythologies" as they attempt to revise their own and their readers' visions of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century American West (Campbell 14). Central among them is the grid, a geographical tool and strategy used to organize the West, its variegated places, and its diverse cultures and peoples. Dating the "power of the grid as a tool of mapping empire" in the western United States to President Jefferson's 1785 Land Ordinance, Neil Campbell explains that the grid system of mapping helped to generate assumptions "about possession built around the visual control gridding appears to supply" (10). The grid, he argues, operates in policy, cultural 7 production, and our imagination as "a metaphor for contained, boundaried ways of thinking" (9).9 In the American West, the influence of the grid is particularly resonant, for "one cannot think of the West as rural or urban space without visualizing the powerful checkerboard symmetries of the meshlike grid as it arrests and orders space" (9). Campbell's assessment of the grid as an inherently visual and implicitly imperialistic "way of thinking" bears out in Presley's literary endeavors at the start of The Octopus (9). Presley, who is trying to write an epic poem, the "great poem of the West," acknowledges that the project's success depends on his ability "to get back to that first clear-eyed view of things," a transcendental vision free of abstractions (Norris 38). Seemingly unaware of his naïve romanticism, not to mention the colonialist or imperialist dimensions of such a vision, he understands sight as productive of clear-eyed, innocent neutrality. To achieve a "clear-eyed view" and write his epic poem, Presley thinks that he must watch "his West…unrolling there before the eye of his mind" (37). On his walks through the landscape, he looks to gain an elevated vantage point from which to observe "the open, heat-scourged round of desert; the mesa, like a vast altar, shimmering purple in the royal sunset; the still, gigantic mountains, heaving into the sky from out of the cañons" (37). There, "before the eye of his mind," an "open" and "still" landscape unfolds, and Presley tries to achieve poetic mastery of the scene: "As from a pinnacle, Presley…dominated the entire country" (42). In moments of silence, as when "a faint breath of wind out of the south passed slowly over the levels of the baked and empty earth, accentuating the silence, marking off the stillness," Presley is confident in his vision of the West (44). His perception of the "faint breath of wind" differs markedly from his earlier encounter with the murmuring herd, as here sound is dialectically related 8 to silence. Silence creates space wherein, like the wind, Presley is capable of "accentuating" and "marking off" an empty and still earth. In such tranquil moments, he feels "a sudden uplift, a sense of exhilaration, of physical exultation," and "as from a point high above the world, he [seems] to dominate a universe, a whole order of things" (44). The poet's domination of the country is quickly interrupted, however, by sounds that disturb his pastoral vision of a late nineteenth-century California landscape. Just as he is grasping "his song in all its entity," there is a sudden "interruption" (46). Nearby, on the border of the Los Muertos ranch, a locomotive approaches and "[shoots] by in a sudden crash of confused thunder; filling the night with a terrific clamour of its iron hoof" (46). Again, Norris uses the word "confused" to describe Presley's perception of sound; sound is confusing because it disturbs his vision of the landscape and troubles the grid he has been constructing (46). It causes the earth, a moment before serenely "still," to "quiver" (46). As the "thunder" of the train recedes, another sound replaces it: …the moment the noise of the engine lapsed, Presley-about to start forward again-was conscious of a confusion of lamentable sounds that rose into the night from out of the engine's wake. Prolonged cries of agony, sobbing wails of infinite pain, heart-rending, pitiful. (47) A band of sheep, separate from the "mass" Presley observed earlier, has been struck by the Pacific & Southwestern Railroad's locomotive (28). In the immediate aftermath of the collision, Presley listens to the "confusion of lamentable sounds" (47). These sounds have a remarkable effect on Presley's movements. He is "about to start forward again" when the "cries of agony" and "sobbing wails of infinite pain" freeze his steps (47). The sounds of agony and pain communicate a "pathos" that is, according to the narrator, "beyond expression" (47). Unable to endure the cries and wails of the sheep, Presley 9 flees the scene. Norris' representation of Presley's flight highlights the commanding effect that sounds have on his relationship to place on the local scale: He hurried on across the Los Muertos ranch, almost running, even putting his hands over his ears till he was out of hearing distance of that all but human distress. Not until he was beyond earshot did he pause, looking back, listening. The night had shut down again. For a moment the silence was profound, unbroken. (48) Presley regains control of his motions and emotions only after he is "out of hearing distance" and "beyond earshot," at which point, he looks back and listens (48). This moment bears close scrutiny, for Presley's listening follows his attempt to outrun sound, begging the question: is he really listening? In truth, when he encounters sounds that intrude on his peaceful walk, Presley tries to avoid listening, "even putting his hands over his ears," as if he is only willing to listen when sound supports a particular kind of vision of the landscape (48). Presley finds silence "profound" because it upholds "the feeling of absolute peace and quiet and security and untroubled happiness and content" (48) that he hopes to experience in the California countryside, a feeling he imagines will inspire "his West, his thundering progression of hexameters" (44). As the novel continues, forced repeatedly to encounter sounds that disturb quiet meditation in otherwise bucolic settings, Presley learns that he cannot maintain a single "clear-eyed view" of the West, that any moment of profound silence will shortly be shattered by sounds that demonstrate turbulent and unpredictable motion in the landscape (38). The literary sounds of The Octopus-the sheep's murmuring and wailing, a gentle inland breeze that accentuates silence, and the thunder of the railroad-set Norris' West in motion, highlighting interactions between various bodies that here result in conflict rather than producing a 10 coherent form, the "West" of Presley's imagination (44). This mobile or, as Neil Campbell would call it, rhizomatic West is "contested" and "unfinished" (Campbell 43), constituted as much from outside the region-by, for instance, the P & SW railroad or the global trade in wheat-as from inside it. In separate readings of The Octopus, Russ Castronovo and Hsuan Hsu attend to Norris' representation of a mobile West in relation to the process of globalization at the turn-of-the-century. Norris' conceptualization of globalization, in their view, shapes his "aesthetic formalism" in a novel, where "a single, perfect form" (the globe) ultimately overwrites local and regional places and the experiences that take place there (Castronovo 159). Ultimately, according to Castronovo and Hsu, Norris' global aesthetic hinges on connections-between wheat fields in Tulare County and markets in the Far East-that the railroad and shipping fleets help to establish. Assessing the author's relegation of the local and regional to the global, Hsu observes, Norris inserts regionalist aesthetics into an emotionally charged epic of globalization and dramatizes how imperialism and international commerce contribute to the ongoing transformations of a particular wheat-growing region. The novel thus bears out Russ Castronovo's suggestion that Norris's sense of aesthetic form originates not in local communities, but in an expansive and potentially fascist globalism. (44) Castronovo suggests that globalization "has always structured aesthetics," specifically "formalism's ideal of unity and balance" (Castronovo 178). This "criteria of unity" in "traditional aesthetics," evident in Presley's vision of a pastoral California landscape, supplies "the logic of expanding markets" in Norris' novel, where in the global market for wheat "excess meets up with scarcity, famine solves the problem of overproduction, and West folds into East in a series of transnational flows" (178). According to this credible reading of The Octopus, Norris represents local, regional, and hemispheric 11 places as structured by globalization and the transnational "flows" of capital (178). In this relationship, "the ranch" becomes "merely part of an enormous whole, a unit in the vast agglomeration of wheat land, the whole world round, feeling the effects of causes thousands of miles distant-a drought on the prairies of Dakota, a rain on the plains of India, a frost on the Russian steppes, a hot wind on the llanos of the Argentine" (Norris 51). This representation of the Los Muertos ranch hints at the vulnerability of local places within a top-down system of globalization. Yet, the passages from Chapter 1 of the novel, scarcely attended to by Castronovo and Hsu, confirm, supplement, and trouble their interpretation of Norris' fascist, global aesthetic. These earlier passages highlight Presley's desire for formal congruency alongside his suspicion that he cannot systematically contain all forms. Sound performs a central function in Norris' representation of place as at once uncomfortably personal, local, regional, and global. Like the "distant surf," sound flows out and spills over, intensifying Presley's experience in a heterogeneous local (the ranchlands of San Joaquin Valley) and regional (California) place that he cannot satisfactorily organize or conceptualize (28). As a result of this intensification, Presley never discovers the western utopia that he imagines in the first chapter of the novel. In Unsettling the Literary West: Authenticity and Authorship, Nathaniel Lewis observes that "both western literature and its criticism" frequently "take on a utopian character, not only because they sometimes present the West as a ‘garden' or Eden but also because of a teleological sense of arrived-at-understanding" (245). To contest this "utopian character" and the "teleological sense of arrived-at-understanding" that it produces, Lewis identifies numerous disturbing and unsettling moments in western 12 literature that suggest "no common locus, no True West" exists (246). As a consequence, readers of western literature should not "arrive at" a singular understanding or vision of the region; rather, they should encounter a West, or many Wests, in a state of continuous flux (246). According to Lewis, readers of western literature should "resist pedagogical tradition, authorial direction, and cultural instruction" (243) in order to avoid treating it as "a strangely static body, without energy or purpose or mystery" (2). Scholars, he suggests, should "start listening to literature" (243). I take Lewis' recommendation to "start listening" quite literally here, finding in the literary sounds and soundscapes of the American West representations of places that show writers and their characters adapting their understanding of the West according to the sounds, silences, and voices they hear (243). If we arrive at a static understanding of the region, or any place for that matter, then we are no longer listening. Sounds repeatedly introduce new information that should supplement and inform what we know, or thought we knew, about places in the American West and our relationships with them. Place, Space, and Critical Regionalism that Listens In his concise Place: A Short Introduction, social and cultural geographer Timothy Creswell provides a useful overview of the ways geographers and philosophers have thought of the terms place and space over the course of the last several decades. Although space is inseparable from place, particularly in our attempts to define the terms, in general it "has been seen" by various geographers "in distinction to place as a realm without meaning-as a ‘fact of life' which, like time, produces the basic coordinates of human life" (10). Spaces, Creswell suggests, are often conceived in terms of geometry; 13 they have "areas and volumes" (8).10 In contrast, places are "spaces which people have made meaningful" and become "attached to in one way or another" (7). In this sense, to understand places, we must articulate their meaning and examine, particularize, and connect the various energies, encounters, and interactions that "attach" us to them (7). Creswell surveys the evolution of the term place across competing paradigms in the field of geography, beginning with regional geography in the 1960s, which commonly represented place by "reveling in the particular" and "drawing boundaries" (16). He concludes his survey of the field by examining the critical human/cultural geography of the 1990s and 2000s, by which scholars like David Harvey, Doreen Massey, and Edward Soja conceive of place as "an event marked by openness and change rather than boundedness and permanence" (40). Often explicit in these latter analyses of place are the global flows of capital and "the process of uneven [geographical] development across the globe" (26). Over the course of the last couple of decades, the field of western studies has dramatically shifted its attention toward the work of critical human/cultural geographers so as to address, Krista Comer explains, the "complex ongoing interpretive questions" about place-making "that get ever more layered in an era of globalization and the transnational travel of culture" ("Assessing the Postwestern" 4).11 As Comer suggests in "Everyday Regionalisms in Contemporary Critical Practice," this redirected focus has led a number of western scholars to adopt "expansive, flexible interdisciplinary methodologies" (30). Arguably, nowhere is the field's recent interdisciplinary flexibility more apparent than in its adoption of critical regionalism, a theoretical paradigm born in architectural studies.12 In The Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational, 14 Global Media Age, Neil Campbell reviews "the genealogy of critical regionalism as an architectural concept" en route to his argument that an expanded critical regionalism in western studies "enables us to comprehend the West as a complex process…continually being constructed, deconstructed, and reconstructed in multiple spaces" (44). The "reframed region/regionalism" he extends through this paradigm "is an international, living mix of voices, uncontained, problematic, contradictory-a series of border discourses that articulates the West as it works inward and outward" (44). His "redefinition of regionalism" refuses "to get to the border (of region or nation) and turn back, to simply close up on itself from the wider world beyond" (44). A number of key terms in Campbell's account of western critical regionalism speak directly to Presley's experience with place, space made meaningful through articulation. A local and regional place is a "living mix of voices"-of sheep, of wind, of locomotives, of Presley himself-that is "uncontained, problematic, contradictory" despite the protagonist's best efforts to contain place through boundaried ways of thinking (44). When Presley turns tail and runs from the "sobbing wails" of injured sheep (Norris 47), he effectively reaches a conceptual "border," his predetermined notion of the region, and "turns back," seeking the comfort of his romantic vision (Campbell 44). Norris' novel demonstrates the ways of thinking that Campbell's redefinition of region, via critical regionalism, is up against-a conservative tendency to view place (on any spatial scale) as a firmly bounded structure or construct that keeps out what western writer Charles Bowden calls "the dreaded outside" (29).13 Though Norris accommodates a singular conception of place, region, and globe unified through the wheat trade, his representations of sounds rupture the borders he and his protagonist attempt to construct. 15 In like manner, literary sounds perform a central role in rupturing spatial borders and boundaries in the contemporary western texts I examine. Literary Sounds and Soundscapes Defined Literary sounds are a set of narrative practices that writers use to represent sound as well as to provoke audible performance of written text by readers. These practices potentially make reading literature a soundful experience in which, as J. Edward Chamberlain suggests of the stories of George Laforme, "words [are] not about an event; they [are] the event" (115).14 Writers' representations of sounds take the form of elaborate, networked descriptions rather than merely relying on rhetorical devices like onomatopoeia. Onomatopoeia is a device by which writers attempt to imitate sounds by drawing readers' attention to their phonic structure. But descriptions of sound, a general class of literary sounds, do not necessarily serve mimetic purposes. Literary sounds may often begin when writers employ onomatopoeia, but descriptions of sounds subsequently situate specific sounds within broader spatial contexts (beyond the sounds' sources) and emphasize their contact with other bodies within a soundscape. In Thoreau's Walden, for example, the "Hoo hoo hoo, hoorer hoo" of a hooting owl is a "sound suited to swamps and twilight woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and undeveloped nature which men have not recognized" (118-19). Attentive to the soundscape in which this particular sound is located, Thoreau follows his use of onomatopoeia with a description that extends outward from the owl to a place "where the single spruce stands hung with usnea lichens, and small hawks circulate above, and the chickadee lisps amid the evergreens, and the partridge and rabbit skulk beneath" (119). 16 Seeming to interact with, if not react to, the owl, a "different race of creatures awakes to express the meaning of Nature there" (119). A literary sound, in this example, begins with a discrete sound from a singular source, but as with the other examples we will encounter over the course of this dissertation, it provokes interactions that are ultimately more significant to the narrative than the sound itself. A literary sound is never ultimately discrete; instead, it is but one among many sounds that combine and interact in a literary soundscape, a narrative assemblage of sonic events. This term, soundscape, has been defined in multiple ways since R. Murray Schafer popularized it in the 1970s. In his landmark work The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (1977), Schafer argues that a "soundscape consists of events heard not objects seen" (8). For Schafer, a soundscape is an assemblage of "events heard," similar to a musical composition, a relatively organized mass in which some sounds fit and others do not (8). Due in part to his environmentalist ethos, he was quite preoccupied with distinguishing between healthy, or hi-fi, soundscapes and polluted, or lo-fi, soundscapes, which he often associated with twentieth-century urban spaces. Thus, soundscapes have somewhat rigid boundaries for Schafer. A number of scholars have since taken Schafer to task for his definition and application of the term. Jean-Francois Augoyard and Henry Torgue, for instance, note that his "application of the criteria of clarity and precision discredits a number of urban situations impregnated with blurred and hazy (not to say uproarious) sound environments" (7). Because of the rigidity of Schafer's distinctions, Augoyard and Torgue question "whether, other than for the fields of aesthetic analysis, creation, and conservation, the use of the term soundscape remains useful and pertinent" (7). 17 Concerned principally with "aesthetic analysis," my work keeps the term in play, while also attempting to loosen the boundaries of soundscapes so that they refer more broadly to sound environments where individual literary sounds are continuously changing and interacting with others, in the process producing mobile literary soundscapes (7). Literary soundscapes show that the whole, in fact, is never complete, but is instead repeatedly ruptured as individual parts interact. By introducing the idea of acoustic communities, Barry Truax, whose research is influenced by Schafer, provides a noteworthy update to the discourse on soundscapes: The acoustic community may be defined as any soundscape in which acoustic information plays a pervasive role in the lives of the inhabitants (no matter how the commonality of such people is understood). Therefore, the boundary of the community is arbitrary and may be as small as a room of people, a home or building, or as large as an urban community, a broadcast area, or any other system of electroacoustic communication. In short, it is any system within which acoustic information is exchanged. (66) In my analysis, literary soundscapes are "systems" with "arbitrary" boundaries (66). Acoustic information is "exchanged" over the course of a text; literary sounds interact with each other to produce a system, community, or soundscape that is not always coherent (66). In part, soundscapes lack coherence due to the blurriness of their edges, borders, and boundaries. Phenomenologically, sound has an interesting relationship to boundaries. In Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?, Blesser and Salter suggest that "for hearing, volume or area remains primary, and boundaries are secondary," while "for vision, the opposite is true" (21).15 For example, whereas a viewer can see the physical border between the United States and Mexico in El Paso-Juárez and San Diego-Tijuana, no corresponding auditory boundary exists between the nations. Sounds flow across the voluminous boundaries separating the U.S. and Mexico in ways that reflect the everyday, 18 historical movement of bodies across the border. Standing at the wall that divides the nations, listeners can hear sounds from both sides of the border, and these sounds are virtually indistinguishable: traffic moving north-south-east-west and coughing exhaust fumes, people speaking English and Spanish, birds squawking, dogs barking. In contrast, to look at the other side (el otro lado) is to distinguish there from here (este lado), even when what viewers see there is quite similar to what they see here. Sound, in contrast, does not mind borders but instead traverses them. Physical and psychological borders imposed by nation-states and other ideologies do not, and perhaps cannot, obstruct the passage of sound, which courses through the air in all directions. The potential of sound to cross borders freely is evident in another class of literary sounds, readers' realization of text as sound through vocalized reading. Through formal analysis of literary texts that fundamentally rely on sonic rhetorical devices, specifically Terry Tempest Williams' Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert, I argue that in the act of reading aloud the interactions between written text and readers' bodies challenge the oral-literate binary, a historical as well as cultural boundary posited by the likes of Walter Ong and Marshall McLuhan. Though reading today may at first appear to be principally a visual activity, many prose writers attempt to intensify its aural and oral potential by employing rhetorical devices that accent the latent sounds of written text. Repetition, alliteration, consonance, and assonance create textual rhythms that provoke readers to vocalize written text, to read aloud so as to embody language. This embodiment engenders affective responses; by reading aloud, we literally feel written text in and around our throats, tongues, mouths, and facial tissues. In Understanding Media: The Extension of Man, McLuhan argues that "the 19 medium is the message," which is to say that "the personal and social consequences of any medium-that is, of any extension of ourselves-result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology" (7). He suggests that technologies reorganize the senses so that, for instance, when print was introduced humankind entered an age that privileged and extended the visual sense. I find it difficult to argue with McLuhan that technologies influence an age or era and its primary modes of sensory perception. However, the medium of print, or written discourse, does not demand the authority or ascendency of the visual sense. As Richard Cullen Rath notes, "The visible word grew in importance not by competing with the spoken word but by augmenting it" (177). Rath is suggesting that the expansion of written discourse could never eliminate the usefulness of the spoken word, for "distinctive auditory publics" would exist regardless of, if not sometimes as a response to, the stream of writing in the age of press (177). The growth of writing is instead an outgrowth and expansion of the spoken word, an opportunity to listen without a speaker present before us. Throughout the development of silent reading, many readers have continued to vocalize written texts or tell stories aloud as a standard practice, indicating that there has never been a clear break between oral and literate cultures, nor between the auditory and visual senses. Nevertheless, in general, readers have assimilated, to varying degrees, the notion that our ears and mouths are somehow shut when we read. As Sarah Banet-Weiser notes in the preface to a special issue of American Quarterly devoted to sound studies, "when we read, we do not always hear, or are not invited to actively engage aural perception" (vi). Echoing Banet-Weisner, Rath suggests that the readers of his book, How Early 20 America Sounded, must make concerted efforts to "hear the page as well as see it" (x). He argues that the "act of synaesthesia," a visual and aural/oral reading practice, "is only possible to the extent that your auditory imagination is in working order" (x). The writers I examine in this dissertation, to my ears, quite deliberately invite readers to discover in the medium of literature the soundscapes of the real and imagined American West. By attending to literary soundscapes, I argue, we intensify the reading experience and our encounter with the representational places of western literature. Sound Affects Literature, the object of literary analysis, often relies explicitly on descriptions of sound in its efforts to construct character, setting, and plot as well as to create what Raymond Williams calls a "structure of feeling," a tightly-woven association between aesthetics and historical moments and places (132).16 If much literature, specifically literature overtly concerned with place and space, as is Western American literature, depends upon sound, why do trained readers tend to privilege descriptions of images? The visual inclination of many critics, I argue, reflects a more general cultural desire to map place and space as if they are fixed and static entities-a practice that has been enacted, both inside and outside of academia, through gridding and the drawing of boundaries. Such orderly mappings provide structure that is often necessary for people as they operate within and across place and space, but they also serve autocratic purposes, keeping out undesirable threats to a place's order. Sound sometimes advances human attempts to map place and space in an orderly fashion. According to Blesser and Salter, like sight, sound helps people to measure 21 space: "When our ability to decode spatial attributes is sufficiently developed using a wide range of acoustic cues, we can readily visualize objects and spatial geometry: we can ‘see' with our ears" (2). At the outset of Spaces Speak, Are You Listening?, they present space as a set of three-dimensional, geometrical relationships between surfaces and solids.17 People develop spatial awareness, the ability to measure and survey space, in order to "decode" these relationships and navigate space (2). By claiming "we can ‘see' with our ears" (2) or "aurally visualize spatial geometry" (4), Blesser and Salter seem to imply that sound is useful to spatial awareness insofar as it helps people "see" and "visualize" the formal arrangement of space. Yet, when they define "auditory spatial awareness," they distinguish the effects produced by sound from those produced by sight: "Auditory awareness means that there is some neurological reaction to spatial acoustics, including both conscious and unconscious changes to the listener's body state" (14). Sounds produce changes to the body state of the listener. Moreover, because they are "the result of dynamic action, periodic vibrations, sudden impacts, or oscillatory resonances," sounds demonstrate that the formal arrangement of space is itself changing (15). The changes to the body state of the listener are, in effect, physiological and psychological responses to the action and motion transpiring in space. My dissertation suggests that the sounds and soundscapes of several Western American writers create dynamic, active, and mobile places that a primarily visual aesthetic does not. In Sherman Alexie's Indian Killer, Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing, Terry Tempest Williams' Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert, and Charles Bowden's Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields, literary sounds and soundscapes challenge the geometrical and geographical mapping of 22 space engendered by vision. These writers use literary sounds to construct affective geographies, mapping places that structure and are structured by people's (or characters') everyday interactions with their environments.18 In their production of affective geographies, these writers consider the effects of increasing or decreasing interactions between bodies in Western places. Importantly, in affect theory, bodies are inseparable from mental processes, namely the processing of experiences, emotions, and feelings. As we have seen in The Octopus, for example, Presley responds to the wailing sheep by fleeing the scene, but the motion of his body corresponds to a change in mood. According to Nigel Thrift, the term "affect" refers to knowledge that "proceeds in parallel with the body's physical encounters, out of interaction" (61). This knowledge resonates on the surface of the body as the perceiving mind internalizes the information. The effect of this process is not only a change to the body state of a perceiver but also a change in consciousness. As Antonio Negri explains in "What Affects Are Good For," affects "refer equally to the body and the mind" and "involve both reason and the passions" (108). Scholars have employed the term affect to describe emotions in a general sense, embodied responses to events, and libidinal drives, but drawing from Deleuze's reading of Spinoza, I use the term affect to address interactions in and with place that produce changes in body and mind.19 Affect manifests in the works I analyze when these interactions transform places or people's understanding of them. I classify the western places of Alexie, McCarthy, Williams, and Bowden as affective geographies because- due largely to the effects of sound-place continuously transforms rather than remaining static over the course of their texts. 23 Such transformation is not inherently virtuous. As Comer explains in "Assessing the Postwestern," deterritorialization-a Deleuzian transformation of space produced in part by affective relations-is not necessarily "a cause for celebration" as "the globalist flows that are a fact of life under late capitalism may require of the subject a disembedded relation to place that is anything but freely chosen" (12). In Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, Deleuze observes that Spinoza categorizes affective relations as good or bad according to the degree or intensity of the changes they produce: The good is when a body directly compounds its relation with ours, and, with all or part of its power, increases ours…the bad is when a body decomposes our body's relation, although it still combines with our parts, but in ways that do not correspond to our essence, as when a poison breaks down the blood. (22) Deleuze argues that Spinoza's "good and bad" are not so much dichotomous ethical categories as points on an affective continuum (22). As I consider affective geographies in contemporary western literature, I am more concerned with the variable intensification of relations between Wests and Westerners than with any fixed and final classification of places, people, and animals in the West. Sound stirs interactions between bodies and places in literature, and affective geographies of variable intensity are the products of these interactions. The intensity of interaction within a place determines the shape place takes as well as people's relationship to it. In intensely interactive places, people must continuously adapt their relationships with place or else, like Presley, be shocked when they discover that place does not conform to their fantasies. Because interactions intensify relationships, people can utilize them to create collectives or networks that potentially resist the hegemonic organization of place from the top-down by imperialism or globalization. Yet, as Thrift suggests, affect not only generates a "harnessing of the talent of transformation," 24 providing a means by which people reconstruct space for libratory and progressive purposes, but also "a whole new means of manipulation by the powerful" (58). In other words, affect activates new forms of agency as well as different means of control and domination. By associating particular sounds with various interactions between people and places in the West, writers accent people's active production of place alongside their periodic inability to control it. These works represent sound as an affective register that people use to navigate places in the West, identifying opportunities and traps for which strictly rational accounts of space do not prepare them. The Sounds of Silence in Print Literature Literature, unlike storytelling, is centrally visual. The very act of reading begins with the visualization of letters, words, sentences, and pages of text. Textual signifiers provoke further visualization, as readers reproduce a text's setting, characters, and events in their minds' eye. Certainly, reading is also tactile, a reality made all-the-more tangible in the medium of Braille, whereby the visually impaired feel text, rather than see it. The significance of sound and hearing to contemporary reading practices is comparatively more difficult to define than that of sight and touch, and as a consequence, literary analysis rarely attends to sound to the extent that it does to vision. In other words, the primary cognitive and sensory modes we use to consume literature often constrain our analysis of potentialities less immediately apparent in the form of literature itself. Although literature is indebted to oral traditions and the voicing of stories, its consumption has become primarily silent. The commercialization of literature in the nineteenth century granted the masses access to literary texts-with limitations, of 25 course-and subsequently literature was privately and silently consumed, rather than publicly and vocally shared.20 Today, young readers begin by reading and hearing texts aloud, but they then mature into adolescents and adults who internalize the written word rather than voice it. Many readers perform internal auditions of literary texts, pronouncing and pacing words and sentences without ever opening their mouths. Some readers quietly lip text, occasionally allowing their vocalized reading to be heard in public places. In public, such displays may invite derision and the rolling-of-eyes, as if reading aloud to oneself betrays the silence required of mature reading. The silencing of reading, as Garrett Stewart suggests in Reading Voices, affects readers' recognition of the latent, auditory potential of written texts. Stewart argues that literature generally "disallows" voiced reading, and in cases when "deviant voicing" occurs, "no one would or could in the ordinary sense ‘read' that way often or for so long…and still call it reading" (27). This observation, he notes, exposes "the alternating resistances that get in the way of reading, the energies that reading as we know it must for the most part override" (27). Attention to sound, silence, and voice in the practice of reading, I argue, intensifies our experience with literature, producing an energy that exceeds the formal structures of written discourse. Literary Soundscapes of the American West attempts to reenergize the auditory imagination, in the process of reading as well as more generally in everyday life. Readers can and should pay closer attention to descriptions of sound and the rhythms of prose, which affect their experience with a text and the places it represents. Trained for years in silent reading, they must make concerted efforts to shift sound from a peripheral position, momentarily at least, to the center of their attention. 26 Such efforts are well worth our while. In the twenty-first century, we are exposed to, and sometimes overwhelmed by, a diverse array of sounds, communicating various messages, many of which we but faintly notice. The fluctuating volume of twenty-first-century life requires listeners to be critically aware of when, where, why, and how sounds affect them.21 In recent decades, advancements in recording technologies have catalyzed interesting research into acoustic phenomena. A number of these studies have preserved for historical record natural soundscapes threatened by the continued development of wild spaces. These auditory records assign explanatory as well as aesthetic value to sound, in the process marking it as central to our interpretations of place and space. I argue that readers should look to literary texts as additional records of the sounds that resonate in particular places at particular times. Literature charts the effects of sounds on listeners, highlighting variable historical and imaginary attitudes about their significance. The Soundful West In her 2002 essay "Reading a Silence: The ‘Indian' in the Era of Zapatismo," María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo addresses the production of excess meaning in relation to an indigenous community's performance of silence. She first uses the term excess to refute the idea that "the colonial system…created the ‘Indian'" (290). In response to this idea, Saldaña-Portillo argues, "to the degree that indigenous communities produced meaning and value in excess of Spanish techniques of governmentality, they also produced a cultural formation that exceeded colonialism's subalternized category of the Indian" (emphasis added, 290). Colonialism, that is, should not be thought of as deterministic of indigenous identity and culture postcontact, for indigenous people 27 produce "new and resistant indigenous identities" within "a colonial regime of difference" (290). Her evaluation of excess intersects with the aims of my dissertation, for the literary sounds I examine respond to and exceed dominant discourses about places and spaces in the American West produced in the context of imperialism and globalization. The production of "meaning and value in excess" of colonialism takes specific form in Saldaña-Portillo's essay when she documents her experience at an International Meeting for Humanity and against Neoliberalism in Chiapas, Mexico in 1996 (290). There, the "indigenous communities of the Lacandona jungle that make up the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacíon Nacional (EZLN)" host "five thousand visitors from forty-three countries," all outsiders to the Zapatista revolutionary movement (297). Saldaña-Portillo, a guest at the convention, describes "one of the Zapatistas' performative acts of nationalist identity" that takes place at the opening ceremony: By the time Comandante David took the stage and asked for silence, the crowd's cheers for the EZLN and the event seemed irrepressible. Although we quieted down considerably, a low but constant buzz of conversation continued among us. This certainly seemed like silence to us, but Comandante David did not agree. He asked us once again to be quiet. In fact, he insisted on complete silence, repeatedly saying "Hasta que guarden silencio, no podemos empezar" [We cannot begin until you keep silent] and "Hay que guardar diez minutos de silencio antes de poder empezar" [We have to be quiet for ten minutes before we can start]. Europeans, Latin Americans, and U.S. citizens all around grumbled that this seemed unnecessary-even a bit authoritarian. Eventually, after about fifteen minutes, when we realized we had no choice, that he was serious, that there might be a point to this, it happened. We were silent. Completely silent. Not one sigh, not one whisper, not a single chair scraping against the ground. (298) After a period of discomfort, Saldaña-Portillo begins to imagine "how difficult it must have been for the members and supporters of the Zapatistas to keep silent for ten years- one minute of ours for each year of theirs" (298).22 The Zapatistas' production of silence 28 stages "multiple identifications for the visiting (mostly Western) outsiders: with the indigenous Zapatistas, with the symbolic Mexican nation, with ourselves, and among each other" (299). Silence, Saldaña-Portillo discovers, is a baseline for sound that engenders "constitutively fleeting and poignantly inconclusive" identifications among the widely-varied groups of people attending the conference (300). In silence, differences emerge; in particular, she recognizes that her own experience with silence differs from the "subaltern silence" experienced by the Zapatistas (298).23 Additionally, she comprehends that silence "makes it possible for a universal identification in difference to take place" (302). Silence produces excess meaning, in this example, because it is the "mark of alterity," referring to the subjection of the subaltern identities within a colonial system, and also the "mask of alterity, for in ‘silence' the Zapatistas experience community and organize resistance" (300). I dwell on Saldaña-Portillo's essay at length here because it stresses the fluidity of silence and sound. People can compose sound to achieve intended effects, as the Zapatistas have done, but sound is an imposition as well as a strategy, for the colonial subject is repeatedly silenced "in subalternizing discourses of conquest" (300). By accentuating the fluid meanings of sound and silence, writers interested in identity or place usefully imagine emergent ways to navigate the traps and obstacles imposed from above by imperialism and globalization. By combining the overlapping concerns of western critical regionalism, sound studies, and affect theory with my interest in representations of place in contemporary Western American literature, my dissertation evaluates the productive potential of excess in a selected body of literature. The particular excess that I consider here is made up of a relatively immaterial and transient form, sound and, to be more specific, sounds produced 29 in literature. To say that sound, in everyday life or in literature, constitutes excess is not to suggest that it is not necessary to or always already resonant in our interpretations of and experiences with place and space. Rather, I argue that sounds produce excess by activating untapped potential and calling upon readers and listeners to identify in place those contingent truths and realities that escape our notice when we view place as a closed and contained form. The first two chapters of my dissertation focus on fictional texts where sound performs an auxiliary role in the authors' representations of place and space. That is, in these novels, Sherman Alexie and Cormac McCarthy foreground sights and images in their representations of western places. Looking beyond these sight and images, I encounter sounds that productively disturb and unsettle the protagonists' relationships to place. John Smith, in Indian Killer, and Billy Parham, in The Crossing, form unsteady relationships with place according to the sounds they hear: the beating of drums, the howling of wolves, and the silences left in their absence. As these sounds fade, Parham and Smith struggle to survive in places that require mobile relationships with place and space. Alexie's Indian Killer and McCarthy's The Crossing are set in two very different locations in the twentieth-century American West, Seattle and the U.S.-Mexican borderlands, and each location resonates with its own distinct sounds. By focusing on different locations in the West, I aim to stress the diversity of soundscapes in the region and argue that attempts to identify what Neil Campbell calls "a unified, coherent metanarrative" (2) in western literature are ultimately interrupted by the existence of "a complex, messy West" manifesting in many sonic forms (15).24 Recently, 30 representations of urban spaces and the U.S.-Mexican borderlands have taken on increasing significance in western studies, in part because they provide points of departure, or lines of flight, from the utopian garden or virgin land that Myth-Image- Symbol scholars discovered in early western writing.25 The Wests in the first two chapters of the dissertation, I would argue, are equally western, but their "westness" owes more to the tensions that inhabit them than any particular spatial patterns apparent in both (22). The literary sounds and soundscapes of Alexie and McCarthy expose some of the tensions inherent in the twentieth-century West while also portraying opportunities for Westerners, of quite different backgrounds, to revise their relationships to places that have been constrained by U.S. imperialism. In the first chapter, I focus on a sound that some may associate with the mythological West, Native American drums. Through an analysis of Sherman Alexie's Indian Killer, I examine the effects of Native American drumming on John Smith's relationship to an urban place, late-twentieth-century Seattle, as well as an indigenous homeland that Smith has never experienced firsthand. Smith was adopted at birth by a white family, and although his parents attempted to expose him to Native American culture in Seattle, he feels disconnected from his cultural heritage. He encounters the sounds of Native American drums at an urban powwow on the University of Washington's campus and imagines that he has been transported to "the wilderness," where he is "free" and can "hunt and trap like a real Indian and grow his hair until it dragged along the ground" (30). In its representation of the sounds of drums and their effects on Smith, Alexie's novel suggests that, amid the din of twentieth-century cities in the American West, people produce sound in order to transform place and effect multiple 31 identifications. Although Smith ultimately fails to develop a coherent racial or cultural identity, the sounds of drums temporarily transform an urban space that confines him. By focusing on a sound that humans produce in a strained imperial context, this chapter accents the potential for Native Americans, specifically urban Indians, to assert agency within a place by actively producing or listening to sound. The second chapter examines the effects of howling wolves on a white, teenaged rancher living in the mid-twentieth century U.S.-Mexican borderlands. In Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing, the howling of wolves engenders peculiar interactions between the novel's protagonist and places in New Mexico and Mexico. Billy Parham values the wildness that howling wolves signal, and he attempts to preserve the wild quality of the U.S.-Mexican borderlands by returning a captured she-wolf to her native habitat in northern Mexico. In Mexico, he encounters people who place cultural and economic value on the wolf in a different way than American ranchers. A cross-cultural confrontation ensues, and ultimately Billy is forced to modify his relationship to place and space, a task he struggles with mightily. In a borderlands space where not everyone values howling wolves for the wildness they represent, he is unmoored and adrift. With understated attention to the howling of wolves-the author only describes howls on a few occasions-McCarthy highlights the dangers of attaching oneself to any one particular idea of a place. The final two dissertation chapters analyze nonfictional texts-Terry Tempest Williams' Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert and Charles Bowden's Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields-that further address tensions in western places. Williams and Bowden shift our attention to the twenty-first- 32 century American West, and unlike the novels of McCarthy and Alexie, their works overtly privilege sound. Williams' Red and Bowden's Murder City demand that readers attend to sound because it represents local knowledge about pressing ethical concerns. These texts employ orality and aurality, respectively, to highlight the destruction of wilderness in the American Southwest, for Williams, and the increasing violence in Juárez, Mexico, for Bowden. Terry Tempest Williams' Red not only creates literary sounds by describing the sounds and silences of Utah's redrock deserts but also by provoking her readers to perform the text aloud, to treat it as oral literature, written text that ought to be voiced. In "The Erotic Landscape," Williams advises her readers to participate in the landscape and to practice "eroticism," a "being in relation" that "calls the inner life into play" (106). Eroticism, she notes, contrasts with pornography, whereby people engage objects solely by looking at them as spectators. This distanced viewing of the landscape prevents people from developing intimate relationships with the land through participation. By encouraging her readers to participate in the landscape, Williams hopes to foment protection of wilderness, specifically in the Southwest desert. Yet, reading, she seems to suspect, potentially maintains our distance from the landscape; we often read at a remove from the places we are reading about and thus remain spectators. Williams transgresses that distance by creating a literary soundscape that readers participate in. She employs rhetorical devices that stress the auditory quality of language, and by reading her work aloud, readers embody language that is intimately invested in the western desert. In the context of a U.S.-Mexico borderlands city's violence, Bowden uses silence to represent disenfranchised people's lack of agency, their inability to do anything about 33 the conditions that govern their lives and deaths. According to Bowden, Juárez's silence is "not the silence of the grave or the silence of the church, but the speechlessness of terror" (128). As a response to silence's unsettling intrusion into a presumably noisy urban space, Bowden employs narrative voice to construct an audible terrain, where he amplifies the city's prevailing violence. Bowden's voices return noise to the city, and in this case, noise is not unwanted sound. Narrative voice-whether Bowden's voice or his performance of other voices-makes noise and, in so doing, disturbs a silence that he suggests "like protest, is the drug of our time, the way we do something by doing nothing" (36). By creating sound and commanding an audile mode of attention, this text attempts to challenge a potentially destructive historical process, transnational capitalism's production of disempowered people in a Mexican border city. The dissertation concludes with a brief analysis of the ways policymakers, political activists, scientists, scholars, and everyday people have used sound to produce places in the American West. My aim in this conclusion is to align-but not consolidate-the efforts of Alexie, McCarthy, Williams, and Bowden with what seems to be an increasing attention to the functions and potentials of sound in the production of place in the West. 1 Kahn, Douglas. Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. 2. 2 Norris, Frank. The Octopus: A Story of California. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1901. 48. 3 Saldaña-Portillo, María Josefina. "Reading a Silence: The ‘Indian' in the Era of Zapatismo." Nepantla: Views from South 3.2 (2002): 302. 4 Throughout The Octopus, Norris represents a variety of sounds as murmurs, including rain (90), freshly tilled soil (123), a fountain (135), the sounds of a guitar (206), and the sounds of "innumerable" rabbits running (213). 5 In Place: A Short Introduction, Timothy Creswell defines landscape as "the shape-the material topography-of a piece of land" and notes that "Landscape is an intensely visual idea" (10-11). According to Creswell, "We do not live in landscapes-we look at them" (11). Similarly, in The Lure of the Local, Lucy Lippard notes that landscape is "place at a distance, visual rather than sensual, seen rather than felt in all its affective power" (8). 6 In "Border Literary Histories, Globalization, and Critical Regionalism," José Limón claims that critical attention to globalization in literary studies, which gathered steam in the early- to mid-90s, have prevented 34 some scholars from examining the continued importance of the region, the local, and place. He suggests that the concept of critical regionalism develops "a renewal of regionalist thinking not in any isolated sense, but rather within yet in tension with globalization" (166-67). 7 The cross-section of Wests that I examine highlights what Krista Comer recently called "the problem of specifying the West" (3). In the introduction to a 2013 special issue of Western American Literature, Comer notes that this problem is "productive," as by its attention to different types of western places, western cultural production in recent decades has clearly deviated from the "shoot-em'-up Old West or pastoral romance" that in previous times imagined a singular West (3). The West of "familiar popular mythologies" often failed to attend to the development of urban spaces and non-White cultures and was clearly presented as a national form, an extension and endorsement of American exceptionalism (3). For Comer, as for most current scholars in western studies, "West is defined broadly to refer to all of North America that either critically or historically has been considered West, including comparative studies of the American West that cross regional or national boundaries" (4). She adds, "much that is brilliantly western comes from the liminal spaces of elsewhere-spaghetti Westerns a take-away example" (4). 8 Here, I would add that the primacy of vision may shape the perception that sound is ineffectual. A number of sound theorists that I cite in this dissertation dichotomize sight and sound, with some exceptions (Erlmann 2010). For an alternative perspective see Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, where Martin Jay argues that during the twentieth century criticism and philosophy from France became increasingly critical of ocularcentrism, particularly in strands of theory that examine gender and sexuality. 9 Similarly, Mary Pat Brady observes, "The frontier's abstraction meant that as a space it could be understood as isotropic and conceptualized as the same everywhere; it was emptied of meaning except as understood through some formal, seemingly scientific exterior schema, such as a map or grid" (3). According to Brady, the "formal" gridding of the frontier produced an "abstraction" of space "in the service of capital flows" that "entailed a shift from the undifferentiated spaces conceptualized by Apaches, Yaquis, and Mexicanos to the conquered and closed frontier" (3-4). It also resulted in "space's abstraction into geometric homogeneities, its reconceptualization as quantitative, its immersion in exchange relations, and its vitalization of the visual as a primary epistemological model" (4). In Chapter 2 of this dissertation, I address Henri Lefebvre's conceptualization of abstract space in relation to Cormac McCarthy's representation in The Crossing of the Parham brothers' experiences in the U.S.-Mexican borderlands. Brady uses Lefebvre's work as the primary voice in discussions about abstract space. 10 Creswell asserts, "in the post-enlightenment world studies of place were often relegated to ‘mere description' while space was given the role of developing scientific law-like generalizations. In order to make this work people had to be removed from the scene. Space was not embodied but empty. This empty space could then be used to develop a kind of spatial mathematics-a geometry" (19). 11 See Comer, Krista. "Introduction: Assessing the Postwestern." WAL 48.1-2 (2013): 3-15. 12 For an overview of critical regionalism in architectural studies, see Campbell's The Rhizomatic West (46- 54). The key voices in Campbell's assessment of the development of critical regionalism include Kenneth Frampton, Lianne Lefaivre, and Alexander Tzonis. Campbell weds the more explicitly architectural focus of these scholars to critical regionalism as a cultural studies practice in works by Catherine Slessor, John Brinkerhoff Jackson, and Lewis Mumford, among others. 13 Bowden, Charles. Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America. New York: Random House, 1995. Campbell uses this quotation in the introduction to The Rhizomatic West, suggesting that it is "the task of critical regionalists to disrupt this flow of ideas [the perfect, mythic, and essentialized spaces of western mythology in writing] through the activation and articulation of the ‘dreaded outside'" (5). 14 In "Klahowya Tillicum: Coming Home to the Stories and Songs of the West Coast," Chamberlain claims that Laforme's stories "match any I have ever heard, anywhere-and that includes a lifetime of listening around the world" (115). Laforme is a prospector, guide, and everyday storyteller from Revelstoke, in southeastern British Columbia. 15 They add that "when collaborating and reinforcing each other, the aural and the visual sensory systems combine their respective experience of size, merging volume and linear extent" (21). The aural and the visual sensory systems collaborate as we use them to sense and interpret space. This observation, to some extent, seems too obvious to require mention; however, as Campbell and Brady, among others, note, the visual sensory system has been fundamentally important to the orderly gridding of western places. Thus, even as we acknowledge the collaboration between the senses, we must also always consider the ways in 35 which the visual has been and is still being used to maintain boundaries that benefit some people and cultures while constraining others. 16 Structures of feeling include meanings and values lived and felt as well as matters of impulse, restraint, and tone. Williams writes, "we are concerned with meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt…We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and inter-relating continuity" (132). Structures of feeling are produced through social experience as well as through semiotic formulations. 17 Douglas Kahn attends to sounds' contact with surfaces, specifically the ground, and accents the geometrical relationships in space that produce and are revealed by sound: "To hear past the historical insignificance assigned to sounds, we need to hear more than their sonic or phonic content. We need to know where they might touch the ground, momentarily perhaps, even as they dissipate in air" (4). 18 A visual aesthetic often contributes to artists' construction of affective geographies. Through his analysis of the experimental video art of Bill Viola, Nigel Thrift argues that visual representations of the face highlight "the face as a primary composer of affect" (73). According to Thrift, "Viola sees the face as a colour wheel of emotions and constantly places emotion together as sequences which illustrate this shifting spectrum of affect" (73-74). In Western studies, Stephen Tatum's In The Remington Moment addresses the production of affect in the visual art of Western painter Frederic Remington. 19 In his essay "Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect," Nigel Thrift evaluates four critical "translations" of affect that "work with a notion of broad tendencies and lines of force: emotion as motion both literally and figuratively" (60). As mobilized emotion, affect is not only responsive to events but also participatory in them. 20 Citing data from Febvre and Martin's The Coming of the Book, Benedict Anderson observes that the commercialization of literature occurred much earlier than the nineteenth century: "in the 40-odd years between the publication of the Gutenberg Bible and the close of the fifteenth century, more than 20,000,000 printed volumes were produced in Europe" (33). Yet, the coexistence of a large literate population and access to print texts did not occur until later. In centuries prior to the 1900s, as Anderson suggests, literacy was largely limited to the upper classes, providing a means to consolidate power on the basis of class status. 21 In Spaces Speak, Are you Listening?: Experiencing Aural Architecture, Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter note the "cultural relativism for all sensory experience" and suggest that, to evaluate sound effectively, listeners must "ascertain how acoustic attributes are perceived: by whom, under what conditions, for what purposes, and with what meanings" (3). 22 Saldaña-Portillo provides a short history of the Zapatista revolutionary movement in her essay. The "ten years" of Zapatista silence she refers to begins in the 80s, when following "a sharp decline in funding for agriculture" in Mexico the EZLN organizes its resistance to the government's economic policies, which were detrimental to indigenous communities' ways of life. 23 Here, Saldaña-Portillo borrows from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's conceptualization of subaltern silence in "Can the Subaltern Speak?" Saldaña-Portillo stresses "the complexity of possible meanings encoded in subaltern silence" (298) and "the absolute limits of Western knowledge when confronted with subaltern silence and iteration" (299). 24 Campbell argues that this metanarrative claims, "In the West…is the evidence of a nation forged out of the intense and diverse experiences of the so-called open, vacant frontier, transforming encounter and contact into a closed, destined relationship of evolution and progress toward the production of an essentially rooted American character" (2). 25 For noteworthy examples, see Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land and Leo Marx's Machine in the Garden. These texts provide impressive and praiseworthy analysis of representations of the frontier in American literature, but they also focus on writers and texts that fit (or that critics fit to) specific representational patterns, creating a typology that does not always accommodate alternative perspectives on western places. CHAPTER 2 DRUMBEATS: URBAN SPACE, NATIVE PLACE, AND TRANSNATIONAL HUB-MAKING IN SHERMAN ALEXIE'S INDIAN KILLER Pause. Tap. Tap. ~Sherman Alexie, Indian Killer1 The outside world is forgotten, overtaken by a Native American world. This spiritual unmapping of the white world gives Indian people the time and the space to reconnect to a physical and spiritual reality where Indian people truly belong…[The values of respect embedded within tribal traditions] can then be brought into the public sphere to transform a non- Indian, hegemonic culture and community to one that reflects a more respectful Indigenous society. ~Renya K. Ramirez, Native Hubs2 As I note in the introduction, the fictional works I examine in the first two chapters of this dissertation do not necessarily stress literary sounds in their representations of twentieth-century places in the American West. Instead, in relatively understated ways, Sherman Alexie and Cormac McCarthy use literary sounds to represent and examine the intensity-or excess meaning and feeling-that place accrues when their characters engage in audile spatial practices and modes of attention. The term audile, for my purposes, describes practices, techniques, and postures that make "the world audible 37 in new ways" when writers have sound on the mind (Keeling and Kun 449).3 In the introductory essay to American Quarterly's 2011 special issue on sound in American Studies, Kara Keeling and Josh Kun attribute the term audile to Jonathan Sterne, whose book The Audible Past observes the development of "new listening practices and sonic epistemes…born through the massive transfigurations of eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century society, technology and culture" (Keeling and Kun 449). Analyzing literary texts set years after the close of the period Sterne examines, the first two chapters of this dissertation assess organic, one might tentatively say rooted, forms of listening that are not explicitly connected to or strained by the rise of "sound production technologies like the stethoscope, the telephone, and the phonograph" (449).4 For my purposes, audility does not coincide with the development of technologies but rather with transforming and transformative listening practices that are mediated by desire as much as, if not more than, the increasing instrumentalization of sound during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In places in the American West, people have listened to the sounds of drums and the howling of wolves over the course of many generations, and the practices they have used to understand and interpret drums and howls are often rooted in local as well as regional traditions and customs. Alexie and McCarthy represent these particular sounds as affective forces and energies that, in the context of globalization in the mid- to late-twentieth century, require different "listening practices" from people than those employed by their elders (Keeling and Kun 449). In their novels, these authors attempt to bridge the rooted listening practices of the past to increasingly mediated audile modes of attention that developed during a century of sound, the twentieth. 38 To a degree, literary sounds are synecdochal in Indian Killer and The Crossing, as, for instance, the drumming in Alexie's novel signals the cultural practice and form of which it is a part, the urban powwow. Synecdoche intensifies the meaning of a part, as the part fibrously connects to and perhaps for a moment directs the other parts that make up the whole. The circular structure of the powwow serves as an example. Reflecting the traditional spatial organization of Native American rituals, at contemporary powwows, drums and drummers are positioned in the center of the ceremony, and a community circles around them. The rhythm of drums directs the movement of individual dancers, nodes within a continuously expanding and retracting circle that responds to drumbeats and song. The powwow maintains its circular structure, but the shifting positions of bodies and the modulating pulse of drums within this space demonstrate its continuous transformation. The sounds of drums play one among many parts in the transformation of the circle, a geometric space, into a meaningful and sacred place. Their sound is crucial to Indian Killer's representation of an urban West in late twentieth-century Seattle. It intensifies interactions between people and place, provoking urban Indians to transform particular sites in the city into undeniably Native places. Such transformation is, as Deleuze and Guattari would have it, a creative potentiality that repeatedly undermines the striation of space into a hegemonic form. In Alexie's Seattle, this spatial hegemony is part of a colonial and postcolonial historical process that structures the city. There, the global capitalism of the late-twentieth century extends the effects of U.S. imperialism, as multi- and transnational corporations construct skyscrapers that mark the dominance of this urban space by investors headquartered elsewhere. These skyscrapers blanket downtown Seattle, and 39 John Smith, the protagonist of the novel, looks at "the city's skyline" and perceives "the myth and lies of its construction, the myths and lies of its architects" (132). The content of these "myths and lies" is among the many mysteries that this crime thriller/detective story implicitly examines (132).5 While the plot centers on the identity of the Indian Killer, a phantasmal man striking fear into Seattle's white population with seemingly random acts of violence, the city's effect on the construction of identities by urban Indians is a more convoluted mystery that Alexie urges his readers to disentangle. In this chapter, I track this mystery by examining the novel's two central urban Indian characters, John Smith and Marie Polatkin, who demonstrate quite different attitudes toward Seattle as a place for Native American identification. Traditional Songs Sherman Alexie's 1996 novel Indian Killer begins in an "Indian Health Service hospital in the late sixties. On this reservation or that reservation. Any reservation, a particular reservation" (3). The hospital is the place of origin for the novel's protagonist, John Smith, a Native American adopted at birth by a white family, the Smiths. As the narrator's ambiguity makes clear from the start, the place is, in many ways, no place at all. Social and cultural geographer Timothy Creswell explains that, according to most geographers, places are "located": "They have fixed objective co-ordinates on the Earth's surface" (7).6 Moreover, he suggests, "we begin to approach ‘place'" when we replace "a set of numbers [fixed objective co-ordinates] with a name" (2). John's place of origin, which he invents in an effort to reconstruct an irretrievable past, is neither located nor named. The generic name, "Indian Health Service hospital," does not distinguish the 40 hospital from others like it, conjuring instead a shadow of a place that could be located anywhere, on "this," "that," "any," or "a particular" reservation (3). John's fictional construction of a relatively indiscernible place reflects his anxiety about the unknowability of his origins, which become even more difficult for him to imagine because of his cumulative experiences as a displaced Indian in late twentieth-century Seattle. Alexie represents this city, located in the Pacific Northwest and named for a nineteenth-century chief of the Duwamish and Suquamish tribe, as a postcolonial urban space where John feels out of place. John registers the colonial legacy of Seattle in the mostly Scandinavian neighborhood of Ballard, where he lives as an adult: Since the first days of their colonization of the Americas, European immigrants had strived to make the New World look exactly like the Old. They either found similar geographical or climatic locations, such as the Swedes had in Minnesota and the Germans in North Dakota, or they plowed, tunneled, clear-cut, and sculpted the land into something ethnically pleasing. (73) John is as disoriented in twentieth-century Seattle, "sculpted" by European immigrants as well as financial investors dispersed across the globe, as he is confused about his place of origin (73). To convey John's disorientation, the third-person narrator describes his haphazard navigation of the city, observing that John is uncertain about where he walks or "how he came to arrive at his apartment building in Ballard, the Scandinavian neighborhood of Seattle north of downtown" (73). Alexie's representation of this aimless wandering does not evoke the liberating tactics of DeCerteau's street-level walkers in "Walking in the City," who "affirm, suspect, try out, transgress, respect, etc." the possible trajectories they could take through a city (99).7 Rather, John's walking represents his utter incomprehension of Seattle. His struggle to navigate the city signals his 41 displacement as a Native American immersed in a field of cultural signs he cannot understand, namely the signs of imperialism in a progressive U.S. metropolis. His sense of displacement as an adult in Seattle carries over from the invented primal scene at the hospital, where he is taken from his "Indian" mother at birth and given up for adoption to a white family in the suburbs of Seattle (4). The opening chapter, titled "Mythology," foregrounds the text's investigation of the importance of racial and cultural identity to John's experience with place-making and displacement in a late-twentieth-century city in the Pacific Northwest-a city and region with a long and complicated history of Native presence. In Native Seattle: Histories from the Crossing- Over Place, a revisionist history of the lived experiences of Native peoples in the city, Coll Thrush attempts to untangle that complicated history. Thrush suggests that attention to Seattle's Native history is often blurred by "the moral of the urban Indian story as we think we know it: that Native people in the city are barely people; they are instead shades of the past, linked almost mystically to nature" (9). Alexie's novel, I argue, dwells on the process by which John Smith internalizes that moral and, as a consequence, fails to understand the city as a place where he and other Native Americans can construct Native identities and communities. As an adult, John Smith dwells on his identity as a Native American, which for him only runs skin-deep. He senses that his dark skin tone marks him as "another anonymous, silent Skin," and this anxiety about race only helps to obscure the particulars of his past as well as the opportunities for Native identification available to him in the present (35). John's unfamiliarity with his birth culture leads him to invent the narrative that opens the novel. Alexie makes clear at the start that his protagonist knows very little 42 about his cultural heritage or tribal affiliation.8 When John imagines his birth in the opening chapter, "his mother is sometimes Navajo. Other times she is a Lakota. Often, she is from the same tribe as the last Indian woman he has seen on television" (4). Two paragraphs later, Alexie's narrator reiterates the ambiguity of John's tribal identification: John's mother is Navajo or Lakota. She is Apache or Seminole. She is Yakima or Spokane. Her dark skin contrasts sharply with the white sheets, although they are dirty. (4) The repetitive listing of tribal names suggests that John does not distinguish between tribes, each of which, though culturally distinct, blurs into the others; as a result of this blurring, he only understands his native identity and that of his birth mother on the basis of the contrast between "dark skin" and dirty "white sheets" (4). This not too subtle reference to racial difference reveals the force of race in John's identification as an Indian. Not only do the differences between Native cultures blur in his imagination but so too do the associations between tribes and particular places. Although the Spokane are based in eastern Washington and the Seminole in Florida (and later Oklahoma), John eliminates all placed-based particulars, creating in essence a personalized mythology inattentive to the embeddedness of Native cultures in located, named, and meaningful places. Yet, even as race seems to overwrite culture and place in his creation story, John imagines the hospital where he was born as inhabited by sounds and rhythms that mark the presence of Native Americans. After assigning the hospital a generic name and failing to locate it, he observes an "old Indian woman in a wheelchair singing traditional songs to herself, tapping a rhythm on her armrest, right index finger, tapping, tapping. Pause. Tap. Tap" (3). She stops tapping momentarily when she hears newborn John 43 crying, and then "forgets why she is listening" to his cries and "returns to her own song and the tapping, tapping. Pause. Tap. Tap" (5). John's attention to the basic rhythms accompanying "traditional songs" helps him to shape an otherwise indistinct fictional space into a place, a site of personal and cultural trauma inhabited by other Indians (3). Places should be located and named as Creswell suggests, but perhaps more importantly they should be "meaningful," provoking personal and cultural attachments, and should "have some relationship to humans and the human capacity to produce and consume meaning" (Creswell 7). John, for instance, reconstructs the sonority of the hospital in an attempt to attach himself to Native American culture and identify himself as a Native American. Sound, or here music, precipitate his efforts to "produce and consume" Native meaning in the institutional space of the hospital (Creswell 7). The tapping of the old woman contrasts with "linoleum floors swabbed with gray water" and "walls painted white a decade earlier, now yellowed and peeling" (Alexie 3). The hospital is, to use French anthropolgist Marc Augés term, a non-place-cleaned with dirty water and decorated in fading paint-that the old woman's tapping transforms, momentarily at least, into a place resonating with tradition. For Augé, non-places are the product of "the spatial overabundance of the present" in the late twentieth-century and the "changes of scale" brought on by "the spectacular acceleration of means of transport" (34). Non-places are those places people pass through-"high-speed roads and railways, interchanges, airports"-en route to places (34). The Indian Health Service hospital provides a particularly intriguing representation of a non-place, for while John quickly departs it by helicopter following his birth, the old woman appears to make it her home. In this scene, then, a transient 44 place or non-place passed through by John simultaneously functions as a rooted and local place, a home that the woman constructs through action and performance, specifically the production of music. Following his birth, John is almost immediately whisked away from his birth mother and loaded by a nurse onto a helicopter that transports him to his adoptive parents in Bellevue, Washington, a suburb of Seattle. John's constructed memory here turns into a nightmare as "suddenly this is a war," and the helicopter pilot/gunman "strafes the reservation with explosive shells," violently erasing the site John hopes will connect him to his past (6). Aboard the helicopter, John cries "uselessly," his wailing unheard over "the whomp-whomp of the helicopter blades" and "the roar of the gun, the chopper" (6). Whereas the old woman paused her tapping and singing to mark the event of John's birth, stopping to listen to his cries, the gunner effectively silences John, who aboard the helicopter perceives "Noise, heat" and cries "louder than before, trying to be heard" (7). The juxtaposition of traditional music and violent "Noise" in "Mythology" prepares for the novel's proceeding attention to the production of place through music in the context of Native American diaspora (7). I specifically analyze the production of place through music as it resonates in Alexie's representation of Native drumming at an urban powwow in Seattle. Through a detailed examination of this scene, I argue that in Indian Killer ceremonial music potentially enables John Smith, a displaced Native American, to participate in the production of a distinctly Native place. The novel presents the urban powwow as a missed opportunity for him to construct Native identity in the absence of a remembered homeland or past. Placing critical pressure on John's inability to capitalize on this 45 opportunity, Alexie introduces Marie Polatkin, a confident Spokane Indian girl who attends the University of Washington and serves as "the activities coordinator for the Native Americans Students Alliance at the University" (31). Marie embodies the potential of urban powwows to affirm and intensify the cultural identities of Native Americans who no longer live, or in some cases never lived, on reservation or tribal lands and are disconnected by space and time from their families and communities. Alexie's representation of Marie suggests that, in a late-twentieth-century American city, Native American identities are constructive processes engendered by Native peoples' affective transformation of place through ritual performance.9 In his analysis of Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, another novel addressing the experiences of urban Indians during the late twentieth century, David Rice notes the "transformative quality of ceremony" and suggests that ceremonies "must be allowed to meet the changing needs of the people who perform them" (127). As mobile practices that accommodate "changing needs," contemporary Native American ceremonies challenge "Euramerican stereotypes of Native American ritual as codified and stagnant and thus unable to survive the change of Euramerican encroachment and expansion" (127). Much to the dismay of some Native American elders and traditionalists, in Alexie's novel, the powwow is a ritual or ceremony that breaks from tradition in order to accommodate the needs of urban Indians in Seattle for connections that cross tribal and national lines.10 As a critical framework for my analysis of drumming and urban powwows in Indian Killer, I employ Renya K. Ramirez's conception of native hubs, which, she explains, "suggest how landless Native Americans maintain a sense of connection to their tribal homelands and urban spaces through participation in cultural circuits and 46 maintenance of social networks, as well as shared activity with other Native Americans in the city and on the reservation" (3). For Ramirez, the hub is a transnational, geographical concept that emphasizes "Indians' nation-to-nation relationship[s]," nation here implying tribal nations as well as nation-states-primarily, for her purposes, the United States, Canada, and Mexico (23). She uses the term transnational to "accentuate Native peoples' special status in relationship to the nation-state"-a status influenced by a history of conquest and dispossession of Native peoples in North America-as well as to acknowledge their "experience of living at the interstice of various cultural and political communities" (14). Many twenty-first-century Native Americans, Ramirez observes, establish intertribal and transnational connections, creating hubs, "geographic places" that "provide a space for Indians to renew a sense of Indian culture and identity" and "give Native American activists a community from which to organize and demand their rights in the larger public sphere, in order to belong in a world that often denies their very existence" (58).11 Included among these hubs are urban powwows and other ritual gatherings that transform high school gymnasiums, college campuses, and other public locations into places "where Indians...come together to share their feelings of common identity" (63). Ramirez emphatically notes that in these hubs Native people utilize affect, for it "assists in [their] empowerment and struggles to belong" as members of tribal communities and citizens of nation-states (19). Affect is particularly important in "citizenship debates" among Native Americans and other subordinated groups "because citizenship has been a white, male enterprise that emphasizes reason and rationality" (19). Critiquing an imperialistic privileging of reason and rationality, she adds, 47 White women and people of color are disenfranchised in the public sphere, because of the white, masculinist notion that assumes subordinated groups cannot act with reason but only according to feelings. We cannot fully belong in the public domain, because the emotional state of disenfranchised groups will disrupt the reason and rationality that should control the public sphere. (ibid.) Ramirez suggests that the concept of the hub "can be brought into conversation with gendered notions of politics and belonging" (18) so that analyses of "the highly charged and personal manner in which many disenfranchised groups experience citizenship in their everyday life" do not "leave out such potentially volatile concerns as emotions" (19). In other words, the emotions of Native American activists contribute to their reasoned and rational pursuit for belonging in the public sphere, both on and off reservation lands.12 Strategically gendering both the hub and affect as feminine, she argues women are often at the forefront of hub-making and use affect to challenge "dominant notions of citizenship" (18).13 The hub-making in Indian Killer is, in fact, organized by a young Spokane Indian woman, Marie Polatkin, who often boils over with emotion but usually understands how to redirect it productively. In view of Ramirez's attention to the role of affect in Native people's construction of hubs, in my analysis, I attend explicitly to the ways that Alexie's novel represents the transformed University of Washington campus as an affective geography, a place that deterritorializes imperialistic space by facilitating interactions between Native Americans of various tribes. The Sensuous Production of Place In "Sounding Out the City: Music and the Sensuous Production of Place," Sara Cohen posits "music's effectiveness in stimulating a sense of identity, in preserving and transmitting cultural memory, and in establishing the sensuous production of place" 48 (287). Music engenders a "sensuous" production of place, she argues, by its "peculiar embodiment of movement and collectivity" (269); it generates "physical pleasures," resonates "within the body," stimulates "movement and emotion," emphasizes "the intensity of experience," and produces "a sense of identity and belonging" (277). Her essay specifically examines the experiences of a migrant Jewish community in Liverpool, England, post-World War II, and Cohen suggests that "place, for migrant communities, is something constructed through music with an intensity not found elsewhere in their social lives" (284). The "intensity" engendered by music for migrant communities, according to Cohen, reflects their collective memory of "long-distance travel" passed on by story from one generation to the next (285). Music provokes "sensual and expressive movements" that, like the memory of "long-distance journeys" and the repetitive motions they entail, can have "a deep impact upon individual and collective memory and experiences of place, and upon emotions and identities associated with place" (285). Cohen's essay, which generalizes about migrant communities' production of place through music, raises a number of important questions about the place-making functions of music and dance rituals for diasporic Native American communities displaced from tribal homelands in the United States. If the production of place through music is, as Cohen posits, "always a contested and ideological process" (269), what are the central pressures that influence, strain, or engender Native Americans' production of place in North America? More specifically, how, if at all, is this productive process intensified in an urban environment? Finally, how do urban Native people's construction of hubs enable them to navigate twentieth-century cities in the U.S. and cultivate a sense of belonging to these cities as well as to tribal lands where many Indians were born and 49 grew up? In the third chapter of Indian Killer, "Owl Dancing at the Beginning of the End of the World," Alexie begins to sketch the intricacies of Native American sensuous production of place through music by attending closely to John's experience at an "illegal powwow, not approved by the University [of Washington]" (32-33). After John gets off of work one day-he works construction on the fortieth floor of an unfinished skyscraper-he wanders through the streets of Seattle and eventually arrives at a field of grass. When he arrives there, he imagines that he has entered the wilderness: He had made it to the wilderness. He was free. He could hunt and trap like a real Indian and grow his hair until it dragged along the ground. No, it was a manicured lawn on the University of Washington Campus, and John could hear drums. (30) John's association of "real Indians" with wilderness reflects the persistent influence of the frontier myth, a spatial metanarrative that affects representations of Native American culture (by both Native and non-Native writers) in U.S. cultural and historical production (30). According to this myth, if there is a place for Indians in the United States, it is in the wilderness, a place that colonizing white settlers attempt to conquer during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the name of progress. As an extension of this myth, cities, which Thrush suggests are "an outgrowth of broader American ideas about progress," are not places where Native people "belong" (xv). The drums John hears on the U of W campus provoke him to challenge his own internalization of the branching spatial narratives associated with the frontier myth, which locate Native people in the wilderness and conceal their presence in urban places. The drums, as well as the singing and dancing that accompany them, disrupt the noise of colonialism and imperialism implicit in these narratives-noise that echoes for John in Seattle.14 50 After he recognizes his location on a "manicured lawn," John observes that he "had been on campus a few times but had never heard drums there" (30-31). He responds to the unexpected and surprising sound of drums by mobilizing his body, much as Presley does when he hears the wailing sheep in The Octopus. However, unlike Presley, John walks "toward the source of the drums," rather than fleeing the sound (31). Outside of an auditorium, he encounters "two drums, a few singers and dancers, and dozens of Indians watching the action" (31). In response to the music, the assembly of Indians "trample on the well-kept lawn" (33), dancing an owl dance while John silently stands off to the side and "pretends to be a real Indian" (35).15 Though he has learned about owl dances "through years of observation and practice," John identifies himself as a "fraud at urban powwows" and is concerned that his peers will "discover that he was an Indian without a tribe" (ibid.). John is both attracted to and uncomfortable at urban powwows, and the concurrence of these feelings illustrates the affective potential of the powwow as well as the extent of his alienation from Native American culture. His sense of alienation from other Indians is briefly unseated when Marie Polatkin, the organizer of the powwow, invites him to dance. At first, John fails to stay in rhythm with the music, but as the drums "drown out all the other noises in his head" and he "concentrates on the music," Marie tells him "You're getting it now" (39). In the concluding section of this chapter, I will address the significance of the "other noises" in John's head, which communicate his internalization of racist and imperialist ideologies in the United States. Here, I would like to highlight a momentary interruption to the noise, which occurs when he briefly participates in the sensuous production of place through music. For a fleeting moment, John draws closer to the pleasures of belonging to a place 51 and an intertribal community of dancers who embody Native traditions "with dazzling eyes and bright smiles" (38). He recognizes "so much happiness so close to him," and yet cannot "touch it" (38). When the drums go "suddenly silent," he returns to his anxious meditation about his Native identity and begins, once again, only to think of himself as Indian in comparison to white people: "John was not surprised that Indians had always terrified white people…Even in his flannel shirt and blue jeans, John knew he was intimidating" (39-40). John's sudden relapse into racial paranoia should not obscure his momentary participation in a transnational Native community. For as long as the music lasts and John responds to it through dance, he remains temporarily attached to place, a mobile native hub that transforms the hegemonic space of the university into what Ramirez calls a "safe world" where "identity, culture, health, and well-being are supported" (65). The urban powwow provides John with the opportunity to connect to and interact with Native American culture: Even though he had felt like a fraud at urban powwows, he had always loved them…Through years of observation and practice, he had learned how an Indian was supposed to act at a powwow. When he got old enough to go without Daniel and Olivia [his adopted parents], he could pretend to be a real Indian. He could sit in a huge crowd of Indians and be just another anonymous, silent Skin. (35) Clearly, the usefulness of the powwow as a hub connecting John to Native American culture is limited by his sense that he can only "pretend to be a real Indian" (35). In contrast, for Marie, who introduces herself to John when he wanders toward the drums, urban powwows create a cultural circuit through which she repeatedly travels. A Spokane Indian, vocal student at the university, and Native American activist, Marie embodies the transnationalism articulated by Renya Ramirez in Native Hubs. In the 52 following section, I evaluate Marie's participation in and organization of the urban powwow in relation to the process of deterritorialization, characterized by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. Sound, here, takes a backseat as I situate the urban powwow, a mobile cultural form, within a broader discussion of the production of place by twenty-first-century urban Indians. By organizing the urban powwow, Marie initiates a process of deterritorialization that transforms the city of Seattle. This process helps Marie effect multiple identifications, create a transnational identity, and traverse places produced from the top-down through imperialistic practices. Absolutely Sweet Marie Drawing from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's conception of deterritorialization, I suggest that the urban powwow temporarily transforms a striated space, a city, into a sonorous place of Native presence. According to Deleuze and Guattari, the city is "striated space par excellence" (481), and the striated is "that which intertwines fixed and variable elements, produces an order and succession of distinct forms, and organizes horizontal melodic lines and vertical harmonic planes" (478). The smooth, in contrast, is "the continuous variation, continuous development of form," a "fusion of harmony and melody in favor of the production of properly rhythmic values" (478). Smooth space is "filled by events" and "occupied by intensities, wind and noise, forces, and sonorous and tactile qualities"; it is "a space of affects, more than one of properties," an "intensive rather than extensive space" (479). It is an affective geography specifically organized and disorganized according to sound; Deleuze and Guattari's interest in the smooth, rhizomatic places produced by sound influences the readings I will 53 do in subsequent chapters, where I attend specifically to their conception of the refrain. They submit that striated space is defined by "the requirements of long-distance vision: constancy of orientation, invariance of distance through an interchange of inertial points of reference, interlinkage by immersion in an ambient milieu, constitution of a central perspective" (494). Certainly, the frontier myth, embodied in Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis of 1893 and a host of other texts before and after his work, has promoted the constancy and invariance of perspectives on Native presence or absence in the American West, and more specifically in the region's cities.16 Reiterations of this myth have represented Western spaces as static and unchanging; as a consequence, the continuously changing relationship between Native Americans and various places in the American West during the twentieth century and beyond are obscured by an outdated national imaginary.17 Deleuze and Guattari observe that "the creative potentialities of striated space" are not "easy to evaluate" due to the fixity of vision required of people who dutifully follow its rules and laws (494). For example, a university campus can operate as a striated space, a territory people view idealistically as a place for higher learning. A university campus is governed by liberal rules and regulations. Yet, it is also a privileged space that historically has not granted equal access to all populations. Failing to recognize the politics of inclusion and exclusion on their campuses, students, professors, and administrators may solidify existing structures of power, oftentimes through the exclusion of others on the basis of race. Of course, university campuses also provide avenues for the communal realization of "creative potentialities" through collective action and activism-the transformation of striated into smooth space (494). Alexie's novel presents the urban powwow as an exemplar of this potential 54 transformation of the U of W campus. For John, as I have noted, such a transformation is particularly difficult to register. Confused about his racial and cultural identity, John believes that to identify himself as a Native American he must root himself to a place in the past-a place that no longer exists and perhaps never existed at all-or else succumb to victimization in the imperialistic space of the present. The transformation of striated into smooth space depends upon the process of deterritorialization, which Deleuze and Guattari introduce in relation to the rhizome, a symbol of open-ended and uncontained movement through space and time. In A Thousand Plateaus (1987), Deleuze and Guattari note that the rhizome is emblematic of the type of book they are trying to write: a book with "neither object nor subject" (3), "made of variously formed matters, and very different dates and speeds," and comprised of "lines of articulation or segmentarity, strata and territories" as well as "lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization and destratification" (3). Their book is an assemblage of metaphors-the rhizome, faciality, the refrain, nomadology-that eludes linear thought and easy explanation. The rhizome is a "subterranean stem" (6) that "assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubers" (7) and can be "defined solely by a circulation of states" (21). Defined by uncontrolled circulation of states that are often subterranean, the rhizome has no "General" and no "organizing memory or central automaton" (21). Its lack of organization permits a process of deterritorialization, described as an "asignifying rupture" (9) that Deleuze and Guattari characterize through the relationship between an orchid and a wasp: The orchid deterritorializes by forming an image, a tracing of a wasp; but the wasp reterritorializes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless deterritorialized, 55 becoming a piece in the orchid's reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen. Wasp and orchid, as heterogeneous elements, form a rhizome. (10) The relationship between the orchid and the wasp in this figuration is clearly a complicated one. Neither the orchid nor the wasp maintains a separate territory outside of their relations with each other. The wasp and orchid continuously circulate through the processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, creating an endless loop wherein the orchid and wasp "form a rhizome" rather than forming their own respective territories (10). In recent years, the rhizome has become a paradigmatic feature in western studies. By invoking the rhizome to characterize representations of the American West in film and literature, Neil Campbell's Rhizomatic West resists a tradition in western studies of interpreting the West and western texts according to a metanarrative that contains and limits the local or regional as "gridded space" (11). According to this tradition, a landscape, the West, produces cultural production (western texts) and identities (westerners). In other words, the West is a place of origin that determines all forms that spring from within the region. Deterritorialization and reterritorialization are not possible within this tradition because a western metanarrative assumes a coherent starting point, the immobile landscapes of the West, thus rooting territory and identity without recognizing their "lines of flight" (Deleuze and Guattari 9). Rather than duplicating this rooted tradition, Campbell chooses to "[shift] toward a postwestern perspective where the ‘post' signifies the ‘going beyond' and ‘after' the established and ‘taken for granted' notions of the West as a fixed and settled phenomenon" (25).18 This postwestern, rhizomatic perspective takes shape in Alexie's representation of 56 Marie Polatkin, who promotes the transformation and deterritorialization of the University of Washington campus by organizing an urban powwow. She organizes the powwow "as a protest against the University's refusal to allow a powwow" on campus (33). For Marie, the powwow is at once an assertion of Native presence in Seattle and at the U of W as well as a protest against racial ideologies and imperialistic practices that delimit Native Americans' participation in the production of place. Marie's relationship to powwows is quite different from, though equally complicated as, John Smith's. Alexie's narrator explains that "Marie has been organizing protests since her days on the Spokane Indian Reservation," where she was born and raised, but is unable to participate fully in "Spokane Indian culture" as a child due to her commitment to formal education (33). Unlike many of her