TY - JOUR
AU - Hill, Anna
AB - Speeding through open countryside in the 1950s, the protagonist of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road declares, “Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road” (183). By the early 1970s, the protagonist of Don DeLillo’s Americana strikes a markedly different tone: “Along the road and spread out across the desert were hundreds of oil drills … the science fiction of prehistory and hereafter. Black smoke came gusting out of a refinery and covered the land and sky” (375). What happens to the road narrative at the end of the twentieth century, in a time of environmental crisis? What happens, generally, when we consider the genre through a lens focused on resources and infrastructures rather than the idealized mythologies of freedom and endless landscape? American cultural imaginaries have long celebrated the road as a site of personal liberation and possibility, a symbol of independence unburdened by the constraints of rooted life. By the late twentieth century, however, road narratives began to reflect different landscapes and relations to the future. In the 1970s and 1980s, as large-scale environmental issues emerged and a series of oil crises unfolded, authors reworked the road narrative to reflect the changing geosocial atmosphere of their times.1 Rather than the freedom of infinite space, these new road narratives depict the claustrophobia of places rendered barely habitable. Rather than a sense of independence, they demonstrate deeply-ingrained dependence upon volatile resources. Rather than a story of personal development, they explore how the overdevelopment of the more-than-human world impedes the flourishing of individuals and communities. And, beneath it all, rather than an intense experience of the present, they narrate an anxious expectation of the future: not a free-wheeling celebration that “this is” the American landscape, but the foreboding sense that “this will have been.” This essay considers how the realist road narrative developed and began to unravel in the final decades of the twentieth century, as authors reworked the genre into a petrocritique in a time of ecological uncertainty. Every road narrative of this period is an artifact of what Imre Szeman calls “petroculture,” and thus, as scholars have argued, could be read as a petrocritique.2 Even silences on the subject of oil can be conceptually generative, underscoring how energy resources are, as Jennifer Wenzel puts it, “not so much invisible as unseen.”3 Some works, however, focus explicitly on oil and petro-infrastructures, and do so in a way that offers a particularly fruitful lens through which to examine the material and psychological entanglements between Americans and their environments at the end of a turbulent century. This essay reads two such works. I begin with Don DeLillo’s first novel, Americana (1971), before turning to William Least Heat-Moon’s nonfiction travelogue, Blue Highways: A Journey into America (1982). These authors approach the genre from different perspectives and rework it to different ends, but ultimately, they both do so in a way that rethinks the optimistic futurity of the road narratives that preceded them. These narratives do not merely take place on the road, but actively attend to the material mediators of road travel. Their narrators pass through areas polluted by oil and post-industrial debris, through regions exhausted by large-scale extractivism. Their diegetic roads lead in circles and to dead ends, and in doing so, they expose the road narrative as a costly myth stretched to its limits.4 A characteristic feature of these road narratives lies in their temporality, as their present is haunted by an uncertain future in which many existing modes of everyday life cannot sustainably continue. I propose that the vague yet pervasive sense of anticipation in these works is so forceful as to displace the experience of the present, constituting a narrative logic conjugated in the future imperfect tense: “this will have been.” I use this term to refer to the verb tense itself, but also, more broadly, to describe a temporal modality that emerges in these texts, which narrate the present through the lens of its impending passing.5 In light of this anticipatory modality, these late-twentieth-century works demonstrate an anxious impulse to document the present for some future audience that will approach their records as artifacts of a polluted past. DeLillo’s novel takes up the trope of the white male highway wanderer only to set in motion the deterioration of this figure and the environments through which he moves. Least Heat-Moon’s narrative also adopts the perspective of a lone male traveler, but does so in a way that traces residues of his Osage, British, and Irish genealogies in order to explore how imperial histories continue to shape the landscape. Upon these foundations, the texts craft two markedly different orientations toward the future: in DeLillo’s case, a future beyond petroculture is unimaginable; in Least Heat-Moon’s, it is melancholy but inevitable, at times even hopeful. It bears noting at the outset that the mid-century road novel popularized by the likes of Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) and John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley (1962) is merely one version of a much larger and more diverse genre. “For most of [the twentieth] century,” Ronald Primeau writes in his study of the road narrative form, “Americans have treated the highway as sacred space” (1), and a rich archive of scholarship demonstrates how other authors took the genre in different directions during that time. Ann Brigham, for example, explores how travel narratives by women and Indigenous writers subvert the idea of the road as a space of pure leisure, depicting protagonists who take to the road fleeing danger and seeking community.6 Gary Totten illuminates how African American travel narratives often portray protagonists who navigate terrains marked by racial violence and legacies of slavery. Nicole Seymour examines twentieth-century novels that animate the road as a site of queer imagining.7 By treating Kerouac’s On the Road as a primary point of departure, this essay does not seek to reify its perspective, but rather to interrogate how, in a time of environmental crisis, authors came to recognize limits to the carefree brand of auto-leisure that it portrayed, and reworked the form to undermine any assumption that the road narrative could continue operating as an emblem of uncomplicated freedom at the end of the twentieth century. Instead of proposing a new genre history, then, this essay seeks to contribute to a dynamic and ongoing conversation regarding fossil fuels and futurity in twentieth-century literature. In the decades since Amitav Ghosh published his landmark essay, “Petrofiction: The Oil Encounter and the Novel” (1992), many scholars have turned to the road novel in order to explore the contradictions and possible futures of what Stephanie LeMenager calls the “ultradeep” entanglements between humans and fossil fuels in an age of petromodernity.8 Scott Obernesser and Brent Ryan Bellamy, for example, consider how the twentieth-century road novel builds its sense of futurity upon assumptions about the availability of resources and normative ideas about family, gender, and power.9 Daniel Worden’s concept of “fossil-fuel futurity” is also generative here, illuminating how “oil culture became postwar US culture,” and thus became inextricably bound to ideas about the kinds of life that the future might hold.10 Within this field, much attention has been paid to early- and mid-century works like Upton Sinclair’s Oil! (1926) and Kerouac’s On the Road; and, with regard to late-twentieth-century instantiations of the form, ecocritics have examined works of speculative fiction and post-apocalyptic fiction that stretch the genre’s tropes to encompass new historical scales, new planetary environments, and new nonhuman actors.11 The realist road narratives in this essay—although less spectacular in some regards than the oil epics that preceded them or the imagined worlds that followed—nevertheless illuminate petro-entanglements in valuable ways, exploring how present-day life constitutes a particularly destructive business-as-usual. The narrators of these works are not cosmic explorers navigating the irradiated rubble of imagined metropoles, nor are they lively wanderers like Kerouac’s countercultural icons, energized by the boundless highway. They are, rather, melancholy observers, at times dejected and at times cautiously hopeful, documenting the damage inflicted upon the infrastructurally-mediated environments that envelop and sustain them. Tinted by an ambiguous narrative logic—“this will have been”—their wanderings rethink life on and along the road in anticipation of a precarious new millennium. “Slipping Balances,” Anxious Roadways DeLillo published Americana, his first novel, in 1971. Set at the end of the Vietnam War, the novel is narrated by David Bell, the narcissistic rising star of a television company in New York City. The reader first encounters David as he floats among boozy lunches, meetings, and parties before being sent “out west” with a video camera to record a documentary “Navaho project”—a project that he and his bosses, caricatures of racist and misogynistic ad-men, treat with derision (68). Embarking on his road trip, David meanders north from Manhattan through a series of quaint towns, picking up companions on the way, and the middle sections of the novel flicker between memories of his upper-middle-class childhood and descriptions of life along the road as he and his passengers roam westward. David eventually abandons the documentary assignment, stopping in a midwestern town to shoot an experimental autobiographical film instead, and he takes so long working on the project that his friends ultimately return home without him. The final section of the novel then details his haphazard solo wanderings into what turns out to be a hellish and blighted American roadscape. In some ways, Americana resembles the mid-century model of the road novel exemplified by Kerouac and Steinbeck: a white male protagonist takes “a great seeking leap into the depths of America,” setting out on the nation’s roadways in search of some evasive and sublime American essence (341). Like Sal Paradise, David Bell moseys with a motley gang of acquaintances—artists and writers, pals from private school, newly-returned war veterans (from Vietnam this time, rather than World War II)—all of whom, armed with Old West stereotypes, approach the road trip as a journey into myth. And, at times, the narrative resonates with an awed breathlessness not unlike Kerouac’s. As they set out, David recalls, “[America] was coming to glory … There is nothing more thrilling than the first days of a long journey on wheels into the slavering mouth of an incredible and restless country. I shouted as I drove, exceeded speed limits, quoted poetry and folksong” (111). On the romanticized highway, the travelers can, indeed, feel liberated. However, from the very beginning, the trip is marked by a sense of uneasiness. Before leaving, David visits the studio of one of his road-trip companions, an artist named Sullivan, who creates massive sculptures using plastic and automobile paint. Her studio appears like a surreal vehicle graveyard: hanging from the ceiling, the sculptures resemble “coiled shapes, hulking and purgatorial … wheels inside wheels … all fearful, indefinable in the end, looming and never still” (107). And, as David and Sullivan take leave of the city, the journey opens with a reflection on the eerie extensiveness of fossil fuel infrastructures. He recalls, “There was a vein of murder snaking across the continent beneath highways, smokestacks, oilrigs and gasworks, a casual savagery fed by the mute cities, and I wondered what impossible distance must be traveled to get from there to here, what language crossed, how many levels of being” (124). The landscape in Americana turns out to be a mediated and polluted one, marked not by endless natural beauty but by “spectacular filth” (261). Over the course of David’s interstate wanderings, we witness the gradual disintegration of this landscape, the slow festering of relationships between characters, and, ultimately, the moldering of the protagonist’s own psyche. Indeed, the road trip also ends with an unsettling oil encounter. As the novel comes to a close, after David’s friends have returned to the east coast, he hitches a ride with a man named Clevenger, the “superintendent-in-chief of a test track for automobile and truck tires just outside a town in West Texas” (348). For several days David travels with Clevenger, listening to the radio voice of Reverend Tom Thumb Goodloe, a xenophobic, white supremacist preacher. “If you can’t pronounce a man’s name, that man is a stranger,” Goodloe hisses. “Soft white underbelly … We’re too soft and too sweet and we got to bear down on all those people that blaspheme our Christian nation” (366). With this vitriolic diatribe playing in the background, Clevenger ultimately brings David to his tire testing grounds, and the final scenes of the novel read like a descent into a petrochemical underworld. Loud cars drive endlessly around an oil-slicked, steaming, circular track, going nowhere, burning gas and rubber, with no aim other than to find out how long the tires will last. Clevenger deposits David in a garage in the middle of the track, where, assaulted by the noise of engines and the nauseating smell of gasoline, he gets drunk on warm beer in the middle of the sweltering afternoon with several track employees (only the white ones, Clevenger notes; he has instructed his Mexican employees to keep working). The men, with names like Lump and Dowd, proceed to have a violent orgy with three women they have summoned to the garage, and David recalls them in ways that conjure images of maggots or worms: He crawled out onto the running board and dropped to the ground, laughing and vomiting … Peewee was on the ground, curled around the other one’s legs, biting, his pants not quite off … Lump threw the bottle at a wall … I kicked Dowd … Clevenger was slapping me on the back and repeating the words soft white underbelly over and over … The young one was still inside the tire. Lump pissed against the wall. Dowd got up and put his arms around the fat one and threw up again. (373–375) Loud cars drown out voices within this scene, and choke the language of its narration. The men squirm, and bite, and vomit, but they are without speech beyond the racist Reverend’s repetitive chant, puppeted through the mouth of Clevenger, whose desire to talk about money is only surpassed by his desire to boast about abusing his wife. Ghosh describes a certain “muteness” of American literature when it comes to the subject of oil, and while this scene is mute in some sense, it does not fail to engage with petrochemical realities.12 Rather, this muteness appears as a result of being silenced by oil and its infrastructures, rendered speechless by petrocultural excess and the human violences it engenders. Mid-century travel narratives like Kerouac’s are surprisingly replete with references to gasoline: the action of those novels is routinely punctuated by stopping at gas stations and undertaking adventures to earn gas money. David Bell, by contrast, rarely mentions such activities. Filling up the car does not warrant attention, much less narration. As this scene demonstrates, however, oil suffuses this novel in a more intimate and unsettling way. Anything that could possibly disintegrate in this polluted environment does, and the final pages of the novel trail away in the wake of this claustrophobic petroleum nightmare. This scene, and indeed the novel as a whole, casts these pervasive entanglements as deeply significant for the “landscape of the psyche,” to borrow from Leo Marx, shaping how David and the individuals around him perceive the present in light of its bleakly imagined future.13 As he travels further upon the “vein of murder” with Clevenger, for example, David takes to cataloguing his surroundings in a series of nervous snapshots. He recalls: After Kansas we tore off a corner-piece of southeastern Colorado and went charging through New Mexico … nothing was undiscovered, and time was confused … The past returned in plastic. Ecological balances were slipping and things seemed not quite the sum of their parts. Troopers bulged with sidearms. There were neat reversals of the currents of history and geography … [People] talked about places like Phoenix and Vegas as if remembering some telescopically distant moment, some misty green leaflet of childhood on the planet Earth. (350) David’s descriptions are anxiously preoccupied by an uncertain future. Feelings of alienation take on a planetary resonance in this passage, a sense of geographical and temporal distance not merely from a particular society, but from an entire worldly ecosystem. “All those days [on the road] in fact were not far from one’s idea of life on a lunar colony,” David writes, and the text does not present this as a mere observation of a rocky landscape (349). Rather, it reads like a projection. Riding along with Clevenger in what David describes as his “paleolithic lavender Cadillac,” already the relic of a bygone age, this lunar scene seems like a ghostly anticipation, an imagined future wherein David, Clevenger, and the Cadillac alike will be the discovery of some archaeologist to come (348). Rather than a direct engagement with this ruined landscape in the present tense, David encounters it as a “misty green leaflet of childhood on the planet Earth,” viewed from the perspective of a future in which that misty green version no longer exists as such. One might assume that this sense of temporal disjunction emerges only in those places that feel most alien to David—the lunar landscape, where “the past returned in plastic.” However, David’s relationship to his surroundings in general could be described as “telescopically distant,” an experience of the present world as something that has already begun to fade. During a party in the novel’s opening scene, for example, this disjointed temporality is explicit: It was almost over … In a little while I would ask B.G. where she wanted to eat … We would go to a small French restaurant way over on the West Side, on the rim of no man’s land, where the wind blows cold off the river and the low bleak tenements breathe decay; and where, at this time of year, there is a sense of total emptiness, of a place that has been abandoned … those distant lights, crackling over Times Square, belong to another city in another age. (6) David begins this line of thought with the projection of a self-looking back on the narrative from the immediate future—a low-stakes description of the end of the night before its middle. Yet, the lens of this projection quickly expands outward, and within moments, he is imagining Manhattan as a place wrenched across incommensurate epochs. The scene does not juxtapose a pre-modernized New York with modern, glimmering Times Square, though. Quite the opposite: one gets the sense that this Times Square belongs to an age that is passing or has passed already, and the “low bleak tenements breath[ing] decay” are not nineteenth-century anachronisms but rather dark projections of a more widespread future. Sooner rather than later, the scene suggests, this place will have become a thing of the past. It is notable that, beneath this party scene, a petrocultural cacophony rages. David notes that, in the streets below, “traffic built to a tidal roar,” and, stepping out onto the terrace, he observes a crawling patchwork: “Automobiles were moving across Central Park, ticking red taillights trailing each other north and west toward the darkness and the river, headlights coming this way … ” (3, 8). This posh party is far removed from the Texas oilfields and burning rubber of the tire testing track, but even here, the “tidal roar” competes with the characters’ voices, the automobile procession carries on endlessly, and the road seems less a medium of escape than one of tedium and excess, a crowded and inescapable path “ticking” like a bomb. In light of these bleak projections, David appears increasingly preoccupied with documenting his surroundings as evidence for an impending reckoning. It is by way of this anxious impulse to collect proof that, formally, Americana departs most dramatically from its mid-century predecessors. At the novel’s beginning, David expresses a desire to “explore America in the screaming night. You know. Yin and yang in Kansas. That scene” (10). Unlike the figures of the Beat Generation that are evoked here, however, David does not experience “that scene”—or any other—with wild abandon. He is no Sal Paradise, certainly no Dean Moriarty. David narrates his experience by obsessively counting objects and people, categorizing them, composing lists. He inventories the items in a lover’s apartment, imagining it as “a room in a museum in a hundred years from now. The American Wing” (59). He indexes his coworkers’ doors while imagining their future obituaries. At parties, David records the number of attendees: “Counting the house was a habit of mine. The question of how many people were present in a particular place seemed important to me, perhaps because the recurring news of [disasters] always stressed the number of dead and missing” (3–4). These catalogs of the living and dying often refer to the violence in Vietnam, but they also gradually come to reflect a forward-facing anxiety that extends more broadly to the “[e]cological balances [that] were slipping,” to the “casual savagery” “snaking across the continent beneath highways, smokestacks, oilrigs and gasworks” that threaten to overwhelm the landscape (124). David’s obsession with documentation in light of some future reckoning is most notable in his relationship to film, however, which offers a second layer of meaning to the novel’s petrocritique. Recently, scholars have begun to theorize film itself as a form of “oil media,” in LeMenager’s words, or “ecomedia,” as Cajetan Iheka calls it.14 While the novel may not set out to make this connection explicitly, David’s recording interests are surprisingly material and thus, I propose, conducive to such a reading. For example, in one of the novel’s most striking moments, which takes place, as so many of the most notable scenes do, in and around cars, David and his friend are sitting in their camper in a supermarket parking lot when he notices a group of women standing by a station wagon. As he raises his camera, he thinks: [S]omeday if evidence is demanded of their passage through time … a moment might be recalled when they stood in a dazzling plaza in the sun and were registered on the transparent plastic ribbon … [T]here they stand, verified, in chemical reincarnation … Their happiness, I think, was made of this, the anticipation of incontestable evidence, and had nothing to do with the present moment, which would pass with all the others into whatever is the opposite of eternity … [T]heir smiles enter[ed] the lens and wander[ed] the camera-body seeking the magic spool, the gelatin which captures the image, the film which threads through the waiting gate. (254–255) As David registers this moment on the plastic ribbon—the shoppers, the station wagon, the supermarket, the suburban parking lot—one gets the sense that this is not a carefree snapshot of the women so much as a larger memento mori of a twentieth-century way of life whose perceived effortlessness was beginning to show cracks. Gathering this evidence, then, appears as an attempt to counteract the threat of the present’s passing “into whatever is the opposite of eternity.” The irony, of course, is that this medium, too, is part of oil culture; furnishing proof means necessarily also becoming further entangled with the magic spool, the transparent plastic, to the point that one’s existence seems barely to exist without it. In another sense, then, this evidence-gathering appears as gloomy acceptance, what LeMenager calls “petromelancholia,” the “grieving of conventional oil resources and the pleasures they sustained” (102). Even in quiet scenes like this one, removed from testing track and city traffic alike, a sense of preemptive nostalgia looms. This is not to suggest that DeLillo predicts the oil crises that were to come later in the decade. Rather, it is simply to illuminate how this road novel, unlike its predecessors, is preoccupied by an anticipation of endings of a particular kind—the end of petro-sustained pleasures like highway freedom and suburban comfort—and that characters can do little in the face of these anticipations other than “gathering proof” of their passing. In Cruel Optimism, Lauren Berlant describes “the impasse” as a constitutive feature of life at the end of the twentieth century, an experience of the present characterized as an experience of waiting, or hoping, for a better future to come.15 Processes of what they call “slow death” mark life in the impasse, “the physical wearing out of a population that is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and historical existence.”16Americana features numerous scenes of physical wearing-out, be it the exhaustion of the more-than-human environment or the all-too-human characters who cohabit it. The impasse that the novel imagines, however, differs from that which Berlant describes. Rather than a state of waiting for something better to come (“this will have been” expressed as the desire to move beyond the exhausting present), the “this will have been” of Americana appears as an upper-middle-class anxiety, the fear that the free, white, American man—and the automotive fantasies of the good life that he conjures—might not be so unencumbered in the new millennium. It also appears, more deeply, as a fear that the new era will bear out not endless promise but further degradation (a “this will have been” whose future is cause for dread). The novel, in fact, crafts a resonant indictment of David’s petrocultural impasse along these lines. Sporadically, through brief asides, the reader learns that he is recounting this journey from an unnamed island somewhere, alone, where he watches his autofictional road film over and over, obsessed with “the reels which sit in [his] small air-conditioned storage vault” (346). Enthralled by the mythology of the road and the postwar romances that it represents, he has nothing to do but dwell in this melancholy impasse, held in “the magnet-grip of an impending century,” rewinding and replaying the tapes (166). Fixated on a seemingly free and prosperous past from which he cannot move forward, that is, David embodies a particularly debilitating version of the future imperfect perspective. Any ideas about the future are thwarted in the novel by this circular obsession with the past, and the anticipatory tone of the narrative rings with an unsettling finality. In this sense, while most scholars have read Americana as paradigmatically postmodern—a darkly humorous response to the manic postwar technoscape and a condemnation of national identity that has been overwritten to the point of kitsch—I suggest that, by way of its anxious engagement with the environment and its “slipping balances,” the novel earnestly expresses the embodied experience of living in an environment shaped by petrocultural entanglements so vast and complex as to be nervously surreal.17 It thematizes how mythologies of the good life that oil made possible turn out to be what LeMenager calls “the rotten promises of modernization,” and the figure of the white male highway wanderer is devastated by this fact (129). The excess and ebullience of the postwar period—Kerouac’s sense that “everything [is] ahead”—loses steam here. Exploring a troubled present overwhelmed by anticipations of a bleak world to come, the novel bears witness to the dissolution of the environments through which the road leads, and must admit, with a sense of dejection, that it cannot see a future for them. Deep Highways, Decaying Forward Like DeLillo’s novel, Least Heat-Moon’s autobiographical travel account, Blue Highways: A Journey into America (1982), reworks the road narrative in ways that reflect the precarity of a cultural moment marked by new environmental threats and new discourses about their implications for the future. Unlike Americana, however, Blue Highways focuses a petrocritical lens on the American road system in a way that does not merely observe or mourn polluted terrains but seeks to untangle the histories that shaped them. And, while Least Heat-Moon, like David Bell, records the environments and people he encounters as snapshots of a present world that is vanishing—in this case, being obliterated by boom-and-bust industries and the gradual rewriting of the landscape by corporate mega-chains—Blue Highways ultimately crafts a road narrative with a markedly different relationship to the future. Rather than a portrait of a world with no path forward, Least Heat-Moon’s text seeks to imagine more sustainable futures—in some cases, futures beyond oil—which might avoid the mistakes of the past. Ultimately, the narrative invites the reader to consider the decay of the US landscape as a bruised yet generative opening through which new ways of life might emerge. In some ways, Blue Highways resembles mid-century works like On the Road more than Americana does. Least Heat-Moon undertakes his road trip earnestly, as Ronald Primeau puts it, as both a “journey of self discovery” and a “search for national identity”: setting out on the quiet back roads of the United States (those “blue highways” that offer alternatives to the major interstates marked in red on old maps), the narrator initially approaches the road as a site of exploration and personal fulfillment.18 Least Heat-Moon acknowledges his own resemblance to the image of the highway wanderer that was popularized by the likes of Kerouac and Steinbeck: “[I] was rolling effortlessly along,” he writes, “turning the windshield into a movie screen … That was the temptation of the American highway … (from the Latin vacare, ‘to be empty’)” (187). The text also shares with mid-century works an active attention to oil and its infrastructures. Least Heat-Moon regularly stops to get gas and to chat with station employees; filling up the tank is a topic of narrative interest and plot development. However, the text departs from those mid-century works in meaningful ways. While Least Heat-Moon “[takes] to the open road in search of places where change did not mean ruin,” he ultimately encounters extensive ruination on his travels (5). Large-scale agriculture has exhausted rural areas and left resource towns to wither; big cities are mazes of streets where he gets lost and racially profiled by police. Some of the most menacing instances of ecological deterioration appear with regard to oil and its infrastructures, which, as in Americana, mark the landscape with a sense of precarity and threat. Least Heat-Moon observes full cities “in a swelter of petrochemical plants and wharves;” on the interstate, he laments how “[t]ruck diesel spouts blowing black, the throttle-guts slammed past me” (125, 67). He encounters local lifeways disrupted by oil industry: in Louisiana’s Atchafalaya Basin, where traditional practices of fishing and moss-picking have already been disturbed, he reflects, “Maybe the swamp is doomed anyway, what with bayous being dredged and channels dug so oil and gas drilling equipment can get in, what with pipelines being laid” (123). And, whereas Kerouac’s characters float from one gas pump to another in a way that suggests a feeling of abundance—the resource is always available, one simply needs to find the gas money—Least Heat-Moon’s narrative conjures a feeling of urgency and lack. He often comes close to running out of gas, finding himself in areas where stations have closed, or where towns have dwindled altogether. Rather than an abundance of cheap energy, one witnesses an anxious sense of scarcity, and the narrative is often poised on the edge of its seat: will he make it to the next station? Once there, will the pumps be in order? Beyond this tension, Blue Highways differs from its predecessors most dramatically in its understanding of the kinds of “discovery” that the road enables. While he acknowledges the urge to sit back, Least Heat-Moon rarely partakes in this kind of passive spectatorship. Rather, he actively narrates the histories by which this world-in-passing was made, attending to Indigenous histories and legacies of settler colonization that linger in the landscape. In Louisiana, for example, he observes, If you’ve read Longfellow, you can’t miss Cajunland … Evangeline Speedway (autos), Evangeline Thruway (trucks), Evangeline Drive-in … I found my way among the Evangelines into an industrial area of Lafayette, a supply depot for bayou and offshore drilling operations. Along the streets were oil-rig outfitters where everything was sections of steel: pipes, frames, ladders, derricks, piles, cables, buoys, tanks. (111) Least Heat-Moon certainly mourns the state of this environment. From the “forest primeval” of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem “Evangeline,” he draws a jarring connection to the present. In place of “[t]he murmuring pines and the hemlocks,/Bearded with moss, and in garments green,” one encounters offshore drilling supplies, speedways and thruways, the hostile and rusting detritus of oil infrastructure.19 However, beyond simply lamenting this littered and leaking landscape, he makes a broader point about the settler histories that have created it. By drawing attention to the fact that the petro-infrastructures of this area bear Longfellow’s imprint—Longfellow, whose Song of Hiawatha (1855) generated racist stereotypes about Indigenous peoples and influenced Anglo-American perceptions of the nineteenth-century West—Least Heat-Moon invites the reader to consider how a white settler perspective continues to shape this area in destructive ways. By observing the oil-spilled site in this manner, he reorients this literary genealogy to new ends.20 The road itself comes to function as an actor in this reorientation, rather than mere background to it. Throughout the text, Least Heat-Moon traces the particular histories of different roadways as they change names and change uses over time. In Texas, for example, he reflects: Older than the mind of man, [blue highway 21] started as a bison trail … then Indians came up it to hunt the buffalo. In 1691, Spain established a thousand-mile camino real, a royal road, that would link San Antonio with Mexico, French Louisiana, and Spanish Florida … And so it was that wandering bison … laid down a route that a nation whose explorers steer tangents past the planetary arcs still follow. (132) Undoubtedly, there is an element of critique here: the twentieth-century highways are shaped by European colonization and Indigenous displacement, violent histories that Least Heat-Moon narrates at length. Yet, these roads also bear longer patterns of Indigenous stewardship and vaster cycles of geological change that preceded them and extend beyond them. In this sense, while the mediators of road travel are often presented as destructive, the roadway itself becomes a means to establish a different kind of temporality: as the most recent manifestation of routes that have been traveled for centuries, these blue highways cast the narrator and his life-worlds as mere blips in the grander, cyclical scheme. Cyclical timelines, in fact, form the foundation of Blue Highways’ historical perspective. The text’s future-imperfect tone—its particular “will have been”—is built upon the observation of cycles past, which play out at multiple scales, from seasonal and yearly cadences to larger cycles of deep time. At the level of individual communities, Least Heat-Moon often encounters people who reflect upon how their lives have been shaped by the rise and fall of resources and markets, often tied to oil or road infrastructures. While stopped in Dime Box, Texas, for example, a town that waned when the railroad did, an elderly man tells Least Heat-Moon, “[t]hey located a big pool of oil here … Now people believe oil’s gonna bring things back like they used to be. I say hoping’s swell, but better be ready for it to go as fast as it comes” (139). Such encounters evince a keen awareness, on the part of narrator and residents alike, of the fleeting nature of petromodernity’s cycles. “This will have been” seems the text’s very rhythm of life. Unlike the protagonist of DeLillo’s novel, shocked into stasis upon learning that petromodernity’s linear progress narratives are “rotten,” the characters in Blue Highways acknowledge this freely. The narrator even derives a certain measure of balance from recognizing this cyclicality, and in its most striking moments, the text extends its attention to historical cycles of much larger proportions, measured in the timelines of species, eras, planets. Driving through Montana, for instance, Least Heat-Moon gazes out over the sea-like prairie and reminds that even fossil fuels are the product of living things, dredged up millennia after death. Feeling “a prescient awareness of the tug between coming and going,” he imagines how “the buffalo grass, the wheat and rye spring from the limestone bones of ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs lying under stony blankets of the ancient seabed where molecules turn to soil and cellulose” (269). The ancient creatures invoked here make oil seem less like an inert substance and more like one phase of a life cycle—a cycle in which Least Heat-Moon himself is enveloped. Continuing on this stretch of road, he reflects, “First the highway held me, then it entered me, then I was the highway … [I] became part of the machine: generator, accelerator, humanator” (269). Obliterating the boundary between himself and the road in this way, the narrator is swept up in the same temporal currents; this journey is not as an escape from the world but a deeper engagement with it. “[T]hat time mineral, this time vegetable, next time animal, sometime man,” Least Heat-Moon reflects (269). Imagining the striated layers of history beneath his car as he drives, he also envisions the present-day landscape as its own projected seabed, the site of some future excavation where the car, asphalt, grasses, his own bones might one day be unearthed. There certainly is a melancholy tone to this cyclicality—projecting one’s own end as part of this great “machine” is not uncomplicatedly peaceful—and at times, the circular patterns can become bewildering and unsettling. For example, after learning about long histories of displacement and slavery in a particular area in Kentucky, Least Heat-Moon reflects on these legacies as he travels uphill to a Shaker community, and there, from the hilltop, overlooking the road, he experiences a moment of disjointed time much like the one David feels while driving with Clevenger. “I saw far to the east a yellow smear from a power generating plant smokestack,” he describes. “The yellowed sky gave me the sense … that I was standing in the future in that hundred-thirty-nine-year-old building” (23). In this scene, the future has arrived already, and it is a somewhat bleak one, not the utopia that the Shakers imagined but a present marked by a palimpsest of traumatic experiences. Beyond these moments of historical disorientation, a sense of melancholy also emerges when Least Heat-Moon reflects on the loss of mid-century modes of life that fossil fuels once afforded. He admits to what LeMenager calls “loving oil,” that is; fossil fuels are intimately bound to some of his most cherished memories. While visiting Newport, Rhode Island, for example—a town where he was stationed as a young man in the Navy—Least Heat-Moon laments the fact that the old military infrastructures have disappeared. “Where the hell was the diesel oil of yesteryear? [Where were the] trucks honking … the last smoke blowing grit on us from the tall stacks?” (363). The diesel itself, recalled with tenderness, is affectively bound up with a nostalgia for a time in the narrator’s past, a time before Newport became dominated by tourist strips and parking lots and expensive stores, like so many of the towns he encounters on his journey. This nostalgia extends beyond individual scenes to encompass a broader sense of sociality that petroculture once provided. “As filling stations cease to be garages and community centers,” Least Heat-Moon reflects, “they become nothing but expensive nozzles” (368). Petromodernity, then, does not function in the narrative as a wholly negative force; losing the modes of life that it once afforded can be painful. Yet, Least Heat-Moon ultimately acknowledges the necessity of moving with the flows that he observes rather than fighting to preserve a way of life that cannot be sustained. At times, this acknowledgement manifests with explicit regard to oil. In Maine, he encounters an engineering student who is visiting the area to study a local gristmill. Describing the efficiency of small-scale hydropower, the student notes that developing small existing dams “could save a couple hundred million barrels of oil a year. As I see it, that gristmill may be the oldest thing in Kennebunkport, but it’s also the most futuristic” (346). While the gristmill, of course, is by no means a solution to the large-scale issues that shape this landscape, scenes like this one nevertheless demonstrate an attempt to imagine the hazy outlines of a future beyond oil. The future-imperfect orientation of the narrative, here as elsewhere, comes as a recognition of return: not a “this will have been” that tracks a linear progression through states that pass, as David put it, “into whatever is the opposite of eternity,” but rather a willingness to embrace a sense of cyclicality in order to move beyond harmful habits of the present. Least Heat-Moon does not, in other words, merely accept a pessimistic vision of the future. He expresses, rather, a belief that the cyclical timelines he observes might bring about more hopeful paths forward. In some cases, this realization comes through the land itself. After leaving Philadelphia, Mississippi, for example—a town located where a Choctaw village once stood—Least Heat-Moon reflects upon the histories by which the Choctaw were forced off the land through one of Andrew Jackson’s brutal Indian Removal “treaties.” Yet, he also notes “It was spring here … stuff was stirring in the rot … Things once squeezed close, pinched shut, things waiting to become something else, something greater, were about ready … I stood among the high mysteries of being as they consumed the decay of old life” (104–105). He by no means suggests that one should move past the violent histories borne out along this stretch of road, but his encounter with the bog does demonstrate that energetic growth toward “something else, something greater” comes only from engaging with past deaths. It is only from decay, he suggests, that the slow friction of new growth can issue forth. This insight reaches its most resonant crescendo at the end of the narrative—notably, in the form of a final oil encounter. Driving through West Virginia, gazing out over the landscape on his way home, he recalls: Again came the feeling … that somehow I’d made a turn in time … On west lay the Pennzoil country of small valleys barbed with rusting derricks, the great flywheels turning slowly, inexorably like the mills of God … I couldn’t shake the sense I was driving in another era. Maybe it was the place or maybe a slow turning in the mind about how a man cannot entirely disconnect from the past. To try to is the American impulse, but to look at the steady continuance of the past is to watch time get emptied of its bluster … To be only a nub in the eternal temporary is still to have a chance to see, to pry at the mystery. (408) This narrator, like David Bell, is caught in an impasse of sorts, a “nub in the eternal temporary.” Yet, suspended in this strange feeling of having “made a turn in time,” of “driving in another era,” Least Heat-Moon does not look back longingly to a mid-century moment, nor does one get the impression that this impasse is an immobilizing one. The “Pennzoil country” described here is already in some sense a relic of the past, and while this knowledge is melancholy and somewhat anxious—it is difficult to imagine what lies beyond this slow, inexorable turning—the text holds open space to believe that a greater attention to the “steady continuance of the past” might lead toward more hopeful futures. Navigating Petrocultural Futurity At the end of the twentieth century, as threats posed by pollution and resource exhaustion grew increasingly visible and urgent, the road narrative became a means through which to record the changing environment, to express anxieties about those changes, and to imagine alternative futures. By reworking the genre that became so mythically prominent over the course of an ecologically destructive century, these authors demonstrate its contradictions and propose alternatives. In Americana, the narrator wanders the nation’s highways and encounters deterioration rather than freedom, fears about the future rather than a heightened experience of the present. In Blue Highways, the road becomes the site upon which to mourn the loss of older forms of life, to reorient dominant versions of US history and to imagine better paths forward. Despite their different approaches, however, both works reimagine the road as a site at which to think through the entanglements between individuals and their environments in light of an uncertain future. Rather than freedom to roam the open road, they express anxiety about the material consequences of such roaming. Rather than stories of self-discovery and personal development, they depict loneliness, pollution, and resource dependence. Yet, whether by failure or by example, they also invite us to acknowledge and imagine generative forms of inter-reliance and the creation of new models of cohabitation. These late-twentieth-century road narratives express the present by projecting forth its inevitable passing—“this will have been”—a temporal displacement that can be unsettling, alienating, mournful, and even frightening. At the same time, they invite us to consider that some version of the road narrative might, in a new century, envision sustainable connections rather than bearing witness to their dissolution. Acknowledgement Special thanks to Marta Figlerowicz, Joseph Cleary, Ursula Heise, and the members of the Yale Environmental Humanities community for their feedback on earlier versions of this essay. Thanks also to Victoria Baena and Shaj Mathew for their suggestions and support. Footnotes 1 In the late nineteenth century, scientists had already begun to warn that carbon dioxide from fossil fuels was becoming a climatic threat; in the late 1950s, new statistical models projected this threat into the future; by the 1970s, major oil spills like Torrey Canyon (1967) and Union Oil (1969) collided with global oil crises, illuminating the volatility of the resource. See Broecker; Buell. 2 See Szeman, On Petrocultures. See also Wilson et al. 3–20; Macdonald 7. 3 Wenzel notes, “This is the great paradox of fossil fuel imaginaries: in literature as in life, oil in particular is at once everywhere and nowhere, indispensable yet largely unapprehended” (11). 4 These works predate discourses about climate change and the Anthropocene—the phrase “global warming” first appeared in a scholarly journal in 1975, and the fossil fuel industry promoted the use of this term over “climate change” well into the twenty-first century—but they nevertheless express preoccupations with ecosystem change. For more on this discourse, see Buell. 5 Saint-Amour’s Tense Future provided helpful frameworks for thinking through this narrative mode. 6 See Brigham 106–86; Rymhs. See also Louise Erdrich, “The Red Convertible,” in Love Medicine: Newly Revised Edition, 2016, 177–89. 7 See Totten; Seymour 105–46. 8 See LeMenager 3–19. 9 See Obernesser; Bellamy. See also Robertson. 10 Worden 441. 11 Examples include Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006); Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998); Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992); Claire Vaye Watkin’s Gold Fame Citrus (2015); and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Three Californias Tryptych (1984–1990). 12 Ghosh 31. 13 Marx 28. 14 See Iheka 1–24. 15 Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 191–222. 16 Berlant, “Slow Death,” 754. 17 DeLillo would go on to expand this inquiry in later works like White Noise (1985), which portrays characters taking to the road as they flee an airborne toxic event. 18 See Primeau 51–88. 19 Longfellow, “Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie,” Poets.org. 20 For a comparative reading of Indigenous and Anglo-American environmental writing, see Adamson. Works Cited Adamson Joni. American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism: The Middle Place . U of Arizona P , 2001 . 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TI - Toward a Future Imperfect: Environmental Crisis and the Late-Twentieth-Century American Road Narrative
JF - Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment
DO - 10.1093/isle/isac033
DA - 2022-06-04
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/toward-a-future-imperfect-environmental-crisis-and-the-late-twentieth-tYjMJcWCph
SP - 92
EP - 111
VL - 31
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -