Grizzly @ Adams

American Studies. You might be wondering why I’m having you read that hefty excerpt from Freeman Tilden’s Interpreting Our Heritage. It’s because I believe it can help us understand an intellectual event crucial to this course: the controversy, which took place during the 1990s, over the deconstruction of nature. Think of Jacques Derrida’s infamous dictum, “il n’y a pas de hors-texte,” which is usually (and misleadingly) translated as “there is nothing outside the text” but actually means something like “there is no escaping textuality,” which in turn means something like “there is no escaping the fact that our understanding of reality is always mediated by signs,” which is important because signs always have to be interpreted.

As you’ll recall, a sign is made up of a signifier and a signified, and there’s no intrinsic relationship between the two. There’s no intrinsic relationship between, say, the signifier cat (the sound or the marks on a piece of paper) and the signified cat (the mental image of a cat that comes into our minds when we hear or read the word). The relationship between the two is basically arbitrary. The relationship does not exist in nature; it exists only because human beings have invented a code (in this case, the English language) linking the two together.

Back to deconstruction and “il n’y a pas de hors-texte.” The basic idea here is not that objects do not have their own objective reality, but that we humans always encounter objects through the mediation of some human-devised code (that is, some semiotic system). For us, a sunset is never just a sunset. It’s something we understand symbolically as part of a larger symbol system of meanings, the all-encompassing “textuality” from which Derrida says we cannot escape.

Note that to call the sunset a sun “set” is to name it not simply in reference to what it is “in itself,” but in reference to a larger set of understandings in which the sun “rises” and “sets,” rather than a framework in which, say, the sun stands still and the earth rotates. We might call the first of these sets of understandings a geocentric code and the second a heliocentric code. (If we were approaching this issue by way of Michel Foucault instead of Jacques Derrida, we might speak instead of the geocentric and heliocentric discourses of astronomy.)

A deconstructionist would note a fundamental conflict in Interpreting Our Heritage. On the one hand, Tilden stresses the value of bringing national park visitors face-to-face with the “thing itself.” On the other hand, being in direct contact with the Thing Itself is never quite enough for the visitor to comprehend that thing’s significance. Even when visitors are confronted by the Thing Itself, they still need the park ranger to tell them what it means. But wait — it’s not the Thing Itself that has a meaning; only signs have meaning. The Thing Itself has no meaning; by itself it is only — the Thing Itself.

Once you have something that can be interpreted you’re no longer dealing with the Thing Itself, you’re dealing with a sign, the entity that appears after the yoking-together of the thing and the meaning you’ve assigned to the thing. And once the thing has in this way become a sign, whose meaning depends on its place in a larger system of signs, it has entered the realm of textuality. Il n’y a pas de hors-texte.

Okay, so “natural” landscapes are texts. In my essay “Canonizing Landscape,” I argue that the national parks function much as conservative literary critics would like the western literary canon to function: as a collection of the most profoundly beautiful and meaningful texts which must be preserved for the edification of future generations. In the language of traditional lit-crit, the canon is the best that humans have thought and said; in the language of natural theology (think of Thomas Paine’s argument in The Age of Reason), the national park landscapes are the best that God has thought and said (or revealed).

In the same vein, the national park service interpretive ranger becomes analogous to the literary critic. Each, in this essentially conservative view, is responsible for transmitting their respective texts’ intrinsic meanings to the masses, who are too illiterate to draw out those meanings without professional help. Here’s Tilden:

Thousands of naturalists, historians, archeologists and other specialists are engaged in the work of revealing, to such visitors as may desire the service, something of the beauty and wonder, the inspiration and spiritual meaning that lie behind what the visitor can with his senses perceive. This function of the custodians of our treasures is called Interpretation. (3-4, my italics)

A bit later, Tilden adds that interpretation is

[a]n educational activity which aims to reveal meanings and relationships through the use of original objects, by firsthand experience, and by illustrative media, rather than simply to communicate factual information…. Interpretation is the revelation of a larger truth that lies behind any statement of fact. (8, Tilden’s italics)

I argue that if park interpreters perform the same function as literary critics, then their work is vulnerable to the same critique that has been leveled against traditional literary criticism since the 1960s, namely, that it pretends to be an objective revealing of the intrinsic meanings of the works themselves but is actually a decidedly subjective exercise in discursive construction shot through with unconscious biases (including racism, sexism, nationalism, and the like).

I included this post’s illustration as an example of what Tilden calls “the genius of the revealer — the man or woman who uncovers something universal in the world that has always been here and that men have not known…. To take a slice of a tree like the giant sequoia, and to associate its growth rings with a time chart of human history, was an idea that occurred to some master interpreter” (5). Well, that was a clever idea. I would add, however, that it requires killing a tree, which we may take as a symbol of what happens to the Thing Itself — to “real” or unmediated nature — when it into enters the realm of textuality. There’s a kind of violence involved in turning the Thing Itself into a sign.

So, any comments on the deconstruction of nature?