What can art from more than a century ago tell us about the future of the West? William R. Handley explores that question, and others, in his new book called "Horizons of Catastrophe in the American West."
Handley, an associate professor of English at the University of Southern California, looks at paintings, photography, writing and other art forms from the 19th and 20th centuries, to try to get a sense of what types of problems people then may have seen in the future in this part of the country.
Handley spoke to The Show more about this.
Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: And, Bill, can we start with a sort of thumbnail version of exactly what it is you're looking at in this book?
WILLIAM R. HANDLEY: Yeah, so climate change has forced people to rethink our notions of history and progress, given that Enlightenment notions of progress are what led to the technological revolutions that have also now imperiled us.
So I'm interested in looking at writers and artists in the past who, even though they did not understand what was what was coming, nonetheless saw in the American West the capacity for catastrophic downturns. So what can we learn from them about how to prepare ourselves for this future that we face?
You know, the West is often associated with Manifest Destiny and progress in the triumphal version of settler colonialism, but I'm arguing that, in fact, a number of factors led writers to understand that things might not just work out the way we think.
MARK BRODIE: So in your reading of it then, writers, artists from let's say the 1800s, maybe had a sense that in the, you know, in the 2000s and beyond that things might not be all all rosy in this part of the world?
WILLIAM R. HANDLEY: Well, they already knew that they weren't so rosy right then. So, and I'm not the first scholar to argue this, but the vast exploitation of resources and the development of the railroad had huge costs not only for Plains Indians, but also for the natural world.
If you just think about the fact that in around 1800 there were about 60 million buffalo and by 1890 there were 1,000. They were well aware of what natural resource exploitation could produce.
MARK BRODIE: Yeah, well how closely do you have to look at some of the the artwork and the writings from that time to get a sense that people understood that maybe things weren't ideal at that moment and would continue to not be ideal into the future?
WILLIAM R. HANDLEY: Well, I'll just give you one little example, that's the writer Willa Cather. You know, she's much loved, very popular writer in her time, and what struck me about her fiction, which I had long kind of wrestled with, was that things happen in her books that don't seem to have any particular meaning in terms of plot.
A young man, for example, in "O Pioneers!" is, just, just got married and he's got this optimistic future and suddenly dies of a burst appendix. Or Ántonia's father in "My Ántonia," a Czech immigrant, a Bohemian immigrant, comes to Nebraska only to take his own life out of despair in the middle of the winter. Cather knew that, you know, a faith in a a rosy future wasn't necessarily going to create it, that things happen.
And also, I look at rephotography — 1990s and early 2000s photographers who went out to try to recreate the very spot where they, where the survey for the US Geological Survey photographers photographed much of the West for the purposes of developing the railroad, but also in terms of wanting to find evidence for theories of what was called in geological science, catastrophism.
The notion that the geological and fossil record suggest that some really big upheavals happened that didn't follow any known laws of nature. So that was the big tension. So even just in the geological record, we have evidence that a lot of unexpected stuff occurred.
MARK BRODIE: When you look back at what folks were writing about and and creating art about in the 1800s, did they have a sense of what potential problems might be on the horizon for us today, or just the fact that there could and maybe would be problems on the horizon?
WILLIAM R. HANDLEY: No, I think — well, of course they wouldn't have thought about it in terms of climate change. That that would have been unimaginable, but what they certainly could understand is that civilizations can fall.
Because one example I talk about in the book is the discovery by white Americans in the 1870s of the ruins at Mesa Verde of ancestral Puebloans, which became a, the photographer William Henry Jackson and a geologist friend created these models of these cities for the centennial of the Philadelphia Exposition, and they drew as many people as Alexander Graham Bell's phone. And so there was a kind of chilling premonition that that could be the fate of any civilization.
MARK BRODIE: When you talk about ancient people and you talk about, you know, geological formations and the kinds of things that you see in the West, it seems like an interesting juxtaposition between the timeframes that we're talking about with those kinds of things and the timeframes we're talking about in terms of like getting the railroad built and telephones and, you know, some of the technology that we see now in our modern society.
Like it just seems like some is very slow, like we're talking millions of years, and some, you know, we're talking weeks, months, or even a year or two.
WILLIAM R. HANDLEY: Yeah, you've you've kind of nailed one of my fascinations in writing the book was just with these incommensurable time scales and speeds. You know, if you look at the Grand Canyon, that's about a billion years of geological history on view.
But we're talking about in terms of climate change that since 1945 alone, three-quarters of all of the human-caused carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been produced. And of course the huge technological changes that transformed the whole look of the West. So I think that the slowness of time has been used to try to give us a sense that there is a there's a sublime divine presence in the landscape.
But I'm sort of arguing these writers understood that what you're looking at when you look at the Grand Canyon is a history of millions of years of catastrophic upheavals. And it's humbling. We need as a species to be humble about our very short blip of time in which we've had such a huge impact.
MARK BRODIE: Do you think that art maybe allowed people at that time, and maybe allows us now, to think about and grapple with these issues a little bit differently than, you know, if somebody had gotten up on a soapbox and given a speech or or whatever?
WILLIAM R. HANDLEY: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely, and let me let me give you one example that I start the book off with. There's a famous painting by Albert Bierstadt called "The Oregon Trail," and it shows covered wagons heading into the sunset. And, you know, it stands as a kind of icon of the Western promise from the settler point of view.
But I do this reading of it where you can see there are tipis sort of vanishing into the golden light on the distant horizon and there are ox skulls in the foreground. And what I'm arguing about it is, given how invested white Americans were in this sense of the triumphal march of progress, standing on a soapbox and saying you've got it all wrong would have convinced absolutely no one.
But if you look long enough at Bierstadt's painting, something unsettling happens, and you realize that he's giving these little hints about the limits of this whole enterprise of settlement and conquest. And in part, especially if you know the date of the painting, it's 1869, it's when the railroads were completed, and so this mode of transportation that we romanticized, that Hollywood films picked up on, the covered wagon, they're obsolete when he's painting it.
So it's a, it's a painting not so much of hope as it is mourning and nostalgia as well. And I think it's that ambiguity, you know, when, when we see how art really forces us to contend with what we think of as opposing ideas or feelings, I think we become more nimble in our own thinking when when we're exposed to that kind of work.
MARK BRODIE: Do you ever wonder if people in that time saw that painting in that way?
WILLIAM R. HANDLEY: I do wonder, and I'll bet you most people did not. But I'm sure others did. I'm sure certain artists did. A lot of people don't even look at that painting that way today, but — and it's weird how art that didn't seem to communicate certain things at the time that it was created does later.
MARK BRODIE: William R. Handley is an associate professor of English at the University of Southern California and author of the book "Horizons of Catastrophe in the American West."
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