The Rhetoric of a Nature Writer: Subversion, Persuasion, and Ambiguity in the Writings of Edward Abbey

The genre of nature writing in American literature is rich in tradition and cultural significance. It has produced such canonical figures and texts as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau's Walden, and is now, with the many environmental pressures of these last years of the twentieth century, becoming one of the most frequented avenues for literary expression by the artists of our time. Indeed, with the recent rise in the genre's popularity, galvanized by such writers as Annie Dillard and Barry Lopez, some scholars are claiming that nature writing is "arguably the major genre in American literature" (Murray 73). The rhetorical intricacies of this essay-driven, advocacy-focused genre are elaborate in the least. The work of Edward Abbey in particular, Abbey being one of the most significant of modern nature writers, demonstrates the real rhetorical and theoretical complexity embedded within the genre. In order to locate Edward Abbey in the intellectual and philosophical tradition of nature writing, certain key concepts which exist in the genre need to be defined, and certain key distinctions need to be made between those same concepts. In the genre of nature writing, there seems to be certain philosophical and rhetorical assumptions about such large issues as "nature," "wilderness," and "civilization." These assumptions act as the controlling concepts of the genre, and provide the nature writer with a particular rhetorical environment or situation that conditions the discourse that is being constructed. Indeed, in even attempting to make these intellectual distinctions and definitions, we come immediately to a central rhetorical issue: what is the "nature writer" writing about? In one sense, the definition of the genre and the answer to this question are simple: [Nature writing] is a specific genre of non-fictive prose about nature, written in a way that remains faithful to the objective scientific facts, includes those facts as a significant element of content, and at the same time presents a human response and relationship to those facts. (Bryant, Frontier Experience 205) Yet in a deeper sense, in the very rhetorical assumptions of the genre, we discover something else: nature writing seems geared towards "discovery," towards the delivery of "meaning," "significance," and "truth." Another critic writes of the genre: At its most characteristically American, it captures and reflects the pecularily deep and detailed, if often troublesome, relationship between ego and ecos, or pysche and bios, in American history and culture. (Fritzwell 153) The same critic also argues: It captures and explores the radically different modes of ordering experience that first attained full expression in Aristotle's Historia Animalium and Saint Augustine's Confessions and that later came together with particular force in early America. It is, in fact, largely the product of these two traditional modes of thought. It is likewise the largely unarbitrated expression of the two-geobiotic science and autobiography.... (154) Thus, nature writing is a genre concerned with the "egos" or the self, and the world that surrounds that self; it is, in fact, concerned most with that self's interaction with that world, with "nature." The self is understood to be "historical," to be layered with cultural and mythic contextualities which the writer either strips away or better understands in the naked, solely individual observation, exploration, and contemplation of the natural world; the function, indeed, of "nature writing" is to enact that process, to discover some kind of self, and also, importantly, some kind of "real," "truthful" world-the self will discover something, must discover something, and must deliver that message, that discovery to the reader of the work, to the audience. Inside this discovery, and inside the entire notion of "nature" or the natural world, there occurs an intellectual opposition between the concepts of "wilderness" and "civilization. …