Robinson Jeffers' California Landscape and the Rhetoric of Displacement
by Pierre Lagayette
University de Paris IV-Sorbonne
Volume 3, Number 1

1. Theodore Roosevelt's well-known phrase, "When I am in California, I am not in the west, I am west of the west" has more to it than a superficial look of rhetorical redundancy. Beyond mere linguistic repetition, it points to some cultural phenomenon that h as to do with direction, movement, distance, and difference.

2. The formula first conveys a sense of furtherance though accumulation. Obviously California concentrates upon itself all the essential characters of the West -- i.e. the so far commonly accepted conception of the West -- plus another special set of qualities that may transform redundancy into improvement. In fact, California epitomizes a whole movement/displacement that incessantly drove people westward with the hope of personal or collective improvement. Repetition, here, stands for migration. And the West is, metonymically, the archetypal land of migrants, or emigrants -- which is to say, of dis-placed persons.

3. Repetition is also the best linguistic approximation to the sense of other-worldliness that California always imparted to those who sought to connect the place to any of their previous experiences of place. In that respect, it would easily symbolize arch- displacement, in the same way as Americans are arch-migrants. In other words, there is a whole cultural construct based on dis-placement or out-of-placement that California has helped develop because it somehow enlarged the western canon without being ent irely contained by it. The preposition ("of ") is not inclusive but directional, and signals a change of place if not a change of world. This is no "western" west but another -- different -- region, "at the west of things" as young Robinson Jeffers somewh at awkwardly wrote around 1912.

4. The power of Roosevelt's description is to indicate that California is the recipient of a whole tradition of "westering", for which it supplies an appropriate symbol (but symbolization is already detachment), yet is likely, because of its geographic and c ultural placement, to provide new grounds for a repeated, though different, western experience. This is repetition and variation, then, if we want to substitute even more abstract concepts for Roosevelt's already symbolic West, or "the other of the same" as Grard Genette would have it.

5. The formula may lead us to a couple of additional comments on California as a land of novelty and as culmination of a historical process. If we do approach "west of the west" from the standpoint of the dialectics of repetition, we recognize that Californ ia cannot but repeat the past experience from which the very notion of the American West emerged, and, at the same time, acquires its originality in the very process of repetition California thus appears both as a final place -- an end -- and the locus o f a new beginning : there is concentrated the powerful dynamics of change, there lies the tension by which the sense of dis-placement is founded, both in time and in space.

6. The exceptional quality of the California landscape had been acknowledged by a long line of travelers, observers and artists, and Jeffers inherited their vision of California as the perfect epic and the culmination (apotheosis, said W. Everson) of the Am erican Sublime. Glorified by Pike, Muir, Olmsted or even Emerson, the far western landscapes brought a final touch to the widespread belief in American excellence, both because it was final (topographically it included, in California, the end of the conti nent -- finis terrae) and because its beauty had no equivalent elsewhere. Olmsted, for example, was overcome by the majestic scenery in Yosemite, by the "union of the deepest sublimity with the deepest beauty of nature." (qt. in Huth 149). Californ ia was a spectacularly natural counterpart to human eschatology. There you could, through landscape, visually experience finality. "Come join me to worship Nature," Muir had written to Emerson in 1868 : "It will cost you nothing save the time, and very li ttle of that for you will be mostly in Eternity" (qt. in Huth 151).

7. Watching, however, excludes, separates the spectator from the scene, places him in a position of aesthetic contemplation. The West may well be, then, that form of "first class art" that Whitman mentions in Specimen Days. Representation does divide the seeing subject from the observed object, and only symbolic vision may seem to atone for the severance. In this respect, we may contend that the spectacular is also specular, inexorably referring us back to ourselves and the power of the eye. Th ere is a Romantic, humanist, anthropocentric tradition of seeing Nature as a mirror image of ourselves, powerfully translated in the homonymy eye / I, which Emerson and Jeffers use in very similar ways.

8. But our aspirations towards empathy, towards a blending with Nature (of which there are many instances in Jeffers's poetry) go along with a permanent desire (clearly a constant in American culture) to dominate Nature, to tame the land beyond the limits o f subsistence. This utilitarian relation to Nature is a way of refusing severance, but also humility. Civilizing the wilderness in the West is truly a way of denying our dis-placement from the center of Creation.

9. Yet, this is exactly what Robinson Jeffers had undertaken to do: give man his true place back in the physical world. "Uncentering" was his catchword. Or decentering, shifting the eye from man to not-man, to landscape and the intrinsic values of the natur al world. This, an idiosyncratic response to the humanist tradition, he aptly called Inhumanism. But shifting the emphasis from man to not-man, one must concede, is essentially a matter of rhetoric, the art of expression and discourse. One can formalize o nly into language the desire to express the emotions aroused by the contemplation of landscape. Which, in fact, amounts to moving the problem from percept to concept, from sense to utterance. For the well-known paradox of the poetic undertaking (among oth er types of expression) is precisely to try to name the unnamable, to turn a presence into an absence, to dissolve the real into words. Jeffers, as a poet, could not escape the contradiction. He simply pretended he could overcome it with his own w ords, using two major expedients : incantation (i.e. repetition) and narrative enlargement. His is a definitely Promethean project, one of a poet dramatically confronted with the anxiety of the fragment, conscious of the impermanent nature of the poetic a ct. The fragment, as we find Derrida explaining, is nevertheless the natural form of writing, an illustration of the principle of discontinuity produced by the rationality of the Logos:

10. "Writing," says Derrida, "will never be Nature. Writing proceeds only by jumps. Which makes it perilous. Death roams between the letters. To write, what is considered so, requires acceding to the spirit courageously by losing one's life, by being dead to Nature" (108).

11. The hugeness of the continent and that of the ocean (see "Continent's End" for example) as experienced by Jeffers in California has a rhetorical equivalent in the huge narratives, the endless dialogues -- even beyond death, as in "The Double Axe" or "Hun gerfield" -- that seem to defy the extinction of voices. The incantatory quality of Jeffers's poetry is there also to remind us that repetition of the Same is one way of attempting a reconciliation of fragment and permanence.

12. But obviously there is no one word (except if the divine could speak itself) to invite us into the beauty of landscape, no word either to carry us beyond the walls of the Logos. There is no syntax, however transitive, that can express the processe s of Nature : "There could be no complete sentence," Ernest Fenollosa once wrote, "save one which it would take all time to pronounce"(qt. in Blasing 148). The poet must compose and circumvent, without cheating must trap language into unexpected -- if not unprepared û significations.

13. To illustrate one way that Jeffers adopted to treat the theme of displacement in a California environment, let us turn to the often discarded long poem "The Loving Shepherdess" (CP 2. 45). This 1929 poem appears superficially more alluring than the previ ous somber epics of family disaster like "Tamar", "Cawdor" or "The Women at Point Sur." Here is a gentle, caring, loving heroine with a flock of sheep, the meekest of creatures. No visible violence, little blood. Yet, beneath the surface of an innocent pa storal lies the most terrifying of realities : that we are mortals. While we wander over the land with the shepherdess, Clare Walker, the real object of the poem is human finitude and, accordingly, to the horizontal movement over the California landscape corresponds a vertical displacement of signification from surface to depth, from the physical to the metaphysical.

14. Much of Jeffers' poetry (as one recent study of "Roan Stallion" by Tim Hunt suggests) was allegorical. This poem may itself be considered an allegory which I would qualify as an allegory of closure; with three types of interrelated closures : 1) the end of the Frontier and the pastoral ideal; 2) the closure of life; 3) the closure of the text (which brings us back to the problem of the fragment).

15. Clare the shepherdess is definitely as out of place as she is anachronistic. In the opening scene of the poem, she is confronted with a bevy of children coming out of school, who jeer at her with the usual unrestrained verbal violence of children. Clearl y, the school represents the world of thought and knowledge while Clare and her sheep are the world of feeling. What is more, Clare has to suffer from constraints that reflect the post open-range era (CP 2.53), having to avoid ranches, ranchers and their cattle along the way. She is, to some extent re-enacting the old pastoral idyll of the classical shepherd, but in a post-pastoral world from which she is being expelled on account of her untimely quest (see the bucolic scene, CP 2.52). Rejection is her lo t even though she encounters a few charitable individuals along the roads.

16. The sense of a final Frontier is also conveyed by the northward direction of her progress. The continent drops here into the sea and along the invisible wall that seems to deprive the protagonists from any chance of advance beyond it, Clare repeats the p rimitive, original movement of migration ("along the last ridge of migration", 74) into California, effected along a north/south, or south/north, axis. The presence of a Spanish Indian boy that befriends her spontaneously and protects her from the schoolc hildren, and that of Onorio Vasquez (64), the Spanish farm-hand with visions, confirm the allegorical reference to the first occupation of the land, one untainted by modern civilization. Clare is clothed in rags and tatters, lives a primitive life she sha res with animals that she eventually proves to be very similar to ("as meek" as one of her ewes, 46). She is out of place because she is out of time, her own sense of chronology being extremely vague (she had left her home "a long time ago," 63). Only the month of April and its intimations of renewal seem to be part of her personal sense of history -- but negatively, since she is expecting to be dead by then. Jeffers lets her life story unfold by little bits, with blurred time bounds, fragments of a past that the reader is offered as clues that 1) no biography can be apprehended whole; 2) stories import only as they are shared, so that Clare's life is revealed only through dialogue.

17. Geographical movement, rambling through the hills, finding subsistence and pleasure wherever one wants seems to represent perfect freedom for Clare after her stay in prison (91). Yet, something seems wrong with this too perfect freedom. Jeffers's narrati ve introduces alarming intimations of doom, scattered through the poem. Clare cannot bear a child without jeopardizing her life. The heart of the narration is that Clare is not moving back but on, inexorably, the way she leads her flock. And the sheep who blindly follow her are in similar danger of unpredictable death. The linguistic construct of the poem comes to terms with this unpredictability by trying to stage the drama of human mortality, by providing the conditions in which inevitabil ity supersedes unpredictability, without despair.

18. Reconciling man with his human condition, with his mortal fate, is what Jeffers does with Clare. Showing that birth and death are intimately connected requires the affirmation of an inescapable movement ahead. Man's ontological nature is progressive, cha racterized by this displacement we experience in time -- which Clare also experiences in space. Her journey towards death is also a journey towards life-giving -- which is also the poet's "inspiration" (see the etymology of the word) in his development of a narrative. His tale of "The Loving Shepherdess" is an allegory of mortality, a reflection on our feeble resistance to finitude.

19. Repeatedly, Clare indicates that she is aware of the vanity of her journey: "happiness must end" (51). She is going "to nowhere" (53), while looking for a place to die. For she knows her fatal predicament: "The life that will make death" has begun in her body (she is like her mother who "died to bear me" 82) and her wanderings are but a way of translating into spatial movement through landscape this slow, inescapable, approach of death. She knows she "must move or die" (75). Movement is an indication of life: "It is horrible to lie still" (94) she admits, and fully meditates on the fate of salmons swimming upstream to the place of their death, moved only by their instinct of reproduction. One is reminded here of Ted Hughes magnificent poem, "October Sa lmon" where he meditates on the pathetic efforts of the fish towards their doom. "She saw her own fate reflected"(105). The journey is from the mother's womb to the earth's, a "flutter from darkness to darkness" Jeffers writes in "The Torch-Bearers' Race ," not cyclical, but linear, like a story unfolding.

20. Not even Vasquez's visions can atone for the tragic outcome. Jeffers, after Pascal and Schopenhauer, asks the metaphysical question of why come into this world of being? Why wring man from the realm of non-being for this finitude? Ionesco's dying King as ks: "Why was I born, if it were not for ever" (qtd. in Jankelevitch 406). Jeffers's answer is simple: life, like Nature, is not kind to the meek, the humble and the submissive. Love and gentleness are not properly rewarded : Clare dies of having loved to o much. She loves her sheep, yet is not much of a savior for them. She loses them despite her utmost care. "What's punished is kindness" (57) she observes when one of her ewes has broken a leg while she was making love to Will Brighton.

21. Though she would like to save the heron attacked by a hawk (61-62), she is helpless towards striking death, just as she is helpless against her own fate. She claims to have finally made peace with death but yearns to go back to the only Eden she remember s -- not California -- "a purer peace in a more perfect heaven" (93), her mother's body (94)

22. Vasquez's visions work as an attempt to revoke the power closure. Imagination is the place where the illusion of canceling mortality can be strongest. One of the most striking of his visions is about space, the cosmos, the universes where the allegory of displacement finds its best rhetorical expression. Envisioning the gigantic dance of the stars in the empty cosmos, he realizes that all creation is marked by perpetual motion. The formula he finds for this is revealing: "no annihilation, no escape, but change; it must endure itself forever" (97).

23. Unfortunately, this does not work for discourse and text. Allegorically representative of life itself, the story has a beginning, a middle and, above all, an end. Yet while implicitly conceding that the imagination cannot entirely transcend the limits of its own expression, by contrasting Vasquez's fiery, beautiful, but useless visions with Clare's inexorable doom, Jeffers stubbornly looks for ways of canceling the sense we may get of a desperately closed narrative. These are mere expedients, rhetorical devices, that use language to dis-place our attention from the inevitability of an ending, to establish the necessity of writing as an act, and a sign, of life; writing the poem, just like Clare's rambling, is also a movement in space. To it Jeffers adds a movement through literary texts as well. Intertextuality is at work in this poem, and we cannot miss it.

24. There would be much to say about the similitudes between "The Loving Shepherdess" and Mary Austin's story "The Walking Woman," not just because Austin's protagonist is called Mrs. Walker, but in connection with a woman's experience of maternity. There is an elegiac tone in both texts and other parallels that make Clare's story a distant echo of Jenny's (Mrs. Walker's) own.

25. More significantly, Clare's journey also retraces some literary steps across Jeffers's own poetic corpus. Places she visits, landscapes she watches, may have an indisputable topographical reality (Point Pinos, Point Sur, Carmel Valley, etc.), but what sh ould interest us here is that they refer back to literary places or landscapes that have a previous significance of their own. The most meaningful of these intertextual "displacements" is Point Sur and the landmark farm of the Barclay family whose tragedy is recounted in "The Women at Point Sur" (55, 63-64).

26. The intertextual references distract us from the contents of Clare's story towards an outside of the text which here is elegiac because reminiscent of past deaths and losses, and which makes somehow the present story an extension of former ones, w hose remains are thus revived. The writing project uses places and landscape to provide connections between the texts and challenge their closure through repetition. In a way, all such revisited places are Clare's own "west of the west", a manner of takin g up an old thread for a new use.

27. Yet, can words, as redundant signifiers, cancel the reality of the fragment, of closure ? Not quite, although Jeffers takes pains to suggest, especially towards the end of the poem, that former landscapes and places, vacant, empty and ruined, may be re-u sed for another tragedy (see at Cawdor's barn, for example).

28. And the last lines also describe a line of trees (poplars) that point "dreadfully away" (105-6) to the north, to an exit from the narrative. Worse, even, the poem ends on an ultimate recoiling upon consciousness and self-centering. The narrator, who so f ar had followed Clare's final journey northward objectively ("she was seenà," 105) surreptitiously turns to a subjective stance: "she called / The sheep about her and perceived that none came" (106), as if to prove that there is no escape from mort ality ( both her death and her sheep's are concomitantly suggested) and that since no further vision or imaginary construct may atone for it, the story should be terminated there.

29. "Imagination my traitor," cried Jesus in the companion poem "Dear Judas," "I am in the net and this deliberately sought / Torture on the Cross is the only real thing"(34). The same is true of Clare, caught in the net of her humanity, deluded by the p ower of love for her flock; and the conviction that love (despite the risks of childbirth) would vanquish death. This fantasy of godlike powers ("I am like its God," 94) is the poet's own delusion. Even though he once declares (one of Vasquez's visions) t hat the human and the non-human may occasionally blend ("And Clare love all things / Because all things are herself" 98), the recognition itself irremediably confirms the severance, being only a figment of the imagination. Displacing, de-centering humanit y to project it onto the landscape (in California and elsewhere) will always be a rhetorical artifice. The lesson is that there is no transcendence possible through the "flaming walls" of vision (98). Gazing, or trying to gaze beyond the "four walls of hu manity" ("The Torch Bearers' Race"), Vasquez only meets "his own eye." "I am whom I have sought "(98).

30. But as we see in the poem, Clare's essential solitude (hers is a story of successive losses, mother, father, lover, child, sheep) is compensated by chance encounters of other suffering humans, thirsty for love themselves and by the freedom that her unmed iated contact with Nature provides.

31. For all her wanderings through California "On the last coast above the not-to-be colonized / Ocean" (74), Clare can't escape her fate and the poet the fact that, as Milton said, "the mind is its own place."

32. To strain the limits of human intelligence (see "The Beginning and the End"/ "Old age hath clawed me" 3) in order to leave such a place and explore the shores of not-being is a temptation into which Jeffers regularly falls. California, being both the end of a continent and an open space overlooking a huge ocean, instigated, stimul ated, but also thwarted his attempts. Like Clare, nevertheless, he would each time overcome his defeat and move on, over the poetic landscape he cherished most, his California.

1. For "what is repeated was, otherwise it could not be repeated, yet it is precisely the fact that it was which gives repetition its character of novelty." Soren Kirkegaard: quoted in "Repetition and Variation," (Corps Escrit, 15, 91)

2. Yet this was always with him. This was inscribed in his egg. This chamber of horrors is also home. He was probably hatched in this very pool. ("October Salmon," Hughes 74)

3. "And the passionate human intelligence/Straining its limits, striving to understand itself and the universe to the last galaxy--/Flammantia moenia mundi, Lucretius wroteà/ The flaming world-walls, far-flung fortifications of being/ Against non-being" ("Old age hath clawed me" CP 3.484)

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Derrrida, Jacques. L'Ecriture et la difference. Paris: Seuil, 1967.

Hughes, Ted. River. New York: Harper & Row, 1983.

Hunt, Tim. "Jeffers's 'Roan Stallion' and the Narrative of Nature" in Robinson Jeffers: Dimensions of a Poet. New York: Fordham University Press, 1995, 64-83.

Huth, Hans. Nature and the American. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1972.

Jeffers, Robinson. The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers. Ed. Tim Hunt. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Volumes 2 and 3, 1989 and 1991.

Jankelevitch, Vladimir. La Mort. Paris: Flammmarion, 1977.

Kirkegaard, Soren. "Repetition and Variation." Corps Ecrit [Paris: Presses Universitaires de France] 15 (September 1985).