Site Presented By
Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Cultural historian Rebecca Solnit talks about her new memoir, "A Field Guide to Getting Lost," and how losing things -- and ourselves -- makes us who we are.
Aug 4, 2005 | In her teens and early 20s, before she launched a career as a writer and cultural historian, Rebecca Solnit was religiously devoted to punk. As she hung around suburban garages, watching her friends wail away on their instruments, she thoroughly absorbed the punk ethos of rage and ruin. But she never joined a band. Solnit's own way of revolting against the social order was to establish her own amid the vacant lots and deserted rail yards of San Francisco.
Looking back on that blurry phase between adolescent angst and adulthood, as she does at one point in her new memoir, "A Field Guide to Getting Lost," Solnit pays tribute to a friend named Marine. A bassist with a predilection for eye shadow and self-destruction, Marine embodied the leather-jacket lifestyle Solnit adored but could never fully embrace. The passage in which Solnit remembers her friend's funeral -- Marine died after taking a double shot of heroin and speed -- is a sorrowful reckoning with loss.
But because this is a book by Rebecca Solnit, reflection doesn't lead toward anything as simple as nostalgia or closure. In her hands the memory of Marine's death intertwines with an incisive discourse on suburbia and urban decay, with intermittent references to AIDS and nuclear warfare tossed in for good measure. Ian Curtis, the late singer from the new-wave band Joy Division, shares a page with John Keats -- Vladimir Nabokov, Djuna Barnes, the Marquis de Sade and Persephone are also brought along for the ride. Interpretive leaps and odd syntheses are Solnit's stock in trade, and she has earned both devoted readers and critical acclaim by threading together seemingly disparate subjects with a prose style that is at once poetic and sharply analytical.
At a time when the trend in nonfiction publishing favors microhistories -- the current file under "C" alone yields popular books on cod, cocaine and caffeine -- Solnit's interests remain expansive. "Wanderlust," her sprawling history of walking, covered everything from early hominids stepping out on the savanna to latter-day tourists promenading along the postmodern wonderland of the Vegas Strip. Solnit's "River of Shadows," winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism in 2003, was ostensibly a biography of Eadweard Muybridge, the 19th century photographer who pioneered motion studies and paved the way for cinema, but to Solnit the story of his life telescoped a history of Western modernization. Her 2004 book "Hope in the Dark" took on the abstract notion of hope to reassure peace activists that their protests leading up to the war in Iraq were not for naught. "Victories may come as subtle, complex, slow changes," she wrote.
In fact, all of Solnit's books address in some way the vague mechanics of change. "A Field Guide to Getting Lost" is no exception, but where she typically haunts the shelves in dusty corners of the library, here she haunts her past. Drawing on her own well of experience, she explores identity as a process by which we're always becoming ourselves. Landscapes figure prominently in these autobiographical essays, as they often do in her more scholarly writing: In this case, the places we pass through become a sort of private map, what she calls "the tangible landscape of memory."
Memory and identity are slippery subjects, to be sure, and at times the book threatens to spin out into the ether. But "A Field Guide to Getting Lost" is never less than brilliant -- and neither is the author, as I found out during a recent conversation with her over the phone. I caught her, Solnit explained, at the tail end of a 1,500-mile drive around the West and in the throes of her first cup of coffee in years. What follows are her slightly wired thoughts on the nature of loss and self-doubt, the danger of Bush-era certainties, and the immeasurable value of setting houses on fire.
This book is quite a departure for you. What prompted you to turn inward at this point in your career?
When I finished "River of Shadows," I was burned out in a certain way. I wasn't sick of writing books, but I didn't want to be on contract and on deadline, because that stipulates that you have to know when you start out where you'll end up, and the book can't mutate into something different. It can't be something you don't know you can do. "River of Shadows" was about doing exactly what I knew how to do best, which is a kind of imaginative but research-based writing that draws from multiple disciplines and sources. But "Field Guide," like "Hope in the Dark," which I wrote around the same time, was a foray into a kind of writing I didn't know I could do. There was a real possibility when I set out to write it that I would fail, that I wouldn't reach an end. But I wanted to be free to fail.
So the writing itself was an exercise in getting lost?
In some ways. Most of my books have been driven by a linear story. Muybridge was born and then he died, to give you the simplest possible narrative. "Wanderlust" is a moderately chronological survey of the cultural, political, social and spiritual functions of walking. This one was much more intuitive in that things connect to things that lead you to things. The final chapter begins with a dream in which I'm carrying a tortoise in my childhood home. And then it talks about desert tortoises, and then the mythology of desert tortoises by the Chemehuevi, one of the tribes down there in the Mojave, and then it goes on to contrast them with the Death Valley '49ers -- you get the picture. I thought of it as a certain kind of story I hear on the radio sometimes, or something you hear in music, where somebody kind of improvises and noodles around, and there's often a moment where you think, "Do they have any idea where they're going? This is so far from where we started out." And then the last bit falls into place, and you realize that you haven't just been plodding through the underbrush but you've actually been traversing a sort of elegant circle.
