Intimate Distance: Landscape, History, and Cartographic Care in William T. Vollmann, W.G. Sebald, and Anne Carson

Abstract

Intimate Distance is an interdisciplinary consideration of the geographical, historical, emotional, and ethical dimensions of “distance” in the work of three contemporary authors. My treatment of William T. Vollmann’s Argall, about the colonization of the U.S., emphasizes the distant destinations that destructive desires – for land, conquest, and so-called progress – drive us to, and the abundant confusion at the center of a traveler without ethical bounds. “Settlement” required clearing people from the land but also clearing the land itself, denuding an area until a fertile fen becomes a fallow field; thus a natural body of water is remade through violence into a body of human work. I interpret W. G. Sebald’s peripatetic stories in The Emigrants, about the distant, long reach of war, as a cartography of care marked by natural and human made monuments, by salt mines and surnames, by dust and the fact of death, however eroded by time and the pernicious comfort of forgetfulness. Sebald’s book is a threnody on the violent loss of belonging to a country and a culture, and then on the slow loss of longing to belong. Conversely, I examine our occasional inability to care about the things and relationships closest to us as portrayed in Anne Carson’s Nox, in which she laments her disassociation with her brother and contemplates history as the travel and translation of objects into words composed into a kind of long-distance leporello letter addressed to the self and to time itself. These three books share a preoccupation with personal and collective trauma – ruptures in time and place (history and geography) that require imaginative narration to bridge the emotional and ethical distances separating us from past violent events. To that end, I expand the concept of vanity into a gesture of witness and propose prepositions as markers that help us gauge how “a part of” or “apart from” we are from the places, people, and causes we claim to care about. Distance, I argue, is an invisible obstacle to care and an as-yet-unwritten area on the map of one’s own making; the self thus becomes a compass of conscience charged with engaging the people and places it alone finds essential to remember. Throughout I weave memoirs of time I spent in Germany, where I worked at a former concentration camp, now memorial, and in South Africa, where, as a Fulbright scholar, I observed the still divisive social dynamics of a country. Merging academic analysis with my own creative nonfiction, I offer a model for scholarship seeking to create, kaleidoscopically, a nexus of intellectual and artistic intersections intent on asking how far each of us is from consensus, community, and care.