Nature in the selected works of four contemporary American novelists

While much of recent American literature seems to exhibit only depression, despair, absurdity, and alienation as characteristic responses to the bleakness of life in a modern technological society, a few literary artists have felt that the only recourse from, or alternative to, the constriction of spirit and feeling in the mechanized, computerized world is to return--almost in desperation-to "nature"--as if humanity's only hope lay in rediscovering those "natural" or spontaneous hopes, desires, passions, and dreams that make us fully human. We have not said enough, it seems to me, about these contemporary writers who, in taking the "return to nature" as one of their principal ways of recovering the wholeness of being that has been eroded by modern civilization, offer an optimistic alternative to the doomsayers of contemporary American literature. Thus this study is concerned with how and why novelists James Dickey, John Gardner, Richard Brautigan, and John Updike are united in their interests in investigating the natural world as a means of restoring value and meaning to individual human lives.

These four writers, in suggesting that nature contains the means of countering the imposing threat of domination by civilization and in associating nature with the intuitive and imaginative freedom neglected by a highly scientific and rational society, are working within a well-defined literary tradition. In affirming the value of the "return to nature," Dickey, Gardner, Brautigan, and Updike align themselves with those major American writers--Cooper, Hawthorne, iv

Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Steinbeck, Hemingway, and Faulkner--who have viewed the natural world as the source of forces which enable the individual to escape the suffocating crush of civilization. Dickey, Gardner, Brautigan, and Updike, each in his own way, suggest that the movement into and return from the natural world can heal the broken spirit and release the suppressed physical and mental potential of an urban-oriented, over-specialized population. Thus these four novelists, like their romantic predecessors, search for the vital balance of nature and civilization, the conscious and unconscious minds. Their subject is humanity in the post-World War II world; but their theme is one that places them squarely in the tradition of American letters.