Presenter(s): Scott Zeigler
Faculty Mentor(s): Gordon Sayre & Stephanie LeMenager
Oral Session 1 SW
This research evaluates the representation of the fictional Wakonda Auga River as a character in Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel Sometimes a Great Notion. By investigating Kesey’s personal journals and correspondence, I show how Kesey took his native Oregon, the natural world in which he lived, and wrote it into his story. Rivers are traditionally viewed in English literature as a component of setting or as a metaphorical representation of some human dilemma. Occasionally, a fantastical work gives nature agency by applying human characteristics like speech or movement or some combination thereof. Yet, a river is a force unto itself, and it interacts with the human animal in its own ways, both positively and negatively. Ecocriticism offers a method for exploring how rivers can be given agency without adding anthropocentric characteristics. Through the ecocritical theoretical lens, readers can evaluate the natural components of a text, understand the figurative or metaphoric meanings, and still read nature for its powerful literal meaning. I will use this lens to evaluate the text and show how Kesey represented the Wakonda Auga River in the novel as both a fictive place, one based on the actual Siuslaw River, and as an antagonistic character in conflict with other characters in the story. By reading Sometimes a Great Notion in this way, readers gain access to the historical world of Kesey’s Oregon and the fictive world of an Oregon mill town in the 1960s, and they are encouraged to explore today the natural places associated with both.