Home Issues 11 Expressions of Environment in Eur Hidden Cities in the American Wil This essay discusses a few examples of this ambivalent representation of the land by first looking into the trope of the mysterious ruined city awaiting discovery in the middle of the American wilderness and finally by considering the cultural work of this imperial trope in two selected modern fictional texts on the American West.
Here is what Baudrillard writes in his essay America :. They are places where humours and fluids become rarefied, where the air is so pure that the influence of the stars descends direct from the constellations. And, with the extermination of the desert Indians , an even earlier stage than that of anthropology became visible : a mineralogy, a geology, a sidereality, an inhuman facticity, an aridity that drives out the artificial scruples of culture, a silence that exists nowhere else.
The silence of the desert is a visual thing, too. A product of the gaze that stares out and finds nothing to reflect it. There can be no silence up in the mountains, since their very contours roar. And for there to be silence, time itself has to attain a sort of horizontality ; there has to be no echo of time in the future but simply a sliding of geological strata one upon the other giving out nothing more than a fossil murmur.
Desert : luminous, fossilized network of an inhuman intelligence , of a radical indifference β the indifference not merely of the sky, but of the geological undulations where the metaphysical passions of space and time alone crystallize. Here the terms of desire are turned upside down each day, and night annihilates them.
But wait for the dawn to rise, with the awakening of the fossil sounds , the animal silence. Silence and invisibility are qualities of the desert that Baudrillard appreciates. Nuclear radiation, of course, is indeed invisible. The bare vastness of the Hopi landscape emphasizes the visual impact of every plant, every rock, every arroyo. Nothing is overlooked or taken for granted. Each ant, each lizard, each lark is imbued with great value simply because the creature is there, simply because the creature is alive in a place where any life at all is precious.
