Bringing Up More Wildness

A Review of Wilderness Tales: Forty Stories of the North American Wild

Diana Fuss has put together an eclectic anthology of short stories which has both historic depth and celebrates the wild landscapes of North America, from snowy Alaska and Canada to swampy Florida, to the mountains and deserts of the American southwest and Mexico. In Wilderness Tales: Forty Stories of the North American Wild, Fuss, a Professor of English at Princeton, explores “the harmony and interdependency between communities and environments,” with the intention of challenging the “standard wilderness endurance plot” (or ‘Humans versus Nature’) of stories such as Jack London’s “To Build a Fire.” But many of the stories also explore the Wild, or Nature suggest that we’re only one disaster away from going back to living wildly. Fuss, like her readers, feels extremely conscious of the precariousness of these landscapes, and the contemporary stories included here are cautionary. The anthology offers, if not solutions, ways we might rethink our place in the wild.

Fuss organizes Wilderness Tales by subject rather than publication date, with ten sections of four grouped stories. For example, there are four stories of “Suspense and Terror” that draw from a more traditional view of nature —publishing dates range from from 1819 (Washington Irvings’s “Rip Van Winkle”) to 1926 (N. B Young Jr.’s “Swamp Judgement”)–– when nature was something to be feared, conquered or be killed by. Another section explores “Women and Panthers,” from James Fennimore Cooper’s “A Panther Tale” from 1923 to Lauren Groff’s “The Midnight Zone” which appeared in The New Yorker in 2016. Here, panthers represent the sublime aspect of nature: both beautiful and terrifying.

Groff’s story takes place at the edge of the Florida Everglades, at the end of a road, in a cabin where a family is at the edge of the wild, embodied in a black panther circling the area closer than most readers would be comfortable with. After an accident, the narrator has a sort of out-of-body experience, becoming, possibly, the panther, becoming wild:

I was vigilant, moving softly in the underbrush, and the palmettos’ nails scraped down my body.

The cabin was not visible, but it was present, a sore at my side, a feeling of density and airlessness. I couldn’t go away from it, I couldn’t return, I could only circle the cabin and circle it. With each circle, a terrible, stinging anguish built in me and I had to move faster and faster, each pass bringing up ever more wildness (97).

In addition, classic ‘wilderness’ stories such as London’s “To Build a Fire” and “Big Two-Hearted River” by Hemingway are included, as is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” from 1835, about a satanic ritual which takes place in the Massachusetts woods. Despite the ‘North American’ part of the title, most of the stories are by authors from the United States, with a handful of Canadians and one lone Mexican: Juan Rulfo. Most notable is Fuss’ inclusion of two stories in translation from the oral storytelling tradition of indigenous peoples of North America—one by a member of the Inuit, Ohayohok titled “The Human Kayak,” (1940) and “Spotted Eagle and Black Crow” (1967) by Jenny Leading Cloud, from the White River Sioux in South Dakota. Both stories come from a time before Turtle Island was completely colonized: the native characters don’t have a word for ‘wilderness’ or ‘wild, ‘what modern readers think of as wild is simply the world.

Readers may quibble about what exactly ‘wilderness’ is and whether some stories ‘count’ as wilderness stories. For example, should the settings be on lands defined by the American Wilderness Act of 1964 as ‘pristine’ and ‘untrammeled’? Some of the stories in Wilderness Tales ‘count’ in that way: London, Hemingway, Ohayohok and Leading Cloud, Margaret Atwood’s “Death by Landscape,” and Wallace Stegner’s “The Wolfer.” But Fuss is much freer with her definition, and at least two stories push beyond that wilderness boundary, including Boyle’s “After the Plague,” where a small group of people survive a modern-day plague which wipes out most of the world’s population. 

Another notable wilderness-boundary-crossing story is a speculative-horror piece, “the river” by Adrienne Maree Brown, set around Belle Isle in Detroit. Not exactly a wilderness setting, even in an alternative near-future, but Fuss is looking to represent ways in which Nature or the Wild fights back—in this case in the form of a monster which may or may not be the embodiment of the spirit of Detroit—cleansing the land of those who don’t somehow belong there. 

Some ‘literary fiction’ purists may be bothered by Fuss’ inclusion of ‘genre’ fiction, for example L. Frank Baum’s fantasy story “The King of the Polar Bears”; or Ray Bradbury’s horror story “The Fog Horn;” there are also science fiction stories such as T.C. Boyle’s “After The Plague” and Lydia Millet’s “Woodland.” Speculative fiction is included in the last three sections: “Myth and Magic”; “Endangerment and Extinction”; and “Climates and Futures.” These last two sections especially help to end the anthology with a sense of urgency. That is, the speculation by the authors is that our relationship with the land isn’t going to get any better in the near future.

In putting together this anthology and including a variety of genres within short fiction, Fuss seems to be looking for how we can transform and adapt, to become wilder perhaps, to survive in an increasingly damaged and unlivable world. Fuss uses the term ‘eco-fiction’ interchangeably with ‘wilderness fiction’ in her introduction, and I wonder if that wasn’t the original preferred title for this anthology, though ‘eco’ anything nowadays has the ring (or taint) of being ‘good for the environment.’ Maybe that is what Fuss wants to share: stories which are good for us, which serve the good. For Fuss—and, I think, for many of the writers included in Wilderness Tales—our world has become damaged because we’ve lost our wild, and only by coming back to the wild, Fuss seems to imply, can we survive. And it’s stories like these ones that bring us there, that will teach us how to be wild. Again.