Bonney+-+D.C.

"John McPhee's //Coming Into the Country//: The Frontier as Commodity" by William Bonney

- Darcy Cameron

The article “John McPhee’s //Coming into the Country//: The Frontier as Commodity” was a very interesting and, in some ways, hilarious one to read. It was definitely not what I was expecting. The author, William Bonney, seems to have quite a lot of contempt for McPhee, or at least for this book that he wrote, calling him a hack and questioning his methods, his motives, and even his intelligence. The obscure references and often bizarre style that we have been coming to recognize as McPhee-esque is seen by Bonney as the work of a writer who doesn’t really know what he’s doing from one sentence to the next.

  “Early in the book, as he peers downward into the river, the narrator notes that ‘everywhere, in fleets, are the oval shapes of salmon,” only thereafter to remark that ‘looking over the side of the canoe is like staring into a sky full of zeppelins.’ Somehow, the fleshy bodies of fish, undulated in three-dimensional schools beneath the water, are to be understood as analogous to fleets of metallic ships that stiffly ply the two-dimensional surface. But no sooner is this mind-boggling comparison established than an even more extreme suggestion is made: somehow, the graceful, subaqueous fish that supposedly look like surface vessels now also resemble rigid, cylindrical, gassy airships, as the turbulent watercourse miraculously becomes a static and transparent sky.”  The contempt that comes through in this paragraph was enough to actually make me laugh out loud. The man has a point. McPhee does seem, at times, to say things that in and of themselves are interesting, but can contradict himself a few sentences later, as if he forgot what he had just said. This kind of writing can seem totally random and disconnected to the overall piece, leaving us with the impression that either McPhee knows exactly what he is doing and is doing it on purpose, or that he has no idea what he is doing and just a wacky guy who can’t keep his thoughts straight. A case could probably be made for both. Bonney argues the latter:  “It seems that McPhee works primarily to create isolated remarks that will be only superficially striking, but lacks the insight needed to control his figures of speech in an extended manner so as to permit implications to cohere even somewhat according to categories derived from rudimentary logic and sensory interaction with the physical world.”  He also argues that McPhee doesn’t really understand or sympathize with the people of the “frontier land” he’s pretending to advocate for, as evidenced by the way he contradicts the actions and beliefs of the people around him, possibly without even realizing he’s doing so.  “...the incoherent idea of the frontier used by McPhee in order to justify environmental rapine that itself is described by means of rhetorical devices that preposterously identify salmons and zeppelins, flowers and corroding 55-gallon steel drums, farming and gold mining. In his zeal to market the verbiage of ‘the frontier’ and, in turn, Alaskan lands to the American consumer, McPhee tries to have most everything both ways. This is possible only within a mystical context that suppresses contradictions and favors isolated caricatures.”  It’s unfortunate that I haven’t actually read this book that Bonney is commenting on, but it was surprising and actually a little refreshing to read someone who so clearly had no admiration for McPhee or his style, at least in this specific case. We get wrapped up sometimes, especially in a classroom setting, in assuming that we’re studying a great writer and trying to focus on any positive qualities we see in his work that it’s nice to be reminded of other perspectives like this one, which makes a lot of good points about the hacky nature of McPhee’s writing.