Wilderness and Belief: Deconstruction
in an Idaho Memoir

        Regarding a memoir as an object of literary criticism can be a very intriguing exercise. Memoir is something highly crafted, carefully selected and arranged not into a history, but into a work of art. Treating it as a literary work frees us from traditional oppositions like fiction/nonfiction or, perhaps more to the point, truth/fiction, and in the process helps us also to recognize the instability of creation/criticism. A memoir, as a highly art-ificial interpretation of one’s experience, mimics the task of literary criticism; it tries to tell a particular story about a story.

        I have chosen the term “wilderness” as my starting point because of its obvious centrality to the work as a whole, and thus its inherent susceptibility to become entangled in hierarchical oppositions. We will first tour the various meanings and connotations of the word, especially with regard to its use in the text, and this will give us some sense of where we are to begin with. However, just a tour of these meanings hardly constitutes a deconstruction of the text. We must delve more deeply into the central wilderness/civilization opposition itself. Finally, we shall apply the ideas gained from this study to one other major opposition within the text—that of belief and unbelief.

I.

        The OED entry for “wilderness” is highly revealing, especially to someone with Barnes’ book still fresh in his or her mind. One meaning is simply “wild or uncultivated land” (1a) a place without human influence but particularly not subdued for human interests. In Barnes’ book this idea comes out in the early days of her family in the wilderness as placed in opposition to the cultivated Great Plains of her ancestors; they eat undomesticated animals and uncultivated fruits, and cut down unplanted forests (20). They live in the land at first, but they are the land’s, and the land is not yet theirs. “Uncultivated” leaves the possibility open that the wilderness could be a city. The idea of “wild land” carries overtones of uninhabitedness or solitude (1b), again in Barnes contrasted with the populated and exhausted soil of the Midwest.

        Another (and more Biblical) use of the word applies to any “waste or desolate” area (2). The wilderness carries the idea of emptiness, like the desert or sea or sky. The northern Idaho wilderness is not literally like this, but of course it all depends on the construction of the empty/full or wasted/used dualities. A place full of wild timber is at the same time empty of cities and highways. A land used for animal habitat and containing trees that produce oxygen is useful in those ways, but a “waste” from a developer’s point of view. Barnes’ early depiction of the wilderness is that of fullness almost exclusively (20). The biblical idea of a waste or desert is not yet present, but will be of great importance later on in the work, especially as the Barnes family is abandoned by its relations and as their new religious worldview begins to influence their ways of thinking; the woods become a place of spiritual danger, full of strange spirits. Still, the meaning refuses to stand still; Barnes’ father and his family had come to the wilderness to escape demons of a different sort (50-51).

        The OED specifically notes that one meaning of the phrase “in the wilderness” is “unrecognized” or “out of favour,” derived from Israel’s ancient wanderings (OED 3c; Numbers 14:32-33). To be in the wilderness is to be shunned or ignored by others, often because of some failure in the person ostracized, and usually the period in the wilderness is a time of clearing oneself of the fault and preparing for reentry into the respect and esteem of others. This element is also clear in Barnes’ work, especially later on as wilderness begins to lose some of the rosy tints of childhood, and take on darker meanings in the wilderness of the city. In the city, the Barnes’ wilderness origins creates various prejudices against them; even Nan expresses her disapproval (125; 129), but their new church and the school also have this attitude toward them, as if they are from “the Dark Ages” (130), or feel like “outcasts” (136). But the position is reversed and complicated within the Barnes family after Kim’s rebellion against her parents. She falls out of favor into the wilderness outside family and church, and was for long afterward shunned by her father. The wilderness may have been a place of salvation and grace for her parents and herself (182), but it also represents the “outside.” There is a little “circle” of family or faith that steels itself against the wilderness, and for someone to go voluntarily out into the wilderness is perhaps to meet the fate of her friend Matthew—exposure and death.

        A related meaning is that of “wildness or licentiousness of character” (OED 5b). The uncultivated land is a metaphor for an uncultivated person, in both positive and negative senses of the word. It is positive in that many modern people (influenced by Rousseau) tend to value a kind of spontaneity in thought and action, and generally have a suspicion of that which is mannered, trained, or required by social constraints. Kim Barnes’ own “wilderness” character takes on all of these dimensions in the course of the story; the evaluation of her character is tied closely to an opposition we shall see below, that of belief/unbelief.

        In its religious dimensions, “wilderness” also refers to “this world” or “this present life” (OED 3a; 6b). John Bunyan famously begins The Pilgrim’s Progress: “As I walked through the wilderness of this world…” The wilderness can be a bewildering, dangerous place, and so becomes a perfect metaphor for human life on earth. People are travelers through the earth, presumably coming from and going to a more cultivated place, but for now doomed to something that has no rhyme or reason. Interestingly, Barnes’ full childhood acceptance of religion, as expressed by her baptism, coincides with her journey out of the first wilderness area that she experienced. The wilderness is a place of doubt, loss, and uncertainty, and one goal of religion is to lead us safely out of such a place into happiness. The wilderness is an unfortunate “stage” through which we all must pass, on our way to something better.

        The Bible and the long history of Christianity provide more complex connotations for the idea of wilderness. Adam and Eve began their existence in a garden, protected from the wilds of the world outside (Genesis chap. 1-3). Corrupted by the forbidden knowledge, they were cast out into the wilderness, doomed to always seek the original garden but to never find it. In the same way, Barnes tries to seek the wilderness as a point of origin, a viewpoint from which all other things make sense, an archē in which all her scattered memories might cohere. Specifically she wants to find herself as a young child living in harmony with the wilderness.

        I sometimes think that if I could go back, follow the driveway down, past the woodshed and out into the meadow, I might find her—I might find what I have lost. Like my brother wandering in the wilderness, I might find home. (8)

        No matter what I did, no matter how many times I left, I could always come back to the woods. (239)

        What I mourned was the loss of myself: that girl who had fished long into the warm summer afternoons, who had believed in a world held solid by family and the encircling presence of trees. (240)

        I long for the river and its course to be as they once were, the way I remember before the dam [. . .]. I think of how long we search to find that place we might call ours, where we might feel we have found a home: the perfect house in the perfect town; the secret hollow; that place in the heart we call love; that state of grace we call salvation. (256)

        The search for something solid and absolute that she can take hold of is one of the driving themes in the book, but it constantly eludes her. The wilderness remains a distant point of origin, something to be searched for but never found, just as the meaning of the word itself can never be cornered, boxed, analyzed, and filed away. There is something of the loss of Eden at back of the whole story; Barnes’ whimsical, ironic tone conveys perfectly both her desire for it and the sense of its continual inaccessibility—with the further irony that her original Eden is not a garden but a wilderness.

        The children of Israel, freed from slavery in Egypt, faced a desolate wilderness, on the other side of which was the already populated and cultivated promised land. Wandering in the wilderness was the sentence for their lack of faith, which was evidenced in their fear of entering the promised land (Numbers chap. 13-14). Barnes’ reaction against her parents and her faith, and her refusal to enter their “promised land,” also causes her to be (self-) condemned to the wilderness of the world. On the other hand, her family’s provoking and oppressive policies, their inability to enjoy the good things of life, desire to escape the world, and largely idiosyncratic interpretation of the Bible, relegate them to a wilderness of suffering of their own. The meanings cut both ways.

        The Jewish prophets, culminating in John the Baptist and Jesus, have often chosen the wilderness for teaching, contemplation, prayer, discipline, and renewal (Bratton 123, 143-44). In Isaiah, the wilderness is a symbol of restoration and salvation (41:17ff, 43:23, 55:12-13). Kim Barnes quotes Isaiah 32:15-16 at the beginning (origin) of her book; in context the passage refers to the longing prophecy of a time when Israel has peace in its land. The Song of Solomon uses images of wild nature for erotic purposes (Bratton 88-90). The idea of wilderness is as complex in the Bible as anywhere else, and the wilderness experience is as vast and profound as life itself. The basic opposition of wild/tamed is the only constant.

        Wilderness can be any “mingled, confused, or vast assemblage or collection of persons or things,” but especially one that causes people to feel lonely or lost (OED 3b; 4). This sense particularly applies to cities, where such alienation and confusion is generally more common. To the family coming “out” of the woods, it is a shock: it never stops or sleeps, and people act as if they have no home (123). It is more difficult to find a church community there, and even in church the family felt isolated, just as Kim feels isolated at school. Whatever the “assemblage” that makes up a wilderness in this sense, it need not be in one particular location or time. I imagine the author’s “writing self” wandering, trailing through a vast, mingled, and confused tangle of memories, wondering always whether she has found her real story or not.

        A related meaning (OED 1c) is that of a carefully constructed labyrinth in a garden. This is an artificial wilderness, a maze made of growing trees. This directly subverts the idea of wilderness as somehow natural or uncultivated or threatening; here a wilderness is constructed by human beings within their gardens. Why? It symbolizes discontent, an almost unconscious unwillingness to have everything subdued, understood, and controlled; the ambivalence toward things under the sway of one’s own authority, which secretly wishes them to rebel. This is interesting since another meaning of wilderness has connotations of licentiousness of character (5b). It is the discontent that drives people, bored with the garden, to make something in the garden to function as the wild, dangerous, unknown, and uncontrolled. We like to create Eden for ourselves, and then we wish our escape from it. It is a double desire to rebel and be rebelled against, simultaneously done by submitting to something larger than oneself.

        We have so far examined several connotations and denotations of “wilderness,” but in order to deconstruct the text we must go further. This meaning is an important clue to the subversion of the garden/wilderness or civilization/wilderness oppositions themselves. Which of the two elements is more primary or original? Certain beliefs of Christianity seem to put garden and civilization in the privileged spot on the hierarchy (although historically Christianity’s relation to wilderness is much more complex), while most people today simply find themselves holding the reverse position. The opposition itself has remained intact. The city and wilderness are “two worlds” (Barnes 8). What has not generally been done is a denial of the opposition itself, or at least a recognition of its inherent instability. It is not possible to establish the line of the opposition precisely, so that one side is pure wilderness and the other pure civilization. We must recognize that the terms of civilization and wilderness allow interchanges of meaning. A city can be a wilderness, but a city/garden/farm is also that which is “obviously” non-wilderness; a wilderness also cannot be defined apart from its difference to something outside of itself. Wilderness is an absence, a negation, an isolation, an un-cultivation, with no positive meaning in itself. People who have a sense of civilization construct wildernesses, and people construct civilizations in reaction to the wilderness. Barnes, throughout her book, explores the nature of this unstable difference in many of its various forms. She tries to find the meaning of the wilderness, but the language resists and defers her to only another meaning and another superficial opposition.

II.

        We have so far discussed the notion of wilderness itself, along with its various connotations and oppositions. Because it is a central concept to the book as a whole, the idea of wilderness will also throw light upon the various other basic thematic oppositions within the text. The profusion of meaning and lack of single, certain meaning in the wilderness/civilization duality is representative of the profusion of meaning elsewhere.

        First let us examine instances of the belief/unbelief opposition. This is an incalculably important relation in the life of Barnes and her entire family. She defines her entire life in terms of it. “And so my life is divided by this line: before the church, and after” (51). Some parts of the text reinforce the hierarchy of belief over unbelief, as if the first is the original, positive thing, while the second is derivative or parasitic. Belief is what saved her father and mother in the wilderness from economic hardship and isolation, once the circle of their larger family had been broken (49). From it flowed the ecstasies of glossolalia and the peace of baptism. At her second conversion, it was the feeling of something positive and healthy, coming over her like a robe (186). To her, belief offered something positive and sure, a “state of grace” called salvation. It is the presence of a real community and the real felt presence of a God. She affirms some positive reality in her belief in the conclusion of her work (256-57). Unbelief, on the other hand, is just that—a negation, a lack, an emptiness, and thus these two categories are opposed in much the same way as an empty/full or masculine/feminine dichotomy. Unbelief means going out into the desolation of the wilderness. After her final separation with her family, she deeply feels the absence of something, and Sundays are a time of profound emptiness and loneliness (234). In unbelief, as Dostoevsky or Tolstoy might say, “all is permitted.” Un-belief means dis-obedience. Rebellion, in this hierarchy, is parasitic of the dominant, positive order. Unbelief is a vacuum of freedom where there are no maps, guides, or directions. When she lost belief, she “craved destruction” (162). Seeking self-dissolution in the oblivion of alcohol and marijuana symbolized the negation she felt. “What difference did it make?” (158, emphasis added).

        Perhaps it makes no difference, but it does make a great deal of différance. Barnes’ text actually betrays any stability that this view of belief and unbelief might have. Her family’s faith itself was not something pure, original, and underived; it flowed out of the vacuum caused by job losses and by the retreat of her relatives to the towns. There had been a positive community before the faith. The spiritual realities of glossolalia, baptism, and conversion are betrayed within the text by the negative connotations of the language used to describe them. The ecstasy of tongues is a sort of purgation, exhaustion, or emptiness; it is not a positive feeling but a lack of something in the mind and emotions.

        Sometimes I think I never felt anything, only imagined the pure joy of absolute faith. [. . .] I felt emptied, purified by my physical weakness. [. . .] I felt [. . .] mesmerized by this thing that controlled my body and my soul. (119)

        I felt drained [. . .] at a time when I considered myself incapable of choice. The exhaustion I felt I believed stemmed from a spirit made meek in the face of its Creator. [. . .] It is often like this for those possessed of the Spirit [. . .] You feel the sweetness of surrender. You feel taken, ravaged by the very air—every breath, every pore, every part of your being a gift, perfectly composed and consumed. (204-5)

        Her baptism she sees as marking an ending, not a beginning; it is the symbol of her loss of her childhood self and her life in the woods. Her conversion she describes as a release, or purgation, of hatred and bitterness. It was also an absence of will and almost individuality: “Surrender is no less sweet than the fight: absolution, pure submission, bliss in having no will that cannot be consumed, floating like Ophelia in the lovely waters” (187).

        The gnostic distrust of physical things, which was part of her belief in the system of Pentecostalism, destabilizes the positive object of belief. She was taught that the world and its pleasures were evil, and required strict abstinence. This belief, which was to find something original and certain, actually leads to the hunger of asceticism. Physical matter should be depended upon as little as possible, and their great hope was for the Rapture: a taking out, an absence. The object of her belief was something not experienced and not directly knowable. It was a desire for whatever was not-world. They were taught that the goal of life is “to be free from all desire” (133). With these considerations in mind, it is possible to imagine unbelief, or contentment in the physical world, as the original thing, while belief is something derivative and “unnatural” in comparison.

        Belief, as evidenced above in the descriptions of glossolalia, baptism, and conversion, involves a surrender of the will. Sometimes people think of belief as the supreme exercise of will, a dedication in the face of contrary evidence or simple lack of evidence. But we see that the word, if we press it, cannot resist, and can very easily be turned into something passive and empty, needing to be filled by the masculine God-principle. Indeed, in Barnes’ situation as a woman within Pentecostalism, this idea of belief as negation is intensified. She felt it was a sin to think of herself in definite, positive terms (in other words, to question the masculine/feminine opposition):

        I never imagined that what might tempt me was not desire for wine or food, money or sex, but desire for something even more insidious: some sense of myself as a girl becoming a woman, coming to age in a landscape empty of anything that might define her worth except as a good daughter and future wife. (133)

        We can play with the concept of unbelief as well. Recall Barnes’ attempt to trace her memories and selves back to an origin, e.g., herself as a young girl in the wilderness. This origin she seeks lies in the time before her family’s belief; thus her wilderness arche, the one true and solid thing, is tied inseparably with a lack of belief. This strong meaning directly subverts the other indications of the nature of unbelief in the text. Her family had real community and “wholeness” in that time. When she rebelled against her parents the first time, she found a new “community” of friends, and especially her cousin Les. Her unbelief was geared toward finding a positive heaven “right here” on earth (158). Her central break with father and faith was exactly for the reason outlined in the above quoted paragraph—to find some positive sense of herself.

        One could define unbelief as a turning away from certainties and rigid codes to doubt and freedom—the prefix implies a negation of something positive. This seems obvious, but again Barnes’ text will not allow it to remain a solid and unquestionable edifice. On the one hand, she states that her beliefs were strict, “stodgy,” repressive, and even perhaps abusive (125, 162, 208). However, when she describes her rebellion and rejection of family and faith, the same language intrudes; her unbelief takes the same shapes as its opposite. “There was comfort in the fatalism of my vision. Like my father, I yearned for my life to be expressed in absolutes. I had made my decision. I could never go back” (171). Her rejection is not uncertain, agnostic, or lax at all. It is just as unwavering and absolute; it surpasses even the rigidity of her parents’ belief by embracing an inexorable, impersonal Fate. Neither is unbelief freedom. She describes herself speeding along with her rebel friends in this way: “At least I am free, I thought as the wind whipped in through the open windows and carried the smoke away. At least I am free. But I was not free” (165). Her new circle has strict codes and rules just like the one she had left. She escapes one uniform—the long, plain skirts of the “holy rollers,” only to adopt another uniform—Levis, Marlboros, tight shirts and peace signs. The peer pressure makes her do things she does not particularly enjoy; there is a unique sort of asceticism in a junior high student’s submission of his or her body to the initially unpleasant disciplines of beer and cigarettes. “I sat next to John around a campfire, gagging down half a beer from the six-pack one of the boys had brought. I hated the bitter, grassy taste, but it seemed the thing to do my first night of freedom” (233).

        These possibilities and interpretations of the thread of belief/unbelief in Barnes’ text subvert the normal hierarchy and cast some doubt upon the construction of belief and unbelief. Her language is constantly working against the positive presence of belief, instead subverting it into a thing no less vacuous or parasitic than its opposite. It is a thing that controls her while saving her. Its tenets derived their strength from the surrounding emptiness of unbelief and isolation in the wilderness. The allusion to Ophelia is particularly fitting: her despairing, suicidal insanity is almost a supreme negation; Barnes effectively says of belief and unbelief both, “I think we craved destruction.” She recognizes the instability at last:

        Slowly [. . .] the tenor of my prayers changed, settling into a kind of contract, an acquiescence of both faith and reason: if God could not take me while I searched for some truth, if the quest itself were a sin, then so be it. Whatever faith I had left, compromised as it was, was mine. I possessed it, had forged it. It was all that I could offer any man or god. (226)

III.

        Barnes begins her life in the wilderness, without belief; her father’s family escaped there and it was their salvation from the hopeless red clay of the Midwest. Her family is converted in order to escape the wilderness’s hard face of loneliness and exploited exhaustion of resources. The failure of her father’s spiritual quest drives him to sacrifice their home in the wilderness, for some strange, supernatural, non-rational reason; he simply feels the call of the Spirit directing him outward (115-16). The repression required by her belief and the awkward separation from the “wilderness of this world” leads her to experiment in that wilderness for a time before she is called back to the safety of home. Finally, she rejects both belief and unbelief and begins a long question in search for the origin behind her entire life; she searches for it in the haunts of her childhood and in the city college. She recognizes that she is “half novitiate, half sibyl” (218), and that she feels both impulses inside of her, disconnected yet united (170). She recognizes that her soul is a battleground for tensioned threads of meaning, and that at any time one might dominate, and the subtle flow of personality could be altered radically. She refuses that kind of dominance; she accepts the tension of opposites.

        What I cannot do is imagine the girl I was at twelve becoming the girl I was at fourteen. [. . .] Even now it scares me to understand how easily a soul may pass from one dimension of itself into another, as though the boundaries separating what we are and what we might become, given an infinite set of motivations and conditions, are little more than the line between waking and sleep, between story, memory, and dream. The most frightening thing of all is that each of those girls is still with me, both vulnerable and bitter, believing and hardened against belief. I [. . .] steel myself to become neither. (170-71)

        The best metaphor for her and her relation to the wilderness is the River. As her family hardens and simultaneously begins to disintegrate, she glimpses a sight of an enormous dam across the Clearwater River; like the river, she is going to be controlled and stifled. As she returns to the place of her childhood near the end of the book, all of her hatred and bitterness is concentrated upon that great concrete symbol of power. She concludes the book comparing the flow of herself and her memories to the river (268). The strictures of belief and unbelief, and the tension between the wild and civilized worlds, and the relation between them, all becomes concentrated in the dam and the river.

        The two oppositions of city/wilderness and belief/unbelief play off of each other in a unique way in this text. They influence, interpenetrate, and destabilize one another in a very complex way. Belief is closely tied to wilderness, as it has been throughout the long history of the Christian faith (Bratton 16). Believers subdue the wilderness into garden, and they revert enemy gardens back into wildernesses. They rejoice in the unharnessed freedom of wild lands, full of trees and rivers and mountains that by their very existence praise God. God himself reveals himself on mountains—the ultimate wildernesses. A wilderness is a place of trial and temptation, with slavery behind and a promised land ahead. Prophets retreat into the wilderness to be alone with God, or they draw people out behind them and form a new community of teaching and learning. They enter desolate deserts to discipline their bodies with hunger; they pray to God in thanks for the uncultivated abundance of the hills. It is a place of utmost ignorance and rebellion; it is a place of ultimate obedience and sacrifice. Belief and wilderness are opposite; they are identical. A cacophony of history, experience, connotation, and denotation transcends any attempt to contain and label their meanings. And yet there is meaning—a thing as sure as the fawn she saw by the stream, as stark as the lands she left and entered, as dark as the demon by her father’s bedside, and as turned and changing as the dammed and undammed River, which is her selves’ true symbol.

Works Cited

Barnes, Kim. In the Wilderness. New York: Anchor, 1997.

Bratton, Susan Power. Christianity, Wilderness, and Wildlife: The Original Desert Solitaire.

London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1993.

Bible. New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1994.

“Wilderness.” Oxford English Dictionary Online. 2nd Ed. 1989. Oxford UP. 8 May 2002.

<http://dictionary.oed.com>.