Language and Reality Theme Analysis

Despite his disdain for academics, Edward Abbey trained in philosophy. In Desert Solitaire, his extended meditation on the desert, he ponders a classic philosophical question: whether an objective reality exists. Abbey can see and touch the surface of a rock, for instance, but how can he know the rock is really there? Though Abbey concludes that this question is unanswerable, he finds that his deep sensory experience of the desert gets him as close as humanly possible to this elusive reality, and he urges readers to try the same. But he warns readers of a common obstacle to this compromise: words. Words are artificial, so they distort the nature of reality and experience. By stressing the inaccuracies of language, Abbey argues that words ought to reflect the world, not try to describe it.

When Abbey arrives in the desert, he notes that the appearance of the world doesn’t always equal reality. Colors, for instance, are not inherent qualities in things. Instead, Abbey sees that the desert’s natural archways change color “with the time of day and the moods of the light, the weather, the sky.” Similarly, clouds “have lost” shades of pink and can suddenly “become” violet. In many scenes, Abbey looks to trees or the sky for “a vision of truth” beneath their appearances. Every time, however, the tree gives him “no response” or the sun’s “music is too high and pure for human ear.” “The essence of the juniper,” he laments after prolonged meditation, “continues to elude me.” Instead of obsessing over the true nature of the arches or the clouds, Abbey contents himself with prolonged, sensory appreciation of them. Meditating on the magnificent Delicate Arch, Abbey says that “to see and touch and hear” the world around this monument is enough for him, even if it is impossible to access “things-in-themselves.” This term comes from the philosopher Immanuel Kant, who argued that the objective existence of an object—the “thing-in-itself”—is impossible for humans to perceive beyond their five senses. Though Abbey can’t refute Kant’s logic, he insists that his own stance is “anti-Kantian.” After repeated and profound experience of rock formations, he argues that if one threw at rock at a philosopher’s head, they would instantly duck, thereby refuting the claim that humans can’t access the real world. In other words, if stoning feels painful, then what is left to prove? Elsewhere, Abbey calls this discovery “the shock of the real.” Abbey concludes proudly that “I know nothing whatever about underlying reality” but that “I am pleased enough with surfaces—in fact they alone seem to me to be of much importance.” Though philosophers like Kant are unhappy about reality’s elusiveness, Abbey admits that the sights, sounds, and feelings of nature are good enough for him.

Though contented with his sensory experience of nature, Abbey warns readers that language can make the problem of reality worse by misrepresenting experience. Writers tend to enjoy the “personification of the natural”—using similes and metaphors that give human qualities to nature. Throughout the book, however, in his search for “the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental,” Abbey stops himself when he lapses into that old habit. For instance, Abbey refuses to name some anonymous rock formations he comes across. Once an object or place acquires a name, he explains, the name can become more important than the thing itself, and “so in the end the world is lost again.” Words are particularly useless, he says, when describing the desert. Abbey tries to define “wilderness,” only to abandon the task because “something more [than words] is involved.” His defeat here echoes Ludwig Wittgenstein’s famous statement, which Abbey quotes in the original German: “what can’t be spoken of must be passed over in silence.” The fact that language (an artificial thing) cannot accurately describe nature (an organic thing) is a linguistic problem that mimics Abbey’s own frustrated hunt for reality.

With this linguistic frustration in mind, Abbey urges that language be used poetically as a tool to reflect the world rather than to describe it. Since “you cannot get the desert into a book any more than a fisherman can haul up the sea with his nets,” nature writing should “evoke” the desert, rather than simply describe it. To back up his theory, Abbey draws up a bibliography of prose narratives that fail to capture the desert accurately. In these books, the authors unnaturally force a “mirror” of themselves” onto a “picture of external reality.” Words, by definition, say things, but “the desert says nothing.” So traditional description is bound to fail. Instead of straightforward prose, Abbey offers one solution by quoting liberally from poets: Robinson Jeffers, Walt Whitman, William Wordsworth, and many others. By bringing his book into the company of poetry—a medium which mimics its subject matter with the sound of its words—Abbey suggests that effective language ought to follow the lead of poets. Dismayed with the “poor image” of his own prose, Abbey even inserts his own poem in an attempt to capture the shock of a flash flood. In the same way that Abbey settles for a deep sensory experience of the desert instead of obsessing over objective reality, Abbey argues that writers can at least be very strategic with how they describe the world around them. Nature is well worth experiencing firsthand, Abbey argues, so he urges that it’s worth being strategic about how one communicates this experience. Even if objective reality is inaccessible, people can strive to avoid language that further separates them from an authentic experience.