In the passages on pp. 91-3, Mary Austin offers what seems to be a description of an almost primordial nature--a fetid, boggy area where "little grows" and where Austin has "meant to explore" but has "never done so." Stylistically, the conclusion of the chapter seems to mark the edge of human inhabitability and, thus, the limits of Austin's knowledge.
Or maybe not. For Austin then describes the place as teeming with life, and she is quite well informed about these mysterious and malignant areas. She tells us about a flower, the heliotrope, growing amidst this "evil-smelling" place which actually has medicinal properties. The "poisonous-looking" tules or reeds, which are "inconceivably thick" and impenetrable, actually offers a habitat to redwinged blackbirds, blue heron, mallards, crane, and geese (92).
Read closely, though, it turns out (unless I'm way off base here) that the passage only stages these birds' presence and that Austin is performing an imaginative leap into the "happy mystery" of this unexplored area. That is, the sounds of these water fowl nesting in the tulares are not actually to be heard. Rather, "you would think to hear" them (92). Moreover, the last line, landing emphatically on "the secret of the tulares," suggests that Austin has not not penetrated this secret but has attempted to convey imaginatively that which could lie beyond her empirical knowledge.
Great. I like the notion of the "imaginative leap"--the bestowal and then the withdrawal of knowledge--as an approach to this passage, along with the notion that it "perfiorms" what it ultimately refuses to yield to us. I also like the idea of asking where exactly Austin is in all this--somehow privileged in comparison with us, with our limited insight, or similarly ignorant as she claims we are (the latter would especially apply if what she parades for us here--some half-knowledge of the tulare's "secret"--is nothing but a fiction, as you suggest),
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