What do the “clanging geese” go over?:  Toxic Semiotic Mystery in Mary Austin’s The Land of Little Rain

These final paragraphs of Mary Austin’s “Other Water Borders” chapter in The Land of Little Rain contrast significantly with  the immediately previous ones in which she describes the beauties of the spring mesa landscape.  For example, she describes the iris that is native to the mesa meadows in these glorifying terms:

“Native to the mesa meadows is a pale iris, gardens of it acres wide, that in the spring season of full bloom make an airy fluttering as of azure wings.  Single flowers are too thin and sketchy of outline to affect the imagination, but the full fields have the misty blue of mirage waters rolled across desert sand, and quicken the senses to the anticipation of things ethereal” (91).

Then with no immediately discernible foreshadowing, she abruptly introduces her readers to a landscape whose characteristics contrast starkly with the springtime beauties of the mesas—one that is, in fact, a contaminated repository of toxins and diseases (e.g. “alkali-collecting pools,” “leakage from canals,” “sickly slow streams,” “dingy pools,” “rotting willows,” 92).   

This diseased landscape is actually a locus of ambivalence for Austin.  On the one hand, its toxic aspect generates revulsion, but on the extreme other, its latent healing components constitute its “mystery.”  Specifically, she describes the heliotropes who manage to thrive in this toxic environment as capable of producing a “mucilaginous sap [that] has healing powers” (92). 

Thus while Austin’s sentence constructions replicate the slow oozing movements of the “sickly” streams (i.e. series of short clauses separated by semicolons:  “old stalks succumb slowly;”) her syntax becomes increasingly open-ended with descriptive progression.  For example, what do the “clanging geese” go over?  At the same time, “…how fare, what find” omits the [already] ambiguous pronoun.  Indeed, what is the referent for “those” that “the reedy fens have swallowed up”?  In other words, what is the referent for that which is unknowable and thus indescribable—that eludes language, or signification—that gets “swallowed up” in semiotic mystery? 

In sum, the [uneasy] coexistence of the healing and the toxic aspects of nature can generate in the reader an ambivalence that is paradoxically communicated through increasing syntactical omissions.  These omissions, in turn, form the poststructuralist core of a lyricism that signifies the impenetrable “secret of the tulanes” (93).