The Maze Below, The Journey Above

Hernan Diaz’s 'In the Distance' and the Conversation of Silence

Authors

Keywords:

Hernan Diaz, silence, vertical geography, literary travel, geographic space

Abstract

This essay explores the link between burrowed caves as geographical space and the resulting scenes of anti-conversation present in Hernan Diaz’s novel In the Distance (2017). Drawing on Ralph Crane and Lisa Fletcher’s theorizing of literary caves as “anti-places” which characters can traverse and dwell in, but which resist normative place designations, we can read the unique formal characteristics of what are known as the burrowing chapters in Diaz’s novel (Spatial Literary Studies).

Author Biography

Nicole Dib, Southern Utah University

Nicole Dib is an Assistant Professor of English at Southern Utah University. Her work in American literature, comparative ethnic studies, and comics studies has been published in MELUS, Studies in the Novel, and INKS, among other venues.

References

Acharya, I. and Panda, U. (2022) Geographical Imaginations: Literature and the ‘Spatial Turn’. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Beavers, H. (2018) Geography and the Political Imaginary in the Novels of Toni Morrison. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Campbell, N. (2019) ‘What West? Worlding the Western in Hernan Diaz’s In the Distance.’ Western American Literature, 54(2), pp. 103-121.

Crane, R. and Fletcher, L. (2021) ‘Caves as Anti-Places: Robert Penn Warren’s The Cave and Cormac McCarthy’s Child of God.’ In Tally Jr., R. (ed) Spatial Literary Studies. New York: Routledge, pp. 149-163.

Diaz, H. (2017) In the Distance. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press.

Diaz, H. (2021) ‘The Heart of Fiction: Storytelling, Experience, and Truth.’ The Yale Review, 109(2), pp. 53-67.

Kollin, S. (2001) ‘Genre and the Geographies of Violence: Cormac McCarthy and the Contemporary Western.’ Contemporary Literature, 42(3), pp. 557-588.

Massey, D. (1994) Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Vermeulen, P. (2023) ‘Frankenstein’s Monster Goes West: Hernan Diaz’s In the Distance, Cli-Fi, and the Literature of Limitation.’ Modern Fiction Studies, 69(1), pp. 143-162.

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Published

2024-10-30

Issue

Vol. 10 No. 2 (2024)

Section

Thinking Space

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