Patagoni by Paul Metcalf

First published: 1971

Type of work: History/diary/letters

Form and Content

Patagoni is a difficult book to classify by genre. Linking folklore to history to personal diary and letters to conflations of history texts, Paul Metcalf has made genre subservient to artistic whim. While the book resembles a long modernist poem, it concludes with a lengthy bibliography of sources Metcalf quoted or paraphrased, indicating to the reader that the text he is reading is also a research paper. However flashy and original a glance through the book suggests it to be, it is, above all, a work of meditation upon texts. Original authorship takes less space in Patagoni than the sections on South America and Henry Ford which Metcalf borrows from his sources.

If the subjects Metcalf examines are not new, their arrangement, enjambment, compression, and structuring relative to one another are wholly original. Part anthropological speculation, part history, the book is a work of art and is experienced by the reader as a “poem about civilization,” such as those written by Metcalf’s modern ancestors Ezra Pound (the Cantos) and Charles Olson (The Maximus Poems). The visual “look” of the pages is modernist as well. Eschewing capital letters and conventional paragraphs, Metcalf builds his text like a collage. Like Pound’s Cantos, Patagoni even includes bars of musical text. Thus, though the book is classified as “nonfiction” it is a challenging book to read for anyone unequipped with the decoding skills developed through contemplating the disjunctions of modern art.

Patagoni’s subject is the New World, South America and North America, rather than the southern tip of South America the title suggests. The term “Patagoni” refers to the giant natives Ferdinand Magellan reported seeing while exploring the coast: “fo bygge, that the heade of one of owr men of a meane ftature, came but to his wafte.” The New World Metcalf contemplates is not the discovery Columbus made in 1492 but the primordial America of the great Indian civilizations and their obscure ancestors. Of the two continents, Metcalf favors the southern as the center of origins, especially what is today known as Peru and the Lake Titicaca region of Bolivia. The book’s second section, “Tihuanacu,” describes this western side of South America as it was before Europe found it, with special attention to the holistic unity in the vitality of geography, plant life, animals, and aboriginal Indians. Metcalf shows how this richly alive kingdom, untouched by the European influence, gave issue to the artifacts, religion, and brilliantly designed cities which exist today only as memories. The place Metcalf describes in “Tihuanacu” is an American Eden, far surpassing in resources the northern continent. “Tihuanacu” is a book of genesis for this place, a world so rich in life that even the clay could sustain a hungry Indian.

Metcalf’s third section, “Sialia,” presents the other side of his American coin: Henry Ford’s doings in North America. Condensing gists from biographies and instruction manuals, Metcalf profiles the mind and energies of the inventor of the assembly line. Juxtaposing the Ford section to the South American section advances Metcalf’s subject—the contrast between the New World’s original or aboriginal geography and mentality and the white orientation in the less fructive northern continent.

The juxtaposition of the ancient south and the modern north is in focus throughout the book’s five remaining sections. The contrast is made complex by the contrasts Metcalf finds existing within each side. Early Peru, described in the second section, is compared with contemporary Peru as described in Patagoni’s final section. The early Detroit described in “Sialia” is compared to the Detroit Metcalf visited in the 1950’s and describes in the fifth section, “d’Etroit.” The mystically fructive Eden of the second section becomes a modern wasteland in the last section, and the early successes of Henry Ford’s automobile manufacture, which included a thriving and well-paid work force, become the nightmare of contemporary labor strikes and layoffs. The degenerative energy of historical process is a theme Metcalf introduces on the book’s first page, where the image of stock cars racing in the Darlington 500, “chomping butyl, gorging gas, puffing smoke,” foresees in reverse the edenic energies of birds and animals in the second section: “snowwhite islands black with birds, the air thick with mutterings, the hum of wings, grunts and screepy calls.”

Like a symphony, the narration of Patagoni progresses in radically contrasting tones. The personal poet’s voice of the first section is followed by the second and third sections’ less personal historical narration. A page from a McGuffey’s Reader is quoted at length, and a how-to process from a manual on the construction of a motor. Later, in “Diario y Cartas” (diary and letters), the author’s informal personal presence is central. By quoting himself at length in words written before the composition of his book, Metcalf underlines the method of authorship he has chosen, that of the historian who cannot know his subject at first hand but is limited to the words which other men (in this case, even, himself), living in the past, chose to write down. Thus, the issue of “the perceiver” is a secondary but essential theme of Patagoni. The tangibility of a former world is reduced to texts, and the book’s central historical individual, Henry Ford, is the person famous for saying “History is more or less bunk.”

Critical Context

Paul Metcalf is the great grandson of Herman Melville. Like his grandparent, Metcalf’s scope as a writer is broad in geographical and cultural subjects. Melville’s placing a tattoo-covered savage, Queequeg, in bed with Ishmael, the white American narrator of Moby Dick (1851), is comparable to Metcalf’s union of South American Indians and Henry Ford. The connection of pagan and civilized poses the problem many contemporary writers have addressed: Western civilized man is adrift and alienated because he lacks meaningful symbols to order his spirit and behavior.

English writers in the twentieth century have offered various opinions on this problem. T. S. Eliot was pessimistic, sensing in The Waste Land (1922) that cultural cohesion was impossible. Ezra Pound was more optimistic, arguing that America could be saved if Confucian principles were adopted by its rulers. D. H. Lawrence searched past civilizations and advocated abandoning civilized mores and replacing them with the sensibilities of Etruscans or Mexican Indians. Other writers have offered Eastern religion as a means of rescue. The message of Patagoni seems closest to Lawrence’s point of view. The white American needs to return to the symbology of Incans and Mayans and recognize that a place supersedes its inhabitants and must be listened to and, ultimately, worshiped. The Indian’s art had significant dialogue with his place. He was not alienated from but embraced by his environment, and his works bore testimony to his happy situation.

Metcalf’s architectonic style, the joining of apparently different subjects without transitional explanation, is also typical of twentieth century writing. Unexpectedness, strangeness, freshness are aesthetic ideals this style attempts to embody. The virtue of Patagoni is its accessibility. Though a reader may have initial difficulty adjusting to the lack of plot, the suspension of a directing narrative voice, the book is much easier to understand than books in a similar style, such as Pound’s Cantos and Olson’s The Maximus Poems, which require cribs or even libraries for elucidation. Metcalf’s book is not written only to a coterie of scholars but to general readers as well. Despite its readability, Patagoni goes unread just as Metcalf’s earlier book Genoa (1965), written in the same collage style, goes unread. This seems mainly attributable to the publisher, The Jargon Society, which specializes in producing avant-garde books in small numbers. Yet Patagoni revivifies the content of history books and social studies texts that most Americans encountered in the elementary grades. Its avant-garde style is not really all that new. The critic Guy Davenport has pointed out that Metcalf’s eclectic style, where almost anything pertinent will be inserted, is much like the style of his grandparent’s Moby Dick: “Of what other novel than Moby Dick can you say that a chapter on any subject under the sun might fit into it?”

Patagoni’s madeness stands for more than its author’s attempt to be different for the sake of being different. He attempted to make a hieroglyphic, a lasting American symbol, upon which the twentieth century reader can meditate. Its obscurity seems only to heighten the quality of its vision, just as a stone covered with glyphs discovered among Mayan ruins mesmerizes its happy finder.

Bibliography

Callahan, Bob. Review in Credences. III (March, 1980), pp. 36-37.

Campbell, Andrew. “Paul Metcalf, Geology, and the Dynamics of Place,” in Sagetrieb. V (Winter, 1986), pp. 87-110.

Davenport, Guy. “Narrative Tone and Form,” in The Geography of the Imagination, 1981.

The New York Times. Review. CXXI (September 15, 1972), p. 34.