Fresno, Calif.—Mark Neumann’s book On the Rim: Looking for the Grand Canyon (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1999) explains how the Grand Canyon is a setting for stories. Many of the stories are narratives of national identity, westward expansion, democratic ideals, & individual perseverance.
But many of the other stories played out against the backdrop of the Grand Canyon are personal narratives of individuals looking for so-called authentic experience. That is the subject of Neumann’s fifth chapter, “Fantasy Trails across Popular Terrain” (pp. 165-211).
Neumann argues that the stories of & about the Grand Canyon that people experience in the media are the stories & places they come to the Grand Canyon to experience. While at the Grand Canyon, people watch themselves through the eyes of ideal spectators as if they were in a story. In short, they don’t witness the Canyon as much as they witness themselves witnessing the Canyon.
These media representations of the Grand Canyon, Neumann continues, are more interesting than the real Canyon because the representations tell people more about themselves than the actual place. Travel guides, for instance, don’t tell people what to see at the Grand Canyon as much as they tell people who they might be. In other words, the meaning of the landscape is less important to many people than the meaning of their lives within the landscape.
In a nutshell, people don’t go to the Grand Canyon to see & learn about the Grand Canyon itself; they go to the Grand Canyon to see & experience & learn about themselves; they want the Grand Canyon to be a place where they can experience their own authentic lives. The Grand Canyon, Neumann says, “is the setting for some other drama audiences will find interesting, thrilling, disappointing” (210).
As a result, Neumann observes that the “official story” told by the National Park Service—the story of the Canyon’s long geologic history & the sense of human insignificance it creates—is not always the story people come to hear. People don’t come to hear the definitive official story; they come to “have a story worth telling by living as if in a story” (210).
“Next to the maps, visitor centers, and management plans that keep the Grand Canyon for future generations, motion pictures, novels, and television programs would continue to remind the public that the canyon was a stage for their own ordinary lives, their humor and romance, and the backdrop for scenes of extraordinary adventure” (211).
Although Neumann does not address it, what is true of the Grand Canyon is likely to be true of most landscapes around the Colorado Plateau (& perhaps true of most national parklands & scenic landscapes throughout the country & the world).
Furthermore, Neumann’s conclusions imply a more compelling interpretative strategy & a better use of interpretation resources—money, ideas, & manpower: instead of telling the story of the Grand Canyon (& other natural landscapes), help people live & tell their own stories within those landscapes.
Elsewhere in his book (pp. 303-304), Neumann addresses the comparisons between the Grand Canyon & Disneyland that some people make (as well as the work others engage in to disavow those comparisons). And that got me wondering whether Disneyland’s success results from Disneyland being a place that allows & encourages people to live & tell their own stories.
Disneyland is full of stories (fairy tales & popular movies & children’s stories), but the explicit point of their presence is to serve as a backdrop for the visitors’ own lives. At Disneyland people live their lives like stories because that is the way Disneyland is designed to be. At the Grand Canyon (& other Colorado Plateau landscapes) people live their lives like stories in spite of the efforts of the government visitor centers & natural & cultural history museums to force an official story onto the visitor.
(And everything I say about Disneyland can be applied just as well to Disneyland’s urban-size alter-ego of Las Vegas, Nevada.)