Summary
#e theoretical framework within which the author reads John Casey’s novel Spartina is the 
renewed interest in the notion of the regional. #e choice of the novel is additionally dictated by 
the fact it deals with the sea. As such it allows the author to discuss the sea both as it is positioned 
within the American cultural imaginary and the way that it is represented in works of literature. 
#e article delineates how these two themes are thematized in the novel and what kind of insights 
they can provide about certain aspects of the American polity.
Key words: John Casey, spatiality, regionalism, sea, cultural imaginary
 Povzetek
T eoretični okvir, skozi katerega avtor prispevka obravnava roman Spartina Johna Caseyja, ponovno 
vzpostavlja pojem regije v književnosti. Izbira romana je dodatno pogojena z dejstvom, da je v ospredju 
morje kot tako, kar omogoča njegovo obravnavo tako v kontekstu ameriškega kulturnega imaginarija 
kot v smislu njegove upodobitve v književnosti. Razprava odstira postopke tematizacije teh dveh tém 
in omogoči vpogled v različne vidike ameriške organizirane nacionalnosti.
Ključne besede: John Casey, prostornost, regionalizem, morje, kulturni imaginarij
 DOI: 10.4312/elope.3.1-2.183-192

My title juxtaposes two spaces which I believe are not only relevant to the reading of the chosen 
novel but have a theoretical pertinence both within the general and the more local, in this case 
American, context. Namely, both the broader concept of regionalism and the more specific site 
of the sea create new resources for the study of literature and its place in culture. As part of an 
ongoing project, the point I want to underline is my belief that geographical knowledge can greatly 
contribute to our understanding of culture and its artifacts. #e basic premise of my argument is 
that readings of regionalist texts, which all too frequently are ignored in critical surveys, enable us to 
reclaim works and the places they describe which would otherwise be sidelined or simply ignored. 
T o situate my reading within the broader theoretical framework and the more specific field 
of American studies I feel it is necessary to briefly comment upon the place of regionalism in 
these discussions. Without doubt there is a certain pejorative quality attached to the word. One 
can adduce reasons for this by referring to the value-laden opposition between the concepts 
of the particular and the universal or, if literary works are at issue, one can see it as the logical 
consequence of the aesthetic moment where the local tends to be elided in seeking out universal 
aesthetic worth. On a more concrete level, one can see the demise of regionalism as resulting from 
the decline of spatial diversity in the ways of life during the last century. New communication 
technologies have contributed to the disappearance of distinctive localities, a process which in its 
wake has dissolved the psycho-emotional ties humans have traditionally felt for distinct places. 
In an earlier reading of the contemporary American novel I have shown how these developments 
have manifested themselves in the United States and how their prominence gives one ample 
warrant to consider the United States as the exemplary postmodern polity (Grgas 2000).
In addition, it has often been contended that the American project as such is antipodal to the 
sustainability of the region. On the present occasion I call upon Jim Wayne Miller who is of the 
opinion that the American national identity “is essentially extraterritorial … subordination of 
place, and hence of region, to a national perspective” (in Mallry and Simpson-Housley 1987, 4). 
He expands on this idea:
An inherited Renaissance concept of culture; the increasing tendency to see human 
collectivities in terms no smaller than the nation state; the association of culture with 
history, with time rather than with space; the essential extra-territoriality of the American 
idea – all of these and subordinate considerations have caused regions and regionalism 
(literary and otherwise) to come to be associated with backwardness and limitation. (5)
#e rhetoric which legitimated the United States either as a religious mission or as the embodiment 
of Enlightenment ideas projected a homogenized, unified space. Its undeniable plurality, perhaps 

precisely because of the latent danger of heterogeneous fragmentation, was throughout American 
history being co-opted into an ideal of unity.
But these remarks far from exhaust the issue at hand. Looking at the matter from a general 
perspective, one can hardly speak of a consensus if the question of the homogenization of space 
or the process of globalization is at stake. In a paradoxical fashion, the process of globalization 
has, for instance, been accompanied by an antipodal human affective and existential investment 
in the local. In the revised edition of his !e Cultural Geography of the United States (1992) 
Wilbur Zelinsky speaks of the “disappointments of the contemporary world” and the search 
for “more authentic modes of anchorage”. He remarks: “In spatial terms, the safest haven 
appears to be located somewhere midway between the cold, faceless bureaucratic state and the 
incertitudes of kith, kin, and hearth – in the renewal of regional identity” (173). In the later 
added “afterthoughts” to his study he discerns “that, working at cross-purposes against the all too 
obvious process of convergence and homogenization, are innumerable local foci of resistance, all 
those spatially intimate and personal assertions of individuality and specialness” (184).
T o return to the American context, it should be pointed out that the unifying vision or the 
rhetoric of monolithic political identity never actually extirpated oppositional, particularist 
solidarities. Sectional interests are and have always been a constant of American politics; 
United States history bears the traces of their struggles, while its space of cultural production is 
geographically differentiated both according to those who are its makers and to the landscapes 
that it has mapped and explored. Needless to say, the relationship between the nation and the 
region bears the imprint of different historical junctures. During different historical periods either 
one or the other side have been emphasized or underplayed. In his classification of narratives 
that emerged in the United States during the formative period between 1820–1860, Jonathan 
Arac describes “local narratives” as at that time offering “alternative emphases” to the “national 
narratives” adding: “#e actual differences among the regions of the United States meant that the 
story of America was not the only story” (2005, 30). 
Both a certain crop of novels in the United States, amongst which I count John Casey’s Spartina, 
and theoretically informed investigations of the local have prompted some to speak of a “new 
regionalism”. Introducing his collection of essays bearing this title, Charles Reagan Wilson calls 
upon Foucault and contends that the French philosopher offers insights “as to the significance 
of regionalism in a postmodern world”(Wilson 1998, xv). He adds: “Even more relevant, 
though, is his stress on site. Foucault draws attention to marginal social groups who experience 
the effects of power in particular places and contexts” (xvi). In accord with this line of thinking, 
instead of being a remnant of a simplistic understanding of the intimate relationship between 
humans and their environment, the region is envisioned as a powerful tool of analysis and 
synthesis. As a metonym of the collective, the region is a barometer of the distribution of power 
within the state polity, at times contributing to and at times subverting its hegemony. Scattered 
over the varied landscapes of America, one can see regionalism as the critical interrogation of 
the center with its official histories and definitions, as the inscription of voices and places which 
have been elided from the dominant narrative of the American polity.

One of those elisions is the relegation of the sea from the American spatial imaginary. In the 
preface to the collections of papers entitled America and the Sea (1995) Haskell Springer makes 
the following observation: 
While, for example, the vanished western has been repeatedly so studied and invoked as 
to make it a hoary cliché, that other, and permanent, American frontier, the sea, hardly 
registers today in our cultural consciousness as setting, theme, metaphor, symbol, or 
powerful shaper of literary history. (1995, ix) 
Notwithstanding the displacement of the sea by the continental saga, a development which has 
been accounted for by both politico-economic and ideological reasons, the contributors to Spinger’s 
collection trace its abiding presence in American literature. It was one of these, Dennis Berthold, who 
in his survey of American prose since 1960 drew my attention to John Casey’s novel (1995, 317).
Casey’s novel won the National Book Award in 1989. If, as T ony Tanner had diagnosed the earlier 
period, much of American literature during the previous decades had “foregrounded language” 
(Tanner 1971, 20), Spartina belongs to a growing number of texts published during the most 
recent period which, in different ways, evince a rejection of postmodernist extravaganza, finding 
it both tedious and self-indulgent. Instead of the earlier metafictional obfuscations and their 
linguistic play, a growing number of writers espouse a revived realism as a textual practice that 
can provide a meaningful purchase on today’s America. 
In their attempts to render America in a more straightforward manner, many of these writers 
ground their novels in geographically specific sites so that there are those who have found 
evidence of a new regionalism in the contemporary American novel (Rebein 2001). However, 
neither are the novels written in this vein replicas of traditional realism nor is their regionalism 
a throwback to an outdated mode of writing that shuns the complexities and the trials of 
the present. Discussing the work of Annie Proulx, perhaps the best known representative of 
this literary tendency, Karen Rood makes the following observation: “Readers who approach 
the works of these new regionalists out of a turn-of-the-century nostalgia for getting back 
to their country roots quickly have their notions of pastoral serenity replaced by pictures 
of rural poverty and varying degrees of violence” (2001, 15). Without engaging questions 
of comparative aesthetic value, one can say that John Casey’s novel accords with Rood’s 
pronouncement on what awaits the reader in this new trend within contemporary American 
fiction. #erefore, in what follows, my first task will be to delineate those features of Casey’s 
novel which allow the reader to approach it as a regionalist novel. #e second step of my 
analysis will be to show how, far from projecting a “pastoral serenity”, his novel registers the 
impact of forces and agencies from the world at large. In conclusion of my paper I will return 
to the problem of the sea and show how Casey deals with it.
 Excepting the flashback account of Dick Pierce’s trip with Parker to the West Indies, the entire 
narrative of Spartina is set in the salt marshes, on and off the coast of Rhode Island. Descriptions 

of these sites, focalized through Dick’s native vision, reflect an intimate knowledge of their 
geological, botanical and ichthyological characteristics. At a remove from these renderings of 
the natural world, the text relies upon toponyms to inscribe the locale: Pierce Creek, Sawtooth 
Creek, Salt Pond, Block Island and so on. When Dick daydreams about his boat entering the local 
harbor with the inscription “Galilee, R.I.” (26) written under its name on the stern, giving him 
the right to moor as a resident, he discloses the South County town that is the nearest political 
seat of power. Finally, Rhode Island as a state is the outlining border which constitutes the 
horizon of space that the main character projects and within which he and the other characters 
appear in this novel. As far as the Rhode Island setting is concerned I draw attention to the self-
deprecatory comment made by Parker:
 Cute little state. First time I heard of it, I was running a
 charter boat in the Gulf, had a couple of T exans on board.
 One says to the other, ‘I hear you picked up that land next
 to yours. You must have quite a spread now.’ #e other one
 says, ‘Middling. Just over two and a half Rhode Islands’. (51)
Although no more than a trifling exchange this is the only instance in the book where the 
reader has an outsider’s perspective on the state-region in which Casey sets his novel. A similar 
differential logic is evident when Dick, thinking of fish prices, summons up places like New 
York (7) or Connecticut (11) as providing better opportunities than he can expect in his place 
of residence. However, the act of constituting identity through difference can best be seen in the 
explanation why he felt “fuddy-duddy” in the West Indies:
 But it wasn’t just that, or the foreignness of the people or
 the sleekness of some of them, that put Dick at half-speed.
 It was the place that knocked him for a loop. #e air, the 
 sea, the islands. Dick had fished off Cape Cod, Maine, and
 Nova Scotia. All that was more or less the same, or at
 least understandably different. #e West Indies was another
 planet. #e air smelled different, touched his skin like silk.
 #e water was the same salt water, but the colors were different,
 greens and blues he’d never seen. (14)
Without elaborating upon this or going into the question to what extent is New England indicated 
here as the reference point of a broader regional identity – or something that is “understandably 
different” – I think the italicized form of the word “place” as it appears in the text is sufficient 
proof of its significance in Casey’s novel. T o put this otherwise: the geographical space of Rhode 
Island is not a mere geometrical extension but is a place invested with affective attachments and 
experiential significance.
Although this passage downplays the impact of the “foreignness of the people”, the same 
relationship between identity and difference is reenacted on the level of characters. Dick Pierce 

is a descendent of one of the oldest families – at one point explicitly naming it the “good 
stock” (128) – who had of yore been able to live off the marshes and the sea, relying on 
their wit, skill and toil. Keeping to the old ways he is known for his “grim Yankee manner” 
(15) and, comparing himself to the encroaching newly rich, he thinks of himself as a “dumb 
swamp Yankee” (48). #ese qualities are recognized by the other characters so that Parker at 
one point censures Dick for “dividing up the world into the idle rich and the true-blue salts. 
#e unworthy and the worthy” (75). While Parker is representative of those on the cast of 
characters who, although they are willing to avail themselves of Dick’s skills, hardly show him 
any sympathy, there are others, Elsie in particular, whose words and deeds reflect a profound 
respect for the values Dick epitomizes. To use a graphic metaphor one could say that the 
characters are either absorbed into the centripetal spin of Dick’s value system and his obsession 
of building his own boat or they look upon these in an askance manner from the outside. 
Dick’s response early in the novel to the bank loan officer who suggests that he consider welfare 
as a way to alleviate his financial difficulties is indicative of his ethical profile. He is appalled 
at the suggestion and his rejoinder that he could be making good money if only he could 
build his boat instead of going on welfare (8) has a resounding political charge in the ongoing 
discussion of US social policy. 
Although distinct, the region is nevertheless a part of a larger whole and is therefore susceptible 
to developments that originate elsewhere. Since regionalist literature invests so much in the 
notion of place, a useful way of understanding that relationship and its consequences would be 
to analyze the impact outside forces have had on the land itself, particularly on the way humans 
have used it. Reshuffling the numerous references to this problematic scattered throughout 
Spartina one could propose a history whose beginning and present stage are juxtaposed in the 
following passage: 
Tautog. Squeateague. Indian names. Names left over like
bones. From half a mile away Dick heard the trucks leaving
the building site on Sawtooth Point. Narragansett. Matunuck.
Words from before anyone had owned anything. (87–8)
In passing, through the character of Miss Perry, Dick is made aware of the original inhabitants 
and the fact that they “hadn’t owned land individually” but as tribes “they’d had dominion 
over tribal lands” (88). But not much is made of this within the novel since the focus is upon 
what happened to the land that Dick’s family had previously owned and upon how it is being 
transformed in the present of the novel. #roughout the narrative Dick is constantly being 
reminded, feeling “anger, envy, and regret” (89), of the fact that his father had lost the largest 
part of the family land. Apparently his belief “in the natural order of the Pierces’ owning land” 
(128) was unfounded and after that order had showed itself to be far from natural his son was 
left with a “sliver of marsh” (9), with certain hunting and fishing rights. It is from this position 
of the dispossessed native, at a point where the old mode of “family’s farming and fishing” 
(89) has been displaced by the rules of late capitalist economy, that Dick Pierce is witnessing 
changes that are transforming the land and the older way of life.

Real estate transactions had driven away all but a few of the older residents so that “every other 
house was now a summer rental” (24). A “flood tide of money and fun” (49) had brought 
in a new group of people who see the land as an opportunity for profitable investment in 
the cottage project. To put this in economic terms, what is unfolding before Dick’s eyes 
is the gradual disappearance of the use-value of land and the growing significance of its 
exchange-value. #e role of the filmmaker Schuyler can be understood within this context 
since he is there to booster the appeal of the place to future property buyers. Although Dick 
is constantly immersed in financial worries both as they pertain to supporting his family 
but, more significantly, to the project of building his own boat, he refuses to compromise 
on the issue of mortgaging his home place. His “sliver of marsh” is his last anchorage in 
a world which is in flux, caught up in changes over which he has no control. In making 
Dick the center of the novel, Casey is giving a voice to a specimen of those who are being 
overwhelmed by the processes of corporate America. #e narrative of Dick Pierce’s survival 
strategies and of his tortuous humanity provides a counterpoint from which to take stock 
of what is involved in the all-devouring power of capital and its ability to appropriate and 
expand. If that alternative is not already foreclosed the question that needs to be asked is from 
where does it draw its potential.
 To answer this question we have to go the coast and out to sea as the other site of my reading. 
To be more precise, it is the ocean and its lure, the way that it calls out the best in man and the 
way that it is has always been the element that cannot be subjugated to the whims of human 
hubris – these facets of the sea and the way man relates to it, on different levels of the narrative, 
empower the mode of being which is embodied in the main protagonist of the novel. Faced 
with its elemental force the humans have to rely on their mother wit, their skills and their 
energy. On each of the voyages to the sea depicted in the novel one can decipher a story of 
trial and initiation. It is on the sea that the constrictions and the encroachment of capital do 
not hold dominion.  
#ere are different psycho-emotional responses that are evoked by the sea. In one place we 
read that some of the lobstermen are “scared to go all the way out to the edge of the shelf” 
(7). At one point, ruminating on the need of making a compromise in order to build his boat, 
Dick muses that he will work just in order to “get himself out to sea” (34). #e journey out 
is envisioned as an escape from the pitfalls and the debilitating protocols that reign on land. 
Elsewhere Dick explicitly states his love of the sea – “I like the time out there” (52). On a 
more abstract level there is the following comment: “Being at sea opened you up. And if you 
wanted to do things right, you had to use all that opening up for what you were doing, for 
where you were, for what was going to happen” (63). #e exigent circumstances in which man 
encounters the elements on the open sea demand of him an utter intentness to the tasks at 
hand, an attentiveness through which the skilled mariner becomes one with his surroundings. 
In a rare metaphysical bent of mind Dick thinks of the sea in the following manner:

 Everything in the sea dissolves – the particular matter
 into the deeps, then back into upwellings, into the chain 
 whose first invisible links are animal-plants, plant-animals;
 and all the while the great fluid of the sea is drawn into
 the sky by the sun, takes passing shapes as cloud, and
 returns to the earth. (137)
In an extended metaphor appearing later in the text I find a word which I think summarizes 
many of the characteristics that are latent in these pronouncements: “a bay as it becomes deeper 
and vaguer, undefining itself into the broader sea” (158). #e expanse of waters lapping at the 
shore is the site where land demarcations and all of the cultural weight that they carry become 
irrelevant. #e arrangements that prevail on the land mass are blotted out on the sea where the 
solid security of the firm earth – which is in this novel socially differentiated – falls into disarray. 
I offer here a thought from an article by David Wills:
 the distinction between ocean and dry land has led to attempts
 at the partition and defense of parcels of that land, to interminable
 territorial dispute. Again, the sea has parted, distinguishing and 
 defining the land, defining it as distinction in opposition to the
 indiscriminate sea; but again the sea has returned for the lines drawn
 in the sand of the land are lines drawn in the ocean, undecidable,
 difficult to defend, changeable, always threatened with 
 disappearance or reimposition, subject to waves of conquest
 or flight. (Wills 2001, 531)
Although the implications of this observation go far beyond our immediate topic, nevertheless it 
gives us some of the parameters which allow us to read the thematic of the sea in Casey’s novel.  
#e sublimity of the ocean, the fact that in a sense it can be seen as the radical other of culture is, in my 
opinion, one of the reasons that it has had a problematical position within the imaginative repertoire 
of different peoples. #e American example offers a fascinating story of the displacement of the 
sea from its cultural imaginary, particularly if we keep in mind both the early history of the United 
States on the Atlantic seaboard but also the geographical position of the United States between two 
oceans. However, a novel such as Spartina shows that this displacement has not been total and that 
geographical realities inevitably make their way into the cultural archive. Let me propose a thesis: in 
order to reclaim the ocean for the American imagination, in order to understand how the ocean has 
related to different aspects of American experience we would have to go to texts which project the 
space of the littoral or which stage the human drama on the waters that spread out in front of it.
Bringing these remarks to a close I join the ranks of those who, in arguing for the continuing 
relevance of the regionalist approach, call upon Michel Foucault to theoretically sustain their 
claims. In a passage often quoted in this context Foucault argued that historical research is prone 
to ignore or to eliminate from its accounts “particular, local, regional knowledge … incapable of 

unanimity” and to privilege “systematizing thought” or the established version (Foucault 1980, 
82). He voices a plea for the “subjugated knowledges”, that have been eclipsed by the dominant 
paradigms, to be recovered and reclaimed as vital elements in charting human reality. Although 
there might be some who would warn that I am reading too much into a straightforward tale I 
nevertheless maintain, as I have tried to show in my reading, that John Casey’s novel can be seen 
as a work of reclamation and that it gives voice to geographical sites and social groups who are 
often displaced from the different American narratives. #is can be seen in two antipodal passages 
in the closing section of the novel. #e first one is the disparaging commentary that accompanies 
Schuyler’s movie which is being watched by Dick and his cronies in the local bar Neptune. After 
some statistics have been read out, there is a factual description of the state of Rhode Island, some 
of whose items the reader recognizes had been previously thematized in Casey’s novel:
 If Rhode Island were a country, it would be part of the
 #ird World. #e largest employer is the military. T ourism 
 is the major moneymaker, although most Rhode Islanders
 benefit from it only in service positions. #e bulk of choice
 real estate is in the form of second homes or resorts run by
 absentee corporations.
  #ere is a seafaring tradition, and there is – still – a 
 fishing fleet. By comparison to the high-tech factory ships
 of Russia, East or West Germany, Japan, or the tuna clippers of
 our own West Coast, the boats and methods are quaint. (344)
What is occluded in such a stereotyping account of the region is exactly the content, both spatial, 
temporal and human, that the novel Spartina in different ways has brought to light. Near the end 
of the book, in a kind of epiphanic revelation, Dick comes to terms with “something he’s always 
known – that they all flowed into each other. All of them set about the salt marsh in the little 
towns and the houses on the hills – they all got mixed in, they stayed themselves” (371). Dick 
intuits at this point the human value of the particularist solidarity that had been explored and 
put to the test in the previous escapades. T o put a number of complex, interweaving themes in 
the crudest terms, we can say that Spartina makes visible a region and its inhabitants which have 
been overwritten by the United States national narrative. 
In doing so it has empowered through the vision and voice of its narrator a social group – that has 
“stayed themselves” to use Casey’s formulation – that has, in my opinion, all too frequently been 
ignored even in the contemporary “full-blown diversity madness” (Jacobson 2006, 313). In the 
context of present day identity politics, in which every statement is discussed as the projection 
of someone’s distinct self or view of the world, I would contend that a stratum of United States 
society, a very important one for that matter, has been blotted out from the overall picture. 
Simply put these are the impoverished Anglo-Saxons. #eir presence complicates the celebratory 
discourse of ethnic difference and compels us to reengage the issue of fault lines between classes 
within seemingly homogenic ethnic groups, an issue that I believe can help us gain a better 
understanding of certain politico-cultural realities in present-day America.