Volume 22, Number 16 · October 16, 1975
Haunted Landscape
By Robert M. Adams
Pueblo: Mountain, Village, Dance
by Vincent Scully
Viking, 398 pp., $19.95
Two problems are likely to be perplexing in writing about an alien culture: the strangeness of the alien culture, which no member of it ever feels, and pressures, positive and negative, from our own culture. We can't escape our own categories, which are surely not theirs; it's just as hard to avoid seeing the new culture as a sort of 'answer' to our old one. Detachment and involvement, both necessary, are hard to balance; overcompensation can be as false as insensitivity. And then we have to translate concepts that took shape in one medium—almost wordlessly, among ancient friends long initiated in tribal secrets, and almost without technology—into another medium, of English prose set on a linotype machine and augmented by photolithography. To do all this sympathetically yet accurately, so that the final image is not blurred by reflexes of our own, is a work of the rarest difficulty. Professor Scully has gone boldly and imaginatively at this more than impossible task; the record of his success and failure, if mixed, is never without vital interest.
Review, 2850 words
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