22
Years afterward, when the open grazing days were over, and the red grass had
been ploughed under and under until it had almost disappeared from the prairie;
when all the fields were under fence, and the roads no longer ran about like wild
things, but followed the surveyed section-lines, Mr. Shimerda’s grave was still
there, with a sagging wire fence around it, and an unpainted wooden cross. As
grandfather had predicted, Mrs. Shimerda never saw the roads going over his
head. The road from the north curved a little to the east just there, and the road
from the west swung out a little to the south; that the grave, with its tall red grass
that was never mowed, was like a little island; and at twilight, under a new moon
or the clear evening star, the dusty roads used to look like soft grey rivers flowing
past it. (59)
The spatial rendering of the grave as well as its function relative to the prairie, human
constructs, and human action paint a picture in the style of Jim’s romanticism that also
captures the dynamism of the forces at play and allows Mr. Shimerda to exist not only as
a victim, but an agent in his own right.
Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, as discussed in the lecture “Of Other Spaces,”
facilitates a reading of Mr. Shimerda’s suicide as disruptive to a narrative of pathologized
self-death.
According to Foucault, there are “certain [sites] that have the curious
property of being in relation with all other sites, but in such a way as to suspect,
neutralize, or invert the set of relations that they are having to designate, mirror, or
reflect” (24). In other words, a heterotopia—literally, “other place”— has two primary
components. First, the heterotopia is connected to its context in such a way that lays bare
the ongoing relations in its milieu. These representations then serve as a means of
challenging or interrupting those relations by existing as “counter-sites … in which all
While the concept of heterotopia is one of Foucault’s less developed conceptions, Peter Johnson
suggests that the heterotopia and its “ambivalent relation to power” can be understood more clearly by
putting it in conversation with concepts of utopia. Johnson’s conclusion is that “heterotopias are
fundamentally disturbing places” that “display and inaugurate a difference and challenge the space in
which we feel at home” (84).