New Wests and Post-Wests : Literature and Film of the American West [1 ed.] 9781443853347, 9781443849647

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New Wests and Post-Wests

New Wests and Post-Wests: Literature and Film of the American West

Edited by

Paul Varner

New Wests and Post-Wests: Literature and Film of the American West Edited by Paul Varner This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Paul Varner and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-4964-2, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4964-7

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction .............................................................................................. vii Paul Varner Part I: Literature and Film of the American West Chapter One ................................................................................................ 2 Defining Post-Western Cinema: John Huston’s The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre (1948) Neil Campbell Chapter Two ............................................................................................. 21 Longing for Fulfillment: The Temptation of the Californian Life in Sam Shepard’s True West and Nathanael West’s The Day Of The Locust Melanie Marotta Chapter Three ........................................................................................... 44 Into The Wild: Chris McCandless and his Search for a “Yonder” Stephen Cook Chapter Four ............................................................................................. 59 “She Looked West”: Eco Crime Fiction Hits the Road in Martha Grimes’s Biting The Moon Charlotte Beyer Chapter Five ............................................................................................. 80 There Will Be Blood: Captain Ahab in the Oil Fields of California Leonard Engel Chapter Six ............................................................................................... 91 Windswept and Scattered: Place and Identity in Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show Todd Womble Chapter Seven......................................................................................... 113 The Beat West of Edward Dorn Paul Varner

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Chapter Eight .......................................................................................... 125 Mutilating the Western; Re-inventing the West: Robert Coover’s Ghost Town and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes Salwa Karoui-Elounelli Part II: Issues of the Literature and Film of the American West Chapter Nine........................................................................................... 164 “The Glorious Climate of Californy”: Gold Rush Prostitution and Transformation in Western American Literature Angie Fitzpatrick Chapter Ten ............................................................................................ 186 The European Imperial Gaze and Native American Representation in American Film Kathleen M. German Chapter Eleven ....................................................................................... 207 The Six-Shooter: Comanches, Texas Rangers, and Connecticut Gunsmiths John M. Gourlie Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 215 Reconsidering Winnetou: Karl May Film Adaptations and Contemporary Indigenous Responses Nicole Perry Chapter Thirteen ..................................................................................... 238 Two Men in Search of a Writer: Brando, Peckinpah and the Authentic Death of Hendry Jones Allison Houston Sauls Chapter Fourteen .................................................................................... 254 The American Western in Italy: Sergio Leone’s Dialectic Cinema Alessandro Alfieri Contributors ............................................................................................ 276

INTRODUCTION PAUL VARNER ABILENE CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY As we are now moving well into the first quarter of the 21st century and past the turn of the century, I am seeing a rapidly changing paradigm in literary and film studies of the American West. In the early years of our present century the scholarship was dominated by the crucial work from the 1990s that brought serious study of the West to academic respectability. Scholars from the 1990s such as Richard Slotkin, Jane Tompkins, John G. Cawelti, Lee Clark Mitchell, Christine Bold, and Robert Murray Davis developed new ways of looking at the canonical Western literary texts and the Classic Western films. These scholars’ work has proven invaluable and is still foundational to any serious approach to Western literature and film. But new scholarship is moving well beyond the work of the 1990s. Outstanding scholars of the new century such as Valerie and Blake Allmendinger, Susan Kollin, Stephen Tatum, and Neil Campbell are changing the paradigm of Western studies, often basing their ideas on the evolving and expanding scope of theories from New Western History originated by Patricia Limerick. Since the days of Frederick Jackson Turner, studies in the American West have been dominated by a rigidity of geographical place. The West was seen to consist of a specific area in the United States beyond the Mississippi River. Mexico and Western Canada were not traditionally considered part of “the West.” For the most part, the West in media representation was seen as a testing ground for the national experience and for one’s masculinity. It was a playground for young men, as Owen Wister once remarked. Most 20th-century scholarship of the American West in literature and film worked within paradigms that either reinforced these traditional views of the West or attempted to debunk them. But here we are well into the 21st century, and I have been observing a number of clearly different critical approaches to our interpretations of the literature and film of the American West. So I have gathered in these chapters what I hope will be seen as new scholarship tending in very different directions from much of the scholarship of the past.

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The writers of these chapters often are working with changing assumptions about literary and media interpretations of an American West. Here we see critical approaches to a West that never was, a West of myth so enduring that the myth dominates nearly all artistic representation about this place that never was. In this collection we see critical approaches to a New West, a West that is a state of mind, not a geographical place but a mythic space with no boundaries and no political inevitabilities. These New Western studies accept the idea of a West that includes Canada, Mexico, Alaska, and, in the case of the US, every geographic and historical point west of the historic founding settlements. The West we study today is a post-West, an idea of the West past the traditional views of an old West dominated by white US nationalism and gendered as uncompromisingly masculine. The idea itself of a single West no longer holds validity. We now understand that all renderings of the West are renderings of multiple Wests, Wests constructed by American nationalists, Wests constructed by European writers and filmmakers, Wests constructed by native peoples, or Wests constructed outside the geographical boundaries of the US. In this collection, then, I present an eclectic array of new scholarship ranging freely over the New Wests and Post Wests. Neil Campbell, one of the major voices in early 21st-century Western scholarship, begins Part One by defining the genre concepts of postwestern and post-Westerns by examining John Huston’s film set in the West of Mexico. Melanie Marotta treats the literature of a 1950s California West, and Stephen Cook examines Chris McCandless’ trek into the Western wilds of Alaska. The idea of a West informs Charlotte Beyer’s interpretation of eco crime genre fiction. Traditional “cowboy and Indian” stories may be what many associate with the American West, but Len Engel shows a Western set in the oil fields and Todd Womble looks at Larry McMurtry’s coming-of-age story set in the flatlands of 1950s west Texas. The Beat Generation of the 1950s has always been associated with the western US but not usually with the West. My essay on Edward Dorn examines a Beat version of the West and of Westerns. Salwa Karoui-Elounelli, in a major new study, shows how western writers are reinventing a West from scratch. Part Two presents new studies of several specific issues of Western studies. Angie Kirkpatrick looks at images of prostitution in California Gold Rush literature. The subject of representations of Native Americans in Western films and novels has certainly been an important one for scholars, but Kathleen German shows European perspectives on film representations of the first peoples. John Gourlie, then, rounds out Part

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Two with an account of perhaps the one item most associated with the traditional American West – the six shooter itself. Part Three consists of three essays presenting new scholarship on genre Westerns. Nicole Perry writes about German Westerns, and Allessandro Alfieri writes about Italian Westerns. Allison Sauls provides new information on classic Hollywood and Marlon Brando’s and Sam Peckinpah’s efforts to turn a novel into a film. Unique to this collection, I hope, is the range of writers interpreting the American West in film and literature. Besides those of us writing from within the United States, five of the writers provide international perspectives. Neil Campbell and Charlotte Beyer write from the Universities of Derby and Gloucestershire, respectively; Salwa KarouiElounelli writes from the University of Tunis; Nicole Perry writes from the University of Vienna; and Allessandro Alfieri writes from the University of Rome. I have asked all writers to include reviews of relevant scholarship in their subject area and bibliographies that are extended beyond the works cited in their essays in order to provide readers with a fundamental starting point for further research. I thank each of the contributors. It is my hope that readers will find much here to inspire new ways of thinking about the way the West has been interpreted and that later scholarship will find some of its beginnings with these essays.

PART I LITERATURE AND FILM OF THE AMERICAN WEST

CHAPTER ONE DEFINING POST-WESTERN CINEMA: JOHN HUSTON’S THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948) NEIL CAMPBELL UNIVERSITY OF DERBY There is a pre-history to the term “postwestern” within American Western Studies and a brief discussion of some of its differing uses will help to explain my development of the concept when applied to certain films emerging after 1945.1 In 1973 British film critic Philip French applied the term “post-western” to films dealing with “the West today, and [which] draw upon the western itself or more generally ‘the cowboy cult’,” and in particular “the way in which the characters are influenced by, or victims of, the cowboy cult,” and to do this, “they intensify and play on the audience’s feelings about, and knowledge of, western movies” (French 2005, 84, 85). However, more often the notion of the “postwestern” relates to a broader consideration of historiography or periodization, such as in Virginia Scharff’s 1994 call for “a postwestern history” taking mobility seriously and questioning “the stability of our most cherished historical categories of analysis” in order “to imagine history anew” and, most significantly, to both recognize “the weight of the western frame” and to simultaneously treat it with a certain scepticism, or, in her words, to be “alert, edgy and restless” and “burst the boundaries of region” (Scharff in Matsumoto and Allmendinger 1999, 167, 166). Scharff reminds us of the extent to which the concept “West” is a “totalizing and value-laden” term 1

I employ the spelling “postwestern” to refer to the broader historical or cultural use of the concept as a period of historical time during which the USA moves beyond thinking about the “West” as a frontier culture. When applying it to specific films, however, and in order to differentiate the two terms, I spell it “postWestern.” See my book Post-Westerns (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013) for more discussion of the topic.

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and that more nuanced and subtle approaches would always expand and cross-refer it in complex but meaningful ways (ibid., 166). By implication, Scharff urges critics to get “outside” the “weight of the western frame” with its inherent and deep-rooted cultural myths and national identity markers, so as to see it differently and askew, taking a “deterritorialized” position or “a sort of conceptual trip,” as John Rajchman calls it, “for which there preexists no map – a voyage for which one must leave one’s usual discourse behind and never be quite sure where one will land” (Rajchman 2000, 21-22). In the wake of this initial exploration, other critics continued to define and explore notions of the postwestern (see Klein 1996, Knobloch 1996, Cawelti 1999, Baym 2006, Campbell 2008); however, it was in Susan Kollin’s edited collection Postwestern Cultures (2007) that the term was finally understood as “an emerging critical approach” working “against a narrowly conceived regionalism” and with a distinct awareness of how the West has been seen as a “predetermined entity with static borders and boundaries” with the book as a whole making a determined call for a method based on the “critical reassessment of those very restrictions, whether they be theoretical, geographical, or political” (Kollin 2007, xi). She explains very clearly how the problem manifests itself: … in dominant national discourse, the American West has been imagined and celebrated largely for its status as “pre” – for its position as a prelapsarian, pre-social, and pre-modern space … so that like the very spaces of an idealized western geography, some literary and cultural scholarship about the region has adopted a pre- or even anti-theoretical stance, as if regional studies could offer a similar retreat or refuge from a dehumanizing culture (ibid., xiii).

Thus Kollin invokes the “post” as a counter-balance to this “prelapsarian, pre-social, and pre-modern” vision, reminding us that the West persists as a real and imagined cultural space to be fully and critically engaged with within a global context. Similarly, I would argue, classic cinematic Westerns too often reproduced this sense of “retreat or refuge” into a “pre-modern” community and region governed by specific values and ideologies, such as the valorisation of the hero’s actions, the promotion of unanimity, settlement against the odds, establishing familial and domesticated roots, transforming the earth from wilderness to garden, taming land from its “savage” populations, expressing a renewing masculinity as the engine for these actions, domesticating the feminine within this new western world, and confirming through the combined power of these acts a national identity forged in the West.

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To varying degrees, the post-Western films that I am exploring deterritorialize the classical form by questioning these intrinsic values, and by implication, the myths of the region itself as so often projected in the “most coded of cinematic genres,” as Jacques Rancière called the Western (2006, 15). Indeed, the classic Western’s world-view or “distribution of the sensible,” to borrow another phrase from Rancière, was defined through “engaged heroes who morally ensure the rule of right,” as Stanley Corkin puts it, and could be found in iconic films such as My Darling Clementine (1946) and Red River (1948). Such “Cold War Westerns” were “concurrently nostalgic and forward looking. They look back upon the glory days of western settlement as they look ahead to the expression of US centrality in the postwar world” (Corkin 2004, 9). Like Rancière, Corkin saw this process as creating a “map for a great many Americans that helped them navigate the stresses and contradictions of Cold war life” and enabled them to believe in a unifying frontier dream of building a nation-as-one, a just consensus for an audience now living increasingly ordered and gendered lives in the post-war suburbs (ibid., 10). As Corkin notes, such visions both look back and forward, but simultaneously films appeared that were uncertain of this map’s “moral order” and were more intent on exploring a sense of “living in the aftermath of loss” (Tatum 2006,127), looking back towards some (imagined) moment of wholeness and goodness now threatened by an emergent post-war US culture defined by consensus, militarism, and renewed expansionism. Between 1946-56 came My Darling Clementine, Red River, High Noon, Shane and The Searchers, all regarded as examples of a golden age of classical cinema, and yet in this same period Hollywood also produced post-Westerns like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), The Lusty Men (1952) and Bad Day at Black Rock (1956), which, in differing ways, explored aspects of a troubled and problematic modern West living in the aftermath of the frontier dream with a tangled and complex history ignored in earlier films. The very stark, simple landscapes of the classical Western of desert, mountains, homestead, or an incipient town epitomized a particular vision of entrepreneurial, settler culture, whereas, increasingly the landscape that cinemagoers in the 1940-50s actually experienced in the West was in transition, modernising and affected by shifting national and global economies, militarization, suburban development, and the Civil Rights movement. Films of the West could no longer be defined through John Ford’s Monument Valley when the cultural and political landscape was urban, multi-racial and globalized, juxtaposing traditional forms of life with an ever-changing, contingent experience. As Rancière puts it in a

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memorable phrase, there was the need to “leave to its ghostly destiny the by now provincial world of the Western” (Rancière 2006, 89). Thus postWesterns emerged to explore “western” themes in new contexts, casting fresh light on the provincial ideologies that gave rise to the fabled West in the first place; becoming generic mutations of sorts, following “a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy … a sort of participation without belonging – a taking part in without being part of, without having membership in a set” in Jacques Derrida’s words (1980, 55, 59). Thus post-Westerns “participate” in many of the formal, thematic and tropic discourses of the genre whilst “not belonging” entirely within its borders, offering instead a challenge through interruption; unsettling through its “minor” language the dominant forms of the forms of established Western. Indeed, post-Westerns are a good example of what Deleuze would call “minor,” precisely because they are aligned with the genre whilst folding outward; maintaining a vital connecting tissue to its “inside” whilst simultaneously allowing reflection and critical interaction upon it. Thus post-Westerns function “to send the major language racing” by stretching and interfering with generic frameworks and expectations, and ultimately, by causing us to question the values endorsed by the traditional Western (Deleuze and Guattari 1996, 105, 99). Like Rancière’s concept of the “distribution of the sensible” which explains how dominant, visible forms of discourse define and constrain what is thought and felt, “major language” is the dominant form and ideology of the classic Hollywood Western which sustained and promoted a particular imagined American national identity at the heart of which existed a traditional “movementimage” (as Deleuze called it) of hero-based situations and resolutions. Deleuze argues, however, that within this patterning can coexist, in tension and dialogue, another or minor language – a “creative stammering” – “whose value is to trigger uncontrollable movements and deterritorializations of the mean or majority” (Deleuze and Guattari 1996, 98,106). Significantly, this dynamic critical process aims for “a state of continuous variation,” of “stretching” which is, they assert, in parenthesis “(the opposite of regionalism)” (ibid., 104-5) thereby advocating a rethinking of conventional western regionalism and of its expression in its dominant form, the Western. Thus the post-Western, as minor, acts in relation to the classic Western, like “a foreigner, but in one’s own tongue,” “uprooting [the standard forms] from their state of constants,” and creating a “cutting edge of deterritorialization of language” (Deleuze and Guattari 1996, 103, 98, 99). Post-Westerns, therefore, contribute to a critical regionalist rethinking of

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the Western’s place in the assertion and reproduction of national ideology. In Cinema 2, Deleuze coined the term “neo-Western” for films deterritorializing an “already given” and unanimous sense of American identity and community defined in earlier films. The pre-given or predefined mythology of a triumphalist America formed in the frontier West was interrogated in neo-Westerns which were not “addressing a people … presupposed already there, but of contributing to the invention of a people” (Deleuze 2000, 217). For Deleuze, classical Hollywood asserted a unanimous vision of an American “people” through Westerns like My Darling Clementine (1946), where communities were shown being built and settled through the struggles of individuals in and against the wilderness (ibid., 216). Cold War Westerns presupposed community as ultimately orderly and resolved embodying the needs of a post-war ideologically defined community: European, white, male, entrepreneurial, and imperial. So in watching these “unanimist” Westerns, as Deleuze calls them, because they promote a set of unified, agreed notions of community and nation, it is as if “the [American] people are already there, real before being actual, ideal without being abstract,” as though cinema was the perfect medium with “the masses a true subject” for nation building and identity formation (Deleuze 2000, 216). For Deleuze the “neo-Western” questioned “the movement-action-image” version of cinema which sustained these concepts of unanimism and “the people” and with it “the universal triumph of American cinema” (Deleuze 2005, 145). As David Martin-Jones puts it, “in the movement-image characters are able to act in order to influence their situation, usually to their advantage. Accordingly, the time of the narrative is edited around the actions of the protagonist … continuity is created by the actions of characters whose stories we follow … time is predominantly linear, with the outcome of the narrative (the bad guy dies, the world is saved … ) coherent with the logic of the narrative world” (in Buckland 2009, 215). For Deleuze the Second World War changed these assumptions, through Hitler and Stalin’s appropriation of the masses for undemocratic ends, as well as, “the break-up of the American people, who could no longer believe themselves to be either the melting-pot of peoples or the seed of a people to come” (Deleuze 2000, 216). Deleuze believed “the neo-Western … first demonstrated this breakup,” questioning ideological frameworks “presupposed already there” so that this “modern political cinema,” as he called it, developed in a post1945 climate of increased social and political movements, challenging “unanimity”; rejecting one “people,” asserting “several peoples, an infinity of peoples,” and refuting “tyrannical unity” (ibid., 216-17, 220).

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If the classic Western had moved through heroic action toward resolution, community definition, and national identity, by aggregating “a voice above and beyond style, as a universal subject prior to any of its expressions,” then the post-Western in the spirit of minor cinema, sought to stress the “provisional” and the contingent, the unfinished aspects of a people not already defined and labelled, but still emerging and creating itself (Colebrook 2002, 119). If the classic Western had represented the past as knowable and conquered, as a chain of events leading to the inevitable position of the white man as central and originary of the nation, then the post-Western functions to question these taken-for-granted mythic discourses and framed hierarchies. Hence when the post-Western “repeats” or remembers tropes and styles established under earlier forms of the Western, it does so not to emphasize their timelessness, continuity, or essential significance to identity, community, or nation, but to re-focus attention upon them in order to critically reflect and disclose their assumptions. Deleuze is, therefore, always directing us to the construction of a historically informed American national identity, both through montage and narrative content within movies. Thus as montage edits together linear sequences of action within the classic Hollywood film, it simultaneously constructs an imagined narrative of unanimous nationhood sutured together from its constituent parts – in many the one, E Pluribus Unum. The classical Western forms America’s creation narrative and with it “the triumphalism inherent in the belief in Manifest Destiny” played out in the “unbroken sensory-motor continuity … that informs the structure of US montage (expression of the whole)” (Martin-Jones 2011, 30). Consequently the “settler individual (as representative of the collective) in his duel with the milieu (the harsh landscapes and border worlds) is precisely the product, and expression, of westward expansion” and through such structures, Martin-Jones asserts, the Western, constructs and endorses a particular national identity (ibid., 30-1).2 In Sam Peckinpah’s work, however, as Deleuze argues, the certainty and fixity of “milieu” is gone and so any sense of “a [True] West” (singular) is replaced by “Wests … totalities [ensembles] of locations, men and manners which ‘change and are eliminated’ in the same film” (Deleuze 2005, 172). In terms of American Western history in the same era, this relates to the awareness of multiple stories that needed to be told and which had, for so long, remained buried or silenced. The “legacy of conquest,” as Patricia Limerick termed it, was an unnoticed broken line in history constituted by 2

See also David Martin-Jones, Deleuze, Film and National Identity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2008), 121-53.

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the ghostly voices of the dead and the repressed: women, Indians, immigrants, Mexicans and the environment itself (Limerick 1997). The multiple Wests invoked by Deleuze and traced, I would argue, in the postWestern, critique and counter the classic Western with its drive to unanimity and consensus, towards settlement and coherence of an American ideal community. This post-war shift away from the “movement-action-image” with its linearity, predictability, and presentation of “all things in One” moved the Western toward a more irresolute form with a greater complexity, “like a knotted rope, twisting itself at each take, at each action, at each event” (Deleuze 2005, 191, 172). As I will suggest in the second part of this chapter, such a “knotted rope” can be seen in works such as The Treasure of the Sierra Madre with its hybrid mix of action-image and time-image cinema. The creative space of these films, freed from the absolute authority of the classical form is defined as “skeleton-space” by Deleuze showing “the articulation, the joints, the wrinkle or broken stroke” – suggesting its gaps and openings, “missing intermediaries, heterogeneous elements” which work to conjure “vectorial space” set against the classic Western’s “encompassing stroke of a great contour” (ibid., 191, 173). Such vectorial space, as we shall see in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre has the capacity to challenge established lines of thought, to deterritorialize expectations and shift us between generic modes. Deleuze’s Cinema books argue ultimately that American cinematic genres like the Western can never avoid a retreat to the American Dream and so always, as he puts it, “collapse and yet maintain their empty frame,” reasserting the ideological values that these genre films could never unhinge (ibid., 215). For Deleuze, the Western was destined to retell the same stories of expansionism and Manifest Destiny, often parodying, but ultimately asserting the values embedded in its creation story, its version of the American Dream in the West. This chapter contends that Deleuze was wrong and the Western lived-on beyond its supposed death, posthumously reconfigured and renewed within and outside Hollywood, thereby reframing the audience’s critical sense of the region of the West and its place in the world. I wish to examine how this can be seen in a very early example of the post-Western, John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), a film that both works with and against the Western so as to present the “skeleton-space” of myth, “the articulation, the joints, the wrinkle or broken stroke” of its formation as central to the American psyche.

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“Skeleton-space”: John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) “He moves half a step towards the gutter …” (Naremore1979, 47). “Dobbs gets down on his hands and knees studying the map. His face is haggard; the cheekbones more prominent than before and there is a frightened, haunted look in his eyes” (ibid., 177).

Broken, lost, and haunted, Fred C. Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart), the would-be focus of John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre ends the film macheted to death amid the ruins of some forgotten Mexican village, his bones scattered like his ill-gotten gains in the dust of a foreign land. The movement-action-image that dominated Hollywood was based on the continuity of hero and action, but in a time of post-war uncertainty and doubt was becoming untenable. The non-heroic Dobbs epitomizes the post-Western shift because his actions cannot, finally, affect the situation or pave the way for the future within this conventional framework, and instead throughout his journey, the audience is confronted by a different vision of time, one unhooked from the progressive inevitability of Manifest Destiny. The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is a spectral Western echoing back through time and the history of the West wherein bordercrossing adventurers went looking for gold, got attacked by bandits, used guns and knives, had their masculinity tested by landscape, and their greed exposed in spaces without women or home.3 The film remembers the Western, utilising that memory as a back-drop and sounding board for its own vectorial narrative and, in so doing, comes after and goes beyond the classical genre, creating its own theatrical space or “skeleton-space,” to interrogate universal themes that have roots in and routes through the Western. In this sense, it is an early example, perhaps the earliest, of the post-Western offering critical reflections upon regional ideologies represented through this most American of cinematic genre. 3

John Huston, as director, writer and actor, has a spectral role in the development of the post-Western, emerging at significant moments as filmmaker with The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Misfits, and Fat City, actor in Chinatown, as well as point of reference in The Last Movie, demonstrating across his own career a fascination with the geography and identities of the West, but more specifically with exploring the region critically as “New” and post-Frontier. He directed The Unforgiven (1960) set in the post Civil War West, and The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972). Paul Thomas Anderson’s, There Will Be Blood was highly influenced by The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.

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Jacques Rancière refers to “someone who knows the gestures and codes, but can no longer share the dreams and the illusions” (of the Western) (Rancière 2006, 87) and this characterizes Huston’s approach to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre as he works with the Western in order to interrogate its underlying value system so fundamental to American national identity. As James Naremore points out, Warners’ advertising for the film emphasized “a montage of colourful scenes … a band of sombreroed horsemen … a handsome, moustachioed rider in the act of rescuing, or perhaps capturing, a dark-haired, big-breasted woman in a low-cut blouse.” Few of these images relate directly to the film itself, but they do “vaguely suggest a western” (Naremore 1979, 22). Within the film, Huston employs familiar tropes of and scenes from the Western genre: border town, down-at-heel wanderer, saloon fight, barbershop, dreams of gold, mining camps, train journeys, campfires, double-crossing, bandits, gunplay, ambushes, Indians, absent women, and death.4 This conventional Western familiarity is twisted by Huston, displacing events into the border zones of Mexico where these recognizable signifiers are interrogated to reveal their underlying ideologies and historical echoes. The Greater West of Mexico is a new or last frontier where Manifest Destiny continues in its rawest, imperial form, as capitalist exploitation and economic slash-and-burn. There is no domestic settlement or civic economy on this frontier, for what Huston dramatizes instead is a cutthroat masculine world of mistrust, anger and scheming, epitomized through Dobbs’s unsympathetic character, a desperate, ironic “pioneer” on the make. We see him early in the film, unkempt, living from hand to mouth, begging from rich Americans and trying his luck on the lottery to survive, and yet his dream, carried south across the border, is still of unimagined wealth and “lighting cigars with $100 bills.” This is a get-rich-quick world in extremis, where human value is defined only by what you possess; the kind of frontier suggested, perhaps inadvertently, by Frederick Jackson Turner’s belief that “The West was another name for opportunity. Here were mines to be seized, fertile valleys to be pre-empted, all the natural resources open to the shrewdest and the boldest” (Turner 1961, 69). At the frontier, according to Turner, “the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant” (ibid. 61-2); an idea pushed later to its transgressive limits in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian.5 4

The film was shot on location in Mexico and at 30 Acres, a site owned by Columbia Pictures that had been used for the western High Noon. 5 See my ‘Liberty Beyond its Proper Bounds: Cormac McCarthy’s History of the West in Blood Meridian’ in R. Wallach (ed.), Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy, (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2000), 217-226.

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In The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Huston’s second feature after The Maltese Falcon, he returned to themes of greed and quest amongst a “small, eccentric group at the margin of ordinary society” whose activities stand for a broader satiric commentary upon the values of “the whole culture” (Naremore 1979,13). John Engell defines them as men “on the fringes of modern capitalist society who are radically alone: friendless, penniless, without family, virtually without identity,” and yet through them Huston turns his critical eye on the very forces of the capitalist dream of success that created them (Engell in Studlar and Desser 1993, 82).6 Huston’s left-leaning views critiquing American capitalism and individualist greed, are reflected in his films’ themes, their “gritty, antiHollywood ‘realism’” (ibid., 13), and their re-working of literature by authors such as Dashiell Hammett (The Maltese Falcon), Arthur Miller (The Misfits), and Leonard Gardner (Fat City), and B. Traven’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. In The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Traven’s American prospectors crossing the border remind us of the long, painful history of “colonial, Roman Catholic, and capitalist exploitation of Mexico” (Naremore 1979, 14), of the South/North divide, and the cultural differences of such proximate neighbours. Elsewhere in the film, Traven’s most pointed anti-capitalist, anti-colonial critique is removed, such as in one scene from the published script where Howard (Walter Huston) comments that when you “Come round down to it we are bandits of a kind. What right have we got to go looting their mountain anyway? About as much right as the foreign companies that take their oil without paying for it … and their silver and their copper’ (Naremore 1979, 141). One might argue, however, that elements of this critique nonetheless remain in the systematic stripping down of greed and the exposure of “banditry” (of all kinds) that haunts the film, played out in its relentlessly grimy, broken and desperate landscape. The use of close-ups, night settings, and sweat-soaked confrontations give the film a certain slow weight through which the viewer finds little release or digression. Although clearly working within a Hollywood system at Warner Brothers, Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre is “more in the tradition of Flaherty and the neo-realists than in the line of classic Hollywood directors,” enjoying working outside the studio back-lot with actors in natural locations and settings: the mountains of Mexico in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and later the deserts of Nevada in The Misfits or the urban wastelands of Fat City (Naremore 1979, 31). 6

This is similar to the approach he took with his later post-Western film The Misfits and which I discuss at length in Post-Westerns (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2013)

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Significantly, Deleuze argues that neo-realism in European directors like Rossellini and De Sica, marked the shift away from the “movementimage” towards the “time-image” after the Second World War giving greater attention to odd spaces or “any-spaces-whatever” in which “we no longer know how to react,” including those which are “deserted but inhabited, disused … waste ground,” where the “sensory-motor” link between heroic actions and narrative continuity is weakened and less significant in contrast to “optical and sound situations” (Deleuze 2000, xi). Applied to The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the border towns, mountains, and deserts function in this way, taking characters and audience beyond familiar timespaces in order to analyse their responses and relations. In these “emptied or disconnected” spaces of the post-Western, like the dismal town of Tampico at the opening of the film, what Deleuze calls the “already specified” (ibid., 5) begins to loosen, so established codes, values and frames of reference are more readily scrutinized. This recalls my earlier definition of “postwestern” as where “one must leave one’s usual discourse behind and never be quite sure where one will land.” In such alien spaces and under such situations of “crisis” where the old system of action-resolution and linearity was questioned, Deleuze suggests people see differently, questioning the structures that had pre-existed because “situations could be extremes … or … those of everyday banality” (ibid., xi). In turn, cinema’s established formulaic action-image will “collapse” or “lose its position” so that “time … rises up to the surface of the screen” in moments of “tiredness and waitings” or through “subjective images, memories of childhood, sound and visual dreams or fantasies” (ibid., 6). In The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, the American characters are constantly duped or wary and paranoid, seemingly unable to direct their own lives as they stumble from one crisis to the next. In Tampico, Dobbs repeatedly approaches a prosperous American in a crisp white suit (played by John Huston) for spare change, immediately disrupting the audience’s sense of normal order. For this is an American begging from an American in Mexico! Such extremes of wealth and poverty are used to establish the destitution of Dobbs whilst simultaneously unsettling the audience’s sense of normal cinematic codes and cultural mythologies. Thus the audience is alerted that this film will see things differently and expose alternative perspectives. The subsequent journey into the desert reveals the types of hallucination and fantasy that Deleuze argues mark off this shift away from action towards a greater apprehension of time and inwardness. The “optical drama” replaces the action-image in significant parts of the film, with theatrical scenes in tight close-up, in claustrophobic spaces, or with

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moments of intense paranoia or fantasy that alter our perceptions of typical action-driven cinema. Consequently, Huston seems to assert a primary conclusion in Deleuze’s work, that “there is no present which is not haunted by a past and a future … [and] each present coexists with a past and a future without which it would not itself pass on” (2000, 37). Accordingly the actions of these Americans, Dobbs, Howard and Curtin (Tim Holt), are shown within relations of the past, present and future, but unlike pure “movement-image” films, are “not locked into a certain past and a clarified present” (Rushton 2012, 60), for it is this instability of time that generates the film’s unsettling power.7 In this I disagree with Engell’s reading of the film as entirely devoid of all “social and political material” and merely a “traditional bourgeois moral fable” (Engell in Studlar and Desser 86) wherein Huston “deletes” all the anti-capitalist and radical themes evident in Traven’s novel. All three central characters, as Martin Rubin has argued, are unconventional because “the film steadfastly withholds the creation of a stable or clearly defined hero position” and instead engages the audience precisely because, as we have seen, they are “suspended” in time and “remain in a state of almost constant circulation and redefinition” (Rubin in Studlar and Desser, 147). Thus, without such clear markers of identity and motivation the audience is emancipated to situate them into a context beyond the typical movement-image film, to exist in their “present … haunted by a past and a future.” In my terms this is constituted by the absent presence of the West and the very “social and political material” that has formed these broken-down men; a frontier mythology of Manifest Destiny, dominant individualism, and strident capitalist economics. Thus, when Howard, the “old gnawed bone” of a man (Naremore 1979, 63), holds forth at the Oso Negro flophouse he invokes this haunted past whilst over-heard by Dobbs and Curtin, who immediately relate his words to their present and their desired future. Dobbs and Curtin are, after all, desperate men driven by a broken American system southwards in search of their fortunes. The scene is shot in shadowy light and in tight close-ups suggesting both the ominous impact of these words but also their undeniable influence on their audience, who despite the obvious warnings, hear only the tales of unimaginable wealth they want to hear. I’ve dug in Alaska and in Canada and Colorado. I was with the crowd in British Honduras where I made my fare back home and almost enough 7

Tim Holt, the actor who plays Curtin was associated almost exclusively with Westerns, having roles in both classic action-image Westerns Stagecoach and My Darling Clementine (as Virgil Earp).

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Chapter One over to cure me of the fever I’d caught. I’ve dug in California and Australia, all over the world practically. Yeah, I know what gold does to men’s souls … That’s gold, that’s what it makes of us. Never knew a prospector yet that died rich. Make one fortune, you’re sure to blow it in trying to find another. I’m no exception to the rule … I’d rather go by myself. Going it alone’s the best way. But you got to have a stomach for loneliness. Some guys go nutty with it. On the other hand, going with a partner or two is dangerous. Murder’s always lurkin’ about. Partners accusin’ each other of all sorts of crimes. Aw, as long as there’s no find, the noble brotherhood will last, but when the piles of gold begin to grow, that’s when the trouble starts (Naremore 1979, 63).

Of course, he predicts the whole film ahead in this early scene and his “I know what gold does to men’s souls … That’s gold, that’s what it makes of us” establishes its inward turn, from the movement-image and towards the psychological voyage from “noble brotherhood” to individual paranoia, in the full knowledge of the global political and cultural networks that dictate such desire. These men are, in one sense, “made” by their lust for gold, but as this speech underlines, this is a “making” with a particular history in colonial, capitalist adventure and exploitation (“the crowd in British Honduras”), and it is this that has already produced the minds and bodies of men like Dobbs who are now enticed by the promise they hear in Howard’s words. For him, however, wealth has no other purpose than individual pleasure: Turkish baths, “brand new duds,” a “swell café, and “a dame” (Naremore 1979, 98), whereas Curtin’s dream is a childhood memory of community, a fruit farm in the San Joaquin Valley with “whole families working together” (ibid.). What Engell calls the film’s “Jeffersonian” vision of the yeoman farmer was, of course, the seed of westward expansion and this juxtaposition of Dobbs’s dream alongside Curtin’s highlights Huston’s interest in interrogating the cultural and individual consequences of that vision in the wider world (Engell in Studlar and Desser 1993, 88). These tensions between competing visions of the individual and the community are played out in different ways throughout the film as suspicions arise over the gold and how it should be divided up, or whether one man should save another’s life, or, ultimately if it is right to murder to increase your share of the spoils. What Huston’s film permits is a dramatic examination of these motivations, always aware of their roots in a Manifest Destiny ideology exported south to Mexico, and how they are bound into contrasting interpretations of a type of displaced westward dream. As I suggested earlier, following Deleuze, when these visions are removed (or “suspended”) from the familiar and reassuring context of the

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movement-image Western, with its heroic actions leading to resolution and closure, they “remain in a state of almost constant circulation and redefinition,” and are thus open to closer analysis and interrogation. So the pastoral dream of Curtin – later supported by the letter found on the dead Cody and its promise of “life’s real Treasure of the Sierra Madre” in the gathered harvest and a good wife back in Texas – stands alongside Dobbs’s hedonism and both contrast with a romantic tribal life that finally embraces Howard when he is taken in as a medicine man by local Indians. All three outcomes seemed flawed for different reasons and these positions are held up for analysis in Huston’s film, whereas in Traven’s original novel there is a greater celebration of the communalism of the natives as a more approved and desirable life. Ultimately, however, it is Dobbs’s actions that drive the film and yet he cannot sustain his role as motivating Hollywood protagonist, and so it is through him that the film’s post-Western qualities can best be traced. Increasingly, it is Dobbs whose suspicion and paranoia over the gold he so craves turns him ever inward to a delirium manifested as feral violence and insane self-conversations. In this ever-confining world of shadows and extreme heat Dobbs is overcome by his conscience and having killed Curtin (as he thinks) Huston frames him in a shot seen through a raging campfire as if he is in the inner rings of Hell. Now alone and broken, driven on by greed and fear, he moves to his inevitable death at the hands of the Mexican bandits he had overcome earlier in the film. Ironically the earlier scene was a classic action-image moment of gunplay wherein the Americans defeated the “indigenous” peoples to establish their illegal “rights” to the land and its contents. However, as we shall see, in his final scene Dobbs is far from this earlier figure, becoming instead a lost and aimless man buffeted by fate and tormented by guilt as if the living embodiment of Howard’s previous warning of an undone “noble brotherhood.” This is exemplified as Dobbs draws his gun in the pose of the Western gunfighter, only to find he has no bullets left to defend himself. In this poignant moment of impotence his status as hero evaporates and he understands he has no power to affect his situation or to solve the crisis he is in. The chance lottery win that accelerates his initial journey and the many references to gambling in the film underscore the irony of his luck running out in these final scenes. There is no divine plan, no real Manifest Destiny, just the terrible recognition of loss, failure, and imminent death. So The Treasure of the Sierra Madre ends, as I intimated earlier, with violence, waste, and ruins as Dobbs is macheted to death alongside a drainage ditch on the edge of an abandoned village. In these scenes of

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desolation, in the midst of a windstorm (ironically named a “Norther”), surrounded by ruins and the desert scrub, Huston reminds us of failure and loss, of the broken and the incomplete, of the underside of regulation, order and fixity. The fragmented scene reminds us that the past cannot be denied or buried under the seamlessness of the present for it returns through the smooth surfaces of things as an excess or remainder, a disruptive, awkward trace. In the frontier dream of the American West the urge to tame, order, purify and regulate ran in parallel with the surveying of the land and the mapping of the wilderness. Settling as a concept embraces more than just establishing people in space, for it also suggests the actions of stabilising, resolving, and reconciling; of bringing the world into classified shape, of fixing the past and the future in place, typified in the gridded western landscape or the structured order of the map like those that Dobbs and Howard examine in the film. Ruins, however, remind us of antithetical forces, of the inability to fix the past, of the buckling of the grid and the failure of the map, which cannot maintain its shaped, constrained, and domesticated order. The dream of untrammelled wealth held by all three men following their conditioned belief in their assumed right to success, has come down to this place and this moment of withering irony as the gold, so painfully taken, scatters into the dust of the desert floor and Curtin and Howard can only laugh “Homerically” at the joke played on them (Naremore 1979, 194). Dobbs provides the dominant narrative of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre dramatising the absolute ruination of dreams through what Rancière calls a “fiction of collapse” (2006, 90). As Dobbs approaches his end, no longer equal to his milieu, the script describes him “moving in a nightmare” of such proportions that the very earth that had been the focus of his lust for gold seems to conspire against him; “Every so often the ground he is walking on rushes up at him and deals him a vicious blow in the face” (Naremore 1979, 180). These are the ruins of men and the worldview or mythology that created them; of Manifest Destiny and the dream of success stripped away in the course of the film just as the bandits strip away Dobbs’s boots and trousers at the moment of his death. Although not present in the script of the film, its climax takes place near and then amid actual ruins; reminding us intentionally or subconsciously of the past, of another “civilization” and their attempt to draw wealth out of this very same landscape, like the conquistadores searching for the Seven Cities of Gold in the very hills staked out by Fred C. Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The new conquistador Dobbs is murdered near the ruins, ironically returned to the earth like the gold he has stripped from the mountainside of

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the Sierra Madre and his story placed alongside the others who came and failed before him.8 Just as the gold is blown back by the wind to mix with the dust and dirt, Dobbs’s bones are broken by machetes, his blood flowing into the driest desert ground. The borderlands reclaims his colonial presence – the “West” that Dobbs represents – and a different, purer (and better) dream remains in the viewers’ imagination, Curtin’s dream of Paradise – growing peaches in California, or redeeming himself by returning to Cody’s widow in Texas and growing fruit with her. His is the approved settler dream washed clean of Dobbs’s brutal capitalist quest for money at all costs. Not present in Traven’s more radical novel, this pastoral dream of a lost America is added by Huston as a nostalgic reminder of an idyllic West of the imagination, the “real” The Treasure of the Sierra Madre exemplified by home, family, settlement and nature (and echoed by the romanticized “natives” in the film who finally embrace Howard as a tribal healer lavishing gifts upon him). Naremore terms this compromise by Huston “a rather complacent morality” (1979, 20) and Engell calls it “comfortably bourgeois” (Engell in Studlar and Desser 1993, 86) because, they both argue, he shifts away from Traven’s withering attack on capitalism towards a more generalized commentary on materialism and its human losses. This might be seen as a sop to the studio and to the expectations of a post-war American audience who wanted to be reassured about their core values, but as I have argued throughout this chapter, one might see it as Huston’s attempt, within the constraints of Hollywood, to portray the various consequences of Manifest Destiny. Rancière refers to a “contract” between director and audience (2006, 76) which, as we have seen in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, supplies the frameworks and tropes of a recognisable genre, but within which occurs “an essential gap” serving to “supplement and thwart … narrative continuity and the rationality of the goals by not aligning two visibilities” (ibid., 16). Thus, despite the fact of Howard’s colonial survival and Curtin’s imminent return to an American Eden, these seem, in the context of the film, asides to the almost Shakespearean demise of Dobbs and all he represents. Rather than John Engell’s “traditional bourgeois fable” (Engell in Studlar and Desser 1993, 86), these contesting elements give rise to what Rancière terms une fable contrariée or a “thwarted fable,” becoming within itself “a critical object, a site where conflict promotes interpretation and interpretation gains access to an arena in which politics and aesthetics are set in play in multifarious ways” (emphasis added). As Tom Conley explains, “Rancière understands a ‘fable’ to be a narrative composed of 8 Director Sam Peckinpah paid homage to Dobbs in Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974), including a character with the same name.

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visual and discursive elements that move with and against each other. The ‘tracks’ along which stories unwind are at odds with their own form and that of film” (Conley 20006, n. p.). For Rancière Westerns exemplify this definition following certain established genre “tracks” (as in the case of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre) only to diverge and “thwart” our expectations and the genre’s norms. Thus, the aesthetic power of Dobbs’s story and in particular his delirious demise, with its intense close-ups, claustrophobic paranoia, and concentrated physicality are at odds with the more fabled myths of Curtin’s and Howard’s “happy endings,” and ultimately, therefore, “thwart” them, making them seem as questionable as Dobbs’s own. In different ways, they seem unreal and dream-like, just the consequent fantasies of mastery over tribal people or the land itself, both perhaps as dangerously flawed as Dobbs’s selfish vision of wealth. Through these three endings: Dobbs mad and destroyed, Howard submerged by a colonial fantasy, and Curtin retreating to a dead man’s pastoral, family narrative, I sense a deep melancholy in Huston’s film made at the close of World War II, and derived from a “anticipatory shiver of disappointment” in never having got the utopian dream right, of missing the great American opportunity for transforming the world for the better (Papanikolas 2007, 16). In Papanikolas’s words, there “is a kind of longing, a sense of something lost, lost perhaps even at the moment of gaining it, and possibly irretrievable. It was a silence as compelling as all the myths of success you grew up with and believed, and perhaps inseparable from them” (ibid.:19). That dream is usurped here by the “nightmare” of Dobbs’s quest “lost perhaps even at the moment of gaining it,” which is reflected in his near ecstatic outburst at the end of his trek when he cries out, “Made it. I made it,” which is immediately dampened by the reflection of the bandit Gold Hat in the water he kneels over. In the silence at the end of the film, as the camera closes upon a torn gold sack hooked on a cactus plant, following the brutal killing of Dobbs by his alter ego Gold Hat, the execution in turn of the bandits for their crimes, and the ironic scattering of the gold back into the desert, we are reminded finally of Papanikolas’s “figure of silence” as a trace of the “palpable absence and sense of loss” haunting the American Dream of success and its “dream of conquest … like a dark thread” and, which, with all its critical brutality imagines too the necessary advent of the post-Western (Papanikolas 2007, 20).

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Bibliography Baym, Nina, “Old West, New West, Postwest, Real West” in American Literary History, September 14, 2006. Campbell, Neil, The Rhizomatic West: Representing the West in a Global Media Age, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008). Cawelti, John, The Six-Gun Mystique Sequel, (Bowling Green; Popular Press, 1999). Colebrook, Claire, Gilles Deleuze, (London: Routledge, 2002). Conley, Tom, Review of Film Fables from Screening the Past website, 20 November 2006 http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/20/filmfables.html Accessed 19th January, 2012. Corkin, Stanley, Cowboys as Cold War Warriors: The Western and U.S. History, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004). Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Fèlix, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (London: Athlone Press, 1996 [1987]) Deleuze, Gilles, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, (London: Continuum 2005 [1986]). —. Cinema 2: The Time Image, (London: Athlone Press, 2000 [1989]). Derrida, Jacques, “The Law of Genre,” Critical Inquiry 7, Autumn, 1980, 55-81. Engell, John, “Traven Huston, and the Textual Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” in Studlar and Desser (as below), 79-95. French, Philip, Westerns, (London, Carcanet, 2005). Klein, Kerwin Lee, “Reclaiming the “F” Word, Or Being and Becoming Postwestern,” The Pacific Historical Review, 65, May, 179-215, 1996. Knobloch, Frieda, The Culture of Wilderness, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). Rajchman, John, The Deleuze Connections, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2000). Kollin, Susan (ed.), Postwestern Cultures, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007). Limerick, Patricia Nelson, The Legacy of Conquest, (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997). Martin-Jones, David, Deleuze, Cinema and National Identity, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008). —. “Demystifying Deleuze: French Philosophy Meets Contemporary US Cinema,” in Warren Buckland (ed.) Film Theory and Contemporary Hollywood Movies, (London: Routledge, 2009), 214-233. —. Deleuze and World Cinemas, (London: Continuum, 2011).

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Matsumoto, Valerie and Allmendinger, Blake (eds.), Over the Edge: Remapping the American West, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Mitchell, Lee Clark, Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film, (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1996). Naremore, James (ed.), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (screenplay), (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1979). Papnikolas, Zeese, American Silence, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007). Rajchman, John, The Deleuze Connections, (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2000). Rancière, Jacques, Film Fables, (London: Berg, 2006 [2001]). Rubin, Martin, “Heroic, Antihero, Aheroic: John Huston and the Problematical Protagonist” in Studlar and Desser (as below), 137-156. Rushton, Richard, Cinema After Deleuze, (London: Continuum, 2012). Scharff, Virginia, ‘Mobility, Women, and the West’, in Matsumoto, Valerie and Allmendinger, Blake (eds.) Over the Edge: Remapping the American West, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Studlar, Gaylyn and Desser, David (eds.), Reflections in a Male Eye: John Huston and the American Experience, (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993). Tatum, Stephen, “Spectral Beauty and Forensic Aesthetics in the West’ in Western American Literature, 41.2 (Summer 2006) 123-45. Turner, Frederick Jackson, Frontier and Section: Selected Essays, (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1961).

CHAPTER TWO LONGING FOR FULFILLMENT: THE TEMPTATION OF THE CALIFORNIAN LIFE IN SAM SHEPARD’S TRUE WEST AND NATHANAEL WEST’S THE DAY OF THE LOCUST MELANIE MAROTTA MORGAN STATE UNIVERSITY In her essay, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” Joan Didion observes that “The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.”1 In fact, in contemporary United States literature it tends to be the past, specifically the dissatisfaction with life that propels a Californian or soon-to-be Californian towards this utopian desire. Unfortunately, this embracing of the Californian ideal more often than not irrevocably alters the identity of the character in question. This study investigates the assertion that the obsession for the ideal life leads to bleakness, to the downfall of the main characters in Sam Shepard’s True West (1980) and Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust (1939). In his classic text, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971), Reyner Banham examines the Los Angeles environment noting the originality of its landscape and the alterations produced through the impact of human migration. While Banham’s analysis is not literary, it does offer invaluable insights into the human condition as influenced by the Los Angeles area and is, therefore, utilized for this study. Banham writes about California being an Eden and notes that “Some of the world’s most spectacular gardens are in Los Angeles, where the southern palm will literally grow next to northern conifers, and it was this promise of an ecological miracle that was the area’s first really saleable product – the 1

Joan Didion, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” in We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live (New York: Knopf, 2006), 13.

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‘land of perpetual spring.’”2 Interestingly, David Wyatt in The Fall into Eden: Landscape and Imagination in California observes that because the Californian landscape appears as Eden, it eventually causes feelings of “loss.”3 He reveals that “California has always been a place no sooner had than lost; every family has its paved garden. There is a recurring pattern in the experience of place in California that echoes our First Story.”4 In his critical text, Wyatt focuses on the influence of history, Eden, the landscape, the lives of the writers and their influence thereof. While Wyatt uses the aforementioned points as influences, this study utilizes landscape and Californian culture as dominating forces. Wyatt’s analysis gives a detailed look at early works about California, but is limited regarding West’s novel (there is no examination of Shepard’s work). While the natural beauty of the area and its temperate climate tends to draw people to it, this writer believes that it is the mystique of the place which contributes the most to the desire to venture to California. It is the need to become something other than what a person is, to change one’s identity. It is the desire to become accepted by the Californian collective. In reference to West, there are multiple texts that are biographical in nature; the writers discuss his identity, its formation, and its impact on his texts. For example, Stacey Olster in her article “The ‘Other’ in Nathanael West’s Fiction: Jewish Rejection or Jewish Projection” reveals that West was isolated from certain aspects of society because he was Jewish and that this rejection affected the creation of his texts.5 Olster centers her examination on the creation of identity due to religion affiliation and class while this writer focuses on the effects of space on the self. It has been documented that during the Great Migration, many African Americans went to New York, Baltimore, and even the San Francisco-Los Angeles areas on the basis of a rumor that these locales offered an improved lifestyle. Many went on the foundation of a rumor and were disappointed to find that these places did not meet their needs. The Harlem Renaissance in the American West, edited by Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz, contains a collection of essays denoting the African American experience in the United States West. In many Californian texts, characters have 2

Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (Berkeley: U of California P, 2001), 13. 3 David Wyatt, The Fall into Eden: Landscape and Imagination in California (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990), 207. 4 Ibid., xv. 5 Stacey Olster, “The ‘Other’ in Nathanael West’s Fiction: Jewish Rejection or Jewish Projection” in MELUS 15.4 (1998), 52-53, http://www.jstor.org/stable/ 466986.

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ventured to the state on the basis of speculation – that California will offer the key to happiness. In the following works what is discovered is that California does not appear as an Eden, but rather as Hell, a dystopic lure based in materialism. California does not offer life but, instead, offers symbolic death. California appears in these texts as a site of temptation which, if the character is seduced will cause the character to fall from symbolic grace. In Shepard’s play, True West, his two main characters, the brothers Austin and Lee, have been engulfed in the Californian dream and continuously strive for the future; however, their respective pasts and their memories thereof do not permit success. Leslie Kane, in her essay “Reflections of the Past in True West and A Lie of the Mind,” proceeds with this train of thought (the impact of the past); however, her work focuses on the representation of the father in Austin and Lee’s lives.6 In fact, one of Matthew Roudané’s questions to Shepard in his interview is about the portrayal of the family in many of his plays, including True West.7 To Roudané, Shepard notes that there is “no escape from the family” (the family is clearly a commonly debated issue in reference to his plays – Roudané calls it his “life-long interest in exploring the American family”); after this point he continues to discuss important moments from United States history, and then the issue of the American Dream.8 He notes that this concept has been created by false “advertising,” specifically observing that “The move westward was promoted by advertising.”9 Shepard reveals that “the American Dream is always this fantasy that’s promoted through advertising. We always prefer the fantasy over the reality.”10 In this study it is highlighted that it is this creation of this Californian identity that impacts the selves of the main characters in Shepard and West’s texts. In True West, as a result of their dissatisfaction with the way their lives have turned out, Austin and Lee become selfdestructive and lash out at others. They also become caught up in the dream of the other when their own lives are found to yield unsatisfactory results. For example, Lee wants to become a screenwriter and Austin 6

Leslie Kane, “Reflections of the Past in True West and A Lie of the Mind,” in The Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard, Ed. Matthew Roudané (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 139-153. 7 Sam Shepard, interview by Matthew Roudané, “Shepard on Shepard: An Interview,” in The Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard, Ed. Matthew Roudané (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 67. 8 Ibid., 67-70. 9 Ibid., 70. 10 Ibid., 70.

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wants to go out to the desert. While Annette J. Saddik has previously observed that in Shepard’s early plays (including True West) the “lack of stability brings liberation” to his characters’ identities; here, this writer will note how in True West the influence of Shepard’s Californian culture causes constriction to the identity and ultimately results in confusion for the characters, Austin and Lee.11 Like Shepard, West centers his text on a pair of male characters, Tod Hackett and Homer Simpson. Both Tod and Homer venture to California upon the premise that their lives will be improved if they do so. Unfortunately for both men, they become immersed in the Californian (Hollywood) lifestyle, so much so that Tod and Homer become mentally unstable. Shepard and West portray California’s inhabitants as succumbing to the temptations offered by the locale. When Shepard’s play opens, the brothers Lee and Austin are masking their dissatisfaction with their lives and with each other with a conversation about their mother’s leaving for Alaska. In the text of True West, including the description of the set, Shepard highlights the importance of the Southern Californian setting. Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher note, “The enormous swath of arid country stretching from Texas to southern California became the postwar destination of millions of Americans, and almost overnight there appeared thousands of tracts of detached homes, each framed by ample lawns with clusters of palm, avocado, or banana trees, and perhaps a swimming pool in the backyard.”12 This description of Southern California makes it appear much like a human-made paradise, rather than as a dystopic wasteland, which is how it is shown in Shepard’s play.13 As the play opens, Austin and Lee are discussing their mother’s departure for Alaska. Boiling beneath the surface of this seemingly banal conversation is the brothers’ resentment for one another and their desperation for the California dream. The positioning of the mother character takes in the play is symbolic. She physically appears only near the conclusion of the play; however, her choice of lifestyle impacts the play throughout its entirety. In the opening of Act One, Mom has already departed for Alaska and has left Austin, the responsible son, with the house. Austin, in response to Lee’s query regarding the management of the house, informs his brother that “Well, 11

Annette J. Saddik, “‘You Just Forge Ahead’: Image, Authenticity, and Freedom in the Plays of Tennessee Williams and Sam Shepard” in South Atlantic Review 70.4 (2005), 79, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2006468. 12 Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher, Frontiers: A Short History of the American West (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2007), 209. 13 Ibid., 209.

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she knew I was coming down here so she offered me the place.”14 It should be noted that Mom’s role in the play is as a temporary escapee from California, and she also appears to the sons as one who has captured the Californian dream. Lee tells Austin that “This is a great neighborhood. Lush. Good class a’ people.”15 Lee is at their mother’s home because he has nowhere else to go and he also wants to rob the unsuspecting neighbors. Austin’s previous statement about the house does not show that Mom is returning to her home, rather it appears that she has left for Alaska permanently. Conventionally, California and Alaska have been portrayed in literature as frontiers, as wild spaces that some believe are made to be conquered by humanity. In California, Mom is unsuccessful in capturing the dream, so she leaves for Alaska. The mother character leaves a false paradise, in search of one that is believed to be authentic only to find that the desolation in Alaska is exceedingly worse than that of California. To herself more than to her sons Mom says, “It was the worst feeling being up there. In Alaska. Staring out a window. I never felt so desperate before. That’s why when I saw that article on Picasso I thought – ,”16 When she is unable to locate paradisiacal bliss in Southern California, Mom heads for Alaska, only to be disappointed by what she found. Hine and Faragher observe, “During the 1990s, as many as two million more people left California than arrived there from other states …” and note that the climax of the discontentment appeared in the form of the 1992 Los Angeles riots.17 While the mother character does not face discrimination (a primary reason for the 1992 riots), she does return to California to find herself in the midst of an extreme amount of violence – the downward spiral of her sons towards bleakness and the destruction of her home. Hine and Faragher continue their discussion of Southern California, specifically noting that in the 1950s the “megalopolis” was created.18 They state, “Americans embraced this new kind of urban living with enthusiasm. Despite the objections of social critics, families delighted in the opportunity to own their own detached house and yard on a cul-de-sac miles from the central city.19 The mother character has pride in her house and the plants contained within – she is greatly distressed when she arrives home to discover the state of her home and the death of her plants. To 14

Sam Shepard, True West (New York: Samuel French, 1981), 7. Ibid., 10. 16 Ibid., 70. 17 Hine and Faragher, Frontiers, 221. 18 Ibid., 210. 19 Ibid., 210. 15

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Austin, Mom states, “Well, I’m going to check into a motel. I can’t stand this anymore … I can’t stay here. This is worse than being homeless.”20 Throughout the play, Shepard places emphasis on the mother’s house and her indoor plants. For the mother character, her home and the plants contained within symbolize Eden; however, it becomes clear that it is a false representation of Eden. After Mom tells Austin that she is going to leave, he says to her, “Stay here, Mom. This is where you live.”21 It is to this statement that Mom responds, “I don’t recognize it at all.”22 The reason that Mom cannot “recognize” her house is because she has been living in an illusion of paradise.23 Mom has left California for Alaska because she is not content with her lifestyle, her “own detached house and yard” in a neighborhood; when she returns she comes to the realization that she has captured a fantasy of life rather than the Californian dream.24 She suffers her own downfall and departs, leaving her sons to succumb to their own destruction. Unfortunately for the brothers, they are also immersed in the desire for the Californian dream, of which they are surrounded by in Mom’s house. Shepard’s play consists of four characters, two of which command the focus of the text and its audience. The brothers, Austin and Lee, are desperately searching for the Californian dream, but are unable to escape their illusions of grandeur and their respective pasts in order to obtain paradise. When Austin is introduced, he is writing a film script. He has left his wife and children at home and has moved into his mother’s house to create his “project.”25 When questioned by his brother about the content of the film, Austin replies, “We’re uh – it’s a period piece.”26 Austin’s response to his brother’s query reveals a great deal about his identity. In Shepard’s play, Austin appears as a Southern Californian construct, meaning he has created an identity using pieces of stereotypical information about California and, subsequently, behaves as he believes he should. When he is first introduced, he is sitting at a typewriter in candlelit darkness with cigarettes nearby. Austin behaves like he believes a writer should. He has set himself up in his mother’s house, alone, so that he may create this unknown work and meet with his producer, Saul Kimmer, about 20

Shepard, True West, 70. Ibid., 70. 22 Ibid., 70. 23 Ibid., 70. 24 Hine and Faragher, Frontiers, 210. 25 Shepard, True West, 17. 26 Ibid., 17. 21

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it. Austin has immersed his identity in his Hollywood fantasy and has convinced himself that by doing so he will be able to capture the Californian ideal. This character, however, has no clarity of focus and has a weak disposition – he is easily influenced by outside forces. Interestingly, it is his brother, Lee, who envisions a successful idea for a script, rather than Austin. Richard Slotkin documents the rise of the Western film in the twentieth century.27 In Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in TwentiethCentury America, Slotkin observes that “Like any pioneer in a new territory, the movies began by adapting to the environment, which in the case of the Western was both a real place and a set of myths associated with that place.”28 In other words, in order to create the Western, both historical and societal views must be incorporated within.29 The concept of the West was highly influential on the lives of the American public, and Shepard reveals this attraction to the West through the use of his character, Lee. In Shepard’s play, Lee appears as the wanderer character, a man that spends his time searching for paradisiacal contentment. Lee is, however, not a hero; he is a thief whose personality constantly contains an undercurrent of anger, particularly towards his brother, whom he believes is a success in obtaining the Californian ideal. Both brothers feel that Lee is inferior to Austin, when in reality each of the brothers has flaws in his respective identity. For example, when discussing Austin’s script Lee tells Austin, “You probably think that I’m not fully able to comprehend somethin’ like that, huh?”30 It is telling that Austin does not explain to his brother the task that he is completing and, instead, he says “It’s just a little research.”31 The conversation’s subject has come about because Lee is attempting to distract Austin from his task and is intentionally attempting to pick a fight with his brother. Austin is disparaging about his work due to Lee’s critical behavior towards him and Lee is self-deprecating because Austin believes Lee is inferior in intellect. Significantly, the brothers appear in the roles of educated man and every man: Austin is universityeducated and Lee is worldly. It is also telling that it is Lee who comes up with the idea for a script that Saul, the producer, thinks will be successful. Lee’s character is immersed in the notion of the Western. For example, when Austin offers Lee money, Lee physically attacks his brother. 27

Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in TwentiethCentury America (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1998). 28 Ibid., 234. 29 Ibid., 234-235. 30 Shepard, True West, 8. 31 Ibid., 8.

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According to the stage directions, “LEE suddenly lunges at AUSTIN, grabs him violently by the shirt and shakes him with tremendous power.”32 Lee’s character appears much like that of the stereotypical cowboy. He spends his time alone as the wanderer, he prefers to be out of doors, and if he believes he has been wronged, he retaliates. During the 1960s and 1970s, in response to waning public interest in the Western, the classical construct of the cowboy figure was altered to become more violent.33 For example, “the Italian ‘spaghetti’ Westerns that featured the young actor Clint Eastwood as a completely amoral gunfighter” was popular, but the public soon lost interest in this type of character.34 Lee is not “amoral”; he is, however, exceedingly violent, particularly towards Austin.35 Lee’s aggressive behavior is shown when he believes he has been slighted by his brother. When Austin offers to give money to Lee, Lee’s anger emerges quickly and just as quickly it disappears. To Austin, Lee says, “Don’t you say that to me! Don’t you ever say that to me! … You may be able to git away with that with the Old Man. Git him tanked up for a week! Buy him off with yer Hollywood blood money, but not me!”36 Like the cowboys in classical Hollywood Westerns, Lee has pride and a certain amount of morality. He views Austin’s offer as an insult, as a way of being rid of his brother, which is exactly what Austin intended. Significantly, it is Lee who is secure in his identity, not Austin. Unfortunately, both brothers are attempting to grasp the unattainable, the Californian ideal. Reyner Banham discusses the Los Angeles landscape in his Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies: “a basic socio-economic consideration … becomes stunningly apparent on any map that shows the distribution of average incomes; the financial and topographical contours correspond almost exactly: the higher the ground the higher the income,”37 Even though Lee has asserted that he is not interested in “Hollywood blood money,” Lee’s position alters once he has gone to the foothills to scout out places to burgle and once he and Austin reminisce about the past.38 The space that Banham is writing about is the Los Angeles foothills housing, which is what Lee goes to explore one night. When Austin asks Lee what the foothills are like, Lee reveals that he is unable to escape his past (see Didion’s analysis of the Californian past) and that similarly to his 32

Ibid., 11. Ibid., 212-213. 34 Ibid., 213. 35 Ibid., 213. 36 Shepard, True West, 11. 37 Banham, 79. 38 Shepard, True West, 11. 33

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brother he yearns to capture the Californian ideal. Austin’s query about the foothills is met with the following response from Lee: “Like a paradise. Kinda’ place that sorta’ kills ya’ inside. Warm yellow lights. Mexican tile all around. Copper pots hangin’ over the stove. Ya’ know like they got in the magazines. Blonde people movin’ in and outa’ the rooms, talkin’ to each other. (Pause). Kinda’ place you wish you sorta’ grew up in, ya’ know.”39 At this point in the play, both brothers are shown longing for the Californian ideal, specifically for aspects of life that they have never had. In Shepard’s play appearances are, however, deceiving; Lee is a witness to a false depiction of paradise. In his discussion of the foothills Banham notes, “on the north face … and round to the east, is perfectly typical foothill development complete with tortuous roads and restrictive covenants in the title deeds which exclude Negroes and Mexicans.”40 While Lee depicts the foothills residences as ideal, seething beneath the surface is the exclusionary nature of these residences.41 Neither Lee not Austin is considered the ideal people to be included in this so-called paradise; yet as a result of witnessing Eden, their desperation for paradise increases. After the conversation about the foothills, Austin must have Lee leave the house so he may meet with his producer and then Lee actively tries to take his brother’s job. There is a brief lull in violence when both brothers believe their respective solutions to obtaining Eden are to be successful. Once it becomes apparent that their plans are not working, they each envision a new scheme to obtain paradise. Throughout the play, Lee tells Austin about how he has returned from the desert and is planning on going back there in the near future. Once Lee’s idea for a film has been accepted by Saul, the brothers work on the film together, with Austin doing the writing. As their relationship disintegrates, Lee’s desire to return to the desert becomes more urgent. Hine and Faragher observe, “Much of the West’s urban growth originated in the search for open space, for a freer, cleaner, less encumbered life, especially in an appealing climate.”42 The brothers believe that through the script they will become part of Californian society and will obtain prosperity, but once they realize that they cannot work together and that they cannot accomplish a successful script separately, they choose to flee from their problems. According to Mark Siegel, “Neither character embodies in himself a healthy, integrated personality, nor is there during the course of the play any indication that they will 39

Ibid., 15. Banham, 80. 41 Ibid., 80. 42 Hine and Faragher, Frontiers, 209. 40

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merge or repair each other.”43 The desire for the desert, “the search for open space,” is an attempt at an escape from reality for the brothers.44 Their dream for success in Hollywood has unraveled – it is no longer a place of opportunity, so they dream of being pioneers in a space that symbolizes freedom. To his mother Lee says, “I’m clearin’ outa’ here once and for all. All this town does is drive a man insane. Look what it’s done to Austin there. I’m not lettin’ that happen to me. Sell myself down the river. No sir. I’d rather be a hundred miles from nowhere than let that happen to me.”45 At this point Lee and Austin have just had a monumental battle and are headed for another in which Austin attempts to strangle his brother. Lee’s previous statement is hypocritical; both brothers are frustrated and desperate to grasp success, only to have their desires erupt in violence. Their obsession for the ideal life culminates in the attempted murder of Lee by Austin and their movement to the desert. Their obsession causes both brothers to become wanderers, men lost in an endless wasteland. Like the brothers, Nathaniel West’s Tod Hackett yearns for success as it is denoted by the Californian ideal. Tod leaves Yale to go to Hollywood because he dreads becoming a mediocre artist, thereby taking a position in set design at the National Films studio. In the opening of The Day of the Locust, Tod is described as a driven, yet “lazy” man.46 He appears to want to be unique rather than copy other artists; however, this is an illusion. According to Douglas Flamming, “Modern Los Angeles was born in the 1880s, when railroads connected the sleepy town to the rest of the nation … Trainloads of easterners arrived daily – northerners fleeing cold winters, southerners fleeing a depressed economy or an oppressive racial regime or both.”47 In his statement, Flamming identifies the reason why the area has become such a draw for people. California, specifically Hollywood in West’s text, has become a refuge for those who desire to escape from unfortunate circumstances and who subsequently run towards more favorable ones, ones that appear to promise paradise. Flamming 43

Mark Siegel, “Holy Ghosts: The Mythic Cowboy in the Plays of Sam Shepard,” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 36.4 (1982): 246, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1347360. 44 Hine and Faragher, Frontiers, 209. 45 Shepard, True West, 68. 46 Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust, in Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust (New York: New Directions, 1962), 60. 47 Douglas Flamming, “The New Negro Renaissance in Los Angeles, 1920-1940,” in The Harlem Renaissance in the American West: The New Negro’s Western Experience, Eds. Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz (New York: Routledge, 2012), 59.

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continues, “Refugees and dreamers from all over the globe found their way to Los Angeles … The open spaces and the churning economy absorbed them all.”48 The issue that is not realized by the migrants is that California is not a cure-all; it does, however, exacerbate their problem until it reaches climax and the self is irrevocably corrupted. Tod appears to already be a restless and reckless person when he relocates to Hollywood. When West’s text begins, Tod is depicted as an observer of life rather than a participant. For example, before he completes his workday Tod hears a great commotion outside his office window and discovers multiple actors in army costumes from various countries. As the novel opens, after Tod’s description is given and Tod leaves work for the day, West calls attention to the fact that Tod resides amidst a society full of falsity. The soldiers appear authentic at first until it becomes clear that the formation is chaotic, the soldiers are from multiple nations, and there is a man in contemporary clothing shouting orders at the group. According to the narrator, “While he [Tod] watched, a little fat man, wearing a cork sun-helmet, polo shirt and knickers, darted around the corner of the building in pursuit of the army.”49 As the scene unfolds, it becomes apparent that in Hollywood nothing is at it seems at first. The army is merely a group of actors being led by a stagehand and Tod retains a great amount of fury behind his calm composure, which is only revealed the longer he is under the influence of the Hollywood mystique. At present, Tod is creating the scenery for a film, “‘The Burning of Los Angeles.’” Tod has immersed himself in his vision of what he believes would be the perfect set for the film. Unfortunately, Tod is losing his identity over time and is becoming obsessed with the idea that Los Angeles, or even California in general, will cause the deaths, the downfall, of many. Alex Vernon observes that “in ‘The Burning of Los Angeles’ we see an artistic dramatization of Tod’s larger predicament, the predicament of identity he fights – or that is fought in him – throughout the novel.”50 As Tod is walking home from work, he notices and describes the people he encounters. He sets his sights not only on those who appear in costume – “A great many of the people wore sports clothes which were not really sports clothes. Their sweaters, knickers, slacks, blue flannel jackets with brass buttons were fancy dress” – but also on the poverty stricken.51 At 48

Ibid., 59. West, The Day of the Locust, 59. 50 Alex Vernon, “Staging Violence in West’s The Day of the Locust and Shepard’s True West,” South Atlantic Review 65.1 (2000): 145, http://www.jstor.org/stable/ 3201929. 51 West, The Day of the Locust, 60. 49

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once Tod identifies the two classes that exist in Hollywood, the wealthy and the poor, and reveals his odd obsession. The poverty-stricken are described as spending their evenings watching the wealthy; the narrator notes that they are voiceless, but that their eyes display their abhorrence of the rich. The narrator observes that “At this time, Tod knew very little about them except that they had come to California to die.”52 It appears odd that Tod should feel this way towards this group. California is often portrayed as a paradise, an Eden where people venture to for life rather than death. For example, Homer comes to California on the advice of his physician – he comes to California after an illness to heal. Mircea Eliade has stated that “both the first colonists and the later European immigrants journeyed to America as the country where they might be born anew, that is, to begin a new life.”53 America and California have been frequently highlighted as spaces in which one may finally locate utopia, but to Tod California offers more than just paradise. Wyatt describes West’s version of Los Angeles as “a disposable wasteland.”54 West’s Los Angeles has been created much like a patchwork quilt. On the surface it appears to offer hope for the fulfillment of yearnings, but underneath the surface lurks personal discontent which causes the breakdown in the self. Tod’s dissatisfaction with life increases the more time he spends in Hollywood and it is punctuated with moments of terrifying rage and violence towards others. When Tod arrives home, he resides at the San Bernardino Arms, two of the main influences in Tod’s life, Abe Kusich and Faye Greener, are introduced. Significantly, these two characters, as well as Faye’s father, Harry, and Homer, appear through Tod’s memories. The arrival of Tod at the San Bernardino Arms sparks memories of when Tod first came to Hollywood and shows his behavioral progression from a man who is unsure of himself to one that immerses himself in violence and selfgratification. The narrator notes, “After opening the window, he took off his jacket and lay down on the bed. Through the window he could see a square of enameled sky and a spray of eucalyptus. A light breeze stirred its long, narrow leaves, making them show first their green side, then their silver one.”55 Throughout his text, West spends a great deal of time describing the landscape, concentrating particularly on the housing 52

Ibid., 60. Mircea Eliade, The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion, (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984), 98. 54 Wyatt, The Fall into Eden, 160. 55 West, The Day of the Locust, 62. 53

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available in Hollywood. According to Hine and Faragher, one of the reasons people came to Los Angeles was, in fact, for the property.56 They note, “The boom came when the two rail lines [Southern Pacific and Santa Fe] were completed in 1887 and was provoked by a fair war … that brought an estimated two hundred thousand tourists, curiosity-seekers, and land speculators who thrilled to the pitch of boosters, as had generations of previous westing dreamers.”57 Contained within West’s work is the need, the desire for a space of one’s own; however, the descriptions given tend to revolve around the artificiality of the structures rather than emotional attachment to them. For example, as Tod walks home he notices the various styles of houses such as “Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts,” and “Mediterranean villas.”58 There is no cohesion in the landscape, except the chaos. Wyatt observes, “California preserves many strange and wonderful houses … It is a state in which designing selves have been altogether free – too free, West grumbles in The Day of the Locust – to protect themselves through domestic containers unconstrained by any architectural tradition, let alone a building code.”59 The disorder in West’s Hollywood society denotes its organization, and this plot point following shows its artificiality. When Tod arrives at his apartment and is looking out of the window at the various styles of houses in the area, West conveys the landscape as if it were a set – the narrator describes the sky as “enameled” and the people as actors.60 The artificiality of West’s people and the chaos of his landscape cause Tod and other characters to go to behavioral extremes. Tod reminisces about when he first meets Abe. At this point in West’s novel Tod appears to be newly arrived in Hollywood and is still unsure of himself. Tod’s first residence is the Chateau Mirabella: “He wanted to move, but inertia and the fact that he didn’t know where to go kept him in the Chateau until he met Abe.”61 West frequently refers to Tod’s unindustrious behavior. Interestingly, it appears that few people in West’s novel have the drive for work. While history highlights the fact that people came to California in droves when employment became scarce (see Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath), West calls attention to the worst elements in Californian society, such as the lackadaisical behavior of many of the characters. It is these aspects which subsequently cause the 56

Hine and Faragher, Frontiers, 168. Ibid., 168. 58 West, The Day of the Locust, 61. 59 Wyatt, The Fall into Eden, 175. 60 Ibid., 62. 61 Ibid., 62-63. 57

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destruction of many of West’s key players. Tod has a weak character. He has no inclination for labor and he lacks confidence. This hesitancy in Tod makes his identity pliable. He is easily affected by the glamorous lifestyle that he witnesses others as having. On the surface, these characters, to Tod, appear to have tangible identities, but in actuality their identities are ineffective. Tod has chosen imperfect role models that, like the Californian landscape, have a highly chaotic existence. When he meets Abe, this character preys on Tod’s insecurities. During his escape into his memories, Tod remembers that he has arrived home to find a little person on the floor of his hallway. Abe has been thrown out of a woman’s apartment because of his abusive behavior towards her. At this point in West’s text Tod fears Abe, particularly the repercussions of standing up to Abe. Abe is rude, self-assured, and aggressive. For example, Abe informs Tod that for slighting him, he has the contact and the money to have the woman grievously injured (“‘I can get her leg broke for twenty bucks and I got twenty’,”); it is this type of behavior that causes a great change in Tod’s identity.62 Abe is also steeped in Californian culture and appears worldly to Tod. The use of current slang, the references to sex, and to violence introduce Tod to a society that makes him very uncomfortable. When Tod believes Abe is going to physically strike him, he gets ready to safeguard himself, but not to fight back. He even permits himself into being bullied into moving to the San Bernardino. Whether he desires to or not, Tod accepts Abe’s behavior and by doing so he molds his own identity. It is when Tod is with Faye, or envisioning Faye, that his identity noticeably appears to have undergone a change. Tod is not simply enamored with Faye, he is obsessed with her. After Tod awakened from his after work rest, he stares repeatedly at a photograph of Faye he has posted on his mirror. The inscription on the photograph is telling of how Faye views their relationship. The narrator notes, “She had given him the photograph willingly enough, had even autographed it in a large, wild hand, ‘Affectionately yours, Faye Greener,’ but she refused his friendship, or, rather, insisted on keeping it impersonal.”63 To Faye, Tod is just another adoring fan, an admirer of her beauty and her craft. The narrator continues, “He had nothing to offer her, neither money nor looks, and she could only love a handsome man and would only let a wealthy man love her.”64 Los Angeles is about possibilities and, in West’s publication, it stands as a symbol of wealth. 62

Ibid., 64. Ibid., 67. 64 Ibid., 67. 63

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West introduces Faye as a seventeen-year-old girl/woman born into the performing industry. Harry, a vaudevillian, has taught his daughter that life is about self-fulfillment through acting and money. For instance, when Homer first meets Harry and Faye, Harry comes to his home and repeatedly performs vaudevillian skits in order to con him into purchasing imitation silver polish. When Harry collapses, Faye shows nothing but false concern for her father’s condition. It is as if Faye is incapable of behaving as an authentic person. Faye’s identity is comprised of roles she has become accustomed to playing. Both Harry and Faye become lost in their falseness until they finally reach the point of no return. For Harry, he spirals out of control at Homer’s, he keeps making failed attempts to become his vaudevillian character once more until he dies. For Faye, she becomes a prostitute, she uses and abuses Homer and, finally, after having indiscriminate sex with Miguel, she leaves abruptly with both Earle and Miguel only to be seen in the chaotic mob in the conclusion of the text. Hine and Faragher document the industrial growth in the Los Angeles area and observe the following: “Perhaps the most visible sign of economic development was the fabulous growth of the motion picture industry, which by the end of the twenties was employing more than fifteen thousand people.”65 Faye desperately wants to become part of this workforce and as her discontent increases, it spreads to the others in her life. Hine and Faraday reveal that “The Great Depression hit Los Angeles hard … with a third or more of the county’s workforce unemployed by 1931.”66 West expertly exposes the desolation, the feeling of loss and hopelessness in his novel. The cowboys, Earle and Miguel, are out of work and Faye is an inept actress who has dreams of fame and fortune only to be rewarded with bit parts in some films. In one film “Faye played one of the dancing girls. She had only one line to speak, ‘Oh, Mr. Smith!’ and spoke it badly.”67 Even Homer, after coming to Hollywood for his health and instead being taken advantage of by Faye reaches his breaking point and is last seen being taken away after a mental break has occurred. No one in Hollywood is safe from the ill effects of its atmosphere of acute desire. When Tod first describes his initial meeting with Faye, like his fixation with the “Burning of Los Angeles,” the concentration of the memory is on a member of society inflicting harm onto another. As he describes Faye’s pose in her photograph he pays particular attention to her body, noting that “She was supposed to look inviting, but the invitation wasn’t to 65

Hine and Faragher, Frontiers, 173. Hine and Faragher, Frontiers, 174. 67 West, The Day of the Locust, 67. 66

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pleasure.”68 Significantly, Eliade has observed the fact that while many people came to America because they believed this space would house the new Paradise, others thought that it contained evil which must be conquered (“a moral and spiritual trial”) in order for them to reach Paradise.69 Tod portrays Faye as temptation, even going as far as to tell Homer that she is “‘a whore.’”70 When Tod describes Faye, his attention is attracted to her body and her actions regarding herself and others. While Faye’s behavior is disturbing, she uses the people in her life in order to achieve her goal of becoming a famous actress, Tod’s behavior towards Faye is frightening. Continuing his observation about Faye’s pose in the photograph Tod states that “Her invitation wasn’t to pleasure, but to struggle, hard and sharp, closer to murder than to love.”71 The longer Tod is in the presence of Faye, the more he wants to possess her. Tod is caught up in West’s Californian sense of urgency for fulfillment and begins his descent into madness, an insanity which climaxes during the riot when he is carted away in the police car while verbally imitating the siren. In regards to the siren as a symbol Robin Blyn states, “In West’s novel, Hollywood cinema proves to be siren-like in the full sense of the term, the aggressive pulse of an aesthetic law and a seductive call to selfdestruction.”72 The siren at the conclusion of West’s text serves as a symbol – it appears both to notify the mob that Tod has become one of them, the dissatisfied, and to warn others away from the search from paradise. Didion states, “time past is not believed to have any bearing upon time present or future, out in the golden land where every day the world is born anew.”73 West’s characters have become entangled in this illusion of time and, as a result, cannot escape.74 In fact, Tod is highly susceptible to the impact of time, which can be witnessed through one of Tod’s memories of Faye. Faye is first introduced in the novel by Tod, specifically through Tod staring at the photograph and his subsequent memory of going to see her in a film. Tod cannot escape Faye’s influence even though he is fully aware of her negative impact on others; therefore, the concept that “every

68

Ibid., 68. Eliade, The Quest, 94. 70 West, The Day of the Locust, 162. 71 Ibid., 68. 72 Robin Blyn, “Imitating the Siren: West’s The Day of the Locust and the Subject of Sound,” Literature Film Quarterly 32.1 (2004): 51, http://web.ebscohost.com/. 73 Didion, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” 29. 74 Ibid., 29. 69

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day the world is born anew” does not exist for Tod.75 Tod’s life is steeped in reality, meaning he cannot escape his past, or that desire for the ideal life. While Tod believes he wants some sort of relationship with Faye, in actuality he wants to have power over the one who has power over him; this behavior explains why he repeatedly envisions raping Faye. Tod wants the domination and destruction of Faye, not a romantic relationship with her. For example, when Tod goes to a brothel, he discovers that one of Faye’s friends is employed there. Tod becomes momentarily elated that Faye may also be a prostitute because there could be the possibility that he can pay to possess her. According to West’s narrator, “Tod’s hope that he could end his trouble by paying a small fee didn’t last long.”76 At this point early in the text Tod’s behavior is fluctuating; he is still unconfident yet he is also attempting to embrace West’s “live in the moment” Californian mentality. In this instance, Tod is persuaded to visit Mrs. Jenning’s brothel with some of Claude’s party guests. Claude, a screenwriter, has a party in which he has had a fake horse head placed in the bottom of his swimming pool. This prop is there for jest and to thrill the partygoers, the exact same reasons that some venture to watch a pornographic film at the brothel. Faye appears like the horse head and the film, as if she is an object that Tod may possess in order to have a moment of instant gratification. When he discovers he cannot pay to have sex with Faye “Tod wasn’t really disappointed. He didn’t want Faye that way, not at least while he still had a chance some other way.”77 Tod’s behavior can be summed up through a statement by one of Claude’s party guests, Mrs. Schwartzen. A woman informs Mrs. Schwartzen that the horse’s stomach, which is about to explode, is “‘only full of air.’”78 Mrs. Schwartzen begins to mimic weeping and tells the woman “‘You just won’t let me cherish my illusions.’”79 For West’s characters, every so often the Californian dream is shattered by an intrusion of reality. Tod cannot have an intimate relationship with Faye as a prostitute and he disapproves of her actions. For example, “His interest in her grew despite the things she said and he continued to find her very exciting. Had any other girl been so affected, he would have thought her intolerable. Faye’s affectations, however, were so completely artificial that he found them charming.”80 Faye’s personality is a creation of her 75

Ibid., 29. West, The Day of the Locust, 76. 77 Ibid., 76. 78 Ibid., 71. 79 Ibid., 71. 80 Ibid., 103. 76

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imagination and Tod momentarily loses himself in this fantasy. He understands that she is materialistic and only interested in her career, but still he fixates on her. This behavior can be explained through an examination of one of Tod’s rape scenarios. While Harry is ill, Tod visits the duo at night, and often goes into Faye’s room with her so they may talk. One evening Faye tells Tod of her imaginings, her storylines for future film scripts that she wants Tod to write. It is during one of these stories that Tod immerses himself in a daydream of a rape scenario in which he imagines violently possessing Faye. The narrator reveals, “If he only had the courage to throw himself on her. Nothing less violent than rape would do … It was her completeness, her egglike self-sufficiency, that made him want to crush her.”81 For all her faults, Faye is still desirable in Tod’s eyes; however, it is the illusion of Faye that Tod wishes to conquer. In The Day of the Locust, Faye represents California, specifically the Californian dream. The rape of Faye is the symbolic possession of California, which is Paradise. In California, Tod is inadequate and unable to meet the standards set in this society. Like Homer, he stands apart from the collective, not able to fit in, and over time his desperation increases, as shown by the proliferation of rape fantasies. If Tod can possess Faye, he believes he will no longer feel marginalized and will be accepted into Californian society. Didion discusses the San Bernadino Valley and one set of settlers, the Mormons.82 Didion notes that after the Mormons had departed “for the next hundred years the San Bernardino Valley would draw a kind of people who imagined they might live among the talismanic fruit and prosper in the dry air, people who brought with them Midwestern ways of building and cooking and praying and who tried to graft those ways upon the land.”83 It is significant that Tod resides in the hotel that appears to be named after the valley and meaningful that he is forced to reside there by Abe. Symbolically, Tod is unable to enter Paradise on his own. While Tod tries to force his “ways upon the land,” on Faye, it is eventually West’s California that ends up swallowing him whole.84 After Tod leaves Homer’s he tries to find Earle and then goes to a restaurant for a drink. He then leaves the restaurant and encounters a mob outside of a theater. The mob, while waiting for the stars to arrive and the film premiere to begin, spots Tod and criticizes his appearance. The narrator states, “Tod had walked only a short distance along the narrow 81

Ibid., 107. Didion, “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” 13. 83 Ibid., 13. 84 Ibid., 13. 82

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lane when he began to get frightened. People shouted, commenting on his hat, his carriage, and his clothing. There was a continuous roar of catcalls, laughter and yells, pierced occasionally by a scream.”85 The crowd is chaotic and intimidating. At one point Tod is attacked and is laughed at by member of the mob. The narrator notes, “He [Tod] knew enough to laugh with them. The crowd became sympathetic.”86 Once members of the mob believe that Tod is one of them, he is treated well and protected. Throughout the novel, Tod has been going back and forth between companions, Faye and Homer. To Tod, Faye represents West’s Californian dream while Homer represents reality and his original lifestyle, in other words, Tod’s past. Now, Tod has become part of the mob, a member of the group of the unsatisfied that has had their Californian dream shattered. In two very telling moments, the narrator captures the mob mentality. One, the narrator observes that newcomers to the mob alter their identities, their behavior once they enter the mob. Two, the narrator reveals that they become this way because they have discovered they are unable to grasp the Californian dream. The narrator states, “Their boredom becomes more and more terrible. They realize that they’ve been tricked and burn with resentment … . The sun is a joke. Oranges can’t titillate their jaded palates. Nothing can ever be violent enough to make taut their slack minds and bodies. They have been cheated and betrayed. They have slaved and saved for nothing.”87 West expertly captures the discontent felt by those that have come to California hoping to find paradise and wind up dissatisfied with their lives. Tod becomes swept up in this mob and, while he is immersed in it, he discovers his unhappiness with the lifestyle. As a result, Tod then attempts to escape into his “Burning of Los Angeles” set, which symbolically includes Faye, and his other companions. Tod’s obsession had finally come to a head – he is as unhappy as the others. His possession of the Californian mentality of dissatisfaction finally causes him to mentally break while in the police car and the text concludes with Tod’s shift in behavior, specifically from the desire for the ideal life to a state of utter bleakness. Banham writes, “the city will never be fully understood by those who cannot move fluently through its diffuse urban texture, cannot go with the flow of its unprecedented life.”88 For many of the characters in Shepard and West’s texts, they “cannot go with the flow” of the Los Angeles area

85

West, The Day of the Locust, 176. Ibid., 177. 87 Ibid., 178. 88 Banham, Los Angeles, 5. 86

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and become lost in the process.89 Both brothers, Austin and Lee, attempt to find their niche in Californian society only to be deprived of true happiness. In an effort to capture the Californian ideal, out of desperation the brothers swap dreams. In a frantic search for paradise, Lee tries writing while Austin envisions the desert. Both brothers spiral out of control, ending up in a physical and mental wasteland. Like the brothers, Tod searches for the Californian ideal and ends up destroying himself. When last seen, Tod is in the rear of a police car imitating a siren. Tod becomes immersed in the chaos that is Hollywood and, as the title states, he is descended upon by the dreamers, by the “locust[s],” When Tod is unable to obtain the California ideal, he releases his hold on his self and becomes part of the mob of unhappy fanaticists. Both Shepard and West paint dismal portraits of the Californian dreamer in their texts, True West and The Day of the Locust.

Bibliography Anderson, Donald R. “The West of Frederick Jackson Turner in Three American Plays.” The Journal of American and Comparative Cultures 23.3 (2000): 89-97. http://web.ebscohost.com. Banham, Reyner. Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. Berkeley: U of California P, 2001. Barnard, Rita. The Great Depression and the Culture of Abundance: Kenneth Fearing, Nathanael West, and Mass Culture in the 1930s. Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture 87. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Bassan, Maurice. “The ‘True’ West of Sam Shepard and Stephen Crane.” American Literary Realism 28.2 (1996): 11-17. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/27746649. Blyn, Robin. “Imitating the Siren: West’s The Day of the Locust and the Subject of Sound.” Literature Film Quarterly 32.1 (2004): 51-59. http://web.ebscohost.com/. Bottoms, Stephen J. “The Real Thing: True West (1980) and Fool for Love (1983).” The Theatre of Sam Shepard: States of Crisis. Cambridge Studies in American Theatre and Drama 9. New York: Cambridge UP, 1998. 182-212. Dardis, Tom. Some Time in the Sun: The Hollywood Years of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Nathanael West, Aldous Huxley, and James Agee. New York: Penguin, 1981. 89

Ibid., 5.

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Didion, Joan. “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.” We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live. New York: Knopf, 2006. Edmunds, Susan. “Modern Taste and the Body Beautiful in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust.” Modern Fiction Studies 44.2 (1998): n.p. http://muse.jhu.edu/. Eliade, Mircea. The Quest: History and Meaning in Religion. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984. Flamming, Douglas. “The New Negro Renaissance in Los Angeles, 19201940.” The Harlem Renaissance in the American West: The New Negro’s Western Experience. Eds. Bruce A. Glasrud and Cary D. Wintz. New York: Routledge, 2012. 58-82. Gabriella, Varró. “Acts of Betrayal: Arthur Miller’s The Price and Sam Shepard’s True West.” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 11.2 (2005): 63-76. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41274319. Greenberg, Jonathan Daniel. “Nathanael West and the Mystery of Feeling.” Modern Fiction Studies 52.3 (2006): 588-612. http:// muse.jhu.edu/. Harper, Phillip Brian. “Significance, Movement, and Resistance in the Novels of Nathanael West.” Framing the Margins: The Social Logic of Postmodern Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1994. 30-54. Heilman, Robert B. “Shepard’s Plays: Stylistic and Thematic Ties.” The Sewanee Review 100.4 (1992): 630-644. http://www.jstor.org/stable/ 27546616. Hine, Robert V. and John Mack Faragher. Frontiers: A Short History of the American West. New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 2007. Kane, Leslie. “Reflections of the Past in True West and A Lie of the Mind.” The Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard. Ed. Matthew Roudané. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 139-153. Lukes, H. N. “Portrait of the Artist as a Social Symptom: Viral Affect and Mass Culture in The Day of the Locust.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 40.1 and 2 (2012): 187-200. http://muse.jhu.edu/. Meade, Marion. Lonelyhearts: The Screwball World of Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010. Meyers, Jeffrey. “The Paintings in The Day of the Locust.” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews 22.1 (2009): 50-55. http://web.ebscohost.com. Olster, Stacey. “The ‘Other’ in Nathanael West’s Fiction: Jewish Rejection or Jewish Projection.” MELUS 15.4 (1998): 51-65. http:// www.jstor.org/stable/466986.

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Rabillard, Sheila. “Destabilizing Plot, Displacing the Status of Narrative: Local Order in the Plays of Pinter and Shepard.” Theatre Journal 43.1 (1991): 41-58. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3207949. Rhodes, Chip. “Nathanael West: Desire, Art, and Cynicism.” Politics, Desire, and the Hollywood Novel. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2008. 2548. Rogers, Martin. “Monstrous Modernism and The Day of the Locust.” The Journal of Popular Culture 44.2 (2011): 367-384. http://web.ebsco host.com. Rosefeldt, Paul. “Escape of the Father and the Son’s Hopeless Quest-II: Sam Shepard’s True West; David Rabe’s The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel.” The Absent Father in Modern Drama. Series 3 Comparative Literature Vol. 54. NY: Peter Lang, 1995. 51-62. Rosen, Carol. Sam Shepard: A ‘Poetic Rodeo.’ Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Saddik, Annette J. “‘You Just Forge Ahead’: Image, Authenticity, and Freedom in the Plays of Tennessee Williams and Sam Shepard.” South Atlantic Review 70.4 (2005): 73-93. http://www.jstor.org/stable/200 4688. Schott, Christopher Ryan. “‘A Veritable Bedlam!’ The Culture of Mass Media in Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust.” Pennsylvania Literary Journal 1.1 (2009): 63-82. http://web. ebscohost.com. Shepard, Sam. “Sam Shepard’s Master Class in Playwriting.” Interview with Brian Bartels. The Missouri Review 30.2 (2007): 72-88. http:// muse.jhu.edu/. Shepard, Sam. “Shepard on Shepard: An Interview.” The Cambridge Companion to Sam Shepard. By Matthew Roudané. Ed. Matthew Roudané. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002. 64-80. Shepard, Sam. True West. New York: Samuel French, 1981. Siegel, Ben, ed. Critical Essays on Nathanael West. New York: G. K Hall & Co., 1994. Siegel, Mark. “Holy Ghosts: The Mythic Cowboy in the Plays of Sam Shepard.” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 36.4 (1982): 235-246. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1347360. Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1998. Springer, John. “‘This Is a Riot You’re In’: Hollywood and American Mass Culture in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust.” Literature Film Quarterly 24.4 (1996): 439-444. http://web.ebscohost.com.

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Turan, Aysegul. “Sam Shepard’s Family Trilogy: Family as a Site of Peace or Violence.” Romanian Journal of English Studies 5 (2008): 360-368. http://www.litere.uvt.ro. Veitch, Jonathan. American Superrealism: Nathanael West and the Politics of Representation in the 1930s. Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 1997. Vernon, Alex. “Staging Violence in West’s The Day of the Locust and Shepard’s True West.” South Atlantic Review 65.1 (2000): 132-151. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3201929. Wade, Leslie A. “Sam Shepard and the American Sunset: Enchantment of the Mythic West.” A Companion to Twentieth-Century American Drama. Ed. David Krasner. Malden, MA: Blackwell P, 2005. 285-300. Weisenburger, Steven. “Williams, West, and the Art of Regression.” South Atlantic Review 47.4 (1982): 1-16. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3199 403. West, Nathanael. The Day of the Locust. Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust. New York: New Directions, 1962. 59-185. Westgate, J. Chris. “Negotiating the American West in Sam Shepard’s Family Plays.” Modern Drama 48.4 (2005): 726-743. http://web.ebsco host.com. Wyatt, David. The Fall into Eden: Landscape and Imagination in California. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.

CHAPTER THREE INTO THE WILD: CHRIS MCCANDLESS AND HIS SEARCH FOR A “YONDER” STEPHEN COOK CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, SACREMENTO The story of Chris McCandless is multi-layered. It started as an article by Jon Krakauer in Outside, “Death of an Innocent,” and became a book by the same writer, Into the Wild. A tsunami of reader response to the magazine piece, both extolling and castigating Chris McCandless, convinced Krakauer to write his non-fiction account of McCandless’s adventures, which was well-received by critics; for example Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, writing in The New York Times Book Review, said, “Because the story involves overbearing pride, a reversal of fortune and a final moment of recognition, it has elements of classic tragedy. By the end, Mr. Krakauer has taken the tale of a kook who went into the woods and made it a heart-rending drama of human yearning.”1 Kirkus Reviews echoes Lehmann-Haupt in its contention that Krakauer captures the expansive narrative while showing how McCandless’s inner life took on a centripetal force: “Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.”2 Ultimately, Sean Penn transformed it into the 2007 movie, giving the film the same title as the book, and Penn’s retelling of Krakauer’s story garnered many honors, including a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast and two Academy Award nominations. The contrast between book and movie is readily apparent to anyone who 1

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, “Taking Risk to Its ‘Logical’ Extreme,” The New York Times Book Review, January 4, 1996. 2 Kirkus Reviews, Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer, October 15, 1995.

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spends time with both, for Krakauer’s writing is clear and not muddled by the romanticism of Penn’s loopy narrative, which is by turns mesmerizing and infuriating but never dull. Penn’s account is much too forgiving of the real Chris McCandless, but the director is not bound by any journalistic code of unbiased reportage. Instead, what Penn offers is a monomythic vision-quest, an epic story of a 23 year old dreamer who pursues a personal Manifest Destiny: transformation promised by “‘a yonder’”3 located in the American West, more specifically the Alaskan outback. However, “yonder” is more than place, for it conflates dream and being with geography. Certainly, movement to or toward a location or an ideal is universal, but in an American context – perhaps best represented by a prairie schooner traversing an ocean of grass, its canvas cover luffing like a sail – we can comprehend how the quest or even the crackpot adventure may be initially sublime yet turn deadly. Viewers of Into the Wild see Penn’s representation of McCandless the man, the son, and sojourner into the American West, who, in a voiceover, quotes Wallace Stegner, writing in the essay “Living Dry”: “It should not be denied … that being footloose has always exhilarated us. It is associated in our minds with escape from history and oppression and law and irksome obligations, with absolute freedom, and the road has always led west.”4 However, Stegner also writes on the following page, “But the rootlessness that expresses energy and a thirst for the new and an aspiration toward freedom and personal fulfillment has just as often been a curse … . American individualism, much celebrated and cherished, has developed without its essential corrective, which is belonging. Freedom, when found, can turn out to be airless and unsustaining.”5 These latter ideas and sentiments are not directly articulated, yet are present in the film, for while Into the Wild can be seen as a celebration of liberation and authenticity, it also provides the rational observer with more than enough optics to see the dichotomy Stegner outlines. In so doing, Penn explores the deeply American connection between mobility and transformation, and he cautions that individualism ultimately finds its deepest meaning not in prolonged detachment from family or community but rather in what one may, in time, bring to others.

3

Frank Bergon and Zeese Papanikolas, Looking Far West: The Search for the American West in History, Myth, and Literature (New York: Mentor, 1978), 2. 4 Wallace Stegner, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West (New York: Penguin, 1992), 71. 5 Stegner,72.

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Still, the submerged warning eludes many. The hero worship of McCandless continues. The abandoned bus where he died of starvation has become a shrine for those willing to make the pilgrimage, an effort requiring a dangerous crossing of the Teklanika River in late spring and summer as winter snows melt. A Swiss tourist named Claire Jane Ackermann drowned in the Teklanika August 14, 2010 close by the “Magic Bus” although her traveling companion says they were not going to McCandless’s death site, an assertion local residents dispute.6 Who knows? Mystery begets more mystery as well as further controversy, for while twenty years have passed since McCandless’s death, a roaring debate continues, carried on primarily in the ether of the Internet, a microcosm of which is the effulgent emotional response in my classrooms during discussions of Into the Wild, in particular as students view the film, for the visuals lend themselves to evoking judgments from the students, who usually fall into two divergent camps comprised of those who see McCandless as a tragic poet/philosopher, irredeemably damaged by the venality of capitalism and heavy-handed parents, and those who deride him as an arrogant, deluded fool with First-World problems. Of course, as is so often the case, reality is most likely to be located in a synthesis of two extremes, and it is a measured view of McCandless this essay seeks to advance while also attempting to place the movie and its portrayal of the real Chris McCandless into a larger, scholarly context, which in turn, reflects an American culture largely built on the geographical reality of wilderness and open space. Environment, history, and culture are inseparable, and more specifically, in the case of the United States, the physical enormity of the West provided a grand stage upon which to create a national narrative, heroic and sad, true yet mythological. The core of that story is a celebration of mobility and transformation promised to those who have the optimism and the nerve to go forth, to seek the open road and in some cases to establish it in spite of the dangers inherent in the quest, the very real possibility that death is the true destination. Into the Wild is squarely within the tradition of the American Highway Narrative, a genre finding expression in various mediums, and immediately accessible to even the casual viewer is Penn’s celebration of Chris as an American Pilgrim in search of what Ronald Primeau calls a “Journey of Self-Discovery” in his superb analysis of movement in American culture, Romance of the Road: The Literature of the American Highway. Primeau writes: 6

Mowry, Tim. “Swiss Woman Drowns in Teklanika River, near ‘Into the Wild’ Bus.” Fairbanks Daily News Miner. August 17, 2010.

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The road is freedom from schedules, commitments, memberships, and credentials; the highway journey also suspends for a while definition according to one’s origins, profession, and geography. Movement also leaves behind restricting ways of looking at oneself and brings at least temporarily a frozen time and ever-changing space where all is possible … where people in motion are suspended not only in space and time but between what they think they know about the past and what they have reason to suspect will be inevitable when they get home. Highway travelers give up – or are released from – a social structure that impinges upon dreams and aspirations. The apparent powerlessness of the traveler living in a suspended state has its compensation in knowledge gained along the way. Road heroes refer often to the wisdom, power, and infusion of new energy they receive on the journey.7

Sean Penn in an interview conducted by Charlie Rose makes a personal connection with the protagonist of his movie, calling himself out to Rose as a “road rat,”8 who began to travel throughout the United States as soon as he got a driver’s license. Penn’s love of movement is the soul of Into the Wild, and Chris, whether on foot or transported by car, train, truck, kayak, and even threshing combine, is Penn’s soul-mate. Accordingly, viewers become immersed in a photo montage reflecting Penn’s genuine romance with the American landscape, one tempered by an awareness of its “ruthless authentic[ity]” as he declares to Rose. On-screen, the beauty is torrential, a fluid stream of core physical images – wave, moose, rock, water, desert, wolf, horse, sky, eagle – appealing to viewers on a cerebral level as well as connecting us to a time when we were intimate with that world, its terror, its bedrock reality, its fleeting moments of grace. Penn accentuates this central motif of a cellular yet nearly-forgotten tie to the natural world through Chris’ pell-mell retreat from a stop in Los Angeles, its endless pavement, its bustle, its ugly dysfunction. Finally, viewers cannot help but be struck by the role of water as a conveyor of Chris into sun-dappled and unfamiliar worlds; indeed, at the end of the movie, even while the rushing chute of the Teklanika becomes an insurmountable barrier for Chris and he wisely decides not to cross it, the river nevertheless “sweeps” him away into death, for Chris has been inexorable, so obsessed with making it to the “yonder” of the Alaskan frontier and its

7

Primeau, Ronald. Romance of the Road: The Literature of the American Highway (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1996), 69. 8 Sean Penn and Eddie Vedder, interview by Charlie Rose, The Charlie Rose Show, PBS, September 9, 2007.

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absolute separation from privilege and the “effete superstructure”9 of family and high-toned Virginia suburb that he carves a prominent “N” for north on the belt he makes, using Ron Franz’s leather working tools. Still, the Teklanika is implacable, making McCandless’s lonely demise a surety. Viewers can see as does Chris ultimately that “happiness [is] real only when shared,” and that cryptic insight is the mind of the film, laden as it is with cautionary notes about the value of family and the wisdom of Chris’s actions: Jan’s admonition to Chris to “be fair” to his parents, Wayne’s good-natured skepticism of Chris’s idealistic expectations about simply being in the Alaskan outback, or even a rock climber watching an illprepared McCandless illegally running the Colorado rapids, “Helmet, man!” Although my students voice much criticism concerning Chris’s treatment of his parents and his assertion to Ron Franz that human relationships are not the center of happiness, a discussion of Penn’s theme of a tension between individual and family/community as inherent in American culture has been missing from a larger, cultural debate over Into the Wild, but it is the primary focus of this work. Penn’s McCandless is a charismatic but arrogant protagonist who seems so above the world as to be intent on leaving it. McCandless preaches but will not listen, and seeking to kill “the false being within” leads the film version of Chris McCandless to strip away rationality and self-preservation, paralleling the actual Chris, who becomes “a monk gone to God.”10 His disappearance and death leave his immediate family in considerable pain, a condition well acted out by Jena Malone, who plays his sister Carine, Marcia Gay Harden as Chris’s mother Billie, and William Hurt, who portrays Chris’s controlling, sometimes-violent father. Malone’s narration is whiny and pretentious at times, but Harden and Hurt show the strain of regret and not-knowing, most especially in Hurt’s case as in one scene he shambles up the street in front of his home, finally sagging until he sits in the middle of the traffic lanes, legs akimbo, utterly broken by what is essentially an extreme form of the silent treatment. Some may say that Walt McCandless gets what he deserves, but to make the argument, one must first accept as a premise that pain may be answered by pain. Certainly, Penn understands that the emotional and familial dynamics are not clear-cut, for in a masterful stroke, he makes a point of showing that Hurt’s character is sockless, a tie-in between father and son as Chris is admonished in an earlier scene to wear socks while working at Burger King to make some road money. Walt and Chris are terribly at odds, a 9

Marshall, Bob. “The Problem of the Wilderness.” Scientific Monthly 30, no.2 (1930): 143. 10 Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild (New York: Anchor Books, 1996), 199.

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division Penn accentuates with a quick visual of Chris’s battered Datsun parked next to his parents’ gleaming Cadillac, on the day of Chris’s graduation from Emory University. Chris’s unwillingness to contact his family for more than a year seems to be retribution for his parents’ materialism and Walt’s dishonesty concerning his first family and the timing of Billie’s pregnancies with Chris and Carine, just as Chris’s search for authenticity is likely a counterweight to his father’s values. Even so, Chris abandons his family as Walt left his first wife and their children, and Carine, in an ironic twist, says of Walt’s decision, “Dad’s arrogance made him conveniently oblivious to the pain he caused,” yet she could have easily been speaking of her brother. Father and son mirror one another: stubborn, unhearing, arrogant, intelligent, and solitary, one imperious, the other gradually releasing ballast until he simply flies away. Walt lords it over his wife, yet one may also argue that Chris’s militant refusal to contact his mother is as dismissive as Walt is to Billie (or perhaps more) and therefore abusive although not in the same way as his father’s physical mistreatment of Billie. Chris tellingly reveals his condescension toward his mother when he imagines her graduation day from college and speaks of her holding a few “light” books at her side. Further, it is in the same scene that Penn first accentuates Walt’s idiosyncratic habit of not wearing socks. The poster of Clint Eastwood as the Man with No Name bears silent witness in Chris’s apartment to the renunciation of family as Chris destroys all forms of identification, eliminating the possibility that his parents can locate him and acting out so extremely that he is well beyond the “characteristic immoderation” Carine speaks of in a voiceover. His separatism is not about gaining freedom; Chris is 23 and out of his parents’ home, and he has physical distance as well, so his actions must be about cancelling or obviating blood ties, a need so compelling he arranges for his mail to be held “to buy himself some time” as his sister’s narration informs viewers. His actions thus constitute a get–away, one arguably unnecessary, for to truly find liberation and sovereignty would require that he cultivate emotional inaccessibility from his parents’ values and influence, rather than simply travel the physical distance between Virginia and Alaska. As Carlos Castaneda writes in the chapter “Being Inaccessible” from Journey to Ixtlan, “It makes no difference to hide if everyone knows you are hiding.”11 Nevertheless, the romance of the wanderer infuses Into the Wild, and both the cinematic and historical Chris have entered the realm of what I call American Heroic Mythology, our take on Joseph Campbell’s notion of the Monomyth as presented in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 11

Carlos Castaneda, Journey to Ixtlan (New York: Pocket Books, 1972), 66.

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Certainly, Into the Wild is one version of the hero’s journey, and a scholar could no doubt write a paper unto itself about Chris’s adventures as a selfimposed rite of passage, but more germane to this work is Campbell’s assertion that a hero must “assimilate his opposite,”12 which in Chris’s case means he should have stood against his oppressor – his father – thereby gaining a transcendence of his father’s values and traits, some of which he shares. Instead, he flees and avoids making contact although he meets men along his journey who serve as mentors. Certainly, Rainey, Wayne, and Ron point the way toward reengagement, rationality, and forgiveness, yet Chris is either unteachable or understands and is simply not ready for reconciliation. In a scene set in two opposing phone kiosks at Hoover Dam, the movie implies that Chris nearly drops a quarter into a pay phone to call his sister, but he gives the quarter to an old man in the pay phone next to him as the man desperately pleads for forgiveness from someone significant in his life. The gesture is altruistic on the surface, but Chris has also clearly decided he must perpetuate his self-imposed exile. As he says: “Some people feel like they don’t deserve love. They walk away quietly into empty spaces, trying to close the gaps of the past.” However, Chris cannot find true closure in escape or in changing his name to Alexander Supertramp, no matter the romance or the extravagance of his gestures. A parallel to the abrogation of family is the denial of the body, and it is only one way in which Into the Wild examines individual physicality within the physical space of the open road and wilderness; Chris’s subjugation of his body and direction of his will – for example, confronting his fear of water – are necessary for him to find distance and separation and to co-sign his moral choices, which are often questionable. Of course, he was harmed by his parents’ arguing and materialist quest, but so was his sister, and he leaves her utterly adrift as is his intent. Carine is young – in the movie she only has a learner’s permit to drive – and her narration indicates a hero worship bordering on co-dependence, one gradually giving way to bewilderment and betrayal. A fair question to ask is how she would have reacted to Chris’s assertion to Ron Franz that he has no family. Chris shows real coldness when it comes to others, especially blood relations, and while he interacts with those he meets and while they often come to truly love him, he always leaves the touch, the grasp if you will, of others. It is as if human interaction is but one of the layers he must strip away if he is to find absolute truth. Chris does indeed find the edge of the drop-off into eternity, but his denial of nourishment for 12 Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1949), 108.

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the physical allows him no possibility for recovery and runs parallel to the emotional detachment that removes the influence of others who might provide “the essential corrective” of which Stegner writes. Regardless, Penn allows Chris and the viewer in a vicarious way to experience real joy, whether soaring off a cliff and into a river below, eating his “super-apple,” flinging himself into Northern California surf, or as a scofflaw taking on the rapids of the Colorado River. We see his exultation on a mountaintop in Alaska as Eddie Vedder’s voice soars in the background. These scenes ought to move even the most cynical viewer, and yet always there is the question of price, from the loss of family to the expenditure of calories while climbing a mountain, ones not easily recouped on a diet of rice and wild birds. The moose McCandless kills is a waste, and although he shows remorse, the reality is that he did not have the skills to utilize the animal’s sacrifice. In fact, as he butchers the animal, he works from instructions written into a notebook rather than using muscle memory gained from actual experience. McCandless is out of his element, and he knows it. The movie at this point offers a voiceover of Emile Hirsch, who plays Chris, quoting Henry David Thoreau: “Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful … . Man was not to be associated with it … . There was clearly felt the presence of a force not bound to be kind to man. It was a place of heathenism and superstitious rites – to be inhabited by men nearer of kin to the rocks and to the wild animals than we.” Thoreau’s voice is of the dilettante, words echoed by McCandless who seems surprised that the land doesn’t care a whit about him. Rather, nature is governed by rules we disobey at our peril, ones not obviated by romantic notions, high motives, spiritual quests for meaning, or arrogant imperatives that the physical world yield any of its secrets. Clearly, it is unwise to park one’s car in a flash flood area of the Mojave Desert. Coming so early in the film, surely that narrow reprieve from drowning must serve as a foreshadowing of Chris’s negligence and or arrogance. Directly to the point are the mysteries of Chris’s actions or inactions. Krakauer’s narrative makes clear the desperation of the real Chris in the days prior to his death although Krakauer also reveals that a hand-operated bridge over the flood-stage Teklanika River was only a half-mile away from the bus, so the river was not an insurmountable barrier to leaving his isolation had Chris simply had a topographic map to let him know of the bridge’s existence. 13 Also, nearby were two fully-provisioned private cabins and one Forest Service cabin with emergency supplies.14 Again, a 13 14

Krakauer, 173. Krakauer, 196-197.

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topographic map would have alerted Chris to these possibilities although he may have been aware of these cabins and considered them unworthy of consideration. Krakauer makes clear that after a certain point these cabins could do no good for anybody as someone – perhaps McCandless and perhaps not – thoroughly trashed them and their contents.15 Whatever the reality, it is obvious that while physical distance can promote emotional healing, a point of no return exists where the individual has lost the means by which to rejoin the group. Penn makes it clear that Chris, at least in the director’s imagination and therefore in the film depiction, comes to an understanding of what an individual’s essential needs are – shelter, intellectual pursuit, meaningful work, companionship, nurturance, and above all, family – and yet Chris’s miscalculations are a death sentence, for the Teklanika simply cannot be crossed. Chris’s need to be an ascetic cowboy, alone on the road in pursuit of truth only he alone can perceive or appreciate, kills him, and Penn’s instinct as a storyteller is not to overtly criticize Chris’s choice to do without a map, to literally be lost in the Alaskan bush. Thus, on the surface Chris is noble and a tragic dreamer, and for many viewers, that emotionally-based interpretation satisfies. Penn feeds the mythology of Chris as repudiation of American Materialism with the image of him floating downstream, naked, arms extended and ankles together, Jesus on the cross, a perfect sacrifice to the venality of the world. Perhaps the image is also meant to allude to forgiveness, a theme fully broached during a conversation about love between Chris and Ron Franz on a scruffy hilltop overlooking the Salton Sea in Southern California, a more recessed Christian allusion since Jesus probably did not visit the Dead Sea during his ministry. Regardless of Penn’s thematic intentions, the motif of forgiveness reaches its zenith in the director’s imagined reunion between Chris and his parents during Chris’s death-hallucinations. Of course, the ending is made-up yet satisfying, very much Penn’s acknowledgement of Chris’s real-life parents, of whose honesty Penn speaks glowingly in the Charlie Rose interview. To consider Into the Wild as “an indictment” of Walt and Billie McCandless would be “a wild misinterpretation” of his film, Penn asserts. However, the sins of the parents are very much in evidence as are Chris’s wounds, yet so much better for the world had the actual Chris McCandless lived. Like Krakauer and Penn, I see personal parallels, ones which struck viscerally upon my first viewing of Into the Wild. In my early twenties, I spent as much time as I could backpacking the Cucamonga Wilderness Area of Southern California in the company of a maniacal 15

Krakauer, 196-197.

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cocker spaniel with four-paw drive, seeking an internal resolution to extreme family drama and a nagging sense that living might not have any meaning beyond the feeding of basic physical necessities. I remember with vivid clarity eating an extraordinarily tasty apple while sitting on a boulder. I did not encounter a bear, but I did run into a bad-tempered lynx, who did not surrender the trail until it was good and ready. I had my own life and death drama while clinging to an icy chute that would have launched me into oblivion, a not altogether undesirable option at the time. However, unlike Chris, I survived and made my way home, literally, intellectually, and spiritually. Before Chris’s sojourn became a desperate fight against starvation, he extolled his journey and the changes he anticipated. Krakauer writes of how Chris carved a proclamation into a plywood board covering a broken window in the “Magic Bus,” a relic of the Fairbanks City Transit System, transported to the Denali National Park by Yutan Construction and left for hunters and hikers when the company ceased its road building project: TWO YEARS HE WALKS THE EARTH. NO PHONE, NO POOL, NO PETS, NO CIGARETTES. ULTIMATE FREEDOM. AN EXTREMIST. AN AESTHETIC VOYAGER WHOSE HOME IS THE ROAD. ESCAPED FROM ATLANTA. THOU SHALT NOT RETURN, ‘CAUSE “THE WEST IS THE BEST.” AND NOW AFTER TWO RAMBLING YEARS COMES THE FINAL AND GREATEST ADVENTURE. THE CLIMACTIC BATTLE TO KILL THE FALSE BEING WITHIN AND VICTORIOUSLY CONCLUDE THE SPIRITUAL PILGRIMAGE. TEN DAYS AND NIGHTS OF FREIGHT TRAINS AND HITCHHIKING BRING HIM TO THE GREAT WHITE NORTH. NO LONGER TO BE POISONED BY CIVILIZATION HE FLEES, AND WALKS ALONE UPON THE LAND TO BECOME LOST IN THE WILD.

Chris signed his screed “ALEXANDER SUPERTRAMP, MAY 1992.”16 Would he have desired a different end? Who knows? What Penn adamantly asserts to Rose is that, for the director, Chris’s journey is “much less a flight from [an unhappy family situation] than a pursuit of things that he … that we all need.” Fair enough. Chris wants the wild and its challenges, resisting society’s imperative to trim and shape our hearts like so many bonsai plants. In a voiceover, Emile Hirsch as Chris quotes Primo Levi, declaring he desires immersion “in the most ancient of human conditions, facing blind, deaf stone alone.” It is clear that Chris seeks to test himself against the natural world’s ruthless equity and imperious 16

Krakauer, 163.

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stance, to find “[t]he dignity of room, the value of rareness.”17 Chris understands he “must take [himself] away … . [He] must retrieve [himself] from the middle of a trafficked way,”18 and wilderness provides the room and inaccessibility necessary to achieve the psychic healing he desires. Roderick Nash explores this possibility of sanctuary in a seemingly hostile wilderness as he explicates the etymology of the word: The usual dictionary sense of wilderness implies hostility on man’s part, but the term also has a favorable connotation … . On the one hand it is inhospitable, alien, mysterious, and threatening; on the other, beautiful, friendly, and capable of elevating and delighting the beholder. Involved, too, in this second conception is the value of wild country as a sanctuary in which those in need of consolation can find respite from the pressures of civilization.19

For Chris, the “pressures” he feels are external and internal; a parallel is Gretel Ehrlich writing in The Solace of Open Spaces, a true classic. After the death of her fiancé, Ehrlich flees the familiar, including friends, to grieve among strangers in the vastness of Wyoming, and she writes of how she lost “the distinction between background and foreground.”20 While she is writing in spatial terms, an embedded truth is that the exigencies of tending sheep on the often-harsh and windy plains subsume the past, its grief, its self-pity, even the solicitations of well-meaning friends. Chris’s background of an unhappy past does become secondary to the foreground of his day to day struggle to simply survive, and in Penn’s account, he does indeed find resolution and forgiveness because of his willingness to submit to the rigors of the wild, to let the world pare away illusion and indulgence until only the keen insistence of the body remains. The price he pays is absolute, yet it is fair to say Chris McCandless achieves happiness. Eddie Vedder’s lyrics “I’ve been wounded / I’ve been healed” certainly emphasize Chris’s joy at the moment he resolves to return to the world and presumably his family. Chris sets out to find the Stampede Trail, the route to Healy, the closest town, yet directly before reaching the Teklanika River and the grim understanding he is trapped, Chris encounters a nest of owls, which he sees as charming and amusing. However, Penn uses irony to create another message, one foreshadowing 17

Robinson Jeffers, “November Surf,” The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers: Volume Two, ed. Tim Hunt (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford UP, 1989), 159. 18 Castaneda, 67. 19 Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, Rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale UP, 2001), 4. 20 Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces (New York: Penguin, 1985), 2.

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Chris’s demise, for owls are traditional Native American symbols of death. Further, we see the hat knitted by Jan and secured to a sapling by Chris as a way to mark his original crossing point, surely an emblem of irretrievable distance from friends, family, and community. Perhaps it is in this moment that Chris finally internalizes the extraordinary pain of Jan’s forced separation from her son, Reno. Still, certainly the director rings the cautionary bell again, and in his existential drama, Chris is emblematic of what Robert Bellah calls “mythic individualism”: A deep and continuing theme in American literature is the hero who must leave society … in order to realize the moral good in the wilderness … . [However,] [w]hen it is not in and through society but in flight from it that the good is to be realized … the line between ethical heroism and madness vanishes, and the destructive potentiality of a completely asocial individualism is revealed.21

Wallace Stegner, writing in the essay “Variations on a Theme by Crevecoeur,” echoes Bellah by paraphrasing Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, who wrote with such disdain of frontier people. “It was Crevecoeur’s wild man, the borderer emancipated into total freedom, first in eastern forests and then in the plains and mountains of the West, who really fired our imaginations and still does. We have sanitized him somewhat, but our principal folk hero, in all shapes, good and bad, is essentially anti-social.”22 How is it possible that seeking only to be mobile and unattached, to be for nobody else and only for realizing one’s dreams, and to place oneself directly within the American tradition of the romantic loner is destructive? Krakauer and Penn touch on McCandless’s infatuation with the Transcendentalists, and one imagines Chris reading Emerson: “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against … every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree for the better securing of … bread to each shareholder to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater … . Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.”23 Penn clearly understands the concept of seeking individual redemption through the refining process of movement as well as intimacy with the land as he has Chris visit Salvation Mountain, a folk-art sculpture near Salton Sea in the desert of Southern California, accompanied by Tracy, a sixteen year old lovely who tries unsuccessfully to seduce Chris. 21

Robert Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart (Berkeley: U of California P, 1985), 47. Stegner, 106. 23 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, “Self-Reliance,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Richard Poirier (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990) 133. 22

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Still, as Bellah and Stegner tell us, the danger lies not in the journey but in the distance one travels away from the company of others in the form of personal relations and societal influences. The real Chris was no Theodore Kaczynski, yet he was rebellious and even overtly hostile to laws and conventions, perhaps because they might interfere with his quest or possibly because they symbolized the authoritarianism of Chris’s father. What is known is that local Jim Gallien, an experienced outdoorsman, picked up Chris as he was hitchhiking his way out of Fairbanks and dropped him off on the Stampede Trail. During the 200 mile journey, Gallien sized-up McCandless as very poorly prepared and tried to discourage the adventure, even asking if he had a hunting license. Chris replied, “‘Hell no … . How I feed myself is none of the government’s business. Fuck their stupid rules.’”24 In Chris’s crude declaration is an echo of the motto famously offered by Thoreau from Thomas Jefferson, “That government is best which governs least,” and while this part of the conversation between Gallien and McCandless is not in the movie, Penn offers several scenes representative of Chris’s dismissive attitude toward rules he regards as controlling. Of course, we see Chris closing his bank account and destroying all forms of identification, including his Social Security card and Virginia driver’s license. Further, Chris camps illegally, sits by a fire, and drums madly on a No Camping Allowed sign, which he has torn down and will most likely feed into the fire as it begins to die. Yet another is crossing the border into Mexico by steering his kayak through the spillway at Morelos Dam, and of course, the most dramatic example is Chris kayaking the Colorado without proper permits and helmet. In Wayne Westerberg, Chris has an employer and a soul mate, a man arrested by the FBI for illegally selling devices capable of stealing cable television programming, and Slab City, where Chris resides for a time with Rainy and Jan, is downright Libertarian. Even more off the grid is Oh-My-God Hot Springs, a refuge for “nudists and dope smokers” as Ron Franz says with horror during the film, a place nearby which McCandless camps as he makes final preparations for his trip to Alaska. This theme of extreme individuality may seem odd coming from a writer/director who has been so left-of-center in his public life, but Into the Wild does not seem an overtly political work. Rather, it is profoundly American in how it ties mobility to transformation and alludes to the tension in our culture between community and individual, a dichotomy which informs our political discourse but is not a product of it. What Penn ultimately shows is that balance is key; clearly, a tipping point exists where the family or community cannot irreparably alienate the 24

Krakauer, 6.

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individual yet neither can an individual exist alone indefinitely. Viewers can agree that Chris is a wounded soul and argue that Into the Wild is a tragic yet expansive epic that at its best creates dream-like, transcendent, Thoreauvian moments. We see an ecstatic communion with unfettered mobility leading to the “yonder” of frontier Alaska, its solitude, freedom, and unrelenting demands. Even so, rational viewers must disengage from the movie’s rhetoric and mentally dismiss the highly-embellished ending of the movie. Instead, let us consider the reality of a 23 year old man reduced to 67pounds; let us also imagine his final moments trapped and utterly alone in the “Magic Bus”; and finally, let us reflect on the cryptic epiphany Chris McCandless left behind: “Happiness only real when shared.”25

Bibliography Bellah, Robert, et al. Habits of the Heart. Berkeley, U of California P, 1985. Bergon, Frank and Zeese Papanikolas. Looking Far West: The Search for the American West in History, Myth, and Literature. New York: Mentor, 1978. Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton, NJ, Princeton UP, 1949. Castaneda, Carlos. Journey to Ixtlan. New York: Pocket Books, 1972. Ehrlich, Gretel. The Solace of Open Spaces. New York: Penguin, 1985. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Self-Reliance.” Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Richard Poirier. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990: 131-151. Grossman, Lev. “Nature Boys.” Time. September 13, 2007. Into the Wild. With Emile Hirsch, William Hurt, and Marcia Gay Harden. Dir. by Sean Penn. 2007. Jeffers, Robinson. “November Surf.” The Collected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers: Volume Two, 1928-1938. Ed. Tim Hunt. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1989: 159. Kirkus Reviews. Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer. January 1, 1996. Krakauer, Jon. Into the Wild. New York: Anchor Books, 1996. —. “Death of an Innocent.” Outside. January, 1990. Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher. “Taking Risk to Its ‘Logical’ Extreme.” The New York Times Book Review. January 4, 1996. Marshall, Bob. “The Problem of the Wilderness.” Scientific Monthly 30, no.2 (1930): 141-148. 25

Krakauer, 189.

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Mowry, Tim. “Swiss Woman Drowns in Teklanika River near ‘Into the Wild’ Bus.” Fairbanks Daily News Miner. August 17, 2010. Primeau, Ronald. Romance of the Road: The Literature of the American Highway. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press. 1996. Nash, Roderick. Wilderness and the American Mind. New Haven: Yale UP, Fourth Edition. 2001. Penn, Sean and Eddie Vedder. Interview with Charlie Rose. The Charlie Rose Show. 9 September 2007. Stegner, Wallace. “Living Dry.” Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs. New York: Penguin, 1992: 57-75. —. “Variations on a Theme by Crevecoeur.” Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs. New York: Penguin, 1992: 99-116.

CHAPTER FOUR “SHE LOOKED WEST”: ECO CRIME FICTION HITS THE ROAD IN MARTHA GRIMES’S BITING THE MOON CHARLOTTE BEYER UNIVERSITY OF GLOUCESTERSHIRE Introduction Martha Grimes and the West “She looked west” (Grimes 2000, 40). This phrase, taken from the American crime writer Martha Grimes’s 1999 novel Biting the Moon, alludes to the symbolic and physical significance with which this locus is invested. The American West represents a geographical location and a literary setting, but also represents an “extremely powerful idea” which “shimmers with abstractions such as frontier, opportunity, honor, individualism, and justice” (Witschi 2011a, 4). Increasingly, critics are drawing attention to the contradictions and marginalization inherent in traditional constructions of gender and the American West. My chapter reads Grimes’s Biting the Moon in the light of its location in the American West, and its creative engagement with that setting through the foci of gender, crime, and mobility. This discussion of Grimes follows two conceptual and generic areas of enquiry, eco crime fiction and the female road narrative, arguing that both are central to the reimagining of the American West proposed by Grimes’s novel1. Biting the Moon opens with the teen-age girl, Andi Oliver, waking up alone in a motel in Santa Fe, New Mexico, suffering from amnesia and unable to remember who she is or how she ended up there. Andi discovers that a man has brought her there, claiming she was his daughter and, suspecting he kidnapped her, goes on the run to get away from him. She heads towards New Mexico’s Sandia Mountains, where she finds an empty 1

These aspects of the text have also been noted in Dwyer (2010, 49), and CalhounFrench (2010, 181).

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cabin in the mountains. Here, she shelters for a time while rescuing coyotes caught in illegal traps, nursing the wounded animals back to health before releasing them. One night Andi breaks into a local chemist store to steal medical supplies for the animals she treats. Here, she meets and subsequently befriends another teenage girl, Mary Dark Hope, and this developing friendship is at the heart of the narrative. Having told Mary her story, Andi comes to the conclusion that they need to actively go looking for her kidnapper, rather than passively wait for his return. The two girls then embark on a road trip across the West from New Mexico in their search for Andi’s kidnapper, who she thinks of as Daddy, and who may know her real identity. On the road trip Andi and Mary engage further with animal welfare issues and uncover an illegal operation using exotic animals for “canned” hunts. Their enquiries eventually lead them to Idaho where they locate the sinisterly named Daddy, a local man called Harry Wine who organizes river rafting trips on the Salmon. Having caught Harry Wine in the act of producing child pornography, and having gained information about his other criminal activities, Andi confronts him and shoots him. Following this event, the girls’ road trip comes to an end. In the denouement, Andi travels on alone, while Mary returns to Santa Fe. Grimes’s novel is one of many recent literary representations of the American West. Bonney MacDonald observes that “Over the past twenty years, Americans have thought a lot about place. They’ve tried to counter the effects of a people on the move with a renewed attention to the local, to the regional” (2011, 506). In Andi Oliver, Grimes re-imagines the outlaw character stereotypically associated with the American West, both in terms of gender and age. The American Western novel typically features outlaw characters as well as characters in pursuit of justice (McLure 2007, 259), but in Biting the Moon, Grimes is “deconstructing the male outlaw role by casting women” (Mills 2006, 195). My chapter explores these gender-political dimensions of representing the American West, and examines Grimes’s strategy of what the critic Marian Scholtmeijer calls “establishing the legitimacy of outcast experiences” (233), by focusing on her use of genre fiction and the road narrative, and relations between women.

Theorizing the “New” American West Grimes’s Biting the Moon is a prominent example of how recent literary texts highlight the complex, even problematic, relationship between humanity and nature, self and other which has been a vital dimension of the history and representation of the American West. The

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West is traditionally portrayed through myths of violence and conflict but also as a place of newness, “a place of immense promise and growth” (Campbell 2000, 1). Recent critical work on the American West focuses on this multi-dimensionality, and on motifs related to identity and mobility. According to Neil Campbell: “In a postmodern West where the onedimensional notion of the frontier has been replaced by a more complex sense of multiple borders, multiculturalism, and diversity, the idea of hybridity has a particular contemporary resonance” (2000, 102). Hybridity is also an important dimension of Grimes’s approach to genre in Biting the Moon. Echoing Campbell’s idea of the postmodern West and its multidimensionality, Grimes’s text is in itself a hybrid form which mixes different genres and narrative motifs, prominent among which is crime and mystery fiction. The West, it seems, lends itself to this hybridity, as, contextually speaking, there are close historical links between the detective genre and the topos of the American West at almost every acknowledged point of significance in its history, the detective novel in the United States relies vitally on the American West – as subject, as topos, or even simply as setting –to aid in the process of evolution or reinvention (Witschi 2011b, 381).

Biting the Moon reflects this cultural-specific reliance on the American West as a symbolic site representing transformation. Nancy Pates’s discussion of “eco crime writers” (2001, 194) is useful to generate a reading of Grimes’s work, the range and complexity of genre fiction, and its use of setting. Eco crime can be defined as “a term that seeks to harness existing illegalities or environmental offences defined by municipal or international law, but also integrate diverse discourses to explore harms against, humans, non-humans, and the natural environment” (Walters 2011, 16). Jim Dwyer’s eco fiction criticism provides further useful contextualization of the environmental crime motif in Grimes (2010, 57) throws light on her representation of animal rights and environmental issues. Interestingly, Dwyer specifically lists Biting the Moon as an example of an “environmental action/ecodefense” text (2010, 49), thereby supporting this reading of Martha Gromes’s novel. Situating itself within recent critical engagements with the American West, my discussion of Grimes is influenced by feminism, crime fiction criticism, and environmentalism. Susan Kollin comments on these developments in ecocriticism “in recent years, a significant body of literature has emerged that examines the relation between local communities in the American West and larger global environmental developments” (2011, 515). Diana Calhoun-French’s recent analysis of

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Grimes’s Andi Oliver series and her animal rights preoccupations presents a useful critical assessment of the work for the purposes of my own analysis. Following Calhoun-French’s focus on the animal rights aspect of Biting the Moon, my enquiry extends this analysis, reading the text as an example of the emergent genre of eco crime fiction set in the American West. Examples of eco crime writers using settings in the West and treating environmental themes include Nevada Barr, Kirk Russell, Lise McClendon, and Jessica Speart (“Crime in the Great Outdoors”). The cultural critique articulated in Biting the Moon is closely linked to its examination of literary genre and the gender political dimensions of representing the American West. These concerns reflect wider developments, as Steve Glassman and Maurice O’ Sullivan note “At the same time that the regions writers have evolved, they have shown a shifting and growing understanding of everything from the complex heritages and psyches of the area to the codes and languages of its cultures” (2001a, 232). These critical approaches facilitate a foregrounding of the role of location and the American West, and prioritize Grimes’s focus on marginalized perspectives within American Western writing. The importance of this visibility is underlined by Campbell’s point that “to look again at the West is not just an academic game, but a political act concerned with survival, especially for all those previously omitted or silenced in the old histories” (2000, 9). A central aspect of the crime plot is the quest for justice, and in Biting the Moon this journey motif is promoted through the narrative convention of an adventure or road trip. Reading Grimes’s novel in the context of American road trip narratives and the West situates the text within a tradition which has long been used to articulate counter-cultural perspectives. Discussing influential depictions of the American road trip, such as Jack Kerouac’s 1957 novel On the Road, Campbell refers to the motif of “Kerouac’s countercultural road” (2000, 1) as being central to this tradition. More recently, a number of commentators, feminist critics included, have explored and interrogated the road narrative. The critical approaches specifically useful for addressing ideas of nomadic identities – what Neil Campbell refers to as “the Rhizomatic West” (2000, 164), and the symbolic and geographical dimensions of the road trip and the American West – include the works of critics such as Katie Mills, Deborah Paes de Barros and Kristi E. Siegel, who examine the significance of road narratives and the motif of mobility in women’s writing, including the American West. The spontaneous mobility of the road trip is central to Grimes’s story of female friendship. This reflects the critic Alexandra Ganser’s suggestion

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that “Journey and chance encounter, as they are narrated in the road text, offer the potential to imagine a community based on communication and negotiation, rather than on a bonding of homogenous identities on common ground and soil” (2009, 38). The road narrative offers the promise of change, according to Glassman and O’Sullivan “We can transform ourselves more easily on the fringes of society, at the edges of the country. And we can demonstrate those changes most clearly in the state of nature – the traditional American vision of Eden” (2001a, 230-1). However, this also brings a potentially unsettling open-endedness, reflected in the question posed by the character of researcher-expert Nils Anders in Biting the Moon “how are you going to find your way home if you don’t know where it is?”(2000, 61). The open ending of Grimes’s novel also reflects this sense of an ongoing quest. This “new space where new identities might be constructed and new communities forged” (Campbell 2000, 128) is represented through the American West of Grimes’s eco crime-road trip novel. The novel’s focus on marginalized perspectives is intrinsically linked with a Western locus. Together, my two focal points for the discussion of Grimes’s novel seek to address the complexity of the new American West. Rather than looking at different aspects of the American West (such as crime, gender, or mobility) in isolation, I explore the connections and links between these dimensions, and the tensions they produce, by focusing on Grimes hybrid genre fiction novel and its linguistic, thematic and generic constructions of the West.

Eco crime and the West Grimes’s Biting the Moon is an eco crime fiction concerned with mistreatment of animals and power abuses in the relationship between self and other in a wider sense. Biting the Moon is part of what Glassman and O’Sullivan describe as a growing body of crime fiction set in the Southwest “Far more than almost any other region […] the Southwest has witnessed a remarkable growth in women writing crime fiction. They have become not only the driving force in the area but they have also begun redefining the genre” (2001a, 232). This preoccupation with Southwestern endangered animals and wildlife is evident in Grimes’s novel, and its use of the central image of the coyote, a preoccupation is based on Grimes’s own sense of attachment and commitment to the land, as a resident of New Mexico who “lives in Santa Fe part-time” (Pate 2001, 195). As Pate further observes, this environmental consciousness is reflected in Biting the Moons location and title. The novel is “set in Santa Fe and Salmon,

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Idaho,” and “takes its title from a Zuni expression to describe a coyote’s howl “(Pate 2001, 195). Krista Comer comments on the stereotypical representations of the Southwest widely circulated through literature and popular culture, and refers to the “yipping coyotes” as part of that representation (1999, 124). Calhoun-French also links Grimes’s use of animal imagery to her wider concern with animal rights portrayed in genre fiction It is not surprising that empathy with animals, the eroticization of violence, animal rights, and the question of female agency should all find their way into mystery fiction – particularly that written by women. How could a genre so profoundly interested in the smallest questions of right and wrong not also be concerned with questions of justice writ large? (2010, 175)

My reading of Biting the Moon continues this line of enquiry, by proposing this novel as a Western eco narrative which employs, and alludes to, generic textual techniques and strategies from crime fiction in order to problematize a spectrum of harms. Reading the novel in terms of its attention to genre, generating of suspense and questioning ethos, brings out its discursive and thematic engagement with language and (human) nature. Through its eco crime plot, Grimes’s novel questions received ideas about criminality, considering a range of crimes, such as child abuse, abduction, physical and mental abuse, illegally trapping and killing wildlife, canned hunts of exotic big game, and dog fights for sport, into its investigation. I situate Biting the Moon within a growing body of recent crime and mystery writing which self-consciously questions and expands the gender political and aesthetic parameters of genre fiction. According to Dwyer “environmental concerns have become ever more common in the broad genres of romance, Western Americana, speculative fiction, and mysteries”(2010, viii). As it problematizes one-dimensional depictions of the American West, Grimes’s novel also exposes the tendency to romanticize the West, and to see nature through rose-tinted spectacles. In Biting the Moon, during the white-water rafting trip in the wilderness with Harry Wine, a male participant on the trip called Mixx, waxes lyrical about the natural environment “getting out of Dallas and back to nature. Here is the way Id like to live, just breathe in that air, none of those damned fumes we got to breathe all the time. This is the life. Simple, uncomplicated, basic” (Grimes 2000, 195). This idea of simplicity is far removed from the realities of the American West, as Grimes shows. One of Biting the Moons central arguments regarding the American West is that such romanticized constructions of nature are as one-

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dimensional as those that seek to colonize it. The novel stages a discussion between Andi, Mary, and Isabel, a Californian who has relocated to New Mexico, to interrogate definitions of the spiritual “After they’d talked for what seemed like hours about how spiritual a place Santa Fe was, how mystical, how haunting, it was Mary’s eyes that began to glaze over” (Grimes 2000, 77). In contrast, Andy’s relationship with the natural environment of the West reflects her response to rejection “It was as if – she liked to think this – the natural world was making way for her, inviting her in, where the man-made world had thrown her out” (Grimes 2000, 40). Calhoun-French describes how “much of the action of the novel involves Andy’s ongoing preoccupation with the plight of both wild and domestic animals, her attempts to rescue them, and her engagement of Mary in these efforts” (2010, 180). Thus, through these contrasting attitudes to the natural environment, Grimes interrogates the ways the American West and its landscapes have conventionally been represented and understood. The alternative outlaw-heroine and detective figure Andi Oliver is key to Biting the Moon as an eco crime fiction of the American West. Outlaw figures are commonly associated with the West, and critics such as Katie Mills have recently examined the portrayal of the female outlaw. I use the term detective to describe Andi’s function within the narrative, as someone seeking to solve crime and facilitate justice, but here operating outside official authorities, in the hard-boiled American crime fiction tradition. She is an unconventional detective figure female, a teen-ager, homeless, and not part of an official organisation or law enforcement. In many ways, Andi represents certain specifically American ideas of self-reliance and individualism (Corse 1996, 2), ideas also traditionally associated with the West. Grimes underlines this in her portrayal of Andi “It was as if Andy’s terrible experience had given her life focus […] It was as if she had pulled the battered parts of herself together and was now aimed, like an arrow” (2000, 94). Andi’s sidekick, Mary, is also a teen-age girl, orphaned, and like Andi, seeking to redefine herself because “The past was quicksand” (Grimes 2000, 82). Because of her age and gender, as a detective character Andi falls outside the traditions of conventional crime fiction. Grimes’s insistence on the validity of her characters and their experience contributes to resisting the tendency to marginalize and trivialize girlhood which Nash has observed in crime fiction and popular culture (2006, 2). Crime and mystery fictions typically employ villainous characters to personify contrasting positions of agency and values. In Biting the Moon, the sinister figure Daddy, or Harry Wine, who Andi is trying to trace, is the main villain. Andi’s quest for justice, and her determination to reveal Wine as her kidnapper, places Mary and her in jeopardy. Wine runs a white

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water rafting business taking parties down the dangerous river Salmon in Idaho (Grimes 2000,163). After succeeding in tracking Wine down, the girls decide to take part in his next white water rafting trip, in order to find out more about him. Described as “dangerously attractive” and “magnetic” (2000, 157), Wine’s handsome masculine exterior belies the killer and abuser beneath the rugged good looks. In fact, according to a character in the novel called Kite “Nothing bad goes on around here, but Harry Wines into it “(2000, 167). Wine is a violent man who has killed before, and who is driven by lust for power and domination. A character in the novel, called Reuel, reveals how Wine physically abused his ex-wife, and how he killed his faithful old dog in cold blood (2000, 220-1). Wine was also implicated in the suspicious circumstances surrounding the drowning of a young woman and her father during a white water rafting trip with Wine (2000, 215). Such actions and personality traits are of course the stereotypical characteristics of a crime fiction villain. Wines relationship to the natural environment is one of masculine dominance and alienation, as this description from the novel illustrates “He slouched against the tree as if he owned this place, yet he looked like he didn’t belong here “(2000, 193).Wine’s sense of entitlement, ownership and are mastery are reflected in his eco crime activities, such as arranging canned hunts where people pay money for going on shooting parties involving endangered and exotic animals (2000, 242), and generally behaving abusively towards animals. Disturbingly, his brutality also includes sexual abuse of children and domestic violence. Wines crimes thus cover a spectrum of violation and harms, the commonality being his ability to control and exploit the weak and powerless, according to Calhoun-French (2010, 182). Through these textual and thematic strategies, Grimes reimagines the novel of the American West, by generating a narrative which pays attention to marginalized perspectives and encourages identification with nature and wildlife, rather than conquest. Towards the end of Biting the Moon, in her showdown with Wine, Andi shoots him, an act portrayed almost as an act of self-defence “he started towards Andi […] Andi was still shooting as she walked towards him. Then the gun stopped. Mary had never seen so much blood” (Grimes 2000, 264). Certainly, the novel defends her action, as reflected in Reuel’s statement “if Andi hadnt shot the bastard, hed be around for a long time makin misery for us (2000, 267). The implication is that Wine had made so many enemies through his actions and behavior that the police would have trouble identifying his killer among all the many suspects (2000, 267). Biting the Moon’s solution of taking the law into one’s own hands

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seems in many ways a conventional American West approach. But the book suggests that the real crime is the fact that the police authorities knew about Wine, and did nothing (2000, 268), thereby demonstrating that in a white, male-dominated society those who are marginalized are denied access to power and justice. The image of the coyote, one of the conventional motifs of the American West, links eco crime and outsider experiences in Biting the Moon (Comer 1999, 124). This image of the coyote is familiar to the point of cliché, as Theresa Mélendes points out; “a popular subject for southwestern post cards which feature the animal as an emblem of the desert” (1987, 226). The eco crime activity portrayed in the novel includes the illegal killing of coyote pups (Grimes 2000, 95), illegal trapping of coyotes which maims them and causes suffering and death and illegal dog fighting (2000, 124). The novel exposes the callous disregard for the law where animals and the natural environment are concerned “In New Mexico, the law was you had to check the traps every thirty-six hours, but who paid any attention? An animal trapped stayed trapped” (2000, 3). In Biting the Moon, the coyote thus emerges as an alternative emblem of American Western specificity, reminding readers on the intrinsic symbolic and physical significance of the American Western landscape and its animal wildlife and ecology in defining the nations identity. Biting the Moon extends this theme by suggesting a symbolic connection between Andi and the coyotes as fellow outsiders. As Mélendes argues, twentieth-century American literature has frequently made the coyote “a symbol of the outcast or the fierce individualist who is misunderstood by society” (1987, 227). Other characters in the novel also identify Andi with the figure of the outlaw, as well as with the folklore character Coyote. As Mary’s housekeeper warns, only half in jest “You be careful of her, she’s tricky. Like Coyote” (Grimes 2000, 74). Andi reflects these anti-heroic qualities, which are associated with the coyotes she is trying to save, a trait which can also be linked to the American tradition in crime fiction. She regularly demonstrates the sort of irreverence and disregard for authority that characterizes the American hard-boiled private eye as “outside and often against the authorized centers of power, in a modernized version of the American tradition that values acting out against the institutional centers of government and big business” (Walton and Jones 1999, 190). Andi empathizes with other outlaws who, like her, have been hurt and robbed of their identities and dignity by those who abuse the power and privileges afforded to them by patriarchal society. She identifies with the coyotes which are outsiders like her, defined and treated as vermin, and

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despised because of their reluctance to be tamed. Likewise, Mary, who has suffered traumas of her own, feels drawn to Andi, recognising a kindred spirit. In a capitalist society which defines and classifies everything, human and animal, according to its value, the act of placing oneself outside those systems is a potential challenge and threat to existing binary oppositions. Appropriately, in the novel nature and the animal kingdom are also seen to deliver their own kind of justice against those who abuse them, when the dog Jules turns on his abuser “Jules launched himself at Krueger and, as the man yelled, fastened his teeth in Krueger’s shoulder” (Grimes 2000, 288). Through Andi, Biting the Moon explores “the border between the law and lawfulness, between social norms and deviancy, between social security and individual risk” (Walton and Jones 1999, 191). The novel invites these consideration of ethical questions regarding the nature of abuse and discourses of rights, exposing the tensions in crime fiction between what Walton and Jones call “the possibilities of individual agency [and] the limitations of that agency” (1999, 208) . Grimes’s eco crime novel depicts an American West where female relations and the natural environment provide at least a temporary respite from male violence and an alternative to what Palmer terms “the oppressive facets of a patriarchal society” (1989, 126). Portraying young women as outlaws, and as heroes and solvers of crime, not just victims of crime (Fogle 2010, 3), Grimes examines marginalized and atypical hero characters who are survivors, self-reliant and resourceful – characteristics commonly associated with American values. The American West provides a powerful setting for the novels eco crime plot, in which the plight of the areas nature and wild animals and the abuse of women and children become the linchpin of its problematization of ethics and agency.

American Outsiders on the Road Biting the Moon employs the road narrative motif as a central and transformative element of its eco crime plot. Calling the novel a “quirky road adventure,” Calhoun-French states that; “the girls journey is literally a search for Andi’s identity, but it is also figuratively a journey of discovery for Mary” (2010, 181) The road trip in Biting the Moon is enabled through a thrilling if illicit deception Mary’s older sister who died, had a drivers licence and a car which the girls take, to go to Idaho in search of Daddy and some answers to what happened to Andi. The “myths of mobility” are specifically American literary and cultural motifs, “enacted in the road genre,” according to Ganser (2009, 16). Ronald

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Primeau explains “Because many conventional road heroes are outsiders politically or socially, the genre has developed against the grain of the dominant norms” (1996, 116). Biting the Moon is an example of how, in the 1990s revisioning of the road narrative, female characters were empowered by literally being put in the driving seat (Mills 193). Andi represents an alternative, non-fixed feminine position, in her refusal of domestification, a vital quality identified by Mills “Road narratives usually celebrate rebels who defy the prohibitions that immobilize others” (2006, 20). These are the qualities which we have come to associate with Andi, and also to some extent her companion, Mary. The road trip narrative engenders suspense and lends dynamic movement to the novel. As well as portraying the process of driving across the West, Biting the Moon includes activities such as white water rafting, showing that women’s detective fiction uses setting and symbolic locations, such as the American West, “for the enactment of the multiplex, tension-filled drama of the patriarchal power-struggle between the sexes” (Palmer 1989, 70). Grimes’s novel self-consciously alludes to the road tradition, through its intertextual reference to the film Private Idaho; a film also centered on a quest motif and uses the road narrative convention. An exchange between Andi and Mary, as they reflect on the symbolic significance of their road trip to Idaho, echoes these issues and reinforces intertextual allusion to the film “Looking down the river, she sighed. Maybe this will be our own Idaho. Private Idaho, said Mary. Our own private Idaho.” (Grimes 2000, 119). In portraying the diversity of the American West, Biting the Moon reenacts a number of classic road motifs and locations, such as the roadside diner, where weary travellers purchase refreshments, places with instantly recognisable or realistic names, such as the Roadside Runner and the trailer park (2000, 144). This is done, partly as an acknowledgement of the road narrative tradition but also to open up an exploration of the symbolic and physical locations associated with Western road trips. In American literature, the road motif stands for the questioning and transformative powers of the imagination, conjuring up alternative possibilities restricted by the status quo. Biting the Moon’s Mary articulates these aspects in her private reflections on the freedom to roam “Mary didn’t say it, but such a trip sounded like sheer heaven to her. Imagine being allowed to do it on your own “(Grimes 2000, 24). For the two girls, the road and the West provide “adventure and escapism” (Glassman and O’Sullivan 2001, 228). Biting the Moon also reflects a specifically female revisioning of the road narrative, as Ganser describes “In women’s road stories, the American highways mythical, iconic status, signifying the heroic quest for freedom –

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reproduced time and time again by the adventurous hero’s flight from domesticity – is questioned and challenged, rejected and revised” (2009, 14) In Biting the Moon, Andi echoes these ideas, as she reflects “Learning to drive, its like being baptized; its like a Vision Quest”(Grimes 2000, 72). The road narrative engenders a reimagining of the self, even when this process seems daunting or threatening to the stability of identity. In Biting the Moon, Mary ponders the instability of self when on the road “She closed her eyes, and tried to imagine waking up in unfamiliar surroundings, wondering where she was, wondering who she was, thinking it a dream, and finding the dream didn’t end” (99, 201). The road trip offers opportunities for companionship, excitement, and a sense of purpose mixed with transgression, as Mary’s thoughts reveal “The thought of such a trip was exciting; all she needed to do was work up the nerve for it” (2000, 70). At other times the road is portrayed as a lonely, alien place to be, where the individual – especially if female – may be vulnerable to physical violence, including of a sexual nature. The kidnapping and abandonment of Andi in a motel room with amnesia is a case in point. Furthermore, the natural environment of the American West provides additional suspense and escapism on the road in Grimes “WILDEST RIVER IN AMERICA, said the brochure” (2000, 135). Grimes’s inclusion of the white water rafting and wilderness locations presents an engagement with a variation on the road theme, expanding the parameters of this quintessential American quest narrative, and revealing other dimensions of the American West and journeying. These serve to challenge conventional constructions of gender and of femininity as fragile and adverse to risktaking. Such ambivalent, at times contradictory, ideas reflect the multiplicity of allusions associated with the road and the American West. As well as registering differences of gender and sexuality, the road trip in Biting the Moon serves to introduce the theme of class and cultural diversity in relation to the American West. Angus K. Gillespie and Jay Mechling state that “One source of anxiety among the Americans is the difference between people categorized as Americans, differences along lines of gender, race, ethnicity, age, and social class” (1987a, 3). Thus, in Biting the Moon the Russian migrant Sergei Yavoshenko, who Andi and Mary meet in a trailer park when searching for Harry Wine, represents another culturally marginalized character, signalled symbolically through his disfigurement (Grimes 2000, 150). Here, we see that outsiders and mavericks on the edges of society find momentary liberation on the road, and importantly, also gain acceptance from the natural environment “She stopped again for a minute to sit on a flat rock that seemed so perfectly

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smooth and clean it could have been waiting for some tired traveller” (2000, 40). Adventure and suspense represent one aspect of Biting the Moon’s Western road narrative. Trauma and hurt signify a darker, but equally significant dimension. Deborah Paes De Barros argues that trauma acts as a catalyst for the road narrative in contemporary literature “the sense that something happened and the world has become dramatically altered as a result” (2004, 127). Furthermore, De Barros concludes, the road, and the act of embracing a nomadic sense of self becomes a means of resisting oppression and silence, and the damaging effects of trauma “Within this post-apocalyptic context- the context of an irreversibly altered world – the road emerges as a site of recognition and reckoning” (2004, 127). Andi’s story reflects these ideas, illustrating them through fictional means. The American West and the road afford an opportunity to rewrite the narrative of self-hood. Commenting on this strategy, Ganser notes “By the very act of writing the female subject out of the home and onto the road, these narratives deterritorialize femininity and revise the discursively masculinized road space” (2009, 31). By embracing mobility and attempting to confront the origins of trauma, Biting the Moon also seeks to counteract Andi’s’ position as victim “There’s one way to keep him from looking for me […] Looking for him”(2000, 57). This move transforms her position, from being a passive victim of crime, to becoming an active detective, tracking a criminal. Similarly, Mary’s orphanhood, and her maternal and sororial deprivation, presents a past trauma, the devastating effects of which are ongoing. For both characters, then, the road, and the justice pursuit which constitutes the driving force behind the road trip, is evidence of attempts to assert an active, self-determined female subjectivity and a means to mediate and overcome trauma. Using a split narrative strategy, the novel presents different outcomes for the two girls. Andi journeys on, as she flees from the shooting of Wine, hitching a ride and continuing on her quest, rather than be judged, and compartmentalized as insane or criminal (2000, 266). Mary, in contrast, goes home to her old life in New Mexico. This split narrative strategy allows Grimes to portray both aspects of the road the inevitable return, and being subsumed back into patriarchal structures, and a utopian quest for justice and freedom. Grimes’s novel suggests a re-evaluation or reinvention of the female self in the American West, and language is central to this quest. Language and self-naming become a way of establishing a crucial connection with the American West, as Andi renames herself after a geographical location in New Mexico, chosen intuitively. The initials A.O. on her backpack,

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which inspire her naming, are gender non-specific and open to interpretation (2000, 8)2. Suffering from amnesia, Andi rejects conventionally feminine names, instead discerning a hidden name inscribed in the American Western landscapes which surround her “it had leapt at her like none of the Ann’s and Alice’s had done” (Grimes 2000, 8). She detects the name Andi inscribed in the location “Sandia Crest. It was hidden in the text of the mountains […] the name she had given herself” (2000, 8).3 The feminist preoccupation with self-naming is echoed in this affirmative act, drawing on alternative linguistic traditions. The symbolic nuances of Mary’s name – Mary Dark Hope – are equally suggestive. Dale Spender, in a feminist critique of man-made language, argues that “males, as the dominant group, have produced language, thought, and reality […] In order to live in the world, we must name it” (1998, 97). Andi’s act of renaming herself reflects the recognition that “Names are essential for the construction of reality for without a name it is difficult to accept the existence of an object, an event, a feeling. […] By assigning names we impose a pattern and a meaning” (Spender 1998, 97). Thus, the novel’s critique of the gender political dimensions of language is woven into its portrayal of South-Western American settings. The element of selfreflexivity in Biting the Moon contributes to the novel’s emphasis on the constructedness of identity, and the significance of language and memory in creating reality. The theme of female renaming is underlined by the novel’s emphasis on female friendship and relations between women, a topic conventionally marginalized in traditional depictions of the American West. Karen Hollinger explains the importance of this shift which “challenges articulations of conventional femininity in two ways by portraying female friendship as an alternative to women’s complete dependence on men and by qualifying traditional concepts of feminine passivity” (1998, 8). Recent portrayals have reclaimed the American West and female friendship, through filmic representations such as Thelma & Louise. According to Bernie Cook, “the original poster for Thelma & Louise emphasizes female friendship, the possibilities of the open road, and the appeal of the landscape and associated myths and meanings of the American West” (2007, 16). The allusion in Biting the Moon to Thelma & Louise has been noted by Calhoun-French, who describes the texts structure and narrative 2

Calhoun-French also comments on the significance of the initials on the backpack, and adds “she fashions for herself the name Andi Olivier” (2010, 180), and the changing of the last name to Oliver. 3 Later on, in the confrontation scene with Harry Wine, Wine cruelly mocks Andi’s search for identity and the initials on her backpack (Grimes 2000, 261-2)

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drive as “Part quest, part quirky road adventure humorously reminiscent of Thelma and Louise” (Calhoun-French 2010, 181). According to Jessica Enevold “Thelma & Louise performs, within a long-established heterosexual institution, an attack on conventional patterns of chauvinist male behavior toward females” (2004, 77). In an echo of this idea from Thelma & Louise, when Andi confronts Harry Wine as her abductor and suspected abuser, the novel indirectly demonstrates the difficulties encountered in achieving justice in feminist revisions of crime fiction and road narratives, in the confrontation with personified patriarchal power. Equally, Grimes reinforces the importance of female relations and mobility in re-imagining the American West. Therefore, the return from the road is a generic convention and reader expectation (Primeau 1996, 1), but at the same time it brings closure and, as such, is fraught with ambivalence. This sense of dichotomy is characteristic of Grimes’s depiction of the American West it is a place of female self-naming and self-discovery, but also a place of victimisation and marginalisation. In representing the American West, Grimes’s version is inevitably subjective. Her focus on eco crime and mobility engenders a narrative of marginalized perspectives, but at the same time reveals the continued tensions within conflicting value systems and remaining defined by and circumscribed by generic expectations.

Conclusion The West as Catalyst for Change Through its hybrid approach, Biting the Moon seeks to move beyond generic restrictions and boundaries, in order to take the American Westbased eco crime/road novel in new directions. Biting the Moon remains a questioning narrative which refuses to be pinned down by, or restricted to, one generic dimension, in the same way that the novels protagonist Andi continues questing, uncompromising and driven by ideas and aims which she feels passionate about. Grimes’s generic experimentation reflects Hal Crimmels’ assertion that “This literature and criticism of the New West has expanded the critical canon” (2011, 368). Grimes’s Biting the Moon expands the parameters of both eco crime, mystery fiction and the road narrative, by principally focusing on female experience and the American West, a dimension which has traditionally been marginalized within these literary genres and within conventional constructions of the American West as a masculine space. Witschi comments on recent women crime writers and their engagement with the American West, seeing this as a reinvention of both genre and setting “The American West, though, has

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fostered a particularly strong collection of detective series that expand the genres intersecting interests in gender, region, and racial identity” (Witschi 2011b, 388). The challenge to conventional gender codes associated with the American West is important, Glassman and O’ Sullivan argue, since this location has typically been thought of in masculine terms “Poised between encroaching civilization and the traditional forces of the wilderness, the hero must embody characteristics of both as he becomes the catalyst in society’s attempt to tame the west” (2001a, 230). However, as we have seen, in Biting the Moon, these male-identified taming narrative patterns of conquest and possession are exposed and critiqued, and alternative, non-exploitative ways of being human and relating to the other are suggested and promoted. As a genre fiction narrative, Grimes’s novel has its flaws, structurally and conceptually. According to Calhoun-French, commentators have suggested that Grimes is trying to do too many things, and that the writing is uneven and the plot unrealistic (2010, 189). Such polemical and at times controversial content as that of Biting the Moon can alienate, and some readers and reviewers have responded negatively (Calhoun-French 2010, 189). Equally, as a crime fiction, Biting the Moon invites interrogation and criticism of the definition and application of justice it proposes. Having said that, there is a tradition in American crime fiction of the detective taking the law into his or her own hands and redefining criminality and justice to accommodate subjective preoccupations – Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep is a prominent example of the detective “liv[ing] by their own moral code” (Witschi 385b). In Biting the Moon, Grimes’s decision to have the detective figure shoot the criminal, arguably in self-defence, echoes recent feminist reconfigurations of this motif, as in Thelma & Louise. Witschi argues that this questioning attitude to the administration of justice is an important dimension of crime fiction “The detective novel is less a genre focused on the (re)establishment of order than it is about asking questions about the limits of order and about asserting alternative possibilities” (2011b, 392). This emphasis on independence and “alternative possibilities” is also central to the Western landscape and maverick female characters that the novel portrays, as Glassman and O’ Sullivan state “This rugged landscape has always married adventure and escapism with those themes at the core of the American experience individualism, identity, freedom, responsibility, relationships, maturity” (2001a, 228). Furthermore, on the issue of alternative definitions of justice, Grimes’s novel has a consciousness-raising dimension to it which links it to other eco fictions, using the crime genre “as a vehicle for discussing animal

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welfare issues” (Calhoun-French 2010, 189). With writers like Nevada Barr and Kirk Russell joining Martha Grimes in the eco crime fiction field, it seems a growing body of genre literature is set on tackling politically and culturally sensitive issues, and portraying outsider detective figures or outlaws who do not fit the conventional generic mould. In this chapter, I have argued that Grimes’s Biting the Moon represents a hybrid kind of fiction portraying the American West and engaging with its nature, by questioning what that is. The phrase from the novel “she looked west” illustrates this preoccupation with the American West as a symbolic and geographical location, but also a projection of desires and countercultural visions. The novel’s title, Biting the Moon, alludes to the novel’s eco crime motif, but it first and foremost serves as an illustration of the coyote as an enduring literary and cultural signifier of the American Southwest (Comer 1999, 124). In the figure of Andi Oliver, who is closely identified with the coyotes of the American West, Grimes has created an anti-establishment itinerant detective heroine, a character whose attitude and lifestyle choices are shaped by American Western environments and values.

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Cameron D., ed. 1998. The Feminist Critique of Language, A Reader. London Routledge. Print. Campbell, N. and A. Kean. 1997, rpt. 2001. American Cultural Studies An Introduction to American Culture. London: Routledge. Print. Campbell, N. 2000. The Cultures of the American New West. London: Routledge. Print. —. 2008. The Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational, Global, Media Age. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P. Carragan, A. 2012. “‘Justice is on our side’? Animals People, Generic Hybridity, and Eco-Crime.” In Journal of Commonwealth Literature, June 2012 47. 2 159-174. Print. Cook, B. ed., 2007. Thelma & Louise Live!: The Cultural Afterlife of an American Film. Austin: U of Texas P. Print. —. 2007. “Something’s Crossed Over in Me”: New Ways of Seeing Thelma & Louise. In Thelma & Louise Live! The Cultural Afterlife of an American Film, ed. B. Cook, 7-42.Austin: U of Texas P. Print. —. 2008. Women Writing Nature: A Feminist View. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Comer, Krista.2011. “New West, Urban and Suburban Spaces, Postwest.” In A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West, ed. N. S. Witschi, 244-260.Chichester, UK: Wiley. Print. —. 1999. Landscapes of the New West Gender and Geography in Contemporary Women’s Writing. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P. Print. Corse, S. M. 1996. Nationalism and Literature The Politics of Culture in Canada and the United States. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP. Print. Crime in the Great Outdoors Park Rangers, Fish & Game, & Ecological Causes . Supper Sleuth Booklist.N.d. Lucius Beebe Memorial Library. [Accessed September 2012] Web Crimmel, H. 2011. “The Apple Doesn’t Fall Far from the Tree.” Western American Literature and Environmental Literary Criticism. In A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West, ed. Nicolas S. Witschi, 367-379. Chichester,UK: Wiley. Print. Dwyer, J.2010. Where The Wild Books Are: A Field Guide to Ecofiction. Reno: U of Nevada P. Print. Enevold , J. 2004. “The Daughters of Thelma and Louise: New? Aesthetics of the Road.” In Gender, Genre, and Identity in Women’s Travel Writing, ed. Kristi Siegel, 73-96. New York Peter Lang. Print. Fogle, S. D., ed. 2010. Martha Grimes Walks Into a Pub Essays on a Writer with a Load of Mischief. Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Print.

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—. 2010. Introduction. In Martha Grimes Walks Into a Pub Essays on a Writer with a Load of Mischief, ed. Sarah D. Fogle, 1-6.Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Print. Ganser, A. 2009. Roads of Her Own: Gendered Space and Mobility in American Women’s Road Narratives 1970-2000. New York: Rhodopsin. Print. Garner, Robert. 2013. A Theory of Justice for Animals:Animal Rights in a Nonideal World. New York: Oxford UP. Gillespie, A. K.and J. Mechling, , eds. 1987. American Wildlife in Symbol and Story. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P. Print. —. 1987a. Introduction. In American Wildlife in Symbol and Story, eds. A. K. Gillespie and J. Mechling, 1-14. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P. Print. Glassman, S. and O’ Sullivan, M., eds., 2001. Crime Fiction and Film in the Southwest: Bad Boys and Bad Girls in the Badlands. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State U Popular P. Print. —. 2001a. Conclusion: “Westward Ho.” In Crime Fiction and Film in the Southwest Bad Boys and Bad Girls in the Badlands, eds. Steve Glassman and Maurice O’ Sullivan, 228-234. Bowling Green, OH Bowling Green State U Popular P. Print. Grimes, M. 2000 [1999]. Biting the Moon. New York: Onyx. Print. Hollinger, K. 1998. In The Company of Women: Contemporary Female Friendship Films. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. Print. Johnson, B. H. 2007. Making of the American West: People and Perspectives. Perspectives in American Social History Series. Santa Barbara, CA:.ABC-CLIO. Print. Johnson, M.S. 2007. Hunger for the Wild: America’s Obsession With the Untamed West. Lawrence: UP of Kansas. Kollin, S. 2011. “The Global West: Temporality, Spatial Politics, and Literary Production.” In A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West, ed. N. S. Witschi, 514-27.Chichester,UK: Wiley. Print. Lape, Noreeg Groover. 2000. West of the Border the Multicultural Literature of the Western American Frontiers. Athens: Ohio UP. MacDonald, B. 2011. “Ranging Over Stegner’s Arid West. In A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West, ed. N. S. Witschi, 499-513. Chichester, UK: Wiley. Print. McLure, H. 2007. “Bad Men, Unsexed Women, and Good Citizens: Outlaws and Vigilantes in the American West.” In Making of the American West People and Perspectives. Perspectives in American Social History Series, ed. B. H. Johnson, 259-282.Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. Print.

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Macpherson, H. S. 2000. Women’s Movement: Escape As Transgression in North American Feminist Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Mélendes, T. 1987. “The Coyote.” In American Wildlife in Symbol and Story, eds. A. K. Gillespie, and J. Mechling, 203-234. Knoxville U of Tennessee P. Print. Mills, K. 2006. The Road Story and the Rebel Moving Through Film, Fiction, and Television. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2006. Print. Nash, I. American Sweethearts: Teenage Girls in Twentieth-Century Popular Culture. Bloomington: Indiana UP. Print. Pate, N. 2001. A Flash of Green Fighting the Good Fight in the Bad Lands. In Crime Fiction and Film in the Southwest Bad Boys and Bad Girls in the Badlands, eds. S. Glassman and M. O’ Sullivan. 190-196. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State U Popular P. Print. Palmer, P. 1989. Contemporary Women’s Fiction: Narrative Practice and Feminist Theory. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Print. Primeau, R. 1996. Romance of the Road: The Literature of the American Highway. Bowling Green, OH Bowling Green State U Popular P. Print. Rishoi, C.. 2003. From Girl to Woman: American Women’s Coming-ofAge Narratives. Albany: State U of New York P. Scholtmeijer, M. 1995. “The Power of Otherness: Animals in Women’s Fiction.” In Animals and Women: Feminist Theoretical Explorations, eds. C. J. Adams and J. Donovan, Second printing 1999: 231-262. Durham, NC: Duke UP. Print. Siegel, K. 2004. Gender, Genre, and Identity in Women’s Travel Writing. New York: Peter Lang. Print. Spender, D. 1998. “Extracts from Man-Made World.” In The Feminist Critique of Language: A Reader, ed. D. Cameron, 93-99. London: Routledge. Print. Unger, N. C. 2012. Beyond Nature’s Housekeepers American Women in Environmental History. New York: Oxford UP. Walters, R. 2011. Eco Crime and Genetically Modified Food. New York: Routledge. Print. Walton, P. L. and M. Jones. 1999. Detective Agency Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition. Berkeley: U of California P. Print. Witschi, N. S., ed. 2011. A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West. Chichester, UK: Wiley. Print. Witschi, N. S. 2011a. “Imagining the West.” In A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West, ed. N. S. Witschi, 3-10. Chichester, UK: Wiley. Print.

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—. 2011b. “Detective Fiction.” In A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West, ed. N. S. Witschi, 380-394. Chichester, UK: Wiley. Print.

CHAPTER FIVE THERE WILL BE BLOOD: CAPTAIN AHAB IN THE OIL FIELDS OF CALIFORNIA LEONARD ENGEL QUINNIPIAC UNIVERSITY Suppose Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab had not drowned in the furious, three-day battle with his mighty adversary Moby Dick. Suppose, in fact, he had actually killed the whale and survived the bloody ordeal with just the loss of a leg, then returned to Nantucket with the Pequod ‘s hull filled with barrels of the whale’s oil. Would he be pleased with his triumph? Would it have satisfied his desire for revenge and would he have been able to live out the rest of his life with the wife and son he speaks so tenderly about to 1st mate Starbuck just prior to the final three days of the chase for the ubiquitous white whale. I think not! It’s hard to imagine any lessening of the powerful depiction Melville renders of Ahab’s obsession. One way to consider director Paul Thomas Anderson’s compelling film There Will Be Blood is precisely through the lens of obsession and its tragic effects on human behavior. In examining the nature of obsessive characters, especially as displayed by his driven protagonist Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day Lewis), Anderson is suggesting that such characters are rarely, if ever, satisfied, especially when their obsession focuses on key elements in our capitalist economy. Had he lived, I seriously doubt Ahab would have been satisfied with his revenge, would have been happy, nor would have made the people close to him happy, and he would most likely have come to a sad end, if not the apocalyptic one he experiences in Moby Dick. In There Will Be Blood, Anderson depicts his own epic version of a successful Ahab, one who has achieved his goal and risen to power during the oil rush in the late 19th and early 20th century American West, but it is not a pretty picture. Like Moby Dick, There Will Be Blood dismantles mythologies of our success stories and deeply undermines the notion of

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the American Dream, especially as it is seen in the expansion of the West. Daniel Plainview has been called an American primitive and the film an “epic American nightmare … belching fire and brimstone and damnation to Hell. It tells a story of greed and envy of biblical proportions – reverberating with Old Testament sound and fury and New Testament evangelicalism” (Dargis E 1). And the “Old Testament sound and fury” certainly resonates with the portrait Melville paints of Ahab. Anderson has loosely based his film on Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil; in addition, there are striking resemblances between his Daniel and the title character in Frank Norris’s 1899 novel McTeague, but the epic and biblical power he has invested in Daniel can be traced directly back to Melville’s Captain Ahab.1 The portrait of the obsessed Ahab is such a fixture in our culture that even if one has not read Melville’s novel, one can imagine Ahab through the many pop culture references to him. One film critic has suggested that Daniel bears more than a passing resemblance to the notorious Captain (Denby106), especially in his egotism and command, stumping around on a bad leg which was never properly attended to when he had a serious fall in one of his mine shafts early in the film. What Anderson is projecting in Daniel is a modern version of a very American Ahab, a power hungry tycoon, filled with paranoia and manipulation. However, his success, instead of satisfying him, has made him more obsessive, more demonic, more dangerous to his fellow humanity. In Moby Dick, Ahab’s obsession eventually takes the Pequod’s crew to the bottom of the ocean; in Blood we see only a few of Daniel’s victims, but a number of scenes indicate that he has ruined many in the course of building his empire. The destructive power of obsession is a dominant theme in both Sinclair’s novel and in There Will Be Blood, especially as it is linked to the driving force of capitalism. In Anderson’s film, Daniel’s obsession creates his future but destroys it as well. In point of fact, the film is an elegiac 1 In the thirty-eighth year of Asa king of Judah, Ahab son of Omri became king of Israel, and he reigned in Samaria over Israel twenty-two years. Ahab son of Omri did more evil in the eyes of the LORD than any of those before him. He not only considered it trivial to commit the sins of Jeroboam son of Nebat, but he also married Jezebel daughter of Ethbaal king of the Sidonians, and began to serve Baal and worship him. He set up an altar for Baal in the temple of Baal that he built in Samaria. Ahab also made an Asherah pole and did more to provoke the LORD, the God of Israel, to anger than did all the kings of Israel before him. In Ahab’s time, Hiel of Bethel rebuilt Jericho. He laid its foundations at the cost of his firstborn son Abiram, and he set up its gates at the cost of his youngest son Segub, in accordance with the word of the LORD spoken by Joshua son of Nun. (1 Kings, 16: 29-34 NIV).

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Western about the vanishing American frontier, giving way to, among other things, the relentless power of the extractive industries. One thing Anderson makes clear, almost immediately, is the stunning contrast between the lush, stark beauty of California’s wild landscapes and those that are dotted with oil wells and derricks. He also savagely dissects the role of religion in exploiting and converting those lush landscapes into fetid pools of oil. The main characters in both There Will Be Blood and Moby Dick are master manipulators of religious rhetoric and platitudes to satisfy their own obsessive ends. The first and most obvious parallel between Ahab and Daniel is seen early in the film when Daniel injures his leg, the effects of which remain with him until the end. The injury occurs while Daniel is searching for silver and falls in a mine shaft, and although the fall does not result in his visible anger, it does intensify his determination when he begins to search for oil a few years later. On the other hand, Ahab’s injury is the result of Moby Dick’s biting off his leg, which has infuriated Ahab, a fury that increases during the course of his quest for the whale and magnifies his determination to strike back, to strike through the “pasteboard mask,” which the whale represents to him (Melville 159). Another important parallel between the two works is the image of striking through a surface or outer crust with a sharp, pointed instrument in order to retrieve the oil below the surface. In There Will Be Blood, it is necessary to pierce through the surface of the earth to get to the black gold that exists underneath; in Moby Dick, the harpooner must pierce through the outer skin and then through about six inches of blubber to strike the vital organ that will lead the whale to his “flurries” and, eventually, to his death. Then begins the tedious process of stripping the blubber off the whale, cutting it into “horse pieces,” which will then be “tried out” in two large metal pots (known as the tryworks). As the blubber boils, bubbles, and gradually disintegrates, the oil rises to the surface of the water, is ladled into barrels, and then stored in the hold of the ship. Coincidentally, when Daniel and his crew make an initial strike, as the oil comes to the surface, it appears to be boiling as it gushes out of the earth, similar to the boiling and bubbling oil on the surface of the trypots before it is ladled off. A somewhat ironic parallel between the book and the film is the contrast between the first appearance of each of the main characters. We do nto see Ahab for well over a hundred pages of the novel as Melville keeps him mysteriously sequestered. However, we feel his presence, thumping around on the quarterdeck with his whalebone leg, and we hear about him – much of it ominous. Captain Peleg, one of the self-righteous, God-fearing, capitalistic owners of the Pequod – “fighting Quakers”

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(Melville 82), Ishmael calls them – refers to Ahab as a “grand, ungodly, god-like man,” who has been to colleges and “among cannibals.” However, believing him to be such a good captain, able to find more whales than any of the other captains, the owners are only a little bothered by his moody reticence and increasingly dour demeanor, especially evident since the recent loss of his leg. His ability to convert whales into oil and fill their coffers, overrides any qualms they may have about his increasingly puzzling behavior and slightly altered personality. Peleg also informs Ishmael of Ahab’s marriage, in his advanced age, to a “sweet, resigned girl,” and of the child she has just borne him. Ahab may be “stricken, blasted,” Peleg says, but he “has his humanities” (Melville 87). Ahab also has, in addition to this new son, an adopted son, on the ship – little Pip, the cabin boy, whose mind has been disrupted when he unwittingly jumps out of 2nd mate Stubb’s whaling boat, while it is pursuing a whale. Contrastingly, although we see Daniel from the beginning of the film, we do not hear him speak nor do we hear anything about him. However, we do see him hard at work, climbing up and down a mineshaft, digging, and handling a pickaxe, with his clothes filthy and his face full of sweat and grime. Juxtaposed with these rough images and harsh sounds of men at work is an image of one of the workmen lovingly cradling an infant son. However, when a fire suddenly erupts and spills out of the shaft after the first oil strike in 1902, the father is killed, and Daniel assumes parental duties, tenderly caring for the child, feeding him and nurturing him. As the boy, (named H. W.) grows, he seems almost an appendage of Daniel, following his substitute parent everywhere even accompanying him to meetings, like a silent partner but ever-present. Then in an accident at one of the wells, the boy loses his hearing, and Daniel abruptly sends him to a school for the deaf. H. W.’s departure is wrenching, as his face reflects a deep sense of abandonment; nevertheless, upon his return, he and Daniel renew their close relationship. Although Ahab does not abandon his cabin boy “son,” Pip is abandoned in the ocean when he jumps (for the second time) from Stubb’s whale boat, while it is pursuing another whale. Pip’s terror is palpable, and his solitary experience in the vast ocean is life-changing. Here is Melville’s description after the boy’s harrowing descent: Pip “went about the deck an idiot. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul. Not drowned entirely, though. Rather carried down alive to wondrous depths” where he saw the “unwarped, primal world” and where “Wisdom revealed his hoarded heaps … . He

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saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad” (Melville 367). Pip’s ravings estrange him from the crew, but not from Ahab, who draws closer to Pip after this dire experience. Their affection for each other is most obvious in their final conversation, just before the Pequod’s last gam (with the whale ship Delight). Ahab is leaving his cabin and about to go on deck when Pip catches him by the hand and pleads to stay with Ahab, desiring nothing more than to become Ahab’s missing leg. “Ye have not a whole body, sir,” he says to Ahab, “do ye but use poor me for your one lost leg; only tread upon me, sir; I ask no more, so I remain a part of ye.” Sensing the doom that awaits him, Ahab refuses Pip, ordering him to remain below deck for his own safety. “Now I quit thee. Thy hand – Met! True thou art, lad as the circumference to its center. So: God for ever bless thee; and if it come to that, – God for ever save thee, let what will befall” (Melville 466). As we will see, this affection between Ahab and Pip is in sharp contrast to that between Daniel and his adopted son H. W. toward the end of the film. The way each man manipulates people for his own ends is another significant parallel. Ahab, in the chapter titled “The Quarter-Deck,” fires up his crew members by gradually instilling in them some of his own hatred for Moby Dick, and eventually swerving them from the purpose of hunting whales for oil to hunting the white whale. Starbuck is the only one to resist, and he raises questions that Ahab must take seriously. In fact, as the first mate, he is the only person on the ship who has the authority to do so, and he takes issue with Ahab’s chasing one particular whale for vengeance. He says to Ahab “Vengeance on a dumb brute! that simply smote thee from blindest instinct! Madness! To be enraged with a dumb thing, Captain Ahab, seems blasphemous” (Melville 159). In addition to this theological argument, Starbuck advances a financial one as well: “I came here to hunt whales, not my commander’s vengeance. How many barrels [of oil] will thy vengeance yield thee even if thou gettest it, Captain Ahab? It will not fetch thee much in our Nantucket market.” “Nantucket market! Hoot!” Ahab harshly counters, “But come closer, Starbuck; thou requirest a little lower layer”: All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event – in the living act, the undoubted deed – there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ‘tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him

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outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me.” For could the sun do that, then I could do the other; … Who’s over me? Truth hath no confines. Take off thine eye! More tolerable than fiends’ glarings is a doltish stare! (Melville 158-59).

Carried away by his narcissistic, Platonic harangue, Ahab fails to notice the “doltish stare” on the face of the cowed, dumbstruck Starbuck, and when Ahab does notice, his insult causes Starbuck to redden, stating “my heat has melted thee to anger-glow.” However, Starbuck’s anger fails to deter Ahab from his obsessive goal, neither here nor later when Starbuck enters the captain’s cabin, holds the musket over the sleeping Ahab, but fails to take any action that would change the course of the ship. Ishmael refers to Starbuck’s failure to confront Ahab on the Quarterdeck or his later inaction in the cabin a “fall of valor in the soul” (Melville 118). Daniel also cows his listeners, owners of the land he wants to acquire, with his power of speech, mellifluous, harsh, commanding, cajoling, and finally coercing the property owners to agree to the terms of his promises, that is, they agree to lease him their land, so he can get to the oil beneath it. However, he, too, has his antagonist, Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), who wants to bring religion to the desert by building the revivalist Church of the Third Revelation, and in one extravagant scene, in front of his congregation of worshippers, Eli bullies Daniel into admitting his sins. Standing over Daniel, who is kneeling before him, Eli makes Daniel repeat several times: “I am a sinner; I am sorry, Lord; give me the blood, Lord, and let me get away.” Eli then hits Daniel (which Daniel had done to Eli in front of his family in an earlier scene). Eli then repeatedly slaps Daniel across the face, saying, “Get out of here Devil. Out devil! Out sin!” Then to Daniel, he says “Do you accept the Church of the Third Revelation as your spiritual guide?” To which Daniel replies, “Yes.” Daniel subjects himself to this abuse as part of his own manipulation to gain the favor of these avid evangelicals and to get their land, but Daniel is furious at having to submit to Eli’s power, and he does not forget the humiliation. We will see how this scene drives him to commit deadly violence at the conclusion of the film when he takes his own brutal vengeance on Eli. These two scenes (Daniel’s humiliation in the Church of the Third Revelation and the murderous one where Daniel turns the tables on Eli, not only humiliating him but beating him to death with a bowling pin in the subterranean, bowling alley of his palatial estate in southern California) dramatically reinforce one of Anderson’s main themes

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throughout the film. Westward expansion, the conquest of California, and, ultimately, of America have been fused by two powerful forces – driving capitalism and unbridled evangelicalism (linked to that wonderfully ironic phrase “Manifest Destiny”). In the hands of fraudulent, but charismatic, leaders, capitalism and evangelicalism can have devastating effects, not only on the victims (those who leased their land to Daniel in the film and Ahab’s crew in Moby Dick), but also on the leaders themselves The final, deadly scene in Anderson’s film is preceded by one in which Daniel is visited by his estranged son H. W., now grown up and ready to set off with his wife Mary (Eli’s younger sister; Mary is also the name of Starbuck’s wife in Moby Dick) to start a business that will eventually compete with Daniel’s vast empire. Daniel is outraged and has nothing but contempt for H. W., vehemently cursing him, then telling him to get out of his house. This verbal battle is followed immediately by the visit from Eli, who has suffered major losses in the stock market crash (the year is 1929) and who comes to Daniel begging for financial assistance. After humiliating Eli by making him repeat the words “I am a false prophet. God is a superstition,” – clearly reminiscent of his own humiliation in Eli’s church, Daniel chases Eli around the lanes of the alley with a bowling pin, yelling, “I am the Third Revelation [the name of Eli’s church]. I am the Third Revelation. I am who God has chosen,” and finally catching and beating him mercilessly Exhausted and lying next to the dead Eli, whose blood is slowly spreading across the floor of the bowling alley, Daniel cries out “I am finished!” “I am finished!” Never before have Daniel’s anger and violence been so powerfully dramatized. He has rejected his son, the only person who provided him with some trace of humanity, and he has bloodily vanquished Eli, his competitor and the one who has antagonized him through much of his career. As Anderson convincingly shows, however, Daniel’s career has been highly successful and has made him a very rich man, but it has also ruined him as a person. Daniel displays little, if any, human feeling in these final two scenes; what humanity he once had has vanished – taken over by his obsessive acquisitiveness and paranoia. In essence, by creating a monster obsessed with power, Anderson has fashioned a modern morality play, showing the evils of unbridled capitalism to a 21st century American audience. Over 150 years earlier, Melville issued a similar warning, and although the debate over the meanings of Moby Dick is virtually endless, I want to address only one or two issues. Although Starbuck provides an obstacle for a while, he really does little to impede Ahab’s quest. Ahab’s only serious antagonist lies within himself – Starbuck tells him, “I ask thee not to beware of Starbuck; thou wouldst but laugh; but let Ahab beware of

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Ahab; beware of thyself, old man,” to which Ahab mutters to himself, “He waxes brave, but nevertheless obeys; most careful bravery that!” (Melville 416). So Ahab is fully cognizant of his power over the ineffectual Starbuck, and even though Starbuck’s warning gives Ahab momentary pause, Melville counters any doubt Ahab may have about himself or his mission with the character of Fedallah. The Parsee’s lineage reaches back to Zoroaster and provides Ahab with a link to the Manichean heresy, causing him, as his fiery obsession increases and the Pequod rushes to its inevitable destruction, to fail to distinguish between good and evil. For all intents and purposes, Fedallah is there to push Ahab over the edge, to keep his obsession at a high pitch – absolute and focused on the “evil” of the whale. From the beginning of the book, Ahab’s quest has been marked by a series of rejections (his pipe, the tranquility of a sunset, the quadrant), but his most crucial rejection – a devastating defiance – can be seen in the chapter entitled “The Candles” and in the last of the nine gams the Pequod has with other whaling ships. In the chapter entitled “The Delight,” Ahab rejects the words “Oh! God … may the resurrection and the life,” from the funeral prayer the captain of The Delight recites as he buries one of his crew members killed the previous day by Moby Dick. As he claims, he is burying only that one – the others, he says to Ahab, “were buried before they died; you sail upon their tomb” (Melville 472). As the hammock containing the body of the dead man plunges into the ocean, Ahab desperately tries to get the Pequod away, but he is not fast enough, and some of the drops of sea water spray the Pequod – another dire omen for the crew. Additionally, in the chapter “The Candles,” Ahab’s defiant ravings challenge both the supernatural world and the natural, God and nature, and are nothing short of astounding. What Melville refers to as “the candles” is a phenomenon that occurred, rarely, during an electrical storm at sea, but when it did, it was frightening and was often interpreted as a bad omen by the crew members. Terrified upon seeing what appear to be balls of fire on the crossbars of the masts, they beg Ahab to give up the search and return home. But Ahab, delivering what some critics believe to be the most powerful and sublime passage in American literature of the 19th century, defiantly commands to be handed the fiery “main-mast links there; I would fain feel this pulse, and let mine beat against it; blood against fire!” Then holding the last link in his left hand and putting his foot upon the back of the Parsee, who is leaning over, Ahab, with his right arm flung out, “stood erect before the tri-pointed trinity of flames” and states “oh! Thou clear spirit of clear fire … I now know thee, and I know that thy right

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worship is defiance. I own thy speechless, placeless power … thou leapest out of darkness, but I am darkness leaping out of light, leaping out of thee! Leap! Leap up, and lick the sky! I leap with thee; I burn with thee; would fain be welded with thee; defyingly, I worship thee!” (Melville 443-44). This is Ahab’s apocalyptic farewell speech – he also, like Daniel, is finished, and he knows it. He has reached the pinnacle of his obsessive quest; he has defied the terrors of nature. He has transcended the natural world and has challenged the supernatural – he can go no farther. To kill the white whale would almost be anti-climactic after this speech. Daniel’s words to Eli in the final scene of the film do not rise to Melville’s eloquence, of course, but they come close in their epic grandeur. In this devastating, concluding scene, Daniel, too, as he says, is finished. What are we to make of these apocalyptic endings? Many things, no doubt, but I will suggest only one. The Pequod is the American ship of state in 1850, and Ahab is the leader, obsessed not with the number of whales he can kill, nor with the barrels of oil he can acquire, not with acquisition, in other words, but obsessed with the most powerful creature in the world, the monstrous whale, which, to him, is ultimate evil. In the middle of the 19th century, as America saw that its manifest destiny lay in expansion, pushing the frontier to the Pacific, so does Ahab see his destiny manifest in the death of the whale. He does not kill it, but the attempt could be described as a mighty madness. One critic has commented that “Ahab believes that he will be the one to go further than any man before him and be successful in his attempt to kill the whale. The large amount of trust that Ahab places in himself and the harpoon is indicative of a loss of reason. His illusion of grandeur – that he will be the one to kill Moby Dick – shows his madness. He is completely devoid of any humanity because he has lost all ties to the world [and] … has fated himself to death” (Kinney 4). Viewed in a larger context, Ahab’s obsessive will to power over the natural world could be seen as Melville’s prophesy for democracy, westward expansion, and America’s future – a prediction that is far from positive. Anderson, on the other hand, allows his obsessed protagonist to accomplish his mission, achieve his capitalistic goal, acquire wealth and power, but then, as the final scene indicates, he asks to what end? To live alone, surrounded by his materialistic accoutrements, drinking heavily, rejecting the son he had deeply cared for, and finally beating his only adversary (who was never that much of a threat anyway) into bloody senselessness. Was this what Daniel had in mind when he started out? Was this his vision, his dream, his California paradise? And, more importantly, is this the American Dream? And is Anderson suggesting its end?

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These two powerful depictions of the American experience, one by Herman Melville in the middle of the 19th century, but darkly prophetic of what the future holds for American capitalism and its democratic underpinnings; and one by Paul Thomas Anderson at the beginning of the 21st century, providing a tragic conclusion to the epic narrated by Ishmael – with both visions focusing on the acquisition of oil and its importance in running the American machine of democracy. Very American tales, D. H. Lawrence might have called them. In writing about James Fenimore Cooper’s character Deerslayer and westward expansion, Lawrence states “the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted,” (62), which comes frighteningly close to describing Daniel Plainview. There Will be Blood contains all the ingredients that make up the American experience: apocalyptic grandeur, good and evil, unbridled capitalism, obsession, defiance, rejection – take your pick; they are all there – as are tragedy, defeat, death, and, of course, BLOOD! – A LOT OF IT!

Bibliography Alleva, Richard. “Thicker than Oil: There Will Be Blood.” Commonweal 15 Feb 2008: 19. Print. Anderson, Paul Thomas, Dir. There Will Be Blood. Paramount Vantage, Miramax Films, 2007. —. Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2012. Web. Anwar, Brett. “BLACK GOLD.“ Film Review Mar. 2008: 54-60. Print Arthur, Anthony. “BLOOD AND ‘OIL!’“ The New York Times Book Review 24 Feb. 2008). Web Charity, Tom. “There Will Be Blood.” Cinema Scope 33 (Winter 2008): 72-73. Print Dargis, Manohla. “An American Primitive, Forged in a Crucible of Blood and Oil.” NYT (Dec. 26, 2007): E 1. Denby, David. “Hard Life.” The New Yorker (Dec. 17, 2007): 106. Print Gilbey, Ryan. “Power, corruption and lies: lead actor and director both shine in a drama dripping with foreboding.” New Statesman (1996) 137. Web Goldman, Michael. “Old-fashioned FILMMAKING.“ Millimeter (Nov/ Dec 2007): 8-14. Print Hoey, Matt. “Blood Lines.“ The Journal of the Writers Guild of America (Dec. 2007): 44-50. Print Jones, Alan. “There Will Be Blood.“ Film Review (Mar. 2008): 102-103. Print

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Kemp, Stuart. “In London, ‘Blood’ in thick of it.“ Hollywood Reporter – International Edition (14 December 2007): 4-6. Print Kinney, Marina A. “Ahab’s Devolution in Melville’s Moby Dick.” Student Pulse: Online Journal, 3:3 (2011): 1-4. Klawans, Stuart. “A Hard Man.“ Nation (28 January 2008): 32-34. Print Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. New York: Viking, 1923. McGill, Hannah. “There Will Be Blood.“ Sight & Sound 18: 2 (Feb. 2008): 82-83. Print Melville, Herman. Moby Dick. Eds. John Bryant and Haskell Springer. New York: Longman, 2007. Mottram, James. “Bloody Hell.” Film Review (Mar. 2008): 61-63. Print Norris, Frank. McTeague. Norton Critical Edition, 2nd ed. Ed. Donald Pizer. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996. Pittman, Frank. “Blood and Guts.” Psychotherapy Networker Magazine 32: 2 (Mar/Apr 2008): 79-81. Print Ponsoldt, James. “GIANT ambition.“ Filmmaker: The Magazine of Independent Film 16: 2 (Winter 2008): 40-107. Print Ross, Alex. “Welling Up.” The New Yorker (4 Feb. 2008): 76. Print Ross, Deborah. “Pure Genius.” Spectator (9 Feb. 2008): 42. Web Schwarzbaum, Lisa. “A SECOND OPINION.” Entertainment Weekly (28 Dec. 2007): 110-112. Print Sinclair, Upton. Oil! A Novel. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1927. Print Yacowar, Maurice. “Digging in.” Queen’s Quarterly (Spring 2008): 94. Web

CHAPTER SIX WINDSWEPT AND SCATTERED: PLACE AND IDENTITY IN LARRY MCMURTRY’S THE LAST PICTURE SHOW TODD WOMBLE THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT ARLINGTON “Though it seemed he was not so much in a place as confronting the raw material of human use”1 Annie Proulx

There is something to be said about the flat, dry, and windy landscapes of West Texas and the toll they take on a person’s identity. These landscapes are more than just mesquite trees and dried creek beds – they are visible reminders of the great expanse of surrounding open land, separating the West Texan from the rest of the world. This vast openness, this nothingness, often has an effect on an individual’s identity. But)as evidenced in Larry McMurtry’s early novel The Last Picture Show, this effect is often a negative one. Many critics have published on the role of place in literature, and several have posited rather seminal treatises on the function of settings for plots, characters, and thematic elements. Leonard Lutwack’s The Role of Place in Literature (1984) provides a historical analysis of the incorporation of place as theme in literature, from classic Greek texts to contemporary postmodern literature. Lutwack’s book also posits analyses of place based on contemporary themes of sustainability and environmental concerns, and the psychological toll that the loss of place takes on individuals. He writes, “The twentieth century evidences a new interest in place as an important issue in general”2. As do many similar critical studies, Lutwack’s book focuses wholly on this perennial and 1

Annie Proulx, That Old Ace in the Hole (New York: Scribner, 2002), 3. Leonard Lutwack, The Role of Place in Literature (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1984), 2. 2

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persistent literary fascination with people and the places they inhabit. These critical approaches reveal that scholars and readers alike have noticed the role that place plays in literary texts. It is more than the simple setting of the story; it is not merely the backdrop on which the actions of the plot take place. Lutwack points out that this view of place has been accepted in certain texts or generations, but that it has not persisted. Instead, scholars afford a much more integral role for place. In many cases, the places of texts have direct impacts on the lives of the characters and, more importantly, the reading experiences of the readers. It is with this view of place that this study seeks to further the conversation. Along with scholars, various authors have provided commentary on the role of place in their texts. Specifically, writers of the American Southwest consistently point towards elements of place as crucial factors in their literary efforts. For example, Rudolfo Anaya – often referred to as the “father” of Chicano literature – has spoken numerously about the effect the land of the Southwest has played in his own literary life. For him, the Llano of New Mexico is home, and it recurrently plays an integral role in his novels. In an interview with Juan Bruce-Novoa in 1979, Anaya describes the role of the Llano in his writing: “The influence of that land was early and lasting … Almost a religious experience, or a religious communication that man has with his earth when the two come to meet at one point and the power which is in each one is energized, no longer remaining negative and positive, but fusing together”3. Clearly for Anaya, the Llano is much more than the physical earth of his childhood; it is an entity – a living, breathing source of energy and interaction. This energy affords literary life to Anaya, and he consistently allows his texts to reside in and return to the Llano for motivation and rejuvenation. Like Anaya, Eudora Welty expresses the integral role of place in her work. In her essay “Place in Fiction,” Welty states her view of place plainly: “The truth is, fiction depends for its life on place. Location is the crossroads of circumstance, the proving ground of ‘What happened? Who’s here” Who’s coming’ – and that is the heart’s field.”4 For Welty, there is nothing more important in regards to literature than place. And, like Anaya, place for Welty does much more than provide a path on which we walk, or give us shade under which we can sit. Place gives texts life – it gives them authenticity. In the Preface to his collection of essays entitled In A Narrow 3

Rudolfo Anaya, Interview with Juan Bruce-Novoa, in Conversations with Rudolfo Anaya, eds. Bruce Dick and Silvio Sirias (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1998), 12. 4 Eudora Welty, “Place in Fiction,” in A Modern Southern Reader, eds. Ben Forkner and Patrick Samway (Atlanta: Peachtree, 1986), 538.

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Grave, McMurtry provides his own take on the relationship between place and fiction: “I can never be quite sure whether home is a place or a form: The novel, or Texas. In daily life the two become crucially but vaguely related, and it is difficult to say with precision where places stops supporting fiction and fiction starts embodying place.”5 If we take Anaya’s and Welty’s assertions of place as accurately describing place’s role in fiction, and if the “heart’s field” is in fact grounded in place, then the characters of McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show have lonely and windblown hearts. And, by the end of the novel, this seems to be an accurate description. In his essay “Place and the Novelist,” D.C.D. Pocock writes about the function of place in literary texts and the manners in which authors work to portray the relationships between people and place. He explains, “Place, then, contains our roots, our unique point of reference.”6 Regardless of where exactly a person is born or what era or generation to which he or she belongs, Pocock asserts, similarly to Welty, that the initial place with which a person makes contact and develops a connection, otherwise known as a “home,” is the starting point for each individual’s growth and maturity. Whether a person stays in one place forever or moves on to a number of different cities or countries, “our birthplace leaves a mark in determining the way we perceive the world.”7 The initial place is the root of our perceptions and our worldviews; it is the starting point to which we either latch on or from which we flee wholeheartedly. Either way, it is essential and inescapable. The place in which a person is born and brought up plays an unquantifiable role in determining the personality and mindset of that person in the future. Pocock goes on to describe two specific reactions individuals have to the “home” place. First, place is a haven of positive experiences: “It is on the one hand home, the place of security, stability, belonging.”8 This is the sentimental and comforting aspect of the home place, the place where a person grew up with his or her family and developed positive relationships and fond memories. This positive home place is the Llano for Anaya and plays out in his novels; specifically, the Llano is the positive home place for Antonio, the young protagonist of Anaya’s classic novel Bless Me, Ultima (1972). As in Anaya’s own life, the Llano provides stability and 5

Larry McMurtry, In A Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas (Austin: Encino, 1968), ix. 6 D.C.D. Pocock, “Place and the Novelist,” in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 6.3 (1981). JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/622292, 339. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid, 340.

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security for young Antonio while he deals with various traumatic and lifechanging experiences throughout the novel. Another example of the positive home place is the Joad farm in Oklahoma in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Another place of the Southwest, the Joad farm stands as the beacon of familiarity for the Joad family. It is the place where every Joad child has been born (and conceived); the house contains the same kitchen in which countless Joad meals have been prepared and eaten for decades; the barn represents years’ worth of tools, feed, and animals that have helped sustain the Joad livelihood; and the dirt road leading to the farm is a signal of home for all Joad family members – a welcome signal of comfort and love, as evidenced by Tom’s emotions early in the novel as he walks down the road soon after his release from prison. And the positive connotations of the Joad farm increase greatly once the Joads are forced to leave Oklahoma and flee in desperation to California. This loss of home influences great emotional tolls on the Joad family. These two Southwestern texts exemplify the positive interactions people have with the places of the Southwest. But, this is not always the case. Pocock also describes a second, adverse type of relationship between people and place: Place “has at the same time, however, the potential of boredom, drudgery, entrapment, for which subsequent or foreign place offers excitement, release, freedom.”9 This function of place is in obvious opposition to the previous one. Instead of being a haven, the home place can function as a source of bitterness and feelings of being trapped. In Bless Me, Ultima and The Grapes of Wrath, place functions specifically in line with Pocock’s first option: the home places of the novels are cherished and desired, and once characters have left home, they desperately want to return. Throughout Bless Me, Ultima Antonio consistently returns home whenever confronted with fear and danger; the Joads desperately desire to be able to go back to the farm in Oklahoma in The Grapes of Wrath. Place in Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show functions in a wholly different way: the home place makes the characters feel trapped, suffocated, and their sole desire is to somehow escape the limits of the place in which they live. In McMurtry’s novel, home is anything but the place where the characters hope to remain or return. Instead, the home place of Thalia represents the negative home place Pocock describes in his essay. Looking specifically at the main characters of the novel, both young and old, and the various descriptions McMurtry provides of their emotional journeys, as well as of the physical landscapes of West Texas throughout the novel, this study seeks to investigate the manner in which 9

Ibid.

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the places of McMurtry’s novel enact specific and crucial effects on the inhabitants of Thalia. These effects are both physical and emotional, and they range in scale and type. But by the end of the novel, it is clear that the landscape of West Texas does much more than blow tumbleweeds through the lonely streets of Thalia; instead, the place of the novel takes drastic tolls on the identities of its characters. The book centers on life in the fictional town of Thalia, Texas, and it is no big surprise that the flat and lonely landscape functions as a source of entrapment for the characters. McMurtry describes his own home town of Archer City, the model for the fictional Thalia of the novel: “I grew up in a bookless town, in a bookless part of the state – when I stepped into a university library, at age eighteen, the whole of the world’s literature lay before me unread, a country as vast, as promising, and, so far as I knew, as trackless as the West must have seemed to the first white men who looked upon it.”10 Like Archer City, Thalia is a bookless West Texas town, a place where intellectual thought and opportunity are as rare as a windless day. In Thalia, the oil and cattle industries reign, and school serves as nothing more than a “chance to catch up on their sleep”11 for its young residents. McMurtry’s descriptions of the town and the lives of its inhabitants work to fulfill the aspects of the second option Pocock presents. Instead of offering a sense of stability and serving as a place of connection and security, the limits of experience in life in Thalia produce feelings of entrapment. McMurtry reveals these feelings in a number of his characters, both young and old, and the novel depicts the efforts these characters make to somehow find an escape from the snares of small-town life. McMurtry uses the experiences of the characters of the novel to show how the limited scope of life in a small town affects a person, both physically and emotionally, and how these limits play a part in the construction of the characters’ identities. The emotions felt differ between the young and old characters, and their attempts to escape Thalia range in intensity and type. McMurtry uses Sonny, the central character of the story, to reveal to the reader the fundamental effect that the boredom and monotony of life in Thalia have on a person’s identity. The novel begins: “Sometimes Sonny felt like he was the only human creature in the town. It was a bad feeling, and it usually came on him in the mornings early, when the streets were completely empty, the way they were one Saturday morning in late November.”12 From the opening lines of the novel, Sonny 10

McMurtry, In A Narrow Grave, 33. Ibid, 35. 12 Larry McMurtry, The Last Picture Show (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966), 1. 11

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feels isolated and alone in Thalia, and the reader is introduced to the emptiness of Thalia. Of course, Sonny has a number of friends in town, and he is by no means alone. He has a best friend, Duane, with whom he goes to the movies and courts girls. He has close relationships with some of the older people in town, including Sam the Lion, the owner of the local poolhall and picture show, and Genevieve, the waitress at the local diner. He has a girlfriend, Charlene Duggs, who allows Sonny to explore his sexual desires, to a certain degree, on Saturday evenings when they drive out to the city lake. He has a job filling butane tanks at people’s houses in the area. And he plays sports at school and participates in the typical adolescent activities around town, including drinking beer and spending lots of time at the poolhall. To a certain degree, people he is close to surround Sonny, and his life is full of activity. Yet, despite all of these relationships and outlets for activity and involvement, Sonny feels alone. McMurtry writes, “The night before Sonny had played in his last game of football for Thalia High School, but it wasn’t that that made him feel so strange and alone. It was just the look of the town.”13 From the beginning of the novel, the loneliness Sonny feels is much more than literally being alone; instead, this loneliness is an inescapable product of the town itself: there is simply something about Thalia that inspires feelings of isolation and seclusion. McMurtry’s attribution of this loneliness to the physical space that is Thalia sets the tone for his further descriptions of the town and its residents. Along with Sonny, Jacy Farrow, the pillar of young beauty in Thalia, exemplifies a character feeling the pressures and limits of life in Thalia. The daughter of Gene Farrow, the richest man in town, Jacy fulfills the stereotypical role of “it-girl.” She has all of the privileges her small life can offer, and her place in the town’s spotlight is her ultimate desire. Jacy relishes her elite status in town, and early in the novel she embraces the local fame she is allowed through her life in Thalia. At points McMurtry shows us her feelings about her fame and her status, and she works specifically to make this status endure (as evidenced by her trips to Wichita Falls and her reflections on these trips, covered below). Her views of her life change drastically after conversations with her mother and also after a number of trips to Wichita Falls in which she experiences life outside of the small town and understands the possibilities beyond Thalia. Early in the story, Jacy exclaims to her mother that she is in love with Duane – Sonny’s best friend – and wants to marry him and live in Thalia. Her mother recognizes her naiveté and offers her own take on life: “The only really important thing I came in to tell you was that life is very 13

Ibid.

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monotonous. Things happen the same way over and over and over again. I think it’s more monotonous in this part of the country than it is in other places.”14 Thanks to these words from her mother and the difficulty she finds in maintaining her “it-girl” status in town, Jacy begins to feel the same feelings of isolation and monotony in Thalia as Sonny, and she begins to look outside of the city limits for a new source of excitement. While the young characters of the novel serve as examples of the emotional longing for escape resulting from life in a small town, the older characters reveal the deeply-rooted bitterness and resentment caused by a life lived entirely in one place – specifically, a small, limited place like Thalia. McMurtry uses Lois Farrow, Ruth Popper, and Sam the Lion to portray the mindsets and emotions resulting from lives spent in the small town. Like her daughter, Lois Farrow shines as a beacon of beauty and privilege in Thalia. And, like Jacy, she savors the attention. Her life consists of spending her husband’s money, sleeping with a number of men in town, and binge drinking until she falls asleep. Lois acts as a tool of foreshadowing for life to come for Jacy: she too was once young and beautiful and the focus of every man’s sexual desires, but these attributes resulted in nothing more than a shallow and bitter existence. When Jacy asks her mother why she cannot stay in Thalia and marry Duane, Lois responds: “Because life’s too damn hard here … . The land’s got too much power over you. Being rich here is a good way to go insane. Everything’s flat and empty and there’s nothing to do but spend money.”15 In an attempt at helping her daughter, Lois reveals the baseness of her life, and the emotional chasm it has created. And as he does earlier with Sonny, McMurtry makes explicit the direct connection Lois makes between her loneliness and struggles and a life spent in a small town like Thalia. Later, McMurtry further develops Lois’s emptiness: “To kill the morning she had gone to Wichita Falls and spent $150; to kill the afternoon she had had three drinks and several rubbers of bridge at the country club. It seemed unjust that after all that work she should still have the problem of how to kill the night.”16 Interestingly, shopping, drinking, and playing bridge constitute “work” for Lois, and the depraved nature of her life symbolizes the emptiness she feels. Ruth Popper, wife of the local football coach, exemplifies the loneliness of life in Thalia. After taking her to the doctor for an appointment, Sonny goes to the Popper house for cookies and a cola. Once 14

Ibid, 49. Ibid, 48. 16 Ibid, 49. 15

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inside, Ruth attempts to seduce him. This attempt shocks both of them, and an awkward conversation ensues. In this conversation, Ruth reveals her own feelings of isolation, striking a chord for Sonny in relation to his own feelings. She says, “The reason I’m so crazy is because nobody cares anything about me. I don’t guess there’s anybody I care much about, either. It’s my own fault, though – I haven’t had the guts to try and do anything about it.”17 Later on, after Sonny and Ruth have begun their affair, she articulates her loneliness to Sonny: “You have to remember that I’ve been lonely for a long time. Loneliness is like ice. After you’ve been lonely long enough you don’t even realize you’re cold, but you are. It’s like I was a refrigerator that had never been defrosted at all – never. You can’t melt all that ice in a few days.”18 Ruth’s recognition of her loneliness and her attempts to explain it to Sonny reveal the pervasive nature of these emotions and their intense, almost fundamental role in the lives of these characters. Sam the Lion, the oldest character of the book and the main role model for Sonny, offers a glimpse at another aspect of the life resulting from years spent inside the city limits of Thalia. Throughout the novel, Sam the Lion is seen looking back on his past experiences in the town and reflecting on what could have been. While he functions as a model of responsibility and respect for Sonny and Duane, the boys themselves serve as symbols of the youth and excitement that have passed Sam the Lion by. Early in the novel, when the boys leave Thalia for a night in Fort Worth, Sam contemplates the current situation of his adult life: “Well, have fun in Cowtown … . If I didn’t have all these businesses to run I’d ride along with you. Ain’t been to Fort Worth in fifteen years.”19 In his own way, Sam the Lion has become trapped inside of Thalia. Later, while fishing with Sonny and Billy, Sam the Lion further explains his feelings of missed opportunities and regret: “Seein’ you pissing off the dam reminded me of something,” he tells the boys. “I used to own this land you know. It’s been right at fifty years since the first time I watered a horse at this tank. Reason I always drag you all out here probably – I’m just as sentimental as anybody else when it comes to old times.” He then tells them a story from the past that will resonate later in the novel about Sam the Lion and a “young lady” who used to swim with him in the tank. The story revolves around the two skinny-dipping and a bet between Sam the Lion and the woman over a silver dollar, which “the lady’s still got.” While the story itself seems somewhat ordinary or inconsequential, its importance and 17

Ibid 58. Ibid 126. 19 Ibid 63. 18

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Sam the Lion’s sentimentality and nostalgia are clear. Sonny proceeds to ask Sam the Lion why growing up is such a miserable occurrence, and he responds, “Oh, it ain’t necessarily miserable … . About eighty per cent of the time, I guess.”20 In his nostalgic monologue Sam the Lion reveals the loss and regret he feels in connection with specific landscapes of Thalia, and the bitterness he feels at getting old and losing the chance of an opportunity to amend his mistakes. For a number of the characters in the novel, both young and old, Thalia functions as the stage on which feelings of disillusionment, desire, and entrapment come to fruition. Aspects of the physical spaces of Thalia, as well as specific landmarks (such as the tank for Sam the Lion), serve as catalysts for and reminders of these negative emotions and feelings. In response to their negative relationships with Thalia, these characters enact various attempts to somehow counteract their experiences. To escape the confines of life in Thalia, the young characters, specifically Sonny and Jacy, search for a new source of meaning in their lives. And, in a relatively logical manner, these attempts revolve around excursions outside of Thalia. While their attempts to escape are less literal, the older characters of the novel make their own efforts to release themselves from the loneliness and isolation of their lives. In both cases, the attempts at escape made by the characters result in only deeper feelings of emptiness and confusion, and the trap of Thalia remains intact. To escape his feelings of being the only “human creature in the town,”21 Sonny tries a couple of techniques, including sexual promiscuity and travel. Although Sonny has numerous sexual encounters in the book, with women inside and outside of the Thalia city limits, McMurtry leaves no doubt that these experiences only further increase his feelings of loneliness. Unable to find relief through his sexual endeavors, Sonny looks to places outside of Thalia for release. The clearest examples of his attempts to escape come in the form of trips outside of Thalia, taken by him and Duane. Unaware of the shallow nature of these attempts, the boys choose the first logical option for fleeing their problems: jumping in their truck and driving somewhere else. As Pocock points out in his essay, the feelings of boredom and entrapment result in “man’s age-long fascination with travel and the importance of subsequent place.”22 The first of these trips is their trip to Fort Worth, where Sonny and Duane join a local cattle truck driver on his nightly trip to the big city. They decide to go along 20

Ibid 154. Ibid 1. 22 Pocock, 340. 21

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because, according to Duane, it is “better than loafin’ around here.”23 The boys drink beers on the way and find themselves quite drunk upon reaching Fort Worth. The trip itself is anything but exciting, consisting of nothing more than the telling of old football stories and a trip to the local whorehouse in which Sonny and Duane find themselves waiting outside in the cold while Jerry, the truck driver, “went up to have fun.”24 On the way home, the boys try to sleep and wake up to find themselves freezing and hung over; Sonny thinks to himself: “Coming back from Fort Worth was never as much fun as going.”25 The rest of the trip is “miserably cold,” and when the boys finally get to the café in Thalia they do nothing more than resume their sleeping on the countertop. On one level, the trip to Fort Worth seems like somewhat of a disappointment, resulting in drunken sickness and fatigue. Neither of them accomplishes the “business” they set out for, and McMurtry makes it clear they each feel physically and emotionally defeated by the trip. But the boys see it differently: “‘Well, at least we got to go somewhere,’ Sonny said, picking up a beer can somebody had thrown out on the lawn. Fort Worth, after all, was a city, part of the big world, and he always came back from a trip there with the satisfying sense that he had traveled.”26 The logistical aspects of the trip are somewhat pathetic, yet for the boys it is a success. Sonny’s words and thoughts reveal the feelings of drudgery and entrapment associated with Thalia. If they had stayed in town, they could have done a number of things technically classifiable as more fun or more productive. They could have spent time with their girlfriends or time with Sam the Lion and Billy at the poolhall. But these things are associated with Thalia, and the boys are looking desperately for another source of experience in their lives. As the novel progresses, the feelings of isolation and the subsequent disillusionment Sonny encounters about his life only increase, and his attempt to escape Thalia again comes in the form of a trip. After getting into a fight with a group of boys from Wichita Falls, Duane suggests that the two of them leave town: “‘Why don’t we just take off an’ go someplace,’ Duane said. ‘I’m sick of this town.’”27 Sonny quickly agrees; they decide to go to Mexico and hurry to ready themselves for the trip. McMurtry describes them as “eager,” and he explains, “They could hardly believe such an adventure was before them, and they wanted to get away

23

McMurty, The Last Picture Show, 61. Ibid 65. 25 Ibid 66. 26 Ibid 67. 27 Ibid 162. 24

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before something happened to stop it.”28 The thought of leaving Thalia again revitalizes the boys; all of their problems are focused in Thalia, and leaving town, again, seems to be the logical solution.. When the boys finally get on the road, “It was amazing how different the world was, once the plains were left behind.”29 The boys continue toward Mexico, their excitement steadily rising. They are surrounded by a new landscape, different from the flat and dry land of West Texas, and “in the valley there were even palm trees.”30 The removal from Thalia inspires visions of ensuing excitement. Upon finally arriving, the boys are somewhat clueless as to what exactly they are supposed to do, and they eventually find themselves following a “paunchy Mexican in his undershirt and khakis”31 who tells them, “Ees got movies.” As they follow the man into his house, the situation gets more and more questionable. Both boys feel uncomfortable, but they are determined to fulfill what they set out to do: “They either had to pay and watch the movies or else refuse and leave, and since they had driven five hundred miles to see some wickedness it was pointless to refuse.”32 After they realize that the film involves a grotesque display of bestiality, “they both immediately felt the trip was worthwhile, if only for the gossip value.”33 Neither boy enjoys the movie – McMurtry describes them as “speechless” and “spellbound” – and they refuse the man’s offer for another, but the simple fact that nothing like this has ever happened before in Thalia, at least not to their knowledge, makes the whole situation worthwhile. The movie reminds them of how far they are away from home, and this distance alone constitutes the ordeal as a success. Similar to Sonny, throughout the course of the novel Jacy’s bitterness towards her life in Thalia increases. Again like Sonny, Jacy attempts to escape through her sexuality and trips made to neighboring towns, including Wichita Falls. For Jacy, these two attempts are related: her trips to Wichita Falls revolve around her sexual promiscuity. Jacy relishes in her revered status in Thalia for her beauty and her money, and this is the basis for her happiness in town. As the novel progresses and her security in her place in town diminishes, she looks to subsequent places for a new source of personal fulfillment. She finds this source in Wichita Falls: Lester Marlow offers to take Jacy to a party in Wichita Falls where the attendants 28

Ibid 163. Ibid 167. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid 168. 32 Ibid 169. 33 Ibid 171. 29

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swim in the nude. Jacy is excited and relishes her new opportunity for fame: “When word got around that she had gone swimming naked with a lot of rich kids from Wichita Falls her legend would be secure for all time. No girls from Thalia had ever done anything like that.”34 Her vanity is plain, and her subsequent trips to Wichita Falls depict her pathetic view of what constitutes success and status in Thalia. Her own thoughts of success, similar to Sonny and Duane, revolve around the fact that their actions are unprecedented; in a town of monotony and routine, finding something new – regardless of how degraded or unfulfilling the thing might be – seems to be worthwhile. Unencumbered by the naiveté of the younger characters of the novel, the older characters attempt to escape their lives in seemingly-more strategic and nuanced ways. Interestingly, this sense of planning seems to at the same time reveal the aged characters’ cognizance of the futility of these very attempts at escape. Like her daughter, Lois Farrow tries to create excitement in her life through her sexual encounters. Throughout the novel, Lois’s sexual activity reaches far beyond her marriage bed. At the annual Christmas party, Jacy finds her mother openly kissing Abilene, the local pool shark: “Abilene had just come in the door and her mother was kissing him, right there in the Legion Hall. Not only was it a shock to Jacy, but even more of one to the short, pretty brunette Abilene had come in with.”35 This scene, along with another depicting a late night call to the poolhall in search of Abilene, reveals that Lois and Abilene have an ongoing affair. Later in the novel, Lois extends her sexual advances to a new target: Sonny. After Sonny and Jacy irresponsibly elope and get married, the Farrows meet up with the fleeing couple and have the marriage annulled. Lois volunteers to drive Sonny back to town, and proceeds to seduce him on the way: “I don’t know if you know what I’m worth or not, but I sure like you and I should like you to have a nicer wedding night than Jacy could ever have given you.”36 They proceed to check into a motel and sleep together, upon which Lois says, “Your mother and I sat next to one another in the first grade … . We graduated together. I sure didn’t expect to sleep with her son. That’s small town life for you.”37 As she tells Jacy early in the novel, Lois views life in Thalia as monotonous and dull, and she also knows the futility of fleeing Thalia to escape her emptiness. Instead, she uses her sexuality to create avenues of

34

Ibid 83. Ibid 87. 36 Ibid 253. 37 Ibid 255. 35

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intrigue for her life in Thalia, however unfulfilling these experiences might be. Ruth Popper also uses sexual encounters to create excitement in her otherwise dreadful existence. Her affair with Sonny is the only outlet she has for stimulation, as leaving town is not an option. Her life as Coach Popper’s wife leaves her with limited options, and the “iciness” she describes to Sonny is a direct result of the Popper house, void of love and passion. Soon after it begins, the affair becomes the center of Ruth’s life: “By the time Sonny had paid her a half-dozen visits he was everything to Ruth: he was what made the days worth confronting. The thought that he might quit coming filled her with terror. The thought of going back to the existence she had had before he came was too much to face.”38 For Ruth, Sonny offers a glimpse into a loving, caring relationship that she never had the opportunity to have with her conservative, overbearing husband. Ruth escapes her icy loneliness through her encounters with Sonny, culminating in her first orgasmic experience: “She lay quietly, her eyes closed, as Sonny began, but almost before she knew it she became excited, so much so that she could not be still.”39 The earlier depictions of the intense feeling of loneliness Ruth has felt in her life offer a stark contrast to the fulfillment she feels in her illicit relations with Sonny. The oldest and most experienced Thalia resident, Sam the Lion represents the futility of these various attempts at escape from the limits and regrets of life in Thalia. Unlike Lois and Ruth, Sam the Lion is only able to rouse feelings of excitement through ponderings into his past, as seen in his monologue at the fishing pond delivered to Sonny and Billy. Before delivering his nostalgic words, “Sam began to snort, always a sign that something was affecting him powerfully, and then he began to laugh his loud, solid, rich laugh, something he did so rarely that both boys were startled. He sat by the water laughing, running his hands through his hair.”40 Thinking that Sam the Lion is happy, Sonny soon realizes that he is also crying: “Tears began to run down his face so freely that Sonny was not sure what was happening, whether Sam was laughing or crying. He pulled his handkerchief out of his hip pocket and began to wipe his face but no sooner had he done that than he burst out cussing and got up and stomped around furiously on the Bermuda grass.”41 The laughter and tears inspired by the memories Sonny has recalled for Sam reveal both the happiness of his youth and the bitterness of his old age. As the oldest 38

Ibid 124. Ibid 129. 40 Ibid 152. 41 Ibid 152-53. 39

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character of the story, Sam represents the inevitable inability of finding escape from the loneliness and resentment of life in Thalia. By the end of the novel, Sam’s inability to face the regrets of his life in the fishing scene are mirrored in each of the other characters’ eventual failure to find escape from Thalia. While the characters make a number of attempts – in a number of ways – to flee from the isolation they feel in their lives in the small town, the end of the novel reveals the ineffectiveness of these efforts and the emotional toll these failed attempts have on their identities. McMurtry’s depiction of Sonny in the later parts of the novel serves as an example of the emotions created through failed attempts at escape. For Sonny, his efforts to find answers through new experiences – in his sexual affairs and his trips to places outside of Thalia – leave him with the same feelings of remoteness at the end of the novel. In both of the trips Sonny and Duane have made to places outside of Thalia, nothing of value or worth has taken place. In fact, both trips affect the boys in a negative way. And despite the boys’ best efforts to tell themselves that the trips were a good idea and that they had succeeded, they find themselves quickly returning to Thalia – more importantly, they find themselves happy to be home. After Sonny and Duane leave Mexico and make their way back to Thalia, McMurtry describes their emotional response to being back home: The country around Thalia had never looked so good to them as it did when they came back into it, at four in the morning. The dark pastures, the farmhouses, the oil derricks and even the jackrabbits that went dashing across the road in front of them, all seemed comfortable, familiar, private even, part of what was theirs and no one else’s. After the strangeness of Matamoros the lights of Thalia were especially reassuring.42

The boys have gone full circle: the same farmhouses and oil derricks they so longed to escape before their trip now serve as welcome landmarks of their return, letting them know that they are back where they belong, back to the place where they fit in. The inevitability of the return to home in the novel provides an interesting and important aspect of McMurtry’s depiction of small-town life. While on the one hand, escape and release from Thalia is exactly what the characters of the novel are looking for, they find themselves at the same time wanting to return home after they have left. The feelings of reassurance offered by the lights of Thalia are similar to the feelings encountered by Tom Joad early in The Grapes of 42

Ibid 177.

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Wrath when he sees the early fence posts signaling the Joad farm. After seeing the fence, Steinbeck makes clear a change in Tom: “Joad’s eyes were inward on his memory. He seemed to be laughing inside himself.”43 This fencepost affords welcome feelings of security and belonging for Tom. Similarly, Sonny and Duane feel reassured to be back in Thalia. Regardless of their previous emotions, when faced with the uneasiness of their experiences in Mexico, Thalia does at least offer something familiar. McMurtry’s descriptions of the boys’ emotions reveals the ambivalent relationship between these characters and Thalia. At the end of the novel, the feelings of isolation and loneliness felt by Sonny in the opening lines of the story resurface. Duane has left to join the army; Sam the Lion has died; Billy has been killed; and his affair with Ruth Popper has ended. Sonny finds himself even more isolated than he was at the beginning of the text, and his initial reaction is to escape, as he has tried to do earlier in the story through his trips with Duane to Fort Worth and Mexico. McMurtry writes: About the middle of the afternoon he began to feel like he had to do something. He had the feeling again, the feeling that he was the only person in town. He got his gloves and his football jacket and got in the pickup, meaning to go on out and pump his leases, but no sooner had he started than he got scared. When he passed the city limits signs he stopped a minute. The gray pastures and the distant brown ridges looked too empty. He himself felt too empty. As empty as he felt and as empty as the country looked it was too risky going out into it – he might be blown around for days like a broomweed in the wind.44

As he has done throughout the book, Sonny reacts to his feelings by getting in his truck and leaving Thalia, the source of his loneliness. But by the end of the novel, Sonny finds himself unable to leave town. In his essay “The Death of the Frontier in the Novels of Larry McMurtry,” Christopher Baker describes Sonny’s inability to leave Thalia: “For Sonny, the pull of the familiar, even though depressing, is too strong to escape.”45 While Thalia is undoubtedly isolated and is the source of his feelings of entrapment, the outside world poses an even bigger threat. Baker continues: “The anomie Sonny feels at the end of the novel, his longing, his sense of dislocation, is not the result of his distance from a culture with 43

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Penguin, 1992), 29. McMurtry, The Last Picture Show, 277. 45 Christopher Baker, “The Death of the Frontier in the Novels of Larry McMurtry” in Taking Stock: A Larry McMurtry Casebook, ed. Clay Reynolds (Dallas, TX: Southern Methodist Press, 1989), 170. 44

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whose values he strongly disagreed … . He feels unable to leave a place which now has no values at all, and there is nothing beckoning him away from Thalia.”46 Sonny suddenly realizes that whichever way he chooses to go – either back to Thalia or to the bigger world outside – his feelings of emptiness will remain. Like Sonny, Jacy finds herself without answers to her isolated life in Thalia, regardless of her attempts to find them. In a final attempt to solidify her place in the annals of Thalia legend, Jacy finds herself being willingly seduced by Abilene towards the end of the novel. Again, attraction and desire play no part in her willingness to give in to Abilene; she goes through with it simply for the chance of excitement: “She felt a little nervous, but she knew he would be irritated if she backed out. She stepped out into the night in front of him. Just getting in the Mercury was exciting: it was the most famous car in that part of the country, and the seat covers smelled of tobacco and beer.”47 Yet, when they arrive at the poolhall and the fateful moment comes, “She was rolled this way and that, into feelings she hadn’t known, hadn’t expected, couldn’t avoid … . He played her out as recklessly as he had played the final ball, and when he did she scattered as the red balls had scattered when the white one struck them so hard.”48 After being dropped off at her house, Jacy realizes the shallowness of the affair, the cruelty of Abilene’s actions, and the stupidity of her own. Ironically, she looks to her mother, a previous conquest of Abilene, for advice: “‘I don’t know what I’m going to do,’ Jacy said, looking up. ‘What do you do about it, Mama? Life just isn’t the way it’s supposed to be at all.’”49 In the most sincere interaction between the mother and daughter in the novel, McMurtry describes Lois’s heartfelt response: “‘You’re right,’ Lois said, smoothing back the hair on her daughter’s temples. ‘It isn’t the way it’s supposed to be at all, but what I’ve done about it hasn’t worked very well. Maybe we better work out something better for you.”50 Despite her outward confidence and swagger, by the end of the novel Lois Farrow’s life is shown to revolve around the same feelings of loneliness and emptiness as her daughter’s. After Sam the Lion’s death, McMurtry informs the reader that the young girl of Sam the Lion’s memory – the girl to whom he lost the silver dollar in a bet – was a young Lois. At the funeral, “Sonny was able to quit being embarrassed because of 46

Ibid. McMurtry, The Last Picture Show, 216. 48 Ibid 219. 49 Ibid 221. 50 Ibid. 47

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Mrs. Farrow, who cried all through the graveyard ceremonies. She stood at the edge of the crowd, the wind blowing her long hair, and her cheeks wet; when she walked back to her Cadillac to drive away she was still crying and wiping her eyes with her gloves.”51 After seeing her crying so much, “Sonny learned she had been the woman who watched Sam the Lion piss off the tank dam.”52 From here, McMurtry reveals that Lois had been in love with Sam the Lion all along, but that they had never married because he would not let her leave her husband. The denial of this love becomes the cause for the loneliness of both Lois and Sam the Lion, and his death only further increases Lois’s bitterness. Her attempts to escape these feelings through her sexual promiscuity with Abilene and Sonny have not worked, and this is made clear by her advice to find a “better way” of living for her daughter. Ruth Popper’s dependence on her affair with Sonny for meaning and excitement in her life eventually leads to her devastation when it ends, and she resumes the icy loneliness she had become so accustomed to earlier in the novel. After holding up hope that the affair will continue, Ruth eventually gives up: “When he had not come for two weeks, Ruth was forced to conclude that sex with her did not mean that much to him, and then she did despair. She knew he would never come, not ever again.”53 After finding an escape from her loneliness, her return to it is almost more than she can handle: “She could not do anything in the afternoons for wondering if he would come, and she could barely handle her disappointment when he didn’t. At first she didn’t cry, but later she cried a great deal and it only made her look older and uglier.”54 The ability of Sonny to stop the affair abruptly with Ruth reveals his immaturity and the pettiness of the relationship; at the same time, Ruth’s inability to cope with losing Sonny reveals her intense need for a source of escape in her life and the deep emotional impact that the loss of this source has on her. The failures of these characters to find the escape they so desperately desire at the end of the novel play a crucial role in the overall tone of the story. The crossroads Sonny reaches at the end, unsure of where is he supposed to go and how he is supposed to feel, functions as the culmination of McMurtry’s depiction of the emotional impact life in smalltown West Texas has on individual identity. Interestingly, the ambivalence Sonny feels towards Thalia at the end of the novel – the longing for both escape from and return to Thalia – is similar to McMurtry’s own 51

Ibid 179. Ibid. 53 Ibid 229. 54 Ibid. 52

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relationship with his hometown of Archer City, Texas. The novel is dedicated to Archer City, and McMurtry seems to have experienced the same love-hate relationship with his hometown. In Larry McMurtry and the West: An Ambivalent Relationship, Mark Busby articulates the ambivalence McMurtry displays in his personal feelings towards his hometown, and how this ambivalence plays out in The Last Picture Show. Busby writes, “In The Last Picture Show, McMurtry’s ambivalence about Texas swings emphatically toward the negative side of the ledger. The small-mindedness, boredom, pettiness, and hypocrisy of small-town life almost block out the positive memories of Sam the Lion.”55 According to Busby, McMurtry’s novel works to reveal his own bitterness towards his experiences of growing up in a small town in West Texas: the loneliness and disillusionment felt by the characters in Thalia represent the same experiences in McMurtry’s life. Interestingly, similar to how Sonny finds himself unable to leave Thalia at the end of the novel, McMurtry himself experienced the mutual feelings of both wanting to leave and needing to return to his hometown. After growing up in Archer City, McMurtry spent a number of years living outside of Texas. During these years, McMurtry’s writing about Texas conveyed these feelings of ambivalence, and fell more on the “negative side of the ledger” that Busby talks about. Yet, much as Sonny returns to Thalia after his trips to Fort Worth and Mexico, McMurtry returned to Archer City later in life, and he currently lives there. It seems as if the inability of the residents of Thalia to completely rid themselves of their connections to their home is further evidenced in McMurtry’s personal life. Pocock articulates this characteristic of the relationship between a person and their home: “Although a hierarchy of places emerges as our engagement with the world enlarges beyond our earliest activities, a crucial and indelible bond is established with early place or ‘home.’ … We may move, but we cannot begin again a second time.”56 McMurtry’s personal return to Archer City serves as another example of the deep ties created between small towns and their residents. Feelings of entrapment and isolation often occur for these people, but these emotions entail a deep, crucial connection between people and place, creating almost a codependent relationship. But, first and foremost, the novel works to portray the negative effects of living in a small town on a person’s identity. Busby writes, “With a heavy dose of sarcasm, McMurtry dedicates The Last Picture Show 55

Mark Busby, Larry McMurtry and the West: An Ambivalent Relationship (Denton, TX: U of North Texas P, 1995), 106. 56 Pocock, 339.

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‘lovingly to my hometown,’ and its almost cartoon figures indicate the depth of his growing resentment of the redneck world in which he grew up.”57 This sarcastic dedication and the harsh manner in which McMurtry proceeds to depict life in Thalia reveal the bitterness and resentment he feels towards growing up in a small West Texas town. He knows firsthand the limits of experience growing up in a place like Thalia, and his characterizations and descriptions of these feelings in the book are realistic products of personal experiences. In his essay “Southwestern Literature,” McMurtry further reveals his feelings about life in small-town Texas: “For better or worse, the country has been despoiled. Life in the country nowadays usually means life in or near the small town, and the small towns do not enlarge one’s character, they shrink it.”58As he shows in the novel, regardless of how many people are around, loneliness inevitably takes hold of the individual, “shrinking” their identity and their potential. As Sonny puts it early in the novel, it is simply “the look of the town” that makes him feel isolated. The flat, dry, windy landscape of West Texas dominates the characters’ perspectives. Consisting of little more than a picture show, a café, and a poolhall, Thalia forces its residents to look elsewhere for excitement. Yet, despite these efforts to find a source of pleasure outside of their monotonous lives, the characters inevitably only find themselves feeling more and more isolated. These feelings of ambivalence serve as evidence of the multi-faceted ways that people connect to the places where they live. Places inspire a wide array of emotions for people, from belonging and security to boredom and bitterness. Interestingly, Thalia functions as both for the characters of The Last Picture Show, leaving them in a type of no-man’s land with no good option of where to go next. Echoing his description of Sonny and Duane returning from their trips, and Tom Joad’s return to the farm in Oklahoma, McMurtry reflects on his return journeys to Archer City in his youth: “Through my college years, topping that ridge had always given me a great sense of being home, but time had diminished the emotion and I had begun to suspect that home was less a place than an empty page.”59 These words exemplify the problematized depiction of “home” in McMurtry’s novel, and the multi-faceted and convoluted relationships that these characters have with Thalia. The duality of Thalia as both “home” and “empty” takes a serious toll on the identity of its residents. McMurtry depicts the trap set by life in a small town all too well, and the novel serves as evidence of the types of lives that result from 57

Busby, 98. McMurtry, In A Narrow Grave, 36. 59 Ibid 86. 58

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these limited possibilities of experience. McMurtry’s use of place in The Last Picture Show is deliberate and purposeful; his depictions of the emotional and psychological yearnings of his characters convey his own perceptions of how life in a specific part of the Southwest can produce negative connections between the landscape and the people. Like the terrain in which they live, the characters of McMurtry’s novel reside in emotional desolation; their identities are forced to grow and develop in the harshest of climates, with only the smallest allowance of natural resources. McMurtry compares Sonny to a “broomweed in the wind,” and Jacy to a set of scattered pool balls; like these lifeless and defenseless items, the characters in the novel reveal to readers the depths of isolation and entrapment that life in small-town West Texas can sometimes foster.

Bibliography Ahearn, Kerry. “More D’Urban: The Texas Novels of Larry McMurtry.” In Critical Essays on the Western American Novel. Ed. William T. Pilkington, 223-42. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1980. Anaya, Rudolfo. Interview with Juan Bruce-Novoa. Conversations with Rudolfo Anaya, eds. Bruce Dick and Silvio Sirias, Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1998. 11-28. Baker, Christopher. “The Death of the Frontier in the Novels of Larry McMurtry.” In Taking Stock: A Larry McMurtry Casebook. Ed. Clay Reynolds, 164-74. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1989. Busby, Mark. Larry McMurtry and the West: An Ambivalent Relationship. Denton, TX: U of North Texas P, 1995. Crawford, Ian. “Intertextuality in Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show.” Journal of Popular Culture 27 (1993): 75-81. Davis, Kenneth W. “Initiation Themes in McMurtry’s Cowboy Trilogy.” In Taking Stock: A Larry McMurtry Casebook. Ed. Clay Reynolds, 17480. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1989. England, D. Gene. “Rites of Passage in Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show.” Heritage of Kansas 12.1 (1979): 37-48. Fritz, Donald E. “Anatomy and The Last Picture Show.” In Taking Stock: A Larry McMurtry Casebook. Ed. Clay Reynolds, 186-92. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1989. Landess, Thomas. Larry McMurtry. Austin: Steck-Vaugh, 1969. Lich, Lera Patrick Tyler. Larry McMurtry’s Texas: Evolution of the Myth. Austin: Eakin, 1987. Lutwack, Leonard. The Role of Place in Literature. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 1984.

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McMurtry, Larry. Books: A Memoir. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2008. —. In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas. Austin, TX: Encino, 1968. —. “Larry McMurtry and Black Humor: A Note on The Last Picture Show.” In Western American Literature (1967): 223-27. —. The Last Picture Show. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966 —. Larry McMurtry. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1977. —. The Last Picture Show. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966. —. Literary Life: A Second Memoir. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009. —. “Taking Stock: An Introduction.” In Taking Stock: A Larry McMurtry Casebook. Ed. Clay Reynolds, 1-34. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1989. Morrow, Patrick D. “Larry McMurtry: The First Phase.” In Seasoned Authors for a New Season: The Search for Standards in Popular Writing. Ed. Louis Filler, 70-82. Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green UP, 1980. Neinstein, Raymond L. The Ghost Country: A Study of the Novels of Larry McMurtry. Berkeley, CA: Creative Arts Book Company, 1976. Peavy, Charles D. “Coming of Age in Texas: The Novels of Larry McMurtry.” In Western American Literature 4 (1969): 171-88. Phillips, Raymond C., Jr. “The Ranch as Place and Symbol in the Novels of Larry McMurtry.” In Taking Stock: A Larry McMurtry Casebook. Ed. Clay Reynolds, 68-86. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1989. Pilkington, Tom. “Doing Without: The Thalia Trilogy.” In Taking Stock: A Larry McMurtry Casebook. Ed. Clay Reynolds, 113-27. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1989. Pocock, D.C.D. “Place and the Novelist.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 6.3 (1981): 337-347. Accessed 15 October 2009. http://www.jstor.org/stable/622292. Proulx, Annie. That Old Ace in the Hole. New York: Scribner, 2002. Reilly, John M. Larry McMurtry: A Critical Companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000. Reynolds, Clay, ed. Taking Stock: A Larry McMurtry Casebook. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1989. Schmidt, Dorey, ed. Larry McMurtry: Unredeemed Dreams. Edinburg, TX: School of Humanities, Pan American University, 1978. Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. New York: Penguin, 1992. Stout, Janis P. “Journeying as a Metaphor for Cultural Loss in the Novels of Larry McMurtry.” In Taking Stock: A Larry McMurtry Casebook.

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Ed. Clay Reynolds, 56-68. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1989. Summerlin, Tim. “Larry McMurtry and the Persistent Frontier.” In Taking Stock: A Larry McMurtry Casebook. Ed. Clay Reynolds, 49-56. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1989. Welty, Eudora. “Place in Fiction.” In A Modern Southern Reader. Ed. Ben Forkner and Patrick Samway, 537-48. Atlanta, GA: Peachtree, 1986. Willson, Robert. “Which is the Real Last Picture Show?” in Literature Fiction Quarterly 1. 2 (1973): 167-69.

CHAPTER SEVEN THE BEAT WEST OF EDWARD DORN PAUL VARNER ABILENE CHRISTIAN UNIVERSITY From 1957 to approximately 1962 much of the United States was fixated upon the phenomenon of the Beatnik craze, begun arguably when Viking Press published Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and ending by 1962, as Kerouac was arguing in Dharma Bums. The days of the Beatniks were crazy times dominated by cartoon-like stereotypes of beret-wearing beatniks in dark glasses thumping on bongo drums in a haze-filled underground coffee house with a name like The Purple Onion, the requisite girl in black silently but coolly lounging in the background.1 During these heady days, two characters especially seemed to rule over the New York Greenwich Village / East Side scene: Hettie and Le Roi Jones. Together they ran Totem Press, one of the early small presses promoting the new Beat poetry. In her memoir, How I Became Hettie Jones, Jones tells about the evening in the fall of 1960 when “I came home and found [Roi] with Allen [Ginsberg], Joel Oppenheimer … and some others, as well as two tall fair strangers introduced as Edward Dorn and his wife, Helene. Ed, a former Black Mountain student now living in Santa Fe, had come to New York to read at the 92nd Street Y, which was having an avant-garde poetry series. He and Roi had been corresponding. Raised on Midwestern farms, Ed wrote about the West with insight and compassion … . He was a handsome man, with a bony, focused look and a clear sense of his physical self, very elegant in a raw silk jacket” (128). Edward Dorn was one of the New American poets who is most often associated with the Black Mountain poets, Charles Olson and Robert Duncan. He graduated from Black Mountain College in 1955 with Robert Creeley as one of his examiners. Olson’s long poem, A Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn (1964), a poem attacking the then-dominant 1

Disclaimer: I am describing a media created image. The actual Beat Movement was and remains an infinitely complex movement.

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interpretation of the West by Walter Prescott Webb, pays obvious tribute to his former student. While he was most closely associated with the Greenwich Village Scene, Dorn also had earlier made the San Francisco Beat Scene associated with his friends Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Subsequently, Dorn followed the typical arc in the professional career of other Beat writers who lived long after the early day Beatnik craze. He moved west and became involved in eco political activities while continuing to write poetry and publish in small press and literary magazine media. And, of course, as with many anti-academic Beat writers, he entered the life of university faculty members. From 1961 until his death in Boulder, Colorado in 1999, Dorn served on various university creative writing faculties, culminating in his work as the head of the University of Colorado’s writing program.2 While his work previously has been scattered among numerous hardto-find small press volumes, Edward Dorn’s reputation has always remained steady among scholars. The most substantive treatment of Dorn’s poetry overall is Donald Wesling’s casebook, Internal Resistances: The Poetry of Edward Dorn, from 1985. Because Dorn continued working with and revising his Beat epic Gunslinger after Wesling’s casebook appeared – Dorn even renamed the epic from its earlier title Slinger – the essays therein on Gunslinger, while valuable, are necessarily dated. Of course, much scholarship has developed around the life and poetry of Dorn since 1985. William McPheron’s valuable volume in Idaho State’s Western Writers Series treats Dorn as a Western writer, but downplays his Beat Movement ties. Tom Clark’s 2002 Edward Dorn: A World of Difference is a valuable and sympathetic anecdotal biography similar in style to Clark’s more famous yet controversial biography of Kerouac. Also a well-received volume of his specifically Western poetry, Way More West, came out in 2007. But now with the publication of the Collected Poems in 2012 – edited as was Way More West, by his widow, Jennifer Dunbar Dorn, a scholar and writer in her own right – we can begin the process of seriously appraising Edward Dorn’s achievement. The Collected Poems includes all of Edward Dorn’s poetry arranged chronologically, volume by volume as 2

I distinguish between the 1950s Beat Generation associated in a limited degree to the Kerouac-Ginsberg-Gregory Corso circle and the much broader term, the Beat Movement, which signifies far more than a generation coming of age after World War II. The Movement gathered many elements, including writers of the San Francisco Renaissance, the East Side Scene, the New York School, and the Black Mountain poets. Donald Allen established the early canon of the Beat Movement with his seminal 1960 anthology The New American Poets. See Varner 1-4 where I have developed this distinction more fully.

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they originally appeared and with original prefaces and even jacket blurbs. Interspersed, Jennifer Dorn places the previously uncollected poetry from little magazines. The major works Gunslinger and Recollections of Gran Apacheria are included entire. The canon of his poetry is now established and the texts are as definitive as we are likely ever to get. Edward Dorn was one of the numerous poets and writers who were part of Black Mountain College, the unconventional avant-garde school in North Carolina devoted to the arts and poetry. Black Mountain was Charles Olson’s school and Olson from the beginning exerted a strong influence on the young Dorn’s work. Until Olson’s death in 1970, Dorn maintained a regular correspondence with his mentor who had become his primary confidante in all things related to his intellectual and artistic development as a poet. Of course, Charles Olson’s long poem, The Maximus Poems, develop a grand vision of America set primarily in Gloucester, Massachusetts and is probably the great poem of the Beat poetry movement. Just as Charles Olson is the preeminent poet of New England and America “out” (to use Dorn’s common term), so Edward Dorn saw himself as the preeminent poet of the West. While Dorn was student at Black Mountain, Olson wrote up a plan for his education and later published it as A Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn. This little pamphlet is a loose, free-flowing verse essay on American Studies. Olson recommends Walter Prescott Webb’s two books The Great Frontier and The Great Plains for the young Dorn to read. The point Olson makes is that these early seminal studies of the American West, which trace geographical and etymological effects on American history in a manner similar to Montaigne, will prove that “THE LOCAL AND THE SENTIMENTAL IS HOW HUMANISM COMES / HOME TO ROOST IN AMERICA” (5). Olson attacks The Great Plains because Webb “is led back into the trap of history as time and comes to the foolish conclusion that it is/ the Frontier which is done, and the Metropolis which done it in!” (5). The four sections of the Bibliography themselves are primarily booklists with comments on the various entries. The purpose is to get a full education on America. Clearly, Charles Olson’s plan for Edward Dorn worked. Dorn himself was to pay direct tribute to his mentor with a major critical essay titled “What I See in the Maximus Poems,” used in Donald Allen’s anthology The Poetics of New American Poetry, and in a tribute poem titled “From Gloucester Out.” One of Olson’s key ideas, from Poetry and Truth: The Beloit Lectures and Poems is “That which exists through itself is what is called meaning,” (61) an idea derived from William Carlos Williams. Dorn would apply the

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idea to his interpretation of the American West as seen throughout the Collected Poems, but in a vision of a West yet to be satisfactorily constructed. Dorn’s poetry, along with the poetry of the other Beats, such as Olson and Duncan, from its beginning revolted against conventional mid-century modernist verse and evolved steadily through the decades toward a fully separated postmodernism. Paul Hoover gives Dorn’s early 1961 poem “Geranium” as an example of early postmodernism despite its tendency toward irony and sarcasm, highly prized by modernist critics (1994). According to Kenneth Likis, in relating Dorn to Olson, “Part of Olson’s claim in ‘Projective Verse’ (1950) is that the possibilities in poetry are as various as the individual people writing. Much of Dorn’s poetry shows that nothing in that principle of diversity need conflict with the attainment of formal eloquence and that ornate verse can exist apart from traditional meter and rhyme. The opening lines from “Geranium” illustrate this point” (1980). The speaker on a bus trip back home to the Midwest first observes a geranium growing out of the bricks at a station stop. At the next stop he observes a woman biker dressed in leather. Connections are then made. “Geranium,” then, is a carefully crafted poem; the variety of line lengths lends a formal tone to contemplations of the utterly mundane. And in the 1964 poem “From Gloucester Out” from the volume Hands Up (1963) Dorn extends his range from a late modernist mode to early postmodernism. The poem clearly shows Olson’s influence with its projective verse. The speaker reflects back to a time with the older poet in his hometown of Gloucester, Massachusetts. He laments that he is incapable of the “pure existence” he finds in Olson. The occasion of the poem is a trip a very young Ed Dorn made with his lifelong mentor from Gloucester to New Jersey. But most important here is the way Dorn sees Olson as the fulfillment of the role of the poet. He sees Olson as serving, essentially, as a Wordsworthian-Coleridgian Romantic genius poet: … all the senses, come to him as a swarm of golden bees and their sting is the power he uses as parts of the oldest brain.

Charles Olson, the genius-poet, Dorn continues, can hear “the delicate thrush / of the water attacking.” He “hears the cries … / and watches silently the gesture of grey/bygone people” (Dorn, Collected Poems 122).

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“The Problem of the Poem for My Daughter, Left Unsolved” from Geography (1965), along with many of the Geography poems, illustrates Dorn working within Charles Olson’s projective verse tradition. Donald Wesling notes about Geography and this poem specifically, “Dorn constructs his account based on what he has read and seen, a personal penetration behind the daily discourses that mystify the causes of, for example, … why Americans war with Indians an Vietnamese, [and] why a father has no secret to tell his daughter about how to survive as a modern woman” (Introduction 10). A few facts of the poem are simply related: it opens with an image of Dorn’s daughter on her 14th birthday. She had been born in 1951. The speaker describes how beautiful she looks with a small strand of pearls around her throat. The pearls evidently mask a small surgical scar. The scar is “a thin line red with its own distinction/ … of what she has been made to understand is civilization/ not the brand of the adventurous cutlass” (Dorn, Collected Poems 138).The poem then moves from his daughter to the problem for American women and the “misery,” only superficial now, that she will face. In the context of Geography, this country, this American West, is not a country for women. Instead, the women of this country are the beaten-down souls celebrated in countless poems of the early Beat Generation (although almost always referring to men). The poet meets a woman at a supermarket, a worn-out woman, withdrawn, afraid – a common housewife, as the poem relates it. What women of ideals and passion do exist in the West are doomed to die. Amelia Earhart, daughter of the West, America’s prophet and inspiration, Dorn sets forth as doomed to die, doomed to disappear. So the problem Dorn sees for his daughter as she moves from her state of innocence to experience is unresolvable in the poem. Fortunately, this day of her 14th birthday, she is “not yet bestowed with any curse” (Dorn, Collected Poems 138).The poem ends in Beat depression with first a reference from Jean-Paul Sartre “of how we might / plead our case … that this is a nation where those who care / are the damned of the earth” (Dorn, Collected Poems 139) or, in this poem’s context, those who are Beat. Thus, Dorn, father and poet, feeling helpless, compares himself to an observer standing “behind the pane of my window” or as “some silly/ toscanini/ leading the symphony,” a director who knows by heart all the orchestral scores, but who has lost all control of the orchestra and is “saturated by defeat” (Dorn, Collected Poems 144). Edward Dorn’s “The Problem of the Poem for My Daughter, Left Unsolved,” then, provides us a Beat vision of America not that different in mood although different in tone from Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” But here

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is a vision from the West, from a Western poet, and it bears much more resemblance to Charles Olson’s work than to Ginsberg’s. Further, the preface to Idaho Out contains an idea key to Dorn’s vision of the American West. It quotes Frederick Jackson Turner writing of the decade of 1820-1830: “West of the Mississippi lay a huge new world – an ocean of grassy prairie that rolled far to the west, till it reached the zone where insufficient rainfall transformed it into the arid plains, which stretched away to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Over this vast waste, equal in area to France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, AustriaHungary, Italy, Denmark, and Belgium combined, a land where now wheat and corn fields and grazing herds produce much of the food supply for the larger part of America and for great areas of Europe, roamed the bison and the Indian hunter” (Dorn, Collected Poems 923). Dorn then wittily follows up, “Over this vast waste equal to … It is still waste, although it isn’t so vast any more … . There would seem to loom only facts: that boulder, this mountain, those store fronts, his greed, her compassion, water, no water, prayer, arrogance, futility, loneliness, a swindle, an even break, the dandy charmer, the slothful soilbound fanatic, the dream and of course the inevitable dreamer, History has always seemed to me lying right on the table, forgetful of age, or not present at all. And geography is not what’s under your foot, that’s simply the ground” (923). In volume after volume of verse, Dorn develops this attitude toward his native West. In the essential long poem, “Idaho Out,” dedicated to Hettie and Le Roi Jones, he uses as an epigraph a quote from the eminent American geographer Carl Sauer, recommended by Charles Olson, almost as a thesis for the poem: “The thing to be known is the natural landscape. It becomes known through the totality of its forms” (153). “Idaho Out,” narratively structured about road trip from Pocatello, Idaho to Missoula, Montana, establishes from the outset that the poet is observing those parts of the West not usually noted for celebration but those parts that make up the totality of the West. It turns out that the noble pioneers of the frontier were not so noble – they merely came in and were the first white flour makers (Pioneer Brand flour.) Yet, throughout “Idaho Out” Dorn addresses Hettie and Le Roi back in New York as he shows them his West, not a real West at all any more than their East was as real as scholars such as Perry Miller made it out to be. (Although he never mentions Perry Miller.) While these and the poems included in Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry represent his early work, Edward Dorn’s lifelong project, and the major work upon which his reputation ultimately must rest is his epic Western poem Gunslinger, published in installments between 1968 and 1972 and established in its final form in 1989. Written in the grand

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20th Century tradition of the great long poem, the tradition of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, Hart Crane’s The Bridge, and, especially, Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems, Edward Dorn’s Gunslinger constructs a new West and a new Western, a Beat, postmodern West. While much of Dorn’s poetry is openly political, his style is varied. According to Kenneth Likis, “Dorn has employed a wide range of poetic elements. He is equally himself whether the mode at hand comes closest to lyric, narrative, meditation, elegy, satire, or parody, and such distinctions rarely apply categorically to a given poem” (1980). In fact, Donald Wesling compares Dorn to 18th-century satirists such as Jonathan Swift and says, “The tone that pervades Edward Dorn’s work is that of a Jonathan Swift trapped in a democracy” (15). Gunslinger is a postmodern Beat Western, not because it adopts, parodies, or even contradicts classic genre Western values, but because it both reduces the possibilities of the classic Western and expands the possibilities of a postmodern Western. Dorn’s epic poem, begun in 1968, was initially announced as completed in 1972 and published as Slinger. But later, Dorn revised it as Gunslinger, publishing his definitive version in 1989. This long poem consists of four books and a final section, “The Cycle.” It is a “mock epic of audacious proportions, a metaphysical inquiry that revives the fine pleasures of elaborate parody and bad puns, Gunslinger is at once a vast entertainment and an extremely challenging poem” (Likis, 1980). Sometimes compared to the Canterbury Tales, the narrative consists of a quest for enlightenment by scientists, junkies, and assorted modern pilgrims high on drugs travelling to Las Vegas with a centuries old guide called Slinger. Dorn’s style consists of what he called “clots of phrase,” erratic syntax, unseemly puns, made-up language all with little helpful punctuation. In the opening movement to the long poem, originally titled “An Idle Visitation,” Gunslinger declares his goal to find Howard Hughes, the reclusive, richest man in the world, in Las Vegas. Yet, he notes, nobody has seen Hughes since 1832. This obvious hyperbole, along with the title of the longer poem, suggests a connection with the poem’s present to the frontier myths of the old West. The West of the poem, however, is not the West either of the frontier myth or of the geographically real west. Edward Dorn is a poet of the Beat West. He is not merely a Beat poet in the West. The distinction is crucial. Space in the Beat West is vast and non-temporal. It is constructed, even newly constructed, yet still Western, and still actual. Characters are shifting, non-identifiable: Burroughs-like from the cut-up novels, or Kerouac-like from the Tristessa period. Unlike such Western Beat poets as

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Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, or William Everson, who celebrate yet appeal for realistic visions of an actual, geographic West, Edward Dorn’s “antiepic of the Wild West” is “an epic of contemporary celluloid America, with its cartoon versions of Capitalist Entrepreneurs and Outlaw Heroes, its simulated folksiness, its Sci-Fi allusions and reductive academic clichés, [Gunslinger] was a poem very much ahead of its time” (Perloff i; vi). The main character, named variously Gunslinger, Slinger, and Zlinger, first evokes an image of the Gary Cooper-like Western solitary hero. He is The Cautious Gunslinger of impeccable personal smoothness and slender leather encased hands folded casually … .

The poem opens with the Gunslinger setting out on a quest: And where will you now I asked. Five days northeast of here depending of course on whether one’s horse is of iron or flesh there is a city called Boston and in that city there is ahotel [sic.] whose second floor has been let to an inscrutable Texan named Hughes Howard? I asked The very same. And what do you mean by inscrutable, oh Gunslinger? I mean to say that He has not been seen since 1833 (Gunslinger 6).

Thus the theme of this Western is the typical hero versus bad guys story with Howard Hughes and all he represents about exploitative capitalism being the villain. But the theme is never developed. In the above passage “I” (the character designated by the first person pronoun) is actually called “I” and it is through his point of view that the first book is related. But in Book II “I” dies and is preserved in a barrel of LSD. Later he returns as the secretary of the pre-Socratic philosopher Paramides. But Gunslinger and I never make the quest to Boston. Instead they find out that Howard Hughes (or Hughes, Howard, as he is usually referred to) has moved to “Vegas” (never called Las Vegas). But even when they set out to Vegas they never quite make it either. Nevertheless they set out, and

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along the way Gunslinger and I pick up assorted characters to accompany them on the trip. There is Lil the stereotypical saloon girl/brothel madam who manages the conversation and acts as an interpreter of Gunslinger’s cryptic speeches. It is just that her popular westerny slang is only slightly less cryptic. … you look like you always did Slinger, you still make me shake, I mean why do you think I’ve got my hand on my hip if not to steady myself and the way I twirl this Kansas City parasol if not to keep the dazzle of them spurs outa my eyes …

Of course, Gunslinger has a horse, and as befitting a typical cowboy hero from classic Westerns it is a super horse, large, fast and capable of anything asked of it – except this horse, whose name is first Claude and later Claude Lévi-Strauss, is so stoned on huge Tampico bomber marijuana cigars that it just rides along in the stagecoach with the others making eyes at Lil and telling the handlers how to do their business. It turns out that Claude plays a mean poker hand as well. It is Claude who plans their trip westward up the Rio Grande to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, and on to Vegas. Lil exclaims when she first encounters the horse in her saloon: say haven’t I met that Horse before? The Horse rose from his chair and tipped his stetson XX Hello Lil, it’s been a long time … . Thus sat the four of us at last a company it seemed and the Bombed Horse took his stetson XX, and drew on the table our future course …

Other characters picked up along the way include the poet-singer, also named Martin Heidegger, who accompanies his songs on the Abso-lute. (Marjorie Perloff develops the rationale for Heidegger and Levi-Strauss’s appearances in the poem – “both critics, of course, of the Cartesian

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rationalism the poem is at pains to debunk” (xi).) Then there’s Kool Everything (whose head he thinks has been misplaced); Dr. Jean Flamboyant (a researcher into the “post-ephemeral”); Taco Desoxin (Amphetamine laced taco); and Tonto Pronto (yes the Lone Ranger’s faithful Indian companion). Altogether they head to Vegas to confront Hughes, Howard. But they lose interest in the quest. Hughes himself shows up at the Four Corners but “decoaches without encountering Slinger and abruptly heads for South America” (Perloff xii). This recounting of the narrative of the poem probably sounds like a story line or story arc, but actually nothing of the kind exists in the poem. There is no narrative. And while there are plenty of songs along the way there is no lyricism. Geographical locations are made up movie, pop culture renditions. Truth or Consequences, New Mexico probably epitomizes the superficiality of locales along the way. It is, after all, a town named after a TV quiz show. After four books the group simply disperses. Nothing has happened. Rasselas-like, or Candide-like, here is no satisfactory conclusion. No ending at all. Edward Dorn’s poetry, virtually all originally published in nonestablishment media, today is recognized as integral to the Beat canon and thus the postmodern canon, published by major houses such as Penguin and the University of California Press. And Gunslinger establishes Dorn’s legacy permanently. It is a major poem of the Beat Movement. Beat epic, or anti-epic, perhaps, Gunslinger is also a Western. The genre, once so easily identifiable, now no longer exists. Even among 21st century pulp/consumer Western writers such as William W. Johnstone and Ralph Compton, whose paperback novels still have the garish famous pulp Western cover art – even these Westerns bear only superficial resemblance to the Louis L’Amour or Luke Short products of the 1950s and 1960s. Edward Dorn’s Gunslinger is a postmodern Beat Western, not because it adopts, parodies, or even contradicts classic genre Western values, but because it both reduces the possibilities of the classic Western and expands the possibilities. It reduces the genre to the trivial, but not as in parody. While there is plenty of good humor in Gunslinger, it is not a Blazing Saddles take-down of corny Westerns. It accepts, before the fact, Richard Slotkin’s thesis that every way we generally think about the American West, whether Western history, art, film, literature or even our sense of Western realism, is in fact a constructed West, an artificial West. What Edward Dorn does with his Western epic is what Charles Olson does with his New England Puritan epic, what Jack Kerouac does with his cross the country novels, or better yet with his spontaneous prose novels,

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what William Burroughs does with his Soft Machine cutup trilogy (The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express), and what Diane di Prima does with her epic Loba. His is the West in all its Beat Movement glory. Of course, Edward Dorn and his first wife Helene were early movers in the Beat scene in New York and San Francisco, but Dorn’s poetry is not an urban poetry. It is a Beat poetry of the West. Besides the epic Gunslinger, Dorn wrote other long poems detailing his vision of a Beat West, including the notable “Idaho Out” and his 1974 epic Recollections of the Gran Apacheria. Looking over the whole of Edward Dorn’s Western poetry, Amiri Baraka (formerly Le Roi Jones), has said, here is “A brilliant creative artist iconoclast scholar historian whose wonderful poetry is shaped by and carries the music of intelligence. And it is the real world Ed is clarifying for us with the powerful impact of reason as beauty. Without Dorn’s work the whole network of the [20th] century’s explanation of itself cannot be completely understood.”3

Bibliography Allen, Donald M., ed. The New American Poetry. New York: Grove Press, 1960. Clark, Tom. Edward Dorn: A World of Difference. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2002. Davidson, Michael. “‘To Eliminate the Draw’: Narrative and Language in Slinger.” Internal Resistances: The Poetry of Edward Dorn. Ed. Donald Wesling. Berkley, CA: U of California P, 1985: 113-149. Davidson, Michael. “To Eliminate the Draw: Edward Dorn’s Slinger.” American Literature 53 (1981): 443-464. Dorn, Edward. Collected Poems.Ed. Jennifer Dunbar Dorn. London: Carcanet, 2012. —. Gunslinger. Ed. Marjorie Perloff. Durham, NC.: Duke University Press, 1989. —. Interviews. Ed. Donald Allen. Bolinas, CA: Four Seasons Foundation, 1980. —. Selected Poems. Ed. Donald Allen. Bolinas, CA: Grey Fox Press, 1978. —. Slinger. Berkeley, CA: Wingbow Press, 1975.

3

From the jacket blurb of Dunbar, ed. Way More West.

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—. Views. Ed. Donald Allen. Bolinas, CA: Four Seasons Foundation, 1980. —. Way More West: New and Collected Poems. Ed. Jennifer Dunbar Dorn. New York: Penguin, 2007. Dresman, Paul. “Internal Resistances: Edward Dorn on the American Indian.” Internal Resistances: The Poetry of Edward Dorn. Ed. Donald Wesling. Berkley, CA: U of California P, 1985: 87-112. Golding, Alan. “Edward Dorn’s ‘Pontificatory Use of the Art’: Hello, La Jolla and Yellow Lola.” Internal Resistances: The Poetry of Edward Dorn. Ed. Donald Wesling. Berkley: U of California P, 1985: 208-235. Hallberg, Robert Von. “The Marvellous Accidentalism.” Internal Resistances: The Poetry of Edward Dorn. Ed. Donald Wesling. Berkley: U of California P, 1985: 45-86. Hoover, Paul, ed. Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. New York: Norton, 1994. Likis, Kenneth. “Edward Dorn.” Dictionary of Literary Biography 5: American Poets Since World War II, First Series. Ed. Donald J. Greiner. Detroit, Mich.: Gale, 1980. Web. Lockwood, William J. “Art Rising to Clarity: Edward Dorn’s Compleat Slinger.” Internal Resistances: The Poetry of Edward Dorn. Ed. Donald Wesling. Berkley, CA: U of California P, 1985: 150-207. —. “Ed Dorn’s Mystique of the Real: His Poems for North America.” Contemporary Literature, 19 (Winter 1978): 59-79McPheron, William. Edward Dorn. Boise State University Western Writers Series. Boise, Idaho, 1988. Okada, Roy K. “An Interview with Edward Dorn.” Contemporary Literature 15.3 (1974): 297-314. Olson, Charles. A Bibliography on America for Ed Dorn. Writing 1. San Francisco, CA: Four Seasons, 1964. Paul, Sherman. The Lost America of Love: Reading Robert Creeley, Edward Dorn, and Robert Duncan. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1981. Perloff, Marjorie. Introduction. Edward Dorn: Gunslinger. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 1989: v-xviii. —. “Review of The Collected Poems and Slinger.” New Republic (24 April 1976): 22-26.Wesling, Donald, ed. Internal Resistances: The Poetry of Edward Dorn. Berkeley, Calif.: U of California P, 1985. —. “To Fire We Give Everything: Dorn’s Shorter Poems.” Internal Resistances: The Poetry of Edward Dorn. Ed. Donald Wesling. Berkley, CA: U of California P, 1985: 13-44.

CHAPTER EIGHT MUTILATING THE WESTERN; RE-INVENTING THE WEST: ROBERT COOVER’S GHOST TOWN AND LESLIE MARMON SILKO’S GARDENS IN THE DUNES SALWA KAROUI-ELOUNELLI UNIVERSITY OF TUNIS “He found himself out upon this vast empty plain, where nothing seems to have happened yet and yet everything seems already over, done before begun.” Ghost Town “The Sand Lizard people remained at the old gardens peacefully for hundreds of years because the invaders feared the desert beyond the river.” Gardens in the Dunes

This paper sets out to discuss some of the theoretical implications generated by the current reinvention and critical recasting of a typically American literary and cinematic tradition: the Western. The discussion of two instances of such recasting of the Western from postmodern fiction, namely Ghost Town by Robert Coover and Gardens in the Dunes by Leslie Marmon Silko is meant to shed light on two significant matrixes that have informed much of the recent revisiting of the Western narrative: metafiction and ecocriticism or environmental aesthetics. In their critical rethinking of the Western, Coover’s and Silko’s novels respectively enact the paradigm of literary self-reflexivity and the ecocritical perspective in ways suggesting how in the revisiting of the theme of “Americanness,” the Western literary and artistic tradition exerts a particular appeal in the writer’s imagination, and how in “responding” to such appeal, writers display different readings of that tradition.

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The choice of those two texts is to a large extent motivated by their potential to illustrate the impact brought by parodic metafiction and by environmentalist thought to an American literary tradition that has been the target of much critical, often ironic, rethinking in American fiction since the opening decades of the twentieth century. Ghost Town and Gardens in the Dunes exemplify as well the striking divergence in outlook generated by two critical readings of the same literary tradition through a similar process of demystification of that tradition’s main thematic locus: the Frontier Myth as it emanated from the white pioneers’ and explorers’ narratives of epic encounters and heroic progress. In the two studied novels, the Western narrative’s formulaic patterns, illustrated by such modern classics and popular novels as Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902), or Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) or Forlorn River (1927) ironically echoed and deliberately perverted the iconic Frontier Myth in ways that sustain in both novels- Ghost Town and Gardens in the Dunes- a similar questioning of the Western’s epic dimension. As will be discussed later, the targets of such ironic perversion are mainly the formulaic plotlines (the classic patterns such as those of confrontation and flight and chase), the settings, and the variations on the central heroic figure (the solitary cowboy or the gunfighter in his interactions with the mythic West). The divergence between Ghost Town and Gardens in the Dunes, however, lies in their distinct concerns: Silko’s narrative keeps the paradigm of Native American culture as a normative voice, aiming, therefore, to unmask the silenced stories of gratuitous violence and imperialist mutilation of the wilderness and of history. Coover’s metafictional, parodic narrative deflates the canonized “grand narrative” by shedding light on its potential meaninglessness and absurdity, without ever claiming to celebrate any alternative norm. In addition, Gardens in the Dunes encompasses a sustained ironic echoing of various narrative forms associated with the thematics of the West and the westward movement in the American literary canon, ranging from the pattern of expedition, to the one of flight and chase (in the classical and popular Western), to that of encounter between the white, mainstream civilization and Native tribes. The narrative of Ghost Town, however, develops essentially as a parodic, subversive repetition of the basic formulaic structure of the classic Western in fiction and in cinema. A significant aspect of a likely complementarity may be discerned between the metafictional (aestheticist) tendency in Robert Coover’s sarcastic revisiting of the Western narrative and Leslie Marmon Silko’s fracturing of that American literary tradition by rereading it through the lens of Native ecocriticism. Complementarity may not hold unpolemically,

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though. As the novelistic form targeted by the metafictional and the ecocritical rethinking is particularly laden with ideological connotations, the reader may discern a kind of “redemptive derision” in Coover’s narrative, but a competing, substitutive historiography in Silko’s. On the whole, the choice of the two texts is largely motivated by their potential to contribute to the revival of critical re-reading of an American literary form that has for long been surrounded, according to Richard Wheeler, by a “mysterious silence” (Wallmann 1999, ix). Whether through the ironic echoes of the expedition, or of the captivity narrative (Gardens in the Dunes), or through the parody of the classic formulaic Western narrative (Ghost Town), Leslie Marmon Silko’s and Robert Coover’s novels contribute to the tendency of recent criticism1 of Western fiction and Western cinema to explore the Western’s inherent complexity and paradoxes. Major critics and historians of literary forms such as John Cawelti or Jeffrey Wallmann have asserted the intrinsic bond that has linked the rise and/or decline of the Western with the fluctuating significance that had been assigned to the Frontier Myth through out the different historical phases in the American culture. Cawelti ascribes the decline of Western fiction in the 1980s to “the increasing abandonment of the Turner thesis and other concepts of American exceptionalism” (1999; 6, 127). Jeffrey Wallmann has explicitly linked the Western to the broader cultural myth of the American Dream (1999; 17) and approached the literary tradition of the Western as an “allegory” of the American Dream. Such bond between the literary formula and the American cultural mythology largely accounts for the basic “unifying thread” that has made the Western narrative recognizable to the reader, beyond the huge variety in fictional configurations, in plotlines and settings (Varner 2008; 167-8), but it accounts also for the vein of continuous revision and recasting inherent to the Western (literary and cinematic) in the handling of its basic conventions and motifs. Indeed, critics of the Western in literature and cinema have insisted on the tendency of the Western formula to encompass a continuous process of reshaping of its basic motifs “in order to respond to the changing attitudes in American culture” (Cawelti 1976; 4). A similar reading is developed by Wallmann since a major one of his findings- as 1

My reading of Ghost Town and Gardens in the Dunes as basically metafictional narratives; as implying critical comments on, and re-interpretation of, the most conventional motifs and patterns of the Western novel, may account for my approach that considers them as contributions to the critical, interpretive discourse on the Western, much more than other pieces of entertaining fiction in the body of literary Western novels.

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highlighted by Wheeler in the “Foreward”- insists on the fact that “the flexibility and complexity of the genre are to be traced back to the continuous shifting of its thematic paradigms so as to support the national social concerns of the time” (1999; x). The complex overlapping between the formulaic quality of the Western (literary and cinematic) and its substantial flexibility is often mirrored in the various categorizations, developed by some historians and critics, and within which the plurality of the Western in its very formulaic patterns is explored, in addition to the plurality of its recent ramifications and critical recastings. On the basis of a review of two critical studies, John Seelye explores the formulaic thematics of the captivity narrative and the expedition journal, as significant axes within the formulaic Western or as providing a framework for the promotion of such formulas (such as The Lewis and Clarks Journals 1804-1806). The paradigms of the captive and the captain narratives, Seelye argues, seem to equally promote an idealizing aesthetics; an idealization displayed in an ecologically- oriented celebration of landscape in one (the captain’s narrative of expedition) and in the reinvention of the captivity experience in the other (1995; 307). Seelye also suggests that the problematical relation of the Western to the historical west is a feature that pertains even to the historical captain’s narrative. The two axes or ramifications of the Western explored by Seelye provide this work with a significant archetypal background against which the challenging perversion and the carefully designed overlapping between the two paradigms (the captain’s and the captive’s narratives) are to be analyzed in Ghost Town and Gardens in the Dunes, as will be seen later. Equally significant in providing this essay with a vital framework, are the pertinent categorizations developed by Paul Varner in his survey of the literary and cinematic Western. The two axes identified by Varner as “antimyth Westerns” that developed in the late 1960s, and “alternative Westerns” that took over since the 1980s (2008; xxiii, 11, 48) are quite relevant to the peculiar appropriation and interpretive misreadings2 of the classic Western that Robert Coover and Leslie Marmon Silko undertake in their respective novels: Gardens in the Dunes and Ghost Town. The classic Western, whether narrative or cinematic, “interpreted the historic Western moment in terms of white, male, Anglo-Saxon history” (2008; xxii); it tended also to join a specific vision of the Frontier Myth (informed by a white masculinist figure) to an allegorizing dimension related to the 2

I am here adopting the critical notion of “misreading” developed by Harold Bloom and appropriated by theorists of parodic literature such as Linda Hutcheon in A Theory of Parody in order to emphasize the openness and plurality of the interpretive process that is activated in parodic writing.

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particular historical moment in the American culture (Cawelti 1999, and Varner 2008). In cinematic Western, such classics as Devil’s Doorway (1955) directed by Anthony Mann implied an allegorical exploration “of the ambiguities in American life generated by the traumatic events of the Civil War” (Cawelti 1999; 95). The archetypal conflict in the classic Western- between the outlaws and a gunfighter acting through “regenerative violence” to liberate the community from their corrupt impact, “reflected the United States’ new role as the major superpower in conflict with the Soviet menace during the cold war” (Varner 2008, 48). The critical revisiting of the classic Western, identified by Varner in his survey of the post-1960s Westerns, took the shape of two successive trends that tended either to reinvent the Western formulaic patterns from an ethnic or a gender-oriented perspective, or to reinvent them along the lines of literary self-questioning and self-derision. The common ground shared by the two waves that formulated more or less far-reaching reshapings of the classic Western consists basically in their tendency to expand the archetypal Western setting beyond the territory of the Old American West, and sometimes beyond the American continent altogether, and, consequently, to be more radical in their challenging of the historicity of the westward moment (Cawelti1999; 22-24, Varner 2008; xxiv). Actually, most critics insist that the highly problematical nature of the historicist dimension, and even of the geographical one, is inherent to the Western novel through out its different phases (Varner 2008, xxi, xxiii; Wallmann 1999, 21-23). In his analysis, Cawelti shows how the Frontier motif played a major role in promoting a complex interaction between the Western setting’s geographical dimension (that is west of the Mississippi) and its connotative dimension as a Frontier, or as the incarnation of that “historical moment” of the frontier (1999, 19-20). But it is the frontier that had already been discursively shaped into a symbolic value within Frederick Jackson Turner’s hypothesis; the Frontier as the spatial edge of the free democratic, and forever fluid, spirit of American culture. Thus, the west that has been central to the literary and cinematic Western, Cawelti argues, is the west of a certain “historical moment” that the American artistic forms of the Western turn through the shaping influence of the Frontier Myth into an “epic moment” (1999, 23) without necessarily retaining, even vaguely, the historicity of the western frontier, as did for instance some of Zane Grey’s stories that are set in the twentieth century, or H. L. Davis’ Honey in the Horn (1935) Paul Varner’s descriptive categories of the “antimyth Westerns” and “alternative Westerns” sustain, at least in part, this theoretical tendency that dissociates the “epic moment” (central to the Western setting) from

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the historical process of the westward movement. As demonstrated by Varner, the depiction of the Western setting as a vague frontier space (marked by arid wild landscapes) has been a striking feature of such Western films as The Wild Bunch (1969) in which “the Western place [is stretched] to below the border into Mexico” (2008, xxiv) or the “Spaghetti Westerns” directed by European filmmakers such as Sergio Leone who enacted a “deterritorialization of the classic Western” by shooting his films in Spanish and Italian locations that only vaguely suggested the Western setting (Varner, xxiv,11). Varner uses the category of the antimyth Western to refer to those literary and cinematic works that have challenged the classic Western through the foregrounding of a derisive version of the cowboy hero, in addition to the ironic undermining of the symbolic value of moral regeneration conventionally attributed to the Western space. The antiheroic figures created by spaghetti Westerns remain entrapped in moral ambiguity, pursuing self-gratification rather than the restoration of right, while the historicity of the “Western moment” is altogether dissolved (not only through the vaguely defined Western place, but also by the irrelevance of the conventional nostalgic tone). Varner accounts for the dismantling of the codified figure of the cowboy hero in the derisive portraits articulated by the antimyth Westerns such as Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1967) by the influence of existential ideas; the demystified, disillusioned image of humanity promoted by existentialism. The parodic or satiric versions of the Western in American postmodern fiction, such as John Hawkes’s The Beetle Leg (1959), or Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man (1964), in addition to Ghost Town, were partly inspired by such cinematic vein of antimyth Westerns, even though they tend to highlight more complex and controversial issues related to the ecological implications of the westward movement or to purely literary and aesthetic issues. A similar challenging of the formulaic features of the classic Western is foregrounded by the later development that began in the 1980s and recast the whole artistic tradition of the Western from a perspective that establishes the relevance of such silenced factors as gender and/or ethnicity. Varner describes this wave through the term of “alternative Westerns” (xxiii). Michael Blake’s Dances with Wolves (1988) and the movie based on it (1990) are often cited as illustrating the attempt to revisit the Western, at least in part, from a Native American perspective. The alternative Western dismantles the archetypal figure of the white, heroic gunfighter or cowboy from a perspective that assigns the heroic position to a female or ethnic figure. It is a tendency that reflects a critical re-reading of the Western’s formulaic paradigm along the lines of a

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gender-oriented vision or an anti-hegemonic angle, and consequently brings to the Western’s thematics the issues of gender and ethnicity (Varner, 11, 48). Coover’s novel Ghost Town and Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes incarnate facets of critical reinvention of the classic Western that at once reinforce such categories as antimyth Western and alternative Western and challenge them. As will be discussed later, Ghost Town takes the derisive approach of antimyth a step further in its ironic undermining of meaningful action altogether, while its complex metafictional message reinvigorates the Western formula by allowing it to convey controversial issues related to representation and literariness, which ascribes to it a quality of the “alternative Western,” though the issues raised are mostly aesthetic, rather than social. Similarly, Gardens in the Dunes critically revisits some of the Western’s basic patterns and themes from a Native perspective that develops a different, disillusioned reading of the westward movement, while its demystification of the hegemonic, imperialist nature of the quest and expedition motifs revive the antimyth wave. Critics of Leslie Marmon Silko’s works have often insisted on their sustained critique of the hegemonic perspective that lays at the center of the official historiography in its accounts of the cultural conflicts between the Native American tribes and Euro American values. Most critics of her first novel, Ceremony, considered to be her masterpiece, have explored the Native American writer’s handling of issues of secrecy and sacredness that are substantial to Native American Tribal lore and clan stories (Allen 1990; Moore 1997;); the discussion of the environmental issues raised in Ceremony tended mostly to be framed by the critical re-interpretation, from a Native perspective, of cultural pluralism in American society and of the official historiography of the encounters between Native America and Euro Americans (Taylor 1999; 23- 69, Rice 2005, Holm 2008). Hardly has any of Silko’s canonical critics attempted to situate her fiction within the context of postmodern poetics, or discussed it in relation to the subversive forms of parodic and satiric literature in mainstream American canon, despite the theoretical framework provided by Gerald Vizenor in his discussion of resistance and survival (or “survivance,” as he calls it)3. 3

In “The Ruins of Representation,” Gerald Vizenor’s discussion of Native American literature as providing a facet of postmodern conceptions of writing and representation suggests the possibility of a significant perspective that would account for Silko’s novels in relation to the distinctive feature of postmodern literature, namely its subversive revisiting of conventional and canonical literary forms. However, even the discussions that have taken into account the bond established by Vizenor between the strategies of “survivance” in Native American

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Even the few recent discussions of Gardens in the Dunes (Ferguson 2006, and Ryan 2007) tend to analyze the politics of the Native American ecologism in the narrative in relation to the theoretical framework of postcolonial thought or to Native American ethics; hardly do any one of them debate the ironic echoes of familiar narrative forms or formulaic patterns such as those associated with the Western. The assumption on which this chapter is based is that the aspects of interaction between Silko’s narrative and conventional or classical literary forms in mainstream American fiction, such as the expedition narrative or captivity narrative within the classic and popular Western novel, may allow one to decipher the complexity of Native American poetics and the importance of its dialogic connection to the forms of mainstream literature. Critics of Coover’s fiction have hardly indulged in any sustained discussion of Ghost Town, which partly mirrors the decreasing interest in postmodern, self-reflexive, metafictional narratives since the late 1970s and mid 1980s. Indeed, studies of postmodern metafiction and its canonical figures such as John Hawkes, John Barth, Robert Coover, William Gass, Gilbert Sorrentino, and others were more frequent and more substantial during the 1960s and 1970s, even though metafictional works are still being published (John Barth’s The Book of Ten Nights and a Night (2004) or Ronald Sukenick’s Last Fall (2005), etc.). Robert Coover’s critics have explored the metafictional essence of earlier narratives than Ghost Town in order to highlight the importance of the parodied versions of folk tales articulated in some stories of Pricksongs and Descants 1969 or in Briar Rose (1996), or of historiographic accounts of such real events as the Rosenbergs’ trial in The Public Burning (1977). Even though some of the approaches to Coover’s metafiction tried to decipher in it serious concerns with such theoretical issues as the rethinking of authorship, or textuality and representation (Scholes 1979; 115- 23, Heckard 1976, Schmitz 1974), the critical readings of postmodern metafiction as a whole tended to be caught in a formalist perspective that granted little attention to literature and international Postmodernism have mostly ignored a significant implication of such bond: the Postmodern poetics that seem at play in Silko’s fiction may account for the ironic echoes produced in such novels as Ceremony or Gardens in the Dunes, of classical literary forms as the picaresque narrative, or the Western formulaic novel. I have tried in a previous work to discuss the environmental aesthetics in Ceremony in relation to the novel’s questioning of the Modernist thematics of the wasteland and to its parodic subversion of some conventional literary forms associated with the quest motif (the picaresque form, the biographical narrative) (see « The Aesthetics of Resistance in Ceremony. Academic Research (journal of the Faculty of Letters & Humanities, University of Sfax) 8.1 (2010): 5- 39.

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the cultural and political implications of Coover’s metafictional texts. In a recent critical work on Coover’s fiction, Brian Evenson briefly discusses some aspects of comic distortion of the Western formulaic motifs such as the cowboy figure in some sections of A Night at the Movies. Or, You Must Remember This (1987) (Evenson 2003; 187-89). The whole narrative is built around the complex strategy of having the narrative voice follow the cinematic camera, which allows the novel to bring to its metafictional issues related to literary representation other questions related to visual culture, and to the “marketing” of popular art and of cinematic narrative. Much has yet to be explored in A Night at the Movies and Ghost Town about their parodic distortion of formulaic literary forms and the implied rethinking of popular art forms and their discursive articulations of “Americanness.”

Postmodern Metafiction versus Ecocritical Postcolonialism That likely clash between the two theoretical tendencies incarnated by Robert Coover’s Ghost Town and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes respectively, may be traced back to the much-debated gap between the solipsistic nature of literary self-reflexivity on the one hand, and the militantist politics of ecrocriticism on the other. However, a close examination of the far-reaching implications of solipsistic metafiction may help us relativize such gap. The predominance of literary self-reflexivity in postmodern (meta)fiction has been defended by Linda Hutcheon against the accusation of promoting an “empty solipsism” and meaningless playfulness that can only serve the status quo by implying (and so mystifying) a politically conservative vision. Hutcheon’s category of “historiographic metafiction” (1989, 3-32) aims basically at foregrounding the historical and political significance of “narcissistic narrative” beyond its obvious concern with the problematic of literary representation, the inadequacy of language, and the paradoxes of creative writing. The persistence in postmodern metafiction of a concern with the (historical) world is displayed, according to Hutcheon, in its use and subversion of the conventions of fiction and of those of historiography (1989, 5). Without ever claiming the dissolution of the distinction between fiction and historiography, such metafiction foregrounds the notion that the accessibility of the past, whether historical or literary, remains dependent on narrativity and textuality. This accounts – in Hutcheon’s view- for the significance of intertextuality and of the parodic mode in informing the poetics of historiographic metafiction:

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As an example of the overlapping between the critical reading of literary traditions and the rethinking of history (of the accessibility of the historical past), Hutcheon cites the American tradition of the Western and its ironic, often parodic, revisiting in American postmodern metafiction. The particular appeal of the Western formulas to American historiographic metafiction illustrates, as Hutcheon argues, the frequent overlapping between the parodic and the satiric dimensions: the substantial ideological content of the Western literary tradition makes the satirization of such ideological dimension almost inevitable in any parodic reinvention of the Western’s formulaic patterns: The ironic intertextual use of the Western is not, as some have claimed, a form of “Temporal Escape” … but rather a coming to terms with the existing traditions of earlier historical and literary articulations of Americaness. As such, obviously, parody can be used to satiric ends. (17)

If Hutcheon admits the likely interpretation of the parodic revisiting of the Western narrative as mere “temporal escape” (a version of “absurd solipsism”), it is because parody (like irony) is a “risky business” (Hutcheon 1994; 9). Recognizing and decoding the parodic mode and the whole intertextual game is dependent on an inevitable contingency; grasping the parodic dimension and the patterns of intertextuality is not guaranteed by any textual component, nor is it substantial to the reading act (as Hutcheon herself and other critics often admit4). Consequently, the contingency of parody’s reception, may to a certain extent account for the little attention received by the parodic revisiting of the Western tradition by many postmodern metafictional narratives such as John Hawkes’s The Beetle Leg, John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor, and Robert Coover’s Ghost Town. A close reading of Ghost Town and Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes may allow one to detect the possibility of a common ground between postmodern metafiction and other theoretical frameworks in which the 4

Hutcheon explicitly admits that parody and irony are “risky” in that the reader may not grasp them while undertaking an interpretive act (see, A Theory of Parody. The Teachings of Twentieth- Century Art Forms, London, Methuen, 1985: 84- 99), while John Duvall (199, 382) and other critics often corroborate this idea.

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militant dimension is more obvious, namely ecocriticism. Such common ground has to do with the similar skeptical reception and critical rereading of the narratives of history, noticeable in both trends. In addition, ecocriticism could not function through a denial of the problematical issues that poststructuralist and postmodernist theories have brought to the foreground of critical discourse. Robert Marzec (2009, 422) argues, in this respect, that the guiding assumption in ecocritical studies should not be the claim that environmental representation is capable of escaping the opacity of language and the inadequacy of representation. It may be significant to notice that ecocriticism involves the same risks of supporting the existing (capitalist) order and promoting a politically conservative vision, as does the literary self-reflexivity of postmodern metafiction. The latter through its claimed indifference to the historical world, and the former through its possible institutionalization within such structures of alliance between environmental and military activism as “Green patriotism” (Marzec 427), or within such political strategies as the “ecology of fear” identified by Slavov Zizek (2008, 38). This may in part account for what Graham Huggan has described as “ a postcolonial turn in environmental criticism”; the tendency, as Huggan continues, of ecocriticism to be informed by becoming imprinted by a sense of commitment to the struggle for social justice and for human-centered issues, which is the essence of postcolonialism (2004, 702). In the context of this possible (and actual) convergence between ecocritical and postcolonial perspectives in literary criticism, the ecologically minded interpretation of the Western literary tradition, which has been central to the critical literature devoted to that tradition, is likely to undergo a radical change in its assessment. Through its contribution to such critique, Silko’s novel provides an illustration of that radical change, but so does Coover’s narrative (and much of the parodic metafiction that focuses on an ironic imitation of the Western) even if its theoretical frame is aestheticist rather than ecologically oriented. The derision that targets the epic dimension of the Western narrative demystifies as well the early ecocritical interpretations of the traditional Western that tended to mask the utilitarian approach to the western landscape. The history of the Western novel and of its critical interpretation encapsulates many of those theoretical, political and ethical issues that the discussion of metafiction and of ecocriticism brings to the foreground. The likely fusion (or confusion) in historical narrative between myth and the veracity of facts has for long been suggested by the Western novel in its construction of a mythicized version of American history where a challenging overlapping between the fictitious and the historical is

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consecrated. In addition, the ideology of progress promoted by the traditional canon of the Western functioned through an early and reversed version of Zizek’s notion of “the ecology of fear”; images of the “untamed” wilderness as a potential source of threat to Euro-American civilization were often fused with romanticized descriptions of landscape. Leslie Fiedler pointed to this paradoxical representation of the Western (landscape, character-type) through his comment on “the world’s first Westerns” (187), Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales); it is at once the incarnation of innate nobility and potentially destructive danger (1960, 187-190). Fred Erisman suggests in his survey of the ecological dimension in the Western novel that the representations of the landscape in this American tradition was informed by an uncritical vision of the commodification of landscape that was the cost of progress (1977,16). A paradoxical overlapping between a utilitarian and a mutilating approach to landscape reinforced, thus, the predominant expansionist ideology of the Frontier Myth. Erisman’s survey reveals also that the Western tradition began to witness a turning point since the 1960s with the rise of environmentalism at a global level, as it started to sustain a condemning attitude towards “the destructiveness of progress” (18). A parallel change took place in the critical discourse on the Western tradition. The re-readings of that tradition from an ecocritical perspective that attempts to decipher in its major texts the traces of environmental aesthetics or of an ecological vision, have often developed also a questioning of the expansionist ideology of the frontier myth (where the celebrated value of progress is assimilated to the imperialist politics). David H. Evans, for instance, relates this tendency in the writing and critique of the classic Western novel to the radical changes in the historiography of the westward settlement “long dominated by the shadow of Turner’s frontier thesis” (Evans 2008, 863). With a new generation of historians, Evans argues, The new Western history undertook to rewrite the traditional monologic narrative of the western settlement, replacing the heroic epic of civilization’s progress with a multitude of tragic, ironic, and sometimes comic stories-foregrounding the brutal extermination of native peoples, the mindless environmental destruction, and the marginalization of nonEuropean groups that were an integral part of that history (863).

Thus, the vital interaction between the changes in the historiography of the West, the continuous modifications in the critical interpretations of Western literature, and the specific orientations assumed by the parodic

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revisiting and critique of that literary form, incarnate a significant background against which to interpret Ghost Town. Globally, the postmodern versions of such critical rethinking of the formulaic Western narrative have had their perspectives deeply affected by the changes in the historiographic rereading of the westward movement, by the insights that postcolonial thought infused into postmodernism, and the radical skepticism imposed by the new directions in ecocriticism and environmental thought. Through Ghost Town and Gardens in the Dunes, we will try to discuss the manifestations but also the efficacy of the postmodern critique of the Western literary tradition when such critique is undertaken from within literary writing, within fictional narratives that are substantially informed by a metafictional (self-reflexive) perspective (Ghost Town) or by a postcolonial-ecocritical vision that serves a sense of commitment to Native American culture (Gardens in the Dunes).

Ghost Town: Ironic derision of the Western Epic It is to be noticed that with Coover’s generation of parodic metafiction writers, the literary and novelistic traditions with a formulaic pattern (Western, detective, sea adventure narrative, fairy tale, etc.) are particularly appealing to their ironic, often derisive, repetition. John Hawkes’s second published novel, The Beetle Leg (1951), for instance, was a parodic subversion of the Western narrative in which black humor and grotesque imagery create a macabre version of the literary form. Robert Coover’s novel illustrates the kind of insights articulated by postmodern metafiction in its parodic revisiting of established literary canons. The sustained parody of the Western tradition in Ghost Town may suggest to the reader the power of derision to deconstruct the Western’s basic motifs and thematics through a strategy of storytelling, of character portrayal and plot designing that maintains in the narrative’s foreground a challenging critique of the literary tradition’s features: the epic quality of action; the concordance between the heroic status of the pioneer/cowboy and the idea of civilization’s progress. As a parody of the Western novel, Coover’s Ghost Town ironically imitates its basic conventions; incorporating in the narrative the elements and themes that are typical of the Western while distorting and negating their (expected) conventional significance. The grotesque, comic incongruity, and the cartoonish quality in character portrayal, are among the main devices used throughout Coover’s narrative in order to articulate its parodic version of the American literary tradition.

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The significance of the parodique distorsions in Ghost Town is also to be linked to the earlier forms of revision, recasting, and even distortions of the formulaic paradigm, undertaken mainly within cinematic Westerns, in particular those tendencies that Varner describes as “antimyth” and “alternative” Westerns. In Ghost Town, the narrative opens with a scene of desolation where the decay of the landscape is mingled with the prototypical figure of the “lone rider.” As the travelling of the lone rider is immediately dissociated from purpose or target, an ironic negation of the quest motif is announced: “he found himself out upon this vast empty plain, where nothing seems to have happened yet and yet everything seems already over, done before begun” (4). The cowboy figure is explicitly presented as a mythic character; at once an ancient creature and an eternal child: “he is leathery and sunburnt and old as the hills. Yet, just a kid. Won’t ever be anything else” (3). This deliberate foregrounding of the cowboy’s mythic essence generates an ironic undermining of the historical axis; not for the sake of denying the historicity of the cowboy figure, but rather to highlight the myth-making process within which the classic Western narrative re-invented the cowboy figure. Kid, the cowboy, is immediately situated against the background of a changing landscape within a pattern of sustained disjunction: the interaction between the Western “hero” and the Western space is reduced to some vague memories of past, formulaic patterns of action: the cowboy is presented as vaguely emerging from a hardly recalled past. The repeated description of Kid as emerging from a temporal and a spatial vagueness implies a metafictional comment on the whole Western tradition; it is an ironic reminder of its emergence from a confusing mixture of historical facts and fictitious accounts. In Coover’s parodic narrative, the epic quality of the Western plot line is ironically denied, first through the peculiar articulation of the quest and its space presented by the narrator in terms that highlight the sense of saturation: “everything seems already over, done before begun” (4), and even the sense of void (“a space there and not there, like a monumental void”). Such rhetoric of saturation is quite frequent in postmodern metafiction where the ironic negation of the very possibility of plot often acts as a reminder of an impossible originality, but also a reminder of the nature of such formulaic traditions as artifice: the exhausted formulaic pattern of the parodied literary tradition is explicitly assumed and exaggerated by the metafictional narrative in order to unveil its mechanical investment of the simplistic binary vision that once informed the Frontier Myth. The tendency of many classic and popular Westerns to reduce the conflicts that marked the westward settlements to simple moral

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oppositions between the forces of good and those of evil; civilization and barbarity, is often displayed in such narratives as Frank Water’s The Man Who Killed the Deer (1942) or Man in the Saddle (1951) etc.). A major strategy invested by Coover’s novel in debunking the Frontier Myth consists in repeatedly associating each component of the formulaic Western narrative with a rhetoric of meaninglessness. Thus, the destination of the cowboy’s “quest”; “a town over on the far horizon” (5), is introduced in terms that ironically undermine the quest motif altogether by dissociating its target from any particular significance: “he doesn’t know what it’s rightly called, nor feel any need to know. It’s just the place he’s going to.” A mechanical quality informs not only the happenings, but also what seems to be the cowboy’s conscious or deliberate action. The distinctive quality of the Western setting as described by John Cawelti, emanates from its role as symbolic landscape that “centers upon the point of encounter between civilization and wilderness, East and West, settled society and lawless openness” (1976, 193). In Ghost Town, however, the rhetoric of meaninglessness ironically subverts the ideological content of the Western narrative by denying the symbolic potential of the setting. The play of comic awkwardness or comic incongruity in the major scenes reinforces the novel’s parodic subversion of the Western tradition. In the scene of the conversation between Kid the cowboy and the frontier townspeople, for instance, comic absurdity arises from the discrepancy in their reactions when they are puzzled, even irritated, by the fact that the cowboy’s horse does not have a name, while they see perfectly acceptable the fact that the cowboy himself is nameless (8). Actually, as far as naming is concerned, Coover’s novel appeals to a subverted version of a convention in the Western tradition, which consists in using the term “kid” as part of the cowboy’s name (Billy the Kid, the Sundance Kid, Cisco Kid, etc.). In Ghost Town, as in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, the cowboy’s name is reduced to “Kid,”5 which suggests a reductive approach to the cowboy figure; an approach implying that what persists in this conventional character-type is his juvenile image. The emphasis put on the cowboy’s juvenile (immature) aspect reinforces the deconstruction of the traditional Western’s epic quality: a major target of the novel’s parody. Kid’s “boyish” quality reinforces in the different s scenes a sustained display of cartoonish awkwardness often attributed to the cowboy, which repeatedly generates an effect of comic absurdity. For instance, in the description of the sound made by his agitation while riding: “the rider 5

My belief is that despite this similarity, McCarthy’s poetics in its reinvention of the Western remains substantially different from Coover’s almost ‘nihilistic’ deconstruction of that literary tradition.

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shifts his seat … the saddle creaks audibly like a door suddenly opening under him” (9), when he mistakes his agitation while sitting on a stone for “actual” riding of his mustang (94), or when he is hit my his own boot and has the black mare standing over him (95). Such comic stereotyping of the cowboy hero has in fact been consecrated by many “antimyth” Westerns such as Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man (1964) or Thomas McGuane’s Something to be Desired (1985). In most such “antimyth” Westerns, however, the stereotyping and the comedy imply an ecologically oriented reinterpretation of the Western and of the Frontier Myth. They tend to suggest that the original ecological dimension of the classic and popular Western (the sublime effect attributed to the depicted Western landscapes) provided a deceptive or at least a partial picture of the actual meaning of the winning of the West. Therefore such narratives as Something to be Desired bring to the Western plot the reality of excessive exploitation of resources and of capitalist greed. Coover’s narrative however, seems to pursue in its critical comedy a rethinking of the literary form within an aestheticist paradigm that is related to issues such as literary representation and myth-making. The blurring of the symbolic connotations of the Western setting, as well as the highlighting of an anti-heroic image of the cowboy figure, have already been highlighted by some of the cinematic versions, especially the spaghetti Westerns such as Sergio Leone’s “Dollars trilogy” (Varner 2008; 196-7). Varner describes this cinematic form of critical revision “antimyth Western”; like Coover’s novel, the cinematic “antimyth Westerns” challenge the archetypal motifs and thematics of the classic Western and foreground an image of moral confusion. A major difference remains, however, between the deconstruction process in Coover’s novel and in the spaghetti Westerns; while those cinematic versions of “antimyth Western” maintain a sense of epic grandeur in the aesthetic effect of the artistic work as a whole and beyond the gloomy image of the anti-heroic cowboy, the predominance of comic absurdity and clownish awkwardness in Ghost Town destroys the epic dimension altogether. Much of the parodic narrative structure in Coover’s novel conveys an ironic negation of the symbiosis between space and hero, stressed by Cawelti when he posits that the Western landscape “suggests the epic courage and regenerative power of the hero” (1976, 40). In Ghost Town, a rather comic incongruity holds between an idyllic landscape confined to Kid’s reverie (confined by the reader, since the narrative itself does not clearly situate it) and the macabre “facts” of the Western settlement. The naïve romantic reverie is described as a space of “the unison with love and nature”; an unexplained purification of Kid’s life is achieved through the

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“fragrant water” of a running brook: “all the killing he’s done and seen soon washed away by them, and just as soon forgotten …” (20). Juxtaposed to this free-floating scene of “idyllic wilderness” (21), is the macabre space of the saloon with the awkwardness of the mutilated man, Kid’s clichéd gestures and the narrator’s perverse perception of a synchronized harmony between the musical performance and the violent death of the one-eared man whose “head splits with a pop … and his brains ooze out like spilled oatmeal …” (16). The black humor emanates from the narrator’s imaged description as much as from the characters’ reaction in the fictional world (the audience’s total indifference to the violent murder they witness, while sympathizing with the musical performance of a song about the loss of a heroic cowboy). The third person narrator in postmodern metafiction is no longer a “normative voice” capable of providing a healthy, reliable perception of the fictional world; it rather incarnates the same failure to rationalize or to reach a firm understanding of what goes on, as any character. In Ghost Town, the third person voice reinforces the disjunction of the fictional world and the deconstruction of the very plot convention through the inscription of an absolute indeterminacy expressed in the simultaneous assertion of a plurality of possible plots: .

How did he come to such a place? Perhaps he lost his way, or was sent by the army, or was chased by lawmen, or went in purposeful search of some secret treasure or his own self-knowledge, or perhaps he was captured and dragged to this alien land … (21)

This strategy corresponds to what Gerald Prince has identified as the “disnarrated”: “the events that do not happen though they could have and are nonetheless referred to (in a negative or hypothetical mode) by the narrative text” (1992, 30). Among the functions of the “disnarrated,” Prince mentions the interpretive function that he qualifies as the most important; when associated with the narrator’s vision, it may convey a metafictional message related to the critique or questioning of a particular convention (36); “to multiply signs of arbitrariness and contingency and in order to insist on the text’s own artificiality” (37). The main pattern of the captivity narrative or episode is infused into the disorienting plotline of Ghost Town, but within a framing indeterminacy articulated by the process of storytelling as the narrator presents multiple alternatives of actions without asserting the relevance of any one in particular. Kid’s (supposed? dreamed?) captivity in a Native American tribe is presented within a hypothetical frame that begins with: “perhaps he was captured and dragged” (21). The ironic negation of the

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uniqueness of the plotline (through the assertion of its plurality), which is part of the metafictional critique not only of the Western but also of literary narrativity in general, is suggested by the highlighting of a generalized, clichéd pattern; “life with the tribe … is, though always harmonious in this idyllic wilderness, not always painless” (21-22). The ‘hypothetical’ captivity story is structured around a doubling of the same juxtaposition that frames the whole narrative: idyllic love between Kid and the Indian girl is juxtaposed to the acts of violence, mutilation, scalping (to which Kid is initiated by the tribe and which are explained as “all just for fun” (22)), to end with his Indian wife trying to drown him to prevent him from leaving the tribe. The conventional pattern of the captivity narrative in many of the Western novels such as Alan Brown LeMay’s The Searchers (1954), and which involves the character of a white girl being captured by a Native tribe, is here reversed: the white cowboy is held captive by the Native American woman, and the attempted murder of Kid by his Native American lover becomes part of the romantic love affair! Part of the parodic distortion of the captivity narrative in Ghost Town implies thus a critique of its rigid gender- based and racially determined distribution of roles (the captive being often a female character and almost always white) that has hardly been challenged by the classic or the popular Westerns such as Conrad Richter’s The Light in the Forest (1953) or Deborah Larson’s The White (2002), a recent reinterpretation of Mary Jemison’s captivity. The frame of the reverie, suggested immediately before the clichéd section of captivity experience, when Kid’s eyelids are described as “dropping like iron shutters over his eyes” (20), reinforces the confusion, rather than restoring the boundary, between the character’s dream world and the world of “facts.” Thus, in the scene of the room in the frontier town that is supposed to signal Kid’s return to the “hard facts” of the western settlement, the rule of the dream world still applies since the reader faces Kid as puzzled and staring at the sudden, unexplained change in his appearance; the focus on the sudden, mysterious, cleanness and refinement of Kid’s clothing reaches the point of absurdity: He … examines his new duds, a fringed and beaded buckskin shirt with matching leggings … glossy new boots with silver spurs … He fills out these things in ways unfamiliar to him, as though he might have swelled up in the long soak. He is clean-shaven … his nails have been trimmed. Pulling on a pair of snow-white kid gloves, thin as new skin, he counts his fingers: all there.” (24-25, emphasis added)

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The ironic echo of fairy tale world with the enchanting metamorphosis of the main character reinforces thus the parodic deconstruction of the epic dimension traditionally attached to the Western’s cowboy hero. The comic incongruity of the refinement attributed to Kid – and the consequent derision, as the suggested parallelism with Cinderella puts into question his masculinity – undermines the mythic structure of the parodied Western novel, since Coover’s appeal to the fairy tale’s elements of enchantment and metamorphosis reminds the reader of the fact that both narrative genres function within the frameworks of similar mythic paradigms. Such foregrounding and demystification of the mythic does not necessarily imply a denial of the historicity of the westward movement; it rather lays bare the nature of fiction writing as essentially an act of myth-making; a rule to which the Western narrative is no exception. The dream-like sequence of events and actions in Ghost Town is a major device through which the boundary between the world of Kid’s reverie and the world of “concrete facts” is blurred in ways that at once put into question the very concept of plot and highlight the mythicized “story” of the Westward settlements. Through out the narrative, Kid perceives of the western space as a mixture of void and of an omnipresent, albeit incomprehensible, threat, and his apprehension is repeatedly corroborated by the succession of unjustified happenings, which in turn, reinforces the dream-like structure of the fictional world. For instance, immediately after the ‘hypothetical’ or the dreamt of experience of captivity, and as the narrative shifts back to the tough world of the frontier town, we see Kid involved in an absurdly repetitive pattern of leaving the saloon singer’s room and expecting a meeting or confrontation with some violent men (26- 27). The next scene in which Kid is actually attacked by a group of men as soon as he sets foot out of the singer’s room (27) comes to sustain the dream-like quality of the narrative sequence (no causality or rational account for the many acts of gratuitous violence, imagined, expected, and “actually” undergone by Kid). The repeated shifts in this and later sections of the narrative between the indoors (the saloon singer’s room) and the outdoors (the open, rough space of the ‘ghostly’ town) enact an ironic imitation of the inside-outside shot in some of the classic Western films. In the cinematic version of The Searchers directed by John Ford (1956), the technique of the inside-outside shots foregrounds a visual symbol of the classic Western’s major themes: the question of the cowboy’s belonging to the civilized world as part of the complex moral issues associated with that central Western character (Pippin 2009; 244, 245). In Ghost Town, however, the narrative double to that cinematic technique bears a subversive quality; its mechanical repetition undermines the symbolism in

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the classic Western by reducing Kid’s situation to a double non-belonging or double alienation from the two juxtaposed spaces- the prostitute’s room and the open space of the violent mob, while those juxtaposed spaces incarnate a similar moral perversity and nightmarish chaos. Even in relation to the predominant dream-like quality of the scenes and the irrational shifts between them, the inside-outside shots or fragments become here a deceitful, illusory symbol of the possibility for Kid to break free from the gratuitous violence and unexplained entrapment in a meaningless but threatening world in which he is forced to find his way. Kid moves between macabre and comic scenes in which he is equally helpless and reduced either to the position of the passive witness or to that of the victimized accomplice. Once he is the helpless witness of a cannibalist feast where the saloon mob forces him to taste what he deems his mustang’s testicles (29-30). The repeated death and then resurrection of Kid’s horse sustains the same dream-like sequence through out the whole narrative. In the next scene, that of the sexual encounter with the widow woman, Kid feels lost as to how to proceed, and ends up in a highly comic, even cartoonish, position: “sprawled out on the grand piano with his bare butt in the air” (33), while all the constituents of the previous scene have vanished except for the piano player. Here too, the ungrounded shifts between panoramic scenes with Kid being victimized by a large crowd to the scene where Kid’s naked butt and the piano occupy the center, reveal an inspiring role played by the cinematic technique on Coover’s narrative method, namely the long shot and the close-up. In his comments on the cinematic Westerns, Varner associates the long shot technique with comedies and popular Westerns, while the close-up is said to be more relevant to “serious and character- driven films” (2008; 140) as in thematically central scenes in John Ford’s The Searchers (Pippin 2009; 240). The abrupt shifts, in Ghost Town, between the narrative doubles to those two cinematic methods, however, may imply an ironic comment on the epic dimension enacted in the long shots that highlight the sublime quality of the Western landscapes, as well as an undermining of the symbolic or existential themes suggested by the close-ups as in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). The two techniques are thus dissociated here from the epic and from serious symbolic thematics; they rather sustain two visual perspectives on the absurdly comic and irrevocably meaningless. Within this same dream-like world, Kid finds himself incomprehensibly appointed sheriff of the town; “a badge already pinned on his fringed shirt: a bent-tipped star pierced by a bullet hole and black with blood” (33). The position’s icon (the star) bears the traces of violence and murder but Kid is

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incapable of deciphering any such connotations. Moreover, the moral insightfulness traditionally attributed to the cowboy figure is here perversely suggested when Kid the sheriff tries to persuade the mob that was about to hang a man to organize a trial first. As he gives in under the pressure of the mob’s angry gaze, Kid quickly adopts a perverted vision of justice: “they may be right about the law, who’s he to say? He’s new to this line of work” (34). The partial shift in narrative point of view to semiomniscience sustains the deliberate blurring of the conventional distinctions, not only between the types of narrative viewpoints, but also between the supposed moral subtlety of the extra-diegetic narrator and the character: perverted moral vision is the rule in the narrative’s fictional world in the absence of a conventional normative voice. As Kid appears to be a mixture of cowardice and hypocrisy, to whom the “distinct moral limits” that classically define the cowboy hero (Cawelti 1976; 222) remain quite irrelevant, the epic quality of the cowboy’s experience in the West is ironically denied. The narrator in Ghost Town begins to emphasize the notion of mobility as a quality that is intrinsic to Kid’s life experience. Nevertheless, this appeal to one of the values celebrated in the historiography and the fictional accounts alike of the Westward Movement is actually an enactment of a perverted recasting of the major notions that informed the frontier myth and the typical Western narrative. Kid’s “commitment” to mobility and perpetual travelling is presented as an accidental state of affairs. It does not emanate from choice; nor does it display any pursuit of any particular goal or dream. The narrator’s account in the comment below assigns a mechanical quality to Kid’s mobility while suggesting that his “successful” fulfillment of the sheriff’s job is more a matter of theatricality (acting as if): The sheriff tagging along behind [the deputy] like someone who might belong here. Well, maybe he does. Doesn’t belong anywhere else, and it sure beats hauling his wretched ass all alone across that desert out there. Until now he’s always been homeless as a cloud shadow … whether by choice or luck or nature, he can’t say. Just that he’s always kept moving, as though moving were the same thing as breathing … (35)

Such description and comment could have suggested an amplification of the Frontier Myth as it implies that mobility with Kid the cowboy is more a matter of an unconscious reflex than that of choice and planning. Nonetheless, the narrator’s repeated emphasis on the mechanical quality of mobility and change; a mechanical quality associated more with haphazard and the accidental, than with the epic pursuit of an American Dream,

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establishes in Coover’s text a convergence between mobility and senseless motion. Thus, in a brief account of Kid’s past life, before his arrival to the “ghost” town (which promises the retrieval of the Western’s formulaic pattern), the narrator describes how Kid’s life was quickly transformed overnight thanks to gambling and how he lost this new life as quickly as he gained it: He’d won twenty dollars one night in a keno game and bought the whole ranch for that, including a hundred head of sheep, a potato field, a wife, and six or seven children, counting it a bargain … He learned the sheepherding, shearing … worked hard at it, and might well have lived and died a sheepman on the prairie, for it seemed something worth doing, even if in truth he hated every minute of it. But then one day the cattlemen came and killed all his family and burned the ranch down and shot the sheep … and that was the end of his twenty dollar adventure in the granger life (3536, emphasis added)

The narrator’s sarcastic tone and the cold detachment that inform the account actually reflect the moral confusion in which Kid the cowboy and all the rather “shadowy” characters are caught. The enumeration of “wife and six or seven children” as part of the bargain, like the fact of summing up this past family life in terms of “twenty dollar adventure,” contribute all to a deliberate perversion of the traditionally idealized image of the pioneer figure and of the moral scheme associated with him. The narrator’s account of Kid’s past, albeit brief, experience as a rancher retains some of the formulaic features that had created a space of overlapping between the Western and the pastoral traditions: the celebration of an idealized vision of rural life. However, in Ghost Town, the perversion of the moral vision conventionally associated with both literary traditions (The Western and the pastoral) is displayed in the simplistic handling of family and cattle on equal footing and as part of the same “lot” won by Kid in gambling. The enumeration of family and cattle as belonging to the same “lot” may be an ironic echoing of the essence of pastoralism which consists in the “invention of simplicity and innocence of a Golden Age” (Alpers 1982; 443): the simplistic vision in Coover’s narrative is not guided by an idyllic vision; it is rather the expression of a commercial conception within which every aspect of Kid’s experience as rancher is equally reduced to the rule of exchange value (each- family, cattle, and plantation- being part of the same financial transaction). The narrator’s account of Kid’s absurd reaction to the tragedy of the sudden and violent loss of family and property reinforces the parodic subversion of the Western but also of the pastoral in its peculiar American version. What counts as traumatic experience in Kid’s memory is the loss of the

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cattle, much more than the loss of wife and children: “his memory of the family he had for that time is less substantial. All he recalls is that before they got killed they ate a lot” (36). The perverted moral vision displayed in such reaction suggests the extent to which Coover’s cowboy is as much an “alien” within the scheme of pastoral values as he is within the paradigm of Western adventure and heroism. The overlapping between the Western and the pastoral in the American literary scene may be deduced from the peculiar significance assigned to the wilderness in both traditions. Lawrence Buell (1989; 1-5, 1995; 3352), in his survey of pastoralism in the American literary and critical scene, traces the “pastoral ideology” back to the iconic significance assigned to the wilderness and that contributed to the articulation of American narrative fiction as such. Buell attributes to Leslie Fiedler’s seminal work, Love and Death in the American Novel the earliest “exposition of how the wilderness in American writing serves as a luminal site for male self-fulfillment in recoil from adult responsibilities associated with female-dominated culture in the settlements” (1989; 1). It is significant that Buell’s analysis of the pastoral ideology in American literature relies on the same literary instances emphasized in Fiedler’s discussion of the “boyish” figure and the “Westerner,” initiated in Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales (171-75). Those figures are as much the constituents of American pastoralism as they are of the Western novel. The orientation of the pastoral towards the reinforcement of “local, regional, and national particularism” (Buell 1995; 32) favored, within the American context, even further its overlapping with the Western tradition. Much of the absurdly simplistic reasoning or comic awkwardness in action, in character’s or narrator’s conception, in Ghost Town, may be read as implying a deliberate investment of a perverted version of pastoralism in order to reinforce the narrative’s ironic deconstruction of the iconic, mythic and ideological aspects of the Western narrative. Even though the narrative’s dominant settings consist in the saloon (“the anti type of the home” in Fiedler’s terms6) or one of the saloon women’s room, some of the scenes that articulate the novel’s sharpest dismantling of the epic quality of the Western narrative as well as the ideological connotations of its quest motif are those situated in the arid landscape of the desertwilderness. Kid repeatedly appears as either indifferent to the wild landscape around him, perceiving it as meaningless, or “suffering” the frustrating presence of cattle on the way of his purposeless riding: the narrator describes his irritated attempts to find a path among the crowd of cattle that are covering the prairie before he begins a gratuitous massacre: 6

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Chapter Eight They’ve filled up the whole prairie with the dumb shuffling beasts; he has to pick his way through thousands of them, trying to avoid their scything horns, egging on his reluctant mount … . it’s like moving through some viscous and muscular sea, shoving against a stubborn tide, though how he even knows about seas and tides, he has no idea. Once among them, he can see nothing for miles around, and he worries that he is may be fated to be rafted here above their pale humped hides forever (57; emphasis added)

The comparison between the rural landscape and the risky world of sailing ironically undermines the conventional assimilation (that is at the core of the pastoral tradition) of the rural space to an idealized peaceful atmosphere. Kid’s perception of such scenery as threatening and his crossing of it as a struggle for survival (similar to the struggling of sailors) debunks the pastoral’s celebration of a mythicized harmony between the individual and the natural landscape (Kid’s perception as reflected in the narrator’s comment is informed by a mixture of suspicion and disgust). But it is also a debunking that simultaneously erases the epic dimension in the cowboy’s westward adventure. Traditionally, the cowboy’s sense of destiny or fate guides his moral vision/judgment of the conflict or struggle to which he is confronted, but with Coover’s comic version of the cowboy, the appeal to the metaphysical notion is made in situations of temporary and harmless obstacles (the moving cattle), while fate is never evoked in the moments when the “quest” is resumed by Kid, or in the moments when the narrator repeatedly points to the irrevocable absence of the why and the how of Kid’s mechanical association with movement and travelling. In Coover’s Ghost Town, thus, the sustained parodic deconstruction of the American literary tradition generates a demystification of the thematic locus of the Western narrative by highlighting the artifice that lies at the core of the Frontier Myth and ironically undermining the epic quality of its typical investment of the quest motif. The Western’s peculiar ideological content related to the construction of a national self-image in American culture, renders inevitable the fact that the parodic derision within which its thematics and motifs are recast implies a questioning of various mainstream articulations of Americaness; a questioning of the “elusive national epic [that] has naturally been instrumental in the institution of this sense of American-ness” (Mortley 2009; 14). It is this very questioning that Ghost Town shares with Gardens in the Dunes, even if their similar critique of the Western does not invest the same literary mode, nor does it produce similar implications.

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The Western Reversed: The Wilderness Overthrown: Gardens in the Dunes Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel promotes an equally critical recasting of the Western paradigm, albeit from a significantly different perspective and within the reinvention of a ‘normative’ vision; while Coover’s novel gives up altogether such claim of a ‘normative’ voice. The narrative of Gardens in the Dunes is informed by an ecological sensibility that is partly anchored in tribal Native American value schemes and partly related to a transnational matrix. Silko’s novel seems to display an apparent indifference to the Western as a distinct literary tradition since its modern female protagonist is involved in literal and symbolic journeys through which she discovers the Native ecological values and the distinct AngloSaxon horticulture. And yet, Gardens in the Dunes evokes, puts into question and recasts much of the literary motifs, ethical and political dilemma that the Western tradition had made at once highly problematical and omnipresent in the American literary imagination; the wilderness (its correspondence or distinction from the ‘geographical’ desert), the value of mobility and movement, the challenging plurality of the notion of border. Such critical handling of the thematic associated with the literary and also cinematic Western is often suggested in the ironic echoes sustained through out the whole narrative of such formulaic and popular Western plotlines as the expedition story, the story of cavalry and Indian confrontation, and the one of a wagon train travelling westward. Therefore, in discussing Gardens in the Dunes, I will focus only on those features that are relevant to the implied critique or questioning of the Western tradition. In Western fiction, the content of the ecological dimension has been continuously altered ever since James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales; shifting from a utilitarian approach to nature (in Cooper’s fiction) which developed in some early twentieth century novels into a conscious capitalist attitude (Erisman 1977; 15- 16), to an “increasing awareness of the environment’s plight” caused by the commodification of landscape and natural resources (Erisman 17), up to a “growing sense of ecological disaster” expressed in such novels as Jack Schaefer’s An American Bestiary (1975) and Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975). To such context of deep recasting of the scheme of ethical values along which the Western has continuously been reinvented, Silko’s fiction, not only Gardens in the Dunes, but also Ceremony (1977), brings forward the insights generated by the postcolonial perspective. Whether in Ceremony or in Gardens, thus, the disastrous approach to the Western landscape is

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assimilated to an inherently imperialist ideology that had informed the westward movement of Euro Americans from the beginning of the historical process. In Gardens in the Dunes, Silko creates a counter-narrative of epic encounters between Eastern civilization and the wilderness westward through the destiny of her two Native American sisters, Indigo and Sister Salt, who incarnate each a different version of the conventional “captivity narrative.” The narrative is thematically centered around the botanical practices and activities that Indigo discovers through her white Euro American, adoptive parents, Hattie and Edward, their transatlantic journey to Europe and their frequent travels across the American territory, especially from west to east. Indigo, the main character, emerges often as the typical American questing “heroine” but one whose quest for her ‘Americanness’ corresponds to the retrieval of her lost Native (and tribal) roots through her rediscovery of the ecological paradigm that is substantial to Native tribal culture, rather than through matters of lineage and descent. The novel’s narrative structure is built around a sustained, yet implicit, opposition between the re-cast motif of the questing character and the backgrounded mainstream literary traditions of captivity narrative, the Western and pastoral traditions. The major journey that structurally establishes the “bridge” between the novel’s major sections is the one undertaken by Indigo and her white adoptive parents, Hattie and Edward, from the west to the east, while the journey back to the southwestArizona- becomes the character’s major purpose once on the east coast. The journey pattern which is central to the novel’s plot is intrinsically related to the world of gardening, the discovery of gardens, and the pursuit of botanical collections of wild or rare orchids. Edward, the white male and authoritative figure who is the agent of the expeditions, maintains in Silko’s novel the parodic echo of the narrative accounts of such major adventures related to the West as the Lewis and Clark expeditions, produced in The Lewis and Clark Journals and especially as fictionalized in some popular Westerns. The novel’s major thematics of ecological ethics is mainly developed through the iconic significance assigned to the southwest desert often presented as the site of the Native tribes’ secret gardens (15- 16, 231). The ecological values in mainstream America are illustrated by Edward’s expeditions during which the character’s passion for botanical collections is confused with the capitalist interests of trade companies, besides being stained by an inescapable imperialist framework imposed by the intervention of governmental institutions (Gardens, 12829). The repeated juxtaposition between such ecological vision and practice on the one hand, and the ancestral environmentalism that informs

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the culture of the Sand Lizard people (the fictitious name of the Native tribe to which Indigo belongs) on the other, is mainly expressed in the distinction between Anglo-Saxon horticulture tradition and the particular significance assigned to the desert in the Native ethical and spiritual values. Actually, the reader is invited to approach that juxtaposition in Silko’s novel as implying an antinomic structure of historiographic and literary representations created by the incongruity between such mainstream texts as The Lewis and Clark Journals, on the one hand, and the Clan stories and mythologies of Native American tribes, on the other. The desert in Gardens in the Dunes is the locus of the pattern of reversal through which the counter-narrative is developed: it is constantly associated with values that counteract the meaningfulness of the wilderness in formulaic Western fiction. To the desert are assigned values that challenge the notions of “taming the wilderness,” “civilizing the wild west”; to the iconic notion of the wilderness as the target of Euro America’s containment and reshaping, Silko’s novel opposes a version that equates the Western wilderness with the Natives’ secret gardens. The “wilderness” becomes thus the icon of the Native Americans’ resistance to the imperialist process that was called in mainstream narratives the “advance of civilization.” The narrative opens with a flash back (the time when Indigo and Sister Salt were not born yet) in which the episode of the gold rush is re-told from a Native, tribal perspective, the Sand Lizard people being attacked and massacred by “aliens”; “invaders”: “the invaders were dirty people who carried disease and fever” (15). The West as a space of hostile encounters in which the alterity of the other is assimilated to the monstrous and demonic is thus reversed in Gardens in the Dunes, rather than being denied: it may not be a matter of reaction if the Native Americans perceived or were likely to perceive the white invaders through the same prejudices in which they were stereotyped; it is rather the violent nature of the westward movement that seemed to make the reciprocal hostility inevitable. The captivity narrative or episode in formulaic and popular Western fiction is also reinvented from a Native perspective: the narrator’s account of Indigo’s family past in the novel’s opening foregrounds the motifs of escape, hiding, and struggling to survive the massacres, dispossession and starvation brought by the “strangers.” The female figure Grandma Fleet is suggested to be at the center of those events that are narrated, albeit by a third person voice, mostly from the perspective of her memories or from that of a vaguely implied collective memory. A deliberate blurring of the (historically) chronological sequence of those fictionalized events is developed through out Silko’s narrative: the early encounters between the

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pioneer settlements and the Native tribes, the gold rush, the imposition of the reservation system, and the later governmental strategies to separate the Native American children from their families. This does not only emphasize the repeated patterns of escape, hiding and struggling to survive hanger. Actually, such carefully designed blurring reinvents as well the mythical dimension of the whole westward “story” as retold from a Native American perspective; the mythicizing tendency of the Western narrative is maintained and recast within a Native, tribal vision, rather being eclipsed by the claim of historical veracity7. The carefully designed overlapping between the historical and the mythical aims at re-telling one episode in the westward movement from a perspective that captures the Native American conception of time and history: The Sand Lizard people remained at the old gardens peacefully for hundreds of years because the invaders feared the desert beyond the river [i.e.: Mississippi]. Then, a few years before Sister Salt was born, in the autumn, as the people returned from harvesting piñons in the high mountains, a gang of gold prospectors surprised them; all those who were not killed were taken prisoners. Grandma Fleet lost her young husband to a bullet. (16)

In relation to the narrative’s present, Hattie’s experience within the circle of her white adoptive parents bears the echo of an ironic reversal of the captivity narrative’s typical configuration with the figure of the white girl or boy being captured and brought up by a Native tribe, as in Conrad Richter’s The Light in the Forest (1953), Alan Brown LeMay’s The Searchers (1954), or Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man (1964), or also in Michael Blake’s Dances With Wolves (1988). However, the ironic reversal enacted through Indigo’s situation at once sustains and challenges the trend of “alternative Westerns” (as called by Varner), in that it foregrounds a “genuine” Native American perspective; not simply a “white” perspective that would display a sympathetic vision of Native tribes as in Dances with Wolves, or in Zane Grey’s The Vanishing American (1925). In Silko’s novel, the reversal of the conventional patterns of the Western

7

Silko’s fiction often defends the argument that the celebration of « Indianness » should not be based on the illusion of some retrieval of tribal origins and of Indian “purity”; the reality of mixed blood origins, of hybridity, is part of any conception of Indianness. In the same way the significance of mythic accounts is often stressed in Silko’s novels (like Ceremony) as a substantial part of the Native tribes’ conception of their history and culture.

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story recreates the captive female8 as a Native American figure, and the process of rediscovery of origins as one that leads Indigo back to the Native ‘version’ of the West and to Native tribal values, which radically undermines a major implication produced by the classic and “alternative” Westerns alike. A gesture of “firsting” the white American explorer or adventurer is often produced even by “sympathetic Westerns,” since they tend to portray the Native American as already vanishing (Cawelti 1999; 22 and Armando Prats, qtd. in Cawelti 22). The common pattern to the “sympathetic” Westerns (many of which may be included in Varner’s category of “alternative Westerns”) consists in having the vanishing Native American “hand on the torch to a sympathetic and understanding white American” (Cawelti 1999; 22) as in John Ford’s cinematic version of Mari Sandoz’s Cheyenne Autumn (1964). The alternative pattern presented in Gardens in the Dunes, however, counteracts the image of the disappearing Native American since Indigo’s quest that ultimately takes her back to her native Arizona corresponds to the retrieval of the clan stories, the values and the ethical code of the “Sand Lizard People.” Nevertheless, the narrative tries to maintain a complex and open interaction between the rhetoric of ‘vanishing’ and absence on the one hand, and the one of survival and revival on the other; the Native community is a fictitious one (does not correspond to any one historic tribe), and yet the surviving Indigo and Sister Salt retrieve a sense of “Indianness” through the writer’s well-documented foregrounding of a tribal ecological spirit that guides the whole narrative point of view and the presentation of theme. In Gardens in the Dunes, the iconicity of the wilderness in the Western tradition is also reinvented within a Native American ecological scheme of values that challenges not only the white Americans’ version of the westward movement “story,” but challenges even the white Americans expeditions and the faculty of perception of their agent-heroes like Lewis and Clark. In her discussion of “the startling contrast” between Euro American and Indian American literary expressions of environmentalism, Schweninger (1993; 48, 51) posits that the wilderness as a notion invented by Euro America remains irrelevant to a Native American conception of nature, a conception that is informed by notions of “reciprocity” between 8

The conventional motif of captivity is not made obvious in relation to Indigo’s story, since her adoption by the white couple is more anchored in the twentieth century bureaucratic system of boarding schools and legal adoption. However, the repeated suggestion of Indigo’s alienation from Edward and of the fact that her complicity with Hattie is occasionally accounted for by gender and not parenthood, may be interpreted as implying an ironic blurring of the moral distinction between the old process of capture and the modern one of legal adoption.

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the human and the nonhuman. The wilderness is here assimilated to the “old gardens” that remained inaccessible to the “invaders” and allowed the Sand Lizard people to survive the massive westward settlements and the slave hunters: “the Sand Lizard people preferred the old gardens because the slave hunters did not usually travel that far” (231). Throughout the novel, these mythical old gardens that redefine the cultural symbolism of the wilderness theme from a Native American perspective produce a forceful counter-narrative to the stories of the “tamed,” appropriated, or over-exploited wilderness. Such counter-narrative does rely on an ironic echoing, even vaguely, of the popular Westerns that developed fictionalized versions of the Lewis and Clark Journals (1804-1806) such as Vardis Fisher’s Tale of Valor (1958). The image of the white explorers celebrated in such fictionalized accounts remains one of a ‘heroic naturalist and cartographer’ who brings to the Native tribes the superior knowledge, order, and values of the Enlightenment culture of Euro America (Seelye 1995; 310). In Silko’s narrative, the “old gardens” as a secret place that resisted the exploring process, stands as a spatial trope to the various forms of resistance and survival through which the Native tribal cultures challenged the extinction myth (myth of the vanishing race). Terre Ryan has linked the novel’s central motif of Native gardens to the historical moment that frames the main plot (the opening of the twentieth century) which corresponds to the close of the historic frontier (2007; 121). From the perspective provided by such interpretation, Silko’s narrative may be seen as both an appropriation and reinvention of the thematic range that, in mainstream novels, has been associated with the Frontier Myth, that is an appropriation and a reinvention, within the ethnic paradigm of Native perception of the patterns of discovering unknown space, which reinforce at once a vision of space as infinite openness9. In 9

While venturing in this reading, one has to keep in mind the fact that for a nonNative reader to interpret a Native American text through “alien” categories like the Frontier Myth, should not suggest the claim of reducing ethnic American literature to the norms and thematics of mainstream literature; it is rather an expression of the reader’s position as an outsider to the cultural codes of Native tribal America. Thus, the challenging secrecy attributed to the Native old gardens may be read as a simultaneous consecration of the rule of secrecy (which is vital to the transmission of clan stories in Native tribal cultures) and of the literary effect of indeterminacy and openness. Often when the sense of openness in American literary narrative is implied through the spatial theme, readers tend to decipher an allegorical reinvention of the Frontier Myth (a recreation of the mythicized infinite openness of the frontier). The close of the historical frontier has coincided with the proliferation in mainstream fiction of the celebration, recasting, rethinking, and reinvention of the Frontier mythology; the peculiar meaningfulness assigned to the

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relation to the Native old gardens, the infinite openness has to do with the plurality of meaningfulness that could be attributed to it and that allows it to stand as the literary/verbal counterpart to the mythical openness of the Frontier notion in mainstream American culture. But it is an appropriation of the Frontier Myth that inevitably reverses its implication: the mythicized frontier is not here a response to the saturation of the historical frontier; it is rather an act of resistance to the historical defeat of Native Americans by the United States’ “ever-westering settlers” through whom it “has taken over Indian Country, relegated the Native Americans to reservations, and forced their children into schools, in which they are forcibly separated from their cultural past, their families …” (Ferguson 2006; 37). The “haunting” presence of the old gardens, not simply as a mythicized space but also as the icon of the Native American scheme of values, acquires its particular significance in Gardens in the Dunes within the ironic juxtaposition that holds between them and the botanical collections; “gardens of local imperialism” as Ryan puts it (120)), to which Edward is devoted; between the old gardens and all forms of fetishism displayed by the English horticulture and that are discovered by Indigo during the journeys. The pattern of juxtaposition is central to the novel’s demythicization of the imperialist nature of the various versions through which the Frontier Myth is consecrated within the paradigm of White American cultural codes (travel, expedition, seeming “harmless” passion for plant collection, etc.)10. The Native mythicized gardens as a counterpart, suggest the possibility of resistance and subsistence for Native cultures, but the irony of Silko’s novel is that it forcefully implies that possibility from within its re-appropriation of the Frontier Myth itself. The reversal of some of the formulaic patterns of the traditional Western narrative in Silko’s novel implies a vision that goes beyond mere ironic subversion and metafictional solipsism. The pattern of the journey in Gardens in the Dunes; being from West to East, is accompanied also by tribal gardens in Silko’s novel provides a particular expression, albeit from an ethnic perspective, of an inherently American literary imagination. 10 Sometimes, the descriptions of Edward’s adventurous expeditions (as in the section where his adventure in Portal is narrated) produce an ironic echo of the pioneers’ progress or the crossing of the plains in Western fiction (130-36). The irony emanates for instance from the narrator’s focus on the details of greedy capitalist practices (129-30) or of deliberate destruction of natural resources (the fire in Portal) as part of those same practices, which “mutilates” the idea of passionate pursuit of botanical collections attributed to the figure of the white explorer who is often portrayed- in the Westerns that fictionalize the Lewis and Clark expeditions for instance- as a more sophisticated and more knowledgeable version of the pioneer.

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an ironic reversal of the discovery made by the pioneer’s surrogate (Indigo). Once she finds herself in New York City, the temporary destination of her adoptive family’s journey eastward, Indigo begins to look for, or to dream of, the ‘traces’ of the rural Midwest (160),” her dream of a dense vegetation). She also experiences her errand in the farming areas of New York in a way that evokes to the reader an ironic doubling of the formulaic Western narrative: her errand and loss in the farming area leads to her encounter with a white American family. The reciprocal suspicion and scepticism through which Indigo and the white man (Lloyd) communicated with each other may be perceived by the reader as an ironic euphemistic repetition of the Western “story” (166). When the man offers to take her back home (assuming that she belonged to an Indian settlement near Manhasset Bay), Indigo found comfort in the mere fact that she and the white man moved westward (the fact that it was merely n illusive reminder of the “real” West did not matter): Indigo was sceptical when the white man said he would take her home, but she thought he might know something she didn’t know. Not long after they turned west, they passed through a small settlement … . She was happy to be going west, but she knew there was a great distance south she must travel as well to get back to Arizona. (166)

Indigo’s brief encounter with the Indian settlement until the arrival of her adoptive parents (167) sustains that ironic repetition of the captivity episode from the traditional mainstream Western narratives. The successive misunderstandings between the white and Native characters sustains the ironic echo of the archetypal captivity narrative in the Western genre; they ironically point to the fact that the literary imagination that produced such archetypal form (even in many of the “alternative Westerns”) was informed by bias, prejudiced assumptions, rather than genuine knowledge of the ethnic Other. Not only Indigo was not the Indians’ hostage, but her brief acquaintance with the Indian woman revived her nostalgic longing for her lost family and roots (171). In addition, this “incident” of Indigo’s encounter with an American Indian tribe created the opportunity for Hattie the adoptive mother to discover for the first time that the Matinnecocks have always been living in her native Long Island (170). The conventional pattern of the white settlers discovering the Indian tribes in their westward movement is thus ironically reversed in a way that sheds light on the persistence of the “mystery” of the Native tribes’ survival beyond the whites’ claim of discovery and taming, and beyond the violence of displacement imposed on the Native tribes. Hattie discovers the Indian tribe by going back east, which

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undermines the very iconicity of the east in mainstream culture as the threshold of the New World. In Gardens in the Dunes, the ironic echoing of some of the major motifs of the Western narrative- through the reversal of its patterns, the euphemistic repetition of some of its themes- is not meant to sustain the play of literary self-reflexivity. It is rather an expression of a critical revisiting of some major literary motifs that were vital to the Western tradition (travel, expedition, discovery, east-west and west-east mobility) undertaken through the juxtaposition of a seemingly similar ecological sensibility in mainstream and Native cultures. The persistence of the Frontier Myth in Gardens in the Dunes, despite the patterns of ironic reversal and subversion, may attest to a substantial “Americanness” that lies at the core of that myth, beyond the divergence of ethnic (here American Indian) conception of the stories/histories of the westward movement and of its mythicized reactivation.

Conclusion Both Robert Coover’s Ghost Town and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes create a space for critical rethinking of the Western novel’s major assumptions or implications in its classic and popular version, though such space is more extended in the former than the latter text. The major difference between the two novels (beyond the proportion of the critical space created in each) consists less in the intensity of the demystification or the questioning of the Western’s thematics and ideological dimension, and more in the “paths” along which the critique is undertaken. The frame (or path) of solipsistic metafiction within which Coover articulated his parody of the Western does not allow for any forceful appeal to the postcolonial perspective; the narrative’s derision that highlights the arbitrary violence, the absence of justice, the irrelevance of heroic action, and the predominance of meaninglessness, produces, perhaps, a “universal” satirical vision that does not necessarily display any specifically anti-imperialist vision. In fact, one of the features of the satiric dimension in postmodern metafiction is that it remains largely anchored in the narrative’s concern with textuality, with the paradoxes of literary representation, and with the artifice that informs literary constructs. We may decipher behind the sustained parody of the Western a satiric comment on popular arts forms in American culture and their tendency to manipulate their audience through naïve and even mechanical simplifications of the complex moral vision of the classic Western, by urging them to accept a ‘commodified’ conception of their own

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‘Americanness’. The alternative Western promoted in Ghost Town which is close to the category described by Varner as “formalist Western” (95), articulates its satire of the consumerism and commodification attributed to popular art forms via a questioning of the literary process of representation and of its dialogic link with the politics of representation in other cultural discourses. The path of Silko’s critique is first distinguished by the fact it remains faithful to the Native values as a normative axis. Its demystification of the wilderness and westward mobility thematics highlights a convergence of the quest motif with the conquest process. The significance of tribal values as normative voice in Gardens in the Dunes accounts for the fact that the demystification of the quest does not entail an undermining of its conventional epic quality, as is the case with Ghost Town. Through Indigo and Sister Salt’s adventures the epic quest is rather shifted to the Native American figure, but it is also dissociated from the colonialist agenda of the conquest motif that underpins it in the Western narrative. Despite those substantial differences, both novels produce, nonetheless, a similar deconstruction of the ideological force of the Western. Actually, what may be deduced from Ghost Town and Gardens in the Dunes is that the articulation of a sustained critical re-reading of the Western tradition from within literary narrative may be more efficient (than the essay form) in communicating to the reader a deconstructive, demystifying interpretation. This may seem paradoxical since we are here assuming that the process of creative literature, which is understood by contemporary writers as a process of myth-making, could provide more insights into the ideology or the implications of a literary form that is structured around a myth that is (mis)taken for history. A persistent limit seems to prevail in critical essays or books when tackling the handling of the Frontier Myth in Western novels, and which consists in the fact that they often remain predictable in their findings. Evans tries to explain this fact in his review and discussion of one of the recent and influential pieces of criticism- Sara L. Spurgeon’s Exploding the Western. When criticism relies on myth as an analytic category, Evans suggests, it tends to be entrapped in a priori generality and abstractions that fail to account for the actual complexities of the historical process (2008; 864). Along with this perspective, one may deduce that in the metafictional process (corresponding here to the critique of the Western from within the act of storytelling in both Coover’s and Silko’s narratives), myth-making provides a more efficient demystification of the Western and of its enduring politics, precisely because metafictional writing does not claim to explain or decipher anything.

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Bibliography Alpers, Paul. “What is Pastoral?” Critical Inquiry 8.3 (Spring 1982): 437460. Barnett, L.K and J.L. Thorson eds. Leslie Marmon Silko. A Collection of Critical Essays. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1999. Buell, Lawrence. “American Pastoral Ideology Reappraised.” American Literary History (Spring 1989): 1- 29. —. The Environmental Imagination. Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U P, 1995. —. “The Ecocritical Insurgency.” New Literary History 30.3 (Summer 1999): 699- 712. Brown, Richard M. “Western Violence: Structure, Values, Myth.” Western Historical Quarterly 24.1 (Feb. 1993): 4- 20. Bush, Andrew. “On Exemplarity and Postmodern Simulations: Robert Coover and Severo Sarduy.” Comparative Literature 44.2 (Spring 1992): 174- 193. Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery and Romance. Chicago: University of Chicago P, 1976. Coover, Robert. Ghost Town. New York: Holt, 1998. Duvall, John. N. “Troping History: Modernist Residue in Fredric Jameson’s Pastiche and Linda Hutcheon’s Parody. Style 33.3 (Fall 1999): 372- 390. Erisman, Fred. “Western Fiction as an Ecological Parable.” Environmental Review 2.6 (1977): 14- 23. Evans, David H. “The West of the Story.” Modern Fiction Studies 54.4 (Winter 2008): 862- 69. Evenson, Brian. Understanding Robert Coover. Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, 2003. Ferguson, Suzanne. “Europe and the Quest for Home in James Welch’s The Heartsong of Charging Elk and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes.” Studies in American-Indian Literature 18.2 (Summer 2006): 34- 53. Fiedler, Leslie A. Love and Death in the American Novel. Cleveland, Ohio: World, 1960. Foster, Cheryl. “The Narrative and the Ambient in Environmental Aesthetics.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 56.2 (Spring 1998): 127-137.

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Godlovitch, Stan. “Some Theoretical Aspects of Environmental Aesthetics.” Journal of Aesthetic Education 32.4 (Winter 1998): 1726. Hawkes, John. The Beetle Leg. New York: New Directions, 1951. Heckard, Margaret. “Robert Coover: Metafiction and Freedom.” Twentieth Century Literature 22.2 (May 1976): 210- 227. Hitt, Christopher. “Toward an Ecological Sublime.” New Literary History 30.3 (Summer 1999): 603-623. Holm, Sharon. “The “Lie” of the Land. Native Sovereignty, Indian Literary Nationalism, and Early Indigenism in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony.” American Indian Quarterly 32.3 (Summer 2008): 243274. Huggan, Graham. “Greening Postcolonialism: Ecocritical Perspectives.” Modern Fiction Studies 50.3 (Fall 2004): 701-733. Hume, Kathryn. “Robert Coover’s Fiction: the Naked and the Mythic.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 12. 2 (Winter 1979): 127- 148. —. “Robert Coover: the Metaphysics of Bondage.” Modern Language Review 98.4 (October 2003): 827- 841. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody. The Teachings of Twentieth Century Art Forms. London: Methuen, 1985. —. A Poetics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge, 1988. —. “Historiographic Metafiction: Parody and the Intertextuality of History.” In Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction. P. O’Donnell and R.C.David, eds. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1989, 332. —. Irony’s Edge. The Theory and Politics of Irony. London: Routledge, 1994. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1991. Marzec, Robert P. “Speaking Before the Environment: Modern Fiction and the Ecological.” Modern Fiction Studies 55.3 (Fall 2009): 419442. Mortley, Catherine. The Quest for Epic in Contemporary American Fiction. London: Routledge, 2009. Moore, David L. “Rough Knowledge and Radical Understanding. Sacred Silence in American Indian Literatures.” American Indian Quarterly 21.4 (Autumn 1997): 633- 662. Oppermann, Serpil. “Seeking Environmental Awareness in Postmodern Fiction.” Critique 49.3 (Spring 2008): 243- 253.

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Owens, Louis. “Other Destinies.” Understanding the American Indian Novel. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1992. Pippin, Robert B. “What Is a Western? Politics and Self-Knowledge in John Ford’s The Searchers.” Critical Inquiry 35. 2 (Winter 2009): 223246. Prince, Gerald. “The Disnarrated.” In Narrative as Theme: Studies in French Fiction. Lincoln, NB: U of Nebraska P, 1992: 28- 38. Regier, A.M. “Revolutionary Enunciatory Spaces: Ghost Dancing, Transatlantic Travel and Modernist Arson in Gardens in the Dunes.” Modern Fiction Studies 51. 1 (Spring 2005): 134- 157. Rice, David A. “Witchery, Indigenous Resistance, and Urban Space in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony,” Studies in American Indian Literatures 17. 4 (Winter 2005): 114- 143. Ryan, Terre. “The Nineteenth-Century Garden. Imperialism, Subsistence, and Subversion: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes.” Studies in American-Indian Literature 19.3 (Fall 2007): 115-132. Schweninger, Lee. “Writing Nature: Silko and Native Americans as Nature Writers.” MELUS 18.2 (Summer 1993): 47- 60. Seelye, John. “Captives, Captains, Cowboys, Indians: Frames of Reference and the American West.” American Literary History 7.2 (Summer 1995): 304- 319. Silko, Leslie M. Gardens in the Dunes. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999. Schmitz, Neil. “Robert Coover and the Hazards of Metafiction.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 7.3 (Spring 1974): 210- 219. Spurgeon, Sara L. Exploding the Western. Myths of Empire on the Postmodern Frontier. Texas A&M UP, 2005. Taylor, Paul Beekman. “Silko’s Reappropriation of Secrecy.” In L.K. Barnett and J.L. Thorson eds.: 23- 61. Varner, Paul. Historical Dictionary of Westerns in Cinema. Lanham, MD. Scarecrow Press, 2008. Vizenor, Gerald. ed. Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse On Native American Indian Literature. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1989. —. “The Ruins of Representation. Shadows of Survivance and the Literature of Dominance.” American Indian Quarterly 17.1 (Winter 1993): 7- 30. Wallmann, Jeffery. The Western Parable of the American Dream. Lubbock, Texas: Texas Tech U P, 1999. Wheeler, Richard. “Forward.” In Wallmann, ix-xi.

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Zikek, Slavov. “Nature and its Discontents.” SuStance 117.37.3 (2008): 37-72.

PART II ISSUES OF THE LITERATURE AND FILM OF THE AMERICAN WEST

CHAPTER NINE “THE GLORIOUS CLIMATE OF CALIFORNY”: GOLD RUSH PROSTITUTION AND TRANSFORMATION IN WESTERN AMERICAN LITERATURE ANGIE FITZPATRICK COASTAL CAROLINA UNIVERSITY More than twenty years after gold had been discovered in the foothills of the Sierra mountain range in California, Bret Harte and Joaquin Miller, the two foremost Western writers of the 1870s, captured the magic of the California Gold Rush in their prose and poetry. Outlaws such as gamblers and prostitutes commonly appeared in these works as sympathetic characters whose morally questionable yet kind behavior blurred the lines between vice and virtue. Though the prostitute was a common character in their works, Harte introduced the first of his fictional prostitutes with the line “Perhaps the less said of her the better.”1 It would seem that most scholars of Western literature have agreed with Harte, dismissing her as just another feature of that lawless landscape. Although the prostitute often appeared on the margins of Western literature, if we center her in our analysis we can better understand the gendered mythology of the frontier West. I argue that the fictional frontier prostitute symbolized gender transgression and social chaos in the American West thereby enriching that cultural landscape in the popular American narrative. At the same time, because her presence symbolized lawlessness, efforts to establish social order after the rush required the expulsion of the prostitute through moral reform, local legislation, and vigilante violence. To complete the process of conquering the West the prostitute was cast out to make room for stable family structures and stable frontier communities. Harte and Miller 1 Bret Harte, The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Writings, ed. Gary Scharnhorst (New York: Penguin Classics, 2001), 16.

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explored the process of establishing stable frontier communities via narratives of family formation in the West. Using the figure of the prostitute these authors interrogated the limits of Victorian gender roles and examined stable family structures as symbols of civilization. Both Bret Harte and Joaquin Miller were popular and successful Westerners who rose to fame in the late 1860s and early 1870s. The two men were well-known in California, the East, and in London. Harte first achieved fame with his progressive poem “Plain Language from Truthful James” parodying anti-Chinese prejudice.2 Generally regarded as a traditional literary man, Harte was adored by some critics for his portrayal of California and the complexity of human nature, yet mocked by others for having a sentimental writing style derivative of Charles Dickens.3 Similarly sentimental in writing style, yet even more derivative, Miller was primarily regarded as a mediocre poet with a great deal of flare.4 He embodied the West in his persona as an archetypal frontiersman and capitalized on that image to market himself and his work. Modern literary critics attribute the origins of the Western and the stereotype of the frontier hooker with a heart of gold to Harte.5 Historians such as Richard White have pointed out that mid nineteenthcentury California was characterized by a predominantly male and transient population. At the same time, many of these migrants were middle-class Anglo-American migrants who brought their Victorian 2

Gary Scharnhorst, “`Ways That Are Dark’: Appropriations of Bret Harte’s `Plain Language From Truthful James’,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 51, no. 3 (December 1996): 377; For more on racial politics in Harte’s work see Margaret Duckett, “Bret Harte’s Portrayal of Half-Breeds,” American Literature 25, no. 2 (May 1953): 193 3 “A Star in the West,” Putnam’s Magazine, June 1870; Emily Forman, “Bret Harte,” Old and New 4. 6 (December 1871): 712–717; “Bret Harte,” Every Saturday, September 27, 1873. 4 “A New California Poet,” Alta California, July 14, 1871 http://cdnc.ucr.edu/ cdnc/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=DAC18710714&cl=CL2.1871.07&e=-------en--20--1-txt-IN-----; “Recent Literature: Miller’s Songs of the Sierras,” The Atlantic Monthly, December 1871; “Joaquin Miller as a Novelist,” Saturday Evening Post, October 20, 1877. 5 Axel Nissen, “The Feminization of Roaring Camp: Bret Harte and The American Woman’s Home,” Studies in Short Fiction 34. 3 (Summer 1997): 379–388; Gary Scharnhorst, Bret Harte: Opening the American Literary West (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 2000); J. David Stevens, “`She War a Woman’: Family Roles, Gender, and Sexuality in Bret Harte’s Western Fiction,” American Literature 69, no. 3 (1997): 571; Bret Harte and Ned E Hoopes, Harte of the West, 17 Stories by Bret Harte. (New York: Dell, 1966), 8.

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morals and values with them to the frontier.6 In this framework the family was at the center of the social community and “true women” were those who tended the hearth in contrast to the women located outside the home. While on the one hand, gold rush-era California embodied the laissez-faire capitalism and individualism that nineteenth century Americans prized, on the other, the new state represented the “logical, and threatening, conclusion” of unregulated society.7 A society without rules or families, motivated by the individual desire for profit, was also lacking social cohesion and nineteenth-century Americans feared that void would be filled with vice and violence. Although White argues that the existence of prostitution in the West was not significant in itself, he regards the widespread acceptance of prostitution in the West, made possible by the lack of women and the transient behavior of men, as “[p]erhaps the most telling sign of the fragility of normal social ties.”8 Gold-rush era California was short of women tending the hearth and full of women who walked the streets. Historians such as Jacqueline Barnhart have argued that during the earliest years of the gold rush, the years Harte and Miller imagined, prostitutes were accorded respect because they were the only women in town.9 Yet historians such as Brian Roberts have argued that though gold rush era men found the sexually licentious climate of California exciting, they also longed for the presence of true women.10 Those same men simultaneously feared their gentle sisters of the East could not survive in the harsh climate of the rush. It is precisely this tension between bad and good women, between the excitement of lawlessness and the desire for stable families that Harte and Miller explore in their works. Though prostitution signified unstable communities in the West, it was not isolated to that region. On the contrary, historians such as Timothy Gilfoyle have demonstrated that prostitution was widespread in the nineteenth century, partly because of cultural myths that made women who enjoyed sex deviant. Prostitutes functioned as surrogate sex partners for

6

See also Brian Roberts, American Alchemy: The California Gold Rush and Middle-Class Culture (Chapel Hill: The U of North Carolina P, 2000). 7 Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A History of the American West, 1st ed (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1991), 302. 8 Ibid., 304. 9 Jacqueline Baker Barnhart, The Fair but Frail: Prostitution in San Francisco, 1849-1900, Nevada Studies in History and Political Science no. 23 (Reno: U of Nevada P, 1986). 10 Roberts, American Alchemy.

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men in order to preserve the “virtue” of real women.11 Because of her pervasiveness in American society the prostitute appeared in a wide range of fiction, from realist novels to sentimental fiction to the gothic and, of course, as part of the Western. In most fictional pieces, she was the creation of male writers who often distanced her from any act of prostitution, and instead focused on the ways in which immoral behavior – specifically, sexual licentiousness and love of finery – had destroyed the woman. Despite present day popular ideas about the inseparability of prostitution and the American West, the prostitute of nineteenth century fiction was often located in urban spheres of the eastern American coast, where her fall from grace was linked to the general moral depravity and greed of the capitalist industrial urban space.12 This is in stark contrast to representations of prostitution in the West, where prostitution bolstered the image of the frontier giving it a distinct character by suggesting that painted ladies were an inherent part of the lawless landscape. Harte and Miller constructed the American West as a cultural landscape more generous to prostitutes, and more forgiving of their unladylike behavior than in the East; yet they also articulated distinctions between “good” and “bad” women. For the most part scholars read the fictional prostitute as a symbolic threat to Victorian ideologies of gender and sexuality; more specifically she represented a disruption of public and private spheres, a challenge to the cult of true womanhood ideology, and an articulation of subversive sexual desire. The prostitute’s position in the public sphere, as a woman of the streets, disrupted the Victorian ideology of separate spheres that served to protect a binary gender system.13 That a prostitute, or unchaste woman of any variety, had fallen suggested that the true state of womanhood was one in which a woman was pure, and the fallen woman thus became located outside of the category of woman. Because prostitutes appeared as fallen women, Amanda Anderson argues that they often functioned as “uneasy reminders of the general cultural 11

Timothy J. Gilfoyle, “Prostitutes in History: From Parables of Pornography to Metaphors of Modernity,” The American Historical Review 104. 1 (1 February 1999): 117–141. 12 Laura Hapke, Girls Who Went Wrong: Prostitutes in American Fiction, 18851917 (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1989). This is true even for Western writers such as Joaquin Miller, whose first novel The First Fam’lies in the Sierras (1876) included marginal frontier prostitutes. However, when Miller made the prostitute a central character in his fiction, he moved her to the urban east as in his novel The Destruction of Gotham (1886). 13 Amanda Anderson, Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture, Reading Women Writing (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993); Hapke, Girls Who Went Wrong.

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anxieties about the very possibility of deliberative moral action: to ‘fall’ is, after all, to lose control.”14 From such a position, the prostitute served as a reminder of the fragility of gender; true womanhood could not be taken for granted; instead it needed to be vigilantly protected and routinely proved. We see this most clearly in Miller’s novel, First Fam’lies of the Sierras, where the virtue of the lone non-prostitute woman in camp is continually scrutinized by the miners who find it hard to believe that a “good woman” could end up in their camp, as such a space was no place for a “lady.” Yet, it was precisely because the frontier was a space deemed unfit for women, that fictional frontier prostitutes were granted forgiveness. In this space where only the strong survived, a woman could be forgiven for her gender transgressions because she was only doing what she had to do to survive. While there was a suggestion that she was fallen, her position was not always entirely doomed, particularly because she was cast in the role of the hooker with a heart of gold – the prostitute whose kind deeds compensate for her lack of virtue. That this type of prostitute was commonly depicted in the works of Harte and Miller suggests that gender on the frontier was flexible. As White points out, the mythic West was a space where women existed as either virgins or whores, but the hooker with a heart of gold stereotype suggested that a woman could be both.15 The dearth of women in the nineteenth-century West also created a climate allowing more gender flexibility for men, which literary critics have explored in Harte’s work. For example, Axel Nissen has argued that Harte drew on the cult of domesticity in “The Luck of Roaring Camp” to illustrate that feminine attributes such as cleanliness and nurturing were not strictly limited to women.16 J. David Stevens has argued that family arrangements in Harte’s works represent non-gender normative family structures that challenged hegemonic nineteenth century codes of gender, sexuality, and family arrangement. The men in “The Luck of Roaring Camp” (1868) become feminized caretakers and the title character in “Miggles” (1869) operates as both provider and caretaker in her household, embodying dual feminine and masculine traits.17 Miller’s fictional miners are likewise burly men performing domestic duties. These articulations seem possible only in the imaginative space of the frontier 14

Anderson, Tainted Souls and Painted Faces, 2. White, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own, 304–307. 16 Nissen, “The Feminization of Roaring Camp.” 17 Stevens, “`She War a Woman’”; For a queer reading of masculinity in Harte’s work see Axel Nissen, Bret Harte: Prince and Pauper (Jacskon, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2000). 15

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where men and women were often forced to assume the other’s roles in order to survive. Life on the frontier varied for women and was largely determined by race. Anglo-American immigrants found the region lacking in the civilized domesticity they had grown accustomed to in the East, while Hispanic women found “the arrival of Anglos and incorporation into the American polity a mixed blessing at best” as it disenfranchised them, but also gave them the opportunity to achieve upward mobility by marrying Anglo men.18 Still other scholars have argued that Anglo-American and European immigrants might have found life on the frontier less restrictive. For example, the Homestead Act gave frontier women an opportunity to become landowners that was not available to them in the East. Many women in the West also took advantage of the burgeoning capitalist system and became entrepreneurs, some of them surpassing male mining business in financial success.19 Thus the frontier was a space where the borders of femininity could be crossed, and many Anglo-American women could take on more authoritative and dominant or typically masculine roles. Of course, this was not the case for Native American and Mexican women who found the quality of their lives greatly diminished by the presence of Anglo-Americans. As Albert Hurtado demonstrates, the frontier had a markedly different impact on the communities pushed aside in the name of westward expansion.20 The complex matrix of power, privilege, and oppression for women in the West is illustrated in the works of both Harte and Miller. Harte was the first American writer to depict frontier prostitution. Born Francis Bret Harte in 1836 in Albany, New York he relocated to California as a teenager in the spring of 1854 at the peak of the gold rush. He worked as a druggist assistant, a tutor, school teacher, and finally as an agent and messenger for Wells, Fargo before he began writing professionally in 1858 when he became a printer’s assistant at Uniontown’s newspaper, the Northern California.21 He later wrote for other San Francisco publications 18 Julie Roy Jeffrey, Frontier Women: “Civilizing” the West? 1840-1880, Rev. ed (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), 105. 19 Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher, Frontiers: A Short History of the American West, abridged ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale U P, 2008); Elizabeth Jameson and Sheila McManus, eds., One Step Over the Line: Toward a History of Women in the North American Wests (Edmonton, AB: U of Alberta P, 2004). 20 Albert L. Hurtado. “When Strangers Met: Sex and Gender on Three Frontiers.” Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women’s West, eds. Elizabeth Jameson and Susan Armitage (Norman, OH: U of Oklahoma P, 1997.) 122-142. 21 Scharnhorst, Bret Harte, 3 – 12.

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such as Golden Era and eventually became the editor of the West’s premier literary journal Overland. It was during his tenure with the latter that Harte published his most famous works such as “The Luck of Roaring Camp” (1868), “Miggles” (1869), and “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” (1869). Although Harte initially wrote for a California audience, literary scholar Gary Scharnhorst opines that all of these works were “pitched in every case to appeal to eastern readers who were intrigued by the romance of the gold rush.”22 Once he began writing for the East, Harte developed into a local color writer, writing as if he was an Easterner observing the West rather than as a Westerner himself.23 Reprints of his works appeared in multiple journals in the eastern United States and in England, where he was compared to Charles Dickens. At times Harte has been criticized for writing excessively sentimental short stories and poems, yet Scharnhorst argues that “Harte’s best tales were often antiparables that not only defy conventional readings but subvert the tenets of Christian or cultural orthodoxy.”24 Although Harte’s playful attitude toward Christianity was criticized by religious presses, he was a household name in California and references to his work appeared in the newspapers in the course of everyday events. For example, when a Chinese man by the name of Ah Sin was arrested in 1872, the Sacramento Daily Record joked that this was “probably the 25 individual made famous by Bret Harte in his ‘Heathen Chinee.’” Harte’s popularity peaked in 1870, and though he was still receiving offers to write local color pieces for Eastern journals, he believed that California had no more such stories to offer. In a letter to Whitelaw Reid, editor of the New York Tribune, Harte confessed concern about finding writing material. “The tourists have already exhausted superficial California and what is below is hard, dry and repulsive,” he wrote. “Perhaps in more than one sense ‘placer’ California is – to use an expressive localism – ‘played 26 out’.” Even though Harte considered the California landscape empty of material for storytelling by 1870, he had written his most famous stories only a couple of years prior and would continue to charm the nation with tales of the West for many years after. 22

Ibid., 42–43. Scharnhorst, Bret Harte. 13 – 26, 32. 24 Ibid., 42–46. 25 “Ah Sin.” Sacramento Daily Union. 19 January 1872. http://cdnc.ucr.edu/cdnc/ cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=SDU18720119.2.17&cl 26 Gary Scharnhorst, ed. Selected Letters of Bret Harte (Norman, OK: U of Oklahoma P, 1997), 38. 23

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One of the first iterations of the gold rush prostitute appeared in Harte’s first and most famous essay, “The Luck of Roaring Camp.” Published in the 1868 inaugural issue of Overland, the story tells of a rough mining camp transformed by the birth of a baby boy christened Thomas Luck. As such, the story represents an account of how domesticity and family formation could transform the Wild West. When Cherokee Sal, the child’s mother – a “coarse, and, it is to be feared, a very sinful woman” – dies during childbirth, the mining camp, now comprised exclusively of men, is forced to find a way to care for the child. The prostitute’s surviving offspring becomes a token of good luck and the men, whose rough demeanor can be read as too masculine, become feminized in their commitment to care for the child. They begin to bathe regularly and wear fresh clothing, give up their violent ways, and see the beauty in their surroundings. As a reward for reforming their ways, Roaring Camp is blessed with peace and prosperity and the men consider inviting “respectable families” to live among them for the sake of little Thomas Luck. Unfortunately, this prosperity is short-lived when a flood of biblical proportions destroys the camp. Thomas Luck, the figure responsible for the camp’s transformation, has been read in multiple ways. Most recently, Stevens has rejected the popular argument that Thomas is a messiah figure sent to redeem the camp, in favor of a reading of the child as an Adamic figure, who tames the beasts of Roaring Camp and turns it into an Edenic space. 27 Stevens further argues that Roaring Camp’s transformation is made possible by their willingness to embrace the family, a family made more imperative by the absence of women in the camp. As Stevens puts it: “The reason there are no women in the camp is not to demonstrate that they are unnecessary but to underscore how essential their contributions are.”28 But Roaring Camp was not a camp without women; Little Thomas Luck was born to a Cherokee prostitute named Sal. Though the men of Roaring Camp may not have considered Sal a woman because she did not conform to the cult of true womanhood, she was a woman nonetheless. Though Harte burlesques the nativity scene, he likens Sal not to the Virgin Mary, but to Eve – the most infamous of fallen women – in his description of her birthing experience:

27

Stevens, “`She War a Woman’.” Ibid., 575; See also Nissen, “The Feminization of Roaring Camp.” Nissen disagrees with Stevens arguing that the miners’ attitudes toward women are clearly misogynistic.

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Chapter Nine Dissolute, abandoned, and irreclaimable, she was yet suffering a martyrdom hard enough to bear when veiled by sympathizing womanhood, but now terrible in her loneliness. The primal curse had come to her in that original isolation which must have made the punishment of the first transgression so dreadful. It was, perhaps, the expiation of her sin that, at a moment when she most lacked her sex’s intuitive tenderness and care, she met only the half-contemptuous faces of her masculine associates.29

Only in the Wild West, where “true” women were few and far between, could a prostitute’s child transform a community. The presence of Sal, the fallen woman, in Roaring Camp marks it as a space radically different from the Garden of Eden. Sal is Eve after the fall and Roaring Camp is the place that exists beyond the walls of Eden. It is not a space where the sinful long to return, but where they congregate to live out their lives in misery. As such it is a place where virtuous women dare not tread. “It was argued that no decent woman could be prevailed to accept Roaring Camp as her home, and the speaker urged that ‘they didn’t want any more of the other kind.’” The narrator confides, “this unkind allusion to the defunct mother, harsh as it may seem, was the first spasm of propriety, – the first symptom of the camp’s regeneration.”30 That the camp’s regeneration is predicated on their willingness to reject the prostitute, to exclude the “bad” woman, suggests that the presence of the prostitute is the clearest signifier of the frontier as a space hostile to the family. Only when they resolve to not take in “any more of the other kind” do the men become honorable. By eliminating Cherokee Sal as a mother and removing her from the realm of domesticity Harte evoked white, middle-class femininity and explored the cult of domesticity’s potential to transform the frontier. Yet in the end this potential was swept away in the flood that destroyed the camp suggesting that the sins of the camp were too great – they had to be washed away, to start anew. Harte tackled the process of eliminating vice more directly in “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” (1869). Set in 1850, this is the tale of a group of social misfits exiled from a crime-ridden mining town looking to improve its character. The outcasts are comprised of a gambler, a thief, and two fallen women, the Duchess and Mother Shipton. When the outlaws encounter a young couple seeking their fortune in Poker Flats the difference between virtue and vice is blurred. The young Tom Simson, referred to as “The Innocent” and his fiancée, Piney Woods, mistake the Duchess and Mother Shipton for virtuous women, and the outlaws play 29 30

Harte, The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Writings, 16. Ibid., 20.

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along so as to preserve the innocence of the young couple, laughing all the while to themselves. Piney innocently asks the Duchess if she grew accustomed to finery in Poker Flats, and it is clear that Piney has mistaken the Duchess for a virtuous upper-class woman. Although we are led to believe that Piney herself is chaste, this position is later called into question when the two women huddle together against the winter storm that has taken over their lodgings. “Piney, can you pray?” asks the Duchess. “‘No dear,’ said Piney simply. The Duchess, without knowing exactly why, felt relieved … .”31 The narrator does not explain why Piney cannot pray and though it is tempting to read this moment in the text as Piney’s admission that she is not a virgin, she still maintains her position as a virtuous woman exemplified by the narrator’s continued description of Piney as “pure” while The Duchess is still “soiled.” However, this distinction is lost on the rescue party when they discover the two women. “[W]hen pitying fingers brushed the snow from their wan faces, you could scarcely have told from the equal peace that dwelt upon them, which was she that had sinned.”32 In this moment Harte flattens the difference between the two women and suggests that the differences between good women and bad women are not so clear, not only for the established law but also for the reader. The exiled prostitute made yet another appearance in Harte’s 1869 story “Miggles,” loosely based on the retired life of Lola Montez, a famous courtesan who spent time in San Francisco and rural California.33 When a group of weary travelers encounter a blown-out bridge in the middle of the storm they hear a disembodied voice call out: “try Miggles’s” and they are led through the woods by a mysterious horseman to an isolated house. The travelers enter the house and find a lone disabled and mute man whom they assume is Miggles sitting beside the fire. Again, they hear a voice call out “Miggles,” which Harte then attributes to a magpie, taking a cue from Edgar Allen Poe’s famous 1845 poem, “The Raven.” At this moment the travelers begin to worry that they have stumbled into a haunted house. Their sense of safety is soon restored when Miggles returns home and the travelers find the head of the house is a beautiful and slightly masculine woman.34 As both provider and caretaker, 31

Ibid., 36. Ibid. 33 Scharnhorst, Bret Harte, 45. 34 Harte describes Miggles as “bright-eyed, full-throated young woman, whose wet gown of coarse blue stuff could not hide the beauty of the feminine curves to which it clung; from the chestnut crown of whose head, topped by a man’s oil-skin sou’wester, to the little feet and ankles, hidden somewhere in the recess of her 32

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Miggles possesses just the right combination of masculine and feminine features that she reduces the men of the party to domesticated, gossiping feminine subjects. Her cheerful presence provides warmth the party had found lacking on the road. While Miggles is a central character in this text, she exists on the margins of the Western community, living among Native Americans and the creatures of the forest. When they settle in for the night Miggles tells her silent guests the story of how she came to live in the woods, beginning with her life as a prostitute in Marysville during the gold rush. As she recounts her past we learn that she was once a popular and wealthy madam, though she now lives in isolation and obscurity. She asks her visitors if they knew her in Marysville and when no one replies she falls silent, leading the narrator to conclude that the “absence of recognition may have disconcerted her.”35 She continues her story to say that Jim had been once been a customer of hers and when he fell ill she sold her saloon to care for him.36 The travellers inquire as to the nature of her present relationship to Jim she puts them at ease by explaining that she prefers to care for him out of the kindness of her heart rather than by legal obligation. The travellers interpret Miggles’s care for Jim as the highest order of domestic servitude. Miggles’s heart of gold shines so brightly that her interactions with the two married women in the party alienate her from the women and position her as the true woman, combining the right mixture of beauty, charm, and independence. Harte returns to that difference between good and bad women in his 1869 sentimental tale “The Idyll of Red Gulch.” This is the story of Miss Mary, a virtuous and slightly uptight schoolteacher who commands the respect of the community, including the coarse coach driver and the gambler. When she stumbles upon Sandy, a local drunkard, she comes to appreciate the roughness of the frontier. Her interactions with Sandy transform him from a drunkard to a gentleman, albeit a coarse one, and the two begin to fall in love. This sentimental romance is disrupted by a visit from the mother of a student, a prostitute who begs Miss Mary to take her boy’s brogans, all was grace …” Harte, The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Writings, 41. 35 Ibid., 45. 36 Stevens, “`She War a Woman’,” 576. Stevens argues that Jim’s poor health is due to an untreated case of syphilis, which has interesting implications in that it makes Miggles’ role as a nurse less altruistic and more like reparations since prostitutes have long been regarded as disease carriers. However, the text does not necessarily make this case and if Jim did indeed have syphilis, so too would Miggles, his former lover.

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son to San Francisco. When the mother confesses that Sandy is the child’s father, Miss Mary resolves to take the child and leave the mining camp behind for the civilized city. This interaction between Miss Mary and the prostitute reveal competing discourses about femininity in the West. Harte describes the prostitute as a woman of contradictions: her fancy dress does not match her “timid, irresolute bearing.” Her make-up – jokingly referred to as “war paint” by the community of Red Gulch, a symbol of her failed whiteness – cannot conceal her shame in the presence of Miss Mary, a seemingly true woman. The prostitute admits that it is inappropriate for her to visit the schoolmistress in broad daylight, suggesting that she will taint the pure schoolteacher just as she is afraid that she will taint her own son. As an example of civilization and education, a member of the cult of true womanhood, the schoolteacher has the power to transmit her purity and gentleness to the boy by taking him under her care. Mary’s classroom is a space of proper, traditional femininity while the brothel where Tommy’s mother presumably resides is unfit for a child. Miss Mary has already tamed the drunken Sandy, so there is no doubt of her power to transmit her purity and gentleness to the boy. As was the case in “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” the prostitute could give birth to a child, but she could not be a mother. Instead, it is the virtuous woman who acts as mother reaffirming the idea that the only way for families to survive in the West is in the presence of good women. While Miss Mary and Tommy’s mother are initially set up as contrasting figures – the virtuous schoolmistress in her “chaste skirts” and the prostitute with the parasol left outside – after Sandy is revealed as Tommy’s father, both women become linked through their relationship to Sandy and the virtuous woman’s virtue is called into question. Once again, Harte flattens the difference between good women and fallen women, suggesting perhaps that the West has the potential to ease a woman’s virtue. In this way, “The Idyl of Red Gulch” both reflects and challenges the virgin/whore dichotomy present in the nineteenth-century mythical West. As historian Robert White has pointed out, the mythic West is one where women exist as either virgins or whores, but the hooker with a heart of gold stereotype suggests that a woman can be both. White women such as Miss Mary were predominantly characterized as gentle civilizers and bearers of culture and as the counterpart to the rowdy men of the Wild West. In order for them to be effective “tamers” White argues that the white woman had to be stripped of her sexuality. Indeed, by revealing Sandy as the father, Tommy’s mother becomes the foil for Miss Mary whose sexuality is revealed. Though she fell for a man who patronized

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prostitutes Miss Mary’s willingness to reject Sandy and take care of Tommy makes her a strong, virtuous character – whatever damage has been done by her encounter with the villainous Sandy is reversed by her final action. Her willingness to assume the role of mother for a woman who could not makes Miss Mary a true woman. While the prostitute’s desire to give her son to a virtuous woman imbues her with a certain virtue of her own, this act also marks her as a woman incapable of being part of the domestic fabric. In “The Idyll of Red Gulch,” as in Harte’s other short stories, the prostitute did not belong to the frontier family. Though she was a significant feature of the frontier, as the lawless frontier gave way to established family-based communities, so too did the prostitute give way to the rule of the virtuous mother. Taken together, the fallen women of Harte’s works challenged dominant discourses of domesticity and troubled the binary of nineteenth century American womanhood. Harte’s fictional families do not conform to the ideal middle-class model of man, woman, and child. Instead, his families are comprised of frontier outlaws: coarse miners and prostitutes. Even in the case of the “Idyll of Red Gulch,” the seemingly virtuous Miss Mary teeters on the edge of falling from grace by her association with Sandy and, ironically, it is the prostitute who saves Mary by inspiring her to adopt a domestic role. These complex representations of family and womanhood illustrate transgressive gender and family formations on the frontier, but at the same time the transgression in these narratives is only liminal and it is the middle-class standards of gender and family that prevail in the end. Nonetheless, the popularity of these short stories indicates a larger cultural desire to explore the complexity of gender and family. Harte’s success as a Western writer paved the way for Joaquin Miller who borrowed heavily from Harte’s stock characters of hookers with hearts of gold and comical Chinese servants. Indeed, it would seem that when Harte left California in 1871, he made a space for Miller to rise to fame. The two men met when Harte was the editor of the Overland Monthly and Miller was still an aspiring poet. Although Harte initially rejected Miller’s poetry on the grounds that it was too sentimental, he eventually published Miller’s sketch “Rough Times in Idaho.” Later, when Miller’s collection of poetry Songs of the Sierras was published in London, Harte praised him as “the wild buffalo of the prairies.” Miller also spoke fondly of Harte, claiming Harte returned east because Californians did not sufficiently appreciate his genius.37 37 Axel Nissen, Bret Harte: Prince and Pauper (Jackson, MS: U P of Mississippi, 2000). See “Sauce.” Daily Alta California, 14 August 1871. http://cdnc.ucr.edu/

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Although Harte had a greater record of literary accomplishments, Miller’s works were regarded as more authentic than Harte’s. While Harte was a man of elegance and great intellect, Miller was coarse, wild, and genius in his own simple way. 38 Unlike Harte, Miller considered himself a bona fide Westerner and it was this carefully calculated persona that led to his success as a writer. Born Cincinnatus Heine Miller in Indiana in 1837, Miller moved to Oregon with his family as a young boy, then relocated to California as a young man in 1854. He worked briefly as a miner, pony express rider, and a lawyer, then spent some time living among the Modoc Indians in Northern California after he was convicted of horse theft. Like Harte, Miller also worked as a newspaper and literary magazine editor before becoming a published poet and novelist. Commonly known as the “Poet of the Sierras” and the “Byron of the Rockies,” Miller was a rather colorful character who had a reputation for dishonesty.39 In order to fortify his frontiersman persona, Miller later changed his first name to Joaquin, fashioning himself after the legendary California bandit, Joaquin Murietta. His rise to fame began in 1871 in London, “where his long hair, flannel shirt, and above-the-knee boots created a sensation” and from there spread throughout the United States.40 Miller’s debut novel explores the cult of domesticity and the differences between good and bad women via the frontier prostitution. Published first in London in 1875 then in Chicago the following year, First Fam’lies of the Sierras recounts the story of how a violent and uncivilized mining camp called Forks is transformed when a virtuous woman comes to town.41 Miller borrows heavily from Harte’s “Luck of Roaring Camp,” but while Harte’s frontier prostitutes find themselves displaced by the cult of domesticity, Miller’s prostitutes are absorbed into it. Set in 1850, when cdnc/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=DAC18710814.2.15&cl Critics who favored Harte over Miller were quick to point out that Miller himself was a fan of Harte. 38 “A New California Poet.” Daily Alta California. 14 July 1871. http://cdnc.ucr.edu/cdnc/cgi-bin/cdnc?a=d&d=DAC18710714&cl=CL1.DAC&e=------en--20--1--txt-IN----39 Roger A Hall, Performing the American Frontier, 1870-1906, Cambridge Studies LQ $PHULFDQ 7KHDWUH DQG 'UDPD &DPEULGJH 8.ௗ 1HZ