The New American West in Literature and the Arts: A Journey Across Boundaries [1 ed.] 0367858630, 9780367858636, 9781003056775

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication Page
Contents
List of Contributors
Acknowledgments
Best Ice Cream West of the Mississippi
Introduction: (A) Traveling West
Trends in Western American Studies, or the Road as Seen from the Borrow Pit
PART 1 The West Travels Across Myths
1.1 Other Western Spaces
1 Forging the Future, Forgetting the Human, or What the Los Angeles Freeways Erased: Oblivion in Helena María
2 Diasporic Native Americans in Sherman Alexie’s Short Stories: Roots and Routes in Urban Contexts
3 Nature, Environment, and Direct Action in the American West: Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang
1.2 Other Western Voices
4 Mary Hallock Foote’s Reimagining of the Woman’s West
5 Crossing Time, Crossing Space: Traumatic Memory in Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred
PART 2 The West Travels Across Boundaries
2.1 Continental Journeys
6 “New Blood Time Now”: The American West in Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings
7 Behind the Mask of Zorro: The Americanization of the Legend and Isabel Allende’s Anticolonial Revision
2.2 Intercontinental Journeys
8 Pynchon Stretches West to East in Against the Day
9 No Country for Young Men: Geographies of Anxiety in My Own Private Idaho
10 Exit West to a Borderless Frontier
2.3 Transcontinental Journeys
11 The Western Before the Western: Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814) as a Paradigm of Pre-Western Fiction
12 Beyond the Atlantic: The American West in Twenty- First-Century Southwestern European Literature
13 Uncovering the Western: Pastoralism, Conflict, and Revenge in Agnieszka Holland’s Film Spoor
PART 3 The West Travels Across Disciplines
Visual and Aural Journeys
14 Looking Beyond the West from the Dairy Queen: Local Apertures, Planetary Visions
15 “Comanches in Spain!”: (Re)visiting a Spanish Exhibition on the “Far West”
16 Genre Revision and Hybridity: Westerns and the West in Twenty-First-Century American Television
17 The Basque Far West: Expressions Through Art and Music
Index

Citation preview

The New American West in Literature and the Arts

The story of the American West is that of a journey. It is the story of a movement, of a geographical and human transition, of the delineation of a route that would soon become a rooted myth. The story of the American West has similarly journeyed across boundaries in a two-way movement, sometimes feeding the idea of that myth, sometimes challenging it. This collection of chapters relates to the notion of the traveling essence of the myth of the American West from different geographical and disciplinary standpoints. The volume originates in Europe, particularly in Spain, where the myth traveled and was received, assimilated, and re-presented. It intends to travel back to the West in a two-way cross-cultural journey, which will hopefully contribute to the delineation of the New—always self-renewing—American West. It includes the work of authors on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean who propose a cross-cultural, transdisciplinary dialogue upon the idea, the geography, and the representation of the American West. Amaia Ibarraran-Bigalondo is a lecturer at the University of the Basque Country, where she teaches contemporary North American literature and culture. Her research has been focused on the study of Chicana literature and culture, and she has published several articles in international journals. She is a member of the REWEST research group (Research Group in Western American Literature). She is the author of Mexican American Women, Dress and Gender: Pachuchas, Chicanas, Cholas (2019) and editor of The Neglected West (2012) and Transcontinental Refections on the American West: Words, Images, Sounds beyond Borders (2015).

Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature

116 D. H. Lawrence and Psychoanalysis John Turner 117 The Anthropocenic Turn The Interplay between Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Responses to a New Age Edited by Gabriele Dürbeck and Philip Hüpkes 118 Beards and Masculinity in American Literature Peter Ferry 119 Kashmiri Life Narratives Human Rights, Pleasure and the Local Cosmopolitan Rakhshan Rizwan 120 Migrant and Tourist Encounters The Ethics of Im/mobility in 21st Century Dominican and Cuban Cultures Andrea Morris 121 Painting Words Aesthetics and the Relationship between Image and Text Beatriz González-Moreno and Fernando González-Moreno 122 The Role of the Literary Canon in the Teaching of Literature Robert J. Aston 123 The New American West in Literature and the Arts A Journey Across Boundaries Edited by Amaia Ibarraran-Bigalondo For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com

The New American West in Literature and the Arts A Journey Across Boundaries

Edited by Amaia Ibarraran-Bigalondo

First published 2020 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 Taylor & Francis The right of Amaia Ibarraran-Bigalondo to be identifed as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-85863-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-05677-5 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

From all REWESTers To all REWESTers

Contents

List of Contributors Acknowledgments Best Ice Cream West of the Mississippi

x xv 1

A N G E L C H A PA RRO SAIN Z

Introduction: (A) Traveling West

4

A M A I A I B A RRARAN - B IGA L O N DO

Trends in Western American Studies, or the Road as Seen from the Borrow Pit

10

NANCY S. COOK

PART 1

The West Travels Across Myths

21

1.1

22

Other Western Spaces

1 Forging the Future, Forgetting the Human, or What the Los Angeles Freeways Erased: Oblivion in Helena María Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came with Them

23

C R I S TI N A G ARRIGÓ S

2 Diasporic Native Americans in Sherman Alexie’s Short Stories: Roots and Routes in Urban Contexts

36

A I TO R I B A R R O L A - A RME N DARIZ

3 Nature, Environment, and Direct Action in the American West: Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang G O R K A B R A C E RAS- MA RTÍN E Z

53

viii

Contents

1.2

Other Western Voices

4 Mary Hallock Foote’s Reimagining of the Woman’s West

69 70

M E G A N R I L EY MCGIL CH RIST

5 Crossing Time, Crossing Space: Traumatic Memory in Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred

84

PA U L A B A R B A GUE RRE RO

PART 2

The West Travels Across Boundaries

101

2.1

102

Continental Journeys

6 “New Blood Time Now”: The American West in Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings

103

N E I L C A M P BE L L

7 Behind the Mask of Zorro: The Americanization of the Legend and Isabel Allende’s Anticolonial Revision

120

G E O R G I A S I MAKO U

2.2

Intercontinental Journeys

8 Pynchon Stretches West to East in Against the Day

133 134

M ATTH E W C ISSE L L

9 No Country for Young Men: Geographies of Anxiety in My Own Private Idaho

147

F I O R E N Z O I UL IA N O

10 Exit West to a Borderless Frontier

161

E S R A C O K E R KO RP E Z

2.3

Transcontinental Journeys

11 The Western Before the Western: Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814) as a Paradigm of Pre-Western Fiction A L F R E D O M O RO MARTÍN

177 178

Contents 12 Beyond the Atlantic: The American West in TwentyFirst-Century Southwestern European Literature

ix 191

D AV I D R I O

13 Uncovering the Western: Pastoralism, Confict, and Revenge in Agnieszka Holland’s Film Spoor

206

M A R E K PA RY Z

PART 3

The West Travels Across Disciplines

221

Visual and Aural Journeys

222

14 Looking Beyond the West from the Dairy Queen: Local Apertures, Planetary Visions

223

A U D R E Y G O ODMA N

15 “Comanches in Spain!”: (Re)visiting a Spanish Exhibition on the “Far West”

241

J U A N I G N A C IO GUIJA RRO GO N ZÁL E Z

16 Genre Revision and Hybridity: Westerns and the West in Twenty-First-Century American Television

252

J E S Ú S Á N G E L GO N ZÁL E Z

17 The Basque Far West: Expressions Through Art and Music

267

M O N I K A M ADIN A B E ITIA

Index

279

Contributors

Paula Barba Guerrero is a research fellow at the English Department of the University of Salamanca, where she is writing her PhD dissertation on contemporary African American literature. She is the recipient of a research fellowship fnanced by the Junta de Castilla y León and the European Social Fund, and a member of the research projects “Erasmus+: Hospitality in European Film” and “Critical History of Ethnic American Literature.” Paula has authored pieces on contemporary African American and black British writers, and has been visiting researcher at State University of New York (Cortland) and Cornell University. Gorka Braceras-Martínez studied modern languages at the University of Deusto and a master’s degree in literary studies at the UPV/EHU. He is currently a PhD student who focuses on radical environmentalism in literature and whose work encompasses, among others, the literature of Edward Abbey and his environmental approaches to the American West. Neil Campbell is Emeritus Professor of American Studies at the University of Derby, UK. His major research project has been an interdisciplinary trilogy of books on the post-war American West: The Cultures of the American New West (Edinburgh, 2000), The Rhizomatic West, and Post-Westerns: Cinema, Region, West (both Nebraska, 2008, 2013). He published Affective Critical Regionality (Rowman Littlefeld International, 2016) and edited Under the Western Sky: Essays on the Fiction and Music of Willy Vlautin (University of Nevada Press, 2018). Angel Chaparro Sainz teaches at the UPV/EHU in the translation studies and in the English studies programs. His book Parting the Mormon Veil: Phyllis Barber’s Writing was published by the Biblioteca Javier Coy in 2013. He also co-edited the book Transcontinental Refections on the American West: Words, Images, Sounds beyond Borders in 2015. He has published in national and international journals. His research deals mostly with Western American literature, Mormon

Contributors

xi

literature, ecocriticism, feminist studies, and translation studies. He is also interested in a variety of topics dealing with poetry, popular music, and minority literatures in general. Matthew C. Cissell read through his mother’s box of Louis L’Amour novels before he was 16. He earned his BA in English studies in 1997 at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. His area of research involves applying the work and ideas of the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to the study of literature in general and specifcally to the work of Thomas Pynchon. He attained his PhD from the University of the Basque Country in 2017. Esra Coker Korpez received her MA in 1994 from Wright State in Ohio, USA and her PhD in 2001 from Dokuz Eylul University in Izmir, Turkey. She is currently an assistant professor of American culture and literature at DEÜ, where she teaches American short story, science fction and fantasy, Native-American, and refugee literature. Her research interests lie mainly in the felds of fantastic/magical realist writing and ethnic American fction. Nancy S. Cook (PhD, University at Buffalo) is Professor of English at the University of Montana. A past president of the Western Literature Association, she serves on the editorial board of Western American Literature. Before turning to academe, she worked as a farmer, a rancher, a recording engineer, and in radio. She has published internationally in Western American studies and ecocriticism, including work on the language of US water policy, on Montana writing, on ranching, and on authenticity. Currently, she is preparing a manuscript about twentiethcentury US ranching cultures. Cristina Garrigós is Professor of American Literature at the National University of Distance Education (UNED), where she has been teaching since 2015. She has taught at different universities in Spain (University Autonomous of Madrid, University of León for almost 20 years) and the United States (UNC Chapel Hill, where she got her MA in comparative literature), University of Mississippi (Olemiss) and Texas A&M International. Her research interests include US contemporary literature, flm, music, and gender. She has published on authors such as John Barth, Kathy Acker, Gloria Anzaldúa, Giannina Braschi, Rabih Alameddine, Don DeLillo or Ruth Ozeki. Currently, she is working on memory losses in US fction. Jesús Ángel González is Professor of English at the University of Cantabria, Spain, where he teaches English and American literature. He has published La narrativa popular de Dashiell Hammett: Pulps, Cine y Cómics (2002) and co-edited The Invention of Illusions: International Perspectives on Paul Auster (2011). His most recent research deals

xii Contributors with the American West and its effects on American and international culture, literature and flm. Audrey Goodman is Professor of English at Georgia State University in Atlanta and a longtime member of the Western Literature Association. She is the author of two books published by the University of Arizona Press, Translating Southwestern Landscapes and Lost Homelands, and a contributor to Left in the West (U of Nevada Press), the Cambridge History of Western American Literature, Women in the Americas (AixMarseille UP), the Blackwell Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West, Postwestern Cultures: Literature, Theory, Space (U of Nebraska Press), Transatlantica, and Miranda. Her current research projects include a book about twentieth-century phototexts and a series of essays about Southwestern writers Sandra Cisneros, Denise Chavez, Luci Tapahonso, and Lucia Berlin. Juan Ignacio Guijarro González teaches US Literature and US Studies at the University of Seville (Spain). His felds of research include Western studies, comparative literature, cultural studies, and popular culture. He has published research on authors like Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie, William S. Yellow Robe, Jr., and Tino Villanueva, among many others, and on flmmakers like John Sayles or Spike Lee. He has edited the frst anthology of Spanish poetry about jazz, Fruta extraña. Un siglo de poesía española del jazz (2013), and belongs to the research project on the ‘American West’ based at the University of the Basque Country in Vitoria (Spain). He is currently interested in researching the cultural and literary exchanges between Spain and the United States. Aitor Ibarrola-Armendariz teaches courses in ethnic relations, diversity management, academic writing, and flm adaptation in the Modern Languages and Basque Studies Department of the University of Deusto, Bilbao. He has published articles [in Atlantis, IJES, Miscelánea, Revista Chilena de Literatura, etc.] and edited volumes [Fiction and Ethnicity (1995), Entre dos mundos (2004), Migrations in a Global Context (2007), On the Move: Glancing Backwards to Build a Future in English Studies (2016) on minority and immigrant narratives and processes of cultural hybridisation. He has been the Director of the Erasmus Mundus MA Programme in Migrations and Social Cohesion (2010–14) and Head of the Modern Languages and Basque Studies Dept. (2012–15) in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Deusto. Fiorenzo Iuliano is Associate Professor of American Literature at University of Cagliari. He has especially published on twentieth-century American literature, on critical theory, and on popular culture and cultural studies (music and literature, comics and graphic novels). His

Contributors

xiii

current research is on the construction of the cultural myth of Seattle in the 1990s and about the work of David Leavitt. Monika Madinabeitia is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Humanities and Education at Mondragon University, in the Basque Country. Her main research areas are both the emigration and immigration phenomena into and out of the Basque Country, with an emphasis on the Basque diaspora of the American West. Her book Petra, My Basque Grandmother, which came out in 2019, deals with the Basque American diaspora of the US West by focusing on the story of a Basque woman, Petra. This book gives visibilty to Basque emigrating women, whose story is very rarely told in the offcial history. She is currently the designer and coordinator of the forthcoming degree global digital humanities, which is to be launched in September 2020. Megan Riley McGilchrist is a writer, teacher, and scholar of the American West. Her book, The Western Landscape in Cormac McCarthy and Wallace Stegner: Myths of the Frontier, was published by Routledge in 2009. For the past 11 years she taught at the American School in London. Alfredo Moro Martín holds degrees in English and German philology from the University of Salamanca, where he obtained his PhD in 2013 with a dissertation on the reception of Don Quixote in England and Germany during the second half of the eighteenth-century. His feld of research focuses on the infuence of Cervantes in authors such as Henry Fielding, Sir Walter Scott, C.M. Wieland, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe or Mary W. Shelley. Marek Paryz is an associate professor of American Literature at the Institute of English Studies, University of Warsaw. He is the Chief Editor of the Polish Journal for American Studies and senior editor of the European Journal of American Studies. He has written on the literature of the American Renaissance, contemporary American fction, and literary and flm Westerns. His recent publications include co-edited special issues of the Papers on Language and Literature on “The Visual Language of Gender and Family in the Western” (with Matthew Carter, 2018) and the Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik on “Figurations of Settler Colonialism in Contemporary Cinematic Depictions of the US West” (with M. Elise Marubbio and Matthew Carter, 2020). David Rio is Professor of American Literature at the University of the Basque Country (Spain). His research interests are located within the feld of American Studies, with an emphasis on diaspora studies, regional literatures, and especially western American writing and Basque-American literature. He is the author of El proceso de la violencia en la narrativa de Robert Penn Warren (1995), Robert Laxalt: The

xiv

Contributors

Voice of the Basques in American Literature (2007), and New Literary Portraits of the American West: Contemporary Nevada Fiction (2014). He has also co-edited fve volumes on the literature of the American West. David Rio coordinates an international research group (REWEST) specializing in the literature and culture of the American West. Georgia Simakou has received her BA from the Department of English Language and Literature of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, from which she has also received her MA on “The Greek Element in Anglophone Literature.” She is interested in comparative literary and cultural studies.

Acknowledgments

This book is the result of the work of a group of academics who call themselves REWESTers. We would like to thank the Basque government for funding the REWEST research group Grupo Consolidado IT1206–16 and thus allowing us to work on projects such as this one, the International Conference on the American West, and several yearly symposia. Similarly, the book is part of a project fnanced by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (PGC2018–094659-B-C21(MCIU/AEI/ FEDER, UE)), the European Regional Fund (ERDF). Our deepest gratitude, too, goes to the University of the Basque Country, and in particular, to the Department of English, German and Translation Studies. But this book is also the result of the work of all of those who have taken active part in its completion: each of the contributors has been essential in this journey. Thank you all. Similarly, we would like to thank all of you who have helped us grow and travel beyond our boundaries, who have never doubted to come when we called you, to help us when we needed it, to travel from the American West to the Basque Country, and back. From Europe, to the West, through the Basque Country, and back. We will all meet again, soon.

Best Ice Cream West of the Mississippi Angel Chaparro Sainz

Now She is coming to me, running smiles, spurring her magic, veiled stud, arms open to bust the thin air in between. And I’m welcoming the bliss, in the blink of an eye, anticipated glee. I see the sea behind. I smell her hair, her skin when she reaches and hugs. She calls me dad and she says to come: You gotta be the sheriff now, she laughs. But she rides again and the sand becomes the land of the free. I close my eyes and breath the whole beach in. Her mom is now over my ear: Rest, buckaroo, she whispers, I’m taking her for ice cream. Kisses on my temple; tenderly she yells her name to the width of the bay. I want to grab it, to seize it, to elicit it: promise, longing, wish and apogee, all in the swift agony of an ephemeral realization. I want to grab it, to seize it, to elicit it. To conquer it. She dances vipers over the sandy soil in her way to where her mom awaits. She bends to her, she whispers again, she probably says the creamy word. The tiny outlaw holsters her gun and celebrates. A feeting, fresher, newer,

2

Angel Chaparro Sainz never-ending bond that burns along under the sun. My heart chokes when I see them walking away: one knot of hands and a perpetual mark in the mind. I turn around and set my eyes upon the line that draws the birth of the sky, the end of the sea. And I see him out of the blue, blue sky. I close my eyes. I agree to it. I feel the warmth of the sun on my skin: I surrender to remembering. Then The day was bare. The birds were gargling vocal exercises. The morning: an instant of harmony in the rhythm of my shaky breath. The night before was long and slow like they always were in there and we were both together in silence watching TV. Shane was heading away on the screen when I turned and saw his sober profle, the silhouette of a fugitive life. I didn’t think it twice when I spoke: I’m coming with you tomorrow. I was stubbornly regretting it. My father, pleased. He stopped, looked at me and then he pointed ahead: We are heading to those hills. He was seeing promise where I was reckoning slopes. We jumped down, we pursued the path, we obeyed the way of a waterless creek, the steep cliff, a snaky trail of clay and ore. The pebbles cried along. We climbed a boulder.

Best Ice Cream West of the Mississippi We saw a narrow valley from the top of it and the droughty obstinacy of the horizon, contending a broad cerulean sky. A river crawled itself over a maroon bed, meandering its way. We ran down. We stayed put when we got to the deep bed of the valley, where the embedded river rested quietly, ghostly, in expectation. He pointed to it with the tip of his chin: That’s Portugal, on the other side. Cross the river and you’ll be West of the Mississippi. There was a peace that could be breath; a beauty that could be sensed. He took a deep breath: Worth it, wasn’t it? Now I open my eyes to the blindness of brightness. The enchanted noises, the stream of movement announce that they are back. Sea keeps receding, its scented spirit overspreading. She’s happy. She’s excited. She’s only four. She picks on me. She shows me the ice cream. She. She points at me with it: This is the best ice cream, she starts and I fnish: West of the Mississippi. We hug. And out of the blue, blue sky I answer back never too late: It really was worth it, dad.

3

Introduction (A) Traveling West Amaia Ibarraran-Bigalondo

The story of the American West is that of a journey. It is the story of a movement, of a geographical and human transition, of the delineation of a route that would soon become a rooted myth. The story of the American West has similarly journeyed across boundaries in a two-way movement, sometimes feeding the idea of that myth, sometimes challenging it. This collection of essays relates to the notion of the traveling essence of the myth of the American West from different geographical and disciplinary standpoints. The volume originates in Europe, particularly in Spain, where the myth traveled and was received, assimilated, and re-presented. It intends to travel back to the West in a two-way cross-cultural journey, which will hopefully contribute to the delineation of the New—always self-renewing—American West. Since the West as a myth and an idea disembarked in the European popular imagination, it has recurrently been constructed as a literary, cinematographic space, circumscribed by a very specifc natural environment and a narrow human geography: arid landscapes, vast pastures, natives, and cowboys. There had to be more to it, but this idea worked well in the vision that Europeans had of “America.” The West was thought of as a place of origin: “The West provided a creation story for the American nation” (Jones and Wills 39). European audiences had assimilated, probably in a nonconscious, noncritical way, the Turnerian notion of the exceptionality of the West, of the West as a place of personal rebirth and opportunity. In sum, of the West as the epitome of American democracy; of the West as the “embodiment of certain national myths and ideas,” which “spatially symbolized the triumph and unity of the American people through its imperial endeavors” (Dorman 11). In the particular case of Spain, where this book originates, the West symbolizes the archetypical space and “state of mind” that was re-created in the Saturday-afternoon Hollywood and Spaghetti Westerns in the middle decades of the twentieth century. At a time when the country had just overcome a brutal civil war, the struggle of “good vs. evil” and the essentialist notion of “righteousness vs. injustice” that the genre suggested exemplifed the deep ideological and social fracture that that war

Introduction

5

had brought with it. Likewise, the notion of patriotism and the defense of national values that the Western genre proposed was considered ideal by the ideologically controlling and constraining dictatorial regime led by General Franco. The powerful censorship apparatus that the government relied on saw no apparent harm in Westerns, which were regarded as mere entertainment, encouraging male bravado and promoting national pride in a way that was ideologically suitable from a hyper-nationalistic standpoint. These movies, widely accepted by the Spanish television audiences (mostly male), were embraced as historical truth and propagated a mythic imaginary of the West and its inhabitants, which was soon seen as natural and unambiguous by the Spanish audiences. Similarly, the Western novelas de quiosco, the newsstand novels that became popular for their adventure stories, their low prices, and the possibilities they provided to envision a more exciting life than that permitted by the regime, provided a getaway from the constraining moral and social ideology of the times. In this way, Spanish audiences of the 1950s grew up imagining the West as it had traveled in the form of those movies and novels. Some decades later, this imagined idea of the American West, its infuence in the transmission of a/the “true American story” is still alive and persists: the American West is a place of opportunity, of origin, of beginning. Often a dream, sometimes a metaphor, the American West is a place that millions of people can visualize. Certain landscapes of mountain and desert are instantly recognizable. So are certain residents, if they ride horses and wear broad hats or feathered headbands. In these nearly universal images, the West seems grandly conceived and easily explained. It is the West that servers as popular myth and national symbol. (Milner 3) It remains deep inside even those who have tried to understand its complexity and hybridity. This collection of essays is the endeavor of a group of academics who, like many other Spaniards, imagined and grew up with the idea of the West the way it had traveled in the form of a rooted myth. It tries to prove that even if the myth presents itself as universal, the idea of the West is still traveling, both within and beyond itself. As such, it remains in the minds of those who have been captured by it. The essays in this collection propose a journey, a transatlantic dialogue between European and US scholars, all of whom share a personal and academic fascination for the American West, for its symbolic and mythical value, but also for its contemporary reality and its diverse and heterogeneous re-presentations. The collection stems from the desire of these scholars to highlight the changing, traveling nature of the idea of the West; from the deep conviction that

6

Amaia Ibarraran-Bigalondo

a transnational, transcultural dialogue enables the opening of cultural and intellectual borders and myths; from the belief that traveling ideas are “practice(s) of crossing and interaction that trouble(d) the loneliness of many common assumptions about culture” (Clifford 3); from the need to challenge the common assumptions, proposing a cross-cultural, two-way journey/revision of the myth as re-presented within its internal boundaries and across other geographical realities and diverse artistic disciplines. Hence, the arrangement and selection of the chapters of this book depart from the metaphor of said journey as an allegory for the transnational, cross-cultural transfer that the American West has experienced within its internal boundaries and across other national realities. Similarly, this metaphor relates to the trodden path across disciplines of the representation of the American West: from the literary imagination, to cinema, photography, painting, and television, among other art forms. The chapters will be organized around three different thematic axes, each of which accounts for an aspect of the journey: across myths, boundaries, and disciplines. It opens with Nancy S. Cook’s personal refection on the current state of affairs in the feld of Western American Studies and the Western Literature Association (WLA). The chapter marks a point of origin, a look within, “from the borrow pit,” and addresses future plans and hopes for the feld. It is the aim of this volume to fulfll some of these expectations and open up new trends and to contribute to the dialogue on the American West and its studies. Part 1, “The West Travels Across Myths,” conceived as a point of departure, addresses the revision of the myth of the American West. The chapters in Part 1 travel beyond the foundational idea of the American West as a mostly white, male, rural space. They challenge the essentialist vision of the American West as a bucolic natural space and describe an urban West where highways and bulldozers are predominant. Similarly, they portray a plural space, where its diverse inhabitants offer their own experiences on the American West and add to the notion of “westness.” The frst three essays, compiled under the subheading, “Other Western Spaces,” open with Cristina Garrigós’s work, where she exposes the urban experience of Mexican Americans in the contemporary West through the analysis of María Elena Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came with Them from the perspective of memory studies. It shows how the construction of freeways, roads, and bridges in a metropolis such as Los Angeles has altered the memoirs of the inhabitants of that megacity and, thus, of the very notion of humanity. Aitor Ibarrola-Armendariz’s analysis of Sherman Alexie’s short stories dwells on the “conversion” of contemporary Native Americans into US multicultural, multilayered urban areas, as expressed in Alexie’s work. Finally, Gorka Braceras-Martínez’s chapter expands on the idea of the human intervention on the West. It analyzes the way a radical ecologist such as Edward Abbey proposes a defense of the landscapes of the West in his acclaimed novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. In sum,

Introduction

7

the three essays account not only for the existence of anOther Western setting, an urban, mechanized West, but also for “other human landscapes” than those that convey the myth. Accordingly, in the next subsection, entitled “Other Western Voices,” some of these voices arise. Megan Riley McGilchrist discusses the work of Mary Hallock Foote and defends her relevance as the frst signifcant novelist who wrote about the West from a feminine perspective. Paula Barba Guerrero, for her part, examines Olivia Butler’s black, female portrait of the colonial West through the analysis of Kindred and of its use of temporal border crossing as a means of undoing historical constructs (and slavery in particular). It observes the way the author utilizes science fction to allow her protagonist to move “from West to East, from present to past to end cultural amnesia.” The second thematic axis, compiled under the idea of the transit, revolves around the notion of the journey of the West across geographical boundaries and its adaptation to different sociocultural spaces. The essays compiled in Part 2, “The West Travels Across Boundaries,” are proof of the transfer of the idea of the American West both within the United States and across nations and oceans, encouraging the constant redefnition of this space and concept. The essays show the multifaceted, fexible essence of the American West, in contrast to the stagnant one deployed by previous “standard” representations (both literary and cinematographic). These also traveled, but, on the contrary, to expand on the mythical idea of the American West. The frst two essays of Part 2, assembled under the subheading, “Continental Journeys,” deploy the transfer of the idea of the American West within the zone of the geographical and cultural infuence of the American continent. The frst, Neil Campbell’s analysis of Jamaican author Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings, draws a connection between the novel and the Western genre, demonstrating that the work utilizes the Jamaican tradition of flm, music, and literature and combines it with the Western genre and Western motifs. In so doing, it provides “new symbols of resistance and anti-colonial sentiment” and reimagines the idea of “westness.” With Johnston McCulley’s The Curse of Capistrano’s text as a departing point, Georgia Simakou presents the fgure of El Zorro as a popular hero in the American West and outlines the process of “Americanization” that the originally Hispanic fgure went through. Next, she compares it with Chilean writer Isabel Allende’s revision of the legend in her 2005 novel El Zorro: Comienza la leyenda, where the mythical legend/hero “inherits the . . . anticolonial spirit.” The next three essays, compiled under the subheading “Intercontinental Journeys,” deal with the West-East-(West) movement found in two works originating in the American West and which expand toward Europe and back. Matthew Cissell analyzes Thomas Pynchon’s 2007 novel Against the Day, showing the way the author turns the Western genre and stretches it out to the East via Europe and back to the US frontier. Cissell bases his reading on the novel on Bourdieu’s work in an attempt to better understand

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Pynchon’s use of the genre. Similarly, Fiorenzo Iuliano’s chapter on Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho explores the journeys of its two protagonists through the United States to Europe and back, producing a new geography of the Northwest, “tracing a connection between the movie and the cultural output of the American Northwest during the 1990s.” Esra Coker Korpez’s chapter stretches the notion of the journey and departs from that of the American West as a “boundless” frontier to draw on the contemporary “migration crisis” portrayed in Moshin Hamid’s Exit West. Finally, Part 2 closes with the subsection entitled “Transcontinental Journeys,” which includes the work of three European scholars who demonstrate the inspirational infuence of the American West in Europe and vice versa. Alfredo Moro Martín’s analysis of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley, shows the eighteenth-century author’s use of archetypical Western elements and analyzes how Scott used frontier spaces and wilderness to extol an imperial ideology. Moving on to a mostly Spanish sociocultural environment, David Rio proposes a comprehensive review of authors and novels (French, Catalan, Spanish, and Basque, among others) who are living proof of the transnational, transoceanic dimension of the American West and of its still ongoing, traveling nature. Finally, Marek Paryz’s analysis of the contemporary cinematographer Agniezska Holland’s 2017 movie Spoor observes the way the use of space, characters, and plot by the Polish director recall the generic conventions of the Western from the artist’s perspective. The last section of the book, “Part 3: The West Travels Across Disciplines,” closes with a selection of essays that are testimony of the traveling essence of the idea of the West as a source of inspiration across both genres and geographical realities. It looks at the interdisciplinary transfers that the idea of the American West has gone through. Part 3 thus serves as a closing arrival point for the volume’s journey through, across, and within the American West. From local to global/planetary, from visual to aural, from the West, home. Conceived as a “one-part chapter”—“Visual and Aural Journeys”—it opens with Audrey Goodman’s refection on the representations of photographs and phototexts of women in the West, particularly in the work of photographer Meridel Rubenstain and poet Joy Harjo, showing the way they envision local Western American spaces, “creating relationships between cultures and across spatial scales,” and become examples of the way such feminist regionalist practices allow for the creation of planetary visions. Juan Ignacio Guijarro Gonzalez’s chapter, which is also evidence of the transnational and transdisciplinary envisioning of the West, analyzes its representation in an exhibition hosted at the prestigious Thyssen Museum in Madrid in 2015, entitled “The Illusion of the Far West.” Moving on to television, one of the fastestgrowing contemporary popular artistic felds and means of global/local mass communication, Jesús Ángel González proposes a comprehensive review of contemporary television shows that are either themselves

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Westerns or make references to the genre. The chapter signals the rebirth of the Western genre, which is making a comeback and traveling through nations and across generations in the form of television shows and flms. Finally, Monika Madinabeitia’s chapter closes the volume, arriving home from/to the Basque Country by acknowledging the relevance of music for the construction of a Basque diasporic consciousness and identity in the American West. All in all, these works, which originate in Spain and travel to the West and back, are proof of the contemporary revival and adaptation of the genre to new modes of expression and representation, as well as of its timeless nature. They are proof of the transnational transfers of the idea of the American West, which has traveled across countless borders and cultural realities: from the Basque Country, to Poland, to Scotland, to Jamaica, to Italy, and to the United States and back. Because the story of the American West is that of a traveling idea. The story of the American West is that of a journey. Across the West and back. From the West and back. To the West and back.

Works Cited Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Harvard UP, 1997. Dorman, Robert L. Hell of a Vision: Regionalism and the Modern American West. The U of Arizona P, 2012. Jones, Karen R. and John Wills. The American West: Competing Visions. Edinburgh UP, 2009. Milner, Clyde A., II, et al. The Oxford History of the American West. Oxford UP, 1994.

Trends in Western American Studies, or the Road as Seen from the Borrow Pit Nancy S. Cook

In terms of trends in Western American studies, I often feel like an outlier, or at best a fellow traveler, for I follow my own curiosities, and my methods shift with my interests. And yet, I have thought about both the history of the feld and its future for a long time. I will begin with some thoughts on trends within the Western Literature Association (WLA), an organization that has sought to be the center of Western American studies; then I will offer a brief survey of some developments in the last ten years, then move to a brief provocation on disciplinarity, and end with my hopes for the feld. The WLA plays an important role here, for since its inception in 1965, it has worked both to make the organization the center for study of the literature of the American West and to make Western American literature have a more central role within literary studies as a whole. In the past few decades, the WLA has sought to be a home base and intellectual center for Western American studies more capaciously confgured in terms of discipline, reach, and identities. But to get to the place of the WLA in a discussion of trends, a little history.1 While substantial scholarship about literary traditions in and of the American West appeared from the early twentieth century into the 1950s, with the founding of the WLA in 1965 and the peer-reviewed journal Western American Literature in 1966, a discipline was established. In the organization’s early years there were debates about where the West was, often based on the idea of a moving frontier, but the palpable anxiety was about respect, national audience, and how to get rid of the curse of “regional” writer as pejorative, while keeping the concept of region. The frustration of scholars studying literature of the West manifests as late as 1987, in the “Preface” to A Literary History of the American West. Critic Max Westbrook claims an “underlying purpose” of the encyclopedic tome “is, by demonstration rather than defensiveness, to support the ongoing introduction of Western literary riches to readers interested in American literature, culture, and history” (xvi). Westbrook continues, alluding to charges that the West has produced no equivalent to Faulkner, and suggests that the sometimes defensive positions of Western literary critics, with their “strident attacks on the eastern establishment,” have

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not advanced the cause of Western American literary studies. Still, in the late 1980s Westbrook needs to make distinctions, proclaiming that “although handicapped by association with Hollywood horse operas and stereotypical paperbacks sold in bus stations, [it] includes a large body of frst-rate literary art” (xvi). Much like a government survey team, scholars of Western American literature demarcate a space in the canon, defning it regionally, always already in competition with New England and the South. But Westbrook quickly moves on from old and continuing battles for legitimacy and onto a much more expansive vision of a multicultural West with a range of representational traditions. He addresses the diffculties of fnding defnitions “in terms of geography, themes, subject matter, residence of the authors,” (xvii) or most vexing, “a distinctively Western style” (xviii). Despite these links to past anxieties of stature and infuence, the essays themselves are inclusive and often forward-looking, while they provide important contexts for future study. Indeed, Westbrook, prefguring the use of the term “settler colonialism” within Western American studies, reminds readers that despite rhetorics of frontier, discovery, and newness, the American West already had long-standing residents and representational traditions. These residents—Native, Hispanic, and hybrid—have chapters devoted to their literary traditions, as well as their contemporary work. Opening up the canon, and the conversation, A Literary History of the American West remains a useful reference work while it reveals how much the discipline has changed in just over 30 years. And to ensure that the feld did not rest upon the codifcation implied by A Literary History of the American West, the WLA collaborated on Updating the Literary West, published in 1997. In recent years, the WLA has sponsored plenary sessions at the annual conference that take up questions of methodologies, the limitations of old conceptions of Western literary study, and projections of where the feld might go as it endeavors to remain relevant and meaningful in a world where boosterism can no longer be naïve. Over the past 30+ years, fewer single-author and single-text analyses appear in conference programs or Western American Literature. During the frst ten years of publication, most articles analyzed canonical male American authors, such as Mark Twain, Jack London, John Steinbeck, Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, and James Fenimore Cooper, with Willa Cather earning multiple articles. One fnds a smattering of nonwhite authors—Wallace Thurman, N. Scott Momaday, and Ralph Ellison—as well as a handful of women writers—Jean Stafford, Mary Austin, Mary Hallock Foote—and an increasing number of contemporary writers—Edward Abbey, Thomas Berger, Larry McMurtry, Ken Kesey. Over the years, especially with the shift of journal editors to Melody Graulich in 1997, one sees greater attention given to mainstream critical methodologies, especially those that engage approaches central in other humanities disciplines. The association has formed alliances with several academic associations, and currently the

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WLA sponsors panels and reciprocates with the American Literature Association, the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (founded at a WLA meeting in 1992), the Modern Language Association, the Pacifc Ancient and Modern Literature Association, and the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. Over the past decade or so, the organization has also worked to become less insular in its membership. While recruitment of scholars outside the United States and scholars of color remains challenging, the organization casts a wide net for its prizes for best article or best book and has made many awards to scholars who are not members of the organization.2 The University of Nebraska Press’s series “Postwestern Horizons” offers books that revise our notions of a literary canon, of what and where the West is and how is functions, and that use the West as an important node for issues of global consequence. In the past fve years, Western American Literature has published special issues featuring “young scholars,” queer Wests, suburbia, indigenous literary and visual aesthetics, settler-colonial studies, nature, and culture both within and outside the academy and one that commemorates WLA’s fftieth anniversary with what the editors call a Western “killjoy toolkit,” wherein they and the authors represented open up conversations that are useful, sometimes uncomfortable, engagements “between and among what are often separate or parallel but not [yet] intersecting knowledge projects” (xiii). In commemorating 50 years of organizational work, the guest editors, Susan Bernardin and Krista Comer, seek nothing less than a fundamental reframing of Western American studies. In place of canon formation, they call for “a feld that prioritizes issues of allyship; critical relationally, and more robust engagements of scholars with communities and publics” (xviii). The anniversary issue offers short takes on keywords by major scholars in the feld. Keywords offered for a reframing include land, Mexican, pedagogy, postwestern, queer, regionality, settler, sovereignty, and visuality. And indeed, more scholars have been working to engage other publics with their research as they publish books accessible beyond the scholarly communities (I think of Brady Harrison and Lisa Simon’s collection on Montana poets, These Living Songs, and Neil Campbell’s collection of interviews and essays on Willie Vlautin as writer and musician). And yet there is much to do. Many of the essay collections of the past ten years have been constrained by a publisher’s notion of what a survey of Western literary terrain must contain. Conservative in conception, these publisher-initiated collections, while very good, are bounded and categorized in such ways that they undercut the collection as a whole or work against the possibility of any critical conversation between essays. Even well-regarded literary and cultural histories that are organized according to different rubrics continue to combine a geographical structure (Southwest, Northwest, Far West, Rocky Mountains) with a thematic or topical structure (genre, gender, ethnicity, critical “trends”) and an

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historical structure. One problem with this is that the traditional themes and movements have been unalterably changed by emerging critical concerns. In each of these cases, then, one organizing principal troubles perhaps undercuts the other. Reviewers register dissatisfaction with the result, often lamenting that essayist X failed to mention writer Y without knowing that the press expressly forbade any “duplication” of authors or topics covered in the individual essays. As examples, the otherwise excellent Cambridge University collections, including A History of Western American Literature and A History of California Literature, were edited under highly prescriptive contracts, with charges to contributors that certain authors must be included and that other writers, discussed elsewhere in the collection, must not be mentioned. In their effort both to prescribe a canonical list of authors that must be included and to proscribe names to avoid duplication, these publishers eliminate many opportunities for conversations between essays. Under fundamentally conservative structures as university press essay collections or even special issues of journals, Western American studies, as a feld, cannot capture the collective innovation occurring in isolated moments and publications in the discipline While Western American studies can beneft from organizational efforts to “reframe” the feld, it cannot happen through discrete essays in traditionally confgured collections or special issues of a journal alone.3 I propose here, to borrow from another discipline, to move away from a survey of the terrain of trends over time and instead think in terms of an overlay, a verbal version of the polygon overlay mapping system developed by Ian McHarg and now known mostly as geographic information systems (GIS). Such an overlay asks us to reject linear conception or a progressivist narrative and instead keep several rubrics, strands, and divergences in mind as they coexist. For example, Western American studies could beneft from an overlay of analytical categories such as critical perspectives, histories, geographies, ecologies, eco-histories, ecogeographies, cultures, aesthetics, thematics, and/or disciplines. I ask you to overlay, rather than enumerate, what you have read with what follows: this, my idiosyncratic rendering of trends. I think we need to work on other means of conversation between, among, and across borders and boundaries—disciplinary, national, professional. It will take other kinds of interventions, ones at odds with current academic and publishing structures, to meaningfully “reframe the feld.” To resituate the approaches by which we analyze representation, the built environment, materiality, and myriad ways of knowing how “West” or how “region” matters, we need meaningful engagements with all sorts of allies. For example, the deeply embedded view of a “subregion,” the Rocky Mountain West, one that appears in collections old and new, might beneft from a revitalized examination in collaboration with legal scholars. What happens if we looked at the region not through often problematic assumptions about shared topography or climate but instead

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looked at laws—for example, restrictive abortion laws, open carry/concealed carry for frearms, “stand your ground” laws, open containers for alcoholic beverages, speed limits, and laws that regulate and criminalize sexual practices? Would the Rocky Mountain region cohere as a region when linked by a portfolio of laws that proscribe certain behaviors while endorsing others, even violent ones? My own work has borrowed from Neil Campbell’s conversations with the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart and his engagement with and analyses of her work on “ordinary affect.” I have followed the ways in which Campbell has adapted Stewart’s work toward an “affective critical regionality,” and in turn, I have adapted his reframed formulations to my own ends. But these engagements have not been purely textual. They come out of reading, listening, conversing, adapting, altering, reading, conversing, listening. At a time where the academic conference is increasingly threatened by radical cuts in fnancial and institutional support for intellectual work, we need to consider supplementary or alternative modes of engagement. We might campaign for retreats, seminars, or working groups that would bring together scholars from different nations or different disciplines, or both. We need to develop or borrow other forms of organization, other formats, and other opportunities for putting writers and texts, readers, and publics in conversation. Within environmental activism, crises have birthed alternative modes of publication—for example, the “rapid response” book, The Heart of the Monster, by Rick Bass and David James Duncan, developed from a protest against ExxonMobil’s efforts “to convert 1100 miles of riverways and scenic byways into a ‘High and Wide industrial corridor that will connect the Tar Sands to the industrial nations of the Pacifc Rim” (9). The book project began with local outrage and protests, but it developed into urgent advocacy in the form of often beautiful prose that as it imagines consequences of the transport corridor and the tar sands, both hones in on the local and connects outward to the global. In doing so, the authors and researchers who helped with the book’s production create alternative (and subversive) histories as they imagine ways, in Duncan’s words, “to keep hearts—including my own—awake to some of the inviolable sources of balance, creative action, and inspiration” (15). Here, I am careful to use the word “imagines,” as Nathaniel Lewis’s Unsettling the Literary West whispers in my ear, encouraging me to think in terms that do not privilege a simplistic realism, a contrast between old and new Wests, or to claim authenticity on behalf of Bass and Duncan. From Krista Comer, Neil Campbell, Susan Kollin, and others, I am mindful, as are Duncan and Bass, that often what seems most local is entangled within a web of global reach. As literary critics we might mix up strategies for reading and analyzing literary texts. New thematic readings might link texts through shared experiences, issues, and identities. One could imagine a thematics of

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style, for example, one that would link stylistic innovations in Darcy McNickle’s Wind From an Enemy Sky (1977); James Welch’s Winter in the Blood (1974), Fools Crow (1986), and Killing Custer (1994); and Debra Magpie Earling’s Perma Red (2002) in the way each uses style to reveal multiple epistemologies at play in any representation of Native life, especially post contact. We might adapt Stephanie Le Menager’s distinctions between “easy oil” and “tough oil” for thinking through a history of “resource” exploitation in various Wests, with cultures of mining, timber, and “energy” industries. We might analyze through the lens of institutional presence in the American West. What would a literary history of military posts or occupation in a region or micro-region look like? How about a literary history of public universities in the West? While scholars have begun this work, especially in terms of federally owned lands in the West, we have need of more. Contemporary critical approaches can put once-important but longneglected texts back into play, as Krista Comer does with A.B. Guthrie Jr.’s 1949 novel, The Way West, in her essay “New West, Urban and Suburban Spaces, Postwest.” Guthrie’s most famous novel, The Big Sky, lamented the loss of innocence and freedom that came with settlement. And although it has been the subject of several revisionist treatments, most critics use Guthrie’s work to look backward, to reconsider, for example, his rendering of an almost pristine natural world. But Comer fnds a way to connect the relatively neglected The Way West with more recent history, the second half of the twentieth century and the explosion of urban development, and she brings us (and Guthrie) into the twenty-frst century. Such re-readings are crucial for any sense of a Western literary canon to prevail. Another new trend is to upset the concept of a canon. I have been working to reconfgure Western American literary studies as a critical reading practice rather than as a canonical set of texts. What happens if we read texts not usually considered “Western” in terms of infuences, connections, disruptions, ramifcations for Western readers and citizens? What if we read Ruth Ozeki’s My Year of Meats through a Western lens, one that examines the beef industry in the West, from ranch, to ranching community, to feed lot, to local pollution, to packing plant and the immigrant employees and their adjustment to life in Western towns and small cities? What if we press those writers so important in the frst 20 years of the WLA—Cooper, Twain, London, Crane, and Cather—for the ways their work entwined frontier or Wests with global economies, ethics, policies, and movements? All these projects already have published work that suggests a path we might pursue, but, by and large, they are scattered among publications in other subdisciplines, other felds, other nations. We need better, or at least different, bibliographies, different search terms, different subject headings so that we can fnd, use, and build on this disparate work.

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And now, my pie-in-the-sky hopes for a trend that one might glimpse from time to time but has yet to gain substantial ground. It will take substantial bibliographic work, lots of reading, and considerable persuasion, followed by extensive collaboration. From the early 1970s to the mid-1980s, music listeners around the world had a taste of a “Rocky Mountain High” due to the success not only of John Denver but, less obviously, of the dozens of bands that recorded or mixed at the Caribou Ranch in Nederland, Colorado. In 2014 the once-famous ranch sold for over 32,000,000 US dollars. By the time of the sale, the ranch had been chiseled down considerably from 4000 acres to 1600 acres and several buildings. Built by music producer James Guercio, in part to escape what he considered onerous union restrictions in Los Angeles and New York, the studio produced music from 1971 to 1985 with record sales of over 100 million albums. While the recording studio never reopened after a 1985 fre, Caribou Ranch remained legendary in the development of popular music. Isolated and offering varied opportunities for musicians to experience “nature,” it also provided a retreat from both the distractions of urban life in London, New York, or Los Angeles and a place to dodge expensive union session players and rigid union rules. As a “destination” studio, it attracted best-selling bands and artists across a spectrum of tastes, with a list of musicians who recorded or mixed there like a “Who’s Who” of 1970s and 1980s rock and pop stardom—The Beach Boys; Michael Jackson; Chicago; Earth, Wind and Fire; Rod Stewart; Frank Zappa; Jeff Beck;, Supertramp; Carole King; Yes; John Lennon; Stevie Wonder; and U2.4 Elton John recorded three albums there, naming one album Caribou in recognition of the place. At an altitude of 8600 feet, it must have presented challenges for the musicians and their instruments. No doubt the recreational possibilities— horseback riding, snowmobiling, fy fshing—its remove from big cities, and the acoustics of altitude infuenced the music. As much as any writer might be infuenced by place, why not musicians? And yet the music has never been considered “Western” even though it was recorded in the Rocky Mountains and the circumstances of production are inextricably linked to Caribou Ranch. The story of Caribou Ranch offers several parallels with both stories of the literary history of the Rocky Mountain West and the history of the WLA. Producer Jim Guercio lights out for the territories, as it were, imagining both a retreat from urban modernity and a return to his roots, in a sense, for an uncle had previously owned a ranch in the area. Guercio was also searching for a way around unionization in the music industry. Like many Euro-Americans in the nineteenth century, Guercio hoped that heading West would offer him fnancial rewards without the more stringent regulation found in US urban centers. He envisaged a mountain retreat, offering a more authentic life there. He also imagined a natural playground to keep artists both distracted from urban desires and inspired

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by a carefully groomed “wilderness” experience. And like many stories from the interior West, Caribou Ranch offers a version of a “boom and bust” story. By the mid-1980s “destination” studios had cropped up worldwide, and the competition threatened Guercio’s business model. While the studio business went bust, Guercio managed to ride a real estate “boom,” selling off various parcels and making a tidy proft by the time he pulled up stakes in 2014. Looking closer, we might examine that “Rocky Mountain High” through a set of reading practices. Such a set of practices might offer tools for orienting ourselves in not only a musical landscape but also a literary one. Certain critical reading practices would bring issues, themes, and critical questions to bear on the local. I propose to fnd a literary-critical equivalent of hearing Nederland, Colorado, in a trumpet note, a piano chord, or a singer’s voice. To do so, to borrow from SueEllen Campbell’s book title, Bringing the Mountain Home, would allow us to recognize and analyze the place of place in the myriad aspects of representation— the pacing of a sentence, the airiness of a paragraph, the aridity of vocabulary—in addition to the more common methods we use to discern Westerness in a literary text. So far, this is how a “Western” reading might go, as critics deploy standard methods of poetic analysis. But if we pull back to a wider frame, can we look back and recognize trends that are as fnite as the beginning and end of one recording studio business? Can we hear some sort of natural and/or cultural music running through a wide range of approaches to the study of Wests or Postwests? Crucially, if we push those other questions, such as the altitude factor, how might singing, tuning, and playing a range of instruments be affected by the thin, dry air at such altitude? The recording studio and equipment businesses sell their wares by celebrating audible difference—this microphone, that amp, this console, those speakers, and this room sound different from that one. Going back to albums as diverse as Earth, Wind and Fire’s That’s the Way of the World or Elton John’s Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy, can one discern the effect of place on the music? Can one isolate the variables—a day’s successful fy-fshing expedition; shortness of breath; increased effects of alcohol; clear, dark skies; no sushi delivery—and locate them in the music? Can we hear the Rocky Mountain West, or high-altitude Colorado more specifcally, in any of this music? In all of it? From a list that excludes John Denver? Are there coherences? To what might we reliably attribute differences? How might one go about listening in? What tools might one use? Texts? Rubrics? In other disciplines I fnd scholarship on psychoacoustics, spatial audio, ethnographies of sound and space, the aural in architecture, in literary space, cartography of sound, but I fnd NO ANSWER to my questions, for the concepts of place in such articles are not the ones we use in Western American studies. Among other things, we need more supple methods of searching and accessing bibliographic materials. What would it require

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to think about music and its places of production, of Nederlandness or a kind of Westness, an affective critical regionality in the pop culture artifacts of Caribou Ranch? What I propose here is multiple: we take the wider range of analytical practices available to us and use them to reinvigorate the canon we seem to have moved beyond; we shake up the institutional structures that limit the conversations we have; we reach out to make even more connections with other disciplines; and with the goal of connecting our work and the West to global webs of representation, economics, ethics, and environments, we apply our methods to other kinds of texts: images, music, artifacts, policies, data. As a Westerner, my future in place is less bleak, less isolated, less doomed to the degree that we locals connect to those beyond our borders. I propose the same for Western American studies, my academic discipline.

Notes 1. This chapter includes portions adapted from my essay, Nancy S. Cook, “Imagining the Rocky Mountain Region,” in Susan Kollin, ed., A History of Western American Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 162– 176. Copyright 2015, reprinted with permission. 2. For information about the organization, its conferences, and its awards (with lists of past winners), see the WLA website: www.westernlit.org. 3. Some edited collections, more often those initiated by scholars and not presses, work to create a sense of conversation between the essays in the collection. Exploring Lost Borders: Critical Essays on Mary Austin, edited by Melody Graulich and Elizabeth Klimasmith, models one way of creating such a conversation. 4. Alas, Frank Zappa did not record his “Montana” there, nor did Caribou Ranch foster his dreams of becoming a “dental foss tycoon,” for that semifamous anthem was released before Zappa went to Caribou Ranch.

Works Cited Allmendinger, Blake, editor. A History of California Literature. Cambridge UP, 2015. Bass, Rick and David James Duncan. The Heart of the Monster: Why the Pacifc Northwest & Northern Rockies Must Not Become an ExxonMobil Conduit to the Alberta Tar Sands. Missoula, MT: All against the Haul, 2010. Bateman, Geoffrey, editor. Special Issue, “Queer Wests.” Western American Literature, vol. 51, no. 2, Summer 2016. Bernardin, Susan, editor. Special Issue, “Indigenous Wests: Literary and Visual Aesthetics.” Western American Literature, vol. 49, no. 1, Spring 2014. Campbell, Neil. Affective Critical Regionality. London: Rowman & Littlefeld, 2016. ———. The Rhizomatic West: Representing the American West in a Transnational, Global, Media Age. U of Nebraska P, 2008. ———, editor. Special Issue, “Western Suburbia.” Western American Literature, vol. 46, no. 3, Fall 2011.

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———. editor. Under the Western Sky: Essays on the Fiction and Music of Willy Vlautin. U of Nevada P, 2018. Campbell, SueEllen. Bringing the Mountain Home. U of Arizona P, 1996. Comer, Krista. Landscapes of the New West: Gender and Geography in Contemporary Women’s Writing. U of North Carolina P, 1999. ———. “New West, Urban and Suburban Spaces, Postwest.” A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West, edited by Nicolas S. Witschi, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, pp. 244–260. ———, editor. Special Issue, “Young Scholars.” Western American Literature, vol. 48, nos. 1 & 2, Spring/Summer 2013. ——— and Susan Bernardin, editors. Special Issue, “On the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the Western Literature Association.” Western American Literature, vol. 53, no. 1, Spring 2018. Cook, Nancy S. “Imagining the Rocky Mountain Region.” A History of Western American Literature, edited by Susan Kollin, Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 162–176. Earling, Debra M. Perma Red. New York: BlueHen Books, 2002. Feder, Helena, editor. Special Issue, “Nature and Culture in (and Outside) the Academy.” Western American Literature, vol. 52, no. 3, Fall 2017. Graulich, Melody and Elizabeth Klimasmith, editors. Exploring Lost Borders: Critical Essays on Mary Austin. U of Nevada P, 1999. Guthrie, Alfred Bertram, Jr. The Big Sky: A Novel. 1947. Houghton Miffin Co, 2002. ———. The Way West: A Novel. 1949. Houghton Miffin Co, 2002. Harrison, Brady and Lisa D. Simon, editors. These Living Songs: Reading Montana Poetry. U of Montana P, 2014. Kollin, Susan, editor. A History of Western American Literature. Cambridge UP, 2015. ———. “Introduction.” Postwestern Cultures: Literature, Theory, Space, edited by Susan Kollin, U of Nebraska P, 2007, pp. ix–xix. ———, editor. Postwestern Cultures: Literature, Theory, Space. U of Nebraska P, 2007. LeMenager, Stephanie. Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century. Oxford UP, 2014. Lewis, Nathaniel. Unsettling the Literary West: Authenticity and Authorship. U of Nebraska P, 2003. McNickle, D’Arcy. Wind from an Enemy Sky. 1978. U of New Mexico P, 2000. Ozeki, Ruth. My Year of Meats. Penguin Books, 1998. Painter, Kristen Leigh. “Fabled Caribou Ranch above Nederland Sells for $32.5 Million.” Denver Post. Daily Camera [Boulder, CO] 30 June 2014. n. p. Accessed. 10 Dec. 2014. Wallace, Alicia. “Caribou Ranch: Music Central Part of Nederland Property’s Future, Owners Say.” Daily Camera [Boulder, CO] 3 Aug. 2013. n.p. Accessed 10 Dec. 2014. ———. “Caribou Ranch Property, Historic Recording Studio Near Nederland Up for Sale.” Daily Camera [Boulder, CO] 22 July 2013. n.p. Accessed 10 Dec. 2014. Welch, James. Fools Crow. 1986. Penguin Books, 2011. ———. Winter in the Blood. 1974. Penguin Books, 2008.

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——— and Paul J. Stekler. Killing Custer: The Battle of the Little Bighorn and the Fate of the Plains Indians. 1994. Norton, 2007. Westbrook, Max. “Preface: Western Literature Association.” A Literary History of the American West. Texas Christian UP, 1987. Western Literature Association. A Literary History of the American West. Texas Christian UP, 1987. ———. Updating the Literary West. Texas Christian UP, 1997. Witschi, Nicolas S., editor. A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011.

Part 1

The West Travels Across Myths

1.1

Other Western Spaces

1

Forging the Future, Forgetting the Human, or What the Los Angeles Freeways Erased Oblivion in Helena María Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came with Them Cristina Garrigós Each metropolis preselects its suicide like an offcer packs a capsule, for if a city lives by remembering, mein Liebnitz Herr, the opposite must also be true, ergo a city dies from forgetting, and such death is by the city’s own hand, it turns its neglected bungalows to gallows and potholes its veins. (Vanessa Place. La Medusa)

The 1950s and 1960s were times of “urban improvement” all over the United States, but especially in Los Angeles. Many historians, architects, and urban theorists have analyzed the transformation of the city into a postmodern city, or a postmetropolis, to use Edwards Soja’s term, which Soja defnes as “mass suburbanization, the rise of an automobile-based culture of consumerism, metropolitan political fragmentation, the decline of the inner city, increasing segregation and ghettoization, [and] changing labor” (98). Of all U.S. cities, Los Angeles is possibly the clearest example of the postmetropolis. Books such as Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (1990) or Norman M. Klein’s The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (1997, reedited 2008) remind us of the consequences of the city’s radical transformation from the late nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth and the implications that this new urbanism have had on its people’s lives; a change which has transformed their memories of the past through the identifcation of a space with an identity.1 In this chapter, I will discuss the erasure and obliteration of memory and the consequent questioning of the notion of humanity caused by freeway construction by analyzing its representation in Helena María Viramontes’s novel Their Dogs Came with Them (2007). From the perspective

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of memory studies, the construction of the freeways brought about the activation of a new paradigm related to forgetting the past—that is to say, to the erosion of the identifcation of the human with memory, thus taking us back to a period that connects us with our most remote prehistorical ancestors. Although the novel is not set in an apocalyptic future, but in the period between 1960 and 1970, the tension it sets up between memory and time anticipates a future that returns us to the very beginnings of our evolution as human beings. According to Norman Klein, the late 1960s were a crucial turning point for the “industrio-polis,” especially for the widely praised freeways. Los Angeles was taken as a national model, a city dedicated to auto-mobility. The art historian Reyner Banham described the freeway system as a unique ecology, comparing it to a manmade climate, an autopia (qtd. in Klein 49). Plans to build “elevated and crossingless motorways” (Klein 38) were discussed as early as 1906, and then more seriously after the 1930s, but their construction only took place in the 1950s and 1960s. Highways were central to the idea of the modernization of the new America, and as Klein and Davis argue, they were the primary symbol of state-in capitalism. The transformation of space in Los Angeles to make way for the city of the future was especially noticeable in those neighborhoods that were more socially vulnerable and, therefore, according to politicians and business planners, more disposable. The fact that such interventions were made in the very heart of the city was altogether different from building roads where there had once been desert, or to raising a new neighborhood in an unexploited part of town and thereby transforming the rural into urban. The construction of the postmetropolis in LA implied the destruction of formerly inhabited spaces to make way for new roads, specifcally, new freeways, which would be adapted to the necessities of a new modern population and their automobiles. Unsurprisingly, this new mobilized city was designed by Anglo politicians, engineers, and urban planners with little respect for the houses and memories of ethnic communities, memories which did not chime with their plans for this new, modern vision of the future. The manmade climate or unique ecology (Banham) that resulted from this transformation led to the demolition of another human-made ecosystem: over 50,000 houses were torn down between 1933 and 1980 in eastern Los Angeles. In the new Angelinian dream, the car replaced the house, especially the houses of minorities. No ethnic community was allowed to remain in its original location: Chinatown was demolished to build Union Station; Chávez Ravine, a Mexican American neighborhood, had to be torn down for the construction of the Dodgers’ Stadium; Little Italy was relocated, etc.2 The same happened in other neighborhoods that were predominantly poor and populated by minorities, one example being Boyle Heights in East LA, where the housing stock was being depleted through neglect or by racist urban planning (Klein). The construction of

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the Golden State Freeway (I-5) was especially polemical for its impact on the lives of the Chicano residents. In Mi raza primero!, Ernesto Chávez explains that East Los Angeles residents protested that its construction would either eliminate or divide great swathes of the residential and commercial areas of Boyle Heights and Hollenbeck Heights, neighborhoods that were mostly Mexican American. The “Boyle—Hollenbeck Anti– Golden State Freeway Committee” was formed for the specifc purpose of blocking or rerouting the freeway, but the construction was completed anyway. The newspaper The Eastside Sun wrote that the freeway led to the “eradication, obliteration, razing, moving, ripping asunder, demolishing of Eastside homes,”3 a situation that created what Roberto Acuña called “a community under siege” (106).4 It is not surprising that the “besieged” areas of Los Angeles such as Chávez Ravine, Boyle Heights, Hollenbeck Heights, or East Los Angeles, became the targets of white urban elites: they were, as mentioned earlier, populated mostly by Latinos with a strong sense of community who were a potential danger to the new city project. Destroying the barrio meant disrupting the possibilities of association and, according to Candace Lundell, disintegrating and disempowering “sites of resistance that hold signifcant potential for social emancipation” (13). The demolition of the houses was thus not only physical but also symbolic, in the sense that it meant attacking a community consciousness made up of collective memories—with all the implications of this for the future agency of the people. Collective forgetting may be valuable in the overcoming of past traumas. It may help to move on by reimagining the human experience, as Marc Augé, following Nietzsche and Ricoeur, suggests, thus understanding forgetting as “rebeginning.” That is to say, we can forge a new future by forgetting the past. However, the destruction of memories by an external agent generally fails to work as a positive regenerative force, and rather has the opposite effect. As Anne Galloway remarks, memories are understood as relations of power through which we, as individuals and groups, actively negotiate and decide what can be recollected and what can be forgotten. And without being able to decide what we can remember and forget, we are effectively left without hope of becoming different people or creating different worlds. (np) When forgetting is imposed on it, the community does not have the option to select which archives, as it were, it wishes to keep open, and thus to decide what is to be remembered and what is to be abandoned. It therefore becomes diffcult to use public history as an emancipatory practice. Claire Colebrook’s refections on the role of memory in the Anthropocene remind us that “to remember is never simply to retain and recall a

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past, but always to do so from the point of view of a present that anticipates a future” (507). As she tells us: To think about the Anthropocene is to acknowledge both a humancaused reconfguration of the planet (by way of an industrial, nuclear, colonizing, and plundering past) and dramatically expanded futures. It would seem then that the Anthropocene is an expansion or dilation of memory taking us beyond those forms of inscription authored by humans, and events intended by humans, and towards a ‘memory’ where we will have been an agent in an epochal shift that we only recognized after the event. (507) Human beings are agents, perpetrators, and victims at the same time. In the case of the construction of the freeways, the hegemonic decision to destroy the spatial memories (houses, schools, etc.) of the most vulnerable annuls the possibility of any future recollection. In other words, there is no mode for remembering from the present something that has been completely destroyed, except in the form of the social imaginary. The future that the present anticipates is thus one that presents a memory hole, a void; it is a present without a past, the death of the past. And in this situation, writing—that is to say, inscription—is one way to keep both individual and collective memory alive. The construction of the freeways in Los Angeles has been the subject of refection in many literary texts.5 Of special relevance to my purposes here are those by Chicanas such as Lorna Dee Cervantes; as Dolores Hayden points out, “the body, the home, and the street have all been arenas of confict” for women (22), and indeed home, body, and streets are confronted with the freeway as a symbol of Anglo colonialism in Cervantes’s poems “Freeway 280” and “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway,” from her collection Emplumada (1981). Both imply an exercise of memory, since they attempt to inscribe the past and record the identity of her people so as to avoid the destruction of the archive of the community, the collective memories of the past. In the poems, the casitas with their gardens of roses and geraniums are threatened by the construction of the freeway. The modern landscape, evoking images of death and obliteration, contrasts with the fowers and the trees planted in the former gardens of the Chicano houses, which refuse to disappear. The poetic persona considers her true self to be buried in the “campos extraños de esta ciudad,” in the abandoned lots under the freeway, “a part of me/mown under like a corpse or a loose seed” (Cervantes 39). Meanwhile in “Beneath the Shadow of the Freeway” three women—the grandmother, the mother, and the poetic persona—epitomize three generations and three different attitudes toward colonization and patriarchal structures. The I of the poem, the scribe, records the events. She is the

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translator of cultures, the intermediary between the culture of her ancestors and now. Like her grandmother, she ends the poem growing braids and planting geraniums beneath the shadow of the freeway in the house that her ancestor built with her own hands and that stands defantly next to the imposing, Anglo-built freeway. Tradition continues, but to live beneath the shadow of the freeway means to live threatened by an aggressive, dehumanized world. Like Cervantes’s poems, Helena María Viramontes’s novel, Their Dogs Came with Them, uses literature as inscription to keep alive the memory of those who are threatened by hegemonic structures. According to Markéta Riebová, Viramontes shares with Cervantes a textualization of reality, where the images of the border (freeway) and the barrio are metaphorical dominants (503). Moreover, like Cervantes’s poems, in these works, the grandmothers are the bearers of a tradition inextricably linked to the houses and connected with nature: fowers, lemon trees, etc. (508). Their Dogs Came With Them begins with Chavela Zumaya, Ermila’s Mexican grandmother, as a symbol of the presence and resilience of the past in the present. Opening the work at Chavela’s house, the author focuses on the actions of packing and writing as ways of keeping alive the memory of what is about to disappear. Her scattered notes are fragments of a memory that she is losing because of her old age and also because of the new ways of the world that are threatening it with destruction. Cardboard boxes and bulk-flled pillowcases with tags written by the old woman are the only remains in a house being prepared for eviction. In an attempt at remembering, the grandmother seeks to preserve souvenirs, to create an archive of the past by leaving instructions scribbled over the walls of the house: “I need to remember. . . . It’s important to remember my name, my address, where I put my cigarrillo down” (7). Coming from a past where she lost everything due to natural disasters, she knows what it is like not to have solid tierra under her feet (7). Now, her blue house looks “as empty as a toothless mouth” (9), with no possibility of resisting the “sharpened metal teeth” of the bulldozers making way for the freeway (6). The image of things disappearing and people vanishing is reinforced by images of the doors without hinges and broken windows, materiality dissolving into thin air: “In a few weeks, Chavela’s side of the neighborhood, the dead side of the Street, would disappear forever . . . . In a few weeks the blue house and all the other houses would vanish just like Chavela and all the other neighbors” (12). The house, as Gaston Bachelard proposes, is the space of the unconscious. The space we live in and our consciousness are inextricably linked: “The house is one of the greatest powers of integration for the thoughts, memories and dreams of humans. . . . Thus a being without a house would be a dispersed body” (5). If the landscape we inhabit is destroyed, all that remains will be the individual’s memories, which are fallible, especially in the case of old age. The total disappearance of a place to which we

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are attached creates a memory hole, a cultural scotoma that ensures the inability of both personal and, to a large extent, collective remembrance, thus impeding the possibility of flling in the gaps so as to add meaning to a harsh reality.6 The novel seeks to fll in this gap and to re-create the memories of those houses on “the dead side of the Street” and their inhabitants, so that the readers do not forget what was done and its human consequences. By setting the novel between 1960 and 1970, Viramontes refects on the doings of the past and its implications for the construction of the future. If the ruins represent a traumatic experience for the person who wishes to remember, the new construction of the freeways is regarded as an imposed palimpsestic monument typical of colonizing forces. In postcolonial studies, the palimpsest implies “a parchment on which several inscriptions have been made after earlier ones have been erased. The characteristic of the palimpsest is that, despite such erasures, there are always traces of previous inscriptions that have been overwritten” (Ashcroft et al. 144). Viramontes thus establishes a parallelism between the Spanish territorial and cultural colonization of the Americas and Anglo urban colonization in Los Angeles, as the quotation from The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico by Miguel León-Portilla at the beginning of the book makes clear.7 Autobiographical references to Boyle Heights, Viramontes’s neighborhood, build up the author’s own memories of the space of her youth as the novel tells the stories of four young Mexican American women: Antonia Gamboa (aka Turtle), Ermila Zumaya, Tranquilina, and Ana. Turtle “was really a boy, but didn’t want to be and got beaten up for it” (11); Tranquilina, who is the daughter of two missionaries, tries, after surviving rape, to fnd comfort in religion; Ermila lives with her grandparents following the disappearance of her parents; and Ana takes care of her mentally unstable brother. For Viramontes, the writing of the novel becomes an exercise of inscription, as with Cervantes, of preserving the memories of her community. As Viramontes explains in an interview: I also thought it interesting to begin the novel with the coming of the freeways. I do remember a time when there weren’t any freeways, and then I do remember the neighborhood whole city blocks abandoned, then chewed up, our neighbors disappeared. It devastated, amputated East L.A. from the rest of the city. The bulldozers resembled the conqueror’s ships coming to colonize a second time and I felt a real desire to portray the lives of those who disappeared. (Oliva) The experience of preserving memory in the face of forgetting, and the fact that the author uses the structure of the freeways as both motif and symbol, has led Mary Pat Brady to defne Their Dogs Came with Them

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as “a dystopian story of transit gone awry” (173). It took the author 15 years to write this postmodernist narrative with different, intersecting stories, as the author has acknowledged: “The list of characters kept increasing and with this increase, the stories multiplied like freeway interchanges. Having this Eureka moment, I realized that the structure of the novel began to resemble the freeway intersections” (Oliva). In her novel, Viramontes explores how the construction of the postmetropolis affects the life of the individuals, especially the most vulnerable ones, creating a traumatic relationship with the city, a situation that has been analyzed by Dale Pattison: Pattison fnds that “when postmetropolitan urban transformation overlays and erases street-level community spaces, city dwellers are deprived of their political connection to urban space; this process is complicated by the simultaneous erasure of memory sites, which occurs as communities are sacrifced in the name of urban expansion” (116). The transformation in the city is described as a takeover, or colonization, involving violence and destruction. In the words of Elisabeth Mermann-Jozwiak: East L.A. is portrayed as a war zone, with bulldozers digging trenches and uprooting houses and trees; with armed police patrols staffng roadblocks that restrict people’s access to their homes; and with helicopters with search lights shooting at dogs in the middle of the night, causing fear and intimidating the population. (124) The metaphor of the dogs in the title of Viramontes’s book cannot be reduced to one single meaning: it is not only the dogs of the conquerors that are transformed into bulldozers, but the Chicanos, too, are perceived as wild dogs, many of them unidentifed and illegal, and therefore a target of the authorities. The city is controlled by the Quarantine Authority (QA), which is in charge of “the aerial observation and shooting of undomesticated mammals” (54), to be exterminated due to the rising cases of rabies in the city: “Rising cases of rabies reported in the neighborhood (see shaded area) have forced Health offcials to approve, for limited time only, the aerial observation and shooting of undomesticated mammals. Unchained and/or unlicensed mammals will not be exempt” (54). Alicia Muñoz analyzes the use of fgurative language in the novel, exploring the relationship of the characters to their environment and vice versa and discussing memory and its impermanence as it relates to the fractured nature of the city and its disruptive freeways. For this critic “the novel presents multiple experiences of the city, which reveal not only the way the geography impacts the community it contains but also ways the Latino community can resist the erasive consequences of race and class by forming independent spatial meaning” (24). This reading of the novel,

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based on the idea of resistance and the creation of new meanings despite the efforts to erase any trace of Chicano culture, is supported by the ending of the novel, which will be analyzed in the following pages. References to memories or constructions of the collective imaginary, including Mexican legends, such as the Llorona and cuentos, or allusions to scary stories abound in the novel. Luis Lil Lizard, Turtle’s brother, flls her head with scary cuentos: “Like the discovery of human skulls. While the construction men were building the freeway, they found bones. Telling no one, they just threw the skulls into the wet cement and kept on working” (157). The image of the skulls in the cement is connected to the McBride Homeboys’ intention to record their names on the freshly laid cement of the freeways bridges so as to leave a mark and proclaim eternal allegiance to one another (163). Their intention of inscribing their names on the freeways, however, proves futile, since their dreams of immortality are broken by the narrator, who foresees the future: The Boys would never know that in thirty years from tonight, the tags would crack from the earthquakes, the weight of vehicles, the force of muscular tree roots, from the trampling of passerby, become as faded as ancient engravings, as old as the concrete itself, as cold and clammy as a morgue table. And in those thirty years the cracks would be repaired here and there with newer patching cement, making the Boys’ eternal bonds look worn and forgotten. Not even concrete engravings would guarantee immortality, though tonight they would all feel immortal. (164) In the meantime, being left out of the game, her name not inscribed in the cement, Turtle sits on the porch: She looked out into the endless feld of the construction. By Monday the earthmovers would be running again, biting trenches wider than rivers; the groan, thumps and burr noise of the constant motors would weave into the sound of her own breadth whistling the blackened fumes of dust and crumble in her nasal cavities. And this sound would only disappear at night when she held her breath or when she looked out from her porch steps as she was doing now to see the blue house like all other houses disappearing inch by inch just like Chavela and all the other neighbors. In its place the four freeway interchange would be constructed in order to reroute 547,300 cars a day through the Eastside and would become the busiest in the city. (167) Turtle sees the on-ramp bridge being constructed above the Chinese cemetery and compares it with “a mangled limb, as if a monster dinosaur had

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bitten into it, and a mesh of electrical wires hung out of broken cement like arteries dripping mounds of heaved-up rubble” (168). The image of the ramp as a broken limb bit by a monster dinosaur takes us back to time immemorial, before the presence of humans on earth. Overwriting and erasure are constants in the novel and are not only imposed by the Anglos on the Chicanos but also by the Chicanos on themselves. For instance, the Lote M vatos write over the names of the McBride Boys’ graffti on the walls of the bridge, “cross-outs, tags, new gang emblem” (217) trashed over the names of the McBride Boys, “perforating new conquerors over old ones with a blunt hammer, the remaining tags erased, shitted on, with strokes of red runny spray paint. . . . That’s exactly what the Maravilla vators planned to do on the bridge, send a dispatch announcing erasure” (217). But stronger than human beings, the technologies of the freeways and the movements of the earth are erasing any trace of people, who will be “worn and forgotten” (164), since memory depends on inscription. The tension between remembering and forgetting is a permanent feature of the novel. Turtle does not want to remember, for example, her old house. One night when she visits several cemeteries in town, she recalls another night when her brother Luis calls her “Turtle” because she is so slow. In that part of town, the construction of the interstate has created a landscape from another time, another planet, a crater into another world that is mixed with her own. Severed tree roots jutted from mud walls. It was another planet altogether and she gazed above her at the high ridge and marveled at how far down the tree roots had grown. Except for the horizon being erased by the night, she saw nothing above them. Out of sight, out of mind, and over the embarkment. Everything was forgotten. Nonexistent. (225–226) In this apocalyptic landscape, the gang members become primitives who have to fght for their lives, while the construction technology (caterpillars, bulldozers) are the new dinosaurs and monsters. The endangered human beings (Mexican Americans, minorities) are a new generation of frekeepers (227) in charge of protecting the memory of the earth in the face of obliteration. At the end of the novel, after the members of the McBride gang have gone in search of Nacho to kill him, the description of his death matches that of a cornered animal being attacked by a group of wild beasts: “Turtle watched the boy’s head burst, splattering liquid on the sidewalk. Arms and legs sprouted like one big insect cannibalizing another. This was a hard-core jump and another Turtle, the one not her, pulled out the screwdriver, her old faithful, the dependable cuete, the nonbetrayer”

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(321). In her attempt to prove that she is one of the Boys, and so a real member of the gang, Turtle is the one who uses a screwdriver to fnish Nacho off. The continuous references in the novel to violence, cemeteries, corpses, bones, missing people, and ghosts reinforce this idea of the death and burial of one civilization by another, a notion that is implicit in both the title and the epigraph. Tranquilina sees Turtle alone standing by Nacho’s dead body and she asks her why she did it: Why? The woman asked Turtle, and kept asking. “Why” was not a word that meant something to Turtle. . . . Why? Turtle forgot why. Turtle didn’t know why She didn’t make the rules. Why? Because a tall girl named Antonia never existed, because her history had no memory. Why? Go ask another. (324) As Muñoz concludes in her illuminating essay, “Viramontes suggests that Turtle has fnally succumbed to the erasive consequences of spatial racism. It has not only segregated the community; it has physically destroyed them” (36). Turtle dies from the police shooting in the arms of Tranquilina, who “held all of her together until sleep came to her fully welcomed” (324). The authorities use violence to prevent violence: “We’rrrre not doggggs! Tranquilina roared in the direction of the shooters. Stop shooting, we are not dogs!” (324). In the end, as the narrator says, “Except for Tranquilina, no one, not the sharpshooters, the cabdrivers, the travelers dashing out the depot, the barefoot or slipper-clad spectators in robe, not one of them, in all their glorious hallucinatory gawking, knew who the victims were, who the perpetrators were” (325). As we have said before, in the Anthropocene human beings are both perpetrators and victims. Tranquilina, the one with faith and the only one who knows who were the victims and who the perpetrators, advances fearlessly toward her executioners, “refusing to halt, riding the currents of wilding wind. Riding it beyond the borders, past the cesarean scars of the earth, out to limitless space where everything was possible if she believed” (325). As in Cervantes’s poems, the freeways are the scars of the earth. The wild mammals in the novel, the dangerous beasts, are humans that live in a world of violence, rape, drugs, missing people, a world controlled by police offcers running the city at night, helicopters, lanterns, sirens, and QAs. It is world made inhospitable by humans. The damage is now not being done by animals or earthquakes, but by the work of human beings, who are turning the earth into an inhospitable place, especially for those who do not have cars. As Ermila says: “Four freeways crossing and interchanging, looping and stacking in the Eastside, but if you didn’t own a car, you were fucked” (176). To use the term “dehumanized” would be

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misleading. In the Anthropocene, the world returns to primitive times, where humans are not so very different from beasts, having no inscription, no records and no memory. They have forgotten what it is to be “human.” As the quotation from Vanessa Place’s novel La Medusa reminds us, cities like Los Angeles die from their forgetfulness of the people and the memories they have carried, and they become nonexistent, a memory hole, a void. It is the aim of writers such as Cervantes or Viramontes to be the scribes of this oblivion. Musicians like Ry Cooder, too, who dedicated his album Chávez Ravine to the neighborhood that was destroyed in order to build Dodgers Stadium, seek to leave a cultural record of what has been lost, but in the race for modernization and the pursuit of a more comfortable life, very little space is left for memory.

Notes 1. Davis and Klein apart, there are many publications that comment on the transformation of the space in Los Angeles, such as Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. U of California P, 1971; Eric Avila, The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City. U of Minnesota P, 2014, among others. 2. More information on Chávez Ravine in Miller. Chávez Ravine Evictions. May 8, 1959. Los Angeles Examiner Collection, 1920–1961, U of Southern California; Snow and Paegel. Chávez Ravine Evictions. May 8, 1959. Los Angeles Examiner Collection, 1920–1961, U of Southern California; Don Parson, “This Modern Marve: Bunker Hill, Chávez Ravine, and the Politics of Modernism in Los Angeles”, Southern California Quarterly, Vol. 75, No. 3/4, U of California P, Historical Society of Southern California (1993), pp. 333–350. 3. Quoted in Ernesto Chávez, Mi Raza Primero! p. 26. 4. Other interesting works on this are Galarza, Ernesto, Guillermo Flores, Rosalio Mun´oz, Mario Barrera, and Geralda Vialpando, Action Research in Defense of the Barrio. Los Angeles: Aztlán Publications, 1974. Or Robert Gottlieb, Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City. Berkeley, CA, USA: U of California P, 2004. 5. Other texts that include references to the freeways are Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), where Oedipa Mass refects on what they mean for her: “What the road really was, she fancied, was this hypodermic needle, inserted somewhere ahead into the vein of a freeway, a vein nourishing the mainliner LA, keeping it happy, coherent, protected from pain, or whatever passes, with a city, for pain” (15). Scott McClingtock and John Miller have edited Pynchon’s California. U of Iowa P, 2014 where they study the presence of the Golden State in Crying of Lot 49, Vineland and Inherent Vice. In addition to Pynchon, the freeways play a key role in Joan Didion’s novel Play It as It Lays (1970), since Maria spends her day driving on them without any sense of direction; Karen Tei Yamashita’s Tropic of Orange (1997), where the freeways are inhabited by homeless people who live in abandoned cars; Laura del Campo’s Maravilla (2006), where Cece and her Chicano friends from East LA spend their days cruising on the freeways, drinking, and listening to music, sometimes pursued by the police; or Vanessa Place’s La Medusa, where the characters drive around the city and their lives intersect. In all these texts the freeways become the symbol of contemporary modern life, a life often associated with death, as Laura del Campo’s narrator, Cece, points out: “For

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months, I woke up every morning with the memory of death. LA was a blank landscape of endless freeways, underpasses, overpasses, on ramps, off ramps, and congested traffc in the backdrop of a dense, smoggy sky. The horizon was a flmy, gray-brown blur against concrete buildings, sidewalks, and houses. Everything was gray. Not the gray of silver or fog, but the gray of waste, apathy and death” (197). 6. In The River of Consciousness (2017) Oliver Sacks defnes scotoma as follows: “As used by neurologists, the term ‘scotoma’ (from the Greek for ‘darkness’) denotes a disconnection or hiatus in perception, essentially a gap in consciousness produced by a neurological lesion” (196–197). 7. “They came in battle array, as conquerors, and the dust rose in whirlwinds on the roads. Their Spears glinted in the sun, and their pennons futtered like bats. They made a loud clamor as they marched, for their coats of mail and their weapons clashed and rattled. Some of them were dressed in glistening iron from head to foot; they terrifed everyone who saw them. “Their dogs came with them, running ahead of the column. They raised their muzzles high; they lifted their muzzles to the wind. They raced on before with saliva dripping from their jaws” (np).

Works Cited Acuña, Rodolfo. A Community under Siege: A Chronicle of Chicanos East of the Los Angeles River, 1945–1975. Chicano Studies Research Center Publ., UCLA, 1984. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffths, and Helen Tiffn. Postcolonial Studies: The Key Concepts. Routledge, 2005. Augé, Marc. Oblivion. Translated by Marjolijn de Jager, U of Minnesota P, 2004. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Translated by Maria Jolas, Beacon Press, 1994. Bertman, Stephen. Cultural Amnesia: America’s Future and the Crisis of Memory. Praeger, 2000. Brady, Mary Pat. “Metaphors to Love By: Toward a Chicana Aesthetics in Their Dogs Came with Them.” Rebozos de palabras: An Helena María Viramontes Critical Reader, edited by Gabriela Gutiérrez y Muhs, U of Arizona P, 2013, pp. 167–191. Brodsly, David. L.A Freeway: An Appreciative Essay. U. of California P, 1983. Cervantes, Lorna Dee. Emplumada. U of Pittsburgh P, 1981. Chávez, Ernesto. Mi raza primero! [My People First!]. U of California P, 2002. Colebrook, Claire, et al. “Memory Studies and the Anthropocene.” In Craps, Stef, et al. “Memory Studies and the Anthropocene: A Roundtable.” Memory Studies, vol. 11, no. 4, 2018, pp. 498–515. Del Fuego, Laura. Maravilla. Floricanto P, 2006. Didion, Joan. Play It as It Lays. 4th State, 1998. Galloway, Anne. “Collective Remembering and the Importance of Forgetting: A Critical Design Challenge,” 2019, https://docplayer.net/62163595-Collectiveremembering-and-the-importance-of-forgetting-a-critical-design-challenge. html. Hayden, Dolores. The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History. MIT Press, 1995.

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Klein, Norman. The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory. Verso, 2008. López González, Crescencio. “La urbanización de la comunidad chicana en la novela Their Dogs Came with Them de Helena María Viramontes.” Hispanic Research Journal, vol. 17, no. 2, 2016, pp. 168–179. Lunden, Corinne. “Hegemonic Urban Planning: Contested Space and Interests in Mid-Century East LA.” The Earlham Historical Journal, vol. 9, no. 1, 2016, pp. 7–30. Mermann-Jozwiak, Elisabeth. “Transnational Latino/a Writing, and American and Latino/a Studies.” Latino Studies, vol. 12, no. 1, 2014, pp. 11–133. Muñoz, Alicia. “Articulating a Geography of Pain: Metaphor, Memory, and Movement in Helena María Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came with Them.” Melus, vol. 38, no. 2, 2013, pp. 24–38. Oliva, Daniel. “Interview with Helena María Viramontes.” La Bloga, 2 Apr. 2007, https://labloga.blogspot.com/2007/04/interview-with-helena-mara-viramontes.html. Pattison, Dale. “Trauma and the 710: The New Metropolis in Helena María Viramontes’s Their Dogs Came with Them.” Arizona Quarterly, vol. 70, no. 2, 2014, pp. 115–142. Place, Vanessa. La Medusa. U of Alabama P, 2008. Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. Harper Perennial, 2006. Ricoeur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, Chicago UP, 2004. Riebová, Markéta. “Abordando borderlands. La representación literaria de la frontera en la novela Their Dogs Came with Them de Helena María Viramontes.” Anuario de Estudios Americanos, vol. 73, no. 2, 2016, pp. 499–515. Sacks, Oliver. The River of Consciousness. Picador, 2017. Soja, Edward W. Postmetropolis: Critical Studies in Cities and Regions. WileyBlackwell, 2000. ———. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. Verso, 1989. Tamashita, Karen Tei. Tropic of Orange. Coffee House, 1997. Villa, Raúl. Barrio-Logos: Space and Place in Urban Chicano Literature and Culture. U of Texas P, 2000.

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Diasporic Native Americans in Sherman Alexie’s Short Stories Roots and Routes in Urban Contexts1 Aitor Ibarrola-Armendariz Diasporic experience is necessarily both nationalist and antinationalist. Absolutist invocations of blood, land, and return coexist with the arts of conviviality, the need to make homes away from home, among different peoples. Diasporic ruptures and connections—lost homelands, partial returns, relational identities, and world-spanning networks—are fundamental components of indigenous experience today. James Clifford, “Varieties of Indigenous Experience” He didn’t want to choose between Ernie Hemingway and the Spokane tribal elders, between Mia Hamm and Crazy Horse, between The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Chief Dan George. William wanted all of it. Hunger was his crime. Sherman Alexie, “Flight Patterns”

Introduction It is widely known that the population of American Indians in the United States has increased during the twentieth century from an all-time low of approximately 237,000 in the 1890s to slightly over 2 million persons at the turn of the new millennium. This recovery in numbers has been due, among other factors, to momentous geographical and cultural shifts in the Native population as they have striven to survive under the great pressure to assimilate into white mainstream society. No doubt a signifcant part of that resurgence in the Native population is attributable to the exponential growth of an urban American Indian diaspora, especially after the 1950s. As Donald Fixico has explained, “Following World War II, a steady stream of Indians migrated to various cities across the nation” (2) and they saw their “identity shaped by urban Indians themselves” (3) but also by the powerful forces of an urban style of living. The government’s relocation program of the 1950s, together with the over 25,000 Indian war veterans, made the indigenous presence noticeable for the frst time in metropolitan areas around the country. While statistics show that not even 10 percent of the total Native population lived in cities in 1940, by

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the early 1970s that fgure had risen to 45 percent, and today it is nearing a historical high of 70 percent (over 1.5 million people). And yet, as several Native scholars have complained, The urban Indian community is most frequently invisible to the nonIndian world, both informally in the general public mind that has not discarded the stereotype that everything Indian is rural and in the past, but also formally via institutions such as the US Census Bureau that has yet to adequately count urban Indian people. (Lobo 80) Indeed, in the minds of most non-Indians, Native Americans have traditionally been represented as riding wild horses, paddling canoes on rough rivers, hunting bison, and living in perfect harmony with the surrounding environment. Both literature and the movies have contributed decisively to the dissemination of that myth of the Noble Savage. However, we know now that this idealized image of the indigenous inhabitants of the continent was hardly ever true—at least not after the arrival of the frst European settlers to the New World. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the way of life of most tribal peoples was profoundly altered by the incursions of white homesteaders into their territories, and with the advent of the twentieth century, most of them had been confned to reservations, where it was quite unthinkable to continue living as they had before. Gerald Vizenor (1994) and others have remarked that the history of Native Americans from the nineteenth century onwards has been one of “survivance” (survival + resistance), since they have had to struggle to keep their traditions alive under the exigencies of white America to convert them to its beliefs, values, and way of life. This was particularly true during the frst half of the twentieth century, when Native Americans were often torn between the white and Indian cultures as they succumbed to the destructive infuence of reservation life. Even as late as the 1970s and 1980s, much of the academic literature still foregrounded the diffculties that Indian people were facing then in urban areas (see Sorkin), as the relocation program of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) was failing to deliver most of its promises. However, more recent scholarship has demonstrated that some Native people were able to adapt and reinvent themselves in the context of urban living. Although urban spaces have often been conceived as hostile settings for Native Americans, demographers, ethnographers, and fction writers in the late twentieth century have produced research and narratives that challenge such an antipodean view of reservation and city. Thus, according to David Rice, “Some young authors in the 1990s, such as Greg Sarris and Sherman Alexie, frustrate the deceptive simplicity of the urban/rural dichotomy by exploring the ways in which Indian protagonists can be both progressively urban and traditionally

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rural” (21). Or, as the two epigraphs to this chapter convey, there seems to be a waxing space “for contradictions and excess across a broad spectrum of indigenous experiences by loosening the common opposition of ‘indigenous’ and ‘diasporic’ forms of life” (Clifford 69). Sherman Alexie’s (Spokane/Coeur d’Alene) early works of fction (The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfght in Heaven, Reservation Blues, etc.) dealt mostly with the tribulations experienced by Native Americans—or Indians, as he himself prefers to call them—on the reservations of the American Northwest. But after moving to Seattle in the mid-1990s, Alexie decided to portray a wider range of characters that encompass not just “rez Indians” suffering from indigent life conditions but also bourgeois—and even yuppie—Natives and whites who have become an integral part of the human landscape in Northwestern cities. As Alexie has explained in several interviews, this shift in focus seemed only natural, if only because more than two-thirds of all Native Americans in the United States nowadays live in big cities (Nelson 39). But besides that, it is also clear that the move from the backwoods to big metropolises has allowed the author to delve in more depth into the problems of Indians who now straddle two radically different worlds. As anthropologist Deborah Jackson (2002) has cogently argued, the formidable transition from life on the reservations to an urban lifestyle has required a profound reshaping and reconceptualizing of American Indians’ selfidentity. In the collections The Toughest Indian in the World (TIW 2000) and Ten Little Indians (TLI 2003), Alexie digs into the kinds of transformations and challenges taking place in the lives of Native Americans who have, in most cases, been born in cities of the American Northwest and therefore undergone “an interactive, dynamic process of shifting scales and affliations, uprootings and rerootings, the waxing and waning of identities” (Clifford 69). Notice, for instance, William Loman, the main character of “Flight Patterns,” acknowledging these multiple affliations and identities: “Sure, he was an enrolled member of the Spokane Indian tribe, but he was also a fully recognized member of the notebook-computer tribe and the security-checkpoint tribe and the rental-car tribe and the hotel-shuttle-bus tribe and the cell-phoneroaming-charge tribe” (TLI 109). The body of this chapter will be divided into three sections. First, a very brief historical survey of the presence of Native Americans in urban centers will be offered, paying special attention to the kind of barriers that they have had to overcome at each historical juncture. Second, Alexie’s stories will be used to illustrate some of the important sociocultural shifts that have occurred among Native Americans as a result of their “conversion” to city dwellers. Weibel-Orlando (1999), for one, has pointed out the rise of multiple types of pan-Indianism—or “supratribal urban Indian communities” (60)—as a way of responding to the pressures exerted by mainstream society. The third section will consider the many challenges

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that Native Americans still face in urban contexts, some of which are also evident in Alexie’s narratives: from homelessness and alcoholism to cultural disorientation and existential angst. Finally, a few conclusions will be drawn from the exploration of some of the unique articulations, performances, and translations noted in the experiences of recent urban American Indians as portrayed in Alexie’s fction.

Brief Historical Overview: Urban Indians In all likelihood, the frst signifcant wave of Native Americans toward the cities took place shortly before the horrendous massacre at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1890. A few years earlier, the General Allotment Act (1887) had been passed, which granted a parcel of land and legal status only to those Indians who could demonstrate that at least 50 percent of their blood was indigenous. Of course, these draconian blood quotas left many American Indians deprived and created an extreme divide between those who had been federally recognized and those stripped of this recognition (Churchill 26). The latter were left without any legally recognized tribal homeland and law and without any access to governmental support through the BIA. Many of these dispossessed Indians would seek their future in incipient urban Native communities, which required only participation in communal activities, instead of considering blood quantum and offcial rolls. While these initial movements into urban areas were occurring in the early twentieth century, many reservation tribes—with their population replenishing—kept posing a practical and moral problem for the government, which wanted to secure some control over tribal issues. In this context, the Indian Reorganization Act was passed in 1934, which although granting a degree of self-government to the tribes on reservations, also had to be supervised by the secretary of the interior. Vine Deloria Jr. observes that many reservation Indians “thought that the organization of a corporate government, which the legislation would have authorized, would negate their tribal citizenship and cause them to lose the rights of aboriginal nature which they still held” (19). By the mid-twentieth century, most Native Americans found themselves faced with the tough decision of either staying on the destitute reservations where they had grown up or joining a new stream of Indians who began to trickle into the more industrialized and cosmopolitan areas of the country. As pointed out earlier, both American Indians who had fought in both world wars and other young Natives perceived their future on the reservations as a blind alley offering them absolutely no opportunity. In the story “The Sin Eaters” (TIW), Alexie shows reservation Indians being moved by the U.S. government into internment camps for medical experimentation in the 1960s. Unlike most of the other stories in the collection, the ominous and apocalyptic tone of this tale probably tries to capture the

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atmosphere on many Indian reservations when the government were not sure what to do regarding the so-called “Indian Problem:” Together, my parents and I stepped into our front yard and stared up into the sky. We saw the big planes roar noisily through the rough air above the reservation. We saw the soldiers step from the bellies of those planes and drop toward the earth. We saw a thousand parachutes open into a thousand green blossoms. All over the Spokane Indian Reservation, all over every reservation in the country, those green blossoms fell onto empty felds, onto powwow grounds, and onto the roofs of tribal schools and health clinics. Those green blossoms fell between pine trees, beside deep and shallow rivers, and among sacred and utilitarian headstones of our dead. (TIW 82) In the 1950s, the combination of general social forces and the assimilation policies that the federal government applied gave a signifcant push to the urban Indian diaspora. In 1953, for example, House Concurrent Resolution 108 was approved, which unilaterally dissolved more than 100 Native nations. Churchill has described some of the negative impacts of the “termination” of those Native nations and how—in conjunction with the Indian Relocation Act of 1956, which provided funding to establish “job training centers” for American Indians on condition that they “sign agreements that they would not return to their respective reservations to live” (Churchill 34)—these moves formed the basis of Indian urban migration for decades to come. Needless to say, like most “forced migrations,” the initial results of the government’s efforts to relocate and integrate Native migrants into metropolitan areas were rather poor. As Whittle explains, “Those policies had devastating effects. Relocated tribal members became isolated from their communities. Low paying jobs and higher expenses, combined with the inability to return to reservations which had often been dissolved, left many in precarious circumstances” (np). Most of them felt estranged from and disoriented by lifestyles and surroundings that had nothing in common with those experienced by their older relatives and tribal ancestors. While it is true that the abuses and failures of the termination and relocation programs did discombobulate profoundly Native power and sense of community (cf. Fixico 5), it is not so evident that it achieved the kind of acculturation and assimilation that the government had pursued. In fact, by the mid-1960s it had become clear that, animated by the burgeoning triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement, Native Americans of that period, both in the cities and on reservations, began to engage in social and political activism for their own rights. Probably the most

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visible of the groups was the American Indian Movement (AIM), which was created in Minneapolis in 1968 and initially protested against the way Natives were being treated by the police in the city. AIM began to address wider sociocultural and political rights of both the urban and reservation communities, some of which culminated in well-known, episodes such as the occupation of the island of Alcatraz in 1969 or the massive march in 1972 called “Trail of Broken Treaties” (cf. Deloria 251–252). With almost half of the total Indian population already living in big metropolises and managing to preserve potent elements of their culture and traditions, it was apparent that a glimmer of hope could be foreseen in their future. As legal specialist Charles Wilkinson has put it, Although relocation provided few benefts to the people it directly served, many of their children, having grown up in the cities, helped build the Indian professional middle class, which played a central role in revitalizing Indian life in the latter part of the 20th century. (85) It is this generation and the next that we meet in the two short story collections by Alexie, in which most of the protagonists hold liberal professional careers and lead fairly comfortable lives. See, for instance, the habits and way of life of Mary Lynn, the Native protagonist of “Assimilation,” and her white husband, Jeremiah: After they left Tan Tan [a pan-Asian restaurant in Seattle], they drove a sensible and indigenous Ford Taurus over the 520 bridge, back toward their house in Kirkland, a fve-bedroom rancher only ten blocks away from the Microsoft campus. Mary Lynn [a Coeur D’Alene Indian] walked to work. That made her feel privileged. She estimated there were twenty-two American Indians who had ever felt even a moment of privilege. (TIW 15) No doubt, the increased urbanization of the Native American population has contributed not only to raising the number of intermarriages—over 50 percent now—as more and more American Indians have come into contact with other ethnic groups but also to wearing down the distinctive identity features and local traditions of tribal peoples. LaGrand (2002) and others have contended, though, that despite the inevitable infuences of the urban environment, Natives have been able to cultivate signifcant tribal practices in education, recreation, religion, or politics, with some of them even taking part in ethnic nationalist revivals. Naturally, the appearance of this wider spectrum of possibilities regarding a sense of belonging and affliation is not without its problems, for, as Lobo has noted, “With

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their implications of inclusion and exclusion, the defning of who is Indian and the issue of who does the identifying are complicated and emotionladen topics anywhere in Indian country” (80). The analysis of Alexie’s short stories will demonstrate that despite the increasing cosmopolitanism and the variety of experiences of many Native Americans, their lives are still sometimes marked by the traces of certain legacies—fraught with grievances and sorrow—of a not-too-distant past.

Sociocultural Metamorphoses in Urban Environments As mentioned earlier, until the publication of Indian Killer (1996), most of Alexie’s fction had been set on the Indian reservations of the Northwest, in which his characters only rarely interacted with persons belonging to other ethnic groups. The lead character of Indian Killer, John Smith—a Native who was adopted as an infant by a white family in Seattle with no knowledge of his tribal blood—is in fact Alexie’s frst character who sees himself “trapped in an urban wilderness, dealing with the perils of modern, urban life” (James 171). However, with the turn of the millennium, an increasing number of his characters live their adventures in an urban, multicultural context and try to fashion their futures by taking advantage of the opportunities that cities may provide. Such is the case of Richard, the half-Indian, half–African American protagonist of “Lawyer’s League,” who dreams of becoming the next president of the United States one day: I grew up in Seattle, played basketball at Ballard High School, and attended North Seattle Community College on a partial athletic scholarship. But I soon grew bored of school and small ball. . . . I was underqualifed for CC basketball and overqualifed for CC academics. Don’t get me wrong. I think United States community colleges are the most successful models of socialism in the history of the world, but I was already an intellectual gladiator eager to do battle with the capitalistic lions. (TLI 53) Despite Richard’s political aspirations, he soon realizes that the structures within Indian bureaucracies—“corrupt and self-serving” (54)—are not going to help him much and, furthermore, there is the constant threat of racism that he will need to bear in mind in his relationships with women and colleagues in the legal profession. Near the end of the story, when Richard plays a ball game with a group of white lawyers, he has a violent clash with one of them that shows him how wide the gulf is between himself and this “clan.” Although he is the ever-calculating future politician, Richard comes to see that for a minority candidate, this becomes an increasingly arduous task as he is forced to deal in a civil way with

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situations that could easily alienate him either from the white majority or his own minority group (cf. Grassian 178): Yes, it’s true I’m single. I haven’t found the right woman. I’m searching for Miss Right. What do I want in a woman? Well, intelligence, wit, beauty, faith in God, and goodness. Would I marry another politician? Only if she were a liberal Democrat! I punched Big Bill because he reminded me of my father. No, I punched him because he reminded me of your father. This country would be a better place if every US president had punched racists in the face. That would mean US presidents would have spent a lot of time punching themselves in the face. . . . Look at my hand. See how much it pains me? Can you see how much it hurts to use it? Do you understand that I have a limited range of motion? (TLI 68) Alexie has declared in several interviews that after he moved into the city in the mid-1990s, his fction grew “less and less Indiancentric” and his interests clearly shifted toward urban Indians: “They are really an underrepresented population, and the ironic thing is very, very few of those we call Native American writers actually grew up on reservations, and yet most of their work is about reservations. As someone who grew up on a reservation, I’m tired of it” (Chapel 97). The fact that the urban milieu generates constant changes and feeting relations across racial boundaries has compelled him to contemplate new possibilities offered by the formation of alternative alliances. Emily Mead notes in her review of Ten Little Indians that Alexie is “an established chronicler of the rituals and ruptures of modern Native American life, but his eye for hard truths transcends any ethnic pigeonholing” (np). As the author explains, he is more interested now in groups of people sharing similar problems—marital tensions, class insecurities, sexual disorientation, existential perplexity, fear of terrorism, etc.—in contemporary metropolises, rather than merely in skin color or ancestry. Scott Andrews has remarked that Alexie has interestingly become more of a “cosmopolitan writer” in his attempt to counter the “manifest manners” of the Anglo culture and to combat the infuence of the “imperialist nostalgia” (51) impeding the reconstruction of certain heritages. While it is true that he has signifcantly widened the range of (Native and non-Native) characters that populate his fction, it is also clear that he still tends to concentrate on those—usually Native characters—who are struggling to fnd something they have lost. Such seems to be the case of Corliss Joseph in “The Search Machine” (TLI), a young Indian university student who, unsure of her identity in her transition into adult life, is involved in some sort of vision quest that aspires to rise above ethnic concerns. This unusual quest curiously culminates in a secondhand book store: “Two Indians crying in the back of a used-book

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store. Indians are always crying, Corliss thought, but at least we’re two Indians crying in an original venue. What kind of ceremony was that? An original ceremony! Every ceremony has to be created somewhere; her Eden was a used-book store” (TLI 49). Although Alexie has retained some of the staple themes present in his earlier fction, such as the reversal of stereotypes, unrequited love, basketball, absent fathers, or problems of identity, the new urban context pushes him to interesting reformulations. Laura Szanto underscores that “urban Indians carry with them connections to their homelands, the ties of tradition and kinship, but they also create new diasporic communities in the cities, complicating what it means to be Indian today” (3). Thus, Alexie’s characters see their self-defnitions and destinies shaped by the professional positions they hold, the family and friends they have, or the neighborhoods they live in, as well as by their tribal roots. In the closing story of The Toughest Indian—“One Good Man”—for example, the narrator is an Indian urbanite who, although he had planned to return to the reservation after fnishing college, became “fully conscious of the reservation’s weaknesses, its inherent limitations (geographic, social, economic, and spiritual)” (221). Not only that, but despite the agonies of his divorce, he is happy that his son will go to live with his white stepfather in a big metropolis, where his opportunities will defnitely multiply: Sure my vocabulary was bitter (She’d chosen somebody over me!) but I was happy the white man, the stepfather, was able to provide my son with a better life than I would have on my high school English teacher’s salary. And I was happy that my son was living in Seattle, where twenty percent of the city was brown-skinned, instead of Spokane, where ninety-nine percent of the people were white. I’m not exactly a racist. I like white people as a theory; I’m just not crazy about them in practice. (TIW 217) Throughout the story, the narrator offers different answers—depending on his own circumstances—to the question that one of his professors posed to him on his frst day of class at Washington State University (WSU): “What is an Indian?” (TIW 224, italics in original). However, he realizes that, ultimately, there is no single or exact defnition of what being an “Indian” is and that, in fact, family responsibilities and learning to sacrifce for others may well outweigh any other identitary matters. In Ladino’s opinion, the geographical shift from reservation to urban centers observable in Alexie’s short fction has been accompanied by an “ideological shift” through which he has “moved away from dealing strictly with tribal issues” to reveal “considerable hope for human compassion that crosses racial, ethnic, tribal, geographic and socioeconomic boundaries” (38).

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Readers of Alexie’s “urban stories” will be partly surprised because his Native characters now range from the traditionally isolated and disoriented city Indians to others who have become successful writers, well-off lawyers, newspaper reporters, or traveling executives. Although problems of identity—sometimes sexual, others racial, and even related to faith— are still very central to his work, for his characters still come up against serious barriers in a society warped by prejudice and stereotypes, it is also evident that the writer needs to stretch his imagination in order to fgure out how the more complex urban setting is also shaping their existence (cf. Lobo 81). The city of Seattle with its hospitals, libraries, universities, bars, parks, pawnshops, etc., becomes a suitable setting for Alexie’s sharp and witty dissection of the problems that urbanites—but especially Native American citizens—face when they have to defne their various family, class, sexual, tribal, etc., affliations. As Clifford observes, “Across the current range of indigenous experiences, identifcations are seldom exclusively local or inward looking but rather work at multiple scales of interaction” (71). Edgar (Eagle Runner) Joseph, for instance, a lawyer married to a white woman, discovers in the story “Class” that he cannot simply assume that other Indians are going to feel sympathetic about the troubles he is going through in his life. Sissy, the bartender at an Indian bar, makes it clear to him that he lives in a world completely different from that of her other Native patrons: “We have to worry about having enough to eat. What do you have to worry about? That you’re lonely? That you have a mortgage? That your wife doesn’t love you? Fuck you, fuck you. I have to worry about having enough to eat” (TIW 56, italics in original). In many of these stories, the reader meets city dwellers who, like Edgar, are driven to rethink their positions as human beings, given the permeability and mobility of the boundaries that separate them from others. As several reviewers have remarked, the complexity of city spaces and the diversity of its inhabitants compel urban Indians to improvise new habits and ceremonies to cope with or to change their circumstances (see Mead).

The Challenges of Indian City Life In his review of The Toughest Indian, novelist and scholar Jonathan Penner noted about the main characters in the collection that “being Indian in America is not, for them, an easy condition. Race shapes their entire lives, including the search for love” (np). While admitting that most of the protagonists in the two collections under scrutiny here see their relations with friends, coworkers, relatives, lovers, and the mainstream society very much affected by their indigenous origins, it would be diffcult to assert that they are the victims of explicit racism or direct discrimination. As has been noted earlier, the majority of these Native Americans have managed to reach a middle-class status and to create a

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comfort zone for themselves that allows them to take most of their decisions with a signifcant degree of freedom. It is true that characters such as Richard in “Lawyer’s League” or Edgar in “Class” may seem rather fawed or incomplete to the reader, as they have serious diffculties in managing their ethnic identity properly when other objectives interfere. The latter, for example, prefers to highlight the little drop of Mexican blood in his ancestry rather than his deep roots in the little-known Spokane Indian Reservation from which he fought his way out to go to college: As for me, I’d told any number of white women that I was part Aztec and I’d told a few that I was completely Aztec. That gave me some mystery, some ethnic weight, a history of glorious color and mass executions. Strangely enough, there were aphrodisiacal benefts to claiming to be descended from ritual cannibals. In any event, pretending to be an Aztec warrior was a lot more impressive than revealing. (TIW 40) It could be argued that these characters downplay or enhance their tribal provenance, depending on the assumptions and stereotypes that they suppose other urbanites may have of them. However, the fact is that they are usually the frst ones to reveal certain preconceptions about other sociocultural groups—particularly white Americans—which hinder their capacity to develop normal relationships with them. Thus, the protagonist of the title story in The Toughest Indian, for example, has learned from his father to distrust all white people: “‘They’ll kill you if they get the chance,’ my father said. ‘Love you or hate you, white people will shoot you in the heart. Even after all these years, they’ll still smell the salmon on you, the dead salmon, and that will make white people dangerous” (TIW 21). Predictably, the protagonist-narrator, who has been away from his reservation for 12 years now and works for a newspaper in the city, feels utterly alienated from his white coworkers and has failed repeatedly in his romantic affairs with white women. In fact, in what is the core of the story, he is driven into having unexpected homosexual intercourse with a Native boxer whom he has picked up on the road and which, the reader assumes, allows him to briefy reconnect with his roots and refurbish his damaged masculinity (cf. Grassian 155). But as is the case of many other Native characters in Alexie’s short fction who also make transgressive gestures in an attempt to recover that part of their identity that seems to be dissipating in the urban context, the fnal outcomes are not as positive as expected, at least from the narrator’s point of view: Instead, I woke up early the next morning, before sunrise, and went out into the world. I walked past my car. I stepped onto the pavement, still warm from the previous day’s sun. I started walking. In bare feet, I traveled upriver toward the place I was born and will someday die.

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At that moment, if you had broken open my heart you could have looked inside and seen the thin skeletons of a thousand salmon. (TIW 34) The fact that, as Berglund has remarked, Alexie “has turned his attention to the experiences of urban Indian people in a multiethnic environment in situations where identity and cultural loyalties are questioned because of class standing or romantic and sexual relationships” (xii), may have diverted the author from some of the real problems faced by Native Americans in cities. According to Janeen Comenote, executive director of the National Urban Indian Family Coalition (NUIFC), “poverty remains one of the most challenging aspects to contemporary urban Indian life. While I do recognize that a sizable chunk of our populations are solidly middle class, every Native person I know has either experienced poverty or has a family member who is [sic]” (qtd. in Whittle). It is rather puzzling—and somehow disappointing—that an author like Alexie, who has claimed that he does not write to merely entertain his readers, but rather, to challenge them and even offend them by showing them the harsh realities of American Indian lives (Cline 197), should devote so few pages to the still numerous homeless, alcoholic, poor, or severely ill Natives. In a report published by the NUIFC in 2008, some of the data referring to the health problems of urban Indians, as well as some of the more general socioeconomic indicators, were just devastating. Regarding the latter, for example, urban Natives had a poverty rate of over 20 percent, almost double that of the general urban population, and the same thing happens with unemployment rates (1.7 times higher). “Urban Indians are three times more likely to be homeless than non-Indians” (NUIFC 11). The incidence of illnesses like diabetes, cirrhosis, and liver disease always has higher rates, ranging from 50 percent to 150 percent, in many cases related to high alcohol consumption. Although it may be true that we hear distant echoes of these serious social dysfunctions in some of Alexie’s best stories (see “Indian Country,” “One Good Man,” or “What Ever Happened to Frank Snake Church”), they are never directly tackled or tussled with as one would expect in a bold and audacious writer like Alexie. In “Indian Country,” for instance, we learn that the protagonist, Low Man Smith, had severe problems with alcohol before he became a reputed mystery writer. When he is stood up at the Missoula airport by a girlfriend early in the story, the ghost of his social disease comes up again: “Low Man needed a drink. He’d been sober for ten years, but he still needed a drink. Not of alcohol, no, but of something. He never worried about falling off the wagon, not anymore. He had spent many nights in hotel rooms where the mini-bars were flled with booze, but had given in only to the temptations of the three-dollar candy bars” (TIW 124). It would have been interesting to know how the protagonist a) fell into alcohol addiction in the comfortable urban context in which he grew up and b) managed to

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come out of it in time to redirect his life. However, Alexie prefers to turn the story into another celebration of (female) homosexuality as a possible corrective to the male-chauvinist heterosexuality that seems to guide the behavior of the main male Native characters in the story: “Sara looked at Low and wondered yet again why Indian men insisted on being warriors. Put down your bows and arrows, she wanted to scream at Low, at her father, at every hypermasculine Injun in the world. Put down your fucking guns and pick up your kids” (TIW 144, italics in original). Of course, it could be said that, indirectly, Alexie is pointing here at the aggressive and destructive attitude that many Indian men—and more specifcally fathers—show in their relationships, but it is not as if the pressing issue of child abuse and neglect in urban Native communities were being clearly addressed here either. In any case, it must be admitted that Alexie occasionally dives into some of the dire social problems mentioned earlier. In “What You Pawn I Will Redeem” (TLI), for example, the protagonist-narrator, Jackson Jackson, is not one of those urban middle-class professionals who have, at least partly, adapted to the city context; instead, we learn about the life of a homeless Spokane Indian all too fond of the bottle. Jackson introduces himself as one of the countless anonymous Indians rambling on the streets of Seattle deprived of a home they can call their own: Probably none of this interests you. I probably don’t interest you much. Homeless Indians are everywhere in Seattle. We’re common and boring, and you walk right on by us, with maybe a look of anger or disgust or even sadness at the terrible fate of the noble savage. But we have dreams and families. I’m friends with a homeless Plains Indian man whose son is the editor of a big-time newspaper back east. That’s his story, but we Indians are great storytellers and liars and mythmakers, so maybe that Plains Indian hobo is a plain old everyday Indian. (TLI 170) After the narrator sees his grandmother’s fancydancing regalia in the window of a small pawnshop, we follow his adventures around the city as he tries to gather the money necessary to buy his grandmother’s costume from the pawnbroker: “I know it’s crazy, but I wondered if I could bring my grandmother back to life if I bought back her regalia” (TLI 176). As anticipated, cordial Jackson never manages to put together the signifcant sum of money required, as he spends the few dollars he is able to scrounge on food and drinks for other poor and alcoholic Indians like himself. The reader, however, does get a sense of what the obscure and disoriented existences of this type of urban Indians are like. In an unexpected twist at the end of the story, Jackson’s hopeless mission is fulflled as the white pawnbroker altruistically decides to give him the regalia for free. The

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narrator’s conclusion (“Do you know how many good men live in the world? Too many to count!” [187]) speaks quite clearly of how Alexie’s perspective on white–Indian relations has mellowed signifcantly in these two collections.

Conclusions Scholars such as Susan Lobo and Carol Miller have argued that urban settings may prove, after all, more congenial to indigenous worldviews than has been often deemed, deeply rooted as they are “in the matrices of communality, tradition, and homeland” (Miller 35). In Lobo’s opinion, unlike reservations, urban Indian communities exist “within a fuidly defned region with niches of resources and boundaries that respond to [specifc] needs and activities” (76) in those ever-changing and complex spaces. As this expert and others see it, despite the harmful effects of the termination and relocation policies during the mid-twentieth century, urban Indians have managed to retain some of their shared histories, values, and traditions and have also adapted and come together into pan-Indian community organizations that warranty the survival of their culture. Of course, this does not mean that urban Natives are not facing huge socioeconomic challenges that need to be dealt with rather urgently. As Clifford has explained: Negative experiences of exile, poverty, alienation from family, despair, loss of language and tradition, endlessly deferred returns, nostalgia and yearning are certainly part of the varied experiences of native peoples living in settings removed from their homelands. The physical separation and different knowledge bases of “diaspora” and “local” peoples cannot always be bridged by kin ties, exchanges, and political alliances. (84) In fact, besides the notorious “critical lack of research on the issues facing Native families residing in urban areas” (NUIFC 4), the other important question to be tackled is “to make sure that the needs of reservation-based and urban Native people are not a cause of division but instead for united action to achieve a better future for all Native people” (4). No doubt, the two collections of short stories by Sherman Alexie discussed in this chapter should contribute to fnding a smoother way to make a transition from tribal issues into urban Indian problems and to showing how specifc groups—women, young people, the elderly, and so on—are coming across different roadblocks in the new city contexts. In these stories, Alexie is still intent on exposing the historical grievances and injurious preconceptions that Indians have often experienced in diverse social spheres; however, he also represents the more fexible and dynamic city spaces as suitable places

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where even the most disadvantaged Natives can form new communities and contrive new ceremonies that may change their future: I took my grandmother’s regalia and walked outside. I knew that solitary yellow bead was part of me. I knew I was that yellow bead in part. Outside, I wrapped myself in my grandmother’s regalia and breathed her in. I stepped off the sidewalk and into the intersection. Pedestrians stopped. Cars stopped. The city stopped. They all watched me dance with my grandmother. I was my grandmother dancing. (TLI 194) Hopefully, my analysis of some of the stories in The Toughest Indian in the World and Ten Little Indians has shown that, as Fixico remarked, “Each native person who decided to move to the city grappled with the identity problem while facing a new frontier, an alien culture, and unforeseen changes” (3). Alexie has declared in several interviews that after moving to the city and living there through events such as the terrorist attacks of 9/11, he grew “increasingly suspicious of the word ‘tradition’” and his views on Indian affairs became less “fundamental” (Campbell). Ladino rightly concludes that “Alexie’s stories suggest that being Indian in Seattle involves walking a line between tradition and adaptation, a process of transformation . . . shaped by complex social spaces and their diverse inhabitants” (52). Indeed, most reviewers of the two collections underlined that rather than thinking of his Native characters as just members of an oppressed or marginalized minority, he presents them as affectionate and troubled men and women seeking to make connections in frequently callous and hostile contexts. One could argue that Alexie has become increasingly aware of the heterogeneity, diversity, and multiplicity of dimensions that govern the Native experience in urban environments. As Katherine Gottlieb (Aleut) explains: We are many. We are diverse. We represent our many cultures. We are a resource. We infuence our people. We have roots and heritage. We live in two worlds. We feel unity when we gather. We have dual citizenships. We are the caretakers for many of our aging elder and children. We are the link to those who have left home. We are you. (qtd. in NUIFC 5)

Note 1. This chapter is part of a project fnanced by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (PGC2018–094659-B-C21(MCIU/AEI/FEDER, UE)), the European Regional Fund (ERDF). It was also completed under the auspices of the research group REWEST funded by the Basque government (Grupo Consolidado IT1206–16) and the Instituto de Derechos Humanos, Deusto, (IT 1224–19).

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Works Cited Alexie, Sherman. Ten Little Indians. Grove Press, 2003. ———. The Toughest Indian in the World. Grove Press, 2000. Andrews, Scott. “Ceci n’est pas un Indien.” World Literature Today, vol. 84, no. 4, 2010, pp. 48–51. Berglund, Jeff. “‘Imagination Turns Every Word into a Bottle Rocket’: An Introduction to Sherman Alexie.” Sherman Alexie: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Jeff Berglund and Jan Roush, The U of Utah P, 2010, pp. xi–xxxix. Campbell, Duncan. “Sherman Alexie: Voice of the New Tribes.” The Guardian, 4 Jan. 2003, www.theguardian.com/books/2003/jan/04/artsfeatures.fction. Chapel, Jessica. “American Literature: Interview with Sherman Alexie.” Conversations with Sherman Alexie, edited by Nancy J. Peterson, UP of Mississippi, 2009, pp. 96–99. Churchill, Ward. “Since Predator Came: A Survey of Native North America since 1492.” From a Native Son: Selected Essays on Indigenism, 1985–1995, South End, 1996, pp. 21–36. Clifford, James. “Varieties of Indigenous Experience.” Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century. Harvard UP, 2013. Cline, Lynn. “About Sherman Alexie: A Profle by Lynn Cline.” Ploughshares, vol. 26, no. 4, 2000–01, pp. 197–202. Deloria, Vine, Jr. Behind the Trail of Broken Treaties: An Indian Declaration of Independence. 1974. Revised ed., U of Texas P, 1985. Fixico, Donald L. The Urban Indian Experience in America. U of New Mexico P, 2000. Grassian, Daniel. Understanding Sherman Alexie. U of South Carolina P, 2005. Jackson, Deborah D. Our Elders Lived It: American Indian Identity in the City. Northern Illinois UP, 2002. James, Meredith. “‘Indians Do Not Live in Cities, They Only Reside There’: Captivity and the Urban Wilderness in Indian Killer.” Sherman Alexie: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Jeff Berglund and Jan Roush, The U of Utah P, 2010, pp. 171–185. Ladino, Jennifer K. “‘A Limited Range of Motion?’: Multiculturalism, ‘Human Questions,’ and Urban Indian Identity in Sherman Alexie’s Ten Little Indians.” Studies in American Indian Literatures, vol. 21, no. 3, 2009, pp. 36–57. LaGrand, James B. Indian Metropolis: Native Americans in Chicago, 1945–75. U of Illinois P, 2002. Lobo, Susan. “Is Urban a Person or a Place? Characteristics of Urban Indian Country.” American Indians and the Urban Experience: Contemporary Native American Communities, edited by Susana Lobo and Kurt Peters, Altamira P, 2001, pp. 73–84. Mead, Emily. “Review of Ten Little Indians by Sherman Alexie.” Entertainment Weekly, 13 June 2003, www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,457102,00.html. Miller, Carol. “Telling the Indian Urban: Representations in American Indian Fiction.” American Indians and the Urban Experience, edited by Susan Lobo and Kurt Peters, Altamira P, 2001, pp. 29–45. National Urban Indian Family Coalition (NUIFC). Urban Indian America: The Status of American Indian and Alaska Native Children and Families Today. The Annie E. Casey Foundation, 2008.

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Nelson, Joshua B. “Humor Is My Green Card: A Conversation with Sherman Alexie.” World Literature Today, vol. 84, no. 4, 2010, pp. 39–43. Penner, Jonathan. “Review of The Toughest Indian in the World by Sherman Alexie.” The Washington Post, 9 July 2000, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/ style/books/reviews/toughestindianintheworld0710.htm. Peterson, Nancy J. Conversations with Sherman Alexie. UP of Mississippi, 2009. Rice, David A. “Mediating Colonization: Urban Indians in the Native American Novel.” PhD Dissertation, U of Connecticut, Storrs, 2004. Sorkin, Alan L. The Urban American Indian. Lexington Books, 1978. Szanto, Laura F. “‘Like a Cannibal in Manhattan’: Post-Relocation Urban Indian Narratives.” PhD Dissertation, U of California, Santa Barbara, 2006. Vizenor, Gerald. Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance. Wesleyan UP, 1994. Weibel-Orlando, Joan. Indian Country, L.A.: Maintaining Ethnic Community in Complex Society. 1991. Revised ed., U of Illinois P, 1999. Whittle, Joe. “Most Native Americans Live in Cities, Not Reservations: Here Are Their Stories.” The Guardian, 4 Sep. 2017, www.theguardian.com/usnews/2017/sep/04/native-americans-stories-california. Wilkinson, Charles F. Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations. Norton, 2005.

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Nature, Environment, and Direct Action in the American West Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang1 Gorka Braceras-Martínez

The American West, not only as a tangible part of the United States but also as a more mythical concept, can be considered one of the pillars of the American mind-set. Its importance has meant the development of American civilization and values. Going west in search of new lands, wealth, and freedom were the main driving forces in the expansion of what is today known as the United States of America. Pushing the frontier further “had done the most to spawn the democracy, individualism, and nationalism” (Malone and Etulain 1) of that country, so the frontier myth contributed greatly to the creation of modern American society. Opening the frontier and settling new lands brought a new civilization to the American West, a civilization that later meant industrialization and the exploitation of natural resources. In fact, as Marc Reisner points out, along with the frontier myth there was another myth in the conquest of the West, “the myth that the hostile natural forces of the West could be overcome by individual initiative” (112–113). The taming of the landscape and the power of humans over nature became another key idea in order to develop civilization in what later became the United States of America. This idea is challenged in Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), which somehow defes some of the values that made the United States what it is today, that is, dominion over the land and the endless expansionism of civilization. The taming of the wilderness and the development of civilization in North America have gone hand in hand; however, the wild, or at least natural, landscapes that have survived in the United States (not only in the West) have enabled signifcant connections between humans and the natural world. The relationships with nature so enriching to American society have been a source of inspiration that has developed in literature. Writing about certain ideas and feelings in contact with nature has played an important role and established a rich tradition in North American literature, and in fact, nature writing is key to understanding the relationships

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between humans and the land. Sean Prentiss and Joe Wilkins defne nature writing as: writing that honors the connection between the natural world and human experience, that understands them as parts of a whole, that reckons with the complex forces of place and landscape in human lives. (8) The interactions between human beings and nature, landscapes, fora, and fauna are thus represented in “nature writing.” The perspectives offered by these writings consider human life as part of a natural whole. American authors such as John Muir and Henry David Thoreau are just two examples of authors who can be called “nature writers.” A wide range of ideas about spirituality, beauty, life in society, and so on are presented in their writings as a consequence of human contact with the wild. Muir, in his The Mountains of California (1894), describes nature and the environment in great detail, while Thoreau refects on living a “simple life” surrounded by nature in Walden (1854). New ideas related to philosophy, society, or spirituality have been presented through the works of authors such as these. The ideas they present, a direct consequence of human contact with nature, have contributed to our understanding of the natural world, and the relevance of nature writing has become undeniable. Edward Abbey, a more modern example of writers who focus on the natural world, wrote about his experiences in the American desert. In addition to offering his visions of beauty and wildness in that landscape, he contributed to the image of one of the pillars of American culture and mythology, that is, the American West. The Monkey Wrench Gang is probably Abbey’s most characteristic novel, not because of his depictions of the desert, but because he adds a new element to writings about nature, a new dimension to human–natural relationships: radical environmentalism. The novel was written in 1975 and it offers a twentiethcentury perspective (and arguably a twenty-frs- century perspective, due to its impact) of the American West. It tells the story of a group of four activists who struggle against industrial and capitalist powers in order to save the desert. The protagonists engage in acts of sabotage against machinery, equipment, and diverse structures with the aim of preserving the wild nature of the desert of the American Southwest, which is becoming increasingly industrialized due to human intervention. Their adventures include encounters with nature, as well as with the authorities that try to stop them. Although it is a work of fction, there is some truth in it, because Abbey himself was involved in actions similar to those explained in the novel. The Monkey Wrench Gang can be described as an adventure story that is full of humor, partly thanks to the four protagonists. The group

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of activists is formed of peculiar characters: G. W. Hayduke, a former Green Beret who loves beer; Doctor Sarvis, a surgeon; Bonnie Abbzug, a feminist Jew from the Bronx; and Seldom Seen Smith, a Mormon river guide. Despite its humorous tone, the novel as a whole must be taken seriously. In fact, it has become “the Bible” for radical environmental groups, so its impact in real life is undeniable. This chapter is aimed at explaining some of the relationships that develop between human beings and the natural world in the novel, paying special attention to the fact that these relationships are a consequence of a very unique space, the American West.

The West and Nature Even though Abbey rejected the label “nature writer,” his literature focuses very much on experiences in contact with nature and on descriptions of the landscape and other natural elements. The Monkey Wrench Gang is not different from other works by Abbey, such as Desert Solitaire (1968) or The Brave Cowboy (1956), in terms of writing about nature, and nature is, indeed, one of the main features of the novel. Moreover, as has been said, Abbey wrote from and about the American desert, offering his own perspectives of the West related especially to environmentalism and anarchism. The actions in the novel literally take place in the American Southwest, and the protagonists move around Colorado, Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico. Abbey’s works are dedicated to the natural world of the American West, and, as will be explained later, the connections between nature and human beings that develop in this space are very illustrative of what Abbey understands as the “real West.” Edward Abbey “spent his life describing, defending and ultimately abandoning all efforts to understand the desert” (Lane 125), and this became the place of his devotion and admiration, which is made clear through his literature, such as in The Monkey Wrench Gang. The appreciation of the landscape is shown through the words of the protagonists, but mainly from Abbey’s position as author, outside the action. When there is no real action (or when the protagonists talk about the desert), Abbey takes his time to describe the landscape and its elements. The canyons and mountains that surround the characters take the place of the protagonists when important actions are not happening, but Abbey can write about nature and the landscape at any point in The Monkey Wrench Gang, making clear how important these are for him and for the development and understanding of the novel. The desert is what keeps everything in motion; it can be considered another character. Whether characters or actions, everything depends on the desert. For that reason, the narration of some events can subtly stop in order to express his ideas about the place that surrounds all. When

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one of the characters is walking through the desert, Abbey talks about that place as follows: He marched north over the boulevard of sandstone, among the junipers and pinyon pines oozing their chewy gum, in reverse across the sand fats and—almost!—into a nest of needle-tipped yucca blades: Spanish bayonet. (102) Even if the desert can seem an empty place, Abbey demonstrates that it is full of life, and the reader has a feeling that there is always something going on in an apparently desolate space. The sandstone’s grandiosity and the liveliness of the plants take the place of the character who is marching through the desert, and it is thus clear that the landscape and its elements are no less important than the actions or the protagonists. In fact, as “the sheer and unyielding grandeur of this wasteland incessantly attracts his attention” (Lane 126), Abbey feels the need to show the savage beauty of the desert at any point. The fact that the desert is a main driving force in The Monkey Wrench Gang justifes its radical environmentalism, which can be considered a direct response to the threat of the very nature of the desert and of what that place means to Abbey. This kind of action implies a new dimension in human–natural relationships and to what is traditionally known as “nature writing.” Nevertheless, Abbey’s contact with the desert and the writing process of these experiences still have traditional characteristics because they are also important in spiritual terms. There are certain spiritual connections between the protagonists and the desert, such as an inner peace that cannot be found anywhere else or the feeling of being one with the desert. This spirituality refects Abbey’s own, and, indeed, a spiritual relationship with the desert is key to understanding his perspective of that place. As McClintock points out, “encounters with the desert and writing about them (. . .) brought spiritual awakenings that were antidotes to his despair” (67), so nature is connected to the spiritual world, as in more traditional works of “nature writing.” The fact that the desert acts as an antidote to Abbey’s hopelessness is a key idea in understanding the character’s (and his own) ideology. This justifes all the radical environmental actions that take place in the novel. The destruction of the desert would mean the destruction of Abbey himself, and this is one of the reasons why he thinks this natural space must be saved by any means necessary. Love for the desert and resistance to its destruction are the main ideas in the novel, but it must be understood that what is threatening that land is the so-called progress of American civilization. The industrial and capitalist powers are trying to tame, by different means, the desert of the American Southwest, a place characterized by its

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wildness. One of their methods, probably the most destructive one for Abbey, is the construction of dams. Glen Canyon Dam, whose destruction is the ultimate goal of the four protagonists, was considered an insult to the desert by Abbey, and he struggled and hoped for its removal. This was made evident through the speech he gave in 1981 in Glen Canyon Dam, in which he advocated for its removal and destruction. The construction of the dam had a huge environmental impact, and its destruction would mean an important victory in the fght to save the desert. Although this dam is the most important one for the characters, Abbey’s fctional story shows only a portion of the plague of dams that, as Reisner explains, “in this century, something like a quarter of a million have been built in the United States alone” (104). Abbey shows the contrast between the landscape in the process of being industrialized and the desert before the construction of these dams, and although the impact of the industrial and capitalist powers in that area will be explained later, it is worth mentioning how he describes the Colorado River before it was tamed by the dam. Abbey expresses his admiration for the river through one of the characters in the following fragment: He remembered the real Colorado, before damnation, when the river fowed unchained and unchanneled in the joyous foods of May and June, swollen with snow melt. Boulders crunching and clacking and grumbling, tumbling along the river’s bedrock bed, the noise like that of grinding molars in a giant jaw. That was a river. (58) The very frst thing that is remarkable in this excerpt is the word “real,” which implies that the desert is losing its essence. The Colorado River is to some extent “fake” (becoming a kind of product) as a consequence of human intervention. Immediately after that, Abbey uses the word “damnation” as a play on words, suggesting that the construction of the dam is a curse for the landscape. In terms of writing about that natural space as it was before being chained and channeled, Abbey explains that it was a considerably wild river and full of water. The musicality given to the second sentence of the description, along with the presence of the idea of a giant jaw, transmits the feeling that the river itself was a living creature, a wild, dangerous, and beautiful beast. Abbey thus shows that the desert is a place full of life that is endangered by human interests. Writing about the desert of the American Southwest means writing about canyons, rocks, rivers, plants, and many other natural elements. Abbey takes his time to do so throughout the whole novel. An exhaustive analysis of the “nature writing” in The Monkey Wrench Gang will not be undertaken here, but it must be said that Abbey’s experiences and contemplation of the desert enabled him to talk about different natural

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phenomena. An evident example of this is the process of rain, which is described like this: Mountainous cumuli-nimbi hang above their heads flled with the stuff, in vaporous form. Carloads of water. High over the plateau rims, three thousand feet above at Land’s End and all across the canyonlands foat huge, massive clouds trailing streamers of rain, all of which evaporates, it is true, before reaching the earth. (Abbey 363) The clouds that Abbey fnds in the desert are compared to gigantic mountains that fy in the sky above canyons and plateaus, so even if he is describing the process of raining, he refers to different elements of the desert. Although elements like canyons, rocks, and vast land form this natural space, it is also a whole, and everything there, whether sky or earth (even human), comes together in a wild harmony. The process of raining in the desert is also different from rain in other places, because even if there are big clouds with huge amounts of water, none reaches the earth. In this way, Abbey makes clear that even rain in the desert is special and that this part of the American Southwest is a very unique space. Considering what has been said about Abbey’s “nature writing” and considering the examples used, it is clear that the natural world and the environment have a huge importance for the writer and for the novel itself. The canyons, rivers, mountains, and plants not only constitute the landscape, they are key for the development and understanding of the novel. The relationships that exist between the characters and the wild nature of the desert allow a very specifc “nature writing” that includes opposition to the values of their society (expressed through radical environmentalism). In order to make this clearer, a brief analysis of other kinds of writing about nature will follow, quite different from that already described. In fact, one of the main concerns of The Monkey Wrench Gang is the exploitation and destruction of nature, and Abbey also writes about the natural world, focusing on the damage done to the desert by industrial and capitalist powers.

Environmental Impact and the Destruction of the Desert Pushing the frontier further meant the expansion of what we know as civilization in what is now the United States. This expansionism brought the exploitation of the environment (later increased by technological developments), which also affected the desert of the American Southwest. Establishing a civilization in the desert implied a confict with the natural course of water, and thus dams were built to supply human populations. Reisner explains that “the age of dams reached its apogee in the 1950s and 1960s, when hundreds upon hundreds of them were thrown

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up, forever altering the face of the continent” (158–159). The Monkey Wrench Gang deals with the presence of a small number of these dams and of the damage they caused, but it is quite illustrative (even if it is a work of fction) of the transformation the landscape suffered. It must also be mentioned that “pit mining spread rapidly across the interior West” (Malone and Etulain 25) and that the exploitation of the land also included aspects such as the search for oil. The novel shows the situation of the desert during and after the intervention of the industrial and capitalist powers that are the enemies of the four protagonists. The depictions of their dramatic interventions enable Abbey to talk about new relationships between human beings and the natural world (as will be explained later). Abbey shows the destruction of the environment through different forms of exploitation, which include dams, extraction sites, and new buildings. Moreover, the deterioration and destruction of the environment help justify the radical environmentalism that is so characteristic of the novel, so writing about nature that is endangered is one of the main concerns of The Monkey Wrench Gang. The existence of companies and institutions profting from the exploitation of this area of the American Southwest is shown when George W. Hayduke returns to the desert from the Vietnam War. His beloved wilderness is no longer as wild as he remembered it because there is a bigger human presence that makes him worry about the future of that landscape. There are more people, more companies, and more construction in a place that is supposed to be lonely and savage. This industrial intervention in the desert can be divided into two types, depending on the degree of exploitation: on the one hand, there are new constructions built on the surface, such as roads and bridges, and on the other hand, there are complete transformations of the landscape (dams or excavation sites) that mean a huge environmental impact. Several of the new constructions on the surface, not as terrible as dams or mining (but still highly negative for the desert), are worth mentioning. One of the most evident examples is the construction of bridges in order to link canyons. The construction of a bridge would not require the radical exploitation of the area, but it would mean a new structure and negative consequences for the environment. Depending on the type of construction (short or long term), a new bridge, along with a road, can mean anything from “soil erosion and sedimentation, disturbance to fsh spawning beds, and water contamination” (Transportation Association of Canada 3) to “changes to riparian habitat, alterations to river morphology and processes, disruption of fsh and wildlife migration patterns, pollution from road surface drainage, and noise disturbance” (Transportation Association of Canada 3). All these consequences make it clear that even if the construction of a bridge might seem harmless, the effects for the desert can be terrible. In the novel, there is a big project to build three bridges to connect canyons that would allow further exploitation. This

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idea seems stupid and catastrophic to the four activists, because there is no real need for these constructions, so their aim is to destroy the bridges. Furthermore, it is said that every bridge “is built for the beneft of certain companies that operate in this country” (Abbey 77), so it is evident that a few are profting from a place that belongs to no one and to everyone. In addition to the bridges themselves, new roads are needed so as to connect them, and this means more industrial expansion in the desert. Different companies need (or simply want) roads and bridges that would enable their exploitation plans more easily. All this work, “it’s to help the poor fellas that own the uranium mines and the truck feets and the marinas on Lake Powell” (Abbey 77–78), so it is evident that even if Abbey uses a kind of humorous tone, these powers are slowly becoming the owners of the desert. The presence of uranium mines and whole feets of trucks does not seem very encouraging, so the protagonists’ only way of saving the desert becomes direct action. Abbey’s beloved land is being tamed, and it is becoming a business for those who do not care about the destruction of natural spaces; in fact, it may seem that they try to replace what Abbey would consider the “real West” with voracious capitalism. There are other examples of the new human–industrial presence in the desert, and this is made evident when the four protagonists travel through the desert. It was explained earlier that Abbey stops the narration of action so as to talk about the landscape, but later in the novel the kind of description he makes is radically different. While the protagonists are on the road, instead of talking about rocks, canyons, or mountains, Abbey explains that “they passed, from time to time, familiar names on little metal signs at turnoffs along the road: Conoco, Arco, Texaco, Gulf, Exxon, Cities Service” (150). It can be said, frst, that the presence of all these companies is spoiling the beauty of the desert, but, above all, that they are all oil and gas companies that are profting from the exploitation of the land. It seems that the wild desert is infested with powers that threaten to destroy it, and for that reason, the activists feel an urgent need to take action. Abbey’s humorous tone has been mentioned more than once, but it is worth explaining how he talks about the so-called benefts of the industrialization of the desert in order to criticize it. The presence of big machines, pipelines, railroads, and other constructions in the desert will only be useful “to light the lamps of Phoenix suburbs not yet built, to run the air conditioners of San Diego and Los Angeles, to illuminate shopping-center parking lots at two in the morning” (Abbey 173). What would mean irreversible damage to the environment is justifed as “progress” with some minor benefts that seem quite silly; light in a parking lot could never replace the wildness of the desert. For Abbey and his characters (in fact, for any real-life environmental activist), progress and development and all their “material self-interest, technology development, and nature transformation, are seen as unnatural and extremely destructive of nature”

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(Lee Young 27). Abbey therefore depicts civilization in the desert as mad expansionism, he talks about a ridiculous but highly proftable business, and his characters are not willing to give up wild land for it. In terms of more dramatic and destructive kinds of exploitation, there are examples of complete transformations of the landscape, because, for the industrial and capitalist powers working in the desert, building new structures is not enough, and for that reason they engage in an expansionist process that completely alters the natural order of the desert. When the four characters arrive at one of the many working sites of their enemies, they face a completely alien landscape, as if it was the location of a science fction story. Abbey explains the work that is being carried out by these powers in the following way: blading off the soil and ripping up loose stone down to the bedrock. Since this was a cut-and-fll operation it was necessary to blast away the bedrock down to the grade level specifed by highway engineers. (79) The workers in this area are removing rocks, producing explosions, and overall, transforming natural formations for their own economic purposes. Eliminating natural structures in order to make the area fat means not only a catastrophic exploitation of the environment but also an attempt to transform nature however they like. Abbey is not talking just about the taming of the wild desert but about the elimination of the wilderness for human profts. The next example of radical exploitation in the desert is even more shocking and harmful for the environment. It has been made clear that rivers (and the subsequent construction of dams) are very important for Abbey when writing about nature; however, when talking about the more destructive exploitation of the landscape, elements connected to water in the desert are again highly relevant due to the effects that industrialization has on them. During one of the many journeys of the protagonists through the Southwest, they are horrifed when “the frst thing they noticed was that the river was no longer there. Somebody had removed the Colorado River” (Abbey 120). Human intervention and industrialization reach the point of insanity, removing a river from its original course and placing it somewhere else is obviously highly destructive, but also a sign that humans are no longer aware of the consequences of their actions. The construction of a dam means an alteration to life in the desert, but what Abbey describes is a complete transformation of the landscape. Changing the course of a river (somehow playing god) would lead to, among other consequences, fooded areas in which water was not present and “desert, or cropland, where there were once huge shallow swamps and lakes” (Reisner 12), thus killing animals and plants in both places and having a disastrous environmental impact.

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On top of all the negative consequences for the desert itself, the industrial intervention in the novel is signifcantly harmful to the living creatures in or around this American desert. As will be explained later when talking about the radical activism in the novel, the protagonists focus on actions to liberate natural spaces; however, there is an important example of animal liberation. Abbey explains the situation that justifes and leads to the liberation of animals as follows: now the antelope die by the thousands, the bighorn sheep perish by the hundreds every winter from Alberta down to Arizona, because fencing cuts off their escape from blizzard and drought. (156) So, human intervention—in this case, limiting the freedom of animals so that they are unable to escape from extreme climatological situations—is causing the massive deaths of animals inhabiting the desert. Animals, like the space in which they live, are being radically tamed, and their freedom is being reduced to the point that confnement can mean death. For that reason, the protagonists decide to cut the fences that oppress and threaten these living beings. Although this action is not like the others that the protagonists carry out, it is part of the same struggle against the industrial and capitalist powers that proft from the exploitation of the land. Knowing that the exploitation of the land is spreading, some of the protagonists go north, out of the desert, to a forest area, where they want to discover what is happening in order to avoid more destruction. When they arrive at the working site, the gravity of the situation is made clear through the following conversation in which Abbey uses, once again, his particular sense of humor: “‘What happened to the trees?’ ‘What trees?’ says Hayduke. ‘That’s what I mean’” (227). The protagonists end up in the middle of a desolate place that is supposed to be full of trees and life. The trees they see have been sawn, and there is no life because now destruction reigns in that place. Logging companies have completely exploited the area so as to obtain huge profts at the expense of wildlife. It is clear that the forces against which the four activists struggle are covering more territories of the American West, bringing industrialization and death with them and taming what is left of the real and wild America. Last but not least, when talking about the negative impact that human expansionism in or around the desert has on living beings, the drastic consequences humans themselves can suffer must also be mentioned. As inhabitants of the desert, humans are also being damaged by industrial intervention, even if those who enrich themselves do not seem to care about human welfare. Doctor Sarvis, as an expert on human health, explains that the air pollution caused by different companies working in the desert can have consequences “from poor visibility to eye irritation, from allergies to asthma to emphysema to general asthenia” (Abbey 233).

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The industrialization of the desert is thus not only threatening the natural world but also the human world because it can cause different respiratory problems and diseases. Moreover, if the expansion of “progress” continues its destructive path, more health problems could appear; it is well-known that in many cases in real life radical exposure to industrialized and toxic areas has ultimately caused problems like cancer. Considering the dangers faced by all living creatures in the desert as a consequence of expansion driven by power and greed, some kind of action seems more than necessary. This is why the protagonists of the novel engage in the struggle to save the desert. The extreme characteristics of the situation leads to an extreme response from the activists, and it shows a new type of relationship with the environment that is one of the key aspects of The Monkey Wrench Gang.

Radical Environmentalism in the American West Although radical activism, arguably the most characteristic aspect of the novel, has already been mentioned several times, a brief analysis will focus not only on the actions themselves but also on the ideas that lie behind them and on the overall aims of the group formed by the four protagonists. As “the Bible” for environmental groups, the infuence of The Monkey Wrench Gang is undeniable. Several groups, especially in the United States, use direct action methods like the protagonists in the novel in order to preserve and save the environment. This kind of environmentalism has become a threat to industrial and capitalist powers, and government agencies treat this activism as domestic terrorism. In fact, these activists are known as “ecoterrorists.” This name is somewhat misleading because it suggests terrorism against nature, which it is not. A clear defnition of what is known as “ecoterrorism” would be the following: Ecoterrorism is the violent destruction of property on the behalf of individuals or environmental groups in the name of saving the environment from further human encroachment and destruction. (Miller, Rivera, and Yelin 113) This type of environmentalism generally involves destroying property so as to save the environment. It is considered a form of terrorism, although it differs signifcantly from common terrorism, especially in the fact that the actions do not aim to harm or kill people. What differentiates “ecoterrorism” from other types of environmentalism is its use of direct action methods. Direct action against property appears continuously in the novel, and indeed, the group of activists takes aim at every industrial project, construction, or object they fnd in the desert. The “victims” of their actions

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range from billboards and bulldozers to bridges and other structures. The principal objective of the protagonists (and of anyone engaged in this kind of environmentalism) is to cause huge economic losses to the companies that are profting from the exploitation of the land by destroying their tools, vehicles, buildings, and projects. Repeated actions of sabotage can mean much higher costs for companies, and this can discourage them to the point that they give up their exploitative intentions. The use of direct action against the enemy is seen as the only effective method in the war that industrialization wages on nature, and for that reason, “ecoterrorists” differ signifcantly from other environmentalists. For them, the only way of stopping the advance of industrial and capitalist powers is to act outside their laws. The ideas and actions of the protagonists are obvious reflections of Abbey’s own ideology, especially as Abbey was involved in actions of this type. Abbey’s way of thinking is defined by anarchism, antiindustrialism, and anticapitalism, and these things are all very important not only for his approach to environmentalism but, as will be explained later, for his idea of the West. For Abbey, the powers belonging to humans that are exploiting the desert are representative of the state and its forces, and they are spreading oppression and destruction in a place that should be free. His opposition to these powers leads to new relationships between his characters and the natural world that are materialized in their direct actions. The four protagonists defy human values and civilization itself in defense of the natural world. In fact, as Potter explains, “animal rights and environmental movements directly challenge civilization, modernity and capitalism” (245), so it can be said that the characters of the novel go against Western civilization and culture. This is one of the main features of The Monkey Wrench Gang, and it is a result of Abbey’s personal ideas about humans and nature. The frst direct action in the novel, even before the four activists come together, is the burning of a billboard by Doctor Sarvis. This character enjoys burning these structures, particularly because they spoil the beauty of the desert. Abbey explains that “with a fve-gallon can of gasoline he sloshed about the legs and support members of the selected target, then applied a match” (9), making clear that it is quite easy to carry out this action and that the materials needed are not diffcult to obtain. Although the action might not seem very powerful, burning this symbol of capitalist expansionism is quite successful, and it causes economic damage to the enemy. Once the group of saboteurs is properly formed, one of their principal actions, which becomes as natural as breathing, is the destruction of bulldozers. Several bulldozers are sabotaged throughout the novel (in fact they take action every time they fnd one), and their methods range from breaking the interior of the machine to throwing it from

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a cliff. One of the many bulldozer sabotage procedures is described as follows: He broke open the driller’s toolbox, found the end wrench he needed, crawled on his back under the engines and turned the crankcase plug in each, draining the oil. Then he started the engines and let them run. (Abbey 153) In this case, Abbey explains how one of the protagonists intervenes in the inner functioning of the bulldozer so as to ruin it. He barely needs tools or time to destroy a machine that would be used to exploit the land. Abbey explains the procedure in such an easy and detailed way that anyone could do it. Indeed, the novel can be partly used as a manual for sabotage, and radical environmental groups have done this. The sabotage of big machines becomes for the characters like a game that can cause signifcant economic losses to companies, whether in the novel or in real life. In addition to this kind of action, the novel presents some bigger-scale sabotage that requires more complex and thorough working methods. In one of their biggest attacks, the four protagonists aim at a train and a bridge in order to stop the exploitation of a whole area. This action cannot be carried out by simple means, so they decide to use dynamite to make the destruction of the bridge possible. Abbey explains the procedure to prepare the explosives in a very detailed way in the following extract: He makes up a primer by punching a hole in one cartridge with the handle (non-sparking) on his crimping tool, inserting a blasting cap (electrical) into the hole, and knotting the cap’s legs wires. Next he tapes the six sticks together in a bundle, the primed cartridge in the center. The charge is ready. (191) The activists use dynamite because it is the only way to destroy a bridge and a train and, above all, because they know nobody will be in the train. It is an automatic train that needs no driver, and it transports materials instead of transporting people. The fact that no human beings will be harmed or killed in the attack is what prompts the protagonists to use this method. Extreme care is taken in the handling of the explosive materials and especially in the prevention of human losses. Even the most destructive actions in real life “killed no one injured no one, and targeted no one” (Potter 44). In the end, the action is carried out successfully, and a huge industrial complex used for the exploitation of the land is destroyed, causing huge damages to the powers trying to proft from that exploitation. The examples of radical environmentalism described are quite illustrative of a new dimension in terms of human and natural relationships. In

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the novel, human beings fght against powers belonging to the human world in order to save the natural world, thus going against the laws and ideals of their own society. Direct action is the only way to stop the destruction of a wild space like the desert of the American Southwest, and industrialization, as a sign of civilization and progress, is seen as a completely negative power that should not share space with the wilderness.

Abbey’s Idea of the American West Abbey’s nature writing in The Monkey Wrench Gang has made clear some of his ideas about the West, for example, the appreciation of wild spaces that are literally the West and the contact and peaceful existence in the environment—all of them key aspects of his vision of this concept so rooted in American culture and society. The use of direct action against the powers that threaten that land is justifed by the desert itself because it really stands for freedom and wildness, concepts that are strongly related to the idea of the American West and that Abbey thinks cannot be lost. In fact, Abbey shows that the desert is the “heart of the American West” (119), meaning that it is the very essence and the core of the West. It is real freedom in contact with nature, after going west, that is found in that desert, and so destroying it would mean the end of one of the pillars of the American mind-set, although some people seem to care only about economic profts. There are other ideas from Abbey’s own conception of the West, which was especially infuenced by anarchism. Freedom and a lack of authority are concepts related to anarchism that Abbey fnds in the desert, but Scheese goes further, pointing out that for Abbey “wilderness should be preserved for political reasons, as a refuge from authoritarian government” (310). Nobody can be really free under the oppression of the American government, and one of the only places that offers an alternative to this is the desert. The freedom the government offers is false, because it imposes authorities and limitations on people, as opposed to what the desert stands for. For Abbey, the values of the real American West can thus be found in the wild desert, in the Wild West, not in one corrupted by capitalist America or in industrialized areas. The direct action methods that Abbey defends (also infuenced by anarchism) are also a way of breaking the rules and laws of the American government, and, for Abbey, being a kind of outlaw is the proper way to live in the Wild West. The Monkey Wrench Gang offers a “nineteenthcentury brand of frontier justice on the modern atrocities he sees everywhere” (Ronald 184), and although this idea seems strongly linked to the mythology of the West, Abbey changes it radically. The “sheriffs” who fght for justice are the four activists, while the wrongdoers are civilization and expansionism. Abbey thus defends a Wild West in which outlaws and

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the people that those in power consider criminals are the truly free ones; the people who can live peacefully in the desert. The spiritual connection that exists between Abbey and the desert cannot exist anywhere else because it is the only place that gives the writer complete freedom and peace. American society and civilization do not have anything as pure and wild as the desert to offer Abbey, and this is why he wants to keep this space free from those corrupting powers. Abbey explains, through Hayduke’s words, that “my job is to save the fucking wilderness. I don’t know anything else worth saving” (229). The wilderness and everything it implies (values of the real American West, among other aspects) is presented as the only thing worth fghting for and as something that once lost, cannot be recovered. Dave Foreman, cofounder of the environmental group Earth First!, says that the remaining wilderness in the United States “are the places that hold North America together (. . .) that represent natural sanity in a whirlwind of industrial madness” (84). Wilderness can therefore be considered the very essence of what later became the United States, while the untamed desert is the essence of the West. The Monkey Wrench Gang struggles to preserve that essence. It can be concluded that Abbey’s fght is not only a struggle to defend the environment, but a struggle to defend the American West and its values. Wild nature and living outside the laws of American capitalist society are elements necessary for freedom and peace, and an active resistance through direct action is presented as the only option to keep the desert free from the destruction caused by “progress.” The only West possible for Abbey is a real Wild West. Wilderness must be preserved by any means necessary.

Note 1. This chapter is part of a project fnanced by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (PGC2018–094659-B-C21 (MCIU/AEI/FEDER, UE)), and the European Regional Fund (ERDF).

Works Cited Abbey, Edward. The Monkey Wrench Gang. Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2006. Foreman, Dave. “Radical Visions and Strategies.” Defending the Earth: A Debate. Murray Bookchin, 1991. Lane, Belden C. Landscape of the Sacred: Geography and Narrative in American Spirituality. Johns Hopkins UP, 2002. Lee Young, Russell. “A Time Series Analysis of Eco-Terrorist Violence in the United States: 1993–2003.” PhD dissertation, Sam Houston State U, Huntsville, TX, 2004. Malone, Michael P. and Richard W. Etulain. The American West: A TwentiethCentury History. U of Nebraska P, 1989.

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McClintock, James I. Nature’s Kindred Spirits: Aldo Leopold, Joseph Wood Krutch, Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard and Gary Snider. The U of Wisconsin P, 1994. Miller, DeMond Shondell, Jason David Rivera, and Joel C. Yelin. “Civil Liberties: The Line Dividing Environmental Protest and Ecoterrorists.” Journal for the Study of Radicalism, vol. 2, no. 1, 2008, pp. 109–123. Potter, Will. Green Is the New Red: An Insider’s Account of a Social Movement under Siege. City Light Books, 2011. Prentiss, Sean and Joe Wilkins. Environmental and Nature Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology. Bloomsbury, 2017. Reisner, Marc. Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water. Penguin Books, 1993. Ronald, Ann. The New West of Edward Abbey. 2nd ed., U of Nevada P, 2000. Scheese, Don. “Desert Solitaire: Counter-Friction to the Machine in the Garden.” The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, edited by Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm, U of Georgia P, 1996, pp. 303–322. Transportation Association of Canada. Guide to Bridge Hydraulics. 2nd ed., Thomas Telford Publishing, 2004.

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Other Western Voices

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Mary Hallock Foote’s Reimagining of the Woman’s West Megan Riley McGilchrist1

Mary Hallock Foote, the nineteenth-century writer and illustrator, Easterner-turned-Westerner, who has the dubious distinction of having been plagiarized in a Pulitzer prize–winning novel by Wallace Stegner, one of the icons of Western American writing, was herself a writer who understood the transformative possibilities of the Western landscape. She knew that knowing the natural world of the West was more than seeing it, more than using it, more than living in it. It was both more than the sum of these parts and other than these things. In this chapter I propose to discuss Foote’s particular understanding and deep sympathy with Western places and landscapes and how this is revealed in her writing and illustration. A novel that gives the reader a sustained view of Foote’s understanding of the Western landscape is her late work, Edith Bonham, published in 1917. The eponymous Edith, an Eastern woman who has come West—like her creator—is changed by the choices she has made, but she is changed by the place too. She is changed by choosing to become an exile from the world she knew, but more than that, she is transformed by her acceptance and eventual understanding of the Western landscape. Through the character of Edith, Mary Hallock Foote is telling her own Western story. In this novel, we get perhaps the truest sound of Foote’s voice. At one point in the novel, Edith is in quarantine on the mesa outside Boise with a child who has scarlet fever—an experience Mary Hallock Foote went through with her own children—and the experience depicted might be her own: Those six weeks on the mesa were the most searching experience of my life, and their consequences spread over many years that followed. As the mesa lay out there under the bare sky, so was I exposed and sorted and winnowed and beat upon in the glare of a mortal mistake crueler than many a crime. And as the shadow of the mesa at sunrise and at moonrise extended far across the valley, so over the subsequent levels of my life the shadow of that six weeks extended . . . the main thing about it to me then, was its isolation and elevation, in a stripped, stern way, above the whole plain of my former existence. (Edith Bonhan 153–154)2

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I do not suggest that Mary Hallock Foote had a “mortal mistake” she was expiating during her years in the West, but the sense of the landscape which “exposed . . . sorted . . . winnowed . . . and beat upon” the character Edith is close to some descriptions of spiritual experience, and this is the kind of experience Mary had, and felt, during her Western years. At the end of the novel, after a series of dramatic events and revelations, Edith’s thoughts return, prayer-like, to the experience on the mesa again: Lightnings and thunder come with the storm, and words are torn from us in the tempest-times of our lives, and dead words we wish had died unborn choke the old paths of memory and mark with waste the track of the storm that is past. But when the clear, dark nights of stars return,—our stars that we see from that “top of the world,” as we call the mesa,—or the white nights that steep the earth in moonlight; when the long days of summer’s fruition are back with us again and the shortening days bring back the ancient sadness of the harvestburdened year, we do not complain of these seasons of blessedness that they are not prolifc of sound. And so my story, that began late as a love story, must end as the happy love stories do end—in silence: as life shall end for us all at last. (EB 321) This quiet resolve expressed by the character of Edith is something that Foote herself came to through long years of living in Western landscapes, being shaped and transformed by the experience. Reading these words, the reader is struck by the connection between Foote’s deepest feelings and her life in nature. I want to suggest that Mary Hallock Foote was transformed by the West, by her response to the natural world she encountered there. But it must be said that Mary was always alive to nature. In the West, it became simply a question of degree. She was in nature so much of the time and in a natural world that in its intensity and sometime strangeness, eclipsed the world she had known growing up, the much-loved, much-lived-in, Hudson River Valley of New York. When she came West in 1876, she came to a land that spoke a language she did not yet know, to a landscape she had to learn to read. But she did learn to read it, and in that learning she came to understand a place that had been previously voiceless and often misrepresented in her world. She understood it, and she spoke for it, in her drawings, her journalism, her fction, and her letters. In The Land Before Her, Annette Kolodny writes of pioneer “fantasies” of the West, suggesting that men and women wanted different things, imagined different things, and experienced different things in the American West (xi–xv). Female experience is an area of Western experience that was not often depicted before Mary’s descriptions and illustrations

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of Western themes appeared. These began with “A California Mining Camp,”3 which was published in Scribner’s in February 1878. Beginning with a description of the author picking “a cluster of white-petaled fowers that seem the very expression of the freshness and briefness of the morning” (480) and the writer thinking about the fact that “in some shadowy ‘labor’ a thousand feet below, a gang of Mexicans fnishing their night-shift may be passing the ‘barrilito’ from one grimy mouth to another,” (480) the point of view is focused on the kind of minute detail one may characterize as distinctly feminine in its emphasis and is, I suggest, also distinctly classical in its overtones. In Foote’s vision of the miners’ underground life in contrast to the woman among the fowers above them, the reader hears an echo of the story of Persephone, thus transforming the landscape of New Almaden mining camp into a mythic meadow in ancient Greece. It is diffcult to say how much of some of Foote’s early work for Scribner’s was modifed by the editor, her friend, Richard Gilder. The following passage from “A California Mining Camp” is probably a combination of Foote’s original prose and Gilder’s edits: Early morning in New Almaden is worth getting up betimes to see. Sometimes the valley is like a great lake flled with billows of fog,— pearly white billows, tumbling and surging with noiseless motion. It is more as if the clouds had all fallen out of the sky, leaving its blue intensity unbroken, and heaping the valley with feecy whiteness. On windy mornings, the fog rolls grandly out to sea along the defles of the triple chain of hills; when there is no wind, it rises and drifts in masses over the mountains, making the clear sunlight hazy for a moment before dissolving into it. After the rains, when the morning air has a frosty crispness, the mountains are outlined in sharp, dark blue against a sky of reddish-gold; even the tops of the distant red-woods may be traced, “bristling strange, in fery light,” along the horizon. As the sun lifts its head, the dark blue hills fush purple, long shadows stream across the valley, the windows and spires of San José sparkle into sight, and the bay reveals itself, a streak of silver in the far distance. There is no chorus of birds to break the stillness. (CMC 487) But the spirit of this is Foote’s, even if the prose has been slightly tailored to ft the demands of the magazine. When Foote began writing novels and Western sketches, she offered a new vision of the West to an Eastern readership more accustomed to viewing the West through the tired tropes and sentimental settings of the dime novels. This was a vision that grew throughout her career, as Mary herself became reconciled to her own state of exile and grew to love the

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natural world of the West. Another passage from Edith Bonham refects this transformation: I was extraordinarily happy that night—so happy I couldn’t stay in bed. When the moon had crossed the zenith to the side towards the valley and her light came in through the high west windows and struck upon the wall above Phoebe’s bed, I took a blanket and stole out of the door onto the back veranda. Out at the far end towards the north one saw dim hills where the canal-line cut its way through, making a white gash. Eastward the plain that joins the mesa went back in desert land or ploughed land returned to desert; at night the mountain-line withdrew, the whole earth disappeared as it were and the sky was paramount. Stars, millions of stars, and the great soaring path of the Milky Way amazingly white and sown with sparks of light defying the moon. The wind blew soft and steady. . . . The fve dead poplars, which must have been quite trees when they were planted, whisked about in the night-gale like witches’ brooms. It wasn’t beauty—it was a lofty loneliness that resembles the sea, far inland as we were. I began to feel how people who have lived in such places can never go back to the old values of life in villages and towns; they must forever be the “gypsy-souls,” homeless in the paths of men. (EB 170) This excerpt reveals an understanding of the scene’s spiritual and emotional resonance, as well as the female character’s own place in between worlds, like many of Foote’s female protagonists in her novels and short stories, and indeed, many of the female subjects in her illustrations. Mary Hallock Foote knew that a new world required a new way of looking at things. She says this very clearly in an undated letter to her dearest friend and lifelong correspondent, Helena Gilder, sent sometime in the spring of 1878, from Santa Cruz: I wish I could do justice to all we see here. It saddens me that so much must be trusted to memory. I have made one sketch of the Santa Cruz beach—only one as yet because of numberless reasons—the chief of which seems to be that one must get acquainted with a place in the spirit of it—before approaching it. All I see here is so strange to me that I cannot attack it at once.4 Foote’s sense here that the landscape has a spirit, which must be known, draws her close to Transcendentalist thought. In her respect for that which she does not yet “read” we hear the Emersonian maxim, that not only words but things are emblematic, and “every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact” (Emerson, Nature ch. 4). The reader hears too of the

74 Megan Riley McGilchrist Quaker dictum, which Mary, profoundly molded by her own Quaker upbringing, would have known: “Spiritual learning continues throughout life, and often in unexpected ways. There is inspiration to be found all around us, in the natural world, in the sciences and arts, in our work and friendships, in our sorrows as well as our joys” (Quaker Faith and Practice, Advices and Queries, 1.02, n 7). In the West, nature became the repository of some of Foote’s deepest feelings. It spoke with a voice she could hear, and it became the company she missed. It became what her friends, family, and culture had been: a source of inspiration and solace. Consider this letter again to Helena Gilder from early in the years Foote and her family spent in Idaho, before hard times hit them, in which she describes a moment in nature: May 28th, 1885 The Cañon This is a place of strange and wondrous refreshment to me in the outdoor life. Whatever is going on—a moonlight night, a sunset, a great wind, or a day of brilliant sun, you are always in it—You see it and feel it and breath [sic] it and nothing interferes. Betty was a long time in my arms going to sleep last night and I was tired and heated through and through and depressed. I went down on the beach in the moonlight for an hour, as far from the door as the road at the foot of our yard, at home, and was instantly wrapped round with coolness and softest light and obscurity and a sound of water breaking on the “ripple” and sweeping inshore in long surges—It is so resting. From the baby in her arms, Foote goes to herself being in the embrace of nature. She is wrapped round with “coolness and the softest light” as nature does for her what she does for her child: consoles, comforts, protects, cherishes. But nature is not always benign, of course, and she was aware of that. In her 1901 novel, The Desert and the Sown, Mary gives this speech to the tragic and lonely Packer John, a man whose only mate has been the wilderness: “I never see nature till I came out here. I’d seen pretty woods and views, that a young lady could take down with her paints; but how are you going to paint that?”—he waved his tallow-stick towards the night outside. ‘Ears can’t reach the bottom of that stillness. That’s creation before God ever thought of man. Long as I’ve been in the woods, I never get over the feeling that there’s something behind me. If you go towards the trees, they come to meet you;

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if you go backwards, they go back; but you can’t sit down and sit still without they’ll come a-creeping up and creeping up, and crowding in.’ (51) In this passage, the wilderness is not so much malign, as it is other— strange and unknowable, truly “creation before God ever thought of man.” Similarly, in the short story, “Maverick,” the hapless Rose, whose bleak life has been equated with the Arco desert where the story is set,5 chooses to escape her own hopeless situation by embracing annihilation in nature, wandering into a trackless waste of lava beds. Nature is clearly two-sided in Foote’s understanding, but even in its savagery, Mary gives nature agency. Consider this passage from her 1892 irrigation novel, The Chosen Valley: The face of the plain was featureless and wan. There is but one color to this desert landscape—sage green, slightly greener in the spring, and grayer in summer, with a sifting of chrome dust. In winter it is most impressive under a light fall of snow, not heavy enough to hide the slight but signifcant confguration of the ground, yet white enough to throw into relief the strange markings of black lava, where it crops out, or lies scattered, or confronts the traveler in those low, fat headed buttes, so human, so savage, in their lone outlines, keeping watch upon the encroachments of travel. (133) This much is clear: the colorless plain has a face, has a will, and has a desire for stasis. Its monochrome being makes demands upon the traveler, telling those who journey through its territory that its will takes precedence, once again emphasizing the provisional nature of humanity’s tenure in the natural world. Like the ancients, I think Foote saw sentience in nature where others of her time saw mere matter. Believing in a creative spirit, she believed in the integrity of all creation, and yet she was aware of the ambivalent otherness of nature, its inexplicable, profound reality, beyond good, beyond evil, but true to itself. This is not as simple as Romanticism. Foote’s is a deep understanding of the fact that nature has a being and presence of its own, invisible to those who will not see, but utterly real to those whose eyes are open. How then did the grand vistas of the West reveal the innermost recesses of her soul? Mary had read Emerson. The great thinker’s precepts in Nature resonated clearly for her: “Words are signs of natural facts. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts. Nature is the symbol of spirit” (Emerson, ch. 4). If Foote sees nature as a symbol of the spirit, what kind of change is she going through as she embraces the Western landscape? There is a passage in her memoirs in

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which she describes once again traveling across the high plains of Idaho, many years after they had left behind the ruins of their great hopes there, when Foote’s husband’s irrigation scheme failed: But even now, on our continental journeys, when we have reached that country of the high valleys and the old lava-fows between the knees of the ranges; when we halt at some lone junction or water-tank in the sage brush and step out to breathe that air again and listen to the “essential silence” after the roar of the train—it is there, that whisper of the desert wind—it all comes back, the shiver of an old longing and doubt and expectancy. . . . We see the long low house stretched out on the Mesa raised above the valley, we see the ring of mountains lifting and lowering down to the great gate where the sun is setting in a storm of gold. The purple shadows darken in their canons; the color mounts to the zenith and the plains are fushed with light. (Rems. 329–330)6 Perhaps self-consciously, Mary Hallock Foote refers to what comes back to her in the “essential silence” in terms of ambition—the house, the irrigation scheme—but the reader may fnd this is disingenuous. Foote knew she was writing for a public attuned to themes of Western grandeur and achievement. But I think what she was talking about here is that overwhelming sense of presence one feels in nature: that “place where words stop” (Butala 55), as Sharon Butala describes the sense of being in the presence of the very real but wholly inexplicable sense which is the numinosity of pure nature itself. Foote is talking about something most of us have known, if we are lucky, that inexpressible sense of being in a place and feeling its presence wash through us. The Transcendentalists tried to explain it; Muir got closer in his descriptions of the West, but Foote expresses it in language that in its immediacy and with its artist’s imagery, goes to the heart of an experience that evades expression, revealing itself in poetry more often than prose—but her prose captures it. Mary Hallock Foote’s Western transformation gave her a perspective she might not have acquired in New York, where, if she had not met Arthur Foote, she would have likely stayed. Going to the West gave her a new template, a new vision of the world. It might be argued that it was mainly Foote’s Western experience which was transformative and resulted in her appreciation of a new and foreign landscape; while experience undoubtedly affected her, it was also her early formation as an artist, and as a Quaker, as well as her innate sensitivity and awareness, which gave her the capacity to embrace a world in which all the landmarks were new ones and many of the natural signs had new meanings. It was not simply that the unwritten land became the space upon which her artist’s soul inscribed meaning, but rather that the meaning inherent in the land, its

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own reality, written in its own being, was accessible to her because of her deep respect, sensitivity, and openness to nature in terms both literary and artistic. She took to the West the tools she needed to address its multifaceted complexity and many contradictions. In an essay on Mary Hallock Foote and her work, Shelley Armitage expresses this point precisely: The heart of her writings remains . . . frmly grounded in the perception of the artist’s eye. The resulting conception is an effort to dramatize the tension between the poetic and the actual. Mrs. Foote’s ability to externalize the subliterary experiences of the West hinged on her sensitivity and technique as an illustrator. The result is an authenticity in her fction generated by the perception and depiction of a mythical West other than that popularized by mainstream western critics and authors—an inner reality with all its attendant ambiguities. (164) Compared with the commentaries that accompany her lovely drawings in the 1889 series, “Pictures of the Far West,” Foote’s epistolary descriptions of her actual environment are rich and human. By contrast her journalism was written for a known audience, one for whom the expectation was for a familiar, if somewhat overwrought, descriptive style. This example from “The Irrigation Ditch,” which appeared in the June 1889 issue of Century, is a case in point: West of the Missouri there are immense, sad provinces devoted to drought. They lie beneath skies that are pitilessly clear. The great snow-felds, the treasury of waters, are far away, and the streams which should convey the treasure are often many days’ journeys apart. These wild water-courses are Nature’s commissaries sent from the mountains to the relief of the plains; but they scamper like pickpockets. They make away with the stores they were charged to distribute. They hurry along, making the only sound to be heard in those lands which they have defrauded. Year by year, or century by century, they plow out their barren channels: gradually they sink, beyond any possibility of fulflling their mission. Now and then one will dig for itself a grave in the desert, bury its mouth in the sand, and be known as a “lost” river. (“Pictures” 299) Lost rivers! She might as well say “lost souls,” so freighted with heavy symbolism is this passage, likening a natural phenomenon to the Miltonic journey of a soul from Paradise to damnation. The nineteenth century liked this kind of fulsome eloquence, with its great crescendos of oratorical opulence. One can almost see the speaker shaking her head in dismay before launching into the corollary: “Meantime the long-repressed soil

78 Megan Riley McGilchrist vents itself in extravagant, contorted growths of sagebrush” (ibid). In her public writing, Mary Hallock Foote presented the accepted face of the Western landscape. She wrote for a public that wanted its imagery grand and profound, drenched in worthy moralizing and Bierstadtian vistas—perhaps one might say a male voice, for journalism, as this was, was predominantly male. Interestingly, however, the illustration that accompanies this particular piece of mildly verbose prose is quite different: a wistful mother stands at the side of the irrigation ditch, holding an infant who struggles in her arms. The mother’s long-suffering face retains its placidity as she observes water fowing through the open sluice gate. In the distance, we can make out the shadowy form of her husband, presumably the bringer of this bounty, laboring at some task. Newly sprung vegetation lines the ditch, spindly trees and long grasses. The woman’s look conveys neither relief nor undue satisfaction; she observes, as if reserving judgment, passive and resigned, awaiting the results of her partner’s endeavors. (The reader might ask if there was a hidden subtext here, considering her husband Arthur’s troubled irrigation scheme.) The reader sees a great contrast in Foote’s own letters. For example, the following excerpt from an unpublished letter written to Helena Gilder reveals a very different view. December 16, 1887 Boise Cañon I long to burst out once in a while and tell you how proud I am of this really great work. It is making a country as large as a small state—and if in its isolation and virgin barrenness it is so poetic a land—what will it be with long lines of gleaming ditches traversing its vast levels with felds of alfalfa and herds of cattle, and rows of poplars marking the boundaries of the farms. But I know what fatuity it must seem to you. It is the fate of a scheme to be classed with all other forms of idiocy until it has proved itself a success—So I will hold in. We are not broad here, like the landscape, but very intense; and we worship our common dream, for which each in his or her own way, has sacrifced something. There one hears the true voice, full of power, life, and intensity, a voice that embraces the labor and sacrifce required to fulfll this perhaps unpoetic, but grand plan. This is not just the artist or author’s voice; this is the personal voice, deeply invested in the success of her husband’s irrigation scheme and aware of the integrity of the landscape itself and aware, too, of the signifcance of having sacrifced for a dream. The sacrifce invests the dream, and hence the landscape, with a sacramental import,

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appropriately, since the dream is “worshiped.” This brings us back to the point that Foote’s knowledge of the landscape, and relationship to it, had something religious in its nature; her aliveness to the numinous qualities of the world around her not only establishes links with the Transcendentalists but also reveals a deep personal connection with the spiritual presence inherent in nature. Foote’s understanding of nature often tied into her storylines, and her characters refect Mary’s own understanding. I return to Edith Bonham, for in this novel, she has given Edith her own deepest feelings. At one point in the novel, Edith says, We were in the very heart of the morning light, moving swiftly across the grey-green plain. The line of the mesa-lands, low at frst with mountains snow-capped above it, now rose brown and bare (where ploughed ground had gone back to desert) close ahead and cut off the mountains. (EB 149) “The very heart of the morning light”: with the clarity of this image, Mary has saved that moment from a hundred years ago and given it back to us. The mesa speaks to Edith as the desert has spoken to seekers before. Her six weeks on the mesa is just a little more than 40 days in the desert. Later the character refects, Alone I could stand and open my chest with great breaths of that air, and clasp my hands behind my head and look up deep into that amazing sky! Early morning, and evening after Douglas went away, I chose my time. Each morning the mountains were there inconceivably the same. The Owyhees swung down along the southern sky where they approached the Boisé Mountains with their near foothills, there was a break and through it one looked far off into the Powder River country and saw the Blue Mountains of Oregon. As I knew very little Western geography these names were as new to me as names in a fairy-tale. All fairy-tales—except one—were tame to this. “And the evening and the morning were the sixth day,” I used to say to myself aloud. I fancied I knew why evening came before the morning in that stupendous record. Night is the constructive time when miracles are to be wrought; night for the mind and spirit, day for the body and will. (EB 159) In this passage one sees Edith choosing her time for this spiritual communion. She must be alone for the experience, for such heightened awareness comes only in solitude. “The mountains were there inconceivably the same”—inconceivable because of their dream-like quality.

80 Megan Riley McGilchrist But the mountains are in motion: they “swung down along the southern sky” and “approached the Boisé Mountains.” One feels the living quality of the landscape in Edith’s thoughts and the sentience accorded to nature. One understands what it is to be the still center while the world moves around one. She looks off into unimaginable distances—Blue Mountains, Powder River Country—magical, more than magical, and as she says, all fairy tales “were tame” except one. Edith is seeing Creation. One senses that this passage is not a literary construct; that here we have Foote’s authentic voice, telling the reader what this scene meant to her and giving her this moment of epiphany in nature. In her Reminiscences, Mary talks about their place in Boise Canyon: And now autumn had given warning. The wild geese were fying south; the sun set earlier in the brooding intensity of color and a longer, more marvelous afterglow followed calling us all out of the house to watch it deepen and food the world above us. It was a three-story place: the river and the beach foor, the hill where we said we should build if that ever came to pass, and the bluffs that rose to the level of the mountain pastures. Twilight sank frst upon the river foor; the dark fronts of the bluffs took strange colors scored by shadows like the sculptured doorways of Petra, rock city of the desert. The shadow mounted, the rose-pink turned purple and greenish and died out. (Rems. 291) The powers of observation here are the artist’s, but also there is a sense, once again, of historicizing, placing their canyon in among ancient places, recognizing its geographical antiquity. Petra, where she had never been and never would be, is an apt comparison to the walls of her rocky canyon in Idaho, did she but know it. There is in this, as in so many of Foote’s observations, a sense that nature knows something that we do not; that it is the canvas upon which our lives are painted and which will be painted over with other lives when ours are gone. Writing in her memoirs of 1886, a year when, due to her pregnancy, she was confned to the canyon for several months before and after the birth of baby Agnes—she said: And every day and all day the wood doves up the gulch were calling, calling, hid in the willow thickets . . . [here follows a list of friends and family dead] . . . The air was heavenly, soft and sweet, wild roses scented every breath of wind from up the gulch and all day the patient, maddening doves kept saying something we could not get out of our heads and could not understand. (Rems. 299)

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The use of nature as a template for understanding is not simply the pathetic fallacy writ large; rather, it is an acknowledgment of a continuity between ourselves and nature, a realization that we do not exist, except as we exist in nature. This passage, with its haunting imagery—one can hear the doves, one can smell the air and the roses—tells us that as our lives pass, so does nature continue in its changeless rhythm. One of the most remarkable things about Mary Hallock Foote that became apparent during the Idaho years was that she looked at the landscape in a new way, at least a new way for American writers of her generation. Something akin to Transcendentalism, her view was broader than that. It seems to me that her view really had more in common with the ancient Greek than with any modern tradition. Like the ancients, she expressed reverence and awe, certainly, but also love, on a very personal level. Her old world encompassed land that could be understood in terms of farming, making, growing, even mining. But the West was different, and Idaho was even more so. That a Victorian lady, used to cities, villages, and much-lived-in farmland, used to a world controlled by humanity, should so readily embrace the nonhuman, even inhuman grandeur of the wide Western spaces in which she found herself is telling. Her eyes were open; her ears attuned themselves to the vast stillness; she drank the waters of silence and lived in a world of earth, stone, water, and stars. She was open to the spiritual experience of the land and that this is revealed in her writing: listening to the silence for the sound of the spirit. Mary Hallock Foote had experiences of the natural world that partook of the spiritual, the sublime, the transcendental, perhaps even the mystical. These epiphanic moments in nature are hinted at obliquely in her prose, but the prose was written with the reserve of the Victorian lady. Her native reticence prevented her from revealing her deepest feelings to her reading public, except perhaps in veiled form. But those feelings are revealed in her letters, and through them we may come to an understanding of the rapture of her perception and deep knowledge of the landscapes of the West. In the end, Mary Hallock Foote knew the Western landscape like a beloved friend. That she could have felt the way she did about a place that brought her so many disappointments testifes to both the power of the landscape and the depth of her sympathy with the natural world. Let us leave her with her own words of farewell, written in 1891, from the house on the mesa above Boise, the site of so many of her heartbreaks: The Mesa July 18, 1891 How I wish our delicious nights could reach you, my dearest—“with their odor of sage-brush their breath of balm.” Last evening Arthur and I sat out late under the moon and the great bare sky—on our

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Megan Riley McGilchrist great bare hill, where the grass started and failed because the windmill water would not “go round.” The white sun-baked ground, all levelled and graded and rolled in preparation for the lawn that is not—had the effect of a beach in the moonlight—a high beach, impossible but fne, rolling to the edge and disappearing in a dark gulf of invisible land.

Mary Hallock Foote’s appreciation of the natural world of the West is revealed in her drawings, her fction, her journalism, and her letters. Her life in the West was originally unintentional—she had never planned to become a Westerner—but she came to embrace the life she was given and the place she had come to with a profound understanding and love. Her vision of the West gives us so much more than the adventure stories and dime novels that were contemporary with her own fction. Like the Transcendentists, she believed in the spiritual resonance of the natural world, and as a Quaker, she was open to its inspiration. However, it is as a woman and an artist that Foote’s view is most original, combining both the artist’s vision and the feminine understanding that nature was not simply to be conquered and used, but rather deeply known and loved as a friend, offering consolation and peace.

Notes 1. I am extremely grateful to the Huntington Library for a fellowship in the summer of 2015 to examine the Foote materials in the James Hague collection. I am also very grateful to the Lilly Library at Indiana University at Bloomington for an Everett Helm travel fellowship, which allowed me to examine the FooteGilder archives there. I am grateful to the staff at the Special Collections at Stanford University for their assistance. Playa and Hewnoaks, artists’ colonies, generously gave me uninterrupted time to work on my larger Foote project; I am deeply grateful to them. I would particularly like to thank Ann Gardiner Brillhart, Mary Hallock Foote’s descendant, for her generous permission to quote from her great-grandmother’s letters. 2. Hereafter, EB. 3. Hereafter, CMC. 4. Copies of Mary Hallock Foote’s letters are available in several libraries: The Huntington Library at San Marino, Stanford University’s Special Collections at the Green Library, and the Lilly Library at Indiana University at Bloomington are the locations that I have visited, although the majority of my research was done at the Huntington Library during the summers of 2014 and 2015. In very many cases, the letters are duplicated in all three places. Therefore, rather than list all three, I will identify the letters by date and recipient in the text. 5. This idea originates in Darlis Miller’s excellent study, Mary Hallock Foote: Author-Illustrator of the American West. Norman, OK: U of Oklahoma P, 2002. 6. Mary Hallock Foote, A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West: The Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote, edited by Paul, Rodman. San Marino: Huntington Library, 1972. Hereafter, Rems.

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Works Cited Armitage, Shelley. “The Illustrator as Writer.” Under the Sun: Myth and Realism in Western American Literature, edited by Barbara Howard Meldrum, The Whitson Publishing Company, 1985. Butala, Sharon. The Perfection of the Morning. Harper Collins, 1994. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature. James Monroe and Co., 1836. Foote, Mary Hallock. “A California Mining Camp.” Scribner’s, Feb. 1878. ———. The Chosen Valley. Houghton, Miffin and Co., 1892. ———. The Desert and the Sown. Houghton, Miffin and Co., 1901. ———. Edith Bonham. Houghton, Miffin and Co., 1917. ———. John Bodewin’s Testimony. Ticknor and Co., 1886. ———. “Pictures of the Far West.” Century, 1888–1889. ———. A Victorian Gentlewoman in the Far West: The Reminiscences of Mary Hallock Foote. Edited by Rodman W. Paul, Huntington Library, 1972. Gruber, Laura. “‘The Naturalistic Impulse’ Limitations of Gender and Landscape in Mary Hallock Foote’s Idaho Stories.” Western American Literature, vol. 38, no. 4, Winter 2004, pp. 353–373. Kolodny, Annette. The Land before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630–1860. U of North Carolina P, 1984. Miller, Darlis A. Mary Hallock Foote: Author-Illustrator of the American West. U of Oklahoma P, 2002. Quaker Faith and Practice, 5th ed., Advices and Queries, 1.02, number 7. Yearly meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), Britain, 2013.

5

Crossing Time, Crossing Space Traumatic Memory in Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred1 Paula Barba Guerrero

The dilemma of whether or not to consider the slave narrative a feasible genre to place writings produced by nonslaves in is still a relevant subject in our cultural panorama. As more and more stories revisiting slavery are written, the naïve perception of America as a heterogenous land is questioned. For these narratives trace forms of systemic abuse from slavery up to contemporary times. In so doing, (neo)slave literature associates the contemporary experiences of minoritized groups in the United States to the “bare-life” status and conditions of slaves in antebellum times (Agamben). They connect past and present to revisit our conception of linear time as much as the immobility and veracity of the single historical narrative. They cross time and space to rethink the fgure of the outsider as a simultaneous ghost and guest, invisible and hypervisible at once. They speak of violence from a transhistorical, liminal position according to which the subaltern remains in a perpetual search of shelter. Contemporary (neo)slave narratives attempt to answer the question of who belongs inside the United States. They explore the harsh conditions of slaves only to refect upon their continuity in the present. And it seems that, despite citizenship, minoritized groups do not quite partake of the benefts of nationhood—a reality as true today as it was in 1979, when Kindred was published. In this novel, Octavia Butler presents history as a cycle of discrimination and violence that follows black individuals anywhere across time and space. She does so to denounce the absence of representation for agonic experience in real life: there is no face, no voice that speaks out, works through, and heals from trauma. Butler’s America rather stands for a temporal and conditional shelter where trauma is to be silenced and memory repressed. The frst steps of a much-needed healing process are therefore hampered by the opening of a provisional safe space that is awfully dependent on monolithic representations of the past that disregard the horrors of historical trauma for “post-memory” generations (Hirsch 103). Butler believes that the collective and historical scar the African American community bears is the direct result of said absence of past recognition, which seems connected to a public preference to ignore traumatic wounds, as accountability might burden more privileged groups with feelings of discomfort. But in view of this representational impasse, can

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the African American community feel safe at home? In Kindred, Butler proposes an alternative to the dilemma of telling the past. She leans on science fctional devices to establish a new narrative temporality that allows for her protagonist to visit—and by traveling to antebellum Maryland revisit—her traumatic past. To move from West to East, from present to past, to end cultural amnesia. In an attempt to stop the cycles of trauma and violence and to give visibility to African American testimony, Butler introduces science fctional strategies to disrupt time and space, undoing canonical history to voice what has been silenced. Disowned black stories are thereby re-enacted and embraced, resulting in double meanings for the space the characters occupy; modern California (the West) and antebellum Maryland (the East). Their intertemporal border crossing becomes an act of re-membering (to remember in a literal sense and to re-member (reassemble pieces – memories – back together), articulating, and giving agency to slave bodies while opening new, fctional spaces to access and come to terms with the past. Butler’s fantastical storytelling (and literature and reading in broader terms) stand for a practice of memory and re-creation, a catalyst through which the past is relived and recognized. Time travel therefore becomes the means to access narrative gaps dependent on a conventional temporal chronology. In the novel, representation is contingent upon the characters’ capacity to “bounce back” into “the old plantation,” thus reconceptualizing space as a key element for trauma recovery. The protagonist’s moves across time fgure as a form of memory enactment evocative of Freudian nightmares and trauma repression. This is why I suggest that the experience of collective trauma is to be read through the prism of space theory in this novel, as geolocation seems to be tightly connected to the reliving of a traumatic past. In Kindred, the wounds of the psyche are enacted physically in the tangible world, providing the reader with a frst experience of slavery characteristic of slave narratives (Crossley ix). This chapter thereby traces the ways in which trauma is played out in space through the science fctional trope of time traveling to reconsider, frst, the ways in which trauma survives and is passed on from generation to generation; second, the narrative devices that allow for communal healing through memory retrieval; and third and more specifcally, the movement of the protagonist as a reformulation of history deeply rooted in the idea that in literature, the present can fnd its way into the past just as much as the modern West can travel beyond itself and fnd common ground with an antebellum culture.

Back in Time, Back in Space When we speak of the North American West, we refer to a geographical region that is put together by a common mythology. A cultural construction that Robert Thacker fnds connected to American exceptionalism

86 Paula Barba Guerrero and a desire “to persuade, to control, to sell, or to otherwise take some advantage” (6). A social imaginary that seems ingrained in the collective unconscious of their inhabitants and refected in their construction of place. Yet this does not seem to be the perspective of Octavia Butler’s protagonists who, at the beginning of the novel, elope to Las Vegas to escape their relatives’ judgment and get married. Having just moved from an apartment in Los Angeles to their own house in Altadena, Dana and Kevin settle down in what appears to be an artistic shelter, away from the disapproval of their families. Since they both want to be writers, their microcosmic vision of the American West is flled with positive images of what appears to be their living together: a sense of home characterized by the presence of “big bookcases” flled with lots of books (12). Their notion of the West is clearly mythifed and connected to the ideal of home and the process of writing literature. It is defned and affected by it. Yet the West is also set in opposition to other spaces in the novel because of an implied presence of technology, for instance, opposed to the wilderness that will defne the East. In Kindred, the West appears as a construction aimed at escaping the past. And this must be read both literally and fguratively. In traveling westward, the protagonists escape their relatives’ racial judgment, but also their historical heritage and memories long repressed. As the narrative advances, however, we learn that their initial safe haven is neither safe nor free of racial prejudice. Instead, it stands for an invisible reproduction of the very abuses they try to forget. Faced with an alienating view of their home, Dana and Kevin are forced to deconstruct the institutional ideologies that pervade urban space in order to come across new temporalities that can help them regain a sense of rootedness. As a social construct, urban and domestic space mirror the ideological distribution of the nation. They detain and release depending on the social status of their inhabitants, demarcating the places certain individuals can access. Space as ideology is framed within a larger historical discourse that gives shape to its distribution and provides meaning to its dynamics. It evolves at the same pace as culture, adapting to resemble the social imaginaries ingrained in the society it contains, and of which it is representative. It is not strange to fnd spatial boundaries to be crossed in the articulation of America, then, especially as biopolitics win their way into the nation’s social unconscious. The United States reproduces in its spatial patterns the political ideologies that have governed the country since slavery, for, as Henri Lefebvre maintains, Nothing disappears completely, [. . .] nor can what subsists be defned solely in terms of traces, memories or relics. [. . .] In space, what came earlier continues to underpin what follows. The preconditions of social space have their own particular way of enduring and remaining actual within that space. (229)

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In other words, even when time and scientifc progress tout the idea that the past is far behind us, contemporary spaces point to political ideologies that reaffrm old exclusionary practices. Space is representative of a discourse that “establishes the limits of human intelligibility”; that is, a discursive politics that considers certain losses “unmarkable,” not worthy of grievability or accountability (Butler, Precarious 35). Losses pertaining to minoritized communities and racialized groups whose suffering will remain in a buffer zone, not communicated and hidden under the myth of an egalitarian utopia. In view of marginal spatiality, Octavia Butler ponders the value of cultural memory. Aware of stories that are neither depicted in history nor reproduced in spatial practice, she decides to construct symbolic spaces of memory where the voices of her ancestors can be heard, and the trauma of her contemporaries worked through. If real spaces fail to tell her-story, fctional ones will have to set it forth. As such, she accesses literary spaces of healing that are characterized by a science fctional nature and a mnemonic essence. They fgure as fctional “sites of memory” (Nora 7), which, in the act of being represented, challenge historical discourse, the literary canon, and the status quo. With this, Butler attempts to overcome the representational barrier established by history, getting past the “single story” (Adichie) to retell traumatic events invoking the past into the present. To do so, Butler enables time travel as an option for her black protagonist to repeatedly cross time and space, offering vistas into the continuity of a politics of alterity. Spatial boundaries are dissolved in science fction. Ideologies, unfortunately, are not. Thus, Butler’s characters face the most terrifying face of spatiality as they move between two shores that seem to have more in common than meets the eye. The modern world, epitomized by the American West, is perceived as an immobile landmark wherein technological progress takes place while the overall mind-set remains unaltered. In the act of crossing, Butler provides her protagonist with a liberating mobility. She allows Dana to reconnect with the untold stories of her past, expanding on the narrative and processing it as history. The science fctional ethos of the novel is, then, what enables trauma recovery, as it spatializes the protagonist’s unconscious into a dys-topos that forces her to reconsider her past in order to come to terms with her present. Lucie Armitt underlines the relevance of “border, boundaries and thresholds” in fantastic literature for their work as bridges between the normative and “the otherworldly” (7), the unsaid. In view of the discursive staticity of the nation, time travel becomes the only means to reconcile past and present, the norm and the unknown. This helps Dana access slavery and question notions of nation, West, and home. In his introduction to the novel, Crossley underlines the impossibility to write new slave memoirs (ix). He calls for the application of new literary paradigms that allow contemporary African American writers to retrieve

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voices and stories from the past. By blending faction with science fction, Kindred shifts this fctional paradigm, rendering history a narrative that can be challenged and reformulated from fctional space and memory, re-enacting a forgotten past.

Traumatic Memory in Kindred Kindred tells the story of Dana Franklin, an African American woman in her twenties who lives in California during the 1970s with her white husband Kevin. Unaware of the dangers concealed in the vision of the United States as a hospitable and heterogeneous land, Butler’s protagonists live what appears to be an ordinary life. Technological advancement, that is modernity, only serves to hide national hostile practices repeated over time. Violence has not only been normalized into social practice, it “has lost virtually every show-place” (Han 4–5), becoming a silent threat that hides underneath the surface of familiarity and alleged safety. But accepting that violence persists insinuates a different kind of torture, that of facing trauma and a lost record of time. Trauma awareness thus implies the recovery of repressed memories, but also a recognition of their persistence into the present, which involves a detachtment from chronological time. At the beginning of the novel, Dana’s life seems dull and slow paced, as if time was suspended or held in abeyance waiting for the unforeseen to happen. This early monotony epitomizes the characters’ unawareness of a shared past, their decision, maybe, not to retrieve memories and open old wounds. Yet it is in the contact zones, in the spaces where their black and white realities collide, that trauma is fully present. “We had never talked much,” says Dana, “about our families, about how his would react to me and mine to him. I hadn’t been aware of us avoiding the subject, but somehow, we’d never gotten around to it” (Butler 109). The characters’ inability to offer projections of future, mobilize their agency, or speak about important matters is indeed rooted in an adherence to an unrecognized traumatic scar that continues to defne relationality in modern America. And even as the aftermath of slavery is not directly tackled in the modern West setting, it reaches representation through its very absence. It points to a vacuum in need of reassessment and to the ideological steadiness of the country’s ideology. In Kindred, America remains static and so do the characters, stuck in a slow-motion reality waiting for memory to catch up with them. Ironically, memory does catch up, summoning characters back into unexplored pasts. At some point in the novel, Dana begins feeling “dizzy, nauseated” (13) and faints into the 1800s, where she has to save a young white boy, Rufus Weylin, from a most certain death drowning in a near river. Dana’s realization of her trespassing of temporal and spatial boundaries does not take place until she fnds an “unforgettable gun” (16) pointing at her. It is this threatening act right after saving Rufus that

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rouses her consciousness, producing the kind of uncertainty and fear that can trigger time travel in the novel. Back in Los Angeles, Dana has to accept the existence of a traumatic subworld able to create its “own limbo and h[o]ld [her] in it” (18); a belated traumatic memory she has so far managed to ignore. Dana’s frst experience of trauma is characterized by illocality, displacement, and a sense of numbness. She feels relocated into a spatiotemporal threshold where diffculties arise. Unable to recognize the place she travels to or the reason why she has landed there, Dana’s experience resembles physically the psychological reenactment of repressed memories. Illogical as it seems, she goes to a land that feels real. “As real as the whole episode was, as real as I know it was, it’s beginning to recede from me somehow. It’s becoming like something I saw on television or read about—like something I got second hand,” she affrms (Butler 17). Dana’s description of space questions the materiality of place itself, which could be read as an unconscious enactment of trauma in the form of nightmares (Freud 7, Caruth 59). Her perception of this event as a fading memory points to the intangibility of the site of memory, which, as Nora assures, is “where memory crystallizes and secretes itself” (7). Yet can memory be materialized as it is suppressed? And, if so, what are the implications of conjuring this symbolic space within the literary representation of the 1970s West? In Dana’s refection on her experience of the journey (and trauma and slavery by extension) one can fnd a resemblance between her understanding of mnemonic inheritance and Marianne Hirsch’s notion of “postmemory” (103). Dana’s identity seems construed through an inherited sense of trauma that she relives in the form of nightmares. Butler’s take on this intergenerational reception of memories is particularly interesting, as it tackles the issue of direct accountability by making her nonslave modern protagonist travel into a space where her blackness equals subjugation. Cultural transmission is established in spatial terms. When Dana travels, she undergoes a liminal transition of a spatial and personal kind. She enters a threshold that induces liminality, challenging her sense of belonging as much as her awareness of placeness. Dana’s rootedness in the monotony of Western life is thereby challenged in the act of traveling. Her involuntary mobility seems to activate a wider imaginary that makes her question all those aspects of her daily life she was not paying attention to before. Life in the West is therefore perceived through the prism of slave resilience, which gives meaning to ordinary acts that refect on political imaginaries previously unnoticed. Rooted in a symbolic space of fction, traumatic memories seem defned by abjection, which Kristeva defnes as a series of physical or identity traits that cause general aversion (3–4). The frst time Dana returns home, she does so covered in mud. She showers and changes, yet she does not feel comfortable again. Two core interpretations arise from this scene. On the one hand, the psychological imprint of trauma seems represented

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by an abject cover that water cannot soak, an unknown presence that “stay[s] with [her], shadowy and threatening” (18). On the other, once she has established contact with her slave roots, Dana’s home in the West turns into an ambivalent space that stores ambiguous feelings. The classic understanding of the home as the shelter of the dreamer (Bachelard 6) fades away as she is confronted with direct racial violence. The indirect forms of abuse she is subjected to in her present gain visibility after this event. The ideologies that play out on urban space are thus hinted at in an attempt to demonstrate the survival of exclusionary practices through a history of marginalization. As a survivor attempting to recollect repressed memories, Dana’s frst impression of time travel is tinged with doubt and conjecture. Both her and Kevin analyze her experience, concluding that her journey must have been a dream or a hallucination (17). The connection Butler establishes between the historical past Dana needs to revisit and the fantastic fabric of dreams (or nightmares in this case) renders past spaces not only fctional, but dystopian. In these uncomfortable sites, the political imaginary of the nation is mobilized (Harvey xvii) to make the characters aware of a past they have unconsciously ignored: the “blindness” of everyday practice, of walking without considering the networks and powers that construct the spaces we occupy (de Certeau 93), which in turn produces emotional distress and repressed trauma (Freud 7). The urban West morphs into a microcosmic representation of the nation-state, where acts of violence and containment go unnoticed, inducing fear and the traumatic reenactment of unacknowledged experience. Science fctional devices in Butler’s novel therefore acquire a double meaning. For, in crossing time and space, Dana faces a traumatic reality that would otherwise stay buried. She also becomes fully aware of the spatial practices that govern the present and the past, the East and the West. Dana’s frst contact with her inherited memories is laid out as a call for help from Rufus, her only white ancestor. The fact that her past reappears in the summoning of the white oppressor marks a history of abuse as well as the end of the latency period (Caruth 17). Dana’s liminality is further problematized when considering her role in the (hi)story of her community. As a traumatized subject, she engages in the “attempted avoidance of unpleasurable confict” that Cathy Caruth lays out as the basis of traumatic enactment (60). She experiences spatiality through a fear of reliving, losing the sense of comfort that the West initially bestowed onto her. Dana continues to answer Rufus’s calls for help, for she is forced to assist him in order to ensure her own existence. Featuring black humor, Butler arranges her narrative chronology making Dana’s birth be reliant on Rufus’s rape of her black ancestor Alice. With this complicated ploy, the novel raises questions on the possibility of coming to terms with trauma by voicing those stories not compiled in history, actively incorporating the self into them. It also hints at the alienation of a mixed-race identity, which, in

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the case of black Americans, implies accepting that some ancestors might have acted as oppressors too. All these complex affects are introduced in the story through the familiar bond between Dana and Rufus. Family ties are particularly signifcant in the understanding of space, identity, and trauma in Kindred as they intersect with the alienating views of the home(land) Butler aims to present. Hinted in its very title, Kindred questions family structures and leaves the reader wondering where to locate the characters’ homely shelters. The family becomes a reduction of American society, applying power constructions to control the protagonists’ lives. The binary opposition between blacks and whites to be found in the slave plantation speaks of a biopolitics that shapes the existence of African Americans, depriving them of a space for self-development. Dana’s uncertainty regarding the reaction of Kevin’s family to her hints at the survival of such discriminatory practices fusing past and present into a history that does not recognize trauma, further aggravating survivors’ distress. Even when (some) rights of black individuals seem to be recognized in the novel’s modern West, residual forms of racism can be easily traced. Dana’s questioning of the presumptions Kevin’s family might make points to the survival of these exclusionary politics covertly at work. Los Angeles, representative of the U.S. West in the story, of progress, becomes a space where Dana can no longer feel at home. Haunted by the incertitude of trauma and forced to reassess her previous views of the West, she remains emotionally homeless, a transtemporal nomad occupying a space where no identifcation whatsoever is bound to occur. It is only when she interacts with her past, understands her kinship bonds, and addresses historical trauma that she can build spaces of identifcation, connecting with her community and returning to her ancestral home to fnd closure. Though Dana normally time travels alone, her husband Kevin accompanies her in one of her journeys. It is interesting to see how Kevin’s perception of the horror of slavery is not as traumatic or shocking. Whereas he considers plantation conditions milder than expected, Dana is transfxed and deeply hurt by that same vision. Their divergent reactions illustrate Butler’s understanding of race relations in the United States. Kevin’s incapacity to initially empathize with the horrid scenario of antebellum Maryland refects on his position of power and his detachment from the precariousness surrounding slaves. And even when he is not presented as an insensitive character, his incapacity to identify common ground and responsibilities between others and himself (Ricoeur 203) points to an ethical indifference in need of deconstruction. Kevin’s incapacity to empathize with the slaves is the logical corollary of a canonical representation of history. Because the experiences of slaves have never been accounted for, Kevin’s understanding of slavery seems based on social mythologies. Myths that interfere and impede trauma recovery. Butler challenges her reader’s perception with Kevin’s

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unexpected lack of sensibility to raise awareness on the dangers of narrative absence. She also tests social biases with Dana’s impossible fate. Dana is at a crossroads, forced to decide between hurting black slaves and live, or letting their master die and never be born. Thembile West summarizes her dilemma, stating that “Butler positions the competing demands of self-preservation and personal integrity versus community survival and kinship ties in an unsettling mix illuminated by uncontrollable time travel, enslavement and interracial partnership,” establishing parallelisms between nineteenth- and twentieth-century America (72). And yet, Dana’s choice is circumscribed by considerable symbolism that should be approached as a metaphor of generational trauma survival. For Dana, facing past brutality equals a journey of historical reconnection and self-discovery. Even as she is allowing the rape of her friend and ancestor, Dana is not betraying her community. She might enable racial violence, but she is in no way indifferent to it. Her part in history cannot be oversimplifed by claiming that she is playing Judas. As Yaszel maintains, Dana is “not simply [taking part] on the wrong side of history, but [actually being] trapped and maimed by a history stranger and crueler than [she] had been taught to imagine” (1053). The metaphorical readings of Butler’s generational trauma escalate under this light. Not only is she implying that mythifcation of any sort can be dangerous and misinform future generations of black Americans, leaving them unprepared to face trauma, but she is also stating that for postmemory generations to endure, a reenactment of horror must be embodied. In trying to save her life, Dana represents a modern generation of African Americans that, defamiliarized with their heritage, need to relive the past in order to come to terms with it. To do so, they must expand and experience traumatic narratives in order to relocate them in their consciousness, which can only be done as one works through the pain of acknowledging authentic horror. The tangibility of Dana’s decision is, once again, a side effect of Butler’s application of science fction, which materializes the dys-topos of traumatic nightmares into literary spaces that resemble real spaces. Dana’s embodies represents the intersection of gender and ethnicity too. As Salvaggio contends, Octavia Butler’s science fction is a part of the new scenario, featuring strong female protagonists who shape the course of social events. [. . .] Her heroines are black women who inhabit racially mixed societies [and] inevitably, the situations these women confront involve the dynamic interplay of race and sex in futuristic worlds. (78) As a twentieth-century black woman, Dana has some trouble adjusting to her role as a slave. She demands modern conducts that are not granted to slaves or women, needless to mention slave women, in antebellum

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Maryland. She therefore judges the past from her modern frame of reference, shaping her perception of the slave plantation from a modern viewpoint (Lacroix 111). This allows Butler to spot differences between both centuries, but also to establish a connection and study the ways in which “the present is implied by the past” and vice versa (111). Being deprived of her recently earned rights as a woman and as a black individual, Dana fnds herself experiencing slavery and adopting survival tactics in order to ensure her well-being. “What else can I do?” she argues, “I’ve got to try, Kevin, and if trying means taking small risks and putting up with small humiliations now so that I can survive later, I’ll do it” (83). The fact that Dana has to repress her identity and agency in order to survive points to the liminality of the space she inhabits, which wavers between the modern and the démodé, drawing parallelisms between them both. Her liminal condition points to the opposition between the “subjugation of women and feminism, rape versus the right to say no, submission versus self-defense, separatism versus integration” (West 72). Salvaggio expands this notion, pointing out the power in different social structures. She introduces social taxonomies and personal relationships as examples of the institutional structures that legitimize sexism and racism (79). And wherever there is sexism, there is violence. In the form of physical, psychological, and emotional abuse, gender violence pervades the plantation and the lives of slave women. Perceived as an object (of desire), Dana is the partial exception in this novel. Dana represents the entrance of the present into the past, which grants her the privilege of not being perpetually tied to the plantation. Her mobility confers some freedom upon her. As Butler centers the narrative in the female experience of horror, she mobilizes the cult of domesticity that characterized women’s lives throughout the nineteenth century, a cultural practice Dana does not participate in. While black slave women establish kinship bonds and raise (broken) families, Butler’s protagonist remains homeless, stateless even, in the story. A permanent outsider. A transtemporal fâneuse. Armitt proposes that “if fantasy is about being absent from home [. . .], then the inhabitant of the fantastic is always the stranger” (Theorizing 8). In this sense, Dana’s presence indicates an outsideness that resembles the reader’s one, who accesses fantastic lands and is faced with uncomfortable historical truths about history. Having performed otherness in faraway lands, Dana and Kevin are shaped by their experience of the plantation, and so is their understanding of space. The initial distribution based on social mythologies that deemed the West a refuge from Eastern wilderness is undone in the characters’ reliving of history. Just as they cross temporal boundaries, Dana and Kevin refgure their identities and develop a new understanding of the spaces they occupy. This leads them to return to Maryland in the present to fnd closure to the plantation story in the incorporation of traumatic memories into a reassembled narrative sequence (Vickroy 177).

94 Paula Barba Guerrero The healing from trauma in Butler’s novel is, yet, defned by physical embodiment characteristic of Kristevan abjection. Dana’s physical reactions to horror (sweating, feeling urged to vomit) give concrete new meaning to the “return of the repressed” (Caruth 13) in literature. Testimonial narrative, in Butler’s view, must challenge the preconceptions of the reader from his or her understanding of history to the expected effects of “reading and writing about the past” (Parham 1323). Or, as Laurie Vickroy puts it, trauma fction must “enlist their readers to become witnesses to” stories that open non-conventional routes into the past (20), that make the unsaid visible. In Kindred, the act of reading becomes self-referential. Just as Dana learns that reading is not allowed in the plantation because it might give slaves freedom, Butler’s reader is enthralled (27–28) by the existence of non-integrated visions of America’s past based on memory, which the novel offers. Once traumatic memories are revisited, Dana’s escape from the realm of nightmares is granted. However, although she returns to California to never come back, she gets physically attached to Maryland, losing her arm in the process. Dana’s dismemberment hints at the impossibility to detach ourselves from our roots, at the futurelessness of cultural amnesia. This new underside of memory is based on the need not to forget that to recover from trauma, a sacrifce was required. That it is from the re-membrance of past memories that we tell the stories of what was lost. In Kindred, sites of memory are repeatedly juxtaposed. California is presented as a modern locus where, thanks to the infuence of the 1960s political movements, black characters can (theoretically) fnd a home of their own. However, this mythical picture turns out to be a mirage, and it is not until Dana travels backward that she becomes aware of the systemic oppression that (b)orders social space, repressing subaltern stories. The sense of identity, directly tied to this homeness, can only be acquired once the protagonist has unlearned historical bias and approached her community’s past. In Kindred, time is experienced in the horizontal axis of space. As such, moving East implies rewinding, going backward in time and in memory. Butler’s understanding of time and space complicates Dana’s process of healing, as she is repeatedly located on thresholds, exposing a borderland identity. The traumatic struggle to fnd a space of belonging is defned by this liminality, then, which can only be crossed and overcome once the ghosts from the past have become familiar faces. For Butler, the West and the plantation are refections of the same ideological mind-set infecting spatial practice as “parasites of the mind” (Charcot in Rikvin & Ryan 492) that foster a cyclic repetition of the past. It is only in the recognition of their harmful aftereffects that this cycle of violence and misrepresentation can be stopped, turning the subaltern subject into the center of attention.

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Relational Reading: New Narratives of Healing Cross-cultural infuences have been happening everywhere in the United States for centuries. They are the main reason why the country is perceived as the epitome of social mixing and cultural blending. Yet the sociopolitical relations established between its different communities seem to point to insurmountable differences inherent to the development and distribution of space and power inside the nation-state. In Butler’s work, historical representation is introduced as one of those rights denied to the subaltern. Kindred pinpoints Derridean “hostipitality” (5)—conditional hospitality characterized by invisible power structures—in the United States from its ancient past as a slave-trade country to a post–Civil War setting wherein less visible sociopolitical frictions take place. It establishes an alternative her-story that bears witness to the many atrocities committed against black Americans and opens a fctional space to heal in the form of narrative hospitality. Butler’s America is perceived as an inhospitable land where the white male majority refuses to deem social accountability necessary. Instead, an invisible power structure reproducing violence is sustained. Both past and present Americas are deemed hostile in Butler’s fctional world—rooted in her personal experiencing of U.S. politics. By refecting on socioethical negligence in the novel, Butler refects on social myopia, the incapacity to recognize hurtful pasts. The United States thus fgures as a space mired in cultural amnesia. It is perceived as a country incapable of acknowledging historical trauma. This social denial, Judith Butler argues, is rooted in the belief that some lives are more valuable than others (Precarious 35), that some deserve representation—history—and others do not. In her own words, “if there were to be an obituary, there would have had to have been a life, a life worth noting, a life worth valuing and preserving, a life that qualifes for recognition” (34), but that does not seem to be the case. Historical representation is a conditional right exclusively granted to those who belong to certain social groups. And yet in Kindred, Dana becomes an agent who abandons the historical position of forcible guest to voice her story, act it out, and work through its painful aftereffects. Butler’s protagonist seems haunted by her unacknowledged, unnarrated story, which reappears in the form of repressed memories rooted in a nightmarish site: the plantation. In this space, Dana faces the diffculties of slavery as she tries to ensure her birth. Burdened with the responsibility of guaranteeing her own existence at her ancestor’s expense, Dana accesses a liminal threshold representative of her own in-betweenness. She belongs neither in the present nor in the past and is therefore without a demarcated space to call home. Her split identity is physically enacted as Dana time travels to come to terms with trauma. As she travels to the place where her traumatic memories are stored, Dana revisits canonical history, setting out relational paths among the characters that make visible

96 Paula Barba Guerrero social hierarchies that silently pervade space. Being an alien in the past, the supernatural ascribed to her identity balances out Dana’s blackness in the eyes of Rufus, which paves the way for new forms of social relationality. In Kindred, Dana’s relation with Rufus is based on each other’s recognition of the other’s vulnerability. He locates her in the realm of the supernatural and ties her to the plantation. She repeatedly saves him, defating his normative superiority and highlighting his fallibility. It is not until Dana realizes that her vulnerability has an agentic potential (Butler, “Rethinking” 23) that she is able to exit the traumatic threshold and restore some semblance of identity and rootedness. Dana’s presence is a transtemporal intrusion that rewrites the historical narrative sequence pointing to the plausible combination of history and speculative fction. It is through science fction that Dana physically embodies the traumatic cosmos, burdened with a new responsibility to make the reader think. The need to ensure her lineage becomes traumatic in itself, as it turns her against people she cares for and with whom she feels identifed. Dana’s vulnerability thus resides in her own historical inaction, only allowing her to overcome traumatic anxiety once her alleged fragility has been reclaimed through action. Though she travels back in time, Dana cannot afford to change the past, being forced to witness the violence exerted over her ancestors. Butler’s representation of historical trauma is thereby ingrained in the spatiality of painful experiences. Drawing on the different stages of trauma recovery, she sets her protagonist in the physical world of her nightmares only to reconsider the subversive impact of narrative representation: Dana is alienated and ghettoized in present and past Americas, obliged to come to terms with the harsh, life-threatening reality of slavery, without being able to repress or ignore its aftermath. Yet in her fnal stabbing of Rufus, she seizes control, redefning herself as agentic. Despite the corporeal loss of her arm, Dana’s return to Maryland once in the present proclaims a desire to know her heritage. Traumatic memories are no longer a burden, but powerful stories re-membered and shared in literature. In an interview with Frances Beale, Butler explains how an editor once told her that the only reason to include a black in a novel would be “to write about some sort of racial problem” (qtd. in Beale 18). Aware of the dangers of this racialized vision, Butler retells history from the perspective of a black woman who learns about her horrifc past and processes it at the same pace as her reader. Reading thus becomes a relational practice that, in this novel, turns narrative into a healing device from the inside out. In order to come to terms with traumatic scars, minoritized communities in North America require authentic representations of the atrocities committed against them, a historical account of the past. Yet as their stories are not included in his-story, the cultural pain stored in the form of memories ought to be passed on to following generations, who will bear

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the traumatic burden of events they have not experienced frsthand and struggle to understand. In an attempt to overcome the representational impasse in which the nation seems to be submerged, Octavia Butler challenges the indifference of contemporary readers, reclaiming voices and spaces from the past that can decode dangerous mythologies. When trying to recover a past once lost, Butler chooses to adhere to science fctional patterns that allow her to question the veracity of different canonical discourses. From history to literature, her new narrative of healing opens up spaces of culture and memory where the community’s traumatic wounds can be fully learned and healed.

Conclusion Kindred tells the story of a black heroine able to recover from traumatic wounds as she recuperates her community’s stories; a science fctional stranger encouraged to sacrifce her corporeality as symbolic proof of our need to react, read, question, and care about voices historically silenced. It also presents literature as an act of spatial production in which canonical designs of history can be challenged. In the novel, white male characters repeatedly deny Dana the opportunity to (teach others how to) read. Understood as a symbolic attempt to protect the mythical order of historical canon, this prohibition hides an institutional structure that bans the existence of relational spaces. Only certain voices are expected to be heard in this story, only certain characters are allowed to seek freedom. Butler’s shift in the literary paradigm is expected to work as an empathetic device. It is aimed at waking her reader up, making her or him aware of the need to go beyond romanticized versions of historical horror. Reading becomes an act of insurrection that elicits emotional responses. It opens one’s eyes to realities that national doctrines attempt to suppress. It is the medium through which Dana “bounces back” into her past, transcending spatial and temporal barriers to break cyclic violence and oppressive history. Time traveling thereby becomes an equalizer in spatial terms, which establishes parallels between the West and the antebellum East in order to rewrite spaces of modernity. Only in the artistic production of California as Dana’s actual home by the end of the book does her working through historical trauma seem complete. If we can reconsider history through fctional sites, then it is in the acknowledgment of other stories, of other spaces that narratives and literature open up, that the victims of the past can be vindicated, their suffering paid tribute, and their offspring represented. In merging “the slave narrative” genre with science fction, Octavia Butler manages to reclaim a representational space for those ghost stories that are still not compiled. The “historical ghost” stops being a mere guest in her story and becomes agent and mobilizer of an ontological change toward true social ethics and authentic hospitality. As Kindred

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offers vistas into the reproductive system of hostility that follows the subaltern inside the United States, it redefnes the notion of individual movement (now perceived as the ability to cross time and space in order to come to terms with transgenerational trauma). Movement becomes a metaphorical act of memory that underlines the similarities between past and present, identifying common relational patterns. The correlation of present and past points to the continuity of violent practices and hostile behaviors against the Other, but also to the existence of a myriad of alternative pasts in need of reassessment. And as canonical history will not tell those stories, authors must rely on science fction to set them forth. In Kindred, crossing narrative boundaries allows for a new form of slave memoir in which reading becomes the key to heal from historical trauma, reunite communities, and debunk spatial mythologies in an attempt to re-member together, characters and readers, in an act of agonic exposure that reconciles history and memory and integrates them as one.

Note 1. The research carried out for the writing of this chapter has been co-funded by the Junta de Castilla y León and the European Social Fund (Operational Programme 2014–2020 for Castilla y León). This work has also been supported by the Erasmus+ research project “Hospitality in European Film” Ref. No. 2017–1-ES01-KA203–038181 and by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness through the research project “Critical History of Ethnic American Literature: An Intercultural Approach” Ref. No. FFI2015–6413P.

Works Cited Adichie, Chimamanda. “The Danger of a Single Story.” TED, July 2009, Lecture. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer. Stanford UP, 1998. Armitt, Lucie. Theorizing the Fantastic. Arnold, 1996. ———. Where No Man Has Gone Before: Women and Science Fiction. Routledge, 1991. Bachelard, Gaston. Poetics of Space. Beacon Press, 1994. Beal, Frances. “Black Women and the Science Fiction Genre: An Interview with Octavia Butler.” Black Scholar, vol. 17, no. 2, 1986, pp. 14–18. Butler, Judith. Precarious Life. Verso, 2004. ———. “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance.” Vulnerability in Resistance, edited by Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti and Leticia Sabsay, Duke UP, 2016, pp. 12–27. Butler, Octavia E. Kindred. Beacon Press, 1979. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience. Johns Hopkins UP, 1996. Crossley, Robert. “Introduction.” Kindred, Beacon Press, 1979, pp. ix–xxvii. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. The U of California P, 1984. Derrida, Jacques. “Hostipitality.” Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, vol. 5, no. 3, 2000, pp. 3–18.

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Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Translated by James Strachey, Norton & Company, 1961. Han, Byung-Chul. Topology of Violence. MIT Press, 2018. Harvey, David. Rebel Cities. Verso, 2012. Hirsch, Marianne. “The Generation of Postmemory.” Poetics Today, vol. 29, no. 1, 2008, pp. 103–128. Kristeva, Julia. The Horrors of Power. Columbia UP, 1982. LaCroix, David. “The Implicity of Past and Present in Octavia E. Butler’s ‘Kindred’.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 40, no. 1, Spring 2007, pp. 109–119. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Blackwell, 1991. Manzanas, Ana Mª and Jesús Benito. Hospitality in American Literature and Culture. Routledge, 2017. Nora, Pierre. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations, vol. 26, 1989, pp. 7–24. Ricoeur, Paul. Oneself as Another. The U of Chicago P, 1995. Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan, editors. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Salvaggio, Ruth. “Octavia Butler and the Black Science-Fiction Heroine.” Black American Literature Forum, vol. 18, no. 2, Summer 1984, pp. 78–81. Thacker, Robert. “Introduction: No Catlin without Kane; or Really Understanding the ‘American’ West.” One West, Two Myths: Essays on Comparison, edited by C.L. Highmam and Robert Thacker, U of Calgary P, 2006, pp. ix–xiii. Vickroy, Laurie. Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction. U of Virginia P, 2002. West, Thembile. “The Competing Demands of Community Survival and SelfPreservation in Octavia Butler’s Kinded.” FEMSPEC, vol. 7, no. 2, 2006, pp. 72–86. Yaszek, Lisa. “‘A Grim Fantasy’: Remaking American History in Octavia Butler’s Kindred.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 28, no. 4, 2003, pp. 1053–1066.

Part 2

The West Travels Across Boundaries

2.1

Continental Journeys

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“New Blood Time Now” The American West in Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings Neil Campbell “[E]very time you reach the edge, the edge move ahead of you like a shadow until the whole world is a ghetto, and you wait.” (James 8) “Beneath every history, there is another history.” (Mantel)

Marlon James’s Booker Prize–winning novel A Brief History of Seven Killings (2014) remembers and utilizes the lengthy tradition of Jamaican flm, music, and literature fascinated by the American West from The Harder They Come (both the Perry Henzell/Trevor Rhone flm and its novelization by Michael Thelwell), through reggae’s and dancehall’s consistent “use” of Western themes and motifs.1 According to Louis Sude-Chokei, The Harder They Come is “about westerns and about America—or more precisely, about how America imagines itself and how those on the fringes of its projections re-imagined it while simultaneously re-imagining themselves through it” (Sude-Chokei 147). In an early scene just such a “reimagining” occurs “on the fringes,” when, after watching Sergio Corbucci’s Spaghetti Western Django in the rowdy Rialto Theater in Kingston, aspiring reggae singer Ivanhoe “Rhygin” Martin (Jimmy Cliff) transforms from naïve country “bwoy” to rogue, rude, boy cop-killer.2 In Thelwell’s novelization, he describes Ivan’s response to the Western as “simple, direct, and clear, a world with a sense of honor in which unfolded a story of justice and righteous retribution . . . where justice once aroused, was more elemental and deadly than all the hordes of evil” (Thelwell 148–149). Through “memory and mimicry” (ibid. 194) of such Westerns, Ivanhoe establishes a mythic template for “Johnny-Too-Bad” (ibid. 231)—simple, direct, and clear—dispensing “elemental and deadly” justice: “He saw himself as a calm, cold-eyed and very cunning desperado outsmarting posses and search parties” (ibid., 342). Ivanhoe establishes the badman fantasy of Jamaican popular culture, striking the pose against “Babylon” (police and authority) that would haunt generations and help explain the extraordinary lasting and fexible infuence of the Western on this period and beyond. Michael Thompson (aka Freestylee), the

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Jamaican graphic artist born in Jones Town, Kingston, remembers the atmosphere surrounding this period: [T]hese Spaghetti flms played out on the big screen week after week, double bill and triple bill movies were dished out . . . to a very animated and boisterous audience. . . . [Who] would watch the movies as if they were actors in the movie; dodging bullets and urging on their “star bwoy” hero and cursing the bad guys as fools. . . . Many Jamaicans at the time could recite word for word of their favourite “Star Bwoy” as if they studied the script themselves. It was not unusual to have a fan tell the entire movie with sound effects to go along for the imagination. These westerns were so popular that Ska and Rocksteady musicians at the time would make songs singing praises of their favourite Spaghetti stars like Lee Van Cleef. (Thompson—italics added) The critical phrase, “as if they studied the script themselves,” reinforces the hypnotic, performative pull of these Westerns, demonstrating how they insinuated their way into the everyday lives of Jamaicans in the 1970s, informing self-defnition while providing new symbols for resistance and anticolonial sentiment. The continued and consequent reimagining of this “script” of westness is central to this chapter. Against this discourse of mythic westness within James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings there is a counter-force or friction at work as well, bringing the world with all its sharp-edged awkwardness into a brutal collision with Jamaican culture. This worlding process is a necessary critical practice enacting “openings of time and consciousness to other values and multiple modes of being, projection, and survival” (Wilson, “Worlding Asia” 8), rather like the tumultuous and multiple encounters of A Brief History. This is best explained by the fctional Rolling Stone journalist Alexander Pierce: “Shit doesn’t happen in a void, there’re ripples and consequences and even with all that there’s still a whole fucking world going on, whether you’re doing something or not” (James 671—italics added). There is indeed a world going on in the novel, which on its surface circulates around and radiates out from the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1976.3 This eddying world of reactions, responses, and ramifcations links relationships and events of the novel to a still wider scope of histories of colonialism, neocolonialism, and postcolonialism; Cold War anticommunism; Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) destabilization; the global trade of narcotics and the so-called “war on drugs”; the spread of neoliberalism; and, ultimately, to a commentary on how history is written and by whom. As one reads across the novel’s polyphonic form of multiple and woven voices ranging from Jamaican gangsters, to CIA operatives, to journalists, to innocent bystanders, a mood emerges akin to that described by Zeese

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Papanikolas as “American Silence,” the sense of a haunted, melancholic nation, “a kind of longing, a sense of something lost, lost perhaps even at the moment of gaining it, and possibly irretrievable” (Papanikolas 19). The equivalent haunting myth in Jamaica is of an island paradise made possible through postindependence prosperity, peace, and opportunity but here disrupted by crime, corruption, violence, and political interference. James establishes this mood by his use of a ghostly narrator, Sir Arthur George Jennings, a murdered politician functioning as a Greek chorus framing the book’s events through its opening line, “Listen. Dead people never stop talking” (James 1). His voice, according to James, provides the novel’s “connective tissue,” seeing “a far bigger context” while tying together its many strands with a “singular voice conscious of the passage of time” and able “to speak to the dream of a kind of Jamaica that was possible. The Jamaica of the early-to mid-1960s gave no indication of what the 1970s would be like . . . [Jennings] represents a kind of Jamaica—a failed Jamaica that could’ve happened but was literally snuffed out” (Fraser podomatic; Hudsell—italics added). Jennings’s memory traverses Jamaican history seeing the long duration of “New World expansion” and “exceptional violence” (Thomas 3), leading to the actions of the novel in the 1970s and beyond; from “bloody longcoats” to “Rudeboys’ bodies exploding like pricked balloons,” because “Time doesn’t stop” and the “world [is] still spinning” (James 2–3). Jennings understands the temporal fow confronting Jamaica and the impossibility of its retreat from the world’s messiness into a static, paradisal image. Indeed, later in the novel Jennings describes the “bigger context” of a circum-Caribbean drug trade and its ever-increasing global reach echoing back to the “failed Jamaica” lamented by James: “Colombia, Jamaica, Bahamas, Miami . . . D.C., Detroit, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago. Buy guns, sell powder, when building monsters don’t be surprised when they become monstrous. New riders, new posse the likes of which they have never seen” (600).4 Amid this transnational crime collage, Jennings, too, cannot help but evoke the relentless iconography of the Western, of “new riders, new posse,” as if drawing the parallel the novel constantly makes between Jamaican history and that of the Wild West. This sense of a failed Jamaica is also emphasized through the comments of imprisoned gangster Tristan Phillips following the collapse of the Jamaican peace movement in the late 1970s after the turbulent electoral battles of Michael Manley and Edward Seaga5: “People was just hopeful enough and tired enough and fed up enough and dreaming enough that something could’a really happen” (568). Phillips describes a black and white portrayal of Jamaica in the press and suggests that such a limited palette failed to convey the nation’s complexity and possibility, because, as he puts it, continuing the metaphor, “we already did have colour and lose it. That’s kinda like Jamaica. . . . We did have good times and then it go to shit” (568–569). This chapter examines how James employs references to

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the American West throughout his novel, like Jennings’s “new riders, new posse,” as a way of critiquing the limitations of such a static “black and white portrayal” of Jamaican society, while creating an alternative, layered narrative that complicates, or “colors,” such a mythic framework. As Demus puts it appositely, using the patois that dominates the novel, “West Kingston turn into the Wild West and every man turn into cowboy” (107). Discussing the infuences on his novel, James makes the link back to both The Harder They Come and the Western, explaining: Jamaican gunmen were hugely infuenced by most of the Clint Eastwood westerns but also The Dirty Dozen. . . . Eastwood provided this archetype, this sort of badman archetype . . . keep quiet, carry a big gun, and it also added visuals to the kind of cowboy mythology which is crucial to reggae music. We learned storytelling from Marty Robbins and Tennessee Ernie Ford and so on. You go into any Jamaican household there’ll be Tennessee Ernie Ford hymns . . . Elvis Presley’s Peace in the Valley . . . Marty Robbins’s Gunfghter [Ballads and Trail Songs] about. So the archetype of the gunman came from the gunslinger. (James with Salman Rushdie Podcast) Pierce, one of the many narrators, explains the signifcance of Robbins: Every Jamaican can sing and every Jamaican learned to sing from the same songbook. Marty Robbins’s Gunfghter Ballads. Grab the collar of even the most top-ranking rudie and say El Paso, and he’ll followup in a perfect croon. . . . It’s the Homo erectus of Jamaican guntalk, where anything you want to know about Kingston’s green versus orange war, everything you ever need to know about the rudeboycum-gunman is not in Bob Marley’s lyrics or in Peter Tosh’s but in Marty Robbins’s “Big Iron.” (83–84, italics in the original) Pierce is trying to write about the gang wars of the 1970s in West Kingston, and above all, to understand the events surrounding the attempted assassination of reggae superstar Marley (“the Singer”) at his own home (referred to in the novel as “O.K. Corral” 399).6 As a writer and an outsider (Pierce is white and American), his role in the novel is partly to provide context for events that, in many ways, cannot be easily contextualized, for this is a post-postcolonial battleground of domestic politics, international Cold War tensions, and gang territorialism. As James’s comments and Pierce’s explanation suggest, there is, however, a disjunction in this use of Western mythology between the relative sentimentality implied by the Ford/Presley/Robbins axis and the raw “guntalk” violence of the posses at large in Kingston’s shantytowns. It is as if the traditional heroic

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gunfghter image (black and white—to continue the metaphor) referred to in these songs might still defne the roles of gang members and “shotta [shooter] dons” in West Kingston as they once had defned John Wayne’s cowboys or Robbins’s tragic gunmen dying for love (“El Paso”), the inevitable violence of circumstance as in “Billy the Kid” (“When Billy the Kid was a very young lad / In old Silver City he went to the bad”), or the troubled gunfghter of “Running Gun” whose “nights began to haunt me by the men that I left dead.” It is as if these timeless mythic images provided a “script” for the performance of criminality in the lives of these would-be Caribbean cowboys, for, as Laurie Gunst puts it, recalling Ivanhoe Martin, even “though the movies didn’t necessarily engender the violence, they framed it; they gave it style” (9). As James explains, These are boys with no fathers. These are boys with no sort of masculine role model, so they take it from Hollywood movies, they take it from the Gunfghter Ballads’ music. We love ballads, that is why a badman will listen to Celine Dion. Violent people love sentimentality because violence is a kind of sentimentality, too. (Escoffery)7 These contradictions between violence and sentimentality are exhibited in A Brief History’s don of Copenhagen City (Tivoli in West Kingston), Papa-Lo, based on the gang leader Claude Massop, upon whose death Jamaican newspaper the Gleaner wrote: “Massop is part of a legend of the Wild West. . . . He survived to become, in the tradition of Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and Wild Bill Hickok, a gunslinger putting his sinister skills and reputation at the service of the people” (Gunst 108). In the novel, Pierce is writing of “the gunmen of Wild West Kingston” while understanding that “A western needs a hero for the white hat and a villain for the black . . . the truth, ghetto wisdom is closer to what Paul McCartney said about Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. It’s all dark” (84). In other words, the broad moral clarity associated with myth is much murkier on the streets of West Kingston, and nothing is quite what it seems in the tale Pierce tries to tell, since the typical binary romance of the Western typifed in Robbins’s songs—good vs. bad, white vs. black, cowboys vs. Indians, justice vs injustice, etc.—is persistently disrupted by actual Jamaican lived experience. Thus, the Hollywood Western appears increasingly remote from the brutal reality of Jamaican society in the 1970s, where “posse men mark a pattern in the zinc with bullet” (449). As if accentuating this point, one of the novel’s central criminal fgures is Josey Wales, a direct reference to Clint Eastwood’s character in the flm The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) and to reggae DJ Josey Wales (b. Joseph Winston Sterling) whose frst album was The Outlaw (1983). In the novel Wales is an ambitious and ruthless killer, aiming to be the

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“don of all dons” (44), extending his power base from Kingston out into the world, working with anyone who might aid his journey.8 In this entangled world, though, the mythology of the Old West becomes a performance or a “pose,” like the girl Josey Wales describes “like she’s Jimmy Cliff in The Harder They Come” (41), or the “act” he puts on to fool the CIA talking “like some bush naigger” while asking dumb questions like “Why don’t you transfer Dirty Harry to the Jamaica branch?” (44). As Bam-Bam, a teenage shotta and one of Wales’s would-be assassins recalls, remembering the gunshot that killed his father, it was “not like the pow in cowboy movie and not like when Harry Callahan fre, but one big sharp pap that shake the room” with “the echo going on so long it don’t end with the movie” (13, 39). In fact, as the novel increasingly testifes, real violence resonates way beyond the performance of men like Josey Wales, not ending with the movie or contained by its constructed script, but reverberating painfully through the complex histories of Jamaican families, society, and the nation’s relations with the world. The scripted reality of old Westerns offers a stylish mythic framework to Jamaican gangsters, like Josey Wales, schooled on Hollywood and U.S. TV, who justifes his criminality as simply as the plot of the TV Western Alias Smith and Jones: “like them big scheme you watch on TV where Hannibal Heyes and Kid Curry stick up a bank and still get the sexy girl” (24). Or as if confusing real life with what they watch in the cinema to the extent that “every time Clint Eastwood shoot up a boy Josey Wales sing people are you ready? We sing Bow! Oh Lord, and shoot up the screen till all we see is hole and smoke” (75). In Pierce’s words, explaining this illusionary relationship between Westerns and Jamaican posses, “Every sufferah is a cowboy without a house and every street has gun battle written in blood in a song somewhere. . . . It’s the grabbing of a myth and making it theirs, like a reggae singer dropping new lyrics ‘pon di old version” (84). Chude-Sokei writes that it is as if Jamaicans “dub” the American Western by taking original materials and “carnivalizing” them, or as Pierce said, “grabbing a myth and making it theirs,” until what arises is an “American western run through the West Kingston echo-chamber to emerge as an icon of its own negation as well as an allegory of the violence of freedom” (Chude-Sokei 166). This violence of freedom within the Western relates to earlier uses of its iconography, such as in The Harder They Come, where it speaks of an outlaw resistance to colonial power, which Jimmy Cliff himself once referred to as an “act of defance . . . like some sort of Robin Hood situation, with the rudies standing up for the oppressed” (Bradley 185). Ivanhoe (with its heroic echo to Walter Scott’s myth) becomes, if only temporarily, an allegorical fgure of resistance and empowerment, “a desperado of the imagination” (Thelwell 203); confdent, assertive, brash, and feared, indeed, everything Wales longs to replicate in A Brief History. At the end of his frst chapter, Wales states: “I going take care of a few people. The next day I goin’ take care of the world” (44), as if

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reinforcing Chude-Sokei’s double sense of freedom and negation, whereby images of the Western provide a source of confdent empowerment while simultaneously sounding a warning note of limits and excesses. As Anna Tsing reminds us, “Frontiers energize old fantasies, even as they embody their impossibilities” (Tsing, 29). Throughout James’s novel, the complicated trajectories of West Kingston, mired in the messy politics of neocolonialism, cannot be easily organized into linear plots and happy endings of “old version” movies or simple ballads, and instead become increasingly “negated” in the face of violent power struggles. Bam-Bam realizes, “That shit come from movie” (254), and another henchman, Tony Pavarotti, after failing to hang an enemy, claims “This is cowboy movie fault,” because people assume death by hanging is straightforward, having seen it in old Westerns, orchestrated to happen “as soon as the music stop,” when in truth, it is chaotic and awkward—“hanging where the neck don’t snap can take a long, long time” (355). Put more bluntly, but with a similarly dark comic tone, “only movie motherfuckers can run and shoot straight” (556). As Weeper, the closeted gay gangster, puts it, “Think like a movie. This part you put on your clothes, boy wake up (but boy would be girl) and one of you say babe, I gotta go. Or stay in bed and do the whatever, the sheet at the man waist but right at the woman breast. Never going to be a movie with a scene like this bedroom ever. Don’ know” (447). As we have seen, this emphasis on thinking like a movie is present everywhere in the novel, but like Wales’s stated aim of taking care of the world, it is a dangerous and limited illusion, which James reveals by undermining its mythic frames as mere performance. In doing this, he simultaneously discloses that the real power taking care of the world always lies somewhere else, in Cuba, Colombia, or the United States, and in others’ hands, haunting the narrative like restless, elusive ghosts. Such specters of power emerge as considerable American infuence, which although once representing freedom, democracy, and anticolonialism, now are a more sinister refashioning of neoliberal frontierism. James has spoken of how when growing up he felt less of a dialogue with the “Mother Country” (i.e., the UK) since, “most of us, if we were colonised . . . were colonised mentally and economically by the US” (McKenzie). Jamaica appears as another “covert rather than overt” (Harvey New, 48) frontier of U.S. cultural expansion through A Brief History’s utilizing of the Western and Hollywood and dramatizing how “predation politics” (Gray 359), capital accumulation, and state-sponsored violence follow: “boys like me,” Bam-Bam says, “can’t read Dick and Jane but know Coca-Cola” (James 8). As Kim Clarke comments in the novel about such power, “I love how Americans can just claim something to be whatever they feel it is, despite clear evidence it’s not. Like a football game with nobody using any feet” (280). Symbolic of this process of U.S. colonization, as we have seen, is the infuence of the Western as a powerful

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cultural myth of masculinity, control, dominant individualism, racism, and justifed violence that found early expression in Frederick Jackson Turner’s essay “The Signifcance of the Frontier in American History.” The Western embodied this American frontier myth of Manifest Destiny, promoting a national story of opportunity, promise, exceptionalism, and nation-building, intimately tied to the expansionist project of coloniality, defned as “the logic of domination in the modern/colonial world” (Mignolo 7). In the genre’s “worlded” form via the Spaghetti Western in the 1970s, Jamaican subcultures amplifed their resistance to coloniality with the added style of an amoral, cold, and violent drama, like that represented in A Brief History. This offered a different, darker vision derived from the Western: still of a “frontier, but one without the [original] ennobling narrative of progress to give it promise,” presenting instead the image of a disorderly and “perpetually underdeveloped nation . . . forever on the margins of history” (Chude-Sokei 164). According to Richard Slotkin, the original myth of the frontier defned a magical growth of American wealth, power, and virtue . . . derive[d] from the close linkage of “bonanza economics”—the acquisition of abundant resources without commensurate inputs of labor and investment—with political expansion and moral “regeneration” through the prosecution of “savage war.” (645)9 The unchecked frontier-style violence and immorality enacted in James’s novel are equivalent to Slotkin’s “savage war,” now waged on the streets of West Kingston, like a shadowy continuance of a Turnerian hyper-expansionism no longer ceasing at the borders of the United States, but penetrating into the Caribbean and further across international boundaries and markets, generating forms of “new imperialism” concealing “imperial ambition in an abstract universalism” of U.S. values, corporate capital accumulation, and real extra-judicial violence (Harvey, New 50). As David Harvey explains it, the United States worked out its own form of “imperial domination” in countries like Jamaica, based on a “mix of privileged trade relations, patronage, clientelism, and covert coercion” (ibid. 48). The equivalent “frontiers” Turner used to explain the inevitable movement westward in the United States become James’s references to consumerism, tourism, the lucrative U.S.-owned bauxite industry, and, ultimately, to the multinational narcotics trade linking Jamaica to transnational cartels in Mexico and Colombia. On Turner’s frontier, “the West was another name for opportunity . . . an open feld, unchecked by restraints of an old order” (Turner, 69), and by the 1970s, Jamaica appeared a similar frontier of neoliberal penetration through which “human well-being” was seen as

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best advanced not through advancing democratic justice, but through “liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms” within deregulated markets (Harvey, A Brief 2–3). James’s repurposed Western tropes elucidate Jamaica’s liminal position as a nation caught between its old colonial history and the growing signifcance of an Americanized, globalized world of tourism, commerce, and neoliberal capitalist accumulation. In the midst of this quandary, in the yards of West Kingston sovereignty lay with gang or “posse” overlords or “dons” who although aligned with Jamaican political parties (JLP or PNP), took close everyday control of neighborhood territory: There was no money, there was no food, there was no hope. Politicians had failed. They don’t see nobody to look up to, because as far as it go dem no cater for nobody everything drop, every man fe himself, everybody fe dem food. So everybody pon dem own. (Bogues, NACLA Report) Sounding much like a frontier town such as Deadwood, in this new frontier of deregulated West Kingston, “organized communities operate outside the constitutional and juridical norms of the nation-state” (Bogues), and the older community leaders have given way to violent “shotta dons” maintaining power through violence and intimidation. However, as the novel demonstrates, the power structure is complicated further by the colossal presence of international corporations and foreign government agencies vying for infuence and control of society and the economy. To convey this alternative history of Jamaica as a complex frontier of new globalism, James’s epic novel dialogizes these stories of local, national, and international struggles, showing how they connect, intersect, and contradict in a byzantine layering of history and myth built relentlessly through its multiple voices. To an extent, this parallels the shifts in U.S. Western history from a single, linear frontier narrative of Manifest Destiny, typifed by Turner’s “thesis,” to the more complex and questioning “new Western history” that opened up the feld to diverse and hitherto unheard or erased voices. James’s explanation of his chosen structure and approach has similarities to the claims made by new Western historians: We are writing stories that to a certain extent shouldn’t have to be written in the frst place. We write stories that are under-told, untold, or just plain wrong. So we write in a present that is haunted by history that wasn’t or isn’t being told. We are responding to present erasure. (Hudnell) A Brief History is assembled from voices, living and dead, revealing Jamaica’s many contested frontiers, borders, and “yards” riven by history, class,

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politics, and economics; demarcated by its zinc fences, graffti, and roadblocks that separate people and communities from each other; thrusting them into ruthless struggles for power, authority, and control. Infuenced by William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying with its narratives of the living and dead, Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives’ polyphonic narration, and James Ellroy’s powerfully secret histories of the United States in his “LA Quartet” and, in particular, American Tabloid whose “minor, marginal, forgotten . . . deplorable . . . people . . . end up infuencing the course of major events. . . . The people who would not be in history books but still manage to shape the course of events” (Mumford). In James’s novel these voices reveal the increasing encroachment of the “world” into the streets of West Kingston and how transnational forces interrupt local territorialism and its attendant mythology of the Western, or “badmanism,” with a new, more sinister politics. As Papa-Lo explains, “Badness don’t mean nothing anymore. Bad can’t compete against scheming . . . because politics is a new game now and take a different kind of man to play it” (James 131). Of course, Josey Wales believes he is that different man, a don who sees beyond the ghetto, as he explains: You have people living in the ghetto who can only see within it . . . all I could see was outside it. I wake up looking out . . . People with no plan wait and see. People with a plan see and wait for the right time. The world is not a ghetto and a ghetto is not the world. (416) For this reason Wales mistrusts those, like the Singer, who think peace is possible between political factions in Jamaica when “all that mean is you still poor” (416) and recognizing the ultimate control of what he calls “the leash of Babylon” (417). Above all, he sees the power behind the politics of West Kingston as fundamentally transnational: One American who answer to an American who answer to an American who just want to step on this country to jump over to Cuba. And one Cuban, living in Venezuela, who want this Jamaica to help the Colombian ship his cocaine to Miami and move it on the street in New York. (417) As Deborah A. Thomas has argued, “neoliberalism creates the new frontier space for opportunistic circuits” (44), and Wales imagines himself as his namesake, breaking out from this pyramid of power and severing the “leash” through his own independent actions outside Jamaica. The mythic simplicity of the Old West, however, has been reformulated as an entangled web of transnational infuences, or “circuits,” beyond Wales’s

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control in which systemic forces of neocolonial corruption, political maneuvering, gang rivalry, and drug traffcking circle endlessly around him. As the Western “worlds” in this context, its initial form is shown as naïvely limited, providing chiefy a framework whose “black and white” messages, recalling Tristan Phillips’s comments earlier, no longer ft well with a complex society of ambiguous morality and decidedly gray politics. As Pierce puts it in the novel, “Nothing good ever come out of a gun mouth” (385), for he, despite his weaknesses and arrogance, is one of the few characters who sees through the deceit of Westerns: “You like cowboy movies?” he’s asked, only to reply, “I usually say fuck ‘em. I’m part Sioux” (388). In other words, for those implicated directly in the violence and racism of Western narratives, like Native Americans, Mexicans, or women, there is no heroism and no allegory of progress to be uncovered there. So when two-gunned Josey Wales believes he can “put everything back in its natural order” (468) as if extending his own Western allegory into the world beyond West Kingston, he is unknowingly still strung out on the “leash of Babylon,” ceaselessly pulled back into others’ control and treachery. In many ways, Josey Wales simply wants what Demus articulates early in the novel, Me just want to bathe inside not outside and me want to see the Statue of Liberty and me want Lee jeans and not idiot jeans that some thief sew on a Lee patch. No that’s not what me want. Me want enough money to stop want money. To bathe outside ‘cause me want to. . . . To look ‘pon America and don’t go, but make America know me can go anytime me want, (55) As if proving this dream is out of reach, and with a telling reminder of the novel’s use of Western tropes, Weeper tells Josey Wales how the new posses in the United States are forever “gunning for territory” (468). Perhaps all this proves what Arthur George Jennings understands as symptomatic of “reverse evolution” (435), a process by which Jamaica’s sense of hope for change and improvement slides slowly, relentlessly, backward into greater circuits of violence and oppression. In New York Josey Wales is confronted by a different world run by Eubie, a famboyant, privately educated, non-ghetto Jamaican with ambitions to command the transnational drugs operation, and ironically Wales’s only response is a “reverse evolution” to type, to the Western gunfghter he is named after: “Two guns, one in each hand like an outlaw for real” (577). In a blaze of extreme violence and masculinist assertion, Wales massacres inhabitants of a New York crack house and is arrested and imprisoned for the crime. To Eubie, the pretender, Wales is a relic of the past, a “ghetto mouse,” who “can’t even read a spreadsheet” (676) or comprehend that the Jamaican diaspora is embedded in a

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new transnational drug economy, rather than a narrow postcolonial one, where the once-controllable totality of the nation has been superseded by slippery global capitalism. When a rival gang kills Wales’s son in Kingston, this failure of control is apparent, as it ignites a terrible, destructive “wildfre,” and “the fre spread all the way to Miami and New York . . . even blow all the way to Kansas” (650). In Demus’s words, “Somewhere, somehow, somebody going judge the quick and the dead” (52), and for Josey Wales, trapped in his Western fantasy (like Ivanhoe before him), that judgment is poised on still believing the old rules apply. Recalling Ivanhoe’s fnal words on the beach in The Harder They Come, calling out “Sen’ out you fastes’ gun—de bes’ man unu have” (Thelwell, 390), it is as if Wales still believes in the “heroic” outcomes of the old script, while in reality its ending has already changed, “rewritten” by Eubie, like his “corrected” version of the story Pierce is publishing in the New Yorker, “A Brief History of Seven Killings.” In this new age of transnational crime, however, Eubie refutes the script of gunfghter action, telling Pierce that he doesn’t want “to share Mr. Wales’ spotlight” (675) or be implicated in the long tradition of Jamaican cowboy performance. Instead, like a chief executive offcer (CEO) of some global corporation, walking into the room “like somebody yelled action” with his “royal blue silk suit with a white pocket square” and overshined shoes by Giorgio Brutini (619), Eubie represents a different generation concerned as much with controlling the message and managing information as using intimidation and extreme violence. “One day,” Eubie tells journalist Pierce sarcastically, “somebody going need to write a book ‘bout it” (678).

Conclusion: Nota Bene “If it no go so, it go near so,” declares the Jamaican proverb in one of the novel’s epigraphs, suggesting James’s narrative strategy anchored in historical truth while veering away from it dangerously and imaginatively. As Edwidge Danticat explains, “To create dangerously is also to create fearlessly, boldly embracing the public and private terrors that would silence us, then bravely moving forward even when it feels as though we are chasing or being chased by ghosts” (148). James’s consistent use of Western references anchors this creativity to familiar images of the past around which his narrative “ghosts” circle, while simultaneously using them to tell contrasting and complicating stories. Rather than a simplifed, mythic rendition of history found in traditional Westerns that so many of the novel’s characters have grown up with from movies, TV, and comic books, James deliberately exposes and adjusts them in the course of the novel. For example, in a moment of sardonic critique, the stereotypes of cowboy culture constituting the macho world of the gunfghter and its assimilation into Jamaican posses become instead icons of gay pornography: “On the cover the boy’s cowboy hat put everything in

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the shadow but those wet lips kinda kissing a cigarette . . . OUTLAWS: The Bad Boys Who Love It Anytime” (528). Clearly, A Brief History is anything but brief, since its ultimate aim is to represent a history that is nuanced, layered, and complex by employing Toni Morrison’s defnition of imaginative fction: “to fll in the blanks . . . to part the veil that was so frequently drawn, to implement the stories I heard” (Morrison 113).10 Rather like an elaborate trickster tale or a prescient folk story, “I think a novel,” James has said, “is like the lie that tells the truth” (Escoffery), or as the epigraph puts it remember, “If it no go so, it go near so.” What James achieves is to take the tropes of the Western and confront them like lies that tell the truth, exposing their limits, deceptions, and illusions beyond the narrow parameters of a landmark text such as The Harder They Come. The fantasy is troubled by its exposure to the world in a move compared to the novel’s use of the Bob Marley assassination attempt at its heart: I am slowly realizing that even though the Singer is the center of the story, it really isn’t his story. Like there’s a version of this story that’s not really about him, but about the people around him, the ones who come and go that might actually provide a bigger picture. (221) Similarly, the “bigger picture” James explores is that the central story of the novel is not a one-dimensional myth of westness, of gunslinging heroes and frontier justice, “simple, direct, and clear . . . elemental and deadly” (as Ivanhoe viewed it), but rather, a varied, “active, critical and imaginative process of worlding”(Wilson 210) of the history of “the ones who come and go,” of voices shaped by experience, struggle, and the endless vulnerabilities of their everyday lives. Josey Wales, the would-be gunslinging hero of the novel, says at one point, “I never think about the fucking past. That shit will fuck you up and you can’t fuck it back” (622), and perhaps it is this that ultimately condemns him, for he refuses the nuanced lessons of history, preferring instead a headlong rush into a future he can’t control or predict. In contrast, Pierce, one of the few survivors of the novel’s arc of violence, seems to understand the usefulness of historical knowledge: “Fuck you, Faulkner, the past really isn’t dead. It’s not even past” (636–637). Reminding us of the role of Arthur George Jennings in the novel, the past is never dead, and to ignore its lessons, however ghostly, is to become caught up in the assumed clarity of myth. What Jennings comprehends is that “Dead people never stop talking and sometimes the living hear” (James 2), and, consequently, A Brief History of Seven Killings repoliticizes speech by animating history through the multiple voices of his many narrators, rejecting the one-dimensionality of myth and opting for the dialogic complexities of a deeply worlded assemblage.

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Deborah A. Thomas calls for “a sustained conversation about history— and about the place of the past in the present—in terms other than those of righteous blame or liberal guilt” (238). In many ways, A Brief History’s palimpsest of voices acknowledges “the place of the past in the present,” relentlessly cross-referring historical events into lives lived now. In doing this, blame and guilt are everywhere, from the legacies of slavery and colonialism, to postindependence political divisions, gang territorialism, and beyond to the murky rivalries of transnational drug cartels and state-sponsored agencies. As James comments, echoing Morrison earlier, “People who are trying to live their lives still have to be under the burden of history. They don’t get reported. And imagination can come into that. Imagination still has certain duties to the truth” (Greenidge). What I have argued in this chapter is that in order to show how people live under this burden and carry on, they must frst recognize the scripted myths that too often curtail and control their experience. Crucial to this process is Nina Burgess (Kim Clarke, Darcus Palmer, Millicent Segree), whose multiple identities run through the novel, providing a living character looking back on the past from differing viewpoints. As the surviving witness of the Singer’s assassination, she spends the novel on the run, avoiding all contact with Jamaica and “hoping for my Mary Tyler Moore moment,” as she puts it (681, 289) when she might achieve some equanimity beyond the demands of a patriarchal and sexist environment that encloses her. Her survival is marked by “crucial moments of resistance” (Deckard 185) against patriarchy, when she invents new identities in order to hide from Josey Wales, manages to gain an exit visa to New York, and stops at nothing to carry on as an independent woman. Unlike the male characters whose point of reference is the gunfghter Western, Nina’s is Little House on the Prairie (James 122, 293) or Mary Tyler Moore with their varied images of female empowerment and security, operating in stark contrast to her perilous survival: “hyper-masculinity is thus cast as destructive and unsustainable” (Deckard 184). In looking beyond the dangerous myths of the Western interpreted and lived by the likes of Josey Wales, A Brief History offers, through Nina, a tentative, precarious view of the future that understands the past while refusing to be entirely haunted by it, envisioning instead “the future in new ways and on new terms” (Thomas 238). It is as if the novel teaches Nina and the reader that, in the words of Hilary Mantel, history is no more “the past” than a birth certifcate is a birth, or a script is a performance, or a map is a journey. It is the multiplication of the evidence of fallible and biased witnesses, combined with incomplete accounts of actions not fully understood by the people who performed them. (Mantel)11

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As Nina puts it even more bluntly at the end of the novel, “Fuck the dead. I’m still living” (615), and as her initials suggest to the astute reader, nota bene, note well.

Notes 1. For more on this tradition, see Neil Campbell, “Dollar in the Teeth: Upsetting the Post-Western after Leone or Worlding the Western,” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies, Vol. 16, No. 3 (2015), pp. 267–279. 2. “Rude Boys” rebelled against the establishment like the solitary heroes in Django, A Fistful of Dollars, and The Good, The Bad and The Ugly lived their lives as personal wars and searched for violent vengeance against injustice and corruption. This surfaces as badmanism, with an antihero asserting himself against Babylon by any means necessary, becoming, like Ivanhoe, the Jamaican answer to the gunslinger. 3. This technique of swirling, indirect narration is borrowed from Gay Talese’s essay “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” Esquire, May 2016 see www.esquire.com/ news-politics/a638/frank-sinatra-has-a-cold-gay-talese/. 4. See Jessica Stites Mor, “Circum-Caribbean Development and Transnational Solidarity: Perspectives from a Post-Development Research Paradigm,” Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, Vol. 38, No. 2 (2014), pp. 279–281. 5. In the 1960s and 1970s, Jamaica’s two major political parties, the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) and the People’s National Party (PNP), created politically homogenous enclaves (known as “garrisons”) through inner-city housing schemes where units were allocated to party supporters. Attempts to fnd peace between the factions included Bob Marley’s so-called Peace Concert in 1976. Tristan is based on Trevor Phillips, who is a key informant in Gunst’s Born Fi Dead (see 191–193). 6. The green refers to the colors of the Jamaican Labour Party (Seaga) and the orange to the People’s National Party (Manley). 7. The gang don Papa-Lo calls himself this, as James tells us, because his gang members are like his sons and “every Jamaican man is a man searching for a father” (see 42). 8. “Dons are quasi-celebrities, embodying what Gray (2004, 123) calls ‘badnesshonor’: ‘a stylized outlawry . . . affrming a racially charged defance as a new basis for social identity and honour.’ They can be understood as part of a longer historical tradition of anti-establishment ‘badmen,’ including the 1940s outlaw-hero Ivanhoe ‘Rhygin’ Martin” (in Rivke Jaffe, “The Popular Culture of Illegality: Crime and the Politics of Aesthetics in Urban Jamaica,” Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 85, No. 1 (Winter 2012), pp. 79–102, p. 83. Josey Wales is based on real gangster Jim Brown (real name Lester Lloyd Coke) who named himself after the black football star turned actor in The Dirty Dozen. 9. Slotkin includes under his defnition of savage war, the United States’ interventions in Central America and the Caribbean—specifcally Nicaragua and Grenada. 10. Toni Morrison has been a signifcant infuence on Marlon James’s work, referring to her as a “hero”: see www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/17/ my-hero-toni-morrison-marlon-james#img-1. 11. James is a huge fan of Hilary Mantel’s novels. See Dan O’Donnell, “Marlon James Complicates the Narrative,” http://brooklynquarterly.org/ marlon-james-complicates-narrative/.

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Works Cited BBC Radio 4, www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08tcbrp. Bogues, Anthony. “Power, Violence and the Jamaican ‘Shotta Don’,” 25 Sep. 2007, https://nacla.org/article/power-violence-and-jamaican-shotta-don. Accessed 20 Jan. 2019. Bradley, Lloyd. Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King. Penguin Books, 2001. Chude-Sokei, Louis. “‘But I Did Not Shoot the Deputy’: Dubbing the Yankee Frontier.” The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization, edited by Rob Wilson and Christopher Leigh Connery, Santa Cruz: New Pacifc Press, 2007. Dantikat, Edwidge. Create Dangerously: The Immigrant Artist at Work. Princeton UP, 2010. Deckard, Sharae. “Always Returning from It’: Neoliberal Capitalism, Retrospect, and Marlon James’s a Brief History of Seven Killings.” CounterText, vol. 4, no. 2, Aug. 2018, pp. 169–191. Escoffery, Sherman. LargeUp Interview: Marlon James on a Brief History of Seven Killings, www.largeup.com/2014/10/22/largeup-interview-marlonjames-on-seven-killings. Accessed 2 Jan. 2019. Fraser, Rhone. “Confronting Neocolonialism: An Evaluation of Marlon James’s a Brief History of Seven Killings.” Caribbean Quarterly, vol. 63, no. 1, 2017, pp. 67–82. ———. Podomatic(Podcast), www.podomatic.com/podcasts/rhone/episodes/ 2015-01-22T17_53_27-08_00. Accessed 24 Jan. 2019. Gray, Obika. Demeaned But Empowered: The Social Power of the Urban Poor in Jamaica. Kingston: U. of West Indies P, 2004. Greenidge, Kaitlyn. “Violently Wrought: Interview with Marlon James,” www. guernicamag.com/violently-wrought/. Accessed 6 Feb. 2019. Gunst, Laurie. Born Fi Dead: A Journey through the Yardie Underworld. 1995. London: Canongate, 2003. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford UP, 2007. ———. The New Imperialism. Oxford UP, 2003. Hudnell, RaeNosa. “A Conversation with Marlon James.” Booth: A Journal, https://booth.butler.edu/2017/10/20/a-conversation-with-marlon-james/. James, Marlon. A Brief History of Seven Killings. London: One World, 2014. ——— and Rushdie. Salman on Storytelling (Podcast), 9 Jan. 2015, www.nypl. org/blog/2015/01/09/podcast-marlon-james-salman-rushdie Podcast #43. Mantel, Hilary. “The Reith Lectures, Lecture 1: The Day Is for the Living,” 13 June 2017. McKenzie, Alecia. “A Conversation with Marlon James,” www.jamaicaobserver. com/news/A-Conversation-with-Marlon-James_19234263. Accessed 29 Jan. 2019. Mignolo, Walter. The Idea of Latin America. Oxford: Blackwells, 2005. Morrison, Toni. “The Site of Memory.” Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, edited by William Zinsser, Houghton Miffin, 1987. Mumford, Tracey. “An Interview with Marlon James: Details on His New Fantasy Trilogy,” www.mprnews.org/story/2017/01/26/books-marlon-james-darkstar-fantasy-trilogy. Accessed 29 Jan. 2019. Papanikolas, Zeese. American Silence. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2007.

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Slotkin, Richard. Gunfghter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in 20th Century America. New York: Harper Perennial, 1992. Thelwell, Michael. The Harder They Come. New York: Grove Press, 1980. Thomas, Deborah A. Exceptional Violence: Embodeid Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. Thompson, Michael. FLICKR, www.fickr.com/photos/freestylee/5055422167. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton UP, 2005. Turner, Frederick Jackson. Frontier and Section: Selected Essays. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1961. Wilson, Rob. “Afterword: Worlding as Future Tactic.” The Worlding Project: Doing Cultural Studies in the Era of Globalization, edited by Rob Wilson and Christopher Leigh Connery, Santa Cruz: New Pacifc Press, 2007. ———. “Worlding Asia/Oceania: Concepts, Tactics, Warning Signs Inside the Anthropocene.” [forthcoming in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies], www.academia. edu/34226581/_Worlding_Asia_Oceania_Concepts_Tactics_Warning_Signs_ Inside_the_Anthropocene_forthcoming_in_Inter-Asia_Cultural_Studies_.

7

Behind the Mask of Zorro The Americanization of the Legend and Isabel Allende’s Anticolonial Revision Georgia Simakou

El Zorro, the Fox, is one of the most popular heroes of the American West. Ever since Johnston McCulley published the frst story, The Curse of Capistrano, in All Story Weekly in 1919, countless flm adaptations and numerous television series have not only kept the legend alive but have also been adding to it and transforming it. Typically, Zorro is portrayed as the handsome and dashing masked avenger, who, dressed in black, riding a black horse, and wielding a sword, has Robin Hood–like adventures in California, fghting the evil and corrupt to protect the oppressed and defenseless folk. Nevertheless, what often passes unnoticed is that this image of Zorro is an Americanized one, as twentieth-century American popular culture has appropriated the actual fgures who inspired the legend. Drawing on the literary, historical, and ideological sources of inspiration for the man behind the mask, this chapter will therefore survey the way in which this material became Americanized through Johnston McCulley in The Curse of Capistrano, a novel that appropriates and Americanizes Hispanic traditions. In the process, the novel conceals the political and anticolonial context of those traditions and transforms them by projecting American values onto them, something that reveals unresolved contradictions in American society in terms of national identity. I will then proceed to examine Isabel Allende’s contemporary radical revision of the legend in her novel El Zorro: Comienza la Leyenda (2005), a revision that reclaims the legend’s historical and ideological Hispanic origins, attempting to protect El Zorro from those “who seek to defame him” (Allende Prologue, my translation). In other words, Isabel Allende uses a prominent Western myth of popular culture and transforms it by highlighting the colonial setting and also by making Diego/El Zorro the heir of the ideals and anticolonial spirit of his mother’s Native American tribe. In this way, the author shows that it is still possible to recover the political import of the legend after a series of palimpsestic rewritings that have sought to efface the historical background, giving voice to the subaltern. Some critics like Manuel Quinto justly argue that McCulley modeled his hero on Baroness d’Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel (12). Of course, The

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Scarlet Pimpernel might well have suggested the idea of a protagonist who has a double personality, posing as an incompetent, hypochondriac, and cowardly fool by day and transforming himself by night into a brave hero who leaves behind him a sign that identifes him (12). However, there are also some other signifcant sources that may have been inspiration for the man behind the mask, which include the Irishman William Lamport or, as he came to be known in Mexico, Guillén de Lombardo; Martin Garatuza; and the legendary bandit Joaquín Murrieta. When The Curse of Capistrano was frst published in 1919, there was great interest in Mexican history in the United States because of the impact of the Mexican Revolution (Mystery Files: Zorro). In this context, Mexican author, historian, and politician Vicente Riva Palacio, who had studied the Inquisition’s fles1 and the archives concerning William Lamport’s trial, could well have captured McCulley’s imagination, as the Italian scholar Fabio Troncarelli points out in his article “The Man Behind the Mask of Zorro.” Signifcantly, there is a chapter in Palacio’s novel Memorias de un Impostor, d. Guillem de Lampart, rey de México (1872) called “The Fox and the Wolf” (“El Zorro y el Lobo”). What is more, in another of Riva Palacio’s novels, Martín Garatuza: Memorias de la Inquisición (1868), the protagonist, Martin Garatuza, who also fought the Inquisition, is a trickster fgure expert at disguises known as “El Zorro” (Martin Garatuza 39). Both the Inquisition’s archives and some of Palacio’s documents were published in New York in 1908 by Henry Charles Lee (Mystery Files: Zorro). More specifcally, William Lamport lived in the frst half of the seventeenth century. After being educated in Ireland and England, Lamport was forced to leave Britain because of the persecutions against Catholics that were taking place then, as well as because of his political opinions (Mystery Files: Zorro). He then found refuge in Spain, where he entered the service of the infuential Duke of Olivares. In Spain, Lamport acquired a reputation as a ladies’ man and a swordsman and served in the Spanish army, while at the same time he supported a secret movement for an Irish rebellion (Troncarelli np). In 1640, Olivares sent him to Mexico to spy on the new viceroy, since Spain feared a rebellion of the colonies (Mystery Files: Zorro). There he was struck by the poverty and exploitation of slaves and indigenous Mexicans, as well as by the corruption of the ruling Spanish elite and of the Catholic Church, represented by the Inquisition. After two years in Mexico he was convinced that only a revolution could solve these problems (Mystery Files: Zorro). He accordingly drafted a Proclamation of Independence, which declared that slavery would be abolished, that the form of the government would be elected monarchy, and that he would be king (Mystery Files: Zorro). He tried to recruit a militia of over 400 men from among those he sought to set free to support him, that is, the indigenous Mexicans and slaves (Mystery Files: Zorro). He was, however, arrested by the Inquisition before he could carry out his plans. After spending eight years in prison, he escaped with the help of

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his cellmate, Diego Pinto, something that endowed him with supernatural powers in the minds of many people, since escaping from the Inquisition’s cells was considered impossible (Mystery Files: Zorro). Immediately he spread pamphlets and posters throughout the city, exposing the abusive and corrupt nature of the Inquisition. He was arrested again a few days later, remained in prison for many years, and was fnally executed in 1659 (Mystery Files: Zorro). His fame, however, survived his death. In popular imagination, he has ever since been viewed as a hero who “struck in the darkness, ridiculed the Inquisition, and wanted to proclaim himself king to free the Indians and black slaves” (Troncarelli np). His name spurred the oppressed to rebellion throughout all of Central America for many centuries (Troncarelli np). Similarities and differences between William Lamport and McCulley’s character abound. The similarities include their defance, bravery, gentlemanliness, a sense of justice, and the ability to fool and elude authorities (Mystery Files: Zorro), while it is probably no coincidence that Lamport’s cellmate’s name is Diego. Moreover, the popular image of Lamport as a hero who strikes in the darkness corresponds exactly with McCulley’s Zorro. In both instances, an aristocrat leads a double life, posing as a faithful subject of the Spanish Crown by day and plotting by night. It might be observed, though, that the original Zorro is nowhere near as radical as William Lamport. In The Curse of Capistrano, it is clearly stated that Diego and the caballeros are not contemplating treason. They are rather attempting to protect the Crown and the status quo by opposing the few corrupt politicians who threatened the accepted values (McCulley ch. 38).2 Moreover, Lamport’s concern for the plight of the indigenous people seems to have been genuine, since he tries to improve their condition, whereas Zorro is more concerned with punishing those who mistreat them than with positively improving their condition. Indeed, throughout the Curse of Capistrano, McCulley refers to Native Americans solely in pejorative terms. For instance, the “insubordinate” jailed natives are described as “human derelicts sprawled against the walls” of the cell; they are “the scum of the pueblo,” and it is immensely demeaning for Don Carlos, an hidalgo, to share a cell with “drunkards and thieves and dishonored women and insulting natives” (McCulley chs. 28, 36). In addition, Lamport encourages the lower classes to participate in the rebellion and to occupy important public offces once the rebellion has succeeded (Palacio 135), whereas in McCulley’s opinion, the duty and privilege to rebel and to take part in public affairs are reserved to aristocrats (McCulley ch. 25). Thus, in The Curse of Capistrano, it is argued that Native Americans need a European or a Criollo to save them, since the novel represents them as so many frightened children incapable of helping themselves. In short, McCulley’s Zorro seems not only to have borrowed many elements from Lamport’s biography but also to have manipulated them in

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such a way that the same elements acquire exactly the opposite ideological connotations. A second source of inspiration for McCulley was perhaps Joaquín Murrieta and the tradition of California social bandits. All that is known about Murrieta comes from the dime novels that were written shortly after his death and which begin the process of Americanization long before McCulley. Prominent among these novels is John Rollin Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854), since it originated a legend that came to be regarded as historical fact (Rowe 171).3 According to the legend, Murrieta was originally a peaceful Mexican who, along with his wife, Rosita, migrated to California during the Gold Rush. When ruthless Americans whipped him, stole his mine claim, raped his wife, and lynched his brother, he decided to take revenge by becoming a bandit. It is said that he punished those who molested Mexican miners and that he was generous with those who helped him (Martinez Jitner 00:38:00–00:39:33). It is also believed that he planned to assemble an army of 2,000 men in order to fght and return California to Mexico (Martinez Jitner 00:42:10–00:42:28). His tragic end came when he was killed and decapitated by bounty hunter Captain Harry Love. His head was displayed throughout California, but many did not believe in his death, saying that that was not Murrieta’s head (Martinez Jitner 01:09:33–01:20:00). His legend was immediately immortalized in Mexican corridos, popular narrative poems about the deeds of popular heroes (Leen 32).4 Murrieta’s story, especially as presented by Ridge, represents a whole series of crucial ideological and sociopolitical issues of the American West. For example, it exemplifes American anxiety and obsession with the stereotype of the Mexican bandit, or any other Spanish-speaking “foreigner” for that matter, which resulted from incidents of retaliation by groups of Hispanic miners who had been driven out of the gold felds (Rowe 161). Thus, numerous vigilante committees were quickly formed in response to real or imaginary threats, like “conspiracies to retake California from the U.S. Militias” (Rowe 161). Thus, this is a story that examines the assimilation of many ethnicities into the United States as part of a legal and cultural process, based on the prevailing myth of American individualism and free-enterprise capitalism, since the “ideological construction of ‘foreigners’ was crucial to legitimate an American identity threatened by specifc historical crises and its own internal contradictions” (Rowe 155). At the same time, this story shows the victimization of Mexicans and Native Americans by U.S. governmental paternalism, as well as their economic and political exclusion (Rowe 156). Rosita’s rape is largely symbolic, standing for the “rape” of displaced Hispanics and Native Americans (Lowe 109). As John Lowe points out, Murrieta’s story is a reminder of how the politics of displaced peoples can give rise to heroic-mythical folklore, keeping a

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national dynamic alive and reminding Americans of who they are and what America is (106). Murrieta can be considered a “social bandit.”5 The real appeal and signifcance of the motif of the social bandit lie in oppositions and contradictions inherent to American identity. That is, social bandits embody the unresolved structural contradictions and dilemmas between law and justice; individualism and community responsibility; personal dominance and cooperation; and civilization, maximum productivity, and nature (White 407–408). In an increasingly industrialized, bureaucratic, and seemingly effete society, masculinity is a crucial concept. Social bandits and folk heroes personify “masculine” traits that Americans have always admired: courage, daring, honor, toughness, physical prowess, shrewdness, transcendentalist self-reliance, and freedom; they are indicative of a romantic nostalgia for the freedom of a vanished frontier (Boessenecker 432–433; White 397, 407). They also symbolize the human subconscious distrust of government, laws, social controls, and everything that restricts freedom, so that identifcation with them is a form of momentary imaginary rebellion (Boessenecker 433). Their appeal rests, thus, upon a paradox: social bandits became legends and national symbols in the age of an increasingly industrialized and bureaucratized world, that is, precisely when their values could be safely cherished and admired, but they could no longer be imitated (White 406–407). This is why Murrieta has become a signifcant cultural icon not only among Hispanic people but also among Anglo-Americans (Leen 23).6 In The Curse of Capistrano, Zorro’s legend clearly assimilates all that has been said about Californian social bandits and their cultural, social, and ideological signifcance, something that allows him to function as a liminal hero, as both a social bandit and as a vigilante upholding the status quo at the same time. Zorro not only assimilates this long Hispanic tradition with all its semiotic connotations, but he also functions as a convenient device for its Americanization. Already in nineteenth-century American popular novels Joaquin Murrieta is presented with American-like qualities. For instance, although Murrieta is mestizo, Ridge endows him with the characteristics of the ranchero class; in fact, both Zorro and Joaquin rely heavily on the respectability associated with Californian hidalgo heritage (Rowe 158, 169). Their reckless courage, manly virtue, respect for women’s honor, and self-reliance transform them into potential Anglo-American heroes (Rowe 164, 168). What is more, Joaquin leaves Mexico not merely to search for gold but also to become an American citizen; he conforms to the popular idea of the “noble savage,” a poor Mexican with traditional ruling-class attributes and democratic aspirations (Rowe 169). Thus, the outrages he suffers constitute a violation of his American identity and of values crucial to it, like privacy and property rights (Rowe 158–159). In short, Ridge has already begun this process of Americanization in the nineteenth century, and all McCulley has to do is carry it one step further.

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To do this, McCulley pointedly ignores all the complex social, class, racial, and political tensions and turmoil that have been described earlier. Ethnicity in particular becomes irrelevant. Zorro becomes a generalized Western hero, a fghter for justice who just happened to live in Spanish California, something which enhances the U.S. government propaganda that sought to present American identity as a unifed whole (Szasz 261, 270). This marginalization of important issues is made evident both in the book and in the flms. Hence, in the end of The Curse of Capistrano it is stated that, having driven the few corrupt Mexican/Spanish politicians out, Zorro’s mission is over, “[a]nd now Senor Zorro shall ride no more, for there will be no need,” the novel concludes (McCulley ch. 39). Thus, corruption in the colonial setting is presented as an isolated case and not as indicative of the colonial system at large. This becomes even more explicit in the cyclical description of California in the 1940 flm The Mark of Zorro as “the land of gentle missions, happy peons, sleepy caballeros, and everlasting boredom,” where a man can only “grow old, raise fat children and watch his vineyards grow” (00:05:13–00:05:22, 01:55:24–01:55:34). McCulley’s Zorro is undoubtedly the hero of the story, yet he is not actually described in fattering terms. Structurally this is shown by the fact that McCulley never describes him in an objective third-person point of view. Zorro is repeatedly called the “curse of Capistrano” (McCulley ch. 1). Our frst and most eloquent and deprecating description of the hero comes from the lips of his enemy, Sergeant Gonzales, who introduces him as a “pest of the highway,” a “thief” and a “cutthroat” who can only frighten “a few women and natives” (McCulley ch. 1).7 For the rest, The Curse of Capistrano is a rather straightforward adventure story, which is however underpinned by Zorro’s obsessive use and repetition of the words “punishment” and “to punish.”8 Indeed, throughout the book, Zorro’s aims are repeated like a ritual chant. He is a “friend of the oppressed,” who seeks to “punish the unjust” and “avenge the helpless” with the help of the missionaries—rather than striving to prevent acts of injustice or to improve the natives’ condition like Isabel Allende’s Zorro (McCulley chs. 3, 7, 13, 17, 23–24, 38). The notions of punishment, vengeance, and of taking the law into one’s own hands defne Zorro as a distinctly American vigilante (Johnston 232–233). Dressed in black like a Puritan and using a whip like Christ in the temple, Zorro emerges as a true son of Calvinism, insofar as he assumes his responsibility to society and pays his debts toward it by fghting evil with positive actions (Reichstein 349–350). As Les Johnston points out, the phenomenon of vigilantism, that is, of crime and/or social control, arises as a reaction to actual or potential transgression of institutionalized norms to guarantee a given established order (232). Reading McCulley’s rhetoric that only Californios of noble blood are entitled to the right to defend certain rights and values through such a defnition of the phenomenon of vigilantism allows us to see that Zorro’s

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quest is, in fact, to establish law and to actually defend the aristocracy and the colonialist and imperialistic order (McCulley chs. 25, 33). Isabel Allende’s 2005 El Zorro: Comienza la Leyenda (Zorro: The Legend Begins) constitutes, therefore, a groundbreaking revision of the legend. As the title indicates, Allende’s novel is mainly concerned with the origins of the legend, and, in this sense, it provides a sort of prequel to The Curse of Capistrano. There are, however, important differences between the two novels, which testify to Allende’s purpose to reclaim El Zorro as a Hispanic hero; “With these pages I aim to cover ground before those who try to defame Zorro,” the narrator states in the prologue to the novel (Allende Prologue, my translation).9 More specifcally, Allende’s novel adopts a radically different setting and tone; to the aforementioned American representation of California as a “land of gentle missions, happy peons, sleepy caballeros, and everlasting boredom” (The Mark of Zorro) she juxtaposes a setting of exploitative missionaries and ranchers, discontented peons, and constant confict. Thus, a large part of the frst section of Allende’s novel is not concerned with the hero’s childhood, but rather with the social atmosphere preceding and following his birth (ch. 1). Similarly, while Fray Felipe in The Curse of Capistrano hopes for a day “when those who have founded a rich empire here shall receive the fruits of their labor and daring instead of having them stolen by dishonest politicians” (McCulley ch. 33), El Zorro: Comienza la Leyenda militantly argues, as shall be seen, in favor of anti-imperialism and decolonization. This is why Allende’s version not only reestablishes the Hispanic origins of the legend but also connects it frmly to the Native American shamanic tradition. Allende adopts a very different stance toward the Native American tribes from the one McCulley had originally adopted, since in her novel Native Americans are no longer portrayed as mere victims of injustice, “scurr[ying] like rats for shelter” (McCulley ch. 36), or as a convenient part of the setting. The novel gives voice to their struggles against the colonists by rescuing these struggles from the “palimpsestic narrative of imperialism” (Spivak 76). More specifcally, having a quarter of Native blood, Allende’s Zorro differs from all previous accounts of the legend in that he is a mestizo, while his mother, Toypurnia, the Daughter of the Wolf, is a warrior who manages to unite for the frst time the region’s Native American tribes against the Spanish invaders (Allende Part 1).10 Signifcantly, Toypurnia is not “tamed” by her marriage to Alejandro de la Vega, as her husband had hoped, but rather remains a warrior in soul and is active in the support of Native Americans against the abuses they suffer in the various haciendas. Never being quite comfortable in European clothes, which stand for the imported European culture that her husband and the missionaries try to impose upon her, Toypurnia fnally abandons them and her husband in order to return to her tribe (Part 1). Similarly, for the very frst time, the status of Bernardo, Diego’s servant/sidekick, becomes as important as that of Diego. He is no longer a

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“deaf-and-dumb native servant, who cannot speak or hear, cannot write or read, and ha[s] not sense enough to make [his] wants known by the sign language,” as McCulley’s Zorro patronizingly says to his servant (ch. 21). Instead, he is a spiritual brother and helper, and he can even act as Zorro on occasion. In Allende’s novel, Bernardo’s speech impairment is a direct result of colonialism, since he is only struck dumb when a band of pirates raids the de la Vega hacienda, raping and killing Bernardo’s mother in front of the child. To the missionaries’ inability to heal the traumatized boy, the narrative juxtaposes the healing effect of Bernardo’s reconnection with his tribe, when Lechuza Blanca, Diego’s shaman maternal grandmother, takes Bernardo with her to the tribe and, respecting his silence, teaches him to communicate through sign language as well as through music by means of a fute (Allende Part 1). Later on, Bernardo is separated from Diego to return again to his tribe when he learns he has a child by one of the tribe’s young women, Rayo en la Noche; as the narrator says, Bernardo had to “assume his responsibilities,” he “had to grow up since he could no longer keep living like a child,” in the eternal childhood in which colonial narratives place the natives (Allende Part 3, my translation). Moreover, through Diego’s help, Bernardo has access to exactly the same education and training as Diego, so that Diego invites him to accompany him in his fght for justice: “Together we will multiply as if we were a thousand people, confusing our enemies” (Allende Part 5, my translation). What is more, Diego de la Vega’s transformation into the mythical hero keeps alive the legacy of his mother’s tribe. His frst words as a baby are in the tribe’s, not the Spanish language, and he learns all that the tribe can teach him (Allende Part 1). To the disappointment of his monolithic father, Diego is very proud of his Native American blood and heritage, and he aspires to achieve the ideals inculcated in him by his grandmother. Indeed, without the guidance of his shaman grandmother and her tribe, Diego de la Vega would have never become El Zorro; signifcantly, his future destiny and identity are revealed to him in a Native initiation rite, during which a fox functioned as his spiritual guardian and even saved his life (Allende Part 1). It then becomes clear that Diego should cultivate a fox’s abilities, astuteness, and intelligence. The sacred caves of Native Americans, which functioned as guides for spiritual voyages and where people would go to fnd the life-generating center of the world within them, become thus Zorro’s element (Allende Parts 1, 5).11 Diego’s soul is marked by the injustices he witnesses as a child, but also by the democratic anti-imperialistic and anticolonialist thought of some of the people he meets in his youth (Allende Parts 1, 2, 4). His dual personality and his career as Zorro begin in Spain, where he saves students, professors, or guerilla fghters who opposed the French conquerors (Allende Part 2). He thus becomes the symbol of the universal fghter against injustice and oppression. Allende’s Zorro is also reconnected to

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William Lamport, inasmuch as, like the Irishman in Vicente Riva Palacio’s novel, he joins a secret society, La Justicia, whose aim is also to fght the Inquisition, slavery, and oppression in general, whether its authors are the French invaders or Spanish monarchy (Allende Parts 2, 3; Palacio 124–125).12 Furthermore, this Zorro’s enemies hate him mainly because he “defes the authorities, [and] mocks the law,” threatening to destroy class privileges, as when he attacks his arch-enemy Rafael Moncada’s contraband of pearls, which was based on a system of forced labor of the region’s natives (Allende Part 5, my translation). Signifcantly, Diego’s initiation to La Justicia exactly parallels the frst initiation rite his grandmother had prepared for him, so much so, in fact, that the code name Diego chooses as a member of this secret society is “Zorro” in memory of his frst rite of initiation, when a fox saved his life. Similarly, the European knightly values that Zorro has traditionally embodied as a swordsman are identifed here with the Native American ideal of the Okahué, the fve virtues the tribe’s members sought to achieve: honor, justice, respect, dignity, and valor (Allende Part 1). Moreover, the narrator, Isabel de Romeu, also joins Diego and Bernardo toward the end of the novel, achieving this ideal as well, and becoming, thus, a third Zorro. In the end of the book, when the three Zorros “formed a circle inside the old Magic Wheel” of the tribe’s tradition, which Diego and Bernardo had traced on the cave’s foor in their childhood, they see an incandescent fame “emerging from the depths of the earth [. . .] which danced in the air” inside the cave: “it was the signal of the Okahué, which grandma Lechuza Blanca had promised” (Allende Parts 1, 5, my translation). This fnal emotionally charged scene suggests that what Zorro and his companions have achieved is not a semi-criminal vigilante status—as McCulley, for instance, would have it—but a higher and purer ideal of justice. In their thirst for justice, the three Zorros embody the indomitable spirit of Toypurnia and the teachings of Lechuza Blanca; by having his tribe’s heritage form the basis behind Diego’s decision to devote his life to fghting against oppression, the narrative gives voice to his silenced tribe. Thus, the narrative proves that it is still possible to recover the anticolonial signifcance of the legend after a series of palimpsestic rewritings. The silent Bernardo, no longer being a sidekick to the hero, but rather becoming a hero in his own right, is the clearest indication of the way in which the novel reclaims the origins of the legend in order to give voice to the subaltern. In conclusion, the historical and literary sources that inspired the legend of Zorro come from a context of colonial struggle. However, whereas authors like Johnston McCulley seek to conceal this context, transforming the hero into a false rebel who is in truth a champion of the status quo, Isabel Allende reclaims the legend for the Hispanic world. As Allende explains in the documentary Behind the Mask of Zorro, the signifcance of the legend of Zorro is that the hero does not possess supernatural

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powers; by relying on his abilities and intelligence, he gives us the hope that any one of us can be like him. Within the world of the novel, this idea is illustrated by the fact that everyone can pick up the struggle for justice; not only Diego, but colonized subjects and women can also be El Zorro, as the cases of Bernardo and Isabel de Romeu, respectively, demonstrate. And while the mask hides their identity like the “palimpsestic narrative of imperialism” (Spivak 76), still they speak through their acts. Susanne Langer has suggested that societies go through cycles of demythologization and remythologization and that every time, regression to previous myths results in their improvement (qtd in Schultz 73). This seems to be exactly the case with Zorro.

Notes 1. The Mexican Inquisition was an extension of the Spanish Inquisition to New Spain. The offcial period of the Inquisition lasted from 1571 to 1820. 2. All quotations from McCulley’s novel The Curse of Capistrano will be made by referring to chapter instead of page numbers, since a Kindle version of the novel has been used for the purposes of this chapter. 3. The connection between Murrieta and Zorro has been hinted at in the 1998 flm The Mask of Zorro, which, according to some academics like Catherine Leen, reclaims the hero for Hispanic and Chicano audiences (Leen 23, 33). 4. In reality, Murrieta was no Robin Hood. His band would rob and kill indiscriminately people of all nationalities, including Mexicans and Chinese miners, and it is impossible to know whether the abuses against him actually took place (Martinez Jitner 00:40:30–00:42:00). This confrms the argument of many historians who claim that the outlaw hero is an entirely fctional and folkloric product, a symbolic and typecast abstraction of good versus evil (Steckmesser 351, 354). Moreover, Murrieta was relatively unknown until shortly before his death, and the crimes attributed to him were, in fact, committed by various bandits who all bore the name “Joaquin” and were either members of the same gang or simply happened to be operating at the same time (Leal 3). The frst documents including the surname “Murrieta” appeared only a few weeks before his death, while his decapitation caused every crime that had been committed during the two years before his death to be attributed to him, giving rise to his fame and to a number of Mexican and Chicano corridos praising his exploits (Leal 3). 5. Eric Hobsbawm defnes social banditry as a universal phenomenon, which takes place in rural societies as a form of protest either against oppression and poverty or against the modernization of certain traditional norms and values, arising where law enforcement is distrusted (qtd in Boessenecker 419; White 393, 397). Richard White suggests that social bandits form part of a continuum of extralegal organizations, such as vigilantes, guarding the interests of a certain racial, class, or cultural group against those of other groups, the boundary between the concepts of legality, extra-legality, and illegality being sometimes rather thin (387–388). Signifcantly, Murrieta is not the only Californian bandit to be regarded as a Hispanic Robin Hood. Elfego Baca, Tiburcio Vasquez, Juan Flores, and Salomon Pico, to name but a few, have won the same title (Boessenecker 420, 426). 6. The term is signifcant, insofar as cultural icons are not merely famous people, myths, or legends, but rather personalities who refect the conficts

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9. 10.

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12.

Georgia Simakou and contradictions of their era (Van Hecke 237–238). Indeed, Murrieta is often seen not only as the defender of his culture and as the par excellence representative of the history of Mexicans in the American Southwest, but also as a symbol of “all that we love and fear, admire and reject, he represents all that is good and bad at the same time” (Behind the Mask of Zorro). Thus, the nickname “Zorro” does not seem to have any real signifcance in McCulley’s novel. Zorro introduces himself as “Senor Zorro,” and Sergeant Gonzales obligingly provides us with the translation, “Mr. Fox” (McCulley chs. 1,2). In this context, it sounds like an ordinary surname, although it alludes, of course, to a fox’s cunning. However, it is far from the Spanish “El Zorro,” as in Allende’s novel, in which the name becomes a symbol or concept, or even suggests an identifcation of the man and the animal. Indeed, the whip the hero typically wields is an ambivalent image, symbolizing both power and punishment and purifcation at the same time (Cirlot 346), refecting the hero’s ambivalent status and his inherent duality between good and evil, light and darkness, justice and chaos, rebellion and conformism, individualism and responsibility. All quotations from Isabel Allende’s novel El Zorro: Comienza la Leyenda are made by referring to chapter instead of page numbers, since a Kindle version of the novel has been used for the purposes of this chapter. Allende’s Toypurnia has been based on a real historical fgure, the young medicine woman Toypurina, who led a revolt of Native American tribes at San Gabriel mission in Southern California in 1785 (Suppressed Histories Archives). Toypurina had allied with two chiefs from traditional villages, as well as with the dissatisfed neophyte Nicolas Jose, but the rebels were captured when a soldier who understood the language overheard people talking about the revolt (Suppressed Histories Archives). Toypurina, who reportedly told the Spanish military judges that she had commanded the Natives in the mission not to believe the friars because she hated “the padres and all of you, for trespassing on the land of my forefathers,” was eventually forced to convert and marry a soldier, and she died young (Suppressed Histories Archives). Signifcantly, Toypurina’s revolt was not an isolated incident, but rather a part of the Native American resistance to the totalitarian mission system that had been going on for decades, with revolts against the Spanish missions as early as 1656 in Florida, in 1734–1736 in Baja California, and in 1781 along the Colorado River, where the Yuma successfully expelled the colonists from their lands (Suppressed Histories Archives). Thus, Zorro’s cave can be read in the light of another cave, that of Plato’s allegory in the seventh book of the Republic, in which the philosopher asks us to imagine that the world in which we live is like a cave, an “underground den” (Republic, book VII). However, the sacred caves of the Lechuza Blanca’s tribe are not a representation of a cavernous world of ignorance, suffering, and punishment, where human souls are chained, as in Plato’s allegory, but rather they exemplify the way in which the cave as a symbol indicates the way that the soul has to follow in order to fnd all that is good and true (Chevalier and Gheerbrant 180–184). In other words, Zorro’s cave, drawing on the common symbolism of caves as places of birth, repositories of secrets, and keys to the truth (Crane and Fletcher Preface, chs. 1, 5, 7), acquires both a cosmic and a moral and ethical signifcance. The descriptions of the secret societies and of the medallions which indicate that the heroes belong to these societies in Memorias de un impostor and in El Zorro: Comienza la Leyenda are strikingly similar.

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Works Cited Allende, Isabel. El Zorro: Comienza la Leyenda. Kindle Edition, HarperCollins, 2005. Boessenecker, John. “California Bandidos: Social Bandits or Sociopaths?” Southern California Quarterly, vol. 80, no. 4, University of California Press on behalf of the Historical Society of Southern California, Winter 1998, pp. 419–434. Chevalier, Jean and Alain Gheerbrant. Dictionnaire des Symboles: Mythes, Rêves, Coutumes, Gestes, Formes, Figures, Couleurs, Nombres. Robert Laffont and Editions Jupiter, 1982. Cirlot, Juan Eduardo. A Dictionary of Symbols. Translated by Jack Sage. 2nd ed., Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1971. Crane, Ralph and Lisa Fletcher. Cave: Nature and Culture. Edited by Daniel Allen, Kindle ed., Reaktion Books Ltd., 2015. “The Holy Woman Toypurina Attempts to Liberate the “Indios” at San Gabriel Mission.” Suppressed Histories Archives, www.suppressedhistories.net/articles/ toypurina.html. Accessed 27 Feb. 2019. Johnston, Les. “What Is Vigilantism?” The British Journal of Criminology, vol. 36, no. 2, Spring 1996, pp. 220–236. Leal, Luis. “El Corrido de Joaquín Murrieta: Origen y Difusión.” Mexican Studies/ Estudios Mexicanos, vol. 11, no. 1, University of California Press on behalf of the University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Winter 1995, pp. 1–23. Leen, Catherine. “The Caballero Revisited: Postmodernity in ‘the Cisco Kid, the Mask of Zorro,’ and ‘Shrek II’.” Bilingual Review/ La Revista Bilingüe, vol. 28, no. 1, Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, Jan. 2004–Apr. 2007, pp. 23–35. Lowe, John. “Space and Freedom in the Golden Republic: Yellow Bird’s the Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murrieta, the Celebrated California Bandit.” Studies in American Indian Literatures, vol. 4, no. 2, Summer/Fall 1992, pp. 106–122. The Mark of Zorro. Dir. Rouben Mamoulian, performance by Tyrone Power, Linda Darnell, and Basil Rathbone, Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation, 1940. YouTube, www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3xj8m09iHM. Accessed 10 Oct. 2015. Martinez Jitner, Barbara. “Behind the Mask of Zorro.” The History Channel, 2005, https://vimeo.com/109483041. Accessed 9 Dec. 2015. McCulley, Johnston. The Curse of Capistrano. Kindle ed., All-Story Weekly, 1919. “Mystery Files: Zorro.” National Geographic Channels, 2011, www.youtube. com/watch?v=sVyufGazX7M. Accessed 9 Dec. 2015. Palacio, Vicente Riva. Martín Garatuza: Memorias de la Inquisición. Biblioteca Virtual Universal, www.biblioteca.org.ar/libros/156008.pdf. Accessed 30 Jul. 2016. ———. Memorias de un Impostor, d. Guillem de Lampart, rey de México. México: Manuel C. De Villegas, 1879. Plato. The Republic. Translated by Benjamin Jowett, Book VII., 2008. Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org/fles/1497/1497-h/1497-h.htm#link2H_4_0010. Accessed 5 Jan. 2015.

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Quinto, Manuel. “Aprovechamiento de materials.” El Ciervo, vol. 48, no. 574, Ciervo 96, S.A., Jan. 1999, p. 12. Reichstein, Andreas. “Batman: An American Mr. Hyde?” Amerikastudien, vol. 43, no. 2, Universitätsverlag Winter Gmbh, 1998, pp. 329–350. Rowe, John Carlos. “Highway Robbery: ‘Indian Removal’, the Mexican-American War, and American Identity in ‘The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta’.” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 31, no. 2, Duke UP, Spring 1998, pp. 149–173. Schultz, William. Cassirer and Langer on Myth. Garland, Taylor and Francis, 2000, pp. 321–334. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory, edited by Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman, Columbia UP, 1993, pp. 66–111. Steckmesser, L. Kent. “Robin Hood and the American Outlaw: A Note on History and Folklore.” The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 79, no. 312, American Folklore Society, Apr.–Jun. 1966, pp. 348–355. Szasz, Ferenc Morton. “A New Mexican ‘Davy Crockett’: Walt Disney’s Version of the Life and Legend of Elfego Baca.” Journal of the Southwest, vol. 48, no. 3, 2006, pp. 261–274. Troncarelli, Fabio. “The Man Behind the Mask of Zorro.” Early Modern History (1500–1700), vol. 9, no. 3, Autumn 2001, n.pag. History Ireland, www.history ireland.com/early-modern-history-1500-1700/the-man-behind-the-mask-ofzorro/. Accessed 10 Oct. 2015. Van Hecke, An. “Review.” Iberoamericana (2001–), Nueva época, vol. 9, no. 33, Iberoamericana Editorial Vervuert, Mar. 2009, pp. 237–239. White, Richard. “Outlaw Gangs of the Middle Border: American Social Bandits.” Western Historical Quarterly, vol. 12, no. 4, Western Historical Quarterly, Utah State University on behalf of Western History Association, Oct. 1981, pp. 387–408.

2.2

Intercontinental Journeys

8

Pynchon Stretches West to East in Against the Day Matthew Cissell

New approaches to studying the U.S. American West cannot limit themselves to analyses of literature and cinema, even though those two art forms are central to the formation of the idea of the West that circulates in and among cultures. Extending that study involves other considerations such as geography, American exceptionalism, national narratives and identities, colonialism, race, borders, and more. The history of the idea of the West and specifcally the U.S. West is a vast topic that branches into a number of areas. It is then appropriate that the novel dealt with herein is almost as vast in scope: Thomas Pynchon’s 2006 novel, Against the Day, his frst and so far only use of the Western genre. This prompts the question of how a writer uses a genre without being or becoming a genre author. (This has real consequences, as seen in the case of Margaret Atwood and the question of whether she has written science fction or, as she calls it, “speculative fction”.)1 Why and how Pynchon used the West is what the following addresses. At almost 1,200 pages, the novel is far too large to try to analyze or even summarize in the space available here, so this chapter looks at Pynchon’s use of the genre and, as the title suggests, how he stretches it eastward, well beyond what most would think of as the limits of the concept of the West and the genre associated with it. First, though, it must be noted that despite the importance of the West and the Western genre in Against the Day, it is not only a Western; in fact, it makes use of several genres, which is not unusual for Pynchon. And yet his use of the West and the Western is not the only thing that makes this novel stand out from Pynchon’s other works; where the novel begins is quite signifcant: the Colombia Exposition of 1893 in Chicago. Before looking at why that event is so signifcant in the novel, it must be pointed out that Pynchon’s other novels have been primarily set on the East or West Coast, albeit with some exceptions, and none of his work had explored the lands and histories between. The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Vineland (1990), and Inherent Vice (2009) are often referred to as the California novels.2 And though they are set in the Western United States, they are in no way Westerns. Conversely, most of his other novels

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are set, at least in great part, on the northeast coast of the United States, these are V. (1963), Mason & Dixon (1997), and Bleeding Edge (2013). The exception is Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) in which the action mostly unfolds in Europe. Through these various novels he has drawn on spy fction, sci-f, gothic, detective fction, and more. Pynchon’s genre praxis amounts to a type of montage of narrative within a novel, or what Pynchon scholar Brian McHale has called his “genre poaching” (McHale 18). In Against the Day Pynchon uses this technique to connect all his novels, complexly knotting together the various storylines into what some critics considered an ungainly novel. Unfortunately, students of U.S. literature are unlikely to encounter the novel and thus decide for themselves. Research indicates that The Crying of Lot 49 is the Pynchon novel that is most often included in syllabi, with Against the Day having no real representation (Cissell 244). Also, the size is enough to dissuade some. In fact, many professional critics were driven to exasperation by the titanic tome, and at least one admitted to having not read the novel (something that may have also been due to the time constraints created by the review embargo placed on the novel, leaving reviewers a narrow window of time in which to read and review the mammoth and complex novel). In the following, I argue that there is a form that corresponds to the content and that the use of the Western genre and other genres is central to Pynchon’s project. Why does an author use or draw on a genre? According to Franco Moretti in his Atlas of the European Novel, “Each genre possesses its own space, then—and each space its own genre” (35). He further claims that “style is indeed correlated to space, so space is correlated to plot” (Moretti 46) and though that may be, it is certainly not the only factor that determines choice of place and setting and the distribution of space and positions within the novel. This is clearly not a position shared by Moretti, who writes, “Space is not ‘outside’ of narrative, then, but an internal force, that shapes it from within” (70). One should note that Moretti clearly follows on Vladimir Propp and takes a somewhat narratological approach that is quite formalist, ignoring the wider social world in which agents of the literary feld exist. Perhaps this is what affects his understanding of Pierre Bourdieu, whose use of maps to analyze Sentimental Education impressed Moretti but left him “unsure what to do with them” (9).3 In contrast to Moretti’s view, one can look to the work of Pierre Bourdieu, who was somewhat critical of narratologists like Gerard Genette whose approach treats the literary object as an autonomous entity, subject to its own laws and owing its “literariness” or “poeticity” to the particular treatment given to its linguistic material, that is to say, to the techniques

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Bourdieu’s sociology of literature is based on his broader general theory of practice, which does not lend itself to easy summary. Still, one can differentiate the two scholars by noting that whereas Moretti focuses on genre to the extent that it eclipses writers and others, Bourdieu provides the agent and his or her habitus an important place in his schema. A rather reductive version of his theory is rendered as a formula in Bourdieu’s Distinction and given as “[(habitus) (capital)] + feld = practice” (Bourdieu, Distinction 101). An agent has a particular habitus, something which Bourdieu defned in The Logic of Practice as: Systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them. (53) Although this may appear to some as stereotypical French theory to be put alongside all the other oft-quoted Gallic mandarins, that conclusion would be both inaccurate and unfair, as there is wonderful academic work that has been done or is being conducted now that continues in Bourdieu’s spirit but is not heavy on theory—in fact, it is often rather quantitatively oriented. As an example one may look to the work of Bo Ekelund, Mikael Börjesson, and their colleagues at Uppsala University. In “Comparing Literary Worlds: An Analysis of the Spaces of Fictional Universes in the Work of Two US Prose Fiction Debut Cohorts, 1940 and 1955” their goal was “to research changes in the social conditions of authorial practices within the production of prose fction, that is, primarily the novel, in the US” (Eklund and Börjesson 348); they do so by studying different cohorts and their debut novels. The fndings are quite telling: debut age, novel setting, and protagonist gender correspond strongly to the authors’ backgrounds. The authors found “a direct relation between biographical modalities and literary choices” (11). This is not an argument for a biographical approach to literary study, but rather support for Bourdieu’s ideas and approach to the analysis of a cultural product such as a novel. One cannot simply ignore the agent (here the author) when analyzing a cultural product. Seen this way, an agent’s choices are hardly arbitrary and instead must be seen as position-takings chosen in response to other agents in the feld and the positions they occupy or any positions that may be available or have yet to be staked out.

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The study mentioned earlier by Eklund et al. focused on debut novels, and yet the novel involved here is not by a debut author. However, had Pynchon’s cohort been studied, he would likely have been located in a position somewhat similar to the one ascribed to William Gaddis. The authors write: “William Gaddis’s massive, modernist work The Recognitions is now found right in between the recognizable clusters, at a position of tension between different choices” (364). In other words, the work is seen as being a site of tension, which also describes Against the Day. Pynchon’s sixth novel stands out for more reasons than just its size. It may not present the same diffculties as reading Gravity’s Rainbow, but reviewers were often fummoxed by the narrative tangle of the novel, with one claiming that it was actually several novels crammed into one book. This is due to the numerous storylines and subplots and their corresponding narrative genres. In Against the Day Pynchon takes a more Protean approach to the use of genre than in any of his other novels. However, two main plotlines and their associated genres can be discerned—in fact, they become apparent at the outset of the novel. The frst is that of the Chums of Chance, a “fve-lad crew” that serve on a balloon; it is the frst time Pynchon has drawn on juvenile adventure fction and to which he provides a steampunk twist. This plotline opens and closes the novel, acting as bookends for all that transpires. The Chums do not have much contact with the other main plotline that they run parallel to and that the reader encounters shortly after meeting the lads as they arrive at the Columbia Expo in Chicago. The second central plot is that of the Webb Traverse family (his wife, three boys, and a girl, each receiving his or her own subplot) as they try to deal with and/or avenge the killing of the anarchist father at the hands of corporate henchmen employed by the arch-protagonist of the novel, a robber-baron called Scarsdale Vibe. At frst glance it appears to be a Western, albeit one that focuses on mines and miners instead of cattle and cowboys; initially set in Colorado, it bears the marks of the genre (one of the brothers is a cigar smoking card hustler and another ends up in Mexico aiding the anti-Porfristas). And yet upon closer inspection one sees a storyline closer to proletarian literature than Western novels, perhaps more in the line of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell than any Zane Grey story. The characters from this plot are miners, and the action occurs initially in mining areas of the West, as opposed to cowboys out on the range. For example, early in the novel the reader fnds anarchist miner Webb Traverse in Leadville: “The town, only recently founded, was already being turned black with slag, up every alley all the way out into open country you saw it towering in great poisoned mountains” (88–89). It is worth noting that Leadville is mentioned throughout the novel; a place tied historically to the natural exploitation of the West, as well as the economic systems that drove the cycles of boom and bust of which

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Leadville is but one example. So, the reader slowly fnds a proletarian narrative disguised as a Western. If the rocket in Gravity’s Rainbow is seen to arc through that novel from start to fnish, the same can be said of these two main narrative lines that arc through and structure Against the Day. The former is associated with the Chums on the frst page and arcs over the narrative of the Traverse family; these two major overarching narratives (one fantastic/ extraordinary and the other “earthbound”/ordinary) that traverse the novel correspond to the bifurcation of light as it passes through Iceland Spar, which is so symbolically and structurally central to the novel. The centrality of this theme is made clear by the book cover of the frst edition of the novel, which shows the title as perceived through transparent calcite and the bifurcation that ensues.4 The impression is that the novel has already somehow passed through a piece of spar and the narrative lines and more have doubled. Against the Day starts in Chicago, an industrial city rising in the Midwest where cows coming from the West arrive to the slaughter yards and beef goes to the East to feed the growing cities. It is a city of immigrants and labor struggles. But specifcally, it is the Columbia Exposition in 1893 that the Chums are fying toward with their somewhat futuristic airship; this is the more fantastic storyline. The approach is standard Pynchon; a historically documented but surprising event is given an incredible twist. Briefy, the Expo had a number of elements that set central themes for Pynchon’s novel. Frederick Jackson Turner read his Frontier thesis there. Tesla did the wiring for the White City that symbolized the arrival of electricity to homes and towns. There was the cultural-centric fascination with “exotic” peoples. But there was also a Parliament of Religions, a Krupp Gun display, and Scott Joplin and John Philip Sousa were there. This brief list does little justice to the historically rich range of exhibits and persons that were in attendance and ft so well within the Pynchonian literary landscape. Still, not much narrative time passes here. The scene of action soon shifts to Colorado, so that the reader is taken farther west to meet the real protagonists, the Traverse family, and especially Kit, whose narrative is the more earthbound and ordinary. However, this is not the West of cowboys and ranchers, although they appear occasionally out of the background. Instead, the reader fnds miners who use dynamite for work as well as more destructive political ends. The frontier was dwindling as declared by Turner; barbed wire had fenced off the land, and trains and telegraphs had trimmed the expanse of the vast distances. The reader is in the West that is starting to disappear. But what is the West? “The West is the best” might sound good walking down Venice Beach in 1966, but it sounds doubtful thinking of Skid Row today. So what West do we imagine? Imagining the West started a long time ago as European peoples looked out over the Atlantic or trekked to Finisterre, and it continues today. We might look at the cultural products made for the

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European powers as they colonized the “New World,” these West Indies. One may well contemplate an engraving from 1774 titled “The Oracle,” made by John Dixon, an Irishman. Though diffcult to distinguish perhaps, it depicts Father Time showing Britannia a bright future in which Concord triumphs over Discord; it is worth noting that Hibernia and Scotia are next to Britannia, and it is America that is portrayed exotically in feathered native dress across from them in the shadows, sitting on commerce from the colonies.5 Little more than a year later the colonies would be at war with Britain. The extraordinary narrative of a bright British future with its happy colonies was about to intersect with the more earthbound narrative of colonial discontent. An imaginative, if not naïve, idea of the West would be displaced and destroyed by other ideas of the West supported by different narratives. With that inevitable collision of conficting narratives in mind, a quote from Pynchon’s 1997 Mason & Dixon offers an apt rumination on what the West means or may mean: Does Britannia, when she sleeps, dream? Is America her dream?—in which all that cannot pass in the metropolitan Wakefulness is allow’d Expression away in the restless Slumber of the Provinces, and on West-ward, wherever ‘tis not yet mapp’d, nor written down, nor ever, by the majority of Mankind, seen,—serving as a Rubbish-Tip for subjunctive Hopes, for all that may yet be true,—Earthly Paradise, Fountain of Youth, Realms of Prester John, Christ’s Kingdom, ever behind the sunset, safe till the next Territory to the West be seen and recorded, measur’d and tied in, back into the Net-Work of Points already known, that slowly triangulates its way into the Continent, changing all the subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the end of Governments,—winning away from the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair. (345) The “subjunctive hopes” of colonists in the 1770s or of miners in Colorado were certainly far from the mind of the author, as he grew up on Long Island, so it is hard to see much connection between Pynchon and a character like Kit Traverse. Born in 1937, Pynchon was fve years old when The Cisco Kid began to air on the radio, the same year that the immensely popular and very vocally anti-Semitic priest Father Coughlin was forced into silence. Radio and later TV, cinema, and, of course, books, clearly marked Pynchon and the way he was beginning to imagine the world, although it may seem that his youth was curtailed by going to Cornell at 16 on a math scholarship with the idea to study engineering, thus following his father’s choice of study. However, after briefy serving in the U.S. Navy Pynchon came back to

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Cornell and turned his back on engineering by switching to English literature. Moreover, he soon left New York and went west to Seattle, where some friends got him a job at Boeing, a place Pynchon did not much like and a job he wanted only until his novel was fnished. As soon as he was able, he then went to Mexico. He was estranged from his parents for some years. There is a very similar but inverse trajectory of the main protagonist in Against the Day. Just as Pynchon went west, turning his back on his parents and the conservative world they were part of, so Kit Traverse betrays his father by taking money from the industrialist Vibe to study math at Yale, going East in the process. There are some other symmetrical aspects to their respective trajectories, such as the fact that Kit’s work in the development of aircraft as materiel in war is not too far removed from Pynchon’s work on Boeing’s BOMARC rocket program. Incidentally, both Kit and Pynchon turn their backs on war and its industry; Kit abandons an Italian nose dive pilot he had been fying with, and Pynchon wrote Gravity’s Rainbow, arguably one of the greatest literary critiques of war. Furthermore, both Kit and Pynchon are the most broadly traveled of their siblings. Of course, there is a great difference between the trajectory of the author and that of the character; it is only when Kit is away at school some time that he learns of his father’s death and suspects the authorship, which prompts his decision to fee to Germany with the excuse of greater study. While at Yale Kit comes to a conclusion: “Tengo que get el fuck out of aqui.” He begins to see Yale as “no more than a sort of high-hat technical school for learning to be a Yale man, if not indeed a factory for turning out Yale men” (318). Attending a track meet he sees one student greeted by a group “of older men dressed in what Kit recognized by now as very expensive town suits” (note the knowledge he has acquired while studying this, for him, exotic culture). He concludes, I will never look like this fellow, talk like that, be wanted in that way. At frst it produced a terrible feeling of exclusion, a piercing conviction that because of where and to whom he had been born, some world of visible privilege would forever be denied to him. (319) It is almost certain that Bourdieu, who drew on authors from Flaubert to Gunther Grass, would have liked this passage. Kit experiences the symbolic violence that is exerted in the social feld over agents in dominated positions and/or lacking the cultural capital to participate in the various language games that occur within diverse felds. Shortly after this, Kit is given a letter from his sister, “so unraggedly slit open as to suggest a letter knife from a desk-set of some quality” (321), in which he learns of his father’s demise. Violence in writing and language begets violence in acts.

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This scene and Kit’s refections deserve greater study. Kit cannot talk like the other Yale students, not because he does not understand the language, but rather because he lacks the relevant cultural competence due to his habitus being so different from young East Coast scions that are born and raised to be there. Linguistic practice as expressed by accents and lexicon is something that agents take with them even when the context of communication is different or even if the language is changed. It affects how one fts in or not, how one is perceived to be. This phenomena and what it points to are used to comic effect with Kit’s eldest brother Reef, who also goes east to Europe by joining the entourage of a wealthy libertine socialite. This character is cut from cowboy clichés; he is a card playing, cigar smoking, and sharpshooting man of the West. About halfway through the book Reef has left the entourage and has been doing tunneling work, a job he is suited to. Later in a Swiss sanatorium he fnds his brother Kit, who thinks: “It would’ve taken Kit a minute to recognize Reef (. . .) seeing that his brother had undergone some redesign. (. . .) Kit would have taken him for a tourist (. . .) except for the voice” (664). Language betrays Reef, and the language jokes center on him. Reef tries to pass for European but he literally cannot talk the talk even if he looks the part. He says “pennsilvoney” for Italian pensione, “Hottentot” for the French attentat, “areeferdirtcheap” (arrivaderci), and “forty mule” (faute de mieux) all in less than ten pages. Reef also uses the term “drygulchin” (737), as does his brother Frank back in Mexico, which is quite particular to the discourse of the Western genre (one only has to think back on the prominent use of the term in Louis L’Amour novels) although no corpus work has been done for this chapter to confrm this. Still, one can see how the Traverse brothers take their language and cultural capital with them as they try to avenge the death of their father. At this point in the novel Kit has also been reunited with his romantic interest, a girl named Dally that he knew back in Colorado. Dally tells Reef and Kit that they call undue attention to themselves “every time you move or open your mouth” (733), a statement that points to the brothers’ lack of appropriate cultural capital; they are obvious outsiders who do not know how to act in this world so far from Colorado. And yet they plan to proceed with their plan to kill Scarsdale Vibe since he is in Europe. The narrative that started in Colorado has been stretched to Italy, but as stated earlier, it is also a proletariat story. How so? Vibe is the antagonist for the Traverse family; however, there are others that see him in an equally negative light but for other reasons: the proletariat class. It is worth noting that Vibe is in Europe for business, not pleasure. The industrialist robber-baron is there to buy up art as an investment. The reader learns that “Scarsdale was no aesthete, the Cassily Adams rendition of Little Big Horn was fne enough for him” (726).6 The attempt is interrupted by a young Italian anarchist who is shot down by Vibe’s security.

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“He was doing the one thing authority cannot abide, will never allow to pass, he was refusing to do what he was told” (742). In this way Kit and Reef avoid incurring the dramatic debt that comes with murder (one must bear in mind that this is not Cormac McCarthy or Louis L’Amour, but rather that author that perhaps most stands between the Beats and the Hippies). The fact that Frank Traverse mortally shoots one of his father’s killers leads the reader to expect more of the same, especially since Reef, a great shot, has been given a new “Rigby Nitro Express, point 450 caliber” (737). Scarsdale is the arch villain and plutocrat of the novel, and although the storyline that connects him to the Traverse family is one of revenge for the wrongful death of a miner, he and the type he exemplifes are targets in Europe for reasons well outside of the Western genre. Signifcantly, the event and time coincide with real historical assassinations of aristocrats and plutocrats by anarchists, something clearly referenced in the novel. The aborted attempt on Scarsdale Vibe happens in Venice a bit more than halfway through the book, but it is clearly pivotal. Surprised by the size of the security detail, Reef later exclaims, “Where’n the hell’d all ‘em pistoleros come from?” (744). This language would ft any stereotypical Western, but this is hardly the Old West. Kit believes that Vibe saw him during the assassination attempt, which unnerves the youngest Traverse. “It was probably also the undeniable moment, if one had to be singled out, of Kit’s exclusion from what had been spoken of at Yale as a ‘future’—from any routes to success or even bourgeois comfort that were Scarsdale Vibe’s to control” (745). This dramatic scene is not some clichéd version of the OK Corral shootout, but it is still defnitive, as it concludes the exclusion Kit frst felt at Yale. Agents that occupy positions of authority are able to close doors of opportunity that seal off the path to some possibility. So Kit abandons academic pursuits and he heads east to Inner Asia, as far as Lake Baikal, in an effort to lose himself. Of course the dramatic confict is at this point still unresolved, and that resolution will have to wait another 300 pages. The Western is stretched further east before the wayfarers fnd a home, returning one or more at a time. One of the frst to return to the Western frontier is Scarsdale Vibe. The reader fnds him in Trinidad, Colorado, addressing an industrial group; his speech, both crude and cruel, is a violent discourse on how capitalists use humans. While walking through the town, Frank Traverse sees Vibe; he and a friend decide to confront the industrialist. However, they do not have a chance to kill him because Vibe is shot down by his own bodyguard (an act that has a history from Aurelius to Indira Gandhi). The Old Western revenge narrative has been fnished in Colorado but within the frame of modern discontent and animus produced by the forces of unchecked capitalism. The Western has returned to the scene of the crime, but only to be resolved in the context of a worker striking out at his abusive corporate overlord. However, this is not the end of the line for Frank;

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after Trinidad he moves on to Ludlow, both in Colorado and central to the mining that was being done at the time. In a tent city set up by striking miners, Frank fnds his brother Reef’s ex and their child, Jesse. (It should be noted that the depiction of the event in the novel compares closely to primary sources about the occurrence.) The tent city was mowed down by bullets from machine guns that would soon be used overseas; among those killed were the wives and children of some of the miners. In the novel Frank and his family members escape. As Kit heads east his brother Reef follows his own trajectory, which brings him to a family that he takes back to the United States. Even this late in the novel Reef’s limited linguistic competence causes him problems. “At Ellis Island, Reef, thinking both his English and Italian could get him in trouble whichever he spoke, remained indecisively mute long enough to have a large letter I, for idiot, chalked on his back” (1074). In other words, speaking as someone from out west could be as bad as sounding “foreign” when dealing with workers at Ellis Island. He is only saved from being rejected by what he later thinks of as a crypto-anarchist, who wipes the letter off of him. Going west Reef and his family encounter his brother Frank along with Reef’s former wife and child, and they are last seen in the Northwest near modern-day Seattle. This part of the Western narrative has elliptically returned but it is still marked by proletariat concerns, as evidenced in an essay written by Reef’s son. On the subject of what it means to be American, he wrote: “It means to do what they tell you and take what they give you and don’t go on strike or their soldiers will shoot you down” (1076). This is more a comment about the suffering of laborers than an ode to the West and its disappearing frontier. This proletariat narrative dressed as a Western has come back around to its U.S. origin after a lengthy ramble east across Europe and into Asia.

Conclusion In terms of a broader argument, the position behind this chapter is that Against the Day holds a central place in Pynchon’s creative project and that it is designed to tie together his other novels and thus make of his fctional oeuvre something like the literary world created by William Faulkner. The major claim presented here is that Against the Day stretches the Western genre eastward, but it does so by wearing two hats as it were: a Stetson and a miner’s helmet. The two main narrative lines arc through the novel, as light is doubly refracted through Iceland spar with its ordinary and extraordinary rays. Pynchon warps and pulls the West eastward not by writing about the Camargue, but rather about miners, where the overlap of Western and working-class narratives, set against the backdrop of industrial plunder of nature in search of proft, allowed Pynchon to connect back to Europe and the historical novel of ideas. From that claim come further arguments about Pynchon’s position on organized

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labor and the forces of capital and the relatively comparable but inverse trajectories of the author and the chief protagonist. I have used the work of Pierre Bourdieu to look at how an agent’s trajectory is the history of his position-takings and that decisions are unconsciously calculated by the habitus. The social space that Pynchon inhabits affects the genesis of his literary work; the social space of the author must be considered when analyzing the places and spaces of the literary creation. The critic James Wood found Scarsdale Vibe less than believable or convincing and gave a scathing review of Against the Day (unfortunately, this is not the place to go into how Wood has positioned himself in respect to Pynchon and his works). Perhaps today, more than 10 years on and with a very different president in the United States, he would have a more sympathetic view, since he has managed to do so in regard to some of David Foster Wallace’s work. We could all beneft from rereading Pynchon’s giant novel, since its concerns seem to be even more relevant now than they were before. In the doctoral dissertation from which this chapter is in part developed, I argued for an elliptical structure in Against the Day that brings narratives and characters back around like comets. In this manner three members of the Traverse family return to Colorado at the end of Against the Day, specifcally Ludlow. The events in the novel and its return to Ludlow and the ensuing violence and carnage take the reader right up to the door of tragic horror that would become the twentieth century, starting with World War I and with a view to the rise of corporate-backed fascism that bloomed in the 1920s and 1930s and continues today. In Against the Day Pynchon seems to make clear his political leanings, a fact that detracted from the book for those that would hold him to an art-forart’s-sake approach. Coincidentally, Bourdieu also became much more public about his support for labor struggles, and toward the end of his life he wrote a good deal about the need for a response to what he called the “tyranny of the market,” a warning being sounded to some degree today by philosopher Michael Sandel, among others. These diverse voices raise the alarm that we must heed lest we, too, fnd ourselves forced to prepare Against the Day of we know not what reckoning, a reckoning that would likely involve more than the loss of a romanticized West that had been “won” in some fctional past, the loss of all our subjunctive dreams and all that yet may be.

Notes 1. See Atwood’s article, “Aliens Have Taken the Place of Angels” for an example of her distinction between the two terms. Her disavowal of science fction and a comment about the genre generated a controversy that forced the author to rectify her statements in an attempt at reputational damage control. Atwood’s strenuous attempts to avoid such categorization reveal the forces at play in the literary feld.

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2. Two separate scholars have grouped Pynchon novels thus: David Cowart in Thomas Pynchon & the Dark Passages of History and Thomas Schaub in his piece in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon. 3. This confusion regarding Bourdieu extends to Moretti’s Modern Epic as well, but is coupled with confusion in respect to encyclopedic authors like Pynchon. In that book Moretti holds that authors such as Joyce or Goethe must reject allegory. And yet Pynchon is considered one of the maximalist encyclopedic authors par excellence despite having made great use of allegory as in Gravity’s Rainbow, as several Pynchon scholars have argued. 4. In the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin there is a letter by Pynchon from the 1960s that makes it clear that he intended to be actively involved in his book covers after the release of his debut novel. Moreover, Tore Rye Anderson has noted that Raquel Jaramillo was in close contact with Pynchon regarding the design of his 1997 Mason & Dixon; Anderson also speculates about coordination for other book covers. 5. I have Linda Colley’s Britons to thank for my awareness of this mezzotint, and her interpretation of it stands behind the view presented here. Colley writes, “The main reason why an American Indian was used to symbolise the Thirteen Colonies was, of course, that their white inhabitants had yet to evolve a recognisable and autonomous identity of their own” (134). 6. The print referred to was acquired by the Anheuser-Busch brewing company and is indelibly associated with that mass production beer. The implication is that Vibe has the economic capital to acquire great art but lacks the fner tastes needed to appreciate it.

Works Cited Anderson, Tore Rye. “Cherchez la Femme: The Coercive Paratexts of Thomas Pynchon’s V.” Dream Tonight of Peacock Tails: Essays on the Fiftieth Anniversary of Thomas Pynchon’s V, edited by Paolo Simonetti and Umberto Rossi, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2015, pp. 31–51. Atwood, Margaret. “Aliens Have Taken the Place of Angels.” The Guardian, 17 June 2005, Film. Bourdieu, Pierre. Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market. Translated by Richard Nice, The New Press, 1998. ———. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice, Harvard UP, 1984. ———. The Logic of Practice. Translated by R. Nice, Stanford, Stanford UP, 1990. ———. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Translated by Susan Emanuel, Stanford UP, 1992. Cissell, Matthew C. “Arc of the Absent Author: Thomas Pynchon’s Trajectory from Entropy to Grace.” PhD dissertation, U of the Basque Country, VitoriaGasteiz, 2016. Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837. Yale UP, 1992. Cowart, David. Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History. U of Georgia P, 2011. Ekelund, Bo and Mikael Börjesson. “Comparing Literary Worlds: An Analysis of the Spaces of Fictional Universes in the Work of Two US Prose Fiction Debut Cohorts, 1940 and 1955.” Poetics, vol. 33, nos. 5–6, 2005, pp. 343–368.

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McHale, Brian. “Genre as History: Pynchon’s Genre-Poaching.” Pynchon’s against the Day: A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide, edited by Christopher Leise and Jeffrey Severs, U of Delaware P, 2011, pp. 15–28. Moretti, Franco. Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900. London: Verso, 1998. ———. Modern Epic. Translated by Quintin Hoare, London: Verso, 1996. Pynchon, Thomas. Against the Day. London: Jonathan Cape, 2006. ———. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Penguin, 1995. ———. Mason & Dixon. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1997. Schaub, Thomas H. “The Crying of Lot 49 and Other California Novels.” The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Pynchon, edited by Inger H. Dalsgaard, Luc Herman and Brian McHale, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012, pp. 30–43.

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No Country for Young Men Geographies of Anxiety in My Own Private Idaho Fiorenzo Iuliano

prince henry: Now, my masters, for a true face and good conscience. falstaff: Both which I have had; but their date is out. (Shakespeare, 1 Henry IV II, iv, 480–482)

After My Own Private Idaho was released, Gus Van Sant remarked his debt to Shakespeare, describing the movie as a loose rewriting of Henry IV and Henry V. The existing literature about the movie likewise insists on the Shakespearean sources and especially on the father–son relationship, central to both plays and repeatedly, albeit controversially, addressed in My Own Private Idaho (MOPI henceforth).1 Here the parallel stories of Mike and Scott, two young hustlers traveling across the Northwest of the United States, mobilize narratives of shared imagination about America’s “lost youth” (Barnaby 34), about the troublesome relationship with one’s own family heritage and origins as something to either retrieve or reject, and about the Northwest of the United States as an area that in 1991, when the movie premiered, was enjoying an unprecedented popularity, especially among young people. Mike is looking for his mother, who left when he was a child, and, in order to get to her, even fies to Rome where she supposedly lives. Scott is trapped between two opposite, but paradoxically interchangeable, models of fatherhood: his biological father, the mayor of Portland, a prototype of upper-middle-class masculinity and normative fatherhood that he rejects, and Bob, the “self-proclaimed King of the Streets, exuberant drunk and coke addict, Scott’s lowlife mentor and onetime lover” (Greenberg 24), the counterpart of Henry IV’s Falstaff, a man whom Scott has looked up to as a father fgure much of his life. In her 2003 essay on the movie, Susan Wiseman starts by asking “Where is ‘Shakespeare’ in MOPI?” (200), thus implying that Shakespeare’s presence, though taken for granted or even dismissed as almost obvious, needs to be critically interrogated, being, in fact, much less selfevident than expected. I am going to pose a similar question, shifting the perspective from the movie’s protagonists and their loose association

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with Shakespeare’s characters to the places where the story is set. Where is the West (and the Northwest) in MOPI? The movie features a number of references to actual, and not only Western for that matter, cities and nonurban landscapes. However, I contend that the importance of space in MOPI is to be found in its use of landscapes as tentative metaphors for both impossible desires and unsettled temporality, rather than in its (more or less) realistic representations of the places featured. By remapping the territories where its narrative unravels, the movie reframes its spaces and sense of spatiality, but, at the same time, it probes and questions the scope and the limits of this process. The West is an essential component of this process of grappling with geographical realism. Though undoubtedly evoked and represented as a “state of mind,” as Andrew Barnaby argues about the presence of Idaho in the movie (22), the West nonetheless resists multiple attempts at being idealized, opposing its stubborn and undecipherable materiality to both the protagonists’ and the spectators’ fantasies and projections. MOPI, thus, is a movie in which postmodern and queer geographies of the West are repeatedly evoked and put to use to be fnally rejected as mere superimpositions—Edward Soja would defne them as “semiotic blankets” (246), an impenetrable and impermeable reality that only speaks through its silences.

Diasporic Maps and Unnamed Landscapes The opposition between names of places and unnamed landscapes is one of the movie’s crucial features. MOPI is divided into six sections, each titled by the name of a place: the action starts in Idaho, then the protagonists move to Seattle, then to Portland, to Idaho again, to Rome, once again to Portland, to be fnally back in Idaho. The name of each of these locations is lettered in white against a colored background, so as to label the corresponding section of the movie with the name of the place where it is set. Each name, moreover, pinpoints a distinct episode in the route that takes Mike and Scott across the Northwest, to Europe, and fnally back home again. However, the accuracy in naming each place belies the anxiety produced by the protagonists’ discovery that there is no real difference between the spaces among which they unceasingly move. Despite Mike’s words, which claim (as I will point out later) to identify in each road the unique and distinctive features of a face, singularity is not the most recognizable property of the places in which the movie is set. Undistinguishable skies, prairies, and roads are, as a matter of fact, what all these places are made of. The landscapes featured in each section, moreover, hardly bear recognizable landmarks that the viewer could easily associate with the city or the region evoked by the title. Even ostensibly realistic takes of actual places turn out to be counterfeit reconstructions, thus suggesting that the names displayed on the screen lack any actual reference and function as void signifers that frustrate the protagonists’

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(and the viewers’) attempt to fnd exact correspondences between names, places, and events. Roads are central to both the visual economy of the movie and its storyline, which at least partially follows the traditional pattern of the on-the-road story. This is openly stated by the voiceover at the movie’s very beginning. We read that the scene is set in Idaho, we see a big and empty road and one of the two protagonists, Mike, presumably waiting for someone or something, and we hear what we surmise must be his voice: I always know where I am by the way the road looks. Like I just know that I’ve been here before. I just know that I’ve been stuck here . . . like this one fucking time before, you know that? Yeah. There’s not another road anywhere that looks like this road. I mean, exactly like this road. It’s one kind of place. One of a kind. Like someone’s face. Like a fucked-up face. Moving between opposite polarities—the singular and the universal, the individual and the undifferentiated—the movie addresses from the beginning of its own topographic spaces as mental and emotional constructions, or as blank canvases onto which its protagonists project what they are looking for. If the movie is a quest—and it certainly is, as it focuses on two young men trying to come to terms with the interiorized absence of their parents—it is through landscapes and places that this quest is made possible, and yet constantly undermined. This search is frustrated because of the interchangeability of the places they happen to go to; the road, rather than a promise of freedom and liberation from the constraints of middle-class life, turns out to be the embodiment of a paranoid nightmare, which remains unchanged, despite the protagonists’ efforts to fee away, and which takes them back to the same places, fnally resulting in a monstrous and suffocating circular detour.2 Scott’s quest shifts from his symbiosis with Bob to the fnal identifcation with his late father, whose actual position and symbolic role he acquires in the last part of the movie. Mike, conversely, never fnds his mother, and the last frames of the movie feature him alone, again on the road, in a scene that almost reproduces the one displayed at the beginning. His voiceover comments: “I’m a connoisseur of roads. Been tasting roads my whole life. This road . . . will never end. It probably goes . . . all around . . . the world.” The last scene does not clarify whether Mike is referring to the same road he was traveling along at the beginning of the story or to a new, unknown one, but remarks that any distinction among the places he has visited and traveled through is as pointless as any fantasy of appropriation of the landscape. As the story fows, we realize that big roads and urban streets are always the same. Despite a couple of scenes set in Rome, it is the Roman countryside that takes up the Italian

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section of the movie, and it can hardly be distinguished from Idaho’s rural landscapes. There are only skies, sunsets, prairies, and animals to frame Mike’s fruitless trip to Italy—his mother no longer lives where she used to, and Mike must content himself with the few stories about her that local people have been recounting for years. Mike and Scott’s unceasing roaming thus goes claustrophobically back to its very beginning. Though the empty road featured in the last frames of the movie cannot be distinguished from the one in its opening ones, something has happened in between. Scott has taken over his late father’s position, while Mike is left alone in his eternal wandering. This sharp difference between the two not only accounts for their distinct roles within the economy of the plot but also for the opposite relations they have with the territory. Moreover, the fact that Mike and Scott are looking for a mother and a father (or fatherhood), respectively, makes the trajectories of their desires all the more conficting and irreconcilable also with regard to the spaces they inhabit. What Mike symbolically needs is the retrieval of his lost symbiosis with the land; what Scott needs is the overcoming of this very symbiosis, and the fnal control over the territory, which he achieves by inheriting his father’s power. Scott’s life is constructed according to a teleological pattern, which replicates and mocks any predictable coming-of-age narrative: after disavowing any relation with his family, and especially with his father, and living a dissolute and sexually promiscuous youth, he fnally realizes that he is a grown-up man who needs to comply with the duties that his age and his social status bestow upon him. His life is oriented toward the future; normative temporality turns out to be the epistemic and existential pattern that most suits him and the perspective that can best frame and justify his choices. Mike’s story, conversely, depends less on a narrative than on a bodily and material epistemology, he being affected by forces that preexist any symbolic order and that nonetheless take control of his body and his life. People, stories, and landscapes hold their grip on Mike’s existence, but resist any attempt at being deciphered or understood. The beginning of the movie is crucial in this respect. Though the landscape that enters Mike’s visual feld resembles a face, with “road, hills, two trees [that] do weirdly combine into the unsettling semblance of a face” (Greenberg 24), it is a face that cannot reciprocate Mike’s gaze and that remains hostile to his attempt to provide it with any meaning. As a consequence, “Mike swoons, topples like a stone (or his bag) into the road’s dead center” (24), as if narcolepsy were his only way out of the impossibility to grapple with a landscape—and with a world—that refuses to be made signifcant. The fact that Mike’s visual perspective is often split from the narrative, to the point that at the beginning and at the end of the movie his words are voiceovers while he stays silent, further proves how pointless his efforts to fnd his own place within the landscapes ultimately are.

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If it is true that Mike is “locked into adolescence [as] fgured by a verbal non- or pre-linguistic realm” (Wiseman 210), this aphasia, a symptom of his inadequacy to the world, could also be understood as his frustrated desire to merge with the landscape. The prelinguistic sphere to which Mike is attracted, in fact, is the earth as “a place of physical memory and material/maternal origin” (Howlett 181). His narcolepsy actually amounts to him falling to the ground and curling up on himself; his frst narcoleptic episode precedes a reverie in which he is together with his lost mother, as if he were looking for a maternal embrace he can only hope to fnd in the land that surrounds him. The protagonists’ relationship with sexuality, too, reverberates in the process of resignifcation of the territory staged in the movie. Though the association of MOPI with the so-called “new queer cinema” is a controversial one,3 it is unquestionable that the movie’s scope is not limited to the account of two gay men’s lives, but incorporates queer sexuality as a perspective that destabilizes and reconfgures the protagonists’ epistemic paradigms. Scott and Mike have opposite attitudes toward (their own) queerness, the former’s fnal choice to lead a normative life being, in fact, counterbalanced by Mike’s refusal of any domestic order. The private spheres of their existences are somehow refected in the territory, which functions as a repository of symbolic values associated with either sexual normativity or the rejection of any ordering principle in their intimate lives. The road, for instance, a traditional emblem of freedom and queer liberation, is radically resignifed and turned, as Daniel Sander would put it, into a “queer infrastructure” (30).4 Appropriated and symbolically reshaped by a queer person such as Mike, it is no longer meant as either a connection between different places or, as has historically been the case of U.S. highways, the means through which gay people could fnally fee rural areas and move to big cities. As Sander remarks, conversely, “the movements of Mike’s body [. . .] go nowhere, or at least [. . .] have indeterminate or recursive ends” (30). Mike’s trajectory, in fact, rejects any linearity, topples over itself—as Mike himself does because of narcolepsy—and fnally goes back to the origin, the long, open-ended road in Idaho where everything began. The urban contexts represented in the movie, conversely, are sites of normative behavior rather than of liberation and self-fulfllment for queer people, as witness Scott in the last scenes. Besides emphasizing spatiality and geography as categories to understand sexuality, thus, MOPI also locates itself within the discourse about queerness in nonurban contexts that thrived in the 1990s (Halberstam 42). It profoundly questions the polarization between urbanity and rurality as the pivotal dyad “in the peculiarly Western construction of homosexuality as a sexual identity capable of providing a basis for community” (Weston 255), at the same time effectively eschewing the most trivial stereotypes associated with “sex tak[ing] on a noticeably ‘rural character’” (Bell 83).5

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Because of its symbolic connection with spatiality and with the territory, moreover, Mike’s queerness integrates the different senses of the idea of “orientation,” exposing, as Sara Ahmed suggests, its both spatial and sexual overtones. Mike’s inability to orient himself in the endless landscapes of Idaho, in fact, obliquely refers to his sense of bewilderment in a world that is not shaped according to his needs and longings. His narcolepsy, thus, is the reaction to the immediate awareness that his body, to rephrase Ahmed’s thought, fails to extend into a space that has never, and will never, take his shape (Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion 148). The absence of any destination in his roaming through the West (and beyond) amounts to the melancholic lack of any normative object for his desire. He happens to be in the middle of forces that he cannot control, his queer orientation(s) being the result of the inscrutability of his objects of desire rather than of any free choice or deliberate action.

Nobody’s Idaho The spaces featured in MOPI, though displayed in their “profound ideological implications” (Howlett 181), do not acquire any orientation “through how bodies inhabit them” (Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology 12), implicitly discarding the tenets of postmodern geographies that any space is the result of the forces that defne it. This assumption seems to be no longer working for the movie’s characters, to whom any orientation in space remains unavailable. It is not only the rural landscape of Idaho that returns the gaze back to the viewers, resisting any attempt at interpretation or appropriation. The West as a cultural landscape, too, shows its hostility to the protagonists’ efforts to frame it within traditional narratives. Myths of the Old West are repeatedly evoked only to be debunked and rejected as outdated clichés. The urban spaces featured in the movie, too, hardly live up to the viewers’ expectations that, when the movie was released, were fed on the conventional image of the Pacifc Northwest circulated by the culture industry. The movie thus takes an ironic stance in its realistic featuring of natural landscapes and urban areas, its parody of the West functioning as an asymptote that never overlaps the original it purports to replicate or to approximate to. The protagonists have a hard time locating themselves along the endless roads of the movie, and, despite their efforts, they do not succeed in turning the conventional stories about the West into their own stories either. The title of the movie itself seems to ironically mock its characters’ desperate attempts at carving their niche of intimacy within the places they inhabit, suggesting that the very idea of one’s own private Idaho is a reverie or a projection destined to remain unachievable. Public spaces, be they material (rural or urban) or culturally shaped according to traditional and shared narratives, are foreclosed to Scott and, especially, to Mike. Though aware of the fantasies of appropriation that have

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traditionally reconfgured and resignifed Western maps and territories, they both embody the impossibility of such appropriation by marginalized and non-normative subjects, such as destitute people, queer men, or, to broaden the scope of the narrative, the so-called Generation X, the young men of the 1990s featured in and targeted by the movie. Let me go back to my original question: Where is the West in MOPI? What Idaho—or whose Idaho—does the movie feature? The movie’s references to Western spaces and atmospheres are counterbalanced by the spectators’ awareness that the only West the two protagonists experience is saturated with the fantasies of the place overlapped over the time. The protagonists live in a world packed with projections in which they hardly identify, perceiving instead the conventional or counterfeit nature of the landscapes they move through. Mike in particular, despite the number of places and spaces he tries to explore and appropriate, constantly experiences a sense of alienation and displacement. Being totally “unable to access the systems of meaning that seem effortless to others” (McHugh 29), his story and his body reject any convincing integration with the territories, be they actual places or fantasized sites of belonging and identifcation. The movie repeatedly remarks on this sense of spatial alienation. The section set in Portland, for instance, opens on a scene in which Scott embraces Mike, who has temporarily passed out, in a pose that evokes Michelangelo’s Pietà. Besides alluding to the trip the two will later on take to Rome, the two protagonists’ bodies question the realism of the scene. Moreover, the statue at their back, the Elk Fountain, actually existing in downtown Portland, has been considerably transformed here: a rider has been put on the elk and an engraving has been added on the base, “The coming of the white man,” referring both to the incorporation of the West in the nineteenth-century United States and (ironically) to the two young men’s job as hustlers. The “Western” as a genre is parodied and ridiculed too. When Mike and Scott visit Mike’s elder brother, Richard, the latter tells them that their mother used to date a cowboy whom she killed while they were watching Rio Bravo at a drive-in movie: “Rio Bravo on the big screen. John Wayne on his horse ridin’ through the desert. Spilled popcorn all over the front seat soakin’ up the blood.” The West is thus reduced to a pure simulacrum on the screen. As a mere product of the culture industry, the West can be consumed in a drive-in and then infnitely replicated, appropriated, or even parodied (while fake cowboys ride their horses on the big screen, an actual shootout occurs in the theater, yet at the hands of a woman). Two Western-like stories are simultaneously staged, the borders between fction and reality blurring in a paradoxical continuity between the movie screened in the theater and its supplement, the surreal replica of a traditional Western duel. “This is why she had to leave,” Richard remarks, relating the episode to his family drama and revealing to Mike that their

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mother killed his “real father.” Despite his visible emotional involvement, however, Mike refuses to believe his brother. The latter’s unreliability undermines his narrative and makes it no less fctitious than the Western scenario(s) Richard has just described. Mike rejects Richard’s version, frmly believing that Richard himself is his father and thus realizing how radical his estrangement from the generation of his mother and brother/ father is. The opposition between Mike’s present and his past, evoked through a number of fashbacks that portray him as a little child, further corroborates his own sense of alienation and helplessness with regard to what Richard tells him and to his family’s genealogy. The story of Mike’s family as Richard narrates it mirrors the fctitiousness of the landscapes where it is set, both sounding to Mike as replicas of a real family and an authentic West that he has never had the chance to experience directly. On a broader scale, though referring to or quoting from conventional Western narratives and reproducing their typical features, MOPI utterly overturns them, undermining their symbolic strength. The movie features some of the most common elements of the frontier stories—the land to be conquered, the presence of two male and white heroes as protagonists, and the fact that they seem to have no family or romantic tie—only to fnally debunk them and remark how preposterous, if not totally undecipherable, this narrative may be to the two young protagonists. The territory and the landscape are, in fact, paramount in MOPI, but, as I previously remarked, they are always the same, even when the two protagonists fy to Rome—a city that, as the iconic center of the ancient world, is expected to be completely at odds with the new lands of the American West. The two protagonists’ queer sexuality questions normative masculinity and its role within traditional frontier and Western narratives. The episode of Mike falling in love with Scott and the heterosexual affair that Scott has in Rome with Carmela, an Italian girl, fnally signal their need to establish relationships and respond to their emotional and erotic urges. The fact that both protagonists, moreover, experience a troublesome but emotionally consuming attachment to their parents runs counter to that lack and/or rejection of family roots and domestic environment that has conventionally marked the conquest of the West as a solitary and pioneering experience. The West that, in the past, has mobilized fantasies of escapism and rebellion hardly reconciles with Mike’s and Scott’s lives and expectations. Material and immaterial landscapes have ceased to be meaningful to anyone and can no longer be appropriated by the young protagonists. Even assuming that Idaho had ever been one’s own private land in the past, the last scenes of the movie, featuring Mike alone in the middle of an endless and empty road, frame the Idaho-of-nobody of the present. Besides exposing the collapse of the myths attached to the West, MOPI specifcally focuses on the Northwest of the United States too, addressing it as the site of a burgeoning subcultural scene at the time. In the 1990s

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the traditional narratives about that region that celebrated rural Northwest’s gorgeous landscapes and the lively and welcoming atmosphere of its major urban centers, Seattle and Portland, started being questioned and overthrown. Adolescents and young people were the protagonists of this rebellion, probably because they resented more than other groups the social uncertainty and loss of cultural identity that, in those years, were profoundly affecting the region. The material, cultural, and emotional landscape constructed by Van Sant thus can also be recognized as peculiarly Northwestern. The opposition between the city of Seattle, vibrant and progressive, and the more conservative areas of other Northwestern states, including Idaho, frequently addressed by many cultural productions released in the region at the time represents one of the movie’s central points too. Allusions to the 1990s subcultures, though not frequent, recur more than once in the movie. Music, for instance, is explicitly evoked in episodes that underscore the role of independent music and the grunge scene. In one of these sequences, one of Mike and Scott’s friends, a young hustler from Portland, argues: “I wanna produce my own music. You know, I just . . . I just want total control over my music. [. . .] Then I’d like to, like, stand in back of bigger pictures of myself.” Another passage from the movie elaborates a scene from Henry IV in which a group of wealthy travelers are robbed by Falstaff and his comrades as an assault against a band of young musicians that have just ended their exhibition in what sounds like an almost too obvious reference to a moment in which everyone in the Northwest was actively involved in some musical independent project. Both passages have no real incidence on the storyline, but remark on the role that independent music productions played in reshaping the 1990s Northwestern subcultural scene, being looked at by young people as the only means to make sense of their life and come to terms with the world they lived in.

The Land Is Out of Joint The dullness of the spaces compels the two protagonists to interrogate temporality as the only epistemic lens that can give a sense—again, a possible orientation—to their existences. Whereas in the past Western narratives were chiefy about spaces to appropriate, here the two protagonists’ main concern seems to be that of making sense of their past and deciding whether or not to embrace futurity as their only reasonable expectation. The bewilderment and anxiety that dislocate them across the Northwest of the United States and then to Italy gradually turn into a sense of displacement related to a new perception of time and, especially, to a sense of interruption of normative temporality. Since the different generations represented in the movie do not ft their traditional roles, any temporal linearity seems to be fragmented and

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arranged in new, unprecedented patterns. Mike and Scott’s awareness that the continuity between past and present has somehow undergone a radical transformation emerges as a trouble with growing up and adjusting to the roles and the duties of normative adulthood. Their contrasting fnal choices bespeak the acceptance (Scott) or complete refusal (Mike) of adulthood as a set of concrete rules and symbolic laws. Unlike Mike, Scott understands that he is just experiencing a transitory phase of his existence that will soon give way to a respectable life. Respectability, of course, derives from the acceptance of sexual normativity as a set of norms that shape and identify his public persona, and for this reason needs to be acknowledged and approved by his parents as his most proximate source of authority: When I turn twenty-one, I don’t want any more of this life. My mother and father will be surprised at the incredible change. It will impress them more when such a fuckup like me turns good than if I had been a good son all along. [. . .] I will change when everybody expects it the least. The scene of the funerals of Scott’s father and Bob/Falstaff is paradigmatic too with regard to this new perception of temporality and to how it is internalized by the protagonists. Though celebrated simultaneously and in the same cemetery, the two ceremonies are predictably different: whereas the former follows the pattern of traditional funeral services, Bob’s memory is honored by his friends (Mike among them) in what gradually becomes an orgiastic bacchanal. Here, not only does the limit between life and death gradually dissolve in the euphoria of the revelry, but death and mourning are mocked and laughed at by the participants as arbitrary conventions, whose sole pointless goal is that of making sense of the overwhelming force and utter indecipherability of the events by streamlining one’s own lifetime and segmenting it into discrete, small unities. “There’s no reason to know the time. We are timeless,” Scott replies to Bob when asked the time. The representation of the space beskpeaks this perception of fragmented temporality. The anxiety produced by the awareness of the chasm between the unsystematic circularity of the time and the need to fnd a rational order in its entropy reverberates in the immense and at the same time claustrophobic spaces portrayed in the movie: the big skies of Idaho, in fact, only reproduce themselves infnitely; its large roads only go back to where they started. The movie’s insistence on temporality as an apparatus that empties space of any meaning, besides retrieving “the popular sense of time in the Renaissance as that of a ‘mysterious space’” (Howlett 180, thus making MOPI much closer to its Shakespearian sources than other rewritings), can also be related to a broader debate that, in the 1990s, invested the categories of time and futurity and that probably resulted from the political

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events that occurred at the time. The world suddenly found itself “out of joint,” as Jacques Derrida remarked in his 1993 Spectres of Marx, a book that, as MOPI, resonates with Shakespearian suggestions (in this case Hamlet) in its attempt to decipher the new sense of temporality after the end of the Cold War. Derrida read this crucial geopolitical event in relation to its overall reframing of the sense of futurity: whereas the demise of communism meant for someone the messianic end of history and the beginning of a joyous global future, Derrida pictured the specters of Marx and of Marxism as ignored warnings against the plagues of war, poverty, and ecological disaster.6 The world had become wider and more indecipherable than it used to be; old maps proved immediately of no avail in understanding a global territory that had been thrown “out of joint.” The utopia of postmodern geographies, which maintained that maps are created by the process of multiple appropriation of the territory, suddenly turned into a nightmare: there actually was an unlimited land to be made signifcant, but there were no categories to provide the global territory with a meaning. Derrida’s envisaging the future as a menace rather than a promise echoes in many cultural products released in the 1990s, especially among juvenile subcultures. The opening of new geographic horizons—loosely evoked in the limitless spaces featured in MOPI—had produced a sense of failure and frustration among young people: not only were they unable to decipher a brand-new world that was then still at its inception, but given the collapse of the revolutionary ideologies of the twentieth century, they found themselves robbed of the dreams and the utopias that had helped their parents’ generations fgure out their future. The role bestowed at the time on the child as the “fgure for the universal value attributed to political futurity” (Edelman 19), moreover, completely excluded adolescents from any symbolic identifcation. If children, in fact, were considered the emblem of futurity and adults were both champions and recipients of such investment, there consequently was no space left for the symbolic appropriation of adolescence. Being no longer children and not yet grown-ups, teenagers were forcibly excluded from that symbolic process of “privatization of the citizenship” (Berlant 176) based on the criteria of breeding and futurity, which, besides idolizing the infant as the ultimate addressee of any political choice, postulated as worthy of full citizenship only those adults who could grant a future to the nation. MOPI is one of many cultural products possibly dealing with (the loss of) futurity as the result of global transformations, and is noticeable for confating space and time into a unifed site of spectral anxiety. Mike is the character that more than others embodies the impossibility of fguring out one’s own future. His rejection of temporal normativity refects in the private sphere the disjointed temporality of those years, reproduced in the limitless landscapes featured in the movie. He and his friends are doomed to lead their existences as outcasts, destined to be

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repudiated by mainstream society unless they repudiate their identity, their personal story, their most intimate desires (in a word, their innocence) as Scott does, when, along with Bob, he publicly abjures his own youth: I don’t know you, old man. Please leave me alone. When I was young and you were my street tutor, an instigator for my bad behavior, I was planning a change. There was a time when I had the need to learn from you, my former and psychedelic teacher. And although I love you more dearly than my dead father, I have to turn away. In line with other youth subcultural products of the 1990s, MOPI thus utterly rejects the idea that a respectable life and a normal family is all a young person needs to fulfll his or her necessities and desires, though implying that young people that do not want to yield to the compromises of adulthood have no alternatives to self-destruction. Marginality is presented as the only way to escape conformism and respectability in the absence of any other means to counter the bourgeois ideology and its pragmatic reshaping of time and space into objects to be appropriated and consumed. Heterosexual love, the traditional family, and, more broadly, the timing of reproduction and breeding are identifed as the symbols and staples of the social order that Mike, Bob, and their friends defnitely refuse to be part of.7 Even the Northwest and its hectic major cities, praised in the 1990s as the cultural mecca for people in their twenties, provide no country for young men in the end. The movie’s big roads that only wind back to their starting point voice the discontent and the aimless anxiety of that generation, as does the opposition between Scott’s “successful” story and Mike’s predictable failure. Whereas the former represents a sellout that has settled for an ordinary and conventional life, the latter decides to stick to rebellion and global refusal, thus condemning himself to start his life anew every time. The fnal scenes of the movie, featuring Mike alone again on the road, falling to earth after one of his usual narcoleptic episodes, indicate self-annihilating immobility as the most extreme form of resistance against spatial and temporal normativity. Complete integration among respectable people is too high a price to pay to grow up: it implies breaking up limitless time and space into small and manageable units and no longer being challenged by the overwhelming anxiety of empty roads and timeless existences.

Notes 1. Besides Shakespeare’s dramas, Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight is the most signifcant source of inspiration for MOPI, its integration into Van Sant’s flm making it “something more than just a gay movie” (LoBrutto 41). Among the other movies that may have infuenced Van Sant, Vincent LoBrutto mentions

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Federico Fellini’s Satyricon (5–6) and countercultural flms like The Trip, Psych-Out, Chappaqua, Fando and Lis, and “the granddaddy of acid trip flms, Something Weird” (43–44). Mike’s sense of familiarity with the spaces he moves through has been read as a metatextual reference to the road movie as a genre. MOPI thus, “like other road flms, helplessly re-tracks prior narratives” (Morris 37). Places and characters, almost sliding from one flm to another, produce, Morris argues, a continuity in the spectators’ experience and the impression of having already been “there.” Though maintaining that it is “the flm that securely positions [Van Sant] as heir apparent to Fassbinder,” B. Ruby Rich argues that MOPI “fourished in the mainstream” (20 and 241). Queer infrastructures are theorized by Scott Herring in his 2010 Another Country, which questions the almost unanimously shared idea that queer people, invariably being metronormative, always tend to relocate to big cities and to reject “the non-urbane and [. . .] regionalized or ruralized spaces as culturally inferior” (34). MOPI does not ft in any of the categories listed by David Bell as the three forms of “rural erotics”: white trash erotics, bestiality, and naturism (83). Not only does the movie have nothing to do with either bestiality or naturism, but also any reference to “white trash erotics” is not appropriate, since the polarization between “hillbilly horror” and “the affectations of city homosexuals” (86), pivotal to the construction of the category, does not apply to any of its scenes. Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 The End of History and the Last Man epitomizes the general optimism that heralded the 1990s as the years in which the “remarkable consensus concerning the legitimacy of liberal democracy” had determined the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution,” the “fnal form of human government,” and as a consequence, “the end of history” (xi). The movie thus celebrates “the overcoming of metaphysical heterosexism,” as Bergbusch argues (215), just by—and not, as he maintains, despite—its insisting on the assumption that “for gay persons, the ideal of a self-respect conferred by lineal placing and by procreation with a life partner is in practical terms not available” (214).

Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. Edinburgh UP, 2014. ———. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke UP, 2006. Barnaby, Andrew. “Imitation as Originality in Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho.” Almost Shakespeare: Reinventing His Works for Cinema and Television, edited by James R. Keller and Leslie Stratyner, McFarland, 2004, pp. 22–41. Bell, David. “Eroticizing the Rural.” De-Centring Sexualities: Politics and Representations beyond the Metropolis, edited by Richard Phillips, Diane Watt and David Shuttleton, Routledge, 2000, pp. 81–98. Bergbusch, Matt. “Additional Dialogue: William Shakespeare, Queer Allegory, and My Own Private Idaho.” Shakespeare without Class: Misappropriations of Cultural Capital, edited by Donald Keith Hedrick and Bryan Reynolds, Palgrave, 2000, pp. 209–225. Berlant, Lauren. The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship. Duke UP, 1997.

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Derrida, Jacques. Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf, Routledge, 1994. Translated of Spectres de Marx. Galilée, 1993. Edelman, Lee. “The Future Is Kid Stuff? Queer Theory, Disidentifcation, and the Death Drive.” Narrative, vol. 6, no. 1, 1998, pp. 18–30. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. Free Press, 1992. Greenberg, Harvey R. “Rev. of My Own Private Idaho.” Film Quarterly, vol. 46, no. 1, 1992, pp. 23–25. Halberstam, Judith. In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives. New York UP, 2005. Herring, Scott. Another Country: Queer Anti-Urbanism. New York UP, 2010. Howlett, Kathy M. “Utopian Revisioning of Falstaff’s Tavern World: Orson Welles’s Chimes at Midnight and Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho.” The Reel Shakespeare: Alternative Cinema and Theory, edited by Lisa S. Starks and Courtney Lehmann, Associated UP, 2002, pp. 165–188. LoBrutto, Vincent. Gus Van Sant: His Own Private Cinema. Praeger, 2010. McHugh, Ian. “Language and Liminality in the Italian Section of Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho.” MHRA Working Papers in the Humanities, vol. 3, 2008, pp. 25–32. Morris, Christopher. “The Refexivity of the Road Film.” Film Criticism, vol. 28, no. 1, 2003, pp. 24–52. My Own Private Idaho. Dir. Gus Van Sant. Perf. River Phoenix, Keanu Reeves, and William Richert, New Line, 1991. Rich, B. Ruby. New Queer Cinema: The Director’s Cut. Duke UP, 2013. Sander, Daniel J. “Queer Tableaux.” Rupkatha: Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities, vol. 6, no. 1, 2014, pp. 27–38. Soja, Edward W. Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory. Verso, 1989. Weston, Kath. “Get Thee to a Big City: Sexual Imaginary and the Great Gay Migration.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian & Gay Studies, vol. 2, no. 3, 1995, pp. 253–277. Wiseman, Susan. “The Family Tree Motel: Subliming Shakespeare in My Own Private Idaho.” Shakespeare, the Movie, II: Popularizing the Plays on Film, TV, Video, and DVD, edited by Richard Burt and Lynda E. Boose, Routledge, 2003, pp. 200–212.

10 Exit West to a Borderless Frontier Esra Coker Korpez

The U.S. West in the American social imaginary is mostly associated with the myth of the “boundless” frontier, the vast open spaces of uncultivated wilderness that has generated two overlapping and co-evolving narratives in the American national consciousness. The frst is a liberal progressive narrative built on the vision of America as the “land of immigrants.” It is the American saga of courage and determination for new beginnings, the uprooting of the past—the institutions of feudal-aristocratic Europe grounded on privilege, hierarchy, and descent—in favor of a West beyond the horizon built on the tenets of freedom, egalitarianism, and individualism that have nourished hundreds of millions of newcomers with dreams of liberty and boundless possibilities. The second narrative intertwined with the frst is an imperial narrative; the image of America as an “empire of liberty”1 that has tempted Americans not only to defne freedom in terms of their well-being and safety but also in terms of conquest and expansion. It is the indoctrination of democracy as the only viable “way of life,” a domination that is “good” for all the people of the world. This second narrative emerges not from the liberal humanist tradition but from the underside of colonial modernity and is consolidated by the violence and rugged individualism of, to borrow Richard Slotkin’s concept, “a gunfghter nation” that seeks to civilize and democratize the world by perpetually pursuing new frontiers after exploiting, appropriating, and subduing the old ones without due consideration of its global, economic, social, and political impacts. A wolf in sheep’s clothing, this second narrative of empire-building, the “frontier zeal”2 to transform the world into an American “ideal” of democracy and freedom, has metastasized in the twenty-frst century to a new form of global hegemony:3 The 21st century imperium is a new invention in the annals of political science, an empire lite, a global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy, enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known. It is the imperialism of a people who remember that their country secured its independence

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Especially after 9/11, the dangers and consequences of such an Americanled empire lite, or, to put it in O’Hara’s words, a “Global America” that “permits capitalism, imperialism, and dreams of Manifest Destiny to fourish with more or less a good conscience” (75) has been drastic and even fatal. By stigmatizing the Other—the un-American, the unEuropean, the un-Christian—as “unassimilable” and a serious threat to its well-being and security, this new imperialism has created internal and external frontier warfare in and outside its confnes, ranging from militarized borders to “hostile environments,”4 from wars of aggression to violent civil uprisings, from mass shootings to the war on terror. All of these have taken a heavy toll, resulting in an increasingly insecure, unstable, and fragile world where mass migration and displacement have reached the highest levels since the Second World War.5 For millions of people forcibly or internally removed from their homelands—refugees, asylum seekers, undocumented migrants—the “West,” all the same, continues to function as the frontier of freedom and liberty; however, in reality, it has become a closed door, a gated community6 that rigorously tries to regulate free movement and restrict refugees’ “right to fight” from poverty, war, or dictatorial regimes. The current situation of the migrant can be best summed up by George Nathan and H.L. Mencken’s satirical aphorism of America: “That all immigrants come to America in search of liberty, and that when they seek to exercise it they should immediately be sent back” (160). British Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid’s latest novel, Exit West (2017), by depicting a world that is experiencing a migration crisis that can no longer be controlled by physical borders, military surveillance, or international agreements, allows its readers to understand the urgency of today’s turbulent global conditions of social unrest, war, and human displacement. Through the use of a surrealist device of portals, the opening of black rectangles that function more like magical wormholes that enable thousands of people to “slip away” (211) from the economic destitution and “murderous battlefelds” (211) of their homelands to the safety of the West, Exit West depicts a world on the verge of collapse. Normal doors that “become special door [s] . . . without warning” (72) let migrants from different countries, ethnicities, and religions appear all of a sudden at people’s doorsteps and transform the globe into denationalized cultural spaces, causing the enormous split between the First and the Third World to be reproduced within the experiences of everyday life. Consequently, a new reality emerges, a new mapping of the self and the other where “otherness” in its full diversity and contradictoriness is experienced not as external to the nation-state but as internal to its being.

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Drawing upon Ulrich Beck’s “risk society” theory and his “cosmopolitan outlook,” this chapter reads the migration crisis depicted in Exit West as a “global risk phenomenon” that can open up new paradigms for coexistence and adaptation. It illustrates how in the context of global risk, “the migration apocalypse” can function as a harbinger of a new mode of consciousness built not on the essentialist and imperial standpoint of the West, but on a pluralistic narrative open to dialogue, difference, and diversity. Refecting frst on Nadia, the female protagonist of Exit West, and then on the political community of Marin, California, this chapter examines the migration apocalypse as a momentous force that can destabilize reductionist and exclusionary boundaries of race, nationhood, and difference.

Ulrich Beck, World Risk Society, and the Cosmopolitan Outlook One of the most quoted and infuential sociologists of the recent decades, Ulrich Beck, is known for his groundbreaking theory of “(world) risk society,” a theory that recognizes risks as the predominating force shaping late modernity. According to Beck, we are no longer living in the modern epoch of industrial society where our sole concerns are the distribution of wealth, free-market principles, or the preservation of nation-state borders, but rather living beyond the modern, in a “risk society” (Risk Society 20–22) that includes many unanticipated and interdependent risks brought about by the successes of modernization (like the greenhouse effect, global terrorism, nuclear wastes, worldwide migration, genetic engineering, etc.). In this new and distinct phase of modernity, which Beck distinguishes as “second modernity,”7 risks are mostly invisible and global and are manufactured industrially, externalized economically, individualized judicially, legitimized scientifcally, and minimized politically all at once (“La Politique” 376). Interestingly, however, Beck indicates that we still think and act in the orderly categories of the frst modernity while living in the gray zones and turbulence of the second. This paradox unfortunately has become the new predicament of the human condition. While ecological disasters or manmade catastrophes are ubiquitous and implosive and have a boomerang effect on everyone and everything in the globe, we still think we are safe in the solitary spaces of our nationstates. Such thinking has led to an increase in racism, xenophobia, and the revival of nationalistic ideologies. However, within the horizon of global risk, Beck argues, familiar exclusive differentiations of us/them, internal/ external, and national/international that have until now perpetuated and legitimized Western power structures and apparent Western democracies do not work. They need to be replaced by a new way of thinking, what Beck describes as the “cosmopolitan imperative” that makes it necessary to “break out of the self-centered narcissism of the national outlook,” (Cosmopolitan Vision 3) and acknowledge the reality of “globality” in

164 Esra Coker Korpez its full scope. As Beck states in his article “The Cosmopolitan Society and Its Enemies”: The central defning characteristic of a cosmopolitan perspective is the ‘dialogic imagination’. The dialogic imagination corresponds to the coexistence of rival ways of life in the individual experience, which makes it a matter of fate to compare, refect, criticize, understand, combine contradictory certainties. . . . [It] is an alternative imagination, an imagination of alternative ways of life and rationalities, which include the otherness of the other. It puts the negotiation of contradictory cultural experiences into the centre of activities: in the political, the economic, the scientifc and the social. (emphasis in original, 18) Beck’s cosmopolitan outlook that includes the necessity of the “cosmos” within the “polis,” whereby “people view themselves simultaneously as part of a threatened world and as part of their local situations and histories” (Beck and Sznaider, “Unpacking Cosmopolitanism” 391), is more in tune with “critical cosmopolitanism”8 than its normative formulations. This can be best exemplifed in Beck’s own criticism of Kant, in particular, his concept of “the right of hospitality”:9 What does this right to hospitality mean as regards global risks? The essential differentiation here is between the degree to which hospitality rests on an invitation and the degree to which this right means that those who have not been invited—for example, people in need—can claim the right to hospitality. . . . The difference resides already in the fact that, in the global space of responsibility of global risks, nobody can be excluded from ‘hospitality.’. . . Perhaps it makes more sense to speak of all people being transformed into neighbors? (“Critical Theory” 5–6) Rather than the pursuit of a global world order or the imagination of planetary connectedness, Beck’s cosmopolitan outlook emphasizes more a sense of responsibility toward the Other and a concern with the future of humanity. Eventually, for Beck, the project of the “Enlightenment” is still not fnished, and will never be, if it remains blind to a cosmopolitan moral life-world that can respond to the global risks of late modernity.

Exit West to a World of Open Doors: Migrancy as the New Mode of Being and Surviving Mohsin Hamid’s novel Exit West, which uses a “migration apocalypse”10 as its framing narrative, appeals for new ways of being and seeing, a new global ethos that is in tune with Beck’s “cosmopolitan vision.” Through

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the use of magical doors that enable thousands of people to move freely in and out of nation-states, Hamid challenges the reader to envision a world where everyone, irrespective of class, color, or religion, internalizes something of the quality of being a foreigner, an immigrant, a refugee. In a global migration crisis where diversity and plurality have become the norm rather than the deviation, the reader thus is invited to conceive a world largely divorced from borders and political imaginaries. The spontaneous and random appearance of black rectangle magical doors that offer unrestricted freedom of mobility draws attention to the “befores” and “afters” of displacement, the process of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, rather than the perilous details of pain, anguish, and suffering experienced during a border crossing. By severing the migrant from the condition of “precariousness” that she or he is normally associated with, Hamid makes it clear that he is not concerned with the wide spectrum of political or ethical arguments that have presented the refugee as either a clandestine villain or a courageous hero: a noncitizen relegated to the space outside the law, exempt from all political and human rights, a status that Giorgio Agamben describes as “bare life,”11 or as a victim, a relatively homogeneous group of “benefciaries and recipients” (Sorensen 1998) mainly defned by the experience of war and displacement.12 If we are to understand the migrant for who she or he really is, Hamid warns us, we must frst “exit” the exclusionary and privileged standpoint of the West, discharging the issue from its political and ideological context. It is only then that we can realize that the millions of lives outside our borders also matter and that we have to turn our indifferent and often exploitative actions and decisions into conscious and self-critical ones. Exit West opens with the “befores” of migration, as we get a glimpse of two college students, Nadia and Saeed, taking evening college classes “on corporate identity and product branding” (1) in an anonymous city “not yet openly at war” but “teetering at the edge of the abyss” (1). The political unrest and violence looming over the city show its ugly face as frst Saeed loses his mother and later Nadia her cousin and 85 others in a bomb explosion, her cousin “blown . . . literally to bits, the largest of which . . . were a head and two-thirds of an arm” (29). As days pass by, for Nadia and Saeed, the trauma of witnessing the death and loss of beloved ones and fearing for their own on a daily basis becomes a natural reality as helicopters begin to zoom over the city while bombs explode and heavy gunfre is heard. To cope with the wide range of uncertainties that lurk ahead, the couple turns to their intensifying love relationship as the only stable point of reference. But when the curfews in the city increase, cutting city dwellers off from the outside world, when windows become the “borders” through which death can easily come (68), and when private and public executions become so common that “bodies hanging from street lamps and billboards” form a kind of “festive seasonal

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decoration,” (81) the couple, like thousands of “countless others” (55), decide to take advantage of the widely rumored magical doors and walk into the unknown “blackness” to start a new life far removed from the “death trap” (69) of their country. With the escape of Nadia and Saeed through black mystic doors, frst to the Greek island of Mykonos, then to London, and fnally to California, the focus of Exit West shifts from illustrating the violent civil uprising experienced “intimately” (69) in a particular Moslem city to depicting the whole world in chaos and anarchy, the West and the Rest, dissolving, fracturing, and giving way to new sites of power and contestation: The news in those days was full of war and migrants and nativists, and it was full of fracturing too, of regions pulling away from nations, and cities pulling away from hinterlands, and it seemed that as everyone was coming together everyone was also moving apart. Without borders nations appeared to be becoming somewhat illusory, and people were questioning what role they had to play. (155) Without the national security of borders, the reader is challenged to envision a world, in Hamid’s words, of a “migration apocalypse” where mobility and deterritorialization become the paradigm of a new historical consciousness: “That summer it seemed to Saeed and Nadia that the whole planet was on the move, much of the global South headed to the global North, but also Southerners moving to other Southern places and Northerners moving to other Northern places” (169). Migrancy becomes the new mode of being and surviving, and its risks, as in all risks, begin to display what Beck calls an “equalizing effect within their scope and among those affected by them” (Risk Society 36). And, in fact, in the novel deterritorialization becomes a condition experienced not only by the migrant but by the citizen as well, as people begin to lose their “sense of territory,” becoming physically, socially, or psychologically displaced while hundreds of migrants silently emerge out through “rectangle[s] of complete darkness—the heart of darkness” (6) into upstate mansions or dark alleys “staking claim” (120) to their places of arrival. By providing secure passageways to migrants in need and suffering, these magical doors turn the currents of unpredictability and incertitude inside out, creating “black holes in the fabric of the nation” (126). The sheer random pace of such “openings” creates new social and political dynamics that radically contradict the language of predictability, control, and security that had once prevailed in the “safe” and “protected” democratic West. As the motion, confict, and confrontation with the other, the stranger, is carried from the periphery to the center, this time, it becomes the West experiencing the repercussions of civil strife. In place of militants, it is the military and paramilitary

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formations of nation-states that are guarding the doors and committing the acts of violence, the police and armed forces who work together hand in hand with aggressive “nativist mobs” (131) carrying “iron bars and knives” and forming “their own legions, with a wink and a nod from the authorities” (132). The split between us and them, good and evil, right and wrong, begins to get blurred as the qualitative distinction either/or is replaced by the quantitative difference between more or less risky. While for nation-states, it is the migrants who constitute the biggest risk, for migrants it becomes the nativists. When “a group” represents a risk, as Beck warns us, “its other features disappear and it becomes defned by this ‘risk.’ It is marginalized and threatened with exclusion” (“Critical Theory” 1). Consequently, a situation very similar to what Nadia and Saeed experience in their war-torn homeland begins to occur in the democratic West where law condones violence and cities turn into open prisons monitored “under the drone-crossed sky and . . . the invisible network of surveillance that radiated out from . . . phones, recording and capturing and logging everything” (188–189). Governments, rather than providing safety for their citizens, become the very source of the problem. In order to restrict the movement and life of migrants, cities take severe measures and divide neighborhoods into “light” and “dark” zones (142). Dark zones “occupied” by migrants begin to represent spaces of threat and menace not only for the residents but also for the newcomers. All of a sudden, the tolerant and open image of Western liberal democracies is shattered in the face of an overarching militarization of the “fear” of the Other. The extreme indifference and apathy of nation-states toward the protection of migrant lives remind Nadia once again of the “evisceratingly real” (28) face of violence: The fury of those nativists advocating wholesale slaughter was what struck Nadia most, and it struck her because it seemed so familiar, so much like the fury of the militants in her own city. She wondered whether she and Saeed had done anything by moving, whether the faces and buildings had changed but the basic reality of their predicament had not. (156) Whether rich or poor, man or woman, Christian or Moslem, everyone slowly begins to be affected by the unconscious politics of hatred and exclusionary violence that surround them and soon realize that it is not the migrants or the nativists, but the inability to adapt and adjust to this new condition that will constitute the biggest risk for mankind. In a world where “everyone was foreign, and so, in a sense, no one was” (100), and where nations were beginning to be “like a person with multiple personalities” (155), risks no longer responded to the imperatives of the

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nation-state and its exclusionary forceful practices. Slowly, there begins to emerge a very different apperception among the majority of people: Perhaps they had grasped that the doors could not be closed, and new doors would continue to open, and they had understood that the denial of coexistence would have required one party to cease to exist, and the extinguishing party too would have been transformed in the process, and too many native parents would not have been able to look their children in the eye, to speak with head held high of what their generation had done. (164) The possibility of an interethnic violence serves as a “wake-up” call to the fatal consequences of the “great massacre . . . [that] seemed, was in the offng” (159). People gradually realize that the impending global danger is not the uncontrollable infow of migrants, but its irreversible and unanticipated side effects—the sheer violence and racial hysteria of an all-or-nothing mentality that “would have required one party to cease to exist” (164). In the face of such an all-pervasive threat entering the experience of ordinary life, nativists as well migrants begin to search for possible ways of coexistence, an act analogous to what Beck describes as “one of the most striking and heretofore least recognized key features of global risks, that is their generating a kind of ‘compulsory cosmopolitanism,’ a ‘glue’ for diversity and plurality in a world whose boundaries are as porous as a Swiss cheese” (“Critical Theory” 4).13 Out of injury and pain, out of a possible experience of loss and vulnerability, the possibility of creating new ways for coexistence emerges. It is at this point that the focus of the novel changes for the third time. For it is not the violent confrontations or the systemic institutional failure of states in overcoming the global crisis, but an ethos of critical responsiveness to existing social risks, or what Beck calls the “cosmopolitan moment,”14 that captures the reader’s attention. To the surprise of Nadia, the virulent xenophobia incited toward “the other” quiets down as common sense begins to soothe the tension and confict that had predominated the oncewarring city: And so, irrespective of the reason, decency on this occasion won out, and bravery, for courage demanded not to attack when afraid, and the electricity and water came on again, and negotiations ensued, . . . Saeed and Nadia and their neighbors celebrated. (165) While people try to fnd new ways to coexist, to reestablish the social cohesion of the past, the building of exclusionary compartmentalized spaces accelerates. As Beck argues, “[T]he hidden central issue in world

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risk society is how to feign control over the uncontrollable” (“Terrorist Threat” 41, emphasis is mine). No longer able to secure the doors and their national borders, authorities of nation-states try to secure their image of sovereignty by implementing their “right to exclude,” by constructing “human halos” (167), rings of new cities on the outskirts of society that are huge enough to accommodate more people than the cities themselves. In one of the working camps of the London Halo, in exchange for their labor in building the infrastructure and its dwellings, Nadia and Saeed are promised “forty metres and a pipe” (167–168) that would connect them to “all the utilities of modernity” (167–168), a promise reminiscent of the “forty acres and a mule” assured to former slaves during the Reconstruction.15 The safety of “forty meters of space,” however, does not stop Nadia from dreaming of fnding new doors that open to new lands, new people, and new beginnings. For rather than living in these homogeneous inhumane halos, Nadia prefers to be in the company of the various women that she meets in the food cooperative in Marin, California. These women make her feel welcome and offer her their support and protection, making her feel as if a new “door was opening up” (215). While cultural mixture becomes the utmost value in Nadia’s life, for Saeed, it is the sense of home, the yearning for the familiar: “the further they moved from the city of their birth, through space and through time, the more he [Saeed] sought to strengthen his connection to it, tying ropes to the air of an era that for her [Nadia] was unambiguously gone” (187). Unlike Nadia, for Saeed, to whom the appeal of the “local,” “national,” and “traditional” is essential, each departure feels like “play[ing] roulette” (163), a game that will at the end take him farther away from the “sense of community” that he deeply yearns for. In all the places they temporarily stay, whether it is the Palace Garden Terrace in London, or the London halo, or Marin, Saeed tries to hold on to whatever sense of belonging he has got left by taking his “cultural borders” with him. He distances himself from Nadia; at frst, sexually, in his hometown by resisting to have premarital sex (61); then, spatially, in London, “giv[ing] up their bedroom for a pair of separate spaces” so that he can be “among people of [his] own kind” (149–150); and at last, emotionally, in Marin, by preferring the company of a preacher’s daughter whose father was “full of soul-soothing wisdom” (197). At the end, in his persistent attempt to acknowledge the demands of his religious faith and communal ways of living, Saeed is forced to relinquish his love for Nadia and his claims on individual selfhood. While Saeed tries to compensate for his sense of displacement by trying to re-create the homeland that he has left behind and that he can no longer corporeally inhabit, Nadia sees each departure as a new beginning: “Nadia had long been, and would afterwards continue to be, more comfortable with all varieties of movement in her life than was Saeed, in whom the impulse of nostalgia was stronger” (90). Unlike Saeed, it is not

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the “anguish” but the “joy” of boundarylessness, “the something new, of change,” that Nadia is “feverishly” keen for (90). Besides the excitement of experiencing limitless possibilities, each departure also allows Nadia to understand and refect on other cultures and operate within different systems of meaning, value, and obligation: around her she saw all these people of all these different colours and in all these different attires and she was relieved, better here than there she thought, and it occurred to her that she had been stifed in the place of her birth for virtually her entire life, that its time for her had passed, a new time was here. (156) Consequently, each removal helps Nadia to think outside the box and form a cosmopolitan subjectivity that can, in the words of Ulrich Beck, “revea[l] not just the ‘anguish’ but also the possibility of shaping one’s life and social relations under conditions of cultural mixture. It is simultaneously a sceptical, disillusioned, self-critical outlook” (Beck Cosmopolitan Vision 3). This self-critical stance motivates Nadia to keep an ironic distance from her own culture as well as from the essentialist narratives of race, religion, and gender. Her openness to diverse experiences is manifest in every action of her life, ranging from her attending underground concerts to smoking a joint; from having a bisexual relationship to joining the assemblies of Nigerians. It allows Nadia to form a fuid and fexible self that cultivates respect and care for other cultures beyond her own. This cosmopolitan outlook which is at the heart of Nadia’s actions and thoughts also forms the core of the community of Marin, a community that Nadia fnds herself most welcomed in and undeniably a part of. The city of Marin provides the reader with a vision of a cosmopolitan community founded on human interaction, or what Eugene Holland in his article “Nomad Citizenship” describes as a self-fashioned “assemblage” of individuals: Key to the concept of assemblage, . . . is that group membership is characterized not by a shared identity or obedience to a common law or a single authority, but by the simple operators “and” or “with”. Unlike “the people”, whose mode of being-together is a matter of homogenizing representation for and by the state, and unlike “the masses”, whose being-together is a matter of indifference, the self-organization of an assemblage is determined by difference and relation, . . . by the power of “related difference.” (Holland 153) With its “trading posts” and “creative fowering” of artistic and culinary activities, Marin provides a wide range of shared experiences

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whereby people can “f[i]nd things to do and ways to be and people to be with” (216): one could walk around Marin and see all kinds of ensembles, humans with humans, humans with electronics, dark skin with light skin with gleaming metal with matt plastic, computerized music and unamplifed music and even people who wore masks or hid themselves from view. Different types of music gathered different tribes of people, tribes that had not existed before. (216) The self-fashioned assemblage of individuals in Marin helps to form not a unity-seeking but a diversity-appreciating community that absorbs “varied experience” into all walks of life. In fact, “related” difference becomes the most signifcant characteristic not only of Marin but also the whole California Bay Area. Merging a wide range of different cultures, the Bay Area becomes the center of “conversation” for everyone with mutual interests, tastes, and preferences and allows “imaginative engagement” rather than “assimilation.” The free-spirited and liberating atmosphere of the region also encourages Nadia and Saeed to let go of their faltering relationship and move on to new experiences, new people, new relationships. It supplies Nadia with the courage to take a radical step forward and cross the boundaries of both gender and ethnicity. She fnds solace in the arms of a female cook, a “handsome woman with strong arms” (216) whose pale blue eyes were as attractive as her lovemaking. Even Saeed, whose devout religious nature makes him susceptible to being trapped in an insular subjectivity, expands his borders to experience the closeness of an Afro-American preacher’s daughter who “carried both a spark of the exotic and the comfort of familiarity” (218). With its local campaigns that support a plebiscitary model of popular power (219), with its multicultural “layers of nativeness” composed by “parents or their grandparents or the grandparents of their grandparents” (196), and with its “overwhelmingly poor” (192) socioeconomic condition, the city of Marin, by default, gives its inhabitants the opportunity to participate in a cosmopolitan society characterized by “assemblage,” by “related difference.” Without a pervasive sense of ethnicity and class consciousness, the city becomes a place of inspiration and hope for hundreds of newcomers, a “taster’s paradise” (117) where, as Hamid suggests, the “old” and the “new” come together, are “reborn” and “re-formed” (217). California, the epitome of the American West, serves not only as the fnal destination base for the protagonists of the Exit West but also as a place of inspiration and hope for hundreds of migrants forced to fee their homelands in search of a secure and freer life: “not just in Marin but in the whole region, in the Bay Area . . . the apocalypse appeared to have arrived and yet it was not apocalyptic, which is to say that while the

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changes were jarring they were not the end, and life went on, . . . , and plausible desirable futures began to emerge, unimaginable previously, but not unimaginable now” (215–216). The region creating and re-creating itself with each and every newcomer brings to mind the long-neglected history of the American West:16 a history united not by the legacy of conquest and pioneering of English-speaking white men, of their civilizing missions and nation-building, but by the resilience and diversity of a frontier life formed by the daily negotiations, exchanges, and cross-cultural interactions of indigenous people, women, Mexicans, French Canadians, and people of many other different ethnic and national origins. Cast in this light, California in Exit West represents the “cosmopolitan frontier” of the future, a cultural crossroad in the making, characterized by constant fux, uncertainty, and encounters with the Other. But the arrival and proximity of the Other, Hamid seems to be suggesting, does not need to be threatening and perilous by defnition; for it is actually a risk worth taking if it can move the individual beyond his or her entrenched beliefs and knowledge to a cosmopolitan stance toward diversity, openness, and intersubjectivity. And, as a matter of fact, in the closing of the novel, the chaos and uncontrollability of the migration apocalypse, previously seen as a threat and danger to the whole world, gradually appear “not apocalyptic” (215) at all. In a different way, the novel reiterates the message that Kof Annan gave in his Nobel lecture in Oslo in 2001, reminding us that real borders are not between nations, but between powerful and powerless, free and fettered, privileged and humiliated. Today, no walls can separate humanitarian or human rights crises in one part of the world from national security crises in another. . . . We can love what we are, without hating what—and who—we are not. By putting an end to the secure worlds and solitary spaces maintained by the territorial nationalism and ethnocentrism of nation-states and by destroying the image of the nation as the guarantor of unitary collective action, Exit West challenges the reader to envision a world where “we are all migrants” (209) in time and space and yet anchored to a moral position to accept responsibility for our actions and hold ourselves accountable for them. For the real global threat is not the world of open doors, but a world of closed ones that remains blind to the global risk of mass migration, poverty, and human displacement.

Notes 1. Thomas Jefferson used the phrase “empire of liberty” in 1779 to advocate his expansionist vision of the responsibility of the United States to spread freedom across the world. For further reading on how this expansionist vision has operated within the axiomatics of imperialism, see Tucker and Henderson.

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2. I have used “frontier zeal” here in line with Carl Lotus Becker’s defnition of the frontier as a “state of mind” rather than a matter of location. According to Becker, “Puritanism is itself a kind of frontier” (3), since the people who open and settle frontiers, whether they be New Englanders or Kansans, “must be always transforming the world into their ideal of it” (4–5 emphasis mine). For further reading see Becker. 3. This new form of global hegemony, also known as “new imperialism,” or “liberal imperialism,” is exercised through humanitarian intervention and control. It is justified on the grounds that in the era of globalization, a unipolar world maintained by the international relations of the individual states (especially of non-Western countries) is much more dangerous than the bipolar world of the Cold War era. As such, the new “unipolar” world order requires, to borrow John Ikenberry’s term, “liberal leviathans” like the United States, who can guarantee global security, democracy, and stability. For a critical overview of this new imperial power that is seen as “beneficiary” to all its supposed victims, see Bouges; Foster 1–16; Sparke 239–312. 4. The “hostile environment,” a set of British government policies proposed by Theresa May in 2013 and implemented by the Immigration Act 2014 and Act 2016, includes a series of measures to make the life of illegal immigrants very diffcult by preventing them from accessing housing, healthcare, work, education, bank accounts, driver licenses, and any other support. 5. According to the statistics of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), as of 2018, the world is “witnessing the highest levels of displacement on record” with an unprecedented 68.5 million displaced people worldwide. According to the 2017 United Nations International Migration Report, as of 2017, the number of estimated international migrants worldwide has reached 258 million. 6. See Walters, 149–151. 7. In his “risk society” theory, Ulrich Beck describes the major difference between frst modernity and the second as a shift from a wealth-driven, class-based society to a growth-driven (world) risk society, where the usual “collective patterns of life, progress and controllability, full employment and exploitation of nature” are replaced by radical processes of “globalization, individualization, gender revolution, underemployment and global risks” (World Risk Society 2). Furthermore, Beck states that in “world risk society” the “line” of conficts also differs. Rather than being socioeconomic or political, the conficts in this new phase are cultural, what he terms as the clash of “risk cultures, risk religions” in contrast to Huntington’s “clash of civilizations.” For example, while for the Europeans, issues like climate change or global fnancial movements pose risks, for Americans, it is primarily the threat of terrorism (“Living in the World Risk Society” 337). 8. For a comprehensive assessment of situated cosmopolitanism, see Delanty Cosmopolitan Imagination 25–42; Delanty Idea of Critical Cosmopolitanism 38–46; Mignolo “The Many Faces of Cosmo-Polis” 741–748; and Mignolo “Cosmopolitan Localism” 11–45. 9. In Perpetual Peace, Kant proposes the “right to hospitality” as a right only to “visit,” a right that can easily be declined by the host as long as it is done nonviolently. For further reading see Kant 67–109. 10. The migration apocalypse described in Exit West corresponds closely to what Beck describes as civilizational risks that are triggered by revolutionary and economic upheavals and which help to “sharpen global normative consciousness, generate global publics and promote a cosmopolitan outlook” (Cosmopolitan Vision 22–23).

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11. Agamben defnes the refugee and the migrant as a “homo sacer” who doesn’t have the rights and privilege of the citizen. 12. Many scholars have posited that the popular image of the refugee is one that is often associated with suffering, deprivation, and powerlessness in need of the West’s compassion. For further reading see Malkki, Inhetveen, and Kisiara. 13. Under the omnipresence of a global risk, Beck states that there are only three possible reactions: denial, apathy, or transformation of which, he argues, only the last is capable of coping with the “existential shock of danger” (331) of world risk society. For further reading see “Living in the World of Risk Society” 330–332. 14. I am using the phrase “cosmopolitan moment” in reference to Beck’s world society. For Beck the “cosmopolitan moment” designates the “enlightenment function” of global risks that are “capable of awakening the energies, the consensus, the legitimation necessary for creating a global community of fate, one that will demolish the walls of nation-state borders and egotisms—at least for a global moment in time and beyond democracy” (“Risk Society’s ‘Cosmopolitan Moment,’” 5). 15. The promise of “forty acres and a mule” was part of a reform program that tried to be implanted in the United States during the Reconstruction period as reparation for the injustices of slavery. Nevertheless, the promise was never actualized. 16. It is only recently, with new Western history scholarship, that the conceptualization of the U.S. West has departed from the one-dimensional mythologized version of Turner’s frontier and focused on the manifold and diverse lives of women, Native Americans, Asians, Hispanics, and other ethnic and racial groups. For further reading on the West as cultural crossroads see Limerick, Milner and Rankin (1991), Jameson and Armitage (1997), and Milner (1996).

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. Means without End: Notes on Politics. Translated by Vincenzo Binetti and CesaTe Casarino, U of Minnesota P, 2000. Beck, Ulrich. “The Cosmopolitan Society and Its Enemies.” Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 19. nos. 1–2, 2002, pp. 17–44. ———. The Cosmopolitan Vision. Translated by Ciaran Cronin, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006. ———. “Critical Theory of World Risk Society: A Cosmopolitan Vision.” Constellations, vol. 16, no. 1, 2009, pp. 1–22. ———. “La Politique dans la Société du Risque.” Revue du Mauss, vol. 17, no. 1, 2001, pp. 376–392. ———. “Living in the World Risk Society.” Economy and Society, vol. 35, no. 3, 2006, pp. 329–345. ———. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, Sage, 1992. ———. “Risk Society’s ‘Cosmopolitan Moment’.” Lecture at Harvard University, 12 Nov. 2008, pp. 1–12, www.labjor.unicamp.br/comciencia/fles/risco/ AR-UlrichBeck-Harvard.pdf. ———. “The Terrorist Threat: World Risk Society Revisited.” Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 19, no. 4, 2002, pp. 39–55. ———. World Risk Society. Polity Press, 1999.

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——— and Natan Sznaider. “Unpacking Cosmopolitanism for the Social Sciences: A Research Agenda.” The British Journal of Sociology, vol. 61, no. 1, Suppl. 1, 2010, pp. 381–403. Becker, Carl Lotus. Everyman His Own Historian: Essays on History and Politics, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1935. Internet archive; digital images. Bouges, Anthony. Empire of Liberty: Power, Desire and Freedom, Dartmouth College P, 2010. Delanty, Gerard. “The Cosmopolitan Imagination: Critical Cosmopolitanism and Social Theory.” The British Journal of Sociology, vol. 57, no. 1, 2006, pp. 25–47. ———. “The Idea of Critical Cosmopolitanism.” Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitanism Studies, edited by Gerard Delanty, Routledge, 2012, pp. 38–46. Foster, John Bellamy. “The Rediscovery of Imperialism.” Monthly Review, vol. 54, no. 6, pp. 1–16. Hamid, Mohsin. Exit West, Hamish Hamilton, 2017. Holland, Eugene. “Global Cosmopolitanism and Nomad Citizenship.” After Cosmopolitanism, edited by Rosi Braidotti, Patrick Hanafn and Bolette Blaagaard, Routledge, 2013, pp. 145–165. Ignatieff, Micheal. “The Burden.” The New York Times Magazine, 5 Jan. 2003. Ikenberry, G. John. Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American Order, Princeton UP, 2011. Inhetveen, Katharina. “‘Because We Are Refugees’: Utilizing a Legal Label.” New Issues in Refugee Research, Research Paper no. 130, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Geneva, 2006. Jameson, Elizabeth and Susan Armitage, editors. Writing the Range: Race, Class, and Culture in the Women’s West, U of Oklahoma P, 1997. Kant, Immanuel. “Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch.” Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History, edited by Pauline Kleingeld. Translated by David L. Colclasure, Yale UP, 2006, pp. 67–109. Kisiara, Otieno. “Marginalized at the Centre: How Public Narratives of Suffering Perpetuate Perceptions of Refugees’ Helplessness and Dependency.” Migration Letters, vol. 12, no. 2, 2015, pp. 162–171. Malkki, Liisa H. “Refugees and Exile: From ‘Refugee Studies’ to the National Order of Things.” Annual Review of Anthropology, vol. 24, 1995, pp. 495–523. Limerick, Patricia Nelson, Clyde A. Milner, II, and Charles E. Rankin, editors. Trails: Toward a New Western History, UP of Kansas, 1991. Mignolo, Walter. “Cosmopolitan Localism Decolonial Shifting of the Kantian Legacies.” Localities, vol. 1, 2011, pp. 11–45. ———. “The Many Faces of Cosmo-Polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism.” Public Culture, vol. 12, no. 3, 2000, pp. 721–748. Milner, Clyde A., II, editor. A New Signifcance: Re-Envisioning the History of the West, Oxford UP, 1996. Nathan, George Jean and Henry Louis Mencken. The American Credo: A Contribution toward the Interpretation of the National Mind, Knopf, 1920. Internet archive; digital images. O’Hara, Daniel T. Visions of Global America and the Future of Critical Reading, Ohio State UP, 2009.

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Slotkin, Richard. Gunfghter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in TwentiethCentury America, U of Oklahoma P, 1998. Sparke, Matthew. “Empire’s Geography: War, Globalization and American Experience.” In the Space of Theory: Postfoundational Geographies of the NationState, U of Minnesota P, 2005. Tucker, Robert W. and David D Henderson. Empire of Liberty: Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson, Oxford UP, 1990. Walters, William. “Rethinking Borders Beyond the State.” Comparative European Politics, vol. 4, 2006, pp. 141–159.

2.3

Transcontinental Journeys

11 The Western Before the Western Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814) as a Paradigm of Pre-Western Fiction Alfredo Moro Martín Introduction: The Western Travels Back in Time It is widely assumed that the Western novel is a literary genre with clear local color. Its association with a particular point in American history, with the progressive establishment of settlements from east to west, and with a certain typology of characters may lead us to claim with apparent certainty that we are facing a fundamentally North American genre, focused on a retrospective look back to a time from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth-century, when American expansion toward the coast of the Pacifc Ocean was fnally completed. This assumption, however, must be questioned. As John Cawelti notes in his study of the genre, The Six-Gun Mystique (1999), the previously mentioned formula is clearly inadequate, as it would include novels that we would not normally defne as Westerns and omit from the canon at the same time other works of fction that may well deserve ascription to the genre: Tentatively, we may say that the Western setting is a matter of geography and costume; that is, a Western is a story that takes place somewhere in the Western United States in which the characters wear certain distinctive styles of clothing. However, this formulation is clearly inadequate since there are many stories of the American West we would not call Westerns under any circumstances―for example, the novels and stories of Hamlin Garland or Ole Rolvaag, the detective stories of Raymond Chandler, or the postmodern novels of Thomas Pynchon set in California. Moreover, there are novels set in the eastern United States that are really Westerns, for example, the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper. Our geographical defnition must immediately be qualifed by a social and historical defnition of setting: the Western is a story which takes place on or near a frontier and consequently the Western is generally set in a particular moment in the past. (20, my emphasis)

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The Western genre therefore seems to be organized more around certain structural elements, such as the frontier, rather than a particular setting or geographical space. This geographical and historical defnition of the Western has also been questioned by scholars such as Kollin (2007), Witschi (2011), Campbell (2013), and Gónzalez López (2017), who have all emphasized the need for a theoretical expansion of the defnition of the genre, which they deem restrictive. For Kollin, the emergence of a post-Western current of scholarship has opened up a more dynamic space for Western studies: As an emerging critical approach, post-western studies work against a narrowly conceived regionalism, one that restricts western cultures of the past and present to some predetermined entity with static borders and boundaries. Post-western studies instead involve a critical reassessment of those very restrictions, whether they be theoretical, geographical, or political. (xi) Also working within this current of thought, Neil Campbell has defned post-Westerns as “ghost stories” that refuse to dwell in the temporal framework usually associated with the Western genre: These “ghost stories” emerge for me through a variety of flms of the post-war West that refuse to dwell in the nineteenth-century moment of the classic Western but rather explore the divergent stories by veering into and across unexpected, uncanny landscapes. (2) Post-Western scholarship has therefore broadened the range of generic possibilities for the Western, expanding the canon to other works that are not only geographically distant from the American West but also belong to other national literatures and to other historical periods. Following this logic, González López has coined the term transnational post-Westerns (2017), widening the idea of the post-Western originally developed by flm critics during the 1970s and redeveloped by the scholars mentioned earlier. For the Spanish scholar, this transnational transformation of the genre “adapts typically American assumptions and values to other national environments and thus not only questions the features of the original genre but also scrutinizes their own regional identities and conficts” (2017: 4). González López thus articulates an understanding of the genre that transcends the local or regional character of previous formulations in order to establish a more structural, and, above all, transnational vision of the Western, which enlarges the range of possibilities for a genre that is apparently fettered to a particular

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space and time. In the words of Neil Campbell, the Western genre “travels” (4) to other geographical contexts, departing from the classical set of associations related to this genre. Following this argumentative line, it may perhaps be necessary to not only analyze the transformations of the Western beyond its long proclaimed death but also to explore the lines of fliation between the Western and the literature preceding this literary genre, traveling not just in space but also in time. In this sense, it seems interesting to focus on a retrospective analysis of the presence of certain archetypical elements of the Western genre in Sir Walter Scott’s novel writing, especially if we take into account that the Scottish author had a very strong infuence on some of the North American precursors of the genre, such as James Fenimore Cooper, whose debt to Scott was extensively explored by George Dekker in his monography of 1967 (James Fenimore Cooper: The American Scott), Washington Irving, and even in Owen Wister, whose Virginian becomes with time an avid reader of Scott’s Kenilworth. Tentatively, I believe that we may exemplify the clear affnities between the genre and Scott’s novel writing through a systematic analysis of the characteristic structural elements of the Western that are present in the frst novel by Scott, Waverley, or ‘Tis Sixty Years Since, published in 1814. The surprising correlation between them will perhaps enable us to widen our vision not only toward the postmortem progeny of the genre but also to its illustrious ancestors, among whom, as I shall try to demonstrate in what follows, the laird of Abbotsford may be counted.

The Structure of the Western: Some Theoretical Considerations As I have pointed out earlier, the Western genre is articulated through a very precise spatial setting. The structural element that provides the backbone of almost any Western is the frontier, described by Cawelti as the “locus of conficts” of the genre (22). In the Western, the frontier is presented as a meeting point between civilization and savagery, as a space articulating a confict of civilizations that embody antagonistic worldviews, or as a contact zone between different states in a teleological view of the evolution of the nation. As Cawelti points out, the main objective of the frontier as a structural element is to provide the narrative with a series of conficts that give the Western its particular epic tone: The central purport of the frontier in most Westerns has simply been its potential as a setting for exciting, epic conficts. The Western formula tends to portray the frontier as “meeting point between civilization and savagery” because the clash of civilization (“law and order”) with savagery is implicitly understood to be on the way out. (20)

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The frontier articulates, therefore, a world of deep contrast: civilization or barbarism, law and order or primitivism, past or future, colonial settlers or Indians and outlaws. The frontier also defnes the typology of the archetypal characters of the genre. These are constructed as symbolic representatives of the dichotomies noted earlier. The world of the settlers, usually represented by the frontier settlement or town, is generally associated with the world of progress and civilization, symbolizing, as Cawelti points out, “an advance guard of oncoming civilization” (24). On the other hand, the savages, whether Indian or outlaws, are usually associated with the great open spaces, such as the prairies or the woods in the novels of Fenimore Cooper, representing an individualistic, patriarchal world quite isolated from the mode of life that the colonial settlers impose in their inexorable march toward the West. The savage symbolizes, in the words of Cawelti, “the violence, brutality and ignorance that civilized society seeks to control and eliminate,” but at the same time, this fgure becomes a living epitome of some of the traits that will be destroyed by the advance of the settlers and their mode of life, such as “the freedom and spontaneity of wilderness life, the sense of personal honour and individual mastery, and the deep camaraderie of men untrimmed by domestic ties” (34). The typical protagonist of the Western is usually situated between both groups, becoming the “man in the middle” (29) who is so present in Fenimore Cooper’s novels. As highlighted by Cawelti, the heroes (or antiheroes) of the Western usually possess characteristics of both savages and settlers (29). In general, we fnd characters who, despite their origins in the world of civilization, feel, for different reasons, a clear attraction to the world of the savages and for an existence withdrawn from the world of colonial settlers. The intermediate hero of the Western evinces an ambivalent attitude toward both sides of the frontier, thus enhancing the treatment of a great variety of narrative patterns and outcomes, among which we can note their fnal reintegration into the domestic world of colonial settlers, for example. Female characters usually represent the symbolic dualism, which has already been mentioned. On the one hand, we usually fnd a blonde, domestic girl, who is an emblem of conventional femininity; and on the other, we encounter the brunette maiden, a representative of the more savage or less civilized characteristics of the protagonist. Most of the Western plots end with the archetypical romance ending, of the protagonist’s return to civilization and the conventionalisms of the settlers (31). This sense of loss, of the evanescence of a time already condemned to disappear, is articulated in the Western through the chronotope,1 which Cawelti defnes as the “epic moment,” the classical situation of the Western: There is a kind of Western situation that develops out of what I have called the epic moment when society stands balanced against

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The Western therefore assumes a Hegelian understanding of history to show a transitional moment of great historical importance in the birth of the new nation. The internal confict of the hero reproduces this social confict, articulated around the idea of the frontier, and from the destinies of hero and savage a clear message is derived, a message which, though responding to the imperial logic of domestication and the “civilizing” of the savage, can in certain cases be charged with a clear nostalgia that implicitly criticizes the modes of the new society, or in some cases, as in many post-Westerns, directly undermines them. These characteristics give the Western a clear foundational character, a sense of exaltation (or subversion) of the myths upon which a very concrete idea of the nation is built: The Western, with its historical setting, its thematic emphasis on the establishment of law and order, and its resolution of the confict between civilization and savagery on the frontier, was a kind of foundational ritual. It presented for our recurrent contemplation that epic moment when the frontier passed from the old way of life to the present. By dramatizing this moment, and associating it with the hero, the Western ritually reaffrmed the creation of America and explored not only what was gained, but what was lost in the movement of American history. (49, my emphasis) We are facing therefore a genre that symbolically establishes a teleological narration of history, generally permeated by an imperial and colonizing logic that does not usually consider other alternative narrations of history. In any case, despite its use as one of America’s foundational myths, the structure of the Western shows some clear parallels with another genre that is intimately related to it due to its evident infuence in the United States at the beginning of the nineteenth century: the historical novel. This genre shares with the Western an interest in the origins of the nation, as well as a clear political orientation directed toward the justifcation of one vision of history. Could we consider this genre a precedent of the Western? I will try to answer that question in the fnal part of this chapter.

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The Western Before the Western: Sir Walter Scott and Waverley, or ‘Tis Sixty Years Since At frst sight, the Waverley novels of Sir Walter Scott may not seem an evident precedent for the Western genre. Of a clear Scottish tone, Scott’s frst novel attempts to depict essential moments in the history of the country. For example, Waverley (1814) situates the reader in the context of the second Jacobite rising of 1740, Rob Roy (1818) focuses on the frst rising of the “old pretender,” and Old Mortality (1816) is a fantastic portrayal of the religious turmoil that devastated Scotland at the end of the seventeenth century. We are quite far from the American West or the historical period of expansion toward the Pacifc. Scott’s narratives and the Western do seem two very strange bedfellows. If, however, we analyze the presence of certain structural elements that are characteristic of the Western in the narrative of Scott, and specifcally in his frst novel Waverley, or ‘Tis Sixty Years Since (1814), the comparison does not seem completely preposterous. In Waverley, the protagonist, young Edward Waverley, after a solitary and bookish youth, decides to embark on a military career and join one of the regiments of dragoons serving in the south of Scotland. His journey to the north constitutes a truly pleasant aesthetic experience, as he fnds a new world where “all was beautiful because all was new” (Waverley I. 7: 39). However, the military career and its technical character will soon become tedious for the young Englishman, who asks for a leave of absence in order to direct his steps to Tully-Veolan, the hall of the Bradwardines, an old family acquaintance. In Scott’s novel, Tully-Veolan is clearly constituted as a liminal space between the Lowlands and Highlands, as the threshold between civilization and savagery. The inhabitants of the nearby hamlet surprise Waverley with their clear “stagnation of industry, and perhaps of intellect,” and in fact, the poorly dressed washing women surprise Waverley because of their misery, especially for an eye “accustomed to the smiling neatness of the English cottages” (32). Scott presents a frontier space radically different from the civilization embodied by the prosperous English society from which young Waverley stems. The journey to Tully-Veolan is thus transformed into a voyage to the past, and the residence of the Baron, “built at a period when Castles were no longer necessary, and when the Scottish architects had not yet acquired the art of designing a domestic residence” (I. 8: 35) awakens in Waverley a “Monastic illusion,” which he soon associates with the medievalizing world of Spenser and Ludovico Ariosto (36). The baron, defned by Lars Hartveit as “the lingering survivor of an ancient world” (19), and his daughter, Rose Bradwardine, reinforce these initial impressions with their tales of domestic reality in Tully-Veolan, where Highlander raids became habitual after the baron refused to pay a tribute for the protection of the local chief, Fergus MacIvor. As Rose declares, Tully-Veolan has never been a secure place, and the ambushes

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between Highlanders and Lowlanders have more than once ended in a funeral, with the Highlander corpses laid up in their plaids and their wives singing the Coronach. After hearing these tales, young Waverley understands that he is in a world that is radically different from the world of civilized England: Waverley could not help starting at a story which bore so much resemblance to one of his day-dreams. Here was a girl, scarce seventeen, the gentlest of her sex, both in temper and appearance, who had witnessed with her own eyes such a scene as he had used to conjure up in his imagination as only occurring in ancient times. He felt at once the impulse of curiosity, and that slight sense of danger which only serves to heighten its interest. He might have said with Malvolio, “I do not now fool myself to let imagination jade me”. I am currently in the land of military and romantic adventures, and it only remains to be seen what will be my own share in them”. (I. 15: 72, my emphasis) As one may appreciate, Tully-Veolan can be related to some of the structural characteristics noted in the frst part of this chapter. In the frst place, it is a frontier space between two opposed, antagonistic visions of civilization. The patriarchal and aristocratic culture of the clans, of Gaelic culture, is irremissibly confronted with the more bourgeois existence of the Lowlanders, who are closer to Waverley’s vision of civilization and who have a fundamentally Anglo-Saxon culture. Tully-Veolan is thus presented as the locus of conficts, and the anachronistic hue that Scott gives to this area in this historical moment situates us in the epic moment so characteristic of the Western, that in which the ancestral structures of the Gaelic culture steadily died away due to the thrust of the Act of Union of 1707, against which the Highlanders and the nostalgic Jacobites of the south rebelled in order to restore the ancient Stuart monarchy to Scotland, the main historical problem treated by Scott in his novel. Edward Waverley, piqued by his own curiosity, feels an irresistible attraction to the world of the Highlanders and soon decides to make an excursion to the Highlands in order to gain acquaintance with the local outlaw responsible for the baron’s cattle stealing, Donald Bean Lean, expecting to meet a second Robin Hood or Adam o’Gordon (I. 16: 78). The banquet which Fergus MacIvor, the local chieftain, offers in honor of Waverley, with a clear political intention, takes Waverley’s fascination for the MacIvor clan and the Highlands to its peak, and the local bard’s verses, appropriately translated by Flora MacIvor, “for honour, for freedom, and for fame” (I. 21) awaken in Waverley the desire to embark with the Highlanders on the Jacobite chivalric adventure. The encounter with Bonnie Prince Charlie, also known as the Chevalier or the adventurer, makes Waverley’s involvement in the utopian Jacobite enterprise certain,

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an endeavor tinted with clear chivalric hues which seduce Waverley’s quixotic mind-set.2 This fascination for the world of Highland outlaws and for the Jacobite cause places Waverley in a situation that is highly reminiscent of that of the heroes of the Western. Caught between two antagonistic worlds, Waverley will be the quintessential intermediate hero, driven by an aesthetic attraction for the world of the savages, but belonging, in any case, to the civilized world represented by England and her more developed society. His “ambulatory motion” establishes a clear contrast between two different modes of life (Welsh 57), transforming Waverley into a “medium for introducing historical and topographical detail” (Welsh 34–35).3 As we shall see, this intermediate nature is of fundamental importance in the development of Scott’s novel, as it articulates a movement of systole and diastole very similar to that of the heroes of the Western, usually fascinated by the world of the Far West, but invariably returning to the world of civilization from which they departed after understanding the obsolete nature of the world for which they feel a clear aesthetic fascination. Despite this initial process of attraction, the apparent glories of the Jacobite cause will soon fade away, giving way to a less fanciful vision of the rebellion. The narrator will soon present the Jacobite army that Waverley has joined as a band of outlaws fghting for the survival of a social order on its way to extinction. This becomes evident during the parade of the Jacobite troops in Edinburgh before their march to the south of Scotland and England. From St. Leonard’s hill, Waverley contemplates the parade, and the initial fascination for the Highlander army, with its bagpipes and its organization in the different clans, is soon joined by a feeling of disgust, after the narrator depicts the rear of the Jacobite army as a troop of bandits, a clear danger to civilized society: From this it happened, that in bodies, the van of which were admirably well armed in their own fashion, the rear resembled actual banditti. Here was a pole-axe, there a sword without a scabbard; here a gun without a lock, there a scythe set straight upon a pole; and some had only their dirks, bludgeons or stakes pulled out of hedges. The grim, uncombed, and wild appearance of these men, most of whom gazed with all the admiration of ignorance upon the most ordinary productions of domestic art, created surprise in the Lowlands, but it also created terror. So little was the condition of the Highlands known at that late period, that the character and appearance of their population, while thus sallying forth as military adventurers, conveyed to the south country Lowlanders as much surprise as if an invasion of African negroes, or Esquimaux Indians, had issued forth from the northern mountains of their own native country. It cannot therefore be wondered if Waverley, who had hitherto judged of the Highlanders generally, from the samples which the policy of Fergus had from

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The parallel between the Highlanders and the Native Americans is evident, and it is of Scott’s own making, not mine. This spectacle makes Waverley awaken from his Jacobite dream, as he fnally understands how his place is on the side of civilization and how the Jacobite attempt to restore an absolute monarchy belongs to a period of history that has been already overcome. This tendency will be accentuated in the fnal part of the novel, which marks Waverley’s return to domesticity, as well as his fnal acknowledgment of the historical inadequacy of the cause of the young pretender. This last phase will be sparked by the encounter between Waverley and Talbot, a representative of the British army, which fnally suffocates the revolt. The execution of Fergus MacIvor and, most importantly, the contemplation of the disasters of the war, give the last volume of this novel an elegiac tone, which is also typical of those Westerns where the protagonist fnally returns to civilization, albeit not without a certain melancholy for the disappearing Western world left behind. The climax of this process will be the contemplation of Tully-Veolan, destroyed in the war, a sight which forces young Waverley to throw a retrospective and corrective look along his own trajectory in Scotland: It was evening when he approached the village of Tully-Veolan, with feelings and sentiments―how different from those which attended his frst entrance! Then life was so new to him, that a dull or disagreeable day was one of the greatest misfortunes which his imagination anticipated, and it seemed to him that his time ought only to be consecrated to elegant or amusing study, and relieved by social or youthful frolic. Now, how changed, how saddened, yet how elevated was his character within the course of a very few months! Danger and misfortune are rapid, though severe teachers. “A sadder and a wiser man,” he felt, in internal confdence and mental dignity, a compensation for the gay dreams which in his case experience had so rapidly dissolved. (III. 16: 296) This elegiac tone will be followed by a symbolic return to England, the restoration of Tully-Veolan, and Waverley’s marriage to Rose Bradwardine―the blonde maiden―closing a period of border confict and inaugurating a period of peace and prosperity not just for Waverley but also for the British Isles in accordance with Scott’s own vision of history. As David Brown remarks, Scott’s frst novel offers a double plot, refecting

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not just the destiny of its protagonist but also the historical progress of the whole nation: The full title of Scott’s frst novel, Waverley, or ‘Tis Sixty Years Since, warns us that we are about to read a double history; the history of not just one man, but of a historical epoch. The novel is easily divisible into two plots on different scales. On the personal scale, it covers the events of Edward Waverley’s life and the development of his character from early youth to manhood. On the public scale, Waverley depicts the failure of the Forty-Five Jacobite rebellion to reinstate in Britain an older political order—the Stuart absolutist monarch, overthrown with James II in 1688. (6) The novel’s ending must therefore also be understood at this second symbolic level mentioned by Brown. Waverley is not just the portrayal of young Waverley’s formative process, but it is also a depiction of the process of the formation and establishment of the United Kingdom as a nation after the union between England and Scotland in 1707. With the novel’s ending, the British Isles leaves behind an obscure epoch, moving toward a new period of prosperity. Just as usually happens in Westerns, Scott’s novel assumes a teleological narration of history, which adopts an imperial vision by which the Highlands are colonized by the south for the sake of progress and modernization.4 This is Scott’s vision in the novel’s postscript, where he defends this process of change as a transition to modernity: There is no European nation which, within the course of half a century, or little more, has undergone so complete a change as this kingdom of Scotland. The effects of the insurrection of 1745, —the destruction of the patriarchal power of the Highland chiefs,—the abolition of the heritable jurisdictions of the Lowland nobility and barons,—the total eradication of the Jacobite party, which, averse to intermingle with the English or adopt their customs, long continued to pride themselves upon maintaining ancient Scottish manners or customs, commenced this innovation. The gradual infux of wealth, and an extension of commerce, have since united to render the present people of Scotland a class of beings as different from their grandfathers, as the existing English are from those of Queen Elizabeth’s time [. . .] the change, though steadily and rapidly progressive, has, nevertheless, been gradual; and like those who drift down the stream of a deep and smooth river, we are not aware of the progress we have made until we fx our eye on the now-distant point from which we set out. (340)

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Scott thus justifes the Act of Union as a historical necessity and the English colonization of the Highlands as a process of gain, but also of loss. From this perspective, Waverley could well be understood as a foundational narrative exalting the birth of a new nation, the British nation. Scott, just like some of the authors of the Western genre, does so while fully conscious of the fact that, despite its progress, Scotland has also lost an ancestral Gaelic culture belonging to a period of history superseded after the violent conficts which his novel depicts.

Conclusions According to what has been found so far, it is my belief that a good number of clear parallels between the narrative of Scott and the Western may be drawn. First of all, as is the case in the Western genre, Waverley is articulated around a narrative structure in which the frontier plays an essential role, structuring itself as a locus of conficts where two different civilizations, worldviews, and historical points encounter each other. Tully-Veolan, in this sense, adopts a very similar role to the function assumed by the frontier settlement typical of the Western, ensuring the epic point in which two different periods of history confront each other in a confict in which the disappearance of one is the only way out. What is more, one may emphasize that Scott’s protagonist assumes the role of the intermediate hero generally associated with the characters of the Western. Fascinated by the civilization on the other side of the border, Waverley will have to learn through his immersion in armed confict how his fascination for the Highlands is purely aesthetic, his place being close to the civilization of the Lowlanders. That movement of return will be sanctioned by his symbolic marriage with Rose Bradwardine, representative of the civilized values and the Lowlands, and by the renunciation of his love for Flora MacIvor, a symbol of that ancient patriarchal Scotland condemned to disappear. The novel’s ending therefore assumes the dual nature so typical of the Western, intermingling the particular and the collective, weaving a narrative of foundational character about the origins of the nation. In this sense, the parallels between the historical novel and the Western should not seem so surprising by now, as both genres share a common ideological purpose. Their shared structures are employed with a clear interest in offering a particular narration about the origins of the nation and its political raison d’être, justifying the shifting of symbolic borders as a painful, although necessary, state in a teleological narration of history and, in this sense, enacting a public wish-fulfllment dream (Welsh 57). Scott’s popularity in America, famously lamented by Mark Twain in Life on the Mississippi (1883), can also be understood in its relationship with the foundational narrative of the United States, the Western. Waverley (1814) and the rest of the Scottish novels of the laird of Abbotsford,

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articulate narratives of expansion and cultural assimilation, justifying both in the interest of peace and progress. It seems logical, therefore, to claim them as precursors of the Western, as pre-Western fctions, or narratives that anticipate structural and ideological elements that will later be present in this infuential genre and of a perhaps unrivaled importance for the collective imagination of North American culture. Perhaps it may be time to tread the path of the transnational pre-Westerns, where other illustrious ancestors of the works of Wister, Shaffer, and others may be found.

Notes 1. I am using the term chronotope in the Bakhtinian sense of “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (84). 2. For the connections between Edward Waverley and the fgure of Don Quixote, see Gerli (2005), McDonald Jr (1959), Moro (2016, 2017), Pardo (2016) SnelWolfe (1957), Ter Horst (2000), Welsh (1981), and Wolpers (1986). 3. Kerr considers Scott’s middle characters as guides “to the ways of the past, of the men and women who peopled the pre-history of burgeois society” (13). 4. For Kerr (1989), Scott’s novels present a narrative reconstruction of history that endorses English colonialism in Scotland for the sake of progress: the novel resolves its basic semantic opposition by taming or simply killing off the fgures who represent the darker side of the older order. Having projected the older forms of social life as other, as obsolete and dangerous despite their virtues, the novel then rescues the virtuous representatives of the past and destroys those it has conceived as dangerous (11–12).

Works Cited Bajtin, Mikhail, editor. M. Holquist: The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. U of Texas P Slavic Series, 1982. Brown, David. Walter Scott and the Historical Imagination. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979. Campbell, Neill. Post-Westerns: Cinema, Region, West. U of Nebraska P, 2013. Cawelti, John. The Six-Gun Mistique Sequel. Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1999. Dekker, George. James Fenimore Cooper: The American Scott. Barnes and Noble, 1967. Gerli, Michael. “‘Pray Landlord, Bring Me Those Books’: Notes on Cervantes, Walter Scott and the Ethical Legitimacy of the Novel in Early Nineteenth Century England.” Corónente tus hazañas: Studies in Honor of John Jay Allen, edited by M. J. McGrath, Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2005, pp. 231–243. González López, Jesús Ángel. “Transnational Post-Westerns in Irish Cinema.” Journal of Transnational American Studies, vol. 7, no. 1, 2016, pp. 1–27. Hartveit, Lars. Dream within a Dream: A Thematic Approach to Scott’s Vision of Fictional Reality. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1974. Kerr, James. Fiction against History: Scott as Storyteller. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007.

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Kollin, Susan, editor. Postwestern Cultures: Literature, Theory, Space. U of Nebraska P, 2007. McDonald, William, Jr. “Scott’s Conception of Don Quixote.” Midwest Review, 1959, pp. 37–42. Moro Martín, Alfredo. “Don Quijote y la novela histórica. Consideraciones sobre la infuencia de la novela cervantina en Waverley, or Tis Sixty Years Since (1814), de Sir Walter Scott.” Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America, vol. 37, no. 2, 2017, pp. 169–201. ———. Transformaciones del Quijote en la novela inglesa y alemana del siglo XVIII. Alcalá de Henares: Servicio de Publicaciones, 2016. Pardo García, Pedro Javier. “Cervantes, Scott y el héroe quijotesco decimonónico.” Erbea: Revista de Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales, vol. 6, 2016, pp. 109–145. Scott, Walter. Waverley, or Tis Sixty Years Since. Edited by C. Lamont, Oxford UP, 2008. Snel-Wolfe, Clara. “Evidences of Scott Indebtedness to Spanish Literature.” The Romanic Review, vol. 23, no. 4, 1932, pp. 301–311. Ter Horst, Robert. “Effective Affnities: Walter Scott and Miguel de Cervantes.” Cervantes for the 21st Century/Cervantes para el siglo XXI: Studies in the Honor of Edward Dudley, edited by F. la Rubia Prado, Newark, DE: Juan de la Cuesta, 2000, pp. 199–220. Welsh, Alexander. The Hero of the Waverley Novels. New Haven: Yale UP, 1963. Witschi, Nicolas, editor. A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West. Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Wolpers, Theodor. “Der romantische Leser als Kriegheld und Liebhaber: Poetisierung der Realität in Walter Scotts ‘Waverley’.” Gelebte Literatur in der Literatur. Studien zu Erscheinungsformen und Geschichte eines literarischen Motivs, edited by T. Wolpers, Gottingen: Vandenhock, 1986, pp. 185–197.

12 Beyond the Atlantic The American West in TwentyFirst-Century Southwestern European Literature1 David Rio The consolidation of transnationalism in American literary studies has certainly contributed to the growing critical reconceptualization of a region whose imagery has often shown its power to travel across national borders: the American West. Making sense of this region in a global context implies analyzing the connections of the American West with other geographical imaginaries and its representation in other cultures, for example, beyond the Atlantic. The case for transnationalism in literary and cultural studies has been promoted by an increasing number of scholars over the last three decades. Paul Giles, for example, has argued that “in a world of transnational mobility and spatial dislocation, no enclosed community—neither university nor region nor nation—can defne itself in a separatist manner” (64). Similarly, Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor have proposed a transatlantic turn in literary studies, claiming that “focusing on the Atlantic, with its emphasis on mobility and migration,” means a challenge to “the security of static and bordered spaces of all kinds, none more so than the defning authority of the nation” (18). In the case of the American West, its multinational dimension and, in particular, its transatlantic features are already present “in the origins of a territory with borders and boundaries characterized by violence, cultural exchange, transculturation and heterogeneity” (Rio and Conway x). Transnational perspectives in the feld of Western American studies are a coherent choice because, after all, the American West was built upon a history of global exchange, and stories set on the frontier have often been a transatlantic and transnational literary phenomenon. As Janne Lahti has argued, the “West was international before it became national, and it became known and placed in a global context of empires, markets, epidemics, and knowledge before it was claimed by the United States and its brand of settler colonialism” (17). Besides, in the present century, in this globalized age of transoceanic studies, the international and hybrid properties of Western American culture have become more visible than ever. A proper understanding of Western writing beyond its mythic frameworks often requires a shift toward a post-Western perspective, where the American West also acquires a postregional dimension. Contemporary

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interpretations of the American West and its culture cannot dismiss its global dimension and must move beyond the regional and the national imaginary. As Steven Frye has pointed out, This remapping of the West, which preserves but enriches the regional and geographic model with concepts of movement that can be charted along ethnic, economic, and cultural lines, has led to a more complete understanding of the American West as a locus point for an international imaginary. (3–4) The transatlantic dimension of the American literary West may be traced to the earliest writings about this region by Spanish explorers, such as Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación de los naufragios y comentarios (1542; the book has been translated into English as Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America), and is often related to European colonial adventure tales, to narratives “centered on the travels and exploits of a protagonist from the metropole whose adventure took place on the far edges of empire” (Kollin 3, “Introduction: Historicizing the American Literary West”). Although the texts have been often overlooked in favor of texts written in English, such as The Journals of Lewis and Clark (1814), the truth is that these travel accounts played an important role in transmitting particular visions of the American West. For example, Cabeza de Vaca “created an image that to a large extent persists today—the West as an extraordinary place, where man fghts for survival against an alien and extremely dangerous environment” (Gomez-Galisteo 10). Frontier narratives became immensely popular in European literature during the nineteenth century, as illustrated by the success of authors such as René de Chateaubriand, Gustave Aimard, Gabriel Ferry, Mayne Reid, Rudolf Muus, Emilio Salgari, Charles Sealsfeld, Balduin Mollhausen, and, in particular, Karl May, whose role as an image maker has been emphasized by many scholars of the American West. Ray Allen Billington, for example, has stated that “Karl May never saw the American West, but his seventy books, half on the American frontier, shaped the views of millions of Europeans” (53). The European fascination with the American West is also exemplifed by the success of Buffalo Bill’s transatlantic travels with the Wild West show (1887–1892). As Robert W. Rydell and Rob Kroes have claimed, the warm response to Buffalo Bill’s tours was favored by the literary familiarity of the frontier mythology to Europeans, who, either through American authors, such as James Fenimore Cooper, or through European writers such as May, Chateaubriand, Aymard, or Reid, were well acquainted with images of the American West (111). In the twentieth century, the iconography of the American frontier extended in Europe, in particular, through the success of formula Westerns, both in translations and in their European versions, as testifed by the immense popularity

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of pulp fction by authors such as Marcial Lafuente Estefanía, José Mallorquí, George Fronval, and Louis Masterson. Even prestigious writers— for example, the Spanish writers Camilo José Cela (Nobel Prize Award in Literature, 1989) and Ramón J. Sender—published novels dealing with iconic events and characters in frontier mythology, such as the duel at the O.K. Corral or Billy the Kid. The European literary fascination with the American West has continued in the present century, as illustrated by a number of remarkable books published in the last two decades where the reader may fnd notable examples of the transnational expansion of Western geographies, motifs, and themes. In this chapter particular attention will be paid to several southwestern European writers who have revised and complicated traditional constructions of a place and a space too often tied to archetypal frontier mythology. Although the transatlantic fascination with the American West in the present century cannot be confned to southwestern Europe, as illustrated, for example, by several insightful frontier novels recently published by authors from countries such as the United Kingdom (Carys Davies’s West), Ireland (Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End), and Italy (Wu Ming’s Manituana), the truth is that some of the most remarkable transatlantic literary approaches to the American West in the last two decades have been written by southwestern European authors. The present chapter is not meant to be a comprehensive survey of contemporary images of the American West in southwestern European literature, but it will focus on a series of authors and books that testify to the increasing complexity and maturity of transatlantic literary representations of the American West. The selected texts belong to different literary traditions (French, Spanish, Catalan, and Basque) and are representative of the vitality and diversity of the genre in contemporary European literature. They epitomize transnational readings of both the Old West and the New West, often exploring new cultural constructions of Western experiences. The frst book to be discussed is Christine Montalbetti’s Western, a novel originally published in French in 2005 and translated into English in 2009. Other contemporary French authors, such as Maylis de Kerangal (in Naissance d’un pont, originally published in 2010 and translated into English as Birth of a Bridge in 2014) or Paul Fournel (in Jason Murphy, 2013) have focused on the American West, but it is Christine Montalbetti who has shown a recurrent literary interest in this region. Apart from Western, she has also published two other novels set in the American West: Nothing But Waves and Wind (originally published in French under the title Plus rien que les vagues et le vent in 2014 and translated into English in 2017) and American Journal (originally published in French as Journée américaine in 2009 and translated into English in 2018). In Western, Montalbetti’s frst literary approach to the American West, she offers an unconventional portrait of the mythical cowboy and life on the frontier, debunking classical Western mythology. The novel has been called

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“a western nouveau roman” (Kauffman 11), and it may be regarded as a remarkable challenge to the authenticity of the cowboy myth and masculinity in the American West. This metafctional work is set on a frontier town called Transition City, and it focuses on a mysterious 30-year-old cowboy, who remains unnamed almost until the end. Taking the book as a whole, it may be argued that one of the most interesting features is the way Montalbetti deconstructs the classical ingredients of the genre, creating a postmodern pastiche, almost devoid of action, dialogue, or plot. As Paul Constant has argued in his review of the book, “she shoves the action of the piece—a gunfght, a man looking for revenge on another man— far into the background, instead focusing on details and characters that would otherwise be a barely described, terse sentence or two in a L’Amour novel.” The novel also parodies the emblematic taciturnity of the Western hero, traditionally associated with masculinity because, as Jane Tompkins has pointed out, “the Western itself is the language of men, what they do vicariously, instead of speaking” (65). For the Western hero, “silence is a sign of mastery, and goes along with a gun in the hand” (Tompkins 64), but Montalbetti’s hero is an almost speechless cowboy whose inability with words is mocked by the narrator. In fact, for this character the mere act of speaking becomes a “heroic action” (Montalbetti 46–47). In Western, Montalbetti experiments with novelistic forms and metaliterary elements, with an emphasis on dilatory techniques that give priority to discourse over plot. For example, she delays the traditional violent events of the genre until the very end of the book. In fact, the archetypal shootout takes place on its fnal page. It is a story where we may see Montalbetti disrupting some of the best-known conventions of the genre. Thus, instead of the traditional fast-paced story of the Western, Montalbetti offers the reader constant narrative digression and suspension of the action. She not only plays with the reader’s expectations, but she also introduces an interactive discourse through which she tries to construct the reader as an accomplice. As Warren Motte has noted, “she seeks to enlist her reader in a textual dynamic based on the principle of collaboration, while at the same time whetting his or her semiotic desire” (195). Early in the book this intrusive narration is exemplifed by several comments by Montalbetti acting as narrator-persona and instructing the readers about how to call the unnamed hero or what to do if they are not fond of digressions on animals and their lives: “those not interested in animal life can skip immediately to Chapter 2 with no harm done” (8). The intrusions by the narrator sometimes go beyond temporal and spatial borders. Although the book is set in the American West in the 1800s, it contains a lengthy digression about the author’s life in France in contemporary times that starts in the following way: “I’m ready to tell you a silly story, one of the silliest, really the story of one of the many incidents that have irritated me over the course of my life. Hear, then, the lamentable fable of Christine Montalbetti” (125–126). In this case the digression not

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only contributes to creating a sense of complicity with the reader but also hints at the transnational and global dimension of the Western. Certainly, Montalbetti’s text becomes a challenging novel for those readers used to the classical tropes of the Western, in particular because of its emphasis on moments and elements traditionally neglected in conventional stories dealing with the American West. Thus, Montalbetti focuses on small details such as the insects in the soil where the cowboy is standing, the wall where he is staring, the light in a mirror, a lazy cow, or the way the cowboy’s boot hangs off the porch. Montalbetti’s wish to withhold the action sometimes goes so far that it gives birth to seemingly endless descriptions, such as one focused on the movement of drops of water: “Sometimes, too, in their failed trajectories, the drops fall onto skin, there to engage in a little duel with this surface, impermeable for the most part but not entirely, because the epidermis, happy to have this very local, very unexpected hydration, may greet them with the appetite of an ogre” (157). With these postmodernist techniques, Montalbetti seeks innovation in a genre full of clichés, aiming to turn what traditionally might be regarded as ominous digressions into compelling interludes that may contribute to embellishing the emotional and sensual part of her story and even to gaining psychological insight into the cowboy and his surroundings. Contemporary Spanish literature also contains interesting examples of the recurrent European fascination with the American West. And one of the most remarkable features of the presence of Western themes and motifs in Spanish literature is its outstanding diversity. For example, in her short but engaging book of poetry Western (2016), Luci Romero explores the lyrical dimension of the Western as a genre, with a particular emphasis on its cinematic version. A completely different book is Extraño Oeste [Weird West], a 2015 hybrid collection of stories by several authors that combine traditional elements of the Western with science fction, fantasy literature, and horror fction. Another hybrid book is José Javier Abásolo’s 2014 novel Una del Oeste [A Western], where noir fction and Western ingredients coexist in a story that plays insightfully with the most popular features of both genres. Historical novels set in the American West have also achieved some visibility in the last two decades, as illustrated by titles such as Javier Pascual’s Los acasos (The Fates, 2010) or Jesús Maeso de la Torre’s Comanche (2018). Nevertheless, perhaps the most compelling Spanish book dealing with the American West published in the last two decades is Juan Carlos Rubio’s Arizona: Una tragedia musical americana [Arizona: An American Musical Tragedy]. This play was originally written by Rubio in 2005, and since then it has been performed worldwide, though it did not appear in book format until 2017. Arizona is a remarkable text that resists an easy defnition from a formal point of view because Rubio goes beyond traditional borders, successfully combining different genres: comedy, tragedy, absurdist theater, musical, and political drama. The genesis of the play is

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the birth of a border militia in Arizona, the Minutemen Project, whose main aim was to block immigrants from coming into the United States from Mexico. The militia was founded in 2004 and was quite active during the following decade, whereas nowadays it has split into several rival factions. Although the militia may have fallen apart, its legacy is visible both regionally and nationally, as illustrated by the current rise to prominence of the populist, far-right fervor against illegal immigration, exemplifed by the approval of controversial anti-illegal immigration laws, such as Arizona SB1070, or by Donald Trump’s commitment to build a border wall with Mexico. Rubio’s play focuses on an American couple (George and Margaret) who are determined to patrol the border with Mexico to defend their homeland from potential intruders. Although the story is set in the Arizona desert, the transregional and transnational implications of the play are obvious, and its political message against borders becomes explicit both in the prologue of the Spanish edition written by Esteban Beltrán, the director of Amnesty International in Spain, and in the dedication included at the beginning of the play: “A las malditas, malditas, malditas fronteras. (To the damned, damned, damned borders).”2 Irony and parody are some of the instruments employed by Rubio to portray this American couple whose immersion in this militia project at the border seems to be justifed by their wish to protect their country: “We’ve come to keep an eye on our neighbors and to assess the border situation” (17). Rubio also resorts to absurd dialogues between the two main characters that symbolize not only the lack of proper communication between them but also the failure of communication between countries. Absurdity often goes together with artifciality in Arizona, as illustrated, for example, by Margaret’s watering of a plastic cactus while insisting on her love for authentic things. Despite the oppressive heat, their trip to the desert is represented in the frst scenes of the play as a picnic that includes golf and a musical number, but as the play goes on its tragic elements become more evident. In the end, Rubio’s play allows violence to regain its traditional power in a contemporary American West where intellectual and cultural borders are more rigid than the political ones. Although Arizona, with its insightful approach to issues such as frontiers, migration, political manipulation, the fear of the unknown, and the lack of communication, certainly explores transnational and transcultural themes, Rubio’s play also calls attention to specifc national and regional issues connected to the setting of the story, the American Southwest. The play mocks the obsession with protecting this border, a job that is carried out not only to safeguard U.S. citizens but also for their southern neighbors’ own beneft: “They know we’re doing this for their own good. And they appreciate our reminding them that they should know their place” (21). Particularly remarkable is the contrast that the play establishes between the southwestern frontier with Mexico and the U.S.

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northern border with Canada that is privileged by George in what may be regarded as a clear example of cultural and economic discrimination and xenophobia: “Our neighbors to the north are always welcome. They are not a threat to us. They’re not a threat to anyone!” (24). The classical confict of the Western between good and evil acquires in this play a geographic dimension and becomes a clash between north and south, where the north is equated with paradise and the south is associated with danger and evil: “MARGARET: So, the danger is in the south. Isn’t it George? GEORGE: Always. When God created Earth he banished the damned to the south. And ever since then, they’ve been trying to get back to paradise” (24). Surprisingly enough in a play discussing frontiers and migration, the immigrants crossing the border are almost invisible in Arizona. Although in the list of characters included at the beginning of the play there is a reference to “dozens, hundreds, thousands of immigrants” (5), only one immigrant, a kid, is mentioned in the book, as the target of George’s shooting, and he remains voiceless. Instead of focusing on the multiple “others” existing in the Southwest or bringing attention to a series of Hispanic communities often neglected by traditional Western stories, Rubio prefers to stress the contradictions of an Anglo-American couple unable to understand the multicultural and hybrid condition both of the West and of the United States.3 Through Margaret’s voice, the play exposes the paradoxes of a nation built by immigrants and obsessed with building borders to stop the arrival of new immigrants. Margaret’s attempts to understand the reasons for the immigrants to cross the border are dismissed by George with simplistic statements that refect archetypal, monocultural visions of America often biased by reductionist formulas and ethnocentric prejudices: “But they want to destroy our harmony, sully the purity of our minds and bodies [. . .] ‘cause of pure evil, and envy.” (28). In the play the Southwest desert, with its suffocating heat and its aridity, intertwines with the personal situation of this American couple, who have no children. Their lack of descendants epitomizes the symbolic sterility of an American society that seems to be more concerned about the future of whales than about the plight of their illegal immigrants: “The south also exists for whales, George. Fortunately, an NGO was able to save her. It’s hard to believe that the government just washes its hands in these cases. [. . .] Poor whale, right, George?”(34). Margaret’s refusal to succumb to George’s manipulation and to his willingness to resort to violence to defend the border makes the play lose its comic and absurdist side, preparing the way for its tragic end. The notion of regeneration through violence, popularized by Richard Slotkin in his seminal study Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860, is challenged in Arizona because at the end of the play it becomes clear that violence only generates self-destruction, as epitomized by George’s killing of Margaret and his own suicide. George’s last words about the “zenith” and the “sunset” (43) work as a warning about the

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bleak future for a country unable to respect the human rights of its immigrants regardless of their legal condition. Overall, the play may be viewed as a satire on contemporary “vigilante” border projects and attitudes, emphasizing cultural isolation or purity in the United States in general and, in particular, in the American West. The fascination with the American West in contemporary southwestern European literature is not limited to authors using widely spoken languages, like Spanish or French, but also affects writers in other languages.4 For example, if we focus on Catalan literature, it is worth discussing Jordi Solé’s Barcelona Far West (2010). This historical novel illustrates the ability of European authors to reconceptualize classical Western motifs and characters, stimulating mutual exchange between the Western American tradition and European culture. Barcelona Far West, originally published in Catalan and translated into Spanish in 2011 as El revólver de Buffalo Bill, is Solé’s third novel and is based on the travels of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show to Europe and, in particular, to Barcelona. In fact, this city plays a major role in the novel, a book where Solé shows his gift in integrating classic Western motifs and characters in a crime fction story set well beyond its archetypal frontier scenarios. The whole narrative may be read as a post-Western text because it disrupts the conventions of the classic Western by reversing the traditional geographical movement of its characters from east to west. As Krista Comer has claimed, “postwestern . . . [is] the cultural space and critical practice involving the crossings, fows, transnational circulations, of a regionalism notbounded” (11). Similarly, Neil Campbell has defned “post-westerns” as “hauntings, shady, ‘ghost-Westerns,’ . . . casting fresh lights on the regionalist ideologies that initiated the fabled West” (378). In Barcelona Far West, the archetypal American journey from the settlements of the East to the frontier and a fresh start in the West is replaced by the material and symbolic transportation of the Wild West to the East, as epitomized by the vivid portrayal of the experiences of Buffalo Bill and the members of his show in Barcelona in 1899. The main purpose of Solé’s novel may be to entertain the reader with an interesting combination of historical ingredients, fast-paced action, and thriller features, but the novel also offers illuminating insights for understanding the complex relationships among local, regional, national, and international spaces. Although Buffalo Bill certainly plays an important role in Barcelona Far West, Solé departs from classical portrayals of this character as a formula Western hero, giving the protagonist role to a young Barcelona journalist, Pol Vidal, who longs to obtain an interview with the legendary frontier fgure. In fact, the whole story is based on Vidal’s reminiscences about the visit of the Wild West show to Barcelona, with a particular emphasis on the kidnapping of a Native American girl by a local pimp and her later rescue by the journalist and the members of the show. Although the novel represents Buffalo Bill as an international celebrity, unwilling to

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lose his star status, it also tries to provide insight into the reality behind the myth, presenting him as a man who has to face ordinary problems, such as a toothache or the outbreak of a fu epidemic that threatens the success of his Wild West show. The reference to this infuenza pandemic affecting Barcelona in 1889 is also one of the elements that Solé employs in the novel to reinforce the historical dimension of his narrative. He also includes in the book different newspaper clippings describing the arrival of the Wild West show to Barcelona, contributing in this way to emphasizing the credibility of the historical background of his fctional tale. One of the key points for the success of Barcelona Far West is Sole’s ability to explore the problematic integration of a global phenomenon, promoted as the Western world’s greatest traveling attraction, in a particular local scenario, the city of Barcelona at the end of the nineteenth century. Buffalo Bill’s show, with its power to spread the “Wild West” fever in different European countries, certainly has a global dimension, not only because of its international travels but also due to the contents of its performances (Kollin, “The Global West” 523). The novel contains a detailed description of the Wild West show, including the re-creation of well-known elements of frontier mythology, such as the Pony Express, the wagon train, rodeo and shooting exhibitions, the historical duel between Buffalo Bill and the Cheyenne Yellow Hand, and an attack by the Native Americans on the stagecoach. The show is presented as an opportunity for the inhabitants of Barcelona to enjoy a global event and to know an international celebrity, who brings to the locals both the authentic and the primitive features of the American West. For critic Richard Slotkin, in Buffalo Bill’s show the Wild West arena worked as “a mythic space in which past and present, fction and reality, could co-exist: space in which history, translated into myth, was re-enacted as ritual” (Gunfghter Nation 69). However, Solé does not allow the global and mythic dimension of the Wild West show to obscure the genuine features of the city of Barcelona at the end of the nineteenth century. For Buffalo Bill and his crew, Barcelona may be a second-class city, unable to compete with the glamour of previous stops of the show in places such as New York, London, or Paris (“it had certain charm and the girls were beautiful, yes, but having replaced the Champs Elisées by the Ramblas was not a good deal. It was a step backwards,” Solé 123),5 but in the novel the Wild West show has to share its leading role with the city of Barcelona and its people. Solé not only uses a Barcelona journalist as the protagonist of his story, but he also introduces lengthy descriptions of emblematic places of the city and references to relevant local fgures of the era, such as Antonio Gaudí, Isaac Peral, and Santiago Rusiñol. Even the title of the book refects this dual prominence of the Wild West and the city of Barcelona in Sole’s story.6 The book cover also includes text that epitomizes the hybrid dimension of the novel as a Western and as a Barcelona narrative: “A city full of secrets, a mystery to be solved and . . . Buffalo

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Bill.”7 Besides, the novel emphasizes the need of the Wild West show to adapt itself to this local context, which inevitably has an impact on the members and the characteristics of this global attraction. Whereas some of the changes are voluntarily introduced by the leaders of the show to adjust the exhibition to the local circumstances (for example, the introduction of national symbols of the host country), the Wild West circus also has to deal with unforeseen events, such as the infuenza pandemic in the city, unfavorable weather conditions, and the hostility of some local inhabitants. For example, Solé introduces a character (Palermo), one of the villains of the novel, who puts into question the authenticity of the show and Buffalo Bill’s role as a true Western hero: “A tin soldier! A clown. A fairground hero. [. . .] You cannot imagine my disgust towards fakes like that yankee!” (Solé 82–83).8 The novel explores the encounter with the difference, with the Other, stressing the way in which a particular place may shape the classical characters and experiences of the American West. This time the archetypal confict between good and evil of the formula Western is only present on the Wild West arena, with Buffalo Bill fghting and defeating the Native performers. However, in the streets of Barcelona Buffalo Bill has to join forces with his Lakota Sioux warriors and Pol Vidal to face a local pimp and his gunmen. Although the novel’s villains are too stereotyped and the shootout between Buffalo Bill and one of these gunmen in Barcelona appears somewhat artifcial, the interaction of Bill and the members of his show with the local inhabitants contributes to complicate traditional visions of frontier mythology. The American West has also attracted the attention of southwestern European authors writing in minority languages, as exemplifed by Basque literature. Although only about 850,000 Basque speakers live on either side of the Pyrenees in France and Spain, the truth is that Basque literature enjoys good health, as testifed by the international prominence of some contemporary authors, such as Kirmen Uribe and Bernardo Atxaga. Uribe is well-known due to his postmodernist novel Bilbao-New York-Bilbao (originally published in Basque in 2008), but he has also published a series of short young-adult novels on Garmendia, a Basque sheepherder and gunman who will later work for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. Atxaga is certainly the most prominent contemporary Basque writer, and he also has played a leading role in representing the American West in Basque literature. Already in 1984 he published his frst story set in the West, Bi letter jaso nituen oso denbora gutxian (its English translation was published in 2008 as “Two Letters All at Once” in a volume called Two Basque Stories). In the twenty-frst century, Atxaga’s recurrent interest in the American West is illustrated by two books, Soinujolearen semea (originally published in 2003 and translated into English as The Accordionist’s Son in 2007) and Nevadako egunak (2006), awarded the prestigious Euskadi Prize for Literature in the Basque Country in 2007 and published in English as Nevada Days in 2017. The Accordionist’s Son is

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set partially on a California ranch, the place of exile for the Basque protagonist. In fact, Western motifs and scenes intertwine successfully with the main plot of the novel, focused on the story of several inhabitants of the fctional Basque village of Obaba from the Spanish Civil War until the 1990s. Nevertheless, the most accomplished book on the American West written by Atxaga is Nevada Days, a fctionalized account of his ninemonth stay as a writer in residence at the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno, in 2007–2008. The book constantly blends fact and fction and contains multiple short chronological entries, where standard narration coexists with several letters, diary entries, telephone conversations, and journalistic excerpts. The chronicle of the experiences of Atxaga and his family in the American West and in Nevada, in particular, often intertwines with several family memories and reminiscences of his early life in the Basque Country, and hybridity is certainly one of the most prominent features of this travelogue. Atxaga’s novel breaks with archetypal portrayals of the American West centered on frontier mythology, opting instead to deal with the New West, as exemplifed by contemporary Nevada. The book also challenges the recurrent view of this state as the “Sin State” due to its libertarian laws and to its past ties with organized crime. Atxaga’s approach to Nevada illustrates the increasing attention to city landscapes in post-frontier fction and the end of restrictive notions about the literature of the American West, too often almost exclusively emphasizing rural rootedness and proximity to the land. In his effort to break with stereotyped visions of Nevada, Atxaga does not focus on Las Vegas, the icon of the New West, but on Reno, a city that has been eclipsed in the last few decades by the weight of the neon myth of Las Vegas. In his novel, Atxaga refuses to repeat stereotypical clichés about this city, too often associated with the topics of vice, gambling, and divorce. In fact, he departs from conventional Reno mythology to underscore silence as the most remarkable feature of the city at the time of the narrator’s arrival: “Reno is always silent, even during the day. The casinos are airtight edifces, carpeted inside, and no noise spreads beyond the rooms where the slot machines and the gaming tables stand in serried ranks” (1). In general Atxaga prefers to offer alternative views of Nevada based on his own experiences there rather than stressing the archetypal sin element associated with this state. Atxaga’s particular view of the state is also present in his rejection of traditional views of the Nevada landscape as an empty and marginal space, to vindicate instead its overwhelming features and to reject anthropocentric perspectives: “But that vision, which is there in the myth—‘Adam, you are the centre of creation’—and which you fnd in the gentler landscapes of Europe, is untenable in Nevada, where the mountains and the desert proudly proclaim their power” (169–170). In Nevada Days Atxaga successfully connects cultural and social elements related to Nevada and the American West with events and situations

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that trespass regional and national borders. For example, violence, a traditional ingredient of the Western, plays an important role in the novel, as testifed by the recurrent references to several contemporary violent episodes in Reno, in particular the kidnapping and death of a university student. However, violence in the book is not depicted as a local or regional phenomenon, but as a global one, as epitomized by the constant references to major wars and, especially, to the war on terror. Atxaga does not hesitate to emphasize the transatlantic dimension of war and violence, linking the Reno funeral for a soldier killed in Iraq with the funeral for the terrorist attacks in Madrid in 2011 and defending life as a supreme value, as “the most precious thing of all / To lose a life is to lose everything” (249). Atxaga’s wish to integrate traditional Nevada and Western ingredients in a global framework may also be observed in his approach to the impact of Basque immigration on this state and in the American West in general. Instead of representing the classical Basque sheepherder fghting for success, acceptance, and recognition in Nevada, Atxaga prefers to address the stories of the descendants of these immigrants (with a special emphasis on the second generation of writers in the Laxalt family) and on the Basque visitors and employees of the Center for Basque Studies in Reno. Besides, once again Atxaga chooses to employ a transatlantic perspective; he does not limit his scope to exploring the traces of Basque immigration in Nevada, but rather the narrator’s experiences in this state constantly interplay with his memories of family and home in the Basque Country. The result is a compelling mixture of experiences, refections, and emotions from both sides of the Atlantic that become key elements in this perceptive travelogue, a book that exemplifes both the maturation of contemporary writing on the New West and its global dimension.9 Overall, the different texts discussed here illustrate both the consolidation of the transatlantic dimension of the American West and the fundamental role of contemporary southwestern European writers in bringing attention to the literary representation of the American West in a global context. Actually, the thematic and formal maturation of European Westerns over the last two decades often parallels the evolution of post-frontier writing in the United States, in particular, its growing departure from the overused topics and images of the formula Western. In fact, the books discussed in this chapter testify to the increasing weight of concepts such as interdependence, diversity, hybridity, and transculturation in contemporary literary portraits of the American West.

Notes 1. I am indebted to the Spanish Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports (PGC2018–094659-B-C21), FEDER, and the Basque government (Dpto. de Educación, Universidades e Investigación / Hezkuntza, Unibertsitate eta Ikertu Saila, IT 1026–16) for funding the research carried out for this chapter.

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2. All the quotations from Arizona are taken from the English version of its acting edition, which has not yet been published. The author of the translation is Laureano Corces. 3. Ironically enough, the actors playing the roles of the Anglo-American couple in an important number of performances of this play in cities such as Madrid, London, and Mexico D.F. have been two Mexican actors, Alejandro Calva and Aurora Cano. 4. Galician literature also includes a few examples of books set in the American West, though they were published in the late twentieth century. Thus, Xosé Fernández Ferreiro’s A morte de Frank González (Frank González’s Death, 1975) is regarded as the frst Western written in Galician. A better-known book is perhaps Isidro Novo’s Por unha presa de machacantes (For a Fistful of Dollars, 1997), a comic Western that Novo wrote under the name of Isy New. There also interesting stories about the experiences of Portuguese immigrants in the American West, some of them published originally in English and others in Portuguese, but they are often twentieth-century works. For further information on these autobiographies, see Francisco Cota Fagundes 701–712. 5. All quotes from Barcelona Far West are my translation. Original quote: “Tenia un cert encant, i les noies eren boniques, sí. Però haver canviat els Champs Elisées per les Rambles li simblava un mal negoci. Un pas enrera.” 6. This dual prominence disappears in the title chosen for the Spanish translation, El revólver de Buffalo Bill (Buffalo Bill’s Gun), because Barcelona is not named in this title. Signifcantly, the reference to Barcelona also disappears in the text included on the book cover of the Spanish edition: “Un misterio por resolver en la España de fnales del XIX” (“A mystery to be solved in late nineteenthcentury Spain”). The emphasis on the local features is replaced by the stress on the national dimension. 7. Original quote: “Una ciutat plena de secrets, un misteri per resoldre i . . . Buffalo Bill.” 8. Original quote: “Un soldadet de plom, ês! Un pallasso. Un heroi de barraca de fra. [. . .] No et pots imaginar quin fàstic em fan els impostors com el ianqui aquest!” 9. For an extended analysis of Atxaga’s revision of traditional Western and Basque imagery, see Rio 175–192.

Works Cited Abásolo, José Javier. Una del Oeste. Erein, 2014. Atxaga, Bernardo. Bi letter jaso nituen oso denbora gutxian. Erein, 1984. “Two Letters All at Once.” Two Basque Stories. Translated by Nere Lete, Center for Basque Studies, Reno: U of Nevada, 2008. ———. Nevadako egunak. Pamiela, 2006. Nevada Days. Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa, Maclehose Press, 2017. ———. Soinujolearen semea. Pamiela, 2003. The Accordionist’s Son. Translated from the Spanish by Margaret Jull Costa, Harvill Secker, 2007. Barry, Sebastian. Days without End. Faber and Faber, 2016. Billington, Ray Allen. Land of Savagery, Land of Promise: The European Image of the American Frontier in the 19th Century. 1981. U of Oklahoma P, 1985. Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar Nuñez. Relación de los naufragios y comentarios. Zamora, 1542. Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America. Translated by Cyclone Covey, Collier, 1961.

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Campbell, Neil. “Postwestern Literature and Criticism.” A History of Western American Literature, edited by Susan Kollin, Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 374–388. Comer, Krista. “Introduction: Assessing the Postwestern.” Western American Literature (Special Issue: Young Scholars), vol. 48, nos. 1 & 2, Spring and Summer 2013, pp. 3–15. Constant, Paul. “Western: Look at That Bug Crawling on John Wayne’s Boot!” The Stranger, 18 Feb. 2010, www.thestranger.com/seattle/western-look-atthat-bug-crawling-on-john-waynes-boot/Content?oid=3442202. Accessed 19 Feb. 2019. Davies, Carys. West. Scribner, 2018. Fagundes, Francisco Cota. “Portuguese Immigrant Experience in America in Autobiography.” Hispania, vol. 88, no. 4, 2005, pp. 701–712. Ferreiro, Xosé Fernández. A morte de Frank González. Ediciós do Castro, 1975. Fournel, Paul. Jason Murphy. P.O.L., 2013. Frye, Steven. “Introduction.” The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American West, edited by Steven Frye, Cambridge UP, 2016, pp. 1–6. Giles, Paul. “Transnationalism and Classic American Literature.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. 118, no. 1, 2003, pp. 62–77. Gomez-Galisteo, M. Carmen. “Transnational Wests: The Literature of the Spanish Exploration.” The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the American West, edited by Steven Frye, Cambridge UP, 2016, pp. 7–19. Kauffman, Janet. “A Western Nouveau Roman.” American Book Review, vol. 30, no. 6, Sep./Oct. 2009, p. 11. Kerangal, Maylis de. Naissance d’un pont. Gallimard, 2010. Birth of a Bridge. Translated by Jessica Moore, Talon, 2014. Kollin, Susan. “The Global West.” A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West, edited by Nicolas S. Witschi, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, pp. 514–527. ———. “Introduction: Historicizing the American Literary West.” A History of Western American Literature, edited by Susan Kollin, Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 1–12. Lahti, Janne. The American West and the World: Transnational and Comparative Perspectives. Routledge, 2019. Lewis, Meriwether and William Clark. The Journals of Lewis and Clark. New York, 1814. Maeso de la Torre, Jesús. Comanche. Ediciones B, 2018. Manning, Susan and Andrew Taylor. “Introduction: What Is Transatlantic Literary Studies.” Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader, edited by Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor, Edinburgh UP, 2007, pp. 1–13. Ming, Wu. Manituana. Einaudi, 2007. Montalbetti, Christine. Journée américaine. P.O.L., 2009. American Journal. Translated by Jane Kuntz, Dalkey Archive P, 2018. ———. Plus rien que les vagues et le vent. P.O.L., 2014. Nothing But Waves and Wind. Translated by Jane Kuntz, Dalkey Archive P, 2017. ———. Western. P.O.L., 2005. Western. Translated by Betsy King, Dalkey Archive P, 2009.

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Motte, Warren. “Christine Montalbetti’s Engaging Narrations.” French Forum, vol. 32, nos. 1 & 2, Winter 2007, pp. 189–212. Noriega, Rodrigo Martín, et al. Extraño Oeste. Libros del innombrable, 2015. Novo, Isidro (Isy New). Por unha presa de machacantes. Edicións Positivas, 1997. Pascual, Javier. Los acasos. Mondadori, 2010. Rio, David. “A Basque Chronicle of Nine Months in the New West: Bernardo Atxaga’s Nevada Days.” Western American Literature, vol. 54, no. 2, Summer 2019, pp. 175–192. ——— and Christopher Conway. “Guest Editors’ Introduction: The Case for Transnationalism in the American Literary West.” Western American Literature, vol. 54, no. 2, Summer 2019, pp. ix–xiii. Romero, Luci. Western. Delirio, 2016. Rubio, Juan Carlos. Arizona: Una tragedia musical americana. Ediciones Antígona, 2017. Rydell, Robert W. and Rob Kroes. Buffalo Bill in Bologna: The Americanization of the World, 1869–1922. The U of Chicago P, 2010. Slotkin, Richard. Gunfghter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in TwentiethCentury America. Harper, 1992. ———. Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600–1860. Wesleyan UP, 1973. Solé, Jordi. Barcelona Far West. Pàmies, 2010. El revólver de Buffalo Bill. Translated by Jordi Solé, Pàmies, 2011. Tompkins, Jane. West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns. 1992. Oxford UP, 1993. Uribe, Kirmen. Bilbao-New York-Bilbao. Elkar, 2008.

13 Uncovering the Western Pastoralism, Confict, and Revenge in Agnieszka Holland’s Film Spoor Marek Paryz This chapter aims to identify and analyze the generic tropes of the Western in Agnieszka Holland’s 2017 flm Spoor, a Polish-Czech-Slovak-GermanSwedish coproduction and an adaptation of Olga Tokarczuk’s acclaimed novel Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead (2009), with respect to three key elements of its narrative development and construction of the world presented: the depiction of space, the portrayal of the characters, and the plot convention. Lee Mitchell observes that the “generic markers of character and plot” in the Western are so strong that “we increasingly have come to read some flms as Westerns despite the absence of cowboys and horses, period costumes, and familiar historical crises between ranchers and farmers—in short, despite nothing else about the flm suggesting it is a Western” (85). The setting evoked in Spoor is a borderland in a double sense of the word: it is located near the national border, and it marks the line separating the settled urban area from the natural expanses. The symbolic signifcance of the landscape in Holland’s flm can thus be adequately analyzed within the framework of pastoralism. The main positive characters are liminal fgures who, despite their functioning within the society, physically and psychologically remain on its fringes. Through their eccentricity or misanthropy, they subtly defy the standards of what may be called a regular social life. They represent one side of the flm’s central ideological and moral confict, which has been handled with the directness that brings classic American Westerns to mind. Spoor ironically plays with the idea of lawlessness in portraying as outlaws those who cherish and defend the fundamental human values, such as friendship, honesty, and respect, and at the same time it offers a somber diagnosis—even if by means of somewhat exaggerated solutions—of the contemporary forms of the corruption of law, a sign of the moral erosion of institutional or other commonly accepted structures of power. Open resistance to those who—due to their position or status—usurp the roles of community leaders culminates in a violent outcome. The vehicle for the flm’s presentation of violence is a revenge plot, perhaps untypical, but very logical. It is the combination of the borderland setting, the unequivocal moral confict, and the revenge plot that establishes the Western as

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a valid frame of reference for Spoor when it comes to defning the flm’s genre. Holland has created a flm that abounds in references to culturespecifc contexts and concomitantly engages in a dialogue with the Western as a globally circulated cinematic form. Essentially, the tropes that—in combination—build up the Western subtext of Spoor facilitate the articulation of the flm’s central ideological concerns, which have to do with the indictment of the Polish staunch conservative mind-set. The manifestations of its detrimental infuence include the destruction of the natural environment, insular religiosity, gender inequality, and economic exploitation. Spoor conveys a warning against the excesses of power in social and political life and justifes the necessity of radicalism in resistance to oppression. It is worth mentioning that when a new conservative government—with a populist agenda—was formed in Poland in 2015, Agnieszka Holland soon became one of its most outspoken critics in artistic circles. After its release, Spoor immediately acquired an evident political meaning, which could not have been intended because when Holland started to work on the adaptation of Tokarczuk’s novel, the political situation in Poland was markedly different. She said in an interview that “Spoor became extremely political when aggressive populists came into power—people who think that they are kings of all creation and believe that their caprices decide about the shape of reality” (Steciak). In the context of Polish cinema, the label of the Western has been ascribed to a group of flms that are set in the aftermath of the Second World War and focus on the attempts to fght off anarchy and to establish the rule of law in areas along the new Polish borders in the West and in the East. After the war, Poland acquired new territories in the West, the so-called “Recovered Territories”—which in the course of history were frst settled by the Poles and later taken over by a German population— and this was a compensation for the loss of a huge part of the country’s prewar Eastern territory to the Soviet Union. Most of the German inhabitants of the “Recovered Territories” had left their places and the region had to be resettled, the process facilitated by a massive migration of the Poles from beyond the new Eastern border. In the East, the cause of permanent tension and occasional fghting for several years after the war was the activity of the Ukrainian nationalist partisan formations in the area of the Bieszczady Mountains. The flms that helped to defne the singular historical context of “Polish Westerns” include Rancho Texas (dir. Wadim Berestowski, 1959), The Broken Bridge (Zerwany most, dir. Jerzy Passendorfer, 1963), The Law and the Fist (Prawo i pięść, dir. Jerzy Hoffman and Edward Skórzewski, 1964), Wolves’ Echoes (Wilcze echa, dir. Aleksander Ścibor-Rylski, 1967), Meridian Zero (Południk zero, dir, Waldemar Podgórski, 1970), The Trap (Pułapka, dir. Andrzej Piotrowski, 1971), and All and None (Wszyscy i nikt, dir. Konrad Nałęcki, 1977). In the existing critical discussions of “Polish Westerns,” The Law and

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the Fist and Wolves’ Echoes are usually presented as exemplary cases of the genre. The Law and the Fist, considered by Łukasz A. Plesnar as “artistically superior” to the other flms in the category (139), tells the story of a former soldier of the Home Army (formally dissolved in January 1945) who joins a group of men sent on a mission to establish new state structures in an isolated post-German town. As it turns out, the protagonist’s companions are only interested in looting the place; therefore, having refused to join them in crime and having become a threat to them, he is forced to confront them in a fnal shootout in the empty streets of a literal ghost town. Plesnar claims that The Law and the Fist draws from the Western primarily with regard to the portrayal of the main hero, as refected in his similarity to Will Kane in High Noon (dir. Fred Zinnemann, 1952) (140). In turn, Wolves’ Echoes, according to the same critic, “creates a relatively successful image of the Bieszczady Mountains as the Polish Far West, full of anarchy and lawlessness, but at the same time a suitable place for brave and independent men who can tell good from evil” (139). In his comprehensive discussion of “Polish Westerns,” Piotr Skurowski, apart from the previously mentioned flms from the 1960s and 1970s, looks at two recent productions that revisit and reinterpret the genre; the titles in question are Rose (Róża, dir. Wojciech Smarzowski, 2011) and Aftermath (Pokłosie, dir. Władysław Pasikowski, 2012). Unlike the earlier flms, which often served the propaganda purposes of the communist state and depicted past conficts in black and white colors, Rose and Aftermath highlight the ambivalence of the complex historical and cultural legacy of Poland. The protagonist of the former flm, a veteran of the Home Army from Warsaw, fnds himself in the Mazury region in the northeast of the country and, in Skurowski’s words, he is assigned quarters in the house of a German-speaking Mazurian woman (Rose) and eventually becomes her lover, protecting her and his new home from savagery at the hands of the Soviet soldiers and the Polish bandits who abound in the immediately postwar, frontierland situation. (par. 16) Aftermath is set in the contemporary time and features two brothers who “uncover the dark secrets surrounding the death of the local Jewish population at the hands of their Polish neighbors during the Second World War” (Skurowski, par. 19). In a review for the New York Times, J. Hoberman compared Aftermath to “American ‘guilty town’ Westerns like Bad Day at Black Rock and High Plains Drifter” (“The Past Can Hold a Horrible Power”). One other contemporary flm discussed by Skurowski is Yuma (dir. Piotr Mularuk, 2012), the story of a gang of young criminals in the postsocialist reality involved in “the cross-border

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theft and the bootlegging business thriving on the Polish-German border in the early 1990s” (Skurowski, par. 21). It should also be added that there are two relatively recent Polish flms that actually are Westerns in the sense that they rely on the American genre’s iconography: Eucalyptus (dir. Marcin Krzyształowicz, 2001) and Summer Love (dir. Piotr Ukla―ski, 2006). They have attracted hardly any critical attention so far; it seems that the critics have not been able to fnd a relevant way to approach them and prefer to treat them as curiosities. Jerzy Franczak, whose article on “Polish Westerns,” predictably enough, revolves around The Law and the Fist, writes of Eucalyptus and Summer Love that they “employ the Western as an alien and anachronistic form so as to create a comic and defamiliarizing effect” (95). A separate phenomenon is the work of the amateur flmmaker Józef Kłyk, who has directed several flms about Silesian emigrants in Texas. Spoor has not been analyzed in connection with “Polish Westerns” because it shares hardly anything in common with them, at least at frst glance. In one of the interviews following the release of the flm, when asked about its complexity with respect to genre, Holland said, I have never played with genre cinema to such an extent before. My flms heretofore have been based on well-known conventions. . . . I knew that in Spoor I had to use completely different tools . . . something new, something unknown, without being sure that I was able to do that. (Steciak) In another interview, she half-jokingly described the flm as “a feminist-anarchist-ecological thriller with some elements of black humor” (Stanowski) and on a different occasion labeled it “a revenge fantasy” (My―liwiec). The interplay of genres in Spoor opens it to a range of interpretations, especially with regard to the ways of conveying the problems of a local culture through a globally appealing cinematic form. A relevant point of departure for the reading that uncovers the Western subtext of Holland’s flm is a recognition of its affnity with “Polish Westerns,” because such a connection does exist and it results from the use of a characteristic type of setting: the borderland in the former Recovered Territories. The flm is set in the Klodzka Valley in the Sudetes in the very corner of southwestern Poland, close to the meeting point of three borderlines: Polish, Czech, and German. When read alongside “Polish Westerns,” Spoor brings to the fore a crucial historical issue that the flms from the 1960s and 1970s gloss over by focusing on the diffculty of implementing the rule of law or treating it as an inevitable consequence of the historical process—namely that the creation of a new postwar society often entailed various forms of cultural imposition, and this caused a complicated existential situation for the populations that had built their collective identity

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on a strong emotional attachment to the region. In a historical study of the Polish resettlement of the formerly German-speaking areas along the Oder in the years 1945–1948, Beata Halicka observes that those who stayed in Poland “were expected to assimilate unconditionally into the Polish nation” (365). She further writes that the ethnic groups (which identifed themselves with the Poles anyway) were forced to renounce their regional cultural specifcity and merge with the national monolith of the homogeneous society. This had disastrous consequences, leading to a complete eradication of the multicultural legacy of pre-war Poland. (365) The complex history of the Polish borderlands is not a primary subject of Spoor, but the flm at least subtly undermines the myth of a homogeneous nation by featuring characters with different national or ethnic backgrounds and by suggesting the power of the lingering traumas of those who did not ft in the vision which the myth promoted. Spoor’s female protagonist is Janina Duszejko (Agnieszka Mandat), a retired engineer who lives in an old house in the mountains and works as a teacher of English in a nearby town. She owns two dogs and shows a strong emotional bond with them. One day, upon coming back home from the town, she fnds the dogs missing and they do not show up in response to her calls. An immediate search brings no results. Duszejko begins to suspect that the hunters, who regularly roam the woods, can be responsible for the dogs’ disappearance, and her suspicion is confrmed by a photo she discovers at a local poacher’s place. However, what the photograph shows is revealed only toward the end of the flm. Duszejko tries to instigate an investigation or an intervention; therefore, she meets the police chief (Andrzej Konopka) and the priest (Marcin Bosak), but all her efforts are to no avail because the infuential men she talks to do not treat her seriously. Besides, they themselves belong to the local group of hunters. What follows in the plot is a series of mysterious deaths of the hunters: the police chief dies frst; after him the man named Wn―trzak (Borys Szyc), an owner of a fox farm; and the last two men to die are the priest and Mayor Wolski (Andrzej Grabowski). In the meantime, Duszejko has made friends with several people who, like herself, are social outcasts: her reclusive neighbor Matoga (Wiktor Zborowski); Good News (Patricia Volny), a young woman who works in a secondhand clothes shop; Dyzio (Jakub Gierszał), an IT specialist at the police station; and Boros Sznajder (Miroslav Krobot), a Czech entomologist. When Duszejko realizes that the police have found evidence connecting her to the murders, she starts to prepare for an escape, and her friends work out a plan that enables it. A series of fashbacks in the concluding part of the flm show how Duszejko killed the police chief,

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Wnętrzak, and Wolski. Her responsibility for the priest’s death cannot be determined, but it is clear that she wanted him to die, too. The picture that she found at the poacher’s place explains her motive: it shows the game count after one of the hunts and among the dead animals there are Duszejko’s beloved dogs. Spoor opens with a series of shots of a mountainous landscape, analogically to a number of Westerns, although the character of the scenery is markedly different: the mountains are less monumental, the vegetation seems denser, and the time is a foggy dawn and not a bright day. Still, it has a comparable power to generate pastoral associations and sentiments. As Richard Slotkin observes, The genre setting contains not only a set of objects signifying a certain time, place, and milieu; it invokes a set of fundamental assumptions and expectations about the kinds of event that can occur in the setting, the kinds of motive that will operate, the sort of outcome one can predict. If the setting does not absolutely determine story, it at least defnes the range of possible plots and treatments. (233) As the plot unfolds, it becomes apparent that the construction of the setting in Spoor corresponds in meaningful ways with the American pastoral imagination, which often underlies the depictions of men amidst the wilderness in Westerns, although, of course, its uses are not limited to this genre. The pastoral space, according to Leo Marx’s seminal description, is primarily characterized by the presence of a tripartite structure, comprising “the settled community with its ordered, sophisticated ways” (43), the wilderness, and the borderland between these two contrasting areas. The borderland is the domain of the shepherd, a “liminal fgure” that “[s]een against the wilderness . . . appears to be a representative of a complex, hierarchical, urban society,” whereas “[s]een from the opposite vantage . . . he appears to epitomize the virtues of a simple unworldly life disengaged from civilization and lived, as we now might say, ‘close to nature’” (43). The pastoral hero, at least in the classic American version, “becomes something of an ascetic; he is independent, self-suffcient, and like Henry Thoreau or the rugged Western hero of American mythology, a man singularly endowed with the qualities needed to endure long periods of solitude, discomfort, and deprivation” (Marx 43). Marx sees the pastoral as a narrative mode which, thanks to its immense appeal across time, helped shape the discursive vehicle for the expression of a certain American worldview. However, as the critic points out, “If this world view can be said to have a constant feature, it may well be a recognition of the ineradicable, ultimately irresolvable nature of the confict at its heart” (44). Spoor addresses a similar confict by portraying a heroine who cherishes pastoral sentiments and at times even yields to pastoral

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illusions, but is ready to take radical action to defend the necessary balance as she understands it. Holland’s flm accentuates Duszejko’s pastoral liminality from the very beginning: in the scene in which she is introduced, she is shown sleeping with her two dogs; the animals wake up and insist that she come out with them, which she gladly does. She then takes a morning walk, and as she walks toward the bright sun, she stretches out her arms in a gesture of greeting the new day. In the course of the flm, there are repeated scenes that remind the viewer about the heroine’s fascination with all forms of animal life. For example, on a winter day she is chopping frewood in the shed, and when a boar enters the building, she welcomes it with a smile. In another scene, after an unsuccessful attempt to interrupt a hunt, she fnds a dying boar in the woods and lies down next to it, poignantly witnessing the animal’s last moments. Duszejko accompanies Boros Sznajder when he examines the habitat of a local beetle he has been studying and, captivated, she listens to his talk about the insect’s behavior. At the same time, Duszejko is frmly rooted in the civilized life and, considering her engineering profession, it can even be said that she has contributed to the expansion of technological civilization: at one point in the flm, she tells Dyzio that she built bridges in Syria and Libya and proudly shows him a picture of one of her constructions. She admits that she wants to stay busy and needs contact with other people. Her movement between the civilized and natural areas is refected in a number of shots of Duszejko driving her jeep. One shot in particular conveys the idea of movement as something that defnes the heroine’s existential situation: an overhead bird’s-eye shot of her car following a meandering road amidst a woodland. Duszejko’s closeness to animals, which at times verges on intimacy, is a factor of othering, and her otherness is further emphasized by the fact that she stands for alternative spirituality. She believes in astrology and, whenever she has an opportunity, she tries to convince other people that planetary confgurations have infuenced their characters and lives. When she meets Good News, she muses, “She looked like she came from a better world to learn about all our sins. It’s true, her life was bitter and hard, but she has a conjunction of Venus and Jupiter where law meets love.” The theme of alternative spirituality is of crucial signifcance given that the flm addresses the problem of oppressive tendencies that have their source in institutional Catholicism. Accordingly, Duszejko’s manifestations of her spiritual oddness can be seen as a form of resistance to the dominant religion which, in a big degree, dictates the norms of social life. Her attitude sometimes disturbs others, however; instead of pondering why this woman’s presence and speech disquiet them, they prefer, as it were, to neutralize her by giving her to understand that she is crazy. Even though such an analogy may appear to be far-fetched, on a general level, the notions that underlie Duszejko’s spirituality correspond with certain

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elements of Native American systems of beliefs. Christopher Jocks writes that for native communities religion is understood as the relationship between living humans and other persons or things, however they are conceived. They may include departed as well as yet-to-be-born human beings, beings in the so-called “natural world” of fora and fauna, and visible entities that are not animate by Western standards, such as mountains, springs, lakes, and clouds. (“Native American Religions”) Furthermore, Duszejko’s eccentricity bespeaks a wildness of sorts, and she never conforms to the rules only because the majority of people accept them. John G. Cawelti claims that “it is possible to have Westerns without Indians or outlaws, but not without somebody playing the role of savage, for the antithesis between townspeople and savagery is the source of plots” (53). It could perhaps be said that the heroine of Spoor has been “indianized,” and her male counterpart in this respect is Matoga, who has been unable to come to terms with his mixed ethnic legacy. He reveals his burdensome family history to Duszejko; his grandfather, a German mining engineer, was forced to stay in Poland and oversee the work in the local mines. Matoga’s German mother married a Pole who, being a former prisoner of a concentration camp, “hated the Germans more than anything.” Matoga poignantly refects on this, “People usually marry for love, but he married out of hate,” and tells Duszejko that when he was born his father chose a name for him that his mother would not be able to pronounce. She felt trapped in marriage and eventually committed suicide; there is a retrospective shot of a young boy discovering the mother’s hanging body in the attic. Matoga’s father’s tyranny and his mother’s tragedy have incapacitated him from achieving a kind of self-reconciliation. The emotions triggered by the traumatic memory of his mother’s death have had an alienating effect on him. The film implies that his late wife helped him develop a connection with the community, but after her death he completely withdrew from most forms of involvement with others. He resembles, however remotely, the reclusive mixed-race AngloIndian characters or the brooding Indian captives who have been reunited with the white community in American Westerns. Interestingly enough, while Duszejko and Matoga can be seen as “indianized” characters, the only direct reference to Native Americans in Spoor is the nickname by which Duszejko calls her poacher-neighbor—Big Foot. The confguration of the main characters in Spoor is clearly dichotomous, and it brings to mind the Western’s classic division of archetypes into “the goodies” and “the baddies.” In Holland’s flm, this division coincides with a different one: the weak vs. the powerful, and the weak

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ones are the bunch of Duszejko’s friends, the people whose lives have been tainted by trauma, disease, or family pathology, resulting in their limited social adaptability. Matoga has a history of mental breakdowns. Dyzio is ill with epilepsy and struggles to keep it a secret so as to avoid the possible consequences at work. His dissociation from the society at large is refected in his obsessive reluctance to collect belongings, as if he chose to live in a state of permanent uprootedness. His apartment is almost devoid of any furnishings. Good News escaped from a dysfunctional family and now fghts in court for the custody of her younger brother, who has been placed in an orphanage. Ironically enough, the weak ones are concomitantly the outlaws in Spoor, an implication that the notions of criminality do not necessarily serve the achievement of justice, but rather the purpose of perpetuating a given structure of power. Thus, Matoga served time in prison, having been convicted of terrorism after an attempt to blow up a local offce of the national health insurance agency. He held the institution responsible for his wife’s death because—as Matoga’s son explains to Duszejko—“They refused to pay for her expensive treatment abroad.” Dyzio worked in an IT company in Germany, but lost the job after an epileptic ft, though not because of it: he had concealed the fact of his illness when registering as a worker and in this way broken the law. Good News goes to prison for a short period of time after Wn―trzak’s death when the police fnd out that she may have had a motive to kill him. Wn―trzak, her employer and lover, had been writing letters to the court, tarnishing the young woman’s reputation and preventing her from taking custody of her brother. Last but not least, there is Duszejko, the murderess. Importantly, as shown in the sequence of Duszejko’s escape at the end of the flm, the outlaws, apart from sharing a certain sensibility and outlook, work together perfectly and possess complementary skills, and this allows them to organize an action quickly and complete it successfully in the face of the prevailing opposing forces. The powerful ones are—without any exception—infuential men who collectively embody a concentration of different kinds of power: religious, economic, and institutional. We see them mostly in ordinary situations, but they function as archetypal fgures: the priest, the police chief, the businessman, the mayor (as a matter of fact, Wolski is referred to as “mayor” in the offcial English version of the flm, whereas in the original he is more vaguely called prezes, which is the equivalent of the English “chairman” or “president”). Their authority enables them to enjoy an excessive lifestyle, which the community accepts as a privilege of the elite. A particular manifestation of this lifestyle is hunting (considered in Poland to be an elitist and expensive hobby). Hunts provide occasions for the strengthening of the bonds of camaraderie through ritual, as well as for the reassertion of the men’s superior social status through its mutual recognition. What the four men also share is a general disrespect toward women: the best that a woman can expect from them is condescension,

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the worst—abuse. Wnętrzak pretends that he cares for Good News—he gives her a job and allows her to use the backroom in the shop as her lodging—in reality, however, he takes advantage of the young woman who accepts his “generosity” because she has no choice if she wants to achieve a modicum of independence. All in all, having broken free from a helpless situation (a pathological family), she falls into another such situation (an abusive relationship). The true character of her relationship with Wnętrzak is refected in a short but suggestive scene of oral sex in a car. Mayor Wolski humiliates his wife in public, as if he made a show at her expense so as to assert his self-importance. The priest, the mayor, the businessman, and the police chief only have respect for those who belong to the same privileged class of men as themselves, and they treat all others arrogantly. As archetypal characters, they stand for different facets of the conservative mind-set, which is presented in the flm as a degenerate basis for a range of norms and mores. Common adherence to them sanctions tyranny, abuse, hypocrisy, etc., as a state of social normalcy. In her seminal book West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns, Jane Tompkins discusses the construction of gender in the Western genre and lists “the classic oppositions from which all Westerns derive their meaning: parlor versus mesa, East versus West, woman versus man, illusion versus truth, words versus things” (48). The Western thus clearly separates speech, which is a female domain, from action, which is a male one. Tompkins further writes that The position represented by language, always associated with women, religion, and culture . . . functions as a critique of force and . . . as a symbol of the peace, harmony, and civilization that force is invoked in order to preserve. But in the end, that position is deliberately proven wrong . . . with pounding hooves, thundering guns, blood and death. (55) There is a corresponding, albeit noticeably different, duality with respect to the symbolic gendered functions of language in Spoor; the division of discursive attributes in the flm does not pit loquacity against action, but the invasive language of power against the inward-looking language of self-autonomy. The former has been monopolized by men and it aims to delineate rigidly the limits of human experience with respect to gender, class, faith, etc., contrary to the latter, which gives expression to the diversity and uniqueness of human lives. The language of power effectively shapes people’s attitudes and therefore it helps sanction a variety of social practices, enacted both overtly and covertly, often morally dubious. Tompkins quotes a number of symptomatic pronouncements made by male heroes in Westerns that convey the nature of the language of men, “The sayings all have one feature in common: they bring you down” (50).

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Such is precisely the purpose of the male language of power in Spoor: it reasserts a given fundamental hierarchy irrespective of the circumstances. For example, Wnętrzak is introduced in a scene in which Duszejko gives him and Good News a lift after having found them in the woods by a broken car. In her car, he immediately takes out his mobile phone and calls someone; such an expression of disrespect places him outside the linguistic and emotional space that the two women in the car begin to share. Not surprisingly, the male language is a discourse of enforced instruction, the manifestations of which are as self-evident as they only can be. When Duszejko goes to see the police chief and report the missing dogs, he tells her brusquely, “You live in the country, what do you expect? We keep our dogs chained. If it bothers you, contact those animal rights groups. Why involve us?” This might seem to be an utterly accidental analogy, but the implications of the dialogue at the police station in Spoor are similar to the signifcance of a corresponding situation in the recent Indonesian flm Marlina: The Murder in Four Acts (dir. Mouly Surya, 2017), whose debt to the Western genre has been almost unanimously pointed out by the reviewers. In Marlina, the heroine, a widow who has killed a bunch of gangsters to avoid rape and robbery, travels a long distance to a police station to report the crime and there she learns that the police do not have suffcient means to undertake an action. Both Spoor and Marlina feature female protagonists whom the pressure of circumstances compels to reinvent themselves by assuming new roles that they never thought they would be capable of performing. And in both cases, this personal reinvention is conditioned by a newly discovered ability to commit acts of extreme violence. The new role Duszejko takes on is that of a merciless revenger. In his discussion of the revenge variety of the Western, Will Wright argues that it is characterized by the presence of a narrative sequence which he labels “Weakness.” This sequence “explains why the hero desires revenge and why he must seek it alone”: “The villains harm both the hero and society, but society can do nothing about it. The institutions of justice are inadequate to correct the wrong or punish the guilty. If retribution is to be exacted, the hero must do it himself, alone” (156). Wright further writes that “the vengeance hero begins as a member of society,” but eventually “leaves the social group because the institutions of society cannot support the values it proclaims” (156). In consequence, A confict exists not between independence and social values . . . but within the values themselves, or between the values and the institutions; and this confict forces the hero to become autonomous and self-suffcient, thereby putting himself in opposition to society and its values. (156)

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Wright’s description applies quite well to the method of narrative dramatization in Spoor. Duszejko strives to achieve justice, but her understanding of it is at odds with the prevailing notions, corroborated by custom; therefore, she cannot count on any kind of institutional support. The men who exercise institutional power turn out to be among the villains, and it is only obvious that they treat her with disdain. Apart from the police chief, the priest is another case in point: when Duszejko complains to him about the loss of her dogs and says that they were her “family,” he accuses her of blasphemy and reproachfully reminds her that, “You can’t treat animals like people. It’s a sin. . . . God made animals subject to man.” The policemen are unsympathetic without a single exception, and the kinder ones instead of arrogance express embarrassment when they speak to Duszejko. The society is defned by its conformity, the epitome of which is the female schoolmaster who reprimands the heroine for taking a group of schoolchildren to the forest in the evening to help her search for the dogs. When the poacher Big Foot dies, Duszejko tells Matoga about him, “I once reported him to the police. He was a cruel poacher. . . . They didn’t respond,” to which Matoga tellingly replies, “You trust authorities too much. You need to take matters in your own hands.” In revenge Westerns, as Wright puts it, “In seeking revenge, the hero becomes very much like the men he is chasing” (156). In a like vein, in Spoor the drastic nature of Duszejko’s crimes is justifed, in a way, by the downright corruption of her victims. The four men embody a range of human vices, for example greed, dishonesty, and contempt for others, as well as of social evils, such as misogyny, hypocrisy, and economic exploitation. In a conversation with the prosecutor, who happens to be Matoga’s son, Duszejko complains that “the law protects the murderers. Hunters, butchers. The crime was made legal, so everyone just accepts it.” The men whom she targets share the responsibility for a state of things which Duszejko perceives as a fundamental imbalance of the universe. Not accidentally, the portrayals of Duszejko’s would-be victims are consistently one-dimensional, devoid of any nuance. Perhaps the only scene that makes one of the men appear a bit more complex is Duszejko’s conversation with Mayor Wolski after a costume ball when the man, completely intoxicated, admits that he shot her dogs and adds that he did not mean to do that. The point is that only when drunk does he realize his regrets, so there is going to be no forgiveness. Duszejko has dressed up as a wolf for a reason. It seems that all her male antagonists have been caricatured, to an extent, through the highlighting of their grotesque qualities. The police chief walks barefoot when on duty at the police station. The priest scolds Duszejko for articulating blasphemous ideas, but to her it is he who spreads heresy, for example, when he says in a homily that “Hunters are God’s ambassadors to his creation.” Wn―trzak, being an owner of a fox farm, is guilty of extreme cruelty toward animals. Spoor is thematically related to the American Western In a Valley of Violence (dir.

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Ti West, 2016), which features a protagonist, played by Ethan Hawke, who takes revenge on the killer of his dog and the men who accompanied him. Spoor does a lot to justify Duszejko’s mission of revenge by emphasizing the repulsively evil nature of her victims; therefore, its implications are somewhat less radical in comparison with In a Valley of Violence, in which the death of the dog killer is a punishment for his unimaginable stupidity. Duszejko’s murders are acts of regenerative violence. In symbolic terms, the time of action in Spoor is a period of disequilibrium, characterized by an accelerated erosion of the entrenched structures of power. Violence facilitates the resolution of the central confict, and this in turn leads to the emergence of a new order, which fnds its refection in the exaggeratedly idyllic closing scene of the flm in which Duszejko, Matoga, Boros, Dyzio, Good News, and her brother are about to sit for dinner on a beautiful day. A new family has been formed in which the rules of kinship have little consequence and the familial bonds between the people derive from a shared sensibility and sensitivity. The fnal scene emanates an aura of pastoral bliss, of timelessness and unreality; in a word, it is a utopian image. The scene is introduced by Duszejko’s voiceover monologue: I grew up in a time when people wanted to change the world with their revolutionary visions. Now we only see the status quo and think it will last forever. But things will change again. They always have. When Uranus enters Aries or. . . . Never mind. Something new will happen that we cannot predict. A new cycle will begin and reality will be reborn. Even if the fnal scene suggests that the positive characters live in complete isolation from the society, this very society also has faced a promise of regeneration: freed from its tyrannical leaders, it can achieve a moral renewal, although the question as to the likelihood of such a course of events remains open. Grayson Cooke, Warwick Mules, and David Baker write that the three main phases of the American Western—the early silent Western . . . the classical Western . . . and the revisionist Western— give us a kind of “dramatic arc” via which we can view the development of the use the Western has been put to in the US. Accordingly, “what develops and changes over these phases is the political and ideological function of the Western,” which ultimately becomes “a kind of medium, a vehicle which may be co-opted for a range of different purposes” (Cooke, Mules, and Baker). MaryEllen Higgins, Rita Keresztesi, and Dayna Oscherwitz describe the Western as “a malleable, targeted construct, a recodeable universe subject to multiple forms of global

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domestication, innovation, and reconstruction” (5). Agnieszka Holland’s Spoor, through its unobvious, but traceable, connection to the Western confrms the genre’s unique ability to handle a range of vital, culturally specifc issues in ways that make them intellectually and emotionally relatable virtually across all borders.

Works Cited Cawelti, John G. The Six-Gun Mystique. Bowling Green U Popular P, 1970. Cooke, Grayson, Warwick Mules, and David Baker. “Editorial.” Transformations: Journal of Media, Culture & Technology, no. 24, 2014, Special Issue on “The Other Western,” www.transformationsjournal.org/issue-24. Accessed 25 Feb. 2019. Doberman, J. “The Past Can Hold a Horrible Power.” The New York Times Online, 25 Oct. 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/movies/aftermath-athriller-directed-by-wladyslaw-pasikowski.html. Accessed 25 Feb. 2019. Franczak, Jerzy. “‘Dziki Zachód, dziki Wschód.’ Western a sprawa polska.” Przestrzenie Teorii, vol. 24, 2015, pp. 73–96. Halicka, Beata. Polski Dziki Zachód. Przymusowe migracje i kulturowe oswajanie Nadodrza 1945–1948. Universitas, 2015. Higgins, MaryEllen, Rita Keresztesi, and Dayna Oscherwitz. “Introduction.” The Western in the Global South, edited by MaryEllen Higgins, Rita Keresztesi and Dayna Oscherwitz, Routledge, 2015, pp. 1–8. Jocks, Christopher. “Native American Religions.” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 7 July 2016, www.britannica.com/topic/Native-American-religion. Accessed 15 Feb. 2019. Marx, Leo. “Pastoralism in America.” Ideology and Classic American Literature, edited by Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen, Cambridge UP, 1987, pp. 36–69. Mitchell, Lee Clark. “Hidden in Plain View: Family, the Western, and the Syntax of Genre in A History of Violence.” Papers on Language and Literature, vol. 54, no. 1, Winter 2018, pp. 85–102. Myśliwiec, Dawid. “Pokot to fantazja mścicielska. Wywiad z Agnieszką Holland.” Film.Org.Pl, 7 Mar. 2017, https://flm.org.pl/wywiad-2/pokot-tofantazja-mscicielska-wywiad-z-agnieszka-holland-103085/. Accessed 10 Feb. 2019. Plesnar, Łukasz A. “Dziki Zachód, dziki Wschód. Konwencje westernowe w Prawie i pięści Jerzego Hoffmana i Edwarda Skórzewskiego i Wilczych echach Aleksandra Ścibor-Rylskiego.” Kwartalnik Filmowy, vol. 95, Fall 2016, pp. 138–151. Skurowski, Piotr. “Dances with Westerns in Poland’s Borderlands.” European Journal of American Studies, vol. 13, no. 3, 2018, 7 Jan. 2019, http://journals. openedition.org/ejas/13595. Accessed 25 Feb. 2019. Slotkin, Richard. Gunfghter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in TwentiethCentury America. HerperPerennial, 1993. Spoor. Dir. Agnieszka Holland, 2017. Stanowski, Rafał. “Agnieszka Holland o flmie Pokot.” Loungemagazyn, 20 Mar. 2017, https://loungemagazyn.pl/agnieszka-holland-o-flmie-pokot/. Accessed 10 Feb. 2019.

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Steciak, Małgorzata. “Agnieszka Holland o Pokocie: To flm o wrażliwości sprzecznej z mentalnościa tzw. ‘dobrej zmiany’.” Gazeta.Pl Weekend, http:// weekend.gazeta.pl/weekend/1,152121,21350240,agnieszka-holland-o-pokocieto-flm-o-wrazliwosci-sprzecznej.html. Accessed 10 Feb. 2019. Tompkins, Jane. West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns. Oxford UP, 1992. Wright, Will. Six Guns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western. U of California P, 1975.

Part 3

The West Travels Across Disciplines

Visual and Aural Journeys

14 Looking Beyond the West from the Dairy Queen Local Apertures, Planetary Visions Audrey Goodman In their introduction to Home Lands (2010), historians Virginia Scharff and Caroline Brucken issue a compelling invitation to readers to reorient their approach to space in the U.S. West: “We invite our readers to imagine a new geography, to envision a map delineated by the boundaries of home places rather than by the aspirations and conquests of nations” (2). Such an approach to redrawing the spatial organization of Western lands as home places situates women’s work and experience at the center while it encompasses and mingles the intimate and the environmental, the physical and the emotive, the close in and the gathered towards, the places we fnd refuge in or haunt, that which we are given and which is not of our own making, and the meanings and shapes we give it. (2) As it complements the work of contemporary scholars in Western American literary studies who have also been engaged in the process of sketching new regional cartographies, it offers a model for critical feminist reorientations of the feld. In this chapter, I propose that reading the visualization of home places in Western women’s photographs and phototexts leads toward such an active and transformative geography. I focus on how images and texts intertwine in the work of New Mexico–based photographer Meridel Rubenstein and poet Joy Harjo to create complex visualizations of time and multiple scales of space—in particular locations in and beyond the U.S. West. By creating composite images, or phototexts, these artists test the relation between the observer and the observed, reframe the photograph’s visible spaces, and redraw environmental boundaries. As these works take us far beyond the physical boundaries of the region, they exemplify the active process of seeing regional spaces as simultaneously participating in prior visualizations and comprehending their potential to generate new visions.

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Local Apertures My thinking about how Western women’s landscape photographs visualize the U.S. West through drawing the boundaries of home places started in two unlikely locations: a Dairy Queen and a dirt path along an irrigation ditch. The frst spot is not just any Dairy Queen, but the Dairy Queen in Archer City, Texas, where Larry McMurtry started reading Illuminations by Walter Benjamin, thinking about his own relation to place, and writing his memoir. He started wondering when, if ever, oral narrative thrived in that part of the West where he grew up surrounded by silence and frst-generation pioneers. And his wondering led him to think about Dairy Queens: “clean, well-lighted places” open all day long, “simple roadhouses” where people from all walks of life could meet or at least exchange gossip over coffee or iced tea. The Dairy Queen marked the intersection where a dispersed group of settlers could create a collective, if provisional, home. From this place, McMurtry remembers the potent emptiness of the land and “the intensity and depth” of his family’s hunger for that land (22); the huge sky; the silence; and the strong allure of the cowboys whose work occupied his life for 20 years, even as he embarked on his own “subversive, deeply engrossing secret life as a reader” (51). He becomes curious about “(a) what had happened in the county that was worth remembering, and (b) if so, did anyone still living remember it?” After pondering these questions for a minute, he concludes that the answers are as glaringly, disappointingly simple: “(a) nothing, and (b) no one” (31). It seems that Benjamin’s lament for the loss of the storyteller in modern life held true, at least among white settlers in West Texas in the late twentieth century. McMurtry hazards a reason for this silence and for the lack for written storytelling among the generations that preceded him: once the camera came, “writers weren’t needed, in quite the same way” (81). If writers were merely expected to provide descriptions of the landscape, photography made them superfuous. Any outsider or potential settler “could look at those pictures and see it for themselves. And what they saw was a West with the inconveniences—the dust, the heat, distances—removed,” (82) with its native inhabitants either vilifed or idealized, despite any evidence to the contrary. As seeming proof, McMurtry describes his dissatisfaction with a photograph of himself in 1939 standing on a metal washtub used daily to clean all his family’s clothes. He narrates his memory of this moment to compensate for the defciencies of the image, which fails to convey either the scalding temperature of the washtub’s surface “heated by the sun until it was hot enough to fry an egg” (85) or the sensation of that heat burning through his sandals to the skin of his feet. In the photograph, any inconvenience on the part of the subject, much less pain, is effectively removed. This example, however, suggests that often what photographs “removed” were just those grounded experiences that

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writers could express so effectively: the work of everyday life and the sensations of physical contact with local materials and environments. McMurtry’s essay reveals how images and verbal narratives intersect in any construction of place and home. It foregrounds the importance of the storyteller’s and the photographer’s locations in space and time, as well as the critical relations between material and imaginary places. Taken by itself, the photograph locates and captures part of a Western experience; when reframed and incorporated into a written narrative, it initiates a process of refecting on the challenge of creating a home place, a process that entails connecting local experiences across regional, generational, and cultural boundaries. The second place from which my thinking originated can be seen in the photograph “And There You Are on the Other Side” by Muscogee Creek poet Joy Harjo. Printed in the collection of essays and interviews entitled Soul Talk, Song Language, it depicts an ordinary, dusty path along an acequia in Albuquerque, New Mexico, illuminated by the sun setting in the background behind the bushes and trees. While lacking the drama of open space or a distant horizon, the photograph and its caption articulate an ongoing conversation with this place and suggest an intimate knowledge of how many perspectives intertwine in this particular location, an irrigation ditch dug and collectively maintained by generations of Indo-Hispano settlers. By walking on this path, writing about it, and photographing it, Harjo recognizes and extends a deep local history of water allocation and traditional agriculture, affrming the belief shared by people who live along the Río Grande: Our River Our Life.1 The image locates an origin of the poet’s creative identity, while the caption calls out to the sun as a companion and life force. By contrast, consider a single, iconic photograph of the New Mexican landscape: Ansel Adams’s Moonrise, Hernandez, NM (1941).2 Viewing the town from above, Adams claims to capture in a decisive instant the contrast between luminous buildings and vast, dark sky, the clarity of the air, and the wondrous appearance of the moon. In his recollection about the making of this photograph, Adams claims that he had “an almost prophetic sense of satisfaction” when he released the shutter for this image, even though he was missing his exposure meter and had to rely on “immediate technical recall” (41) to set the exposure. Adams defnes a successful landscape photograph as one that realizes the sudden alignment of inner vision and natural scene through the individual artist’s technical mastery; for him, a landscape is a bounded aesthetic object. For Harjo and for many Western women artists, however, a landscape is already inhabited and storied, the view always partial and located in space and time, and vision is an emerging process that engages ecological and planetary concerns. Other photographs included in Soul Talk, Song Language range from the opening vista of clouds and the snow-capped peak of Mt. Hood seen from an airplane window to close-up views of the sun refected on water

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(“Our Star”) and a turtle crawling “at the Ceremonial Grounds.” To read this collection through its photographic images is to see the poet looking at the world from her local grounds and from the sky, placing herself and her vision within the dialectics of responsibility and the scales of relation specifed by Gayatri Spivak in “Imperative to Reimagine the Planet.” Harjo envisions herself not opposed to “the other side” of the acequia or to the cycles of nature but as part of a still unmapped planet. Spivak’s theorization of what she calls a “planetary poiesis (imaginative making)” (346) seeks to create an ethical framework for thinking about human relations on the largest possible scale through subjects who accept the responsibility to articulate their positions in multiple imagined worlds. She proposes, If we imagine ourselves as planetary accidents rather than global agents, planetary creatures rather than global entities, alterity remains underived from us, it is not our dialectical negation, it contains us as much as it fings us away—and thus to think of it is already to transgress. (339) Harjo’s work visualizes such “planetary poiesis” in photographic and literary terms as it situates its subjects and speakers in local, regional, Indigenous, and planetary contexts; it transgresses the boundaries of home and those between categories and scales of space in order to sketch maps of the “next world.” While Harjo spent many creative years in Albuquerque, her vision has always traveled, carrying with it the ethical imperative to see and act responsibly in the many worlds her poetry inhabits. Any place can become the grounds for both local and planetary thinking, Harjo explains in the essay “It’s Diffcult Enough to Be Human,” written from a refuge in the Ko‘olau mountains near Honolulu: “It’s all here, in a sense everywhere is here. We’re in the same story wherever we are, though the details might be different.” This story, for Harjo, is the common struggle to “be human” in a world in which women still struggle for recognition of their power and Native identities “continue to be imagined by those who know nothing about us” (Soul Talk 99). She writes, “I’m convinced that women are anchors and bearers of knowledge in a profound way,” (98) and she takes seriously her responsibility “to get our own story right” (100). To counter the erasure of colonial visuality, she creates poems that chart transformational geographies, such as “A Map to the Next World.” In this poem, she speaks to the next generation, to children “who would climb through the hole in the sky” from the fourth world into the next one (A Map 19). With her “only tools” being “the desires of humans as they emerged from the killing felds, from the bedrooms and the kitchens,” Harjo imagines a map that “must carry fre to the next

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tribal town for renewal of spirit,” even if it “can’t be read by ordinary light” (19) and will always be “imperfect” (20). She concludes that the process of creating a map to guide us beyond our current world must continue, one imagination at a time: “there is no beginning or end,” she writes. “You must make your own map.” (21) In the remainder of this chapter I travel beyond these very material but also generative locations, the Texas Dairy Queen and the Albuquerque acequia that constitute imaginative terrain for two major contemporary voices in the literature of the U.S. West, to demonstrate how practices and publications of Western women’s landscape photography reveal the transformation of home places in the U.S. West.3 McMurtry and Harjo remind us that any place can be a critical location for rethinking regional stories and for mapping belonging through an open network of reciprocal relations rather than a grid imposed by globalized capitalism, thus providing an introduction to the feminist theories of landscape I survey in the next section and to the collaborative and composite photographs created by Meridel Rubenstein I discuss in the second half of the chapter. Rubenstein’s work in New Mexico, especially the Low Rider photographs she made in the Española Valley, continues to provide a model for how to locate visions of home from the ground up.

The Worlds in Western Women’s Photographs Photographs both foreground vision as a situated practice and call the relation between physical and imaginary places into question. Thus, they have the potential to work as what Donna Haraway calls “a feminist writing of the body that metaphorically emphasizes vision again.” As Haraway insists in her foundational essay “Persistence of Vision,” We need to learn in our bodies, endowed with primate color and stereoscopic vision, how to attach the objective to our theoretical and practical scanners in or to name where we are and are not, in dimensions of mental and physical space we hardly know how to name. (357) Like Neil Campbell and other scholars in Western American literary studies, I view Haraway’s feminist theorizations of visuality and Walter Mignolo’s critiques of Western modernity’s colonial foundations as essential to located practices of reading and writing about regional literatures. Campbell cites Haraway’s concept of “situated knowledge” as central to his practice of “affective critical regionalism.” As he explains the concept, it rejects this narrow version of objectivity in favour of “the ability to partially translate knowledges among very different—and powerdifferentiated—communities” by . . . insisting on “the particularity

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The phrase of Haraway’s that recurs in Campbell’s book is one I keep coming back to as well: “The only way to fnd a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular” (Haraway 362). This claim entails what Campbell refers to as a “cartographic shift” and emphasizes a process at the center of critical re-visionings of Western spaces. Campbell sees Haraway’s conception of vision as primarily metaphorical; my focus on photography and gendered practices of visuality leads me to emphasize the physical. The photographer needs physical ground to stand on, and images themselves enclose space. Photography makes theoretical work on location and scale material, even as the apparatus of the camera and aesthetic conventions shape the view and its reception. Women’s photographs not only situate knowledge; they also function as forms for interrogating the way we see time and history. While they visualize locations in the present, photographs complicate our view of when is present and what is past. The work of unraveling chronology and envisioning new confgurations of place and time is feminist work, I suggest. In her foundational 1971 essay, “When We Dead Awaken,” Rich explains how essential it is for women to look back and rethink received ideas on their own terms: Re-vision—the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction—is for women more than a chapter in cultural history; it is an act of survival. (4) Rich’s conception of the coercive rigidity of a male literary tradition as she articulates it in this essay could be applied as well to settler-colonial traditions of regional representation and landscape photography. Looking again at Western places through photographs and texts provides opportunities for women artists to assess and revise old visual histories and to begin to see and name new sites where local, embodied knowledge can be articulated. Arguing along similar lines, feminist photohistorian Lucy Lippard describes the critical potential of phototexts to challenge the objectifcation of landscapes and people common in Western photography throughout her work, claiming that photography “can reframe a place in retrospect or in preparation for new or renewed experience. Sometimes this is done best in books, which have their own way of moving out from the centers, especially books with texts in which the people of a place speak for themselves” (Lure 284). Photobooks created in collaboration with people native to a place express “a sense of community from the

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inside, a place rather than landscape described for outsiders” (284). Lippard and other photohistorians emphasize how women photographers in the U.S. West create landscapes otherwise, from the ground up and from multiple angles. Women photographers’ fexible and experimental revisions of colonial visuality also shift the viewer’s perspective by incorporating multiple lived and imagined histories within each frame. They invite viewers to explore photographs as unpredictable passageways into local knowledge and to recognize what Lippard calls “the reciprocity in the process of looking at history through images” (Partial Recall 17). Thus they provide a means for “thinking about new confgurations of place, time, and meaning occasioned by global economic restructurings and new technologies,” as Krista Comer describes critical regionalism, and for thinking about the role of “bodies in place, and knowledges derived not only via textuality and discourse but from place as a critical location, an orientation, a material entangling of the human, the more-than-human, and the crossings of matter and meaning” (“Thinking Otherwise” 7). As they invite viewers to enter scenes visualized from the other side, photographs can lead toward new paradigms for visualizing local places and home lands.

Low Riding with Meridel Rubenstein: From Local Habitats to Global Environments New Mexico–based photographer Meridel Rubenstein visualizes the ground of northern New Mexico as just such a critical location, constructing photo-collages and extended portraits that juxtapose local and embodied senses of place with multiple senses of time. Rather than considering her camera work as an individual, isolated practice, she uses photography as a means to create connections with local communities and to explore how people express their identities in their environments. “Place and the land on which it rests have meant everything to me,” she affrms (Belonging). Through mixing perspectives and forms, Rubenstein’s projects reorganize space to make room for the body and engage in what she in considers “conversations between nature and culture,” initiating an exchange of stories drawn from the experience of living in New Mexico, where, in her view, one inevitably “acquir[es] a sense of the divine” (Belonging 183). “Belonging,” the title Rubenstein chose for both her artistic statement and for the book that collects her many recent projects, means “sharing this earth,” continuing to connect land and home, culture and nature, scientifc and indigenous knowledge. Rubenstein’s work with New Mexican communities and vernacular landscapes models a feminist and located way of seeing Western lands and people. It demonstrates how looking again at New Mexico can open passageways toward other real and imaginary places and intertwine many scales of spatial imagining,

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from the local to the planetary. Following the observation of one of her mentors, Emmet Gowin, that “The gift of landscape photograph is that the heart fnds a place to stand,” Rubenstein defnes her relation to place from within her body and through her heart, a word that encompasses her physical and emotional connection to the places she inhabits and the generous impulse that motivates her work. She approaches all the tools and devices that allow her to gather images and ideas—camera, computer, paper—as instruments for mapping what she refers to as a “common ground,” or the “landscape of my heart/mind,” (183); she designs her work to “allow viewers to search for, to feel their fragments, to try to embody them as whole” (178). Her process of slow looking and vernacular framing began with her immersion in the Low Rider community concentrated in the Española Valley in the late 1970s. Adapting the pachuco style created by Mexican immigrants in Los Angeles in the 1930s and the Chicano styling of classic American cars practiced in other Western cities, Hispano men in New Mexico integrated their cars, their faith, and their families. According to Brenda Jo Bright, “A lowrider is the expression of aspirations and affections, the execution of vision and skill. To make a lowrider, Chicano customizers simultaneously draw upon and create culture.” In rural northern New Mexico, in contrast with urban lowrider cultures, “lowriders merge regional ethnicity, working-class ideologies and Chicano nationalism in a localized discourse of tradition,” Bright claims (41). Peggy Beck confrms, They will tell you that New Mexican low riders are different. They are not as concerned with clothes perhaps; or maybe it’s that they prefer the typical norteño polka and rancheras to “oldies” and disco music. In New Mexico, traditional values and aesthetics still characterize low riders and car clubs. As one low rider put it—they are closer to tierra madre, closer to mother earth. (26) It is a community that expresses its determination to live on its own terms and follows the motto “Life is an art; time is eternal” (Belonging 38). To enter into the Low Rider view of the world, Rubenstein had to meet the creators of the vehicles and follow their pace. She called one car upholsterer, Benino Martinez, who agreed to meet her at the Kentucky Fried Chicken in Española. When she arrived, she found the parking lot full of the members of two car clubs, Los Bajitos and Los Unidos, and 20 fully designed cars. When the police showed up, she explained that they were artists, she was from the Museum of New Mexico, and she needed to photograph them. So, the police let them all drive over to the lot behind the police station. As she waited for them to get moving, she realized they were forming a procession. She made the connection with other local rituals, such as the yearly pilgrimage devout Catholics made to the

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sanctuary in Chimayo on Good Friday. As she wrote in a press release for the 1980 exhibit of this work in Santa Fe, New York, and elsewhere, she learned how “family, religion, and the Anglo-American world have affected the lives of these people and how such a seemingly technological and materialistic obsession as lowriding can mirror a subculture’s psychic development. The cars and their nightly procession have ancient religious as well as sexual overtones.”4 In an interview with Katherine Ware, the photography curator at the New Mexico Museum of Art who organized Con Cariño, an exhibit that revisited and extended attention to Low Rider culture in 2016, Rubenstein explains, “once I got that they were artists, it was great. They were showing me their art and I was celebrating their art by photographing it. Totally reciprocal” (Orale 45). From the beginning, she insisted on putting the artists in the frame and let them choose the locations for their portraits. She’d meet them at the Sonic drive-in or in the Safeway parking lot. Her collaborative work with Low Riders confrmed the ethics of seeing through their eyes, the signifcance of moving slowly through landscape, and the value of sharing local rituals. The Low Riders also provided Rubenstein with working methods and aesthetic models. She made the portraits slowly, deliberately, “looking through the ground glass on the back of the camera,” watching them as they got bored and then relaxed. “You need time till the people are ready to give you the picture themselves,” (Orale 48) she explains in the interview. “Without them,” Rubenstein writes elsewhere, “I don’t think I could have understood the power of ‘contrary’ materials and myth enacted in everyday life. The Low Riders’ chrome and velvet are just as real to me as photography’s silver and salt” (Belonging 178–9). The photographer claimed that working with the Low Riders completely changed me. Their use of velvet and chrome together was a powerful combination for me. Later I made work with palladium and steel, glass and wood, and copper and metal—that’s all from understanding from the lowriders what two different materials do to your psyche. (Orale 48–49) The photograph that circulated with the press release for the Artist’s Space exhibit of the Low Rider series in New York, The Medina Family, Bad Company, ’68 Chevy Impala, Chimayo, exemplifes the many layers of collaboration in this work, from the personal to the aesthetic.5 The family chose to pose behind the sanctuary in Chimayo and in front of a crucifx attached to a cottonwood tree, locating themselves on ritual ground. Their design for the car further conveys the family’s connections with this landscape, as the carefully painted lacquered panels resonate with the rectangular shape of the wooden benches set up for outdoor prayers and heighten the viewer’s awareness of the gradations of green

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and brown in the grasses and earth in the feld behind them. The perfectly clean car gleams. Wearing complementary outfts, Paul and Annabel Medina stand in similar positions, relaxed and with their hands clasped, while their daughter Paula looks out from the driver’s seat, surrounded by parents who seem ready to care for her until she can take the wheel herself. Placing the car and the family who created it at the center, Rubenstein’s framing of this portrait communicates their integration of art, faith, and family life. Another portrait, Peggy Martinez,’64 Chevy Two-Tone, Santa Cruz Lake also links the visions of the car’s creator and the photographer. It balances the depth of view into the distant shore of the lake with Peggy’s gaze back at the photographer and viewer, linking the gleaming horizontal stretch of the car’s body with the still expanse of the lake and the hills beyond. The Martinez Sisters, Chimayo, is one of my favorites in Rubenstein’s Low Riders series. Taken relatively close up, the photograph arranges the sisters, their car, the house, the land, and the sky into an entire world. It locates the car and its owners on a particular stretch of dirt adjacent to the house, making the car both an extension of domestic space and a vehicle of escape from domesticity. It recalls Kathleen Stewart’s description of a still life: “a static state flled with vibratory motion, or resonance” (19). Rubenstein charges this “still life” of sisters with car with beauty—and the potential for slow motion and transformation. The photograph keeps drawing the viewer from the women’s faces back to the car, which is deliberately, absurdly low to the ground, by design. Rubenstein explains, These cars are works of art. They are directly descended from a great tradition of Hispanic crafts. The outside of the cars must be famantito or clean. This means they must be perfectly spotless and waxed, and beautifully painted with either metal fake or pearl paint, pinstriped or lacquered with a mural and often a message. (Belonging 39) Despite the absence of decoration, it is clear that this car has been transformed from a functional mode of transportation to a vehicle of artistic expression; neat and sleek, it’s ready to join any procession. Through these and other portraits that make up the Low Rider series from 1980 to 1981, a time of resurgence for Low Riders in Española and Chimayo, Rubenstein presents Low Rider culture as a familial, religious, and intensely local affair. The exhibit of this work on the Plaza in Santa Fe on October 19, 1980, conveyed Rubenstein’s vision through both her own photographs, displayed outdoors on kiosks, and selected cars, parked around the plaza for display. The event attracted over 3,000 people, a big crowd for a fne art show. According to the artist’s statement Rubenstein wrote for the event, “The Lowriders basked in this praise. Art and

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life co-mingled: myth and reality joined to create a living image of this cultural art form.” Re-read from the perspective of feminist theories of vision and feminist histories of the U.S. West, Rubenstein’s Low Rider series assumes new relevance as part of both the vernacular landscape movement originating New Mexico in the 1980s and the global preservation movement of the 1990s that has led to new United Nations Educational, Scientifc and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) heritage designations for cultural landscapes. Meanwhile, even as the town of Española has struggled to address drug use, poverty, and unemployment and to contend with controversy regarding the statue of Juan Oñate, a public monument commemorating colonial savagery, it continues to defne itself as the “Low Rider Capitol” of the world.6 In addition to supporting annual public processions of cars, a town event offcially started in 2017, the city council passed an ordinance to support “responsible cruising,” declaring the city a “cruisefriendly municipality” in September 2018. Having secured funding from the state Department of Tourism’s Rural Pathway project and a local nonproft organization, a coalition of collectors and city and Rio Arriba County offcials are currently planning to build a Low Rider Museum to celebrate the region’s cruising culture.7 The Low Rider series led Rubenstein toward “Habitats,” a sequence of composite portraits depicting how land and buildings in three distinct communities across the New Mexico have changed over time, and eventually to “Eden in Iraq,” a recent response to environmental and humanitarian crises in southern Iraq’s Mesopotamian wetlands. These projects respond to the effects of environmental damage on local communities through visualizing the composite centers of intimate domestic spaces and then seeking to protect expression of local and vernacular cultures. “Habitats” focuses on the dwellings and artifacts left in Paguate (Laguna Pueblo), the Hispanic village of Wagon Mound (named after the wagonshaped rock located where the Cimarron cutoff joined the main Santa Fe Trail), and the ranch town of Progresso.8 Created for The Essential Landscape project curated by Steven Yates with essays by landscape historian J. B. Jackson, it contributed to the critical redefnition of the New Mexico landscape in terms of its visible histories of everyday use. To create the composite images for this series, Rubenstein returned to empty houses and other abandoned sites, looking for stories of home in these ruins. She viewed the landscape from within what remained of the structures and from a distance, looking through windows and doorways from both directions. “The exposures were made in sequences because the lives of these remarkable places, from my limited vantage point, seemed to exist at once in the past, present, and future—each with its own fction as well as its own reality,” she explains (Essential Landscape 132). In one portrait, Delpha Graham and Son, “All My Dreams Are of This Place,” Progresso, Rubenstein encircles a family snapshot with branches curved by hand and

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nestles the portrait in the trunk of a tree with the desert stretching out into the distance. Where the horizon would be, she places a sequence of stone walls, the remains of the family house, layering frames, perspectives and scales to suggest that wherever this mother and son may be now, their dreams keep circling back to their home territory. Displayed again in a recent exhibit at the New Mexico Museum of Art Exhibit, “Shifting Light: Photographic Perspectives” (November 25, 2017, to October 7, 2018), Rubenstein’s portrait from Progresso creates a grounded and fully inhabited landscape, in stark contrast with Ansel Adams’s iconic Moonlight, Hernandez, NM (1941), hung on a facing wall. Rubenstein declares, “Living in New Mexico planted my feet on dry ground and my head in the sky.” Her current work continues to visualize strategic local places by frst sharing the ground with their subjects and then creating relationships between cultures and across spatial scales. A 2018 exhibit at the University of New Mexico Art Museum, Eden Turned on Its Side, integrated three of her long-term projects that respond to diverse, imperiled environments around the world, including forests in Vermont, volcanoes in Indonesia’s Ring of Fire, and marshes at the junction of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in southern Iraq. As with her earlier work, Eden Turned on Its Side focuses on senses of beauty in nature and vernacular expressions of culture, on many scales and in many locations. Examples include a brilliantly variegated “Sibu Island leaf” from Malaysia; a new blade of grass emerging through volcanic ash; a lush, still “Farm Wetland” in Vermont; and a stand of grasses beginning to grow again near the Euphrates River. In the words of director of the University of New Mexico Art Museum Arif Khan, “Rubenstein allows us entry to an infnite number of ‘Edens’ if only we look attentively” (Eden xi). Curator Shawn Michelle Smith writes in the companion essay that this exhibit “is about human relationships to the environment” in the Anthropocene, our current era in which human industry is created irreversible environmental changes. Rubenstein’s work “asks viewers to consider their own place in this ongoing dynamic,” as well as their “relationship to place and plants people, both intimately and planetarily” (1). Rather than dramatize environmental catastrophe, Rubenstein’s planetary visions invite viewers to place themselves, to contemplate the worlds she makes visible through her photoworks, and to consider positive action, whatever the scale. “The work grounds people in specifc places within planetary environments,” Smith concludes, “and encourages one to recognize the ways in which daily life is imbricated in global forces” (7). As Rubenstein recounts in the essay she wrote for the exhibit, this region is thought to be close to the historic site of the Garden of Eden. It supported the Marsh Arabs for over 7,000 years, until, in the early 1990s, Saddam Hussein destroyed the marsh, building a canal to drain the wetlands and ordering the land to be burned. His army then murdered or drove away the people who had sustained themselves in this place for

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innumerable generations. Only in 2003, with Hussein’s demise, could the people begin to come back, using “simple hand tools, to break through the earthen canal and let the waters back into the desiccated land” (67). In 2010, Rubenstein became aware of the larger-scale restoration work in these wetlands initiated by Azzam Alwash, an engineer who returned from California to create an Iraqi environmental nongovernmental organization (NGO), Nature Iraq. She wrote to Alwash and, at his invitation, joined his efforts in 2011. She envisions her Wastewater Garden as “a stopping-off point for tourists on their way to visit this newly designated UNESCO World Heritage site and frst Iraqi National Park, the Mesopotamian Marshland Natural Park” (97). The photographs displayed as part of “Eden in Iraq” express the artist’s planetary vision through local designs as they layer images of landscapes undergoing transformation and restoration.9 Rubenstein chose to print many of the photographs on rag paper or fabric, inviting viewers to consider them as weavings or tapestries and to read them like texts. Two composite works, Eden Again and The Green Kitchen, convey her intentions for the project especially well. Designed as a complex triptych entirely framed by water, Eden Again consists of three even panels, each composed of three photographs of earth, water, grass, or marshland. In the middle panel, images of drier earth serve as contrasting frames for the central images of the reviving landscape. Dead center is a photograph taken from inside a house made of woven reeds, framing a window that looks out toward a patch of grass and then further toward a distant horizon. Other photographs in each panel bring viewer closer to the ground, showing animal tracks in the sand, tangles of grasses, and waterways. Due to the symmetry of the work, it can be read forwards or backward, up or down, or diagonally, allowing viewers to create their own narratives of transformation. The Green Kitchen offers more intimate perspectives on the region’s every day and imagined histories. Composed of eight photographs arranged like squares in a quilt and printed on fabric, it reveals both how the kitchen brings the vital color of the grass inside for those who live there and how the photographer sees each view as part of the landscape’s larger pattern of restoration. The largest frame and foundational image for this collage reveals a lively tangle of fowering branches. The next layer juxtaposes a rocky foreground and a cloud-flled sky at sunset; just above, Rubenstein offers a glimpse of the steps of the Ziguraut temple at Ur leading toward the clouds. And the top layer arranges fve photographs like a cross, with a tray set against brilliantly colored textiles at the base, an image of the unexcavated Temple of Inanna at Uruk at the center, and interior views of the green kitchen from three directions set around the other sides. These complex and collaborative landscapes show that renewal occurs in many dimensions: ecological, cultural, and aesthetic. The people who live here actively preserve and transform cultural and spiritual traditions as they inhabit terrain perceived from the outside

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as “rural;” the artists re-visions the foundational myths shared across regions and reveals how people create beauty in all the places where they make their home.

Conclusion Western women photographers continue to provide powerful insight into the potential of their medium to create locations where people and places omitted from regional and global imaginaries can tell the stories that cross regional, cultural, and continental divides. In the summer of 2018, the New York Times published a series called Being Women: Poetry and Imagery that invited six women photographers to respond to the work of contemporary women poets. The editors chose Ruth Fremson to create a series of photographs for Joy Harjo’s poem “Praise the Rain,” originally published in Confict Resolution for Holy Beings (2015). Harjo’s poem begins: Praise the rain; the seagull dive The curl of plant, the raven talk— Praise the hurt, the house slack The stand of trees, the dignity— Praise the dark, the moon cradle The sky fall, the bear sleep— Praise the mist, the warrior name The earth eclipse, the fred leap— Praise the backwards, upward sky The baby cry, the spirit food— Praise canoe, the fsh rush The hole for frog, the upside-down— Praise the day, the cloud cup The mind fat, forget it all— Each phrase in the frst long stanza sketches a scene in the process of transformation, whether through movement (the earth eclipse, the fsh rush); through sound and speech (the raven talk, baby cry); or through cycles of nature (the eater becomes the eaten; the rain is in the process of bringing more rain). Because of the rain, life can continue, bringing common hurt and a need for protection. Everything praised gets equal emphasis, from the curl of plant to the song to the singer: the repetition and accumulative rhythm undoes any hierarchy; each beat of the poem is an aperture, one that reveals the world to be in motion at every scale. Then, as the poem’s rhythm builds, Harjo unsettles and reorients the reader’s sense of direction and sequence: the sky is both backward and upward, even “upside-down.” Beginnings start to blur into ends. The poem ends with a litany of prayers for the emotions, environments,

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nonhuman beings, and common processes of creation that remain in tension, if not contradiction, until the speaker affrms the natural cycle that encompasses each of these elements: Praise crazy. Praise sad. Praise the path on which we’re led. Praise the roads on earth and water. Praise the eater and the eaten. Praise beginnings; praise the end. Praise the song and praise the singer. Praise the rain; it brings more rain. Praise the rain; it brings more rain. Fremson’s photographs pull images from the poem and connect them to the natural world around her on many scales, revealing the wonder of a brilliantly green forest, a fern’s delicately curved spine, a path beckoning into the woods, sunlight striated in thick rays as it penetrates to the forest foor. One photograph looks out to the Pacifc’s horizon from a shore cluttered with pile of driftwood, offering evidence of the ocean’s perpetual power. Fremson explains that she used her own recent move from New York to the Pacifc Northwest to connect with Harjo’s writing: My intention was to create a series of images that honor Harjo’s words, the Pacifc Northwest Native American culture that I have been slowly learning about, and my own transition to a new chapter in my life. Being among old growth trees feels as sacred as any cathedral, so I revisited places in Washington State that I have been to—the Hoh Rain Forest, North Cascades National Park, Olympic National Park, and the upper Skagit Valley—and let them lead me to new parts I hadn’t seen before. Along the way I tried to convey that while nature has power and fury and should always be respected, she can also be funny, elegant and whimsical. On the website, the images change every few seconds, creating a quicker pace and alternative destinations for the imaginative journey mapped in the poem. As published in an interactive digital format, the collaboration between Fremson and Harjo links regional visions and further opens the poem for planetary thinking.10 “Praise the Rain” is a planetary poem, and even more so in this collaborative, mixed-media form. Although not necessarily originating in New Mexico or even in the U.S. West, the poem draws its inspiration, the rain, from the natural resource most precious in a desert environment. It imagines a place where people defne themselves through how they

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express gratitude for water as the foundation of life; songs and singers materialize in the same breath. In specifying a world where bears and fsh and trees and babies coexist, it imagines a place with specifc, interconnected human and natural histories that extend back into an unspecifed past and into the future. It is a poem that, especially when read with Fremson’s photographs, made in the Pacifc Northwest’s lush forests and the edge of the ocean, frees readers to locate and reimagine their place in an interconnecting, expanding, and renewable world.

Notes 1. For a history of the acequia system of communal irrigation, recent perspectives on the value of this tradition for sustaining agriculture and communities in the Río Grande Valley, and ongoing efforts to restore river habitats, see La Vida del Río Grande, edited by Carlos Vásquez; Mayordomo; and Reining in the Rio Grande. 2. To view Adams’s photograph, consult the Online Collection at the Center for Creative Photography: ccp-emuseum.catnet.arizona.edu. 3. For indigenous perspectives on literary expressions of home in the U.S. West, see Larry Evers and Ofelia Zepeda’s edited volume, Home Places: Contemporary Native American Writing from Sun Tracks. As the editors explain in the introduction, for Native peoples the entire continent “is home, an earth house, a place to live within ever-widening webs of community that spin out to include not just humans but all the living things of the natural world” (vii). 4. For this work, Rubenstein was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1981. Her Low Rider photographs were also exhibited at Consejo Mexicano de la Fotografa in Mexico City; Studio 666 in Paris; and the Susan Spiritus Gallery, Newport Beach, California, among other venues, and were included in group show of 11 Santa Fe photographers at the American Center in Paris. 5. To view photographs from Rubenstein’s Low Rider series, consult the portfolios available on her web page: www.meridelrubenstein.com/gallery/ lowriders. 6. For a fascinating cultural and anthropological study of the Española Valley, see Michael Trujillo’s Land of Disenchantment. 7. For recent coverage of the Low Rider Museum plans, see www.abqjournal. com/1229294/espantildeola-declares-itself-lowrider-capitol-of-the-world-excity-embraces-its-culture-and-tradition-with-the-new-title.html. 8. For a brief history of Wagon Mound, see Frances L. and Roberta B. Fugate, Roadside History of New Mexico. Mountain Press Publishing Co., 1989, pp. 135–136. 9. A selection of these images can be seen at www.meridelrubenstein.com/ eden-in-iraq. 10. See Joy Harjo and Ruth Fremson, “Praise the Rain. Being Women: Poetry and Imagery,” Produced by Kerri MacDonald and Morrigan McCarthy, The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/17/us/ women-poetry-photos.html. Accessed 24 March 2020.

Works Cited Adams, Ansel. Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs. Little, Brown, 1989. Beck, Peggy V. “The Low Riders: Folk Art and Emergent Nationalism.” Native Arts/West, Oct. 1980, pp. 24–27.

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“Being Women: Poetry and Imagery,” www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/17/ us/women-poetry-photos.html. Bright, Brenda Jo. Customized: Art Inspired by Hot Rods, Low Riders and American Car Culture. Harry Abrams, 2000. Campbell, Neil. Affective Critical Regionality, Roman and Littlefeld International, 2016. Comer, Krista. “The Problem of the Critical in Global Wests.” A History of Western American Literature, edited by Susan Kollin, Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 205–221. ———. “Thinking Otherwise across Global Wests: Issues of Mobility and Feminist Critical Regionalism.” Occasion, Vol. 10, Stanford U, 7 Dec. 2016. Cosgrove, Denis E. “Introduction to Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape.” Landscape Theory, edited by Rachael Ziady DeLue and James Elkins, Routledge, 2008, pp. 17–42. Crawford, Stanley. Mayordomo: Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico, U of New Mexico P, 1988. Fugate, Francis L. and Roberta B. Fugate. Roadside History of New Mexico. Mountain Press Publishing Co., 1989. Haraway, Donna. “The Persistence of Vision.” Visual Studies Reader, Third Edition, edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff, Routledge, 2013, pp. 191–198. Harjo, Joy. Confict Resolution for Holy Beings. Norton, 2015. ———. A Map to the Next World. Norton, 2000. ——— and Tanaya Winder. Soul Talk, Song Language: Conversations with Joy Harjo. Wesleyan UP, 2013. Iturbide, Graciela. Eyes to Fly with: Portraits, Self-Portraits, and Other Photographs. UT Press, 2006. Lippard, Lucy. The Lure of the Local: Senses of Place in a Multicentered Society. The New Press, 2007. ———. Partial Recall: With Essays on Photographs of Native North Americans. Free Press, 1993. McMurtry, Larry. Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Refections on Sixty and Beyond. Simon and Schuster, 2010. Phillips, Fred, G. Emlen Hall, and Mary E. Black. Reining in the Rio Grande: People, Land, Water. U of New Mexico P, 2011. Rich, Adrienne. “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision.” Essential Essays: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry, Norton, 2018, pp. 3–19. Rubenstein, Meridel, www.meridelrubenstein.com/gallery/. ———. Belonging: Los Alamos to Vietnam. St. Ann’s Press, 2004. ———. Eden Turned on Its Side. U of New Mexico P, 2018. ———. “Interview with Kathleen Ware.” ¡Orale! Lowrider: Custom Made in New Mexico, edited by Don Usner, U of New Mexico P, 2016, pp. 39–57. Scharff, Virginia and Caroline Brucken. Home Lands: How Women Made the West. U of California P, 2010. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Imperative to Re-Imagine the Planet.” An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization, Harvard UP, 2011, pp. 335–350. Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Duke UP, 2007. Trujillo, Michael. Land of Disenchantment: Latina/o Identities and Transformations in Northern New Mexico. UNM Press, 2009.

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Usner, Don. ¡Orale! Lowrider: Custom Made in New Mexico. U of New Mexico Press, 2016. Vásquez, Carlos, editor. La Vida del Río Grande: Our River: Our Life, National Hispanic Cultural Center, 2002. Yates, Steven A., editor. The Essential Landscape. UNM Press, 1985.

15 “Comanches in Spain!” (Re)visiting a Spanish Exhibition on the “Far West”1 Juan Ignacio Guijarro González

Several years ago, three respected Argentinian writers made their Spanish audience somewhat uneasy when, during an otherwise illuminating exchange about the cultural exchanges between Latin America and Spain over the centuries, they all repeatedly used the term “conquest” to refer to the historical process which began in the year 1492. Paradoxically, even in the twenty-frst century, most Spanish people—both conservative and progressive—still usually talk about the “discovery” of America, or about the “New World,” words thta reveal a heavily ethnocentric bias. Such a state of affairs does make sense to a certain extent, given that Spain has never lamented the abuses of its imperial policy in Latin America—not even during the celebrations in the year 1992. This is the mental mechanism that Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz defnes in her book An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States as “nullifying guilt related to genocide” (107). In the sphere of arts and literature the situation is quite similar: Native American authors are practically absent from Spanish cultural discourse—like those of other U.S. ethnic minorities: Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie, Sandra Cisneros, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, or even a Nobel Prize winner like Toni Morrison are hardly mentioned by their colleagues in Spain—Morrison’s Beloved, hailed as “the single best work of American fction published in the last 25 years” in a poll carried out by The New York Times in 2006, is never mentioned by Spain writers, critics, publishers, or readers (Scott); meanwhile, the names of—white and male—contemporary novelists like Paul Auster, Jonathan Franzen, Philip Roth, and, inevitably, David Foster Wallace have become a mantra. Bearing in mind this racially unbalanced presence of U.S. culture in Spain, it is remarkable that one of the most respected cultural institutions in the country, the Thyssen Museum in Madrid, organized an art exhibit which—for the very frst time in Spanish history—was entirely devoted to cultural (re)presentations of the “American West.” “La ilusión del Lejano Oeste/“The Illusion of the Far West” opened in November 2015 and went on for three months, displaying about 200 works of art (mostly paintings and photographs), as well as some objects from Native American life.

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This chapter will explore which version of the “American West” was constructed by a major cultural institution in a European country like Spain at the dawn of a new millennium, during the days of Barack Obama’s presidency. The goal of this text is to study this exhibition as a social and a cultural phenomenon, as the ultimate illustration of the transnational quality that the mythical geography of the “American West” has acquired over the years. Consequently, the analysis will focus not only on the works of arts exhibited, but also on the catalog published by the Thyssen Museum and on the reception in the Spanish press. The frst idea to emphasize when discussing an event like “The Illusion of the Far West” is that it is a clear proof that, as Susan Kollin amply demonstrates in her essay, it is now mandatory to consider the “American West” as a global phenomenon: it was an exhibition about the west of the United States organized in the capital of Spain by a museum founded by a member of the Central European aristocracy. Even though Madrid is far enough from Washington D.C., both literally and metaphorically, (re)visiting the art of the “American West” nowadays can be an extremely controversial affair, as the organizers of the exhibition held in 1991 at the Smithsonian Institution under the title “The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the American Frontier, 1820–1920” soon found out. Douglas R. Nickel recalls that “the project brought together 164 historical works—paintings, sculpture, watercolors, photographs and prints—by major and minor fgures alike . . . , each depicting the life and landscape of the West and the process of settlement” (362). The curators articulated a revisionary narrative of U.S. history that tried to prove that the expansionist ideology of Manifest Destiny formed the subtext of those works of art. The show caused an uproar nationwide, and negative reviews were soon published in newspapers like The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and periodicals like Time or The Times Literary Supplement. Both politicians and prominent fgures of those days like Lynne Cheney (chairperson of the National Endowment for the Humanities), former Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin, or (British) historian Simon Schama publicly criticized the show as a manipulation of history based on political correctness. From a more recent perspective, historians like Alan Trachtenberg or Douglas R. Nickel agree that “The West as America” exhibition was too narrowly conceived and consequently failed to establish a fruitful critical dialogue with nineteenth-century art. It makes sense that the frst exhibition in Spain about the “American West” should be held at the Thyssen Museum, given that this cultural institution—which forms the so-called Art Triangle in the heart of Madrid together with the Prado Museum and the Reina Sofía Museum—claims to have the only works of art on this subject in the country, and one of the largest collections about it outside the United States. In his memoirs, the late Baron Hans Thyssen-Bornemisza recalled that he frst felt the

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attraction of the “American West” when, as a boy, he began reading the novelist who did the most to popularize that fascinating territory in Germany: “En mi juventud tuve una especial predilección por los libros de [Karl] May—de hecho, aún los conservo” (qtd. Ruíz 5). This fascination for the West made the baron quite an anomaly among European collectors of his time, given his tendency to acquire nineteenth-century U.S. landscapes when no one else was doing it, as Marta Ruíz explains in a note published by the Thyssen Museum. She also contends that the frst works of this kind he bought—probably in the early 1960s—were engravings made by the Swiss Karl Bodmer during his trip to the United States between 1832 and 1834; in the year 1979, Heinrich Thyssen began collecting landscapes by nineteenth-century painters such as Thomas Cole, George Catlin, or Albert Bierdstadt, all of whom fgure prominently in “The Illusion of the Far West.” The curator of “The Illusion of the Far West” was neither a critic nor an academic but a Spanish artist named Miguel Ángel Blanco (Madrid, 1958), fascinated not only—like Baron Thyssen—by the “American West,” but also by Native American life. In his introduction to the exhibition catalog, Blanco honestly acknowledges: “esta exposición . . . no es fruto del trabajo de un experto en la materia, sino de un artista apasionado por los paisajes americanos y por los pueblos que los habitaron” (16).2 As it will later be suggested, the fact that the curator is an artist without any formal academic training will determine which version of the “American West” was articulated. To begin with, the title chosen for the exhibition, “The Illusion of the Far West,” is revealing: on the one hand, the term “illusion” suggests that the image of the West that predominated for centuries was but a fabrication, a cultural construct; on the other hand, the phrase “Far West” not only belongs to the vocabulary of the “Old West” but also unveils an ethnocentric perspective in which the only gaze displayed is the white one. The ideology of the “Old West” pervades the entire catalog as well, since it is written in a troubling ‘neutral’ historical perspective, already manifest on the second page, when curator Miguel Ángel Blanco fatly states that in the West “se produjo una violenta colisión de paraísos” (“there was a violent clash of paradises,” 16), as if both sides of the confict were equally legitimized to inhabit the land. The impersonal tone of this sentence is the one that recurs throughout the catalog, which neatly avoids blaming white people for causing what Native American historians like Ward Churchill or Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz have openly termed “genocide.” It is undeniably a major achievement that most important artists of the “American West” are all present in the exhibition: Karl Bodmer, George Catlin, Henry Lewis, Thomas Hill, Albert Bierstadt, Edward S. Curtis, Carleton E. Watkins, or Fredrick Remington, among others—all of them white men. In the catalog, Miguel Ángel Blanco laments that it was impossible to bring any works by a major painter like Thomas Moran (56).

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Again, the transnational quality of the West should be highlighted, since Karl Bodmer was German and Thomas Hill was English. Both crossed the Atlantic in the nineteenth century, irresistibly lured by those vast territories in the West and its “exotic” inhabitants, which they probably perceived as an escape from the Europe of the Industrial Revolution. Sadly, it is equally undeniable that there is not a single example of Native American art in the entire exhibition, and there is no reference whatsoever either about its existence or its absence—in all these paintings, prints, and photographs, the Natives are always objects, but never subjects with agency in a cultural narrative about the West. “The Illusion of the Far West” was divided into six sections. The frst one, “Explorar el Nuevo Mundo/Exploring the New World,” included the oldest pieces displayed in the exhibition—most of them loaned by the General Archive of Indies, in Seville. Given that the Thyssen Museum is located in the historical heart of Madrid, this opening room is a friendly reminder that, between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, Spain was the frst European empire to explore territories in Florida and New Mexico. In such an opening section, one might detect that imperial nostalgia mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. Here, there are mostly maps, the oldest one of which (from the year 1605) is entitled “Map of the rivers, channels, lagoons, hills, settlements, dry rocks, and rancherías.” However, the oldest document in this section—and in the entire exhibition—is “Drawing of a bison, which accompanied the Report of the Expedition of the Cattle of Cíbola, written by the sargento mayor Vicente Zaldívar in the province of New México,” dating all the way from 1598, that is, only 106 years after Columbus “discovered” “the New World.” The impact of what the European gaze regarded as new is evident in this drawing, which depicts an animal which would be essential for the survival of many Native American tribes and which three centuries later would practically disappear, as it will be later discussed. The core of the exhibition was to be found in sections two, three, and four, respectively named: “Pueblos y paisajes inéditos/New People and Lands,” “Indios en las grandes llanuras/Indians on the Great Plains,” and “Efgies y ceremonias/Effgies and Ceremonies.” They mostly contained artistic (re)presentations of either landscapes or Native American people. In the frst half of the nineteenth century there are only prints or paintings, but in the second half photographs also play a major role in depicting the West after the new medium was invented in 1839. Painters like Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt, or Thomas Hill depict in their canvases impressive views of the nature in the West, since such huge and magnifcent landscapes were unthinkable either in the East Coast or in Europe. Two specifc locations seem to have had a special appeal for artists: Yosemite (which was frst protected in 1864 and then turned into a national park in 1909 partly because of the impact

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of these renderings), and the Falls of Saint Anthony, “discovered” and named in the year 1690 by a Catholic missionary. For centuries they used to be the only natural major waterfall on the Upper Mississippi River, but later became part of Minneapolis. Fortunately, the exhibition brings together three contrasting pictorial renderings of the falls: the earliest one was made by Henry Lewis in 1847, George Catlin offered his version in 1871, and fnally Albert Biedstadt painted his between 1880 and 1887. Interestingly enough, these three reproductions of the Falls of Saint Anthony all belong to the collection of the Thyssen Museum, stressing again the fascination that its founder felt toward the “American West.” Another common denominator to these paintings is that Lewis, Catlin, and Bierstadt all coincide in including Native Americans in them, even if they are just one or two and hard to perceive amid the massive natural landscape around. This presence is an exception to the rule since, in many of the landscapes painted and photographed in “The Illusion of the Far West,” Native Americans are nowhere to be found. This symbolic absence serves to underscore the old U.S. founding myth of the “Virgin Land,” according to which North America was a vast vacant land awaiting the arrival of “civilized” Europeans. As Robert Stam and Ella Shohat contend in their insightful analysis of Western flms: Central to the western is the land. The reverent attitude toward the landscapes themselves—Monument Valley, Yellowstone, the Colorado River—occludes those to whom the land belonged and thus naturalizes expansionism. The land is regarded as both empty and virgin, and at the same time superinscribed with Biblical symbolism—“Promised Land,” “New Canaan,” “God’s Earth” . . . . The dry, desert terrain furnishes an empty stage for the play of expansionist fantasies. Nor is it usually explained that the native populations portrayed as an intrinsic part of the landscape were for the most part driven there by the White expropriation of more fertile lands farther east. (116) After asserting that one of the many intertexts of Western flms is frontier paintings, Stam and Shohat conclude: “The western projects a vision of wide-open possibility, a sense of vistas infnitely open in both space and time. Esthetically, this vision is expressed in wide-screen perspectives” (118). This thought-provoking idea is nowhere more evident in the Thyssen exhibition than in a photograph by William Henry Jackson, “Grand Canyon of Arizona” (1907), which rapidly brings to mind dozens of similar shots from classic Westerns by directors such as John Ford or Howard Hawks. This is the gaze which, according to Mary Louise Pratt, defnes the white subject as superior

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and invulnerable observer, as what she terms the “monarch-of-all-Isurvey” (qtd. Stam and Shohat 115). John Wayne was often placed in that position of visual power in flms like John Ford’s canonical The Searchers (1956); in her poem “Dear John Wayne,” Louise Erdrich deconstructs the powerful gaze of the most legendary of Hollywood cowboys. Depictions of the “American West” both in flm and in the plastic arts force the viewer to adopt the white gaze, that is, to see the world through the eyes of the colonizers, but never from the perspective of the colonized, a visual strategy that has undeniable ideological implications: “The pointof-view conventions consistently favor the Euro-American protagonists; they are centered in the frame, their desires drive the narrative. . . . The possibility of sympathetic identifcations with the Indians is simply ruled out” (Stam and Shohat 120). Portraits in “The Illusion of the Far West” include early paintings of chiefs and warriors made by George Catlin in the 1830s and 1840s, on loan from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Two of many popular bronze sculptures that Frederick Remington produced in the early twentieth century, joyfully celebrating the myth of the cowboy, are also included: “The Mountain Man” and “The Buffalo Signal,” both of which belong to the Thyssen Museum. This section closes with other portraits also made very late, in the frst decade of the twentieth century, when Native Americans had already been confned in reservations: the photographs that Edward S. Curtis included in his massive project, The North American Indian, here on loan from the Prints & Photograph Division of the Library of Congress. They are either images of relevant fgures, such as the legendary chief Joseph. Nez Percé (1903), or scenes from daily life, like Giving the Medicine—Navaho (1905). As curator Miguel Ángel Blanco mentions in the exhibition catalog, Edward S. Curtis has been criticized for his attempt to portray a “vanishing race,” and because all too often the scenes and ceremonies he photographed were not authentic, but artifcially staged (129, 131). Native American author and cultural critic Gerald Vizenor has lucidly explored this fascinating postmodern paradox. He wonders why Natives would “pose to create a portrait simulation, a pictorial image not their own, for photographic adventurists who later nominate their pictures as the real” and suggests that perhaps it was either for money or for what he terms “tricky camera stories” (180). According to Vizenor, if Curtis’s images are relevant nowadays it is not for their ethnographic value, but for the aesthetic one. He concludes his critique by asserting that the artist was “clearly a photographic faker by his removal and insertion of details, and by false captions” (189). But the work of Edward S. Curtis acquires a further postmodern aura since, as Vizenor himself admits at the beginning of his essay, his photographs tend to be popular among Native Americans. Even

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contemporary authors of note such as Louise Erdrich or N. Scott Momaday have publicly praised his work. From a feminist perspective, Erdrich states: Although these portraits were posed and painstakingly arranged, the liveliness and the spirit of the women always breathe in the image”; she later adds: “There is a fow of energy in these photographs that carries into the present . . . although Edward Curtis believed that he was documenting a vanishing culture. (“Edward”) The most challenging section of “The Illusion of the Far West” is number fve, “Indios y vaqueros/Indians and Cowboys,” which seems to have been jointly curated by Miguel Ángel Blanco and Alfredo Lara, who authors the chapter on this section in the catalog, entitled “El ensueño de la frontera/The Dream-Fantasy of the Frontier.” Revealingly, this chapter opens with a large reproduction of a frame from John Ford’s foundational Western, Stagecoach (1939): it shows a vast landscape in which only a stagecoach and several soldiers appear, while the Native American presence has been symbolically erased. Composed mainly by flm posters and frames made in Spain to advertise classic Western flms, this ffth section is a nostalgic celebration of how these cinematographic narratives about “cowboys and Indians” have shaped several generations of Spanish people, reinforcing the transnational nature of the “American West.” Stam and Shohat’s assertion that classic Westerns “played a crucial pedagogical role in forming the historical sensibilities of generations of Americans” (115) can readily be expanded in order to include foreigners from Spain and other parts of the world, although the meaning of those flms will most likely differ for viewers in the United States or abroad. Because of the irresistible power of flm, so often mocked in Sherman Alexie’s works, many people in Spain probably know more about the history of the “American West” than, for example, about the Spanish Civil War. The only poster displayed that escapes from this uncritical celebration of the “Old West” is that of Soldier Blue, a revisionist flm directed by Ralph Nelson in 1970, in which crimes against Natives Americans are brutally depicted in order to denounce those committed by the U.S. government in Vietnam at that time. A very suggestive addition to this flm overview might have been Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson, a satire of the national myth directed by Robert Altman which premiered in the United States in June 1976—weeks before the Bicentennial—with Paul Newman in the title role. As a matter of fact, the attitude toward Buffalo Bill in the exhibition is extremely reverential, refecting one more time how the ideology of the “Old West” prevails throughout. Buffalo Bill fully took

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part in a massive process of ecological extermination that Dunbar-Nelson has unhesitatingly identifed: In an effort to create Indigenous economic dependency and compliance in land transfers, the US policy directed the army to destroy the basic economic base of the Plains Nations—the buffalo. The buffalo were killed to near extinction, tens of millions dead within a few decades and only a few hundred left by the 1880s. (142) This fnal section about the reception of the West and the frontier also includes best-selling dime novels published in the twentieth century in European countries like Germany (Karl May), Italy (Emilio Salgari), and, obviously, Spain, where authors like Marcial Lafuente Estefanía turned the popular Western novel into a mass-scale social phenomenon. Given that this chapter aims to explore the relevance of the Thyssen exhibition as an illustration of the transnational nature of the “American West” nowadays, it is worth studying the critical reception that such an unusually original show had in the Spanish press. A major art critic and full professor of art history at the Universidad Complutense in Madrid, Estrella de Diego, published a long and lavishly illustrated review in El País Semanal, the Sunday supplement of the leading newspaper in the country, El País. In her opening sentence she highlights the paradox that, despite its seemingly foreignness, the “American West” has become part of the collective memory of countries like Spain. She strikes a more penetrating note when she agrees with Stam and Shohat’s contention that Hollywood has consistently articulated an ethnocentric gaze, since Western flms “narran la historia desde un solo ángulo: el de los colonizadores con sus caravanas en círculo para evitar el ataque de los temibles y malvados indios” (63).3 As an expert on twentieth-century art, de Diego is especially interested in discussing the impact that what she terms the “el mito fundacional” (65) of the West had on U.S. experimental artists such as Georgia O’Keeffe, the Beat Generation, or Jackson Pollock. She hails Edward S. Curtis as one of the most powerful photographers in U.S. history and celebrates the psychological depth of his portraits of Native American chiefs. Nevertheless, what is strangely missing in a review written by an academic specialized in contemporary areas such as postmodernism, gender, or critical theory is any reference to the absence of Native American art in the exhibition, to the controversy caused by the 1991 Smithsonian show, or to the fact the “Old West” is still being perpetuated by a major museum at the dawn of the new millennium. It is enlightening to read the words of an academic like Estrella de Diego alongside those of the leading Spanish intellectual in recent times, novelist Antonio Muñoz Molina, who published a review of the exhibition in his weekly column for El País. In the very last sentence of this

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column, entitled “El mayor espejismo” (“The Largest Mirage”), Muñoz Molina reveals that he had the pleasure of visiting the exhibition in the company of curator Miguel Ángel Blanco, whose efforts contacting museums and cultural institutions both in Spain and the United States he praises. Throughout the piece, the novelist emphasizes the gap that existed between the wonders that Europeans found in the vast territories of North America and the fctions they constructed in order to describe them, starting with Spanish explorers like Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, “el primer europeo que vio manadas de bisontes” (the frst European who saw herds of buffalo) according to Muñoz Molina. Surprisingly, an art expert like him hardly discusses the paintings and photographs which form the core of the exhibition; only in the fnal paragraphs of his review does he discuss George Catlin or Karl Bodmer while, for example, Edward S. Curtis is not even mentioned. As a progressive intellectual who, over the last 30 years, has often functioned as the critical voice of Spain (a role akin to that of Arthur Miller or Toni Morrison in the United States), Muñoz Molina denounces several times the abuses historically endured by Native Americans, a thorny issue that is not suffciently addressed in the Thyssen exhibition: he frst writes about “matanzas . . . expulsiones y desplazamientos forzosos,” then about “rapiña destructive,” and fnally laments “la maquinaria imparable de la destrucción colonial” (4).4 However, nothing is said in his article about the concept of the “New West” or about Native American art. In the closing paragraph of his article, Muñoz Molina—who is two years older than curator Miguel Ángel Blanco—nostalgically recalls his childhood in the early 1960s, when he grew up both watching Hollywood Westerns on Spanish television and playing cowboys and Indians with his friends. The fact that during the Francoist dictatorship, the “American West” should be part of the sentimental education of a boy from a poor rural family in southern Spain—like Antonio Muñoz Molina—underscores, once again, that it really is a domain of the imagination. Most other exhibition reviews published in the Spanish press tend to coincide in two assertions: frst, that the “American West” has become an international domain and, second, that Hollywood Westerns are largely responsible for it. Most of these texts are penned by men who often recall, in a nostalgic vein (like Antonio Muñoz Molina or Miguel Ángel Blanco), the days when they innocently played cowboys and Indians: in his review for ABC Cultural, Fernando Castro Flórez uses a highly subjective and nostalgic tone which is self-evident in the very title of his text. In his review for El Cultural (the arts supplement of newspaper El Mundo), Sergio Rubira rightly notes that the Thyssen exhibition is based on “una fascinación que tiene un componente nostálgico, casi melancólico” (24);5 he also asserts that the image of the “American West” curated by Miguel Ángel Blanco perhaps “nunca existió” (never existed) (25). In the closing

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words of his review, Rubira rightly suggests that the tragic dimensions of the conquest of the West are actually diffcult to trace in this exhibition. In conclusion, the exhibition “The Illusion of the Far West,” which opened in November 2015 at the Thyssen Museum in Madrid, was a truly remarkable cultural event since, for the very frst time in Spanish history, the artistic (re)presentation of both the “American West” and Native Americans was taken into consideration by a major cultural institution. Curator Miguel Ángel Blanco made a commendable effort to bring together paintings and photographs by leading artists like George Catlin, Frederick Remington, or Edward S. Curtis. However, Native American art was ignored in the exhibition, most likely because its curator relied excessively on the values and the ideology of the “Old West,” in which the achievements of not only Native Americans, but also women, African Americans, Chicanos, Chinese, Mormons, and other groups do remain invisible. No reference is made either in the exhibition or in the catalog to Native American life today—as if they had really vanished. Therefore, most of the nuances and complexities that the theoretical framework of the “New West” has unveiled in recent times are largely missing from this peculiar exhibition, which is based more on a nostalgic celebration of the myths of the “American West” than on a deep understanding of the tragic history of that territory. The fact that the classic formula “Go West, young man” (193) should be the curator’s closing words in the exhibition catalog requires no further explanation. Nevertheless, and despite its shortcomings, with an exhibition like “The Illusion of the Far West,” the Thyssen Museum clearly proved in Spain that the imaginative frontiers of the “American West” long ago ceased to be in the United States so that, in the new millennium, that mythical space has traveled beyond itself and, as a result, metamorphosed into a truly transnational phenomenon.

Notes 1. This chapter is part of a project fnanced by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (PGC2018–094659-B-C21(MCIU/AEI/FEDER, UE)), the European Regional Fund (ERDF). It was also completed under the auspices of the research group REWEST funded by the Basque government (Grupo Consolidado IT1206–16). 2. This exhibit is not the output of an expert in the feld, but of an artist fascinated with U.S. landscapes and the people who inhabited them. 3. narrate history from a single perspective: that of colonizers with their caravans forming a circle in order to avoid the attack of terrible and evil Indians. 4. slaughtering . . . forced outings and removals . . . destructive pillage . . . the unstoppable machinery of colonial destruction. 5. a fascination with a nostalgic, and almost melancholic, touch.

Works Cited Blanco, Miguel Ángel. La ilusión del lejano oeste. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, 2015.

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———. “Miguel Ángel Blanco. Biblioteca del Bosque,” bibliotecadelbosque.net/ exposiciones/la-ilusion-del-lejano-oeste/. Accessed 23 Feb. 2019. Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson. Dir. Robert Altman, United Artists, 1976. Castro Flórez, Fernando. “El deseo infantil de ser ‘cowboy’. O piel roja.” ABC Cultural, 7 Nov. 2015, pp. 18–19. Diego, Estrella de. “Paseo por el Lejano Oeste.” El País Semanal, 25 Oct. 2015, pp. 58–64. Dippie, Brian W. “Drawn to the West.” Western Historical Quarterly, vol. 35, no. 1, Spring 2004, pp. 4–26. Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. Beacon, 2014. “Edward Curtis: Photographer and Ethnographer,” edwardcurtis.com/edwardcurtis/contemporary/. Accessed 14 Feb. 2019. Erdrich, Louise. “Dear John Wayne.” Jacklight, Holt, 1984, p. 55. Kollin, Susan. “The Global West: Temporality, Spatial Politics, and Literary Production.” A Companion to the Literature and Culture of the American West, edited by Nicolas S. Witschi, Wiley-Blackwell, 2011, pp. 514–527. Muñoz Molina, Antonio. “El mayor espejismo.” Babelia, 11 Nov. 2015, p. 4. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. “A History of the Collection,” museothyssen.org/ en/collection/history. Accessed 28 Feb. 2019. Nickel, Douglas R. “Art, Ideology, and the West.” Companion to the American West, edited by William Deverell, Wiley-Blackwell, 2004, pp. 361–374. Prieto, Darío. “James Baldwin: negro, homosexual y poeta.” El Mundo, 14 Aug. 2016, http://elmundo.es/cultura/2016/08/13/57aeedee46163fdf6f8b45e3.html. Accessed 18 Feb. 2019. Rio, David. “Una frontera abierta: vertientes europeas de la novela popular del Oeste.” El intertexto cultural, edited by Jesús Camarero and Salah Serour, Arteragin, 2003, pp. 151–162. Roca Barea, Mª Elvira. Imperiofobia y leyenda negra. Roma, Rusia, Estados Unidos y el imperio español. Siruela, 2016. Rubira, Sergio. “Cercano Oeste.” El Cultural, 6 June 2015, pp. 24–25. Ruíz del Árbol, Marta. “Una excepción en el coleccionismo europeo. El baron Thyssen-Bornemisza y la pintura norteamericana del XIX.” Ventanas, 7 May 2016, pp. 2–6. Scott, A.O. “In Search for the Best.” New York Times, 21 May 2006, http:// nytimes.com/2006/05/21/books/fction-25-years.html. Accessed 8 Mar. 2019. Stam, Robert and Ella Shohat. Unthinking Eurocentrism. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2014. Trachtenberg, Alan. “Contesting the West.” Museums in a Material World, edited by Simon J. Knell, Routledge, 2007, pp. 292–300. Truettner, William H., editor. The West as America: Reinterpreting Images of the American Frontier, 1820–1920. Smithsonian, 1991. Vizenor, Gerald. “Edward Curtis: Pictorialist and Ethnographic Adventurist.” True West: Authenticity and the American West, edited by William R. Handley and Nathaniel Lewis, U of Nebraska P, 2004, pp. 179–193.

16 Genre Revision and Hybridity Westerns and the West in Twenty-First-Century American Television Jesús Ángel González1 A simple Internet search for the terms “TV” and “Western” leads to dozens of results, including American television shows such as Rawhide or Gunsmoke that started in the 1950s or 1960s and were no longer produced after the 1970s. Does this mean that Westerns and the American West have now disappeared from American television? Far from it, as Michael K. Johnson pointed out in 2012: “we have seen in the twentyfrst century a remarkable rebirth of the portrayal of the American West on television” (Introduction 124). It is true that, with a few interesting exceptions, we do not fnd many Westerns set in the time and space of the traditional genre, but if we widen our scope and look at the number of series that use a Western setting or make references to the American West or the Western genre, the number of interesting Western-related series that have been developed in the contemporary “Golden Age” of American television is certainly more signifcant. If we look frst at the actual Westerns shown on American television in the last two decades, the most successful from a critical point of view is defnitely Deadwood (HBO, 2004–2006), but as there have already been several books and articles written about it, we are going to focus on other TV Westerns that have critically revisited the West and have received less scholarly attention, including Into the West (TNT, 2005), Hell on Wheels (AMC, 2011–2016), The Son (AMC, 2017–2019), and Godless (Netfix, 2017). Into the West is a miniseries produced by Steven Spielberg that tries to summarize the history of the conquest of the West from the 1820s to the 1890s in 12 hours, from the point of view of both the European settlers and the Native Americans. Into the West includes the Battle of Little Bighorn, the Ghost Dance Movement, and the Wounded Knee Creek Massacre, together with the creation of reservations and the problems of the forced integration and acculturation of Native Americans. It is extremely inclusive and well-meaning, but as Kay McFadden pointed out, the characters become simple archetypes to illustrate a politically correct version of the conquest of the West: “As the frst major commercial miniseries to give equal time to the perspective of Native Americans, the program is

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commendable. As entertainment, it’s on par with summer school.” Hell on Wheels makes a similar effort to portray Native American characters and culture (such as a Cheyenne Sundance ceremony) and focuses on the progress of the transcontinental railway as it moves through Indian territory (both Cheyenne and Sioux). As Johnson has pointed out, it “provides a more balanced portrayal of that confict [between the railway builders and the Native Americans] than has often been seen in the television Western” (Introduction 126), although the depiction of female characters leaves much to be desired. The Son and Godless are critically acclaimed shows that continue the revision of Western tropes that seems to characterize TV Westerns in the twenty-frst century. The Son is based on the 2013 book of the same name by Philipp Meyer and stars Pierce Brosnan as Eli McCullough, a Texas cattle baron who was captured by Comanches as a child and later became a Comanche warrior himself. Most of the storyline alternates between 1849–1850, when Eli becomes “the son” of a Comanche tribal chief, and 1915, when Eli is a ranch owner (so well-known by his legendary exploits that he is called the “frst-born son” of Texas) with two “sons” with conficting loyalties who help him save his ranch. The frst season offers a compelling portrayal of Comanche life at the time of the conquest, and it rewrites the portrayal of Latino characters in Westerns by focusing on a family of rich Tejanos whose land and property are stolen by the McColloughs in the context of the Texas Border Wars (1910–1919). The second season manages to connect the two storylines and adds a coda that takes place in the 1980s. The series offers a dark, Hobbesian view of both distant and recent Texan past, stressing the cruel similitudes between the different settlers of the land: Comanches, Apaches, Mexicans, Americans, and local or foreign oil corporations (“The man who slaughters his opponents wins. That is Texas”). It also creates very interesting parallels between father–son relationships in different contexts and engages very successfully in the Western tradition by presenting a stark contrast between reality and the “legend” created around it. Godless was created by Scott Frank under the executive production of Steven Soderbergh and is probably the Western TV show that has received the best reviews since Deadwood. It is set in Colorado in 1884 and it tells the story of La Belle, a mining town where an accident has killed all the men, forcing women to step in and take over. The trailer emphasizes the absence of men (“Welcome to No Man’s Land”) and promised a more “feminist Western in a #MeToo Era” than it actually is. It does rewrite gender roles by offering different means of female empowerment (the prostitute turned schoolteacher because of the lack of customers, the lesbian leader of the town, and Alice, the widow who is able to defend her land and ranch on her own), but it does many other things in order to rewrite Western conventions. Another storyline is about Frank Griffn (Jeff Daniels as a ruthless outlaw gang leader dressing like a preacher)

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and his confrontation with his son-like fgure Roy Goode. Griffn is an awe-inspiring fascinating character, reminiscent of Judge Holden in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, who defnes the title of the series by answering a Norwegian pioneer who does not understand his cruelty: “This here’s the paradise of the locust, the lizard, the snake. It’s the land of the bleeding and the wrathful. It’s godless country. And the sooner you accept your inevitable demise, the longer you all are gonna live” (Episode 2). Godless questions the traditional gender roles of Westerns, their conventional religious values, the predominance of the individual over the community, the gun-loving culture of the American West (by means of Roy Goode, a skillful gunman who teaches Alice’s son not to use guns carelessly), and, in general, “the notion of the Old West as an embodiment of American values” (Gilbert). As well-meaning as Into the West, it offers a much more gripping story and multidimensional engaging characters, which enables it to revise and update Western conventions well into the twenty-frst century. There are two other series that can also be considered Westerns (because of their location, iconography, characters and themes), but which take place not in the time span of the conquest of the West but in a contemporary setting. The protagonist of Longmire (A&E, Netfix, 2012–2017) is a sheriff in a small Wyoming town near a reservation, and the protagonist of Yellowstone (Paramount Network, 2018–present) is a rancher in Montana fghting Native Americans and other white people in order to keep his ranch, but they both do their jobs in twenty-frst-century America. Longmire is based on a book series written by Craig Johnson, which has been called “Western noir” and is certainly more of a detective series than a Western: every episode has a detective story structure, with a whodunit solved at the end which is combined with a longer plot (about Walt’s wife death) connecting all the episodes. The Wyoming setting provides the series with many interesting Western references, however. For example, the aging broken sheriff in confict with modern times and the arrival of contemporary crime (such as transnational drug cartels and serial killers) in the West may remind the viewer of revisionist Westerns of the 1960s and 1970s with similar characters. Similarly, the vicinity of the town to a Cheyenne reservation makes it a very interesting setting in which to contrast conficting white and Indian attitudes toward crime, as well as to delve into contemporary Native American issues, such as the legal adoption of Cheyenne children by white families to save them from supposedly negligent Indian parents. The second “contemporary Western,” Yellowstone, presents Kevin Costner as John Dutton, the owner of a huge ranch in Montana, who uses all kinds of measures to keep the property in the family. The series raised high expectations, since it was written and produced by Taylor Sheridan, the reputed screenwriter of flms like Sicario (2015) and Hell or High Water (2016), but according to most reviewers, the frst two seasons failed

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to meet the high standards set by those flms. It deals with contemporary Western issues, such as the politics and economics of ranching in a global world, the arrival of Eastern money and tourists into Montana, and the problems of Native American reservations and casinos, but it does so by using soap-opera melodramatic clichés more reminiscent of Dallas or Dynasty than the Western genre. Although the second season in particular offers an interesting take on contemporary cowboy life, when it deals with the psychological problems or the political and corporate power fghts of the Dutton family, it does so without any realism or subtlety in the delineation of characters or plots. Longmire and Yellowstone are also examples of a tendency, identifed by Michael K. Johnson in 2012, to set TV programs in the American West. He listed a number of “reality TV” shows with a Western setting and programs set in Alaska as the “Last Frontier State,” demonstrating a proliferation that bears witness to the fascination that the frontier experience still holds in the American imagination. A similar fascination with the American West (together with the strong presence of the television industry in the West) might also explain the number of fctional series with a Western setting. In his introduction to the 2012 special issue of Western American Literature Johnson mentioned CSI (Nevada; CBS, 2000–2015), Big Love (Utah; HBO, 2006–2011), and Friday Night Lights (Texas; NBC, 2006–2011), but also series that make use of the Western location to “include character, plot, and/or visual references to the genre Western” (125), such as Sons of Anarchy (California; FX, 2008–2014), In Plain Sight (New Mexico; USA, 2008–2012), or Arctic Air (Canadian West, CBC, 2012). Western references become so important in some of these programs that the shows themselves end up being defned by the word Western. This is the case for Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008–2013), as its showrunner, Vince Gilligan, has admitted: I like to think of our show as a modern-day Western. I’m not sure what I mean by that. There are no 10-gallon hats or six shooters, no horses and whatnot. Q: Well, you do have a lone gunman. A: [laughs] Yeah we do. There’s a man standing on the horizon in a pair of chaps, or in the case of our show, in his underpants. I guess Breaking Bad is a post-modern Western. [My italics] (Gilligan, Q&A) The New Mexico desert present in so many Westerns seems to be the perfect location for the story of Walter White, a timid chemistry teacher transformed into Heisenberg, a methamphetamine manufacturer and violent drug lord. The image of Walter pointing a gun into the camera, the frequent standoffs in the desert landscape, and the black hat worn by Walter when he changes into Heisenberg (no longer “white”), are all

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visual allusions to the Western genre that indicate other thematic connections. The hero’s transformation takes place signifcantly not on the traditional frontier, but in the new borderlands between Mexico and the United States, a space consisting of multiple “borders between countries, between peoples, between authorities, sometimes between armies” (Limerick 91). In this violent context of criminals, transnational drug cartels and conficting laws the (anti)hero needs to assert himself as an individual and try to fnd (or lose) his own moral compass. As Brett Martin has emphasized, Breaking Bad, like some of the other shows branded as “quality TV” in the last two decades (e.g. The Sopranos [HBO, 1999–2007], The Wire [HBO, 2002–2008]), Six Feet Under [HBO, 2001–2005], and Mad Men [ACM, 2007–2015]) have to do with “diffcult men” (the actual title of Martin’s book): men in crisis who become protagonists of stories “largely about manhood—in particular the contours of male power and the infnite varieties of male combat” (Martin 13). The solution proposed by Breaking Bad to this crisis, as Brian Faucette points out, lies in a return to the “hegemonic masculinity” represented by the Western genre: “Walt’s transformation demonstrates that often in an effort to reclaim control men resort to empty rhetoric and performances of hegemonic masculinity because these modes have been crucial in the formation of the nation” (85). Jason Mittell has pointed out how Breaking Bad stands out from the other programs for two reasons: frst, because of what he calls its “centripetal complexity” (which creates a “storyworld with unmatched depth of characterization, layers of backstory, and psychological complexity” [223]); and second, because of stylistic choices directly related to the Western genre: “Breaking Bad embraces a much wider visual palette, ranging from stylized landscape shots evoking Sergio Leone Westerns to exaggerated camera tricks and gimmicks” (218). Michael Slovis, Breaking Bad’s cinematographer, has noted that Gilligan asked him to look for visual and stylistic inspiration in Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). Accordingly, the wide-angle shots, the slow rhythm in the action scenes, the dark comic tone, and the artistic stylization that Mittell calls “maximum-degree style” (219) seem to come straight from Spaghetti Westerns. A good example might be the “Fly” episode, an esthetic tour-de-force where we only see Walter’s efforts to catch a fy in his lab for a whole episode, seemingly inspired by the opening scene of Once Upon a Time in the West, where the suspense of the gunmen waiting at a railroad train station is undermined by the “mini-subplot” of a fy annoying one of the heavies. Finally, the ending of the series was also inspired by the Western genre, as Gillian himself admitted: “In the writers’ room, we said, ‘Hey, what about ‘The Searchers’ ending?’ So, it’s always a matter of stealing from the best” (Gilligan, “Breaking Bad”). According to Gilligan, Walter’s decision to spare Jesse’s life is inspired by Ethan’s similar decision not to

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kill his niece in Ford’s flm, in spite of the many forewarnings that this might actually happen. As Johnson has pointed out, Gilligan acknowledges the debt to the flm aurally (by playing a cowboy ballad at the beginning of the last episode) and visually (by showing Walter looking at his son from the outside in shots that replicate The Searchers’ signature shots of John Wayne framed by doors and windows outside his brother’s house) (Johnson, Goodbye, “Bad”). Looking at the fnal episode through the lens of the Western, it is easy to identify Walter as the Western “man in the middle” (Cawelti, The Six-Gun Mystique Sequel 74), related to characters like Ethan, but also Leatherstocking in James Fenimore Cooper’s novels, or Tom Doniphon in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), men who need to resort to their own moral conscience and often end up alienated by society, since “the hero’s violence is primarily an expression of his capacity for individual moral judgment and action, a capacity that separates him from society as much as it makes him a part of it” (97). Johnson concludes that Walter is “on the border between the civilian and the outlaw” and in the fnal scenes is shown to be alienated, like Ethan in The Searchers, “away from the interior space (his house, his family) that symbolizes his connection to civilization” (Johnson, Goodbye, “Bad”). Another series that takes advantage of its location on the border with Mexico is The Bridge (FX, 2013–2014, set in El Paso/Juárez) one of the most thought-provoking TV series from a transnational perspective. The original Danish/Swedish crime series (Broen/Bron, SVT1/DR1, 2011– 2018)2 is set between Malmö and Copenhagen and takes advantage of this location to refect on the conficts of the borderlands, the relationships, similitudes and differences between people on both sides of the border. This is illustrated by the relationship between two investigators of contrasting nationality and personality: Swedish Saga Norén is “neurodivergent,” presumably affected by autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and certainly lacking in social skills, whereas Danish Martin Rohde is extroverted and friendly, a typical representative of the “South of the North” as the Danes like to see their country in the Scandinavian context. The frst season focused on the appearance of a corpse in the middle of the Oresund bridge joining Sweden and Denmark (which triggered a double investigation both north and south of the border), and it became so successful that it has been replicated in four different remakes across the world, demonstrating the relevance of borders and the existence of a transnational television audience and industry in a global world. These new settings are the borders between France and the United Kingdom (The Tunnel, Sky Atlantic/Canal+, 2013–2018), Estonia and Russia (Mocm/Sild, NTV, 2018), Malaysia and Singapore (The Bridge, HBO Asia/NTV7, 2018), and the United States and Mexico (The Bridge, FX, 2013–2014).3 The American remake is particularly interesting because of its location in one of the most complex and fruitful borders in the world, the border

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between Mexico and the United States, which has been theorized by scholars like Gloria Anzaldúa or José David Saldívar. The latter describes the borderlands as a “Transfrontera contact zone,” a hybrid “third space” which becomes a “paradigm of crossings, intercultural exchanges, circulations, resistances, and negotiations as well as of militarized ‘low-intensity’ confict” (ix). The border presented in The Bridge is all of these things, a greatly conficting area from a legal and moral point of view, where (as in many Westerns) the protagonists have to look to their own conscience in order to choose a moral path, as we saw in Breaking Bad. In The Bridge, Sara becomes Sonya Cross, a strict detective from the El Paso Police Department with ASD, and Martin becomes Marco Ruiz, a detective from the Chihuahua State Police who has more fexible ethics in order to achieve the same goals. In this sense, Mexico represents the “Wild West” of personal justice and corruption as opposed to the bureaucratic justice system of contemporary America. As one of the characters says, “We Mexicans have the virtue of an openly corrupt system,” and in fact, at the end of Season 1, Marco fnds himself in the position of either taking personal revenge (after his own son is killed) or following the offcial law. The moral dilemma of taking the law into your own hands or respecting the formal justice system is carried into the second season and related to the Western genre in visual terms. Hank Wade is Sonya’s mentor and father-like fgure in the El Paso police force and he comes to represent the Old West of personal revenge by always wearing his cowboy Stetson hat. In fact, this is underlined in the script, frst when a federal offcer asks him if he is “into the whole cowboy thing,” and later when he misplaces his hat and replaces it with a baseball cap as a visual metaphor of something that does not work anymore (“I thought I could make a difference,” he says, talking about his diffcult job in a modern transnational world). We can see how the new location adds a great deal of thematic density to the series, as illustrated also by the allusions to the Juárez femicides, the network created to facilitate illegal immigration, the Mexican drug cartels, and the corruption of the Mexican police force, none of which appeared in the Scandinavian original. References to the Western genre are not limited to series set west of the Rocky Mountains, and we can also fnd them in shows set in very different places, such as Baltimore, Georgia, Kentucky, Iraq, and even alternative worlds in fantastic or science fction series. As we get further away from the Western location and from the Western temporal setting, we can see that we are moving into new “uncharted territory” where a new concept might be useful: the post-Western, which we will deal with later. One of these series is David Simon’s The Wire (HBO, 2002–2008), where the streets of Baltimore become a contemporary version of a lawless frontier town. As I have written elsewhere (“‘Wiring’ The Wire” 285–286), the Western genre is one of the most relevant transtextual references to The Wire; in fact, by using the Western as a hypotext, The

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Wire can highlight the message of the series as a refection on the evolution of the “American experiment” and its failure in American inner cities. Another show created by David Simon (Generation Kill, HBO, 2008) also makes commentaries about the Western genre, and is set even further away than Baltimore: Iraq. Susan Kollin has already noted the relocation of the Western hero abroad, pointing out that “western American fction and flm have also developed along transnational routes by featuring the US cowboy hero in an international setting, where his adventures often involve battling foes and restoring order on the global frontiers of the Middle East” (1). She has illustrated her point with flms like In the Valley of Elah (2007) and The Hurt Locker (2008), which tell tales of soldiers in “Indian/Iraqi country” and demonstrate how the use of the metaphor of the American soldier as cowboy abroad questions “the logic of the Wild West analogy” (163). We can fnd something similar in Generation Kill, a documentary-like miniseries based on a book by journalist Evan Wright, narrating the story of a group of marines invading Iraq, where the soldiers constantly use the Wild West analogy. Similarly, Homeland (Showtime, 2011–present) is based on an Israeli series called Hatufm (Prisoners of War, Channel 2, 2010–2012), and in the frst seasons it tells the story of a U.S. marine held captive in Iraq, who later turns on his own country. The series plays with Western captivity stories (like The Searchers) and the “classic frontier anxieties in the Western concerning racial and cultural contamination” (Kollin 4), but inverts gender roles by making the captive a man and the rescuer a woman. In fact, the most interesting aspect of this series is probably the portrayal of its female protagonist, Carrie Mathison, a CIA offcer with bipolar disorder whose condition is often a liability for her and who often needs to examine her own moral compass to question her allegiances to her political and/or military commanders. In fact, when we look at female characters like Carrie Mathison or Sonya Cross (from The Bridge), we need to reconsider Brett Martin’s statements about “diffcult men” in contemporary television to include “diffcult women” whose characterization and evolution is one of the main assets of these new programs. Another group of series where we can fnd Western allusions is part of the fantasy genre. Johnson noted the case of The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010–present), describing two Western-related situations: a saloon fght and the arrival of a protagonist wearing a hat and riding a horse into a zombie-dominated town. Johnson pointed out that “The Walking Dead may literally take place in Georgia, but, metaphorically, we are in the ‘Wild West,’ a state of being brought about by the collapse of civilization” (Johnson, Introduction 124). He also quoted Paul A. Cantor to explain that both the Western and the zombie genre encourage a “philosophical enquiry into the concept of ‘the state of nature . . . the pre-political existence of humanity’” (128–129), a situation that we can fnd both in frontier life and in the zombie postapocalypse. Without denying this

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function, I think that we can fnd another reason that the fantasy genre refers to the Western. The case we can consider is the Western references in Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011–present), the fantasy drama based on George R. R. Martin’s successful series of books A Song of Ice and Fire. Dan Hassler-Forest has pointed out that “one of the most remarkable transformations in this period of widespread acclaim for certain kinds of new televisual content has been the prominence of fantastical genres” and that one of the strategies followed by HBO has been the pursuit of “a cultural logic of gentrifcation.” The producers of Game of Thrones needed to overcome “the low-brow perception of the fantasy genre” (163) in order to broaden the audience and make the series ft into the format of premium cable “quality TV,” a concept that has “bestowed a bourgeois sense of respectability upon a medium too frequently maligned by highbrow audiences” (164). Hassler-Forest mentions a number of changes oriented to “gentrify” and “rebrand” a fantasy novel originally perceived as a product for immature teenagers and turn it into a product (“quality TV”) consumed by an adult audience. These changes include the promotion of a showrunner identity (emphasizing the presence of producers David Benioff and Daniel B. Weiss in promotional materials, to the detriment of George R. R. Martin); the creation of “gritty,” cynical characters and environment; and the introduction of nudity, sex, violence, and profanity. The adaptation therefore suggests “high-culture categories of authorship, novelistic narrative complexity, psychological realism and adult-oriented scenes of sex and violence [in order to] connect to a larger discourse of innovative quality television that is innovative and ‘edgy’ in ways that remain tasteful to bourgeois viewers” (173–174). Although Hassler-Forest does not mention it, I think it is important to point out that, in order to reach that broader “bourgeois” audience, the adaptation also encourages hybridity, downplaying the fantastic elements (particularly in its frst season) in favor of the pseudo-medieval imaginary and the historical aspects of the plot, making it easy for the audience to connect the series’ storyworld to the real world of European history and geography. This is also where the Western allusions ft in: as Garret Castleberry has pointed out, there are several scenes in the series that “pay tribute to the Western in form and style.” He mentions one where Arya and The Hound get into a tavern fght, reproducing a scene from Sergio Leone’s For a Few Dollars More, and points at both Arya and The Hound as loners in a frontier-like environment of order versus chaos, as well as at the general relationship between the mythological medieval imaginary and the Western cultural mystique. The genre hybridity that Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead display when they make these Western allusions can therefore be understood as a strategic way of broadening the audience base, “gentrifying” a fantasy book series and a zombie comic book, by offering the adult “quality TV” audience genre tropes and conventions that they can recognize and identify with.

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We can see how in the last groups of series we have considered (The Wire, Generation Kill, Homeland, The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones), we have moved away from the space of the American West and from the time frame of traditional Westerns. The allusions we have identifed may have an aesthetic, industrial, social, or political function, and, as mentioned before, I believe the term “post-Western” might be appropriate. This term was frst applied to cinema by Philip French in the 1970s and has been employed by a variety of critics since then to refer to different cultural products. Neil Campbell uses the term for flms produced after World War II, which are “coming after and going beyond the traditional Western while engaging with and commenting on its deeply haunting assumptions and values” (31). Post-Western flms thus take the classic structures and themes of the genre to interact, overlap, and interrelate in complex dialogical ways with them: “post-Westerns constantly and deliberately remind us of the persistent presence of the Western genre, its traces and traditions within the unravelling of new, challenging forms and settings” (309). The television shows we have described so far make limited use of these post-Western allusions, but we are going to look now at other series that, although not Westerns, are strongly infuenced by the genre. The transtextual references affect the generic semantics and syntax of the series, modifying the iconography, themes, characters, and plots of the text, therefore establishing a consistent, systematic dialogue with the Western genre and taking the spectator into the “space of refection” described by Campbell in order to comment on the genre’s “assumptions and values” (36). Following Genette’s ideas about transtextuality, we could say that these Western references are not simply intertextual or hypertextual, but architextual, since their purpose is to design a text as part of a genre. Let us remember that, for the French narratologist, architextuality refers to the “generic taxonomies” suggested by a text, infuencing the reader’s expectations and reception of the work, which is precisely what happens with the post-Western television series that we are going to analyze now. Justifed (FX, 2010–2015) is set in Kentucky, based on a short story (“Fire in the Hole”) by Elmore Leonard (who was also a producer of the series), and I believe it can be considered post-Western television because of the central role played by the Western genre. The Kentucky setting includes Harlan County and the Appalachian area that was once considered the “Kentucky frontier” (when Daniel Boone and other pioneers found a way to cross the Appalachians in 1775) and even the “frst American West;” it was advertised by FX as a “twenty-frst-century Wild West,” since it is depicted as an area where crime is hard to fght and the police forces need to resort to “justifed” violence, as we will see later. The protagonist is U.S. marshal Raylan Givens, played by Timothy Olyphant, the actor who played Sheriff Seth Bullock in Deadwood and who has been

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called a “postmodern Eastwood” (Barrett) because of his Western hero persona. The references to Westerns are obvious from the very frst scene, set not in Kentucky but in contemporary Miami, where Raylan, wearing his Stetson white hat, his cowboy boots, and a gun holstered at his hip, shoots a mafa lord in cold blood, albeit after giving him a chance to draw his gun frst; of course, this makes the killing “justifed,” not just for the hero but also for the Western-loving audience, even if Raylan is mildly punished by his bosses and transferred to his native Kentucky. Raylans’s hat, in particular (as we saw to some extent in The Bridge and Breaking Bad), becomes an instant metaphor for everything Western. For example, there is an episode called “Hatless,” when Raylan loses his hat, another episode where a criminal wears a hat like Raylan’s to incriminate him in a crime, and a confrontation with a thief, also quick on the draw, wearing a black hat. From that point on, several characters make references to his hat, and say things like “you’re the guy who pulled a Wild Bill,” or “Gary Coopered up on that guy in Miami” (Series 1, Episode 3). There is a poster of the movie Tombstone (1993), marshals and villains watching Westerns on TV, and nostalgic conversations about the Kentucky “Western” pioneer past, and about the contrast between marshals like Wyatt Earp fghting crime in the past and in the present (not unlike the refections of Tommy Lee Jones’s character in No Country for Old Men). The series is obviously a hybrid of crime drama and Western, with a touch of Southern grotesque that has been called “hillbilly noir,” but I believe that the accumulated transtextual references become a central part of the series (become architextual) and “justify” the use of the term post-Western. The Western-like Kentucky setting, the iconography, the characters (the contrast between Raylan and the other marshals in particular), the themes, and the plots (fghting modern crime using contemporary tools or “Old West” values) actually depend on the spatial and temporal relocation of Western conventions, therefore establishing a permanent dialogue with the genre and their “deeply haunting assumptions and values” (although not necessarily criticizing them), which is why we can call the series “post-Western.” For Johnson, however, the term postWestern implies an ethical position, a rewriting of Western conventions to “think differently and better” (129), and here Justifed does not ft the bill, since, as Justin A. Joyce points out, Justifed is “inherently conservative, deeply continuous of the traditional, triumphalist Western’s glorifcation of individuals taking justice into their own hands” (180). Johnson does consider another series to be post-Western, in both the “aesthetic and ethical sense” (127): Firefy (Fox, 2002–2003), a cult series created by Josh Whedon that was discontinued after the frst season, but had such strong success in its release to DVD format that Universal made a flm summarizing the script of the second season: Serenity (2005). The action is set in 2517, in a new solar system ruled by “the Alliance” after a civil war that has left a group of rebels moving in the “border

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planets,” far from the “civilized” central planets. This might sound like Star Wars (a flm series that is often associated with the Western and has been described as a “space opera” or even a “space Western”), but the Western in this series becomes, once again, crucial, architextual, since the iconography, the themes, the characters, and the plots all hinge on the spatial and temporal displacement of the genre. Life on the “border planets” includes horses, gunslingers, stagecoaches, cows, cowboys, and trains crossing deserts (all of this mixed with spaceships, technology, and weapons from the future). The characters use Western slang and Western stock situations, such as the saloon brawl, the train robbery, the bounty hunter, the town bully, and the spaceship itself, which is very much like the stagecoach in the John Ford flm (which inspired the choice of some of the characters, including the outlaw hero, the doctor, the priest, and the prostitute, as acknowledged by Whedon himself). It was defned by Emily Nussbaum as “an oddball genre mix that might have doomed it from the beginning: it was a character-rich sci-f western comedy-drama with existential underpinnings” (72), but I think that it fts within the framework of post-Westerns as we have defned them. Johnson has also related it to Campbell’s defnition of post-Westerns and their “deliberate jarring of expectations” (128) and stressed its redefnition of gender roles: “postWestern television shows such as Firefy move us beyond the traditional Western’s often-stereotypical depictions of masculinity and femininity and ask us ‘to think differently and better’ about the roles of women and men in society” (129). The series has also had a strong academic impact, as shown by the existence of a scholarly volume and several articles devoted to its use of language, gender, genre, religion, visual aesthetics, and fan reception. Finally, the last post-Western series that I would like to mention, and the most recent, is Westworld (HBO, 2016–present). It is based on the eponymous 1973 flm written and directed by Michael Crichton, which describes three amusement parks in the future (Westworld, Medievalworld, and Romanworld). The flm’s three “worlds” are populated with lifelike androids that are practically indistinguishable from human beings. For $1,000 per day, guests may indulge in any adventure with the android population of the park, including sexual encounters or a fght to the death. Unfortunately, as one may expect, the androids malfunction and begin killing visitors, but there is no hint of a Blade Runner–like rebellion. In the TV series, the frst big difference is that it basically deals with only one park (“Westworld”),4 and the second difference is the focus on the (mostly female) androids, now called hosts, and their rebellion. Described by HBO in their promotional material as “a dark odyssey about the dawn of artifcial consciousness and the future of sin,” the thematic emphasis is on artifcial intelligence, cognition, psychology, and philosophical issues related to posthumanism: the possibility of creating life, and the relationship between consciousness, identity and memory, or, in essence,

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what makes us human and different from androids. Another interesting aspect is how the series (like the flm before it) presents the park as the place where you can fulfll all your fantasies, by taking part in “100 interconnected narratives” or storylines, which is in fact an extension of what happens in popular narratives like Westerns, detective stories, or romantic novels. As John G. Cawelti explained in Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, readers and spectators (or, in this case, participants) fulfll their fantasies (respectively, power over life and death, knowledge over all mysteries, or eternal love) when reading, watching, or participating in popular stories. In this case, the guests (mainly male) can decide whether they want to go “black hat” or “white hat”: if they want to indulge in their worst perversions, or if they want to choose a cleaner fantasy. Westworld hybridizes science fction and Western conventions and takes the audience to the post-Western “space of refection” about the myth of the West and the role it has played in the United States and about the ethical issues related to reception and identifcation processes: how Western flm spectators have fulflled their fantasies by enjoying battles where Native Americans were massacred or women were mistreated, and how the TV series spectators can identify with the guests indulging in their worst fantasies. This discourse is articulated through transtextual references to Western flms, specifcally those by John Ford, because Westworld “is built upon the foundation of tropes, clichés, and cinematic shorthand that Ford’s work popularized” (Bady): it is flmed in Castle Valley, Utah, where Ford flmed his last four Westerns; the creator of the park is called (Robert) Ford, and he actually repeats the famous quote from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (“when the legend becomes true, print the legend”) to explain some of his decisions about the park; there is a female captive (Dolores) and a captivity subplot very similar to The Searchers, and the beginning of the frst episode also has a shot which is a reference to the famous doorway signature shots from The Searchers (which we also identifed in Breaking Bad). Finally, as in Ford’s last flms, Westworld “forces us to consider our understanding of the American ‘settler’ and his false distorted view of the American west as his land for the taking” (Wilson). By extension, I would add that it also forces us to consider our own role as spectators and consider our own sense of guilt when we feel that we have identifed with the guests in their perverted fantasies. Finally, it is interesting to note that the second season includes a more hopeful rewriting of the Western myth, when we see a group of Indian and white pioneers heading into a new different West-looking world called “The Valley Beyond.” In fact, it is a group of androids, who have been forced to play those roles before and have now been liberated, leaving the world of the West for a better realm where the peaceful coexistence of different races is possible. In conclusion, we have seen how the trend that Michael K. Johnson identifed in 2012 has continued in the last decade, so that we can still

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speak of a “rebirth” of the West and the Western in twenty-frst-century American television. Whether in the form of traditional or contemporary Westerns or in the form of post-Western hybrid formats (relocated away from their traditional spatial and/or temporal framework), the series we have mentioned are a testimony of the persistence of the Western myth in the American imaginary. We have also seen that most of these TV series are part of a general revisionist process to rewrite genre conventions in order to include groups (basically women and Native Americans) who had been excluded in traditional Westerns, to offer a less triumphalist and more thought-provoking vision of the settling of the West, and to take Westerns away from their traditional setting and into new, hybridized worlds.

Notes 1. This chapter is part of a project fnanced by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (PGC2018–094659-B-C21(MCIU/AEI/FEDER, UE)), the European Regional Fund (ERDF). It was also completed under the auspices of the research group REWEST funded by the Basque government (Grupo Consolidado IT1206–16). 2. Another Scandinavian TV series adapted to the American West is The Killing (AMC, 2011–2014) set in Seattle and adapted from Forbrydelsen (DR1, 2007–2012). 3. There is a ffth series inspired by Broen/Bron: Der Pass (Pagan Peak, Sky, 2018), a German/Austrian coproduction where the corpse is found on an alpine border between Germany and Austria, but the plot in this series departs fundamentally from the original. 4. Although in the second season we see a samurai world, called “Shogunworld,” and a “colonial fantasy” world, called “Tajworld.”

Works Cited Bady, Aaron. “‘Westworld,’ Race, and the Western.” The New Yorker, 9 Dec. 2016. www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-westworld-failed-thewestern. Accessed 31 Jan. 2019. Barrett, Jenny. “A Cop in a Cowboy Hat: Timothy Olyphant, a Postmodern Eastwood in Justifed.” Critical Perspectives on the Western: From a Fistful of Dollars to Django Unchained, edited by Lee Broughton, Roeman & Littlefeld, 2016, pp. 89–102. Campbell, Neil. Post-Westerns: Cinema, Region, West. U of Nebraska P, 2013. Castleberry, Garret. “Creating Game of Thrones’ Cross-Demographic Appeal through Genre-Mixing Iconicity.” In Medias Res, 23 Sep. 2014, http://mediacommons.org/imr/2014/09/09/creating-game-thrones-cross-demographicappeal-through-genre-mixing-iconicity. Accessed 31 Jan. 2019. Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. U of Chicago P, 1976. ———. The Six-Gun Mystique Sequel. Bowling Green State Press, 1999. Faucette, Brian. “Taking Control: Male Angst and the Re-Emergence of Hegemonic Masculinity in Breaking Bad.” Breaking Bad: Critical Essays on the

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Contexts, Politics, Style, and Reception of the Television Series, edited by David P. Pierson, Lexington Books, 2014, pp. 73–86. Genette, Gérard. Palimpsestes: Literature in the Second Degree. U of Nebraska P, 1997. Gilbert, Sophie. “What Godless Says about America.” The Atlantic, 27 Nov. 2017, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/11/godless-reviewnetfix/546719/?utm_source=feed. Accessed 31 Jan. 2019. Gilligan, Vince. “‘Breaking Bad’: Creator Vince Gilligan Explains Series Finale.” Entertainment Weekly, 14 Apr. 2014, https://ew.com/article/2014/04/14/vincegilligan-breaking-bad-fnale-better-call-saul. Accessed 31 Jan. 2019. ———. “Q&A: Creator Vince Gilligan: Part II,” www.amc.com/shows/breakingbad/talk/2008/02/qa-vince-gillig-1. Accessed 31 Jan. 2019. González, Jesús A. “‘Wiring’ the Wire: Transtextual Layers and Tragic Realism in the Wire.” The Journal of Popular Television, vol. 7, no. 3, 2019, pp. 279–297. Hassler-Forest, Dan. “Game of Thrones: Quality Television and the Cultural Logic of Gentrifcation.” TV/Series, vol. 6, 2014, pp. 160–177. Johnson, Michael K. Goodbye, “Bad”, 5 Oct. 2013, http://westlit.wordpress. com/2013/10/05/goodbye-bad/. Accessed 26 Jan. 2019. ———. “Introduction: Television and the Depiction of the American West.” Western American Literature, vol. 47, no. 2, 2012, pp. 123–131. Joyce, Justin A. “The Warp, Woof, and Weave of This Story’s Tapestry Would Foster the Illusion of Further Progress: Justifed and the Evolution of Western Violence.” Western American Literature, vol. 47, no. 2, 2012, pp. 175–199. Kollin, Susan. Captivating Westerns: The Middle East in the American West. U of Nebraska P, 2015. Limerick, Patricia. “The Adventures of the Frontier in the Twentieth Century.” The Frontier in American Culture, edited by James R. Grossman, U of California P, 1994, pp. 67–103. Martin, Brett. Diffcult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad. Penguin Books, 2013. McFadden, Kay. “Noble Intentions Can’t Save Spielberg’s ‘into the West’.” The Seattle Times, 10 June 2005, www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/noble-intentions-cant-save-spielbergs-into-the-west/. Accessed 31 Jan. 2019. Mittell, Jason. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York UP, 2015. Nussbaum, Emily. “A DVD Face-Off between the Offcial and the Homemade.” The New York Times, 21 Dec. 2003, p. 72. Saldívar, José David. Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. Wilson. “Wilson’s Movie Log: Westworld, John Ford and Doorways,” http:// wilsonh915.wordpress.com/2016/10/05/westworld-john-ford-and-doorways. Accessed 31 Jan. 2019.

17 The Basque Far West Expressions Through Art and Music Monika Madinabeitia1

There is not a single West, but many Wests (Wrobel and Steiner). There is not “a single imagined West” either (White 617), but many. Nonetheless, historians of the American West and the Hollywood industry have been some of the main manufactures of the imposing image we nowadays have of the Far West. This image comes with the also popularized belief that the conquest of the West resulted in the uniqueness of some people (Murdoch 2–3). However, the Anglo-Saxons were not the only ones to shape or to be shaped by the West, since, for starters, Native Americans and Hispanics were there before them; Chinese, Basques, Blacks, and Okies, among many others, also molded the West and were similarly molded by it. This chapter counterargues the monolithic and monologic conception of the West by exploring the Basque Far West as a constituent of the American West. Equally, this chapter also examines how Basque Americans have made use of art and music to orchestrate their own creation stories as individuals and as a collective. These expressions have become part of their own ethos within the Basque Far West. Equally, these formulations articulate the multiple ways of being both Basque and Westerner in the Basque American West. The myth of the West is usually referred to in the singular, although it actually involves many myths that were created not only in the West but also about the West. In other words, although critics often use the phrase “myth of the West,” there is not “just one single myth about the West” (Meldrum 2). The myth temporally referred to the frontier or westward movement—the meeting point between civilization and wilderness— which moved westward from the Puritan era to the 1890s. Spatially, the myth refers to a West settled at the end of the frontier era (ibid). International involvement, industrialization, and urban sprawl were considered a menace that loomed over the West that had been considered the source of life, both imaginary and substantive (Athearn 10). As a result, stories were re-created. The aim of these stories was for Westerners to see themselves reproduced the way they wanted to be. These stories gave Westerners the chance to reinvent and fantasize who they wanted to be. In fact, stories are like mirrors where we see ourselves refected. They help us see ourselves

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while they also allow us to go about the continual business of reimagining ourselves (Kittredge 159). The identity of a place is intimately related to the stories told about it, who they are addressed to, and which story turns out to be more dominant. This is the case of the history of West, which not only did it turn out to be dominant but it also created the values that are considered American: “exceptionalism, destiny, power, race, ecology, gender and identity” (Campbell & Kean 124–126). The West, the Old West, gave the tranquility of a past, and was the response to the need to hold on to roots to combat the encroaching uncertain future. That is why writers, historians, artists, and flmmakers, to mention just a few, looked back to the source of the West repeatedly and hence perpetuated an image of the West that would counterbalance its demeaning transformation into a mundane existence. The nineteenth century therefore became the imaginary land of boundless possibilities; its concomitant myth retained the defnition of unique American characteristics and values. Beginning in the mid-ninenteenth century, mass migration changed the largely Native American and Hispanic West of small villages and tribal communities. The movement of millions of Anglo-Americans, Black Americans, European immigrants, Mexican immigrants, and Chinese, among other groups, into the American West rearranged the social and physical landscape and altered the region’s history forever (Malone & Etulain 183). Similarly, the urban American West of the early twentieth century attracted large numbers of immigrants (Deutsch et al. 639). However, the Anglo-Americans and White ethnic immigrants used race as a way to ensure their own privileged social status. Rural, urban, and class divisions split western communities (White 320). The decline of Native American peoples, the enslavement of blacks, and the conquest of Mexico became the fate of those considered as inferior in all senses. It is within this historical and social viewpoint that iconic images heralded and stapled a monolithic view of the triumph and vision of the West. Artists such as George Catlin (1796–1872), Thomas Moran (1837–1926), the German Albert Bierstadt (1830–1902), Frederic Remington (1861–1909), or Charles (Marion) Russell (1864–1926) immortalized and featured the American West and contributed to the creation of its myth. Their portraits of Native Americans, cowboys, or landscapes have indeed fueled the imagination of a romantic West, even transnationally. They left a pictorial record of the West and fashioned America’s image of the vanished Western frontier. These artists, in particular Remington and Russell, are the most celebrated of all the artists of the American West. They were able to engineer artistically the frontier of limitless possibilities as it was turning into a more unexceptional region whose uniqueness lay in its past. This pictorial record certainly failed to capture the mundane West, the true West, the West of disillusionment, of idiosyncrasies, and complexities; that is, the West of immigrant people, the West of peoples that convey part of this real West that is invisible in its romantic construct. Basques,

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for example, have often been out of the offcial history and imagery of the mythic American West. They did not make it to the history in capital letters, but they were certainly there. In fact, THE NEW WORLD is a mosaic of ethnic groups. No period of its history, no sector of its society, none of its regions may be understood fully if immigrant traditions and ethnic heritages are ignored. . . . Certain ethnic and certain periods . . . have received comprehensive treatment while others have remained at the margins of awareness and concern. Such is the case with the Basques . . . despite the fact that they were among the frst Europeans to emigrate to the New World. (Douglass & Bilbao [1]) Nonetheless, as did many other immigrant communities and ethnic groups, Basques intimately participated in the shaping of the West and have now become a myriad of its mainstream. Basques have evolved from being just Basque to becoming both Basque and American. The Basque Country is considered the European region with the highest rate of overseas migration, primarily to the Americas, during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Douglass “Basque Immigration” 3). Basque modern immigration into the United States started by the middle of the nineteenth century. The news of the California Gold Rush promptly attracted Basques too, but in the 1850s a few Basque Argonauts in the California Gold felds became disillusioned with the miner’s lot and hence turned to sheep herding. Actually, Basques found opportunity in shepherding when they arrived in the West because it was a job hardly wanted. The middle period began in the 1870s, as Basque sheepmen spread throughout the American West, which lasted into the early twentieth century (Lane and Douglass [1]). Many of those Basques who came West and were hired as shepherds often had little idea of the practice and were not acquainted with the English language, which was not a requirement for the job and it therefore made it easier for the newly arrived Basques to be employed. Despite the fact that few Basque immigrants herded sheep back home, their agrarian background and values of hard work, perseverance, and endurance often allowed them to be successful in the sheep business. Because of this success, “While Basque Americans . . . engaged in mining, cattle ranching, construction, small-scale commerce, . . . by the turn of [the twentieth] century throughout much of the region ‘sheepherder’ was to mean ‘Basque’” (Douglass “Identity” 185). In the contemporary West although Basques are still associated with herding, they have become more American and have climbed the ladder and are now, for example, managers, bankers, lawyers, and entrepreneurs (Bieter and Bieter 4). “Because they were fuent in English and had attained far higher education that did their parents, second-generation Basques were

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very unlikely to seek work in sheepherding. Less than 5 percent of the second generation went into this occupation” (Miller 227); “[c]learly, the era of the Basque sheepherder in the American West is over” (Lane and Douglass 24–25). Another salient element to the Basque herding community is Basque hotels or boarding houses. Hotels became the closest thing to a home for many Basque shepherds—it was a “Home Away from Home” (Echeverria 1999). These houses offered lodging but were also the gathering point for frst-generation Basques. Basque hotels initially emerged to meet “the needs of an Old World Basque population of single males. . . . [T]hese needs went far beyond the simple provision of room and board, and the hotel became the single most important social institution for the immigrant Basque population in the American West” (Douglass and Bilbao 379). The typical Basque sheepherder during the modern period of Basque emigration in the American West was likely a disinherited son of a rural Basque farmstead, young, unmarried, and poorly educated. He was usually a sojourner who aimed to save up the money with which to return to Europe. Once back home, he plausibly married and acquired a farm or started a small business with his American stake. However, many changed their minds due to various reasons and remained in the American West; they often became more comfortable in the Anglo world and eventually bought a ranch or established a Basque boarding house in town. They went back or sent back to Europe for a bride. The hotels also became marriage mills that recruited single women as workers from the Basque Country. They rarely remained single for long, since the cycle of transhumant sheep was such that about half of the labor force was laid off for about fve months per year, during which time the unemployed sheepmen usually resided in Basque boarding houses (Douglass “Basque Immigration” 4–5). They reveled in Euskera, Basque music and dance, and received news from the Old Country, while they hoped to meet Basque women. No doubt, boarding houses “served many roles and flled needs for the sheepherders including as social, economic, ethnic identity maintenance, and information gathering environments” (Totoricagüena “Music”). Assuredly, boarding houses helped the Basque community create they own myths and ethos. Like other communities and ethnic groups, Basques created their own creation stories, which have been both transformed and transforming as Basque settlement in the American West is increasingly established. Music and art certainly play a key role in the creation story of Basque Americans in the West. Music and art occur in many settings and forms, although initially boarding houses were of crucial importance and they provided the venue for such bonds. Basques in the American West are clear examples of creative ways to negotiate and develop their identities and make meanings of their place in the world. Basques have largely assimilated into the mainstream, but they are also representations of being both American and Basque; in other words,

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they have earned the pride of their Basqueness without dismissing or degrading their American identity. The merriment of Basques—their music, meals, typical sports, and card games—have endowed the Basques in the West and have become primary elements of their celebrations and festivals. In fact, in the contemporary American West different types and sizes of Basque festivals are celebrated. These festivals give the Basques the opportunity to boost their ethnic identity publicly and privately; dancing events, singing, food, rural sports, and other types of competitions serve for this purpose. One of the Basque festivals worthy of mention is Jaialdi, which is celebrated in Boise, Idaho, every fve years. Jaialdi,“The World’s Largest Celebration of Basque Culture” is an exhibition of “Basque culture with dancing and musical performances, sporting events, authentic food and drink” (“Jaialdi”). First celebrated in 1987, it welcomes thousands of American Basques and non-Basques, as well as other Basques from all over the globe. Primarily third and further generations have had the possibility to proft from actual public manifestations without questioning their American identity. Jaialdi is an example of this public ethnic exhibition. As a matter of fact, the third generation, the ethnic generation, developed during a period of immense change in the United States. During 1960s and afterward, it became less fashionable to be simply American . . . and increasingly popular to be from somewhere, to have an identity that set one apart. (Bieter and Bieter 5) This was possible because “[i]n many ways, third-generation Basques had the best of both worlds; they could claim to be unique in the larger American society, yet still feel the security of a community” (ibid.). Certainly, the role of community is vital in the construction of Basque identity since “[c]ommunity is related to the search for belonging in the insecure conditions” (Delanty x–xi). Basque hotels and boarding houses initially played the role of a community and gave way to many of the key elements in the construction and maintenance of Basque identity. These social gatherings were the initial venue for many of the activities that are currently performed in both formal and informal contexts. For example, contemporary choirs are a more organized version of the singing that took place at boarding houses—Bi(h)otzetik (Boise) or Elgarrekin (San Francisco) come to mind as examples. Music in Boise, Idaho, also emerged from these informal social and community gatherings. Research indicates that “those who lived in areas with a concentration of Basques often participated in Basque American organizations that provided cultural education to the children of immigrants and organized events that celebrated Basque culture.” And added, “Some actively participated in traditional Basque dancing and musical groups” (Miller 226).

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In theories of ethnic identity and maintenance, music is often an ethnicity marker for further generations in their attempt to preserve aspects of their intergroup distinctive features (Totoricagüena, “Music”). The case of Jim “Jimmy” Jausoro is an exceptional illustration of identity awareness, maintenance, and preservation. Jimmy was born in 1921 in Nampa, Idaho, to parents that had come from the Basque Country. Jimmy’s neighborhood was predominantly Basque, and his family operated a boarding house, which, as previously indicated, worked as a social gathering venue. It was then common for Basques to casually meet there and perform dances, songs, mus card games, and music. As a matter of fact, Basques in boarding houses were Jimmy’s frst audience. Similarly, being around the Basque sheepherders and hearing their music provided Jimmy with learning opportunities. Before beginning a 40-year partnership with Domingo Ansotegui, Jimmy had already played with others and earned a reputation. Jimmy and Domingo played at boarding houses and Basque dancing events in southern Idaho. Jimmy eventually formed an offcial band in 1957, Jimmy Jausoro and His Orchestra, and they played Basque and contemporary music for dances, weddings, picnics, and Basque festivals around southern Idaho, eastern Oregon, and northern Nevada. Jimmy and Domingo also provided music and entertainment for Basque folk dance groups—the Oinkaris and the Boise’ko Gasteak children’s dancing groups—for more than 40 years. In their own quiet way, Jimmy and Domingo contributed substantially through their music to the awareness of Basque people and their heritage (ibid.). Others followed the tradition that Jimmy had instilled within the Basque community in Boise. That is the case of the bands Ordago, formed in 1986, and Gaupasa, late 1990s. Amuma Says No has been playing until recently, while Kalimotxo Cowboys is an emerging band that plays every now and then. These music groups no doubt refect the aim to conceive their own little Basque Country at home (Baily and Collyer 38). Certainly, “music is central to the diasporic experience, linking home and hereland with an intricate network of sound . . . [P]eople identify themselves strongly, even principally, through their music” (Slobin 243). There are many other Basque American music bands and musicians throughout the West that re-create new meanings and react with enthusiasm against the possible stagnant identity of the Basque community. Noka (California), Mercedes Mendive (Elko, Nevada), David Romtvedt (Buffalo, Wyoming), or Amerikanuak (California), to mention just a few, cross boundaries and create a strong sense of belonging. They contribute to the imagery and fantasy of a collective and individual ancestry and engage in a sense of ethnic belonging. Music has the power to trigger visceral reactions, even when the lyrics are not understood (Frith 303), as when songs are sung in Euskara and the audience may not be fuent in it. On the whole, music entices a sense of collective, a sense of community and belonging; it is “a key to identity because it offers, so intensely, a sense of both self and

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others, of the subjective in the collective” (ibid. 295). Similarly, “Memory, perception, cognitive thinking, historical experience, and other material relations, and immaterial forces all intersect with individuals’ sensory grasp of the world” (Hayes-Conroy and Hayes-Conroy 465). Music creation, performance, and expression, as well as the audience’s engagement, contribute “to the shared memories and experiences and connectedness of the diaspora Basques” (Totoricagüena, Identity 127). The performers induce a strong sense of “affective communication” (Livingstone and Thomson 7), which is also received with an intense feeling of “affective engagement” (ibid.). Indeed, music has the power to ignite deep emotional and, even, visceral responses, in which the body becomes a musical instrument and weaves together times and places—as well as identities. Likewise, art is to be included within the ethnic identity expressions that have helped Basque Americans to develop their own distinctive cultures. This is the case of Frank Goitia, born in the 1940s in Idaho, Boise. Goitia’s paintings express his growing up in Boise as one of the fve children born to Basque parents. His mother, Ana Gabiola, was born in Idaho but then moved back to the Basque Country with her parents. Because of the civil war they all returned to Idaho, as did many other Basques at the time. Gabiola worked at a boarding house in Gooding, Idaho, and met Patxi Goitia, a shepherded who had come to Idaho from the Basque Country in 1920, at a sheepherds’ picnic in the late 1930s. Frank Goitia’s paintings are based on his memory, and they embody a visceral way of engaging with himself and his community; both Basque and American. They are the result of affective engagement and communication and they put together pieces of a community that struggled to achieve the American Dream. Likewise, Goitia’s pale tints are unconventional and untraditional in the Basque American community, which disrupts the romantic and single way of being Basque and American. In 1945, the Goitia family took over the Royal Hotel, which sat where the City Hall of Boise now stands. They ran it until the early 1970s, when it was demolished due to urban renewal. Both the Royal Hotel and downtown Boise played a signifcant role for Frank Goitia and his siblings. In fact, the main source of Goitia’s work lies in the memory of his childhood in these places. For example, Goitia remembers visiting his mother’s friend, Juana Echevarria, at her house. Juana was another Basque in Boise and her house sat in what is now the parking lot adjacent to Bar Gernika, also in downtown Boise. Goitia’s painting of Juanita encloses details such as a cross on the wall and Juanita stoically sitting on her sofa with one of her legs bandaged. That is how Goitia remembers her. That is how he paints her. In actual fact, Goitia works from memory, since most of those places no longer exist. He captures those memories in his art. He constructs meaning through memory. Goitia started painting in 1970, when he was a student at Boise State University. One of his teachers told him to paint what he knew best;

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to Goitia that was his life in a Basque boarding house in downtown Boise. His dad’s Basque friends would ask if he could paint pictures of their farms, baserriak, in the Basque Country. They would give the then 18-year-old Goitia worn photos of their baserriak back home, photos that they had dearly brought with them across miles and miles and had kept as relics in Boise. In turn, Goitia would give them back paintings that they could hang in their homes in Boise. Goitia no doubt helped many Basques in Boise to emotionally re/connect with their old family homes and their homeland. In his own quiet way, Goitia’s artistic expression operated as a means to anchor the Boise Basques’ affective engagement through stepping into their own past. Thanks to Goitia’s paintings their new homes became forums where the “here” and “there” blended and became more explicit. Some of Goitia’s paintings reveal the life he remembers at his family’s boarding house: how it was the residence of his family, but also the medium for many Basques to socialize and feel safe to speak Basque. At weekends people, mainly Basques, would pay to enter what used to become a dance foor, thanks to the jukebox they had at the hotel. Goitia and his siblings saw adults go up the stairs, dance, drink, speak Euskara, meet their signifcant others, and feel at home. This same staircase was where Goitia learned Euskara from his father, Patxi. As one of this other painting shows, they held hands and went up the stairs while both father and son counted “one, two, three, four” in Euskara for each step up. Hence the title of this painting, “Bat, bi, hiru, lau.” This painting also brings back the joy Goitia felt while wearing the cowboy boots his father had bought. His father Patxi had gone to someone’s funeral out of the city and on his way back he saw some cowboy boots he fancied. He bought a pair and hoped they would ft one of his fve children. Frank Goitia was the lucky one. Goitia still remembers the merriment he felt while wearing his new boots. This gaiety is also represented in this painting, where the receiver can actually feel the affective bond of the moment. Goitia has exhibited his pastel-colored paintings at coffee shops and restaurant art shows. His paintings are currently displayed at his brother Lui’s Hairlines Lui, also located in downtown Boise. As Lui tells,2 he was the youngest of the fve siblings. He still remembers how he was picked on at school because he was a Basque kid in Boise. In fact, and as already explained, many second-generation Basques were forced to be Basque at home and American in public. The Basque community is now fully established in the American West, and it is now safe to claim to be Basque American, but it was not always so. Lui’s display of his brother’s work at his business certainly indicates the shift from being ashamed of one’s heritage and keep it at home to being able to publicly manifest one’s ethnic roots. Goitia’s paintings have assuredly become the means to positively project on one’s ethnic ancestry and feel proud of it.

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Individuals that show a positive image of themselves due to their ethnicity are likely to maintain and keep their ethnic identity and group affliation (Tajfel 1978). This is a signifcant factor in the Basque identity maintenance (Totoricagüena, “Agents” 130), in which “individuals . . . are vested in wanting to be associated with positive categories because these confer positive self-evaluation and create feelings of self-esteem” (Padilla 10). The costly experience that frst and second generations went through, and their desire to ft into the dominant group by minimizing stigmatizing conditions (ibid. 23), has induced a Basque American “community without cost” (Waters 149). It is within this social and cultural context that Goitia’s paintings become key ingredients in harmoniously re/connecting with one’s own past. The illustrated examples of Basque American art and music exhibit how the hostland and the homeland blend; additionally, these expressions raise opportunities for both the real and the imaginary to gather. The combination of “memory, fantasy, narrative, and myth” (Hall 226) provides the chance for stories of e/immigration, settlement, adaptation, and reinvention to concentrate and combine in multiple ways and formats. These stories are shared by different generations and individuals, as well as collective identities. Similarly, the Basque American production of music and art is also the outcome of artists reinterpreting “their tradition within a new environment: . . . a meeting within between the home and local tastes” (Burns 129); that is, the reality of what has become their new homes in the Far West plays a vital role in their artistic choices, which may not always be the trend in the homeland. For the frst generations, music and art were usually a way to go home; it was for them the possibility to feel “home away from home” (Echeverria). However, although generally unaware of it, they were putting into practice home practices in what had already become their home. The artistic expression of the Basque American West lies on a liminal zone, on a third space, a passage that crosses and allows cross-cultural and cross-identities to emerge in the “‘in-between’ reality” (Bhabha 19), in a hybrid identity. Basque American artistic and musical expressions entail their own autonomy. Rather than pressured to imitate iconic images of the West or of the homeland, art and music can be the means to express one’s own unique biography and publicly share it with the community. To put it another way, Basque American music and art are “developing unique forms of group expression rather than reviving previously forsaken ones” (Douglass, “Basque” 145); thus they should not be regarded as ethnic revival, for that would be too a simplistic view of a much more complex matter. The endeavor to connect and shorten the divide between “here” and “there” is not merely a practice to copy or imitate the homeland; on the contrary, it is an attempt to feel at home, at one’s own home, with different variations and combinations of both places, here and there. Mercedes Mendive’s music or Goitia’s works, to mention just a few, are

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vivid examples of these combinations and their undertaking to feel at home, etxean. Indeed, the Basque American community in the West displays uncountable examples of elaborating an identity which is guided by two pivotal grounds that take place simultaneously: the need to be unique and the need to belong (Brewer). This new identity discloses at least another new one, which opposes and combats the conception of diaspora Basques, their music, and artistic expressions as a diluted version of the homeland Basque identity. They have also been able to fght back the exclusive and monologic view that articulates the West as the core of individualism, success, and masculinity; in other words, they disrupt the image of the West as the sole outcome of the selective discourse produced by the dominant group. The Far West is but a “multilayered,” “multiaccented,” “agglomerative” (Campbell Cultures 2), and “rhizomatic” (Campbell Rhizomatic) space whose various cultures exist both separately and in dialogue with all of the others around them. The West is not a single identifable unit of place, but rather a space of paradox. The West is built and driven by that multiplicity (Deutsch et al. 666). Certainly, Basque Americans have developed a way to exercise adaptation, creativity, and resilience. Both music and art are some of the means to hold onto Basque ethnicity and to celebrate one’s own individual and collective ethnic identity within a West that is inhabited by diversity and multiplicity and a homeland that is both imaginary and real. These Basque American practices are the outcome of a new creation story, in which, same as with music or art making, performance, and engagement, Basque diaspora members are making identity choices that suit them and their audiences; that is, they choose to act and react, bearing in mind their individual and collective voluntary affliation choices, whichever these might be. Younger and older audiences are brought together thanks to different musical and artistic expressions and through these manifestations their individual and collective biographies and histories remain alive. These manifestations no doubt disrupt the idea of a single imagined romantic West and tell us about the mundane Far West.

Notes 1. This chapter is part of a project fnanced by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (PGC2018–094659-B-C21(MCIU/AEI/FEDER, UE)), the European Regional Fund (ERDF). It was also completed under the auspices of the research group REWEST funded by the Basque government (Grupo Consolidado IT1206–16). 2. Interview with Frank and Lui Goitia, Boise, Idaho, March 2018.

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Index

Abásolo, José Javier 195 Abbey, Edward 6; and environmental activism 63–66; and environmental destruction 58–63; and idea of the West 66–67; and nature 55–58 activism: environmental 54–55, 63–66; political 40–41; see also Civil Rights Movement Adams, Ansel 225, 234 African Americans 84–85, 91; and healing narratives 95–97; and women 92–93; see also racism; slave narratives alcoholism 47–48 Alexie, Sherman 6, 36–50, 247 allegories 6, 113, 130n11, 145n3 Allende, Isabel 7, 120, 125–129, 130n7, 130n10 American Indian Movement (AIM) 41; see also Native Americans Anheuser-Busch 145n6 Atwood, Margaret 134, 144n1 Atxaga, Bernardo 200–202 bandits 123–124, 129n5, 185; see also outlaws; Zorro, El Basques 8–9, 200–202, 267–276; see also Atxaga, Bernardo Beck, Ulrich 163–164, 173n10, 174n13 beef industry 15, 138; see also cowboys; herding Benjamin, Walter 224 Bierstadt, Albert 244, 245, 268 Blanco, Miguel Ángel 243, 246, 249–250 borders 165–166, 172, 188, 191, 194–196, 257–258

Bourdieu, Pierre 135–136, 144 Boyle Heights 24–25, 28 Breaking Bad 255–256 bridges 59–60, 257–258 Bridge, The 257–258 Buffalo Bill 192, 198–200, 247–248 Butler, Olivia E. 7; and science fction 85–87; and slave narratives 84–85; and traumatic memory 88–95 Cabeza de Vaca, Alvar Nuñez 192, 249 California 72, 94, 120, 123–126, 130n10, 171–172, 269 canonical literature 11–13 capitalism 24, 56–64, 66, 67, 114, 142 Caribou Ranch 16–17, 18n4 cars 230–236 Catalonia 198 Catlin, George 243, 245, 250, 268 caves 130n11 Cervantes, Lorna Dee 26–27, 33 Chicanos 25–26, 29–31, 230–236 chronotypes 189n1 Cisco Kid, The 139 cities 23, 33; and Native Americans 36–42; see also Los Angeles; postmetropolis Civil Rights Movement 40–41 Cole, Thomas 244 colonialism 125–128, 181, 226–229; and Jamaica 109–110; and Los Angeles 28; and Scotland 189n4; see also imperialism Colorado 16–17, 57, 61, 137–139, 141–144 Cooder, Ry 33 Cooper, Fenimore 178, 180–181 cosmopolitanism 163–164, 170

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Index

cosmopolitan moment 168, 174n14 cowboys 193–194, 224, 246–247, 249, 272; see also Wayne, John cultural capital 140–141 Curtis, Edward S. 246–247, 250 Dairy Queen 224 dams 57, 58–59 Deadwood 252, 253 del Campo, Laura 33n5 Denver, John 16 Derrida, Jacques 157 deserts 55–58, 59–63, 66 diasporas 36–39, 148–149; see also immigrants Didion, Joan 33n5 dime novels 72, 82, 123, 248 Django 103 dons 107, 111, 117n8 Earth, Wind and Fire 17 Eastwood, Clint 106–108 ecoterrorism 63; see also activism Eden 234–235 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 75 England 184–188 environment: and activism 63–66; destruction of 58–63 epic moment 181–182, 184 Erdrich, Louise 241, 246–247 ExxonMobil 14 Falls of Saint Anthony 245 femininity see women Firefy 262–263 Foote, Mary Hallock 7, 70–82 France 194 freeways 23–33, 33n5; see also highways Fremson, Ruth 236–237 frontiers 10, 53, 109–111, 124, 138; defnition of 172n2; and diversity 172; narratives of 192; in Westerns 180–184, 188; without boundaries 161–162 Fukuyama, Francis 159n6 Gaddis, William 137 Game of Thrones 260 gender 215–216, 253–254; see also masculinity; women General Allotment Act (1887) 39 Generation Kill 259

genre 134–135, 153, 159n2; and Westerns 180–189; see also road movies; science fction; Spaghetti Westerns; speculative fction geographic information systems (GIS) 13 Georgia 259 Germany 207–209 Glen Canyon Dam 57 Godless 253–254 Goitia, Frank 273–276 Grand Canyon 245 Guercio, Jim 16–17 gunslingers 106–107, 116, 161; see also bandits Guthrie, A.B. 15 Hamid, Moshin 8, 162, 164–172 Harjo, Joy 8, 225–227, 236–237 herding 211, 269–270 highways 6, 24, 61; see also freeways Hill, Thomas 244 Holland, Agniezska 8, 206–210, 212 Hollenbeck Heights 25 Hollywood 4, 107–109, 246 homes 24, 223, 233–234; and memories 27–28 homosexuality 46, 48, 151 hotels 270 hunting 210, 214–218 Hussein, Saddam 234–235 Idaho 76, 271–274 identity 267–268, 270–271, 273–276; see also African Americans; gender; masculinity; Native Americans; women immigrants 162–163, 165–166, 173n4, 268; see also diasporas imperialism 4, 8, 43, 110, 126, 161, 172n1, 173n3, 241, 244; see also colonialism Indian Relocation Act (1956) 40 Indian Reorganization Act (1934) 39 industrialization 56–57, 59–63; see also capitalism; highways intersectionality 92–93 Into the West 252–253 Iraq 234–235 irrigation 75–78, 225, 238n1 Jackson, Henry 245 Jaialdi 271

Index Jamaica 103–117 James, Marlon 7, 103–105 Jausoro, Jim 272 Jefferson, Thomas 172n1 John, Elton 16, 17 journalism 77–78 journeys 6 Justifed 261–262 Kant, Immanuel 164, 173n9 Kentucky 261–262 Killing, The 265n2 Kingston 105–109 Kristeva, Julia 89, 94 Lamport, William 121–122, 128 landscapes 6–7, 148–155, 201, 225; and photography 227–235 languages 140–141 legends 7, 30, 120, 123, 264; see also myths; Zorro, El Lewis, Henry 245 Longmire 254, 255 Los Angeles 23–33; see also cities lowriders 230–236 Manifest Destiny 110–111, 162, 242 Manley, Michael 105 Marley, Bob 104, 106 Martin, George R. R. 260 Marx, Leo 211 masculinity 214–215, 256; and gunslingers 116; and Native Americans 46; and social bandits 124; see also cowboys; gender; gunslingers; social bandits Massop, Claude 107 May, Karl 192 May, Theresa 173 McCulley, Johnston 7, 120–123, 124–126, 128, 129n2, 130n7 McMurtry, Larry 224–225, 227 memories 23–24, 25–26, 88–95 mesas 70–71, 73, 76, 79, 81–82 Mexican Americans see Chicanos Mexican Inquisition 121–122, 129n1 Mexico 121, 257–258; see also Chicanos; Zorro, El mining 59, 72, 123, 137–138, 142–143 Molina, Antonio Muñoz 249 Montalbetti, Christine 193–195 Moran, Thomas 268

281

Morrison, Toni 117n10, 241 movies 4–5, 247, 249; see also television; Westerns Muir, John 54 Murrieta, Joaquin 123–124, 129n3, 129n4, 130n6 music 9, 16–18, 155, 272–273 myths 4–6, 53, 152–153, 267–269; see also frontiers; legends; noble savages Native Americans 6, 241, 246–248, 268; and Allende, Isabel 126–127; in art 244–245; challenges facing 45–50; and change 42–45; in cities 39–42; and colonial identity 145n5; and diaspora 36–39; and racism 122; and television 252–253; and Westerns 212–213 nature 53, 55–58, 74–75; see also environment nature writing 53–54, 56–58, 66 Nevada 201–202 New Mexico 225–226, 229–234, 255 noble savages 37, 48, 124 Obama, Barack 242 oil 15, 59–60, 253; see also environment; mining O’Keefe, Georgia 248 outlaws 66, 107, 113, 206; see also bandits; gunslingers Pacifc Northwest 152, 237–238; see also Seattle paintings 244–246, 273–274 Palacio, Riva 121 palimpsests 28 pan-Indianism 38, 49; see also Native Americans pastorals 211–212 Phillis, Tristan 105 photography 223–227, 244; and Eden 234–236; and lowriders 229–234; and Native Americans 246–248; and women 227–228, 236–237 plantations 93–94; see also slave narratives; slavery Plato 130n11 Poland 207–210 Pollock, Jackson 248 portraits 246 postmetropolis 23, 24, 29; see also cities

282

Index

post-Westerns 261–265 poverty 47, 121, 157, 162 punishment 125 Pynchon, Thomas 7–8, 33n5, 134–145 queerness 151–154, 159n4, 159n7; see also homosexuality racism 268; and freeways 25–26; and Native Americans 45–46; see also African Americans; Chicanos; Native Americans ranches 15, 16 rape 90, 92, 93, 123 reading 95–97 reality shows 255 refugees 162, 165, 174n12; see also diasporas; immigrants regionalism 13–14, 15, 228–229 Remington, Frederick 243, 246, 250, 268 reservations 36, 39, 44, 49; see also Native Americans revenge Westerns 217 Ridge, John Rollin 123 Río Grande 225, 238n1 risk societies 163, 169, 173n7 road movies 159n2 Robin Hood 120; see also social bandits Romero, Luci 195 Rubenstein, Meridel 8, 223, 227, 229–236, 238n4 Rubio, Juan Carlos 195–196 Rude Boys 117n2 rural erotics 159n5 Russell, Charles 268 science fction 7, 85–87, 90, 97, 134, 144n1 Scotland 183–188 scotomas 28, 34n6 Scott, Walter 8, 178–180, 183–189 Seaga, Edward 105 Searchers, The 264 Seattle 45, 48; see also Pacifc Northwest Serenity 262–263 settler colonialism 11; see also colonialism

sexuality 151–154, 156, 158, 159n7; see also homosexuality Shakespeare, William 147 shepherds 211, 269–270 slave narratives 84, 97; see also African Americans slavery 7, 86, 91–92; and Mexico 121; and reparations 169, 174n15 Slotkin, Richard 110, 117n9, 161, 197, 199, 211 social bandits 123–124, 129n5 Solé, Jordi 198–200 Son, The 253 Spaghetti Westerns 4, 103–104, 110, 256 Spain 4–5, 195–196 Spanish Inquisition 129n1 speculative fction 134 Spielberg, Steven 252 spirituality 56 Spivak, Gayatri 126, 129, 226 Stegner, Wallace 70 style 14–15 television shows 8–9; and postWesterns 261–265; and Westerns 252–261 Texas 224 Thoreau, Henry David 54 Thyssen Museum 241–244, 250 time travel 85, 90, 97 Tokarczuk, Olga 206–207 Tompkins, Jane 194, 215 Toypurina 130n10 Transcendentalism 76, 81 transnationalism 191–193, 243–244 trauma 25, 84–85, 88–95; and healing narratives 95–97 Trump, Donald 196 Van Sant, Gus 8, 147–158 Vermont 234 vigilantism 125; see also social bandits violence 31–32, 168, 218; see also bandits; gunslingers Viramontes, Helena María 6, 23–33 Walking Dead, The 259 Wayne, John 107, 153, 246 Welles, Orson 158n1 Western American Literature 12

Index Western Literature Association (WLA) 10–12 Westerns 4–5, 249; and genre 7, 178–189; and Jamaica 103–117; and Poland 207–210; revenge 217; and television 252–256 Westworld 263–264 whips 130n8 white gaze 245–246 wilderness 17, 53, 59, 61, 66–67, 74–75, 86, 93, 161, 181–182, 267; see also frontiers Wild West shows 198–200; see also Buffalo Bill

283

Wire, The 258–259 women 78, 214–216; Basque 270; and intersectionality 92–93; Native American 247; and photography 223, 227–228; and pioneer fantasies 71–72; and television 253–254 Wyoming 254 Yamashita, Karen Tei 33n5 Yellowstone 254–255 Yosemite 244 Zappa, Frank 18n4 Zorro, El 7, 120–125