Part Three
REDISCOVERING THE WEST
INTRODUCTION
Part Three
REDISCOVERING THE WEST
INTRODUCTION
EXPLORATION CONTINUES . The land is largely settled,
the water must be filtered, and the sky vacillates
between startling blue and grainy brown,
yet exploration continues.If nature itself seems diminished by
development, and survival appears uncertain, exploration nonetheless
continues, with a richer cast and an enlarged literary perspective.
The West has become less a dream, more a place, or collection
of places, with pressing problems, limited potentials and high
drama. It is in process of rediscovery.
The process itself has been far from pleasant because westerners,
like other Americans, have seen national leaders assassinated,
observed fellow citizens brutalized because they sought to exercise
constitutionally guaranteed rights, viewed in living color a
disillusioning war and its domestic effects, created smog and
breathed it; they have also been forced to recognize that they
live from moment to moment threatened by nuclear catastrophe.
Illusions have been cut away by forces as inexorable as acid
rain. Like it or not, western writers have had to face the problems
of survival in the late twentieth century. If they don't enjoy
the luxury of dwelling in an imagined past, they may with reason
hope that the actual historic West has prepared them for the
present.
One writer who seems to symbolize contemporary western literary
exploration is William Eastlake (treated at length in Part Two
of this history), whose fiction has as much in common with absurdist,
postmodern expression as with traditional western writing. His
work preceded that of other revisionists such as Tom Robbins,
John Nichols, Sam Shepard, and Richard Brautigan. Moreover, if
his early writing seemed to lean toward Jack Kerouac's vision
of a harmonious, multiracial society in the West, a society based
on Mexican, Native American, and "hip" or counter-cultural
white values, it quickly evidenced a hard edge that had been
tempered by Eastlake's varied experiences in the previous three
decades and that would achieve a startling maturity (and an occasional
shrillness) during the 1960s.
The opening lines of Eastlake's first published novel, Go
in Beauty (1956)–
Once upon a time there was time. The land here
in the Southwest had evolved slowly and there was time and were
great spaces. Now a man on horseback from atop a bold mesa looked
out over the violent spectrum of the Indian Country into a gaudy
infinity where all the colors of the world exploded, soundlessly.
"There's not much time," he said.
–contrast the temporal assumptions of
white Americans with the great scheme of nature. They also revealed
to readers at the time the emergence of a writer who broke paradigms,
who guided his audience on an oblique journey. Like Lewis and
Clark, Eastlake stands at a threshold–but not of discovery,
of rediscovery, and a distinguished cadre of younger writers
has followed his lead.
This explorer was no innocent youth when his first novel was
published. Born in 1917, Eastlake, like many others in his generation,
had been scarred by the Great Depression and bloodied by World
War II. Unlike many others, however, his vision extended beyond
the past to a present that required judgment on new terms, and
a future whose terms seemed unimaginable. Willing to face the
possibility of nuclear devastation and environmental degeneration,
William Eastlake was and remains a modern man coming to terms
with modern conditions.
Because he has long since lost his own naïveté, Eastlake
insists that readers test theirs, taking an unflinching look
at the contemporary West and the world of which it is a part.
This second awareness–the West as part of a larger and interrelated
world–is a salient characteristic of contemporary western
writing. Like Eastlake, many present-day authors are so talented
that their discomforting ruminations cannot be simply shrugged
off. Among other signals of literary maturity, Eastlake was one
of the first western writers to introduce ethnically diverse
casts, to express deep concerns over possible ecological disaster,
to pose serious questions concerning American foreign policy,
and to introduce both the ironic humor and the sometimes harsh
language of contemporary letters to western writing.
As another contemporary giant, Wright Morris, has pointed out,
truth is the business of fiction and of art in general. A much
earlier American genius, Emily Dickinson, had poetically advised
to "tell the truth but tell it slant." Eastlake and many
younger writers as well have told the truth but told it slant,
for slant often seems the only acceptable way of dealing with
today's world. Irony, for example, is frequently Eastlake's tool
as he winds his "radical" views into revisionist fiction;
two white men hunting eagles engage in the following conversation:
"Eagles and Indians at one time controlled this whole country,
Drago; you couldn't put out a baby or a lamb in my grandfather's
time without an Indian or an eagle would grab it. Now we got
progress. Civilization. That means man is free to go about his
business. Build a dam in Indian Country. Motorboats. Varoom varoom
varoom! That's the music of progress, Drago."
"It is?" (Dancers in the Scalp House, p. 25)
Historically, many of the most stimulating western writers have
been transplanted easterners–Owen Wister, Helen Hunt Jackson,
Nathanael West–and at least some of their work has been
the product of disillusionment, of their own discoveries that
the actual West and the West they expected were not the same.
Eastlake, born and raised in New Jersey, fits the pattern, but
he has found more than he expected: more beauty, more space,
but also more danger of losing those things. He has also added
a provocative element with his suggestion that places seek their
writers, rather than vice versa, and he has been but one of a
large number of easterners who have offered varied, sometimes
innovative views of the contemporary West: Gerald Locklin, Edward
Abbey, Gerald Rosen, among many others.
Finally, it is the questing of Eastlake and his peers, not their
conclusions, that is most important, their questing and their
willingness to employ contemporary philosophy and literary techniques
to examine a region always in danger of romanticization. The
fiction of William Eastlake exemplifies many of the most important
directions of recent western writing: harsh, modern language;
fluid characterization; nonlinear plots; magical realism; a necessary
degree of irreverence. Beneath the flippant tone that he and
more than a few of his contemporaries sometimes employ dwells
a reverence for the land and a desire to shock westerners and
non-westerners alike into survival. Activism not angst is
their advice. Eastlake concludes Dancers in the Scalp House
this way: "The undiscovered country is . . . the ease
and wonderment at life's mysteries. It is the only country that
abides." In seeking his undiscovered country, William Eastlake
helps guide the rediscovery of the West.
Unlike Eastlake, many of the most admired authors from earlier
generations had retained links to the original discovery of the
West, to the classic frontier, and their work reflects its vigor
and naïveté. Moreover, a large number of critics
and scholars sharpened their own tastes on similar experiences
in literary fashions produced in response to those fading realities.
Contemporary writing, like contemporary life, may offend them.
For example, one respected critic recently asserted that "There
is no one `coming up' in Western letters who is even close to
indicating that he or she will one day be in the same league
with Clark, Waters, Fergusson, or Stegner."
Since it is impossible to project
how important any author may become, who is to say that the large
and increasingly heterogeneous mix of contemporary writers doesn't
include individuals who evidence as much promise as the four
mentioned above? More to the point, however, is that present-day
authors do not write like earlier artists, nor do they
view their region in the same ways their predecessors did. Frequently
they approach old subjects in new fashions or from novel perspectives–Richard
Brautigan's packaged trout stream, Wayne Ude's omnipresent coyote,
or Joan Didion's freeways to nowhere–and they have expanded
the range of both expression and subject matter in their continuing
rediscovery of region.
They have also affronted more than a few traditionalists: Black
cowboys? Cluttered cities? Uppity women? Hippy communes? Polluted
streams? Drugs? Sex? Rock 'n' roll? Where will it all end? Many
modern writers are attacked not for their art but for the world
they reflect. Critics are doomed to respond to change rather
than initiate it, especially in an electronic age when change
seems constantly to accelerate for, as has always been true,
artists create reality as they explore it.
A major factor in the recent intensification of literary exploration
has been the nationalization of American culture. No longer dominated
by the East Coast corridor, national values and expressions are
undergoing a homogenization that, in turn, has created an awareness
of endangered sectional uniqueness and led to awakened local
sensibilities. Regional anthologies, regional literary magazines,
and regional book reviews are being published in increasing numbers,
most featuring a distinct sense of place, many examining specific
western subregions and suggesting that we'd best know what we're
losing before allowing it to be lost. In Goodbye to a River
(1960), written on the cusp of rediscovery, Texan John Graves
points out:
. . . The man who cuts his roots away and denies that they were
even connected with him withers into half a man. . . . It is,
I think, necessary to know in that crystal chamber of the mind
where one speaks straight to oneself that one is or was that
thing, and for any understanding of the human condition it's
probably necessary to know a little about what that thing consists
of.
One product of such knowledge is a West not defined by the illusions
or desires of outsiders, but by western experiences–and
illusions–a West reexplored by westerners. Writers, who
in an earlier time might have believed that the stuff of truly
memorable literature was somehow limited to Europe or the eastern
seaboard, recognize that their own perceptions and the places
that shaped them offer universality; the short stories of Raymond
Carver, for example, touch modern people, whether or not they
share his West Coast roots. James D. Houston's Preface to California
Heartland (1978) eloquently expresses the philosophy behind
this generative regionalism: "The region is real. It can
be any region. Somewhere between the freeways and the fast-food
chains, somewhere out behind the interchangeable supermarkets
of America, the regions are still there. . . . The place can
give shape to the writing. And the writing in turn helps us see
and grasp the place."
A number of other interrelated developments have emerged from
contemporary exploration. The first is a recognition that the
traditional West may itself be a fiction, the creation of myth-peddling
popular writers and slick cartographers unconcerned with local
realities. What actually exists is a series of related but distinct
subregions, many Wests: coastal California's "westernness"
is distinct from South Dakota's, which is in turn different from
northern Arizona's.
If regions are distinct, so are experiences, values, and styles:
all westerners don't wear Stetsons and ride pintos. As a result,
writers have tested western stereotypes of late, and found greater
complexity and richness than previously acknowledged. In works
such as Abbey's The Brave Cowboy (1956) or Max Evans's
The Rounders (1960), traditional roles are examined in
unromantic, modern arenas; Thomas Berger's Little Big Man
(1964) plays against myths, planting an elbow firmly in readers'
ribs; Goin' a Buffalo by Ed Bullins (1968) and Zoot
Suit by Luis Valdez (1978) use the stage to explore dramatic
aspects of nonwhite life; Houston's Gasoline: The Automotive
Adventures of Charlie Bates (1980) and Peter Gent's North
Dallas Forty (1973) look closely at contemporary urban scenes,
the former surrealistically, the latter naturalistically; the
poetry of Wilma Elizabeth McDaniel (The Carousel Would Haunt
Me, 1973) uses twangy, country speech, while William Barney's
verse (The Kildeer Crying, 1979) employs a haunting formality.
This list could be very long indeed, but the point is that variety
itself seems to be the most prominent characteristic of writing
from the West. If many contemporary writers are irreverent, they
are also imaginative and more conceptually open than their predecessors,
expanding vistas while questioning assumptions. Like their nineteenth-century
counterparts, they are actually creating a West, as much upon
shards remaining from other artists' versions as upon social
and physical reality.
In the midst of such churning, a complex of questions endures:
Where is the West? What is western? Who is western? In a sense,
this volume is an expanded definition of the region and its literature,
of what it has meant and what it means. No single mode of defining
is adequate because change and diversity also endure. West as
place: trans-Appalachian West, transMississippi West, regions
and subregions; West as time: the census of 1890, for example,
marks the end of the frontier; West as terrain: Walter Prescott
Webb's arid land in the rain shadows of mountains is one instance;
West as legend: "We too are symbolic frontiersmen," contemporary
novelist Larry McMurtry has declared; West as myth: the continued
popularity of shootem-up Westerns exemplifies this; West as style:
recently, the urban cowboy and cowgirl craze; even West as East:
California begrudgingly acknowledged to be a national cultural
avatar. Again, variations might fill many pages. The questions
remain complicated and the answers varied, even threatening,
because they are the products of dizzying change that can obfuscate
valuable historical perspectives.
In any case, autochthonous literature is burgeoning. As Delbert
Wylder has observed of recent western fiction, "the variety
is amazing. . . . [it] demonstrates a surprising amount of both
versatility and vitality." Such vitality is in part the product
of growing confidence that has followed independence from traditional
literary taste-makers with their urban, East Coast biases, and
a recognition of the importance of regional expression. American
culture, in escaping the clutches of European yearning, continues
moving west, and no group has been quicker to grasp this phenomenon
than artists. The old sense of regional persecution that once
led westerners to cast hooded eyes toward eastern literati wafts
away like yesterday's smoke signals.
East Coast publishing, for example, no longer seems dominant.
Neither do reviewers and critics from that region. As a result
of the nearly logarithmic growth of presses and literary magazines
in the West, as well as the founding of the Western Literature
Association in 1966, both art and criticism have swerved away
from the older national paradigm. After reading the work of such
native western critics as Wylder, J. Golden Taylor, John R. Milton,
Max Westbrook, Don D. Walker, Ann Ronald, and William T. Pilkington,
for instance, the observations of an auslander such as
Leslie Fiedler, while interesting, seem inconsequential.
Moreover, the Civil Rights Movement that rocked America in the
1960s has led to considerably expanded perceptions within the
region, giving the lie to the mythic all-white West that never
was. Within the last decade, readers have begun to catch increasingly
revealing glimpses of the West as experienced in various ethnic
perspectives, from women's vistas, through counter-cultural visions.
The cast grows richer.
Regional small presses, many of which originated in the radicalism
of the late '60s and early '70s often bring an underlying pugnacity
to their tasks, a willingness to confront and challenge old assumptions,
as demonstrated by the very title of Gary Elder's "Foreword,
Circular" introduction to his revisionist collection of stories,
The Far Side of the Storm: New Ranges of Western Fiction (1975).
Writes Elder:
Something about the West has always been portentous in the American
sense. Prodigious marvels and ominous prophecies, great dreams
and the betrayal of reality, the signification of some place
always Out There, try again, the myth stuff for renewal. Or betrayal.
Out There the forest, unused; Out There the land, free; Out There
the savage world, to take; Out There the Pacific shore, peace.
. . . The mindwarp of the sixties strung Out There to "the
frontiers of the mind." John Kennedy assayed the weft of that
country beyond "the new frontier" and was lost Out There
as surely as Jed Smith was.
Lost Out There.
Whatever their weaknesses–trendiness,
cronyism, elitism, a tendency to confuse difference with innovation–small
presses and their periodical equivalents, "little" literary
magazines, are offering a no-holds-barred reexamination of western
life through western letters. It has been suggested that, beyond
location, many such enterprises are traditionally western in
their very robustness, spontaneity, and contentiousness. Nonetheless
more than a few traditional critics would as soon ignore–if
not eliminate– them. As one reviewer wrote of Elder's unconventional
collection, "If this is current Western fiction at its best,
perhaps a new storm is due and newer ranges should be sought."
Such disagreement is itself valuable, of course, for it marks
a serious questioning of literary and cultural values.
That alternative publishing constitutes a new and promising range
is not argued. As Milton has observed concerning big business
publishing today, "without a well-known name, or without
a relative in the publishing house, a good craftsman–an
artist in the true sense of the word–has no chance." What
results, according to James Sallis, is that alternative outlets,
"for many years our literary underground, . . . are close
to becoming our only ground." While it is certainly true that
commercialism seems to have overwhelmed art at most major publishing
houses, the rise of gifted westerners such as Carver, Houston
and Didion illustrates that their doors are not entirely closed.
Nor is all sweetness in the world of alternative presses and
magazines. Milton, for example, who edits the prestigious South
Dakota Review, points out that "many little magazines
and small presses are cruel jokes." While most editors would
agree, each would probably assemble an idiosyncratic list of
offenders. This is illustrated by the fact that many reject out
of hand journals such as South Dakota Review that are
sponsored by colleges.
Major paperback publishers have continued producing popular Westerns
at a rate resembling the breeding tempo of gerbils, and for good
reason, according to C. L. Sonnichsen, "a natural and normal
hunger for a heroic past." At a time when the present seems nearly
out of control to many, the fantasy West remains a source of
comfort. But it is more than that, Michael Marsden has argued;
Louis L'Amour and company celebrate "the possibilities
of the American condition." Marsden further suggests that
popular Westerns motivate "the human spirit to win the West
again, but this time to win it as it should have been won, with
respect for human dignity and human rights." The very tone of
Marsden's remarks reflects the new vision of the West that pervades
contemporary scholarship.
What emanates from contemporary publishing,
then, alternative or otherwise, is a richer, more heterogeneous,
less innocent region in which a warrior tradition reemerges as
political activism and injustices are aggressively attacked or,
sadly, aggressively defended. Although revisionist zeal often
leads to overcompensatory behavior–writers of little accomplishment,
for instance, lauded because they represent a trendy group–
in the final analysis it is important that all perspectives be
considered so that their underlying sense of purpose and place
might be understood. Linda Palumbo demonstrates the former when
she writes:
. . . Art is work; its working papers are literature.
Tired, sometimes depressed, often horrified, yet capable of feeling
thrilled, amused and awed nevertheless, women writers in the
small western presses embrace the ambiguity and paradox in their
lives in the hope that through cultivating these qualities we
can hope to change the world.
The intimate relationship of artistic perception to locale, as
well as the growing recognition of the value of particular regions,
is captured by Larry McMurtry when he acknowledges, "I can
never be sure whether home is a place or a form: The Novel or
Texas." Indeed, there are now more forms and more places and
more faces, all of them components of an enriched literary West.
With the emergence of writers like Sam Shepard, Preston Jones,
and Luis Valdez, even western drama is on the move. Little wonder
Wylder suggests that western writing has come of age.
It is clear that contemporary artists are discovering a new West
built on the old, a West that can face the threat and promise
of the present, face them with verve and a belief that life is
not only worth living but worth fighting for. Without rejecting
the past, westerners are no longer trapped in it. In fact, many
of the finest authors are recreating it to include previously
ignored realities while rejecting illusions previously cherished,
and doing so most effectively when stressing local history rather
than an all-engulfing
myth. Wallace Stegner, now the dean of western writers, once
advised:
In the old days, in blizzardy weather, we used
to tie a string of lariats from house to barn so as to make it
from shelter to responsibility and back again. With personal,
family and cultural chores to do, I think we had better rig up
such a line between past and present.
Writers are rigging the line, and a few are even extending it into the future. Rediscovering
the West, they are discovering themselves.
Like many of his issue-oriented
peers, Eastlake wields a needle more effectively than a bludgeon.
The pioneers, for example, he has described as ". . . unimaginative,
tough, stupid clods, romanticized reactionaries, ready to kill
or debase the last of the Indians, cut down every tree in sight,
overgraze and till land that should not have been tilled. . .
." Such hyperbole is, unfortunately, a characteristic of some
revisionist writing, yet the underlying impulse to demythologize
the past in order to better understand the present is defensible.
© Texas Christian University Press, 1998. All rights reserved.