Contemporary Trends in Western American Fiction
SINCE THE SECOND WORLD WAR , much western literature has become
increasingly self-conscious and self-reflective. While popular
and historical western fiction, for example, have always evinced
a gradual development of thematic and plot interests, what John R. Milton
has called the regional and colloquial Westerns as well as the
historical Western have begun to examine their own values and,
sometimes, to parody their own concerns and techniques. Not only
have writers like Edward Abbey (The Monkey Wrench Gang, 1975),
Charles Portis (True Grit, 1968), Max Evans (The Rounders,
1960), Richard Bradford (Red Sky at Morning, 1968),
and Robert Flynn (North to Yesterday, 1967) produced western
fiction centered around antiheroes, but Thomas Berger (Little
Big Man, 1964) and E. L. Doctorow (Welcome to Hard Times,
1975) have written novels that might be called "anti-Westerns,"since
they willfully turn the previously accepted standards of the
genre–or at least of the popular Western–upside down.
There is also a sense in which some of the above-listed writers
seem to be catering to the tastes of non-western audiences.
The appearance in western literature of the anti-hero–or
of what Anthony Hopkins has called the "annihilated hero"
in whom people see embodied their tensions, anxieties, and frustrations
about contemporary life–is not simply a reflection of current
trends in the mainstream of American literature. The material
excesses of America have recently come to plague the West in
a literal sense, especially in the past thirty years. Booms in
the development of petroleum, uranium, natural gas, oil shale,
and coal, intensified by the recent energy shortages, have already
had a devastating impact on the ecology and social organization
of much of the western United States. Although a sense of losing
the vast, open, unspoiled environment has been a characteristic
of serious western writing almost since its inception, and even
Natty Bumppo was eventually outcast from the society that he
helped to gain a foothold in the new Eden, in recent years the
conflict of machine and garden has intensified. William Eastlake,
Vardis Fisher, Edward Abbey, and Jack Schaefer have all treated
the spiritually devastating advance of civilization's urbanization
and industrialization over the past thirty years. Moreover, the
work of such writers as Shawn Wong, N. Scott Momaday, Maxine
Hong Kingston, Ben Santos, Tomás Rivera, Hisaye Yamamoto,
Rudolfo Anaya, John Okada, Richard Vasquez, Simon Ortiz, Leslie
Silko, and J. L. Navarro shows how western American literature
can deal with the problems of minority cultures in America across
a far broader spectrum than can any other regional literature.
Western writing has focused sharply on the confrontation of eastern
and western cultures, on industrial and "natural" Americas,
in both material and spiritual terms, but it has generally been
a bastion of the opposition to changes that meant exploitation.
"Easternization" in this literature has generally meant
a loss of individuality, at least in the sense of the individual's
one-to-one relationship with the land, a loss of freedom, self-reliance,
and the more fulfilling lifestyles of the past. Social order,
once seen as the contribution of the East, is now either taken
for granted or despised as corrupt, vitiating, or emotionally
castrating. The more recent serious "traditional" western
novels of A. B. Guthrie, Wallace Stegner, Frank Waters, and Paul
Horgan, as well as those of younger writers such as Bill Hotchkiss,
David Galloway, and Thomas Sanchez, have examined ways in which
the past and the present might be bridged and western myths retained
or evaluated in more sophisticated ways.
The fiction of James D. Houston illustrates this movement, examining
important western themes in contemporary settings. A Native
Son of the Golden West (1971) is set largely in Hawaii, but
involves a symbolic migration of the protagonist's forebears
from the South to California to the last geographical fringe
of America, where we observe the confrontation of the American
dream and the American reality that is so much a part of serious
western fiction. Most of Houston's fiction is set in California,
where surfers and solid citizens in mid-life crisis, draft-dodgers
and veterans confront their universal concerns. Continental
Drift (1978) effectively employs the San Andreas Fault as
a metaphor for the protagonist's certainty of death finely balanced
by the miracle of continuing life, and for the shifting, delicate
balance that exists in his family relationships. The exemplary
paradox of the American West, the coexistence of lush beauty
and the promise of life with violence, hardship, and the threat
of death, also underlies the basic structure of the novel and
is one of its basic thematic concerns.
Another West Coast writer, Joan Didion, has offered intense,
sensitive portraits of usually neurotic western women in novels
such as Run River (1963) and Play It as It Lays (1970).
Didion's great strength as a writer lies in her ability to evoke
the harried and askew sensibilities of her heroines, the harried
and askew sense of life in an increasingly urban and socially
complex place. The neurosis of her characters is, by extension,
the region's, the product of rapid growth unattended by rapid
maturation. Didion touches a special pulse and shares its beat
with her readers.
Because these themes and issues of western fiction are also the
concerns of much contemporary mainstream literature, it has become
increasingly difficult to define what a work of western fiction
is, and what it isn't.
Pieces by Raymond Chandler, Tillie Olsen, and
Ishmael Reed were all included in a recent volume called West
Coast Fiction (1980). Despite editor Houston's claim that
these works all "have emerged from the experience of the
west coast, from the terrain, from the legends, from the dreams
dreamed and the lives lived," some critics are likely to argue
that these authors have little in common except a geographic
coincidence. Still, Houston's point cannot be dismissed; these
writers have shared a common influence of coastal living and
therefore perhaps ought to be considered together as westerners.
Serious western literature in its traditional forms will continue
to show its distinctive qualities, largely because western fiction
reflects its environment more than any other regional literature
in the United States. The vastness, aridity, and sublime magnificence
of the West that force man to reexamine his relationship to nature
will continue to be the hallmark of traditional western writing,
and that tradition will necessarily evolve as the face of the
West itself changes. Evolution is noticeable in the short story
in particular, where there is a good deal of innovation and experimentation
with narrative perspective and time frame.
Two interesting anthologies of short fiction have updated the
direction of the contemporary western tale. The Far Side of
the Storm: New Ranges of Western Fiction, edited by Gary
Elder, appeared in 1975 and stressed experimental perspectives
and forms, while also emphasizing strong regional flavor. Reviews
ranged from outright panning (usually from traditionalists) to
raves (often from younger critics). The book balanced the work
of acknowledged masters–William Eastlake, Frederick Manfred,
Don Walker, Max Evans–with stories by promising younger
writers–Len Fulton, Robert
Roripaugh, Ramona Weeks, and Gerald Haslam, among others.
Six years later, Karl and Jane
Kopp's Southwest: Toward the Twenty-First Century offered
an even more contemporary, equally experimental view of the western
short story. Featuring a wildly varied collection of tales, the
book displayed such emerged or emerging talents as David Kranes,
Linda Hogan, Gerald Locklin, Ronald Koertge, Leonard Bird, David
Remley, and Haslam. All the stories were informed by a distinct
sense of place, but their techniques and perspectives were unpredictable.
Wrote the editors:
. . .This extraordinary, almost hallucinatory
intersection of many "realities" is reflected in the stories
in this collection. To be forced to shift from viewpoint to viewpoint
in reading a book can be disconcerting: to be forced to do so
in real life, even more so. Yet each of these stories arises
out of the real stuff of everyday life in the Southwest.
Roripaugh's short story "The
Legend of Billy Jenks," which appeared in the Elder anthology,
proceeds from the historical realism associated with Vardis Fisher,
A. B. Guthrie, Jr., and Jack Schaefer. It is, however, uncomfortably
reflective about the consequences of living in a changing West
where a sense of history, and the perhaps unavoidably idealized
sense of one's place in that history, can be disorienting or
even destructive. Roripaugh's narrator reflects about the fate
of his modern-day Billy the Kid: "To the tourists, Billy
was a modern fragment of frontier legend–a young outlaw
born in the wrong century . . . To those of us who knew Billy
Jenks, though, he was mostly something else. He was clumsy and
not very bright. He was the hand-to-mouth past that most of us
knew too well and wanted to forget. He was our Western innocence
. . . ."
The range of contemporary stories–even by any individual
author– is vast. While personal taste and stylistic preference
may influence favorites, it is the range itself that most confounds.
The western short story tradition, which extends from Bret Harte
through Jack London and William Saroyan to the present, is rich
indeed and growing richer. A number of innovative contemporary
writers continue to concentrate on this intense form despite
the considerably greater commercial viability of the novel. William
Kittredge (The Van Gogh Fields, 1978), Laurel Speer (The
Hundred Percent Black Steinway Grand, 1979), William Rintoul
(Roustabouts, 1980), Richard Dokey (Birthright, 1980),
Chester Seltzer (The Stories of Amado Muro, 1978), David
Kranes (Hunters in the Snow, 1980), Raymond Carver (Will
You Please Be Quiet, Please?,1976, and Furious Seasons,
1980), and Gerald Haslam (The Wages of Sin, 1980,
and Hawk Flights, 1983), these among others have made
noteworthy contributions to the continued development of the
western story.
The careers of Carver and Haslam, which have run roughly parallel
courses, exemplify the versatility and quality of the contemporary
western short story. Both first attracted public attention when
they were cited in the 1971 Joseph Henry Jackson Award. Carver,
also a gifted poet, is noted for tight, tough yet sensitive stories
dealing with life's small struggles, triumphs and tragedies.
His subjects have tended to trace–often with exquisite language–a
more critically-valued range of subjects than have Haslam's:
principally the interior journeys that so intrigue contemporary
American writers, and that so illuminate the secret lives of
everyone. For example, in "Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?"–one
of the best recent stories from the West–a husband suspects,
discovers, then agonizes over his wife's sexual dalliance, reconciling
himself to reality in an act of abject and painfully believable
impotence,
. . . He held himself, he later considered, as long
as he could. And then he turned to her. He turned and turned
in what might have been a stupendous sleep, and he was still
turning, marveling at the impossible changes he felt moving over
him.
Leonard Michaels, himself a short story writer of acknowledged
skill, considers Carver's stories "extraordinary in their
language, their music, and their huge terrifying vision of ordinary
human life in this country." Following the publication of Cathedral
(1983), critics in both America and Britain
acknowledged that Carver had become a major writer.
As for Haslam, Max Westbrook observes
that his writing demonstrates "a vision that is sympathetic
and affirmative, realistic and unafraid." Few subjects intimidate
him–spontaneous human combustion ("Heat"), vitalism
("Earthquake Summer"), abortion ("A Prison of Words")–and
he has probably employed the most rigorously multiethnic cast
in western writing. Moreover, like many of his contemporaries,
he often handles such diverse subjects by devising technically
original presentations, such as the use of a chorus ("Sojourner")
or merged levels of reality ("Smile"). Haslam's stories
feature what Bill Baines has characterized as "his broad
sense of the rhythm of dialect as well as his uncanny gift of
showing minds working through the spoken word."
Both Carver and Haslam have supported their writing by teaching
in universities. Carver's work has tended to be published by
more established presses, eastern publishers in particular, while
Haslam has been principally published by regional houses in the
West. Both have also been widely printed in literary magazines
and both are appearing with increasing frequency in anthologies.
The growth of regional presses and magazines since 1965 has provided
much greater exposure for autochthonous literary material. Contemporary
western writers need not alter their own sense of the real in
order to be published by presses in another part of the country,
and, in both journals and books, views from within are being
increasingly printed. Magazines such as Scree, Black Jack,
Maelstrom Review, New Mexico Humanities Review, Quarry West,
Vagabond, South Dakota Review, Blue Cloud Quarterly, Prairie
Schooner, Rocky Mountain Review, Arizona Quarterly, and Southwest
Review, among others, have published and are publishing innovative
writers.
Of more importance, perhaps, since literary magazines have ebbed
and flowed regionally for a long time, has been the emergence
of regional publishers, often dedicated to printing the finest
material being written in their area, material that not infrequently
is of little interest to eastern publishers. For example, Len
Fulton's The Grassman (1974), Jack Walker's Boomer's
Gold (1978), Paul Foreman's Sugarland (1978), and
James Hoggard's Trotter Ross (1981), as well as the aforementioned
stories by Chester Seltzer, are among books issued by Thorp Springs
Press of Austin, Texas. All are set in a known, concrete West,
usually Texas, and all have been well and widely reviewed. Some
other regional presses that have contributed to the growth of
quality fiction are Seven Buffaloes Press in Big Timber, Montana,
Red Earth Press in Corrales, New Mexico, Dustbooks in Paradise,
California, Peregrine Smith in Layton, Utah, Capra Press in Santa
Barbara, California, and Duck Down Press in Fallon, Nevada. All
of these publishers acknowledge the importance of grants, especially
from the National Endowment for the Arts, to their enterprise,
as well as the growth of western American literature classes
at colleges which have created a steady market for solid western
titles.
Another, often ignored but quite important factor in the continued
growth of fiction in the West–indeed, in the growth of all
western literature–has been the establishment of highly
regarded creative writing programs at colleges and universities.
Stanford, San Francisco State and Iowa are acknowledged leaders,
but programs large and small are developing almost everywhere,
with creative writing now considered among the most popular humanities
options in higher education. Before programs became so widespread,
Stanford University (which boasted Yvor Winters and Wallace Stegner),
San Francisco State University (with Mark Harris, Ray B. West,
and Walter Van Tilburg Clark) and the University of Iowa (which
awards the Ph.D. in creative writing, and attracts a distinguished
faculty) were pioneers, and their alumni constitute an impressive
list of contemporary writers.
While there is no question that the growth of creative writing
programs has been a major contemporary influence, there remains
controversy over whether they constitute a good training ground
for future authors. Observes Allan Temko: "Thus far they
have produced competence rather than brilliance . . . ." Countering
arguments simply point to lists of accomplished graduates. Other
critics claim that such programs lead to a homogenization of
regional writing, a loss of the sense of place as future writers
are more influenced by books and classes than by people and land.
These may be moot points, for Louis L'Amour's novels demonstrate
the continued power of the fantasy West that has for so long
attracted a popular audience, and high-quality "traditional"
western fiction continues to be written, while at the same time–as
the short story collections cited above illustrate–other
western works seem to be changing in more radical
ways, expanding the limits of both subjects and techniques.
The westernization of American
literature in general, in its quest for the spiritual, intellectual,
and cultural encounters that have long been characteristic of
western literature, must be examined at least briefly in any
examination of contemporary trends in western literature. When
Richard Etulain, in "The New Western Novel," and Leslie
Fiedler, in The Return
of the Vanishing American, talk about
the New Western, they are talking about different things. Etulain
lists Ken Kesey, William Humphrey, Richard Bradford, N. Scott
Momaday, and Benjamin Capps as contemporary western writers.
However, he primarily discusses the development of A. B. Guthrie,
Paul Horgan, and Wallace Stegner, all writing in the 1970s in
a tradition well established by the late 1940s. Also in this
latter group, perhaps, should be Capps, whose attentions have
shifted from cowboys to Indians, paralleling contemporary sympathies,
but whose style remains simple and straightforward and whose
themes are less than alarmingly original. While Guthrie, in Arfive,
for instance, is concerned with the environment, and Horgan
and Stegner reflect, at least peripherally, recent changes in
American society, none of these writers makes a radical break
with the traditional perceptions of these issues. Fiedler, on
the other hand, defines western literature by the presence of
a symbolic Indian in a mythological West. To Fiedler, the beatnik
and the hippie are the heirs of the frontiersman and the cowboy,
and the frontier is not merely spiritual, but particularly
psychological. Madness, he says, is the last frontier. As soon
as one starts to consider as "western" any literature dealing
with a spiritual, psychological, or material frontier, the expansion
of western literature into the domain of American mainstream
literature and into such genres as science fiction is an eminently
predictable phenomenon.
There are many precedents for this consideration. More traditional
works, such as Edwin Fussell's Frontier: American Literature
and the American West (1965), which conceive of the frontier
metaphorically, are really not so far from it. Lucy Hazard, who
wrote The Frontier in American Literature in 1927, saw
our literature's concern with the frontier as having evolved
through two stages thus far, and she predicted a third stage.
Frontier literature in Cooper and Bret Harte had begun by dealing
with physical pioneering for the control of nature, then later
became concerned with industrial pioneering for control of the
labor of other men in Norris, Sinclair Lewis, and Edgar Lee Masters.
Finally, she predicted, American literature would come to deal
with a spiritual pioneering for the control of man's self.
Perhaps one finds the beginnings of this movement in the years
immediately following Hazard's statement, though it is not in
the writing of William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Fitzgerald
so much as in the work of Henry Miller. Nathanael West's fiction
belongs in this tradition as well, but his characters make up
the Donner party of the spiritual Western, lost, snowbound, and
ultimately self-destructive. The movement has taken another forty
years to gain force. Its newest proponents are Thomas Pynchon,
who sees the quest as apparently in chaos and its chances for
success minimal, and Tom Robbins, who is more optimistic. Between
the two extremes range such geographic westerners as Richard
Brautigan and Ken Kesey, as well as figures who can be said to
have written Westerns at least some of the time such as Bernard
Malamud (A New Life, 1961) and James Dickey (Deliverance,
1970).
In his assessment of this mythic situation, Pynchon is not far
from Leslie Fiedler, who maintains that the final outcome of
each confrontation between WASP and Indian is the annihilation
of one or the other. Pynchon finds American behavior, especially
as it is ritualized in western literature, to be in large part
futile and self-destructive. On the other hand, some western
critics and scholars find Pynchon's writing to be in large part
futile and self-destructive.
While Pynchon's attraction to western literature is primarily
analytical, Tom Robbins has lived in Washington for over twenty
years and writes about the West with a natural enthusiasm. Works
of literature are always affected by the time and place in which
they are written, and Robbins's are no exception. Western American
literature has often chronicled conflict that occurred on the
frontier between the free-spirited, natureoriented individual
and restrictive civilization, and Robbins is one of the new writers
able and inclined to employ traditional western patterns in an
original fashion so that the individual remains unvanquished
by society. In Another Roadside Attraction (1971), Even
Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976), and Still Life with Woodpecker
(1980), set mostly in Washington state, the Dakotas, and
Hawaii, Robbins has reworked in an unusual style many of the
conflicts familiar to the pop-western genre. Robbins has apparently
given rise to a number of other hippie-cowboy western writers,
most notably Gino Sky (Appaloosa Rising: The Legend of the
Cowboy Buddha, 1980) and Ron Swigart
(Little America, 1978). However, it
is Richard Brautigan who bridges the gap between Pynchon's pessimistic
interpretation of western archetypes and Robbins's optimistic
assertion of the western spirit. At least geographically a western
writer of fiction and poetry, Brautigan has written a variety
of novels that take place in the West and at least two that deal
with themes that are typically western. Both A Confederate
General from Big Sur (1964) and Trout Fishing in America
(1967) deal with the attempts of characters to rediscover
the lost promises, either ideal or historical, of pastoral America.
The title character of A Confederate General from Big Sur
is Lee Mellon, an "expatriate" Southern explorer seeking
new freedom in the California wilderness. Brautigan describes
the American Dream as a nightmare, and implies that the reason
for this turn of events is that the American people, like Mellon,
are greedy, cruel, con artists who plunder and pollute nature.
Trout Fishing in America is a metaphorical excursion into
the myth of American pastoralism. The trout streams that might
promise the literal fisherman his reward are now plundered, polluted,
or closed off, but, Brautigan suggests, America "is often
only a place in the mind," and its imaginative reality is still
potent and promising. Brautigan does not explore compromises
that must be made between spiritual needs and material reality,
as so many traditional Westerns do. Rather he presents the material
impossibility of literally reliving the dream of pastoral America,
the frustration and corruption that result from trying to, and
the possibility–or even, perhaps, the necessity– of
creating imaginative alternatives that will satisfy our spiritual
needs. Like Robbins, Brautigan in his later works seems to have
fallen into somewhat formulaic expression of what were once original
ideas.
Ken Kesey's Sometimes a Great Notion (1964) and One
Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) are frequently seen as
contingent to the contemporary development of western American
literature. Writing about his native Northwest, Kesey fulfills
almost anyone's definition of a western writer, on both historical
and mythic levels, and it is not surprising that his is virtually
the only name mentioned by both Fiedler and Etulain. Sometimes
a Great Notion examines the fierce independence and individualism
of the members of a family of nonunion loggers during a strike.
Kesey employs an alienated "part-member" of the family as
protagonist in order to universalize this theme, while at the
same time he provides strong regional qualities in description
and other characterizations. One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest
is narrated by Fiedler's "returning" Native American,
who has lived for years on Fiedler's "last frontier." The
schizophrenic Indian's tale of R. P. McMurphy, in many ways a
classic western hero, and his conflict with the grotesque and
gargantuan schoolmarm of civilization, Nurse Ratched, is essentially
a battle between the natural man, innocent, rebellious, free,
and vital, and the castrating, suffocating minions of a repressive
society. Kesey's assessment of America's potential for redemption
through the western myth is rather oblique; while critics of
both novels tend to interpret their endings as pessimistic, presenting
hope for the future merely as a necessary illusion, Kesey's western
heroes are powerful figures of defiance who imply that the qualities
of the westerner will always live on in the hearts of Americans.
While writers such as Robbins and Brautigan
are certainly the best-known younger novelists, they are not
necessarily the best, for the novel remains a kind of "ultimate
genre" among westerners, with more and more published each year
and sales consistently high. Two predictable categories dominate
recent fiction: novels reexamining the historic West and novels
surveying aspects of the region today.
Within those two categories, however, predictability falters,
for contemporary authors respect far fewer restrictions on form
and content than did their predecessors. If their work falls
into patterns, they are new patterns, for example the satiric
hero quest, the psychopathological frontier, and the hippie road
novel. In the midst of excesses, compelling, more human and often
humane presentations of the past and present have emerged. Ron
Hansen's Desperadoes (1979), a dramatic retelling of the
Dalton gang's story, is a rousing adventure yarn that shows gang
members as people and as criminals; they are not heroic. Bill
Hotchkiss has explored the mountain man years in Jim Beckwourth's
life, creating a hint of previously unrecognized complexity,
in The Medicine Calf (1981), while Speer Morgan's Belle
Starr (1979), an effective internal drama, portrays a menopausal
woman uncertain of her life. Custer in Douglas Jones's The
Court Martial of George Armstrong Custer (1976) is a flawed
and damaged man hanging on desperately to what remains of his
values. Of the four novels, Hansen's is clearly the most successful
work of art. It opens with portraits of the dead Daltons, so
it moves with a tragic inexorability toward the Coffeyville raid
of 1892, limning life on the frontier and not hiding the considerable
faults (tragic or
otherwise) of the Daltons.
Clearing of the Mist (1979)
by Richard Fleck exemplifies the continued expansion of subjects,
even historical subjects, for it is the story of Irish immigrants
in the nineteenth-century West. While Fleck has not fully pulled
off what he has attempted in this novel, he has nonetheless offered
an interesting insight into an overlooked frontier experience.
In Creek Mary's Blood (1980) Dee Brown traces the movement
of a Creek family from Georgia through the Indian Territory to
the Northern Plains. Again, the novel is not as fully realized
as might be wished, but the story is strong. D'Arcy McNickle's
final novel (he died shortly after completing this book), Wind
from an Enemy Sky (1978), explores the destruction of Indian
values on western Agency land. It is set in the first half of
the twentieth century and, as was often true of McNickle's work,
has about it the texture of tragedy.
Another unique novel is Paula Gunn
Allen's The Woman Who Owned the Shadows (1983), which
is structurally cyclical, seeking to reveal layers of culture
and consciousness as the author, a mixed-blood (Laguna Pueblo,
Sioux, and Lebanese-American) who was raised in New Mexico, feels
and understands them. Linda Hogan points out that "The writing
is mythical in its telling of our origins, mystical in its relation
to the world layers and human consciousness that derives from
those layers." For those reasons, The Woman Who Owned the
Shadows is an unusual and interesting first novel.
A list of historical western novels could be vast, of course,
because the historic West remains rich literary territory, in
no small measure because so many of the books purporting to treat
it deal instead with the West-that-never-was. Contemporary portraits
from the West also range widely. Carolyn Doty, for example, has
produced a satiric road novel, A Day Late
(1980), that humorously and not so humorously probes American
mobility; Terry Davis's Vision Quest (1979), with its
exuberant, upbeat style, uses wrestling as a vehicle to explore
maturation and masculinity. Modern homesteaders in California's
Big Sur area–some of whom unfortunately fall into stereotypes–illustrate
contemporary problems facing individualists in Jack Curtis's
Eagles over Big Sur (1981). Peter Gent, in North Dallas
Forty (1973), has built a revealing story of a pro football
player's decline, and has revealed something of the social dynamics
of fat-cat Texas. Douglas Terry has produced an impressive first
novel dealing with a young man's loss of innocence in a college
football program, The Last Texas Hero (1982), that complements
Gent's account of the pro grid scene.
The range of subjects and styles seems endless and varied: Wayne
Ude's imaginative exploration of contemporary Indian magic and
mendacity in Becoming Coyote (1981) projects an almost
supernatural tone, while Gerald Haslam's one novel to date, Masks
(1976), explores an Okie family's disintegration in California
with the inexorability of neo-naturalism. Ron McClure's Rawlins
(1972) proceeds from historical realism toward an acknowledgement
of change. The poetic language of James Welch's Winter in
the Blood (1974) renders it memorable. In nearly all these
examples, the writers seem to be asking where we are heading,
what we are gaining, and at what price.
Not only are emerging writers contributing to recent developments
in the western novel, many well-established novelists continue
to produce outstanding work. John Nichols, for example, burst
on the scene in 1974 with The Milagro Beanfield War, a
comic and highly original tale set in New Mexico. His subsequent
New Mexico novel, The Magic Journey (1978), is less successful
but in no way lessens the triumph of his first effort. Both William
Eastlake and Edward Abbey have recently produced fantasies dealing
with eco-raiders. Eastlake's Dancers in the Scalp House (1975)
is less compelling, although he remains a–possibly the–major
influence in the introduction of modern, perhaps post-impressionistic
or absurdist literary forms to the West. Abbey's aforementioned
The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975) is more effective, largely
because it does not seem to caricature any of the author's earlier
work. And Wallace Stegner's often-ignored All the Little Live
Things (1967) is a high-quality precursor of the by-now-tiresome
hippie vs. straight confrontation stories; Stegner's version
is in no way tiresome. Frederick Manfred produced one of his
finest novels in 1975 with the publication of The Manly-Hearted
Woman, a novel that explored a Sioux warrior through the
vehicle of a womanly-hearted young man and a manly-hearted young
woman whose paths cross in battle. Manfred plays with male and
female roles and moves his readers toward a mythic apprehension.
Delbert Wylder, in an important study, "Recent Western Fiction"
in Journal of the West (January 1980), summed up matters
well when he observed:
. . . the variety is amazing . . . Western
fiction demonstrates a surprising amount of both versatility
and vitality. A genre which was once almost totally thought of
as "the realm of the horse opera" now examines both past
and contemporary America from different perspectives. It retains
its distrust of progress, but more frequently with wisdom rather
than mere reaction. Western fiction seems to be growing beyond
some of its earlier limitations. It has come of age. (p. 70)
One especially interesting example of the maturation Wylder proclaims
is the work of Tony Hillerman. The University of New Mexico professor
has written three novels detailing the exploits of Joe Leaphorn,
a Navajo tribal policeman–The Blessing Way (1970),
Dance Hall of the Dead
(1973), and Listening Woman (1978). Hillerman has successfully
integrated various techniques of the detective/mystery novel
into a sensitive and wide knowledge of Navajo culture, producing
books that are entertaining and enlightening. Leaphorn is descended
from a line of Singers, and a large part of his success as a
lawman is due directly to his spiritual wholeness. As Ellen Strenski
and Robley Evans sum him up, "more than a successful detective,
Leaphorn is a cultural hero whose concern for pattern as defined
typologically by The People gives him a spiritual strength and
insight not available to the alienated criminals and misfits
who die without finding the appropriate kachinas." Hillerman's
is perhaps the most successful conversion of traditional material
to a nontraditional format.
Whether intentionally or not, Hillerman's books reflect the growing
influence of "magical realism," a movement first powerfully
developed in Latin American writing. George McMurray defines
magical realism as "a recent movement whose purpose is to
penetrate objective reality and reveal the mysterious and poetic
qualities underlying the daily lives of a community of people."
In an article, "Magical Realism in Spanish American Fiction"
(Colorado State Review, Spring-Summer 1981), McMurray
points to the work of Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier and Argentinian
short story writer Jorge Luis Borges as possible instigators
of this movement. Carpentier has described two basic traits of
such writing: its treatment of the living myths and legends that
defy logic, and the magical realist's belief in the validity
of the reality he is projecting. Such realism rejects chronological
time and the conventionally understood psychological unity of
the human personality. Carpentier has suggested that magical-realist
fiction seems to find expression primarily in countries with
large Indian or black populations.
One such country is the United States. In another essay published
in the aforementioned issue of Colorado State Review, "North
American Magical Realism," novelist Wayne Ude further refined
the definition of magical realists, asserting that their work
includes the following elements: they reject the narrow confines
of traditional realism for a multidimensional, metaphysical reality;
they distort time, space, and identity as those elements are
conventionally understood, seeking new understanding; their psychology
tends to be Jungian; and finally, they believe in the realities
they present. Ude describes the work of William Faulkner, Go
Down Moses in particular, as magical realism. He further
lists such titles as The Man Who Killed the Deer by Frank
Waters, One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey,
Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow, Ceremony by
Leslie Silko, Mumbo Jumbo by Ishmael Reed, Bless Me,
Ultima by Rudolfo Anaya, and the novels of Toni Morrison.
In another sort of extension, Why Are We in Vietnam? by
Norman Mailer, Texas has been corrupted, but Alaska is still
the New Frontier. One step further joins western literature with
America's other frontier literature, science fiction. (Mailer
himself employs western imagery to ponder outer space as a new
frontier in Fire on the Moon, 1971.) In New Worlds
for Old
(1974), David Ketterer links science fiction with American literature
and experience in general. More precisely, as David Mogen has
noted in Wilderness Visions: Science Fiction Westerns (1981),
"though science fiction frontiers have often been regarded
as artificial transplants of the past on the future, they are
more accurately understood as products of a cultural mythology
which, like a genetic code implanted in the American imagination,
structures visions of the future." For example, James Blish's
"Okie Cities" series of novels, collected under a single
cover as Cities in Flight (1970), take westering into
the cosmos. So-called "space Westerns" are often to science
fiction what the popular Western is to western literature in
general, and are in fact derivative of popular Westerns. However,
there are enormous numbers of serious works of science fiction
that employ parallels to nearly all of the concerns of serious
western writing. The frontier in serious science fiction still
serves as a testing ground for human nature, values, and abilities,
provides a field for the adventurer and the individualist, and
generates encounters between our technologically oriented culture
and The Alien Other. In The American Western Novel (1966),
James Folsom mentions Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles
as dealing with "the theme of the last frontier"; Bradbury
consciously evokes the small towns of the American Midwest and
West in his description of the colonization of Mars, and the
issues he explores are primarily human nature and American ideals,
particularly the ethnocentrism of our dominant culture with its
questionably blind faith in technological progress. Huxley's
Brave New World, with its "savage" confronting the
monotonous society of ultra-industrial America, provides another
well-known example of the affinity between the two genres.
Science fiction actually contains two different thematic types
of western literature, one literally concerned with the values
and conditions inherent in exploration and colonization, the
other employing planetary "myths" to investigate many of
the same themes as serious western literature. A striking example
of the former is Destinies, a paperback periodical whose
editor, James Baen, believes that it is mankind's duty and destiny
to colonize space. The "Hainish" works of Ursula LeGuin
(The Lathe of Heaven,
1970, et al.) explore man's struggle to adapt to the universal
forces of nature and chronicle again the confrontation with "the
alien other." These stories of loss, adaptation, and change are
fascinating examples of contemporary western themes in science
fiction.
The appearance of the frontier, both literally and metaphorically,
in so much contemporary American literature testifies to the
centrality of the concerns of western literature to our national
consciousness. Whether one sees the contemporary trends in western
American literature as western literature dealing with contemporary
issues or as contemporary literature dealing with western themes,
continued evolution in western literature seems fairly probable.
One general prediction is that in the future, western fiction
is likely to merge to a greater degree with mainstream American
literature while retaining many of its traditional and regional
characteristics. Western fiction will employ more stylistic experimentation
and deal with a broader range of issues, while mainstream fiction
will continue to explore the thematic concerns traditionally
associated with western literature. However, if only because
of the symbolic power of their region, westerners are apt to
continue setting their fiction in distinct places and times even
as their concerns and techniques become increasingly nontraditional.
Western fiction, by whatever name we choose to call it, is more
than ever before an emergent force on the national literary scene.
Primary Sources
Abbey, Edward. The Monkey Wrench Gang. New York: Lippincott, 1975.
Apple, Max, ed. Southwest Fiction
Anthology. New York: Bantam, 1981.
Berger, Thomas. Little Big Man. New York: Dell, 1976.
Bradford, Richard. Red Sky at Morning. New York: Lippincott, 1968.
Brautigan, Richard. A Confederate General
from Big Sur. New York: Grove Press, 1964.
Brown, Dee. Creek Mary's Blood. New York: Holt, Rinehart
and Winston, 1980.
Capps, Benjamin. Sam Chance. New York: Ace Books, 1980.
Carver, Raymond. Furious Seasons. New York: McGraw-Hill,
1980.
Curtis, Jack. Eagles over Big Sur. Santa Barbara: Capra
Press, 1981.
Didion, Joan. Play It as It Lays. New
York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970.
Doctorow, E. L. Welcome to Hard Times. New
York: Random House, 1975.
Dokey, Richard. August Heat.
Chicago: Story Press, 1982.
Doty, Carolyn. A Day Late. New York: Viking, 1980.
Elder, Gary. The Far Side of the Storm:
New Ranges of Western Fiction. Los Cerrillos,
New Mexico: San Marcos Press, 1975.
Evans, Max. The Rounders.
New York: Macmillan, 1960.
Fleck, Richard. Clearing of the Mist. Paradise, California:
Dustbooks, 1979.
Flynn, Robert. North to Yesterday. New York: Knopf, 1967.
Guthrie, A. B. Arfive. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971.
Hansen, Ron. Desperadoes. New York: Knopf, 1979.
Haslam, Gerald. Hawk Flights: Visions of
the West. Big Timber, Montana: Seven
Buffaloes Press, 1983.
Hillerman, Tony. Dance Hall of the Dead. New York: Avon,
1973.
Houston, James D. Continental Drift. New
York: A. A. Knopf, 1978.
Huth, Tom. Unnatural Axe: A Novel of Colorado. New York:
Dell, 1979.
Jones, Preston. A Texas Trilogy. New York: Hill &Wang,
1976.
Kesey, Ken. One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest.
New York: New American Library, Inc., 1962.
Kopit, Arthur. Indians. New York: Hill & Wang, 1969.
Kopp, Karl and Jane (eds). Southwest: Toward
the Twenty-First Century. Corrales,
New Mexico: Red Earth Press, 1981.
Mailer, Norman. Why Are We in Vietnam? New York: Berkeley
Publishing, 1977.
McClure, Ron. Rawlins. New York: Dial Press, 1972.
McNickle, D'Arcy. Wind from an Enemy Sky. New York: Harper
& Row, 1978.
Milton, John R. Three West. Vermillion, South Dakota:
Dakota Press, 1970.
Morgan, Speer. Belle Starr.
Boston: Little, Brown, 1979. Peterson, Levi. The Canyons
of Grace. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1982.
Portis, Charles. True Grit.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1968.
Pynchon, Thomas. Gravity's Rainbow. New
York: Viking Press, 1973.
Robbins, Tom. Another Roadside Attraction. New York: Bantam Books, 1971.
Schaefer, Jack. The Mavericks. New York: Dell, 1974.
Seltzer, Chester. The Stories of Amado Muro. Austin: Thorp Springs Press, 1978.
Sky, Gino. Appaloosa Rising: The Legend of the Cowboy Buddha. New York: Doubleday, 1980.
Stegner, Wallace. Angle of Repose. New York: Doubleday, 1971.
Swigart, Ron. Little America. New York: Pocket Books, 1978.
Ude, Wayne. Becoming Coyote. Amherst, Massachusetts: Lynx House Press, 1981.
Secondary Sources
Barsness, John. "Ken Kesey: The Hero in Modern Dress." In
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest: Text and Criticism, edited by John Kesey Pratt.
New York: Viking Press, 1973. Suggests that Kesey has nor broken
the traditional heroic mold but has, in response to harsh, modern
realities, given it a harsh, modern and somewhat zany face.
Busby, Mark. "Eugene Manlove
Rhodes: Ken Kesey Passed by Here." Western American Literature
15 (Summer 1980): 83–92. Points out intriguing similarities
between Ross McEwen in Pasó por Aquí and
Randle McMurphy in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, concluding
that "when you read both stories, it is clear that you are
in the presence of an authentic American hero."
Cawelti, John. The Six-Gun Mystique. Bowling Green, Ohio: The Popular
Press, 1971. Argues that an understanding of the Western is necessary
if the American popular mind is to be understood. Urges an interdisciplinary
approach be employed in future studies. Offers stimulating generalizations
about the nature of western writing, stressing the triumph of
imagination over stereotypes.
Etulain, Richard. A Bibliographic Guide to the Study of Western American Literature.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. The most extensive
available checklist of interpretive books and articles on western
writing. Includes sections on bibliographies, anthologies, and
general works, as well as listings for individual authors. Indispensable.
Fiedler, Leslie A. The Return
of the Vanishing American. New York: Stein and Day, 1968.
A simplistic, hyperbolic, and interesting argument that such
modern writers as James Leo Herlihy, John Barth, and Kesey are
leading us away from stereotypes toward genuine American literature.
Unfortunately, Fiedler himself seems to know little about the
"vanishing American" he lauds, and less about western letters.
Folsom, James K. The American
Western Novel. New Haven: College and University
Press, 1966. Another stimulating book in which Folsom discusses
the major themes, forms, and ideas employed by western novelists.
Particularly effective when exploring mythic dimensions.
Gurian, Jay. Western American Letters. Deland, Fla.: Everett/Edwards,
1975. Uneven, yet nonetheless valuable. Contains a plea for more
realistic literature delineating actual regional realities while
rejecting romantic and stereotypical approaches. "The Possibility
of a Western Poetics" is an especially stimulating chapter.
Haslam, Gerald. "The Southwestern
Novels of William Eastlake." The Review of Contemporary Fiction
3 (Spring 1983): 20–26. Asserts that Eastlake "broke
the paradigm of Southwestern letters."Says further that he merges
a post-modern,
absurdist view with a shaman's vision.
Lee, Robert Edson. From West
to East: Studies in the Literature of the American West.
Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966. In this provocative
study, Lee argues that the East has vitiated the freshness of
western life and letters. Too pro-western, this book nonetheless contains valuable insights.
Lewis, Merrill, and L. L. Lee,
editors. The Westering Experience in American Literature. Bellingham: Bureau for Faculty Research, Western Washington
State University, 1977. A collection of papers presented at the
1976 Western Literature Association meeting, it contains such
important essays as Jamie Robertson's "Henry Adams, Wallace
Stegner, and the Search for a Sense of Self in the American West,"
and Westbrook's "Mountain Home: The Hero in the American
West."
Marsden, Michael T. "The Modern
Western." Journal of the West 3 (Fall 1968):
54–61. Examines the continuing impact of popular Westerns
on American consciousness, saying that they aim "to provoke
human imagination by chronicling what could be credible strife."
He concludes that Westerns remain in favor because they 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." A strong article.
McMurray, George R. "Magical
Realism in Spanish American Fiction." Colorado State Review
8 (Spring-Summer 1981) : 7–20. The best brief study
of this LatinAmerican literary development which has so influenced
American writers. McMurray defines magical realism this way:"a
recent literary movement whose purpose is to penetrate objective
reality and reveal the mysterious and poetic qualities underlying
the daily lives of a community of people."
Milton, John R. The
Novel of the American West. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1980. A pioneering western scholar and
editor presents his sensitive views on major novels and novelists.
Especially good treatments of Frederick Manfred and Frank Waters.
An examination of the base upon which contemporary novelists
build.
Mogen, David. Wilderness Visions: Science
Fiction Westerns. San Bernardino: Borgo Press, 1981. Extends
the conceptual range of western themes and subjects to outer
space and the ranges of the future. A fascinating extrapolation.
Nesbitt, John. "Change of Purpose in the Novels of Louis
L'Amour." Western
American Literature 13 (Spring 1978): 65–81. Argues
that L'Amour's novels "are not just the same old story with
the hero of each volume given a different name and a different
colored horse," but show growth in "moral and historical
purpose." An admiring, yet not uncritical view.
Rendezvous 7, no. 2 (Winter 1972). This "Special issue on Western
American Literature" contains major essays by Westbrook, Wylder,
Milton, and Walker, plus a selected, annotated bibliography by
Richard Etulain.
Small Press Review 12, no.
10 (Oct. 1980). This number of SPR explores "Literature in the Eighties." It features not only the work of Ellen
Ferber and Len Fulton, but also many guest articles from small
press luminaries. A valuable inside view of alternative publishing.
Small Press Review, "Annual Library Issue " (June–July each year). Ferber and Fulton again, along with a Who's Who of
guest contributors, updating the state of alternative publishing.
As close to current as anything one is apt to find.
Siegel, Mark. Tom Robbins. Western
Writers Series, Number 42. Boise: Boise State University, 1980.
Asserts that Robbins explores the clash between society and free
individuals. An admiring view. Final section, "Tom Robbins
as a Western Writer," not entirely convincing.
Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land:
The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1950. The most influential and important book
yet written about the West. It remains a starting point for all
studies.
Stegner, Wallace. The Sound of Mountain Water. Garden
City: Doubleday and Company, 1969. This collection of sixteen
essays contains two of particular importance in the study of
contemporary fiction: "Born a Square" and "History, Myth and the Western Writer."
Strenski, Ellen, and Robley Evans. "Ritual and Murder in Tony Hillerman's Indian Detective Novels." Western American Literature 16 (Fall
1981): 205–16. Shows Hillerman's detective, Joe Leaphorn, blending modern police techniques
and "his Navajo belief in the metaphysical nature of the universe
in which what is `evil' is `unharmonious.'"This combination of
the practical and the spiritual represents a new direction for
both detective novels and western writing.
Ude, Wayne. "North
American Magical Realism." Colorado State Review 8 (Spring–
Summer 1981): 21–30. Points out the generative influence
of Latin American writers on their northern counterparts, suggesting
"there is, indeed, more reality than either realism or post-modernism
is able to encompass." Suggests, further, a link between contemporary
magical realism and the earlier "romance-novel."
Walker, Don D. "The Rise and
Fall of Barney Tullus." Western American Literature 3
(Summer 1968): 93–102. Classic and classy debunking of single-perspective
criticism, this remains a valuable starting point for contemporary
scholars. Also the most entertaining item on this list.
Westbrook, Max. "Conservative,
Liberal, and Western: Three Modes of Realism." South Dakota
Review 4 (Summer 1966): 3–19. Perhaps the single most
influential essay on criticism in recent western literature.
This controversial thesis posits three modes of literary apprehension:
conservative, which suggests that truth is accessible only through
institutions; liberal, a belief that truth is attainable only
when individuals escape institutions; western, which is sacred
while the others are profane, Jungian while they are Freudian,
which claims that truth is found through the unconscious, and
that many western writers– Clark, Waters, Manfred, among
others–have sensed this and produced work reflecting this
deeper reality.
Wylder, Delbert. "Recent Western Fiction." Journal of the West 19
(Jan. 1980): 62–70. Beginning with 1975, this major critic
examines fiction in the West and finds it is thriving. He discusses
a heterogeneous group that includes Abbey, Eastlake, Haslam,
Dillard, Nichols, Manfred, and Roripaugh. Wylder concludes that
contemporary "variety is amazing," and he praises "both
versatility and vitality." The best recent survey.
with supplementary material provided by the editors
. The Brave Cowboy. Rpt.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, . Trout Fishing in America. New York: Dell,
1967.
. The Trail to Ogallala. New York: Ace Books, 1980.
. The White Man's Road. New York: Harper &
Row, 1969.
. A Woman of the People. New York: Duell,
Sloan, and Pearce, 1966.
. What We Talk About When We
Talk About Love. New York: McGraw-Hill, . Will You Please
Be Quiet, Please? New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978.
. Run River. New York: I. Obolensky, 1963.
. Okies: Selected
Stories. Third Edition. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith,
1975.
. Masks: A Novel.
Penngrove, California: Old Adobe Press, 1976.
. Snapshots: Glimpses of the
Other California. Walnut Creek, California:
Devil Mountain Books, 1985.
. The Wages of Sin. Fallon,
Nevada: Duck Down Press, 1980.
. Listening Woman.
New York: Avon, 1978.
. The Blessing Way. New York: Avon, 1970.
. Gasoline: The Automotive
Adventures of Charlie Bates. Santa Barbara, California: Capra Press, 1980.
. A Native Son of
the Golden West. New York: Dial Press, 1971.
.
(ed). West Coast Fiction. New
York: Bantam Books, 1980.
. Sometimes a Great
Notion. New York: Bantam Books, 1966.
. Of a Fire on the
Moon. New York: New American Library, 1971.
. ed. "The Western
Novel–A Symposium." South Dakota Review 2 (Autumn 1964).
. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. New York: Bantam Books, 1976.
. Still Life with Woodpecker. New York: Bantam Books, 1980.
. All the Little Live Things. New York: Viking
Books, 1967.
. Recapitulation. New York: Doubleday, 1979.
. Wolf Willow. Rpt. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1980.
. ed. Western American
Writers. Deland, Fla.: Everett/Edwards, 1974. A definitive series of taped lectures on varied
subjects ("The Roots of Western Literature" by Hector Lee,
"Women in Western Literature" by Barbara Meldrum, "The
Cowboy in Literature" by W. H. Hutchinson, etc.) as well as individual
authors ("Wallace Stegner" by Merrill Lewis, "Frederick Manfred" by Joseph
Flora, "Thomas Hornsby Ferril" by John Scherting).
. ed. Western Writing. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1974.
A diverse crew of writers–Stegner, Westbrook, Stewart, Guthrie,
DeVoto, Fisher, Dobie, et al.–contribute essays on their
craft and its relationship to their region.
. "The Western Novel–A Symposium."
South Dakota Review 2 (Autumn
1964). This special number of South Dakota Review includes
the responses of
Manfred, Waters, and Fisher, among others, to questions about
their craft.
. "The Writer's Sense of Place."
South Dakota Review 13 (Autumn 1975). Another special
number of SDR, this one including a symposium (with such
writers as Snyder, Manfred, Evans and Paley), plus commentaries
and essays by a large group including Ross Macdonald, Rudolfo
Anaya, William Stafford,
Eastlake, and Stegner, all dealing with the relationship of locale
to writing.
. "The Practical Spirit: Sacrality
and the American West." Western American Literature 3 (Fall 1968): 193–205. Further exploration
of Westbrook's sacred/profane dichotomy applied to western letters.
Cites such apparently diverse writers as Steinbeck, Fisher, Ferlinghetti,
and Manfred. See also "The Ontological Critic" in Rendezvous
(Winter 1972) and "Mountain Home: The Hero in the American
West" in The Westering Experience in American Literature
(edited by Lewis and Lee).
© Texas Christian University Press, 1998. All rights reserved.