Old West, New Fables
Re-imagining the American West.
When we think of the literature of the American West what comes to mind is a curious mythological stew made up of short stories and novels stretching back to the early 19thcentury, heavily seasoned by countless films and television shows. This mix of legend and fable was already being promulgated in print and world touring ‘Wild West Shows’ before the West was fully ‘tamed and settled’.
The notion of where this Wild West lay has changed over time. In James Fenimore Cooper’s 1826 novel The Last of the Mohicans, which is set in 1757 and contains many of the tropes associated Wild West fiction, the frontier is upstate New York. Similarly, and of more recent vintage, The Road to Reckoningby Robert Lautner published 2014, with a plot reminiscent of Charles Portis’s 1968 True Grit, is set in 1837 and its lawless frontier setting is located in western Pennsylvania.
None the less, we’ll take as a given the Wild West’s location being well the other side of the Mississippi River, from south of the Mexican border north to Canada and extending all the way to the Pacific Ocean, and within a time frame of roughly the 1830s to the 1900s. It features a distinct landscape of prairie, desert and mountain.
Our current default imagining of this world, it could be argued, is based largely on the pulp fiction of the 1920s and 30s, as exemplified by the authors Zane Grey, Max Brand and Louis L’Amour. They follow on from the earlier ‘Penny Dreadfuls’ and ‘Dime Novels’ which were often based on the exploits, greatly exaggerated, of real personages. The pulp stories, largely featuring fictional characters, solidified and codified the classic hero and villain trope. Beyond the ‘white hat versus black hat’ there is the underlying dynamic, caused by the tension between the dangerous freedom of the wide open and lawless frontier and the safety and security provided by the inevitable ever westward march of settlement. Our square-jawed, ‘a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do’, self-reliant hero is often cast as the ‘knight errant’ tasked with defending the helpless innocents engaged in that settling, against the anarchic threat represented by outlaws and native peoples.
Briefly on the issue of the portrayal of native peoples, there has always been a great deal of ambivalence in the genre on the subject. Going back to James Fenimore Cooper and the German author Karl May there is certain degree of sympathetic treatment and more recent efforts can’t help but factor in the grave injustices, continuing to this day, visited upon the original inhabitants of North America.
While no where near the popular mass-market force they once were, the Western with those plot dynamics described above, more or less intact, continues to be written. Larry McMurtry’s 1985 Lonesome Dove could be seen as a revival of the form. More recently there is the 2011 Sisters Brothersby Patrick deWitt, TheSonby Phillip Meyer in 2013, the aforementioned The Road to Reckoning and the re-issue of John Williams’ Butcher’s Crossingoriginally published in 1960.
It’s also useful to note here, as a introduction to first author who’s novel is going to feature below, Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy;All the Pretty Horses1992, The Crossing1994 and The Cities of the Plain1998, although set in the 1940-50s tap into much of what defines 19thcentury placed classic Westerns.
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
Published the same year as Lonesome Dove,what many would consider McCarthy’s masterpiece, could be seen as seminal in moving the historic Wild West novel into new territory.
Based on, in part, on actual events and characters, the Glanton Gang’s activities in 1849-50 on both sides of the Mexican border, Blood Meridianis not for the faint- hearted. Passages describing the natural world in beautifully incandescent prose segue into delineating most horrific and debased violence in equally beatific language. McCarthy treats this slipping from the sublime, or sometimes just the quotidian, into a Boschian hell not as a descent but as co-existent realities. In other words, degradation and violence as also sublime. Uncomfortable stuff.
Blood Meridianis the novel that probably the best expresses McCarthy’s Gnosticism (in simplistic terms, dualism) and Theodicism (the attempt to explain why a supposedly benign deity allows evil), and which is personified in the story’s antagonist, Judge Holden. He is a complex ambiguous character, representing at once a dark satanic atavism and the light of human reason. For the protagonist, known only as The Kid, the Judge is guide, corrupter, and nemesis.
McCarthy, in this instance, leaves the traditional Wild West novel’s focus on the quandary of the heroic individual caught between lure of the dangerous wilderness and restrictions of safe and secure civilization, in the dust. Blood Meridianis as much about the American West as Conrad’s Heart of Darknessis about Belgian colonialism or Melville’s Moby Dickis about 19thcentury whaling. The locale of Texas and Mexico and the historical events of 1849 are just the stage setting for this author’s journey into humanities’ heart of darkness.
In the Distance by Hernan Diaz
In the Distance, published 2017, is the story of Håkan Söderström. He and his brother are poor illiterate farm boys who set off from Sweden in mid-19thcentury for America. They get as far as Britain when misadventure separates them, with one brother bound for New York and the other, Håkan, ending up in San Francisco. With no resources and unable to understand English, he knows only that he needs to travel east to re-join his brother. What follows are his adventures in attempting to do this, against the prevailing westward flow of humanity.
Except this not an adventure tale in the picaresque sense, of amusing anecdote, of trial by ordeal and of endurance rewarded. Håkan’s experiences are those of a stranger in a strange land. We see everything through his eyes, adrift in a bewildering alien world that he has very little frame of reference for. He is no Candide and though this novel could viewed as a Bildungsroman, Håkan’s education is piecemeal and erratic. Much of what he ‘learns’ along the way from the people he meets is wrong, or deceitful, or useless, or useful, or interesting, it matters not as Håkan has no way means to assess its value.
Much of what transpires in the story takes place in deserts. This a landscape that is as sublime as it is inhospitable, a desolate and empty place full of wonder, a place that has no use for man and where he sojourns on borrowed time. Diaz’s prose, conveying this with hyper-real effect, approaches the artistry of McCarthy’s BloodMeridian.
And, as in that novel there is a hierarchal and moral levelling of experience, with one important exception and that is the profound effect a moment of violence has on Håkan. The river of experience, that seems to flow through Håkan relatively unimpeded, there hits an outcrop of a moral bedrock.
West by Carys Davies
Published in 2018 Davies’ short novel has very much the quality of a fable or fairy tale. This is in part due to the monomaniacal obsessive Grail-quest that the protagonist has embarked on and the amount of coincidence the author indulges in to resolve the story.
Set in 1815, a time when large parts of the American West were still terra incognito, at least ways for non-native inhabitants. Where the notion of ‘here be dragons’ could be applied to large, as yet unmapped, territories. Or in this instance, here be Mastodons. Which is not as far fetched a notion as, for instance, the Loch Ness Monster or Bigfoot. These animals, larger than present day elephants, existed in the wooded areas of North America as recently as 10,000 years ago. The general consensus is they, like the Giant Moa of New Zealand, did not survive the arrival of human hunters.
Cy Bellman reads of the discovery of massive bones and tusks in Kentucky. Reckoning that these creatures are alive and roaming about somewhere ‘West’ he becomes fixated on seeing one for himself. He leaves his Pennsylvania farm and ten-year-old daughter and sets out on what he figures to be a two-year journey.
He is joined on this adventure by a Native American boy, who’s name translates into English as, Old Woman from a Distance. He functions as both guide and foil, in the grand tradition of Don Quixote’s Sancho Panza, Phileas Fogg’s JeanPassepartout, Robinson Crusoe’s Friday and of course, The Lone Ranger’s Tonto. He also serves as means for the author to introduce into the narrative a commentary around the fraught situation in which Native Americans found themselves.
This is not a ‘lighting out for the territories’ idea of escape, or re-inventing yourself, or of conquest, or even of discovery. Nor is it entirely ‘quixotic’ except perhaps in its underlying foolishness. It is something more akin to those people who devote themselves, with great expenditures of time and money, to be present at as many solar eclipses as possible. The need to witness, to ‘see with your own eyes’, something wonderous or even just out of the ordinary, is so ingrained in us as not seeming to warrant explanation.
That is until it reaches the point of obsessive mania. Bellman’s adventures in his odyssey play out against the rather more prosaic threats facing those he has left behind in Pennsylvania. This contrast accentuates the poetic metaphor implicit in his peculiar quest.
Inland by Tia Obreht
Like In the Distance,this another stranger in a strange land story of the American West and likewise a setting in a desert landscape. Alternating between two stories Obrecht mixes historical fact with flights of phantasmagorical fancy. She uses the actuality of the employment of camels as pack animals and men from the Ottoman Empire as their handlers in 19thcentury Southwestern America to introduce elements of Near-Eastern culture. By way of a principle character hailing from the Balkans, the author, originally from there herself, adds yet another outlier cultural strand to the mix. In her Orange Prize winning first novel of 2011, The Tiger’s Wife, she uses that inheritance of a rich folkloric storytelling tradition to great effect, interweaving it with a narrative centred on the 1990s conflicts in the former Yugoslavia. There is a similar modus operandi at work here, transplanted to the American West of the 19thcentury.
While both story lines play upon classic tropes present in Wild West fiction, the outlaw on the run and the frontier settler under threat, the pervasive use of magic-realism and supernatural experiences push the narratives in to new territory. And yet again, as in previous novels discussed, the unforgiving, unremittingly harsh, desert environment serves to heighten sensory dislocation and lends creditability to the required suspension of disbelief.
How Much of These Hills is Gold by C Pam Zhang
The authors of the three novels discussed prior to this are all from outside the USA, either emigrating there as adults or in the case of Carys Davies, while having lived in the States for some years, residing in the United Kingdom. These writers are in a sense twice removed in their Wild West narratives. The first remove being the implicit one of the distance time imposes any story set in the past, the second added on is of coming from outside of the national culture and history. The American West, both as locale and legacy, is appreciably that much more of an imaginary world to an author whose sensibility was not formed by what that legacy’s contribution to the national mythos. One of the authors, Hernan Diaz, makes a point of not having physically visited the locations in which he has set In the Distance.
Zhang on other hand, is American. Although born in China, she has lived in America from the age of 4 and most pertinent to this discussion, her family travelling across the American West to set up home in Northern California when she was 8 years old.
Her debut of 2020, How Much of These Hills is Gold, is a coming of age story set in the time of the California Gold Rush. Crucially a number of years after the discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill when the initial easy pickings were over. While a large part of Zhang’s purpose in this novel is to redress the leaving out of the Chinese experience in the narratives of this period, her story in its key passages moves out ordinary into the realm of magic realism and fable.
This story is narrated by the newly orphaned Lucy; who with her sister have stolen a horse in order to transport their father’s corpse to its proper resting place. That is place, apparently, that will make itself known to the girls when they arrive at it. This task, resonant of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, takes quite some time to complete and involves traveling through a blasted apocalyptic landscape that is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Strange and macabre, full of signs and wonders, this odyssey marks the transition of the sisters from their embryonic state to adult forms they attempt to create for themselves.
The story then moves back and forth in time; back to explore the aforementioned Chinese experience, the sisters’ childhood in the gold fields, and discovering the truth of their parents’ relationship, then forward to questions of gender identity and towards the attempt to resolve the tensions existing between the sisters as well as between them and the dominant American culture.
How Much of These Hills is Gold, along with the other four novels I have picked out represent a trend that plays off of the standard tropes of the classic Western and applies the world building quality one finds in science fiction, as well as the uncanny otherness inherent in the gothic, to a moribund genre.