|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Western Writing, Ivan Doig, and New Ground
| Article
# : |
19044 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1991 |
3,152 Words |
| Author
: |
Carl Bredahl
Carl Bredahl is professor of American literature at the
University of Florida. He has published numerous articles, on
topics ranging from Charles Brockden Brown to Tom Wolfe, and
three books: Melville's Angles of Vision (Florida, 1972); New
Ground: Western American Narrative and the Literary Canon
(Chapel Hill, 1989); and Hemingway's Green Hills of Africa as
Evolutionary Narrative: Helix and Scimitar (Edwin Mellen,
1990), coauthored with Susan Drake. |
Almost forty years ago, Henry Nash Smith published his highly acclaimed Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, an analysis of myth's role in the settlement and literature of the American West. The book was a revision of the Turner thesis but still a description that valued the straightforward story of "monomyth" as the movement of the white pioneer into unsettled lands. In a later reprint of Virgin Land, smith said that he "was guilty of the same kind of oversimplification...ascribed to others," acknowledging as a problem that monomyth validates the actions of the dominant culture--in this case, a "virgin" or "vacant" land awaiting arrival of the Anglo-white westward course of empire.
More recent scholarship, of which Patricia Limerick's Legacy of Conquest would be an excellent example, rejects monomyth; instead of virgin land, the West becomes the dynamic meeting ground of native American, Mexican, Anglo-American, and Asian-American cultures. As with Smith's study, this "new" multidimensional western story should be approached as a paradigm for the large American story, increasingly understood as more diverse than an account of white, Anglo-Saxon males. Women and people of all colors, together with white males, make up a story both rich and painful in its experiential diversity.
Within this "new" account of the West, the clean westerns of Zane Grey, Owen Western, or Louis L'Amour become useful largely within the frame work of understanding monomyth and, therefore, are of narrowly limited interest to anyone attracted to the diversity of western/American experience. Western writing is no longer only the province of names like Willa Cather and Walter Van Tilburg Clark. It now includes such native Americans as Wendy rose, Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, and Louise Erdrich, and Chicano writers including Rudolfo Anaya, Jose Villarreal, and Raymond Barrio. It is also becoming increasingly clear that the West itself cannot be talked about in monolithic terms: Silko (Southwest) and Erdrich (northern plains) inherit distinctly different tribal cultures; and Anglos from the Pacific Northwest (Kesey or Goig) do not write out of the same contextual experience as do figures like Wright Morris, from the Midwest, or Harvey Fergusson, from the area around Taos, New Mexico.
Looked at now, there does not seem to be anything particularly surpassing in the above brief sketch; in fact, the surprising things is that for so long we viewed the vastness of the American West in such reductive terms. Anyone interested in American and American western writing now has the opportunity both to encounter a multiplicity of riches and to
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
