Unsettling the literary West: authenticity and authorship

U N S E T T L I N G T H E L I T E R A RY W E S T

postwestern horizons General Editor: William R. Handley University of Southern California Series Editors: José Aranda Rice University Melody Graulich Utah State University Thomas King University of Guelph Rachel Lee University of California, Los Angeles Nathaniel Lewis Saint Michael’s College Stephen Tatum University of Utah

UNSET TLING the LITER ARY WEST

Authenticity and Authorship

Nathaniel Lewis

university of nebr aska press lincoln and london

Publication of this volume was assisted by The Virginia Faulkner Fund, established in memory of Virginia Faulkner, editor-in-chief of the University of Nebraska Press. “Going West” copyright © 1981 by Robert Penn Warren. Reprinted by permission of William Morris Agency, Inc., on behalf of the author. Lyric excerpt of “I’m an Indian Too” by Irving Berlin © copyright 1946 by Irving Berlin, © copyright renewed. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission on page 204. Part of “Fact and Fiction” appeared in American Literary Realism: 1879 –1910 31 (winter 1999): 63 –71. It is reprinted with permission. Part of “Authentic Reproduction” is reprinted from Arizona Quarterly 57, no. 2 (2001), by permission of the Regents of the University of Arizona. © 2003 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America   Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lewis, Nathaniel, 1962 – Unsettling the literary West : authenticity and authorship / Nathaniel Lewis. p. cm. — (Postwestern horizons) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. isbn 0-8032-2938-0 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. American literature—West (U.S.)—History and criticism. 2. Western stories— History and criticism. 3. Frontier and pioneer life in literature. 4. West (U.S.)— Intellectual life. 5. West (U.S.)—In literature. I. Title. II. Series. ps271.l49 2003 813.08740978 — dc21 2003047321

For my mother And the memory of my father

Westward the Great Plains are lifting, as you Can tell from the slight additional pressure The accelerator requires. The sun, Man to man, stares you straight in the eye, and the Ribbon of road, white, into the sun’s eye Unspools. Wheat stubble long behind, Now nothing but range land. But, With tire song lulling like love, gaze riding white ribbon, forward You plunge. Blur of burnt goldness Past eye-edge on each Side back-whirling, you arrow Into the heart of hypnosis. This is one way to write the history of America.

robert penn warren, “going west”

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CONTENTS Acknowledgments Introduction: The Legacy of Authenticity

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1. Truth or Consequences: Western Literature in the 1830s

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2. Fact and Fiction: Canonical Simulations

48

3. Authentic Reproduction: The Picturesque Joaquin Miller

78

4. The Trap of Authenticity: Frank Norris and Western Authorship

109

5. Coming Out of the Country: Environmental Constructivism in Western Nature Writing

145

6. Inside Out in the Postmodern West

186

Epilogue: Territorial Expansion

241

Notes

251

Index

291

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Lawrence Buell, first and foremost. My debt to Larry is a deep and wideranging one. He guided early drafts of this project, offering tireless support, insightful critiques, and mentorly attention that immeasurably improved my work. He is for me the model of intellectual vigor and professional integrity, and I extend to him my warmest appreciation. I offer my deepest gratitude as well to Sacvan Bercovitch, Lynn Wardley, and Jacques Debrot— their rigorous and imaginative investigations of literature were wonderful influences on this book’s early stages. My work in western studies has been guided by a host of terrific friends and colleagues. Stephen Tatum showed me the way with his adventurous, progressive criticism. Over the past fifteen years Steve has consistently inspired and challenged me; his help with this book has been invaluable. William Handley is a gifted scholar, a keen reader—and a dear friend. Melody Graulich’s superb grasp of western literature is happily equaled by her intellectual generosity, and I have greatly benefited from both. And Susan Bernardin represents the very best of our profession; I am eternally grateful for her insight and her kindness. Steve, Bill, Melody, and Susan deserve much of the credit, and none of the blame, for this book. The Western Literature Association is the real thing, and I would like to offer my affectionate gratitude to the many wla members who shepherded me into the fold and continue to be inspirational to me: Lawrence Berkove, Charles Crow, Joseph Flora, William Kittredge, Michael Kowalewski, Bonney MacDonald, Barbara Meldrum, Gary Scharnhorst, Robert Thacker, and so many others. And to newer friends such as Neil Campbell, Krista Comer, Nancy Cook, Susan Kollin, Tara Penry, Barbara Stevens, Nic Witschi—the list is a long one. It is an honor to be a member of the wla and a pleasure to know these wonderful people. I would like to express my gratitude as well to the inspiring community that is Saint Michael’s College and specifically to Carey Kaplan, Christina Root, and Lorrie Smith for their perceptive readings; the incredible Joan Wry, for her incredible help; Dr. John Kenney and Dr. Janet Sheeran, for their generous support of my research; Shannon McCarthy and Jessica McEachern, for their fine assistance in preparing this book for publication; and my colleagues in the English department, who demonstrate daily what “right livelihood” means. And, finally, loving thanks to my teachers, friends, and family, pole stars all: Daniel Aaron, Richard H. Brodhead, Scott Cohen, Tom Ferraro, Elizabeth Gratch, Patty Limerick, David Lubin, Townsend Ludington, Judith ix

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McConnell, Joe Oechsli, Helle Porsdam, Ladette Randolph, Mark L. Reed, Richard Rust, Alan Trachtenberg, Bryan Wolf, Sophie, Emma, Daniel, Beatrix, my parents, so many others . . . and especially Andrea and Iris, who always encourage me to go off the trail while keeping me on the path.

x

U N S E T T L I N G T H E L I T E R A RY W E S T

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INTRODUCTION The Legacy of Authenticity

I value accuracy more than any other quality. owen wister

In Sam Shepard’s play True West two brothers fight it out to see who can sell a screenplay about the West to a Hollywood producer. The younger brother, Austin, an Ivy League graduate and writer, has been staying at their mother’s house outside Los Angeles and working on a romance. His brother Lee, a petty thief and aggressive drunk who has been living in the desert, proposes his own idea, a sketchy plot involving horses, adultery, and the threat of violence. Much to Austin’s dismay, the producer chooses Lee’s idea as more “authentic.” “It has the ring of truth,” the producer explains, “something about the real West.” Austin angrily responds: “Why? Because it’s got horses? Because it’s got grown men acting like little boys?” “Something about the land,” he is told. “Your brother is speaking from experience.” Austin explodes: “What’s he know about what people wanna’ see on the screen! I drive on the freeway every day. I swallow the smog. I watch the news in color. I shop in the Safeway. I’m the one who’s in touch!” 1 “In touch” with what? Contemporary LA culture? The Hollywood marketplace? The “real West”? True West teases out the implications in all of these answers, refusing to see much difference between them. To readers of western literature the brothers’ fight over what is “true” in the West is all too familiar. The play’s title is both patently ironic and quietly suggestive, enacting multiple possibilities. The play tells a postmodern story about the invention of the West—about greed, cynicism, Hollywood dealings, and textual contrivance. But it also tells an iconic western story of palpable integrity—a story of whiskey, family clashes, solitude, masculinity, and violent standoffs. What makes the title suggestive rather than merely ironic is not that it endorses or subverts a particular incarnation of the “real West,” but that it recognizes the very struggle over authenticity as perhaps the only “true” condition of the western cultural imagination. The pursuit, production, and marketing of the “real West” all but define the history of western literature and criticism.2 Two recent anthologies by two of the West’s most accomplished critics exemplify this surprisingly unexamined condition. In 1997 William Kittredge edited The Portable Western 1

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Reader for the popular Viking Portable Library. The back cover of this book promised that the collection would “transcend the Western myth and explore the vast range of Western experience.” Two years later Thomas J. Lyon edited The Literary West: An Anthology of Western American Literature for Oxford University Press. The promotional flier opened with a solitary supporting voice, Stewart Udall, proclaiming, “No one has a better grasp of Western Literature and its relationship to the authentic history of the West than Thomas Lyon.” The anthology is then described as offering “the panoramic literary range of the American West, from the romance of the mythic Wild West to the present-day creative explosion of the real, diverse West.” Lyon himself remarks in his introduction that there are “two Wests,” “a projective West” of the imagined frontier and the “real West,” where “people actually live.” 3 Of course, it is entirely reasonable to suppose that western writing reflects the West itself. Indeed, such an approach may well encourage an enhanced understanding of regional cultures and landscapes, of the places where people actually live. But insisting on the “real West” in a body of imaginative writing ultimately limits the explosive reach of literature. For two centuries readers have had little choice: western literature has been constructed and legitimized primarily in relation to “authentic history.” Western writing has been evaluated as either “mythic” or “real.” As Krista Comer puts it in her illuminating study Landscapes of the New West, “the bulk of critical opinion holds that if one can point to any general genre identity to characterize western literature, it would probably be realism.” 4 When encountering a western work, readers tend not to engage “literary” issues (such as narrative aesthetics, forms of signification, or intertextuality) but to question its realism: is it authentic or inauthentic? accurate or unreliable? realistic or mythological? But to evaluate a body of writing in relation only to the real is to treat that writing—and indeed the “real”—as a strangely static body, without energy or purpose or mystery. When we ask whether a work is true or false, we unintentionally limit western writing. We need to see these questions themselves as forming the context of reception, the determining environment. In Cultures of Letters Richard H. Brodhead calls for “a history not of texts or contexts alone but of the multiform transactions that have taken place between them.” 5 This book examines such transactions in western literary history through a study of western American authorship. The working critical theory is that authors influence their canonical reputations through 2

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their own self-inventions and strategies; authors are not mere functions or reflections of culture but are active agents—writing under the influence, to be sure, but in turn asserting themselves. Complexly, the self-fashionings of western writers frequently produced results that failed, at least by the established, usually eastern standards of American canonical success. That is, the canonical invisibility—as well as the frequent marketplace successes— of western literature can often be directly attributed to the strategies of the region’s writers. These strategies, I will argue, depend consistently on the claim of authenticity. Western writers present themselves as accurate and reliable recorders of real places, histories, and cultures—but not as stylists or inventors. Furthermore, to a surprising degree readers have accepted the claim of authenticity and read western literature primarily in relation to historical record. Through the study of a set of western authors and their relationships to canonical and cultural history, this book seeks to offer a reconsideration of the deceptive and often defeated history of western American literature. Authenticity, as Lionel Trilling puts it in Sincerity and Authenticity, is one of those words that “are best not talked about if they are to retain any force of meaning.” 6 Indeed, the term’s meaning is so elusive that Jacob Golomb, in his book In Search of Authenticity: From Kierkegaard to Camus, claims that “authenticity defines itself as lacking any definition”: “The notion of authenticity, it seems, signifies something beyond the domain of objective language.” 7 I certainly do not want to overdefine or overdetermine the idea of authenticity at the beginning of this study, but the ubiquity of the term in contemporary cultural discourse—in everything from advertising to selfhelp manuals to classical music circles to academic journals— demands some comment. While the word enjoys an intense currency in such fields as postcolonial theory, cultural studies, ethics, and philosophy (notably in the study of Heidegger), I prefer to begin by recognizing less esoteric uses. One important use of the word, explored by cultural philosophers such as Trilling and Charles Taylor, implies the modern notion of a true, inner self. In The Ethics of Authenticity Taylor identifies what he calls the “contemporary culture of authenticity,” a culture pursuing such individualistic goals as “self-fulfillment or self-realization”: “Being true to myself means being true to my own originality, and that is something only I can articulate and discover. In articulating it, I am also defining myself. I am realizing a potentiality that is properly my own. This is the background understanding to 3

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the modern ideal of authenticity.” 8 Somewhere inside every person is that “originality,” and this inner self needs to be “realized”—that is, recognized as real. As Taylor puts it in his essay “The Politics of Recognition,” the culture of authenticity implores us not to live “in imitation of anyone else’s life.” 9 Taylor traces this culture of authenticity back to the end of the eighteenth century (coincidently or not, the eve of American western expansion) and aligns it with “the massive subjective turn of modern culture, a new form of inwardness, in which we come to think of ourselves as beings with inner depths.” 10 While modern culture seems to encourage us to explore individually our own higher latitudes, so this thinking goes, it also encourages us to evaluate the hidden depths of public figures, including celebrities, politicians, and authors. For example, it was a commonplace of the 2000 U.S. presidential election to mock the emptiness of the two majorparty candidates and lament their lack of authenticity. Neither George W. Bush nor Al Gore seemed “real.” In response, Gore started wearing flannel shirts to promote his authenticity, while Bush preferred to demonstrate his authenticity through rhetorical gestures, campaigning on “Real Plans for Real People.” A second, related use of authenticity evokes the world outside of the self, the world of cultural production and commodity. The authentic is again defined by its originality, as distinguished from the imitation or the phony. Miles Orvell persuasively argues in The Real Thing that a “culture of authenticity” (the same phrase that Charles Taylor uses) developed at the end of the nineteenth century in response to a “culture of imitation” that was “fascinated by reproductions of all sorts—replicas of furniture, architecture, art works, replicas of the real thing in any shape or form imaginable.” The culture of authenticity, by contrast, attempted “to get beyond mere imitation, beyond the manufacturing of illusions, to the creation of more ‘authentic’ works that were themselves real things.” To Orvell “the tension between imitation and authenticity is a primary category in American civilization, pervading layers of our culture that are usually thought to be separate, from commercial design and advertising to literature.” 11 In The Culture of the Copy Hillel Schwartz suggests that this tension produces uncertainty, even anxiety: “The more adroit we are at carbon copies, the more confused we are about the unique, the original, the Real McCoy.” 12 Thus, we ask whether an antique chair or Ted Williams autograph is authentic—is it real? More playfully, Frank Zappa—an authentic original who virtually began his brilliant, idiosyncratic career by writing the music to a low-budget Western, Run 4

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Home Slow — could ponder in song the profound difference between a real poncho and a Sears poncho.13 The authentic is, above all, original and real. This notion of authenticity, of course, goes beyond material commodities and is often applied to broader categories of cultural experience. Significantly, authenticity is often freighted with the burden of the golden past, a nostalgia for an earlier age that seems, in retrospect, more real. Historian Philip J. Deloria remarks that “the authentic serves as a way to imagine and idealize the real, the traditional, and the organic in opposition to the less satisfying qualities of everyday life.” 14 Fenway Park, a gorgeous but often decrepit baseball stadium, is considered authentic; Camden Yards, with better seating and concessions, is not. Similarly, the worlds of baroque and classical music have been rocked by the introduction of authenticity; entire orchestras have appeared using only period instruments, reconstructing original tempos and sounds, dismissing current fashions and taste in search of the real Bach or Beethoven. Obviously, such a shift in performance value, while based on scholarship and sincerity, is itself a current fashion. (Beethoven did not use “period instruments”; he used instruments.) And, while many people look back with fondness on earlier highbrow forms of authenticity (period instruments, English gardens, Jane Austen, Emily Post), others celebrate as authentic those cultures, usually indigenous, deemed to be more genuine, natural, and spiritual. The love of the folk, “that protean re-source from whom comes the lore of authenticity and the illusion of innocence,” 15 is perhaps best exemplified in the United States by the romanticization of the American Indian. Deloria argues in Playing Indian that those who seek out authenticity often “locate authenticity in the figure of an Other.” “The quest for such an authentic Other,” Deloria concludes, “is a characteristically modern phenomenon, one that has often been played out in the contradictions surrounding America’s long and ambivalent engagement with Indianness.” 16 Such uses of authenticity and their many gradations converge on a number of points relevant to this study. First, authenticity is frequently an elusive characteristic or aura (to recall Walter Benjamin), something that must be sought out and tested. The notion of an authentic inner self may seem particularly intangible—how exactly does one “find oneself ” or engage the true self of another?—but even the authenticity of material artifacts or cultural experiences can be elusive. Commercial forums such as the Home Shopping Network can confidently offer a “Certificate of Authenticity” for merchandise, a document suggesting that an autograph or rare coin 5

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is original and real, but obviously such a certificate itself needs to be certified, to be authenticated, and that authentication in turn needs to be authenticated, ad infinitum. Determining authenticity is a slippery business. Second, the concept of the authentic implies a complementary category: the inauthentic. Common sense suggests that the inauthentic is secondary: something copied, constructed, often commodified, as opposed to the authentic, which is original, natural, priceless. (Zappa’s line implies that the Sears label makes the poncho inauthentic—although exactly what an inauthentic poncho might be is open to question.) Whether it appears decidedly real (a counterfeit) or decidedly imitation (kitsch), the inauthentic serves a number of functions, notably to reinscribe and legitimize the power of authenticity itself. Indeed, to distinguish between the authentic and the inauthentic is to promote the very idea of authenticity. Third, moreover, in many phases of American cultural life, the copy takes on its own aura and authority. In his essay “Travels in Hyperreality” Umberto Eco, discussing the “authentic duplicates” and copies in the chain of Ripley’s Museums, criticizes this “casual attitude toward the problem of authenticity. The authenticity the Ripley’s Museums advertise is not historical, but visual. Everything looks real, and therefore it is real; in any case the fact that it seems real is real, and the thing is real even if, like Alice in Wonderland, it never existed.” For Eco, whose comments are largely directed at the West, the United States is “a country obsessed with realism,” even when that realism is based on “a ‘real’ copy of the reality being represented.” 17 Finally, we must acknowledge the possibility that, while the inauthentic (the copy) is patently a construction designed to appear credible and real, the authentic may be a cultural construction as well. By this logic both the authentic and the inauthentic are designed to simulate cultural conceptions of the real. Such a proposition, associated with postmodern theory, may seem troubling. After all, the authentic is usually described with words like true, genuine, original, real, and natural. But postmodern theory argues that these terms are themselves self-validating cultural markers, promoting not the true, the self, the real, or the natural, but, rather, ideologically infused discourses and delusions. What we take to be authentic is a “simulacrum,” a copy without an original. The West of which I speak is but another name for the Authentic. For Krista Comer, “postmodernist culture” tells us that “there can be no such thing as western authenticity. There can be no defensible, insider, regional discourse, no ethnic or racial purity, no sure opposition between masculin6

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ity and femininity, no ‘natural’ nature, no final claim on what counts as ‘westernness.’” 18 In principle, I agree with this notion—I am emphatically averse to pursuing the authentic West in literature. At the same time, before dismissing the category of authenticity, we need to recognize that western literature is frequently, perhaps fundamentally, about authenticity. The history of western literature (authors, texts, and readers) is the history of the “production of the real,” to borrow a phrase from Jean Baudrillard. And no feature of western writing is more prominent, celebrated, or misleading than its realism. Jean-François Lyotard has suggested that realism “can be defined only by its intention of avoiding the question of reality implied in the question of art,” and this certainly holds true in the American West— but it is equally true that the question of art has been avoided in attempting to settle the question of reality.19 And so, in simplified terms, this project studies the tension between western reality and western art by examining how western writers employ notions of realism, the real, and the original to promote that deeper (and Trilling might say “ominous”) sense of authenticity. Authenticity is the perennial philosophy of western literature, with readers caught between the aspiring text and the more perfect form of the West itself. For now suffice it to say that authenticity of western place has something to do with what Patricia Nelson Limerick calls with wry amusement the “Real West”; 20 authenticity of author suggests a writer deeply connected to place, somehow in touch with regional spirit; and authenticity of text implies a writing through which place shines without the interference of language, desire, or intention. Masquerading as benign and accessible, western writing appears to lack the “depth” or complexity of other categories of American literature. It stands not so much as a body of imaginative literature but as the record of a region’s landscapes and histories. Indeed, that masquerade—the appearance of reliable representation offered by reliable authors—is so complete as to be invisible; we take it for granted that western writing represents, with varying degrees of accuracy, the Real West. When we read Faulkner, we assume that his creative vision is behind his South—he invented the place. (Thomas McGuane, writing on the western sense of place, once remarked that it made him very suspicious “that no one from Yoknapatawpha ever went to Miami.”) 21 But when we read Caroline Kirkland or Willa Cather or Wallace Stegner or N. Scott Momaday we treat their works as sincere at7

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tempts— often as successful attempts—at representing a profound reality. In other words, the place invented them. Or so they tell us. We might begin with an apparently simple question: why would western authors insist that their work is authentic? The answers, surprisingly complex, must eventually consider a variety of possibilities, ranging from genuine regional affection to commercial advantage to marketplace expectation to the burden of tradition. But we might start by recognizing that writers want to record a stunning western reality. At first the West was remote to the dominant white culture, a distant place of savagery and wildness, sometimes exotic, often unattractive. Explorers, travelers, and tourists visited the far-off region and brought their impressions back to an armchair audience, reading mostly in the East and in Europe. Yet, oddly, this sense of remoteness lingered in the cultural imagination well past the age of exploration and then past the age of immigration; even after the West was settled, after the frontier was “closed,” after the decimation and confinement of native cultures, after the emergence of transcontinental rail and air travel, the West remained and remains a region somehow beyond representation. The Indians and landscapes could be conquered, but the “meaning” of the West—its spirit, its reality—remains too awesome to be captured. Perhaps, it has been suggested, one needs faith to grasp that spirit: recall N. Scott Momaday’s familiar quip that “the West has to be seen to be believed, and believed to be seen.” It is as if the West is too big to fit on a canvas, too wild to conform to language, too transcendent and limitless to be corralled by literature and art. Yet complications as well as some anxieties immediately set in. How do writers measure up against the magnificent West? And what is the role of the author’s imagination when the topic is grander than any possible literary creation? In Don D. Walker’s words, for many western readers and critics “the imagination functions only in imitation of what history offers.” 22 For example, in 1843 P. T. Barnum advertised his museum’s “Wild Indians of the Far West” by proclaiming, “however high curiosity may be raised, the anticipation cannot come up to the reality.” 23 So it is throughout western cultural history: the reality is always thought to be more stunning than the painting or book, than memory or anticipation. In 1896 Owen Wister remarked: “When our national life, our own soil, is so rich in adventures to record, what need is there for one to call upon his invention save to draw, if he can, characters who shall fit these strange and dramatic scenes? One cannot improve upon such realities.” 24 Reality controls both writing and re8

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sponse. The most a writer can hope for is to approximate, to approach, to convey just a little of the excitement and expanse of the West. We marvel, finally, not at how big Bierstadt’s canvasses are but how small they seem compared to their subjects. This West, at once America’s ultimate reality and ultimate fantasy, may be said to exist beyond: beyond the horizon, beyond the present, beyond representation. The West is the ever-distant site of national destiny, where dreams will someday be fulfilled. Thoreau wrote, “we go westward as into the future.” 25 But, paradoxically, the notion of the West’s sublimity exists alongside a very different regional conception: from the moment of first European contact the West has been slipping away, eroding, and declining. From this perspective we envision not a glimpse of the West as perpetual future but, rather, a palimpsest of the Edenic past, that fresh, green breast of the new world. Thus, western writers must not only try to record a profound reality but must preserve it. At almost exactly the same time that Thoreau romanticized about the golden West, Francis Parkman sought to explore America’s prehistory before it vanished. “Great changes are at hand in that region,” he wrote in The Oregon Trail; soon, he felt, “its danger and its charm will have disappeared together.” 26 Parkman romantically lamented not only the disappearance of the “vanishing American” but implied that the winning of the West would inevitably be the losing of the West. Parkman, like so many others, hoped in his book to fix, in that word’s many meanings, that authentic, doomed region. This book asks: what happens when the claim of authenticity is examined critically and is revealed to be not only a quixotic rhetorical strategy but also a form of authorial self-invention? What happens when the repeated claims of authenticity are themselves treated as constituting a narrative of literary history? And what happens to western literature when it is unhinged from authenticity—from history, from some “actual landscape,” from “reality”? Not only is western authorship suddenly exposed as contested, nervous, and disarmingly ambitious, but a new history of western literature begins to emerge. First, we begin to see an unsettling tradition of authorial self-fashioning, one based on an unusual form of writerly competition. The establishment of this tradition is the subject of my first three chapters: how writers such as James Hall, Caroline Kirkland, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, and Joaquin Miller initiated and critiqued the central discourse of authenticity. One remarkable component of this process is how often authors shift the 9

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site of authenticity from their own imagination to their works’ accuracy and finally to the West itself. In his preface to The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones (1956), itself a patterned simulation of Pat Garrett’s Authentic Life of Billy the Kid, Charles Neider explains that he set out to write “a book as authentic in its details as [he] was capable of making it.” He researched every inch of his subject, living in a mountain canyon and studying handguns. He writes: “for a couple of months, all the time except when I was asleep, I wore an old Colt .45 on my right leg, the holster tied to my thigh.” The weight of the gun was such that certain leg muscles became overdeveloped and he had “an odd walk for a while”; his fingers would bleed from practicing his draw. Neider’s preface implies that readers should be able to trust the details of the book and should realize the authenticity behind it.27 Indeed, it is the West and its history, mighty and imposing, that seem to stand behind every western author and text, that seem to inform and legitimate writers and writing. Trilling may have examined what one commentator calls “the role of the artist as the archetype of the authentic person,” 28 but for the most part western writers seem to look to the West as the source of their own and their works’ authenticity. There is an “abiding assumption that the West gives the artist his possibilities and imposes his limitations,” Don D. Walker wrote; “the writer has only the history, the myths, the forms given him.” 29 In turn a text is authenticated because it reflects the Real West, not the author’s stylized vision or creativity. In the West what Foucault called the “author function” is negligible; it is a “place function” that determines the discourse of authenticity (even as that discourse determines place). Further, because western writers so often stake their claims based on the authenticity of their work, rather than, say, creativity or individuality, they are left with a strange and largely unproductive form of literary inheritance. “Influence” is an especially uneasy concept in the West. It is familiar enough by now to trace forms of influence in other bodies of American writing, whether that influence produces competitive anxiety or salubrious kinship (or both). James revises Hawthorne, Morrison revises Faulkner and Hurston—and perhaps James and Hawthorne. Yet, if a text is presented not as a creative work of art but, rather, as a record of history and place, then the revising author can only acknowledge or correct his or her precursor, can only uphold an earlier text as authentic or dismiss it as phony. If there is a tradition of influence in western writing, this may be it: call earlier representations inauthentic and unrealistic and determine to do a better job. In the literary West there are only second acts. Timothy Flint, James Hall, 10

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Caroline Kirkland, Mark Twain, Joaquin Miller, Frank Norris, Hamlin Garland, Owen Wister, Charles Eastman, Mary Austin, Willa Cather, Wallace Stegner, Edward Abbey, N. Scott Momaday, William Kittredge, Leslie Silko, Terry Tempest Williams—many if not most western writers implicitly make this move. Indeed, the presence of this corrective tradition obscures an even more tangled form of influence, for it allows western writers to define and police the boundaries of the western territory. Western literature has generally presented itself as self-contained, a regionally grounded body of works by a group of writers alone in the world, independent and proud. In 1901 William Dean Howells wrote: “The West, when it began to put itself into literature, could do so without the sense, or the apparent sense, of any older or politer world outside of it; whereas the East was always looking fearfully over its shoulder at Europe, and anxious to account for itself as well as represent itself. . . . [I]t is not claiming too much for the Western influence upon American literature to say that the final liberation of the East from this anxiety is due to the West, and to its ignorant courage or its indifference to its difference from the rest of the world.” 30 In this remarkable statement Howells claims that western writing is free from the anxiety of influence because it is simply uninfluenced by other writings—it is sui generis, original. This sense of being pure and uncontaminated has historically allowed western writing to appeal to readers as an antidote to the increasing unreality of the world. It is authentic in a world of commercialized copies and local in a world of threatening globalization. And, too often, this parochial vision has allowed western criticism to see itself as an enclave of sanity and pragmatic integrity, especially in the wake of the invasion of Continental theory. Not surprisingly, these traditions of western realism and western exceptionalism produce, at subtle levels, their own anxieties. And this is my second hope: that we can begin to recognize that, although this tradition of authenticity can be a source of creative fun and marketplace authority for authors, it can also produce a kind of anxiety or burden as writers often find themselves trapped by the perceived need to be accurate and mimetically faithful. This trap of authenticity is the fourth chapter’s subject: how writers such as Owen Wister, Hamlin Garland, and Frank Norris worked within and against the tradition of western realism. When we understand that western writers in fact produce texts not (only) in relation to the Rocky Mountains or to the Ghost Dance but in relation to more “literary” pres11

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sures (other writers, global traditions, rhetorical constructs, competing cultural narratives, and so on), then we can see how crippling is the narrow discourse of authenticity. In 1987, for example, William Kittredge lamented that he felt confined by a long history of inauthentic writing—the same lament heard throughout western literary history: “The myth has been an insidious trap for those who would write about the American West, a box for the imagination. For a long time it was as if there was only one legitimate story to tell about the West, and that was the mythological story.” Kittredge is, in fact, echoing generations of western writers who felt compelled, for various commercial and cultural reasons, to repeat the sins of their fathers and reinvent the mythological wheel. Kittredge, however, expresses hope for the modern western author; he argues that contemporary western writers (he names Gretel Ehrlich, Thomas McGuane, Louise Erdrich, James Welch, and Leslie Silko, among others) are producing “antimythological” works that subvert the tired mythology: “So, out in our West, artists are trying to run their eyes clear of mythic and legendary cobwebs, and see straight to the actual.” 31 Kittredge, one of our most insightful writers, is hardly projecting a simple or naive “actual”; on the contrary, he insists on the complexity of western reality. Yet what is so fascinating here is that Kittredge and other western writers continue to aim for the actual, continue to explain that their work is an attempt at descriptive accuracy. Their choices seem to be the mythological (inauthentic) West or the actual (authentic) West. But why is western writing so committed to representational authenticity? Why is a literature that first came into self-awareness during the Romantic period and finally flowered in the Modernist period so suspicious of imaginative constructions and avant-garde disruptions? Why don’t writers aggressively abandon the goals of descriptive veracity or historical authenticity and celebrate, instead, their own imaginative reaches and inventions? And why should readers of Kittredge’s brilliant, complex, and sometimes kinky writing be bound by the expectations of the actual? Kittredge himself is indeed the “genuine article,” as the dust jacket for his Southwestern Homelands tells us, but that doesn’t mean that his writing should be corralled under the rubric of the genuine. The “box for the imagination” is not the myth—it is, rather, the tradition of correcting the myth. Third, recognizing the authorial insistence on authenticity helps us understand the reception history of western writing and that writing’s dramatic noncanonicity. Authors disappear— erase themselves—in textual homage to place. This activity may have encouraged a marketplace security 12

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for western writing, but it spelled doom for a literary and academic culture that canonizes authors. And, rather than attend to the embedded imaginative reaches of western literature, critics engage history—in fact, battle with historians for the rights to the authentic West. To be sure, I am not the first to raise these concerns. Over twenty years ago a subschool, as it were, of critics, led by Don D. Walker and Max Westbrook, argued with persuasive—if largely ignored— conviction that, in Walker’s words, “western literary criticism has for a long time been dominated by the historian’s way of judgment.” 32 Arguing for “the restoration of the imagination to its properly dominant position in western literature,” 33 these critics contested the hegemony of authenticity in essays such as Walker’s “Can the Western Tell What Happens?” Westbrook’s “The Authentic Western,” and Jackson K. Putnam’s “Historical Fact and Literary Truth: The Problem of Authenticity in Western American Literature.” Concerned that readers tend to “value any work which recreates that [western] past in a way they trust is authentic,” these critics recognized with striking acuity the tendency to read for authenticity.34 Putnam summarized the problem by writing that “critics of the authenticist school demanded that western writers abjure the imagination entirely and depict the ‘real’ West by relying solely on the factual record.” 35 Interestingly, Putnam in this statement empowers critics with the responsibility for this historicist methodology—but Westbrook himself had already noted two years earlier what he called the “rub”: “the unmistakable fact that so many of the best of Western writers are devoted to the authentic.” 36 My book investigates exactly this rub. Further, we should note that Putnam uses the past tense in his essay, believing that “this dismal situation”— the “problem of authenticity”—had been “transcended” by Westbrook, Walker, and others.37 But, despite Westbrook’s assertion that “no literature should be judged on the rack of authenticity,” despite the sharp denunciation of the “fallacy of authenticity,” critics largely continued to demand historical realism.38 And continue to demand historical realism, even in an academic age that distrusts realism itself. Poststructuralist readings are nearly unheard of in western criticism.39 Here we find ourselves in a postmodern theater of the absurd; even when critics recognize that history is “constructed,” they want in on the building. What, critics argue, could be more historically authentic than literature? (Why not claim the opposite, substituting less for more? Why not, at least as an experiment, divorce the literary from authentic history? Even then it remains a vital barometer of a culture’s sense of self.) In many 13

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ways my approach should be obvious by now. Cultural studies and postmodern theory have firmly established the limitations of representing “reality”; as Mark Poster remarks, “the performative aspects of language are recognized.” Poster goes on to quote Roger Chartier, who suggests that “what is real, in fact, is not (or not only) the reality that the text aims at, but the very manner in which it aims at it in the historic setting of its production and the strategy used in its writing.” 40 The point, as will be made clear, is not that literature has no social function. Quite the opposite: literature invents social function. Fourth, by investigating writers’ claims of textual authenticity, we confront a number of challenging questions about authorial identity and “nativeness.” How does a writer become authentic? Do the demands of authenticity require that an author be from the West? What does it mean to be “from the West”? Chapters 5 and 6 ask this last question, first from an ecocritical perspective and then through the lens of postmodern theory. Nature writers, for example, often claim authenticity based on a relationship with place: being “from the West” means, quite literally, being from the land, from “mother nature.” In fact, nature writers often suggest that their authorial identity is formed not through cultural influences but through natural ones. The concept of what I call environmental constructivism allows western nature writers (such as John Muir, Mary Austin, and Gary Snyder) to claim a remarkable place-based authority. But, of course, the notion of being from the West also raises questions of heritage and ethnicity. If authenticity implies some “natural,” “deep,” and long-standing connection with place and history, does it follow that western Native American writers are the “most authentic”? Is there indeed something “in the blood”? This problematic question, as reductive as it sounds, forces yet another reconsideration of western literature and authorship. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. puts it in an essay on the “Little Tree” furor: “Start interrogating the notion of cultural authenticity and our most trusted critical categories come into question.” 41 How should we respond when N. Scott Momaday’s novel House Made of Dawn is advertised as being “almost unbearably authentic”; or his Way to Rainy Mountain as “so authentic and so moving”; or James Welch’s Fool’s Crow as possessing a “scrupulous authenticity”? It is easy enough, as Ward Churchill has noted, to recognize how nineteenth-century cultural stereotypes of Indians “had assumed a documented ‘authenticity’ in the public consciousness”; does the word authenticity carry the same assumed tone (and racism) when applied to con14

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temporary Native authors? Are these dust jacket blurbs implying a form of representational realism or something deeper, something true to ethnic condition—and thus, possibly, suggesting as much about Anglo perceptions of the native Other as about the books’ accuracy? The implicit cultural logic here is striking, if all too familiar: the simulated cultural margin (the Indian) is valorized as the authentic in the popular and critical imagination. And the trap is doubled: Native writers are burdened with the “honor” of genetic authenticity (they inevitably reveal a truth), while Anglo writers are burdened with a secondhand authenticity (they inevitably reveal a copy). These questions of nativeness and ethnicity are examined in the book’s final chapter, in part through multiculturalist theories but primarily through a broader consideration of how theories of postmodern displacement and simulation force us to reconsider an author’s relationship to place. I want to suggest that when we stop evaluating western writing with the test of authenticity, we can begin to dismantle the burden of realism and can treat western literature itself as simulation rather than representation. If only because in the West the real was never an Eden or empty wilderness (beyond preservation) and because the real has always seemed so vast and extraordinary (beyond representation), we can identify the production of the real at work from the beginning. Western literature, by this logic, may be understood as a series of simulacra, copies without originals, maps that precede the territory. With reality so contested, the production of simulacra was probably inevitable. Baudrillard suggests that, “when the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning”; when simulation has overtaken representation, we find ourselves, not surprisingly, amid “a plethora of myths of origin and of signs of reality—a plethora of truth, of secondary objectivity and authenticity.” 43 Consequently, Gerald Vizenor has argued that the indian (lower case and italicized) is a simulation, a hyperreal fiction, the absence of the native; I am extending this argument to consider the broader simulation of western reality throughout western writing. Western literature, imbued from the start with both anticipation and nostalgia, has helped produce these myths of origins, these signs of reality—this overwhelming burden of authenticity. Treating western literature as simulation rather than representation redirects our attention from history and place to text or screen; makes the connection between language and reality not only suspect but playfully unnecessary; and helps us to project and finally glimpse a previously invisible history of western literature. Unsettling the traditional approach to western literature reveals an unset15

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tling body of writing. This book—looking behind the scenes at authorial design—may serve as a prelude to a more important project: recognizing the postmodern play of western literature. Indeed, western writing may be the first and most successful form of postmodern writing in American literary history. Its apparent banality, reliability, and repetitive imitations cloak (as a Romulan space vessel might cloak) its extraordinary achievement: the production of a hyperreal West. In closing, I should perhaps point out that, as is probably obvious, I have no interest in testing an author’s authenticity or comparing forms of authenticity. In literary terms the dime novel is every bit as authentic as the historical narrative, and it makes no sense to say that Zane Grey or Louis L’Amour is less— or more—authentic than Willa Cather or Leslie Silko. Nor do I intend to deride the authorial claim of authenticity. I can admire, for example, Timothy Egan’s intentions in Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West (1998), as when he writes: “I have tried to find a true West at the start of the next hundred years, leaving the boundaries of the old metaphors in search of something closer to the way we live.” 44 It makes lyrical sense for authors to investigate their world through their writing. My complaint is with the claim’s ubiquity and with its oppressive effects on authorial reach and on reading practices. Even granting Egan the charm of sincerity, I see no reason to read his book to get “closer” to a “true West.” Further, I should point out that, in considering western literature as a series of simulacra—always already copies without originals—I am hoping to get at and unsettle a two hundred–year reliance on textual authenticity. I am not, however, repudiating the existence of the West itself, even if I do gesture in that (non)direction a few times. While I am susceptible to the seduction (or cynicism) of a world without authenticity, a world of freeplay and illusion, I’m not exactly giving up the West or even “westernness.” And I certainly have no interest in championing either postmodern theory or postmodern culture, both of which are currently experiencing a welldeserved backlash of sorts. Rather, I’m interested in an authorial condition and even what might be called, in an old-fashioned sense, literary history: how authors produce texts (borrowed, rewritten, deferred texts) that can be called “authentic.” Simulation, while “unreal,” can be stirring and effective; the production—and, significantly, concealment— of simulation can be equally impressive. To a large degree all authors provide directions for reading their works; for western writers these directions amount to a code 16

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of authenticity, a subtext that is itself fascinating, deceptive, textured, and even beautiful in its architectonics. Whether writers are struggling with the burden of authenticity or deploying its authority, they are producing a map of the West and of creativity itself that is a wonder to behold. That we take this map to be mimetic rather than imaginative is only one cultural effect of authenticity’s pull. Moreover, although I am suspicious of metanarratives, the emergence of certain interpretive strategies, broadly termed cultural studies, suggests that the time is right for reconceptualizing western writing. The continued, often covert reliance on realism, authenticity, place, and history—no matter how ironically these terms are deployed— calls for significant attention to the relationship between text and place, between representation and history. Of course, such a reconceptualization of western literary history runs the risk a priori of asserting a New Western Criticism, a New Western literary history of the New West. That is, in presenting a corrective vision of western writing, new readings, including my own, may fall into the authenticity trap— out with the old, in with the new. My hope here is simple: by unsettling the relationship between history and literature, by seeing literature as what might be termed a “procession of simulacra,” we can at least sidestep the long-standing and problematic reliance on history by readers and critics. I am hardly calling for an ahistorical textual hermeneutics. I agree with Frank Lentricchia’s axiom that “not all social power is literary power, but all literary power is social power.” 45 But, in turn, I would suggest that we have yet to understand or even appreciate the literary power of western writing. No doubt, some readers will criticize my choice of authors as being too familiar, too canonical; what about Lewis Garrard, Helen Hunt Jackson, Zitkala-Sˇa, or Gloria Anzaldúa? Although I do examine a number of noncanonical or marginalized writers, I admit that I do not see this book as a search-and-rescue mission. I prefer to consider a range of major and minor writers as well as a range of genres and periods. On a deep level every western author participates in what Susan Bernardin calls the “authenticity game,” some more playfully or painfully than others.46 I could easily have included chapters on Black Elk (or John Neihardt), Amy Tan (or Frank Chin), and so on. In this book I do not pretend to be definitive but hope, instead, to be suggestive. Other readers will object that my subjects are too esoteric and fanciful; shouldn’t there be greater consideration of Cooper, Cather, Stein, and Stegner? In response I would ask: as we unsettle western 17

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literary history, what short list of authors could possibly represent western writing? Indeed, while I recognize that certain authors have contributed more than others to the functioning “mythology” of the West and to the establishment of the authenticity discourse, I would argue that the idea of a canon is itself a projection of authenticity. This book does not make a case for reconsidering the canon, but the need for it is as obvious as it is ignored. Since, as I argue, the western canon (a largely marginalized one at best) has repeatedly depended on the claim of authenticity, that canon will necessarily be challenged by questioning authenticity itself. In other words, once realism is abandoned as the defining characteristic of western literature, we are left with a remarkably heterogeneous and “disorganized” group of writers. Finally, by necessity, in this book I am inevitably reading “around” a tradition of criticism and implicitly reading “through” a tradition of authorial directives. I realize that many readers will disagree with my ideas about western literature, disapprove of my flirtations with postmodern theory and literary aesthetics, and dislike my attempts to unsettle reading traditions. I offer my ideas in the hope of discovering new ways of loving western literature. At the very least I hope that my study suggests that the self-inventing strategies of western authors are surprisingly intriguing. These strategies not only explain a great deal about western writing but also shed much light on the broader reach of American literature. To see these authors struggling in the act of self-definition is to see one of the fascinating untold stories in American literary history.

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1 TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES Western Literature in the 1830s

Nothing so much resembles a hollow as a swelling. — charles augustin sainte-beuve

In his introduction to Sketches of History, Life, and Manners in the West (1834) James Hall reflected at length on the troubled condition of writing in the American West. Hall, an influential Cincinnati lawyer, editor, and author, remarked that “few of the writers who have treated of the western country, rank above mediocrity; and little of all that has been written on this subject is interesting or true. Books we have had in abundance; travels, gazetteers, and geographies inundate the land; but few of them are distinguished by literary merit or accurate information.” 1 The complaint is typical of Hall’s thinking, for he had long worried that western writing was a series of “failures” 2 —the available books, he wrote, “are the hasty productions of incompetent writers, whose opinions are generally wrong.” 3 And literary history has largely agreed: of the seemingly limitless contingent of authors who wrote on the West in the first half of the nineteenth century, only one, James Fenimore Cooper, is canonically remembered for his western writings, even though, strictly speaking, little of Cooper’s prose took place in the West, and he himself never went west. History has forgotten scores of others, including Timothy Flint, Henry Marie Brackenridge (son of Hugh Henry), Charles Fenno Hoffman, and Hall himself. But during the 1830s the West was quite literally “cultural capital” for enterprising writers, a topic of enormous commercial appeal to both eastern and western authors—and the site of considerable writerly competition. Although contemporary literary scholars have aggressively studied the formation of an American canon and the development of authorship that occurred in the East during the first half of the nineteenth century, few have considered the parallel struggle taking place in the West.4 But in fact western writers such as Hall and Flint were energetically voicing the need for a recognized literature of the West, trying to corral a proliferating market of writings about the West into a more profitable situation for the region’s authors. And, just as the debates over authorship—and copyright and nationalism—taking place in the major eastern cities helped determine the course of a recognized national literature, so too the early debates in the 19

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West contributed to the condition of western authorship for years to come. The difference, of course, is that no effective regional or national literature emerged from the struggle, no Hawthorne or Longfellow or Sedgwick or Child around whom to build a powerful tradition. This chapter attempts to establish the condition of authorship in the 1830s for those writers “treating of the Western country” (in Hall’s language)—that is, for authors writing in the West and about the West. The struggle to incorporate (give recognizable body to) western authorship finally points to a historical absence and to a set of troubled expectations and conditions that predict the broader nineteenth-century failure of a recognized western canon. In many ways the tangle of the western marketplace in the 1830s serves as a model in American literary history of how authors and cultures interact. Significantly, the terms of the western literary debates were often exactly the same as those heard in the East. Words such as romance, imagination, originality, fancy, genius, and truth were heatedly discussed in deploying the emerging literature. Moreover, the challenges to western authors were largely the same challenges being faced by Poe, Emerson, Sedgwick, and Sigourney: although the explosive proliferation of writings may have produced an optimism for authorship, it also caused significant problems for aspiring authors, raising questions applicable to any burgeoning literary moment. How do authors assert themselves into a crowded market? What claims do they make about their work and themselves? And how do those claims influence a developing tradition? The answers to these questions help explain how culture works to determine authorship and how, in response, authors assert themselves against cultural pressures in the struggle for self-invention. If, however, the inchoate western market echoed the same terms and concerns as that of the East, it also developed in significantly different ways. That is, if the early development of western literature can serve as an American model, it also precipitated a regionally unique condition. In fact, authorship was developing along dramatically different paths, and the very different shades cast by those literary terms (such as romance) suggest the uneasy dialectic between West and East. If, as others have argued, authorship for eastern writers increasingly emphasized the individualized authorial personality and imaginative genius, authorship in the West revolved first around the perceived authenticity of the work and authority of the writer and second around any internal “interest” of the text. James Hall signals these two related points when he laments the lack of “interesting or true” 20

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writing in the West. Authenticity (often coded in the words fidelity, accuracy, and truth) implied factual representation of landscape, population, and historical record. For western writers experience preceded authentic writing, whereas genius and imagination were the purported foundation for eastern writing. The “interest” of the western text—what set it apart from other authentic works—was far more nebulous and usually suggested not imaginative originality but, rather, the stunning and even original presence of western landscapes and people. The two concepts were central to the discourse on authorship at the time and contributed to the problematic construction of authorship and authority, one that precipitated the subsequent nineteenth-century canonical failures of western literature. Literary Nationalism and Western Double Consciousness In 1834 Joseph B. Longacre and James Herring brought out the first of four projected volumes of The National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans. Published in Philadelphia, the book contained portraits of the country’s “Eminent Citizens,” with accompanying biographical essays. As Longacre and Herring wrote in their introductory “Address,” the “enterprise present[ed] the loftiest appeal to national honour and self respect, as an effort at once to preserve the features, and to rescue, from the wasting hand of time, the memory of those whose noble deeds, exalted fame, or eminent virtues, have shed a lustre upon their age.” 5 Relying on “taste and patriotism” to complete the mission, the two men were attempting to identify those men and women most American and to “preserve” both the face and the memory for posterity. It is a classic example of the process of canon formation. For their first volume the editors chose just three authors out of thirtyfive subjects: Washington Irving, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and James Fenimore Cooper.6 All three writers were praised for their literary achievements and their representative nationalism. As the Gallery portraits (text and etching) suggest, authorship was moving toward a marketplace conception in which individual figures were commodified as public personalities, personae both representative (nationalist) and individual (original). If reviewers and readers remained largely uninterested in authors’ private lives, they were increasingly sensitive to their public identities.7 James Hall disparaged exactly this development in an 1833 review of Tales of the Glauber Spa, an anthology of short fiction by “several American Authors”; he wrote that “the names of Sedgwick, Bryant, Paulding and Leggett will secure these volumes 21

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a kind reception, and probably, a ready sale. Those persons that ask, not what is the merit of the work, but what the name of the writer, will praise them to the skies.” 8 Toward establishing a recognized name, an author’s individual style became, in critic Mark Rose’s term, the “objectification of a personality,” 9 a construction brilliantly reified by Poe in his 1836 “Autography” series, in which he “reads” the author’s character through the author’s (hand)writing. Authorial individualism was crucial to this developing formula: writers became proprietary agents who “owned,” if only metaphorically, a body of work and a public reputation, both being central to their commercial visibility. Martha Woodmansee, in her essay “On the Author Effect: Recovering Collectivity,” defines the idea of authorship developing during the Romantic period: “By ‘author’ we mean an individual who is the sole creator of unique ‘works’ the originality of which warrants their protection under laws of intellectual property known as ‘copyright’ or ‘authors’ rights.’” 10 By the end of the 1830s Emerson, Poe, and others were developing this conception of authorship based on the simultaneously representative and individualized creative figure. Yet in the West the development of authorship proceeded with a halting gait, at least in part because it depended on a significantly different conception of authorship. That literature (by any definition) thrived in the early West is beyond dispute, although literary history often overlooks the prolific output. British authors were immensely popular in the West, as they were in the East, Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott chief among them.11 But the range of literary expression self-consciously western was enormous as well; the literary landscape was populated by novels, poems, plays, travel accounts, emigrant guides, religious tracts, journalistic essays, histories, political manifestoes, printed journals, legal opinions, and numerous other forms of writing.12 As early as 1826, the Congregational minister Timothy Flint gazed with some writerly dejection on the already crowded market. Flint, who had traveled widely in the West often promoting religious activity, opened his popular and influential Recollections of the Last Ten Years by noting that “there are such showers of journals, and travels, and residences, and geographies, and gazetteers; and every person, who can in any way fasten the members of a sentence together, after having travelled through a country, is so sure to begin to scribble about it, that I have felt a kind of awkward consciousness at the thought of starting in the same beaten track.” 13 That is, by 1826, roughly fifteen years before the “great migration” of the 1840s, the inviting pioneer trail of western writing was, metaphorically, 22

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a beaten track. Flint’s answer was to turn his “awkward consciousness” into a fully developed and directed awareness of the possibilities of western literature. The following year, 1827, Flint began publishing the Western Monthly Review in Cincinnati with the hope of establishing the foundation of what can only be called an accepted western canon. In the journal Flint articulated a literary sensibility decidedly western—and one suspicious of the eastern literary power structure. “Little, as they have dreamed of the fact in the Atlantic country,” he wrote, “we have our thousand orators and poets. . . . We hope our readers feel, without our prosing upon the subject, that it is high time, amidst our improvements of every sort, that some effort should be made, to foster polite literature among us.” 14 Flint’s prescription for “encouraging authorship” in the West quickly turned into a contentious treatise on the undemocratic institutionalization of literature in America (17): “writing has long since grown to be a profession, and book making, a trade, in which . . . there is more falsehood, flattery, supplanting and envy, than in any other profession practised on the globe. Reviews are the engines of this trade, too often driven with a forty-horse power of arrogant injustice” (10). Of course, Flint was referring to the perceived cultural hegemony of the eastern marketplace and its editors, reviewers, and publishers. He understood that “one, or two self constituted reviews become despotic courts of opinion” and that the western author suffers at the hands of the eastern critic (11): “we have seen . . . with what a curl of the lip, and crook of the nose an Atlantic reviewer contemplates the idea of a work written west of the Alleghany mountains” (10). Authorship in the West was therefore both prolific and professionally invisible. The result was that the “exhausted author” in the West could only “drop the dear offspring of his brain into the immense abyss of a public,” with little hope for remuneration or even acknowledgment (9). Flint hoped his magazine, arguably the first major effort to lend critical authority to western writing, would act as a source for fostering a more salubrious and profitable atmosphere. He saw himself, at least as an editor, as a “gifted and good father developing the powers of a child” and an “experienced and benevolent instructor, watching, encouraging, and enlightening the efforts of his pupil” (16 –17). In 1833 Flint, in failing health, returned east, where he briefly edited the Knickerbocker Magazine. His departure neatly coincided with the introduction of James Hall’s Cincinnati literary periodical, the Western Monthly Magazine. In the first issue Hall noted that “the literature of the West is still in its 23

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infancy” and seemed determined to guide it along conciliatory lines.15 He expressed the desire to conjoin narrative (fiction) and science (facts), the “flowers of literature” with the “cause of science and useful knowledge.” “The friends of science and literature,” Hall rhapsodized, “however they may differ in other respects, may meet and agree in learned and useful discussion. . . . [T]hey may enlarge the public mind.” 16 This self-introduction to his readers remains his most idealized hope for producing a regional literature that can entertain through accurate knowledge. But, if Hall’s first words were largely harmonious and nonsectional, by the August issue he seemed less determined to “soften the asperities of human passion”; in his harsh review of the Knickerbocker (which he claimed was “established to redeem the literary character of New York”), Hall questioned Flint’s new editorship and, using the aggressively campy language of frontier battle or even revolution (not to mention civil war), proclaims: The editor of the Portland [Ohio] Advertiser says in one of his letters, that the western literati are forming a solemn league and compact to beat their eastern rivals. This is undoubtedly the case. A caucus of writers took place lately at Columbus, to arrange the plan of the first campaign. Such being the fact, it behooves the Atlantic gentry to shake off their literary lethargy, or we shall beat them out and out. We have an immense mass of lead, and a wonderful deal of talent lying idle here, affording material for both manuscript and type, and books will soon flow in this land with as much force than at the east, as the Missouri is bigger than the Hudson. A sense of this, probably, induced the Knickerbocker to install a western editor into office; they want some one that understands bush-fighting to conduct their armies; they are wise, but it will not prevent the catastrophe, though it may postpone it. “Westward the star,” etc.17

Here, then, is Hall’s revisionary conquest, in which the West has more forceful writers, more resourceful editors, and more imposing vistas than the East. Western authors are depicted as virile—and, significantly, collective, not individual—and implicitly compared to the land itself through the empowering myth of the region’s natural raw materials (“talent lying idle”). Likewise, the region’s literature itself is explicitly associated with landscape, as “books will flow” like the mighty Missouri. Significantly, the vision also reverses the traditional empire-building direction: Eastward the star of literary empire takes its way, according to Hall. (Frank Norris would 24

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later imagine a similar reversal of the economic frontier.) Hall even hints that the conquest is akin to both Indian eradication and colonial revolt, attacking and displacing the lethargic (but at times “wise”) natives and gentry and emerging victorious with a sense of inevitability. On the whole, however, the sectional advocacy of Flint and Hall produced an uneasy double consciousness in which the widely voiced call for a national literature seemed to trouble the regionalized call for a western literature. As Ralph Leslie Rusk put it in his monumental study The Literature of the Middle Western Frontier (1925), “When an Easterner wrote, he was conscious of the fact that he was an American; but, when a Westerner attempted authorship, he was troubled by the consciousness of the fact that he was not only an American but a Westerner.” 18 This double consciousness is quietly apparent in Flint’s preface to his biography of Daniel Boone, in which he responds to tradition-building projects such as the National Portrait Gallery: “Our eastern brethren have entered heartily into the pious duty of bringing to remembrance the character and deeds of their forefathers. Shall we of the west allow the names of those great men, who won for us, from the forest, the savages, and wild beasts, our fair domain of fertile fields and beautiful rivers, to fade into oblivion?” 19 Longacre and Herring imagined their project in relation to Britain and conceived of it in terms of patriotic nationalism; Flint worked in relation to the East and, while implying nationalist credentials, emphasized western regionalist results. The relation between West and East was further complicated by an inevitable western dependence on the East. Population centers remained eastern, and literacy rates were growing but still low in the West, making eastern readers all the more desirable—in fact, imperative—for ambitious authors.20 Transportation, necessary for a widespread distribution of material, was also uneven; the railroad, which would revolutionize the publishing industry, was not yet established in the West. Most important, western authors often depended on eastern publishers. Certainly there existed in Cincinnati, Louisville, and other towns the ability to print periodicals, newspapers, and other regionally relevant writings. Yet, because published writing tended to flow from east to west and not west to east, the technology and capital to publish and advertise major books remained centered in the East.21 Timothy Flint published primarily in Boston and New York, Caroline Kirkland in New York, James Hall in Philadelphia. In fact, at the same time that James Hall was editing the very successful Western Monthly Magazine, published in Cincinnati, he was sending his book manuscripts off to 25

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Philadelphia. Tellingly, when he decided to have his Sketches of History published in Cincinnati in 1834, the firm of Hubbard and Edmands went bankrupt after releasing only the first of two volumes; the Philadelphia publisher Harrison Hall published both volumes the next year. Thus, when we speak of the “western market,” we unavoidably encounter two markets that served up western material, one in the West, and one in the East—a division that helped produce a sense of double consciousness. Western authorship invented itself in relation to both markets but explicitly recognized the commercial (and at times cultural) superiority of the East—a condition carried forward well into the twentieth century. Hall and Flint, the two strongest advocates of western authorship, inevitably wrote for two audiences—audiences with very different perspectives. Complicating this condition further was the fact that western literature was not, and is not, written solely by native westerners. Whether they were born in the West or not, authors claimed time in the West and, consequently, an authentic relation to western material. Who counts as a western writer? That group was not, and is not, limited to writers born in or writing in the West. In truth, most historically remembered western writers of the nineteenth century (including Flint, Kirkland, and Hall and later Harte, Muir, and Garland) were born in the East (or, in Muir’s case, Europe), and many (including Kirkland and later Mark Twain and Willa Cather) lived and wrote primarily in the East. What made, and still makes, a western author “authentic” is first some direct experience in the West; second, a willingness to write with some explicitly articulated commitment to the West; and, finally, less absolutely, the employment or parody of recognizable western genres, styles, or characters. Flint, Hall, Daniel Drake, Lewis Cass, and Henry Marie Brackenridge (identified on one title page as “A Native of the West”) are all easily classified as western writers: all lived in the West, wrote about the West, and advocated western writing. But on the whole the market for western writing was solidified by authors with ties to both the West and the East—writers “who treated of the West,” including explorers, travelers, and emigrants who spoke with some authority about the western country. Writers such as Caroline Kirkland, John A. M’Clung, Samuel Parker, and James Hildreth all had at least two things in common: experience in the West and commercial ambitions in the East. Even Charles Fenno Hoffman could be counted in the clan; although the title page of his Winter in the West identified him as “a New-Yorker,” his time on the Michigan and Illinois frontier gave him the necessary credibility. Conversely, to Flint, 26

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Hall, Drake, and others, James Fenimore Cooper was not a western writer, because he never traveled in the West and could not speak with any personal authority about actual conditions in the region—although he virtually defined the western myth for the entire nineteenth century.22 Finally, the market was significantly impacted by European travel accounts; British writers were especially prolific, often reporting on the “manners” of the western people. Captain Basil Hall’s Travels in North America (1829) was one widely read account. Although today it seems mild and often generous in its appraisals, many American readers at the time took offense at Hall’s social criticisms and retaliated in print. One respondent went so far as to publish a short book, defending the “American character.” Three years later Frances Trollope (mother of novelist Anthony) produced her own sensation with Domestic Manners of the Americans, a work more popular—and more provocative—than Hall’s. Of course, most British books were far less objectionable and far less commercially successful. Works such as Thomas Hamilton’s Men and Manners in America (1833) and Charles Augustus Murray’s Travels in North America (1839) helped solidify the British interest in the West. The British held a unique position in the region: their alliance with certain Native American tribes during the War of 1812 continued to produce occasional tensions with the American settlers, and their governance of Canada allowed for a self-legitimizing perspective. They not only had their own history in the region; they also had an ongoing point of comparison. With such a range of writing, how did writers assert themselves into that market? Flint’s response to his own dejected survey and “awkward consciousness” is instructive and representative. Flint begins to shake off his rivals and clear some space for his own work by setting it apart from the “showers” of other writings: “And yet I cannot certainly be classed with those writers of travels, who travel post, or are wafted through a country in a steam boat, and assume, on the ground of having thus traversed it, to know all about it.” 23 Flint makes his case based on the authenticity of his writing: he has spent more intimate time in the West than most other writers who claim “to know all about it,” and thus he can speak from valuable experience. Further, Flint suggests that “the incidents that have remained fresh in [his] memory . . . must have excited a vivid impression when they occurred, and must have had, in the narrator at least, their share of interest.” 24 As if anticipating Hall’s broad rebuke of 1835, Flint claims his work 27

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is both true and interesting, the necessary combination for commercially viable western writing. Questioning Authority Virtually every author in every western genre from novel to tourist manifesto claimed that his or her work was “true,” an accurate representation of the western landscape and its people. In fact, the claim of authenticity was often the primary raison d’être for the presented work. Amos Parker began his Trip to the West and Texas (1835) by noting that “the author . . . has not attempted the regions of fancy and fiction; but has told his own story. . . . [H]e hopes it may be found to contain information sufficient to repay a perusal.” Likewise, Samuel Parker opened his popular Journal of an Exploring Tour (1838) by remarking that “it is believed that no defects exist in the work, irreconcilable with a strict adherence to facts. The principal merit which is claimed for this volume is, a scrupulous adherence to truth.” Charles Augustus Murray, an English author, makes the same advertisement in Travels in North America (1839): his book “pretends to no other merit than that of truth.” Some writers were less emphatic: William Keating explained that his Narrative of an Expedition to the Sources of the St. Peter’s River (1824) sought “to present a faithful description of the country.” Still others considered their reliability in extravagant terms: James Hildreth began his Dragoon Campaigns to the Rocky Mountains (1836) by explaining that many writers “overstep the limits of their circumscribed boundary of truth, and soar away upon the wings of imagination, into the boundless and inviting realms of fiction”; he suggests that his book, on the other hand, would be accurate.25 That authors would assert authenticity may hardly seem surprising; textual reliability was essential to many forms of western writing, for very obvious reasons. Exploration and survey expeditions were often designed to produce scientific and geographic data—and the purpose of the narrative write-ups was to report the findings accurately. Other works were written specifically for prospective visitors or armchair travelers. For example, Calvin Colton, an American minister who moved to London, concisely summarized his intentions in Tour of the American Lakes, and among the Indians (1833) with a simple question-and-answer: “Why should this book be written? To give information.” 26 And, as easterners saw increasing opportunity for investment in the West, they demanded accurate reporting, not jingoistic dogma. Nathan Hoskins, in Notes upon the Western Country (1833), hoped to supply “emigrants from the Atlantic States” with helpful information be28

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cause “it is useful for them to [understand] it correct, without incurring the expense of visiting the place of their intended locations before making a settlement.” 27 Furthermore, it must be understood that the claim of textual realism was by no means limited to western writing; eastern authors energetically employed the discourse of authenticity as well. Even fictional forms such as the novel, as Nina Baym has shown, were often judged by their “fidelity to nature,” the catchy, often-heard criteria.28 The difference between eastern and western conceptions of representational fidelity was based on the presumption that eastern reality conveyed a familiar and visible set of cultural codes, character types, landscapes, and social values; hence, “nature” in the East was eminently knowable. But western life, on the other hand, was thought to be remote, exotic, “other.” Beyond the experience of eastern readers, western life required other methods of representation. “Fidelity to nature” in the West had nothing to do with “a perfect transcript . . . of ordinary life” (to borrow from a New York Mirror review) but, rather, a mimetic representation of an extraordinary world. Furthermore, the ubiquity and assertiveness of the claim in all forms of early western writing—including fiction, sketches, and “entertainments”—suggest more than a simple desire for veracity. Because the West was represented as an emphatically different and alien environment, one beyond the imaginative vision of eastern essayists, historians, and novelists, the claim of authenticity seemed to situate power in the author. Authenticity therefore referred to both the work and the author: textual authenticity meant mimetic “fidelity,” while authorial authenticity suggested individual authority and credibility. And if fidelity to nature was often unprovable, authorial integrity could be determined, almost legalistically. The claim became an assertion of writerly authority and a marker for the author’s presence, both in the West and in the text. As such, it became a form of authorial self-identification, a way for authors to describe and even invent themselves. With eastern readers increasingly fascinated by all things western, writers who spoke with credibility and insight about the West could take great advantage of the flowering market. But the claim of authenticity also produced troublesome results: first, it obscured the considerable liberties that the authors took with their writing. Calvin Colton, for example, does much more than “give information”—his Tour is often a provocative polemic on Indian rights, slavery, and English and American federal policy. More familiarly, Hall’s own contention of accuracy thinly veiled his myopic and romantic representations. Predictably, 29

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as western writing leaned harder on exaggerated romance, it also affirmed its reliability more vociferously. The claim of authenticity thus produced a problematic condition of authorship that seemed to pull in two directions: on the one hand, it centralized authority in the figure of the reliable author; on the other hand, it obviated the author’s stylistic or imaginative power by emphasizing the process of regional translation: what was being conveyed was the landscape and people, not the author’s creative vision. If authenticity became the discourse of legitimation, it also proved to be an implosive and crippling foundation for western literature. In keeping with the autogenetic power of authority on which western authorship was based, many leading western writers held positions of public trust, converting their professional authority into literary authority: Hall, Flint, Daniel Drake, and Lewis Cass were, respectively, a judge, a minister, a doctor, and a state governor. The authorial reliability of less renowned writers could also be established through the testimony of editors and publishers—themselves authorities who could attest to the author’s integrity. For example, the publisher of Tilly Buttrick’s Voyages, Travels, and Discoveries (1831) combined respect for Buttrick’s factuality with sympathy for his condition: “In preparing this little work . . . the Editor had not only in view the interest with which an enlightened people seize upon facts not previously in their possession; but sympathy for this unfortunate traveler,” who by then had lost his property and eyesight.29 Timothy Flint himself, in “editing” James O. Pattie’s Personal Narrative (1831), vouched for “the literal truth of the facts, incredible as some of them may appear,” with a long list of evidence supporting Pattie’s virtuous credibility, including Flint’s own “acquaintance with the Author . . . the respectability of his relations, the standing which his father sustained, the confidence reposed in him by the Hon. J. S. Johnston, . . . the concurrent testimony of persons now in this city,” and so on.30 And D. W. Moore, the publisher of Zenas Leonard’s Narrative (1839), explained that the truth of the text could not be permanently verified because a part of the original journal “was stolen from [Leonard] by hostile Indians”; nevertheless, Moore wrote that Leonard’s “character for candor and truth, among his acquaintances, we have never heard suspected; and, indeed, among the many who heard the narrative from his own lips, we have yet to hear the first one say they disbelieve it. At all events, in its perusal, the reader will encounter no improbabilities, much less impossibilities.” 31 Authors pressed their own claims of textual authenticity in a number of ways, most of which located the credibility in the site of the author. The 30

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three principal methods were: through the memory of firsthand experience, through the notes and letters they wrote on the spot, and through references to other recognized authorities. The most frequent (and perhaps convincing) claim was that of authorial experience—that the author spoke as witness. James Hall inevitably recalled as evidence his “long residence in the Western States” and his “opportunities for personal observation.” 32 “Scenes and objects of interest occur at every step,” he wrote, “but they are of a character entirely new. All that the traveler tells must be learned upon the spot.” 33 Likewise, Samuel Parker noted that “most of what is narrated in this work came under the author’s personal observation.” 34 Yet, as powerful as firsthand experience was, memory was also susceptible to challenge; consequently, many authors explained that they relied on their own notes, journals, and letters written soon after, or even during, the related experience. Such notes and letters revealed textual immediacy, an unvarnished relationship with the land and the people. Caleb Atwater, in the preface to Remarks made on a Tour to Prairie du Chien (1831), suggests both the bustling activity of his travels in the Michigan Territory and the original foundation of his book: “Employed as I was, on my Tour, I had only leisure to reduce to writing a few leading facts, at the time, the remarks were made. From my original remarks, I have selected only a part of them, for the public eye.” 35 After tour narratives, collections of letters may well have been the most popular form for writing about the West and a self-authenticating genre. Newspapers and publishers would often commission a traveler to send letters east for publication, and these letters would later be collected, perhaps rewritten, and then offered in book form. Edmund Flagg explained at the beginning of his memoir, The Far West (1838), that the Louisville Journal had requested that he “contribute to the columns of that periodical whatever, in the course of his pilgrimage, might be deemed of sufficient interest.” 36 Other examples of the genre include George W. Ogden’s Letters from the West (1822); Timothy Flint’s Recollection of the Last Ten Years (1826); James Hall’s Letters from the West (1828); Mary Austin Holley’s Texas. Observations, Historical, Geographical and Descriptive, in a Series of Letters (1833); Charles Fenno Hoffman’s Winter in the West (1835); James Hildreth’s Dragoon Campaigns (1836); Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home, Who’ll Follow? (1839); and Frederick Hall’s Letters from the East and from the West (1840).37 The reliance on other authorities was perhaps the most complicated play of authorial assertion, for it ran the risk of belying the author’s own author31

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ity. The employment of sources could result in stale reproduction or, worse, could approach plagiarism. For these reasons many authors opted to deny that they had been influenced by other writings; Flint wrote in Recollections: “I have striven to depart from the common fashion of emptying the contents of one book into another, and serving them up to you in new form. . . . I can assert, with perfect confidence, that I have not consulted a book on my subject.” 38 More often authors were eager to enlist the authority of others as support for their own truthfulness. Edmund Flagg gave credit “to [ John M.] Peck, Hall, Flint, [Alphonso] Wetmore, and to others”; Hoffman pointed to “the eloquent writings of Mr. Flint, the graphic sketches of Judge Hall, and the valuable scientific researches” of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, William Keating, and Thomas Say; and Washington Irving acknowledged the “collateral lights” such as Lewis and Clark that helped produce Astoria.39 This strategy was perhaps more essential for those writers not writing from firsthand experience. John A. M’Clung, who had previously written the fictionalized Camden, worried in his preface to Sketches of Western Adventure (1832) that his readers would suspect it to be “as truly an offspring of the imagination” as Camden; he therefore decided to “refer distinctly to the sources from which the materials for the present work have been derived, in order to give every one who chooses, an opportunity of satisfying himself as to its authenticity.” 40 By referring to other authorities, writers could establish or augment the accuracy of their own work while simultaneously reinscribing the accuracy of the chosen authority. The continuous circulation of certain names—notably Flint and Hall—maintained the value of their currency and allowed derivative authors to borrow against them. Moreover, it is essential to recognize that the claim of authenticity was by no means limited to nonfiction. Indeed, the necessity of realistic representation in fiction was arguably more important than in nonfiction. Daniel Drake, the influential orator, doctor, and scholar, criticized Cooper and novelist James Kirke Paulding for their illegitimate creations. Drake argued that “the failure of Mr. Cooper in his Prairie, and Mr. Paulding in his Westward Ho, is conclusive evidence, that in delineating the West, no power of genius, can supply the want of opportunities for personal observation on our natural and social aspects. No western man can read those works with interest; because of their want of conformity to the circumstances and character of the country.” 41 Drake’s use of the word failure, like James Hall’s, does not signal a lack of commercial success (both Cooper and Paulding were enormously popular) but, rather, the failure of imaginative and histor32

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ical fiction to produce authentic western material. Because these works were being judged on their accuracy and not their “genius,” no brilliance could substitute for authentic experience. Such criticism echoes the advertisements of western nonfiction: it was authorial experience, not bookish learning or inventive vision, that counted; the West had to be seen to be textually represented. Timothy Flint, in reviewing Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie, articulated the same critical position that opposed excessive creativity; he praises Sedgwick’s fidelity while rebuking the developing romantic and sensational writing in the East: “At present, the aim of all, who write for the imagination, is to produce an effect. The author cares not what established rules he violates, in making his book, if, by so doing, he can create a sensation in his readers. This mania does not seem to have touched our authoress. Her story presents a regular account of well regulated people, who figure only in still life.” 42 Both Drake and Flint censured the fiction of the East through their calculated rejection of keywords such as genius, effect, and sensation, words in increasing vogue in the East. (Consider Poe’s claim that he “prefer[s] commencing with the consideration of an effect” or Emerson’s bold belief that “genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates.”) 43 Conversely, Drake and Flint bolster their own positions with terms such as evidence and regular account, terms suggesting their rigorous and firsthand authority.44 Flint does, however, take Sedgwick to task for her portrayal of Magawisca, the Indian heroine: “This authoress has fallen into the error, so apparent in the works of Cooper and all the American novelists, that have any thing to do with Indians. They dress a figure in the Indian costume; give it a copper skin; make it use extravagantly figurative language; and introduce it with the interjection, ugh! as a natural savage.” Flint then, rather generously, remarks that “dealers in fiction have privileges; but they ought to have for foundation, some slight resemblance to nature.” 45 As Flint’s review suggests, the portrayal of Native Americans provoked considerable anxiety; all noted authorities in the West, such as Flint, Hall, and Daniel Drake, used their public positions to vilify those writers (including Cooper) considered inaccurate in their representations. Often the argument became divided along regional lines, with the western writers taking a selfproclaimed “realist” approach (the dangerous savage in need of civilizing) and the eastern press often preferring a romantic one (Cooper’s Vanishing American). 33

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To enforce their claims of representational authenticity, fiction writers who wrote about the West made elaborate assertions for the truth of their work, even while acknowledging a certain inventiveness. Timothy Flint in dedicating his novel Francis Berrian (1826) to his friend Henry A. Bullard, remarked that Bullard, a surveyor of the Southwest, would “well know, that no inconsiderable portion of these adventures is any thing, rather than fiction.” Likewise, James Kirke Paulding, the prolific New York author and intimate friend of Irving, at first claims that his novel Westward Ho! (1832) “professes no connexion with history, and aspires to no special chronological accuracy”; but Paulding (who was later rebuked by Drake) next stakes his claim to authenticity as well: “it is believed that sufficient regard has been had to truth in this respect to give it the interest of something like reality.” And in the preface to his historical romance Elkswatawa (1836) James S. French explained that “the main incidents detailed in this work are strictly historical, and drawn from authentic sources.” Most emphatic is James Hall, who in introducing his Souvenir sketch collection (1829) vouched for its validity by remarking that “it is written and published in the Western country, by Western men, and is chiefly confined to subjects connected with the history and character of the country. . . . Most of the tales are founded upon fact, and though given as fiction, some of them are entitled to the credit of historical accuracy.” Hall’s language is even stronger three years later in the preface to his popular collection of sketches Legends of the West (1832), neatly epitomizing the claim. He acknowledges that “the legends now presented . . . are entirely fictitious,” but by no means does he suggest that they are not authentic representations: “The sole intention of the tales comprised in the following pages is to convey the accurate descriptions of the scenery and population of the country in which the author resides. The only merit he claims for them is fidelity.” Hall can claim that “fidelity” because the legends “are founded upon incidents which have been witnessed by the author during a long residence in the western states, or upon traditions preserved by the people, and have received but little artificial embellishment.” 46 The willingness to eschew the “embellishment of style,” in Hall’s words,47 for the authenticity of fact had a startling effect on the implicit advertising of the writings: the claim of authenticity often displaced and even erased any claim of aesthetic quality or imaginative power. By suggesting that the “only merit” he claims is fidelity, Hall subordinates any “literary merit” (to return to his complaint in Sketches of History) and concentrates that 34

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desired fidelity in both his own experience and in the authorities of the region’s “traditions.” Such a strategy appears even more emphatic in nonfiction: as early as 1807, when Patrick Gass (an officer in the Lewis and Clark expedition) put out his Journal, the publisher admitted to “difficulty” in “determining the form”: he could “preserve the form of a daily journal” or, “assuming less of the journal form and style, [could] describe and clothe the principal parts of it as his fancy might suggest.” In choosing the former, the publisher considered that “the climate and face of the country will be more satisfactorily described.” In 1810 Fortescue Cuming suggested in Sketches of a Tour to the Western Country that, “as the intention of the author was the increase of information, he makes no apology for the plainness of his style, and he expects, on that account, to be spared any criticism.” Edwin James compiled his Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains (1823) from “a large mass of notes and journals,” including the notes of the leader Major Stephen Long and Major Thomas Say; Edwards remarks that “it was not deemed necessary to preserve uniformity of style, at the expense of substituting the language of a compiler for that of an original observer.” 48 Tellingly, the painter George Catlin faced exactly the same problem with his Indian Gallery, as Nancy K. Anderson has shown. “Anxious to promote his paintings as factually accurate if not aesthetically pleasing,” Anderson writes, “Catlin frequently attached certificates of authenticity to the backs of his Indian portraits . . . confirming the ‘accuracy,’ ‘fidelity,’ ‘correctness,’ and ‘singular truth’ of the images.” These certificates were signed for Catlin by recognized public figures, such as William Clark—virtually the same ploy the writers used in bolstering their own credibility.49 These writers were acutely conscious of both literary form and style, as were eastern writers, but in the West the desire for authenticity often meant the emphatic avoidance of “high” literary delivery.50 Imagination, style, fancy, and genius were avoided, and any polished regularity of form or sophistication of style became suspect, for they suggested the authorial manipulation of material rather than the faithful recording of region.51 Presentational roughness—and the claim thereof—became signs of authenticity. Charles Murray explained that “the careless arrangement of materials . . . will furnish . . . more than abundant evidence of the fact, that the manuscript has been untouched” since his return from the West.52 Similarly, in editing Pattie’s Personal Narrative, Flint decided to “leave the narrative as [he] found it,” despite the fact that Pattie “thinks more of action than literature, and is more competent to perform exploits, than blazon them in 35

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eloquent periods.” Flint corrected spelling and punctuation, he admits, but “to alter [the narrative], to attempt to embellish it . . . would be to take from it its keeping, the charm of its simplicity, and its internal marks of truth.” 53 Perhaps most revealing is James Hildreth, who notes that books based on letters such as his may “wear the appearance of roughness” because of the “sometimes disconnected manner in which they are thrown together”; Hildreth claims that “this should . . . be construed as a commendation,” for it avoids the “inviting realms of fiction.” 54 Indeed, he had given “serious consideration” to “the manner in which to lay the incidents . . . before the public.” The continuous narrative of a journal might be more rhetorically fluid, but, as Hildreth puts it, “letters themselves would be better calculated to carry with them the impress of the truth, than if the story had been told in the smoother style of romantic narrative.” 55 Yet, if stylistic or imaginative quality was so rarely foregrounded, and if any author who traveled in the region could claim authenticity, how then could an author make an impression in that crowded marketplace? Could one author be “more authentic” than another? Broadly, how does a western work, limited to authentic representation, become “of interest,” become “interesting” (to use the deceptively mundane keywords of Flint and Hall)? On rare occasions authors would call attention to themselves as the explicit point of interest in their narratives. Estwick Evans’s Pedestrious Tour (1819) is remarkable primarily for the author’s eccentric presence: “the supposed singularity of the tour,” as Evans calls it, was based largely on his own unorthodox appearance. As a devout follower of Rousseau’s romantic savagism, Evans traveled wearing “buffalo skins,” an “Indian apron . . . covered with fine bear skin,” and “cap and gloves [that] were made of fur.” 56 Little wonder that he would be “much pleased with the interest which [his] appearance excited in little children,” not to speak of astonished adults.57 Subtler still is Washington Irving’s introduction to his Tour on the Prairies (1834), which acts as a model of authorial self-positioning. Irving might easily have claimed the interest of an original relationship with the West; indeed, not long into the Tour he signals that he and his companions will join a “company of mounted rangers” and “make a wide exploring tour . . . including a part of the Pawnee hunting-grounds, where no party of white men had as yet penetrated.” 58 But, if he took advantage of an “opportunity of ranging over those dangerous and interesting regions” on the tour itself (10), he did not in his prefatory remarks. Rather, Irving modestly claims “no wonders to describe, nor any moving accidents by flood or field to narrate” 36

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(2)—leaving only his celebrated presence on the Plains as the implicit “interest” of his Tour. In feigning reluctance to write up his travels, Irving remarked that he had “been like a poor actor, who finds himself announced for a part he had no thought of playing” (1). James Hall himself noted the authorial oddity: “Irving on the prairies! . . . The very idea has a novelty about it.” 59 But for the most part western authors refused to celebrate themselves: at exactly the period that America was beginning to recognize literary personalities such as Irving and Sedgwick and Cooper, western authors were playing a dangerous game. Just as the “merit” of the work lay in its representational fidelity, similarly the central point of textual interest became the West itself, not the authorial persona or the power of rhetorical expression. While writers in the East increasingly marketed their own reputations and reveled in the genius or power of their imagination, western writers avoided such self-identification. If style was the de facto “objectification of personality” for eastern writers, exotic landscapes and peoples became the “personality” for western works. Their writerly identity was dependent on the power of western place; more authentic meant closer to actual experience and meant somehow closer to the physical sense of place. Accuracy could be interesting or thrilling or seductive exactly because the West exhibited those marketable features. Charles Fenno Hoffman, for example, noting the popularity of other western writings, still believed that “there is an eversalient freshness in the theme of ‘The Far West.’” 60 Similarly, “originality” was an especially elusive concept, implying in many writers a desire for imaginative capacity. The works themselves were rarely described as original; quite the opposite, writers increasingly relied on rigid generic forms and rhetorical conventions. Originality could be traced to an original experience—perhaps a first contact or wilderness journey—but, conveniently, this again situated originality in the place, not in the text. And often originality was expressly avoided: James Hall displaced any originality of his Sketches of History by explicitly relying on “facts” (a word repeated eight times in four pages) and on the research of other authorities: his book “has no claim to originality, but is properly a compilation.” 61 Hall’s prose, however, often belied his claim, as James Freeman Clarke argued in the North American Review: “On this subject of originality, Judge Hall will do well to revise his conclusions. The very vice of his historical works is, that they are too original. He confounds too much the departments of history and romance. Let him give to the incidents of his histories 37

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less originality, and to those of his romances more, and he will find that both will profit.” 62 Clarke neatly conflates two shades of originality: on the one hand, Hall’s histories, while hardly rhetorically imaginative, were unreliable and mythologized (hence too original); on the other hand, his romances—his fiction—were unoriginal and stilted. In Clarke’s charge we glimpse the unfortunate result: accuracy was often compromised by romance, and the tension between the two poles was frequently vague and self-perpetuating. Constrained by their claims of fidelity, western writers reverted to romance, which they claimed to be more authentic and interesting. As novelist James S. French put it, “the nature of his [historical] materials . . . make truth appear stranger than the wildest fiction.” 63 Calvin Colton epitomizes the rhetorical self-justification and inevitable perpetuation: he wonders whether his book should be “properly fiction, or sober history” (the descriptive choice itself a tip-off ), and then determines that “the facts were abundantly sufficient to demand [history], and that no fictitious dress could equal the interest of the exact truth.” But the “interest of the exact truth” became increasingly problematic. Colton lays it bare in discussing American Indian culture and the nature of that “exact truth”: “The maxim of Byron: ‘Truth is strange, stranger than fiction’—was perhaps never more applicable, than to the principal subject of these pages. The history of the American Indians is the Romance of Fact. It needs not a single dash of the pencil—not a single ingredient of the sentimentality of poetry, to give it life and power over the feelings. The naked truth has in it more of poetry and a more energetic challenge to the affections, than any possible embellishment, or fictitious garniture, that could be thrown around it—more than any creations of fancy, with which it could be charged.” 64 Thus Colton imbues a factual and truthful representation of the West with a sentimental “poetry” and “power over the feelings.” 65 That a popular but unreliable form of writing emerged from the Romance of Fact is by now critically established. Hall, Hoffman, and others were hardly realists and were not reliable historians or cultural commentators. But for this chapter’s purposes we must also appreciate the result for the western author, who becomes an authority—and potentially a romantic one— dwarfed by his or her subject. Even if authors such as Hall “invented” the West in their own ideologically partisan terms, their selfconception is the opposite: that the author is not an active constructor of the region but, rather, that place dictates text. Thus, the claim of authenticity produced an uneasily doubled result, a condition of simultaneous power 38

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and authorial invisibility. On the one hand, the claim of authenticity situated a forceful presence in the author, ultimately reflecting on his or her literary integrity. Western authors identified themselves as truthful witnesses, strong figures who were attempting to codify history in a manner fair to the region’s population. On the other hand, the claim to factual authenticity risked reducing the author’s position to one of mere translator or observer: he or she became the vehicle for reproducing the contours of landscape or articulating local traditions—but not a creative visionary. The lack of authorial individualism spelled monstrous trouble for future writers. Here were authors invested with an obvious romanticism, filled with imaginative abilities, but who opted to claim the opposite. Quite simply, they lost their chance at becoming individualized romantic authors, imbued with power and imagination. At the extreme, perhaps, these authors hoped for the kind of response that Irving received for his Tour on the Prairies in the North American Review. Here, as in other reviews and commentaries, the critic suggests that Irving managed to combine literary regionalism and nationalism. If Irving’s text was inspired by the land, it was governed by the author’s imagination: “we wish nothing so ardently, as that the literature of the country should be the indigenous growth of the soil; indigenous in its topics, associations and spirit,—not for patriotic reasons merely, but on principles of art and taste.” But for western writers the rub was felt at the end of the same paragraph: “We thank [Irving] for turning these poor barbarous steppes into classical land;—and joining his inspiration to that of Cooper, in breathing life and fire into a circle of imagery, which was not known before to exist, for the purposes of the imagination.” 66 Deconstructing Western Authenticity Authorship in the West existed in a bizarre conflation of pre-Romantic and early-Romantic conditions: it was both an identifiable professional position that empowered itself and an insecure position of derivative invisibility. Michael J. Colacurcio is just one of many critics to argue that in the East Emerson and other writers of the 1830s and 1840s were working “to free the American Mind, including the fledgling Imagination, from its peculiar problem of imitation,” imitation meaning both debt to other writers and narrow mimetic reproduction of “specific conditions of local culture.” 67 But, as we have seen, western authors at this time were advertising a mimetic ability and a reliance on other authorities. To summarize: by 39

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refusing the construction of individualized authorship (that would fully arrive in the 1850s), western authors inadvertently reinscribed an increasingly obsolete role—the transcribing author rather than an individualized inventor. Because western authorship was established through this unstable condition of simultaneous power and invisibility, it was particularly susceptible to challenge and subversion. To understand the troubled history of nineteenth-century western authorship that ensued, we must uncover the considerable internal vulnerability of these original authorial self-fashionings. Indeed, from the beginning the position was weakened and subject to attack. In this way we can say that western authorship was easily deconstructed, by which I mean simply that strong western authorship depended on difference (author and place, power and invisibility, West and East) and that epistemological, rhetorical, and cultural forces all acted to put these dualities in flux, forever undoing any established stability. In the West authority itself was negated, yet it was also, in certain historically traceable patterns, successful. That a writer such as James Hall can be simultaneously ignored as a minor figure in literary history and also held up as a prime mover in the institutionalization of the patriarchal, prejudiced “Wild West” myth is a sure sign that Hall and other authors had a curiously powerful and impotent reach. Western authorship deconstructed itself because it had effect and was also erased. Rather than writing themselves into canonical celebrity, they wrote themselves out of literary history. Further, that Cooper survived canonically and not Hall emblematizes the eastern subversion of western literary authority; that Cooper’s western contemporaries did not survive argues for the displacement of authorial authenticity. First, most obviously, authenticity was a doomed foundation, if only because it became rigid, inflexible. As the 1830s wore on, the claim of authenticity necessarily became an implicit criticism of other works; each text that purported to tell the “real truth” about the West cast doubt on the veracity of others. If every text claimed authenticity, authenticity itself was demeaned. (Poe, writing reflexively on the “novelty” of the beautiful, remarked that “the ennuyé who travels in the hope of dissipating his ennui by the perpetual succession of novelties, will invariably be disappointed in the end. He receives the impression of novelty so continuously that it is at length no novelty to receive it.”) 68 That is, the success of the market itself spelled trouble—as did the success of western expansion. The migrations of the 1840s made authorial authenticity largely obsolete, for there were 40

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suddenly thousands of authorities, witnesses to the land and the people of the West. If authorship depended on veracity more than creativity, anyone could be an author. Walter Benjamin discusses exactly this shift occurring at the beginning of the twentieth century, the age of mechanical reproduction: “today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character. The difference becomes merely functional; it may vary from case to case. At any moment the reader is ready to turn into a writer.” 69 For Benjamin this development largely depended on changes in technology and the corresponding cultural reformation, and his thesis is dramatically supported by the Internet culture in which anyone can build a web site and become an authority or a “published” writer. But already by the middle of the nineteenth century thousands of readers and travelers, settlers, and explorers were becoming writers, not merely because of the development of print culture or the popularity of western expansion but because authorship itself failed to demand privilege. Western writers promoted the leveling of reader and writer. There was no distinction between the author and the public. And, as more and more people moved west and wrote about it, the exotic became familiarized, accessible, and even mundane. Western writing risked becoming dull. The most obvious remaining options were to turn inward, toward ludicrous extremes, or backward to past, presettlement events. Thus, the claim of authenticity developed a kind of rigidity that approached self-parody and resulted in static formulaic genres, emerging almost immediately as nostalgic romance and later as dime-novel adventure, both genres that conspicuously obviated authorship. To borrow the language of Jean-François Lyotard, the discourse of legitimation, based on authorial and textual authenticity, increasingly relied not on scientific formulations (fact) but on narrative strategies (story) and precipitated what can only be called a crisis in regional representation, one that ultimately could not be resolved by any systematic efforts to relegitimize itself.70 The “Romance of Fact” became standardized, and, as the West became increasingly knowable and accessible to the nation, western authors disappeared. Simply put, western writing foundered on the reef of verifiable factuality. Yet these historically inevitable weaknesses may obscure an inherent susceptibility to implosion, a frailty that helped produce those historical consequences. Western authorship did itself in from the beginning. For 41

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those works of the Far West that claimed to reveal an original experience (such as a first contact) or travel in unmapped territory, there was an insurmountable gap of logic: authenticity was inherently unverifiable and thus epistemologically meaningless. How could one “prove” a unique and remote experience? What evidence could convince a skeptical audience of the author’s veracity? What established language could convey a legitimately “new” landscape, animal, or people? James Hall, responding to an early showing of George Catlin’s landscape paintings, commented that the pictures would “communicate valuable information—to all who have never had the good fortune to see a prairie, they will convey some idea of the appearance of those vast meadows, so boundless, so beautiful, so rich in scenic attraction. The shores of the Missouri have a peculiar and strongly marked character. They are like nothing else in nature but themselves.” 71 But being like “nothing else in nature” made comparison at best a type of metaphor. Rather than enforcing a strict adherence to fact, the claim of authenticity was, conversely, poetic license in the truest sense; there were almost no limits on authors, and they could write whatever they wanted. Further, the intention to produce recordings of high fidelity was easily undermined by critics, often for sectional or ideological reasons. By challenging the author’s credentials (as opposed to his or her “effect,” “imagination,” and so on), a reviewer could shatter the legitimacy of the work— and of the author. Nowhere is such a problem more evident than in the byzantine public skirmish between James Hall, Unitarian minister James Freeman Clarke, and historian Mann Butler, traced here in some detail, for it epitomizes the heated contest over sectionally determined claims of authenticity and the ensuing complications of plagiarism. In 1834 Hall published Sketches of History, a “compilation” of historical anecdotes. Indeed, Hall predictably wrote that “nothing further is attempted, than a collection of facts, some of which are the result of the writer’s own observation, and which are intended rather as examples and illustrations of topics connected with the western states, than as a regular narrative of its history.” 72 Still, Hall acknowledged his sectional agenda (or, to be fair, his western pride): his “object” was in part to present “many facts which are highly honorable to the character of the western people,” 73 and he believed that through the accumulation of these facts the settlers of the West would “take the proud station which they deserve, among the illustrious founders of the American republic”—a fine example of western double consciousness.74 In Sketches of History, therefore, Hall claimed accuracy, but he did not pretend to be writ42

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ing history, and he extensively acknowledged his use of other “authorities,” including the Kentucky historian Mann Butler.75 In May 1836 Butler reviewed Hall’s book in the Western Messenger, a relatively small Louisville journal. Butler, who had recently penned A History of the Commonwealth of Kentucky (1834), perhaps felt some rivalry with Hall for a claim on western readership, perhaps felt slighted by Hall’s broad dismissal of western writing (as being neither “interesting or true”), or perhaps felt sincerely misused by Hall. In any case, in his review he attacked Hall’s accuracy, challenged Hall’s use of sources and essentially accused Hall of plagiarizing other works, including Butler’s own. “In most instances,” Butler charged, “there are no references afforded, which give to original authority the justice due to his merit.” 76 Elsewhere Butler was even more direct: in at least one place “Mr. Hall has availed himself of other men’s labors, without any acknowledgment, in a manner we can neither reconcile with justice nor generosity.” 77 Two months later James Freeman Clarke anonymously reviewed both Butler and Hall in the influential Boston literary magazine the North American Review. Clarke, Boston transcendentalist and Harvard classmate of Oliver Wendell Holmes, had recently moved to Louisville to supervise the transcendentalist periodical the Western Messenger, the same journal that had published Butler’s review. Although then living in the West, Clarke remained in active spirit an eastern thinker and writer, publishing poems and essays by friends such as Emerson, William Ellery Channing, and Frederic Henry Hedge and returning to Boston once a year to renew those ties. He devoted most of his North American Review article to Butler’s book, noting that Butler’s “style is not so good as Judge Hall’s” but praising the historian’s research for its “fairness, earnestness, and fidelity” and calling the history a “storehouse of facts and documents.” 78 Of Hall’s Sketches of History Clarke essentially offered a mixed review. He described it (and Butler’s book) as “valuable” and “useful” (1) and remarked that “the work of Judge Hall is written in his usual easy and graceful style; it is calculated to interest readers who would not venture upon a regular history; without being very profound, it has an air of philosophy, well adapted to a parlour fireside. . . . It is the most entertaining book on the subject. It is, what it professes to be, a collection of sketches.” But Clarke also criticized Hall. Clarke wrote that Hall “professes to be a western man . . . but of the western character he knows little, and of the western spirit he possesses nothing. He wants the intellectual openness, which would enable him to catch the spirit of society” 43

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(1–2). Further, Clarke argued that “Judge Hall is not an accurate writer” and proceeded to challenge the details of Hall’s history, using many of the same corrective criticisms that Butler had raised. Clarke concludes benevolently: “With these qualifying remarks, we recommend the ‘Sketches’ to our readers as a work full of entertaining anecdote and description” (4). Not surprisingly, Hall was incensed by the review.79 To be praised for his style and entertaining anecdotes was bad enough for a writer suspicious of style, but to have his accuracy and westernness challenged was a call to action. Hall wrote a lengthy and detailed response, published as the preface to his next book, Statistics of the West (1836), in which he attacked the North American Review, Clarke (whom he had no way of identifying), and Butler. First, Hall criticized the North American Review for partisan politics by suggesting that it was “so very North American, as seldom to bring within the scope of its criticism the literature of the more genial latitudes of our republic.” 80 He next pointedly noticed the similarities between Butler’s review and that of the “Boston critic” and implied that they were either written by the same hand or that the Review critic had plagiarized. (And, knowing as we now do Clarke’s position at the Western Messenger, Hall’s charge seems quite reasonable.) Hall then responds, point by point, to both of his “joint opponents,” responding to Butler with an assertion of his facts and to the Boston critic with an assertion of his authentic westernness.81 That is, Hall defended himself from a fellow western writer’s charge of inaccuracy and from an eastern writer’s charge of sectional naiveté. Both Butler and Clarke in turn kept the charges flying, responding to Hall’s polemic with their own justifications and attacks. Butler published a short treatise, “An Appeal from the Misrepresentations of James Hall,” essentially defending his scholarly veracity. Clarke meanwhile used the North American Review to attack Hall’s sense of authorship. Noting that Hall took umbrage not only at his review’s criticisms but also at its “praise,” Clarke found Hall “confounding,” “wondering and chiding, that we should recommend a work as not wanting in entertainment, which we said was wanting in accuracy, and some other merits. But that which is a problem to Judge Hall, was none to Dr. Samuel Johnson. He said, of a book of his day, in language stronger than our benevolence suffered us to use, ‘though it is sufficiently defective to crush the vanity of its author, it is sufficiently entertaining to invite readers.’” 82 But the author’s “vanity,” to which Clarke makes oblique reference (through Johnson), is Hall’s very sense of authorial ego, which is crushed, erased— despite the ensuing popularity of the 44

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“entertainment.” Thus, Clarke’s article worked toward two surprising ends: first, it brought Hall into visibility for the readers of the North American Review, or, as Hall himself put it, “condescended to notice the existence of the writer . . . for the first time.” 83 But, through discrediting his accuracy and westernness, it simultaneously subverted Hall’s authority, thus rendering him obsolete. Amazingly, Clarke seems to be implicitly recognizing the developing condition of western authorship: invisible yet popular. And, using the recognized British authority of Samuel Johnson, Clarke analogically replaces the author with readers. The replacement of the author with a community of readers may have demonstrated Hall’s own peculiar marginality, but it further calls into question the broader issue of authorial presence. It is only too easy to suspend the individual authority of western authorship and to “recover collectivity”—in fact, these authors point to it themselves. Who wrote Hall’s Sketches of History? Who wrote Lewis and Clark’s Journals? Who wrote Irving’s Astoria? None of these three seminal works was produced by a single voice or vision; none had an individual author. Hall calls his Sketches of History a compilation, based on Butler, Drake, Brackenridge, and others. Nicholas Biddle, the wealthy, Princeton-educated, literary Philadelphian, “edited” and essentially rewrote the Lewis and Clark journals for the 1814 publication. And Irving produced Astoria (1836) from John Jacob Astor’s considerable collection of business documents, journals, and letters detailing the establishment of the American Fur Company and the expeditions across the Rockies. Furthermore, Irving, as he readily admits, enjoyed even more assistance: his nephew Pierre performed most of the work “rummaging among business papers, and . . . collecting and collating facts from amidst tedious and commonplace details,” while Irving himself took advantage of the “collateral lights supplied by the published journals of other travellers,” such as Lewis and Clark.84 Did such borrowings produce heteroglot intertextuality or merely shallow plagiarism? No single answer suffices. Certainly, plagiarism abounded; writers not only referred to other authorities but stole from them. Yet, more subtly, what today might be called intellectual property was only vaguely defined in the 1830s West, in part because western authors refused to acknowledge imaginative invention. How could one claim any (copy)right to facts? When Butler charged that Hall “availed himself of other men’s labours” and complained that Hall’s historical “facts are all used without any mention that they were not the result of [his] own inquiries,” Hall deri45

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sively retorted that, “as these facts occurred before we were born, they could not have resulted from any of our doings. . . . Mr. Butler, in the simplicity of his heart, verily believes that he discovered the treaty of Fort Stanix.” 85 As long as the center of fidelity lay in the obsession with authentic facts, charges of plagiarism were easily obfuscated. Furthermore, stories became conventionalized and referred to as “traditions”; as a kind of local myth or folklore, these stories were themselves beyond the reach of any copyright, immune to entanglements of plagiarism. Finally, while federal and local agencies made every effort to assert land ownership wherever possible, it proved more difficult to own landscape descriptions. This condition produced what might be seen as a kind of repetition compulsion: literally, most transcontinental expeditions used the same routes, notably the Missouri River system as well as the Platte River, the Oregon Trail, and the Santa Fe Trail; thus, most travel descriptions were necessarily of the same features, and subsequently both travelers and writers (transcribers) depended on previous accounts such as Lewis and Clark’s Journals. In fact, the Journals were only one textual incarnation of the exploration: Charles Floyd, Patrick Gass, John Ordway, and Joseph Whitehouse all wrote journals of the trip— though even their journals were rewritten for publication. Is one version more authentic or original than another? Textual “originality” was extirpated when both the experience and the prose were derived from mutual, shared experience. The claim of accurate representation all but precluded a formal charge of plagiarism. Thus, if texts were not technically plagiarized, many were at least copied. One can, for example, hear Meriwether Lewis’s voice throughout Irving’s Astoria. Combined with the rigidity of form and the uneasy authority/invisibility of authorship, copying often produced palimpsests—reproduced works with earlier and often foreign voices speaking through them. Finally, the ethos of borrowing and reproducing also resulted in literal copies: for example, Hall’s Statistics of the West was republished as Notes on the West and Sketches of History as Romance of the West. While such practice was hardly unique to western writing, it took hold in a particularly pernicious way. The use of authenticity in authorial self-invention thus helped produce three dramatic and ultimately crippling results. First, it catalyzed the movement toward inauthenticity by helping to institutionalize the dime novel. I would argue that the western dime novel—and other exaggerated stories of western adventure, violence, intrigue, and romance— did not develop so much from James Fenimore Cooper’s works or from the emergence of mass 46

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market popular culture, two leading theories, but more from the inevitable burden (and splintering) of the claim of authenticity.86 Second, the claim solidified a pattern of reception, a way of reading. Following the instructions of James Hall and others, readers do not treat western literature as an aesthetically complex or imaginative body of writing; rather, western literature is advertised, reviewed, read, and studied for its representations of historical conditions and natural landscapes. The range of reading room is extraordinarily narrow. And, third, the claim of authenticity instigated a powerful but nearly invisible diminishment of western reality itself. The complicated and ultimately imploding idea of authenticity derailed the difference between original and copy, between representation and simulation. And thus we might ask: if we lift the veil of authenticity, what are we looking at? The territory, the map of the territory— or a simulacrum?

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2 FACT AND FICTION Canonical Simulations

The procedures of the great movement of art of the early century may serve to put us in mind of the violent meanings which are explicit in the Greek ancestry of the word “authentic.” Authenteo : to have full power over; also, to commit a murder. Authentes: not only a master and a doer, but also a perpetrator, a murderer, even a self-murderer, a suicide. —lionel trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity

In reestablishing the forgotten history of western authorship in the 1830s, I have attempted to identify a significant component of western literature’s troubled canonical beginnings. By revisiting the ultimately self-erasing forms of authorial self-fashionings, we can understand, at least in part, why western literature failed to establish a viable canonical tradition. But this western context also provides an opportunity to reconsider writers who played off of the authorial conventions, manipulating them in the process of autogenesis. Caroline Kirkland and Edgar Allan Poe were two of the first American authors to engage western American literature in dialogically imaginative ways, inventing themselves neither inside nor outside that market but, rather, in the susceptible margins. They produced strong texts that both encode the generic expectations of western works and subvert them. By rehistoricizing A New Home, Who’ll Follow? and The Journal of Julius Rodman within the context of the popular and perhaps overextended western marketplace of the late 1830s, we discover two writers manipulating the rigid conventions to assert their own individual authorial voices. By critiquing literary authenticity, realism, individualism, and plagiarism, Kirkland and Poe entered into an intertextual dialogue with their literary environment and attempted to fashion themselves in relation to a variety of cultural pressures. My reading of Kirkland’s book is largely corrective, showing how critical interpretations have depended on the orthodoxy of authenticity and read A New Home primarily as realistic. Such readings inevitably promote Kirkland as an alternative to James Hall and other 1830s writers who invented a romanticized, masculine West. But Kirkland’s deceptive use of authenticity is far more complex. By playing fact against fiction, she ultimately undermines facile definitions of authenticity, realism, and western literature. Poe’s odd and ignored Journal of Julius Rodman does even more than that: it undermines reality itself. As a hoaxy account of 48

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the (fictional) first exploration across the Rocky Mountains, Rodman explodes the difference between fact and fiction, between authenticity and imitation. Poe’s insistent use of—and plagiarism of—actual exploration narratives produces a work that not only ridicules the claim of authenticity in western writing but also uses the idea of authenticity to reevaluate both western literature and the Real West itself. Borrowing from Jean Baudrillard’s theories of simulation, this chapter argues that Rodman’s extreme destabilization of authenticity produces what can only be called a postmodern aura, an aura quietly intrinsic to all western writing. Mark Twain’s early stories and Roughing It, published in 1872, are secondgeneration authentic, taking full advantage of their belatedness. Twain is one of the few authors to enjoy the tradition of authenticity, reveling in the ludicrous expectations of accuracy and reliability. Like Kirkland and Poe, Twain focuses attention on the claim of authenticity, most dramatically in his prefatory dismissal of textual “information” in Roughing It; he broadly parodies the authorial claim of authenticity and implicitly pokes fun at the expectations for western writing. More complexly, Twain directs the discourse of authenticity toward his own self-inventions. He deploys strategies of authorship that theatrically reveal the internal instability of the western authorial imagination. This fact is remarkable enough in itself, and critics have produced taxonomic reports on Twain’s (in)authentic identities. But the reception history of Twain’s writing and reputation suggests something else: that critics have not only examined Twain’s complex construction of authorship but have themselves been complicit in that construction. Critics end up playing the authenticity game; indeed, they end up as pawns in a game with only one inevitable winner, Mark Twain. “Penetrating the Interior”: Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home, Who’ll Follow? Caroline Kirkland, a well-educated and relatively well-connected New Yorker, moved to Detroit with her husband in 1835 and, upon his acquisition of some eight hundred acres of land, to the Michigan frontier in 1837. In her first book, A New Home, Who’ll Follow? (1839), written under the pseudonym Mary Clavers, Kirkland described in witty and entertaining detail their struggles to establish the village of Pinckney, renamed Montacute in the book. Based on the “village-sketch” model popularized by English author Mary Russell Mitford, A New Home is replete with vignettes of settlement life, emphasizing the social habits and daily discomforts of the fron49

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tier. Kirkland pays special attention to her female characters: her neighbors, her domestic help, the town schoolteacher, and so on. By the book’s end Clavers’s Montacute is seemingly secure, but the real settlement of Pinckney was not so lucky, finally succumbing to dishonest land agents and economic failure. Kirkland and her husband returned to New York in 1843, where, with considerably more success, she established a productive career as writer, editor, and member of the city’s “literati.” In its day A New Home was well received in the eastern press, warmly praised for its realism and charm. The North American Review characteristically commended it for its “fidelity and reality.” More recently, over the last two decades or so, Kirkland’s book has again come into prominence, primarily as a work that represents the reach of women’s writing in antebellum America and that reveals an authentic (“realistic”) vision of the frontier American West. A New Home, with its careful, spirited depictions of village social life and the so-called women’s sphere, seems almost designed to appeal to contemporary western historians and feminist literary scholars— and has attracted the attention of such influential critics as Annette Kolodny, Paul Lauter, Judith Fetterley, and Sandra A. Zagarell. But, by reading A New Home solely in the contexts of domestic fiction and historical realism and by overlooking the context of popular western writing, dominated, as it was, by men, critics risk interpretive myopia. Kirkland did not break established forms of writing so much as quietly defamiliarize them. The result is an author who positions herself among a number of different models and a text that resists easy codification. By recontextualizing Kirkland within— and sometimes against—the midcentury market for western writing, I hope to offer a reconsideration of her authorial strategies and move toward a broader understanding of the claim of authenticity in early western fiction. Consider, for example, Kirkland’s textual reliance on the letters she sent to her friends in the East, letters that served as a basis for her book. In A New Home Kirkland explains that her friends had “expressed so much interest in such of our letters to them, as happened to convey an account of the peculiar features of western life . . . that I have been for some time past contemplating the possibility of something like a detailed account of our experiences. And I have determined to give them to the world, in a form not very different from that in which they were originally recorded.” 1 Paul Lauter takes Kirkland’s epistolary foundation as a key to decoding the relationship between gender and the “problem of form.” Lauter suggests that “Kirkland tried to solve what was at once an artistic and social problem by posing her 50

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narrative as an adaptation of a series of letters. Writing for publication was an activity still viewed in many quarters as inappropriate to women, precisely because it was public. Letter writing, however, sustained the quality of private communication . . . . That may explain the popularity of the form with many women writers of the antebellum period.” 2 Letter writing may indeed have been an inviting and empowering avenue for female authors, but (as argued in my first chapter) it was also a firmly established genre for writing about the West. To understand this western context is to understand that Kirkland knew her western competitors and placed her book in the company of such letter-structured western works of the 1830s as Charles Fenno Hoffman’s Winter in the West, Edmund Flagg’s The Far West, Mary Austin Holley’s Texas, James Hall’s Letters from the West, James Hildreth’s Dragoon Campaigns, and Timothy Flint’s Recollections. Of course, Lauter’s point is not negated, only qualified: in her decision to base the narrative on her letters, Kirkland is doubly situating herself at once within at least two different literary conventions, one often associated with women’s writing, the other with western (and other forms of travel) writing.3 Furthermore, a careful examination of Kirkland’s literary context suggests another small, but not insignificant, correction to critical commentary and demands a reorientation of Kirkland in relation to her literary contemporaries. In an oft-quoted passage early in the first chapter Kirkland writes: “When I first ‘penetrated the interior’ (to use an indigenous phrase) all I knew of the wilds was from Hoffman’s tour or Captain Hall’s ‘graphic’ delineations: I had some floating idea of ‘driving a barouche-and-four anywhere through the oak-openings’—and seeing ‘the murdered Banquos of the forest’ haunting the scenes of their departed strength and beauty. But I confess, these pictures, touched by the glowing pencil of fancy, gave me but incorrect notions of a real journey through Michigan” (6). In their respective editions William S. Osborne and Sandra A. Zagarell have correctly identified “Hoffman’s tour” as Charles Fenno Hoffman’s travels, recounted in his popular Winter in the West, and, with some hesitation, “Captain Hall’s ‘graphic’ delineations” as the colorful imaginings of James Hall, whose Sketches of History is indeed “touched by the glowing pencil of fancy.” 4 And nearly every critical commentator has taken advantage of this crucial passage to juxtapose Kirkland’s corrective domestic realism with Hall’s bigoted romanticism. Fetterley describes Kirkland as “consciously defining herself against the romanticism of previous western chroniclers, such as Charles Fenno Hoffman and James Hall”; Zagarell remarks that A New Home “mocks 51

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the rosy depictions of the West’s natural environment in the many guides . . . and in such travel literature as Charles Fenno Hoffman’s popular A Winter in the West . . . [and] exposes the supposedly ‘realistic’ celebration of the West as the site of untrammeled nature in the newly emerging western literature (particularly James Hall’s Legends of the West [1832]) as the mere reproduction of conventions of continental, British, and American Romanticism”; and Annette Kolodny, who structured a significant portion of her argument (in The Land Before Her) around the passage, argues that Kirkland aggressively “examine[d] the impressions gleaned from [ James] Hall and Hoffman” and finally “quarreled” with the two writers as she established her own textually represented West.5 The flaw in these analyses is simply that Kirkland’s “Captain Hall” was not James Hall, discussed in print always as Judge Hall. Captain Hall refers to Captain Basil Hall, a British travel writer widely known at the time for his Travels in North America (1829), the popular but somewhat controversial antecedent to Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans. In his Travels Captain Hall (as he was customarily called) both praised and critiqued the American natural and cultural landscape, offering mostly modest, often generous appraisals of American manners. Understanding that Kirkland was storming a different Hall does not in any way invalidate the underlying insights of Kolodny, Fetterley, Zagarell, and others, but it does suggest that perhaps critics have at times projected onto A New Home a revisionary agenda that may itself stand in need of some revision. James Hall neatly fits many critical projects; he is today remembered, if at all, as an Indian-hating reactionary who helped to invent and legitimize the mythic Wild West by glamorizing character types such as the ignorant, misogynist backwoodsman. Further, there is good reason to think that Kirkland objected to Hall’s kind of opinionated prose, and critics have used Hall’s unattractive politics and unreliable historicism to help crystallize a vision of Kirkland as a social and literary reformer. Yet, in citing Basil Hall at the beginning of her book, Kirkland is after different game: she is situating herself in relation to a tradition of social critiques and in relation to the innumerable British appraisals of Americans. Kirkland thus clears some nationalist space for herself in the overcrowded market of “Manners” books (David Leverenz calls her “the Miss Manners of Michigan”) 6 and suggests that she will produce not an anti-romance but, rather, a native version of the British “village sketch” popularized by Mary Russell Mitford. Moreover, the passage from Basil Hall’s Travels that Kirkland undoubt52

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edly has in mind hints at the need for a reevaluation of Kirkland’s vaunted realism. I do not mean to undermine this quality in Kirkland’s work—her text remains an important and refreshing alternative to many western writings, and her insightful depictions of frontier domesticity remain all too rare in the 1830s.7 (I, too, teach her work in opposition to male fantasies of the frontier.) But, in recognizing that her response to Basil Hall is constructed within and against both nationalist and regionalist ideologies, we must reexamine the very definition of realism as applied to A New Home. The “murdered Banquos of the forest” may seem to refer to “ghostly Indians,” as Kolodny quite reasonably supposes, but the truth is far more complicated.8 In fact, Hall is describing the very unattractive frontier settlements that he encountered (in this case in western New York), not unlike Kirkland’s Pinckney—though quite unlike her fictional Montacute: there prevailed a most uncomfortable appearance of bleakness or rawness, and a total absence of picturesque beauty in these villages; whose dreary aspect was much heightened by the black sort of gigantic wall formed of the abrupt edge of the forest, choked up with underwood, now for the first time exposed to the light of the sun. The cleared spaces, however, as they are called, looked to our eyes not less desolate, being studded over with innumerable great black stumps; or, which was more deplorable still, with tall scorched, branchless stems of trees, which had undergone the barbarous operation known by the name of girdling. An American settler can hardly conceive the horror with which a foreigner beholds such numbers of magnificent trees standing round him with their throats cut, the very Banquos of the murdered forest! 9

If this passage is imbued with any romanticism, it is a proto-Thoreauvian appreciation of wild nature, devoid of a sunny idealism and hardly the “celebration of the West as the site of untrammeled nature” associated with James Hall. The West here is decidedly trammeled—and trampled. One must wonder: why did Kirkland find this passage in Travels problematic? Kirkland may have simply objected to Hall’s aestheticized horror or to his metaphorical use of Macbeth. But, because Kirkland is celebrated for her willingness to reveal the less colorful side of frontier life, her apparent objection raises doubts about Kirkland’s objectivity. The answer possibly lies 53

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in Kirkland’s own investment in the frontier, an investment both literal and literary. In fact, her immediate textual response to Hoffman and Hall, apparently designed to show a more “correct” idea “of a real journey through Michigan,” may be read as nearly the opposite of any stark realism. This is the well-known “mud-hole” scene, in which she describes her “despair” at encountering a “formidable gulf ” of mud blocking the forest road (6). She declares that she will describe the mud-hole “for the benefit of future travellers, who, flying over the soil on rail-roads, may look slightingly back upon the achievement of their predecessors” (5).10 While this episode is usually interpreted as a corrective response to the blithe travelers (James) Hall and Hoffman, in fact, when contrasted with Basil Hall’s description of environmental degradation, Kirkland’s prose may seem both ideologically partisan and even . . . romantic. At the moment that the frustrated Kirkland considered turning back, “a man in an immense bear-skin cap and a suit of deer’s hide, sprang from behind a stump just within the edge of the forest” and soon helped the stranded travelers across. Kirkland concludes: “This instance of true and genuine and generous politeness I record for the benefit of all bearskin caps, leathern jerkins and cowhide boots, which ladies from the eastward world may hereafter encounter in Michigan” (7). Kirkland obviously plays on the romance of the scene, but she also seems sincere in her appreciation for the “true and genuine and generous politeness” of the backwoodsman. Even if we overlook the dramatic implausibility of the rescue or the sensational appearance of the heroic “stranger” or the moralistic conclusion she draws for eastern “ladies,” we are still left, when contrasted with Basil Hall’s scene, with an author subtly endorsing the denuding of forest for the sake of good roads. The tree stump here is no murdered Banquo but, rather, the surprising origination of her salvation. Thus, when Kirkland alludes to the railroad travelers looking back at the “achievements of their predecessors,” she suggests two kinds of achievements: first, the rough travel by wagon of her age and, second, the beneficial construction of the railroad that obliterated the mud-holes. That Kirkland held settlement deforestation to be a civilizing good should not necessarily be held against her—but, in contrasting her mudhole description to Hall’s “tall scorched, branchless stems of trees,” we have two depictions of frontier environment that seem quite equal in their unsettling realism. Which prompts the question: what realism— or whose realism—is at work here? In discussing the realism of A New Home, critics 54

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actually treat two distinctly different kinds (too often conflated), historical realism and literary realism, the first being a condition of factual record, the latter being a genre of imaginative fiction. A New Home is described as the “first realistic depiction of frontier life” and as attempting to depict “what life in the West is really like,” but the book also “signals a realism in American fiction” and represents one of “the roots of fictional realism.” 11 I would suggest that Kirkland is implicitly destabilizing the difference between the two kinds of realism; by playing fiction against fact, or, more accurately, authenticity against romance, Kirkland not only subverts any established hierarchy but also nearly eradicates the system. Quite simply, she is setting off one discourse against another and playing the conventions of western writing against both historical and domestic fiction—and in the process deconstructing western authenticity. The explosiveness, then, of the text is not that Kirkland’s book is realistic or is fictional but, rather, that she claims it to be either one— or both. Perhaps, finally, the most important correction that this recontexualized reading can offer concerns this authorial claim of authenticity. Kirkland writes that she hopes to produce “a veracious history of actual occurrences, an unvarnished transcript of real characters” (3), and in her preface she sets out her authorial position: I claim for these straggling and cloudy crayon sketches of life and manners . . . the merit of general truth of outline. Beyond this I venture not to aspire. I felt somewhat tempted to set forth my little book as being entirely, what it is very nearly—a veritable history; an unimpeachable transcript of reality; a rough picture, in detached parts, but pentagraphed from the life. . . . But conscience prevailed, and I must honestly confess, that there be glosses, and colorings, and lights, if not shadows, for which the author is alone accountable. Journals published entire and unaltered, should be Parthian darts, sent abroad only when one’s back is turned. To throw them in the teeth of one’s every-day associates might diminish one’s popularity rather inconveniently. (1)

Critics have inevitably locked on to Kirkland’s claims of realism, consistently quoting her desire for an “unimpeachable transcript of reality.” If they acknowledge Kirkland’s own reference to her “glosses” and “shadows,” it is only as an ancillary admission. But the claim of authenticity, founded on firsthand experience and delivered through a “rough picture,” 55

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is exactly what every other writer of the period was claiming. There is virtually nothing unique about her stated desire for representational or historical accuracy. On the contrary, what is most important here is the opposite— her assertion of fictionalizing the portrait. The intrigue of her prefatory remarks is not her claim to authenticity but, rather, her affirmation of the imaginative prose for which “the author is alone accountable.” And, in acknowledging her embellishments (as they might be termed elsewhere), she even claims for her text rhetorical power. Unlike her contemporaries, Kirkland will not pretend to offer crude originals or “unaltered” journals but will attempt stylistically heightened prose. Her allusion to Washington Irving (“the cloudy crayon sketches”) is only the first tip-off. Kirkland is inventing and authorizing herself within the tradition of western writing— but at the same time outside of its predictable limitations. Caroline Kirkland produced a strong text that both encodes the generic expectations of western works and subverts them. By reading the novel solely in relation to some construction of authentic realism, critical history here—as nearly everywhere in western letters— overlooks the complex authorial strategies and invention at work. By rehistoricizing A New Home, Who’ll Follow? within the context of the popular western marketplace of the late 1830s, we discover an author manipulating the rigid conventions to assert her own individual authorial voice. Second Nature: Edgar Allan Poe’s Journal of Julius Rodman At least one critic seemed to recognize Kirkland’s heterodox use of authenticity and fiction. Edgar Allan Poe, in his “Literati” sketch of Kirkland (1846), lauds A New Home for both its “truth and novelty.” 12 Most Kirkland scholars remark on Poe’s treatment of Kirkland’s “life-like . . . representations”; as Sandra A. Zagarell writes, “for Poe, Kirkland’s significance resided in what later commentators have termed her pioneer realism.” 13 But, if Poe was interested in pioneer realism, it is the strongly fictionalized type that conveys truth through elusive metaphor—through simulation—not fact. Poe explains that he appreciates Kirkland’s use of fictional sketches because “a truthful picture of pioneer habits could never be given in any grave history or essay so well as in the form of narration, where each character is permitted to develop itself.” 14 Poe was no stranger to the attempt because in 1840 (the year after A New Home appeared) Poe himself performed a similar deconstruction of western authorship in his Journal of Julius Rodman. Rodman purports to be an account of the first exploration across the 56

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Rocky Mountains. Poe, in the role of coeditor (supposedly with William Burton, founder of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine), explains in the prosaic “Introductory” that the journal of the 1791– 94 expedition had only recently been recovered—“an unusual piece of good fortune.” 15 Poe had a keen sense of the journal’s proper form because he was deeply read in western writing and committed to, in his words, “the bright hopes for the Literature of the West”; 16 indeed, as Edwin Fussell puts it, “no important American writer was more realistically concerned with, and more accurately informed about, that literature of the West which in the mid-1830’s flooded the country.” 17 In late 1839 Poe conceived of Rodman as a twelve-part series (one chapter per magazine issue) and began serialization in January 1840. But by June of that year, after the first six installments had appeared, Poe and Burton split, and Rodman, text and character, was left hanging, suspended in the Montana wilderness, never to return. Poe apparently felt little remorse about abandoning Rodman and never sought to finish or republish it. Rodman is a strange and unrecognized work. Despite the fact that it is a significant work on the West by a major American writer, it remains largely unnoticed by western critics. Despite the fact that it appears designed to appeal to contemporary Poe scholars—with its insistent commentary on authorship, plagiarism, intellectual property, nationalism, cultural history, and American landscapes—the work has received almost no notice over the last forty years. Most critics agree with biographer Kenneth Silverman’s dismissal that it is “but [The Narrative of Arthur Gordon] Pym transposed to the Rocky Mountains.” 18 Rodman’s low profile, however, is deceptive. It is certainly, emphatically, un-Poesque, and the reason is simple: in constructing (and I use that word quite literally) the text, Poe essentially pasted together excerpts from other accounts, notably those of Lewis and Clark, Alexander Mackenzie, and Captain Bonneville, with frequent “borrowings” from Washington Irving’s Astoria. Burton R. Pollin calls the work “a long verisimilar narrative springing from the rich soil of authentic journals of Western explorers.” 19 In other words, the other journals are authentic; Rodman’s is not—at least not exactly. Poe himself is marginalized in that he presents himself as editor, writing the introduction and the footnotes and producing a playful metafiction in which he actually calls attention to the similarities between Rodman’s journals and the others. Perhaps this “patchwork” design, as Pollin calls it, is responsible for the work’s invisibility. It seems entirely unoriginal and derivative— of all things, boring Poe. Yet it may turn out that the work’s invisibility signals its success rather 57

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than its failure. Because of Rodman’s intense intertextuality and persistent borrowings, it exists only in relation to other western works and comes into focus only through a thorough western contextualization. In fact, placing it in context reveals Poe’s canny response to the consistent claims of authenticity in western literature of the early nineteenth century, and Poe’s inscribed study of authenticity and his overt plagiarism of other western works force us to rethink western authorship and western representation. We have to ask whether Rodman is invisible exactly because of its authenticity, because Poe so seamlessly deployed the strategies of western writers (by borrowing and reproducing), and because, in its perverse way, the narrative is authentic, though stolen. But it may serve an even more dramatic role: Rodman may be the most complete and provocative example in early western writing—indeed, in American literature— of postmodern invention. In fact, that “plagiarism” may be an early form of what Fredric Jameson calls pastiche, the employment of earlier voices or the “imitation of dead styles.” Jameson argues that, although pastiche wears a “linguistic mask” like parody, it is not parody, for it is “a neutral practice . . . without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists.” 20 Rodman is neutral in exactly this way, its lack of parodic laughter producing that strange, remote effect.21 “Normality,” in terms of both the author’s voice and the West itself, is exactly what is unsettled and called into question. In Rodman we find the most self-conscious construction of a hyperreal West. We cannot understand either western literature or the West itself without engaging The Journal of Julius Rodman. Poe depicted the West, for example, using other people’s words—by plagiarizing from those “authentic journals.” Indeed, throughout his fiction Poe frequently toyed with other texts, borrowing from other authors while writing bizarre critical commentaries on plagiarism. But the plagiarism of Rodman is unlike other Poe plagiarisms and borrowings—though very much in keeping with the borrowings of other western writers. Perhaps the obvious comparison is with Pym (following Silverman’s derisive lead), yet, if Pym manipulates numerous sources, Rodman is its sources. Pym is often treated for its use of contemporary material: Poe relentlessly employed and/or parodied popular texts (such as Robinson Crusoe), genres (such as the sea adventure or polar exploration), and cultural curiosities (such as cannibalism). In this respect, Pym is representative Poe: “it is generally as58

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sumed that Poe developed his literary style in the 1830s by studying the works of the most popular or the most highly reputed authors.” 22 Significantly, the source studies of Pym and other works argue or assume that Poe’s own authorial voice interacted with and controlled these sources. But the borrowings in Rodman are so extensive as to be absolute, producing less a heteroglot fiction than what Pollin calls a “verbal collage.” 23 Yet, despite the fact that Rodman foregrounds and almost advertises its plagiarism with the patchwork design, studies of Poe’s plagiarism ignore Rodman, perhaps because it fails to conform to critical paradigms. For example, in his essay on Poe and plagiarism, Stephen Rachman argues that “plagiarism offers Poe a special, inherently transgressive discourse regardless of content; like the ‘man of the crowd’ it can only be read as crime.” 24 While the plagiarism of Rodman does display a taste of this “transgressive discourse,” it also upsets Rachman’s totalization, for the content here—the western exploration narrative—is one that was frequently replayed and borrowed. In describing the Missouri River, for example, Rodman is describing the same features that others encountered, and Editor-Poe often points out the similarities in footnotes and commentary. Poe simply used his sources—Lewis and Clark, Alexander Mackenzie, Captain Bonneville, and Irving—to patch together the Journal. Poe himself points out these other works in his introduction, explaining their similarity to Rodman. In fact, Rodman reveals Poe borrowing from Irving, who, using John Jacob Astor’s notes, borrowed from Lewis and Clark as rewritten by Nicholas Biddle. If Poe’s actions are criminal, they are also unexceptional, de rigueur, and entirely in keeping with other western authors. Rodman is exceptional only in its total derivativeness, its convincing absorption of the conventions of its time. The peculiar condition of authorship in Rodman may signal an even greater challenge to critics. Many consider the text’s banality un-Poesque, but the limited projection of the canonized Poe-etic voice is deceiving, for that subdued tone not only produces the successful authenticity of the Journal but also signals a highly unusual form of authorial presence. In fact, one may argue that Poe’s “authentic” voice is stronger here than in any other work of fiction. First, for the only time in his oeuvre Poe appears in a work of fiction as his own nonfictional, editorial self; and, second, unlike any of his other unsigned hoaxes, he actually “signs” the production with his own name. Of course, Poe wrote himself into a number of his works but always as a character treated by invented editors. Most obviously, it is a common59

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place of Poe criticism to notice Poe’s self-referential appearance in Pym: protagonist Arthur Gordon Pym, in his preface, refers to “Mr. Poe, lately editor of the Southern Literary Messenger,” who supposedly advised Pym and wrote the “first few pages” of the Narrative. But this “Mr. Poe” is a fictionalized Poe, a character in a novel, not even the editor of the presented work. Furthermore, Pym declares that the “difference in point of style” of Mr. Poe’s “few pages” will be “readily perceived,” but, of course, it is impossible to detect any difference.25 Although the entire work is typical Poe, not a word can be directly attributed to him except through the fictional Pym and editor. In The Journal of Julius Rodman, however, Poe exists as Poe, the coeditor of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine. His name prominently appeared along with Burton’s on the cover. And thus Rodman exists as a strange double narrative, in which Poe—and, significantly, Burton—write the “Introductory,” the footnotes, and the lengthy connecting sections that explain what has been edited out of the journal. In fact, some of the extirpated material (such as the missing account of the “Spanish commission sent to intercept and turn the party back”) sounds more interesting than the entries included (1208). In all, nearly one-third of Rodman’s (extant) length consists of editorial commentary and notes, explicitly written by (and repeatedly signed by) “Eds. G. M.”—the editors of the Gentleman’s Magazine, Poe and Burton. Three points follow: first, Poe exists in name as editor, and thus the text is attached to him in a way that many other texts (and all other hoaxes) could not be. In emphasizing the “importance of anonymity and pseudonymy as mediating factors in Poe’s career,” Meredith L. McGill convincingly argues that “a broad range of his texts and textual practices drifts free from the confines of individual authorship.” 26 She notes a number of works, including Pym, that appeared detached from Poe’s authorial pen. But, in calling considerable attention to the editorial commentary (the lengthy footnotes, the disruptive connecting prose), Poe does assert a kind of signed presence, if not as creative author, then as reliable coeditor. Significantly, this is the same position that James Hall (like many others) claimed for himself in Sketches of History, a book that Poe had reviewed four years earlier. Like Hall, Editor-Poe points to the factual veracity of the Journal and to his own authority, downplaying any creative input. The editors’ knowledge of other western explorations is framing and validating the presented journal. That Poe’s presence as coeditor reveals collaborative authority is the second point: Poe seems to emphasize that the production of Rodman is not due to 60

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an individual but a group—Poe, Burton, Rodman, and, up one metanarrative level, the many other narratives cited in the introduction. Finally, Poe’s editorial position allows him, like nowhere else, to exist and write in the margins and borders of a fictional text. This is no fashionable deconstructive conceit: Poe’s language literally positions itself in relation to Rodman’s, at the beginning of the whole work, at the bottom of the page, in the middle of a chapter, and so on. While it is not stylistically differentiated from Rodman’s (as Mr. Poe’s is not from Pym’s), it is formally separated, occupying a different place on the page and representing a different sphere and tone of authorship. Thus, by deploying the conventions of western presentation, Poe can both conform to the formula of western authorship (as knowledgeable editor and collaborator) and critique its vulnerability. Like Flint and Irving, Poe is an editor of an explorer’s journal, an editor with considerable knowledge of other western accounts. Like them, he remarks that he (and Burton) “did not wish, by any means, to alter the manner of Mr. Rodman’s narration, and have, therefore, taken very few liberties with the ms” (1190). Indeed, Rodman, like many other explorers, kept “an outline diary of his tour, during the many difficulties of its progress” (1188). And, like other western editors and writers, Poe takes pains to establish the veracity of the work, in part through juxtaposition with other accounts. Poe’s treatment of western authenticity is at once normative and subversive. That is, Poe, who got no closer to the West than West Point, recognized that the claim of authenticity was not only standard practice but was a strategy bound to implode, bound to produce authorial invisibility. By unraveling the complexities of western authorship and the extraordinary duplicity of the claim of authenticity, Poe managed to question both the representation of the West and the West itself. He produced a postmodern narrative: self-consuming, ironic, and endlessly (in)authentic. The West of Rodman is hyperreal—it is a simulacrum, a copy without an original, and a copy that simultaneously exists as both fiction and fact. To read Rodman is, quite literally, to read Lewis and Clark, Bonneville, Irving, Astor, Mackenzie. There’s no there there in Rodman, and this seems to be Poe’s point about the West as well. Once we lift the veil and look past the claim of authenticity, we are not left with landscape or history or reality (as western writers and readers like to assert) but with hyperreality. Rodman simulates western landscape, creating an image with no real referent; remarkably, it also simulates (not parodies) western literature. In a different western context Gerald Vizenor has written that “the simulation of the indian is the absence of real 61

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natives—the contrivance of the other in the course of dominance.” 27 That simulation is, of course, that of the “authentic Indian,” a culturally prevalent image that erases “real natives.” Similarly, Poe’s simulation of the West—while equally authentic in its way—is the absence of the West. And Poe’s simulation of western literature is the absence of western literature: it becomes invisible. More simply, Poe’s strange work helps us to understand a chicken-oregg riddle: which came first, the West or representations of the West? We might also ask, how do we know the difference between representation and the West? In fact, is western literature in general what Jean Baudrillard calls the “map that precedes the territory”? 28 Baudrillard’s well-known essay “The Precession of Simulacra” helps explain Rodman and the inherent implosiveness of the claim of authenticity. Baudrillard famously identifies a succession or perhaps even history (if we can use that term around Baudrillard) of the image as referent, identifying phases that lead up to a kind of postmodern condition. In the first phase, Baudrillard writes, the image is “the reflection of a profound reality.” 29 This is the phase that western literature, especially “high” western literature, so frequently and dangerously insists on—that a Wallace Stegner novel or Leslie Silko poem reflects a history and environment. That reflection may not always be entirely adequate, for the West is in every way “profound.” But the attempt is genuine. As Baudrillard puts it, “the image is a good appearance—representation is of the sacramental order.” Here the connection between the West and writing is secure, grounded in the possibility of representational authenticity. In the second phase the image “masks and denatures a profound reality.” Here the reality remains intact, while the text or image confounds that reality. Such an image may intentionally “denature” reality. As Lee Clark Mitchell writes of the Western, “actual landscapes are everywhere recast” because the genre “conceives of setting not as authentic locale but as escapist fantasy.” 30 This phase may seem like an inversion of the first, but, at least in terms of this map of literary history, it is merely the flip side of the same coin. This phase includes the obviously falsifying, mythologizing texts (romances, tall tales, dime novels, Westerns, and so on) that inauthentically distort the Great West. Reality, or “history,” is dismissed. Mitchell writes, “when factual accuracy comes to seem inconsequential, novels emerge to do the narrative work that history refuses.” 31 But, even when an exaggerated adventure novel, Western, or tall tale corrupts western history, 62

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it is still trading on that history, still making assumptions about the Real West. Western literary criticism is complicit here as well, frequently offering up interpretations that examine and correct textual distortion and that revise the myth. Such an approach, while often sophisticated, still plays the authenticity game, believing in the connection between writing and fact and hermeneutically trying to recover the West. Baudrillard writes that in the third phase the image “masks the absence of a profound reality.” This phase initiates the postmodern construction of reality, for here the image “plays at being an appearance—it is of the order of sorcery.” It is easy enough to observe this kind of play and sorcery in Rodman—Poe repeatedly teases out his text’s ability to confuse the relationship between language and place, between signifier and signified. While skeptical, this phase of deconstructive imaging nevertheless continues to examine the relation between image and profound (and now profoundly absent) reality. In the fourth and final phase the image “has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.” This phase may be seen as both radical and romantic, allowing the image to produce both hyperreality and a self-referential, creative (literary) discourse.32 Baudrillard calls simulation at this stage a “strategy of the real,” and it is exactly what Poe explores in Rodman.33 That is, the referent of Rodman is not landscape and history but language and writing. But, of course, it’s not that simple; although I believe in something called “literary history” (just as I believe in a place called “the West”), it is impossible to place Rodman merely in a vortex of books and words. Rodman is self-contained in that it is a simulacrum, a copy without relation to western reality, yet it circulates in cultural space, carrying with it the aura of authenticity. Rodman is revealing not because it is fictional or factual but because it is both. Poe’s use of editorial convention combined with his borrowings from legitimate explorations result in a work that is at once truthful and fraudulent.34 Although the premise of the work as the first exploration is obviously false, Rodman is paradoxically Poe’s most authentic fiction. In fact, Rodman managed to fool Robert Greenhow, “Translator and Librarian to the Department of State,” who recorded in an official Senate report that Rodman’s journal was appearing in Burton’s and that—in a wonderful phrase—it was not “calculated to excite suspicions with regard to its authenticity.” 35 Unlike Pym and “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall,” both written as parodic fantasies and not as true hoaxes, Rodman succeeded in con63

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veying not only “verisimilitude” but also actual authenticity. Its descriptions of exploration equipment, of Missouri River landscape and geography, of flora and fauna, and even of Indian hostility, are all lifted from other credible nonfictional accounts. What is fact and what is fiction in Rodman? Consider that Poe borrowed frequently from Washington Irving’s Astoria; Irving in turn had employed his nephew Pierre’s summaries of numerous sources, what he called “collateral lights,” including Astor’s notes and files, Wilson Price Hunt’s journal, Robert Stuart’s journal, Henry Marie Brackenridge’s narrative, Jonathan Carver’s writing, and, of course, Biddle’s rewriting of the Lewis and Clark journals. At what point does an account of the actual Missouri River become so layered in reiterations, like a game of Telephone, that it loses any connection with the original landscape? We might try to identify what in Rodman (and Irving’s Astoria and countless others) is in fact Lewis and Clark and then cut our way through the Biddle redaction hoping for the actual notes and journals—perhaps a facsimile of those notes would get us closest to the actual place. But then Poe ridicules that idea with the unending circularity of texts and signs: Rodman supposedly preceded Lewis and Clark, making his journal literally the precession of the simulacrum, the copy that comes before the original. Poe’s implication is that “behind” a text is not a landscape or a reality but, rather, other texts, themselves plagiarizing, borrowing, and copying. In short, Poe suggests that we should not be asking about the authenticity of a western text—that’s a hopeless assignment, a game we’ll never win. Rather, we should be asking: how do texts circulate? How are they reproduced? How do they produce copies, simulacra? Thus, Rodman must be read in parallel with Kirkland’s A New Home, for both works dramatically unsettle the literary concepts of fact and fiction and appear skeptical of any sort of knowable truth. It might be tempting to say that Rodman is the inverse of A New Home: while Rodman is a work of fiction masquerading as fact, Kirkland’s book tells her own story as novel. Yet such a formula oversimplifies the much more dramatic reevaluation of authorship and the West at play in both texts. In June 1849, just a few months before he died, Poe wrote in “Marginalia” that “we can, at any time, double the true beauty of an actual landscape by half closing our eyes as we look at it.” 36 Poe’s we is an authorial we that simultaneously appropriates reading and, here, observing. Poe imagines an author with the power to transcribe and increase nature’s beauty through a fictionalizing activity. Both Poe and Kirkland enjoyed that power of transcription, of rewriting 64

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both the natural and literary landscape. If we get less than the actual landscape, we also get more. Bring Out Your Dead: Petrified Twain, 1862 –1872 Because western writers staked their claim on factual representation of landscape, legends, and people—rather than authorial creativity—the dominant canon of American literature has largely ignored western authors. Despite prolific output and sales, nineteenth-century western writers are nearly unknown. At century’s end writers such as Hamlin Garland and Frank Norris would confront that invisibility, and, soon after, western nature writers would turn that attachment to place to their own self-inventing advantage. But for much of the nineteenth century western authors continued to struggle with authenticity’s hold. To understand this condition is to understand a series of self-imposed limitations with which western authors have struggled and to understand as well a profound, unsettling difference between western writing and the established eastern canon. Popularity remained a temporary possibility—but western authorship itself remained crippled and inevitably “dead.” Poe himself, in his 1843 review of Cooper’s Wyandotté, considered the demands of popularity; discussed, in uncanny terms, the death of the author; and unintentionally offered a stunning forecast of western writing in the second half of the nineteenth century. Poe emphasized that the theme of “life in the wilderness” remained “one of intrinsic and universal interest, appealing to the heart of man in all phases; a theme, like that of life upon the ocean, so unfailingly omniprevalent in its power of arresting and absorbing attention, that . . . success or popularity is, with such a subject, expected as a matter of course.” 37 But Poe goes on to scoff at the demeaning notion of popularity, dividing those authors merely popular from authors of genius. He contends that “a writer, distrustful of his powers,” relies on popular adventure plots, either life in the wilderness or on the ocean; however, “a man of genius will rarely, and should never, undertake either,” in part because the subject will overwhelm the author. He continues: And thus there are two great classes of fictions,—a popular and widely circulated class, read with pleasure, but without admiration—in which the author is lost or forgotten; or remembered, if at all, with something very nearly akin to contempt; and then, a class not so popular, nor so widely diffused, in which, at every paragraph, arises a distinctive and highly pleasurable interest, spring-

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fact and fiction ing from our perception and appreciation of the skill employed, of the genius evinced in the composition. After perusal of the one class, we think solely of the book—after reading the other, chiefly of the author. . . . In the former case, the books sometimes live, while the authors usually die; in the latter, even when the works perish, the man survives.38

We may employ Poe’s language and conclude that western writers could not survive; although they were often read with pleasure and enjoyed a temporary popularity, they allowed their subject to overpower their own genius. Their work did survive, absorbed into the stratosphere of popular visions of the West, but the authors, as individually identified figures, died. Indeed, one is tempted to argue, following Lionel Trilling’s Greek etymologies, that the claim of authenticity, while empowering, was a form of suicide. (Emerson, at about the same time, remarked that “imitation is suicide.”) It is no coincidence that only one nineteenth-century western author, Mark Twain, managed to attain a canonically visible position in American literary history, and it is no coincidence that Twain did so in great part by ridiculing to perfection the entire foundation of western authorship. Twain opens Roughing It (1872) with a virtual dissection of western writing, copying every detail of prefatory convention and vilifying the precursive process: This book is merely a personal narrative, and not a pretentious history or a philosophical dissertation. . . . Still, there is information in the volume; information concerning an interesting episode in the history of the Far West, about which no books have been written by persons who were on the ground in person, and saw the happenings of the time with their own eyes. . . . Yes, take it all around, there is quite a good deal of information in the book. I regret this very much; but really it could not be helped: information appears to stew out of me naturally, like the precious ottar of roses out of the otter. Sometimes it has seemed to me that I would give worlds if I could retain my facts; but it cannot be. The more I calk up the sources, and the tighter I get, the more I leak wisdom.39

Twain’s subversion of authorial reliability, veracity, and authenticity could not be more evident. Deriding the innumerable prefatory remarks advertising “information” (such as James Hall’s call for “accurate information,” Calvin Colton’s desire “to give information,” and Amos Parker’s hope that 66

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his book “may be found to contain information sufficient to repay the perusal”), Twain instead treats information as parodically regrettable, literally the urination (“leak”) of an unreliably intoxicated (stewed and “tighter”) author. But, if Twain cannot “retain [his] facts,” he nevertheless does manage to “give worlds”: he gives away the West that earlier authors had imagined and mercilessly exposes their carefully constructed identities. In considering Twain’s reputation as a western writer, Lee Clark Mitchell has written that “Twain’s brilliance lay in his recognition of the shaping power of discourse, and his popularity derived from his skill in showing as if for the first time how much more fully our experience is structured by words than by geography.” 40 If Mitchell is correct—and I think he is— Twain’s insight into the “power of discourse” has enormous implications for western literature and its reliance on regional geography, the Real West, and authenticity. And yet I would suggest that Twain’s vision is nearly unique until well into the twentieth century. Arguably, it is not until literary modernism is well under way that western writers began to question the power of place. For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries writers and critics continued to emphasize that geography structures discourse— indeed, they banked on it—and this belief continues to hold sway in the postmodern age. Further, I would add to Mitchell’s statement this: that Twain’s brilliance lay as well in his recognition that authorial identity and canonical reputation are structured by words—by literary performance— and not by geography, biography, or cultural environment. He claims to be an invention not of the West itself but of the literary imagination, specifically his own imagination, making him simultaneously authentic and inauthentic. That Twain deployed and critiqued the idea of authenticity is hardly news. While few scholars have studied Twain’s investigation of historical realism, authorial identity, and authenticity in the narrow light of western literary history, many critics have examined his playfully ambitious maneuvers in terms of American authorship, American humor, and the tall-tale tradition. In fact, almost every major biography and critical study of Twain over the past thirty years has commented on, if not focused on, his participation in the treacherous authenticity game, considering ways that Twain’s own authorial identity is divided between real and fictive and examining ways that his writing complicates representational realism. It is now a commonplace of critical inquiry to recognize the doubleness of the author (Clemens/ Twain) and the multiple personalities of his literary realism. As 67

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Susan Gillman succinctly puts it, “the peculiarly double personality Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain has continued both to elude and to fascinate.” 41 We now assume, in the words of Richard S. Lowry, that “Mark Twain was a social fiction ‘authored’ by a particular man.” 42 The very titles of many major works suggest how actively scholars have interrogated Twain’s constructions of authorship and history, titles such as The Authentic Mark Twain; Inventing Mark Twain; Getting To Be Mark Twain; Constructing Mark Twain; The Inventions of Mark Twain; The Mythologizing of Mark Twain; The Making of Mark Twain; Our Mark Twain: The Making of His Public Personality; Acting Naturally: Mark Twain in the Culture of Performance; In Bad Faith: The Dynamics of Deception in Mark Twain’s America; Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain’s America; and “Littery Man”: Mark Twain and Modern Authorship. Given the intensity and accomplishment of such scholarship, what new can be said about Twain’s critique of authenticity? It would be a fairly simple process to relocate these arguments into western studies, showing how Twain engaged these binaries (authentic/inauthentic, public/private, original/copy, artificial/real) in relation to western writing of the 1860s. Indeed, I would argue that Twain’s complex persona and parodic realism are a direct response to the western cultural imagination and its insistence on the power of place. But, because generations of critics have studied Twain’s construction of authorship in the light of authorial psychology, narrative identity, theater and performance, celebrity and publicity, “capitalist speculations,” American nationalism, and so on, the mere thought of another examination of Twain and authenticity is enervating. Instead, let me propose a very simple and no doubt predictable thesis: Twain’s very public deliberations over authenticity not only parody the foundations of western writing, not only encourage an ever-expanding mass of critical work, but ultimately produce one of the grandest, most illusive of literary bodies. Twain’s manipulation of western authenticity produces an author simultaneously ubiquitous and invisible. The tradition of questioning Twain’s authenticity is perhaps his cleverest invention, insuring his own status as unnervingly original in a world of copies. James M. Cox has argued that “the entire narrative of Roughing It is actually the exaggeration, the tall tale of Mark Twain.” 43 I would extend this ad absurdum: the entire history of reading Twain is a tall tale, a narrative that cannot settle on being either fiction or hoax but which circulates with unending power. I have in mind as a model the kind of critical exhumation that Louis A. Renza performs on Poe in his groundbreaking essay “Poe’s Secret Autobi68

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ography.” Renza argues that “one can construe Poe’s tales as autobiographical cryptograms,” secret codes that ultimately attempt to manipulate Poe’s own canonical reception.44 Taking autobiography to suggest “a figure of reading as opposed to genre of writing,” Renza imagines that Poe’s tales “seek to control, predict, and thus predicate their own secret identity in terms of misreadings.” 45 Because his stories repeatedly enforce misreadings, Poe retains control of them, and the result is that his tales are “selfdistracting artifacts.” 46 Poe’s own internalized theorizing not only encourages his “narcissistic project to possess a private and original relation to his act of writing” but also “helps convince him of the possibility that his written works will indeed ‘rise again’ in the future.” Renza concludes that Poe attempted to “ghost-write . . . his place in American literary history.” 47 To be sure, many (if not all) writers attempt to control reading, and many (if not all) writers manipulate their canonical reception. Renza suggests that Poe is unusual in part because his attempts are so carefully encrypted and because every effort to discover Poe’s secrets only contributes to the codification of his reputation. Twain likewise attempted to control his reception and enlarge his reputation but with one dramatic difference: he chose public display over secret writing. Twain is a literary exhibitionist who deployed images of authorial spectacle rather than imprisonment. If Poe chose the authority of Foucauldian discipline, controlling his stories and readers through covert but implied surveillance, Twain chose punishment —the burlesque circus of authority’s violence. The symbolic image here is not Poe’s cryptogram (which suggests both a secret code and a message from the crypt) but Twain’s Petrified Man. Twain published the short hoax titled “Petrified Man” in the Virginia City (Nevada) Territorial Enterprise on 4 October 1862. This “squib,” as he later called it, describes the recent discovery in Nevada of an ossified man, petrified into stone. “This strange freak of nature,” as Twain refers to the figure, sits upright against “a huge mass of croppings,” apparently frozen there by a century of limestone deposits. He sits with a “pensive” attitude, “the right thumb resting against the side of the nose”—that is, thumbing his nose at his viewers. A local justice holds an inquest, and the jury determines that the “deceased came to his death from protracted exposure.” The justice concludes that, rather than blasting the stone figure from his spot in order to bury him, they should leave him on display. The petrified man, according to the hoax, not only “created a profound sensation in the vicinity” but became a tourist spectacle: “Everybody goes to see the stone man, as 69

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many as three hundred having visited the hardened creature during the past five or six weeks.” 48 Twain’s hoax also took on a life of its own, earning a broader visibility by being reprinted in a number of newspapers, many of which failed to identify it as a hoax. Both the figure and the story of the petrified man exquisitely embody Twain’s own subsequent literary identity. I do not mean to suggest that by 1862 Twain, who had not yet taken that name, was already prefiguring his canonical reputation with subtle, proleptic textual inscriptions—rather, that he was using his publications to think through the cultural logic of celebrity, spectacle, and literary authenticity. Twain eventually becomes the petrified man because he himself is a canonical spectacle, impossible to bury. Or, rather, if he is buried, it is in full public view, a monument of authorship in an open-air pantheon. He gains extended (shelf ) life from his “exposure.” Twain seems to have written a remarkable tableau of literary history: crowds of critics gather around, staring at the sight. Yet the sight is itself a hoax, and simply staring at it reproduces both its authority and comic irony. While the death of this author may be in question, his birth is not. Everett Emerson writes, “the newborn, original—in more than one sense— and authentic Mark Twain was a product of Nevada.” 49 It was in Nevada— and California and the West in general—that Samuel Clemens started inventing Mark Twain and the shifting personalities of his own authorship. More important, it was during his early career in the West that he developed his critique of authenticity. In 1868 he wrote to his friend Mary Mason Fairbanks about his own reputation and the recent publication of his first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches: “There is nothing that makes me prouder than to be regarded by intelligent people as ‘authentic.’ A name I have coveted so long—& secured at last! I don’t care anything about being humorous, or poetical, or eloquent, or anything of that kind—the end & aim of my ambition is to be authentic—is to be considered authentic.” 50 What does Twain mean by authentic? Is he suggesting the anxious discourse of authentic selfhood and identity? Or does he mean something more specific, perhaps that he hopes to appear an authentic author, authentic westerner, or authentic man? Everett Emerson reasonably points out that “his concern was not so much to be authentic as to be considered authentic. This concern is manifested in the way he presented himself— or rather presented Mark Twain: a personage palpably present in his words.” Noting that there were two Twains, the “youthful innocent” and the 70

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“experienced . . . veteran,” Emerson concludes: “Whichever it is, Mark Twain seems like the genuine article. Both the vulnerability of the innocent and the casual ease of the veteran assure the reader that whoever touches his book touches a man.” 51 And yet, to state the obvious, Twain’s letter lacks sincerity, not because of the insistent superficiality of his desire (to be considered authentic) but because he did everything possible to subvert even the appearance of authenticity. Judging by his actions, he disdained authenticity. Everything was an act, signed by the actor. We might call Twain a method actor who feigned a madness of techniques. Certainly, he tried every manner of displaying his artfulness: he invented an alter ego named the “Unreliable”; he wrote hoaxes that looked like hoaxes; he publicly feuded with rival writers and editors over his veracity; he “borrowed” and plagiarized, recirculating the work of other writers and journalists; he repeatedly revised his own public image; and, of course, he played Mark Twain off Samuel Clemens. In all of these acts Twain seems to have taken Poe as his model. Louis J. Budd argues in Our Mark Twain that Twain, a “kindred spirit” of P. T. Barnum, was a writer who “started from western attitudes based in the newspaper office rather than the book and frankly allied to the trades of publicity and staged entertainment.” Yet Budd, like most critics, continues to see in Twain a concealed integrity. In tracing the “evolving impact of his role,” Budd writes that, “on balance, Twain encouraged his public to reach out for autonomy and authenticity. In a subtler message, he achieved by 1900 a heartening degree of frankness about his image-building, a frankness that more than makes up for his moments of fakery. As early as 1863 he openly warned that he had ‘a sort of talent for posturing.’” 52 Of course, it seems entirely plausible that Twain’s frankness—that is, the very show of frankness about fakery—is itself a form of acting, even of fakery. Similarly, Randall Knoper, in his illuminating book Acting Naturally: Mark Twain in the Culture of Performance, studies Twain in relation to the wide range of acting opportunities in postbellum America. Refusing a facile distinction between “realism” and “performance,” 53 Knoper argues that Twain was keenly aware of the power of performance and the need to dramatize authenticity: “the concerns here—between mimicry and identification, detachment and absorption, and the artificial and the real— were crucial questions . . . for Mark Twain as a ‘realist’ writer, as a depicter of characters he evaluated according to their ‘authenticity.’” 54 Knoper, however, refuses to see Twain as a postmodern performer who ironizes all authenticity. Instead, Knoper wants “to affirm that Twain was indeed a re71

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alist, partly in his grasping for the ‘genuine,’ partly in his persistent sense that it was out of reach.” 55 Other critics and biographers are not so sure that there’s anything real at all about Twain. Andrew Hoffman, for example, proposes not only the “unreality of Mark Twain” but the “hollowness at Clemens’ core” as well: “Sam Clemens could play Mark Twain to such success for so long only because his fundamental self was so unstable and uncertain.” 56 Is Twain (or Clemens) real or authentic in any sense? Judith Butler’s theory of “performativity” sheds light on Twain’s authorial performance, even if the theoretical leap may seem extravagant. In claiming in her book Gender Trouble that gender is constructed, she does not “assert . . . its illusoriness or artificiality, where those terms are understood to reside within a binary that counterposes the ‘real’ and the ‘authentic’ as oppositional.” 57 Rather, for Butler “certain cultural configurations of gender take the place of ‘the real.’” 58 In other words, there is no original gender, no authenticity other than the cultural copy. The performance and parody of identity (e.g., drag) in which she is so interested “does not assume that there is an original which such parodic identities imitate. Indeed, the parody is of the very notion of an original.” 59 Mark Twain seems to have lived his life this way. Richard S. Lowry, whose “Littery Man” remains the most sophisticated investigation of Twain’s construction of authorship and authenticity, is keenly aware of Twain’s performative impulse. For Lowry, Twain’s works “enact a parodic performance of authorship, a performance whose success depends paradoxically on establishing the very authority such performance calls into question.” 60 Lowry is right, and the “performative nature” of Twain’s writing does indeed shed light on the “cultural theater” of the Gilded Age, on Twain, and on authorship itself. Yet when we extend this cultural theater into the present—when we consider the theater of criticism—then something slightly different takes place: Twain did not need to establish that authority but to explode the very idea of authority. It is the very instability of authority and authenticity that keeps critics guessing. In other words, Twain not only simulates authenticity; he also simulates fakery—both are shows. And to attend to this performance, as critics inevitably do, is to pay admission to Twain’s hall of mirrors. Twain dramatizes his performative impulse by parodying a parody. In 1870 (a year after The Innocents Abroad appeared in print and two years before the publication of Roughing It) he revisited the “Petrified Man” squib in a piece for his New York Galaxy column, lamenting that, despite its “roaring absurdities,” readers nevertheless believed the story. Indeed, because of his 72

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own “unfair pretence of truth,” Twain remarks that he himself “was in some danger of believing in [his] own fraud.” 61 Twain took the opportunity to ponder why parody is often received as realism. Sometimes, he writes, the reader is simply too trusting; but sometimes the “nub” or moral of the burlesque—if its object be to enforce a truth— escapes notice in the superior glare of something in the body of the burlesque itself. And very often this “moral” is tagged on at the bottom, and the reader, not knowing that it is the key of the whole thing and the only important paragraph in the article, tranquilly turns up his nose at it and leaves it unread. One can deliver a satire with telling force through the insidious medium of a travesty, if he is careful not to overwhelm the satire with the extraneous interest of the travesty, and so bury it from the reader’s sight and leave him a joked and defrauded victim, when the honest intent was to add to either his knowledge or his wisdom.62

Unlike Poe, who instructed his readers to read between the lines in order to solve his cryptograms, Twain simply tells his readers to read every line, suggesting that misreading occurs by a kind of oversight or textual distraction. Like so many western writers, Twain insists on the importance of surfaces, in this case of his own authorial image. In the case of “Petrified Man” the clue to its absurdity, as Twain soon tells us, is the position of the frozen figure thumbing his nose. But even here, exactly when noting that the reader “turns up his nose” and misses the point, Twain is subtly thumbing his nose again. The “body of the burlesque” is a spectacle that casts a “superior glare,” while the satire itself is buried “from the reader’s sight.” In Poe the body is buried (often alive) and haunts the anxious characters; in Twain the body (quite dead) is displayed for the amusement of the public. Instead, what’s being buried or occluded in Twain is the “nub”—the “truth” (“if its object be to enforce a truth”) or original point of the satire. And, in a moment of feigned earnestness, Twain confesses that the original motive of satire is to increase the reader’s “knowledge” or “wisdom.” As if to prove it, Twain then retells the original “Petrified Man” story and the history of its success but ends up burying it in a gaudy display of excess. He exaggerates every point (a single century of ossification is now three) and ludicrously suggests that the story itself was so “copied and guilelessly glorified” that it “swept the great globe and culminated in sublime and unimpeached legitimacy in the august ‘London Lancet.’” 63 That is, as Don Flor73

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ence points out, “showing just how difficult truth is to come by, Twain turns this piece, purportedly explanatory, into a hoax in its own right. . . . With this follow-up article, as with the original, the reader is left cemented as fast to Twain’s ongoing hoax as the petrified man is to the rock.” 64 The fate of that “original” is especially fascinating, for it begins to disappear before our very eyes, buried in our sight through its prodigious display, leaving us joked and defrauded. In the simplest sense the original grows smaller as Twain’s retelling grows larger: both the story and its publication seem less real. The power and effect, Twain suggests, lay in the “guilelessly glorified” copies that circulated. The original vanishes in a literal way as well; in one of those predictable twists of literary history, the Territorial Enterprise printing of “Petrified Man” is nowhere to be found: there is no known extant original. We have only reprints of it from contemporary newspapers. And, in yet another turn, even the nonexistent original is not original. As Edgar Marquess Branch and Robert H. Hirst, editors of Twain’s Early Tales and Sketches, reveal, “in fact, Clemens’ piece was not the first western hoax about a petrified human being: an article entitled ‘Extraordinary and Shocking Death of Miner’ was published four years earlier (1858) in the San Francisco Alta California and widely reprinted as ‘Extraordinary Account of Human Petrifaction.’” 65 Thus, “Petrified Man” is a copy without an original, a simulacrum of sorts. More complexly, Twain makes the idea of authenticity itself a subject for study. He instructs us to attend to his fabrications—and we do, perpetuating his act of fabrication. Richard S. Lowry remarks that “Twain’s authorial self-construction represents what Fredric Jameson, drawing on Kenneth Burke, has characterized as a ‘symbolic act.’” 66 It is “symbolic” in the sense that the act occurs at the level of symbols (i.e., representation): indeed, authorship becomes itself a symbol, an icon to behold; and it is a “symbolic act” because the visible act itself is the act of producing symbols, copies. Considering Twain’s crafted identity as a tourist/author in The Innocents Abroad, for example, Lowry writes: “in visiting an ‘authentic’ site, the tourist reproduced a sight; in representing such an experience, the writer reproduced representation.” 67 (Readers of Don DeLillo’s White Noise will recognize this scene as an earlier version of the “most photographed barn in America.”) Lowry concludes that “what Twain learned as a tourist was precisely the lesson he discovered in writing his book: originality and authenticity have nothing to do with the culture he produced. The magic of authorship lay in copying, and thereby altering and converting, authentic art 74

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into reproduced art—into a commodity.” 68 Twain not only insists that we observe the act of copying but that we learn the magician’s secrets. In other words, critics are forced into addressing copies of copies. This kind of metacritical complexity is on display in Harold K. Bush Jr.’s essay “Our Mark Twain? Or Some Thoughts on the ‘Autobiographical Critic.’” This piece is one of the niftier—but more slippery—articles on Twain to have appeared in recent years. Bush sets out to examine “autobiographical criticism” and “personal writing” in Twain scholarship. Looking at recent works—notably Lowry’s “Littery Man” and Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s Lighting Out for the Territory—Bush argues that Twain criticism inevitably turns personal. “Since autobiographical criticism has been historically commonplace among Twain scholars,” Bush writes, “it is particularly instructive to view how some critics have appropriated the author and how others have been scandalized by those appropriations even as they proceed to enact their own.” 69 That is, Twain’s critics claim “their” Twain and end up inscribing their own scholarly personalities. Bush’s broader goal is to recognize “how the personal aspects of our lives as scholars inform and lend power, for better or worse, to our scholarly creations” (119), and his implicit target seems to be academic culture, which he repeatedly describes (skeptically, it seems) as postmodern. For example, Bush notes that Lowry utilizes the “postmodern garb of social constructionism” to read Twain’s performance of authorship, but, more important, he argues that “Littery Man” “constitutes Lowry’s attempt to create authority within the larger context of academic culture generally and the smaller circle of Mark Twain scholarship specifically” (110). It is an example, Bush contends, of the “tenure book,” and it says nearly as much about Lowry in his academic milieu as it does about Twain in his cultural environment. Indeed, as Lowry reads Twain in cultural context, Bush read Lowry. At first Bush’s essay may not appear to be a major statement on Twain but, instead, a provocative “reconsideration” of contemporary scholarship, a kind of “review-essay.” But Bush’s article is so smart—and deceptive— that it deserves comment, for in Poe-esque fashion it turns itself into exactly what it is critiquing. Intentionally or not, it is perfectly postmodern, a hoax of sorts, and serves Twain in exactly the kind of metacritical manner that I am investigating. I don’t mean to suggest that Bush is insincere or merely ironic; rather, he deploys a discourse of authority and authenticity to critique that same discourse in others and to show their critique of the same in Twain. First, Bush reveals the “personal stakes involved in the scholarly 75

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enterprise” (108), by which he means scholarly investment in both Twain and the critic’s career. Bush sees Lowry’s investigation of Twain, on one level, as self-promotion, literally, to tenure; Lowry, in this sense, is putting himself on display in the academic theater, authorizing himself as a sort of “littery-criticism man.” Moreover, Bush reads Lowry’s scholarly apparatus (acknowledgments, notes, and so on) as itself an exemplary text: “the trail of notes left in most of today’s scholarly tomes indicates a great deal about their authors, for it comprises a sort of ‘intellectual autobiography’ of the writer. In addition, insofar as the contemporary style of noting exemplifies what I mean by scholarly ‘models of language,’ such documentation should be seen as performing a highly rhetorical task, most prominently the creation of an authorial ethos” (113). Bush seems to rewrite (copy from the original) Lowry’s explanation of Twain’s symbolic act of authorship, seeing Lowry’s notes as the symbolic activities of Lowry’s own quest for authorship. But of course, as Bush surely knows, this critique boomerangs back at Bush himself, who naturally uses the conventions of modern scholarship in his own essay, including elaborate footnotes. Amazingly, Bush’s first footnote reads: “I would like to thank Richard Lowry [and three others] for their close and intelligent readings of earlier drafts of this essay” (100). And a subsequent note refers to the “personal correspondence” between Bush and Lowry (114). Not only does such documentation lend professional authority to the essay but itself performs a “highly rhetorical task.” Or multiple tasks: on the one hand, it tends to produce Bush’s own “intellectual autobiography,” demonstrating the traces of his intellectual paths and values. (The handwriting is on the wall.) On the other hand, it tends to decenter the essay itself in stunning ways by situating authority in other texts, both earlier (original) drafts of the essay and in letters. Given that Bush’s tone toward Lowry, while generally admiring, is at times skeptical, at least in suggesting that Lowry’s book is professionally self-serving, one must wonder about their correspondence. Admittedly, this extended reading of Bush’s piece may seem frivolous. Am I not writing a critique of a critique of a critique of Twain’s cultural critique of authenticity? Yes, and that is my point. Even if I am misreading Bush as a postmodern hoaxer or exaggerating his article’s intent, I am still doing exactly what Bush says criticism does. And every step in the process is another (limestone) deposit on Twain’s own petrified figure as well as a deposit in his canonical account. If, as Bush argues, “some critics have appropriated the author,” claiming him as our Mark Twain, then clearly Bush 76

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has appropriated Lowry, and I have appropriated Bush.70 And we have all always already been appropriated by Twain, who wrote all these moves for us. What Bush calls the intellectual autobiography buried in notes is akin to what Louis A. Renza calls the “secret autobiography” buried in Poe’s tales, for both assert a covert, cryptic authorial presence, one that misdirects readers away from the real subject and toward a phantom figure of the author. Twain’s encoded autobiography is neither “intellectual” nor “secret” but, rather, what might be called a “manifest autobiography” that insists less on our misreadings of his authorial hoax than on our rereadings of them. He keeps us spinning in place, repeatedly examining “Twain and authenticity” as if there were an end in sight. The only thing in sight is “Mark Twain,” a forever outsized public figure, thumbing his nose.

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3 AUTHENTIC REPRODUCTION The Picturesque Joaquin Miller

A great poet, a really great poet, is the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look. The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. — oscar wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

Joaquin Miller, now largely forgotten, is arguably the central figure in the early history of western American authorship and a connecting link between the so-called San Francisco circle of the 1860s and the flowering of western realism toward the century’s end. Miller emerged— exploded, rather— during the early 1870s, a time when western literature was still essentially a promise, not yet delivered goods. Throughout the 1870s and later Miller’s international celebrity as a western writer was equaled only by Mark Twain’s and Bret Harte’s—although their literary efforts met with a considerably warmer reception. In fact, the public cared less for Miller’s actual poetry, much of which was dismissed and attacked, than for the face and the figure, the icon that Miller became. Drawing on the surging popularity of western types such as Daniel Boone and on the expanding market for sensational dime novels, Miller invented himself as a poetic frontiersman, the “Byron of the Rockies” or “Poet of the Sierras,” as he was known. He was the first author to capitalize fully on the myth of the West and to circulate a western persona to economic advantage. After his extraordinary ascent in 1871, his face and figure were ubiquitous. He had become a public relations genius and an author of wide renown. Miller’s strategies for authorial advance dynamically reveal the construction of authorship on both regional and national levels. First, Miller’s flamboyant posturing suggests as much about the complicated condition of authorship in the American West in the early 1870s as about Miller’s own canonical ambitions. While the eastern and European audiences eagerly sought news of the West and enjoyed the stories and accounts arriving from the region, no individual author had yet emerged who personally embodied the perceived western spirit. Dime novels were in their infancy (then introducing Buffalo Bill to the public), and the popular San Francisco scene was increasingly moribund, largely exporting itself eastward. Bret Harte may 78

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have been the “prototype of the modern man of letters as a business man,” in the apt words of Gary Scharnhorst, and Mark Twain may have possessed a genius for authorial performance, but no author had come fully to represent the West.1 But Miller sought exactly that—to stand for the region as an icon both imitable and authentic. If, as Miles Orvell contends in The Real Thing, “the tension between imitation and authenticity is a primary category in American civilization,” then Joaquin Miller played it both ways.2 On the one hand, Miller capitalized on the developing popularity of exaggerated (recognizably inauthentic) western romance, a form of regional imagining that required formulaic, imitative representation; Miller literally invented himself not as a genuine original but as an endlessly reproducible copy. His investment in the power of commercial imitation is unmistakable. On the other hand, he vociferously claimed a regional authenticity as well—the consistent, almost generic claim of western authors since the 1830s. He employed his attachment to place as a legitimizing strategy, and, oddly, as he sought to represent the West, he also argued that the West represented him—that those associated sites emblematized his canonical condition. Second, and more broadly, Miller’s successes raise a number of theoretical questions about the nature of authenticity itself and the ways in which strategies of authenticity inform cultural representation and celebrity. Indeed, using the language of Jean Baudrillard, we might say that Miller’s career depended on a “strategy of the real”: Miller is helping to invent the West as “hyperreal” and himself as representative of that West, a simulation “of a real without origin or reality.” 3 Miller is an “authentic reproduction” and in retrospect appears to be aware of all the discursive play assumed in that phrase: the ironies, the duplicities, the commercial appeal. Miller’s own history—his corporeal body, his borrowed name, his shifting home sites, his creative autobiographies—all work to collapse easy distinctions between fact and fiction. Further, Miller’s struggles epitomize the dynamic exchange between a self-authenticating author and the cultural pressures of nationalist canon making. Miller’s presence emerges as one of the supreme models of self-advertisement in American literary history; he was an author who used every available technology to publicize himself—a material author in an increasingly material world. Incorporating the poses of Byron, Whitman, and Poe, anticipating the antics of Mailer and even Madonna, Miller’s flamboyant, excessive presentation is both parody and paradigm. The late nineteenth century, imbued with what Orvell calls the “culture of imitation,” was ready for Miller’s brand of self-reproduction: Miller 79

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emerged in a period when “both the resources and the public were available to be exploited and appealed to by those aspiring either to construct greater stages or to appear on them.” 4 Newspapers and magazines circulated with increased effect, commercial advertising was discovering its enormous potential, and the fashion industry would soon exert its own peculiar influence.5 Indeed, Miller showed himself to be profoundly interested in the language of advertising as a form of public discourse and even claimed that “our best real American literature so far is found in our business letters, advertisements, and concise telegrams.” 6 Using every marketing technique available, Miller fashioned himself into a star and was arguably the first American author to use the machinery of modern commercial culture to invent himself as literary celebrity.7 Miller’s presence parodies earlier notions of the “self-made man,” the figure who develops moral and personal character: Miller is the prototype of the self-made man who develops only a public reputation. And, as Karen Halttunen has shown, just such a shift was also occurring in the “reorientation of middle-class attitudes toward social mobility after mid-century. . . . After 1870, a new success literature was emerging that effectively instructed its readers to cultivate the arts of the confidence man in order to succeed in the corporate business world.” 8 Miller both adapted and employed these masking “arts” to fashion himself as the poetic frontiersman, the “Byron of the Rockies,” and even as the literary confidence man for the age that commenced with P. T. Barnum’s touring spectacles and closed with Buffalo Bill’s final Wild West show.9 Technologies of Selfhood: The Picturesque Miller Significantly, Joaquin Miller’s reputation was fostered and secured not in the United States but in England; indeed, American audiences were at first slow and cautious in accepting him. As an unknown Oregon poet, journalist, and lawyer, Miller had separated from his wife (according to legend telling her that “a man never becomes famous until he leaves his wife, or does something atrocious to bring himself into notice”) and eventually descended on San Francisco in 1870 to make his name.10 When the busy literary circle led by Bret Harte largely ignored him, he traveled to London with equally high hopes. In the preface to Pacific Poems (1871), published soon after his arrival in England, he described himself as “a nameless young man leaving the woods of the Great West, and seeking the capital of the world, to publish.” 11 There is unselfconscious irony in the words, for he indeed did seek the capital to publish, paying the printing costs of his early poetry 80

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collections. But even Miller’s notably unironic intellect must have enjoyed the adjective nameless, for Miller had recently changed his first name (after much deliberation) from Cincinnatus to Joaquin, borrowing the more exotic and impressive sobriquet from Joaquin Murietta, the legendary California bandit and title figure of Miller’s second collection, Joaquin et al. (1869). Miller, with the encouragement of the savvy Ina Coolbrith, hoped that the recherché name would bring him notice and a somewhat dangerous reputation. Miller’s lifework was to maintain and ever increase the value of this name. By taking Murietta’s name, Miller was staking a claim to a number of literary and multiethnic discourses. Murietta, a Mexican rebel/outlaw finally captured and executed in California, was well known through numerous legends and reports, notably John Rollin Ridge’s popular and sensationalized Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murietta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854). Miller seems to have adored his contrived association with Murietta and once playfully suggested the possibility that he was Murietta: “And is it not possible that I am even now the original and only real Joaquin Murietta? For more than once in the old days I was told (and how pleased I was to hear it said) that no other than Joaquin Murietta could ever ride as I rode. But here again is confusion. . . . For his hair was as black as a whole midnight, while mine was the hue of hammered gold. And, after all, was it not my vanity and willingness to be thought Joaquin, rather than pity for the brave boy outlaw . . . that made me write of him and usurp his bloody name?” 12 In wondering whether he has a “double,” Miller here boasts that he is not the “original and only real” Murietta—as if the original could ever be known in the intricate layerings of the hyperreal West—but a simulacrum, a copy designed to take full advantage of the established name. By presenting himself as a copy of Murietta, Miller turns savagery into marketable and reproducible product. Miller even implies an awareness of the ethnic and commercial transformation represented by the name’s new owner, a transformation from Mexican (perhaps implied in the obliquely derogatory terms black and bloody) to Euro-American (“hammered gold”). Further, Miller, who often portrayed his personal past as heroically linked to Native American cultures, is borrowing some of the authorial light cast by John Rollin Ridge (“Yellow Bird”). Like Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman (to name two obvious precursors), Miller sought a reputation; almost immediately, he discovered one that worked, and he worked it hard for the next four decades. His break81

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through book (his fourth collection) was titled Songs of the Sierras (1871), published in London and Boston just months after Pacific Poems. The collection, like all of Miller’s writing, is a series of self-inventions designed to introduce and publicize his persona. His initial success in London was unprecedented in western American letters—the British public and literati, overlooking his limited poetic talent, found the frontiersman irresistible. Miller had arrived at a ripe moment: London was ready for the Wild West. Since the 1850s England had voraciously consumed sensational accounts of the West, provided by such authors as Mayne Reid, G. A. Henty, and George Frederick Huxton. But Miller was the first American author to arrive as a frontier poet—seemingly raw, wild, and genuine. Years before Buffalo Bill’s touring spectacle, Miller’s practiced showmanship triumphed; his sombrero, cowboy hat, spurs, and animal skins delighted his audiences, who thrilled at his often invented and ludicrous tall tales. The likes of Robert Browning, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Algernon Charles Swinburne feted him even while doubting his poetic gift. Miller helped instigate and popularize a fashion for the West in Britain that endured for decades; by the late 1880s Oscar Wilde, who became Miller’s friend, could write that “English people are far more interested in American barbarism than they are in American civilization. . . . [T]hey have been known to prefer buffaloes to Boston.” 13 Joaquin Miller depicted himself as reflecting, rather than affecting, his historical moment and locus. His egotistical posturing certainly suggests an attitude of self-importance, but he did not seek the status of romantic genius, the sui generis original poet. Quite the contrary, his contrived persona ultimately refused the burden of an individualized, complicated self; further, the problem of representational reliability is negated in Miller, who donned the mantle of cultural icon. By assuming (and popularizing) a western type, the backwoodsman or frontiersman, Miller sought both a recognizable commercial image and an escape from the idiosyncrasies and limitations of individuality. This strategy holds true for his later persona as well, that of the wise and wizened sage. Even when his vanity got the best of him, as when he pronounced himself “the American poet,” he made his case not by claiming literary merit or critical recognition but by pointing to the familiar American scenes he depicted and to his own personal experience “on the spot spoken of.” 14 Like James Hall, Timothy Flint, and others, Miller pointed attention at the West, not at his writing. And, like Buffalo Bill Cody, his strategy was to appear representative: a larger-than-life character but a 82

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recognizable symbol of the American West. By appearing as a type in a variety of media, Miller accomplished a novel and enviable authorial condition: he was not only marketable but reproducible. Miller’s most effective method of authorial self-positioning was the advertisement of his physical presence. His use of outrageous western costume became his early signature, the signifier of his presence. His image was conveyed through personal appearance (such as lectures, readings, dinners, and other social functions) as well as through the circulation of publicity portraits. The British literati felt that they had discovered an American original, or at least a good show, and American audiences, even if suspicious of Miller’s British reception, were naturally curious about the attention paid to Miller. Indeed, the two countries often shared their entertainment; as Miles Orvell documents, “the popular culture in America was rapidly becoming, after the Civil War, at once a culture of consumption and a culture of spectatorship. Richard Altick in The Shows of London (1978) details the extraordinary variety of spectacles that caught the fascinated eye of the British public, and many of these had a second life across the Atlantic, or were imitated and adapted for American consumption. During the 1870s and 1880s spectator entertainment grew . . . into more and more elaborate spectacles: circuses, minstrel shows, vaudeville, light musicals, sports, road shows.” 15 Miller took advantage of the culture of spectacle and played an exaggerated western role, filling a commercial void. The fact that he was role-playing was hardly lost on his admirers and critics: for example, one reviewer commented that “it is the ‘sombreros’ and ‘serapes’ and ‘gulches’ . . . which have caused our English friends to find in Mr. Miller a truly American poet,” and another reviewer, less generous, complained in 1878 that Miller was “still the half-reclaimed savage he has chosen to represent himself.” 16 But such recognition only propelled Miller’s unusual status. (As Nathanael West described his character Harry Greener in The Day of the Locust: “His outfit fooled no one, but then he didn’t intend it to fool anyone. His slyness was of a different sort.”) 17 When his public image later evolved from the frontiersman into an elderly sage figure, Miller himself could refer to his earlier persona as “that creation of the American imagination, the stalwart, red-shirted and six-shootered hairy man of the Sierra Nevada Mountains”; 18 disingenuously denying agency, Miller here pretends that his first public incarnation was reception-generated. Quite the contrary, Miller had always carefully produced himself. Miller accomplished this end by inventing himself as “picturesque”— 83

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the term itself finally standing as not only a canonical strategy but also as something richer, a philosophy of sorts. The word picturesque has, of course, traditionally been applied to landscapes, especially country houses and gardens, suggesting the subject’s aesthetic composition and its “fitness for imitation by art,” in Walter Bagehot’s phrase.19 The word is transferred to Miller with surprising ease, for his persona was itself composed and designed for imitation and reproduction. Miller is remembered, quite literally, as a picture. The British celebrity and actress Lillie Langtry, for example, recalled Miller as a “child of nature and perhaps the most picturesque personality of the literary world”; Harr Wagner, Miller’s friend and coeditor of the San Francisco Golden Era, described Miller as the “most picturesque figure American literature has produced”; New York’s Literary Digest commented that “picturesque in his red flannel shirt and top boots, Mr. Miller was the lion of the London drawing-rooms”; Mark Twain remembered that in London Miller was “affecting the picturesque and untamed costume of the wild Sierras”; Martin Severin Peterson is one of many biographers who describe Miller’s “picturesque and romantic figure”; and Stuart P. Sherman, editor of Miller’s Poetical Works, avoided literary evaluation but remarked that Miller was a “picturesque figure” and the “picturesque incarnation of the spirit which pervades his poems.” 20 Such testimonials suggest much more than the importance of Miller’s physical appearance, more even than the correlation between appearance and inner “aura” so common earlier in the century. The descriptions of Miller’s picturesque presence identify his highest achievement, a quality carefully produced and manufactured and worthy itself of laudatory attention. Oscar Wilde could say of Lillie Langtry that her beauty was “a form of genius”; 21 so with Miller his physical persona was a brilliant example of self-representation. In the 1870s the most recognizable and accessible form of portraiture was the photograph, and Miller’s calculated dress and figure became ubiquitously reproduced. His era saw a series of dramatic improvements in photographic technology. As the demands for daguerreotype portraits (difficult to reproduce) outpaced printing ability in the 1850s, new methods of reproduction became available, first the wet-collodion tintype, then the immensely popular but undersized carte de visite (mid-1850s through the 1860s), and soon the cabinet card (51⁄ 2  4 inches, introduced in 1866). Significantly, actors and actresses placed a particular priority on publicity photographs, especially the cabinet photograph, resulting in a new marketing specialization; “the success of the [publicity] photograph was largely due to 84

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the sitter’s power to project his personality.” 22 By the end of the century, as Leo Braudy points out, “photography was already well established as the prime way to bring oneself to the attention of one’s relatives, friends, and followers.” 23 Miller employed this developing technology of photographic reproduction, and portraits of him in the 1870s and later became circulated in a way that Poe’s daguerreotypes never could in the 1840s or even Hawthorne’s in the 1850s. Pictures of Miller were widely distributed as gifts, as forms of personal introduction, and as an advertising image. Photographic collections of San Francisco celebrities, including Miler, were commercially released (like an early version of baseball trading cards or perhaps fan magazines). Miller’s image was later pictured on postcards (one riding a horse named “Chief ”), and the Berkeley Chamber of Commerce printed cards of Miller for tourists visiting the Bay Area. Miller had made his own bodily presence a work of art and an easily reproduced one. The reproduction of photographic portraits fit Miller perfectly. Earlier in the century, as Alan Trachtenberg has noted, “what was needed was confidence that the eye could reliably discern inner character from outer appearance,” and therefore “photographers adopted the notion that the exterior of a person might reveal inner character.” 24 This somewhat mystical sense of photography had faded by the 1870s, replaced by culture-wide enthusiasm for cheap and accurate imitations. Walter Benjamin influentially affirmed that this transition to the “age of mechanical reproduction” was marked in part by a change in performative value: “to an even greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the ‘authentic’ print makes no sense.” 25 Joaquin Miller seemed to intuit this concept and apply it in subtle ways to his own public presentation, destabilizing as it were the notions of “inner self,” originality, and authenticity. The concept of an authentic original here refers not to the first print or photograph but to Miller himself; his insight (or instinct) was to blur and even negate the possibility of authenticity, even while claiming to be the real thing. As a work of art himself, he refused to be limited to a single authentic or true self but labored subversively toward a kind of permanent and infinite reproducibility. He used photographic portraiture in the same way that actors did: exactly not to reveal his “inner character” but to display the outer persona. Thus, even friends, knowing better, remembered not him (the original) but his “picturesqueness.” Significantly, the shift in photographic representation (from the aura of 85

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inner self to received, reliable public image) reflects a larger cultural change: Miller’s rise coincided with the beginnings of a shift in the perception of the independent subject, the individual self. Over the second half of the nineteenth century America became increasingly less convinced of a stable, definable “genuine” self beneath the layers of social convention. T. J. Jackson Lears has shown that toward the end of the nineteenth century “identity seemed far more fragmented and problematic than earlier generations had imagined,” and even “at the highest theoretical levels . . . Americans showed a fascination with social role playing.” 26 Miller seemed to turn this developing fascination—and uneasiness—with selfhood to his advantage, inventing a character nonthreatening in its simplicity. Indeed, biographer Martin Severin Peterson marvels that Miller’s “personality shows so many facets that the central one is hard to fix upon.” 27 And Miller took every advantage of a market in which “the fragmented self became a commodity like any other, to be assembled and manipulated for private gain.” 28 He was the confidence man returned but without a hidden identity, without an inner self. Miller’s insistence on the mechanical reproducibility of his character is reflected in textual portraits as well: both his poetry and prose incorporate techniques of echoing self-portraiture. His poetry, despite its imaginative license, was an explicit manipulation of autobiographical legend. As critic O. W. Frost writes, “Songs of the Sierras and later writings of the 1870’s that sustained Miller’s popularity present the same image of the Far Western hero, and this hero in poem after poem is essentially the poet himself.” 29 Miller often advertised this angle: “My first lines, and in truth, all my lines, as a rule, were descriptive stories of the lands I knew, so that my poems are literally my autobiography.” 30 Poems such as “The Arizonian,” “Walker in Nicaragua,” and even “Kit Carson’s Ride” all suggest that Miller had participated in daring, dramatic adventures, and audiences were quick to associate Miller with his poetic fantasies. Yet Miller could also acknowledge that, like all phases of his autobiographical presentation, his poetic self is a fiction. In a note to “The Tale of the Tall Alcade” he wrote: “I recall that when Trelawny told me that Byron was more ambitious to be thought the hero of his wildest poems than even to be king of Greece I could not help saying to myself, as Napoleon said to the thunders preceding Waterloo, ‘We are of accord.’” 31 In a typically self-aggrandizing flash Miller aligns himself with Byron and Napoleon through a kind of double ventriloquism—and displaces the king of Greece. And, revealingly, he does not suggest that he 86

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would like to experience the heights of heroic action but, rather, that he wanted “to be thought the hero.” In addition to poetic reproductions, Miller made an industry of prose self-portraits. His Life Amongst the Modocs (1873), telling of his partially invented life with the Pit and Modoc Indians, was the first of his autobiographies; its immediate popularity resulted in numerous republications. Like the man himself, the book was reprinted in multiple incarnations over the next quarter-century, usually with little or no substantive changes. It appeared as Unwritten History, Paquita, My Own Story, and Joaquin Miller’s Romantic Life Amongst the Red Indians, each title implying a different genre (history, romance, autobiography, adventure/dime novel) designed to appeal to its own target audience. Similarly, he wrote a lengthy autobiographical piece for a Washington newspaper that was later reprinted as the eightytwo-page introduction to his collected Poems (1909) and again posthumously as Overland in a Covered Wagon (1930). Miller’s organic sense of literary production (organic in that it constantly grows in a seemingly natural, even Whitmanian progression) can even be found within his footnotes to his republished poems; Miller compulsively incorporates lengthy and often irrelevant updating notes, notes that together form a stream-of-consciousness narrative that Stuart P. Sherman aptly terms “shredded memoirs.” 32 In these poetic and prose writings, in interviews, in lectures, and in published letters, Miller made a virtue of excess by repeatedly retelling his life, enacting Walter Benjamin’s observation that “by making many reproductions [one] substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence.” 33 By endorsing the “publicness” of his persona, Miller celebrated the opportunity of self-multiplication. It is as if by multiplying himself he could create immortality, or at least canonical security. Further, as Miller carefully turned himself into myth using the methods of the reproducible picturesque, the problem of another kind of authenticity—telling the truth—became inverted. Miller refused to be limited by fact or original experience; quite simply, he lied. Many critics attacked him for his duplicity, especially those invested in western letters; Ambrose Bierce, for example, wrote in the San Francisco Examiner that Miller “cannot, or will not tell the truth.” But getting caught in a lie or exaggeration (a frequent occurrence) had no real ill effect; quite the contrary, his “Munchausenisms” (in the language of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son Julian) became a part of his legend, and even Bierce had to admit that Miller “never tells a malicious or thrifty falsehood.” 34 Miller, who was occasionally called “Joking Miller,” re87

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sponded to Bierce as he responded to many such attacks, by declaring: “I am not a liar. . . . I simply exaggerate the truth.” 35 In fact, Miller’s lying became much more than simple self-mythologizing, more than a Poe hoax or Twain tall tale—it became a kind of triumphant insider game that thematized an ideology of fiction and selfhood. And as such it became a strategy for authorial positioning. Critics note that Miller’s oeuvre is old-fashioned, that his exaggerations (in his life and writings) display a traditional romantic sensibility that resisted the advance of literary realism, which was quickly becoming the dominant literary “school” of Miller’s day. Yet, although Miller clearly uses an imaginative force to manipulate the cult of nostalgia for the Wild West (a familiar strategy of popular western narratives), he is hardly romantic, hardly old-fashioned, hardly a mere sensationalist. Rather, Miller carefully juxtaposes his fantastic imaginings with credible (or at least strenuously argued) accounts, and both historical and literary realism become subjectified. T. J. Jackson Lears has shown that, in the second half of the century, “reality itself began to seem problematic, something to be sought rather than merely lived,” and Amy Kaplan uses this idea to argue that “realistic narratives enact this search not by fleeing into the imagination or into nostalgia for a lost past but by actively constructing the coherent social world they represent.” 36 Miller took full advantage of this constructed nature of reality and consequently encoded in his writings a formula for an entirely modern authorship. That is, he built, through the careful manipulation of fact and fiction, a hyperreal western world to inhabit, a virtual theme park, and made himself the central attraction. Miller’s personality machine suggests a man discovering the cult of fashion, celebrity, and stardom; Miller anticipated and perhaps precipitated the twentieth-century consumer culture, what William Leach calls the “land of desire.” William Dean Howells could deride the “clamor” around Miller but not alter the shift in literary authorship.37 This problematic literary realism reveals itself to perfection in the 1890 revision of Life Amongst the Modocs (1873). In the prefatory explanation Miller himself raises the problem of truth and fiction but mischievously proceeds to subvert his own message. He writes that the original book was zealously produced to help his “best friends,” the Modoc Indians, who were then at war. His method of composition, he declares, was to collect a few “sketches,” combine them with the “wild and romantic accounts” that other “imaginative writers” had told about him, and “throw” them into a book: 88

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“in great haste, and with a confusion of fact and fiction, a volume was brought out by the Queen’s Publisher. The first edition was dedicated to Wendell Phillips, and that great orator and humanitarian mounted the forum for the Red Man, as he had for the Black Man. . . . The author expected this book to quietly die when it had done its work; but as it seems determined to outlive him, with all its follies and fictions, he has taken it severely in hand, cut off all its fictitious growth, and confined its leaves to the cold, frozen truth: ‘the truth, and nothing but the truth,’ if not ‘the whole truth.’” 38 It is well worth attending to Miller’s curious explanation. Indeed, the passage is more than explanation: it stands as testimony (“the truth, and nothing but the truth”), although in place of a Bible Miller ironically holds “in hand” his own transmuting book. Miller’s first move is to shift responsibility for the original unreliable history, first onto the other writers, then onto the “Queen’s Publisher.” Miller’s use of the passive voice (“a volume was brought out”) seems to reinforce his innocence. In fact, he understates the assistance he received—his friend Prentice Mulford deserved credit for much of the actual writing. His next move, somewhat contradictory, is implicitly to accept credit for the book’s political influence, suggesting a direct causal relationship between his autobiographical work and Wendell Phillips’s pro-Indian activism. But such a relationship distorts history: Phillips’s outspoken concern about Native American conditions long predates 1873, the publication year of Modocs. Further, Miller seems to be toying with his own history, reclaiming and revising it; as an Oregon newspaper editor in the 1860s, he expressed “strong pro-Southern sympathies” and must have frowned on Phillips’s abolitionist agitation.39 Miller’s strongest claim in this preface is his pledge to prune the “fictitious growth,” perhaps punning that the “leaves” (what is left) will be exclusively the “cold, frozen truth.” Needless to say, the volume itself does nothing of the kind, leaving intact and even adding many fictions and exaggerations. But more important is that the prefatory claim is already a fib— Miller did not dedicate the first volume to Wendell Phillips but to the “Red Men of America.” Miller’s final claim that the volume may not contain the “whole truth” is thus wordplay. His ostensible meaning (repeated elsewhere) is that what he tells will be “nothing but the truth” but that the “whole truth” is too violent and awful for his audience. But, of course, Miller is also winking at the very idea of autobiographical authenticity, acknowledging and even advertising that the updated version is as colorful (i.e., suspect) as the first. Retitling the book My Own Story may suggest that 89

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Miller has indeed taken editorial and authorial charge. Such a reading is belied, however, by the simultaneous British printing of the same text, titled there Joaquin Miller’s Romantic Life Amongst the Red Indians, in which his name becomes a part of the title and the author is both obscured and simultaneously fictionalized. Finally, if Miller advertised his picturesque persona (based on a constructed, perhaps corrupt form of authenticity), he also theorized the correspondence between his poetry and his picturesque self. At its simplest he produced poetry that celebrated aesthetically constructed images over ideas or emotions, so that reviewers often observed that Miller’s lines displayed the “romantic and picturesque effect” or that his poetry consisted of “a number of picturesque things picturesquely put.” 40 Similarly, Van Wyck Brooks, perhaps conflating Miller and his writing, later wrote that, “verbose and banal as [Miller] often was, rough-hewn and melodramatic, he evoked the romantic, heroic life of the plains and especially the mountains that appeared in the popular pictures of Albert Bierstadt.” 41 Miller himself prized the “color, action, and atmosphere” of his poems (the 1907 Light, in this case) and often referred to them as “sketches,” even “photographs.” 42 Yet Miller’s use of the picturesque was far more than aesthetic formula; rather, it constituted a working theory that effectively erased Miller’s words and inserted Miller’s persona. In his description of the celebrated “Rossetti Dinner” of 1871 that would become so central to his own literary status, Miller articulates his theory of poetry. Miller recounts the evening’s discussion as it moves through literary topics, the diners, “giants of thought,” 43 offering their critical views while Miller silently waits his turn. The group attempts to define poetry— one is discouraged to think of such banalities at Rossetti’s table—until finally the “Master” (Rossetti) turns to Miller for his theory of poetry. Miller’s simple response is accorded a kind of centrality and is given its own indented line: “To me a poem is a picture.” 44 The pedants immediately take up Miller’s pronouncement (as he proudly recalls) and spend considerable time endorsing the concept—a concept already familiar dogma to the Pre-Raphaelites. The group, however, seems to misinterpret Miller’s point, chortling on about the power of the written word to represent nature, to paint a picture. But Miller, who at times lectured that poetry was a “succession of beautiful pictures,” 45 is quite serious in his theory of detextualized picture-poetry. Miller is exploding the “writtenness” of poetry in favor of a portable, memorialized picture, deconstructing the words in favor of a reproducible commercial image. Rossetti 90

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believes himself to be in agreement with Miller when he responds that “the only rule I have for measuring the merits of a written poem, is by the height of it. Why not be able to measure its altitude as you measure one of your sublime peaks?” Miller’s response subverts Rossetti’s emphasis on the “ written poem”: “I do not want to remember the words. But I do want it to remain with me—a picture—and become a part of my life” (1:110). Miller’s conflation of poetry, picture, and his “life” is an emblem for his entire canonical design. By unwriting, as it were, his own poetry, by reducing, even negating, the textuality in favor of the picturesque, he returns the writing to a site that he inhabits, to a “succession of pictures,” to a geographically invented place where the picture might “remain” with him, to his own reproducible presence. Joaquin Miller’s Kingdom of the Ideal Miller’s vigorous attempts to advertise his own image may at times seem playful or benign, but they can also obscure a dangerous fascination with power. Miller never abandoned the reproducible, picturesque persona but became increasingly dependent on flaunting his proximity to sites of institutionalized authority. Miller’s writings consistently exhibit a complex dialogue between the disenfranchised and the powerful, and his reluctance to show his cards suggests a profound uneasiness about the influences of authority and about his own canonical ambitions. Miller preferred to front as the champion of the underprivileged, but his writings indicate a man fascinated with, and perhaps envious of, the elite. The position he most frequently takes is a relational one: he is a follower, a reporter, a visitor, a eulogizer, a prophet. As such, he can claim knowledge of and intimacy with individual power figures, men (mostly) who transformed history. But even these poses suggest conflicting conditions of authority and voice. This dialogue, finally, may begin to suggest the profoundly displaced and marginalized condition of authorship in the West in the last quarter of the century; as Miller juxtaposes authority and dispossession, he reveals the western author’s inevitable confrontation with eastern and European power structures. Although Miller attempted to negotiate between vastly different cultures (from Native American to aristocratic British to elite eastern), he could not always comfortably picture himself. His self-portrait was designed to accommodate the late-century model of rags-to-riches, using the familiar Horatio Alger paradigm to enter into the discourse of popular economics. Yet, while Alger’s writings, exact contemporaries of Miller’s 91

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own, celebrate the financial ascension of a deserving but unlucky youth, Miller’s story is invested with different kinds of ascension: of class, blood, and finally spirit. Miller repeatedly casts his own life as one of movement and development, principally a movement from unusual weakness to health and strength, from backwoods to the royal court. He often remembers himself underdeveloped as a youth (“I had never, as yet, been a robust boy, as my brothers were. I had never, as yet, been able to eat meat”) and tended to retain a sympathetic attitude toward the struggling settlers, the impoverished Indians, and others facing hardships.46 Commentators frequently remark on Miller’s social largesse: one critic writes that “Joaquin identified himself with the underdog, be it the Indian of the West, displaced, wronged, and massacred by rapacious miners; or the Confederate in the Civil War; or the poor of many nations”; another avers that Miller was “in sympathy” with “all oppressed races”; and a third that he was “the champion of oppressed peoples.” 47 Yet, despite Miller’s apparently genuine concern for Native American rights and democratic principles (which I do not intend to demean or devalue), the notion that Miller was at heart a defender of the weak rings hollow. He appeared increasingly enamored with the powerful—with famous literary figures, politicians, and, most significantly, with aristocracy. His fascination with royalty is everywhere in details: his repeated casual references to being printed by the “Queen’s publisher”; his description of Mt. Shasta as the “monarch of the Sierra de Nevada . . . monarch of the entire mountain range”; his glamorizing account of the “Prince,” the gallant leader who dominates Life Amongst the Modocs (“a perfect man. . . . A prince! truly nothing less than a prince!”); and his descriptions of even minor characters as royalty: “This man Ream . . . is and has ever been, the king and dictator of all that end of California.” 48 More important, Miller reiterates his own physical position in relation to these figures, his intimacy with the aristocratic. He describes sitting next to the Master, Rossetti; he boasts of “standing before kings”; he less than humbly recalls the queen’s interest in him and his friendship with Lord Houghton in London (to whom he dedicated an English edition of his complete poems). Indeed, Miller’s references to such personal encounters seem positively compulsive: the king of Greece reportedly visited with him, revealing that, “if Lord Byron had lived he surely would have been chosen by Greece for her first king”; the king of Italy may have asked Miller to address the Italian parliament; and the empress’s son Prince Napoleon, whom he 92

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met on a ride with Anthony Trollope, invited Miller on a tour and later tried to give Miller a “large diamond” (which Miller magnanimously refused because he “had heard that the Emperor died poor”).49 Perhaps strangest of all is a story that Miller is said to have told about attempting with a friend to purchase a Mediterranean island that conveyed the title of duke; the deal fell through, but Miller at times referred to himself humorously as “Half-Duke Miller.” 50 As Miller’s infatuation with power evolved, he came to prefer the image of prophet to that of backwoodsman; his persona as reckless red-shirt progressed into a persona of gentle bard and seer. This shift to sage did not endanger his earlier “rough” role, which remained a workable past persona; he simply adjusted it to take advantage of a new audience. As sage, he could continue his emphasis on reproducibility and his insistence on playing a type, but he could simultaneously adopt a visionary voice. And he continued to circulate self-portraits, now as the bearded and horizon-watching prophet. As prophet, he sought to rise like the phoenix out of the dying ashes of the Wild West and emerge as mystic or at least as the wise mountain man. And his proximity to royalty began to take on religious tones. His daughter Juanita Joaquina Miller discloses exactly this shift when she remembers that her father dwelled in a “kingdom” that was the “realm of the ideal”; 51 unwittingly, she conflates all of Miller’s aspirations and postures, as well as his tendency toward untruths. His experience next to royalty had allowed him to play the companion of the elite, but, increasingly, he favored the role of disciple, identifying and announcing the presence of a Christian spirit. Miller exclaims at the opening of his autobiographical introduction, “Let us cry aloud in the wilderness, ‘the king is coming,’ and prepare the way.” 52 He visited the Holy Land (like Twain and others) and may have attempted to write a life of Christ, which was never completed.53 His developing use of religious imagery took full hold in The Building of the City Beautiful, an allegory for constructing a Christian utopia. Miller thus became a usurping prophet, one who identifies and controls the public personae of others and in so doing strategically manipulates his own. A brief comparison of the opening lines of a single poem illustrates the ever-escalating nature of Miller’s self-incarnation. “With Walker in Nicaragua” was placed second in the original London edition of Songs of the Sierras (1871). It offers a lengthy description of the narrator’s (i.e., Miller’s) alleged experiences with William Walker during the tempestuous filibus93

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tering campaigns in Central America (1855 –57). Although Miller largely ignores Walker in the poem, he does allow his hero initial prominence: He was a brick, and brave as a bear, As brave as Nevada’s grizzlies are, A Texan tigress in her lair, Or any lion of anywhere; Yet gentle as a panther is Mouthing her young in her first fierce kiss, And true of soul as the north pole-star, Tall, courtly, grand as any king, Yet simple as a child at play. (27, ll. 1– 9)

Generously granting Walker the opening moment (“He”), Miller paints the man as a western folk hero, comparing him to a variety of regional predatory animals— or, rather, mythic animals, the “Texan tigress” being a particularly unlikely beast. But the imagery itself obfuscates a more subtle invention—although Walker did spend time in California, he was actually from Tennessee and, as president of Nicaragua, even advocated an African slave trade to work his colonized country. Miller essentially took a controversial public figure and reincarnated him as both a king and as Daniel Boone.54 Walker thus becomes the hunter (conquering and colonizing a new frontier) and hunted (by an East Coast political machine), a true western heroic type. And Miller himself, here obsequiously admiring Walker, becomes a mythmaker, using familiar symbolism and vocabulary (including allusions not only to Ovidian mythology but perhaps to the civilizing Romulus and Remus) to deliver his legend. Yet Miller sought a more active and central role for himself within the text. For the Boston publication in the same year Miller revised his opening lines to read: He was a brick: let this be said Above my brave dishonored dead. I ask no more, this is not much, Yet I disdain a colder touch To memory as dear as his; For he was true as any star, And brave as Yuba’s grizzlies are, Yet gentle as a panther is,

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The introduction of the poet’s voice in these first lines suggests not only a desire for attention but even a rivalry with Walker’s memory. Miller is literally filibustering his own poem, making a profitable advance onto Walker’s territory. Suddenly this is not the description of Walker’s mythologically generated character but of a grieving bard figuratively standing at the grave. The urgency is not in Walker’s conquistadorial invasion but in the speaker’s determined eulogy (“I ask no more”); Walker is dead, and the issue has become the act of remembrance. Like the title that ostensibly refers to a legendary figure (William Walker) but actually returns to the narrator (“With Walker in Nicaragua”), the poem’s opening referent (He) evaporates into rhetorical portraiture. We listen to Miller rather than attend to Walker. Miller again revised the poem for inclusion in his six-volume collection of 1909, Joaquin Miller’s Poems. Songs of the Sierras, standing as an individual volume, now opens with the much-altered “Walker in Nicaragua.” The poem is considerably longer, more indirect and discursive, perhaps the result of the many sharp doubts raised about Miller’s original veracity and accuracy (the With being dropped, perhaps to obscure Miller’s continued presence in the poem, perhaps in compensation for largely dropping Walker). Although he never publicly recanted his original testimony, Miller almost certainly was never in Nicaragua nor with Walker. Critics had attacked Miller for his autogenic dishonesty, and even friendly readers questioned such erroneous descriptions of Walker as “tall.” (Miller weakly responded to such attacks that by tall he meant Walker’s spiritual stature.) The revision is startling, and the opening stanza now reads: I celebrate no man of strife, I eat no bread with blood upon. ’Twere braver far to live unknown, To live alone and die alone Than owe sweet song, aye owe sweet life, Or sweeter fame, to saber drawn. (1, ll. 1– 6)

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Miller’s words, pointing with such multidirectional panache, undo themselves at every turn. The opening couplet, revising both Virgil and, more important, Miller’s precursor and sometime friend Whitman, now begins with the poet’s persona (“I”) gesturing extravagantly (“celebrate”)—but toward nothing, toward a negation (“no man”). The entire stanza neatly erases itself by acknowledging only absence (“no man,” “no bread,” “unknown”)—an absence marked and filled only by the initial “I.” If Whitman’s self-celebration guided the reader back to his own bodily presence, Miller’s misdirection returns the reader only to the poetic gesture itself. Similarly, the stanza’s concluding sentiment seems to leave a logical void: one wonders why fame is sweeter than song and life and why obscurity is “braver” than death and poetry. Coming from Miller, of course, the entire conceit is meaningless, a self-referential joke—he willingly “owed” his poetic fame to outlandish conduct, including the calculated brandishing of buck knives and the many self-centered dramatic and violent legends he told. Indeed, his ability to transact cultural exchanges between the West, the East, and Europe paved the way for later western writers such as Frank Norris, Jack London, and Willa Cather, all of whom played the regional powers to their own advantage. It is no coincidence that Miller was one of only a few western writers elected into the first National Academy of Arts and Letters in New York (1898).55 Miller engineered a writing career that borrowed from influential European sources (the aesthetic tones of Byron and the later PreRaphaelites); that wooed and then advertised European connections; that published in Boston and New York; but that remained in theme and style essentially western. It is intriguing, though probably only intellectual sport, to consider “With Walker in Nicaragua” as an inchoate vision of such transnational exchanges. The midcentury interest in Nicaragua was, of course, as a commercial route from East to West, being shorter than the overland roads and arguably faster than the proposed Panama Canal. European interest was equally high, and British forces long held the Mosquito Coast at the San Juan River, the possible eastern terminus for a Nicaraguan canal. Miller’s early poem provided a literary tableau of East-West trade, a metaphor in which the poet himself traverses the cultural schisms and fills the interstices. The colonizing Walker scouted the territory, but the memorializing Miller performed the service. 96

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A Place in History Joaquin Miller’s attempts to secure an authorial reputation were far from subtle, and his uses of the picturesque and the powerful reveal his most explicit and also most unnerving ambitions. Yet, as Miller’s concept of reputation developed, he became increasingly interested in the notion of place and particularly the relation between place and canonical identity. By place I have in mind the literal, that is, the mapped sites associated with Miller, who claimed that “all my lines, as a rule, were descriptive stories of the lands I knew”; 56 the theoretical, that is, the use of place as a cultural marker; and the canonical, that is, the specific connection between Miller’s geographical locations and his place in literary history. Miller, from his poetic beginnings, used the concept of place as the simultaneous signifier for his body and his reputation; he defined his canonical position in purely spatial terms. Later Miller self-consciously intended to build a reputation as one builds a house or even a city. He sought to construct his historical place by representing western American culture itself and increasingly did so by inventing or negotiating manageable forms of space, which he intended to occupy. From the beginning the notion of a secure home site, permanent and visible, appealed to Miller, who habitually depicted his life as evolving from a state of unsettled displacement to one of established permanence, a transitional movement that he will apply to his own literary status. He enjoyed claiming that his early life was kinetic: that he “was born and cradled on wheels,” that his “cradle was a covered wagon, pointed west,” and that he was born “at or about the time [the wagon] crossed the line dividing Indiana from Ohio.” 57 His infant condition was therefore represented as transitory and liminal—moving across boundaries—but equally directed, taking its inevitable way westward like the star of empire. Perhaps, Miller seems to imply, his migratory career was genetic. He describes his mother’s “people” in purely ambulatory terms: they had “come up from the Yadkin river country, North Carolina, whither they had gone with the Boones.” 58 Miller proceeds to ally his genealogy with that of Daniel Boone’s, describing Boone’s restless leadership. As Miller matured, he maintained this wanderlust and repeatedly conveyed a sense of urgent mobility. As a young man, for example, he was faced with a decision to stay with family or seek his fortune and decided: “go I must. The wheels of the covered wagon in which I had been born and bred were whirling and whirling, and I must be off.” 59 Miller’s frequent use of that “covered wagon,” suggesting western 97

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pioneering, adventure, and movement, reaffirms his attempts to employ western iconography as a vehicle of self-creation. In canonical terms Miller sought stability and security and consistently idealized his reputation in terms of place. Miller obviously wrote with a regional consciousness and often claimed that his poetry drew its power from the place depicted: he wrote, emphatically, “on the spot spoken of ” and “amid the scenes described.” 60 Miller repeatedly used such locations to claim an empowered authority; as he states in the preface to Songs of the Mexican Seas (1887), “The lines in this little book, as in all my others, were written, or at least conceived, in the lands where the scenes are laid; so that whatever may be said of the imperfections of my work, I at least have the correct atmosphere and color.” 61 But, more important, Miller quite literally formulated a dependence on locatable sites as markers of literary position, a subtly complicated act for a man of frequent relocations. Most obviously, Miller, “the Poet of the Sierras,” was and is identified with places—the West, California, his various cabins and homes, and so on. More complexly, from his earliest writings Miller associated his literary reputation with his location and later used this connection as the nucleus of a canonical strategy. He came to believe that canonical memory is powerfully influenced by such place associations. That is, he not only depended on a regional identity, but he actually equated his physical location (“on the spot”) with his canonical position. Interestingly, like Edgar Allan Poe, Miller often employed the imagery of death and entombment to signify his condition (his reputation both in life and after death).62 But for Miller there is a suggestion of spatial development: from the early “exile” of uncelebrated death (unknown and anonymous) to a struggle with the ghost and tomb of a more famous precursor (Byron) to the material construction of self-memorializing monuments (notably “The Hights,” his Oakland self-portrait-as-estate, complete with funeral pyre). Joaquin et al. (1869), Miller’s second collection of poetry, reveals in excruciating abundance the despair Miller experienced at his initial literary obscurity. His first collection, Specimens (1868), had fared poorly, and Miller devoted much of Joaquin et al. to gloomy if often laughable laments. The pose is a familiar one: the romantic poet, an unrecognized genius, about to perish from the earth. Miller manages to combine Poe’s moody sense of the grotesque with the unappealing whine of unsatisfied ambition. And in poem after poem Miller’s attention is held by the distant location of his fate and the local fate of his poems. He literally “stand[s] apart as one that’s 98

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dumb” from the day’s popular western writers, as he acknowledged in “To the Bards of S. F. Bay” (6). While those authors (Harte, Stoddard, and others) exist in San Francisco’s “brown bent hills / Discoursing with the beaded rills” (25 –26), Miller’s home is in the “wilds,” “among these frowning firs” (17)—presumably Oregon. Even a simple introduction is an act of (dis)placement: when Miller describes himself as “a skilless northern Nazarene— / From whence no good can ever come” (4 –5), it is unclear whether “no good” can come from the northern wilds or from Miller himself. Indeed, the destabilized referent suggests the powerful coalescence of place and self—they are one and the same. In the moodier “Vale” Miller can “stand by the rushing river” (16), leaving his lines “to those who have known [his] mad life’s troubles” (1), concluding (with comical sincerity) that The sounding waters will drown forever The critic’s jeers and paynim pride,— And reviews are not ferried to the other side. (18 –20)

Here “death’s dark river” beckons to him as it rushes by (13), and he regrets only that he has “writ no thought, or thing, not one, / That lives, or earns a cross or cryptic stone” (24 –25). Similarly, in “Ultime” Miller prepares to “cross the stony threshold of death’s door” (3), ruefully remembering that “it was [his] boy-ambition to be read beyond the brine” but that “now at last [he can] make no claim to be read at all” (100, 103). This poem, however, finds a quiet solace in silent death (“feel my calm, low breath. / How peaceful all! How still and sweet” [84 – 85]) and even a possible sense of hope: But to conclude. Do not stick me down in the cold wet mud, As if I wished to hide, or was ashamed of what I had done, Or my friends wanted to plant me like an Irish spud. (118 –20)

His body and his writing resist entombment and burial (and, it must be added, cannibalism); rather than such a concealed fate, he prefers to “ascend in clouds of smoke up to the sun” (122). Miller’s contrast of high and low imagery again questions where his final place in the authorial pantheon will be, where his body will rest. Miller’s “In Exile” most dramatically reveals his sense of canonical displacement and anonymity. Miller pictures himself vaguely lost, without a 99

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secure position; he is “alone on this desolate border— / On this ruggedest, rim’d frontier” (1–2). In this borderland he waits for death (“the eloquent quiet” and “the final folding of hands” [11, 12]), dispirited and despairing: Oh! why was I ever a dreamer? Better a brute on the plain, Or one who believes his redeemer Is greed, and gold, and gain, Or one who can riot and revel, Than be pierced with intolerable pain Of poesy darling, in travail, That will not be born from the brain. (39 – 46)

In this poem Miller uses western imagery (the “rim’d frontier,” the “brute on the plain,” even the “greed, and gold, and gain”) as a geographical selfplacement, but the West here is understood, not surprisingly, as itself exiled, beyond—the suitable site for his unknown, unheard poetry. In fact, in each of these poems Miller uses images of liminal or unstable places as tropes of canonical anonymity. Miller is attentive to the place his body occupies and how that place affects or effects his literary reception—but he is still only on the threshold, on the border, apart. Later he will claim both a cultural centrality (as representative, reproducible poet) and marginality (as supporter of the underdog, as disenfranchised American), but at this point he cannot yet suitably place himself anywhere. Such early poetic gestures, signaling Miller’s strategies and ambitions, found little if any audience. The audience was imminent, of course; only two years later the London literati were prepared to coronate Miller, a triumph dependent on his flamboyant western persona. But the importance of place, incipient in the early poetry, is radically if subtly developed during this period through Miller’s self-association with Byron. This association can be understood to exist as a subtext or pre-text to Miller’s exaggerated picturesque presence. Unexpectedly, Byron’s importance is not primarily as authorial character or caricature. Of course, Byron does stand as a prominent canonically recognized and media-savvy precursor, yet in numerous ways Byron did little for Miller. Byron did occasionally provide a convenient, provocative model and a memorable nickname (Miller was called the “Byron of the Rockies”), but Miller had many other effective models, including Poe and Whitman, and had already lifted a nickname (Joaquin) from recent 100

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literary history. Indeed, Byron was largely dropped from Miller’s consciousness once he encountered the Pre-Raphaelites and the other London poets. What Byron did provide for Miller was a connecting trail from the American West to London and a bridge from the Romantic early nineteenth century to Miller’s own 1870s. During his formative period (the late 1860s and early 1870s) Miller vociferously evoked his Byronic inheritance, hitching his covered wagon to Byron’s star. But it is not Byron the poet or Byron the sensational rogue nor even Byron the literary celebrity whom Miller pursues. Rather, Miller intuitively attends to the sites of Byron’s life, to the geographical places associated with him; Miller writes on Byron’s tomb, on Byron’s European homes, on Newstead Abbey. This tactic produced three results. First, while utilizing Byron’s name, Miller can simultaneously turn his attention away from Byron toward his own experience “on the spot spoken of,” similar to Miller’s treatment of William Walker in “With Walker in Nicaragua”. Despite the gestures toward Byron, Miller repeatedly manipulates the spotlight toward himself. Second, it follows that this translocation of textual focus—from Byron to Byronic site to Miller— enacts Miller’s own interpolation of literary history: the developmental shift from Byronic romanticism to Miller’s own brand of poetic enterprise. Most significantly, the writing signals Miller’s developing insistence that poets can be remembered as much for their mythologized existence, materialized in associated places, as for their actual writings. Miller sought to be a visitable poet. Miller’s pose regarding Byron is not without some idol worship, as revealed in his description of the visit to Byron’s tomb on his first journey to London. With whatever publicity he could attract, Miller carried a laurel wreath from San Francisco to place at the site. He then wrote both a short poem (“At Lord Byron’s Tomb”), which reads as a familiar paean to Byron in the form of the atmospheric gothic, and next a more startling journal entry (as reprinted in the collected Poems): “O my poet! Worshipped where the world is glorious with the fire and blood of youth! Yet here in your own home—ah well! The old eternal truth of Christ * * * but why say the truth of Christ? Better say the words of Christ; and that means eternal truth. * * * I have not told any one here that I write verses. * * * Byron sang in the voice of a god: and see what they say of him. But they may receive me. ‘No prophet is without honor, save in his own land,’ is the language of the text I believe.” 63 Miller’s apostrophe reveals a reverential tone but one complicated by suggestions of reputational wonder. Miller immediately turns his attention 101

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from Byron’s splendor to Byron’s literary status “at home”—the word home referring both to England and obliquely to Byron’s neglected tomb (the center of this visit), described in the poem with wet walls that “drip all day in dark and silent gloom.” In fact, Miller puns in the poem that Byron’s “great estate” has “shrunk to this sombre room,” his tomb. But such wordplays on Byron’s canonical estate pale next to Miller’s subsequent (mis)focalizations in the journal, all but impossible to follow: in the strange eddies of apparent free association, Miller leaps from Byron’s reputation to the “words of Christ,” then oddly to his own unannounced (secret) writing, then back to Byron, now linked with Christ as singing “in the voice of a god,” then to Miller’s own hope for reception in Britain, and immediately to the presumed biblical passage, conflating homeland prophetic honor with literary reception. The paragraph, saved from hubristic arrogance only by a disarming naiveté, enacts Miller’s revisionary strategy by beginning with Byron (“my poet”) and concluding with Miller’s own voice (“I believe”). The shifting centers of aleatory attention (Byron, Christ, Miller; text, voice, reception) promote a truly bizarre set of connections. Miller’s obfuscation finally suggests that he is both Byronic poet and religious prophet—and unrecognized, like Byron and Christ, in his homeland of the United States. Miller seems even to suggest that he may succeed where Byron (and Christ!) failed. Miller’s pursuit of Byronic sites continued after his success in London, and his tour of Europe frequently became a tour of Byron’s homes, notably Newstead Abbey. In “Byron and Newstead,” an essay largely about his stay at Byron’s estate in the late 1870s, Miller declares his intention to deliver a prose portrait of Byron and Newstead—though delivering finally a portrait only of himself.64 Miller believes his readers to be interested in the “plain story of [Byron’s] life, at home and in his own house.” 65 Remarkably, Miller has virtually no interest in the individual poetic works of Byron, noting only that Byron’s “heaps and heaps of manuscripts”—“half a ton”— could “cover a ten-acre field” (thus from the beginning extending the textual work into purely spatial, if arable, dimensions).66 Rather, Miller implies that Byron is accessible chiefly through his homes. He writes: “not only at Newstead Abbey, the old home of his youth and early manhood, but everywhere on the continent where he had lived and labored I could hear only of his sober, patient and persistent industry and devotion to art.” 67 Miller then describes a trail of Byronic sites: Miller traveled to Florence, to 102

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“the house occupied by Byron”; to Byron’s Venice; and to Greece, where the English poet eventually died. Yet it is Newstead Abbey that holds Miller’s attention. Byron’s family estate sparked a profound response in Miller, and “Byron and Newstead” incorporates all of Miller’s familiar iconography. First, he compares the English countryside to the American West: the new owner of Newstead reminds Miller of a wheat farmer “of Dakota”; the mud of the “poetic estate” stuck to his boots “as it might in Illinois or Oregon.” Second, he playfully recounts numerous anecdotes about a recent guest at Newstead, the princess of Wales, again aligning himself with aristocracy. (The essay also conspicuously mentions Lord Houghton, Colonel Webb and Colonel Wildman, the consul general of Florence, the king of Greece—and, of course, Lord Byron.) Third, Miller employs religious imagery by repeatedly referring to Byronic mementos as “relics,” perhaps appropriate for an abbey. Miller decides that the most “noteworthy” relic is, naturally, a portrait of (the picturesque) Byron, in which “you can read something of the character, the pride, the pomp, the poetic love of figure and color, and all that marked the future of the immortal poet.” 68 As if Miller is viewing (or “reading”) a portrait of himself, he celebrates not the imagination or literary ability that marked the “future of the immortal poet” but, rather, the striking personal features and dress. Fourth, and most strange, is Miller’s odd implication that these Byronic relics are, in fact, reminders of— even remnants of—Byron’s corpse. The use of the word relics in this less common sense of “bodily remains” (as of a saint or martyr) recalls the journal’s juxtaposition of Byron, Christ, and Miller. Such a reading of holy corpus is perhaps implied in the Byron portrait but is heightened by Miller’s next remarks on the “most interesting relics,” Byron’s papers: his will, unpublished poems, and unpublished letters, “all sacredly guarded” by the new owner. This description of an almost holy corpus of writings, sacredly guarded, perhaps represents the true remains of Byron, the hidden body of writing. Most bizarrely, Miller suddenly breaks in mid-paragraph to describe the interior of the house, reminiscent of “some great national museum,” where the “immense hall is a perfect ‘zoo’ of stuffed lions, tigers, hyenas, and indeed all the wild beasts and birds of Africa.” 69 The non sequitur seems contingent and suggestive, as if the stuffed animal corpses somehow signal Miller’s connection to Byron— as if Byron himself is somehow preserved for viewing at the estate. Miller’s subsequent move in the essay is to entangle himself with Byron’s 103

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legacy in even more dramatic fashion, literally seeking to re-place Byron. Miller’s desire to encounter the poet is matched by a sense of revisionary desire; in fact, it might be argued that Miller’s report enacts with alarming exactness the anxiety of influence, with two willful poets battling for primacy. But Miller barely notices his precursor’s literary output and seems not the least affected by Byron’s written legacy. He is, however, deeply impressed by Byron’s lingering physical presence as manifested at Newstead. Textually, Miller dislocates Byron in the essay, veering away from the memorial tour of Byron’s estate to an extended description of Miller’s own sojourn there and especially his determination to view the legendary ghost at Newstead known as the “Black Friar.” But Miller is, consciously or not, after a more material form of relocation and actually moves into Byron’s “haunted” room, indicating the improved vantage for observation of the monkish ghost. Miller’s efforts to re-place Byron even lead him to sleep, most suggestively, in “the very bed of Lord Byron,” a bed with “golden coronets and gorgeous yellow curtains . . . literally falling to pieces from age.” 70 Although Miller mysteriously discovers that he “could not write” in the rooms “further than a few letters,” perhaps the block of influence’s anxiety, he maintains his nighttime, bedded vigil—not, it turns out, for the ghostly Black Friar but for the specter of Byron himself. After several uneventful nights Miller experienced a vivid dream: “One night, after I had become not only accustomed but really attached to the haunted rooms, I dreamed— let me call it a dream—that I was in another land, a land that I could not name.” 71 Byron’s ghost soon appears to the terrorized Miller and leads him by boat out into the open sea. Thus, in the dream Byron actually resists the usurping Miller, takes him out of the bed and the rooms (that Miller had become so “attached to”), places him in “another land,” and finally whisks him over the ocean, perhaps back to America. Miller’s account (or, perhaps, translation) of the experience reaffirms his conviction about poetic place; the scene between the poets is without dialogue or text and is quite simply one of territorial identity. The fact that Miller could not “name” the dreamland signifies the poetic displacement. If Miller cannot name and textualize the place, he cannot use it as poetic capital. Whether or not the dream persuaded Miller to establish his own homeland, it seemed to confirm his desire to mark his name with associated places. In the early 1880s Miller increasingly turned his attention to constructing the kind of estate that could memorialize his presence, as Newstead had for Byron. Miller was hardly alone in wanting to build a unique 104

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and grand estate—it is exactly the age of the American “country house.” Such estates as Frederick Church’s Olana, P. T. Barnum’s Iranistan, and Mark Twain’s Hartford riverboat mansion began to populate the landscape, each the dramatic personal vision and, ultimately, architectural representation of an ambitious owner. But Miller’s desire was, naturally, quite different: whereas others built private estates, Miller’s homes were emphatically public and visitable; and, whereas others built dominating edifices, Miller preferred modest buildings—the better, as it were, to focus attention on himself. Miller quite literally set out to invent and produce an authorial site that would draw visitors and draw attention; he sought a place that would represent his body, that would enact his future canonical ambitions. Miller’s new homes were planned as sensational and permanent symbols of Miller’s poetic presence. Like Newstead itself, his homes would display his relics (including his cremated body), and would secure his reputation. In 1883 Miller moved to Washington, dc, where he proceeded to construct a “frontier” cabin on the edge of the city, a replica of his own early Shasta (California) home. Miller’s intentions were apparently always public and pedagogic; he later wrote that he built the cabin “to be more in touch with both sides of the Civil War as well as with the smaller republics. And then many noble people who had been ruined in the South were ill content to live in log cabins, as their slaves had lived.” 72 Miller concludes that he “wanted to teach that a log cabin can be made very comfortable, with content at hand.” Whether or not these stated goals were sincere, the effect was quite different: the cabin became a symbol not of southern reconstructive unification but of Miller’s western persona, turning the cabin into a tourist attraction for the capital’s visitors. The cabin brought Miller significant attention, undoubtedly a part of his plan: biographer Martin Severin Peterson remarks that “Joaquin Miller’s cabin did for him in Washington what his ’49 costume had done for him in England. It brought him into the limelight again as a picturesque figure.” 73 The cabin did double duty, as a recreated reminder of his western past and as an updated showcase for his revitalized present. As such, it performed the same kind of cultural work as the increasingly popular dime novels and western touring shows, playing into American nostalgia and fantasy about the Wild West. Predictably, Miller used the cabin as a poetic vehicle for juxtaposing the high and the low, the powerful Washington government and the marginalized citizens (including, somewhat disingenuously, himself ). And, as elsewhere, Miller claimed both a centrality and a liminality. The description of 105

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the site in his poem “The Soldier’s Home, Washington” attempts this double function: The monument, tipped with electric fire, Blazed high in a halo of light below My low cabin door in the hills that inspire; And the dome of the Capitol gleamed like snow In a glory of light, as higher and higher This wondrous creation of man was sent To challenge the lights of the firmament. (Poems 4:131, ll. 1–7)

Miller’s language is typically misdirected and confounding: the blazing monument (presumably the Washington Monument) is both “high” and “below” his cabin door, which is both “low” and “in the hills that inspire.” Miller’s use of assonance further deflects a localized meaning by conflating halo, low, below, dome, and snow. The result is that Miller’s position is both humble and august, above the glowing monuments but seemingly in awe. Miller’s Washington cabin proved a temporary experiment and precursor to his final ambition: the construction of a western estate that would insure his historical identity. In 1887 he purchased seventy-five acres of prominent hillside land above Oakland. (One is tempted to remark that it could only be Oakland: Gertrude Stein’s notorious comment that “there’s no there there” works as an unintended description of Miller’s purely public self.) The purchase was not insignificant, for it marked the permanent residence of a well-known western author; unlike Twain, Harte, and others who left the West for personal, economic, and professional reasons, Miller returned to the West and established a home that became a center of literary and tourist activity. The estate, named (and spelled) “The Hights” by Miller, symbolized his desire for a literal place in history, a desire already encoded throughout his writing. In fact, Miller developed The Hights into a tribute to authorship itself. It was designed as something of a poetic amusement park, with colorful bohemian characters (notably Miller himself ), scenic walks, and unorthodox stone monuments to Robert Browning, Moses, and John Charles Frémont, whose exploration Report constituted Miller’s first literary experience—“every scene and circumstance in the narrative was painted on my mind.” 74 The central dwelling, modest but prominent, was named “The Abbey,” perhaps after Byron’s Newstead Abbey, perhaps after his wife, Abby. Miller welcomed visitors, especially area literati, 106

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including the young Jack London and Frank Norris. He and his family spent considerable energy establishing the estate, and publicity photographs as well as newspaper accounts of Miller from his last two decades repeatedly depict him posing on his property. Ultimately, of course, Miller built The Hights as a monument to himself. The property represents a kind of self-portrait: high on a hill, looking out over the landscape, rugged, populated by outlandish references (such as the monument to Moses), and accessible— even inviting—to visitors. Miller’s investment in material self-creation seemed to produce a high yield at first; even after his death, Miller’s daughter Juanita continued to transact her father’s business of canonical placement by maintaining The Hights and advertising the Miller industry. Later, the city of Oakland bought the property and turned it into Joaquin Miller Park, where Juanita continued to live and preserve her father’s name. She worked to popularize The Hights, selling Miller’s books in the souvenir shop, along with postcards and guides. In one tourist booklet (About “The Hights”) she reports on her father’s reputation as she perceived it at the time: “He is much loved and honored. The cabin he built in Washington, D.C., is in Rock Creek Park. In Indiana there is a huge boulder inscribed with one of his poems marking the location and date of his birth. In Oregon the house he lived in at Canyon City is furnished with his things and kept in memory. His former property, ‘The Hights,’ is now Joaquin Miller Park. The road is named for him. The Native Sons of California have placed a large tablet with inscription near his home. Joaquin Miller and Neighborhood Clubs, Woodminister Memorial, honoring him as well as other California immortals. And there is gratifying appreciation of his poetry.” 75 The inherited belief in place as canonical marker could not be more transparent. She evaluates his reputation solely in terms of associated places. The perceived “appreciation of his poetry” seems merely tagged on; for Juanita, her father’s immortality rests in those memorialized sites. Ironically, The Hights remains today an accurate symbol of Miller’s reputation, so deep in decline.76 The Oakland park is decaying and dilapidated; although The Abbey still stands and the monuments survive, they are ignored and without majesty; most of the other building are gone. Few signs identify the poet’s one-time popularity. Similarly, Miller’s reputation has disintegrated, and Miller is now a mere footnote to literary history. Perhaps the decline was inevitable: even as a “poseur,” he was less inventive—if no less flamboyant—than his admired acquaintances Whitman and Wilde; 107

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and, as a commercial or social phenomenon, he lacked the broad international appeal of Buffalo Bill Cody, with whom he apparently paraded in the New Orleans Exhibition of 1884 and, according to his own legend, there overshadowed. Finally, the rising group of western writers (including Norris, Cather, Austin, and London) may have appreciated Miller’s élan and his loyalty to western writing, but their agendas were far removed from the perceived propagation of dime-novel histrionics. Yet Miller remains a vital, marvelous, inevitable figure in the history of western literature, and recovering Miller helps to explain the oddly misplaced nature of that history. Miller chose the path not of authenticity but of authentic reproduction— of the simulacrum; he wanted to stand as representative of the West. Indeed, in unintentional ways he represented western conquest: he usurped the “bloody” name Joaquin from both Mexican and Native American cultures, defeating savagery and bringing poetic civilization; he rewrote local history through self-serving inventions; and, claiming a native connection to place, he tried to remodel that place. But his ultimate influence lies in the refashioning of the real, the authentic. Jean Baudrillard writes that “when the real is no longer what it was, nostalgia assumes its full meaning. There is a plethora of myths of origin and of signs of reality—a plethora of truth, of secondary objectivity, and authenticity.” 77 While Miller hardly initiated the growing cult of western nostalgia, he capitalized on the developing occlusion of the real by accumulating those “myths of origin” and by imploding “signs of reality.” And perhaps, finally, this explains Miller’s easily overlooked legacy: he has not been forgotten by western literary history so much as absorbed into it. For Baudrillard, in a world replete with simulation, “the impossibility of rediscovering an absolute level of the real is of the same order as the impossibility of staging illusion. Illusion is no longer possible, because the real is no longer possible.” 78 As with other western charlatans from Buffalo Bill to Ronald Reagan, it makes no sense to ask of Joaquin Miller what is authentic and what is illusion; neither concept is reliable in the always already postmodern West.

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4 THE TRAP OF AUTHENTICITY Frank Norris and Western Authorship

She had heard all about excluded middles; they were bad shit, to be avoided; and how had it ever happened here, with the chances once so good for diversity? —thomas pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

In the autumn of 2001 the long-circulating rumors were finally confirmed as true: Thomas Eakins had cheated. Or so some felt. It turned out that Eakins, the nineteenth-century artist widely considered one of America’s foremost realists, did not paint exclusively from inspired vision or memory but, at times, from projected photographs. He traced much of his art onto canvas, copying images rather than creating them. Suddenly, artists, critics, and literati around the country were heatedly discussing the relationships between art, realism, and reality, and many felt uneasy with the discovery of Eakins’s method. It even appeared to some that Eakins’s reputation as an imaginative artist needed to be rethought. “This is big news,” said Darrell Sewell, organizer of the Philadelphia Museum of Art exhibit that presented the evidence. Richard B. Woodward, writing in the New York Times, suggested that it would have been bigger news in Eakins’s day—it probably would have been “scandalous.” 1 It is tempting to say that, if Eakins concealed the fact that he wasn’t making it all up, nineteenth-century western realists concealed the fact that they were. Of course, such a formula would be hopelessly simplistic, particularly in the context of the age of realism. In Traces of Gold, his invaluable study of western realism, Nicolas S. Witschi argues that “all claims to realism have their foundation in a crisis of representation,” and this is emphatically true in the West.2 But it is also true that in the West writers experienced a crisis of reality as well. And, of course, these two crises define each other. Western writers tried to take advantage of this condition, sometimes with unnerving success. In “The Blue Hotel,” for example, Stephen Crane reveals the constructedness of the West by drawing characters who see their environment in terms of dime-novel dramas rather than lived history. But often the condition seemed to take advantage of the region’s writers, leaving them uncertain about how to proceed. When Jean-François Lyotard argues that one traditional function of realism is “protecting consciousness from 109

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doubt,” he might as well have been discussing the burden that reality and representation had become for western writers by the turn of the century.3 This period is, by any measure, an extraordinary one for western literature. Literary history has long held that American literature came of age during the period often labeled the “American Renaissance” (say, 1830 – 60) and that a central tenet of this emergent national literature was a sense of what may be called Emersonian expansiveness, a culturally optative mood. The signifying icon of this expansiveness was, of course, the American West, which became the always-receding site of national promise, “the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us,” to borrow from F. Scott Fitzgerald. When Henry David Thoreau wrote in “Walking” that “every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a West as distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes down,” he rhetorically maintained the distance between himself and the West—the West was a place to dream and write about but, like the setting sun, impossible to reach.4 Western American literature may be said to have come of age roughly fifty years later, sparked by the writings of Hamlin Garland, Owen Wister, Frank Norris, John Muir, Jack London, Mary Austin, and, slightly later, Willa Cather. Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Joaquin Miller, and the other western writers of the 1860s and 1870s had certainly created and capitalized on popular images of the West, producing an incomplete, immature, yet fully creditable form of regional literature, but the quarter-century or so that followed saw a stagnation of western literary development, a lull or quiet before the considerable burst of creative energy at the turn of the century. Between 1872 (the year of Roughing It, published after Twain’s departure east) and the 1890s the list of acknowledged literary achievements is modest at best. We can identify a few peaks: in 1875 John Wesley Powell produced his narrative of the Colorado River exploration; eight years later Mary Hallock Foote commenced her productive career with The Led-Horse Claim; and in 1884 Helen Hunt Jackson published Ramona. But, for all the historical significance of Clarence King’s Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada (1872) or Sarah Winnemucca’s Life Among the Piutes (1883), this period of western writing seems undeveloped and certainly unrecognized. Hamlin Garland’s midwestern Main-Travelled Roads did not appear until 1891, John Muir’s Mountains of California not until 1894, and Owen Wister’s The Virginian not until 1902; the major works of London, Austin, and Cather were published after that. This chapter will consider the emergence of western writing at the turn of the century, a remarkable period rife with cultural tensions and anxieties 110

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over the Real West. It seems fair to say that, even if nineteenth-century writers “constructed” the West, they did not doubt its reality. Even Poe and Twain, who mercilessly derided the cult of authenticity, could present their fantasies because— or, at least, as if—the Real West existed. But for later writers such as Norris the Real West seemed threatened, if not already defunct. And, they wondered, if the Real West did not exist, how could western authorship? Consequently, more than ever, writers set out to capture the Real West. Garland, Norris, Wister, and others were put off by popular nostalgia and dime-novel fantasy and became increasingly obsessed with authentic, accurate representation. Yet it seemed that writers such as Twain and Miller, who had exploited the shifting currents of the authentic West, left little room to maneuver in their wake. Although the West was increasingly centralized in the country’s imagination and commodified through tourism and touring spectacles, the region’s emergent writers could rarely take advantage of this centrality, except through parody or nostalgia, evoking a wilder, wide-open West. This “selling” of the West, as it is often called, all but confirms Lyotard’s argument that “capitalism in itself has such a capacity to derealize familiar objects, social roles, and institutions that so-called realist representations can no longer evoke reality except through nostalgia or derision—as an occasion for suffering rather than satisfaction.” 5 It was clear by the 1880s and 1890s that the West was changing, modernizing, but it was not so clear whether the Real West was being left behind (the West of the frontier past), stagnating (the West of the decadent present), or pushing ahead (the West of the progressive future). And, if the westward movement of the frontier symbolized the development of American nationalism itself, then both regional and national identities were at stake. Western writers recognized this turning point and sought to take advantage of it—but were uncertain whether this transformation was an opening or a closing, offering new opportunities or commercial limitations. While Twain and Miller could exploit the gradual loss of certainty— could define authenticity in their own self-serving terms—most writers in postbellum America felt an increasing anxiety and insecurity when confronting the apparent inauthenticity of place, of self, and of representation. Consequently, the possibility of regional representation appeared endangered, and numerous questions arose for young, ambitious writers: if the cultural climate was so complicated, then what did it mean for western authors to attempt what Garland called “real novels”? If the marketplace rewarded what Norris 111

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termed “falsifying” accounts, then how could a brutally realistic writer find a national audience? And what of regionalism in the East, the “twilight writers” doing “women’s work”—what did this popular genre imply for writers in the West, both in terms of gender and marketplace? More broadly: what did it mean, canonically (and to some degree culturally), for western literature to come of age at the end of an age, when its regional landscape, celebrated and abused by outlandish precursors, had lost its traditional signifying power? These questions are further complicated by the broader establishment of literary and social realism. As David E. Shi puts it in Facing Facts, “a realistic outlook seeped into every corner and crevice of intellectual and artistic life during the second half of the nineteenth century.” 6 Writers, artists, journalists, and social critics engaged material reality and social conditions in ways that seemed new and invigorating, challenging the staid, genteel expression of earlier generations. But what may have seemed innovative for eastern writers such as Rebecca Harding Davis, Henry James, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman—the sometimes gentle but intractable turn away from sentimental, romantic fiction toward social and even scientific accuracy— was de rigueur for western writers. I don’t mean to suggest that western writing didn’t change as the century wore on but, rather, that the authorial vision and self-description remained the same. The claim of authenticity, voiced in the 1830s, was repeated, often word for word, in the 1880s and 1890s. What elements of this authorial vision can be attributed to literary realism and what elements to the tradition of western authenticity? This chapter will not—indeed, cannot—take on the staggeringly complex relationship between realism and the cult of western authenticity; that’s another book.7 But that relationship exists and needs to be recognized. It would be foolhardy, of course, to argue that literary realism developed exclusively from the impetus of western authenticity’s pull; even I find it hard to imagine Honoré de Balzac, Henry James, or Edith Wharton riding the range. But it seems far more than coincidence that many, if not most, American realists were midwestern or western (Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Edward Eggleston, Henry Blake Fuller, Hamlin Garland, E. W. Howe, William Dean Howells, Joseph Kirkland, Jack London, Frank Norris, Mark Twain) and that others (such as Stephen Crane, Richard Harding Davis, John William De Forest, and Bret Harte) used the West as subject. Certainly, the landscapes of the West and the literature of the West influenced these writers. And, when, for example, Norris and Garland theorized about real112

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ism (or naturalism or “veritism”), they did so from a pronounced western perspective. At some risk they saw themselves as western writers as much as realists or naturalists. The attempt at depicting the real—“the problem of American realism,” to borrow Michael Davitt Bell’s phrase—may be understood as quintessentially western.8 Thus, one simple goal of this chapter is to recognize that many authors who are consistently remembered as “realists” or “naturalists”—and rarely as western writers—were in fact working in an established, entrenched tradition of western authenticity. Maybe this goal is not so simple. I am concentrating on the 1890s, a period in which western writers vehemently complained that the authentic West and its authors remained absent from the record of literary history. In A Literary History of America (1901), for example, Harvard professor Barrett Wendell acknowledged that the West might prove important to American letters but insisted that it “has not yet achieved . . . literary expression.” He concluded: “we may say of our great confused West, that just as surely as New England has made its mark in the literary history of America, so as yet this West has not.” 9 Still, the focus of this chapter, Frank Norris’s encoded study of western authorship’s anxieties and failures, may seem unduly pessimistic. What about the professional successes of western writers such as London, Wister, and indeed Norris himself ? I don’t mean to neglect the successes that were imminent (yet another book or at least another chapter), but I am primarily interested here in the moment before western writing seems to emerge—the period of authorial struggle in the 1890s— exactly because it reveals so much about western authorship and the burden of authenticity. In their way, however, the subsequent successes are equally revealing; realism and naturalism swept like a tsunami over the identity of western writing, and these authors are primarily remembered and canonized, when canonized at all, as realists. Their relationship to western literary history is largely ignored. The irony is apparent: at the very moment that western writers find a mite of literary reward for their attempts at authentic reproduction, they effectively cease to be western writers. With the omnipresence of realism in mind, this chapter studies the condition of western authorship in the 1890s. It is during this period that we catch the best glimpse of writers fighting both for and against the legacy of authentic reproduction. As writers struggled to respond to culturally determined images of the West, they found themselves caught in a number of binds, facing invisibility on all fronts. Certainly, they fought against the inherited burden of authenticity, frequently promoting, for example, western 113

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authorship based on a more “romantic” view of individualized accomplishment rather than collective practice. But just as often they fell into the trap of authenticity by de-emphasizing style, squabbling with eastern authority, and, of course, insisting on accurate, realistic representation. Such strategies were tired—they were already imploding a half-century earlier—but they also presented new challenges for writers who could no longer make easy claims to identifying the Real West. The uncertainty over the Real West often left writers wondering exactly what the “real thing” was and how they could trace that elusive thing onto paper, project it in their prose. Reality Check: Western Literature in the 1890s In A Literary History of the American West James H. Maguire identifies 1890 and following as the “nascent” period of western belles-lettres—1890, the year, as the author notes, of the notorious frontier-closing census.10 But into what kind of world was this nascent literature born? Not only is the western frontier now closed (“gone at last,” in Norris’s melancholy words of 1902), but a larger conflation of death, sickness and dis-ease permeates the literary landscape: late Victorian mourning sentiments, Continental decadent writings, grim naturalistic theories, and a fin de siècle aura of exhaustion all contributed to this sense of decline. European intellectuals despaired that civilization had done its work all too well—that the cultural elite had become overcivilized, inbred, and susceptible to many transcultural forms of social illness. The descriptive trope, even here, is a faded frontier: the Hungarian social critic Max Nordau described this cultural malaise as a “twilight mood” and compared this decline to a pale, setting sun. He wrote in Degeneration, his landmark 1892 critique (translated into English in 1895 and read by Owen Wister, among many), that “in our days there have arisen in more highly developed minds vague qualms of a Dusk of the Nations, in which all suns and all stars are gradually waning, and mankind with all its institutions and creations is perishing in the midst of a dying world.” 11 The sun setting in the West, once a Romantic symbol of tomorrow, was by the end of the century a fatigued symbol of yesterday. The eastern United States seemed to fall under the spell of decadence and disease, la maladie de fin de siècle. Writers such as Henry James and William Dean Howells documented the thinning bloodlines of the Boston and New York aristocracy, the enfeebled patrician class. American society appeared sick. Cultural historian Tom Lutz is one of many to chronicle the turn-of-the-century prevalence of what he calls a “cultural complex,” the 114

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condition of neurasthenia, or simply “American Nervousness”: the fragile nerves of the body become overtaxed, resulting in symptoms such as dyspepsia, insomnia, hysteria, hypochondria, headache, rashes, and even insanity.12 The problem seemed so severe that numerous doctors and social theorists discoursed on causes and sought out remedies, Dr. S. Weir Mitchell’s famous “rest cure” being the most popular. This perception of European and eastern exhaustion conversely helped to maintain the popular myth of the West as rugged, untamed, and uncivilized. The reputation of the West as revitalizingly “savage” became a salubrious necessity for a nation in need of a culture-wide cure—the West was seen as a place offering remarkable health and vigor. Discussing the “Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West,” John Muir remarked that “thousands of tired, nerveshaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home. . . . Awakening from the stupefying effects of the vice of over-industry and the deadly apathy of luxury, they are trying as best they can to mix and enrich their own little ongoings with those of Nature, and to get rid of rust and disease.” 13 Theodore Roosevelt, Owen Wister, and Frederic Remington all took “West cures” and extolled in their writings the recuperative influences of the West. Why should America care about curing the neurasthenia of its leisure classes? One answer is that many social theorists at the time abstracted from individual experience and predicted a parallel culture-wide recovery. The health of the representative individual was seen to correlate to that of the nation itself—what Mark Seltzer in Bodies and Machines describes as “a system of analogies between the individual and the national or collective body.” At the turn of the century “the male natural body and national geography are surrogate terms,” Seltzer argues.14 This theorizing was certainly true for Continental critics such as Max Nordau, who imagined cultural malaise as the result of individual illness and perhaps even something as specific as population-widespread poisoning through tainted food, narcotics, social diseases, and so on. This sort of body-as-nation trope became increasingly familiar; the corresponding argument that ontogeny repeats phylogeny convinced a culture intent on reading racial and historical development through the individual (e.g., frontiersman or cowboy). And to advocates who saw the West as reinvigorating manly spirits it followed that the health of the individual western body predicted or improved that of the national corpus. “As it is with the individual,” Theodore Roosevelt would claim in “The Strenuous Life,” “so it is with the nation.” 15 In Vandover and 115

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the Brute Frank Norris would skillfully adapt exactly this correlation between individual bodily health and geographical strength (both canonical and political), though with deeply ambivalent results. That ambivalence was inevitable for any West Coast intellectual because by 1890 the American West had become a complicated, multivalent, even self-contradicting symbol. While the West retained its popular image of revitalizing wildness, it also persistently projected a darker image of a dying, declining region. To see the West in the century’s last quarter was to see a region imperiled and doomed, perhaps already exhausted. Indeed, civilization seemed already to have triumphed, wiping out many key elements of the Real West. By the 1890s the perception of symbolic disappearance was climaxing, fueled by the popular incorporation of Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1893 address on the closing of the frontier; the meeting point of civilization and savagery had exhausted its westward march. The closing of the frontier, a symbolic act if ever there was one, confirmed for Norris and other progressive artists their worst fears about western degeneration. Norris summarizes such attitudes in “The Frontier Gone at Last” by declaring: lament it though we may, the Frontier is gone, an idiosyncrasy that has been with us for thousands of years, the one peculiar picturesqueness of our life is no more. We may keep alive for many years yet the idea of a Wild West, but the hired cowboys and paid rough riders of Mr. William Cody are more like “the real thing” than can be found today in Arizona, New Mexico or Idaho. Only the imitation cowboys, the college-bred fellows who “go out on a ranch” carry the revolver or wear the concho. The Frontier has become conscious of itself, acts the part for the Eastern visitor; and this self-consciousness is a sign, surer than all others, of the decadence of a type, the passing of an epoch.16

Although Norris gamely attempts to reinvent the frontier as a modern site of commercial opportunity, the essay’s melancholy tone is never convincingly overcome. Norris may have been capable of reimagining the frontier as economic empire-building, but he could not so easily circumvent the problems of representing the American West. The first trap of authenticity in this kind of thinking is a historical trap: the notion that an earlier West was somehow the real thing and that, like Norris’s character Presley in The Octopus, these writers lived “too late.” In 1885, for example, during his first trip to Wyoming, Owen Wister found not 116

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only the invigorating big sky country but also a vanishing land. He wrote that he wanted to “find out all about [the West]—and master it—theoretically. It’s a life as strange as any the country has seen, and it will slowly make way for Cheyennes, Chicagos, and ultimately inland New Yorks— everything reduced to the same flat prairie-like level of utilitarian civilization.” 17 Wister, while falling in love with the West, laments the inevitable loss of the region, as if white settlement erases what is most real about the West. The irony hardly needs to be pointed out: Wister, the Harvard-educated Philadelphia scion, was a carrier of civilization, and his desire to “master” the West implies much more than an artist’s ambition. And soon enough, though his “real life” was just beginning, Wister’s Real West was gone, leaving him to publish books with titles such as When West Was West.18 Similarly, in a brief autobiographical sketch Frederic Remington recalls an early experience in the West when an “old wagon freighter,” despondent over the “receding frontiers,” told him that “now . . . there is no more West.” Remarking that “the old man had closed [his] very entrancing book almost at the first chapter,” Remington sees the land “about to vanish forever” and sets out “to try to record some facts.” 19 This kind of language implies that the authentic West was disappearing, slipping away—but it also presumes that such a disappearance was unique to the frontier-closing 1890s. But, of course, such sentiment had been around for quite some time and endures today. For most of the nineteenth century the West appeared to be past its peak and, like the indigenous Indian cultures, doomed to vanish. In midcentury Francis Parkman was one of many who sought to catch the West and the native peoples before environmental and cultural extinction; already, in the late 1840s, he could lament that “great changes are at hand in that region” and soon “its danger and its charm will have disappeared together.” 20 Nearly one hundred and fifty years later William Kittredge could recall his grandfather, gazing across the Bitterroot Valley of Montana, remarking, “They’ll never see it the way we did.” 21 It appears that in the West writers inevitably and repeatedly encounter the end of history. As Joan Didion has suggested about California, the past “reached a happy ending on the day the wagons started West”; in the West “we had long outlived our finest hour.” 22 The second trap of authenticity is representational. Western writers of the 1890s such as Wister, Garland, and Norris seemed uniformly committed to write, in Norris’s words, the real thing. But what did it mean, amid the tensions and contradictions, to attempt this regional realism? What did the 117

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authentic West look like? The inauthentic West was obvious and helped to define the problem. The enemy, as it were, was the sentimental, romantic, popular western writing that seemed to proliferate during the last quartercentury. Excited newspaper and magazine reports, published letters from “out West,” travel accounts and guides, nostalgic memoirs, and, most important, the sensational dime novel influenced and often defined the image of the West to the growing popular market. Critic Bill Brown argues that in the dime-novel Western “the image, idea, and aura of the West offer an alternative to the rational dictates of modernity, while the fund of jargon, gesture, and attitude distinguishes the pragmatic American from the refined European: it favors anti-intellectual intuition, interrupts any class-coded system of taste in the name of authenticity, and hence protects America from what Theodore Roosevelt called the dangerous ease of ‘over-civilized man.’” In arguing that the dime novel facilitates the process by which “legend becomes mass-mediated memory,” Brown signals the tangle of perception.23 I would add that the dime novel’s depictions of the West settled into cultural memory as either historically reliable or laughably inaccurate—and in both cases the test of the text was authenticity, real history, the Real West. It was easy enough for “serious” writers and critics to vilify the dime novels and other popular, sentimental literature as inauthentic, vulgar, tame, and historically inaccurate. Columbia professor Harry Thurston Peck, for example, complained as late as 1898 that he “would give ten Mrs. Humphry Wards for one good, realistic novel about Denver or Seattle”; for Peck, Hamlin Garland and Edgar Howe were “the only writers who [took] the West seriously.” 24 In Crumbling Idols (1894) Garland himself put it this way: “We have had the figures, the dates, the bare history, the dime-novel statement of pioneer life, but how few real novels! How few accurate studies of speech and life!” For Garland literature had missed the mark, and, with few exceptions, “the mighty West, with its swarming millions, remains undelineated in the novel, the drama, and the poem.” 25 And Owen Wister reminisced about his anger over the disappearing, undelineated West: “Why wasn’t some Kipling saving the sage-brush for American literature, before the sage-brush and all that it signified went the way of the California fortyniner . . . ? Roosevelt had seen the sage-brush true, had felt its poetry; and also Remington, who illustrated his articles so well. But what was fiction doing, fiction, the only thing that has always outlived fact?” 26 Frank Norris, who would attempt exactly that “realistic” and “real” novel, agreed with 118

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such sentiments and frequently lambasted the “traducing, falsifying dimenovels,” as here in “The Literature of the West” (1179). In the Boston Evening Transcript, for example, he lamented that writers had “neglected” and “overlooked” the “Winning of the West” and had “abandoned the one great field for American epic literature to the yellow-backs and dime-novels.” 27 And in his essay “A Neglected Epic” Norris complained with even more vehemence: “But when at last one comes to look for the literature that sprang from and has grown up around the last great epic event in the history of civilization . . . —I mean the conquering of the West, the subduing of the wilderness beyond the Mississippi—What has this produced in the way of literature? The dime novel! The dime novel and nothing else. The dime novel and nothing better” (1202). The mythologized Wild West could be left “to the yellow-backs and dime-novels”—Norris concentrated on exposing the “decadence” of the obsolete western types and simultaneously considered methods of presenting and publishing the “real thing” and “the things that live” (1114). In short, Garland, Norris, and others insisted that the “mighty West” remained “undelineated”—but that strong writing could convey authentic reality, the Real West. They insisted on what Baudrillard calls representation of the first order, when the image is a “reflection of a profound reality.” Of course, by dismissing other writings as inauthentic and by aiming “straight for the actual” (to recall William Kittredge’s phrase), these writers were reproducing with predictable regularity the traditional western invocation of authenticity, professing the same goal as so many others before and after them. The claim is familiar: in the preface to Red Men and White (1896) Owen Wister wonders: “When our national life, our own soil, is so rich in adventures to record, what need is there for one to call upon his invention save to draw, if he can, characters who shall fit these strange and dramatic scenes? One cannot improve upon such realities.” 28 This is the legend of the West, the great tradition, by now a burden: writers need not invent or create but need merely record the “realities.” Wister comments that for most of his stories “the incidents, and even some of the names, are left unchanged from their original reality.” 29 But what exactly did Wister mean by “original reality”? Is it different from imitation reality, or secondhand reality? (Recall the layerings of the Missouri River exploration narratives—the game of Telephone in which reality was always obscured by borrowed, rewritten texts, all claiming authenticity.) Consider that, at roughly the same time, Frank Norris bemoaned the passing of the real thing, lamented the “decadence of 119

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a type,” and ridiculed the “imitation cowboy.” That Frederic Remington likewise feared that “with the advent of the wire fence” “the cowboy—the real thing, mark you, not the tame hired man who herds cattle for the mere wage of it, and who lives for weeks at a time in convention store clothes”— was disappearing.30 And that Hamlin Garland declared, “The West, reckoning itself an annex of the East, has imitated imitations.” 31 Wister wanted to believe that he had caught the West’s original reality just years, perhaps days, before it disappeared; Norris looked around and saw a West that was rotting before it was ripe, leaving inauthentic, imitation characters; and Garland argued that western culture still insecurely depended on eastern culture, producing an art and philosophy twice copied. In the 1870s Joaquin Miller and Mark Twain could play imitation and authenticity off of each other, seeming to control both. But by the end of the century writers seemed confused and even angry about the relationship. Garland and Norris argued that the knowable West had become a copy of itself. Garland suggested that western writers literally overlooked the mighty West because they had been trained to see a very different reality. “The Western poet and novelist,” he wrote, “is not taught to see the beauty and significance of life near at hand. He is rather blinded to it by his instruction.” 32 The problem, as always in western literature, is not that turn-of-thecentury western authors were incapable of producing powerful works of literature but, rather, that, in training their gaze on authenticity, they were in fact not subverting the dime novel but merely playing the authenticity game. This kind of claim reveals the third trap of authenticity: the authorial trap. As the Real West slipped into the past, leaving only the simulated road signs of nostalgia in its wake, authorship seemed increasingly vulnerable and fragile. Already the authority of early contact was gone, and writers could no longer claim a unique knowledge of a distant region; already the first wave of western stars (Twain, Harte, Bierce, and others) had largely moved east; already the foundation of western authorship, the claim of authenticity, was crumbling. With the instability of the West itself, authors could no longer claim a simple authenticity, and yet they could not easily ignore the burden of marketplace expectation. Moreover, the troubled development of authorship is complicated by the tension between dime novelists and western realists. The production of the dime novel quite literally erased individual authorship, a trend that I am tempted to associate as much with the self-effacing western authors of the 1830s as with the rise of a bourgeois reading class. Literary historians such 120

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as Christine Bold and Michael Denning have shown that dime novels were produced by “fiction factories,” groups of writers operating under a single name.33 Publishers increasingly controlled the process of writing, denying individual authors a voice and identity. Denning writes that “the tendency of the industry was to shift from selling an ‘author’ who was a free laborer, to selling a ‘character’, a trademark whose stories could be written by a host of anonymous hack writers.” To Denning many dime novels “are best considered as an essentially anonymous, ‘unauthored’ discourse.” 34 More ambitious western writers such as Norris and Garland naturally fretted over this kind of authorial invisibility. It appeared that the slide of the Real West into remote regions of nostalgia produced a parallel effect on authorship, making it equally indistinct. Unlike the publishers of dime-novel Westerns and unlike the writers of the 1830s, Norris, Garland, and others typically endorsed individual vision and achievement—and individual remuneration. Norris, for example, like London later, celebrated the reach of the novelist and, in almost Nietzschean terms, attempted to write what he called the Great American Novel (“G.A.N.”). His model was Émile Zola, who Norris believed eschewed the “rank and the file” in favor of the “extraordinary, imaginative, grotesque” (1107). But, if these writers maintained a belief in individual accomplishment, they fell quickly into the trap of abandoning an interest in style, the same trap that caught James Hall, Timothy Flint, and others. Throughout the nineteenth century “having a style” meant obscuring the Real West; few authors would admit to having a literary technique, for aesthetically realized language could only inauthenticate a text. The categories of high and low literature in the West are never determined by style, vocabulary, or literary reference but, instead, by the test of authenticity. Recall James Hall’s discomfort with the “embellishment of style.” Or Joaquin Miller’s insistence that “the world is waiting for ideas, not for words. Remember Shakespeare’s scorn of ‘words, words, words.’ . . . Will we ever have an American literature? Yes, when we leave sound and words to the winds.” 35 So it is no surprise that Owen Wister remarked: “I value accuracy more than any other quality in such stories as I write. I don’t care how effective they are, if they’re false, they’re spoiled for me.” 36 And Hamlin Garland declared that “the literature which is already springing up in those great interior spaces of the South and West is to be a literature, not of books, but of life. It will draw its inspiration from original contact with men and with nature. It will have at first the rough-hewn quality of firsthand work.” 37 (It is unclear what will happen later, when the “original con121

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tact” fades.) Frank Norris was perhaps most emphatic of all: “I detest ‘fine writing,’ ‘rhetoric,’ ‘elegant English’—tommyrot. Who cares for fine style! Tell your yarn and let your style go to the devil. We don’t want literature, we want life.” 38 Indeed, there is a violent tone in Norris’s language: not enough “has been done in the way of gripping hold upon and impressing this life of ours between the covers of works of fiction,” he suggests. “It’s the Life that we want, the vigorous, real thing, not the curious weaving of words and the polish of literary finish. Damn the ‘style’ of a story, so long as we get the swing and rush and trample of the things that live” (1113 –14).39 For my purposes it is largely irrelevant whether these authors really believed that style was “tommyrot.” (Garland almost certainly did not; Miller and Wister undoubtedly cared more for language and “effect” than they let on; but Norris’s prose actually does seem to suggest that he may well have detested “rhetoric.”) Rather, one wonders: why the distrust of style and language? Part of the answer may be an attempt at a broader literary realism and naturalism. Michael Davitt Bell argues that “the obvious defects of Norris’s style were, in effect, learned and . . . this deliberate learning was a product of growing commitment to what he took literary ‘naturalism’ to be.” 40 David E. Shi agrees: Norris’s “disavowal of stylistic concerns was intended to reassure readers of his sincerity and accuracy.” 41 True, but here, as elsewhere, critics tend to overlook the western context of American realism and naturalism; throughout the nineteenth century, well before the institutionalization of realism, authors argued that representing “life” and the “mighty West” required a style-busting directness. This attack on style was not merely mainstream realism or naturalism but a commitment to western authenticity and an attack on eastern conventions of writing as well—and implicitly eastern politics, eastern authority, and eastern effeminacy. In his essay “Literary Masters,” for example, Garland sets up an imaginary debate between the West (the “radical”) and the East (the “conservative,” the “aristocrat”). “The West is crude,” charges the East. Garland’s West soon responds: “We deny that the East is to be the exclusive home of the broadest culture. We feel that much of this culture is barren and insincere. It has a hopeless outlook. It leads nowhere.” 42 (Garland’s use of barren reflects, of course, those cultural anxieties about both literary and biological reproduction.) Garland then goes on to make his case for western literature and culture, a case based on authenticity—an authenticity not just of fact or personal experience but of implied sincerity and patriotic vision: “it is my sincere conviction, taking the largest view, that the interior is to be hence122

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forth the real America” and further that “the genuine American literature . . . must come from the soil and the open air.” 43 Garland is attempting to unify that western double consciousness by claiming the Real West: the West is the “real America” and will produce the “genuine American literature.” Although his literary corpus offers many answers, Frank Norris himself, in his brief professional career (1896 –1902), could not resolve the complexities of representing the Real West. Indeed, for Norris the “passing of an epoch” in the West left him in a precarious position, without a revitalized epoch to inhabit, without a defined space in which to work. Norris’s character Presley experiences exactly such a detached, alienated world in the Octopus: he desires to write an epic of the West, “that world’s frontier of Romance,” and he hopes to produce “the great song that should embrace in itself a whole epoch, a complete era, the voice of an entire people” (584). He despairs, however, that he has missed his opportunity: “To-day, the life was colourless. Romance was dead. He had lived too late” (594 – 95). Presley lives between two worlds—is literally pressed between the past and the present, between romance and realism, between verse and prose. He is a western writer in search of a way out of a debilitating middle. Norris offers his most penetrating articulation of this uneasy position in a newspaper article of 1902 fittingly titled “The Literature of the West.” He questions what an authentic, realistic West looks like by asking which character type is more “true to Western life,” the sensationalized “red-shirt” or the “prosaic farming folk” (1176). He then goes on to argue that “the West is yet in the transitional period. There was a time when the wild life was the only life. There will come a time when the quiet life will be the only life. But as yet the West is midway of the two extremes” (1175). But, in fact, this liminal space of transition (“midway”) is canonically absurd—it leaves the author quite literally nowhere, in a twilight zone cut off from past and future, from recognizable landscapes, existing only in a marginal, undefined space. How can a region’s writing discover itself when its very ground is disputed, when its moment is both always already past and silently waiting for a future? It is this transitional condition, the existence midway, that this chapter will now consider through readings of Vandover and the Brute and Blix. These novels, Norris’s two efforts at full-length fictionalized autobiography, reveal the author’s disturbing vision of western authorship and canonicity. From the beginning Norris recognized an authorial liminality, a situation of artistic nonexistence, and turned it into a central trope. To be stuck midway of extremes is to be stuck between two unreal positions, with 123

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no stable point and possibly with no available original to copy. This canonical disability and invisibility come to signify Norris’s ambivalent, skeptical attitude toward western literature and western authorship. The Excluded Middle: Vandover and Authorial Invisibility Frank Norris, on the early cusp of western literature’s emergence, deploys the themes of degeneration and invisibility to study western canonical disability. He takes as his central subjects not only death but also the state of diseased division, a division that results in diminishment and authorial invisibility. Norris’s novelistic imagination turns spatial, figuring both the West and authorship as constrained in that twilight zone, disappearing into the void, persisting in the popular imagination but only as copies. Further, Norris considers how, if that region increasingly appeared as a copy of itself, an author or character could claim an authentic connection to region. Thus, in his novels he studies the very idea of imitation. Using stock western characters—representatives of the region—Norris explores worlds of copies that no longer refer to originals. Twain and Miller could seductively toy with notions of the authentic and inauthentic because both terms continued to carry meaning, but Norris could no longer lay claim to a recognizable authenticity, and his fiction manifests the tension between reaching for the Real Thing and doubting its existence. In 1897, two years after finishing drafts of Vandover and McTeague, Norris contributed a minor piece of fiction to the Wave titled “Shorty Stack, Pugilist.” Although critics pay scant attention to the story, treating it as one of Norris’s “salable, chuckle-inducing entertainments,” “Shorty” delivers a comic miniature of that debilitating position “midway of the two extremes,” the position that Norris fully explores in Vandover.44 Shorty, a “bedrock cleaner” at the Big Dipper mine and an amateur boxer, prepares for a highly anticipated match against a “professional pugilist” named McCleaverty. If the hard-hitting McCleaverty is the representation of the savage “wild life,” then the quiet life is embodied by Shorty’s would-be sweetheart, brightly named Miss Starbird, a cook at the mine. Miss Starbird, though too “genteel” for a “regular prize fight,” looks forward to the “entertainment.” Her primary concern, however, is Shorty’s health. “How do you feel, Shorty?” are her first words, and he responds by reiterating clichés from “the interviews with pugilists that appeared in the San Francisco papers”: “I feel fit to fight the fight of my life.” 45 The healthy, vigorous Shorty seems 124

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physically ready to win on two fronts, to beat his savage opponent in the ring and to win the object of his affection. Yet Norris refuses to allow Shorty his victories. When Shorty and Miss Starbird visit on the night before the match, she offers him some of her potato salad. Although Shorty at first refuses (“I’m in training”), Miss Starbird convinces him to eat it by challenging his courage (“you must be ’fraid of getting whipped if you’re so ’fraid of a little salad”).46 Their querulous têteà-tête comically foreshadows the fight—and his double loss. The potato salad, apparently tainted, causes Shorty to lose the match; he gets ill in the final round, the pain in his stomach making it “torture to stand erect.” 47 Thus, Shorty, who literally represents the region as the “Champion of Placer County,” is undone by both sides—he is caught between Miss Starbird and McCleaverty, between potato salad and his opponent’s fists, between the damaging civilization and the damaging savagery. Not only is Shorty midway, but he is finally ignored and omitted; after the fight his two opponents, McCleaverty and Miss Starbird, walk off together romantically linked. Already “shorty,” by the end he is doubled over and overlooked. Similarly, Vandover and the Brute points with ironic alacrity to that vague, unknown, and unknowable West termed the “midway of the two extremes” and to an authorship that is equally occluded. The novel, described by Donald Pizer as “Norris’ most autobiographical,” 48 details the Jekyll-and-Hyde decline of young Vandover, whose animalistic “brute” half battles his reputable “artistic” half. This condition of internal division is oddly echoed both within and without the novel. The publication itself has an unusual history: it was Norris’s first novel, mostly written during his year at Harvard, 1894 – 95, but it was his last to be published, not appearing until 1914. Not only was the publishing history divided, but so was the young Frank Norris, a man who himself embodied a divided condition. Like Vandover, Norris was caught between the East (both Paris and New York) and the West and between a father who envisioned Frank as a businessman and a mother who saw only an artist. (In fact, his parents separated in the early 1890s.) Further, the very bodily division that afflicts Vandover is an unsettling reproduction of Norris’s own physical health and outlook. On the one hand, Norris (like Roosevelt and others) made extravagant claims for a masculine, “virile” western ethic, one that repudiated softness in the name of the “heroic.” His model, as always, was the male body: “Give us stories now, give us men, strong, brutal men, with red-hot blood in ’em, with unleashed passions rampant in ’em, blood and bone and viscera in ’em” (1113). And yet Norris 125

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himself was never athletically developed and often seemed weak, even effeminate. He often appeared foppish, one who “affected Parisian elegance and who once showed up to gym class [at Berkeley] in chic black leotards.” 49 Norris’s own body was a site of contention, a divided structure between vigor and weakness. As it is with Norris’s body, so it is with his adopted western home, San Francisco, aptly described as “midway” or divided between extremes. The influence of that city on Norris was an important one, and Norris was certainly aware of the considerable literary precedent of the San Francisco Circle—but by the turn of the century the city’s celebrated cultural landscape had changed. Like Norris, San Francisco was considerably doubled up; as one critic writes: “San Francisco stood with one foot in the Old West, the other in Nineties aestheticism. Norris signed his letters as ‘the boy Zola,’ and left his mark beneath, a drawing of a six shooter. He dressed like a Parisian dandy and defended football games as the purest expression of Anglo-Saxon virility.” 50 That is, both the city and Norris expressed emblematic, manly impulses and decadent, European impulses. Whether a midway of extremes, a cultural hybrid, or simply a schizophrenic state, this ground for writing was divided, disputed. Norris even divided his celebrated literary field, naturalism, between extremes, caught conspicuously between romanticism and realism; as Presley complained in The Octopus, “Romance was dead. . . . Reality was what he longed for, things that he had seen. Yet how to make this compatible with romance” (594 – 95). At times Norris sought to resolve the perceived conflicts of romanticism and realism—for example, famously recasting his idol “Zola as a Romantic Writer” (in an 1896 essay of that name): “For most people Naturalism has a vague meaning. It is a sort of inner circle of realism—a kind of diametric opposite of romanticism.” Norris, however, argues that “Naturalism, as understood by Zola, is but a form of romanticism after all” (1106). Typically, Norris later adjusts his theory and once again finds himself in the middle, writing in his “Weekly Letter”: “Does Truth after all ‘lie in the middle’? And what school, then, is midway between the Realists and the Romanticists, taking the best from each? Is it not the school of Naturalism, which strives hard for accuracy and truth?” (1141). Vandover and the Brute is Norris’s naturalistic study of his own early personal, professional, and regional condition. Thus, the self-divided Vandover can be understood to represent Norris’s biographical self; to represent Norris the author; and, most important, to represent the West, a region 126

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caught between the wild and quiet life, the real and the imitation, canonically invisible. Norris uses each of Vandover’s friends to represent a western type. Although some are familiar from the stock characters of dime novels (the quiet heroine, the earthy prostitute, the greedy speculator), Norris updates these figures, suggesting that they embody new western values and experiences. Norris’s method, however, is to show the decadence of even these types. In other words, Norris is playing a dangerous game. On the one hand, he seems to embrace the western convention of authenticity, axiomatically proclaiming “out with the old, in with the new.” By dismissing established western representation as inauthentic, he creates a New West and reenacts the entrenched authorial claim of authenticity. On the other hand, he agonizes over this New West, worrying that it is artificial and even unreal. Norris explicitly uses the three major female characters to examine life in this New West. Turner Ravis, Ida Wade, and Flossie together suggest a microcosm of the divided extremes, with the center finally elided and forgotten. Turner Ravis and her family represent the quiet life, here of the established, conservative sphere. They represent the staid East Coast world of civilized education (“their library had been in process of collection for the past half century”), but Norris modifies that cliché by making the family emphatically western: they “had lived in the same house on California Street for nearly twenty years” and are as rooted as any family in San Francisco: “Everybody in San Francisco knew of the Ravises and always made it a point to speak of them as one of the best families of the city” (59). Turner, whose name possibly echoes Frederick Jackson Turner, stands for the world of literature and art, afternoon tea, and religion. The Ravises are “old-fashioned” and “had family traditions and usages and time-worn customs.” Turner Ravis literally embodies the belles-lettres tradition as she sits “in her room writing letters” (60); she also seems to be a positive influence on Vandover’s condition by helping “to bring out all that was best in Vandover” (160). Yet typical of Norris’s sardonic vision, a closer look reveals Turner to be a sterile character in an exhausted, inbred western family. Time-worn is no compliment here. There is something unhealthy and exaggerated in their isolation. They have ceased to extend themselves, to move forward. Mr. Ravis “seldom” goes to his social club, Turner “went out but little,” and her brother is “absorbed in his law business.” When Norris writes that “they much preferred each other’s society to that of three fourths of their acquaintances,” he describes a cloistered, remote family (59). The possibility 127

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of familial exhaustion, the end of the bloodline, is further revealed in Norris’s careful depiction of Turner’s sexuality. Possibly suggesting a genetic deterioration from inbreeding—“They were a home-loving race”—Norris presents Turner as sexually prudish and infertile. Unlike Ida Wade, who becomes pregnant after one encounter with Vandover, Turner’s procreative abilities seem stifled. Whereas Ida and Flossie will allow or encourage Vandover’s libidinous drive, Turner allows no more than a single kiss—and only after they arrange an early-morning church rendezvous. Rather than projecting future motherhood, Turner can only simulate maternity, doing housework with her own mother every day and supervising her younger siblings (“she had them to bed at nine, mended some of their clothes, made them take their baths regularly” [60]). And Turner may in fact end up unmarried, simply living within her family walls; she breaks with Vandover, then breaks with Dolly Haight (who has contracted syphilis from Flossie), and finally drifts out of the novel’s gaze, last seen dating the abominable Charlie Geary. At the other extreme is the prostitute Flossie, depicted as Turner’s opposite: “Turner Ravis influenced him upon his best side, calling out in him all that was cleanest, finest, and most delicate. Flossie appealed only to the animal and the beast in him, the evil, hideous brute that made instant answer.” Flossie is as unconnected as Turner is connected; in the novel Flossie has no last name, no family, no known residence, no connection to history itself. Of course, prostitutes, like high-minded civilized women, were a familiar part of popular western myth: as historian Patricia Nelson Limerick writes, “the prostitute was as much a creature of Western stereotype as the martyred missionary, and in many ways a more appealing one.” 51 This figure is more appealing because the popular prostitute, the whore with the heart of gold, the cheerful dance hall girl, epitomized a friendly, healthy, eminently safe figure. Flossie at first seems to fit the bill: she “radiated health; her eyes were clear, her nerves steady, her flesh hard and even as a child’s. There hung about her an air of cleanliness, of freshness, of good nature, of fine, high spirits, while with every movement she exhaled a delicious perfume that was not only musk, but that seemed to come alike from her dress, her hair, her neck, her very flesh and body” (38). Every turn of her body seems strong, convincing. Yet Norris immediately alters the image by transforming that perfumed air into the “foul sweet savour of the great city’s vice” (39). Like Norris’s depiction of Turner, this portrait of Flossie gradually reveals decay and degeneration. Flossie in fact carries syphilis and 128

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will decline into a depleted, alcoholic shadow; her sexuality may appear as the opposite of Turner’s, but she also ends up childless (we assume) and decayed. If Turner and Flossie represent the extremes of civilization and savagery, both seemingly healthy but secretly jaundiced, Ida Wade is the midway—a midway that will be squeezed out, ignored, deleted. The hierarchy between the three is not subtle, and Ida is emphatically centered: Ida is “as far removed from Flossie’s class as from that of Turner Ravis.” But being in the middle is being nowhere in this western culture. Ida seems to exist on the borders of definitions, between the economic and sexual identities of Turner and Flossie. She is virtuous, “but the very fact that it was necessary to say so was enough to cause the statement to be doubted.” When young, she had been “the companion of such girls as Turner Ravis and Henrietta Vance, but since that time girls of that class had ignored her.” Ignored from above, Ida fiercely fights against association with the class below: “She was very clever; half of her acquaintances, even the men, did not know how very ‘gay’ she was. Only those—like Vandover—who knew her best, knew her for what she was, for Ida was morbidly careful of appearances, and as jealous of her reputation as only fast girls are” (50). Yet “what she was,” exactly, is unclear, for Norris presents her as a simulation, “careful of appearances.” Her jacket is “imitation astrakhan,” her hair “very blond, though coarse and dry from being bleached” (49). She appears as a copy but with no original in sight. Like Flossie, she works, yet even this is temporary: she “substituted at various kindergartens in the city. She hoped soon to get a permanent place” (51). While Turner volunteers to play mother and Flossie exchanges sex for money, Ida essentially does both, but with a tentative ephemerality. She can only substitute with the kindergarten children and only once engages sexually with Vandover. Permanence is exactly what Ida does not possess. Her place (in society, in the labor market, in the West) is dramatically unstable, mirroring the instability of the West itself. Her suicide is an implosion of sorts, a release of life that ironically recalls Norris’s proclamation that in literature “it’s the Life that we want, the vigorous real thing.” Ida’s death is the antithesis: she takes an overdose of laudanum, and lies unconscious until she slips away. Charlie Geary delivers the news to Vandover (who is offstage, in the bathtub), and Geary’s announcement reflects Ida’s departure with all of Norris’s black humor. Geary says: “She was unconscious then, and between one and two she died. She was unconscious all the time. Well, I can’t stop any longer, Van; 129

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I’ve an appointment downtown” (76). Geary, like the impact of Ida’s death, like Ida Wade herself, quickly disappears. Ida’s pregnancy and subsequent suicide are pivotal plot points in the novel. Vandover’s decline was perhaps pathologically inevitable, but it is Ida’s pregnancy and suicide that, directly or indirectly, dramatically accelerate the narrative by causing Vandover’s loss of reputation, his loss of property, his loss of much capital, and indirectly his father’s death. Yet, despite her lingering effect, Ida is an oddly absent character. She “lives” in only one chapter (chap. 5) and is otherwise merely a vague instrument of narrative, a ghostly figure whose death continues to alter Vandover’s plans. The other characters inevitably turn their attention from Ida to themselves. Vandover’s response to her suicide is predictably self-centered: “He could think of nothing worse that could have happened to him” (77). Vandover’s pain quickly dissipates, and Ida is forgotten. And, although Vandover’s friends seem concerned about the incident, some indeed ostracizing him, they seem more upset that he violated the rules of social decorum than that he seduced (or raped) a woman who consequently committed suicide. Charlie Geary could hardly show less concern for Ida, his repeated use of the firstperson pronoun reflecting his egotism: “Ah, you bet I don’t let any girl I go with know my last name or my address if I can help it. . . . I wouldn’t worry. I guess it will be all right” (148). Geary typically describes the problem as “that business with Ida Wade,” reducing her death to an unfortunate financial transaction that damaged Vandover’s reputation; Geary tells Vandover that “it got around somehow that she killed herself on your account.” Geary’s words imply that the “business” of Ida’s death is a debit on Vandover’s “account,” a literal and figurative withdrawal. Finally, Geary proleptically understands that incidents like this can affect Vandover’s space— limiting Vandover’s bodily and social movements. He warns that “you’ll always have to be awfully careful in those things, or you’ll get into a box.” At the end of the novel Geary himself puts Vandover in a box, a filthy cubby under a sink. Even the newspaper account of Ida’s suicide reveals her fleeting, marginal presence, a fading copy of a remote original. Vandover searches the paper: “At first he could not find it, and then it suddenly jumped to prominence from out the gray blur of the print on an inside page beside an advertisement of a charity concert for the benefit of a home for incurable children. There was a picture of Ida taken from a photograph like one that she had given him, and which even then was thrust between the frame and glass 130

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of his mirror. He read the article through; it sketched her life and character and the circumstances of her death with the relentless terseness of the writer cramped for space” (77). Like Ida’s character, the article seems almost hidden “on an inside page.” Norris gives more details of the adjoining advertisement than of the account of Ida’s death. The advertisement’s numerous qualifying phrases are a series of shorthand allusions, each packed with significance: Norris obliquely refers to Vandover’s dependence on charity; to his love of concerts and music; to the loss of his home and his subsequent homelessness; to the incurable disease from which he suffers; and to the children whom Turner supervised and Ida taught. Conversely, Ida’s presence seems vague, displaced. Her life itself is only “sketched” in the article, as it is in the novel. Her image itself is a series of copies, “a picture . . . taken from a photograph,” but her reproducibility is empty, for there is only the vaguest of originals. Vandover’s copy is itself “thrust between the frame and glass of his mirror.” (And the irony hardly needs identifying: she can only appear in pale reproductions but will not reproduce herself—will not give birth.) Vandover’s own image, a copy in reflection, thus cramps her image. The apparent irony of the “writer cramped for space” is twofold: first, Ida is given so little space by Norris, squeezed out of the novel; second, the western writer attempting to depict that midway character is also “cramped for space.” Oddly, this scene itself is later copied nearly verbatim, emphasizing Ida’s role as narrative object, as the excluded middle. When Ida’s father sues Vandover, blaming him for her death, Vandover must read the news in the morning paper: “It was a very short paragraph, not more than a dozen lines, lost at the bottom of a column, among the cheap advertisements. . . . It seemed hardly more than a notice that some enterprising reporter, burrowing in the records at the City Hall, had unearthed and brought to light with the idea that it might be of possible interest to a few readers of the paper. But there was his name staring back at him from out the gray blur of the type, like some reflection of himself seen in a mirror” (172 –73). This report emphasizes Ida’s limited value as a commodified character: first, by the suit itself, her father appraising her life’s worth; and, second, by the persistent parallels between the account of her death and the account of the suit. Here the report is again cramped and hidden, “at the bottom of the column,” and is again bordered by advertisements. Like the previous writer, this “enterprising reporter” is depicted as cramped, figuratively buried, “burrowing” until he or she “unearthed and brought to light” the story. 131

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Norris does, however, produce a telling thematic shift between the two scenes: in the first it is Ida Wade’s portrait that stands out from the “gray blur of the print,” the same portrait that Vandover has attached to his mirror. In the second Vandover’s attention is turned away from Ida and toward himself: the portrait “from out the gray blur of the print” is now his own, “like some reflection of himself seen in a mirror.” The parallel newspaper accounts accentuate two of Norris’s strategic moves: first, the displacement and elimination of Ida Wade; and, second, the corresponding replacement of Ida with Vandover himself. In other words, Vandover literally takes Ida’s place in that “hidden” and “lost” account—his body, reflected in the mirror, will come to represent the division of extremes and will itself become squeezed out. If Norris portrays Ida as the midway of extremes and subsequently erases her from even that marginal position, he attempts an even more ambitious portrait in the vanishing Vandover. Vandover’s decay and division suggest exactly that unhealthy and directionless position midway of extremes. Within his body rages the ironic conflict between civilization and savagery, the artist and the brute. Vandover himself is midway between the wild life and the quiet life and, like western literature, his existence is not only imperiled but increasingly marginal and invisible. Norris uses Vandover’s body, that meat-consuming, wolfish body, to represent a broader condition of western experience. Vandover’s body comes to represent a kind of regional cosmology, the site of contested intentions; it stands as the battle ground between extremes, between western civilization and savagery, between the wild life and the quiet life, between art and brutality. But, if Vandover represents the state of western representation, Norris destabilizes and often inverts the expected patterns; if degeneration was seen by theorists to be the result of overcivilization and if the remedy was revitalizing western activity, Norris reverses the process. Here Vandover’s decline results from his savage, beastly side. As the illness progresses, he becomes more savage, less cultured. The proposed cure also inverts expectations: an increased dose of art and culture— even a move eastward, away from the damaging environment, perhaps to Paris. Finally, degeneration was seen as the thinning out of bloodlines, the increasing sexual and physical impotence of the weary; as Nordau wrote, “the fin-de-siècle mood” was the “impotent despair of a sick man.” 52 But, again, Norris alters the expected play—it is Vandover’s sexual beastliness, the seduction/rape of Ida Wade and her resulting pregnancy, that reinforces his decline. The sexuality is dis132

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eased—Vandover may have syphilis—yet still fertile. If the despair is impotent here, the body certainly is not. Yet, if Vandover’s body represents the West through the conflicts between savagery and civilization, health and illness, his body also represents the gradual erasure of that region’s presence. Throughout the novel Vandover’s body occupies a specifically defined space: it is seen as moving from an expansive set of spatial locations to a minimal existence, vibrating as it were in an increasingly narrow space between culturally determining positions. Most obviously, his geographical world shrinks. He begins his life in Boston, moves west to San Francisco, and after high school prepares to travel in Europe. “He never got farther than Boston” (11). This curtailment is only the first in a series of conditional limitations. Upon his return to San Francisco, he continues to dream of Paris, but the only trip he makes is the escape to San Diego, an ill-conceived trip with disastrous consequences. Increasingly, he finds his geographical and social area restricted: unwelcome at old friends’ homes, his own living space decreases into smaller and shabbier sites, from the grand homestead to a suite of rooms on Sutter Street to the claustrophobic room in the “Lick House . . . well toward the rear of the building” (199), to the squalid Reno House room. Inverting the traditional cultural geography of the West, expansive and open, Norris imagines an increasingly claustrophobic spatial environment. As Vandover’s financial resources crumble, as his appearance deteriorates, his body literally seems to shrivel up, to take up less space, to become confined. This invisibility is naturally a social and economic one—his friends cease to recognize him as one of their own—but Norris makes this point a bodily one as well. In his criticism Norris called for writers to attempt “gripping hold upon and impressing this life of ours between the covers of works of fiction,” and it is exactly Vandover’s life—his ability to exist in a work of fiction—that slips away. As Vandover deteriorates, his friends increasingly fail to know him: “He had completely passed out of the lives of Haight, Geary, and Ellis, just as before he had passed out of the life of Turner Ravis” (232). Vandover’s social invisibility is echoed by a physical invisibility: certain acquaintances actually have difficulty making out their former associate, as when “Geary did not recognize the gaunt, shambling figure with the long hair and dirty beard” (242). Norris’s suggestive trope of endangered visibility dominates the novel’s conclusion, subtly reiterating the impossibility of midway existence. This bodily reduction and invisibility are most dramatically exposed in 133

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the novel’s final scene, in which the depleted Vandover cleans one of Charlie Geary’s filthy rental houses. This act of humiliation requires Vandover to “crawl way in” to the cubby under the sink, into a dark and dreary space, tomblike and filled with decomposed animal and plant matter, including a moldy hambone, a rusty pan of congealed gravy, a broken rat trap, a battered teapot, and a handful of hair. Vandover “was obliged to crouch lower and lower” until “he lay flat upon his stomach” (258). The greasy and decayed surroundings are, of course, reflections of Vandover’s own bodily decline. But this final scene articulates more than decline and dying: it exposes the role of bodily invisibility from which Vandover increasingly suffers. Even more significantly, Vandover disappears from sight, and the renting family at the novel’s conclusion has difficulty actually seeing him, certainly not seeing the figure that the reader has come to know. The novel ends on a note of misreading, or, worse, of nonreading. The conceit of interpretive vision (reading) at the end is emphasized by the mother’s inspecting eye (“I don’t see how you come to overlook that” she says to Vandover of a dirty baseboard [256]), an eye that can spot her husband from a distance in a crowd (“There he is!”) but cannot see the human being that is Vandover. “Did you ever see anything like that?” she complains as she examines the dirty cubby, and she and the family watch Vandover as he climbs in to clean it, “seeing to it that he did the work properly” (257–58). The novel’s conclusion, however, is an ambiguous one. The young son, Oscar, enters into the dynamics by shrilly crying out to the prone Vandover: “Hey there! Get up, you old lazee-bones.” The adults are delighted by Oscar’s apparently vicious remark, for “it was wonderful how that boy saw everything that went on” (259). But what is he seeing? Oscar lingers after the adults have left, and remains “very interested in watching Vandover, still on the floor.” When Vandover glances up, “the two remained there motionless, looking into each other’s eyes, Vandover on the floor, one hand twisted into the bale rope about his bundle, the little boy standing before him eating the last mouthful of his bread and butter” (260). These final words seem to resolve nothing: is Vandover, the one-time Harvard student and artist who declined into invisibility, watching the future, the next generation of critical voices? Is the boy, so intent on studying Vandover, seeing anything beyond a decrepit and meaningless cleaning person? And are we as readers being challenged here, being asked what we see in Vandover, what we have read, how we have pushed Vandover into our own invented canonical cubby space? 134

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In the end critics may deride Norris’s novel as being stylistically and intellectually immature, the work of an emerging but still developing author. But that is exactly what makes it so revealing: Vandover and the Brute is not the nostalgic vision of an innocent West that Blix portrays nor the straining, soft-core attempt to reimagine the frontier as Darwinian economic opportunity described in The Octopus. Rather, Vandover, like Norris himself, was caught between the worlds of romance and modernism, between youth and old age, between ironic forms of savagery and civilization—between competing visions of the Real West. Norris used his early novel to explore the condition of being in-between, of being noncanonical, of existing in the margins of competing worlds. Selling (Out) the West: Blix and Beyond Vandover and the Brute proved prophetic in that Norris himself was soon caught in a debilitating middle, struggling in the ideological space between the East and West, between commercial adventure stories and more “serious” efforts. The lurid subjects and the uneasy, defiant tones of Vandover and McTeague made publication difficult for Norris. Although both manuscripts were well on their way to completion by 1895, it would be four years before Doubleday and McClure published McTeague and nearly twenty years before Vandover’s posthumous appearance in 1914. In 1896 Norris accepted a position at the San Francisco weekly the Wave, contributing a wide variety of fiction and nonfictional prose. He continued, however, to hope for more significant publication and submitted a collection of short stories to a New York publisher; the collection was refused, and Norris took the advice of the publisher and began to write an adventure novel. In 1898 the Wave serialized Norris’s first published novel, Moran of the Lady Letty, the story of a California treasure hunt. Doubleday and McClure took notice and invited Norris to New York as an editorial assistant. Norris’s career within the New York marketplace had commenced. Moran of the Lady Letty, despite some distinguishable Norris touches, was a novel designed to appeal to the eastern audience and to his eastern publisher. Norris appreciated the notice and opportunity that followed but also felt uncomfortable with the result. He hardly wanted to be known for such commercial, sensational writing. When Howells wrote a laudatory review, Norris responded gratefully but also dismissed the novel as a “little yarn,” hoping that Howells would take the time to read the forthcoming McTeague. This next novel, Norris promised, would be “as naturalistic as Moran was 135

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romantic and in writing it I have taken myself & the work very seriously.” 53 Fair enough, of course— except that Norris had written McTeague five years earlier and at the time of the letter was continuing to produce lightweight, middlebrow material, arguably not taking his current work seriously at all. During that first year in New York he wrote much of Blix and began A Man’s Woman, both undeniably romantic, sentimental, and, by most modern judgments, aesthetically insignificant. Blix (1899) is Norris’s fictionalized recollection of the period of professional struggle leading up to his move east. The book is a sentimental backward glance, an autobiography-as-novel recounting Norris’s development as a writer and his evolving romance with Jeannette Black. It is also an unusual opportunity to observe a young western writer considering his own early canonical struggles with the East’s cultural and economic authority. If Vandover and the Brute recounts the decline of a would-be artist, Blix portrays the opposite: the ascent of a determined author. The novel follows the two characters—here named Condy and Blix—as they fall in love and as Condy, with Blix’s iron-willed support, works his way toward a successful literary career by writing sensational adventure narratives. At the novel’s overwrought conclusion Condy receives (as did Norris) a timely, even miraculous, offer from a New York publisher and follows Blix east, where she is to study medicine. In tone and direction the sunny novel is a dramatic departure from Norris’s two naturalistic novels and indicates Norris’s move toward the mainstream, which had commenced with Moran of the Lady Letty. Indeed, Blix’s cheerful nostalgia seems to suggest only that Norris was content to have found in New York a satisfactory income and audience at any cost to his own aesthetic or creative principles. And, predictably, the novel’s comfortable accessibility was warmly received by critics, who were discomfited or repulsed by McTeague. As one reviewer wrote, Blix is “fresh and simple and wholesome,” making it Norris’s “finest” novel and “likely to be the most popular.” 54 For most contemporary readers, of course, Blix pales before the more original and ambitious McTeague and, in fact, Blix is long out of print at this writing. The publication of Blix, rather than promising a strong future for a unique talent, seemed to confirm the worst form of authorial compromise and to anticipate a literal form of authorial invisibility. Without begrudging Norris his marital bliss and growing professional success, one can only imagine how he felt about serializing such a slight, saccharine work in the Puritan, a so-called woman’s magazine, and to do so at the same time (1899) that he was unsuccessfully trying to place Vandover. 136

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Norris must have suffered when reviewing his own derisive critical pronouncements, merely two years old, on the popular magazines and “magazinists”: “There is in them no freshness, no originality, no vitality, no close, keen grip on life or nature. . . . They are safe. . . . They adorn the center table. They do not ‘call a blush to the cheek of the young.’ They can be placed— Oh, crowning virtue, Oh, supreme encomium!—they can be ‘safely’ placed in the hands of any young girl. . . . It is the ‘young girl’ and the family center table that determines the standard of the American short story.” 55 Norris predictably suggests that reality—“originality,” “life”— demands a tough, macho prose: that reality is the business of manly writers. But, by this gendered logic, what is Blix but eminently safe—safe enough for the “hands of any young girl” and for the “family center table”? And does its very presence not suggest that post-frontier western realism is indeed prone to co-optation by eastern publishers and limited to soft-core adventure and romance narratives? Worse yet, Blix is not only fictional autobiography but may be read as a dispiriting revision of Vandover as well. Norris radically alters the grim, naturalistic view of San Francisco life found in the earlier novel, reimagining the city as a delightful playground for the young. But the revision is yet more subtle and disturbing. Biographer Franklin Walker describes Norris as being “somewhat carried away by his playfulness when writing Blix” and suggests that Norris “amused himself by caricaturing his own foibles in the creation of Condy Rivers,” foibles such as “childishness, irresponsibility, and absentmindedness.” 56 Of course these “foibles” are Vandover’s as well, reduced in degree. Norris actually sanitizes Vandover’s crippling flaws (specifically gambling and dissolute behavior) by first lightheartedly downplaying them in Condy and then simplistically resolving them through the love and diligent support of Blix. It seems more than coincidence that Blix’s first name in the novel is actually Travis, oddly echoing the would-be heroine of Vandover, Turner Ravis. Yet, if Norris was in any way reworking the as-yet-unpublished Vandover, from which he actually lifted certain scenes, perhaps it was not merely to sanitize and ameliorate that novel’s lurid subjects. The revision may have suggested itself to Norris as a means of utilizing his themes while allowing for further investigation into the conflict he clearly felt between writing in the West and in the East. That is, Blix stands as a revealing, if ultimately disheartening, reflection on western double consciousness, on authorial ambition, and on the apparent necessity of writerly compromise, for Norris 137

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was feeding his eastern audience a thin diet of romance and adventure. Within the text Norris portrays a struggle, one that he himself must have felt: Condy’s unwavering desire to go east, to write whatever the New York editors ask for, contrasts sharply with his character’s simplistic but sincere aesthetic and professional convictions. And Norris, despite the reasonably successful publication of McTeague earlier in the year, seems equally uncertain about his own writing career, unable to fit the likes of the slight Moran of the Lady Letty and A Man’s Woman (serialized soon after Blix)—and even Blix itself—into his own young but aggressive corpus of writings. Norris leaves clues that suggest that Blix is at least self-conscious about the creative dangers of his departure from California and his acceptance of a compromised eastern marketplace. Like Norris at the time, Condy engages in three distinct types of writing: his work for the San Francisco Daily Times, corresponding to Norris’s work at the Wave; short stories, specifically “A Victory Over Death”; and a novel, titled In Defiance of Authority. Norris presents these projects, and the three genres, as hierarchically ordered, ascending from the newspaper work toward the heroically produced novel. The newspaper work is repeatedly dismissed throughout the book as writing “of the hack order—special articles, write-ups, and interviews”; it remains merely a source of income for Condy and a convenient narrative device as it leads Condy around the city.57 “A Victory Over Death,” on the other hand, is given considerable attention, in origination, composition, and reception. The story recounts the Poesque narrative of an old sailor who searches a sunken ship, finds a drowned nineteen-year-old woman perfectly preserved underwater, and leaves her body there to maintain the memory. But it is the novel, a tale of economic exploitation and filibustering adventure, in which Condy (and Norris) seem most interested—an unappreciated, ambitious epic of sorts. Norris’s titles all seem to indicate the author’s own struggle to identify his authorial position. The name Blix itself points in at least two directions: toward bliss, of course, but less obviously toward the term blick, that is, “the brightening or iridescence appearing on silver or gold at the end of the cupelling or refining process.” 58 Norris, who had researched the technical processes of gold mining while working on McTeague, may be using the term to indicate that his sentimental novel represents a late-stage economic gain for the author, a contribution to the “gilded age”—though, perhaps, also indicating that the book is largely surface gloss. Norris’s language within the text subtly hints at this economic interpretation; when Condy 138

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thinks up the nickname Blix for his “chum” Travis, he genially cries, “Capital! . . . sounds bully, and snappy, and crisp, and bright, and sort of sudden” (44). Norris’s (“sort of sudden”) career has discovered (“just found it out”) new capital to invest; like the “bright” mineral sheen, Blix is both a valuable asset and a thin product. Further, Condy’s short story and novel both eventually come to enact the drama implied in their titles, the drama of authorial positioning. Condy’s sensational and breezily fantastic tale “A Victory Over Death” first provides the author his own breathing space. Needing to provide some material to his Times editor, Condy casually submits the “yarn,” which, soon published, “attracted not the least attention.” Discouraged, Condy calls it a “rotten failure” and wonders if it amounts to a “hill of beans” (107– 8). The story quite literally rots and dies, and Condy also seems ready for a collapse. (Norris himself at the time suffered depression and perhaps a nervous breakdown.) But the story itself actually becomes the vehicle for Condy’s own victory when the New York publisher discovers it and offers Condy a job. Thus, the tale offers Condy a quite literal victory over a professional death and canonical invisibility. In direct contrast, In Defiance of Authority becomes ironically disheartening, for the Centennial Company rejects the novel, a rejection that Condy barely notices while celebrating their offer. That is, an eastern “authority,” the publishing giant, emphatically conquers Condy, whose own “defiance” is muted and who ends up an employee of the company. The tale of filibustering thus becomes a sadly ironic one: the notion of an outsider entering and conquering an established power is made entirely obsolete. Although related in idyllic terms, Condy’s story is about the East’s power to buy and sell the western author and the West itself. And, sadly, Blix itself seems to emblematize that compromise. Blix’s conclusion is more explicitly divided, painting the departure for New York as both wonderful and, more subtly, dangerous. As Norris opened Vandover with an unsettling and tragic movement west, Norris concludes Blix with Condy’s troubling decision to move east. The scene is overloaded with purple prose and twice-baked romantic symbolism: a glorious sunset, New Year’s Day, realizations of immortal love (“a happiness so deep, so intense, as to thrill them with a sense of solemnity and wonder”), bathetic farewells (“what are tears for, Blixy?”), the miraculous New York invitation, the profound gaze east (171–72). Norris suggests a sense of professional and personal determination and the possibility of loss. But the scene oddly unsettles the entire novel, for in many ways Condy (like Norris) is heading east 139

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exactly not to face the gray and darkening sky (Norris at least had done that with Vandover and McTeague), not to move toward realism and authenticity, but only to glance backward at the romantic western sunset, now remembered as innocent and golden. That is, we can retrospectively conclude that he is going east to write Blix, to return to this concluding scene and perpetually rewrite it. If the western author survives this reflection, it is only after a co-optation by eastern publishers and readers, by the limiting, romantic set of familiar expectations, and by the East itself. Blix’s subtle concerns proved to be more perceptive than its optimism. Like Condy, Norris, who lived in and around New York City from early 1898 until mid-1902, was trapped by the East, unable to pursue his own form of realism and increasingly gloomy about western authorship. His move had promised a secure position, both in the world of publishing (he worked as an editorial assistant for Doubleday and McClure) and in the world of letters. Perhaps Norris hoped that his own move east would reproduce the same kind of reverse frontier conquest on which he had speculated in “The Frontier Gone at Last”; “Eastward the course of commerce takes its way,” he had written, and perhaps he imagined an equally lucrative resettlement on his part (1187). But, even when his own star was on the rise, his work increasingly displayed a discouragement about western authorship. He looked back to the West to remember or retain his sense of authorial identity but in such works as “Dying Fires” and The Octopus repeatedly found only degenerating invisibility. He left New York in July 1902 and purchased a homestead south of San Francisco—but his own rediscovery of the West ended with his death in October of that year. If Vandover is Norris’s autobiographical investigation of western authorship’s canonical invisibility and Blix his autobiographical depiction of the East’s magnetic pull, then his autobiographical short story “Dying Fires” serves as his consideration of the possibility of a return to the West. Norris’s apparently blithe depiction in Blix of his move to New York is dramatically undone in “Dying Fires,” the tale of a young western writer named Overbeck who is destroyed by the genteel, sentimental, feminine East. “Dying Fires,” written during his New York years, is a transparent reflection on eastern literary pressures but serves more broadly as a critique of western authorship’s struggle against canonical decline and invisibility. Through it we can sense Norris’s haunted attempts to envision a kind of authentic western author, one who can secure a national audience while maintaining a sense of originality and authenticity. 140

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Overbeck embodies the authentic West, possessing a freedom from literary influence and eastern overcivilization. Born in a place where the “reading circle [was] a thing unknown,” a frontier town “along the line of cleavage where the farthest skirmish line of civilization thrusts and girds at the wilderness,” Overbeck can experience the Real West and reproduce that West without interference: “he had not been influenced by a fetich of his choice till his work was a mere replica of some other writer’s. He was not literary. . . . He lived in the midst of a strenuous, eager life, a little primal even yet.” 59 Overbeck enjoys an original relation with his natural and cultural landscape and writes that fresh vision into his first novel, The Vision of Bunt McBride. Like James Hall, Timothy Flint, and Joaquin Miller, Overbeck’s implicit strength is his authentic, unadulterated experience “on the spot spoken of ” (to recall Miller’s words), and his work is original, not a “mere replica.” But once in New York (to which, like Condy and Norris himself, he is called by a welcoming publisher) he is taken in, and taken over, by the group of “New Bohemians,” whose effete, tired, pretentious set of literary values Overbeck takes as the “real thing” but which only corrupts him (121). Overbeck suddenly aspires to “refinement.” Aesthetic elegance had been irrelevant to the young writer, implicitly undesirable, as it was for so many western writers of the early nineteenth century, but the “originality and unconventionality” of his early novel “he came to regard as crudities” (122). Like Vandover and perhaps Norris as well, Overbeck becomes stuck between the “strenuous, eager life” of the rugged West and the ostentatiously precious life of New York society. Between the wild life and the quiet life, Overbeck’s inspirational fires die out, and he is “shouldered off, forgotten,” ignored, invisible. Although he moves back west “to the mountains and the canyons of the great Sierras,” he never recovers, can never find his place again (126). Norris’s scathing critique of the New Bohemians (the “thirdraters”) leaves no doubt that they are not the real thing that Overbeck supposes. And through their influence Overbeck himself loses his ability to represent an authentic West. The real thing—the legitimate western author—is one that can hold on to a regional vision and can withstand the gravitational pull of the black hole of authorial invisibility, can avoid being caught midway of extremes. Norris’s last great effort to envision western authorship and western authenticity was The Octopus. Like “Dying Fires,” it reveals Norris’s horror at co-optation by “literary” forces, but it returns with self-evident discouragement to the notion found earlier in Vandover that the western writer is dis141

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eased, damaged here by the passing of historical opportunity and by an internal, almost physiological weakness. That is, Norris suggests that the would-be poet Presley inherited a condition, historically and biologically determined, that limited him forever. Vandover’s weakened condition is inflicted on him (perhaps by himself ), but Presley is born with his; Vandover was pressed between extremes and erased from view, whereas Presley is always already impotent and invisible; Vandover struggled against his fate, while Presley never stood a chance. Presley weaves his way in and out of the book’s central plot, having a limited effect on the action but serving as a narrative thread. Norris opens the story with Presley’s cross-ranch bicycle ride, a modest parody of the mounted cowboy who initiates the Western’s plot. But Presley is no hero and barely a poet; he is a neurasthenic, moody writer who despairs of being “born too late,” born into a western world that had faded (609). This decline reduces the poetic vision and reach to the point of absolute negation. Unlike Overbeck, who was destroyed by eastern influence, Presley blames the very passing of the West for his impotence. “Reality was what [Presley] longed for” (595), but conveying that authentic vision was impossible because the western writer has lost any connection with that reality. “It is the man who is lacking, the poet,” he laments, “we have been educated away from it all.” The western author, overwhelmed by civilization’s overrefinement, can no longer “see as Homer saw, as Beowulf saw, as the Nibelungen poets saw” (609). Presley is a western writer literally out of time. He turns his attention away from the “vast, vague, impersonal Song of the West” toward a labor (and undoubtedly labored) poem on working-class valor titled “The Toilers” (872 –73). Presley’s ambitions offer Norris an opportunity to consider the relationship between textual success and authorial recognition—the life and death of the author. Presley had hoped that his poem would appear in a “great magazine” that would help spread his name and would give him “such weight.” His friend Vanamee objects: “Gives you such weight, gives you such background. Is it yourself you think of ? . . . You must sink yourself; must forget yourself and your own desire of fame, of admitted success. It is your poem, your message, that must prevail,—not you, who wrote it. You preach a doctrine of abnegation, of self-obliteration, and you sign your name to your words as high on the tablets as you can reach, so that all the world may see, not the poem, but the poet” (876 –77). Although his words sound noble, Vanamee is suggesting that Presley accept the legacy of the western writer; as Edgar Allan Poe had written of the western wilderness 142

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story, the work remains, but the author dies. In fact, as if to demonstrate his own idea, Vanamee soon “disappeared in the grey of the twilight” (877). Presley is “left alone wondering,” wondering perhaps how a writer in the West can produce an effective text and can avoid sinking and forgetting himself. True to form, Presley enjoys a temporary and deceptive success; like Joaquin Miller, Presley captures public notice. He is “tempted to cross the continent and go to New York and there come unto his own, enjoying the triumph,” but he decides against it, decides that “his place was here” in the West (890). But Presley loses his moment, and he is soon forgotten. He ultimately sees that he “had not helped” his culture and “never would” —“he had failed” (1018). Neither the message nor the poet prevails; both are co-opted by the nouveau high culture of California, just as Magnus Derrick is overrun and then “bought” by Behrman and the railroads. In this case, New York did not corrupt the western poet; the West did. And the “self-obliteration” that Vanamee had hoped to be Presley’s “doctrine” became Presley’s canonical legacy. In fact, Presley falls “to pieces,” suffering from “nerves . . . insomnia, and weakness, a general collapse” (1025). Overwhelmed by his own failure and sickness (words repeatedly applied), he decides to leave—to follow the “Anglo-Saxon” impulse to India, to follow the new direction of commerce. Ironically, where the West once offered salubrious cures for eastern neurasthenics, now western victims of neurasthenia must travel elsewhere. At the end he turns his back on the West in Norris’s bitter revision of the western hero’s ride into the sunset: “Presley, alone, thoughtful, his hands clasped behind him, passed on through the ranches—here teeming with ripened wheat—his face set from them forever” (1086). Thus, Presley is not only a western writer out of time but one out of place as well. His presence in the novel, always somewhat ghostly and enigmatic, becomes dissociated, entirely alienated from his western environment. At the close of The Octopus Norris’s attitude toward Presley appears elusive, at once disdainful and sympathetic. Norris all but leaves aside the question of writerly intention— whether Presley fought the good fight, whether he quit—and instead seems to assert that the poet never had a chance. Norris understood. As he gazes from the ship taking him away, Presley recalls Vanamee’s words of self-negation, words that join with Norris’s own voice, sweeping and straining for optimism, conveying both hopes and laments: “the individual suffers, but the race goes on” (1098). The history of western authorship is one of individual obscurity and in143

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visibility even in the wake of broader, popular successes. I have devoted considerable space to Norris’s novels, as obscure as they are, because they remain an expressive treatment of the burden of authenticity, a self-examination of the limitations on western authors. Writing at a moment in which the Real West seemed especially unstable, Norris lived the tensions between eastern authority and western experience. Norris felt that the eastern marketplace was demanding inauthenticity, the sensationalized Old West. In turn, he wanted to produce the Real West but was himself unsure of what that meant, whether it too was an elusive Old West. But the trap, of course, was not simply in locating the authentic West. The trap was the process of mapping it. Determining literary success in relation to regional history was itself the burden. Many later writers would experience this burden of authenticity, and most western writers of the twentieth century responded to the expectations of authentic reproduction. But some attempted to think through the rules of the authenticity game and to reimagine the relationship between place and literature. Nature writers, the subject of my next chapter, implicitly respond to the turn-of-the-century alarms over degeneration by emphasizing generation: their own birth as writers in relation to the natural environment. They locate the Real West outside of the cultural histories that Norris and others depended upon and claim an authenticity that, they argue, is itself free from the burden of the past.

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5 COMING OUT OF THE COUNTRY Environmental Constructivism in Western Nature Writing

You didn’t come into this world. You came out of it. —alan watts

In his essay “The Writer as Alaskan: Beginnings and Reflections” poet John Haines considers the relationship between western place and identity. He begins: “As a poet I was born in a particular place, a hillside overlooking the Tanana River in central Alaska.” 1 Haines is not attempting to reveal a metaphorical rite of passage or to locate the site of a writerly transformation. He means, quite literally, that he came into authorial consciousness because of environmental influence. His essay minimizes human and social agency, suggesting that he was born in, into, and finally out of that particular natural place. Haines emphatically claims that he “learned that it is land, place, that makes people” and argues that his years in remote Richardson, Alaska, “formed [him] as a person and as a poet.” 2 The notion that place forms identity is not unfamiliar. Authors for centuries have imagined nature as a formative influence. But western nature writers mean something more specific in their apostrophes to the environment: that the natural landscape has manifestly impacted their thinking and their writing—has, as Haines put it, literally “made” them.3 The claim is extensive, even holistic. As William Kittredge writes, “Warner Valley [Oregon] is the main staging ground for my imagination.” 4 At first this notion that the land, however defined, influences consciousness and identity seems tame enough, seems to be either self-evident or perhaps self-flattering—an affectionate acknowledgment of a writer’s love of the outdoors. But, as is so frequently the case in environmental writing, the feigned simplicity and quiet playfulness of such claims obscure a surprisingly vital assertion. These writers seem quite serious in claiming that the natural environment, and not the cultural environment, made them. And, when the claim of nature’s formative influence is examined critically, worlds fall apart, for human “culture” becomes contingent, literally displaced and sometimes entirely erased. The consistency and apparent deliberateness of the claim suggests that it is something more than gentle ode-making: it is a claim of authenticity and a form of authorial self145

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identification, a way that authors describe themselves, perhaps even invent themselves. And, as such, it is well worth consideration. This claim of authenticity is in many ways familiar. As usual, both textual and marketplace appeal stem from the author’s firsthand experience in the Real West—real here implying the “deeper” and arguably more authentic “native” experience of the natural environment. Like Lewis and Clark, James Hall, Caroline Kirkland, (Julius Rodman), Mark Twain, Joaquin Miller, Owen Wister, Frank Norris, and most nineteenth-century western writers, western nature writers suggest that an author’s connection to place determines his or her authority. Place, the Real West, influences both authorial identity and representation. But what exactly does it mean to be “connected” to place? Must an author grow up in the West, live in the West, write “on the spot,” or tour the region? Must an author spend time in Yellowstone National Park, in noisy saloons, or in Indian country? Must an author know local plant names, horsemanship, or mineral mining? These questions were challenging in the nineteenth century and became virtually unanswerable in the twentieth. As the successes and failures of Miller and Norris suggest, both authorship and reality were increasingly disputed terms. Indeed, for the nation as a whole there was a developing sense that both individual identity and experienced reality were not personally determined but created by social conditions. T. J. Jackson Lears has written, “the decline of autonomous selfhood lay at the heart of the modern sense of unreality.” 5 And thus nature writers became doubly disabled: both individual authorship and nature itself became increasingly subject to the defining power of cultural influence, resulting by late-century in the “death of the author” and the “cultural construction of nature.” In other words, as the twentieth century wore on, the notion of authenticity itself became suspect; the real, the genuine, and the natural became artifacts of a naive past. Nature writers such as Mary Austin, Edward Abbey, Barry Lopez, Terry Tempest Williams, and Gary Snyder respond to these attacks in radical fashion. Indeed, it is easy to overlook the dramatic strategies of western nature writers exactly because their writing is so often read in facile opposition to modern and postmodern culture. Nature writing appears to offer an orthodoxy of simplicity and folk authenticity, a haven from the cruel ironies and shallow commodification of developing literary and social practices. Often standing in staunch opposition to both capitalist ideologies of progress and postmodern celebrations of hyperreality, much nature writing seems reassuringly honest, conservative (as in conserving a golden envi146

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ronmental past), crunchy, and genuine. Yet the obvious fact that these writers work and produce in an age that doubts these very sentiments suggests that they are not isolated icons of authenticity but, instead, active participants in their cultural environment— even, or perhaps especially, when they appear to ignore that culture. Indeed, one could even claim that many nature writers are ferociously “postmodern,” not because they dress in pomo fashions or devise clever labyrinths but because they claim a real and erase their own inventions. To put it more cautiously, throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, nature writers can’t just “be authentic.” Such an idea luxuriates in naive nostalgia, like advertisements for “authentic New York Pizza,” a food that by any logic never existed. (Would “inauthentic New York Pizza” taste any different?) To “be authentic” is to trigger not certainty but doubt, for “authenticity” can never be aware of itself except as a concept that always alters exactly the condition that it is projecting. Thus, nature writers must claim authenticity, or, just as complicated, they must have that mantle thrust upon them. And so their writings and their personae represent— often in subtle and invisible ways—an engagement with the debates about reality, identity, and the postmodern condition. Western nature writers redefine both western authorship (the self ) and western nature (the reality), and they suggest that each informs and even invents the other. This chapter will focus primarily on the former, the notion of an authorial identity based on the authenticity of nature. Rather than examine how western writers invent themselves and their texts in relation to culture and place (as my first four chapters attempt), I’m interested here in the way that a group of western writers can marginalize the concept of human culture and use place as the source of that self-invention. Is the claim of “environmental constructivism,” as I will call it, a sincere and legitimate theory of authorial origination or an authorial strategy that subverts cultural/critical authority and quietly establishes the author’s own agency as paramount? My preliminary answer, a tentative one, is both. Although certainly skeptical of authenticity, to this point I have not argued that place— the Real West— does not exist but, rather, that we need not seek it in works of literature. It may be that even Lewis and Clark’s Journals reveal an imagined West—but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t make a remarkable, almost unthinkable journey. Indeed, we may find in the essays of Edward Abbey and Terry Tempest Williams inspiring reasons to commit our lives to environmental preservation. As an ardent environmentalist, I believe that 147

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we should live with compassion, humility, and hope, and we may well find a source for these values in works of literature. But we need to recognize the degree to which such works are imaginative in their lyrical depictions of nature, and we need to recognize the force of authorial vision. To the degree that we seek the Real West in literature—and it’s a significant, perhaps determining degree—we encounter imaginative constructions. It may well be that western literature reveals more about the creative and professional reaches of authorship than about the West. Thus, I would agree that, in representing the environment, nature writers do invent nature in their works. It doesn’t necessarily follow, however, that nature doesn’t exist and doesn’t exert its own power, and so I’m respecting the possibility that nature may have invented the writer. Environmental constructivism is supported by scholarly research as well as readerly intuition: nature writers have been affected— emotionally, psychologically, developmentally, professionally— by their natural environment. Yet just as other western writers (such as Hall, Twain, Miller, and Norris) pursue canonical recognition through self-invention, empowering themselves in relation to cultural pressures, so too do nature writers. They also invent themselves, but they do so under the camouflaging rubric of natural influence, an influence that is itself seen to predetermine and overwhelm cultural influence. These authors seek to accomplish two remarkable ends: (1) they apparently minimize, with unusual authorial modesty, forms of essentialist identity or self-creative powers—they celebrate their writerly influences and their own (often) passive role; (2) at the same time they establish a legitimizing and authorizing force behind their prose, a force equal to, if not greater than, cultural influence. Thus, this claim is both modest and audacious. It is akin to Milton invoking the Spirit of God or Virgil, except that the inspirational, pre-scribing force here is nonhuman and non literary (emphatically Other) and, in a skeptical age, almost perversely visible and material. Indeed, the ecocentric claim may turn out to be the single most radical form of authorial self-invention in American literary history, for nature writers use it to avoid the epistemological crisis of cultural construction before it is established. Nature writers need not battle with the cultural forces that surround them; they refuse to recognize the importance of cultural ascendancy. And they can do so with impenetrable circularity: even if authors “write nature,” then they are inventing themselves without reference to readers or cultures. It is finally not an argument about canon formation or about reception but an argument with contemporary academic 148

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critics. Living nature gives birth to writers, and the death of the author becomes empty theory. The Theory of Environmental Constructivism When John Haines stated that the Alaska landscape “formed [him] as a person and as a poet,” he explicitly suggested two recognizable types of personal identity: the individual self and the authorial self. Both selves need to be considered, for, although this chapter concentrates on the latter, the claim of nature’s influence on authorship is predicated, in part, on the former. To speak in the broadest of terms, we can identify two general trends in discussions of the self and authenticity. One trend, developing since at least the mid- to late nineteenth century and culminating in contemporary postmodernism, can be seen in the range of social theories that reject any notion of a “born” or authentic self and understand the formation of human identity to be the result of applied cultural pressures. The essentialist notion of an authentic, or “natural,” self is largely displaced by what is usually called a socially or culturally constructed self. In his introductory essay to Constructions of the Self George Levine emphasizes that “the predominant intellectual position within the humanities and some of the social sciences at the moment is social constructivism, the view that the categories of human thought, social organization, and psychic (even biological) organization are culturally constructed—not empirically registered aspects of reality but conceptions created by ideology and social and political power.” 6 Social constructivism, which often results in the skeptical questioning of authenticity and of the self ’s very existence, emphasizes that social institutions (“ideology and social and political power”) are responsible for the formation of the individual subject. It is, of course, the basis of, and parallel to, theories of the “construction of authorship” (to borrow one contemporary title) and “cultural constructions of the environment” (to borrow another). Just as a dominant culture is seen to “make” the private self, so, too, it defines our understanding of authorship and of nature. The other trend, again, is what Charles Taylor calls the “culture of authenticity,” the belief in an inner self that is real, genuine. In The Ethics of Authenticity Taylor describes this familiar position: “There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else’s.” 7 This search for authentic identity is in part a result of the erosion of the idea of self. As always, notions of authen149

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ticity emerge at moments of cultural loss. The emergence of the authentic as a category of discourse signifies its absence. Philip J. Deloria discusses “the empty sense of self generated by the historical chasm that served as a signpost of the modern. Many intellectuals and critics perceived and characterized this radical break in terms of an older authenticity and a contemporary sense of inauthenticity. . . . American identity was increasingly tied to a search for an authentic social identity, one that had real meaning in the face of the anxious displacements of modernity.” 8 Significantly, culture and authenticity are frequently put at odds—indeed, oppose each other. Culture is seen to get in the way of authenticity. “Authenticity,” Lionel Trilling writes, “implies the downward movement through all the cultural superstructures to some place where all movement ends, and begins.” 9 Or, as Regina Bendix argues, “the call for ‘authenticity’ implied a critical stance against urban manners, artifice in language, behavior, and art, and against aristocratic excesses; it promised the restoration of a pure, unaffected state of being.” 10 One significant dimension of this search for authenticity, a dimension that this chapter will examine, is the perceived affinity between the authentic and the natural—and their contest with the cultural. Trilling, Taylor, and others often date the opposition between that authentic, natural self and the corruption of cultural influence to the age of literary Romanticism. (Trilling offers Wordsworth’s Michael, from the poem of that name, as an example of authenticity; Thoreau’s Canadian woodchopper in Walden displays a similar persona.) Trilling suggests that “from Rousseau we learned that what destroys our authenticity is society.” 11 While authenticity is not exclusively understood as a condition in apposition with nature, for many this “unaffected state of being” exists most purely in nature. Taylor, with some skepticism, sketches out the position of natural authenticity in opposition to developing industrial culture: “There are people who look on the coming of technological civilization as a kind of unmitigated decline. We have lost the contact with the earth and its rhythms that our ancestors had. We have lost contact with ourselves, and our own natural being, and are driven by an imperative of domination that condemns us to ceaseless battle against nature both within and around us. This complaint against the ‘disenchantment’ of the world has been articulated again and again since the Romantic period, with its sharp sense that human beings had been triply divided by modern reason—within themselves, between themselves, and from the natural world.” 12 150

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Trilling identifies a similar type of authenticity grounded in nature and opposed by cultural power: The belief that the organic is the chief criterion of what is authentic in art and life continues, it need hardly be said, to have great force with us, the more as we become alarmed by the deterioration of the organic environment. The sense of something intervening between man and his own organic endowment is a powerful element in the modern consciousness, an overt and exigent issue in our culture. In an increasingly urban and technological society, the natural processes of human existence have acquired a moral status in the degree that they are thwarted. It is the common feeling that some inhuman force has possessed our ground and our air, our men and women and our thought, a machine more terrible than any that Emerson imagined. In many quarters, whatever can be thought susceptible of analogy to the machine, even a syllogism or a device of dramaturgy, is felt to be inimical to the authenticity of experience and being.13

Thus, to connect with nature, to be born into the world from nature, is to realize authenticity in its most pure state. The possibility of environmental constructivism—a nonsocial, even nonhuman form of influence—seriously challenges the exclusivity and adequacy of social constructivism.14 The claim of nature’s influence on the formation of human consciousness announces itself in a variety of ways, each ultimately impacting authorial identity as well. Environmental theorists generally seek to subvert cultural constructivism (and its erasure of knowable nature) by reconnecting the self with nature. It is that affirmed and immediate relationship—that authenticity—that limits the priority of cultural influence and establishes the possibility of environmental influence.15 Simply put, if a self can enjoy an unmediated connection with nature, then it can be influenced by nature. It follows that environmental constructivism begins with the recognition that landscape imposes itself on the human imagination from birth, either as an innate or a learned connection between infant and nature. (Gary Snyder reminds us that the word nature is derived from the Latin nasci, “to be born.”) Because a significant component of the environmental claim is that nature impacts the preauthorial self—indeed, that nature’s influence inevitably anticipates cultural influence and even articulated consciousness— any study of environmental constructivism must take into account the ear151

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liest points of potential contest between culture and environment. Biologist Edward O. Wilson, explaining his widely respected biophilia theory, argues for “the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms.” 16 Wilson uses evolutionary theory and experienced scientific reasoning to support the claim that humans possess an instinctual (or deeply learned) tendency to interact with the natural environment, the biota. Stephen R. Kellert, explaining the reach of Wilson’s ideas, writes that “the biophilia hypothesis proclaims a human dependence on nature that extends far beyond the simple issues of material and physical sustenance to encompass as well the human craving for aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive, and even spiritual meaning and satisfaction. This daring assertion reaches beyond the poetic and philosophical articulation of nature’s capacity to inspire and morally inform to a scientific claim of human need, fired in the crucible of evolutionary development, for deep and intimate association with the natural environment, particularly its living biota.” 17 The biophilia theory implies that human individuals and communities depend on that “intimate association” for individual psychological health but, more important, for the health and even survival of the species. The connection (one might write “dialogue”) between person and place constitutes a significant source of health and identity. Similarly, theorists in the social sciences have investigated the possibility that the natural environment (as distinct from the human environment) influences the development of self and consciousness. The central point of the writer’s origination, both literally and metaphorically, is birth, because consciousness begins with a relation to the earth. When nature is made into a progenitive force (most often, problematically, female), it is established as a primary power, impacting and even “educating” individual and authorial identity. Ecopsychology is one field that often argues for a tangible connection between nature and the formation of the self. Significantly, ecopsychologists are not simple-minded environmental apologists or would-be poets; they take contemporary social theories (including adaptations of social constructivism) and incorporate them into their models of natural influence. Anita Barrows, for example, is a proponent of the “growing movement” of constructivism that shifts “the paradigm of a bounded, isolated self toward a vision of a self that is permeable, interconnected.” In her essay “The Ecopsychology of Child Development” Barrows challenges the “isolated” or essentialist self but not merely through the theory of social constructivism; she extends the theory to include the impact of nature’s 152

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inevitable presence. She argues that “such a theory must take into consideration that the infant is born into not only a social but an ecological context.” 18 When Barrows argues that infants are “born into . . . an ecological context,” she is emphasizing the importance of (mother) nature to the development of consciousness. Terry Tempest Williams, for example, writes that the “womb is the first landscape we inhabit.” 19 This relationship between child (self ) and nature (as parenting influence) is more frequently encountered as a traditional trope, one that nature writers repeatedly use to enormous effect in constructing their own identity. Even within the social sciences this relationship is often metaphorized: Theodore Roszak writes that “ecopsychology proceeds from the assumption that at its deepest level the psyche remains sympathetically bonded to the Earth that mothered us into existence.” 20 But, when nature is gendered, a number of problems and questions arise. The figurative connection between women and nature is, of course, a conceit so entrenched that it works as cultural myth. But the metaphorical connection between the female body and the landscape only complicates any understanding of environmental constructivism, seemingly dividing by gender the impact of nature and often dividing again along lines of troubled representation into mother (earth) or virgin (land). This identification of female body with nature is often seen by ecofeminists as a damaging manifestation of patriarchal tradition; that same identification, however, has also been seen as a salubrious and empowering bond for women. Without rehearsing the myriad theories of ecofeminism, we can at least recognize these two views, one arguing for authentic connection and the other for cultural construction. Vera Norwood, in considering the “tensions within the feminist movement regarding the definition of women’s ‘true nature,’” points on the one hand to “ecofeminists identified with radical feminism [who] focus on women’s ‘physical’ connection with the earth as a result of their menstrual cycle, pregnancy, and childbirth.” Norwood suggests that for many of these ecofeminists “the problem is not women’s alignment with nature, but the patriarchal culture’s alienation from women’s physical experience in the push to dominate the earth.” On the other hand, Norwood cites as a convincing alternative those “ecofeminists with a more socialist bent [who] find such biologically linked essentialism troubling.” These critics “maintain that gender socialization has been used in capitalist, patriarchal culture to further women’s oppression. Thus, the apparently ‘natural’ connection of women with nature is a myth serving to 153

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subjugate both.” The central point for thinking about environmental constructivism is that both strains of ecofeminism recognize a bond between women and nature, either through an “authentic” biospiritual connection or through a history of oppressive patriarchal mythologies. That is, even if women are not bodily related to natural processes, they still must work through symbolic constructions of gender. And men must also consider the resulting dilemma: an apparent disconnection with landscape and nature. In the broadest sense environmental constructivism acknowledges the importance of gender without necessarily fixing a meaning. Increasingly, nature writers self-consciously raise the issue of nature’s gender and sexuality but do so only to defamiliarize the established norms. Terry Tempest Williams, for example, has written on the emotionally charged relationship between nature and self. Williams is capable of obscuring what she calls the “erotics of place” with intentionally heightened, oblique language: “The land is love. Love is what we fear. To disengage from the earth is our own oppression.” 22 Indeed, Williams testified at a 1995 congressional hearing on public land use and development in Utah, mystifying the conservative panel by suggesting that, “if you knew wilderness in a way that you know love, you would be unwilling to let it go. . . . We are talking about the body of the beloved, not real estate.” 23 Williams sexualizes the relationship with nature, emphasizing the need for a loving affiliation: “If we ignore our connection to the land and disregard and deny our relationship to the Pansexual nature of earth, we will render ourselves impotent as a species.” 24 By warning of the possible impotence of the human species, metaphorical or otherwise, Williams uses the same scientific metaphor as E. O. Wilson—biological extinction—here connected to human sexual development and de-evolution.25 Williams would have us “embrace the bear,” for, in doing so, “we undress, expose, and embrace our authentic selves.” 26 If we are born into a relationship with nature, whether gendered/sexualized or not, we still need to process the environmental information, to remember and recognize that relationship. One important element of environmental influence is thus the perception of place and the way that cognitive memory codifies such environmental shapes. Personal development—a foundation of individual psychology—is located in the perception of landscape (including both natural and urban).27 In Wolf Willow, for example, Wallace Stegner speculated on the impressionable period of childhood, “somewhere between five and twelve”: “expose a child to a 154

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particular environment at his susceptible time and he will perceive in the shapes of that environment until he dies.” 28 Similarly, in The Solace of Open Spaces Gretel Ehrlich considers the same effect that wide-open landscape can have, even on adults—and, conversely, the effect that adults have on the land. She quotes a Wyoming sheepman, nicknamed “Highpockets,” as saying: “Open space hasn’t affected me at all. It’s all the people moving in on it.” 29 Ehrlich gently implies that both forces can affect the western imagination. More formally, Wayne Franklin and Michael Steiner, in their introduction to Mapping American Culture, attempt a careful analysis of place and its effect: “As an all-encompassing condition of life, place informs our identity. Our very sense of the world is colored by the physical environment; the landscapes and settings and things of our lives influence our attitudes and values, penetrate our thought and behavior.” 30 Citing Annie Dillard and Paul Shepard, Franklin and Steiner suggest that memories of landscapes influence child development and, by extension, the development of intellectual and perceptual consciousness. Researchers have often attempted to legitimize this hypothesis. Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan has argued, for example, that “the physical environment itself has an effect on perception. . . . We can say that the development of visual acuity is related to the ecological quality of the environment.” 31 Like Stegner, Tuan considers the actual shapes present to the eye. Stegner has in mind the natural features of the western landscape, but Tuan, while stressing environmental influence, extends the argument to any form of landscape. Tuan differentiates between “carpentered” and “noncarpentered” landscapes, the former “replete with straight lines, angles, and rectangular objects,” the latter composed of “nature and the countryside.” 32 Tuan concludes, “people who live in a ‘carpentered’ world are susceptible to different kinds of illusion from those who live in an environment lacking in orthogonality.” 33 In both cases the landscape has influenced the development of both imagination and identity. Biophilia, ecopsychology, some theories of ecofeminism, and many environmentalist branches of cultural geography all argue that the individual self is influenced by nature and thus all support the theory of environmental constructivism. These theories all lend scholarly credence to nature writers who claim that nature “made” them. Further, all of these theories can be found at work, implicitly or explicitly, in American nature writing. But these authors do not limit themselves to scholarly theory; because they pursue creative ends as well (mythologies, fictions, metaphors), they extend them155

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selves into imaginative constructions. Further, the authenticity that they are claiming is not a neutral psychological model. It is their own identity as author, both private and public, that they investigate. Western Authorship, Environmental Education, and “Naive Reality” If social constructivism is, as Levine suggests, the “predominant intellectual position within the humanities” for understanding the formation of the self, a parallel theory holds sway over literary production. Many contemporary critics agree that authors are the products of cultural environments. The initial impulse of this critical shift—a healthy one—was to demystify authorship and to see writers not as solitary singers and isolated ode makers but as participants in cultural exchanges, affected and even determined by social, political, and economic forces. By “turning the transcendent genius back into a culturally situated human subject,” in the words of Donald E. Pease, these critics attempted to place the author squarely in the real world.34 In Cultures of Letters, for example, Richard H. Brodhead convincingly calls for “a history of the interactions between American writing and the changing conditions of its social life,” arguing that “writing is always an acculturated activity. . . . Writing always takes place within some completely concrete cultural situation, a situation that surrounds it with some particular landscape of institutional structures.” Writing, for Brodhead, is “realized from among the possibilities set in different cultural situations.” 35 Many western nature writers tend to agree but would rewild this particular landscape by removing the concrete: they see writing as taking place in place, in ecosystems rather than in social systems. Gary Snyder points out that, in a broad sense, we don’t even have a word for the influence of nature and landscape: “we have the terms enculturation and acculturation, but nothing to describe the process of becoming placed or re-placed.” 36 Of course, the very notion that nature and culture may be distinct conceptual or experienced categories is problematic, often critiqued by environmentalists and cultural theorists alike. Donna J. Haraway, in her celebrated writing on the postmodern self as a cyborg, argues against the “discredited breach of nature and culture.” 37 Indeed, to many cultural critics, the concept of a nonsocial writing environment is itself simply illusory. This challenge goes well beyond the familiar recognition that Thoreau and others went to college, walked into town, had their laundry done, their meals cooked, and so on. The challenge to environmental constructivism 156

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posed by contemporary theory argues that nature (and hence natural influence) cannot be known and perhaps does not exist: the very concept of nature is determined by cultural perception and perhaps by language itself. Nature is always already mediated by culture—there is no such thing as pristine, immediate nature but only a landscape upon which our own cultural and commercial values are imposed. The notions of authenticity and the Real Natural West are under attack here. William Cronon calls the notion of unmediated nature a “naive reality” and argues that “ideas of nature never exist outside a cultural context.” 38 I. G. Simmons examines preconditioned perception in Interpreting Nature: Cultural Constructions of the Environment (1993); similarly, Neil Evernden, in The Social Creation of Nature (1992), considers views of nature as a “category, a conceptual container.” 39 More emphatic is Alexander Wilson, who, in his study The Culture of Nature (1992), unhesitatingly voices the dominant contemporary view when he writes that “the whole idea of nature as something separate from human existence is a lie.” For Wilson “our experience of the natural world . . . is always mediated. It is always shaped by rhetorical constructs like photography, industry, advertising, and aesthetics, as well as by institutions like religion, tourism, and education.” 40 While many nature writers and environmentalists express horror at such theorizing of nature, many cultural critics and even ecocritics, when pondering American perceptions of nature, proceed from this vantage. Susan Kollin writes that “recognizing nature as a socially constituted entity is not an arrogant or egocentric concept. . . . Instead, a realization of the ways language limits and constrains our understandings of the world may help us avoid the assumption that science or even certain forms of literary criticism can have unmediated access to the real.” 41 And Alison Byerly, in an essay on “The Uses of Landscape,” “presupposes that what we call nature or wilderness is a fiction, a cultural myth.” 42 In other words, just as an essential “self ” does not exist, “nature” does not exist; nature is socially constructed. When Lewis and Clark envisioned the American West as a “void to be imagined,” they imposed onto an already-populated landscape their own longing for romantic and commercial opportunity and perhaps colonial conquest. If nature is always culturally determined, the claim, then, of nature’s authenticity appears naive, vacant, or disingenuous. Significantly, even from this relativist position the claim of environmental constructivism does not evaporate into thin air but, rather, takes on a new appearance. In this light the claim may yet be understood as a dramatic form of self-positioning. Such an argument does not 157

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immediately validate or dismiss the author’s personal belief in environmental influence but, instead, suggests that the claim also functions as a canonical marker. The author can minimize or even deny agency of invention; it is emphatically a claim of context. These writers are apparently not suggesting that the authentic author is born from the imagination or that the author is somehow established from within. Indeed, the claim follows contemporary theory in acknowledging the construction of authorship— but it also manages to displace the authority of culture, to make cultural influence secondary, at times to erase it as a category of influence. Nature writers might argue that writing can take place in a “naturalized” dialogue with the environment and with environmental memory and that the authentic authorial self is derived not (merely) from cultural institutions but from this environmental interaction. Whether or not they “invent” nature, nature writers certainly assert it in strong, often poetic language, and that assertion of nature inevitably returns as part of the process of authorial self-invention. To write nature is, literally, to create an environment that can, in turn, be understood to create an authorial self. Writers such as Mary Austin, Edward Abbey, Barry Lopez, and Terry Tempest Williams emphasize both the influence of landscape shapes and the emotional (perhaps innate) connection they feel with their natural environment. In turn, these perceptions and memories affect the writer’s imagination, resulting in a creative, aesthetic vision (their authorial identity) indebted to landscape. Thomas J. Lyon, in his introduction to This Incomperable Lande: A Book of American Nature Writing, considers nature’s effect on authorial creativity to be nearly self-evident: “the first and greatest influence on nature writing, of course, is the land itself.” 43 It goes without saying that such natural influence need not be exclusive; nature writers can acknowledge, even celebrate, their cultural influences as well—their readings, their education, their family and friends. The importance of the environmental claim lies in its priority and primacy (“the first and greatest influence”). Terry Tempest Williams, whose palpably genuine and earnest demeanor itself suggests the aura of authenticity, writes: “I am a woman whose ideas have been shaped by the Colorado Plateau and the Great Basin. These ideas are then sorted out through the prism of my culture.” 44 Similarly, Barry Lopez, in his essay “Landscape and Narrative,” describes the human mind as engaging what he terms an “interior” landscape; mental functions are “deeply influenced by where on this earth one goes, what one touches, the patterns one observes in nature.” He concludes that “the inte158

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rior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of an exterior landscape; the shape of the individual mind is affected by land as it is by genes.” 45 These claims of authorial development reveal specific ways in which authors understand and describe their environmental precursors. As verbalized expressions of the land’s effect on human consciousness and on authorial vision, they elucidate the naturalists’ claim of authorial invention and serve as a devastating response to cultural constructivism. The manner in which “the shape of the individual mind is affected by land” amounts to a theory of environmental education, accounting for the way that nature teaches its attentive children and the way that ecological experience influences the developing mind.46 Environmental education is at times a metaphor for the way that nature impacts the self, but it is also a careful codification of environmental influence, providing a socially familiar and workable grammar for an elusive activity. At its most traditional, environmental education suggests that nature teaches its human pupils “about life.” 47 For much of the mid- to late nineteenth century the woods were perceived as offering students lessons in physical toughness and in secularized spirituality. Thoreau “went to the woods” to “front only the essential facts of life, and see if [he] could not learn what it had to teach.” 48 These lessons of life were only infrequently seen as inimically environmental, but nature (the woods) could best “teach” Thoreau and others about the stimulating, rigorous (often manly) demands of social existence. The Boy Scout movement at the end of the century, for example, made a virtue of turning boys into men and used nature as a vehicle for the transformation. Indeed, the wilds of the American West have long been perceived to offer young men economic opportunity and salubrious health. The romantic notion of nature as a teacher continued to thrive into the twentieth century. In The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (1913) John Muir recalls his Scottish childhood, in which “wildness was ever sounding in our ears, and Nature saw to it that besides school lessons and church lessons some of her own lessons should be learned.” 49 The price for these lessons (and the boys’ subsequent tardiness with home chores) was frequently a father’s violent “thrashing,” the awful word repeated for effect. But these thrashings were a punishment the boys endured for the “attraction of the fields and woods.” 50 It was upon arrival in America and the “glorious Wisconsin wilderness” that nature’s lessons held full sway for John and his brother David: “Nature streaming into us, wooingly teaching her wonderful glowing lessons, so unlike the dismal grammar ashes and cinders so 159

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long thrashed into us. Here without knowing it we still were at school; every wild lesson a love lesson, not whipped but charmed into us.” 51 Muir’s depiction of nature’s benign lessons contrasts pointedly with his own father’s more severe methods, the thrashings. By repeating into us, Muir emphasizes the contrast between his teachers and the profoundly beneficial effects of nature’s lessons. As the boys came into their new homeland and simultaneously “into pure wildness,” nature streamed into them. Indeed, anticipating Terry Tempest Williams’s heightened language, Muir envisions (female) nature as a lover, wooing with love lessons; into us thus might be read as an acknowledgment of what Williams calls the “Pansexual” in nature, the ability to interact on a charged and intimate level. At the close of his narrative Muir again emphasizes the conceit of education. After a brief and mostly cheerful reminiscence of his time at the University of Wisconsin, he realizes that he “was far from satisfied with what [he] had learned” and that, rather than stay, he preferred to wander away “on a glorious botanical and geological excursion”—his life in the Sierras. He concludes the book with one longing glance at the university and writes: “There with streaming eyes I bade my blessed Alma Mater farewell. But I was only leaving one University for another, the Wisconsin University for the University of the Wilderness.” 52 That is, he was leaving one “Alma Mater” for another, one educational institution for another, and one “nourishing mother” (translated literally) for another—Mother Nature. Yet for many western nature writers since Muir, the conceit of nature’s teachings goes far beyond such imaginative romanticizations. When Barry Lopez states that we are all “tutored by the land,” he invokes a methodical and deliberate set of lessons. Similarly, the “lessons of the wild” that Gary Snyder would have his readers heed are perhaps less methodical but equally specific and rigorous; “the school where these lessons can be learned, the realms of caribou and elk, elephant and rhinoceros, orca and walrus,” teach the engaged student a detailed ethic about interacting with a living place.53 This discipline may require not only eager students but also those willing to recognize and embrace a radical—as in rooted— cultural outlook, one that sees “no great dichotomy between their culture and nature.” 54 For such peoples “the pathless world of wild nature is a surpassing school and those who have lived through her can be tough and funny teachers.” Living “through” this school means both “surviving” the challenge and, more important, living within a world of natural interdependence. “To be well educated,” Snyder concludes, “is to have learned the songs, proverbs, stories, 160

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sayings, myths (and technologies) that come with this experiencing of the nonhuman members of the local ecological community.” 55 It is, he suggests, to hear and understand these natural voices. Of course, environmental education cannot always be reduced to such formal “schooling”: the term also evokes the broader ways in which nature influences the developing author and consciousness. Essayist David W. Orr, assuming that “the child’s imagination is woven into a home place,” calls for “the establishment of more natural places . . . where children can roam, explore, and imagine.” 56 And in “The Place, the Region, and the Commons” Gary Snyder analyzes nature’s influence; he sets out “to talk about place as an experience and propose a model of what it meant to ‘live in place’ for most of human time, presenting it initially in terms of the steps that a child takes growing into a natural community” (25). But, just as Stegner argued that a child “will perceive in the shapes of that environment,” Snyder asserts that “all of us carry within us a picture of the terrain that was learned roughly between the ages of six and nine” (26). Similarly, Edward Abbey has written that his “deepest emotions—those so deep they lie closer to music than to words—were formed, somehow, by intimate association in childhood with the woods on the hill, the stream that flowed through the pasture, the oaken timbers of the old barn, the well, the springhouse, the sugar maples,” and so on.57 Although Abbey prefers to leave the process intentionally abstract and slightly mystical (“formed, somehow”), he leaves no doubt about this emotional influence, an influence that is frequently, if covertly, exhibited in his writing. (The connection in Abbey’s prose between nature and writing is often felt through the formation and expression of heightened emotion: his essays “are meant to serve as antidotes to despair.”) 58 If Orr, Snyder, and Abbey assert the developmental influence of living in relation to a natural environment, then Terry Tempest Williams dramatically complicates it—leaving intact, however, an overwhelming biological and emotional connection with place. In her autobiographical Refuge (1991) Williams offers a provocative study of the doubled relationships between parent and child, nature and writer. When she writes that she “come[s] from a family with deep roots in the American West” (13), she is simultaneously recognizing her Mormon heritage and her family’s tangible connection (the natural “roots”) with a regional environment. And, although Williams would undoubtedly agree with Lopez’s conclusion that “the shape of the individual mind is affected by land as it is by genes,” she pushes the 161

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idea and questions exactly what is natural and informing in her own genes and how her life is determined by both genetic constructs and landscape. The environmental constructivism at work here is not casually benign, to use the tragically appropriate word: Williams seeks to understand both the positive influence of nature (including Great Salt Lake and the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge) and the devastating effect of a western landscape poisoned with atomic radiation. Her “Prologue” subtly introduces the complicated play of her themes: illness and healing, writing, cultural politics, memory, gender, motherhood, earth, family. She writes: “In the past seven years, Great Salt Lake has advanced and retreated. The Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, devastated by the flood, now begins to heal. Volunteers are beginning to reconstruct the marshes just as I am trying to reconstruct my life. I sit on the floor of my study with journals all around me. I open them and feathers fall from their pages, sand cracks their spines, and sprigs of sage pressed between passages of pain heighten my sense of smell—and I remember the country I come from and how it informs my life. Most of the women in my family are dead. Cancer. At thirty-four, I became the matriarch of my family” (3). When Williams writes of remembering the “country I come from,” she quietly explodes the text—though the reader cannot yet know it. The “country” that “informs” her life is, of course, the natural landscape of Utah: the feathers and sand and sage all help announce that Williams is the Naturalist-in-Residence at the Utah Museum of Natural History, that she is a nature writer, that she literally “come[s] from” the country, that she believes that her “ideas have been shaped by the Colorado Plateau and the Great Basin.” The claim at first seems to be a representative and celebratory example of environmental constructivism. Further, the gentle convergence of her journals and the triptych of rediscovered nature (feather, sand, and sage) all suggest the congenial interaction between writing and nature. Yet this thematized interaction between textuality and ecosystem is far subtler than it appears and cannot be contained within the pressed pages. For one thing it recalls Williams’s own authorial and naturalist past by invoking her earlier book Pieces of White Shell: A Journey to Navajoland (1984). This work, a series of autobiographically reflective essays on nature and culture, consistently foregrounds feathers, sand, and sage in such chapters as “Prologue: A Sprig of Sage,” “Rocks, Sand, and Seeds,” and “A Bouquet of Feathers Bound by Yarn.” As with Refuge, she opens the book by playing the present off of the past. She begins, “Out of my pouch falls a sprig of sage. I 162

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can crush its leaves between my fingers and remember who I am.” 59 Here the sage is not yet pressed, still only potential as a memory trigger. By opening Refuge with the feathers, sage, and sand (interestingly reversing the order of appearance in Pieces of White Shell, perhaps hinting at a return home), Williams is engaging in intertextual storytelling, maybe suggesting that symbols can change over time and that anything that we might call “meaning” may have to be sought outside of textual boundaries (“one can never know for certain,” she writes)—sought in the process of change and transmutation itself. Of course, change is at the heart of Refuge. And each of the natural signifiers also sounds an ominous note: the feather falling from the text, the sand cracking the spine, the sage pressed between “passages of pain.” Each is subtly altering the text, perhaps healing it, perhaps resisting it, perhaps even corrupting it. There is a sense that nature and text here do not quite agree—that the natural elements she previously collected and the journal she previously wrote are out of sync—and that her own history and her own understanding of nature need revision. It is this delicate doing and undoing, like the advance and retreat of Great Salt Lake, like her own “retreat” and “return” announced on the following page, that Williams quietly projects. Part of that personal revision requires a recognition of the inevitable transference between natural landscape and political landscape. Thus, that country that “informs” her life is also the United States, although that meaning is not yet obvious. By signing the preface “ttw July 4, 1990,” Williams evokes a certain sense of national place—and perhaps also evokes Henry David Thoreau’s own retreating/returning act of individual independence at Walden, commenced (at least in metaphor) on July 4, 1845 —although even here the reference is problematized, for she is telling the story of her return “home” from a retreat, altering or even inverting Thoreau’s story of departure/retreat that began 145 years earlier. Although perhaps unintentional, the inversion is also telling because, as we discover much later in the book, her country (in terms of landscape, government, and ideology) is exactly what has poisoned the women of her family with carcinogenic radiation and patriarchal authority. Here she proleptically hints at the “above ground atomic testing in Nevada [that] took place from January 27, 1951 through July 11, 1962,” and the ensuing radiation fallout in Utah (283). By shifting without explanation from that country to death and cancer, Williams anticipates the unspoken connection. And Refuge is on its way toward an outraged and pained attack on cruel government policies and 163

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toward a shattering denunciation of federal laws that allowed family and place to be horribly altered. By suddenly shifting from country to the dead “women in [her] family,” Williams also calls attention to the importance of gender in understanding both nature and nation. A few pages later Williams recounts a visit with a friend to the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, one of the many refuges the book establishes. Williams and her companion “spoke of rage. Of women and landscape. How our bodies and the body of the earth have been mined” (10). “Mined” because both cancer cells and uranium (the two related, lethal elements of this story) are removed from the female/earth body but also “mined” because, as Williams implies, much more has been taken from both: the ability to assert that body and that voice. Mined shows the erasure of the possessive my. (Thoreau uses the same pun to very different effect near the beginning of Walden, also conflating body, earth, and self: “I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine.” Thoreau is coming into a sense of self; Williams remembers losing hers.) 60 Williams suggests that cancer, and especially cancer in women, is a largely unvoiced public health threat. Williams writes that in her family and in her Mormon culture “authority is respected, obedience is revered, and independent thinking is not. . . . We sat in waiting rooms hoping for good news, but always receiving the bad. I cared for [the dying women in her family], bathed their scarred bodies, and kept their secrets” (285 – 86). Similarly, the dangers of atomic testing were kept hidden from the public for decades, and Williams herself did not understand her own unarticulated childhood memories of the tests—she had assumed they were dreams, nightmares. By rhetorically breaking from her country, as it were, Williams is also breaking the silence, speaking the word cancer, giving the word its own isolated sentence. She will later fully voice the threats to these two bodies, women and nature, in her concluding essay, “The Clan of One-Breasted Women”: “The fear and inability to question authority that ultimately killed rural communities in Utah during atmospheric testing of atomic weapons is the same fear I saw in my mother’s body” (286). Refuge refuses to keep the secrets. Country, finally, encompasses all of these meanings. The book’s subtitle, “An Unnatural History of Family and Place,” creates a reverberating conflation of family and place, and that informing country recalls both and the threat to both: “I could not separate the Bird Refuge from my family. . . . The 164

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landscape of my childhood and the landscape of my family, the two things I had always regarded as bedrock, were now subject to change” (40). The country she comes from is thus metaphorically both family and place, both uneasily transforming in front of her. She writes: “What is there about the relationship of a mother that can heal or hurt us? Her womb is the first landscape we inhabit” (50). It is this relationship, this female landscape, that is threatened. Refuge attempts to examine this first landscape, this connection between family and place, between womb and landscape, between self and nature. Williams is intent on finding that part of her own body that is cancer free and that part of her family that precedes the atomic testing. Writing becomes for her a way of adjusting culture and nature—and restoring her own health (and writing) through the latter. When Muir, Abbey, Lopez, Snyder, and Williams consider environmental education—the way that nature teaches, informs, and influences its pupils—they imply that nature offers a form of instruction in living, what Gary Snyder calls the “practice of the wild.” As such, nature itself is often recognized as possessing a form of independent and nonhuman “culture,” though certainly not every writer uses that word. Nature has a “voice” or “voices,” speaks in its own language, has its own history and its own stories. And environmental education is thus a kind of acculturation by nature (the sense of being “placed” that Snyder suggests). Thus, nature writers counter constructivist claims by positing or recognizing that nature’s education is not only formative but also serves the same influencing function as human culture. Language would seem to be an obvious “rhetorical construct” (to return to a phrase from Alexander Wilson’s polemic), a socially developed institution that may influence or even determine our perception of the environment. In implicit response to this constructivist claim, nature writers posit a biota that speaks to them and through them; they take a central and seemingly inviolable foundation of cultural constructivism and reposition it as a natural force. Terry Tempest Williams, for example, suggests that the overwhelming experience of solitude in nature is also a stirring connection: “It renders me fully present. I am desert. I am mountains. I am Great Salt Lake. There are other languages being spoken by wind, water, and wings.” 61 Williams remarks that “we call out—and the land calls back.” 62 Even the titles of familiar works suggest nature’s ability to hold a conversation: Words from the Land (Stephen Trimble’s anthology), Robert Finch’s “What the Stones Said,” Joseph Wood Krutch’s The Voice of the Desert, Annie 165

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Dillard’s Teaching a Stone to Talk, Theodore Roszak’s The Voice of the Earth are only a few examples. Garry Nabhan, writer and ecologist, has said that “people like Ann Zwinger and I back off from the term environmentalism. We prefer to explain what we do as going out into the boonies and interviewing plants.” 63 Barry Lopez, in Arctic Dreams, takes the notion of nature’s language one step farther. Not only does nature speak in a recoverable and understandable tongue, but nature impacts human language as well. In his reconsideration of linguist Benjamin Whorf and of native languages, Lopez argues that “for Whorf, language was something man created in his mind and projected onto reality, something he imposed on the landscape, as though the land were a receptacle for his imagination. I think there are possibly two things wrong with this thought. First, the landscape is not inert; and it is precisely because it is alive that it eventually contradicts the imposition of a reality that does not derive from it. Second, language is not something man imposes on the land. It evolves in his conversation with the land. . . . The very order of the language, the ecology of its sounds and thoughts, derives from the mind’s intercourse with the landscape.” 64 Lopez (here following Inuit culture) emphatically insists that the land is “alive” and that language itself results from human interaction, the “conversation,” with the land. The land is understood to resist human “imposition”; akin to the principle of Gaia, nature seems directed, even intentional in its response. By using the word intercourse, Lopez suggests that the dialogue is an intimate one and one that includes an economic dimension as well. Similarly, in his essay “Tawny Grammar” (the title borrowed from Thoreau’s “Walking”) Gary Snyder argues that both language and written text are intrinsically connected with natural phenomena. He identifies an “ecology of language,” in which “language belongs to our biological nature and writing is just moose-tracks in the snow” (72, 69). Snyder sees language as an inherently natural result of our relation to environment: “language and culture emerge from our biological-social natural existence, animals that we were/are” (17). His ecology of language emphasizes that all human (and, by extension, animal) languages are related; as he says of the “mix of dialects and standard languages” in an Alaskan village, “all are rooted in nature; but their vines and creepers reach worldwide” (72). Writing (the moose tracks) is merely the textualized expression of nature, akin to the “calligraphy of rivers” or the “expanding circles in the trunk of a tree”: in 166

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tracing the Chinese understanding of writing’s history, he concludes that “every kind of writing relates to natural materials” (66). Snyder is ready to acknowledge the demanding “Whorfian challenge” put by a friend: “is there any experience whatsoever that is not mediated by language?” (71). But, by arguing that language is “natural” and environmentally derived, Lopez, Snyder, and others achieve two important ends. First, their claim offers skeptical readers a recognizable and codifiable form of environmental impact. When we speak with a voice educated by nature, the words we use are literally indebted to nature. Second, they defeat the narrow implications of social constructivism that suggest that experience and the cognitive understanding of experience are mediated or predetermined by language. If language is accepted as a nature-based medium, then it follows that, even if our experience is mediated by language it is still essentially mediated by nature. “Language does not impose order on a chaotic universe,” Snyder writers, “but reflects its own wildness back.” 65 Like the other elements of environmental constructivism, this language theory allows for, even endorses, constructivist activity but shifts the final agency back to nature. And, if nature writers write nature, then they do so in a language indebted to, and even authorized by, nature. Finally, contemporary theorists are quick to apply the notion that “all that we know, we know through the prism of ideology.” 66 But nature writers are equally quick to point out that even ideology is influenced by environmental constructivism. We might recall Theodore Roosevelt’s claim that, “as it is with the individual, so it is with the nation”—in other words, just as these writers replace culture with nature as the determining force in the individual author’s life, so they reconceive of the broader national identity. Tuan argues this point, at least in the possibility that landscape affects a country’s self-defining set of myths and beliefs: “environment necessarily provides the major building blocks of autochthonous cosmologies and world views.” 67 Barry Lopez seems to summarize the argument of and for environmental constructivism in his 1983 essay “Yukon-Charley: The Shape of Wilderness.” In his polemic Lopez provides an insight into the formation of self, of author, of language, and of national mythology when he considers the influence of nature. And what begins as a political tract turns into a subtle re-vision of American authorship. Lopez argued that the Reagan administration 167

coming out of the country wishes to reduce “the wilderness controversy” to economic terms, which is like trying to approach the collapse of a national literature as primarily an economic problem. The administration’s attitude reveals an impoverished understanding of the place and history of the physical landscape in human affairs— of its effect, for example, on the evolution and structure of language, or on the development of particular regional literatures, even on the ontogeny of human personalities. Such observations have been offered by writers and artists recently to make a single point: as vital as any single rationale for the preservation of undisturbed landscapes is regard for the profound effect they can have on the direction of human life.68

Lopez’s prose rewards careful reading, for it stands as a detailed reflection on the theory of ecocentric influence (or “effect,” the word Lopez prefers here). Lopez first establishes a rhetorical parallel between wilderness and literature; he uses syllogistic reasoning to align both environmental and literary crises with economic terms. But it is a move of subtle undoing as well, for both wilderness and literature, he implies, cannot be understood in primarily economic terms. Lopez next plays on the negation of economic importance by labeling the Reagan administration’s understanding as “impoverished”; if there is an “economic problem” to overcome, it is governmental ignorance. He then carefully underscores his point by allowing even the parallel construction of wilderness and literature to slip out of alignment, favoring nature: wilderness, Lopez argues, is primary and is creative, affecting (in strategic order) language, literature, and human identity. Wilderness defines the self, defines authenticity. The Example of Mary Austin’s Earth Horizon Perhaps no work by an American nature writer reveals the complicated play of environmental constructivism and authorial self-invention as forcefully as Mary Austin’s autobiography, Earth Horizon. Published in 1932, the book was Austin’s last major literary effort (she died two years later) and stands as one of the most ambitious works of environmental reflection in American literature, dramatically reconsidering the position of the author in relation to both natural and cultural landscapes. As such, it is a representative and revealing example of environmental constructivism, indicating the reaches—and perhaps inevitable limitations— of theoretical applications. Austin uses a sophisticated hybrid, heteroglot style to encode the compet168

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ing influences in her life, producing a multivoiced work that infuses culture with nature and nature with culture. In “The Saga of Polly McAdams,” the eighty-seven page, eleven-chapter “Book One” of Earth Horizon (and the principal subject here), Austin explores the ways that nature, language, gender, and education affected her early childhood development and how those influences predict and determine her authorial self. Indeed, Austin spent a lifetime anticipating, inventing, and reflecting on herself as author—a self-described “woman of genius.” Earth Horizon is only the most deliberate exposition. Austin remembers that even as a child of seven she decided that she would write “all kinds” of books; 69 by 1907, four years after she debuted with The Land of Little Rain, she could confidently write to her publisher, “I think I have it in me to do bigger novels than anybody in the west is doing.” 70 Her ambition to establish “a public identity to circulate in the market through her writing” (in the words of biographer Esther Lanigan Stineman) led her to a number of predictably eccentric devices designed to reflect and advertise her authenticity.71 Austin was not only a nature writer, an amateur ethnologist, a mystic, and a feminist; she was also a tireless self-promoter in the florid tradition of Joaquin Miller, Mark Twain, and even P. T. Barnum. While living in Carmel, California, for example, Austin often donned flamboyant costumes, such as the “leather gown of an Indian princess,” and would notoriously write sitting in “her Paiute wickiup (sacred shelter) perched in a tree.” 72 Later, in New York, she capitalized on her “theatrical” instincts by wearing exaggerated western clothes and “dramatic Indian jewelry.” 73 Impressed by the influence and industry of Frank Hamilton Cushing and Franz Boas, Austin engaged in the popular activities of folklorists, borrowing the aura of “primitive” folk authenticity to showcase her own writing and persona. Despite her genuine interest in cultural anthropology, Austin seemed unaware of at least one central irony: the difference, as Regina Bendix points out, between “anonymous ‘folk’ authenticity and individual, authorial authenticity”; Austin clearly tailored her accoutrements for a marketplace visibility.74 One cannot help but feel the marketing impact of Miller, her California neighbor and precursor, who was still quite visible during Austin’s early career.75 Austin, however, was far more serious about her art and authorial identity than such calculated charades suggest; she took her own “genius” to be an important natural gift deserving independent study.76 Many critics persuasively point to Austin’s considerable authorial ego and contend that she invented herself; indeed, some argue that Earth Horizon is Austin’s testa169

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ment to self-invention—that she had produced her own genius. Melody Graulich, for example, comments on the “act of self-creation in Earth Horizon.” 77 Esther Lanigan Stineman also perceives a deliberate form of selfcreation, remarking that in the autobiography “Austin gives an absorbing account of how a woman of pioneer stock, stimulated by few of the cultural influences that might be expected in a literary life but having faith in her own imagination, leapt over seemingly insurmountable barriers of geography, gender, and class.” 78 Stineman suggests that Austin’s “faith in her own imagination” was the critical influence that allowed her, sui generis, to leap (over both place and culture) and arrive. But, if Austin is inventing herself here—a distinct probability—she is doing so by frequently denying that invention; she carefully introduces the possibility that nature acted as a formative influence and that her writing reflects this influence. Indeed, environmental constructivism can be traced back to her early works, such as The Land of Little Rain (1903) and Lost Borders (1909); Marjorie Pryse has argued that Austin’s early nonfiction “conveys the intensity of connection between natural landscape and human life. [Austin] believed that the writer’s consciousness is influenced by that connection.” 79 In the desert Southwest “the land set the limits,” and similarly the patterns of her life and career were also bounded by natural markers and limits. But such environmental influence is for the most part only implied here; although Austin does write (in Little Rain) that, “to understand the fashion of any life, one must know the land it is lived in and the procession of the year,” she is largely reticent about the direct impact of nature on her consciousness and her writing.80 It is, in Lawrence Buell’s words, “oblique autobiography.” 81 Austin is considerably more direct in The American Rhythm (1923), her quirky and provocative “reèxpression” of “Amerind Songs.” Here Austin pursues a form of textual and authorial authenticity rooted in notions of the primitive and the native. Sometimes called “folk authenticity,” it emerged most visibly at the end of the nineteenth century, concurrent with the closing of the frontier and the loss of vast natural areas, and exists today in a variety of New Age practices, notably what Philip J. Deloria calls “playing Indian.” He writes: The authentic, as numerous scholars have pointed out, is a culturally constructed category created in opposition to a perceived state of inauthenticity. The authentic serves as a way to imagine and idealize the real, the traditional, and the organic in opposition to the

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coming out of the country less satisfying qualities of everyday life. The ways people construct authenticity depend upon both the traumas that define the maligned inauthentic and upon the received heritage that has defined the authentic in the past. Because those seeking authenticity have already defined their own state as inauthentic, they easily locate authenticity in the figure of an Other. This Other can be coded in terms of time (nostalgia or archaism), place (the small town), or culture (Indianness). The quest for such an authentic Other is a characteristically modern phenomenon, one that has often been played out in the contradictions surrounding America’s long and ambivalent engagement with Indianness.82

Mary Austin searches out exactly this Other, this transcultural form of authenticity, and, in turn, claims it as her own. Of course, the authenticity of the folk or of Indianness is itself allied with nature. Playing Indian, as Deloria and others point out, inevitably involves such activities as campouts, hunts, vision quests, and nature ceremonies. Folk culture—primitive, simple, genuine—is understood to be connected with local environmental practice. In The American Rhythm Austin draws on this connection between authenticity, nature, and native cultures—and mixes in her own professional milieu, American literature. After establishing, through assertion more than argument, that “rhythm is experience” and that it affects consciousness, Austin attempts to develop a theory of the imprint of landscape on our individual and national thinking and writing. The condition of early settlement influenced this rhythm, but “something was also added by the land. Poignancy is of the poet’s soul, perhaps, but rhythm is always in his sense; eye and ear have each their part in it. Streams of rhythmic sights and sounds flowed in upon the becoming race of Americans from every natural feature. . . . There was hunger in man for free flung mountain ridges, untrimmed forests, evidence of structure and growth.” 83 Austin goes on to claim that the American Indian’s “primitive mind” has best captured the native and natural rhythm and that our national poetry (specifically the works of Walt Whitman, Edgar Lee Masters, Robert Frost, and Carl Sandburg) is influenced by those beats. As an acknowledgment and expression of environmental constructivism, The American Rhythm is significant but flawed. Austin manages to produce a powerfully lucid articulation of the theory: “native rhythms develop along the track of the rhythmic stimuli arising spontaneously in the environment and are coordinated by the life-sustaining gestures imposed upon us by that environment.” 84 171

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But, because the study is so overdetermined by dubious social science and literary theory (such as her sympathetic but now dated reflections on the “primitive mind”) and because Austin seems so reluctant here to extend her thinking beyond static formulation, The American Rhythm extends a largely reductive theory, not a living demonstration or enduring practice. Austin’s interest in Amerindian rhythms, native cultures, and the folk is also extensively at play in Earth Horizon. Indeed, although Austin represents her personal and authorial development primarily as a dialogue between nature and family, the book frequently claims the related authenticity of folk as well. The work’s title, Earth Horizon, is itself a complicated register of this interplay between cultural and natural symbolisms, patterns, and influences: “In the Rain Song of the Sia, Earth Horizon is the incalculable blue ring of sky meeting earth, which is the source of experience. It is pictured as felt, rays of earth energy running together from the horizon to the middle place where the heart of man, the recipient of experience, is established, and there treasured” (33). This description, which Austin significantly presents as an immediate textual prelude to Mary’s birth, brings together through the medium of song the rays of “earth energy” with the “heart of man,” brings together the sky and the folk (specifically the Zia Indians). The “source of experience”—that is, the source of her own autobiography—is thus the meeting of the mystical (incalculable) and identifiable (“treasured”), the natural and the human. Austin emphasizes these connections, this dialogue, in her brief introduction to the book, describing the “pattern” of her life: “the pattern was set for me, the main lines of it clearly indicated, the important evidences of it cleared, before I had lived the first third of my life. . . . Long before that time it was clear that I would write imaginatively, not only of people, but of the scene, the totality which is called Nature, and that I would give myself intransigently to the quality of experience called Folk, and to the frame of behavior known as Mystical” (vii). Austin thus establishes the point of contact, the horizon in which she is most interested: her childhood contact with the “totality which is called Nature.” Austin’s autobiography is the search for “evidences,” the recognition of relationships and patterns, the literary representation of people, nature, folk. In Earth Horizon, however, Austin goes well beyond a limited anthropology, encoding the process of environmental constructivism through a study of remembered relationships represented through a plurality of different voices. By treating the development of a consciousness from birth through 172

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early childhood, by considering the role of differing educational forces, and by juxtaposing the natural and cultural influences, Earth Horizon serves as an example of, and a critique of, environmental constructivism that is perhaps without parallel. Her earliest memories suggest a young Mary not entirely integrated into her family, increasingly isolated, and beginning to interact with the natural landscape. As Austin matures—marked by the linear progression of her narrative—she increasingly interacts with other voices, including the voices of nature as well as of educational and religious authority. Austin’s autobiography not only acknowledges these voices but allows them room to assert themselves, producing at times a powerfully dialogic text. That Austin’s book may be read as dialogically charged is hardly surprising, for many nature writers enjoy the textualized play of a heteroglot world. Michael J. McDowell writes that “Bakhtin’s theories might be seen as the literary equivalent of ecology, the science of relationships.” 85 But the textual polyphony in Austin’s works finds more than a “literary equivalent” in ecology; rather, the dialogism finds a deliberate foundation in Austin’s passion for ecology and natural science. Susan J. Rosowski has taken a similar tack in her essay “Willa Cather’s Ecology of Place,” arguing that ecology served as a working model of literary production for Austin’s popular contemporary. After reviewing Cather’s undergraduate interest in the natural sciences, Rosowski concludes that “botanical and ecological principles helped shape Cather’s very idea of art.” 86 The same might well be argued of Austin, who (unlike Cather) actually majored in science at college. More to the point, Austin’s commitment to the sciences elucidates her complicated employment of environmental constructivism by offering her a model that seemed to transcend, or at least challenge, the exclusivity of cultural power. Stineman proposes this very idea to explain Austin’s feminism: “The study of science, particularly biology, was opening up the debate about gender differences. . . . Austin developed a lifelong interest in the objectivity claimed by science with regard to women’s biological capabilities as distinct from those that resulted from cultural conditioning.” 87 Similarly, the same interests suggested to Austin the influence of nature on her writing and genius. Throughout Earth Horizon Austin explores both the impact of nature and the impact of culture and encodes the process as a meeting of influences. Austin’s introduction begins to expose the broader intertextual pattern that she is also weaving, the play of text and text and of competing forms of constructivism. Through embedded references to her own previous works, 173

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Austin carefully allows her own authorial voice to take part in the dialogue. Indeed, the intertextual exchange begins before the first word, for Earth Horizon is already a self-aware revision of Austin’s earlier autobiographical novel, A Woman of Genius (1912). Stineman goes so far as to suggest that the novel “was nothing less than a dress rehearsal” for Earth Horizon.88 Both texts follow the development of a promising young woman, her influences, and her battles.89 But, as I will argue, Earth Horizon is also a radical revision: whereas A Woman of Genius reveals, in Stineman’s words, “Austin’s understanding of the cultural construction of gender during the crucial decade after 1900,” Earth Horizon treats instead Austin’s growing interest in the possibility of environmental construction.90 Furthermore, the introductory exposition of A Woman of Genius contrasts tellingly with Earth Horizon, revealing the thematic shift from gender to environment. In the novel Olivia (the fictional stand-in for Austin) begins: “I thought then of writing the life of an accomplished woman, not so much of the accomplishment as of the woman. . . . From the earliest I have been rendered highly suspicious of the social estimate of women, by the general social conspiracy against her telling the truth about herself ” (3 – 4). Thus, like Earth Horizon, the novel begins with a similar explanation of purpose—and with a similar attention to the “earliest” point—but the purpose of the novel is not exploring what she calls (in Earth Horizon) “the mysterious complex called Nature” (78) but, rather, critiquing socialized gender roles. If Earth Horizon explores the authority of nature, it also delivers the story of Austin’s emergence as a literary figure, an author who understands and in turn influences her own cultural moment. Thus, the plurality of genres and voices both blend and compete; Austin displays her multiple early influences, she foregrounds the natural ones, but she finally seeks to activate and establish her own identity as writer. Lawrence Buell has demonstrated that nature writers can employ what he calls an “aesthetics of relinquishment”—a “suspension of ego to the point of feeling the environment to be at least as worthy of attention as oneself and of experiencing oneself as situated among many interacting presences.” 91 Buell suggests that Austin employs this aesthetic in The Land of Little Rain. But in Earth Horizon relinquishment is, perhaps paradoxically, only the beginning—a kind of inchoate emptiness, perhaps even tabula rasa before individual consciousness. Gradually, as Austin describes her increasing sense of voice and self among the “interacting presences,” her own authorial voice quite literally emerges as the dominant tone. Thus, rather than relinquishment, her auto174

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biography enacts a kind of possession of self (recalling both Thoreau’s and Williams’s use of mine). Nevertheless, if she is “weaned” from nature, to use Thoreau’s language, she retains the remembered contribution of nature. Earth Horizon is a part of the remembering and a part of her own homage. In “The Saga of Polly McAdams” Austin describes her early childhood; in doing so, she records a multiplicity of specific influences—notably, family, school, and the outdoors. Austin places great emphasis on her ability to remember her infant experiences (the subject of chap. 5). She describes three early memories, each signaling the interplay between natural and human culture. The first, her “earliest” memory, significant as an “index of dominant interest,” “must have been when Mary herself was two years old: a family gathering, of a Sunday afternoon, probably to inspect [Mary’s mother] Susie’s newest baby, Jennie. The house was full of people, unidentified, but having a sense of kin, with Mary trotting along a boardwalk between the house and the corner of the front yard to the gate in the picket fence. She recalls, besides that, the thick green of the maples overhead and the grass coming up between the boards of the walk” (40). Austin carefully constructs, through the licensing filter of memory, her emerging self. Mary is both inside and outside her reconstructed image. The group is family and those with “a sense of kin,” and the center of attention is her infant sister, Jennie, two years younger than Mary; yet, subtly, Austin also distances herself from the “house . . . full of people.” First, by using the verb inspect, she implies a critical, cold estimation of her baby sister—and, indeed, Austin’s narrative elsewhere suggests a strange alienation between the two siblings. Second, more obviously, Austin drifts away from the house, “trotting along a boardwalk,” outside, near the yard. Finally, as the passage develops, both experiencing Mary and author Mary seem to move away from family and toward nature—nature seems to overwhelm the memory, the “thick green” of the maple leaves becoming sky, and the grass working through the wooden walk, a kind of dialogic subversion. The reenactment, finally, is not about the family gathering but about nature’s effect and the play of memory. Austin’s second early memory reiterates the theme of Mary as an isolated figure in relation to natural environment and family. In this memory Mary and family have been visiting “Uncle Jim Valentine’s”; on the walk home young Mary “wilted down in the middle of the boardwalk,” and, although her father would have carried her, her mother insisted that Mary would “come when she finds she has to.” Mary recalls “feeling very small and faint” and watches “the rest of the family disappear over the top of the hill.” 175

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Mary waits without hope, until “finally over the hill a figure appeared . . . Papa!” (41; Austin’s suspension points). At this point “the recollection snaps off like a broken stick.” Austin literally juxtaposes the hill and her family, envisioning the landscape as alternatively empty and populated. Here, as elsewhere, Austin’s mother appears remote and callous. Her father is the beloved figure, but Austin perhaps anticipates his permanent departure in this scene by foreshadowing his death. Book 1 concludes (some forty-five pages later) with her father’s premature death, the early scene quietly repeated: fearing her father’s imminent death (departure), Mary leaves school early with Jennie, beginning to cry when they “came to the place on Broad Street from which the white headstones of the City Cemetery gleamed on the hill.” In both scenes Austin remembers the hill from the vantage of the boardwalk; here Mary sits down “on the boardwalk in tears” (85), this time her father nowhere in sight. Austin’s third early memory is the most complicated and suggestive: She [Mary] was out-of-doors, blue and a flicker of color overhead. Jennie was in the cradle—a low hooded cradle with solid rockers easy to move about, as distinguished from the crib-cradle to which you were promoted as soon as you ceased to be the baby. Outside, beyond the cradle’s rim, pale round flowers in the grass. Bindweed! Mary knew that was what you called it . . . pale films of color fluttering, and a feeling that went with it . . . it was a long time before you got a name for the feeling, but bindweed you never forgot. Only—this was very odd—when the recollection came back to you, there was sometimes a singular confusion, the bindweed was always there, but it was Mary in the cradle, and Jennie did not come into the picture at all. So it is just possible that Mary was less than two years old when it occurred—bindweed has a long season of blooming and proves nothing. (41– 42; Austin’s suspension points)

Here Austin shows her hand— erasing her sister from the memory and literally revising her own text as she goes: because she might have been “less than two years old when it occurred,” this image now supplants the family gathering as her “earliest memory.” In a sense Austin has killed off Jennie by resituating the scene at a time when Jennie could not have lived (Mary was thus still “the baby”) and replaced Jennie with the bindweed. That is, the passage now circulates between Mary and the bindweed, not Mary and Jen176

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nie. Significantly, bindweed has a double function here, as both plant and noun (“that was what you called it”); Mary is recalling the vision through the vehicle of language, signaling one of the central ideas of the book. Here, and elsewhere, Austin notes the existence of both nature and language, how they are connected and discrete. Further, Austin carefully denudes the family tree, pruning her narrative until both her first and last early memory (first chronologically, last textually) leave only Mary, nature (the sky, the bindweed), and language. And, finally, she subverts even her own narrative by concluding that “bindweed has a long season of blooming and proves nothing.” She summarizes the shifting of her thoughts by suggesting that the plant itself cannot be an adequate marker, further mystifying the event. Indeed, Austin immediately summarizes these three early memories by remarking that “the only thing worth noting in all these is that they occurred out-of-doors. Not, as it was afterward proved, that there weren’t other things remembered out of the first two and a half years, but these were the only things that spontaneously recurred to mind” (42). This passage, an independent paragraph, suggests Austin’s careful desire to shape not only her own remembered experience but the reader’s experience of the text as well. By remarking on the “only thing worth noting,” Austin offers up a tidy interpretation of the often confusing scenes, heralding the importance of nature in her own development. The foregrounding of nature in the images “that spontaneously recurred to mind” suggests the importance of imprinted landscape on later life, as Stegner and Tuan would insist. Where she might comment on the presence—and transforming absence— of family, she conspicuously does not and thus reenacts the very distancing and silencing of family occurring in each passage. Finally, it is worth noting that Austin oddly admits that there were other things remembered, the assertion reluctantly delivered through a double negative (“Not . . . weren’t”)—but this acknowledgment seems to belie the chapter opening, in which she somewhat duplicitously claims that “Mary recalls but two or three unrelated flashes” (40). Austin’s use of afterward is consequently jarring, having no obvious temporal referent: as if she remembered other moments only after writing the first three. It appears as if Austin intends to include only those memories that emphasize environmental construction at work, and her self-interpretation reinscribes that theme. Austin’s next chapter, chapter 6, is literally the center of the first book and casts itself forward and backward with ambitious élan. Austin uses the chapter to deploy a central theme: her own relation as developing author to 177

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the complex of environmentally occurring voices, including her own. She begins by looking backward at the variety of her late childhood memories, worth quoting at some length: “All these things come back with the shattered brilliance of light through stained glass. I remember the orchard with great clumps of frail spring-beauties coming up through the sod; the smell of budding sassafras on the winds of March, and the sheets of blue violets about rotting tree-trunks in the woodlot. I remember the tree toads musically trilling, the katydids in the hickory tree by the pump, and a raw Yorkshire lad who had come to work for Father, not able to sleep because of them. I more than recall the hot honey-scent of red clover, and the heavy, low flying bumble-bees” (48). Figuratively filtering her memory like “light through stained glass,” Austin combines a variety of sensory impressions: smells and visions and sounds that, like ecological dialogism, run into one another and then out again. The chapter’s opening emphasizes beginnings: springtime (“spring-beauties,” “the winds of March”), youth (“a raw Yorkshire lad”), and nature’s song (“tree toads musically trilling”). But Austin wants more than a simple catalogue of natural memories. She wants to demonstrate how these images also connect with human voices and historical impressions. She soon moves from spring to summer, telling of “army worms; tobacco worms; potato bugs”—and then, midparagraph, toward the farming anecdotes her father “used to collect.” These stories in turn recall her mother’s singing, specifically the “Negro spiritual,” which leads Austin to the “evenings” when Mose Drakefield, a woodcutter and “the town’s sole ‘colored man,’” would sing and call out “Co’d wood, co’d wood.” Austin concludes the series of recollections with “night memories” of her parents pointing out the “constellation of the drinking-gourd,” the stars of the northern sky. She associates this memory with a “high piercing plaint,” a folk song retelling the journey of runaway slaves who escape by “bearing north by the star pointer of the drinkinggourd, picking up the way marks of creeks and rivers toward the stations of the Underground.” Austin uses the natural cycle of the day (and, to some extent, the year) as her organizing principle, itself suggesting the connection between nature and human events. The convergence of early childhood memory, stellar landscape, song, and historical progressions epitomizes Austin’s intention—to reveal the dialogue between the natural world and the human, between her memory and her development. Austin uses these heteroglot techniques to prepare her text for the chapter’s ambitious reach: an exploration of Mary’s own relation to other voices 178

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—the voices of God, of other religious authorities, of nature, and of her own earlier texts. She begins by retelling her spiritual encounter with “God,” a moment of youthful transcendence apparently modeled on the Buddha’s transformation under the bodhi tree. Austin had first publicly recounted this revelation in fustian detail a year earlier in Experiences Facing Death (1931). But, rather than give a complete description in Earth Horizon, she writes simply: “And then God happened to Mary under the walnut tree. . . . When I first wrote of how Mary went down to the walnut tree at the bottom of the orchard, as she did in Experiences Facing Death, Mary-byherself, and felt herself in the bee and the bee in the flower and the flower in God, I put her years at seven, but I know now it couldn’t have been” (51–52). Austin curiously forgoes an examination of the actual experience, summing it up in one terse if allusive sentence. Her game here is redating the event based on reconsidered proof (recalling the predating of the bindweed memory). In order to prove that she was younger than originally thought, she argues first that, “at seven, Mary was in the fourth grade” and already had a “ticket to the circulating library”—that is, had by then considerable experience walking out alone. But, because the walnut tree episode “was the first clear recollection of the way the land lay between her house and Rinaker’s Hill” and was the first time she went “timidly” alone away from the house and toward the orchard, she argues that it must have occurred earlier than age seven. Her second point of proof is that this initial encounter with God predated a more formal understanding of religious authority that she connects with the custom of “spending Sunday at Grandpa’s. . . . And that didn’t happen until after Mary had begun to go regularly to school at six.” Austin concludes that “the very latest that Mary’s religious experience could have dated would, by the evidence of the wild foxglove, be late June of the summer of half-past five.” Why would Austin spend so little time commenting on the spiritual turning point of her life and so much time on the exact date? The answer can only be that she desires to revise herself and consequently foreground the moment of natural, precultural encounter. She makes primary, first and foremost, the interaction and union with the bee and flower and God, insisting that the socializing institutions of youth (school, library, and religion) were secondary and contingent. But what is especially curious about this twice-told tale is that Austin spins a Nabokovian web of misdirection, conspicuously misquoting herself and playfully manipulating the reader. In her initial account in Experiences Facing Death she does not identify her age as 179

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seven as she implies here but as “between five and six”—the exact age her Earth Horizon calculations finally determine. More astounding, Austin actually includes the original passage from Experiences Facing Death (with her correct age) in her notes at the end of Earth Horizon. She seems to be daring the reader to crosscheck her claims—to discover her untruth. Finally, the “evidence of the wild foxglove,” purportedly proving her age, is nowhere explained in Earth Horizon (though it undoubtedly refers to the “flower”) but, indeed, is found in the very passage of Experiences Facing Death quoted in the back of the book. In other words, no possible sense can be made of this crucial moment in Earth Horizon without reference to Austin’s earlier work or at least the quoted passage in the notes—and any such meaning is immediately subverted by Austin’s strategic contradiction about her age. Austin can only be calling attention to the uneasy authority of text; she herself leaves the “wild foxglove” as evidence, as a remnant of a natural world that, like the bindweed, proves everything and nothing at the same time. Having emphasized to this point the role of nature and language and their influence, through memory, on the self, Austin turns in chapters 7 and 8 to the role of formal education in her youth. Mary started school at an early age, “five and a half ” (again, the approximate age of her experience of God), in part because her mother “did not know . . . what on earth to do with her.” Austin is critical of enrolling young children in school and of the attitude that saw “‘nothing else to do with [children]’ but crowd them into the schoolroom as early as possible, to begin these incredible sessions of desksitting and the stultification of young intelligence by hours of mock business, occasionally punctuated by boring recitations” (58). In contrast to such thinking, Austin endorses the role of nature in childhood development: an “extra hour of fresh air and sunlight was necessary to growth and health.” In advocating the importance of the outdoors, Austin employs the metaphor of human growth: school at that age results in “stultification.” More subtly, Austin soon turns away from formal education toward the relation between education and environment. She begins chapter 8 by declaring, “The business of going to school appreciably widened the known world.” Although this sentence may sound like a familiar, even trite, acknowledgment that education expanded her horizons, Austin is actually playing on the word going. She means, quite literally, that she benefited from the daily walk between home and classroom. “There were three ways of getting [to school] and home again,” and each path provided both natural and cultural vistas. “Plum [Street] to Second South,” for example, took 180

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Mary “past a gullied thicket where in the spring there were blossoming haws and wild crab-apples, with bluebells under them,” and later past the “general store” at the top of a hill, where “there were Indian baskets for sale . . . bundles of wild herbs and roots, and huddled in among unfamiliar German sausages and cheeses, quaint wooden implements” (65). The detail of the walks to school far exceeds the details of school itself—here, even the store suggests the dialogue of remembered visions: a range of cultures (midwestern, German, Indian) and of nature (the hilltop setting, the wild herbs and roots). And each of these cultural and natural sights, in its way, became a source for Austin’s own writerly vision. Austin comes close to summing up her own brand of environmental constructivism near the end of “The Saga of Polly McAdams”: “There were always for Mary two interchangeable approaches to the mysterious complex called Nature.” In the first “she could pass by way of the little animal’s frisking response to bright airs and warm sun . . . so easily into the little human’s appetite.” The second approach was to recognize that “there was always the chance of being caught up into an absorbed contemplation of the mere appearance of things for their own sake; the pattern of a leaf or blossom” (78). These two approaches (reacting as an animal and reflecting abstractly) indicate a kind of divide between a unity with nature and a contemplative distance—a divide that recalls the earth horizon itself and Austin’s attempt to cross that divide. Austin sees the two approaches as “interchangeable” because she hopes to link, at least within her text’s reasoning, the influence of nature and culture. Her vision of environmental constructivism is that ambitious: she invents herself as being invented by nature (first) and culture (second) and celebrates the dialogue within herself, within her writing, within her world. The result is that Austin can present herself as a writer of high culture but a writer whose very sense of culture is grounded in place. Place does not transcend culture but creates, even “constructs,” it. At the same time, Austin asks us to attend to her own inventions, her own authorial power. Austin is indeed a woman of genius, but that term comes to mean something much more than intellectual or social brilliance. Rather, genius takes on its more evocative meanings, as both a unique inner character and a spirit of place. Austin thus becomes doubly authentic in that she claims her own originality and also claims a deep and inviolable connection to nature. 181

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“Born Again”: The Rebirth of the Author During one of the long meditation retreats called sesshin, the Ro¯shi lectured on the phrase “The perfect way is without difficulty. Strive hard!” This is the fundamental paradox of the way. — gary snyder, “On the Path, Off the Trail”

It probably goes without saying that most nature writers, ecocritics, ecofeminists, ecopsychologists, and monkey-wrenchers— environmentalists, for short—fear that as a culture we have lost an authentic and vitalizing connection with nature. We are alienated from our local and global environments and must, in Gary Snyder’s words, “resolve the dichotomy of the civilized and the wild” (23). Environmental constructivism, as a canonical strategy of self-invention, may offer nature writers a logical and effective method for achieving this ambitious goal. To be sure, many ecothinkers have speculated on how to “make intimate contact with the real world, real self,” again in Snyder’s words (94), but that connection with what can only be called authenticity itself is elusive. Numerous writers and thinkers call for a fundamental change in the central ideologies of Western civilization, decrying that split between mind and nature, subject and object, that has resulted in both individual isolation and environmental exploitation. In The Environmental Imagination Lawrence Buell summarizes: “If, as environmental philosophers contend, western metaphysics and ethics need revision . . . then environmental crisis involves a crisis of the imagination the amelioration of which depends on finding better ways of imagining nature and humanity’s relation to it.” 92 And perhaps green thinking has found a ripe moment; as Irene Diamond points out: “the breakdown of Western metaphysics, or the ‘postmodern condition,’ contains within it much more reason for hope than many of its academic apostles would lead one to believe. The loss of historical verities concerning values, cultures, and persons allows all of us to imagine the world anew.” 93 Frankly, despite a few positive signs, it is difficult to see exactly where and how the “postmodern condition” has altered the way most Americans perceive and treat nature. Imagining the world anew is not an easy task, and Jack Turner speaks for many when he laments “our preference for artifice, copy, simulation, and surrogate, for the engineered and the managed instead of the natural.” 94 Still, attempts have been made, and a short review helps convey both the hope and challenge. Aldo Leopold suggested that we 182

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“think like a mountain.” Edward Abbey, as always difficult to pin down, favored among many practices individual opportunities to connect with nature and endorsed an active disruption in federal control of public land. Like Terry Tempest Williams, Doug Peacock found therapeutic recovery in natural connection; he had returned from the Vietnam War “estranged from [his] own time” and recovered his sense of identity and even sanity through interaction with “wild places and grizzly bears.” 95 Wes Jackson has made the case for rethinking our attitudes toward science, sustainability, and progress and for the possibility of “becoming native to this place,” in his book’s title.96 Max Oelschlaeger discusses the way that deep ecologists “offer a variety of paradigmatic alternatives to the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm.” Warwick Fox, for example, “argues that deep ecology hinges on the idea that there is no ontological divide between human and nonhuman.” 97 Oelschlaeger himself has argued in Caring for Creation: An Ecumenical Approach to the Environmental Crisis that various forms of spirituality offer a powerful hope for reconnection. And many who study, practice, and teach Buddhism, such as Joanna Macy and John Daido Loori, emphasize nonduality and the codependent arising of all things, pointing to a new “turning of the wheel,” a new flowering of the dharma. Answers and hopes arrive from more traditional academic sources as well: David Orr speaks eloquently for specific kinds of pedagogical changes in the way we run our schools and universities, emphasizing practical knowledge and biophilial principles (and principals). Gregory Bateson, lamenting the history of institutional learning that emphasizes difference and division, argues for a “patterns which connect,” a “necessary unity of mind and nature.” 98 Lawrence Buell suggests an equally radical form of literary theory; through a reconsideration of the “most searching works of environmental reflection,” he argues that “environmental interpretation requires us to rethink our assumptions about the nature of representation, reference, metaphor, characterization, personae, and canonicity.” 99 Some cultural critics have called for an “environmental cultural studies” that recognizes that nature “is created within particular social contexts”: as Susan Kollin puts it, “The interdisciplinarity of environmental cultural studies allows us to see the various interconnectedness of social phenomena that occur across forms of knowledge, an interconnection that is vital to the field of environmentalism.” 100 Ecofeminists seek nothing short of a revolution: to overturn “both the ideological assumptions and the hierarchical structures of power and domination that together serve to hold the majority of 183

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earth’s inhabitants in thrall to the privileged minority.” 101 And Donna J. Haraway undoes the relationship between human and nature, arguing that “by the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.” And thus, for Haraway, “nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other.” 102 One of the most frequently voiced approaches to escaping subjectivity and its resulting environmental alienation is that we adopt a non-occidental (often Native American) perspective that realizes an intimate, if often mystically undetermined, connection with nature. Mary Austin expressed this hope as well as any when she imagined that connection as an “earth horizon,” the “incalculable blue ring of sky meeting earth.” Earth horizon is the point where experience and environment meet. But the process of altering one’s entire relation to place is, to say the least, formidable. How exactly does a person born and educated in the United States ignore centuries of Euroamerican culture? How does a person create a new value system, a new aesthetic, a new understanding of the world? Gary Snyder offers at once the most reasonable and most radical solution to the problem of alienation from environment: “for the non-Native American to become at home on this continent, he or she must be born again in this hemisphere, on this continent, properly called Turtle Island” (40). Snyder, as always sensitive to religio-mystical dimensions of existence, puns on born-again fundamentalism, but he is quite serious about the necessity of remaking the “real self ”—the authentic self—in relation to natural place. Environmental constructivism is a process by which authors can connect a priori with an immediate and “real” nature and can simultaneously be reborn, inventing themselves as both private and public figures. I began this chapter by asking whether environmental constructivism is a sincere and legitimate theory or a strategy of self-invention. I answered both. It is both and neither as well. Environmental constructivism might best be termed a practice, a “way” that is without difficulty and nearly impossible to achieve. It demands that: a connection be made with nature through (what Buell calls) the “relinquishment of self,” the idea already on its way toward both postmodern “schizophrenia” and Zen emptiness. But this relinquishment does not occur necessarily at the textual level, but at the

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coming out of the country meta-level of creation itself. Both individual power and cultural power are relinquished, and nature’s identity-creating authority is acknowledged. Paradoxically, environmental constructivism also teaches that, through reflection, discipline, and relinquishment, a new self is born, is taught, becomes sentient and conscious. The sense of being created (step 1) and the sense of being creator (step 2) converge in the position of the author. For an author, to be “born again” is to reinvent the self— consciously, laboriously —and to assert the primary influence of nature. So, when John Haines writes that, “as a poet [he] was born in a particular place, a hillside overlooking the Tanana River in central Alaska,” he means much more than metaphor and much more than a self-fashioning claim of agency.

Finally, if environmental constructivism seems author empowering in that it advances the possibility of rebirth, it also emphasizes the fragility and limitations of green authorship. If nature writers relinquish themselves to the “interacting presences” of ecology, then the environmental crisis is itself a threat to authorship. The “life” and preservation of the author are linked with the life and preservation of nature. In wildness is the preservation of the word.

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6 INSIDE OUT IN THE POSTMODERN WEST

Text Not Available In October 2000 the Western Literature Association held the banquet for its annual conference at the National Cowboy Museum and Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.1 It is a marvelous place. The outside looks like a vaguely faded sports complex surrounded by a massive parking lot (picture a Jai Alai fronton from the 1970s), but the inside is spacious, bright, impressive, and even elegant. One walks from a gallery of classic western painting (including works by Albert Bierstadt, Charles Marion Russell, and Frederic Remington) to one of contemporary Native American art; from a room of faded publicity posters for faded Westerns to a room of ornate show saddles. On the floor of one room is a large stone map of the West, showing the routes of famous cattle drives; in the same room is a large diorama of mealtime on the trail, a plastic mannequin preparing vittles at an “authentic” chuck wagon. And at one end of the museum (though the layout cheerfully precludes any sense of progression or direction) there is a reconstructed rodeo pen. The railings of the pen trick the eye—they are carefully painted with small reddish brown specks that resemble kicked-up mud. Nearby is a television playing videos of rodeo competitions. Best of all is the long hall just beyond the admission booth that leads to the galleries. It is a clean, well-lighted place lined with portraits of wellknown actors from well-known Westerns. There is Ronald Reagan, John Wayne, and Dennis Weaver, dressed up in familiar western garb. Despite their reassuring smiles, the effect is vaguely unnerving. At first the viewer isn’t sure: are we looking at rugged cowboys, western heroes, or movie stars? Why is Ronald Reagan in the Cowboy Hall of Fame? (There is also a sculpture of him, slightly larger than real life—if “real life” is the best point of comparison.) The portraits themselves have a sunny intensity that leaves one feeling almost giddy even after one realizes that most of them are almost certainly painted from photographs or publicity stills, making them reproductions of reproductions of actors posing for commercial pictures 186

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for movies in which they play western heroes. Do these portraits merely greet tourists with reassuringly familiar western faces? Do they reinscribe the old fantasies of the Old West? Do they serve to lead viewers gradually toward a more authentic history in the following rooms, establishing the imitation in order to deliver the real? Or do they serve to eliminate the distinction between real and copy? Readers of Umberto Eco’s essay “Travels in Hyperreality” will recognize the museum’s mixture of copy and original, high and low art—and so will readers of western literature. When the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan displayed “The Art of the Motorcycle” in 1998, art critics thrilled or scoffed at the juxtaposition of Frank Lloyd Wright’s storied building and high-chrome Harley-Davidsons. Indeed, that juxtaposition seemed to be part of the exhibit’s intent. The Cowboy Museum delivers a similar sense of jarring, scintillating contradiction, but it does so apparently unconscious of the act. The mixture of authentic and imitation, popular and elite, colonizer and colonized, seems unexamined. Representation becomes inseparable from history; history, everywhere on display, seems adrift. Eco undertook his American odyssey in search of the “Absolute Fake” and discovered a culture suffering from amnesia and emptiness: “the frantic desire for the Almost Real arises only as a neurotic reaction to the vacuum of memories; the Absolute Fake is offspring of the unhappy awareness of a present without depth.” 2 The Absolute Real and Absolute Fake become indistinguishable, the only solution for a culture overwhelmed by both. In turn we might say that western American literature enacts, if not precipitates, this undoing of authenticity, realism, and representation. Remarkably, it also simultaneously critiques this very process. This chapter serves as a conclusion, reframing the book’s central arguments. By studying the largely unexamined relationship between postmodernism, regionalism, ethnicity, and authenticity, I hope to reconsider how western authors deploy the claim of authenticity. Admittedly, this chapter ranges widely, from Borges to Silko to Baudrillard, and frequently assumes an informal tone—the better, I hope, to confront the implications of the western authenticity game in today’s literary and academic cultures. If, as so often seems the case in a postmodern climate, nothing is true and everything is permitted, in the West an alternative presents itself: everything is true and nothing is permitted. Between these axioms lies the heart of the contemporary literary West. 187

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Review: The Postmodern Pull of Authenticity Throughout this book I have implicitly asked: what is the relationship between western history and western literature? I take this question to be the single most important challenge for contemporary western literary historians and critics. The traditional answers credit the primary power of history, relegating literature to the status of imitation; at best the terms are seen as codependent, propping each other up. As Don D. Walker perceptively put it, for many readers and critics, western “history and literature supposedly complement each other,” and in this scheme “literature depends on a close detailing of places as they were and experiences as they could have happened. The imagination functions only in imitation of what history offers.” Walker concludes that literature’s “relationship with history has been onesided and vitiating to [literature’s] value.” 3 We might ask: must a “regional” literature always refer back to regional history and place? What if we consider the possibility that literature is the primary creative influence, that regional writing projects history and place? Or, what if we unsettle the notion of difference—what if we treat the difference between history and literature, between original and imitation, as being so complex, or tiresome, as to be indeterminable, even irrelevant? I have not attempted to answer these questions directly but, rather, to consider a series of possibilities, answers (and more questions) gleaned from the site of authorship. I have chosen to study authors in large part because they have so carefully framed their own writing. I admit to a fascination with authorial power and even “genius,” but that is not really the point here. In fact, I believe that ultimately literature escapes authorial control and runs wild; the fun is in watching authors try to corral that energy and power. I have not argued so much that individual authors have invented western reality, though that may be implicit, but, rather, that authors, by deploying a discourse of authenticity, have helped to define the terms of both production and reception and that authors in turn are defined and limited by the discourse as well. We might say that the tension between western cultural history and western authorship exists on the playing field of authenticity. And a component of this discourse, like a command in a computer program, is that it erases itself as discourse. By so consistently claiming reliable, authentic authorship and reliable, authentic representation, these writers conceal their creative designs and self-inventions. Western literature so often seems banal and simple, at least to outsiders and canon makers, because it appears to reflect in slightly faded tones the Real West. It is a 188

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copy, not the original. But that apparent banality and “surfaceness” is itself shockingly deceptive, marking the successful creative powers of the claim of authenticity. It’s outrageous: authors claim that the West is primary and their work is secondary, a double invention that assumes what it is arguing for—the Real West and representational realism. By and large western literary criticism continues to see reality as controlling western literature. Western writing is read in relation to historical truth and representational accuracy. Western critics, rather than claiming for themselves the arena of representation and lyricism, demand the arena of history. This tradition of reading for authenticity seems especially unnecessary given the transition to cultural studies as the dominant interpretive practice over the last decade. Following the lead of Hayden White and his theory of tropology, cultural studies and poststructuralism in general would seem to preclude a reliance on authenticity. In Cultural History and Postmodernity Mark Poster has written that, for the cultural historian, “texts do more and less than represent: they configure what they point to, and they are configured by it. To the extent that discourse configures what it indicates, it is a fiction as much as a representation. When reality and fiction are seen as permeable to one another, material reality has a cultural component, and culture is material.” 4 Perhaps the problem is that western literary criticism seems to have followed an unusual course, one quite different from the broader run of academic reading practices: it jumped from a traditional form of historicism to a newer model, cultural studies, without going through any intermediate phase of structuralism, poststructuralism, or deconstruction. I think it’s fair to say that, in general, we can find very few examples of western deconstruction, hermeneutics, semiotics, reader response, or even narratology. In other words, those theories that study language and textuality were largely, if not exclusively, bypassed. What does this leap mean for the development of the western critical tradition? My concern is that the new cultural studies—an approach that I often practice—risks reinscribing and in fact exaggerating the relationship between narrative and history, between literature and the West. Does it not participate yet again in what Baudrillard calls the “production of the real”? Does cultural theory assume, even in its poststructuralist relativism and irony, a closeted sense of real history, real culture, authentic knowledge? Furthermore, the beginning of the twenty-first century is witness to a new realism, a post-postmodern realism that rejects the relativist whims of postmodern theory and its “need to subvert or dismantle identities” and 189

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advocates a renewed commitment to social justice and ethics. Pronouncing an end to postmodernism, scholars such as Michael Hames-García and Satya P. Mohanty employ a “postpositivist realism” that, according to Hames-García, “entails both a critical reconceptualization of objectivity and an analysis and accommodation of the sources of error, thereby avoiding the pitfalls of both essentialist and relativist responses to the problems of identity and justice.” 5 Mohanty, without denying that identity and experience may be “constructed” in certain ways, argues that they are nevertheless “real”; “their ‘reality’ consists in their referring outward, to causally significant features of the social world.” 6 And, since the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, literary critics have increasingly warmed to the thought of authenticity as an antidote to both the world’s despairing emptiness and their own past attachment to abstract theory. This “return of the real,” to borrow a phrase from art critic Hal Foster, like earlier forms and theories of realism, promises to produce dramatic readings of western literature and the West itself, often by emphasizing historical conditions, class conflicts, and material culture.7 Yet, if only because western criticism has yet to embrace either textual hermeneutics or postmodern theory, such an approach in western studies risks once again collapsing literature into the real, into historiography. To be fair, what does regionalism mean if the connection between place and representation is radically disrupted? The interplay between reality and fiction, between authenticity and inauthenticity, is so centralized in the western critical imagination that it is invisible. Indeed, the West, as Lee Clark Mitchell argues, “has always been . . . an ideological terrain reinvented with each generation of fears and hopes.” 8 This reinvention, no matter how romantic or ludicrous, has consistently produced a renewed Real West or New West, in large part by insisting on an accessible distinction between authentic and inauthentic narrative. In many ways “inauthentic” Westerns, dime novels, and romances that define one end of western literature’s spectrum serve to authenticate the other end, that of Willa Cather and Wallace Stegner. But once authenticity is seen as a cultural construction, then obviously the distinction becomes undone. Baudrillard insists that Disneyland exists “in order to make us believe that the rest [of the world] is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real, but belong to the hyperreal order.” 9 Using this example, Christopher Norris points out that Baudrillard denies “the possibility of drawing a line between real and fictive, or authentic and inauthentic modes 190

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of knowledge.” 10 As if determined to prove Baudrillard right, in 2001 the Disney Company produced its own commentary in the form of a new theme park, named the “California Adventure.” Located outside of Los Angeles, this simulation of California offers visitors the unthinkable: the opportunity to have an authentic California experience without ever leaving California. Tourists can experience an “eight-acre mini-wilderness” named Grizzly Peak, can stroll around “Pacific Wharf,” and can visit an “authentic, working” tortilla factory. It seems anticlimactic to read Baudrillard’s analysis of the postmodern world, an analysis that suggests that the sign and the referent may mimic each other but are entirely unconnected and ungrounded. Still, western writing clearly does cultural work, if only by pointing to the condition of hyperreality. We tend to say that cultures invent narratives, or “myths,” that explain the experience of living in a place. The myth about myths has it that shepherds in ancient Greece looked into the night sky and devised stories about gods and monsters; thousands of miles away native peoples living on what some called Turtle Island looked around and created legends about Bear and Frog. But, when it comes to western literary history, the opposite may well be true: the narratives invent the place, invented the place even before contact. It is a fine example of what Baudrillard calls the “precession of simulacra.” This condition may not be that unusual, indeed may be inevitable in a colonizing culture that carries myths in anticipation—John Winthrop’s Arbella sermon comes to mind—but it remains significant, for it both underscores the importance of western literature and teaches us something about our broader national myths. Our search for the authentic America inevitably leads us to the West, to western narratives . . . and thus to simulacra. This fact is not necessarily lamentable, nor does it diminish the West or America. But, at the very least, it should make us reevaluate western literature. What if we treat western literature not as a record of history but as a record of creative imagining? What if we divorce, say, a Cather or Stegner or Momaday novel from history and, instead, treat it purely as a work of the imagination? This is hardly to deny the social influence of the work, nor is it to deny the author’s devotion to place, but simply to recognize the work’s rhetorical power. Such a move may or may not change our appreciation of Cather, Stegner, or Momaday, but, to the degree that we shake up the idea of textual authenticity, such a move may actually start to distort our perception of western culture and even reality itself. Fredric Jameson argues that a central feature of postmodernism is the “transformation of reality into images,” and equally interesting is the cor191

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responding reversal, images transformed into reality.11 One might even say that in western literature the image simulates the West. Baudrillard writes that simulation is “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal.” 12 I tend to see western literature as exactly that: a series of simulations that model reality for us. One should not be stunned that such is the case with much of contemporary western writing—Baudrillard, Jameson, and others calmly tell us that today the image is no longer referring to any reality and that the postmodern world is inevitably isolated, through the logic of late capitalism, from any reality. What I do find stunning is that western literature began what Baudrillard calls the “production of the real” at least two hundred years ago; that western literature took this production as a primary goal; and that the history of this production has been so carefully erased that we no longer see it. In other words, western literature has always been the first and best example of postmodern writing in American literary history. Jorge Luis Borges, whose writerly vision stretched to include figures such as Bret Harte and Billy the Kid, provides a fine allegory for this condition in his story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” Borges describes a literary hoax with striking consequences: a “benevolent secret society” invents an imaginary planet, Tlön, complete with its own language, philosophy, mathematics, literature, and even laws of physics. This secret brotherhood produces a forty-volume encyclopedia of Tlön and places it in libraries. Over time Tlön not only becomes accepted as a real world but begins to replace the existing world. Borges calls this the “first intrusion of the fantastic world into the real one.” 13 “Almost immediately,” writes Borges, “reality gave ground on more than one point. The truth is that it hankered to give ground.” By the end of the story the narrator laments that reality was essentially superseded: “Now, the conjectural ‘primitive language’ of Tlön has found its way into the schools. Now, the teaching of its harmonious history, full of stirring episodes, has obliterated the history which dominated my childhood. Now, in all memories, a fictitious past occupies the place of any other.” 14 It is perhaps obvious how this scenario may work as an allegory for western cultural history. A textual (and artistic, musical, and cinematic) tradition arises that not only distorts actual history but replaces it with a kind of fantasy. This fantastic world gradually intrudes on the real one until it becomes established as reality itself—indeed, people “hanker” to believe the story and what it says about them; they want to trust this new authenticity. Thus, people live in a hyperreal world, a simulacrum in which 192

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reality is only a copy, a set of invented images. Or, as Fredric Jameson writes, “the past as ‘referent’ finds itself gradually bracketed, and then effaced altogether, leaving us with nothing but texts.” 15 The end of history never seemed so real. To a certain degree this allegory is rather banal. Of course “mythological” works, as we call them, intrude on history. This fact only gets interesting when it becomes absolute. But, ultimately, I am more interested in the formal qualities and creative complexities of the encyclopedia than I am in either the “fantastic world” of Tlön or the “real one.” I’m not concerned so much in lifting the veil of the western myth as I am in studying the veil itself— examining the craftsmanship and artistry of the veil. I would recognize: (1) the undervalued aesthetic and imaginative component of western literature; (2) the extraordinary way in which that literature has erased its own sense of that aesthetic and emphasized, instead, its authenticity: western writers generally claim that their work is authentic rather than creative, so that, when Krista Comer suggests that for a hybridized, postmodern culture “there can be no such thing as western authenticity,” she is presenting a case against the claims of western writers, even many contemporary western writers; 16 and (3) the unintentional complicity of western literary criticism in reinscribing the centrality of textual realism, even in an academic age that derides the notion of mimetic realism. Ecce Pomo Sitting in the kitchen clicking his slides through the handheld device. He specialized in slides of the great West. He called it the great West and it was, it is, look at it, his 3-D slides of the trail ride down the canyon on muleback, or the Canyon Dons the Velvety Cloak of Twilight, and that’s exactly what it did, his completely unreachable West, and he sat in the kitchen because the light was better there. — don delillo, Underworld

Throughout western literary history authors have consistently invented themselves as authorities, their work as reliable, and their West as real, even though these dimensions of authorial, textual, and regional identity have never been internally stable. Narratives that seem to claim otherwise— dime novels, tall tales, adventure stories—are, again, ultimately propping up the idea of authenticity rather than subverting it. But writers of postmodern western narratives intentionally put into play the concepts of au193

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thenticity, textuality, and authorship. They do not automatically dismiss the idea of authenticity but, instead, treat it as matter of textuality. Because the postmodern world is a hyperreal one, literature must reflect this cultural fabrication of reality. These writers offer the bending of realistic representation, the subversion of historical “truth,” the ironic commodification of cultural values, and the use of postmodern techniques such as pastiche, metanarrative, kitsch, fictional autobiography, and so on. They make visible, and often laughable, what has been hidden all along: the literary creation of a hyperreal West. At first it may seem surprising that there are so many postmodern western texts and postmodern western writers. Most contemporary readers and even many critics continue to think of western writing as simple and shallow, realistic and traditional, anything but postmodern. But even overlooking a number of authors with marginal ties to either western literature or postmodernism (such as Raymond Chandler, Raymond Carver, Maxine Hong Kingston, Barbara Kingsolver, Richard Ford, Kathy Acker, and Christopher Isherwood) there are still many, many writers widely described as postmodern who represent the West while playing with their own authorial identities. Think of the following authors and works, all legitimately, if not exclusively, described as postmodern and western: Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49, Ishmael Reed’s Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Vikram Seth’s Golden Gate, Louise Erdrich’s Tracks, Ron Arias’s The Road to Tamazunchale, E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, Ed Ruscha’s Every Building on the Sunset Strip, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Anna Deveare Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, Leslie Silko’s Ceremony, Dave Hickey’s Prior Convictions, Gerald Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus, Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, Raymond Pettibon’s The Books, 1978 –1998, Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Annie Proulx’s Close Range, Richard Misrach’s Crimes and Splendors: The Desert Cantos, Cherríe Moraga’s Heroes and Saints, Jonathan Franzen’s The Twenty-Seventh City, Exene Cervenka’s Virtual Unreality, Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera, T. Coraghessan Boyle’s Tortilla Curtain, Jean Baudrillard’s America, and so on. These books are among the most innovative, daring, and ambitious works of western literature in the last fifty years. Still, one must admit that these works, though often brilliant and inventive, are in many ways the most obvious of western writings. While Annie Proulx’s literary craft is undeniably impressive and Jean Baudrillard’s cultural potshots are impressively undeniable, both writers seem at first to be 194

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laying bare the rules of the authenticity game rather than rewriting or ignoring them. Once the construction of authenticity is recognized as a central premise of western writing, postmodern western texts begin to look, well, jazzy but familiar. Exploring and tweaking the concept of regional realism has been going on, largely unrecognized, for over two centuries. Let’s acknowledge and quickly move beyond several familiar critical observations, for, if anything, these writers are laying a trap with their explicit designs. First, postmodern writers critique and revise the myths of the West. This statement, a keynote of much critical commentary, is undoubtedly true, curiously naive, and remarkably uninteresting. Certainly, from the vantage of the Tried-and-True school of reading, works such as Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Love Medicine, Twilight, and Close Range challenge the familiar received history and literary mythologies of the West. They do indeed upend, often in sharp ways, the old paradigms and patterns. I applaud this revision of social and cultural history and am encouraged by the fact that we are finally getting works that seem to subvert the old patriarchal system. It is a pleasure to encounter ambitious western writings that focus on non-Anglo, non-male, non-hetero characters. With enthusiasm I would assert that these representation of the West are more personally appealing than many of the hoary pictures of that gloried, white, conquering “civilization,” and with some reluctance I would admit that these depictions are often closer to my own vision of a diverse, heteroglot West. As a form of social activism, these works are admirable and contribute to the vital recovery of oppressed histories and stories. But any reading of such works that argues for the arrival of a New West, a fresh vision of the region based on a revisionary, corrective narrative, is under the sway of authenticity’s power. In arguing for the production of the real, this type of reading is axiomatic. For two centuries nearly every major work of western literature has carried the same tag: out with the old, in with the new; out with the inauthentic, in with the real. Second, the corollary—that these works are heavily mythologized—is equally facile. Of course they claim to tell a new story, of course they claim to reinvent the place. The tedious irony at work here is that these writings are so often received as authentic. Exactly because they both critique the old forms of representation (and even representation itself ) and produce a vibrant new regional story (though often ironic and skeptical), these writings seem to convey a sense of deep and genuine reality. Despite the fact that Annie Proulx playfully opens Close Range with an epigraph declaring, “Reality’s 195

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never been of much use out here,” the back jacket tells us to read the stories for their “absolute authenticity.” Third, it would be a start to say that as part of their broader postmodern project these writings frequently subvert distinctions between high and low literature, between copy and original. Postmodern western writers frequently display the performative dimensions of western literature, critiquing the notion of an original West. But writers such as Miller and Twain exploded the difference over a century ago. It might be more to the point to recognize that postmodern western literature portrays not reality but hyperreality. Just as postmodern narratives dismiss facile definitions of authorship and authorial identity, they also unsettle simple notions of textual realism. This seems to be one of Thomas Pynchon’s points in The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), a novel that attacks the notions of reality, representation, and history like a pit bull. It begins as a satire of California but moves quickly to a violent subversion of the complacent belief in the Real West. Pynchon’s West is hyperreal not only because Oedipa Maas can’t distinguish what is real and what is imagined but also because there’s ultimately no difference between the two. We are presented with a series of parallel histories that revise and replace the official history—notably the history of the West— through a series of dubious signs and texts. As one character asks, “Why . . . is everybody so interested in texts?” 17 A postage stamp of a Pony Express rider includes “a single, painstakingly engraved, black feather,” “a deliberate mistake” (97). It’s a counterfeit, a copy, that tells a different history of the West; it’s a joke, a plot . . . a narrative. Oedipa tries to get to the bottom of it all: “Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she too might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself ” (95). Caught in a fantastic series of events and texts, she is unsure of her sanity, unsure of her reality. In her memo book she writes, “Shall I project a world?” (82). Certainly, any reading of western literature since the publication of The Crying of Lot 49 should be wary of the idea of a projected world. In a postmodern culture every world, every gender, every identity, every subject, every reality, is projected. Yet the argument that postmodern western writing reveals the constructedness of reality and the presence of hyperreality is underwhelming. Isn’t that one of the points of postmodern writing? If one follows postmodern theory, if just for the sake of argument, then the categories of authenticity, realism, and history become contingent and radically indeterminate. 196

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Of course a postmodern text acts “postmodernly.” Thus, what can one really say about postmodern western writing? Certainly not that it cuts through myth to reveal “reality.” One can’t even argue with much enthusiasm that it configures the discourse and cultural understanding of that reality—such a move is at least two centuries old. As Forrest G. Robinson argues, many western writers recognize “the constructedness of ‘history’ set forth in their narratives of the past.” 18 But, even more telling, what’s the point in claiming that postmodern western writing destabilizes reality and reveals hyperreality? This move would only be to serve up the crudest of intentions; again, it’s a far neater, if arguably self-defeating, trick to cloak that process. Revealing the artificiality of authenticity pales in comparison to covertly inventing and concealing that authenticity in the first place. Moreover, the creation of textual hyperreality is no longer a literary phenomenon. Everyone today seems obsessed with virtual realities and the problems of authenticity. The times have caught up with western literature. So, how might a criticism of postmodern western writing develop? What would it look like? The ground here, “new ground” I suppose, is wonderfully shaky. There is no terra firma. As I have been suggesting, it would be unfitting to read postmodern writing in relation to the Real West, and unprofitable to read it in relation to the imagined West. One possible approach would be to employ what used to be called “formalism”— examining language, aesthetics, presentation, and “style”—an approach not often taken in western criticism. Some variation of poststructuralist formalism may well be a desideratum. But then we’re stuck with the problem of regionalism and social history: what connects the text to place? Thus, another approach might be to rethink the concept of regionalism itself. In his 1994 review-essay “Writing in Place: The New American Regionalism” Michael Kowalewski argued for a “revitalized interest in American literary regionalism and the literature of place.” 19 Too often, he argues, literary criticism appeared dismissive of this literary renaissance, seeing regionalism as a kind of “boosterism, a fatuous puffing of merely local talent—a kind of literary chamber of commerce juxtaposed to the three national congressional houses of race, class, and gender.” 20 And over the last decade critics such as Willam W. Bevis, Krista Comer, William R. Handley, Susan Kollin, and Kowalewski himself have started to pay serious attention to regionalism in the West. As always in this study, I am pursuing the authorial imagination and, consequently, the relation between author and region. So, let’s return to 197

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some familiar but necessary questions. What is an author? What is a western author? Responding to widespread reports that the author was missing and presumed dead, Michel Foucault notoriously resurrected the author, or at least the author function. “We must locate the space left empty by the author’s disappearance,” he wrote, “follow the distribution of gaps and breaches, and watch for the openings that this disappearance uncovers.” 21 The author in Foucault’s terms did not make a comeback as an individuated, creative figure but, rather, as a cultural marker, a function through which cultural power is registered, distributed, and exercised: “the author is not an indefinite source of significations which fill a work; the author does not precede the works; he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction.” 22 But in the West the author was always already secondary, often invisible. With few exceptions authorship suffers (or enjoys) a self-imposed and self-created position of absence, insisting on a profound deference to the Real West. Rarely was, or is, an author thought of as being the source of significations, or the main force preceding the works. I want to suggest that we might perform a metonymic operation here, substituting the word West for author in Foucault’s scheme. In fact, authors have already performed the surgery for us in their very self-inventions (pace Foucault). In this regional writing it is the “West” that enjoys a functional principle, one that controls and redistributes discourses and knowledge. The word possesses a classificatory function. In “Claiming, Corrupting, Contesting: Reconsidering ‘The West’ in Western American Literature,” Martin Padget argues that “the words West and Western are loaded with historical and contemporary significance. . . . Clearly, critics must take significant ideological considerations into account as they frame rationales for examining literature designated ‘Western American.’” 23 And it is this idea that so many postmodern western writers explore: the possibility that the West can be understood not as a geographical region that inspires or influences its own representation but as the inscribed site of cultural power that serves to categorize discourses and ideologies, ways of knowing and speaking— canons, pedagogies, and reading practices. Try this: “The West is not an indefinite source of significations which fill a work; the West does not precede the works; it is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, 198

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by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction.” The idea of the literary West limits the range of signification. Again, I am not suggesting that the West doesn’t exist or denying its influence on the imagination but simply recognizing that a number of writers are implicitly or explicitly critiquing the word’s rhetorical force, the cultural and literary authority that the term possesses. Krista Comer pursues a comparable approach in Landscapes of the New West. Using contemporary theories of cultural geography to examine what she calls the “new female regionalism,” Comer argues that “the very invocation of ‘landscape’ in western discourse predetermines the ways we talk about the environments in which people find themselves.” 24 Similarly, continuing my appropriation of Foucault’s essay, I would argue that the West may be “only a projection, in more or less psychologizing terms, of the operations that we force texts to undergo, the connections that we make, the traits that we establish as pertinent, the continuities that we recognize, or the exclusions that we practice.” 25 When we think of the West in this context, we shouldn’t think of prairies or mountains, missile silos or toxic waste dumps. Rather, we should think conceptually, think of how the term forces us into investing in these very “traits.” The West is a projection of our cultural need to canonize, to exclude, and to create. Given the thrust of my argument so far, I am hardly suggesting that authors are impotent but, rather, effaced. They themselves situate authority in the first word of the phrase western author. Postmodern writers have initiated a vigorous investigation of this condition, insisting on their own rhetorical power. No doubt, to a large degree postmodern western writers (and critics) are beginning to examine the relationship between representation and “reality,” between reality and hyperreality, between authenticity and inauthenticity. But these writers are going one step farther by denying that these paired terms are binaries at all. It doesn’t matter whether the West is real or imagined in a literary work because “The West” functions to impede and delimit its own fiction. Further, many postmodern western writers attempt to visit and get “inside” this West . . . and things get weird. Like the character Wintermute in William Gibson’s Neuromancer who moves through a computer program, these writers are exploring a nonplace, a matrix of creative and cultural energies that appears real. If this is another “New West,” it is one designed to appear exactly the same as every other New West (follow the flashing neon sign, New West), which is to say, inevitably, every other Old West (same sign). They step into the projection, not worrying about 199

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whether the show is “true” or not but watching themselves on screen, playing author. They do not seek to destroy the projection, which would be regional suicide, but to entice a kind of seduction and play. But, in moving inside, they simultaneously preserve their outsider status, refusing to settle or even fix this West. They become “present” in an unusual way but present as an absence; they are traces, palimpsests, spirits in the material. I should admit here to considerable uneasiness about these arguments, for I risk appearing indifferent to, and dismissive of, the West, the authorial commitment to the West, and issues of social justice in the West. Ultimately, I believe the opposite is true: regional concerns may become clearer when liberated from an absolute dependence on the literary imagination, and the literary imagination can be better understood when isolated from a reliance on authenticity. Is either goal “realistic”? Perhaps not, suggesting all the more the imploding confusion (not just the codependence) of reality and representation. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of authenticity. I see postmodern theory as offering a methodology that reveals a contemporary firstworld culture committed to the shallow, insidious values of commodification, consumption, and meaninglessness, a culture alienated from its past and itself. It is, of course, a culture that can only simulate authenticity. But one can agree with the musings of Baudrillard, Jameson, and Lyotard without celebrating the postmodern condition. (Indeed, there is a definite nostalgia to postmodern theory.) And one can still fight for environmental preservation, social justice, and cultural mindfulness. Further, to state the obvious, postmodern thinking may have a salutary effect on art, certainly on western art so attached to history and realism. Postmodern theory allows us the pleasure or anxiety of the text, without a consequential disregard for cultural practices. The “death of history” and the loss of traditional truths may result in the reworking of the old through pastiche, but we need not understand this as a limitation. There is, indeed, a freeplay of the imagination that can: (1) imagine forms of identity (in terms of region, gender, sexuality, class, technology) that are liberated from former limitations. Why not a western cyborg culture? And (2) imagine representation itself as unmoored from authenticity or sincerity, even in its use of pastiche—a representation that teases and tricks, that invents and displays, that ruptures and violates. Why not a seductive western literature? I see postmodern theory as an extreme way of collapsing the difference between the real and repre200

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sentation, leaving only what Baudrillard calls, with a certain appreciation, “appearances.” In their book Peter Handke and the Postmodern Transformation Jerome Klinkowitz and James Knowlton argue that “postmodernism celebrates the rupture between language and event as an occasion for true imaginative freedom. With no determining center of authority, human discourse is free to create itself . . . no single view of reality can be legitimately imposed, for reality itself is no longer an externally verifiable standard.” 26 Similarly, in his discussion of postmodern fiction Fredric Jameson, though frequently skeptical of that fiction and its use of pastiche, recognizes the possibility that “postmodern ‘fantastic historiography’” may possess “a genuine aesthetic” through this “new free play with the past.” 27 Although not committed to “partisan history,” this writing “can be seen as entertaining a more active relationship to praxis” than is generally understood: “here the making up of unreal history is a substitute for the making of the real kind. . . . Fabulation— or if you prefer, mythomania and outright tall tales—is no doubt the symptom of social and historical impotence, of the blocking of possibilities that leaves little option but the imaginary. Yet its very invention and inventiveness endorses a creative freedom with respect to events it cannot control. . . . Narrative invention here thus by way of its very implausibility becomes the figure of a larger possibility of praxis, its compensation but also its affirmation in the form of projection and mimetic reenactment.” 28 As is no doubt obvious by now, I am arguing that western literature has always engaged in this kind of postmodern “fabulation,” cloaked by both its stylistic and thematic commitment to realism. Krista Comer uses the notion of cultural construction to argue essentially for Jameson’s “larger possibility of praxis.” In her words, “the new female regionalists deploy representations of western lands and nature to talk about and, more, to challenge and change myriad social and political topics.” 29 I find Comer’s study consistently persuasive, but I would also press these ideas in a different direction: an investigation of the “genuine aesthetic” and “creative freedom” of western fantastic historiography as a dynamic possibility, perhaps even a necessary step before pursuing social justice through literary representation. Richard Ford, whose Montana writings remain quintessential examples of regional representation, is among the few western writers to acknowledge and own this freedom. In Gregory L. Morris’s collection of interviews, Talking Up a Storm: Voices of the New West, Ford says: “Paul West wrote someplace else that language can never accurately report the truth of anything, 201

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anyway. So, the distinction between my stories set in the West and the West itself exists the instant I use language to refer to place at all.” 30 Ford points out that he “must want to invent something [he] can take absolute responsibility for.” When Morris suggests that the “distancing from tradition and that invention of history” allow Ford a “certain aesthetic freedom,” Ford agrees: “Well, okay. So I’m free to write what I want. . . . Place doesn’t control me. . . . I just make the place up out of words and call it what I want to call it. I could call it Mars. I’m sure, in the case of this place, Montana, that I’ve been affected, and my life has been, by living here. But I don’t feel responsible for recording that, or for explaining it in prose, or for reporting on it in any way.” 31 How unwestern! Perhaps Ford, who grew up in Mississippi and has written celebrated novels about New Jersey, is not really western at all. And yet his inclusion in Morris’s collection of writers of the “New West” is hardly atypical; he is often spoken of as an important voice in western writing. Moreover, Rock Springs and Wildlife are obviously regional works of considerable effect—astonishing creations of the literary imagination that evoke a powerful sense of place. They most certainly do not take place on Mars, and the cultural landscapes of The Sportswriter and Independence Day are thousands of miles away. Ford himself acknowledges that he has been “affected” by “this place, Montana.” While we might test the psychology at work here, I’m much more interested in his dissent from the authorial tradition of claiming authenticity. He claims authorial responsibility. Most western writers, even many postmodern western writers, take a very different tack from Ford. As Martin Padget writes in his review of Morris’s collection: “Ford’s insistence on the fictionality of writing is noteworthy because Morris’s other interviewees usually follow a fairly conservative aesthetic of realist fiction.” 32 Of course they do: nearly every western writer does and always has. Ivan Doig, for example, tells Morris that he has “tried to take aim at . . . self-referential fiction. . . . Goddamn it, life is real, life is earnest. Sure, we need literary experimentation, but it has to be a lot more daring than academic wordgames.” Lamenting the “hermetically sealed” prose of the last quarter-century or so, Doig remarks: “we came through an important historical period in this country . . . without enough fiction writers who looked closely and honestly at that period. And that doesn’t chime very well with us out here in the West. What’s going on in life—that’s what there is to write about and experiment with.” 33 (Recall that Hamlin Garland advocated a “literature, not of books, but of life” and that Frank Norris declared, “It’s the Life that we want, the vigorous real thing, not the curious 202

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weaving of words.”) I admire Doig; he is a writer of brilliant, moving fiction. And I have no doubt that he is sincere in his remarks. Just as I am not testing the authenticity of any specific work, I am generally not testing the authenticity of authorial pronouncements. And it would be beyond pretense to “liberate” Doig’s writing from real “life.” But, as always, I want to see such comments as part of the broader narrative of western authorship, shaping reception and even the cultural imagination. Why should literature be read solely in light of the author’s instructions? And what western literature has even been presented or read as “self-referential”? Western literature is always “West-referential” as well as “West-deferential.” I’m not exactly saying, “Let the wordgames begin!”—I’m simply acknowledging that they have always already been in play. The appearance of postmodern insensitivity becomes more acute when applied to Native American literature, the topic of this chapter’s next two sections. Who am I to doubt an author’s tribal sincerity or a critic’s projected piety? Here is the opening paragraph of one recent scholarly study of Native American poetry: “Contemporary Native poetry has its roots in the land, in the oral tradition, and in history. The older stories, songs, and chants that shaped the indigenous perceptions of life are reimagined, so that when Native poets evoke traditional literature, they are continuing in the oral tradition, drawing from cultural memory the words and images that have sustained their people and sharing parts of their cultural identities. Native references to traditional oral literature and to the land are more than literary allusions—they embody life and spirit, a vision of the sacred.” 34 I don’t disagree with this appealing sentiment so much as marvel at its unexamined familiarity and at the unrecognized debt that it owes to authorial invention, both western and Native. The author’s imagination is buried in this paragraph’s center, rhetorically contained in the word reimagined, minimized in a passive construction, and made dependent on “cultural memory.” The poet’s individual creative agency is all but denied in deference to organic nature (“roots”), history, and the sacred. Seen in the context of the larger authorial claim of authenticity, this paragraph accepts without reservation the self-determining narrative of authenticity. In this light the claim of authenticity functions exactly as the West functions: it neutralizes and controls the entropy of representation. How far can our understanding and appreciation of a literary text go with such limitations? Authenticity is a code that establishes boundaries that can be mapped and patrolled: this is inside, that is outside; this is authentic, that 203

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is inauthentic. Whereas authors once invested in these boundaries and the resulting real estate, postmodern authors critique the notion of boundaries and binaries. Yet literature, perhaps by its nature, is inevitably “read,” and one result is that it becomes subject to critical and popular boundaries: categories and canons. What follows is an attempt to examine the implications of the authenticity game in today’s literary and academic cultures. I want to consider how the idea of authenticity promotes the establishment of boundaries in terms of an institutionalized, academic canon; in terms of ethnic identities; and in terms of “the West”; and to consider how writers traverse, erase, or reinforce these boundaries. Insider Trading: Native American Literature from Across the Culture Line Like the Chippewa, Iroquois, Omaha, Like those Indians, I’m an Indian too, . . . And I’ll wear moccasins, Wampum beads, feather hats, Which will go to prove I’m an Indian too. — irving berlin, “I’m an Indian Too”

Storytelling. On the day after my last college exam, in May 1985, I was on a plane heading from New Haven to Fort Collins. Colorado was a popular place to dream about back east, and it seemed like the right adventure. I knew enough to avoid the hordes of outlanders in Boulder but not much else. Even then, nearly twenty years ago, I was keenly aware of being an eastern college graduate in search of the Real West, another pollutant in a crowded stream. (How many western hotspots have regretted their popularity over the last fifty years? Berkeley, Boulder, Missoula, Bozeman, Eugene. . . . I remember William Kittredge once reflecting in conversation about the hipness of Montana. Playing with the title of his popular Montana anthology, he crisply annunciated with typical good humor the growing sentiment in the state: “The Last Best Place—Please Don’t Come.”) Soon after arriving in Fort Collins, I began to notice a green and white bumper sticker, designed to resemble the Colorado license plate, proclaiming a single word: native. The implication was clear: the driver of the car could 204

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claim a history in the Rocky Mountain West that went back five years or perhaps five generations—anyway, a lot longer than the recent arrivals of rockjocks and wannabes. I felt suitably shamed. But soon a second bumper sticker started appearing, same license plate design, this time with one small emendation, the removal of a single letter. It read: naive. Again, the implication was clear: very, very few of us were “native” to the region in any sense at all. My feeling of shame turned into a sense of alienation that was downright communal. What does it mean to be native to the West? The term native, of course, functions as an emphatic claim of authenticity, the ultimate insider identity. Indeed, there may be no more dramatic claim of authenticity in the contemporary West or in contemporary America. Westerners who trace their family roots to nineteenth-century homesteaders often express a native connection to region; farmers and ranchers who work the land may feel a similar sense of attachment to place; and environmentalists and nature writers frequently struggle to overcome their Euroamerican inheritance and become “at home on this continent” (in Gary Snyder’s words). But above all the word native calls to mind indigenous peoples: Native Americans. My hope in this section and the next is to consider how the idea of authenticity functions in relation to Native American literature and culture. Certainly, it would be possible to follow the paradigm of chapter 5 and consider ways in which Native authors claim an authenticity based not on individual inspiration but on connection with tribal culture and tradition, similar to the way that nature writers claim that they are “made” by their natural environments.35 Simon Ortiz has said, “the Native American writer comes from his people,” and this sentiment is echoed by many Native authors committed to cultural connectedness and tribal nationalism.36 But arguing that Indian writers invent themselves as authentic through the trope of tribal inheritance would be big quick trouble—and it is exactly this trouble that I want to investigate.37 Using authorial voices to tease out the implications for setting boundaries in a postmodern climate, these two sections will consider how the idea of being an “insider,” being native, functions in academic discourse and critical perception. I am interested, first, in how the insider claim of nativeness creates an outsider status in non-Native scholarship and writing, a perspective that reinforces Indian authenticity; and, second, how even within Native American literary circles there exists fierce contests over authenticity, contests that frequently call into question the role of postmodern theory and representation. My goal is primarily to offer a modest 205

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overview of the authenticity game in Native American writing over the last quarter-century and then to place these particular debates over authenticity in the context of both postmodernism and the history of western literature that this book is presenting. In short, I want to examine how the “infighting” and “outfighting” over Native American literature inform both western literature and the history of authentic reproduction. Obviously, the topics addressed in these sections could fill many long chapters and even books—and indeed they have. I realize that by subordinating my discussion of Native literature to a broader discussion of postmodernism I may appear dismissive of Native literature or the multicultural West. My intention is exactly the opposite. For one thing, I remain unconvinced that the canonical categories of Native American literature and western literature are coextensive, despite the fact that most Indian literature, certainly since the nineteenth century, is written in or about the American West by authors with extensive regional knowledge. Further, though I am reasonably experienced with reading and teaching Native American literature, I remain unconvinced that this “territory,” even if a contact zone, is any place for the uninvited or uninitiated. Even discussing Native American literature may seem to violate the insider/outsider boundaries and with good reason—although these boundaries are as often determined by academic authority as by ethnic authenticity.38 Finally, a single chapter on Native American literature would risk both assuming and essentializing the category of “Native American literature,” a category infused with an authenticity that itself deserves critique. If I am using a chapter on postmodernism to displace Native American literature, it is precisely to avoid situating it comfortably inside or outside western writing, postmodern writing, or even “American literature.” Indeed, the subtext to these sections is exactly the difficulty we have in talking about these very topics, difficulties that largely arise from a cultural sense of ethnic authenticity. Admittedly, my own self-consciousness about how I organize my chapter and how I discuss these issues is symptomatic of the perils of authenticity—I would feel no such compunction writing about, say, James Fenimore Cooper and the legacy of Federalism, even though I know comparatively little about either. Thus, I want to begin by situating myself, and most academic readers, on the other side of the culture line, and so I intentionally use those lightning-rod pronouns we and our to refer to an interpretive and ethnic position on the outside. Obviously, such a move risks an exclusionary tone and may seem to insist on an “Other,” 206

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creating boundaries and reifying Indian authenticity. But the use of a more inclusive we might well constitute exactly the kind of authenticity claim that I want to investigate—and flies in the face of the values of Native sovereignty. Even though the culture line that defines the “insider circle” may turn out to produce more of a Möbius strip than a sacred hoop, I want to commence this discussion as an outsider, acknowledging an inevitable insider position as well, both in the academy and, of course, in my own book.39 It seems fair to say that no category of literature from the West is more entangled in the authenticity game than Native American writing. Critiques and examinations of authenticity are indeed “essential” to both Indian literature and theory. The idea of the Indian is perfectly doubled: the word itself implies, as Gerald Vizenor shows, a simulation, the “loan word of dominance.” 40 In her essay “Telling the différance: Representations of Identity in the Discourse of Indianness” Jana Sequoya-Magdaleno remarks that, “iconically coded as a vanishing trace of the sacred at the horizon of the secular world, the Indian is (to paraphrase Jacques Lacan) a word in somebody else’s conversation.” 41 Louis Owens writes that “the American Indian in the world consciousness is a treasured invention, a gothic artifact evoked . . . out of the dark reaches of the continent to replace the actual native, who, painfully problematic in real life, is supposed to have long since vanished.” 42 In other words, the Indian is a hyperreal fiction, a copy without an original, what Vizenor calls a “commemoration of an absence.” “The indian is a simulation,” Vizenor writes, “the absence of natives; the indian transposes the real, and the simulation of the real has no referent, memories, or native stories.” 43 The figure and conception of the Indian functions, it has effect, and yet it marks only the absence of the real. What Vizenor calls “manifest manners” are “the racialist notions and misnomers sustained in archives and lexicons as ‘authentic’ representations of indian cultures.” 44 What makes this embodied, hyperreal cultural construction so interesting, of course, is not only that it appears authentic but that it functions today exactly as the authentic. It is only too obvious how the figure of the Indian simulates authenticity itself for a broader cultural theater. The Indian seems to transcend the idea of the copy (or belatedness) and be “original.” Indians were “here first” (to use the title of a contemporary collection of “Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers”). They predate Lewis and Clark, the Puritans, Columbus, and the American Adam. Vizenor writes: “John Pizer argues that 207

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most ‘historical research is driven by etiology, the striving towards origins.’ That ‘originary moment’ is the tease of new historicism, and the tricky overtures of postmodern critiques. The indian, in this sense, is striven, a hyperreal simulation and, at the same time, the ironic enactment of a native presence by an absence in a master narrative.” 45 By embodying the very idea of the original, the Indian embodies the authentic. Furthermore, not only are Indians original, but they are ancient and “timeless.” This incarnation does not challenge the concept of the copy so much as induces a nostalgia for the past, a golden age of harmony with Gaia. If in the mid-nineteenth century Francis Parkman could seek out the Indian as the embodiment of prehistory, today that search for the authentic past lingers in New Age ceremonies such as the vision quest and in museum displays. Lisa Aldred, in her essay on “Plastic Shamans and Astroturf Sun Dances,” argues that “New Agers romanticize an ‘authentic’ and ‘traditional’ Native American culture whose spirituality can save them from their own sense of malaise.” 46 She writes: “Real Native Americans are not a part of most Euro-Americans’ lives. Yet non-Indians feel that their own lives are increasingly ‘unreal’ and ‘inauthentic,’ so they imagine a pre-industrial, pre-European America where things were ‘real’ and ‘authentic,’ not representations but originals. Thus they simulate the original ‘authentic Native American Spirituality’ and consume it. Meanwhile, their simulations allow them to ignore real indigenous peoples and the historical and socioeconomic relations that tie them together.” 47 Putting on temporary hold the phrase Real Native Americans, I want to suggest that this pull of authenticity—this anxiety over inauthenticity, this simulation of the real—is nowhere more powerful, covert, or dangerous than in academic pedagogy and criticism. It’s a touchy subject, but the fact is that today ethnicity in general is considered an inviolable form of authenticity and one not to be tampered with. To a large degree Native American literature is held up as important and “great” exactly to the degree that it is authentic. There may be an unsettling inversion here between the academic and popular perceptions of Indian authenticity. In the popular marketplace native authors experience limited success, while white authors who cover Indian themes (such as Lynn Andrews and Tony Hillerman) enjoy huge audiences. Sherman Alexie writes that “there are hundreds of books about Indians published every year, yet so few are written by Indians.” When he visits a bookstore he discovers: 208

inside out in the postmodern west 1. A book written by a person who identifies herself as mixedblood will sell more copies than a book written by a person who identifies herself as strictly Indian. 2. A book written by a non-Indian will sell more copies than a book written by a mixed-blood or Indian writer. 3. A book about Indian life in the pre-twentieth century . . . will sell more copies than a book about twentieth-century Indian life. 4. If you are a non-Indian writing about Indians, it is almost guaranteed that Tony Hillerman will write something positive about you.48

Alexie is signaling multiple polemics here, including, ultimately, his own skepticism of mixed-blood writers, but he’s probably right that Indian writers are less popular and accepted than the idea of Indian culture itself. The opposite is true in the academic world, in which both “authentic” Native American writing and culture have become precious commodities.49 D. H. Lawrence once wrote that “the minority of whites intellectualize the Red Man and laud him to the skies. But this minority of whites is mostly a high-brow minority with a big grouch against its own whiteness. So there you are.” (Gerald Vizenor, quoting this passage, replies, simply: “So, here we are.”) 50 Lawrence’s remarks seem harsh and perhaps unnecessary today, and most professors of American literature would agree that there are many good reasons for “including” Native American oral and written expression in the canon of American literature.51 Academics bring Indian literature “inside” canonical territory, with an odd effect. Native American literature appears simultaneously strange and foreign, retaining an outsider status— but through the projection of authenticity it paradoxically takes on an insider status as well, an almost pathologically American body of expression. The danger, as always, is that the valorization of authenticity runs great risks for the teaching of literature. “Native American Indian literature too often constitutes a kind of literary Indian Territory,” Owens writes, “to which students can be sent briefly for a semester’s touch of the exotic.” 52 Even with the best of intentions teachers and readers get caught reaching for authenticity. As Susan Bernardin remarks, “texts get burdened with the dual role of confronting and dispensing with a range of assumptions while also serving as conduits to the real lives and histories of Native peoples.” 53 One risk is that, in our desire to overturn the simulated (artificial, imitation) Indian, we end up not with a genuine native (whatever that might be) but 209

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with new simulations: the “Native American” and “Native American literature.” Even the rhetorical transformation taking place over the last quartercentury from the term Indian to Native American, a complicated and contested transformation, may itself suggest a projection—more often it seems than a claim— of authenticity onto an ethnic minority by applying the word native, a word that connotes original status.54 Indeed, are we not merely updating the Real West here, not merely saying yet again, “the old version is inauthentic; here is the real”? Conversely, are not some forms of representation (of place, identity, experience) more accurate, more authentic, even more ethical than others? Is there a “real Indian” or a “real Native American” to be found? Can one representation be “more real” and more authentic than another, or is this merely playing the authenticity game? I am hardly suggesting that Native American literature should not be taught in the college classroom but, rather, recognizing the enormous complexities involved. In Mixedblood Messages Louis Owens asks how Native American literature can be taught to a wide (largely non-Native) audience: “what of the reader confronted with the world of [ James Welch’s] Fools Crow, or the web of creation in [Silko’s] Ceremony, or the trickster narratives of Vizenor? How does one on the other side of the cultural line go about the challenge of crossreading, a challenge that for my students often seems enormously intimidating.” 55 It is indeed intimidating—not only to read Native American literature but to teach it and to critique it. Or at least it should be. Too often, as Owens points out, we tend toward the lee shore, preferring “literary works that provide a comfortable, easy tour of colorful Indian country.” 56 So, how can we get inside and stop playing tourist? How can we make our own reading strategies more appropriate to an encounter with Indian literature? Do non-Native readers have to imitate nativeness (“play Indian”) to get it? What happens to our own readerly identities when we crossread? Do we, no matter how “rooted” we are in the West or experienced with western literature, end up suddenly as outsiders trying to “enter the circle”? Are we suddenly “outsiders inside,” to borrow a phrase from Cheryl Walker? 57 To be sure, many scholars have agonized over the problem of “merely overlaying [Native American literature] with an authoritative and ill-fitting European theory-grid,” in Owens’s words.58 For example, Susan Berry Brill de Ramírez warns of the extent to which “contemporary literary theories and criticisms do more to obscure those literatures through (mis)readings that end up forcing works into interpretive frameworks that they do not 210

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necessarily fit.” 59 But given that certain Euro/Russian theorists appear with regularity (notably Bakhtin but also Foucault, Lacan, even, in Brill de Ramírez’s work, Wittgenstein), we’re left with yet another questioning of authenticity: what forms of European (or Russian) theory are acceptable or adaptable, and what forms are “ill-fitting”? Who decides? Because nativeness and Native American literature are so often seen as a kind of insider territory, it may make sense to ask not how the non-Native can get “in” but whether the attempt should be made at all. After all, if we resist the label of “tourist,” what identity fits? Settler? Guide? Intruder? Sister/Brother? Guest? Gregory L. Morris asked Elizabeth Cook-Lynn in an interview whether she writes for an Indian reader who is “inside the circle”—and then whether there “are . . . ways for the non-native reader to enter the circle.” Cook-Lynn replied, “Why must ‘non-native readers enter the circle?’” and later argued that the “metaphor” of entering the circle “cannot be taken lightly as it is a familial as well as tribal matter.” 60 No doubt, in practice the simple and perhaps best response to these questions is to learn as much as we can about the specific cultural context of a work—say, the traditions, stories, and histories of the Laguna Pueblo culture of Ceremony—and try our best to show how that culture informs the work. But consider the risks and problems. For one thing, I would argue (and have throughout this book) that texts do not simply emerge from a cultural context but to a large degree respond to that context, indeed critique, resist, anticipate, and “construct” that context. And authors are not functions of cultural power but activate and deploy it. In short, the West does not stand behind western literature but, rather, the other way around. Yet few critics want to argue that Silko, for example, constructs or invents southwest New Mexico and its people through complex literary maneuvers.61 Would we want to say that Ceremony is the map that precedes the territory? Because so much of critical and pedagogical practice relies on the “deployment of ethnic texts as proxies for ethnic peoples,” in the words of David Palumbo-Liu, a work like Ceremony seems to reflect “real” Laguna culture.62 Although Ceremony is often treated as postmodern, few would call Silko’s imaginings “hyperreal” or even imaginings at all. Indeed, my guess is that most professors of American literature in this country know what they take to be the “real Laguna” largely through Silko’s masterful novel. (Just as so many readers know Lakota culture from that hybrid work Black Elk Speaks or Cherokee culture from that infamously “inauthentic” work The Education of Little Tree.) One result is that Ceremony carries enormous cultural authority as 211

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an authentic reflection of Indianness. And a corresponding result is that Silko’s own imaginative authority is slighted or even ignored. In her penetrating analysis of narration, authorship, and Indianness in Ceremony, Jana Sequoya-Magdaleno writes: “Rather than recognizing essentialist inscriptions as a strategy to locate the work and to set the terms of its reception, many scholarly interpreters of Native American fiction seem to assume that the writer, however explicitly bicultural, however modern—as evidenced by appropriation of the novel form itself—is nevertheless transparent at some preconscious level.” 63 All too frequently, as always, place and history (coded in words such as the land, tradition, and story) seem to stand behind the work. Silko is admired for her translation of Laguna culture but not for her invention. In Other Destinies Louis Owens reads Ceremony in exactly this way. In his intelligent and focused reading of the novel, Owens argues that Silko announces “in what amounts to textual superscript her own subordination as author to the story-making authority of Thought-Woman, or Spider Woman.” 64 By “placing her novel within the context of the oral tradition,” Silko “rejects the egocentric posture of the modern author in favor of what could be defined as an ecocentric orientation and attempts a culturally determined heteroglossia in which her text serves as transmitter rather than originator of voices and meanings.” He concludes: As a result, Ceremony, more than any other novel I know of, approaches the category of “authorless” text. In response to Foucault’s rehashed questions, “Who really spoke? Is it really he and not someone else? With what authenticity or originality?”—Silko’s text points toward the polyvocal oral tradition that predates the “privileged moment of individualization” marked by the coming into being of the notion of author. In the oral tradition, stories are never original and always have the “duty of providing immortality”— of preventing the death of a culture; the very absence of author illuminates their authenticity. In the present age of author as icon, one can easily imagine a work such as Ceremony published with no author’s name attached, a delightful possibility.65

Owens’s reading is immensely appealing and bright—itself a delightful possibility. But it is one that slides all too easily into the tradition of western reading, even if the subject here is decidedly Other. The goal, a familiar one, is the assertion of authenticity and authority through the erasure of creative 212

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authorship and the promotion of cultural and environmental history. Silko’s book is not an “originator” but, rather, a “transmitter.” To suggest that her novel redirects or even subverts traditional stories through the creative vision of the author seems almost rude, an imperialist opposition to true Native culture. (I see it as the opposite, at least in the context of this book: not to recognize Silko’s creative and authorial power would be condescending.) When Paula Gunn Allen criticized Silko for telling Laguna stories “outside of the clan,” for Silko’s cultural ignorance or even tribal betrayal, Allen is paradoxically reinscribing Ceremony’s authenticity and power, at least outside that “clan.” 66 To outsiders Ceremony seems all the more authentic for Allen’s concerns. Indeed, her use of an insider/outsider discourse, while suggesting in this case a violation, nevertheless both emphasizes and polices the notion of native insiderness. In fact, Allen’s criticism may suggest a more general anxiety about the loss of Indian autonomy. As Arnold Krupat puts it in The Turn to the Native, “once there is a degree of circulation of stories, that is, once narrators permit ‘outside’ auditors . . . then—again—although ‘insiders’ may be especially well positioned to speak of these stories, there is no ground on which they can claim sole rights to possession.” 67 Furthermore, Allen writes that Silko “is unaware of one small but essential bit of information: the information that telling the old stories, revealing the old ways can only lead to disaster.” 68 Allen’s warning is impressive, and apparently the presence of the novel may cause exactly the kind of harm that it attempts to heal. But, in terms of the novel’s commercial and canonical health, telling “real” Laguna stories is powerful medicine. It is hardly a stretch, and hardly new, to apply these arguments to the broader reach of canon reformation itself. Philip J. Deloria argues that in the early part of the twentieth century “American identity was increasingly tied to a search for an authentic social identity, one that had real meaning in the face of the anxious displacements of modernity.” 69 Deloria points out that this identity was (and is) frequently found in Indianness. The same holds true at the beginning of the twenty-first century, an age seemingly divided between those, on the one hand, who embrace the “posthuman,” the cyborg, and the freeplay of postmodern culture and those, on the other hand, who desperately seek a fount of authenticity in the face of the anxious displacements of postmodernity. The revision of the canon over the past three decades toward a more inclusive, multicultural set of authors and texts reveals both impulses. On the one hand, revisionists reject the asserted uni213

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versalism of the past in favor of a canon that reflects ethnic hybridity and cultural plurality. Disbanding the old pantheon seems to offer new recognition for complex ethnic identities (as well as complex gender/sexual orientations, class structures, and so on). Yet the emergence and inclusion of such categories as “Native American Literature” threaten to institutionalize a new form of essentialism, based on an updated, liberal view of canonical nationalism. The new anthologies and new canons perform the same functions as the old ones: imagining America through overdetermined literary paradigms. “Because of flaws in pedagogy and criticism,” Elizabeth CookLynn writes, “much modern fiction in English by American Indians is being used as the basis for the cynical absorption into the ‘melting pot,’ pragmatic inclusion in the canon, and involuntary unification of an American national literary voice.” 70 And, even when a category such as “Native American literature” (or African-American, Asian-American, and so on) retains its separate and separatist identity, it nevertheless risks becoming yet another monolith, a canonical category as grossly oversimplified as any in literature. Over this period Native American literature has become an established category on college syllabuses and anthologies, appearing in predictable ways in surveys of American literature. For example, anecdotal evidence suggests that many anthologies and college surveys covering early American literature now begin with Native expressions: “the oral traditions,” “creation myths,” “indigenous traditions,” and so on. Of course, these stories, because they are oral in nature, are inevitably taken out of historical context and modernized; unlike a written document, there is no specific moment to fix them. They are just as real and vital in 1970 as they were in 1670 or 1470 (which is not to say they are the same). In fact, the suggestion that these anthologized translations are somehow “original” and specific to pre-Columbian culture is absurd. So, why teach them at the semester’s start, why open an anthology with them? The implicit answer is that Indians were here first, and teaching the “oral tradition” at the start of a semester conveys that sense of priority. It is the assertion of authenticity, of originality, and a way for Anglo teachers and editors to assuage a little guilt by seeming to emphasize the importance of native cultures. But anecdotal evidence also suggests that after a week or two many syllabuses then drop Native literature and turn toward the written Anglo record, the latest incarnation of the canon. The logic seems to be this: since there is little written Indian “literature” before the nineteenth century, why “return” to the “same” oral sto214

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ries and the same lessons during, for example, the Puritan period, the Federal period, or the Romantic period? Further, in the nineteenth century, as Cheryl Walker argues, written literature is inevitably bicultural and heteroglot, sometimes “mimicking the discourse of the whites”; thus it seems corrupt, not authentic or pure.71 Unfortunately, such pedagogical strategies reenact the displacement of native cultures by erasing them as the semester goes on, except for their presence as Other in writings by, say, Rowlandson, Franklin, Cooper, and Melville. (Why is it that syllabuses don’t end with the Native literature or the oral tradition—“here last”?) My point is not so much to resurrect the tiresome complexities of syllabus making and canon formation as it is to recognize how messy the projection of authenticity can be from across the culture line. Harold Bloom writes that “all canonizing of literary texts is a self-contradictory process, for by canonizing a text you are troping upon it, which means that you are misreading it. Canonization is the most extreme version of what Nietzsche called Interpretation, or the exercise of the Will-to-Power over texts.” 72 And, for Gerald Vizenor, “Native American literatures have been pressed into cultural categories, transmuted by reductionism, animadversions and the hyperrealities of neocolonial consumerism.” 73 Moreover, the very concept of Native American literature—necessary, important, and progressive in many ways—is not entirely a Native concept; that is, Indian literature is inevitably taken up and legitimized (authenticated) by dominant non-Native critical practices. As Krupat argues, “Native American literature,” like “Native American religion,” is a “Western category.” “Traditional cultures,” he notes, “neither conceptualize nor linguistically articulate the generalized abstract categories of philosophy, literature, and religion.” 74 How, then, does one read from across the culture line? How can we who are on the other side avoid projecting our own cultural needs (e.g., for authenticity) onto Indian writing? Elizabeth Cook-Lynn writes: “Drawing on the consequences of what started it all, Black Elk Speaks, an ethnographic biography, and House Made of Dawn, a novel, it is clear that the larger culture, both academic and popular, has been quite adept at replacing whatever political realities those works might have engendered in academic studies with its own pleasing fantasies. The activities sponsored by the vast numbers of readers of those works have discredited whatever authenticity they might have had, and the really fearful thing is that there is no way of measuring the effect of these fantasies on Indian communities themselves.” 75 We seem hopelessly stuck, caught in a double bind, caught between two 215

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iron mountains, as the phrase goes.76 On the one hand, in the words of David Palumbo-Liu, we encounter “the possibilities of containing and coopting the cultural objects of heretofore marginalized peoples,” an ignoble result. On the other hand, we confront “the necessity to carry on even in the face of such possibilities,” for to ignore multiethnic texts is a form of silencing and erasure.77 The specific double bind that interests me here is this: if we read, say, Ceremony in ignorance of Laguna Pueblo culture, we are simply applying Euroamerican reading strategies onto the text and dismissing an important element of the author’s cultural inheritance—and indeed her own implicit instructions for reading the novel. As Daniel F. Littlefield Jr. writes: “Relieving readers of the burden of accounting for the literature [by Native Americans] in a cultural context makes it easier to discuss it in what the Indians call the ‘lit-crit speak tropes’ of Western literary criticism. We also relieve the reader of the burden of tribal or Indian national history. Thus it is easy to force the literature into traditional Western historical constructs so that it becomes what we want it to be or think it should be.” 78 And, as Susan Bernardin puts it, “by loosening American Indian literary texts from their cultural matrices, readers risk, at the least, misreading, and the worst, emptying out these texts’ specificities in the name of universalizing interpretive strategies.” 79 But, if we read for Laguna cultural practices (or, worse, a more generalized Native American attitude toward, say, nature or spirituality), we are participating in the game of authenticity, a “circular game,” as Bernardin explains, “in which the identification of a text’s ‘Indian’ features becomes entangled with assigning that self-same text as cultural informant or race representative.” Again, we end up reading a work of literature for its portrayal of history, ignoring authorial invention, and possibly inscribing renewed fantasies of history and identity onto the text. David Palumbo-Liu warns against models of teaching and reading “ethnic literary texts [that] assume their status as authentic, unmediated representations of ethnicity.” He argues that, “in such scenarios, material history is reduced to being an ‘influence’ on the individual writer’s art, an influence that, once understood, can be subsumed in the production of understanding, not sustained in a critique of historical, political process.” 80 These models are all the more invisible when applied within the context of western literature, in which the assumption that regional landscape and culture overwhelm authorial design is standard operating procedure. Once we understand authors as being sophisticated and ambitious in their reflections 216

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of and responses to cultural inheritance; understand them as negotiating and subverting the very canonical categories into which they are placed; and recognize, and enjoy, the performativity of representation—then we begin to liberate (if that word is not too strong) western literature from the prison house of authenticity. Infighting and Inwriting: Postmodernism, Canons, and Constructs Native stories are a literary giveaway. — gerald vizenor, Fugitive Poses

Most readers, teachers, and critics who teach Native American literature in this country are non-Native, working from across the culture line. “Crossreading,” the practice of encountering Indian literature, seems to reinscribe the dichotomy between “us” and “them.” Even Arnold Krupat, who argues for an ethnocriticism that “seeks to traverse rather than occupy a great variety of ‘middle grounds’” 81 that seeks to avoid the imposition of a dominant (Anglo) discourse, still wryly describes himself as a “nice Jewish boy among the Indians.” 82 Krupat positions himself as an outsider—though one with a significant and self-conscious commitment to the field. Yet even here the claim of being an outsider is a gentle claim of inauthenticity, and inauthenticity preserves the very concept of the authentic. (My own initial outsider claim does this as well.) Terry Tempest Williams’s alignment of her Mormon heritage with the Navajo culture in Pieces of White Shell and Ian Frazier’s self-professed assimilation of Indianness in On the Rez both reinforce the category of Native; their failures or ultimate refusals to become Indian protect the category of Indian. I don’t mean to suggest that playing Indian is harmless and certainly not that it “preserves” in any meaningful way Native culture. Quite the opposite. Of course, crossreading too often preserves the simulation of the Indian, turning the Indian into a museum piece, and Indians themselves end up succumbing to or simply adopting the simulation—they, too, play Indian. In other words, from across the culture line the we that I employed in the previous section seems all too secure—we are non-Natives, non-Indians. But who are “they”? Determining Indian identity and Indianness itself can be an impoverishing business. Does it depend on blood quantum? Tribal enrollment or federal recognition? Reservation experience? Education? Political/tribal values? And who decides? Arnold Krupat and Brian Swann offer three forms of Indian identity: (1) “Nationalists generally define Indian identity as a matter 217

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of tribal enrollment,” which generally implies blood quantum; (2) “Indigenists find this position unacceptably ‘Eurocentric,’ and, instead, look to an ecologically based philosophy or system of indigenous values . . . regardless of ‘blood,’ although indigenists seem somewhat ambivalent about whether just anyone can be Indian”; and (3) “The cosmopolitan position” is articulated through Vizenor’s character Stone Columbus, who “would accept as ‘tribal’ anyone committed to the values of healing rather than stealing tribal cultures, ‘no blood attached or scratched.’” Krupat and Swann themselves default to a position first articulated by Swann: “Native Americans are Native Americans if they say they are, if other Native Americans say they are and accept them, and (possibly) if the values that are held close and acted upon are values upheld by the various native peoples who live in the Americas.” 83 In other words, the definitions are quite loose. In his essay “Chopping Down the Sacred Tree” Larry McMurtry, after reminding readers of his own Sioux blood, argues that “the most gifted of the writers who are called Native American now—N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, Gerald Vizenor, Sherman Alexie, and others— have for two generations ranged widely through the white academies, from Dartmouth and Cambridge to Stanford and Seattle; they not only know what their ancestors knew as tribal people, they know what our ancestors knew as dead white Europeans. With this long mixing of bloods and cultures it is now less easy, in speaking of Native Americans, to know to what extent they are we and we they.” 84 Nevertheless, the boundaries marking insider and outsider, though shifting, are carefully monitored and policed by those inside, those outside, and those in-between. For example, Ward Churchill, a self-described indigenist, criticizes Gary Snyder for his appropriation of Indian traditions and spirituality. He quotes Snyder as saying: “Spirituality is not something which can be ‘owned’ like a car or house. . . . Spiritual knowledge belongs to all humanity equally. Given the state of the world today, we all have not only the right but the obligation to pursue all forms of spiritual insight.” 85 Churchill argues that the “traditional Indian perspective is diametrically opposed” to this kind of thinking and quotes Russell Means as saying: “What’s at issue here is the same old question that Europeans have always posed with regard to American Indians, whether what’s ours isn’t somehow theirs. . . . And those who engage in this [appropriation] are not cute, groovy, hip, enlightened, or any of the rest of the things they want to project themselves as being. No, what they’re about is cultural genocide.” 86 218

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Equally revealing are the border wars within the “circle.” These wellknown skirmishes over authenticity need not be rehearsed, only listed: Paula Gunn Allen versus Leslie Silko, Leslie Silko versus Louise Erdrich, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn versus Michael Dorris, Sherman Alexie versus Louis Owens, and so on. These debates focus on questions of identity (who’s an Indian?), experience (on or off the reservation?), education (tribal or Euroamerican?), tone (victimry or survival?), and representation (accurate or misleading?). The disagreement between these writers—intense, passionate, and sincere—reveals what’s at stake. For many Native American writers the debates over authenticity do not involve academic theories but, rather, personal and tribal concerns. Postmodernism, which so often dismisses the idea of authenticity as a naive cultural construction, might very well seem to deny the validity of these writers’ arguments. To what degree are postmodern theory and Native American literature compatible? And, second, to what degree are the canons of western American literature and Native American literature compatible or coterminous? There can be no doubt that these question are inquiring into authorial identity and the claims of authenticity, but ultimately the issues may be much deeper, involving cultural survival itself. And, if these questions have answers—admittedly a dubious possibility—those answers may emerge from a critique of authenticity. Sidner Larson has written: “If the authenticity debate can be explained as a kind of allegorical representative of the postmodern American Indian condition, it may finally find its appropriate context.” 87 Larson summarizes the “authenticity debate” as one usually “grounded in blood quantum”: “Lately, however, the debate has also branched into discussions of whether the content of Indian writing is authentic, which opens up the new problem of who is qualified to judge. In addition, the debate ranges from expressions of personal frustration about who gets to be Indian to first-rate analyses of the problems related to authenticity.” 88 In what ways might this debate serve as “an allegorical representative of the postmodern American Indian condition” or, I would add, of American Indian literature? In Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism Craig S. Womack argues against the “skepticism of postmodernism.” 89 He endorses forms of cultural and canonical separatism and promotes the recognition of insider/ outsider boundaries and, arguably, Indian authenticity. “It is way too premature,” he writes, “for Native scholars to deconstruct history when we haven’t yet constructed it.” 90 While being careful not to promote the idea of “Native perspectives [that] are pure, authoritative, uncontaminated by 219

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European influences,” he acknowledges an interest in “the idea of a Native consciousness.” The notion that “all things Native are, in reality, filtered through contact with Europe” is, for Womack, “an assimilationist ideology, a retreat into sameness.” He concludes: “To be sure, there is no one pure or authoritative act that constitutes Native literary criticism. We can only take such a notion so far, though. The postmodernists might laugh at claims of prioritizing insider status, questioning the very nature of what constitutes an insider. . . . In terms of a reality check, however, we might remind ourselves that authenticity and insider and outsider status are, in fact, often discussed in Native communities, especially given the historical reality that outsiders have so often been the ones interpreting things Indian.” 91 Womack’s “reality check” is well taken. And bell hooks points to a similar academic dismissal in her essay “Postmodern Blackness”: “It never surprises me when black folks respond to the critique of essentialism, especially when it denies the validity of identity politics by saying, ‘Yeah, it’s easy to give up identity, when you got one.’ Should we not be suspicious of postmodern critiques of the ‘subject’ when they surface at a historical moment when many subjugated people feel themselves coming to voice for the first time.” 92 The postmodern impulse to distrust the “subject,” history, tradition, and metanarrative may well hit native cultures where they live, and Euroamerican critics may be quicker to dismiss what Cook-Lynn calls “the reality of race memory as it is connected to environment and geography,” or even to dismiss “Indianness” itself, than many Native critics.93 Womack recognizes “two separate canons”: “our American canon, the Native literary canon of the Americas,” and “their American canon” (7), presumably the largely Euroamerican tradition. We might, in this case, subdivide yet again, identifying separate canons of Native American literature and western American literature. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, who argues against the imposition of western literary history on Native writing, has said, “Indians have no relationship to what America calls the West at all.” To her this West is an imperialist construction, and she wants no part of it: “I don’t read the literature of the ‘American West’ either for pleasure or instruction. If I read it at all it is out of obligation, that is, as a scholar I must read certain texts.” 94 She expresses little interest in crossreading. As she puts it, “canon theory and critical theory rise out of pedagogy, not the other way around . . . thereby magnifying issues of cultural authenticity. Since, in general, the faculties in departments where these works are taught are often the last places to draw in any great numbers of Native scholars, it is quite likely that 220

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conflicting and minority views will be dismissed, distorted, or unknown.” 95 Cook-Lynn emphasizes the need for “cultural autonomy,” and this extends beyond the academy to literary production; 96 she is especially critical of Indian writers, often mixed-blood, who she feels contribute to Euroamerican domination by abandoning the principles of tribalism and sovereignty.97 Naturally, many writers and critics take issue with Womack’s separatism and Cook-Lynn’s tribalism. Joy Harjo, for example, sees Indian literature as being not “outside the mainstream of American literature” but “closer to the center” of an American literature that is undeniably multiethnic.98 Similarly, Louise Erdrich has said, “I don’t think American Indian literature should be distinguished from mainstream literature. Setting it apart and saying that people with special interest might read this literature sets Indians apart too.” 99 In more extensive critical commentaries Louis Owens and Arnold Krupat (who is non-Native) have both argued for the importance of mixed-blood or bicultural Indian writing, tending to see the very performance of cultural exchange and literary dialogism as crucial elements of Native literature. Significantly, both Owens and Krupat have expressed mixed feelings about postmodernism and its implicit critique of Native identity and authenticity. In Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History, Literature Krupat announces his “substantial disagreement” with “postmodernist orientations for criticism” and writes that he wants “to argue against the politics of postmodernism . . . in the interest of ethnocriticism’s very different politics.” 100 Krupat is concerned that postmodernism’s insistence on absolute relativism, its celebration of the “prisonhouse of rhetoric and ideology,” 101 and its fracturing of metanarratives—and even group stories— tend to produce an academic culture incapable of political action or even compelling critical discourse. At the same time, Krupat is highly suspicious of traditional binaries, both the binaries of insider/outsider separatism and, more pointedly, the binaries that he perceives in the very postmodern treatments of Indian literary and cultural practices (14). Instead, he argues for a “frontier,” “understood as simply that shifting space in which two cultures encounter one another” (5). With implications for canonical and cultural history, Krupat’s idea of ethnocriticism challenges the binary nature of separatism, which too often serves “to justify that form of postcolonial revisionism” of victimry (20). He argues in The Turn to the Native that “the production of knowledge about Native American literatures is usefully sited among both ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’” and that these literatures “should 221

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be strongly represented in American literature courses” and in “specific courses” on Indian literatures.102 Louis Owens sees similar traps in postmodernism and similar possibilities for crossreading. In Other Destinies Owens allows that “thanks in part to critics such as Foucault and Lyotard, marginalized literatures are moving onto the center screen of critical concerns.” Owens, however, goes on to suggest that “Native American writers have their reservations; they work for the most part consciously outside the concerns of postmodern theorists, at times working at odds with the aims of deconstructionist theory.” 103 Owens is playing here with the insider/outsider binary, implying that Indian writers own an insider status (“have their reservations”) exactly because they work “outside” the illusory world of contemporary academic (postmodern) theory. Owens is particularly concerned with postmodernism’s rejection of authenticity and stable identity, an approach that he sees as being in basic disagreement with Indian literature: “repeatedly in Indian fiction . . . we are shown the possibility of recovering a centered sense of personal identity and significance.” 104 While hardly a nationalist or a “purist,” Owens argues that “Native American writing represents an attempt to recover identity and authenticity by invoking and incorporating the world found within the oral tradition—the reality of myth and ceremony—an authorless ‘original’ literature.” 105 Still, Owens is committed to transcultural dialogue, and in Mixedblood Messages he suggests that “the Native American novel is the quintessential postmodern frontier text” in large part because it denies the boundaries of cultural identity and, instead, presents what Mary Louise Pratt calls a “contact zone” between cultures.106 Gerald Vizenor is the most visible presence among critics promoting the applicability of postmodern theory to Native American literature. Indeed, the theory itself may be secondary, the stories primary, themselves displaying the elusive tricks and maneuvers of postmodernism. In his oft-quoted preface to Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures Vizenor suggests that “the postmodern opened in tribal imagination; oral cultures have never been without a postmodern condition that enlivens stories and ceremonies.” 107 “The ironies and humor in the postmodern,” he argues in Manifest Manners, “are heard in tribal narratives”—in their performative and trickster poses.108 For Vizenor (and most postmodern theorists) “the postmodern pose is a noetic mediation that denies historicism and representation; in particular, it denies the kitschy speculation on the basic truth.” 109 But, if oral cultures and subsequent Indian literatures (em222

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bodied in the figure of the trickster) display the postmodern, the postmodern also displays the indian. As previously indicated, Vizenor argues that the familiar representation of the indian is a simulation, a hyperreal construction. Given the presence of the postmodern in the Native canon and the simulation of the indian in the traditional literary canon, it follows that Vizenor advocates and employs the use of postmodern theory as a strategy of critical inquiry. “Trickster hermeneutics,” he writes, “is access to trickster stories, and the shimmer of a tribal presence in simulations; this new course of tribal interpretation arises from the postindian turns in literature, the reach of tribal shadows, postmodern conditions of translation, the traces of deconstruction, and the theories of representation and simulation.” 110 With these summaries in mind, let me conclude with some speculations on postmodernism, authenticity, and Native American literature. The Vanishing American. Native American writers take the “offering” of postmodernism and reciprocate with a postmodern turn of their own. They turn non-Natives into simulations and simulacra. Simon Ortiz has said: “If the critic really looked at what Native America was and is today, he would have to undo the construct that America according to Western civilization and its rationalizations is. He would have to throw it all out. He would have to say this is all wrong; the Native American is indeed right. There is a real—not only a hesitation— denial of what the real America is; and the real America is the Native America of indigenous people and the indigenous principle they represent. That’s the real America. The critics refuse to live with that. It’s too fearful.” 111 Ortiz is expanding the notion of insider/ outsider canons to their logical end— or beginning. He is presenting the same choice that Morpheus presents Neo in the Baudrillard-inspired film The Matrix: take the red pill and see the posthuman real, or take the blue pill and continue to exist in a reassuring hyperreality. If the “real America is the Native America,” then non-Natives produce and inhabit an unreal or at least less real America. Interestingly, while Ortiz seems to be promoting a nationalist authenticity, Native writers need not claim an insider status—nonNative critics set up those boundaries themselves. Here the Anglo critic is emphatically an outsider, working toward absence rather than presence. For the critic, playing Indian may seem to simulate the Indian and authenticity, but it in effect produces not a sense of authenticity but the opposite: critics end up performing outsiderness, insisting on their identity as copy, as imitation. They draw circles, that authentic shape, only to peer in from 223

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the outside. They make themselves into absences. So, we might revise Vizenor’s argument that “the indian is the invention, and indian cultures are simulations” by saying that the non-Native critic is the invention and academic culture is a simulation.112 The ultimate ironic act of imitation is exactly this: critics become “vanishing Americans.” They imitate a grotesque simulation and disappear in the process. The Giveaway. Gerald Vizenor writes, “many native authors have actuated a literary giveaway in their stories, and a narrative of deconstruction of cultural dominance.” 113 This “giveaway” is hardly free, for it produces a “debt [that] is a lasting, moral obligation of the nation.” 114 The process of this giveaway, however, necessitates that in order to deconstruct “victimry,” cultural dominance, and “the indian,” each Native author must essentially turn not only outward to the broader arena of cultural oppression but inward— at least look into the mirror at his or her own projected image, a “double double.” Challenging the simulation of the Indian means reexamining Indianness and the relationship between an author and region. Perhaps we are seeing the repayment of that debt in debates over authenticity, in which boundaries and intellectual reservations are repeatedly redrawn. Should these lines be made more permanent, marking a separate Indian territory? Or do the lines themselves reproduce static notions of Indianness while containing and “ghettoizing” Native American literature? Chance Arrangements. When asked to comment on his autobiography, Interior Landscapes, Gerald Vizenor once said, “I create my life in oral stories, and so create my life in the book. Chances, not causes, are my stories. I tried in my autobiography to relate the chance and ironies of my experiences. Chance is my best sense of the real, and chance must deny the cause of victimry.” 115 Vizenor’s conception of “chance” has received significant attention, notably from Louis Owens, who expresses concern that “a mere capitulation to chance, or random event, would deny the emphasis upon our ultimate responsibility for ordering and sustaining the world we inhabit that is central to Native American ecosystemic cultures.” 116 Yet the “responsibility for ordering” may be understood as a novelist’s (or a culture’s) impulse to bring order to chance and disorder. If the “real” is imbued with, sustained by, or dependent on chance and randomness, then written literature is inevitably containing rather than liberating. Western literature, I have argued, does exactly that: places boundaries around its subject, using the claim of authenticity to conceal its very lack of the real. But, if the real is recognized to be unstable and defined by chance, then representing it is 224

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equally loosed from its moorings. Following Vizenor’s lead, we might say that such a literature is open to new arrangements and at the very least no longer committed to representational realism. The West as Native America. The difficulty of defining canonical or genre boundaries is immense. Is western Native American literature recognizable as western literature? It seems to me that traditional answers (in either the affirmative or negative) have emphasized the complexity of Indian literature and the stability of western literature. Western literature is usually defined in terms of regional geography or sociology (e.g., aridity, meridians, social mores), but the essential western impulse toward realism is rarely addressed. But, if western literature (whatever its limits) is recognized, instead, as unstable and prone to a kind of representational entropy, in which signification tends toward absence and chaos, then perhaps we’re closer to answering the question. Both claim or enact an authenticity, both are received as authentic, yet both also refuse to be limited by cultural projections. Traditionally, both convey skepticism about individualized authorship, and both enforce a commitment to environmental and cultural authority. Perhaps most important, both western literature and Native literature can claim a postmodern impulse, a tendency toward change, chance, and elusiveness. Back to the Future. I am primarily interested in understanding the literary implications of these issues: how the narratives and rhetorics of creative representations produce the effects they do. But those effects clearly manifest themselves in political and cultural alterations. It seems to me profoundly important to study the manner in which the idea of authenticity structures the production and reception of texts, the perception of group and individual identities, and the cultural understanding of reality itself. “Yet,” as Susan Bernardin writes, “even when wielded self-consciously, the discourse of authenticity risks the reinscription of the very categorical values it seeks to dismantle.” 117 And, ultimately, the idea of authenticity is culture consuming; it can only exist in a culture that feels alienated from itself. And thus, for both literary and cultural praxis, it may be that the idea of authenticity is destructive and must be abandoned. As Robert Allen Warrior writes, “both American Indian and Native Americanist discourses continue to be preoccupied with parochial questions of identity and authenticity. Essentialists categories still reign insofar as more of the focus of scholarship has been to reduce, constrain, and contain American Indian literature and 225

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thought and to establish why something or someone is ‘Indian’ than engage the myriad critical issues crucial to an Indian future.” 118 No Future: Outsiders in the Next West The American Old West symbolizes honesty and clean living for us,” said a 61-year-old cowboy, who only goes by the name Jackson. “Here, nobody lies.” —“Life at the Czech Corral,” Boston Globe, on Wild West Town, Boskovice, Czech Republic

On 14 January 1978, in San Francisco, the Sex Pistols played their final concert.119 The British punk band had been in the United States for less than two tumultuous weeks, heading west on a tour from Georgia through Texas and Oklahoma before their implosion in California. In a sense they were extending a tradition of European writers and artists touring the West, performing as cultural curiosities and offering critiques of American social values. Alexis de Tocqueville, Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, D. H. Lawrence, Antonin Dvorak, Igor Stravinsky, Michel Foucault, and countless others visited the West, bringing European sensibilities and sensational entertainment to the hinterlands. The Sex Pistols, however, seemed to invert the process in one crucial way: they embodied savagery, not Old World civilization, and were consequently treated by the “natives” as if they were exhibits in what might be called producer Malcolm McLaren’s traveling Wild Waste Show. But these savages-on-display didn’t seem to represent ancient history, as Parkman had assumed of American Indians; instead, they seemed to portend a new wave of anarchy and art. In this inversion they were turning history back upon itself. And they began that San Francisco show, like every show on the abbreviated tour, with “God Save the Queen,” the punk anthem in which Johnny Rotten screams the quintessential refrain, “No Future.” Postmodernism, for which the Sex Pistols serve as a kind of amateur house band, offers the same refrain. Not only no future but no past as well. What might this mean for the literary West, a represented region that delivers endless bits of nostalgia and frontier logic and serves as the textual embodiment of America’s past and future? It is perhaps an odd coincidence that many of the most influential foreign writers of postmodern fiction and theory would take a particular interest in the American West. (It is, of course, no coincidence at all.) This section will focus on three: Vladimir 226

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Nabokov, Peter Handke, and Jean Baudrillard. All three have written of the West as the postmodern incarnation of America and, to varying degrees, treat western landscapes and themes as influences on their own authorial imaginations. All three are careful to depict themselves as outsiders, and none ever claims native knowledge. And yet each also portrays certain experiences as decidedly western: for Nabokov it is a tour through a Wild West story; for Handke a visit with John Ford; and for Baudrillard a viewing of Death Valley’s “cinematic” spectacle. Are these experiences authentic for Nabokov, Handke, and Baudrillard? To a certain degree they are, exactly because each is the experience of the hyperreal. These writers do not disparage or ridicule the role of authenticity in the West but, instead: (1) marvel at the American obsession with the Real West; (2) investigate the relationship between realism and the West and how this relationship has affected western literature and art; and (3) indulge in the gaps between representation and the West. And, even though each writer can hear the postmodern refrain of No Past/No Future, these writers are surprisingly sanguine in these works, offering an optimism often missing in their other writings. Perhaps that optimism is an outsider’s luxury. Of the three Nabokov devoted the most time to western reflections. Beginning in the early 1950s, he traveled throughout the West, hunting butterflies, writing, and sightseeing. By 1967 he could remark: “I am as American as April in Arizona. The flora, the fauna, the air of the Western states are my links with Asiatic and Arctic Russia.” 120 Nabokov’s West is frequently tinged by this kind of nostalgia for a lost land, a lost time, a lost textuality. His experiences in the West—in Texas, in Colorado, in Oregon, and elsewhere—appear throughout his late fiction. In Lolita, much of which was written in Oregon and the West, Nabokov offers extended ruminations on the region, as Humbert Humbert and Lolita voyage across country; 121 in Pale Fire Nabokov exiles editor/narrator Charles Kinbote to Utana (near a “very loud amusement park”), an invented hybrid of Utah and Montana; even in Ada or Ardor and Look at the Harlequins! Nabokov interposes western images. But it is the extraordinary chapter 10 of his autobiography, Speak, Memory (1966), in which Nabokov most fully explores the literary West. Chapter 10 of Speak, Memory is arguably the most underappreciated work of twentieth-century western literature. Originally appearing as an autobiographical essay in the New Yorker in 1949, the chapter conveys Nabokov’s debt to western writing and culture, playfully weaving his childhood memories of Mayne Reid’s Headless Horseman (1865) with reminiscences about his 227

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own sexual and authorial development—and occasionally interjecting references to more contemporary western excursions. The baroque precision and complexity of Nabokov’s essay defy analysis and echo Reid’s typically convoluted Western, which involves multiple plots, mistaken identities, and obscure actions.122 But at every turn Nabokov returns to western iconography and mythology to explain his own experiences. He recalls, for example, how he and his cousin Yuri would act out scenes from the Headless Horseman, dueling like Maurice the Mustanger (in actuality an Irish nobleman) and Cassius Calhoun (the scoundrel cousin of the desirable Louise Pointdexter). Later, “for obvious reasons,” he names a young woman at a roller-skating rink with a “twangy feminine voice” Louise and expresses outrage when he spots her with a dashing instructor, “a sleek ruffian of the Calhoun type.” Nabokov imagines that the following night the instructor was “shot, lassoed, buried alive, shot again, throttled, bitingly insulted, coolly aimed at, spared, and left to drag a life of shame.” 123 Perhaps no evocation is more poignant than the shocking recollection of Yuri’s death. The first section’s final paragraph opens with Nabokov “suddenly” remembering a visit with Yuri in which the teenage boys exchanged clothes, “like Maurice Gerald and doomed Henry Pointdexter,” Louise’s brother. Nabokov then describes a swing on which they would play, one of the boys lying on the ground underneath and the other dangerously swinging “from what seemed an enormous height,” passing “just a couple of inches” above “the supine one’s face.” The unprepared reader is hardly allowed the luxury of allusion, for, if Nabokov wants us to remember that the “doomed Henry” is indeed decapitated in Reid’s story, there is yet another headless horseman. “And three years later,” Nabokov writes midparagraph, without warning, “as a cavalry officer in Denikin’s army, he was killed fighting the Reds in northern Crimea. I saw him dead in Yalta, the whole front of his skull pushed back by the impact of several bullets, which had hit him like the iron board of a monstrous swing.” Yuri’s “lifelong thirst” for “that ultimate gallant gallop” was “quenched.” Nabokov concludes the first section by writing: “Had I been competent to write his epitaph, I might have summed up matters by saying—in richer words than I can muster here—that all emotions, all thoughts, were governed in Yuri by one gift: a sense of honor equivalent, morally, to absolute pitch” (199 –200). Here we witness Nabokov at the height of his powers, and knowing it. The closing metaphor is indeed a stunning epitaph for Yuri, and Nabokov, surely realizing his literary feat, delays the delivery, rhetorically building up 228

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a sense of expectation and anticipation that he had denied in his sudden disclosure of Yuri’s horrible death. The result is brilliant syntactically but produces an odd effect. Nabokov seems to pit his own genius (or competency) as a writer against Yuri’s legacy; the power of this sentence is in the presentation, not in the tribute. Ultimately, there is a tension between Yuri’s death and Nabokov’s stylistic performance, between narrative and authorial ego, between experience (the real) and expression (representation). And it is this tension that Nabokov explores through his use of the West. To a degree Nabokov uses this chapter to describe his own authorial development as a kind of western spectacle. It comes as something of a surprise when he traces his own writerly past to Reid’s Western. His recollection of Louise Pointdexter, “standing upon the edge of her azotea,” holding a lorgnette, triggers a realization: “that lorgnette I found afterward in the hands of Madame Bovary, and later Anna Karenin had it, and then it passed into the possession of Chekhov’s Lady with the Lapdog and was lost by her on the pier at Yalta” (202). At first it is hard to imagine that Nabokov seriously wants readers to trace the prestigious Russo-European literary tradition back to a forgotten Wild West story or even to trace Nabokov’s own aesthetic sensibilities to that Western. But his gesture is itself a dramatic show, and throughout the chapter he continuously presents himself as a master of rhetorical spectacle. “I am now going to do something quite difficult,” he grandly announces at the end of the second section, “a kind of double somersault with a Welsh waggle (old acrobats will know what I mean), and I want complete silence, please” (204). Nabokov, as usual, is attempting to control the textual show and the readers’ experience, but what is especially interesting here is that the “difficult” acrobatic performance constitutes the control of not only his writing but of Mayne Reid’s as well. Just as his epitaph for Yuri turned into a stylistic tour de force, so his homage to Reid’s Western is, instead, a coup. Nabokov reaches into the heart of the Western and pulls out the real thing: his own West and his own authorial identity. Nabokov uses the idea of performance as itself a stage to command. He recalls sitting in an orchestra box at the Wintergarten, enjoying the “show” that included jugglers and a bicycle act (207). He subsequently performs his own bicycle act, in which he rides by the coachman’s daughter, the seductive Polenka.124 Even the encyclopedia, with its abbreviations to save space, “acquired the trumpery fascination of a masquerade” (208).125 Perhaps the most visible spectacle is the barroom fight between Maurice and Calhoun, which Nabokov describes: “The duel took place there and then, in the emp229

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tied barroom, the men using Colt’s six-shooters. Despite my interest in the fight (. . . both were wounded . . . their blood spurted all over the sanded floor . . . ), I could not prevent myself from leaving the saloon in my fancy to mingle with the hushed crowd in front of the hotel, so as to make out (in the ‘scented dark’) certain señoritas ‘of questionable calling’” (201; Nabokov’s suspension points). Nabokov here treats Reid’s story as a projection, a virtual Western reality in which he can control his own movements. (As always, Nabokov claims as a reader exactly the interpretive freedom that, as author, he consistently denies to his readers.) While it may seem that he is embracing anonymity, mingling with the “hushed crowd,” the effect is exactly the opposite: Nabokov here becomes the star, a director of the images. He is rewriting Reid according to his own interests and desires and, despite his childhood inability to control his reading focus, moving through Reid’s western world at authorial will. Remarkably, Nabokov’s most thorough deconstruction of the Real West is nearly invisible and easily missed, for it takes place in the essay’s very first paragraph. He begins chapter 10: “The Wild West fiction of Captain Mayne Reid (1818 –1883), translated and simplified, was tremendously popular with Russian children at the beginning of this century, long after his American fame had faded. Knowing English, I could savor his Headless Horseman in the unabridged original” (195). Nabokov immediately implies that both the past and authenticity itself are textual matters. The “original” Wild West is an edition of fiction. Moreover, in these opening sentences Nabokov shifts the focus from Reid’s writing to his own reading, a transformation that continues to evolve. The paragraph concludes: The edition I had (possibly a British one) remains in the stacks of my memory as a puffy book bound in red cloth, with a watery-gray frontispiece, the gloss of which had been gauzed over when the book was new by a leaf of tissue paper. I see this leaf as it disintegrated—at first folded improperly, then torn off—but the frontispiece itself, which no doubt depicted Louise Pointdexter’s unfortunate brother . . . has been so long exposed to the blaze of my imagination that it is now completely bleached (but miraculously replaced by the real thing, as I noted when translating this chapter into Russian in the spring of 1953, and namely, by the view from a ranch you and I rented that year: a cactus-and-yucca waste whence came that morning the plaintive call of a quail—Gambel’s Quail, I

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Reid’s novel gives ground to Nabokov’s writing, and Reid himself dematerializes in the course of the paragraph. First, Nabokov seems to reimagine Borges’s “On Exactitude in Science,” the celebrated short fable in which cartographers create a map so exact that it “coincided point for point” with the empire itself, essentially covering the territory.126 In Borges’s story the map decays over time, leaving “Tattered Ruins” throughout the territory. (Baudrillard later uses this story to announce that in a postmodern world “it is the territory whose shreds slowly rot across the extent of the map.”) 127 For Nabokov both the tissue paper and the frontispiece are texts. While it would seem that the tissue paper is the decaying map and the frontispiece is the territory, in fact both decay, one materially and the other mnemonically. Nabokov’s imagination is so powerful that it “bleached” Reid’s fantastic image—and replaced it with the “real thing,” Nabokov’s own image of the West. The replacement of Reid’s West with Nabokov’s West is deceptively exact, for the “original” (Reid’s frontispiece) also contained a view of yucca and cactus.128 Moreover, Nabokov himself replaces Reid in this paragraph: first, he evolves from reader to writer and translator; and, second, he concludes with his own “attainments and rewards,” while Reid’s “American fame had faded.” Even the desired Louise is replaced by Nabokov’s own wife, Vera, identified in the address to “you.” For Nabokov the literary West is always hyperreal, a text to be recoded rather than revised. A generation after Nabokov, Peter Handke took up the subject of the West, again as a hyperreal projection. Handke, considered one of Europe’s most accomplished writers of postmodern fiction, did a lecture tour of the United States in 1971 and the following year used his experiences to write Short Letter, Long Farewell (Der kurze Brief zum langen Abschied). The unnamed narrator of this novel begins his story in New England and gradually, somewhat randomly, makes his way west (St. Louis, Tucson, Oregon, California), pursued by his estranged and apparently homicidal wife, Judith. Spending much of the trip with his friend Claire and her young daughter, Benedictine, the narrator travels across an America that appears both shallow and deceptive. Handke, who famously dislikes “literature with a story,” 129 invents a self-absorbed narrator whose neurotic uncertainty produces a questionable narrative reality that is mirrored in American iconography. As June Schlueter writes, “he becomes increasingly conscious of the 231

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presence of America, a consciousness which creates an ongoing dialectic between the ‘outer’ world of America and his own elusive ‘inner’ world.” 130 This dialectic mirrors the narrator’s status as an outsider to an elusive American culture— except that it is a culture without an inside, a culture that reflects only the hyperreal. The narrator is a postmodern neurasthenic, turning to regional simulations for his West cure. Handke is often labeled by the European Left as an apolitical and narcissistic writer more concerned with language than with social issues—and Handke himself has declared that his primary interest as a writer is language.131 Yet Handke’s fascination with the fabricated, textualized West reveals, of course, an engagement with the Real West and with cultural constructions. Gerd Gemünden has written that for Handke “America and its landscapes, culture, and cinema serve as an imagistic exteriority onto which the narrator can project his imported preoccupations”; but that “imagistic exteriority” is already a projection, a hyperreal America, and so Handke is projecting onto a projection.132 Like Nabokov, Handke is retextualizing an already textualized Real West. Gemünden points out that in the novel “America is first and foremost an imaginary America, pre-fabricated out of images, characters from novels and films, landscapes and buildings familiar from advertisements and billboards—a hyperreal place in which the narrator’s stifled imagination struggles to distinguish reality from representation.” 133 Naturally, this struggle is a futile one. In hyperreal America there can be no distinction between reality and representation, between the map and the territory, between authentic and inauthentic. And it is in the American West that Handke’s narrator arrives at an understanding of this world and a surprisingly peaceful acceptance of it. Although the novel revels in signs of the West from the start (the “Yellow Ribbon” associated with John Ford’s film is an especially prevalent icon), it first fully dramatizes the nature of western signification during an extended scene that takes place in St. Louis. This scene opens the book’s second half, and the city that proclaims itself the “Gateway to the West” serves exactly that function in the novel. Claire, Benedictine, and the narrator stay with an unnamed couple, old friends of Claire. The man is an artist who paints movie posters and also “episodes in the settlement of the West, landscapes with covered wagons and riverboats.” 134 This artist sees the West in terms of representation and in turn sees representation as faithfully recalling history. As he and the narrator stand in the garden one night at sunset, the artist comments on the yellow light cast upon the blank canvas of an interior 232

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wall. Comparing this color to the yellow seen in a Catlin or Remington painting, he explains to the narrator, “you’ll only find that kind of yellow light in the Western paintings of the last century.” “Nowadays you see imitations of that yellow wherever you go,” he remarks, listing highway signs and McDonald’s arches. “It’s a color that makes you remember,” he concludes, “and the longer you look at it, the further back you remember, till you reach a point where you can’t go any further. At that point you can only stand there and dream” (118 –19). Handke is alluding to Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, the novel that the narrator is reading at the beginning of Short Letter, Long Farewell. (“I see now that this has been a story of the West, after all,” Nick Carraway remarks near the end of his story.) The artist’s lyrical vision of the yellow light recalls Gatsby’s association of Daisy, the green light, and the original moment of Dutch arrival. But, if Fitzgerald exploited the myth of America and created in Gatsby a most appealing fake, he at least lent some stability to the representation of Daisy, the dock light, and the presettlement American continent.135 In Handke’s version, however, the referents are both vague and unreal, signifiers only aping other signifiers and gesturing toward the hyperreal. The yellow light may seem authentic, as opposed to the “imitation” yellow of mass culture, yet its source is obscure: Handke’s language suggests that it may be the sunset (although the sun is already “behind the Missouri plains”), but it also may be a television, a light in the house, or even the wall itself, which seems “to generate rather than reflect” that yellow (118). Figuratively, however, the light is a simulacrum: the original, found only “in the Western paintings of the last century,” is itself a copy. For the artist the color seems to evoke a primary moment at the dawn of history, a moment in which memory fades into dream, but it’s unclear whether he is talking about personal history, American history, or some deeper sense of a mythical past. His wife cryptically responds, “In the years of gold,” apparently identifying the original dreamy moment in terms of the nineteenth-century gold rush and the corresponding period of western settlement (119). Handke is suggesting not only that reality is a cultural construction but that, as he writes in The Weight of the World, “the very word ‘reality’ is a euphemism; to use it, even in a critical sense (the ‘demands of reality’), would be to give this obscure ‘reality’ a prestige it doesn’t deserve.” 136 Klinkowitz and Knowlton argue that for Handke “literature must reflect critically upon the language it uses; this way language may be freed from its implicitly purveyed sense that there is a prior interconnectedness of things, a preexistent 233

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meaning in the world.” 137 Tellingly, it is Benedictine who seems to grasp the hyperreal nature of America and of the West. Like the children in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, she seems comfortable in postmodern America, amused and reassured by its simulations. Disregarding nature, she looks instead to “artificial signs and objects”; “the presence of traffic lights and electric signs seemed to soothe her and at the same time to make her more lively. She took letters and numbers for granted and felt no need to decipher them; they stood for themselves” (99). The narrator remarks: “When the child saw a representation of nature, one of the painter’s pictures, for example, she never thought of asking whether there really was such a scene, and if so where, because the copy had replaced the original forever” (99). At this point in the novel the narrator can appreciate but not experience Benedictine’s vision of the West and America. He is still caught in his solipsism, hoping that representational realism will offer solace. Like the narrator, the artist argues for representational authenticity. In fact, he precisely voices the traditional authorial claim of authenticity: he is “unable . . . to conceive of sketching anything that did not exist: his landscapes had to be exact imitations of real landscapes, the people in them had to have really lived, and they had to have done what they were doing in the pictures.” The artist “couldn’t conceive of a picture standing for itself,” and his wife adds, “we all of us here learned to see in terms of historical pictures.” They are invoking the belief in representation of the first order, in which the image “is the reflection of a profound reality”—the couple insists that their art is authentic and that the sign can signify real places and histories. In fact, even those places represent history: “what we see in the landscape isn’t nature,” the wife explains, “but the deeds of the men who took possession of America. . . . Every view of a canyon might just as well have a sentence from the Constitution under it” (100 –101). But, of course, the idea of authentic representation is implicitly subverted by such declarations—there is a gap between written history and landscape (the Constitution is, after all, always interpreted). Claire articulates this exact gap when she later explains that American historical figures “haven’t any biography, they’re trademarks for what they did or what was done in their day. . . . We remember them as they appear in monuments and postage stamps” (125). In other words, Americans know history from popular representations (“monuments and postage stamps”), and thus those representations, which must be “exact imitations” in the artist’s words, are based on other representations, ad infinitum. Handke is describing the end of history, 234

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Baudrillard-style, in which history does not disappear but, instead, proliferates in endless simulations. Thus, when the artist remarks that the yellow light triggers a memory that stretches back “till you reach a point where you can’t go any further,” he is caught between two mirrors, one representation and the other the West, both reflecting only each other, and ending only in dream. At this point in the novel Handke’s narrator experiences only the nihilism of this condition, not yet recognizing the “seduction” of the postmodern. Baudrillard writes: “There is no more hope for meaning. And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal. But that on which it has imposed its ephemeral reign . . . that is, appearances, they, are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism of meaning or of non-meaning itself. . . . This is where seduction begins.” 138 “Appearances” for Handke can occur in language and representation, and he consequently often prefers literary and cinematic representations that play at being false, that do not pretend to realism or meaning. He considers genre films such as the Western to be more “realistic” than art films because they “are accepted in their total falsity as the only adequate representation of a reality which is fabricated through and through.” 139 But his narrator still has to learn this and adjust his self-obsessive outlook to match the illusion of appearances. If there is a path through Short Letter, Long Farewell, it seems to meander toward the confrontation between the narrator and Judith—but this confrontation turns out to be a false summit, a short, melodramatic scene on the Pacific Coast that ends with the couple, apparently reconciled, on a bus to California. In fact, the climax of the novel—if such a work can have a climax—is the astonishing final scene, the visit with director John Ford. Perhaps the most remarkable feature of this final scene is Handke’s eradication of the difference between authenticity and inauthenticity, between the West and the Western. If the narrator has indeed “struggle[d] to distinguish reality from representation,” 140 that struggle disappears during the visit with Ford, replaced by a personal calm. This calm is created by and reflected in Handke’s language, for in a dramatic departure this scene abandons the narrator’s compulsive inner dialogue and, instead, proceeds with a compelling realism. Judith, Ford, and the narrator sit on the terrace of the director’s Bel Air home, discussing movies, history, and America. In a tone emptied of interior subjectivity the narrator describes in credible detail the terrace, the wicker chairs, and Ford himself, wearing his black eye patch, dressed in a “navy-blue jacket, baggy khaki trousers, and light-colored can235

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vas shoes with big rubber heels” (159). Of this final episode one critic has written: “the scene with Ford is so realistic that several reviewers have suggested that Handke quite possibly met Ford during his own visit to America”; another critic has suggested that it has, “by way of the plethora of details describing the occasion, an aura of authenticity,” although this same critic calls the scene “mythmaking”; a third sees only artifice, “another version of the celluloid reality that has engulfed his entire American experience—John Ford is just as ‘made’ as his films”; and a fourth sees what he calls “‘John Ford’ parareality.” 141 Of course, each critic is correct: this scene is realistic, pararealistic, hyperrealistic; it is authentic, inauthentic, and mythologized. Handke has made categorical interpretations impossible. Fredric Jameson identifies this kind of scene as the “second form of postmodern historiographic narrative” in which “imaginary people and events” encounter “real-life ones.” 142 For Jameson the effect of such postmodern narratives confirms the description of postmodernism as something for which the word fragmentation remains much too weak and primitive a term, and probably too “totalizing” as well, particularly since it is now no longer a matter of the breakup of some preexisting older organic totality, but rather the emergence of the multiple in new and unexpected ways, unrelated strings of events, types of discourse, modes of classification, and compartments of reality. This absolute and absolutely random pluralism[,] . . . a coexistence not even of multiple and alternate worlds so much as of unrelated fuzzy sets and semiautonomous subsystems . . . is, of course, what is replicated by the rhetoric of decentering.143

Benedictine grasped the nature of this condition. Knowing that “the copy had replaced the original forever,” she is the only character in the book to look forward rather than backward, although such temporal markers are ultimately meaningless in a world of simulation. But it is (and can only be) John Ford who embodies it, as a fictional/real character who speaks in simulacra. The narrator acknowledges that “John Ford repeated a good deal of what [he] had heard about America from Claire and the other people during [his] trip”; Ford’s “ideas were not new, but he backed them up with stories” (160). These stories are all about his films—about scripts, actors, and about an America and a West that are themselves cinematic and projected. Ford “talked about his pictures and kept insisting that the stories were true. 236

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‘Nothing is made up,’ he said. ‘It all really happened’” (165). And he’s right, of course. Ford’s Westerns are the most reliable, historically accurate representations of the hyperreal West. And when Judith recounts for Ford the story of Short Letter, Long Farewell —that she followed the narrator to America to kill him—Ford asks, “Is that all true?” And she ends the book by telling him, “it all happened” (167). And she’s right as well, not only because it happened in the now-concluded novel but because, for Handke, telling the truth and telling a lie are both acts of telling. In other words, if nothing is true in the hyperreal West, nothing is false either. When PBS aired its reality television miniseries “Frontier House” in the spring of 2002, it was essentially updating Jameson’s notion of postmodern historiographic narrative, with real families agreeing to live in authentic reproductions of 1883 Montana. The participants seemed surprised but impressed to discover that homesteading was hard work, even on a television set. One remarked that the experience was “a little more real than [she] had anticipated, a little more real than [she] really wanted to get.” 144 With echoes of T. S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton”—“human kind/Cannot bear very much reality”—this participant gets to the heart of the matter. To ask what in the world is real about the experience, the people, the setting, the television show, or even the audience is to miss the point entirely. It’s all real, all too real, all hyperreal. In his book America Jean Baudrillard extends these ideas to their logical limit, reporting on Americans’ absolute belief in surface and facts, “in the total credibility of what is done or seen, in this pragmatic evidence of things and an accompanying contempt for what may be called appearances or the play of appearances.” For Baudrillard “nothing deceives, there are no lies, there is only simulation.” 145 America serves as a kind of gloss on Handke’s novel and as a postmodern theorizing of the “West as America.” This travelogue offers Baudrillard’s observations on hyperreal America, for he “went in search of astral America, not social and cultural America, but the America of the empty, absolute freedom of the freeways, not the deep America of mores and mentalities, but the America of desert speed, of motels and mineral surfaces” (5). This book, though widely read, is widely criticized for its banalities and exaggerations, its hypocrisy, its “disregard for idiosyncrasy or local difference,” and its “totalizing pronouncements that masquerade as cultural analyses.” 146 There is undeniable merit to these charges, and America is certainly an uneven, superficial, naive masquerade. And yet, without excusing its faults, one should note that the text is mirroring or copying what it sees in its sub237

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ject: Baudrillard says of his outlook, “this country is naïve, so you have to be naïve” (63). He finds the most perfect reflection of America in the West, in “the deserts, the mountains, Los Angeles, the freeways, the Safeways, the ghost towns, or the downtowns” (63). And, significantly, he takes the West at its word, treating it only as surface and material image. Oddly, Baudrillard has been described as a western hero of sorts, “a sharp-shooting Lone Ranger of the post-Marxist left” and a “poststructuralist webslinger.” 147 But throughout America he insists on being an outsider—a standpoint that allows him a dubious objectivity as he tours a nation that exists only as a “hyperreality” (28). He repeatedly uses phrases such as “we in Europe” to define a perspective that is amused and intimate; “they” are Americans who remain remote curiosities. Predictably, his outsider status produces a kind of insider insight: “it may be that the truth of America can only be seen by a European. . . . The Americans, for their part, have no sense of simulation. They are themselves simulation in its most developed state, but they have no language in which to describe it, since they themselves are the model” (29). “I know the deserts, their deserts, better than they do,” he writes, “since they turn their backs on their own space . . . and I get to know more about the concrete, social life of America from the desert than I ever would from official or intellectual gatherings” (63). Americans may well ignore its deserts (as Van Dyke, Austin, and Abbey all attest), but Baudrillard frequently implies that something else is happening: that the desert is largely invisible to Americans exactly because it so perfectly represents them. Having produced a hyperreal nation, Americans live trustingly within simulation—are themselves simulated—never doubting it. “All other societies” possess “some kind of suspicion of reality,” but in America there is “no suspicion” (85). Whereas Nabokov infiltrated the dime-novel Western and Handke embraced the cinematic Western, Baudrillard goes one step farther and sees simulation in landscape itself. Moreover, Nabokov and Handke allow that the West may have existed even if it is entirely a simulation in postmodern America; if “the copy had replaced the original forever,” at least there was an original. For Baudrillard, if there was a Real, it only anticipated the copy. To be sure, “the cinema has absorbed everything—Indians, mesas, canyons, skies.” He writes: “Should we prefer ‘authentic’ deserts and deep oases? For us moderns, and ultramoderns . . . the only natural spectacle that is really gripping is the one which offers both the most moving profundity and at the 238

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same time the total simulacrum of that profundity. . . . Monument Valley is the geology of the earth, the mausoleum of the Indians, and the camera of John Ford” (69 –70). Baudrillard allows that there was an “American reality . . . before the screen was invented” but insists that “everything about the way it is today suggests it was invented with the screen in mind, that it is the refraction of a giant screen” (55). This passage helps to explain why John Ford’s films are realistic for Handke but also conveys Baudrillard’s belief that a desert landscape cannot be grasped except as a copy of the very landscape that it appears to be. Thus, during his travels the deserts and freeways of the West revealed to Baudrillard the material presence of his theories of simulation. And perhaps he realized that the presence of America therefore transforms his ideas into simulacra, copies of a hyperreal America (copies of simulation). He writes: “America is the original version of modernity. We [Europeans] are the dubbed or subtitled version. America ducks the question of origins; it cultivates no origin or mythical authenticity; it has no past and no founding truth. Having known no primitive accumulation of time, it lives in a perpetual present. Having seen no slow, centuries-long accumulation of a principle of truth, it lives in perpetual simulation, in a perpetual present of signs” (76). To a degree Baudrillard is rehashing Emerson and Fitzgerald in his observations that Americans invent themselves in denial of an “origin” and past, and perhaps there is even a hint of what Simon Ortiz meant when he said that “the real America is the Native America.” But, of course, Baudrillard is not quite correct when he declares that America has no “mythical authenticity.” He is suggesting that authenticity is determined historically (in a past, a tradition) or culturally (in a “founding truth”). But for America authenticity is primarily self-evident: it is a matter of landscape and surface. The landscapes of the West—Yosemite, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon— are the ultimate proof of America. Thus, when western authors and critics insist that western writing is best understood as a literature of surface, that in itself is not a denial of “depth” but, rather, a claim of authenticity exactly because what authors mean is that western writing is best understood in terms of the surfaces of the West itself. And so, when Baudrillard directs his attention to western surfaces, he is “reading the West” exactly as America and its literature demand. And his pronouncement that those surfaces are themselves simulacra suggests that the landscape is a hyperreal representation of art, literature, and cinema. He has unveiled the perfect postmodern image. If Handke’s narrator is caught between two mirrors, one represen239

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tation and the other the West, Baudrillard speculates on two facing mirrors, both hyperreal simulations, with his commentary as a copy of those copies. There is no way “in,” no way “out.” It may seem that Baudrillard has produced a scathing denouncement of America as an empty cultural wasteland, a “non-referential desert” in which meaning is exterminated (10). And yet, naturally, this “desertification of signs and men” suggests to Baudrillard that “the us is utopia achieved” (63, 77). One feels a discernible sense of wonder, even joy, in Baudrillard— and in Nabokov and Handke (and Eco, Foucault, and others)—a blithe exaltation in the dismantling of the referential world. This exaltation is apparently a combination of the effect of postmodernism’s seduction with a performed authorial awe at the West’s beautiful emptiness. These authors have gone through the looking glass, producing an exact imitation of the “original” claim of authenticity. They insist that their work is contrived and constructed (all writing is contrived and constructed)—but, because the West itself is only a simulation, their work is therefore mimetic. They are delivering authentic representations of the simulated West, just as the West presents a perfect copy of literary imaging.

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EPILOGUE Territorial Expansion

The only true voyage of discovery, the only really rejuvenating experience, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to see the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is. —marcel proust, The Captive (Remembrance of Things Past)

It seems only commonsense that literature emerges from real-world conditions and produces real-world effects. As a professor of American Studies, I encourage the examination of our national literature as an integral force in American cultural history. But in Western Studies we take this connection too far, insisting that literary works mimetically reflect the region’s history and landscapes, suppressing the imaginative power of authors and the discursive play of language. As a professor of English, I lament that western literature is primarily read as cultural history. When I first started reading western literature, I was startled by its complexity, elusiveness, and beauty. I didn’t especially care whether the works reflected regional history or landscape, probably because I didn’t know much about either. I knew something about literature, however, and I felt that rare thrill of encountering the real thing. (It’s irrelevant what I was reading—a Cather novel, a Zane Grey Western, cowboy poetry.) When I started to spend more time with western writing—and with western social, political, and environmental history— that original excitement grew, though I soon realized that the way that I talked about western writing wasn’t the way that most authors or critics talked about it. I couldn’t find much discussion of the imaginative reach of western writing nor of its “beauty,” except in a vague, celebratory sense, as one might talk about a cherished landscape; nor was there much buzz about the visceral pleasure of reading. And yet western critics love western literature. The poet Jacques Debrot once lamented that most professional literature associations are groups of experts, not of lovers—but the Western Literature Association is an assemblage of scholars joyfully devoted to the region’s literature and not to faddish theories or professional squabbles.1 Members of the wla and, more generally, critics of western literature demonstrate an inspiring range of intellectual interests and scholarly abilities, constituting the most generous, supportive, and friendly academic community that I know. They don’t 241

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parade their knowledge but share it. Still, I think that as a community they—we —in our very devotion to the West and its literature, have unnecessarily limited our reading room. I believe that the authorial claims of authenticity form an intriguing narrative that has influenced both literary history and cultural experience. The story that authors tell about their work is subtle and compelling. But critical discussions of, and debates about, authenticity (mythology, history) can be exhausting, depleting the energy of the literature itself. Western literature has been subject to a kind of surveillance— observed, and loved, but never allowed its force. It is as if, because we can never contain the mighty West, we have settled for the next best thing: containing textual representation of the West. Of course, we don’t really want to contain the West; we don’t even want to think that the West can be contained. So, why would we want to limit western writing? Nearly a quarter-century ago Max Westbrook wondered the same thing. Referring to Don D. Walker’s exposure of the “fallacy of authenticity” in an article the year before, Westbrook asked: “why does the belief persist? Why do so many good people defend a critical standard that seems so obviously wrong?” 2 Perhaps the investment in regional historicism and the Real West is a defensive measure against the East and oppressive eastern strategies of critical inquiry. What makes western literature unique? The answer seems to be the West itself. Or perhaps we are clandestinely acting out the fantasy of conquest, treating western writing as a map, a territory, that needs order. Disdaining the legacy of conquest, we nevertheless civilize western literature, police its wildness, neutralize its tendency to corrupt and distend. Or perhaps the authorial deployment of authenticity, like a black hole’s gravitational pull, is simply irresistible. In my introduction I expressed the hope that this book would serve as a prelude. Prelude to what? I have examined authorship, but we might study narrative clues. Dorrit Cohn, for example, has argued for the “distinction of fiction.” Cohn, who is dismissive of “postmodern practices” that “efface” the distinctions between fiction and historiography, argues that the “fictional narrative is unique in its potential for crafting a self-enclosed universe ruled by formal patterns.” 3 How tempting it is to test these theories on, say, The Virginian, Angle of Repose, or Woman Hollering Creek. (Dr. Charles Kinbote once put it this way: “‘reality’ is neither the subject nor the object of true art which creates its own special reality.”) 4 Or we might study readership or the marketplace. In what ways do publishers and reviewers reward projections of the Real West? In what ways do readers, western and eastern, 242

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demand authenticity? How can we measure the effects of such expectations on readers? The answers might begin with cultural critiques but could quickly involve “philosophies” of reading. I am thinking here of Jean-François Lyotard’s ruminations on reading—that we are constituted as subjects through the act of reading and that we need to “unlearn” institutional reading practices that trade in knowledge as information to be transmitted and exchanged. In his “Address on the Subject of the Course of Philosophy” Lyotard suggests that “philosophical reading” should be “an exercise in discomposure in relation to the text, an exercise in patience . . . an exercise in listening.” “Forming in yourself this capacity for listening in reading,” he continues, “is forming yourself in reverse; it is losing your proper form.” 5 Ultimately, this “course” of reading, listening, and elaboration “works on so-called reality: it strips away reality’s criteria, it suspends reality itself.” 6 And, naturally, this course can never be completed, because to finish would be to settle on and fix a new reality—a New West. Lyotard’s immediate topic in the essay is pedagogy and practice. How do we learn this kind of listening? Lyotard hardly advocates a classroom of freeplay, in any sense of the word: those who “tempt us in this way,” who would “trade off their seduction against our wisdom, which is worthless,” only end up “buying into an exchange between dupes.” 7 Risking, I suppose, my own dupish sentimentalism, I would suggest that we resist pedagogical tradition, authorial direction, and cultural instruction—resist textual truth, information, and authenticity—and start listening to literature. Even if resistance is futile, it is pleasurable. At least, without reverting to an aregional formalism, we might begin to enlarge the discussion of the rhetorical properties of western writing. Concerned with “the blurring of important differences between history and literature,” Don D. Walker wrote, “I would argue for the value of literature as literature.” 8 Walker’s sentiment, now thirty years old, is as disconcerting as it is stirring, both transparent and elusive. How do we proceed with a discussion of the “value of literature” in the age of politicized cultural studies and skeptical postmodernism—in an academic age that often refuses to acknowledge any difference between history and literature, that refuses to acknowledge even those terms themselves? Perhaps an answer can be found in Walker’s 1977 essay “Criticism of the Cowboy Novel: Retrospect and Reflection,” in which he argues that “what makes a subject worthwhile is afterall not its historical, economic, or sociological importance, but its capacity to be invested by the imagination with significance.” 9 On the one hand, that very “significance” undeniably pro243

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duces “historical, economic, [and] sociological importance.” On the other hand, signification enjoys its own imaginative life and power. Catherine Belsey, considering the study of literature in the “postmodern condition,” expresses concern that “we may have neglected the signifier.” While objecting to “empty formalism,” she would have us attend the “mode of address”: “conventions, and breaches of convention, do signify; genres, and generic surprises, constitute something of the meaning of the text. How ironic if poststructuralism, which draws attention to the opacity of language, should be invoked in support of a new assumption of its transparency.” 10 And we do have hermeneutic models in western criticism. In Deadly Musings: Violence and Verbal Form in American Fiction Michael Kowalewski writes that “it may seem a country-headed thing to say, but the only presence violence has in fiction is verbal.” While rejecting the idea that “style somehow exists independently of represented acts,” Kowalewski still insists that violence and other acts are “verbally mediated.” 11 Similarly, Stephen Tatum has suggested that we might pursue a “rhetorical cultural studies”—which I take to mean an investigation of the languages, discourses, rhetorics, and narratives that exist within and perhaps without western culture. In his commentary on Charles Neider’s Authentic Death of Hendry Jones Tatum expresses little concern with the historical accuracy of the gunplay and adventures, the factual authenticity that Neider claims in his preface, and instead looks to an arguably deeper power of representation. For Tatum the narrative voice can “shock a world grown stale,” and this is the book’s force: “this consideration, more than any simple recognition of the polemical nature of the concept of authenticity, means the reader should further consider exactly how the novel works with language to shake up a world and penetrate the enigmas that define human history.” 12 Simply put, without dismissing the signified (the West), perhaps it is time to emphasize the signifier, the language that shakes up the world. Let me briefly propose two possibilities, one for rethinking western criticism, the other for rethinking western literature. First, we might well examine the implicit sense of “progress” in western literary and critical history. As I have argued, the claim of authenticity entails a revisionary agenda. If the Real West serves as a stable center of truth occluded by prior inauthentic representation, it is discovered “with each generation” (in the words of Lee Clark Mitchell) by authors and critics who repeatedly unveil a New West. And, despite the fact that critics such as Neil Campbell, Krista Comer, William R. Handley, and Forrest G. Robinson have shown that this New 244

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West is inevitably fraught with tensions and instability, the march of progress continues. Although such a move hardly constitutes an Orwellian Newspeak, the rejection of the old and inauthentic in favor of the new conveys a sense of hermeneutic progress. (Do¯gen writes: “To follow buddha completely means you do not have your old views. To hit the mark completely means you have no new nest in which to settle.”) 13 Ironically, the study of literature (and other arts) may be the only academic discipline that can function without the idea of progress. There is no convincing reason to think that twentieth-century poetry is more sophisticated or accomplished than seventeenth-century poetry, and, for all the professionalized intensity of contemporary theory, there is no reason to think that twenty-first century reading practices are any more perceptive or “correct” than eighteenth-century reading practices. Styles of writing and styles of reading change, but they neither mature nor advance. That is their charm. Yet both western literature and its criticism take on a utopian character, not only because they sometimes present the West as a “garden” or Eden but also because of a teleological sense of arrived-at understanding. Foucault writes that “Utopias afford consolation: although they have no real locality there is nevertheless a fantastic, untroubled region in which they are able to unfold; they open up cities with vast avenues, superbly planted gardens, countries where life is easy, even though the road to them is chimerical.” 14 Of course, the West of contemporary literature and academic criticism is hardly an “easy” place; it is often socially volatile and politically unattractive, exactly in its legacy of conquest. Yet it remains utopian in that it is epistemologically stable (Real), progressive (New), and accessible (represented). We might try disrupting this liberal, revisionary mode and consider the literary West as a “heterotopia.” Imagine all the representations of the West tossed into a bag, shaken up, randomly scattered across a single plane, unmoored from historical certainty, all equally valid and equally suspect, a sort of Indra’s Net.15 (Is this an example of what Deleuze and Guattari call “rhizomatic” thinking? Picture this “acentered” plane of Wests as an infinite long-grass prairie—a “Great Plane.”) 16 No longer can the labels Old and New function except rhetorically—there is no historical moment upon which to depend. Neil Campbell writes of this West: “the New West is always relational, dialogic, engaged in or capable of reinvention—and, therefore, contradictory, irreducible, and hybrid.” 17 As in Baudrillard’s spin on Borges’s fable, we read, perhaps live, amid these maps of the West, unable to organize or authenticate them, unable to grasp their multiplicity or 245

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to anticipate their extent, dependent on critical strategies that enforce a comforting, if random (or worse), appearance of order. Foucault writes that “heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy ‘syntax’ in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to ‘hold together.’” 18 Foucault is talking about a kind of “disorder in which fragments of a large number of possible orders glitter separately in the dimension, without law or geometry, of the heteroclite,” and in this heteroclite state “things are ‘laid,’ ‘placed,’ ‘arranged’ in sites so very different from one another that it is impossible to find a place of residence for them, to define a common locus beneath them all.” 19 There is necessarily something unsettling about the literary West as a heterotopia, a glaring madness. But there is a frightening, ecstatic beauty to this vision as well. Even though no “common locus” exists, no True West, we can still luxuriate in the “glitter” of the disorder and marvel at the dislocation of familiar arrangements. Indeed, my second suggestion is that we begin to talk about beauty. What exactly, or where exactly, is western literature’s beauty? My point might be best made by offering some examples of western literature’s beauty, or perhaps its madness. But such examples would also be a futile distraction, at least in this short epilogue, providing only new boundaries and revealing in unnecessarily sharp detail my own convictions about great art—that, for example, it always upsets boundaries and always challenges critical orthodoxies while inducing a somatic thrill— convictions that no doubt imply a different but recognizable form of aesthetic and imaginative authenticity. In defending Lolita, Nabokov once wrote: “For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.” 20 It is, of course, no coincidence that this book spins in part on an axis formed by that unlikely western troika of Poe-Borges-Nabokov. If I am advocating an authenticity of beauty, however, it is one that itself plays against the beauty of authenticity. It is fluid, disruptive, elusive, and ultimately beyond the containment of representation or reading. The beauty of western literature—the fun and force of western literature—may lie exactly 246

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in its refusal to situate its own power either in text or in place, either in representation or in the West. While every writer has contributed to some degree to this fantastic surregionalism, the western artist Ed Ruscha has offered a most sublimely irreducible map in Artesia. A stunning, “realistically-rendered” image of a snowy mountain range plays against a receding vertical list of words on the left edge of the image, Los Angeles street names.21 (Think of the painter’s wife in Handke’s novel Short Letter, Long Farewell declaring that in America “every view of a canyon might just as well have a sentence from the Constitution under it.”) While our impulse may be to make sense of the relation between words and landscape and explain how text illuminates the image, and vice versa, ultimately such an ordering only produces, as art critic Dave Hickey puts it, “a narrative constructed out of our own desire and need for narrative.” To infer a relationship between text and image is to impose meaning; to deny a relationship is also to insist on a reading. Hickey writes, “Ruscha’s work routinely sets us adrift . . . in the crazy zone between concept and memory, grammar and narrative, art and life.” 22 Hickey speaks with authority on both that “crazy zone” and beauty. As an influential, if controversial, art critic, he has significantly contributed to a renewed discussion of beauty and aesthetics—a discussion that is spreading from art criticism to other disciplines throughout the humanities. Hickey puts it this way: “there are issues worth advancing in images worth admiring; and the truth is never ‘plain,’ nor appearance ever ‘sincere.’ To try to make them so is to neutralize the primary, gorgeous eccentricity of imagery in Western culture since the Reformation: the fact that it cannot be trusted, that imagery is always presumed to be proposing something contestable and controversial. This is the sheer, ebullient, slithering, dangerous fun of it.” 23 Interestingly, Hickey is also an authentic western figure and one-time writer of western stories. Born in 1940, raised in Texas and California, Hickey initially hoped to be a writer of short fiction, and in the early 1960s wrote a number of provocative western tales for relatively obscure magazines—and then stopped, choosing instead to “become another sort of writer,” an essayist and critic. His stories were eventually collected and republished over twenty years later in Prior Convictions (1989). The book’s title suggests that the stories belong to Hickey’s past, but it also comes to suggest that these stories are themselves freighted by outdated images of the Old West and perhaps even that they exhibit the effect of surveillance and policing (being convicted). I am hardly suggesting that the stories seem 247

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tired or even familiar but, rather, that at the time Hickey himself struggled to understand the relationship between his own life and his creative writing, between the West and representation—and between madness and beauty. He explores these issues in “Proof through the Night,” a retrospective essay presented in the third person in which he reminisces about his early work and considers the reasons that he stopped writing fiction. Hickey recalls that he felt a creeping sense of anxiety that his stories, his West, and his readers were out of sync. He had been taught to write according to strict patterns of formal “showing” rather than expressive “telling,” and the things he wanted to tell seemed outside of the genre and outside of readers’ expectations. He remembers rereading “I’m Bound to Follow the Longhorn Cows,” his early story based on both an Austin newspaper item and on his grandfather’s West, and discovering to his dismay that “he had mythologized the whole environment, making it blunt and stupid and ‘archetypal.’” 24 He realized, in fact, that, “in the kind of fiction he had learned to write, everyone was looking at the pictures and nobody was listening to the words, so that the mental music, which made whatever magic there was, remained, by the conventions of the genre, unheard, subliminal. Everyone, he suspected, was disengaging the clutch and ‘participating’ in the illusion— and he did not wish it so” (169 –70). He preferred that “music,” the magic of words—the unheard and unrecognized beauty of writing and sounds. But he realized it was even more complicated: “he finally figured out that the world he had learned to live in and the ways he had been taught to describe it just did not fit, period, end of report. He lived in the invisible West, in a world of words not pictures, in an America whose aural and ideological nature simply could not be portrayed within the visual and psychological parameters of modern fiction” (170). For a while he attempted to turn his words away from mythology and toward that “invisible West,” toward “subjects a little closer to his heart and life.” Naturally, his friends still preferred the “cowboy stories” (172). This poor “fit” between his West and his representation of it became a pathological concern for Hickey. He found it increasingly difficult to move between the world of his writing, what he calls “fictionland,” and the world that most people call “reality.” It was easy enough to enter his fictionland but far harder to come back: “softly, almost imperceptibly, over a period of time, he could feel that net casting itself over the world into which he was returning, altering and revising his primary reality, editing his life. And that 248

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had not been a good feeling at all. It was one thing, he began to feel, to ‘realize a fiction,’ and quite another to ‘fictionalize reality’ in its reflection. . . . Madness, he knew, lay in that direction” (162 – 63). And so Hickey left fictionland behind and eventually became a presence in the world of art criticism—but an absence in the world of western literature. Over the past twenty years Hickey has studied the relationship between art and institutional control—namely, between beauty and “a loose confederation of museums, universities, bureaus, foundations, publications, and endowments.” 25 Chafing against the “therapeutic” idea that beauty is “good for you,” he advocates, instead, the “efficacy of images” and the sheer power of visual pleasure.26 Although his preferences in art are no secret (Caravaggio, Mapplethorpe, Ruscha), he generally prefers to talk about what beauty does rather than what it is—and in his essays he has “habitually suppressed the traditional contrariety of beauty and ugliness and of pleasure and pain in order to privilege all these extraordinary conditions over their true contrary: the banality of neutral comfort.” 27 (Baudrillard speaks of the “nihilism of neutralization”— of the “system” that “has the power to pour everything, including what denies it, into indifference.”) 28 The “neutral comfort” that Hickey identifies is, ultimately, the danger in reading western literature for authenticity. In a New York Times article published in 1998 Michael Kimmelman offered his observations on the art museum in Steve Wynn’s Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. The art and sculpture on display were impressive—works by Brancusi, Giacometti, Warhol, Johns, Lichtenstein—and the “hoopla about the hotel” suggested that Las Vegas “was no longer a city of simulated histories” but a place of real culture. Kimmelman points out, however, that the gallery is only a “quasi-museum” because Wynn “treats great works of art a little like poker chips,” and everything in the gallery is for sale.29 After watching the hotel’s “other big attraction,” a Cirque du Soleil show that takes place “in a vast pool of water, which miraculously comes and goes onstage,” Kimmelman writes: “Las Vegas is a desert, and just as you don’t expect to find great art here, you don’t imagine that a lake can be conjured up, then suddenly made to disappear. A funny thing happens as a result of this cognitive dissonance: neither the art nor the water seems altogether real at first. They are initially absorbed into the simulationist culture of Las Vegas— they seem unbelievable.” Because “real art” appears and acts like a simulated spectacle, Kimmelman comes to the logical conclusion that “authen249

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ticity as a thing in itself becomes an attraction.” Dave Hickey, who lives in Las Vegas and contributed to the gallery’s catalogue, calls this condition a “post-hyperreal real.” 30 I could take genuine pleasure in ending this book with a celebration of a post-hyperreal real, a literary West rescued from pure abstraction, hip to the authenticity game and projecting a real that can outperform the hyperreal. And no doubt such a reality exists in the infinity of Wests on the Great Plane. But of course I would only be celebrating yet another New West, same as it ever was—a West easily caught collapsing into what Gerald Vizenor calls the “curious crease of authenticity.” 31 Western literature is far ahead of this move too, always already anticipating our attempts to read, revise, contain. Perhaps the best course is simply to pause in our pursuit of New Wests. Perhaps we should even resist new ways of imagining western literature. Perhaps it is time to let western literature start imagining us. Do but observe the mode of our illumination. When I converse with a profound mind, or if at any time being alone I have good thoughts, I do not at once arrive at satisfaction, as when, being thirsty, I drink water, or go to the fire being cold: no! but I am at first apprised of my vicinity to a new and excellent region of life. By persisting to read or to think, this region gives further sign of itself, as it were in flashes of light, in sudden discoveries of its profound beauty and repose, as if the clouds that covered it parted at intervals, and showed the approaching traveler the inland mountains, with the tranquil eternal meadows spread at their base, whereon flocks graze, and shepherds pipe and dance. But every insight from this realm of thought is felt as initial, and promises a sequel. . . . And what a future it opens! I feel a new heart beating with the love of the new beauty. I am ready to die out of nature, and be born again into this new yet unapproachable America I have found in the West. —ralph waldo emerson, “Experience”

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NOTES Introduction 1. Sam Shepard, True West, in Seven Plays (New York: Bantam Books, 1981), 30, 35. Neil Campbell, who cites the play to open his discussion of “New West Postmodernism and Urbanism,” argues that Shepard “deconstructs” tired binaries: “here there is no single truth,” Campbell writes, “only people living in the landscape and creating their own New West” (The Cultures of the American New West [Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000], 130). 2. Critics and historians working on the West inevitably struggle to define the geographical boundaries of the region. Some see it in terms of the “moving frontier,” others in terms of landscape features (e.g., the trans-Mississippi West) or aridity or ideologies or cultural practices. I take the West to be selfdetermined by its authors; thus, it does not begin at a specific longitudinal line but, rather, as authorial consciousness. For example, James Hall and other Ohio Valley writers of the 1830s saw themselves as writing in and about the West—they saw themselves as western writers and advocated for the recognition of western writing. 3. The promotional passages are taken from an undated flier distributed by Oxford University Press in support of the publication of Lyon’s anthology. Lyon’s own words are from The Literary West: An Anthology of Western American Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3, 2. 4. Krista Comer, Landscapes of the New West: Gender and Geography in Contemporary Women’s Writing (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 2. 5. Richard H. Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 8 – 9. 6. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 120. 7. Jacob Golomb, In Search of Authenticity: From Kierkegaard to Camus (New York: Routledge, 1995), 12, 7. 8. Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 31, 29. 9. Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 30. 10. Taylor, Ethics, 26. 11. Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880 –1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), xv.

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notes to pages 4 – 8 12. Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York: Zone Books, 1996), 11. Schwartz points out that “we don’t even know who the Real McCoy was.” 13. See Frank Zappa, “Cosmik Debris,” on Apostrophe. rcd 10519. 14. Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 101. 15. Schwartz, Culture of the Copy, 373. 16. Deloria, Playing Indian, 101. 17. Umberto Eco, “Travels in Hyperreality,” in Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, 1986), 16, 4. 18. Comer, Landscapes, 5. 19. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 1982 –1985, trans. Don Barry et al., ed. Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 7. 20. I will return to this phrase, the Real West, using it as Limerick does in her book of that title: capitalized and with a certain detached irony (Patricia Limerick, The Real West [Denver: Civic Center Cultural Complex, 1996]). Of course, there are any number of rhetorical attempts to describe the West’s presence, majesty, and elusiveness. Perhaps no other region in the country is so consistently tagged with suggestive modifiers, indicating yet another form of the force of authenticity. Probably most common, certainly in the nineteenth century, is the “Great West.” By the “closing” of the frontier at the end of the century, when the meaning of the Real West became intensely disputed, the West was often divided into the “Old West” and the “New West.” (Today we have the “Old Western History” and the “New Western History.”) Hamlin Garland referred to the “mighty West” that remained “undelineated” in literature; Theodore Roosevelt felt that the West should more accurately be called the “Centre”; O. Henry published a collection called The Heart of the West; Sam Shepard wrote “True West”; and Montana poet Richard Hugo playfully titled his autobiographical writings The Real West Marginal Way. (An unsuspecting reader slips on the emphasis in Hugo’s title; in fact, “West Marginal Way” is a road.) And by the end of the twentieth century any western literature conference inevitably boasted any number of papers on the “mythological West.” 21. Thomas McGuane, An Outside Chance: Essays on Sport (New York: Penguin, 1982), 221. 22. Don D. Walker, “Can the Western Tell What Happens?” in Interpretive Approaches to Western American Literature, ed. Daniel Alkofer et al. (Pocatello: Idaho State University Press, 1972), 33.

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notes to pages 8 – 13 23. Quoted in Paul Gilmore’s “The Indian in the Museum: Henry David Thoreau, Okah Tubbee, and Authentic Manhood,” Arizona Quarterly 54, no. 2 (1998): 25. 24. Owen Wister, Red Men and White (New York: Garrett Press 1969), ix. 25. Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” in Thoreau: Collected Essays and Poems, ed. Elizabeth Hall Witherell (New York: Library of America, 2001), 235. 26. Francis Parkman, Francis Parkman: The Oregon Trail and The Conspiracy of Pontiac, ed. William R. Taylor (New York: Library of America, 1991), 176 –77. 27. Charles Neider, The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1993), viii. Neider goes on to criticize with good humor the film made from his book, Marlon Brando’s One-Eyed Jacks. Brando possessed a “clear romantic vision” of the material and violated much of the book’s historical accuracy. Brando was after something else. Neider writes: “At times, Brando encouraged actors to forget their lines and make up dialogue as they went along, as if this might produce more authentic stuff. Usually it brought forth silence, or embarrassing lines” (xii–xiii). Authenticity, Neider suggests, is always carefully scripted. 28. K. Anthony Appiah, “Identity, Authenticity, Survival: Multicultural Societies and Social Reproduction,” in Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, ed. Amy Gutmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 152. 29. Don W. Walker, “Criticism of the Cowboy Novel: Retrospect and Reflections,” Western American Literature 11, no. 4 (1977): 291. 30. William Dean Howells, “Mark Twain: An Inquiry,” in Selected Literary Criticism: Volume III: 1898 –1920, ed. Ronald Gottesman et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 44. In Traces of Gold: California’s Natural Resources and the Claim to Realism in Western American Literature Nicolas S. Witschi uses this passage to initiate his discussion of the “claims to realism in relation to the American West” ([Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002], 2). 31. William Kittredge, Owning It All (St. Paul mn: Graywolf Press, 1987), 171, 177. 32. Walker, “Can the Western Tell What Happens?” 35. 33. Jackson K. Putnam, “Historical Fact and Literary Truth: The Problem of Authenticity in Western American Literature,” Western American Literature 15, no. 1 (1980): 18. 34. Walker, “Can the Western Tell What Happens?” 33. 35. Putnam, “Historical Fact,” 17–18. 36. Max Westbrook, “The Authentic Western,” Western American Literature 13, no. 3 (1978): 215. 37. Putnam, “Historical Fact,” 18.

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notes to pages 13 – 19 38. Westbrook, “ Authentic Western,” 214. For a fine overview of these debates, see Harry F. Thompson, “History, Historicity, and the Western American Novel: Frederick Manfred’s Scarlet Plume and the Dakota War of 1862,” Western American Literature 37, no. 1 (2002): 48 – 82. 39. This fact is rapidly changing, primarily with the emergence of western cultural studies and postcolonial studies. Critics such as Blake Allmendinger, Krista Comer, Susan Kollin, and William R. Handley employ poststructuralist theory with terrific effect, and Stephen Tatum has for years been a pathfinder, using both critical theory and Continental philosophy. 40. Mark Poster, Cultural History and Postmodernity: Disciplinary Readings and Challenges (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 9. 41. Henry Louis Gates Jr., “‘Authenticity,’ or the Lesson of Little Tree,” New York Times, 24 November 1991. 42. Ward Churchill, Fantasies of the Master Race: Literature, Cinema and the Colonization of American Indians, rev. ed. (San Francisco: City Lights, 1998), 8. 43. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 6. 44. Timothy Egan, Lasso the Wind: Away to the New West (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 10. 45. Frank Lentricchia, Criticism and Social Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 19. 46. Susan Bernardin has written persuasively on the “authenticity game” in Native American literature and criticism; see, for example, “Mixed Messages: Authority and Authorship in Mourning Dove’s Cogewea, The Half-Blood: A Depiction of the Great Montana Cattle Range” (American Literature 67, no. 3 [1995]); and “The Authenticity Game: ‘Getting Real’ in Contemporary American Indian Literature” (True West, University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming). I am indebted to her work and borrow her felicitous phrase with gratitude.

1. Truth or Consequences 1. James Hall, Sketches of History, Life, and Manners in the West; Containing Accurate Descriptions of the Country and Modes of Life, in the Western States and Territories of North American (Cincinnati: Hubbard and Edmands, 1834), 9. The first volume of Sketches appeared in 1834, but it was not until the following year that both volumes were published together; the 1835 edition is identical to the 1834, with a preface. Most reviewers were responding to the 1835 edition. 2. Hall, Sketches (Philadelphia: H. Hall, 1835), n.p. (see preface). 3. Hall, Sketches (1834), 12.

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notes to pages 19 – 22 4. The list of critics considering canon formation, authorship, and literary nationalism in eastern writing is impressive. A short list includes Richard H. Brodhead (The School of Hawthorne); Nina Baym (Novels, Readers, and Reviewers; Feminism and American Literary History); Judith Fetterley (Provisions: A Reader from 19th Century American Women); David Reynolds (Beneath the American Renaissance); R. Jackson Wilson (Figures of Speech: American Writers and the Literary Marketplace, from Benjamin Franklin to Emily Dickinson); and Kenneth Dauber (The Idea of Authorship in America: Democratic Poetics from Franklin to Melville). The list of critics treating those issues through studies of individual authors is even more extensive; for example, Steven Fink (Prophet in the Marketplace: Thoreau’s Development as a Professional Writer); Lawrence Buell (The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture); and David Reynolds (Walt Whitman’s America). In stark contrast, the list of works on canon formation in nineteenthcentury western writing is far shorter. Stephen Fender’s Plotting the Golden West: American Literature and the Rhetoric of the California Trail touches on issues of western canonicity; Peter Antelyes’s Tales of Adventurous Enterprise: Washington Irving and the Poetics of Western Expansion is a careful consideration of capitalism and the market for writings about the West; and A. Carl Bredahl’s New Ground treats the stylistic, formalist differences between eastern and western writing that influenced canonical history. 5. Joseph B. Longacre and James Herring, eds., The National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans (Philadelphia: H. Perkins, 1834 –39), 1: n.p. 6. Over the next three volumes they added only one living author: Lydia Sigourney. The editors also included two earlier authors, Joel Barlow and Charles Brockden Brown. 7. See Nina Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 249 –58. 8. James Hall, review of Tales of the Glauber Spa, by “several American Authors,” in Western Monthly Magazine (January 1833): 45. 9. Mark Rose, “The Author as Proprietor: Donaldson v. Becket and the Genealogy of Modern Authorship,” Representations 23 (summer 1998): 75. 10. Martha Woodmansee, “On the Author Effect: Recovering Collectivity,” in The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature, ed. Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 15. Both Rose and Woodmansee developed their model based on the British literary tradition. In terms of American reception history this model holds, but in terms of legal ownership and copyright its application to the American marketplace is complicated by competing concepts of intellectual property.

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notes to pages 22 – 27 As Meredith L. McGill has argued, American copyright law, “rather than confirming the author as the owner of a text,” established “going-into-print as the moment when individual rights give way to the demands of the social.” Meredith L. McGill, “The Matter of the Text: Commerce, Print Culture, and the Authority of the State in American Copyright Law,” American Literary History 9, no. 1 (1997): 23. 11. See Ralph Leslie Rusk, The Literature of the Middle Western Frontier (New York: Columbia University Press, 1925), 2:12 –23. 12. The very presence of Rusk’s enormous bibliography (over three hundred pages) of literature of the midwestern frontier suggests the considerable range of western writing. I am bound to put some constraints on the idea of “authorship.” In considering authorship in the West, this chapter will consider those texts that (1) appeared in print during the period; and (2) appealed to a relatively catholic audience. Thus, I am not treating unpublished diaries, religious sermons, oral legends, and so on. That the writers/speakers of such texts considered themselves authors I have no doubt—but they did not generally consider themselves professional authors in relation to a literary marketplace. 13. Timothy Flint, Recollections of the Last Ten Years (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1932), 5. 14. Timothy Flint, “Editor’s Address,” Western Monthly Review (May 1827): 9 –10. 15. James Hall, “To the Reader,” Western Monthly Magazine (January 1833): 1. 16. Hall, “To the Reader,” 1–2. 17. James Hall, “Literary Notice,” Western Monthly Magazine (August 1833): 384. This notice is unsigned. 18. Rusk, Literature of the Middle Western Frontier, 1:272. 19. Timothy Flint, Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone, The First Settler of Kentucky (Cincinnati: N. and G. Guilford and Co. 1833), iii. 20. See Ronald J. Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 198 – 99. 21. Rusk demonstrates that “the West, as a pioneer country, received the impress of various outside influences without exerting a very great direct influence in return. . . . [T]here was no noticeable backwash of influence from the West upon the East” (Literature of the Middle Western Frontier, 2:1; see also 2:30 –38). 22. And therefore Cooper has received the literary lion’s share of critical commentary. Whether appreciated for his effect or attacked for his historically sentimental and culturally myopic outlook, Cooper remains the central literary influence. Edwin Fussell, whose book Frontier: American Literature and the

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notes to pages 27– 30 American West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965) is the standard treatment of the subject, wrote that Cooper “defined the age and became (insofar as any one man can be) the improbable founder of the national expression. The Leatherstocking Tales are not in any ordinary sense great art; but the rest of American writing through Whitman is a series of footnotes on them” (68). If the works of Hawthorne, Emerson, and others are “footnotes” to Cooper, then what are we to make of Hall, Flint, and others who offered a dramatically different alternative? 23. Flint, Recollections, 5. 24. Flint, Recollections, 6 –7. 25. Amos A. Parker, Trip to the West and Texas, Comprising a Journey of Eight Thousand Miles, through New-York, Michigan, Illinois, Missouri, Louisiana and Texas, in the Autumn and Winter of 1834 –5: Interspersed with Anecdotes, Incidents, and Observations (Concord nh: White and Fisher, 1835), 3; Samuel Parker, Journal of an Exploring Tour beyond the Rocky Mountains (Ithaca ny: By the author, 1838), iii; Charles Augustus Murray, Travels in North America during the Years 1834, 1835, and 1836. Including a Summer Residence with the Pawnee Tribe of Indians, in the Remote Prairies of the Missouri, and a Visit to Cuba and the Azore Islands, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1839), dedication page; William H. Keating, Narrative of an Expedition to the Source of St. Peter’s River, Lake Winnepeek, Lake of the Woods, &c. &c. Performed in the Year 1823 (Philadelphia: H. C. Carey and I. Lea, 1824), vii; James Hildreth, Dragoon Campaigns to the Rocky Mountains. By a Dragoon (New York: Wiley and Long, 1836), 5. 26. Calvin Colton, Tour of the American Lakes, and among the Indians of the North-West Territory (London: Frederick Westley and A. H. Davis, 1833), 1:xi. 27. Nathan Hoskins Jr., Notes upon the Western Country. Contained within the States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and the Territory of Michigan: Taken on a Tour through that Country in the Summer of 1832 (Greenfield ma: James P. Fogg, 1833). 28. See Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers, 160 –72. 29. Tilly Buttrick Jr., Voyages, Travels and Discoveries of Tilly Buttrick, Jr. (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1904), 19. 30. Timothy Flint, “Editor’s Preface” to James O. Pattie, The Personal Narrative of James O. Pattie of Kentucky during an Expedition from St. Louis, through the vast regions between that place and the Pacific Ocean, and thence back through the City of Mexico to Vera Cruz, during journeying of six years, etc., ed. Reuben Gold Thwaites (1833; rpt., Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1905), 25. 31. Zenas Leonard, Narrative of the Adventures of Zenas Leonard, a Native of Clearfield County, PA, Who Spent Five Years Trapping for Furs, Trading with the Indians, &c.,

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notes to pages 31 – 35 &c., of the Rocky Mountains: Written by Himself (Clearfield pa: D. W. Moore, 1839), iv. 32. Hall, Legends of the West (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke, 1885), n.p. (see preface). 33. Hall, Sketches (1834), 11. 34. Parker, Journal of an Exploring Tour, iii. 35. Caleb Atwater, Remarks Made on a Tour to Prairie du Chien; thence to Washington City, in 1829 (Columbus oh: Isaac N. Whiting, 1831), v. 36. Edmund Flagg, The Far West: or, A Tour beyond the Rockies (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1838), 1:vi. 37. British travelers often used the same format, such as Morris Birbeck’s Letters from Illinois (1818) and James Flint’s Letters from America (1822). 38. Flint, Recollections, 4. 39. Flagg, Far West, vii; Charles Fenno Hoffman, A Winter in the West, by a NewYorker (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1835), n.p. (see preface). 40. John A. M’Clung, Sketches of Western Adventure: Containing an Account of the Most Interesting Incidents Connected with the Settlement of the West, from 1755 –1794 (Philadelphia: Grigg and Elliot, 1832), vii–viii. 41. Quoted in Rusk, Literature of the Middle Western Frontier, 1:272. 42. See review (unsigned) of Hope Leslie, by Catharine M. Sedgwick, Western Monthly Review (April 1827): 290. 43. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” in Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 13; Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Lectures, ed. Joel Porte (New York: Library of America, 1983), 58. 44. See also Stephen Fender’s treatment of the “scientific modes in Hall, Flint,” and others in Plotting the Golden West: American Literature and the Rhetoric of the California Trail (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 181. 45. Western Monthly Review (April 1827): 294 – 95. 46. Timothy Flint, Francis Berrian, or The Mexican Patriot (Boston: Cummings, Hilliard, and Co., 1826), 1:iii; James Kirke Paulding, Westward Ho! A Tale (New York: J. and J. Harper, 1832), 4; James S. French, Elkswatawa; or, The Prophet of the West (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1836), 1:ix; James Hall, The Western Souvenir, a Christmas and New Year’s Gift for 1829 (Cincinnati: N. and G. Guilford, 1829), iii; Hall, Legends, n.p. (see preface). 47. Hall, Sketches (1834), vii. 48. Patrick Gass, A Journal of the Voyages and Travels of a Corps of Discovery, under the Command of Capt. Lewis and Capt. Clarke (Pittsburgh: David M’Keehan, 1807), viii; Fortescue Cuming, Sketches of a Tour to the Western Country, through the States of Ohio and Kentucky; a Voyage down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and a Trip

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notes to pages 35 – 38 through the Mississippi Territory and Part of West Florida (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1904), 24; Edwin James, Account of an Expedition from Pittsburgh to the Rocky Mountains, 3 vols. (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1823), 1:1. 49. Nancy K. Anderson, “‘Curious Historical Artistic Data’: Art History and Western American Art,” in Discovered Lands, Invented Pasts: Transforming Visions of the American West, ed. Jules D. Prown et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 6 –7. Anderson shows a similar impulse in Albert Bierstadt: after one trip to the Rocky Mountains the painter “had begun to surround himself with objects that testified to the fact of his journey (he was an eyewitness) and therefore to the authenticity of his paintings” (8). 50. The suspicion of rhetorical sophistication goes far beyond any culture-wide resistance to “polish.” William Charvat points out that many writers of the time “assumed that much finishing reduced strength.” By finishing he means “fine effects” and detailed rhetorical flourishes, as opposed to “broad” effects. William Charvat, The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800 –1870, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Columbia: Ohio State University Press, 1968), 72. 51. Of course, the word imagination does not maintain a single meaning in the 1830s. Flint felt comfortable referring to himself as “a writer of works of the imagination.” He did not, however, mean the same thing as Emerson; Flint resisted the self-empowering flights of the eastern writer/genius. 52. Murray, Travels in North America, v–vi. 53. Flint, “Editor’s Preface,” 26 –27. 54. Hildreth, Dragoon Campaigns, 5. 55. Hildreth, Dragoon Campaigns, 6 –7. 56. Estwick Evans, A Pedestrious Tour, of Four Thousand Miles, through the Western States and Territories, during the Winter and Spring of 1818 (Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark Co., 1904), 103. 57. Evans, Pedestrious Tour, 115. 58. Washington Irving, A Tour on the Prairies (New York: Pantheon, 1967), 10. 59. Quoted in Peter Antelyes, Tales of Adventurous Enterprise: Washington Irving and the Poetics of Western Expansion (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 45. 60. Hoffman, Winter in the West, n.p. (see preface). 61. Hall, Sketches (1835), 8. 62. James Freeman Clarke, North American Review (1837): 235. 63. French, Elkswatawa, 1:ix. 64. Colton, Tour of the American Lakes, 1:xii–xiii.

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notes to pages 38 – 44 65. William R. Handley, responding to my reading, has suggested that in the phrase naked truth Colton may be implicitly playing on the representation of Indians as “naked” savages; clothes suggest culture here, a falseness, inauthenticity. 66. Review (unsigned) of A Tour on the Prairies, by Washington Irving, North American Review 88 (July 1835): 14. 67. Michael J. Colacurcio, “Idealism and Independence,” in Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Emory Elliott (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 215. 68. Quoted in Fussell, Frontier, 157. 69. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 232. 70. Lyotard’s distinction between narrative and scientific discourses precisely recalls James Hall’s own vision in the Western Monthly Magazine; Hall identified, and hoped to synthesize, the “flowers of literature” (narrative) with the “cause of science.” 71. Hall (unsigned), “Literary Notices: Mr. Catlin’s Exhibition of Indian Portraits,” Western Monthly Magazine (November 1833): 537. 72. Hall, Sketches (1835), 7. 73. James Hall, Statistics of the West, at the Close of the Year 1836 (Cincinnati: J. A. James and Co., 1836), vii. 74. Hall, Sketches (1835), 7. 75. Hall, Sketches (1835), 6. 76. Mann Butler, review of Sketches of History, Life, and Manners, in the West, by James Hall, Western Messenger 1, no. 10 (May 1836): 677. 77. Butler, review of Sketches of History, 680. 78. James Freeman Clarke, North American Review 42 (July 1836): 4, 5. 79. Hall was not the only reader put off by Clarke’s article. In a letter to Philadelphia printer Harrison Hall, Edgar Allan Poe wrote that he had read James Hall’s Sketches with “great interest,” and he had “also read the objectionable article in the N. A. Review”; Poe agreed with Hall that “some personal pique is at the bottom of it.” One cannot help but feel Poe’s interest in such public squabbles, an interest that would produce a similar magazine argument between Poe and Longfellow within five years. Poe to Harrison Hall, 2 September 1836, The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. J. W. Ostrom (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948), 1:103. 80. Hall, Statistics of the West, vii. 81. Hall, Statistics of the West, xiv.

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notes to pages 44 – 52 82. James Freeman Clarke, review of Statistics of the West, by James Hall, in North American Review 45 (July 1837): 239. 83. Hall, Statistics, vii. 84. Washington Irving, Astoria, or Anecdotes of an Enterprize beyond the Rocky Mountains, ed. Richard Dilworth Rust (Boston: Twayne, 1976), 4. 85. Hall, Statistics, xii. It is worth noting that Hall, a lawyer, misrepresents Butler’s charge. Butler is not suggesting that he owns the facts but simply that Hall found his facts in Butler’s work. Butler merely suggests that Hall acknowledge his sources, a seemingly fair request. In fact, as mentioned earlier, Hall had recognized his many sources in the book’s introduction. Hall’s response to Butler is to argue over ownership of facts, a very different debate. 86. For excellent investigations of this history, see Christine Bold’s Selling the Wild West (1987); and Michael Denning’s Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (1987).

2. Fact and Fiction 1. Caroline M. Kirkland, A New Home, Who’ll Follow? or Glimpses of Western Life, ed. Sandra A. Zagarell (New Brunswick nj: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 3. 2. Paul Lauter, Canons and Contexts (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 125. Lauter credits Judith Fetterley with this idea but offers no specific citation. 3. The effect of letter writing on American literature remains a matter of debate. Ronald J. Zboray, for example, downplays the public/private dichotomy favored by Lauter and suggests, rather, that, “since the stream of personal correspondence carried a great deal of affection, it comes as no surprise that the most popular literature of the period was high in emotional content.” Ronald J. Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 115. 4. Both Zagarell and Osborne use the word probably to identify the allusions. See Zagarell, A New Home, 203n; and William S. Osborne, ed., A New Home— Who’ll Follow? (New Haven ct: College and University Press, 1965), 13. 5. Judith Fetterley, Provisions: A Reader from 19th Century American Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 119; Zagarell, intro., A New Home, xxvii; Annette Kolodny, The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630 –1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 132, 155. 6. David Leverenz, Manhood and the American Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 156.

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notes to pages 53 – 62 7. See also Marcia B. Kline, Beyond the Land Itself: Views of Nature in Canada and the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970). 8. Kolodny, Land Before Her, 132 9. Basil Hall, Travels in North America, in the Years 1827 and 1828 (Edinburgh: Cadell and Co., 1829), 1:128 –29. 10. Slightingly here seems either to mean “fleetingly” or to denigrate the mud holes themselves. It does not ironically “slight” the process of frontier travel. 11. Kolodny, Land Before Her, 133; Zagarell, intro., A New Home, xxvii; Fetterley, Provisions, 123; Lauter, Canons, 56. 12. Edgar Allan Poe, “Caroline M. Kirkland,” in Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1181. 13. Zagarell, intro., A New Home, xi. 14. Poe, “Caroline M. Kirkland,” 1181. 15. Edgar Allan Poe, The Journal of Julius Rodman, in Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales, ed. Patrick F. Quinn (New York: Library of America, 1984), 1187. 16. Quoted in Edwin Fussell, Frontier: American Literature and the American West (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), 132. 17. Quoted in Fussell, Frontier, 132. 18. Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 147. 19. Burton R. Pollin, intro., The Journal of Julius Rodman, in The Imaginary Voyages: Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Burton R. Pollin (Boston: Twayne, 1981), 508. 20. Jameson, Fredric, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). 21. See also John J. Teunissen and Evelyn J. Hinz, “Poe’s Journal of Julius Rodman as Parody”; the authors argue that the Journal is “parody rather than plagiarism” (317). Nineteenth-Century Fiction 27 (1972): 317–38. 22. Pollin, intro., Imaginary Voyages, 4. 23. Pollin, intro., Rodman, 512. 24. Stephen Rachman, “‘Es lässt sich nicht schreiben’: Plagiarism and ‘The Man of the Crowd,’” in The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 83. 25. Edgar Allan Poe, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, in Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales, 1007– 8. 26. Meredith L. McGill, “Poe, Literary Nationalism, and Authorial Identity,” in Rosenheim and Rachman, American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, 283. 27. Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), vii.

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notes to pages 62 – 68 28. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 1. 29. Baudrillard, Simulacra, 6. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations from Baudrillard’s phases are found on page 6 of his essay. 30. Lee Clark Mitchell, Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 4. 31. Mitchell, Westerns, 6. 32. Niall Lucy is just one of many commentators to explore postmodern literary theory’s romantic, sometimes even nostalgic inclination, which Lucy finds in “the radical affirmation of imaginative becoming . . . vested in the opposition to what it sees as the oppressive force of rational being.” Niall Lucy, Postmodern Literary Theory: An Introduction (Malden ma: Blackwell, 1997), 228. 33. Baudrillard, Simulacra, 7. 34. Rodman’s narration is also unreliable, as numerous readers have observed. Like many other travelers, Julius Rodman went west for health reasons, but his illness, “an hereditary hypochondria,” calls into question his reliability; Rodman may be heroic, but he also possesses a “peculiar character.” Furthermore, Rodman “imbued” his narrative “with a vast deal of romantic fervor, very different from the lukewarm and statistical air which pervades most records of its kind.” 35. Quoted in Pollin, intro., Rodman, 511. Pollin credits the discovery of this passage to David K. Jackson, in Poe Studies 7 (December 1974): 47– 48. 36. Poe, Essays and Reviews, 1458. 37. Poe, Essays and Reviews, 479. 38. Poe, Essays and Reviews, 480. 39. Mark Twain, Roughing It, in Mark Twain: The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, ed. Guy Cardwell (New York: Library of America, 1984), 527. 40. Lee Clark Mitchell, “Naming the West and Making a Name: The Reputations of Bierstadt and Twain,” Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 14 (1989): 119. 41. Susan Gillman, Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain’s America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 1. 42. Richard S. Lowry, “Littery Man”: Mark Twain and Modern Authorship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 9. 43. James M. Cox, Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 97.

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notes to pages 69 – 75 44. Louis A. Renza, “Poe’s Secret Autobiography,” in The American Renaissance Reconsidered, ed. Walter Benn Michaels and Donald E. Pease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 63. 45. Renza, “Poe’s Secret Autobiography,” 60, 83. 46. Renza, “Poe’s Secret Autobiography,” 82. 47. Renza, “Poe’s Secret Autobiography,” 78. 48. Mark Twain, “Petrified Man,” in Early Tales and Sketches, 1851–1864, vol. 15 of The Works of Mark Twain, ed. Edgar Marquess Branch and Robert H. Hirst (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 169. 49. Everett Emerson, The Authentic Mark Twain: A Literary Biography of Samuel L. Clemens (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 20. 50. Mark Twain to Mary Mason Fairbanks, 20 February 1868, in Mark Twain’s Letters, vol. 2: 1867–1868, ed. Harriet Elinor Smith and Richard Bucci (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 189. 51. Emerson, Authentic Mark Twain, x. 52. Louis J. Budd, Our Mark Twain: The Making of His Public Personality (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 24. 53. Randall Knoper, Acting Naturally: Mark Twain in the Culture of Performance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 2. 54. Knoper, Acting Naturally, 74 –75. 55. Knoper, Acting Naturally, 2. 56. Andrew Hoffman, Inventing Mark Twain: The Lives of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (New York: William Morrow, 1997), x, xii–xiii. 57. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, tenth anniversary ed. (New York: Routledge, 1999), 43. 58. Butler, Gender Trouble, 43. 59. Butler, Gender Trouble, 175. 60. Lowry, “Littery Man,” 13. 61. Mark Twain, “A Couple of Sad Experiences,” in The Galaxy (June 1870), reprinted in Contributions to The Galaxy, 1868 –1871, ed. Bruce R. McElderry Jr. (Delmar ny: Scholars Facsimiles, 1977), 48. 62. Twain, “Couple of Sad Experiences,” 47. 63. Twain, “Couple of Sad Experiences,” 48. 64. Don Florence, Persona and Humor in Mark Twain’s Early Writings (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1995), 33 –34. 65. Branch and Hirst, Twain’s Early Tales and Sketches, 157. 66. Lowry, “Littery Man,” 43. 67. Lowry, “Littery Man,” 67. 68. Lowry, “Littery Man,” 67.

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notes to pages 75 – 80 69. Harold K. Bush Jr., “Our Mark Twain? Or, Some Thoughts on the ‘Autobiographical Critic,’” New England Quarterly 73, no. 1 (2000): 102. 70. Bush playfully implicates himself in the tall-tale tradition by admitting to a few “stretchers” in his treatment of Lowry. I admit to no such license in my reading of Bush’s article.

3. Authentic Reproduction 1. Gary Scharnhorst, Bret Harte: Opening the American Literary West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), xiii. As Scharnhorst explains, Harte’s audiences were frequently disappointed because “Harte simply did not dress the part of a rustic westerner in his public appearances. Unlike Joaquin Miller, who paraded in sombrero and pantaloons, and unlike Clemens, who was adept at many types and styles of performance, Harte simply failed to play to type” (96). 2. Miles Orvell, The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 1880 –1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), xv. 3. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 1. 4. Orvell, Real Thing, 39; Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 506. 5. See, for example, Louise L. Stevenson, The Victorian Homefront: American Thought and Culture, 1860 –1880 (New York: Twayne, 1991), 42 – 44; T. J. Jackson Lears, “The Ad Man and the Grand Inquisitor: Intimacy, Publicity, and the Managed Self in America, 1880 –1940,” in Constructions of the Self, ed. George Levine (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992) 107–20; and William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage, 1993), 93. 6. “Joaquin Miller on American Literature,” Literary Digest, 25 March 1899, 338. 7. But not, of course, as an American author. Many writers attempted canonical self-fashionings. Walt Whitman remains perhaps the best example; see, for example, Tenny Nathanson, Whitman’s Presence (New York: New York University Press, 1992); David S. Reynold, Walt Whitman’s America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995); and Miles Orvell, Real Thing. Whitman certainly used the projection of his persona as a marketing strategy—indeed, his very first public gesture, that famous portrait in Leaves of Grass, is exactly such a move. Joaquin Miller drew from his friend Whitman and learned much from the poet about self-promotion. The crucial difference is that Whitman invented himself as poet, if iconographic poet, and returned the publicity toward his writing. Miller invented himself as invention, advertising himself as ad-

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notes to pages 80 – 84

8. 9.

10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

vertisement. He simulated authorship. A secondary difference is simply the available machinery; Miller emerged twenty years after Whitman and could take advantage of a more developed promotional technology. Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830 –1870 (New Haven ct: Yale University Press, 1982), 198. It is no coincidence that Miller was one of three finalists in P. T. Barnum’s poetry contest to commemorate (and advertise) the white elephant Toung Taloung nor that Miller apparently marched with Buffalo Bill in the New Orleans World’s Fair. The three men shared, and helped invent, the popularity of commercial spectacle familiar to mid- to late-nineteenth-century American culture. See A. H. Saxon, P. T. Barnum: The Legend and the Man (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 306. Biographical accounts of Miller’s life inevitably encounter and often reinscribe apocryphal legends, in part because Miller was unreliable about his own story, in part because many biographers (such as his daughter or his friend Harr Wagner) had a stake in perpetuating or rewriting the tall tales. Because this chapter is primarily interested in Miller’s popular persona, it considers the effect of such self-invention without always attempting to correct dubious material. Nevertheless, I have made every effort either to verify biographical details or to acknowledge their questionable foundations. Margaret Guilford-Kardell, the leading expert on Miller, is currently compiling the most factual record of Miller’s life. Joaquin Miller, Pacific Poems (London: Whittingham and Wilkins, 1871), viii–ix. Joaquin Miller’s Poems (San Francisco: Whitaker and Ray, 1909), 2:91. Oscar Wilde, The Artist as Critic: Critical Writing of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 54. “Joaquin Miller on American Literature,” 338. Orvell, Real Thing, 34. See Stuart P. Sherman, preface and intro., The Poetical Works of Joaquin Miller (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1923), 27; and Martin Severin Peterson, Joaquin Miller, Literary Frontiersman (Palo Alto ca: Stanford University Press, 1937), 79. Nathanael West, Miss Lonelyhearts & The Day of the Locust (Norfolk, Conn: J. Laughlin, 1962), 77. Joaquin Miller’s Poems, 1:2. Walter Bagehot, Literary Studies (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1895), 2:330. The concept of the picturesque has, of course, been discussed at length in numerous scholarly studies of art and literary history. For a con-

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notes to pages 84 – 88 sideration of the term that also treats representations of the American West, see Alison Byerly’s essay “The Uses of Landscape: The Picturesque Aesthetic and the National Park System,” in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996). 20. Lillie Langtry, The Days I Knew (New York: George H. Doran, 1925), 94; Harr Wagner, Joaquin Miller and His Other Self (San Francisco: Harr Wagner Publishing, 1929), vi; Literary Digest, 338; Mark Twain in Eruption: Hitherto Unpublished Papers about Men and Events, ed. Bernard De Voto (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1940), 332 –33; Peterson, Joaquin Miller, 113; Sherman, Poetical Works of Joaquin Miller, 3, 39. 21. Quoted in Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 111. 22. Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1964), 57. 23. Braudy, Frenzy of Renown, 492. 24. Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 27, 28. 25. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 224. 26. T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880 –1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 36 –37. 27. Peterson, Joaquin Miller, vi. 28. Lears, No Place, 37. 29. O. W. Frost, Joaquin Miller (New York: Twayne, 1967), 64. 30. Joaquin Miller’s Poems, 1:79. 31. Joaquin Miller’s Poems, 2:90 – 91. 32. Sherman, Poetical Works of Joaquin Miller, iii. 33. Benjamin, Illuminations, 221. 34. See Carey McWilliams, Ambrose Bierce: A Biography (New York: Archon Books, 1967), 206. The attacks on Miller’s veracity did have a local effect, and Miller was often forced to defend himself from critics and other poets. But most audiences found such fabrications harmless and, in the growing western tall-tale tradition, perhaps even endearing. 35. See M. M. Marberry, Splendid Poseur: Joaquin Miller—American Poet (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1953), 253. 36. T. J. Jackson Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880 –1920,” in The Culture of

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notes to pages 88 – 94 Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880 –1980, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 6; Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 9. 37. William Dean Howells, “Recent Literature,” review of Songs of the Sierras, Atlantic Monthly 28 (December 1871): 771. 38. Joaquin Miller’s Romantic Life Amongst the Red Indians (London: Saxon, 1890), vi– vii. See also, My Own Story (Chicago: Belford-Clarke, 1890). 39. See Peterson, Joaquin Miller, 50. 40. Miller himself provides these reviews in his 1909 Poems (1:148, 128 –29). Miller identifies the newspapers as the Globe and the Academy. 41. Van Wyck Brooks, The Times of Melville and Whitman (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1947), 307. 42. Joaquin Miller, Light: A Narrative Poem (Boston: Herbert B. Turner, 1907), v. 43. Joaquin Miller’s Poems, 1:108. 44. Joaquin Miller’s Poems, 1:110. 45. Quoted in Marberry, Splendid Poseur, 158. 46. Joaquin Miller’s Poems, 1:27. His emphasis on personal health throughout his career may also be seen as a comment on the growing sense of nervous disease, the spread of neurasthenia, and fragmented human psychology throughout the country. 47. Frost, Joaquin Miller, 21; Peterson, Joaquin Miller, 128; Sherman, Poetical Works of Joaquin Miller, 39. 48. Joaquin Miller’s Poems, 1:69; Life Amongst the Modocs: Unwritten History (London: Bentley, 1873), 36 –37; Joaquin Miller’s Poems, 1:68. 49. See Joaquin Miller’s Poems, 1:216; Peterson, Joaquin Miller, 78; Joaquin Miller’s Poems, 4:154 –55. 50. See Marberry, Splendid Poseur, 140. 51. Juanita Miller, About “The Hights”—Joaquin Miller Park—Then and Now (Oakland: Tooley-Towne Printers, 1946), n.p. The first edition was apparently written in 1919. I quote from the eighteenth edition, printed in 1946. Earlier editions are less historical and seem designed to be guest books, with passages of poetry, pictures of the property, and blank pages for notes. 52. Joaquin Miller’s Poems, 1:1. 53. See Marberry, Splendid Poseur, 137. 54. Miller was not the first to reinvent Walker as western hero. Walker’s publicist, William Wells, performed the same trick fifteen years earlier in his book Walker’s Expedition to Nicaragua. As described by Richard Slotkin in The Fatal Environment, Wells “sought to represent the filibustering expedition as the log-

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notes to pages 96 – 103 ical extension of Manifest Destiny and the agrarian Frontier” (251). Walker’s own The War in Nicaragua (1860)—a “self-mythologization,” in Slotkin’s words (261)—similarly depicted a romantic hero. Joaquin Miller, using an established tradition, simply extends the western implications. 55. Later the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and today the American Institute of Arts and Letters. 56. Joaquin Miller’s Poems, 1:79. 57. Joaquin Miller’s Poems, 1:58, 2. 58. Joaquin Miller’s Poems, 1:2. 59. Joaquin Miller’s Poems, 1:61. 60. On the spot is from the Literary Digest, 338; the latter phrase can be found in Light (v), Pacific Poems (vii), and the London (1871) edition of Songs of the Sierras (ix). 61. Joaquin Miller, Songs of the Mexican Seas (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1887), n.p. (see prefatory note). 62. The New York Literary Digest of March 1899 quotes Miller as saying that “the one great American poet who is no more is Edgar Allan Poe” (338). 63. Joaquin Miller’s Poems, 1:90. 64. The essay, included in the collected Poems, is apparently composed of an article from Harper’s Magazine and subsequent introductory reflections. 65. Joaquin Miller’s Poems, 1:215. The “plain story” of Byron’s life may be termed revisionist at best: in the very limited space devoted to the poet, Miller emphasizes the “goodness” of Byron—“at heart, a truly good man . . . socially clean” (1:215). 66. Joaquin Miller’s Poems, 1:215. There are only two references in the essay to specific poems, and they reveal much about Miller’s vision. First, Miller uses “Childe Harold” as a place marker: Newstead is “the very heart and core of Sherwood Forest” and “has been since the publication of ‘Childe Harold’” (1:218). The same poem is again summoned two pages later: “In looking over the [unpublished] papers of the poet I observed that in the original copy of the ‘Pilgrimage’ he wrote ‘Childe Byron,’ instead of ‘Childe Harold’; and it was clearly evident to me that this greatest poem in our language was not at first intended for publication” (1:220). What fascinates Miller is not the poetic effect or craft of Byron’s work—not the poem as poem—but the fact that Byron had positioned himself in his work and the suggestion (as Miller would have it) that Byron wrote the verse without an intended audience. 67. Joaquin Miller’s Poems, 1:215 –16. 68. Joaquin Miller’s Poems, 1:219 –20. 69. Joaquin Miller’s Poems, 1:220.

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notes to pages 104 – 114 70. Joaquin Miller’s Poems, 1:222, 223. 71. Joaquin Miller’s Poems, 1:225. 72. Joaquin Miller’s Poems, 4:131. 73. Peterson, Joaquin Miller, 88. 74. Joaquin Miller’s Poems, 1:26. 75. Juanita Miller, About “The Hights,” n.p. 76. In the last couple of years the city of Oakland has designated considerable funds for the maintenance of the park. 77. Baudrillard, Simulacra, 6. 78. Baudrillard, Simulacra, 19.

4. The Trap of Authenticity 1. Both Sewell’s and Woodward’s remarks are from Richard B. Woodward, “The Truth Is Out: How Realists Could Be So Realistic,” New York Times, 25 November 2001. 2. Nicolas S. Witschi, Traces of Gold: California’s Natural Resources and the Claim to Realism in Western American Literature (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002), 8. 3. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 1982 –1985, ed. Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas, trans. Don Barry et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 5. 4. Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” in Thoreau: Collected Essays and Poems, ed. Elizabeth Hall Witherell (New York: Library of America, 2001), 235. 5. Lyotard, Postmodern Explained, 5. 6. David E. Shi, Facing Facts: Realism in American Thought and Culture, 1850 –1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 3. 7. Witschi’s Traces of Gold is the most sophisticated examination of this surprisingly neglected history. 8. I refer to the title of Michael Davitt Bell’s The Problem of American Realism: Studies in the Cultural History of a Literary Idea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). 9. Barrett Wendell, A Literary History of America (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1901), 502, 513. 10. James H. Maguire, “Introduction: Encountering the West,” in A Literary History of the American West, ed. J. Golden Taylor (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1987), 3. 11. Max Nordau, Degeneration, trans. from the German; intro. George L. Mosse (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 2.

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notes to pages 115 – 120 12. Tom Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 5. 13. John Muir, Our National Parks (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1901), 1. 14. Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992), 149 –50. 15. Quoted in Seltzer, Bodies and Machines, 149. 16. Frank Norris, Frank Norris: Novels and Essays, ed. Donald Pizer (New York: Library of America, 1986), 1185. Unless otherwise indicated, all references to Norris’s essays, Vandover and the Brute, and The Octopus are from this volume. 17. Owen Wister, Owen Wister Out West: His Journals and Letters, ed. Fanny Kemble Wister (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 35. 18. Castle Freeman Jr. writes that, when Wister went west in 1885, his “real life was about to begin.” Castle Freeman Jr., “Owen Wister: Brief Life of a Western Mythmaker: 1860 –1938,” Harvard Magazine 104, no. 6 (2002): 42. 19. Frederic Remington, The Collected Writings of Frederic Remington, ed. Peggy and Harold Samuels (Garden City ny: Doubleday, 1979), 551. 20. Francis Parkman, Francis Parkman: The Oregon Trail and The Conspiracy of Pontiac, ed. William R. Taylor (New York: Library of America, 1991), 176 –77. 21. William Kittredge, Owning It All (Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 1987), 62. 22. Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem (New York: Noonday Press, 1990), 172. 23. Bill Brown, Reading the West: An Anthology of Dime Westerns (New York: Bedford Books, 1997), 30 –31. 24. Quoted in Thomas Beer, The Mauve Decade: American Life at the End of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Octagon Books, 1980), 92. 25. Hamlin Garland, Crumbling Idols, ed. Jane Johnson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 16. 26. Wister, Owen Wister Out West, 11–12. 27. Frank Norris, “The National Spirit as It Relates to the ‘Great American Novel,’” in The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris, ed. Donald Pizer (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), 118. 28. Owen Wister, Red Men and White (New York: Garrett Press, 1969), ix. 29. Wister, Red Men and White, viii. 30. Perriton Maxwell, “Frederic Remington, Most Typical of American Artists,” Pearson’s 18 (October 1907): 4. Quoted in G. Edward White, The Eastern Establishment and the Western Experience: The West of Frederic Remington, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989), 109. 31. Garland, Crumbling Idols, 121. 32. Garland, Crumbling Idols, 13.

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notes to pages 121 – 136 33. See Christine Bold, Selling the Wild West: Popular Western Fiction, 1860 –1960 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); and Michael Denning, Mechanic Accents: Dime Novels and Working-Class Culture in America (New York: Verso, 1987). 34. Denning, Mechanic Accents, 20, 24. 35. The Complete Poetical Works of Joaquin Miller (San Francisco: Whitaker and Ray, 1897), xiii. 36. Wister, Owen Wister Out West, 223. 37. Garland, Crumbling Idols, 120. 38. Quoted in Bell, Problem of American Realism, 115. 39. Similarly, Poultney Bigelow, Frederic Remington’s editor at Outing magazine, believed that “genius was in those rough drawings” of Remington; indeed, Bigelow “loved them for their very roughness” (qtd. in White, Eastern Establishment, 100). 40. Bell, Problem of American Realism, 116. 41. Shi, Facing Facts, 230. 42. Garland, Crumbling Idols, 130. 43. Garland, Crumbling Idols, 134, 135. 44. Joseph R. McElrath Jr., Frank Norris Revisited (Boston: Twayne, 1992), 17. 45. Frank Norris, “Shorty Stack, Pugilist,” in The Third Circle, vol. 4 of The Complete Works of Frank Norris (New York: Kennikat Press, 1967), 28. 46. Norris, “Shorty Stack,” 29. 47. Norris, “Shorty Stack,” 34. Norris often puns on the de-evolutionary transformation (and on the tainted sexuality) of his characters, including Vandover, who also ends up hunched over. 48. Donald Pizer, The Novels of Frank Norris (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966), 33. Pizer suggests that it is the most autobiographical in its depiction of the “inner” Norris; Blix is more factually accurate. 49. Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 1850 –1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 197. 50. Don Graham, “Frank Norris,” in A Literary History of the American West, ed. J. Golden Taylor (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1987), 370. 51. Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: Norton, 1987), 49. 52. Nordau, Degeneration, 3. 53. Norris to William Dean Howells, 28 March 1899, Collected Letters, ed. Jesse S. Crisler (San Francisco: Book Club of California, 1986), 73. 54. See Critical Essays on Frank Norris, ed. Don Graham (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), 18, 16.

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notes to pages 137– 150 55. Quoted in Franklin Walker, Frank Norris: A Biography (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), 145 – 46. 56. Quoted in Franklin Walker, Frank Norris, 154. 57. Frank Norris, Blix, vol. 3 of Complete Works of Frank Norris, 10. 58. Definition from the Oxford English Dictionary (1971 ed.). The definition is in fact a quotation taken from R. W. Raymond’s Glossary of Mining and Metallurgical Terms (1881). 59. Frank Norris, “Dying Fires,” in The Third Circle, vol. 4 of Complete Works of Frank Norris, 115, 114.

5. Coming Out of the Country 1. John Haines, “The Writer as Alaskan,” in This Incomperable Lande: A Book of American Nature Writing, ed. Thomas J. Lyon (New York: Penguin, 1989), 366. 2. Haines, “Writer as Alaskan,” 369, 372. 3. This chapter considers western nature writers, a term that demands some comment. I use the phrase nature writers in its most conventional sense: a group of writers, mostly Euroamerican, who write environmental reflections, polemics, and histories. When I refer to western nature writing, I mean the wellestablished canon that emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and flowered in the late-twentieth: from Clarence King and John Muir, through Mary Austin and Aldo Leopold, to Edward Abbey, Rick Bass, Dave Foreman, Barry Lopez, David Quammen, Gary Snyder, Jack Turner, Terry Tempest Williams, Ann Zwinger, and so many others. My hope in this chapter is to study western nature writers in the context of western authorship, but I do not mean to suggest that the theory of environmental constructivism applies only to western writers. 4. William Kittredge, Hole in the Sky: A Memoir (New York: Vintage, 1992), 5. 5. T. J. Jackson Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880 –1920,” in The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880 –1980, ed. Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 9. 6. George Levine, “Introduction: Constructivism and the Reemergent Self,” in Constructions of the Self, ed. George Levine (New Brunswick nj: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 1. 7. Charles Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 28 –29. 8. Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven ct: Yale University Press, 1998), 100 –101.

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notes to pages 150 – 153 9. Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 12. 10. Regina Bendix, In Search of Authenticity: The Formation of Folklore Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 16. 11. Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 93. 12. Charles Taylor, Ethics of Authenticity, 94. 13. Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity, 127–28. 14. My critique of social constructivism takes seriously two alternatives: the possibility that authors are indeed “made” by nature and the possibility of authorial self-invention. But other challenges exist. For example, Lawrence Buell persuasively argues for “mutual constructionism: of physical environment (both natural and human-built) shaping in some measure the cultures that in some measure continually refashion it.” See Lawrence Buell, Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 6. An equally powerful argument is made by N. Katherine Hayles, who suggests the notion of “constrained constructivism,” a theory that considers the “interactivity” of sense and cognitive process, of self and environment, on the “cusp” that exists between any immediate knowledge of nature and the culturally determining cognitive process. See N. Katherine Hayles, “Searching for Common Ground,” in Reinventing Nature? Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction, ed. Michael E. Soulé and Gary Lease (Washington dc: Island Press, 1995). 15. That the self is perceived in occidental culture to be distinct from nature is an epistemological dilemma far beyond the scope of this essay. Ecofeminism, briefly considered here, takes the division as perhaps the most insidious threat, terming it a form of “patriarchy, an ideology whose fundamental self/other distinction is based on a sense of self that is separate, atomistic.” Greta Gaard, Ecofeminism: Women, Animals, Nature (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 2. 16. Edward O. Wilson, “Biophilia and the Conservation Ethic,” in The Biophilia Hyphothesis, ed. Stephen R. Kellert and Edward O. Wilson (Washington dc: Island Press, 1993), 31. 17. Stephen R. Kellert, intro., Kellert and Wilson, Biophilia Hypothesis, 20 –21. 18. Anita Barrows, “The Ecopsychology of Child Development,” in Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth/Healing the Mind, ed. Theodore Roszak, Mary E. Gomes, and Allen D. Kanner (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1995), 103. 19. Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (New York: Vintage, 1991), 50.

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notes to pages 153 – 155 20. Theodore Roszak, intro., Roszak, Gomes, and Kanner, Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth/Healing the Mind, 5. See also Barry Lopez, “Yukon Charley: The Shape of Wilderness,” in Crossing Open Ground (New York: Vintage, 1989). Lopez extends the concept of “ecopsychological formation” from individual identity to nationalist identities, suggesting again that, in Thoreau’s famous phrase, in wildness is the preservation of the world. Lopez, considering the possibility of nature’s “therapeutic value,” speaks of wilderness’s impact on “our ethical and psychological well-being as a country” (82). 21. Vera Norwood, Made From This Earth: American Women and Nature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 265 – 66. 22. Terry Tempest Williams, An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field (New York: Vintage, 1994), 65. 23. Such language can baffle politicians. Utah Republican James V. Hansen, the panel’s chair, left the room during Williams’s testimony, later saying that he did not object to her language but could not understand it (New York Times, 13 November 1995). 24. Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 86. 25. The consistent problem of individual and cultural impotence (heard in Thoreau, E. O. Wilson, and Williams) may be more than just a metaphor. A number of studies and articles argue that male sperm count is decreasing worldwide, perhaps in part because of environmental degradation. 26. Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 57. 27. The importance of memory—indeed, the reliance on memory— can be confounding to theorists, especially to scientists. British naturalist and novelist John Fowles, for example, comments that nature refuses to stay put—is in perpetual “presentness,” while the human mind often gravitates toward the past. He writes: “I long ago noticed this in my naturalist self: that is, a disproportionately backward element in any present experience of nature, a retreat or running-back to past knowledge and experience.” See The Oxford Book of Nature Writing (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 232. 28. Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow (New York: Viking, 1962), 21. 29. Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces (New York: Penguin, 1985), 2. 30. Wayne Franklin and Michael Steiner, Mapping American Culture (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 5. 31. Yi-Fu Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 246. 32. Tuan, Topophilia, 75. 33. Tuan, Topophilia, 246.

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notes to pages 156 – 157 34. Donald E. Pease, “Author,” in Critical Terms for Literary Study, ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 112. 35. Richard H. Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 9, 8. 36. Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild (New York: North Point Press, 1990), 25. 37. Donna J. Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Contemporary Literary Criticism, ed. Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer, 4th ed. (New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 1998), 698. 38. William Cronon, intro., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: Norton, 1996), 34, 35. 39. Neil Evernden, The Social Construction of Nature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 89. 40. Alexander Wilson, The Culture of Nature: North American Landscape from Disney to the Exxon Valdez (Cambridge ma: Blackwell, 1992), 13, 12. 41. Susan Kollin, Nature’s State: Imagining Alaska as the Last Frontier (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 28. 42. Alison Byerly, “The Uses of Landscape: The Picturesque Aesthetic and the National Park System,” in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 53. I am arguing about authorship: the ways that writers use the idea of “real nature” to claim their own authenticity. But there have been numerous responses to Uncommon Ground and to the idea of nature’s “constructedness.” In 1995 Michael E. Soulé and Gary Lease brought out Reinventing Nature? Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction (Washington dc: Island Press, 1995), a collection of essays critiquing the idea of cultural and rhetorical hegemony. The contributors to this book “agree that certain contemporary forms of intellectual and social relativism can be just as destructive to nature as bulldozers and chain saws” (xvi). About a year later, the journal Wild Earth devoted an entire issue to the debate: “Opposing Wilderness Deconstruction.” The articles, with titles such as “The Trouble with Cronon” and “Uncommon Ground Needing to Be Re-trodden,” attacked the notion of the cultural construction of nature. “This socially constructed nature,” Gary Snyder wrote, “finally has no reality other than the quantification provided by economists and resource managers. This is indeed the ultimate commodification of Nature, done by supposedly advanced theorists, who prove to be simply the high end of the ‘wise use’ movement.” Gary Snyder, “Nature as Seen from

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notes to pages 158 – 164 Kitkitdizze Is No ‘Social Construction,’” Wild Earth 6, no. 4 (winter 1996 – 97): 8. 43. Thomas J. Lyon, “A Taxonomy of Nature Writing,” in This Incomperable Lande: A Book of American Nature Writing (New York: Penguin, 1989), 16. 44. See Stephen Trimble, Words from the Land: Encounters with Natural History Writing, expanded ed. (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1995), 372. 45. Barry Lopez, “Landscape and Narrative,” in Crossing Open Ground, 65. 46. The notion that twentieth-century nature writers were educated by nature requires some perspective. Thoreau’s experience at Harvard may seem more familiar to many of these writers than his experience at Walden Pond. Even an incomplete list suggests the reach of their schooling: John Hay studied at Harvard; David Quammen at Yale and Oxford; Edward Hoagland at Harvard; John McPhee at Princeton; Wendell Berry at the University of Kentucky and Stanford; Gretel Ehrlich at Bennington, the ucla Film School, and the New School for Social Research; Ann Zwinger at Wellesley, Harvard, and Indiana University; Gary Snyder at Reed and Berkeley; Aldo Leopold at the Yale School of Forestry; and so on. 47. Obviously, this form of imaginative education is not specifically American. Wordsworth’s Prelude may be the ultimate literary articulation of environmental education. 48. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, in Henry David Thoreau, ed. Robert F. Sayre (New York: Library of America, 1985), 394. 49. John Muir, The Story of My Boyhood and Youth (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), 49 –50. 50. Muir, Story of My Boyhood, 49. 51. Muir, Story of My Boyhood, 63. 52. Muir, Story of My Boyhood, 286 – 87. 53. Snyder, Practice of the Wild, 4 –5. 54. The obvious model, one that Snyder often emphasizes, is Native American. But Snyder does not limit himself and suggests a number of other cultures living in some connection with nature. 55. See Snyder, Practice of the Wild, 18. 56. David W. Orr, Earth in Mind: On Education, Environment, and the Human Prospect (Washington dc: Island Press, 1994), 146 – 47. 57. Edward Abbey, Down the River (New York: Penguin, 1982), 111. 58. Abbey, Down the River, 3. 59. Terry Tempest Williams, Pieces of White Shell: A Journey to Navajoland (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1984), 1. 60. Thoreau, Walden, 401.

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notes to pages 165 – 170 61. Williams, Refuge, 29. 62. Williams, Unspoken Hunger, 82. 63. Quoted in Trimble, Words from the Land, 3. 64. Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (New York: Scribner’s, 1986), 277–78. 65. Gary Snyder, “Language Goes Two Ways,” in A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds (Washington dc: Counterpoint, 1995), 174. 66. Here in the words of Myra Jehlen, summarizing Karl Mannheim. Myra Jehlen, “Introduction: Beyond Transcendence,” in Ideology and Classic American Literature, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen (New York: Cambridge University Press 1986), 12. 67. Tuan, Topophilia, 246. 68. Lopez, Crossing Open Ground, 81. 69. Mary Austin, Earth Horizon: Autobiography (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991), 71. 70. Quoted in Esther Lanigan Stineman, Mary Austin: Song of a Maverick (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 119. 71. Stineman, Mary Austin, 53. 72. Stineman, Mary Austin, 95. 73. Stineman, Mary Austin, 124. 74. Bendix, In Search of Authenticity, 47. 75. Stineman writes that “Austin’s personality was so strong that it tended, at times, to overpower people’s recollection of her work” (Mary Austin, 2)—a fate suffered by Miller as well. Interestingly, both Miller and Austin benefited from the literary tutelage of Ina Coolbrith, although Austin was to become less than gracious about Coolbrith’s help. 76. She had already examined her gifted abilities in the autobiographical novel A Woman of Genius (1912). Austin’s striking interest in her genius is amply demonstrated by Stineman, who reveals that Austin was so committed to her own genius that in 1927 she actually sought to “bequeath her brain to . . . Cornell University” for study. Stineman, Mary Austin, 133. 77. Melody Graulich, “A Book You Could Walk Around In,” afterword to Earth Horizon: Autobiography, by Mary Austin (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991), 379. 78. Stineman, Mary Austin, 207. 79. Marjorie Pryse, intro., Mary Austin, Stories from the Country of Lost Borders (New Brunswick nj: Rutgers University Press, 1987), xix. 80. Mary Austin, The Land of Little Rain (New York: Penguin, 1988), 61.

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notes to pages 170 – 184 81. Lawrence Buell, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 175. 82. Deloria, Playing Indian, 101. 83. Mary Austin, The American Rhythm (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1930), 14. 84. Austin, American Rhythm, 54. 85. Michael J. McDowell, “The Bakhtinian Road to Ecological Insight,” in The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology, ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 372. 86. Susan J. Rosowski, “Willa Cather’s Ecology of Place,” Western American Literature 30, no. 1 (1995): 42. 87. Stineman, Mary Austin, 23. 88. Stineman, Mary Austin, 136. 89. Austin cast the female protagonist in the novel as an actress searching for celebrity—a telling decision. 90. Stineman, Mary Austin, 134. 91. Buell, Environmental Imagination, 178. 92. Buell, Environmental Imagination, 2. 93. Irene Diamond, Fertile Ground: Women, Earth, and the Limits of Control (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994), 30. 94. Jack Turner, The Abstract Wild (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996), xiv. 95. Doug Peacock, Grizzly Years: In Search of the American Wilderness (New York: Henry Holt, 1990), 5. 96. See Wes Jackson, Becoming Native to This Place (Washington dc: Counterpoint, 1996). 97. Max Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 301. 98. Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity (New York: Dutton, 1979), 11. The second phrase in the sentence is a reworking of his title. 99. Buell, Environmental Imagination, 2. 100. Kollin, Nature’s State, 177. 101. Gaard, Ecofeminism, 10. Academic thinkers have also pointed out the conceptual impossibility of ever breaking the hermeneutic circle of cultural hegemony; Neil Evernden, for example, has considered the possibility that environmentalists’ “action is a defense of cosmos, not scenery. Ironically, the very entity they defend— environment—is itself an offspring of the nihilistic behemoth they challenge” (Neil Evernden, The Natural Alien: Humankind and Environment [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985], 124). Here is

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notes to pages 184 – 192 cultural constructivism as pernicious totality; even challenging it is to engage and validate it. 102. Donna J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991) 150, 151.

6. Inside Out in the Postmodern West 1. The museum has since changed its name to the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum. A number of the displays that I am recalling have moved or changed, including the gallery of movie stars, which, at the time of writing, is expected to be moved to the “Western Performers Gallery.” 2. Umberto Eco, “Travels in Hyperreality,” in Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver (New York: Harcourt, 1986), 30 –31. 3. Don D. Walker, “Can the Western Tell What Happens?” in Interpretive Approaches to Western American Literature, ed. Daniel Alkofer et al. (Pocatello: Idaho State University Press, 1972), 33, 34. 4. Mark Poster, Cultural History and Postmodernity: Disciplinary Readings and Challenges (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 9. 5. Michael Hames-García, “Dr. Gonzo’s Carnival: The Testimonial Satires of Oscar Zeta Acosta,” American Literature 72, no. 3 (2000): 464. Hames-García is here identifying his goals by summarizing Mohanty’s ideas about postpositivist realism. 6. See Satya P. Mohanty, Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 229, 230. 7. See also Brandon Taylor’s “argument for realism” in Modernism, PostModernism, Realism (Winchester uk: Winchester School of Art Press, 1987). 8. Lee Clark Mitchell, Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 6. 9. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 12. 10. Christopher Norris, What’s Wrong with Postmodernism? Critical Theory and the Ends of Philosophy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 174. 11. Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983– 1998 (New York: Verson, 1998), 20. 12. Baudrillard, Simulacra, 1. 13. Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” in Ficciones, ed. Anthony Kerrigan (New York: Grove, 1962), 32. 14. Borges, “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” 34.

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notes to pages 193 – 205 15. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 18. 16. Krista Comer, Landscapes of the New West: Gender and Geography in Contemporary Women’s Writing (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 5. 17. Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 78. 18. Forrest G. Robinson, “Clio Bereft of Calliope: Literature and the New Western History,” in The New Western History: The Territory Ahead, ed. Forrest G. Robinson (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997), 82. 19. Michael Kowalewski, “Writing in Place: The New American Regionalism,” American Literary History 6, no. 1 (1994): 171. 20. Kowalewski, “Writing in Place,” 175. 21. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 105. 22. Foucault, “What Is an Author?” 119. 23. Martin Padget, “Claiming, Corrupting, Contesting: Reconsidering ‘The West’ in Western American Literature,” American Literary History 10, no. 2 (summer 1998): 380 – 81. 24. Comer, Landscapes of the New West, 13. 25. Foucault, “What Is an Author?” 110. 26. Jerome Klinkowitz and James Knowlton, Peter Handke and the Postmodern Transformation: The Goalie’s Journey Home (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983), 3. 27. Jameson, Postmodernism, 368. 28. Jameson, Postmodernism, 369. 29. Comer, Landscapes of the New West, 11. 30. Richard Ford, interview by Gregory L. Morris, in Talking Up a Storm: Voices of the New West, ed. Gregory L. Morris (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 112. 31. Morris, Talking Up a Storm, 112 –13. 32. Martin Padget, “Claiming, Corrupting, Contesting,” 382. Morris presents interviews with fifteen western writers, including Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Gretel Ehrlich, William Kittredge, Thomas McGuane, and Amy Tan. 33. Ivan Doig, interview by Gregory L. Morris, in Talking Up a Storm, 67. Padget also juxtaposes Doig with Ford. 34. Norma C. Wilson, The Nature of Native American Poetry (Albuquerque: University New Mexico Press, 2001), ix. 35. Being native is akin to being natural, the two most persistent claims of authenticity at work in modern culture—recalling the reductive association between the Indian and wildness.

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notes to pages 205 – 207 36. Simon Ortiz, interview by Laura Coltelli, in Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak, ed. Laura Coltelli (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1990), 115. 37. I take the phrase big quick trouble from William Kittredge’s fine essay “Grizzly,” in Owning It All (St. Paul mn: Graywolf Press, 1987), 129. 38. Consider, for example, the territorial disagreement that erupted in the New York Review of Books in the spring of 1999. In March, Thomas Powers wrote an extensive review of a number of books about Plains Indians. Although the editors later claimed that Powers “had for years been making a study of the subjects of his review,” Powers was not, and is not, known for his work in the field of Native American studies. A number of specialists in the field, led by Patricia Hilden and Arnold Krupat, responded with a sharp letter of protest, expressing concern over Powers’s glib tone and employment of Indian stereotypes and “great disappointment” that the Review “chose someone with little or no detailed knowledge of Native American scholarship to write this essay.” “We find it unfortunate and insulting,” they wrote, “that he has been asked to review books in our fields.” Powers responded angrily, defending his essay and challenging the territorial nature of the letter. “I believe I am accused,” Powers wrote, “of some combination of straying beyond the proper confines of ‘my field,’ of poaching, or of reviewing without a license.” Their letter, he argued, “amounts to an attempt to intimidate—it cannot fairly be called an attempt to persuade—[him] from writing about ‘their field.’” The editors of the Review added a short comment, siding with Powers. “Passion Play: An Exchange,” New York Review of Books, 20 May 1999. 39. See also Arnold Krupat, “Scholarship and Native American Studies: A Response to Daniel Littlefield, Jr.” Krupat considers different uses of the first-person plural pronoun, arguing that, while Littlefield claims to use that pronoun to refer to “American scholars, American Indian as well as nonIndian,” in fact he uses we to mean “non-Indian scholars.” Arnold Krupat, “Scholarship and Native American Studies: A Response to Daniel Littlefield, Jr.,” American Studies 34, no. 2 (1993): 81. 40. Gerald Vizenor, Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 14. 41. Jana Sequoya-Magdaleno, “Telling the différance: Representations of Identity in the Discourse of Indianness,” in The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions, ed. David Palumbo-Liu (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 88. 42. Louis Owens, Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), 4.

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notes to pages 207– 211 43. Vizenor, Fugitive Poses, 15. 44. Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), vii. 45. Vizenor, Fugitive Poses, 27. 46. Lisa Aldred, “Plastic Shamans and Astroturf Sun Dances: New Age Commercialization of Native American Spirituality,” American Indian Quarterly: Journal of American Indian Studies 24, no. 3 (2000): 329. 47. Aldred, “Plastic Shamans,” 343. 48. Sherman Alexie, “The Unauthorized Autobiography of Me,” in Here First: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers, ed. Arnold Krupat and Brian Swann (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 10. 49. Alexie’s point applies here as well: mixed-blood writers (including Momaday, Silko, and Erdrich) are consistently more popular than full-blood writers, for whatever reason. 50. D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York: Viking, 1961), 36; Vizenor, Fugitive Poses, 41. 51. See also Arnold Krupat, The Turn to the Native (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 19. 52. Louis Owens, Mixedblood Messages: Literature, Film, Family, Place (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 44. 53. Susan Bernardin, “The Authenticity Game: ‘Getting Real’ in Contemporary American Indian Literature,” in True West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming). 54. See, for example, Michael Yellow Bird, “What We Want to Be Called: Indigenous Peoples’ Perspectives on Racial and Ethnic Identity Labels,” American Indian Quarterly: Journal of American Indian Studies 23, no. 2 (spring 1999): 1–21. 55. Owens, Mixedblood Messages, 9. 56. Owens, Mixedblood Messages, 42. 57. In Indian Nation: Native American Literature and Nineteenth-Century Nationalisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997) Walker discusses the complexities of such labels as insider/outsider and margin/center in terms of both authenticity and American nationalisms—and implicitly in terms of her own critical position. See, for example, her preface and her first chapter, “The Subject of America: The Outsider Inside.” 58. Owens, Mixedblood Messages, 38. 59. Susan Berry Brill de Ramírez, Contemporary American Indian Literatures and the Oral Tradition (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999), 1. 60. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, interview by Gregory L. Morris, in Talking Up a Storm, 37–38.

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notes to pages 211 – 217 61. Jana Sequoya-Magdaleno, in a critique of Arnold Krupat’s reading of Ceremony, considers the possibility that “Silko refuses rather than accepts the traditional function of Pueblo storyteller to ‘participate in a communally sanctioned manner in sustaining the group’” (“Telling the différance,” 96). 62. David Palumbo-Liu, intro., The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Institutions, and Interventions, ed. David Palumbo-Liu (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 13. 63. Sequoya-Magdaleno, “Telling the différance,” 93 – 94. 64. Owens, Other Destinies, 169. 65. Owens, Other Destinies, 169 –70. 66. Paula Gunn Allen, “Special Problems in Teaching Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony,” American Indian Quarterly: Journal of American Indian Studies 14, no. 4 (1990): 383. 67. Krupat, Turn to the Native, 22. 68. Allen, “Special Problems,” 384. 69. Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven ct: Yale University Press, 1998), 101. 70. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner and Other Essays (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 96. 71. Walker, Indian Nation, 16. 72. Harold Bloom, Kabbalah and Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1984), 100. 73. Gerald Vizenor, “A Postmodern Introduction,” in Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures, ed. Gerald Vizenor (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 5. 74. Krupat, Turn to the Native, 17. 75. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, “How Scholarship Defames the Native Voice . . . and Why,” Wicazo Sa Review: A Journal of Native American Studies 15, no. 2 (2000): 91. 76. For a discussion of such double binds, see Krupat, Turn to the Native, 11–13; and Palumbo-Liu, Ethnic Canon, 2. 77. Palumbo-Liu, Ethnic Canon, 3. 78. Daniel F. Littlefield Jr., “American Indians, American Scholars and the American Literary Canon,” American Studies 33, no. 2 (1992): 104. 79. Bernardin, “Authenticity Game.” 80. Palumbo-Liu, Ethnic Canon, 12. 81. Arnold Krupat, Ethnocriticism: Ethnography History Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 25. 82. This phrase is the title of the final essay in Krupat, Turn to the Native.

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notes to pages 218 – 222 83. Arnold Krupat and Brian Swann, intro., Here First: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers, ed. Arnold Krupat and Brian Swann (New York: Modern Library, 2000), xii, xiii. 84. Larry McMurtry, “Chopping Down the Sacred Tree,” in Sacagawea’s Nickname: Essays on the American West (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001), 45. 85. Ward Churchill, Fantasies of the Master Race: Literature, Cinema and the Colonization of American Indians, rev. ed. (San Francisco: City Lights, 1998), 102. 86. Churchill, Fantasies of the Master Race, 103, 104. 87. Sidner Larson, Captured in the Middle: Tradition and Experience in Contemporary Native American Writing (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 48. 88. Larson, Captured in the Middle, 41. 89. Craig S. Womack, Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 3. 90. Womack, Red on Red, 3. 91. Womack, Red on Red, 5. 92. bell hooks, “Postmodern Blackness,” in Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology, ed. Paula Geyh, Fred G. Leebron, and Andrew Levy (New York: Norton, 1998), 628. 93. Cook-Lynn, Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner, 82. 94. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, interview by Gregory L. Morris, in Talking Up a Storm, 35. 95. Cook-Lynn, Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner, 92 – 93. 96. Cook-Lynn, Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner, 77. 97. Cook-Lynn, Why I Can’t Read Wallace Stegner, 96. 98. Joy Harjo, interview by Laura Coltelli, in Winged Words, 61. 99. Louise Erdrich, interview by Laura Coltelli, in Winged Words, 47. 100. Krupat, Ethnocriticism, 7, 9. 101. Krupat, Ethnocriticism, 9. 102. Krupat, Turn to the Native, 28. 103. Owens, Other Destinies, 19. 104. Owens, Other Destinies, 19. 105. Owens, Other Destinies, 11. 106. Owens, Mixedblood Messages, 46. 107. Gerald Vizenor, preface to Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures, ed. Gerald Vizenor (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), x. 108. Vizenor, Manifest Manners, 68. 109. Vizenor, Narrative Chance, xii.

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notes to pages 223 – 229 110. Vizenor, Manifest Manners, 15. 111. Simon Ortiz, interview by Laura Coltelli, in Winged Words, 115 –16. 112. Gerald Vizenor and A. Robert Lee, Postindian Conversations (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 85. 113. Vizenor, Fugitive Poses, 55. 114. Vizenor, Fugitive Poses, 56. 115. Vizenor and Lee, Postindian Conversations, 57. 116. Owens, Other Destinies, 234. See also Krupat, Turn to the Native, 65 – 66 n. 16. 117. Bernardin, “Authenticity Game.” 118. Robert Allen Warrior, Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), xix. 119. This concert has received a great deal of attention from critics, usually as a symbol of the band’s explosive ability to self-destruct as well as a cultural indicator of sorts. Incredibly, or predictably, the Sex Pistols reunited in 1996 for a “comeback” tour, titled “Filthy Lucre.” Without Sid Vicious, who had died of an overdose in 1979, the band played a number of dates to occasionally amused but largely hostile reviews. 120. Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: Vintage, 1990), 98. 121. Lolita, who had hoped to go to Alaska, dies in “a settlement in the remotest Northwest” (4). 122. The themes and allusions in Nabokov’s chapter are so intricately interconnected that even the simplest analysis would overwhelm this short section. I am forced to demote a number of observations to notes. Similarly, to convey more than the roughest outline of Reid’s story would take a number of pages. A helpful summary can be found in D. Barton Johnson’s essay, “Vladimir Nabokov and Captain Mayne Reid,” Cycnos 10, no. 1 (1993): 99 – 106. 123. Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (New York: Vintage, 1989), 206. 124. These scenes are linked by far more than the “bicycle act.” Bicycle riding is implicitly compared to horseback riding (208 – 9) and thus recalls The Headless Horseman as well as Yuri’s “ultimate gallant gallop.” Nabokov remembers that in Reid’s novel, during a romantic scene between Maurice and Louise, “the gallant author interpolat[ed] a strange confession”—that the “sweetest kiss” of his life occurred when a woman on a horse next to him “leant over in her saddle” and kissed him as he “sate” in his. Nabokov uses this interpolation to leap into a discussion of “centaurian love-making” and his own rather innocent childhood—but this kiss is exactly what he tries to reenact with Polenka, as he rides past her “subsaddle” on his bicycle.

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notes to pages 229 – 235 125. He recalls one entry: “Moses tried to abolish P. but failed . . . In modern times, hospitable P. flourished in Austria under Maria Theresa” (208). Leaving the worldly reader to decode the sign (“prostitution”), Nabokov recreates his own “monstrous” innocence and alludes to the “señoritas ‘of questionable calling’” that so fascinated him in Reid’s Western (203, 201). 126. Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Penguin, 1998), 325. 127. Baudrillard, Simulacra, 1. In fact, Baudrillard takes the comparison to its inevitable end, declaring that Borges’s fable is “unusable” because the “sovereign difference” between the map and the territory, between the real and the copy, has disappeared (1–2). 128. D. Barton Johnson points out: “A reexamination of that frontispiece does indeed show yucca and what appear to be cactus.” See Johnson, “Vladimir Nabokov and Captain Mayne Reid,” 105. 129. Gerd Gemünden, “Travelling Subjects, Moving Images: Peter Handke’s America,” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 31, no. 1 (February 1995): 34. 130. June Schlueter, The Plays and Novels of Peter Handke (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1981), 93. 131. This reputation, though lingering, took a sharp jolt with the publication of A Journey to the Rivers: Justice for Serbia (1997). Handke’s indictment of the European media, and his apparently pro-Serbian polemics, caused an uproar in many literary and political circles. 132. Gemünden, “Travelling Subjects,” 33. 133. Gemünden, “Travelling Subjects,” 37. 134. Peter Handke, Short Letter, Long Farewell, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), 94. 135. William R. Handley convincingly argues that “Fitzgerald knew how unstable the term ‘West’ was geographically and culturally, as any real site of origin, destination, and meaning.” William R. Handley, Marriage, Violence, and the Nation in the American Literary West (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 170. 136. Peter Handke, The Weight of the World, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984), 143. 137. Klinkowitz and Knowlton, Peter Handke and the Postmodern Transformation, 85. The authors are responding, in part, to this passage from The Weight of the World but use a slightly different translation. 138. Baudrillard, Simulacra, 164. 139. Gemünden, “Travelling Subjects,” 35. 140. Gemünden, “Travelling Subjects,” 37.

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notes to pages 236 – 244 141. Schlueter, Plays and Novels of Peter Handke, 105; Kurt Fickert, “The Myth of America in Peter Handke’s Der kurze Brief zum langen Abschied,” German Studies Review 21, no. 1 (February 1998): 37; Gemünden, “Travelling Subjects,” 47; Stanley Kauffmann, review of Der kurze Brief zum langen Abschied, New Republic, 28 September 1974, 30; quoted in Richard Arthur Firda, Peter Handke (New York: Twayne, 1993), 153. 142. Jameson, Postmodernism, 369. 143. Jameson, Postmodernism, 372. 144. Anita Gates, “Frozen, Tired, Hungry: Ah, the Good Old Days,” New York Times, 29 April 2002. 145. Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner (New York: Verso, 1988), 85. 146. Stephen Watt, “Baudrillard’s America (And Ours?): Image, Virus, Catastrophe,” in Modernity and Mass Culture, ed. James Naremore and Patrick Brantlinger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 138. 147. The first phrase appears as a blurb from the New York Times on the back cover of America; the second is from C. Carr, “Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?” (Village Voice, 1 November 1988, 38; quoted in Watt, “Baudrillard’s America,” 135).

Epilogue 1. Jacques Debrot, conversation with the author, May 2001. 2. Max Westbrook, “The Authentic Western,” Western American Literature 13, no. 3 (1978): 214. 3. Dorrit Cohn, The Distinction of Fiction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), vii. 4. Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (New York: Vintage, 1962), 130. 5. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence 1982 –1985, trans. Don Barry et al., ed. Julian Pefanis and Morgan Thomas (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 101. 6. Lyotard, Postmodern Explained, 102. 7. Lyotard, Postmodern Explained, 105. 8. Don D. Walker, “Can the Western Tell What Happens?” in Interpretive Approaches to Western American Literature, ed. Daniel Alkofer et al. (Pocatello: Idaho State University Press, 1972), 34. 9. Don W. Walker, “Criticism of the Cowboy Novel: Retrospect and Reflections,” Western American Literature 11, no. 4 (1977): 275. 10. Catherine Belsey, “English Studies in the Postmodern Condition: Towards a Place for the Signifier,” in Post-Theory: New Directions in Criticism, ed. Martin McQuillan et al. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 130 –31.

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notes to pages 244 – 249 11. Michael Kowalewski, Deadly Musings: Violence and Verbal Form in American Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 4. 12. Stephen Tatum, commentary on The Authentic Death of Hendry Jones, by Charles Neider (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1993), 210. 13. “Guidelines for Studying the Way,” trans. Ed Brown and Kazuaki Tanahashi, in Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Do¯gen, ed. Kazuaki Tanahashi (New York: North Point Press, 1985), 43. 14. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973), xviii. 15. It might make postmodern sense to imagine these Wests scattered across multiple, infinite planes instead of a single plane, thereby further disorienting that sense of a common locus. When Jameson describes the “coexistence . . . of unrelated fuzzy sets and semiautonomous subsystems” created by the effect of postmodern decentering, he compares their structure to “hallucinogenic depth planes in a space of many dimensions” (Postmodernism, 372). I have chosen a single plane to correspond with the Baudrillardian sense of western surface. 16. Neil Campbell has speculated on what he calls the “rhizomatic West,” both in The Cultures of the American New West (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn, 2000) and in a conference paper (Western Literature Association Conference, Omaha ne, October 2001). 17. Campbell, Cultures of the American New West, 164. 18. Foucault, Order of Things, xviii. 19. Foucault, Order of Things, xvii–xviii. 20. Vladimir Nabokov, “On a Book Entitled Lolita,” in Lolita (New York: Vintage, 1995), 314 –15. 21. Dave Hickey calls this image “realistically-rendered, spatially-resolved.” Dave Hickey, “Edward Ruscha: Mean Streets Mean Streets,” in Metro Plots (Beverly Hills ca: Gagosian Gallery, 1998), n.p. 22. Hickey, “Edward Ruscha,” n.p. 23. Dave Hickey, The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (Los Angeles: Art issues Press, 1993), 17. 24. Dave Hickey, Prior Convictions: Stories from the Sixties (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1989), 171. 25. Hickey, Invisible Dragon, 53. 26. Hickey, Invisible Dragon, 12. 27. Hickey, Invisible Dragon, n.p. (see acknowledgments). 28. Baudrillard, Simulacra, 163.

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notes to pages 249 – 250 29. In fact, when mgm Grand Inc. bought the casino in 2000, it sold many of the museum’s most valuable artworks, including a Rembrandt and a Rubens. According to a piece in the New York Times, “Katherine Clewell, director of the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art, said the gallery was now like a philanthropic kunsthalle, a museum without its own collection.” See Carol Vogel, “Inside Art: Leaving Las Vegas,” New York Times, 27 October 2000. 30. Michael Kimmelman, “In an Unreal City, Real Masterworks Beat the Odds,” New York Times, 6 December 1998. 31. Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), xi.

290

INDEX Abbey, Edward, 11, 146, 147, 158, 161, 165, 183, 238 Aldred, Lisa, 208 Alexie, Sherman, 208 – 9, 218, 219 Allen, Paula Gunn, 213, 219 Allmendinger, Blake, 254 n.39 Anderson, Nancy K., 35, 259 n.49 Andrews, Lynn, 208 Antelyes, Peter, 255 n.4 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 17 Atwater, Caleb, 31 Austin, Mary, 11, 14, 108, 110, 146, 158, 168 – 81, 184; and “folk authenticity,” 169 –72 —Works: The American Rhythm, 170, 171– 72; Earth Horizon, 168, 172 – 81; Experiences Facing Death, 179 – 80; The Land of Little Rain, 169, 170; Lost Borders, 170; A Woman of Genius, 174, 278 n.76 authenticity: definitions of, 3 –7, 149 – 51, 190 – 91; and nativeness, 14 –15, 204 –5, 210 –11; and nature, 14, 146 – 48, 149 –51, 153 –54, 156 –58, 168, 171, 182; and nostalgia, 5, 15, 88, 108, 111, 120, 147, 171, 200, 208; and postmodern theory, 6, 13 –14, 15, 16 –17, 146 – 47, 149, 187, 189 – 90, 194 –200, 219 –25; and the Real West, 1–2, 7, 10, 49, 67, 118, 119, 146, 148, 190, 210, 242 – 43. See also Native American literature: as authentic; Native Americans: as authentic; Native Americans: and authenticity debates

235; and production of the real, 7, 15, 189, 190 – 91; and the strategy of the real, 63, 79; and theories of simulation, 15, 49, 62 – 63, 79 —Works: America, 237– 40; “The Precession of Simulacra,” 62 Baym, Nina, 29 Bell, Michael Davitt, 113, 122 Belsey, Catherine, 244 Bendix, Regina, 150, 169 Benjamin, Walter, 5, 41, 85, 87 Bernardin, Susan, 17, 209, 216, 225, 254 n.46 Bevis, William W., 197 Biddle, Nicholas, 45, 59, 64 Bierce, Ambrose, 87– 88, 120 Bierstadt, Albert, 9, 90, 186 Bigelow, Poultney, 272 n.39 Black Elk (Black Elk Speaks), 17, 211, 215 Bloom, Harold, 215 Bold, Christine, 121, 261 n.86 Boone, Daniel, 78, 94, 97 Borges, Jorge Luis, 187, 192 – 93, 231, 245, 246, 287 n.127 Brackenridge, Henry Marie, 19, 26, 45, 64 Branch, Edgar Marquess, 74 Braudy, Leo, 85 Bredahl, A. Carl, 255 n.4 Brill de Ramírez, Susan Berry, 210 –11 Brodhead, Richard H., 2, 156 Brooks, Van Wyck, 90 Brown, Bill, 118 Browning, Robert, 82, 106 Budd, Louis J., 71 Buell, Lawrence, 170, 174, 182, 183, 184, 274 n.14 Buffalo Bill. See Cody, William F. Burton, William, 57, 60, 61 Bush, Harold K., Jr., 75 –77, 265 n.70 Butler, Judith, 72 Butler, Mann, 42 – 46, 261 n.85

Bagehot, Walter, 84 Barnum, P. T., 8, 71, 80, 105, 169, 266 n9 Barrows, Anita, 152 –53 Bateson, Gregory, 183 Baudrillard, Jean, 119, 187, 190 – 91, 192, 194, 200, 227, 231, 245, 287 n.127; and nihilism, 235, 249; and nostalgia, 15, 108; and postmodern seduction,

291

index Buttrick, Tilly, 30 Byerly, Alison, 157 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 22, 38, 86, 92, 96, 98, 100 –104, 106, 269 n.65 n.66

dime novels, 16, 46 – 47, 62, 78, 105, 118 –19, 120 –21, 127, 190, 193 Doig, Ivan, 202 –3 Drake, Daniel, 26, 27, 30, 32, 33, 45

Campbell, Neil, 244, 245, 251 n.1 Cass, Lewis, 26, 30 Cather, Willa, 7, 11, 16, 17, 26, 96, 108, 110, 190 Catlin, George, 35, 42, 233 Channing, William Ellery, 43 Charvat, William, 259 n.49 Chin, Frank, 17 Church, Frederick, 105 Churchill, Ward, 14, 218 Clark, William, 35. See also Lewis and Clark, expedition and Journals of Clarke, James Freeman, 37–38, 42 – 46 Cody, William F. (Buffalo Bill), 78, 80, 82, 108, 116 Cohn, Dorrit, 242 Colacurcio, Michael J., 39 Colton, Calvin, 28, 29, 38, 66 Comer, Krista, 2, 6 –7, 193, 197, 199, 201, 244, 254 n.39 Cook-Lynn, Elizabeth, 211, 214, 215, 219, 220 –21 Coolbrith, Ina, 81, 278 n.75 Cooper, James Fenimore, 17, 19, 21, 27, 32, 33, 37, 39, 40, 46, 65, 206, 256 – 57 n.22 Cox, James M., 68 Crane, Stephen, 109 Cronon, William, 157 Cuming, Fortescue, 35

Eakins, Thomas, 109 Eastman, Charles, 11 Eco, Umberto, 6, 187, 240 ecofeminism, 153 –54, 155, 183 – 84, 274 n.15 Egan, Timothy, 16 Ehrlich, Gretel, 12, 155 Emerson, Everett, 70 –71 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 20, 22, 33, 39, 43, 66, 151, 239, 250 Erdrich, Louise, 12, 219, 221 Evans, Estwick, 36 Evernden, Neil, 157, 279 n.101 Fairbanks, Mary Mason, 70 Faulkner, William, 7, 10 Fender, Stephen, 255 n.4 Fetterley, Judith, 50, 51, 52 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 110, 233, 239 Flagg, Edmund, 31, 32, 51 Flint, Timothy, 10, 19, 26, 33, 61, 82, 121, 141, 257 n.22, 259 n.51; and defense of western authorship, 23; as editor of Knickerbocker Magazine, 23, 24; as editor of Western Monthly Review, 23; as western authority, 27–28, 32, 61 —Works: Daniel Boone, 25; Francis Berrian, 34; The Personal Narrative of James O. Pattie (editor), 30, 35 –36; Recollections of the Last Ten Years, 22, 32, 51 Florence, Don, 73 –74 Floyd, Charles, 46 Foote, Mary Hallock, 110 Ford, John, 227, 232, 235 –36, 239 Ford, Richard, 194, 201–2 Foucault, Michel, 10, 198 – 99, 222, 226, 240, 246 Fowles, John, 275 n.27

Debrot, Jacques, 241 DeLillo, Don, 74, 234 Deloria, Philip J., 5, 150, 170 –71, 213 Denning, Michael, 121, 261 n.86 Diamond, Irene, 182 Didion, Joan, 117

292

index Franklin, Wayne, 155 Frazier, Ian, 217 Frémont, John Charles, 106 French, James S., 34, 38 “Frontier House” (pbs television series), 237 Frost, O. W., 86 Fussell, Edwin, 57, 256 –57 n.22

Halttunen, Karen, 80 Hames-García, Michael, 190 Hamilton, Thomas, 27 Handke, Peter, 227, 231–37, 238, 239 – 40, 287 n.131 Handley, William R., 197, 244, 254 n.39, 260 n.65, 287 n.135 Haraway, Donna J., 156, 184 Harjo, Joy, 218, 221 Harte, Bret, 26, 78 –79, 80, 99, 106, 110, 120, 265 n.1 Hayles, N. Katherine, 274 n.14 Hedge, Frederic Henry, 43 Henty, G. A., 82 Herring, James, 21, 25 Hickey, Dave, 247–50 Hilden, Patricia, 282 n.38 Hildreth, James, 26, 28, 31, 36, 51 Hillerman, Tony, 208 Hirst, Robert H., 74 Hoffman, Andrew, 72 Hoffman, Charles Fenno, 19, 26, 31, 32, 37, 38, 51, 52, 54 Holley, Mary Austin, 31, 51 hooks, bell, 220 Hoskins, Nathan, Jr., 28 –29 Howells, William Dean, 11, 88, 114, 135 Hugo, Richard, 250 n.20 Huxton, George Frederick, 82

Garland, Hamlin, 10, 26, 65, 110 –22 passim, 202; and the East, 120, 122; and realistic representation, 111, 112 –13, 117, 118, 119 Garrard, Lewis, 17 Gass, Patrick, 35, 46 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 14 Gemünden, Gerd, 232 Gillman, Susan, 68 Golomb, Jacob, 3 Graulich, Melody, 170 Grey, Zane, 16 Guilford-Kardell, Margaret, 266 n.10 Haines, John, 145, 149, 185 Hall, Basil, 27, 52 –54 Hall, Frederick, 31 Hall, James, 9, 10, 19 – 47 passim, 66, 82, 121, 141, 146, 257 n.22, 260 n.70; and Caroline Kirkland, 51–54; on development of western literature, 19, 21– 22, 23 –25, 26; and dispute with Butler and Clarke, 42 – 46, 260 n.79, 261 n.85; as editor of Western Monthly Magazine, 23 –24, 25; on George Catlin, 42; as western authority, 30, 32; on Washington Irving, 37; and Wild West myth, 40, 52 —Works: Legends of the West, 34, 52; Notes on the West, 46; Romance of the West, 46; Sketches of History, Life, and Manners in the West, 19, 26, 34, 37–38, 42 – 44, 45, 46, 51, 60; Statistics of the West, 44, 46; The Western Souvenir, 34

Irving, Washington, 21, 56, 59, 61 —Works: Astoria, 32, 45, 46, 57, 64; A Tour on the Prairies, 36 –37, 39 Jackson, Helen Hunt, 17, 110 Jackson, Wes, 183 James, Edwin, 35 James, Henry, 112, 114 Jameson, Fredric, 58, 74, 191– 92, 193, 200, 201, 236, 237, 289 n.15 Johnson, D. Barton, 286 n.122, 287 n.128

293

index Kaplan, Amy, 88 Keating, William, 28 Kellert, Stephen, R., 152 Kimmelman, Michael, 249 –50 Kinbote, Charles, 242 King, Clarence, 110 Kirkland, Caroline, 7, 9, 11, 25, 26, 31, 48 –56, 64 – 65, 146 Kittredge, William, 1–2, 11, 12, 117, 119, 145, 204 Klinkowitz, Jerome, 201, 233 –34 Knoper, Randall, 71–72 Knowlton, James, 201, 233 –34 Kollin, Susan, 157, 183, 197, 254 n.39 Kolodny, Annette, 50, 52, 53 Kowalewski, Michael, 197, 244 Krupat, Arnold, 213, 215, 217–18, 221– 22, 282 n.38 n.39, 284 n.61

Lopez, Barry, 146, 158 –59, 160, 165, 166, 167– 68, 275 n.20 Lowry, Richard S., 68, 72, 74 –77 Lucy, Niall, 263 n.32 Lutz, Tom, 114 –15 Lyon, Thomas J., 2, 158 Lyotard, Jean-François, 7, 41, 109 –10, 111, 200, 222, 243, 260 n.70 Macy, Joanna, 183 Maguire, James H., 114 McDowell, Michael J., 173 McGill, Meredith L., 60, 256 n.10 McGuane, Thomas, 7, 12 M’Clung, John A., 26, 32 McMurtry, Larry, 218 Miller, Joaquin, 9, 11, 110, 111, 141, 120, 121, 146, 267 n.34, 278 n.75; and Bret Harte, 78 –79, 80, 99, 106, 265 n.1; and Byron, 86, 92, 96, 98, 100 – 104; and Mary Austin, 169; and Native American cultures, 81, 87, 88 – 89, 91, 92, 108; and photographic portraiture, 84 – 86; and P. T. Barnum, 80, 105, 266 n.9; and Walt Whitman, 79, 81, 96, 100, 107, 265 – 66 n.7; and William Walker, 93 – 96, 101, 268 – 69 n.54 —Works: Poems: “The Arizonian,” 86; “In Exile,” 99 –100; “Kit Carson’s Ride,” 86; “The Soldier’s Home, Washington,” 106; “The Tale of the Tall Alcade,” 86; “To the Bards of S.F. Bay,” 98 – 99; “Walker in Nicaragua,” 86, 95 – 96; “With Walker in Nicaragua,” 93 – 96, 101; “Ultime,” 99; “Vale,” 99; Collections: Joaquin et al., 81, 98; Joaquin Miller’s Poems, 87, 95, 102; Specimens, 98; Songs of the Mexican Seas, 98; Songs of the Sierras, 82, 86, 93; Pacific Poems, 80, 82; Prose works: Building of the City Beautiful, 93; “Byron and Newstead,” 102 – 4; Life amongst

L’Amour, Louis, 16 Langtry, Lillie, 84 Larson, Sidner, 219 Lauter, Paul, 50 –51 Lawrence, D. H., 209, 226 Leach, William, 88 Lears, T. J. Jackson, 86, 88, 146 Lease, Gary, 276 n.42 Lentricchia, Frank, 17 Leonard, Zenas, 30 Leopold, Aldo, 182 – 83 Leverenz, David, 52 Levine, George, 149 Lewis, Meriwether, 46. See also Lewis and Clark, expedition and Journals of Lewis and Clark, expedition and Journals of, 32, 35, 45, 46, 57, 59, 61, 64, 146, 147, 157 Limerick, Patricia Nelson, 7, 128, 252 n.20 Littlefield, Daniel, Jr., 216, 282 n.39 London, Jack, 96, 107, 108, 110, 113 Longacre, Joseph B., 21, 25 Loori, John Daido, 183

294

index the Modocs, 87, 88 – 90, 92; Overland in a Covered Wagon, 87 Miller, Juanita, 93, 107 Mitchell, Lee Clark, 62, 67, 190 Mitchell, S. Weir, 115 Mitford, Mary Russell, 49, 52 Mohanty, Satya P., 190 Momaday, N. Scott, 7, 8, 11, 14, 218 Moore, D. W., 30 Morris, Gregory L., 211 Muir, John, 14, 26, 110, 115, 159 – 60, 165 Mulford, Prentice, 89 Murietta, Joaquin, 81 Murray, Charles Augustus, 27, 28, 35

style, 121–22; and eastern marketplace, 122, 135 – 41, 144; and realism, 112 –13, 117–19, 122, 123, 126, 137, 140; and the Real West, 111, 116 –17, 119 –20, 121, 123, 135, 141, 144; and the Wave, 124, 135, 138 —Works: Blix, 123, 136 – 40; “Dying Fires,” 140 – 41; “The Frontier Gone at Last,” 116, 140; “The Literature of the West,” 119, 123; A Man’s Woman, 136, 138; McTeague, 124, 135 –36, 138, 140; Moran of the Lady Letty, 135, 136, 138; “A Neglected Epic,” 119; The Octopus, 116, 123, 135, 140, 141– 43; “Shorty Stack, Pugilist,” 124 –25; Vandover and the Brute, 115 –16, 123, 124 –35, 136, 137, 139, 140 North American Review, 37, 39, 43, 44, 45, 50 Norwood, Vera, 153 –54

Nabhan, Gary, 166 Nabokov, Vladimir, 226 –31, 232, 238, 240, 246, 286 n.122 n.124, 287 n.125 —Works: Lolita, 227, 246; Speak, Memory, 227–31 National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans, 21, 25 Native American literature, 14 –15, 203 – 26; as authentic, 206, 207, 208 –17; and crossreading, 210, 217, 220, 222; and postmodernism, 206, 207– 8, 211, 219 –25; and western literature, 203, 206, 210, 212 –13, 216 –17, 219, 220 – 21, 224 –25 Native Americans: and association with nature, 170 –72, 184, 203, 208, 216, 281 n.35; as authentic, 5, 14 –15, 33, 35, 170 –72, 203 –10; and authenticity debates, 206, 217–19 Neider, Charles, 10, 244, 253 n.27 Neihardt, John, 17 Nordau, Max, 114, 115 Norris, Christopher, 190 – 91 Norris, Frank, 11, 24 –25, 65, 96, 107, 108, 110 –22 passim, 123 – 44, 146, 202 –3; and dime novels, 111, 117–19, 121, 127; and dismissal of literary

Oelschlaeger, Max, 183 Ogden, George W., 31 Ordway, John, 46 Orr, David W., 161, 183 Ortiz, Simon, 205, 223, 239 Orvell, Miles, 4, 79, 83 Osborne, William S., 51, 261 n.4 Owens, Louis, 207, 209, 210, 212, 219, 221–22, 224 Padget, Martin, 198, 202 Palumbo-Liu, David, 211, 216 Parker, Amos, 28, 66 – 67 Parker, Samuel, 26, 28, 31 Parkman, Francis, 9, 117, 208, 226 Pattie, James O., 30, 35 –36 Paulding, James Kirke, 32, 34 Peacock, Doug, 183 Pease, Donald E., 156 Peck, Harry Thurston, 118 Peterson, Martin Severin, 84, 105 Philips, Wendell, 89

295

index Poe, Edgar Allan, 20, 22, 33, 40, 142 – 43, 246, 260 n.79; and critique of western authenticity, 9, 48, 58, 61, 63, 111; as editor, 57, 59, 60, 61, 63; and Joaquin Miller, 79, 81, 98, 100, 269 n.62; Journal of Julius Rodman, 48 – 49, 56 – 66; and plagiarism, 57, 58, 59, 64; and secret writing, 68 – 69, 73 Pollin, Burton R., 57, 58 Poster, Mark, 14, 189 postmodern theory. See authenticity: and postmodern theory. See also Baudrillard, Jean; Butler, Judith; Eco, Umberto; Foucault, Michel; Jameson, Fredric; Lyotard, Jean-François Powell, John Wesley, 110 Powers, Thomas, 282 n.38 Proulx, Annie, 194, 195 – 96 Pryse, Marjorie, 170 Putnam, Jackson K., 13 Pynchon, Thomas, 196

Scharnhorst, Gary, 79, 265 n.1 Schlueter, June, 231–32 Schwartz, Hillel, 4 Scott, Sir Walter, 22 Sedgwick, Catharine Maria, 20, 21, 33, 37 Seltzer, Mark, 115 Sequoya-Magdaleno, Jana, 207, 212, 284 n.61 Sewell, Darrell, 109 Sex Pistols, 226, 286 n.119 Shepard, Sam, 1 Sherman, Stuart P., 84, 87 Shi, David E., 112, 122 Silko, Leslie Marmon, 11, 12, 16, 62, 187, 219; Ceremony, 210, 211–13 Silverman, Kenneth, 57, 58 Simmons, I. G., 157 Slotkin, Richard, 268 – 69 n.54 Snyder, Gary, 14, 146, 151, 156, 160 – 61, 165, 166 – 67, 182, 184, 218, 276 –77 n.42, 277 n.54 Soulé, Michael E., 276 n.42 Stegner, Wallace, 7, 11, 17, 62, 154 –55, 161, 190 Stein, Gertrude, 17, 106 Steiner, Michael, 155 Stineman, Esther Lanigan, 169, 170, 173, 174, 278 n.75 Swann, Brian, 217–18 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 82

Rachman, Stephen, 59 Reagan, Ronald, 108, 186 the Real West: anxieties over, 111–22, 144; definitions of, 2, 252 n.20. See also western literature: as reflection of the Real West Reid, Mayne, 82, 227–31 Remington, Frederic, 115, 117, 120, 186, 233, 272 n.39 Renza, Louis A., 68 – 69, 77 Ridge, John Rollin, 81 Robinson, Forrest G., 197, 244 Roosevelt, Theodore, 115, 118, 167 Rose, Mark, 22 Rosowski, Susan J., 173 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 82, 90 – 91, 92 Roszak, Theodore, 153 Ruscha, Ed, 247 Rusk, Ralph Leslie, 25, 256 n.12 n.21

Tan, Amy, 17 Tatum, Stephen, 244, 254 n.39 Taylor, Charles, 3 – 4, 149, 150 Thompson, Harry F., 254 n.38 Thoreau, Henry David, 9, 110, 150, 156, 159, 163, 164 Trachtenberg, Alan, 85 Trilling, Lionel, 3, 7, 10, 66, 150, 151 Trollope, Frances, 27, 226 Tuan, Yi-Fu, 155, 167 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 116, 127

296

index Turner, Jack, 182 Twain, Mark, 11, 26, 65 –77, 78, 79, 84, 105, 106, 110, 146; as authentic, 70 – 72; and critique of western authenticity, 9, 66 – 68, 70 –71, 72, 74, 76 –77, 111, 120 —Works: The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, 70; The Innocents Abroad, 72, 74; “Petrified Man,” 69 – 70, 72 –74; Roughing It, 49, 66 – 67, 72

123 –24, 140 – 44, 188; as postmodern, 15 –16, 48, 58, 146 – 47, 187–204; as reflection of the Real West, 1, 2, 7, 10, 63, 67, 111, 119, 121, 123, 148, 188 – 89, 242. See also Native American literature: and western literature Western Messenger, 43, 44 Western Monthly Magazine, 23, 25 Western Monthly Review, 23 Westerns, 4, 62, 118, 142, 186, 190, 228, 229, 235, 237 Whitehouse, Joseph, 46 Whitman, Walt, 79, 81, 96, 100, 108, 265 n.7 Wilde, Oscar, 82, 84, 108, 226 Williams, Terry Tempest, 146, 147, 153, 154, 158, 160, 161– 65, 217 Wilson, Alexander, 157, 165 Wilson, Edward O., 152, 154 Winnemucca, Sara, 110 Wister, Owen, 8, 11, 110 –22 passim Witschi, Nicolas S., 109, 253 n.30, 270 n.7 Womack, Craig S., 219 –20, 221 Woodward, Richard B., 109 Wordsworth, William, 150

Vizenor, Gerald, 15, 61– 62, 207– 8, 209, 210, 215, 222 –23, 224, 250 Wagner, Harr, 84 Walker, Cheryl, 210, 283 n.57 Walker, Don D., 8, 10, 13, 188, 242, 243 – 44 Walker, Franklin, 137 Walker, William, 93 – 96, 101, 268 – 69 n.54 Warrior, Robert Allen, 225 –26 Welch, James, 12, 14, 210 Wendell, Barrett, 113 West, Nathanael, 83 Westbrook, Max, 13, 242 western literary criticism, 1, 2, 8, 11, 13 – 14, 17–18, 63, 188 – 97, 241– 46 Western Literature Association (wla), 186, 241– 42 western literature: canonical invisibility of, 3, 12 –13, 18, 20, 40, 48, 65, 113,

Zagarell, Sandra A., 50, 51–52, 56, 261 n.4 Zappa, Frank, 4 –5, 6 Zboray, Ronald J., 261 n.3 Zitkala-ˇSa, 17

297