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How America Went West
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14594 |
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BOOK WORLD
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5 / 1988 |
2,111 Words |
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David Hallman
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SELLING THE WILD WEST:
Popular Western Fiction, 1860-1960
Christine Bold
Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1987
215 pp., $27.50
The story is familiar and seems old. A tall, dark stranger (unless he is short, blond, and Alan Ladd) rides into town; he discovers corruption galore and a damsel in distress, but sets everything to rights, kisses his horse, and rides off into the sunset. At least that is the version most Americans have come to expect according to the almost ritualistic formula for the popular culture genre of the American Western--film or fiction--although there are variations. But while the story line is familiar, it only seems old. What most readers think of as Western literature began to develop only after the Civil War, as the opening of the West captured the popular imagination and became the great American romance.
The mythologizing of the Western adventure had begun earlier, of course, when in the 1820s, James Fenimore Cooper began chronicling in his own fanciful way the westward passage from the Eastern seaboard in his Leatherstocking Tales, but it was not until the crisis of the war had passed that Americans at large--and Europeans, for that matter--became enamored of what would become our native American myth. In the evolution from dime novels and cheap pulp fiction, through a kind of quasi-legitimate literary development, to the classic cinematic expressions of American cowboy movies, the Western has become probably the most universal of American images. That this should be so obviously true in itself says something profound about the American imagination and experience.
The hold of Westerns on the American mind is nigh on to remarkable, especially considering the generally low level of their literary quality. However, it has been said that every great culture must have its native mythology, that body of history, stories, and legends that gives some unifying bent to its people. The Greeks and Romans had their classical epics; the French their Roland; the Germans, Faust, Grimm's Fairy Tales, and their own epics; the British were doubly blessed with the Arthurian legends of knights and valor at Camelot and the peasantry's tales of Robin Hood--protests against oppression from high places. It has been argued that Shakespeare's great historical plays constitute a third mythical bond of English pride.
An American myth?
As the self-styled "Brave New World" and the "Great Experiment" in human civilization, America would seem likely to possess an abundance of materials for a serious body of mythology. Yet something funny--call it history, a flawed vision, or even John Wayne--happened on the way to posterity. The colonization of the New World and the American Revolution were historic events of immense consequence, yet they have never really captured the popular imagination. The struggle for national independence and all its ramifications were unforgettably trivialized by the July 4, 1986, lighting of the Statue of Liberty, and good old American patriotism, as such, has probably found its best expression in the wonderfully corny songs of George M. Cohan. The Civil War was a most significant historical event--violent, heroic, and genuinely high tragedy--but the experience seems somehow more European
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