Somewhere I Have Never Travelled: The Second Self and the Hero's Journey in Ancient Epic by Thomas Van Nortwick (review)

110Rocky Mountain Review book either, a striking omission for a feminist author of popular culture writing about Westerns. In the second half of the book, Tompkins has a chapter on The Virginian, or rather the influence of Wister's mother on his writing of the novel; one each on Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour; and a compelling account ofher visit to the Buffalo Bill Museum. Unable to reconcile her distaste for the "celebration of violent conquest" she found there with her personal response to "the shining figure ofBuffalo Bill" (202) she formed from reading novels, the author concludes that historical acts of violence and destruction are born in the individual despite their prevalence in the culture. In the epilogue, she notes the extent to which the Western genre exists in order to justify violence and ends with Amy's plea to husband Will Kane in High Noon: "I don't care who's right or who's wrong. There has to be some better way for people to live" (233). I found the most provocative chapter in the book to be "Women and the Language of Men" in which Tompkins examines the hero's relationships with women as seen through language. Westerns are action pieces; doing is what matters, not talking. Hence, the abrupt commands: "Turn the wagon. Tie'em up short. Get up on the seat" (51). Or Gary Cooper's monosyllabic responses of "nope" and "yup." Tompkins notes that language is associated with women, religion, and culture, and the ability to manipulate language confers power. Because Westerns are in revolt against these Victorian qualities , power is reversed; Westerns equate power with "not-language" (50) and not talking is what men do in Westerns. Hence, silence establishes dominance and when women's voices are heard, they often sound silly or insignificant . Tompkins speculates that men's silence symbolizes a shutting down of emotions the hero would rather not face, and in doing so, he pays a price—in bullets, bodies, and graves. So the hero flees, seeking "the solace of open spaces" (67). In West of Everything, Jane Tompkins offers some fresh interpretations toward understanding this complex and compelling genre, the Western. The book is a highly readable and thought-provoking new look at a topic once confined to Saturday afternoon matinees (for girls, too) that has come to shape our emotions and attitudes toward the West and all its elements. It should be of great interest to readers in a broad range of fields including literary criticism, film history, women's history, and of course, popular culture. SANDRA SCHACKEL Boise State University THOMAS VAN NORTWICK. Somewhere I Have Never Travelled: The Second Selfand the Hero's Journey in Ancient Epic. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. 204 p. A phrase such as "the hero's journey" must inevitably remind us of the monomyth elaborated by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Book Reviews111 Faces (Princeton University Press, 1949, 1968) and indeed Campbell's theory is one of the cornerstones of Van Nortwick's close analysis of three classical epics, the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Iliad, and the Aeneid. Van Nortwick acknowledges this debt to Campbell (191) and also debts to Robert BIy (8, 193), Jungian analysis (4), and Carl Keppler, from whose The Literature of the Second Self(University ofArizona Press, 1972) he takes the term second self and a list of characteristics that distinguish the second self from other literary motifs (5-6). Unlike Campbell's earlier analysis in which each stage of the monomyth was illustrated by a succession of partial examples excerpted from larger wholes, this study examines three complete texts one by one in increasingly careful detail, drawing parallels between and among the texts and pointing to variations in the ways in which the motif of the second self is elaborated in each hero's journey. Chapter one illustrates how the character of Enkidu acts as a second self for Gilgamesh and how the death of this second self eventually leads Gilgamesh to a greater awareness of himself and a redefinition of the heroic. This early epic is a distilled version of the motif of the second self as it affects...