Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove: "This Is What We Call Home"

Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove: "This Is What We Call Home" Marion Tangum Southwest Texas State University Lonesome Dove has been the subject of several recent articles on the novel's representation of a mythic Texas past. Ernestine Sewell points to the Texas "Cowboy-God" elements of the novel, which she sees represented in Gus, Call, and Jake, so that, collectively, they attain "that mythically heroic stature where [the cowboy] remains forever superior to other men" (225). David Mögen claims that the novel's central concern is an epic quest for a mythic "true west," a "last paradise" of virgin frontier (39). Clay Reynolds, on the other hand, suggests that the novel examines a combination of myths; it represents not merely a mythic past but the ways a past shrouded in myth impinges on a future that is indissolubly connected to it (23, 28). Although each of these studies illuminates important elements of the novel's concern with myth, none is based on a systematic examination of its narrative structure, or who is relating central statements regarding a mythic Texas past. In a manner suggested by Mikhail Bakhtin, I will explore the narrative structures through which McMurtry illuminates myth in Lonesome Dove. Listening to the novel in a Bakhtinian way reveals a myriad of narrative voices dialogically colliding and collaborating to bring to the surface mythic definitions of a "Texas" home, and so inviting our attention—and perhaps their own individual deconstructions. The mildly ironic tone in which Augustus introduces the Irishmen to Lonesome Dove—"Get down, boys . . . This is what we call home"— suggests that the definition ofhome is a matter ofdispute (138). "This is what we call home" [my emphasis]; but what "this" refers to and whether it is home may vary, depending on who "we" are. Bakhtin's definition ofthe novel—an orchestration ofdisparate narrative voices which engage in dialogue as they present conflicting ideologies—seems particularly appropriate to apply to Lonesome Dove, because the answer to "Who is talking?" is central to Bakhtin's theoretical explorations (Emerson 248). The answer to this question is often not immediately apparent, given a novel's rich stratification of "heteroglossia": another's speech in another's language [which] serves two speakers at the same time and expresses simultaneously two different intentions: the direct intention of the character 61 62Rocky Mountain Review [or narrator] who is speaking, and the refracted intention of the author. In such discourse there are two voices, two meanings and two expressions. And all the while these two voices are dialogically interrelated, they—as it were—know about each other ... ; it is as if they actually hold a conversation with each other. (Bakhtin 324) Such "conversations," no one of which is unequivocally confirmed by the intrusion of a master narrator, allow dialogue to occur not only between characters and narrators who corroborate those characters' particular points of view but also among various narrative voices. Like many ofhis forebears—Flaubert, Joyce, Faulkner—McMurtry tells this story with the help of numerous narrators, all ostensibly authorial, since all present their cases in a third-person anonymous voice, but actually highly subjective, since each speaks with the accents and represents the view ofa single character. What Clay Reynolds has pointed to as inconsistencies in "the" narrative voice ofLonesome Dove (26)—instances in which the narrator's accent slips into the characters' vernacular—are not inconsistencies at all, but, instead, a variety of narrative voices. The anonymous narrator who presents Augustus' recollection ofDillard Brawley's centipede-infested leg, for example— "it had rotted sufficiently that the family got nervous about blood poisoning and persuaded he and Call to saw it off" (15)—sounds more like a native of the hills of Tennessee than a spokesperson for the author. This is also true of the passage "when the sky had pinked up nicely over the western flats, Augustus went around to the back ofthe house and kicked the kitchen door a time or two" (16). But the passage "it seemed to Call the mare had probably stood on three legs long enough, and he had surely jawed with Gus long enough" (83), sounds more like language the discomfited Call would choose...