The Completeness of Washington Irving’s A Tour on the Prairies

W A Y N E R . K I M E New College, University of Toronto The Completeness of Washington Irving’s A Tour on the Prairies* In his introduction to A Tour on thePrairies, W ashington Irving explained that rather than a “spirit-stirring narrative” or a detailed report on abstruse features of W estern life, he had simply written an anecdotal account of his own experiences during a m onth’s tour of Oklahoma Territory three years before, in the fall of 1832. However, while he described A Tour diffidently as “a simple narrative ofevery day occurrences,” Irving insisted that it recounted an action that was, as he put it, “complete as far as it goes.”1 By way of defining the nature of its completeness, I would like to offer a new reading of this minor classic of W estern American literature. In my view,^ Tour is a retrospective personal narrative whose subject m atter is both the prairies and W ashington Irving as he perceived and reacted to them. Within the carefully shaped narrative framework of the book, that is, Irving portrays the se­ quences of observation and action through which he acquired an inform ed understanding of the West and its inhabitants. As A Tour proceeds, Irving represents himself as abandoning his naively conventional preconceptions about W estern life and gradually achieving a clearer awareness of the West as reality. In the past, critical discussion of A Tour has tended to focus on only a few passages which, it has been suggested, embody the quintessential characteristics both of the book and its author. In particular, Irving’s use of historical and literary allusions in the work has been attacked by John Francis McDermott, Robert 'Washington Irving, A Tour on the Prairies, ed. John F. McDermott (Norman, Oklahoma, 1956), p. 9. Subsequent quotations from A Tour will be cited parenthetically in the text. *This paper was read in slightly different form at the annual meeting of the Western Literature Association at Red Cloud, Nebraska, in October 1971. 56 Western American Literature E dson Lee, an d o th e rs ,2 as re v e a lin g his c o n s titu tio n a l unpreparedness to describe W estern life as it actually was. Accord­ ing to this generally accepted view, Irving’s comparisons of an Indian brave to Adonis, a half-breed cook to Gil Bias, or the prairie terrain to a landscape by Claude Lorraine, are all bogus and misleading because they fail to represent these personages and places in immediacy, relying instead on stereotyped, derivative models. Such an approach, the critical argum ent runs, is in an unfavorable sense “literary”; it is a conventionally Eastern mode of writing which bespeaks habits of perception impossibly illattuned to the realities of W estern life. I take exception to this hostile reaction, however; not merely because it too hastily holds up a few isolated sentences as supposedly revealing the nature o f the whole work, but rather because it fails even to consider the work as a formal or thematic whole. Discounting Irving’s explicitly stated aim of describing an encounter between himself and the West, it ignores the contributive function of the offensive comparisons and allusions in the development of the book. It is surely necessary to point out, after all, that almost without ex­ ception these fillips of style appear only in the first one-third of A Tour} They constitute part of a design which extends far beyond their immediate contexts, and they help to make the work, as Irving said, complete. In the course of his original trek in 1832, Irving compiled a set of journals which, when he came to write A Tour, provided him with a firm docum entary basis for his narrative.4A comparison of the extant W estern journals to the finished work reveals, how­ 2See McDermott, ed. The Western Journals of Washington Irving (Norman, Oklahoma, 1944 [second printing, 1966]), pp. 41-64; and Lee, From West to East: Studies in the Literature of the American West (Urbana, Illinois, 1966), pp. 58-68. See also Stanley T. Williams, The Life of Washington Irving (New York...