The Code of the West by Bruce A. Rosenberg (review)

Reviews 359 The Code of the West. By Bruce A. Rosenberg. (Bloomington: Indiana Uni­ versity Press, 1982. 213 pages, index, $15.00.) The most pressing question to appear after a reading of Bruce Rosen­ berg’s latest book is an old one: Is the West a place of the imagination, or a place of exploitation? That there is something in the western air, the western water, the sweep of western space, that makes fools of its interpreters seems evident after a reading of The Code of the West. Works like the present study establish the West as a kind of primordial space of exploitation, a place in which the simple-minded, the simplistic, the clever, the unimportant are idolized. Such studies not only continue to keep the American West as placeof -the-imagination from being taken seriously; they also continue to endow folklore studies with the aura of playful simplemindedness. Rosenberg’s ostensible purpose in this book is to recompose the past: “to give structure, order, hierarchy, and purpose to several events, etc.” (p. 1). But such a recomposition yields little here beyond the tired language of popularization: “Perhaps he [the lone prospector] has made a pact with Satan himself, selling his soul for a secret mine; we, who dwell on this side of the badlands, will never know” (p. 45). Perhaps what the tissue of events we call western needs is not a recomposing, but a decomposing: an attempt not to impose a hierarchy, a comfortable order, where none exists, but a move to deal humanly with human things. A code of the West exists only in the minds of its popularizers. This is, perhaps, best illustrated in the section of the text about Moun­ tain Men. Some moderns seem obsessed with the recomposing principle that demands the mountain man was “tough, resourceful, skillful, and knew the land and its way” (p. 33). The Mountain Man knew the land, but it was out of necessity, the establishment of a sense of place, not from some mysterious aura or code. His dealings with the land were worked out within a human context. As with most studies of the American Cowboy, those that glorify the Mountain Man place him, as serious subject for human event, beyond our reach — every bit as much as dressing an accountant in buckskin and allowing him to toy with a replica of a Hawken rifle recomposes the human event into a farcical reliance on an assumed historicity. Such illusions are manifold, and seem no respecter of interpreters. The American West (unrecomposed) is a place of the imagination (like all Wests), not a place of cliches. The fabric of folklore is the fabric of life. The actual folklore (un-recomposed) of the Mountain Man is rich in the unselfconscious materials of the folk: the widespread practice of naming; the telling of tales (about the Buenaventura River, or whirlpools in the Great Salt Lake) ; the richness of folk speech — the idiom of his trade; the material culture. Rosenberg makes virtually no mention of the “real” folklore of moun­ tain men, the human need to compose orally and materially, within the context of a demanding occupation. Such needs and actions cannot be dis­ covered within handbooks, or slick and shallow mountain texts, but within the immensities of the journal. 360 Western American Literature “The Code of the West offers no major new understanding of that vast and nebulous region we call the trans-Mississippi West, either historically or folklorically” (p. 13), because it deals with visible institutions and their machinations, not with the subleties of human life and action. So within the swirl of a tired search for origins, the playing of a western “market,” we wait for real and meaningful interpretation. The wait is long and dreary — it seems interminable. One hopes that layers of exploitation, of re-composing the West into a worn image of superficialities, will not finally deny all of us access to the essence of a space and a time which can only be understood from and through that which is genuinely human. RICHARD C. POULSEN Brigham Young University Wilderness Visions. By David Mogen. (San Bernardino, CA: Borgo Press, 1982. 64 pages, $2.95...