ARCHETYPE WEST: The Pacific Coast as a Literary Region by William Everson (review)

Reviews 161 Zimmerman has a gift for narrative. But what sticks in the mind afterward is the author’s radical, almost 18th-century, assumption that the average American, i.e., his reader, is a right-minded creature. THOMAS J. LYON, Utah State University ARCHETYPE WEST: The Pacific Coast as a Literary Region. By William Everson. (Berkeley: Oyez, 1976. xiv + 181 pages, $8.95 cloth, $3.95 paper.) William Everson returns literature to its religious roots in Archetype West, a powerful, sometimes troubling, certainly stimulating book. Working organically from western American literature’s deepest points, he ignores traditional scholarly and critical categories to produce a book that is as much a Vision as a study. And he makes it work, for Everson’s is a poet’s grasp of language. Only a very few scholars have probed the core of western life and its literary expression to comparable depth. The doubtfulness of established critics in their assessments of “the entire Western movement” prompted Everson’s examination, which origi­ nally began as an article for an American Library Association book on American literary regions. Working from aboriginal literature to contemporary writers, Everson has sought recurrent patterns of symbol and myth until he has discovered what he believes is the underlying archetype from which all truly western literature has evolved. Call it pantheism or vitalism or animism, it is the great arational force of nature itself, that force of which all humans are a part, though buzzing consciousness may hide such deeper, inevitable realities. In the west, Everson tells us, “newcomers experienced Nature not as refuge, . . . but as encounter.” His key term is participation. He cites Lionel Trilling’s perceptive comment: “They think with their sensations, their emotions, and, some of them, with their sex.” In the early west, nature’s force could not be denied. Artists, then, at their best, could achieve apotheosis, “. . . a point in an evolving process at which its intrinsic potentiality achieves not only actuation but transcendence — radical realization manifested in an instant of quintes­ sential truth.” From such an abstract base, Everson explores a range of western writers: Joaquin Miller, Frank Norris, Jack London, John Muir, Edward Markham, Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, Mary Norbert Korte, Lenore Kandel, and Ken Kesey, among others. It is in the chapters examining the work of specific authors that Everson makes his perceptions most concrete. 162 Western American Literature Miller, for example, is credited with truly feeling the power of the archetype, though his limited craft did not allow him to produce “a single achieved poem.” Nonetheless, “in Life Amongst the Modocs he emerges permanently as the West’s first literary autochthon.” Robinson Jeffers is the fulcrum upon which Everson’s study balances, for he “gave the Western archetype its fiercest clench and its prospective apotheosis.” Jeffers took “the peculiarly Western ingredient of violence” and applied it catalytically to transcend rationality and achieve apotheosis. In “Tamar,” which Everson argues is the inceptive work in Jeffers’ break­ through, a pregnant irony is found: the same story evolved in the oral literature of a coastal California culture, the Yurok, and has been included in Theodora Kroeber’s The Inland Whale, further evidence of the arche­ type’s pervasiveness. All western writers, Everson implies, no matter what their cultural or historic milieus, must acknowledge the underlying force of the archetype. This is not a book for general audiences. It is often abstract, sometimes turgid. But for students of western life and letters it is important indeed, and will be more than a little controversial. Despite the passion of his presentation, Everson really does not prove, in a rhetorical sense, his central point, but then how does one prove the arational through rational argument? This reader at least, feels Everson has struck mighty close to the mark. GERALD HASLAM, Sonoma State College Shabegok. By Jaime de Angulo. Edited by Bob Callahan. (Berkeley: Turtle Island Foundation, 1976. 109 pages, $10.00.) How the World Was Made. By Jaime de Angulo. Edited by Bob Callahan. (Berkeley: Turtle Island Foundation, 1976. 101 pages, $10.00.) Here are two more magnificently produced books from Turtle Island. I emphasize books because this is what hardbound books used to be like, before the...