The Spokesman: Dorothy M. Johnson's "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" and Infinite Reference

From Buffalo Bill to John Wayne to George W. Bush, men have swaggered theatrically while claiming to speak for the Americas. Although their messages differ in many particulars, these men find their popular support by appealing to their audience's identification with the Old West. Masters of the utterance, they may be angling for power or money or fame, but they always claim to speak the simple truth and back up their talk with the threat of violence. They often (to appropriate a bit of contemporary slang useful for its suggestion of slipperiness) come off as cowboys. As a rule, people either worship or despise these bold men while never bothering to scrutinize their place in larger systems of American signification. When the spokesman becomes serious, he forestalls scrutiny by appearing so plainspoken. Hiding nothing, the spokesman speaks for someone or some thing. A border-walker between speech and writing, he never warrants linguistic scrutiny. No mere reporter, the spokesman quotes but rarely cites. He frequently speaks for the absent, or the silent. Indeed, their words have already become his words, and he openly assumes the authority to carry on his work, which engenders (he claims) a host of benefits such as order, protection, fame, and justice. Perhaps it goes without saying that a genealogy of the spokesman in the Americas has yet to be written. The present essay aims to commence this labor by scrutinizing the way men claim to speak for the North American West in a circuit of texts inspired by Dorothy M. Johnson's "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance."¹

There are many reasons why no one seems to pay critical attention to the spokesman, the most obvious being his sagebrush context, a region that has always inspired people to abstain from scrupulous analysis. With all the profundity of myth, Willa Cather captures this culture in My Antonia as Jim Burden remembers his arrival on the Great Plains: "The wagon jolted on, carrying me I knew not whither. I don't think I was homesick. If we never arrived anywhere, it did not matter. Between that earth and that sky I felt erased, blotted out."² Under this erasure, a culture of restraint emerges. Gretel Ehrlich describes the evolving mode of expression: "People hold back their thoughts in what seems to be dumbfounded silence, then erupt with an excoriating perceptive remark."³ Famous for his wise reflections on the West, Wallace Stegner describes twin poles of thinking and throbbing, the latter referring to the Westerner's celebration of experience without thought: "the largeness and clarity take the scales from my eyes, and I respond as unthinkingly as a salmon that swims past a river-mouth and tastes the waters of its birth."⁴ In this way, way out west, context is everything as it awaits our simple response.

Striding into the center of Main Street in this large land, the spokesman offers spectacle that further reinforces the passivity of his audience. Stirring up the plebeian masses while stomping his alligator boots, our hero waves his sixshooter and ten gallon Stetson. Mention of this scene probably ought to conjure up images of Wild West Shows where Buffalo Bill presided over the antics of Annie Oakley, who once shot a cigarette out of Kaiser Wilhelm's mouth. On this stage, a kaiser stands in for history in order to heighten suspense and underwrite the audience's sense that the past was never more than spectacle. Floating in a bubble we call the Old West, these shows always seem detached from South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia, even from the metropolitan experience of North America.

That said, should anyone want to question the matter more rigorously, it will always be possible to find authorities who assure us that the spokesman's context for utterance is real, plain and simple. In How to Do Things With Words (1962), J. L. Austin took pains to urge this model of communication by identifying the conditions of its success:

Speaking generally, it is always necessary that the circumstances in which the words are...