Selling the Wild West: Popular Western Fiction, 1860–1960 by Christine Bold (review)

196 LETTERS IN CANADA 1987 d'Agnes Whitfield est une oeuvre de reference indispensable pour tous ceux qui de nos jours s'interessent de pres ou de loin au roman quebecois et ala theorie litteraire des vingt dernieres annees. (PAUL PERRON) Christine Bold. Selling the Wild West: Popular Western Fiction, 1860-1960 Indiana University Press. 251. us $27.50 This is a pretentious book which (in the author's own words) 'reads popularWestern fiction in a new way.' Bold claims to 'reveal a dynamic of tension and forced creativity which hitherto has gone unremarked.' This is not so, but the tension and creativity have not before been couched in her particular literary jargon. Sensitive readers and critics have long noted what Bold calls 'authorial rebellions of different orders.' Such readings have sometimes been self-defeating: 'One thing is clear: my ordering of the works according to conventional notions of literary merit is almost entirely reversed when the yardstick is popularity.' Since ordinary people who buy popular literature are not impressed with overly rhetorical scholars and critics, we may not be as astonished at this conclusion as Bold seems to be. Adding yet another banality, she remarks that 'any comments on readers' responses to authorial rhetoric must remain speculative.' Translated, this would seem to mean: We don't really know what makes a book popular. There is more. 'The main import of my discussion is that creating formulaic literature is not an automatic or a neutral task.' Did anyone who had attempted to write (or for that matter even read) books like those of Owen Wister, Zane Grey, Alan LeMay, and Louis L'Amour thinkit was? From what Bold calls 'the detailed evidence presented in this book plus speculations about the reading public' she constructs what she calls 'a hypothesis about the interaction between best-selling authors and their audience.' The result is not impressive. She labours mightily and brings forth a mouse. Did Bold really read and ponder books in her 'Selected Bibliography' like John Cawelti's The Six-Gun Mystique and RussellB. Nye's The Unembarrassed Muse: The PopularArts in America?Ifso, how could she miss the material that predates and explains her hypothesis? Much of the material here has been presented many times; once again we hear that popular Western authors inherited their fictional material from James Fenimore Cooper, that pulp magazines took over from dime novels, and that the 'paperback revolution' changed everything. Bold discusses the standard authors in well-researched chapters. She uses unpublished letters and diaries and digs up examples of Western fiction that many of us do not know. The most original part of this book, chapter 5, deals with 'Anti-Western Westerns.' Unfortunately it is only ten pages HUMANITIES 197 long, and ends on an unspectacular note: 'It is not surprising that the Western should be parodied in the 1960s ... Nor is it strange that the formula should be revived repeatedly.' Sellingthe Wild West has long been a successful and colourful aspect of American popular culture. Selling Bold's hypothesis and claims will not, I fear, be so easy. (MARSHALL W. FISHWICK) Constantin V. Ponomareff. On the Dark Side of Russian Literature, 1709-1910 American University Studies Series XII: Slavic Languages and Literature, vol 2. Peter Lang. xi, 261. SFr56.70 In his conclusion to this book, Constantin Ponomareffwrites of 'the sense of moral discomfort and ·spiritual unease among the major Russian writers,' adding: 'This intent to overcome inner and social malaise induced by a growing awareness of the disparity between European humane ideals and Russian political reality - began with Kantemir's satires and finished with Blok's yearning for wholeness in the poetical outpourings to his Beautiful Lady' (235)~ This in effect is his central thesis, and he pursues it admirably in a book which shows an impressive grasp of Russian and European literature alike. The author chooses to call this 'dark side' of Russian literature 'nihilism,' which he defines as 'an inherent hostility to man and to life, a cold inhuman vision' (2). He supports this view with a number of definitions by other writers. For me the word is nevertheless somewhat confusing: I constantly found myself asking whether the author...