Coyote Kills John Wayne: Postmodernism and Contemporary Fictions of the Transcultural Frontier (review)

Invoking the postmodern fascination with borders, Carlton Smith draws upon Derrida, Lyotard, Jameson, and Vizenor to reexamine Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous thesis from the vantage point of the repressed Other of the frontier—an alternate history composed of alternative voices. Defining the frontier in terms of a borderland of intersecting Native American, postcolonial, and postmodern versions of cultural representation, Smith reads six contemporary texts: The Rifles by William T. Vollman, Almanac of the Dead by Leslie Marmon Silko, Green Grass, Running Water by Thomas King, the “spaghetti western” films of Sergio Leone, Bingo Palace by Louise Erdrich, and the Deadrock novels of Thomas McGuane. Smith notes a renewed interest in the western frontier—“frontier history and postmodernism share some mutual concerns”—but argues that his employment of postmodern theory, far from being another “heavy-handed appropriation of the Other by the European,” merely explicates “what the Other has actually demonstrated.” Smith’s book will be of use to readers representing a variety of interests.

There are some distracting elements, including imposing jargon. Some chapters, and the book as a whole, frequently seem to consist of disparate thoughts that require further synthesis and clarity. For example, an architectural metaphor of a haunted site offered briefly in the introduction—the ghost town or the deserted rancho as representative of “continuously reforged and renegotiated history”—does not work particularly well, and the concluding “Coda” on performance art does not constitute a conclusion. More successful is a very promising trickster theme, the “narrative gaming” mentioned in the introduction, interestingly developed in the chapters.

Smith offers insightful discussions of multiple frontier identities: “What does it mean when the West is not west, or the frontier is not a frontier, but simply your land?” He ably handles the paradoxes of simultaneous disparities and intersections experienced by different groups of people on the frontier. The chapter on Louise Erdrich’s reconceptualization of the relations among property, origins, and “blood” is quite useful for reading Erdrich and a number of other Western writers.

But the most engaging chapter is “Displaced Horizons: Sergio Leone’s Man with No Name: Films and the Politics of Postmodern Representation.” Beginning with the 1960s political and cultural anxieties that contextualize these films, Smith goes on to analyze how they satirize the formulas of the western. His central point is that the “exaggerated masculinity and overexposed body” of the “Man with No Name” actually effects a “dissolution of patriarchal discourse.” “[T]he phallus,” he argues, “is reduced to the tool of slapstick and, with this gesture, threatens a phallus-centered discourse,” thus bringing about a feminization of the western genre. Smith’s casting of Clint Eastwood in this role is a critical maneuver to be admired.