Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power, and Waste in Western American Literature (review)

Not too far into John Beck's Dirty Wars you may get the feeling that you are stuck in a seminar full of argot-eager graduate students from which you should have disenrolled before the semester began, but persevere: this is an important book, and mostly it gets better once the author is doing close readings of the texts with which he is concerned.

Those readings—well reasoned, theoretically informed, critically acute—of contemporary prose fiction and nonfiction (not any poetry, unfortunately) of the American West, with a strong emphasis on the Southwest, provide a radically contrarian and damning account of what the region has been greatly about since World War II. What it has been greatly about—crucially, according to Beck—is the furtherance of an emergency state of "permanent warfare" (8) that began with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the internment of Japanese Americans, and the atomic-bomb test at Trinity. His discussions of the works of Cormac McCarthy (especially), Don DeLillo, Julie Otsuka, Leslie Marmon Silko, Terry Tempest Williams, and others, in tandem with eclectic sources otherwise, build a convincing case that the role of the military-industrial economy in the West has been less to ensure national security than obscurely to create waste lands and waste populations of Native, Japanese, Mexican, and other thus abject American peoples.

Beck is therefore engaged in writing against history-as-written-by-the-winners, which makes his book a sort of counterhistory of contemporary Western literature. His repeated figure of the "purloined landscape" (22) proves wonderfully fruitful in that regard—though such repetition, with tropical variations, causes the book to suffer a bit from redundancy. On the other hand, some of his most cogent readings stray at times from his topic and theme.

One might wish that Beck had offered more first-hand descriptive detail about the Western places, as opposed to texts, on which he focuses, but that's a minor quibble. And, to set his work on a stronger rhetorical foundation, he might have paid more attention to the nondomestic forces that helped maintain the dirty wars of the West. There are infrequent but distracting oddities of diction and some overlong sentences, but typically the book is crisply written; and abstractions are largely balanced by precise, concrete, even evocative language.

The book's value derives from the interpretive lens through which Beck perceives interconnections among various sources—literary, philosophical, historical, governmental, etc.—to construct his thesis that "[t]he myths, fictions of science, and oracles produced by contemporary writing about the West . . . provide signs and clues about the way the West, and the arid Southwest in particular, has become the self-erasing fulcrum of postwar American geopolitics" (4). Because of that compendiousness, Dirty Wars should be of interest to readers in a variety of specialties, not only contemporary American literature but also environmental history, military history, Western history, cultural studies, and, of course, American studies.