The Archetypical Ethic of The Ox-Bow Incident

M A X W E S T B R O O K The University of Texas The Archetypal Ethic of The O xOne of the most sensible of all critical principles warns the reader that he must not choose indiscriminately what questions pose the conditions of possible meanings. Philosophers and literary theorists— Susanne Langer, for example, in Philosophy in a New and its applications. The legal mind is alert to this principle in the court room, realizing that what is admitted as evidence depends as much on questions asked as on answers given. The practical critics of Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s The Ox-Bow Incident, how­ ever, have allowed circumstances to mislead them into asking the wrong questions; and the evidence thereby granted relevance has confused our reading of the novel. In 1940, when it was first published, The Ox-Bow Incident was immediately recognized as an exception, as a cowboy story of literary merit; and it is still conceded to be, on critical grounds, the best or at least one of the best cowboy novels ever written. Some such judgment has prompted reviewers and critics to ask why this cowboy story is superior to other cowboy stories. But the question suggests that the excellence of The Ox-Bow Incident consists in Clark’s having handled skillfully what is normally not handled skillfully in works of sub-literary merit. The approach might have worked had critics compared the novel with the fiction of Western writers like Willa Cather, John Steinbeck, Frederick Manfred, Vardis Fisher. The comparison, however, is between The Ox-Bow Incident and the formula cowboy story, which is about as profitable as trying to find the meaning and excellence of he will ask of a work of art. To ask a significant question is to imKey — have written learned and convincing studies of the principle Moby Dick by limiting yourself to a discussion of ways in which it does not fall into the clichés and ineptitudes of the formula sea story. Clark s critics have tried to analyze the novel by negation— the narrative is not loose, the cavalry (in this case the sheriff) does not gallop unrealistically to the rescue— and the result is an im­ poverished criticism amounting to little more than praise for a tight and suspenseful narrative.1 Placing a work of art in its proper genre is essential to criticism, but the discovery of that proper genre must itself be an act of criticism. Certainly Clark chose the setting with reason. The Ox-Bow Incident is Western in a significant way, and its craftsmanship is excellent. The novel, however, cannot be called a cowboy story except in some perversely abstract sense, except in that sense in which The Scarlet Letter is a true-confessions story or Hamlet a detective-mystery. Nor can the injustice of lynch-law be called the subject of the novel, for surely the subject of a work of art must be something which is investigated. Hemingway’s A Fare­ well to Arms, for example, includes an investigation of the subject of loyalty. Frederic Henry is a conscientious volunteer who deserts, and neither his devotion to duty nor his desertion is overtly con­ demned. The problem is subjected to aesthetic study. But in The Ox-Bow Incident there is no evidence that lynching, under any circumstances, is just or even expedient. Most men consider lynching .wrong, both legally and morally, and the novel does not question that judgment. It questions something else. 1See, for example, Ben Ray Redman, “Magnificent Incident,” Saturday Review of Literature (October 26, 1940), XXIII, p. 6. Redman is representative in that his review is very favorable, with only minor reservations, and yet contains no significant analysis. For the most part, he praises the tension in the novel, the suspense, Clark’s abilities in craftsmanship. Typical of the general criticism on Clark is Chester E. Eisinger’s essay in his Fiction of the Forties (Chicago, 1963), The University of Chicago Press. Eisinger writes that Clark has no interest in “society” or in “ideology” (p. 310) and then describes The Ox-Bow Incident as a philosophical novel, as a “deliberate commingling of social and moral issues...