Tragedy and Western American Literature

L E V I S. P E T E R S O N Weber State College Tragedy and Western American Literature One writer has conjectured that the dearth of tragedy in Western literature comes from the fact that the tradition of the West is suc­ cess and achievement. “There is an excess of triumph,” he says. “One is tempted to say, indeed, that western materials are simply defective in the tragic component, that they are too exclusively a melodrama of victory.”1 Popular Western literature supports this view; history does not. To demonstrate, I quote from the diary of a Mormon cattleman, who with his brother attempted to apprehend a fugitive bank robber in 1892: I being somewhat dazed from the shot, but I drew my pistol, and as he whirled and shot Charles, through the neck severing his Jugler vein, and going through his spine, at the same instant I shot the robber through the mouth: and as he partly turned to face me I shot him in the right cheak the Ball going through and coming out at the top of his head, he died almost without a struggle, and my Bro: after lyeing unconscious for over two hours passed away. This is the first real sorrow I had ever known, for months I was dazed, and time only made it harder to bear, and every new trouble brings this old one fresh before me.2 This is not an exceptional case of frontier tragedy. The inhabitants of the frontier inevitably suffered more actual tragedy than did a proportionate number in the East. That tragedy has not entered popular Western literature is due, therefore, to a state of mind rather than to a lack of frontier disaster. The West has preferred the heroic to the tragic in literature, partly, I believe, because a population physically beleaguered as was that of the frontier has no relish for reviewing in literature the painful facts it suffers in actuality. More important, the West, as a cultural backland, has not grown as rapidly as the East from a nineteenth century mentality into one of the twentieth century. If, at the very R obert Heilman, “The Western Theme: Exploiters and Explorers,” Partisan Review, XXVIII (March - April, 1961), 291. !James Madison Flake, “Record,” in James Madison Flake: Pioneer, Leader, Missionary, comp. S. Eugene Flake (Bountiful, Utah, 1970), p. 41. 244 Western American Literature moment naturalism was coming into being, William Dean Howells could still insist that realism must be faithful to the “well-to-do actualities” of American life, the turn-of-the-century shapers of the Western mind—Roosevelt, Hough, and Wister, among others— may be forgiven for choosing to create non-tragic heroes like the Virgin­ ian, heroes fulfilling the diluted Romantic doctrine that literature exists to figure forth the ideal. The Western hero remains in pop­ ular literature today as then, stoically indifferent to existential anxiety, justly violent, and programmed for triumph. For over a quarter century, however, the literature of what some of us are calling the Western Renaissance has rejected the ideally heroic. The dark vision of naturalism— the vision of man as a minor animal distracted by the illusions of his unconscious mind, as a creature molded and determined by social forces working through aggregates of individuals with the implacable force of physical law, as an emotional child unable to adjust to a world where no providence intervenes in the fated march of mortality— this vision has established a mood and fostered a taste for the tragic that even the West has acceded to. The twentieth century has caught up with the West, and in its new quality fiction, the West has produced tragedy of worth. If it is good, Western tragedy will produce the effects that draw us to any good tragedy. Tragedy depends upon the valuation we place upon things we lose. In literature as in life, tragedy arises from the perishing of values so intensely meaningful that their loss cannot be tolerated. One large reason why people willingly view in literature what they flee in actuality is the catharsis defined by Aristotle. Trapped in mortality, consciously or unconsciously, we all sense our potential as sufferers...