Writing Together/Writing Apart: Collaboration in Western American Literature by Linda K. Karell (review)

4 5 6 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e W i n t e r 2 0 0 5 rendered in “dark tones” and, at the same time, one that contains totemic, faceless, boxy figurines who seem to exist in a space without land, an utterly internal West (51). James Castle was bom in 1899 along the banks of southwestern Idaho’s Payette River. He endured a childhood of taunting and derision while living and creating in a world of “physical, cultural, and social isolation” (iv). The peculiarities of Castle’s background conjoined with his enormous productivity and unusual methods make “reading” his work, as Trusky tells us, “tantalizing and frustrating” (44). Inevitably the questions overshadow the answers. But the puzzlement that shrouds Castle’s legacy is precisely what draws us to his work, to what Trusky calls his “visual mantras” (48). Perhaps most stunning of all, though, is that Castle carefully bound much of his work in books, each adorned with found covers taken from catalogs, cigarette packages, religious leaflets, and other material. It is “astonishing,” Trusky rightly observes, “that a reputed illiterate should make books at all” (95). Working initially from the loft of his family’s icehouse, later a deserted chicken coop, and finally a small trailer home, Castle produced a staggering number of these books before his death in 1977. James Castle: His Life and Art is valuable because it recovers an important western American artist who has nearly been forgotten. But its significance moves beyond recovery for recovery’s sake. Trusky’s work is a noteworthy contribution to the growing spectrum of visual and cultural studies in west­ ern literature. As the field becomes more concerned with, and enriched by, otherwise marginalized voices, textual and metatextual analyses like Trusky’s advance our understanding of the complexities of the West, whether they are internal or external representations. Writing Together/Writing Apart: Collaboration in Western American Literature. By Linda K. Karell. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. 219 pages, $49.95. Reviewed by Philip R. Coleman-Hull Emporia, Kansas InWritingTogether/WritingApart: CollaborationinWesternAmericanLiterature, Linda K. Karell adopts the stance that “all literary writing is inevitably collab­ orative, both regardless of the circumstances of its authorship ... and because of the circumstances of its authorship” (xx). Karell then launches into an engaging study of various collaborative endeavors in select works from the western literary canon. In many respects, her analysis seems to present a kind of double unfolding as she moves from more accepted (Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris’s output) toward more compelling—if not theoretically compli­ cated—collaborative schemes: Her final chapter recasts the charges of plagia­ rism against Wallace Stegner’s Angle ofRepose (1971) as a form of collaboration. b o o k R e v ie w s 4 5 7 And her analysis gradually becomes more western-oriented and addresses more clearly the ramifications for how such a study truly matters in the western liter­ ary/critical landscape. Following her introduction, Karell gives the reader a thorough yet engag­ ing overview of the debates and definitions surrounding collaboration stud­ ies—invoking theorists and critics as diverse as Michel Foucault, Andrea Lundsford and Lisa Ede, and Jeffrey Masten—ending with a briefdiscussion of the importance of the nexus between collaboration and western literature. In sum, she writes, “The western writers I discuss here use collaborative strategies to directly and decisively investigate identity and its paramount relationship to landscape and region” (30). From there, Karell renders close studies of Erdrich and Dorris’s interwoven literary relationship; the complications of literary and cultural authority in Mourning Dove/Lucullus McWhorter’s Cogewea (1927); Earth Horizon (1932) as a multilayered autobiographical collabora­ tion with Mary Austin/I-Mary/ Mary-by-Herself; the western memoirs of Ivan Doig, Mary Clearman Blew, and William Kittredge, with their use of “stories remembered or recovered from the past” (119); and finally her examination of Angle ofRepose. Karell enhances our understanding of how these several texts—all quite distinct in form, function, and tradition—are created collaboratively and challenge the reader to think about collaboration as a complex...