Critics Gather to Look Again at the American West

The Canadian Review of American Studies, Volume IX, Number 2, Fall, 1978 Critics GatherTo Look Again AtThe American West The Hi!steringExperience in American Litera/ure: Bicente1111ial Es.1·a1·s. Editedby Merrill Lewis and L. L. Lee. Bellingham: · Western Washington University, 1977. 224 pp. Marshall Gi/1,/and BlackElk recounts the song the oldest Grandfather sung, which he heard whilelooking down on the Lakotas during his Great Vision: "l here 1ssomeone lying on earth in a sacred manner. There 1ssomeone-on earth he lies. In a sacred manner I have made him to walk." John G. Neihardt's record of this song in Black Elk Speaks serves me as an openingfor this review because the "someone" in the collection of essays in question is the white man for nearly all the critics. This near-sighted view ofthe people in or writing about the West has been around a long time. Its predominance in this collection is a little surprising because the editors believethe essaysto be "revisionist in spirit and conception." The ambitions of the editors are grand and admirable, but the Preface is short,and since it is a preview of what isin the book, it isappropriate to quote someof it: Innumerable critics have addressed themselves to the westering theme in eighteenth and nrneteenth century American literature since Henry Nash Smith published his seminal I rrgm Land The A.merinm ~Vestas Symbol and Myth in 1950. Most critics who in this volume write of that earlier literature do so selectively and with an eye towards arguing with and modify111g \\hat they preceivc are the accepted critical opinions of that literature. In short, they are rev1~1onistin spirit and conception. The fact that many of the essays examine the \\Ork of twentieth-century writers may indicate that the critics feel that there is little more to say about the westering theme in the work of such writers as Cooper, or Whitman, or Twain. But 1tmay abo suggest that many critics are more intrigued in the 1970s with the continuing interest 111 the westering experience by modern writers-although the historical frontier is long smce closed, 1h meaning 1s still alt\e. 210 Marshall Gilliland W1thtwo hundred years of history srnce the foundmg of the nation and well over twohundred year~ of literary treatment of the westering experience, there is much that ought to mvne rev1S1on. While no one critic seems to directly use Harold Simonson's recent book, TheClosed Frontier: Studies in Literary Tragedy, as a point of departure, still many writers and cntic~ alike are preoccupied with the belief that the westering experience can no longer beseen\\Ith the innocent eyes that Americans seem to have seen it in the era of expans ion. And sothe~pint of re\'ision is fed as much by changing perspectives as by the discovery of neglectedwntm or themes. The Journey to the West is after all an image behind the American experience, or, rather,the American dream. The dream did not involve simply the West itself, it must be remembered, but the movement towards something called the West-a movement in the direction olthe We5t The dream was to reach that West sometime and there to find out what the mmement was all about: in Eden we can look back at time and explain it. Bythe American dream, we mean the European-American dream, largely. And so, whate\er ebe they propose to be and do, the essays in this volume are also examinations of the American d,eam, in much if not all of its multiplicity, including possible endings of it, certamlvot counter-dreams. · In the Preface, the editors also speak of lacunae existing, and I regret that they do exist. Perhaps the editors were too determined to publish as many papers as possible from the Western Literature Association meeting, thus having less space for which to solicit manuscripts to fill lacunae. I also regret the use of what may be photographically reduced typewritten pages for thi~ paperbound book's text; this may be an economy measure, but the pages do not contribute anything positive to the aesthetics of the book, and do nothing to entice a reader to the several...