Dirty Words in Deadwood: Literature and the Postwestern

Introduction: Deadwood’s Barbaric Yawp: Sharing a Literary Heritage

xiii introduction Deadwood’s Barbaric Yawp Sharing a Literary Heritage Melody Graulich When discussing the genesis of Deadwood, David Milch has often declared, “I did want to do a show on the American West, but I didn’t want to do a Western. I’ve never really understood or cared for the conventions of the Western .” This does not mean, however, that the series is free of conventions. As Melody Graulich demonstrates in her literary historian’s approach to Milch’s writing, the series is best “read intertextually,” a feat accomplished by paying specific attention to the various “conversations” with a wide array of literary and cultural histories that Milch engages in (including, in fact, those of the genre Western). By way of introduction to this collection of essays, Graulich opens for consideration a number of Milch’s conventional concerns, among them the “conversations” he has about character, point of view, and narrative perspective; about the use of humor and the grotesque; and about the power of language to both obfuscate and reveal deeply held truths. More importantly, though, Graulich’s opening appraisal makes clear that as “a verbal and visual construct,” Deadwood is far from conventional. Ultimately, she affirms that the approaches offered by the essays that follow, while initially literary in focus, will rapidly expand to include the full range of critical insights and rewards that “close analysis and interpretation” can bring. Deadwood’s literary conventions are those that come into view when an interpretive model informed by the tools of contemporary literary and cultural analysis are brought to the task, when, as Graulich concludes, the show’s engagement with “imagination” is more fully accounted for. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself” Mr. Warren spread out pretty much all the literary artifacts of American culture for me to study, as part of my working for him on that his- xiv graulich tory of American literature. And in that I found the refraction, the perspective that I needed, to give me access to play the cards that I’d been dealt. David Milch When we rehearse, David sits down and gives his take on the scene. But he usually doesn’t talk about the scene; he talks about where it sits in the larger picture. Nineteenth-century American literature is what he’s steeped in, with big themes on a small level. Ian McShane In September 2006 I was invited to participate in “Got Yourself a Gun: Frontier Violence in American History and Culture,” a symposium on the hbo series Deadwood at the Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders at Yale. The plan: the show’s creator, David Milch, who had attended and later taught at Yale, would speak one night; the next day the “scholars” would comment extemporaneously on his remarks, and Milch would then respond. I was invited, I presume, because I had published in 1984 one of the first essays on violence against women in the U.S. West, in a collection called The Women’s West, edited and widely read by western historians , who made up the rest of the panel. Along with its profane language (the number of times “cocksucker” was used per episode, as well as the average length of time between its use, had actually been tallied) and its “authenticity” in representing the frontier West, the series’ shockingly vivid and repeated scenes of brutality against women had been a topic of discussion, among scholars, fans, and critics—and here I mean those who disliked the show—alike. Although enjoined not to prepare remarks, I knew generally what I wanted to talk about—and it was not to speculate about the historical accuracy of Swerengen’s stepping on Trixie’s neck after slapping her around or Wolcott’s murders of women at the Chez Ami. I wanted to speak as a literary historian, to talk about Deadwood’s many allusions to U.S. literature to argue that the series must be read intertextually. From 1975 to 1976 I had absorbed the anthology American Literature: The Makers and the Making, written and ed- Introduction xv ited by Cleanth Brooks, R. W. B. Lewis, and Robert Penn Warren, to study for my PhD-period exam, which focused on nineteenthcentury U.S. literature.1 I had learned from...