Exploding the Western: Myths of Empire on the Postmodern Frontier

5. Sanctioned Narratives and the (Non)Innocent Triumph of the Savage War: Mythic Co-Dependence in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead

102 |     Sanctioned Narratives and the (Non)Innocent Triumph of the Savage War Mythic Co-Dependence in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead Every society and official tradition defends itself against interferences with its sanctioned narratives, over time these acquire an almost theological status, with founding heroes, cherished ideas and values, national allegories having an inestimable effect in cultural and political life. . . . Paradoxically , the United States, as an immigrant society composed of many cultures, has a public discourse more policed, more anxious to depict the country as free from taint, more unified around one iron-clad major narrative of innocent triumph.   I n Almanac of the Dead, Leslie Marmon Silko attacks and disrupts the sanctioned narratives of American innocence and the presumption of the inevitable triumph of superiorAnglo culture over the darkskinned natives of the“New World”by subverting the most common vehicle of that mythic narrative, the Western. She challenges the mythical status of America’s founding heroes and the “cherished ideas and values” that support them. Nonetheless, she depends upon the very myths she challenges. The result is a complex text, at once recognizably a Western and, simultaneously , radically opposed to the narratives of innocence most Westerns present. It is a work anchored in the myths of both Anglo and Indian cultures and one that demonstrates the dialogic interconnections between them,   | 103 without ever entirely escaping their confines. She succeeds, however, in calling into question many of the most common assumptions about frontiers, borders, and their roles in constructing national(ist) identities for Americans and for those who fall under the shadow of American imperialism. Almanac presents another,darker version of the decolonizing process Silko explores in Ceremony.Here she illustrates the modern process of mythogenesis in its most vicious form: building and destroying the identities of colonizer and colonized alike. The Mexican American border comes to hold special meaning as a signifier of the history of invasion and conquest that created it and the mythically directed acts of imperialism needed to uphold it. Ironically , however, the border is a symbol both of the power and the futility of imperialism.In a sense it structures the entire novel and directly or indirectly shapes the lives of every character in it. Individuals are defined as legitimate or alien depending on their position relative to it. The value of goods, both legal and illegal, increases or decreases as those goods are moved from one side of it to the other. Governments are ready, even eager, to kill in order to defend it. And yet, like the frontier, everywhere but nowhere in the mythic cyberspace of the twenty-first century, the border is maddeningly elusive. Dangerous,fluid,permeable,it is a product and producer of a particular brand of myth, structured, as in McCarthy’s vision, around a privileged form of sacred violence all sides battle to claim for their own.The competing versions of myth generated to either uphold or erase this border and to legitimate the violence necessary for both or either action are astonishingly similar: hybridized , mixed, and frankly dependent upon each other for their very existence. The struggle to legitimate this violence sits at the heart of American identity . Richard Slotkin argues in Regeneration through Violence that the founding fathers of the United States were not those august men who gathered in Philadelphia to draft a nation. Rather, they were “the Indian fighters, traders ,missionaries,explorers,and hunters who killed and were killed until they had mastered the wilderness; the settlers who came after, suffering hardship and Indian warfare for the sake of a sacred mission or a simple desire for land; and the Indians themselves, both as they were and as they appeared to the settlers, for whom they were the special demonic personification of the American wilderness. Their concerns, their hopes, their terrors, their violence , and their justifications of themselves, as expressed in literature are the foundation stones of the mythology that informs our history” (). Frontier sites, from which these foundation stones are dug, have entered the modern American imagination as the mythic birthplace of Anglo America, but they have also come to serve,through centuries of cultural imperialism,as a birth- 104 |   place for non-AngloAmerica as well,with devastating consequences for both groups. The Mexican American borderlands, as the site of Anglo frontiers with both Indians and Mexicans, have become a sort of focal point of frontier...