Not a 1950s novel of the 1870s
The current hot topic among Western literary scholars is authenticity. In books like "True West" and "Unsettling the Literary West" they note how Western authors have always pursued authenticity, and how it has always been a self-defeating way to achieve a literary legacy. After all, the argument goes, by definition a novel is made up rather than authentic; this is a game only a memoirist can win.
I've been having some trouble with the argument. After all, much of what I dislike about many Westerns is their inauthenticity -- no cowboy behaved that way, even in the 1880s (much less now). Yes, I'm amused that authors like Zane Grey and Clarence Mulford (Hopalong Cassidy) took great pride in the authenticity of their details -- describing knives and muskets and river crossings that really did exist, dammit -- when their plots and characters were sheer fantasy. But isn't the cure for that MORE authenticity rather than less? As academics mused about what "authenticity" really meant and urged novelists to rediscover their inner waywardness from the truth, I feared this was not a productive avenue.
Then I read Guy Vanderhaeghe's "The Last Crossing."
First, a word on this extraordinary book. Vanderhaeghe writes tales whose settings generally encompass both Montana and Alberta/Saskatchewan, but since he himself is Canadian, he gets too little credit south of the border. The critics who do know him love him, and compare him to Dickens and Tolstoy. I agree: he's got rich, evocative, complex plots and characters that I'm not going to summarize here.
But what struck me in the book's final third is how similar Vanderhaeghe's worlds are to the 21st century. His characters and cultures -- white, Blackfeet, and Crow -- grapple with the same sorts of issues we face today. Multiculturalism, racial barriers, family structure, sexual identity. . . I went through the book amazed: Wow, how can you do that!?
I'm not saying it's not authentic. Vanderhaeghe's acknowledgements cite some of his prodigious research. I even recognized a story told by one of his characters, about a man named Private Noonan, as basically a restatement of an authentic historical anecdote I too had researched.
I'm saying I came to a new appreciation of the novelist's gift. It is to see key struggles of our own time in fully-realized other worlds. If those worlds are "authentic," then more the better: we understand that we are not the first to grapple with these issues. But the novelist's main ambition should not be archaeology, finding true nuggets of past worlds. It should be creative vision. We can all be grateful that Guy Vanderhaeghe understands his gifts.
Join the discussion at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/johnclaytonoutreach/, or let me know your thoughts via info at johnclaytonbooks (and you can fill in the rest).
I've been having some trouble with the argument. After all, much of what I dislike about many Westerns is their inauthenticity -- no cowboy behaved that way, even in the 1880s (much less now). Yes, I'm amused that authors like Zane Grey and Clarence Mulford (Hopalong Cassidy) took great pride in the authenticity of their details -- describing knives and muskets and river crossings that really did exist, dammit -- when their plots and characters were sheer fantasy. But isn't the cure for that MORE authenticity rather than less? As academics mused about what "authenticity" really meant and urged novelists to rediscover their inner waywardness from the truth, I feared this was not a productive avenue.
Then I read Guy Vanderhaeghe's "The Last Crossing."
First, a word on this extraordinary book. Vanderhaeghe writes tales whose settings generally encompass both Montana and Alberta/Saskatchewan, but since he himself is Canadian, he gets too little credit south of the border. The critics who do know him love him, and compare him to Dickens and Tolstoy. I agree: he's got rich, evocative, complex plots and characters that I'm not going to summarize here.
But what struck me in the book's final third is how similar Vanderhaeghe's worlds are to the 21st century. His characters and cultures -- white, Blackfeet, and Crow -- grapple with the same sorts of issues we face today. Multiculturalism, racial barriers, family structure, sexual identity. . . I went through the book amazed: Wow, how can you do that!?
I'm not saying it's not authentic. Vanderhaeghe's acknowledgements cite some of his prodigious research. I even recognized a story told by one of his characters, about a man named Private Noonan, as basically a restatement of an authentic historical anecdote I too had researched.
I'm saying I came to a new appreciation of the novelist's gift. It is to see key struggles of our own time in fully-realized other worlds. If those worlds are "authentic," then more the better: we understand that we are not the first to grapple with these issues. But the novelist's main ambition should not be archaeology, finding true nuggets of past worlds. It should be creative vision. We can all be grateful that Guy Vanderhaeghe understands his gifts.
Join the discussion at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/johnclaytonoutreach/, or let me know your thoughts via info at johnclaytonbooks (and you can fill in the rest).
