Paul Varner's Blog: Zane Grey's The Heritage of the Desert--How Zane Grey became an author, page 2

FILMS AND WESTERNS IN LITERATURE

What are your favorite Westerns that have been adapted into movies? Shane (1953), Hondo (1953), The Ox-Bow Incident (1943)—an argument could be made that Hollywood’s greatest Westerns are the ones adapted from the greatest Westerns in literature. Certainly, Shane and The Ox-Bow Incident are based on truly great novels—by Jack Schaeffer and William Van Tilburg Clark, respectively-- and probably it would be difficult to say which is better in both cases, the movie or the novel. Of course, great novels do not guarantee great films. Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) has been made into numerous films as has Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902), most of them forgettable usually because unlike Shane, The Ox-Bow Incident, or Louis L’Amour’s Hondo, the producers made little effort to protect the integrity of the novel. Occasionally, as in Max Brand’s Destry Rides Again (1930) and its film counterpart made in 1937, starring James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich, both film and novel are classics but the film bears little resemblance to its original source.

A particular problem with scholars of Westerns is whether there is a significant difference in critical approaches to Westerns as film and Westerns as fiction. Some readers such as Jane Tompkins, Richard Slotkin, and Lee Clark Mitchell make little distinction between film Westerns and Western novels. However, Stephen Tanner takes issue with such approaches. He says, “Literature and film have much in common but remain distinctly different media. And recognizing the differences is especially important in relation to the Western. Ignoring the distinctions, as Jane Tompkins does in West of Everything, induces doubtful conclusions drawn from undiscriminating generalizations.”

ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS OF THE WESTERN NOVEL Part Three: The Western Place

A Western would not be a Western if it were not located in a specific locale. The place that unifies all Westerns is usually considered the trans-Mississippi western United States. Classic Westerns focused on the high plains regions of the West or such majestic areas as Monument Valley. Rarely were they set in coastal California or the Northwest. The idea has always been that in vast stretches of unpopulated frontier, humanity functions at its most elemental level. The landscape of a Western has become a formative factor in character development. It often serves as an antagonist that must be conquered, as in A. B. Guthrie's The Big Sky (1947). Antimyth Westerns such as Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West (1985) stretched the Western place to below the border into Mexico, where that landscape served as a foil to the more recognizable landscape of classic Westerns. Place was becoming much less important.

Conclusion
Today, the three elements that traditionally define a Western often seem blurred or altogether absent. Nevertheless, in order to read a Western one must still be aware of the historical context of the genre. In Westerns, perhaps more than in any other genre, the traditions and myths developed over time are assumed to be understood by all viewers. Even such bizarre postmodern Westerns as James C. Work’s Ride West to Dawn (2001) depend on a certain knowledge of previous Westerns.

Unfortunately, a generation of readers has grown up without knowing the assumptions on which Westerns are based. Many people today have never read a Western in their lives. Their entire knowledge often consists of occasionally surfing television channels or encountering references in popular culture, such as John Wayne or Clint Eastwood imitations. For postmodern readers of Westerns, then, the old stories of the West are in the background but no longer hold the imagination. After all, postmodernism by definition repudiates the myths of the past, including Western myths. Since those myths were all told from a white masculine perspective, because they were stories of white men beating up on Native Americans and women and “winning” the West, many have lost interest in Westerns. Few postmodern readers can accept the values on which classic Westerns were based and often have little acquaintance with new postmodern Westerns.

The “question of questions” about Westerns is whether they will continue to thrive in the 21st century. Shelves of Westerns at bookstores seemingly are shrinking. Yet writers of Westerns in literature such as Larry McMurtry and Cormac McCarthy continue to win Pulitzer Prizes. Perhaps with the reinterpretation of history by the New Western Historians we must learn to look for Westerns beyond the Westerns section at the bookstore. In other places we will find Barbara Kingsolver, Sherman Alexie, Cormac McCarthy, writers of Westerns for our own time. Zane Grey and B. M. Bower long ago often set their novels in the present and called them Westerns. Perhaps today we should be seeking to expand our definition of a Western to transcend the Western moment, myth, and place.

ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS OF THE WESTERN NOVEL

Part Two: The Western Myth
In Part One I talked about the concept of the Western Moment as essential to understanding a Western. But Westerns are not solely concerned with the time period of the old West. They also base their narratives on the Western myth, the accumulated stories, customs, codes of behavior, and traditions developed in movies and fiction from the beginning of the genre to the present. Westerns do not reflect actual history. They reflect the myths that have accumulated over the years.

What Billy the Kid was like as a real human being at a real moment in history is relevant to a Western only as one element out of many. The myth in novels such as Elizabeth Fackler’s Billy the Kid: The Legend of El Chivato (1995) gives us a handsome and devilish but likeable gunfighter, still just a kid, still with a measure of puckish innocence. The common myth may not square with history exactly, but is that necessarily relevant?

The Western myth was fully developed in the classic Western period when the role of whites in relation to Native Americans, the role of women in relation to cowboy heroes, and the role of violence and gunplay in establishing justice were all codified. When readers of the classic era read of Hondo Lane or Shane, there was no question what character qualities they possessed. Antimyth Westerns and later alternative Westerns have been reimagining the Western myth since the 1960s to include women, Native Americans, and all ethnic groups that were a part of the historic West.

THREE ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS OF THE WESTERN NOVEL

Part One: The Western Moment

When in 1902 Owen Wister, a member of the Eastern blueblood aristocracy and friend of novelist Henry James, became a bestselling novelist with the publication of The Virginian, few readers would have guessed that a new kind of American literature was being born. The story itself was not remarkable, yet it immediately captured the imagination of a highly literate audience. Its plot takes place in the West in the late 19th century, and it contains the basics of what would become the Western myth. These basics would develop, as the century progressed, into the three essential elements of a Western novel: the Western moment, myth, and place.

The Western moment refers to that brief span time in United States history after the Civil War ended in 1865 when the country turned its attention westward and began the final process of settling the rest of the country. The United States Census Bureau determined that by 1890 the West had been settled, so Westerns more often than not take place sometime between 1865 and 1890. But these dates have little relevance to Westerns. Most never indicate a historical date. Many indicate dates well before 1865 or well after 1890, continuing through the 20th century and into our own time.

While Owen Wister was enjoying his success with The Virginian, Edwin S. Porter in New Jersey was filming the first cinema Western The Great Train Robbery, which would usher in a new era both of movies in general and of Western movies in particular. Both events would lead to a century of cultural fascination with stories of the old West. It is important to remember, though, that as The Great Train Robbery was being filmed in New Jersey, and as The Virginian was selling rapidly, much of the western United States remained as primitive as it had been in the true Western moment. Thus, Wister and Porter were telling stories set within the memory of many of their viewers. So the earliest Westerns told stories that their audiences truly understood.

Through the years, memory of the historic old West faded and movies began portraying not a recent West but a West that was no more. Early Western writers tended to look back nostalgically and romanticize the West. Popular Western novelists such as Zane Grey, Max Brand, and Clarence Mulford described a West that never was. The popular Westerns of the first generations after the turn of the 20th century are much more romantic than later Westerns. These romantic era Westerns tended to compare the historic Western moment to the contemporary moment, identifying the former as a time when goodness and purity were possible and the latter as a time corrupted by modern influences. Zane Grey and B. M. Bower wrote nostalgic novels that looked back yet were set in the contemporary moment. Their heroes rode in automobiles as often as they rode on horses and flew in airplanes, yet often carried pistols and settled their problems with gunplay.
The romantic era novelists wrote beautiful prose travelogues of the Western United States yet they saw a natural continuity between the Western moment of only a few years before and their own moment. Some, like Max Brand associated the West with powerful myths of human culture in all times. Writers and readers, it seems, knew that the West and the new literature and films celebrating it were mythical and epic in their possibility.

World War I and the Great Depression, however, crushed the nostalgic sentiment for an idealized West and brought about a generation of writers and readers who began interpreting the West in terms of conflict—historical conflicts similar to conflicts with Germany and the Soviet Union; physical conflicts with unforgiving landscape; social conflicts brought on by increased racial tensions; and internal conflicts spurred by increasing interest in psychoanalysis. Scholars usually consider the 1930s to the 1960s as the classic era of Westerns as opposed to the previous romantic era. Such writers as Ernest Haycox, Luke Short, Dorothy Johnson, and Louis L’Amour typify the era.

If conflict defined the era, then writers tended to look back on the Western moment as a period in which America grew up, a period in which a man (but not a woman) could make his way in the world unlike any other time in history.

By the 1940s and 1950s, the true historical Western moment had become almost irrelevant in Westerns except as a mythical period when humanity was forced to live at the most elemental level, to confront raw nature and human evil in the form of outlaws or Native American tribes unaided by modern technology. The Western moment, then, for Louis L’Amour became a time period useful for working through the nation’s social and cultural problems with war, civil rights, and ultimately its past and treatment of indigenous peoples. Dorothy Johnson and Walter Van Tilburg Clark used the Western moment to portray intense character trials and personality development in their dark Westerns.

While no one remarked on it at the time, the history of classic Westerns through the 1950s was based on certain assumptions that over time became the dominant myth of the West, and thus of America. Classic Westerns interpreted the historic Western moment primarily in terms of white, male, Anglo-Saxon history. Westerns of the 1960s, however, began questioning this narrow view of history. Antimyth Westerns blurred the Western moment to such a degree as to be unidentifiable. Larry McMurtry’s Thalia Series brought the Western moment up to the, then, present in such novels as Horseman, Pass By (1961). All that mattered, seemingly, was that the Western moment was not a period to look back on nostalgically. It was not a time when a man could discover what his real character was. It was not a time to be proud of in U.S. history. In Alex Hawk Westerns, in the adult Westerns that flooded the marketplace, in the later Cormac McCarthy Westerns, there are no good characters, no noble cowboy heroes. The Western moment has become a time of human corruption.

Most Westerns of this Alternative Western era since the 1980s have attempted to respond to antimyth Westerns and the attack on classic Westerns by looking at elements of the West ignored by such Jack Schaefer. Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man (1964) is one of the first the first major Westerns to look at the United States’ treatment of Native Americans through the perspective of Native cultures. Other alternative Westerns treat racial and gender themes. The way we look back at the historic old West in our movies and popular Westerns today has fundamentally changed since the genre’s beginnings in 1903.