Re: Adventure, Mystery And Romance: Formula Stories As Art And Popular Culture John G. Cawelti
Clotilde Wilks
A. Robert Lee is Professor of American Literature at Nihon University, Tokyo. He formerly taught at the University of Kent at Canterbury and has been a frequent Visiting Professor in the US, including The University of Virginia, Northwestern University, The University of Colorado and The University of California at Berkeley. His recent books include Designs of Blackness: Mappings in the Literature and Culture of Afro-America (1988), with Gerald Vizenor, Postindian Conversations (1999), and the pamphlet Ethnics Behaving Badly: US Multicultural Narratives (2001) in the Working Papers Series in Cultural Studies, Ethnicity and Race Relations (Pullman, Washington).
Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture John G. Cawelti
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From his first book-length publication, Apostles of the Self-Made Man (1965), through to his recently completed essay-collection, Mystery, Violence, and Popular Culture (to be published like a number of his works by the Bowling Green State University Popular Press under the aegis of Ray and Pat Browne), the focus has been directed at the typologies, the variations of formula and genre, whereby works of popular imagination take hold of (and reciprocally help shape) our sense of the world.
Nor is this to suggest that he has been a stranger to canonical writing. James Fenimore Cooper, Melville, Joyce, Faulkner, Nabokov and Bellow have long been among the favorites in his teaching and criticism. But popular culture has been his forte, everyday, plural America in its exultations and anxieties refracted in what he once characterized as "magic pigments of adventure, romance, and mystery." In this, and since the late 1950s when he first made his scholarly bow, he has served as a pioneer theorist and analyst, an American Studies voice (though with frequent delvings into British and European work) as keen-edged as it has been comprehensive.
Two of his books deservedly rank as interpretive classics. The Six-Gun Mystique (1971), across three revisions, decodes the Western both of text and screen. Here, under his purview, has been a "collective" fantasy, at once heroic myth, a frontier of High Noons, and all the ritual of gunplay. Cawelti was also early to spot, and decipher, the implications to do with white American masculinity, the role of women, the "Indian" as Other, and the familiar western decor of homesteader, cattle drive, horsemanship, stagecoach, saloon bar, and, to be sure, the quick-draw.
Both accounts, moreover, carry another hallmark. Infinitely to their credit, they read with genuine accessibility, theoretical where necessary, but unabstract. His has always been the overall argument backed by local case study, the view in-close.
Much of his other writing can be seen to connect to these volumes. Focus on Bonnie and Clyde (1973) gives a fresh perspective to the West's best-known (and loved?) renegade couple. Why Pop (1973) opened a window, which Cawelti has shared with Leslie Fiedler among others, on the still active issue of cultural canon and non-canon. The Spy Story (1987), written with Bruce Rosenberg, did trans-Atlantic duty, another classic, wide-ranging map of a popular form with annotation and analysis from Cooper to Le Carr.
Cawelti on the West, as on the culture of other American regions, has had a wide ambit. Unsurprisingly, the Journal of Popular Culture has been a regular magazine, outlet for his voluminous publications, along with journals like Western American Literature and The American West. He has also carried his skills and interests beyond America. Visiting lectures (and professorships) have been frequent, whether at Dutch universities like Groningen or Utrecht, or at The University of Reading, England, or in 1978, at the American Studies Research Center in Hyderabad, India.
In fall 1980, he gave the keynote address at a conference on "The Western" at the Buffalo Bill Museum in Cody, Wyoming. It brought together the two kinds of "West" which have most interested Cawelti: the actual, historic West and the West of myth so often and engagingly addressed in his different writings.
Like many American males born in the first half of the twentieth century, I knew the mythical West and the tourist West long before I had any idea of the actual West. I suppose my first memory of the mythical West is one I used to begin The Six-Gun Mystique. I must have been six or seven, which means it was around 1937, when I became an avid listener to the Lone Ranger. The program itself began in 1936 from station WXYZ in Detroit, and if I remember rightly it came on at 6:30. I still remember sitting in front of the old Philco radio in our living room, enraptured by the masked man's adventures while fending off my mother who wanted me to come to dinner.
Not long after this, I started going to the Saturday afternoon movie matinees at the Winnetka Community House. Winnetka didn't have an actual movie theater but, mainly for younger children, put on a weekly show of cartoons, serials, newsreels and a film. The film was often a Western. I think that's where I first saw Stagecoach, for example, but almost always one of the serials was a Western, including the first movie version of the Lone Ranger.
Around the same time that I started going regularly to the movies, my father spent two summers, one in New Mexico and the other in Oregon, teaching a summer course for teachers of Native Americans. Many of the teachers were not Native American, and I had little opportunity to get to know actual contemporary Native Americans. Our family, however, spent a good deal of time at the great western tourist sites, which included a few special Native American places like Taos and Acoma Pueblos.
I don't remember ever being bothered by any discrepancies between the mythical West and the land of Yellowstone Park and the Grand Canyon, perhaps because they seemed completely unconnected in my mind. This must have been my first experience with the way in which one can hold a mythic reality and a very different actuality in one's mind at the same time and not even think about the contrast between them.
These early experiences gave me a permanent interest in the West. Much later, in the 1960s and 1970s, I had the opportunity to teach in Wyoming, Nebraska, and New Mexico. This, along with my reading, began to give me some sense of the complexity of the actual West in contrast to the grand simplicities of the mythic West and the overwhelming spectacle of the great tourist sites. You'll note that I said the "actual" West rather than the "real" West. This latter phrase is related to one of the persistent mythical themes of the West. Actually I had written the first edition of The Six-Gun Mystique before I had any of this first-hand adult experience of the West, though I had certainly become aware, through my reading in Western history and contemporary Western
literature, of the discrepancies between mythic, tourist, and historic Wests.
Revisionist Western history increasingly shapes the way in which the West is presented in popular culture. The main themes of this new approach to Western history are nicely summed up in Patricia Conquest's The Legacy of Conquest. Three of these themes were particularly central in Ken Burns' great television series about the West, a series that reached millions of people. First of all, there is the idea that, pace Turner, the West was not a unique experience that transformed people, but something linked in many ways to the rest of American history. Second, the most important thing about the history of the West was an encounter between many different cultures rather than the clash between civilization and savagery. Finally, the Americans who "won the West" were not moral crusaders but thoughtless and greedy exploiters of nature and of the rich Native American and Hispanic cultures they found in place, and that we all bear some burden of guilt for their depredations. In short, the conquest of the West was not a grandly simple matter of Lone Rangers bringing outlaws to justice and Indians to civilization, but a complex, dirty and ambiguous proceeding like the rest of human history. Westerns have struggled to accommodate this new perspective, and it has not been easy to give some play to these ambiguities and still retain the great sense of great and simple conflicts that made the Western such an effective form of film. In many ways, the new vision of the West has led to a decline in the production of Westerns. Instead, more and more films deal not with the mythic West but with the contemporary West as a theater of much more murky and complex actions.
My essay on the "Post(Modern) Western" that appeared in Paradoxa in Summer 1998 was actually a preliminary version of a chapter on this topic in The Six-Gun Mystique Sequel (2000). In this chapter I tried to give a more complex answer to the question about recent changes in the treatment of the West that you just asked me. In essence I suggested that the myth of the West and the popular genre that carried it on into the twentieth century were so well established that they, themselves, became a subject of writing. Contemporary writers and filmmakers were able to use the conventions of the genre in a variety of different ways: ironic, satirical, debunking, recreating. Many postmodern writers see the Western as one of the key myths that shaped America. For this reason they feel driven to expose and deconstruct it in their work, as Ishmael Reed did in Yellow Back Radio and John Sayles did in a different way in Lone Star. In fact the last words of that wonderful film might be taken as summing up the general attitude toward the Western in
postmodern fiction and film: "Forget the Alamo."
As you suggest, one of the central concerns of the postmodern treatment of the West is the reconstruction of the role of women, and of Hispanics and Native Americans, in the history of the West. This dominates Ken Burns' series, for example. As far as the traditional Western is concerned, women and ethnics tended to be reduced to a few simple stereotypes, often set up in a system of contrasts: the schoolmarm and the dance hall girl, the savage Indian and the noble savage, the happy-go-lucky Mexican and the sinister Spaniard, etc. Ironically, this did not do justice to the actual West, which, with the tragic exception of the situation of the Native American and of Asian Americans, was actually much less sexist and racist than many other regions of the country, especially the South. Many Western states gave the suffrage to women much sooner than the rest of the country, with Wyoming leading the way. Women professionals also often found more opportunities in the West, probably because the need for skills was so great that male hostility had to give way to necessity. Ironically, one of the few successful television Western series of the last decade was Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.
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