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Reviews
Hope and Dread in Montana Literature
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By Ken Egan, Jr.
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University of Nevada Press, Reno, 2003. Notes, bibliography, index. 231 pages. $34.95 cloth.
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Reviewed by Rick Newby
Helena, Montana
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| This important study participates in the rethinking, even revisioning, of western culture that Wallace Stegner called for when he urged his fellow westerners to "dream other dreams, and better" ("A Geography of Hope" in A Society to Match the Scenery, ed. Holthaus et al., p. 229). Ken Egan, for many years a professor of English at Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Montana, takes as his starting point that string of bizarre events not so long ago, when the Freemen, Ted Kaczynski, and the Militia of Montana captured the national imagination and Big Sky Country seemed a place inhabited solely by violent paranoids. |
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Montana, of course, is populated by a diversity of peoples, many of whom abhor the extreme attitudes and behaviors of their most militant neighbors; but nevertheless, Egan argues, most Montanans share with these fringe elements the "sense of lacerating manipulation by outside forces, quest for a world apart, and attraction to violence as a solution" (p. xv). Egan then proceeds to examine, in the state's brief but rich literary tradition, the roots of such apocalyptic thinking and to seek out, within that same tradition, "alternative ways of responding to our crises" (p. xvii). |
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Egan sees Montana literature as profoundly dialectical. "Side by side with tales of woe," he writes, "move tales of endurance and even recovery" (p. xviii). Ranging across the entire history of Montana literature and skillfully placing specific works within regional, national, and even global contexts, Egan first leads readers through a prehistory of the state's literature, where both Native Americans and early settlers (Two Leggings, Pretty-shield, Plenty Coups, Andrew Garcia, Nannie Alderson) acknowledge terrible losses while maintaining at least a mordant sense of humor.Thence he moves to the midcentury modern tragic tradition (A.B. Guthrie, Jr., D'Arcy McNickle, Richard Hugo, Joseph Kinsey Howard, K. Ross Toole), in which the losses and failures appear irrevocable — and strangely seductive. These catastrophists, Egan argues, however beguiling, may not have served us well. "Visions of cataclysm," he writes, "can contribute to a culture of despair and thereby disempower as much as empower the reader" (p. 109). |
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Egan concludes his study with examples of what he calls "pragmatic comedies," works by such recent masters as James Welch, Mary Clearman Blew, William Kittredge, Deirdre McNamer, and Ivan Doig, whose voices espouse "engaged, careful, concrete, caring responses to the pressures that continue to exert themselves on the rural West" (pp. 109–10). These novels and memoirs, in the tradition of Wallace Stegner, offer (mostly) unsentimental hopes — often through the discovery of deep connections to family and place — in the face of entirely real and often profound displacements, losses, and seismic economic shifts. |
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I cannot say that I came away from Hope and Dread entirely agreeing with Ken Egan's thesis. I found myself wondering whether a region's literature, however pragmatic, can eradicate persistent myths. As Wallace Stegner said of the mythic cowboy, whom he wanted to bury, "He is a faster gun than I am. He is too attractive to the daydreaming imagination" (The American West as Living Space, p. 79). I also feel more than reluctant to dismiss the work, apocalyptic or otherwise, of such extraordinary (and beloved) writers as Richard Hugo or Joseph Kinsey Howard. |
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That said, Hope and Dread in Montana Literature is a wonderful book, fluidly written, splendidly researched, witty, and riddled with insights large and small. As Egan clearly knows, Montana literature has always cut close to the real, however much it has partaken of foolish dreams, and one of the lovely things about the book is Egan's insistence on bringing to bear his own experience as a deeply rooted Montanan. His inclusion of Montana philosophers and historians is appropriate and refreshing, his focus on women writers is exemplary, and his tribute to James Welch, both for his brilliance as a writer and for his service to the broader Montana community, is worth the price of the book. |
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Hope and Dread in Montana Literature seems destined to stand on the shelf next to William W. Bevis's Ten Tough Trips, William Kittredge and Annick Smith's The Last Best Place, and all those other Montana classics about which Ken Egan writes with such clear-eyed passion. |
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