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Reviews
Unsettling the Literary West: Authenticity and Authorship
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By Nathaniel Lewis
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University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2003. Notes, index. 290 pages. $49.95 cloth.
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Reviewed by Richard W. Etulain
University of New Mexico (emeritus), Albuquerque
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Nathaniel Lewis is a young, ambitious scholar. He wants to
"unsettle" the American literary West, to free it from a self-defeating
hold on "authenticity," and move it in more fruitful directions.
An assistant professor of English and American studies at St. Michael's
College in Vermont, Lewis is convinced that western writers' attempts
to write about a "Real West" have hogtied them to a literary agenda
leading to a literature at once provincial, narrow focused, and
definitely second rank. Sadly, Lewis's densely written volume is
too narrowly focused to be entirely convincing.
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1
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Lewis divides his volume into six
chapters, an introduction, and an epilogue. After broaching his
major topic — western authors' excessive emphases on authenticity
(factual realism, a "Real West") — in the introduction, the
author lays out examples of this problem. The first chapter deals
with early frontier writers such as Timothy Flint and James Hall,
whereas the second chapter discusses Caroline Kirkland, Edgar Allan
Poe, and Mark Twain. In chapter 3, Lewis focuses primarily on the
literary career of Oregon writer Joaquin Miller. Chapter 4 provides
close readings of the selected fiction of Frank Norris, Hamlin Garland,
and Owen Wister. The next chapter discusses "environmental constructivism
in western nature writing," with stress on Mary Austin's autobiographical
work Earth Horizon and glancing comments on the scattered
writings of John Muir, Terry Tempest Williams, and Barry Lopez.
The sixth and concluding chapter calls for a postmodern approach
to western literary and cultural history and literary criticism
about the West. The epilogue provides a few brief and rather vague
glimpses of what Lewis hopes for in western literature after it
has been "unsettled."
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Unsettling the Literary West
exhibits a number of strengths. First of all, Lewis does a more
than creditable job of showing how many western writers have been
addicted to the delimiting concept of authenticity. Second, his
close readings of obscure works by Flint and Hall, Poe, Twain, and
Vladimir Nabokov reveal his strengths as a literary critic. Third,
in the chapter on postmodern western literature, he correctly lists
(and sometimes discusses) the works of writers such as Thomas Pynchon,
Ishmael Reed, Gerald Vizenor, and Annie Proulx who deserve more
attention as western authors. Finally, Lewis calls attention to
numerous other literary products of the West that specialists in
western literature, literary criticism, and cultural history should
know.
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Unfortunately, large limitations
offset the strengths of Lewis's volume. Before Lewis attempts to
"unsettle" the West, he needs to "settle" more of it. Specialists
in the literary West will find large gaps in the author's coverage.
Even though he argues that most western writers fall into the trap
of authenticity, he does not mention John Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis,
H.L. Davis, A.B. Guthrie, Jr., or Jane Smiley; and he glancingly
treats Willa Cather, Wallace Stegner, and Larry McMurtry. These
omissions are all the more notable because all these western writers
won Pulitzer prizes, and Lewis and Steinbeck won Nobel prizes as
well. The same omissions are apparent in his coverage of western
literary critics. Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land: The American
West as Symbol and Myth (1950), which many authorities on the
literary West consider the outstanding study of western mythology,
is not cited in Lewis's volume. Nor does Lewis deal with Leslie
Fiedler's The Return of the Vanishing American (1968), a
book that argued for something of a postmodern approach to the literary
West more than thirty-five years ago. The single garbled footnote
to Richard Slotkin's monumental trilogy on the mythic frontier and
the West is another oversight. Although Lewis cites a few of the
notable essays of earlier critics Don D. Walker and Max Westbrook,
he overlooks their books and seems unacquainted with their other
essays as well as most western literary criticism written before
the 1990s. Revealingly, Lewis cites the ideas of theorists and cultural
critics such as Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Jean-François
Lyotard, and his mentor, Lawrence Buell, much more than any of the
dozens of western literary critics he might have used.
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Most readers, except those with a
strong theoretical bent, will also have difficulties with the critical
jargon that invades every page of Lewis's volume. The clichés
of literary theory and cultural criticism and self-referential nods
too often obscure rather than illuminate his meanings. If the author
hopes to attract a larger reading audience, he must make his points
more clearly, rely less on the complex theoretical language of others,
and show a much wider acquaintance with western literature, history,
and criticism. His valuable close readings and provocative arguments
indicate that he is up to the task of writing other books with more
strengths and fewer large limitations.
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