Hall's Warlock

[dennis grace]

Sorry, Henry, but I gotta take another shot at this.

For a number of reasons, some related to TRP criticism, I recently finished
reading Oakley Hall's _Warlock_, a text TRP once reviewed favorably.  About
a week ago, I posted a query about that text and got only a couple of
responses.  One suggested that Warlock was probably only interesting to
Pynchon as a youth and wasn't worth the bother.  I disagree.  One was Henry
Musikar's suggestion that this topic had already been hashed out on the
list.  Well, I took Henry's advice:  I reviewed the pynchon-l archives on
the matter of Oakley Hall's _Warlock_.  I didn't find much hashing.

I did find several responses from folks who claimed to be having trouble
finding a copy of the then out-of-print _Warlock_.  If any of you are still
interested, the book is back in print.  To order it, contact your fave
bookserver with this

Hall, Oakley.  _Warlock_.  Reno: U of Nevada P, 1996.
ISBN  0874172683

It's a good-sized pb at 488 pages, but despite a rich plot structure, it's a
pretty easy read.

I also found--in the archives--a couple unfavorable reviews.  One reader
recalled the book from a youthful read as a typical, undistinguished
Western.  Another claimed to have been unimpressed and unable to get past 50
pages.  Too bad.  That's about where the book starts to take shape.

In what I would have to call one of the more considered reads, John Mascaro
opined:  

>WARLOCK is a great novel, and very connected to P.'s work.  Though I
haven't >read it but once, and that 6 years ago, I remember distinctly the
feel of >--textuality--it conveys reminding me of the flavor of P's texts.
The notion of >official collusion, the loyalty to preterites of all types,
the use of >--low--genre to say high art things, the modern world's birth
and growth as an >inexorable process of grinding up and flattening out the
angels of innocent >possibility, and the use of language, writing, images of
texts to convey >something of that old delta-t between --words and the
things they stand 
>for--(GR).  All there.

Yeah.

My own initial respose to the work was annoyance with the stilted dialogue
and cliche' cast of characters.  On the other hand, the plot complexity is
impressive.  Few conflicts are resolved as the genre normally dictates.  The
overall tale is a bizarre conflation of the Gunfight at the OK Corral, the
whole John Chisum/Billy the Kid/regulators narrative, and a number of
proto-IWW labor troubles.  

Last night, I subjected my poor wife to a video viewing of the 1959
Hollywood version of _Warlock_.  The acting was even worse than Hall's
original dialogue, but they did manage to preserve some of the more
interesting SIMPLE plot sequences.  And, of course, in the shadow of the
HUAC I never expected to see the proto-Wobbly/US Cavalry conflict
reporduced.  On the whole, however, I wouldn't bemoan the $2.50 rental
price.  All that Hollywood cheese actually helped me see some of the novel's
strengths--mostly by not preserving them.

What John M calls the book's sense of textuality comes through in much the
same way as the metafictional qualities of Tarentino's _Pulp Fiction_.
Hall's plot sets up standard conflicts using pat characters from the
collective narrative of "official history"+penny dreadful history+pulp
western history and then shows how their interactions would actually develop
if these pat characters interacted like real people.  The development of the
"miner's angel" from simple infatuation to psychopathic obsession, for
instance, is particularly gratifying.

Hall also includes a few other intertextual elements to stir the
pot--references to a penny dreadful author and sensational press coverage,
official history being written by a delusional general and some wealthy
mining concerns, the diary entries of a local townsperson, reports from a
court transcript, and an afterword from 40 years after the facts.

Now, understand, I've never been a big Western fan.  Louis l'Amour and Zane
Grey both put me right to sleep.  The only "Western" I've ever enjoyed is
Berger's _Little Big Man_, but classifying _Little Big Man_ as a "Western"
is like calling GR a war novel.  _Warlock_ is a little closer to the genre.

So, any other closet _Warlock_ fans out there?

dgg
_______________
Dennis Grace
University of Texas at Austin
English Department
Recovering Medievalist

"Oh God comma I abhor self-consciousness."  --JB