Hall's Warlock

[Mathew Jacobson]

IMNERHO, you've missed the forest for the trees here,  the magnificent 
thing about Warlock is not the Pynchonesque textual structure, but the 
issues the book deals with - ie the question of conflicted freedoms in an 
newly expanding frontier, one of TRP's faves.

Warlock (one of my favorite books) is about the establishement of an 
"ordered" society out of chaos/freedom/frontier, with all the regular 
pynchon type hero's and heavies, badass outlaws, goverment/corporate 
lackeys, miltant minded proto-fasciests, and the monied interests behind 
it all.

Warlock wrestles with the question of whether we need the freedom from 
laws/authority/government, or whether we need the freedom from badass 
outlaws taking our stuff & raping our women.  The book is about peoples 
need for an established orderly form of government, in order to preserve 
their day to day freedoms, and the use the forces of darkness make out of 
that need.

How can freedom really exist, how do we manifest it in community, why do 
repressive orders always form out of human expansion into new 
opportunities for freedom?

Surely these are more interesting questions than plot devices, narrative 
tricks and dialogue.

Sometimes you folks make me wonder...
>Sent:        5/26/97 3:20 PM
>Received:    5/26/97 3:03 PM
>From:        dennis grace, amazing at mail.utexas.edu
>To:          pynchon-l at waste.org
>
>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
>


Mathew Jacobson 
Green Mountain Forest Watch
48 Elliot St. Brattleboro, VT  05301 
grnmt at sover.net 
http://www.sover.net/~grnmt/