NP Warlock (1959)

[jbor at bigpond.com]

Keith, my point was simply that _Warlock_ is a western, in the 
tradition of the pulp westerns, though a pretty good one. (O'Brien: 
_Warlock_ "is also a true western to the core, holding tight to the 
laws of the genre"; it "lives by its language, which sustains a 
through-line of pulp narration".)

The movie is also pretty good. (O'Brien: "a very effective movie", not 
"effective" as you've misquoted.)

The other interesting thing about the review is that it takes its lead 
from Pynchon's old 'Holiday' piece (the America's "national Camelot" 
angle.) I guess that's the reason most of us read the book in the first 
place, it's certainly why I read it, and it's probably a big part of 
why it is still being reprinted.

I put the ellipses in, I gave the reference. I got the review from a 
journal database, not the web. (I see that the old "appeal to 
authority" gambit is fine when you're the one using it. But it beats 
the hell out of that "appeal to numbnuts" strategy, eh.)

I'm not actually sure what you think is wrong with any of that, how it 
diverges from what I've already written, or what you imagine the 
opposing consensus to be. (It is "better than Blood Meridian"? It isn't 
a genre western?? It ranks in the literary canon??! The movie is 
terrible / "doesn't do the book justice"?)

As for the original phrase I used "as far as pulp westerns go", I'll 
cop to that being a bit lazy. But it was a two-line email. And I would 
have thought it pretty obvious that I wasn't talking about paper 
quality or garishly-coloured covers.

I'm pretty thick-skinned by now. And we're all accustomed to your ad 
hominem tactics. So, no, please don't trouble yourself to apologise. 
And just by the way, you've known my name for about eight years, so 
there's no need to keep up the pretence that you don't know it.

best

On 17/04/2006:

> You typed in excerpts that were relevant to your inaccurate point and 
> carefully omitted (sometimes mid-sentence) what supported what several 
> of us are saying.
>
> O'Brien says the movie is an "effective movie" which is "remarkable 
> for its elaborate and unpredictable plotting." If that is the same as 
> saying it is a "pretty good" movie, so be it. When I think something 
> is remarkable, I never call it "pretty good," but I am an elitist.
>
> O'Brien places Warlock as a forerunner to Larry McMurtry's _Lonesome 
> Dove_ and Cormac McCarthy's _Blood Meridian_ , neither of which are 
> "pulp westerns,"and one major point of the review is that, while Hall 
> utilizes techiniques of the "pulp western," he is doing something new 
> which transcends the "pulp western." There are many examples from the 
> text itself illustrating this, but the last paragraph makes it crystal 
> clear.
>
> Most of the time I find jbor's readings spot on, but when he allows 
> his own prejudices to distort a text's offerings, he will never cry 
> uncle even when it is as obvious as hell, as it is in this case. He 
> becomes the very thing he despises in others' readings.
>
> Despite the disagreement, I do heartily agree that there is no need to 
> apologise.
>
> jbor at bigpond.com wrote:
>
>> Thanks Keith. I couldn't find that review on the web so only typed in 
>> some of the excerpts which were relevant to the discussion, those 
>> being (1) that O'Brien rates the movie as pretty good (which it is), 
>> and (2) that the novel itself is in (and Oakley even situates it in) 
>> the genre of pulp westerns. (And that Hall's dialogue clunks like 
>> hell, which is part of what Pynchon and Farina liked so much about 
>> it.)
>>
>> That genre westerns are different from other types of "literature" is 
>> stating the obvious, isn't it? Doesn't make them intrinsically 
>> inferior though. Literary snobs can turn up their noses, but it's far 
>> more accurate to say that _Warlock_ fits into the Zane Grey/Louis 
>> L'Amour tradition rather than into the Dostoevsky/Joyce tradition.
>>
>> It's a good read, but does tend to get overrated here (e.g. "better 
>> than Blood Meridian"), which sets up a false expectation.
>>
>> No need to apologise by the way.
>>
> On 17/04/2006:
>
>> http://www.bookforum.com/archive/dec_05/obrien.html
>
>>> Excerpts from:
>>> 'The Design of the West' (review of _Warlock by Oakley Hall) by 
>>> Geoffrey O'Brien.
>>> _Artforum_ 12.4 (Bookforum supplement). New York: Dec 2005/Jan 2006, 
>>> p. 47.
>>>
>>> America's great cowboy epic consists of a hundred thousand simulacra 
>>> (cast in forms ranging from novels and movies to model kits and 
>>> lunch boxes) of an imaginary original. At that primal point where 
>>> other cultures find their Ramayana or Iliad or Le Morte d'Arthur, we 
>>> make do with rumors and fabrications, replicas of wanted posters and 
>>> tintypes of miners' shacks, Owen Wister and Zane Grey, and the 
>>> deathless ideogram of a man on a horse crossing an empty space [...]
>>>
>>> So successfully does Warlock enact the necessary moves of the 
>>> classic western that it was itself turned almost immediately into a 
>>> very effective movie (directed by Edward Dmytryk and starring Henry 
>>> Fonda and Richard Widmark) which, though it drops significant chunks 
>>> of Hall's convoluted narrative [...]
>>>
>>> The hiring of a celebrated gunslinger -- Clay Blaisedell, with his 
>>> goldhandled Colts, an enigmatic character already half-legendary 
>>> thanks to the efforts of a burgeoning dime-fiction industry -- to 
>>> defend the town against the cowboys initiates a series of violent 
>>> confrontations and brutal reversals of loyalty that at each turn 
>>> promise the town a redemption that never quite arrives.
>>>
>>> It's the kind of town where men are given to saying things like, 
>>> "I'm going out and drink some of the meanness out of me," or, "Never 
>>> heard a man make such a fuss over getting shot." The desultory 
>>> dialogue that fills the long stretches of waiting between sudden 
>>> bursts of violence plays a choral role in this novel, which at times 
>>> feels like some long and strange stage play. [...]
>>>
>>> Warlock lives by its language, which sustains a through-line of pulp 
>>> narration and a heightened version of B-western repartee ("You are 
>>> like a hellfire-and-damnation preacher gone loco on bad whiskey") 
>>> [...]
>