Oakley Hall essay

[terrance fitzgerald]

I guess it was RW Emerson who advised America to look to the exploits of Boone and Crocket to discover an new and stronger tone in Our literature. American Literature.  TRP's fiction, while pretending to be international, is as American as Morrison's and Melville's. Thus, his heroes and anti-heroes are American. They are not Victorian and they are certainly not gentlemen. While it may seem strange to imagine old Ralph ejoying a good fart joke on the fuckin frontier while a couple of violent backwoods boyz or adventure feminists (see Sal Fink)  skin a couple-few rabbits, we should do well to remember that American democracy and American fiction were once two sides of the same experiment. No Jane A. preaching me about novel reading too much or too little of the correct kind thank you very much. America is haunted. We don't need no stinkin Abbey.  
  

kelber at mindspring.com wrote:
  >
>I'll tell you what is a big mystery to me: the hero,
>or anti-hero, as he is as often as not, of the genre
>called "the Western." I seem to be missing the faculty
>that allows the reader to grasp what is at stake when
>the Western hero (or anti-hero) feels he's gotta do
>(or not do) some deed (or misdeed). I can't help
>comparing this baffling fellow with another literary
>figure, the "gentleman" of Victorian novels, a
>character whose code of conduct is just as inexplicit,
>but whose every nuance I feel I detect. John Henry
>Newman said, "It is almost a definition of a gentleman
>to say he is one who never inflicts pain." Conversely,
>it seems to me that it is almost a definition of a
>Western hero to say he is one who is forever
>inflicting pain, if not on someone else, then on
>himself, and preferably on both at one and the same
>time. The guy is just one big pain center, silently
>pulsing with an inarticulate hurt that raw whiskey
>can't ease. And as he claps his big old dusty hat on
>his big old dusty head, and walks through the swinging
>doors with an air of purpose, he leaves me staring at
>the page with no idea where he's going.

 		
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