ATDTDA (7): Out as far as Reef could see, 209-210

[Paul Nightingale]

I don't think Madsen is suggesting the Western "sprang
full-blown from Wister's brow", and one would have to
be foolish to ignore the role played by, eg, the Wild
West shows in its provenance. She is saying that the
Western, as a self-conscious exercise in nostalgia,
all in the interests of American exceptionalism, can
be dated from the time of The Virginian, ie the first
years of the C20th. This doesn't mean Wister invented
anything; she is dealing with the evolution of a
literary genre, exemplified by Wister's novel. (There
is no such thing as an original thought, so she might
have worded it more carefully, I suppose.) She
emphasises the importance of Wister's Turner-esque
foreword, which alone would be enough to make it an
exemplar. What's important is the perceived
relationship between 'then' and 'now' as a means to
constructing an ideal reader.

Wister:

"It is a vanished world. No journeys, save those which
memory can take, will bring you to it now. The
mountains are there, far and shining, and the
sunlight, and the infinite earth, and the air that
seems forever the true fountain of youth--but where is
the buffalo, and the wild antelope, and where the
horseman with his pasturing thousands? So like its old
self does the sage-brush seem when revisited, that you
wait for the horseman to appear.

"But he will never come again. He rides in his histric
yesterday."

Cf. Prof Vanderjuice's speech on 53.

Cf. also, at the start of the current chapter: "Out as
far as Reef could see, the desert floor was populated
by pillars of rock ..." etc (209). Which in turn
recalls: "Well, it was sure another world they were
riding through ..." etc (200).