Perhaps interesting to note that of the endless parade of superhero films, the one probably most acclaimed—Logan—not only riffs on elements from Shane but directly cites the film version of Shane.
It even works because the film version of Shane is partly famous for upping the violence in Westerns, making the bloodshed seem more real (they attached strings to the actors to tug on them violently when they were shot, making it more intense). Likewise that’s how Logan was marketed: more violent, more serious
Absolutely wonderful article - I have never really been interested in the Western as a genre but I was planning on reading Blood Meridian later this year and this essay helps contextualise the literary backdrop it was written against.
As far as mythic deconstruction is concerned I think you hit on some very valid points - it has become rather fashionable to write literature that busts or deconstructs myths instead of celebrating them. I agree - but I think this mythbusting is predicated on a very superficial understanding of the mythic tradition which is a lot more complex than any of the authors who "deconstruct" these myths give it credit.
If we take The Iliad for example - we are treated to a "hero", Achilles, who shows narcicisstic tendencies, a crippling fear of his own mortality and condemns several men of his own army to death just to prove a point. If we look at the Mahabharata - the Pandavas are not saints, they are complicated and there are several points where we sympathise with the Kauravas (Bhima's killing of Duryodhana is often played for tragedy rather than a heroic victory). Krishna is himself a very complex character - as much a wily politician as he is a hero and Dharma? Well - that is a very thorny discussion for another day and hopefully a future post from you on the Mahabharata.
What I am trying to say is this - that the myths in their original form are complicated and complex and have undergone a social filtering of perception into something less complex. THis simplistic version has then been "deconstructed" into complexity by the myth busters - which is an exercise in redundancy. A lot of these " deconstructions" are of social perceptions of myths rather than the myths themselves which are monstrous unweidly things that are likely to make readers uncomfortable the more they engage with them.
Thank you for the great article - I really enjoyed it .
You're really doing a unique service by bringing these literary genres into the popular (well, insofar as Substack is popular) consciousness. Thank you! (And this post led to me finding what appears to be a Tanith Lee space western, so thank you again.)
Have looked forward to this piece for sometime, watching your notes and process.
OK now that I finished the whole article, let me say that I realize you probably are aware of the Washington Irving book and the James Finnemore Cooper ones.
I actually think that Elmore Leonard helped transition the western from its Wild West setting into an urban environment, which is what a lot of of his crime novels do, and the main difference between him and Tarantino‘s adaptations of him is that Leonard quite clearly hates and subverts violence whereas Tarantino seems to adore it or even potentially find it kinky. Especially when feet get involved. The movie starring George Clooney Out of Sight seems to me to be the best Elmo Leonard adaptation because when the main gun goes off and a bad guy gets killed, the entire movie basically stops and it’s like they’re saying yes violence is this terrible, this awful, this unsettling, which reminds me of Shane.
Shane too was adapted into the film Logan, which shows that the fantasy genre is actively interacting with this compost heap of ideas. A similar thing happened when the Mandalorian adapted Lonewolf and Cub., which is the samurai version of the western and was itself adapted into westerns
All of that in mind, Die Hard is a western in an urban tower (basically a one horse town: the elevators) with the plot of Midsummer Night’s Dream. I tried my best to turn, Die Hard back into a western in a fantasy setting with my own Tap and Die, and I probably failed miserably in the attempt, but it was certainly an attempt to comment on all three genres at once.
Everything else you said near the end there was exactly what I was thinking about : how often westerns are a province of fantasy and how often fantasies do what westerns do. After all, what is Han Solo other than a western hero?
To go back to the opening points of the piece I do think that Frodo is a great example of someone who has no magical powers, no special ability and who is only helpful because he’s short and able to hide. Can he use the ring? Sometimes, but only at a heavy cost and like the rest of the magic in the book, it’s seldom actually effective, often makes things immediately worse (consider the morgul blade), and certainly not in the long run since it’s the very thing he’s trying to destroy. There is a very real sense in which it’s a knight errant tale — one of someone who is thrust into a very corrupt world and forced to be good in the middle of it with limited powers. It’s pretty much dumb luck that Gollum dies instead of Frodo.
In fact, pretty famously, Tolkien made every single one of the members of the fellowship outside the hobbits heroic characters from any epic poem, like Beowulf or the Kalevala or the Edda. But not Frodo. It’s not a book about heroes.
Excellent as ever! This whole discussion about the core, the history, of genre(s) is fascinating, and insightful.
I read Shane as an assignment in either junior high or high school, and I thought it very good. Perhaps I should reread it. I read The Virginian on my own when I was probably 11 or 12 and completely loved it. I never have read The Searchers -- I'm not sure I knew it was a novel. The movie is of course remarkable. I have seen a lot of recommendations of Warlock. I mean to get to Lonesome Dove -- my brothers-in-law all worship the book (and the TV series.) I think Charles Portis is one of the best American novelists of the 20th century, and True Grit is great, in great part because of the voice of the narrator. And I don't think it's really "deconstructing" -- yes, Rooster Cogburn is not exactly a pure hero but he is the right man at the right time; and like other heroes -- like Shane -- he leaves at the end.
I haven't read any Zane Grey, though I have a couple of hardcovers -- reprint editions from the early 20th century, before there were paperbacks, when publishers like Grosset & Dunlap would put out a cheap hardcover, often reusing the plates from the original edition, a year or two after the first publisher put it out. I should try one of them. I've only read one Louis L'Amour novel, The Haunted Mesa, which I read only because it is science fiction -- and I found it disappointing.
I was going to say something like this—-while True Grit is definitely FUNNY in a way that the classic western (movie, I haven’t read a single one of these books) isn’t, it’s also pretty dang faithful to the overall Western project in a way that Blood Meridian totally isn’t (I also haven’t read Lonesome Dove). I just can’t quite group it in with revisionism, and not only because both films based on it are definitely classic-Western-feeling movies.
I agree that people put a bit too much emphasis on "deconstructing" genre, which can be interesting or just kind of lazy. But what's really interesting to me is when people use this term just as a way to say "it was genre, but I liked it." I've seen more than one literary agent wishlist include "works that deconstruct or have a new take on the whodunnit, like KNIVES OUT." Now, setting aside the fact that KNIVES OUT is a movie and not a book... it doesn't deconstruct anything! It's not a new take! It's a very good example of the whodunnit played straight.
As you point out here with THE SEARCHERS, it's also the case that the best examples of genre literature are actually much better at interrogating their genre's assumptions and beliefs than those who overtly try to deconstruct it. You need real appreciation for the genre you're writing in. I think this is why George RR Martin succeeds, to the extent that he does.
Re: the bit at the end about the idea of genius, there are some definite parallels in music. A lot of people, not least of all the Nobel Prize committee, treat Bob Dylan as a genius, making songwriting into literature. But notably Dylan's stuff is very much playing on both traditional music traditions and the rest of the singer-songwriter scene, often very explicitly (a bunch of his songs are basically reworked versions of traditional ballads). Yet he gets acclaimed, but the influences that produced him don't get as much respect. Personally I think this is also wrong from a talent perspective but eh, people will differ on that.
Great piece, the depth of research and thought that goes into it really shows through, my only quibble is that surely you don't mean that if a book is set in the future it can only be good if it follows the traditional sci-fi template? I thought Station Eleven was quite solid, even if it replaces some of the interesting elements of the sci-fi template with other interesting elements.
I can't tell if you have heard it and didn't want to reference it, or somehow haven't heard it, but I think the reason you responded to the western so much is that, as used to be said with some frequency (and as insult) those early space opera science fiction stories were just westerns in space. Same basic plot tropes, but with spaceships and Martians. One of those generalizations where you say "oh yeah, of course" and then "wait a moment, I can think of ______ exceptions"
Next you should read Captain Blood and other pirate tales.
Also glad to see you retract trash talking about LOA. It is great, and I was shocked at your dislike when you commented previously.
Thanks for this. This is helpful for thinking about some of the things rolling around my head. I may refer back to it in future in my own newsletter. I am currently reading Six Gun Mystique Sequel by John G. Cawelti, one of the more digestible academic books, looking for hand holds.
My interest in the Western started some years ago when I began staying up all night watching Spaghetti and Tortilla Westerns as a cope for not liking my job. I find I historically like the Italian movies best because they have a strange and elemental quality and don’t get caught up in mythologizing America as much as the American movies tend to. Anyway, they follow this good man with a gun pattern you’ve talked about pretty stringently. As a result, I don’t recall the names of many of the movies I’ve watched over the years.
If you want protagonists who are ordinary, may I suggest the late Iain Banks? In his science-fiction novels, the protagonists are ordinary people for the Culture, his civilization in a galaxy-spanning space-traveling future. it is inhabited by super-intelligent artificial-intelligence robots with jokey names, bizarre technological and natural marvels of enormous scale, fearful fanatic antagonists who cannot be reasoned with, facing off against do-gooders who leave a cornucopiac utopia to try to help the less-fortunate using whatever means are necessary, and at the end whatever more-or-less ordinary person Banks has chosen as a protagonist will find that a malign fate has put them at the sharp end of the spear that might thwart the evil purposes of the antagonists. They will then have to screw their courage to the sticking place, remember that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one, do what needs to be done, and die—or maybe not, if Banks was feeling exceptionally generous on the day he wrote the climax.
In my view, it works.
> Naomi Kanakia: We need myth-makers, not just myth-busters: 'I fell out of love with science fiction.... I kept thinking, "What if we're not exceptional. What if we're ordinary? What then?"... I's obvious what would happen: they would die.... To survive exceptional circumstances, you need to either be very skilled or very lucky (or both). And if I was committed to writing about people with ordinary luck and skill, then I couldn't write about exceptional circumstances...
I was going to ask about Charles Portis, because I loved the Coen brothers' version of True Grit. I've not read the book. I did read all of Elmore Leonard's short westerns set in Arizona and liked them.
I was at PulpFest a few weeks ago, where there were a lot of those genre readers, of various flavors (including some Westerns), most of whom also had the collector trait. It's more than just wanting the emotional reassurance of reading the same story over and over (which in SF / fantasy circles is often called "escape"), though there were people there who openly admitted that their lives sucked and they wanted a way to transcend them. There's also that collector thing, which is a way of mastering a volume of material so that you can show off that knowledge in friendly competition with other fans. Old-school SF fans used to call that 'egoboo,' as short for "ego boost."
I really appreciated your discussion of the emergent nature of creativity. We see a similar situation in science, where culture demands that progress be simplified to a series of geniuses, but the work is actually done bit by bit, by large numbers of people who receive little or no credit.
Perhaps interesting to note that of the endless parade of superhero films, the one probably most acclaimed—Logan—not only riffs on elements from Shane but directly cites the film version of Shane.
OMG, Logan is Shane. Can't believe I hadn't put that together. I guess bc I hadn't yet seen Shane when I saw Logan
It even works because the film version of Shane is partly famous for upping the violence in Westerns, making the bloodshed seem more real (they attached strings to the actors to tug on them violently when they were shot, making it more intense). Likewise that’s how Logan was marketed: more violent, more serious
Logan not only is Shane, the film shows CLIPS of Shane as the characters watch it.
Absolutely wonderful article - I have never really been interested in the Western as a genre but I was planning on reading Blood Meridian later this year and this essay helps contextualise the literary backdrop it was written against.
As far as mythic deconstruction is concerned I think you hit on some very valid points - it has become rather fashionable to write literature that busts or deconstructs myths instead of celebrating them. I agree - but I think this mythbusting is predicated on a very superficial understanding of the mythic tradition which is a lot more complex than any of the authors who "deconstruct" these myths give it credit.
If we take The Iliad for example - we are treated to a "hero", Achilles, who shows narcicisstic tendencies, a crippling fear of his own mortality and condemns several men of his own army to death just to prove a point. If we look at the Mahabharata - the Pandavas are not saints, they are complicated and there are several points where we sympathise with the Kauravas (Bhima's killing of Duryodhana is often played for tragedy rather than a heroic victory). Krishna is himself a very complex character - as much a wily politician as he is a hero and Dharma? Well - that is a very thorny discussion for another day and hopefully a future post from you on the Mahabharata.
What I am trying to say is this - that the myths in their original form are complicated and complex and have undergone a social filtering of perception into something less complex. THis simplistic version has then been "deconstructed" into complexity by the myth busters - which is an exercise in redundancy. A lot of these " deconstructions" are of social perceptions of myths rather than the myths themselves which are monstrous unweidly things that are likely to make readers uncomfortable the more they engage with them.
Thank you for the great article - I really enjoyed it .
You're really doing a unique service by bringing these literary genres into the popular (well, insofar as Substack is popular) consciousness. Thank you! (And this post led to me finding what appears to be a Tanith Lee space western, so thank you again.)
Have looked forward to this piece for sometime, watching your notes and process.
OK now that I finished the whole article, let me say that I realize you probably are aware of the Washington Irving book and the James Finnemore Cooper ones.
I actually think that Elmore Leonard helped transition the western from its Wild West setting into an urban environment, which is what a lot of of his crime novels do, and the main difference between him and Tarantino‘s adaptations of him is that Leonard quite clearly hates and subverts violence whereas Tarantino seems to adore it or even potentially find it kinky. Especially when feet get involved. The movie starring George Clooney Out of Sight seems to me to be the best Elmo Leonard adaptation because when the main gun goes off and a bad guy gets killed, the entire movie basically stops and it’s like they’re saying yes violence is this terrible, this awful, this unsettling, which reminds me of Shane.
Shane too was adapted into the film Logan, which shows that the fantasy genre is actively interacting with this compost heap of ideas. A similar thing happened when the Mandalorian adapted Lonewolf and Cub., which is the samurai version of the western and was itself adapted into westerns
All of that in mind, Die Hard is a western in an urban tower (basically a one horse town: the elevators) with the plot of Midsummer Night’s Dream. I tried my best to turn, Die Hard back into a western in a fantasy setting with my own Tap and Die, and I probably failed miserably in the attempt, but it was certainly an attempt to comment on all three genres at once.
Everything else you said near the end there was exactly what I was thinking about : how often westerns are a province of fantasy and how often fantasies do what westerns do. After all, what is Han Solo other than a western hero?
To go back to the opening points of the piece I do think that Frodo is a great example of someone who has no magical powers, no special ability and who is only helpful because he’s short and able to hide. Can he use the ring? Sometimes, but only at a heavy cost and like the rest of the magic in the book, it’s seldom actually effective, often makes things immediately worse (consider the morgul blade), and certainly not in the long run since it’s the very thing he’s trying to destroy. There is a very real sense in which it’s a knight errant tale — one of someone who is thrust into a very corrupt world and forced to be good in the middle of it with limited powers. It’s pretty much dumb luck that Gollum dies instead of Frodo.
In fact, pretty famously, Tolkien made every single one of the members of the fellowship outside the hobbits heroic characters from any epic poem, like Beowulf or the Kalevala or the Edda. But not Frodo. It’s not a book about heroes.
Excellent as ever! This whole discussion about the core, the history, of genre(s) is fascinating, and insightful.
I read Shane as an assignment in either junior high or high school, and I thought it very good. Perhaps I should reread it. I read The Virginian on my own when I was probably 11 or 12 and completely loved it. I never have read The Searchers -- I'm not sure I knew it was a novel. The movie is of course remarkable. I have seen a lot of recommendations of Warlock. I mean to get to Lonesome Dove -- my brothers-in-law all worship the book (and the TV series.) I think Charles Portis is one of the best American novelists of the 20th century, and True Grit is great, in great part because of the voice of the narrator. And I don't think it's really "deconstructing" -- yes, Rooster Cogburn is not exactly a pure hero but he is the right man at the right time; and like other heroes -- like Shane -- he leaves at the end.
I haven't read any Zane Grey, though I have a couple of hardcovers -- reprint editions from the early 20th century, before there were paperbacks, when publishers like Grosset & Dunlap would put out a cheap hardcover, often reusing the plates from the original edition, a year or two after the first publisher put it out. I should try one of them. I've only read one Louis L'Amour novel, The Haunted Mesa, which I read only because it is science fiction -- and I found it disappointing.
I was going to say something like this—-while True Grit is definitely FUNNY in a way that the classic western (movie, I haven’t read a single one of these books) isn’t, it’s also pretty dang faithful to the overall Western project in a way that Blood Meridian totally isn’t (I also haven’t read Lonesome Dove). I just can’t quite group it in with revisionism, and not only because both films based on it are definitely classic-Western-feeling movies.
I agree that people put a bit too much emphasis on "deconstructing" genre, which can be interesting or just kind of lazy. But what's really interesting to me is when people use this term just as a way to say "it was genre, but I liked it." I've seen more than one literary agent wishlist include "works that deconstruct or have a new take on the whodunnit, like KNIVES OUT." Now, setting aside the fact that KNIVES OUT is a movie and not a book... it doesn't deconstruct anything! It's not a new take! It's a very good example of the whodunnit played straight.
As you point out here with THE SEARCHERS, it's also the case that the best examples of genre literature are actually much better at interrogating their genre's assumptions and beliefs than those who overtly try to deconstruct it. You need real appreciation for the genre you're writing in. I think this is why George RR Martin succeeds, to the extent that he does.
Re: the bit at the end about the idea of genius, there are some definite parallels in music. A lot of people, not least of all the Nobel Prize committee, treat Bob Dylan as a genius, making songwriting into literature. But notably Dylan's stuff is very much playing on both traditional music traditions and the rest of the singer-songwriter scene, often very explicitly (a bunch of his songs are basically reworked versions of traditional ballads). Yet he gets acclaimed, but the influences that produced him don't get as much respect. Personally I think this is also wrong from a talent perspective but eh, people will differ on that.
Great piece, the depth of research and thought that goes into it really shows through, my only quibble is that surely you don't mean that if a book is set in the future it can only be good if it follows the traditional sci-fi template? I thought Station Eleven was quite solid, even if it replaces some of the interesting elements of the sci-fi template with other interesting elements.
what about the sci-fi westerns like Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, Dark Tower?
I can't tell if you have heard it and didn't want to reference it, or somehow haven't heard it, but I think the reason you responded to the western so much is that, as used to be said with some frequency (and as insult) those early space opera science fiction stories were just westerns in space. Same basic plot tropes, but with spaceships and Martians. One of those generalizations where you say "oh yeah, of course" and then "wait a moment, I can think of ______ exceptions"
Next you should read Captain Blood and other pirate tales.
Also glad to see you retract trash talking about LOA. It is great, and I was shocked at your dislike when you commented previously.
Thanks for this. This is helpful for thinking about some of the things rolling around my head. I may refer back to it in future in my own newsletter. I am currently reading Six Gun Mystique Sequel by John G. Cawelti, one of the more digestible academic books, looking for hand holds.
My interest in the Western started some years ago when I began staying up all night watching Spaghetti and Tortilla Westerns as a cope for not liking my job. I find I historically like the Italian movies best because they have a strange and elemental quality and don’t get caught up in mythologizing America as much as the American movies tend to. Anyway, they follow this good man with a gun pattern you’ve talked about pretty stringently. As a result, I don’t recall the names of many of the movies I’ve watched over the years.
If you want protagonists who are ordinary, may I suggest the late Iain Banks? In his science-fiction novels, the protagonists are ordinary people for the Culture, his civilization in a galaxy-spanning space-traveling future. it is inhabited by super-intelligent artificial-intelligence robots with jokey names, bizarre technological and natural marvels of enormous scale, fearful fanatic antagonists who cannot be reasoned with, facing off against do-gooders who leave a cornucopiac utopia to try to help the less-fortunate using whatever means are necessary, and at the end whatever more-or-less ordinary person Banks has chosen as a protagonist will find that a malign fate has put them at the sharp end of the spear that might thwart the evil purposes of the antagonists. They will then have to screw their courage to the sticking place, remember that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one, do what needs to be done, and die—or maybe not, if Banks was feeling exceptionally generous on the day he wrote the climax.
In my view, it works.
> Naomi Kanakia: We need myth-makers, not just myth-busters: 'I fell out of love with science fiction.... I kept thinking, "What if we're not exceptional. What if we're ordinary? What then?"... I's obvious what would happen: they would die.... To survive exceptional circumstances, you need to either be very skilled or very lucky (or both). And if I was committed to writing about people with ordinary luck and skill, then I couldn't write about exceptional circumstances...
Everyday, I write "Make Myths" at the end of each journal entry. Along with a few other short reminders.
This is utterly brilliant. Loved it.
Fascinating. I'm not interested in Westerns of any flavor but reading about the history of them was a delight. Thank you, Naomi.
Anti-postmodern aktion
I was going to ask about Charles Portis, because I loved the Coen brothers' version of True Grit. I've not read the book. I did read all of Elmore Leonard's short westerns set in Arizona and liked them.
I was at PulpFest a few weeks ago, where there were a lot of those genre readers, of various flavors (including some Westerns), most of whom also had the collector trait. It's more than just wanting the emotional reassurance of reading the same story over and over (which in SF / fantasy circles is often called "escape"), though there were people there who openly admitted that their lives sucked and they wanted a way to transcend them. There's also that collector thing, which is a way of mastering a volume of material so that you can show off that knowledge in friendly competition with other fans. Old-school SF fans used to call that 'egoboo,' as short for "ego boost."
I really appreciated your discussion of the emergent nature of creativity. We see a similar situation in science, where culture demands that progress be simplified to a series of geniuses, but the work is actually done bit by bit, by large numbers of people who receive little or no credit.