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
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.)
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 .
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.
Yes it's so funny. Knives Out is just a good whodunnit! But I do think there's something accessible about Knives Out--you don't need to have ever watched another mystery before in order to get Knives Out. So I think what agents are saying is they want a book that refreshes genre conventions and makes them accessible for other people, which is exactly what Shane and The Searchers did. They were _like_ pulp westerns, but written for a mainstream audience that wasn't that familiar with the pulps.
HARD agree about Knives Out... and I think I know the exact agents you're talking about. Just because Knives Out is fully aware that it's a whodunnit doesn't make it a subversion in any sense. It just makes it fun.
Martin's a great example: he hates _unearned_ tropes. That doesn't mean he doesn't believe in the tropes! He might not even be writing grim dark, in the end!
From a sheer potential energy standpoint, it's always easier to destroy than to make. Consider any major human-targeted bombing of a building. That's deconstruction. Happens in minutes, seconds even.
I liked your post! I think with ASOIAF it's so complicated because the quality of the first three books is so much higher than the later books, and the first three books do have something of a cohesive arc. There's clearly something that gets gestured to in the text: goodness paired with strength is good--that is the ideal. Goodness + strength defeats someone who has strength but no goodness. However many of the people in the book are good but not strong, or they're good and strong but quite brittle and close-minded. It's really a very rich trilogy.
Aww thanks. True! Part of that too is that 4 and 5 were separated in arguably the worst way possible. There are many attempts out there to recombine them into one book and George seems to have given a head nod to this one that it's chronologically correct. It's the way I read it and I really enjoyed it this way:
Word to the wise among the rest of us: if we HAVE to split up a book because of writing too many characters, we must make sure we keep SOME of our readers's favorite characters in each book.
Yeah, I think you're right in your assessment. I think I disagree with his goodness and strength obsession. There IS power in weakness, the meek do indeed inherit the earth when those who live by the sword die by the sword, but that seems absent in the trilogy to me in a way it most certainly wasn't in the War of the Roses. It's like a modified nihilism, in a way, but I get what he's after.
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.
Nice to see a comment from you! I've really been liking your posts lately.
Yes I felt like maybe I would get in trouble for my jab at Station Eleven. The answer is that you're right--I think novels set in the future can be good even if they ignore the genre sci-fi tradition. Cormac McCarthy's _The Road_ is excellent, and it's excellent precisely because it ignores sci-fi conventions. The world of the Road makes no logical sense--there's no way it could possibly work and scifi readers would've rebelled at its cavalier treatment of ecology--but the book is still great.
With Station Eleven I dunno. I liked it at the time, but I do think it was kind of a retread of ground that sci-fi writers had covered a lot better in a ton of post-apocalyptic books. Although it was interesting to give equal time to before/after the apocalypse. That's the kind of thing that wouldn't really fly in a genre sci-fi novel but that she could get away with for a mainstream audience, and it was a good and interesting thing to do. But the two halves of the story felt so bifurcated that I don't know if the author really got a lot of narrative or thematic mileage out of it.
Basically, I am glad that it got published, and it definitely rewarded the time I spent reading it, but I did think the book could've been more ambitious.
Glad you've been enjoying them! Yeah, maybe the issue is that I haven't read as much sci-fi. It's been a while since I read it and I do think that the fill-in-the-gaps style of bifurcated storytelling is not everybody's taste but I personally enjoy it, lots to connect the dots with.
Before I get into the bulk of my comment, I want to remind everyone that the Luminist archives have every issue of the western pulps and western comic books available for the curious:
I 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.
This is great! Yes I agree that Frodo is an everyman. You're right, I should think about that more. I do feel like Frodos are quite rare in fantasy and science fiction--I wonder why that is. Or maybe that's just my perception, and it's not accurate.
I think you're right that the Western DNA is in the crime novel, in science fiction / fantasy, and in the action thriller. So it hasn't really died. In the same way, there was this whole genre of colonial adventure (like the Man Who Would Be King) that doesn't exist anymore, but got imported into the Western. The Western was basically this colonial adventure, but in an American setting.
I _love_ James Fenimore Cooper's leatherstocking tales. I wrote about him earlier this year. https://www.woman-of-letters.com/p/james-fenimore-cooper-is-more-honest I wanted to mention him in this post, but somehow there wasn't a good place. With James Fenimore Cooper what's interesting is he's very interested in the Indians side. He has many named Indian characters who are a major driver of the plot--most Westerns don't really have that, they only have glancing mentions of Indians (some don't feature Indians at all). JFC is also very overtly romantic in a way that I find kind of charming. It's relatively light on grittiness. But it's astonishing how many of the tropes of the Western date back to JFC and to these books!
Part of it, I think, is that very, very few Tolkien imitators actually understood Tolkien. It's like how Peter Jackson got Bilbo's buttons right but THE LORD OF THE RINGS wrong. I doubt a better adaptation can be made, but some of the soul and point was excised by a guy who hadn't even read the letters enough to know that pipeweed wasn't marijuana. I mean Pippin and Merry are still funny, but it kind of misses the point. So too with Frodo: it's hard to write incompetent characters. Hell, I think it was even hard for them to even dial back Bond's competence for the Daniel Craig versions: they have to be extremely sympathetic and protag HARD.
Good point about Kipling, et al. I'll have to think on that one. What predicates the colonial adventure, I wonder?
I'll check out the JFC post. Fascinating about that: more should focus on the Indian side. I've written an epic alliterative poem based on a couple of my ancestors and land taking place in what was basically a medieval empire in the Americas, died out from drought, but the graphic novelist stalled out on the illustration. Hoping for a new partner somewhere, someway. I love that stuff.
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've been reading a lot of L'amour lately, to try and understand what the hype is. Will have a post about him at some point--hopefully won't try my readers' patience too much
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.
True Grit is something unique. It does feel essentially like a mythic Western, but it's also different in the ways you've pointed out. It doesn't really fit into any schema. It's also the rare mythic Western that's really survived having a great movie made about it. I read True Grit after watching the movie (which I adored) and I adored the book too!
Hi Rich. Did you ever get to "Lonesome Dove"? If not, you should. McMurtry's best, and my favorite of his stuff. Our Host didn't mention it, but McM really was a Son of the Pioneers in that part of West Texas (Archer City). I have a long love-letter to the book at https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/506836274
Yes I wasn't really sure what to make of that in Riders of the Purple Sage. It definitely feels like there was some paranoia in the air about Mormon people--it's a pretty unflattering portrait in the book.
I love this piece and this project. I've almost got myself convinced that the lack of mythic heroes is what defines Serious Lit vs. Genre Lit in the last 100 or so years. Lets's say it starts with Stephen Daedalus's forge (which presumes a melting or deconstruction of the available matter) of a new conscience. The shift is not just stylistic, it's explicitly moral (for better or worse). The message is "don't fall for the heroic myth--that's what got us in this mess in the first place."
The Serious Lit people might have a point--someone's idea of a mythic hero is someone else's tyrant. The call of the non-genre modernists, then, is not to idealize the hero, but to pity the common ("Attention must be paid to such a man," says Linda Lo(w)man of Willy).
The irony is we still want mythic heroes, and pity can be less satisfying/stirring than heroism, pity being what happens when heroism didn't. So the hero becomes the author (you'll see the face of Joyce and Woolf on their covers, but you'll still see horses and cowboys on McMurtry's covers). OR genre will fill the void. And not just literary genres, but lit-adjacent narrative genres like movies (the Marvel reference is perfect), video games (the player is literally the hero that is predestined to succeed in saving the princess), and politics (what else is Trump to his supporters than John Wayne saving the white girl from the Comanches?).
Among other things, this great essay calls for the inclusion of past genre masters like Zane Grey and Jack Schaeffer into the ranks of Serious Lit, and if my thesis is anywhere near the mark, it calls for erasing what separates Genre from Serious Lit: the lack of the mythic hero. (Did old man McCarthy start down this road? Isn't the father in The Road a mythic western hero? He's literally called "the good guy," if memory serves).
McCarthy has done it the best. He has found a way to combine mythic heroism with the conventions of the 20th-century modernist novel. I personally like _The Road_ the best out of all the books of his I've read, though I know not everyone agrees.
My dad, who had not read a novel in let’s say 40 years found The Road on a plane and loved it. I have to think it was exactly that mythic Good Guy quality.
Please don't number all of the traditional Westerns readers as dead--there are a few of us hanging on like stubborn sagebrush in the lee of a sandstone outcropping. I grew up reading everything I could get my hands on--including my grandfather's well worn Louis L'Amour and and Elmore Leonard paperbacks . I snuck my mother's copy of "Lonesome Dove" off the bookshelf when I was in the 6th grade.
My mother so adores Westerns that she named her dog Augustus McCrae.
I believe that the Western is such an essential thread in the fabric of American literature, that my homeschooled sons read L'Amour's "Callaghen" as part of their American literature class.
I believe that many of the L'Amours you have read are similar enough to Callaghen that it will not feel sufficiently different to be worth the time. For a first experience of the genre, as in my boys' case, it is a fun adventure read.
I love Cowboy Bebop, it's so good. Also gets at the fact that the Western had a strong influence in other countries--it's kind of funny to think about, but something about this American frontier myth even caught peoples' imagination in Germany, Japan, Italy, etc.
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.
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.)
Thank you! I'm glad you liked it
Did you read it? Title?
I used to read a lot of Tanith Lee's stuff. I kinda sorta remember (maybe) the one you're thinking of? She was prolific!
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 .
I agree completely! You put it very well--All these deconstructions often take out a lot of complexity that's there in the original.
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.
Yes it's so funny. Knives Out is just a good whodunnit! But I do think there's something accessible about Knives Out--you don't need to have ever watched another mystery before in order to get Knives Out. So I think what agents are saying is they want a book that refreshes genre conventions and makes them accessible for other people, which is exactly what Shane and The Searchers did. They were _like_ pulp westerns, but written for a mainstream audience that wasn't that familiar with the pulps.
HARD agree about Knives Out... and I think I know the exact agents you're talking about. Just because Knives Out is fully aware that it's a whodunnit doesn't make it a subversion in any sense. It just makes it fun.
Martin's a great example: he hates _unearned_ tropes. That doesn't mean he doesn't believe in the tropes! He might not even be writing grim dark, in the end!
• https://lanceschaubert.substack.com/p/does-george-r-r-martin-write-grimdark
From a sheer potential energy standpoint, it's always easier to destroy than to make. Consider any major human-targeted bombing of a building. That's deconstruction. Happens in minutes, seconds even.
I liked your post! I think with ASOIAF it's so complicated because the quality of the first three books is so much higher than the later books, and the first three books do have something of a cohesive arc. There's clearly something that gets gestured to in the text: goodness paired with strength is good--that is the ideal. Goodness + strength defeats someone who has strength but no goodness. However many of the people in the book are good but not strong, or they're good and strong but quite brittle and close-minded. It's really a very rich trilogy.
Aww thanks. True! Part of that too is that 4 and 5 were separated in arguably the worst way possible. There are many attempts out there to recombine them into one book and George seems to have given a head nod to this one that it's chronologically correct. It's the way I read it and I really enjoyed it this way:
https://afeastwithdragons.com
Word to the wise among the rest of us: if we HAVE to split up a book because of writing too many characters, we must make sure we keep SOME of our readers's favorite characters in each book.
Yeah, I think you're right in your assessment. I think I disagree with his goodness and strength obsession. There IS power in weakness, the meek do indeed inherit the earth when those who live by the sword die by the sword, but that seems absent in the trilogy to me in a way it most certainly wasn't in the War of the Roses. It's like a modified nihilism, in a way, but I get what he's after.
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.
Nice to see a comment from you! I've really been liking your posts lately.
Yes I felt like maybe I would get in trouble for my jab at Station Eleven. The answer is that you're right--I think novels set in the future can be good even if they ignore the genre sci-fi tradition. Cormac McCarthy's _The Road_ is excellent, and it's excellent precisely because it ignores sci-fi conventions. The world of the Road makes no logical sense--there's no way it could possibly work and scifi readers would've rebelled at its cavalier treatment of ecology--but the book is still great.
With Station Eleven I dunno. I liked it at the time, but I do think it was kind of a retread of ground that sci-fi writers had covered a lot better in a ton of post-apocalyptic books. Although it was interesting to give equal time to before/after the apocalypse. That's the kind of thing that wouldn't really fly in a genre sci-fi novel but that she could get away with for a mainstream audience, and it was a good and interesting thing to do. But the two halves of the story felt so bifurcated that I don't know if the author really got a lot of narrative or thematic mileage out of it.
Basically, I am glad that it got published, and it definitely rewarded the time I spent reading it, but I did think the book could've been more ambitious.
Glad you've been enjoying them! Yeah, maybe the issue is that I haven't read as much sci-fi. It's been a while since I read it and I do think that the fill-in-the-gaps style of bifurcated storytelling is not everybody's taste but I personally enjoy it, lots to connect the dots with.
Everyday, I write "Make Myths" at the end of each journal entry. Along with a few other short reminders.
I like that =]
Before I get into the bulk of my comment, I want to remind everyone that the Luminist archives have every issue of the western pulps and western comic books available for the curious:
• PULPS: https://www.luminist.org/archives/PU/
• COMICS: https://www.luminist.org/archives/CB/
I 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.
This is great! Yes I agree that Frodo is an everyman. You're right, I should think about that more. I do feel like Frodos are quite rare in fantasy and science fiction--I wonder why that is. Or maybe that's just my perception, and it's not accurate.
I think you're right that the Western DNA is in the crime novel, in science fiction / fantasy, and in the action thriller. So it hasn't really died. In the same way, there was this whole genre of colonial adventure (like the Man Who Would Be King) that doesn't exist anymore, but got imported into the Western. The Western was basically this colonial adventure, but in an American setting.
I _love_ James Fenimore Cooper's leatherstocking tales. I wrote about him earlier this year. https://www.woman-of-letters.com/p/james-fenimore-cooper-is-more-honest I wanted to mention him in this post, but somehow there wasn't a good place. With James Fenimore Cooper what's interesting is he's very interested in the Indians side. He has many named Indian characters who are a major driver of the plot--most Westerns don't really have that, they only have glancing mentions of Indians (some don't feature Indians at all). JFC is also very overtly romantic in a way that I find kind of charming. It's relatively light on grittiness. But it's astonishing how many of the tropes of the Western date back to JFC and to these books!
Part of it, I think, is that very, very few Tolkien imitators actually understood Tolkien. It's like how Peter Jackson got Bilbo's buttons right but THE LORD OF THE RINGS wrong. I doubt a better adaptation can be made, but some of the soul and point was excised by a guy who hadn't even read the letters enough to know that pipeweed wasn't marijuana. I mean Pippin and Merry are still funny, but it kind of misses the point. So too with Frodo: it's hard to write incompetent characters. Hell, I think it was even hard for them to even dial back Bond's competence for the Daniel Craig versions: they have to be extremely sympathetic and protag HARD.
Good point about Kipling, et al. I'll have to think on that one. What predicates the colonial adventure, I wonder?
I'll check out the JFC post. Fascinating about that: more should focus on the Indian side. I've written an epic alliterative poem based on a couple of my ancestors and land taking place in what was basically a medieval empire in the Americas, died out from drought, but the graphic novelist stalled out on the illustration. Hoping for a new partner somewhere, someway. I love that stuff.
What did you think of the Washington Irving bits?
https://www.amazon.com/Washington-Irving-Narratives-Adventures-Bonneville/dp/1931082537
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've been reading a lot of L'amour lately, to try and understand what the hype is. Will have a post about him at some point--hopefully won't try my readers' patience too much
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.
True Grit is something unique. It does feel essentially like a mythic Western, but it's also different in the ways you've pointed out. It doesn't really fit into any schema. It's also the rare mythic Western that's really survived having a great movie made about it. I read True Grit after watching the movie (which I adored) and I adored the book too!
Two great movies, in fact (in different ways)
Hi Rich. Did you ever get to "Lonesome Dove"? If not, you should. McMurtry's best, and my favorite of his stuff. Our Host didn't mention it, but McM really was a Son of the Pioneers in that part of West Texas (Archer City). I have a long love-letter to the book at https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/506836274
I haven't got to Lonesome Dove yet but it's definitely in my plans.
It strikes me that both the founding detective novel--A Study in Scarlet--and the founding Western--Riders of the Purple Sage--have Mormon villains.
Yes I wasn't really sure what to make of that in Riders of the Purple Sage. It definitely feels like there was some paranoia in the air about Mormon people--it's a pretty unflattering portrait in the book.
I really enjoyed reading this piece--it's now got me excited for the romantasy of 2035 or 2040.
Me too! Surely something good will happen
I love this piece and this project. I've almost got myself convinced that the lack of mythic heroes is what defines Serious Lit vs. Genre Lit in the last 100 or so years. Lets's say it starts with Stephen Daedalus's forge (which presumes a melting or deconstruction of the available matter) of a new conscience. The shift is not just stylistic, it's explicitly moral (for better or worse). The message is "don't fall for the heroic myth--that's what got us in this mess in the first place."
The Serious Lit people might have a point--someone's idea of a mythic hero is someone else's tyrant. The call of the non-genre modernists, then, is not to idealize the hero, but to pity the common ("Attention must be paid to such a man," says Linda Lo(w)man of Willy).
The irony is we still want mythic heroes, and pity can be less satisfying/stirring than heroism, pity being what happens when heroism didn't. So the hero becomes the author (you'll see the face of Joyce and Woolf on their covers, but you'll still see horses and cowboys on McMurtry's covers). OR genre will fill the void. And not just literary genres, but lit-adjacent narrative genres like movies (the Marvel reference is perfect), video games (the player is literally the hero that is predestined to succeed in saving the princess), and politics (what else is Trump to his supporters than John Wayne saving the white girl from the Comanches?).
Among other things, this great essay calls for the inclusion of past genre masters like Zane Grey and Jack Schaeffer into the ranks of Serious Lit, and if my thesis is anywhere near the mark, it calls for erasing what separates Genre from Serious Lit: the lack of the mythic hero. (Did old man McCarthy start down this road? Isn't the father in The Road a mythic western hero? He's literally called "the good guy," if memory serves).
McCarthy has done it the best. He has found a way to combine mythic heroism with the conventions of the 20th-century modernist novel. I personally like _The Road_ the best out of all the books of his I've read, though I know not everyone agrees.
My dad, who had not read a novel in let’s say 40 years found The Road on a plane and loved it. I have to think it was exactly that mythic Good Guy quality.
Please don't number all of the traditional Westerns readers as dead--there are a few of us hanging on like stubborn sagebrush in the lee of a sandstone outcropping. I grew up reading everything I could get my hands on--including my grandfather's well worn Louis L'Amour and and Elmore Leonard paperbacks . I snuck my mother's copy of "Lonesome Dove" off the bookshelf when I was in the 6th grade.
My mother so adores Westerns that she named her dog Augustus McCrae.
I believe that the Western is such an essential thread in the fabric of American literature, that my homeschooled sons read L'Amour's "Callaghen" as part of their American literature class.
Yay! That's nice. Do you recommend Callaghen? I've now read 10-15 L'Amours but not that one yet.
I believe that many of the L'Amours you have read are similar enough to Callaghen that it will not feel sufficiently different to be worth the time. For a first experience of the genre, as in my boys' case, it is a fun adventure read.
I now want to add some westerns to my never ending tbr.
I know right? Look at me! I write a post like this and immediately people recommend ten more Westerns that all look kinda good!
Fascinating. I'm not interested in Westerns of any flavor but reading about the history of them was a delight. Thank you, Naomi.
I think your early reading was the way to go! Fantasy is generally about hope. And we can all use a deal of that!
what about the sci-fi westerns like Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, Dark Tower?
I love Cowboy Bebop, it's so good. Also gets at the fact that the Western had a strong influence in other countries--it's kind of funny to think about, but something about this American frontier myth even caught peoples' imagination in Germany, Japan, Italy, etc.
Also this. This pinged in my mind when reading, but I forgot that it did. Great point.