What is Post-Western?

The 1996 film Lone Star directed by John Sayles tells the tale of  Sheriff Sam Deeds and his search for the truth into a decades-old murder case. Sam must find the truth for himself, which comes with its own personal disappointments and complexities. Sam must both accept and reject the mythology of his father the great Buddy Deeds, defining the film as ‘post-Western,” in which traditional conventions of the Western genre are complicated and challenged.

Throughout of the majority of the film, Sam Deeds rejects the idea of his father as a legendary hero, but once he finally learns the circumstances of Wade’s death, he realizes that upsetting the entire town’s conception of the legend Buddy Deeds legend is more trouble than it’s worth. This shows that Sam Deeds must both work with and against regional ideology in order to make personal and public sense of his father’s legacy.  Critic Neal Campbell defines ‘post-Western’ as “working both with and against the mythic frame of the genre, deliberately invoking and critiquing many of its guiding values while pointing the audience beyond classic Western ideologies” (Campbell 206). Thus, while Sam initially rejects the town’s celebration of his father, Sam later learns that the Buddy Deeds myth serves a purpose in uniting townspeople of different backgrounds and classes, such as Otis and Hollis, Mercedes and the town’s business sector, for example. After their final confrontation, during which Hollis reminds Sam that if the identity of the skeletal remains gets out, people might figure Buddy Deeds as the killer. But Sam has learned, and responds,” Buddy is a god-damned legend. He can handle it.” This shows that Sam has both personally rejected but also accepted his father’s public fame, therefore, illuminating the complexity of which the past can affect characters but not dictate their actions and future.

The final scene of the film also serves to complicate the traditional Western cross-racial love-interest trope, exposing another post-Western twist. Pilar learns from Sam that they share a father, Buddy Deeds, making the lovers half-siblings. The scene is tense and viewers worry. But as Pilar can no longer have children, the couple decides they can “Start from scratch,” and not let the past, or their shared biological bloodline, interfere.  The line “Start from scratch” acts as a motif in the film, also explored by the Colonel, his son Chet, and Chet’s grandfather Otis, to express  the idea that such traditional “borders” obstructing racial, familial, and intimate relationships can be reexamined, especially as a way to rewrite hurtful assumptions made in the past.

For Westerns, the past is significant and plays an important role in understanding the relationships between people and the land; however, the post-Western encourages its audience to go one step farther and call the past into question, just as Pilar signs off, “All that other stuff, all that history? To hell with it, right? Forget the Alamo.”

Works Cited

Lone Star. Dir. John Sayles. A Sony Pictures Classics Release of a Castle Rock Entertainment         Presentation, 1996.

Neil Campbell. "From Story to Film: Brokeback Mountain's "In-Between" Spaces." Canadian         Review of American Studies 39.2 (2009): 205-220. Project MUSE. Web. 21 Feb. 2016.        <https://muse.jhu.edu/>.

Ninja Camp: Pynchon’s Satire of the Commercial Narrative’s “Fictive Time” in Vineland

Throughout Vineland, Pynchon critiques consumer culture of American mainstream media and the techniques used to create our summer blockbusters and weeknight sitcoms. The novel is packed with incessant references to “the Tube,” as well Pynchon’s own use of some of the elements that create what critic Frederic Jameson describes as “ the simulacrum of fictive time” (75).  In particular, Pynchon’s writing style during DL’s flashbacks from her life as a ninja assassin satirize the stereotypical romance, slapstick, and flashiness of American mainstream media. Throughout these cheesy scenes, Pynchon plays with key temporal elements traditionally used to create and break “fictive time,” such as coincidence and interruption, in order to draw attention to our ceaseless and empty consumption of media.

    Pynchon calls attention to coincidence as one element that can achieve “fictive time,” or the effect of realistic timing that is actually manipulated in order to captivate a mainstream audience.   In his chapter “Video” in Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,  Fredric Jameson describes “fictive time” as “one of the various film techniques” in which a “movie screen [can] radically foreshorten reality as the clock ticks” (74). This idea is an identifier of postmodernism because the representation of reality has become more important the reality itself. While mainstream viewers are captivated by commercial use of “fictive time,” Pynchon hopes to disrupt his readers from this reverie. More specifically, Pynchon uses coincidence as a temporal technique used commercially to create “fictive time,” namely the coincidental scene in which Prairie and DL meet. Here, Pynchon uses an aspect of magical realism to aid this coincidence. At the wedding, DL carries with her a “small silvery unit” that can detect her partner Takeshi Fumimota’s business card, which Prairie carries with her (99).  Just as readers are coached to suspend their disbelief in situations of magical realism, so are they taught to do so in matters of Dickensian coincidence, which aids the writer’s development of “fictive time,” as the story is sped up. Pynchon satirizes this illusion of seamless “fictive time” and thus draws our attention to the temporal techniques that achieve this effect.  Therefore, Pynchon is playing with coincidence as one the “various techniques of film narrative,” to show how preposterous it is that mainstream audiences will suspend their disbelief for such ridiculous devices. But this serendipitous meeting between DL and Prairie foreshadows Pynchon’s continued play with temporarily for the next three chapters, allowing his readers the simultaneous joy and discomfort of incessant interruption.

    As Pynchon continues DL’s flashbacks, he interrupts his own seamless, action-packed prose to refocus readers’ attention on the original frame of the story. In this way, Pynchon is calling attention to his own play with the structure of the narrative, causing readers to notice the elements with which he creates and manipulates reality.   Jameson argues the medium of video, particularly experimental video, best captures our postmodern connection to technology because the medium itself draws attention to its own technology (74). This is what Pynchon is doing with his prose, causing readers to question why he is making such elements visible when he has the ability as a writer to easily mask them. For example, Prairie is captivated by a photograph of her mother, in which she can experience her mother’s friendship with DL: “Prairie could feel in the bright California colors, sharpened up pixel by pixel into deathlessness” (115). Here, Prairie  continues to gaze at the photo, imagining a conversation between the two young women. But even in Pynchon’s flawless prose here we notice that Prairie’s aware of the “California colors, sharpened up pixel by pixel into deathlessness,” showing that Pynchon has made the medium, or the technology and its “pixel[s]”, visible for us. This interruption, and visibility, allows readers to question their own relationship with media, especially when photographs and videos have the ability to create a sense of “deathlessness,” the ultimate distraction.

And he will not stop; Pynchon continues to tease readers with another interruption to his conventional illusion of “fictive time,” continuing to disrupt the comfort of a conventional narrative, and draw our attention to how he is constructing his prose. While exploring the files of her mother, Prairie is jolted from her sleepy trance, “which the unit promptly sensed, beginning to blink, following this with a sound chip playing the hook from the Everlys’ ‘Wake Up, Little Susie’ over and over again” (115). Thus, as Prairie is losing herself in the fiction she is building when constructing meaning out of all the files and this particular photograph of her mother, she is jolted awake by the computer that can somehow magically detect her falling asleep. This interruption comes from a conscious machine’s choice in pop music, alluding to a television’s quintessential use of interruption, the commercial advertisement. And just as a sitcom’s plot arch is determined by commercial timing, Pynchon suggests that now it is the  technology and not the story that can unfortunately determine a narrative’s structure.

Pynchon’s interruptions refocus our attention on the frame of the story and also call attention to Pynchon’s interest in what label him as a Postmodern author. Pynchon does not allow readers to forget what they’re reading, thus calling for readers’ heightened attention to the world around them. Jameson poses that our consumption of such commercial narratives are often forgotten due to their reliance on such enchanting and manipulative techniques. Jameson describes how one of the“most interesting feature[s]” of video production is that “out of the rigorously nonfiction languages of video, commercial television manages to produce the simulacrum of fictive time” (75).  Here, Jameson uses “simulacrum” to mean the representation of reality and not reality itself. Writers achieve this verisimilitude of timing in a commercial narrative while in actuality using many temporal techniques to speed up, skip, or slow down certain events and details.  Pynchon seeks to remind readers and call attention to such temporal techniques to show his interest in how our attention span is changing and being shaped and manipulated by our constant consumption this media.

While Pynchon might not support the mass hypnosis of ninja flicks and prime time Tube, he expertly understands how such narratives are constructed and can reflect these same effects in his prose. However, with his novel, Pynchon can disrupt the illusion of “fictive time” in many different ways, allowing us to reflect on our relationship with media. Instead of consuming such narratives mindlessly, Pynchon forces us to do the work, making our entertainment experience that much more meaningful.

Works Cited

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke         UP, 1991. Print.

Pynchon, Thomas. Vineland. Boston: Little, Brown, 1990. Print.

Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses

Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses tells the tale of John Grady Cole, a sixteen-year-old young man who decides to leave his Texas home for Mexico to find work after his grandfather has passed away.  Cole’s best friend Lacey Rawlins joins him, and together they ride on and end up caring for Jimmy Blevins, a younger boy who brings with him nothing but trouble. Throughout the novel McCarthy romanticizes the desperado lifestyle, landscape, and mythic role of horses, but McCarthy’s portrayal of the protagonist John Grady Cole rewrites the stereotype as a more sensitive and even androgynous being, showing that love and compassion, not violence, can define the American cowboy.

    In her essay “About Men,” travel writer Gretel Ehrlich argues the cowboys she spent time with while passing through Wyoming overturn the popular stereotype of the cowboy as strong, silent and stoic; instead, Ehrlich contends, the cowboy is a “ balancing act between male and female, manliness and femininity,” which is also a more fitting way to describe the disposition of the McCarthy’s John Grady Cole (84).  Erlich’s main point is that the cowboy is sensitive namely due to his work with animals. Cole is nothing if not a horse whisperer. After breaking his first horses at la hacienda, he continues to build relationships with them and speaks to them softly in Spanish (translated): “I am the commander of the mares . . .I and I alone. Without charity

from my hands you have nothing. Neither food nor water nor children. I am the one who brings

the mares of the mountains, the young mares, the savage ones, and the mares that burn with

passion” (Priola).  Here, we can see that Cole leads the horses with authority but that he also respects them for their own private “passions” and pasts, especially the mares. Thus, we can see he is not only a lonely desperado who has killed a man and cauterized his own wounds with a pistol barrel, but that he represents qualities this, as Erlich reminds us, “Ranchers are midwives, hunters, nurturers, providers, and conservationists all at once” (84).

    Just as a god or higher being might contain the multitudes of the masculine and feminine and all in between and beyond, McCarthy aims to develop Cole in this way. His love for horses and Alejandra, his sensitive conscience, and his inability to commit even vengeful violence show that he is a cowboy more clearly defined by humility and selflessness.

Works Cited

Ehrlich, Gretel. "About Men." The Solace of Open Spaces. New York: Penguin, 1985. 82-85.         Print.

McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. New York: Vintage, 1993. Print.

Priola, Marty. Translations: All the Pretty Horses, page 128. CormacMcCarthy.com. The Cormac     McCarthy Society, 2016. Web. 14 Feb. 2016.

Karen Russell's "Proving Up"

     In Karen Russell’s short story “Proving Up,” eleven-year-old Miles leaves his family’s Nebraskan farm on horseback to intercept a rumored government inspector who audits for the Homestead Act of 1872. The last condition of the Homestead Act requires the dwelling must have a glass window, which Miles carries across the plains to share with a neighboring family who is also hoping to “prove up” (86). Unfortunately, for Miles “proving up” proves fatal, as Russell demonstrates by weaving motifs of blindness ultimately symbolizing the West’s ruinous obsession with ownership and materialism.

            Miles and his horse Nore fight across the blizzarding plains in blindness, causing Miles to realize the price he is willing to pay for dignity. Miles becomes aware that “If the Hox glass is in pieces, I won’t ever go back home. I’d rather die here than return to our dugout without it” (102). At this point, Miles’s protection of the pane of glass, whose function is to protect a dwelling’s inhabitants from exterior elements, has taken control over him, along with the paternal pressures that govern his family life and wider culture. Luckily, the glass has not yet shattered, and Miles is able to continue when a branch cuts his eyelid, blinding his sight with blood.  Miles admits, “Outside of my mind I can barely see” (100). Here, Miles has finally assimilated into the West’s culture and has become fatally obsessed with his ownership of the Window procuring his family’s land title. 

Miles’s protection of the glass consumes him. He continues through the blizzard on foot, “I crouch over the burlap like something feeding--my skin becoming one more layer of protection for the glass…The elements seal my eyes, so that I have to keep watch over the Window blindly in with my arms” (102). He nurses the Window as if he were a mother and it his child. The window’s importance is further emphasized by its capitalization as a proper noun or name throughout the text. Thus, as Miles’s protection deepens, as does his blindness as his eyes completely “seal.” This change marks Miles, like his father, as a man of the frontier.

  Thus, Russell illustrates for readers that it was not the homesteaders who owned the land, but, as Death hauntingly reminds Miles near the end of the story, “No, you are mistaken, sir. The land owns you” (109).