Cooper's Pathfinder: Revising Historical Understanding

Abstract

AMES FENIMORE COOPER'S Leatherstocking Tales are typically read as a saga of American frontier that focuses primarily on their more or less unified protagonist Natty Bumppo. Such mythological readings seek unity in diversity of various tales, and yet that need to wrest harmony from flux of events that confound even Natty himself tells us more about reader's preference for unity than about discontinuities of novels. A search for unity reduces inconsistencies in character to mythic American who is the sum of all his names and results in interpretive violence to dissonances of historical experience.' This propensity to reduce tales to a single epic is responsible for prevailing critical notion that in order to consider a single novel one must discuss them all. Thus mythic reading substitutes chronology of character for order of composition, subordinates disorder of history to an aesthetic criterion, and reveals an ideological agenda that ought not go unexamined. The search for ideal meanings in detachment from present practice ignores power of fiction to refigure world. For example, myth of frontier quietly relegates present political conflict to an ahistorical, contemplative past. In regretting effects of colonization at level of sentiment and nostalgia, mythical reading tries to reconcile irreconcilable by discovering in past a determinant order that secures our own present from conflicts of that past. In effect myth buries unresolved tensions in safety of distance. Accordingly, responsibility for rape of wilderness, for genocide of Indians, and for aggressive expansionism of European culture belongs only to past and makes no claim on us. It is hardly too much to say that a mythic reading of Cooper's hero champions history as a means of escaping it and risks becoming complicitous with what it opposes. If mythologizing disposition to find a timeless meaning in tales is insufficient, so too is assumption that Natty is a mimesis of a particular person. To see these novels as essentially biographical,