Kate Horsley’s New Mexico Trilogy: Masks of Ambivalence in the Southwest

Abstract

Roxanne Swentzell. SOMEONE TO TALK TO. 2001. Clay. 10"w x 15"d x 18"h. Courtesy of the artist. W o r k s R e v i e w e d Kate Horsley. Crazy Woman. Albuquerque, N.Mex.: La Alameda Press, 1992. 239 pages, $14.00. --------. A Killing in New Town. Albuquerque, N.Mex.: La Alameda Press, 1996. 271 pages, $14.00. --------. Careless Love: Or the Land of Promise. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003. 249 pages, $23.95. Ka t e Ho r s le y ’s New Mexico T rilogy: Ma s k s o f A m b iv a l e n c e in t h e S o u t h w e s t D o n n R a w l i n g s Despite all precautions, fiction continues to shape our understanding. Rudimentary stories insistently repeat themselves in our lives. But we may be compelled to turn toward all those muttering, chaotic voices that push against the familiar shape of the tale. Official stories redundantly colonize our experience, as it were, but sooner or later the buried life talks back—and writes back (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin, passim).* Kate Horsley has a good ear for the voices that talk back. She has produced in the last decade or so three novels that make up a coherent trilogy all set in New Mexico: Crazy Woman, A Killing in New Town, and Careless Love: Or the Land of Promise, and the publication of Careless Love provides an opportunity to examine how the trilogy functions as a whole and where these characters have been. These novels are crowded with voices that talk back against the official colonizing stories of a westering empire. Revisionist fiction about the West has become its own tradition by now with some of its own strident patterns. But Horsley’s fictive world is filled with such rich and questioning humanity, such resonant pain and unpredictable delight, that it does not settle into a mannered revisionism. Novels that come alive hurt, according to D. H. Lawrence, because they work against the “real voluptuousness [that] lies in re-acting old relationships, and at the best, getting an alcoholic sort of pleasure out of it, slightly depraving” (530). They hurt because they tear away the comforts of denial. Horsley’s novels imagine the unrecorded lives that would flesh out the historical record she has so closely studied. The official stories are re-enacted in a critical, subversive, often comic or grotesque context that opens us to much that we need (but do not always want) to know. Her fiction con­ tributes to an unauthorized, illicit, irreducible history, the history of what Lawrence called the uniquely “living moment” (527). Although each novel has its own cast of characters, Horsley’s tril­ ogy works as a whole, a reading of each novel informing our under­ standing of the others. They present a clear historical progression, showing the increasing impact of the Anglo incursion in New Mexico, from shortly before the Civil War to the late 1880s. Horsley traces the entangled implications for the development of the West of sex and gen­ 1 0 6 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L i t e r a t u r e S p r in g 2 0 0 4 der, ethnicity, religion, economics, and loss of roots in place—with the railroad playing a powerful symbolic role in illuminating how diverse motives and fears mesh in an aggressive capitalist empire. She makes subtle use of the captivity narrative, the La Llorona folktale, and the metaphor of the theater to explore the boundaries of self and culture. Most significantly, her protagonists, in their efforts to create themselves anew in their westward migration, encounter in the landscapes and peoples of the West a range of intractable potencies and uncanny pos­ sibilities that force them back upon themselves, with a seditious refusal of closure and yet with genuine revelation. It’s an outcome that leads to tentative but lifelike compromises. As Edwina says near the end of Careless Love, “We don’t like liars, but we...