Lost in the New West: Performing Western Identity in Thomas McGuane’s Deadrock Novels

Abstract

Lost in the New WestPerforming Western Identity in Thomas McGuane’s Deadrock Novels Mark Asquith (bio) Getting lost in the New West is easy because nobody seems to know where or even what it is. Even after years of scholarly study, western historian Donald Worster confided in his ironically titled “New West, True West” that “I could not put my finger on the map and say, ‘There is the West’” (143). Perhaps a map is not the best place to start. The Center of the American West’s promisingly titled Atlas of the New West (1997) is full of colorful maps that codify everything from dams, roads, and Native American reservations— but remains elusive in defining what binds them together into a cohesive whole (18). For Frederick Jackson Turner the West was less a place than a process of nation-building, but for the New Historians of the eighties it was the echo chamber of marginalized voices left out by Turner’s Anglo imperialism (Native Americans, African Americans, women in general). Much recent settler colonial criticism has accepted this pluralist vision while simultaneously seeking to replace its tendency toward American exceptionalism with a transnational comparative model that places the West within the context of other colonial projects. Conversely, the approach of post-structuralists has been to reject geography in favor of the West conceived as a signifier endlessly repeated and reinterpreted globally. Neil Campbell coins the term the “rhizomatic West,” which rejects the linearity of Turner (associated with the rootedness of a tree) in favor of the complex underground horizontal root system of the rhizome (which erupts everywhere) (Rhizomatic West 35). Whether a region defined by aridity, an idealistic direction of travel, a political paradigm endorsed through the ideology of “the Frontier,” a romantic “wilderness” promising self-identification (another Anglo-Imperial construct), or a free-floating cultural signifier comprised of kitsch symbols—how could we not get lost! [End Page 1] Thomas McGuane has spent a lifetime exploring the porous texture of the West. He writes in his foreword to William Allard’s photographic collection Vanishing Breed, Photographs of the Cowboy and the West: The West, whatever that is, is still there, believe it or not, in its entirety. It is the leading chimera of our geography. The dead windmills lost behind the high wire of the missile range, the stove-up cowboy at the unemployment office, the interstate that plunges through the homesteads, all bring aches to an American race memory. . . . The West vanished for the Indian and the drover; it vanished for the cowboy. Simultaneously it reappeared in all the same places, and in movies and rodeos. It’s like fire. Hollywood, calf tables, and depreciation schedules can’t kill it. (6–7) This is typical McGuane—the mockery lubricates the dryly serious and adds nuance while the scripted diffidence (“whatever that is”) is both flippant and demanding critical scrutiny. Campbell’s rhizomatic West is replaced with a set of combustible cultural signifiers—landscapes, homesteads, and vanishing Indians (McGuane’s preferred term)—making up a hopeful if misguided race memory. It lives in a set of landscapes, symbols (Stetsons and windmills), archetypes, and ritualistic tropes independent of both geography and history that help to produce a particular identity. The West becomes a “thirdspace” that flattens the distinction between new and old, fake and real in favor of competing narratives and dialogues (a form of Bakhtinian polyphony), the most important being the region’s conversation with its own past.1 McGuane’s West is symbolized by the town of Deadrock (a play on McGuane’s Livingston home), a cliché of a western town nestling beneath the aptly named Crazy Mountains. The mountains should act as a site of spiritual regeneration but are emblematic of Deadrock men struggling for self-definition in the shadow of hypermasculine mythology. It is a riposte to what he denounces in an interview with Gregory Morris as “the pompous backward-looking revisionist West of Wallace Stegner, Vardis Fisher, and even A. B. Guthrie” (McGuane, “Thomas McGuane” 210) and, as he makes [End Page 2] clear in the essay “Roping from A–B,” the southern nostalgia of Faulkner, whose Yoknapatawpha is a “morbid Cloud-Cuckoo...