Misbegotten Muses: History and Anti-History by Richard C. Poulsen

Abstract

Reviews 283 Writings About Butte; Remembering the Agricultural Frontier; Literature of Modern Montana; Contemporary Fiction; Contemporary Poetry),each intro­ duced by an informative and thoughtful essay. The editing of this anthology, which took over three years, is masterful: a random selection of entries will reward the reader with the verve and vividness and compelling drama of the writing. But the volume is unwieldy and daunting; I found myself avoiding picking it up to read for this review because it was so massive. I can’t see it being used—as it should be—as a text in high schools in Montana. Although the editors seem wedded to the idea of “one big book,” I think Montana literature would be better served if the material were divided into two volumes, one of early works, the other of modern and contemporary writing. Another small improvement that mightbe considered for future editions:page headings not only of the section titles, but of the authors as well. That would make it easier to dip into the collection—the most enjoyable way, I find, of reading an anthology. All in all, though I’m weighed down by the size, I’m elevated by the inspiring contents of this marvelous anthology of both familiar and unfamiliar works. NANCY PROTHRO ARBUTHNOT United States Naval Academy Misbegotten Muses: History and Anti-History. Richard C. Poulsen. (New York: Peter Lang. American University Studies, Series IX: History; vol. 32, 1988. 211 pages, $36.50.) Unhappy with the restrictions imposed on experience by historians, sci­ entists and other codifiers, Richard Poulsen in Misbegotten Muses seeks to speak to the unspoken, to spaces instead of things, to what is not there instead of what is there—to a reality lying beyond the usual modes of discourse. It is guru time, in short, and other gurus (Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marshall McLuhan, Roland Barthes, Joseph Campbell, Jacques Derrida, Black Elk) are assembled to bolster fifteen loosely-linked essays on such topics as the Donner Party, Mormon migration, Manifest Destiny and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a great book, we are told, because it resists conventional literary analysis and evokes a past “impervious to the inroads of history: there are no systems here” (147). That statement pretty much sums up Poulsen’s concerns. History, as his subtitle indicates, is the villain, and he fingers historians for encasing the illimitable past in rigid chronologies and the like and preferring their systems to reality’s untidiness. Systematization may be necessary, “but nihilation isalso essential to make sense of the individual’s journey toward the great truth of living, vibrant, inter­ human relations” (55). And so it goes. Folk culture is natural, open-ended, life-affirming; history is artificial, closed, life-denying, “a noise devoid of human meaning” (104). 284 Western American Literature Myth expresses “verities,” history only “manifest fictions” (88). It victimizes the past by “measuring an illusion of reality rather than feeling the pulse of a significant human event” (87). Thus the inability of historians to enter the Puritan mind or any unfamiliar territory. Not that feeling the pulse of the past is easy. It requires considerable groping, judging from Poulsen’s prose: “And yet some explanations seem insufficient to cope with, appreciate, the immense pervasiveness of certain folk, certain mythological images. It is one problem to be able to explain, prove, that animals. . .” etc. (60). This stylistic hesitancy, throat-clearing, is distracting, puzzling, given the author’s equal penchant for flat pronouncements. Those he disagrees with are wrong, even disgustingly so. And when he isnot lecturing historians for misrepresenting the past, he is lecturing the sources they use (the Donner Party survivors, for instance) for misunderstanding their own experiences. Yet all he offers are fortune cookie profundities: “facts are illusions of measurement which portray the mind of the researcher, not the condition of the thing observed” (86) ; “History is a divinity” (107) ; “Truth is the unending reflection of an image” (119); “Science is a system of measured prejudices” (120) ;“Chaos, like truth, is unbearable” (125) ; “Human life is a tissue of spaces” (135) ; “Satisfaction and greatness are antithetical” (147). One thinks of Herbert Spencer’s strain...