New Ground: Western American Narrative and the Literary Canon by A. Carl Bredahl, Jr.

Abstract

Reviews 89 New Ground: Western American Narrative and the Literary Canon. By A. Carl Bredahl, Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. xi, 195 pages, $29.95.) Bredahl argues that easterners are concerned “with the problems and possibilities inherent in the act of intellectually enclosing wilderness. The eastern imagination generates a story fascinated by mind and intellectual energy, a mind fundamentally distrustful of space” (2). He also contends that “traditional students, trained to distrust surface, frequently regard western writing as naive. But the western eye regards surfaces as neither hollow nor artificial” (30). In valuing surface, Bredahl says, western writers try to stretch their minds to meet the challenge of the western environment; and conse­ quently, “the effort to stretch language, subject, and form characterizes many of the works created by America’s western writers. As individuals who value surface, these writers create works that offer a corrective and a balance to postmodern despair” (48). To support his contentions, Bredahl briefly surveys the development of “The Traditional Canon,” and then he looks at early narrative responses to the West. The real contribution of his book lies in his subsequent close readings of The Land of Little Rain, Winesburg, Ohio, Green Hills ofAfrica, The Big Sky, The Ox-Bow Incident, The Conquest of Don Pedro, The Home Place, In Orbit, and This House of Sky. In the last chapter, Bredahl compares and con­ trasts the western movies of John Ford and Sam Peckinpah. Although he selected books that would “offer diversity oftime, region, and form” (5), Bredahl’s in-depth discussion of only a dozen or so texts does not constitute a sample sufficiently large and varied enough to support his sweeping generalizations. Moreover, his argument rests on his use of terms such as “enclosure,” “surface,” and “space”—terms so broad and general as to be confusing or imprecise without more definition than Bredahl provides. And he writes as if there were just one West. Nevertheless, flawed though it is, New Ground deserves to be read because it sheds somuch light on some individual texts. And Bredahl may well be right in saying that “Because distrusting place leads to an overweening ego, a sense of superiority within an ecosystem, and isolation, opening the canon to western as well as ethnic and feminist perspectives offers a significant corrective to the perspective of modern alienation” (147). JAMES H. MAGUIRE Boise State University ...