Bo o k Review s Jam es Castle: His Life and Art. By Tom Trusky. Boise: Idaho Center for the Book, 2004. 172 pages, $19.95. Reviewed by Brandon R. Schrand University of Idaho, Moscow Because his work is so riveting, it is tempting to want to understand James Castle’s artwork in terms of formal art movements. Indeed, a handful of critics for the last forty years have wanted to see Castle in relation to other, wellknown artists. But Castle—the enigmatic Idaho native who was, as far as we know, deaf, mute, and illiterate—resists such comparisons. Castle’s self-taught methods, appropriation of found material, use of soot-and-saliva ink, and mysterious background, make parallels to any artist, medium, or style nearly impossible to draw. In this brief yet ambitious rendering of Castle’s oeuvre and captivating life, Trusky negotiates a complex web of oral narratives, newspaper clippings, historical events, and interviews that help situate Castle’s place in the greater art world generally and western American art in particular. But, as Trusky points out, Castle’s West isn’t the rhapsodic West of Frederick Remington or Charles Russell. His is a complicated West of “unpopulated landscapes” James Castle. MANNINGS COFFEE BOOK. Post-1932. Soot-and-saliva ink on found papers. Shown is a spread ofhow-to-draw examples. 11 1/2" x 17 1/2". Courtesy of the Idaho Center for the Book. 4 5 6 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n L it e r a t u r e W i n t e r 2 0 0 5 rendered in “dark tones” and, at the same time, one that contains totemic, faceless, boxy figurines who seem to exist in a space without land, an utterly internal West (51). James Castle was bom in 1899 along the banks of southwestern Idaho’s Payette River. He endured a childhood of taunting and derision while living and creating in a world of “physical, cultural, and social isolation” (iv). The peculiarities of Castle’s background conjoined with his enormous productivity and unusual methods make “reading” his work, as Trusky tells us, “tantalizing and frustrating” (44). Inevitably the questions overshadow the answers. But the puzzlement that shrouds Castle’s legacy is precisely what draws us to his work, to what Trusky calls his “visual mantras” (48). Perhaps most stunning of all, though, is that Castle carefully bound much of his work in books, each adorned with found covers taken from catalogs, cigarette packages, religious leaflets, and other material. It is “astonishing,” Trusky rightly observes, “that a reputed illiterate should make books at all” (95). Working initially from the loft of his family’s icehouse, later a deserted chicken coop, and finally a small trailer home, Castle produced a staggering number of these books before his death in 1977. James Castle: His Life and Art is valuable because it recovers an important western American artist who has nearly been forgotten. But its significance moves beyond recovery for recovery’s sake. Trusky’s work is a noteworthy contribution to the growing spectrum of visual and cultural studies in west ern literature. As the field becomes more concerned with, and enriched by, otherwise marginalized voices, textual and metatextual analyses like Trusky’s advance our understanding of the complexities of the West, whether they are internal or external representations. Writing Together/Writing Apart: Collaboration in Western American Literature. By Linda K. Karell. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. 219 pages, $49.95. Reviewed by Philip R. Coleman-Hull Emporia, Kansas InWritingTogether/WritingApart: CollaborationinWesternAmericanLiterature, Linda K. Karell adopts the stance that “all literary writing is inevitably collab orative, both regardless of the circumstances of its authorship ... and because of the circumstances of its authorship” (xx). Karell then launches into an engaging study of various collaborative endeavors in select works from the western literary canon. In many respects, her analysis seems to present a kind of double unfolding as she moves from more accepted (Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris’s output) toward more compelling—if not theoretically compli cated—collaborative schemes: Her final chapter recasts the charges of plagia rism against Wallace Stegner’s Angle...
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Mar 1, 2007
August John Hoffman + 1
Open Access