6.12.2006
The Rest of the West
If you've ever driven in L.A -- and I only have once -- it may be a lot easier for you understand why the mythic cowboy West has played such an ongoing role in the imaginations of writers. You are thrown into six lanes of wild, stampeding traffic and forced to fend for yourself (often with guns blazing). When you emerge, you feel lucky to be alive, and also, strangely, a sort of withdrawl kicks in, compelling you to go go back for more. Then you swill some whisky at the saloon. The mythic West, as a place of perpetual rebirth, is a gripping, striking place that can still break the backs of mountains and leave woods dead in its path. It's that primal. No, really.
Of western writing: "The elements will dominate here, and a spare, elemental language, with now and then a touch of elegance, will suffice." The question, I ask, is whose West are we talking about? This article from Salon.com (reg. req.) is correct in postulating the need for recognition of writers in the West, but I think the West Allen Barra represents may need some re-examination. A movie about a couple of cowboys having sex in the mountains is hardly "such a shock to the system," when, believe it or not, men have been having sex with other men in the West for quite some time. The only shock I received when I watched Brokeback Mountain, was that anybody made such a big deal about it.
Now I realize that Barra's talking about shocking the "Western" system, but, beyond speculating on the potential for some cowboy-indian porno action, he fails to mention where the biggest shocks have resided: in the fact that the west is not solely populated by repressed white men trying to live out their fantasies of freedom. Of western writers: "There isn't enough of an audience in their own environment to support them, and it takes a long time for the nation's literary nerve centers to find out about them." Perhaps the lack of audience should be a cue that the wrong West is consistently being written.
If we go back to my car-car story and rewrite "wild, stampeding" to read "insane, racing," and "whisky at the saloon" to read "cocaine in the Viper Room" we suddenly have the urban story that Bret Easton Ellis writes over and over. Moreover, if we actully add the perspective of a non-white character we may accidentally tap into the rich tradition of Asian writers that has developed in the "West" over past thirty years. For them, the West is the East.
And then there's where I come in, and that's from the North. Although I currently reside in Ontario, I am from B.C. and am spending quite a bit of time thinking about what the West means. Candian writers like Wayson Choy, Joy Kogawa, Douglas Coupland and Daphne Marlatt have mercifully decentered the outmoded and nostalgic notion of the American Wild West. Often these writers don't even bother to mention the myth, which as best I can tell, seems to lose its vision somewhere in the Colorado Rockies. If you want to talk about the "New True West" it had better be urban, inclusive, and not simply pandering to a vision that only makes sense when viewed with a longing, Westward looking gaze.
P.S. In case I haven't made it clear here and everywhere on this site: I HATE "THE SYSTEM"! Anyone caught speaking unironically about the system on this site will expelled and ejected and banished for ever until the end of time.
