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There Is a Moment at the Very End of Charles Portis's Novel True

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There Is a Moment at the Very End of Charles Portis's Novel True History, Fiction, and Ethics: The Search for the True West in True Grit Kenneth Millard here is a moment at the very end of Charles Portis’s novel True Grit when the narrator, thirty-nine-year-old Mattie Ross, looks Tback on the events of twenty-five years earlier and offers the words “Time just gets away from us” as a succinct moral to conclude her account of the passing of the Western frontier and of that historical period in her life that constituted her coming of age.1 Mattie Ross has been deeply shaped by that moment in history, and marked forever by the loss of her right arm. Simultaneously, the passing of the frontier, the advent of statehood for Oklahoma, and modernity for the emergent nation, mark a crucial his- torical stage in the nation’s coming of age. Thus True Grit offers the young teenage protagonist’s story at a significant moment in American history and thereby conflates the coming of age of both the fictional individual and the historical United States. The study of fiction of the American West has long since been character- ized, even beleaguered, by a tension between history and fiction. Because the myths of the American frontier are so well established and widely promulgated, historians and literary critics have devoted much energy to understanding how the West really was, as a scholarly counternarrative to the baneful stereotypes of film and television. This project has led to antagonism between history and literature as to which discipline has the higher grounds of knowledge. What kind of critic has the better claim to understanding the true nature of the West? This question was given par- ticular urgency in the 1990s by the advent of the movement known as New Western History, founded on such studies as Patricia Limerick’s Legacy of Conquest, Richard White’s “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own,” Cronon, Miles, and Gitlin’s Under an Open Sky, and Donald Worster’s Riv- ers of Empire.2 These works of history made bold statements (that claimed to be new) about the political nature of Western studies. Their authors ar- gued that the study of the West had been hampered, until now, by spurious 463 464 KENNETH MILLARD investments in a triumphalist narrative of colonization in which literature was tacitly complicit. New Western History aimed to provide a corrective to this political travesty and purported to have privileged access to under- standing the West because its enquiries were based on historical facts that were not clouded by the ideological freight of imaginative writing. Fiction, they argued, only contributed to the perpetuation of myth that occluded a true sense of how the West really was. In turn, literary critics complained that the almost complete absence of imaginative writing from the scholar- ship of New Western History seriously impoverished its claims, with a naïve assumption that history was ideologically neutral. New Western History tended to assume too readily that history had a reasonably straightforward mimetic relationship to the West, one that gave it privileged authority over what counted as definitive knowledge. Literature and history, then, continue to dispute this epistemological territory, as one critic recognized in 1997: “To have a discussion about the relationship between literature and history which . is able to consider some of the questions about ‘stories’ that preoccupy many scholars requires . a re-formulation of the discussion.”3 This is essentially a debate about the politics of narrative, one in which literature and history provide stories of the past with competing claims to authority. It is a debate that has a par- ticular urgency in Western studies because of the remarkable closeness of historical and literary texts in the creation of Western mythology. Charles Portis’s True Grit has been caught up in this debate about the merits of history and fiction since it was first published in 1968. In My Country’s Blood: Studies in Southwestern Literature, W. T. Pilkington was very critical of the novel. In particular he cited the scene in which Mattie falls into a pit of snakes as completely implausible. Yet in his review of Pilk- ington’s book in Western Historical Quarterly, Max Westbrook points out that Paul Wellman’s A Dynasty of Western Outlaws “recounts an experience strikingly similar to the snake pit scene in True Grit.” Westbrook uses this knowledge to make the point that historical veracity “does not provide a principle by which we may judge the quality of a work of art.”4 This review appeared in 1975, and yet literary fiction of the American West continues to be dogged by a sense of ethical responsibility to his- torical verisimilitude that is clearly misplaced. The debate about history has given rise to many wrangles over the concept of Western “authenticity” as a measure of the value of the literary text. To what extent must fiction of the West be historically accurate as an integral part of its creative merit, and, in a postmodern culture characterized partly by the loss of the historical referent, how can judgments based principally on historical truthfulness be sustained? TRUE GRIT 465 In Unsettling The Literary West: Authenticity and Authorship, Nathaniel Lewis argued that “the idea of authenticity is culture consuming; it can only exist in a culture that feels alienated from itself.”5 One feature of such alien- ation is a suspicion of history as a relatively unproblematical epistemologi- cal framework, and certainly as a measure of literary value. In his review of a collection of essays that was significantly entitled True West, L. C. Mitchell argued that “authenticity is never simply given once and for all but negoti- ated through the duplicitous documents we preserve.”6 The “true West” then does not exist in absolute terms but is actually constituted through the processes of textual representation; it is a textual product, and some of those texts that constitute Western authenticity are historical ones. The very idea of verisimilitude is only created through the various other forms of textuality by which it is constituted in the first place, and readers who hope to apprehend the “true” or “authentic” West in either history or fiction are simply inclined to accept views of the West that might best accord with their existing political ideology This issue might be broadly relevant to much postmodern American fic- tion. In 1985 Bobbie Ann Mason’s fictional character Emmett Hughes sat in a motel room watching Joan Rivers hosting the Johnny Carson show and lamented, “Nothing’s authentic anymore.”7 These three words have come to articulate so much that is regarded as fundamentally important to late twentieth-century fiction: that which was once authentic has been replaced by a host of surrogates and substitutes, depriving us of the experience of the real. Don DeLillo’s White Noise, also 1985, is almost entirely dedicated to dramatizing the problem of identifying where authenticity might reside in a contemporary United States which is entirely composed of mediated or simulated experiences. Here, characters visit “the most photographed barn in America.” But in the absence of a real barn, long since erased by history, they can photograph only the other photographers. In this way, visitors are merely “taking pictures of taking pictures.”8 Similarly, Richard Powers’s novel Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, again 1985, is also devoted to the importance of the image and its power to shape characters’ lives. Pow- ers’s novel (a narrative inspired by a photograph) even includes a chapter that provides a detailed critical exposition of Walter Benjamin’s paper “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” as if to suggest that authenticity is such a significant issue for any novel that purports to address the ethics of representation, that ambitious works of literary fiction may as well accommodate the appropriate critical theory as part of their very composition.9 However, the problem of forms of true knowledge is exacerbated in the case of the American West because much of its canonical fiction is historical 466 KENNETH MILLARD fiction. James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, Owen Wister’s The Virginian, Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, A. B. Guthrie’s The Way West, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian: these are novels that look back to an historical moment lost or passed and reimagine it in terms of the political exigencies of their own contemporary predicament (Shane, for example, as a Cold War western of 1949, or Blood Meridian as a response to Vietnam). Thus, struggles over the politics of narrative are not confined to the best recent scholarship but are integral to classic Western texts. In this sense we might facetiously observe that all Western fiction is postmodern, and not only that of the postmodern period. William Handley expressed the point more precisely when he argued that “an important aspect of the aesthetic complexity of western literature, however, derives precisely from writers’ anxiety about historical content.”10 One of the most valuable of literature’s contributions to this debate is its self-consciousness about history and fic- tion as forms of narrative representation. Literary fiction can bring a vital self-reflexivity to the scrutiny of its own engagements with history, and to its own creative practices, too. One way for a novelist to dramatize this challenge is to create a first- person narrator who is struggling with it. The first-person narrative locates anxiety about history in an individual subject, rather than through an om- niscient voice that has by its very nature a formal authority. Many late twen- tieth-century Western novels use the first-person perspective specifically to situate uncertainty about the nature of history in their self-doubting nar- rators.
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