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

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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 historical 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 characterized, 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 particular 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 argued that the study of the West had been hampered, until now, by spurious

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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 understanding 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 scholarship 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 particular 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 historical 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 epistemological 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 fiction. 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 fiction 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 omniscient voice that has by its very nature a formal authority. Many late twentieth-century Western novels use the first-person perspective specifically to situate uncertainty about the nature of history in their self-doubting narrators. E. L. Doctorow’s Welcome To Hard Times (1960), Larry McMurtry’s Horseman, Pass By (1961), Thomas Berger’sLittle Big Man (1964), Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose (1972), and Ron Hansen’s Desperadoes (1979) are just some of the novels of the West that address historical subjects directly, but in a first-person voice that expresses doubts about the specific relationship between the nature of historical knowledge and the artful contrivances of fiction. In these novels we can see the declension of the West, the retreat from a triumphalist narrative of “how the west was won.” Their narrators are characterized by uncertainty, especially as regards the nature of writing, and by a new awareness of the politics of narrative that has become an integral part of their story. These narrators thus withdraw into romantic solipsism caused by a pressing self-consciousness about the processes by which their own narratives are conceived, and by a strong sense of their own textual limitations. In this sense, authors such as Stegner and Doctorow are the late twentieth-century heirs of canonical Western authors such as Mark Twain and Jack Schaefer. Forrest Robinson’s study Having It Both Ways: Self-Subversion in Western Popular Classics argues that these earlier writers are “not fully attentive to the complexity of their own discourse.”11 But the TRUE GRIT 467 late twentieth-century or early postmodern narrators bring a more strongly self-reflexive quality to the contrivances of their own narratives and thereby give renewed vigor to appraisals of the powerfully self-determining sover- eign individual that is such a cherished part of Western mythology. Here True Grit is especially valuable for the ways that it scrutinizes the epistemological status of history and fiction through the use of a first- person perspective. The novel offers a critical disquisition on this disciplin- ary divide and anticipates many postmodern anxieties about the nature of knowledge and its relation to forms of representation. Despite its surface simplicity True Grit is especially alert to the political and aesthetic investments of writing in ways from which recent Western studies could benefit. It is surprising that the novel has not attracted more sustained critical attention. It is important to remember that although True Grit principally concerns the experiences of a fourteen-year-old (from whose perils the drama derives), Mattie Ross does not recount the narrative until she is thirty-nine. This mature adult narrator interjects occasionally to remind us that she is the compositor of an account of events from twenty-five years earlier, for example telling us that a country store “is now part of the modern little city of McAlester, Oklahoma” (154). Such observations from her retrospective position show Mattie’s awareness of her perspective and signal clearly that her story is conditioned by it. Further, our narrator holds some firm beliefs about the proper nature of composing a story. For example, Mattie owns a newspaper clipping that she once used in order to write “a good historical article” with a long didactic title. She wanted to pass off this article as “a personal recollection” of Judge Parker. The newspaper report is “not an official transcript but faithful enough.” The reader cannot assess the faithfulness of her appropriation of Parker’s voice (as it appears in an attenuated form in her article’s lengthy title) but clearly the concept of composition that is of- fered here is a very subtle synthesis of history and fiction. The nonfictional Isaac Parker (the frontier’s notorious hanging judge, 1838–96) is the subject of Mattie’s fictionalizing, but in a composition that she terms “a good historical article,” one which takes on his personal voice for her own didactic ends. Such ventriloquizing does not appear to recognize its own complicity in the rhetoric of fiction. Mattie’s historical article is rejected by contemporary magazines because it is “too long and discursive.” Mattie is in turn dismissive of the market’s preferences, and defines her own distinctive aesthetic as “a graphic writing style combined with educational aims” (39). Mattie’s narrative style then is understood by her as graphic and didactic, and she distinguishes it from the style of other women writers cited in True Grit, such as Lucille Lang- 468 Kenneth Millard

ford. Langford has already attracted Mattie’s ire for writing about her father Frank Ross in the historical memoir entitled Yell County Yesterdays, which Mattie rebukes on the grounds of historical inaccuracy: quite simply, “I am in a position to know the facts” (11). Mattie’s knowledge of the facts, however, her commitment to a firm belief in simple historical verisimilitude, does not recognize its indebtedness to the politics of narrative. Mattie’s attempt at publishing a historical article that purports to be the memoir of Judge Isaac Parker does not admit its own entanglement with fiction. The only direct reference in True Grit to pure fiction is to a novel Mat- tie reads called Bess Calloway’s Disappointment, and her characterization of it is therefore a significant moment in terms of defining and distinguishing her own aesthetic principles. This novel dramatizes the romantic dilemma of a young girl in England who cannot decide between a rich man and a preacher. Mattie concedes that the novel’s narrative interest is created by the girl’s indecision: “she would never say what she meant but only blush” (66). This model of romantic femininity corresponds to the forms of feminine passivity that is characteristic of Mattie’s mother, and is comically contrary to Mattie’s direct and articulate manner of self-expression. It is significant that Mattie’s interest is held partly by the fact that the novel contrasts a man of money and a man of the faith, foregrounding the conflicts of her own moral ideology. Mattie is herself caught in a drama with two men, Rooster and LaBoeuf, who are suitors in their different ways and who are broadly rivals for her attention. It becomes clear that Mattie prefers chicken to beef. But Bess Calloway’s Disappointment is a romantic and perhaps sentimental fiction and therefore it has little lasting hold on Mattie’s imagination. Mattie cannot remember which of the two men Bess chose, only that “he turned out to be mean and thoughtless” (66). The narrative resolution then is irrelevant, rich man or preacher; what is important to Mattie’s memory is that the English girl chose wrongly and was therefore disappointed. This is perhaps a surprisingly unhappy resolution for what appears to be a conventional work of generic romance fiction, but it is clearly signaled by the novel’s title. Disappointment is in the very nature of romantic engagements. This partly helps to explain why Mattie trusts herself to history as a form of narrative composition, and, perhaps, why she never marries: her distrust of romance is partly informed by her reading of fiction such as Bess Calloway’s Disappointment. In respect of the relative and competing claims to efficacy of history and fiction, Mattie’s use of the word “story” is particularly interesting. Mattie habitually uses it to disparage a kind of exaggeration that borders on lying, as when she tells Mr. McAlester’s wife that she is not tired when she is in fact completely exhausted: “it was the biggest story I have ever told” (165). TRUE GRIT 469

Other uses of the word confirm Mattie’s association of “story” and lying: when LaBoeuf tells the ferryman that Mattie is a runaway, she can only counter with “That is a story,” and when Rooster joins in the ruse Mattie exclaims, “They are in this story together” (102). When Chaney lies to Ned Pepper, Mattie retorts, “How can you stand there and tell such a big story?” (178). Such uses of the word “story” as a synonym for outrageous untruths are part of Mattie’s firm conviction in the integrity of historical narratives that have a strong basis in undeniable fact. Mattie ends her own story, True Grit, with the words “This ends my true account” (215) because an “account” is unequivocally opposed to mere “story” and for her its value can be made quickly assessable by historical verification. Columns of figures in bookkeeping can be pronounced true or false by simple audit, in contrast to checking the credibility of human testimony. The auctioneer Stonehill is similarly aware of how his experiences might test the credulity of an audience unfamiliar with frontier life: “I would gladly take pen in hand and write a thick book on my misadventures here, but dare not for fear of being called a lying romancer” (77). Stonehill understands exactly how fantastical his true experiences might appear to the uninitiated, that such accounts would be dismissed as mere tall tales. The auctioneer has good reason to be particularly sensitive to the veracity of stories about frontier experience, because he was himself seduced by exaggerated reports of the area’s potential: “I should never have come here. They told me this town was to be the Pittsburgh of the Southwest” (33) and “I was told this city was to be the Chicago of the Southwest” (77). Pittsburgh, Chicago: the transplanting of these cities to Arkansas is alone sufficient evidence of the outrageous duplicity of advertising stories. The seductive potential of a good story is seen everywhere in True Grit, for example in LaBoeuf’s claim that West Texas is so dry that he once “lapped dirty water from a hoofprint and was glad to have it” (113). Rooster punctures this evocative image by retorting that he believed this story only “the first twenty-five times I heard it” (113). Many of LaBoeuf’s stories and anecdotes are greeted in this way, as if he has a tendency to speak in purple prose that cannot be trusted. LaBoeuf says that Mattie has “won her spurs,” but Rooster immediately repudiates this cliché language: “we won’t have a lot of talk about winning spurs” (161). This language misrepresents experience by simply rehearsing exhausted rhetorical forms, and it must be rejected in favor of a language of representation that is truly authentic. True Grit thus positions its young narrator in an environment where it is her particular challenge to learn exactly what authentic language consists of, and this means making crucial adjudications between the claims of history and fiction. 470 Kenneth Millard

Mattie needs to learn to be similarly alert to the contrivances of Rooster’s stories, she finds herself in an environment that puts a great deal of pres- sure on every individual’s ability to discern the appropriate value of what they hear. At one point on the trail Mattie tells us, “Rooster talked all night . . . I did not give credence to everything he said” (142). The key word here is “credence” because in this frontier context every character’s ability to make critical discriminations about the value of what they hear is vital to the quality of their knowledge, and therefore to their survival. Rooster’s tall tales challenge Mattie’s credulity, and this of course is absolutely characteristic of the specifically Western genre of the tall tale. Elsewhere, however, the quality of Mattie’s judgment is more difficult to assess. When Rooster tells the story of how he robbed a bank in New Mexico and vanquished the posse, Mattie comments skeptically, “That is hard to believe,” and when he elucidates further she says, “I think you are stretching the blanket” (139). It seems more likely, however, that this tale of Rooster’s is entirely true (a point borne out by his act of heroism in riding alone at Ned Pepper’s gang at the novel’s end). It is characteristic of the tall tale that it walks a line between fact and the impressively fantastical in ways that test the auditor’s ability to recognize the difference between them: at what point in a story does the audience begin to suspect they are the victim of a sly exaggeration? This is an important question for True Grit because the novel’s particular cultural environment is one that places a great deal of value on the spoken word, and because it is partly through oral transactions that “history” is created. When Lawyer Daggett discovers that he has made false accusations about Rooster’s conduct, he goes to Fort Smith to seek out Rooster personally and pays him $200 “for the hard and unfair words he had spoken” (210). One of the few times we see Rooster subdued is when he is “brooding about the hard words LaBoeuf had spoken to him on the subject of his war service” (165). The spoken word can have great power and great personal effect as regards a man’s reputation and standing in the community; the integrity of the word is central to his identity and social position, and a liar is as villain- ous as a horse thief. The powerful potential of the duplicitous story, and especially its ability to mislead and corrupt, is seen throughout True Grit. For example, there is a significant moment in the numerous verbal altercations between the two bounty hunters in which Rooster claims that he can simply catch Chaney before LaBoeuf does, and thereby claim for himself all of the reward. La- Boeuf counters this by arguing that he could problematize Rooster’s claim sufficiently that the authorities would not pay him; LaBoeuf says simply, “I would dispute your claim. I would muddy the waters” (94). This ability to introduce uncertainty about important aspects of knowledge is endemic in TRUE GRIT 471

True Grit, and central to its depiction of how history is forged. Of course, one way to guarantee truthfulness is simply to tell things exactly as they are. At one point Ned Pepper confronts Mattie with a question that is characteristic of the novel’s direct ethical engagements: “Is this any good to me?” In response to this question about “good-ness” the narrative language of True Grit demonstrates in its own graphic terms the importance of ensur- ing an exact correspondence between things in the material world and the language that is used to represent them: “It was a cashier’s check for $2,750 drawn on the Granger’s Trust Co. of Topeka, Kansas, to a man named Marshall Purvis. I said, ‘This is a cashier’s check for $2,750 drawn on the Granger’s Trust Co. of Topeka, Kansas, to a man named Marshall Purvis’” (186). Here the novel’s narrative structure closes the gap emphatically between Mattie’s reported speech and her omniscient narrative voice, and in a way that demonstrates unequivocally her belief in the value of calling things as they are. In terms of narrative style, however, there is an almost absurdist simplicity to this paragraph that invites the critical reader to recognize the limitations of such an outlook. It is Mattie’s honesty here that forces her to use her education in the service of criminal forgery on Ned Pepper’s behalf; her real naïvety is to believe that stating “the facts” can exempt her from ethical difficulty, that simply telling things exactly as they are is sufficient to avoid the muddy waters of moral compromise. Charles Portis thus offers us a first-person narrator whose story consists of learning that an absolute faith in the sanctity of the Word does not serve as a certain guide to life’s ethical challenges. This moment with Ned Pepper permits the reader to recognize the limitations of Mattie’s outlook, and to understand that her forthright determination is not equal to the uncomfortable challenges of modernity. The language of history cannot proceed by a faith in mimesis, because it is not simply the linguistic representation of empirical experience. There is an important distinction to be observed, in these engagements with the politics of narrative, between the spoken and the written word. In the scene above, Mattie is recording in writing an account of a verbal exchange between herself and Pepper; the verbal exchange concerns the efficacy of a piece of writing, in the form of the check. The comic incongruity of the scene belies the remarkable sophistication of its dramatic interest in the ethical permutations of the politics of narrative. The reader’s ability to understand the first-person narrator’s naïvety has its focus in the referential limitations of language, both in terms of the narrator’s cogency of voice, but also in terms of the efficacy of a cashier’s check. There are some important ideas at work here about how language, either written or spoken, can act as a guarantor of meaning, because as Greaser Bob remarks, “Nothing on paper 472 Kenneth Millard

is as good as gold” (188). This is a significant statement for Mattie’s written document, True Grit, to express, because it undermines her conviction that the word can refer to the world in ways that are irrefutable. Again, it is indicative of the subtlety of Portis’s creation of his narrator that Mattie then quotes Pepper’s response to Greaser Bob: “This paper is worth over $4000 with a little writing” (187). The written word can in fact be extraordinarily valuable, but only if it aspires to certain aesthetic qualities that facilitate its exact correspondence with the world. Here the value of “this paper” is entirely dependent on the quality of the writing on it; that is to say, Mattie must create counterfeit sig- natures of sufficient credibility to pass as those of “Monroe Whelper.” But with only a turkey feather for a pen, Mattie is confident that the aesthetic shortcomings of her attempts to represent Whelper will render these checks worthless: “Who will believe that Mr Whelper signs his banknotes with a stick?” (187). In terms of the politics of narrative, Portis has fashioned here a first-person narrator who is acutely sensitive to profoundly challenging ideas about how language signifies, and to how the written and spoken words strive for a mimetic relationship with the world that depends upon convincing aesthetic qualities. The creative artistry of her enterprise undermines the narrator’s simple faith in a concept of mimesis that is everywhere contingent upon forms of creative invention. In terms of the relationship between history and fiction, then, Mattie’s insistence that forms of historical knowledge have greater authority because they are exempt from the contrivances of fiction is everywhere subverted by that knowledge’s intimate relations with aesthetic forms and artistic creativity. At this level True Grit conducts a forensic enquiry into the ways that different kinds of knowledge are conceived and legitimized; the question of the politics of narrative is not simply one that concerns a struggle between history and fiction but acquires an urgently ethical dimension. Here, the court scene is especially useful to understanding Charles Por- tis’s handling of his first-person narrator, and the subtlety with which the novel dramatizes ideas about the authorization of narrative discourse. For example, it is important to recognize for the novel’s form that the court scene’s verbatim transcript interrupts and wholly replaces Mattie’s first- person narrative voice for a significant duration. The scene is thus a text within a text, where the reported testimony purports to have a greater claim to veracity than that of the novel’s first-person voice. Again, there is an important distinction here between speaking and writing, as we saw with Ned Pepper, above. On one hand the scene is provided as a direct transcript, but although it is therefore an interpolated written document, it is nevertheless an account of speaking. It is a written record of the rhetoric of specifically TRUE GRIT 473 oral performances, where verbal mannerisms and spoken nuances are vital to its conduct. The scene demonstrates the problems of reconciling an account of history in competing and disputed narrative languages; it illus- trates principally how historical narratives are simply a function of the different languages available to contesting antagonists. Although Mattie is determined to hold to a faith in historical veracity that authorizes her account in True Grit, this scene replaces her voice with a text that dramatizes the idea that definitive historical knowledge can never be securely established. There is a strongly ethical dimension to this disquisition on what we might term the politics of historical composition, partly because this scene is used to establish Rooster’s credentials as a man of the law. Rooster has killed twenty-three men in the last four years of service as a deputy marshal; he is a ruthless man who, it appears, takes some liberty with the letter of the law and its precise language. The adversarial questioning in court uses the rhetoric of certain strict forms of what is admissible knowledge: this opens a gap between Rooster’s word and how the court audience interprets it. The formal questioning of Rooster is abruptly discontinued, but his status as an antihero is established and Mattie chooses him because he is “a pitiless man” (22–23). The moral compromise of the novel’s narrator, and therefore her self-deception, depends partly on her interpretation of Rooster’s linguistic performance; that her own text provides this scene specifically as a written transcript reveals the radical indeterminacy of secure forms of knowledge and the first-person narrator’s complicity in ethical questions that are language dependent. The court scene thus dramatizes the ideological borderlands surrounding the ethical connotations of knowledge and language. Judge Parker super- vises this territory very closely, policing the word and acting as the guarantor of good verbal conduct. Parker’s role is to govern the idea of historical truthfulness that the word aspires to express; his interventions are especially significant because he regulates the discourse with statements such as “con- fine your testimony to what you saw,” “strike the comment,” and “do not bandy words” (42, 46, 49). Parker is especially alert to hyperbolic diction such as “massacre” and “assassin” (48), because he immediately recognizes its proximity to the contrivances of fiction. Judge Parker, then, is the legal Patriarch, and it is not surprising that the historical article that Mattie once wrote attempted to appropriate his voice for her own didactic ends. In this we can see her desire to appropriate the word of the father and thereby achieve entry into the symbolic order of so- ciety’s authoritative language. Mattie’s interpolation of the court scene transcript into her own textual composition thereby subordinates this historical figure, Judge Parker, to her own larger narrative designs. The inclusion of 474 Kenneth Millard

the frontier’s notorious hanging judge in her text lends support to its claims to historical veracity while slyly obfuscating its close engagement with the tropes and strategies of creative writing. Although lawyer Daggett is entirely fictional (there is no mention of him, for example, in Paul Wellman’s A Dynasty of Western Outlaws), his name is invoked to lend Mattie’s position a ventriloquized authority throughout True Grit.12 More important than her strategic invocation of Daggett in mo- ments of peril is Mattie’s reproduction of his written document in her text in the form of his letter to her. This letter, in Daggett’s direct written language, is interpolated into Mattie’s own textual composition. Daggett’s discourse, like Parker’s, is one of paternal injunctions; he lays down the law by which Mattie should proceed, using the imperative mode “you will wire me,” warning her against her “headstrong ways,” and telling her that she is now her mother’s “strong right arm” (a prophetic expression, given that Mattie’s right arm will be amputated in front of her mother at the novel’s end). Fur- ther, Daggett claims a kind of intimacy with Mattie specifically through the use of a scriptural allusion “you are a pearl of great price to me” (74). That this moment of quotation occurs when Mattie is herself quoting Daggett’s letter as part of the text that becomes True Grit is characteristic of the novel’s habit of textual deferral beyond the immediate context to some larger frame of reference that can only be accessed through further textual knowledge. This kind of intertextual complexity is further demonstrated here because Daggett’s letter contains a “notarized release,” and his letter begins “I hope you will find the enclosed document satisfactory” (73). Such multiple textual allusions are typical of how Portis’s novel dramatizes the relationship between knowledge and writing and explores the problem of the integrity of different forms of textual document. Here True Grit depicts with forensic scrupulousness a relationship between language and knowledge that makes the idea of simple historical fact impossible. Mattie’s composition employs the voices of Parker and Daggett to situate herself in relation to the discourse of patriarchy; in a sense, they are both teaching her to speak, as textual fathers, who help to give her own voice its unique self-composure. Mattie’s agency as a character is necessarily circumscribed by her deferral to these textual voices, but it is worth noting that both Parker and Daggett end on a note of failure and defeat. Daggett is compelled to apologize to Rooster for mistakenly assuming a moral high ground, and Parker’s last words in Mattie’s text reveal a similar admission of uncertain moral knowledge. It is not simply Mattie’s independent self- determination that is circumscribed by ethical codes that are untenable, shifting, and uncertain. It might be argued that this whole culture of Ameri- can exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny cannot be sustained, and that TRUE GRIT 475

Mattie’s adventure dramatizes the ways in which the heroic West of legend and myth is undermined by increasingly vertiginous circles of moral uncertainty. This is in large measure because Mattie’s text cannot help but admit that all knowledge, including historical knowledge, is informed by the languages that are used to create it. Portis’s achievement consists partly of creating a first-person narrative voice that can be used to explore the limits of knowledge and its relation to language acquisition. This is sophisticated territory for a “genre western” of 1968, and it is no wonder that Rooster la- ments: “if you don’t have no schooling you are up against it in this country, sis” (79–80). There is an important formal distinction between those novels in the first person whose narrators are still adolescent when the narrative ends (Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye) and those first-person novels about adolescence that are written from a mature adult retrospective position which is revealed at the end, such as True Grit. The former simply retain the integrity of the adolescent voice throughout their narratives, while the latter must capture the unfolding drama of adolescence without corrupting it with any sense of that drama having been already resolved by the novel’s adult narrator. One technical challenge of any novel that conforms broadly to the conventions of the coming-of-age genre in the latter category is how to reconcile the mature adult position of the text’s retrospective composition with the consciousness of the naïve subject whose maturity is yet to be realized. The text of True Grit is written by a thirty-nine-year-old woman remembering experiences from twenty-five years earlier, and the end of the novel must address this temporal discrep- ancy, between the limitations of the young subject and the consciousness of the adult narrator who, in effect, composes them. The resolution of True Grit is especially interesting for the ways in which it addresses this formal challenge. After her short illness, Mattie hears news of Rooster “in the early 1890s,” and then receives a newspaper clipping about him “in late May of 1903” (211). Next, she goes to Memphis to meet Rooster with the words “A quar- ter of a century is a long time!” (213). Here the text’s italicized exclamation helps to cover the reader’s surprise at how much time has suddenly elapsed. Mattie passes this off as part of the novel’s moral lesson, simply that “time just gets away from us” (215), and thus the novel brings together in this adroit and economical temporal shift many significant points that are ger- mane to an understanding of the whole novel. It is important to note that in the novel’s conclusion its subject, Mattie, and its narrator, become one and the same person, no longer distinguished from one another by the gap of twenty-five years. Now, Mattie is speaking of herself in the contemporary 476 Kenneth Millard

moment, and as a result there are significant changes in her tone. Mattie honors Rooster to the very end, even to the point of rewriting his historical reputation on his headstone, against her better judgment and completely contrary to her own historical knowledge of Rooster’s involve- ment in the Johnson County War, where he “did himself no credit” (211). Mattie defines Rooster on his gravestone as “A resolute officer of Parker’s court” (214), and the reader can plainly see the ironic understatement of Mattie’s choice of words. Further, Mattie’s brother chastises her for her spinsterhood by “making out that he was my secret sweetheart” (212). This teasing has taken place “over the years” and has clearly found its target. Mat- tie never marries because Rooster was the one true love of her life, the only man fit to lie alongside her father, who “might have been a gallant knight of old” (12). This chivalrous model of masculinity, as its language suggests, is now consigned to history. But where does this leave Mattie? As she finds herself back in the contemporary moment of her novel’s composition, there is a certain self-deception in her voice that acquires fresh urgency at the novel’s close. As she writes about herself in the present tense of the early twentieth century, Mattie is disarmingly candid about becoming “a cranky old maid” (214). But there is a defensive tone in “I care nothing for what they say,” and her rhetorical pro- testation “What is wrong with that?” calls for a rejoinder from the reader. Mattie repeats the word “marry” six times in the novel’s penultimate paragraph because she is conscious that spinsterhood might seem anomalous. Here Portis’s narrator has momentarily lost her self-composure. Is it really true that “I avenged Frank Ross’s blood,” rather than hired Rooster to kill Chaney and simply accompanied him? There are forms of self-deception here that appear to give Mattie some agency, but it is an illusion of inde- pendence and autonomy that she does not entirely possess. Mattie has been scarred for life, and the outlook that served her as a child can now be recognized by the reader as a serious limitation. The first-person is thus used by Portis to show how the Old West has a legacy of damaged individuals and a dubious moral ideology unequal to the violence of the birth of the nation. Mattie is no more socially integrated than Holden or Huck, but it is an enormous credit to Portis that Mattie can stand the comparison with them. It has recently been argued that the fiction of Cormac McCarthy “real- izes that language is not able to completely and unambiguously signify the w or l d .” 13 This might be true, but it is equally true of Portis’s novel, which was sufficiently early, in 1968, for McCarthy to have learned something from. Mattie is determined to insist upon a theory of the referential capac- ity of language that has its origin in the Bible and the Word, and which has authoritative expression in the patriarchal law of fathers; she also has cor- TRUE GRIT 477 responding ideas of ethical goodness and historical veracity that are, for her, beyond dispute. But Portis situates Mattie in a lawless frontier borderland where such a language theory is threatened by challenging experiences that destabilize the larger shapes of narrative discourse and undermine her own storytelling aesthetic. As the integrity of narrative discourse is subverted, then so too are the ethical principles that accompany it and depend upon it for its integrity. Like the promiscuous circulation of money in Mattie’s modern economy, the circulation of writing and speech is uncoupled from ethical standards, threatening the stability and confidence that Mattie’s narrative is at pains to assert. The indiscriminate energies of speaking and writing are beyond the control of a first-person narrator who, therefore, experiences anguish and self-delusion at the failure of her Presbyterian ideology to match the nature of her narrative. Portis’s novel of 1968 was made popular again by the 2010 film starring Jeff Bridges and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, but it should be remem- bered that this movie is as much a reworking of the earlier movie starring John Wayne (1969) as it is an adaptation of Portis’s original novel. One crucial distinction to note here is that in Portis’s novel Mattie shoots but does not actually kill the villain Tom Chaney; she falls into the pit of snakes, and a man’s voice calls down to her: “It was the voice of Tom Chaney! I had not yet made a good job of killing him!” (202). But in the Coen brothers’ film, Mattie shoots and kills Chaney: he falls over a cliff edge blasted in the chest, and is thereby completely expunged from the text by her. Thus the recent film attributes much more personal agency to Mattie than does the Portis novel. Here the film conforms more closely to conventional (and predict- able) movie expectations, where the novel makes Rooster the killer and thereby crucially retains Mattie’s moral innocence to the very end. By this interpretation, the Coen brothers’ film is its own reading of the novel, and could be construed as working closely within the Western as a film genre rather than as a close adaptation of the novel. In the 1969 version, directed by Henry Hathaway, Chaney is killed by John Wayne (as befits his screen persona), and this is much closer to the novel in confirming Rooster’s compromised status and in preserving Mattie’s high ground. The Western movie has shown something of a revival recently, demonstrating an abiding popular interest in the genre: Brokeback Mountain (2005), The Assassination of Jesse James (2007), 3.10 to Yuma (2007), No Country for Old Men (2007), Sweetgrass: The Last Ride of the American Cowboy (2009), and Meek’s Cutoff (2010). All have enjoyed popular and/or critical acclaim, and we might best understand the Coen brothers’ film as participating in a cinematic revival of interest in the West. Sara Spurgeon believes that the genre of the Western continues to have 478 Kenneth Millard

contemporary resonance because “the issues and concern associated with the frontiers of the past . . . far from being purged, are in fact the very same that currently vex modern America.”14 This includes the politics of historical representation, where, post 9/11, the U.S. is engaged in a struggle to maintain a form of national mythology that involves, among other things, a repositioning of the frontier in the remote desert territories of southern Afghanistan. Here, and in places such as Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, we witness the compromise of ethical standards in the service (paradoxically) of upholding the moral high ground of historical mythologies. Despite the apparent success of the quest in True Grit, Mattie’s narrative reveals a failure to resolve a clash of resolutely held principles with the exigencies of frontier life. The directness of her ethical stance is compromised by the subtlety with which forms of narrative discourse betray it. This is remarkably prescient of Portis. The U.S. sortie into Afghanistan acts as “an unsettling reminder that barbarism, senseless violence, and random death are commonplace even in the most ‘just’ and ‘honorable’ of wars.”15 Authorized knowledge of such wars is shot through with the problem of the politics of their representation. It has even been claimed by one recent scholar that “fictions become the only viable form of history in that they supply narratological structure, however complex or damaged, to knowledge of the world everywhere sub- jected to the obfuscatory concealments and erasures of power.”16 This may seem a large claim on behalf of fiction over history, but a close examination of True Grit endorses it in ways that reveal how Portis’s novel might still serve as a valuable creative paradigm for our contemporary moment. University of Edinburgh

NOTES

1 Charles Portis, True Grit (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), 215. Hereafter cited in text.

2 Patricia Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: Norton, 1987); Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A History of the American West (Norman: U. of Oklahoma Press, 1991); William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin, eds., Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past (New York: Norton, 1992); and Donald Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (Oxford U. Press, 1992).

3 Krista Comer, “Literature, Gender Studies and the New Western History,” Arizona Quar- terly 53 (1997): 104. TRUE GRIT 479

4 Max Westbrook, review of My Country’s Blood: Studies in Southwestern Literature by William T. Pilkington (Fort Worth: Texas Christian U. Press, 1973), Western Historical Quarterly 6 (1975): 69, 70.

5 Nathaniel Lewis, Unsettling the Literary West: Authenticity and Authorship (Lincoln: U. of Nebraska Press, 2003), 225.

6 L. C. Mitchell, “Authenticity, the West, and Literature,” Western American Literature 40 (2005): 93, a review of True West: Authenticity and the American West, ed. William R. Handley and Nathaniel Lewis (Lincoln: U. of Nebraska Press, 2004). See also his essay ‘What’s Authentic about Western Literature? And, More to the Point, What’s Literary?” Postwestern Cultures: Literature, Theory, Space, ed. Susan Kollin (Lincoln: U. of Nebraska Press, 2007).

7 Bobbie Ann Mason, In Country (London: Flamingo, 1987), 19.

8 Don DeLillo, White Noise (London: Picador, 1985), 13.

9 Richard Powers, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance (New York: William Morrow, 1985).

10 William Handley, Marriage, Violence, and the Nation in the American Literary West (Cambridge U. Press, 2002), 3.

11 Forrest Robinson, Having It Both Ways: Self-Subversion in Western Popular Classics (Albuquerque: U. of New Mexico Press, 1993), 2.

12 Paul Wellman, A Dynasty of Western Outlaws (London: Museum Press, 1962).

13 John Cant, Cormac McCarthy and the Myth of American Exceptionalism (London: Rout- ledge, 2008), 7.

14 Sara Spurgeon, Exploding the Western: Myths of Empire on the Postmodern Frontier (Col- lege Station: Texas A&M U. Press, 2005), 12.

15 Jon Krakauer, Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman (London: Atlantic, 2010), xxiii.

16 John Beck, Dirty Wars: Landscape, Power, and Waste in Western American Literature (Lincoln: U. of Nebraska Press, 2009), 4. Copyright of Philological Quarterly is the property of Department of English, University of Iowa and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.