Clude-Sukei grew up reading whatever books he could get his hands on, most of them by default White writers writing for a White audience. A first his reading simply matched his life experience--it was a bigoted, racist world he lived in, and the books he read were consistent in vision. Then Clude-Sukei grew more sophisticated and grew "to enjoy the frisson of contradiction." He writes about how "those damned racist books": "taught me that we are all shaped and rendered impure by racism, colonialism, and various forms of inequality, all the time and in all texts. Who or what we would be without those forces is unanswerable." The racism and gender rigidity in Grey's novels are historical footprints of times past (and present).
Here are a few concepts from the article that resonated with me:
- "I’ve [Louis Clude-Sokei] lived by Joan Didion’s evergreen dictum, 'Writers are always selling someone out.'”
- "Not seeing myself in any of the characters enabled me to identify with all of them, so innocence was impossible. And suspecting that the author might have been hostile to someone like me only made the dance of interpretation more exciting. This all taught me to find freedom even in narratives hell-bent on my erasure."
- "One can love a work of literature while vehemently disagreeing with it. This seems so obvious it’s hard to believe it must now be defended. To teach students the opposite is to hobble them with a need for innocence."
- "To cleanse the past, though, is not only to rob ourselves of the prickly pleasures and unique challenges of such works. More importantly, it can aid in the removal of evidence from the scene of crime."
- "To make sanctuary in hostile or indifferent territory is a necessary skill."
My recent foray into Zane Grey's world was his romance The Light of the Western Stars. In the novel, Madeline Hammond leaves the privileged world of the East, seeking her brother in the wilds of New Mexico, during the beginnings of the revolutionary times in Mexico in the early 1900s. She experiences the vivid roughness of the environment and the people who live there. Action includes lightning storms, fast horses, wild cowboys, gunfights, and of course love. Grey's ability to describe the Western environment is at times sublime.
Rain fell steadily. The fury of the storm, however, had passed, and the roll of thunder diminished in volume. The air had wonderfully cleared and was growing cool. Madeline began to feel uncomfortably cold and wet. Stewart was climbing faster than formerly, and she noted that Monty kept at her heels, pressing her on. Time had been lost, and the camp-site was a long way off. The stag-hounds began to lag and get footsore. The sharp rocks of the trail were cruel to their feet. Then, as Madeline began to tire, she noticed less and less around her. The ascent grew rougher and steeper—slow toil for panting horses. The thinning rain grew colder, and sometimes a stronger whip of wind lashed stingingly in Madeline's face. Her horse climbed and climbed, and brush and sharp corners of stone everlastingly pulled and tore at her wet garments. A gray gloom settled down around her. Night was approaching. Majesty heaved upward with a snort, the wet saddle creaked, and an even motion told Madeline she was on level ground. She looked up to see looming crags and spires, like huge pipe-organs, dark at the base and growing light upward. The rain had ceased, but the branches of fir-trees and juniper were water-soaked arms reaching out for her. Through an opening between crags Madeline caught a momentary glimpse of the west. Red sun-shafts shone through the murky, broken clouds. The sun had set.
I enter Grey's world as an immigrant, a time traveler. The author has his "boxes" or perspectives that inform his writing: the sensitivity and intuitions "unique" to women, a "let's bash Mexicans" box, the insipid anemia of Easterners and the childlike impulsiveness of Westerners, the regenerative qualities of nature (which at times Grey romanicizes until it becomes a cliche).
I love Grey's description of the natural world, and I love his passionate characters and storylines, even with their brittle characterizations and moral binary development. As an immigrant reader, I enter Grey's novels, recognizing that I'm entering territory that will sometimes be hostile to my world view. I enjoy the frisson of being on guard, of advancing into a perspective that I at times will vehemently disagree with. Like all travelers, I advance cautiously into the "history" of the writing, the world at times beautiful and at times ugly, a stranger in a strange land--a situation not all that different, actually, from every time I walk out my front door.
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I am reading The Rainbow Trail and the depth of the sexism suddenly shows how deep it runs as a double standard for women. The main character, former clergyman John Shefford, struggles with the idea that the woman he loves is capable of having killed her rapist with a knife to the chest in self defense. He calls it 'murder'. His concern about her character surfaces right after he himself has killed several of their pursuers with one lucky shot that sends men and horses over a cliff. Is that indeed a sign of the times Zane Grey lived? Knowing a little about Zane Grey's bio, I tend to think it is a sign of his personal perspective. My grandparents, of his generation, lead a monogamous life but would they have also minimalized the offense of rape? Maybe. I'm here to learn. I very much like Clude-Sokei's statements above. Thanks for bringing this up.
ReplyDeleteI think we can learn a lot about current endemic racism and sexism by reading writing from Grey's era. As an example, Theodore Roosevelt was an admirable man and president in many ways. During his Rough Riders time, he fought, camped, and interacted with individuals from different races and economic levels. He treated them equally and respected their strengths. However, from what I've read, he never once doubted that his view of the world was best and that others would be better off if they adopted it. Much of his work was to promote his rich, white generation's point of view, working to have other cultures change to the "best" way of life. I finally have to think that many people of that time were good people who lived with standards that we find unacceptable today, I'm also reminded that Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn used the word "nigger" over 200 times because he wanted the novel to use realistic vernacular. Nowadays, modern writing and cinema use the word to characterize racist behavior. In Twain's time, the word was just common usage in the South.
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