WILDERNESS AND CIVILIZATION
343
these "romances." Leatherstocking insists that it should be there for
all men to use reverently.
These are the facts which by emphasis and reiteration are im–
planted in the reader's mind. The same elements, with some modifi–
cation of Faulknerian rhetoric, can be found in
Go Down, Moses.
There also exists a
curious
affinity between the persons whom the
two writers have made to represent the closest communion with the
wilderness: Cooper's Leatherstocking and Faulkner's Sam Fathers,
son of a Chickasaw chief and a Negro slave, who initiates Isaac Mc–
Caslin to the woods. It is an affinity which stems not from literary
tradition but from similar symbolic aims. Both are old, illiterate but
wise, solitary, kinless, childless,
without
property, and are held by
the others in the veneration of an almost extinct species. Their deaths
coincide with the death of the wilderness, it is a waning away, as if
they are taken back into nature, "When I am gone," says the dying
Leatherstocking, "there will be an end to my race."
This
is at least the way
in which
Cooper first conceived Leather–
stocking; later he rejuvenated him, but although he tried hard to get
him into wedlock, he did not succeed.
It
has been shown by H. N.
Smith
in Virgin Land
how the convention of the romance and
Cooper's own social prejudice hindered that; but actually Cooper
had already sinned against both by creating this character and giv–
ing
him
a dominant role. Above all, it was the symbolic significance
invested in Leatherstocking, weightier than Cooper himself realized,
which refused to be destroyed: Leatherstocking as well as Sam
Fathers had to be and remain solitary to serve their symbolic func–
tion. To start a family, to provide and procreate, would have severed
their bonds to the wilderness and involved them in all the activities
bearing the burden and the taint of civilization. Sterile in their soli–
tariness, they are the representatives of a dying giant: the wilderness.
II
It has been said that America is a country without a pre–
history.2 In another sense, however, America is the unique case of a
country whose pre-history, the wilderness, is still with us,
in
rem-
'2 F . G. Friedmann, "America: A Country without Pre-History,"
Partisan
Review,
March-April 1952.
