488
PARTISAN REVIEW
foray ashore, with the difference that where Huck loses the stranger
wins-but win or lose it is all the same: one must in any case be on
the move. The shift from east to west accomplishes a rotation from
the organic to the inorganic, from the green shade of Huck's willow
towhead (or Novalis's leafy bower) to the Southwestern desert. But
both the chlorophyll rotation (Hudson's Riolama) and John Ford's
desert are themselves rotations from the human nest, the family fam–
iliar, Sartre's category of the viscous. The true smell of everydayness
is the smell of Sunday dinner in the living room. Rotation from the
human organic may occur to the animal organic (Mowgli in the wolf
den), to the vegetable organic (Hudson in Riolama), to the inorganic
(John Wayne in the desert), or back again. To the alienated man of
the East who has rotated to Santa Fe, the green shade of home be–
comes a true rotation; to his blood brother in Provence, it is the mesa
and the cobalt sky. The I-It dichotomy is translated intact in the
Western movie. Who is he, this Gary Cooper person who manages
so well to betray nothing of himself whatsoever, who is he but I
myself, the locus of pure possibility? He is qualitatively different
from everyone else
in
the movie. Whereas they are what they are–
the loyal but inept friend, the town comic, the greedy rancher, the
craven barber-the stranger exists as pure possibility in the axis of
nought-infinity. He is either nothing, that is, the unrisked possibility
who walks through the town as a stranger and keeps his own counsel
-above all he is silent-or he is perfectly realized actuality, the
conscious
ens soir)
that is to say the Godhead, who, when at last he
does act, acts with a ritual and gestural perfection. Let it be noted
that it is all or nothing: everything depends on his gestural perfection
-an aesthetic standard which is appropriated by the movie-goer at
a terrific cost in anxiety. In the stately dance of rotation, Destry
when challenged borrows a gun and shoots all the knobs off the
saloon sign.
But what if he did not? What if he missed?
The stranger
in the movie walks the tightrope over the abyss of anxiety and he
will not fail. But what of the movie-goer? The stranger removes his
hat in the ritual rhythm and wipes his brow with his sleeve, but
the movie-goer's brow is dry when he emerges and he has a headache
and if he tried the same gesture he might bump into his nose. Both
Gary Cooper and the movie-goer walk the tightrope of anxiety,
but Gary Cooper only seems to: his rope is only a foot above the
