ROBERT B. HEILMAN
THE WESTERN THEME:
EXPLOITERS AND EXPLORERS
BUTCHER'S CROSSING. By
John Willioms. Mocmillon.
$3 .95.
If
western Kansas and eastern Colorado are not quite
in the heart of the West, and if buffalo-hunting is only a third or
fourth cousin to westering, nevertheless the scene and the fore–
ground action of John Williams's
Butcher's Cf/'ossing
inevitably
bring to mind the problems of the writer who would make literary
art out of the history of the West. It has been the fate of the Ameri–
can West to beget the stereotypes that belong to pseudo art before
it has yielded up the individualized types that belong to art proper.
A natural history of
stereotyp~s
would reveal, I surmise, that they
come into being in two opposed ways. One of these involves the
familiar death-in-life paradox: the stereotype is the devitalization
of a once strong life that naturally can be neither reproduced nor
replaced and so drags on in pale likenesses. There were, for in–
stance, the Pamelas that resisted men, the Tom Joneses that did
not resist women, and the Yoricks .that resisted no vibrations, how–
ever minute, of delight and pity-mechanical imitations that
crowded through fiction until almost 1800. An innovator of genius
(and genius may not always mean greatness) forms a taste, and
camp-followers, mastering expected motions, gratify it. More re–
cently we have the examples of Wells providing an image in science
fiction, Doyle in detective fiction, and
Gone with the Wind
in the
lusty-busty historical.
If
we think of "grades;' of stereotype, an ap–
proach which may be fruitful, we can perhaps see an upper-level
stereotype in what we call by the slightly less condescending name
of "vogue" or even in what we call, a little more honorifically, a
"style." Zola created a pattern with such limitations that it may
come, with the modification of a particular sensibility, to seem a
stereotype, and even as early as the present time the existentialists
seem threatened with the same danger. When the innovator is not
so much providing a re-illumination of constants as he is catching
a particular note of his own time, the threat of the stereotype is
soonest perceived.
The stereotypes of the West, however, do not represent a de-
