BOOKS
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tennined on an "objective" presentation and on the avoidance of
that inner flux of sensation, emotion, and consciousness which in
the "psychological" tradition is made the center of reality. This may
be either a self-imposed aesthetic discipline or a considered adapta–
tion of style and meth')d to the western theme, to a milieu of
in–
transigent, often brutal, fact and happening
in
which men had
better expend energy only in the primary physical activities of sur–
viving and arriving. The method has certain disadvantages: human
responses that seem inevitable are sometimes missing; the reduction
of memory leaves us curious about the hero's past and its relation
to the present; major choices are made in an apparently mechani–
cal way that leaves a motive unclear, even though motive does not
seem unimportant; and even the hero's final clarification is not
entirely free of fuzziness. On the other hand, Williams makes the
convention of the non-responsive and apparently analgesic man
serve an excellent effect by discarding it at key moments and shift–
ing to the convention of full sensibility; reality is no longer cen–
tered in impersonal muscular transactions with an external world
of things, but shifts to the realm of feeling and thought. By this
break in method, notably employed during the slaughter of the
buffalo herd and at the final collapse of the buffalo hunter's world,
Williams dramatizes as sharply as possible the emergence of un–
derstanding: character and reader are thrust simultaneously into
moments of enlightenment, of the appraisal of external phenomena
by the sentient observer newly revealed as the human reality be-.
hind the facade of the automaton-like adventurer. The world of
Ol1ter scene and action itself gains a new intensity through a greater
frequency of sensory images, just as we draw away from it into a
new knowledge of it. The density of things is greatest when we tum
to their significance; the novel opens out most widely as it moves
inward into consciousness.
Williams's instinct for playing down meaning except at mo–
ments of epiphany serves him well in a different area: it con–
tributes to a laudable reticence in the symbolic overtones that, in
an
age when writers can hardly help being highly self-conscious
technicians, are likely to become much too assertive. Perhaps most
open to view is the hero's involvement with both love and death:
his progress from a shrinking diffidence to a knowing and yet
