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Montana; or The End of Jean-Jacques
Rousseau
Hier oder nirgends ist Amerika. GOETHE
There is a sense, disturbing to good Montanans,
in which Montana is a by-product of European letters, an invention
of the Romantic Movement in literature. In 1743 a white man penetrated
Montana for the first time, but there was then simply nothing
to do with it: nothing yet to do economically in the first place,
but also no way of assimilating the land to the imagination. Before
the secure establishment of the categories of the interessant
and the "picturesque," how could one have come to terms with the
inhumanly virginal landscape: the atrocious magnificence of the
mountains, the illimitable brute fact of the prairies? A new setting
for hell, perhaps, but no background for any human feeling discovered
up to that point; even Sturm und Drang was yet to come.
And what of the Indians? The redskin had been part of daily life
in America and a display piece in Europe for a couple of hundred
years, but he had not yet made the leap from a fact of existence
to one of culture. The Spirit of Christianity of Chateaubriand
and the expedition of Lewis and Clark that decisively opened Montana
to the East were almost exactly contemporary, and both had to
await the turn of the nineteenth century. Sacajawea, the Indian
girl guide of Captain Clark (the legendary Sacajawea, of course,
shorn of such dissonant realistic details as a husband, etc.),
is as much a product of a new sensibility as Atala - and neither
would have been possible without Rousseau and the beautiful lie
of the Noble Savage. By the time the trapper had followed the
explorer, and had been in turn followed by the priest and the
prospector, George Catlin in paint and James Fenimore Cooper in
the novel had fixed for the American imagination the fictive Indian
and the legend of the ennobling wilderness: the primitive as Utopia.
Montana was psychologically possible.
One knows generally that, behind the thin neo-Classical facade
of Virginia and Philadelphia and Boston, the mythical meanings
of America have traditionally been sustained by the Romantic sensibility
(the hero of the first American novel died a suicide, a copy of
Werther lying on the table beside him); that America had been
unremittingly dreamed from East to West as a testament to the
original goodness of man: from England and the Continent to the
Atlantic seaboard; from the Atlantic seaboard to the Midwest;
from the Midwest to the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific. And the
margin where the Dream has encountered the resistance of fact,
where the Noble Savage has confronted Original Sin (the edge of
hysteria: of the twitching revivals, ritual drunkenness, "shooting
up the town," of the rape of nature and the almost compulsive
slaughter of beasts) we call simply: the Frontier.
Guilt and the Frontier are coupled from the first; but the inhabitants
of a Primary Frontier, struggling for existence under marginal
conditions, have neither the time nor energy to feel consciously
the contradiction between their actuality and their dream. Survival
is for them a sufficient victory. The contradiction remains largely
unrealized, geographically sundered; for those who continue to
dream the Dream are in their safe East (Cooper in Westchester
or New York City), and those who live the fact have become total
Westerners, deliberately cut off from history and myth, immune
even to the implications of their own landscape. On into the second
stage of the Frontier, it is dangerous for anyone who wants to
live in a Western community to admire the scenery openly (it evokes
the Dream); such sentiments are legitimate only for "dudes," that
is to say, visitors and barnstorming politicians.
But the schoolmarm, pushing out before her the whore, symbol of
the denial of romance, moves in from the East to marry the rancher
or the mining engineer (a critical cultural event intuitively
preserved as a convention of the Western movie); and the Dream
and the fact confront each other openly. The schoolteacher brings
with her the sentimentalized Frontier novel, and on all levels
a demand begins to grow for some kind of art to nurture the myth,
to turn a way of life into a culture. The legend is ready-made
and waiting, and speedily finds forms in the pulps the movies,
the Western story, the fake cowboy song manufactured at first
by absentee dudes, but later ground out on the spot by cultural
"compradors." The Secondary Frontier moves from naivete' to an
elementary consciousness of history and discrepancy; on the one
hand, it falsifies history, idealizing even the recent past into
the image of the myth, while, on the other hand, it is driven
to lay bare the failures of its founders to live up to the Rousseauistic
ideal. The West is reinvented!
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At the present moment, Montana
is in some respects such a Secondary Frontier, torn between an
idolatrous regard for its refurbished past (the naive culture
it holds up defiantly against the sophistication of the East,
not realizing that the East requires of it precisely such a contemporary
role), and a vague feeling of guilt at the confrontation of the
legend of its past with the real history that keeps breaking through.
But in other respects, Montana has gone on to the next stage:
the Tertiary or pseudo-Frontier, a past artificially contrived
for commercial purposes, the Frontier as bread and butter.
In the last few years, Montana has seen an efflorescence of "Sheriff's
Posses"; dude ranches; chamber of commerce rodeos, hiring professional
riders; and large-scale "Pioneer Days," during which the bank
clerk and the auto salesman grow beards and "go Western" to keep
the tourist-crammed coaches of the Northern Pacific and the Great
Northern rolling. The East has come to see its ancient dream in
action -and they demand it on the line, available for the two-week
vacationer. What the Easterner expects, the Montanan is prepared
to give him, a sham mounted half in cynicism, half with the sense
that this is, after all, what the West really means, merely made
visible, vivid. There is, too, a good deal of "play" involved,
a not wholly unsympathetic boyish pleasure in dressing up and
pulling the leg of the outlander, which over-lays and to some
degree mitigates the cruder motives of "going Western." But in
Montana's larger cities and towns a new kind of entrepreneur has
appeared: the Rodeo and Pioneer Days Manager, to whom the West
is strictly business. There is scarcely a Montanan who does not
at one remove or another share in the hoax and in the take; who
has not, like the nightclub Negro or the stage Irishman, become
the pimp of his particularity, of the landscape and legend of
his state.
Astonishingly ignorant of all this, I came from the East in 1941
to live in Montana, possessing only what might be called the standard
Eastern equipment: the name of the state capital (mispronounced);
dim memories of a rather absurd poem that had appeared, I believe,
in The Nation, and that began: "Hot afternoons have been in Montana";
some information about Burton K. Wheeler; and the impression that
Montana (or was it Idaho?) served Ernest Hemingway as a sort of
alternative Green Hills of Africa. I had, in short, inherited
a shabby remnant of the Romantic myth; and, trembling on an even
more remote periphery of remembering, I was aware of visions of
the Indian (out of Cooper and "The Vanishing American") and the
Cowboy, looking very much like Tom Mix. I was prepared not to
call cattle "cows," and resolutely to face down any student who
came to argue about his grades armed with a six-shooter.
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I was met unexpectedly by
the Montana Face.* What I had been expecting I do not clearly
know; zest, I suppose, naivete', a ruddy and straightforward kind
of vigor - perhaps even honest brutality. What I found seemed,
at first glance, reticent, sullen, weary - full of self-sufficient
stupidity; a little later it appeared simply inarticulate, with
all the dumb pathos of what cannot declare itself: a face developed
not for sociability or feeling, but for facing into the weather.
It said friendly things to be sure, and meant them; but it had
no adequate physical expressions even for friendliness, and the
muscles around the mouth and eyes were obviously unprepared to
cope with the demands of any more complicated emotion. I felt
a kind of innocence behind it, but an innocence difficult to distinguish
from simple ignorance. In a way, there was something heartening
in dealing with people who had never seen, for instance, a Negro
or a Jew or a Servant, and were immune to all their bitter meanings;
but the same people, I knew, had never seen an art museum or a
ballet or even a movie in any language but their own, and the
poverty of experience had left the possibilities of the human
face in them incompletely realized.
"Healthy!" I was tempted to think contemptuously, missing the
conventional stigmata of neurosis I had grown up thinking the
inevitable concomitants of intelligence. It was true, certainly,
that neither the uses nor the abuses of conversation, the intellectual
play to which I was accustomed, flourished here; in that sense
the faces didn't lie. They were conditioned by a mean, a parsimonious
culture; but they were by no means mentally incurious - certainly
not "healthy," rather pricked invisibly by insecurity and guilt.
To believe anything else was to submit to a kind of parody of
the Noble Savage, the Healthy Savage - stupidity as mental health.
Indeed there was, in their very inadequacy at expressing their
inwardness, the possibility of pathos at least - perhaps even
tragedy. Such a face to stand at the focus of reality and myth,
and in the midst of all the grandiloquence of the mountains! One
reads behind it a challenge that demands a great, liberating art,
a ritual of expression - and there is, of course, the movies.
*Natives of Montana, it is only fair to say, don't believe in,
don't see the Montana Face, though of course they can describe
the Eastern Face, black, harried, neurotic. It takes a long time
before newcomers dare confide in each other what they all see,
discover that they have not been enduring a lonely hallucination;
but the unwary outlander who sets down for public consumption
an account of what he has noticed before he forgets it or comes
to find it irrelevant must endure scorn and even hatred. Since
the first publication of this essay, I have been reviled for putting
in print my (I had supposed) quite unmalicious remarks on the
"Montana Face" by men who have never read the Partisan Review
- indeed by some who, I suspect, do not read at all. Yet some
of those most exercised have been quite willing to admit the inarticulateness,
the starvation of sensibility and inhibition of expression, of
which "the Face" is an outward symbol To criticize the soul is
one thing, to insult the body quite another!
The seediest moving-picture theater in town, I soon discovered,
showed every Saturday the same kind of Western picture at which
I had yelled and squirmed as a kid, clutching my box of jujubes;
but in this context it was different. The children still eagerly
attended, to be sure - but also the cowhands. In their run-over-at-the-heels
boots and dirty jeans, they were apparently willing to invest
a good part of their day off watching Gene and Roy, in carefully
tailored togs, get the rustlers, save the ranch, and secure the
Right; meanwhile making their own jobs, their everyday work into
a symbol of the Natural Gentleman at home.
They believed it all - not only that the Good triumphs in the
end, but that the authentic hero is the man who herds cattle.
Unlike, for instance, the soldier at the war picture, they never
snickered, but cheered at all the right places; and yet, going
out from contemplating their idealized selves to get drunk or
laid, they must somehow have felt the discrepancy, as failure
or irony or God knows what. Certainly for the bystander watching
the cowboy, a comic book under his arm, lounging beneath the bright
poster of the latest Roy Rogers film, there is the sense of a
joke on someone - and no one to laugh. It is nothing less than
the total myth of the goodness of man in a state of nature that
is at stake every Saturday after the show at the Rialto; and,
though there is scarcely anyone who sees the issue clearly or
as a whole, most Montanans are driven instinctively to try to
close the gap.
The real cowpuncher begins to emulate his Hollywood version; and
the run-of-the-mill professional rodeo rider, who has turned a
community work-festival into paying entertainment, is an intermediary
between life and the screen, the poor man's Gene Autry. A strange
set of circumstances has preserved in the cowboy of the horse
opera the Child of Nature, Natty Bumppo become Roy Rogers (the
simple soul ennobled by intimacy with beasts and a virginal landscape),
and has trans-formed his saga into the national myth. The boyhood
of most living Americans does not go back beyond the first movie
cowpuncher, and these days the kid without a cowboy outfit is
a second-class citizen anywhere in America. Uncle Sam still survives
as our public symbol; but actually America has come to picture
itself in chaps rather than striped pants.*
*The myth of the Cowboy has recently begun to decline in popular
favor, crowded out of the pulps by the Private Eye and the Space
Pilot; and is being "secularized," like all archetypes that are
dying, in a host of more or less highbrow reworkings of the archetypal
theme: Shane, High Noon, etc.
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Since we are comparatively historyless and culturally
dependent, our claim to moral supremacy rests
upon a belief that a high civilization is at a maximum distance
from goodness; the cowboy is more noble than the earl.
But, on the last frontiers of Montana, the noble lie of Rousseau
is simply a lie; the face on the screen is debunked by the watcher.
The tourist, of course, can always go to the better theaters,
drink at the more elegant bars beside the local property owner,
dressed up for Pioneer Days. The cowhands go to the shabby movie
house off the main drag and do their drinking in their own dismal
places. And when the resident Easterner or the visitor attempts
to pursue the cowpuncher to his authentic dive, the owner gets
rich, chases out the older whores, puts in neon lights and linoleum
- which, I suppose, serves everybody right.
But the better-educated Montanan does not go to the Westerns.
He discounts in advance the vulgar myth of the Cowboy, where the
audience gives the fable the lie, and moves the Dream, the locus
of innocence, back into a remoter past; the surviving Cowboy is
surrendered for the irrecoverable Pioneer. It is the Frontiersman,
the Guide who are proposed as symbols of original nobility: Jim
Bridger or John Colter, who outran half a tribe of Indians, barefoot
over brambles. But this means giving up to begin with the possibilities
that the discovery of a New World had seemed to promise: a present
past, a primitive now, America as a contemporary Golden Age.
When the point of irreconcilable conflict between fact and fiction
had been reached earlier, the Dream had been projected westward
toward a new Frontier - but Montana is a last Frontier; there
is no more ultimate West. Here the myth of the Noble Woodsman
can no longer be maintained in space (the dream of Rousseau reaches
a cul-de-sac at the Lions Club luncheon in Two Dot, Montana);
it retreats from geography into time, from a discoverable West
into the realm of an irrecoverable past. But even the past is
not really safe.
Under the compulsion to examine his past (and there have been
recently several investigations, culminating in the Rockefeller
Foundation-sponsored Montana Study), the contemporary Montanan,
pledged to history though nostalgic for myth, becomes willy-nilly
an iconoclast. Beside a John Colter he discovers a Henry Plummer,
the sheriff who was for years secretly a bandit; and the lynch
"justice" to which Plummer was brought seems to the modern point
of view as ambiguous as his career. The figure of the Pioneer
becomes ever more narrow, crude, brutal; his law is revealed as
arbitrary force, his motive power as - greed. The Montanan poring
over his past comes to seem like those dance-hall girls, of whom
a local story tells, panning the ashes of a road agent who had
been lynched and burned, for the gold it had been rumored he was
carrying. Perhaps there had never been any gold in the first place.
It is in his relations with the Indian that the Pioneer shows
to worst advantage. The record of those relations is one of aggression
and deceit and, more remotely, the smug assumption that anything
goes with "Savages." There are honorable exceptions among the
early missionaries, but it is hard for a Protestant culture to
make a Jesuit its hero. For many years the famous painting of
Custer's Last Stand hung in the state university, where the students
of history were being taught facts that kept them from taking
Custer for the innocent Victrm, the symbolic figure of the white
man betrayed by crafty redskins that he is elsewhere. In Montana
it is difficult to see the slaughter at Little Big Horn as anything
but the result of a tactical error in a long warfare with whose
motives one can no longer sympathize.
Driving across Montana, the conscientious sightseer who slows
up for the signs saying "Historic Point 1000 Feet" can read the
roadside marker beside US 2 at Chinook, which memorializes "The
usual fork-tongued methods of the white which had deprived these
Indians of their hereditary lands," "One of the blackest records
of our dealings with the Indians..." Or at Poplar he can learn
how the Assiniboines "are now waiting passively for the fulfillment
of treaties made with 'The Great White Father.' "*
*I have since been told that these signs were composed by a self-conscious
"rebel," who later accommodated to the ruling powers and grew
rich; but such an account is itself an American Legend - and anyway
the words of the "rebel" have never seemed inappropriate to legislator,
road commissioner, or traveler on the highways.
It is at first thoroughly disconcerting to discover such confessions
of shame blessed by the state legislature and blazoned on the
main roads where travelers are enjoined to stop and notice. What
motives can underlie such declarations: The feeling that simple
confession is enough for absolution? A compulsion to blurt out
one's utmost indignity? A shallow show of regret that protects
a basic indifference? It is not only the road markers that keep
alive the memory of the repeated betrayals and acts of immoral
appropriation that brought Montana into existence; there are books
to document the story, and community pageants to present it in
dramatic form. The recollection of a common guilt comes to be
almost a patriotic duty.
What is primarily involved is, I think, an attempt to identify
with the Indian. Notice in the sentences quoted from highway signs
the use of Indian terminology, "fork-tongued," "Great White Father"
- the attempt to get inside the Indian's predicament. If the Pioneer
seems an ignoble figure beside the Indian, it is perhaps because
he was, as a Noble Savage, not quite savage enough; as close as
he was to nature, the White Pioneer, already corrupted by Europe
and civilization, could not achieve the saving closeness. "Civilization,"
a road sign between Hysham and Forsyth ironically comments, "is
a wonderful thing, according to some people." The corpse of Rousseau
is still twitching.
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At the beginnings of American
literature, Cooper had suggested two avatars of primeval goodness:
Pioneer and Indian, the alternative nobility of Natty Bumppo and
Chingachgook; and the Montanan, struggling to hang on to the Romantic
denial of Original Sin, turns to the latter, makes the injured
Chief Joseph or Sitting Bull the Natural Gentleman in place of
the deposed Frontiersman.
But the sentimentalized Indian will not stand up under scrutiny
either. "The only good Indian is a dead Indian," the old folk
saying asserts; and indeed the Montanan who is busy keeping the
living Indian in the ghetto of the reservation cannot afford to
believe too sincerely in his nobility. The cruelest aspect of
social life in Montana is the exclusion of the Indian; deprived
of his best land, forbidden access to the upper levels of white
society, kept out of any job involving prestige, even in some
churches confined to the back rows, but of course protected from
whisky and comforted with hot lunches and free hospitals - the
actual Indian is a constant reproach to the Montanan, who feels
himself Nature's own democrat, and scorns the South for its treatment
of the Negro, the East for its attitude toward the Jews. To justify
the continuing exclusion of the Indian, the local white has evolved
the theory that the redskin is naturally dirty, lazy, dishonest,
incapable of assuming responsibility - a troublesome child; and
this theory confronts dumbly any attempt at reasserting the myth
of the Noble Savage.
The trick is, of course, to keep the Indian what he is, so that
he may be pointed out, his present state held up as a justification
for what has been done to him. And the trick works; the Indian
acts as he is expected to; confirmed in indolence and filth, sustained
by an occasional smuggled bout of drunkenness, he does not seem
even to have clung to his original resentment, lapsing rather
into apathy and a certain self-contempt. The only thing white
civilization had brought to the Indian that might be judged a
good was a new religion; but one hears tales now of the rise of
dope-cults, of "Indian Christianity," in which Jesus and Mary
and the drug peyote are equally adored. Once I traveled for two
days with an Indian boy on his way to be inducted into the Army;
and, when he opened the one paper satchel he carried, it contained:
a single extra suit of long underwear and forty comic books -all
the goods, material and spiritual, with which our culture had
endowed him.
On the side of the whites, there is, I think, a constantly nagging
though unconfessed sense of guilt, perhaps the chief terror that
struggles to be registered on the baffled Montana Face. It is
a struggle much more diflicult for the Montana "liberal" to deal
with than those other conflicts between the desired and the actual
to which he turns almost with relief: the fight with the Power
Company or the Anaconda Copper Mining Company for the instruments
of communication and the possibilities of freedom. The latter
struggles tend to pre-empt the liberal's imagination, because
on them he can take an unequivocal stand; but in respect to the
Indian he is torn with inner feelings of guilt, the knowledge
of his own complicity in perpetuating the stereotypes of prejudice
and discrimination. In that relationship he cannot wholly dissociate
himself from the oppressors; by his color, he is born into the
camp of the Enemy. There is, of course, no easy solution to the
Indian problem; but so long as the Montanan fails to come to terms
with the Indian, despised and outcast in his open-air ghettos,
just so long will he be incapable of coming to terms with his
own real past, of making the adjustment between myth and reality
upon which a successful culture depends. When he admits that the
Noble Savage is a lie; when he has learned that his state is where
the myth comes to die (it is here, one is reminded, that the original
of Huck Finn ended his days, a respected citizen), the Montanan
may find the possibilities of tragedy and poetry for which so
far he has searched his life in vain.
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Originally published in the
Partisan Review, December 1949;
Republished in An End of Innocence, 1955 (Beacon Press)
Second edition of An End of Innocence published by Stein and Day,
1971
From INTRODUCTION TO THE SECOND EDITION, 1971
...many of the contradictory impulses memorialized in Montana;
or the End of Jean-Jacques Rousseau-impulses which led me first
to abandon the East, then to criticize the place to which I had
come-presently possess the minds of the those young men and women,
the children of fathers who unlike me stayed in the Urban East,
who are just now abandoning the city and moving into what survives
of the West. Such young wanderers constitute a third westward
migration which promises to become as significant in the making
of American culture as was the mid-nineteenth-century first wave.
I can now see my own move as part of a small second wave, whose
goals were more ironically and less sentimentally defined than
either of the other two since we sought not mining camps (like
the first) or communes (like the third) but only universities
and colleges, fortresses of culture in a dying wilderness. But
we managed all the same to keep alive in a time of paralysis and
timidity the notion of heading westward, the dream of getting
out.
*Here or nowhere is America. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(1749-1832)
Date sent: Wed, 14 Jun 2000 13:54:47 -0400
(EDT)
From: Leslie A Fiedler
To: mercury@fvcc.cc.mt.us
Subject: Permission
Dear Mike Evans,
You certainly can have permission to reprint my little essay
on Montana. It has been a long time since I managed to get back
to the place which deep in my imagination I have never left. But
I don't feel in the mood to say anything more than what is already
present in that essay written so long ago.
Regards,
Leslie Fiedler
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