There they are: the silent cowboy, the stubborn ‘sheriff’, the bandit who dreams of having a ranch or the other, the psychopathic destroyer, the girl from the ‘saloon’, the woman on the wagon that brings civilization, the cattle stampede , the lurking Indians, the unbearable tension of the final duel. We know the tropes of the genre well, even if we are not particularly fans, we carry them burned like cattle. It has been said many times: the western is the North American epic. But for many decades that epic has been fraying, critical and renovating with itself. And it has become an adult.
And yes, it came to us through films, of course, but it is often forgotten that they were novels and stories long before the cinema functioned as a sounding board for those stories of colonization and frontier. With the current premiere of ‘The Power of the Dog’, the extraordinary novel by Thomas Savage made by Jane Campion, one might wonder if there is an umpteenth revival of the genre or if on the contrary, as some argue, the novels of the West have always been there, from the days of Feminore Cooper to the apocalyptic phantasmagorias of the great Cormac McCarthy and his unappealable ‘Blood Meridian’, which is not only a masterpiece of the western world, but of American letters, to dry.
Around with the Pulitzer
The impregnation of the genre in contemporary North American writing is reported by the latest Pulitzer Prize for fiction 2021, ‘The night watchman’ (Siruela), by the North American Louise Erdrich, a veteran of the matter, daughter of a Chippewa Indian, who has dedicated herself to telling in her novels the contradiction of living between two worlds. In this novel, Erdrich recovers the story of his grandfather, a member of his tribe’s council fighting for his identity rights. But the imprint is also detectable in novels such as the excellent ‘A lo Distancia’ by Argentine-American Hernán Díaz -who was nominated for that award in 2019- and, further afield, in the western world -this is more classic- ‘Lomesone Where’ by Larry McMurthy, who won it in 1989 and was once overwhelmingly successful.
The publisher and bookseller Alfredo Lara, literary director of lthe Frontera collection, which brings together indisputable translations of the western, is tired of needing that more than 60% of the great classic films that we know have behind them a novel or a short story and they have little to do with that throwaway kiosk literature to which many associate them. “The western, like the crime novel, the historical one or the science fiction, has its masterpieces, pure rubbish and an enormous quantity of enjoyable novels without having to consider them the quintessence of literature & rdquor ;, he says while it hurts that the genre does not has had any revaluation movement comparable to the police one. Along with the Valdemar seal collection, it is fair to mention two classics like ‘Warlock’ and ‘Bad Lands’ by Oakley Hall, that Galaxy Gutenberg recovered a few years ago.
When it comes to thinking about the great literary milestones of the western world, Lara remembers how her collection, started in 2011, had as its founding piece the books of stories from Dorothy M. Johnson, which had spawned three memorable films such as ‘The Hanged Man’s Tree’, ‘A Man Called Horse’ and ‘The Man Who Killed Liberty Valance’. “In a vote that took place at the end of the 20th century, she and Jack London were ranked among the best authors of short stories in the West. The presence of Johnson, a woman, as a teacher of the genre, is not a historical rarity in a traditionally hypermasculinized panorama that carries as its main sins the exaltation of violence, the Indian genocide and weapons as a fetish (a myth that in the United States has arrived to the present day). Lara also points to the work of Leigh Brackett, author of crime novels from the 40s and 50s as well as the scripts for ‘The Eternal Dream’, ‘Hatari’, ‘Río Bravo’, ‘El Dorado’ or ‘Río Lobo’, as well as that of ‘The Empire Contraatraca’. “I personally see no difference between their work and that of their male colleagues,” he says.
Beyond the United States
To the capacity of the genre to cross borders – ask Sergio Leone – and times the writer Jon Bilbao attributes the current validity of a genre that has ended up being filtered in some recent novels in Spanish. The same Bilbao, which has just released the novel ‘Los strangeños’, published last year ‘Basilisco’ (Impedimenta), recently awarded the 42nd and the Euskadi Booksellers Guild and a kind of Western novel in which they ghostly dialogue past and present. “The western was born to indoctrinate,” says Bilbao. He told us that it is nice to be a free and wild cowboy but that, in the end, you have to give way to civilization, order and justice. By internationalizing, the stories of the West freed themselves from that original message and that allowed both in Europe -especially in the comic book universe- and in Japan to relate other concerns and other aesthetics & rdquor ;. The Basque writer, who is currently writing the continuation of ‘Basilisco’, was guided at the time to make a comparison of the old and archetypal masculinity of the West with the current one, more liquid and difficult to define. “But above all,” he adds, “the sheer enjoyment of writing about a genre that I have loved since I was a child and in which I am becoming more and more established. & Rdquor ;. Far from pastiche or nostalgic recreation, the author maintains that the genre allows him to speak in terms of his most personal interests.
West key
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Something similar can be detected in the works of two authors. The Barcelona woman Olga Merino, who in the celebrated ‘La Forastera’ (Alfaguara) he approached the genre, without being excessively aware of it at first, with a story marked by the landscape and by uprooted characters. More astonished is the Argentine Mariana Travacio, that in his first foray into the novel with ‘As if there was forgiveness’ (The Outskirts) has been read in the key of western. “It is something that I had not proposed to myself, I never do, but there is a moment when the interpretations no longer depend on you, they fly free. And the image of the gaucho or the peasant guy with his knife in a rural setting is something that is easily assimilated to the images of the West & rdquor ;, he explains.
Polysemic and multiform, the Western still seems to have a lot to say: “And it is that sometimes genre literature – Bilbao maintains -, whether conscious or not, can function as that shy man who does not dare to dance but one day becomes a mask and unties. In my case, the western has brought out very deep things & rdquor ;.
Reference-www.elperiodico.com