"Peeping Toms on History": Barry Hannah's Never Die as Postmodern Western

In his thoughtful essay "Home by Way of California: The Southerner as the Last European," Lewis P. Simpson explores what seem to him basic differences between the mind of the South and its western "other." The latter, contends Simpson, has corollaries in the artistic vision of northeasterners--Henry David Thoreau, James Fenimore Cooper, and the "father" of the popular western, Owen Wister--who create fictions in which a hero transcends history amid the pristine, naturally democratic vistas of the American landscape. In contrast, the former extends a tragic European outlook that sees the individual as a creature trapped, the hapless victim of history. Simpson's paradigm has been very influential in southern studies, and one can indeed see how the tragic ethos he identifies informs to grand effect the body of southern writing produced during the fabled Renascence, a literature acutely concerned with the past in the present (to paraphrase Allen Tate's famous formulation) and the doomed yet heroic efforts to cope with or survive history, not escape it--reflected in Faulkner's famous proclamation in the Nobel speech that humanity will not merely "endure," but "prevail." Yet this South-versus-West theory tells only part of the story, for the West has, since the early nineteenth century, occupied a special place in the southern imagination. Historian Richard Slotkin notes in particular how southerners have "mythologiz[ed] ... the Frontier ... as a new Garden of Eden"; he locates this mythos in a Jeffersonian agrarianism in which the "frontier ... promises complete felicity, the satisfaction of all demands and the reconciliation of all contradictions" (69-70). No less a canonical southern text than Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)--identified by both Tate and Louis D. Rubin as the first modern southern novel--bears out this representation, as Simpson himself tacitly admits. Huck's account shows that life is "satisfying" only when marked by a pastoral plenitude beyond the artificial and hypocritical constraints of southern (read eastern) culture, a realization that ultimately impels him to "light out for the territory" of the western frontier. Twain's story may lack the gunplay of the novels that were already beginning to gain popularity in the 1880s, but in its fusion of the southern pastoral and the unadulterated frontier, it is in many ways the prototypical "western." Its influence continues as contemporary southern fictionists, including Charles Portis, Richard Ford, Ishmael Reed, and Cormac McCarthy, stake out territory west of the Mississippi. The popularity of McCarthy's The Border Trilogy confirms most decisively how alluring the West remains for southern writers and readers alike. Such recent authors, however, offer a more complicated version of the western than does Twain. Whereas the modern (or "proto-modern") Huckleberry Finn helped establish the cultural authority of a mythologized West, its successors have done much to question that authority. In this respect, they might be called "postmodern." The western's role as a totalizing construction that organizes history into a coherent, "satisfying" set of patterns that essentialize American identity marks it as an example of what Jean-Francois Lyotard calls "metanarrative."(1) For Lyotard and other noted theorists, postmodern art exhibits a thoroughgoing "incredulity toward metanarratives" and usually strives to undermine these overarching "stories" from within. Linda Hutcheon has shown that postmodern novels about the West, in particular, exhibit a "contradictory attraction/repulsion to structure and patterns" that uses and abuses the western as a genre, ultimately destabilizing the historical, political, and personal fantasies it tries to fulfill (133). One of the most well-known novels by a southerner to do this is McCarthy's prelude to The Border Trilogy, Blood Meridian (1985). This fascinating account of exploitation and violence parodies Huckleberry Finn and later westerns. …