There are times when the line between myth and legend disappears. Our usage of the word myth here is intended to encapsulate those aspects of the West that to a great extent defined the US as a culture. Myths in this context are more like values, in the LD sense, than the specifics of legends. The legends may entail certain mythic aspects, but their goal is not the telling of underlying myth. And the myths may derive from the legends, but whereas the legends are about themselves, and about their narrative, the myths are about what underlies the narratives. What underlies the narratives becomes the metanarrative. (Don’t you love tossing jargon like this around?)
The myth of the West begins with the idea of the frontier. It begins with the idea that, as we move west, there is absolute freedom. We can release ourselves from our lives and begin again. We can become or find ourselves. No one knows who we are out there, so we are free to be whoever we want to be. This freedom and this land may test us, but it will also better us. F. Scott Fitzgerald to the contrary notwithstanding, American lives had an explicit opportunity for second acts, and that was by hauling up stakes and moving west. I don’t know of any other cultural self-image that includes such movement. A Frenchman is a Frenchman, happy to be wherever he is in France; substitute most any other nationality and the statement remains true. Even unhappy countries would be happy if they could only overthrow their nasty leaders and be the Blankmen they are destined to be. Americans are restless. They keep moving. They need to conquer new frontiers. And keep in mind we’re talking image here, not necessarily reality. But that’s beside the point.
There’s a loner aspect to the myth of the West, which is seen in the collected legends. We see ourselves as standing tall but standing by ourselves. We draw on our own resources, some of which we may not have been aware we possessed. In fact, you might say that our myth of the West includes us as our own legends of the West. We are all Wyatt Earp or Kit Carson or John Wayne or Gary Cooper. If you know the movie The Fountainhead (the most inadvertently hilarious motion picture of all time) you know the shot at the end of the Coop as God at the top of the building. Make that a mountaintop, and you’ve got the Western conqueror in the nutshell (and it’s no great stretch to see Randian individualism as a part of it).
So the Myth of the West is the endless frontier and the individualist conqueror. This myth, as a part of our culture, feeds back to our image of ourselves beyond the West. As a culture we believe in the process of reinvention, and we believe that there is a place for us to go to undergo this process. The point that this is myth implies that there might be some flaw in it as a conception of reality. It is based on our desires and our perceptions and our personalization of the legends, and as truth it is seriously flawed (as are, the pomos would say, most if not all metanarratives). The conquering of the Indians leaves out the reality of the Native American situation. The taming of the land leaves out the reality of the abuses of the environment. Building the mighty railroads leaves out the reality of abusing the Chinese laborers. Creating a place of freedom excludes the reality of the lack of freedom for former slaves, Native Americans, Hispanics, Asians, etc., which is forever a problem with the American myth of liberty for all. I’m no Howard Zinn, but facts are facts, and my recommendation to anyone in America is, first and foremost, be white, upper-middle class if you really want to enjoy the place to the fullest.
So legends make for good stories, while myths make for good (hopefully) characters. Admittedly, as I’ve alluded, you could define these terms differently, but the result in the end would be roughly the same. And the end, for us, is the end of the West. At some point, there is no West in the mythic or legendary sense anymore. It’s all settled. It’s all conquered. There is no longer any frontier. At this point, we don’t have any reality anymore informing the myth, but just the myth itself (and, of course, history). The myth persists, even though it’s no longer part of anyone’s daily endeavor. We start studying the myth, and retelling the legends, at a remove from their actuality. We’re no longer studying the West, we’re studying what happens after there no longer is a West. Hence the literature and the films. And as our study moves further and further away from the reality into the representations of that reality, we become more ironic and convoluted and self-conscious—in other words, we take on all the attributes of the postmodern. We’re not studying the West, we’re studying the study of the West. We’re getting into the hermeneutics. We’re getting structural and post-structural and critical. The whole thing is becoming an academic exercise, subject to whatever pressures and trends are afoot in academia, rather than a cultural exercise. One wonders at what point the West as culturally formative/informative myth goes away, to be replaced by other culturally formative/informative myths. It does: there’s no question about that. It probably already has, otherwise there would be more Westerns at the multiplex this weekend.
to be continued…
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