Critics have noted that Morris's view of life darkens in his later novels, particularly Plains Song (1980). Throughout many of his nineteen novels runs an irony sometimes so subtle that even so astute a reader as Wayne C. Booth admits to difficulty in understanding it. Referring specifically to Love Among the Cannibals (1957), Booth says: 'I can be certain that I sometimes judge when judgment is not intended, sometimes fail to judge when Morris expects me to, and sometimes judge on the wrong axis: Morris may intend undercuttings that many readers will overlook, yet many a reader may make moral and aesthetic judgments against Morris that he in fact intends to be made against the narrator.' But Booth also points out that reading more than one of Morris's works helps readers correctly identify and gauge the ironies.
Complex irony also pervades the novels of William Eastlake, a native New Yorker who as a young man moved to a New Mexico ranch. In a series of three novels set in Indian Country — Go in Beauty (1956), The Bronc People (1958), and Portrait of an Artist with Twenty-Six Horses (1963) — Eastlake undercuts virtually every stereotype of the popular Western. For example, instead of being bloodthirsty fiends or taciturn Noble Savages, the Native Americans often function almost as a sophisticated Greek chorus, wittily commenting on the other characters. However, Eastlake's novels offer much more than ironic undercuttings. He probes the psychological and emotional sources of conflict between brothers, between races, between cultures. His persistent irony strips away the stereotypes people use to conceal their real motives. And like Faulkner and Wright Morris, Eastlake presents many of his novels as a series of seemingly separate stories or sketches, thereby making the reader piece together the narrative fragments.
Eastlake's symbolism shows the dualities that split the American mind and divide American society. Yet the chorus of Indian comments reminds us that from the Native American perspective those dualities matter very little, since they constitute the yin and yang of a world view that continues to 'civilize' the continent. Because of its -445- tonal complexity and its penetrating critique of American civilization, critics Delbert Wylder and Gerald Haslam have rightly called The Bronc People a classic in the literature of the West.
Another novel of the 1950s, Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957), drew national attention because it seemed a paean to the controversial Beat movement. Consisting of Sal Paradise's account of his transcontinental journeys with or in search of his buddy Dean Moriarity, On the Road seemed to some of its first readers only a picaresque travelogue. Initially denounced by many critics as non-art and an irresponsible glorification of Bohemian irresponsibility, On the Road nevertheless was heralded by a New York Times reviewer as a 'major novel,' and it hit the best-seller lists. A decade later, another wave of critics saw Kerouac's work not as random ramblings in his notorious 'spontaneous prose' but as a carefully structured love story. Although Kerouac's characters only crisscross the West, seldom staying in one place for long, On the Road deserves classification as a novel of the West not because it recounts Bohemian antics in the region but because it depicts at least one undying notion about the West: that it is a land of possibility.
Westerners live 'out where the sense of place is a sense of motion,' as Stegner puts it; and On the Road shows mid-century Americans pulled by this aspect of the westering impulse as the pioneers in Emerson Hough's The Covered Wagon (1922) and the Okies in The Grapes of Wrath are pulled by it. Yet Stegner and other Westerners disapprove of Bohemianism like Kerouac's. Was this Beat a martyr to the truth, savagely attacked for trying to reveal the hollowness and decadence of the American Wasteland? Or was he a latter-day Pied Piper who led thousands to forsake responsibility in exchange for lives eventually ruined by promiscuity and the drug culture? Some Westerners answer 'yes' to the first question, some 'yes' to the second. Their differing responses show that the Beat movement and On the Road helped create a counterculture within the West, further fragmenting an already complex society.
Whatever their differences, contemporary Western novelists stand united in their opposition to the rape of the land. They know that the frenzied rush toward ecocide will not abate until we gain a new consciousness of our relationship to the earth and its creatures. Most contemporary Western authors try to fashion the beginnings of the -446- necessary new consciousness. Westerner Gary Snyder, the subject of Kerouac's novel The Dharma Bums (1958), writes poetry infused with Native American and Far Eastern thought that sees wilderness as a source of spiritual sustenance, not as a source of maximum profits. Don Berry, who once roomed with Snyder around the time when they were students at Reed College, shares Snyder's outlook. In a remarkable trilogy — Trask (1960), Moontrap (1962), and To Build a Ship (1963) — Berry probes the psychological forces that impelled whites to settle the Oregon Coast in the years from 1848 to 1854.
Trask takes for its title character a mountain man who has married and settled near Astoria. Stirred by a restless desire to possess new lands, he sets out with two Native American guides to chart a route to Murderer's Harbor, where he hopes to establish a new settlement. As Glen A. Love has noted, a brief plot summary makes Trask sound similar to formula Westerns. But like other Western authors (most notably Fergusson, Fisher, Guthrie, Manfred, and, most recently, Bill Hotchkiss) who have written novels about the mountain men, Berry sees the natural world as sacred and he deplores the forces within us that have driven us to attack and destroy so much of that world. Trask's journey goes beyond the pioneering of a Natty Bumppo, because Trask's experiences force him to explore his own psyche. Indeed, the novel's ambiguous ending starts with Trask's vision quest, or Searching — terms for the Native American rites of passage to spiritual awareness. Because Trask captures so vividly the process of enlightenment, it belongs, as Love says, 'among the small group of works by which Northwest literature will be enduringly defined.'
That small group of works also includes Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962). Set in an Oregon insane asylum and narrated by an escaped inmate (an Indian named Chief 'Broom' Bromden), Kesey's novel exposes the repressive institutions of modern industrial societies that demand sterile conformity. Into a ward of 'loonies' comes Randall Patrick McMurphy, a convict who has opted for a stretch in the asylum rather than a term of hard labor at the state prison farm. When McMurphy notices how cowed and hopeless his fellow inmates are, he tries to revivify them. Frustrated when his efforts are opposed by Big Nurse Ratched, who represents and defends the 'Combine' (the Establishment), McMurphy tries to strangle and rape her. His violent attack gives her an excuse to have -447- him lobotomized. Although she successfully destroys his mind, his free spirit lives on in Chief Bromden, who in mercy kills what is left of McMurphy and then escapes from the asylum.
In the first half of Cuckoo's Nest, McMurphy swaggers onto the scene like a hero from a Hollywood Western and spins yarns like a frontier rip-tail-roarer. His weapon against Big Nurse and the Combine initially is nothing more nor less than a laughter that seems to burst forth inexhaustively from his boundless energy. His initials, R.P.M., which in machinery stand for 'revolutions per minute,' reveal his quintessential Westernness, for his free spirit comes from the sense of place that in the West is a sense of motion. But by novel's end McMurphy has been transformed from a confidence man into a cowboy Christ who willingly sacrifices himself for the good of others. He is, as Jerome Klinkowitz has observed, 'the first fictional hero to practice that key strategy of sixties leadership: raising the consciousness of the people,' and he also invents 'a new way of perceiving reality, which is nothing less than a new reality itself.' And who is the Ishmael of Kesey's modern Moby-Dick? Significantly, a Native American who has learned from McMurphy that the Combine will never capture his spirit if he tries McMurphy's new way of perceiving reality.
During the 1960s, novelists outside the American West also used the Western donnée to show the power of language to shape reality. A native New Yorker, E. L. Doctorow wrote Welcome to Hard Times (1960) after reading screenplays of Westerns for CBS Television and Columbia Pictures. The novel consists of a chronicle written by a dying man who has witnessed the destruction and then the rebuilding of a settlement, only to see it destroyed again. Doctorow undercuts or inverts elements of the traditional Western in order to create a novelistic version of the Theater of Cruelty, twentiethcentury plays intended to exorcise erotic cruelty by depicting it in virtually religious rites.
Another Easterner, Thomas Berger, composed a novel of the West after reading some seventy books of Western autobiography, history, and anthropology. But Little Big Man (1964) has a narrative structure more complex than that of Doctorow's novel, for Berger uses the framing device characteristic of the humorous tall tales of the Old -448- Southwest. The main narrator, Jack Crabb, tells us that after Native Americans had killed his pioneer father, they raised Jack. Crabb says he reentered white society and then returned
