LITERATUREnA View From thenTop of the Ridgenby M.E. BradfordnOn the Literature of thenAmerican WestnFor the last several weeks, working atna leisurely pace, I have been readingnthrough the new and extremelynambitious Columbia Literary Historynof the United States. This is a hugenwork, one which has many merits andnaspires to be inclusive. Indeed, it is anconscious attempt to practice the “newnliterary history” — a generous mix ofninterpretive strategies. But in one respectnit offers nothing more than anslight modification of the familiar tendencynof the Northeast to confuse itselfnwith the rest of the country — to takenits own peculiar taste too seriously. Fornin the 1,263 pages of this historynnothing is said about the literature ofnthe American West. All that we find tonbreak such silence is a chapter onnMexican-American writers (includednfor the sake of ethnic diversity) and anlittle praise for the Kiowa poet andnnovelist M. Scott Momaday, with thenbrief comment that the West is “not anregion” but rather an expectation, “allnfuture and mobility.”nSuch a turning away from a corpusnof serious literature, distinguished bothnby subject and by relation to a specificnscene, is difficult to explain. That is,nunless we remember the arrogance ofnthe New York cultural establishment: anblindness found even beyond the Metropolisnin its academic outposts, in thenaccounts of fashionable historians andncritics who reluctantly acknowledge thenregional particularity of a Southernnliterature or the distinctive inheritancenof three hundred years’ worth of NewnEngland authors, but doubt that anythingnWestern should command theirnVITAL SIGNSnattention.nThis omission functions as if to saynthat there is something wrong with thenWestern milieu itself, that it is essentiallynmelodramatic or vulgar, suitablenonly to cinematic, stylized treatmentnand not a context for serious imaginativencreation as defined in most literatencommunities. However, the scholarsnwho have assembled the ColumbianLiterary History do nothing in explainingnthe cultural record of the UnitednStates that their predecessors have notndone before them — going back evennto the beginnings, to narratives of earlynexploration and settlement that evadenor distort these experiences by seeingnthem through European eyes. For anliterature of pure and unmixed possibility,none that assumes as axiomatic thensignificance of individual human freenagency, while at the same time unfoldingnits characteristic action within anframework that posits the force andnvalue of nature as a reality independentnof man, has always been a literaturenthat made the inheritors of the EuropeannEnlightenment very uneasy.nSpokesmen for either the highly refinednor the deracinated versions of then”Republic of Letters” do not easilynperceive the essentially Americannevents, those that embody the archetypenof going outward and then returning:na pattern of hard pastoral, whichnincludes in homecoming a distillationnnnK»'<:^SE»^nof the truth-to-self experienced whilenfar away. The explanation for thisnestrangement of interpreters from theirnsubject, of Cambridge, MorningsidenHeights, and New Haven from Durango,nCheyenne, and Salt Lake City, isnan appropriate point of departure fornany contemporary commentary onnWestern American literature.nThe prime difficulty in commentingnupon the literature of westering, out ofna background in other British andnAmerican writing, is that a corporatenmyth informs most of the works thatnlocate their central action either in anEuropean setting or in the Americannsettlements east of the frontier. WesternnAmerican literature contains nonsuch corporate myth, no sense of collectivenpurpose beyond a desire toncontinue in the Western setting.nNew England as such had no beckoningnWest, only a dark forest to be cutndown and subdued, according to anmythos derived from the Old Testamentnand summarized in Hawthorne’sn”Young Goodrrian Brown.” The NewnEngland sense of mission rests on anmyth of covenant and of a specialnrelation to the Deity. The region’snsense of itself as a “second Israel,” of itsnredemptive errand into the wildernessnby means of which human historynmight be transformed, of the zealousnlabors of God’s elect, has been well andnthoroughly described in a body of dis-nFEBRUARY 1989/43n