Analysis
The writing of Frank Waters is always concerned with the tensions that underlie human existence: male and female, reason and instinct, conscious and unconscious, progress and tradition, linear and nonlinear, matter and energy (or spirit). His fictional characters are involved in efforts to reconcile these tensions, either within themselves or in the world of events. The search for reconciliation is inseparable from what Waters called the spirit of place: Once one is able to embody the unconscious rhythms of one’s locale, one may move more completely toward the reconciliation of these tensions.
In another sense, Waters attempted to give literary expression to this spirit of place. Viewed sociologically, his novels show how this spirit imbues the various racial types of the Southwest. The spirit of place is found in the blood, experienced as a “blood-power” from which one can never quite break free. Because of these instinctual or biological ramifications, the novels about “racial types” are not mere sociological studies but expressions of a spiritual search.
Waters said that the three novels People of the Valley, The Man Who Killed the Deer, and The Yogi of Cockroach Court express his interest in the racial types of the West: the Spanish or Mexican, the Native American, and the mestizos, or those of mixed race. The Woman at Otowi Crossing, which deals primarily with Caucasians, completes this study of racial types. Pike’s Peak portrays the mingling of various racial types, but here Pikes Peak itself is portrayed as an active agent.
This late novel thus makes graphic what in the previous novels was a subtle but powerful undercurrent: In all of Waters’s work, the earth itself plays a dominant role. It is the matrix that reconciles polarity. Fruitful and destructive by turns, benevolent or menacing, it resists people’s efforts at domination or comprehension yet demands of them that continuing process of individuation that is inseparable from the reconciliation of polarity. The earth, the source of life, embodies a mystery that cannot be overcome but must be understood through faith. As the beginning and end of people’s essential polarities (such as life and death, summer and winter), it is both a material fact and a rhythmic energy with which one must be in harmony.
Harmony, however, does not indicate a static equilibrium. Waters’s novels end with reconciliation, yet the reconciliation leads to ongoing movement. As Waters points out in an explication of the Nahuatl hieroglyph “Ollin” (movement), the tension between dualities results in movement. This movement is found not only in the processes of the natural world but also inside the heart of people. This ancient Nahuatl concept is reflected in all of Waters’s novels. The central reconciliation is in the human heart, as the characters attempt to find that harmony in movement that enables them to be part of the great pattern of Creation.
People of the Valley
People of the Valley was Waters’s first nonautobiographical novel to be published. The most obvious social polarity—progress and tradition—is the main impetus of the plot. The government is going to build a dam that will uproot all the people of the Beautiful Blue Valley. The name is significant: The color blue symbolizes the abiding faith of the people in their traditional ways and in the faithful fruitfulness of the valley itself. (This symbolic use of the color blue returns in other novels, most notably The Man Who Killed the Deer , where Dawn Lake, the center of the Pueblo religious life, is referred to as the Blue Eye of Faith.) In this period, when their faith is threatened, the people of...
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the valley look to Maria, a localbruja, for her reaction and her strength, her wisdom and her faith.
Maria has been in the Beautiful Blue Valley for as long as anyone can remember and has become, in the minds of its inhabitants, synonymous with the valley itself. She knows its secrets and its cures and has lived through its periods of fruitfulness and flood. She is, then, an embodiment of the spirit of place; by turns, she is a goad and a comfort, a shrewd businesswoman and a prophet. As the story progresses (a chapter is devoted to each period of her life), it becomes clear why she is the repository of the implicit faith of the people: She is trusted because of her own implicit trust in the earth, in the essential trustworthiness of its rhythms, even of its floods. Because she accepts the earth in all of its many moods, she is the spokesperson for its wisdom. Like the earth, she can be sharp and repelling, or healing and comforting. Like the earth, she accepts all who come to her, whether as lovers, questioners, or even husbands. Within change, however, she abides in a faith that grows, year by year.
In addition, Maria makes the welfare of the earth—of the valley—synonymous with her own welfare. She has reconciled the duality of self and other by making her own wealth inseparable from that of the valley, and hence of its people. The clearest example of this comes from her early life, when, destitute, she survived by gathering discarded wheat-seed from the local fields. This seed she divided into superior and inferior. The latter she used for food; the former she kept until spring, when she would trade it for a double measure to be collected at the next harvest. This process she repeated yearly. Because she kept the best seed for replanting, the wealth of the valley’s wheat increased; because she received a double measure at harvest, her own wealth increased as well. Her wealth, however, was never monetary; rather, it was in the natural yield of the earth, and in the faith that such a yield is sufficient for all purposes.
In the end, it is this faith that makes Maria significant. Faith, too, is the essence of the people of the valley, and of their traditions. Without such faith, life there is not possible. This faith, as she points out, is not a concept, but a baptism into life itself, into the rhythmic experience of harmony, which comes from giving oneself wholly to the spirit and energy of one’s locale, the spirit of place. The significance of the dam is that it stops the flow of faith, which is likened to water. Faith refreshes life and gives it meaning; the dam causes stagnation, a break in natural rhythms. The example of Maria shows, however, that if one’s faith is deep enough, it will not be disrupted by surface events. In the end, this faith is in the heart, and what one sees in the external world corresponds to one’s inner nature.
The Man Who Killed the Deer
The idea of faith carries over into Waters’s next novel, The Man Who Killed the Deer. Whereas Maria had grown slowly into her faith and had never been torn from it, Martiniano must find a faith within the exacerbated polarities of his nature. The disruptions of progress had not come to Maria until she was an old woman; they come to Martiniano during his formative years. Because of this, his search is one of finding what he has lost, not simply deepening what he already knows.
Half Apache and half Pueblo, Martiniano’s mixed blood indicates the duality of his nature, the spirit of independence and rebellion opposed to the spirit of acceptance and harmony. Sent away to a government school at an early age and thus deprived of his initiation into the kiva at the proper age, Martiniano must be taught to find harmony, not only with his world but also within himself, where the pole of masculine independence has not recognized the pole of the “female imperative.”
The story of the novel is, on the surface, a simple one. Martiniano has killed a deer out of season, against regulations of the U.S. government as well as against those of the pueblo. The matter seems simple, but as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that the apparently simple event has many layers. It is not so much that Martiniano has broken the white person’s law, but that his insistence on his own independence of action indicates an inner disharmony and a lack of wisdom. It indicates, finally, a lack of connection with the mystery of life itself. In place of this connection is a belief that a person can be free when alone, when cut off from society or the earth, from the source of faith, symbolized by the lake in the mountains above the pueblo, “The Blue Eye of Faith,” the center of the pueblo’s religious-ceremonial life.
The deer that Martiniano has killed becomes for him a totem, appearing to him in various places and guises to demonstrate that there is something in his situation that he cannot defeat by confrontation, something that he first must understand, to which he must submit. Eventually, the deer appears in his wife, Flowers Playing; as she grows with child, with the mystery of life, Martiniano begins to lose connection with her.
Martiniano learns, slowly, that even his own sense of manhood is held in bondage to the feminine part of his being and that until he reconciles this polarity, he will never feel fully alive. This is best symbolized by the description of the Deer Dance (in a passage found in both The Man Who Killed the Deer and Masked Gods). Flowers Playing is one of the Deer Mothers in the ceremony, the embodiment of the mystery of organic life. The Deer Dance symbolizes how the male force of independence and escape is held bondage, unwillingly but necessarily, by the female imperative, the rhythms of Earth that are deeper than the ego. The dance offers another vantage on the spirit of place, here appearing as the “blood power” from which people can never break free and on which they are dependent for the development of wisdom.
There is another sense in which Martiniano’s action was not done in isolation: His killing of the deer has repercussions that are felt in the wider sphere of politics. It has made more difficult the pueblo’s case for restoration of Dawn Lake. As the pueblo elders point out again and again, one person’s action is like a pebble dropped into a pool; the ripples extend far beyond the action itself. The effort of the elders enables Martiniano to see that much wider whole, of which he is an integral part and without which he is an incomplete human being.
The pueblo elders embody a different way of knowing from that of the white race, which has control of the lake. The polarity is rational-linear opposing nonrational-nonlinear. The method of the elders is intuitive, and, while it does not deny the validity of rational methods (any more than the female imperative denies the validity of the male drive for independence), it does indicate a deeper level of wisdom. The elders know the eventual result of their legal disputes over Dawn Lake far before these results come over the telegraph, even when all indications (relayed, of course, over the telegraph) point to the futility of their case.
To the elders—as, it seems, to Waters himself—linear or rational knowledge is not as encompassing or effective as the more intuitive method of the Indians. The difference between these two methods of knowing is a duality to which Waters returns in later books, particularly The Woman at Otowi Crossing. It is interesting to note, in this context, that just as the pueblo elders correctly predicted that they would regain their Dawn Lake, so Waters himself, in his novel, predicted the actual political event; for just as in the novel the Native Americans regain rights to their lake, so, thirty years later, did they do so in fact, through a congressional decision in December of 1970.
The Yogi of Cockroach Court
Waters’s next novel, The Yogi of Cockroach Court, takes the working of polarities one step further to juxtapose Eastern mysticism (particularly Buddhist) to life in a Mexican border town. Sociologically, Waters is here concerned with the mestizo culture. Barby is an example of this type. Orphaned as a child, he is brought up by Tai Ling, who runs a small shop, The Lamp Awake, beside the prostitute district, Cockroach Court. The name of the shop itself introduces the duality of light and dark, associated respectively with the clarity of the mind and the darkness of the senses. Tai Ling is repeatedly pictured meditating by his lamp, amid the swirl of a violent, dark world.
Barby and Guadalupe (Barby’s lover, and another person of mixed race) cannot detach themselves from that dark world, which to Tai Ling is the result of blindness, the working out of karma. Their relationship is a tempestuous one, fueled by Barby’s impotent desire for control. This impotence results from Barby’s rootless feeling of inferiority, from his inner division. Where Barby is at the mercy of his internal division, Guadalupe is at the mercy of external ones. In the daytime, she is alive in the absorption in her own physical vitality; at night, she comes under the domination of Barby.
These complexities are interwoven with the life of Tai Ling, whose lamp illumines the darkness of the physical world in which he sits, even as his search for a way to transcend the play of polarities illumines the darkness of his mind. Inherent in Tai Ling’s search for transcendence, however, is yet another polarity: The life of transcendence is itself polarized with life in a physical body. In this way, Tai Ling is still involved in duality, or karma, and in the end, just as Barby cannot dominate Guadalupe except in darkness, so Tai Ling cannot subdue the ongoing karma of the physical world until the darkness of death surrounds him.
Both Barby and Tai Ling bring about their own deaths by attempts to conquer the physical world. The difference between them is nevertheless a significant one: Barby dies while blinded by passion, aggression, and ignorance; Tai Ling, whose mind is clearer, finally sees and accepts his inner polarity, accepts his karma and his situation, and sees the folly of trying to transcend the world by separating oneself from it. Tai Ling, therefore, achieves a reconciliation, and though it comes at the moment of death, there is great hope in it, as Tai Ling finally comes to a unity with his world, comes to true knowledge.
Tai Ling’s realization is not a rational one. He uses rationality to dissect his ego, but his realization is intuitive. He speaks of the difference between those who see that life’s journey is a spiral and those whose vision is so limited that the curve of the spiral seems a straight line. To people of unconsidered action, whose vision is limited to the rational, horizontal plane, all seems linear, not cyclic. The person of contemplation, however, sees the nonlinear nature of things that underlies the linear but does not negate it. Thus, the treatment of two ways of knowing is here given an additional perspective.
The Woman at Otowi Crossing
The Woman at Otowi Crossing deals primarily with Anglos and thus completes the cycle of novels dealing with racial types. It also brings many of Waters’s concerns into a contemporary focus. As in previous books, the action develops out of the tension between polarities. The developing, intuitive awareness of Helen Chalmers is juxtaposed to the development of the atomic bomb on the mesa above her. Both developments signal people’s evolutionary potential, and both involve the unification of matter and energy.
Helen has come from a broken marriage to operate a small teahouse at the edge of Pueblo Indian land. Coincident with the beginning of the Los Alamos Research Laboratory—called The Project—she discovers a growth on her breast. Her assumption that it is cancerous, and the resultant immediacy of death, triggers in her a chain reaction of explosively expanding awareness, an explosion that radically alters her view of the world around her and her relationship with it.
The scene of Helen’s discovery ends with Facundo, a member of the pueblo kiva, tossing pebbles against her window. The moment is significant, for in the kiva, the American Indians continue their attempt to understand and ensure the unity of matter with energy, or spirit. Facundo’s response to Helen’s condition is one of immediate comprehension, but his response is undramatic. He simply points to the sun, the source of life, empowered by the same unity of energy and matter that the people of the project seek to harness. Facundo’s emphasis, however, is on the presence of that process, that reality, in each moment.
Thus, Helen’s task becomes what will eventually become the task of everyone: to integrate her newfound knowledge with the tangible events of her life. The discovery of the bomb requires the same integration; the two discoveries together create a new world order in which one must learn to live. Again, the methods of the Native Americans point the way to reconciliation, for they have shown how the development of insight and the knowledge of the unity of matter and spirit can be integrated into, and are in fact a necessary part of, a stable, viable society.
Waters draws a number of additional parallels between the activities of the Pueblo kiva and those of the project. Both are shrouded in secrecy, and both have their selected initiates who take on new identities vis-à-vis the rest of their society. (Members of the kiva take on the identity of cosmic forces; project members take on new, common names: Niels Bohr becomes Nicholas Baker.) Both kiva and project exclude women, and in both there is an attempt to empower the mystery of life, to make use of the unity within the duality represented by matter and energy, matter and spirit. (These parallels echo Waters’s speculations in Masked Gods, where he writes of the common search of all people, whether in a Tibetan monastery, an Indian kiva, or an atomic research laboratory.)
Along with these parallels, however, the book demonstrates obvious differences as well. Primary among these is that the rituals of the Pueblo are to ensure the ongoing life of all creatures, whereas the activity of the project is directed toward death. The method of the kiva, being intuitive and nonrational, includes and embraces polarity, whereas the method of the project, being rational, divides one entity from another. Even this polarity, however, can result in a reconciliation, not in the external world, necessarily, but within the individual heart. The scientists involved in creating the bomb are presented in warm, human terms. Gaylord, a young scientist and the lover of Helen’s daughter, comes to a more intuitive, even mystical awareness as a result of his exposure to radiation.
Pike’s Peak
Pike’s Peak is a kind of summing up of Waters’s work. This may be understood literally, because the novel is a rewritten and shortened version of three early novels, the titles of which are retained as major divisions of the new novel. It may also be understood symbolically, because in its panoramic scope, Pike’s Peak encompasses many of Waters’s lifelong concerns.
Joseph Rogier, the protagonist, is largely a fictionalized version of Waters’s grandfather; Waters himself, like the character March (grandson of Rogier and part Native American), spent much of his youth in the mining camps of Cripple Creek, went to college as an engineering student, and worked in the Salt Creek oil fields. The novel transcends the category of autobiographical fiction, however, because of Waters’s use of symbolism, in particular that of Pikes Peak itself, which stands as both tangible fact and intangible symbol. A mystery to be understood, an ungraspable meaning that one feels impelled to grasp, it stands at the borderline between the conscious and the unconscious, at once numinous and tangible.
The peak both draws and repels Rogier, who seeks within it for its golden heart. The pull is irresistible, and in his effort to plumb the peak, Rogier slowly lets go of all his social responsibilities. His building firm deteriorates, his family becomes near destitute, and he loses the respect of the community and becomes an object of mockery. His search is an obsession, not for mere gold, and not for riches (though he is not above their temptation), but for the symbolic golden heart, within himself as it is within Pikes Peak, shining in the center of the dense granite, or in the center of the flesh.
The method of his search combines the rational and the irrational. The obsession is irrational, and at its service he places his considerable rational gifts and material wealth. Yet, despite his knowledge of engineering and geology, he cannot strike a significant vein, while those of lesser knowledge, and without his material resources, make seemingly lucky strikes, literally at the drop of a hat. Rogier’s situation has parallels to that of Martiniano, for he, like Rogier, finds something in his search that he cannot conquer by rational means or external manipulation. Rogier’s attempts to find gold—symbolic or literal—lead him increasingly deeper into darkness and isolation. Like the deer for Martiniano, the peak for Rogier becomes a sort of totem, appearing as a lure, as a guide, or as an obstacle—a truth he cannot grasp, but that is constantly within his sight.
The tragedy of Rogier is that his view of the world is linear. As a miner, he has literal and symbolic tunnel vision. By going straight ahead, mining a vertical shaft, he hopes to find the essence of the mystery symbolized by the mountain itself. Its apparent tangibility as real gold draws him irresistibly, but Rogier’s linear viewpoint blinds him to the world around him, isolating him from the sympathies and understanding of his family. His search for truth takes place at the expense of human warmth and community, and he finds, as does Martiniano, that such obsessive pride—even if it seems to be a search for truth—is doomed to futility. Where Martiniano is finally able to understand his folly and arrange for his son to enter the kiva and so live in the harmony it had taken him so long to achieve, Rogier dies in psychological isolation, unable to release his passion into genuine human community.
For all that, however, the tragedy contains a triumph. March, Rogier’s grandson, carries on a search encompassing many of Rogier’s ideals. Of mixed race, March shows promise of reconciling the intuitive ways of his American Indian blood with the rational methods of his grandfather. Despite himself, Rogier has passed on to March a profound respect for depth and knowledge; one feels for him a deep sympathy, because for all his gruffness, even his selfishness, he has somehow managed to give March a profound respect for enduring value and the determination to search for it, for the enduring gold within the dense rock of material being.
The search for eternal value in the middle of flux is a final polarity. Tai Ling sought it in his meditation and Maria found it in her inseparability from natural cycles; even Martiniano found it by acquiescing to the Pueblo’s ways. For Helen Chalmers, the search was for a way to integrate eternal value into the apparently mundane particulars of everyday living. Thus, even the discovery of eternal verities is not a final resting point. The eternal is continually juxtaposed to and interwoven with the mundane, and just as the action of the novels is given impetus by this polarity, so the movement of the world both rises from it and expresses it. As each new layer is peeled off, new polarities emerge.
Waters’s writing reveals an attempt to penetrate and illuminate these symbolic and literal layers, and to find within movement the enduring values of human life. His characters seek these values within the temporal, within enduring change, the first cause and final truth. Thus, in Waters’s novels, the Nahuatl hieroglyph “Ollin” comes to literary expression: that eternal movement comes from the tension between polarities. The reconciliation between polarities is found in the movement of tangible existence—in concrete substance, not abstract form; in the harmony within activity that expresses harmony with greater cycles, such as those of society, of one’s locale, or of the earth. In this sense, the expression of the spirit of place is an expression of the unity of humankind, for all are subject to the same enduring, cyclic existence. In a wider sense, Waters’s writing is rightly considered mystical, concerned with the oneness of people with others, with the earth, with all that exists.