SOURCE: Folks, Jeffrey J. “Richard Ford's Postmodern Cowboys.” In Perspectives on Richard Ford, edited by Huey Guagliardo, pp. 141-56. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000.

[In the following essay, Folks argues that although Ford draws upon the recognizable figure of the drifter or outlaw, he is able to undercut the western myth by setting stories in different geographical locations and addressing non-localized American social and economic issues, which results in postmodern westerns with postmodern cowboys.]

Richard Ford approached the mythology and literary conventions of western fiction from the perspective of a native southerner who has spent most of his life in the South and the East, and, following the publication of Rock Springs and Wildlife, he has not returned to the western subject. As Russell Martin puts it, in explaining Ford's absence from his 1992 anthology of contemporary western writing, Ford is among those “writers with strong connections to this Western country whose lives and work are now focused elsewhere” (xxii). But why should Ford have decided to write about the West at all? Why, one must ask, should a native southerner, educated in the Midwest and resident more recently at Chicago and Princeton, elect to devote a substantial portion of his creative life to an alien and marginal culture?

As a writer from outside who briefly entered the literary culture of the West, Richard Ford is hardly an anomaly. The audience for cowboy myth in its classic form—in dime novels, popular fiction, film, or television—was created for consumption by a national and, in practical terms, largely an eastern audience.¹ The classic western story, which gradually came to center on male initiation experiences,² was adapted for each subsequent generation of readers. In the 1930s and 1940s, the “singing cowboy” (in the person of Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and Tex Ritter) sentimentalized and softened the cowboy's rugged image. A third generation of cowboys, identifying the cowboy with the gunfighter, appealed to audiences in the 1950s and 1960s concerned with defending American democracy against Cold War enemies. A fourth-generation cowboy myth, popularized in film and country music during the 1970s, introduced the cowboy “drifter” and “outlaw,” as defined in songs like Waylon Jennings's “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys” (1976). In his outlaw persona, the cowboy projected “a peculiar blend of nostalgia and pessimism” (Savage 90). In the decade after 1975, the outlaw figure was featured in a succession of popular songs, collected on such albums as Willie Nelson's Red-Headed Stranger (1975) and Wanted: The Outlaws (1976), which repeated “the isolation, violence, and inconsolable sorrow habitually associated with the genre” (Dunne 227). As Michael Dunne notes, one important feature of outlaw mentality is the awareness of a life of lost opportunities. Or as Waylon Jennings sings in “My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys,” the cowboy as a kind of poet manqué has wasted his life: “Picking up hookers instead of my pen / I let the words of my youth slip away” (quoted in Dunne 230).

In its more extreme variants, as Bill Malone writes, the outlaw figure verges on dangerous forms of survivalist figuration. Hank Williams, Jr.'s, song “A Country Boy Can Survive,” for example, “was virtually a survivalist hymn with its emphasis on rural independence and its underlying hint of violence” (393). Richard Ford's more radical examples of western “independence” similarly echo, in a prescient manner, the militant antigovernment sentiments that reportedly led to the actions of those responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. For the most part, however, his protagonists are too demoralized even for resistance. What they do share with the militant extremists is an embittered loss of faith in American society, particularly as it relates to the traditional roles of young white males, who feel increasingly marginalized and have reacted either by dropping out, in acts of passive resistance (as Ford's protagonists do), or by striking back, either in literal or fantasized gestures.

Like the popular media, Ford draws on the figures of the drifter and outlaw—those romantic losers forever unsettled in love and in trouble with the law. At the same time, the social realism of Ford's writing continually undercuts the element of fantasy in western myth and implicitly interrogates the often commercialized and colonizing usages of regional myth. Indeed, by exploring radically different geographical locales for his writing, Ford asserts a powerful artistic independence which frees his work of parochial attachments to particular “subjects” as such. The more profound aspects of social limitation, forms of human oppression which are not localized or culturally specific, are the focus of his art. At the heart of this form of social oppression is the control of consciousness, through the processing of cultural images and linguistic authority.

In Ford's postmodern western, the social and economic dilemmas of America as a whole are not escaped but only magnified by the desolate, ecologically damaged New West, which as Craig Lesley has written, “contains working people living a hardscrabble existence and trying to stay ahead of the bills and banks” (2). Ford's protagonists live just such lives “on the edge” where economic survival is unsure and social relationships are unstable. As Martin perceptively writes, the American West, more so than other regions of America (but no more so than Ford's native South), is the product of a colonial history as eastern and European financial interests have historically “developed” its resources: “The entire region, perhaps inevitably, became a kind of colony, a place whose wealth was channeled elsewhere and that suffered, therefore, a colony's classic sense of inferiority as well as its gnawing, troubled urge to assert its independence” (xviii). In this colonial economy, human beings are subjected to the same shortsighted economic forces as the environment: both are stripped of value until they are exhausted and then abandoned, and like Earl Middleton in the title story of Rock Springs, they are colonials whose injured mental life “leaves something out” (9). Within this society, Ford's postmodern cowboys are utterly out of place; they stumble through life, hoping at best to avoid being hurt or causing harm to others and aspiring only to understand and communicate their anxiety.

In the title story “Rock Springs,” Ford presents three characters who are immediately recognizable as victims of a restrictive social environment: a father fleeing imprisonment on a “bad check” charge, his young daughter, and his current girlfriend. En route to Florida in their stolen Mercedes, this hapless family cannot help but suggest and parody the typical western “family vacation,” as the three characters comment on the scenery and search for a motel where they may spend the night. Along the way, Ford's protagonist, Earl Middleton, stumbles upon the fabled “gold mine,” the object of all generational eschatologies, but finds that its wealth is controlled by corporate owners and that its workers subsist in a grimy boomtown of trailers that only resemble “homes.” A potentially more valuable discovery is Earl's chance meeting with an elderly black woman and her grandson. Within her cramped trailer home, the woman seems to have created “[s]omething good and sweet … instead of just temporary” (14). Unlike Earl himself, who has refined lying to an art, the black woman appears to speak sincerely of love and family, and in questioning Earl about himself, she “seemed to want truth” (14). Together with her exemplary husband, off working hard in the mine, she has uncomplainingly taken responsibility for a brain-damaged grandchild, apparently abandoned by the child's parents. In this chance encounter, as presumably in all such encounters, Earl is easily seduced by his own conventional paradigm of family happiness, and it is clear that he seizes on this idealized family as a nostalgic reminder of the kind of homey goodness and responsible stability that he associates with “real” families. Yet his idealization of “family” is a gauge of the disruption of his own social existence; it seems a misguided and desperate effort to secure meaning. It is precisely the instability and rootlessness of his life, and his inability to escape his limitations, that makes Earl a figure of particular narrative interest. His “leav[ing] something out,” a feature that his girlfriend, Edna, identifies as his chief character trait, admits an absence denied by others; his disorganized flight from authority suggests the limited opportunities of his environment.

Like several stories in Rock Springs (“Going to the Dogs” and “Fireworks,” for instance), the title of the story “Great Falls” refers allegorically to social breakdown as well as to the literal setting of Great Falls, Montana. The story traces a series of “great falls”—adultery, maternal desertion, premature death of the father, and a son's loneliness—that come to seem inevitable to the Westerners who stoically accept and even take pride in their barren lives. When Jackie's father, Jack Russell, retires from his job at an air base in Great Falls, he elects not to return to his “home” in Tacoma, Washington, and one imagines that it is the “placelessness” and dissociation of Great Falls that he finds attractive. Russell's transgressions of the legal system, as he supplements his income by selling illegally procured fish and game to local caterers, resembles the widespread resistance to federal governance of western lands, a part of a regional culture in which federal “law” is connected with a long history of colonial intrusion. It is not surprising, in a way, that when Russell confronts his wife's lover he asks first about Woody's home and if his parents are living, as if to position the younger man in relation to communal boundaries which he himself lacks. Russell's rootlessness and indifference to the law are liberating but also place Russell and his family at risk, as his son, Jackie, comes to understand after his parents' breakup when he says, “We were all of us on our own in this” (48).

Ford connects Jack Russell's rootlessness with the kind of work he performs, first at the air base in Montana and later following the oil-field boom in Ely, Nevada, where he is killed in an accident; his labor is temporary and dissociated from society. Military bases are established or closed according to national priorities (or politics) and mining and drilling operations are even more transient. As Martin notes, “[A]t the close of the twentieth century, the West's frontier legacy of boom and bust still hasn't abated. Immigrants continue to barrel into the region, certain that it harbors those things that their lives have always lacked, and they continue, most of them, to end up disappointed” (xviii).

Jackie's mother is also uncomfortable in the confinement of settled relationships—so much so that when she abandons Jackie, she explains tersely, “‘I'd like a less domestic life, is all’” (47). At the end, Jackie can only say of his mother that he has seen her “from time to time—in one place or another, with one man or another—and I can say, at least, that we know each other” (49). The verb “know” in this sentence suggests mere acquaintanceship more than friendship or intimacy, and when Jackie and his mother do meet by accident in a grocery after many years of separation, they have only a few words to say to each other. As Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have written in theorizing “minor literature,” an author from a marginal culture must find a point of “underdevelopment” and must develop a patois to express forms of de-territorialization. Paradoxically, a regional writer such as Richard Ford, whose work is embedded in a sense of place (albeit a shifting sense of place) may be best situated to utilize the “impossibilities” of marginal culture (by writing outside the dominant language and national culture). His writing does not attempt to re-territorialize itself by reauthorizing traditional referents of place (in the sense that Gabriel García Márquez may attempt through the amassing of local myths, legends, and particulars of place); rather it embraces its de-territorialized condition by exploring the gaps and incongruities of language. In the story “Sweethearts,” for example, Ford employs the nuances of provincial speech. On the morning he is to enter prison for a year, Bobby is still anguished by love for his ex-wife, Arlene, who is now married to Russell. Bobby's admission that he had considered murdering Arlene and perhaps killing himself or Russell terrifies his ex-wife, as one might expect, but it is also a kind of archaic assertion of romantic love that seems out of place in his oppressed situation. How can Bobby assert faithful love for Arlene in a society where he cannot even be assured of employment, to say nothing of physical freedom? When Arlene and Russell toss Bobby's pistol into the river after driving him to prison, it is as much a purification—against the displaced conventionality of Bobby's awkward fidelity—as an expression of their fear.

As Deleuze and Guattari have suggested, within marginal literature, all personal relationships are “shadowed” by political facts. “Children” is a story set in the Hi-line section of northern Montana, near the Canadian border, “an empty, lonely place if you are not a wheat farmer (69).” Like the Four Corners region of the Southwest, which Martin describes as “not the absolute end of the earth back then [in the early 1950s], but … close enough to make you sort of skittish” (xiii), the Hi-line's very emptiness constrains the lives of its inhabitants. Driven by anger, escapism, or sheer boredom, its young people seem to respond destructively to the mere vacancy of the land. The association of the narrator, George, and his “friend,” Claude Phillips, is as arid as the mechanized farming culture of the Hi-line. George comments that he didn't really know Claude or anyone else very well, and he implies a connection between his separateness and the environment: “You did not learn much of other people in that locality” (70). In the culture that the “children” of the story are entering, maturity involves learning to live “on your own” in a frighteningly complete sense. George understands that the young runaway, Lucy, separated from her family across the Canadian border and temporarily paired with Claude's father and later with Claude, “was already someone who could be by herself in the world” (94)—a fact that seems disturbing because it is so much an accepted part of George's experience. Perhaps because he is trying to come to terms with his own mother's desertion—he notes that her leaving “that part of Montana” was “not unusual” (82)—George finds nothing remarkable in Lucy's promiscuous independence: she seems to him pretty much a “normal girl.” The fact that she is “running away” is not unusual and doesn't seem “a bad thing” to George.

It is clear that the conditions of George's childhood, in their dissociation of feelings and experience, have resulted in the creation of a new idiom. When Lucy says that she “loves” George and Claude and claims that she would rather spend the night with them than with Claude's father, George understands it as “just talk”: “I knew that wasn't what she meant. It was just a thing to say, and nothing was wrong with it at all” (90). Nor do Claude's actions—his disrespect and hatred for his father and his casual affair with Lucy, whom his father puts under his “protection”—trouble George, who sees that “nothing you did when you were young matters at all” (98). In fact, little that one does as an adult matters to the larger world, “a place that seemed not even to exist, an empty place you could stay in for a long time and never find a thing you admired or loved or hoped to keep” (98).

The quest that all of Richard Ford's adult protagonists undertake has everything to do with this definition of experience as “an empty place.” While they seem cowboys—transient laborers with few loyalties or social ties—it is evident that Ford's protagonists are at least shadowed by the absent virtues that George lists: a full place where you can find attachment, things you can admire and love and hope to keep. In their failure to obtain such a place or to find something to admire or love, Ford's characters construct a unique patois which may be based on absence and failure rather than success. Narrators such as Les Snow in “Winterkill” and “Communist” or Frank Brinson in “Optimists” carve their own right way to act and speak, appropriate to their own experience.

In representing the impossibility of these lives, Ford draws on the nuances of regional working-class speech as it creates unexpected meanings from familiar words. Expressions such as “you could trust me to …,” “that's a sure fact,” or “I had known him to …” cite but simultaneously undermine conventional meanings of “trust,” “fact,” and “know.” Presumably the difference between a simple “fact” and a “sure fact” is a context in which “fact” is not “sure,” a linguistic distinction which reflects precisely the uncertainty of regional culture. It is urgent for Ford's characters to express their tentativeness of experience in carefully drafted speech, but what they invariably discover is that the stories of their lives are inconclusive or even inconsequential. It means a great deal, however, to arrive at the conviction that nothing matters.

In “The Language of African Literature” (chapter 1 of Decolonising the Mind), Ngugi wa Thiong'o writes of the centrality of language to cultural identity: “The choice of language and the use to which language is put is central to a people's definition of themselves in relation to their natural and social environment, indeed in relation to the entire universe” (4). The imperialist domination of African languages and cultures resulted in a colonial alienation of African identity, for the repression of language closes off communication between self and others, between self and nature, and indeed “between me and my own self” (15). Particularly ironic is the fact that so many African writers, under the mental control of imperialist nations, participated in the devaluation of their own local cultures and in the exaltation of European languages and cultural models. One of the worst effects of this process was the exclusion “of the participation of the peasantry and the working class” from the cultural debate (26).

It is not coincidental that Richard Ford, like so many regional writers before him, should focus on a region's particular oral language. Like Faulkner, O'Connor, Wright, Welty, and Morrison, Ford understands that the writer's work is one of the recovery or at least the utilization of repressed speech, particularly the orality of marginalized social groups. Like his predecessors, Ford creates art out of excluded forms of orality. Indeed, Ford himself, as a writer whose works have achieved critical approval, appears to stoically accept the possibility that his work might at any time fall out of favor, or that he might not continue writing at all. As he told Kay Bonetti, “[I]f next year I decided I didn't want to write another book, or if I couldn't write another book, it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to happen to the world or to literature or to me; it would just be something else that happened” (84). In this, Ford admits that his literary world, and experience in general, is largely beyond his control. The outside world is filled with potential harm, largely as a result of the fact that art is so little understood and “employed,” so that Ford's narrative focuses on language as a way to admit and confront the emptiness of experience. While Ford's comments on his role as an artist are characteristically “cool” and indifferent, he is deeply engaged in opposing internal colonialism and reversing its effects. His meticulous use of regional and working-class orality are inseparable from a political consciousness of the repression of local cultures within an assimilationist model of American democracy (a model meticulously analyzed in Sacvan Bercovitch's recent book, The Rites of Assent). Ford's comments on the precision with which he renders regional and class speech betray a serious artist compelled by both technical and ethical concerns.

Richard Ford admitted that, as an individual, he found the “voice” of Rock Springs similar to his own (Bonetti 95). In the expression of a provincial working-class culture, Ford brings to postmodern writing the voice of the aggrieved, excluded provincial, forever denied significance within the national culture. Ford's own self-conception as a writer involves a belief that language affords “consolation” against the kind of anxiety produced in an unreflexive, colonized use of language. In the interview with Bonetti, Ford stated that Faulkner “treated me with and to language which was about things that made the world more orderly to me.” On the next page, Ford suggested that literature “can be consoling. It can say the thing not before said. … We think we know what love is; we think we know what passion is; we think we know what hatred is. We know, in fact, a lot about those things. And literature's opportunity is to say about those concepts what hasn't been said yet, so that we know more about them, so that we'll find a way to take some solace in them” (80). For this writer from a fractured and excluded culture, immediate experience is always inarticulate and inherently painful, but presumably, experience does become more “orderly” as the myths we live within are better understood.

In any provincial culture, the cultural mythologies have been created or at least largely shaped from the outside by hegemonic cultures. In his western fiction, the mythology of individual opportunity which the national culture has for long associated with the western frontier occupies Ford in several stories. “Empire,” for example, is a fable of the duplicity of personal freedom. Riding the Great Northern line between Spokane, Washington, and Minot, North Dakota, Victor Sims enjoys the pleasant illusion of detachment that he associates with train travel: observing others from his compartment without being observed, crossing a near wild landscape without personal risk. Sims believes that he need exercise no control over events in his life, but that, paradoxically, his life is continually getting better: “Things you do pass away and are gone, and you need only to outlive them for your life to be better, steadily better” (136). Several ominous events in the story suggest that this philosophy is not reliable: Sims's seduction of Cleo, a neighbor's sister, leads to a phone call from Cleo's biker friend, Loser, who threatens Sims's wife. Like some repressed voice of conscience, Loser charges that Sims has been an “asshole” who has betrayed his wife and “doesn't deserve her.” A similar suggestion of consequences is implied by the wildfire that threatens the lives of all the train passengers.

It is in the context of what Ngugi calls cultural alienation that Sims's benign fatalism “makes sense.” When a culture has been denied the opportunity for coherent significance, all expression must be accidental and purposeless. For example, Sims's brief tryst with Doris Benton is only one episode in a lifetime of disengagement, suggested at the beginning of the story by his answers to his wife's personality quiz (for every question, he answers “None of the above”). Even his marriage to Marge is largely accidental, for he had been almost equally attracted to Marge's sister, Pauline. Indeed, when he first met Marge, he at first thought she was Pauline, whom he had once dated. Both Marge and Pauline presumably attracted Sims because of their “imagination for wildness” (116), a quality which involves all of them in accidental and bizarre relationships—such as the pairing of the neurotic and superstitious Sims with the unsentimental, mechanical Sergeant Benton. Like George in “Children,” Sims does not feel that “things you do” have any lasting impact; his actions matter so little that he invents stories about his past, including the falsehood that he had served in Vietnam during the war. If Sergeant Benton catches him in this lie, which he regrets only because he is caught, she is equally unconcerned. For her part, Marge shares Victor's attraction to a deceptive freedom. Even as she watches farmers in the distance battling the flames, their farms destroyed by the wildfire, she remarks: “‘The world's on fire. … But it doesn't hurt anything’” (147). With her sense of “how happy I am” and his feeling of being “alone in a wide empire, removed and afloat, calmed, as if life was far away now” (147-48), Marge and Victor travel within a discourse of illusory freedom, chance events, and inconsequential preoccupation.

In one of the finest stories in Rock Springs, “Winterkill,” the adult Les Snow describes his and Troy Burnham's meeting with Nola Foster. All three characters are victims of a harsh, unforgiving economic system, and their condition is intimately connected with internal colonialism and with their status at the bottom of that system. At the beginning of the story, Les is represented as an individual alienated from all society—“alone, where I didn't mind being at all” (168). Les's conception of “trust” is oddly mechanized, based on “predictability” rather than social obligation. If one could predict that Les will act in a certain manner, one could “trust” him to act that way. By his own code, Les is faithful toward his friend, Troy, whose paralysis below the waist leaves him physically impotent, but, as we learn at the end of the story, Les is simultaneously attractive to Nola (herself a wanderer who spends her days in barrooms in the company of various men). For his part, Les finds it difficult to enter a long-term relationship since he is frequently out of work and waiting for better times which may require geographic removal. Yet the economic system is only part of a quiescent culture in which Les's posture is that of “waiting.” Ford peoples his fiction with characters who are, in more than a literal sense, “out of work” and “waiting” for their luck to change. The question of their survival is posed well by Frank Bascombe near the conclusion of The Sportswriter: “Where do sportswriters go when the day is, in every way, done, and the possibilities so limited that neither good nor bad seems a threat?” (339).

Understandably, the best Les Snow can imagine is a life in which harm “stays away” and in which he hurts no one, rather than a system in which he “acts.” When the freezing river yields a dead fawn, one of the unprotected creatures that die in the course of the winter, Les takes the “winterkill” as further evidence of the world's ubiquitous danger. For Les at the end of the story, Troy and Nola, whom he leaves together undisturbed, appear as two further examples of winterkill—damaged individuals who can only find momentary comfort in one another, but who are unable to change their condition.

Frank Brinson is another character in Rock Springs who finds that the cultural myths of individualism and economic opportunity associated with the West are particularly unreliable. In the story “Optimists,” Frank's father, Roy, a switch-engine fireman on the Great Northern Railway, believes that his union has created a “workingman's paradise” until he finds his job threatened by layoffs. By late 1959, the railroads have begun to cut workers: “everyone knew, including my father, that they would—all of them—eventually lose their jobs, though no one knew exactly when, or who would go first, or, clearly, what the future would be” (172-73). Under this pressure, at the end of a horrifying night when he sees a hobo cut to pieces by a train and bleed to death on the tracks, Roy Brinson snaps. After he is insulted by Boyd Mitchell in his own home, Roy lands a single punch which kills his abusive neighbor. He spends five months in prison for manslaughter, but his entire life unravels afterward.

From this episode, Roy's son, Frank, concludes that, as he says, “situations have possibilities in them, and we have only to be present to be involved” (181)—a strikingly agentless analysis of social repression. As Frank comments: “The most important things of your life can change so suddenly, so unrecoverably, that you can forget even the most important of them and their connections, you are so taken up by the chanciness of all that's happened and by all that could and will happen next” (187). Frank's reaction to the catastrophe is impassive, just as, in cowboy music, there is a conventional lack of protest to the “loneliness, social alienation, poverty and the strain of arduous physical labor” (Dunne 227). Yet protest of a sort is implied—at least from the perspective of the narrative if not from that of Frank—in the very act of recording the cowboy's voice.

If Ford's text registers the distress of the working-class culture he narrates, it is practically impossible for Ford's western characters to articulate their own resentment. As Ngugi puts it, “It is the final triumph of a system of domination when the dominated start singing its virtues” (20). Just how out of place cultural criticism is in the American West is illustrated by the story “Communist,” in which Glen Baxter fantasizes a network of communists in Montana and suggests an impending social revolution. Ford, however, undermines Baxter's rhetoric by showing that his personal crises have driven him outside society and that his political radicalism is a measure of his control rather than his independence. Baxter, currently an unemployed young man living with Les Snow's mother, competes with her for Les's approval. If Aileen hopes for a middle-class future for her son, Baxter attempts to inculcate his radical ideals and, at a deeper level, to pass on his heritage of futility and stoic acceptance to the boy. While Glen Baxter seems to have been only a minor influence on Les, he, in fact, turns out to be a formative substitute for Les's father. The entire point of Les's retelling Baxter's story twenty-five years later is that Les hopes to better understand his own situation by rehearsing that of his exemplar. Despite his mother's opposition, Baxter's influence has been lasting.

By contrast, Aileen's authority has been slight. Les feels that he doesn't know his mother very well and in fact feels more comfortable when she is absent. At the time he tells the story, Les is forty-one and admits that his last real communication with his mother occurred when he was sixteen. In the last paragraph, in what is also the last line of the collection Rock Springs, Les speaks of the separation from his mother with sad resignation, suggesting that he has accepted the loneliness and fragmentation of his social environment: “I am forty-one years old now, and I think about that time without regret, though my mother and I never talked in that way again, and I have not heard her voice now in a long, long time” (235).

Stories such as “Communist” explore the role of the male code of stoic acceptance within a colonized western culture. Paternal and maternal ideals compete for Les's approval, since Baxter's passion for hunting reiterates the boxing lessons that Les received from his father before his death. His father had trained him to stay on his opponent until he falls (226)—an implicit irony since Les's father soon “falls” himself and his place in his wife's bed is taken by the younger, fitter man, Glen Baxter. Baxter, in his turn, imparts a similarly fatalistic male code to Les. When, for example, Baxter returns from months of drifting following his sister's funeral in Florida, his “story” seems to Aileen Snow unreliable, and Les, who better comprehends his incoherent desperation, comments that “[a] light can go out in the heart” (232). Baxter has crossed the line at which it no longer matters whether his life can be imagined coherently: he can poach while claiming he is not poaching, he can live with one companion or another, he has lost whatever protection language affords. In an episode in which Baxter and Aileen argue over leaving a wounded goose to die on the freezing lake, he attempts to pass on a stoic masculine code that accepts the harshness of the outside world and that insists on the limits of pity. Aileen understands perfectly well what Baxter is attempting to teach, and her fury over his leaving a suffering bird on the lake is more deep-seated: although her vision of life is never developed in the story, it is clear that she is uncomfortable in the “half-wild” country in which she lives and that she opposes the male code of killing and fighting. She even has hopes of Les's attending college—the ultimate apostasy, apparently, for the cowboy hero.

While the West, with its store of cowboy myth and frontier ideology, is especially well suited to Ford's purposes, a similar absence of social discourse is apparent in all of Richard Ford's works, including those set in suburban New Jersey (The Sportswriter and Independence Day, the American South (A Piece of My Heart), and expatriate Mexican society (The Ultimate Good Luck). The mountain West offers a convenient symbolic landscape for expressing the rootlessness of an increasing number of Americans, for in the West, pursuing quintessential myths of freedom and opportunity, Americans have typically preferred to “pick up stakes” and “move on” rather than confront communal problems. Yet the cowboy and frontier myths encode cultural values and mask social problems shared by the nation as a whole.

Like Ford's protagonists in Rock Springs and Wildlife, Harry Quinn and Rae in The Ultimate Good Luck lead transient and rootless lives, and they are essentially early sketches for the outlaws who appear later in his fiction. Rae, who appears at the beginning of the novel traveling in the company of a bronco rider and car thief named Frank Oliver “figured out that what she was doing was simply craziness and nobody in his right mind would be doing it, but it was all she could bear to think about longer than a minute” (41). Against the backdrop of the seventies drug culture in the expatriate American community in Oaxaca, Mexico, Quinn is also something of a colonial amnesiac, a figure who attempts to follow a merely personal code (that includes loyalty to “buddies”) that leaves out any collective vision, as, for example, in his respect for the use of weapons without regard for their social damage. When Quinn's attorney, Bernhardt, toward whom he feels some sense of attachment, is shot to pieces by a campesino, and the entire magazine is unloaded into his body (stopping only “when there wasn't enough left to shoot at”), Quinn remarks laconically: “It was skilled work, something Bernhardt wouldn't have expected” (155).

Like Ford's western characters, Quinn learns from experience to suspect all settled relationships or institutions, and his rule is to avoid human connection altogether. At one point Quinn recalls a childhood experiment of placing a frog in a pan of water over a gas flame. As he gradually increases the heat, the frog sits calmly in the water until it realizes the danger, but it is now helpless to move, staring “out past the time when it could move even if it needed to.” The lesson for Quinn is that human beings are in the same position: the frog is “an illustration of how people let certain things they're used to go on so long that they don't know that the things they're used to are killing them” (152). His solution is to remain mobile and in apparent control of his life.

The Sportswriter and its sequel Independence Day focus on the character of Frank Bascombe, a divorced suburbanite who resembles Ford's western protagonists in his reflections on the illusory myths of individualist society. At the beginning of The Sportswriter, Frank compares his own experience with the myth of the American Dream as he reflects on “the good life” he had expected with his wife and three children: “Just exactly what that good life was—the one I expected—I cannot tell you now exactly, though I wouldn't say it has not come to pass, only that much has come in between” (3). In contrast with Ford's western characters, to some degree Frank's social isolation is masked by a more benevolent suburban environment (he, after all, continues in the same job, lives in the same house and neighborhood, and retains some of the same acquaintances), but Ford's artistic purposes in the New Jersey novels are not essentially different from those in his western fiction. The middle-class enclaves of central New Jersey are represented as equally desolate and shallow, equally lacking in communal attachments. In its unique patois of sports-talk, the suburban male community expresses an absence similar to that of Ford's western figures. It may be, however, that the western material allows a more blatant representation of alienation. Like the physical environment of the West, which must weather greater extremes of climate and geography, the social environment subjects human beings to unusual stresses of isolation and trauma.

Perhaps because of the severity of their conditions, many of Richard Ford's western characters are shown to vividly imagine their now lost families and childhood communities. As he records an ambiguous definition of “family” and the tentativeness of all social relationships, Ford's language employs the colonial tropes of emptiness and impossibility: the ways in which parents fail their children, the loneliness of adults “out in the world” without families, the “chanciness” of all social ties.

Like Earl Middleton, moving furtively in the parking lot of a Ramada Inn in Rock Springs, Wyoming, Ford's protagonists often have a sense of déjà vu as they observe the apparently purposeful lives and ordered communities of others. Like Earl, peering into the windows of “a Pontiac with Ohio tags”—an imperial sort of family car loaded for a western vacation—they experience the colonial's startled admission into the presence of the colonizer. As Earl puts it: “It all looked familiar to me, the very same things I would have in my car if I had a car. Nothing seemed surprising, nothing different. Though I had a funny sensation at that moment” (26). Earl's “funny sensation” is associated with the unfamiliar and uncomfortable knowledge that he is being observed; however much he tries to escape notice of the controlling legal and social systems, he is always within the jurisdiction of cultural hegemony.

Like all of Richard Ford's postmodern cowboys, Earl Middleton wants mostly to be left alone, to find “solace” from the pain of his alienation, “to put things like this out of your mind and not be bothered by them.” As Earl reflects at the end of “Rock Springs,” what he wants out of life is not more freedom and opportunity but less adversity and grief, not more of the American Dream but less: “Fewer troubles, fewer memories of trouble” (26).

Notes

1. “Western” art was indeed often the creation of eastern writers who had little actual contact with the West—as in the case of Clarence E. Mulford, inventor of the Hopalong Cassidy figure, who never visited the West until seventeen years after his first published western story (Savage 143-44), or Rodgers and Hammerstein, who had not visited Oklahoma until the premiere of their now classic “western” musical.

2. The trail ride, from the southern plains to markets in the North, may have actually served the purpose of initiation for many young men, if we are to judge from memoirs and historical accounts. The long trail ride provided the first extended period away from home for many young men from small towns and rural backgrounds, and it offered a memorable, and in many cases one-time, adventure for youths destined to return to their isolated communities (Savage 14ff).

Works Cited

Bonetti, Kay. “An Interview with Richard Ford.” Missouri Review 10.1 (1987): 71-96.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

Dunne, Michael. “Romantic Narcissism in ‘Outlaw’ Cowboy Music.” In All That Glitters: Country Music in America, edited by George H. Lewis. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Press, 1993.

Ford, Richard. Rock Springs. New York: Random House/Vintage, 1987.

———. The Sportswriter. New York: Random House/Vintage, 1986.

———. The Ultimate Good Luck. New York: Random House/Vintage, 1981.

Lesley, Craig. Introduction to Dreamers and Desperadoes: Contemporary Short Fiction of the American West, edited by Craig Lesley and Katheryn Stavrakis. New York: Laurel, 1993.

Malone, Bill C. Country Music, U.S.A. Rev. ed. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985.

Martin, Russell. Introduction to New Writers of the Purple Sage: An Anthology of Contemporary Western Writers. New York: Penguin, 1992.

Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: J. Currey, 1986.

Savage, William W., Jr. The Cowboy Hero: His Image in American History and Culture. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979.