NATIONAL AND AMERICAL LEAGUE

Albert Einstein: "Nationalism is an infantile disease. It is the measles of mankind."

I've been working on a Western novel for a few years. Although it is far from completion, its structure is basically complete, and I thought this a good time to try to explain why I even embarked on this journey in the first place. If nothing else than for my own understanding. As my readers know, I’m entranced by the power of myth and storytelling, and I use them as the backbone of my creative work. Many years ago, I came across the book Christ and the End of Meaning by Paul Hessert, in which he provides fascinating descriptions of myth and connects the “Western” to our quintessential understanding of Christianity and life in the West. I would be lying if I said that reading Hessert wasn’t an inspirational moment for me to use the Western as the form for my next tale. After years of struggle, my Western novel is taking shape.
I would like to share Paul Hessert’s words below:
 
In popular understanding, myth is an untruth… Technically, however, myth is a story telling the culture’s understanding of truth. It articulates a circle of reality. Our dominant myth is probably the hero story typical of the Western…The basic shape of the Western is simple: A community suffers from lawlessness it cannot control. Someone from the outside rides into town and by employing extraordinary procedures saves the community, either by his own strength and craft or by organizing the otherwise impotent citizens. In the process of saving the community he may be killed. But if not, when victory is won, he leaves the community and disappears…Many shape the story of Jesus in this same form as they read the gospels…Because this is the shape of our culture, it is also the shape of our religion. It is the master form in which we appropriate ancient traditions, sacred books, and familiar liturgies. It is the shape in which we recognize our own development. Any challenge to this shape will challenge the circle of reality itself.
 
I found all these statements extremely insightful, but it was that last sentence that stayed with me. What would happen if the Western was used as the medium to challenge the very structure that it inhabited? And so, I embarked on my take on the Western. There are obvious and simple heresies throughout my book that conspicuously refuse to follow the shape Hessert describes. There is no clear hero, no uncomplicated villain, and no ultimate victory. There is also, perhaps, an even more blatant disregard for the traditional Western: the story does not take place in what we ordinarily think of as Western territory. Set east of the Mississippi, it might, more correctly, be categorized as an Eastern Western, an oxymoron that seems appropriate for a story concerned with emphasizing the inherent contradictions of reality.

But perhaps even more radical is the idea that neither of these deliberate dissensions are technically incorrect. Perhaps the West as we know it is something of a fantasy, and never really existed. Perhaps the West is the combination of a set of conditions that the American East needed to invent and glorify in order to counterbalance their manners, etiquette, and social politeness, and to justify their atrocities. Maybe the West is what the political and religious leaders of the East needed to keep it under control. An immense treasure, just out of reach. Something similar to the role Heaven plays in the myth. When describing one of my favorite Western novels, Butcher’s Crossing, its author, John Williams, said:
 
There’s a very real sense in which ‘The West’ does not, did not ever, exist. It’s a dream of The East—almost as if The East made up The West.
 
If that is true, then perhaps the popular Western has always been doing more than entertaining us. Perhaps the popular Western (and, in today's day and age, I would include the common pop-country song) has become a superficial mythology that reinforces a simple narrative propagating a hidden agenda of the American East. And what did the East use as its basis for that West? Not the truth of raw frontier territory, lawlessness, violence, extreme wilderness, or the hopeless grind of subsistence for anyone daring enough to venture there. Instead, it emphasized endless beauty and the promise of wealth hidden within the land. It emphasized evil, but only insofar as evil was necessary to make the salvatory nature of the protagonist unmistakable. And it coated it within the guise of a universal nationalism, as John Williams pointed out in his article, “The ‘Western’: Definition of the Myth.”
 
Its rhetoric and repetitive structure, is its fundamentally nationalistic nature. The heroism, the bloodletting, the superhuman bravery, the terrible mutilations—these are given point and intensity only by the nationalistic impulse that lies behind them. Without that impulse, the adventure is empty, is bombast, is violence without rage.
 
Once the story is sufficiently charged with nationalistic pride, the crowd becomes entranced by the hero. But who, then, are the hidden protagonists of these stories of the West?

John Williams lays out an answer in the same article, proving how the Western has historically served as a vehicle for propagating a Calvinist agenda as American values, embedding Calvinist ideals beneath the surface of the adventure. The popular Western becomes, in this sense, a kind of mythology that reinforces our inherited circle of reality as fundamentally Calvinist.
John Williams writes:
 
The early Calvinists saw experience as a neverending contest between Good and Evil. Though fundamentally corrupt, man might receive, through the grace of God, a state of salvation. Of this inner state of Grace man can never be fully sure, but he may suspect its presence by such outward signs as wealth, power or worldly success. Since this state is the choice of God, the elect tend to be absolutely good; and the more numerous damned tend to be absolutely evil. This affair is wholly predetermined; man’s will avails him only the illusion of choice; and the world is only a stage upon which mankind acts out a drama in which Good will ultimately prevail and in which Evil will inevitably be destroyed. In the very simplicity and inadequacy of this world view lies its essentially dramatic nature. All experience is finally allegorical, and its meaning is determined by something outside itself. The relationship between this habit of mind and the typically primitive Western is immediately apparent. The hero is inexplicably and essentially good. His virtue does not depend upon the “good deeds” he performs; rather, such deeds operate as outward signs of inward grace. Similarly, the villain is by his nature villainous, and not made so by choice, circumstances or environment; more often than not these are identical to those of the hero. And even in those instances, relatively infrequent today, when the villain is Indian or Mexican, the uses of racial origin are not so conventionally bigoted as they might appear. Racial backgrounds are not explanations of villainy; they are merely outward signs of inward damnation. In the curiously primitive nature of this drama, it is necessary that we know at every moment the figure in whom Evil is concentrated and that we be constantly assured that it is doomed to destruction. Beneath the gunplay, the pounding hooves and the crashing stagecoaches, there is a curious, slow, ritualistic movement that is essentially religious.
 
So, beyond its flagrant blasphemy to the Western shape, the themes in my Western are furthermore intended as counter-themes to this traditional Calvinistic propaganda and to the simplified mythology echoed in today's top-charting pop-country songs.

Grief, struggle, and transformation are emphasized here, not as forms of masochism or manliness, but as natural conditions of the human experience that can provide us with greater access to life itself, if we’re willing to enter them. The promise of hope, belief, and salvation preached through the mouths of the chosen righteous few can be comforting, especially when it arrives in the familiar forms our culture has been repeating for generations.

But a story repeated does not mean a story that is correct. The same is true of religion. Using pagan traditions to justify an Absolute Good on high, sending His Son as a messenger to be killed and rise again in glory to overcome evil, in the literal sense, is not the only way to view Christianity. Those stories are tempting in their simplicity and powerful in the ultimate supremacy they provide to certain chosen groups. But what if the stories of Jesus call us to something more?

What if the Western (and, in turn, the Gospels) could be used as an instrument to call us to something deeper than these conventional readings. What if, instead of Jesus painted as the conquering cowboy, the story isn’t so simple. What if Christ is who we relate with, not in our supremacy, but in our shared brokenness and aloneness with he who felt the same upon the cross? What if the oxymoron of the crucified/God tells us more about the structure of reality than the all-powerful monarchical Lord God ever could. What if life’s journey is about dialectically delving into the unknown rather than making the unknown known?

When taking this form, the potential of the Western to explore new themes is therefore endless. Perhaps the frontier is not merely a place where a man goes to discover what is already there. Perhaps it is the place where he discovers that the act of searching changes him. Perhaps the emancipatory power of the Western comes in our shared experience of the true West, not in the fantasies of the American East.

John Williams ends his essay with words that, for me, capture the reason I continue to believe the Western is such a powerful form for exploring the human condition:
 
Viewed in a certain way, the American frontiersman…is man moving into the unknown, into potentiality, and by that move profoundly changing his own nature. He is an adventurer in chaos, searching for meaning there. He is, in short, ourselves.

If you enjoyed this new meditation on the deeper meaning of the game, you’ll love THE ART OF WAR AND BASEBALL!! Check it out here: www.theartofwarandbaseball.com ... Also, anyone interested in pre-reading my next novel, please don't hesitate to contact me.