Overton's Overture

At this point it seems that the role of "adventure" is coalescing around tales of the West, stories of sea travel, and perhaps most fundamentally, imperialism. The importance of indigenous presence, whether acknowledged or projected has been the denied obsession of this collection (evident in stories by Davis, White, Russell, Harte). That continues with Frank H. Spearman's "The Run of the Yellow Mail," a simple tale of the young little engineer who could. Except, well, that engineer needed some Sioux people to risk their lives for his safety. The relationship between vigilantism and ambitious young men runs deep in the American imaginary. Often knowing what is "right," in the moral sense, comes to a head with professional growth. Of course, the trick of narrative is to draw a narrow focus around what is right—i.e. Dirty Harry movies or the Deathwish series, rely on dominant logics of racism to promote their revenge stories. Thus what is show...

There is a moment in the penultimate episode of the 2016 mini-series  The People v OJ Simpson  that re-framed how I understand narratives. While the whole show is about the importance of persuasive stories this episode examines what it means for a script to escape the control of the author. In “Manna from Heaven” Marcia Clark and Chris Darden discover something new in the audio tapes which feature officer Mark Fuhrman detailing, with pride, his racist practices in the LAPD.  While Fuhrman’s vicious quotidian account has already made the tapes controversial, Clark and Darden listen and hear the officer misogynistically insulting Margaret York, one of the highest ranking women in the LAPD. York is also Judge Lance Ito’s wife. This bit of information, combined with a form signed by York that acknowledges that she had no prior relation to Fuhrman, threatens to ruin the case and cause a mistrial. O. ...

Part of what comes with the subtitle “Adventure” is the promise of action. I expected that the prose of this first section would try  to be exciting. Each of the ten tales would be like some kind of fast-paced Saturday morning cartoon. Most likely there wouldn’t be any fine Italian cuisine as in Samurai Pizza Cats or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but the first story might have some danger to dish. I thought things would move quickly, and characters would persistently be on the verge of death. I imagined that life would ornately pop and the alleged barren ruggedness of Marlboro men in the desert plains would reveal some elaborate interiority. Even as I held these predictions, I knew they were silly. That was clear reading this opening entry by the spiritualist writer Stewart Edward White. Here is a slow four chapter participant in the myth-building of the the American West.  “The Two-Gun Man” begins with a characterization of, Buck Johnson, the protagonist...