Monster
by JP Maloney
Mr. Smith stood in the foreman’s
office, thinking only of the day’s carriage ride ahead of him to take
the gold from the mine back to the bustling city 60 miles to east. His thoughts
were drifting towards his eagerness to get back to his family, and this tempered
the strain of the impending journey. He reached for the box containing the
gold that sat on the desk of the foreman, soliciting the help of Gonzalez,
his partner, to carry the first of the heavy boxes. Walking from the office,
he faced down, cautious about loosing his footing, straining under the weight
of the gold. The dirt of the street was that last thing Mr. Smith saw. At
the very moment that Smith had exited the building Cameron pulled the trigger
of his shotgun, liquefying the top of his forehead; Silas fired his revolver
dispatching Gonzalez with a shot to the chest.
The twins, Cameron and Silas, then burst into the office firing wildly emptying
both their weapons, Silas missed, but the foreman caught Cameron’s buckshot
in the chest and neck, causing him to crumple into a pile of increasingly
lifeless flesh on the floor, bleeding out over an agonizing half hour.
Cameron dragged the boxes out to the wagon, and with the help of Silas heaved
them into the bed. Rushing to exit the area, Silas took the reins, working
them hard; while Cameron shot all the horses they rode past, so as to thwart
the posse. As they left the mining camp, they could see in the distance the
beehive of activity that had become the town. Riding out of yet another robbery,
the brothers were fast becoming legends throughout the west.
Once at their hiding place in the canyons, Cameron jumped out and immediately
smashed the wooden box upon the ground, dispersing the gold pieces in an arc
around the brothers. The sheer amount of gold that they had stolen was more
then either of them had seen in their lives. They were in awe. Silas immediately
began to pick up the pieces as Cameron walked into the cabin. Stealthily,
Silas skimmed thousands of dollars worth of gold off of the three foot pile.
Scanning for Cameron, Silas was sure that he was not watching, and would not
have seen the pilfering. Greedily Silas went off to stash his “extra”
share, returning twenty minutes later with a blank face, and resuming his
work retrieving and dividing the mound of gold.
That night Cameron cooked one of the foreman’s legs and fed it to Silas,
under the guise that it was pork. Throughout dinner it was conversation as
usual, and the generally high spirits maintained from the days successful
ventures carried on. Silas kept complementing the delicious meat, and at the
end of the meal they sat by the fire pit outside and rolled cigarettes for
hours. After splitting a rousing bottle of whisky the brothers went to sleep,
Silas knowing nothing of what Cameron had in store.
When he awoke Cameron was awake and cooking breakfast. Silas leisurely walked
outside to relive himself, satiated from the meal the night before. When he
returned Cameron was gone. All the gold was missing, and the butchered thigh
of the foreman was on the table. Overwhelmed and disgusted, Silas searched
in vain for Cameron, yet he was nowhere to be found. Then after hours of fruitless
searching, Silas realized that Cameron had found out his deception, and fearing
that all was lost, he went to check on his pilfered horde.
He rode furiously towards the direction of his hiding place, dismounting and
running down the path that led to where he buried the gold. In his haste,
he missed out on the fact that Cameron had set a deadfall across the path,
and was waiting in the bushes for the very moment that he arrived.
Suddenly Silas felt the weight of a massive log fall square on his shoulders,
pinning him to the ground. Writhing was no good, and when Silas realized that
he could not overcome the weight of the log he started screaming for help.
When it fell the log settled firmly between two rocks, pinning his stomach
and right arm to the ground. After an hour Cameron slowly walked down and
stood looking at his traitorous brother, and silently drew his shotgun. Silas
begged, then screamed, finally breaking down into tears, yet Cameron simply
lowered the gun, placed it to his kneecap, and pulled the trigger.
The screaming was ceaseless until Silas passed out, a steady stream of blood
saturated the earth below him, and at that point Cameron unburied the gold
and rode back to the house. Collecting his possessions he loaded up the wagon,
and lit the corner of the roof. He went on to start a new life out in California.
The gold he possessed was the only reminder of the life he had lived before;
of his past, there was no trace.
The Cowboy’s value as a tool for understanding the unique American cultural identity is unrivaled, showing a facet of the monstrous that we embrace and shun at the same time. The longstanding American fascination with cowboys stems from the interplay between capitalist and Christian ethics. In this struggle for supremacy the cowboy, a creation of society, has become at the most fundamental level a monster that society now tries to tame, its very notion threatening. In the context of validating the idea behind my creation of literary drivel I sadly call a work of literature, I will put forth in this essay a defense of the cowboy as monstrous in general, and in doing so discuss the significance of the cowboy as a tool for societal and literary criticism. The examples henceforth will come from authors who, unlike myself, created something original that in the context of their times say more about the cowboy as a monster, topics that my piece only superficially demonstrates.
By looking at Ishmael Reed’s postmodern cowboy novel Yellow Back Radio
Broke-Down as a criticism of the western and its relation to American culture,
we see the cowboy as what he has come to represent in his most basic sense.
Reed’s very choice of characters, taken alone, shows how the cowboy
in values and actions is the devil himself, and his nemesis the evil rancher
is the opposing force of civilization as Christian society. The main character,
the Loop Garoo Kid, is a “cleft foot” “hoodoo cowboy”
(Reed 1). He is in literal terms the devil. Reed says of his origins, Booted
out of his father’s house after a quarrel, whores snapped at his heels
and trick dogs did the fandango on his belly… Born with a caul over
his face and ghost lobes on his ears, he was a mean night tripper who mover
from town to town quoting Thomas Jefferson and allowing bandits to build a
flophouse around his genius (Reed 1).
This devil in the flesh with his affinity for quoting dead American
presidents is the typical cowboy. The values that he holds in esteem are those
of capitalism, and collective individualisim, his society constructed in a
concurrent fashion to that of Sartre’s. His very actions assign value,
characterizing his choices as good simply because he has chosen them. This
differs drastically when compared with the values held by society, in which
moral behavior is determined by referencing an a priori absolute. The entire
story shows the cowboy and his struggle with American society. By associating
Loop with the Thomas Jefferson, he is in effect saying that the values of
the cowboys are those values that America was founded on. The notoriously
effeminate Drag Gibson, the evil rancher yells in his drunken rage “You
want to abandon American institutions, huh! When you give up your institutions,
you ain’t got nothing someone once said. Get back here and watch this
good old killing. Make em get up their hands, boys” (Reed 169). This
quote is also revealing of the institutions that the cowboy disregards, which
are those of social control by an elite few, and they highlight the contradictions
both moral and abstract that society has allowed Americans to get away with.
Cohen’s idea that “the monster notoriously appears at times of
crisis as a kind of third term that problematizes the clash of extremes—as
“that which questions binary thinking and introduces a crisis””
is extremely befitting in its application to the categorizing of cowboys as
monsters; the only criticism being that cowboys only become the third term
in their move from real human beings to the abstract concept of new wave counter-societal
unrest (Cohen 6).
The cowboy in his time represented an agent of American imperialism,
and in effect was a physical embodiment of capitalism. Sent out to tame the
west, he simply paved the way for society to move out, but in doing that created
a culture of violence and individualism that in itself had to be stamped out
before the west was truly civilized. The initial creation of society was immeasurably
transmogrified by the conditions and the events that took place in these societal
margins. Thus, his very surroundings transformed the nature of the cowboy
from Cooper’s Natty Bumpo to Reed’s Loop. The cowboy did not eliminate
the savage and monstrous Indian; he became one and in his triumph became even
more monstrous. Society’s response to the cowboy has been mixed, initially
resulting in literature and myths dedicated to explaining and rationalizing
his nature so as to once again bring it back under the wing of society. At
first he was embraced as man in his natural element; his backdrop being a
moralized idyllic nature. This view is seen in Cooper’s works, as well
as in Owen Wister’s the Virginian, of the cowboy as a moral agent of
something superior, a clean virginal state of humanity.
There was a point where this image was all that was seen, and
from this initial work, authors like Louis L’Amour sprang forth and
filled Americans heads with images of a romanticized view of the cowboy. Yet
even these views illustrated, and in their brief societal rationalizations,
confirmed that the ease and manner in which human life was taken had no bearing
in a Christian society.
From this initial image, when the true nature of the west was
realized we begin to see the changing face of the cowboy, in society’s
fascination, and condemning of Jesse James and Billy the Kid. While traditionally
evil people who killed for their own unadulterated profit, society then tamed
them by placing them next to the increasingly savage Indian. Even in cases
such as the aforementioned outlaws, the motivations for their actions were
never questioned, and unless the stories containing them spoke of their demise
at the hand of a moral sheriff, they were simply grouped in with the general
category of cowboys; their actions concurrent with those seen in the eradication
of the Indian. As a well-used method for the rationalization of the state
of the cowboy, the idea at the time was to skew the notion of the Indian,
and reissue his image, not as the noble savage, but as the treacherous, lecherous,
and generally evil savage in the most derogatory sense of the word. Using
the Indian as a mode of comparison, any action of the cowboy was acceptable
by comparison; the cowboy becoming an agent of society and his violence necessary
for survival. As Cohen so lucidly states, “representing an anterior
culture as monstrous justifies its displacement or extermination by rendering
the act heroic” (Cohen 7).
Thus in an effort to mediate the divisive and “monstrous”
effect of the cowboy on society, society itself has tried in vain to redefine
the nature of our perception of the cowboy. Thus, the image of the Lone Ranger
was created. The Lone Ranger was society in a cowboy suit, and his very actions
reinforced the view that he was fundamentally different. His strict code of
morals, placed impracticality at the forefront, his honor and Christian virtue
being his motivator. The unfounded irrational idea that in a godless state
man by nature chooses the values accepted by Christianity drives this point
home even more. It is with the arrival of the cowboy film that we see the
cowboy metastasize into what we see him as today: the lone individual related
to others only by his very humanness, and the fact that he is rational then
gives his actions however contrary they are, meaning.
In choosing a cowboy film to speak on I must preface it with the fact that I am portraying a view of the cowboy as monstrous based on the judgments made in a Christian society. That being said, for this purpose some films work better then others, and in my willful disregard of some, it is not that they contradict my hypothesis, but merely classic films such as high noon speak more to the condition and fate of the cowboy then they do to the cowboy himself. Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch in without a doubt the seminal modern cowboy film, and its portrayal of the cowboy show that while still human, there is something separate in the character of the cowboy that distinguishes him from the everyday man. The foremost would be his propensity towards violence. Davis states in Playing Cowboys that there are two main theses that define the allure of the myth of the cowboy, one of them is the “Rambo thesis, which recognizes the central position of the gunfighter in the Western myth, serves as an outlet and encourages the audiences aggressive instincts in a way not permitted or encouraged in contemporary society” (Davis xx). Thus, in The Wild Bunch the very allure that the movie creates is that one can define his life in a blood-spattered blur of domination and violence, and this then brings forth his second thesis. The root of the second thesis draws heavily upon Fiedler’s stance in Love and Death in the American Novel. In his final chapter he delves into dissection of the themes that define Twain’s Huckleberry Finn seizing as its main triumph the idea that the reader is left with the idea that Huck is never civilized, and has exerted his will in rebelling second thesis: “by presenting an almost exclusively male world, this argues, the western allows characters and readers to escape from a society dominated by feminine social and religious values” (Davis xviii). While one may feel the topic has diverged from what defines cowboys as monstrous, the very exploration of the nature of the cowboy myth once explained shows that it is not only is the idea of the cowboy that is contrary to society, cowboys themselves are fundamentally immoral in a Christian sense. This drastic split from society would define them as monsters of a most basic type, but it is the fact that they create a desire within us to realize ourselves as a cowboy, which makes them truly monstrous.
Many of Cohen’s seven theses can be applied to this interpretation of
the cowboy as a monster. “The monster is the harbinger of category crisis”
fits well when evaluating the cowboy, as the changing face of the cowboy in
literature has yet to classify the cowboy in any sense except that he is a
marginal character who embraces absolute freedom. When trying to rationalize
the violent actions of the cowboy, society falls short; the very idea of the
cowboy makes his appearance almost universal.
Cohen also speaks of “monsters born of political expedience and self
justifying nationalism function as living invitations to action” (Cohen
13). Thus in creating the cowboy as a tool to realize our Manifest Destiny,
the government created something that transformed over time in reality and
in literature into something almost always at odds with society. What makes
this dangerous is when we apply Cohen’s idea that our “fear of
the monster is really a kind of desire” (Cohen 17). Cohen states, “Through
the body of the monster fantasies of aggression, domination, and inversion
are allowed safe expression in a clearly delimited and permanently liminal
space. Escapist delight gives way to horror only when the monster threatens
to overstep these boundaries” (Cohen 17). Thus while Douglas would define
the cowboy as monstrous due to his marginal state, Cohen would say he is monstrous
because he is encroaching on culture. They are both correct. While the west
is no longer uncivilized, the modern cowboy can be seen in situations where
there is little regulation. Drug dealers (especially murderous ones), motorcycle
and plain gang members are the cowboys of today. They have little regard for
human life, their needs being first and foremost. They live outside of society,
always on the outskirts, and to some are idols, to others monsters. Take Fifty-Cent,
millions of people embrace and attribute positive meaning to his time as a
crack dealer and a pimp by buying his records; now that he is in society he
is no longer the cowboy, but they are buying the image of the thug that he
was, not the musician that he is. Thus in this interplay between the cowboy
in society and the cowboy on the margins, the cowboy himself embodies qualities
that Kristeva would consider “abject,” and as she explains, that
“primal space between fear and attraction” is itself monstrous
(Cohen 19).
In my short story, I include the elements that make the mythic cowboy monstrous,
as well qualities that define monsters in general. First and foremost, the
twins live in a marginal state, taking up residence in a hidden canyon. Secondly
the ease with which they kill, both committing the physical act and in mentally
dealing with it, shows how removed from society they are. The fact that they
are twins, and that they come to a final showdown is monstrous, as Freud would
argue that the double is inherently uncanny, and horrific. Finally, I include
a line that speaks to their becoming legends throughout the west, meaning
that regardless of what happens next they will be remembered, and some will
idolize them, ensuring that more like them will be created.
Thus, the cowboy rides off into the monstrous, again reaffirming the notion
that he bucks American society’s efforts to tame him. Even now that
the frontier has closed, the cowboy has remained, and we see him all the time,
society’s reactions now being the same that they were at in the nineteenth
century: condemning and fearful.
Bibliography
Aquila, Richard. Wanted Dead or Alive: The American West in Popular Culture.
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Aquila’s book examines
the cowboy in pop culture and provides a good background for speaking on the
subject, as well as putting a different spin on Davis’s interpretation
of “The Wild Bunch.”
Cohen, Jeffery J. Monster Culture (Seven Thesis). Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1996. Cohen’s work allowed me to critically evaluate
the cowboy as a monster, and provides a good description of that which is
monstrous in itself, and in relation to culture.
Davis, Robert M. Playing Cowboys: Low Culture and Art in the Western. Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. Davis’s book is a study of the form
and content of works involving the cowboy. His book helps define the western
myth.
Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution
and Taboo. London: Routledge, 1966. Douglas outlines a theory in which that
which is marginal is seen as monstrous. This can be applied to define cowboys
as monstrous.
Feidler, Leslie A. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Criterion
Books, 1960. Fielder’s book speaks to anti-societal urges that promote
our fascination with the cowboy. This defines cowboys as something outside
of society, and hence leads to their classification as monstrous.
Freud, Sigmund. Writings on Art and Literature. Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1997. Freud’s concept of the uncanny allows my story to take
on another level of monstrousness, and in its application shows the monstrous
nature of the relation between my characters.
Kristeva, Julia. The Powers of Horror: An Essay On Abjection. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1982. In outlining the concept of the abject, Kristeva’s
notions can be applied to the characterization of the cowboy as monstrous.
Peckinpah, Samuel. “The Wild Bunch.” 1969. This movie portrays
an image of the cowboy that is both realistic and frightening, and exhibits
well defined monstrous qualities.
Reed, Ismael. Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down. New York: Doubleday & Company,
Inc., 1969. Reed’s book is both a novel, and a work of criticism that
helps to define the nature of the cowboy, and in his opinion, the cowboy is
monstrous, or devilish.
Wright, William. Six Guns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western.
Berkeley: University of California Press. In this book Wright adds his own
opinions to the interpretation of modern western films, building up a broader
base of knowledge off which to base my theories.
