Riders of the Virtual Sage: Zane Grey, Cormac McCarthy, and the Transformation of the Popular Western

Abstract

It is hard to imagine the evolution of the American novel into its first great movement—the American Renaissance—without the vulgar and transgressive power of the popular to set it into motion and to give it its stores of images, themes, plots, character types, and resentments. A profane energy resonates in Whitman’s democratic embrace of the masses, in Melville’s rough-edged metaphysics, in Hawthorne’s perverse communities. Indeed, the l ink between popular culture and “serious” art has become a starting point rather than a point of contention in cultural s tudies. The echo of c rime reportage in The House of the Seven Gables, the rhythms of jazz in the novels of Ralph Ellison or James Baldwin, the textures and voices of sensational fiction and anime in the bold work of Quentin Tarantino have all been convincingly argued for. What I wish to add to these arguments is the distinction between two forms of inf luence, one based on potentiality—which I will describe as the inf luence of transportation—the other based on a concept introduced and elaborated by Gilles Deleuze in Difference and Repetition—the “virtual,” which I will describe as the inf luence of transformation.