다시 쓰는 서부 이야기: 월터 반 틸버그 클라크(Walter Van Tilburg Clark)의 『만곡부 사건』(The Ox-Bow Incident)

Abstract

The West in American history and society has been served as an official American ideology since the significance of the West has been repeatedly invoked as the unifying force of American people in times of national crisis. The West has been believed as the significant place in which the essential Americanness such as self-reliance, independence, and individualism was formed and the precious values for healing the problems of American society were imbedded. However, with the introduction of the new Western discourse, the established beliefs of the West have been turned out to be a fictitious myth. In a word, the history of the West was revealed to be the violent history of conquering the racial other. Similarly, in the field of the Western literature and film there has been a revisionist movement which deconstructs the myth of the West and discloses the violence of the Western society. This essay aims to reread the novel The Ox-Box Incident from the viewpoints of the new Western discourse. The Ox-Bow Incident has been evaluated as one of the best Western novels so far. Most of critical views of this work have been focused on its well-made plot and its value as the insightful probing of the human nature. However, a new Western discourse approach leads to illuminate the new crucial significance of the work as a revisionist Western novel. The author seems to recreate the traditional Western novel by employing the conventional cowboy characters and the plot of the popular Western novel such as cow rustling and a lynching party to catch cow rustlers. However, the two main cowboy characters in this work are described to be ceaselessly in fear of not being accepted by the town men, instead of being self-reliant and determined strong men. Moreover, the attention is paid to describe the narrow-mindedness and exclusivism of the Western town and reveal the violence of lynching party as an irrational mob. In this novel the West is no longer a positive place in which self-reliant and heroic Western men can fulfill their sense of justice and their individual values as described in the traditional Western novels or films. In the work of Clark, the West turns out to be a violent place in which the false values of the irrational mob culture are prevailing. Thus The Ox-Box Incident can be evaluated as the forerunner of the revisionist Western novel in that it presents a real West by casting doubts on the myth of the West and reveals its cruel and violent reality.