The Western movie is an exercise in rotation stripped of every irrelevant trait. The stranger dropping off the stagecoach into a ritual adventure before moving on is the Western equivalent of Huck’s foray ashore, with the difference that where Huck loses the stranger wins — but win or lose it is all the same: One must in any case be on the move. The shift from East to West accomplishes a rotation from the organic to the inorganic, from the green shade of Huck’s willow towhead (or Novalis’s leafy bower) to the Southwestern desert. But both the chlorophyll rotation (Hudson’s Riolama) and John Ford’s desert are themselves rotations from the human nest, the family familiar, Sartre’s category of the viscous. The true smell of everydayness is the smell of Sunday dinner in the living room. Rotation from the human organic may occur to the animal organic (Mowgli in the wolf den), to the vegetable organic (Hudson in Riolama), to the inorganic (John Wayne in the desert), or back again. To the alienated man of the East who has rotated to Santa Fe, the green shade of home becomes a true rotation; to his blood brother in Provence, it is the mesa and the cobalt sky. The I–It dichotomy is translated intact in the Western movie. Who is he, this Gary Cooper person who manages so well to betray nothing of himself whatsoever, who is he but I myself, the locus of pure possibility? He is qualitatively different from everyone else in the movie. Whereas they are what they are — the loyal but inept friend, the town comic, the greedy rancher, the craven barber — the stranger exists as pure possibility in the axis of nought-infinity. He is either nothing, that is, the unrisked possibility who walks through the town as a stranger and keeps his own counsel — above all he is silent — or he is perfectly realized actuality, the conscious en soi, that is to say, the Godhead, who, when at last he does act, acts with a ritual and gestural perfection. Let it be noted that it is all or nothing: Everything depends on his gestural perfection — an aesthetic standard which is appropriated by the moviegoer at a terrific cost in anxiety. In the stately dance of rotation, Destry when challenged borrows a gun and shoots all the knobs off the saloon sign. But what if he did not? What if he missed? The stranger in the movie walks the tightrope over the abyss of anxiety and he will not fail. But what of the moviegoer? The stranger removes his hat in the ritual rhythm and wipes his brow with his sleeve, but the moviegoer’s brow is dry when he emerges and he has a headache, and if he tried the same gesture he might bump into his nose. Both Gary Cooper and the moviegoer walk the tightrope of anxiety, but Gary Cooper only seems to: his rope is only a foot above the ground. The moviegoer is over the abyss. The young man in a Robert Nathan novel or in a Huxleyan novel of the Days after the Bomb may rest assured that if he lies under his bush in Central Park, sooner or later she will trip over him. But what of the reader? He falls prey to his desperately unauthentic art by transposing the perfect aesthetic rotation to the existentiaclass="underline" He will lie in his green shade until doomsday and no fugitive Pier Angeli will ever trip over him. He must seek an introduction; his speech will be halting, his gestures will not come off, and having once committed himself to the ritual criterion of his art and falling short of it, he can only be — nothing. In no event can he become a person; not even Cooper can do that, for the choice lies between the perfected actual and nothing at all. His alienated art of rotation instead of healing him catches him up in a spiral of despair whose only term is suicide or total self-loss.
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A man riding a train may incarnate alienation (the commuter) or rotation (i.e., the English variety: “I was taking a long-delayed holiday. In the same compartment and directly opposite me, I noticed a young woman who seemed to be in some sort of distress. To my astonishment she beckoned to me. I had planned to get off at North Ealing, but having nothing better to do, I decided to stay on to render what assistance I could…”) But he is also admirably placed to encounter the Return or repetition. Tom Wolfe, lying in his berth while the train passes by night through lonely little Midwestern towns, is alienation re-presented and so reversed. He may be lost and by the wind grieved but he is withal triumphant. But George Webber going home again and Charles Gray going back to Clyde are transmitted intact — once the reader, who has never been to Clyde or Asheville, has made the shift. But this is not rotation, for it is a deliberate quest for the very thing rotation set out at any cost to avoid; the rider has turned his back upon the new and the remote and zone crossing, and now voyages into his own past in the search for himself. It is thus in the nature of a conversion. Unlike rotation, it is of two kinds, the aesthetic and the existential, which literature accordingly polarizes. The aesthetic repetition captures the savor of repetition without surrendering the self as a locus of experience and possibility. When Proust tastes the piece of cake or Captain Ryder finds himself in Brideshead, the incident may serve as an occasion for either kind: an excursion into the interesting, a savoring of the past as experience; or two, the passionate quest in which the incident serves as a thread in the labyrinth to be followed at any cost. This latter, however, no matter how serious, cannot fail to be polarized by art, transmitting as the interesting. The question what does it mean to stand before the house of one’s childhood? is thus received in two different ways — one as an occasion for the connoisseur sampling of a rare emotion, the other literally and seriously: what does it really mean?
Repetition is the conversion of rotation. In rotation, Shane cannot stay. In repetition, Shane neither moves on nor stays, but turns back to carry the search into his own past (we need not consider here Kierkegaard’s distinction that true religious repetition has nothing to do with travel but is “consciousness raised to the second power”—which I take to be equivalent to Marcel’s secondary reflection). In East of Eden Steinbeck leaves the wheel of rotation, the wayward bus, and with a great flourish turns back to Salinas and the past. In a less cluttered repetition, In Sicily, Vittorini’s “I,” on the occasion of a letter from his father, leaves his life of everydayness in Milan, where he is besieged by “abstract furies,” and makes the pilgrimage back to Sicily. It is a very good repetition, or as Hemingway says in a somewhat purple introduction, it has rain in it. Like rotation, repetition offers itself as a deliverance from everydayness, yet it is, in a sense, the reverse of rotation. It is also a reversal of the objective-empirical. The latter world view cannot get hold of it without radically perverting it. For example, the dust jacket of Vittorini’s book says something, as I recall, about modern man’s renewing his vital energies by rediscovering his roots, etc. This remark is no doubt true in a garrulous dust-jacket sense, yet it is the very stuff of the “abstract furies” which drove him from Milan in the first place. It is the objective-empirical counterattack, the attempt to seize and render according to its own modes the existential trait — which it does only by rereversing and alienating. (Even when a critic tries to stay clear of the abstract furies and writes of The Adventures of Augie March that it has the “juices of life in it,” if it did have any juices, he is already drying them up.)