Return of the American: speculations on Fred Gipson and Texas writing

Abstract

To the extent that the Southwest perceives itself as an alter ego of mainstream America, the myth that informs Fred Gipson's writing should not be interpreted as nostalgia, but rather as an attempt by a community of believers to survive in the shadow of a dominant culture. The structures that undergird Gipson's fiction and history and the relationships of works, author, and audience reveal a hierarchy of values and a social construction of reality communicated through compelling metaphors and symbols. If the fiction seems formulaic and the history taxonomic, that is in part because in the Southwest a distinction has never been clearly drawn between fiction and history: both suffer from an aesthetic of verisimilitude. Criticism has been arrested by these symptoms. The intentionality of this writing has not been coherently examined, nor has the world view that manifests itself in this literature been exposed. Products of a residual, intuitive America where assimilation has been slow, the fiction and the history of the region are neither escapist nor reversionary, but project an America that was, and might have been. This literature is characteristic of the fiction and history that emerging nations produce: mythopoetic, vernacular in setting and form, and affective.