How the West was Lost. John Ford's Account*

What I discovered at Apple was a community without boundaries. A free-form environment, an artist's workshop. At Pepsi, we were warriors. We fiercely competed on a tenth of a per cent of market share. And we sold what Steve disdainfully called sugared water. At Apple, we are dreamers. We are driven by a passion to change the world, to make it a better, more productive place for every individual. And we sell, not refreshment for the body, but tools for the mind. (London 1988, p.10f )

Third-wave companies are designed for management by dissent. Second-wave companies are built to foster consent, which is considered healthy. Apple would never develop the products or principles it has if not for the love of colliding ideas. Structure has no permanence. (loc.cit. p.142 )

In the United States, the summons to dissent, because it was grounded in a prescribed ritual form, preempted the threat of radical alternatives. Conflict itself was rendered a mode of control. (Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad, Madison 1978, p.160 )

The trappings of loyalty - pension, cradle-to-grave employment - have been replaced by attention to such things as creating opportunity, rewards, and challenges for people. In return, people pledge their commitment to do their absolute best - for themselves and for the company. (Sculley, loc.cit. p.176 )

Insights into the structure of the current system governing a person's motivation and social rewards are peculiarly powerless regarding this system's hegemonic force. Trying to throw some doubt on the smooth transfer of biblical metaphors towards the realm of new frontiers opening up when investment capital senses a promising venture consequently is a difficult enterprise. Since a certain set of deeply ingrained cultural patterns is constantly enforced by agencies restaging the mythology significant change is only to be expected through shifts within these sets of values. Simple loss of credibility will most likely be counterproductive, leading to even more frantic attempts to colonise new frontiers of meaning. It is against this background that I intend to analyse a Western by John Ford to simultaneous strengthen Sacvan Bercovitch's points and plot them against the directors distinctivly non-messianic nonconformism introducing a peculiar twist into the ruling mythology.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is an incisive demonstration of American ideology at work and of the problems it gives rise to. But it does not rechannel doubt into the system the classical way. Rather than propose its own distinctive version of an errand into the wilderness it does no more than stage the dilemma of critical analysis mentioned above, still telling a riveting story and at the same time indicating that something is fundamentally wrong with it. Mythologies are not changed by simple works of art, not even by popular movies. But in picking out an example of a film deeply involved into the success-story of the United States as well as initiating a displacement of such narratives I hope to show that biblical premises can be utilised against the evangelism of the puritan tradition. In fact John Ford's message, as the US slowly turns into an Old World, is that this country still has to learn from how Catholicism handles the guilt incumbent on imperialistic idealism.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was released in 1962. Senator Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) and his wife Hallie arrive by train in the Western town of Shinbone to attend the funeral of an unlikely person, Tom Doniphon who died a destitute drunkard. Prompted by journalists the politician explains his interest telling the story of his erstwhile errand into the wilderness Flashback. Approaching Shinbone a stagecoach is held up by the outlaw Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) and Ransom Stoddard, a young and idealistic lawyer, is severely beaten up. Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) an autonomous farmer who knows very well how to use his gun picks him up and delivers him into the care of the Ericsons, his girlfriend's family. This starts a series of tragic-comical confrontations revolving around Stod?dard's attempts to establish a lawyer's office and his utter inability to challenge Liberty Valance's reign of terror. Tom Doniphon amusedly assists Stoddard in trying to teach Shinbone's citizens the basics of civilisation but is visibly piqued by Hallie Ericson's growing concern about Stoddard's safety. Developments reach a climax as the election of representatives for the territorial convention approaches. Liberty Valance is paid by the cattle owners to bully the small town-settlers into submission but Doniphon, throwing his natural authority behind the lawyer, heads off Liberty's assaults on the elective process. Stoddard being nominated to head Shinbone's delegation to the territorial convention a showdown with Liberty is inavoidable. After being shot into the left arm Stoddard apparently kills Liberty Valance and is catered for by an obviously worried Hallie. Her sympathy towards the wounded man is more than Doni?phon can stand. He gets drunk and burns down his house which he was enlargening in view of the projected marriage.

Shooting Liberty Valance has made Ransom Stoddard enormously popular, even though he himself regards it as a taint on his honour and - challenged on this point - is on the verge of withdrawing his candidacy at the convention. But Tom Doniphon taking things into his hands once more privately urges him to accept the nomination explaining what actually happened at the duel. It was Tom who watching in the dark took the law into his hands and shot Liberty. Stoddard is sent to Washington with a pure conscience as well as on the strength of his having shot the bandit. Now he wants the journalists to finally set things straight and posthumously correctly attribute this fame to the man who deserves it. But this is not what the reporters had been looking for. Not wanting to demythologise a popular character they destroy the notes they have been taking.of Stoddard's story. The point is emphasised by the final sequence when the senator and his wife are heading back to Washington. Thanking the train's ticket collector for the excellent service he has been getting Stoddard is met with his response that ''Nothing is too good for the man who shot Liberty Valance''.

Basically John Ford's film is concerned with the illusion that the current social system is resting on self-made foundations. If it is true that ''ideology transmutes history into myth so as to enable people to act in history'' (Sacvan Bercovitch The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History, Critical Inquiry 12 (1986) p.636) it follows that - once a community has taken roots - it attempts to rewrite the account of its own beginnings. It will be rendered as an initial confirmation of the legitimacy of its continuing existence. To be a successful politician will still require that one is thought of as sharing the values of the founding fathers who menaced by anarchy built a nation on law and civilisation's values. The twin ideals of self-reliance and consensus that Bercovitch singles out as main influences on American ideology must loom large in any story recounting how the West was colonised. John Wayne's Tom Doniphon can plausibly be seen as an allegory impersonating the fusion of both concepts: living outside of Shinbone, being the only one who is up to Liberty Valance, but at the same time active in the democratic process albeit not as someone seeking elective office. From the way John Ford's story unfolds it is clear, however, that there is a major impediment to the promotion of such conveniently double-sided paradigms. The film evokes the genesis of the US as it emerged from the state of local self-sufficiency driven by the energy of a broader vision, to be sure. The utopia of American wilderness finally seems transformed into a flourishing garden. Bercovitch's description fits nicely:

Process and essence merge in the symbols of the Revolution, teleology precludes dialectics, and progress and conformity stand revealed as the twin pillars of the American temple of freedom.'' (Jeremiad, p.149 )

Tom Doniphon, however, dies as the town bum whereas Ransom Stoddard onto whom the values of teleology seem to be projected is revealed as having been less than candid about his own past. Obviously this is a Western reaching out to include topics ordinarily excluded from the genre. Progress is not depicted as smooth development blending the features of idealistic adventure and down-to-earth mastery of the martial arts. Rather it is seen as a course of events resting on presuppositions that cannot be approached without seriously calling into question its encompassing ideology. The peculiar fusion of idealism and pragmatism is no longer taken for granted.

Stanley Cavell has pointed out that Ransom Stoddard is treated like a woman in John Ford's film, an apron rather than a gun or at least a hat being his pictorial attribute. (Stanley Cavell The World Viewed, Cambridge, Mass. 1979, p.57 )This indicates a fragility of the law and civilisation's values quite different from the weaknesses ordinarily conceded in this respect, i.e. the cowardice of an elected sheriff or the drunkenness of a preaching newspaperman. Ordinarily US-style teleology is supposed to save the good cause even if such deviations cannot be avoided. But Ransom's humiliation at the hands of Liberty runs deeper than that. As a representative of the political system he has supposedly overcome the threat of anarchy by successfully risking his own life, otherwise he would be just another victim. As it turns out he actually had the courage to face the gunman but the whole point is that this does by no means imply what popular opinion believes it to imply. Ransom Stoddard owns his actual and allegorical life to external intervention, his kenosis is only transformed into triumph by Doniphon's saving grace.

Theologically speaking this amounts to adding the experience of the passion of Christ to the pattern of Exodus explaining the perseverance of the elected people by supernatural assistance. This, however, is just the beginning of an even more incisive shift. Initially Doniphon's actions are a kind of substitute for the Lord's intervention into secular affairs the belief in which lies at the core of biblical nation-building. But in the course of the movie he undergoes his own kenosis with no divine help forthcoming. Losing his authority based on self-reliance to the prospect of cultural development ruins his existence. Tom's awkwardness towards the rules of civilised courtship indicates why, according to the logic of this film, autonomy is threatened by an urge to self-destruction. It lacks the ''female'' qualities of flexibility and vulnerability which help Ransom Stoddard not only to win Hallie Ericson but to succeed with his political career.

To look at it from another angle: it is common wisdom that when the Gun confronts the Book it is only by defensive, cunning or at last extremely prudent behaviour that the Book can prevail. Although gun-happy preachers or judges can be found in Westerns they are not typical of the problem around which the genre is built. Not just whether a good guy can win against the bad guy but how the community that defines goodness can bring itself to accept someone who has to step outside the boundaries of the law in order to defend its very existence. Numerous solutions to this dilemma touching the core of consent by radicalism have been proposed. John Ford tries a remarkably independent approach, severing the link between social compromise and standing up to an external enemy.

Heroes are normally thought of as persons embodying those ultimate values of a community that can only be actualised in borderline situations. This is the concept taken apart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Neither Tom Doniphon nor Ransom Stoddard qualify as representatives of such a concept, sovereign self-reliance being beyond heroism, defenceless idealism remaining on this side. The simple fact that missionaries most often needed an army to support their message is deeply inscribed into the way progress is commonly rationalised. In blocking this foregone conclusion John Ford raises two unsettling issues: the guilt a community incurs just by being built on these foundations and the extremely tricky question of whether this guilt might not be the best prerequisite to success.

Juridically the acceptance of the duel as an instrument of adjudicating conflicts nicely exhibits the contradictions inherent in society's efforts to have its cake and eat it, i.e. to integrate non-lawful procedures since the rule of the law has not only to be defended within the area of its jurisdiction but also vis a vis adverse forces from outside that will not submit to a given set of social obligations. Now the interest of law-abiding citizens naturally demands that those para-juridical procedures at least turn out to have the right results. (In this respect duels in Westerns resemble the ordeal of the Middle Ages.) The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is an extraordinary film because it demystifies such wishful thinking. Continuities between defending the law at the limits of and within a community are mostly apparent. To conceive of duels as the origin of justice is part of an ideology seeking to block curiosity about the genesis of legal power. The errand into the wilderness motivated and symbolically represented by the Book (the Bible, the codices of Law) cannot generally be sustained without the employment of the Gun and whether this can be legitimised is very much an open question. Stoddard's books are torn apart by Valance in the initial sequence of the flashback and they are neither restored within the film nor by its message. On the contrary their validity is subjected to the test of historical and ideological truth throughout the movie. Progress is not conceivable as an innocent category any longer. Human endeavour presupposes favourable initial conditions if it is to survive - call this grace - but there is no guarantee of continuity, much less of flourishing and general acclaim. Tom Doniphon's demise reveals a major problem with Americanism: its tendency to generalise the logic of democratic rationality into an universal system superimposing itself on all preceding stages and not allowing any exceptions.

John Ford's film, then, participates in the tradition of the American Jeremiad insofar as it evokes a biblical pattern in order to criticise and re-direct society's status quo. And yet short of overthrowing this tradition it undermines it by pointing to the illusions that blind us against the strangeness of the merger of autocratic pragmatism and romantic messianism with middle-class ideology. Sharing the defensive projection of a state of ''anarchy of unfettered self-interest'' Jeremiad p.154 )into its own pre-history nevertheless it then proceeds to explode the myth of machismo turned into statesmanship. To put it in Hegelian terms: mediation between Being and Becoming falters, neither teleology nor dialectics can serve to bridge the gap opening up when it is discovered that the received accounts of how the dynamics of progress themselves developed are unreliable. The image of an omnipotent yet suffering God perfectly matches the needs of a society built on self-righteousness and adventurism.

John Ford's construction adds the observation that autonomy breeds its own fragility just as indigence builds on its own strength. It amounts to a crucial blurring of distinctions to assume that both can be made to coincide within the continuity of one homogeneous narrative. Doniphon and Stoddard are not equals, not even partners working together on the same project. American progress feeds on denying its origin in undeserved assistance from outside. The reason is that Christian compassion which serves to cover up the internal brutality of the system is at a loss to explain generosity not caught up in the web of the exchange of commodities. Tom Doniphon is the inexplicability of kindness with no strings attached. Its existence is a feature of everyday experience, to be sure. But its deployment as the moving force behind the course of European and American history is unsustainable. Christian theology had a hard time figuring out why God should have bothered to save mankind. With John Ford the story takes a further twist: He cannot survive this redemption whereas his people appropriate the results.

Following the lead of John Ford's Western one ends up with a very peculiar dialectics. Accustomed to the strategy of probing unfamiliar territory to expand our insight we are threatened by confusion when this expansion turns out to question the very strategy of knowledge-acquisition. Stoddard tries to add one more piece of the truth to the jig-saw puzzle of public opinion only to find himself refuted because this addition would in fact destroy the delicate and necessary web of belief of his compatriots. There is an obvious argument against John Ford's treatment of journalism here. Newspapers are not as sentimental as he pictures them, thriving on scandals and regarding muckraking as a service to democracy. But, as Michel Foucault and Sacvan Bercovitch to name but two have taught us, shattering conventions of an well-established consensus serves nicely to reaffirm the embattled values.

Privacy exposed increases the need of even closer privacy, new frontiers call for stronger social coherence. Under those circumstances John Ford can be seen as carefully stopping short of applying the old rules to a situation where they begin to lose their appeal. It does not matter whether the media refuse to tell the truth or transform the telling of the truth into their particular kind of lie, the problem facing an American citizen at this point is having to respond to contradictory urges, namely to try yet another departure or to mistrust this move on the evidence of the wreckage of former attempts. One consequence of the American Jeremiad is this impasse between an almost instinctive tendency to confidentially ''attack'' a problem and the growing suspicion that this might be the wrong approach to ever solve it. But how can one escape the gloomy outlook arising from such indecision?

This question itself is but a paraphrase of the problem. Escaping from a predicament consisting in an inability to decide upon one's own future is the classical move towards new frontiers. John Ford has lost the West for us by focussing his attention on characters marked by the awareness of the necessity and unacceptability of the myth of the glorious conquest. It is comparatively easy to point fun at those still believing the manipulated stories. Coming to terms with the constitutive power they still exert on our civilisation is more difficult. But it is the only way open to someone who does not want to repeat the mistakes of the past in reverse order. One first step to break out of the circle is to stand confused and to stop looking for the quickest remedy.

The categories that determine human priorities along the axis of time and space are themselves subject to temporal and spatial change, this, in prose, is what Martin Heidegger's Seinsgeschichte is all about. In John Ford's story this understanding is arrived at as the backlash of the flashback, as a result of reflective memory's intrusion into the presence of political reality. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance concludes with the image of Ransom Stoddard in bad humour as he is hit by the insight that he will not escape from the ambiguity of figuring as an indispensable supplement of the hero he knows he never was.

Such considerations cannot fail to evoke the deconstructionist program. In fact it seems extremely tempting to give a reading of John Ford's film which emphasises its auto-destructive character, its rendering obsolete the quasi-natural conventions of the genre. Such an interpretation would, however, fail to capture the full impact of the movie and in order to argue this I will take a detour, commenting on Sacvan Bercovitch's view of literary critics facing the problem of ideology. This will enable me to offer some observation on how theory at the present time can proceed.

The advantage in focusing on the problem of ideology is not that this will lead us out of the wilderness of consensus into a Canaan of unmediated truth. Quite the contrary: it is the recognition that that promise is itself a function of ideology...and the possibility, therefore, that we may see the ways of the wilderness more clearly. (Problems of Ideology, p.649 )

Compared to deconstruction the attitude is decidedly old-fashioned. The errand does not rest on Divine providence, it is true, but this statement still exhorts its readers to penetrate the darkness, presumably to reach a more enlightened place. In fact Bercovitch envisages ''an open-ended dialectics between literary and historical analysis'' (loc.cit,. p.650 ) that might produce the preconditions for basic change. To put it even more bluntly he still trusts history and theory to nudge society into the direction of a revolution. Now I began this paper by pointing out that such critical approaches have been undermined by the awareness that they have to coexist with more fundamental needs for mythologies pointing into the opposite direction. Deconstruction's piecemeal and stylish attempts to dwell on those contradictions seem more appropriate to this diagnosis.

Diagnosis is ordinarily considered the precondition of a cure but the issue at hand is more complex than that. There are good reasons to argue that the theoretician's job has to be regarded as an autonomous activity, not bound by any extraneous social obligations. If all political involvement ensnares one into some ideology or the other it seems natural to turn demystification into an art, evading at least the blindness of scholarly insight. This position has some of the appeal of formalism plus the advantages of a newly found emphasis on the varieties of writing and it certainly has opened up important new perspectives of research. On the other hand it would be foolish to overlook the simple fact that this is still a civilisation looking for cures, not for the beauty of diagnosis per se. Wherever the course of progress will take us to it is just an illusion that its wheels can be turned back. This is, of course, the dilemma outlined above, John Ford's problem repeats itself on the level of theory. In sorting things out a small but all-important difference should be observed.

Even habitual disbelieve in the validity of claims to truth is something else than unbelief in truth. Two quite radical traditions are at work here, critical Enlightenment thinking leading to Hegel and Marx on the one hand and the post-Enlightenment philosophy of Nietzsche and Heidegger on the other. This is not the occasion to discuss whether it is more daring to stick to the traditional concept of truth or to throw it overboard but - following John Ford - I want to make a case for seriously considering the first alternative. Sacvan Bercovitch seems to follow the same path situating literature within the larger framework of historical development. Granted that the indecision we were considering is the same for a deconstructionist and a dialectician the consequences offering themselves are markedly different. If there is no truth to the matter this is where we have to stand, open to developments yet unimaginable. My reading of Stoddard's stance has acknowledged such a view. But - never forgetting about this perplexity - it is obvious that another assessment comes closer to John Ford's point: we cannot rely on truth yet we have nothing but the discovery of our errors to lead us on. No matter how we might feel about the displacement of the philosophical concept politics clearly is going to make use of it for a long time to come. The alternative of stylishly submitting to relativism is not to embrace some kind of positivism or metaphysics but to emphasise that human experience includes features that will not bear relativisation. How this is possible is a puzzle, to be sure, but so is acceptance of the ubiquity of skepticism.

The values of truthfulness and gratitude stand undisturbed as John Ford's story recounts how they have been disregarded. To accept this tension amounts to a refusal to short-circuit the problem of normative ethics in a pluralistic society. Sacvan Bercovitch has pointed out that the invocation of the absolute serves the interests of the ruling class and Ransom Stoddard's humiliation indeed functions as a ploy to ward off a more comprehensive criticism of the imperialistic state. He is shown guilty by the standards of common decency, his personal dilemma is central, drawing away attention from the fact that the contradictions confronting him are inherent in the system he exemplifies. It would certainly mean falling into a trap to regard individual responsibility as the ultimate piece of the chain of explanation.

Ethical imperatives are not the kind of statements to come up with when a whole set-up of norms within history in question. And yet: if we have to confront the evanescence of social legitimacy as contingent beings, the one chance not to hand things over to fate is to look for indications of how the process of learning from history might be continued even as much of history's givens are overturned. John Ford coming from a Catholic background conceives the predicament of his protagonist as one of guilt, personal shortcoming as well as original sin. These concepts are not fashionable nowadays as it has become customary to question the Christian outlook in its entirety. But there is a price to pay for this, namely the loss of a mediating position between private life-styles and trans-historical analysis. It is an open question whether the shallowness of idealism exhibited by John Ford's Western should be completely flattened by treating this conviction as just one aspect of an interrelated pattern of a thoroughly discredited ideological scheme or if it does at least provide a foothold on a very slippery slope.

Such matters cannot be settled by decision the one way or the other. But this does not eliminate the need to decide on where to put one's priorities. The picture of a politician grappling with a weight of responsibility exceeding his competence should in my opinion not be defused by theoreticians invoking the end of metaphysics. Their guardianship at the edge of the impossible is a very subtle way of profiting from (lost) security. Belief in the feasibility of actual social change in the face of nihilism on the other hand is more than an exercise in revealing contradictions: it is an attempt to turn the loss of the West into a gain for the victims of its conquest.