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              Notes on Cooper's The Pioneers (2)

     "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is
unhappy in its own way." (Tolstoi) "Good books are all alike;
every bad book is bad in its own way."  Nice people, when you
come right down to it, are pretty boring, and the nicer they
are, the duller.  It is the bad people who are interesting,
and the sicker and more miserable the victim, the more obscure
the diagnosis and the more botched the treatment, the more
likely the doctor is to point out to his students: This patient
is a great case.

     In this sense, though probably not a great book, James
Fenimore Cooper's "The Pioneers" is in its way, also a great
case. Mark Twain provides the benchmark. What he says about
"Deerslayer" is true of The Pioneers, only more so.

     I may be mistaken, but it does seem to me that
     "Deerslayer" is not a work of art in any sense; it does
     seem to me that it is destitute of every detail that
     goes to the making of a work of art; in truth, it seems
     to me that "Deerslayer" is just simply a literary
     /delirium tremens/.

     A work of art? It has no invention; it has no order,
     system, sequence, or result; it has no lifelikeness, no
     thrill, no stir, no seeming of reality; its characters
     are confusedly drawn, and by their acts and words they
     prove that they are not the sort of people the author
     claims that they are; its humor is pathetic; its pathos
     is funny; its conversations are -- oh! indescribable;
     its love-scenes odious; its English a crime against the
     language.

     Counting these out, what is left is Art. I think we must
     all admit that.

     Relying on Mark Twain's reference as a point of
beginning, I try to make a more detailed and specific
diagnosis of the novel.  The book begins auspiciously enough,
in a sleigh, which, from the cosmopolitan perspective of New
York City, conveys a judge, an urbane widowed gentleman and
his adolescent daughter, from the finishing school that she
has just absolved, to ...  I don't know where, Otega Lake,
Cooperstown, to the boondocks.  From the boondock perspective
a middle-aged sex-starved land owner with his prey, a thickly
veiled pubescent girl, a female, so denominated, whom he
cannot have, because she is his daughter; and who vents the
disappointments and frustrations of middle age on the
fruitless effort to assert his masculinity and himself to
become the deerslayer whose ultimate prize, it appears at
the very outself of the novel, is none other than the
"Veiled Lady", the female under the pioneer-muslim veil
in the carriage.

     A sleigh moving through a wintry landscape is not a bad
beginning for a novel.  Beyond that, however, much is left to
be desired.  At this juncture, I have four comments:

     1) The language is unmusical as if the author were deaf.

     2) The landscape is one dimensional.  Nature is
catalogued: the trees, the sky, the mountains, the lake, the
clouds are listed, but neither Temple nor Elizabeth nor
anyone else sees, or experiences them; and therefore neither
does the reader.

     3) The novel is a monument to incompetence,
pretentiousness and fraud.  Temple cannot shoot, and lies
about having killed the buck, the sleigh driver cannot
control his horses, and pretends to have saved the sleigh and
its inhabitants from the abyss. The architect and builder
can't design a roof, and pretends to camouflage his mistake
with various coats of paint.  And Cooper himself presumes
to be a writer, but writes no better than the folks who
put out the tabloids sold at the supermarket checkout,
and perhaps worse.

     4) If his product sells none the less, it may be
because that product is the same as theirs: sex, with the
difference that today's readership requires glossy photos of
near nudity, to entice it to slip the genteel pornography
into the shopping cart, while for Cooper's semi-literate
frontier population, emerging as they were from Puritanical
repression and marooned in the backwoods, with starved
imaginations more readily titillated, a single word, repeated
often enough, sufficed to sell his books: female, female,
female, female ... and so on, ad nauseam.

                          * * * * *
Copyright 2005, Ernst Jochen Meyer
