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              Notes on Cooper's The Pioneers (3)

     In addition to the sex theme, which receives such
awkward emphasis with the biologically oriented denomination
of girls and women as females, one of the important selling
points of "The Pioneers" must have been the wish of individuals
to see their class, to see reflections of themselves in print,
perceiving that their immortality is somehow guaranteed by a
lugubrious NY Times obituary, if not indeed by a biography;
and as a class, as a group to see themselves memorialized in
fiction.  Reality, as Cooper explains in his introductory
paragraph is not the simple fact, not the observed circumstance,
but the idea, the concept, the representation; and in this
context, what made Cooper a publishing success is his
presentation of the judge, of Elizabeth, of Natty Bumppo on the
stage of history, the concern, in other words, with the world-
historical, which is implicit in his description of events
and landscapes, and which made him insensitive to, made it
impossible for him to humiliate himself to the experience of
the moment, the only experience that there is; made it
impossible for him to hear his characters or to speak simply
and honestly through them.  That perhaps even more than sex,
is what made Cooper's novels such a success in the bookstore.

     The absence of a literary (classical) tradition not only
deprives the author of guidelines, of standards, but also
deprives the reader of standards against which to judge the
text.  Curious is Balzac's approval ...  There is here an
intricate net of influences and relationships, so complex
that it is perhaps no longer possible to disentangle.  The
politics of literary criticism and the economics of book
promotion and selling come into play.

     One must also be mindful that not only birth and death
notices, but notices of birthdays, celebrations, good wishes
of all sorts are published, because an event is unreal until
it is recognized in the reflection of the newspaper.  Thus
arguably the Pioneers found their experiences to be made more
compelling by the stories which Cooper wrote for them.
Coopers novels probably had a different function from, for
example, the novels of Jane Brox or Donald Hall.  And it is
quite plausible that Cooper's novels should have a different
function for us than for the original readership.  Just as
when I visit a museum of frontier culture, my interest in the
furniture, in the cooking implements, in the tools, is not in
consideration of my own use, but to further my understanding
of how these implements were in fact used, and more to the
point what these implements reveal of the lives of the
settlers who invented and used them.

     The important and interesting facet to understand, is
that the intellectual, emotional, and if you will, the
spiritual lives of those settlers were very different from
our own. It is necessary to understand those differences in
order to be able to understand our own diversity.

     How reliable is Cooper's account? Can we rely on it?
Not exclusively. What else do we have? Church records,
newspapers, historical accounts. In the end we have no
alternative but to synthesize the data, the sources available
to us, cognizant that our knowledge is transcendental, i.e.
cannot reach that to which it aspires.

     In this context it is interesting to consider Cooper's
own epistemology; In the very first paragraphs of his book he
seems to identify valid (genuine) knowledge as a kind of
theory, a generalization, from which the recital of facts
serves only to detract. A more modern theory would hold that
it is the theory which detracts, when forces itself or is
forced on us; that facts are the prisms through which alone
reality can be apprehended (anticipated, surmised).  Das
Hoechste waere zu begreifen, dass alles Faktische schon
Theorie ist; and that the distinction between facts and
theory is by no means absolute.

     Cooper's derogation of facts in itself suggests that he
was not entirely satisfied with them, and that the
significance of the characters to which he introduces us is
primarily and ultimately symbolic. We look at the imagery
that he presents to us as we look at an ancient frieze, where
stylized heroes and villains, boys and men and matrons and
maidens, interspersed with gods and demons, remind us of an
inaccessible world which we can never know.

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Copyright 2005, Ernst Jochen Meyer
