Wandering 'Round 'Yonder'
Rudolph Wurlitzer gets the ‘Drop Edge’ on the American West
There’s nothing new about the old West, it seems. It’s long been a place where writers of novels, movies, and television shows ruminate on questions of history (personal and national), violence, justice, redemption, and mortality. In The Drop Edge of Yonder (Two Dollar Radio), his first novel in more than two decades, Rudolph Wurlitzer’s West is a sacred space, an American dreamtime, and a carnival of travesties and transfigurations.
Wurlitzer is best known as the author of two classic screenplays,Two-Lane Blacktop and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid; he is also the author of three intoxicating cult novels (Nog, Flats, Quake), a novel about the movies (Slow Fade), and a contemplative travelogue (Hard Travel to Sacred Places). He knows more than a little something about Americans and their wanderings into the ineffable. Inspired by Beckett and Buddhism, Wurlitzer’s works are bold adventures into the consciousnesses of characters hounded or haunted by forces outside their control and comprehension.
Although my CityBeat colleague Ron Garmon esteems Quake among the author’s novels, I prefer the “headventure” Nog. Thomas Pynchon anointed Wurlitzer’s first book as “another sign that the Novel of Bullshit is dead and some kind of re-enlightenment is beginning to arrive, to take hold,” and I suspect that’s not just because the narrator’s traveling companion is an octopus. The narrator of Nog (to be reissued by Two Dollar Radio next year) is a constantly shifting personality with an epically precarious sense of identity: “I think about trips, bits and pieces of trips, but I no longer try and put anything together (my mind has become blessedly slower), nor do I try as much to invent a suitable character who can handle the fragments. But I don’t want to get into all that.”
Unlike the narrator of Nog, The Drop Edge of Yonder’s solitary fur trapper Zebulon Shook would seem to be a less fragmented central character. Though this one is sans cephalopod, he keeps company with desperados, lawmen, miners, indigenous Americans, an expatriate count, an Abyssinian courtesan, and his own father. He finds himself in saloons and opium dens and experiences jailings and sea voyages. He encounters magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt and hears about self-appointed American President of Nicaragua William Walker. (Wurlitzer wrote the screenplay for Alex Cox’s 1987 film Walker.) Zebulon is the still point in the novel’s procession of “all the noisy chaos that marked a new frontier.”
At the outset of the story, however, he has been cursed by a “half Shoshoni half Irish” woman named Not Here Not There to “drift like a blind man between the worlds,” condemned not to know whether he is alive or dead. Set adrift in a weird dream-realm in which “Zebulon was awake when he slept, and sleeping when he was awake,” his journeys could also be travels across that hallucinatory plane of existence between life and death Tibetan Buddhists know as the bardo.
Over the course of his purgatorial peregrinations, Zebulon reaches the status of outlaw, with a bounty on his head and newspapermen who wish to make him a legend, an embodiment of the West itself. “You’ll always be on the move, trying to find out who you are,” one oracular character says to Zebulon, in a line akin to one Bob Dylan’s Alias delivers to Kris Kristofferson’s Billy in Pat Garrett. “Like the rest of this crazy country.” If Zebulon’s on-the-edge-of-death scenario sounds reminiscent of that of improbable gunslinger William Blake in another metaphysical Western, Jim Jarmusch’s 1995 Dead Man, it’s because Wurlitzer and Jarmusch spent time discussing the story when Wurlitzer was still working it up as a screenplay.
Wurlitzer’s wonderfully tall tale incorporates and alters all the conventions of the Western and offers reflections on quests for gold, land, and other expressions of our American imperialism. Drop Edge occupies a space between the whimsical and the mystical, the silly and the sublime. Wurlitzer’s philosophical, humorous, and visionary yarn guides the reader into a landscape in which to wander around and get lost, a West that leads into the numinous terra incognita between sleep and waking, life and death, and toward the contemplation of what it means to cross a frontier.
For info on The Drop Edge of Yonder and Two Dollar Radio press, go to www.twodollarradio.com.
Published: 06/04/2008
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