A roundup of ironies

Patricia NELSON LIMERICK, a distinguished contemporary historian of the American West, coined the phrases that prod us into distinguishing between what she calls the “Real West” and the “Fake West.” But as we discover in “True West,” the effort to capture and define the “authentic” West was already underway when the West was still wild, and it was no more successful than it is now.

“Before the ‘frontier’ had ceased to exist,” write editors William R. Handley and Nathaniel Lewis in their astute introduction to this new collection of essays, “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show was already touring the world, satisfying a desire for what General George Custer’s wife described as a ‘most realistic and faithful representation of a Western life that has ceased to be.’ ”

The various contributors to “True West” come at the subject from some surprising directions. Lisa McFarlane, for example, admits that it is a “hard sell” to present Henry Adams -- “a Harvard-trained, Eurocentric, Boston Brahmin, establishment historian” -- as “a writer of the American West,” but that’s precisely what she does in “Cowgirls and Sage Hens.”

“The United States, [Adams] believed, was a nation constructed out of language and imagery,” writes McFarlane, “justified in its belief in its own exceptionalism by the presence of an authentic and original space, the West.”

Considerably more provocative is “Cameras and Photographs Are Not Permitted in the Camps,” Melody Graulich’s study of Nisei writers and artists who struggled against “the erasure of Japanese Americans ... and the distortions of their experiences” during World War II. Richly illustrated with drawings, paintings and photographs, her essay contrasts the internment camps as they were perceived by Dorothea Lange and Ansel Adams with the same scenes viewed by eyewitnesses like Toyo Miyatake, a photographer who smuggled a lens into Manzanar and built a camera to document his experiences behind the barbed wire.

The so-called entertainment corridor in Buena Park, home of Knott’s Berry Farm and other tourist attractions, draws the attention of Hsuan L. Hsu in “Authentic Re-Creations.” Hsu points out that “[t]he lawless boom town, California’s beaches, bloody battles with Mexicans and Indians, and the threatening grandeur of the wilderness are reduced to an outdoor shopping mall ... and an effort to recapture something that never even existed.”

At the core of “True West” is a cluster of essays on the troubled encounters between those who fancied themselves to be the discoverers of the West and those who were already there. Here, too, the touchstone is the search for nuggets of authenticity amid the claptrap of propaganda, pop culture and pseudo-history: “In the face of longstanding popular and literary simulations of Indianness,” writes Susan Bernardin, “authenticity, to revise a phrase coined by Cornel West, matters.”

Drucilla Mims Wall, who is descended on her father’s side from the Southeastern Creek (Muscogee) Indians of what is now south-central Alabama, condemns the exploitation of Indians as symbols of a “sacred landscape” by white historians, poets and critics who fail to see them as flesh-and-blood human beings. Her heartfelt “Simulations of Authenticity” is the most compelling effort in the collection.

“[W]hat I have seen of European and Euro-American engagement with Indianness remains a representation or simulation ... of Indianness, not anything to do with actual Native Americans,” Wall writes.

And, in a rare and startling moment of self-revelation in a work of highly disciplined scholarship, she confesses: “I have learned to be comfortable being uncomfortable in both traditional Indian and mainstream white culture.”

But “the authenticity game,” as Bernardin puts it, can be played by such Native American writers as Sherman Alexie. She calls him an “agent provocateur” and a self-styled “Indian du Jour” who conjures up characters who “fall prey to the tragic role scripted for them by U.S. popular culture,” ranging from “the Crazy Horse model of heroic armed resistance” to “the drunken or stoic ‘Tonto’ Indian.”

Such ironies are at play throughout “True West.” “[T]here is no other region in America that is as haunted by the elusive appeal, legitimating power, and nostalgic pull of authenticity,” write Handley and Lewis.

Again and again, “True West” reminds us that the relentless search for authenticity is a quest for something that is elusive -- and perhaps wholly illusory. *