Wallace Stegner, Political Correctness and Who We Are

Here in America, we live in an age of political correctness. From time to time, it mutates, or morphs, or goes so far as to shoot itself in the foot (the election of Donald Trump, for instance), but it refuses to go away.

And as a result, "ideological pigeonholing" has, in the words of  New York Times critic A.O. Scott, "become our dominant form of cultural analysis."

This observation appeared in Scott's lengthy appreciation of Wallace Stegner, an author known primarily for his depictions of the American West, both in fiction and in other forms of writing. Scott's piece, the lead article in the June 7, 2020, NYT weekly Book Review section, was identified as the first in a series called "The Americans" -- profiles of "writers who show us who we are."

The point, an introduction to the series explained, is to restore a sense of complexity to an America that is increasingly being parsed through the medium of "the simplified, sloganized language of politics."

A certain paradox associated with Stegner  makes him worth reading at a time "when we spend so much time mapping the fault lines between privilege and resentment and fighting over who is part of the elite and who is entitled to victim status." So said Scott.

Although known during his lifetime as "the Dean of Western Writers," the author,  who died in 1993,  thought of himself as an outsider, but not in the usual sense of the region. He was an advocate of community and a critic of the rugged individualism so central to the mythical ethos of the American West and what it long appears to have stood for.

The Times said the new series will include a variety of American authors -- "some well-known, some unjustly forgotten and some perpetually misunderstood."

Stegner probably fits into the middle group -- largely forgotten.

His work "is hardly a fixture on college syllabuses or in the pages of scholarly journals," Scott said. In addition, one might add, his name is pretty much totally absent from popular cultural.

Moreover, Scott noted, "there is no Library of America collection of his writings."

In the context of political correctness, Scott noted that Stegner's work has been criticized by, among others, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, a writer and member of the Crow Creek Sioux Tribe on the grounds that his works fail to significantly address the indigenous peoples of the region or a variety of non-white immigrant groups.

Well, Stegner's novels ("Angle of Repose" perhaps the most well known) are works of fiction, not sociological treatises. Novels certainly can be sociopolitical in nature, but they don't have to be. As Scott points out, Stegner was most concerned about marriage and, in particular, the nature of monogamous marriage. Stories generally need a setting and he chose the West.  All he needed to tell readers about the West is what was important to the lives of his particular characters.

Then again, one can argue Stegner's main concern -- monogamous marriage -- is sufficiently sociopolitical in and of itself.  Monogamy, with its "crags and chasms" is "the human undertaking around which all the others are organized," Scott said.

Perhaps Stegner's exploration of that topic, more than is depiction of the West" is his salient contribution to "who we are."