Shane (Novel and Film) at Century's End

Six years ago, I conducted a lecture-discussion on Jack Schaefer's novel Shane for the public library in Durham, North Carolina. The audience was made up of middle-aged and/or retired people. They liked the book, and we had a lively evening's interchange. Recalling that evening as I made plans for a course in the American novel, I decided that I would sneak Shane on the syllabus. It was 1993, the centennial year of Frederick Jackson Turner's pronouncement on the significance of the frontier in American history, and I thought it appropriate to emphasize frontier experience in literature. Shane would help me do that. It would also serve as a counterpoint to Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth-so very New York and civilized and (as several students complained later) so very long. I'd give the class a quick read, one with a plot marked by classic economy.1 There were other reasons for my semester plan. Like many Americans, I was giving much thought to the violence prevalent in our society. Emblematic of the issue was the beating of Rodney King by policemen in Los Angeles, imprinted on the nation's mind by the numerous replays of an amateur video on the television screen. Then came the first trial of the officers and the acquittal by jury (no blacks) from middle-class Sima Valley and the ensuing riots and deaths in L.A. Truck driver Reginald Denny narrowly escaped with his life; the nation watched numerous replays of the vicious assault on him. Other instances of violence were abundant in the newspapers and nightly news programs. Children frequently were victims of random gun fire. So numerous were shootings everywhere that it seemed likely that the National Rifle Association might no longer have the last word on legislation to control unregulated purchases of guns. Responding to public pressure, politicians everywhere were making crime a major theme. But, as David Zucchino has observed, the American historical memory is short: Violence has plagued our republic throughout its history. By many measures, this decade has not been the most violent in American history.2 But in the centennial Turner year, course attention to a violent history and "justice" was definitely in order. I wanted to do more than give the chronological sweep that plays off romance and novel, novel of manners and naturalism; I taught the traditional major figures in the course, but even those I handled somewhat differently. Instead of Moby Dick, I chose "Benito Cereno" and Billy Budd. For Mark Twain, I chose Pudd'n Head Wilson; for Faulkner, I took The Unvanquished, frontier as well as Southern. My endpoint was Walter Van Tilburg Clark's The Ox-Bow Incident. Schaefer's Shane would lead up to Clark's powerful account of frontier violence and thwarted justice. Because memorable films had been made of both Western novels, I arranged for screenings. Like many other Western novels and films, they foreground violence and gunplay. Could those classic Western texts help us better understand contemporary America? It was appropriate to include Shane for historical reasons, as well. Jack Schaefer had died on January 24, 1991, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at age 85. Tribute seemed in order-especially since so little note had been taken of the writer's death. The Western Literature Association's journal, Western American Literature, which usually has memorial tributes for winners of the Association's Distinguished Achievement Award, carried no memorial tribute to Schaefer, who had received the award in 1975. The course was populated by juniors and seniors, including many majors-bright people who certainly had some sense of multi-culturalism, cultural criticism, and challenged canons. I thought of those dimensions as I watched the Shane video with the class and in our discussions about it and the novel. The culture that produced those and the culture of my class sometimes seemed very remote from each other. I was about the age of my students when I first viewed Shane in the 1950s. …