Thomas Berger - Little Big Man

Chapter

H AD T HOMAS B ERGER never written anything other than Little Big Man, he would have earned a respected place in American literary history. Just as surely as there can be no single Great American Novel, Little Big Man has by now been almost universally recognized as a great American novel, and while its genius was not immediately apparent to large numbers of readers or to all initial reviewers, that genius has now been recognized by some two dozen scholarly studies and uninterrupted popular sales in the more than forty years since it was first published. As L. L. Lee so accurately observed in one of the first articles to give careful consideration to Little Big Man: This is a most American novel. Not just in its subject, its setting, its story (these are common matters), but in its thematic structures, in its dialectic: savagery and civilization, indeed, but also the virgin land and the city, nature and the machine, individualism and community, democracy and hierarchy, innocence and knowledge, all the divisive and unifying themes of the American experience, or, more precisely, of the American myth. Surely Frederick Turner was correct when he concluded in a 1977 reassessment of Little Big Man for The Nation that few creative works of postCivil War America have had as much of the fiber and blood of the national experience in them. It now seems safe to predict that Little Big Man the novel will match its survival skills against those of Jack Crabb, its 111-year old protagonist. And in some ways, Little Big Man must be acknowledged as Bergers greatest novel, the one in which he took on the sweeping matter of his American literary and mythological heritage and made a lasting contribution to both.

Little Big Man is a story purporting to tell the truth about the old American West. It is ostensibly transcribed from the tape-recorded reminiscences of the late Jack Crabbfrontiersman, Indian scout, gunfighter, buffalo hunter, adopted Cheyennein his final days upon this earth. That Jacks final days come some 111 years after his first, and that he claims to have been the sole white survivor of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, puts this truth in some doubt. Equally strong and contradictory evidence exists that the last of the old-timers is hopelessly senile and that he is a fiction maker as concerned with developing his own story as a narrative to be read as he is with relating the incidents of his life. Furthermore, Jacks narrative comes to us through the patently unreliable editorship of one Ralph Fielding Snell, a fatuously gullible and weak-minded self-professed man of letters, who not so incidentally reveals a number of parallels between his life and that of his narrator. Snell, who does admit to some doubts about Jacks story, also admits that he passes on its claims only after his own emotional collapse of some ten years, and his foreword and epilogue contain numerous hints that this emotional condition persists.

Yet against all of this postmodern self-reflexivity stands the disarming realism of Jacks tale, the authority and credibility of his voice. The action in Little Big Man is episodic, its story a macaronic of historical events and personages, its atmosphere the swirling myths that transformed people and events into Americas defining epoch: the West. What unites the disparate threads of the novels action and its swings between the antithetical world views of white and Indian cultures is Jacks voice and vision as he takes his place in the great American literary tradition started by James Fenimore Cooper with his character, Natty Bumppothe legendary Leatherstocking.

Significantly unlike Leatherstocking, however, Jack can be counted on to describe frontier life with both humor and accuracy. Whatever else may be said of Jack Crabb, let there be no doubt that he gets things right whenever he speaks of customs or events in the Old West. Indeed, Jacks description of Cheyenne life draws heavily from anthropological studies such as E. Adamson Hoebels The Cheyennes: Indians of the Great Plains and George Bird Grinnells The Fighting Cheyennes. Likewise, when Jack speaks of Custer or the cavalry, the fine points and drawbacks of specific handguns, the growth of frontier cities, or other matters of white culture, he is equally accurate and often insightful. There is simply no way of knowing how many of Jacks experiences Berger directly or indirectly drew from other sources. Acknowledging many of those sources, Berger says of his research: After reading some seventy books about the Old West I went into a creative trance in which it seemed as though I were listening to Jack Crabbs narrative. The brilliance of Little Big Man, however, has much more to do with Bergers principles of selection, combination, and comment than with the diversity and accuracy of his sources.

And it should not be overlooked that Jack also consistently offers a folksy-sounding but astute critical commentary on the literature of the West. Indeed, one of the wonderful ironies inherent in Bergers structure is that Jack, the ostensible man of action, reveals much more literary sophistication than does Snell, the ostensible man of letters. Just as surely as Jacks account of his life explores the nature and importance of western mythsboth white and Indianit also explores the linguistic and literary mechanics of myth-making, whether in history, anthropology, journalism, or the novel itself.

Berger has so crafted Jacks voice as to make it at once a part of and comment on the process through which the Old West has been created for the public by language. First and foremost, Jack is a