Facing Old Age and Searching for Regeneration in a Dying American WestGregory Martin’s Mountain City

  1. David Río 1
  1. 1 Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea
    info

    Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea

    Lejona, España

    ROR https://ror.org/000xsnr85

Journal:
Atlantis: Revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos

ISSN: 0210-6124

Year of publication: 2016

Volume: 38

Issue: 1

Pages: 149-164

Type: Article

More publications in: Atlantis: Revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos

Abstract

Contemporary western American literature is increasingly departing from the traditional association between the West and youth in classical frontier mythology, showing an aging, gray and often ill West, as illustrated by authors such as Cormac McCarthy, Marilynne Robinson, Wallace Stegner and Ken Haruf, to name just a few examples. This perspective also plays a powerful role in Gregory Martin’s Mountain City (2000), an impressive memoir about a decaying Nevada mining town and its aging population. This article explores the interaction between living and aging in Martin’s book. It is often a continuous dialogical process of exchange and overlap where Martin revises western mythology centered on the youth trope and deconstructs negative images of old age and disease. Martin offers a realistic portrait of a fading western way of life. However, his emphasis on the vanishing condition of traditional western stereotypes turns out to be problematic. In fact, Martin’s bleak vision of the Old West and its broken promises coexists in Mountain City with his recognition of the pervasive quality of the archetypal western regenerative influence, as exemplified by the power of this declining community to heal the narrator’s placelessness and provide him with a sense of “homeplace” and a cultural identity.

Bibliographic References

  • Bagnell, Prisca von and Patricia Spencer Soper, eds. 1989. Perceptions of Aging in Literature. New York: Greenwood Press.
  • Busby, Mark. 1989. “The Significance of the Frontier in Contemporary American Fiction.” In The Frontier Experience and the American Dream: Essays on American Literature, edited by David Mogen, Mark Busby and Paul Bryant, 95-104. Texas A&M UP.
  • Butler, Robert N. 1969. “Age-ism: Another Form of Bigotry.” The Gerontologist 9: 243-246.
  • Campbell, Neil. 2004. “Introduction: On Youth Cultural Studies.” In American Youth Cultures, edited by Neil Campbell, 1-30. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP.
  • Deats, Sara Munson and Lagretta Tallent Lenker, eds. 1999. Aging and Identity: A Humanities Perspective. Westport, CT: Praeger.
  • Eder, Richard. 2000. “Roughing It.” [Review of Mountain City]. The New York Times, August 6. [Accessed online on March 15, 2016].
  • Folsom, James K. 1989. “Imaginative Safety Valves: Frontier Themes in the Literature of the Gilded Age.” In The Frontier Experience and the American Dream: Essays on American Literature, edited by David Mogen, Mark Busby and Paul Bryant, 87-94. Texas A&M UP.
  • Fuller, Thomas. 2004. “Go West, young man!”Martin, GregoryAn Elusive Slogan.” Indiana Magazine of History 100 (3): 231-242.
  • Fussell, Edwin. 1965. Frontier: American Literature and the American West. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP.
  • Gray, Billy. 2004. “‘Lucky the Culture Where the Old Can Talk to the Young and the Young Can Talk to the Old.’ In Conversation with Doris Lessing.” In The Polemics of Ageing as Reflected in Literatures in English. Dedal-Lit 3, edited by Maria Vidal-Grau and Núria Casado-Gual, 83-98. Lleida: U de Lleida.
  • Gullette, Margaret Morganroth. 2011. Agewise: Fighting the New Ageism in America. Chicago: The U of Chicago P.
  • Hartung, Heike and Robert Maierhofer, eds. 2009. Narratives of Life: Mediating Age. Berlin: LIT Verlag.
  • Haruf, Ken. 1984. The Tie That Binds. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
  • Hendrickson, Robert. 2000. The Facts on File Dictionary of American Regionalisms. New York: Facts on File.
  • Hepworth, Mike. 2000. Stories of Ageing. Buckingham: Open UP.
  • Hoskins, Janet. 1998. Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People’s Lives. London: Routledge.
  • Katz, Stephen. 1996. Disciplining Old Age: The Formation of Gerontological Knowledge. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P.
  • Kendall, Diana. 2005. Framing Class: Media Representations of Wealth and Poverty in America. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
  • Lefcowitz, Barbara F. and Allan B. Lefcowitz. 1984. “Old Age and the Modern Literary Imagination.” In Aging in Literature, edited by Laurel Porter and
  • Laurence M. Porter, 129-148. Troy, MI: International Book Publishers.
  • Maierhofer, Roberta. 1999. “American Studies Growing Old.” In Crossing Borders: Interdisciplinary Intercultural Interaction, edited by Bernhard
  • Kettemann and Georg Marko, 255-268. Tübingen: Gunter NarrVerlag.
  • Martin, Gregory. 2000. Mountain City. New York: North Point Press.
  • Martin, Gregory. 2001. Mountain City. Translated by Ismael Attrache Sánchez. Madrid: Debate.
  • Martin, Gregory. 2011. “Elegy and the Defiance of Elegy: Longing and Writing in the American West.” In Beyond the Myth: New Perspectives on Western Texts, edited by David Río, Amaia Ibarraran and Martin Simonson, iii-xi. London: Portal.
  • Martin, Russell. 1992. “Introduction.” In New Writers of the Purple Sage: An Anthology of Contemporary Western Writing, edited by Russell Martin, viii-xx. New York: Penguin.
  • McCarthy, Cormac. 2005. No Country for Old Men. New York: Knopf.
  • O’Neill, Maria and Carmen Zamorano, eds. 2002. The Aesthetics of Ageing. Critical Approaches to Literary Representations of the Ageing Process. Dedal-Lit 2. Lleida: U de Lleida.
  • Pew Research Center, Social and Demographic Trends. 2009. “Go West, Old Man. Where Older Adults Feel Young at Heart.” Pew Research Center: Social and Demographic Trends. [Accessed online on March 15, 2016].
  • Phillipson, Chris. 2013. Ageing. Cambridge: Polity Press.
  • Porter, Laurel. 1984. “Aging and Social Responsibility.” In Aging in Literature, edited by Laurel Porter and Laurence M. Porter, 1-12. Troy, MI: International Book Publishers.
  • Robinson, Marilynne. 2004. Gilead. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
  • Smith, Henry Nash. (1950) 1982. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP.
  • Stegner, Wallace. 1971. Angle of Repose. New York: Doubleday.
  • Taylor, Sue A. 2002. “Stories of Ageing (Open UP, 2000, 130 pages) by Mike Hepworth.” International Review of Modern Sociology 30 (1): 125-127.
  • Vidal-Grau, Maria and Núria Casado-Gual, eds. 2004. The Polemics of Ageing as Reflected in Literatures in English. Dedal-Lit 3. Lleida: U de Lleida.
  • Wallace, Diana. 2011. “Literary Portrayals of Aging.” In An Introduction to Gerontology, edited by Ian Stuart-Hamilton, 389-415. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
  • Woodward, Kathleen. 1988. “Simone de Beauvoir: Aging and Its Discontents.” In The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women’s Autobiographical Writings, edited by Shari Benstock, 90-113. Chapel Hill: The U of North Carolina P.
  • Woodward, Kathleen. 1991. Aging and Its Discontents: Freud and Other Fictions. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP.
  • Worsfold, Brian J., ed. 2005. The Art of Ageing: Textualising the Phases of Life. Dedal-Lit 5. Lleida: U de Lleida.
  • Worsfold, Brian J., ed. 2011. Acculturating Age: Approaches to Cultural Gerontology. Dedal-Lit 7. Lleida: U de Lleida.
  • Wyatt-Brown, Anne M. 1993. “Introduction: Aging, Gender, and Creativity.” In Aging and Gender in Literature: Studies in Creativity, edited by Anne M.
  • Wyatt-Brown and Janice Rosen, 1-18. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P.
  • Wyatt-Brown, Anne M. and Janice Rosen, eds. 1993. Aging and Gender in Literature: Studies in Creativity. Charlottesville: U of Virginia P.