Where Joss Whedon navigated some of the rules for Buffy the Vampire Slayer

This was like a college textbook. I felt I had taken a course for the semester with this one. I most enjoyed the last chapter with the discussion of the symbolism in Moby Dick.

This is proving to be a rather trying book to plow through. Maybe my attention span for books is waning? Or I expect too much, a solid journey inside every cover I pick up? Sometimes this book is damn captivating, and the other half of the time I'm delving through repetitious meanderings and wondering if Slotkin could have said just as much with half the paper.

Primarily this is a study of the tension between the Puritan settlers and the native people they had to figure out how to live with when they left Europe - yet, rather than a straight history of this complicated interaction, Slotkin gives you a literary history, tracking tendencies in the published writings of the time (captivity narratives, heroic accounts of battles, etc.) to illustrate the birth of the American frontier mythos.

This is the first in a trilogy, along with The Fatal Environment and Gunfighter Nation, which follows this thread into contemporary literature (and, presumably into issues such as why men like Ronald Reagan ever work their way into positions of power). I'd love to be able to say with honesty that I'll run for the next one after I finish this, but right now I'm not so sure... although the subject itself is fascinating, and he is clearly deeply invested in the material at hand, Slotkin could have used a more aggressive editor. Or hell, maybe I just got spoiled on the readability of someone like Howard Zinn?

This was a pivotal book in my academic development and a cornerstone of research for my Master’s thesis on the mythology of the American West in the works of Sam Shepard. By reinventing the narrative of the Western experience, Slotkin deconstructs Western mythology to purport that the decimation of Native Americans, an unerring belief in the supremacy of white European immigrants, and the greed-filled exploitation of the environment is what truly fueled Westward expansion. An unflinching examination that shows another side of the halcyon glow of the idea of “Manifest Destiny” upon which our society was founded.

Just an amazing book. It can be academic and dense at points, and sometimes Slotkin has a tendency to beat points to death. But the wealth of information and breadth of vision more than make up for the shortcomings. I don't think there's a better book on the American frontier; certainly I haven't read one.

Very interesting and necessary look at the origins of so many things we consider "American," and it is thought provoking, bordering on crazy, that so these threads go back 400 years. We're not so original after all. The text is dense and more like a college textbook than a page turner but the author does a great job of weaving together the original text references and commentary, on the whole.

Mind-bogglingly great so far.

Why a thing is the way it is is never an easy question to answer, or formulate for that matter.
Why is American culture so violence-prone, trigger-happy, or quick-to-strafe? There are likely many reasons. Slotkin settles on one of the easier methods, even if it isn't so secure: culture.
Now, it'd be easy to say that popular culture and especially, literature, which is what Slotkin focuses on here is a kind of elitist, not popular, trend that can't really inform the way people think, can it?
Well, you'd be wrong. Two words: Inter. Net.
Before the days where hearsay and unreason dominated our digital diatribes, people got their scurrilous misrepresentations from other mediums, largely the elite- and often religious-dominated world of literature. How the medium was used to forge the idea of the "heroic" American is Slotkin's focus. He digs into changing views of the American frontier, starting with those startling assholes, the Puritans, who fled England to be free to practice their own fundamentalist, Taliban-like version of Christianity (and in whose honor we endure annual feasts). Nature, Indians, frontiersmen, they're all discussed here to a near-suffocating level of detail, the volume's only drawback. Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett and how perspectives shifted on what it meant to be an American, or a pioneer, or an outright cold-blooded Indian killer did much to secure in the American conscious the need for an utter lack of conscience and scruple. God wants us to do all this, right?
Things haven't changed much, I guess.

3.5 stars

A thunderous text!!! This was an absolute treat.

This book may be formidably long and its scholarship slightly aged, but the thesis is fascinating and its sweep epic. If I ever reenter the academy as a historian, this will undoubtedly prove an inspiration. Meanwhile, it gives insight into the mental and psychological forms that shape American history, literature, and outlook.

Generally, I never read the same book twice. Even if I loved the book. There are too many unread classics out in the world, and I am a slow reader.

But I made an exception for Richard Slotkin’s Regeneration Through Violence. Not because I loved it, however. Not at all. Quite the opposite. This was a tough slog. The first time through, my mind kept wandering away like a toddler chasing bubbles. (As I write this, I am distracting my toddler by blowing bubbles). By the time I finished, it occurred to me that I’d probably skimmed over half the text. I couldn’t remember a thing.

This isn’t the first time this has happened to me. Usually when I don’t like a book, I’m comfortable saying I don’t like this book. Or if I failed to grasp the concepts, I would say I don’t like this book. In this case, though, my initial response was at such a variance with other reviews that I felt it necessary to try reading it again.

This time I paid close attention. This time I took notes. This time I got drunk on Yellow Tail and burned through 45 pages which I have now forgotten. The next day, I re-read those 45 pages with a raging headache. This time my experience was the exact same.

I cannot say anything that changes this fact: Regeneration Through Violence is an undisputed classic. It attempts to deconstruct America’s frontier mythology – and trace its evolution – through an examination of important contemporary literature.

This examination begins with the Puritans and their “captivity narratives.” The captivity narrative is a genuinely American literary tradition, a first-person memoir of a white person’s (usually a woman) survival among the savage Indians of the dark woods. Slotkin parses these narratives – chief among them, Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God: Being a Narrative of Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson – to analyze the Puritan’s anxieties about life in the New World.

As the pithy title of Mrs. Rowlandson’s work implies, Puritans had an external locus of control when it came to the dangers of pre-Revolutionary America. They – or more specifically, their leaders – took the position that all was in God’s hands. The Indians took Mrs. Rowlandson because she had sinned; and God delivered Mrs. Rowlandson from their hands because He was good. The underlying theme is a lack of human agency.

This began to change following King Philip’s War, one of the most violent per capita conflicts in America’s history. One-tenth of military-aged men were killed. When it ended, King Philip’s decapitated head decorated Plymouth, a little nugget you probably never heard when learning about Thanksgiving. One of the great heroes of King Philip’s War was Benjamin Church. He wrote – you guessed it – a memoir that gave less credence to God’s greatness than to the abilities of Church himself. During the war, Church utilized Indian tactics to defeat the Indians, thus making him the forerunner of the archetypal frontiersman who dresses, fights, and lives like an Indian in order to destroy the Indian.

Church’s account of his own efforts in the hunting of that great leviathan, King Philip, was completely unrestricted by any desire to fit the narrative into one of the orthodox metaphorical molds…Just as he took his method of fighting from the Indians he fought with, he took the pattern of his book from the pattern of events in his extended hunt of King Philip. In the process he created the prototype of the myth that was to mingle with the Puritan mythology as a characteristic American vision of American experience… In the course of his hunt for the Indian king, Church became more and more like the Indian. Furthermore, he not only accepted this amalgamation of white and Indian characteristics; he actively and enthusiastically sought it…

The discussion of Benjamin Church segues into a long passage on John Filson, a schoolteacher, surveyor, writer and booster. He wrote The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke (sic) as a promotional vehicle to spur settlement in the region. He appended an appendix to this volume about the life of Daniel Boone. This appendix took on a life of its own. It willfully ignored the historical Boone and turned him into a fictional character drawn from other mythological traditions and stories. Of course, it is the fictional Boone – as it is the fictional Davy Crockett – that lives in our memories.

[I]t was the figure of Daniel Boone, the solitary, Indian-like hunter of the deep woods, that became the most significant, most emotionally compelling myth-hero of the early republic. The other myth figures are reflections or variations of this basic type… The figure and the myth-narrative that emerged from the early Boone literature became archetypal for the American literature which followed: an American hero is the lover of the spirit of the wilderness, and his acts of love and sacred affirmation are acts of violence against that spirit and her avatars.

Slotkin also spends some time – though considerably less – on the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and Henry David Thoreau (whose time at Walden was a faint echo of the actual wilderness experience of the early pioneers.

My chief difficulty with Regeneration Through Violence is its presentation. This is a book with a thesis, and it’s written like a dissertation. That is to say, it is ploddingly written; it is filled with terms of art that are not fully defined; it is maddeningly repetitive; and it is exclusionary. If you are not familiar with the lingo of this particular English Department, or if you have not read every single author that Slotkin mentions, you will find yourself with the uncomfortable feeling that you are once again a freshman in college who stayed up all night drinking peach schnapps instead of doing your homework.

Dense prose and arcane literary comparisons are tough enough. What made this book even more difficult is its insistence on abstraction. I’ve gone through several reviews of this book – all of them wholly laudatory – trying to figure out what I did wrong. Many of these reviews say things like “this is the best book on the frontier I’ve ever read.”

I’ve been reading about “the frontier” my whole life. My bookshelf groans with titles on American-Indian relations, from the Mayflower to Wounded Knee. And I’ve got to say, this isn’t a book about the frontier at all.

Regeneration Through Violence is almost entirely divorced from an historical context. Slotkin makes no attempt to lay the historical foundation from which these myths derive. Instead, you get a highbrow, abstruse lecture about ridiculous topics that are entirely untethered from reality. The concept of a national myth is itself notional; Slotkin takes it another step, pounding out ivy-tower passages that are almost parodic:

A significant example of this romanticization is the medieval and Renaissance treatment of the myths and rituals of sacred marriage, an archetype in which the hero-king achieves sexual union with the goddess of nature in the wilderness, thus ensuring the seasonal renewal of human and vegetable life. Underlying the myth and its attendant rituals is the psychological quest of the anima, the feminine principle of passivity, passion, and acceptance within the reasoning, cold, masculine consciousness. Achievement of reconciliation between these halves of the mind means the attainment of psychological identify, self-containment and self-contentment. But rather than plumb the metaphor of the sacred marriage, European Christians elaborated the metaphor, ornamented it, and bowdlerized it of those elements that spoke too intimately and too directly to the deeply sexual, unconscious yearning for psychological unity…

And it goes on like this.

I’m not an anti-intellectual. I’m certainly not disdainful of academe in general or Slotkin in particular (I’m reading his Lost Battalions right now, and getting through it quite well). At certain points during this book, however, I just thought it superfluous. Is there really a national myth? Do they really spring from these various authors? Or is Slotkin just projecting, heaping a whole lot of meaning upon some pretty slender novels?

In the end, those substantive questions I’ve posed are not as important to me as fundamental literary execution. As a reader, I value clarity, no matter the topic. I don’t mind subject-complexity; I do mind it when the author adds to that complexity. Here, the prose, the verbiage, the offhand allusions to some author I’ve never heard of, combine to create an arm’s-length reading experience that did not get better the second time around.