The desert, the devil, and maturation in the southwestern fiction of Paul Hogan.

Abstract

This paper explores chronologically the development of Paul Horgan's sense of place within his southwestern fiction and shows how the desert setting embodies the themes of good and evil which in turn develop maturity in the characters as they gain knowledge and responsibility. In the southwestern novels and short stories Horgan develops a setting in which nature has great beauty and great harshness. His desert and mountain settings are not only attractive because of their beauty but are also dangerous because his characters must struggle to survive there. As the characters in the fiction come into conflict with nature they are forced to understand their own potential for either good or evil. The vast expanses of the West with its rugged mountains, its hot arid desert, and its violent weather detaches man from the softening influences of civilization and forces him to confront both the land and himself. In the confrontation he either survives or is destroyed and because of it he undergoes a process of maturation. The process is not just a loss of innocence in youthful characters but is a growth which occurs in men of all ages. The setting in Horgan's fiction also serves as symbol. His dust storms and thunderstorms come to represent the storms of human passions; his trees and adobe houses become symbolic of the continuum of life and the peace men find; his poisonous snakes symbolize the evil inherent in men. Over a period of forty years Horgan has used setting to reinforce his themes of man's conflict with nature and himself and maturation. In his early novels and short stories the themes are less closely linked with the setting than in his later work. The novels A Lamp on the Plains, Far From Cibola, and A Distant Trumpet all embody excellent examples of the blending of setting and theme. One short story, "The Devil in the Desert," reaches a high point in story telljn~ and symbolism as well as vivid evocation of place. His latest novels Whitewater and The Thin Mountain Air are not so satisfactory for the first evokes no sense of place and the latter lacks realistic characters to develop within the setting. Horgan's work is so widely varied that it is difficult to evaluate, but his southwestern fiction is both symbolically satisfying and universally applicable.