“I told myself, and therefore it was no doubt true, that I was not much impressed by Wallace Castlebury’s predicament. By my reckoning, killing another person made someone a bad man.”
In a 2023 lecture at Yale, Percival Everett called Wounded the “closest [he’s] got” to an “abstract novel.” It is a Western of sorts, that provides a straightforward rendering of violence and intolerance. The novel follows John, a black, Berkley educated rancher in Wyoming, his uncle Gus, a former convict, and Morgan, a fellow rancher and John’s love interest. Things change in the small town when a homophobic murder occurs, and John’s recently hired ranch-hand, Wallace Castlebury, is arrested for the crime. In an effort of solidarity with the crime’s victim, a rally is staged attracting David and Robert to town, a gay couple, who stay with John and Gus on account of the fact that David’s father went to Berkley with our protagonist. Violence continues in the town, escalating to the slaughter of several dozen cattle owned by the Native Americans. The plot moves in a direct, causal way concluding with the revelation a trio of neo-Nazis, equipped with swastikas, pickup trucks, and a storage of weapons, committed the original killing and the preceding violence. As John remarks at the conclusion, “Sometimes things were just simple…the people you expected to do the bad thing did the bad thing.”
Subtextually, the novel is perhaps about, what John calls “some rural or western disease of intolerance.” John accuses the “East” of isolating this “disease” to the West. A mistake he suggests by going on to list a series of hate crimes across the country, as if violence were a balance sheet. This rumination on the state of intolerance in America immediately follows the above speech by John, a bit of aww shucks exposition, which John indulges in while considering the plight of Castlebury. In the characters’ speech, Everett’s mode of abstraction reveals itself. The dialogue and John’s exposition comes highly mediated—it is symbolic or referential. Two characters, Gus and Robert, both oppressed in a way that mirrors David and John, choose instead to speak clearly about their positions in society. Everett writes the affected dialogue of John and David as a method to render the forms of speech forced onto the marginalized: always abstracted from their “Real” feelings. Here, Everett toys with the Causal Reality of “the people you expected to do the bad thing did the bad thing,” by placing it up against a Moral Reality for the victims. He reveals the interlocking structures of feeling that guide human interactions, while arguing that the continued violence of the people one “expects” to commit crimes does nothing to lessen the horror for the victims.
The novel is not so much unsettling as it is soothing, like a common Western. The good guys get their revenge, the hero learns his lessons, and almost everyone, save for the old timer, Gus, and David make it home alive and safe. The abstraction Everett claims over the novel can best be seen and understood through the speech of John as it moves in clear and concise ways along with the clear and concise events. His speech, when contrasted with the actions of Gus and Robert destabilizes the clarity John has over the world. And yet, that clarity is oddly confirmed by the events of the novel. It is in the often harsh moral universe of the novel which by confirming John’s worldview, Everett announces an abstraction. The lowest in society die because society is built that way.
Speech requires an interlocutor, a listener; abstraction requires something concrete. Textual abstraction, as opposed to visual, must come from the cultural context of the words. Unlike say a Kadinsky painting, language is physical. You are reading this sentence typed onto a screen. The word, “clock", has a physical structure that cannot be neglected or talked around in such precise terms as a visual representation of a clock can. A clock is a clock. The noun means something. It can also be a verb “to clock” being to sus someone out, particularly as is used among Trans people to identify one another. This usage is related, but not precisely so, to the physical time keeping device. It represents a gesture towards something general.
We often see abstract language in political speech. When politicians speak about “freedom,” they often mean something real but are being inexplicit. Freedom means something contextual and bound. Abstract language lacks a clarity that is often praised in fiction. There is the space Everett revels in.
John suggests, he has “no affection” for the “mythic West, the West that never existed.” He favors the “land” what that “did to someone who lived on it.” His distinction between myth and the land disaggregates the narrative of the book from the text. The plot, to some extent, represents a common or mythic Western, at least in at the symbolic level—Native Americans just outside the normal function of society, a sheriff who trusts the Protagonist, a young misbehaving horse our Protagonist heels. The surface myth present in Wounded comes first dislodged by the identity characteristics of the principal characters, mainly black and/or gay. Yet the destabilization caused by those characteristics becomes absurdist as John reveals he studied art history at Berkley, that famous institution of left-wing professional managerial accreditation. By the time we meet him, John is the town’s horse tamer, with few other references to his interest in the humanities. On one hand, the art history degree could be a quick, off-hand addition by the author (several Everett characters have a fascination with the visual arts and Everett himself is a painter). Being fascinated with art history, rather than the making of art itself, however, rubs against his love of the land over the myth, the physical, material world over the symbolic. A historian analyzes and narrativizes; they’re not artisans or craftsmen but mere intellectuals. A historian-cowboy is an absurdist opposition.
The Berkley detail adds confusion to John’s speech, which moves in and out of a classically Western register. His aww shucks exposition, “the stiffness in Gus’s knees had [John] believing [rain] was coming;” he calls his mule “the devil himself;” adds “have mercy” to exclamations, which all taken together, suggests an affectation on the part of John. The sentence construction of “Gus’s knee had [John] believing [rain] was coming” is a particularly rural American one. An urbane sentence, or even more directly spoken one would be “I believed rain was coming because Gus’s knee ached.” The language tangling amidst John’s credentials reveals a character committed to a way of speaking against their social training. Its not impossible to imagine someone with a yokel’s speech patterns enrolling in Berkley, but the purpose of elite American post-secondary institutions (other than real estate capture and extraction) is to inculcate and homogenize a way of being in the world for professional class Americans. More than anything, American colleges are places of extremely specific and consistent socialization. And thus, John’s speech belies that training, almost rejects it.
The religious invocations “have mercy” and “the devil himself” can be read as further rejection of his education and put-ons in his new environment. When considering the New Left and Vietnam War protests of the ‘60s and ‘70s at Berkley often centering culture war issues around sex and love, the choice of college becomes more peculiar. It is an elite, agnostic, and yes, predominately white institution. It is also famous as a major site of queer theory in the humanities, an issue and theme that finds life in Wounded. An initial read of the affectation would suggest that he’s putting on airs to elide the “coastal elite” moniker of a Berkley grad.
The other characters notice John’s way of speaking. Gus says to John “that’s what a cowboy says, eh,” gently taunting his affectation. The town “bothers John” according to Gus and John retorts “it used to be a village, a real Western town. Now, it’s working on being just like any place else.” He holds on to some sense of the real West then—a thing untainted by the sameness of the world.
John’s efforts in cultural elision are common in off-kilter westerns, a tradition among which Wounded announces itself. However, in a story directly about intolerance, John’s affected speech and attitude represents something far more sinister, often called “code-switching,” but here might be a form of extreme tolerance on the behalf of John. It is an extreme tolerance of a man with no method to properly fight back against the racist society he was born into.
The distinction might be best understood by opposing John’s speech to the dialogue and actions of Robert and Gus, who align in their more hard-nosed stance against the straight, white establishment of the town. The dichotomy between John and Gus/Robert presented by Everett reveals his Moral and Causal abstraction in this novel. On the one hand, John performs a version of himself he aspires to be, a cowboy or rancher, in the West. This performance is at least semi-ironic. The novel takes place in contemporary early 2000s, America, Cormac McCarthy, spaghetti Westerns, and the Sun Belt’s urbanization have already happened.
Their opposition clarifies the Moral Reality of the novel. Robert is in fact correct that the way the townsfolk treat him is homophobic. The neo-Nazi’s attack Robert and David at a vigil for their initial victim and various townsfolk make snide remarks to him. Robert’s response, as it’s presented by John, is simple rudeness and childish ignorance. Yet, there’s something morally admirable about his indignant energy. He doesn’t sit quietly while those around him wish him ill. Robert’s character abstracts a certain cliché of a well-educated white queer, one whose knowledge about the way of the world perhaps reveals an ignorance about themselves.
Robert, who appears for about forty pages total, is a far more minor character than Gus, yet his impact on John is strongly felt. When David asks what the town is like, and John replies, “It’s a little town. It’s okay. Mostly white. Indians get treated like shit. You know, America. The murder hit everybody pretty hard.” He thinks to himself “Robert might have smirked” at this statement. He “felt” the smirk “as much as he saw it.” The shared knowledge of America’s penchant for intolerance comes with the confusion about a smile. The gesture could be knowing or sarcastic; it may not even have happened. This uncertainty creates a sense of apprehension for John, which Robert seizes on.
Robert has a snide costal attitude about rural life; the tension between Robert and John is at once racial and sexual. It’s not until John reveals his education and his possession of a real Klee painting that Robert begins to respect John. When Robert affects a “slightly strident tone” to announce “we [gay people] put up with [homophobic] people” all the time, John in narration sees the boy recognize the blackness of John and Gus “for the first time.” John and Gus let the boy off easily and warm heartedly. But Robert persists. When a local speechifies at Robert about his intolerance towards queer people, Robert only says “nice speech.” He is often rude and pushy in the world of the book, refusing to abide by the various small indignities he suffers.
A twinge of sadness fell on me reading about Robert. Notably, his moral and political attachments are so sincere he’s found himself angry, furious with the world around him. His sentimentality mimics that of the mythic West John supposedly despises: anger from a belief in an America clean from the sins of human beings. Why is Robert so defensive? The initial answer is homophobia: he’s in the town because a gay hate crime occurred there. Something else is occurring underneath though. Everett’s use of Robert to push on John’s buttons, the niceties and politeness he’s affected reveals John’s ability to compartmentalize his identity and his experience in the novel. John begins speaking more clearly about the town while Robert’s there. Two injured animals in the novel, a coyote and a wild horse named Felony, become clear symbols for the ways in which interactions are often colored by unconscious thoughts and feelings: Felony has to be “trained to tolerate the troubling thoughts of his rider,” while the housed coyote pup needs constant training or risks becoming a wild, feral animal.
Animal and human similarities are not inventions of this novel exactly, but their deployment further digs into the attempts at Moral Reality within it. Animals are born one way and it’s the duty of the animals’ caretakers to make the best efforts possible and give them good lives. If an animal fails, its not because of the animal itself, but because of the owner. So goes people in a social life: if one falls into defensiveness or bitterness, the question should be for the people around them, not only the person themselves. All of that might sound a bit too trite, a bit too kumbaya.
At one point John chides Robert “you just make friends everywhere you go,” and notices himself that he can’t place whether those feelings arose because of Robert’s reaction to homophobia, or Robert’s simple act of publicly kissing David. John’s admission, though an Honest Cowboy maneuver, begins to unravel his own feelings about his oppression in the world—what had John himself done to deserve casual mistreatment other than be “the black rancher?”
While Robert may offer an outsider’s perspective on the mistreatment of the oppressed, it is Gus who bisects the situation and provides a way through the mire. He spent time in prison for shooting and killing a white man raping his wife. John delivers this exposition casually in a short sentence “[Gus] killed a man who was raping his wife.” Gus acted to defend those he loves, to protect them from the dangers of the world. Gus remains “hard, but never bitter,” a clear contrast to Robert’s view of the world from a similar position. There’s a notable irony in Gus’s exposition which withholds the sort of emotional and wandering storytelling possible when describing the immorality of Gus’s situation. One could imagine the life history of Gus becoming tens of pages, which dramatize a particular version of mid-century black life in America. By reducing it to a few short sentences, Everett reveals John’s moral scope: there’s so much horror in the world that the best way to understand it is by directly looking at it. Review the text, he might say, what plain evidence is on the surface and how does that reveal the underlying machinations of life below? Things are often exactly how one expects them to be, he’d say. Gus went to jail because he shot a white man, simple as.
When John and Gus find David kidnapped by the neo-Nazis, it is Gus who stays behind to exact revenge on them, both the literal and symbolic. John, shocked at Gus’s murder of the first kidnapper, comes with Gus’s casual reply “I’ve got two left.” In this violence, John’s cowboy persona comes crashing down. He is still to some extent a good member of society, while Gus is the literal outlaw. Gus occupies that position for two reasons: his unjust history as a convict (what is a cowboy if not a righteous criminal?) and Gus’s certain death from cancer, revealed throughout the book. “I’ve got two left” is hard, not bitter. The problem presented here is with the American West; it’s sentimental, “mythical” as John puts it, which occludes the supposed certainty of American life—domination by those in power. The West of Wounded isn’t a place that makes good men hard, exactly, its not even a place that reveals the True America, it is a place like the rest of America: “there’s plenty of hate for everyone” especially while the town is “working on being just like anyplace else.”
As a well-educated man, John is able to understand the sort of performance he’s engaging in; his ironic distance can only be so large. Thus, he’s become an abstract cowboy—a black man with an impressive degree in an urbanizing west. John’s demeanor, as a stoic often unemotional man, must be understood within that context, one a historian might offer. He’s not a rootin, tootin horse tamer, or an alcoholic rider on his last adventure: he’s a serious man doing serious cowboy work. He’s a man performing the sorts of physical labor often attributed to the lowest in society, but in the most exaggerated sense. He behaves in a way that tracks Causal Reality, but amidst moral issues, amidst injustice and the like, he often struggles to act in a way aligned with the ethical reality he wishes to follow. Each event of the novel proceeds as one would expect, and the ultimate evil of the book is the erotic evil of the 20th century, Nazism. The underlying action, too, tracks with the normal, linear events of realist literature. There is no tricks or slights of hand by the author to deconstruct the Novel—in fact, or absurdly, it is the extreme reliance on the tropes, notions, and traditions of American realism that allow for Everett’s experimentation.
Wallace Canterbury, the supposed murderer from the beginning for whom John has no sympathy, ends up haunting the novel as he fades away in prison, eventually committing suicide early into his stay. Canterbury’s plight doesn’t phase John, and he’s rarely thought of as the novel progresses, though he’s another victim of an often capricious justice system, similar to Gus. The revealing moment of Canterbury’s innocence passes John by at the end of second chapter: Castlebury admits to John he “liked” the victim, “you know what I mean?” he says. John demurs, “I don’t know son.” His inability to see another person’s honesty in a difficult moment reveals John’s inability to listen. For all his moral clarity by the end of the novel, his failing of Castlebury remains largely unremarked upon following his death. What remains intriguing about this interaction is the cross section of forces that made John ignore what was so clear about Castlebury. The police accused Castlebury of the murder and arrested him; John has no interest in the evidence or reasoning, he simply couldn’t care less instead, he chooses to defer to the apparatus of state violence and control, one that is often applied unevenly, as he well knows. His inability to see the gay man distraught and wrongfully accused in front of him further allows for this to be a more general and abstract tale, which then further shows the Moral Reality of American cowboys. For all the bluster about independence and libertarian self-hood, when the Law comes to town, cowboys defer to the them. By John’s “reckoning” killing someone makes the murderer bad. By leaving this reckoning largely unquestioned, John helps elide the context that might explain murder and wrongful accusation: what motives might the police have for charging the lover of the deceased? Those permitted context and history in the novel are the neo-Nazis who wear that context loud and proud. They present themselves clearly and obviously. Castlebury and by extension John, Gus, Robert, and David, fall into roles and oppositions rather than characters or people. Their identities become the defining thing about them. Their particularities are stripped away, and personhood is hollowed out by the author to render the moral situation in which oppressed people often find themselves.
Rather than close on a sentimental suggestion of the American west’s ability to find the next frontier of American life, the next bend towards justice, Gus tells John “talking is over,” as he returns from murdering the three neo-Nazis. No more words could be or maybe should be used to describe the horrors America has wrought on its subjects. “This is the frontier, cowboy,” Elvis Monday, one of the Native Americans has the final word. At this, John “stepped away,” and the novel concludes.
The final sentence has no direct or indirect object, leaving the answer to the reader. John could’ve stepped away simply from the car, or Gus’s actions, or his own complicity. What is chilling about this novel is that lack of object, a final missing piece, a coastline, or closing of the frontier. A step away, the dangling preposition, wanting its horizon to end. Manifest Destiny, that logic of westward expansion, represents a myth of American life. It’s most certainly a vicious moral claim on the people and land from sea to sea. A sentence attempts to corner nouns, verbs, and adjectives into temporal, causal, and logical links in the service of all types of legibility and expression. It is finite, restrictive, and can be amended with the following sentence. When a speaker finishes, a narrative concludes, the claims end. Those ends can be read as violence, but not all forms of violence need be a predicament.