Roaring Camp

I found Harte’s writing style in Roaring Camp to be intensely interesting and mildly annoying.  Okay, maybe it was intensely annoying too…but as an observing narrator displaced from the real-time of the events he is relating, he seemed to be presuming quite a bit about the events he discusses and the people involved in them.  For example, right from the start when we are introduced to our first developed character, Cherokee Sal, the first thing we learn about her is that “she was a coarse and, it is to be feared, a very sinful woman.”  That sounds very suspiciously more like a personal opinion than a measurable reality to me.  It also interested me how Harte portrayed his characters…they all came across as very down low, primitive, uneducated people, which certainly might be expected of the pioneers living on the frontier of civilization, not to mention the pilgrims of America.  We see this in dialogue like “see what you kin do.  You’ve had experience in them things.”  So that all may be fine and good and go down in my mind as realistic and well-written dialogue given the context, but it directly contradicted with his own writing style so much so that it made the reading process a bit abrasive.  Let me elaborate on that…dropping fancy words like “climes,” “putative,” and “extempore” right after such unsophisticated, meat-and-potatoes dialogue and the introduction of characters named “Kentuck” and “Stumpy” can only have one possible motivation written all over it…the guy is trying to sound sophisticated.  And trying much too hard, in much too inappropriate of a context.  Aye, there’s the rub for me that I alluded to earlier…in Roaring Camp, Harte’s writing just seems so abrasively self-contradictive.  It just doesn’t do to take one of the most unsophisticated subjects imaginable and try to embellish as many bells and whistles of sophistication as humanly possible.  Maybe he’s just trying to be taken seriously…but as I scratch my head over this, I just can’t bring myself to take him as anything but another pretentious author who thought he really had something in nothing.  Granted, though, it certainly doesn’t help his case that there are literally millions more of those now than there were when Harte was taking pen to paper.  Yes, pen to paper…not finger to keyboard.