Read an Excerpt
La Salle
A Novel
By John Vernon
University of Nebraska Press
Copyright © 2006
University of Nebraska PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-8032-9632-0
Foreword
SUE PEABODY
From the opening line of this intelligent, stimulating novel, John
Vernon puts his readers on notice: words are not to be trusted,
and truth must be wrestled from a confusion of error, imagination,
and lies. The professional historian also engages in this process
of evaluating testimony, separating the self-serving memorial
from more critical evidence, and closing in on something that approaches
the truth. But as each generation of historical investigators
approaches the detritus of the past from a new vantage point,
with new preoccupations, new insights (and new blindnesses!),
even professional history becomes a struggle and a debate: a living,
shifting process of storytelling and debunking. What I like
best about La Salle: A Novel is that it puts its readers into the role
of historical detectives, forced to sift through contradiction and
obfuscation to get a glimpse of the truth.
Unlike Vernon's fictitious preface-writer, Elizabeth Goupil
Fox-Reckmeyer, I am a genuine historian whose enthusiasm for
Vernon's fiction led me to this opportunity to introduce one of
my favorite books. I love many things about La Salle: A Novel
and assigned it regularly in my classes on European exploration,
conquest,and colonization, until it went out of print in the
early 1990s. I was thrilled when the University of Nebraska Press
announced that it would issue a new edition. Now Vernon's novel
can reach a wider audience; it is a book that works equally well
for pleasure and in the classroom.
Ironically, much of what Elizabeth Goupil Fox-Reckmeyer
tells us in the preface about the historical setting of La Salle
is quite true, despite the fact that she, herself, is an invention.
However, the central premise-a set of letters and journal entries
by the French explorer La Salle and his woebegone sidekick,
Goupil-is, of course, fictitious. The historian Peter H.
Wood tells us that the real René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de la Salle
(1643-1687), "did not write frequently or easily," yet Vernon's
character La Salle is eloquent, loquacious, and something of a
creative writer himself. Goupil is pure invention: a foil to La
Salle's arrogance, cynicism, and tyranny, yet not without a certain
homespun lyricism of his own.
Because the novel plays with truthfulness and deception, I
wrote to John Vernon in 1988 when I was a graduate instructor,
asking him how I could frame the problem of fiction versus
history for my undergraduate students. Vernon wrote back a
generous and insightful letter, a portion of which I quote here:
I have no qualms drawing the lines between what I fictionalized and
what I didn't; I followed the broad historical outlines of the story
(including dates), and fleshed out fictionally within those outlines.
The character of Goupil is entirely fictional (including of course his
letter in Part IV), as are the stories about La Chine ..., Minime,
and the play La Salle writes. Many of the more "historical" events,
such as the episode in which Prudhomme gets lost, are so sketchy in
the historical record that in effect my version of them is just about
completely fictional. Almost all of the accounts of the confrontations
between the Europeans and native Americans in Parts I and III are
of this nature too: fictional extrapolations of meetings that apparently
took place. The accounts of torture at the hands of the Iroquois
are based upon the Jesuit Relations.... I wanted to show what
the pictures in textbooks of early explorers (with their clean faces,
elaborate costume, shining weapons, neat flags, natives in rows-all
idealized and antiseptic) don't show-the lice, the fatigue, the
continual closeness of death, the dysentery, the cold, the discomfort,
the loss of orientation, the dirt, the grease for a meal three times a
day, the annoyance, the boredom, the hunger, the fear, etc.
Vernon excels in using imagination to fill in those gaps in the
historical record, portraying this vivid tale of survival in a way
that is, in a sense, more truthful-more complete-than either
the primary sources or the secondary historical accounts. This is
one reason why La Salle is such a great teaching tool. A rigorously
accurate historical account may fail to engage the reader because
the very details that make the story come alive (passions, physical
sensations, ulterior motives, even descriptions of the surroundings)
are missing from the historical record.
La Salle's fictive invention also provides a clear window into
several general historical themes that are worth pursuing in a
classroom or book group discussion: the pervasive religiosity in
this century of French Catholic revival and the simultaneous
chipping away of that faith by scientific inquiry and skepticism;
the capacity of the scientific worldview to unlock nature's secrets
while justifying violence and suffering in the name of discovery;
the carnivalesque world of Parisian street life-an ironic counterpoint
of "civilization" to the supposed "savagery" of the American
Indians; and explorers' incapacity (or unwillingness) to understand
the geography of the new worlds they encounter.
Many of the elements in this novel that seem too strange to be
true nevertheless have ample historical precedents in the annals of
European exploration. La Salle's possible falsification of the latitude
of the mouth of the Mississippi has a well-known historical
antecedent in the diaries of Christopher Columbus, as edited by
Bartolomé de las Casas. The explorer-turned-healer/mystic can
be found in the story of Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, another
European explorer who barely survived being stranded in east
Texas some 150 years before La Salle's fateful voyage. There are
many stories of Europeans who "went native," preferring their
new lives as adopted Indian kinfolk, often of elevated status, to
the miserable lives of sailors or soldiers in European expeditions.
Goupil's complaints about native cooking and his treatment as a
slave of the Chickasaw echo Mary Rowlandson's famous captivity
narrative. So, while several of the plot's eddies and meanderings
sound fantastic in Vernon's charmed rendition, they nevertheless
are firmly grounded in the field of historical plausibility.
Historians and novelists (as well as filmmakers and, in a different
way, painters) share several central problems in storytelling:
Of the infinite details that make up the past, which facts should
be included and which omitted? In what order should the story
be told? Who shall the main characters be and whose perspectives
will fall by the wayside? When an artist deviates from the
historical record it is instructive to see how he or she bends the
truth, for it is often a clue to the plotting, theme, or vision of the
artist's imagination.
Vernon's selection of which part of the story to tell and which
to omit is revealing. Unlike a traditional biography, La Salle reveals
nothing of the explorer's early life or even of his early explorations
of the Great Lakes and upper Midwest. Instead, we
jump into a voyage in progress, getting our feet wet immediately
in the Mississippi River. Also omitted are La Salle's return voyage
to France in 1682 and his second transatlantic voyage in 1684,
including the potentially dramatic seizure of La Salle's ship, the
Saint François, by Spanish pirates; the sojourn in Saint Domingue
(now Haiti); the bypassing of the mouth of the Mississippi; and
the establishment of La Salle's colony in Matagorda Bay. Indeed,
with typical minimalism, Vernon signals readers that colonists
from the second voyage survived for more than a year before the
novel's action picks up in 1686 with this lament by Goupil: "I
never thought I would spend another Christmas in this wretched
land but here it comes again in six days ... no one cares."
Vernon is clearly not interested in the detailed rendition of a
transatlantic voyage, historical accounts of which typically consist
of tedious notations on latitude, currents, weather, and sand bars.
Rather, Vernon's vigorous telling takes readers right to the heart
of personal conflict, accentuating the dramatic even while underscoring
the boredom and physical depletion of the colonists.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from La Salle
by John Vernon
Copyright © 2006 by University of Nebraska Press .
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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