Carl Remick wrote:
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> Does the (deeply tedious) myth of the cowboy really have that much of a
> death grip on the national consciousness?
Thus farr his bold discourse without controule Had audience, when among the Seraphim Abdiel, then whom none with more zeale ador'd The Deitie, and divine commands obei'd, Stood up, and in a flame of zeale severe The current of his fury thus oppos'd.
(PL V, 803-08)
... yet him God the most High voutsafes To call by Vision from his Fathers house, His kindred and false Gods, into a Land Which he will shew him, and from him will raise A mightie Nation, and upon him showre His benediction so, that in his Seed All Nations shall be blest; he straight obeys, Not knowing to what Land, yet firm believes: I see him, but thou canst not, with what Faith He leaves his Gods, his Friends, and native Soile Ur of Chaldaea, passing now the Ford . . . .
(PL, XII, 120-30)
. . .at last they seise The Scepter, and regard not Davids Sons, Then loose it to a stranger, that the true Anointed King Messiah might be born Barr'd of his right; yet at his Birth a Starr . . . .
(PL, XII, 356-60)
I Who e're while the happy Garden sung, By one mans disobedience lost, now sing Recover'd Paradise to all mankind, By one mans firm obedience fully tri'd Through all temptation, and the Tempter foil'd In all his wiles, defeated and repuls't, And Eden rais'd in the wast Wilderness.
(PR, I, 1-7)
The cowboy is just one particular variation on the lone hero (or abstract -- isolated -- individual) of bourgeois culture. One current variation on it is the man (or woman) suffering from amnesia, coming from nowhere to put things in order in the process of 'finding' him/herself.
With just a little stretch you can fit Proust's narrator into the pattern.
And who the hell is speaking and where did he come from in
And then went down to the ship, Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea, and We set up mast and sail on that swart ship. . . .
(Cantos, I, 1-3)
And even Austen's young women with hopeless parents and nebulous future. Someone wrote an essay 60 or 70 years ago on "The Young Man from the Province" in 19th c. fiction. The phrase perfectly fits The Son in Paradise Regained, or Abdiel described in the first quotation above.
It defines modern literature.
One of the more degenerate forms of it is the modern academic conviction that one must be "original" in one's thought.
Carrol