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The Linguistic Key to Crabb’s Veracity: Berger’s Little Big Man Revisited

2003; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 38; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/wal.2003.0019

1948-7142

Brett Zimmerman,

Lexicography and Language Studies

T h e L in g u is t ic K e y t o C r a b b ’s V e r a c i t y B e r g e r ’s L i t t l e B ig M a n R e v is it e d B r e t t Z i m m e r m a n A central theme in Thomas Berger’s 1964 novel Little Big Man is the question of Jack Crabb’s veracity— whether or not he is telling the truth in his long narration to his auditor, that dandified “man of let­ ters,” Ralph Fielding Snell. Did Jack really have all those adventures and meet all those famous people (Kit Carson, Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickok, Calamity Jane, Buffalo Bill Cody, George Armstrong Custer), and did he really survive, most miraculously, the Battle of the Little Big Horn? Or is he a bunco artist, a confidence man, a fraud? If so, what are the implications, if any? W hat is Berger trying to suggest? W hile sev­ eral scholars have considered, briefly, the possibility that Jack’s claims may be fraudulent, no one has asserted that that is the case so confi­ dently, so authoritatively, as Sherrill E. Grace: “as a captive of the Indians and the sole survivor of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, Jack Crabb is a hoax, but as a self-conscious spinner of tall tales who throughout his narrative is aware of the human propensity for tall tales (Cheyenne and white), he is a genuine fabulator, another in the long line of western mythologizers” (151). Unfortunately, Grace provides very little to back up that claim, probably because her essay is designed to do other things, but at least she does draw our attention to matters of Jack Crabb’s narrative style— we should really say styles, for that is the key. Still, given that she does not make her case with a patient styl­ istic analysis, she might be considered rather overconfident when she refers to Jack’s crude frontier colloquialisms as something that “every­ one but Snell can see as a deliberate manipulation, through language, of his image in order to snare Snell” (150). No, not everyone can see that, certainly not most of my rather unsophisticated undergraduates, at least not without help. A nd other, more sophisticated readers, have taken Jack at his word, too. Grace is absolutely correct in calling Jack a fraud, but we need, once and for all, to do a more detailed stylistical analysis to make the case (with additional help, especially from the ever-astute Brooks Landon). Claims against Jack’s veracity cannot be based on matters of history, social science, anthropology, or geography, for scholars have shown— especially Leo E. Oliva, in “Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man as History”— that his claims, when they can be verified, 2 7 2 WAL 3 8 . 3 F a l l 2 0 0 3 are for the most part quite trustworthy. The key against Jack is the lin­ guistic, and this would seem quite appropriate, given “Berger’s assertion that language is the theme of all his novels” (Wallace, “Meaning of Custer’s Last Words” 2). We can, finally, make our case within the larger thematic context of tricksterism, confidence schemes, tall tales, and the mythopoeic. T h e T r i c k s t e r F i g u r e in N a t i v e L o r e We begin our excursion into the novel’s world of perverse and per­ vasive bunco with Native American mythology, the trickster figure, known to tribes in nearly all parts of the continent. N o Berger scholar whose work I have read, except Daniel Royot, refers to this figure, and Royot does so briefly, almost incidentally. Typically, the trickster is half human, half animal; sometimes he is a cultural hero, and he is famous for his cleverness but also for his foolishness. That would be a good way to describe Jack Crabb, who is a fool sometimes but occasionally very clever, shrewd. By far the most widely...