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Jack Burns:

An Abbey Fictional Character From Two Dimensions

By Scott Thompson

Several examples from The Brave Cowboy stand out. Consider this conversation between Burns and a police booking offcer following his arrest for a fght in a local bar:

“We might expect a peculiar change in the mentality of the world in the next fifty to one hundred years.” – Carl Jung, 1929

“‘What’s your address?’ said the booking offcer. ‘I don’t have none,’ Burns mumbled hoarsely. ‘You got to have an address.’ ‘I don’t. I just wander around wherever I feel like.’

I believe that Jack Burns, a character in several of Edward Abbey’s novels, is in effect a time traveler from the pre-agricultural world. The hunter-gatherer societies that inhabited that world thrived for well over 100,000 years and constituted the basic environment of human evolutionary adaptation. In duration they dwarf the last 5,000 years of agriculture-based human civilization (“syphilization” is what Ed called it.)

I also believe that humanity is destined to reclaim salient features of those pre-agricul-tural societies, whether we do so by our own choice or because we are hammered into it by a long series of ecological disasters.

So Jack Burns is also a time traveler

…

‘What’s your occupation?’ asked the booking offcer.

Burns looked at him. ‘Cowhand,’ he said; ‘sheepherder; game poacher.’

‘Which is it?’

‘All of them. What difference does it make?’

The booking offcer typed for a minute. ‘Where’s your papers?’ he said.

‘My what?’

‘Your I.D. – draft card, social security, driver’s license.’

‘Don’t have none. Don’t need none. I already know who I am.’” (pp.71-72)

from humanity’s future.

He frst appeared in Abbey’s 1956 novel, The Brave Cowboy: “He was a young man, not more than thirty. His neck was long, scrawny, with a sharp adams-apple and corded muscles; his nose, protruding from under the decayed brim of the [cowboy] hat, was thin, red, aquiline and asymmetrical, like the broken beak of a falcon. He had a small mouth with dry lips, and a chin pointed like a spade, and his skin, bristling with a week’s growth of black whiskers had the texture of cholla and the hue of an old gunstock.” (p.6)

In the novel Burns rode his temperamental mare Whiskey into Duke City, New Mexico, in order to rescue his close friend Paul Bondi from jail, where he was sent for refusing to register for the draft. Burns engineered his own arrest in order to help Paul break out, but his friend had already decided to serve out his sentence. Burns then escaped on his own and outran the

Imagine what it would feel like to shred every card you have in your wallet: credit cards, voter registration card, library card, driver’s license, social security card, professional membership cards, and so on. Imagine how doing that would affect your way of life and how it could alter your subconscious picture of who you are.

I’ve had dreams myself about beginning to accomplish something important and then losing my wallet and going into a panic. Our collectively defned identity has a powerful grip on us.

Sheriff and his deputies on a local mountain range, only to be crushed by a tractor-trailer loaded with privies when Whiskey panicked crossing a highway at night.

Abbey’s 1980 futuristic western Good News was set in Phoenix following the collapse of the dominant political system. Burns was a one-eyed old man, once again on a rescue mission. He and his Hopi friend Sam Banyaca rode into the smoldering ruins of the city to fnd Burns’ son, an offcer in the army of a local tyrant who sought to re-establish a mass hierarchical social order. Burns failed to persuade his son to leave and was promptly shot down in an impulsive attempt to kill the tyrant, once his son had refused. Oddly, Burns’ body vanished before the tyrant’s soldiers could bury it.

Here is a dialogue in the jail between Burns and his compadre Paul Bondi:

Bondi: “‘…I composed a little pledge or prayer…Would you like to hear it?’

Yes,’ Burns said.

It went like this: “I shall never sacrifce a friend to an ideal. I shall never desert a friend to save an institution…Great nations may fall in ruin before I shall sell a friend to preserve them…”’.

…

I’ll not argue it,’ Burns said; ‘I like it; I think I thought of it before you.’” (p. 109)

I believe that Jack Burns,

a character in several of Edward Abbey’s novels,

is in effect

a time traveler

from the pre-agricultural world.

Group size matters. I suspect that when an organization is large enough to start issuing membership cards, that’s when – strangely - it’s at risk of selling out its own members.

Such behavior by large groups is unfortunately commonplace, and that may be a reason why mass societies are flled with disillusioned people, and also why their institutions are plagued by chronic public mistrust. Examples: (1) an ethical employee reports misconduct within a corporation or non-proft agency and is fred and scapegoated in order to protect the organization’s public image; (2) a professional organization undermines its own objectivity by taking huge sums of money from pharmaceutical companies, despite the earnest protests of its more alert members; (3) legislators who are supposed to rep-

So: two novels, two rescue attempts, two failures. And Burns was killed, or apparently so, both times.

Usually, that doesn’t make for a memorable character.

Yet there was something about Burns that was strangely appealing and also disquieting: for example, the way Jerry Bondi, Paul’s wife in The Brave Cowboy, reacted to him: “She was having trouble with her thoughts; this man Burns, whose mere physical presence was so reassuring, and whose love and loyalty she could never have doubted, yet made her feel for some reason a shade uncomfortable: in his sombre eyes, in his slow smile and the lines of his face, in the frm rank masculinity of his body, she thought she perceived a challenge. A challenge in his every word, every motion.” (p. 30)

Perhaps she had such a pronounced reaction to him because he possessed ancient human qualities that rang true on an intuitive level, but that threatened to demolish her social conditioning. Qualities that contemporary urban literary critics (“literary crickets” is what Ed called them) were much too dense to fathom.

I’d like to discuss some of these qualities.

Burns was striking in that he had no emotional connection to the abstract notions and institutions of the mass culture that surrounded him. It was not that he was disloyal to them, strictly speaking: he was not a card-carrying rebel or revolutionary. Such institutions were simply

irrelevant to him.

resent the public’s best interests consistently give priority to the demands of lobbyists for multinational corporations that fnance their election campaigns.

By contrast, pre-agricultural societies were comprised of small bands, typically made up of only a few families. It has taken me a long time to appreciate how resilient and emotionally healthy such a seemingly frail social framework is. This is because the well-being of an individual member of the group is much more likely to be congruent with the well-being of the group itself, and because the leaders are less apt to be emotionally distant, hierarchical fgures. So that the people are far more likely to trust them. Deeply.

Burns was striking in that he had no emotional connection to the abstract notions and institutions of the mass culture that surrounded him. It was not that he was disloyal to them, strictly speaking: he was not a card-carrying rebel or revolutionary. Such institutions were simply irrelevant to him.

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	Jack Burns: An Abbey Fictional Character From Two Dimensions By Scott Thompson Several examples from The Brave Cowboy stand out. Consider this conversation between Burns and a police booking offcer following his arrest for a fght in a local bar: “We might expect a peculiar change in the mentality of the world in the next fifty to one hundred years.” – Carl Jung, 1929 “‘What’s your address?’ said the booking offcer. ‘I don’t have none,’ Burns mumbled hoarsely. ‘You got to have an address.’ ‘I don’t. I just wander around wherever I feel like.’ I believe that Jack Burns, a character in several of Edward Abbey’s novels, is in effect a time traveler from the pre-agricultural world. The hunter-gatherer societies that inhabited that world thrived for well over 100,000 years and constituted the basic environment of human evolutionary adaptation. In duration they dwarf the last 5,000 years of agriculture-based human civilization (“syphilization” is what Ed called it.) I also believe that humanity is destined to reclaim salient features of those pre-agricul-tural societies, whether we do so by our own choice or because we are hammered into it by a long series of ecological disasters. So Jack Burns is also a time traveler … ‘What’s your occupation?’ asked the booking offcer. Burns looked at him. ‘Cowhand,’ he said; ‘sheepherder; game poacher.’ ‘Which is it?’ ‘All of them. What difference does it make?’ The booking offcer typed for a minute. ‘Where’s your papers?’ he said. ‘My what?’ ‘Your I.D. – draft card, social security, driver’s license.’ ‘Don’t have none. Don’t need none. I already know who I am.’” (pp.71-72) from humanity’s future. He frst appeared in Abbey’s 1956 novel, The Brave Cowboy: “He was a young man, not more than thirty. His neck was long, scrawny, with a sharp adams-apple and corded muscles; his nose, protruding from under the decayed brim of the [cowboy] hat, was thin, red, aquiline and asymmetrical, like the broken beak of a falcon. He had a small mouth with dry lips, and a chin pointed like a spade, and his skin, bristling with a week’s growth of black whiskers had the texture of cholla and the hue of an old gunstock.” (p.6) In the novel Burns rode his temperamental mare Whiskey into Duke City, New Mexico, in order to rescue his close friend Paul Bondi from jail, where he was sent for refusing to register for the draft. Burns engineered his own arrest in order to help Paul break out, but his friend had already decided to serve out his sentence. Burns then escaped on his own and outran the Imagine what it would feel like to shred every card you have in your wallet: credit cards, voter registration card, library card, driver’s license, social security card, professional membership cards, and so on. Imagine how doing that would affect your way of life and how it could alter your subconscious picture of who you are. I’ve had dreams myself about beginning to accomplish something important and then losing my wallet and going into a panic. Our collectively defned identity has a powerful grip on us. Sheriff and his deputies on a local mountain range, only to be crushed by a tractor-trailer loaded with privies when Whiskey panicked crossing a highway at night. Abbey’s 1980 futuristic western Good News was set in Phoenix following the collapse of the dominant political system. Burns was a one-eyed old man, once again on a rescue mission. He and his Hopi friend Sam Banyaca rode into the smoldering ruins of the city to fnd Burns’ son, an offcer in the army of a local tyrant who sought to re-establish a mass hierarchical social order. Burns failed to persuade his son to leave and was promptly shot down in an impulsive attempt to kill the tyrant, once his son had refused. Oddly, Burns’ body vanished before the tyrant’s soldiers could bury it. Here is a dialogue in the jail between Burns and his compadre Paul Bondi: Bondi: “‘…I composed a little pledge or prayer…Would you like to hear it?’ Yes,’ Burns said. It went like this: “I shall never sacrifce a friend to an ideal. I shall never desert a friend to save an institution…Great nations may fall in ruin before I shall sell a friend to preserve them…”’. … I’ll not argue it,’ Burns said; ‘I like it; I think I thought of it before you.’” (p. 109) I believe that Jack Burns, a character in several of Edward Abbey’s novels, is in effect a time traveler from the pre-agricultural world. Group size matters. I suspect that when an organization is large enough to start issuing membership cards, that’s when – strangely - it’s at risk of selling out its own members. Such behavior by large groups is unfortunately commonplace, and that may be a reason why mass societies are flled with disillusioned people, and also why their institutions are plagued by chronic public mistrust. Examples: (1) an ethical employee reports misconduct within a corporation or non-proft agency and is fred and scapegoated in order to protect the organization’s public image; (2) a professional organization undermines its own objectivity by taking huge sums of money from pharmaceutical companies, despite the earnest protests of its more alert members; (3) legislators who are supposed to rep- So: two novels, two rescue attempts, two failures. And Burns was killed, or apparently so, both times. Usually, that doesn’t make for a memorable character. Yet there was something about Burns that was strangely appealing and also disquieting: for example, the way Jerry Bondi, Paul’s wife in The Brave Cowboy, reacted to him: “She was having trouble with her thoughts; this man Burns, whose mere physical presence was so reassuring, and whose love and loyalty she could never have doubted, yet made her feel for some reason a shade uncomfortable: in his sombre eyes, in his slow smile and the lines of his face, in the frm rank masculinity of his body, she thought she perceived a challenge. A challenge in his every word, every motion.” (p. 30) Perhaps she had such a pronounced reaction to him because he possessed ancient human qualities that rang true on an intuitive level, but that threatened to demolish her social conditioning. Qualities that contemporary urban literary critics (“literary crickets” is what Ed called them) were much too dense to fathom. I’d like to discuss some of these qualities. Burns was striking in that he had no emotional connection to the abstract notions and institutions of the mass culture that surrounded him. It was not that he was disloyal to them, strictly speaking: he was not a card-carrying rebel or revolutionary. Such institutions were simply irrelevant to him. resent the public’s best interests consistently give priority to the demands of lobbyists for multinational corporations that fnance their election campaigns. By contrast, pre-agricultural societies were comprised of small bands, typically made up of only a few families. It has taken me a long time to appreciate how resilient and emotionally healthy such a seemingly frail social framework is. This is because the well-being of an individual member of the group is much more likely to be congruent with the well-being of the group itself, and because the leaders are less apt to be emotionally distant, hierarchical fgures. So that the people are far more likely to trust them. Deeply. Burns was striking in that he had no emotional connection to the abstract notions and institutions of the mass culture that surrounded him. It was not that he was disloyal to them, strictly speaking: he was not a card-carrying rebel or revolutionary. Such institutions were simply irrelevant to him.
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