The Last of the Iroquois: History and Myth in James Fenimore Cooper's: "The Last of the Mohicans"

Abstract

The text [...] as we possess it to-day, will tell us enough about its own vicissitudes. Two mutually [.. ..] opposed treatments have left their traces on it. On the one hand it has been subjected to revisions which have falsified it in the sense of their secret aims, have mutilated and amplified it and even changed it into its reverse; on the other hand a solicitous piety has presided over it and has sought to preserve everything as it was, no matter whether it was consistent or contradicted itself. Thus almost everywhere we notice gaps, disturbing repetitions and obvious contradictions have come aboutindications which reveal things to us which it was not intended to communicate. In its implications the distortion of a text resembles a murder: the difficulty is not in perpetrating the deed, but in getting rid of the traces. We might well lend the word Entstellung (distortion) the double meaning to which it has a claim but of which to-day it makes no use. It should mean not only 'to change the appearance of something' but also 'to put something in another place, to displace'. Accordingly, in many instances of textual distortion, we may nevertheless count upon finding what has been suppressed and disavowed hidden away somewhere else, though changed and torn from its context. Only it will not always be easy to recognize it (Freud 1964: vol. 23, 43).

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