The Field of Vision

Of his brilliant new novel, which concerns itself with the affairs of a group of Americans in Mexico and the drama of an afternoon in their lives, Wright Morris has this to say:

"IN MEXICO, two years ago, as I sat in the sunny side of the bullring, I found myself less concerned with the bull than with the ring itself. The sanded ring, like a polished mirror, seemed to gather and reflect everything but the bullfight. In the drama of the bullring what a man saw was himself. His success or his failure to come to terms with his own life. The durable fragments of a man's life seemed to gather around the bullring, as around a magnet, and his mind seemed compelled to come to imaginative terms with them. This book grows from the belief that this imaginative act is man himself. The field of vision is the pattern of meaning it brings to his life. In my effort to dramatize this idea I have dealt with the imagination of the plains, where corn is sometimes grown, dust sometimes blows, but the bumper crop is still fiction and romance. I have tried to suggest what a changing world does to the unchanging drives of this imagination — drives which seek to trans-form an ever changing set of facts to their 'own terms. The range and nature of the plains imagination — its audacity, how-ever ill advised, and its practicality, how-ever illusive — contain elements that are peculiarly American. Out of this tension grows one of the durable dreams of American life. One with which the writer, as well as the dreamer, must come to terms. In The Field of Vision the mind circles Lone Tree, a symbol of the plains imagination, that looms up, larger than the bull, in the bullring in Mexico. There, mirrored in the bullring, a group of touring plainsmen see, for the first time, the drama of their tangled lives."