How to Show Horses and Win often reads like a self-help book. Chapter Ten is about horse judges. Ronnie explains that horse judges are subjective, do not like bribes, do not like being questioned about their judging, do not like tardiness or being stared at, and are in fact human beings. Could the same not be said for judgmental people in general? Or the judgmental gaze? Or, to make a reach, criticism itself?
There is also a singlemindedness and repetition on the virtue of success. The cover shows Ronnie winning a blue ribbon for the horse he shows in a competition. Ronnie shows us visually as well as textually how to show horses and how to win. Winning here is the symbolic object of the relationship between Ronnie and the horse. Viewed parasitically, Ronnie receives social acceptance and a place in society through his excellence with horses, not to mention the money to feed, clothe, and shelter himself and his family. The show horse, in exchange, also receives social acceptance and sustenance, a pasture to roam in, whatever may please him. There is often affection between horse and rider, between man and animal: see here Donna Haraway's When Species Meet.
Simply piling up facts to argue: Ronnie and his horse are both hosts and parasites: signifiers and signified. The saddle is the interface, the screen, on which their shared meaning and desire is transmitted. That one rides, and one is ridden: does this imply superiority? If so, who is to say that the horse is not, metaphorically speaking, riding Ronnie?
There is another parasitical relation in this text in its use of footnotes. On Chapter Two Ronnie writes that there isn't enough space to write extensively on conditioning a horse: instead he footnotes two other books from Farnam Horse Press. In effect the footnote operates as an advertisement inserted within the text. The text is penetrated, commercialized. This is true of the back inside-cover that displays color photographs of twenty four horse manuals: How to Shoe Your Horse, How to Break and Train the Western Horse, Know All About Tack, and my favorite, Riding the Gymkhana Winner. Also included are the two footnoted works, Know Practical Horse Feeding and How to Recognize Horse Health Problems.
These advertisements, far from detracting the work as a whole, inform the text in a surprisingly novel and interesting way. We come to recognize this book in relation to its publisher, its author, and us as readers. Our relation to this book as general, literary, and academic readers is different from those who read it to gain knowledge in showing horses. The act of criticism acknowledges a distance or a difference between the object of the book and its audience and the meaning generated by writing paradoxically remains outside of writing itself.
Ronnie Richards has put a lot of thought and ability into the preparation of his book, and it seems likely that it will become a handbook for showpeople everywhere. (Back Jacket)
Winning here means acceptance of this parasitical relationship within the context of horse showing. I remember my own experiences in basketball, in particular the ceremony for receiving a ribbon for sixth place in a junior high basketball tournament. It was said that we 'placed.' To place is to be put into context. The ribbon was more than a gesture to acknowledge our placement and participation in the tournament; it was also a contract, however unwitting the participants were. At that moment a symbol was transferred and a new relation began.
If the ribbon, the symbol, were refused? Openly, this would be hostile, frowned upon. I'm reminded of the scene in David James Duncan's Brothers K when Peter, the son of a minor league pitcher, quits his high school team upon receiving their MVP award. He is then ostrasized by his parents, their teammates, and the coaching staff. Thus the dilemma of the signfied.
For most of us, if not all, our sixth place ribbons were refused either by collecting dust in some forgotten drawer or thrown away in defiance after the ceremony. To us the medals did not matter. Something else mattered. We were excersizing our power to reject this relation. Our pride resisted the awards we did not care for, did not earn, and even to us teenagers did not matter.
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Ronnie Richards is a winner. He cares very much for blue ribbons. The back jacket explains that, 'Ronnie got into the winning habit back in 1953 when he started showing his mare, Nita, who won 42 classes in a row and was never defeated in Junior Stock Horse Competition.'
Of course there is the question of why success relates to the ability of the author to explain how to show horses. Michael Jordan might be one of the best basketball players in history, but its very likely that, were he to try, he could not write a helpful how-to guide on mercilessly destroying his competition, on consistently beating the Detroit Pistons, and how to make clutch shots when NBA championships are on the line. These skills, which are in part what sets him above his competition, are incommunicable. I think that excellence itself is incommunicable, that something is inevitably lost. Words in their commonality are unable to show excellence. What occurs as a result is that often the best literature is that which its subject is what is common. The more universal the writing, the more excellent. Do we not see this in the clipped prose of America and England in the past fifty years?
This is why writing is never a solitary act.
Can a great artist of life, of living life itself, successfully convert his ideas and strategy to writing? What of literature in which the subject is life itself? Are these books written by exceptional human beings? This you must answer yourself. Too many examples come to my mind, and yet I worry the exceptions (numerous as they are) may not prove the rule.
I think that it might be testament to Ronnie Richards' genius for showing horses that his book is, formally speaking, a failure. Not only formally: it is not even listed on Amazon. One of the few images of it online was on a New Zealand craigslist. I found my copy on a used book cart in the market of a grocery store. I traded Melville's Redburn for it which I still consider a fair trade. He might move the Melville, but I'm guessing he'd carried this book a long time. Where did he get it? I wish I had asked.
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