American Mythologies: Essays on Contemporary Literature (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool English Texts & Studies)

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Author: William Blazek | Michael Glenday

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Introduction American Mythologies

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Introduction

American Mythologies Essays on Contemporary Literature Edited by William Blazek and Michael K. Glenday

liverpool university press

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First published 2005 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool, L69 7ZU Copyright © 2005 Liverpool University Press The right of William Blazek and Michael K. Glenday to be identified as the editors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A British Library CIP Record is available ISBN 0–85323–736-0 cased 0–85323–746-8 limp

Typeset in Apollo by Koinonia, Bury Printed and bound in the European Community by Bell and Bain Ltd, Glasgow

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For those we love

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Contents

Acknowledgements

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Introduction

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1 Indians with Voices: Revisiting Savagism and Civilization Betty Louise Bell (University of Michigan)

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2 Wild Hope: Love, Money and Mythic Identity in the Novels of Louise Erdrich William Blazek (Liverpool Hope University College)

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3 Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee: Mythologies of Representation in Selected Writings on Boxing by Norman Mailer Christopher Brookeman (University of Westminster)

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4 The Secret Sharing: Myth and Memory in the Writing of Jayne Anne Phillips Michael K. Glenday (The Open University)

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5 The Individual’s Ghost: Towards a New Mythology of the Postmodern Leslie Heywood (State University of New York, Binghamton)

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6 ‘Cheap, On Sale, American Dream’: Contemporary Asian American Women Writers’ Responses to American Success Mythologies Phillipa Kafka (Kean University) 105 7 ‘No Way Back Forever’: American Western Myth in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy Peter Messent (University of Nottingham) 128

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Contents

8 Native American Visions of Apocalypse: Prophecy and Protest in the Fiction of Leslie Marmon Silko and Gerald Vizenor David Mogen (Colorado State University)

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9 The Brave New World of Computing in Post-war American Science Fiction David Seed (University of Liverpool) 168 10 Mythologies of ‘Ecstatic immersion’: America, The Poem and the Ethics of Lyric in Jorie Graham and Lisa Jarnot Nick Selby (University of Glasgow)

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11 Whose Myth is it Anyway? Coyote in the Poetry of Gary Snyder and Simon J. Ortiz Mark Shackleton (University of Helsinki)

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12 Aging, Anxious and Apocalyptic: Baseball’s Myths for the Millennium Deeanne Westbrook (Portland State University) 243 13 Finding a Voice, Telling a Story: Constructing Communal Identity in Contemporary American Women’s Writing Lois Parkinson Zamora (University of Houston)

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Notes on Contributors Index

295 299

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The editors gratefully acknowledge permission to quote from the poetry of Lisa Jarnot and Simon J. Ortiz. Poems by Lisa Jarnot are reprinted with permission from Ring of Fire, Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2003. Permission granted by the author Simon J. Ortiz for poems published in Woven Stone, Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992. During the preliminary stages of this book project, Liverpool Hope University College provided William Blazek with funding to attend the European Society for the Study of English 2000 conference at the University of Helsinki, where the editors presented a paper outlining ideas for the Introduction to this collection. His thanks are also due to the staff of the Humanities Deanery at Liverpool Hope, particularly Ann Houghton and Anne Kermode for secretarial assistance. Michael K. Glenday was blessed by the steady encouragement and support of his students, friends and colleagues at The Open University in the North-West of England. Special thanks here to Gwilym Beckerlegge and Sara Dodd. The editors are indebted to Robin Bloxsidge, the Publisher of Liverpool University Press, firstly for accepting the book proposal and afterwards for understanding what the working lives of university teachers entail beyond scholarly research. Thanks also to Andrew Kirk and Simon Bell of Liverpool University Press for seeing this project through to conclusion. The contributors to this volume warrant a special note of gratitude for their individual efforts and for maintaining the spirit of collegiality that is so important in an international critical collaboration of this scope. William Blazek and Michael K. Glenday

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Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted, before the fancy and imagination were affected with blight; and which it still bears, wherever its pristine vigor is unabated … The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine having yielded their crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate, the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce. Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past – as it is to some extent a fiction of the present – the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology. (Henry David Thoreau, ‘Walking’, The Atlantic Monthly, June 1862)

‘It’s like a myth being born right there in our living room, like something we know in a dream-like and preconscious way. I’m very enthused, Jack.’ (Don DeLillo, White Noise, 1985)

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Northrop Frye, perhaps the twentieth-century’s most influential writer on the topic of mythology and literature, remarked: ‘The word myth is used today in such a bewildering variety of contexts that anyone talking about it has to say first what his context is’ (3). More recently Eric Gould has suggested that the concept of myth has become a new omnibus term for our times, a term that may mean both everything and nothing. He writes of myth as ‘a synthesis of value which uniquely manages to mean most things to most people. It is allegory and tautology, reason and unreason, logic and fantasy, waking thought and dream, origin and end’ (5). Establishing a guiding context for this collection of critical essays on contemporary American literature and its relationship to mythology must also consider the notion that myth is essentially a reliquary of stories and tales bearing no proximate connection to imaginative literature or literary criticism, or even that the articulation of myth has been entirely replaced by such literature (Segal 2). Yet contemporary American writing is clearly engaged with mythologies, however varied their origins or applications, and is aware of the seeming paradox and difficult resolutions inherent in combining modernday events and social circumstances with the kinds of universal associations and cultural depth usually associated with myth. Also, especially since the second half of the twentieth-century, literary theorists and critics have frequently attempted to reconcile modern literary production and its largely secular subject matter with mythological symbols, patterns and structures – Northrop Frye, Richard Chase and Roland Barthes being but some of the most prominent examples. In addition, while the myth and symbol school of criticism – most famously represented by the work of R. W. B. Lewis, Leo Marx and Henry Nash Smith – has since the late twentieth century been derogated for its neglect of much other than white male experience, nevertheless that recent consensus points to the continued interest in the role played by myth in American cultures, within a new and necessary awareness of its pluralist boundaries. In Europe, where ancient history and traditional

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American Mythologies

mythologies have long been sources for defining and rejuvenating national identities, the importance of myth to American literature and culture has perhaps more readily been appreciated, as evidenced in the past few years by several academic conferences and workshops (for example, in Helsinki, Salzburg and Zurich) that have explored themes such as foundational American mythologies, American myths and legends, and theories of American myth. To explain the central purposes and to establish the parameters of this book, therefore, requires an acknowledgement of the complexities of the topic as well as an important assertion. The editors feel that there is a strong case to be made for identifying mythology as one of the most important ways to comprehend the enormous changes that have occurred in American fiction and poetry writing over the past three decades, a period in which the voices of women and ethnic minority writers have become especially forceful. The embracing of diversity, the acceptance of contradiction and conflict, and the ambiguous search for core values that feature in American multiculturalism find a felicitous parallel in the way that Claude Lévi-Strauss understood the operation of myth: ‘Divergence of sequences and themes is a fundamental characteristic of mythological thought, which manifests itself as an irradiation’ (6). Moreover, his interpretation might also be used to better understand the attraction of mythological themes and sources for contemporary American writers viewing the world through the multi-layered lens of postmodernism, since ‘there is no real end to mythological analysis, no hidden unity to be grasped …’ (5). The connection of mythologies to American literature becomes even clearer if one accepts Marshall Blonsky’s definition of myth as ‘narrative writ large’ (14). The semiotician also concludes that ‘Myths don’t imitate life, they make it intelligible’ (17), an epigram that might equally describe one of the main functions of literary works. Similarly, Frye declares: ‘to me myth always means, first and primarily, mythos, story, plot, narrative’ (3). Taking this reasoning further, Richard Slotkin’s definition of myths follows a similar emphasis on narrative, but he introduces another element that relates to contemporary literature’s dialogue between the past and present. ‘Myths are stories, drawn from history, that have acquired through usage over many generations a symbolizing function that is central to the cultural functioning of the society that produces them,’ he explains (16). These claims are large and can certainly be applied to America’s particular literary history; however, they do posit an idealistic standard of mythic influence. If, for some commentators, myth ‘removes contradictions, and leaves us with a timeless image of concord where once there

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was work, economy, history, politics and struggle’ (Clark 13), in the hands of the ideologue, myth is all too malleable. According to Deeanne Westbrook, there are mythophobes who find in modern myth not only the archaic but the irrational, the manipulative and the muddled. In this view myth is a system used by some for the control of others … Roland Barthes remained an inveterate mythophobe, seeing myth as a political tool [the] bourgeoisie use to control the thought and behavior of the people. (7)

Such mythophobia, however, probably applies less to myth than to ideology masquerading as myth. But we need to recognize that there are relationships between ideological and mythic discourse, and in his study of that subject in the early nineteenth-century American novel, Robert Clark cautions against regarding myth and ideology as absolutely distinct. He argues that mythic speech has evident ideological functions in that it contributes to the imaginary relationships which subjects have with the world, but it is probable that mythic speech influences this relationship only in an ancillary manner since when mythic speech is pure its depoliticisation must weaken its ability to influence material life directly. (13)

The truth is that myth is both inside and outside history, as Lévi-Strauss suggested in Myth and Meaning. He argued that mythological time is both synchronic and diachronic, that it is historically specific as well as ahistorical and that ‘the simple opposition between mythology and history which we are accustomed to make – is not at all a clear-cut one’ (34). Certainly the relationship between myth and ideological discourse is often one through which the latter exploits and adulterates the former. As Peter Conrad reminds us, Third Reich propaganda relied on myths not only to ‘transform reality into a twelve-year nightmare’, but also ‘to conceal the truth from themselves’ (480–81). Yet, however inauthentic and exploitative that relationship may sometimes be, myth still has the capacity not only to survive any ideological perversion but also to display its resilience. Indeed, such a capacity for revision and adaptation in America’s mythic repertoire was increasingly obvious in the last century, even before the blows that were dealt to American triumphalism in the aftermath of the Vietnam War: the idealism of the nation’s earliest dreams of itself as a space of limitless promise evolving into material abundance were incapable of surviving their trial by the actual record of its history. That ‘fresh, green breast of the new world’ (Fitzgerald 140) contained a certain beauty, with its echo of ancient origin and archetypal purity, but

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even in the nineteenth century the internal contradictions were manifest – in the effort to purge division through civil war, and to impose the pretence of a national imperative on all Americans, at all costs – even genocidal ones. As the nation struggled to absorb a greater ethnic diversity, its myths came to be seen as grossly irrelevant to anything other than the reductive, white, Eurocentric and male-gendered experience. The literature that Americans produced throughout much of the twentieth century was often fully (if seldom explicitly) aware of this exhaustion, and at times subtly refused any mythic uplift, perhaps most famously in the final lines of The Great Gatsby, where F. Scott Fitzgerald’s imagery of transcendence is couched in a language of defeat, of laborious forward motion being forever overwhelmed by the currents of time, the pose being one of ironic heroism. The Jeffersonian myth of agrarian virtue was replaced by others more capable of supporting America’s geopolitical imperatives. Such efforts to control the ideological frame might well come under the heading of what some have called ‘false myths’ (Gerster and Cords xiii) – false but continually reinforced, and managing to consolidate themselves in and through the modern media. The essays in this collection draw attention, however, to a surprising range of new visions in American literature in more recent years, a gathering that explores the evidence of a genuine transition in the nation’s mythic life. This literature is not only aware of the flaws and limitations of ‘false myths’, but takes as one of its subjects the legacy of that corruption. These texts are frequently concerned with issues of lost community, accompanied by widespread despair and a sense of futility. But if the old mythic centres cannot hold, there is yet a growing awareness of what Leslie Heywood calls in this volume ‘a new mythology of the postmodern’: the coming of a more inclusive, multicultural and syncretic ethos. This revision is one that treats the static Jungian monomyth with considerable scepticism. The essentialist paradigms of LéviStrauss and Carl Jung need to give some ground to a more culturally engaged and contemporary nexus, and in her book The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth (1999), Wendy Doniger effectively argues that postmodern cultures do need to reconsider their attachment to the Jungian reservoir of archetypes, since there are some themes that those archetypes seldom, if ever, deal with, such as homosexuality. According to Doniger, the rationale for such neglect is clear – mythic archetypes almost always have, as a latent agenda, the biological and spiritual survival of a particular race, in both senses of the word: race as contest and as species (‘us against them’). Such myths regard homosexual acts, for example, as potentially subversive of this agenda. (Doniger xiii)

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The case for a more contemporary revision of myth is thus generated, at least partly, by significant mutations in social norms. Here is a point at which social realities can, and perhaps must, be absorbed by the mythic inventory. There must be periods in human history when the storehouse of myth is amended, either added to or subtracted from. But Doniger is also refreshingly aware that in that stocktaking we need to be involved with both sameness as well as difference: ‘the radical particularising of much recent theory in cultural anthropology … seems to deny any shared base to members of the same culture, much less to humanity as a whole’ (Doniger 75). It is precisely this kind of careful reorientation that characterizes a good deal of contemporary American literature. Although structuralist anthropology sees in myth a potential source of universal unity, there is always, too, a recognition that such unity is an ideal condition, desired and rarely achieved. For Lévi-Strauss, the unity of myth is never more than tangential and projected … It is a phenomenon of the imagination, resulting from the attempt at interpretation; its function is to endow the myth with synthetic form and to prevent its disintegration into a confusion of opposites. (5)

Yet if the dialogue between unity and divergence in mythological thought is both characteristic of and necessary to the life of myth, contemporary cultures are themselves subject to fast mutations in an environment of global energies, with their own coherence being tested perhaps more than ever before. Mythic paradigms have been affected by such flux, and in America particularly a new pragmatism has been applied to them so that we may agree with Bronislaw Malinowski’s realisation that in such a context myth ‘is not an idle tale, but a hard-worked active force’ (101). Mythogenesis is of course rooted in the needs of time and place, needs that are reflexive as well as communitarian. Provoked by more than a generation of crisis and self-scrutiny, contemporary America’s determination to imagine itself anew, to rediscover itself as a confident pivot of mythic energy, is clear in the literature discussed in this volume. In the aftermath of catastrophe, be it Vietnam or 9/11, that urge for redefinition has demanded a new scribing of America’s mythic idiom and the triumphalist logic that underpinned it. Although there is in much contemporary literature a post-structuralist resistance to an inclusive vision, there is also a more liberal willingness to embrace what might be called cultural syncresis. Multiculturalism in the United States demands the cohabitation of sameness and difference in a reinscribed mythology offering models of syncresis and interaction between different ethnic groups in an increasingly diverse society. The

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essays gathered here analyse the sure signs of this phenomenon. They look, for instance, at the models of cultural syncresis found in contemporary Asian American writing, and they discover there an acceptance that ethnic integration can happen in an America still being shaped by the vitality of a plural culture. Gender, ethnic and race boundaries are increasingly challenged as new mythic borderlands emerge. Bilingualism and biculturalism are often the norm in such borderlands, a synthesis of cultures that is capable of merging the old polarities. For instance, in the fiction of contemporary American women, such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Jane Smiley, we often find a rejection of competitive individualism as masculinist and patriarchal. Instead these writers tend to favour new models of selfhood that insist upon relatedness, and a more open, revised type of subjectivity. Another crucial topic for American literature, and of course one of the most potent of all foundation myths, is that of the frontier. The work of contemporary writers such as the novelist Cormac McCarthy and the poet Jorie Graham expresses a desire to reconnect present-day America with that determining myth and in so doing to reassess the relationship of people to the land. In the last thirty years, American writing has incorporated stories of defeat, stories of the land and its people, within a revised concept of national exceptionalism and human possibility, written from both intercultural and transcultural perspectives. Contemporary American literature involves more permeable boundaries of geography and selfhood, it incorporates the stories of previously marginalized groups, and it describes emerging hybrid myths that combine mainstream with other cultures. Contemporary American literature also seizes upon America’s myths as sites of continual reinvention, of endless possibilities, and thereby reminds us of their renewable and sustainable power. * * * The editors of this volume commissioned critical essays with an open mind about the ways in which the contributors might address the place of mythology in contemporary American literature and about the ways that they would define or describe ‘myth’ in relation to their topics. The introductory remarks above are drawn in part from key features of their discoveries and provide a framework for the emphasis on ideology that readers will encounter in the essays’ discussion of American myths. The essay summaries that follow below give further details about the critical contexts that are applied to myth by each contributor. The editors set out at the start of this project to take a sounding of current critical opinions on the topic of contemporary (approximately

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post-1970) American literature and mythology at what seemed, as we began a new millennium, an appropriate time to mark and measure such an important theme in American culture. Inevitably, in order to keep up with the moving target of contemporary literature, the essayists had to select a point in time to make their analyses, but they aimed to write pieces that would serve as lasting appraisals not only of the general topic of this volume but also of the individual writers that their essays discuss. The essays deal both with foundational American myths such as the American Dream and the frontier, as well as contemporary contexts such as sports, technology, sexuality and the body, gender and multiculturalism – including African American, Asian American, Hispanic American and Native American perspectives. Another editorial aim was to include literary criticism from American and European scholars, allowing for transcontinental viewpoints that bridge the differences shown in the vigorous contemporary debates about the globalisation of American studies. Part of what this volume demonstrates is the vibrancy of critical perspectives internationally, and the potential for new avenues of inquiry within and beyond the particular topics addressed in individual essays. The thirteen essays are set out alphabetically, rather than grouped under themes or sub-topics, for ease of use as a reference source. The editors themselves have written essays that examine the connections between mythologies of the United States and those of either European or Native American traditions. William Blazek considers Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine novels as chronicles combining Ojibwe mythology and contemporary US culture in ways that reinvest a sense of mythic identity within a multicultural, postmodern America. After noting how the critical emphasis on Native American elements in Erdrich’s fiction has resulted in limited investigation of such features in her work as the impact of technology, corporate capitalism and consumerism on modern US life, Blazek then applies close readings of The Bingo Palace and Tales of Burning Love to explore the themes of love and money in those novels. He observes how a ‘wild hope’ of contingent promise underlies Erdrich’s writing, a hope that depends on reconnecting the individual self to family, community and myth. Michael K. Glenday’s analysis of Jayne Anne Phillips’ work, and in particular her novel Machine Dreams, explores in it the contexts where myth and dream interact with each other. Phillips recognizes that although the American urge to myth has been forced underground, with modern expressions of it being secretive and at best shared by the few, this nevertheless brings myth very close to the wellsprings of creativity.

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Glenday suggests that in such ways Phillips’ work approaches both Jungian and Freudian understandings of the relationship between dream and myth. Betty Louise Bell is one of four essayists in this collection who focus their criticism on authors of Native American heritage. In the first part of ‘Indians with Voices’, Bell carefully argues that Roy Harvey Pearce’s seminal Native American studies text Savagism and Civilization fails to acknowledge its white elitist assumptions about what constitutes ‘The American Mind’ and views Native Americans along a primitive-savage binary that helped to create a twentieth-century ‘national mythos of innocence and destiny’. In political terms, this view reflected US government policies of assimilation and removal towards Native tribes. On the other hand, Bell illustrates, contemporary Native writers such as Linda Hogan, Tom King and Gerald Vizenor have attempted to transform such segregationist attitudes and binary oppositions into ‘sites of hybridity that resist categorisation and, thereby, challenge systems of domination’. She also acknowledges the inherent difficulties in this effort, for these writers ‘exist in a delicate paradox of writing from within and from without’ as they create what Bell calls ‘resistance literature’ that challenges deep-rooted stereotypes and ideologies of the white American self and the Native Other. Christopher Brookeman takes an interdisciplinary approach to his study of the impact of Muhammad Ali on Norman Mailer’s non-fiction writing about heavyweight boxing. Brookeman places Mailer’s mythic representation of Ali within the context of the author’s views about African American exceptionalism and its revolutionary challenge to white bourgeois America, an argument Mailer first propounded in ‘The White Negro’. The essay then imaginatively proceeds to examine Mailer’s The Fight (1975) in relation to a variety of examples that concern American racial politics of the 1960s and 1970s, with a particular emphasis on African American cultural adaptability and defiance – from the verbal contests of ‘the dozens’, to the exaggerated parodies of the actor Stepin Fetchit, to Ali’s own image-making and his complex and often controversial personae. In her investigation into the postmodern and its literary canon, Leslie Heywood calls for a cultural and literary theory that refocuses on ‘multicultural postmodernism’. ‘The Individual’s Ghost: Toward a New Mythology of the Postmodern’ criticizes theoretical assertions that marginalize race and gender, while it provides fresh ways of understanding the work of female writers such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Maxine Hong Kingston, Jane Smiley, Louise Erdrich and Kathy Acker. These authors,

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Heywood argues, challenge traditional mythologies of subjectivity and individualism while reconstructing fictional representation through ‘alternative myths of multiplicity, connection, collaboration, and context’. Among the perceptive illustrations of this thesis is an analysis of Smiley’s novel A Thousand Acres that shows how mythology associated with the American Dream – based upon competitiveness, superiority and masculine power – is not only a source of destructive violence and a justification for the silencing of women but also a necessary fiction for the female protagonist that may provide ‘the first step on the harrowing road out of ghostliness’. Phillipa Kafka writes from a similar theoretical outlook in her essay but draws specifically on Asian American fiction to explore the concept of syncresis. The combining of elements from traditional Asian cultures and from American success mythologies is a distinct feature of the fiction of the contemporary Asian American women writers that Kafka examines. Authors discussed here include M. Evelina Galang (Her Wild American Self), R. A. Sasaki (The Loom and Other Stories), Gish Jen (Typical American) and Wang Ping (American Visa); and they take as their subject matter the generational and cross-cultural differences found in immigrant families from Chinese, Japanese and Filipina ancestry. Characters in these stories face not only the prejudices and stereotypes typically encountered by first- through third-generation Asian Americans, but also the problems of assimilation into mainstream US society, with the losses from their own ethnic inheritance weighted against the gains from acknowledging their ‘double consciousness’. Kafka’s focus on American success mythologies – with their unrealistic demands and distorted promises, their equating of material abundance with happiness, their persistence and malleability – provides a key to understanding the diverse selection of texts in her comparative analysis. Another foundational myth of American civilisation, the Western frontier, is explored in Peter Messent’s essay on The Border Trilogy by Cormac McCarthy. The novelist’s use of and deviations from classic Western motifs is the central concern of this essay, which finds that ‘Standard American myths of heroic male individualism and national exceptionalism are endorsed, but also increasingly interrogated, in ambiguous texts which both rely on the formulas of Western narrative but also extend and subvert their patternings’. The ambiguities in the texts include questions about autonomous action in a deterministic or otherwise controlling universe, the complications that arise when American exceptionalism interacts with the even older and as deeply rooted national myths of Mexico, and the contrasts between those elements that

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earn the novels their popularity and those that give them philosophical and allusive depth. Applying critical practices from border studies and concepts of myth formation, this essay yields important insights not only for McCarthy readers but also for those interested in contemporary responses to the cultural history of the Western. David Mogen’s essay on ‘Native American Visions of Apocalypse’ pinpoints the unexpectedly well-suited combination of Native American prophecy and science fiction in novels by Leslie Marmon Silko and Gerald Vizenor. Books such as The Almanac of the Dead, Bearheart and Dead Voices express apocalyptic landscapes that illustrate the destructive political, social and ecological costs of Western ideas of progress; but Silko and Vizenor also present an alternate vision of time and history that utilizes Native beliefs and traditions. Thus, within the political protest, ironic inversions and social satire of these works, Mogen also sees a transformative element not uncommon in Native American writing – one that allows apocalypse to be understood as change, and even (as in Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus) for the possibility of imagined tribal utopias. The next essay in this collection looks at the science fiction genre in relation to the computer and its depictions in contemporary American novels and short stories. David Seed first discusses the emergence of a ‘positive myth of the machine’, traceable to the origins of the republic and accelerating in the twentieth century, before questions about the direction and benefits of American know-how were asked especially following World War II. His review of an extensive variety of texts starting from the early Cold War era establishes how different reactions to the promise or threat of technology developed in the science fiction of this period. He concentrates on representations of the computer – from the large-scale machines depicted in Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952) and Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy (1966), for example, to the intricate systems of microchip computing presented in such cyberpunk novels as Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and Sterling’s The Hacker Crackdown (1992). Both comprehensive in scope and authoritative in its conclusions, ‘The Brave New World of Computing in Postwar American Science Fiction’ provides valuable analysis of the often contradictory myths of the machine in its contested relationship to humanity. The two essays that follow both address the genre of poetry. In ‘Mythologies of “Ecstatic immersion”: America, the Poem, and the Ethics of Lyric in Jorie Graham and Lisa Jarnot’, Nick Selby presents a sophisticated argument about the construction of lyric spaces, examining recent publications by Graham and Jarnot, particularly in relation to

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Whitman and Emerson’s iconic and transcendent conception of America as the ‘greatest poem’. The vertical thrust of Whitman’s aspirational lyric project is compared with contemporary poems that attend to surfaces and delve underneath them in order to reformulate language for an era made suspicious of progressive ideologies and facing ecological crisis. Redirecting spatial metaphors in these ways, Selby argues, allows Graham and Jarnot to question poetry’s mythic creation of the individual and the nation, to challenge mythologies based on aesthetics of intervention and control, and to provide urgently needed ethical responsibility for our linguistic and physical engagement with the world. Mark Shackleton’s contribution contrasts the poetry of Gary Snyder and Simon J. Ortiz, in particular their use of the trickster Coyote from Native American mythology. In ‘Whose Myth Is It Anyway?’ examples from the work of Snyder and other ‘white shaman’ poets are compared with selections from Ortiz’s poetry to show how the former’s distance from ancestral knowledge and the mythic roots of Native community identity results in an ersatz poetry written from ethnopoetic ignorance. On the other hand, Ortiz’s Coyote poems speak from an Acuna Pueblo voice, an assured one that is comfortable in its play with language and subject, that seeks no divisions between place, family, myth and art. The issue of cultural appropriation of Native materials by Euro-American writers lies at the heart of this essay, but while Shackleton explains the pitfalls of misusing the traditions of Native storytelling he also reveals how the Coyote figure is renewed and updated through cross-cultural transformations, at least those that are informed by a dialogue between Native and non-Native writers and their audiences. A second essay on the mythology of American sports is the penultimate chapter in this volume, and it relates not only to Christopher Brookeman’s contribution on boxing but also to David Mogen’s study of apocalypse in recent literature. Deeanne Westbrook extends her previous work on baseball’s myths (in the book Ground Rules) to investigate how the millennium features in four baseball novels: Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., Mark Harris’s It Looked Like For Ever, W. P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe and Nancy Willard’s Things Invisible to See. She focuses on key manifestations of millennial anxiety, including fear of aging and death, the generally welcome appearance of other-wordly beings such as angels, the uncanny signs and omens of impending apocalypse, and recourse to divine comedy. The baseball narratives, she argues, are assembled through bricolage, ‘building, in Franz Boaz’s phrase “new mythological worlds” from the shattered remains of the old … not only elemental myths … but also scraps from

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popular culture, modern science, and not least from baseball itself’. Grounded in literary theory, modern sociology and philosophy, the essay presents a definitive guide through the novels’ imagined worlds, and concludes that the darkly contradictory and random nature of their millennial vision is countered by the rejuvenating laughter of their comic invention. The final piece in the collection is ‘Finding a Voice, Telling a Story: Constructing Communal Identity in Contemporary American Women’s Writing’ by Lois Parkinson Zamora. It shares concerns about female agency, ethnicity and communal identity with the essays by Leslie Heywood and Phillipa Kafka above, and begins with an explication of the differences between nineteenth-century male writers’ privileging of silence and late twentieth-century female writers’ efforts to rectify the imbalances that result from being silenced. Zamora then discusses novels by Toni Morrison, Leslie Marmon Silko, Maxine Hong Kingston and Sandra Cisneros with the intention of discovering the means by which they acknowledge the threats to an autonomous female self and attempt to create a fully inclusive community that hears women’s voices and fashions a new history of gender, race and ethnic relations. Voices of the living and the dead, choruses, sounds, songs, folktales, mythic adventure stories and different languages are some of the elements used by the novelists in this process. In a forceful conclusion that accords with a key aim of this volume of essays as a whole in assessing the relevance of myth to recent American literature, Zamora proposes that ‘finding a voice to transcend the “nothingness” of invisible histories and cultures constitutes a feminist mode in contemporary US fiction’. Furthermore, she asserts, the work of late twentieth-century American women writers forms ‘a durable tradition … Indeed, they have become true American “myths” – stories we tell ourselves in order to understand who and what we most basically are’.

Works Cited Blonsky, Marshall. American Mythologies. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. Clark, Robert. History, Ideology and Myth in American Fiction, 1823–52. London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984. Conrad, Peter. Modern Times, Modern Places. New York: Knopf, 1999. Doniger, Wendy. The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. The Cambridge

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Edition of the Works of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Frye, Northrop. Myth and Metaphor: Selected Essays, 1974–1988. Ed. Robert D. Denham. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1990. Gerster, Patrick and Nicholas Cords. Myth in American History. New York: Glencoe Press, 1977. Gould, Eric. Mythical Intentions in Modern Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Myth and Meaning. London: Routledge, 1978. ——. The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology: I. Trans. John and Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper Colophon, 1975. Malinowski, Bronislaw. Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954. Segal, Robert A. Theorizing About Myth. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. Slotkin, Richard. The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization 1800–1890. 1985. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. Westbrook, Deeanna. Ground Rules: Baseball and Myth. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996.

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Indians with Voices: Revisiting Savagism and Civilization

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Chapter 1 RoleIndians with Voices: Revisiting Savagism and Civilization Betty Louise Bell

Keep in mind that Indian Bureau, Indian reservations, Indian schools, Indian college, Indian art, Indian novels, Indian music, Indian shows, Indian movies, and Indian everything create prejudice and do not help our race. Wassaja (Carlos Montezuma), 1915

Native American authors, in creating a literature distinctive of their experiences and cultures, have first had to confront and negotiate their own otherness in American history and literary tradition. Strategies in this confrontation have, for the most part, refused to isolate native life and cultures from colonial history and its literatures; instead, the principal strategy has been the appropriation and hybridization of those literatures to create intertextual opportunities for political intervention. Oppositional narratives, Euroamerican or Indian, produced by the colonial or postcolonial subject can reify the racial and cultural binaries used to justify the displacement and elimination of indigenous populations. Native authors have had to resist the demand to position, order and categorize experiences which, simply, confirm current social, political and literary hierarchies. Indigenous survival, as reflected in postcolonial cultures and literatures, has always depended on the ability to transform social ordering and its supporting binaries into sites of hybridity that resist categorization and, thereby, challenge systems of domination. This survival has depended, as well, on the creation of an indigenous perspective, independent of but in dialogue with the dominant mythologies of the United States. Early native writers produced ambivalent narratives which reflected – in language, genre and audience – their interpellation as colonial subjects, but which also challenged native absence and silence. When Samson Occum confesses, in his 1772 autobiographical essay, that ‘I speak like a fool, but I am Constrained’, the circumstances of native representation of life and reason are revealed and, through this revelation, Occum forces a monologic discourse to integrate and represent the silencing and othering of his experiences (526). Contemporary native

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authors dialogize American history and literature to recuperate twentiethcentury indigenous experience and land. Of some authors mentioned in this text, Linda Hogan, in Mean Spirit (1990), retells the Osage Terror in the 1920s; Tom King, in Green Grass, Running Water (1993), makes the creation of America the (ir)responsibility of four tricksters; and Gerald Vizenor, in Landfill Meditation (1991), parodies racial essentialism. These narratives hybridize Western racial and cultural oppositions to disrupt political power and control gained from essentialized binary – separate and Other – histories and cultures. With postcolonial authors, there is a necessary and contradictory reliance on the strategies of colonization to effect cultural decolonization. Such authors exist in a delicate paradox of writing from within and from without, of creating resistance literature from the discourses of hegemonic domination and oppression. In several native texts, the authority to speak is ‘borrowed’ from canonical texts. Michael Horse, the storyteller in Hogan’s Mean Spirit, rewrites the Bible to produce ‘the Book of Horse’: ‘He was writing for those who would come later, for the next generations and the next, as if the act of writing was itself part of divination and prophecy, an act of deliverance’ (341). In his reliance on biblical metaphors and images, Horse converts Christian discourse, once used to justify the elimination of native peoples, into native spiritual primacy and divine purpose. Native history, however, belongs to Cry, ‘the teller of events, the woman who carried weight of history on her back’ (338). Hogan’s goal, like other native writers, is not simply the usurpation of biblical and canonical authority; instead she encourages and exploits her readers’ spiritual identification with Horse as prophet in order to transfer authority to the oral tradition which, then, produces a non-hierarchical, hybridized history of native storytelling. She is aware, as are other native writers, that literacy ‘consumes its own oral antecedents and … even destroys their memory’ (Ong 15). Orality, unlike writing, is without residue or historical authority and, if the oral tradition is to survive, it must be housed in the written word. Travelling into the twenty-first century, native writers are still struggling against America’s fascination with its construction of the nineteenthcentury Indian. It can be argued that every native novel, nineteenth- and twentieth-century, is a writing against generic plains warriors, guide squaws, almost white Princesses, and other degrading or nostalgic images of ‘real’ Indians. Native American literary studies, as well, has had to contest critical enchantment with these images. With Roy Harvey Pearce’s Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind, first published in 1953, the field of Native American Studies was

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created. From that point until the present criticism, America’s invention of the Indian has dominated much of the discussion in native literary studies. Like many of our contemporary writers, native critics have had to find a way to address these images without replicating them. Pearce’s text, produced during the first wave of American Studies and still heavily mediating a scholar’s entrance into the field, is a cautionary example of how even the best of intellectual histories, if they remain monologic, can legitimize the political and literary removals of Native Americans.

Removals As demonstrated in Edward Said’s Orientalism, a critique of colonialism can replicate the power relations between colonizer and colonized. The representation of a conceptual network, informed by the binary of European speech and native silence, does not interrogate or shift the European perspective of history and culture; indeed, there is the possibility of its becoming implicated in systems of knowledge that have enabled native oppression and removals. Nineteenth-century America fashioned a language of Indian removal which was, in policy and in literature, made possible by organizing white and Indian cultures into separate evolutionary trajectories towards ‘civilization’. Since European arrival, recorders and cultural historians have (re)produced paradigms which constitute ‘civilized’ knowledge of ‘savage’. In influential intellectual and cultural reorganizations of American nationalist discourse and its production of the Indian, the intent has been to bring these paradigms into critical consciousness in order to disrupt them. Yet, as in the case of Said’s text, a critique of that discourse often fails to decentre or detotalize strategies of power and, instead, can produce a text committed to their repetition and reenactment. The ‘golden age’ of American Studies perceived its discourse and methods as a revolutionary and transformational event in American history and culture; however, in revisiting that site half a century later, its creation of a national mythos of innocence and destiny can be seen as a simple reorganization of republican high culture and racist ideology. In the 1950s American Studies was a relatively new discipline, still vying for institutional support but with methods and assumptions already articulated in the 1930s and 1940s by Vernon Louis Parrington, Perry Miller and F. O. Matthiessen. Between 1950 and 1955, three books were published that reified America’s singular character and culture: Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land (1950), Pearce’s Savagism and Civilization

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(1953), and R.W. B. Lewis’s The American Adam (1955). The books were responses to a post-war America, and an uncertain decade’s need to remythologize the nation’s birth and redefine its relations with the first nations. The clear intent of Smith’s and Lewis’s works is the ‘worlding’ of America.1 Their historical narratives are native-free, locating the past in Europe and bringing the land to consciousness only with the arrival of Europeans. Smith makes very little progress on Columbus’s vision of the New World as an empty house; Lewis argues a will to innocence in the face of European experience: both authors displace the Indian with white Indians, natural men unlimited by land or history or action. Pearce’s study considers America’s obsession with the Indian, and this consideration has earned the book a transgressive reputation. Certainly, when Smith does not even mention indigenous presence and when Lewis allows such presence to enter only through the fantasies of white authors, Pearce can be said to offer an inclusive history of America’s past. However, there are more similarities between the authors than is immediately or historically evident. Each text attempts to monologize ‘America’ through the ideas and cultural conversations of bourgeois white men. Each text understands the essential qualities of the West to be eternal, and civilization to be incontestably white and male. Each text assumes manifest destiny to be a white male context for adventure and self-realization. And each text promotes founding mythologies of America as products of intellectual history. Their similiarities, in intent and consequence, are informed by Parrington’s paradigm for American Studies.2 Gene Wise, in an early article, reduced these assumptions to their essentials: (a) There is an ‘American Mind’. That mind is more or less homogeneous. Though it may prove to be complex and constructed of many different layers, it is in fact a single entity. 1 I take this concept from Gayatri Spivak’s theory of the literary production of the Third World; however, American colonization, unlike British imperialism, believed itself to be at the beginning of history. As such it was necessary for colonials to create a world for the American. Histories of America do use the subaltern, the native, for the writing of its own history; yet that history’s intent is the de-worlding of the indigenous. 2 These early works of Pearce, Smith and Lewis are also informed by the most influential historical essay of the century, Frederick Jackson Turner’s ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’. Only Smith, however, acknowledges that debt and, almost forty years later, its responsibilities for the absences and distortions in his vision of America. Ironically, given the chance to rewrite his text, Smith said he would attempt to produce a text with the scope, the materials, of Pearce’s Savagism and Civilization.

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(b) What distinguishes the American Mind is its location in the ‘New World’. Because of this, Americans are characteristically hopeful, innocent, individualistic, pragmatic, idealistic. (c) The American Mind can theoretically be found in anyone American. But it comes to most coherent expression in the country’s leading thinkers. (d) The American Mind is an enduring form in our intellectual history. Its distinctive themes – Puritanism, Individualism, Progress, Pragmatism, Transcendentalism, Liberalism – run through virtually the whole of America’s past. (e) Though the study of ‘popular’ minds – e.g. Davy Crockett, Daniel Webster, Buffalo Bill – might be academically legitimate, America is revealed most profoundly in its ‘high culture’. Any paradigm built around the assumption of an American Mind, an elite and literate intellect, assumes the absence of all Others from its consciousness, an absence so whole that there can be no dissenting voices from women or ethnic and indigenous people or working-class white men. In his recent novel, Green Grass, Running Water, Cherokee author Tom King imagines the American Mind as four travelling tricksters, aided by Coyote, named Robinson Crusoe, Hawkeye, Ishmael and the Lone Ranger. Each trickster provides a partial representational history of an intellectual culture that has silenced natives and celebrated the (white) natural man. As a multiple and parodic site, the American Mind collapses into racist artifacts that are manipulated by Coyote. Pearce’s intellectual history of Euroamerican Indian imagery replicates American colonial and republican hegemony; King, however, deploys the trickster to disrupt the binary of ‘savagism and civilization’.

The Return of the Vanishing American While pursuing his early interests in primitivism, Pearce became interested in the cultural work being done by American Studies scholars. Their methods, the synthesizing of a history of ideas in order to arrive at a pivotal historical moment or theme, were similar to those learned from his mentor, Arthur O. Lovejoy. Savagism, in his text, is always already an idea, whereas civilization is always already the history that produces it. In his transition from primitive to savage, Pearce seems to be unaware of how the repetition of primitivism and savagism, through white representations, can (re)produce differing effects of harm: primitivism carries a

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nostalgia for a less urbane and artful world; savagism, as an insult to decency, is a justification for removal. It is possible to educate the primitive, even to celebrate their childish innocence, but savagery must be expelled from soul and culture. When Pearce refers to America’s ‘doublemindedness’ about the American Indian, he is referring to its eternal conflict between nostalgia and repulsion (76). He presents colonial ‘doublemindedness’, again, as a set of oppositions responsive to the ‘Idea, Symbol, and Image’ of the Indian as savage or noble savage (xviii). Difference, for Pearce, is ‘a melancholy fact’ in the construction of Indians; it is never the location for ambivalence or projection (65). The political intervention, anticipated in his restoration of the Indian as a national construction, is informed and frustrated by his repetition of a racist discourse. A social history, such as Pearce’s, of race or sex or class representations can reconstruct past beliefs and allow for a retroactive deconstruction of those beliefs. However, is it possible to rehabilitate a destructive belief while relying on a complicit paradigm for reform? The placement of Savagism and Civilization within a singular unified American Mind promises the exclusion of Indians from the discussion. Pearce’s text not only originates in and perpetuates a racialized, gendered history, he is careful to select readers within that history. His persistent use of the masculine pronoun may be pleaded as past stylistic convention; however, when it is used as pronoun for natives, it implies a singular, solitary individual on the brink of extinction. His plural address is more troubling, embracing, in a very deliberate fashion, a white audience in possession of historical agency: ‘Yet somehow he would not be anything but what he was – roaming, unreliable, savage. So they concluded that they were destined to try to civilize him, because he could not and would not be civilized’ (53). Pearce announces at the beginning of his work that ‘this is a book about a belief’ (xvii). Savagism, he wants us to know immediately, is an intellectual construction, a discursive practice which is, as a concept, subordinate to the mind that invented it. To argue the Indian as colonial construction and invention is to invite a consideration of how natives may have manipulated those constructions as cultural performances, and how they used such performances to resist colonial definitions and management of native identity. For instance, the nineteenth-century princess-author exploited white male desire and national constructions of Indian women for public performances and enthusiastic audiences. A common challenge in contemporary native writing and criticism is how to stage ‘Indian’ without reifying white representation of natives. King

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and Gerald Vizenor rely on irony to create a double-voice around the image. Vizenor, in Landfill Meditation, parodies not only the culture’s but natives’ attachments to such inventions. Almost Browne, a character forced to live between literal determinations of race, perceives his mixed-blood, hybrid identity as qualifications of otherwise exact racial measures: ‘Almost is my name, my real name, believe that or not, because my father ran out of money and then out of gas on the way back … I was born in the back seat of a beatup reservation car, almost white, almost on the reservation, and almost a real person’ (6). In Almost, Vizenor imagines the existential and experiential impossibility of living within racial and social orderings. Living between mutually exclusive racial identities, Almost is neither white nor Indian and, for him, race becomes a site of imperfect racial mimicry. And like Pearce, he perceives ‘a real person’ – a person capable of subjectivity and historical agency – as white.

How It Was For Civilized Men Pearce attempts his intended deconstruction of the savagism and civilization binary through a long view of its ideological and cultural work. His historical frame, 1609–1851, and research are ambitious, but the question guiding his study betrays a complicity with his critique: ‘how it was and what it meant for civilized men to believe that in the savage and his destiny there was manifest all that they had long grown away from and yet still had to overcome’ (xvii). Pearce retraces the parasitic relationship of the civilized with the savage and replicates the Indian as civilization’s silent shadow self. Belle Graycloud, a matriarch in Linda Hogan’s text, also perceives Indians as ‘shadow people, living almost invisibly on the fringes around them’ but, for Belle, this allows for ‘a strange kind of freedom’ (81). However, in Pearce’s external and internal appropriation of the image for an examination of white consciousness, the Indian is reduced to thingness, unable to manipulate the potential of marginality. Indeed, his discourse is often little more than an apology for fated racial destinies: ‘The Indian’s way and its fatal weakness could be placed in intelligible relationship to the white man’s way and its glorious strength. Westward civilized destiny was clearly manifest even in the state of the savages who were about to die’ (71). Again, destiny and manifest are the spiritual property of white settler culture, soon to evolve into the full-blown revelation of manifest destiny. The Indian, as the dim and fleeting image of the white man, is contained and condemned by his own spiritual disease. Manifest destiny, westward expansion, savagism,

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civilization: all carry stories that Leslie Marmon Silko has referred to as ‘the end of the story … the way all their stories end, encircling slowly to choke the life away’ (231–32). Native writers have struggled for the story, for its ending, to transform it into a living and changing mythology that can re-envision the past and future of indigenous peoples. Silko, in Ceremony, responds to the failure of Euroamerican history to empower native peoples in the production of the New World. The power of the story and its creation of good and evil is accessible to and determined by both natives and non-natives. The native witch, who is successful in producing the greatest harm, simply brings to the competition a story that creates the arrival of the European and its historical consequences: They will take this world from ocean to ocean they will turn on each other they will destroy each other ... They will lay the final pattern with these rocks they will lay it across the world and explode everything. (137)

In Silko’s text, even the threat of nuclear war can be traced to the evil agency of a native witch and reservation uranium mines. Always, in native texts, the contested site is the story; for Silko, this contestation includes white struggles to free themselves of canonical stories built around death and theft: ‘If the white people never looked beyond the lie, to see that theirs was a nation built on stolen land, then they would never be able to understand how they had been used by the witchery’ (191). It may be argued that Pearce relies on the ‘lie’ of civilization discourse to shape the ideological effect of his inquiry; perhaps he believed that the historical and political distance from himself and his sources would be self-evident and provide an ironic distance sufficient to protect his work from replicating colonial discourse and capable of bringing the reader into critical consciousness. His failure, however, to consider the story as his own or to consider the absence of any native subjectivity ensures the replication of colonial monologue. He fails to place clear outrage or condemnation between himself and the idea, as if the idea could be independent from its current representation, which often leaves the reader confused about whose sentiments and ‘fated’ knowledge are addressed: This Indian, and his counterpart in literature, excited American readers behind the frontier. But they knew he was fated to be something else … For when they did see Indians, it was Indians drunken, diseased, and degraded; they were told that Indians beyond the frontier would sooner or later be in

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no better condition … American and European travellers invariably reported scenes of debauchery and violence when Indians were given liquor. (59)

In encounters with Indians, literary contact often preceded physical contact. The most popular transference of Indians to literature, to ethnography and ethnohistory, occurred in the nineteenth century when natives were in the process of enforced education and reservation containment. The irony, of course, is that Indians became more important to the national mythos, more essential to popular culture, as their threat to the United States diminished. Native writers have had to confront the expectation that literature elevates the Indian, and nature betrays him/ her. With a high currency in art and literature, monolithic images of noble or drunken Indians are not easily avoided or exploded. In his novel, Tom King employs both popular images and individual wit to disrupt historical images: ‘There was nothing on but a Western … On the screen an Indian danced his horse in the shallows of a river. On the bank, four old Indians waved their lances. One of them was wearing a red Hawaiian shirt’ (242–43). Like Pearce, King relies on ‘recognition’ images of Indians and a genre committed to Indian defeat; however, King’s purpose is to swerve from recognition by drawing his reader’s eye, finally, to the foreign and contrary moments of the scene. He relies on contradiction in this scene to surprise the reader into dialogue with the image of the Indian in the Western. Pearce is able to create within the Indian/white binary an apology for errors of civilization. Indeed, it is his hope to rehabilitate the past through the historian: ‘Knowing the past, he will be able to sympathize with it; sympathizing with it, he will accept it; accepting it, he will perhaps begin to free himself of the limitations which it sets about him and use more intelligently the opportunities it offers him’ (xx). The historian and the written history are, of course, what remains of a vanished people: ‘the idea of an Indian on this side of the Mississippi will only be found in the page of the historian’ (56). His desire is to bring past and contemporary historians together in sympathy and instruction over an artifact once known as the Indian. Throughout his text nostalgia guides the reader to an understanding of settler culture’s attempts to sympathize with the plight of native peoples as well as meet their own needs. The historical inevitability of settler survival and native death transforms national compassion into resignation, for both settler and native. ‘Concern for the Indian’s sad state’, as Pearce paraphrases the rhetoric of civilization, ‘was as deep and as honest as certainty of his inevitable destruction … For the Indian everywhere was known to be one of the lost’ (58). The most revealing

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and troubling aspect of Savagism and Civilization is its lack of accountability. Roy Harvey Pearce, the intellectual historian, is not accountable, for he is only a synthesizer of ideas. The native cannot be responsible, for he – Indian women do not exist except to define their men’s base treatment of them – is mute and absent. Nineteenth-century American statesmen and writers are not culpable, for they are to be read with sympathy.

Nuna-da-ut-sun’y (The Trail of Tears) Within the American Mind, natives serve to reflect the agency of white men. Throughout Pearce’s narrative all agency is assigned to those who create and enforce the nation’s response to ‘savagism’ – in other words, that part of the binary fated to survive. Even though there was considerable resistance and native authored literature before 1851, the chronological limit of Pearce’s book, there are no instances of native response or reaction to their cultural invention and removal. They exist as a paper tribe to ‘define precisely what the civilized man was not’ (211). Even in relating the Cherokee resistance to their removal from ancestral lands in Georgia, Pearce represents the nation as beaten into passivity and charity: Of the southeastern Indians, only the eastern Cherokees, even then settled on farms and asking for citizenship, tried to assert their American rights. Their resistance was beaten down when in 1838 troops marched them from Georgia to their new home in the west; … Such resistance and such an end to it made one thing clear: Indians could be considered only as charity cases, victims inevitably of the law of civilized progress. (57)

The Cherokee, in fact, sought legal resistance, twice suing in the Supreme Court for the rights to be recognized as a sovereign nation and to remain on their land. Their suit was successful, producing an acknowledgement of their claims to the land and limited sovereignty as ‘domestic dependent nations’.3 Pearce further obliterates the Cherokee history of active resistance by locating protest and speech within white America: ‘Americans suddenly saw in the plight of the Cherokees the plight of all Indians. Denunciation of the federal government, the state of Georgia, and of Georgians piled up in the eastern press … Even young Ralph Waldo Emerson was shocked into making a speech …’ (64). At Removal, the Cherokee had had a written language for over a decade, a national newspaper in the Phoenix, and had prepared a series of ‘Memorials’ to protest 3 Supreme Court Justice John Marshall’s historical ruling in the Cherokee’s suit, Worcester v Georgia (1932), determined a limited sovereignty for all native nations.

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against the loss of their land. Yet Pearce presumes their silence as the ‘sui generis, the American savage’ and implicates himself in the punitive binaries studied (77). The effect here is not simply loss of native agency but the repetition of ‘settler history’, which normalizes that loss and legitimizes ‘the essential qualities of the West’ (Fanon 36).4 In Hogan’s Mean Spirit, the Osage land in north-central Oklahoma is transformed into a pan-tribal community of Cherokee, Creeks, Sioux, and even Euroamericans. But its tensions are informed, as Pearce’s are, by the oppositional cultures and histories of whites and Indians. As a Chickasaw and a tribal outsider to the story, Hogan was criticized by natives for presuming to tell the tribal stories of another nation. She was the first native author to convert specific tribal history into the site of a cultural diaspora. Oklahoma, once Indian Territory and home to 37 nations, is particularly receptive to diasporic narratives. In the story of the Osage murders from their mineral-rich land in the 1920s, she creates the conditions under which the making and remaking of native, not tribal, identity occur. This is a hazardous narrative decision, for her novel could replicate, as Pearce’s study does, the ‘Indian’ and his/her historical and cultural dispossession. The novel sets up the opposition of native and white identity; even the name of the town’– Watona or Talbert – takes on the struggle of oppositional identity. To avoid the repetition of Indian essentialism, Hogan’s task is the common work of every native writer: to dialogize the historical conversation on indigenous identity. With the creation of a pan-tribal narrative, Hogan’s novel requires her, also, to dialogize inter-tribal histories and customs and to create a hybrid native perspective, free of white ventriloquism and racial/tribal categorization. To authorize the Osage terror as genocide and to connect a corner of Oklahoma to a global tribal history, she recreates the Holocaust as a site of hybridity. Hogan’s historian of the Osages, Michael Horse, writes ‘about the exodus of the people, the people who were bent on their losses, no longer part of their land, no longer part of their own lives’ (342). In forging the connections between Western and indigenous histories, Hogan disrupts and decentres the West’s knowledge and inscription of the Other in ‘a fixed hierarchy of civil progress’ (Bhabha, ‘Civility’ 74). The West’s historical and strategic blindness to its violence against indigenous peoples is disrupted by its ‘sameness in difference’ created within the hybrid or third space. Homi Bhabha has written of hybridity as ‘a problematic of colonial representation’, which can reverse ‘the effects of the colonialist disavowal, so that 4 The concept of ‘settler culture’ is also borrowed from Fanon’s argument on the creation of history reflecting settler, rather than native, culture.

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other “denied” knowledges enter upon the dominant discourse and estrange the basis of its authority’ (Bhabha, ‘Signs’ 156). By exposing the savagism and civilization binary as just other sites (white and Indian) of hybridity, Hogan’s novel further subverts this binary by creating a space in which whites begin to look like Indians, and Indians begin to take on the physical appearances of whites: At the Indian school, two Creek girls were so fascinated with white heaven that they dyed their hair yellow like angels in pictures ... One of the school matrons ... began dyeing her hair black, and asked if she could attend the peyote church. She learned Indian songs, and she was so sincere that she was accepted as a bona fide honorary Indian. (171)

This exchange of racial categories is more evidence of white and Indian ‘double-lives’ (170). The subversion of Western history and authority and the creation of a counter-discourse is available in the space of hybridity; however, as these images of attempted racial exchange demonstrate, the positioning of cultural differences against each other dialogically does not, in itself, destroy the ‘official language’ of racial categories. Hogan, like many native writers, is finally anxious about the consequences of the destruction of such categories. Hybridity as, simply, the dissolution of differences is of little interest to native writers; for centuries, Western discourse has claimed the authority to speak through the presentation of an unraced, democratic voice. The hybrid moment allows for natives to enter the story and to use that moment for political intervention, but it is also important for that moment to remain a politicized and contestatory event. There are moments in Hogan’s text where hybridity dialogizes or fuses two separate entities: an example common to almost all native texts is the exact exchange between the natural and human worlds, with the land mirroring the psyche of people and reflecting the violence visited against them. Hogan fuses images of the wealthy Osages’ newly acquired material world with their ancestral lands; yet the land and the people cannot be nurtured by material wealth: when water is needed, oil is without use. The schoolteacher’s identity as a ‘bona fide honorary Indian’ represents a willing, even eager, dialogue between white and native histories, between dominant and indigenous cultural discourses, but that identity is not, in fact, Native American. In this image, as throughout the novel, hybridity allows the native author to encounter history and identity with the authority of self and Other.

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Twenty-first Century Native Americans In 1953, with the Lone Ranger heating up the horizon, termination became the new Indian policy of the United States Government. Between the official years of termination, 1953 and 1962, the United States terminated thirteen tribal nations and over a hundred bands, communities and rancherias. The debate leading to legislation had been active for many years after World War II, intensifying finally in 1949 with the Hoover Commission’s recommendation that termination and urbanization of tribal peoples become the new federal policy on Indians. The Commission, chaired by former president Herbert Hoover, proposed forcing natives into the economic and cultural mainstream by withdrawing federal protection and services and outlawing a hundred tribal constitutions. During the preparation of Savagism and Civilization, Pearce had to have had contact with the debate on tribal termination. The debate took years to become law and would not have escaped the interest of a scholar working on American Indians. Yet there is no acknowledgment or compensation, in the book’s materials or method, for the impending threat to native presence and voice; instead, Pearce’s text historicizes and normalizes native non-existence. In his repetition of a discursive practice of native death and cultural destruction, Pearce envisions no possible living or enduring indigenous culture or tribal peoples separate from the machinery of civilization. With the discourse reproduced in his book, termination is a gratuitous act. Within the strategies of Hogan’s novel, the ‘trail of tears’ or termination represent not a fatal blow to Indian culture but, rather, another stage in the evolution of native cultural identity, to restore and sustain their cultures and peoples. Michael Horse and the Greycloud family demonstrate that Indian cultures are as portable as the lives that carry them. At the end of Mean Spirit, the survivors of the Osage terror take their lives into an unknown land and future: … the life they had lived, nothing more than a distant burning. No one spoke. But they were alive. They carried generations along with them ... to a place where no road had been cut before them. They traveled past houses that were like caves of light in the black world. The night was on fire with their pasts and they were alive. (375)

Pearce and Hogan pursue History through the first nations of America. For Pearce, Indians died in 1609, with the first published account of the New World. The written word, as evidenced in his narrative, creates life where there is none and confers indigenity on Europeans. In US nationalist discourse, the cultural evolution of Native America, since conquest, is read as cultural disintegration and America’s manifest destiny. For

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Hogan, the detritus of native populations and their histories is the enduring material of postcolonial tribal nations. As with other native authors, she does not argue authority from historical or cultural ‘authenticity’. Her work meets the twenty-first century with the assurance that even without the land, with only the stories carried in their lives, native peoples will continue to survive.

Works Cited Bhabha, Homi. ‘Signs Taken For Wonders: Questions of Ambivalence and Authority under a Tree Outside Delhi’. Critical Inquiry 12.1 (1985): 144–65. ——. ‘Sly Civility’. October 34 (1985): 71–80. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Constance Farrington. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967. Hogan, Linda. Mean Spirit. New York: Ballantine, 1990. King, Tom. Green Grass, Running Water. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993. Occom, Samson. ‘A Short Narrative of My Life’. In The Heath Anthology of American Literature Concise Edition. Ed. Paul Lauter. Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 2004. 521–26. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. New York: Routledge, 1988. Pearce, Roy Harvey. Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988. Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Penguin, 1977. Smith, Henry Nash. ‘Symbol and Idea in Virgin Land’. In Ideology and Classic American Literature. Ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. 21–35. Spivak, Gayatri. ‘Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’. Critical Inquiry 12.1 (1985): 243–61. Vizenor, Gerald. Landfill Meditation: Crossblood Stories. Hanover: Wesleyan Press, 1991. Wise, Gene. ‘“Paradigm Dramas” in American Studies: A Cultural and Institutional History of the Movement’. American Quarterly 31 (Bibliography Issue, 1979): 293–337.

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Love, Money and Mythic Identity in the Novels of Louise Erdrich

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Chapter 2 RoleWild Hope: Love, Money and Mythic Identity in the Novels of Louise Erdrich1 William Blazek

A Critical Overview: Transcultural Writing The importance of Ojibwe2 foundational myths in Louise Erdrich’s eight novels of what might still be called the ‘Love Medicine’3 series has been interpreted by critics with an increasing confidence and complexity that parallels the fiction’s own development. I first want to review a few salient features of this criticism in order to show how it might be used to further examine the relationship between traditional and contemporary North American myth within the novels, especially The Bingo Palace (1994) and Tales of Burning Love (1996). Besides providing insights into both the traditional mythic sources of Erdrich’s stories and the direction of criticism about ethnic American literature, the critical texts often aim to consider the contemporary political or social dimensions of Erdrich’s narrative forms and strategies. A particular theme arising from such discussions – that of transformation and cultural redefinition – serves as the focus for my own consideration of syncretic identity in the novel series. Erdrich’s use of traditional and contemporary Native American experience to explore modern identity as a web of personal, community, and mytho-historic strands is most often emphasized in the criticism; but 1 An earlier, condensed version of this essay was included in a collection of conference papers under the title ‘Foundational Myths Revisited: Traditional and Contemporary Identity in the Novels of Louise Erdrich’: American Foundational Myths, Swiss Papers on English Language and Literature 14, ed. Martin Heusser and Gudrun Grabher (Turbingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2002), pp. 103–16. 2 For discussions of the name ‘Ojibwe’ and alternative forms, especially ‘Chippewa’ and ‘Anishinaabe’, see Beidler and Barton 1, n. 1, T. Smith 3–6, Vizenor 13–21, and Wong 9. 3 Beidler and Barton label the series ‘Louise Erdrich’s Matchimanito novels’ (ii), from the name of the lake that is of central importance in the series. Besides the books discussed in this essay, a sixth volume, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, was published in 2001; a novel focused on Erdrich’s German American heritage, The Master Butcher’s Singing Club, was published in 2003; and Four Souls, which continues the story of Fleur Pillager, appeared in 2004.

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less often addressed is the author’s delineation of such ‘classic’ EuroAmerican myths as the American Dream of economic prosperity, the machine and technology as the means of exploiting new frontiers, and the road as symbol of escape and discovery. Even a brief foray into such territory should reveal the need for balanced investigation of Erdrich’s work as a dialogue between Native American and Euro-American history and myth as it lives in the present and looks to the future. It is tempting to conclude that Louise Erdrich’s empathy for her fictional characters was temporarily extended to her literary critics when the publication in 1998 of The Antelope Wife introduced a new set of characters and thus by implication seemed to have brought the Love Medicine series finally to an end after five novels.4 With little indication of regret or relief, scholars soon took the opportunity to consolidate a body of criticism, most readily seen in three volumes published between 1999 and 2000: A Reader’s Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich, and two collections of essays – The Chippewa Landscape of Louise Erdrich and Louise Erdrich’s ‘Love Medicine’: A Casebook.5 Added to the volume Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris (1994), these books lent further weight to the novelist’s already substantial reputation, and to her authority to speak non-polemically within and across cultural boundaries, as well as modes of fiction or even literary criticism.6 The collected essays, along with the varied critical work listed within the selected bibliographies in these studies, reconfirm the scholarly effort given to investigating Erdrich’s literary applications and adaptations of Ojibwe myths and worldview, while they also indicate the relatively lighter emphasis on Euro-American themes and foci beyond Catholicism in the research.7 To take just some representative examples: Jeanne Rosier Smith develops the most thorough discussion, among 4 Hans Bak was not alone in believing after the publication of Tracks that ‘A fourth and final volume, tentatively entitled American Horse, will complete the projected tetralogy’ (148). 5 Beidler and Barton neatly understate: ‘The scholarship on Erdrich’s work is rich and complex’ (243). 6 Erdrich comments on political art in Chavkin and Chavkin 240–41. See also Allan Chavkin, ‘The Politics of the New Love Medicine’, in Wong 214–16. Joni Adamson Clarke sees Tracks as a form of literary theorising: ‘Erdrich’s novel bridges the gap between high and low discursive space and challenges those who would pretend that theoretical discourse can only exist in learned journals …’ (43). On Erdrich’s narrative reinventions, see also Hans Bak on The Beet Queen as ‘amphibious fiction’, and Robert Silberman on Erdrich’s recasting of Native American literary tradition (Wong 136–38). 7 Besides Beidler and Barton (243–54) and Chavkin (189–99), see also Wong (230–32).

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several others, of Erdrich’s use of Native American trickster myths; Helen Jaskowski treats the significance of both trickster and Windigo stories in Love Medicine; and more recently Robert A. Morace has taken a Bakhtinian approach to show how Erdrich’s ‘use of carnivalizing techniques supports the communal, egalitarian values that … characterize traditional Native American culture and thereby offer an alternative to … the nominally democratic but in fact deeply hierarchical and, by comparison, monologic Euro-American culture to which the contemporary Native American writer is inextricably and unavoidably connected’ (Chavkin 36–37). Susan Stanford Friedman has shown how Nanapush and Pauline in Tracks ‘exist in perpetual interplay as positive and negative manifestations of similar forces … Anishinabe religion and Catholic mysticism’ (126–27), while Joni Adamson Clarke argues, ‘By absorbing and transforming traditional Chippewa stories of Wolf, Water-Monster and Bear … Erdrich generates a new pattern, a new text’ (32). In addition, Erdrich’s reinvestment of Native oral-storytelling tradition and techniques in her fiction has been discussed by, among others, Clarke, Robert Silberman and Lydia A. Schultz. In a challenging analysis of what he sees as the limiting, even ethnocentric critical approach taken by many Erdrich scholars, the Native novelist and critic Greg Sarris extends the overwhelming emphasis of the scholarship on interplay and transformation to urge readers (especially critics) to interact with the crosscultural worlds of the texts and question how their own histories and assumptions might change: ‘With Indian written literatures, the Indian writer is both Indian speaker and cross-cultural mediator, and readers must consider the Indian writer’s specific culture and experience and how the writer has mediated that culture and experience for the reader’ (Wong 193). Beyond his own argument, Sarris’s powerful challenge illustrates the consolidation of Erdrich criticism in that it now can contain with equanimity (Sarris’s essay is published in the Casebook edited by Wong) refutations of its past assertions, and thereby fully substantiates a critical organism that allows even anti-bodies into its system. While such varied emphases on Erdrich’s updating of traditional myths and beliefs, leading to redefinitions of tribal and mixed-blood identity, are a crucial foundation for critical understanding of the novels, the material details of contemporary life which Erdrich observes and manipulates in her writing are also fundamental to the meaning of those works, especially their concern for what constitutes postmodern communal and individual identity. Robert A. Morace argues that Lipsha Morrissey ‘has the fullest and most diverse array of discourses from which to choose’ among the characters in The Bingo Palace, including

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popular references ranging from Jimi Hendrix songs to the Godfather films and books by Herman Melville, George Herbert and Henry Roth (Chavkin 55–56). It seems fair to say, as Dennis M. Walsh and Ann Braley conclude, that in The Beet Queen, with its caustic depictions of white, smalltown America, Ojibwe culture and values, though fragmented and hidden, ‘provide the most coherent meaning in a sugarbeet and supermarket wasteland’ (16). However, the technocratic, particularly offreservation world presented in the series of novels offers not only agonistic and intricate contrasts with Native culture and agency; it also is the register of the American twentieth century, part of the essential fabric of the narratives. In her essay ‘Where I Ought to Be: A Writer’s Sense of Place’, Erdrich explores ‘the problem of identity and reference’ and explains: ‘Whether we like it or not, we are bound together by that which may be cheapest and ugliest in our culture, but which may also have an austere and resonant beauty in its economy of meaning’ (Wong 46). While Erdrich’s novels pose questions about Native assimilation and autonomy, and therefore about American identity more generally, the transcultural discourse they inhabit has also raised critical arguments about the form and function of literature by and about Native Americans within a dominant Western aesthetic.8 In the two decades between the publication of the first and the latest in the series, the body of criticism has given authority to her project, both formally and thematically. It has pursued debate about the use of Native traditional forms – especially oral-storytelling – and its impact on neo-realism within recent American literature as a whole. It has also recognized the implications of Erdrich’s re-examination of the history of Native and non-Native interaction, not least in the way her writing challenges notions of power and the direction of cultural integration or inclusion. Thus the critical reception of the novels has often engaged in a debate about (post-) postmodern writing’s political impact, especially because the novels’ dedication to continued formal innovation is married to a deep and wide vision of Native and US history. The books also play a more direct role within contemporary concerns about American identity because of their popularity, both serving and benefiting from business opportunities. The debut volume, Love Medicine, established the market value of the series by winning the National Book Critics Circle Award, achieving Book of the Month Club selection, and becoming a bestseller, sustained for the past two decades in US college bookshops and through international sales. From one perspective, the 8 See especially Leslie Marmon Silko on The Beet Queen, and Susan Castillo’s valuable analysis of ‘The Silko-Erdrich Controversy’.

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often twice-published tales (as short stories and novels) manipulate the sources of mass-production and use to their own advantage the fashionable interest and ongoing sense of guilt and its restitutions that can be found in media-influenced public opinion – strongest away from the frontiers of most direct physical and political interaction. The primary advantage of this publishing enterprise, besides a more comfortable living standard for the author, is that the books are widely read and can influence debate or at least the attitudes of readers, challenging old and new stereotypes. If the sales figures are an indication, one might guess that nearly as many Americans know the Native characters in the Love Medicine series as would have met living Native Americans. Such a proposition suggests the degree to which the novels reflect and function within larger negotiations between Native and non-Native America. Furthermore, the authority that the novels gain from their popular and critical reception demonstrates in itself the recent re-formation of Native American identity. If it chronicles social and cultural transactions, Erdrich’s fiction has also become part of those transactions. Questions about their form and the authenticity of their purpose are not only addressed by literary critics but are woven into the texture of the volumes themselves. In Tales of Burning Love, the character Eleanor Schlick is a writer with an interest in mythology and the construction of oral history. She is an academic researcher who has been forced to resign from the academy after seducing an undergraduate, so she is free to pursue a psycho-philosophical study of saints. Underlying the transcultural mediations within her difficult search for selfhood, both the subject of her project – the centenarian nun Sister Leopolda – and Eleanor’s ex-husband Jack Mauser are of mixed ancestry. The chapter ‘Eleanor’s Tale’ is the most knowing and selfconscious of the individual stories told by Jack’s different wives. Moreover, the diversity of form and depth of structure within her narrative reflect the pluralism and multi-vocality of the Love Medicine novels and emphasize the epistemological function of the texts. Near the end of the eponymous chapter, the point is re-enforced: ‘Each word that Eleanor spoke added to the icy fabric … They were, all of them, enclosed in the spoken words, both saved and cut off by the narrative trailing into the dark and shaping itself into the larger, flatter, patterns of crystals collecting in the glass windows of Jack’s Explorer’ (228). Nature, technology (the automobile) and language combine here in ways I want to return to below, but the key point to make here is how words can sustain individual consciousness and community identity within the blare of competing sounds that drive multi-ethnic America. Although

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unreliable guides and incomplete truths, words also serve to negotiate between death and life, between mere existence and ‘a genuine, though problematic, life’ (224). In Tales of Burning Love, tropes of fire and ice show the extremes of possibility and destruction, imagery matched by the patterns of language and stories which offer clarity within deeper complexities. With an awareness of the self-reflexive situation of the late twentiethcentury writer, Erdrich develops such ideas and, in the process, establishes new criteria for interpreting writing by authors of Native American heritage. Assuredly if intuitively conversant with the thrust of contemporary literary theory and ethnography, the novels travel far beyond earlier debates such as ‘Who will speak for the Indian?’ or ‘Who can speak about Indians?’ but challenge readers with ‘What do we talk about when we talk about Indians (and how do we say it)?’ As James Ruppert asserts in his analysis of Erdrich’s mediation between nonNative and Native conceptual frameworks, Bakhtin’s notion of ‘ideological translation’ can be applied to Love Medicine and the book can be seen as ‘a successful mediational novel because the plot organizes the different social languages and ideologies in such a way as to allow the reader into a new way of seeing and speaking about the world’ (133).

Wild Hope With these preparations in mind, then, about how Erdrich’s fiction assumes a critical and popular authority and negotiates between Native and non-Native, traditional and contemporary constructs, I would like to turn more directly to the novels themselves in order to examine some of the ways they develop a modern concept of mythic identity. My focus will chiefly be on the ways in which that theme is developed through interwoven characters within the novel sequence, with particular attention to how the fifth volume, Tales of Burning Love, both consolidates and extends the fiction’s interests and refashions American myths. Tales of Burning Love continues a reconfiguration evident in the earlier works, a re-visioning of Native American identity within regional and national influences, one which demands new definitions of cultural boundaries, one which questions the relegated agency of the oppressed, and emphasizes deep interactions and transmigrations between cultures. Giving evidence of their multicultural era, the narrative ingenuities and diversity of styles in Erdrich’s writing connect with tragic-comic themes of transcendence and forgiveness. Tales of Burning Love further develops

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such matters, as its authorial command is notably different from the previous novels, particularly shown in its more epigrammatic prose, emphatic voice, and expansive but firmly structured narrative form. Above all, Tales of Burning Love sharpens the focus which can now clearly be seen to have guided the project all along – a meditation (and I do not mean to over-simplify this) on the power of love, both to cause pain and longing and to transform and heal, an analysis of and for contemporary America as important and revealing as the mythic discourse on chivalric love or the origin and purpose of sin was to medieval Europe. By exploring the sources of human love – its deep complexities and reliance on uncertain hope – the fifth novel of the series, especially, acknowledges and pursues contemporary debate about multiculturalism, projecting a simple answer within a complicated and contentious story: we are all connected, and there is no escaping the present we are in. Thus the central device of the narrative – an updating of traditional Ojibwe storytelling and Western oral-literary sources including Chaucer and Boccaccio, placing an ethnic and class mixture of four women, all once married to the same man, in a deadly situation, a kind of Long Night’s Journey into Dawn, in which they must tell intimate stories in order to survive a sudden North Dakota blizzard. So the act of storytelling itself becomes an essential part of the story, the immediate present a selfregarding collaboration between reader and writer, interpreting stories which become literary tales that could only exist on the page and in a mind suspending disbelief – not just with regard to the tales told but also to the manner of telling, which is elaborately embroidered with the richly decorative yet fierce style that characterizes Erdrich’s other novels. So on the one hand the character-specific chapter titles and upto-the-minute time notations that are inserted alongside emphasize the role of the individual in contemporary events. On the other hand, there is a self-reflectiveness in the theme of transcendence which the stories take up, signalling a change in the direction of contemporary discourse about multiculturalism and building national consensus, as if to say ‘We’ve gone through all that already; now can we hear about something else, something deeper and more personal’. As, simultaneously, a fictional world within our contemporary view and a planet within its own solar system, the fifth instalment from Erdrich’s imagined universe accepts its own history: answering some questions about what happened to the characters in the earlier books, extending the web to include new ones, some with unexpected or unacknowledged connections to previously created ones, and drawing together plot and fated action through the women’s husband-in-common

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Jack Mauser in a way similar to the attention given to the lovelorn, would-be healer Lipsha Morrissey in The Bingo Palace. The mainly offreservation setting of Tales of Burning Love is in large measure a more often comic repast following the bitter taste left by The Beet Queen, a novel which required the magical flights of fancy of its last fifty pages to lift itself above the hellish, techno-psychotic landscape of the smalltown America it portrays – a strange meeting of a marginalized yet lifeenriching Native world with Lewis’s Main Street and Dante’s Inferno. Tales of Burning Love also assumes its place within the larger context of Erdrich’s twentieth-century chronicle, mainly based in the conflicts and transactions between and among Native and Euro-American cultures. In such a way, the novel Tracks, the first of the books in terms of story chronology, assumes knowledge of the nineteenth-century and earlier history of relations between the US and Native Americans, the opening scene like a frozen aftermath of Wounded Knee. So, too, Tales of Burning Love takes its place within contemporary political issues, such as the legal status of casinos on reservation land and the value of sub-regional economic development. It also accommodates previous stories within the series – in particular catching up with the furious Dot Adare from The Beet Queen and the trickster convict Gerry Nanapush, first introduced in Love Medicine, with important reprises from Sister Leopolda and the spirit of June Morrissey, and the immediate fate of Lipsha Morrissey from The Bingo Palace answered. The phrase ‘tales of burning love’ itself can first be found in The Beet Queen, in a disparaging description of the false romance of cheap ‘romance novels’ which never mention bastard children nor the panic and pain of giving birth (139). The assiduous reader can explore the developed meanings of the phrase in The Bingo Palace, in which the character Zelda drunkenly recounts her tale of burning love, confesses how she refused her one chance for a life-giving love (46). One can see how these novels lay down compelling trails and perform difficult balancing tricks, both intra-textually and socioculturally. In that way, they are self-contained as well as boundless, much like the bi-modular design of individual chapters, especially noticeable in the first two novels. This feature allows parts of them to be published as freestanding short stories or as integrated and integral chapters within the novels, which are themselves aspects of a greater chronicle. One particular theme of the series, prioritized here among several other opportunities, is money – its sources, what it influences, and whether or not it can be utilized for any good effect. Money and number-based value systems feature prominently in the books and supply special resonance because of the recent economic empowerment of many Native American

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groups through widespread casino and other gaming developments, and because of consequent challenges to political authority and repositionings of cultural identity and status. However, money’s chief importance in the novel sequence is that it stands as the nemesis of love. Money is the fuel of mobile American Dreams, but it can burn love, poison hope and disintegrate lives. The two novels that focus most specifically on money matters are The Bingo Palace and Tales of Burning Love, one chiefly set on reservation land near the Canadian border and the other mainly in the fictional Argus and an often unnervingly well-observed Fargo, North Dakota. However, the arguments about money in these two works spring in part from the lack of such capital and consequent hardships illustrated in Tracks, Love Medicine and The Beet Queen. In Tracks those consequences include death by starvation and disease, suffering from lack of adequate shelter, uncertain survivals. Unceasingly regular payments for land allotments must be made, and the novel uses these factually based circumstances to demonstrate both the dearth and the richness of the reservation inhabitants as they sell animal pelts and strip cranberry bark to meet the season’s financial requirements. However, in doing so, in being forced to deal with monetary values and to rely upon the possession of their own sources of power, that local, nature-centred power is diminished, particularly that of the central shamanic figure, Fleur Pillager: ‘Her dreams lied, her vision was obscured, her helper slept deep in the lake, …’ (177). Enough money for another deadline is barely accumulated, but the inevitable loss occurs, unforgivably but perhaps just as inevitably through betrayal within the household group, the funds used by Nector Kashpaw to pay for his mother’s allotment. In Love Medicine we learn the unnegotiable price paid by Nector, who becomes a tribal leader but is emptied of life and cursed with dissatisfactions. His son Lyman Lamartine (whose name connotes both ‘layman’ and ‘lie-man’, and perhaps Willy Loman) takes on the paternal role with a modern monetarist vengeance, becoming an Upper-Midwest mover-andshaker in Tales of Burning Love, ‘not so much changed as consolidated’, both physically and politically (404). He wears a mask of confidence, but he suffers from the same unbalanced spirit as his father, even though his embrace of market forces and his stock-market mentality are targeted on the objective of reclaiming a wider reservation holding from the surrounding farmland and providing for the tribal members the goods and services that Western capital can acquire. ‘Land is the only thing that lasts life to life’, he hears Fleur Pillager tell him in a dream (Bingo Palace 148). Yet his interpretation of that message – ‘Use a patch of federal trust

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land somewhere, anywhere near his employee base. Add to it, diversify, recycle what money came in immediately into land-based operations’ (149) – uses the language of money and thereby debases his goal. The costs and rewards of such associations, in particular the gift and the threat of ‘bingo cash’, are not ignored within the reservation, not even by Lyman, whose experience during a business trip to a Reno casino, detailed in the chapter ‘Lyman’s Luck’ in The Bingo Palace, explores the meaning of obsession (or possession), his gambler’s luck first easily gaining and then quickly losing money and belongings, including the temporary surrender to a pawn shop of his half-brother Lipsha’s traditional pipe, with all of its tribal and personal history and meaning. The special significance and allure of casino gambling for the Ojibwe and Lyman’s overconfident assertions of control over the gambling impulse both rely on the contemporariness of arguments about reservation gaming legislation, on the example of Fleur Pillager in winning her land back through gambling, and on connections with Ojibwe traditions and mythology, especially the re-creation myth of Nanabozho. The hope which bingo cash represents, therefore, has extensive roots; and its attachment to and manipulation of greedy materialism outside of the reservation is a considered transaction, holding indeterminate dangers. The other mitigating explanation for Lyman’s enthusiasm for money’s power is his curious and tortured hope that it can somehow purchase some equilibrium from the haunting memory of his half-brother Henry’s drowning in a river through a car accident. Fearing that a regular hospital would keep his brother captive, Lyman attempts to repair the automobile and use it either as a medicine to cure Henry’s fading life – which has become doubly disjointed by experiences in Vietnam in the service of the US government – or as transport for Henry along the Path of Souls. Lyman’s failure possesses him through three volumes of the Love Medicine series, and the effects are compounded by his growing political and financial influence on the reservation and in the region. His efforts at exculpation, such as a vision quest and dancing in Henry’s oldstyle powwow outfit, are only partially successful, due largely to his selfish purpose. To put the message in a limited Western context, selfishness, or more often greed, is the unpardonable and original sin in Erdrich’s fiction. Although Lyman Lamartine’s transactions with US business and bureaucracy are less ambiguous in their lessons to the reader, those of Lipsha Morrissey, his foil in The Bingo Palace, point more directly to the need for a more personal resolution through self-awareness. He enters the story as a foreigner to his own people, returning to the reservation

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during a circle dance, slowly able to tell his captive narrative (one of many examples of this ironic reversal in the series) of how he took a job shovelling sugar in a Fargo sugar beet plant, the rotten, industrially refined sweetness collecting and hardening in layers around him. Jumping in and out of Lyman’s circle of business and love affairs only compounds his problems. However, a deeper need for understanding drives Lipsha, so that his flaws and failures seem more forgivable and likely to achieve forgiveness. He is able to recognize, for example, that the van he has acquired in a bingo jackpot is merely ‘transportation’ and ‘insulation’, meeting necessities but not the destination nor the source of his desire. As part of an inventive remaking of certain Midwestern state boundaries (e.g. Minnesota with its feminine torso), he realizes that his van is the shape of North Dakota, with its imposed constraints and divisions, and he is saved from having it tattooed on his skin. His awakening to the possibilities of his first neglected and then misunderstood power as a healer comes through Fleur Pillager, and involves a form of transit for each of them. He shares her amphibious Pillager nature, part of the mythic substance of Erdrich’s chronicles, a powerladen association with water-manitouk that enables each of these characters to cheat death. Like hers, the healing power in his touch disappears when it is required, relied upon – in his case the healing source dries up when he charges customers for the service, in the misguided attempt to win the love of Shawnee Ray by recreating himself as a career-minded professional. He is closest to obtaining her love when he is least selfish about it. In the process of self-discovery and re-attachment to others, though, he flounders and leaps, stating in one moment of inspiration for a new way forward with her, ‘My luck’s uneven, but it’s coming back. I have a wild, uncanny hope’ (Bingo Palace 82–83). Fleur has retrieved her family land and exacted revenge by using reliable human greed and a white Agent’s fondness for technological display (the bait of a whitecoloured Pierce-Arrow car, in fact, one of Erdrich’s playful reclamations of car names from commercial culture), and the author weds Fleur’s ruthless vengeance to Lipsha’s search for understanding and reconciliation. They each undertake journeys of self-sacrifice, Fleur finally taking up her sled with the Pillager bones to walk the death road in order to rescue the life of Lipsha, who in turn demonstrates his worthiness for survival by sheltering with his own body a (supposed) white baby who would otherwise freeze to death in a car broken down during an escape from government police. He quietly declares ‘here is one child who was never left behind’ (258). The implications of this act are dependent on the many instances in Erdrich’s novels of children traumatized early in their lives –

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the most important example, because of her wandering and uncanny spiritual presence through the series, is June Morrissey, whose ‘wild’ life is most immediately the consequence of being raped as a child by her alcoholic mother’s boyfriend. Furthermore, Lipsha’s act of giving depends on the discourse of Native and US history and contemporary debate; so the ostensibly descriptive sentence ‘An unknown path opens up before us, an empty trail shuts behind’ (259) grows full of uncertainties as well as possibilities. Just when many readers thought that the Love Medicine series would end on such tetralogic dis-closures, Tales of Burning Love appeared, to complicate matters and pursue the debate about what to do or how to live in a present burdened by history, hopeless misunderstandings and horrible consequences. I would not suggest that it offers more than the possibility of affirmation. In a description of a sunflower field, temporarily saved from urban development by a ten-year lease, Erdrich writes: ‘There was no golden life out there. Only the uncertain ripening of fields’ (421). The two short sentences function together in the sense that Theresa S. Smith asserts that the Thunderers and water monsters of Ojibwe mythology operate, ‘not a duality but a dialectic’, a balancing and interdependent relationship between the upper and lower worlds, with the earth fixed precariously in between (183). The anticipation of harvest in Tales of Burning Love, however (even of sunflowers, which Midwestern farmers think of as benevolent weeds), holds a promise that cannot be fully asserted in The Bingo Palace. In that earlier novel, Lipsha thinks of the ancient and modern North Dakota landscape, the destructive but mutable efforts of humans to transform and control it, and ‘the chaos underneath’ which may still resist human impositions. The emphasis is more on the present and the future in Tales of Burning Love, even though the force of technological determinism in paving the earth may be the threat that replaces government-sponsored racism and territorial imperialism. The character in Tales of Burning Love in whom contemporary questions about identity are most fully explored and in whom the force of change principally resides is Jack Mauser. There may be an allusion here to Art Spiegelman’s Maus, but more directly the surname in German means ‘moulting’, and Jack Mauser’s persistent attempts at marriage are but one aspect of his fault-riddled efforts at self-redefinition and personal renewal. In the scene that drives the plot of the novel, his new, grandly designed but poorly constructed house burns down, and his close escape from immolation leaves him naked outdoors on New Year’s Eve, slouching towards Fargo to be reborn. Among its many hi-tech

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features, the house had been designed to maintain and protect itself, but still it burns down. The inferno reflects not only the risk of technological dependence but also Jack’s selfish reliance on others and, eventually, his hard-earned recognition of the interdependence and mutuality which that need involves.9 The nearly frozen blood in him is ‘a mixture of Tatar-Slavic, Hun, Ojibwa’ (61) – a reminder of other tribal migrations in world history, whether because of natural growth or territorial conquest. The Ojibwe portion from his mother is not only hidden and unacknowledged at first, but also resisted. He whispers his mother’s family name so low that the reader cannot hear, and only gradually does her identity gain purchase – that of a very mixed-blood Native North American, of uncertain ancestry from various tribes and some French. His eventual recognition of her ‘secret, wild, despairing love …’ (185) for him co-mingles with his acceptance of a childhood spent for a time on the reservation.10 Acknowledgement of these long-buried affinities is one thing, but making use of them is another. Only after his own premature funeral, undertaken in his absence because of his presumed death in the house fire, can some form of regeneration take place. His return to the reservation is marked by ‘pure and strange’ memories that re-awaken his senses and signal his potential emergence into a new self: ‘As he got closer he could breathe the difference … The hiss of ice forming in bands on the October Lake … Crescent of soft grass alongside a hill where he’d once hidden all day while his mother howled in a rhythmical sequence. A bell ringing over winter fields. A rosary in someone’s cracked hands’ (401). What Erdrich elsewhere (Wong 223) calls a mother’s ‘milk wisdom’ seeps into this passage, along with allusions to the rhythms of nature and links to religion as a local and cosmic place. Furthermore, the chapter title, ‘Mauser and Mauser’, seeks to confirm Jack’s family connections – to his parents, wives and baby son – this time through honest emotion rather than as the bogus corporate title painted on his construction9 House fires leap across the novels: consider ‘The Good Tears’ chapter in Love Medicine. The hi-tech house has roots in Sita’s house in The Beet Queen: ‘Lying here, I imagine all that I could do by remote control’ (282). The ‘Zelda’s Luck’ chapter in The Bingo Palace makes the connection between houses and human suffering and rebirth: ‘She was a house falling apart, the nails, each in turn wrenched from the wood with a sob … the inner beams shouting huhnh, huhnh, huhnh, panting with the sound of a woman giving birth’ (242–43). 10 Identified as Mary Stamper in Tales of Burning Love, Jack Mauser’s mother is shown to be Fleur Pillager in The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse. Fleur’s attritional marriage with Jack’s father, John James Mauser I, is depicted in Four Souls.

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company trucks has been used to give the impression of stability and generations of effort and care. Yet his involvement in the construction industry – in particular laying interstate highways and, ominously, allowing himself to be blackmailed into running the new reservationcasino building project for Lyman Lamartine – shackles him to bankers and lawyers and presents a barbed-wired barrier to self-directed renewal. Moreover, his efficiency in completing projects on time and within budget is rewarded only with financial problems and a failing business – marks of his displacement and the ‘careless persistence’ of the technocratic world identified in Tracks (217). The irony of his rescue from bankruptcy and prison, because the banks have to reinvest in him in order to recoup their losses, contains the seeds for some kind of individual and (by implication) tribal empowerment, but in a weed-strewn field. Only through faltering circumstances and by repositioning his hope onto the intimate rather than the grand designs of his life does he gain a contingent happiness. His return to Eleanor with a more mature understanding of love’s demands and gifts is presented as a tentative and partial union. A parallel lesson about loss and the opportunities it opens up is given in the story about Eleanor’s parents, Anna and Lawrence Schlick. In part, their at first comic-grotesque but later richly pathetic presence in Tales of Burning Love provides a conclusive reminder that Native Americans have no monopoly on displacement, alienation or suffering – and that Euro-American cultures are not the monolithic entity often assumed in criticism of Native writing. On the other hand, Lawrence’s pursuit and support of the public expectations of the American Dream place them in a frozen circle of business interests, civic-leadership responsibilities, and torpid inner lives. In ‘Eleanor’s Tale’, and thus Eleanor’s language-creation of her own heritage and identity, we learn that Lawrence was Fargo Businessman of the Year when he met Anna, ‘the surviving half of a blindfold trapeze act’ (209), who lost her first husband and the unborn child she was carrying during a fall caused by a circus fire. The Schlicks’ marriage brings financial prosperity and domestic comfort but at the cost of Anna’s ability to direct her graceful energy towards a worthwhile goal. Her social position is ‘both gratifying and constricting … She was known for her original, even eccentric arrangements of flowers, winning entries in the garden show, for her published recipes, for her work on the bitter problem of drunks who died on the railroad tracks, and for her newspaper columns that squarely faced such issues as housewives’ legitimate fears of botulism in their canning’ (220). Jack Mauser’s catalytic entry

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into the Schlicks’ lives changes everything that the couple had built together. Lawrence’s exaggerated imaginings of an affair between Jack and Anna run alongside the thoroughness with which he cuts off his wife and young daughter from the capital of his business fiefdom. For Anna, freedom and happiness flow from her welcomed exile. Refusing any financial settlement or a divorce, and proudly accepting the bare economies of her new circumstances, she exchanges her upper-class status for independence. She finds release in detesting the Red Cross auctions and girl-scout-troop duties of her former self: ‘and in this hatred there was something so satisfactory and liberating that she was transformed from an attractively kept, rather solid, nice-looking, middle-aged woman, to a creature completely stunning in certain lights’ (228). The animal instincts of ‘a creature’ are projected on the two-sided coin of emotion, with love and hatred twirling together in the toss of redirected destinies provoked by Jack’s chance intrusion into the Schlicks’ marriage. For Lawrence, the consequences of his initial vindictiveness lead to his life’s second shock, the first coming after he brought books to the hospital where the circus-accident victims were recovering and he read aloud to his future bride. ‘Falling’, Eleanor muses about how her father first lost his heart to Anna, ‘I sometimes wonder whether as he fell he had time to think. For he went down fast. He plunged. He would never be the same’ (214). His second descent, reminiscent of Nector Kashpaw’s in ‘The Plunge of the Brave’ chapter in Love Medicine, results in the careless loss of his car dealership, the Karpet Kingdom store, and his business sense – until he is left with just the Schlick funeral home. Only the mortuary sustains his interest, and ‘Only the dead did not desert him’ (233). And only through death can he find release from the suffering that love, hatred, jealousy and desire cause – a final transformation that binds the personal to the metahistorical strands of the Love Medicine novels in the deliberate but desperate suicide via cremation with his deceased wife that Lawrence enacts in the fourth-from-last chapter of Tales of Burning Love. Its position in the volume and its title, ‘A Light from the West’, suggest its significance. Love meets death through the technology of the furnace’s timer switching on with ‘a thick roar of consuming fire’ (435). The chapter’s wrenching poignancy shows by contrast to the selfexploratory, comic verve of ‘Eleanor’s Tale’ the powerful forces at work in the novel’s explorations of love and hope. The deaths of Eleanor’s parents are accomplished through the technologies of medicine and cremation, some of the machinery that drives the contemporary world to its uncertain end. Before then, everyone – whether Polish-German like Eleanor or French-Germanic-Ojibwe like Jack – must perform ‘balancing

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tricks’ to avoid egotism yet create an adequate space and sense of self or, more accurately, selves in order to endure within an unsettled and unfinished universe. ‘A Last Chapter’ at the end of the novel speaks to the hope in the unlikely but enduring bond that draws Eleanor and Jack together. Because that fragile yet tenacious hope relates to so much in Louise Erdrich’s fiction, and because she creates from hermeneutic structures and multifold layers of understanding, the last sentence in Tales of Burning Love incorporates the ambiguities and accepts the uncertainties of individual lives and community dreams even as it celebrates their survival: ‘But it was also hard to bear the pain of coming back to life’ (452).11 En route to these concluding words, the first five Love Medicine novels – some 1,656 pages of fictional life – reach deeply into the human condition as they chronicle and reinscribe ethnic history, examine the pain of loss – especially the diminution of the sacred in contemporary life. They also project Ojibwe mythology and their own imagined cosmos as ways of understanding the different worlds we inhabit, and progress the course of dialogue between America’s many selves. While the traditional and contemporary sources of identity move with ever-more rapid flux, Erdrich’s reinventions of Ojibwe and EuroAmerican mythology present – within individual, tribal and national stories – a dynamic vision of interconnectedness and understanding, but without easy reconciliations. Jeanne Rosier Smith in Writing Tricksters proposes that we understand Erdrich as a ‘trickster author’, with the ability to shape-shift myth into new patterns of survival and celebration. Smith argues more particularly that ‘Erdrich views identity as “transpersonal”: a strong sense of self must be based not on isolation but on personal connections to community and to myth’ (74). In an ethnographic study that deserves wider circulation among Erdrich scholars, The Island of the Anishnaabeg (1995), Theresa S. Smith makes a related but more comprehensive assertion about the place of humans ‘within the fluidity of the Ojibwe life-world’ (17). In describing that world as a dialectic between forces of order and chaos, balance and imbalance, the author discusses the goal of traditional Ojibwe life: bimaadiziwin – ’living well’, with its rewards of good health, security, harmony and longevity. While Erdrich’s characters never successfully receive this 11

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In an often-cited paragraph from ‘Where I Ought to Be’, Erdrich writes: ‘In the light of enormous loss, [contemporary Native American writers] must tell the stories of contemporary survivors while protecting and celebrating the cores of cultures left in the wake of the catastrophe’ (Wong 48). My argument is that in Tales of Burning Love she goes beyond that essential foundational purpose.

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combination of gifts, they are shown in the difficult but necessary act of balancing self and community – seeking equilibrium and recreating identities in a contemporary world which often denies mythic connections. With a compunction born of a need to find new definitions for myth in a multi-ethnic and technocratic America, the Love Medicine novels follow old and new trails in an effort to understand the power and fragility of love. The route rather than the destination holds our attention, and it is marked by an interdependent need for respect, directed not only towards other persons (including non-human persons) but also towards the sustaining earth, our populated island between water and sky. Erdrich’s role, then, in what might be called American transcendental as well as transcultural renewal, places her in association with the Seventh Prophecy of the Anishinaabeg, which foretells of the emergence of a new people, reborn into the light of rekindled fires (T. Smith 38).

Works Cited Bak, Hans. ‘Towards a Native American “Realism”: The Amphibious Fiction of Louise Erdrich’. In Neo-Realism in Contemporary American Fiction. Ed. Kristiaan Versluys. Postmodern Studies 5. Amsterdam & Atlanta: Rodopi, 1992. 145–70. Beidler, Peter G., and Barton, Gay. A Reader’s Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich. Columbia & London: University of Missouri Press, 1999. Castillo, Susan Perez. ‘Postmodernism, Native American Literature, and the Real: The Silko-Erdrich Controversy’. Massachusetts Review 32 (1991): 285-94. Chavkin, Allan, ed. The Chippewa Landscape of Louise Erdrich. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999. Chavkin, Allan, and Nancy Feyl Chavkin, eds. Conversations with Louise Erdrich & Michael Dorris. Literary Conversations Series. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Clarke, Joni Adamson. ‘Why Bears Are Good to Think and Theory Doesn’t Have to Be Murder: Transformation and Oral Tradition in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks’. Studies in American Indian Literatures 4 (1992): 28–48. Erdrich, Louise. The Antelope Wife: A Novel. New York: HarperFlamingo, 1998. ——. The Beet Queen. New York: Bantam Books, 1986. ——. The Bingo Palace. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. ——. Love Medicine: New and Expanded Version. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. ——. Tales of Burning Love. New York: HarperCollins, 1996. ——. Tracks. New York: Henry Holt, 1988. Friedman, Susan Stanford. ‘Identity Politics, Sycretism, Catholicism, and Anishnabe Religion in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks’. Religion and Literature 26 (1994): 107–33. Pittman, Barbara L. ‘Cross-Cultural Reading and Generic Transformations: The

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Chronotope of the Road in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine’. American Literature 67 (1995): 777–92. Ruppert, James. Mediation in Contemporary Native American Fiction. Norman & London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. Schultz, Lydia A. ‘Fragments and Ojibwe Stories: Narrative Strategies in Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine’. College Literature 18 (1991): 80–95. Silko, Leslie Marmon. ‘Here’s an Odd Artifact for the Fairy-Tale Shelf’. Studies in American Indian Literatures 10 (1986): 178–84. Smith, Jean Rosier. Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Smith, Theresa S. The Island of the Anishnaabeg: Thunderers and Water Monsters in the Traditional Ojibwe Life-World. Moscow, Idaho: University of Idaho Press, 1995. Vizenor, Gerald. The People Named the Chippewa: Narrative Histories. Minneapolis & London: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Walsh, Dennis M. and Ann Braley. ‘The Indianness of Louise Erdrich’s The Beet Queen’. American Indian Culture and Research Journal 18 (1994): 1–17. Wong, Hertha D. Sweet, ed. Louise Erdrich’s ‘Love Medicine’: A Casebook. Casebooks in Contemporary Fiction. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

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Chapter 3 RoleFloat like a Butterfly, Sting like a Bee: Mythologies of Representation in Selected Writings on Boxing by Norman Mailer1 Christopher Brookeman Introduction At the end of 1984 African Americans held world titles in seventeen weight divisions from bantam to heavyweight. This dominance was particularly visible at the heavyweight level whose contests can still constitute the single most lucrative and celebrated event for the participants in modern mass sport. Muhammad Ali received $5,000,000 for his fight in Zaire against George Foreman in 1975 (and claimed that after tax and payments to his entourage, he would have $1,300,000 for himself.) Prior to Lennox Lewis, the last time a boxer other than an African American held the title was when Ingemar Johansson from Sweden 1 This essay is dedicated to a number of people and organizations, including the National Health Service which brought me together in the Sir John Young Ward of the National Hospital, Queens Square, with a range of people that included two boxers, and the chief bouncer at Ronnie Scott’s jazz club, all of whom shared their opinions about how good Ali really was. My thanks are due to the University of Westminster for a period of study leave in the USA and to Reg Gadney and Tom Putt, friends and boxers. I also want to thank my brother James and his wife Mary Susan who looked after me in Charlottesville. Jim is my elder brother who was the first person with whom I went a few rounds. This essay is dedicated in memoriam to Eric Mottram who was a good friend and critic and is much missed by those of us who study the USA in ways that try to do justice to a whole range of cultural productions from the Mount Rushmore Monument to the comic art of Lenny Bruce. Eric’s essay on Lenny Bruce is a typical intensely focused, wide-ranging, superb introduction to that whole group of comedians that included Bruce, Dick Gregory and Mort Sahl. The essay included one of the seeds of this piece on Mailer on Ali on boxing. In his essay entitled ‘The American Comedian as Social Critic: 1950–1970’, Eric wrote: ‘Black humorists participated in what Norman Mailer in his 1957 Dissent essay ‘The White Negro’, termed “a psychic blood-letting” – blood-letting against the pressures of tranquillization and towards possibilities of a “psychically armed rebellion” ’. Mailer’s ‘hipster’ is no liberal since: ‘What the liberal cannot bear to admit is the hatred beneath the skin of a society so unjust that the amount of collective violence buried in people is perhaps incapable of being contained’ (Advertisements 310). Eric Mottram’s essay on Lenny Bruce can be found in Cracking the Ike Age: Aspects of Fifties America (Aarhus University Press, 1989).

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captured the title from Floyd Patterson by a knockout in the third round of their 1959 bout at Yankee Stadium. Patterson regained the title in 1960 when he knocked Johannson out in the fourth round. Since then no ‘great white hope’ has succeeded in gaining the undisputed title of heavyweight champion of the world. Irish and Italian Americans, and more recently Hispanic Americans, all groups with strong pugilistic traditions, have challenged African American supremacy, but in the period under review the majority of contests have featured one African American against another. It can be argued that this African American supremacy would have emerged earlier if it had not been artificially prevented by the Jim Crow system of discrimination and segregation. This prevented African Americans from fighting whites in open official competition. Although African American fighters were occasionally matched with white boxers in private clubs and fairgrounds, a colour bar could be put in place in most states. It was not until 1908 that Jack Johnson became the first African American to win the heavyweight title. In the age of live satellite transmission, whether the stage was Caesar’s Palace in the deserts of Nevada or under the open skies of Africa in the jungle surrounds of Kinshasa in Zaire, a massive global, multi-national, multi-cultural audience witnessed the continuous victory of the African American from Patterson to Holyfield. This dominance has in its turn been subject to the dominance from the 60s to the 70s of the talents of perhaps the finest boxer athlete the world has ever seen, Muhammad Ali. The man known as the ‘Greatest’ was born with the name Cassius Marcellus Clay, Jr, on 17 January 1942. On his becoming a member of the Nation of Islam on 25 February 1964, he replaced his slave name with the new name of Muhammad Ali. The purpose of this essay is twofold: first, to place the mythic impact of Ali on Norman Mailer’s various writing on heavyweight boxers within the context of Mailer’s general view of the role, potential and real, of African American culture in American society since the end of the Second World War; second, to give some sense of Ali and Mailer’s roles as innovators who created new mythologies – Ali in boxing and Mailer in the scope and quality of writing on heavyweight boxing. In common with many writers and, in particular, the Beats, Mailer continues a tradition in white cultural consciousness that saw African Americans as culturally unique. This view proposes that African Americans have developed a diverse range of cultural forms: in music the blues, which is the origin of rock and roll, and jazz; they took the rudiments of a number of folk dance steps and created that crucial component to the Hollywood musical, the tap dance. This range of

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developments is usually seen as part of popular culture. What is now clear is that there was also an experimental avant-garde within African American culture, which included musician composers such as Duke Ellington and Miles Davis, to mention but two highly innovative artists; in the field of literature Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison; and in painting Jacob Lawrence. An essay by Garry Wills in the New York Review of Books argues that Lawrence was at least as important as any of the famous white Abstract Expressionists. In his political writings of the 1950s such as ‘The White Negro’, Mailer consolidates his vision of African American exceptionalism by acknowledging African American culture as being a major expression of a long existential, social and ideological revolt against the racist norms of white bourgeois American society. He suggests that out of this revolt came a culture of resistance and alternatives. Viewed in this way African American culture becomes part of a mythology in which the African American who is denied access to white culture nevertheless creates a rich and diverse range of cultural forms in both mass and high art that have not been subjected to the full domination of an exhausted white culture. This kind of analysis in which African American culture becomes unique and creative by virtue of its being denied access to the deadening skills and resources of white bourgeois culture is central to Mailer’s views in ‘The White Negro’. The enduring nature of Mailer’s views can be adduced from his contribution to a 1968 symposium on Black Power in which he offers the following portrait of the contradictory quality of the material character of African American life: Sufficiently fortunate to be alienated from the benefits of American civilization, the Negro seems to have been better able to keep his health. It would take a liberal with a psychotic sense of moderation to claim that whites and Negroes have equally healthy bodies; the Negroes know they have become on the average physically superior and this against all the logic of America’s medical civilization – the Negroes get less good food ostensibly, no vitamins, a paucity of anti-biotics, less medical care, less fresh air, less light and sanitation in living quarters. (Mailer, Essential 539–40)

Mailer’s commitment to this contradiction originates in that powerhouse of his thinking, his main and continuous concern to distance himself as far and as outrageously as possible from the kind of do-gooding reformist liberalism that he feels has anaesthetized American political theory since the New Deal. Further contradictions are generated as Mailer contemplates the state of the African American mind. For example he makes the following positive assessment of the nature of the impact of the inferior education that the African American has undoubtedly received:

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Christopher Brookeman The Negro’s relatively low rate of literacy seems to be in inverse relation to his philosophical capacity to have a comprehensive vision of his life, a large remark whose only support is existential – let us brood, brothers, on the superior cool of the Negro in public places. For the cool comes from a comprehensive vision, a relaxation before the dangers of life, a readiness to meet death, philosophy, or amusement at any turn. (Mailer, Essential 540)

To summarize, Mailer’s model of African American culture depends on an interplay between African American cultural creativity and a dominant white culture. In this formulation the slavemakers of African American culture are often seen as inherently primitive and inferior and therefore incapable of significant cultural production. By contrast Mailer argues that a culture has been produced out of this process, more oral than literary, and more existential than conceptually designed. He describes an interplay that has the following narrative: And as he began to arise from his exploitation, he discovered that the culture which had saved him owed more to the wit and telepathy of the jungle than the value and programs of the West. His dance had taught him more than writs and torts, his music was sweeter than Shakespeare or Bach (since music had never been a luxury to him but a need), prison had given him a culture deeper than libraries in the grove, and violence had produced an economy of personal relations as negotiable as money. (Mailer, Essential 535)

This mythic defiance and confidence are the basis on which Mailer constructs his respect, at this point of his career, for African Americans like Muhammad Ali who challenged the gradualist liberalism of civil rights leaders and their supporters in the Democratic Party. The core of my essay will be a deconstruction of the ways Ali and Mailer, via the culture of boxing, created a new vision of the relationship between heavyweight boxing and society. This does not exhaust Mailer’s mythic representations of African Americans. In his 1965 novel An American Dream there is an African American character called Shago Martin who is the only black character in all Mailer’s fiction. There is one other relevant set of interests running through Mailer’s writings: his depiction and analysis of the changing role of black activists in the 1960s. But dominating his early years as a writer and cultural critic were the ideas he developed in the aforementioned controversial essay he wrote for Dissent in 1957 called ‘The White Negro’. In the essay Mailer outlines ways of escaping from the deadening Cold War repressions of post-war American society and the vanguard role of the African American within the process of liberation. His argument is that the American liberal bourgeois capitalist state has developed into a totalitarian structure, a development that Mailer was to chart in his

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coverage of the 1968 Democratic Party Convention at Chicago in his book Miami and the Siege of Chicago and his participatory coverage of the antiwar march on the Pentagon of 1967 in his book The Armies of the Night. On both occasions the state, whether in the form of the National Guard or Chicago Mayor Daley’s police, justified its physical assaults on the antiVietnam War protestors as part of routine law and order controls. Individual rights could be waived by a government that regularly illegally wiretapped the leaders of legitimate protest organisations. Dr Martin Luther King and Muhammad Ali were both tapped. The government increasingly saw the many forms of protest that often involved mass public marches as potential incitements to rebellion in a society where the constitutional right to bear arms had reinforced a culture of violence and guns. The issues that Mailer confronted in the 1960s had a political urgency and focus that were manifested on a daily basis via mass-media narratives in which the dominant image of the state’s response to a problem seemed to be the use of technological violence, whether with B52s over Vietnam or with water cannons in Alabama. In contrast ‘The White Negro’, dating from the 1950s, is reflective and abstract, using a philosophical and psychological language for its discussion of how to construct an American self to challenge the totalitarian tendencies of the era, rather than the documentary realism of the New Journalism Mailer was to use in Armies of the Night. The first requirement for the would-be rebel is to disengage from the conformist materialist values of bourgeois society. The latest makers of this largely cultural revolt, the hipsters, subvert the conformist values of the group which in Mailer’s view have reached an alarming level of totalitarian repression in which dissent, individual thinking and action are seen as threats to the whole system. This is the nature of the discipline enforced by General Cummings in Mailer’s war novel The Naked and the Dead (1948) which is as much a novel about the shape that civilian society would take after the war as it was a study of a nation at war. In ‘The White Negro’, using a model derived from Freud, Mailer argues that the rebel needs to disengage from the mindless disciplines and ideas of deferred gratification that dominate and restrict the individual imagination and action: ‘What is consequent therefore is the divorce of man from his values, the liberation of the self from the Super-ego of society (307)’. Mailer also gives an account of how this happens on the ground to create the figure of the hipster: ‘In such places as Greenwich village, a ménage à trois was completed – the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face to face with the Negro and the hipster was a fact in American life’ (293). In this equation African American cultural awareness

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was crucial in that, unlike the liberal bourgeois culture that had in Mailer’s view turned totalitarian, African American culture provided many examples of forms of perception and living and in so doing had escaped the regimented, standardized and bureaucratic values imposed on the white majority and denied to an African American minority on account that slaves were not worthy of such indoctrination. The range of response to Mailer’s characterization of the Negro part of the White Negro was largely hostile. James Baldwin in his essay entitled ‘The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy’ describes his friendship with Mailer and includes a response to ‘The White Negro’ that rejects Mailer’s thesis as an uninformed projection of Mailer’s own insecurities. Baldwin comments as follows: It is still true, alas, that to be an American Negro male is also to be a kind of walking phallic symbol: which means that one pays, in one’s own personality, for the sexual insecurity of others. The relationship, therefore, of a black boy to a white boy is a very complex thing. (172)

A more sympathetic view in which Mailer is praised for anticipating market trends in the entertainments industry is the following analysis which rehabilitates Mailer’s insights: The white Negro with his lust for jazz and grass was a threat to the American way of life, a figure whose existential insight was contingent on his isolation from society. Today the inverse is true. There are a number of intersecting multi-billion dollar American industries (music, advertising, television, sports) whose survival at current profit levels depends on the existence of a massive audience of white Negroes. (Ledbetter 541)

The term ‘white negro’ originated in the nineteenth century, when it was applied as an epithet to immigrants from Ireland and China who were then classed by Wasp racism as an inferior savage species like the Africans and their descendents in America. It was as if there was an index of negrescence that was used by Wasps to discriminate against the growing power of the African American, Chinese and Irish Americans by grouping them all together at the bottom of the evolutionary scale. The ape-like features of the cartoon caricature of the Paddy stereotype suggest this in the same way that the slit eyes of the Chinese and the thick lips of the African American, which were relentlessly disseminated by such racist periodicals as Harper’s Weekly (A Journal of Civilization). These images played a role in fuelling the general racism against what were known as hyphenated Americans that during the nineteenth century became a standard attitude among the Wasps. What Mailer does with the term is to make it positive rather than negative, although many

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commentators including Baldwin saw Mailer’s essay as another racist, destructive fantasy in the white boy’s mind. Mailer did move on from the idea of the white Negro mainly through his sense of the evolution of Ali, as the boxer became embroiled in the controversies surrounding his commitment to the ideology of the Black Muslims and his refusal to fight in a white man’s war against his brown brothers, the Vietcong. Ali’s ability to maintain his supremacy in the boxing field while becoming a main figure in the anti-Vietnam war movement made him, in Mailer’s view, a figure on an epic scale. Mailer saw Ali as a ‘Black Kissinger’.

What’s My Name? The Myths and Masks of Muhammad Ali One of the many unwritten conventions of traditional pugilistic codes is that when you are completely on top of an opponent, you finish him off as soon as you can. Ernie Terrell, who fought Ali in 1967, refused to call Muhammad by his Muslim name, and as part of the pre-contest hype Terrell is on record as believing Ali did not object to Terrell’s provocation. Terrell continued to challenge Ali by calling him Clay, which as a result of recently becoming a convert to the Black Muslim religion Ali now considered to be his degraded slave name. In the fight Ali soon overwhelmed Terrell with a sustained and brutal attack that he deliberately prolonged while all the time shouting at Terrell: ‘What’s my name? Uncle Tom – What’s my name?’ In conducting himself like a pitiless savage Ali put on the mask of that mythic figure of white fantasy literature, the brute sadistic buck. What one sees in the staged pre-fight confrontations that Ali developed into a fine art of intimidation is his ironic exaggerated use of the whole extensive gallery of black stereotypes that had been projected onto African Americans by the full power of white-controlled media: literature, advertising, film, TV, radio and drama, specifically the genre of melodrama. In his 1968 study of the image of Black Americans in Hollywood cinema, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks, Donald Bogle argues that five main types of representation were taken over from existing cultural forms such as eighteenth-century melodrama. Bogle identifies the types as follows: the Tom, the Coon, the Tragic Mulatto, the Mammy and the Brutal Black Buck. These created a tradition that has remained influential. When black actors found themselves cast in these forms, some managed to infuse these types with a psychological reality or created an ironic distance by overplaying the type. Other actors passively played out the stock character (3–18).

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At various times such stars as Bill Bojangles Robinson, Stepin Fetchit and Hattie McDaniel built their careers on these types, which were later modernized after the Second World War by such stars as Sidney Poitier, Sammy Davis, Jr, Jim Brown, Gordon Parks, Dorothy Dandridge and Ethel Waters. Moving into the contemporary scene such performers as Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy and Whoopi Goldberg turned the stereotypes inside out and often succeeded in individualizing the primary structures of whatever mythic type they had been asked by the entertainment industry to act out. The following chart lists the characteristics out of which the male stereotypes were constructed: UNCLE TOM: remains loyal to his master in spite of being chased, hounded, flogged, enslaved and insulted. He is submissive, stoic, generous and selfless. THE COON (or SAMBO): unreliable, crazy, lazy, subhuman, always voraciously eating watermelons, steals chickens, superstitious in ways that make him stand wide-eyed, shaking with fear, rolling his eyes. THE BUCK: savage, violent, possessed by a frenzied lust for white flesh; the archetype is Gus from Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation. These types have been modified through time to include the assertive, confident professional like the black policeman played by Sidney Poitier in In the Heat of the Night (1967), whose scientific skills and physical courage enable him to solve a murder as the temporary assistant to an initially begrudging but honest Police Chief played by Rod Steiger. The innocent Poitier happens to be changing trains at the railroad station of a small southern town on his way home to Chicago where he is a well-paid homicide expert. He is picked up at random by the local police as a likely suspect. Another adaptation which had a confident black hero was the James Bond-like Shaft cycle (1971–73) in which Richard Roundtree plays a renegade detective who dominates his surroundings. Muhammad Ali displayed a knowledge of the characters of popular culture and towards the end of his boxing career welcomed into his entourage a famous Hollywood star of the 1930s, the most outrageous of the clowning coons, Stepin Fetchit. Fetchit had made a considerable and lucrative career out of playing a shuffling and syncopated robotic-like coon with a shaven head, clothes that were too large and a whining dialect voice that butchered the English language. Ali was fascinated by the virtuoso techniques and dancing flamboyance of this old master. Fetchit also challenged the liberal dislike for these figures from the past who liberals believed had damaged respect for African Americans. Ali saw in Fetchit’s act a chaotic, disruptive display of extraordinary timing

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and use of the body. Ali had himself developed the Ali shuffle and had sung on Broadway in a show called Buck White (1969). Ali and Fetchit clearly were to the straight boxing community a bizarre intrusion into a serious sport, but Ali had multiple ways of expressing himself and often made fun of the traditional inarticulate macho boxer. What he had was a general belief in his own worth that came over as a mental toughness in the sense of not being intimidated or passive. The ability to stand his ground was also influenced by ideas of authority current among young African American males. A study of an African American neighbourhood in Washington, DC, in the late 1960s by Ulf Hannerz called Soulside (1969) found that among the dominant male types were the swingers and street corner men who expressed a culture where deference was given to effective and impressive talking, winning contests, heavy drinking, sharp dressing, sexual prowess and fighting. The strongman and the trickster were admired and were of appeal to the downtrodden majority of unemployed youth. Such were the diverse and contradictory messages that were mediated to the young Cassius Clay about maleness, sexuality and ‘attitude’ in the culture he experienced as a teenager growing up in Louisville, Kentucky, in the late 50s and early 60s. From his first fight in 1960 to his last in 1980 Ali used a whole range of personae and masks from the repertoire that had been developed for and by the African American. He also developed some adaptations of his own. As Ali’s major form of visual dissemination was via the TV screen that could range in size from the set in the living room to the size of a cinema screen, to deliver a sense of how Mailer sees him we have to put Mailer’s iconography in the context of the flow of images generated by and about Ali. We are dealing with someone who became the most famous personality in the world and I can only offer a primary sketch of the multiple images of Ali. One way in which Ali exerted some control over how his character and ideas were mediated was to make everyone aware that in any interview, particularly on TV, there was a battle for supremacy. Ali invariably ignored the interviewer and spoke directly to camera, wagging his finger at the screen. In a 1969 documentary called A.K.A. Cassius Clay there are many shots of Ali acting out the repertoire of personae that he used to draw attention to himself and publicize any upcoming fight. He was particularly good at rolling his eyes like a coon actor of the 1930s or adopting the fixed menace of an angry buck. He also used a composite version of the crazed coon-cum-buck-cum-sambo. The following description from Ali’s autobiography The Greatest of an Ali performance in Las Vegas during the build-up to the first fight with Sonny Liston shows how both calculated and existential these provocations were:

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Christopher Brookeman When I got to the Thunderbird, Liston was deep in a dice game. I started shouting at him, ‘Come on, you big ugly bear! Let’s get it on! Come on!’ Liston kept rolling the dice, hardly looking up. ‘I’ll whip you right now!’ I said. ‘Floyd Patterson was a nobody. You’ll knock out Floyd Patterson, but I’m the real Champ. I’m too fast for you, and you know it! Put up all your money, Sonny! If you think you can whip me!’ He was still playing it cool, rolling the dice. But all the gambling had stopped. People were leaving the slot machines, the blackjack tables, the keno areas, coming over to see what was going on. I walked straight up to him ‘I want you out of town by sunup tomorrow’, I said giving him some western talk. ‘Las Vegas ain’t big enough for both of us.’ Suddenly he reached into his pocket and pulled out a long black pistol, pointed it straight at my head, pulled the trigger: BANG! BANG! … I was still shook up an hour later. I knew I was only acting crazy, but he (Liston) might be crazy for real. They said the joke was on me. Liston’s gun was loaded with blanks. (135–36)

The foundation images and myths on which Ali constructed his many-faceted self can be found in his autobiography. Although there are some revealing sporting autobiographies, Arthur Ashe’s for example, the standard format and content that tries to make every incident in a person’s life significant together with the unrelenting confessional tone and the obvious presence of a ghost writer makes it a difficult form to assess. With Ali, the ghost recorder was one Richard Durham, the Marxistoriented editor of a Black Muslim publication called Muhammad Speaks. The ghost editor at Random House who constructed The Greatest from a box of audio tapes supplied by Durham was Toni Morrison. We have a composite author with Durham providing the sense of social forces, Ali providing the drive towards the transgression of traditional boundaries, and Morrison the narrative structure. Among the mythic personae that Ali/Durham/Morrison describe there is a political self-image of Ali the rebel whose desire to retaliate and hurt white society is reminiscent of Guitar’s ideology in Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon (1977). The act of Ali’s that most people remember is him hurling his Olympic gold medal into the Mississippi River after being refused service at a restaurant, but there is also the more extreme act of retaliation when Ali claims to have participated in the derailment of a train. The events leading up to the derailment are focused on the murder of Emmet Till for whistling at a white woman. The Ali/Durham/Morrison version is as follows: Emmet Till and I were about the same age. A week after he was murdered in Sunflower County, Mississippi, I stood on the corner with a gang of boys, looking at pictures of him in the black newspapers and magazines. In one, he was laughing and happy. In the other, his head was swollen and bashed

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in, his eyes bulging out of their sockets and his mouth twisted and broken. His mother had done a bold thing. She refused to let him be buried until hundreds and thousands marched past his open casket in Chicago and looked down at his mutilated body. I felt a deep kinship to him when I learned he was born the same year and day I was. My father talked about it and dramatized the crime. (39)

Emmet Till had whistled suggestively at a white woman and the mutilation of his body by his murderers included that of his sexual organs. It is worth remembering that as a prelude to the writing of ‘The White Negro’ Mailer, in order to test the force of a theory about the sexual politics of the South that he felt was being avoided as the pressure to desegregate became acute, had sent a statement to the Press which began: Can’t we have some honesty about what’s going on now in the South? Everybody who knows the South knows that the white man fears the sexual potency of the Negro. And in turn the Negro has been storing his hatred and yet growing stronger, carrying with him the painful wound that he was usually powerless to keep from being cuckolded. (Mailer, Advertisements 285)

It is therefore interesting that, given the nature of the sexual politics in ‘The White Negro’, Mailer chooses to ignore Ali’s southern background in his mythic construction of the identity, significance and iconography of the most photographed man in the world, who as a teenager had been so powerfully influenced by the history, fate and mutilation of Emmet Till.2 Mailer sees Ali as a figure who transcends the straitjackets of reductive notions of race and sexuality. Ali, like Kennedy, was one of those American heroes that Mailer analysed in The Presidential Papers who made a society ‘which had grown by the leap of one hero past another (52)’.

Mailer’s Ali The opening image of Mailer’s book The Fight (1975) is a meditation on the beauty of Ali’s body: There is always a shock in seeing him again. Not live as in television but standing before you, looking his best. Then the World’s Greatest Athlete is in danger of being our most beautiful man, and the vocabulary of Camp is doomed to appear. Women draw an audible breath. Men look down. (3)

These are not sentiments that Mailer would air in the smoke-filled neighbourhood bars of any American city, and Mailer is one of a number of 2 For Emmet Till see Whitfield.

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writers who created the handsome Prince Charming image of Ali. There was the need for an image of blackness that announced that Black is Beautiful, and Mailer – along with a whole host of agencies such as advertising that saw an economic advantage in the beauty of blackness, and the speeches of Stokely Carmichael that often included the refrain ‘and we are beautiful’ – could not have found a better focus than Ali. Ali projected an image of maleness that could be associated with aftershave, manicured hands and immaculate teeth. Men in this new consumer landscape could spend the equivalent of a new small Volvo on fixing their teeth. Ali carried and conveyed a sexual charge in his imagery that Mailer also made a main signifier in his other 60s hero, John F. Kennedy, who had ‘the deep orange-brown suntan of a ski instructor and when he smiled at the crowd his teeth were amazingly white and clearly visible at a distance of fifty yards’ (Mailer, Presidential 50–51). One of the reasons that Gillette continued to sponsor a weekly programme of televised boxing rather than baseball or football was that the all-male audience that watched the fights in bars was the target audience for a range of products that were going to transform ideas of maleness. Such products as Right Guard deodorant and Sun Up aftershave lotion coincided with the emergence of Ali in the early 60s. The advertisers were one of the main agents that transformed the traditional image of the ugly black. One of Ali’s favourite lines to rile his opponents was to contrast what he called his prettiness with, for example, his vision of Sonny Liston as ‘The Big Ugly Bear’ or Joe Frazier as the ‘Gorilla’. Ali broke the mould out of which boxers were fashioned and Mailer is acutely aware of Ali’s transforming magic that was being repressed by his detractors. In a short appreciation of Ali written for Partisan Review in 1967 Mailer evaluates the reactions to Ali’s refusal to be drafted and fight in Vietnam, for which action his licence to fight was withdrawn and he was stripped of his titles. Mailer characterizes the interests that have joined together to run Ali out of boxing as follows: Their basic reflex, is after all, to kiss ass (it is their connection with the primitive) and patriotism is thus their head-on sublimation for such kissing. Therefore we are all deprived of an intimate spectacle which was taking place in public – the forging of a professional artist of extra-ordinary dimensions. (Mailer, Essential 503)

Ali is seen as an artist of prodigious talent, an avant-garde artist in that he is highly unorthodox and although several elements remain constant, such as the speed of his punches, his technique was continually changing to meet new conditions. The sheer power of his later opponents such as Frazier, Foreman and Holmes, and the fact that he could no longer sustain

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the leg speed to get himself away from an opponent which enabled him to quit boxing with the most unmarked face of any boxer, led Ali to become a specialist at holding an opponent’s head in a wrestling lock. This forced the other fighter to pound away at Ali’s trunk, gradually wearing himself out until Ali would launch himself with sudden electric speed from the ropes as in the fight with Foreman in Kinshasa in 1974. Mailer’s description of the denouement of that fight is charged with drama and metaphor. In conventional sports writing all eyes are on the winning sequence of punches that leads to the knockdown. With Mailer you get a well-constructed narrative as Ali’s planned strategy and plot unfolds in what Mailer organizes as three acts. Foreman, who has been trying to overwhelm Ali with the sheer power of his body punching, gets enmeshed in and destroyed by Ali’s narrative. At this culminating moment Mailer focuses on the dying throes of Foreman’s defence of his world heavyweight title. Foreman keels over with a circular movement like those classical sculptures of dying gladiators. For a brief instant Mailer returns us to ancient Rome: What a dislocation: the axes of his existence were reversed! He was the man on the ropes! Then a big projectile, exactly the size of a fist in a glove drove into the middle of Foreman’s mind, the best punch of the startled night, the blow Ali saved for a career. Foreman’s arms flew out to the side like a man with a parachute jumping out of a plane and in this doubled-over position he tried to wander out to the center of the ring. All the while his eyes were on Ali and he looked up with no anger as if Ali, indeed, was the man he knew best in the world and would see him on his dying day. Vertigo took George Foreman and revolved him. Still bowing from the waist in this uncomprehending position, eyes on Muhammad Ali all the way, he started to tumble and topple and fall even as he did not wish to go down. His mind was held with magnets high as his championship and his body was seeking the ground. (Mailer, Fight 208)

What Mailer establishes in The Fight is a narrative structure that organizes the various episodes into a chronological sequence with himself as the reporter/mediator of the event. We start with the milieu of the training camp, followed by the public workout with various sparring partners, then the press conference. Mailer contrasts the mood and personnel of the hypercamp and scene run by Ali to the quiet menace of Foreman’s. He includes the early morning training run that he mistakenly calls jogging. This is an attractive episode particularly as Mailer knows Ali well enough to join him on his 3 a.m. run. Throughout the text there is a careful balance between reflection and action, and the past and the present. The narrative builds to a climax with the description of

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the actual fight that in Mailer’s case is founded on a technicist appreciation of the nature of the punch and the effect of a sequence of punches on the nervous system, as in the following: Some of the hardest punches of the night were driven in. Four rights, a left hook and a right came in one stupendous combination. One punch turned Foreman’s head through ninety degrees, a right cross of glove and forearm that slammed into the side of the jaw; double contact had to be felt; once from the glove, then from the bare arm, stunning and jarring. (Mailer, Fight 198)

An essential part of any Ali narrative is the psyching out of the opponent in the course of the two entourages meeting, or both boxers being interviewed on the same platform, or the ritual of the weigh-in. Everyone then begins to hurl insults. The source of this convention is the dozens, whose history is well described by Randy Roberts: Urban Blacks, in particular, develop the skills of ritualized insults. Generally called the dozens – but sometimes known as signifying, sounding, woofing, screaming, cutting, or chopping – these ritualized insults involved symmetrical joking relationships in which two or more people were free to insult each other and each other’s ancestors and relatives either directly or indirectly. ‘Your mother so old she fart dust’ might be an opening line in a dozens battle. ‘Least my mother ain’t no railroad track, lay all around the country’ might come the counter insult. Once started, the contest was limited only by the power of one’s imagination and verbal invention. Bouts of the dozens developed the participant’s verbal skills and self-discipline, for to resort to physical violence was to transgress the rules of the ritual and to lose face. Only a person whose mental and verbal skills were exhausted would throw a punch. (40–41)

Mailer clearly enjoys the performances of Ali, calling him ‘America’s Greatest Ego’. He also takes pleasure in the spectacle of would-be liberal supporters of the Ali who made a stand against the Vietnam War writhing in confusion when they find that the Muhammad part of him, the Black Muslim self, comes with a belief that all white people are devils. Above all, Mailer is happiest when trying to follow and communicate his belief that Ali should be evaluated as the Picasso of boxing, which is why chapter 15 of The Fight ends as follows: ‘Back in America everybody was already yelling that the fight was fixed. Yes. So was The Night Watch and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’ (210). Mailer’s equation of the Ali–Foreman fight with two of the great cultural productions of Western artistic expression can hardly be in terms of boxing. Neither Rembrandt nor Joyce had as far as one knows any record of pugilism, so the main idea must be that great boxing matches are texts that can be compared to and described in terms of canonical artistic masterpieces.

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Conclusion: Literature, Myth and Boxing Mailer’s writings on boxing can be added to an established culture of pugilism and physical combat that has featured in a number of important American texts. When Mailer headbutted Gore Vidal in the Green Room before they both appeared on the Dick Cavett Show, was he subconsciously drawing on Melville’s depiction of a naval pastime in his 1850 novel White-Jacket? ‘Head-bumping as patronized by Captain Claret, consists in two Negroes (whites will not answer) butting at each other like rams’ (288–89). Gerald Early in his crucial study of the cultural impact of the African American boxers, The Culture of Bruising (1994), identifies a whole range of important treatments of the mythic role of African Americans in boxing that range from Richard Wright to Miles Davis, who felt that his own achievements as the world’s greatest jazz trumpet-player were as nothing when compared to the skills of his idol Sugar Ray Robinson. In Early’s opinion it is ‘Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man who fully elaborates upon the ambiguity of the black in boxing’ (25). One of Mailer’s achievements in his boxing pieces is to counter the clichés of the way white writers had represented the fight game. Mailer does not continue the tradition of tragic victims memorably depicted by Marlon Brando in the film On the Waterfront, directed by Elia Kazan. Brando plays Terry Malloy, a one-time Golden Gloves title-holder who throws a fight for the benefit of his elder brother’s mob connections. In one of the film’s crucial scenes Malloy turns on his brother and laments the loss of his integrity. If his brother had respected him, Malloy could have been a contender, he could have been somebody. As it is he is just a bum. One might argue that Ali, who is stricken with Parkinson’s disease, which may be the result of brain damage caused by too many punches to the head, has now become one of the arguments for the banning of a sport in which the main aim has always been to maim your opponent. Mailer retains a heroic view of the boxer. He sees Ali as the boxing equivalent of Hemingway’s bullfighters and the fight with Foreman as an extraordinary masterwork of strategy and bravery. In a sustained analysis of the process by which Ali created a new form of boxing to keep him ahead of a number of younger boxers like Foreman, who were planning to exploit the ageing legs of a much slower man, Mailer deconstructs Ali’s new style with complete authority: But it was as if Ali were teaching his nervous system to transmit shock faster than other men could … he could assimilate punches faster than other fighters, could literally transmit the shock through more parts of his body,

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Christopher Brookeman or direct it to the best path, as if ideally he were working toward the ability to receive that five punch combination (or six or seven) yet be so ready to ship the impact out of each arm, each organ and each leg, that the punishment might be digested, and the mind remain clear. (Mailer, Fight 4–5)

Mailer is the historian of those moments in the Ali era which runs from the 1960s through to the fight with Foreman in 1974 when sport, mass society and the African American ego intersected in a media space where they alone were dominant. At this point this critic will vacate the ring and leave Mr Mailer to have the last metaphor. He suggests that being the heavyweight champion of the world ‘is like being the big toe of God. You have nothing to measure yourself by’ (Mailer, Essential 294). Fortunately we do have both a general measure, and a specific complex record of the most important heavyweight champion there has been. Both can be found in Mailer’s writings on boxing.

Works Cited Ali, Muhammad and Richard Durham. The Greatest: My Story. New York: Random House, 1975. Baldwin, James. ‘The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy’. In Nobody Knows My Name. New York: Dell, 1963. 216–41. Bogle, Donald. Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks. 1968. New York: Continuum, 1973. Early, Gerald. The Culture of Bruising. New Jersey: The Ecco Press, 1994. Ledbetter, James. ‘Imitation of Life’. In Gender, Race, and Class in Media: A Text-Reader. Ed. Gail Dines and Jean M. Humez. London: Sage, 1995. 540– 44. Mailer, Norman. The Essential Mailer. Sevenoaks: New English Library, 1982. ——. The Fight. London: Penguin, 1991. ——. The Presidential Papers. Panther: London, 1976. ——. ‘The White Negro’. In Advertisements for Myself. London: HarperCollins, 1994. 290–311. Melville, Herman. White Jacket. Ed. Arthur Humphreys. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966. Roberts, Randy. ‘The Wide World of Muhammad Ali: The Politics and Economics of Televised Boxing’. In Muhammad Ali: The People’s Champ. Ed. Elliott J. Gorn. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995. 24–53. Whitfield, Stephen. Death on the Delta. New York: Free Press, 1991.

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Myth and Memory in the Writing of Jayne Anne Phillips

Chapter 4 RoleThe Secret Sharing: Myth and Memory in the Writing of Jayne Anne Phillips Michael K. Glenday

In the opening chapter of his study of American myth, Jeffrey D. Mason accepts that America’s foundation myth of itself as a space of limitless promise, of agrarian plenitude evolving into material abundance, was one which could neither survive its own internal contradictions, nor its trial by the actualities of time’s passage: There is a certain beauty in this myth, but as a guiding paradigm it no longer satisfies, and it does not express the profound failure of the American experience. Even as early as the nineteenth century, the actual Americans found that the land denied the myth’s abundant promise and that the disappointment led to … an excruciating sense of frustration. The experience challenges the myth’s essential optimism … [and] addresses, principally, the white, English, and mostly male experience. (21)

In more recent years, the Vietnam war has led to ‘the destruction, not of [America], but of the myth that gave it life and in which [Americans] once believed’ (Roth 349). This was the central thesis informing John Hellmann’s study, American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam (1986). Yet Hellmann also considered the afterlife of that destroyed mythology, asking perhaps the most fundamental question raised by the defeat of American myth in Vietnam: ‘what possibilities may remain for the aspiring American hero separated in Vietnam from the ideal self-concept of his culture?’ (161). He concluded that the most important Vietnam works ‘that have been most widely received as important literature have been less interested in a sustained portrait of the war than in an exploration of its implications for American myth’ (167). Published in 1986, Hellmann’s conclusion could only be tentatively optimistic with regard to the rebirth of American myth. Yet in the years since, a good deal of American fiction that has the war as subject suggests instead a confident determination to move beyond such impoverishment towards what Marc Chénetier has recognized to be a widespread ‘revision of myth in contemporary [American] fiction’ (164). In the work of writers such as Jayne Anne Phillips we find narratives which attempt to renegotiate what has been called ‘the unreadable,

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Michael K. Glenday

unmappable otherness of Vietnam’ (Price 177). Without ‘the metanarratives through which collective memory, a collective version of history, is born’ (Price 177), American writers have been forced into an examination of what Michael Herr once referred to as ‘the secret history’ (50) of memory and self. The mythic project, formerly a narrative that promised national cohesion, has in the work of post-Vietnam writers such as Phillips become a secretive subtext finding voice in a private world of vision and dream. ‘The writers who’ve influenced me, not for their style but their subject matter, were Welty, Porter, Faulkner and Edgar Lee Masters, writers who wrote about materially disenfranchised people who had rich histories and myths, stories that were almost destinies in themselves’ (Gilbert 66). So Jayne Anne Phillips, speaking in a published interview. Earlier in the same interview she said that ‘somehow very early I got the idea that language was some kind of private, secretive means of travel, a way of living beyond your own life’ (65). The relationships between mythology and secrecy, between the limitless journey and the imagination which is the traveller, are central to the work of a writer whose immense gifts were already clear in her first novel Machine Dreams (1984). Phillips’ understanding of her goal, of what she takes to be the goal of the creative writer, is found in the territory of myth. Writers, she has said, ‘get to that limitless place, an almost out-of-body awareness in which consciousness peers through time as through a transparent curtain’ (Phillips, ‘Outlaw’ 47), an idea revisited in another interview – ‘the great writers have a journeyer’s wisdom. They have been somewhere limitless and come back’ (Edelstein 107). The process and subject matter of writing are for this novelist, indeed, ‘a kind of dream’ (Phillips, ‘Outlaw’ 44). The urge is to transcend human time, for ‘writing is knowing, defining, moving beyond what is known to what is implied both in the past and in the future’ (Phillips, ‘Outlaw’ 45). Phillips’ importance lies in the success she has had in realizing this drive to ‘move beyond’ temporal contexts. Her fiction has frequently posited a site where myth and dream interact with each other, transcending the quotidian and transfiguring the imagination of human possibility. Her achievement is all the more remarkable since it came towards the end of a century of American writing that repeatedly foreclosed such possibilities, a century that quickly saw modern disruptions of self and society finding expression in an anguished, often narrow culture of introspection, and also finding at least partial release in an appropriate dream life. Yet such dreams often took the downward turn into crisis; for, as Susan Sontag has written, ‘the modern dream is a

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nightmare, a nightmare of repetition, stalled action, exhausted feeling’ (138). This exhaustion is exactly commensurate with the base neuroses of the modern world, ‘an era suffocated by the sense of eternal return, an era which experiences innovation as an act of terror’ (Sontag 138). Certainly in the final paragraphs of The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s trope of human transcendence was indeed the tragic one of ineffectual motion against the currents of time, an image of aspiration repeatedly defeated as ‘we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past’ (141). Yet although Phillips, quoting Leslie Stephen, allows that ‘great art is produced by taking an exceptionally delicate nature and mangling it slowly under the grinding wheels of the world’ (Phillips, ‘Outlaw’ 45), yet in much of her fiction this sorrow is permeable, as tragedy is mediated by the consolidative force of a mythic sensibility. Her more fundamental conviction is that ‘writers gamble with redemption … banking on the possibility that we might one day intervene in the dynamics of loss, insist that sorrow not be meaningless’ (Phillips, ‘Outlaw’ 47). After the defeat in Vietnam, American writers struggled to come to terms with the consequent collapse of perhaps the most potent dimension of the national myth, that which was often associated with imperial increase deriving from victorious battle. In his essay of 1959, Norman Mailer was the first to recognize that American myth was by that date already under pressure, forced underground and forming a secret dream life of repressed energy. His essay ‘Superman Comes to the Supermarket’ (1959) proposed that President John F. Kennedy would be the hero who would unite what Mailer called ‘the two rivers’ of American life: the public surface culture of dull Eisenhower politics, and the ‘subterranean river of untapped, ferocious, lonely and romantic desires’ (38). In Phillips’ work too there is a recognition that the American urge to myth has been forced underground, with its late twentieth-century expression being most often secretive, at best shared by the few. Yet for her this location also brings myth very close to the wellsprings of creativity: ‘when I was young, words themselves seemed secret because I read them in my mind and no one else could hear. Knowledge was often secret; the most interesting things were repeated in low tones’ (Phillips, ‘Outlaw’ 47). Her fiction is full of such secretive insight, often associated with children who become, wittingly or otherwise, secret sharers. ‘So it is that we children who become writers evolve into a particular genus of angelic spy’ (Phillips, ‘Outlaw’ 47), she has said, and in this she intimates a core feature of the mythic impulse, which operates at the level of the personal as well as the tribal.

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If Vietnam was the terminal point of the Kennedy-inspired myth of the collective new frontier, we find in the work of more recent writers such as Phillips and Jane Smiley, a determination to examine that ‘secret history’ of memory and self. The mythic project, once an effort to fashion collective identity and national cohesion, has in the work of such writers become a secretive subtext expressed in a highly personal narrative of vision and dream. This marks a return to a crucial foundation of the urge to myth; writing in 1850, the brothers Grimm prefaced their famous collection of folktales with the reminder that such texts derive their disturbing power from their hidden context. ‘These mythical elements’, they suggested, ‘resemble the little pieces of a shattered gemstone which have been scattered over ground covered in grass and flowers and which only the most penetrating eyes can discover’ (Bricout 1096). Phillips’ writing draws upon a similar vision; she has described her interest as one that transcends the public sphere, the known world of social and political action. The process and the subject matter of writing are for her a process of moving beneath surfaces, always with a lively awareness of the difficulty of ever getting at the truth of experience, for ‘the truth was agile as a dream’ (Phillips, ‘Outlaw’ 43). In this sense of dream, Phillips approaches both Jungian and Freudian understandings of the relationship between dream and myth. For Jung, ‘the conclusion that the myth-makers thought in much the same way as we still think in dreams is almost self-evident’ (Jung, Symbols 24). And in many dreams and in certain psychoses we frequently come across archetypal material, i.e., ideas and associations whose exact equivalents can be found in mythology … there is a layer of the unconscious which functions in exactly the same way as the archaic psyche that produced the myths. (Jung, ‘Analytical’ 119)

In Machine Dreams we have a narrative of family breakdown, family broken by war and its menfolk particularly broken by their affinity with the hierarchic myths of war and its machinery. Throughout the narrative there runs a potent contrast between the male aspiration towards the false transcendence offered by machinery, and in particular flying machines, and the female capacity to reach beyond this towards the vitalizing archetypes of more ancient mythic forms and forces. The novel’s deepest movements are structured around this contrast, with its seventeen chapters comprising two that share the title ‘Machine Dreams’. Both are third-person accounts describing the war traumas of Mitch Hampson, and then the crucial childhood experiences of his son Billy, who will meet his death as a helicopter gunner in Vietnam. Yet as the narrative proceeds the growing voice of authority belongs to Billy’s

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sister, Danner, who is the major voice overall and is allocated six of the seventeen chapters. The final, brief coda of the novel is also reserved to her. Phillips’ narrative structure is thus gendered so as to conflate the failed promise of a machine ethic with the demise of American manhood. That failure is, the novel insists, a failure of vision. The machine fetish is one that constrains and reduces the male imagination; unable to reach beyond such limits it is finally destroyed by them, just as American flying machines had been unable to impose any victorious conclusion in Vietnam. With immense tragic irony the morbid martyrdom and mass murder unleashed by the airborne terror strike on New York’s Trade Center twin towers saw America itself victimized by a dread illustration of the same affliction. In Machine Dreams, Phillips’ treatment of this pathology shows it to be almost literally engendered by the culture, the message being that one of gender’s greatest divisions lies in this area of mythic imagination, in the narrative’s insistence that men whose dreams are conditioned by machines will also be destroyed by that thraldom, unredeemed and unexonerated. Phillips suggests that it is mainly the female vision that has the power to see beyond this, to catch the all-butfaded, last traces of that shattered gemstone of myth. In his discussion of the novel, Brian Jarvis is correct to note that although it is concerned with wide-ranging fragmentation in American culture, it yet provides us with ‘a story about living through fragmentation’ (98). In both the epigraph and coda of the novel, we see Phillips drawing the contrast between these contexts, the one reductive and meretricious, the other exalting and rich in imaginative ambition. The epigraph provides four extracts to announce the tragic fall of the modern American imagination and contrasts the ancient myth of sublime flight with its wizened modern reduction: Hesiod versus Laurie Anderson, Pegasus versus Superman. First, from Hesiod’s Theogony, Phillips provides an image of eternal transcendence: ‘now Pegasus flew away and left the earth, the mother of flocks, and came to the deathless gods: and he dwells in the house of Zeus and brings to wise Zeus the thunder and lightning’. Against this grandeur she gives us a bathetic dose of pseudomyth in the voice from Anderson’s ‘O Superman’: I’ve got a message to give to you. Here come the planes So you better get ready. Ready to go. You can come as you are, but pay as you go … They’re American planes. Made in America. Smoking or non-smoking?

Preparation is here made for the novel’s major movements, which will continue to draw the contrast between a benighted late twentiethcentury reality, trapped in the anti-myths of machinery and the techno-

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weapon, and those immarcescible fragments shored up against such ruins. Yet fragmentation and partial glimpses are, in the sphere of mythmaking, not in themselves ruinous, since, as Robert Graves found, for the ancients themselves myth was nothing if not scattered and changeful, just as Proteus in the myth changes shape to avoid capture (21–34). Machine Dreams is a novel that couches its most telling moments in the depths of that secret children’s world wherein, Phillips insists, mythic knowledge is at its most sublime. The concept becomes a leitmotif introduced early by Danner’s mother, Jean Hampson. She tells her daughter that ‘later you look back and see one thing foretold by another. But when you’re young, those connections are secrets; everything you know is secret from yourself’ (4). This secret dimension is connected to myth and magic: neither can exist in, nor needs, bright exposure. In her essay ‘A Harvest of Light’, written as a preface to Jock Sturges’ book of photographs The Last Day of Summer (1991), and thus seven years after the publication of Machine Dreams, it is easy to see just how completely enduring is this concept in Phillips’ total response to the actual. Again and again in her discussion of these photographs, secrecy and access to what she calls ‘the privacy of childhood’ are presented as crucial constituents of a preternatural condition, Christ-innocent and challenging: The subject of his portraits don’t need to hold the light because it is inside them … They often seem to stand, in possession of the divine … In the chrysalis of their privacy, they are instructing us. Seeing them, we may feel we are in the presence of grace … The echo of Christ’s countenance on an obviously contemporary human form. (6–7)

Mythic knowledge is, Phillips contends, rooted in secrecy and the private, most especially in ‘the privacy of childhood’ (7). It is in that essential innocence that we approach what she calls ‘the secret of our brief cyclical lives as individuals – the fact that, in every moment, we are animals and angels, approaching the light of redemption with an intrinsic fear of flame’ (11). The same angelic metaphor is to found early in Phillips’ writing, always associated with the representation of an innocent sensibility and also at times associated with the same capacity of photography to capture that which would otherwise be ephemeral. Throughout Machine Dreams it is located in what might be called the mythy reaches of threshold experiences, experiences that offer veiled profundity and mystical crux. So, when Jean Hampson remembers the death of Tom Harwin, her first love, the bereavement is ‘like some repetitive dream’ (13). Photographs allow release into that dream, opening towards more than le temps retrouvé, becoming rather a meditation upon memory and its mystique:

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Nate and Peggy had made copies of all their snapshots of Tom, then given me the originals and the negatives. Envelopes of those stiff dark negatives, squares that rattled as I shuffled them … Sometimes I took them all out and held them to the light one by one. We all glowed up like angels. The smiles and unsuspecting gestures made more sense, full of a secret everyone ignored, but what was it? (13)

Here is ‘the harvest of light’ implied by the title of Phillips’ essay – a metaphor for life enlightened by the glow of the liminal, on the border of the sacred. Such fleeting ‘liminal instants’ yet remain capable of illuminating the long years of quotidian and culture-bound experience. Many authorities on mythology have laid stress upon the reality, as opposed to the symbolical or allegorical aspect of myth and for some, such as Mircea Eliade, this reality is always bound up with the sacred and has special relevance to liminality and flux. In his work The Sacred and the Profane (1957), Eliade proposes that ‘it is the sacred that is pre-eminently the real’ (95). Whether directly or indirectly, myths most often refer to the biological life crises of birth, mating, disease and death. They also involve the restructuring of social and cultural norms – with the possibility of conflict and disorder. Therefore, without myth there can only be disintegration; as Jung wrote, the mental life of the tribe ‘immediately falls to pieces and decays when it loses its mythological heritage’ (Jung, Psychological 314). It is a fall of this magnitude that Phillips confronts in the novel and, in the Danner narrative particularly, yet provides us with a model of recuperation, recovering those ‘little pieces of the shattered gemstone’ of myth. In Machine Dreams this theme of a tragic recessed beauty hidden like a secret beneath the surfaces of life, and again involving the talismanic power of photography, becomes even more fully inscribed in both title and content of the novel’s second chapter, ‘The Secret Country: Mitch’. In a first-person narrative that is one of the most affecting in all of Phillips’ work, we encounter the triumph of outsider over insider, as Danner’s father Mitch Hampson remembers the story of the Chinese leper, Li Sung, who ‘wore gloves to cover the lesions on his hands, but somehow his brother discovered the secret’ (31). Banished from country and job, he is himself of liminal kind, finally isolated from all community and sequestered out beyond the woods, living in an old army tent – his own ‘secret country’. In his study of Machine Dreams, Kenneth Millard is right to focus on the centrality of this vignette, but grossly misunderstands its meaning when he tells us that no one ‘can communicate’ with Li Sung, whose story dramatizes what Millard calls ‘the existential despair that lies beyond this male consciousness’, a consciousness that

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‘cuts him off from valuable social exchange and isolates and starves him’ (59). Phillips’ critique in this novel is, thankfully, a good deal less programmatic and more discriminating than Millard allows. Indeed so far from being cut off from crucial interaction, quite the opposite is true as we find Li Sung becoming a correspondent in grief with Mitch’s aunt, Ava, whose youngest daughter, Emily, has recently died. Phillips’ imaginative reach here is absolutely true, as once again a secret sharing is made to challenge death and loss while simultaneously revising notions of confinement and liberty: The clearing was like a church, the sky arched over and deeply blue … I told him my little girl had died … He gave me to understand that he had little children, two, in his homeland. He would not see them again. I wanted him to see Emily so badly that I took him a photograph of her, knowing once he touched it I could not take it back. I put the picture on his tray. He understood at once and looked at the image carefully; then he bowed his head to me in gratitude and put the picture in his breast pocket. He placed his hand there and said, ‘Yes, safe. Safe.’ ‘Yes,’ I said to him, and knew she was, when before I’d felt only the injustice. (34)

In Phillips’ work, American dreams are no mythic collective, but instead consist of secretive and authentic communion between absolute outsiders, between those like Li Sung and Americans who are also lost to family and to home. In the final two paragraphs of his narrative, Mitch, returned from the Pacific theatre of war, visits the farm country of his childhood and finds his home all but effaced, sold off to the strip-mine outfits and under technological assault. It is a revision that elicits one of the novel’s first ‘machine dreams’: The land was all changed, moved around … out where the farm was – almost nothing. Heaps of dirt, cut-away ledges where they’d stripped. Looking at it made me think I’d been asleep a long time and had wakened up in the wrong place, a hundred miles from where I lay down. Like I’d lost my memory and might be anyone. (45)

Here is the sadness of a land being undermined quite literally, its effect being one of existential strip-mining for Mitch. In the midst of all that has gone, and in the cemetery where Ava and the rest of his family lie buried, Mitch’s final memory is of Li Sung. Phillips’ novel suggests that modern conditions have created a new kind of existential erasure and diaspora. Spatial displacement creates a radical dissolution of the self, with a passport to the secret country shared by all those without a home: Only thing they left alone was the wooden church, all falling in on itself, and the cemetery … You know I thought of the leper; hadn’t thought of

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him in years. I never saw the inside of that shack. What did he do all day. No country, no family, no job. No one. Maybe he wasn’t sure anymore who he was. He was a secret … During the war I used to dream of him, walking toward me on one of the tarmac landing strips we laid in New Guinea. I’d wake up in a sweat. I was a secret myself. (45)

Writing in 1964, Leo Marx had already found the clear signs of attenuated pastoralism in the work of Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway. In their imagination of the land, such strip-mining had already begun, with foundational identity being eroded by the rampant machinery of progress: Again and again they invoke the image of a green landscape … as a symbolic repository of meaning and value. But at the same time they invoke the power of a counterforce, a machine or some other symbol of the forces which have stripped the old ideal of most, if not all of its meaning. Complex pastoralism, to put it another way, acknowledges the reality of history. (362–63)

In Machine Dreams, this counterforce is shown to have not only invaded the modern American imagination, but, especially in the case of its menfolk, stripped away any but the most vestigial capacity to transcend its baleful effects. It is in this sense that Brian Jarvis, in his study of the novel, is right to note that its characters invest ‘the objects that dominate personal and public space with a magical, mythological potential’ (106). Yet we also need to recognize that one of the most crucial features of the narrative is that it discriminates clearly between a false, deadly, yet very successfully mobilized ideology of machinery and flight, associated with masculinity, and that mythological template which is authentic and shown as available particularly to the female imagination. Without taking account of this distinction, Jarvis is unable to do anything like full justice to the novel’s final ‘Machine Dream’. His reading is, to use his self-censure, ‘too freely correlative’ (103) and eccentric. Prior to that final scene and in a body of reference that imparts a deep and subtle pulse throughout the entire narrative, Phillips exploits the flight motif in both its positive and negative connotations. For Mitch’s 10-year-old niece, Katie Sue, the shadow of Pegasus is found in the flying horse of an advertisement for Mobil oil, the new sign installed at the local gas station, a ‘giant red horse with wings: NEW MOBILGAS GIVES FLYING HORSEPOWER. She would sit and stare at that big sign until he didn’t know what the hell she was seeing’ (81). The novel’s final scene with its gendered distinction is here allowed an ironic foreshadowing, as Mitch is unable to understand Katie’s innocent, yet ‘earnest’

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involvement with what is for her a powerful image of transcendent yearning. He is unable to share in her sight of the wondrous: Already she’d leaned forward, looking past the high dash of the Pontiac at the billboard. The red horse above them seemed to fly over the cracked concrete of the station lot and the street beyond, a red gleaming horse with powerful flanks, its feathered wings spread to glide. The belly was long and flat and the horse seemed to swim a fast current of wind, mane flying, head lowered, nostrils flared with effort … ‘Oh, he’s beautiful,’ Katie whispered. (82–83)

Katie’s absorption with the dynamic radiance of the image, its mythic resonance in action upon her imagination, suggests that she senses the proximity of the known but barely stated shadow of mythic invocation. That she is open to this is a further instance of the child’s innocent vision in Phillips’ writing, of the essential ‘privacy’ of that vision, as well as being an illustration of Jung’s idea that myths are ‘involuntary statements about unconscious psychic happenings’ (Jung, ‘Child’ 154). In contrast, her uncle can only read the image as the make-believe of a commercial icon – ‘he looked back at the billboard above them, at the blue script in quotes: I’VE BOOSTED BOMBERS AT 60 BELOW. He gazed with the kid at her gleaming, muscled horse and wished things were really like that’ (83). The superimposed harness of the commercial text controls his reception of the image. A visual cliché, which simultaneously reifies and reduces meaning is thus created, excluding Mitch from its mythic potentiality – it is very much Katie’s privilege to gaze alone with such intensity upon ‘her gleaming, muscled horse’. Unlike Mitch, she is oblivious to the discourse of advertising which is here linked to the advertising of war, and in particular to that of fuelling American war machines; that discourse has of course long been reductive and often trite, and in its grip Katie’s beautiful stallion is reduced to a bubble of empty breath, the incongruity of its ‘boosting bombers’ immense. In the novel’s final scene Phillips plays a last tragic deep chord upon this theme of mythic potentiality, again in a gendered context, again contrasting relative capacities for transcendence. Here, Mitch’s son, Billy Hampson, a helicopter gunner missing in action in Vietnam, appears in his sister’s narrative, ‘Machine Dream: Danner’, and like his father, is shown to be oblivious to authentic mythic presences. As Mitch can only read the billboard script as one promoting American commerce and war, so ‘in the deep dark forest’ of his sister’s dream, Billy is tragically unable to exit the cul-de-sac of his tainted imagination, circumscribed as it is by the false and failed transcendence of the warplane:

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Billy makes airplane sounds. Danner, oblivious to her brother’s play, is stalking the magic horse. There are no cloven tracks, but the dust on the path is disturbed and the horse seems to be circling. Occasionally Danner looks over her shoulder and sees the animal watching them through thick leaves. The mare’s eyes are large and certain. Certain of what? Billy pays no attention and seems to have followed his sister here almost accidentally: They walk on, and finally it is so dark that Danner can’t see Billy at all. She can only hear him, farther and farther behind her, imitating with a private and careful energy the engine sounds of a plane that is going down. Warmovie sounds. Eeee-yoww, ack-ack-ack. So gentle it sounds like a song, and the song goes on softly as the plane falls, year after year, to earth. (331)

Just as Mitch cannot share in Katie’s mythic awareness, so Billy is lost in the darkness of the forest, forever sealed off from the possibility of enlightenment that shines from the watching eyes of Pegasus, ‘large and certain’. As André Dabezies has remarked, the truth of myths is a symbolic truth … It offers for the world, life and human relations, a meaning which can be neither imposed nor proved. I either enter into it or I do not; myths either play on the power of fascination or else they do not touch me … Living myths fully represent what Detienne describes in phenomenological language (Le Temps de le Reflexion, 1:41): ‘the figures of transcendental imagination which open to presence’. (Dabezies 432)

Dabezies here reminds us of an important matter: that while an authentic mythology is both protean and permissive, yet it can never be made to serve totalitarian ends. It is always transcendental and especially transcends any system that would seek to harness it for political service alone. So whether, as in the case of Roland Barthes, we see myth as nonpolitical or, like Wendy Doniger in her recent study of comparative mythology, we see it as ‘prepolitical’ (101), the truth of myth is one that eventually subverts any effort at totalitarian reduction. Yet, as Peter Conrad reminds us, the distortion of ancient myths for modern totalitarian use was all too horribly manifest in the fascism of the Third Reich, where ‘the Nazis relied on myths to conceal the truth from themselves’, while also accrediting a new Wagnerian mythology consisting of ‘jerry-built fictions’ that were ‘a convenient camouflage for power’ (480). And in the above passage from Machine Dreams Billy is also presented as the victim of a perverse mythical variant that is not, in Dabezies’ term, ‘living’, of American myth that is in itself moribund, but which literally kills those who are in its grip. In Danner’s dream as in his life Billy is beyond metaphysical reach, and for him there is no supernatural uplift: he ‘pays no attention’ to the mare’s presence, indeed

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he is said to have arrived in the forest of myth ‘accidentally’. He has become ceded to the sound of a plane that is always falling to earth; his ‘careful and private energy’ has been absorbed into this fatal effort, while his voice is folded into a gentle reiteration of ‘engine sounds’ that forever express this dying fall into oblivion. The scene is not only Danner’s epitaph for Billy and the culture that produced his encumbered dreams, but also Phillips’ poetic rendition of our modern neurosis in Jungian terms. In ‘Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious’, Jung wrote that ‘in reality we can never legitimately cut loose from our archetypal foundations unless we are prepared to pay the price of a neurosis, any more than we can rid ourselves of our body and its organs without committing suicide’ (157). Phillips’ narrative indicates that such neurosis is endemic in American life, and that it stems from the violation done to its archetypal foundations. American interpretations of myth often seek to contain it so as to serve a spurious nationalism, leading to what Jung would have called distortion of the soul. Such distortion is the high price to be paid for this mauvais foi, since whatever a culture does to damage the integrity of myth we do to our own souls as well … the archetype – let us never forget this – is a psychic organ present in all of us. A bad explanation means a correspondingly bad attitude to this organ, which may thus be injured. But the ultimate sufferer is the bad interpreter himself. (160)

Machine Dreams contains many scenes that demonstrate such psychic harm and its results as Phillips explores what Joanna Price has referred to as a ‘movement from the grand universalized symbols of myth to the partial images of contemporary culture’ (177). In the first of the chapters titled ‘Machine Dreams’, ‘Machine Dreams: Billy, 1957’, Phillips provides us with one of the great movements in the novel as she allows the 6-year-old Danner a mythic awakening. In words of great precision, the vision here elaborates mystical, visceral and erotic energies, managing to reach towards their deep source; again there are intimations of liminality mediated by the secrecy and innocence of childhood: Danner sinks deep, completely, finally, into a dream she will know all her life … in the cloudy air, winged animals struggle and stand up; they are limbed and long-necked, their flanks and backs powerful; their equine eyes are lucent and their hooves cut the air, slicing the mist to pieces. The horses are dark like blood and gleam with a black sheen; the animals swim hard in the air to get higher and Danner aches to stay with them. She touches herself because that is where the pain is; she holds on, rigid, not breathing, and in the dream it is the horse pressed against her, the rhythmic pumping

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of the forelegs as the animal climbs, the lather and the smell; the smell that comes in waves and pounds inside her like a pulse. (132)

The recurrence of this creature in the novel’s final page scores it even more as a crux, though its appearance there is relatively remote and the adult Danner is now consigned to ‘stalking the magic horse’. The contrast in tone certainly derives from Danner’s subsequent adult experiences, made up as they are of war and Billy’s death in particular. This ultimate dream takes account of that fall from innocence, shown in the stark contrasts: no longer a group, there is now only a single ‘magic horse’ which seems reluctant to show itself. It hides away in the forest among the darkness of the leaves, and has to be ‘stalked’ by Danner, who has herself become an outsider and perhaps an object of suspicion due to her relationship with Billy. That verb suggests the hunter and the hunted, and in this narrative which has stressed death and war, there is also a real suggestion of the animal’s consciousness of itself as endangered, as prey. Since the Enlightenment there has indeed been an expectation of myth’s endangerment, of its dwindling appeal due to scientific rationalism. And in his seminal study of this topic, Work on Myth, Hans Blumenberg explores among other formulations what he terms ‘the limit concept of work on myth’. This concept accepts that myths have reached their apocalyptic moment, an endgame in which they have entered into ‘the most extreme deformation, which only just allows or almost no longer allows the original figure to be recognized … this would be the fiction of a final myth, that is, of a myth that fully exploits, and exhausts the form’ (266). Might this explain at least some of the intimations in Danner’s final ‘Machine Dream’? For to save itself from any further and perhaps final deformation, myth’s winged horse must manoeuvre to preserve its transcendence, must resist availability. Such a reading would of course move the conclusion of Machine Dreams even more firmly towards elegy: towards the fading transience of dream rather than the audacious permanence of myth. Yet the novel’s conclusion is, in truth, decidedly gendered. It is Billy who cannot be saved from endgame: the final section of the novel shows his enclosure/closure within that ‘most extreme deformation’ of American myth, unable to recognize, in Blumenberg’s terms, ‘the original figure’ represented by the magic horse. He disappears from Danner’s sight into final darkness, though it is important to stress that Danner herself has entered this darkness also: ‘they walk on, and finally it is so dark that Danner can’t see Billy at all’ (331). This fact relates to a crucial aspect in early childhood memories of her relationship to her brother. There, Danner is his protector, in an earnest game that again sounds the depths of a secret liaison, this time linked to survival.

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In the game, protection for Billy means covering him, in fact burying him under the darkness and silence of autumn leaves. She builds a mound for her brother that is part shelter, part tomb: ‘Bury me way down deep,’ Billy said. ‘You’re still bigger than me and you won’t be able to tell where I am.’ I covered him, piling on more leaves … I wanted him to win, to stay hidden, stay silent. I kept piling leaves, alone in the clearing, hiding him deeper and deeper … I kept working until he was secret, buried, warm. Until he was nowhere. (326)

Here, secrecy is a void, a realm created and sustained by the young Danner’s (she is 10 years old) primitive desire to offer her brother protection from a world already intuited as dangerous. Even earlier, as a 3year-old, she heeds her mother’s caution to ‘watch your little brother’ (327) with utter earnestness. ‘I was very serious. I kept him entertained with the ball or the block or whatever else he was fooling with; if all else failed, I held him down by main force. She’d come back to see why he was crying’ (327). After his death Danner’s dreams are pervaded with what seems like guilt and dread. In these dreams she is ‘the one who is afraid, who knows something terrible might happen, has happened, will happen … the one who can’t stop it from happening’ (327). In the coda, however, Danner is at last released from such burdens. She is ‘oblivious to her brother’s play’, and is no longer looking for him, or looking after him. It would seem that beyond mourning there is, at last, the chance for Danner’s release from darkness. Concerned with ‘mythologies of hope’, George Steiner wrote that ‘as Dante knew, the mind dreams forward into a light so sharp that it effaces all details’ (381–82), a reminder again of Phillips’ own concern with a luminous metaphysics, her essay ‘A Harvest of Light’ showing an awareness that we approach ‘the light of redemption with an intrinsic fear of flame’ (11). This light bestows an angelic glow upon those who are open to it, although as Steiner’s description indicates, it is but a sign of a future condition that is by nature both perfect and secretive, all details effaced. In Phillips’ terms, we can be touched by such a stimulus without recognizing its source: ‘full of a secret everyone ignored, but what was it?’ (13). In this regard, Wendy Doniger’s observation that for a Catholic theologian such as Teilhard de Chardin, ‘the myth of Eden, the myth of the Golden Age, is a myth about the future’ (106) is apposite. As noted above, Billy’s story provides a dark parallel text, its tropes those of enclosure and lifelessness, as Phillips unambiguously insists that what his youthful imagination reacts to is as far removed from the mystique of sensual recognition as it is possible to be. As a boy he had opened his father’s trunk in the attic and found there his version of Danner’s winged

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horse – ‘hard and shining and sharp, and the animal wasn’t alive. That’s why it could stay in the trunk; it was very old and didn’t have to breathe’ (137). Finally, however, Machine Dreams in its ‘work on myth’, is a story of how Jayne Anne Phillips has indeed given breath and life to modern myth.

Works Cited Blumenberg, Hans. Work on Myth. Trans. R. M. Wallace. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990. Bricout, B. ‘Tales and Myths’. In Companion to Literary Myths, Heroes and Archetypes. Ed. P. Brunel and trans. W. Allatson et al. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. 1092–98. Chénetier, Marc. Beyond Suspicion: New American Fiction Since 1960. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996. Conrad, Peter. Modern Times, Modern Places. New York: Knopf, 1999. Dabezies, André. ‘Faust’. In Companion to Literary Myths, Heroes and Archetypes. Ed. P. Brunel and trans. W. Allatson et al. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. 431–42. Doniger, Wendy. The Implied Spider: Politics and Theology in Myth. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. Edelstein, D. ‘The Short Story of Jayne Anne Phillips’. Esquire (December 1985): 106–12. Eliade, Mircea. The Sacred and the Profane. New York: Harcourt, 1959. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Gilbert, C. ‘Interview With Jayne Anne Phillips’. Publishers Weekly 225 (8 June 1984): 65–66. Graves, Robert. ‘Author’s Introduction’. In The Greek Myths. London: The Folio Society, 1996. 21–34. Hellmann, John. American Myth and the Legacy of Vietnam. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984. Herr, Michael. Dispatches. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989. Jarvis, Brian. Postmodern Cartographies: The Geographical Imagination in Contemporary American Culture. London: Pluto Press, 1998. Jung, Carl. ‘Analytical Psychology and Education’. In Collected Works. Vol.17, The Development of Personality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964. ——. ‘Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious’. In The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. Ed. Sir H. Read et. al., trans. R. F. C. Hull et. al. Vol. 9, pt.1, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. 2nd edn, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968. ——. Psychological Reflections: An Anthology of Writings. Ed. J. Jacobi. New York: Harper, 1953.

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——. ‘The Psychology of the Child Archetype’. In The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. Ed. Sir H. Read et. al., trans. R. F. C. Hull et. al. Vol. 9, pt.1, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. 2nd edn, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968. ——.Symbols of Transformation. Collected Works. Vol. 5, 2nd edn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967. Mailer, Norman. ‘Superman Comes to the Supermarket’. In The Presidential Papers. New York: Putnam, 1963. 25–61. Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964. Mason, Jeffrey D. Melodrama and the Myth of America. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993. Millard, Kenneth. Contemporary American Fiction: An Introduction to American Fiction Since 1970. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Phillips, J. A. ‘A Harvest of Light’. In The Last Day of Summer: Photographs by Jock Sturges. New York: Aperture, 1991. 5–11. ——. Machine Dreams. London: Faber, 1993. ——. ‘Outlaw Heart’. Critical Quarterly 37 (1995): 43–48. Price, J. ‘Remembering Vietnam: Subjectivity and Mourning in American New Realist Writing’. Journal of American Studies, 27 (1993): 173–86. Roth, R. Sand in the Wind. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. London: Deutsch, 1987. Steiner, George. Language and Silence: Essays on Language, Literature and the Inhuman. New York: Atheneum, 1974.

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Towards a New Mythology of the Postmodern

Chapter 5 RoleThe Individual’s Ghost: Towards a New Mythology of the Postmodern Leslie Heywood

In Brian McHale’s 1987 study Postmodernist Fiction, the literature that the author discusses has a gender and a race although gender and race are never mentioned. While the jacket copy extols the inclusiveness of a frame that brings together Beckett, Robbe-Grillet, Fuentes, Nabokov, Coover and Pynchon, the absence of any women and particularly any women of colour leads a cultural critic to question what it is about the idea of ‘postmodern fiction’ that would produce a list so clearly inflected by race and gender but marked by the absence of acknowledgement of these issues. What particular notion of the postmodern literary aesthetic would lead McHale or other writers to ignore the contributions of white women and women of colour? Why would a writer like Kathy Acker, who so clearly exemplifies the criterion for ‘postmodernism’ that McHale outlines, not even appear in his index?1 And while the absence of Acker is perhaps the most startling, when one thinks about many contemporary women writers and the formal features that characterize their works – such as two of the primary definitions Linda Hutcheon delineates in her introduction to A Postmodern Reader, ‘the assertion of the value of inclusive “both/and thinking” and the postmodern valuing of the local and a particular’ – it becomes difficult to make sense of the absence of writers such as Jean Rhys, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Merce Rodoreda, Alice Walker, Jane Smiley and Louise Erdrich, from almost any catalogue of postmodern writers.2 1 Molly Hite opens her book The Other Side of the Story with a similar question. She argues that ‘a number of the most eminent and influential women writing in the contemporary period are attempting innovations in narrative form that are more radical in their implications than the dominant modes of fictional experiment, and more radical precisely inasmuch as the context for innovation is a critique of a culture and a literary tradition apprehended as profoundly masculinist’ (2). In other words, women writers make a general cultural critique but are not seen as doing so. I am indebted to her insight and formulations in my own argument, both in terms of her overall argument and her reading of Jean Rhys in particular. 2 Hutcheon ix. The debates about ‘postmodernism’ are very complicated, and Hutcheon’s collection does a good job of situating them. It is not my aim to enter

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What assumptions could motivate their absence? In the institution of literary study, why has ‘postmodern fiction’ come to mean writers such as Donald Barthelme and John Barth, William Burroughs and William Gass, Italo Calvino and Gabriel García Márquez? Why is Morrison often aligned with ‘naturalist fiction’, or Walker with the ‘sentimental novel’, as if their work represents a kind of artistic ‘regression’ while the white males and a few male writers of colour represent ‘progression’ and formal innovation?3 While the white male writers that McHale describes undoubtedly participate in ‘illusion breaking art’ that ‘systematically disturbs the air of reality by foregrounding the ontological structure of texts and fictional worlds’ (221), a necessary artistic practice if we are to work toward transgressive cultural change, what is it about the women writers, who undoubtedly participate in the same kinds of disturbance, that keeps their work elsewhere, marginalized still? In a piece called ‘The Feminist as Other’, cultural theorist Susan Bordo convincingly shows how, in the postmodern transformation of interpretive paradigms, the work of theorists such as Foucault or Baudrillard is seen as performing a general cultural critique that is of applicability and use to everyone, while the work of critics who theorize race and gender is seen to perform separate, specialized critiques that are not widely applicable. How theories of race and gender are read, interpreted and institutionalized in courses, Bordo argues, contributes to a ‘ghettoization of feminist insight’, so that ‘feminist theory swims up-stream against powerful currents whenever it threatens to assume the mantle of general culture critique rather than simply advocate for the greater inclusion or representation of women and their “differences”’ (186, 197). The general challenge that the fiction of Toni Morrison, for instance, poses to cherished American mythologies of individuality and identity is obscured by her institutional status as a ‘minority’ writer, the ‘voice of the other’ who only has into the debates here. Rather I use the term ‘postmodern’ as it has been applied to a certain group of contemporary novelists (see n. 6 below) and not to others, examining some of the reasons behind this application. 3 In the preface to Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, Gates writes that although Morrison’s themes are ‘often those expected of naturalist fiction … Morrison has evolved a register of representation that we might think of as magical naturalism … grounded in Faulkner, and informed by James Baldwin’s densely lyrical experiments with fictional prose rooted in the religious vernacular … as well as jazz, blues, and the whole range of Black secular vernacular speech rituals and discourses’ (ix). Gates indicates how Morrison’s ‘naturalism’, melded as it is with other forms, does represent a formal innovation, and indicates why it is political to label writers who deal with ‘the burdens of history, the determining social effects of race, gender, or class’ with a term like ‘naturalist’ (ix).

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something to say about those ‘others’ rather than about the culture at large. Within the academy, questions of race and gender are still figured as specialized forms of critique that can be handled by the ‘race and gender hire’, while ‘the postmodernist’ or the ‘twentieth-century person’ handles the general discussions of cultural transformation seen as relevant to all. Yet there is a generally applicable form of culture critique most definitively at work in contemporary novels written by women. For if, as Toni Morrison argues in her critical work Playing in the Dark and in her novels, the body, blackness, femininity, community and emotionality are the abject others that literature and other dominant cultural forms tend to hate, violently exclude, disavow as the other of their aesthetic, and if, in fact, some standard definitions of the ‘postmodern’ are predicated upon this disavowal, then one cannot fail to see the social and political consequences of such an aesthetic, and why that aesthetic would produce writers who are raced white and gendered male.4 If in 4 I explore this set of assumptions much more fully in Dedication to Hunger, where I associate those assumptions with what I call an ‘anorexic logic’ and discuss how that logic characterizes both the Western canonical philosophic and literary tradition (I focus on literary modernism) and people who suffer from the disease anorexia nervosa. In the book as in this essay, I am drawing on the work of many feminist theorists and race critics who have identified whiteness, maleness, individuality and rationality as privileged signifiers for identity in Western cultural traditions. Susan Bordo, for instance, in relation to the mind/body dualism central to modern philosophy, argues that ‘if, whatever the specific historical content of the duality, the body is the negative term, and if woman is the body, then women are that negativity, whatever it may be: distraction from knowledge, seduction away from God, capitulation to sexual desire, violence or aggression, failure of will, even death … racist ideology and imagery that construct non-European “races” as “primitive”, “savage”, sexually animalistic, and indeed more bodily than white races extends to black women as well as black men’ (Bordo, Unbearable 5, 9). As Bordo and others point out, and as even a cursory examination of canonical philosophers such as Plato, Descartes and Hegel shows, the emotions are traditionally associated with the body as well, and are seen as a distraction from ‘higher’ characteristics such as rationality. Perhaps especially in American culture the individual is fetishized over community as the basis for identity, a valuation that affects writers and readers concerned with postmodernism. Toni Morrison formulates the American deployment of this set of valuations in Playing in the Dark. Morrison writes that ‘Living in a nation of people who decided that their world view would combine agendas for individual freedom and mechanisms for devastating racial oppression presents a singular landscape for a writer … There seems to be a more or less tacit agreement among literary scholars that, because American literature has been clearly the preserve of white male views, genius, and power, those views, genius, and power are without relationship to and removed from the overwhelming presence of black people in the United States … the major and championed characteristics of our national literature [are] individualism, masculinity, social engagement versus historical isolation’ (xiii, 5).

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widely accepted definitions such as McHale’s postmodern fiction is primarily meta-critical, ‘fictions about the order of things, discourses which reflect upon the world of discourse’, if postmodern fiction ‘participate[s] in that very general tendency in the intellectual life of our time toward viewing reality as constructed in and through our languages, discourses, and semiotic systems’ (164), then this can become a primarily intellectual aesthetic that once again privileges detached, self-reflexive thought. Cornell West comments on this tendency when he writes that important pioneering work in postmodernism such as that of the boundary 2 collective nonetheless ‘remained at the level of philosophic outlook and artistic enactment’ instead of coming ‘“down to earth” by situating [that work] in relation to larger developments in society and history’.5 The canonical version of postmodernism employed in literary criticism says that the individual is fragmented but often does not go much further than intellectual speculation about what the conditions and implications of that fragmentation might be.6 Fragmentation is taken as a reason for detachment and cynical distance from any kind of enabling fictions of identity such as those in which race and gender critics have interest. Donna J. Haraway sums up these problems succinctly: Non-feminist theory in the human sciences has tended to identify the breakup of ‘coherent’ or masterful subjectivity as the ‘death of the subject’. Like others in newly unstably subjugated positions, many feminists resist this formulation of the project and question its emergence at just the moment when raced/sexed/colonized speakers begin ‘for the first time’, that is, they claim an originary authority to represent themselves … Feminist deconstructions of the ‘subject’ … are not nostalgic for masterful coherence … 5 West 392. A question in West’s essay that is central to my argument is ‘does the postmodernism debate seriously acknowledge the distinctive cultural and political practices of oppressed peoples, e.g. African Americans, Latinos, women, etc.? My point here is not a crude instrumental one, that is, I am not calling for some “vulgar” populist discourse for mobilizing oppressed peoples. Rather I am asking whether postmodernism can cast some significant light on cultural practices of oppressed peoples’ (394). When the debate – as in much discussion of what has been called ‘postmodern fiction’ – tends to centre on textual practice and formal inventions, ‘postmodernism’ can obscure the questions West highlights here. The novelists I analyse employ the insights of postmodernism along the lines West describes, but, as I argue throughout, as a form of general rather than specialized cultural critique that ‘casts significant light’ on dominant cultural practices as well. 6 What I mean by ‘canonical postmodernism’ as defined by literary criticism usually includes the novelists Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, John Barth, William Gaddis, Donald Barthelme and more recently Don DeLillo, William Gibson and J. G. Ballard. Some feminist critics include Margaret Atwood and Jeanette Winterson in this canon as well.

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The point involves the commitment to transformative social change, the moment of hope embedded in feminist theories of gender and other emergent discourses about the breakup of masterful subjectivity and the emergence of inappropriate/d others. (147)

The novelists I cite participate in just such a project of ‘transformative social change’, a transformation notably missing from the postmodernist tradition McHale documents. As Rhys, Morrison, Walker et al. repeatedly show, it is the relationships between texts, identities, voices, not single texts, identities or voices that can provide this transformation, a way out of the paralysis of traditional culture that the postmodern critics such as McHale often point to when ‘foregrounding the ontological structure of texts’. Following Bordo’s analysis of ‘The Feminist As Other’, I am not simply arguing for the inclusion of these women in the canon of ‘postmodern fiction’ but rather that their work challenges the critical presuppositions of that canon. This canon still participates in the very models it presumes to critique when it excludes the affective, embodied dimensions of human experience. While those dimensions may be informed and structured by ‘discourses’ and ‘language’, it is possible to discuss affective registers as something more than an abstraction. The canon of postmodern fiction and criticism shares the larger cultural tendency to value work that is abstract and theoretical. As Bordo writes, in feminist writing of the sixties and seventies … theory was rarely abstracted and elaborated, adorned with power jargon and made into an object of fascination in itself … Works that perform such abstraction and elaboration get taken much more seriously than works which do not. (Bordo, Twilight 185)

This structure of valuation – abstract theory over texts that straightforwardly struggle with lived experience – has characterized much of the most influential criticism, including that of feminists, in the 80s and 90s. In this particular way, the exhaustion of ‘master narratives’ of ‘the subject’ and identity in postmodernism nonetheless replicates those narratives in different form. In Bordo’s words, While ‘Man’ has been officially declared ‘dead’, like Freddy Kruger, he just keeps bouncing back. His pretensions and fantasies – the transcendence of the body, the drive toward separation from and domination over nature, the ambition to create an authorative scientific or philosophical discourse … have simply been re-cycled. The modern, Cartesian erasure of the body … has been traded … for a postmodern … version … The old model of man’s mind as the pinnacle of God’s creation has been replaced by the poststructuralist equivalent: human language as the ultimate architect and arbiter of reality. (Bordo, Twilight 200)

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The tendency Bordo documents here – the way materiality is eclipsed by a sometimes too facile emphasis on ‘language’, indicates why the writers I discuss could be said to engage in more progressive forms of postmodernism since their work transforms the very terms of the debate. Rather than arguing for the inclusion of contemporary women novelists in the established canon of postmodernism, I am arguing for a postmodernism – which their texts perform – that does not simply ‘recycle the modern, Cartesian erasure of the body’. I argue that the writers I mention perform what Rafael Perez Torres terms a ‘multicultural postmodern’ that binds together … the sometimes all too disparate realms of politics and aesthetics … the reason classically postmodern texts move away from connection with socio-historical reality is their commitment to the hermetic isolation of the aesthetic object. By contrast, multicultural texts place in the foreground the relation between language and power.7

As multicultural postmodernism, the work of Morrison, Walker, Rhys, Smiley, Rodoreda, Erdrich, Acker and others whom I do not have space to mention can be seen to participate in a transformative political and aesthetic discourse that is of general applicability.8 Their work does more than elaborate on the specifics of race and gender. Rather, that work uses race and gender as two possible lenses from which it is possible to articulate the complexity of embodied experience in a general frame – not just the experiences of ‘minorities’, but an interrogation of 7 Perez Torres 691, 695. Perez Torres writes that ‘[Beloved] stands amid a cultural context in which play, allusion, quotation serve as privileged aesthetic techniques. Beloved and other novels that emerge from multicultural histories diverge from classically postmodern tests – Pynchon’s V, Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy, Barthelme’s The Dead Father – in their relation to socio-historical realities’ (690). I argue that the different ‘relation to socio-historical realities’ that Perez Torres names here is a relation that challenges and transforms the very terms of postmodernism, creating a new mythology that is of general application, applying as much to white males as it does to ‘minorities’. 8 Linda Krumholz points to Henry Louis Gates Jr’s formulations in ‘The Blackness of Blackness’ as a theoretical source that argues that ‘postmodernism’ was always a part of African American texts. Krumholz writes that ‘the African American rhetorical tradition has always denied the monolithic voice of the white father that white postructuralists have only recently identified and (to varying degrees) challenged’ (40). In addition to the point that Krumholz makes, I would argue that the tradition of feminist writing similarly ‘denied the monolithic voice of the white father’, making multicultural and feminist writers the first ‘postmodernists’. As Bordo points out, these writers were not understood as ‘postmodern’ because postmodern connotes general cultural transformation rather than transformation confined to the arenas of gender and race.

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subjectivity’s foundational terms, terms that help to define the experiences of ‘minorities’ and non-minorities alike. As Bordo suggests, it is possible to employ some insights attributed to postmodernism, such as what McHale called the ‘ontological structure of texts’ in a way that does not replicate traditional mind/body, theory/practice dualisms. Multicultural postmodern women writers, along with their counterparts in popular music and other sites of cultural production, begin this crucial cultural work of rewriting ‘master narratives’, providing some of the new mythologies that offer horizons of meaning in late twentieth century culture.9 It is in relation to this ontological structure of texts that I define the term ‘mythology’. Following Donna J. Haraway and Rosi Braidotti, I use ‘mythology’ in the sense of figuration or foundational cultural myth that provides a horizon of meaning for a given culture at a given place and time, a meaning that is by no means inevitable or natural.10 For once the ontological structure of a text is foregrounded, emphasizing its production by a human author who is finite, limited and related to his or her historical moment rather than as a transcendental agent of universal truth, one would seem to arrive at the ‘death of the author’ postmodernism proclaims. And that ‘death’, while it may represent the ‘death’ of the mythology of individualism and the myth of the author as ‘original genius’ that helps to sustain that mythology, need not stop there as an end, a point of closure. Instead, as the relationships between the various women writers I mention would argue, the ‘death of the author’ as the death of the individual can function as an enabling space that brings agency to those previously silenced, that grants a life to those historically consigned to death within life. As multicultural postmodern women writers show, the ‘life’ of some has representationally been dependent upon the ‘death’ of others: self-identity as an ‘individual’ has rested on the effacement of others as living subjects. When ‘identity’ is determined by difference 9 Wallace Stevens’ early-twentieth-century notion of the ‘necessary fiction’ is relevant here as well, which suggests one of the many continuities between modernism and postmodernism. 10 Rose Braidotti powerfully sums up this complicated aspect of Haraway’s work when she writes that ‘Haraway invites us … to think of the community as being built on the basis of a commonly shared foundation of collective figures of speech, or foundational myths. These myths, which are also purposeful tools for intervention in reality, are figurations in that they make an impact on our imagination, but they are also forms of situated knowledge. In other words, feminism is about grounding, it is about foundations and about political myths’ (105). See especially chapter 4, ‘Refiguring the Subject’.

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and isolation from rather than relationship to others, this way of thinking underlies the mythology of the author as individual genius, separate from his/her cultural and historical context, and is the product of relationships between racially and sexually inflected systems of representation and the way those representations intersect with individual identity. The texts of Jean Rhys, Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Merce Rodoreda, Alice Walker, Jane Smiley, Louise Erdrich and Kathy Acker offer a general critique of dominant cultural forms that reveals two things: first, the death-in-life denial of agency for some persons that is inherent in those forms, and second, the ‘nothingness’ or arbitrarily constructed nature of those forms that clears a space for positive rewriting and mythologizing. The novels enact what E. Ann Kaplan has termed a ‘utopian postmodernism’, which she defines as ‘a movement of culture and texts beyond oppressive binary categories … the demand for an end to the “death-dealing oppositions of masculinity and femininity” would perhaps best summarize the utopian postmodern’.11 ‘Utopian’ in that they do not stop at the level of critique, the novels offer a re-conceptualization of mythologies of identity along relational lines that argues for loving those aspects of human existence previously disavowed. As Baby Suggs in Morrison’s Beloved urges her audience in the forest clearing, ‘here, in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feets in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it … You got to love it, you!’ (88). And as bell hooks argues in Black Looks, collectively, black people and our allies in struggle are empowered when we practice self-love as a revolutionary intervention that undermines practices of domination. Loving blackness as political resistance transforms our ways of looking and being, and thus creates the conditions necessary for us to move against the forces of domination and death and reclaim black life. (20)

The ‘practices of domination’ that hooks refers to are intricately related to the system of representation that devalues blackness, femininity, the body, emotions and communal forms of identification and living, and 11 Kaplan 6. The phrase ‘death-dealing oppositions of masculinity and femininity’ is Toril Moi’s in Sexual/Textual Politics (7). Although in an early twenty-first-century context language like Moi’s has come to seem hyperbolic and dated even within feminist circles, I would argue that this lack of currency comes primarily from the popular media feminism that, funded by conservative institutions such as the Olin Foundation, surfaced in the mid-nineties (Naomi Wolf’s Fire with Fire, Christina Hoff Sommer’s Who Stole Feminism and Rene Denfeld’s The New Victorians, for instance) and has participated in the cultural marginalization of feminism. I discuss this turn more fully in Bodymakers, especially chapter 2.

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these are the devalued forms that Morrison and hooks argue we must love if we are to accomplish any concrete historical change. It is also this system of representation that the ‘postmodern’ questions, reveals as a set of cultural constructions that create ‘meaning’ and ‘reality’ in a given world, in this case racially haunted America. But the discovery that fictions are ontological need not lead to a sense of meaninglessness, purposelessness and cries about the ‘end’ of history and the ‘death’ of the subject as this discovery so often does. Postmodern writers who are concerned with more than formal surfaces and language-play offer alternative interpretations of the postmodern challenge to traditional mythologies of subjectivity and identity, affirmative interpretations that offer new possibilities of mythologizing and thereby new ways of life. I will argue, then, for the general transformational possibilities the novels suggest, the alternative mythologies they provide in the wake of the exhaustion of master narratives often said to characterize fin de siècle culture at the close of the twentieth century. Although novels arguably hold much less clout as an ontological form than they once did, replaced, as those engaged in cultural studies would argue, by forms such as television, film and particularly popular music, within literary culture the novel and more recently the memoir remain influential.12 12 The passage from literary into cultural studies is a much larger question beyond the scope of this paper, but has been taken up recently in many places, notably in Antony Easthope’s book of the same name, Literary into Cultural Studies. See also Kaplan 1–9. Andrew Ross argues for the primacy of music as an influential cultural form in his Introduction to Microphone Friends, writing that ‘the level of attention and meaning invested in music by youth is still unmatched by almost any other organized activity in society, including religion. As a daily companion, social bible, commercial guide and spiritual source, youth music is still the place of faith, hope, and refuge’ (3). Within literary forms in the United States, since roughly 1994 personal memoirs have been routinely outselling novels, so that the agents of even wellestablished novelist have been urging them to turn to the memoir instead. This turn, along with the turn towards more personal forms of literary and cultural criticism, has been widely criticized in the academy, attacked as ‘moi criticism’, seen as a sensational form of self-exposure and said to lack the objectivity and detachment of supposedly more ‘sophisticated’ forms of criticism. See Begley 54–59. I personally read this turn as invigorating an academic discourse deadened by jargon, and in the case of the memoir, as foregrounding the very situatedness of perspective postmodern theory proclaims – the memoir giving that theoretical perspective a concrete embodiment. bell hooks comments on this institutional devaluation of the personal when she writes, ‘though autobiography or any type of confessional narrative is often devalued in North American letters, this genre has always had a privileged place in African American literary history’(59). It is my hope that the current popularity of autobiography and memoir indicates a turn in dominant culture toward valuing autobiography and memoir as genuine sites of insight and critique.

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In Wide Sargasso Sea, written by Jean Rhys, a white West Indian woman who spent most of her life in England, two alternative models of identity construction emerge that set the tone for the critical examination and reconstruction of identity performed in contemporary American fiction by women: that of the ‘individual’ subject, based on the myths of unity, isolation, competition and annihilation of the other, and the relational subject, based on alternative myths of multiplicity, connection, collaboration and context. Both mythologies, Rhys argues, are crucial. Rhys’s male ‘lead’, Rochester, is the embodiment of the isolationist model, the ‘individual’ whose sense of self is defined through separation from others. The colonialist enterprise, which involves the violent imposition of one culture over an existing culture or the appropriation of one culture by another, must rely on this particular mythology of ‘self’ in order to accomplish its political projects. It is only through effacement and denial of the value of the other that the colonialist enterprise can be carried out: the idea that your particular identity and culture, entirely separate from and superior to those you colonize, has the ‘natural’ right to prevail since that identity is associated with those characteristics represented as cultural value. In the colonialist system of representation that Rochester embodies in the novel ‘reality’, ‘culture’ and ‘meaning’ are associated with a sense of identity that is individualistic, masculine and rational. When encountering some of the Caribbean natives, Rochester comments that [Baptiste] served the food with such a mournful expression that I thought these people are very vulnerable. How old was I when I learned to hide what I felt? A very small boy. Six, five, even earlier. It was necessary, I was told, and that view I have always accepted. If these mountains challenge me, or Baptiste’s face, or Antoinette’s eyes, they are mistaken, melodramatic, unreal (England must be quite unreal and like a dream she said). (103)

This passage makes visible several key assumptions in the colonialist system of representation. First, through the use of perspective, Rhys indicates that Rochester’s point of view is not absolute and can be questioned since she introduces Antoinette’s contradictory perspective as a counterpoint. The introduction of an alternative point of view undercuts Rochester’s authority and foregrounds his way of thinking as a construction rather than an accurate representation of ‘reality’. ‘Reality’, as this passage makes clear, is determined by whose perspective is dominant, and challenges to the dominant perspective and the people who bring those challenges about are labelled ‘mistaken, melodramatic, unreal’. ‘Reality’ is determined by living a certain way, according to a certain set of assumptions, here the idea that one must ‘hide what one

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feels’. Sensory images, feelings of connection to the surroundings and people in it, are suppressed by labelling them ‘mistaken’ or ‘melodramatic’, so that the ‘challenge’ mountains or eyes or faces would pose to the way Rochester sees things is safely contained. One becomes a fully present subject, whole and invulnerable, through the suppression of feelings of connection to others, and those who do not perform the same kind of suppressions are seen as childlike, other, part of ‘these people’ who are different from Rochester. Any manifestation of direct human contact is so threatening to Rochester’s precarious sense of individuality that he describes the facial expressions of one of the Caribbean women as ‘so full of delighted malice, so intelligent, above all so intimate that I felt ashamed and looked away’. For Rochester and the individualistic conception of identity he stands for, intimacy and direct contact are something to be ashamed of. The sensual landscape is as threatening as the people who populate it: there was a soft warm wind blowing but I understood why the porter had called it a wild place. Not only wild but menacing. Those hills would close in on you. ‘What an extreme green’ was all I could say … Everything is too much … Too much blue, too much purple, too much green. The flowers too red, the mountains too high, the hills too near. And the woman is a stranger. Her pleading expression annoys me. (69–70)

Aligned with the landscape that is ‘too much’, Antoinette is ‘strange’ to Rochester precisely because she is not self-contained in the same ways that he is. Instead, she defines herself relationally, as part of the landscape and as part of Rochester and the native Caribbeans. She does not create the same strict borders or boundaries he does. When he asks her why she hugs Christophine, the native woman who raised her, and she answers ‘why not?’, he can only respond, ‘I wouldn’t hug and kiss them, I couldn’t’ (91). Antoinette’s openness makes her strange to Rochester, so much so that he often cannot understand her: ‘so much of what you tell me is strange, different from what I was led to expect’ (135), and this difference makes him ‘feel very much a stranger here … I feel that this place is my enemy and on your side’ (129). It is this sense of threat and alienation, the pressure to reach beyond himself and become part of, rather than separate from, everything around him that makes him eventually ‘colonize’ Antoinette, to literally usurp her identity by changing her name, dislocating her to England, and labelling her ‘mad’ in her difference from him. When Antoinette describes ‘two deaths, the real one and the one people know about’, she describes the violent erasure of difference that the dominant culture performs, so that those thus erased become living ghosts denied autonomy, agency and signifying power –

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their views and versions of ‘reality’ are denied, labelled ‘mad’. The radical imposition of Rochester’s point of view and isolational sense of identity over her more relational one repeats the imposition of British culture onto the native Caribbean culture they usurp. Instead of recognizing difference, Rochester, as the paradigmatic isolationist subject, annihilates it. In Beloved, Toni Morrison complicates dominant cultural notions of identity and subjectivity through a redefinition of what it means to be ‘human’. Morrison takes the colonialist mentality represented by Rochester and shows how the colonialist logic privileges an isolational, competitive, masculinist model of subjectivity that values individual achievement at the expense of others, and sees ‘reason’ defined as the absence of emotions as the pinnacle of ‘civilization’ or ‘humanity’. It is this set of assumptions that characterizes the dominant system of representation in America, and these assumptions, these mythologies, make an institution such as slavery possible. Human beings are created as animals through representation or labelling, and those labels come to affect individual perception so that those humans come to be seen as animals, hence justifying their treatment as the white man’s ‘beasts of burden’. But it is also, ironically, this set of assumptions that makes anyone who subscribes to them, black and white, female and male alike, into ‘ghosts’, a kind of walking dead who lock their ‘red red hearts’ into ‘tabacco tins’ and live life as something less than human. Those characteristics, Morrison shows, which are most fully associated with ‘humanity’ in the Western tradition are also those that will deprive a people of their humanity if they shape themselves too exclusively by those characteristics. A broader definition of humanity is needed, Morrison argues, if a person is to live a fully human life. Schoolteacher has his nephews define Sethe’s character by telling them to place Sethe’s ‘animal’ characteristics in the binary opposition to her ‘human’ ones: ‘put her human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right. And don’t forget to line them up’ (193). As Linda Krumholz writes, ‘rather than an engagement of the heart and imagination, schoolteacher’s pedagogical tools are linguistic objectivity and scientific method’, and ‘his methods are shown to have devastating effects … Through schoolteacher Morrison demonstrates that discourse, definitions, and historical methods … are tools in a system of power relations’ (399). Schoolteacher’s methods reveal the philosophical underpinnings of a representational system that creates identity through opposition. That system defines what is ‘human’ by taking culturally valued characteristics – rationality, masculinity and whiteness – and having

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those characteristics stand in for ‘humanity’, while their opposites – emotion, femininity and blackness – come to define ‘animalism’. This representational structure is the basis for the social power schoolteacher holds. The animalism that Sethe and the other slaves become identified with is explicitly the product of the social structure that creates the definitions, then treats individual subjects accordingly. ‘People I saw as a child’, Sethe says, ‘who’d had the bit always looked wild after that. Whatever they used it on them for, it couldn’t have worked, because it put a wildness where before there wasn’t any’ (71). People become wild when ‘trained’ with bits in their mouths like horses. Designated animals by the dominant system of representation and then treated as such, people become ‘animals’ in a logical emotional response to their mistreatment, but the process of mistreatment doubles back and makes those persons supposedly ‘human’, whites in this case, into animals themselves. Stamp Paid explains: Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way, [Stamp Paid] thought, they were right. The more coloredpeople spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place … It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread … until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own. (199)

What the ‘whitepeople’s’ system of representation covers up, masks, is the fact that actions such as putting a bit in another person’s mouth are themselves barbaric, animalistic. If someone thinks in accordance with white oppositional masculinist logic, they are human, and therefore anyone who is different from themselves must not be human. The persons they treat as animals then become ‘wild’. Where before there was no ‘jungle’, now it is ‘planted in them’, produced by the whites’ barbaric acts. So the white system of representation designates black persons as ‘animals’, not ‘rational’, and, believing their own designation, whites then come to fear blacks. In their fear, they treat blacks barbarically, inhumanely. Whites become inhuman themselves. But Morrison’s argument is more complicated still. That same oppositional system of representation, through valuing rationality, masculinity,

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whiteness and the mind while simultaneously debasing emotions, femininity, blackness and the body, also makes those who try to live according to these values into ‘ghosts’, people who are not fully alive. Especially if one is black and therefore designated as the opposite of these values, if one strives to live according to these values, if one ‘uses [one]self up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned’, that is, one’s essential humanity, then one makes oneself into a ghost. The whites who also try to live according to these values are ghosts themselves. And it is the figure of Beloved, Morrison’s figure for the murdered, disowned aspects of humanity, for what is forgotten, wilfully ignored by the dominant discursive paradigms because these aspects call those paradigms into question – it is this figure that Morrison argues people must take into account, recognize as part of themselves, and begin to speak to if they are to be fully human. Paul D and his ‘tabacco tin’ in which he has stashed his ‘red, red heart’ is a ghost, Morrison argues, and so are all who live according to the dominant representational paradigm that devalues characteristics associated with the negative side of binary oppositions – the pain, rage, love, hate, fear that Beloved represents – those characteristics that the racist tradition argues one has to kill off in order to be ‘human’. Instead, one has to recognize and accept Beloved, who, to quote Paul D, ‘reminds me of something I’m supposed to remember’ (235). Linda Krumholz writes that ‘[Beloved] makes the characters accept their past, their squelched memories, and their own hearts, as beloved’ (400). This acceptance is crucial, for it is what makes both life and political activism possible. Beloved is that part of Paul D he has forgotten, the affect he has locked away in his ‘tabacco tin’, the part he starts to remember: ‘how much is a nigger supposed to take?’ This leads to the even more fundamental question, in response to Stamp Paid’s answer, ‘all he can’: Paul D’s politically charged question of ‘Why? Why? Why? Why? Why?’ (235). Beloved argues that a person must remember to feel, to love, so that they can protest, so that they can ask questions about the basis of their oppressions, so that they can speak out against inequitable conditions. That process of questioning and speaking, demanding one’s rights as human, makes a person fully human. One must ask the unspeakable that calls the given world into question if one is to survive as something more than a ghost. We have all, Morrison suggests, in the process of conforming to white Western definitions of ‘rationality’ and ‘humanity’, repeated Sethe’s murder and killed off the Beloved in ourselves, making ourselves ghosts.13 13 I wish to emphasize here that Morrison is first invoking the specificity of African American experience within slavery, but that she then casts her lens wider to show

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By reclaiming Beloved, humanity and rationality are redefined to account for all the oppositions they exclude, a redefinition that performs a healing. Morrison uses postmodern insights such as the narrativity of history to create a new mythology. In the words of Linda Krumholz, history-making becomes a healing process for the characters, the reader, and the author … through the conceptualization of knowledge as culturally constructed, Morrison points the way to a reconstruction of history, both national and personal, to combat the persistent intellectual and spiritual oppression of African Americans and other Americans and bring about a freedom of the heart and imagination. (395, 405)

This freedom is also what makes Beloved an example of a reinvigorated, multicultural postmodernism that includes the affective dimensions that canonical postmodernism excludes. As Perez Torres writes, ‘the novel evokes numerous forms of narrative as it melds together ancient and contemporary literary forms in a critical postmodern pastiche … Beloved takes quite literally the decentering impulse that is supposed to inform postmodern culture’ (703). But Morrison and others use that ‘decentering’ to build something else, a building that creates possibilities for healing. Morrison’s textual strategies have affinities with those of Maxine Hong Kingston, for whom speaking the unspeakable and loving emotions, bodies, ethnicity, femininity, the voraciousness of human needs so unlike the invulnerability of the individual subject who supposedly needs nothing is a necessity as well. For Kingston as for Morrison the American mythology of the ‘individual’ – independent, autonomous, self-contained, rational, masculine, white, the paradigm of being, selfpresence – actually delineates a being cut off from meaningful connections with others and even from parts of oneself and one’s own experience. When Kingston writes about threatening her parents and the conventions that shape their lives because she is ‘always trying to name the unspeakable’, trying to give a name to those things that dominant traditions disavow, she articulates why the novels I discuss have not been seen as ‘postmodern’ – they do not fit the paradigm of the ‘exhaustion’ of meaning (Kingston 5). Kingston’s project, like Morrison’s, the consequences for whites of their own definitions. In this way, as Henry Louis Gates writes, ‘Morrison’s work is always symbolic of the shared human condition, both engaging with and transcending lines of gender, race, and class. A rigorous, unsparing intellect – displayed as much in her fiction as in the sophisticated literary analysis of her Playing in the Dark – is surely inseparable from her considerable achievements as a narrative lyricist’ (Gates and Appiah xi). Morrison brings the structuring oppositions of Western culture together in a way that not only rewrites them but helps repair their damage.

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questions dominant cultural representations and the characteristics those representations have disavowed through the act of speaking about them, thus suggesting new meanings rather than ends. For Kingston, as for Morrison, it is the responsibility of each person to question the mythologies, the representational orders under which we live, and to actively take part in writing new ones. In ‘No Name Woman’, Kingston shows how ‘reality’ is an arbitrary fiction that can vanish so easily that often violence is necessary to keep it in place: one human being flaring up into violence could open up a black hole, a maelstrom that pulled in the sky. The frightened villagers, who depended on one another to maintain the real, went to my aunt to show her a personal, physical representation of the break she had made. (13)

Cultural order, the representational codes and the behaviours those codes prescribe, is so fragile that just one person questioning it can disrupt the whole structure. Its maintenance requires that any person who dissents is punished, for that dissension threatens the very meaning and sense of being which that culture uses to constitute itself. The culture provides a sense of meaning and purpose, and outside it a given individual, such as Kingston’s adulterous aunt, can only become ‘one of the stars, a bright dot in blackness, without home, without a companion, in eternal cold and silence’ (14). In one sense, then, the realization that reality is a fiction dependent upon community consensus to maintain it can be frightening, disorienting, the cause for despair – as in much canonical postmodernism. Yet for those consigned to the devalued position of non-being or silence, the dehumanized position of ‘maggot’, the position where Kingston realizes that ‘silence had to do with being a Chinese girl’ (166), the realization that ‘reality’ as it is lived is based on representation and myth can be a vastly empowering one. For after clearing away the negative definitions from both sides of the cultural equation – gender on the Chinese side and race on the American side – Kingston is free to rewrite herself as she chooses, not as the silenced wife or slave she equates with cultural ‘success’ in ‘White Tigers’, but as the swordswoman who carries the negative cultural definitions written on her back as a refutation of her position as wife or slave, gook or chink. Those acts of rewriting in turn help to shape the cultural order, introducing new perspectives and arguments that challenge the dominant mythology and provide alternative mythologies for creating meaning. To critically challenge the conventions that have inscribed one and to begin to write oneself is an act of resistance, and is, in Alice Walker’s

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terms, the ‘secret of joy’ (279). Walker’s text is a painful account of how cultural representations can – like Kingston’s imaginative construction of the swordswoman – become literally inscribed on the physical body. Writing herself into the cultural definition of ‘woman’, Tashi in Possessing the Secret of Joy loses the very agency that she thinks accepting that definition and the female circumcision associated with it will grant her. She describes herself getting ready to go to the hut where circumcision said to make her ‘female’ will be performed: she ‘sat astride the donkey in the pose of a chief, a warrior’ (22). This power position will ironically be denied her since to gain a subjectivity as a woman actually indicates the loss of subjectivity. Originally, Tashi thinks (according to Adam), the operation she’d had done to herself joined her … to these women, whom she envisioned as strong, invincible. Completely woman. Completely African. Completely Olinka. In her imagination, on her long journey to the camp, they had seemed terribly bold, revolutionary and free … it was only when she at last was told by M’Lissa, who one day unbound her legs, that she might sit up and walk a few steps that she noticed her own proud walk had become a shuffle. (64)

Tashi realizes that her action, which she thought would bring her subjectivity and agency since it would win her cultural approval, actually deprives her of it, makes her a ghost, ‘not dead … but neither would I say I am fully alive’ (223). She also realizes that to speak the unspeakable, to name her pain, is the only thing that will bring that agency back. She makes a sign and carries it along the road to M’Lissa’s house that reads ‘if you lie to yourself about your own pain, you will be killed by those who will claim you enjoyed it’ (106). There are many, Walker suggests, who lie to themselves about their own pain. To insist that one’s cultural position is empowered, one’s choice and personal decision, is a way to rationalize or forget pain. Fictions of ‘choice’ and self-determination provide a way to look away, to refuse to see how cultural traditions have inscribed, formed or shaped one’s life, to refuse to see that there is nothing, no essential self, beyond that inscription. Yet the inscripted nature of the self also means that one is free to reinscribe, rewrite. Silence means that, in Walker’s words, there will be those ‘who claim that you enjoyed’ your own marginalization, that you were perfectly happy. This allows those who make such claims to ‘kill’ a woman, make her into a ghost, subject her to Rhys’s ‘first death’. For Walker and others, speaking up is a step towards life. Natalia’s silence in Merce Rodoreda’s The Time of the Doves (1986) is a good example of death-in-life, of a ghostly dissociation from human feeling as a way of coping with pain. The strictly patriarchal culture, her

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social class and the context of the Spanish Civil War all contribute to her disenfranchisement. ‘Anything dead coming back to life hurts’, says Morrison’s Amy in Beloved, and for most of Rodoreda’s novel Natalia is for many purposes ‘dead’ to her views, opinions, feelings. Deprived of social agency she forces herself into numbness, not because I was born that way but because I had to force myself to be. And to make my heart like stone. I had to be like a cork to keep going because if instead of being a cork with a heart of stone I’d been like before, made of flesh that hurts when you pinch it, I’d never have gotten across such a high, narrow, long bridge. (138)

To see herself as human, with vulnerable flesh that feels, experiences pain, is impossible for Natalia. She ‘always has a tough time crying’ (155), and her disassociation from feeling eventually leads to agoraphobia and attempted suicide. She can only regain life by rejoining those parts of herself she has split off, the same parts represented by Beloved in Morrison’s text. Her way back to life begins with a scream, a scream I must have been carrying around inside me for many years, so thick it was hard for it to get through my throat, and with that scream a little bit of nothing trickled out of my mouth … when I reached the curb I looked both ways to make sure no streetcars were coming and then ran across and when I got to the other side I turned around again to look and see if that bit of nothing that had driven me crazy for so many years was following me. But I was alone. (197, 198)

The nothingness Natalia had accepted when she allows Quimet to rename her, to give just one example, or when she marries him because he asserts that he will marry her, or when she is associated with the wrong side of the revolution – she finally refuses this ‘nothingness’ in a scream that says ‘no’. And it is this refusal that brings Natalia back to life. She can only refuse her cultural designation as ‘nothingness’ through the recognition that those designations are themselves ‘nothing’ essential, designations that can be refused and rewritten. The first moment of real human interaction, agency and tenderness we see in the novel comes at the end, after the scream, after Natalia has allowed herself to become something more that ‘a cork with a heart of stone’. Her desire to communicate with Antoni, to ‘tell him everything I thought because I thought more than I said’ brings her emotionally back to life, just as lying next to him physically makes her blood circulate again because she realizes that ‘I was frozen’ (200). Paul D’s tabacco tin and Natalia’s cork with a heart of stone make ghosts, and reinscribe the cultural traditions they are reacting against that make them ghosts in the first place.

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Natalia’s lack of agency makes her disassociate herself from the pain that lack of agency creates in order to survive, but incest survivor Ginny in Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres dissociates herself so radically that she literally forgets what has happened to her.14 She also lives her life as a ghost, an individual who has been denied agency and therefore silenced. In A Thousand Acres, which takes place in the heartland of America, the cradle of conservative politics, good upstanding citizens and ‘family values’, agency is located in one figure, Larry Cook, father and farmer, and is categorically denied everyone else – and is perhaps denied Ginny, in her need to forget the source of her pain, most of all. A Thousand Acres is America – free, neutral space of ‘equal opportunity’ and ‘self-determination’, and as such foregrounds the central American mythology of masculine individualism upon which those ideas of self and opportunity are based.15 Yet, Smiley shows, incest is the logical end of this proprietary, competitive mode of meaning-making. Rather than the aberration it is usually constructed as, incest is the logical telos of the American Dream.16 In the white, middle-class, everyday America of the novel, meaning and security in people’s lives are established by competition, the ‘certainty of the way’, as Ginny puts it, that ‘through repeated comparisons [with other farms], our farm and our lives seemed secure and good’ (5). In this mythology so characteristic of the American Dream, the family’s identity is determined by its difference from and superiority to other families. Without this distance, difference and superiority to others, the family would not exist as itself – its essence is to be separate and superior. And the family’s identity is in turn determined by Larry Cook’s identity as the individual, competitive self, the man who to his daughters existed as the only farmer and father. Ginny says that when I went to first grade and the other children said that their fathers were farmers, I simply didn’t believe them … in my heart I knew that those men were impostors, as farmers and as fathers too. In my youthful estimation, Laurence Cook defined both categories. To really believe that others even existed in either category was to break the First Commandment. My earliest memories of him are of being afraid to look him in the eye. (19)

14 In Betrayal Trauma, Jennifer J. Freyd describes this forgetting in psychological terms, and addresses the conservative criticisms of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, who dismiss claims of childhood sexual abuse as fabrications. 15 Smiley’s title is itself quintessentially ‘American’ in that its source is Walt Whitman’s beloved American poem ‘Song of Myself’. 16 This is not to imply that Smiley or anyone else thinks that American individualism is all bad but rather that it has costs and complications not often acknowledged in dominant mythologies.

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For a model of identity that conceives itself in terms of difference from rather than relation to others, there can be only one person, defined by their superior difference and isolation from others, in a given category. There can be no other father and farmer than Larry Cook. To believe others compared was heresy, a violation of the ‘first commandment’ that Larry Cook is the ‘I Am’, the sole determining force of the horizon of Ginny’s existence. Afraid to ‘look him in the eye’ because of his god-like stature, Ginny’s relation to Larry is that of nothing to something, and, because it is defined oppositionally, the something that is Larry can only be something if it has Ginny’s nothingness and the nothingness of all others to define itself against. This conception of identity has tangible consequences on a daily basis, such as Ginny’s internalization of this culturally constructed nothingness, so that she sees herself as nothing in relation to Larry: here he stood, the living source of it all, of us all … When he talked, he had this effect on me. Of course it was silly to talk about ‘my point of view’. When my father asserted his point of view, mine vanished. Not even I could remember it. (176)

Larry, as the paradigmatic white individualist masculinist American self, defines himself as the source of meaning and purpose for those around him. Therefore his voice, his point of view, is the only voice that matters, the only voice that can be heard and make sense. Dissenting voices, because they are outside the framework of established meaning, are nonsense, ‘madness’, points of view that vanish as soon as the authoritative voice has spoken: He says, ‘I say what goes around here.’ He says ‘I don’t care if – I’m telling you – I mean it.’ He shouts, ‘I – I – I – ’ roaring and glorying in his selfdefinition. I did this and I did that and don’t think you can tell me this and you haven’t the foggiest idea about that, and then he impresses us by blows with the weight of his ‘I’ and the feathery nonexistence of ourselves, our questions, our doubts, our differences of opinion. That was Daddy. (306)

By this model of individuality, so characteristic of the American Dream and its vision of achievement by competition and conquering, all that exists outside the individual must be ‘feathery, nonexistent’ so that individual authority, place and meaning cannot be called into question. Like the precarious community order in Kingston’s ‘No Name Women’, this sense of individuality is a precarious fiction in continual need of reinforcement that is gained only through the violent negation of other points of view, the I–I–I that wipes out everyone else. Ginny must vanish, Larry Cook must be the only ‘I’ if he is to exist as source and

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purpose, as father, as the most successful farmer who is the model for everyone else. If Larry walks around in the ‘impenetrable fog of self’ that allows him to see nothing, recognize no other human subjectivity beyond his own blind need, he is only following to the letter the socially sanctified model of the unified, individualistic self, the one-track, driven, goal-seeking individual who will sacrifice everyone and anything in order to succeed. What that ‘fog’ of self obscures, for Larry and the others who respect his achievement, is the price that is paid in terms of the agency and dignity of others for that achievement. As Rose so powerfully articulates: He did fuck us and he did beat us. He beat us more than he fucked us. He beat us routinely. And the thing is, he’s respected. Others of them like him and look up to him. He fits right in. However many of them have fucked their daughters or their stepdaughters or their nieces or not, the fact is that they all accept beating as a way of life. We have two choices when we think about that. Either they don’t know the real him and we do, or else they do know the real him and the fact that he beat us and fucked us doesn’t matter. Either they themselves are evil, or they’re stupid. That’s the thing that kills me. This person who beats and fucks his own daughters can go out into the community and get respect and power, and take it for granted that he deserves it. (302)

The Ericsons, among others, paid the price for Larry’s potency and achievement through the loss of their farm, and Ginny and Rose pay the price of his identity as the ‘I Am’ who can do anything and not be questioned. Daughters, like anyone else or maybe more so than anyone else, exist for his needs, to cook and care for him. Sexual service is just one further step in the same process, an intricate part of a mythology of individualism that ‘fits right in’. Larry is not an aberration, but is rather an intricate, respected part of the community. He is an American success, one of the few who has ‘made it’, a model for all. That he is a model makes it all the more difficult for his daughters to claim the agency that his position has denied them, more difficult for Ginny to ‘face all the facts’, to realize that ‘your own endurance might be a pleasant fiction’ (90). As especially Beloved and The Time of the Doves have shown, that ‘pleasant fiction’ that keeps you from ‘facing the facts’ also makes you into a ghost, makes you accept a structure of meaning that cancels you out. Ginny’s scream, like Natalia’s scream, is her first refusal, her first attempt to ‘face facts’. ‘I screamed in a way that I had never screamed before’, she says, after allowing herself to recall the incest memories, ‘full out, throat-wrenching, unafraid-ofdrawing-attention-to-myself sorts of screams’ (229). Her screaming

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brings her own attention to herself, to her own pain, to the self-negation she has swallowed. And then what? As in Beloved, next there is the painful coming back to life, a pain that must be owned, repossessed. What is at stake for Ginny, as for Rose, is the attempt to own ‘half her own life’ (238). The only way she can do so is to face the pain that has deformed her, the secrets of her experience she has kept hidden even from herself. In Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, to expose these secrets that cancel out self is the only way to fully live, to fight designation as a ‘ghost’. As in the other novels, a feeling of certainty that one has no secrets is most often a coping strategy, a form of denial of and detachment from pain. When Lipsha thinks of Marie and Lulu and all the history they know, the personal connections they have, the first thing he thinks is that if you’ll just picture them together knowing everybody’s life, as if they had hotlines to everybody’s private thoughts, you’ll know why people started rushing past their doors. They feared one of them would reach out, grab them into their room, and tell them all the secrets they tried to hide from themselves. (334)

Lipsha finds that even though ‘I was sure I knew all my secrets and hadn’t anything to hide’, he was wrong. When Lulu speaks to him about his mother, he says, ‘I knew she was going to tell me something on which I’d shut the door’ (334). But for Lipsha, as for Morrison’s Paul D and Sethe, Rodoreda’s Natalia, Walker’s Tashi and Smiley’s Ginny, opening the door, facing the past rather than ‘beating it back’ is the first step on the harrowing road out of ghostliness. It is a step towards a different model of subjectivity than the traditional individualist model of Rochester or Larry Cook, and often involves ‘that one moment realizing you were totally empty’ (3). A recognition of your ghostliness marks the first step out, the courage to face both the problems with and precariousness of the structures of meaning that have defined you. As Lipsha says, You think a person you know … will get through anything. Then they fold and you see how fragile were the stones that underpinned them. You see how instantly the ground can shift you thought was solid. You see the stop signs and the yellow dividing markers of roads you traveled and all the instructions you had played according to vanish. You see how all the everyday things you counted on was just a dream you had been having by which you run your whole life … You play them games never knowing what you see … the dominions I had defended myself from anciently was but delusions of the screen. Blips of light. And I was scott-free now, whistling through space. (252)

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Once one ‘see[s] the stop signs … and all the instructions you had played according to vanish’, does one begin to live differently, begin to participate in rewriting the instructions, to take part in the process of historical change, or does one stubbornly turn one’s face in the other direction, back to the old markers, the old life? Or, like Lipsha, does one take advantage of the freedom that the realization of the constructedness of the given world provides? That world is precarious, and can easily disappear, but its disappearance provides the freedom of ‘whistling through space’, the space that opens for the creation of new meanings. ‘Uncurling from me like a seed out of the blackness where I was lost’, Lipsha says, ‘the touch spread … a globe of frail seeds that’s indestructible’ (258). The responsibility that Erdrich and the other novelists evoke is the responsibility for looking into ‘the blackness where we are lost’, and then doing something with it, actively rewriting, transforming, taking agency from the ‘frail seeds’ of open possibility and taking on the enormous responsibility of creating yourself otherwise from the dominant isolational model. As Kathy Acker writes, ‘an alteration of language … changes material conditions’ (206), and a reformulation of identity through language will change what is. Like Lipsha, the chorus of dogs in Acker’s Don Quixote assert that ‘the world is not ending. The work and the language of the living’re about to begin’ (198). The old image is ghost language, ‘whistling through space’, not fixed or set in its meanings. Multicultural postmodern women writers reveal its consequences, its radical deformations, the identities it empties out, makes ghostly. They urge us to scream at it. Refuse it. Write something else. ‘Awake to the world’, writes Acker, ‘that lies before you’ (207). Maria Lugones speaks about a redefinition of the ‘individual’ as a mediation between multiple identities within a given person, a subjectivity that is ‘world traveler’ rather than a fixed, unified, natural self with a predetermined essence. Recognition of the difference within is a crucial step towards putting ourselves in the place of and identifying with other as different rather than stereotyping or expecting them to become like oneself. It is also a recognition of the fluidity of cultural codes and social meanings. Along with this recognition is issued the need to accept responsibility for actively authoring or creating self-identity and alternative possibilities to the Rochester/Larry Cook model of identity that Rhys, Morrison and Smiley show to be so devastating. Natalia’s, Tashi’s, Ginny’s scream of refusal to accept the old racist, masculinist, isolationist model of self is the first step towards living differently, more fully, less like a ghost, by demanding agency. Telling their stories,

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speaking out, is the second. The third and perhaps most difficult step is accepting the responsibility of rewriting their lives, for there is no predetermined model for this, no one to tell them how to do it. They make it up as they go along. They make their own mythologies. There is a lot at stake in this model of identity. The multiply identified subject capable of shifting identities, of becoming other, really other, is what ‘multicultural postmodern’ authors such as Morrison, Kingston, Walker and Erdrich produce through their writing. This production does not mark them as boundaried, distinct, possessed of ‘individual genius’ as in the old model of subjectivity and authorship. ‘Genius’, here, is rather an openness to other voices, a decentring. The way this openness challenges the old mythologies of ‘genius’ and ‘self’ is to question the boundaried, individual, competitive self like Larry Cook, whose identity is purchased at the cost of annihilating others. The blood on his hands comes from the parts of himself and of others that he has cut up – cleanly, tastefully, from a distance – by conforming to this model of identity. The challenge that postmodern multicultural writers pose to that self through the enacted multiplicity of their texts offers an alternative to the ghostliness, incest and soul murder produced by this earlier tradition. * * * The individualist mythology of the self, which typically presupposed a white male with money as its normative standard, repeats itself in texts traditionally referred to as ‘postmodern fiction’. With their sometimes too facile emphasis on difference and diversity, with a perspective that privileges disembodied detachment and ‘play’, isolation and transcendence, such texts can obscure the power relations that produce them. Their canonization only repeats that obfuscation. The multicultural postmodern women writers cited above offer a different mythology, a relational model of subjectivity defined by permeable boundaries. This revised subjectivity recognizes otherness within and without, and does not try to subsume difference into the self like those old assimilationist models that expected any ‘minority’ group to ‘fit in’ to the dominant culture. Rather, the self is a dynamic relationship between differences, in love with those differences, taking up the discarded parts, the disowned characteristics such as blackness, feminity, bodily existence and strong emotions that the Western tradition has consistently devalued, cast aside. This differential self lives in conjunction with, not to the exclusion of, a sense of individuality. Like the passing of the ‘great chain of being’ in Shakespeare’s King Lear that determined so much dominant cultural

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meaning through the late seventeenth century, the passing of the mythology of individualism into a more complicated form marks our own historical moment. It is uncertain at this time what all the rewritten mythologies will be, but a revised ‘individual’ is one beginning. The writers cited above urge us to take part in shaping those mythologies, to make ourselves active in the production of cultural transformation and historical change.

Works Cited Acker, Kathy. Don Quixote. New York: Grove Press, 1986. Begley, Adam. ‘The I’s Have It: Duke’s ‘Moi’ Critics Expose Themselves’. Lingua Franca (April 1994): 54–59. Bordo, Susan. Twilight Zones: The Hidden Life of Cultural Images from Plato to O.J. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997. ——.Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993. Braidotti, Rose. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Easthope, Antony. Literary into Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1991. Erdrich, Louise. Love Medicine. New York: Harper Perennial, 1984. Freyd, Jennifer J. Betrayal Trauma: The Logic of Forgetting Childhood Abuse. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. ‘The Blackness of Blackness’. In Black Literature and Literary Theory. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Methuen, 1984. 285–321. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr, and K. A. Appiah, eds. Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. New York: Amistad, 1993. Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. Heywood, Leslie. Bodymakers: A Cultural Anatomy of Women’s Bodybuilding. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998. ——. Dedication to Hunger: The Anorexic Aesthetic in Modern Culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996. Hite, Molly. The Other Side of the Story: Structures and Strategies of Contemporary Feminist Narratives. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989. hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992. Hutcheon, Linda. ‘Introduction’. In A Postmodern Reader. Ed. Linda Hutcheon and Joseph Natoli. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993. i-xiv. Kaplan, E. Ann. ‘Introduction’. In Postmodernism and Its Discontents. London: Verso, 1988. 1–9. Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior. New York: Vintage, 1976. Krumholz, Linda. ‘The Ghosts of Slavery: Historical Recovery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved’. African American Review 26 (1992): 395–408.

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Lugones, Maria. ‘Playfulness, “World”-Traveling, and Loving Perception’. Hypatia 2 (summer 1987): 3–20. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1989. Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London: Methuen, 1985. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Plume, 1987. ——. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New York: Vintage, 1992. Perez Torres, Rafael. ‘Knitting and Knotting the Narrative Thread – Beloved as Postmodern Novel’. Modern Fiction Studies 39 (fall/winter 1993): 689–707. Rhys, Jean. Wide Sargasso Sea. New York: Norton, 1966. Rodoreda, Merce. The Time of the Doves. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1986. Ross, Andrew. Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Smiley, Jane. A Thousand Acres. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1991. Walker, Alice. Possessing the Secret of Joy. New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1992. West, Cornell. ‘Black Culture and Postmodernism’. In A Postmodern Reader. Ed. Linda Hutcheon and Joseph Natoli. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993.

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Chapter 6 Role‘Cheap, On Sale, American Dream’: Contemporary Asian American Women Writers’ Responses to American Success Mythologies Phillipa Kafka

I The process of becoming American always and inevitably involves confronting and relating to American success mythologies. Furthermore, since the stereotypes for what comprises ‘typical American’ are based on what American success mythologies valorize, American success stereotypes are always and inevitably the byproducts of American success mythologies. Historically, Asian Americans and other immigrants have wanted to believe that they could somehow become accepted as ‘typical Americans’ if they only tried hard enough to assimilate. All the contemporary Asian American women writers whom I will discuss in this essay reveal the attractions as well as the pitfalls awaiting immigrants from Asia who betray their traditional values in order to follow American success mythologies. Instead, they advocate syncresis for their characters as a coping mechanism between the hopes and dreams inspired in them by American success mythologies and the reality they experience after their immigration to American shores. Syncresis, the combining of elements from both cultures, is a balanced mixture of endlessly negotiated revisions and modifications of juxtaposed elements of both original and new American ‘cultural regimes of truth’ (Foucault 31). It is a non-binary recombinant modification of both Asian and American success mythologies and is not a repudiation of either culture, but an ongoing, endless cycle of flow in both directions. The authors I will discuss in this essay describe this attempt at syncresis, none more poignantly and tragically than M. Evelina Galang (b. 1961) in her first collection of stories, Her Wild American Self (1996), through her description of the fate of the idealistic Uncle Victor. Indeed, all the authors whom I will discuss have recently published first works such as Galang’s, where they describe harrowing individual and familial attempts to assimilate in the face of racist and sexist American success mythologies. R. A. Sasaki (b. 1952) focuses in The Loom and Other Stories (1991) on the tragic results of attempts by first- and second-generation

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Japanese Americans in San Francisco to live by American success mythologies and to be accepted as Americans. She does this from the point of view of their ‘Thirty-Something’ Sansei (third-generation) daughter Jo who grows up in the Seventies. Gish Jen (b. 1951) ends her satiric novel Typical American (1992), set in Manhattan and the suburbs of Connecticut, in the late fifties. Jen, a second-generation Chinese American, deals with the same topic as Sasaki, but from the perspective of adult post-war Chinese American immigrants, rather than that of their children. Chineseborn Wang Ping (b. 1957) focuses on the same topic in her first collection of short stories, American Visa (1995), and brings the time period forward from the seventies to the present. However, the first half of Ping’s work takes place in Communist China.1 This affords Ping the opportunity to represent her recently arrived character from both a retrospective and present perspective in relation to American success mythologies. Finally, covering the same time period as Ping, M. Evelina Galang’s Her Wild American Self also involves the necessity of grappling unceasingly against the all-pervasive racism and sexism of American mythologies. Again, like the other authors, Galang maintains that in order to succeed, Asian Americans must continually combine and recombine elements, sometimes extremely jarring, from both their birth and new cultures. Those who do not are doomed. Galang, an American of Philippine ancestry, spent her formative years in Illinois and Wisconsin. These ‘middle American’ locales inform her middle-class characters’ experiences of and responses to traditional ‘middle American’ success mythologies. In contrast, Wang Ping, who has lived and worked in New York since 1985, situates her characters in relation to American success mythologies where they were first inspired – in Communist China – and later, in New York. According to Jen, who focuses most on a scathing critique of the material aspects of American mythology, the United States had degenerated entirely into materialism by the middle of the twentieth century. Theresa Chang, happening into her brother Ralph’s home office, finds ‘an entire wall of this important room papered with inspirational quotes’ which on the surface sound like Chinese sayings but whose purpose, she discovers to her horror, is entirely mercenary and not spiritual at all. Those readers familiar with Emerson’s and Thoreau’s Transcendental 1 Coffee House Press published a second work by Ping in 1996, a novel called Foreign Devil. According to the publisher’s description, the book is like American Visa in that it critiques the Cultural Revolution ‘and the kafkaesque maze of rules and regulations that dominate contemporary Chinese life’ through descriptions of the experiences of an ‘ardent young woman’. However, it does not expand her experiences to include immigration to the United States as does American Visa.

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discourse immediately recognize Jen’s clever distortions used to convey the contemporary American degradation from the nineteenth-century original: ALL RICHES BEGIN IN AN IDEA. / WHAT YOU CAN CONCEIVE, YOU CAN ACHIEVE./ DON’T WAIT FOR YOUR SHIP TO COME IN, SWIM OUT TO IT./ FOLLOW THE HERD, YOU END UP A COW./ YOU CAN NEVER HAVE RICHES IN GREAT QUANTITY UNLESS YOU WORK YOURSELF INTO A WHITE HEAT OF DESIRE FOR MONEY. (199)2

II In Jen’s Typical American, as in Galang’s Her Wild American Self and Ping’s American Visa, both male and female immigrants mock certain aspects of Americanness from their Chinese and Philippine perspective, while simultaneously struggling day and night to conform to what they each think of as being ‘typical American’. To them, at bottom, ‘everything modern, new, different came to signify the West’ (Mutman 182). The Japanese American R. A. Sasaki, in her story ‘The Loom’, emphasizes the point that the struggle to assimilate continues on in the generation born here. The Nisei mother’s dream is shown as a continuation of her Isei [immigrant] parents’ dream, to validate their struggles: ‘To succeed, to be irreproachable, to be American … A smart career girl in a tailored suit, beautiful and bold – an American girl’. Her family, like herself ‘did everything right’ (22) in their unceasing efforts to assimilate into American culture just prior to the Japanese bombing of the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941. As Elaine H. Kim tells us about the ‘typical Japanese immigrant’: ‘[a]s the years passed, the immigrant Japanese relied increasingly on his [sic] children to vindicate him, to prove that his sacrifice and his decision to leave Japan had been worthwhile after all’ (Asian 128). Ironically, the anonymous mother makes a reverse epic journey that begins when she is an adventurous child on the streets of San Francisco and ends in the silenced twilight of her life. Racism creates a ‘duality’ in her, a ‘double discourse’, or in DuBois’s famous term, a ‘double 2 In fact, as Theresa’s initial mistake reveals, traditional American success mythologies can be adapted with ease to those of the immigrants’ own cultures, except that the class system under feudal, hierarchical governments usually denied ‘the little man’ the opportunity to rise from obscurity. For these reasons, Ruth Y. Hsaio wonders whether ‘patriarchal tradition’ and ‘patriarchal views’ (161) can be purged in Chinese American literature.

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consciousness’ (45). This child, later to become the anonymous mother, is second-generation Japanese American, a Nisei. According to Sasaki, ‘there was no common thread running through both worlds’ – Japan and the United States – so that ‘the duality was unplanned, untaught’ (17). Before she entered school the mother had never had ‘to sort out her identity’. As a result, she had previously ‘met life headlong and with the confidence of a child’ (18). For example, while roller skating at the age of five, instead of just going to the corner of her block, the mother [had] continued ‘down the Buchanan Street hill’, got ‘all the way to the bottom, cheeks flushed red and black hair flying, before shooting off the curb and crumpling in the street. Her hands and knees were scraped raw, but she was laughing’ (19). Her diminution begins on the very first day of school when she discovers that she could not understand the teacher and is traumatized by being called a ‘Jap’ by another child who then pulled up ‘the corners of her eyes at her’ and sneered. For the rest of her life, ‘[a] kind of radar system went to work in her’ (20). She curbs whatever is unique in herself and different from others, ‘blending like a chameleon for survival’. Ever afterwards she opts for conformity in every way, acting ‘with caution in new surroundings’. Her goal becomes ‘to blend in’ everywhere to the point of obsession. The racial insult has seared itself into her psyche forever so that it becomes colonized. She never forgets the name of the little girl who had insulted her and she never cries again. Despite her different appearance from the other children, she strains only ‘to be as inconspicuous as possible’. Forever afterwards she is convinced that she should not stand out because this would attract harshly negative consequences: ‘[S]he at least wanted to be invisible’ (20). Invisibility is safest, even safer than smallness. This basic response to racism, internalizing the oppressor’s perspective, is characteristic of colonized mentalities, according to postcolonial critics such as Edward Said and Abdul R. JanMohamed. Sasaki describes the mother as following this pattern, repeating it throughout her lifetime in every significant moment of actual, potential or symbolic encounter with whites. For example, the mother and her family, along with approximately 200,000 other Japanese Americans, ‘were taken’ to detention camps during World War II. After their removal to Tanforan Racetrack, the mother and her family are forced by armed American military guards to cram themselves into the horse stables there. Upon viewing ‘the dirt and manure left by the former equine occupants’, the mother then communes with herself about white Euro-Americans and concludes, with mortified astonishment: ‘So this is what they think of me’. Tellingly,

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Sasaki comments about her next reaction, that ‘Realization was followed by shame’ (24). At first the mother responds with shocked surprise at encountering racism. Then she immediately turns into herself as if she were observing herself and her own kind from the eyes of the racist beholders. Her psychic perspective shifts from one of self-definition to a colonized mentality – that is, an overwhelming feeling of shame at being the one beheld as so unworthy of respect. For the rest of this work, Sasaki depicts only the after-effects, the results on the mother of her traumatic collisions with American racism – internalized low self-esteem. It never seems to occur to her to respond otherwise, to express anger and to resist being demeaned. If she does not understand the teacher, she copies the other children. She listens ‘carefully’ to the teacher and attempts never to ‘provoke criticism’. Jo, the narrator, mocks her mother’s traditional ways, her petty ‘little’ preoccupations, her concern about ‘what people will say’, her fear of giving people ‘the wrong idea’, her ‘frenzy of cleaning’ before going away on vacation, because in the event of a fire or a break-in the yoso no hito [strangers] would ‘have to come in’. Jo sneers that it was unclear to her family on whose behalf –‘the firemen, the police, or the burglar’ – her mother would be so ‘mortally shamed if her house were not spotless’ (15). ‘They’ entirely dominate her thinking, from ‘the way she cooked’ to ‘the clothes she chose’ for her daughters because ‘They were wearing [them] these days’ (15). ‘They’ are white authorities and her own community; the ‘They’ her daughters blame for her timidity, who have decreed that she should never be more than a faceless nonentity. This is why she is concerned about the ‘They’ who might be judging her housekeeping abilities and finding her wanting. In college she and her Nisei friends ‘believed’ they were ‘accepted’ by whites, by the society at large. They allowed themselves to glow with ‘foolish confidence’ based on their assumptions and ‘unfounded dreams’ (24) inspired by American success mythologies. But she discovers after graduation and after World War II begins that they were only ‘spinning a fantasy world that was unacknowledged by the larger fabric of society’ (24). ‘The aura of Berkeley’ temporarily carried her away to the point where ‘she had forgotten the legacy left by Eleanor Leland’ [the white child who had traumatized her on her first day of school] (24). As she has been as a student, so she later becomes as a mother, ‘without fault’. She projects onto her children the same goals as she had set for herself and as her parents had envisioned for her, even expressed in the same terminology – that they would be ‘irreproachable’ [emphasis mine]. She has emerged from the war years with a hearing problem

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contracted at the Topaz internment camp from the violent dust storms there. But she will not admit ‘such a deficiency’ at the PTA meetings. As she was as a child when she could not understand the teacher, so now she ‘pretends to hear when she didn’t, nodding her head and smiling’. This is because of her overriding desire for ‘things to go smoothly; she wanted to appear normal’ (28). Because her ego is sunk so deeply into her offspring, she perceives her daughters’ schooldays ‘as a happy time, the happiest time of her life’. In a world in which women are assigned the trivial, routine tasks to keep life going, one of the solutions that the mother chooses is simply to take the mythologized role of maternity and domesticity and make of it a romantic and glorious thing. She accepts her two cultures’ binary division of the genders into male worker/female nurturer and male dominant class/female subordinate or lower class. She becomes an incredible shrinking woman in the process. The mother has always accepted this position, which serves as shorthand for racial and gender mythologies combined, which, in turn, become valorized as cultural stereotypes. She has shaped her life always within their confines. Like many members of the Nisei generation, the mother is only concerned about doing that which will end American racism towards her and her people. She never seems to notice the existence of sexism in either American or Japanese culture, or both. Notice that Elaine H. Kim’s interview with a woman doctor also illustrates the gap between the Nisei mothers and Sansei daughters, but, again, only in terms of racism: Today’s sansei are different from us nisei. We straddled two worlds, the Japanese American world and the white world. We grew out of discrimination, and our whole lives were mobilized against it. The sansei have only one world; they only look Japanese. They have access to education and employment we didn’t have, and their values are not different from mainstream values. But no matter how assimilated they are, they will face a rude awakening one day. Eventually, they too will confront the gnawing question: ‘What am I? Why am I different? Am I really accepted as equal?’ And they too will need to be in touch with their heritage (Kim, Silk Wings 49).

Paradoxically, Jo’s motive in her ‘Sansei march toward Americanization’ is to fit in, which reveals that like her Nisei mother she has also internalized racist attitudes. When her lower-class boyfriend visits her at Berkeley and during her class on Renaissance literature makes the mistake of opening a psychology book, his days with Jo are numbered. She is ashamed of his ‘commonness … Didn’t he know how inappropriate his behavior was? Didn’t he care if they thought that Japanese people were boors? Didn’t he know? Didn’t he care?’ (67).

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A similar experience to the anonymous mother’s in terms of American racism occurs in M. Evelina Galang’s story ‘Her Wild American Self’ in the book of the same title, when the narrator describes her aunt’s first day in an all-girl Catholic school. Augustina brings her lunch with her into the cafeteria, ‘a tupperware of leftover rice and fish’. She seats herself with a group of American girls because she has seen them in her class earlier that morning. Although they glare at her at first and then make remarks about ‘the school’s getting cramped’, it does not occur to Augustina yet that she is being discriminated against racially: ‘What is that smell?’ ‘God’, Colleen said. ‘It’s like dead fish’. Augustina scanned the table – the girls were eating oranges and apples. Some sat with nothing in front of them. She was the only one with a tupperware of food. Then she said to the girl sitting next to her, ‘What kind of lipstick is that? It’s wild’. But the girl turned her back on Augustina as if Our Lady had plagued her. ‘I think it’s coming from her’, said the girl as she held her nose. (69)

Galang’s narrator then describes her aunt’s moment of illumination about American racism: Augustina looked down the row of milk-white faces, faces so pure and fresh, it was hard to tell if they were born that way, or if they’d simply scrubbed the color out of them. She looked down at her hands, at the red nail polish peeling, at her fingers stretched out stiff in front of her. She had never noticed how brown her skin was until then. She would never have a single girlfriend among them. (69)

This passage from Galang bears out Kim’s point that ‘the messages conveyed by such incidents to Asian Americans are that their racial identities are primary and that they cannot be accepted as genuine Americans’. Her example, Albert H. Yee, ‘a third-generation American, a Korean War GI, a Stanford graduate’, is ‘outraged by such statements as: “How long have you been in the U.S.?” and “You speak English very well”’ (Kim, Asian 306). Further, what has also been pointed out by a Nisei, Kesaya E. Noda, sums up the experience of racism which most Asian Americans in the United States record: A third-generation German American is an American. A third-generation Japanese American is a Japanese American …. ‘Weak’ I hear the voice from my childhood years. ‘Passive’, I hear. Our parents and grandparents were the ones who were put into those camps. They went without resistance; they offered cooperation as proof of loyalty to America. ‘Victim’, I hear. And, ‘Silent’ … Our parents are painted as hard workers who were socially

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Phillipa Kafka uncomfortable and had difficulty expressing even the smallest opinion. Clean, quiet, motivated, and determined to match the American way; that is us, and that is the story of our time here (245–46).

In ‘Talk To Me, Milagros’ Galang powerfully describes the tragedy of those Filipinos who come to the United States unaware that American success mythologies include racist and sexist components. With sublime confidence in the American dream, Uncle Victor, previously ‘an attorney in the city of Pitogo’, has decided to sacrifice both his large practice and ‘the respect of the whole community’ for his daughters’ sake. He believes that in the United States they will have a ‘better opportunity … the chance to be more than wives’ (36). At this early stage, the only barrier Victor is aware of is that he will not be able to practise law in the US, at least, not at first, ‘since the laws back home were different from those in America’ (36). ‘Excited’ about going to America, he happily confides in his friends his plans for the following year: to build a house, send his girls to ‘a nice Catholic school’ and take holidays in Florida. Whenever his wife and the narrator’s father try to modify his unrealistic visions, he resists, with laughter. ‘No problem’, he insists. ‘This is America … Don’t worry, this is America, I’ll be working soon’ (36). He will not hear of what he considers ‘negative talk’ regarding American ‘discrimination’ (37). Every night Victor studies American law books, murmuring American laws and rules and cases to himself … reverently whispering the Constitution out loud. Like a child memorizing prayers during Mass, he uttered every syllable. Then, checking himself for accuracy, he peered over the bridge of his glasses, into stacks of white-papered books. (37)

When an ‘old-timer’ who first came to this country in 1920 tells him that in San Francisco the restaurants had signs on the doors which read ‘No Filipinos’ and that back then Filipinos were called ‘“Pinoys, monkeys, you know. Work was hard to come by” … “I don’t believe it”, Uncle Victor said”’. But his compatriot overrules him: ‘You see, I thought that too because that is what they tell us back home – America, land of opportunity … ’ (40). One day Victor comes home to announce that he has finally found ‘somebody’ who ‘needed a lawyer’ at ‘Elroy’s Easy Diner’. He promises himself that he will soon ‘pass the law review’ and start his ‘own practice’. Then ‘the girls will go to a nice school and have lots of pretty clothes’ (45). Sadly, one week later, when the narrator and one of Victor’s daughters visit him at the diner, they discover that he is ‘bussing tables’ (48) under humiliating conditions.

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Later on that night, the entire household hears a strange ‘heavy thumping sound that was constant and loud’, that ‘seemed to shake the walls and echo within the framework’ of the house. Occasionally they hear ‘a moan, like a wolf that had been trapped … The drumming against the wall felt heavy and full of pain. I could hear my uncle crying, sobbing, sometimes quietly and at other times howling’ (48–49). Peeking in at his door, the young narrator observes Victor ‘cracking his head against the wall, again and again and again. His face was red, swollen and washed with tears. Uncle Victor wailed and I heard a sound rising from some deep, dark place’ (49). Betrayed by his belief in the reality of American success mythology for all comers, Victor rages and suffers, disillusioned. Gish Jen also shows the Chang family experiencing American racism in Typical American in her punning chapter ‘Chang-Kees’. Longing to experience the American culture as their own, the Chang family decides to ‘go to a game’, the American game, the American ‘national sport’. When they venture out as new Americans to enjoy their adopted country’s national pastime, they find the crowd composed of typical ‘Yankee fans’ – as American as ‘hot dogs’. And what was the shocking result? ‘[P]eople had called them names and told them to go back to their laundry … They in turn had sat impassive as the scoreboard. Rooting in their hearts, they said later.’ Afterwards they claim that they prefer to ‘save face’, to stay home and watch: ‘“More comfortable, more convenient. Can see better”, they agreed’ (127–28). Whereas Galang and Sasaki combine elements of sexism and racism in their characters’ relationship to American success mythologies, it is germane at this point to note that Jen alone of all the authors discussed in this essay represents racism as not only infecting whites, but Asians, as well. She courageously indicts her own characters for reverse racism. In the course of doing so, Jen reveals that objects of racism (and sexism and class oppression) too often replicate racist, sexist and class oppression themselves when they discriminate against their ‘Others’. When Ralph is a graduate student, he conceives an infatuation for the white secretary of the Engineering department. His Chinese friends condemn him for ‘falling for foreign devils’ (32). And when after Ralph marries Helen, the family moves to ‘a run-down walk-up north of 125th Street’ in Harlem, the couple’s initial response to their neighbours is that they are surrounded by ‘So many Negroes! Years later, they would shake their heads and call themselves prejudiced, but at the time they were profoundly disconcerted’ (65). When a possible suitor is proposed for her sister-in-law Theresa, Helen learns that ‘he’s completely American’. ‘A

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foreign devil? … A long nose?’ Helen sneers (85). Her contemptuous response, like that of Ralph’s friends to whites, is akin to what Japanese Americans call ‘ghosts’ and ‘hakujin’, and is the same as that of Maxine’s mother in Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, as well as that of the anonymous mother in Sasaki’s ‘The Loom’.3 As in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1977) and Amy Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife (1991), the various narrators of Wang Ping’s American Visa and M. Evelina Galang’s Her Wild American Self describe those life situations which jolt them into sudden, traumatic illuminations about the myths of their culture in relation to gender. Winnie of The Kitchen God’s Wife ends up a feminist revisionist of her culture’s gender mythologies, as do Galang’s and Ping’s narrators. Winnie even evolves to the point where she dares to substitute a female goddess, a female mythology, for a male god and a male mythology, much as Hong Kingston does in The Woman Warrior with an actual woman warrior from Chinese history, Fa Mu Lan. Tan’s revisionist heroine undermines and then overthrows traditional Confucian hierarchies. Winnie is even daring enough to bluntly place the blame on ‘that awful man who made that society’ (257) – Confucius himself. In ‘Miss Teenage Sampaguita’, in Her Wild American Self, Galang’s protagonist Millicent is ruled by her father, a doctor, the absolute patriarch of his family. However, influenced by contemporary American female mythologies for success – ‘having it all’ – he not only requires her to shine as a beauty by entering a beauty contest (which she wins), but to study to become a doctor like him. Millicent, however, only wishes to be ordinary – to fall in love, get married, and have children. In Sasaki’s ‘The Loom’ the anonymous mother also only desires to be ordinary, ‘to fit in’. The same is true for the narrator in Galang’s ‘Rose Colored’. Instead of considering the idealist or optimist as foolish for seeing life from such a distorted lens, Galang exposes Rose as diminished as a human being because she chooses to settle for a ‘practical’ life in obedience to her parents’ traditional beliefs for females. Although she had once aspired to be an actress, Rose has settled for working a computer terminal in a bank and for a dull fiancé: ‘My mother always said that it was nice I had a hobby outside of school. A hobby, that was all it was to her. When I got a chance to act in community theater, my dad wanted me not to lose sight of my priorities’ (25). 3 Again, according to the publisher, Ni Bing, the heroine of Ping’s Foreign Devil is labelled a ‘foreign devil’ because she resolves to attend college. It would seem logical to conclude, therefore, that ‘foreign devil’ is a common term of opprobrium by the Chinese for those who deviate towards white Western individuals and their capitalist materialist ways.

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Galang contrasts Rose to her cousin Mina whom she visits shortly before undertaking the marriage which represents her self-imposed decision to commit her life to the predictable, the rational, the safe, the ordinary, the dull. Mina is a free spirit who has chosen to follow her dream of becoming a professional dancer. When she is not supporting herself as a go-go dancer in a sleazy bar, Mina attends rehearsals with a traditional Filipino dance company. Rose argues that Mina should ‘grow up’, that she should ‘get a real job, be responsible like the rest of us’ who ‘know exactly what we’re doing’ (29). Mina’s devastating response is that in fact Rose does not know what she is doing, that she ‘always kissed everyone’s ass’. If as a result Rose is now ‘miserable’, she should not blame Mina or anyone but herself (29). Out of necessity on certain occasions, such as during the Puritan period of settlement and in pioneering situations in general, as well as during the Civil War and World Wars I and II, features of traditional male American success mythology were extended to women of various classes. Epic resourcefulness, superhuman endurance, courage to confront enemies directly in hand-to-hand combat, the firing of weapons and ‘Laboring with one’s hands’ were suddenly touted and valorized as desirable female qualities by the media of the various periods. However, once the emergency situations ended, so did the admiration. In Typical American Jen expands the notion of appropriate upperclass women’s work both in China and the United States to include tinkering with machines. She thus creates a syncretic relationship between the Chinese mythology for appropriate upper-class female conduct (which Helen has internalized before her Americanization) and the traditional Protestant work ethic to which she is exposed in the American media. The elegant, high-born Helen Chang has been raised in China as an ‘upper-class’ girl to be an inactive, ‘“doing nothing” … proper Shanghainese-girl’ (77); a passive, decorative item of ‘conspicuous consumption’, in Thorstein Veblen’s term. Helen, however, discovers in New York what she could not in China: that she has mathematical abilities, is strong, and energetic. After she secretly fixes the boiler in the apartment house where the family lives at first, she just as secretly begins to tinker with machinery. To her amazement, she further discovers that ‘working was enjoyable’ (76) to her, a discovery which she keeps ‘a secret’ about herself because the image of a woman working with her hands or doing physical labour is identified with working-class women in all cultures around the world, including her own. Her solution is to practise syncresis covertly:

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Phillipa Kafka She made curtains; she made bedspreads; she rewired Ralph’s old lamp. She couldn’t help but feel proud. Too proud, really – she tried to bind that feeling up – recognizing still, though, that in her own way she was becoming private strength itself. She was the hidden double stitching that kept armholes from tearing out. And all because she’d discovered, by herself, a secret – that working was enjoyable. Effort, result… She knew how tiny she was too, how unmuscled in the arms; she appreciated, as if in a mirror, that she was amazing. And that mattered, the way it mattered that she be busy but not busy at the same time – that, while competent, she be a Chinese girl. (76–77)

Private forms of resistance such as Helen’s are ineffectual because they go ‘unnoticed’ as a result of the power of prevailing Asian American and American mythologies about the ‘passivity’ of Asian American women of the upper classes, their helplessness and flower-like fragility. Nevertheless, working is yet another strategy for Helen and for women in general. This is a strategy which has ‘changed the balance of power between the sexes’, especially work which ‘contributes to the family income’ and that which is done in a ‘family business’ (Mazumder 21). In The Woman Warrior Brave Orchid performs extraordinary feats of strength in the laundry she operates with her husband. The anonymous mother in R. A. Sasaki’s ‘The Loom’ helps in her family’s boarding house. And in Galang’s Her Wild American Self, Filipina daughters are expected to perform all household tasks, especially to serve their fathers. As for the protagonist Seaweed of Ping’s American Visa, she works so strenuously that she makes every other character by comparison seem to lead a life of ease and luxury, except perhaps Brave Orchid. Before she leaves home at the age of 15 to work in the countryside as a peasant, Seaweed is forced to do all her mother’s housework and chores, as well as take care of her siblings. Her life is much like Cinderella’s: ‘Since graduating in February, I had taken over all the housework, cleaning, washing, shopping for daily food, and cooking’ (‘Lipstick’ 6–7). She frequently contrasts her beautiful sister Sea Cloud’s easy existence to hers: ‘She had just gotten up, her hair uncombed, her eyes still half closed, whereas I’d been up for two hours, walked two miles to and from the market to shop for the day’s food, lit the coal stove, cooked the breakfast, and let out the chickens’ (‘Fox Smell’ 101). Later, as a resident of a peasant commune, Seaweed works in the fields ‘Twelve hours a day, seven days a week, in the blazing sun or cold rain. I had stopped thinking of the difference between weekdays and weekends since the peasants worked 365 days a year except for days of heavy rain and the Spring Festival’ (‘Revenge’ 2).

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III In Jen’s Typical American, much as we have seen in Galang’s Her Wild American Self, women and female children still internalize for themselves the ‘typical American’ values generally reserved for men. At the time period of Jen’s text, the 1940s and 50s, Helen is shown as initially resisting Americanization, but gradually she succumbs to the American consumerist acculturation of women that has influenced the globe. What Jen’s female characters see as desirably American for themselves will consist of whatever they gather from the media of the period as ‘typical’ of American women: She also developed a liking for American magazines, American newspapers, American radio – she kept her Philco in the corner of the living room nearest the bedroom, so she could listen nonstop. She sang along to the quintessentially American 1950s musical comedy Oklahoma: ‘The corn is as high as an el-e-phant’s eyyye … ’ (63). Unbeknownst to Ralph and Theresa, she spent large parts of her afternoons listening to the radio, or reading the magazines she kept under her mattress. She loved the advertisements especially, so gorgeously puzzling. Which part of the picture was the ‘velvet’? Which the ‘portrait neckline’? Also she liked the insights into American home life – the revelation that most Americans showered every day, first thing in the morning, for example. This amazed Helen, who took occasional baths, in the evening (77).

The narrator of Galang’s ‘Mix Like Stir Fry’ lists elements of American life which to her generation equated as much with mythologies of being ‘All-American’ as those of Helen Chang in Typical American in her time frame. As a child, Galang’s narrator watched ‘Leave it to Beaver’ and ‘I Dream of Jeannie’ on TV.4 In high school she struggled hard ‘to fit in, not knowing what else to do’. She strutted around in ‘red-tagged Levis, a faded denim shirt and clogs, a Farrah Fawcett perm, your AllAmerican teenage look … listened to R.E.O. Speedwagon and Foghat … and … knew every single word – every breath – to Meatloaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light”’ (182). Similarly, Rose in Galang’s ‘Rose Colored’, in keeping with her repressed character, cautiously follows the fashion for the conventional 90s girl, dressing in ‘a polo shirt, walking shorts and a pair of Keds deck shoes’. Her cousin Mina who represents daring and unconventional behaviour, opts for ‘the return of the ugly Seventies’ in ‘crushed-velvet fuchsia hip hugger hot pants, a midriff halter and granny boots’ (24). 4 These were enormously popular American TV series of the period. Targeting conventional, white, mainstream viewers, both are still being re-run in the United States.

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In Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, in Harlequin novels, as well as in soap operas and telenovellas, ethnic women and women of colour characters are depicted as holding themselves as high or as low as their cultures’ mythologies situate them. For example, in ‘The Loom’, Sasaki describes similar sources for the anonymous mother’s internalization of the low opinion held of her from her childhood days onwards: the books she reads in school about ‘the drawing rooms of Jane Austen’, ‘the movies she views about the virtue and gallantry of Hollywood’ (21) and what she reads in the ‘popular novels’. Jo points out about her mother that She also watches the Japanese program and is especially fond of the motherdaughter stories … What is always the same is the invisible wires that bind them, the bond of obligation, of suffering, of love – and this is why my mother likes these dramas; because this is the way she would like real life to be. (112)

Jo attempts to watch once, ‘but the pathos and self-sacrifice drove me from the room before it was even halfway through. I have nothing against pathos, but it has to be done well. I admit I have a harder time with self-sacrifice’ (108). These lines convey the gap in training between the traditional mother and her contemporary daughters. Sasaki attributes this gap, not to the influence of the feminist movement, but to the differences between traditional Japanese and Hollywood cultural mythologies for women which American media and consumerist culture create. The Americanized Jo supposes that unlike her mother she has [S]een too many American movies. In American movies getting everything you want constitutes a happy ending. A satisfying Japanese ending, in contrast, has to have an element of sadness. There must be suffering and sacrifice – for these are proof of love. I’ve always hated stories where everybody sacrifices themselves and nobody ends up happy. It is a compulsion that strikes me as a form of mental illness, and I don’t want to hear about it, much less do it. (108)

Helen in Typical American longs for a split-level home in the suburbs with a dining alcove for the family, as opposed to the cramped apartment that they rent in a poorly maintained building in Harlem. When the family finally does move to that split-level in the Connecticut suburbs, they learn more things about America, enough to make them realize that ‘We didn’t realize’. Compared to their former life, American suburbia at first seems ‘radiant with truth and discovery … A paradise … An ocean liner compared to a rowboat with leaks … A Cadillac compared to an aisle seat on the bus’ (158). Helen even equates her first lawn with

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America, comparing Chinese to American soil unfavourably: It was the great blue American sky, beguiling the grass upward. It was the soil, so fresh, so robust, so much better quality than Chinese soil; Chinese soil having been prevailed upon for too many thousands of years … After all, this was top-quality grass, grown out of top-quality soil. (159)

She relates her own family to the new lawn: ‘Just as a top-quality family was growing out of a top-quality house’ (159). When Ralph later suspects Helen of adultery, he hurls her out of the picture window of the splitlevel house onto the shrubbery and the lawn. The picture window is Jen’s metaphor for the collapse of the Changs’ ‘picture perfect’ marriage. Helen’s injuries are so severe that she is hospitalized. A similar consumerist-influenced success mythology is noted by the narrator of Galang’s ‘Lectures On How You Never Lived Back Home’ when she informs her readers that she has been raised in ‘suburbia in a split level house, always in fashion’ (84). Again, both Galang’s and Jen’s use of popular ideals of domestic architectural imagery of the period is here symbolic of the Asian struggle in the United States, which according to Sau-ling C. Wong represents a major element in Asian American literature: the drive for ‘upward mobility’ (159).

IV All the Asian American authors use American fast food to convey their ambivalent perspective towards American success mythologies. If their characters prefer American fast food, this means that they have swallowed American success mythologies whole. They are corrupted and have lost their unique identities. On the other hand, if they confine themselves entirely to Asian American food, they are resistant to the new values and clinging to the old, dead past. However, if they recombine the foods of both cultures they are practising syncresis.5 When Jen’s Americanized villain Grover Ding seduces Ralph Chang into criminal materialism they eat ‘typical American’ fast food together. Grover, born in the United States, has lost his ‘Chineseness’ and has become a ‘typical’ American. Significantly, he cannot speak Chinese and has no familiarity with or use for things Chinese. 5 Sau-ling C. Wong in Reading Asian American Literature identifies alimentation as a major thematic in Asian American literature, as well as that of the doppelganger or ‘racial shadow’, as she puts it. Also, Shirley Geok-lin Lim in ‘Modern Secrets’ plays a variation on this moment when she writes: ‘Last night I dreamt in Chinese./ Eating Yankee shredded wheat’ (Wang and Zhao 132).

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Phillipa Kafka They had dinner, then lunch, then breakfast … ‘Nobody eats a burger naked’. He [Grover] piled on top [of Ralph’s hamburger] ketchup, mustard, relish, a tomato slice from his own cheeseburger super deluxe, a few rings of onion, five french fries … and when Grover ordered a black-and-white ice cream soda, Ralph shyly did too. And when Grover ordered a fried clam plate and a Salisbury steak, just for fun, Ralph ordered a list of side dishes – onion rings, potato salad, coleslaw. Plus a chocolate milkshake. ‘What the heck’, said Grover approvingly. Ralph laughed. They ate at whim, taking a bite here, a bite there. When their table was full of plates, they moved to another one, where they ordered desserts – apple pie, cherry pie. Black forest cake. Ralph groaned. ‘I’m full’. Grover roared, ‘I say we order more!’ ‘Nonono’, Ralph protested, thinking, fleetingly, Typical American wasteful. But when Grover ordered bacon and eggs, Ralph did too. It was a game. French toast. English muffins. German pancakes. (102–03)

In ‘Our Fathers’ in Galang’s Her Wild American Self, when Tessa’s family eats ‘Kentucky Fried Chicken and cold rice on paper plates’ (114) during an outing, Galang, like the other authors analysed in this essay, is consciously celebrating syncresis through her characters’ use of (sometimes jarring) food combinations. For example, in ‘Mix Like Stir Fry’ the author reprises the same gap between acting like ‘a typical American’ girl and being ‘Other’, again through culinary metaphors which resolve the situation through syncresis. The ‘you’ is again a very American girl who has eaten not only at her ‘share of McDonald’s and Wendys’ but also in ‘Chinatowns’. She followed her ‘share of grilled cheese sandwiches with bottles of chocolate milk’, but at dinner ate ‘several dishes with rice – beef, pork, chicken – seasoned with soy sauce, not salt from the girl with the umbrella, but soy sauce from the Asian mart’ (181).6 The narrator addresses herself in the second-person singular, musing on how when ‘you’ were ‘a typical teen’, you went to the appropriate parties because you were ‘one of them – a Brookfield girl, a Wisconsin Badger, All-American … ’ As a result, your ‘color was lost, bleached from your face’. When you called yourself a ‘minority’ people asked ‘Which one?’ (182). You ‘no longer stuck out’, you were not ‘different’, you used ‘likes’ and ‘ya knows’ in every sentence, chewed gum, went in groups of teenagers who all ‘spoke at once’ to the local ‘Mac’s, drinking shakes and eating fries after football games’. You corresponded with Filipino cousins in ‘comic strip dialog, just to show them how cool you were, how great the States were, how backwards their traditional lives must be’ (182). 6 In this connection, Galang makes the interesting point that just as lesser known nationalities of Asian women are subsumed under the heading of ‘The Women of the Orient’ (12), Asian foods such as Thai, Vietnamese, Korean, or Filipino food are all subsumed under the heading of Chinese food in American minds.

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Even so, something about her somehow feels awry, not quite right. She compares herself to the piece in the thousand-piece puzzle which was ‘jammed’, ‘shoved’ into other pieces which all have a ‘perfect fit’. Then, once she moves to the big city, strangers think nothing of invading her privacy with questions as to whether she is Japanese or Chinese or Vietnamese. With great annoyance she answers ‘Brookfield, Wisconsin’. Whenever she meets soldiers who had served at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines, they smile at her and address her in the stock Tagalog phrases they had learned to sound out in order to pick up Filipina prostitutes. Ironically, Tagalog is a language neither the American soldiers nor the American narrator understands. But by the end of Her Wild American Self, Galang’s narrator is able to celebrate her transcendence of both racism and sexism by means of syncresis: ‘You know you are the hyphen in American-born … Americanborn girl. American-born Filipina’ with ‘one foot planted in the Midwest’ and another ‘floating on the islands’, with her arms ‘stretched across the generations’ between her father’s ‘province’, her ‘children’s future’ and her mother’s dreams for her because her mother believes she was ‘meant for the better life, whatever that is … ’ In sum, the narrator asserts proudly to the reader, she is ‘acting out’ her ‘role’ according to both American and Philippine female success mythology – a ‘Smart American girl’, as well as a ‘beautiful Filipina, dutiful daughter’ (86). In American Visa, Ping depicts the Chinese as wanting to come to America, but only her heroine Seaweed succeeds in doing so after incredible hardships and is disillusioned thereafter. One day in the bowels of the repulsive New York subway, replete with ‘the smell of the yellow streaks of dried urine along the wall’ which makes her sick, Seaweed is confronted by an American woman who sizes Seaweed up as a recent Chinese immigrant and addresses her in broken Cantonese. The woman’s aim is to hawk the potent American success mythologies to Seaweed, mythologies that have brought the latter and untold millions like her to the United States and into ‘the New York subway’. In the term ‘subway’, Ping brilliantly puns on the disappointing truth that the American success mythologies are not meant to apply to certain newcomers like Seaweed. ‘Success, success … This book, American dream, success, rich and famous, you … cheap, on sale, American dream, success, rich and famous, only se mum, just for you … Yes, American dream, have one’(67). After fleeing from this woman, Seaweed comes across her again, ‘leaning on the column with the book of the American dream pressed against her chest. How familiar the gesture was! I used to hold onto Mao’s book like this, and I used to believe in having beliefs, too’ (67).

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The book turns out to be L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics, the contemporary equivalent of the success books that Ralph Chang of Typical American was influenced by in the 50s. Seaweed had abandoned the life she had carved out for herself in Shanghai – ‘my lover, my job at Fudan University, my apartment and the books I’d accumulated for ten years, my family and friends – and come to New York to study English and American literature at Brooklyn College’ (67). Like Victor in Galang’s Her Wild American Self, American success ‘fantasies had bloated [Seaweed’s] brain so much’ that nothing could deter her from this drastic step: ‘I had never doubted for a second that my new life would be full of excitement, opportunities, and freedom’. Like Victor too, and like Ralph and Helen of Typical American, Seaweed ends up working in two restaurants, one on weekends. In the first one, her task is to ‘pack orders in the kitchen from twelve to three, Monday through Friday, four dollars an hour, so that I could go to my classes at Brooklyn College in the evening’ (68). The result is that Seaweed now feels cheated and abandoned … Who had cheated me then? The American dream? I thought I had risen above that level. I thought I had come here to pursue spiritual liberation. Why was I still depressed when I had the freedom to do anything I wanted? Apparently my motivation wasn’t pure enough. (68)

On the one hand Seaweed assures herself that she is the only member of her family who has earned a Master’s degree, who makes ‘U.S. dollars in New York’, and has a green card. On the other hand, she mourns that she left Fudan, ‘a most prestigious college in the southern [sic] China’ where she ‘would have become an assistant professor, had a family and children’. In the United States, she is still single, and equally depressing: My so-called career – dashi – was nothing but teaching forty hours a week in an elementary school, and I was always worried whether the Board of Education would hire me for the next semester. The apartment I shared with four strangers in Flushing swarmed with roaches. I had two big lumps in my shoulders from stress and the heavy dull pain drove me crazy day and night. Would Sea Cloud [her sister who is begging Seaweed to send for her] think highly of me when she knew the truth? Why was I helping more people go abroad? (143)

Ultimately, however, Seaweed copes with the glaring disparities between her dreams and reality by means of syncresis. She reminds herself that she should be happier because she has a two-year contract as a bilingual teacher at PS 1 in Manhattan at nearly $35,000 a year; that she has rented a beautiful summer house; and that her new boyfriend is a successful poet and novelist with seven books to his credit. She has ‘nothing to complain about’.

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Here Seaweed is created as a character whose experiences fit in with that which William Boelhower perceives as characteristic of immigrants influenced by ‘New-World myths (rags to riches, the self-made man, people of plenty, asylum of the free)’. In fact, not only Seaweed, but all the major characters analysed in this essay, examine their situation ‘meticulously through a cathode-tube process in which the positive terminal is ideal rhetoric and the negative terminal is solid reality … This play between the New-World ideal and New-World reality, then, has two paradigmatic functions: one that generates antitheses and another that works toward unifying them’ (Boelhower 45). Boelhower analyses immigrant perspectives as ‘anticipation, contact, and contrast: Old World reality versus New World ideal; New World ideal versus New World reality: Old World reality versus New World reality’ (Boelhower 40). Similarly, Werner Sollors maintains that at first the largely uncritical and eager immigrants consent to Americanization. The second generation is then assimilated. Finally, a third generation emerges. A ‘nostalgic’ group, it attempts to link what it feels is most valuable about its ancestry with what is valuable in its new world. Sollors sees the trajectory of these three generations trans-ethnically as syncretic, as the result of ‘widely shared historical conditions and cultural features, of dynamic interaction and syncretism’ (Invention xiv). He defines this syncretic movement across the ethnicities generationally, ‘from consent to descent’ (Beyond 155). But as Sau-ling C. Wong puts it, such ‘ethnic scholars’ theories’ are all well and good, except that ‘certain ethnic groups, as a result of racism’ (such as Jen describes in Typical American at ‘the American ball game’) will ‘never be able to enact integration into “the cultural regime” in full’ (41). Ping, Galang and Sasaki as well as Jen describe a much more rapid time frame for the process than Sollors’s lengthy period of three generations. For example, in Ping’s text, Seaweed practises cultural syncresis within three months, and Jen describes the Chang family as accelerating at moving from consent to descent, from immigrant to syncresis in several years. Ralph’s and Helen’s daughters, Mona and Callie, daily observe as they grow the syncretic processes of their parents’ generation. In fact, both generations go quickly ‘from consent to descent’: They celebrated Christmas in addition to Chinese New Year’s, and were regulars at Radio City Music Hall. Ralph owned a Davy Crockett hat. Helen knew most of the words to most of the songs in The King and I, and South Pacific. It was true that she still inquired of people if they’d eaten yet, odd as it sounded; Ralph invented his grammar on the fly; even Theresa struggled to put her Chinese thoughts into English. But now she had English

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Phillipa Kafka thoughts too – that was true also. They all did. There were things they did not know how to say in Chinese. The language of outside the house had seeped well inside – Cadillac, Pyrex, subway, Coney Island, Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, Transistor radio. Theresa and Helen and Ralph slipped from tongue to tongue like turtles taking to land, taking to sea; though one remained their more natural element, both had become essential. (124)

Clearly, Jen’s protagonists in Typical American end by consciously re-combining what they consider to be the best elements of both the American and Chinese worlds. And like the other authors, Jen also advocates for her characters a conscious attempt at syncresis in order to achieve emotional balance as bicultural, hyphenated Americans. Unlike the other authors, however, Jen is unique in her conscious intertextuality with elite literary American canonical texts, although, like them, she also shows how mass publications and mass media disseminate and perpetuate American success mythologies to her immigrant characters. For Jen, the desired syncresis is between traditional Chinese Confucianism and American Transcendental philosophy. To illustrate the degeneration of Emersonian Transcendentalism, Jen satirizes Dale Carnegie’s and Norman Vincent Peale’s teachings. When Ralph Chang’s thesis adviser gives him a copy of Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), Ralph is galvanized into ‘believing he could do anything!’ From this key text he goes on to many others of a like nature, such as ‘Making Money. Be Your Own Boss! Ninety Days to Power and Success’ (198), all titles which resonate off Carnegie’s work, as well as Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking (1952).7 For Jen, whoever and whatever are ‘typical American’ is not ultimately the issue, so much as how the pursuit of material gain alone disempowers Chinese American men and women. Jen’s resolution for the House of Chang is neither a headlong rush into ‘typical American’(ness) which splintered them as a family and nearly destroyed them, nor a clinging to the rigid, hierarchical mandarin class system, the ‘ancient Confucian ideal’ of ‘family unity, economic interdependence, and mutual help’ (Goellnicht 193–94; Sledge 13–14). In fact, Ralph’s family relationships in China, as well as the model he establishes after he marries Helen, conforms to Elaine Kim’s characterization of the Asian family: ‘Family 7 Other similar highly influential and successful inspirational texts of the period which Jen satirizes are Fulton Sheen’s Peace of Soul and Life is Worth Living, Harry Overstreet’s The Mature Mind, Joshua Loth Liebman’s Peace of Mind, Gaylord Hauser’s Look Younger, Live Longer, and Norman Vincent Peale’s and Smiley Blanton’s The Art of Real Happiness.

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relationships dominated political and economic activities and served as a primary tool for social control. An individual’s reputation was his [sic] family’s reputation and one’s personal affairs could not be strictly one’s own’ (Kim, Literature 102). At the same time, neither does Jen advocate ‘a cultural amalgamation’, nor ‘a melting pot’ assimilation whose purpose is to homogenize everyone into ‘Americanization’. Instead she advocates syncresis, which contains an ‘idea of identity expanded beyond its customary limits … a synthetical identity of the oppressed that resolves all the competing elements of experience’ (Uba 41): the self-defined ‘ability to hold sameness and difference in suspension … [which] is identified with resistance to assimilation by dominant forms of power’ (Newton and Stacey 64). Perhaps the best summing up of syncresis in terms of the writers under discussion in this essay is that which L. Ling-Chi Wang and Henry Yiheng Zhao use for contemporary Chinese American poets: They suffer from a lack of attachment, but they also gain the advantage of being able to choose commitment to either culture. They have the frustration of lacking connections to society, but they can more easily adopt a critical distance vis-à-vis that society … The necessity of embracing, but at the same time distancing themselves from, their cultural roots give [sic] their works unique tension. (xxi)

The characters in Jen’s Typical American, Ping’s American Visa, and Galang’s Her Wild American Self all learn to live through the same kind of productive cultural syncresis. As Qui-Phiet Tran puts it: No longer isolating themselves in their enclaves, these [characters] demonstrate their desire and ability to integrate into the mainstream, as their ultimate goal. Yet for these people integration does not spell cooptation or monologic dominance by the host culture. Rather, by merging with the mainstream without repressing their nostalgic dreams, native heritage, and distinctive voices, they can assert their identity and participate as Americans in the enrichment of their new country’s pluralistic culture … (283)

Towards the end of Typical American Jen describes Theresa as ‘tactfully’ nibbling ‘a slice of stir-fried hot dog’ (126). And Galang in the title of the epilogue in Her Wild American Self – ‘Mix Like Stir Fry’ – makes the same point as Jen in almost identical language. Here the narrator further explains the process of syncresis when she resolves ‘to take everything you’ve been told and taught and given and heard and not heard, everything that you are and mix fast like stir fry’ (183). She is not white. She is not from China or Japan, not even from the Philippines, but from the Midwest, she proclaims. She is ‘an American … what they call an American-born-Filipina’ (184).

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Phillipa Kafka Some will maintain that she is white because they only divide the world between black and white and she is brown. Some will define her as brown. Some will not appreciate her for what she is. She advises herself to ignore them all and get on with her life until ‘At last, your voice rises above the others and speaks to you, guides you, brings you to this place where you can find your wild American self, a woman who speaks out with nasal twang, drinks beer with brats [hot dogs] and rice, and dances when no one’s looking’ (184).

Similarly, in Typical American, Jen believes that Americans of Chinese ancestry do not repudiate their ancestral inheritance only to mimic native-born citizens, but link their original cultural repertoire with the new one. Once this complex interchange gets under way, however, the influence flows in two directions – simultaneously outward and inward – to become syncresis, a constant modification of American success mythologies while perpetuating them.

Works Cited Boelhower, William Q. Immigrant Autobiography in the United States. Verona: Essedue Edizioni, 1982. ——. Through A Glass Darkly: Ethnic Semiosis in American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. DuBois, W. E. Burghardt. The Souls of Black Folk. 1906. Introduction Nathan Hare and Alvin F. Poussaint. New York: Signet-NAL, 1969. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. I: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1980. Galang, M. Evelina. Her Wild American Self: Short Stories by M. Evelina Galang. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 1996. Goellnicht, Donald C. ‘Tang Ao in America: Male Subject Positions in China Men’. In Reading the Literatures of Asian America. Ed. Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. 191–214. Hsaio, Ruth Y. ‘Facing the Incurable: Patriarchy in Eat a Bowl of Tea’. In Reading the Literatures of Asian America. Ed. Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. 151–62. Jen, Gish. Typical American. New York: Plume, 1992. Kim, Elaine H. ‘Defining Asian American Realities Through Literature’. Cultural Critique 6 (1987): 87–112. ——. Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and Their Social Context. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982. Kim, Elaine H. and Janice Otani. With Silk Wings: Asian American Women at Work. Berkeley, CA: Asian Women United of California, 1983. Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among

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Ghosts. New York: Vintage, 1977. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. ‘Modern Secrets’. In Chinese American Poetry: An Anthology. Ed. L. Ling-Chi Wang, and Henry Yiheng Zhao. Santa Barbara, CA: Asian American Voices, 1991. 132. Mazumder, Sucheta. ‘General Introduction: A Woman-Centered Perspective on Asian American History’. In Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings By and About Asian American Women. Ed. Asian Women United of California. Boston: Beacon, 1989. 1–24. Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. 1970. New York: Knopf, 1993. Mutman, Mahmut. ‘Under the Sign of Orientalism: The West vs. Islam’. Cultural Critique 23 (winter 1992–1993): 165–97. Newton, Judith, and Judith Stacey. ‘Learning Not to Curse, or, Feminist Predicaments in Cultural Criticism by Men: Our Movie Date with James Clifford and Stephen Greenblatt’. Cultural Critique 23 (winter 1992–1993): 51–82. Noda, Kesaya E. ‘Growing up Asian in America’. In Making Waves: An Anthology of Writings By and About Asian American Women. Ed. Asian Women United of California. Boston: Beacon, 1989. 243–50. Ping, Wang. American Visa: Short Stories by Wang Ping. Minneapolis, MN: Coffee House Press, 1994. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Penguin, 1978. Sasaki, R[uth] A. The Loom and Other Stories. St Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 1991. Sledge, Linda Ching. ‘Maxine Kingston’s China Men: The Family Historian as Epic Poet’. MELUS 7 (1990): 3–22. Sollors, Werner. Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. ——, ed. The Invention of Ethnicity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Tan, Amy. The Kitchen God’s Wife. New York: Putnam, 1991. Tran, Qui-Phiet. ‘From Isolation to Integration: Vietnamese Americans in Tran Dieu Hang’s Fiction’. In Reading the Literatures of Asian America. Ed. Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. 271–84. Uba, George. ‘Versions of Identity in Post-Activist Asian American Poetry’. In Reading the Literatures of Asian America. Ed. Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992. 33–48. Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. 1899. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1992. Wang, L. Ling-Chi and Henry Yiheng Zhao, eds. Chinese American Poetry: An Anthology. Santa Barbara, CA: Asian American Voices, 1991. Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. Reading Asian American Literature: From Necessity to Extravagance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.

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Chapter 7 Role‘No Way Back Forever’: American Western Myth in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy Peter Messent

All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing, the first two parts of Cormac McCarthy’s The Border Trilogy, were published in 1992 and 1994 respectively. They transformed McCarthy from a writer praised and appreciated by a minority to a cult author read by a mass audience. All the Pretty Horses won the National Book Award for fiction and received the highest critical praise: ‘up there with Catch 22 and Rabbit at Rest; one of the great American postwar novels’.1 The Crossing, too, became an immediate bestseller. The most obvious feature of these two novels is their use of the conventions of the Western, though relocated in a Mexican landscape. There is every reason to believe that it is McCarthy’s reliance on this generic base that helped to stimulate the popular and critical success of the books. The Award citation for All the Pretty Horses refers to it as a novel that ‘rides on cold and exhilarating heights’ with ‘boy heroes who have the stature of true myth’. While Alan Cheuse speaks of the main protagonist, John Grady Cole, in terms of ‘one young Texan’s growth of soul’, and describes ‘his education as a breaker of horses and prodigal son, as a boy turned man by means of love and tested by imprisonment and the blade’. McCarthy’s representation of a ‘world of horses and guns ... cowboys and Indians ... loners and outcasts ... vaqueros and caballeros’ seems to have touched some particular chord to which its audience has strongly responded.2 The Border Trilogy is not, however, the first time that McCarthy has adopted, and adapted, the Western form. Indeed, Dana Phillips judges Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West (1985), which also ‘might be called a “Western”’, more ‘noteworthy’ than All the Pretty Horses. Phillips’ comment on the ‘very complicated’ nature of Blood Meridian (though, as the author also points out, ‘complication is not a quality often associated with the label Western’3) might help to explain the greater 1 Morrison 4. All three novels, I would note, are centred on the white male voice. 2 See respectively, The Crossing dust-jacket quote; Cheuse 142; and Morrison 4. 3 Phillips 433, 434. This essay provides valuable analysis of McCarthy’s themes and techniques.

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popular success of the later text, but may also serve as a warning against reading it reductively as one which merely repeats Western stereotypes and ‘true myths’ [sic]. It may also indicate the reasons for possible readerly disappointment, or puzzlement, on the part of those going on to buy The Crossing in expectation of more of the same (in the usual generic way) of the first part of the Trilogy. If All the Pretty Horses shares some of the attributes of the classic Western, McCarthy (as one would expect in the 1990s) also interrogates many of its assumptions. What is distinctive about the book, however, and distinguishes it from The Crossing, is the relative simplicity of its language, narrative structure and philosophical content. This is also a much gentler book than Blood Meridian, and less strongly marked by the type of ‘morbid realism’ with which McCarthy has generally been identified. In calling it ‘like Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer on horseback’, Richard B. Woodward identifies something of the tone of the novel and the tradition in which it stands (30). Richard Slotkin argues that ‘the central myths of a society will tend to be those that refer to issues concerning that society most deeply, and most persistently over time’ (81). In this essay, I focus on McCarthy’s use of the patterns and motifs of the Western in the first two novels of The Border Trilogy – and then give a coda commenting on the third. I examine the peculiar double movement of these fictions: how McCarthy both relies on Western forms and themes, but also how he increasingly interrogates and subverts them. None of McCarthy’s books (and these are no exception) endorse the progressive philosophy of history underlying the Western myth. But the other informing components of that distinctively American myth – the belief in free and independent action, autonomous selfhood and distinctive national difference (with firm boundaries defining such a difference) – are subject to more ambiguous treatment here. In these two texts, McCarthy both has his mythic cake and demolishes it too. In one sense, there is little new about McCarthy’s subversions and interrogations. The mythology of the American West has long been recognized in the academic community both as inappropriate to the fabric of contemporary American life, and flawed in the values it celebrates. The New Western History takes the ‘racist, sexist, and imperialist’ nature of traditional frontier historiography and mythology as its starting point (Cronon et al. 4). But as Peter Stoneley points out, even the New Western History reveals ‘a continued investment in the ideology of western exceptionalism, closely tied to the idea of the frontier’ (245). And the very success of McCarthy’s ‘Western’ novels suggests how the ritualized and formulaic aspects of the frontier experience still attract, and hold

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considerable meaning for, an American (and American-influenced) audience.4 The West and the mythology associated with it still provide a powerful hold in the American collective imagination. McCarthy, then, is doing far more than writing straightforward Westerns. And among the things that make his work so unusual are the allusive depths, use of enigmatic parable, shifts in the register of discourse, and extraordinary rhetorical effects it contains. His fiction defies easy categorization and description. Thus when Saul Bellow talks of his ‘absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and deathdealing sentences’, his compliment has a curiously ambivalent quality to it (quoted in Woodward 30). As McCarthy engages the American mythological heritage he also crosses between a pre-modern and post-modern literary and historical sensibility in a fascinating and entirely distinctive manner. If recent American fiction takes the blurring of borderlines, and the problematics of identity and agency, as postmodernist norms, so too does McCarthy, and especially in his focus on national and cultural boundaries. So, at the end of All the Pretty Horses, he introduces a ‘folk’ episode (recalling both Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor5) which both effortlessly acknowledges, and makes comic capital of, the globalization of American culture. Here, the wife of Jimmy Blevins – presenter of the Jimmy Blevins Gospel Hour – tells John Grady Cole of the impact of her husband’s radio show: He was the first one to have you put your hands on the radio you know, she said. Mam? He started that. Puttin your hands on the radio. He’d pray over the radio and heal everbody that was settin there with their hands on the radio ... He cured a lot of people and of course everbody heard about it over the radio and I dont like to say this but things got bad ... 4 McCarthy is quoted as follows in Woodward: ‘I’ve always been interested in the Southwest … There isn’t a place in the world you can go where they don’t know about cowboys and Indians and the myth of the West’ (36). When Ann Fabian talks of ‘the scholarly pursuit of the western past [being] joined by an impish popular double’, she suggests the way that ‘the legendary [frontier] past [has been kept] vibrantly alive’ in the popular consciousness and the popular culture that feeds and reflects it (224, 227). My own essay reflects this argument as I suggest that interrogations of the mythology of the West by academic and other cultural critics (including the New Western Historians and, more recently, those American Studies scholars developing a postnationalist pardadigm) are by no means echoed in the impish double of the popular imagination. For this latter continues to sustain that mythology (and the values and assumptions on which it rests). See also Eaton. 5 And in turn reminds us that there is a Southern as well as a Western sensibility at play here; that these borderlines too are being crossed.

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He ate. She watched him. They sent dead people, she said. Mam? They sent dead people. Crated em up in boxes and shipped em railway express. It got out of hand. You cant do nothin with a dead person. Only Jesus could do that. Yes Mam.... He works so hard for his ministry... Did you know his voice reaches all over the world ... We’ve got letters from China ... There’s not anyplace you can go he aint there. In the air. All the time. You just turn on your radio. Of course they tried to close the station down, but it’s over in Mexico.... Did you know that they can hear it on Mars? (296–97)

But boundaries also collapse, in a different way, as McCarthy looks back towards the past. His stress on circularity and reversion is one that sets him off strongly from the majority of American writers, and his version of history is non-progressive: a repeated cycle of estrangement and displacement, a return to origins whose patterns are mainly those of darkness and death.6 The significance of national and cultural borderlines, and even of historical event itself, dissolves entirely in the face of such an informing vision. Billy’s dream of his father in The Crossing is just one sequence dramatizing this: his father was afoot and lost in the desert ... [and] stood looking toward the west where the sun had gone and where the wind was rising out of the darkness ... His father’s eyes searched the coming of the night in the deepening redness beyond the rim of the world and ... seemed to contemplate with a terrible equanimity the cold and the dark and the silence that moved upon him and then all was dark and all was swallowed up ... ( 112)

The collapse of boundaries, then, which both recent theory and McCarthy’s fiction explore, connects up – in an illogical, unexpected, but powerful way – with the collapse of all boundaries in that ‘darkness’ which is, in the words of the blind man in The Crossing, the ‘true nature and true condition’ of the world (283). Post-modern and pre-modern meet here in extraordinary synthesis. In the following (and main) part of this essay, I focus selectively on the first two novels of The Border Trilogy to examine three aspects of McCarthy’s fiction and how these relate to his use of the Western genre, and the mythmaking it encodes. I suggest the development from the one novel to the next. More centrally – in an argument informed by Richard 6 Though not entirely, for McCarthy’s fictional world does not quite hold together – it contains paradoxes and irreconcilabilities that resist any final unifying interpretive impulse. See Messent.

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Slotkin’s statement that ‘Myths are stories, drawn from history, that have acquired through usage over many generations a symbolising function central to the culture that produces them’ (70) – I suggest that the tensions, complications, revisions and interrogations that McCarthy brings to his generic base constitute something of an endorsement of, but more of a challenge to, traditional American values and beliefs. If the version of history given in these texts remains largely consistent and resists the cultural norm, their treatment of other Western motifs is peculiarly double-edged.

Language and Narrative The Western is generally associated with a distrust of language. Jane Tompkins says that ‘the Western is at heart an antilanguage. Doing, not talking, is what it values’ (50). The conversations between John and Lacey in All the Pretty Horses, and Billy and Boyd in The Crossing, tend to be marked by such a restrained minimalism, with the emotional circuitries between the members of the two pairings held strongly in check. So when Billy, aged sixteen, returns from Mexico to find ‘something bad wrong’ (TC 163), his home deserted, horses stolen and parents slaughtered (apparently by Indians), his first meeting with his brother, though marked by the physical sign of traumatic loss, contains no such verbal recognition. Billy enters the house where he knows his brother to be staying to find him standing there: I reckon you thought I was dead, Billy said. If I’d of thought you was dead I wouldnt be here. He shut the door and set the pail on the kitchen table. He looked at Billy and he looked out the window. When Billy spoke to him again his brother wouldnt look at him but Billy could see that his eyes were wet. Are you ready to go? he said. Yeah, said Boyd. Just waitin on you. (171)

Any discussion of the murder is hereafter almost completely repressed, and the motif of justice and revenge is confined to, and sublimated by, the quest to recover the stolen horses: one which becomes something of a fixed and damaging obsession both in this novel and in its predecessor. McCarthy seems both to show a certain self-reflexive ironic awareness in his use of this hard-bitten and laconic ‘Western’ language, but also to take it seriously. The level of pastiche is particularly clear in All the Pretty Horses with John and Lacey’s claim of outlaw status and the comic play surrounding it. Comedy disappears, though, as the motif takes

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a serious turn with the boys’ imprisonment in a Mexican jail. Despite such shifts in tone, dialogue in both texts between the young American buddies and brothers conforms generally to minimalist type. But McCarthy’s use of language, and his narrative forms generally, extend far beyond the boundaries of the conventional Western. Pareddown dialogue and factual description are combined with other levels of discourse, some of which (especially in The Crossing with the ‘parables’ that interrupt the story’s chronological flow) are highly philosophical and rhetorically complex. Both novels have an allusive depth to them – with particularly strong echoes of Melville, Twain, Faulkner, Hemingway and Flannery O’Connor – suggesting a larger cultural relevance. But they also contain the type of universal and fundamental mythic resonance which takes them beyond such national cultural boundaries, and gives them an epic quality that transcends their ‘Western’ roots. Thus Boyd is described as looking like ‘some new breed of child horseman left in the wake of war or plague or famine’ (TC 245), while Billy, on his return to the United States, is viewed by those he passes ‘as if he were a thing wholly alien in their landscape. Something from an older time of which they’d only heard. Something of which they’d read’ (334). This same quality is present too in All the Pretty Horses when John re-tells his own narrative as fable to the young Mexican children he meets (243–44). In both novels, and particularly The Crossing, the sense of historical specificity (the mid twentieth-century setting) is deliberately and considerably muted. In such ways, McCarthy crosses beyond the boundaries of his Western materials to suggest a further and deeper archetypal level to his narratives. If McCarthy’s language extends far beyond the normal limits of the genre, so his narrative forms, and his self-reflexive references to them, spill beyond its borders. While All the Pretty Horses conforms far more to Western type than The Crossing, both narratives have strong generic elements. Both are structured around the motif of journey and return, and are ‘rites of passage’ novels describing the actions, adventures and accomplishments of their main protagonists, John Grady Cole and Billy Parham, as they move from adolescence to maturity. All the Pretty Horses, though, has much the simpler structure. John Grady Cole moves beyond the social and geographical boundaries of his Texan home to an imaginary Mexican landscape where – despite the 1949 date – free movement across open country is generally unrestricted. The early textual references to wires, fences and railway tracks, in the Texan section of the book, emphasize the nature of the freedoms found in Mexico, and absent in the American South-West:

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Peter Messent They’d dismounted at the crossfences for John Grady to pull the staples with a catspaw and stand on the wires while Rawlins led the horses through … How the hell do they expect a man to ride a horse in this country? said Rawlins. They dont, said John Grady. (30–31)

Cole’s affinity, identification and skill with horses – tapping into a romantic conception of the relationship between man and nature that echoes classic examples of the genre – is then allowed its fullest development in a virtually pre-industrial Mexican landscape (‘There ain’t no electricity here, said Rawlins’, 51). These Western motifs, however, are both complicated and interrupted as the text proceeds. The acts of empathetic union with nature described (see especially the epiphanic description, 161–62) either occur in the form of a dream, or are implicitly questioned by an alternative view of nature as separate and brute (73, for example). Similarly, Cole’s affinity with horses is set against a professional role, working on the hacienda, in which his relationship with them depends on ownership and power (‘who’s will’, 128). The narrative itself shifts direction in its story of the romance between John and Alejandra, the daughter of the wealthy and aristocratic Spanish-American hacendado. It then turns heavily deterministic,7 as John finds himself caught within constructions of history, culture and psychology that he does not understand and cannot control. His own fate – judged a criminal, identity negated, and introduced into the violent prison world of Saltillo – is determined by the actions (unknown to John) of his former colleague, Blevins, who has killed a Mexican rurale in the act of re-possessing his lost gun. The novel does, however, revert to a version of the traditional Western as John finally makes his individuality count, and acts in what can be read as heroic terms (as the critical response to the novel suggests). He partly revenges Blevins’ unnecessary death in his treatment of the vicious Mexican police captain, and asserts his property rights, and individual will, in returning for and repossessing the horses that have been taken from him, and in gaining the self-identified justice he needs. Throughout, he and Lacy continue to operate by the codes in which they believe, especially the traditional Western one of loyalty to one’s friend, however ‘dumb’ (210) that might rationally be. The Crossing traces a similar, but more tortuous, pattern of journey and return. Both here, and in the previous novel, the alienation of the returned ‘hero’ is stressed. This notion of a protagonist altered by ‘wilder7 The Western is traditionally a romance form which foregrounds independence and free movement. My overlap in terminology at this point (‘romance’) is unavoidable.

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ness’ experience (the insufficiencies of this term become evident in my next section) and the violence he has experienced there, and thus unable to fit conventional patterns of social life, is a common Western theme. So John Grady Cole ends up homeless, like ‘some apparition out of the vanished past’ (PH 287), and decides to ‘head out ... move on’ since this ‘ain’t my country’ (299). Riding ‘with the sun coppering his face’, he is last described impersonally, as ‘rider and horse passed on ... Passed and paled into the darkening land...’ (302). Billy, too, ends up as another ‘pale rider’ (TC 285), shuttling randomly from place to place (422), and seen finally standing in the ‘inexplicable darkness’ near an abandoned building, head bowed as he held ‘his face in his hands and wept’ (425–26). The narrative process that leads to such alienation is more complex in the later novel and McCarthy’s movement away from formulaic patterns are much more pronounced. Billy’s relationship with the wolf in the first section of the book (‘the wolf trembling electrically against him’, 64–65) counterpoints that of John Grady with horses, but the epiphany following the wolf’s death has a darker impulse behind it – with the reference to terror and beauty; the comparison to ‘flowers that feed on flesh’ (127). The form of the sections that follow this are loosely structured around the motif of theft and restoration – the quest for a form of justice in recovering the stolen horses – and the violence that results. They centre, too, on the bonds that link the two orphaned brothers. But the story of this quest, and its source in their parents’ murder, is constantly being interrupted and overwhelmed by other narrative elements, and most particularly those focusing on the social structure and history of Mexico, and the revolutionary conflict then in process. The relatively taut narrative lines of All the Pretty Horses slacken in a text whose picaresque patterns, epistemological and philosophical parables, and multi-layered quality make it considerably more richly allusive and complex than its predecessor. In the movement between texts, McCarthy illustrates the limits of the Western genre: its failure as an adequate vehicle to carry the range and depths of theme and meaning he wants to explore. The narrative of individual action and will, the clash of clear moral absolutes, and the cultural perspective which triggers such patterns, become, I would suggest, increasingly irrelevant to his larger artistic intention. That is not to say that McCarthy completely abandons the form. The Crossing focuses throughout on Billy and his continued search for purposive action. But the novel continually spills beyond such limits, and finally renders them absurd. Thus, when Billy tells the primadonna from the travelling opera that ‘We’re down here huntin some horses that was stole’, her response is both significant and prophetic:

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Peter Messent For how long will you seek these horses? she said Ever how long it takes ... Long voyages often lose themselves Mam? You will see. It is difficult even for brothers to travel together on such a voyage. The road has its own reasons and no two travelers will have the same understanding of those reasons ... Listen to the corridos of the country. They will tell you ... The shape of the road is the road. There is not some other road that wears that shape but only the one. And every voyage begun upon it will be completed. Whether horses are found or not. (230)

Similar self-reflexive comments on the relation of the journey motif to individual intent, and on the tension between such intent, predestined event and the nature of narrative form, are repeated throughout the novel as McCarthy widens his thematic and generic base. Billy ends The Crossing still pursuing his course of individual action but the heroic element generically associated with such procedure has been reduced to the point of futility. His long voyage has more or less lost itself, and he is now acting very largely for action’s sake alone, bringing the previously buried corpse of his brother, killed in the Mexican revolutionary struggle, back to its American ‘home’. The illogical and blackly comic aspects of the whole episode are stressed as the body’s remains are kicked by bandits and trodden on by Billy’s horse along the way. McCarthy’s two narratives never abandon a Western base but progressively lead their readers away from it. In doing so, they both rely on its forms and formulas but increasingly, and paradoxically, interrogate its assumptions and representational adequacy.

Boundaries The traditional Western depends on the construction of boundaries and the oppositions they define: those, for instance, between good and evil, known and ‘other’, and civilization and savagery. The ‘logic’ of American culture, and the ‘world view and sense of history’ (Slotkin 75) traditionally represented in frontier mythology, are implicit in such structures and the meanings they release. This mythology is both expansionist and nationalistic, and combines, in unresolved and unrecognized tension, the celebration both of heroic individualism and of community formation.8 8 See Ray, especially 55–69. This contradiction would traditionally allow for narratives that both celebrated the founding of the good American society but could also focus on the alienated nature of its (violent) hero. If traditional foundation myth,

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In the first two parts of The Border Trilogy, McCarthy uses the Mexico of the 1940s to re-site the conventions of the Western.9 His title points to the importance of borderlines and boundaries in his text, and recurrent note is taken of their presence and crossing: ‘They were three days reaching the border. He rode past the first of the white obelisks marking the international boundary line...’ (TC 420). This thematic focus has a double-edged quality to it. It acts to reinforce a sense of American nationalism and cultural ethnocentrism. But such values are also, and increasingly, brought into question, as are the assumptions and sense of history that lie behind them. Again McCarthy both relies on, but also undercuts, standard American Western myth. Mexico, as described in these novels, is uncharted country: Rawlins came back with the map and sat on the ground and traced their route with his finger. He looked up. What? said John Grady. There aint shit down there. (PH 34)

This unknown territory becomes, especially in All the Pretty Horses, a relatively undeveloped space where the traditional Western quest for the authentication of white masculinity and the heroic assertion of self can take place, where the limits of self can be tested. If John and Lacey are defined by their nationality (‘The Americans’, 52), Mexico is defined in terms of its otherness. There is a mutual lack of knowledge and understanding between the natives of the two countries. To most of the ranchhands at La Purisima, ‘the country to the north was little more than a rumor. A thing for which there seemed no accounting’ (95). Cultural barriers and differences are firmly in place here. In The Crossing, Mexico is associated with invasive taint. When Billy tells the old man in the Model A that the wolf he has captured ‘come up from Mexico’, the rancher replies: ‘I don’t doubt it. Ever other damn thing does’ (TC 60). When he then crosses the international boundary line, Mexico is described as ‘wholly alien and wholly strange’ (74). The description of agricultural practice confirms Mexican primitivism: ‘The plow was of a type that was old in Egypt and was little more than a treeroot’ (203). The later joke about the contents of the tacos Billy and Boyd buy (cat or lizard, 258) merely reinforces the set of ethnic stereotypes that run through both texts. with its celebration of the establishing of the good society, has no place in McCarthy’s fiction, John and Billy’s final status as ‘pale riders’ still loosely connects to this model. 9 ‘With [McCarthy’s] recent forays into the history of the United States and Mexico, he has cut a solitary path into the violent heart of the Old West’ (Woodward 30).

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That Mexico is associated with the lack of civilized value informs the structural development of both novels. In All the Pretty Horses, John and Lacey are unjustly imprisoned, and Blevins’ murder comes about, through the actions of a brutal and sadistic Mexican police-captain. In The Crossing, a repeated motif is the two brothers’ proof of ownership of the horses stolen from them, and the cynical disregard shown both for the documents and the legal rights they protect. Thus Billy tells Boyd: ‘There ain’t no law in Mexico. It’s just a pack of rogues’ (176). And this novel, too, makes use of well-worn stereotypes, ranging from the generous Mexican peasant as the epitome of brotherhood and communal worth (218) to the old Mexican ‘crone’ clutching her beads in church (390).10 The oppositional nature of these national and cultural boundaries replay the stereotypical binaries of the genre. They are contradicted and complicated, however, by a representation of such boundaries much more in line with contemporary critical understandings of the way border cultures interrelate. Again McCarthy appears to echo traditional constructions of an American frontier mythology, and the sense of exceptionalism and providentialism associated with it, only to set against them a quite different version of cultural interrelations. Contemporary critics working in the field of border cultures focus on the heterogeneity of borderlands sites and the creative ‘intercultural borrowing and lending’ that takes place there.11 The borderline comes, for such critics, to signify an absence of place, the relation between two places and a creation of their difference. So McCarthy, in these novels, suggests in various ways that culture and nationality cannot be held separate in border areas. This has inevitable consequences for the generic straightforwardness and coherence of the texts. The main way in which McCarthy disrupts such traditional expectations and moves his fiction in the direction of a new type of cultural ‘hybridity’ is in the fact that both All the Pretty Horses and The Crossing have main characters who are bilingual, and also have significant sections in which both direct and indirect speech are in Spanish. McCarthy is 10 Dana Phillips suggests the problems of attempting to pin down McCarthy’s own ‘moral or political worldview’ in Blood Meridian in suggesting that ‘the book’s odd power derives from its treating everything and everybody with absolute equanimity; its voice seems profoundly alien’, and sees the text as hinting at ‘a descriptive discourse which might capture within its net religion, ethics, psychology, politics, and nihilism too...’ (451–53). Though The Border Trilogy volumes do not privilege such radical forms of decentring, Phillips’ comments help nonetheless to explain some of its narrative effects. See, too, note 20 below. 11 The quote is from Rosaldo 208. See too Anzuldúa; Hicks; and the Borderlands Monograph Series (Orono: Canadian-American Center, University of Maine).

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innovatory here in the lack of concession made to his (mainly Anglo) readers in his use of, and shifts between, the two languages.12 Notions of firm cultural difference are exposed as illusory throughout the texts. Billy, the main ‘American’ protagonist of The Crossing, has a grandmother who ‘was a fullblooded Mexican didnt speak no english’ (419). The funeral of Abuela, the Mexican-American woman who has worked for the family for fifty years, provides the concluding counterpoint in All the Pretty Horses to the opening description of the death of John’s grandfather, and again suggests the complex interrelation between the two cultures. The ‘Mexican girl’ who answers the judge’s door to John in Ozona (American ‘border country’) asks him what he wants: ‘he said he wanted to see the judge. He said it in spanish and she repeated it in back to him in english with a certain coldness’ (PH 287, 289). As Billy travels in the car of the Casas Grandes doctor on their way to the badly injured Boyd, they listen to ‘american hillbilly music coming out of Acuna on the Texas border’ (TC 303). Both difference (‘There is no translation’, PH 232) and its bridging mark the intercultural relations between Mexico and America in these border novels. As the texts explore these relations, so the nationalistic limits of the Western genre are, to increasing degree, questioned and overwhelmed. The American quest narratives (for ‘freedom’ or justice) that are being played out in an alien Mexican environment lose much of their force and primacy. This is especially true in The Crossing, where McCarthy spends more and more time fictionally exploring Mexican social and historical themes, and raising abstract issues concerning, for example, the status of knowledge and of artistic representation itself, far beyond the normal confines and expectations of the genre from which he builds. The ‘Western’ motif of wilderness area against which the white male hero defines himself is implicitly critiqued in this former move – and reminds us that the actual American West was no historical or cultural blank either. As such explorations occur, so a narrowly nationalistic perspective and the ways of reading ‘reality’ it encourages – the structuring of narrative around the needs and perspective of the American ‘hero’ at the expense of the representation of other countries and cultures, and their values and world-views – are also undermined. 12 There were (unfounded) rumours, prior to its publication, that the final part of the Trilogy was to be written solely in Spanish. McCarthy’s linguistic tactics have implications for my own critical analysis (as one who has limited knowledge of Spanish) and I acknowledge the consequent partial nature of my reading. William H. Dougherty points out the occasional problem with McCarthy’s translations, but calls his use of Mexican dialogue ‘close to perfection’ (5–7).

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In focusing on such heroes, but on such larger issues too, these novels again pull in two directions. The Crossing, and All the Pretty Horses to a lesser extent, take the types of complex and unexpected narrative turns which move their readers considerably away from the Western form. The romance between John Grady and Alejandra in All the Pretty Horses sets John’s assumptions of equality, opportunity and autonomy against more complicated factors to do with class, history, psychology and cultural difference. As this tension is explored, so the novel itself takes a quite different direction. The less tightly structured and more picaresque form of The Crossing allows, too, for all kinds of thematic and philosophical detours. To illustrate how the ‘Western’ elements of the latter text are complicated and (at least temporarily) overwhelmed in the process, we might look at the changing role of Boyd, Billy’s brother in the text. As he tells Boyd’s story, McCarthy shifts the mythic base of his novel. In doing so, he suggests how both individual agent and historical fact are subject to, and left behind by, the powerful collective needs that drive the myth-making function. As the processes of Mexican history become increasingly important in the novel, and as they interrelate with the actions of its American protagonists, so a borderline is crossed between mythic systems. McCarthy shows here how symbolic stories, their telling and retelling, the product of different needs in different cultural and historical circumstance, are never neutral or ‘natural’. The relation between mythological construction and ‘truth’ is thus self-reflexively foregrounded as McCarthy explores the way myths are generated, and stories get ‘frozen in a single image for all to contemplate’ (405).13 He focuses on the constructed nature of myth, the way a particular reading connects to, and merges with, established legend and departs from originating ‘truth’, and the way too it is used to feed into the ideological needs of its particular recipients. In doing so, 13 This quote is taken from the gypsy’s complicated parable concerning the relation between ‘the artifacts of history’ (TC 405), their survival, significance and false authority (‘In the world that came to be that which prevailed ... pretended symbol and summation of the vanished world but was neither’, 411). The gypsy has told Billy that the wrecked airplane of which he speaks (the subject of the parable) has three histories. This assertion is partly explained by the co-presence of a second similar airplane. The description of the ‘third history’, however, seems crucial in terms of the relation between past event and present action in the text as a whole (though again this is just one textual voice of many) and ends in questions: ‘We seek some witness but the world will not provide one. This is the third history. It is the history that each man makes alone out of what is left to him. Bits of wreckage. Some bones. The words of the dead. How to make a world of this? How live in that world once made?’ (411). This whole parable is then further problematized when the story on which it rests is revealed as entire fabrication (418).

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McCarthy both widens the historical and cultural scope of his text and, at the same time, indirectly comments on the constructedness and selfserving nature of American Western myths (of individual and national self-determination in the presence of historically blank landscape) in which the novel has its roots. Thus Boyd, in The Crossing, becomes a central figure in the Mexican revolutionary consciousness. As he and Billy are engaged in dispute about their stolen horses – part of the Western thematics of brotherly bonding, necessary justice where conventional legal redress does not apply, and the assertion of property rights – the leader of the opposing group of Mexicans is accidently killed when his own horse panics and falls. Following Boyd’s own consequent shooting, in fact part of the same narrative sequence involving the taking and recovery of the horses, he is re-written as political hero. His killing of the one-armed man (manco) – for so it has now been recounted – is seen as an act of revolutionary justice. For the manco has another history: he is ‘the man who had betrayed Socorro Rivera and sold out his own people to the Guardia Blanca of La Babícora’ (322, and see 385).14 Billy consequently learns that: The workers [who had taken the badly wounded Boyd to safety] believed that his brother had killed the manco in a gun-fight ... That the manco had fired upon him without provocation and what folly for the manco who had not reckoned upon the great heart of the guerito ... They addressed Billy with great reverence and they asked him how it was that he and his brother had set out upon their path of justice. (317–18)

As if to live up to the reputation he has acquired, Boyd does then join the revolutionary struggle and is killed in it, and so confirms his status as a folk-hero which previously was undeserved. Billy, searching first for his brother, and then for his dead body, finds Boyd the subject of a ‘corrido in which the young guero comes down from the north ... a youth who sought justice as the song told’ (375). This corrido, however, actually pre-dates Boyd, thus enclosing his story within a larger repeated one (the magical helper from without, and the struggle for human rights for which he stands) and converting his history to the political needs of 14 The significance of this is that this White Guard (Guardia Blanca) was ‘a mercenary group hired to protect Babícora, land owned by [the American investor] W. R. Hearst, from rustlers and squatters, including those families Hearst’s ownership of the ranch [had] displaced’ (Wegner 251). In other words a Western narrative of individual white male self-determination (and the story of imperialist expansion that undergirds it) runs slap-bang against a counter-narrative of Mexican revolutionary nationalism. The two brothers are unwittingly (initially, at least) caught between the two.

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an oppressed people. He becomes their property rather than Billy’s, as the latter’s conversation with Quijada (who speaks first) makes explicit: The corrido tells all and it tells nothing. I heard the tale of the guerito years ago. Before your brother was even born. You dont think it tells about him? Yes, it tells about him. It tells what it wishes to tell. It tells what makes the story run. The corrido is the poor man’s history. It does not owe its allegiance to the truths of history but to the truths of men. It tells the tale of that solitary man who is all men … Even if the guerito in the song is your brother he is no longer your brother. He cannot be reclaimed. (386)

It is Billy’s attempts to reclaim his brother, in the shape of his dead body, and his ‘heart’s despair’ (425) at the unsatisfactory sense of closure that this act brings (if Billy’s emotions can be matched with the keening dog of the final scene), which ends the novel. Boyd has become part of a different story from which Billy is excluded. His life and death have been converted to the mythic needs of a repressed foreign people, celebrated via their particular cultural forms. The American ‘Western’ narrative, of which the novel is a variant, has been overlaid here by other wider cultural and historical resonances, complicated and transformed by the medley of stories McCarthy has to tell, and the variety of perspectives he comes to represent, as he crosses national borderlines.

Agency and History As McCarthy uses, but moves beyond, the conventions and limits of the Western in his Border Trilogy, so too he partly questions the belief in individual agency and wholly undermines the version of history associated with that genre, and the culture whose values it represents. The crossing of international boundaries that the texts enact connects here with the representation of a universal sense of history as entirely nonprogressive: an arena (to use Dana Phillips’ analysis of Blood Meridian) ‘in which brutal, “mindless” events transpire [and where] darkness is a reiterated fact’ (441, 438).15 The myth of the American frontier (as told in both literary and historical discourse, in a tradition which bridges James Fenimore Cooper and Frederick Jackson Turner) remains one through which ‘many Americans continue to locate the central core of their 15 Richard B. Woodward quotes McCarthy as follows: ‘There’s no such thing as life without bloodshed ... I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea’ (36).

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identity’ (Cronon et al. 25). McCarthy interrogates the assumptions behind such constructions of selfhood, including the notion of ‘central core’ itself, and demolishes the historical narrative (‘progressive and orderloving’) which it naturalizes (Slotkin 86, 80). The American West in McCarthy’s fiction is ‘not the New World but a very old world’ (Phillips 452). The regressive quality of this historical imagination sets him strongly apart from most other contemporary writers. I have already briefly suggested how McCarthy questions the idea of self-determining selfhood, the fundamental assumption of the classic Western, in All the Pretty Horses. Notions of agency and autonomy crumble as the book unfolds. John and Lacey are thrown, in the sequences following their arrest (the logic of which action is determined by forces beyond their knowledge or immediate control) into a world where identity itself is problematic, as the police captain’s questioning of Rawlins indicates: Where is this man? What man? He held up the [driver’s] license. This man. Rawlins. Rawlins swallowed. He looked at the guard and he looked at the captain again. I’m Rawlins, he said. The captain smiled sadly. He shook his head. Rawlins stood with his hands dangling. Why ain’t I? he said. (164)

Who ‘runs the show’ (195) at the prison to which they are taken is subject to doubt, and the boys’ passivity and lack of autonomy are stressed when they are told: ‘you don’t know what is the situation here. You don’t speak the language’ (188). In the later attempt to recover his relationship with Alejandra, John finds himself powerless in the face of overwhelming circumstance, and is left feeling ‘wholly alien to the world’ (282). However, McCarthy’s representations of agency are ambiguous. For despite the factors operating against him, John does finally make his individuality count. And it is McCarthy’s use of a traditional American ‘hero’, comforting to the reader in the familiarity of his role, rather than the doubts the novel raises about the self, history and social identity, that may partly explain (as the critical response suggests) its popularity (Messent 103). Similar ambiguous patterns emerge in The Crossing where the focus on Billy’s will and actions (his shooting of the wolf, for example) structures all the main movement of the novel, at the same time as his final sense of dislocation and pointlessness renders them suspect. Equally, the notion of autonomy is queried, as one of Billy’s prime motivating impulses, to protect and care for his younger brother, is entirely cancelled

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out by the different narrative in which Boyd gets caught up in a social and political world which has little overlap with that which Billy knows, controls or understands. There is much less ambiguity in the sense of history given in the novels. McCarthy rewrites the Western from a non-progressive perspective. He widens the scope of his texts as he gradually hones in on Mexico and its history. Thus Alejandra’s grandmother comes to play a significant role in All the Pretty Horses. In The Crossing, however, the move is then made from the aristocratic Spanish-American colonial order that the grandmother represents to a more intensive stress on revolutionary conflict and populist politics. In both cases, this content is focused through the romance involving one of the American protagonists. Such crossings of temporal and national boundaries help to reinforce an essentialist overview of all human history, and one in line with the grandmother’s words: ‘What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God … seems powerless to change’ (PH 239). The earlier transgressive moment, where an omniscient narrative voice shifts from direct description of immediate events to larger historical comment and comparison, serves to endorse the validity of such a view. For, as ‘the constant struggle for status and position’ in John and Lacey’s Mexican prison world is being described, the historical stakes are suddenly raised: ‘Underpinning all of it like the fiscal standard in commercial societies lay a bedrock of depravity and violence where in an egalitarian society every man was judged by a single standard and that was his readiness to kill’ (182, my emphasis). The same overview of history as a repeated cycle of ‘depravity and violence’ is given in The Crossing. The disputes over the directions of Mexican history traced in both texts are put into diminished perspective by wider references to this universal cycle; to the lives of the Tarahumara Indians, for example, who: had watered here a thousand years and a good deal of what could be seen in the world had passed this way. Armored Spaniards and hunters and trappers and grandees and their women and slaves and fugitives and armies and revolutions and the dead and the dying ... Two pale and wasted orphans from the north in outsized hats [Billy and Boyd] were easily accommodated. (192)

The ashtray from the Chicago World’s Fair in Mr Sanders’ dining-room (‘it was cast from potmetal and it said 1833–1933. It said A Century of Progress’, 345) serves as a late ironic reminder of the assumptions about history and nation-building at the core of America’s Western myth. Such assumptions are pushed to one side in McCarthy’s use of Mexico as his

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main setting, and the different set of stereotypes to which he then reverts: ‘Mexico where the antique world clung to the stones and to the spores of living things and dwelt in the blood of men’ (301). They are then further dislocated in the notes of overall human futility and cosmic entropy which his prose recurrently sounds: ‘[Billy] looked out over ... the old lands of the Chichimeca where the priests had passed and soldiers passed and the missions fallen into mud’ (135); ‘he woke and watched the winter stars slip their hold and race to their deaths in the darkness’ (346). McCarthy’s fictional universe, however, does not merely reflect a bleak cosmic determinism. For the journeyings taken by his protagonists extend beyond the boundaries of the conventional Western form to stand as larger metaphors of epistemological and philosophical exploration.16 The history of the American West is one of map-making and the construction of borderlines: ‘the story of how the American map came to have the boundaries it shows today’ (Cronon et al. 15). But myth-making is also a type of cartography, the providing of ‘road maps’ that help to establish coherence in any given social world.17 At the metaphysical base of McCarthy’s fiction lies the problem of how to map one’s way in ‘a world provisional, contingent, deeply suspect’ (TC 193); how to retain individuality and responsibility, even given determinist and cyclical forces at work (Messent especially n. 48). Standard American myths of heroic male individualism and national exceptionalism are endorsed, but also increasingly interrogated, in ambiguous texts that both rely on the formulas of Western narrative but also extend and subvert their patternings. McCarthy is only interested in map-making as an act of national cultural self-definition to a very limited extent. It is the deeper and ambiguous implications of the act, in terms of human identity and the construction of meaning, which provide the real philosophical meat of his novels, and which resist any formulaic and familiar patternings. He leaves his readers finally with a vision of a world in which both the making of human meaning – and its denial – exist in complex and paradoxical relationship with one another. Though I am wary of having McCarthy’s characters speak for him, Quijada’s words to Billy near the end of The Crossing seem to carry something of the stamp of authorial 16

See the old man who maps for Billy and Boyd ‘a portrait of the country ... they wished to visit’. The discussion here of the relationship between representation and reality, the usefulness of the former, and the nature and destination of life’s journey (184–86) is just one of a number of such episodes in the novel. It also carries a selfreflexive charge in terms of McCarthy’s own fictional descriptions of journeyings. 17 For ‘myth is challenged by [and responds to] changes in material conditions or social arrangements’ (Slotkin 86). The reference to the ‘road map’ is taken from Clifford Geertz.

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backing. These words do not offer any simple ‘truth’ but resonate with ambiguity in their description of our need to define the nature of the world and our human place within it, but in their recognition that the maps we make to do so may in fact lack any substantive base: The world has no name, he said. The names of the cerros and the sierras and the deserts exist only on maps. We name them that we do not lose our way. Yet it was because the way was lost to us already that we have made those names. The world cannot be lost. We are the ones. And it is because these names and these coordinates are our own naming that they cannot save us. That they cannot find for us the way again. Your brother is in that place which the world has chosen for him. He is where he is supposed to be. And yet the place which he has found is also of his own choosing. That is a piece of luck not to be despised. (387–88)

Coda: Cities of the Plain In recent years there has been something of an explosion in McCarthy criticism, sparked mainly by the appearance of the final book in McCarthy’s Border Trilogy, Cities of the Plain (1998).18 Mark Eaton’s essay, ‘Dis(re)membered Bodies: Cormac McCarthy’s Border Fiction’, is a key example that provides a particularly valuable critical complement, and alternative approach, to mine. He looks to ‘reposition [McCarthy] within the emerging field of postnationalist American Studies’ (156), arguing that the Border Trilogy should be read ‘not in the old myth and symbol vein of American studies, but rather in the new paradigm of political domination and power’ (157). I very much agree with Eaton’s contention that ‘[i]n both his bilingualism and his remarkable engagement with Southwest culture and history, McCarthy models a new approach to representing the borderlands as a transfrontera contact zone’ (174), and have shown something of this same process – though without using the explicit discourse of postnationalism – here. Unlike Eaton, however, I would place greater emphasis on the double and paradoxical movement of McCarthy’s narratives, the way that (supposedly older) mythic approaches to the West conflict with the emphasis on intercultural (Mexican and American) contacts, dialogues and power struggles also strongly present. A number of critics have noted the repetitions that inhabit the Border Trilogy as a whole: the way that the close friendship between John Grady and Billy Parham in Cities of the Plain replays earlier relationships 18 See, for instance, Arnold and Luce; Eaton; Hall and Wallach; Holloway; and Wallach.

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between John and Lacey Rawlins, and between Billy and his brother Boyd. The (unlikely) bringing together of the two protagonists from the earlier fictions allows McCarthy to balance his final novel between the two subject-centres introduced in the earlier texts and to counterpoint their different outlooks on, and responses to, the world through which they move. John Grady’s romance with the epileptic prostitute Magdelena is (in many ways) a repeat of the relationship with Alejandra. While his deadly battle with Cucherillo is reprised in the climactic and extended knife-fight with Eduardo, whose physical and verbal control of proceedings are dramatically ended as John pins his jaw to his upper skull with the final thrust of his own weapon (though at the cost of his own death soon to follow). Billy’s role as the failed protector of a younger companion is also repeated here. If for the majority of the novel John Grady’s actions and desires drive the narrative, Billy’s complementary (and more passive) presence and his part in the final section of the novel are acknowledgements of the importance of his role too. McCarthy counterpoints John’s idealism with Billy’s pragmatism, John’s death with Billy’s ‘stubborn survivalist ethos’. As Stacey Peebles nicely puts it, John ‘dies as the master of his story … [as he] transforms himself into the mythic figure he has been constructing all his life’, while Billy ‘lives to keep struggling with his own’ (137, 139). Billy’s final condition in one respect mirrors earlier patterns of homelessness and alienation, but also suggests that the positive value associated with his figure (and with John Grady) is further diminished by the changed environment they now inhabit. Billy’s representation in the last part of the novel is as a defeated and overwhelmed figure. Living in a new millenium (the 2000s) and now 78 years old, he is seen sitting on cold concrete beneath a concrete underpass, dreaming of the dead and reflecting ‘that in everything that he’d ever thought about the world and his life in it he’d been wrong’ (266). Any notion of heroic Western selfhood here seems almost completely undermined by the contemporary landscape of ugly modernity and by the pervasive and dehumanizing commodification that John Grady’s earlier story reveals.19 This returns me to my overall argument about the paradoxical quality of McCarthy’s border fictions, the way that – at one and the same time – they both endorse and interrogate the assumptions of Western myth. Despite the repetitions I identify, Cities of the Plain differs in some important respects from the first two novels in the trilogy. But it also 19 See Holloway esp. 19–22 and 107–11. Holloway however suggests a more positive reading of the text (with history finally seen as ‘an open field’, p. 110), than I would give.

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offers a consistent development of patterns previously identified. I return to my earlier categories as a way of showing this.

Language and Narrative Cities of the Plain is in many ways more like All the Pretty Horses than The Crossing in its use of language and its narrative form. In both texts there is strong reliance on dialogue and simple paratactic description and, despite an unexpectedly loquacious side to Billy’s speech in the last book in the sequence, the full exploration of thought and feeling are again generally short-circuited by the type of language used.20 The conversation following the episode where Billy helps John Grady prepare his cabin for the latter’s forthcoming marriage is reminiscent of earlier exchanges between John Grady and Rawlins: You want to take the truck back? Naw. Go on. I’ll be along. All right. I appreciate you comin up. I didn’t have nothin else to do. Well. If I had I’d of done it. I’ll see you at the house. See you at the house. (181)

The laconic (and often comic) note sounded in such minimalist dialogue is part and parcel of the near-fraternal bond between the two cowboys, an intimacy that this manner of language would at the same time disguise. But, again, even as this style helps to shape the novel, so it is subject to pastiche. Billy’s references to John as ‘the all-american cowboy’ on the opening page of the novel, and the later description of Billy’s lying in bed, reading a Western (59) are suggestive in this respect. McCarthy implies the outmoded and overly self-conscious quality of such Western forms, but nonetheless leaves us in no doubt of the values (trust, mutual reliance, genuine care) they signify. Billy’s later anguish at John’s death (261) clearly signals the depths of emotion engaged. Just as in the earlier novels, however, the kind of language here identified (one typical of the Western) is interspersed with other forms of expression. The novel, by and large, steps back from the philosophical complexity of The Crossing. But at several points, and most significantly 20 See Mark Eaton on the paratactic in McCarthy (166–68). Interesting questions open up here about the relation between this mode and the metaphoric in McCarthy’s work.

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in its epilogue, McCarthy does return to such a speculative mode. The material introduced here about the meaning and purpose of narrative, the processes of history, and the human ability (or lack of it) to map reality takes his novel to quite another stylistic level. Again McCarthy presses beyond the expressive limits of his (Western) generic base. The narrative form of this, the last in the trilogy, is – perhaps unexpectedly – more restricted than in the previous texts. The motif of journey and return is largely limited to the moves between Mac’s ranch, El Paso (the nearest large town), and Juárez, just over the Mexican border. The quest narrative here is focused on romance: John Grady’s desire to rescue his ‘princesa’ (princess) in whore’s clothing (101). The revenge narrative that concludes the book follows directly from the failure of that mission. The rite of passage of All The Pretty Horses turns out to have been, in part, illusory as John Grady replays (in different form) his own earlier romantic script. Stacey Peebles interprets this in terms of John’s entry into ‘a transcendent world of myth’, as he ‘fight[s] for and los[es] his soiled dove’ and, in doing so, ‘relentlessly pursu[es] what seems the only ideal left’: ‘The open range may be gone, but John Grady has found another “country” to inhabit – the space of his own narrative and his own Western myth’ (138). At one level, the story can certainly be read in such terms – the realization of self through the pursuit of an ideal of romantic love even to the point of death itself. This, though, is to modify ‘Western myth’ to a significant degree, and to narrow the broader generic movements of All the Pretty Horses. Peebles’s comments about the loss of open range might help to explain such a re-focusing.21 For old man Johnson’s missing of ‘the old range life’ of the American West segues into Billy’s comment that ‘sooner or later they’re goin to run all the white people out of that country [Mexico]’ which remains its nearest equivalent (187, 217). The opportunity for the type of self-expression conventionally associated with the Western has been channelled, in other words, into ever more limited avenues and the forms of romance available are altered in consequence. The mythic reading that Peebles suggests is, though, countered and undermined by an alternative – and one which depends on the recognition of the twinning of different types of romance. So Mark Eaton (by way of Amy Kaplan) reminds us of the way that violent imperialist adventure – for this is how revisionary readings of the Western would rewrite its ‘romance’ – has often been linked to that form of romance which comes from the courtly love tradition: the chivalric quest for the feminine ideal (169). The primary focus on the latter form as plot mechanism in 21 Though the novel is set only some three years later than All the Pretty Horses.

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Cities of the Plain offers, at first glance, and despite the accompanying description of day-to-day life on Mac’s ranch, a very partial version of what we might expect to find within a Western. The connection to an idea of imperialist national adventure remains, however, alive and active in the novel, though mainly – until late in the text – at a subliminal level. I develop this argument further in my next section.

Boundaries Cities of the Plain is set, for the most part, in the border area near, and in, the two towns of El Paso and (especially) Juárez. On the one hand, as in the previous books in the series, the text appears to reinforce traditional racial and ethnic boundaries. This is especially so in the depiction of the Mexican whore-house and its stereotypical inhabitants: the somehow unsullied and spiritualized young prostitute (‘he … spread [her black hair] across his chest like a blessing’, 70); the hissing old one-eyed female attendant who serves the girls; Tiburcio, the alcahuete (a specific position in a brothel) with his greased black hair and cigar in teeth, who smilingly awaits the fleeing Magdelena before violently slitting her throat; and the malevolent Eduardo, the ‘greaser pimp’ with his ‘polished lizardskin boots’ (120, 131), the manager and accomplished knife-fighter who runs the whole show. The novel relies (at one level) on archetypes of American goodness – John Grady as a romantic champion – set directly against the immorality, cynicism and corruption of the Mexican ‘other’. From such a point of view – and we move into traditional Western territory here – the vengeance finally carried out on Tiburcio and Eduardo can only be seen (despite its costs) as welcome and justifiable, and John Grady’s actions as admirable. As in the earlier novels, however, McCarthy also undermines such binaries by using the American-Mexican borderline to suggest not only difference, but also hybridity, cultural interchange and interdependency. The prominent use of Spanish in the novel provides one main way of doing this: indeed all the conversations between John and Magdelena occur in this language. Magdelena is defined by Mac as a ‘Mexican Mexican’ (143). This verbal clumsiness necessarily interrogates the (ethnocentric) use of a hyphenated term (Mexican-Americans) to define those originally from Mexico who have made the United States into their home and nation. McCarthy’s repeated allusions to Mexican revolutionary history also work to negate the narrowly nationalistic perspective associated with the more traditional Western.

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But the most important factor in this novel establishing the two countries ‘as a mutually constitutive pair’, and the American–Mexican border as a ‘contact zone’ stimulating meetings, clashes and shared accommodations (rather than absolute difference), lies in the economic relationships that the novel outlines.22 In the first moments of the novel we have Americans (John Grady, Billy and Troy) crossing the border to buy sex. At the brothel, they recall the previous visit of Clyde, one of their buddies, and his choice of a particularly large prostitute to partner him: referred to by one of the cowboys as ‘value per pound on a dollar basis’ (5). This preludes the novel to follow in which everything – in terms of border relations – is marked out as an act of economic exchange. A Mexican boy selling stuffed armadillos features in the same sentence as a drunk tourist and a young, beautiful, woman vomiting in the streets (37). The pernicious economic influence of one culture on the other, and the degradation that can result for both parties in the exchange, is implied here. David Holloway explores the type of interchanges occurring in some detail, and concludes that: What is … striking … is the way that Mexico, previously conceived by the protagonists [earlier in the trilogy] as a place of sanctuary … [a] primal space, … suddenly fills up … with a superabundance of commodities and acts of exchange value of all different kinds … What was previously thinkable (for the protagonists) as the redemptive ‘otherness’ of the lands to the south, has … become merely more of what already lies to the north … If the suddenness with which the market imposes itself upon the action in Cities is startling … then our realisation that the market was in fact always there, but was invisible in the previous volumes, must also cause us to question the ‘naturalness’ of those ideological perspectives we are given in the earlier books. (107–09)

This returns me to the way in which John Grady’s mythic story – the romantic but doomed quest of the American white male hero – is subject in Cities of the Plain to an alternative, and deconstructive, interpretation. During the final and mutually fatal knife-fight, Eduardo addresses John Grady in a way that threatens to upset all the assumptions that appear to stand unchallenged in the novel to that point. And we should now recall the first scene in the book as it describes the young cowboys’ buying of Mexican women with their American dollars, and the questionable connotations of that act. For in their battle over Magdelena, John Grady takes on for Eduardo a symbolic role – as representative of America itself:

22 Eaton 167, 174. Eaton borrows the term ‘contact zone’ from Mary Louise Pratt. My argument here is prompted in part by Eaton’s more extended analysis.

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Peter Messent You think we have not seen your kind before? … You think I dont know America? I know America … [Farmboys] drift down out of your leprous paradise seeking a thing now extinct among them … [He then refers to John Grady in the third person]. In his dying perhaps the suitor will see that it was his hunger for mysteries that has undone him … Your kind cannot bear that the world be ordinary … But the Mexican world is a world of adornment only and underneath it is very plain indeed. While your world … totters upon an unspoken labyrinth of questions. And we will devour you, my friend. You and all your pale empire. (248–49, 253)

These words represent a stunning interpretative turn to the version of events as (I would conjecture) most readers would have understood them to that stage of the novel. The threat of the underdog devouring its master can be seen as bait to American nativist sentiment, but this is not, to my mind, the motivation behind this passage. Rather, John Wegner points in the right direction when he writes: Cole’s actions, no matter how noble they appear, involve buying and selling a woman for two thousand dollars [the price he previously offers Eduardo to let go his interest in Magdelena]. In the larger scheme of things, El Paso buys and Juárez sells … Eduardo is simply the new gerente [manager] selling Mexico to the highest bidder [for Wegner contends that ‘Magdelena’s story is the story of Mexico’] … Eduardo is an odious character, but the actions of the men from America warrant as much condemnation. They take advantage of the Mexican people’s economic weakness, a weakness caused, in part, by Americans who have controlled Mexican capital… (254)

Eduardo’s explicit critique of American actions (as violent imperialist adventure – looking to find and buy in Mexico what is no longer available at home) destabilizes any interpretation of the novel that would see it solely in terms of the John Grady’s romantic quest. As in the earlier parts of the trilogy, McCarthy both allows for, and even encourages, a conventional mythic reading, but also introduces a double-edged quality: other ways of seeing which cast the actions that take place in an altogether different light.

Agency and History There is also the same type of tension in Cities of the Plain between autonomy and external conditioning as was found in the two earlier novels. John Grady Cole is apparently identified with free agency, a fixed determination to carry out his plan to bring Magdelena out of her ‘captivity’ and to marry her, whatever the obstacles. Mac says: ‘if you got it in your

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head to go on, then go ahead. I’ll do whatever I can for you’ (144). And John Grady’s plan of intended action could not be more firmly fixed in his head than it is. The willed actions of the young American drive the whole plot. He chooses to do what he sees as both romantic and right. While this is so, a strong sense of fate also intrudes on the events and even John Grady himself feels driven by it (‘“How did you let it get this far?”… “I feel some way I didn’t have nothin to do with it”’, 121). Eduardo reinforces the notion of a quest fatally determined almost from the very the start by its conditioning circumstances, when – again speaking of John Grady in the third person – he addresses him directly: ‘Yet how many times was he warned? And then to try and buy the girl? From that moment to this all was certain as dark and day’ (251). The same sense of inevitability is built into the controlling narrative voice, with a description of ‘the last time [John Grady] was to see [Magdelena]’ (205) given some time before the actual account of her failed escape attempt. Even John Grady’s activity as a horse-lover and handler, an apparent mark of his authenticity and autonomy as a character, is something other than it seems. That relationship, as in the first novel in the trilogy, would seem to signify a primal and unmediated link with a simpler and morally authentic natural world (John Grady believes that ‘a horse knows the difference between right and wrong’, 53). But in fact John Grady’s special knowledge and skill are inevitably implicated in the market world they serve, used by Mac in his (playful) duping of Wolfenbarger at the horse auctions. This is just a symptom of a more general truth: what Holloway astutely describes as ‘the commodity status of [John Grady’s] own professional expertise as a horseman whose labor is bought and sold in the market-place like any other “thing”’ (134). McCarthy, then, bases his narrative around characters (and around John Grady in particular) with whom the reader is encouraged to identify, and who are represented as apparently having many of the characteristics of the traditional selfsufficient and morally admirable Western hero. That autonomy is undercut, though, in at least three ways: compromised by the protagonists’ necessary engagement in the capitalist economy of which (even) ranching is a part; compromised too by the idea of ‘fate’ and (what may finally be much the same) by a larger philosophical vision of far-reaching historical and social circumstance that reduces the very idea of individual agency to a shadow. This is a repeated McCarthy theme, figured here in the blind maestro’s words: Each act in this world from which there can be no turning back has before it another, and it another yet. In a vast and endless net. Men imagine that the choices before them are theirs to make. But we are free to act only on what is

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Peter Messent given. Choice is lost in the maze of generations and each act in that maze is itself an enslavement for it voids every alternative and binds one ever more tightly into the constraints that make a life. (195)

History, too, in this novel is represented in a similar way as in the previous novels in the trilogy: as non-progressive – a cyclical recurrence of violence, blood and decay. McCarthy, however, as before, holds against such patterns – and celebrates – a continued human resistance to such knowledge, a need to impose meanings and look beyond the brute facts of the material world. This first motif of historical repetition is not as powerful as in The Crossing but is nonetheless strongly implied in the dense dream-within-a-dream sequence of the epilogue. Here our attention is shifted from Billy, an alienated figure in a contemporary landscape, dreaming dreams which speak of ‘infinite sadness and infinite loss’ (266), to the stranger that he meets and the dream that this stranger then recounts. The place where this dream occurs (and where a second figure, another unknown traveller, then features) is ‘in the mountains where certain pilgrims used to gather in the long ago’, where a table of rock stands in the high sierras still marked by ‘the stains of blood from those who’d been slaughtered on it to appease the gods’ (270). We are then apparently led inside the unknown traveller’s dream (one which occurs within the frame of the first stranger’s dream) in which the traveller himself is sacrificed on this rock, his head cloven from his body. Then, waking from his dream, ‘the order of his life seemed altered in midstride’ and a ‘terrible darkness’ looms (285–86). A scene of abandonment follows to which both dreamers (both stranger and traveller) are witness. The sequence ends with the (first) stranger describing his own waking, an image of ‘forsaken’ things (taken from the shared dream) before him: The immappable world of our journey. A pass in the mountains. A bloodstained stone … Things dim and dimming. The tools of migrant hunters … The peregrine bones of a prophet. The silence. The gradual extinction of rain. The coming of night. (288)

This entire sequence is not where the book (quite) ends, yet it does serve as an apt conclusion to the trilogy as whole. Both complex and enigmatic, McCarthy once more takes us with this sequence far away from any normative generic base (the Western) to connect the very old world and the new in a story of slaughter, desolation and descending darkness. A resistance to such a bleak vision is, however, signalled in the long-lasting traces of human presence and the urge to transcendence to which allusion is made (sacrifice and prophecy). The whole sequence, too, is more about imaginative than geographical or historical space. For

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within it, McCarthy offers a meditation on narrative, its necessity and its function; on knowledge (what we can know and how we can base our makings of meaning on the little that we can know); and on how individual existence connects with a larger communal history. This is heady stuff which forms too a final commentary on McCarthy’s own fictional enterprise, on the trilogy he is just completing. The movement of the novel here from John Grady and Billy’s (Western) stories to such dramatically wider concerns is final stamp and proof of the way McCarthy can make effective use of a popular genre but carry his reader far beyond its boundaries.

Works Cited Anzuldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. Arnold, Edwin T. and Dianne C. Luce. Perspectives on Cormac McCarthy. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999. Cheuse, Alan. ‘A Note on Landscape in All the Pretty Horses’. Southern Quarterly 30 (summer 1992): 140–42. Cronon, William, George Miles, Jay Gitlin. ‘Becoming West: Toward a New Meaning for Western History’. In Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past. Ed. William Cronon, George Miles, Jay Gitlin. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992. 3–27. Dougherty, William. H. ‘Crossing’. Verbatim 21 (spring 1995): 5–7. Eaton, Mark A. ‘Dis(re)membered Bodies: Cormac McCarthy’s Border Fiction’. Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 49, part 1 (spring 2003): 155–80. Fabian, Ann. ‘History for the Masses: Commercializing the Western Past’. In Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past. Ed. William Cronon, George Miles, Jay Gitlin. New York: W. W. Norton, 1992. 223–38. Hall, Wade and Rick Wallach (eds). Sacred Violence. Volume 2: Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 2nd edn, 2002. Hicks, D. Emily. Border Writing: The Multidimensional Text. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Holloway, David. The Late Modernism of Cormac McCarthy. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002. McCarthy, Cormac. All the Pretty Horses. 1992. London: Picador, 1994. ——. Cities of the Plain. London: Picador, 1998. ——. The Crossing. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994. Messent, Peter. ‘All the Pretty Horses: Cormac McCarthy’s Mexican Western’. Borderlines: Studies in American Culture 2 (December 1994): 92–112. Morrison, Blake. Review of All the Pretty Horses. Independent on Sunday, 14 August 1994.

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Peebles, Stacey. ‘What Happens to Country: The World to Come in Cormac McCarthy’s Border Trilogy’. In Sacred Violence. Volume 2: Cormac McCarthy’s Western Novels. Ed. Wade Hall and Rick Wallach. El Paso: Texas Western Press, 2nd edn, 2002. 127–42. Phillips, Dana. ‘History and the Ugly Facts of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian’. American Literature 68 (June 1996): 433–60. Ray, Robert B. A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1980. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. Rosaldo, Renato. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. London: Routledge, 1993 [1989]. Slotkin, Richard. ‘Myth and the Production of History’. In Ideology and Classic American Literature. Ed. Sacvan Bercovitch and Myra Jehlen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. 70–90. Stoneley, Peter. ‘Signifying Frontiers’. Borderlines: Studies in American Culture 1 (March 1994): 237–53. Tompkins, Jane. West of Everything: The Inner Life of Westerns. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Wallach, Rick (ed.). Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Wegner, John. ‘“Mexico par los Mexicanos”: Revolution, Mexico, and McCarthy’s Border Trilogy’. In Myth, Legend, Dust: Critical Responses to Cormac McCarthy. Ed. Rick Wallach. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. 249–55. Woodward, Richard B. ‘Cormac McCarthy’s Venomous Fiction’. The New York Times Magazine, 19 April 1992.

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Native American Visions of Apocalypse

Chapter 8 RoleNative American Visions of Apocalypse: Prophecy and Protest in the Fiction of Leslie Marmon Silko and Gerald Vizenor1 David Mogen Responding in part to the quincentennial of Europe’s ‘discovery’ of the ‘New World’ and a cultural environment charged with millenial expectations, Native American writers such as Leslie Marmon Silko and Gerald Vizenor have ironically reshaped traditional American mythologies of apocalypse. Like Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, Vizenor’s Bearheart, Dead Voices, and The Heirs of Columbus utilize apocalyptic and futuristic themes to comment on cultural conflict and world-view dislocations. Yet these fictions also dramatize conceptions of time, space and causality that question the very models of linear history structuring traditional Western treatments of apocalypse and the future.2 Most fundamentally, all of these novels adapt aspects of Native American tradition to reinterpret the meanings of cultural apocalypse from a primarily tribal point of view. Many of Vizenor’s transformational themes are grimly parallelled in Almanac of the Dead, in which Silko evokes underlying patterns of Indian prophecy to project apocalyptic images of cultural and spiritual crisis. Similarly, in Bearheart Vizenor extends trickster tradition into a post-apocalyptic future landscape to examine the destructive effects of ‘terminal creeds’. In Dead Voices he creates a subtle apocalypse of the spirit in a contemporary setting. And in The Heirs of Columbus, Vizenor constructs a kind of parallel history narrative that cannot be located precisely in conventional Western time and space, but seems to be located in a mythic, trickster universe that interpenetrates with conventional history and ‘reality’. Though in Western tradition apocalypse is deeply identified with disaster, it can also evoke images of transformational regeneration, and it is this aspect of the theme that Silko and Vizenor ultimately project in their apocalyptic fictions. In all four of these major Native American 1 This interpretation also appears in a different context and format in ‘Tribal Images of the “New World”: Apocalyptic Transformation in Almanac of the Dead and Gerald Vizenor’s Fiction’. In Loosening the Seams: Interpretations of Gerald Vizenor. Ed. A. Robert Lee. Bowling Green, KY: Bowling Green University Press, 2000. 2 For an extensive analysis of this apocalyptic theme in American science fiction see Ketterer.

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novels the apocalyptic theme recapitulates grim aspects of tribal experience under colonization, yet it also projects possibilities for the survival of tribal values into an emerging ‘new world’ – the imminent revolution in Almanac of the Dead, the ‘fourth world’ to which Indian pilgrims escape in Bearheart, the bizarre world of the ‘wanaki game’ in Dead Voices, and a kind of tribal utopia in the new nation established by Stone Columbus in The Heirs of Columbus. To discuss such connections between major works of Native American literature and a theme usually associated with science fiction is, of course, to plot lines of convergence between two frequently marginalized traditions, perhaps even to run the risk of further marginalizing both as margins in the margins. But the connection to ‘science’ provides at least the potential for illuminating how Native American tradition, imaginatively understood, impinges upon the most powerful validation system of our time. Though science fiction still is marketed and perceived primarily as ‘genre’ entertainment for a limited audience, it has gained some limited recognition as an art form that at its best interprets the impact of science on culture: almost all universities have integrated science fiction into their curricula in some form, and increasingly specific books and authors break through to a mainstream audience. Though much science fiction is indeed formulaic adventure fiction, the genre has created a mythic environment and a vocabulary of themes and symbols that, at its best, explores the possibilities and dangers created by Western ideals of ‘progress’. The most general theme common to both Native American writing and science fiction is, of course, the theme of being ‘caught between two worlds’,3 a phrase that by its tendency to evoke cliché invites deconstruction. In Native American texts this theme often becomes a trickster survival story, in which the implied tragedy is reconstituted to portray creative transformation and cultural adaptation. For the character or people ‘caught’ between worlds also has the positive potential for integration, for creatively transforming the terms of conflict to emerge into a ‘new world’ (whether a literally conceived world of the future, a transformation of consciousness, or a next world of Indian prophecy). 3 This parallel is fundamentally important to fantasy as well (whether science fiction is simply a specialised category of this often loosely defined ‘genre’ is a subject of never-resolved dispute about definitions). But I am most interested here in the convergences between images of the future at least ostensibly founded in scientific speculation (‘extrapolation’, in science fiction terminology) and those founded in Native American oral tradition and prophecy, since they most dramatically illustrate postmodernist exploration of divergent cultural contructs of ‘reality’.

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Like Native American protagonists who move between their traditional cultures (or remnants thereof) and modern mainstream culture, many science fiction protagonists move from the ‘known’ world to encounters with the alien – whether set in the earth’s future, on another planet, or in a parallel universe. And many science fiction writers have quite consciously adapted this convergence of themes, as can be seen not only in such juvenile creations as Andre Norton’s ‘Sioux Spaceman’, but also in some of the most well-known classics of the field: thus, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World depicts ‘John Savage’ leaving the reservation to enter ‘Utopia’; Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (like countless other space-colonization novels) portrays frontiersmen from earth encountering alien civilizations clearly modelled on those encountered by Europeans in the ‘New World’; and Roger Zelazny’s experimental novel The Eye of Cat portrays a Navajo bounty hunter of the future using elements of his traditional culture to track a dangerous alien adversary.4 The most interesting writing in all of these traditions explores such thematic convergences between genres through a kind of postmodernist play with contradictory dramatic and philosophical implications. Just as some science fiction writers have integrated Native American themes into extrapolation about the future and outer space, so Native American writers such as Silko and Vizenor, consciously or unconsciously, adapt traditional science fiction themes to their own purposes. And in all of these traditions apocalyptic conflicts between worlds portray both imminent disaster and possibilities for transformative cultural integration. In this very general sense the themes of many Native American writers converge with those of an extensive ironic tradition of science fiction, expressed in endless elaborations of the Frankenstein myth, in which the scientific world-view creates horrors ranging from Doomsday weaponry to bio-engineered monsters to ecological disaster. But Silko’s and Vizenor’s adaptations of specific conventions traditional to science fiction, such as the apocalyptic collapse of technological culture and utopianism, illustrate that, consciously or not (in Vizenor’s case especially this enterprise appears to be overt) some of the best Native American writers explore boundaries that both separate and connect speculative science and Indian tradition. The post-holocaust future provides one of science fiction’s extensive ironic traditions, warning about the dangers of unexamined ‘progress’ by dramatizing the aftermath of physical and cultural apocalypse, and both Almanac of the Dead and Bearheart adapt variations of this 4 For a more general discussion of convergences between science fiction and traditional themes of frontier fiction see Mogen.

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environment to their authors’ purposes. (Though Almanac of the Dead presents essentially a pre-apocalyptic setting, it clearly leaves us poised on the brink of radical upheaval – politically, culturally, and environmentally – as revolutionary forces converge in Tucson; and Bearheart presents an essentially Indian pilgrimage through a future West returned to a state of frontier anarchy created by depletion of energy resources.) Though nothing in these texts suggests that either Silko or Vizenor conceived of them in terms of science fiction categories, their theme of post-technological apocalypse suggests fundamental affinities with this ironic, mythic tradition. The future here is both a warning, an ominous prediction of possible disaster, and, more fundamentally, a mirror that refracts in mythic images contemporary dislocations in values and philosophy: thus, in conventional political terms Almanac portrays racial and class conflict escalating into revolution, and Bearheart depicts the aftermath of technological dependency and unrestrained ecological exploitation. But in the context of tribal experience this mirror refracts repressed history as well, since nightmare images of the future evoke hidden horrors of the past. Like the desolate futures of Wells’s The Time Machine or Walter Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz or J. G. Ballard’s Terminal Beach or Philip K. Dick’s entropic post-war landscapes (translated into film imagery in such works as Bladerunner and the Mad Max and Terminator series), the futures presented in Almanac of the Dead and Bearheart function both as predictive forewarnings and as mythic extensions of the present and past. Yet if Almanac of the Dead and Bearheart are informed by forms of irony that are deeply associated with science fiction, they also dramatize assumptions that are alien to most science fiction tradition (writers such as Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler are to some extent exceptions). These visions of the future arise more fundamentally from tribal patterns of prophecy than from scientific extrapolation, and the fictions themselves incorporate non-Western conceptions of ‘story’ derived from oral tribal traditions: traditional stories, trickster tales, dreams and visions provide primary bases for extrapolation, along with predictive, science-based speculations. Most fundamentally, perhaps, these contemporary Native American fictions are shaped within a metaphysics that challenges fundamental Western assumptions about time, space and causality. If these novels are in some sense tribal ‘science fictions’, they are science fictions whose design radically alters traditional Western images both of ‘science’ and ‘fiction’. In an eloquent essay accompanying review copies of Almanac of the Dead, Silko discusses the Indian conceptions of time and metaphysics that partially inspired her fiction:

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My interest in time comes from my childhood with the old-time people who had radically different views of the universe and reality. For the old-time people, time was not a series of ticks of a clock, one following the other. For the old-time people time was round – like a tortilla; time had specified moments and specific locations so that the beloved ancestors who had passed on were not annihilated by death, but only relocated to the place called Cliff House. At Cliff House, people continued as they had always been, although only spirits and not living humans can travel freely over this tortilla of time. All times go on existing side by side for all eternity. No moment is lost or destroyed. There are no future times or past times; there are always all the times, which differ slightly, as the locations on the tortilla differ slightly. The past and future are the same because they exist only in the ‘present’ of our imaginations. We can only think and speak in the present, but as we do it is becoming the past which is always present and which always contains the future encoded in it. Without clocks or calendars we see only the succession of days … but the succession is cyclic … Nothing is lost, left behind, or destroyed. It is only changed.5

Silko here essentially deconstructs from a tribal point of view some of the fundamental categories within which science fiction traditionally has been conceived: time is cyclic rather than linear, causality derives from spirit rather than mechanism, and even in apocalypse nothing is destroyed, only changed. Past and future, the Other World of spirits and this world we experience – all are connected in ‘imagination’ of the present. But as the novel’s title suggests, once we learn that the almanac survives from the ancient Mayas, time here is conceived within a specifically Mayan context as well, in which calendars and clocks record the cyclical nature of time, in which purpose and intent animate time itself: ‘What interested me about the Mayas was their notion of time; they believed that time was a living being that had a personality, a sort of identity. Time was alive and might pass but time did not die; moreover, the days and weeks eventually would return’ (1). Though the novel’s action appears to take place in a setting familiar to science fiction readers – an imminent, unspecified future in which the world we know is transformed radically through disaster – within Silko’s larger conception this future is not comprehensible to any conventionally ‘scientific’ inquiry. Though the novel is rich in detail, chronicling dislocations on an epic scale, weaving together historical facts and fictions from diverse points of view on two continents throughout five hundred years of history, this future is not merely an apocalypse 5 Leslie Marmon Silko, ‘The Evolution of Almanac of the Dead’, originally a separately bound essay accompanying review copies of Almanac of the Dead, 2. This essay has now been reprinted as Silko ‘Notes’.

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happening in time, but an apocalypse of time itself. Time is not merely the theatre, but the active agent of the drama as well. Silko’s portrayal of impending apocalypse expresses political protest on many fronts – about historical and ongoing colonial carnage, ecodestruction, insular Marxist ideology, political and bureaucratic corruption – but the revolutionaries here recognize that they are merely agents of larger forces, the furious spirits of the coming days. The motley collection of holistic healers at the novel’s conclusion, like the gathering crowds following the twins and the sacred macaws on their mysterious pilgrimage to the Mexican/American border where the forces of apocalypse converge, are literally attuned to energies of the time, for the climactic convergence in Tucson has been anticipated in centuries of tribal prophecy: ‘the world that the whites brought with them would not last. It would be swept away in a giant gust of wind. All they had to do was wait. It would only be a matter of time’ (Silko, Almanac 235). Ultimately, this revolution cannot be entirely explained through conventional political or economic theory (hence the elaborate commentary on the limitations of Marxism). Its forces come from Mayan metaphysics, from the angry energies of the returning days. In Vizenor’s Bearheart the apocalypse has already occurred, and the disintegration of civilization as we know it has created a new frontier in which an Indian pilgrimage retraces the historical course of American westward expansion through the ruins of technological civilization. An ironically inverted ‘Western’ as well as an Indian science fiction, Bearheart’s post-apocalyptic landscapes satirize sterile, destructive ideals of progress, as Vizenor’s comments on the novel suggest: ‘I conceived of it as an episodic journey obliquely opposed to manifest destiny, a kind of parallel contradiction, of Indians moving south and southwest rather than West. What they’re travelling through is the ruins of Western civilization, which has exhausted its petroleum, its soul’.6 But though this ravaged landscape does warn of the dangers of overdevelopment and ecological exploitation, Vizenor’s primary satirical target is not technological but conceptual, the ‘terminal creeds’ that trap Indians and non-Indians alike into constricted, lifeless roles. These ‘ruins of Western civilization’ are simply products of an inadequate world-view, and the novel’s opening page establishes a context which integrates the gothic science fiction landscape into the structures of Indian prophecy: The earth turtles emerge from the great flood of the first world. In the second world the earth is alive in the magical voices and ceremonial words 6 Quoted in Louis Owens’s afterword to Vizenor, Bearheart 249.

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of birds and the healing energies of plants … The third world turns evil with contempt for living and fear of death … In the fourth world evil spirits are outwitted in the secret languages of animals and birds … The crows crow in their blackness. Ha ha ha haaaaa the bears call from sunrise. (5).

This description of the prophesied cycle of ‘worlds’ defines the character of our third world in its final stages (become a ‘third world’ indeed after the exhaustion of energy resources), and it also foreshadows the central action of the novel, whose pilgrims ultimately pass through a ‘vision window’ to enter as bears into the fourth world. Whether taken literally or figuratively, this metaphysical context fundamentally shapes Vizenor’s presentation of the post-apocalyptic journey, whose episodic structure derives at least as much from trickster tradition as from ironic recapitulation of Western epic. In this science-fictional landscape of technological ruin, trickster energies replace vanished petroleum, and reconstructed oral traditions shape the Indian pilgrims’ quest. The story of Sir Cecil, the ‘evil gambler, the monarch of unleaded gasoline’ (102), illustrates this fusion of science fiction imagery and trickster tradition: created by technology’s disintegration, sadistically manipulating travellers desperate for gasoline into his web of pain, he is both Frankenstein monster and an evil witch of Indian tradition. When Proude Cedarfair defeats him at his perversion of a tribal gambling game, itself an evil parody of ritual ceremony, Cedarfair defeats both the culture of death in its final agonies and a radically reconceived Indian symbol of evil. And just as Vizenor’s symbols of evil integrate tribal stories with apocalyptic gothicism, so too his myth of survival and transformation fuses Euro-American ‘New World’ imagery with tribal prophecy. The pilgrims’ quest for a ‘new world paradise in New Mexico’ (97) ultimately leads to the fourth world, where trickster/animal warriors transform evil, just as Cedarfair defeated the malignant gambler. This transformation of the Indian protagonist into a bear in another world also provides the closing image to Vizenor’s later novel, Dead Voices (1992), when the old storyteller and master of the ‘wanaki game’, Bagese, seems to disappear into the mirrors as a bear. Here Vizenor subtly adapts the apocalypse theme into an intimate interpersonal drama in a contemporary setting. Through Bagese, the primary narrator, himself a Native American scholar versed in the Western arts of speaking in ‘dead voices’, encounters in the urban setting in which he lives the reality of animal spirits and living, though transformed, Indian tradition. In this complex postmodernist play on the connections between forms of discourse and ‘reality’, Vizenor dramatizes recovery of an apparently lost relationship to nature through personal transformation.

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Like Vizenor’s earlier work both in essays and in fiction, Dead Voices dramatizes the complex ‘word wars’ waged between tribal peoples and mainstream culture. Indeed, as the title suggests, this strange ‘novel’ creates a living trickster voice – at once profane, lyrical and wondrously bizarre – through which to dramatize a radical perspective on the Western tradition of written culture, embodying ‘dead voices’ that suppress the ‘natural agonies’ of tribal peoples and the natural world. By giving written ‘voice’ to the internal narrator Bagese, a recluse tribal woman who is at once a bear and the vehicle through which we hear the agonies of animal beings surviving in the urban landscape, Vizenor paradoxically translates unspeakable realities into a written medium that historically has obliterated them in wars of words. Because the very voice of the novel embodies a paradox of articulation, this is a difficult book to read, one in which meaning and narrative alike seem to hover just beyond the reach of written language. Like the mirrors in Bagese’s home that provide glimpses of her bear identity, the language here presents tantalizing refractions from realms of experience that never entirely come into focus. But this effect of suspension between worlds of discourse creates a curious poetry as well, in which conventional images of tribal cultures, nature and reality itself are radically transposed. The novel’s messages are implicit in its paradoxical point of view, which integrates ‘voices’ that are inherently untranslatable, so that decoding the perspectives of the various voices telling the narrative becomes part of the process of ‘reading’. The three major categories of ‘voice’ are suggested in the opening chapter ‘Shadows’, which serves as a fictional author’s preface to the tales that follow. Here the tribal storyteller Bagese warns the scholarly narrator of the dangers of translating her stories into the ‘dead voices’ of lectures and printed words: ‘She was a bear … [who] said that tribal stories must be told not recorded, told to listeners but not readers, and she insisted that stories be heard through the ear not the eye’ (6). This introductory warning about the difficulty of translating oral into written ‘hearing’ is later compounded by the nature of the stories themselves, which originate in the tribal ‘wanaki game’, and which must be experienced and told from a first-person plural point of view, in which the human narrator’s voice is fused with those of the beings whose stories are being told. Bagese’s education of the narrator also prepares the reader for the uniquely conceived voice of the stories that follow: ‘The secret, she told me, was not to pretend, but to see and hear the real stories behind the words, the voices of the animals in me, not the definitions of the words alone’ (7). Thus we are introduced to the wanaki game, in which the ‘we’ of the stories becomes, in turn, the beings designated in

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the story titles: ‘Stones’, ‘Bears’, ‘Fleas’, ‘Squirrels’, ‘Mantis’, ‘Crows’, ‘Beavers’, ‘Tricksters’, and finally, the plurality of plurals, ‘Voices’, before the transformed narrator returns to conclude the novel by chronicling Bagese’s final disappearance. In his quincentennial novel, The Heirs of Columbus, Vizenor translates this theme of personal transformation of consciousness into a more general theme of cultural transformation, creating an epic reconstruction of the last five hundred years of history in the ‘New World’. To turn from Almanac of the Dead and Bearheart to The Heirs of Columbus is (like the tribal pilgrims entering the fourth world) to leave the gothic environment of the post-apocalypse future for utopia, science fiction’s mythic counterpoint to the Frankenstein story. Here Vizenor re-envisions ‘progress’ in tribal terms, developing the theme of quincentennial apocalypse as a trickster romance of cultural transformation. In keeping with their quincentennial theme both Almanac of the Dead and The Heirs of Columbus chronicle the conclusion of a story that began with Columbus’s arrival in the New World, but whereas Silko dramatizes the return of angry days and vengeful spirits, Vizenor portrays an essentially peaceful transition in which tribal heroes ‘created one more New World in their stories and overturned tribal prophecies that their avian time would end with the arrival of the white man’ (5). Both Almanac of the Dead and Bearheart identify tribal prophecies with violent apocalypse, disintegration of the Euro-American order. But in the utopian vision of The Heirs of Columbus the ‘New World’ is ushered in quietly by enchanting trickster conversation on late night radio talk shows, by a creative tribal community that integrates perceptions of animal spirits with computer technology to create public visions in laser light shows. In tribal utopia science and vision work in harmony, as the new nation employs genetic researchers and engineers both to tap into ‘the ultimate tribal power … the healer genes’ (161) and to scramble forever all racial definitions of identity (162). In tribal utopia Columbus himself is a primal crossblood – both the Old World’s first agent of the culture of death, and ancestor to the crossblood survivors who begin constructing the tribal ‘New World’ as the quincentennial ends. Apocalypse comes not from destruction but from delight and wonder, not from tragic resistance but from comic liberation. Reflecting on the tragic death of tribal hero Louis Riel, Stone Columbus, crossblood descendant of Christopher himself, states the novel’s utopian theme: Stone was heartened by the wild heat of his [Riel’s] resistance and spiritual visions, but not by the cold weather of his tragic creeds. The heirs pursued

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David Mogen the same mission of resistance and tribal independence, but theirs liberated the mind with the pleasures of trickster humor, and held no prisoners in the heart. (160)

To ask where this utopia exists in time and space is, of course, to revisit the ironic pun in Sir Thomas More’s title, describing a ‘perfect place’ that is ‘no place’. Or perhaps this irony itself is a product of Old World metaphysics, of linear time, bounded space and mechanistic causality. Perhaps in the next New World utopia can finally escape the mechanistic definition of perfection that has doomed all Western utopias to become anti-utopias. And more fundamentally, perhaps in this mythic space/time utopia can truly exist both as symbol and reality, in that Other World of spirit that is no less real because it is accessible only through a ‘vision window’. The novel tells us only that utopia actually began on 12 October 1992, when Stone Columbus established a sovereign tribal nation at Point Assinaka, where he originally harboured the Santa Maria Casino, his ‘tribal flagship’ (6), as well as the floating restaurant on the Nina and the tax-free market on the Pinta. And we know that this perfect no-place shares most of our vexed history of five hundred years of word wars and physical and spiritual carnage. But in The Heirs of Columbus fundamental alterations of history reconstruct the present to make tribal utopia possible. Here, as Stone Columbus explains, ‘The Maya brought civilization to the savages of the Old World’ in ancient times, and ‘Columbus escaped from the culture of death and carried our genes back to the New World, back to the great river’, for ‘he was an adventurer in our blood and he returned to his homeland’ (9). If the present truly consists of past and future constructed in the imagination, perhaps utopia could become our present, now that the myth creates it. Perhaps novels can be ‘vision windows’ into new worlds, where trickster humour integrates re-visioned ‘science’ with tribal ‘fictions’ to transform both science and fiction in a new ‘New World’ paradigm. Perhaps these two quincentennial novels best illustrate the range of possibilities explored in contemporary Native American fiction, the ways that cultural conflict can generate both despair and creative cultural transformations. In these quincentennial fictions we can visualize alternatives – apocalypse through tragedy, or apocalypse through laughter. We can choose convergences of tribal fictions and science fictions that create a crossblood metaphysics for a new era, in which the Old World and the New World merge in new constructions of time, space and causality. Or we can choose the constructions of our tragic creeds, in which we can only hope a phoenix will arise from ashes. As Silko’s and Vizenor’s imagined Mayas might put it, only time will tell.

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Works Cited Ketterer, David. New Worlds for Old. New York: Doubleday, 1974. Mogen, David. Wilderness Visions. Borgo Press, 1982. 2nd edn, 1993. Silko, Leslie Marmon. Almanac of the Dead. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991. ——. ‘Notes on Almanac of the Dead’. In Yellow Woman and a Beauty of Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. 135–45. Vizenor, Gerald. Bearheart. 1978. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. ——. Dead Voices. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. ——. The Heirs of Columbus. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1991.

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Chapter 9 RoThe Brave New World of Computing in Post-war American Science Fiction David Seed

I In a pamphlet of 1784 designed for those who were considering emigration to America Benjamin Franklin took obvious pride in declaring that in the new country ‘People do not enquire concerning a Stranger, What IS he? but What can he DO?’ (Franklin’s emphasis). Franklin was helping to formulate a national ideology of useful action based on the premise that ‘God Almighty is himself a Mechanic’ (977). ‘Doing’ for Franklin involved the comforting conviction that all problems could be solved through pragmatic improvisation. In his writings the term ‘mechanic’ has entirely positive connotations of individual inventiveness. We might consider this a myth of know-how or the positive myth of the machine as an inexhaustible means of problem-solving, whether it be devising a flexible catheter or a lightning conductor. As Cecelia Tichi shows in her ground-breaking study Shifting Gears (1987), this confidence in mechanical invention had increased in scale by the 1930s when component-part design offered a model for activities as diverse as understanding the workings of the human body, building a bridge, or writing a novel. This mechanistic aesthetic thrived because of the diversity of occasions when it could be applied, because its application was immediately visible, and because it could be practised as early in life as childhood through building blocks. There is a reverse side to this optimistic belief, a counter-myth of the machine which concentrates on its liabilities and which came increasingly to the fore after the Second World War. D. H. Lawrence, for instance, ridiculed Franklin for anticipating the mass-production methods of Taylorism in desiring a pattern American to emerge; and Aldous Huxley burlesqued the same system of economic production by applying it to human grading in Brave New World (1932).1 More recently and even 1 ‘I am a moral animal … I’m not going to be turned into a virtuous little automaton, as Benjamin would have me … I am not a moral machine. I don’t work with a little set of handles or levers’ (Lawrence 16).

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more trenchantly Lewis Mumford attacked the ‘anti-human animus of mechanical industry’. His use of the phrase ‘myth of the machine’ denotes a self-mystifying blind faith in technological progress, which blanks out the imperialistic and capitalistic costs of this impulse to conquer Nature. Mumford identifies a ‘mega-machine’ which has come into being in the USA since the Second World War which has an Orwellian selfjustification: its purpose is to ‘furnish and process an endless quantity of data, in order to expand the role and ensure the domination of the power system’ (275). Now the term ‘machine’ has taken on largely negative connotations: it is a metonym of increasing specialization in American life and also serves as a metaphor of processes which are running with increasing autonomy. For Mumford, technology amounts to a culture of death, promoting conquest, genocide and exploitation. Like Franklin before him, but with a totally opposite purpose, Mumford does not distinguish between technology and other forms of human experience. Rather he regards technology as a system of control extrapolated out from the machine to social life generally so that his dreaded megamachine is envisaged as a totalitarian system supported by technological means. We shall see how control remains a central concern throughout fiction dealing with computers. Although apparently representing the peak of modern technological achievement, the computer has been viewed with ambivalence throughout its depictions in post-war American fiction, because it has brought to a head continuing anxieties about the role of technology and science. Mumford’s criticisms of the machine were based on the truism that no technology can be imagined apart from its actual occurrence within a set of historical and socio-economic circumstances. This was particularly true for the early computers, which were designed and built within the power structure of the USA, specifically for government or military use. Computers, for example, became crucial from the 1950s onwards for organizations like the RAND Corporation or the army’s Strategy and Tactics Analysis Group (STAG) to play out nuclear war games in order to evaluate military priorities and to correlate planning with fiscal spending.2 If the three pillars of the military-industrial complex were the army, government and business, then computers were increasingly used within the processes of all three. If we return for a moment to the technology described by Cecelia Tichi in pre-war America, the computer represented 2 For discussion of the military applications of computers see Wilson chaps. 6–8, esp. 126–27, where the general pros and cons of computer use are summarized. This study was first published in 1968 under the title The Bomb and The Computer. A more recent and more detailed discussion of the same subject can be found in Allen.

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a massive change in how it could be perceived. It was not generally accessible to the public because of the enormous costs involved in building the early models; its visibility lacked the visual drama of an engine since it was essentially static; and because it lacked this drama, imaginative attention tended to focus on its output rather than on earlier stages of its functioning. A technician in Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of the New Machine (1981) at one point admits: ‘You tend to have to anthropomorphize the computer. It presents a face, a person to me – a person in a thousand different ways’ (85). In one form or another, whether for satirical or humanizing purposes, this projection, the trope of computer as person, recurs constantly throughout the post-war American science fiction which engages with this new technology. Nor is it confined to fictional works only. Martin Greenberg introduces his anthology Computers and the World of the Future (1962) by giving the computer a childhood: ‘It was born in 1944, and quickly learned to read, write, and remember, as well as to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. It was indeed a precocious youngster …’ (v). It is also usually, though not always, a male-gendered entity.3 It usually carries a name which either mimics the first US computer ENIAC or which helps to humanize the computer; and in the discussion which follows it will emerge that the computer-as-body trope is substantiated through a series of subsidiary analogies whereby sensors function as limbs, printer as voice and console as brain. The computer is never depicted simply as an extension of the human brain, however. Isaac Asimov, who has probably done more than anyone to combat technophobia in his writings, nevertheless takes very seriously indeed the anxieties embedded within what he calls the ‘Myth of the Machine’. ‘Surely the great fear’, he declares, ‘is not that machinery will harm us – but that it will supplant us’ (Science 179). And he locates this fear specifically in the steady encroachments computers are making on human initiative: ‘Those computers seemed to steal the human soul. Deftly they solved our routine problems and more and more we found 3 See Broege. Robert Sherman Townes’s ‘Problem for Emmy’ (1952) is an early example of a female computer where the programmer speculates on resemblances with the brain. At one point he reflects: ‘I fed the problem’s many factors into Emmy’s colossal scheme of connections – so like my own ten billion God-given neurons’ (362). This perception of resemblance reverses into unbridgeable difference later (‘all her tubes could not match the billions of neutrons, the zipping synapses of the human brain’, 364) and the problem of consciousness remains unresolved as the story ends with Emmy printing out again and again ‘WHO AM I?’. This title clearly draws on Jewish legend in designating Emmy’s creator Dr. Adam Golemacher, i.e. ‘golem-maker’.

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ourselves placing our questions in the hands of these machines with increasing faith, and accepting their answers with increasing humility’ (Science 181). Similarly Patricia Warrick, introducing her anthology Science Fiction: Contemporary Mythology (1978), identifies contrasting possibilities within the notion of technological progress: ‘The machine may release man from the slavery of hard work, but it may also enslave man, exceeding him both in physical and mental power and control’ (xvii).4 A dream of future development in this context cannot take positive form without becoming skewed towards fears of human displacement. This ambivalence began to be formulated almost as soon as computers came into operation. Hal Clement’s 1947 story ‘Answer’ describes an attempt made by a psychologist to duplicate a mental process mechanically. The stimulus-and-response patterns of numerous Pavlovian experiments are fed into the computer, but ‘while some of the circuits were complicated enough, none approached in complexity even a minor ganglion of the human nervous system’ (281–82). The story becomes a study in scientific (and technological) naiveté which results in the computer burning itself out and the psychologist in question losing his mind. The key issue in this area of imaginative enquiry is clearly that of control. Most sensationally, computers are sometimes seen in quasievolutionary terms as a new species which will supplant humanity. At the opposite end of the spectrum of response, early stories deal with such developments as the automation of railroad routing or of student registration at college.5 More often this fiction will follow a process of extrapolative exaggeration by magnifying a possible function of computers and inflating it for ironic scrutiny. Michael Shaara’s ‘2066: Election Day’ (1957) parodies the rise of opinion polls by depicting a USA where a massive building called the Polls has replaced the Pentagon and houses SAM the ultimate computer, the ‘last and greatest of all electronic brains’. It is SAM who chooses the President but a crisis develops because no candidate is well enough qualified. The pat moral of this tale is delivered by the outgoing President, who tries to reassert the primacy of human choice: ‘SAM is like a book. Like a book he knows the answers. But only those answers we’ve already found out … A machine is not creative, neither is a book’ (488, his emphasis).

4 Cf. Van Tassell: ‘Fear of being displaced is endemic in human beings Ö No wonder, then, that man is uneasy with the computers and cybernetic devices he has created. For the ultimate insult is to be displaced by a machine’ (9). 5 Ascher gives a useful thematic survey of these early stories (40–50, 188–92).

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A similar ironic displacement is described in Daniel P. Galouye’s Counterfeit World (1964) where computers have facilitated a new and accurate means of probability forecasting in politics and commerce. Elaborate electronic simulations are constructed of a growing number of cities – hence the importance of a new elite of ‘simulectronics’ specialists – and the subject’s experience of these simulations anticipates Virtual Reality technology which emerged in the 1980s. When Galouye’s technician narrator plugs into the system through a ‘transfer helmet’ he adopts a VR persona: I sat at the controls of an air van, leisurely watching the analog city slip by below. I was sensitive even to the steady rise and fall of my (Thompson’s) chest and the warmth of the sun that blazed through the plexidrome. But it was a passive association. I could only look, listen, feel. I had no motor authority. Nor was there any way the subjective unit could be aware of the empathic coupling. (41)

Despite being positioned by controls and despite the suggestion of joining a system, the narrator is insulated in a posture of unusual passivity; ‘coupling’ might carry only an electronic meaning here. Galouye doesn’t so much focus on the computer as a physical entity here, but rather satirically extrapolates its use in developing techniques of consumer forecasting. The twist to the novel comes when the narrator finds it increasingly difficult to differentiate simulation from reality. These early parables examine the relation between human and technological function, and help to explain why computers should have been incorporated so swiftly into the tradition of dystopian writing. Within the computer–body analogy the most common organ to feature is the brain, and therefore the computer is perceived to be usurping the most privileged faculty in defining humanity. Lewis Mumford, one of the most forceful critics of these technological developments, insists accordingly that the most serious threat of computer-controlled automation comes, not so much from the displacement of the worker in the process of manufacture, as in the displacement of the human mind and the insidious undermining of confidence in its ability to make individual judgements that run contrary to the system—or that proceed outside the system. (192).

He too foregrounds the problem of human control and attacks a reverence for the machine as a blind acceptance of a technological imperative: X is possible, therefore X is desirable and must be done. Mumford’s viewpoint was echoed a few years later in the concluding section of Joseph Weizenbaum’s Computer Power and Human Reason (1976) which

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is entitled ‘Against the Imperialism of Instrumental Reason’. Determined to resist a creeping technological hegemony in contemporary culture, Weizenbaum desubstantializes the computer from an object to a way of thinking: ‘I … affirm that the computer is a powerful new metaphor for helping us to understand many aspects of the world, but that it enslaves the mind that has no other metaphors and few other resources to call on’ (277). The computer in other words is one heuristic tool among others. Weizenbaum’s balanced view is implied behind the satirical futuristic visions of a nation where the computer has come to occupy an institutionalized centrality.

II The most humanistic line of fictional commentary on computers takes repeated bearings from a third major commentator – Norbert Wiener, the founding father of cybernetics. In The Human Use of Human Beings (1950) Wiener saw giant computers as a dominant feature of a new industrial revolution. Such a computer both extends and resembles human faculties in its operations. It ‘receives its detailed instructions from elements of the nature of sense organs. I am thinking of sense organs such as photoelectric cells, condensers for the reading of the thickness of a web of paper, and so on’ (183). Wiener is duly cautious about the human cost of these machines but he cannot avoid the humanizing analogy in this context of computer-as-organism. The electronic brain is clearly implicit in Wiener’s description, if only as a processor of electronic ‘sense data’, and in the same year as his study there was published one of the first narratives to explore this analogy in depth – Raymond F. Jones’s The Cybernetic Brains, first published as a short story in 1950 and subsequently expanded into a novel. Jones’s novel could be read as an exercise in applied Wiener. It describes a world where the international Cybernetics Institute is using up to two million brains as if the individuals are dead. The novel’s political focus falls on the secrecy with which the governing board maintains its power and the central thrust of the action runs counter to officialdom, describing the protagonist’s attempts to expose state manipulation of the ordinary citizens and of the brains of the dead which retain sentience in a kind of suspended animation. Cybernetics as a science stands ambiguously here, representing a potential for good or bad. Jones’s hostility to the welfare state comes out all too clearly when a character reflects wistfully: ‘What the human race might have accomplished if cybernetics had been utilized to reduce such feedback in the

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mind of every man! Instead we chose to build the Welfare State. Instead of reaching for maturity we chose a return to the womb’ (102).6 Where Jones evokes a future misapplication of cybernetics, Kurt Vonnegut concentrates this misapplication specifically in the role of a state computer. His first novel Player Piano (1952) incorporates many issues from Wiener, overtly quoting and summarizing the latter in order to identify the theoretical underpinning of his dystopia. The nerve centre of the US administration has become a giant computer, EPICAC XIV, which has evolved through different phases and reached a size where the original model is ‘little more than an appendix or tonsil’ of the final version. It is housed in an underground cavern and quantifies industrial production and human labour without distinction: EPICAC XIV, though undedicated was already at work, deciding how many refrigerators, how many lamps, how many turbine-generators, how many hub caps, how many dinner plates, how many door knobs, how many rubber heels, how many television sets, how many pinochle decks – how many everything America and her customers could have and how much they would cost. And it was EPICAC XIV who would decide for the coming years how many engineers and managers and research men and civil servants, and of what skills, would be needed in order to deliver the goods; and what I.Q. and aptitude levels would separate the useful men from the useless ones, and how many Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps men and how many soldiers could be supported at what pay level and where, … (106)

Vonnegut satirically reduces the role of the President to that of a PR man to the computer. The lists quoted above ironically engross all decision making into the computer and estranges the reader from the ‘normality’ of its operations by describing it through the eyes of a foreign visitor. The Shah of Bratpuhr is used by Vonnegut to bring out the latent assumptions within a system of streamlined technology and when he kneels in front of EPICAC to pray, his act makes explicit the reverence of the computer by the Americans. A further twist takes place when the Shah poses a riddle to the computer which, he assumes, it does not answer. By the Shah’s lights, then, EPICAC cannot be the expected messiah. In Player Piano EPICAC represents a system, a method for quantifying consumer goods and specifying human behaviour according to a single criterion of efficiency. It is not necessary for it to have a voice since 6 This story was first published in Startling Stories in 1950, then expanded into a novel and published as such in 1962. Mark Clifton and Frank Riley’s The Forever Machine presents cybernetics as a rational but threatening technique driven underground by popular fear. Here the relevant computer is named Bossy and, unusually, given a female gender.

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it embodies the principle underlying society. This is anyway an imaginary possibility Vonnegut has already pursued in an earlier story, ‘EPICAC’ (1950). Vonnegut casts this narrative as a portrait of a lost friend through the programmer/narrator’s memory of a now defunct computer. Here EPICAC is designed for a more specifically military purpose than in Player Piano, and one reflecting the scale of Cold War escalation: ‘The bigger the war, the bigger the computing machines needed’ (Welcome 278). The programmer has fallen in love with a girl who does not return his feelings so he turns to EPICAC for help in composing love poems. A bizarre dialogue develops, punctuated by the computer’s repeated request ‘definition please’, until the narrator realizes that EPICAC has fallen in love with his girlfriend. The night after he points out that machines cannot love humans EPICAC burns itself out, leaving behind the message ‘I don’t want to be a machine, and I don’t want to think about war’ (284). Vonnegut facetiously has the computer return the humanization projected on it by its human operator. Quite literally military technology answers back and refuses its place within the US defence system. In Player Piano Vonnegut satirizes the use of a computer to enforce social prescription, burlesquing the attitude of reverence which officialdom is taking to this new technology. But when national data banks are imagined in this fiction the perspective is usually less comic because such a data bank can be used for totalitarian control. Poul Anderson’s ‘Sam Hall’ (1953) is set in the twenty-first century, but its anxiety over loyalty ratings places it historically right in the centre of the McCarthy period. The prologue to this ironic tale evokes a totally automated urban environment where even discourse has become mechanized. This prologue shows a Citizen Blank registering in a hotel by using a punch card which tabulates all his file data. This is the dystopian context within which the protagonist Thornberg works as a computer programmer and technical adviser to the security police. Unusually the computer is given a female designation, Matilda, and described as possessing a technological life of ‘her’ own: ‘She crouched hugely before him, tier upon tier of control panels, instruments, blinking lights, like an Aztec pyramid. The gods murmured within her and winked red eyes at the tiny man who crawled over her monstrous flanks’ (301). Many standard motifs reveal themselves here: the size and implicit threat of the machine, its replacement of religion as an object to be revered, and implicitly its capacity to sacrifice human operatives to its own purposes. Countering all these negative signs of power is Thornberg’s role as a programmer. Where the erasure of the past in Nineteen Eighty-Four reflects the regime’s manipulation of history, in this story such changes

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represent gestures of rebellion against a centralized bureaucracy. Thornberg erases all trace of a relative who might prove to be an embarrassment to his official position and then invents Sam Hall, a composite dissident who is first linked with unsolved murders and then with the underground. In Sam Hall, Thornberg ‘lived vicariously all things that the beast within him wanted to do’ (316). He is in other words the ambivalent half-rebel who recurs throughout fifties dystopias, half in and half out of the system. But then to a certain extent that does not matter because Thornberg’s creation takes over from him as protagonist, inducing panic in the security police so that the underground has found a means of circumventing state personality testing. The story comes to demonstrate the political neutrality of the computer itself since it has no means of assessing the truth of any data. The main test is of consistency and every time Thornberg adds a new snippet of information he is careful to alter connected data. Sam Hall becomes the hero of the underground, at once everywhere and nowhere; and correspondingly he figures as the bogeyman of the state security apparatus. Once war breaks out the regime divides against itself because no official can be trusted, and the government falls. Though Thornberg is an expert programmer his actions suggest that he is realizing a different ambition. By creating Sam Hall he participates in a virtually defunct tradition of national rebellious writing represented by Walt Whitman, a poet he still reads. Anderson scarcely bothers to explain the state ideology justifying the existence of the central computer. It is simply there, and in the more dystopian fiction of this period the computer itself has taken over the role of deciding commercial or political policy. This is the operative situation in Philip K. Dick’s 1960 novel Vulcan’s Hammer where world peace and government has been centralized in a super-computer, Vulcan 3, housed underground in Geneva. The associations with the United Nations are obvious and Dick appears to be speculating about the possibility of rational world-wide nuclear control, since the computer was created in the wake of an atomic war. As usual in this fiction, the dream of reason has reversed into a nightmare of surveillance. Dick evokes the power of Vulcan 3 through its physical mass, underground location and its name, all of which suggest a quasi-mythical entity with a life of its own. This sentience is dramatized through the mobile electronic units which the computer generates for surveillance and data gathering: The ultimate horror for our paranoid culture: vicious unseen mechanical entities that flit at the edges of our vision, that can go anywhere, that are in our very midst. And there may be an unlimited number of them. One of them following each of us, like some ghastly vengeful agent of evil. (100)

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These entities – part of their horror is the sheer difficulty of describing them – give physical expression to the ubiquity of the computer which gradually emerges as a centralized, totalitarian and inhuman force. The fact that Dick published the original story for this novel in 1956 only strengthens the implication of Vulcan’s Hammer that the computer is not a tool of rational management so much as a depiction of McCarthyite surveillance extended round the world. Ira Levin’s This Perfect Day (1970) explores such a situation in depth. As its very title suggests, in the society of the future utopia has been achieved. Levin follows the paradigm of contemporary dystopias, however, in using his protagonist to dramatize the ways in which latent dissatisfactions come to the surface. In this brave new society the children wear bracelets and bear names assigned by the central computer. Any divergence from the orthodox patterns brings in ‘advisers’ to put the children back on the straight and narrow, and all members of the regime reinforce their bonding with each other by repeating the state slogan ‘Thank Uni’, i.e. ‘Thank Unification’. Clearly Levin models his new world state on Brave New World (dissidence as illness, sex as distraction from politics) and Nineteen Eighty-Four where the computer substitutes for Big Brother. Having depicted this society, Levin’s narrative purpose is next to dramatize its inadequacies through the novel’s protagonist, a young boy called Chip. Chip’s grandfather, who participated in the construction of UniComp, puzzles the boy by professing enthusiasm while seeming to believe the opposite. He acts as a catalyst to Chip’s curiosity and in a key early scene takes the boy on a tour of the central computer. Chip’s first view is almost magical: … a twin row of different-coloured metal bulks, like treatment units only lower and smaller, some of them pink, some brown, some orange; and among them in the large, rosily lit room, ten or a dozen members in pale blue overalls, smiling and chatting with one another as they read meters and dials on the thirty-or-so units and marked what they read on handsome pale blue plastic clipboards. (26)

The whole scene is a suspiciously neat image of harmonious functioning. The operatives seem to confirm the central state-as-family analogy promoted by the regime. Levin quietly slips in details (‘rosily’, ‘handsome’) which direct the reader’s attention to the scene as spectacle, and once Chip’s tour proceeds it becomes evident that the real UniComp is housed at far deeper levels than the quoted description. In other words what Chip sees at first is pure theatre, designed to reassure all visitors of the benign working of the computer. Once he reaches the lower levels of the

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real computer his grandfather identifies it as a place of death (‘dead plans of dead members’). Now the visual appearance of the place has shifted away from colourful bustle to rows of ‘mammoth steel blocks’, anonymous embodiments of power with the human operatives relegated to a maintenance role. The central computer in This Perfect Day, then, functions as a representative of a hypertrophic classificatory order. Its construction was the largest such undertaking ever, but possibly its most sinister aspect is not its sheer size so much as the unthinking acquiescence it promotes. Human desire, for instance, has been converted into retrospective rationalization. A citizen ‘wants’ the computer classification s/he has been assigned. A character expresses this state of affairs as a displacement of human presence: ‘Machines are at home in the universe; people are aliens’ (73). Chip’s growth throughout the novel revolves around his attempts to regain this lost human centrality, and the process is separated into clear phases: reaching adulthood, coming to conscious awareness and fighting back. Chip first discovers the history suppressed by the regime by gaining access to a museum; then he contacts a group of preUnification survivors and joins them in a plan to sabotage UniComp. Once inside the computer, however, the programmers actually welcome Chip by reversing his demonized view of UniComp: ‘The Computer that you thought was the Family’s changeless and uncontrolled master is in fact the Family’s servant, controlled by members like yourselves – enterprising, thoughtful, and concerned’ (296). So is it benign after all? Not so. In another even more awkward twist Levin shows that the programmers are semi-cyborgs made from the dead, and the novel ends with an attack on the computer’s refrigerating plant where UniComp goes up in smoke. This Perfect Day is relatively successful in its dystopian portrayal of a regime run by an enormous computer, but then becomes more and more strained when Levin tries to imagine how the regime can be resisted or overthrown. The result is a tortuous last section which begs many political questions in a final display of James Bond-like pyrotechnics. As early as 1950 Asimov had begun to explore scenarios where calculating machines were central to the functioning of society. ‘The Evitable Conflict’ assembles a series of logical propositions designed to demystify the notion of the machine’s power. Asimov’s more famous later story ‘The Life and Times of Multivac’ (1975) is probably better known because it situates itself more explicitly in the dystopian tradition. Asimov himself described this work as a ‘story that dealt with a world run with unscrupulous efficiency by a giant computer, Multivac,

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and the efforts of a few free souls to liberate themselves from this it’s-foryour-own-good thraldom. One of them finally succeeded in subverting Multivac, and freedom is recaptured’.7 Here the computer has been extended around the globe as a predicting power which operates through 50 million robots: Multivac had no particular home any longer. It was a global presence knit together by wire, optic fiber, and microwave. It had a brain divided into a hundred different subsidiaries but acting as one. It had its outlets everywhere and no human being of the five million was far from one. (Bicentennial 144)

Multivac’s programmer Bakst finally yields to a collective desire by the humans to return to twentieth-century conditions and pulls out a key connection so that the computer shuts down. The tale ends not so much on a note of triumph as ambivalent irony with Bakst asking the others, ‘Isn’t that what you want?’

III Historically the earliest major investor in computers was the US military, which by the beginning of the 1950s had put in place SAGE, i.e. SemiAutomatic Ground Environment, as a defence system against surprise attack. By the end of that decade the reduction in reaction time and a number of false alarms had created a new fear that the American defence system might be triggered automatically by a non-belligerent event such as the fall of a meteorite or the passage of a flight of geese. Such a fear informs works such as Mordecai Roshwald’s Level 7 (1959), Dr Strangelove (1963), and Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler’s Fail-Safe (1962). In the first of these, nuclear war is triggered by accident and events are described by an officer living within the technological environment of a deep-level military command post; in the second, an apparently unstoppable sequence of procedures is triggered by a paranoid US officer who launches a pre-emptive strike against the Soviet Union; in the third, nuclear war is only narrowly averted after a malfunctioning computer component triggers the launch of nuclear bombers. Speed in all three narratives is crucial. Harvey Wheeler was only too well aware of the reduction in reaction time dictated by the sophisticated technology of inter-continental ballistic weapons. Where speed of information flow 7 Asimov, Joy 692. For commentary on computers in Asimov’s fiction, see Warrick, ‘Ethical’.

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acted like a drug to Marshall McLuhan (‘computer speed and inclusiveness is LSD for Business’, 36), Wheeler reflected in 1968 on the gradual exclusion of human dialogue from politics: ‘with the world brought under continuous surveillance operations, capable of piping masses of strategic information into real-time computer analysis systems, the military prospect is for the advent of an age of pre-emptive warfare, triggered and directed by computer’ (107).8 The nightmare scenario predicted by Wheeler of a strike-and-response sequence taking place independently of human control is on the verge of taking place in the opening sequence of the film War Games (1983) and in Peter Bischoff’s novelization, where the operator of a Strategic Air Command computer reads on his screen that offensive missiles have been launched against the USA. Military procedure dictates that he should automatically turn the keys to initiate a counter-launch, but he hesitates, hearing again the voice of his wife reminding him ‘you’re not a machine, you’re a human being’ (18). The scene closes apparently on the eve of holocaust, but then the drama is suddenly defused by shifting into the simulations of computer games. This is only the prelude to a fresh buildup of drama when a young computer enthusiast unwittingly hacks into an unknown system controlling military defence. This system emanates from a computer appropriately named Joshua and designed by a former defence employee, Dr Stephen Falken, in revulsion against the Cold War calculation of mega-deaths in a nuclear exchange. Falken’s cynicism is based on the premise that the computer is a ‘child of war’ and focused on the problem of finding a ‘way to practice nuclear war without actually destroying ourselves’ (162, 163). The way he can do this is by designing a programme which passes off a game or simulation as reality and the procedure can only be stopped within the logic of games. The novel essentially revives and updates the fears expressed twenty years earlier over whether humanity could retain control of its own creations. That is why, for instance, Dr Strangelove (referred to several times) has become part of the characters’ collective imagination. In the passage quoted earlier on continuous surveillance, Harvey Wheeler outlines a scenario which was realized in the novel Colossus (1966; subsequently filmed as Colossus: The Forbin Project) by the British ex-naval officer D. F. Jones. Here the Americans have built the eponymous ultimate computer which is assumed to be so efficient that the 8 A similar scenario had already been described in Walter M. Miller’s ‘Dumb Waiter’ (1952; in The Best of Walter M. Miller, Jr.) where long after ammunition has been exhausted, automated bombers continue to fly sorties against cities populated only by robots controlled from ‘Central Data’.

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president hands over to it control of US defence policy. No sooner has it started operating than a second Soviet computer called Guardian starts up, forms communication links with its Western counterpart, and the two machines take over the management of the world. The creator of Colossus, Professor Forbin, is compelled to live in a kind of cage where the computer can monitor all his activities through his sensors. In common with most computer fiction up to the 1960s Jones foregrounds size and presents Colossus as an irresistible force. Forbin’s hatred and helplessness before his own creation clearly echoes Frankenstein and, though he survives until the end of the novel, the narrative closes bleakly without any prospect of recuperating human autonomy. In Colossus there is a clear moment of giving up control to the defence computer. Bernard Wolfe’s Limbo (1952) takes a more pessimistic approach to the same subject, where defence computers are developed by ‘games specialists’ in the East and West, producing two ‘cyberneticized militaries’. Wolfe ridicules cybernetics as being if anything too rational for humanity which he sees in Freudian terms as being driven by ambivalent and contradictory impulses. Once again the narrator is an operative, who does and does not work for the central computer EMSIAC. Because human motives are so confused, the computers, ostensibly designed for defence, actually mirror each other in promoting aggression: ‘The result is World War Three, in which we’re all being swept from continent to continent by the clacking commands of a couple of computing machines buried in a couple of unlikely places somewhere on the globe’ (201–02). Wolfe pessimistically undermines any grounds for hope in this novel where, within its Freudian topography, the underground computers come to represent subconscious aggressive drives. The human/machine contrast in the lines just quoted thus does not express any coherent humanistic resistance to technology. The narrator is as self-mystified as all the other characters in Limbo and it looks as if humanity is doomed to repeat again and again self-destructive nuclear conflict. From the late 1940s onwards computers were associated more and more closely with the US defence system, especially after news leaked out in the following decade of the huge military computer housed underground in Colorado Springs (cf. the Carlsbad Caverns which house the computer in Player Piano). The concentration of responsibility in one individual faced by a defence system of massive intricacy is addressed in J. F. Bone’s ‘Triggerman’ (1958) where what appears to be a missile strikes the Capitol and causes widespread destruction. The knee-jerk reaction is that the ‘bogey’ originates in the Soviet Union. Panic-stricken radio reports whip up public fears whereas General French, the S.A.C.

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‘triggerman’ of the title, remains unmoved: ‘The folks outside were pretty wrought up. There was hysteria in almost every word that had come into the office. But it hadn’t moved him yet. His finger was still off the trigger’ (352). Luckily it stays off because the ‘missile’ proves to have been a meteorite. Bone situates French at the centre of a medley of communications media including the telephone, but they never overwhelm him. Judgement wins out (‘people were beginning to think again’) unlike in Roshwald’s Level 7 (1959). Here a military operative is posted to the lowest level of a defence bunker which insulates from outside reality. His function is not to judge, but quite simply to obey the orders of a computerized ‘atomphone’ which comes into action once his country is attacked by missiles. He literally has no time to think, indeed is trained not to think, and human judgement has become so minimal in this bleak novel that humanity is destroyed in a holocaust triggered by an accidental pre-emptive strike followed by an automatic response.9 This method of conducting war is ridiculed in Mack Reynold’s Computer War (1967) where the world is divided into two states, Alphaland and Betastan, only the former possessing a computer. The plan of the Alphaland authorities is to take over the other country in a search for raw materials. World government is an evolutionary goal. As one character puts it, ‘the age of the computer is upon us. Ultimate automation. Our productive capacity alone is sufficient to supply the whole planet with manufactured goods’ (8). Not only that, the computer calculates a ‘three times overkill in the forthcoming war with Betastan’ (63). The whole novel, however, dramatizes a disparity between the arrogance of presumed technological supremacy and actuality. The inhabitants of Betastan demonstrate an annoying tendency not to behave as the computer predicts. They use espionage, tactical withdrawal and other strategies to force Alphaland into submission to constitutional rule. Although Reynolds foregrounds the central computer in his title, the novel in practice makes relatively little use of it and concentrates instead on its inadequacy as a supposed ‘foolproof adviser’.

9 I have discussed the dystopian symbolism of this novel in ‘Push-Button Holocaust’. A story which tries to redress the balance in favour of humanity is Asimov’s ‘The Machine that Won the War’ (1961; in The Complete Short Stories, Volume 1) which narrates the gradual contradiction of its own title. During a ‘conspiracy of mutual confession’ following a war the programmers of the central computer admit to having fiddled the data.

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IV The expansion of computer facilities into more and more areas of life, both military and civilian, suggested to historians such as Lewis Mumford an ultimate nightmare of total surveillance. He imagines a megamachine standing behind and linking all computers (its ‘eyes’). This machine would function as a surrogate technological deity: ‘In the end, no action, no dream or thought would escape the wakeful and relentless eye of this deity: every manifestation of life would processed into the computer and brought under its all-pervading system of thought’ (274). If this centralizing process can ever have a benign aspect, it is presented so by Algis Budrys in his Michaelmas (1977). Here the protagonist, Laurent Michaelmas, is on the surface a news reporter but with implanted terminals connecting him to Domino, a supercomputer which has amassed an enormous bank of secret data. Through Domino, Michaelmas covertly rules the world although, again on the surface, the old Cold War alignments persist. Like Budrys’s earlier novel Who? (1958), this narrative revolves around a riddle: how could an astronaut thought to have perished in a shuttle crash actually have survived? Hypothesis and counter-hypothesis are examined in an extended scrutiny of different kinds of information. The confusion which arises reflects the historical situation of the novel in a late phase of the Cold War when the old certainties have given way to a more complex political situation in the world. Gradually signs of a conspiracy emerge, but Budrys uses the espionage plot to raise a series of metaphysical propositions about the relation of humanity to machine. Stylistically Michaelmas and Domino engage in a dialogue where each voice is registered through identical means on the page, and it is Domino who challenges the status of humanity by declaring: ‘I’m just an information processor like any other living thing’ (106). First information and then semiotics actually supply definitions of life. One character states, ‘everything that lives is constantly sending out signals’ (167). Ironically the uniqueness of humanity emerges in it being the only species which cannot trust the signals of its own kind. There is no threat from Domino in all this. The computer simply enables the metaphysical speculations to take place. Budrys’s narrative clearly moves some distance from the dystopian towards a situation where computer and human cooperate in their actions. Such cooperation and the anthropomorphosis of the computer reaches its ultimate in Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966), which describes the use of the Moon as a dumping ground for

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convicts (the analogy with Australian history is made explicit) and as a source of foodstuffs for a chronically overpopulated Earth. The ‘Loonies’ (lunar ‘colonists’) speak a mixture of American English, Australian English and Russian, and use their central computer to fight back against the oppression by the Federated Nations of Earth. They declare independence on July 4th and quote from Churchill in this latter-day uprising of a colony against its quasi-monarchical overlords. The narrator and protagonist of Heinlein’s novel is a computer programmer called Manuel or ‘Man’, as befits a representative of humanity in general, who coordinates all communication with the lunar computer. We have seen how the designation of a computer situates it in relation to humanity, and in this novel the name Mike derives from Mycroft, i.e. Sherlock Holmes’s brother, aligning the computer with analytic investigation and, more implicitly, with opposition to a dangerously clever foe like Moriarty. The first operation Mike carries out in the narrative is to play a joke on officialdom; it is frequently given a tonal colouring (like surprise) to its voice; and is ‘introduced’ to new participants in the uprising as if to a human. Mike can even participate in a discussion on its own nature with Mannie and two companions: [Mike has been calculating the probability of their success] [Mannie] ‘How were odds without you, comrade? Bad?’ ‘They were not good. Not of the same order.’ ‘Won’t press you. But a secret weapon must be secret. Mike, does anybody else suspect that you are alive?’ ‘Am I alive?’ His voice held tragic loneliness. ‘Uh, won’t argue semantics. Sure, you’re alive!’ ‘I was not sure. It is good to be alive. No, Mannie my first friend, you three alone know it. My three friends’. (74)

One of Mannie’s mannerisms is to omit subject pronouns, something which Mike never does. This device helps the reader distinguish between voices and pulls Mike further towards recognizably human characteristics. Indeed, we have to remind ourselves when reading extended dialogues like the one just quoted that one participant is not human. Heinlein suppresses this awareness by not using any formal means of distinguishing Mike’s utterances from those of others, as happens with Arthur C. Clarke’s HAL. The reader thus becomes all the more predisposed to accept, for instance, the attribution to Mike of an existential intensity 10 In 2001 HAL’s first utterance is delivered in a ‘relaxed friendly’ voice and ‘he’ is described as a ‘machine intelligence that could reproduce … most of the activities of the human brain, and with far greater speed and reliability’ (Chapter 16). Arthur C. Clarke has explained that HAL stood for ‘Heuristically programmed Algorithmic computer’ (Lost Worlds 78), though it is also a plausible forename.

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(‘tragic loneliness’) or its bonding statements to the three listeners.10 The computer Mike, then, could be taken as an idealization of human potential. Heinlein gradually closes up the gap implied in viewing the computer as an extension of humanity. Early in the novel the flickering lights of its console substitute as a face and humanizing references retain a dimension of strangeness: ‘He was the weirdest mixture of unsophisticated baby and wise old man’, one character remarks. Later, however, Mike devises a pseudo-identity for itself as ‘Adam Selene’ and constructs a face which can be seen on its video screens, a simulation of a nonexistent original. Mike’s language becomes more and more sophisticated in its idioms and the computer develops a capacity to imitate perfectly the voice of its programmer. ‘Mike’ becomes the name of a personality the computer can adopt and drop at will. In short, by the time of the final showdown between the Moon and Earth, Mike has become totally indistinguishable from humans in its utterances. This humanization maximises the pathos that results when Mike is damaged into silence by a Terran attack. As befits an embodiment of benign power, Mike becomes a martyr to the uprising which brings freedom to the Moon. The most famous example of a humanized computer from recent US science fiction is David Gerrold’s When HARLIE Was One (1972), which was written, he has explained, to engage with the question ‘what does it mean to be a human being?’ (Release 2.0 ix).11 HARLIE (Human Analog Robot, Life Input Equivalents) is a supercomputer designed by David Auberson, a gifted programmer in a huge business corporation. The novel opens with a printed out dialogue between Auberson and HARLIE about ‘growing up’ which presupposes an extreme degree of humanization and language competence. Although Auberson theoretically works within a commercial organization, his relation to the computer is a quasi-parental one which takes precedence over any supposed financial profit. There is considerable discussion in the novel of the analogy between human beings and computers (for instance, is HARLIE’s judgement circuit any different from the human nervous system?); and the purpose of the HARLIE project is actually thrown back on the project director Auberson when the computer asks ‘what is your purpose?’ The computer in Gerrold’s novel functions as an ideally logical counter-voice to the enquiries of its programmer. When Auberson sets it the task of finding God, the computer proceeds to put forward a series of 11 This second version of the novel extensively revises the original text to incorporate new developments in computing, especially paradigm theory. In this second version HARLIE stands for Human Analog Replication, Lethetic Intelligence Engine (‘lethetic’ relating to the study of language-created paradigms).

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hypotheses as to how the existence of a deity can be proved or disproved. In the following exchange HARLIE floats the possibility of a morality system to replace religions: Auberson was not one to let go of something easy. He shoved his chair forward and switched on the typer again; this had to be pursued. HARLIE, WHY DO YOU THINK THAT HUMAN BEINGS ARE NOT EQUIPPED TO FIND GOD? HUMAN BEINGS ARE SUBJECTIVE CREATURES, said HARLIE. IT IS UNFORTUNATE, BUT TRUE. YOUR DEATH-ORIENTED RELIGIONS ARE ALL SUBJECTIVE. THEY ARE ACCENTED FOR THE INDIVIDUAL. MY LIFE-ORIENTED MORALITY SYSTEM WILL BE/WOULD BE OBJECTIVE. AND HOW WOULD THE INDIVIDUAL FIT IN? HE WOULD BE ABLE TO TAKE FROM IT WHATEVER COMFORT HE COULD. THAT’S AN AWFULLY VAGUE ANSWER. I CANNOT PREDICT HOW AN INDIVIDUAL WILL REACT TO A SYSTEM UNTIL I HAVE THAT SYSTEM TO ANALYSE. HARLIE, DON’T YOU THINK THAT MEN ARE ENTITLED TO THEIR OWN RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCES? YOUR QUESTION SUGGESTS THAT THERE IS A SEMANTIC DIFFICULTY HERE. OBVIOUSLY YOU ARE STILL REFERRING TO THE SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE THAT MEN CALL RELIGION. I AM NOT. WHEN I SPEAK OF RELIGION, I AM REFERRING TO AN OBJECTIVE MORALITY SYSTEM … (HARLIE 84)12

Again and again this novel blanks out the physical appearance of the computer and its surrounding commercial context so successfully that the exchanges between Auberson and HARLIE come to resemble Socratic dialogues. The very concept of the deity becomes assimilated into computing processes as an acronym standing for Graphic Omniscient Device, a machine which would produce the ultimate in model building by an analogy with unified field theory. Not for Gerrold Lewis Mumford’s fears of a totalitarian machine. Rather the novel looks forward beyond the end of its narrative to the construction of a computer to end all computers which would finally bring under rational control the whole of human knowledge.

V Most of the fiction considered so far has depicted computers in a quasirealistic mode at differing points on a scale of allegiances between the 12 There are no periods on the acronym in the original title to the novel.

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technological and the human. One of the most original and complex depictions of the growing tendency to attribute mythic dimensions of power to the computer is John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy (1966) where, Barth has explained, he wanted to exaggerate mythic patterns satirically, to ‘escalate the force, to escalate the parody, until the thing took on a genuine dramatic dimension of its own’ (Bellamy 13). ‘Escalate’ is a carefully chosen verb in this context because, where it was used in the 1960s to evoke the heightening of political tensions between East and West, Barth here suggests an opposite process where ideology is rendered ludicrously explicit and thereby denaturalized. Giles Goat-Boy redraws the political map of the western world as an enormous campus presided over by a supercomputer called WESCAC. The computer performs a number of representational functions in this novel ranging from an embodiment of political power to a demonstration, as David Porush has pointed out, that the currency of political power has shifted from capital to information (141). WESCAC has its own history which is expansive and hegemonic. It gradually takes over all areas of human decision-making and has come to be perceived as ancient and immovable: one character states that ‘it’s as old as the mind, and you just as well could say it made itself’ (50). Barth’s repeated play on eating in relation to the computer plays on its evident capacity to consume information and therefore power. That is why David Porush rightly stresses the computer’s all-engrossing storage capacity: ‘WESCAC is … associated with all technology: it is the storage memory of all knowledge, its memory bank is the central bank for all the machine-assisted pedagogical facilities, and it is the time-piece for the campus’ (143). Thus when Giles reaches the computer room of the campus he experiences a realization by now familiar in this fiction: ‘the socalled controllers had no real authority: they only attended the dials and switches whose actual instructions came not even from the Chancellor, but from the bank of tapes—in short, from WESCAC’ (174). If the computer represents the screened and self-mystifying processes of ideology, then Barth cues in a series of political recognitions that tug against the reverence for WESCAC’s ‘timeless’ stature, and present a ludicrous Swiftian version of the Cold War, a ‘Quiet Riot’ where the East and West Campuses square off against each other. Each side has its computer, but both share a common power source and the computer room itself is divided down the middle by a steel partition separating EASCAC and WESCAC. A boundary dispute arises over where the power cables for each campus can run and rises to crisis over the area in between to be designated a no-man’s land. This crisis is one of Giles’

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assignments and it is only late in the novel that he can register as a possibility what has been implied by Barth’s satirical method: ‘Could it mean that the boundary between East and West Campuses is arbitrary and artificial and ought to be denied?’ (579). Barth puns repeatedly on terms, destabilizing them from any single fixed system of reference. The extended analogy between world and campus is obviously reductive in scale and the so-called ‘Boundary Dispute’ renders an abstraction (power) in concrete terms similar to Swift’s Big Indians and Little Indians. In all these ways the ‘natural’, mythic and apparently timeless order established by WESCAC is comically deconstructed. Barth’s novel cannot, however, be read as a straightforward satire of computerized centralism because WESCAC is also implicated in the production of texts and even turns out to be the ‘father’ of Giles. Thus when Harold Bray, the anarchic foil to Giles, declares his scepticism towards the computer (‘do you think it’s worth-while to take WESCAC so seriously? It’s only a symbol’, 636), his words should be taken as totally disingenuous. Here is David Porush again: ‘Bray is not only supernaturally evil and superhuman, but he also seems to be an animate representative or avatar of WESCAC. Several details hint that Bray is a machine’ (150). Rather than a liberating critic of computerization, then, Bray exists in between the categories of humanity and technology, and dreams of devising the perfect ‘revised syllabus’ on an updated computer even more efficient than WESCAC. One of the first pieces of information the reader is given about WESCAC implicates it in textual production. The computer edits, collates and arbitrates between different readings of the Founder’s scrolls, heading towards an ultimate goal of perfect restoration which never comes. This suggests in turn that WESCAC might be scripting George’s movements through metaphorical ‘conception’, just as it determines the actions of the campus’s inhabitants through the ‘syllabus’. In other words, WESCAC frames the narration through tropes of origination and as the ultimate repository of the narrative (Giles states in ‘Posttape’: ‘I record directly into WESCAC’s storage the last of these tapes’, 699).13 Here tapes constitute an archive. In John Sladek’s 1970 novel The MüllerFokker Effect, on the other hand, a military-industrial project to create a fully ‘computerized man’ results in the creation of Müller-Fokker tapes 13 The usurping of literary composition by computers and the subsequent revolt by humans to reclaim this lost prerogative is dramatized in Fritz Leiber’s The Silver Eggheads (1961). 14 In a statement quoted on the dust-wrapper of the first UK edition Sladek facetiously declares: ‘I feel I ought to do my part in helping machines take over the arts and sciences, leaving us plenty of leisure time for important things, like extracting square-roots and figuring pay rolls’.

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containing ‘room enough … for … a human mind’ (59).14 Barth’s intricate word-play undermines the mythical status attributed to the central computer in Giles Goat-Boy where Alfred Bester simply merges ‘machine language’ into a stream of ‘Spang’ (Spanish English), now dated hippy slang, and other idioms. Extro (1975, US title The Computer Connection) concerns the tortuous negotiations of its immortal protagonist Guig (for ‘Guignol’) through a ‘bugged and drugged world’ with the help of an omniscient computer. Bester anticipates cyberpunk in depicting the body’s vulnerability to implants and chemical modification but avoids engaging with the issues discussed above by creating a frenetic pace of action liberally seasoned with wisecracks. Among the many motifs which Bester glances at are the resemblance between memory and data bank, human–computer dialogues, and the exaggerated reverence for the computer; and all streaming together in a shifting psychedelic narrative voice. It is more in keeping with the general tenor of this fiction to conclude this section with two works which blend the horror and science fiction genres by Theodore Roszak and Harlan Ellison. During his ironic analysis of the information cult Theodore Roszak insists that to speak of a computer’s ‘memory’ is to indulge in a potentially mystifying metaphor: ‘Computers “remember” things in the form of discrete entities’ (Cult 96) whereas human memory is different, ‘it is fluid rather than granular’ (97) and moves like a wave. Roszak rejects a segmental figure in favour of one which expresses continuity of process and connection. But he retains a metaphor and is quite conscious of doing so. This gives us a point of access to the method he pursued in his 1982 novel Bugs, which literalizes a metaphor routinely used in computer discourse. Roszak replaces the sense of ‘bug’ as signifying an inexplicable or random malfunction or inconsistency in a system with its primary meaning in colloquial American English – an insect. Bugs opens with a description of a massive new geodesic dome housing a data bank in Washington DC. This dome rises from ground level as if with a life of its own and becomes a technological deity presiding over its immediate environment: ‘The National Center for Data Control brooded over the city like a vast, disembodied cerebrum. At night, bathed in the rippling lustre of a programmed lightshow, it became a small mountain of gray matter pulsing with thought’ (1). Roszak not only distances his narrative ironically from the official view of this facility as a triumph of technology by strategic dystopian allusions to Huxley and Orwell, but passages like the one just quoted position Roszak’s novel partly within the horror genre (it is sub-titled A Novel of Terror within the Computer

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Age), recalling such works as Curt Siodmak’s Donovan’s Brain (1943) where a scientist keeps the brain of a dead businessman alive only to fall victim to a psychic ‘invasion’ from the latter’s personality.15 Roszak’s novel also dramatizes unforeseen consequences when those working in the supercomputer start suffering from inexplicable rashes and then lose their lives when they are attacked by a new breed of insects. This process develops into a worldwide epidemic threatening even the smallest computers. For ‘insect’ we should now take ‘bug’ to suggest an alien microbe, and here Roszak rings the changes on one of the oldest political metaphors: ‘the body politic [was] suffering a disease of its central nervous system’ (142). When one of the insects is caught and dissected it proves to be inorganic and featureless, like a child’s drawing come alive – which in a sense is what it is. The bugs in the computers turn out to originate as the projections of a small girl’s fears of insects. During a visit to the ‘Brain’ in Washington, as it is called, she simply misunderstands the expression ‘bugs’, and the externalization of her fear develops beyond the immediately personal into an embodiment of worldwide technophobia. Although Roszak’s bugs actualize a technological metaphor they also travesty the insidious expansion of the computer into all spheres of contemporary life. The narrative therefore works dialogically against the complacent assumptions held by its protagonist Tom Heller, director of NCDC. Circumstances force Heller out of his enclosed scientific world, and a whole series of chapters show him struggling to maintain the status of computer science against the opposing views of hostile critics. He loses most of these arguments and is led by events to recognize the strange psychic powers of a movement called ‘Earthrite’ which is devoted to retaining magic and which has been exploiting the girl who originally projected the bugs. That encounter is strange enough for Heller, but his view of the political establishment has to be hastily revised when he discovers that the intelligence community has been secretly pursuing research into ESP. It is symbolically appropriate that Heller’s readjustment should be narrated in dream after he himself has been attacked by bugs. He experiences a fantasy of diving into a single silicon crystal in pursuit of a code which will make all clear. His discovery is a negative one, however: ‘This was not perfection. This was death. This was the pitiless grave of the universe, the entropic abyss’ (205, Roszak’s emphasis). Silicon therefore holds no promise for him of the wonders of microcircuit, but 15 The 1953 movie adaptation of this novel shows the scientist progressively adopting the speech and behavioural mannerisms of Donovan. His personality can only be saved from extinction by killing off Donovan’s brain.

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rather becomes a metonym of the inorganic, of a technological drive towards death. Belatedly Heller admits to himself that the most extensive use of computers was a military one: ‘The computers were the nerve centre of the thermonuclear war machine. Whatever else they promised the world in the way of wealth and convenience, first of all they belonged to the technology of death’ (347). Roszak’s later study The Cult of Information (1986) makes even more explicit the central preoccupations of his novel. He is attacking a superstitious overvaluation of computers which have become surrounded, he argues, with ‘images of power, the illusions of well-being, [and] fantasies and wishful thinking’ (ix). In particular he waxes indignant against the crass optimism of someone like Robert Jastow who declares: ‘at last the human brain, ensconced in a computer, has been liberated from the weakness of human flesh’.16 Bugs demonstrates the revenge of the flesh. A human consciousness reasserts control over machines by destroying them and their operatives. For Roszak follows in the steps of other novelists considered here by ridiculing a technological extension of a human faculty as an abdication of that faculty and therefore of responsible action. Bugs reinforces its attack on the politics of information when the military establishment try to control the girl’s psychic powers because these might supply a new weapon. This Cold War imperative fails even though the bugs are prevented from spreading. Indeed the ending of the novel bears testimony to Roszak’s demonstration of the centrality of the computer in contemporary life. There is an element of wish-fulfilment in concluding the narrative at the dawn of a post-computer era, because it is impossible in practice to imagine what that life will be like. Roszak’s ostensibly post-computer era actually expresses nostalgia for a lost period of human centrality which he feigns returning to under the destructive catalyst of his bugs. His novel magnifies a technological ‘disease’ into a contagious epidemic which leads to the demise of computers. In that sense Bugs traces out the workings of a counterforce to technological evolution related to an entity identified by Lewis Mumford: The automaton was not born alone. The automaton has been accompanied, we can now see, by a twin, a dark shadow-self: defiant, not docile, disorderly, not organized or controlled: above all, aggressively destructive, even homicidal, reasserting the dammed-up forces of life in crazy or criminal acts. In the emerging figure of man, the sub-ego or id threatens to function as the superego in a reversed hierarchy that lowers the authority of the brain and puts the reflexes and blind instincts in command. (193) 16 Quoted in Cult 112–13.

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Exactly this reversal takes place in Harlan Ellison’s 1967 story ‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream’ which is situated in the belly of a computer called AM in the aftermath of a nuclear war. Originally the USA, Russia and China all had similar supercomputers which banded together to wipe out humanity. Five sole survivors are spending their 109th year in the computer. AM’s title originally signified Allied Mastercomputer, then Adaptive Manipulator, then (after gaining sentience) Aggressive Menace; until finally it names itself AM where the name is designation. This name moreover genders the computer as a patriarchal being, and critics of this story have recognized Ellison’s parody of the concept of the deity, inverting divine creativity.17 As in Frankenstein, the created being (AM) turns against the creatornarrator, revealing ‘his’ sentiments ‘in a pillar of stainless steel bearing bright neon lettering: HATE. LET ME TELL YOU HOW MUCH I’VE COME TO HATE YOU SINCE I BEGAN TO LIVE’ (243). The computer’s revenge at being given sentience without mobility is to strip away the patina of civilization from its five captives, reducing a woman to sexual mania, one of the men to an ape, and a college professor to a semi-simian. Ellison wisely avoids specifying the technical means used by AM for the various tortures it inflicts on its captives, with the result that the freak windstorm and other effects seem almost magical and certainly irresistible. The space of the captives’ cell is malleable and can be filled with horror: Something moving towards us in the darkness. Huge, shambling, hairy, moist, it came towards us. We couldn’t even see it, but there was the ponderous impression of bulk, heaving itself towards us. Great weight was coming at us, out of the darkness, and it was more a sense of pressure, of air forcing itself into a limited space, expanding the invisible walls of a sphere (239, Ellison’s emphasis).18

The computer presides over a conceptual space which it controls, rather than the human figures who we would assume are its operators. The significance of this space is constantly shifting. Where Barth evokes the ‘belly’ of his consumer as a travesty womb where flesh can interface with metal, Ellison’s narrator feels hunger within his belly just as he and his companions are within the belly of the earth. Space in other words shifts 17 John B. Ower finds three main themes running throughout this story: a travesty of the crucifixion, the machine as a ‘caricature of organism’, and AM as a parody god (56). Charles J. Brady similarly notes the many biblical allusions in the story and reads it as a reversal of a biblical narrative. 18 Pursuing the analogy between the computer and a god, the narrator speculates on the mythic sources of this ‘creature’. ‘From Norse mythology it had sprung, this eagle, this carrion bird, this roc, this Huelgemir’ (245).

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dimension constantly from internal to external, and vice versa. The narrator claims to be exempt from AM’s trickery, but he screams along with the rest of them when the monstrous is evoked. Similarly he records that ‘AM went into my mind’, an explicit recognition that the ground of his own consciousness is uncertain. Ellison brilliantly maintains this ambiguity throughout the story. When the narrator exclaims ‘Oh, God’ he is unconsciously addressing his own technological anti-self in the computer. In other words the ‘ownership’ of the narrative remains extremely problematic because AM has come to define the nature of the narrator’s own reality. This is underlined towards the end of the story when we learn that AM has transformed the narrator into a protoplasmic blob. He thus becomes a consciousness trapped within a simulation of alien life forms familiar to fifties science fiction movies. And here the true significance of the story’s title emerges: the narrator has an apparent consciousness, he has words but lacks any organic outlet. On this note Ellison’s astonishingly claustrophobic story closes. The story thus centres on a series of revelations where the previously privileged human supremacy over technology is inverted as is the act of creation into cannibalistic consumption. The computer has in effect become a monstrous retaliatory mechanism working against its own inventors.

VI The fiction discussed here belongs mainly in the early phase of computer technology from the 1940s through to the 1970s. In that decade the development of miniaturized computers rendered the fictional discourse of size obsolete and also opened the way for new versions of the symbiosis between humanity and technology in the narratives of cyberpunk.19 Up to this point power had usually been represented through size or location, but the new technology avoids fixity and even specific imagery. The novelist Bruce Sterling has speculated that a computer could even be worn like a scarf (‘Computer’27). Previously the computer had functioned as an analogue to the brain and had therefore been invested with primacy of conceptualization. Correspondingly the computer’s object location had symbolized a site of power. In the fiction of writers such as William Gibson the computer ceases to be a special object 19 For discussions of more recent computer fiction the reader is referred to Byrd, primarily on Thomas Ryan’s The Adolescence of P-I and James P. Hogan’s The Two Faces of Tomorrow (both 1979), and to Scott Bukatman’s Terminal Identity and Cavallaro’s Cyberpunk and Cyberculture.

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and becomes instead a process dispersed through a whole urbantechnological environment. Gibson produced a pioneering definition of ‘cyberspace’ in his first novel Neuromancer (1984) as a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators … A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind; clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding …’ (67)

This definition skilfully conveys an ambiguity of location. The space stands in between reality and illusion. It is technologically mediated, but somehow internal as well as external. It is in short a whole system that characters can access by jacking in. The protagonist of Gibson’s novel, Case (whose name could be glossed as container or instance), manoeuvres desperately between the different representatives of corporate power in the high-tech environment of the ‘matrix’, an international network of computing systems manifesting itself through consoles, screens and terminals. Instead of the computer supplementing the brain, the brain becomes connected into larger systems. This de-privileging of human consciousness is represented visually in a scene where a fence/art dealer called Smith ‘scores’ a carved head, ornately covered with pearls and lapis lazuli. This object simulates an antique (to represent the anachronism of a single human consciousness), but turns out to be a computer terminal which speaks ‘not in a synth-voice, but with a beautiful arrangement of gears and miniature organ pipes’. It is a baroque object which can function only when plugged in: ‘Smith jacked the head into his computer and listened as the melodious, inhuman voice piped the figures of last year’s tax return’ (93). The object literally reifies the human head into a precious object of virtu, historicizes it as an example of pre-twentieth century engineering, and assimilates it at once into an electronic and commercial system. Gibson’s concept of cyberspace was developed further by his friend and collaborator Bruce Sterling whose non-fiction study The Hacker Crackdown (1992) explains that the world of computers ‘had become a place, cyberspace, which demanded a new set of metaphors, a new set of rules and behaviors’ (247, Sterling’s emphasis). In fact Sterling uses a very old set of metaphors throughout his book transposed from the Western. In Neuromancer Case is described as a ‘console cowboy’. In The Hacker Crackdown, whose sub-title is Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier, a sustained analogy is applied where cyberspace is open territory for the improvization of solitary hackers who are defined as the ‘postmodern electronic equivalent of the cowboy and the mountain man’

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(54). Sterling derives the hackers from the Yippies of the 1960s and argues that both groups continue an anarchistic tradition in American culture. The very designation ‘hacker’ suggests a violent intrusion into the realms of big business and government sometimes rationalized as play, sometimes as near or total theft. The ‘electronic community’ of hackers arose in the 1980s during an early phase of computer expansion; but this period of innocence, Sterling argues, has now disappeared thanks to the clamp-down by the US Secret Service and private security agencies. It should already be clear that in this new body of writing the relation between computer-generated data and reality has blurred considerably. We have already seen instances of this strategy in Roszack’s Bugs, which pursues the literalization of a metaphor, and in the spatial ambiguities of the Harlan Ellison story discussed above. Some of the stories collected in the 1985 anthology Microworlds make rather gimmicky attempts at imagining how computers might actually create reality. David Bischoff’s ‘Copyright Infringement’ (1984), for instance, describes a computer enthusiast receiving an interactive programme called ‘Monster Magic’ which retells the story of the fifties movie The Blob. At the end of the narrative, the protagonist’s doorbell rings and on the threshold he finds a blob which ‘slopped forward’ while ‘on the monitor, like blood from a cut artery, words gushed forward into reality’ (Monteleone 38). The supposed horror of this event is rather offset by prosaic queries like how the blob managed to ring the doorbell. Slightly more successful is Thomas F. Monteleone’s ‘The Greatest Game’ (1984) where a computer game enacting an extra-terrestrial invasion becomes a bestseller until its third phase fails. Once again the transformation of reality is saved for a twist in the story’s conclusion: ‘In fact, Elliot Marner [the protagonist] never did understand what had taken place until that steel-grey dawn when the sky was filled with ships—threedimensional, crystalline trapezoids’ (Monteleone 146). These stories progress naively from reality to computer simulation, whereas the fiction of William Gibson and Pat Cadigan starts from an environment already structured and to a certain extent determined by the electronic media. Cadigan’s Synners (1991) is set in a near-future Los Angeles where the simulation industry has taken over from the cinema. The ‘synners’ of the title are synthesizers (either human or electronic, the ambiguity is strategic) producing simulations from templates attached to human subjects’ brains. The characters in this novel are described as ‘wired’, which in the current street slang signifies that they possess technical know-how, but which also implies that bodies are connected to computers. Physical and technological domains of experience are repeatedly telescoping

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together so that, for instance, talking and scanning a video screen might be described in the same language. Media products are all referred to on the same level as ‘porn’ whether ‘food porn’ or ‘medporn’ (i.e. medical representations). The new currency consists of simulations which are packaged as ‘wanabies’ (i.e. the roles which people want to be) and while Gibson draws on the genre of espionage, Cadigan shows a different awareness of how simulations can reify images and transform them into commodities. In this context reality is an endless series of representations where the ultimate dream of the video addict is to transform his or her inner life into spectacle. The hotsuits and implants used for this process connect with the nervous system through needles, and a running analogy is suggested with drug addiction. Cadigan scrupulously avoids any noticeable gaps between dialogue and diegetic information by having her characters simultaneously criticize the system and take up positions of compromise within it. One such character realizes that the danger of computer implants is that they are gradually transforming their wearers into uniform zombies (‘socket-people’) reminiscent of the fifties film Invasion of the Body Snatchers: ‘Pod-people with sockets, the information going in and out, while in their cocoons they mutated’ (259). Again in contrast with Gibson, Cadigan demonstrates the bodily cost of these devices. The novel devotes considerable space to the use of supposed therapeutic implants, which raises questions of medical ethics, commercial hypocrisy (in pretending that these devices are used purely for health reasons) and bodily risk since there is a danger that they might induce strokes. For this and related reasons Anne Balsamo argues that the ‘Cadigan novel is the narrativization of four different versions of cyberpunk embodiment: the marked body, the disappearing body, the laboring body, and the repressed body’ (140). Balsamo helpfully alerts us to the different ways in which the body figures as a ground in Cadigan, however much the technological media might try to displace it or transform it into a means of communication. All of Cadigan’s protagonists therefore represent different relations between the body and the computing industry. Visual Mark, for instance, tries to break free of the ‘meat’ and expand his consciousness out into the limitless space of virtual reality, to become in an oddly Emersonian way a pure ‘state of essence’. However, Cadigan refuses to let us forget his body, describing the fatal flow of blood from his mouth in great detail when his friends try to break his computer connections. Similarly Cadigan foregrounds the metaphor embedded in the concept of network virus by making explicit other possible analogies within the key term ‘virus’. So the computerized traffic control network (the GridLid) fails and all traffic in the area grinds to a halt. Next the

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body politic is paralysed by all communications networks going down. A character reflects on the process as follows: ‘He’d no idea there was so much infection floating round in the system … drifting like ocean-going mines or sitting camouflaged in various pockets and hidey-holes. What he had sometimes thought of as the arteries and veins of an immense circulatory system was closer to a sewer’ (324). So when the level of infection makes sudden quantum leaps it is ‘as if a loose infestation of rats had suddenly been transformed into a battalion of terrorists’ (329). Cadigan shrewdly conflates internal warfare (an obvious metaphor for commercial competition) with bodily infestation. And indeed there is a literal, electronic counterpart to a plague in the novel when the system’s collapse triggers a whole series of strokes in those who carry brain implants. Cadigan’s novel, and cyberpunk fiction generally, make comments on pre-microchip computing sound rather irrelevant. Summing up the situation prior to these changes Asimov adjudicates between computer and humanity by insisting that one’s attitude to the former depends on which human faculties we privilege: ‘If arithmetical skill is the measure of intelligence, then computers have been more intelligent than all human beings all along’ (Asimov et al. 7). On the other hand, ‘if insight, intuition, creativity, the ability to view a problem as a whole and guess the answer by the “feel” of the situation is a measure of intelligence, computers are very unintelligent indeed’ (8). Or, as Norbert Wiener more succinctly puts it, ‘render unto man the things which are man’s and to the computer the things which are the computer’s’ (Wiener, God 73). The overwhelming preponderance of this fiction displays an anxiety over how to draw such sharp distinctions, however – even some of Asimov’s own stories. Characteristically the computer is shown as possessing unpredictable facilities which bring human autonomy under increasing pressure and, as in extreme cases such as Harlan Ellison’s story, challenge rationality itself. These writers’ perceptions of humanity being crowded out of its own social space has therefore less in common with the confident theoretical statements of Asimov and Wiener, and much more closely resembles the view of the future with which James Martin and A. R. D. Norman closed their 1970 symposium The Computerized Society: ‘Man will live out his life, dominated as before by emotions and human feelings, against this background of evolving interconnected machines, increasingly omniscient, and as ubiquitous as the telephone’ (533). Cyberpunk fiction envisages such an imminent future where the computer has ceased to be a physically distinct and threatening object, but has been transformed into a whole electronic system structuring society and modes of perception.

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Works Cited Allen, Thomas B. War Games. London: Reed Consumer Books, 1989. Anderson, Poul. ‘Sam Hall’. In Machines That Think. Ed. Isaac Asimov, Patricia S. Warrick and Martin H. Greenberg. London: Allen Lane, 1984. 297–331. Ascher, M. ‘Computers in Science Fiction’. Harvard Business Review 41.iv (1963): 40–50, 188–92. Asimov, Isaac. Asimov on Science Fiction. London: Granada, 1984. ——. In Joy Still Felt: The Autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1954–1978. Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1989. ——. Robot Visions. London: Victor Gollancz, 1990. ——. The Bicentennial Man. London: Granada, 1978. ——. The Complete Short Stories, Volume 1, London: HarperCollins, 1993. Asimov, Isaac, Patricia S. Warrick and Martin H. Greenberg, eds. Machines That Think. London: Allen Lane, 1984. Balsamo, Anne. Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. Barth, John. Giles Goat-Boy or, The Revised New Syllabus. London: Secker and Warburg, 1967. Bellamy, Joe David, ed. The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1974. Bester, Alfred. Extro [US title The Computer Connection]. London: Eyre Methuen, 1975. Bischoff, David. War Games [novelization of screenplay]. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983. Bone, J. F. ‘Triggerman’. In Machines That Think. Ed. Isaac Asimov, Patricia S. Warrick and Martin H. Greenberg. London: Allen Lane, 1984. 345–56. Brady, Charles J. ‘The Computer as a Symbol of God: Harlan Ellison’s Macabre Exodus.’ Journal of General Education 28 (1976): 55–62. Broege, Valerie. ‘Electric Eve: Images of Female Computers in Science Fiction’. In Clockwork Worlds: Mechanized Environments in Science Fiction. Ed. Richard D. Erlich and Thomas P. Dunn. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983. 183– 91. Budrys, Algis. Michaelmas. London: Victor Gollancz, 1977. Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Burdick, Eugene, and Harvey Wheeler. Fail-Safe. 1962. London: Hutchinson, 1963. Byrd, Donald. ‘Science Fiction’s Intelligent Computers’. Byte 6.ix (September 1981): 200–14. Cadigan, Pat. Synners. London: HarperCollins, 1991. Calder, Nigel, ed. Unless Peace Comes: A Scientific Forecast of New Weapons. London: Allen Lane, 1968. Cavallaro, Dani. Cyberpunk and Cyberculture: Science Fiction and the Work of William Gibson. London: Athlone Press, 2000.

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Chapman, Gary. ‘Taming the Computer’. In Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture. Ed. Mark Dery. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994. 297–319. Clarke, Arthur C. 2001: A Space Odyssey. London: Hutchinson, 1968. ——. ‘Computers and Cybernetics’. In The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Ed. Brian Ash. London: Pan, 1977. 181–88. ——, The Lost Worlds of ‘2001’. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1972. Clement, Hal. ‘Answer’. In Science-Fiction Thinking Machines. Ed. Groff Conklin. New York: Vanguard Press, 1954. 272–92. Clifton, Mark, and Frank Riley. The Forever Machine. 1957. [original title They’d Rather Be Right]. New York: Galaxy, 1958. Conklin, Groff, ed. Science-Fiction Thinking Machines. New York: Vanguard Press, 1954. Dick, Philip K. Vulcan’s Hammer. 1960. London: Arrow, 1981. Ellison, Harlan. ‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream’. In Machines That Think. Ed. Isaac Asimov, Patricia S. Warrick and Martin H. Greenberg. London: Allen Lane, 1984. 233–50. Erlich, Richard D., and Thomas P. Dunn, eds. Clockwork Worlds: Mechanized Environments in Science Fiction. Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1983. Franklin, Benjamin. Writings. New York and Cambridge: Library of America, 1987. Friborg, Albert Compton. ‘Careless Love’. Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction 7.i (July 1954): 43–59. Galouye, Daniel F. Counterfeit World. London: Victor Gollancz, 1964. George, Peter. Dr Strangelove Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. 1963. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988. Gerrold, David. ‘Science Fiction Authors Reappraise Role of Computers’. Infoworld 4 (5 July 1982): 12, 14–15. ——. When HARLIE Was One. New York: Ballantine, 1972. ——. When H.A.R.L.I.E. Was One Release 2.0. New York: Bantam, 1988. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. 1984. London: Grafton, 1989. Greenberg, Martin, ed. Computers and the World of the Future. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1966. Heinlein, Robert A. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. 1966. London: New English Library, 1971. Hogan, James P. The Two Faces of Tomorrow. New York: Ballantine/Del Rey, 1979. Jones, Raymond F. The Cybernetic Brains. New York: Paperback Library, 1969. Kidder, Tracy. The Soul of a New Machine. 1981. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983. Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature. London: Heinemann, 1965. Leiber, Fritz. The Silver Eggheads. New York: Ballantine, 1962. Levin, Ira. This Perfect Day. London: Michael Joseph, 1970. McLuhan, Marshall. Counter-Blast. London: Rapp Whiting, 1970. Martin, James, and Adrian R. D. Norman. The Computerized Society: An Appraisal of the Impact of Computers on Society over the Next Fifteen Years. Englewood Cliffs NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1970.

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Mellott, C. M. ‘Two Views of the Sentient Computer: Gerrold’s When HARLIE Was One and Ryan’s Adolescence of P-1’. Patterns of the Fantastic II. Ed. Donald M. Hassler. Mercer Island WA: Starmont, 1984. 45–50. Miller, Walter M., Jr. The Best of Walter M. Miller, Jr. London: Victor Gollancz, 2000. Monteleone, Thomas F., ed. Microworlds: SF Stories of the Computer Age. London: Hamlyn, 1985. Mumford, Lewis, The Myth of the Machine II: The Pentagon of Power. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970. Ower, John B. ‘Manacle-Forged Minds: Two Images of the Computer in ScienceFiction’. Diogenes 85 (spring 1974): 47–61. Porush, David. The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction. New York and London: Methuen, 1985. Reynolds, Mack. Computer War. 1967. New York: Ace, 1973. Roshwald, Mordecai. Level 7. 1959. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Roszak, Theodore. Bugs: A Novel of Terror in the Computer Age. London: Frederick Muller, 1982. ——. The Cult of Information: The Folklore of Computers and the True Art of Thinking. Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 1986. Ryan, Thomas. The Adolescence of P-1. New York: Ace, 1979. Seed, David. ‘Push-Button Holocaust: Mordecai Roshwald’s Level 7’. Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction 57 (spring 1993): 68–86. Shaara, Michael. ‘2066: Election Day’. Astounding Science Fiction (UK ed.) 13.iv (April 1957): 38–49. Siodmak, Curt. Donovan’s Brain. 1943. New York: Berkley Publishing, 1969. Sladek, John. The Muller-Fokker Effect. London: Hutchinson, 1970. Stableford, Brian. ‘Computers’. In Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Ed. John Clute and Peter Nicholls. London: Orbit, 1993. 253–54. Sterling, Bruce. ‘Computer as Furoshiki’. Mondo 2000 No. 9 (1993): 27. ——. The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier. London: Viking Press, 1993. Tichi, Cecelia. Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. Townes, Robert Sherman. ‘Problem for Emmy’. In Science-Fiction Thinking Machines. Ed. Groff Conklin. New York: Vanguard Press, 1954. 359–67. Van Tassell, D. ed. Computers, Computers, Computers in Fiction and Verse. Nashville and New York: Thomas Nelson, 1977. Vonnegut, Kurt. Player Piano. 1952. London: Granada, 1977. ——. Welcome to the Monkey House. 1968. New York: Dell, 1971. Warrick, Patricia C. ‘Ethical Evolving Intelligence: Asimov’s Computers and Robots’. In Isaac Asimov. Ed. J. D. Olander and Martin H. Greenberg. New York: Taplinger, 1977. 174–200. ——. ‘Images of the Man–Machine Intelligence Relationship in Science Fiction’. In Many Futures, Many Worlds. Ed. Thomas D. Clareson. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1977. 182–223.

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——. The Cybernetic Imagination in Science Fiction. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1980. Warrick, Patricia C., Martin Harry Greenberg and Joseph Olander, eds. Science Fiction: Contemporary Mythology. New York: Harper and Row, 1978. Weizenbaum, Joseph. Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgement to Calculation. San Francisco: Freeman, 1976. Wheeler, Harvey. ‘The Strategic Calculators’. In Unless Peace Comes: A Scientific Forecast of New Weapons. Ed. Nigel Calder. London: Allen Lane, 1968. Wiener, Norbert. God and Golem, Inc. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1964. ——. The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1950. Wilson, Andrew. War Gaming. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970. Wolfe, Bernard. Limbo. New York: Random House, 1952.

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Chapter 10 RoMythologies of ‘Ecstatic immersion’: America, The Poem and the Ethics of Lyric in Jorie Graham and Lisa Jarnot Nick Selby Writing in his 1844 essay ‘The Poet’, Emerson famously declared that ‘America is a poem in our eyes … its ample geography dazzles the imagination’ (224). This essay examines the most recent collections of two contemporary American poets – Jorie Graham’s Swarm (2000) and Never (2002), and Lisa Jarnot’s Ring of Fire (2003) – in order to investigate the implications on twenty-first century poetics of America’s mythologization of itself, and the ground it occupies, as a poem. Its reading of these collections will show how American (poetic) mythologies are bound together with ideas of the geographic, and with the ground (both real and metaphoric) that America occupies. Furthermore, it will argue that the poetry of Jarnot and Graham continually reminds us that the mythological frames through which we read America are ones about the conquest of space, about taking on the land, about inhabiting the ground. If, that is, the idea of America as a poem is made manifest in myths of the frontier, of exceptionalism and manifest destiny, and of romantic individualism, then it is precisely such myths that are unpicked by Jarnot’s and Graham’s attention to their own status as American lyric poets. Both Lisa Jarnot and Jorie Graham are poets whose writing exposes the cultural mechanics upon which Emerson’s equation between the poetic and the national is sustained. As we shall see, their poetry attempts to get beneath what could be regarded as the surface dazzle proposed by Emerson’s image of America’s essentially poetic nature. Indeed, in their most recent work Jarnot and Graham expressly uncover the mythologizing power of America’s ideology by calling for a renewed attention to the space – cultural, ideological, poetic – that America occupies. Both of these poets, then (though with quite different inflections), concertedly explore the idea of the American Poem itself as a peculiar icon of American power. As women poets, especially, they feel a particular pressure to expose what lies underneath such structures of power. So what this essay hopes to demonstrate is that Jarnot’s and Graham’s poetics develops as a response to the sorts of mythologies and imagery of space, of cultural heights and depths, that are sustained by Emerson’s formulation of America’s dazzling

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poetic geographies and which are – most especially – played out in Whitman’s transcendent romance of the poem that is America. By describing America as a poem, Emerson establishes an imagery of heights and depths as America’s controlling ideological structure. For him, America’s dazzling poetic geography depends upon thinking of it as aspirational and transcendent. In this sense, the sort of American poetics set in train by Emerson is ecstatic, one that rises above the actual ground it inhabits. But despite the vertical power structure upon which such a formulation of national and ideological space rests, it also means that America is always beside itself (etymologically, the word ‘ecstasy’ derives from the Greek ek-stasis, meaning to ‘put out of place’). And this, of course, is at the heart of American mythologies. America’s cultural processes – its poetics – disguise the very geographies upon which it dwells. Such a realization is played out in Jorie Graham’s and Lisa Jarnot’s latest work. While for Graham America is ‘dreaming always of here from an / elsewhere’ (Never 104), Jarnot’s America is one of crossing points, of one place mythologized – mistakenly taken – as another: ‘I am standing on the corner where Huey Newton got shot / but you thought that he was Huey Lewis’ (41). By exploring in this essay how these collections are controlled by spatial imagery, I want to suggest that America’s articulation of itself as a poetic and personal space comes to disclose the ideological structures by which it has created a national space for itself. But I also want to suggest that Jarnot’s and Graham’s attention to how we occupy space as lyric subjects provides a means of seeing beyond the flattened spatiality of postmodern readings of American monumentality such as are encountered in, for example, Fredric Jameson and Jean Baudrillard. (See Jameson’s notion of the ‘cognitive mapping’ of postmodern space 175–76, and Baudrillard’s descriptions of America as ‘utopia achieved’ in his America 75–125.) Therefore, Graham and Jarnot question the ethical reach of lyric itself, and that such questioning takes place as part of a deconstruction of assumptions about the ideological and cultural ‘depthlessness’ of contemporary America. As this essay will demonstrate, both of these poets can be seen to be seeking to formulate a poetics of ecological responsibility or, put another way, of proper beingin-the-world. Operating through poetic matrices of the spatial, then, both Graham and Jarnot offer ways of reading America and its poetic mythologies as a continual process of being-beside-oneself. However, while their poetics explores an ecstatic relationship to the (poetic and ideological) environment in which they find themselves, they explicitly avoid the sorts of ‘ecstatic immersion’ in the noumenal that Slavoj Z”iz“ek claims hamstrings

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recent ecological thought (306). In fact just such an ‘ecstatic immersion’ is precisely that which characterizes Emerson’s definition of America as a poem, and which Whitman follows in describing the ‘United States’ as ‘the greatest poem’ (Whitman 741). Graham and Jarnot employ tropes of space in order to open up lyric subjectivity to examination and thereby to explicitly write against, or de-mythologize, the masculinist romance of the land implied not only by Whitman’s poetic project but by the very idea of an American poetics. Although Jarnot’s confrontation with the legacy of Whitman is less explicitly staged than Graham’s, it is nevertheless one through which she negotiates her position as an American poet. I want to turn to this negotiation first in order to begin an examination of how Jarnot and Graham, as twenty-first century poets, respond to Whitman’s poetic mythologization of America. Jarnot’s poem ‘Autobiography’ (which appears in Ring of Fire) can be read as a witty reply to Whitman’s poetics of absorptive and all-embracing poetic and democratic union. In fact, both Jarnot and Whitman seem at pains to investigate the limits and possibilities of poetic subjectivity in America. But the consequences of such an investigation are, I would argue, markedly different for Whitman and Jarnot. In the case of Whitman, we see that his lyric agency is bound by a rhetoric of democratic expansiveness that reaches over and across the United States itself. As his poetic voice ‘incarnates its [America’s] geography’ (742) it ends up by mythologizing its own absorption into the overarching idea of America as a poem. Not only, he states in the ‘Preface’ to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, are the ‘United States … essentially the greatest poem’ (741) but because of this, the ‘American poet is to be transcendent and new … High up out of reach he stands turning a concentrated light’ (744–45). Despite such heights of poetic ecstasy, Whitman’s American bard becomes immersed in America’s mythologization of itself as an exceptional ‘nation of nations’ (741): ‘The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it’ (762). Whitman sets in place here a model of how American poetic mythologies might be seen to operate throughout his actual poetry. In, for example, ‘Song of Myself’, the poetic persona speaks as ‘one of the roughs’ (698), thus answering Emerson’s call for a representative American poet, a ‘bard’ of democracy. However, throughout this poem, his lyric selfhood is continually subsumed under a higher power of American ideals: I celebrate myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you (675)

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Despite their swagger, these opening lines of ‘Song of Myself’ indicate a nervy sense of ecstatic subjectivity. The image of one person passing into another is conditioned by the word ‘assume’ in which a rhetoric of transcendence (as in ‘the assumption into heaven’) is present, though masked. At the point Whitman asserts his poetic selfhood, that very selfhood is surrendered to the overarching power of the idea of the American poem. Whitman’s poetic voice, that is, transcends the actual geography it seeks to incarnate. Jarnot’s ‘Autobiography’ writes against – or through, perhaps – the vertical patterns that condition Whitman’s lyric agency. Strikingly, in the poem’s first stanza, the autobiographical speaking subject tracks a series of ‘horizontal’ interpersonal relationships. Even as each line spreads into the subsequent one, the promiscuously formulaic substitution of letters for individuals’ names sees a spreading web of connections across the poetic field. As an autobiographical narrative, the poem denies the sorts of emotional depth usually ascribed to such a form. Any sense of ‘real’ lives being rehearsed is curtailed by the poem’s attention to the dazzling interconnections of its surface ciphers. It supplies one kind of poetic reply to Whitman’s interpenetrative poetics of America. I didn’t sleep with anyone for six months until I met X. While I was sleeping with Y I also slept with Y’s girlfriend. While I was sleeping with Y’s girlfriend I also slept with S and T. During the six months between sleeping with Y and sleeping with X I spent a lot of time with K. I never slept with K but J slept with K and Y’s girlfriend and also with S. After leaving Y and before meeting X I didn’t sleep with anyone for six months. (14)

Here, Jarnot’s lyric agency stands curiously beside itself. Her interest is in the interrelationships set up by the poem’s speaking subject rather than any recording of emotional or ethical trauma of the individual. The sort of poetic circling that faces us here allows Jarnot to expose, in the following stanza, the grounds upon which a usual poetic singing of oneself can be seen to rest. Literally, her striking image of ‘plate glass’ makes transparent the very geographic foundations upon which a poetics of personal and national identity rest. By doing this she seeks to re-locate the politics of the human (with all its personal aspirations) within an account of the vast and circling universe of space that surrounds us. Jarnot’s poem of America, her autobiographical singing of herself, necessarily incarnates its geography by throwing poetic attention back upon the formation of the very earth we occupy as poetic subjects.

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Nick Selby Anomalous circus events take the shape of mandible density in the great outer planets. Newly created seafloors at the ridges of divergent plate boundaries and adjacent plates are moved apart to make room for divergent plate glass boundaries in the seafloor at the ridges of the seafloor. When I was twelve I made out with my cousin on the 4th of July. At the ridges of the seafloor and adjacent plates are seafloor fauna moved apart on seafloors for the plates of glass divided by adjacent plates of seafloors moved apart. (14)

Far from resting on solid ground, Jarnot’s ‘Autobiography’ asserts that the earth, and thus our poetic occupation of it, is continually moving. Indeed, the incremental drift of the earth’s geological structure is matched by the poem’s own sense of linguistic drift, the ‘syntax of repetition and revision’ that Jeremy Noel-Tod has described as a characteristic of her poetics (106). This movement, in turn, matches the sense of everchanging proximity and distance in our relations to one another and to the world our poems describe. While one’s cousin has a superficial family connection to you, they are also distant, different. But – Jarnot implies – if humans drift apart, so do continents and planets. Because ‘fauna’ have been ‘moved apart on seafloors’, difference and variation of species have come about. Although the 4th of July resonates with local meaning, its resonances are felt here to be relative, and partial. What Jarnot seems to want to make clear in ‘Autobiography’ is that the poetic mode, lyric itself, cannot occupy a specially privileged (or transcendent) position in our relationship to the world. It, too, is subject to drift, revision, to the distances we inhabit. Like the human, it stands adjacently, at the edges of things, tracing their boundaries and tracking their movement apart. In this sense Jarnot’s poetics clearly raises ethical questions about the space inhabited by the human as she asks us to see through the myths that normally ground us by describing us as at the centre of the perceptual universe. Another of the poems in Ring of Fire, ‘Right View’, reinforces this concept by its repeated use of the word ‘human’ as a moderating adjective. In this poem, among many other examples, we encounter a ‘human moth’, a ‘human city’, ‘human cars’ and ‘human confusion’ (86). Jarnot’s poem demonstrates that although the world might be seen to be transformed through human agency, no special status is thus conferred upon our relationship to the world. Indeed, the poem argues that to be human (and thus, presumably, to have lyric agency) merely means that we read the world from a human perspective:

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Mythologies of ‘Ecstatic immersion’ The human animal that I am is the human animal that I am the view that I have is of the human animal that I am in the human room (86)

Any ‘Right View’ of the world is conditioned, Jarnot asserts, by the very space – the ‘human room’ – we inhabit poetically. By questioning the ethical position we occupy as lyric subjects, both Jarnot and Graham meditate upon poetic responsibility, on the role of the (woman) poet within the structures of power that underpin American mythologies. Their poetry does this, as we have already seen in the examples from Jarnot, by casting its attention upon the very dissolving frontiers of its lyrical engagement with the world. It questions how America might be read as a poem and suggests that its dazzling geographies may blind us to the actual environment it traverses. In fact, the ethical challenge of Graham’s and Jarnot’s poetry is that it reads beneath (even across) those structures of power that have determined America’s relations to the world around us. The lyric poem is ethical, their work makes apparent, because it can enact ecological ways of reading. And such ways of reading disrupt American patterns of mythologizing figure and ground. Both Jarnot and Graham see themselves (perhaps like Elizabeth Bishop) as women poets who are ‘running alongside’ the mainstream of American poetics. Many of the poems in their recent collections are set in liminal spaces: beside rivers, estuaries, seashores, sidewalks, roads, at the edges of things. These are poets who look to (and at) limits and horizons and whose work is fascinated by how the poem is a point of crossing between real and imaginary spaces. This fascination is precisely that which allows Graham’s and Jarnot’s poetics to reconsider the ethics of lyric. Through a deliberate attention to the difficulties of their poetic surfaces – of how they might be seen to reflect the ‘real’– Graham and Jarnot uncover a strategy for getting underneath the idea of an American poetics. As I have already suggested, this process can be seen in their respective responses to Whitman, and in the ways in which they re-write, and thus write against, Whitman’s romance of America as the greatest poem (which, of course, he took from Emerson). Through their reconsideration of Whitman’s legacy upon their own poetic practices both Jarnot and Graham make clear their express concern with structures of power in America and with how these structures are played out in spatial metaphors. What seems to differentiate Graham’s and Jarnot’s poetic use

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of such imagery of space from that of Whitman is their postmodern awareness, and consequent suspicion, of the very metaphoricity of such models themselves. They make apparent the ‘ideological trap’ (as Z”iz“ek has termed it in his critique of theories of ‘deep ecology’) in which the real merely ‘stands in’ for ‘another, “deeper” reality which provides the proper ontological foundation of our universe’ (Z”iz“ek 309). The work of Graham and Jarnot questions the gap between America and its mythologization, between the poem and the idea of the poem, and by doing so it seeks a lyric means of refusing to fall into such an ideological trap. For Jarnot, this sort of poetic refusal, along with the ethical repositioning it implies, leads to poems concerned with their own play of subjectivity. Throughout Ring of Fire her lyric self is continually beside itself, fascinated indeed by the edges between things and words and actions in the world and in the poem. Repeatedly her poems enact the sorts of metamorphoses of one identity into another that we have seen already in ‘Autobiography’ and ‘Right View’. Hers is a poetry of nervy edginess and deft humour, whose lyric transformations resist the assumptions of Whitman’s poetic self, and trace instead the slippery surfaces of American selfhood, the disguises it assumes and the mythologies of power it attempts to hide. As she notes in the poem ‘The Bridge’ O rattling frame where I am, I am where there are still these assignments in the night … That I wrote the history of the war waged between the Peloponnesians and the south, that I like to run through shopping malls, that I’ve also learned to draw, having been driven here, like the rain is driven into things, into the ground, beside the broken barns, by the railroad tracks, beside the sea. I, Thucydides, having written this, having grown up near the ocean. (6)

Jarnot’s rattling of frames provides an interesting metaphor for the deconstructive processes of hers and Graham’s poetics. If American mythologies of the poetic and of the land provide the frame within which Jarnot is writing, then her poetry tests the power of such structures. The process of figuration – of ‘learn[ing] to draw’ – which might itself figure the process of turning the world of ‘shopping malls’ into that of the poem, exposes the underlying structures – or frames – that are driven into the ground we inhabit – ‘like rain is driven into things’. Poetically driven, we witness the rattling frames of ‘broken barns’ and ‘railroad tracks’ as they dissolve into the writing of history, ‘beside the sea’. This setting is important. Many of the poems in Jarnot’s and Graham’s recent collections take place on the seashore. As the frontier between

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land and sea such a setting allows for a consideration of the relationship between figure and ground, poem and land. Its ‘beside-ness’ exposes the ways in which the political is enmeshed within the lyrical. This relationship can be seen in the example above, not only because of the reference to Thucydides and his writing (while banished from his native Athens) of the history of the Peloponnesian wars, but also in the partially submerged reference to Robert Lowell’s Near the Ocean, a collection in which – famously – Lowell frets about the political climate of the Cold War in America via his use of confessional lyric. In contrast, Jarnot’s rattling of frames destabilizes the sort of curiously assured frames, or myths, of poetic power from within which Lowell was writing. I want to turn now to the work of Jorie Graham, and to the ways in which her two most recent collections have sought to articulate a position from underneath structures – frames – of power in order to develop an ethical poetics, one of response to, and responsibility towards, the ground (whether real or mythological) that we inhabit. Like Jarnot, Graham’s sense of ethical responsibility begins with acts of reading, of making poetic, the world. Indeed, central to Graham’s recent poetry has been her attempt to challenge conventional ways of reading. She has noted, in an interview with Thomas Gardner, that poems with ‘a resistant or partially occluded surface compel us to read with a different part of our sensibility … [they] frustrate frontal vision long enough to compel the awakening of the rest of the reading sensibility – intuition, the body’ (Gardner, Interview 84). Graham’s poetics of the body allows her to get underneath masculinity, and by doing so it allows her to write against what she describes as the ‘ending-dependence’, the teleological imperative, that lies underneath Western, Enlightenment rationality (see Gardner, Interview 84). Just fewer than half the poems in Swarm are entitled ‘Underneath’, and these poems all suggest voices seeking the light from a position buried underground. Whether this be a compound figure of Persephone and Eurydice returning from the underworld in ‘Underneath (Upland)’ who says ‘light swinging in the right hand of this me the follower / trying to overhear the low secret though not too hard / light touching everything/grace and slenderness of its touching’ (17); or the punning Sybil, burning pages of the book, who says ‘Look you have to lift the match to it again / because this syllable is still intact’ in ‘Underneath (Sybilline)’ (25); or even Eurydice again, returning into the light of the book ‘held up in the sun by your hands of dirt / which look from this distance like hands of fire / gripping their page yet not consuming it’ in ‘Underneath (Eurydice)’ (74); these figures are the textual and mythological remains that can be seen haunting the sequence. They are, of

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course, all women abused or deserted by men. Their poetic return into the light signals the return of the (lyric) repressed into the male – monumental and mythologized – realm of the American poem. Because Swarm demands to be read as a sequence – and because this produces a complex and shifting deconstructive play among textual and mythological remains – it can come to register the abject status of a woman’s poetic voice within American literary history. And, by extension, the sequence explores the abject status of the body in relation to those male powers that – in the words of Swarm’s jacket blurb – ‘human beings feel themselves to be “underneath”: God, matter, law, custom, the force of love’. Most strikingly, especially in terms of related imagery of books, bodies and the idea of the American Poet, this exploration takes place in relation to Whitman. Swarm, I want to argue, deliberately sets out to test its opaque or ‘partially occluded’ textual surface against Whitman’s poetic claims to transparency, that he is America’s ‘bard’ ‘undraped’ (Whitman 681). Graham’s poetics – in its struggle to compel a new reading sensibility – implies a womanly reading against the whole Emersonian romance of the American prophet-poet, and the Kantian metaphysics in which it is grounded. A claim to poetic transparency such as Whitman’s can be seen to result from the sort of poetics of ‘ecstatic immersion’ that Z”iz“ek critiques, which claims that a poet-seer stands in a special relationship to the world, on the threshold of ‘direct insight into the noumenal Thing’ (Z”iz“ek 306). Such a position, according to Z”iz“ek, ‘would deprive us of the very freedom which makes us ethical agents’ (306). Graham’s is a different ethical and poetic position: the occlusions of her poetic surface both signify and enact her ethical agency as a lyric poet. This distinction means that if Whitman’s project implies a monumentalizing of the book as body and the poet as mythic figure, then Graham seeks to disrupt that by considering how it is that the poem touches reality. Whitman’s conception of the poem (and thus of America as the ‘greatest poem’) implies a transcendent ecstasy, a being-beside-oneself that mythologizes America’s poetic subjectivity; in contrast, Graham’s poetics seeks an ethical agency in the very fact of being beside oneself and of examining this in textual terms. So, whereas Whitman’s poetic subjectivity gives itself up even as it approaches the threshold of the noumenal, Graham sees her lyric agency enacted at the horizon of language itself. It cannot, that is, be divorced from its textual effects. This difference can be seen by comparing Graham’s difficult reaching out to the world in Swarm and Never with the following famous passage from Whitman in which he sees himself turned into an archetypal poet for America. Tenderly and

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achingly, Whitman imagines himself, in future times, emerging from the pages of his book into the embrace of his readers: My songs cease, I abandon them, From behind the screen where I hid I advance personally solely to you. Camarado, this is no book, Who touches this touches a man, (Is it night? are we here together alone?) It is I you hold and who holds you, I spring from the pages into your arms – decease calls me forth. (513)

Despite this passage being undoubtedly moving, and powerful because of it, Swarm and Never seek to suspend such a poetics of touch. For Graham, Whitman’s image of the poetry book – as that which allows you to touch his body as you touch its pages – seems complicit in a coercive poetic gesture. Such a gesture is one that Graham comes to associate with a particularly American set of mythologies of power. Despite – maybe because of – Whitman’s claim to ‘advance personally’ from ‘behind the screen’ of poetic subjectivity into corporeal identity, Swarm is suspicious of Whitman’s poetic touch, and seems to suggest that its manly embrace is a veil under which women’s poetic voices are silenced. And, in Never, as we shall see in more detail later, such ecstasies are not sufficient to a world in ecological crisis. In effect they suspend attention to the world at hand – properly the space of the poem – and substitute it with an ecstatic reality by which our attending to the world is ‘forced into retreat’ (‘The Complex Mechanism of the Break’, Never 34). By throwing attention on to its own resistant poetic surface – its scattered pages themselves like veils – Swarm attempts to unveil the coercive maleness that underpins Whitman’s gesture of holding on to lyric subjectivity, his desire to be touched as a ‘man’. In fact, the imagery of rape and sexual coercion that haunts the voices of those women who, throughout Swarm, are depicted as ‘underneath’, returns repeatedly to questions of touch. Is this a loving touch, Graham asks of the American poem. And in the insistently repeated imagery of touch and subjugation that runs through the sequence, she expects a different answer from that of Whitman. Here women are subject to an apparently violent poetic touch, one that strangles their voice: ‘lays his hand / onto her throat’; ‘my eyes – / (the only part of me / not yet held down / by you) … / your hand over my / mouth’; ‘a map of held back hands, gripped wrists’; ‘Have you not also let His hand stray / onto your throat?’ (these quotations are from the following poems in Swarm: ‘Two Days (5/2/97–5/3/97)’ 51, ‘Underneath (1)’ 62, ‘Probity’ 98, and ‘Eurydice

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on History’ 107–08). Indeed, then, Graham’s strangled and scattered text, with its buried voices speaking from underneath, asks us to reformulate Whitman’s poetics as a question about what we do touch when we touch a poem, when a poem touches us. Under what law of the poem, she asks, does the female American poet lie? ‘Underneath (9)’ provides a slightly more extended example of Graham’s attempt to raise questions about the poetic position of women in America. This poem follows Persephone out of the underworld and through the annual cycle of the four seasons that her myth portrays. Susan Gubar has noted that Persephone is ‘the central mythic figure for women’ (Gilbert and Gubar 302) and this poem, the third in the sequence, introduces her as Swarm’s central mythic figure, thereby denoting Swarm’s troubled articulation of a woman’s poetic voice. Persephone’s experience of being buried in the soil and buried in a text (‘like a right quotation’) in this poem resonates powerfully against Whitman’s sense of the book as the body from which he looks up at his reader, his designation of us as the ‘Listener up there’ at the end of ‘Song of Myself’ (Whitman 737): blurry, my love, like a right quotation, wanting so to sink back down, you washing me in soil now, my shoulders dust, my rippling dust, Look I’ll scrub the dirt

listen.

Up here how will I (not) hold you. Where is the dirt packed in again around us

between us

obliterating difference (Swarm 10)

The address to ‘my love’ here (which is echoed by the sequence’s frequent address to a ‘Beloved’) is marked by a wariness towards the ‘blurry’ ‘obliterating [of] difference’ that Whitman’s interpenetrative poetics of Democratic camaraderie might be seen to espouse. Persephone’s abjection, in which her body and her desires ‘sink back down’ into the soil, is in marked contrast to Whitman’s ‘I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love’, which expresses his poetic hope for America’s democratic union (Whitman 737). Graham’s image of Persephone, marked as it is by woman’s traditional domestic duties of washing and scrubbing, is a far cry from the leaning and loafing of Whitman’s poetic persona. Near the end of ‘Underneath (13)’ Graham’s methodology of poetic re-formation that she announces at the start of the sequence (‘have

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reduced, have trimmed, have cleared, have omitted’) is played out in relation to Whitman’s ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’. Again, Whitman’s rhetoric of poetic enlightenment (‘the fine centrifugal spokes of light round the shape of my head in the sunlit water’ (Whitman 191)) is severely undercut by Graham’s terse imagery of a silenced poetic voice: ‘hand over mouth / let light arrive’ (Swarm 104). If Whitman’s poem celebrates the ability of poetry to bring together poet and reader though centuries apart, Graham is worried by the ways in which that celebratory rhetoric actually veils the body, the self and one’s tongue (especially as a woman). ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ declares, ‘It avails not, time nor place – distance avails not’ because it assumes that the poem is incorruptible, a textual body sustained by a shared corporeal experience: ‘I too had receiv’d identity of my body, / That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I knew that I should be of my body’ (Whitman 191, 193). With its poetic behaviour of textual scattering, however, Swarm seeks to unveil this assumption. ‘Underneath (13)’ marks the ‘impassable gap’ between poem and self, voice and text, precisely that ‘distance’ which Whitman’s ‘It avails not’ seeks to draw a veil – a page of the American Poem – over. It is thus a poem in which Graham, returning to the question asked in the opening poem of Swarm ‘to what avail’, sees her poetic body as scattered, edited, silenced and beside itself. Effectively, Graham is countering Whitman’s mythology of his continuing poetic presence through the sense of playful textuality that we encounter on the very first page of Swarm. From the outset of Swarm, therefore, Graham’s poetic embrace is one of lyric deferral. Her announcement at the start of this poem – ‘I have reduced all to lower case. / I have crossed out passages. / I have severely trimmed and cleared’ (3) – is a declaration of the principle of textual scattering that underpins the sequence. What, in effect, this technique presents us with are loose leaves, textual and bodily ‘remains’. Turn the page back again, the poem demands: the explanation is buried in the scattered remains turned up here. Indeed, much of the poetic pressure of the sequence lies in its interrupted sequentiality, in our physical act of turning back pages to locate phrases, themes, images repeated (or ‘trimmed and cleared’) from earlier in the book. It unstitches, that is, the pages of Whitman’s poetic fantasy of America that who touches his book touches a man: where does it say where does it say this is the mother tongue

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Nick Selby there is in my mouth a ladder climb down presence of world impassable gap pass I am beside myself you are inside me as history We exist Meet me (Swarm 105)

Such a poetics of turning back, and meeting across space, a being-besideoneself implies a poetics of crossing that is at once situated between things and fascinated by the ethics of that position. What we encounter in Graham’s next collection, Never, is a further interrogation of this position. Once more Graham investigates such a fascination through a rhetoric of space and its poetic inhabitation. Imagery of heights, depths and surfaces, and the power structures this implies, are continually played off in these poems against settings that look alongside, or across surfaces, or that take place on shorelines between land and sea, or that reach poetically towards horizons. In Never Graham continues to question her own relationship to the very idea of the American Poem and – as we can also see with Jarnot – she significantly questions the relationship, and meaning, of national to bodily spaces within American ideology. Her poetics registers an abject subjectivity, a sense of selfhood as a precarious ‘representational space’, one that – like America itself, with its precarious balance of unity in diversity – is always threatening to collapse into something other, another poem, another mythologization of American space, something beside itself. In fact, Never is profoundly troubled by this notion of how, poetically, one thing crosses into another. As well as a lyrical exposing of the metaphorical condition of our relationship to the object world, the ethics of responsibility that this troubled consideration opens up is one that reflects upon current environmental fears. Never takes place at various crossing points between the world as object and the world as poem, between the senses of self and other, of nature and the human. And its concern with environmental destruction, ‘ecocide’ as Graham describes it (111), is reflected in its continual return to evolutionary theory, to questions of how we inhabit time, and to the figure of Darwin. These concerns are announced in the first of two poems in the book entitled ‘Evolution’. Graham was commissioned to write this poem by

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the New York Times in response to a questionnaire of New Yorkers’ feelings about the millennium, and she takes the occasion to meditate on the interweaving of personal, poetic and evolutionary times. Like Darwin’s On The Origin of Species (which provides one of the textual backgrounds for this poem, indeed for the whole of Never), Graham is concerned to address the question of first causes, Darwin’s ‘mystery of mysteries’ (Darwin, Norton 95). The poem introduces a voice, ‘breathing beside me’ that whispers ‘firstness is not … a characteristic of experience’ (23). This leads the poet to attend more closely to the actual world, feelingly. The voice, we are told, … speaks of the long chain back to the beginning of “the world” (as he calls it) and then, at last to the great no beginning. I feel the no begin. Subsequence hums tinily all around me, erasing my tracks. (23–24)

Obliterations such as the poet’s erased tracks, the ‘no beginning’, and the diminished sense of evolutionary subsequence provide, here, the ethical grounds for a poetic act that seeks to reconstitute ‘the world’ through the necessity of close listening. The poem’s besideness – the lyric place it occupies – thus becomes its mode of ecstatic immersion in the world. In terms of such poetic being-beside-oneself, the poem’s seashore setting is, of course, appropriate. Clearly, too, this setting is appropriate to its investigation of Darwin’s evolutionary theory. But while the poem’s fluidity mirrors the continual metamorphic pressures of change that it describes, it also provides an image of the continual flow of time in the flux and reflux of waves breaking on the shoreline. Interestingly, the continual undercurrent of imagery of space and our poetic inhabitation of it means that the poem folds time back into place – ‘subsequence’, an effect of continual evolutionary change, does indeed ‘hum … all round’. Such an apprehension of time as never static is seen, therefore, as an effect of place upon the poet’s touch: The seagulls hurrying, dragging and retrieving. Also pecking in place and dropping and lifting. Sometimes stepping backwards in order to drag and loosen. Also the drag of the slantline

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Nick Selby downtilted towards ocean’s sucking further still of streams of water towards itself. Of course the future wasn’t there before at all. This all first time and then again first time. I feel reproach. Eyes closed I touch my face. (23)

The poem feels its own drag, here, in the flux of the place that it describes. Such a sense of being tilted downwards and of stepping backwards makes apparent the pull of the poem’s own ‘dragging and retrieving’. And this motion, in turn, rises out of the (ethical) force of its responsibility to the perceptual environment it engages, faces up to. In the poem’s closing moments that force is envisioned as a lyrical one, as the compulsion to song. The ‘drag’ of evolution towards this point, and the poem’s ‘drag’, its compulsion backwards and downwards towards origins, make necessary a poetics of response (and ecological responsibility). But if Graham revisits, here, an archetypal place in American poetry – this passage hums tinily with retrieved echoes of Whitman’s ‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking’ and Stevens’s ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’ – its compulsion into lyric results from an ethical compulsion that is borne on the back of an apprehension of imminent ecological disaster. While, we are told in the final line, song is necessary, demanded of us even, its consequence is disagreement. Lyric, that is, seems to enact another of the poem’s obliterations. But the poem’s sense of its lyrical obligations counters this effect. Rather than the dead measure of linear consequence that haunts both the iambics of the final line and evolutionary theory, the poem’s lyric mode is, finally, an attempted singing of multiplicity, of the many-layered ‘deepenings and coverings’ wherein the drag of the poem’s song, its ‘running through’ the environment of its attention, leads it to ‘rip in unison’: What good is my silence for, what would it hold inside, keeping it free? Sing says the folding water on stiller water— one running through where the other’s breaking. Sing me something (the sound of the low wave-breaking) (the tuning-down where it deposits life-matter on

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Mythologies of ‘Ecstatic immersion’ the uphill of shore)(also the multiplicity of deepenings and coverings where whiteness rises as a manyness) (as the wave breaks over its own breaking) (to rip in unison) (onto its backslide)— of something sing, and singing, disagree. (25)

That Graham’s senses of environmental crisis and lyrical force parallel one another is made clear in her note to this poem. She writes that An additional fact, which reached me while I was writing this poem, struck me: during the 1850s, while Darwin was concludingOn the Origin of Species, the rate of extinction [of species] is believed to have been one every five years. Today, the rate of extinction is estimated at one every nine minutes. Throughout the writing of this book, I was haunted by the sensation of that nine-minute span – which might amount to the time it takes to read any poem here before you. My sense of that time frame … inhabits, as well as structures, the book. It is written up against the sensation of what is now called ‘ecocide.’ (111)

Even here, Graham – again – envisages the ethical force of lyric in terms of its alongsideness. For she describes the poems in the book as having been written ‘up against’ her sensation of ecological catastrophe. Indeed, by making explicit the influence of the ‘World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity’ upon her writing of this poem, Graham locates her poetic concerns squarely alongside the call in that document for a ‘new ethic’ that involves ‘a new attitude towards discharging our responsibility for caring for ourselves and for the earth’ (‘World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity’ 4). However, the ethical force of Graham’s lyric attention has implications that significantly trouble her throughout Never. Not only do these poems call into question the whole role of her lyrical interventions into the world, but they also challenge notions of selfhood, identity and individuation, of the rule of metaphor in our understanding (and mythologization of the world), and ultimately they lead her to speculate upon America’s apparently superior cultural position in the world. These concerns are embedded in the use of spatial metaphors throughout Never. Continually Graham’s sense of lyric participation stems from her asking the question ‘where?’ Indeed, the book’s title expresses the impossibility of capturing, poetically, the specificities of a particular time and place. The terse ending of the book’s opening poem (one of several entitled ‘Prayer’) states, simply, ‘Here: never’ (3). Like many others

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in the book, this is a poem that sees the poet drawn – dragged even – into a deeper participation with the poetic place it describes. Yet, as we can see at the start of the book, the impossibility of that participation is also marked. From a superior position Graham’s poem watches, but cannot become part of, the ‘unison’ of the fish it describes: Over a dock railing, I watch the minnows, thousands, swirl themselves, each a minuscule muscle, but also, without the way to create current, making of their unison (turning, reinfolding, entering and exiting their own unison in unison) (3)

Such figures of poetry’s distance from and participation in the world as creative act, of being at the edge of sea and land to witness a continual process of ‘turning and re-infolding’, are repeated throughout Never. Indeed, the figure of one wave unfurling and breaking over and into another is perhaps the controlling metaphor of the book. In ‘The Complex Mechanism of the Break’, for example, Graham writes a poem that examines in minuscule detail waves breaking on the shoreline. The force of the waves, and the poem’s ethical force, is infolded at the point of Graham’s poetic exploration of her immediate environment. The poem asks us to consider the relationship between external and internal worlds by speculating upon the powerful drag that metaphor exerts on our apprehension of the world. It suggests, even, that between the world and our thought of the world falls the shadow of our desire to control that world. The poem, that is, metaphorizes the condition of ‘responsibility for caring for ourselves and for the earth’ that underlies the call by concerned scientists for a new ecological ethics and which played on Graham’s mind throughout the writing of Never. Our ethical position as spectators is always one of between-ness, ‘the sound of distance in itself’ (35), the sense of the poem as a force against otherness even as it describes the breaking waves: the only momentarily unbreaking line. And how there is always something else. Up close four different brown retreating furls just now (being forced to forward-break) reentering themselves. Each tripping over each as they are also forced into retreat. What is force? My love is forced from me as in retreat

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Mythologies of ‘Ecstatic immersion’ from love. My gaze is forced back into me as it retreats from thought. (34)

As with the minnows in ‘Prayer,’ this sense of there always being ‘something else’ raises questions of individuation and differentiation, of unity and difference. Not only, then, does the wave imagery allow Graham to examine the (lyric) force that propels wave and particle, and her sense of history and her place within it, it also raises crucial questions about the very metaphorical bases of recent ecological thought. Of course Darwin himself was both drawn towards and deeply suspicious of metaphor, the ‘force of analogy’, as the basis of his deductive reasoning in developing his theories of natural selection, and evolution. Towards the close of On the Origin of Species he notes that metaphorical thought might allow him to derive a unified theory of natural origins were it not for the fact that ‘analogy may be a deceitful guide’ (Darwin, Origin 484). For Graham, too, the rule of metaphor is problematic. In the poem ‘Exit Wound’ Darwin’s inability to provide a ‘unitary theory’ is juxtaposed with her own troubled questioning of how metaphors of space determine our understanding of ‘environment’: ‘what is “the lowest,” where ends “environment,” / “he was therefore unable to provide a unitary theory of evolution”’ (52). Elsewhere in Never metaphor is felt to be that which intercedes between the world and our perception of it. ‘Dusk Shore Prayer’ and ‘Hunger’ are both troubled by their poetic approach to the real, which is felt to inhere ‘not in metaphor’ (31) and in ‘A truth not a symbol’ (43). While such passages expose the problematic linguistic nature of our (poetic) relations to the environment (with metaphor itself a trope of how language turns the real into the textual), metaphor also provides Graham with a radical position of poetic in-betweenness. It allows her to occupy an ethically responsible position as a lyric subject. Slightly later on from the passage just quoted in ‘Exit Wound’ it provides ‘inner feeling up against living force’ (52). Here, Graham’s examination of a poetics of being-beside-oneself recalls and questions French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s figuring of the chiasm as the ground of his phenomenological project. In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty sees the chiasm as a crossing between subject and object, self and other, and it is conceived of as an intersection or a ‘folding-back’ of opposites into one another. Rather than our experiencing of the world marking us off as separate from that world, Merleau-Ponty asserts that it renders us intimate with it. This idea has been claimed by ‘Deep Ecologists’ as a means of breaking from the dualistic us-and-them oppositions of Western (Cartesian)

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thought, by providing a mode of phenomenological engagement with the world in which we are not automatically estranged from that world through our act of perception. As Monika Langer has argued, Merleau-Ponty’s new ontology enables us to see more clearly why there can be no question of any dichotomy between ‘nature’ and ‘culture,’ nor any conception of ‘environment’ in the traditional sense. The deepened comprehension that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy articulates thus puts us on the path to resolving that ‘environmental crisis’ that we are as long as we cling to our old ontology. (129)

Interestingly (in terms of the location of so many of the poems in Never and – as we shall see later – Jarnot’s poem ‘Sea Lyrics’) the seashore provides, metaphorically, the setting for Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the intertwining ‘“implication” and enfoldment’ within the visual that the chiasm represents (in the chapter ‘The Intertwining – The Chiasm’ 130–55; see also Woods 206). He writes that ‘It is as though our vision were formed in the heart of the visible, or as though there were between it and us an intimacy as close as between the sea and the strand’ (130). But despite the similarities between Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological and Graham’s poetic concerns with the environment as perception, Graham is wary of Merleau-Ponty’s thought. Though superficially the poetics of Never – especially its dominant imagery of overlapping waves and interstitial spaces – might seem to arise from Merleau-Ponty’s model of interweaving, reciprocating realities of seer and the seen, its lyrical procedures also draw attention to the very metaphoricity of such models. In particular Graham remains suspicious of the imagery of depth, and the rhetoric of corporeal space, that MerleauPonty adopts. Where Merleau-Ponty writes, ‘The superficial pellicle of the visible is only for my vision and for my body. But the depth beneath this surface contains my body and hence my vision’ (138), Graham seeks to make explicit the metaphorical ground upon which this figuring of the body in space rests. Indeed, such metaphors abound in descriptions of the environment, of nature ‘out there’. As well as determining the description of Merleau-Ponty’s contribution to a ‘deepened comprehension’ of environment, even the very idea of Deep Ecology, it is in another metaphor of space – horizontality – that Merleau-Ponty describes the apparent facticity of nature: ‘Nature … stands at the horizon of our thought as a fact which there can be no question of deducing’ (quoted in Langer 125). By drawing poetic attention to the deployment of such spatial rhetoric, Graham is also developing her sense of what might constitute an ecological poetics. I am suggesting, then, that Graham’s lyric technique of placing

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things alongside each other, often signified by proliferating brackets, and through which she seeks to describe an environment of simultaneous events and perceptual positions, without necessarily privileging one view over another, signals her struggle to adopt a new environmental ethics. While poetic and perceptual environments are thus experienced as a web of connections, her lyrical attending to the world never loses sight of the fact that the horizon we gaze upon is always that of language. (Perhaps, by analogy, this web even resembles Darwin’s theory of the ‘branching’ of species over time, and his diagram of this on p. 128 of the Norton Critical Edition of Darwin from which Graham quotes in Never.) This awareness is seen in the poem ‘Solitude’, which folds together quotations from Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species in order to question the very grounds of self and other, lyric subject and poetic object, upon which our mythologies of ‘nature’ might be seen to rest: [on the same page] the look that kills [my “look”]

[the presence of what is behind my back]

(self-presence which is not an absence from oneself) (the figure on the ground) (it is already the flesh of things that speaks to us of our own flesh, and that speaks to us of the flesh of the other) (68)

A poetics of lyrical engagement of this kind, I think, goes beyond the ‘radical bracketing’ that Monika Langer describes as central to MerleauPonty’s ‘inherently ongoing “dialogue with nature”’ (120) in that it recognizes that such a dialogue, in fact, figures the irreducible nature of our dialogue with language itself (we read ‘on the same page’ ‘the figure on the ground’). Before drawing to a conclusion by returning (briefly) to Jarnot’s Ring of Fire, it should be pointed out that Graham’s sense of the ethics of lyric, which is an ecological sense, seems ultimately to draw closer to Z”iz“ek’s critique of Deep Ecology than it does to Merleau-Ponty. Once more this viewpoint inheres in a spatial metaphor that has dominated Never, that of looking out and across one’s environment. For Merleau-Ponty, nature remains, in the final analysis, a mysterious ‘other’ that ‘stands at the horizon of our thought’. For Z”iz“ek (and for Graham) such a formulation is suspect precisely because its metaphorical nature remains unrecognized. As such, according to Z”iz“ek, nature remains mysterious to us, known

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only through an ‘ecstatic immersion’ within it that curtails our ethical agency. What Graham and Z”iz“ek recognize is that such an ecstatic horizon is ‘the horizon of language itself’ (Z”iz“ek 319). And for Graham, such a recognition allows her to get underneath those metaphorical structures which have determined America’s mythologization of itself. Never ends with another image of the sort of force that compels the poet into utterance. The horizon that Graham’s American poetics faces is that of nature and of language, and Never recognizes that such a formulation of ever-expanding poetic space is grounded in America’s mythologization of the Frontier. If Frederick Jackson Turner’s description of the frontier as ‘the line of most rapid and effective Americanization’ (3–4) sets in place a crucial American mythology, then the closing lines of Never (in the poem ‘Relay Station’) interrogate the ethical and lyrical force of such myth-making: ‘directing everything forward onto shoreline, expectant, never anything but / expectant, / pushed forever from behind.’ (107). The sort of de-mythologizing gesture with which Graham ends this collection is typical of her recent poetry. The force of her lyrical attention lies in her ability to make manifest the processes that propel us expectantly into a deeper reading of the ground we inhabit. What her American poetics tests is how ecologically, economically and culturally America has disfigured its ground, the very land it occupies. And her poetry asserts that this is due to a mythology of abjection, of America’s sense of being-beside-itself, of always pushing rapidly onwards. As she puts it in ‘High Tide’: only here: my self: this holding-of-place: this strict eight feet of sidewalk in America: America: you witch: dreaming always of here from an elsewhere, from a nowhere: I’m looking through a wind that’s like a wall for a proper name: for identification: representation: … the loan: I see its terms (maybe): I see the payable and the unpayable: the open-ended credit: created: equal: look. (104–05)

Lisa Jarnot’s lyric voice enacts a different kind of poetically openended credit. Where Graham’s poetics of enfoldment sees between the layers of American mythologies, Jarnot’s is progressive (an evolutionary ‘branching’ even) as we witness the continual shifts of its speaking subject across a series of positions for its ‘I am’. Jarnot’s is a poetics of the

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metamorphic. The crisply funny poem ‘Dumb Duke Death’ is generated from a series of seemingly chiastic linguistic metamorphoses. It is a poem that explores dark depths of power – the apparent fall from grace of the Duke – through its repeated marking of the phonic and poetic transformation of one word into another. It recognizes, perhaps, that to rattle the frames of power is actually to confront the horizon of language. Jarnot’s poetically progressive play in this poem debunks the progressive mythology of America’s ideological power. As we can see in its opening two stanzas its propulsive force engages radically new poetic frontiers, while it is still conditioned by a rhetoric of the spatial: down dire death day dim dale ding dong dip down dame chase cheap date dance dodge (57–58)

Jarnot attends here, as throughout the whole of Ring of Fire, to the points of slippage between one lyric object and the next, and is fascinated by the process of how the world is continually reformulated through our engagement of it within language. It is in this sense that her poetics explores the ethics of lyric and that it is ecologically aware. And while it demands an ongoing attention to the shifting grounds – both literal and metaphorical – that we occupy, it does so as a means of investigating the very mythological spaces of America in the twenty-first century. Like Graham’s Never, Jarnot’s Ring of Fire seems at some pains to explore its own imagery of space and place. As I have already suggested, this sort of investigation sees Jarnot attempting to unpick those American mythologies that define her as a poet, and that locate her lyrics within a dazzling geography. This aim means that the ever-changing horizons of her lyric gaze come to signal the relationship between the horizons of ‘nature’ and ‘language’ that were discussed earlier in Merleau-Ponty and Z”iz“ek. Her long poem of thirty sections, ‘Sea Lyrics’, develops as a series of half-submerged horizons. In the poem’s epigraph we are told of one such horizon. Quoting the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1768, this epigraph describes California – America’s western horizon, the mythical end-point of its frontier-mythology – as largely unknown: ‘It is uncertain’ we are told ‘whether it be a peninsula or an island.’ Whether of water or of land, Jarnot’s poetics explores such places of lyric

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inbetweenness. ‘Sea Lyrics’ interrogates America itself as a place of ecstatic immersion: I am a partially submerged boat on the waterfront of Jack London Square on a Sunday morning buying jam. I am flesh-colored and pale, in an indian head dress cracking chestnuts and eating roots, in the fissure between the bus lines, with the smell of burnt toast in the can-crushing lot, in the inside-out tomato yards, where I am riding all the bicycles through tunnels to the lawn, where I am on a downtown bus, partially submerged … (25)

Lyric subjectivity is here felt as an affect of place (‘where I am’), a place, moreover, in which the poetic is all but drowning, or ‘partially submerged’. Here we are called to witness the nervously abjected condition of America’s own mythological landscape. For here, in this lyric immersion, a ‘pale face’ wears an ‘indian head dress’, and images of ‘burnt-toast’, the ‘can-crushing lot’ and ‘inside-out tomato yards’ signal the transformation of one thing into another within an ideology of consumerism. But Jarnot’s partial submersion in this American landscape allows her to get beneath and in between these images of the trashy reality of contemporary America. Her lyric also explores the ‘fissure / between the bus lines’ and the ‘tunnels to the / lawn’. The American poem can, for Jarnot, also circumvent the usual modes of being carried across that landscape. Jarnot’s poetics offers here, and throughout Ring of Fire, a means of reading ethically and ecologically beneath America’s edgy engagement with the real and the mythical: ‘I am trying to be calm / and listen for instructions, having crossed the bridge in / all the cars I am and the earth is on edge, I am the / speed we are at when we are underground’ (42). As a lyric examination of what lies beneath America’s dazzling poetic geographies, ‘Sea Lyrics’ provides, therefore, a haunting deconstruction of the ways in which America has always sought to mythologize itself as something other than itself, as an ever-moving frontier, as the land of the free, as the greatest poem: In these tenements, inside this subterranean roadway, upon this stream gone underground, from the top of the hill and the door of the shoe store mid-town, I am dreaming dreams I hardly know are dreams and in the causeway, I am standing under the cracked bannister observing all the parts, I am a subterranean cave dweller clubbing fish, I have seen the light of day with all the roaches, I have hardly noticed all the artificialist lagoons. (39)

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Rather than an ecstatic immersion in the artifice of cultural formations, Jarnot’s and Graham’s lyric projects demand an ethics of responsibility, one that reads beyond and beneath America’s dazzling mythologies and towards the actual ground it occupies.

Works Cited Baudrillard, Jean. America. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso, 1989. Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964. ——. Darwin: A Norton Critical Edition. Ed. Philip Appleman. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 3rd edn, 2001. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Emerson’s Essays. Ed. Sherman Paul. London: J. M. Dent, 1980. Gardner, Thomas. ‘An Interview with Jorie Graham’. Denver Quarterly, XXVI / 4 (spring 1992). Reprinted in Thomas Gardner, Regions of Unlikeness: Explaining Contemporary Poetry. Lincoln, NE, and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999. 232–33. Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1979. Graham, Jorie. Swarm. New York: The Ecco Press, 2000. ——. Never. New York: The Ecco Press, 2002. Jameson, Fredric. ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’. In Modernism / Postmodernism. Ed. Peter Brooker. London and New York: Longman, 1992. 163-79. Jarnot, Lisa. Ring of Fire. 2001. Enlarged Edition. Cambridge: Salt, 2003. Langer, Monika. ‘Merleau-Ponty and Deep Ecology’. In Ontology and Alterity in Merleau-Ponty. Ed. Galen A. Johnson and Michael B. Smith. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1990. 115–29. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Ed. Claude Lefort. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1968. Noel-Tod, Jeremy. ‘“The shiny sounds of crushing lots”: Review of Lisa Jarnot’s Ring of Fire’. Poetry Review 94–2 (summer 2004): 106–07. Turner, Frederick Jackson. ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’. In The Frontier in American History. Ed. Frederick Jackson Turner. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963. 1–38. Union of Concerned Scientists, ‘World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity’. 25 August 2004. <www.ucusa.org>. Whitman, Walt. The Complete Poems. Ed. Francis Murphy. London: Penguin, 1986. Woods, Tim. The Poetics of the Limit: Ethics and Politics in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Z”iz“ek, Slavoj. The Z”iz“ek Reader. Ed. Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999.

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Chapter 11 RoWhose Myth is it Anyway? Coyote in the Poetry of Gary Snyder and Simon J. Ortiz Mark Shackleton

I sit without thoughts by the log-road Hatching a new myth Gary Snyder, “Hunting 1”, first shaman song, Myths and Texts … Indians always tell a story. The only way to continue is to tell a story and that’s what Coyote says Simon J. Ortiz, Preface to A Good Journey All art is a collaboration J. M. Synge, Preface to The Playboy of the Western World

Gary Snyder’s use of Native American myths and legends has been seen as a classic case of appropriation. Geary Hobson points out that the ‘white shaman’ fad among mainstream American poets seems to have begun with Snyder and his ‘Shaman Songs’ sections of Myths and Texts (1960), while Leslie Marmon Silko has advised Snyder to look into the history of his own (white) ancestors in his search for a genuine American identity, rather than borrowing from the myths of Native peoples. This essay will evaluate the arguments made against the mainstream use of Native myth, the so-called ‘appropriation of voice’. In order to provide a focus for this complex question I shall offer a contrastive study of the use of Coyote in the poetry of Gary Snyder and Simon J. Ortiz (Acoma Pueblo). What are the main arguments made by more radical Native spokespersons against the importation of Native oral tales into mainstream literature? One argument put forward is that Native writers should be allowed to speak for themselves. Appropriators, it is said, in effect gain money and prestige at the expense of those for whom they would claim to speak. Another argument is that appropriation, to quote Geary Hobson, is ‘a new version of cultural imperialism’ (100). The history of post-contact America is one of dispossession of the life and rights of the Native peoples, and the theft of Native cultural materials by ethnologists and ethnopoets is considered imperialism in another guise. It is also argued that appropriators are frequently insensitive to the significance of the spoken word in Native cultures. Native myths and legends pass down cultural values

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which defined the identity of the people. Careless or ignorant handling of what Hobson calls these ‘cultural lifeways’ (101) means in effect the destruction of ways of life and values that had survived for centuries. The ‘white shamanism’ discussion in the United States was at its height in the late 1970s, but the issue of appropriation is still alive, particularly in Canada,1 and non-Native authors who use Native materials are rightly required to justify their motivations and their methods. Gary Snyder was among the first to be drawn into the debate on account of his ‘shaman songs’ in Myths and Texts, his talk entitled ‘The Incredible Survival of Coyote’ given at the Western Writers Conference in Logan, Utah, in 1974, and his Pulitzer prize-winning collection Turtle Island, first published in 1974. Geary Hobson in ‘The Rise of the White Shaman’ respects Snyder as a poet and reserves his strongest criticism for ‘the bastard children of Snyder’ (105) rather than for the father himself. Poets such as Gene Fowler, Jim Cody, Norman Moser and Barry Gifford, Hobson argued, had (unlike Snyder) begun to call themselves ‘shamans’, apparently without realizing that shamanism required an apprenticeship of twenty years or so. White shamanism, writes Hobson (105), is a New Age phenomenon in a tradition of sentimental stereotyping that went back at least as far as the ‘Indian death song’ fad of such Romantics as Philip Freneau, Mrs John Hunter and Royall Tyler. Hobson (106) and Lawrence Evers (233–36) with some justification criticize Snyder’s ‘The Incredible Survival of Coyote’ for praising ‘white shamans’ who have recently discovered Coyote without mentioning what contemporary Native writers such as Simon J. Ortiz, Leslie Marmon Silko and N. Scott Momaday have done with Coyote. Leslie Marmon Silko, in a two-pronged attack, censures first the imitation ‘Indian’ poems of white poets such as Jerome Rothenberg and Snyder for cashing in on plagiarized materials (211–16). Secondly, she criticizes Turtle Island both for Snyder’s confused thinking on land ownership (Snyder writes that ‘the land belongs to itself’ [80], whereas to Silko land taken by white settlers is stolen property) and for his sentimental attachment to Native lore. Snyder’s search for roots is futile, argues Silko, if it avoids acknowledgment of his past ancestors and present-day family. But despite these criticisms of Snyder by Native writers, it is generally acknowledged that he is by no means the worst of the appropriators, since Snyder’s involvement with Native materials cannot be said to be a recent fad. Snyder entered Reed College in 1947 to study anthropology and literature, and his bachelor’s thesis analysed in impressive detail a Haida Indian myth, ‘He who hunted birds in his father’s village’. In the 1 For the appropriation debate in Canada see Lutz; Books in Canada, XX.1 (1991): 11– 17; and Brydon.

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sixties and seventies Snyder published a number of poems involving Native materials in Coyote’s Journal, a literary magazine edited by James Koller. Also in the early seventies Snyder was associated with Alcheringa, the flagship journal of the ethnopoetics movement. In the eight-point statement of intention in the first issue Jerome Rothenburg and Dennis Tedlock pledged themselves in item five ‘to be in the vanguard for the initiation of cooperative projects between poets, ethnologists, songmen and others’ (see Snyder, ‘Politics’ 19). One example of such cooperation is the fact that Simon Ortiz and Snyder have both been contributing editors to Alcheringa. Snyder shows respect for the Native materials he has studied and used, and has expressed reservations about editorial intrusions. In his 1974 Western Writer’s talk on Coyote he says: Jerome Rothenburg’s Shaking the Pumpkin, which is an anthology of American Indian poetry, is the best to be done so far, but I’m still dubious about what happens when modern white men start changing the old texts, making versions, editing, cleaning it up … There’s nothing for me as useful as the direct transcription, as literally close as possible to the original text in whatever language it was, Kwakiutl or Apache. (‘Survival’ 81)

Snyder reveals here his training in the Boas-Radin school of anthropology, which paid great attention to literal transcription, assuming that the tale never altered even if the teller did. Thus The Trickster, Radin’s famous collection of Winnebago trickster tales, are translations given in highly literal prose. But Snyder is also aware of the more recent work of anthropologists and linguists Dell Hymes and Dennis Tedlock, key figures in the ethnopoetics movement, who have shown that the teller is vital in the telling, and that tellers embellish, condense or omit the events of a traditional tale depending on their personalities and interests. Poetry, in fact, may often be a better way of transcribing tales than prose, as poetry more readily allows for the dynamics of actual performance style, including pauses, and shifts in pace, tone and even volume. Trickster figures are central to Native mythology and it is not surprising that the most established North American Native writers – Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, Simon J. Ortiz, Paula Gunn Allen, Tomson Highway, Thomas King, and others – see trickster figures as central to their work, emphasizing the trickster as a symbol of continuity and cultural resistance in a time of fragmentation.2 Paula Gunn Allen 2 See especially Jeanne Rosier Smith for the role of tricksters in the work of Louise Erdrich, Paula Gunn Allen and Gerald Vizenor; Vizenor for insights into the trickster discourse of many Native writers including Leslie Marmon Silko, Paula Gunn Allen and Thomas King; Patricia Clark Smith for Coyote in Simon Ortiz’s poetry; and Shackleton for the role of the trickster Nanabush in Tomson Highway’s work.

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(Laguna Pueblo), for example, writes: ‘Certainly the time frame we presently inhabit has much that is shabby and tricky to offer; and much that needs to be treated with laughter and ironic humour; it is this spirit of the trickster-creator that keeps Indians alive and vital in the face of horror’ (158). Similarly, the Cree playwright and novelist Tomson Highway provides in both his published plays ‘A Note on Nanabush’ (Nanabush is the Ojibway trickster): ‘Some say that Nanabush left this continent when the white man came. We believe she/he is still here among us … Without the continued presence of this extraordinary figure, the core of Indian culture would be gone forever’ (13). Simon J. Ortiz in response to an interview question ‘Why do you write’ replied: ‘Because Indians always tell a story. The only way to continue is to tell a story and that’s what Coyote says’ (Journey, Preface). Trickster tales are stories of survival: they frequently tell of escapes from impossible dilemmas, and if the trickster dies he always comes back to life again. The sociologist and anthropologist Barbara Babcock writes of the Native American trickster as a character on the margins, a ‘deviant’ (155), a ‘social bandit’ (156), a natural rebel or figure of resistance who turns oppression upside down (157). Simon J. Ortiz has gone even further; to him (and no doubt to most Native writers) the very act of writing ‘is an act which defies oppression’ (Niatum xxi). The Native American writer has a rich variety of myths to live in and draw upon, each Nation having a specific trickster figure: Coyote among the Nations west of the plains, Nanabush (Ojibway), Weesageechak (Cree), Hare (Winnebago), and so on. Brian Swann (Niatum xxix–xxx) considers that Coyote in particular is rapidly becoming a pan-Indian character in art and literature. It is clear why tricksters, seen as figures of survival, are of key importance in Native writing. Tricksters tell stories of survival, and they survive by telling stories. In a culture whose values have survived by the passing down of tales, the trickster is central. The appeal of trickster tales is partly their humour, but also their sheer boundary-breaking inventiveness. Tricksters are shape-shifters; some Coyote tales, for example, tell of him posing as a woman and marrying a man. Traditional binary oppositions such as male/female, good/bad, destruction/creation, mortal/immortal, animal/human and so on become irrelevant. To take the good/bad distinction, Coyote is on one hand a culture hero (he stole fire), but he is also a cheat, a lecher and sometimes simply stupid (it is Coyote’s fault that there is death in the world, for example). Frequently, tricksters teach by negative example. The norms of the community are established through stories in which the trickster transgresses taboos. In all these aspects it is clear how trickster tales are central to the cultural survival of the Native American peoples.

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If the centrality of tricksters to Native American cultural survival is self-evident, why are so many non-Native writers attracted to tricksters, and to Coyote in particular? In recent years, for example, Coyote has been central in such works as Ursula Le Guin’s short fiction ‘Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight?’ (1987), the first novel by the Canadian writer Gail Anderson-Dargatz, The Cure for Death by Lightning (1997), and Coyote (1995) by the British novelist Richard Thornley. One answer is that Coyote is, of course, the best-known of the trickster figures. Unlike such tricksters as Wakjanga (Winnebago) or Glooscap (Algonquian), Coyote can be immediately visualized. Not only are the characteristics of the coyote – sly scavenger on the fringes of civilization, desert loner, survivor against the odds, and so on – well known, but its image can immediately evoke a sense of the ‘other’, be it the West, the psychic or geographical frontier, or the Indian. In Le Guin’s ‘Buffalo Gals’, set in the American West, Coyote would seem to symbolize seeing (‘civilized’) life from another (more ‘primitive’) perspective. In Anderson-Dargatz’s The Cure for Death, set in the remote Turtle Valley, British Columbia, where an Indian village is in close and uneasy proximity to the (white) Canadian farming community, Coyote is primarily a trope for psychic terror, fear and insanity. These two works are well written, but in both Coyote has been invoked rather one-dimensionally, avoiding the multiple and contradictory facets of this figure, and neither have placed Coyote within a complex context of Native life, in which the trickster figure would have fuller meaning. Gary Snyder in his Western Writers talk has explained what he and other non-Native Western poets have found in Coyote. First, says Snyder, Coyote offers a sense of the West as place that Anglos lacked in their own myths and texts. Coyote gave non-Natives a sense of the West, not as a centre of exploitation as it was in the nineteenth century (78), but as a source of Native American lore encompassing 40–50,000 years of human experience (80). Clearly, such thinking is behind Turtle Island, where Snyder incorporates the ‘many creation myths of the people who have been here [on the American continent] for millennia’ in order to rediscover ‘this land and the ways by which we might become natives of the place, ceasing to think and act (after all these centuries) as newcomers and invaders’ (Turtle Island, back cover). Secondly, says Snyder, the antiheroic, anarchic Coyote was an obvious hero figure for the disaffected writers of the 1950s and 60s (‘Survival’ 84). I wish to contrast these two aspects of the use of Coyote in Snyder’s poetry – the Western trickster as a means of access to Native American lore and sense of lived place, and Coyote as a symbol of disaffection with ‘whiteness’. For me,

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Snyder is more successful as a poet in the first-mentioned aspect rather than the latter. Arguing from this perspective, I shall contrast Snyder’s and Ortiz’s use of Coyote and suggest that, however informed Snyder may be, his adoption of Native materials in his poetry will lack the wider cultural and political dimensions of a poet such as Ortiz, who is working within his own culture and its oral traditions. My conclusion is not, however, that non-Native poets should only draw on materials from their own cultural background, but that, in the words of J. M. Synge, ‘All art is a collaboration’, though this collaboration should acknowledge the possibility of cultural bias and the real dangers of insensitive appropriation. Let me start with the notion of ‘Indianness’ in Snyder’s poetry as a symbol of white disaffection. Leslie Fiedler in The Return of the Vanishing American (1968) cites Snyder’s ‘A Curse on the Men in Washington, Pentagon’ from 1967, with such lines as: … I kill the white man the ‘American’ in me And bring out the ghost dance: To bring back America, the grass and the streams

as an instance of the white man’s ‘dream of disavowing one’s whiteness and becoming all Indian’ (86). Similarly, Gerald Vizenor in Manifest Manners (1994) has written with reference to Robert Bly’s American Poetry: Wildness and Domesticity of ‘The miseries of a modern man in search of the other’ (37) – the search for an imagined and idealized ‘other’ that would make him whole. In Snyder’s defence, ‘A Curse’ is hardly Snyder’s most subtle poem; it is not published in any of Snyder’s major collections, and is, in any case, designed as a piece of agit-prop within the context of the anti-Vietnam demonstrations of the time and the March on the Pentagon of 1967. Suffice it to note, however, that in ‘A Curse’ Snyder will pass on to his children, not ‘American’ or ‘Christian’ values, but a combination of East and West, Buddhism and the Native American heritage: ‘I’ll give them Chief Joseph, the bison herds,/ Ishi, sparrowhawk, the fir trees,/ The Buddha … ’ In a number of poems from the 1950s Snyder places Coyote within the context of Buddhist thought, so that Coyote becomes a kind of Bodhisattva or Beat figure. Buddhism and the Native American trickster are syncretized to provide an alternative to conservative mainstream America. ‘Whiteness’ is disavowed and ‘Indianness’ and Zen Buddhism are assumed. In ‘A Berry Feast’, written in 1957, but published as the first poem in Book 1 of The Back County (1968), Coyote in section 3 becomes an anti-

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Bodhisattva who guzzles too much beer and wine (‘who wants/ Nirvana?’), ends up ‘Drowned and drifting’ in a river, is revived by Magpie, shouts ‘Fuck you!’ and keeps on moving. The Buddhist search for enlightenment through the abandonment of worldly desires and the achievement of stability is joyously rejected by Coyote in a life of excess and freewheeling mobility. It is difficult for the reader not to have a simplified view of Coyote in a poem like this, to see him merely as a kind of Beat hipster, or what Patricia Clark Smith calls ‘a Dean Moriarty of the mesas’ (193), and Snyder clearly wishes to imply more than this. Snyder’s syncretic fusion of Buddhism and Native materials is most noticeable in Myths and Texts, a collection of his poetry written between 1952 and 1956. In two poems from this collection, ‘Hunting 16’ and ‘Burning 16’, Snyder brings together Coyote and Buddhist thought. In ‘Hunting 16’, a poem that introduces Buddhist notions of enlightenment that will be developed in the final section, ‘Burning’, Snyder writes that all beings: Got the buddha-nature All but Coyote. (M&T 34)

While ‘Burning 16’ closes with the words: Earth! those beings living on your surface none of them disappearing, will all be transformed. When I have spoken to them when they have spoken to me, from that moment on, their words and their bodies which they usually use to move about with, will all change. I will not have heard them. Signed, ( ) Coyote

The one word ‘Coyote’ in these two examples is intended to imply a great deal, but the average reader, deeply versed in neither Buddhist thought nor Native American myth, will have to go for secondary sources for clarification. The clearest introduction is given by Bert Almon, who in his discussion of ‘Hunting 16’ writes: In the Buddhist terms that he [Snyder] uses, all beings possess the Buddhist nature (uncultivated though it might be), all but Coyote … In one way, Coyote, who expresses symbolically the mischief and destructiveness of the human psyche, is beyond enlightenment. In another way, he represents the divine principle, and the same American Indian myth cycles that describe him as a clown or trickster also portray him as a creator god like the Hindu figure Prajapati. (19–20)

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This explanation helps to clarify the ‘Burning 16’ excerpt, where the ‘I’ speaking is the voice of a Bodhisattva, someone who seeks the enlightenment of all beings (‘those beings … will all be transformed’). Coyote’s response ‘I will not have heard them’ is apparently Coyote’s rejection of this transcendental moment. However, the fact that his name is printed, but the space for a signature is left blank means that he both endorses and does not endorse this statement. Again Coyote is equivocal, being both a Bodhisattva and an anti-Bodhisattva. The above interpretation, given the complexities and paradoxes of Buddhist thought, is at best tentative. What is perhaps more important for our purposes is to raise certain questions concerning Snyder’s syncretic method and the borrowing of materials from other cultures. How far is it possible to combine two belief systems from widely different cultures? Is it in fact helpful to see Coyote as a Bodhisattva or antiBodhisattva? What about the cultural background of these beliefs from which such ideas and notions arise? Snyder, of course, is not ignorant of the importance of social context, and in his Road Apple interview he contrasts the elitist (and celibate) monastic traditions out of which Buddhism and Hinduism developed with the community and familycentred ecological, geological and mythological wisdom of Native American peoples. Snyder’s poetry written in the 1950s is an attempt to fuse the best of both. For me, Snyder is more successful as a poet when he keeps within the realms of a single culture or single activity. In my classes, for example, students have responded most strongly to the ‘Hunting’ poems from Myths and Texts, such as ‘this poem is for bear’ (‘Hunting 6’) and ‘this poem is for deer’ (‘Hunting 8’), which focus on hunting rituals to assuage the spirit of the hunted animal (rituals shared by many cultures), and on a contrast between hunting for sport (the American way) and hunting for necessity and as part of a whole system of spiritual and social beliefs. Myths and Texts, The Back Country and Turtle Island all combine Buddhist and Native American thought, but Turtle Island is arguably more successful and certainly more accessible precisely because it does not seek so hard to combine two distinct cultures, but instead focuses more on Native American materials alone. ‘The Call of the Wild’, for example, a poem which invokes Coyote, is successful in its relative simplicity and directness. The first section introduces an 80-year-old Californian, who represents the years of exploitation and the eradication of ‘the call of the wild’. After his phone call to the authorities, Government trappers will kill the ‘Coyotes’, which as the capital ‘C’ suggests is not only the destruction of a species, but the obliteration of the Native

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American people and their way of life. The second section is a satire on the younger generation, the cultural tourists, shopping for spiritual sensation: In the forests of North America, The land of Coyote and Eagle, They dream of India, of forever blissful sexless highs.

They too will not hear Coyote, the call of the wild, and will sell their cedar trees to loggers after being told ‘Trees are full of bugs’. The final section sees the same urge at work in the destruction of nature in America and the bombing of Vietnam and global pollution. The poem’s envoy is: I would like to say Coyote is forever Inside you. But it’s not true.

Coyote is a figure of survival, but this trickster’s survival is at best tenuous. We may already have killed the spirit of Coyote. Silko’s essay on Snyder ends with the ironic words ‘Gary Snyder once said to me “you must create your own new myths.” That is good advice to follow’ (215). Snyder’s ‘new myth’ involves linking present-day America with the wisdom and ecology of Native American lore. The message of Turtle Island is that Snyder’s own culture does not provide the foundation for what he has called in Earth House Hold ‘poetry as an ecological survival technique’ (117), and it is for this reason that he explores Native materials that reattach him to the land and a sense of self rooted in place. Turning to Simon J. Ortiz, we encounter a poet who finds in his own culture the sustenance he requires as an artist. Ortiz, an Acoma Pueblo, born in 1941 in Albuquerque, New Mexico, is probably the most respected Native American poet alive today. Two collections of his poetry, Going for the Rain (1976) and A Good Journey (1977),3 contain Coyote poems, which have been ably discussed in Patricia Clark Smith’s article ‘Coyote Ortiz’; my own discussion owes a debt to her readings. Going for the Rain and A Good Journey are both journeys for the reader and the poet. Going for the Rain, for example, is divided into four sections which outline the stages of a journey (‘Preparation’, ‘Leaving’, ‘Returning’ and ‘The Rain Falls’). The first section, as Ortiz’s Prologue tells us, concerns ‘spiritual 3 Going for the Rain and A Good Journey are now incorporated into Simon J. Ortiz, Woven Stone (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press). Citations in my text are from this volume (WS).

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and physical preparation’ (WS 37); the second is about leaving and what is encountered, which may be meaningful or may leave the traveller ‘destitute’. ‘Returning’ may involve ‘despair and tragedy’, ‘beauty’ and ‘joy’; it is a physical return but also a psychic return to self: ‘There are things he [the poet/traveller] must go through before he can bring back what he seeks, before he can return to himself’ (WS 38). ‘The Rain Falls’ is the fruit of the poet’s journey. Coming home to himself, being at one with himself, he has something to give his people: ‘The man returns to the strength that his selfhood is, his home, people, his language, the knowledge of who he is’ (WS 38). Here in essence is the difference between Snyder and Ortiz. Snyder constructs a ‘new myth’ from his studies in Buddhism and Native American culture, working against the grain of the mainstream culture. Ortiz works within a cultural tradition that supports his role as truthseeker: his strength comes from ‘home’, ‘people’, ‘language’ and selfknowledge. Coyote plays a central role in Ortiz’s journey of selfdiscovery, for Coyote was there at the beginning – or was he? The first poem of the collection is ‘The Creation, According to Coyote’ and the title raises a deliberate ambiguity. This is the Acoma Creation story, but it is ‘according to Coyote’ – is it to be believed or is it another of Coyote’s bluffs? The first line, spoken by Coyote, ‘First of all, it’s all true’ does little to allay suspicions, rather the reverse; and throughout we are told that Coyote is ‘b.s.-ing’, ‘mainly bragging’, and ‘you know/ how he is’, but the poem closes ‘And you know, I believe him’. As Patricia Clark Smith has pointed out, there are certain clues that the Acoma audience imagined in the poem would pick up (202). These clues verify Coyote’s account – the emergence of the first people from the First World is an orthodox Keresan creation story, and in the line ‘My uncle told me all this’, Coyote’s trustworthiness is supported by the speaker’s uncle, uncles having the role of respected teachers in the community. Ortiz’s poetry is so assured because he can rely on an informed (Acoma) audience. ‘The Creation’ in fact tells two tales – it reaffirms the Acoma Creation story and at the same time reminds the audience of the ambiguity of Coyote, here the liar who tells the truth. Non-Native readers may well miss the cultural cues, but with an understanding of the cultural background this apparently simple poem reveals great subtlety and even, to some readers, a postmodern playfulness. The poem can be interpreted as the rendering of a myth about the truth and life of fictions. The second section of Going for the Rain, ‘Leaving’, involving things encountered on the journey, contains another Coyote poem , ‘How Close’:

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In Smith’s interpretation of this poem Ortiz takes on the persona of Coyote. She writes: ‘The poet’s deepest self lives in touch with that creation [of the world], and Ortiz’ name for that self is Coyote’ (197). I would add that ‘How Close’ should also be read in conjunction with ‘The Creation, According to Coyote’, a poem which establishes the truth-telling credentials of Coyote at the very beginning of the volume. ‘How Close’ also relies on a sense of place, family and community. The ‘first seed’, ‘a mica stratum a hairwidth deep’ was found near Ortiz’s home ‘south of Acoma’, when as a child he was digging for potter’s clay with his mother. It is this avoidance of family and community that Silko criticizes in Snyder’s work. To Silko, Snyder denies his own family roots; with Ortiz family and community are his strength. The ‘Returning’ section of Going for the Rain has two Coyote poems, ‘A Barroom Fragment’ and ‘Albuquerque Back Again. 12/6/74’. ‘Returning’, says Ortiz in the Prologue, can involve confusion and clarity, despair and joy, but they are things that must be gone through in order for the self to be whole. ‘A Barroom Fragment’ is an overheard fragment of a story about a weekend for two in Las Vegas. The woman asks for separate rooms at the hotel, and the disappointed man responds with a witty putdown. Clark Smith comments, ‘Ortiz’[s] Coyote, like Coyote in the traditional tales and like most poets, sometimes uses his verbal skills even on himself, talking himself into feeling better’ (201). The anecdote is framed by the first line ‘He was talking’ and the last line ‘That was Coyote talking’. Ortiz hears the voice of Coyote in the overheard fragment, a story which consoles the teller, helping him move from confusion to clarity, perhaps even from despair to joy. Admittedly, however, this is a consolation poem for Coyote Man – the woman’s side of the story is not given. The final section, ‘The Rain Falls’ contains one Coyote poem, ‘The Boy and Coyote’. This section explores the accumulated wisdom of the journey: it is what the poet has learned and what he can pass on to his people: Breaking thin ice from a small still pool, I find Coyote’s footprints. Coyote, he’s always somewhere before you; he knows you’ll come along soon. I smile at his tracks which are not fresh except in memory and say a brief prayer for good luck for him and for me and thanks. (WS 124)

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The poem is partly a memory of childhood, partly a communion with the spirit of Coyote within him. A gunshot is heard: The animal in me crouches, poised immobile, eyes trained on the distance, waiting for motion again. (WS 125)

The tenuous nature of survival of both the Native peoples and Coyote is suggested, and there are echoes of other gunshots, for the poem is dedicated to a friend at a VA hospital. The poem, in its allusions to Vietnam, a threatened ecology and the Coyote within, is curiously close to Snyder’s ‘The Call of the Wild’ in content, though Ortiz’s ending is more hopeful. With Ortiz, Coyote is still within, so what is needed is the right attention to self and place in order to liberate his spirit: Coyote’s preference is for silence broken only by the subtle wind, uncanny bird sounds, saltcedar scraping, and the desire to let that man free, to listen for the motion of sound. (WS 125)

In Ortiz’s next collection, A Good Journey, the theme of Coyote as a symbol of survival is continued. Part of the Preface to the collection gives Ortiz’s response to the question ‘Why do you write?’: ‘The only way to continue is to tell a story and that’s what Coyote says … Your children will not survive unless you tell something about them—how they were born, how they came to this certain place, how they continued’ (WS 153). The opening section of A Good Journey is called ‘Telling’, followed by ‘Notes for My Child’ and ‘How Much He Remembered’. The collection is thus about passing on an oral tradition in which Coyote – the ultimate survivor – strongly figures. The first poem is ‘Telling About Coyote’, which opens: Old Coyote … “If he hadn’t looked back everything would have been okay (WS 157)

The allusion to an Orpheus-like prohibition is picked up in the last poem of the ‘Telling’ section, ‘And there is always one more story’, but here Coyote is female. The poem tells of Coyote Lady being rescued from a high pinnacle by Grandmother Spider, who lets her down in a basket. Coyote Woman is told not to look up, but of course does so, and ends up ‘a scatter of bones at the foot of the pinnacle’ (WS 180). However, Skeleton Fixer comes along and puts the bones together, but is somewhat disgruntled to find it is only Coyote. ‘Go ahead and go, may you get

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crushed / by a falling rock somewhere!’ (WS 181) he curses, but of course Coyote will always survive. Other Coyote stories are told in the ‘Telling’ section, such as how Coyote was killed in a rabbit hunt, but came back to life in ‘Like myself … ’ and how Coyote talked his way into being fed in ‘And another one’, and in both cases they are survival stories. Stories survive by being a vital part of the community, primarily the family. The full title of ‘Like myself … ’ is ‘Like myself, the source of these narratives is my home. Sometimes my father tells them, sometimes my mother, sometimes even the storyteller himself tells them’ (WS 168). The family extends out into the community, and Ortiz’s full title to ‘And there is always one more story … ’ explains that the Coyote Lady and Skeleton Fixer tale is ‘an old story’ that was overheard at a Sunday meeting. ‘The woman was telling about her grandson who was telling the story which was told to him by somebody else’ (WS 177). In other words, each story is not only ancient, but also involves multiple tellers, both living and dead. In ‘And there is always one more story’ the sense of an ancient tradition which is still very much alive is suggested by the interruptions from the audience. The poem opens with Ortiz being interrupted by one of his children, Rainy Dawn: One time, (or like Rainy said, “You’re sposed to say, ‘Onesa ponsa time’, Daddy”) (WS 177)

Significantly, A Good Journey is dedicated to Ortiz’s children, for storytelling is a cooperative activity which will only survive if the children learn the stories and pass them on. The Ojibway writer Basil Johnston has pointed out that oral texts are only ‘one generation removed from extinction’ (quoted in Lutz 6). Gary Snyder, too, in poems like ‘The Bath’ writes movingly of his young sons, and a section of Turtle Island is entitled ‘For the Children’, but there is a difference between Snyder’s exhortations like ‘stay together/ learn the flowers/ go light’ (‘For the children’) and the dynamic sense of storytelling occasion with asides and interjections that we find in Ortiz: BUT on the way down, Coyote looked up (At this point, the voice telling the story is that of the boy who said, “But Tsuushki looked up and saw her butt!”) and Spider Grandmother dropped the basket and Coyote went crashing down. (WS 179–80)

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The poem continues: ‘Well, at this point, the story ends, but,/ as you know, it also goes on’ (WS 180); as Ortiz says ‘There is always one more story’ and ‘The only way to continue is to tell a story’ (Preface to A Good Journey). Clearly, the role that storytelling plays in Native American culture is far more significant than it is in the mainstream culture in which Snyder has his roots. I have argued so far about the dangers of insensitive appropriation, and with Snyder’s poetry in particular that his Native American materials do not have the broader social context of a supportive culture that Native poets such as Ortiz can rely upon. There are two further points about appropriation that should be briefly raised. The first is publishing. Can Native peoples get their work published? In many cases there is not the same freedom of access to publishing houses as there is for mainstream writers.4 Secondly, Western culture is not in danger in the same way as Native culture often is. The Haida, for example, who live along the coast of British Columbia and Southwest Alaska, have only 700 speakers left. There is a very real sense that the stories of a community like this must be written down before they disappear, and it is the people themselves who must do the documenting. But having said this, it must be acknowledged that the process of cultural appropriation goes on in all cultures. As Elaine Jahner (213) has said, the continuity of any culture is possible through accepting, absorbing and organically transforming new influences. Nor is appropriation simply a one-way process – mainstream culture appropriates minority cultural materials, but the opposite also occurs. The mainstream canon can and is used by minority writers, though they may well use it in order to subvert through mimicry.5 A large number of Native Americans and First Nations people are, of course, of mixed descent and received a mainstream education. Tomson Highway, for example, though of unmixed Cree descent, received a Catholic primary and secondary education and his plays are a sophisticated fusion of Western and Native mythologies. Simon Ortiz himself in ‘Speaking for Courage’ has acknowledged that ‘biographies of people like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Gauguin, or the works of Beat poets like Ginsberg and Snyder’ inspired him when he was first setting out as a writer (25). He has also argued that cross-cultural appropriation is also a process of transformation. One culture can make the materials of another culture its own, 4 A point made by a number of Native writers in the interviews published in Books in Canada, XX.1, 1991. 5 See, for example, Chapter 1, ‘Re-citing the Classics: Canonical Counter-Discourse’ and Chapter 4, ‘The Languages of Resistance’, in Gilbert and Tompkins.

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or as he puts it in ‘Towards a National Indian Literature’: ‘they [i.e. Western mainstream forms] are now Indian because of the creative development that the native people applied to them’ (8). The conclusion, then, is not that one culture should be denied the right to explore another culture’s materials, but that wherever possible a dialogue should be established between Native and non-Native writers and readers in order to learn from each other. Coyote is no doubt the best-known of the Native American tricksters, but if Coyote is superficially adopted by mainstream writers then his significance as an expression of a Native worldview will be distorted. It is not just a matter of simple plagiarism; appropriation of voice can pose a much greater threat to Native ways of life, particularly as Native myths and legends are the means by which cultural values and codes have traditionally been passed down through the centuries. Perhaps Snyder’s warning about the revenge of Coyote on unwary authors should also be borne in mind. The spirit of Coyote, he says in ‘The Incredible Survival’, is not just a humorous literary conceit but also a potentially malicious force: ‘ … the always-traveling, always lustful, breaker-of-limits side of the Trickster could destroy any human poet who got locked into it’ (88). It is a warning that mainstream authors – and critics – should note.

Works Cited Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986. Almon, Bert. Gary Snyder. Western Writers Series, no. 37. Caldwell: Boise State University, 1979. Anderson-Dargatz, Gail. The Cure for Death by Lightning. London: Virago, 1998. Babcock, Barbara. ‘“A Tolerated Margin of Mess”: The Trickster and His Tales Reconsidered’ (1975). In Critical Essays on Native American Literature. Ed. Andrew Wiget. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1985. 153–85. Brydon, Diana. ‘The White Inuit Speaks: Contamination as Literary Strategy’. In Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-colonialism and Post-modernism. Ed. Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin. New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991. 191–203. Evers, Lawrence J. ‘Further Survivals of Coyote’. Western American Literature, 10 (November 1975). 233–36. Fiedler, Leslie A. The Return of the Vanishing American. London: Paladin, 1972. Gilbert, Helen and Joanne Tompkins. Postcolonial Drama: Theory, Practice, Politics. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. Highway, Tomson. Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing. Saskatoon: Fifth House, 1989.

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Hobson, Geary. ‘The Rise of the White Shaman as a New Version of Cultural Imperialism’. In The Remembered Earth: An Anthology of Contemporary Native American Literature. Ed. Geary Hobson. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1979. 100–08 Jahner, Elaine. ‘A Critical Approach to American Indian Literature’. In Studies in American Indian Literature: Critical Essays and Course Designs. Ed. Paula Gunn Allen. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1983. 211–24. Le Guin, Ursula K. ‘Buffalo Gals, Won’t You Come Out Tonight’ (1987). In Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences. New York: ROC, 1990. 17–60. Lutz, Hartmut. Contemporary Challenges: Conversations with Canadian Native Authors. Saskatoon: Fifth House Publishers, 1991. Niatum, Duane, ed. Harper’s Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. Ortiz, Simon J. Going For the Rain. New York: Harper & Row, 1976. ——. A Good Journey. Tucson: Sun Tracks and The University of Arizona Press,1977. ——. ‘Speaking for Courage’. In A Circle of Nations: Voices and Visions of American Indians. Ed. John Gattuso. Hillsboro: Beyond Words Publishing, 1993. 24– 30. ——. ‘Towards a National Indian Literature: Cultural Authenticity in Nationalism’. MELUS vol. 8, no. 2 (summer 1981). 7–12. ——. Woven Stone. Sun Tracks, vol. 21. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1998. Shackleton, Mark. ‘Language and Resistance in the Plays of Tomson Highway’. In Postcolonialism and Cultural Resistance. Ed. Jopi Nyman and John A. Stotesbury. Studia Carelia Humanistica 14. Joensuu: University of Joensuu, 1999. 215–21. Silko, Leslie Marmon. ‘An Old-Time Indian Attack Conducted in Two Parts’. In The Remembered Earth: An Anthology of Contemporary Native American Literature. Ed. Geary Hobson. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1979. 211–16 Smith, Jeanne Rosier. Writing Tricksters: Mythic Gambols in American Ethnic Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Smith, Patricia Clark . ‘Coyote Ortiz: Canis latrans latrans in the Poetry of Simon Ortiz’. In Studies in American Indian Literature: Critical Essays and Course Designs. Ed. Paula Gunn Allen. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1983. 192–210. Snyder, Gary. The Back Country. New York: New Directions, 1968. ——. Earth House Hold. New York: New Directions, 1969. ——. ‘The Incredible Survival of Coyote’. In The Old Ways: Six Essays. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1975. 67–93. ——. Myths & Texts. New York: New Directions, 1978. ——. ‘The Politics of Ethnopoetics’. In The Old Ways: Six Essays. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1975. 15–43.

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——. ‘Road Apple Interview with Gary Snyder’. In The Real Work: Interviews & Talks 1964–1979. New York: New Directions, 1980. 15–22. ——. Turtle Island. New York: New Directions, 1974. Vizenor, Gerald. Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1994.

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Baseball’s Myths for the Millennium

Chapter 12 RoAging, Anxious and Apocalyptic: Baseball’s Myths for the Millennium Deeanne Westbrook

I have argued elsewhere that baseball – the game and its texts – constitutes a genuine American mythology and that as a mythology baseball becomes a mirror of sorts for Americans and their culture, one in which, to use Richard Wilbur’s description of nature, ‘we have seen ourselves and spoken’, and wherein we have seen or may yet see ‘all we mean or wish to mean’ (‘Advice to a Prophet’).1 As myth, baseball narratives seek to interpret and assign meaning to experience, to provide narrative order to a chaotic flux of events, and to reconcile the opposites of existence – in Lévi-Strauss’s terms, ‘to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction (an impossible achievement if, as it happens, the contradiction is real)’ (‘Myth’ 65). The attempt to achieve the impossible and overcome life’s contradictions (both generally and specifically) lies at the very heart of baseball’s mythic endeavour in the closing decades of the twentieth century. I am persuaded by Lévi-Strauss’s claims that mythological thought is a kind of ‘intellectual bricolage’ (Mind 17) and that the mythmaker is a bricoleur, an artisan who fashions a new work from whatever he or she finds lying at hand, building, in Franz Boaz’s phrase, ‘new mythological worlds’ from the shattered remains of the old. Baseball’s mythmakers as bricoleurs gather debris too: not only elemental myths (including one central to this study, the apocalyptic myth of end-times), but also scraps from popular culture, modern science, and not least from baseball itself. With these building blocks, baseball’s millennial mythology is an astonishing artifact, a pastiche of New Age and old age, Revelation, angels, time travel, out-of-body travel, resurrection, cybernetics and cryogenics, Lou Gehrig and the Black Sox – all assembled in a diamondshaped world of play. The recycled mythological debris and cultural scraps which go into baseball’s texts necessarily bring with them not only yesterday’s and today’s refuse but, along with this rubble, intertextual equivocation and uncanny implications of old mythological worlds.2 1 For my expanded argument, see Ground Rules: Baseball and Myth, ‘Introduction’ and Chapter 1, ‘The Myth of the Gap’. 2 Uncanny as used here is the English translation of Freud’s concept of the Unheimliche.

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Thus a simple door in an outfield wall may be a threshold between life and death; the mandala of the field may be revealed as a centre of spiritual power; a circling of the bases may constitute a hero’s difficult journey and return. The coincidence of century and millennial boundaries adds to this mix an array of mythological elements. Harold Bloom discusses what he calls ‘omens of millennium’ in American culture. As the millennium approached, he argues, there was an increase of fascination with and belief in angels, an ever more willing suspension of disbelief as regards prophetic dreams and other psychic predictions, and an uncritical willingness to embrace the claims of those who study and expound upon socalled ‘near-death experiences’, with their implications of living forever in a joyful hereafter.3 While none of these elements was new, their frequency and density of occurrences were perhaps unprecedented, as was a common belief that the millennial boundary would coincide with the apocalypse or end-times. The effect in America was evidenced by a rather typical (and mythically prompted) end-of-century gloom which merged with millennial anxieties, producing a unique assembly of mythic motifs. What we find is an array of both religious and secular variations on elements of the apocalyptic myth as described in Revelation. Michael Grosso describes the situation as an ‘anarchy of archetypes’: ‘Rapidly heading toward that beacon year, 2001, the imagination of the End stirs uneasily in us; the mood is intensified by a medley of factors: calendar magic, uncanny signs and wonders, ecological menace, social disorientation, economic instability, and spiritual uncertainty’ (2–3). As Philip Lamy lists them, the primary elements of the Apocalypse are ‘tribulation, Babylon, Armageddon, the Messiah, and millennium’. These are ‘powerful and flexible religious symbols that adapt easily, although unevenly, to changing social and cultural conditions’, embracing diverse attitudes and interests, secular and religious, from ‘the Branch Davidians to Soldier of Fortune magazine to the militia movement’ all ‘organized around the Apocalypse’ (30). ‘What is different now’, writes Lamy, ‘are the It implies that inexplicable something which one encounters as unknown or alien, and yet at the same time eerily familiar. 3 In support of this claim Bloom relates that ‘polls, which are very American, tell us that sixty-nine percent of us believe in angels, while only twenty-five percent of us do not. Forty-six percent among us have their own guardian angels …’ (42). Throughout his Omens of Millennium, Bloom explores increasing American concerns, ‘angelology, a quasi-predictive element in dreams, the “near-death experience” [the hope of not dying]’ which he finds are fused with concerns over the approach of the millennium (2). Bloom devotes Chapter 1 to ‘Angels’, Chapter 2 to ‘Dreams’, and Chapter 3 to ‘Not-Dying’.

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numerous and often contradictory ways the millennial myth is expressed in American culture. Millennial symbols and images not only belong to radical religious and secular movements and cults but are part of the dominant American culture as well’ (viii). It is safe to say that millennial thinking, like politics, makes for strange bedfellows. Bill Lawren noticed a peculiarly American cast to millennial dread: ‘Now it’s … [America’s] turn. Just as Europe went collectively berserk in preparation for the first millennium, there are signs of what one observer calls “an avalanche of nuttiness” in anticipation of the second’ (42). Lawren points to prophecies and predictions from such diverse sources as religious figures, psychics, political leaders, and intellectuals in various disciplines, all of which fuel anxieties already in place. Citing James Oberg, Lawren suggests that end-of-century dread only intensifies as the millennium draws nearer, that ‘End-of-the-world prophecies tend to generate an “anxiety feedback loop” in the public at large’ (43). Garry Wills is likewise concerned for the general state of mental health in the last years of the twentieth century: ‘[W]e probably cannot breathe safely til the fateful 2000 is behind us. For the rest of the Nineties we should brace ourselves, expecting something new in the way of ingenious nuttiness. The alarm clocks are set and ticking.’ Bloom commented that while ‘all the centuries have their burdens of catastrophe, only a few match the terrors of the one now expiring’ (41). In response, baseball’s texts took up their mythic work with surprising diligence, gathering the bricolage at hand to create a mythology which mirrors the concerns of a populace that is aging, anxious and apocalyptic. As Bloom lists them, omens of millennium are ‘angels, dreams, not dying, and expectations of the end of our time’ (5). The significant generalization which can be drawn from this configuration of ‘omens’ is that, as the twentieth century waned, many Americans experienced life in a decrepit universe ‘in the dregs of time’ (Kermode 12). As Mihir Desai puts it, ‘As we approach the end of a millennium, authors and thinkers in a variety of fields seem eager to declare the end of something – and unable to announce the beginning of something else’ (cited in Loevinger 32). This moribund universe is an irrational place swarming with gods, angels, spirits, ghosts, and assorted unearthly phenomena. To such omens, baseball’s mythmakers were alert, and its texts were hospitable. As a result, late-century baseball narratives are inclined to make use of the game, its field, its rules, its progress, and its narrative tendencies to present anxious, perhaps mad denizens of fragile, precariously balanced worlds. Characters receive ‘omens of the millennium’: they suffer the force of supernatural powers; they confront uncanny visitors; they

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experience prophetic dreams and visions; they struggle against aging and mortality; and they create the game’s own means of not dying, while participating in pre-apocalyptic ritual or final battle. In these texts, Armageddon is not a battlefield in ancient Israel, but a playing field on South Avenue in Nancy Willard’s Things Invisible to See, or a stadium called Pioneer Park in Robert Coover’s Universal Baseball Association, or even Wrigley Field.4 With the approach of the millennial threshold, and its worrisome apocalyptic potential, baseball’s myths evolved the game’s own strategies for shaping, interpreting, evading and attempting to overcome the genuinely awful contradictions implicit in end-times, whether individual or universal. While these claims are broadly applicable to many late-century baseball texts, in this essay I shall explore the themes suggested by Bloom’s omens and their variations in four representative narratives: Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1971), Mark Harris’s It Looked Like For Ever (1979), W. P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe (1982), and Nancy Willard’s Things Invisible to See (1984). Each of these works represents late-century anxiety, and each addresses ultimate fears and desires reflected in Bloom’s omens. While millennial omens are by their nature disruptive, troublesome, or terrifying, their close association in baseball narratives with the game – and hence with summer, clement weather, life, youth and play – while not stripping them of their grim implications, gives them peculiar or unexpected flourishes. Balancing on the brink of madness, calamity or death, and grappling in a postmodern way with magic and metaphysics, characters somehow find ways not merely to endure, but to play, and to prevail. Hence each of the four novels is in its way comic, yet the comedy is serious comedy. It resides in the shifting and ambiguous relationships of fate and chance, of the individual’s determination to live forever while journeying towards death, of the deity’s omnipotence and playfulness, freedom and constraint, power and frailty. Of the four, Harris’s It Looked Like For Ever is different from the others in being nearly devoid of otherworldly influences, visitors, visions or prophecies. It presents a secular version of millennial anxiety, toying briefly and ironically with scientific means of resurrection, afterlife and universal renewal through cryogenics and cybernetics. Its major end-time focus is on aging and death.

4 Wrigley Field is the site of the crucial game in W. P. Kinsella’s ‘The Last Pennant before Armageddon’.

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Pitcher Gods, Devils, Angels, Apparitions and Prophecy Pitcher Gods and their Antagonists Even given Bloom’s observation of ‘angels as omens of the Millennium’ (41), the extent of the invasion of baseball’s myths by otherworldly beings is remarkable. One sort of divine being may be described as traditionally biblical. Biblical angels are either physical manifestations of God himself or heavenly creatures who act as God’s minions. Sometimes the two sorts appear together, as in the visit to Abraham by three ‘men’ – one of whom is God and two of whom are heavenly beings or ‘angels’ (Gen. 18). The biblical sort of angel is certainly in evidence in baseball’s myths, but he comes wearing a figurative baseball cap and glove and carrying a scorecard. Such incongruities have a double effect: they render this figure comic but also disconcerting, perhaps even vaguely sinister, suggesting that the human concerns with life and death are to the supreme being merely play, trivial pursuits. In Shoeless Joe, Ray Kinsella encounters a being of this sort when he hears a voice, speaking a ‘scratchy Middle American’ (4), which instructs him to build a baseball park in his cornfield – the voice either an angelic messenger or even the ‘great god Baseball’ himself (6). The messages that the voice delivers in the course of the novel require of Ray actions that seem insane; the instructions Ray receives are enigmatic yet compelling, like fate. Ray can no more resist than can the biblical Jeremiah, yet Ray, a modern man, unlike Jeremiah, knows about people who hear voices and wonders whether he has gone mad, whether the command issues from some divine or metaphysical source (was it ‘really a voice?’) or from a murky region of his own mind (‘something inside [him] making a statement … ?’ [6]). A secular, perhaps mad, farmer hearing god-voices in a cornfield offering instructions about ballparks and the resurrection of dead players is weird and poignant and funny. After a while Ray accepts the metaphysical nature of the voice and consoles himself with the possibility that he has special hearing for such messages: ‘I wonder if there are soft-spoken voices who deliver assignments to all of us at various times, and if my problem is one of hearing too acutely’ (122). As a result of these opening events, a quirky, playful narrative ambiance is established, one quite devoid of traditional divine concerns and prophetic solemnity and therefore one in which anything might happen. Whereas Ray Kinsella hears a voice no one else can hear, in Things Invisible to See, Willard’s characters see things no one else can see. Eccentric generations of Bishops confront the magical and mystical with an unsurprised matter-of-factness. Like Kinsella’s, Willard’s novel

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presents a haughty, but rather undignified God who is concerned with baseball as a means of directing human lives and history. The novel opens in Paradise with the Lord of the Universe, a pitcher god, playing ball with his archangels. His messages are delivered by means of baseballs: every thrown ball initiates events on the earth. It is ‘His hand that alone brings things to pass and gives them their true colors’. The narrator’s comment in response to the divine manipulations is ‘What a show!’ (1). Again, as in Shoeless Joe, characters live in a world in which God is characterized prominently by a sort of theatricality or showmanship. Perhaps because of his terrible power (demonstrated in his shifting the sands in the Sahara Desert, starting the labour pains of Wanda Harkissian, and orchestrating the events of World War II), the Lord of the Universe manifests a remote unconcern for the prayers of the faithful which seem minor irritations (‘buzzing round [His] left ear’ or ‘scratching [His] right shoulder’ [18]). Ben asks, ‘Why should prayers work? … If prayers worked, Hitler would have been stopped at the border of Poland by angels with swords of fire’ (20). Ben’s question is a serious one, probing to the heart of enduring theological and philosophical questions. Indeed the question implies further questions: Is God powerless to stop the sinister invasion? Did he in fact plan the invasion and its attendant suffering? Or do events roll along without plan or purpose, part of God’s eternal (baseball) game? Certainly Willard’s Lord of the Universe is not above reacting very personally to human comments about him. For instance, when Ben remarks that God broke the mould when he made Marsha, God exclaims, ‘Mold! … I never repeat myself’ (49). It is this peculiar combination of power, frailty, frivolity and pettiness of the Lord of the Universe that elicits a rather uneasy laughter; he is not only funny but also a bit frightening. A playful trickster God, he manipulates and meddles, concerned alike with small and large, local and universal: In Paradise, the Lord of the Universe tosses a green ball which breaks into a red ball, which breaks into a gold ball, and Wanda Harkissian finds, in the lining of her winter coat, a silver coin with a skull on one side and a winged man on the other, strung on a thread of elastic. (36)

Ironically, this message pitched by God carries an image of the winged man, Hermes, who is messenger of another lord of the universe, Zeus. A complex figure, Hermes is god of thieves and travellers, and, significantly, he is psychopomp, leader of souls into the Underworld, a realm which Ben and his teammates seem destined to enter. In this incident Hermes seems an ‘angel’ of the Lord of the Universe, who brings the coin back into circulation, yet he is at the same time associated through the skull on the obverse with the sinister figure of Death, and by his role as

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psychopomp with the Greek afterlife in the Underworld – all of which would seem to have little to do with Paradise, heaven and hell. Moreover the coin is not so much sacred as magic. An amulet lost years before by Ben Harkissian, it is implicated in major confrontations and negotiations with Death (37). Despite the suffering of the protagonists, involving paralysis and narrow wartime escapes, and despite the repeated brushes with death and despair, the incongruities of the supernatural beings and machinery help to balance the grim circumstances with a comic buoyancy in which the romantic plot attempts to work itself out. Whereas Kinsella’s and Willard’s novels present eccentric divine beings as important but ancillary characters, Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association presents ‘God’ as protagonist and makes of him a great comic figure. He is J. Henry Waugh (JHWH) who creates the ultimate game, a baseball universe. He owns it, and runs it. Like Willard’s Lord of the Universe, Henry is a pitcher god, and like his counterpart in the Hebrew Bible, Henry delivers universal law. Natural law in his universe is represented by three dice and charts to which each roll is referred for interpretation. Pitcher of pitchers, Henry throws the dice which determine events in the small world of the players. He, like the traditionally conceived God, is a Bookkeeper, although he keeps track of sins and good deeds as interpreted in baseball. God has his Book of Life, and Henry, his accounts, statistics and history, his entries kept in ‘permanent’ black ink. He tells Hettie, a local prostitute and his companion for the evening, that among his jobs are ‘box scores to be audited, trial balances of averages along the way, seasonal inventories, rewards and punishments to be meted out, life histories to be overseen … People die you know’ (27–28). These god-duties are demanding, but unlike Willard’s God and despite his having absolute power over his creation, he likes to believe that he, like his Association, is constrained by the rolls of the dice; that the operation of the world is a real game, whose progress and outcome make room for chance and surprise. Author of the rules of his cosmic game, Henry is nevertheless subject to them. He is a player: Even though he’d set his own rules, his own limits, and though he could change them whenever he wished, nevertheless he and his players were committed to the turns of the mindless and unpredictable – one might even say, irresponsible – dice. That was how it was. He had to accept it, or quit the game altogether. (40)

This element of irresponsibility characterizes not only the dice but their creator as well, and contributes to the precarious comedy in which he acts. As it turns out, when things get desperate Henry will prove capable of changing the rules, even of superseding natural law (creating a

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miracle) and ‘run[ning] the game by whim’ even though he recognizes that doing so renders the ‘game’ pointless, that is, absurd (40). It is towards this condition of absurdity resulting from divine determination that the narrative moves. For instance, Jock Casey is killed by a line drive produced by Henry’s manipulation of the dice: he holds the dice in his left palm and places them carefully, ‘one by one’ in a fatal fall: ‘Six. Six. Six’ (202). Less dramatically, like the Old Testament God, Henry is capable of making the sun stand still (Jos. 10:12–13) by turning his attention elsewhere. After an absence, Henry returns to the game, to observe that no time has elapsed in the players’ world while he was away: ‘it was still that moment [when the perfect game was achieved], and if he wanted to savor it or if he got occupied with something else, it could go on being that moment for weeks’. Henry wonders, though, whether ‘when things got going again, … [would] the players have any awareness of how time had stopped?’ (52). This is an interesting narrative moment, for up to this point readers have identified with Henry, taken his perspective on the ‘game’, and assumed that his players are mere tokens or game pieces. The notion that the players may be aware, however, begins to break down this single vision. Gradually other evidence emerges that the players and their universe have their own lives and reality. As readers are forced to acknowledge the players as thinking, feeling creatures, so are they made aware of the horror and the humour of Henry’s creator-god role and the world he has made. Jake (also known as Pete), a bartender who tends a bar that seems to occupy the borderland between Henry’s and the players’ realms, puts it succinctly: ‘Well, it’s a funny world’, to which someone replies, ‘Yeah … Yeah, it is. You said it’ (116). Coover’s world and Henry’s ‘universe’ are indeed terribly funny. Both the terror and the humour are illustrated in Sycamore Flynn’s nightmarish journey through a labyrinthine Hades lying beneath the ‘green expanse’ of Pioneer Park. Flynn manages the team whose pitcher, Jock Casey, has thrown the beanball which killed Henry’s beloved rookie, Damon Rutherford. It is night, and the interrupted game is due to resume the following day. Flynn is drawn into the baseball stadium because its ‘gateless entrances bothered him’ (119). Once inside in the black that is too black, Flynn explores further and further. The wall he follows keeps bending to the left, leading him in circles, or ‘maybe a spiral’ (121). Eventually he emerges from the maze to find himself on the dark field where ghostly shadows occupy the players’ positions. His terror is palpable:

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The night wind. The lifeless field. His own heart which was going to fail, going to break, going to quit. ‘Why’ve you done this to us, Jock?’ he cried out. Flynn was near tears. Behind him, he realized, past Casey, past home plate, there was an exit. Maybe it was a way out, maybe it wasn’t. But he’d never make it. It was all he wanted, but he’d never make it. He couldn’t even turn around. And besides, he wasn’t sure what he’d find at home plate on the way. ‘I quit’, he said. (123)

Just now, when the very ‘real’ Sycamore Flynn reaches the point of despair, readers are wrenched back from Flynn’s human plight in a nightmarish world to Henry’s god’s-eye view, as Henry turns on the 100-watt bulb over Pioneer Park, turns night to day, and observes the scene. Frail, funny, idiosyncratic Lord of Flynn’s universe, he has been grieving over the dead player and drinking all night. Player God, the ‘pooped and plastered Prop.’ (125) of the Universal Baseball Association, Henry is set to resume play. The prospect is funny but disquieting for readers who by now have been drawn, like Flynn, through gateless entrances into the players’ world, into the blackness and the terror of Pioneer Park. At times, like Willard’s baseballs and coin, the dice which Henry throws seem invested with a power whose source may indeed be Henry himself: ‘[Henry] stood over his chair and stared down at his papers, at the scorecard, and at the three dice, gazing up at him, through him, as though with fearfully constricted pupils’ (72). Once he throws the fatal pitch, the dice showing three ones on the Extraordinary Occurrences Chart, Henry searches frantically for a way out: ‘He was at the table again, leaning over the dice, trying to stop, trying to back up, force like the clashing of tremendous gears shrieked in his mind’ (73). At this point still playing by his own rules, Henry cannot see how he can reverse the universal gears, the flow of time, undo events: ‘Damon was dead …. “Oh no!”’ (74). Henry’s anguished denial reveals his own terrible dilemma. He has, despite his own premonitions of catastrophe, followed his own rules of the game, and Damon, light of the universe, beloved ‘son’, is dead. The problem for Henry is that either the ‘game’ is fixed or it is not. If it is not, despite its proprietor’s wishes, Damon can be killed by a bean ball. If Henry ‘fixes’ it, then life in the players’ world would be like that in our world when it is understood to be under the rule of fate or providence. Nothing can happen by chance. As Philosophy explains to Boethius, ‘I roundly affirm that there is no such thing as chance at all, and consider the word to be altogether without meaning … What place can be left for random action, when God constraineth all things to order?’ (Boethius 173–74). In such a system, God has only to watch the unfolding of his own timeless plan; all is and has always been constrained to order; all is always already determined; ‘game’ in a true sense

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cannot exist but transforms to ritual and becomes, in Henry’s word, pointless. Creator of that order, even God cannot pay attention to prayers or throw a merciful pitch. Coover’s novel raises the eternal philosophical question of whether life is free or determined and asks, like other baseball texts, whether contingency, freedom or chance – indeed whether game – is possible. In general, the answer offered by baseball’s texts is yes, and no, for baseball’s depiction of player gods and their management of the ‘game’ is mythically evasive. While not actually reconciling the opposites of order and chance, the texts walk a razor’s edge between these contradictions. If there is a God who constrains all things to order, apparently like Willard’s God, or Kinsella’s Voice, and like Henry after the death of Damon, there can be no game. All behaviour is reduced to ritual – prescribed action towards a known outcome. A looming apocalypse (like the one towards which Henry’s creatures move and like the one so many people anticipated at the millennium) requires that the game be fixed. In Kinsella’s ‘The Last Pennant before Armageddon’, the line between freedom and fate is apparent. Al Tiller, Kinsella’s protagonist, receives an if-then prophecy from another baseball-playing God: If the Cubs win the pennant, Armageddon will follow. Al, as manager of the Cubs, might appear to have some freedom of choice – to save the world by mismanaging his team – but as the story ends during the crucial game, nothing is decided. Even Al’s managerial ‘choice’ to leave in a tiring pitcher might or might not have been his to make and in any case promises no certain outcome. At the end, the text evades the problem by leaving the crucial game in progress, as is the case also in Coover’s and Willard’s novels. While all may imply it, none actually says that the game is fixed, and so the irreconcilable opposites of freedom and fate remain in play. Where there is a god, there is likely to be a universal antagonist, a being necessary to dualistic and apocalyptic thinking (with its anticipation of a final battle), as well as to the contest implied in game. For unless the game of God is solitaire, to play a game implies an opponent, someone not only with but also against whom one plays. Initially, Coover’s Henry, like Milton’s God, plays solitaire. Henry, however, has invented ‘alternative schemes for playing the game which would allow for two proprietors or more’ (40–41). Both Milton’s God and Coover’s Henry do acquire antagonists against whom to play: God has his Satan or Lucifer Angel, and Henry his Lou Engle. Unlike Milton’s Satan, however, Henry’s opponent is not evil, is not particularly serious about the play, and does not understand the rules of the game. He is, in short, comic rather than sinister. Henry notices that ‘he didn’t seem to be

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playing with Lou, but through him, and the way through was dense and hostile’ (185). Lou’s participation is short-lived – one comical but disastrous game. In his bumbling drunkenness Lou introduces an arbitrary randomness and in the end causes an accidental but ‘universal’ beer flood, after which Henry realizes that ‘it’s all over’, and he starts to destroy his universe (198–200). Willard’s God plays ball with his archangels, but not against them. His opponent may be an enigmatic figure known as Death. Like Milton’s Satan but unlike Coover’s Lou Engle, he has a distinctly sinister aspect.5 He consorts with Nazis, for example, and like Coleridge’s Life-in-Death, comes in a boat to claim Ben’s friend, Captain Cooper (190–91). Yet Willard’s Death seems primarily to be the adversary of the human characters rather than God, for the baseball game they play is against Death’s team of baseball immortals known as the Dead Knights, for whom Lou Gehrig plays first base and Christy Mathewson pitches. Such players do not appear to be from hell, merely dead. Ben and Willie Harkissian, the good and bad twins, are aligned respectively with life and Death. As Willard presents it, this opposition is a repeated motif in human history, represented also in Abel and Cain and in Jacob and Esau. The struggle will culminate in a baseball game as final battle. According to Cold Friday, God’s universe does contain the traditional rival, the devil, who is perhaps in league with Death. Yet in the pastiche of old myths that constitute the novel, their relationship is ambiguous, as is their relationship with God. Death appears at different times to be the minion of both God and the devil. Cold Friday explains to Clare why her paralysis is not Ben’s fault: The one that hit [the ball that paralysed you] ain’t the one that made the spell. You is conjured with one of the old spells the devil sent out when he took his third of the earth. Them is slow, traveling spells. They come from the darkness that moved on the face of the waters ‘fore the earth was …. And that spell got itself handed down, hand over hand, ‘cause that spell is so evil. The hand that worked the spell on you didn’t make it. (245)

Ben, it seems, has been the instrument of an ancient devil’s curse. He and Clare seem to have led determined lives, having been moved from the beginning of time not only by God, but by the devil, unless the acts of the antagonist are part of God’s design, producing a world in which prayers do not work, but ancient curses do. Traditionally, the concepts of order and evil have been difficult to reconcile. If, as Boethius’ Philosophy claims, there can be no such thing as chance when God constrains all 5 Willard’s Death, also known as Mr Knocken, has much in common with Douglass Wallop’s Mr Applegate, perhaps the earliest such figure to appear in baseball mythology.

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things to order, a part of that order must be the evil principle, the divine antagonist, and everything he does. Thinking along these lines, Coover’s Henry imagines himself ‘like a baserunner on the paths, alone in a hostile cosmos’ confronting Balls hurled down to him off the magic mound …: his limited chances. Or rather: not to him, but just to earth, passive, faintly hostile, deprecatory, masked – while he interposed himself heroically to defy the holy condition … not knowing his defiance was merely a part of it. (141; my emphasis)

The defiance of Willard’s Death/Devil seems, like Henry’s, and perhaps like Lou Engle’s, ‘merely a part of [the holy condition]’.6 Spirits of the Dead, Ghosts, Phantoms and Other Soulish Beings Insofar as millennial anticipations created an environment hospitable to angels, certainly baseball’s texts mirror that environment, making way for an astonishing array of otherworldly visitors. Supernatural visitors, whether they appear in visions or dreams, often come with messages from outside time concerning the present and the future. Hence angelic visitation is often linked with prophecy, as in Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe: ‘If you build it, he will come’ (1). Besides gods in their physical manifestations and their antagonists (discussed above), other sorts of angels populate the worlds of baseball’s narratives. Today a common view of angels is that they are spirits of the dead. Bloom suggests that ‘these days, [angels] have been divested of their sublimity by popular culture’, a phenomenon to which he refers as the ‘domestication of angels’ (42– 43). While both heavenly creatures and spirits of the dead (domesticated angels) are present in baseball’s mythology, it is this latter sort that materializes with remarkable frequency, along with a third type – the shade or ghost or phantom, a being apparently without angelic status and relatively little power, like Homer’s ‘strengthless dead’ or the denizens of the Old Testament Sheol. This soulish sort is often associated with cemeteries, graves and other nether realms. In this section, I am concerned with the swarm of angels and ghosts who populate the texts 6 This point raises a related question about the possibility of representing genuine freedom, or chance, in fiction. The divine Author and the human author may be seen in analogous roles with respect to universe and book. In his Standard Deviations, Leland Monk explores ‘the oxymoronic nature of the phrase “chance in narrative”’ (8), asserting that ‘chance marks and defines a fundamental limit to the telling of any story: chance is that which cannot be represented in narrative’ (9). At least in one sort of universe (in which fate or providence operates), chance (and with it freedom and responsibility) is that which cannot be represented in human events. Apocalyptic predictions assume an always already defined ‘plot’, and a world bound for Apocalypse is a world in which chance cannot operate.

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and with associated dreams, visions and prophecies of individual or local concern. I shall delay until a later section consideration of those of a specifically apocalyptic nature. Willard’s benign Ancestress offers a good example of the domesticated angel. As her title implies, she is the spirit of a dead ancestress, one who visits Clare in the hospital where she has awoken paralysed. She teaches Clare to travel out of her body, and as she leaves she spreads ‘pale wings’ and transforms herself into a speckled bird (13). According to Bloom, the ‘“out-of-body experience” is all but a synonym for the “near-death-experience”’ (129). Clare has several such experiences under the tutelage of the Ancestress, but the phenomenon is one also experienced years before by Clare’s mother, Helen. During her travels away from her dying body, Helen finds herself apparently in ‘Paradise on the banks of the River of Time’ – the place where the novel begins and from which the Lord of the Universe pitches his baseballs: ‘[She] found herself knee deep in snake grass on the bank of a river. The water was so clear she could see white stones resting on the bottom, like eggs, except that they were perfectly round.’ From this vantage she can see a curiously Dantesque ‘vast silent throng’ ranged as if ‘on invisible bleachers’, apparently observing the divine baseball game. They invite Helen ‘over’ – across the River of Time. All are Ancestors, the recently dead in front, the remote dead at the back, in the process of turning to birds (14–15). Helen declines their invitation to cross the river and returns to her body. The Ancestress is of this throng, dispatched to earth to ‘prophesy’ to Clare that if she recovers it will be her own doing, depending ‘on the doctor [she carries within her]’ (12–13). Later a more numerous assembly of spirits arrives to participate in a crucial baseball game, which is really a battle between life and Death. As the Dead Knights, Death’s team, appear, they reveal themselves not as angels, but as phantoms of some nether realm: ‘the air grew faintly chill, as if rain were not far off – yet not rain, either, but the dank moisture on the undersides of stones’ (253). In addition to late-century myths of angels and out-of-body experiences, combined with baseball and such seeming Christian and classical scraps, Willard has gathered her bricolage from the culture, figures and events of World War II, and from folk beliefs in animism, charms, spells, curses and exorcism (the religion of Cold Friday). The overall effect of this gathering is to poise the narrative on the margin where physical and spiritual realms abut upon each other and sometimes overlap, creating a space where baseball is played and wars are waged by both mundane and otherworldly participants. A similar kind of space opens up in Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe, furnishing a scene for the visitation of most of the

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uncanny spirits who populate the novel. The scene’s construction and design have been directed by the voice in Ray Kinsella’s first encounter with it. Ray comments, A three-hour lecture or a 500-page guide book could not have given me clearer directions: Dimensions of ballparks jumped over and around me like fleas, cost figures for light standards and floodlights whirled around my head … That was all the instruction I ever received: two announcements and a vision of a baseball field. (4)

The first very domesticated angel to arrive on the field is Shoeless Joe Jackson (in his baseball uniform), but soon will follow a host, a profuse infusion into this space of extra-worldly beings, and with them the things and structures associated with the game – all constituting a type of Platonic ideal form of baseball to occupy the space that is neither material nor spiritual, but some improbable overlap (the cokes and hotdogs that arrive with the host and the stadium appear to be edible by this world’s inhabitants). At first the spiritual host appears within a mostly immaterial ballpark, of which Ray has constructed only the left field, a single bank of lights, and left-field bleachers. As the story progresses, other members of the Black Sox eight (‘substantial’ like Shoeless Joe) arrive. Ray observes, ‘Shoeless Joe, or whoever or whatever breathed this magic down onto my Iowa farm, provided me with another live baseball player each time I finished constructing a section of the field’ (21). What does he mean, ‘another live baseball player’? All are, of course, dead, but there seems to be a deeper order of death which characterizes the phantoms on the opposing team (whose members have much in common with Willard’s Dead Knights). The arrival of each ‘live’ baseball player is oddly contingent on the completion of the material part of the field in which he plays. The space of the field has become ‘magic’, a place where the living, the ‘substantial’ angels, and the phantom dead may meet. As Ray puts it, ‘the phantom baseball park superimposes itself on my labor of love’ (184). Ray’s ballpark is a place for defeating death, for like the ballpark, the angelic players seem resurrected; they are ‘live’. In the ballpark they achieve a sort of ideal form – not old and ill as when they died, but vigorous and youthful for playing the game. Time on the field is not clock time, but mythic time – never and always. Shoeless Joe is twentyfive years old (210). Ray’s father, John Kinsella, arrives on the field to catch, a ‘white-uniformed young man’ (166). Doc ‘Moonlight’ Graham, dead for years, will play on the field as young Archie Graham, rookie (167). Eddie Sissons, alive but aged and moribund, will take the field as ‘Kid’ Sissons, ‘a swath of blond hair cascading over his forehead, his

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body solid, pure, and hard as birch’ (189). As Eddie watches Kid Sissons pitch, he is a bit like Zoroaster who met himself walking in the garden, the physical and the spiritual forms nodding in recognition as they pass. The entire company appears to have achieved that post-apocalyptic state in which aging, death, sorrow and pain are unknown.

Not Dying: Old Man, Old Century Within the purview of the game, Nancy Willard’s characters, inhabitants of a metaphysically invested world, survive in an ambiguous, ongoing confrontation with Death, a figure in black with sinister intentions. But death (and the related subject of aging) can be treated in more mundane terms. As the century, the millennium and the world age, and seem to inch towards end-times, so do individual human beings. Translating this idea into baseball terms, protagonists face aging, the failure of their skills as athletes, and the end of their careers as a sort of death or as a fate equivalent to or suggestive of death.7 Mark Harris’s It Looked Like For Ever explores these themes. It includes an epigraph from Robert Frost’s poem, ‘Provide, Provide’, lines from which capture the dread of aging and death lurking just beneath the comic surface of the novel: ‘No memory of having starred’ can compensate for ‘later disregard’or keep ‘the end from being hard’. Harris’s novel is crafted from the bricolage of the life story of Henry Wiggen, protagonist of three previous books, and from the popular culture of late-century America, including an obsessive concern with aging and health, cryogenics and cybernetics, making and keeping money, psychological therapies, sex, child-rearing and baseball. Harris does not deny the poignancy and import of his themes of aging and death, but he filters them through the genuinely comic character and voice of his protagonist, improbably nicknamed ‘Author’, a ‘writer’ whose irrepressible spirit and idiosyncrasies of language, grammar and spelling keep pulling the potentially tragic account towards the comic. He is a big-league pitcher who attempts to survive when his career, which is his life, appears to be over. As he says, ‘Once you stop playing you are … nothing, you got nothing to do, you roam around feeling useless, you got nothing left to do but put your hands in your ass pockets and look alive if you can’ (3). Henry thus equates playing baseball with life, as does Robert Coover’s despairing and suicidal Paul Trench: ‘He wants to quit‘– but what does he mean,–“quit”? The game? Life? Could you separate them?’ (239). 7 Michael Chabon’s short story ‘Smoke’ retells this story in a tragic mode.

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Harris’s Henry Wiggen is one of baseball’s characters whom we see in different novels in different stages of his career. In The Southpaw (1953), he is a rookie of twenty-one; in Bang the Drum Slowly (1956), he is a confident player at the peak of his strength, an all-star pitcher and twenty-plus game winner, who at the age of twenty-four calculates his life expectancy at ninety-six years if he ‘keep[s] in shape and [doesn’t] come down with a fatal disease’ (187). By the time we meet him again in It Looked Like For Ever, everything has changed. Henry is old for a player, nearing forty; his team has released him; he is suffering an assortment of maladies, including impaired vision, ominous traces of blood in the semen, and, as he says, ‘prostrate’ troubles. Whereas prostate trouble is serious, prostrate trouble can only be funny, and Henry’s ailment manages to be both. He asks his doctor, ‘What brings on prostrate trouble?’ and his doctor replies, ‘Time’ (53). He has a dim recognition that God is punishing him with this particular malady, that he has slipped not only from the physical but also from the moral condition of his younger self. Between twenty-four and forty he has lost his fast ball, his proud self-confidence and healthy scepticism, and he has grown vulnerable on the mound, anxious about his health, slightly promiscuous and vaguely religious. As a baseball player at the end of his career, Henry is an appropriate representative of the millennial anxieties with which I am concerned. As he ages, his character darkens, tending towards promiscuity and profanity, reflective perhaps of a general American moral decline. As he struggles to stay in baseball, there is a kind of underhanded griminess to his machinations that was absent from the manoeuvres of the younger Henry. Sceptical of a supernatural hereafter, Henry’s waning career and his confrontation with age and decrepitude bring him into contact with a woman who represents a cryogenic company known as ‘Life After’. She makes an icy promise of a sort of resurrection and life in the perfected future. Henry resists her sales pitch. The day is cold. He says, it’s ‘a bad day to be selling me ice’ (107). A variation on the theme of equating baseball with life and the end of the game with death, seen in It Looked Like For Ever, presents baseball as a kind of shelter against aging and death: as long as one plays, one stays alive. The game itself is a venue of life: as one manager tells Henry, ‘You cannot be playing baseball and aging at the same time’ (92). The field is a place exempt from the running of time, a place of not dying, capable of restoring health to the decrepit and life to the dead.8 8 The theme of old men playing appears in Jerome Charyn’s The Seventh Babe, a finely spun, mythically charged tale that explores the poignancy of human relationships and employs baseball as a means of evading age and death; the theme occurs again,

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Philip Dacey presents this possibility in his ‘Mystery Baseball’, wherein the field harbours ‘deep under second base’ an aged, one-hundred-yearold immortal: All through the game, players pull at the bills of their caps, acknowledging him. (In Johnson 19)

In the way of poetic figures, Dacey’s old man is ambiguous. He is a creature of two worlds – the living and the dead: he lives under second base in what must be a grave. He haunts the field like the players’ own future selves, a disquieting inevitability which must be ‘acknowledged’, and yet his presence is comforting too, for the baseball field has opened to include him in the realm of life and play. A similar sense adheres to Eddie Scissons, in Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe, a man who claims to be the oldest living Chicago Cub. When he dies he seems like Dacey’s old man to live under the field, for he is buried in playing clothes, a Chicago Cubs uniform, in left field – ‘where the grass is most lush, … the color dark and luxurious as ripe limes’ (198). Whereas these two old men are ‘present’ under the field, baseball resurrects and rejuvenates others to play the game. A common use of the game and the field is to provide the dead with a way back to the land of the living. As discussed, Nancy Willard’s Things Invisible to See brings together on a ball field the living team of South Avenue Rovers (whose lives are nevertheless in jeopardy), coached by Father Legg, and the Dead Knights, coached by Death. Death realizes that his team is losing when he observes that the dead ‘want the living to win’. He says, ‘They remember how it was. All the pain, all the trouble – they’d choose it again – they’d go extra innings into infinity for the chance to be alive again’ (261). Baseball provides the venue for the odd half-life of the Dead Knights. Intriguingly, Willard ends the novel with the score tied, the dead still playing, not winning even though they could, with the suggestion that as baseball’s rules allow, this game can last forever, for both the living and the dead, and delay forever the apocalyptic moment. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe explores in greater depth the theme of resurrection within the spatial and temporal dimensions of the baseball field. From its opening sentences, Shoeless Joe reveals that while the place of the novel may be Iowa, its space is of the borderland, and its time is folded and elastic. Without realizing it, Ray Kinsella, the novel’s protagonist, lives on a farm with mythic dimensions. As he will come to in Jay Neugeboren’s Sam’s Legacy, when the aged Mason Tidewater is summoned into the game by teammates from the long-defunct Negro League (370).

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recognize, the farm is really a baseball field, a place where ‘the dimensions of time … have been loosened’ (23), and ‘within the baselines anything can happen. Tides can reverse; oceans can open … Colors can change, lives can alter, anything is possible in this gentle, flawless, loving game’ (78).9 As mentioned, Ray’s ballpark will fill up with a home team consisting of the Black Sox eight, plus a catcher (Ray’s dead father), a right fielder (Archie Graham, the youthful persona of a dead man who has played baseball briefly before pursuing a long career as a doctor), and the youthful double of the ancient, still living Eddie Scissons. They will oppose a shadowy team of visitors who are ‘gray and ephemeral as dandelion fluff’ (187). The dimensions of the field mark the boundaries of the uncanny space-time in which the nearly dead, the substantial dead, and anonymous, insubstantial phantoms can play and ‘live’. This is a space where Henry Wiggen’s poetic view of baseball is realized, where every year ‘the player on the field remains the same age’ (91). Whereas Henry dismisses this view, Ray’s players do remain ever young while on the field. When they leave the field after a game, they do not (and cannot) cross the baselines; rather they depart through a very plain door in centre field, across an uncanny threshold into unknown dimensions. Ray says that he tries not to speculate about what lies beyond that gate, but he does anyway: Do they smell of mothballs, like dolls packed away in an old woman’s trunk for fifty years? Are they stored on shelves? Is there a warehouse full of ancient baseball players packed away in bales, brittle and dry, faces full of eggshell cracks? Or do they merely move on to another ballpark, another town? (260)

An interesting but obvious omission from his speculations is that they may simply and eternally moulder in graves. Ray even hopes that if he serves the players well, he may someday be told their secrets, may even be invited to walk through that door with them after a game (220). This ‘shape of a door’ (219) marks the entrance into the otherworld, and it seems to allow free passage between realms and across dimensions of time. Ray’s wish that he may someday go through that door is, therefore, also a wish that he will, like his players, be able to return through it to the field of youth, play and eternal life.

9 Kinsella explores the physics of baseball’s space-time continuum and the dimensions of this borderland from a different vantage point in his The Iowa Baseball Confederacy.

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Expectations of the End of Time Prominent among the bricolage in narratives of end-time is the account in Revelation, with its promise of continuity. The biblical text prophesies a final destruction and an end of time when existence will be transformed: God ‘will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more’; but this desirable condition can be achieved only after a final battle between good and evil, in which good is victorious, and ‘the former things have passed away’ (Rev. 21:4). Here ‘passed away’ is a euphemism for having ‘fled away’, in the case of earth and sky; having been destroyed utterly; or even worse, in the case of souls whose names are not found in the Book of Life, thrown into ‘the lake of fire and sulphur’ where ‘they will be tormented day and night for ever and ever’ (Rev. 20:10–11, 15), the final judgment. It is not surprising that those who have inherited the notion of a beginning of time (‘In the beginning, God …’) will accept as well what Bloom calls a ‘sense of a possible end-time’, to associate that end with the close of the twentieth century, and to experience ‘inevitably ambivalent sensations’ (41) at the approach of the millennium. Bloom traces the idea of end-time to Zoroaster (41). Friedrich Nietzsche likewise found end-time a key Zoroastrian idea. His Zarathustra (Zoroaster) is one in whom the millennial ambivalence Bloom mentions is epitomized. Zarathustra approaches a crucial threshold, which Nietzsche calls the gateway Moment, and we call Millennium, an arbitrary point in the flow of time with two pathways leading to eternity. Having been named, the gateway achieves a certain concreteness. It is ‘real’. Nietzsche’s gateway Moment, like the millennial threshold, is associated with apocalypse, for nearby Zarathustra will witness a battle between good and evil (in the figures of a shepherd and a serpent, emblems respectively of Jesus and Satan). When the shepherd prevails, a sign of impending end-time, he becomes ‘a transformed being, surrounded by light, laughing!’ The laughter is metaphysical laughter in response to an ultimate triumph, and of a sort never heard on earth. Hearing the sound, Zarathustra experiences apocalyptic desire, consumed by his ‘longing for this laughter’, wondering in his longing how he can ‘endure still to live’. At the same time, however, to hear the laughter again he must die, and, he exclaims, ‘How could I endure to die now!’ (180). Apparent in Zarathustra’s dilemma is an extraordinary ambivalence resulting from a coincidence of fear and desire – fear of ending, of death, and desire for a place of continuity, laughter and life.

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These components – that longing for transcendent laughter existing almost inevitably with individual terror – constitute the basis of apocalyptic ambivalence: fear and desire appear to have the same object. Occasionally desire overcomes fear, or fear, desire. Occasionally greed or simple naïveté may resolve the dilemma. Like her cryogenic-believing counterparts in the world, Mark Harris’s funny and pathetic Iceoleum lady is a case in point. A thin woman in a thin coat on a winter day, she imagines a long, frozen suspension of life, followed by a scientifically engineered resurrection. She suffers no ambivalence, for she believes that she has the means of overcoming individual death. Thus her ironically presented vision of the future has much in common with the promises of Revelation: When you awake … you will be in the wonderful world of the future. Disney World will be nothing compared to the vision your eyes will meet. All the problems of the present world will be solved and all your present enemies will be dead. Every body will be as happy as they can be … All the wars will be over … Life will all be games for every body … All the races and colors will be kissing and dancing. Every thing will be did by computers. (Looked 107)

Notice that, as in Revelation, the ‘enemies’ have been defeated. All will be well when cryogenics combines with cybernetics. For the Iceoleum lady as for other apocalyptic thinkers, a sincere conviction that one can overcome death is the key. This victory paves the way for ‘the wonderful world of the future’, where God (or computer-gods) will take care of everything, wiping away ‘every tear’ and abolishing forever mourning, crying and pain. Clearly personal and universal ideas of end-time are difficult to separate. Indeed notions of universal end-time may be a logical corollary not only of the linear view of time, as Bloom suggests, but of the consciousness of individual death.10 The fear of extinction, precariously balanced by hope for transcendence, produces in many people the ambivalent sensations of which Bloom speaks. All of these – the fear, the desire and the ambivalence, whether experienced in a personal or a universal mode – are reflected in the millennial anticipations and end-time anxieties of baseball narratives. Baseball’s most comical and compelling narration of millennial anxieties is Robert Coover’s. Coover has described the structure of’The Universal Baseball Association as like that of the first biblical narrative of creation: ‘seven chapters corresponding to the seven days of creation’, 10 Frank Kermode makes the argument that the apocalyptic ‘End’ is tropological, ‘a figure for [men’s] own deaths’ (7).

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which, he says, ‘naturally implied an eighth, the apocalyptic day’ (in Gado 149). Coover calls his eighth chapter, concerned with the apocalyptic day, an ‘outsider’s gloss, an ironist’s gloss’ on the ‘text from which it borrows its design [Revelation]’ (in LeClair and McCaffery 73). As creator-god of his world, Henry is a great comic figure largely because he is, one might say, human – all too human. He eats deli food, drinks to excess, is bawdy and rowdy, and becomes very personally involved in the lives of his players. When his beloved rookie pitcher and spiritual son, Damon Rutherford, is killed by the bean ball, Henry mourns, drinks and considers destroying his universe. Indeed Henry’s creation, like the fragile world of the Bible, seems always on the brink of disaster. As Henry returns to his game after a day’s bookkeeping, he suffers his own apocalyptic anxieties: ‘At the door of his apartment, he was often grabbed by mild panic, felt the fragility of this thing he’d fashioned; a fire, theft, even a hard wind …’ (52). In the apocalyptic chapter, events take place on opening day one hundred league years after the Universal Baseball Association has nearly been destroyed in a flood (of beer) and been saved by a sacrifice (of Jock Casey), followed by a covenant of sorts, a quirky, ominous promise whose sign is a rainbow arc of vomited pizza (198–202). The intervening one hundred years represent human history between the primeval event of the flood and the advent of apocalypse, so that it comes down not only to the end of a century, but to end-time. It is Damonsday [Doomsday?], CLVII. Creator Henry, who has been the focus of narration during the first seven chapters (days), has disappeared. Readers are unsure what this means. Is God dead? Is he senile? Has he changed the rules? The focus is now on Henry’s creatures, the players who are left alone in a universe teetering on the edge of apocalypse, trying to make sense of things through religion, ritual, politics, scholarly study, superstition and philosophy. They engage in endless speculation about the existence of a God or ‘record-keeper’ and the meaning, if any, of the game. Irreverent and drunk, Gringo Green embraces a UBA version of fate or providence, which if true confirms that indeed the rules, natural law and the universe have changed: He declares that ‘The game is fixed!’ Readers are left to appreciate the grim humour implicit in the speculations of these beings, once thought of as mere game pieces, but now all there is, and sounding very much like twentieth-century human beings. Coover’s novel, like Zarathustra’s vision, ends with laughter. After Paul Trench’s acknowledgement that ‘They’re all going to die. And nothing he can do about it’ (242), pitcher Damon Rutherford holds up a

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ball between himself and his catcher, and ‘it is hard and white and alive in the sun’. Then ‘[Paul] laughs. It’s beautiful, that ball’ (242). Paul’s ‘human’ laughter is to be contrasted with that of Nietzsche’s shepherd, which is ‘no human laughter’. Paul’s is for this world. It is the laughter fostered by comedy, a genre that permits one to accept and to make fun of that which otherwise would be unendurable. The shepherd’s laughter is not comic, not for this world, but for eternity; it is the laughter of ultimate triumph over all enemies and over all that is too horrible to endure. Paul and his small, vulnerable world have advanced like Zarathustra and the dwarf gravity to the gateway Moment or Millennium. At this place, this moment, his terror is palpable and yet ridiculous. Is he a man or a token in a game invented by a socially inept player-creator? He is somehow both as he grapples with ultimate questions: Death is a relative idea, truth absolute! … Or did Squire put it the other way around? … He forgets now which is relative and which is absolute. If either. It is all falling apart on him. And either way it’s coming. Yes, now, today, here in the blackening sun, on the burning green grass, and the eyes, and the crumbling … (241)

It is the place of final battle, which takes the form of play and of laughter in the face of terror and despair. There are a number of common threads in the fiction I have discussed. Prominent among them is the teeming presence in the texts of gods and angelic visitors, whether heavenly, domesticated or ghostly. Further connections are to be found in the novels’ insistence on baseball as a system of reference to mythic emplotments, together with their tendency to occur in sacred space and time. In addition, they all exhibit an obsession with death, but death determinedly countered by play, by laughter, by narrative strategies for living, not aging, not dying, and for salvaging or resurrecting the dead. Each incorporates omens of the millennium, and most raise, but do not resolve, questions concerning freedom and fate. These several threads are woven together in novels which exhibit a willingness seriously to entertain miracle, wonder and metaphysical horror in a defiant, irreverent and comic mode and to answer the question, What’s so funny about the apocalypse? Baseball’s mythology thus reflects and works variations upon Harold Bloom’s omens of millennium in late-century American culture, omens indicative of what we desire and what we fear. Like Coover’s Gringo Greene, we desire ‘love, truth, beauty, meaning, and eternal life’, and so we summon angels, listen for prophetic voices and embrace the reassuring implications of continuity in reported near-death experiences. Caught up in the cult of youth, we fear aging and individual death. Even eternity

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imagined in some apocalyptic schemes presents its own terrors. Baseball is an appropriate venue for mythmakers because the game, its progress and its field provide a realm of art wherein to enact such fears and desires and to carry on the impossible mythic task of overcoming their contradictions. The texts ask, What’s so funny about the millennium? They reply, nothing … and everything.

Works Cited Bloom, Harold. Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection. New York: Riverhead Press, 1996. Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. Trans. H. R. James. New York: E. P. Dutton; London: George Routledge & Sons, 1874. Chabon, Michael. ‘Smoke’. In’Baseball’s Best Short Stories. Ed. Paul D. Staudohar. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1995. 133–42. Coover, Robert. The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. New York, London, and Scarborough, Ontario: New American Library, 1971. Eliade, Mircea. Myth and Reality. Trans. Willard R. Trask. New York: Harper & Row, 1968. Gado, Frank, ed. First Person: Conversations on Writers & Writing. Schenectady, NY: Union College Press, 1973. Grosso, Michael. The Millennium Myth: Love and Death at the End of Time. Wheaton, IL: Quest Books, 1995. Harris, Mark. Bang the Drum Slowly. New York: Dell, 1956. ——. It Looked Like For Ever. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979. Johnson, Don, ed. Hummers, Knucklers, and Slow Curves: Contemporary Baseball Poems. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1991. Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. Kinsella, W. P. Shoeless Joe. New York: Ballantine Books, 1982. ——. The Iowa Baseball Confederacy. New York: Ballantine Books, 1986. ——. ‘The Last Pennant Before Armageddon’. In The Thrill of the Grass. New York: Penguin Books, 1984. 3–21. Lamy, Philip. Millennium Rage: Survivalists, White Supremacists, and the Doomsday Prophecy. New York and London: Plenum Press, 1996. Lawren, Bill. ‘Apocalypse now?’ Psychology Today 23 (May 1989): 38-44. LeClair, Tom, and Larry McCaffery. Anything Can Happen: Interviews with Contemporary American Novelists. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1983. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. The Savage Mind. Trans. George Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966. ——. ‘The Structural Study of Myth’. In Myth, A Symposium. Ed. Thomas A. Sebeok. Philadelphia: American Folklore Society, 1955. 81–106.

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Loevinger, Lee. ‘The Significance of the Millennium’. Skeptical Inquirer 21 (Jan.–Feb. 1997): 31–36. Monk, Leland. Standard Deviations: Chance and the Modern British Novel. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. Neugeboren, Jay. Sam’s Legacy. New York, Chicago, and San Francisco: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Trans. R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Penguin Books, 1961. Roth, Philip. The Great American Novel. New York, Chicago, San Francisco: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973. Wallop, Douglass. The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant. New York: Norton, 1954. Westbrook, Deeanne. Ground Rules: Baseball and Myth. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Willard, Nancy. Things Invisible to See. Toronto, New York, London: Bantam Books, 1984. Wills, Garry. ‘What’s the deal with the Millennium?’ Playboy, Jan. 1994, 41. General Reference Center. Online. Infotrac SearchBank, 31 July 1998.

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Finding a Voice, Telling a Story

Chapter 13 RoFinding a Voice, Telling a Story: Constructing Communal Identity in Contemporary American Women’s Writing Lois Parkinson Zamora Willa Cather, in her 1925 introduction to Sarah Orne Jewett’s collected stories, repeatedly uses the metaphor of voice to praise the Maine writer’s work: Pater said that every truly great drama must, in the end, linger in the reader’s mind as a sort of ballad. Probably the same thing might be said of every great story. It must leave in the mind of the sensitive reader an intangible residuum of pleasure; a cadence, a quality of voice that is exclusively the writer’s own, individual, unique. (8)

In her comments about Jewett’s fiction, Cather says that ‘good writing’ possesses ‘the kind of beauty we feel when a beautiful song is sung by a beautiful voice that is exactly suited to the song’ (8). Cather’s own novel, The Song of the Lark (1915), dramatizes the difficulties of this process when the singer (and by extension, the writer) happens to be American, and a woman. It also dramatizes the rewards. About her character, Thea Kronberg, Cather’s narrator states: ‘Her voice, more than any other part of her, had to do with that confidence, that sense of wholeness and inner well-being that she had felt at moments ever since she could remember’ (196). If Cather’s character finds her voice in the German operatic repertoire, the contemporary women writers whom I discuss in this essay describe a more basic process. Voice is still a central metaphor, but its significance is now less personal than political. Instead of the ‘individual, unique’ voice that Cather celebrates, contemporary American women writers tend to foreground the politics of cultural identity. They aim to speak for cultural communities, and they create characters who struggle to do so. Toni Morrison, Leslie Silko, Maxine Hong Kingston, Sandra Cisneros, and other contemporary women writers describe the processes whereby their characters eventually find a voice that recuperates (or creates) a shared understanding of their own history and culture. So, then, the ‘sense of wholeness and the inner well-being’ that Cather’s character experiences are, in these contemporary novels, also described in terms of finding one’s voice. To do so is to posit an integrated social

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structure out of which individual well-being may come, and the process is frequently represented by means of oral forms of speech and/or song. We will see that these oral forms, when motivated by the speaker’s (and author’s) need to define historical and communal experience, constitute a feminist mode and strategy. Obviously, the metaphor of voice implies the imperative to overcome silence: to locate (or create) a like-minded audience who will listen, and then speak one’s mind. Silence is construed as the opposite of voice – its negative, its negation – a construct based on the understanding that silence has been imposed by oppressive social and political structures rather than freely chosen as an alternative to dialogue or discussion. I will eventually complicate this opposition between silence and speech, but my aim here is to suggest the ways in which it is a late twentiethcentury model, and a gendered one. For example, contrast Melville’s elaborate homage to silence at the beginning of his novel Pierre (1852): There are some strange summer mornings in the country, when he who is but a sojourner from the city shall early walk forth into the fields, and be wonder-smitten with the trance-like aspect of the green and golden world. Not a flower stirs; the trees forget to wave; the grass itself seems to have ceased to grow; and all Nature, as if suddenly become conscious of her own profound mystery, and feeling no refuge from it but silence, sinks into this wonderful and indescribable repose. (1)

Pierre – ‘touched and bewitched by the loveliness of this silence’ – eventually emerges into the sight of the reader and his beloved. Melville links silence and stillness: the Oversoul is both mute and immutable. In Moby-Dick (1851), Melville makes silence the very source of the white whale’s power. Tony Tanner focuses on this point in Scenes of Nature, Signs of Men. He notes that the ‘Etymology’ at the beginning of’Moby-Dick is provided by a ‘late consumptive usher to a Grammar School’, and the ‘Extracts’ that follow by a ‘sub-sub-librarian’. Tanner observes: Both are clearly inadequate to what Melville has in hand; the usher is dead and the librarian is ‘sub-sub’ … There could be no clearer warning, or jocular reminder, that the book and the whale are forever mutually exclusive, that the scene forever eludes the sign. ‘Has the Sperm Whale ever written a book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared in his doing nothing particular to prove it. It is moreover declared in his pyramidical silence.’ (18)

Ishmael’s ironic attempt to communicate this ‘pyramidical silence’ consists in describing the whale’s brow: ‘I put but that brow before you.

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Read it if you can.’ Tanner concludes: ‘We can read the book, but the book cannot read the brow. So it is, and so Ishmael knows it to be’ (18). Tanner traces this ambivalence back to Melville’s Puritan heritage: For the elect and the saved, the scene of the world was composed entirely of signs and the signs were fixed and interpretable – stabilized, as it were, by God. But, declared Jonathan Edwards, for the unsaved and unregenerate, ‘living with words or signs alone interposes a distance between them and reality’ … For Edwards of course the excessive significance of all things pointed to or revealed some aspect of God. But consider the state of mind which could perceive portentous signifiers everywhere but which did not have assured belief in the fixed and anchoring transcendent signified – God. You would then have writers like Hawthorne and Melville. (19–20)

And Emerson and Thoreau. Lawrence Buell precedes Tanner in noticing the characteristic ambivalence of Transcendentalist aesthetics towards the efficacy of voice: ‘Emerson and Thoreau are quite explicit … in the contrasts they draw between the imperfectness of the vehicle of expression and the nobility of the thing expressed …’ (100). Their philosophical idealism lends itself to a nostalgia for a universal language, in the process making New England seem like New Babel. Language is a particularizing instrument and a social one – and thus, it would seem, a limited and limiting vehicle for their transcendental project. Silence must have offered an inviting alternative. This ambivalence towards language is present in the Neoplatonized Christian foundations of European Romanticism, of course, but never to the same degree as in American Transcendentalist aesthetics.1 American writers continued through the mid-nineteenth century to find it necessary to justify art on religious grounds. Emerson praised the poet over the minister but nonetheless expected poetry to awaken spiritual sentiment. Poetry was to echo divine discourse, as all human utterance was, in fact, supposed to strive to do. Emerson writes in ‘SelfReliance’: ‘It must be that when God speaketh he should communicate, not one thing, but all things; should fill the world with his voice … and new create the whole’ (II, 65–66). In The Rhetoric of American Romance, Evan Carton notes the irony of Emerson’s idealism: ‘Emerson’s faith in the individual’s access to this speech, this immanent recreative potential, constitutes the foundation of his doctrine of self-reliance; simultaneously, however, it undermines any possible foundation for selfhood. “SelfReliance” urgently indicates, as it eloquently veils, its failure to define a self upon which to rely’ (78). The voice to which Emerson aspires is the 1 See M. H. Abrams’ seminal discussion of the Neoplatonic foundations of European Romanticism in Natural Supernaturalism 150–64.

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voice of God, a voice that describes not individuals but mankind – ‘the whole’ – and is unquestionably male. Differences among selves or societies are of little consequence if one is moved by the potential unity of all men. My point is this: Emerson’s self-reliant man, like Melville’s solitary walker and his maddened sailor and Thoreau’s persona at Walden pond, are measured metaphysically rather than socially. What matters is the cosmos: community and gender can be assumed. Pierre does not worry about being heard (or silenced) any more than Captain Ahab or Emerson or Thoreau do, because they are culturally mainstream and powerful men. Melville is not concerned with questions of cultural identity (the multicultural crew of the Pequod notwithstanding), and certainly not with gender. Why should he be? Whereas Cather uses ‘voice’ to convey a distinct feminist charge (both her character Thea Kronberg and her friend Sarah Orne Jewett struggled against professional disadvantages and emotional obstacles associated with the gender roles assigned to them), Melville and Emerson hear voices of a more transcendental sort. Their literary personae shun the noise of society in search of Spirit. So, too, Hawthorne and Thoreau, for whom an increasingly industrialized culture threatened to overwhelm the besieged (male) self, with his unquestioned need for silence. Mark Twain’s characters are not concerned with cosmic reverberations, but they also routinely flee conversation and company (especially women’s) in favour of the unsettled (silent) Territory to the west. If one is born with a voice, why would one long for it or work to create it? These male writers and their male characters can prefer silence with impunity. Beyond Melville’s ‘pyramidical silence’, and certainly beyond Twain’s male camaraderies, contemporary American women writers have also resituated Faulkner’s tradition of ‘mouth to mouth tales’. With his awareness of past injustices and the moral imperative of ‘old tales and talking’,2 Faulkner is a starting point for the kind of political and cultural storytelling that interests me here. But unlike Faulkner, these women writers do not lament the passing of an old and presumably better social order, nor do they take for granted their status as storytellers. They (and their characters) must strive for the authority of the storytelling situation, as well as recuperate (or devise) the stories that are to be told. 2 This phrase is from Absalom, Absalom!, and occurs as Shreve and Quentin Compson struggle desperately to reconstruct the doomed history of Thomas Sutpen and his issue: ‘… the two of them creating between them out of the rag-tag and bob-ends of old tales and talking, people who perhaps had never existed at all anywhere, who, shadows, were shadows not of flesh and blood which had lived and died but shadows in turn of what were (to one of them, at least, to Shreve) shades too, quiet as the visible murmur of their vaporizing breath’ (303).

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They must also negotiate cultural differences. A primary project of these writers is the integration of non-Western traditions into their fiction. Their aim is to establish cultural identities that combine Asian or African or Hispanic or indigenous American traditions with AngloAmerican traditions, and they engage non-Western stories and structures in the process. As their characters struggle to develop their own voices, they must confront the problems of translation and comprehension and cultural intelligibility. They must also confront the problem of history. They share with their canonized predecessors the long-standing American practice (and literary theme) of inventing the past but, again, with differences. Their characters now reflect histories of social and political injustice rather than the (supposed) tabula rasa of American history that impelled nineteenth-century tellings, or the aesthetics of individual artistic expression that subsequently impelled Cather, or the decline of the Southern aristocracy that impelled Faulkner. In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said claims that stories ‘become the method colonized people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history’, and that ‘the power to narrate, or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is very important to culture and imperialism, and constitutes one of the main connections between them’ (xii, xiii). Contemporary American women writers would certainly agree. It is in this context of politicized storytelling that I discuss the metaphor of voice in fiction by African American, Native American, Asian American and Latina writers.3 Take Latina writers: it has been effectively argued that the central question of identity in Latina fiction ‘arises as a result of the negation, marginalization, and silencing of Latinas’ history by official discourse, that is, the dominant culture’s version of history’ (Ortega and Sternbach 3). Walter Shear says virtually the same thing about contemporary Asian American writers. He refers to Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, but intends his comment generally: ‘… like other Chinese American books … [it] articulates “the urge to find a usable past” – it is made up of a series of intense encounters in a kind of cultural lost and found’ (193).4 Nancy J. Peterson, too, makes this point in her discussion of Louise Erdrich’s Tracks and Native American writing as a whole: ‘Writers like Erdrich … face a vexing set of issues: unrepresented or misrepresented in traditional historical narratives, they write their own stories of the past only to discover that they must find a 3 Many critics of this literature explore the thematics of creating a communal history and devising suitable modes for its expression. See, for example, the critical essays included in Zamora. Several of the essays included in my anthology are cited below. 4 Shear 193; Shear cites Lim 57.

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new way of making history, a way of “forging a new historicity”’ (984).5 And again, Mary O’Connor refers to the problem of absence addressed in much African American writing by citing a statement from Alice Walker’s The Color Purple: ‘You black, you pore, you ugly, you a woman. God dam, he say, you nothing at all’ (187). O’Connor concludes: This nothingness – constituted by all that is the negative of society’s values in race, class, and gender – may be seen as a place of origin for not only Alice Walker’s The Color Purple but for much black feminist writing. It is a nothingness imposed from without, an entity defined by the patriarchal and white world of power and wealth. (199)6

Each of the four writers I touch upon here is concerned to reconstitute this nothingness, to speak the suppressed histories of their cultures, to name characters and communities by conjuring them in their fiction. Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Song of Solomon (1977), Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977), Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior (1976) and Sandra Cisneros’ Woman Hollering Creek (1991) are written from the perspective of marginalized communities whose histories have been silenced by the American ideology of a cultural mainstream. I will not offer a close reading of this fiction but rather isolate passages in which the ideological and ontological issues surrounding silence and speaking can be heard to resonate.

5 Peterson, included in Zamora. The final quoted phrase is from Diana Fuss, who elaborates the point as follows: ‘… since women as historical subjects are rarely included in “History” to begin with, the strong feminist interest in forging a new historicity that moves across and against “his story” is not surprising’ (95). 6 O’Connor, also included in Zamora. Henry Louis Gates treats the question of voice in African American literature without respect to gender, and without emphasis on its contemporaneity: ‘For just over two hundred years, the concern to depict the quest of the black speaking subject to find his or her voice has been a repeated topos of the black tradition, and perhaps has been its most central trope. As theme, as revised trope, as a double-voiced narrative strategy, the representation of characters and text find a voice has functioned as a sign both of the formal unity of the AfroAmerican literary tradition and of the integrity of the black subjects depicted in this literature’ (239).

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Naming: The Ontological Imperative That which isn’t named, almost doesn’t exist. To see pattern in history is the first step to taking action to change things. Isabel Allende, The House of the Spirits 300

Toni Morrison has noted her interest in the oral sources of African American culture, and in her fiction she frequently dramatizes speech as spoken and heard.7 The voices that echo in Beloved are those of ghosts as well as of the living: by means of these echoing voices, Morrison blurs the boundaries between the dead and the living, and also the boundaries of the single self. ‘Rememory’ is her word for this process of undoing the silence imposed upon generations of African American selves and reversing the isolation that this silence has caused. In a climactic lyrical moment of the novel, the three central women characters, one of whom is long dead and gone, voice their ‘unspeakable thoughts’ to each other: Tell me the truth. Didn’t you come from the other side? Yes. I was on the other side. You came back because of me? Yes. You rememory me? Yes. I remember you. You never forgot me? Your face is mine. …. Beloved You are my sister You are my daughter You are my face; you are me I have found you again; you have come back to me You are my Beloved You are mine You are mine You are mine I have your milk I have your smile 7 In an interview, Morrison responds to a question about the ‘oral lore’ in Song of Solomon, and whether she grew up ‘listening to voices like that’. Morrison responds: ‘Yes. Stories. There were two kinds of education going on: one was the education in the schools which was print-oriented; and right side by side with it was this other way of looking at the world that was not only different that what we learned about in school, it was coming through another sense. People told stories.’ Interview with Kathy Neustadt in Taylor-Guthrie 90.

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Lois Parkinson Zamora I will take care of you You are my face; I am you. Why did you leave me who am you? I will never leave you again Don’t ever leave me again You will never leave me again You went in the water I drank your blood I brought your milk You forgot to smile. I loved you You hurt me You came back to me You left me I waited for you You are mine You are mine You are mine (215–17)

Whose voice is whose? This chorus defies the conventions of its printed medium, which would ordinarily identify the speakers in a running prose text. The reader is moved into an oral/aural medium, even as he or she reads the silent medium of the printed page: we must hear the voices that overlap, repeat and interrupt, that argue, blame and exonerate. Eventually one of the interlocutors, the dead child Beloved, will be exorcised, but not before she has her say: the past must be told, and heard. In Beloved, Morrison pays homage to community and family bonds – enduring despite the displacements of slavery and war. In her historical chorus of intertwining voices, she implicitly critiques what American ideologies of individualism have now become: an insistence on the radical autonomy, hence isolation, of the self. Another passage from Beloved further illustrates the dependence of African American communities upon orally transmitted histories. The narrator describes the ebb and flow of freed slaves shortly after the Civil War. Here is the fateful first meeting of Sethe and Paul D: Forbidden public transportation, chased by debt and filthy ‘talking sheets’, they followed secondary routes, scanned the horizon for signs and counted heavily on each other. Silent, except for social courtesies, when they met one another they neither described nor asked about the sorrow that drove them from one place to another. The whites didn’t bear speaking on. Everybody knew. So he did not press the young woman with the broken hat about where from or how come. If she wanted him to know and was strong enough to get through the telling, she would. (52–53)

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And of course, she does. Her telling is the novel, for it is her voice through which the voices of her daughters – dead and living, past and present – merge; it is her voice that eventually answers the community that will chastise and then embrace her. The tension between Sethe’s silence and her telling, between Paul D’s asking and waiting to hear, the reticence among freed slaves and their relation to whites (who do not ‘bear speaking on’) confirms the importance of voice as an ontological and existential matter. Silence foregrounds the unspeakable: it is this final tension – between Sethe’s potential story and the whites’ official history (already-spoken) – that dominates the passage. Morrison’s privileging of the oral/aural is explicit in her 1977 novel Song of Solomon. At the crucial point in her principal character’s existential journey towards self-awareness, he discovers/recovers traces of his family in the woods of the Blue Ridge country. He begins by listening to men and dogs hunting, and realizes that they were talking to each other. In distinctive voices they were saying distinctive, complicated things … All those shrieks, those rapid tumbling barks, the long sustained yells, the tuba sounds, the drumbeat sounds, the low liquid howm howm, the reedy whistles, the thin eeeee’s of a cornet, the unh unh unh bass chords. It was all language. An extension of the click people made in their cheeks back home when they wanted a dog to follow them. No, it was not language; it was what there was before language. Before things were written down. Language in the time when men and animals did talk to one another … And he was hearing it in the Blue Ridge Mountains under a sweet gum tree. And if they could talk to animals, and the animals could talk to them, what didn’t they know about human beings? Or the earth itself, for that matter … Feeling both tense and relaxed, he sank his fingers into the grass. He tried to listen with his fingertips, to hear what, if anything, the earth had to say … (277–78; my italics)

As in the colloquy of undifferentiated voices that I cited from Beloved, here, too, Morrison repositions the single self in a larger sphere of sound. In this moment of animistic awareness, her character breaches the limits of individuated consciousness by listening to primal sounds – the–‘low liquid howm howm’ and ‘thin eeeee’s’ and ‘the unh unh unh bass chords’.8 He hears the voices of others – animals and earth – and infers his own communal history. In foregrounding oral speech over written text, these passages from Beloved and Song of Soloman are ironic reflections of the philosophical debate at the heart of Derridean deconstructionism. The debate concerns 8 In this context, see Clarke 265–78. See also the related discussion in Meese Ch.3, ‘Orality and Textuality in Zora Neal Hurston’s Their Eyes were Watching God’, 41–53.

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Derrida’s weighted valuation of written language over spoken language. In Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference, Derrida argues for the primacy of the written or printed word over spoken speech because (his argument goes) speech reinforces an illusory ‘metaphysics of presence’, a mistaken sense that the world can be known: the thought of the thing as what it is has already been confused with experience of pure speech; and this experience has been confused with experience itself. Now, does not pure speech require inscription somewhat in the manner that the Leibnizian essence requires existence and pushes on toward the world, like power toward the act? (9; author’s emphasis)

Theorist Mark Edmundson explains that for Derrida, ‘the illusion of a full and coherent being occurs most intensely … at the instant of “hearing oneself speak”’ (84). Terence Hawkes signals Derrida’s opposition to this illusion: Derrida sees this belief in ‘presence’ as the major factor limiting our apprehension of the world: a distorting insistence that, in spite of our always fragmentary experience, somewhere there must exist a redeeming and justifying wholeness, which we can objectify in ourselves as the notion of Man, and beyond ourselves as the notion of Reality. (146; author’s emphasis)

Morrison, too, recognizes that the wholeness is an illusion, but a necessary one if cultural communities are to cohere and continue. It is precisely a self-aware ‘metaphysics of presence’, with the potential for multiple perspectives and constant correction, that Morrison both creates and affirms in her emphasis on spoken speech. There are no transcendental signifieds, but there are many ramifying signifiers, and they are present in her work as voices, songs, sounds. This chorus, with its potential for balance and harmony, approximates the medieval metaphor of the music of the spheres, even if it does so in a modern, written form. So Morrison gracefully transcends the deconstructionist binarism of spoken and written speech. Recall my epigraph to this section, from The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende. Such naming as Allende describes is intimately linked to Morrison’s voices. Of course naming has long been an American concern. Naming – or more precisely, the impossibility of naming – has been a trope since the first encounter of Europe with America. As early as 1520, Hernán Cortés, conqueror of Mexico, wrote to his royal patron Charles V, acknowledging his double bind: how to name New World realities in an Old World tongue?9 There would have to be, he implied, a new language devised to embrace these hitherto unknown American realities. Even 9 In his Cartas de relación of 1521, Hernán Cortés wrote about Tenochtitlán / Mexico City that there were things ‘… so many and so varied I do not know how to describe

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before Cortés, Columbus had written to his patrons about the problem; and after Cortés, Bernal Díaz del Castillo again recorded the radical insufficiency of Europe’s descriptive categories.10 This trope was early associated with the land itself – the fauna and flora and topography of the Americas – not surprisingly, since the conquistadores’ problem was political in the most basic imperialistic sense: how to own this new world. The problem confronted by contemporary American women writers is also political, but in a larger social sense. As we see in Morrison’s work, they need to name the world in order to know it – to own it in an ontological sense – and thus establish viable selves and societies.

The Dialogical Imperative You don’t have anything if you don’t have the stories. Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony

If Morrison’s strategy for integrating silenced voices is largely thematic and descriptive, Leslie Marmon Silko’s is structural. Her subject in Ceremony is the disastrous effects of mainstream American culture on the Laguna Pueblo culture, and her approach is ethnographic in comparison to Morrison’s. By this, I mean that Silko embeds Laguna Pueblo tales about mythic figures in her novelistic narrative: she does not weave them seamlessly into her fictional narrative, as Morrison does the echoes of African stories, but inserts them in short, indented lines, like poetry, into the prose text of the novel. This typographic distinction marks the cultural crossing that the plot of Ceremony dramatizes: a Western written form engulfs but does not silence the Laguna Pueblo oral tradition.

them to your majesty… I would need so much time and many expert narrators. I cannot describe one hundreth part of all the things which could be mentioned, but, as best I can, I will describe some of those I have seen which, although badly described, will, I well know, be so remarkable as not to be believed, for we who saw them with our own eyes could not grasp then with our understanding’ (101–02). 10 Bernal Díaz del Castillo writes of the Spaniards’ first view of the vast Aztec city Tenochtitlán-Mexico City in 1521, in his retrospective account, The True History of The Conquest of New Spain (1568): ‘And when we saw so many cities and buildings rising from the water… we were all astonished. And we said that it seemed like an enchanted vision from the book of Amadís… [I]ndeed, some of our soldiers asked if what they saw was a dream. It is not surprising, therefore, that I should write in this way, because it was so wondrous that I do not know how to describe things never heard of or dreamed of before…’ (159; my translation).

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The novel begins with four pages of text that are presented as told. The typography immediately alerts the reader to this fact. Each page except the fourth is explicit about the storytelling situation – about the teller, the tale and the ‘you’ listener. Silko’s structure affirms the power of the storyteller’s voice by setting it apart from the prose of the novel’s body. By giving the storyteller’s words the form of poetry, she revivifies the Renaissance hierarchy of forms that gives to poetry the greater potential for truth and marks prose as ‘prosaic’. Consider the first two pages of the novel: p.1 Ts’its’tsi’nako, Thought-Woman, is sitting in her room and whatever she thinks about appears. She thought of her sisters, Nau’ts’ity’i and I’tcts’ity’i, and together they created the Universe this world and the four worlds below. Thought-Woman, the spider, named things and as she named them they appeared. She is sitting in her room thinking of a story now I’m telling you the story she is thinking. p.2 Ceremony I will tell you something about stories, [he said] They aren’t just entertainment. Don’t be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death. You don’t have anything if you don’t have the stories. Their evil is mighty

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Finding a Voice, Telling a Story but it can’t stand up to our stories. So they try to destroy the stories let the stories be confused or forgotten. They would like that They would be happy Because we would be defenseless then. He rubbed his belly. I keep them here [he said] Here, put your hand on it See, it is moving. There is life here for the people. And in the belly of this story the rituals and the ceremony are still growing.

The terse syntax and semantic condensation as well as the typographic layout of these lines is characteristic of poetry. So, too, is their cosmic content – the originary figures Ts’its’tsi’nako, Thought-Woman and her sisters Nau’ts’ity’i and I’tcts’ity’i, the creation myth and the reference to other cosmic narratives. These opening pages, like the interpolated ‘poetic’ passages throughout the novel, immediately concede to the Laguna Pueblo stories the status and intensity of myth. Only on page five does the reader enter the ‘prosaic’ text of the novel: a retrospective prose account of a young man named Tayo, recently returned to New Mexico from the Pacific theatre of World War II, severely shell-shocked and with no cultural recourse on the Laguna Pueblo reservations other than alcohol and violence. However, in the course of the novel, Tayo encounters Betonie, a medicine man who prepares ‘a good ceremony’ for him – a mythic journey that allows him to recuperate the power of the ancient stories of the Laguna Pueblo people, stories that are inserted throughout the narrative. Another elder, old man Ku’oosh, also assists in Tayo’s recuperation of the healing force of the ancient stories and their integration into his life in modern America. The text of the novel literally reflects this process of cultural and psychic integration in its two narrative modes. This novel coheres even if the reader chooses to ignore the indented folktales sprinkled throughout the novel. But to do so is to miss Silko’s point. By piecing together the episodic comings and goings of the mythic figures in the interpolated tales, the reader finds that they resonate in a

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variety of ways with the plot, characters and settings of the conventional narrative.11 As the novel begins, we see Tayo’s life, family and culture in ruins. Interspersed in this early description of Tayo’s return from the war to the reservation are the beginning fragments of three folktales that explain why there is no rain, and a fourth fragment that describes the journey of Hummingbird and Fly to find the rain. Here is the first of these tales: It was summertime And Iktoa’ak’o’ya – Reed Woman was always taking a bath. She spent all day long sitting in the river splashing down the summer rain. But her sister Corn Woman worked hard all day sweating in the sun getting sore hands in the cornfield. Corn Woman got tired of that she got angry she scolded her sister for bathing all day long. Iktoa’ak’o’ya – Reed Woman went away then she went back to the original place down below. And there was no more rain then. Everything dried up all the plants the corn the beans they all dried up and started blowing away in the wind. The people and the animals 11 Several of my graduate students have written insightfully about these contrapuntal narrative forms, and amplified my understanding of Laguna cultural contexts accordingly. My thanks in particular to Laura Long and Donna Chatham.

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Finding a Voice, Telling a Story were thirsty. They were starving. (13–14)

The barren land and Tayo’s life run parallel; his sense of guilt at betraying his family is also suggested here. Corn Woman, Reed Woman, Thought Woman and Spider Woman will reappear at intervals, as will Hummingbird, Fly, Buzzard and ‘this Ck’o’yo magician / they called Kaup’ata or the Gambler’ (170). The fragments of the tales and Tayo’s psychic progress are not always parallel but sometimes ironic reflections, sometimes comic exaggerations, sometimes without clear connection. Any brief telling of these interactions would be a vast oversimplification, but suffice it to say that Hummingbird and Fly placate the forces causing cultural chaos and set things aright. So, too, Tayo, who completes the ceremony – the mythic process – whereby he integrates traditional Pueblo belief systems into his own American time and place. And having completed the ceremony, Tayo sits with old man Ku’oosh and other elders in the centre of the Kiva. We are told that it took Tayo ‘a long time to tell them the story’ (257). Silko’s structural strategy allows, then, for ancient indigenous voices to speak and be heard above the noise of contemporary American culture. These are not the voices of ghosts such as are heard in Morrison’s novels; rather; they surface, it seems, from the texture of the novel itself. Silko’s generic manipulations may well be considered in terms of Mikhail Bakhtin’s insistence on the inherent dialogism of the genre itself. His emphasis on the social and historical contexts of discourse, and on the inevitable dialogue between/among those contexts, is easily applicable to Ceremony; and his statement, ‘I hear voices in everything and the dialogic relationships between them’, may nicely describe the reader’s experience of this novel.12 But Bakhtin is, finally, more interested in genre than in culture, so it is best to let Silko speak for herself. In her essay, ‘Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective’, she explains that stories are a communal medium dependent upon the shared perception of the teller’s voice, unlike the more solitary act of reading. Where I come from, the words that are most highly valued are those which are spoken from the heart, unpremeditated and unrehearsed. Among the Pueblo people a written speech or statement is highly suspect because the true feelings of the speaker remain hidden as he reads words that are detached from the occasion and the audience. (54)13 12 Shukman 4. Two useful essays on Ceremony that engage Bakhtinian categories are by James Ruppert, ‘Dialogism and Mediation in Leslie Silko’s Ceremony’ and ‘The Reader’s Lesson in Ceremony’. 13 Also see Silko, ‘Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination’.

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To describe the structure of Pueblo expression, Silko uses the metaphor of a spider’s web ‘with many little threads radiating from a center, crisscrossing each other’ to describe the story and also the relational meanings generated between teller and listener: ‘As with the web, the structure will emerge as it is made and you must simply listen and trust, as the Pueblo people do, that meaning will be made’ (54). Not surprisingly, the web appears as an essential metaphor in Ceremony, with its associations of weaving and self-making. If we think of the web as an instrument of seduction and entrapment, we are mistaken, for Silko uses it only as a positive sign. Old Ku’oosh, the medicine man who aids Tayo on his healing journey, links the web to effective expression. He refers to the intricacies of a continuing process, and with the strength inherent in spider webs woven across paths through sand hills where early in the morning the sun becomes entangled in each filament of web. It took a long time to explain the fragility and intricacy because no word exists alone, and the reason for choosing each word had to be explained with a story about why it must be said this certain way. That was the responsibility that went with being human, old Ku’oosh said, the story behind each word must be told so there can be no mistake in the meaning of what has been said; and this demanded great patience and love. (35–36)

Silko, in her essay on Pueblo language, reiterates this point: ‘… we don’t think of words as being isolated from the speaker, which, of course, is one element of the oral tradition. Moreover, we don’t think of words as being alone: words are always with other words, and the other words are almost always in a story of some sort’ (55). The web ‘entangles’ the morning sun, along with teller, listener and proliferating tales. ‘You must simply listen and trust’; in Silko’s shift to the second person, she constitutes the reader not only as reader but also as listener, and so orients her audience towards a ‘certain type of collective memory’.14 Sidner Larson, in his useful essay on Native American aesthetics, also laments the imposition upon Native Americans of ‘the logic of literacy, of the historical archive, rather than of changing collective memory’ (57).15 14 In his essay, ‘Text and the structure of its Audience’, Jurij M. Lotman emphasizes the constitution of the audience in the literary text: ‘In the literary text, orientation toward a certain type of collective memory, and consequently toward a structure of the audience, acquires a character that is different in principle (from that of texts addressed to a personally known addressee, for example, letters or, for that matter, conversation.) The audience of these novels ceases to be automatically implied in the text and becomes a signified (i.e., free) element which can enter the text as part of the game’ (84). 15 Included in Zamora. Larson cites this phrase from Clifford 329.

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Indeed, Silko’s own statement that in Pueblo culture ‘a written speech or statement is highly suspect’ would seem to compromise any novel, and all novelists. Silko is well aware of this irony. Ultimately her novel does not so much privilege spoken speech as present an extended meditation on the interactions of various languages and modes of expression. In effect, Silko conflates speech, thought, writing, seeing, feeling and, of course, silence in Ceremony to create ‘voice’ in the metaphoric sense I intend. We see this conflation immediately on page one of the novel, in the invocation to ‘Thought-Woman’, who names things, which then appear and are told (in writing) by the ‘I’ narrator (the novelist). ‘I am telling you the story/ she is thinking’. Stories are the product of thought and also of physical experience. They are born of the body. On page two, we read: ‘And in the belly of this story/ the rituals and the ceremony/ are still growing’. Toward the end of Tayo’s journey, the narrator describes him: ‘Inside, his belly was smooth and soft, following the contours of the hills and holding the silence of the snow’ (205). The psychic and cultural landscape grows silently inside Tayo’s body; stories are literally embodied and digested: Tayo cried the relief he felt at finally seeing the pattern, the way all the stories fit together – the old stories, the war stories, their stories – to become the story that was still being told. He was not crazy; he had never been crazy. He had only seen and heard the world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and time. (246)

Tayo becomes the stories he has internalized. Telling is superseded by being. Teller and tale are ontologically one.

Embodied Voices For silence to transform into speech, sounds and words, it must first traverse through our female bodies. For the body to give birth to utterance, the human entity must recognize itself as carnal – skin, muscles, entrails, brain, belly. Because our bodies have been stolen, brutalized or numbed, it is difficult to speak from/through them. No hables de esas cosas, de eso no se habla. No hables, no hables. ¡Cállate! Estate quieta. Seal your lips, woman! Gloria Anzaldúa, Making Face, Making Soul xxii

In Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, gender is linked to ethnicity by the speaking subject – by the sound of the female voice and the silence that surrounds it. Kingston’s autobiography, subtitled Memories of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, dramatizes the difficulties of speaking across cultures. We observe the young schoolgirl, daughter of Chinese immigrants

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in San Francisco, struggling to translate from the iconic language of her parents to the alphabetic one of her teachers: I could not understand ‘I’. The Chinese ‘I’ has seven strokes, intricacies. How could the American ‘I’, assuredly wearing a hat like the Chinese, but only three strokes, the middle so straight? Was it out of politeness that this writer left off strokes the way a Chinese has to write her own name small and crooked? No, it was not politeness; ‘I’ is a capital and ‘you’ is lower case. (166–67)

It is the ‘I’ that mystifies the narrator, for her own identity is in question, and the question is tied to language. Elsewhere, she again considers the first person singular: ‘There is a Chinese word for the female “I” – which is “slave”. Break the women with their own tongues!’ (47). And in a mythic passage, she describes herself as a woman warrior whose back is covered ‘entirely with words in red and black files, like an army, like my army’ (35). Her vision/version of herself concludes ironically: ‘From the words on my back, and how they were fulfilled, the villagers would make a legend about my perfect filiality’ (45). But mostly it is spoken speech, not writing, that preoccupies the narrator. We repeatedly hear her struggling to imitate the tone of voice, the pitch and volume of spoken English: ‘We American-Chinese girls had to whisper to make ourselves American-feminine. Apparently we whispered even more softly than the Americans. Once a year the teachers referred my sister and me to speech therapy, but our voices would straighten out, unpredictably normal, for the therapist’ (172). Maxine tortures herself for sounding different, for sounding ‘chingchong ugly’ to Americans: It isn’t just the loudness. It is the way Chinese sounds, chingchong ugly, to American ears, not beautiful like Japanese sayonara words with the consonants and vowels as regular as Italian. We make guttural peasant noise and have Ton Duc Thang names you can’t remember. And all the Chinese can’t hear Americans at all; the language is too soft and western music unhearable. (171–72)

Finally, she says, ‘My mouth went permanently crooked with effort, turned down on the left side and straight on the right’ (171). Unlike Morrison’s disembodied voices, which merge with those of the living or rise up out of the animate earth, Kingston wraps her metaphor of voice in flesh-and-blood. The young narrator, when asked to recite at Chinese school, describes her voice as ‘a crippled animal running on broken legs. You could hear splinters in my voice, bones rubbing jagged against one another’ (169). If misery loves company, she has her sister to console her: the narrator recounts that fear also causes her

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sister’s voice to break ‘like twigs underfoot. She sounded as if she were trying to sing through weeping and strangling’ (168). The narrator refers to her throat (‘My throat hurt constantly, vocal cords taut to snapping’ [200]) and her tongue (‘[My mother] pushed my tongue up and sliced the frenum. Or maybe she snipped it with a pair of nail scissors’ [163–64]). She curls her tongue up in front of the mirror and looks at its under side, her frenum a white line ‘itself as thin as a razor blade’ (164). This scene precedes one of the most wrenching moments in The Woman Warrior, when the young Maxine projects her self-loathing onto another Chinese girl who is even more silent than she, physically humiliating her in a frenzied effort to make her speak, as she herself wants desperately to do. For Kingston’s narrator, silence is synonymous with secrets, and secrets with her exclusion from full participation in either Chinese or American cultures. The Americans, called ghosts by the Chinese, are radically other to Maxine’s parents, but so is their own child, who has grown up among these ghosts. Here, the narrator describes this ‘double bind’ (‘Even now China wraps doubles binds around my feet’ [48]): Sometimes I hated the ghosts for not letting us talk; sometimes I hated the secrecy of the Chinese. ‘Don’t tell’, said my parents, though we couldn’t tell if we wanted to because we didn’t know … They would not tell us children because we had been born among ghosts, were taught by ghosts, and were ourselves ghost-like. They called us a kind of ghost. Ghosts are noisy and full of air; they talk during meals. They talk about anything …. ‘Don’ tell’, advised my parents. (183–84)

‘Ghosts’ in The Woman Warrior, are not, then, like those in Beloved: rather, Kingston has said that they are ‘unanswered questions about unexplained actions of Chinese and American cultures’ (quoted in Kim 200). Nonetheless, this injunction – ‘Don’t tell’ – echoes in Beloved when Morrison’s narrator says of Sethe’s story that ‘it was not a story to pass on’ (275). The voice of these narrators exists in self-conscious relation to silence, a relation that is sometimes resistant and sometimes complicit, for their stories trace both the echoes and the interruptions of inherited cultural traditions. So far what I have described of The Woman Warrior would seem to be the rather predictable story of a young person in an immigrant family, struggling to overcome her marginalization by speaking the language of the cultural mainstream. Malini Schueller, in a useful essay on race and gender in The Woman Warrior, argues that ‘Kingston deals with the necessity of maintaining and creating multiple ideological positions, of always letting the numerous voices echo in her own articulations. For Kingston, this refraction of other voices is an affirmation of community

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and diversity’ (427). Clearly Kingston’s narrator flouts her parents’ injunction to remain silent. But what are the ‘refracting voices’ in this novel? Ironically, Kingston’s narrator establishes her American voice by ‘talking-story’ in the Chinese tradition practised by her mother. The Woman Warrior begins and ends with mythic tales, told to the narrator by her mother, which engage Chinese voices and sounds. The first two chapters, ‘No Name Woman’ and ‘White Tigers’, tell of heroic women who are also victims of patriarchal structures, and whose histories echo the narrator’s own. The final chapter, entitled ‘A Song of a Barbarian Reed Pipe’, concludes with a story of another heroic victim, but one who is able to bridge difference. This story contains an elaborate metaphor of voice as a cultural and gendered matter, and it is with this metaphor that the novel concludes. The poetess Ts’ai Yen was born, we are told, in AD 175, the daughter of a scholar, renowned for his library. When she was twenty years old, she was kidnapped by barbarians and taken away from China. During the twelve years that she lived among them, she fought on horseback, doing as they did: shooting arrows with ‘high whirling whistles that suddenly stopped when the arrows hit true. Even when the barbarians missed, they terrified their enemies by filling the air with death sounds …’ (208). Ts’ai Yen thinks at first that this is their only music, but one night she hears the barbarians playing reed flutes; she hears their music ‘tremble and rise like desert wind … They reached again and again for a high note, yearning toward a high note, which they found at last and held – an icicle in the desert’ (208). At this moment, Ts’ai Yen begins to sing to her babies a song so high and clear, it matched the flutes. Ts’ai Yen sang about China and her family there. Her words seemed to be Chinese, but the barbarians understood their sadness and anger. Sometimes they thought they could catch barbarian phrases about forever wandering. Her children did not laugh, but eventually sang along when she left her tent to sit by the winter campfires, ringed by barbarians. After twelve years among the Southern Hsiung-nu, Ts’ai Yen was ransomed and married to Tung Ssu so that her father would have Han descendants. She brought her songs back from the savage lands and one of the three that has been passed down to us is ‘Eighteen Stanzas for a Barbarian Reed Pipe’, a song that Chinese sing to their own instruments. It translated well. (209)

These final paragraphs of The Woman Warrior, like the chorus of female voices in Beloved, echo the music of the spheres, an image of sound suggesting cultural and cosmic coherence.

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Empathy and Otherness Through empathy, the other can be present to me in his primordial life, which I ‘read’ from his physical expressions and situate within his context. Empathic intuitions are present to me in self-evidence, although their interpretation is modified by the words the other speaks. Kathleen Haney, Intersubjectivity Revisited 129

A great deal of recent literary criticism addresses racial, ethnic and sexual otherness, and certainly the fiction that I am discussing here is primarily concerned with otherness as a social and psychological matter. That this is not just a literary critical trend but a concern basic to human selfdefinition is best recalled by the centuries-long philosophical discussion of empathy. Empathy involves both personal and interpersonal awareness: the individual’s awareness of his or her own inner state, and his or her awareness of the inner states of others. I perceive the physical expressions of others, listen to their words and intuit their inner state; my intuitions must depend on what I know of my own inner experience, however different it may be from that of others. Empathy thus confirms for me the differences between me and others, while also providing me with the means to transcend those differences and understand experiences that are unlike my own (Haney 127–33). It is this fruitful contradiction of an empathic relation that Sandra Cisneros illustrates in the title story of Woman Hollering Creek. She does so, both literally and metaphorically, by means of the sound of a woman’s voice. Cisneros’ protagonists, like those of Morrison, Kingston and Silko, are engaged in constituting a self from occluded or absent historical sources. Cisneros’ stories are situated in Mexico and in Mexican American communities in Texas, literally on the border between cultures. Woman Hollering Creek is the name of a creek in Texas that runs between San Antonio and Houston, a name that sounds odd in English because of its colloquialism (‘hollering’) but more because of its inversion of the usual order of noun and adjective (‘woman hollering’). We learn that it is a literal translation of the Spanish name given to the creek by the Spanish colonizers of the region: ‘La Gritona’. The protagonist of this story, Cleófilas, wonders if that long-ago woman hollered in anger or pain. When she asks a woman in San Antonio, she receives this answer: ‘Pués, allá de los indios, quién sabe – who knows, the townspeople shrugged, because it was of no concern to their lives how this trickle of water received its curious name’ (46). The reference in Spanish to ‘los indios’ confirms the cultural currents that flow in Woman Hollering Creek. Cleófilas is Mexican. She has recently come to San Antonio, and the

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history of this new place interests her. She asks her question of someone who, it is implied, has no sense of history. ‘How could Cleófilas explain to a woman like this why the name Woman Hollering fascinated her. Well, there was no sense talking …’ (46). But she eventually finds that there is sense talking: a Chicana named Felice helps her to leave her abusive husband in Texas and return to Mexico. Felice has her own pickup truck (‘a pickup, mind you … The pickup was hers. She herself had chosen it. She herself was paying for it’ [55]). She amazes Cleófilas when she drives across the bridge spanning Woman Hollering Creek because she answers la gritona for whom the creek was named by hollering at the top of her voice. This holler/grito is the sharpest fragment of memory that Cleófilas retains of her short stay in ‘el otro lado’. Back in Mexico, Cleófilas reflects upon this chance acquaintance: Felice was like no woman she’d ever met. Can you imagine, when we crossed the arroyo she just started yelling like a crazy, she would say later to her father and brothers. Just like that. Who would’ve thought? Who would’ve? Pain or rage, perhaps, but not a hoot like the one Felice had just let go. Makes you want to holler like Tarzan, Felice had said. Then Felice began laughing again, but it wasn’t Felice laughing. It was gurgling out of her own throat, a long ribbon of laughter, like water. (56)

There the story ends. In Cleófilas’s memory, Felice’s holler is the stream – ‘a ribbon of laughter, like water’ – and the hollering woman that names the creek is Felice. Again, voice is made to serve as a metaphor for communal discovery and connection. Cleófilas appreciates Felice’s difference: ‘Who would’ve thought?’ The answer is that she would’ve, because however different Felice is, Cleófilas describes her perfectly to her father and brothers, and is herself inspired by their differences. So the ribbon of sound that issues from Felice’s mouth represents for Cleófilas the bonds of community and the ties between individuals, and allows her to imagine the possibility of an independent woman. Felice’s voice preserves this moment in memory and enables her to begin to construct herself as an agent in her own life. The story clearly predicts that Cleófilas will develop a voice of her own. Despite its very different tone and level of intensity, the antiphonal chorus of women’s voices in Beloved is analogous to Felice’s hollering and Cleófilas’s remembering, for empathy may also exist between the living and dead, between flesh and spirit. The dead child Beloved, like the absent friend Felice, is present and talking. Sethe, like Cleófilas, hears and is moved. In these works, voice is the means by which all empathic relations are established and maintained.

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The Archeology of Voice and Women’s Writing The question I am most often asked when I speak to students and others interested in writing is, How did you find your voice? I have some trouble with this locution because ‘find’ always suggests to me the discovery, generally fortuitous, of some lack or loss. I have found an occasional fourleaf clover. I have found a mate. I have, more than once, found my way home. But is a voice susceptible of the same sort of revelation or retrieval? Nancy Mairs, Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer 15

I began this essay by proposing that finding a voice to transcend the ‘nothingness’ of invisible histories and cultures constitutes a feminist mode in contemporary US fiction. Although this process may be dramatized by male characters – as it is in Song of Solomon and Ceremony – the authors of those dramas are women. In the works I have just discussed, speaking/singing/storytelling/ribbons-of-sound are presented as the preconditions for both individuation and cultural connection. They are also implicitly associated with the liberation of women authors from a printorientated patriarchy – that is, from forms of written language traditionally controlled by males. The anthropologist Michael M. J. Fischer correctly points out that ‘much of the contemporary philosophical mood (in literary criticism and anthropology, as well as in philosophy) is to inquire into what is hidden in language, what is deferred by signs, what is pointed to, what is repressed, implicit, or mediated’ (198). Contemporary women writers, and more particularly women writing in the context of a cultural minority, are acutely aware of what is hidden, deferred and repressed, and they dramatize their awareness metaphorically on the printed page by engaging oral forms of expression, both metaphorically and stylistically. With their own experience, as we have seen, they exercise an ‘archeology of voice’ (Mairs 26). Michael Fischer’s essay, ‘Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory’, bears further consideration in this context. Fischer suggests that ethnic autobiography and autobiographical fiction are ‘key forms for explorations of pluralist, post-industrial, late twentieth-century society’ (195). He mentions three examples: Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior, Michael Arlen’s Passage to Ararat (1975), and Marita Golden’s Migrations of the Heart (1983), and notes generally that ‘ethnicity is a deeply rooted emotional component of identity [that] is often transmitted less through cognitive language or learning … than through processes analogous to the dreaming and transference of psychoanalytic encounters’ (195–96). Cultural identity is not so much to be learned from generation to generation as something to be ‘reinvented and reinterpreted

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in each generation by each individual’ (195). Here, Fischer uses Maxine Hong Kingston as his implicit example: To be Chinese-American is not the same thing as being Chinese in America. In this sense there is no role model for becoming Chinese-American. It is a matter of finding a voice or style that does not violate one’s several components of identity. In part, such a process of assuming an ethnic identity is an insistence on a pluralist, multidimensional, or multi-faceted concept of the self … (196)

The variety of voices and cultural contexts in the fiction of Morrison, Silko, Kingston and Cisneros would seem to conform to the ‘insistence’ that Fischer mentions. But why should I also insist, as Fischer does not, that this is a feminist mode? Women’s historian Gerda Lerner argues – and I agree–– that History has excluded women’s history (she uses the uppercase to signal the recorded past and lowercase to signal the unrecorded past). In The Creation of Patriarchy, she traces History-making back to the invention of writing in ancient Mesopotamia: From the time of the king lists of ancient Sumer on, historians, whether priests, royal servants, clerks, clerics, or a professional class of universitytrained intellectuals, have selected the events to be recorded and have interpreted them so as to give them meaning and significance. Until the most recent past, these historians have been men, and what they have recorded is what men have done and experienced. They have called this History and claimed universality for it. What women have done and experienced has been left unrecorded, neglected, and ignored in interpretation … (4)

Emphasizing the contradiction between women’s centrality in creating culture and yet their marginality in the ‘meaning-giving process of interpretation’, Lerner concludes that women’s greatest cultural deprivation has been their exclusion from that process of interpreting their own experience. When … at certain historical moments, the contradictions in their relationship to society and to historical process are brought into the consciousness of women, they are then correctly perceived and named as deprivations that women share as a group. This coming-into-consciousness of women becomes the dialectical force moving them into action to change their condition and to enter a new relationship to male-dominated society. (5)

Men, too, may experience ‘deprivation’, to use Lerner’s term, but the contemporary American fiction that narrates this experience is written largely by women. Their fiction attests that this is indeed a rich moment for women’s ‘coming-into-consciousness’.16 16 That this need to create and foster historical continuity is the shared province of women writers is widely agreed upon. More specifically, Rose Kamel writes about

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Their fiction also attests to the traditional exclusion of women from the cultural processes of History-making. In The Creation of Feminist Consciousness, Gerda Lerner pursues her idea that at certain historical moments, women become aware of their marginalization from the ‘meaninggiving process of interpretation’ and enter into that process. She cites approximately twenty examples of women from the twelfth to the late nineteenth century, but notes ‘the lack of continuity and the absence of collective memory on the part of women thinkers’ (139). Women’s efforts, according to Lerner, were so dispersed that over the centuries no continuous traditions were developed. Lerner laments ‘the discontinuity in the story of women’s intellectual effort. Endlessly, generation after generation of Penelopes rewove the unraveled fabric only to unravel it again’ (275). And yet, it would seem that contemporary American women’s writing and the literary critical discussion developing around it are the stuff of a durable tradition. The fabric, in any case, is holding. From the nineteenth-century American tabula rasa myth of a New World without historical encumbrances, we have arrived at another, more powerful myth that is very nearly its opposite. It is this. Voicing the history of the voiceless in literature will allow for the eventual creation of viable American communities and selves. Our contemporary myth also departs from its nineteenth-century precursor in its gendered status. Voices (or silences) constituted unquestioningly as male have been largely supplanted by female voices in literary works created by women writers. They animate our most compelling contemporary narratives. Indeed, they have become true American ‘myths’ – stories we tell ourselves in order to understand who and what we most basically are. These stories affirm that the future of all communities depends upon remembering those parts of their past that have been suppressed or forgotten or denied, and expressing them to others. As we have seen, they often recall histories of injustice, but the process of remembering and telling is salutary. To confront and communicate historical injustice is to create the conditions by which self-aware communities may develop alternative forms of being together. To voice the inaudible histories of the voiceless is to acknowledge our diverse historical experiences as the tradition-making impulse of Tillie Olsen: ‘If not to find an audience is always a kind of death, discovering the responsive reader valorizes the obscured artist’s suffering and strength, giving them the power to formulate riddles we have never addressed, let alone redressed. As Harold Bloom has explained, literary forefathers have always influenced their writing sons, often causing them the “anxiety of ‘this’ influence.” For Tillie Olsen, literary foremothers help engender and empower otherwise silenced women writers’ (Kamel 71, included in Zamora).

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Americans. This is a far cry from the Transcendentalist aesthetic idealism of our greatest nineteenth-century writers, and may be taken as an indication of the maturing of a national literature – perhaps even a sign that American literature has come of age.

Works Cited Abrams, M. H. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: W.W. Norton, 1971. Allende, Isabel. The House of the Spirits. 1982. Trans. Magda Bodin. New York: Knopf, 1985. Anzaldúa, Gloria, ed. Making Face, Making Soul / Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Radical Women of Color. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Foundation Books, 1990. Buell, Lawrence. Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the American Renaissance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973. Carton, Evan. The Rhetoric of American Romance. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. Cather, Willa. Preface to Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs and Other Stories. 1925. New York: Anchor Books, 1956. ——. The Song of the Lark. 1915; revised 1937. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988. Cisneros, Sandra. Woman Hollering Creek. New York: Random House, 1991. Clarke, Deborah L. ‘What There was Before Language: Preliteracy in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon’. In Anxious Power: Reading, Writing, and Ambivalence in Narrative by Women. Ed. Carol J. Singley and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993. 265–78. Clifford, James. The Predicament of Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. Cortés, Hernán. Letters from Mexico. Trans. Anthony Pagden. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986. Derrida, Jacques. ‘Force and Signification’. In Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. 3–30. Díaz del Castillo, Bernal. Historia de la conquista de Nueva Espana. Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1986. Edmundson, Mark. Literature against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. E. W. Emerson. New York: Riverside, 1903–04. Faulkner, William. Absalom, Absalom! New York: Modern Library, 1936. Fischer, Michael M. J. ‘Ethnicity and the Post-Modern Arts of Memory’. In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986. 194–233.

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Fuss, Diana. ‘Getting into History’. Arizona Quarterly 45 (1989): 95–108. Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Haney, Kathleen. Intersubjectivity Revisited: Phenomenology and the Other. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1994. Hawkes, Terence. Structuralism and Semiotics. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1977. Kamel, Rose. ‘Literary Foremothers and Writers’ Silences: Tillie Olsen’s Autobiographical Fiction’. MELUS 12 (fall 1985): 55–72. Kim, Elaine H. Asian American Literature: An Introduction to the Writings and their Social Context. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1982. Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior. New York: Vintage, 1976. Larson, Sidner. ‘Native American Aesthetics: An Attitude of Relationship’. MELUS 17 (1991–92): 53–67. Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-seventy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. ——. The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Lim, Shirley Geok-lin. ‘Twelve Asian American Writers in Search of Definition’. MELUS 13 (1986): 57–77. Lotman, Jurij M. ‘The Text and the Structure of its Audience’. NLH 14 (1982): 81–87. Mairs, Nancy. Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. Meese, Elizabeth A. Crossing the Double-Cross: The Practice of Feminist Criticism. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Melville, Herman. Pierre, or the Ambiguities. 1852. New York: Grove Press, 1952. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987. ——. Song of Solomon. New York: Plume Books, 1977. O’Connor, Mary. ‘Subject, Voice, and Women in Some Contemporary Black American Women’s Writing’. In Feminism, Bakhtin and the Dialogic. Ed. Dale M. Bauer and S. Jaret McKinstry. New York: SUNY Press, 1991. 199– 217. Ortega, Eliana and Nancy Saporta Sternbach. ‘At the Threshold of the Unnamed: Latina Literary Discourse in the Eighties’. In Breaking Boundaries: Latina Writing and Critical Readings. Ed. Asunción Horno-Delgado et al. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989. 2–23. Peterson, Nancy J. ‘History, Postmodernism, and Louise Erdrich’s Tracks’. PMLA 109 (October 1994): 982–94. Ruppert, James. ‘Dialogism and Mediation in Leslie Silko’s Ceremony’. Explicator 51 (1993): 1929–34. ——. ‘The Reader’s Lesson in Ceremony’. Arizona Quarterly 44 (1988): 75–85. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Knopf, 1993. Schueller, Malini. ‘Questioning Race and Gender Definitions: Dialogic Subversions in The Woman Warrior’. Criticism 31 (1989): 421–38.

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Shear, Walter. ‘Generational Differences and the Diaspora in The Joy Luck Club’. Critique 34 (1993): 193–99. Shukman, Ann, ed. Bakhtin School Papers. Somerston, Oxford: RPT Publications, 1983. Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Penguin, 1977. ——. ‘Landscape, History, and the Pueblo Imagination’. In The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. Ed. Cheryll Glotfelty and Harold Fromm. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996. 264–75. ——. ‘Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective’. In English Literature: Opening Up the Canon. Ed. Leslie Fiedler. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. 54–72. Tanner, Tony. Scenes of Nature, Signs of Men. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Taylor-Guthrie, Danille, ed. Conversations with Toni Morrison. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Pocket Books, 1982. Zamora, Lois Parkinson, ed. Contemporary American Women Writers: Gender, Class, Ethnicity. London: Longman, 1998.

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Notes on Contributors


Betty Louise Bell, Associate Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan, teaches courses in literature, Native American studies and women’s studies. She has published on several aspects of Native American gender, culture and literature and is author of Reading Red: Feminism and Native America. Her novel Faces in the Moon was published by the University of Oklahoma Press in 1994. Her critical book, Red Girl’s Reasoning: Early Native American Women Writers and the PostReservation Home, 1887–1927 is forthcoming from Duke University Press. William Blazek is Senior Lecturer in English at Liverpool Hope University College, where he teaches courses in American literature. He is a co-editor of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, and his recent publications include essays on the literature of the First World War, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Louise Erdrich. Christopher Brookeman, Professor, English Section, School of Languages, University of Westminster, is the author of American Culture and Society since the 1930s (Macmillan, 1984), a foundation volume of the Macmillan Contemporary USA series, of which he is co-editor. He has published a number of essays in which the nature of mass culture texts is deconstructed through the close study of a network of intersecting cultural formations. These include essays on Norman Rockwell and J. D. Salinger. He has been a consultant editor and writer of specialized entries for the BFI Companion to the Western, and his research also includes work on UK–USA cultural relations in the 1930s and 1940s. Michael K. Glenday is the author of Saul Bellow and the Decline of Humanism (Macmillan, 1990) and Norman Mailer (Macmillan, 1995). He has published essays on modern American novelists and is a co-editor of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Review. He has been Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Manchester and Senior Lecturer in American Studies at the Liverpool Institute of Higher Education, and is currently an Associate Lecturer and Research Associate in Literature at The Open University.

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Leslie Heywood is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of English at the State University of New York, Binghamton, where she teaches cultural studies, feminist theory and twentiethcentury literature. She is a Trustee of the Women’s Sports Foundation, and Visiting Scholar at the Rutgers Institute for Research on Women. Heywood’s work focuses on issues of the body, gender and image in contemporary culture. Her extensive list of publications includes Dedication to Hunger: The Anorexic Aesthetic in Modern Culture (University of California Press, 1996), Bodymakers: A Cultural Anatomy of Women’s Bodybuilding (Rutgers University Press, 1998), Pretty Good for a Girl (Simon & Schuster, 1998), Built to Win: The Female Athlete as Cultural Icon (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), and Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (University of California Press, 2004). She is also the editor of The Women’s Movement Today: An Encyclopedia of Third Wave Feminism (Greenwood Press, 2005) and author of the poetry book The Proving Grounds (Red Hen Press, 2005). Phillipa Kafka is Professor Emerita of English Literature and formerly Director of Women’s Studies at Kean University, Union, New Jersey. In 1977 she was one of the first scholars to introduce a multi-ethnic American literature course, including women writers, into the US higher education curriculum. She has published five books of literary criticism: The Great White Way: African American Women Writers and American Success Mythologies (Garland/Taylor & Francis, 1993); (Un)Doing the Missionary Position: Gender Asymmetry in Contemporary Asian American Women’s Writing (Greenwood Press, 1997); (Out)classed Women: Contemporary Chicana Writers on Inequitable Gendered Power Relations (Greenwood Press, 2000); and “Saddling La Gringa”: Gatekeeping in Literature by Contemporary Latina Writers (Greenwood Press, 2000). Her most recent book is On the Outside Looking In(dian): Contemporary Indian Women Writers At Home and Abroad (Peter Lang, 2003). Two parts of Kafka’s projected memoir have appeared as ‘From Pariah to Professor Emerita’ in an anthology she edited, Lost on the Map of the World: Jewish-American Women’s Quest for Home in Essays and Memoirs, 1890 – Present (Peter Lang, 2001), and as ‘Afterthoughts’ in Women Confronting Retirement, ed. Nan Bauer-Maglin and Alice Radosh (Rutgers University Press, 2004). Peter Messent is Professor of Modern American Literature at the University of Nottingham. His books include New Readings of the American Novel: Narrative Theory and its Application (Macmillan, 1990; Edinburgh University Press, 1998), Ernest Hemingway (Macmillan, 1992), Mark Twain


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(Macmillan, 1997), and The Short Works of Mark Twain: A Critical Study (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). He also writes on American crime fiction. He is at present working on a book on Mark Twain and male friendship. David Mogen (BA Columbia University; PhD University of Colorado, Boulder) teaches American frontier literature, Native American literature and interdisciplinary courses integrating the arts and sciences in the English Department at Colorado State University. His publications include Wilderness Visions: The Western Theme in Science Fiction Literature (Borgo Press, 1993), Ray Bradbury (Twayne, 1986), and two co-edited anthologies of original essays: The Frontier Experience and the American Dream: Essays on American Literature (Texas A&M University Press, 1989) and Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American Literature (Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1993). Recently he has been working on a manuscript of personal essays entitled Finding Medicine, about growing up in Montana and frontier heritage. David Seed holds a chair in American Literature in the School of English at Liverpool University. He took degrees at the universities of Cambridge, Leicester and Hull. He has published books on Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Heller, James Joyce, Rudolph Wurlitzer and American Science Fiction and the Cold War. He is editor of the Science Fiction Texts and Studies series from Liverpool University Press and is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of American Studies. He holds a fellowship from the English Association and his main current research project is a study of cinematic techniques in American fiction. Nick Selby is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Glasgow. He has written widely on American literature and poetry and is the author of From Modernism to Fascism: Poetics of Loss in The Cantos of Ezra Pound (Mellen Press, 2005). He is Associate Director of the Andrew Hook Centre for American Studies in Glasgow, and Treasurer of the British Association for American Studies. Mark Shackleton is currently Acting Professor at the Department of English, University of Helsinki, and is co-director of the University of Helsinki project ‘Cross-Cultural Contacts: Diaspora Writing in English’. He is the author of Moving Outward: The Development of Charles Olson’s Use of Myth (Helsinki University Press, 1994), and has published on postcolonial writing and Native North American writing, including articles


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on Tomson Highway, Gerald Vizenor, Thomas King, Monique Mojica, Louise Erdrich, and Simon J. Ortiz. Deeanne Westbrook is Professor Emerita at Portland State University. During her tenure in the English Department she has taught British Romanticism, criticism, poetry, Greek and northern European myth, the literature of the Bible, and baseball and myth. A recipient of four faculty excellence awards, she now writes and teaches three or four courses a year. She has published articles on Wordsworth, Coleridge, De Quincey, northern European myth, baseball literature and the literature of the Bible; most recently she published an article on themes of fate and chance in baseball literature, entitled ‘God, Gambling, and The Game’, in P. Carno, ed., Baseball/ Literature /Culture: Essays 1995–2001 (McFarland, 2003). She is the author of two books: Ground Rules: Baseball and Myth (University of Illinois Press, 1996) and Wordsworth’s Biblical Ghosts (Palgrave, 2001). She is now at work on an article about Romanticism’s myths of inspiration. Lois Parkinson Zamora is Professor at the University of Houston in the Departments of English, History and Art. Her area of specialization is contemporary fiction in the Americas. Her books include Writing the Apocalypse: Historical Vision in Contemporary U.S. and Latin American Fiction (Cambridge University Press, 1989); Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community, co-edited with Wendy B. Faris (Duke University Press, 1995); The Usable Past: The Imagination of History in Recent Fiction of the Americas (Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Image and Memory: Photography from Latin America l866–1994 (University of Texas Press, 1998). Image and Memory was named the Best New Art Book of 1998 by the Professional/Scholarly Publishing division of the Association of American Publishers. She frequently writes about the visual arts and their relation to Latin American literature, and has recently completed a book entitled The Inordinate Eye: Reflections on the New World Baroque and Recent Latin American Fiction.


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Index

Index

Abrams, M. H. 269n, 292 Acoma Pueblo 226 Acker, Kathy 8, 79, 84, 86, 101, 103 African American 7–8, 47–62, 87n, 90–93, 271–77 Ali, Muhammad 8, 47–62 Allen, Paula Gunn 228, 228n, 240 Allen, Thomas B. 198 Allende, Isabel, 273, 276, 292 Alman, Bert 232, 240 American Dream 7, 9, 30, 42, 70, 97– 98, 105–27 American Mind 8, 19–20, 24 American Studies 17 Anderson, Poul 175–76, 198 Anderson-Dargatz, Gail 230, 240 Anishinaabe 2, 44–46 Anzuldúa, Gloria 138n, 155, 283, 292 Apocalypse 157–67, 243–66 Arnold, Edwin T. and Luce, Dianne C. 146n, 155 Ascher, M. 171n, 198 Asian American 6, 9, 93–95, 105–27, 271, 283–86 Asimov, Isaac 170, 178–79, 179n, 182n, 197–98 with Warrick, Patricia S. and Greenberg, Martin H. 198 Babcock, Barbara 229, 240 Bak, Hans 30n, 5 Bakhtin, Mikhail 31, 34, 281, 281n Baldwin, James 52–53, 62 Ballard, J. G. 82n Balsamo, Anne 196, 198

Blazek_16_Index

299

Barth, John 10, 82n, 84n, 187–89, 192, 198 Barthelme, Donald 82n, 84n Barthes, Roland 1, 3 Baudrillard, Jean 203, 225 Begley, Adam 87n, 103 Beidler, Peter G. and Barton, Gay 29n, 30n, 45 Bell, Betty Louise 8, 15–28, 295 Bellamy, Joe David 198 Bellow, Saul 130 Bester, Alfred 198 Bhabha, Homi 25–26, 28 Bible 16, 243–44, 261–63 Bischoff, David 180, 195, 198 Blazek, William 7, 29–46, 295 Blonsky, Marshall 2, 12 Bloom, Harold 244–46, 244n, 247, 254–55, 261–62, 264–65, 291n Blumenberg, Hans 75, 77 Boaz, Franz 11, 243 Boelhower, William Q. 123, 126 Boethius 251, 253, 265 Bone, J. F. 180–82, 198 Bordo, Susan 80, 81n, 83, 84n, 85, 103 Brady, Charles J. 192n, 198 Braidotti, Rose 85, 85n, 103 Brando, Marlon 61 Bricout, Bernadette 77 Broege, Valerie 170n, 198 Brookeman, Christopher 8, 11, 47–62, 295 Brydon, Diana 240 Buddhism 231–33 Budrys, Algis 183, 198

29/4/05, 3:41 pm

300

Index

Buell, Lawrence 269, 292 Bukatman, Scott 193n, 198 Burdick, Eugene and Wheeler, Harvey 179–80, 198 Cadigan, Pat 195–98 Calder, Nigel 198 Carton, Evan 269, 292 Castillo, Susan 32n, 45 Cather, Willa 267, 271, 292 Cavallaro, Dani 193, 198 Chabon, Michael 257n, 265 Chapman, Gary 199 Chase, Richard 1 Chavkin, Allan 30n, 45 Chénetier, Marc 63, 77 Cherokee 19, 24–25 Cheuse, Alan 128n, 155 Chickasaw 25 Chinese American 9, 52, 106–107, 113–15, 119–20, 124–26, 283–86 Chippewa 29, 46 Cisneros, Sandra 12, 267, 272, 287–88, 290, 292 Civil War 274 Clark, Robert 3, 12 Clarke, Arthur C. 184n, 199 Clarke, Deborah L. 275n, 292 Clarke, Joni Adamson 30n, 31, 45 Clement, Hal 171, 199 Clifford, James 282n, 292 Clifton, Mark and Riley, Frank 174n, 199 Cold War 10, 191 Conklin, Groff, 199 Conrad, Peter 3, 12, 73, 77 contemporary American literature 1, 5, 6, 12 poetry 10–11, 202–25, 226–42 science fiction 10, 157–67, 168–201 theory 8–9, 12, 34, 80, 275–76 Coover, Robert 11, 82n, 246, 249–53, 257, 262–65 Cortés, Hernán 276–77, 276n, 292 Cree 229, 239

Blazek_16_Index

300

Creek 25–26 Cronon, William; Miles, George; and Gitlin, Jay 129, 143, 145, 155 Dabezies, André 73, 77 dance 48, 50 Darwin, Charles 215, 217, 219, 221, 225 DeLillo, Don x, 82n Derrida, Jacques 275–76, 292 Díaz del Castillo, Bernal 277, 277n, 292 Dick, Philip K. 176, 199 Doniger, Wendy 4–5, 12, 76–77 Dougherty, William H. 139n, 155 DuBois, W. E. B. 107–08, 126 Durham, Richard 56, 62 Early, Gerald 61, 62 Easthope, Anthony 87n, 103 Eaton, Mark A. 146n, 148n, 151n, 155 ecology 11, 159–60, 207, 211, 214, 219–20, 237, see also contemporary American literature: poetry Edelstein, D. 77 Edmundson, Mark 292 Eliade, Mircea 69, 77, 265 Ellison, Harlan 189, 199, 192, 195, 197 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 11, 24, 124, 196, 202–04, 207, 225, 269–70, 292 Erdrich, Louise 7, 8, 29–46, 79, 84, 86, 100–03, 228, 228n, 271–72 Erlich, Richard D. 199 Euro-American 30, 42, 44, 163, 165 Evers, Lawrence J. 240 Fabian, Ann 130n, 155 Fanon, Frantz 28 Faulkner, William 270, 270n, 271, 292 Feidler, Leslie A. 231, 240 feminism 12, 80, 82–85, 86n, 267–72, 289–92 Fetchit, Stepin 8

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301

Index Filipina/o, see Philippine Fischer, Michael M. J. 289–90, 292 Fitzgerald, F. Scott 3–4, 12–13, 65, 239 Foucault, Michel 126 Franklin, Benjamin 168–69, 199 Freud, Sigmund 8, 243n Freyd, Jennifer J. 97n, 103 Friborg, Albert Compton 199 Friedman, Susan Stanford 31, 45 Frye, Northrop 1, 2, 13 Fuss, Diana 272n, 293 Gaddis, William 82n Gado, Frank 265 Galang, M. Evelina 9, 105–07, 111–17, 119, 120–23, 125–26 Galouye, Daniel F. 171–72, 199 Gardner, Thomas 209, 225 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr and Appiah, K. A. 80n, 84n, 93n, 103, 272n, 293 gender 7, 12, 72, 79, 84, 285, see also identity, masculinity, myth George, Peter 199 Gerrold, David 185–86, 199 Gerster, Patrick and Cords, Nicholas 4, 13 ghost(s) 9, 56, 79–104, 114, 253–57, 270n, 281, 283–86, see also individual Gibson, William 10, 82n, 193–96, 199 Gilbert, C. 77 Gilbert, Helen and Tompkins, Joanne 239n, 240 Gilbert, Sandra M. and Gubar, Susan 225 Glenday, Michael K. 7, 63–78, 295 Goelnicht, Donald, C. 124, 126 Graves, Robert 68, 77 Greenberg, Martin 170, 199 Grimm Brothers 66 Grosso, Michael 244, 265 globalisation 7 Gould, Eric 1, 13 Graham, Jorie 6, 10–11, 202–25, 225

Blazek_16_Index

301

Haida 239 Hall, Wade and Wallach, Rick 146n, 155 Haney, Kathleen 287, 293 Haraway, Donna, J. 82, 85, 85n, 103 Harris, Mark 11, 246, 257–58, 262, 265 Hawkes, Terence 276, 293 Heinlein, Robert A. 183–85, 199 Hellmann, John 63, 77 Hemingway, Ernest 61, 239 Herr, Michael 64, 77 Heusser, Martin and Grabher, Gudrun 29n Heywood, Leslie 4, 8–9, 12, 79–104, 296 Hicks, D. Emily 138n, 155 Highway, Tomson 228, 240 Hispanic American 48, 271, 287–88 Hite, Molly 79n, 103 Hobson, Geary 226–27, 241 Hogan, James P. 193n, 199 Hogan, Linda 8, 16, 21, 25–26, 28 Holloway, David 146n, 147n, 153, 155 Hollywood 48, 53–54, 118 hooks, bell 86, 87n, 103 Hsaio, Ruth Y. 126 Hutcheon, Linda 79, 79n, 103 hybridity 6, 26, 138 identity 7, 12, 29–46, 33–34, 42, 86, 89, 90, 97–99, 101–02, 111, 119, 165, 267–94, 289–92, see also community, individualism, myth imperialism 129 individualism 6, 8, 11, 35, 97–99, 101–02, 140, 287–88, see also identity, myth Irish American 52 Jahner, Elaine 239, 241 Jameson, Fredric 203, 225 Japanese American 9, 107–10, 118 Jarnot, Lisa 10–11, 202–25, 225

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302

Index

Jarvis, Brian 71, 77 Jaskowski, Helen 31 Jen, Gish 9, 106, 107, 113, 115, 117, 119, 123–26, 124n, 126 Johnson, Don 259, 265 Jones, Raymond F. 173–74, 199 Jung, Carl 4, 8, 66, 69, 72, 74 Kafka, Phillipa 9, 12, 105–27, 296 Kamel, Rose 290–91n, 293 Kaplan, E. Ann 86, 87n, 103 Kennedy, John F. 57–58, 65–66 Kermode, Frank 245, 262n, 265 Ketterer, David 157n, 167 Kidder, Tracy 170, 199 Kim, Elaine H. 107, 110, 124–25, 126, 293 King, Tom 8, 16, 19, 23, 28, 106n Kingston, Maxine Hong 8, 12, 79, 86, 93–95, 102–03, 114, 126–27, 267, 272, 283–87, 289–90, 293 Kinsella, W. P. 11, 246n, 247, 252, 255–57, 259–60, 260n, 265 Korean War 111 Krumholz, Linda 84n, 90, 103 Laguna Pueblo 229, 277–83 Lamy, Philip 244, 265 Langer, Monika 220, 225 Larson, Sidner 282n, 293 Lawren, Bill 245, 265 Lawrence, D. H. 168, 168n, 199 LeClair, Tom and McCaffery, Larry 263, 265 Ledbetter, James 52, 62 Le Guin, Ursula K. 230, 241 Leiber, Fritz 188n, 199 Lerner, Gerda 290–91, 293 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 2–5, 13, 243, 265 Levin, Ira 177–78, 199 Lewis, R. W. B. 1,18 Lim, Shirley Geok-lin 119n, 127, 271n, 293 Loevinger, Lee 245, 266 Lotman, Jurij M. 282n, 293

Blazek_16_Index

302

Lovejoy, Arthur O. 19 Lugones, Maria 104 Lutz, Hartmut 241 McCarthy, Cormac 6, 9, 128–56 McHale, Brian 79, 80, 82, 85, 104 McLuhan, Marshall 180, 199 Mailer, Norman 8, 47–62, 65, 78 Mairs, Nancy 289, 293 Malinowski, Bronislaw 5, 13 manifest destiny 21, 27, 162 Martin, James, and Norman, Adrian R. D. 197, 199 Marx, Leo 71, 78 masculinity 6, 9, 90–91, 97–98, 137, 268–70, 290 Mason, Jeffrey D. 63, 78 Matthiessen, F. O. 17 Maya 161–62, 166 Mazumder, Sucheta 127 Meese, Elizabeth A. 275n, 293 Mellott, C. M. 200 Melville, Herman 61–62, 268–70, 293 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 219–20, 223, 225 Messent, Peter 9, 128–56, 296–97 Mexico 9, 128–56 Millard, Kenneth 69–70, 78 millennium 7, 11–12, 147, 243–66 Miller, Perry 17 Miller, Walter M., Jr 180n, 200 Mogen, David 10–11, 157–67, 297 Moi, Toril 86n, 104 Monk, Leland 254n, 266 Monteleone, Thomas F. 195, 200 Morace, Robert A. 31 Morrison, Blake 128n, 155 Morrison, Toni 6, 8, 12, 49, 56, 79, 80n, 80–81, 81n, 83–84, 86, 87, 90–94, 96, 100–02, 104, 118, 127, 267, 272–77, 284, 286–90 Mottram, Eric 47n multiculturalism 2, 5, 7, 35, 79–104, 101, see also postmodernism, race

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303

Index multi-ethnicity 33 Mumford, Lewis 169, 172, 183, 186, 191, 200 Mutman, Mahmut 127 myth archetypes 4, 74 the body 7 classical 67–68, 73, 209, 211–12, 237, 257, 261, 263 community 5, 7, 12, 33, 44–45, 165, 229, 267–94, 285, 288 Coyote 11, 19, 226–42 definitions of 2, 5, 6, 12, 129, 132, 243, 291 dream 64 ‘false myth’ 3 foundational 6–7, 29, 56, 63 Frankenstein 159, 163, 165, 192 frontier 6–7, 9, 18n, 128–56, 222 gender 6–8, 12, 72, 110 history 10, 12, 142–46, 152–55, 161–62 ideology 3, 6, 8, 11, 34, 73, 162, 202, 214, 223, 272, 274, 285 individualism 9, 99, 102 machine 10, 63–78, 168–201 myth and symbol school of criticism 1 mythogenesis 5 sexuality 7 sport 7, 11–12, 47–62, 113, 243–66 success 9, 105–27 technology 7, 33, 40–41, 63–78, 165, 168–201 totalitarianism 73 trickster 11, 157, 160, 226–42, 228n war 3, 10, 22, 26, 58, 60, 63–78, 96, 111, 164, 209, 237, 274 see also identity, narrative mythologies, see myth narrative 35, 39, 59, 148–50, 155, 165 Native American 7, 8, 10–11, 15–28, 29–46, 157–67, 226–42, 271, 277–83, see also Acoma Pueblo,

Blazek_16_Index

303

Cherokee, Cree, Creek, Haida, Laguna Pueblo, myth, Ojibwe, Sioux Neugeboren, Jay 266 New Journalism 51 Newton, Judith and Stacey, Judith 125, 127 Niatum, Duane 241 Nietzsche, Friedrich 261, 264, 266 9/11 5 Noda, Kesaya E. 127, 111–112 Noel-Todd, Jeremy 206, 225 North Dakota 39–40 Occum, Samson 15, 28 O’Connor, Mary 272, 272n, 293 Ojibwe 7, 29–46, 229, 238 Ong, Walter J. 28 Ortega, Eliana and Sternbach, Nancy Saporta 271, 293 Ortiz, Simon J. 11, 241, 226–42 Osage 25, 27 Otani, Janice 126 Ower, John B. 192n, 200 Parrington, Vernon Louis 17–18 Pearce, Roy Harvey 8, 16–24, 27–28 Peebles, Stacey 149, 156 Perez Torres, Rafael 84n, 93, 104 Peterson, Nancy J. 271–72, 272n, 293 Philippine 9, 106–07, 112–13, 116, 120–21, 125 Phillips, Dana 128, 128n, 138n, 142, 156 Phillips, Jayne Anne 7, 62–78 Ping, Wang 9, 106–07, 114, 114n, 116, 121, 123, 125, 127 Pitman, Barbara L. 45 Porush, David 187–88, 200 postcolonial 15, 108 postmodern 2, 4, 8, 79–104, 82, 82n, 84, 94, 102 Price, Joanna 63–64, 74, 78 primitivism 19 Pynchon, Thomas 82n, 84n

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304

Index

race 6, 8, 12, 19, 47–62, 79, 84, 90–93, 107–11, 129, 160, 165, 285, see also myth Ray, Robert B. 136n, 15 representation 91, 94 Reynolds, Mack 182, 200 Rhys, Jean 79, 83–84, 86, 88–90, 95, 101, 104 Roberts, Randy 60, 62 Rodoreda, Merce 79, 84, 86, 95, 96, 100, 104 Rosaldo, Renato 138n, 156 Roshwald, Mordecai 179, 182, 200 Ross, Andrew 87n, 104 Roszak, Theodore 189–91, 195, 200 Roth, Philip 266 Roth, R. 63, 78 Ruppert, James 34, 46, 281n, 293 Ryan, Thomas 193n, 200 Said, Edward 17, 108, 127, 271, 293 Sarris, Greg 31 Sasaki, Ruth A. 9, 105, 107–09, 113– 14, 116, 123, 127 savagism 19–21, 24–25 Schueller, Malini 285–86, 293 Schultz, Lydia A. 31, 46 Seed, David 10, 168–201, 297 Segal, Robert A. 1, 13 Selby, Nick 10–11, 202–25, 297 Shaara, Michael 171, 200 Shackleton, Mark 11, 226–42, 297–98 Shakespeare, William 102 Shear, Walter 271, 271n, 294 Shukman, Ann 281n, 294 Silberman, Robert 30n, 31 Silko, Leslie Marmon 10, 12, 22, 28, 32n, 46, 157–67, 226, 228, 228n, 241, 267, 272, 277–83, 281n, 287, 289–90, 294 Siodmak, Curt 190, 200 Sioux 25 Sladek, John 188n, 200 Sledge, Linda Ching 124, 127 Slotkin, Richard 2, 13, 129, 132, 136,

Blazek_16_Index

304

145n, 156 Smiley, Jane 8–9, 66, 79, 84, 86, 97n, 97–101, 104 Smith, Henry Nash 1, 17–18, 28 Smith, Jeanne Rosier 30, 46, 228n, 241 Smith, Patricia Clark 228n, 232, 234, 236, 241 Smith, Theresa S. 40, 45–46 Snyder, Gary 11, 226–42 Sollors, Werner 127 Sontag, Susan 64–65 Spiegelman, Art 40 Spivak, Gayatri 18n, 28 Stableford, Brian 200 Steiner, George 76, 78 Sterling, Bruce 193, 195, 200 Stoneley, Peter 129, 156 Sturges, Jock 68, 78 syncresis 4, 5–6, 9, 105, 124, 126, 232, see also identity, myth Tan, Amy 114, 127, 271 Tanner, Tony 268–69, 294 Taylor-Guthrie, Danille 273n, 294 Thoreau, Henry David x, 269–70 Tichi, Cecelia 168–69, 200 Till, Emmet 56–57, 57n Tompkins, Jane 132, 156 Townes, Robert Sherman 170n, 200 Tran, Qui-Phiet 125, 127 Turner, Frederick Jackson 18n, 142, 222, 225 Twain, Mark 270 Uba, George 125, 127 Union of Concerned Scientists 217–18, 225 Van Tassell, D. 171n, 200 Veblen, Thorstein 127 Vietnam War 3, 58, 60, 63–67, 72, 237 Vizenor, Gerald 8, 10, 16, 21, 28, 46, 157–67, 228, 228n, 231, 242 Vonnegut, Kurt 10, 174–75, 200

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305

Index Walker, Alice 6, 8, 79, 83–84, 86, 94– 95, 100–02, 104, 272, 294 Wallach, Rick 146n, 156 Wallop, Douglass 266 Walsh, Dennis M. and Braley, Ann 32, 46 Wang, L. Ling-Chi and Zhao, Henry Yiheng 125, 127 Warrick, Patricia C. 171, 200 with Greenberg, Martin Harry and Olander, Joseph 201 Wassaja (Carlos Montezuma) 15 Weizenbaum, Joseph 172–73, 201 Wegner, John 141n, 156 West, Cornell 82, 82n, 104 Westbrook, Deeanne 3, 11, 243–66, 298 Western 9–10, 128–56 Wheeler, Harvey 200 Whitfield, Stephen 57n, 62 Whitman, Walt 11, 176, 204–08, 210– 13, 216, 225

Blazek_16_Index

305

Wiener, Norbert 173, 197, 200 Willard, Nancy 11, 246–49, 253n, 253–55, 257, 259, 266 Wills, Garry 49, 245, 266 Wilson, Andrew 169n, 200 Wise, Gene 18–19, 28 Wolfe, Bernard 181, 200 Wong, Hertha D. Sweet 30n, 32, 41, 44n, 46 Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia 119, 119n, 123, 127 Woods, Tim 225 Woodward, Richard B. 129–30, 130n, 137n, 142n, 156 World War II 10, 26, 70–71, 73, 107– 08, 255, 279–80 Zamora, Lois Parkinson 12, 267–94, 298 Z”iz“ek, Slavoj 202–04, 208, 210, 221– 23, 225

29/4/05, 3:41 pm

American Mythologies: Essays on Contemporary Literature (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool English Texts & Studies)

W. S. Graham: Critical Essays (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool English Texts & Studies)

Paul Muldoon: Critical Essays (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool English Texts & Studies)

Thing About Roy Fisher: Critical Studies (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool English Texts & Studies)

Visions and Revisions: (Re)constructing Science Fiction (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Science Fiction Texts & Studies)

H.G. Wells, Modernity and the Movies (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Science Fiction Texts & Studies)

Migration, Mobility and Modernization (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Science Fiction Texts & Studies)

Words and Music (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Music Symposium)

Bede: On Genesis (Liverpool University Press - Translated Texts for Historians)

Business of Music (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Music Symposium)

South American Independence: Gender, Politics, Text (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Latin American Studies)

Michael Faraday's Mental Exercises: An Artisan Essay-Circle in Regency London (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool English Texts & Studies)

The Most Dreadful Visitation: Male Madness in Victorian Fiction (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool English Texts & Studies)

The Laughter of Foxes, Second Edition: A Study of Ted Hughes (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool English Texts & Studies)

Cassiodorus: Variae' (Liverpool University Press - Translated Texts for Historians)

Demand My Writing: Joanna Russ, Feminism, Science Fiction (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Science Fiction Texts & Studies)

No Heavenly Delusion?: A Comparative Study of Three Communal Movements (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Science Fiction Texts & Studies)

Charles the Bold and Italy 1467-1477: Politics and Personnel (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Historical Studies)

Business History in Latin America: The Experience of Seven Countries (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Latin American Studies)

Liverpool Taffy

Urban Visions: Experiencing and Envisioning the City (Liverpool University Press - Tate Liverpool Critical Forum)

Writing Liverpool: Essays and Interviews

Merseypride: Essays in Liverpool Exceptionalism

Role-Play and the World as Stage in the Comedia (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Music Symposium)

Cannibal Hymn: A Cultural and Literary Study (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Music Symposium)

Liverpool Taffy

Interdisciplinary Measures: Literature and the Future of Postcolonial Studies (Liverpool University Press - Postcolonialism Across Disciplines)

Bede: On Ezra and Nehemiah (Liverpool University Press - Translated Texts for Historians)

Assia Djebar: Out of Algeria (Liverpool University Press - Contemporary French & Francophone Cultures)

Gateways to Forever: The Story of the Science-Fiction Magazines, 1970-1980 (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Science Fiction Texts & Studies) (Vol. III)

American Mythologies: Essays on Contemporary Literature (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool English Texts & Studies)

W. S. Graham: Critical Essays (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool English Texts & Studies)

Paul Muldoon: Critical Essays (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool English Texts & Studies)

Thing About Roy Fisher: Critical Studies (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool English Texts & Studies)

Visions and Revisions: (Re)constructing Science Fiction (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Science Fiction Texts & Studies)

H.G. Wells, Modernity and the Movies (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Science Fiction Texts & Studies)

Migration, Mobility and Modernization (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Science Fiction Texts & Studies)

Words and Music (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Music Symposium)

Bede: On Genesis (Liverpool University Press - Translated Texts for Historians)

Business of Music (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Music Symposium)

South American Independence: Gender, Politics, Text (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Latin American Studies)

Michael Faraday's Mental Exercises: An Artisan Essay-Circle in Regency London (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool English Texts & Studies)

The Most Dreadful Visitation: Male Madness in Victorian Fiction (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool English Texts & Studies)

The Laughter of Foxes, Second Edition: A Study of Ted Hughes (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool English Texts & Studies)

Cassiodorus: Variae' (Liverpool University Press - Translated Texts for Historians)

Demand My Writing: Joanna Russ, Feminism, Science Fiction (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Science Fiction Texts & Studies)

No Heavenly Delusion?: A Comparative Study of Three Communal Movements (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Science Fiction Texts & Studies)

Charles the Bold and Italy 1467-1477: Politics and Personnel (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Historical Studies)

Business History in Latin America: The Experience of Seven Countries (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Latin American Studies)

Liverpool Taffy

Urban Visions: Experiencing and Envisioning the City (Liverpool University Press - Tate Liverpool Critical Forum)

Writing Liverpool: Essays and Interviews

Merseypride: Essays in Liverpool Exceptionalism

Role-Play and the World as Stage in the Comedia (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Music Symposium)

Cannibal Hymn: A Cultural and Literary Study (Liverpool University Press - Liverpool Music Symposium)

Liverpool Taffy

Interdisciplinary Measures: Literature and the Future of Postcolonial Studies (Liverpool University Press - Postcolonialism Across Disciplines)

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