Language, Gender, and Community in Late Twentieth-Century Fiction: American Voices and American Identities (American Literature Readings in the Twenty-First Century)

A MERICAN LITERATURE R EADINGS IN THE 21ST CENTURY American Literature Readings in the 21st Century publishes works by...

Author: Mary Jane Hurst

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A MERICAN LITERATURE R EADINGS IN THE 21ST CENTURY

American Literature Readings in the 21st Century publishes works by contemporary critics that help shape critical opinion regarding literature of the nineteenth and twentieth century in the United States. Published by Palgrave Macmillan: Freak Shows in Modern American Imagination: Constructing the Damaged Body from Willa Cather to Truman Capote By Thomas Fahy Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics By Steven Salaita Women and Race in Contemporary U.S. Writing: From Faulkner to Morrison By Kelly Lynch Reames American Political Poetry in the 21st Century By Michael Dowdy Science and Technology in the Age of Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James: Thinking and Writing Electricity By Sam Halliday F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Racial Angles and the Business of Literary Greatness By Michael Nowlin Sex, Race, and Family in Contemporary American Short Stories By Melissa Bostrom Democracy in Contemporary U.S. Women’s Poetry By Nicky Marsh James Merrill and W.H. Auden: Homosexuality and Poetic Influence By Piotr K. Gwiazda Contemporary U.S. Latino/a Literary Criticism Edited by Lyn Di Iorio Sandín and Richard Perez The Hero in Contemporary American Fiction: The Works of Saul Bellow and Don DeLillo By Stephanie S. Halldorson Race and Identity in Hemingway’s Fiction By Amy L. Strong

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-20

Series Editor: Linda Wagner-Martin

Edith Wharton and the Conversations of Literary Modernism By Jennifer Haytock The Anti-Hero in the American Novel: From Joseph Heller to Kurt Vonnegut By David Simmons

10.1057/9780230118263 - Language, Gender, and Community in Late Twentieth-Century Fiction, Mary Jane Hurst

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The American Landscape in the Poetry of Frost, Bishop, and Ashbery: The House Abandoned By Marit J. MacArthur Narrating Class in American Fiction By William Dow The Culture of Soft Work: Labor, Gender, and Race in Postmodern American Narrative By Heather J. Hicks Cormac McCarthy: American Canticles By Kenneth Lincoln Elizabeth Spencer’s Complicated Cartographies: Reimagining Home, the South, and Southern Literary Production By Catherine Seltzer New Critical Essays on Kurt Vonnegut Edited by David Simmons Feminist Readings of Edith Wharton: From Silence to Speech By Dianne L. Chambers The Emergence of the American Frontier Hero 1682–1826: Gender, Action, and Emotion By Denise Mary MacNeil Norman Mailer’s Later Fictions: Ancient Evenings through Castle in the Forest Edited by John Whalen-Bridge Fetishism and its Discontents in Post-1960 American Fiction By Christopher Kocela Language, Gender, and Community in Late Twentieth-Century Fiction: American Voices and American Identities By Mary Jane Hurst


Indians, Environment, and Identity on the Borders of American Literature: From Faulkner and Morrison to Walker and Silko By Lindsey Claire Smith


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L, G,  C  L T-C F American Voices and American Identities

Mary Jane Hurst


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LANGUAGE, GENDER, AND COMMUNITY IN LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY FICTION

Copyright © Mary Jane Hurst, 2011 First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–11045–8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hurst, Mary Jane, 1952– Language, gender, and community in late twentieth-century fiction : American voices and American identities / Mary Jane Hurst. p. cm.—(American literature readings in the 21st century) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978–0–230–11045–8 1. American ﬁction—20th century—History and criticism. 2. Communities in literature. 3. Language and languages in literature. 4. Gender identity in literature. 5. National characteristics, American in literature. 6. Multiculturalism in literature. I. Title. PS374.C586H87 2011 813⬘.709355—dc22

2010035923

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: March 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.


All rights reserved.


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For Dan, Katherine, and Chris


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Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-04-20 10.1057/9780230118263 - Language, Gender, and Community in Late Twentieth-Century Fiction, Mary Jane Hurst

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Preface

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

1

Introduction

1

2

Finding One’s Place by Finding One’s Voice in Ernest J. Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying and Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy

21

Language and Gender in the Academic Communities of Ann Beattie’s Another You and John Updike’s Memories of the Ford Administration

51

Balancing Self and Other through Speech and Silence in Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker and Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses

77

3

4

5 6 7

Love, Destruction, and Wounded Hearts in the Fiction of Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris

103

Contours of the Future in Denise Chávez’s Face of an Angel and Rudolfo Anaya’s Alburquerque

139

Twenty-First-Century Reflections on American Voices and American Identities

171

Notes

185

Bibliography

193

Index

219


C   


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Art provides the means not only to express and experience the emotional and intellectual range of human capacity, but also to escape finite boundaries and seek awareness beyond that which already exists. The literary arts, especially in narrative forms, appeal to us in part because they portray ways of perceiving, organizing, and understanding the world, thereby enabling or inspiring readers to perceive, organize, and understand the world anew. In reading fiction, we are able to observe and engage in a process of discovery about the characters, plots, settings, and themes created by the author. Through literary criticism, we continue that process of discovery and extend it to the discovery of process; that is, we aim to enhance the discovery of texts that authors have created and, in addition, we aim to develop understandings of the processes that flow into and out of the creation and interpretation of texts. Both the ease and the difficulty of approaching recent or contemporary fiction lie in the familiarity of the discoveries and of the processes. But, like all literary art, recent fiction and criticism offer opportunities for new and renewed insights about literature and about life. Language, which is one of the distinctive features making humans human, is the medium of literature and the means of communication between and among authors, characters, and readers. Gender has always been a basic organizing principle in life, of course, but acute questioning of assumptions about gender and gender roles is a primary feature of recent and contemporary cultures. The place of the individual with respect to the surrounding community has been an essential tension in American culture and American literature since the founding of the United States, but a variety of factors heightened sensitivities about personal and group identities in the 1990s at the approach of a new century and a new millennium. Language allows for the construction and performance of gender and for the construction and performance of individual and community identity. In fiction across the many American communities of the 1990s, the universal themes of language, gender, and


P 


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x

PREFACE


community are intertwined in interesting, instructive, and sometimes inspiring ways. Recognizing and exploring these themes offer opportunities for processes of discovery and for discoveries of process about American voices and American identities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.


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I am most grateful to all my teachers, colleagues, students, friends, and, especially, family members, who recently, in the past, and over many decades have influenced my understanding of literature, language, and life in expected and unexpected ways. Any and all shortcomings in this volume or in me are, of course, my own, and I apologize for them. I appreciate the long periods of other work that kept me from this project, for such time allowed me to reflect more deeply and at greater length about the issues. I appreciate the brief but crucial research leaves that allowed me time first to commence and then to conclude this project. Though I have not had the privilege of meeting them in person, I thank the wonderful writers whose novels are discussed here. I acknowledge with fondness and appreciation LASSO, the Linguistic Association of the Southwest, as some of my early thoughts about language, gender, and community formed my presidential address to the association and were printed as such in the 1998 Southwest Journal of Linguistics.


A      


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1

Introduction

Before Y2K, before the terrorism and subsequent wars associated with 9/11, before the economic turbulence and all the other difficult issues of the early twenty-first century, American writers and readers still had plenty on their minds. Americans in the 1990s generally had little inkling of what would lie ahead, but were beset by their own challenges. At home, economists worried the nation with pronouncements that the decade’s financial prosperity was superficial and unstable. Abroad, hostilities intensified around the globe, resulting in large-scale activations of U.S. military reserves for Operation Desert Storm in the Persian Gulf at the beginning of the decade and Operation Joint Endeavor in Europe at mid-decade. For a time, the president’s involvement with a White House intern distracted people from domestic and international concerns, and then the long runup to the tumultuous 2000 presidential election began. Meanwhile, the approaching end of the millennium fueled fears about Y2K, and accompanying apocalyptic rhetoric sometimes added extra drama to daily news events. The early years of the twenty-first century witnessed events and changes of such immense proportions that they tend, from a later perspective, to overshadow the new millennium’s immediate past, but what came before is complex and fascinating, interesting for its own sake, and helpful for our understanding of the present and the future. A close reading of mainstream American fiction published in the 1990s finds authors expressing significant anxiety about the aloneness of their protagonists. While fiction does not always reflect its surrounding society, elements of a writer’s cultural heritage must inevitably have some impact. The figure of the lone American has long been a staple not just of popular culture but also of canonical literature, from Natty Bumppo to Hester Prynne and from Huck Finn to Jay Gatsby, to name only a few iconic examples. In


CH A P T ER


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LANGUAGE, GENDER, AND COMMUNITY

late twentieth-century American novels written by male and female authors of various ethnicities and geographies, fictional characters can be seen worrying about their lack of human connections and looking for ways to build meaningful relationships through language with same-sex friends and cross-sex partners. This book examines the presentation of language, gender, and community in selected 1990s novels by Ernest Gaines, Alice Walker, Ann Beattie, John Updike, Chang-rae Lee, Amy Tan, Louise Erdrich, Michael Dorris, Denise Chávez, and Rudolfo Anaya. These novels depict individuals struggling to establish their personal voices and identities in the culturally diverse and gender-conscious environment of late-twentieth-century America. The characters’ searches for individual and communal identities bring them face to face with the perplexing issues of their time, but also reflect classic American themes. In all of the novels considered, despite differences in ages, races, genders, educational levels, geographies, ethnicities, and other personal characteristics, language is shown to be the primary tool for either building or destroying the gendered relationships and human connections sought by protagonists in American fiction of the 1990s. The first half of this introduction will provide background information about the structure of this project, describing what kinds of authors and novels have been included and what themes have been identified. The second half of the introduction will offer critical frameworks for the study, first about gender and language and about language in literature, and then regarding community and identity. Chapters two through six will center on close examinations of selected novels from the 1990s. Chapter seven will conclude the study by reflecting on the significance of language, gender, and community in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and by commenting on the use of narrative as a way to discover truth.

T H R: W A Each main chapter of this book examines novels by two authors, one male and one female, paired with respect to the subjects and themes of their novels as well as with respect to the authors’ ethnic, geographic, and cultural affiliations. The underlying assumption is not that each set of authors is the same or that, being male and female, the two authors present opposing points of view. Rather, the assumption is that insightful comparisons can be drawn because of parallels in the authors’ backgrounds and in their treatments of the themes being


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considered. The authors and the characters they have created include people of African American, Asian American, European American, Mexican American, Native American, and mixed descent. In determining the ethnic association of an author or an author’s character, this study accepts any statements as to what heritage the individual in question claims or what terminology that person chooses for self-reference; in controversial or uncertain circumstances, this study attempts to interpret the biographical or textual information available. Explaining why they chose Native American, African American, Asian American, and Mexican American authors for inclusion in their book Teaching American Ethnic Literatures, editors John Maitino and David Peck said, “The simplest answer is that the recent discovery of American ethnic literature has focused on these four groups” (10), and such an answer could also apply here. Of course, ideas concerning language, gender, and community by or about people of ethnicities, religions, backgrounds, or other identities not represented in this book are equally worthy of investigation. While it is true, as Ellen McCracken has said, that “one of the striking ironies of multiculturalism is the notion of inclusion through difference” (13), it is also true, as the present study will demonstrate, that important similarities as well as differences exist within and among the literary creations of diverse Americans. Any word has multiple connotations and references. Just as the terms Renaissance, Elizabethan, and Early Modern all refer to the same general time period in English history yet have varying cultural, historical, or linguistic significance, so, too, can the different terms used to describe the ethnicity, cultural heritage, racial background, or linguistic preferences of an individual convey important distinctions. Identifying terminology must be used carefully because no one word can capture the rich heritages to which every person may lay claim, and also because ethnic terminology can raise sensitive issues. For example, while one individual resents being referred to as Hispanic, another prefers Hispanic to Latino or Chicano or Mexican American, which are not precisely interchangeable anyway. Trying to choose appropriate ethnic terms can uncover all sorts of complications. For instance, while many people prefer the term African American over black, Carole Boyce Davies rightly points out that not only is the concept of American difficult because America is an entire continent composed of diverse groups, as is Africa, but also the term African has a complicated history: “the term ‘African’ (derived from the terms Afri, Afriqui or Afrigi) was originally the name of a small Tunisian ethnic group” (9). Similar complexities are inherent in most names.


INTRODUCTION


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The best practice involves identifying people as they prefer to be identified, but it is not always possible to know what preferences someone holds or to what extent individuals have thought through the origins, histories, ambivalences, and controversies that might lie behind their choices. The authors selected for consideration in this study are not intended to be viewed as representatives of their race, class, ethnic group, or sex, or as representatives of any other category. In fact, some of the writers included here have been criticized by others with similar backgrounds for not portraying their ethnic experiences in a particular way or, from the point of view of the critics, for misrepresenting the ethnic group. To a large extent, however, it is not the authors but the readers and critics who have been guilty of flawed thinking, engaging in what Ellen McCracken has called “the commodification of ethnicity” (201) or else assuming that an author’s depiction is not only an accurate and literal description but also the only description available. Ernest Gaines does not represent all African American males, just as Amy Tan does not represent all Asian American females, and just as the families in Denise Chávez’s Face of an Angel do not represent all Mexican American families. Attempts to collapse groups of people into simplistic categories should be repudiated. The organization of this book should not suggest that women’s writing can be differentiated absolutely from men’s writing or that different ethnic groups write differently from each other. Great diversity exists within as well as between American ethnic and socioeconomic groups, even at the same place and point in time, just as enormous diversity exists within and among geographical regions, and just as great diversity exists within the categories male and female. The authors chosen for this study have been included in large part because of the compatibility of their fiction with the other writers under consideration. For example, Toni Morrison’s writing absolutely lends itself to discussions of language, gender, and community, but Alice Walker’s roots draw on a Southern perspective that fits especially well with Ernest Gaines’s work. Similarly, to offer another example, Sherman Alexie’s novels deserve recognition in the literary landscape of the late twentieth century, but the marriage of Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich makes them an irresistible combination for study. Many talented novelists—established writers as well as new voices from assorted cultural, ethnic, and geographical groupings—could have been tapped for this project, but this study intends to examine the novels of male and female writers with similar themes; similar


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levels of accessibility and acclaim; and meaningfully paired cultural, ethnic, and geographic backgrounds. It would be naive and presumptive to gloss over gender differences or to ignore the tensions and histories relevant to various racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, or geographical groups. As Rafael Pérez-Torres has argued, “the most devastating conceptualization of the mestizo fits within a pluralist paradigm of benign difference” (“Chicano Ethnicity”156). However, to quote Michael Dorris, “ ‘The common denominator of being American crosses all ethnic lines’ ” (Croft 88), or, as Louise Erdrich commented pointedly to an interviewer, “All of the ethnic writing done in the United States is American writing” (“Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris” 88). Rudolfo Anaya has even gone further, saying, “ ‘The levels of meaning that people respond to in any work of art should be universal. I should be able to read any writer in the world and respond to the world and the characters he creates because we are all human beings and we are all caught up in the same dilemmas’ ” (Martinez 19). John Updike, who named fiction “the subtlest instrument for self-examination and self-display that Mankind has invented yet” (“Importance of Fiction” 86), made a point similar to Anaya’s, explaining that as a realistic novelist, You do try and say something about your own country and its progress in history, but it’s not only that. You are really trying just to describe what it’s like to be human. I am an American male, so to some extent being an American male is my version of being human, but you hope you are describing the human condition, and that these things will make sense in Australia, or in Asia, and maybe a hundred years from now also—that you’re not totally tied to your situation. (Shafer 6)

Thus, as Dorris, Erdrich, Updike, and Anaya assert, fiction can provide timely and timeless insights.

T T P R: W N


5

INTRODUCTION

Despite the essentially arbitrary nature of temporal markers such as century or millennium, the idea of living at the end or the beginning of a century or, especially, a millennium stirs the imagination. In an essay entitled “What Good Is Literature in Our Time?” Rudolfo Anaya points out that between “the prior cycle of time and the time being born, there is a space of transformation” (472) that gives writers


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an opportunity to provide continuity and insight, because art has the power to give meaning and direction to life. The authors discussed here convey in their novels a sense of energy and vitality possible only in a self-reflective culture that is alive, that opens itself to possibility, and that lends itself to the conflicted and conflicting participation of its various members. One hundred years ago, Henry James expressed shock after what he deemed a traumatic visit to Ellis Island, where he witnessed the large and untidy influx of immigrants into what he perceived as his America (Neate 94). In the decades that followed, the United States underwent many changes related to the positions of women and of racial, ethnic, and national groups in society. At century’s end, diverse peoples were describing their own understandings of the American identity through mainstream fictional literature. The idea of American identity and the idea of time have always been particularly bound together. Early colonists saw America as a new place for a new time, while late-twentieth-century American culture has been widely universalized as representative of end-of-time culture. Yet, as Sacvan Bercovitch observes, “On July 4, 1776, the thirteen states declared themselves independent, united, and free because they were not; and the knot of dependencies, discord, and responsibilities remains the United States, rhetoric and all” (“Games of Chess” 56). More plainly, as Joseph Urgo says in Novel Frames: Literature as Guide to Race, Sex, and History in American Culture, “What unites Americans into a common culture is this sense of a core multiplicity of being” (xii). Accompanied by a lingering sense, on the one hand, of optimism and American exceptionalism and, on the other hand, by a gnawing fear that war or some other natural or human disaster could draw history to a close, the 1990s novels in the present study reveal a core American multiplicity as unsettled, dynamic, and changing as ever. The fiction discussed in this book consists of novels published after 1990 but before 2000, an end-of-century, end-of-millennium period uniquely given to reflections of the past, anticipations of the future, and responses to the problems and complexities of the authors’ present. Because these relatively recent books may not be familiar to all readers, the discussions that follow contain more textual information than might be expected in an analysis of canonical or well-known works of the past. Though not necessarily best-sellers, these novels have all attracted both popular and critical attention. They achieve what bell hooks says The Color Purple accomplishes as it “broadens the scope of literary discourse, asserting its primacy in the realm of academic thought while simultaneously stirring the reflective consciousness of


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a mass audience” (454). The “consciousness of a mass audience” has always had the attention of publishers, even more so in the 1990s with the genesis of Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club. One of the novels considered here, Ernest J. Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying, was an Oprah Winfrey Book Club selection. Disparaged by some but exalted by many, Winfrey’s Book Club succeeded in getting Americans to buy books and to read, and then further succeeded in empowering Americans to talk about what they were reading.1 Some of the novels and novelists included in the present study have been derided by those who deem any mainstream work unworthy of critical attention, but Rudolfo Anaya has warned against trying to please critics: “ ‘our instinct is to communicate to the world, to a bright, intelligent audience, if at all possible. In no way should we write to please a critic’ ” (Dick and Sirias 179). In discussing what he considered “masterworks” by authors such as Coover, Barth, and Pynchon, Tom LeClair relates that at a conference he “once asked panel participants Alice Walker and Rosellen Brown why women novelists didn’t write like Thomas Pynchon. Walker replied, ‘Why would they want to?’ ” (30). Walker’s excellent answer underscores the value of a range of styles, subjects, and approaches in literature and in literary criticism. The novels discussed in this study are readable yet sophisticated narratives that tell us new stories and provide new perspectives on old stories.

T L T R: W T The intersection of language, gender, and community is not a new topic for literature. Characters in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare’s plays, and even Milton’s Paradise Lost can be seen grappling with these basic themes. Within American literature, characters as disparate as Rip Van Winkle, Huck Finn, Daisy Buchanan, and Scarlett O’Hara find themselves, in different ways and in different circumstances, enmeshed in questions of language, gender, and community as they seek to build or maintain their personal identities in the midst of uncertainty and change. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter represents an especially instructive and foundational literary case of the interplay between language, gender, and community in the traditional canon of American fiction. The introductory “Custom House” section relates the authorial persona’s purported discovery of a letter, a written text, a linguistic mystery, but then the novel moves on to tell the tale of men and women trying to relate to


INTRODUCTION


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one another in cross-sex and same-sex interactions as the larger community looks on and interprets the unfolding scenario. Dimmesdale’s public manliness depends upon his eloquent speech, yet, unable to speak the truth himself, he pleads with Hester Prynne to name him as the father of their child, while Chillingworth threatens Hester to keep silent about his identity as her husband. Bound by the linguistic and social roles prescribed to them by their Puritan community, all three characters suffer from the division between their public and private identities. The Puritan elders assume so much authority for themselves and attribute so much power to language that that they command Hester to “ ‘Speak; and give your child a father!’ ” (68), as if language itself could create a male parent for the baby. Thus, language issues, both symbolic and literal, permeate the novel and shape its handling of other themes and issues. In many ways, The Scarlet Letter is the quintessential American novel, and in its complexities and ambiguities it sets a high standard for later treatments of language, gender, and community in American fiction. Looking to the more recent past, in American Dream/American Nightmare, Kathryn Hume designates American writers from 1960 to 1990 as “the Generation of the Lost Dream” whose writings express “acute distress” but offer “no answers” (292). Hume argues that “community is central” (241) to these writers and that community is “where most of these authors look when they want to find ways of defining a worthwhile life” (278). In Women Enter the Wilderness: Male Bonding and the American Novel of the 1980s and in Women Without Men: Female Bonding and the American Novel of the 1980s, Donald J. Greiner argues that during the 1980s male novelists broke from the long-standing pattern of American literature in which men would bond with each other and strike out for the wilderness, leaving behind women and their female restrictions. Greiner finds that male authors of the 1980s designed their plots so that their male characters either would take the women along or else when they got to the wilderness they would discover the women were already there. He finds that female novelists of the 1980s often adopted the old male model, their characters bonding with same-sex partners before venturing into the wilderness, or else excluded men from the enterprise altogether. Regardless of whether one accepts or resists Greiner’s observations, issues involving gender roles and tensions between the individual and the community were no more resolved in the 1980s than they were in Hawthorne’s day. In After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s, Samuel Cohen demonstrates the importance of past and present in American


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writers’ conceptions of the postmodern, contemporary self. In his introduction to American Fiction of the 1990s: Reflections of History and Culture, editor Jay Prosser also argues that “American fiction published during the 1990s is vital, energized, and prolific in good part from being hooked into the decade—from reflecting and refracting American culture and history” (2). In the final essay of Prosser’s collection, Stephen J. Burn agrees, concluding that a novel at the end of the millennium “could not escape the tangled complications of self-reference, even when it wanted to” (232). A sense of history mixed with self-reference permeates late-twentieth-century American fiction. A common plot finds characters seeking to assert their individuality amid shifting cultural conditions, particularly conditions related to gender roles and to relationships between men and women, in the context of multiple and sometimes conflicting communities. This is, after all, an extension of the fundamental and essential American tensions found in The Scarlet Letter. Apparent in a variety of late-twentieth-century literature and in canonical and noncanonical authors alike is this key American theme: the need to discover and express the self and yet to belong to a group in the face of cultural change and social conflict. As Elaine Showalter remarks in Sister’s Choice, “one element which unites us and which permeates our literature and our criticism is the yearning for community and continuity” (174).

L  G, L  L In his consideration of American fiction from 1970 to 1990, Graham Clarke holds that writers of the time “speak to . . . that continuing belief in the capacity of the written word to make sense of an impossible world and an impossible situation” (7). An illustration of this principle can be found in a story told by Jim Harrison. After Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall, described to an interviewer how he and his wife had witnessed a man commit suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge, the writer added this coda: “My wife and the driver were contorted with horror, and trembling, and I immediately started making sentences. That’s my only defense against this world: to build sentences out of it” (“Jim Harrison” 55). Certainly one of the primary functions of language, in ordinary as well as dramatic circumstances, is to enable us to articulate our experiences as we try to make sense of the world. Dancing bees, singing whales, and signing chimps notwithstanding, the idea is generally accepted that


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our language capacity is a key feature that sets us apart from other creatures and defines us as human. Through our language we express ourselves, and, hopefully, we understand ourselves and relate to others in the past, present, and future. Language permits us to express and interpret our own experiences, but it also allows us to connect with other people as we interpret their expressions of their experiences. Taking hold of language— exercising freedom of speech, for example—can be an emancipatory strategy in routine personal interactions as well as on a larger political scale. The effects of language vary, of course; as Foucault has written, “Discourse transmits and produces power; it reinforces it, but also undermines and exposes it, renders it fragile and makes it possible to thwart it” (101). In American fiction at the end of the millennium, language stands as a dominant theme with significant implications for power and identity on large and small scales. Verbal interaction is “often the site of struggle about gender definitions and power” (Gal 408), and the novels in this study not only emphasize the importance of language but also show gender roles under scrutiny and being rethought and reconfigured through language. Gender, like language and community, is a social construct, subject to confirmation and affirmation or redefinition and renegotiation in virtually every encounter. There are many paradigms of femininity and masculinity. As Nina Baym notes in her review of Shari Benstock’s Women of the Left Bank, “There are only two genders; but there are hundreds, thousands of sexes or sexualities, whose variety is concealed within the dichotomous gender system” (473), and as Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar conclude at the end of No Man’s Land, “it is no longer possible to propose a monolithic ‘tale’ about the female imagination. What had been a single tradition has become many traditions, as women’s spheres have widened and the certainties of men’s worlds have crumbled” (360). In “Performing Gender Identity: Young Men’s Talk and the Construction of Heterosexual Masculinity,” Deborah Cameron reflects on why popularized and simplistic accounts of male and female language behaviors seem so recognizable. She observes that behavior is often used for explaining gender differentiation, but really should be understood as constructing the differentiation (48). Not only is the general principle true that people can be seen “creating selves in discourse,” as Barbara Johnstone has said in The Linguistic Individual (58), but in very specific ways people can be observed using all of their behaviors, including linguistic ones, to construct gendered identities. Complicating the analysis of language with respect to gender


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or any other feature is the fact that all linguistic strategies, whether they be silence or interruptions or indirectness or control of the floor or anything else, can be used for different, even opposite, purposes depending on context. For example, silence can signal powerlessness and submission, but it can also indicate power and control, or it can have yet other meanings depending on the situation. The inherent ambiguity of language thus compounds the nuances and instability of gender roles and gender identity. Diversity and dynamism can be identified as central concepts in the countless recent studies of gender. As for diversity, what Warhol and Herndl have said about the variety of work done from a feminist perspective applies equally to studies of masculinity or studies written from a masculine point of view: “From the outside, ‘feminism’ may appear monolithic, unified, or singularly definable. The more intimately one becomes acquainted with feminist criticism, however, the more one sees the multiplicity of approaches and assumptions inside the movement. While this variety can lead to conflict and competition, it can also be the source of movement, vitality, and genuine learning” (x). Just as there are many models and theories of womanhood, there are many models and theories of manhood. As for dynamism, beyond the sheer diversity of symbolic scripts for gender, there exist ever-evolving aspects to gender roles and the interpretation of gender roles. As Berger, Wallis, and Watson say in the introduction to their volume Constructing Masculinity, “gender, rather than merely constructed, is performative” and “unfolds as a series of ‘performed’ operations that render complex meanings” (3). From within this dynamic complexity lies the potential for ambiguity, interpretation, and change. Despite the dynamic nature of gender, it is definitely the case that heterosexual culture has achieved a status Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner have dubbed “heteronormative” (548), that is, an unmarked form seen to be coherent, privileged, and normative. The novels under discussion here challenge traditional gender roles but generally reflect heteronormative assumptions. The intersections of language, gender, and community are highly relevant for literature that does not reflect the heteronormative tradition, but 1990s gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, and queer novels are not represented here because they have not reached the same level of readership and attention as the other 1990s fiction selected for this study. Yvonne M. Klein has examined the search for community in late-twentiethcentury lesbian fiction, finding a tendency in her selected authors “to reinvent a mythic history of female power” (331). In The Safe Sea of


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Women: Lesbian Fiction 1969–1989, Bonnie Zimmerman devotes one chapter to “The Lesbian Community” and one to “Community and Difference,” pointing out that “community for lesbians, or gay people, may have been and may still be an inhibiting distorting ghetto” (158), and, furthermore, that the “narratives written by lesbians of color and ethnic lesbians . . . unsettle the static and conventional notions of self and community created by the dominant mythology of white lesbian feminists” (205). Critical analyses of fiction that is not heteronormative indicate “a complex and contradictory literary genre” (232) worthy of continued and further examination. While the novels discussed in this study definitely include characters and situations that are not heteronormative, the plots generally resolve in heterosexual unions even when they do not easily or unconsciously reach their heteronormative resolutions. On this point and many others, the essential questions about language, thought, and culture inherent in what has come to be known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis are not only relevant but inescapable. That is, the question must be asked whether our language and our literature shape our way of thinking about gender and community, or whether our patterns of gender and community shape our literature and our language. If shape is too strong a verb, we might nevertheless ask to what extent language, literature, gender, and community affect or influence each other. Early in the twentieth century, anthropologists and travelers provided descriptions of what they perceived to be differences between men’s and women’s languages in non-European cultures; one of the more famous examples of such classic descriptions can be found in Otto Jespersen’s 1922 Language: Its Nature, Development, and Origin.2 Despite their merits and insights, these descriptions are, by today’s standards, too ethnocentric and androcentric to be useful in serious considerations of language and gender. Early-twentieth-century feminists such as Charlotte Carmichael Stopes or Else Clews Parson also incorporated language issues into their writings and lectures, and their viewpoints also inform the century’s intellectual heritage. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, as part of what can now be seen as a larger social process, a number of educators, writers, linguists, and others worked to establish nonsexist guidelines for writing and publishing, while a few scholars engaged in designing research projects and developing methodologies and theories related to gender and language, sometimes in an attempt to correlate the sex of speakers with the form and content of speech. Robin Lakoff’s 1975 Language and Woman’s Place stands as one of the first books devoted specifically


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and exclusively to the examination of language and gender. While Lakoff’s early work has provided a starting point for much subsequent study, the conclusions in Language and Woman’s Place have been criticized over time for being too sweeping and simple and for implicitly accepting male patterns as the norm. Beginning in the 1970s and throughout the 1980s, scholarship on gender and language turned away from a focus on how women’s language styles might be perceived as deficient when compared to men’s styles, and began to take into account a broader sociolinguistic framework of how gender interacts with other features such as age, class, geographical background, education, or economic status. These studies observed that disparities in power might be responsible for men’s and women’s ways of expressing themselves. Illustrations of a power-based approach can be found, for example, in the essays collected in Barrie Thorne and Nancy Henley’s 1975 Language and Sex: Difference and Dominance and in Barrie Thorne, Cheris Kramarae, and Nancy Henley’s 1983 Language, Gender, and Society. In contrast to such a framework, which emphasizes power disparities and is sometimes called the dominance theory, a competing approach can be located in what has sometimes been called the difference theory, some of whose proponents are more closely associated with the Lakoff tradition. A summary statement of the difference framework can be found in Daniel Maltz and Ruth Borker’s conclusion, based on their survey of existing studies, that “American men and women come from different sociolinguistic subcultures, having learned to do different things with words in a conversation” (200). While not everyone sees the difference model and the dominance model as equally acceptable or as mutually exclusive, both approaches do feed into each other. However, the two models suggest distinctive ways of understanding and interpreting data on gender and language. In the 1990s, gender and language scholarship, no longer marginalized, became increasingly interdisciplinary, theoretical, and complex. Even the preceding brief summary of research in what is sometimes called the deficit, difference, and dominance frameworks shows that assumptions that seem logical, intelligent, and perhaps even universal at one point in time may later prove to be problematic, outdated, or completely untenable. Therefore, caution is needed when assessing the state of the field, but the 1990s framework offered by Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet continues to suggest a fruitful path for current and future work. In their influential essay “Think Practically and Look Locally: Language and Gender as CommunityBased Practice,” Eckert and McConnell- Ginet call for “a view of the


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interaction of language and gender that roots each in the everyday social practices of particular local communities and sees them as jointly constructed in those practices” (462). They define community in this sense as “an aggregate of people who come together around mutual engagement in an endeavor” (464), a more specific and more dynamic framing of Gumperz’s general definition of a speech community as a group of speakers who share rules and norms for language (8). The present study of late-twentieth-century American fiction draws on this view of language patterns, gender roles, and community relationships as being interconnected and socially constructed. Previous publications dealing with language in literature, like previous studies of language and gender, have centered on a variety of subjects and have begun with diverse aims.3 In her 1990 PMLA article on “Linguistic Models and Recent Criticism,” Jacqueline Henkel asserts that “the project of a linguistic-literary theory has failed” (449), but her 1996 book The Language of Criticism: Linguistic Models and Literary Theory effectively describes the need for “more genuine interactions” between linguistics and literature (182). Don Hardy’s essay “Linguistics and Literary Theory” traces the history of the relationship between linguistics and literature in the American academy and finds that the two are connected to “the same cultural and intellectual contexts” and so are “inseparably bound” (10). Barbara Johnstone argues in The Linguistic Individual that while linguistics can contribute to literary analysis, linguistics also has much to learn from literature, particularly with regard to acquiring “a deeper understanding of speakers” (180). As Deborah Tannen shows in Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse, for example, “ordinary conversation is made up of linguistic strategies that have been thought to be quintessentially literary” (1). Author Don DeLillo has observed, however, that literary language is rarely discussed for “ ‘a good reason. It’s hard to talk about. It’s hard to write about’ ” (Remnick 47). To date, only a few publications, such as Scott Romine’s The Narrative Forms of Southern Community, have explored the connection between language and community in particular works of fiction, and no previous study has attempted to discuss language, gender, and community issues in a range of late-twentiethcentury American novels.4


14

C  I The concept of the United States as a coherent and cohesive entity has always been problematic. Benedict Anderson argues in Imagined


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Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism that any nation is actually imagined as a community and that modern nations have maintained their imagined communities in large part because print technology allows for the quick and thorough dissemination of ideas and knits people together in common experiences based on shared information, as, for instance, in the case of a newspaper that by its linking of random events on a single page under a single banner and a single date provides “an essential connection” people share with one another (33). Oral language, Anderson points out, also functions to join people together in imagined communities, as when national anthems are sung on national holidays: “No matter how banal the words and mediocre the tunes, there is to this singing an experience of simultaneity. At precisely such moments, people wholly unknown to each other utter the same verses to the same melody” (145). In a study of texts dating from the early national period, Christopher Looby finds an “intimate association between the revolutionary founding of the United States and acts of voice” (3). In his book Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States, Looby asserts that most nations are built around similarities, but in the United States, diversities of all kinds have upended “traditional notions of nationality. Language, and languages, remained to negotiate the differences and establish a minimum of social connection” (14). In Reciting America, Christopher Douglas extends this point further, noting that “American identity is assumed by its citizens largely through the repetition, as recitation and performance, of different kinds of American discourses” (2). Thus, language and literature have played and continue to play a crucial role in creating and maintaining a national identity, particularly in a country as diverse and diffuse as the United States. In Language, Gender, and Citizenship in American Literature, 1789–1919, Amy Dunham Strand establishes that narratives in American literature have reflected and disseminated ideologies of language and gender that shape notions of nationhood and citizenship. Strand shows how writers such as Washington Irving, Catharine Maria Sedgwick, Charles W. Chestnutt, Henry James, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman not only captured but also contributed to the evolving political and social conceptions of what it means to be an American. The interplay between language and community in the construction of personal and national identity is also demonstrated in Lawrence Rosenwald’s Multilingual America: Language and the Making of American Literature. Using a wide array of texts,


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Rosenwald documents the importance of encounters between very different language communities in the construction of a literary identity and literary history within the United States. The importance of community in American identity resonates in both mainstream and marginalized quarters, even if, as Dennis Foster has said, “an ambivalence about community is a fundamental American tension” (371). In The Patchwork Quilt: Ideas of Community in Nineteenth- Century American Women’s Fiction, Suzanne V. Shepard describes how the local color or regionalist writers of the late 1800s captured a sense of loss and a longing for community in their fiction, and it may be that some experiences and conditions of the late 1900s, like those Shepard describes as present in the late 1800s, encouraged or created a need for community in changing and uncertain times. In 1999, The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that summer reading assignments for freshmen at one college would focus on “the meaning of community” (Stanfield A43), the exercise suggesting not only that the idea of community is valuable, but also that it needs to be discussed and nurtured. One expression of the human need to develop individual identity within a spirit of community affiliation can be seen in the Internet chat rooms that emerged in the 1990s. In view of such social developments at the end of the twentieth century, Robert Putnam, in his 2000 book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of the American Community, identified the absence of community as the most important problem facing America; journalist Laura Pappano in her 2001 book The Connection Gap: Why Americans Feel So Alone sent out an urgent call for Americans to engage and connect with each other; and commentator Amitai Etzioni observed in 2002 that, “the more people withdraw into their homes and cars—say, because of fear of crime or terrorists—the harder it is to nurture a sense of community” (B14). However, as we might expect, given the imaginative and interactive uses of computers and mobile devices for twittering and blogging, as well as for online dating and other forms of social networking, historians and sociologists have more recently begun to reassess the concept of loneliness in the digital age. Communities have traditionally been defined on the basis of variables such as historicity, mutuality, autonomy, participation, and plurality (Selznick 197). The idea of community is complex enough to produce disparate, even potentially incompatible, definitions. In his study of recent American literature, Jay Clayton observes “two opposed models of community: an inclusive,


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historically stable, unified community based on shared values, common traditions, and respected practices versus partial, contingent affiliation based on openness to revision, political struggle, and the subversive power of counternarratives and unofficial practices” (135). Most current theories reject the notion that communities depend on unity or solidarity, and instead see communities as based not on “homogeneity, but organized heterogeneity, not the sharing of practices but the systematic articulation of difference” (Lemke 151). Magali Cornier Michael’s New Visions of Community in Contemporary American Literature proposes that “Americans have been experimenting with creating new hybrid forms of community that operate on the basis of mutual responsibility” (193). In the last book he wrote before his death, Community, Religion, and Literature, Cleanth Brooks identified a “crisis in culture” (47) and warned that dissolution of “participation in shared beliefs” (118) could turn communities into mobs. Brooks’s nostalgic desire for a return to lost state actually provides a classic illustration of a typically essential characteristic of community: its recollection of “what is absent” (Candelaria 185). The prevalence of community themes in literature written by women and ethnic minorities might, in some cases, be related to the authors’ sense of absent or threatened group affiliations. In an examination of Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima, Cordelia Chávez Candelaria concludes that “the sketches of community presented in these writings gain much of their energy and efficacy as stories from their articulation of yearning for the absent What” (185). However, even nonminority writers such as John Updike or Ann Beattie place their protagonists in ambiguous social positions, neither fully connected nor fully disconnected from the larger communities available to them. In her analysis of American fiction from 1960 to 1990, Kathryn Hume observes writers “excoriating America’s present lack of communal identification” and adds that “the lack is of no trivial concern, for the absence of community spirit contributes to a sense of the loss of soul, the loss of innocence, the loss of ethnic identity, and the failure of democracy” (241). Community, Hume argues, “is central to the thinking of writers who wish to get beyond a lament for inadequacies and find a place to start changing America for the better” (241). The 1990s novels discussed in the present study show characters longing for a sense of meaningful connection and mutual respect while searching for or trying to build systems of community that seem to be absent.


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In Almost Home: America’s Love-Hate Relationship with Community, David Kirp says, “The word community itself is a Rorschach blot upon which myriad hopes and fears are projected” (6). The idea of community in literature has sometimes been assumed (erroneously) to represent either a kind of impossible ideal—a Mayberry-like social order more familiar in television than in literature or in life—or, at the other extreme, a coercive social environment that actively enforces conformity. The latter kinds of communities, says Daniel L. Wright in “Flawed Communities and the Problem of Moral Choice in the Fiction of Mark Twain,” explain why Huck Finn flees to isolation in the wilderness. Similarly, Scott Romine in Narrative Forms of Southern Community recognizes the potential menace in community when it “is enabled by practices of avoidance, deferral, and evasion” (3). Examining the narrative structures in five novels ranging chronologically from John Pendleton Kennedy’s 1832 Swallow Barn to William Faulkner’s 1932 Light in August, Romine demonstrates that “narrative is how community happens” (151) and then shows how communities produced by narrative are unstable because of the inherently subjective nature of meaning and because of the potentially ambiguous and even subversive qualities of stories that can take on a life of their own. That is, he finds that individuals and communities in his selected fiction frequently tell stories “that construct and preserve order, only to find that these stories spiral out of control, threatening the very order they had originally maintained” (18). The interaction between language and community can, indeed, produce unexpected results, and communities are depicted in diverse ways throughout American literature.5 In her essay “In Search of Community: The Individual and Society in the New American Novel,” Tamara Denisova observes that American literature presents not just a continuum between benign and malignant communities but also a continuum between concrete and abstract communities, from those grounded in literal connections, such as families, to those bound together by spirituality or views about art, music, love, or other less material concerns (216). Denisova also sees a change in the thematic concerns of American fiction over time, as the “story of the solitary man” (216) recedes and the “search for community as a necessary condition for the existence of the individual becomes the stable characteristic of the American novel of the last few decades” (234). The desire for meaningful connection may be related to the yearning for something important and lasting, especially at the approach of a millennial marker. As Eugene Webb has written, “To form community


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is an act of transcendence” (52). Just as the present study takes a dynamic view of language and of gender, so, too, does this study assert a dynamic concept of community, a multidimensional view that recognizes the various facets, evolving interpretations, and changing possibilities inherent in any human grouping.


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2

Finding One’s Place by Finding One’s Voice in Ernest J. Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying and Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy

Striking similarities in plot and theme can be found in Ernest J. Gaines’s 1993 A Lesson Before Dying and Alice Walker’s 1992 Possessing the Secret of Joy. As in Greek tragedy, suffering in these two novels is inevitable, but during the inexorable march to conclusion—both stories end with an execution—the convicted person reaches a higher state of being while pointing others toward advanced self-awareness and community integration. Because of their many points of correspondence, these two books offer an excellent basis for considering the treatment of gender and language in fiction and for examining the nature of language and community. Even in their differences, the two novels mirror each other as the main characters discover their true selves through community with others and through access to language. These novels demonstrate the redemptive power of language and community, with language serving as the crucial bridge between the individual and the community. The lives and careers of these two novelists contain significant similarities and mirrored reversals. Both grew up with economic challenges in the rural South, Walker in Georgia and Gaines in Louisiana. Both are African Americans of approximately the same generation; Walker was born in 1944 and Gaines in 1933. Through travel and education, their experiences and expectations were greatly altered during their younger adult years. Both have spent a portion of their lives in California. Both are well-known and accomplished writers. Gaines has published numerous short stories and novels (including The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, In My Father’s House, A


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Gathering of Old Men, Catherine Carmier, A Lesson Before Dying, and Bloodline), while Walker has also published numerous short stories and novels (including The Third Life of Grange Copeland, Meridian, The Color Purple, The Temple of My Familiar, Possessing the Secret of Joy, and By the Light of My Father’s Smile), as well as several books of poetry and essays. In his first published novel, Gaines’s protagonist is a woman, and in her first published novel, Walker’s protagonist is a man, but since then Gaines’s main characters have mostly been men and Walker’s main characters have mostly been women. Actually, Gaines said in a 1991 interview with Saeta and Skinner that he had only recently realized “Miss Jane is not about Miss Jane; it’s about the four men in her life” (248). Both Walker and Gaines acknowledge the influence of Zora Neale Hurston, and both have also drawn attention to the importance of their early readings of nineteenthcentury Russian authors (Estes 6, Shelton 20, O’Brien 335, Gaudet and Wooten 33–35). Alice Walker and Ernest J. Gaines have earned awards, critical regard, and fame for their fiction, and both have gained wide public attention from the film versions of their novels, especially Walker’s The Color Purple and Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. Both are academics in the sense that they themselves teach or have taught at the university level, and the works of both are regularly taught, studied, and written about within academia. Scholars have previously noted their emphasis on community, as in John Roberts’s “The Individual and the Community in Two Short Stories by Ernest J. Gaines,” Jeffrey Folks’s “Communal Responsibility in Ernest J. Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying,” or Jennifer Von Ammon’s dissertation “A Selection of Alice Walker’s Women: Ancestry, Community, and the Spirit.” Scholarship on both has also included, scattered among numerous studies, gender-related comments of an adversarial nature. For example, Henry Louis Gates has said of Alice Walker that “inevitably, some black intellectuals—generally male—would castigate her for her doctrinal heresies” (“Preface” x), while David C. Estes has said of Ernest Gaines that his “dedication to exploring the predicament of black men in our culture may account, in part, for the lack of critical attention he has received at a time when scholars have produced numerous studies of his African American female contemporaries and their novels about women’s issues” (9). Regardless of whether they are writing about being a woman or being a man, Walker and Gaines share a concern for self-identity, yet Possessing the Secret of Joy and A Lesson Before Dying emphasize that an individual’s self-identification is inextricably bound to community


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identification. In fact, as the characters in these two novels finally realize, developing a sense of self requires connection and community with others. Both authors show vividly how the problems associated with belonging to a larger community and achieving a satisfactory sense of self are exacerbated by a culture that promotes self-hatred and isolation through racism, classism, and sexism. Both authors have drawn on actual incidents as points of inspiration for their novels. Maxine Sample’s essay “Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy” notes (169), as Walker herself describes in The Same River Twice (160), that during the filming of The Color Purple Walker happened to read an account of a clitoridectomy in which a young girl’s clitoris was picked up by the toes of women who then kicked the flesh away. In his own essay on “Writing A Lesson Before Dying,” Gaines describes his interest in a particular case, brought to his attention first by his colleague Paul Nolan and again later by a lawyer who was a student in Gaines’s creative writing class, involving a poor young man executed in the electric chair. Thus, issues of community and identity set within the context of the two novels’ explorations of race, class, and gender are absolutely real. Issues of race, class, and gender take center stage in both novels, but these concerns are only parts, albeit critical parts, of the larger human problem of belonging or of being in communion with others while developing a strong sense of self. Moreover, in these two novels, the male and female protagonists alike come to understand that community relations are achieved, somewhat paradoxically, through an individual’s free and independent assertion of self. In addition, the assertion of self, the sense of community, and the bridge between self and community are only realized through language, thus supporting Philip Page’s point in Reclaiming Community in Contemporary African American Fiction that “For countless African American characters, recalling and (re)telling familial and communal stories are the primary means of linking themselves to the past, their families, their community, and their culture and therefore are a principal means of (re)establishing viable identities” (27). Both Walker and Gaines show that finding a voice of one’s own enables a person to achieve selfidentity as a man or as a woman and to establish connections with others. Language, then, proves to be the essential link between self and community in Possessing the Secret of Joy and in A Lesson Before Dying. The novels’ provocative titles raise immediate questions: What is the secret of joy? What is the lesson before dying? Both novels begin enigmatically. A Lesson opens with, “I was not there, yet I was there” (3),


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while Possessing the Secret starts with, “I did not realize for a long time that I was dead” (3). Both initial utterances are cast in first person indirect discourse, both repeat the pronoun I twice in the first sentence, and both underscore knowledge or lack of knowledge concerning state of being. In both sentences, the knowledge of being is mysterious, beyond the scope of ordinary life: How can one be and not be at the same time? How can one know being after death? An undercurrent of negativity or resistance is present in the syntax of both opening sentences through the use of the negative adverb not: “I did not realize,” and “I was not there.” Also, in both cases, the narrative I, the inward eye, is telling the story from a later point of knowledge and being, but, using the past tense, is suggesting that the reader will be taken back to an earlier time and then guided through events that led the narrator to a point of higher understanding. The voice behind “I was not there, yet I was there” is Grant Wiggins, a young, unmarried, college-educated, African American male who teaches at a primary school for black children. Grant has returned from college with much ambivalence and self-doubt to teach at the same primary school he himself attended in the Louisiana parish and quarter in which he was raised. The opening sentence of the novel suggests not just a mystical knowledge of life in general (that is, that each person has knowledge of communal truths and is part of the whole of humanity) but also a harshly literal knowledge of life for black men: Grant knows the standard cultural script so well that he does not have to attend the trial or the execution to know what happened to Jefferson. Keith Clark observes that this “incongruous assertion of presence and absence bespeaks Grant’s marginality amidst cultural and communal events” (77). The opening sentence also calls to mind the “Termination song” Grant hears the women singing at church (“Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?”) and thus underscores the association of Jefferson with Christ. The short opening sentence, “I was there, yet I was not there,” richly suggests multiple meanings. Gaines’s novel covers a finite period of about five months, is set in a single location, and, except for a section late in the book, is told from a single point of view so that, with the one exception, Grant’s consciousness is the narrative center of the book and he is the narrator of the story. The response of women to events not within their control initiates the action of the plot as Grant’s aunt, Tante Lou, and her best friend, Miss Emma, insist that Grant help Miss Emma’s godson Jefferson, who is sentenced to die in the electric chair for a murder he did not commit. Jefferson is guilty only of being a young


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black man in the wrong place at the wrong time, having been present when two acquaintances shot a white man who would not give them credit to buy liquor at his store. Over the course of the novel, Grant experiences extreme frustration in his communication with the older women, with their minister, with Jefferson, with local whites, with his woman friend Vivian, and with the children he teaches. In short, Grant lives an isolated existence and has difficulty communicating with everyone, young and old, black and white, male and female, powerful and powerless. However, as he helps Jefferson claim his manhood by asserting Jefferson’s ability to think and to express his thoughts in oral and written language, Grant develops an enriched understanding of himself and of his relationships to others. Through Grant’s and Jefferson’s evolving sense of connections, they enable themselves and others to oppose oppression. The voice behind “I did not realize for a long time that I was dead” is Tashi, an African/African American sometimes identified by her American name of Evelyn Johnson. Though the story behind Walker’s novel is not revealed in chronological order, Tashi ages through a complete life span over the course of events. At one point, Tashi is shown as a young African child who meets and later marries Adam Johnson, the son of African American missionaries. As an adult, Tashi/Evelyn Johnson lives in various locations in Europe and the United States. At the end of the novel, she is presented as an older woman in Africa sentenced to death by firing squad for murdering the Olinka tsunga M’Lissa. This story, obviously, traverses a wide range of time and place. Though many chapters are told in first person indirect discourse from Tashi’s point of view (or from her point of view as Evelyn or Evelyn-Tashi), some chapters are told from other characters’ points of view. In this novel, as in Gaines’s, the response of women to outside events propels the story into motion, though here the women take action as well as facilitate action. In the end, Tashi is perhaps responsible for the death of M’Lissa, although there are mitigating circumstances, but her real crime, which she commits on a grand scale, is disrupting the social order. Tashi, like Grant, eventually searches for identity in relationship with other people. Her character incorporates the attributes and challenges of Grant as well as Jefferson in that she is both the educated voice seeking to find meaning and the voiceless victim seeking to find expression. The object of nearly unspeakable mutilation, Tashi must overcome barriers that prevent her from acknowledging her own problem and from expressing it to others. While her assertion of self-identity results in her death, her language




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and behavior lead others to oppose oppression through an understanding of self and an engaged set of personal relationships. Beyond their similar plots leading up to the unjust execution of a person of color for murder, and beyond their similar characterizations of traumatized people learning about their personal identities, these two novels also center on the same theme. Superficially, they appear to focus on different issues, capital punishment in A Lesson Before Dying and female circumcision and genital mutilation in Possessing the Secret of Joy. On a deeper level, however, they are both about overcoming oppression through access to language. Use of language allows people in both novels to achieve an understanding of themselves and to make connections with others. Herman Beavers has argued that Gaines’s fictions “participate in a wider tradition, one that posits acts of storytelling . . . as sites of intervention (and inventions) in the American dilemma” (Wrestling Angels ix) and that “community functions in numerous fictional narratives by African American authors as the repository of memory, a space where the individual’s redemption hinges upon collective acts of remembering” (67). Similarly, Barbara Christian has observed that community “must be” the source of empowerment for African Americans, and that friendships between men and friendships between women are “critical . . . to the African American community’s search for empowerment” (372). Through language—that is, through self-expression and through communication with others—the characters in these two novels by Ernest Gaines and Alice Walker establish communities in which they are empowered and in which they empower others.

A L ESSON B EFOR E D Y ING In the case of Jefferson, his own defense attorney seems to know that he did not commit murder, but the lawyer also seems to know, as does everyone else, that the guilty verdict is inevitable. The lawyer, therefore, frames his summation around the argument that the jurors should not hold Jefferson accountable for what happened because he is subhuman. Thus, the lawyer appeals to the views of the white community that by Jefferson’s appearance and genetic heritage, he is not qualified to count as a man. The public defender says Jefferson is equipped to work but not to think. He presents Jefferson as stupid because Jefferson knows nothing of canonical authors or historical documents. The defense asserts that because Jefferson lacks knowledge of the cultural symbols of the dominant surrounding community, he has no language that can allow him artistic or philosophical


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self-expression. In sum, says the attorney, “ ‘I would just as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this’ ” (8). The lawyer’s blunt and cruel words are directed from one white man in a particular time and place speaking to twelve white men of his own class serving on the jury, but his words reverberate throughout all the communities within the novel. Jefferson’s response is to internalize his lawyer’s comments, refusing for a long time to communicate with his visitors or to eat the food they bring, asking bitterly if they have brought him “ ‘corn for a hog’ ” (122). The white men in the story respond to the lawyer’s words by taking bets on whether Jefferson will act like an animal as he is taken to the electric chair. Reverend Ambrose, the local black minister, is stirred to bring Jefferson to Christian salvation, but is opposed to any other goals for him. Grant, the only educated black man around, despairs of being able to do anything for Jefferson, saying to his aunt, “ ‘Yes, I’m the teacher. . . . And I teach what the white folks around here tell me to teach—reading, writing, and ’rithmetic. They never told me how to keep a black boy out of a liquor store’ ” (13). Only the black women of the community have hope for Jefferson. His nannan, Miss Emma, feels certain that Jefferson’s manhood can be salvaged. As she tells Henri Pinchot, the white sheriff’s white brother-in-law, “ ‘They called my boy a hog, Mr. Henri. . . . I didn’t raise no hog, and I don’t want no hog to go set in that chair. I want a man to go set in that chair, Mr. Henri’ ” (20). Tante Lou believes that her nephew Grant can connect with Jefferson. Vivian Baptiste, Grant’s significant other, besieges Grant to cooperate with his aunt’s and Miss Emma’s plan. Vivian first says, “ ‘I want you to go for me’ ” (32), but then she adds, “ ‘For us, Grant’ ” (32). As Grant soon realizes, his success or failure with Jefferson will affect his own life and his relationships with everyone; what he says and does will affect the “us” of his entire community. Every conversation or action in this tightly woven novel has repercussions. Despite their contrasting attitudes toward the likelihood that he will make any progress with Jefferson, men and women in the novel speak to Grant with similar styles, their conversations marked by indirection and negativity. When Miss Emma and Tante Lou gather with Grant after the trial, they never state explicitly what they ultimately expect him to do. Miss Emma simply says, “ ‘I don’t want them to kill no hog. . . . I want a man to go to that chair, on his own two feet’ ” (13). When Grant begins to resist their plan, Miss Emma can only repeat, “ ‘He don’t have to do it’ ” (13), but Grant understands her statement really means that she will not be deterred. Then, to add




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another layer of indirection to their plan, they insist that Grant speak not to the authorities about visiting Jefferson, but to Henri Pinchot, the sheriff’s brother-in-law, so that “Mr. Henri” can make the necessary arrangements. This infuriates Grant because he knows it will expose him to humiliation and to an open admission of his powerlessness, but the women are drawing on their community networking experiences, knowing that they will fail if they proceed through official channels but that they might succeed if they can present their plan to someone who is indebted to them for their years of work on his plantation. The two women have accrued moral authority over their lifetimes, and their moral authority is the only basis from which they can act or speak, for they have no power to force Grant or the white men or anyone else to do what they want. In other words, they are going to use their symbolic capital, to borrow a term from Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of social relations, to purchase Grant’s access to Jefferson. Grant, in contrast, maintains an ambiguous position with little moral authority in what Philip Page has described as “this fragile multicultural community” (191). People speak to him with indirection and negativity, if they speak to him at all. His pupils fear him. The older African American women and their minister are pleased about his educational achievements but alarmed by his rejection of the church. Grant reports that when the minister prays, he says, “No matter how educated a man was (he meant me, though he didn’t call my name), he, too, was locked in a cold, dark cell of ignorance if he did not know God in the pardon of his sins” (146). Everyone present grasps Reverend Ambrose’s challenge to Grant, but by speaking in prayer the reverend avoids outright confrontation. Other African American men in the quarter treat Grant with some deference, addressing him as “Professor,” but they are never shown in conversation with him. When Grant goes into town, the older black men at the Rainbow Club basically ignore him; they do not include him in their debates about sports and only nod to him as he comes and goes (Gaines 87–90). The younger, light-skinned men in the Rainbow Club taunt Grant because of his dark color. In the bar, they snicker and whisper insults meant for Grant to overhear; they intend to provoke him into a fight, but they do so in an indirect manner. Grant identifies these patrons as “Dumb as hell, but prejudiced as hell” (198). As Keith Clark observes, “Grant’s cultural disassociation is most evident, ironically, when he shares physical space with other black men” (79). Members of the white community also respond to Grant with an odd indirectness, but their linguistic style does little to disguise


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their attitude. Knowing that he has no recourse in dealing with them, they are free to treat him with disregard. For example, Grant is expected to enter a white household only through the back door, and in one incident is left standing two and a half hours in the sheriff’s kitchen, waiting for a scheduled appointment. During this time, Grant ponders whether he should “act like the teacher that I was, or like the nigger that I was supposed to be” (47). When the sheriff does come into the kitchen to talk, he forces Grant to explain the purpose for the appointment, even though all present know exactly what the request is and have already made up their minds how to respond. In talking to these white men, Grant uses standard English, saying, for instance, of Miss Emma’s health, “ ‘She doesn’t feel that she has the strength.’ ” (48); the white men pick up on this and repeat, “ ‘She doesn’t huh?’ ” and Grant knows, “I was supposed to have said ‘don’t.’ I was being too smart” (48). When the superintendent of schools pays his annual visit to Grant’s classroom, he does not know Grant’s name, mispronounces the name Grant gives him, and, when Grant draws his attention to the poor condition of the students’ textbooks, Dr. Joseph replies, “ ‘Are you questioning me, Higgins?’ ” (57). In town, when Grant tries to buy a radio for Jefferson, the white sales clerk wants to sell him the display model on the shelf, but Grant wants a new one in an unopened box. Instead of saying no, the clerk makes indirect statements such as, “ ‘This one’s brand-new’ ” (175). In a commercial interaction, though, Grant’s ability to purchase something in the store enables him to maintain his position, so he does not have to back down. The indirectness of whites toward Grant can be attributed primarily to mistrust and dislike borne of fear. The indirectness of the blacks toward Grant arises from various conversational factors, ranging from family power struggles to muted respect to thinly concealed hostility. For both racial communities, Grant represents disruption to the established order. One group speaks to Grant from a less powerful position and one from a more powerful position, but both exert pressure. The absence of unveiled and direct language isolates Grant, thwarts his freedom of expression, and prevents him from building community relationships. Within the novel, Gaines successfully captures Grant’s situation through the nuances of language. Silences and subtle language variations carry great weight. As Gaines himself said in discussing this novel, “when you’ve lived in that community and the community is very old—you don’t have to speak a word. . . . When you’re part of the community, when there’s even the




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slightest movement of the hand or a mere look or not looking—it can mean so much” (Lowe, “Interview” 310–11). Two people, Vivian Baptiste and Paul Bonin, do have better communication with Grant, and their relationships with him offer hope for the future at the end of the novel. In responding to Vivian, Grant extends his boundaries across the gender line. In responding to Paul, Grant extends his boundaries across the color line. Neither effort is completely satisfactory, but, in view of Grant’s other relationships, both represent a start at a better, more connected life. Grant appreciates Vivian’s physical appearance, especially her light-skinned features, but Vivian appears to prefer darker men. Her African American family, in fact, earlier rejected her for marrying a dark-skinned man, and they will have nothing to do with her children because of her husband’s dark color. Gaines may be demonstrating Grant’s racial ambivalence, Vivian’s racial identification, and the historical complexities of color lines, but he also creates in Vivian’s character a woman whose isolation matches Grant’s. Disowned by her parents, separated from her husband who has moved out of state but from time to time threatens to use their children as leverage in any divorce proceedings, she is from another part of Louisiana and does not have the familial and historical connections Grant has to the area in which they live and work. Like Grant, Vivian is a teacher, though her school is located in the town. Vivian feels a strong commitment to her profession and recognizes and respects the unacknowledged feelings Grant has for his community. She is completely responsive to his needs, arranging child care on short notice, for instance, so that she can comfort him after his visits to Jefferson. Though he is attentive and tender to her in their intimate moments, Grant can be neglectful. He never seems to appreciate fully the worries and complications she has due to her children, and he does not give the attention to her problems that she gives to his difficulties. His also speaks harshly to her in front of other people. For example, during her first meeting with Aunt Emma and Emma’s church friends, Grant nervously orders Vivian around in the kitchen, finally saying, “ ‘Just do what I said’ ” (115). The older women are pleased with Vivian’s manners, declaring her to be a woman of “quality” (117), but they are uncomfortable in her presence and seem shocked that Grant would introduce this outsider as the woman he intends to marry. When Vivian questions Grant as to whether he knows one of his older students is in love with him, Grant replies that all the females, from the schoolgirls to the old women, are in love with him and


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We black men have failed to protect our women since the time of slavery. We stay here in the South and are broken, or we run away and leave them alone to look after the children and themselves. So each time a male child is born, they hope he will be the one to change this vicious circle—which he never does. Because even though he wants to change it, and maybe even tries to change it, it is too heavy a burden because of all the others who have run away and left their burdens behind. (167)

Grant has internalized this kind of thinking into every part of his being. He sometimes sees himself as a would-be savior who can only fail to help his people, just as he sometimes views Jefferson as the one black man who has a chance to make a stand. Others in the novel, though, take a different view of Grant’s social position and duty to others, especially women. Reverend Ambrose tells him the women have sacrificed to send him to school, not so that he could be become a teacher, but rather so that he could “ ‘relieve pain’ ” (218). However politically or socially limited his views may be regarding the purpose of education or the potential of an educated black man, the minister has seen another side of the women that Grant has ignored. Vividly, Reverend Ambrose describes how the women have scrimped for his education, how their hands are lacerated from picking cotton and their knees are scarred from the time they have spent in prayer. Throughout the course of the novel and especially in his characterization of Reverend Ambrose, Gaines provides, as Suzanne Jones says, “a powerful redefinition of masculinity” that involves “empathizing with others, resolving conflict in nonaggressive ways, and expressing a wide range of emotions” (41). Perhaps Grant is affected by the minister’s lecture on women’s sacrifices, for he ultimately defers to Vivian in their final conversation when she demands his attention and respect. This scene occurs just after Grant has been lured into fighting with the light-skinned men at the Rainbow Club. Vivian is furious with him for fighting and for bad public behavior, which jeopardizes her position in the community. Grant tries to rationalize what he has done, saying he had no choice but to fight, but Vivian insists that he could have talked to them or at least argued instead of engaging in a physical fight. In


resent Vivian because they do not want an outsider taking him away from them. His assessment is partly correct, but Grant, appropriately for his name, takes these women for granted, to some extent because of his desire to resist the pressure of their expectations. He explains to Vivian:


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other words, she sees the possibilities of using language to express feelings, defuse anger, and negotiate through difficult encounters, but Grant does not. Trying to get back into her good graces, Grant calls Vivian “honey” and uncharacteristically assumes a conversationally subordinate position, asking her questions to get a dialogue started, as when he says, “ ‘What are you doing, honey?’ ” (207). Having been focused on himself and on his problems, Grant is shocked when she finally has a quiet moment to tell him the news that her husband has imposed new conditions on their divorce. Grant’s first response is to flee, and he even starts out the door, but then he stops and stares out into the darkness, thinking, “There was nothing outside this house that I cared for” (210). So, he returns to Vivian’s kitchen: “I knelt down and buried my face in her lap” (210). If Grant’s name suggests his tendency to take people for granted, Vivian’s name suggests her life-sustaining qualities.1 During this crisis, Vivian finally takes a stand for herself. By maintaining her dignity and self-respect, she requires and enables Grant to appreciate her as a whole person. This crucial scene between Grant and Vivian, like many other turning points in the novel, including Grant’s visit to Henri Pinchot, occurs in the context of a kitchen, a setting that correlates well with the life-sustaining themes of the book. In his essay on “Transcendence in the House of the Dead,” John Lowe identifies a particular connection between “kitchen, food, jail, and torture” in A Lesson Before Dying (156). Although food preparation generally evokes positive thoughts of home, family, friends, and physical nourishment, the connections are not simple in Gaines’s novel. In fact, Gaines sets scenes of major conflict and tension in kitchens, but key transformations also happen in the context of food. Grant’s reconciliation with Vivian and the collection taken at the Rainbow Club for Jefferson’s radio are two such examples of transformational scenes, but perhaps the most important occurs during Jefferson’s realization in the prison dayroom of what it takes to be a hero as he deliberately chooses to sit and eat, thereby reasserting “his humanity and his membership in the community” (Page 200). Just as Vivian gives more than her share in her relationship with Grant, so, too, does Paul Bonin (whose last name, suggesting the French word bon, might make him “Paul the Good”) go the extra mile with Grant. Paul is a young white deputy at the jail where Jefferson is held. He is the most decent of the deputies, and Grant discovers “from people in the quarter who knew his people that he had come from pretty good stock” (125–26). After Miss Emma’s and Grant’s


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disastrous first visit to the jail, Miss Emma cries out with anguish, and Grant reports that as Paul escorts them from Jefferson’s cell, “The deputy and I exchanged glances. With his eyes and a nod, he told me to put my arms around her. Which I did” (74). Well into the novel, Paul later takes the initiative to be on a first-name basis, offering his own name and a handshake. As Philip Auger says of Gaines’s novel in general, producing change is a rhetorical act. With the exchange of names, Grant and Paul begin to bond, and their relationship suggests the possibility of community relationships beyond one’s color. Like the New Testament Paul who extended his services to people outside his own exclusive circle, this Louisiana Paul ministers in a secular sense to people outside his own race and, at the very end, is a messenger of the good news that emerges from Jefferson’s death. While most who have written about A Lesson Before Dying have associated the character Paul in the novel with the Paul of the New Testament, it may also be notable that in “Writing A Lesson Before Dying,” Gaines credits his colleague Paul Nolan with first telling him about an actual local case involving an execution of a young man in an electric chair. Either way, as Ed Piacentino details in “ ‘The Common Humanity That Is in Us All,’ ” the emerging friendship of Grant and Paul represents a step toward racial reconciliation. At the end of the novel, Paul drives to Grant’s school to tell him the execution has been completed. Such notification is not part of Paul’s responsibilities, but he assumes the action out of respect and kindness. Grant, standing at the side of the road, forces the situation: “ . . . I knew he had come to bring me the news. I didn’t go up to the car, as I was supposed to do. I waited for him to make his move” (253). To his credit, Paul does not allow himself to be bound by the rules for black-white interaction that have been in effect for generations and does not wait for Grant to approach him subserviently. Bringing Jefferson’s diary to Grant, Paul describes Jefferson as “the strongest man in that crowded room” (253) and relates his last words to have been, “Tell Nannan I walked” (254). Grant’s efforts have succeeded. Witnessing, in the African American verbal tradition, “is not valuable until it is voiced, shared with the community” (Page 32), and this passage shows Paul’s willingness to participate in the important community-building tradition of witnessing. Paul’s final exchange with Grant and his promise to return and speak with Grant’s students demonstrates that language can be the medium for building bridges. As Suzanne Jones describes in “New Narratives of Southern Manhood: Race, Masculinity, and Closure in Ernest Gaines’s Fiction,” events in the novel show that new formulations of




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masculinity and racial relations can occur and that language can be used to define and construct new social realities. Thus, hope and possibility are suggested by improved communication between the races and the sexes at the end of A Lesson Before Dying. Such hope is enhanced by the manner in which Jefferson goes to his death. It is Jefferson who brings out Grant’s compassion and care. It is Jefferson who provides the occasion for Vivian to see the best side of Grant and to share with him a challenging and deep experience. It is Jefferson who causes Grant and Paul to meet in circumstances that permit them to understand and appreciate each other. It is Jefferson who awakens Grant’s spiritual feelings and enables Grant, finally, to respect the strength and courage of Reverend Ambrose. It is Jefferson who becomes a symbol for the children of why they should try to learn and to succeed in school. It is Jefferson who represents the women’s hope for a black man who will stand strong. Jefferson, executed as soon after the Easter season as public sentiment will permit, bears all these burdens as he prepares for his own death, and his suffering finally becomes the catalyst for much good. At the beginning of the novel, Jefferson would be capable of none of this. He confuses Christmas and Easter, Good Friday and Easter Sunday. He seems to have no friends. He lacks the vocabulary to express his feelings. He is so angry at what has happened to him that he refuses to talk with the two or three individuals who do visit him. What brings about his transformation over the course of the novel? Community and language. His nannan, believing in the possibility of his manhood, continues to visit him herself or to send the preacher or the teacher to visit him. The stubborn persistence of this one woman keeps Reverend Ambrose and Grant Wiggins going back to Jefferson even though he at first rejects and insults them. Miss Emma, who is described as being “as immobile as a great stone or as one of our oak or cypress stumps,” proves to be an irresistible force for community building. She persuades the sheriff to permit Jefferson to have visitors. She persuades the white women to pressure the white men into allowing Jefferson to see his visitors outside his cell in the dayroom. There she brings him food and sets out a dinner, a veritable last supper, for them all to share. She keeps persuading and resisting until at last Jefferson is brought into community with others. Ironically, the prison rather than the church or the school becomes what John Lowe has termed “a nurturing communal space” that enables Jefferson’s “transcendent transformation” (“Transcendence” 148). Through the various events in the narrative, Jefferson comes into contact with the outside community through language in the same


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two ontological stages through which all literate people develop language: an oral stage and then a written stage. First, Grant gives him a radio, the only gift he has ever received, and Jefferson is thereby exposed to a wide and distant community through speech and music. Grant mainly intends the radio to provide distraction for Jefferson and to give him at least one personal possession, but perhaps he also wants to plant opposition to the women and the minister, for whom “ ‘all music except church music is sinning music’ ” (171). Once that opposition is initiated and then established, the radio supplies companionship and connection, for Jefferson plays the radio continuously and does not feel so alone. Second, Grant gives Jefferson paper and pencil, allowing him his first opportunity for self-expression through written language. The remarkable change in Jefferson’s self-awareness and his astute comprehension of community expectations can only be attributed to the emotional and intellectual processes recorded in his diary. The diary, which is printed as Chapter 29 of the novel and is thus the one departure from Grant’s narrative point of view, contains profound and poetic notes about Jefferson’s last days. He begins with uncertainty about his ability to record his thoughts: “ . . . i dont kno what to put on paper cause i aint never rote nothin but homework i ant never rote a leter in all my life cause nanan use to get other chiren to rite her leter and read her leter for her not me. . . . ” (226), but his second entry includes a descriptive and artistic reference to the sun “splashin” on the floor (226). He describes what he eats and what he dreams, and he tells about his visitors in the week before the execution, noting how he appreciates all the school children who come to see him and how pretty and sweet he finds Vivian. In his journal, Jefferson writes that he wants to reach out from his isolation: “ . . . sometime mr wigin i just feel like tellin you i like you but i dont kno how to say this cause i ant never say it to nobody before an nobody ant never say it to me” (228). Finally, he tells someone face to face that he cares, and he records that experience in his diary: when they brot me in the room an i seen nanan at the table i seen how ole she look and how tied she look and i tol her i love her an i tol her i was strong and she jus look ole and tied an pull me to her an kiss me and it was the firs time she never done that an it felt good an i let her hol me long is she want cause you say it was good for her an i tol her i was strong an she didn need to come back no mo cause i was strong. . . . (231)


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Having first acknowledged and rehearsed his emotions in his diary, Jefferson is able then to think about them and to act upon them. Gaines has told interviewer Anne Gray Brown that he sees this chapter based on Jefferson’s diary as essentially uplifting, not sad, because it represents Jefferson’s epiphany. Using language in his journal, Jefferson becomes more fully human, or as he writes the word with accurate but unintentional metaphor, “youman.” He even stays up all night before his execution in order to write until the very end. Ultimately, the freedom of expression brings him self-respect and a sense of connection with others. He can allow himself the pain of caring for others. He can remember his interactions with other people and can reflect that other people care about him. He recognizes that he is part of the group. His manhood emerges as he is allowed for the first time to think and write, and as he has the opportunity, once again for the first time, to care and be cared for. Anne Gray Brown describes the chapter as transformative (“Writing for Life”), while John Lowe argues that “the incandescent revelation” of Jefferson’s diary is “one of the most powerful pieces of writing in American literature” (“Transcendence” 159). Indeed, fundamental truths about language and community are elegantly portrayed in Jefferson’s diary and in the novel as a whole. Readers and characters alike learn many lessons about moral choices, cultural contexts, and core human values. Ernest Gaines’s story forms a glorious tragedy about the human need for identity, self-expression, and community.

P OSSESSING

THE

S ECR ET

OF J OY

Whereas one of the core issues in A Lesson Before Dying focuses on how a man can become a man when nearly everyone around him questions, denies, or thwarts his manhood, one of the core issues in Possessing the Secret of Joy focuses on how a woman can become a woman when nearly everyone around her questions, denies, or thwarts her womanhood. Unlike Ernest Gaines’s novel, which is told chronologically in a first-person retrospective, Alice Walker’s novel is divided into twenty parts, each containing several chapters, with each chapter presenting a different individual’s point of view about some central event in the story, which is not presented in chronological order. Thus, the theme of fragmentation echoes in a complicated narrative scheme that is at first disjointed and startling but ultimately effective and coherent. Walker’s presentation reflects what Carole Davies has described as “multiple ways of voicing that reside in Black women’s textualities”


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(164), wherein meaning “is constructed out of multiplicities of voices and positions” (162). However, in both Walker’s and Gaines’s novels, despite their distinctive narrative arrangements, the main characters’ gendered identities are eventually realized in the same way: through the use of language as a means for self-expression and as a means for establishing community relations with other people. Possessing the Secret of Joy opens with Tashi uttering a syntactically simple but semantically complicated statement—“I did not realize for a long time that I was dead” (3)—and then launching into an animal story. Her story turns out to be a fable about her own life, about her struggle for connection and voice in a hostile or indifferent society, and about the price her struggle exacts. Tashi’s capacity for weaving symbolic narratives is both her blessing and her curse. Unlike Jefferson in A Lesson Before Dying, she expresses herself from the beginning in a sophisticated and original manner. Her ability demonstrates what Jacqueline de Weever in Mythmaking and Metaphor in Black Women’s Fiction describes as the “mythography of black women writers,” which creates “an imaginative world peculiar to their experience” (1). In the novel’s second chapter, Olivia, who is Tashi’s friend and sister-in-law, relates that Tashi had always expressed herself by creating stories. Even as a child, Olivia explains, Tashi made up stories, which her mother viewed as lies, to explain her behavior or misbehavior. Over the course of the novel, storytelling gives Tashi some measure of control and allows her to process painful reality into a psychologically manageable form. Therein lies the problem, however. Tashi’s fictional creations serve to distance her from painful experiences to the extent that her stories prevent her from understanding herself and her relationships with other people. She must learn how to interpret her own stories in order to know herself and to have meaningful connections with others. Interpreting the central images of Tashi’s imagination becomes a primary pursuit for Tashi’s family, friends, and therapists around the world as she becomes the living text they struggle to explicate. These individuals are all captives of their own experiences, however, so they encounter great difficulty empathizing with Tashi and decoding her stories. Adam, Tashi’s husband, is so bound by his own memories that he cannot reconstruct the past in order to provide context for Tashi’s haunted stories. He even considers that “Sometimes I think Olivia and I remember two entirely different people” (14). Memories from Adam’s perspective omit key details, just as other people’s memories prove faulty or limited in one aspect or another. Adam remembers




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that he fell in love with Tashi because of her appearance, her personality, and her language. He says, “I liked her mealie row fan hairstyle and her impish, darting ways. I liked her self-possession. And her passion for storytelling” (27). He remembers with fondness the way they eventually became lovers before she submitted her body for mutilation. But he does not remember that she was crying on the first day they met as children—partly because of the local custom to deny the presence of crying children in the village—and not until many years later does Adam learn that on the day of his family’s arrival in the village Tashi had just watched her sister bleed to death after ritual mutilation. Adam and the others have difficulty transcending their own experiences in order to interpret and connect with Tashi. The idea of Tashi as a text to be interpreted suggests and plays with, yet also reverses cultural notions that regard women as objects to be explored, concepts explored in Annette Kolodny’s book The Lay of the Land, in Carole Boyce Davies’s analysis “Women as Dark Continent” (78–79) in her book Black Women, Writing, and Identity, and in many other discussions. The scarred body of Tashi connotes multiple symbolisms. Within the novel, for instance, M’Lissa offers a religious meaning, associating Christian baptism with the “bathing,” the term used for ritual mutilation of girls. Hortense Spillers, in her essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” connects the scarring of the black female body with the marks of slavery. Alyson Buckman, in “The Body as a Site of Colonization,” links ritual clitoridectomy with the imperialist gaze of colonization. Other writers, including Angeletta Gourdine and Margaret Kent Bass, have interpreted Tashi in ways that take a highly critical view of Walker as the author. In the final analysis, though, despite the central importance of female genital mutilation to the narrative, Walker’s presentation of Tashi/Evelyn is less about external interpretations of her body and more about what Geneva Cobb Moore calls “the psychological process of self-healing” (121), an inward process. Even professional psychologists encounter difficulty in helping Tashi interpret her situation. After seeking help from other sources, Adam and Evelyn/Tashi say “you are our last hope” (53) to the Old Man/Mzee/Lisette’s Uncle Carl/the Swiss therapist/Carl Jung. Wisely, he replies, “No, that is not correct. You yourselves are your last hope” (15). Slowly, by letting Evelyn/Tashi express herself freely, the Old Man brings her to a critical point of self-recognition, and through her therapeutic artwork she remembers seeing a chicken eat the piece of flesh, her sister’s clitoris, tossed out from the tent in which her sister was being mutilated. After viewing Tashi’s large


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and grotesque painting of a feathered creature, the Old Man asks if she feels better, and she responds with a linguistic breakthrough. Dislodging the “boulder” from her throat that has previously prevented her from speaking the truth about her sister’s death, she replies to her therapist: “I remembered my sister Dura’s murder” (81). Once the idea of murder and the full implications of ritual mutilation take shape in Tashi’s conscious mind, she is moved to take action for herself and for others. Free access to linguistic expression is necessary for Tashi to destroy the power of the taboo and to make the connections necessary for her psychological wholeness and spiritual redemption. By recovering her memory and assigning words to describe what happened, Tashi can escape the image-filled prison her mind has created. Her breakthrough affects those around her, as well. The Old Man tells his niece Lisette that working with Evelyn/Tashi and with Adam enables him to understand himself and his communal relationship with others. He writes to his niece that he is beginning to recognize in himself “An ancient self that thirsts for knowledge of the experiences of its ancient kin . . . . A self that is horrified at what was done to Evelyn, but recognizes it as something that was also done to me. A truly universal self” (84). As Felipe Smith has noted, Alice Walker’s fiction shows the redemptive power of art to be of benefit both to the saver and the saved (109). Adam, too, reports that Tashi’s therapeutic work has touched him deeply. He writes to Lisette that he experiences a spiritual communion through Tashi’s therapy, and he also acknowledges that the bonds between himself and Lisette are strengthened by his experiences with his wife. Several complex issues and ironies related to gender, race, and language surround Tashi’s breakthrough and its effect on the men in her life. First, these two men, one European and one African American, give Tashi their support. Yet, they immediately convey their reactions to Lisette, a white European, who is, because she is Adam’s lover and the Old Man’s niece, a competitor for the men’s attentions and a source of emotional pain for Tashi. Moreover, Adam has turned to Lisette because of the wall between himself and his wife. Tashi’s inability to speak of her true problem and Adam’s consequent inability to build a complete marital community with her has opened the way for his relationship with Lisette. The ironies do not stop here, though, because Lisette actually cares about Tashi and because it is Adam and Lisette’s son Pierre who aids Tashi in her journey to wellbeing through self-interpretation. In a broader sense, as well, who aids or who injures is not necessarily a matter of gender or race or culture in this novel: women hurt and help other women, blacks hurt




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and help other blacks, whites help and hurt blacks, men help and hurt women, Africans mistreat and uplift other Africans, Europeans assist and wound Africans, American missionaries damage and affirm Africans, and so on. While the novel shows harm being done in the name of gender, race, and culture, Walker presents a complex and ambiguous picture of human interconnectedness. One of Tashi’s most painful discoveries is that the greatest harm can be done to a person by someone of the same gender, race, or culture. This truth is embodied in the novel’s epigraph: “When the axe came into the forest, the trees said the handle is one of us.” Tashi figuratively confronts this realization during her therapeutic breakthrough as she at first is haunted by the image of a large fighting cock and then paints an enormous feathered creature, a “giant cock . . . crowing impatiently, extending its neck, ruffling its feathers, and strutting about” (71). Later, though, she realizes it was a “chicken—a hen, not a cock” (73) that waited outside the mutilation tent and consumed her sister’s flesh. In other words, she recognizes through metaphorical terms the contributions females have made to her suffering. Moreover, the repression of women through genital mutilation is a native tradition, not one imposed by white colonialists, and the female circumcision is carried out by women. And yet, Walker shows, harm can also come from the outside, from “the other.” Racism and sexism are not ignored. Ignorance, misunderstanding, and stereotyping are depicted in many situations, as when an American doctor is surprised Evelyn has only one child because “Your people like lots of kids” (18) or when that same doctor pronounces that “Negro women . . . can never be analyzed effectively because they can never bring themselves to blame their mothers” (18). Though he loves her, marries her, and affirms her, Adam also contributes to Tashi’s pain by his infidelity with Lisette. Tashi herself is guilty of codifying and hating “the other,” as in her fury at Lisette as a white woman or in her initial resentment of the American therapist Raye “Because she was black. Because she was a woman. Because she was whole” (113). At one point Tashi despairs of any connection with others, saying, “I felt the violence rising in me with every encounter with the world outside my home” (142). At one point, she sees herself as an outsider on any continent, a stranger in every land. When Tashi is told by a well-to-do elderly white woman that she, too, was circumcised as a child, Tashi is at first disbelieving. She cannot imagine that her suffering has also been experienced by a white upper-class American. She is astounded by the common ground she shares with a person so different from herself. In her subsequent


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obsession with this woman’s case, she begins by distancing herself as separate and alien, briefly constructs the conflict as a language problem (“Perhaps [she] had meant . . . tonsils” [188]), but finally, after reflection, sees herself as deeply connected with this woman and, indeed, with all other women. As Tashi begins to understand her own stories and express herself more literally, she must confront the full implications of her trauma, which has not been limited to witnessing her sister’s mutilation and death. She herself has been ritually scarred facially and genitally. Because her mother converted to Christianity after the death of one daughter, Tashi was not mutilated as a young girl, but as an adult she chose to undergo the procedures. With difficulty—“the boulder rolls off my tongue, completely crushing the old familiar faraway voice I’d always used to tell this tale, a voice that had hardly seemed connected to me” (119)—she explains to her therapist Raye why she willingly agreed to relinquish control of her own body and to forego all sexual pleasure forever: “To be accepted as a real woman by the Olinka people” (120). Her need for community acceptance through submission to the traditional, patriarchal system—clouded by an infatuation with the exiled political figure she calls Our Leader—for a time exceeds all other needs, drives, and impulses. Only later does Tashi realize the physical and emotional difficulties she has created for herself. The consequences of her choice are enormous. Because her circumcised parts are mangled, her bodily functions are interrupted and she is unable to engage in typical sexual intercourse with her husband. Though she conceives, the tortuous process of delivering a nine-pound baby leaves her son brain-damaged and her body the object of morbid curiosity by strangers. Yet, as great as these physical consequences are, they are met or exceeded by the psychological consequences, for Tashi endures a lifetime of suffering. Not coincidentally, Tashi begins to think that perhaps “the story is only the mask for the truth” (130) at the same time that she begins to have greater confidence in her American therapist Raye, whom she believes will be “plucky enough to accompany me where he [the Old Man, now dead] could not” (132). And so, through conversations about her mutilation with her therapist, she begins to find the truth about herself and her place within her community. Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the globe, the seeds of more help for Tashi are sown by Lisette as she converses with her son Pierre. Pierre, three years younger than Tashi’s son Benny, is Adam’s and Lisette’s child, who, at one point in the narrative, is heading to America for a Harvard education. Preparing him for more extended




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contact with his father, Lisette explains to him why she never married, prefacing her remarks with the comment that Pierre would never hear the story from his father because “men refuse to remember things that don’t happen to them” (134). She describes how she initially met Adam in Africa in the tent of a man disgraced for losing control of his wife. The wife had fled because on their wedding night the husband had cut open her mutilated and tightly resown genitals with a hunting knife before penetrating her. When her family failed to support her and instead sent her back to her husband, the wife drowned herself rather than return for more torture. Lisette tells Pierre that she knew of many similar stories, that she and Adam had discussed the subject, and that from exposure to such horrors she then “recognized the connection between mutilation and enslavement that is at the root of the domination of women in the world” (137). Unlike Tashi, who creates a personal symbolism but represses or avoids interpreting her own creation, Lisette translates the symbolism of the outside world. Although Lisette’s reading of the female predicament isolates her in that it keeps her from marrying, it helps her preserve her independence, physical wholeness, and mental sanity. Pierre, in turn, devotes his life to understanding and helping Tashi. At first Tashi rejects Pierre, but ultimately she comes to love him for his goodness, his insight, his connections to Adam, and his compassion for her own damaged son Benny. As Evelyn/Tashi later describes Pierre, “He seems a completely blended person and, as such, new” (170). Bisexual as well as biracial, he is practically pan-cultural by virtue of his family heritage, his extensive travel, and his training as an anthropologist. Pierre, in short, is a sort of Everyperson. Pierre proposes, after much study and consideration, a groundbreaking anthropological theory to account for Tashi’s personal nightmares in relation to the cultural and religious practices of her homeland. As in Gaines’s novel, Walker’s novel offers hope at the end by presenting a character, in this case Pierre, who crosses barriers between races and cultures and who builds bridges between the sexes. However, sacrifice is required before hope can flourish. Walker’s novel, just as Gaines’s, provides its final expressions of hope in the context of an execution. Tashi’s execution in Possessing the Secret of Joy is more morally ambiguous than Jefferson’s in A Lesson Before Dying because of her greater complicity in the crime with which she is charged. Driven as a young adult woman to seek mutilation because of her need for community identification, an aging Tashi becomes empowered by her growing self-awareness and connections with other people. She has even come to recognize her hurt as an


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essentially American trait, for when she is questioned by an African as to what an American looks like, she answers, “an American looks like a wounded person whose wound is hidden from others, and sometimes from herself. An American looks like me” (208). In the later stages of her life, she feels compelled to prevent others from having to endure what she has experienced, so she returns to her homeland to warn other women and to confront M’Lissa, the tsunga responsible for her sister’s death and her own mutilation. Tashi’s first action in Africa, recounted during her murder trial by a young female sales clerk, involves language: she prints signs. Symbolic as always, Tashi purchases paper in the colors of her homeland’s flag, rejecting white paper because, as she says, “White is not the culprit this time” (104). She shows the finished sign to the young sales clerk, telling her, “You are a young woman and your life is still before you. I am an old woman and my life is already over. All I am good for now is alerting you to disaster” (106). The sign Tashi prepares is clear: “ ‘If you lie to yourself about your own pain, you will be killed by those who will claim you enjoyed it’ ” (106). During the courtroom testimony, Tashi says that she chose to make signs because of all the billboards she saw immediately upon deplaning in Africa. She decided, “I am only one old and crazy woman, but I will fling myself against the billboards. I will compete” (108). Tashi’s warnings about genital mutilation are much needed. She does not expect to find the tsunga M’Lissa still living, but, to her surprise, “she was not only alive but a national monument . . . for her unfailing adherence to the ancient customs and traditions” (147). Tashi discovers that M’Lissa has amassed a huge following and that women pour into her home seeking wisdom about the old ways. Dismissing the nurse Martha/Mbati, Tashi moves in with and cares for the bedridden M’Lissa. At first she plans to kill the old woman, but M’Lissa cleverly uses language “like the storyteller Scheherazade,” daily telling Tashi stories that represent “another version of reality” (204). These stories fascinate Tashi to the point that she delays her plan, especially after M’Lissa says that her murder by someone she had circumcised “would elevate her to the position of saint” (204). Intrigued by the play of language in M’Lissa’s stories and unwilling to cause her elevation to sainthood, Tashi sets aside her plans to kill the tsunga. In fact, the narrative does not definitively explain M’Lissa’s death. Tashi confesses to murder because, she says, “I grew weary of the trial” (264). In particular she tires of the attorneys’ language, her own lawyer “Loving the sound of his own mouth” and the prosecuting




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attorney “arguing for my death” (264). However, Tashi tells her sister-in-law Olivia that she did not commit the murder, forbidding Olivia from making this known to anyone else. Yet in a letter to the deceased Lisette, Tashi writes that she did kill M’Lissa by smothering her with a pillow. The ambiguity over M’Lissa’s death derives not only from the conflicting information provided by Tashi but also from the human uncertainty of knowing any fact, an uncertainty demonstrated throughout this circular and nonchronological narrative that shows all the characters having competing explanations for every event. Again, the language issue, the difficulty of articulating life experiences, the complexity of expressing truth so others will understand, and the problems of miscommunication are foregrounded in the crucial question of Tashi’s guilt or innocence. Whether she did or did not commit the murder, Tashi’s conviction and execution become rallying points for women. Even women forced to testify against Tashi, such as the sales clerk in the paper store and the nurse Mbati, are visibly affected by what Tashi says and does. Women from all over the countryside gather under Tashi’s prison window, at great risk to themselves because “cultural fundamentalists and Muslim fanatics” beat and kick them (191). Journalists, photographers, and women’s leaders from across the world visit once her execution date is set, so that Tashi’s jail becomes the center of a global community and the isolating intent of incarceration is completely thwarted. Meanwhile, Adam, Olivia, Pierre, and other friends and family work feverishly on the AIDS floor, doing what they can to alleviate the suffering of the men, women, and children who are gathered there; many young girls have been infected with AIDS during their circumcisions through the cuts of nonsterile razors, glass, tin, knives, or other dirty instruments. The plight of Tashi and the crisis she has precipitated enable women around the globe to form a community of sisterhood. The scene at the execution demonstrates the solidarity of women and the community of friends and family. The road to the soccer field where the firing squad does its work is lined with women holding their baby girls. Though men with machine guns stand ready to enforce public order, the women remove their babies’ wrappings to reveal uncircumcised bottoms in “a protest and celebration the men threatening them do not even recognize” (278). The last act of the novel before the guns fire is a rebellious linguistic act as Adam, Olivia, Benny, Pierre, Raye, and Mbati unfurl a banner on which is printed the following message: “RESISTANCE IS THE SECRET OF JOY!” (279). At last the novel answers the question suggested by


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its title. Resistance can break the “continuum of pain” in life (Pollock 53). If resistance is the secret of joy, resistance is only possible when a person has achieved a clear and honest sense of self and a clear and honest community identification. Furthermore, both personal identity and communal identity require linguistic freedom. In this novel, language is shown to be the problem, as in obscure metaphors, lies, or twisted testimony, but language is also the solution, as in letters, conversations, speeches, or banners. To resist, one must have access to language and one must be free to use and interpret language.

C O A Lesson Before Dying and Possessing the Secret of Joy share many commonalities. Both novels demonstrate the redemptive power of language. Both illustrate vividly how a person must seek his or her own voice not only in order to realize full self-identity and embrace the solitude of the self, but also in order to find community and embrace relationships with other people. The novels thus exemplify Henry Louis Gates’s observation that “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” (“Color Me Zora” 239). Both works of fiction portray the difficulties involved in learning how to be a man or how to be a woman in a hostile and violent environment. As Ann DuCille has noted in her study The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction, traditional male and female roles have been “dramatically disrupted” for black men and women in America, and fiction has been a medium for voicing a “cultural critique” of the situation (144). Yet, while both novels describe the oppression faced by people who are disadvantaged by their race, their gender, their class, or other specific attributes, the fictional themes in the two books have universal applicability for men and women of all status. Emphasizing the universal nature of human language capacity and the importance of language in connecting people with their true selves and with each other, these two novels present language issues sensitively. In both novels, characters and readers alike become witnesses and testifiers, taking on rhetorical roles described, for example, by Geneva Smitherman in Talkin and Testifyin as having specific meaning and relevance for the African American community. However, for the most part, with one major exception, they incorporate relatively little of the language variety identified by linguists such as J. L. Dillard, John Baugh, John Rickford, Lisa Green, Walt Wolfram, and




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others as Black English, Black Vernacular English (BVE), or African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Nonetheless, phonological, morphological, and syntactic features of language variation are presented broadly as issues of social class, education, and experience. That is, Gaines and Walker show whites and blacks of various social strata speaking in ways that reflect not just their ethnicity but also their education, their place within their community, their childhood roots, the French influence in Louisiana (as in titles such as nannan and tante), and so on. Notably, examples of African American Vernacular English do take center stage in Jefferson’s diary in A Lesson Before Dying.2 Sound structures are commonly depicted in literary texts by spelling and orthography in such a way as to suggest dialect. In Jefferson’s diary in Chapter 29, for instance, consonant clusters are reduced and many final consonants are deleted to suggest AAVE: mr wiggin rather than Mr. Wiggins, an rather than and, or ole rather than old. Middle /r/ is often deleted, as when Jefferson writes that his nannan looks “ole and tied” (231) rather than old and tired. The combination /sk/ is reversed to /ks/, as in axe rather than ask. Morphologically and syntactically, the verb done is used to show past action: “I done cut cane.” Multiple negatives occur in a single phrase or sentence: “i aint never rote nothing but homework” (226) and “i dont kno how to say this cause i ant never say it to nobody before an nobody ant never say it to me” (228). Forms of second person plural found in most Southern dialects as well as in AAVE appear, as in “Y’all” and “all y’all” (224). Cadences commonly heard in preaching, the main public speaking style known to Jefferson, are also present, as in repeated questions (“Who ever car’d my cross, Mr. Wiggins? My mama? My daddy?”) or in parallel structures for emphasis (“Cuss for nothing. Beat for nothing. Work for nothing.”). Although Jefferson’s speech and writing contain AAVE features, the marked features of his language also signal his exposure to the oral traditions of rural churches, his lack of formal education, his impoverished circumstances, and his lack of experience with life outside his small parish in Louisiana. Of course, Jefferson’s language also shows his creativity and insight, his fundamental capacity for effective verbal expression, and his desire for connections with other people. That is, Jefferson’s language simultaneously reflects his specific cultural circumstances and his brilliant humanity. Thus, two themes identified by Ikenna Dieke as central to Walker, which are the questing self and the interconnectedness of all life (4–5), are also central to Gaines. Along the same lines, spiritual and


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religious beliefs as reflections of community values and personal values are important in both novels. While Ann-Janine Morey’s Religion and Sexuality in American Literature does not specifically address the fiction of Gaines or Walker, the images and ideas she illuminates can be found in A Lesson Before Dying and in Possessing the Secret of Joy. Specifically talking about Possessing the Secret of Joy, Kimberly Pollock argues that “the traditional practices of religion and nationalism inflict immeasurable pain on all of humanity” (38), but Kimberly Rae Connor in Imagining Grace: Liberating Theologies in the Slave Narrative Tradition shows how liberation theology works for Gaines through characters who change the world by first changing themselves (111–56). Moreover, Madelyn Jablon in Black Metafiction claims that Jefferson’s journal “provides the same role of authentication as that of the amanuensis-editor introducing a slave narrative” (91) and that “Jefferson’s vernacular text that Paul delivers to the bereaved community waiting on bended knee” becomes “a sacred text, a holy book housed in the tabernacle of a one-room schoolhouse” (91–92). In a related interpretation, William Nash argues in “ ‘You Think a Man Can’t Kneel and Stand?’ ” that A Lesson Before Dying represents Gaines’s reassessment of organized religion and the Christian church. Nash asserts that in A Lesson Before Dying, contrary to Gaines’s position in his earlier fiction, the black minister and the black church can be “agents of change” and point to “a possibility of community” (347) in which “religious humility and secular self-respect need not be mutually exclusive” (352). Herman Beavers further argues that Gaines uses Christ’s parable of the prodigal son as his novel’s allegorical underpinning, telling the story “from a different point of view, not from that of the prodigal but from that of the elder, ‘good’ son” (“Prodigal Agency” 137). Beavers views A Lesson Before Dying as an essentially political novel about resistance, a conclusion that could also certainly be applied to Possessing the Secret of Joy. Both novels call into question the right to judge, especially when those sitting in judgment are by race or gender or other factors so different as to have no concept of the accused person’s situation. Both show the need for same-race, same-gender, same-culture bonding as well as cross-race, cross-gender, cross-cultural bonding. Though heterosexual relations are central to both novels, neither book finds conclusion in a heterosexual union; rather, same-sex bonding draws the tragic story lines to an end as Paul and Grant form a friendship and as Tashi becomes a mother figure for Mbati and rallies the Olinka women to rebel.




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Despite their many similarities, these two novels contain at least two critical differences. First, as previously discussed, their narrative presentations are managed very differently, with one told by a single narrator in mostly chronological order and the other told by multiple narrators in nonchronological sequence. Second, the roles of men and women within the narrative frames also differ. In A Lesson Before Dying, women facilitate the action and contribute to the emotional and psychological climate of the novel, but they are not the focus of the book and, though important, are not foregrounded. The reverse situation occurs in Possessing the Secret of Joy, where men facilitate the action and contribute to the emotional and psychological climate of the novel, but they are not the focus of the book and, though important, are not foregrounded. Perhaps more significantly, the gender line and the color line are more marked in Gaines’s novel than in Walker’s novel, though sex and race permeate all aspects of both novels. Of course, the setting of Gaines’s novel, rural Louisiana just after World War II, limits the characters’ opportunities and viewpoints when compared to the global and post-Civil Rights era setting of Walker’s novel. Still, the females in Gaines’s book do not seem to recognize the sexual discrimination and gender-based injustice that surround them. In fairness, of course, the women are being presented through the filter of a male character, Grant, who is constrained by the circumstances of his time and place. Moreover, Gaines’s narrator Grant does not make the overt connection between racism and sexism that Walker’s narrators, especially Tashi, do. The differing narrative patterns in these two novels might well be associated with gender issues. From her work on men’s and women’s personal experience narratives, Barbara Johnstone concludes that “men’s stories tend to be about contests in which the protagonist acts alone and is successful” whereas “women, on the other hand, tell stories which stress the importance of community. When women’s protagonists act alone, they tend not to be successful, and when groups of women act together, they do so in mutually supportive groups” (“Community and Contest” 70). Johnstone’s conclusions about language and gender generally apply to these two novels. That is, Gaines’s story, written by a man about a man, features more contest, while Walker’s story, written by a woman about a woman, features more community. The more important point, though, as Johnstone notes, is that “people create worlds in discourse, as they create selves, communities, and places” (“Community and Contest” 76). In A Lesson Before Dying and Possessing the Secret of Joy, language fuels the characters’ resistance and enables them to rise above their


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surrounding circumstances as they create themselves and their communities through language. Language provides redemptive and empowering opportunities. That is why access to language is so tightly controlled that Jefferson can barely write, that the children in Grant’s school have such scanty resources that they can only be taught the basics, or that Tashi knows her tribal heritage only through obscure symbols. In these two novels, social authority is not just questioned or readjusted; rather, it is revolutionized through the interaction of language, gender, and community as individual men and women in community with others discover their true voices and their true identities.




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3

Language and Gender in the Academic Communities of Ann Beattie’s Another You and John Updike’s Memories of the Ford Administration

Ann Beattie’s 1995 Another You and John Updike’s 1992 Memories of the Ford Administration both depict, with a compelling blend of humor and gravity, the absurdities of academic life, the alarming inarticulateness of American adults, and the sad condition of at least some men of the late twentieth century who search in vain for a past they can comprehend, a present they can control, a friend they can talk to, and a woman they can understand. Unfortunately for Beattie’s Marshall Lockard, a professor of English at Benson College, and Updike’s Alfred Clayton, a professor of history at Wayward Junior College, these individuals cannot decode the past successfully, they exercise virtually no control over the present, they remain basically friendless, and they have little hope of figuring out the equally bewildered but complicated and energetic women with whom they interact. These two white, middle-aged, well-educated, New England men want to establish communities for themselves, but they have difficulty building connections with or even talking to their wives. In the end, both novels adopt a vaguely optimistic stance, suggesting that the protagonists will continue to search for connections with other people, especially women, but throughout their settings, plots, and themes, the two books foreground the significance of language in constructing or, more commonly, deconstructing relationships. Both Updike and Beattie are known for exploring their contemporary American landscapes and for describing middle-class life. Delineating the state of modern manhood has been a constant theme for John Updike, shown particularly, for example, in his popular and


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well-regarded Rabbit series chronicling the life of one man, Harry (“Rabbit”) Angstrom, from the 1950s to the 1990s. The winner of numerous prizes, including the Pulitzer, Updike published dozens of novels, short story collections, and books of essays. He has been designated “the most prolific major American writer of his generation” (Hunt 1). Erica Jong has called him the “most skillful writer” of “the American language” (210), Donald J. Greiner says he is “known as the author of the contemporary adulterous society” (Adultery 3), and George Christian asserts that “He is, in a way, taking society’s temperature” (174). Born in Pennsylvania in 1932, Updike received his undergraduate degree from Harvard, studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts, and was closely associated with The New Yorker during his long and stellar career as a writer from the 1950s until his death in early 2009. Ann Beattie, highly touted as an observer of her American generation, is also the author of many novels and short stories. Abby Frucht has said that Beattie’s novels “hold a finger to the pulse of her generation” (51), while Leo Schneiderman identifies her fiction as “highly representative of contemporary trends” (317). Born in Washington, D.C. in 1947, she received an undergraduate degree from American University and a graduate degree from the University of Connecticut. Like Updike, she has been a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. In fact, a 1994 Richard Avedon photograph of fourteen writers honored by the magazine places Updike and Beattie side by side (Avedon 112). Tall, with wrists or arms crossed almost defensively, they are the only writers with their watches exposed, suggesting their concern for the present time. In the photograph, the two writers’ stances are similar, their gazes are similar, their features are similar, and they both sport wry smiles. Their poses suggest kindred spirits, and the resemblance between them is startling: they could easily pass for cousins or some other genetically related pair. In further solidification of the connections between Beattie and Updike, the First Biennial John Updike Society Conference in 2010 featured as its plenary speakers not only Lincoln Perry, an artist who is married to Beattie and who has created a series of sculptures and paintings based on Updike’s Rabbit tetralogy, but also Beattie herself. An academic environment underlies nearly all aspects of characterization, plot, and theme in Beattie’s Another You and in Updike’s Memories of the Ford Administration. Traits of the protagonists, Marshall and Alfred, would be familiar on any campus; personal insecurity and devious colleagues have warped their love of learning,


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and their interest in teaching and communicating has been twisted into sarcasm and obfuscation after years of dealing with what they see as dull undergraduates. Their academic woes mirror the problems that counselors have observed in actual professors’ lives. At root, declared investigators on the verge of the 1990s, is “low self esteem” (Mooney A14). These fictional academics display their dithering and frailties to the extreme, shown, for example, in Alfred Clayton writing a footnote for a footnote on a footnote. The novels have been read as both playful and serious critiques of academic epistemologies. John Duvall, for instance, says that “Memories of the Ford Administration directly parodies deconstruction” (168) and that by the end, Alfred “becomes the embodiment of deconstructed subjectivity” (170). Both male characters feel they have been left behind by changes in their profession and its emphasis on theory and publication. Updike’s Alfred recalls that for decades he was unable to complete his book on James Buchanan, while one of his rivals, Brent Mueller, published relentlessly, to the point of having even “deconstructed Chaucer right down to the ground” (35). Alfred further resents Mueller’s success with students, achieved “by dismissing on their behalf the full canon of Western masterpieces, every one of them (except Wuthering Heights and the autobiography of Frederick Douglass) a relic of centuries of white male oppression, to be touched as gingerly as radioactive garbage” (53–54). Meanwhile, Beattie’s Marshall, also unable to write “a book when he should have, which would have been his ticket out of Benson College” (31), believes “the serious study of literature had gone out the window when the theorists marched in” (32) but is envious of his Harvard-trained rival, Jack McCallum, who teaches popular fiction and a seminar on the unreliable narrator. Though privileged in many ways, Updike’s and Beattie’s protagonists feel overshadowed and alienated. Their professional troubles seep into their personal relationships so that their wives, also intelligent and professionally frustrated, seek comfort and affection from other men. Meanwhile, the men, availing themselves of the flexible schedule of college professors, fantasize about or act out their sexual fantasies with the continuous supply of new students and new professors’ wives. For both the male protagonists and their wives, the search for meaningful connections and satisfying relationships takes them outside their marital communities but then brings them back together again when they find no better relationships elsewhere.


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As described by Don Lee, Beattie experienced a writing crisis with Another You. Working under the terms of an advance contract with her publisher, she faced an imminent deadline but disliked her manuscript so much that she completely rewrote the novel, taking “less than ten percent of the original version” into the final draft (Lee 235). Beattie has also professed that she will “never know the plot” when she starts writing (Plath, “Counternarrative” 371), and the manner in which Another You develops would certainly stand as evidence for her claim. The story is launched by emotions and interactions rather than by events. The narrative web supporting the circuitous plot is woven by language patterns set in the opening chapters that show Marshall using language to distance himself from other people, while women such as his wife Sonja or his student Cheryl use language to connect themselves to other people. The women seem to understand what is happening within their own speech and with Marshall’s language, but Marshall seems to be oblivious to conversational undercurrents. For example, Cheryl informs Marshall that other students have picked up on his attitude through his language: “ ‘You know, I know quite a few students who think you’re a prick. Because of the way you seem to have all these in-jokes with yourself when you talk to them. You call the guys by their first names. Or if you really like them, by their last names. But you always call women ‘Ms.’ The ‘Ms. Lanier’ bit.’ ” (13). She sees that he has converted a nonsexist term of address, Ms., into a form of exclusion, while, in a further irony, he singles out male students he likes by addressing them with their last name, converting a rude address into a familiar one. Marshall’s language behavior illustrates a type of covert prestige Peter Trudgill identified in his famous Norwich study, showing that marginalized men may grant status and prestige to linguistic forms that are contrary to mainstream usage. The use of language to distinguish in-group from out-group has long been recognized, as has the ironic inversion of polite and familiar forms of speech, but Cheryl’s awareness of the interplay of gender, power, and inverted language contributes to the mid-1990s’ ambiance of the novel while it adds to the characterization of Marshall Lockard. While Cheryl keys into the undercurrents of his language use, Marshall seems unable to interpret linguistic or behavioral signals, even when they are as obvious as Cheryl’s excessive drinking combined with Valium obtained through a false prescription. Marshall’s general inability to connect with other people and to speak clearly is


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shared by other academic men in the story, from the college president down to the department chair and to colleagues such as Jack McCallum. McCallum, for instance, relies on a trademark greeting, “Bless you,” which Marshall finds ridiculous. When Marshall calls McCallum to confront him about Cheryl’s claim that he raped her roommate, McCallum’s answer is incomprehensible to Marshall: Because when I think about it, the weather is dreary and our jobs don’t mean much in the long run, and Susan and I already have a child who poses considerable problems, and now she is overhearing me to say—on this night when she has farmed out the beloved boy to the Luftquists, so we can have a glass of champagne and celebrate, all cautionary warnings about alcohol consumption aside for this last fling, while doing the twist on the new kitchen linoleum—she is overhearing me criticize the direction my life has just taken, on top of which you call with this disturbing question, wanting to probe something I do not want probed, whether or not Elavil may now mitigate my downward mood swings. (85)

As the narrator reports, “Marshall found McCallum’s response so bizarre that he said the first thing that occurred to him: ‘Do you find it impossible to talk like a normal human being?’ ” (85). Nonacademic men in the novel distance themselves with heavy drinking and other destructive behaviors, while the academic men cloak themselves in coded and complex language. Marshall’s fear and hostility toward women are apparent as he and his associates make fun of the lone female professor in the department, finding humor in her commuter marriage, her inability to conceive, her hyphenated name, and her political interpretations of literature. Susan Campbell-Magawa’s husband is also singled out for scorn after fainting at a reception and later sending a note of apology, “saying that his hectic life of commuting had recently begun to cause his physical collapse” (32). The male professors frequently reenact the fainting episode whenever their female colleague’s back is turned, and they think they are being quite funny. In truth, Campbell-Magawa and her husband seem to have a good relationship, and Mr. Magawa cannot be hired at Benson College, the narrator explains, because he is overqualified. Marshall’s preference for traditional or stereotypical patterns of male-female behaviors extends to his participation in the “I’ll fix it for you” syndrome popularized in 1990s best-selling accounts of malefemale interaction such as Deborah Tannen’s 1990 You Just Don’t


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Understand: Women and Men in Conversation or John Gray’s 1992 Men are From Mars, Women Are From Venus. Tannen and Gray contend that women like to talk about their problems as a way of sharing and being friends but that men prefer to talk about their problems only when they need help. According to this paradigm, when women tell their problems to men, the men think they are being asked for help, respond accordingly, and then become distressed when women reject their advice or their assistance. In Beattie’s novel, the female characters use conversations as opportunities to share problems and do what Tannen calls “troubles talk,” reinforcing their relationships with open and intimate discussions. In contrast, Marshall consistently reacts to “troubles talk” by giving directives or by taking action to correct what he sees as the problem. In the case of Cheryl, for instance, when he hears her tale about her roommate, he dispenses advice and devises a plan to solve the roommate’s problem. Instead of thinking about why Cheryl would tell this story or what it means for her, he perceives her narrative to be a plea for help. Cheryl, being manipulative, encourages Marshall’s misunderstanding. Marshall’s approach to language sometimes takes him to the edges of reality. When called into the university president’s office to help convince a wealthy woman to donate money to the college, for example, Marshall decides to “pretend that this was a 1940s movie and that he was a famous, wealthy man in his study, and that two mad people had come to call” (35). Mostly, though, Marshall is frustrated by his own inarticulateness and is alarmed by the lack of language facility in others. Frequently he himself misspeaks, as when he tells his wife Sonja that his stepmother Evie has been taken to the morgue when Evie has, as he well knows, been taken to the hospital (59). Talking at one point with Cheryl’s mother, he thinks, “Were those awkward words really the ones that came out of his mouth?” (261). Speaking with students leads him to believe that “The English language could be abandoned entirely” (37), and when one student says something that doesn’t quite make sense, he concludes, “That wasn’t exactly what the girl meant, either, he thought. But if he thought too much, he’d be in a state of despair” (37). Part of his admiration for his wife rests on her being “so fluent in English” (37). For Marshall, the power of language rests in its capacity for illuminating individual insight rather than its ability to facilitate human connection. When he reflects on former students who stay in touch with him, he observes that “they usually thought of him not at holidays, but at odd times, such as when the line of a poem they’d studied with him was suddenly clarified by what they’d experienced”


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(57). The gap Marshall sees between his construction of reality and the reality of other people has embittered him and caused him to withdraw. Rita Gollin observes in the Nathaniel Hawthorne Review that the men in Another You recall Chillingworth in the way that they withdraw from and thereby harm their wives. Within the novel, Jenny, a therapist who is Sonja’s friend, says that a discussion of The Scarlet Letter finally drove her from the book club the two attended, and the two women’s subsequent discussion of how men relate to women prompts Jenny to ask Sonja a question derived from their discussion of Hawthorne’s story: “What’s made Marshall withdraw from you?” (74). A continuous thread of Hawthornian references is woven throughout the novel with regard to gender and language. Beattie shares with Hawthorne the tradition of the inexpressible and the use of language as a frame for distancing, characteristics described by Page Richards as distinctively important for American literature. In particular, the relationship between Marshall and his nemesis Jack McCallum highlights the tenuous connections men make with each other. After McCallum’s wife allegedly kicks him out of their house and he has nowhere else to turn, he goes to Marshall’s home to give Marshall and Sonja his version of events. Though Marshall foolishly accepts the truth of everything McCallum says, apparently forgetting that McCallum is an expert in the unreliable narrator, he at first rejects McCallum’s overtures at friendship: “ ‘I guess what I’m saying is, I’m not looking for friends’ ” (99). But when his wife Sonja confesses her affair with her boss Tony, Marshall thinks not of himself or of his wife, but of McCallum. Projecting his own feelings onto McCallum, Marshall turns his attentions toward his colleague and the two men do their “ ‘update on the buddy film’ ” (211) by driving to Florida during spring break. Once there, even though he has not fully recovered from stab wounds he says were inflicted by his wife, McCallum abandons Marshall and escapes with Cheryl. He does not tell Marshall the truth about his intent with Cheryl or about his past history with Cheryl’s mother. He withholds crucial information before the trip begins and, when he departs, he leaves behind a confessional letter with half-truths, lies, self-pity, and irony.1 McCallum’s behaviors and betrayals provide further cause for Marshall’s disillusionment with people and their language. Throughout the novel, other male characters also experience difficulty making friends or maintaining friends through positive verbal contact. The men in the English department frequently trade sarcastic remarks as they criticize other people. Sonja’s lover Tony admits to her that he has few friends but claims that he wants to be her friend


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(135). This conversation provides the impetus for the breakup of their affair, as Sonja believes an offer of friendship must mean Tony does not wish to continue their sexual affair. In another illustration of the links between communication and friendship being misunderstood, Gordon, Marshall’s brother in Florida, identifies the local bartender as his friend, but Gordon seems to have confused friendship with the linguistic skills of bartenders: “ ‘He doesn’t contradict a lot of ideas’ ” and “ ‘He hears real good. But he doesn’t hear. You know?’ ” (281). The ultimate rejection of the power language has to connect people takes place when Gordon destroys letters from a previous generation that would have helped Marshall understand his family’s tangled dynamics. The letters exchanged between members of Evie’s generation, which are interspersed between chapters in the novel, reflect the same issues present in the main plot. Private deceptions and public betrayals appear in both generations. The letters describe divisions between men and women, missed opportunities for love, and, above all, the inadequacy of language. In the last paragraph of the novel, presented from the consciousness of Marshall’s stepmother Evie, the dying woman considers how different her life might have been had she not been taken in “by an avalanche of letters to which I added a P.S. that was not there: that he loved me” (323). In other words, women in this novel tend to fill in the blanks so that communication supports their connectedness, but often, filling in the blanks creates misunderstandings and a worldview not shared by others. Because the letters Evie saved are destroyed, the voices from the past are silenced and her life lessons will never be learned by later generations except through the repetition of their own muddled experiences. For Evie and the other female characters, in great contrast to Marshall and the other male characters, language serves as a tool for building communities despite its inadequacies. Female students develop a relationship based on talking about Marshall and their other professors. Stepmother and daughter-in-law have a deep connection revealed by their open and irreverent conversations; Sonja tells Evie about her affair with Tony long before she tells Marshall. Friendships among women in the book club evolve from their lively discussions of literature and male-female relationships in literature. A dinner exchange between Sonja and her book club friend Jenny illustrates the woman-to-woman conversational pattern in the novel. The dialogue is lively, the women do not interrupt, and they allow each other to develop their thoughts. Whereas the men speak in sentences to each other, the women speak in paragraphs to other women. They


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talk about their husbands and ex-husbands, their mutual friends, their work, and various other topics. Jenny announces that she has important news to relate, that she plans to move west, but her son hasn’t decided to move with her or stay with his father because he doesn’t know if he will be able to live “ ‘with a bunch of pond scum lesbo dykes’ ” (71). Sonja is stunned, but the women keep talking. If McCallum had made a similar surprise revelation about his sexuality to Marshall, the conversation would have halted. Jenny explains that she intentionally gives off heterosexual vibes but is bisexual and that her husband knew it when they married. She further says that what she really wants is “ ‘my own little world. A secret society of women’ ” (72). Interestingly, a gender-based secret society is exactly what student Sophia Androcelli accuses Marshall of creating with his “ ‘minimalist approach to male bonding. The secret society wink’ ” (145). Jenny’s revelation prompts Sonja to disclose the details of her affair with Tony. What Sonja really wants to know from Jenny, who is a therapist, is whether “ ‘you thought I’d snapped’ ” (73), to which Jenny replies with jest, “ ‘Clearly’ ” (73). Sonja then provides details about her sexual play with Tony, which Jenny declares “ ‘a lot more fun than book discussion groups’ ” (73). Jenny reassures Sonja that her activity is nothing to worry about and that it is normal to exhibit a certain amount of reckless behavior or a desire to escape for a while. In fact, she suggests that Sonja might want to consider a vacation to Santa Fe, reassuring her that “ ‘nobody in Santa Fe would misunderstand what you were doing’ ” (74), to which offer Sonja replies, “ ‘Thank you’ ” (74), and from there they return to their discussion of books. The women in the novel are able to talk meaningfully with each other. Cross-sex conversations in the novel contain a range of language behaviors and conversational purposes. Same-sex conversations are more predictable, as the male characters tend to use language for distancing, while the female characters tend to use language for connecting. Such a pattern conforms to research findings about gender and language as documented, for instance, in work by Daniel Maltz and Ruth Borker, who conclude that men and women experience difficulty communicating with each other because they have different assumptions about how language is supposed to be used in conversations, those assumptions having been developed in the childhood subcultures of little girls and little boys.2 By the end of the novel, it is unclear whether Marshall and Sonja will be able to communicate more successfully and whether they will be able to reconstruct a satisfying marriage after their distressing experiences. They will never be


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able to understand fully the past or the present because of Gordon’s destruction of Evie’s letters and because of McCallum’s and Cheryl’s fabrications. Their final conversation occurs during a phone call after McCallum has deserted Marshall on the spring break trip. Marshall wants Sonja to meet him in Florida, but she declines to “ ‘pinch-hit for McCallum’ ” (241) and indicates that she is considering a vacation in Santa Fe with Jenny. Husband and wife say “I love you” to each other but completely miss each other’s linguistic cues.

M EMOR IES

OF THE

F OR D A DMINISTR ATION

Just as Ann Beattie struggled in writing Another You, so John Updike wrestled for decades with James Buchanan, having published in 1974 a lengthy closet drama entitled Buchanan Dying. Updike viewed Memories of the Ford Administration, which returns to the subject of Buchanan, with some ambivalence. Speaking with Dick Cavett, he identified the novel’s temporal juxtapositions as “a hard idea to describe, and harder to justify to anyone why I did this monstrous thing. I’ve been carrying Buchanan around with me for years, and I had to get rid of him” (230). Nevertheless, appreciation for the novel has grown over the years as its complex dimensions have been explored in essays such as George Diamond’s “Chaos and Society: Religion and the Idea of Civil Order in Updike’s Memories of the Ford Administration” or Edward Vargo’s “Updike, American History, and Historical Methodology.” Memories of the Ford Administration presents a number of challenges to the reader, most notably, as Updike recognized, with regard to time. The novel is written from the point of view of Alfred L. Clayton as he responds to a request for his memories of Gerald Ford’s presidency from the Northern New England Association of American Historians, an organization with the taunting acronym NNEAAH. Thus, the book is set at the end of the twentieth century, but its focus is largely on the 1970s. Clayton is a professor of history at Wayward Junior College, so named for the nearby Wayward River rather than for campus morals, and a good portion of the book is devoted to the subject of Clayton’s never-ending research on James Buchanan. Updike’s fifteenth novel is, in a way, about the nation’s fifteenth president. The same themes and threads work their way through the 1990s, the 1970s, and the mid-1800s, and occasionally the eras are compressed or thrust against each other, like layers of rock juxtaposed by seismic shifts deep underground. Such a commingling of events occurs, for example, when Alfred has sex with Ann Arthrop, the mother of one


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of his students, because her name, Ann, is the same as Buchanan’s young love, Ann Coleman. In his actions, Clayton fulfills Buchanan’s sexual goal from more than one hundred years earlier, but, in his mind, Clayton is navigating through his own conflicts about death and sex twenty years after his encounter with Ann Arthrop. Another challenge for the reader lies in the novel’s narrative perspective. The narrator/protagonist is sympathetically drawn but at times borders on being downright unlikeable. Clayton’s detailed sexual reminiscences about his encounters in the days before the “deadly viral dimension” (22), are probably not what NNEAAH wanted to hear, though as Kenneth Millard points out, “for Clayton there is a very close association between historical narrative and erotic desire” (235). Most of Updike’s fiction follows the author’s own dictum that, “If you’re going to have sex in a book, you really ought to have it. You should go into it enough to try to show what happens, to make it a human transaction” (Gado 98). Moreover, in this novel, after Clayton recalls in detail a sexual exchange, whether with his wife, his mistress, or other random partners, he often concludes his reminiscence with generalizations about women that some readers will find offensive. It may be that Clayton is revealing his own personal or sexual insecurity by criticizing the women before they have a chance to criticize him, but the general effect is that the narrator consistently portrays women in unflattering ways. Updike’s fictional characterizations of females have drawn strong reactions. Nearly every essay on Updike references the criticism aimed at him over his depictions of women, up to and including Updike’s obituary in The New York Times, in which Christopher LehmannHaupt writes that some readers “carped” about the author’s portrayal of women. Throughout his life, Updike resisted that criticism. Writing in The New Yorker, for instance, Updike complains of “feminist mutterings” over his novel S. (“Me” 39) but comments that on a recent visit to a public library he observed S. had the most wear of any of his books, indicating it had been read more than the others. He reports feeling justified because “the readership of this small town, mostly female, as readership is everywhere, had recognized in ‘S.’ my attempt at a woman’s book, a book for women. A sort of blessing seemed to arise from the anonymous public; I had been, mutely, understood” (39). Of course, thinking admiringly of a female audience as anonymous or mute may not endear an author to women readers. Responses to and interpretations of Updike’s presentations of women do vary. Kathleen Verduin, for example, argues that Updike’s fiction creates “a mythology of women” (61) through archetypal


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characterizations that “interrogate those myths . . . that immemorially divide the Western mind” (74). Also, just as is the case with his portrayal of women, Updike’s portrayal of men has been the subject of numerous publications, including Sally Robinson’s “ ‘Unyoung, Unpoor, Unblack,’ ” which discusses Updike’s depiction of white masculinity in middle America, and Mary O’Connell’s Updike and the Patriarchal Dilemma, which argues that Updike challenges socially constructed masculinity, “revealing its limitations and proscriptions as the source of a great deal of unhappiness for both men and women” (3). In one of his less complicated memories, Clayton recalls in vivid detail a sexual moment with his wife during their separation. In a post-orgasmic condition, she compliments him on his improved performance, while he thinks to himself about differing male and female sexual responses (259). This 1970s bedroom scene seems relatively straightforward, but, immediately thereafter, the storyline turns with no transition to the Buchanan plot and finds Buchanan and Hawthorne conversing in Hawthorne’s Liverpool office about women, art, Cuba, and North-South relations. Hawthorne, loosed as he in actual life could be by liquor, comments crudely on the girth of English women—“You think of them as composed of sirloins, and with broad and thick steaks on their immense rears” (271)—in contrast to slender New Englanders. As for art, Hawthorne remarks, in a passage that might be applicable to Memories of the Ford Administration, particularly in its descriptions of sex, that a writer must resist pleas to trim a text because a “ ‘compromised work of art becomes on the instant worthless, since we look to art for an otherworldly integrity’ ” (267). However, when Buchanan says he writes in the hope that “ ‘When passions have evaporated, and what we strive to achieve has been undone by history, the words we write will remain, and will plead for us,’ ” Hawthorne glumly replies that such is true only for a few writers: “ ‘For the rest, books find a grave as deep as any’ ” (275). Over the course of the Hawthorne-Buchanan conversation, the reader begins to realize that the subjects are, at heart, the same as Clayton’s. Updike is showing, in juxtaposed passages from different eras, that human interactions are cut from the same cloth and that the underlying issues of language, gender, mortality, self, self-identity, and the self’s relationship to others are similar no matter whether someone is thinking about sex or art or politics. The themes apply to the living and the dead as well as to the fictional. In a review of The Centenary Edition of The Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Letters, 1853–1856, Jimmie Killingsworth and Mary Jane Hurst thus summarize some


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LANGUAGE AND GENDER

Hawthorne’s personal insecurity is shown again and again—in his surprising emotional dependence on his publishers and American connections, his hesitancy in approaching his friend Pierce with complaints about his position, his avoidance of major British literary figures, his need to ply himself with liquor before any occasion that would require him to speak publicly in his official capacity as consul or literary lion, and his willingness to be courted (despite his ostensible shyness) by the autograph-seeking English bourgeoisie (accompanied by his unattractive private criticism of their crudity and his preference for the manners of the titled). (93–94)

Updike’s narrative also captures the Hawthorne-Buchanan relationship almost precisely as their friendship is reflected in Hawthorne’s letters. Concerning his first meeting with Buchanan, Hawthorne wrote to William Ticknor on April 30, 1854: “I had the old fellow to dine with me, and liked him better than I expected” (Woodson 210). Later, Hawthorne began to rely upon Buchanan’s opinions. Still later—not unlike Clayton’s evolving views of Gerald Ford—Hawthorne determined that if Buchanan could not be considered outstanding, at least he was doing a better job than most. Finally, Hawthorne came to view Buchanan as a friend. Updike’s connections to Hawthorne have received considerable critical attention, as in James Plath’s “Updike, Hawthorne, and American Literary History.” As for his attraction to The Scarlet Letter, Updike told interviewer Terry Gross following the publication of S., his third novel inspired by The Scarlet Letter that “ . . . it [The Scarlet Letter] is a classic and one of the few books we can point to and say this is an American classic. Also, it’s one of the few 19th- century novels that actually deals with men and women and that seems to interest me—men and women” (207). The comments of Buchanan and Hawthorne in Memories of the Ford Administration regarding the immortality of art (267–75) also bear similarity to some of the feelings Updike himself expressed in interviews and essays. In his essay “Me and My Books,” for example, Updike reflects upon the many volumes he has composed and writes, “Somewhere in their several million pondered, proofread, printed words I must have done my best, sung my song, had my say. But my panicked awareness, as the cut-off age of sixty-five approaches, is of all that isn’t in them—almost everything it suddenly seems” (39). And so, he says, he aims to “write


personal details in Hawthorne’s letters from England, which are represented with exquisite accuracy in Updike’s portrayal of Hawthorne in Memories of the Ford Administration:


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another book that, like one more ingredient sprinkled into a problematic batter, will make the whole thing rise” (39). The narrative point of view of Alfred Clayton, then, forms a kind of roller coaster ride through the “problematic batter” of the universe, through the material world and the spiritual world, the past and the present, the lofty and erudite, the mundane and lowly, the beautiful and the pleasing, and the ugly and the revolting. The nineteenth-century lesson of it all is summarized in a quote from La Rochefoucauld that Buchanan relates to Hawthorne: “Les choses que nous desirons n’arrivant pas . . . ou, si elles arrivent, ce n’est, ni dans le temps, ne de la maniere, qui nous auraient fait le plus plaisir” (276). In the very next scene as she announces that she is going back to her husband, the deconstructionist Brent Mueller, Alfred’s mistress Genevieve conveys the same message more directly and concisely in twentieth-century English to Alfred Clayton: “ ‘Sometimes things we want . . . arrive too late’ ” (296). The sandwiching of the HawthorneBuchanan conversation between the Alfred-Norma and the AlfredGenevieve conversations and the mirroring of their topics underscore the thematic unity of the novel and the centrality of gendered relationships. As Hawthorne and Buchanan reference the chasm between man and woman dating back to Adam and Eve, inanimate forces cry out as Buchanan’s chair makes a noise that reminds Hawthorne of the same kind of sexual and spiritual longing, elemental grief, and supernatural ambiguities he included in The Scarlet Letter: “And the old fellow [Buchanan] laughed, a high-pitched laugh wheezily withdrawn as soon as it was offered, mixed with a shriek from the tormented chair as if its runged and spindled wood were inhabited by the agonies of all the wriggling supplicants who had ever sat there in its hard embrace” (276). Updike shares with Hawthorne an appreciation for the mysteries of the universe and for the forces that separate men not only from women but also from other men, and perhaps even from themselves. Resounding success eludes Alfred Clayton and the political leaders who frame his life, Buchanan and Ford. However, even if they aren’t especially good, under Updike’s generous and comic treatment, they become good enough. Recounting his list of President Ford’s good deeds—recovering the Mayaguez, evacuating the embassy staff from Vietnam, signing peace accords with the Soviets, and pardoning Nixon—Alfred even decides in retrospect that “he was perfect” (354). Alfred shares a fundamental optimism with the political leaders he studies. As he reflects at the end of the novel with some jealousy over Brent Mueller’s latest book, a “short but trenchant deconstruction of


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Whitman’s and Emerson’s optimism entitled Other People’s Facts,” he thinks, “AIDS, famine, boat people, ghetto hopelessness, children by the millions born to misery. If a man had half a heart, he’d drown. Optimism isn’t a philosophical position; it’s an animal necessity” (359). Whether on a small, private level or on a large, public scale, the people in this novel get through life as best they can, and Clayton’s optimism buoys him along the way. Optimism surfaces throughout Updike’s work. As John Neary argues in Something and Nothingness, Updike maintains a positive worldview even though he depicts the negative aspects of life that threaten the edges of our existence. Updike himself has said, “ ‘I’m a fellow with a tragic vision who is also a distinct optimist. I’m a happy man, I would say, as men go. At the same time, I see the inner condition as being fraught with peril’ ” (Shafer 6). Going into more detail, Updike has explained, “My parents were very loving and encouraging, and if Freud is correct, those initial favorable impressions of the world stick with us a long time. So I have a buoyant, optimistic nature. An optimistic person is perhaps better able to entertain pessimistic premises than somebody who is truly down” (Sanoff 183). Updike’s optimism may also be linked to his theological consciousness, which, as James Yerkes says in John Updike and Religion: The Sense of the Sacred and the Motions of Grace, reflects “our sense of the unavoidable, unbearable, and unbelievable Sacred Presence” (10). During Alfred’s “Salad days! Days of blameless leafing out!” when he “had all the equipment of manhood except a grown man’s attitude” (5), Alfred and Norma Clayton produced three children by 1961. At that point, Clayton remembers, “We reined in our fertility and hunkered down for happiness” (5). Alas, they realize they are not happy. As the novel opens, Alfred is recalling the day Nixon resigned, a time of personal as well as national crisis. He watches the proceedings on television with his children, “relieved to have a national scandal distract us from the scandal that sat like a clammy great frog, smelling of the swamp of irrecoverable loss, in the bosom of our family: my defection” (4). Norma is out on a date with the chair of the music department, Ben Wadleigh, and wants Alfred to take the opportunity of her absence to talk to the children (12), but Alfred recalls that he “resented her trying to mar with female talkiness the manly silence, the smooth scar tissue, the boys and I had grown over my defection” (11–12). Alfred considers her main conversational technique to be a ploy aimed at getting him to talk: “She would let her sentences trail off, inviting her conversational partner to be creative” (12). He also perceives “a feminist edge” (13) in her tone after he summarizes


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his reading of pro-slavery arguments before the Civil War, noting that “ ‘slaveholders weren’t all bad,’ ” and she tartly replies with a rare declarative, “ ‘Slaveholders never think so’ ” (13). In this opening conversation, Alfred asks an inordinate number of questions, a stereotypically female conversational trait. He taunts Norma about her date: “ ‘How was Ben?’ ” and “ ‘Where do you two do it, at eleven at night?’ ” (11). The italicized words suggest an exaggerated intonation pattern, another style stereotypically associated with female speech. Alfred uses exaggerated intonation first with irony to put Norma on the defensive and then with sincerity to defend his Buchanan research: “ ‘He’s not dreary. . . . I love him’ ” (14). When Norma voices regret that Nixon’s resignation puts “ ‘that idiot Ford in office,’ ” Alfred takes a jab at the supposed source of her opinions by questioning, “ ‘Ben says he’s an idiot?’ ” (14). With his questioning, italicized manner of speaking, Alfred betrays his confusion and powerlessness. He knows that it is he who disrupted his family and he who cannot finish his book. He feels shamed by these failures but still blames Norma, whom he calls “the Queen of Disorder,” in contrast to his mistress whom he calls “the Perfect Wife.” By reducing them to labels, Alfred can deal with the images he has created; the real women are too complex for him to handle. While he reaches out to them sexually, Alfred feels no deep connection with other women. Though her “Debbie Reynolds-style energy” (16) and petite athleticism do not appeal to him, Alfred carries on with Ben Wadleigh’s wife Wendy, explaining their affair as a matter consistent with the mores of the day: “in those far-off Ford days” any man and woman alone in a room were “duty-bound” to have sex (16). However, her “friendly chatter” annoys him, and after sex with her he feels an “ooze of resentment” (19). Wendy knows, as she says, that he has a wife and a mistress and so is unlikely to develop any longterm interest in her, but she craves affection now that her husband is involved with Norma. She tells Alfred, “ ‘People need loving, and if their spouses don’t give it to them they seek it elsewhere’ ” (21). Alfred, though, resists the link between sex and love. For him, sex is a physical act, not an opportunity for communication or connection. After an encounter with his wife, he thinks, “Sex is impersonal, a well-oiled machine that works best sealed into darkness. The Perfect Wife had taught me that, and the imperfect one responded. I was the piston, she was the cylinder” (259). Alfred’s attitude toward women is further revealed when a student, Jennifer Arthrop, brings a late paper to Alfred’s apartment. As he reads her work on “Protestant-Christian Mythicization as an Enforcer


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of Male-Aggressive Foreign Policy in the Administrations of William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt,” Alfred becomes aroused, thinking that the “trouble with systematic feminism is that it heightens rather than dampens one’s phallocentricity” (82). Even Jennifer’s flaws, which he delights in noticing, increase his attraction to her. Her nearsightedness becomes to him a prototypically female trait pleasing to all men: “a vision that focuses on the cooking pot, the sewing needle, and immediate male needs” (80). He resists sexual intercourse with her, but not because he is married, or because he has promised himself to his mistress, or because Jennifer is his student, or because she is overweight and unattractive. These facts present no obstacles. In fact, they enhance his temptation “to launch myself on this little chubby uncharted sea” (83), but he cannot overcome the girl’s ignorance of James Buchanan or her status as a favorite of his nemesis, Brent Mueller, husband of the Perfect Wife Genevieve. Alfred feels the need to dominate Jennifer Arthrop through intellectual rather than sexual intercourse, and when she does not know the answer to one of his questions, he feels powerful: “ ‘I don’t know’ was all she could say, all I wanted her to say. I had unwomaned her—clapped her into the chastity belt of student inferiority” (84). Language becomes a contest, a substitute for a sexual game, which he wins. Ms. Arthrop’s mother, however, gives Alfred opportunity for sex without the complications of connection or community. She admits that she is a “ ‘Bit of a whore’ ” (220) and has lots of affairs, even though her husband does not because “ ‘He’s too busy, off in town twelve, fourteen hours every day, screwing other guys in his business. He’s in communications technology’ ” (221). As Ann Arthrop keeps talking, conveying her fantasies about “ ‘sharing a man, or a boy’ ” (221) with her daughter, Alfred realizes, “I’ve been used” (222) and concludes, “I was dealing, it seemed, with some kind of masochist, or bully, or combination” (223). He does not recognize that Ann Arthrop is a female version of himself, and he does not admit to her that he is fantasizing about another Ann, Ann Coleman, Buchanan’s young love. When Genevieve Mueller asks her husband for a divorce, Alfred is aghast, thinking, “I just wasn’t quite ready for the agreement’s translation into practical terms, into legal action involving realtors, judges, mellifluous lawyers, abandoned children” (55). Early in their relationship, she encourages Alfred to talk about Buchanan, sympathizes with how “ ‘disempowering of you Norma was’ ” (100), and is sexually submissive. He, in turn, is abusive towards her, but for a time she accepts his bad treatment. Eventually, though, Genevieve


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grows weary. She calculates all that she has lost through her involvement with him and realizes that he has reciprocated by lying and cheating. She, therefore, chooses to return to her husband, who has been offered a job at Yale and who wants to start their marriage anew. Alfred offers minimal resistance, perhaps because of the clarity of Genevieve’s decision, perhaps because his interest in Norma has been renewed, or perhaps because Genevieve laughs when he explains that Mrs. Arthrop’s attractiveness derived from her name, “ ‘Ann. Like Ann Coleman, the love of Buchanan’s life’ ” (289). Until the very end of the novel, Alfred views women only in terms of himself. The death of his mother hurts because “Who now would remember me as a Keds-shod boy padding along the brick sidewalks of our tilted, maple-shaded downtown?” (160), and he thinks of his relationship with his mother in a cold metaphor: “Nothing in nature, not even the expansive force of water as it turns into ice, is as relentless as a mother’s love for a son” (158). He fails to notice that the women around him have personal and professional needs quite apart from him and his needs. Alfred Clayton’s need for connection and community is filled by his Buchanan research, and this is part of the reason he can never complete his book. If he were to finish, he would have to say goodbye to Buchanan. James Buchanan’s relationship with his fiancé forms interesting parallels to Clayton’s relationship with Genevieve. Like Clayton, Buchanan desires the freedom to come and go as he pleases. He wishes to marry Ann Coleman but not at the time of her choosing. Thoughtless of his betrothed’s feelings, Buchanan stays too long at tea with other ladies. Ann, like Genevieve, interprets his behavior as showing disregard for her. She tells her sister, “ ‘As my father asserts, and as many gentlemen of substance privately agree, this man knows no devotion but to his own self-interest’ ” (115). The Buchanan-Coleman engagement is ruined by the same two flaws that spoil Alfred’s relationship with Genevieve: male selfishness and male infidelity according to the custom of the times. Ann Coleman falls ill from the stress of the breakup and takes, whether by accident or intention, a fatal overdose of prescribed laudanum. Alfred believes that Buchanan is so damaged by women’s gossip and unrealistic expectations that he develops “a neurosis that decades later disabled his Presidency and plunged our nation into its bloodiest war” (72). Alfred cannot imagine that weaknesses in Buchanan’s own character could be responsible for his situation with Ann Coleman or for his reputation as a president, just as Alfred does not see the consequences of his own flaws.


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The shifting ground of meaning in Updike’s novel is reflected not only in the presentation of Ann Coleman’s life and death but also in the critical response to her characterization. In his review of Memories of the Ford Administration, Alfred Kazin finds Ann Coleman “altogether charming” (45), whereas, in her review, Anita Brookner calls Coleman “an unloveable character” (30). Such contradictory responses probably would not surprise Updike, who, when asked what advice he would give to readers, responded, “I would say to try to keep open to the humor of these books and to a certain irony. . . . Don’t try to force out conclusions in the works, but think of them as portraits of muddle, portraits of ambiguity” (Shafer 6). According to Paul Boyer, “The essence of lived experience, Updike suggests, is the intimate and the personal—the inner emotional life and passing sensory impression” (“Notes” 73). This truth accounts for the slippery and ambiguous nature of history, a source of frustration for character Alfred Clayton, for whom the entire novel functions as what Updike called “a first-person confession, in the Puritan tradition” (Silvestre 245) and, at least in part, for the ambiguity and shifting ground of meaning in fiction and in life. As Updike himself said, “I think life and faith are both ambiguous” (Nunley 255). Open to various interpretations, cross-sex dialogues appear throughout the novel, as do conversations among men. Woman-to-woman dialogues, however, occur only among sisters. Ann Coleman and her sister have a brief exchange in which Sarah urges Ann to yield her pride and make up with Buchanan: “ ‘Yielding is part of our natures, since our calling is not to fight wars but to nurture families. Mama often yields to Papa, and loses nothing by it. Indeed, she gains, in coin of his gratitude, and in spiritual capital’ ” (117). The notion of symbolic capital as described in contemporary studies of language by Penelope Eckert (“Cooperative Competition” 34–35) and others is herein well defined by Sarah Coleman. In another reported conversation from a more widely known historical event, Lizzie Peabody demands that her sister Sophia must suppress her headache and come downstairs to meet their handsome guest Nathaniel Hawthorne, but Miss Peabody declines: “Somehow certain of her prey even then, Sophia had laughed off the command: I think it would be rather ridiculous to get up. If he has come once he will come again” (272). Alfred’s perception of women lying in wait to snatch a husband colors this interaction, but Sophia’s confidence and patience could be compared to Norma’s, and, in the end, they are right: their men do indeed return. At the novel’s conclusion, back to the future of the 1990s, Alfred and Norma are reunited and, according to Alfred, “fairly content.


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College people acquire a certain grim yet jaunty expertise at aging, at growing grayer with each year’s fresh installment of ever-young, everignorant students” (365). And so, with a whimper rather than a bang ends the account of his wild days, in Alfred Clayton’s own words, when “I was a fabulous creature, wiry and rapacious, racked by appetites as strange to me now as the motivations of a remote ancestor” (369). The conclusion of Memories of the Ford Administration fits the pattern identified in 1985 by Donald J. Greiner, who said, “One puts down an Updike novel with the understanding that happiness is generally not possible” (“Adultery” 40). At the beginning of his retrospective, Alfred expresses frustration with the pace of his Buchanan study “as research led to more research, and even more research led back to forgetfulness and a definitive awareness that historical truth is forever elusive” (13–14). Along the way, he struggles with “the indeterminacy of events” in his life as well as in his scholarship (75). Just as Buchanan realizes that “sub specie aeternitatus nothing greatly matters” (346), so Clayton arrives at a similar truth, cast with a scientific edge: “Our heaving spirits displace little matter; the past, insofar as it consists of human feelings, mostly vanishes, less enduring than recycled nitrogen” (361). This conclusion is painful because it means life lacks significance, but it is also comforting because it means that mistakes are also of little note. In the last line of the novel, Alfred gives his final response to NNEAAH: “The more I think about the Ford Administration, the more it seems I remember nothing” (369).

C O As in Alice Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy and Ernest Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying, both Ann Beattie’s Another You and John Updike’s Memories of the Ford Administration show that in order to find one’s place in community with others, an individual must first work toward establishing his or her personal identity. Unlike Walker’s and Gaines’s characters, however, Beattie’s and Updike’s protagonists benefit from many advantages in life and would seem to have no special obstacles blocking their paths to self-understanding and connection with others. They are well educated, middle-class, white men with tenure at New England institutions of higher education. They are surrounded by women—mothers or stepmothers, wives or wouldbe wives, mistresses or potential mistresses—all eager to interact with them. Their work brings them into daily contact with other privileged people. By virtue of their education and employment, Marshall Lockard and Alfred Clayton have access to language and to the power


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of language every day as they teach and write and freely communicate with whomever they please. Why, then, are they having such an identity crisis? Why are they so unhappy? As any academic knows, a number of conditions within the academic system can foster unhappiness. No matter how well one does, someone else is doing better, publishing more books, generating more research money, attracting more students, or being recruited by a more prestigious school. There are few external rewards, and many people are competing for them, so colleagues can become jealous or can disrupt their rivals’ work. Research and teaching preparation tend to be done in isolation. Time is unstructured, giving undisciplined individuals freedom to wander off track. The glory and meaning one finds in poetry, in history, or in any academic field inevitably contrast with the mundane and trivial distractions of everyday life. Students can be dull, reluctant learners, and they can torment their professors. The list of potential pitfalls could be elaborated further, but these and all others are more symptoms than causes. Besides, as most academics know, teaching can be noble, students can be engaged, coworkers can be supportive, and unstructured time can offer opportunities to do excellent work in an independent environment. In other words, one’s response to an academic life depends largely on the individual’s inner qualities and on the ability to reframe external situations. So, again, why in novels filled with much humor have Marshall Lockard and Alfred Clayton fallen into the academic pit of despair? The two men do not understand themselves or their relationships to other people in large part because they lack meaning in their lives. They lack meaning in their lives, to a large degree, because they do not understand themselves or their relationships to other people. Because of this fundamental circularity, their problems feed on themselves and, while academic stresses exacerbate the men’s situations, they do not cause them. In order to break the self-defeating cycle they are perpetuating, they need to connect and communicate with others. As Ann Beattie said after being asked directly why her characters do not seem to connect with each other, “ ‘It’s a problem to communicate— it’s as simple as that. It’s extremely difficult. I don’t think that, in a lot of ways, this is a culture that really asks people to communicate’ ” (Plath, “Counternarrative” 364). In these two novels, neither of the male protagonists can use language successfully. Missing documents from the Buchanan era and lost letters from Evie’s generation emphasize in both novels the fragility of language, even written language, the impossibility of understanding the past, and the limitations on expressing the whole truth.


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Marshall and Alfred both struggle with self-identity and self-esteem. Alfred Clayton’s version of manhood during the 1970s requires urgent sexual expression with minimal regard for the needs or interests of his partners. From Alfred’s perspective, he and Norma had little in common during those years other than sex and the children that resulted. By the 1990s, Alfred’s earlier version of manhood has been deflated by his lack of success, by new roles for women in society, by physical changes in his aging body, and by changes in the world at large as the danger of fatal disease curbs his and everyone else’s interest in mingling bodily fluids. By the 1990s, Alfred has gained limited insight into himself or his wife, for his middle-class ease keeps him padded and insulated, not only from unpleasantness but also from any discoveries about himself or about life in general. Sexual aggression does not shape the more passive Marshall Lockard’s concept of manhood, though he is a decade or two younger than Alfred Clayton. His older brother, Gordon, however, does follow the model of manhood that demands sexual conquest, or at least he did until his body began to slow down. Marshall has no clear vision of what manhood entails, and, while he doesn’t abuse women in the same way Alfred does, he does not know how to respond to them verbally or physically in a way that will be satisfactory to himself and to them. Such confusion leaves him vulnerable to exploitation by women such as Cheryl Lanier or men such as Jack McCallum. For the most part, Alfred and Marshall do not understand or appreciate women, and they are unable to connect with or relate to women on a meaningful basis because they have a narrow understanding of how to be men. The female characters in these novels avail themselves of their economic and sexual freedoms. They are more decisive in their actions but less curt in their speech than the male characters. Sonja and Genevieve are the ones who decide to leave their lovers, but they do not use cruel language when they end the relationships. The possibility of homosexuality is freely discussed by the female characters but not by the male characters. The bisexuality of Sonja’s friend Jenny presents no problems for Sonja, but Marshall appears so insecure about his own masculinity that it seems unlikely he could be friends with an openly gay man, even if he does embark gleefully on a spring break road trip with McCallum. Naively, Marshall also draws no inferences about Sonja’s interest in going to Santa Fe to visit Jenny. At the end of Memories of the Ford Administration, Alfred reports that Wendy Wadleigh has taken up therapeutic massage and “gives Norma long backrubs that leave my wife languid and (she humorously complains) achy” (366), but so consumed is Alfred by male-female relationships


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that he does not seem to imagine what the adventurous and sensuous Wendy might be doing with his wife, nor does he seem inclined to explore the various sexual possibilities, including sexual orientation, that might have contributed to President Buchanan’s bachelor status. In both novels, women face similar problems as men but have different strategies, especially with regard to language as a connective force, that help them manage their difficulties. The two novels differ, however, in their degree to which the female characters and their speech are developed. Beattie’s novel gives more depth to the women than does Updike’s. In Another You, we see many sides of the women through their conversations. For instance, Sonja’s conversations with her lover and with her women friends are presented as well as her conversations with Marshall, but in Memories of the Ford Administration, Genevieve and Norma are not shown talking to other men or to other women. Narrative perspective influences this distinction, because Updike’s novel is written in first person from Alfred’s point of view, but it is nevertheless true in this case that the female novelist has created more rounded female characters. The characterization of the female characters is interesting, but these novels focus on men and manhood. Both narratives end by depicting a white, middle-class culture of the 1990s that provides few if any guidelines for the appropriate expression of masculinity.3 Due to developments in the surrounding society and in the workforce, the female characters are no longer socially or economically dependent on men, but the males have not adjusted to the changes in women’s lives. Nor can the men, in general, find frameworks or models for heterosexual conduct in friendships with other men. Marshall and Alfred design no visionary alternative to their circumstances. They are locked into their views of male-female relationships and same-sex interactions that are reinforced by the surprising limitations of their life experiences. Not only do they have difficulty communicating with the other men and women of their same race and class and general circumstances, but it is hard to imagine that they could communicate successfully across racial divisions or class boundaries. The male protagonists can’t go back to the way things were, and they don’t like the way things are, but they can’t imagine a better way. Despite their advantages, they feel victimized and alienated. No great sacrifice, daring deed, or heroic effort is required of Marshall or Alfred, and they arrive at the end of their narrative journeys with no defining proofs of manhood and with no visionary revelation or experience. The balance between individual and community tilts tentatively toward community at the conclusions of both novels. Neither


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Marshall nor Alfred achieves mature self-awareness, but they both still long for connection, especially with their wives. Both narratives end with marriages intact, although communication between husbands and wives appears fragile. Throughout the novels, the men use language to separate and divide, and it is not clear in the end that they will embrace the kind of connectedness through language that drives their partners’ speech. Over the course of these novels, Marshall’s stepmother dies, Alfred’s mother dies, Marshall has no children, Alfred’s children grow up and move away, and both men’s friends prove to be false. Thus, a permanent relationship with one woman, a wife, becomes more valuable to Marshall and to Alfred as their life experiences remind them of their mortality and their aloneness. Still, ambiguity prevails, and the white, frigid images that conclude the narratives do not bode well for warm relationships. As Marshall prepares to leave Florida, the noise of the after-sunset revellers became white noise, just as—in a place that seemed across the universe—drifted snow disguised the landscape of New Hampshire in his absence. He thought of New Hampshire. The snowy woods. The icy hoarfrost on his own front lawn. Every man’s house his castle. New Hampshire, blanketed in white. Returning, he would have to drive carefully. Gingerly, back to the gingerbread house, real icicles its white frosting. (298)

Such images could suggest falsehood or a fresh start (“snow disguised the landscape”), could suggest independence or isolation (“Every man’s house his castle”), and could suggest danger or renewed attention to detail (“he would have to drive carefully”). Similarly, Alfred’s final reminiscence also begins with a description of cold whiteness on a ski trip: . . . ice was prevalent and the trails were narrow, a taste of fear made the high hard air hard to breathe. . . . I shoved off, and gathered speed, my knees and feet absolutely together, the whole trick of it absurdly simple, a matter of faith and muscle memory, and, as I with one concluding wiggle-waggle swooped to a stop in a plume of slush, there they all were, my life’s companions. . . . There were smiles on their ruddy faces; they had been waiting for me; they were pleased to have seen me ski so well. . . . Perhaps my vivid mental picture derives from the winter before our crise began. Or perhaps we had all patched things up for appearances’ sake, for this holiday outing, one big falsely happy family. I had descended the mountain into bliss. . . . (367–69)


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This ending to Memories of the Ford Administration also exudes ambiguity. The potential for unity coexists with the possibility of deception (“my life’s companions” or “one big falsely happy family”?), danger and pleasure appear together (“a taste of fear” or “bliss”?), and an individual can be part of a group or outside of a group (the person skiing alone finds it “absurdly simple, a matter of faith and muscle memory” but is greeted by a smiling crowd “waiting for me”). Death hovers around both novels’ closing scenes, which suggest, in their photographic depictions of waiting loved ones, blurred memory, and white obliteration, near-death experiences or death premonitions. Edward Vargo observes “an elegiac sense of irrecoverable loss” (109) throughout Memories of the Ford Administration, which was written about the time Updike’s own mother died, and a similar feeling of loss also pervades Another You. The importance of photography and art for Beattie and Updike is also commonly noted, as in Dawn Trouard’s Conversations with Ann Beattie or James Plath’s Conversations with John Updike, and in their depiction of whiteness, writers such as Beattie and Updike have a place, Jay Prosser has already argued in PMLA, in “a racially conscious American canon.” In particular, Prosser shows how Updike’s work “reveals the white self constructing itself” (590). In the closing paragraphs of these two novels, however, future opportunities for constructing self and community, though by no means impossible, appear decidedly uncertain for these educated and privileged white men whose visions center on a frozen white landscape.


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4

Balancing Self and Other through Speech and Silence in Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker and Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses

Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses and Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker, both published in 1995, share a keen focus on language, gender, and community. Each novel is written in first person, Lee’s from the perspective of New York spy Henry Park and Tan’s from the perspective of San Francisco photographer Olivia Li. Both narratives begin just as the marriages of the protagonists have broken apart. In Lee’s novel, Henry’s wife Lelia, a speech therapist who refers to herself as “an average white girl” (9), has left Henry, who is Korean American, because trauma and deception have replaced joy with pain and speech with silence; as Henry reports, “We were hardly talking . . . sitting down to our evening meal like boarders in a rooming house” (6). In Tan’s novel, Olivia, whose father was Chinese and whose mother “calls herself ‘American mixed grill, a bit of everything white, fatty, and fried’ ” (1), has just initiated divorce proceedings against her husband Simon, a writer of Chinese, Hawaiian, and European ancestry; she attributes their breakup after seventeen years together to “many things: a wrong beginning, bad timing, years and years of thinking habit and silence were the same as intimacy” (24). In the aftermath of these failures of language and of marriage, Olivia and Henry develop close associations with a slightly older person of the same sex and similar ethnic heritage, Olivia with her halfsister Kwan and Henry with New York councilman John Kwang. Ultimately, though, both mentors are sacrificed in circumstances that enable Henry and Olivia to return, albeit with some ambivalence, to their spouses.


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Asian and American heritages figure prominently in the lives and writings of Amy Tan and Chang-rae Lee. Lee’s family emigrated from South Korea when he was three years old. He grew up in the New York area, the setting of Native Speaker, attended Phillips Exeter Academy, graduated from Yale, and then worked on Wall Street before enrolling in the University of Oregon’s Creative Writing Program. Although his career shift at first surprised his family, his fine arts thesis not only became his first novel, Native Speaker, published when the author was twenty-nine, but it also served as the work that secured his first appointment as a creative writing professor. Lee has identified his subject in Native Speaker as pertinent to the immigrant experience but relevant to all Americans: “ ‘The book speaks to what it is to be an American and of the struggles of all immigrants, not just Koreans, who are trying to assimilate and survive in a place that isn’t yet home’ ” (“Professor’s First” 3). Likewise, he said to Sarah Anne Johnson, “People call Native Speaker an immigrant novel, but all immigrant novels are American to the core. They speak to that initial American desire and yearning, which is the possibility of becoming someone else” (6). He told Peter Monaghan, “ ‘What the book is really about is a burgeoning self, that grows out of a sense of being in America’ ” (A6). Lee’s spoken and written accounts of his home life, including a poignant piece in The New Yorker about his evolving attitude toward his parents, indicate deep love for his family and respect for their Korean traditions. Amy Tan was born in Oakland, California, two years after her parents emigrated from China. Her childhood was spent in California, but, after her father’s death, she attended high school in Europe. Tan studied briefly at Linfield, a Baptist college in Oregon, but earned her bachelor’s degree from San Jose State. Her academic interests conflicted with her mother’s wishes, for her parents had dreamed of her becoming a medical doctor, but Tan continued her graduate work at San Jose, earning a master’s degree in linguistics. She began doctoral studies, worked for California in positions related to language programs for the developmentally disabled, later became a writing consultant, and then turned to creative writing as an outlet for personal expression. She resides in San Francisco, the home setting of The Hundred Secret Senses. Tan’s first novel, The Joy Luck Club, appeared in 1989 when the author was thirty-seven and launched her career as a novelist with high sales and strong reviews. While she draws on elements of Chinese culture and Chinese American experiences in her writing, she, too, sees her material as being about themes “present in all cultures” (Pearlman 16).


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Both authors focus on the essential American question of identity. They realize, as Tan told Gregory Morris, that whether you’re talking about the group or individual roles of mothers and daughters or of Chinese and Americans, identity “is not all that clear; it’s in flux all the time, and we never know what the interaction is except in the particular moment” (224). As Amy Ling asserts in her discussion of “Creating One’s Self: The Eaton Sisters,” “the self is not a fixed entity but a fluid, changing construct” (306). Such a philosophy permeates the fiction of Tan and Lee. Their Korean and Chinese roots are essential to their writing, and they describe, in different ways and in different degrees, issues and conflicts unique to particular Asian American experiences. Yet both writers demonstrate, as David Leiwei Li says, that Asian American literature “is a cultural imagining of the nation” that “articulates the perennially deferred yet constantly perfected promise of the ‘America,’ to evoke Carlos Bulosan, that ‘is in the heart’ ” (203). Several similarities mark the personal identities of these two writers. Their parents came to the United States in adulthood and participated in American life as educated professionals. Both authors dealt with the death of an opposite-sex parent at a relatively early age. Both maintain a strong sense of family even though they did not follow the paths expected of them by their families. Both turned to writing after working in other fields. Both spent formative periods of life in geographical areas, East Coast and West Coast, more open to difference and diversity. Tan has said, for example, that she can “take for granted being in a city [San Francisco] where everyone is different” (Morris 215). Tan’s and Lee’s emphasis on universal themes, their compelling presentations of Asian American subjects, their personal biographies, and their abilities as writers have drawn popular and critical attention to their fiction. However, their popularity has not been universally cheered. Tan especially has been attacked by some who see her as falsely representing Chinese or Chinese American culture. A number of writers are similarly implicated in Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers, edited by Frank Chin and others, and published in 1974, a volume that has been described by Sau-ling Cynthia Wong as operating “on the premise that a true Asian American sensibility is non-Christian, nonfeminine, and nonimmigrant” (Reading Asian American Literature 8). The 1991 sequel The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Chinese American and Japanese American Literature, edited by Jeffery Paul Chan and others, asserts that the Asia and Asian American experience portrayed in the works of many Asian


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American writers are actually the products of “a white racist imagination” (xii). The first essay in the 1991 Aiiieeeee!, “Come All Ye Asian American Writers of the Real and the Fake” written by Frank Chin, condemns “the absence of anything real in the writing of [Maxine Hong] Kingston and her spawn David Henry Hwang and Amy Tan” (50). Of course, virtually all groups have people with a range of social and political views, and most groups, majority or minority, include some components promoting their definitions of purity. In point of fact, Hardy Wilcoxon has documented the appeal of Tan’s work to a Chinese audience in Asia, and Christian Moraru has deemed Native Speaker a “critical counterfantasy that goes against the voyeuristic . . . sort of cosmopolitanism” (69). However, it is true that the very popularity of an author may contribute to a backlash, especially from people who feel stereotyped or oppressed by being compared to that well-known and popular writer, as novelist Deanna Fei has explained in her blog post “I Called Amy Tan a Dirty Word—And Then She Friended Me.” A reader would be foolish to assume that Chang-rae Lee represents the point of view of all Korean Americans or that Amy Tan has been writing documentaries. Just as John Updike does not represent all white men and Alice Walker does not represent all black women, Tan and Lee should not be seen as spokespersons for Americans of Chinese or Korean ancestry. They have written from their own experiences, which have been shaped by many factors, including their ethnicity. This may seem obvious, but, as King-Kok Cheung has pointed out, “In view of the general ignorance and diehard stereotypes to which Asian Americans have been subjected, together with the previous lack of nationally published writers, the ones currently receiving literary acclaim are quickly construed to be spokespersons for the ethnic group as a whole” (Articulate Silences 12). Sometimes stereotyped as the model minority, Asian Americans labor under varied prejudices. As Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling have explained, “The term ‘Asian American’ implies a homogeneity of people and of purpose; in fact, it elides highly disparate peoples of different races and with diverse languages, religions, and cultural and national backgrounds” (“Introduction” 3–4). Further complicating the literary picture, as Susan Koshy points out, “Asian American literature inhabits the highly unstable temporality of the ‘about-to-be’ ” because of the continual arrival of new waves of immigrants (315). Despite its inadequacies, the term Asian American is used widely by Asian American as well as non-Asian American critics, and even analysts outside the Aiiieeeee! group have commented on the commercial


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success of some Asian American writers compared to the relative neglect of others.1 Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong in “ ‘Sugar Sisterhood’: Situating the Amy Tan Phenomenon” concludes that Tan’s writings “reflect the contending needs and projections of the times” (194). Such a truth strengthens the implications of this study for understanding American life at the end of the twentieth century. However, as You-me Park and Gayle Wald argue, “Rather than assuming that literary texts unproblematically reflect reality, we want to pay close attention to their strategies of representation” (608). The resulting analyses are not necessarily pretty. Wong observes “ ‘a psychospiritual plantation system’ ” (200) in Tan’s fiction and in popular films such as Driving Miss Daisy or Ghost from the same time period. Similarly, Park and Wald point out that the “shadowy figures of Korean American women disrupt Lee’s narrative” (609) even though their domestic work makes possible the public, masculine world explored in the novel. To the extent that it exists, a “psychospiritual plantation system” is at least partially dismantled in The Hundred Secret Senses and in Native Speaker, but the possibility of its existence alerts us to potential problems inherent in writing that, as Wong says, “allows readers of differing persuasions to see what they expect (or desire) in the texts” (203). Characters in The Hundred Secret Senses and in Native Speaker strive to discover their individual identities as they yearn for a place in the larger community. They wrestle with the very definition of community, seeming to decide, as Min Song says of Kwang in Native Speaker, that “a culture of shared trauma” defines a people (“A Diasporic Future?” 82). Navigating their shared traumas, the characters refuse some and accept other expectations and stereotypes about their gender and ethnicity. They struggle with cross-sex communication but also resist many linguistic and social assumptions about same-sex friendships. They worry over generational continuity. They express anxiety about their families and their coworkers. Sometimes they aim for assimilation, sometimes for hybridization, and sometimes for separation. They face universal issues related to the fluctuating dynamics of language, gender, and community, but they do so in ethnically marked environments. As Shirley Geok-lin Lim says in her essay on “The Ambivalent American,” Tan and Lee are in “the paradoxical, difficult, contradictory, anxious, suspicious, struggling, creative position of the first-generation minority writer in Anglo-American society” (18). In the end, they and their characters must rely on language to express their unique individual perspectives and to establish connections with other people.




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In Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker, protagonist Henry Park’s problems have developed, at least in part, because of stereotypes and prejudices related to his identity as a Korean American man, but his problems are exacerbated by his uncertainty about those stereotypes and about his own personal identity. His responses to women, particularly his wife, and his responses to men, particularly his assigned spy target John Kwang, are strained by his self-directed ambivalence. Through his experiences over the course of the novel, he moves from isolation to integration and from silence to speech, though his concealing masks and inner tensions are never completely removed. Native Speaker is a novel about the use of language in America at the end of the millennium, about the meaning of language, and about the importance of language in reflecting individual and community identity. In its title, Native Speaker, and in its content, from opening to closing, the book is about the power of language to shape and reveal the inner self. The novel functions as a quest to discover the inner self of Henry Park. The opening sentence, “The day my wife left she gave me a list of who I was” (1) launches Henry’s search for identity. Before revealing the contents of the list, Henry describes how he made three photocopies, one for his wallet “as a kind of personal asterisk,” one set aside for the future in case he ever “wanted pity or needed some easy ammunition,” and one “to historicize” that he mailed to himself (4). The original he destroys, explaining, “I prefer versions of things, copies that aren’t so precious” (4). By making copies of his wife’s list, Henry reveals facets of his insecurity: his reliance on other people’s assessment for identification, his custom of fighting with the subversive strategies of the underdog position, and his need to be ever ready to offer proof of his identity. By preferring copies to originals, he exhibits his preference for distancing, no doubt for psychological protection; the real thing being too dear, he can only deal with the image, the representation, the copy. Over time, he himself has become an imitation. Henry Park’s difficulties with his wife stem from his fluid talent to be whatever someone wants him to be. He acknowledges his falseness, admitting, “I lied to Lelia. For as long as I could I lied” (6). He concedes that he has lied in defiance of the Confucian ideals of his father and that in his rebellion against a rigidly ordered community he has lost “the basic comfort in this familial precision” (6). Truth has become a matter of linguistic ability mixed with individual perseverance. As he says, “The truth, finally, is who can tell it” (6). In his work


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as a spy, Henry’s chameleon qualities have enabled him to succeed. He realizes that “whatever I possess in this life is more or less the result of a talent I have for making you feel good about yourself when you are with me. . . . I won’t speak untruths to you. . . . I make do with on-hand materials, what I can chip out of you, your natural ore. Then I fuel the fire of your most secret vanity” (6). He relies at work and at home on his ability to say as little as possible, following a colleague’s advice to be “ ‘unapparent and flat. Speak enough so that they can hear your voice and come to trust it, but no more’ ” (40). However beneficial they may be at work, Henry’s talents prove detrimental in his private life because they foster deception and misunderstanding among people who expect intimacy and trust. When they first meet, Lelia and Henry are attracted to each other in their admiration of each other’s language. He notes her careful manner of “executing the language. She went by word by word. Every letter had a border. I watched her wide full mouth sweep through her sentences like a figure touring a dark house, flipping on spots and banks of perfectly drawn light” (9). While Henry observes the clarity and distinctiveness of Lelia’s speech, she also notices his language. The speech therapist in her recognizes that he is not a native speaker, even though, as she tells him, “ ‘You speak perfectly, of course. I mean if we were talking on the phone I wouldn’t think twice’ ” (11). Henry assumes a racial implication, spelling out the inference, “ ‘You mean it’s my face’ ” (11), but her perception runs deeper. As Lelia explains, “ ‘Your face is part of the equation, but not in the way you’re thinking. You look like someone listening to himself’ ” (11). Like the first observations of the women in Gaines’s, Beattie’s, and Updike’s novels, Lelia’s first remarks prove to be prophetic. At their initial moment of attraction, Henry kisses Lelia, but then, automatically, he assumes a mask. He reports, “Instantly I was thinking of the lover she might want, the man whom she’d searched out but hadn’t found” (12). Instead of being himself, Henry works hard to be what he imagines others want him to be. In the early stages of his relationship with Lelia, she is flattered by his desire to please, but later in their marriage she cannot tolerate his inability to share his real self. By the time Lelia leaves her husband, they have gone from discovering and building a community to maintaining and guarding individual isolation, just as they have moved from joyful shared speech to confused and bleak silence. External circumstances along the way, of course, contribute to the deterioration of their marriage. The pressures of Lelia’s job create burnout as she works hard to make a difference in the lives of




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immigrant children learning English. The pressures of Henry’s job and the secrecy it entails place considerable stress on their relationship. Racial stereotyping within their families adds pressure. Henry knows his father “liked the fact that Lelia was white” (53). Leila’s father admits that he did not approve of their marriage at first, but he adds, oblivious to his insult, “I didn’t know you then. . . . I can see now why Lelia chose you. . . . You’re ambitious and serious. You think before you speak. I can see that now. There’s so much that’s admirable in the Oriental culture and mind” (132). Stewart, Lelia’s father, believes American culture is falling apart, that the Japanese are in a slide, but that “ ‘You Koreans are really doing a number on them, in certain areas. You’re kicking major butt around the world’ ” (113). Stewart puts his desire for grandchildren this way: “ ‘I thought about it and I don’t really give a damn if they look like a goddamn UNICEF poster, though I think they’ll probably be damn nice to look at’ ” (114). Henry neither accepts nor rejects the racial prejudices within his family circle, but, instead, he allows the attitudes to pass with little challenge and even manipulates those attitudes to advance his own status. Far more important than work or family pressures, the death of Henry and Lelia’s son exacerbates their poor communication and forces the crisis in their marriage. Alive, Mitt is the living fulfillment of their love and a symbol of the integration of their lives, cultures, and races. Dead, he epitomizes the failure not only of their personal relationship but also of their racial integration and cultural assimilation. Neither Lelia’s gnawing doubt that “ ‘Maybe it’s that Mitt wasn’t all white or all yellow’ ” nor Henry’s questioned pleasure in Mitt’s appearance “so beautifully jumbled and subversive and historic” (96) can be considered irrational given the circumstances of his death. In the affluent suburbs of his grandfather, other children at first call Mitt names: “a chink, a jap, a gook” (96). Henry calmly tries to talk his way out of the conflict, framing it as a language problem, advising his boy, “They’re just words” (96). Over time, Mitt works things out for himself with the neighborhood children and they become friends, but their play at his seventh birthday party turns fatal as they unintentionally smother him during a game. Unable to find comfort with each other, Henry and Lelia fall into separate ways of grieving that lead to marital separation. Only after a painful time apart can they start over as they begin to heal from the great wound of their son’s death. Personal scenes set the thematic tone for the novel, but the main plot actually deals with Henry’s employment. Henry works as a spy


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or, as the term is used by various characters, a “mole” for a private company. The moles willingly exploit their own racial origins, and they form for each other a hodgepodge community of various ethnicities and backgrounds; they constitute, as one of them says cynically, “ ‘a family . . . a sad excuse for one, but what else do we have?’ ” (272). A recent assignment, for instance, sent Henry as a patient to the New York office of a Philippine American psychoanalyst who evidently was targeted for his political connections. Henry became too involved with Dr. Luzan, however, and had to be pulled from the assignment not long before Luzan drowned in a boating “accident.” Henry’s remorse over Luzan’s fate and his anxiety about ruining another assignment cause him concern. His coworkers are apparently immune from such tensions; as one says, “ ‘People drown, politically involved fat analysts included. A bad thing can happen in the world. We do what we’re paid for and then who can tell what it means?’ ” (41). Emotional distancing is required in Henry’s profession, but as he recovers from his son’s death and begins to reevaluate and rebuild his marriage, he can no longer remain the detached observer. His desire for connection and community becomes detrimental to his professional effectiveness. Henry’s primary assignment in the novel requires him to gather information about John Kwang, a Korean American city councilman considering a run for mayor of New York. Henry does not know who requests the information or even what information is wanted. His job is to infiltrate the personal and public life of Kwang. Kwang, a handsome man with a traditional Korean wife and two young sons, is a self-made millionaire who is active in his church, in the Korean American community, and in the New York political scene. He has brought a new paradigm to city issues. In tendentious language controversies, he advocates “providing tax vouchers for bilingual education, to have English Only in the schools but subsidize native language study outside” (33). He contributes innovative ideas to other issues, too, as when he mediates disputes between Korean American storekeepers and African American shoppers. Such creativity and flexibility have made him a media darling, and Henry himself is thoroughly charmed, reporting that, “Before I knew of him, I had never even conceived of someone like him. A Korean man, of his age, as part of the vernacular. Not just a respectable grocer or dry cleaner or doctor, but a larger public figure who was willing to speak and act outside the tight sphere of his family” (129). Once the idea of John Kwang with his talent for public language becomes a mental reality for Henry, he latches onto his assigned




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target. He thinks, “I had him in my sights. I believed I had a grasp of his identity” (130). Several distinct images surround Henry’s approach to Kwang’s identity. One image resides in the ethnic male bonding and mentoring side of their relationship. Henry says, “you could call ours a kind of romance, though I don’t exactly know what he saw in me. Maybe a someone we Koreans were becoming, the latest brand of an American” (129). Readers and critics have responded in various ways to this image. Liam Corley views the image as “racial marketing,” but Betsy Huang thinks Kwang rises to the iconic level of a “Citizen Kwang” as Lee exposes “the representational predicaments faced by Asian American politicians” (245). In “Surfing the Long Waves of Global Capital in Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker: Ethnic Branding and the Humanization of Capital,” J. Paul Narkunas demonstrates how ethnicity is commodified in the novel, but, as Lori Ween shows in “This Is Your Book: Marketing America to Itself,” ethnicity plays a role not only in how literature is selected for publication and marketing but also in how the public understands ethnicity through literary marketing. Thus, literary theory and criticism provide a number of metaphors for Henry’s interactions with Kwang. In Henry’s mind, spy work involves telling a familiar story: “I’d just have to lurk close enough and witness the play of the story as we already knew it. . . . I would tick off each staging of the narrative” (130). Henry’s use of the word lurk in this passage about narrative patterns suggests a Hawthornian connection, as, for example, in Chillingworth lurking around Dimmesdale in search of a hidden story. Other details also strengthen the Hawthornian allusions in Native Speaker, including, for example, the character of the police commissioner, whose name, Roy Chillingsworth, calls to mind Hawthorne’s character Roger Chillingworth. The notion of spying and lurking calls to mind a literary tradition seen not only in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter or The Blithedale Romance, but also in other traditional American classics such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The image of pulling away Kwang’s layered masks suggests the literary metaphor of an unfolding drama: “Through events both arbitrary and conceived it so happened that one of his faces fell away, and then another, and another, until he revealed to me a final level that would not strip off. The last mask” (131). These masks are related to verbal skills, for Henry notes that as a boy Kwang “learned to read and write and speak his new home language . . . [and so] began to think of America as a part of him, maybe even his, and this for


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me was the crucial leap of his character, deep flaw or not, the leap of his identity no one in our work would find valuable but me” (196). Henry is especially well equipped to grasp the relevance of Kwang’s English literacy for his American identity and for his aspirations for a place in American society. As Patricia Chu says, “this novel depicts the public buying and selling of one’s voice and ideas as the basis for American subjectivity” (3). Another literary metaphor in Native Speaker can be found in the recurring image of the double. As Henry says of himself and Kwang, “We were of different stripes, like any two people, though taken together you might say that one was an outlying version of the other” (129). A scene in chapter ten explicitly depicts the two men as doubles when, in an advance preparation session, Henry is asked to stand in the exact places where Kwang will be seen the next day in his political appearances. Many critics have identified parallels between the Asian American experience, the African American experience, and the female experience with regard to a sense of doubleness. Amy Ling has said, “I find W. E. B. DuBois’s notion of ‘double consciousness,’ from The Souls of Black Folk, useful in my study of Chinese American women. In fact, DuBois’s elaboration of this double consciousness is applicable to all women: ‘this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others’ ” (“I’m Here” 741). King-Kok Cheung has coined a wonderful phrase to describe this phenomenon: “the template both of the dual personality and the unitary self” (Articulate Silences 19). Discussing short story cycles by Amy Tan, Louise Erdrich, and others, Rocío Davis connects the double with the search not just for identity but also community: “The complicated process of selfhood and the inescapable doubleness of the between-world subject is the covert theme of much . . . ethnic fiction, as the writers question what it is that determines both identity and community” (3). The second chapter of Sau-ling Cynthia Wong’s Reading Asian American Literature, entitled “Encounters with the Racial Shadow,” analyzes in detail the motif of doubleness, or, as it has been variously termed, “the alter ego, the shadow, the Doppelganger, the second self, the antiself, the opposing self, and the secret self” (77). Wong sorts through the “voluminous” (80) scholarship on the double and then elaborates on the psychological features of repression and projection that enable a person to “disown” aspects of self through use of the double. Wong ultimately draws back from universal interpretations of the double in order to examine the racial and sexual implications conveyed by the motif in Asian American literature. Although Wong credits Otto




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Rank as having “in 1941 connected the double to man’s fear of death and desire for a symbol of the immortal soul” (80), a deep connection between the figure of the double and the struggle with mortality can actually be found in literary texts as old as the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh or in texts as recent as J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Wong associates projection (as in the use of the double) with various oppositions, including the directional reverse of projection, which is introjection (including images of eating and gagging). She shows that “By projecting undesirable ‘Asianness’ outward onto a double— what I term a racial shadow—one renders alien what is, in fact, literally inalienable, thereby disowning and distancing it” (78). As in A Lesson Before Dying, Face of an Angel, and other novels considered in this study, the symbolism of food emerges, invoking the hospitality theme as well as the sacrifice theme, both of which are embodied in the Christian ritual of the Eucharist; communion in this sense entails notions of community and connection. Wong’s chapter on “Big Eaters, Treat Lovers, Food Prostitutes, ‘Food Pornographers,’ and Doughnut Makers” (18–76) in Reading Asian American Literature identifies food and eating with special meanings in Asian American fiction. She concludes that food is able to “symbolize Necessity—all the hardships, deprivations, restrictions, disenfranchisements, and dislocations that Asian Americans have collectively suffered as immigrants and minorities” (20). Ingestion, according to Wong, “mediates between self and not-self, native essence and foreign matter, the inside and the outside” (26). In Consumption and Identity in Asian American Coming-of-Age Novels, Jennifer Ho also argues that food and consumption are broadly connected to issues of identity in Asian American fiction, and in The Broom Closet, an analysis of domesticity in novels by Amy Tan, Louise Erdrich, and others, Jeannette Batz Cooperman notes that “Domestic rituals, patterns and habits are principles of coherence; even when they are carried out in solitude, they relate back to community” (160). The connection between food, family, and language is clear for Chang-rae Lee in his New Yorker essay “Coming Home Again.” He writes, “it was always the cooking that started our conversations” (168). Another side to the food, family, and ethnic connections appears in Lee’s account of Parents Day at Exeter when his mother brought a cooler filled with Korean foods: “And it seemed I couldn’t get enough of it back. I ate and I ate, so much and so fast that I actually went to the bathroom and vomited” (168). The disparate implications here—of food as a crucial element in one’s family life, ethnic community, and individual identity but, on the other hand, of


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gagging, of having to swallow too much, of being overcome by internalizing distinctive elements—indicate the various meanings Lee finds in food. As Wong says in Reading Asian American Literature, “A large number of images of overstuffing, gagging, bursting, and vomiting testifies to the Asian American writers’ concern with the limits of endurance” (77). Food, historian Yong Chen has told Jeffrey Selingo, “is a carrier of social memory” and is “as important as sexuality in understanding human history” (Selingo A7). The motif of food and the motif of doubling both support Native Speaker’s themes of identity and community in an ethnically marked setting. The ethnically marked experience of immigrants often includes significant humiliation, and public lives in the United States, by definition, require a high degree of exposure. In their foundational analysis of politeness phenomena, Brown and Levinson state that “while the content of face will differ in different cultures . . . the mutual knowledge of members’ public self-image or face, and the social necessity to orient oneself to it in interaction, are universal” (66–67). In intense situations, including conflicts between competing cultural demands, creating a double or an alias or an alter ego provides a mechanism for preserving face. So, to protect himself, or to save his face, from his wife’s disappointment and his son’s death, Henry can create another face. To distance himself from the human consequences of his spying, or, again, to save his personal face, he can create other faces. In his role as politician, Henry Kwang endures constant scrutiny, so a protective face different from his real self serves as a barrier. Part of the attraction between Henry Park and John Kwang derives from their common cultural understanding of face and face-saving needs. It is not enough, however, to say that Kwang and Park represent doubles of each other. It is also inadequate to say that both have created shadow selves or aliases to serve their personal or professional needs. It is also insufficient to say that they see in each other the projected qualities, both positive and negative, those hoped for and those feared, of their Korean backgrounds. It is not enough to recognize the pervasive theme of the double in various minor characters of the novel. Any single interpretation of the double motif falls short. All these meanings of the double and all these aspects of face come into play and interact with each other exponentially in Native Speaker. Moreover, these and other appearances of the doubling theme in the novel involve, directly or indirectly, pragmatic aspects of language just as they all emphasize, directly and indirectly, the role of community in one’s self-identity. Further, the double serves as an offensive as well as defensive tool, for Henry Park and John Kwang employ their




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capacity for doubleness to exploit other people as well as to protect themselves. In the end, Kwang is exposed by Henry, but Henry is duped by another double, and the unraveling of the affair ends his career in espionage as certainly as it ends Kwang’s political career. Though Henry does not for a long time know it, another spy has been planted in Kwang’s inner circle. Eduardo Fermin, a Kwang volunteer, has become so trusted that he alone tracks the money flowing into and out of the operation. Huge sums are being donated, mostly in small amounts by vast numbers of legitimate shopkeepers and poorer workers, many of them illegal aliens, in Kwang’s district. In turn, Kwang distributes money to those starting their own businesses or those with special needs. The system operates with honorable intent, modeled after the Korean ggeh. Henry’s own father “got his first infusion of capital from a ggeh, a Korean ‘money club’ in which members contributed to a pool that was given out on a rotating basis” (46). These arrangements not only provide an internally controlled economic base for the Koreans in New York, but they also offer the chance for a solid social community. Henry fondly remembers the parties, picnics, and various social outings with his father’s friends in the ggeh—at least until everyone “got busier and wealthier and lived farther and farther apart” and eventually became disgusted with “all the disgraceful troubles that were cropping up, people not paying on time or leaving too soon after getting the money” (47). Relying on unreported donations, untaxed activities, and illegal immigrants, Kwang’s money system violates American laws. But, as Min Hyoung Song explains in “A Diasporic Future? Native Speaker and Historical Trauma,” Kwang’s real sin has nothing to do with legalities or technicalities but, rather, is the stuff of ancient tragedy: “hubris—not pride, as this term is often mistranslated, but an offense of self-confidence, a belief in one’s ability to do more than what the facts will bear” (94). After Fermin, the other spy who is tracking the money, dies in an “accident,” Henry takes control of the donor lists, which he turns over to his boss. Federal agents then use the information to identify and apprehend illegal aliens. On the surface at least, it appears that a primary purpose of Henry’s assignment, unbeknownst to him, has been to identify illegal aliens, not to target Kwang. Nevertheless, Kwang has been ruined, Fermin has been killed, and Henry is sickened. Kwang returns to Korea, while Henry returns to his wife. Both men seek a familiar community with familiar language. Henry imagines that Kwang longs for “the exquisite gift of silence” (276) after such a stormy episode, but Henry craves community and communication


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with his wife. Lelia, meanwhile, has maintained her faith in language, having decided to “stick with teaching speech” and to continue “hoping against hope for other people’s kids” (115). Happily, Lelia seems ready to reunite with her husband just as he is ready to understand and accept himself, though both are still grieving the loss of their son. Increased physical contact between Lelia and Henry marks their attempted return to fulfillment and wholeness. Descriptions of their lovemaking late in the novel stress the oral nature of their relationship: “We were forever biting, we bit hard, we spit and shined each other, we licked each other, we slobbered, we gorged, we made elaborate meals of ourselves . . . and she said it was the best way, to use your mouth, that this was it, this was the thing that made us human. Not the thumb but the mouth” (213). In sex as well as in language, their mouths constitute a key point of connection between Henry and Lelia. Writing about Chinese American literature, Sau-ling Cynthia Wong has shown that sexuality has a particular significance as “heterosexual fulfillment free of demeaning compromises signals an idealized state of fullness of being—ethnic dignity without practical failure, power without callousness, self-actualization without social irresponsibility—which seems to be the endpoint of the immigrant’s recentering efforts” (“Ethnicizing Gender” 113). In Native Speaker, sexual relations between Henry and Lelia denote those same meanings Wong finds in Chinese immigrant literature “ethnic dignity,” empowerment, and “self-actualization.” Wong shows that “gender and ethnicity are fused to a much greater extent than previously suspected” (126), so her conclusion is not surprising that in immigrant literature, “sexuality is represented as far more than a physical fact; rather, it constitutes one of the primary terms through which one’s ethnic identity is understood, experienced, and structured” (113–14). Certainly this is true in the conclusion of Native Speaker as Henry reestablishes his personal identity, his community identity, and his linguistic freedom at the same time that he reestablishes free and open expressions of sexuality with his wife. The final chapter of Native Speaker conveys with poetic grace the deep connections between language, self-identity, and community identity. After its opening sentence, “This is a city of words” (319), the chapter describes Henry’s daily routine moving through the streets of New York and listening to the “strangest chorale” (319), making love with Lelia, cooking dinner, and sometimes assisting with her speech lessons to immigrant children. Images of insecure masking and subordination persist in the costume he dons for the




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children—“I wear a green rubber hood and act in my role as Speech Monster” (323)—but as the children leave, he removes his costume and hugs and kisses each one. In speaking to them without his mask, he reassures himself and proves to them, often to their surprise, that his voice and face go together: “I sense that some of them gaze up at me for a moment longer, some wonder in their looks as they check again that my voice moves in time with my mouth, truly belongs to my face” (324). Welcoming children from diverse backgrounds into the American community, Lelia writes the children’s names on badges and “calls out each one as best she can, taking care of every last pitch and accent, and I hear her speaking a dozen lovely and native languages, calling all the difficult names of who we are” (324). Naming each child, Henry and Lelia reprise the roles of Adam and Eve as the world stretches out before them. The commingling of “a dozen lovely and native languages, calling all the difficult names of who we are” conveys a sense of tragic optimism for the future as it captures with lyrical beauty the complicated linguistic and cultural diversity of America at the end of the twentieth century.

T HE HUN DR ED S ECR ET S ENSES Masked personae, the motif of the double, and fluctuating and ambivalent group identifications flourish as much in Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses as they do in Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker. As in Native Speaker, the general movement in The Hundred Secret Senses takes the protagonist from relative isolation to community and from relative silence to speech. The Hundred Secret Senses also bears some similarities to Amy Tan’s two earlier novels, The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife, in that mother-daughter relationships are foregrounded, the plot relies on actions from the past, including hidden children and forbidden relationships, trips are taken back to China, and the themes of the story draw on both Chinese and American values and myths. The most significant tie between The Hundred Secret Senses, Tan’s earlier novels, and Lee’s novel, however, resides in their common focus on the Asian American’s struggle, in spite of stereotypes about race and gender and culture, to verbalize an individual identity without losing community identity. Olivia introduces her mentor/double/shadow/alien self in the opening sentences of the novel: “My sister Kwan believes she has yin eyes. She sees those who have died and now dwell in the World of Yin, ghosts who leave the mists just to visit her kitchen on Balboa Street in San Francisco” (3). In her discussion of “Sisterhood as Cultural


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Difference in Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses and Cristina Garcia’s The Aguero Sisters,” Su-lin Yu draws attention to sisters operating as “a model through which to explore women’s identity, for a sister can provide an alternate path for the ‘other’ woman to develop her subjectivity” (369). In other words, a sibling can function as a double, as Kwan does for Olivia. Kwan is actually Olivia’s half-sister, brought to the United States at the age of eighteen in obedience to their father’s dying wish. Aunt Betty, the cousin of Olivia’s mother, claims that when the first wife of Olivia’s and Kwan’s father died, he left Kwan in the care of relatives while he sought work, but the war intervened, and he diverted to America. Then, according to Aunt Betty, on his deathbed he was warned by the ghost of his first wife to claim the daughter he had left behind. To this account, Olivia adds, “That’s the story my father gave just before he died—that is, told by Aunt Betty years later” (9). According to Kwan, however, their “father caught a disease of too many good dreams” (13) and simply abandoned his Chinese family. And so, with this disputed detail, the pattern of the novel is set: nothing is as it seems, everyone has a complicated past, community relationships are unstable, everything has more than one explanation, including competing supernatural explanations, and no one ever knows whether or not to believe family stories that are passed around at second- or third-hand, often told as stories within stories within other stories. Language is as layered and masked and complicated as the people who use it. The minute Kwan arrives at the San Francisco airport, she lets loose her exuberant and irrepressible personality. Eager to learn English, she embarrasses Olivia with nonstop talking. Other children make disparaging comments that threaten Olivia’s identity; one boy, for instance, asks, “ ‘Is that dumb Chink your sister?’ ” (11). Olivia also insults Kwan and her language, as when she says, “Kwan would jabber away in Chinese. She kept on talking while I was sleeping. That’s how I became the only one in our family who learned Chinese. Kwan infected me with it” (12). Of course, Chinese people in the novel have their own prejudices against English, shown in the “revulsion” one woman later has for the English spoken between Simon and Olivia during their trip to China, and even suggested in Kwan’s description of Olivia’s “strange kind of Mandarin, American style, her thoughts and sentences running backwards” (231). Kwan tells stories to Olivia continuously, many concerned with the affairs of the yin people, those who have died but now live in another world. At the conclusion of her stories she “would always say, ‘You’re the only one who knows. Don’t tell anyone. Never’ ” (14). But as a




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child Olivia repeats the stories to her mother, who, horrified, has Kwan committed to a mental institution, where she is administered electric shock treatments. Kwan never blames Olivia for telling her secrets, but Olivia forever feels the shame of her betrayal. The shock treatments destroy Kwan’s beautiful hair but otherwise only enhance her psychic abilities. Afterwards she can identify in an instant a problem with any electrical circuit or appliance, she can diagnose human ailments, and she extends her contacts with the dead. Kwan is a healer. Her communication with the yin people and her open, loving nature cause her to be beloved by everyone except her relatives. Her American family members think of Kwan as “wacky” (19). Olivia does not hesitate to exploit Kwan when she needs help with Simon. Olivia and Simon met in a college linguistics class, so their interest in language dates to the beginning of their relationship. Olivia reports that her first encounter with Simon was like “seeing my male doppelganger” (66). During their college days, they would spend hours talking at a coffee house where they “added to the drone of hundreds of other life-changing conversations and epiphanies” (67). Impeding their relationship, however, is another woman. For a long time, Olivia assumes that Elza, the woman who first captured Simon’s heart, is “alive and well, traveling on Eurail” (67). But Elza is dead, killed in an avalanche after telling Simon she is pregnant. Olivia fears that Simon has been left emotionally paralyzed, so she asks Kwan to locate Elza in the yin world in order to bring about some closure for Simon. Olivia does not believe in Kwan’s ability to contact the dead, but she hopes Simon will be convinced. In her broken English, Kwan reports that Elza wants Simon to forget her: “ ‘too much waste you life think about her. . . . You must forget her, she say, yes, forget!—never say her name’ ” (106). Simon appears “sad and grateful at the same time” (106) and agrees to release himself from his attachment with Elza and to move on. Instead of feeling happy, though, Olivia feels guilty, not for using Kwan, but for deceiving Simon. She believes that she herself has somehow experienced the presence of Elza “with my one hundred secret senses” and that Elza’s real message is “ ‘Simon, don’t forget me. Wait for me. I’m coming back’ ” (107). Olivia fears their relationship is doomed. False language and false behavior thus inaugurate the relationship between Olivia and Simon just as they did the relationship between Lelia and Henry in Native Speaker. Seventeen years later, Olivia and Simon share with Henry and Lelia another important characteristic: childlessness. Whereas Henry and Lelia’s son has died, Olivia and Simon have been unable to conceive.


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Surprisingly, fertility tests show Simon to be sterile. In addition to presenting an obstacle to their own dreams and plans, this news brings up conflicts from the past. If Simon is sterile, how was Elza pregnant? After their yin-talk, Simon and Olivia will not speak of Elza. She has become taboo, unspeakable and unknowable. Conversation about anything has become difficult. As they separate, Olivia takes steps to change her name from her husband’s last name, Bishop, to her biological father’s last name, Lee. Through language, she edges toward greater identification with her Chinese heritage, but because her father died when she was very young, she has little memory of him, and her knowledge of Chinese culture derives mainly from Kwan’s stories. In reclaiming a prenuptial identity, she limits her name options to patriarchal choices: her husband’s name, her stepfather’s name, or her biological father’s name. Kwan, horrified by this move toward divorce and by Olivia’s misguided efforts at establishing a new identity, steps in with a story about why Lee was not really their father’s name. According to Kwan, who was told the story by an aunt, their father came into possession of a fine coat, a rare treasure during the post-war period. More importantly, he found priceless items sewn inside the coat: documents for immigrating: health certificates, money, a one-way ticket to America, admission letters to a university with the tuition prepaid, a visa, and photographs. Following this discovery, their father transformed himself into the person who had previously owned the coat, completely submerging himself into a new identity. Kwan claims she has not been able to contact her father in the world of yin to confirm all this because “other yin friends tell me he is stuck somewhere else, a foggy place where people believe their lies are true” (163). Like all the other complicated and unexpected identities in the novel, Mr. Lee’s identity is doubled and redoubled, named and renamed. Thus, with her stories, Kwan protects Olivia and draws her into complicated relationships with the yin world. The yin community is not just an alternate reality for Kwan but a way to know the unknowable and speak the unspeakable. After all, the yin people, Kwan says, “ ‘just speak heart-talk. Easier, faster that way. No misconfusion like with words’ ” (211). By naming and describing the hundred secret senses, Kwan—and by extension the narrator Olivia Li and the author Amy Tan—reveal the knowledge beyond the literal, the ideas that cannot be spoken in ordinary conversation. But by using Kwan, who is deemed “wacky,” (19), the narrator and the author undercut and question the hundred secret senses even as they are being upheld and glorified. As Barbara Tepa Lupack has shown in her study of Insanity




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as Redemption in Contemporary American Fiction, the search for personal identity often uses oddness or outright madness as “a metaphor for the disabling and disorienting threats to individuality inherent in contemporary society” (489). In addition to their role as metaphor, Kwan and her yin friends serve as doubles. As in Native Speaker, the figure of the double in The Hundred Secret Senses provides distance from meaning and identity, but, at the same time, the figure of the double represents the quest for meaning and identity. In the end, the yin people may be comparable to the embroidered A on Hester Prynne’s clothing, the possible carvings on Arthur Dimmesdale’s chest, and the supposed signs in the New England sky in The Scarlet Letter. That is, they may exist literally, they may exist symbolically, they may exist literally and symbolically, or they may not even exist at all. As Kwan says, “ ‘Maybe, maybe not’ ” (339). Multiple meanings must be embraced. The first long story Kwan tells about her previous life exemplifies the inadequacy of single interpretations. In 1864, Kwan was one of the “Hakka, Guest People—hnh!—meaning guests not invited to stay in any good place too long” (30). After all the healthy men and women are recruited under false pretenses to fight in another region, Kwan is left behind with the other children and old people. At the age of fourteen in this previous life, she must make her own way in the world. People try to treat her as a beggar because she has sight in only one eye, but, Kwan says, “I refused to become what people thought I should be” (36). She takes courage by identifying herself with a famous one-eyed female being from the mythology of her homeland. What others see as a disability, Kwan sees as a special gift. One day in Kwan’s past life, foreign missionaries dock their boat and, during unloading, an accident takes place. Without thought for herself, Kwan rescues two people, a man and a woman, but then, having saved them, she is eternally responsible for their fates. As she explains to Olivia, “that’s how all three of us went to live in the same house. Our three different fates had flowed together in that river, and became as tangled and twisted as a drowned woman’s hair” (38). The Punti people in the town where the missionaries disembark revere the concept of interconnectedness so strongly that they would not help rescue the drowning Miss Banner and the boatman Lao Lu because, “if they interfered with fate, they would be responsible for those two people’s lives” (37). Kwan, however, rejects the Punti philosophy in favor of her own religion: “I was a Hakka. The Hakkas were God Worshippers. And the God Worshippers were fishers of men” (37).


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Still, because Kwan does rescue Miss Banner and Lao Lu, she feels eternally connected to them. In the narrative events set in late twentieth-century America, just when Olivia and Simon are in the process of dividing up their jointly owned business where he is a writer and she is a photographer, they receive acceptance for their proposal, submitted many months earlier, to write “a photo essay on village cuisines of China” (151). They hesitate and procrastinate, but with maneuvering by the ecstatic Kwan, they decide to go. As Kwan says at the airport, “ ‘You, me, Simon— going to China! This our fate join together at last’ ” (165). The lives and fates of the people from Kwan’s past life then come directly into play with the lives and fates of people in the present, and all their interconnections are revealed. On one level, the object of the trip is to obtain exotic pictures of China for American consumption, but food and language bridge past and present, Chinese and American, as the magazine assignment takes Simon and Olivia back to the area where Kwan plans to show them the duck eggs that sustained her and Miss Banner and the others at the missionary camp more than one hundred years ago. During the trip to China, Kwan’s narrative gifts blossom. One of her stories explains how in her present life she came to be in the body of another person, thereby accounting for her lack of resemblance to Olivia or to their father, and this tale leads to other stories that account for Kwan’s devotion to Olivia. When she was a little girl, Kwan relates, she and another child both died in a flood. The other girl remained dead, but Kwan in the yin world was prodded to return by another yin person, who ran to her, saying, “ ‘You must go back. . . . In seven years, I’ll be born. It’s all arranged. You promised to wait. Did you forget?’ ” (257). According to Kwan, that yin person, who was Miss Banner in their former life, is Olivia in the present one. Kwan, pressed to make a decision in a split second, decided to return to life, but her own body was too broken to take back to life, so her soul entered the body of the other dead girl and returned to the world of the living. The village people were confused and frightened, but, accustomed to ambiguity and supernatural interventions, they accepted the change. Again, the double has been redoubled. Since her return to life, Kwan’s primary goal has been to fulfill her promise and rectify a wrong she feels she committed against Miss Banner in the 1800s. For this she has returned from the yin world, has come to America, and has now returned to China with Olivia and Simon. When they arrive in her hometown of Changmian, Kwan tells another story about two dragons, husband and wife, who long ago




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provided irrigation ditches for the village until outsiders became jealous and killed the dragons, piercing them with arrows. The dying dragons crawled into the earth but were full of holes that forever afterwards caused constant flooding, like flowing tears, with every rain. Those arrow holes also created thousands of caves that lead to a single heart, where, Kwan says, a large, glowing lake stands beside a stone village. When people go into the cave, she claims, they never come out unless someone else enters in to take their place. Therefore, the dead people trapped beside the glowing lake are all singing, “ ‘Hurry! Hurry!’ ” to entice others to join them. Whenever a new person enters, someone is then free to “ ‘fly to Yin World, peace at last’ ” (275). Olivia is disturbed by the story, wondering to herself, “Why does Kwan have so many stories about switching places with dead people?” (275), but Simon is entranced and wants to see for himself the forbidden caves of the dragon mountains and their mysterious glowing lake. The experiences of traveling together and sharing these stories bring Simon and Olivia closer together. As happens in Native Speaker between Henry and Lelia, sex takes Olivia and Simon to a connection beyond words, and their sexual reunion in China signals a return to psychological wholeness. Happy for their reunion, Olivia and Simon go for a walk in the vicinity of the mythical caves but fall into an argument that causes them to separate on the trail. When Simon does not return to the village that evening, Kwan and Olivia become alarmed. As they search for him, Kwan tells more stories that portray herself as having, with the best of intentions, set up a Romeo and Juliet situation in their past lives in which Miss Banner (now Olivia) and Yiban (now Simon) missed a narrow window of opportunity for meeting and were fatally separated. Miss Banner went to the yin world rather than to her own heaven, the afterworlds apparently sensitive to race, because Kwan tells her that Yiban, being half Chinese, would go there after death. Yiban, however, ascended to heaven, expecting to find Miss Banner there. So, the two are separated until their next lives. Therefore, Kwan is devoted to seeing Simon and Olivia unite so that she can fulfill her commitment to Yiban and Miss Banner. Kwan does explain to Olivia that race alone is not the determining factor in the locale of one’s afterlife: “ ‘All depend on what you love, what you believe. You love Jesus, go Jesus House. You love Allah, go Allah Land’ ” (99). The yin world, she says, is not just for Chinese people, but also for people who “ ‘have big regret’ ” (100) and want another lifetime to revisit missed opportunities. Sheng-mei Ma’s essay “ ‘Chinese and Dogs’ in Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses” criticizes Tan for exploiting and collapsing Chinese cultural features into


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an assimilated and unrecognizable blend. Ma particularly takes Tan to task for her “arrogance” in “reshuffling” Chinese history and religion for American fictional purposes (32). Jung Ha Kim, however, places Tan’s presentation of afterlife beliefs in the context of a number of Asian American novels’ inclusions of ghost stories and religious beliefs, while Ken-fang Lee in “Cultural Translation and the Exorcist: A Reading of Kingston’s and Tan’s Ghost Stories” sees the tales as representing memories that must be recalled in order to be exorcised. Within the novel, after various implications of the Miss BannerYiban story settle in on Olivia, Kwan explains one last mystery about their fates. Kwan insists that Olivia misunderstood the yin session so many years ago, that Elza wanted Simon to forgive her, not forget her, and that the being Olivia had heard asking not to be forgotten was her own ghost begging Simon to recognize her. At that point, her narratives complete and her mission certain, Kwan enters the forbidden cave to find and release Simon in order to fulfill her promise and establish peace. As Kwan goes into the cave, Olivia makes her promise to return, and Kwan agrees, saying, “ ‘Yes, promise-promise! Course’ ” (344). Simon immediately appears, Kwan disappears, and no trace of her is ever found. In keeping with the ambiguities and fluctuating realities in the novel, a rational explanation is provided for Simon’s disappearance and reemergence. He says that in anger over their fight, he walked on to a house where he found a visiting American college student and that the two of them began to drink until they passed out. Olivia does not tell Simon or any of the searchers about Kwan’s stories, fearing that “if Simon or anyone else discounted even part of it, then some possibility out in the universe, the one I needed, might be removed” (350). Yet Olivia feels assured of the truth in Kwan’s narratives, finding evidence for them in jars of duck eggs she discovers buried deeply at a location central to events in Kwan’s stories about her past life. Thus, the life and stories of Kwan reflect what Lina Unali finds in the novel as a whole, “progressive memory: not simply a memory of a dead past and dead things, not stagnation, but the presentation of the healing of a trauma” (144). Simon and Olivia reestablish their marital community in the wake of Kwan’s self-sacrifice. As in the final chapter of Native Speaker, the final chapter of The Hundred Secret Senses serves as a unifying coda for the various narrative threads in the novel.2 The ending provides some closure without fully resolving the major conflicts, and it suggests that life will continue to operate in flux. Set two years after the disappearance of Kwan, the concluding chapter shows Olivia with a fourteen-month-old baby.




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The lab, apparently, made an error, because Simon is not sterile. Or, perhaps, as Olivia believes, the baby is a gift from Kwan. The child, in a state of emerging language, has three words: Mama names her mother, Da names her father, and ba is her word for the music box that Kwan once gave to Olivia and that is now the child’s favorite toy. The last item in her vocabulary carries special meaning because a music box also figured prominently in Miss Banner’s life in China during the 1800s. Olivia and baby Samantha have taken Kwan’s last name, Li, and Olivia hopes Samantha will possess the gift of perceiving her hundred secret senses.

C O Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses, written by a female author and featuring a female protagonist, presents a West Coast milieu, while Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker, written by a male author and featuring a male protagonist, is set on the East Coast. The two novels build on similar internal tensions, and their beginnings and endings, though not identical, have much in common. Both are constructed around oppositions—Asian and American, real and not real, male and female, silence and speech, individual and group—but the novels are more complicated than a series of binary or mirrored opposites. Language not only serves as a marker with which to measure personal relationships, especially male-female relationships, but it also serves as a means by which individuals either establish or fail to establish their personal and community identities across lines created by the complex, fluctuating, and overlapping oppositions. Gender issues, particularly those related to communication or miscommunication, form the essential nucleus for both plots. The marriages of Henry Park and Olivia Li are dissolving at the novels’ opening points. Cold silences and bitter arguments have replaced the shared speech and warm conversations heralded in flashback scenes depicting earlier stages in their relationships. The husbands withdraw from their wives because of internal and external stresses, and their inability to communicate with their wives only exacerbates the tension between them. The inability to discuss the loss or absence of children incapacitates the marital relationships. Duplicity also obstructs communication, as Henry assumes a false mask from the beginning of his relationship with Lelia and as Olivia deliberately holds back the truth, or her understanding of the truth, from the start of her relationship with Simon. Ultimately, however, the couples decide to reset their marriages by consciously renewing their conversations and


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their sexual relationships. Satisfying speech and satisfying sex become symptoms of as well as contributors to marital renewal. The domestic reunions in the novels’ conclusions suggest that traumas of displacement and diaspora can be ameliorated through the interplay of language, gender, and community. Most of the novels in this study demonstrate the power of narrative to heal or help heal individual and community injuries. In Native Speaker and The Hundred Secret Senses, as well as in other 1990s novels, much of the emotional shock and trauma is associated with a diasporic loss of personal and cultural connections, a point made regarding Tan and Lee in studies such as Li Zeng’s “Diasporic Self, Cultural Other: Negotiating Ethnicity through Transformation in the Fiction of Tan and Kingston” or Min Hyoung Song’s “A Diasporic Future? Native Speaker and Historical Trauma.” Both Tan’s and Lee’s protagonists experience complicated relationships with persons other than their spouses. John Kwang and Kwan Li serve as older, same-sex prototypes for Henry and Olivia to love and hate, reject and embrace, trust and betray, identify with and rebel against. In some ways representing the characters’ countries of origin, China and Korea, they also embody the contradictory and paradoxical values associated with the psychological and literary phenomenon of the double. The conflicting demands placed upon a minority person negotiating through two or more cultures undoubtedly serves as a catalyst for Henry’s, Olivia’s, and the other characters’ proclivity toward a split self, a masked self, or a double. Metaphorically and literally, the older Korean or Chinese version of self in these stories must be sacrificed in order for the younger-generation Korean American or Chinese American self—or perhaps simply the assimilated and undesignated American self—to emerge. When the double is gone, the main characters are free to return to their nuclear families, and both plots resolve with the couples tentatively reunited and an American lifestyle at hand. Issues of gender and race are not fully resolved in either novel. In her review of Native Speaker, Min Song praises many aspects of the novel but charges that the narrator “clothes the very real racial problems he raises in tired immigrant mythologies and leaves women in the background except as suffocating ideals” (186). In The Hundred Secret Senses, the treatment of Olivia’s father, Kwan, and many other Chinese is, at best, ambiguous, and the conclusions of both novels are open to interpretation with regard to what they are really saying about gender and race. Interpretation depends on language, but it is necessary, as Qun Wang says, “to accept language as a dynamic process by




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which meaning is created” (92). Certainty and certain interpretation appear to be impossible. While complete harmony does not reign at the end of either novel, the final scenes convey a measure of hope for the future and a sense of implicit faith in the dynamic power of language, the vitality of cross-sex relationships, and the potential for the American community. What stands for the microcosm of home and family community also holds for the macro-level community of the entire United States. In the final chapters of Native Speaker and The Hundred Secret Senses, the various levels of community derived from different races, genders, ethnicities, and nationalities are left free not only to blend and to coexist, but also to separate and to struggle. Carving out an American identity as a man or a woman of Asian descent means reinventing and reinterpreting American traditions and myths as well as reinventing and reinterpreting Asian traditions and myths. Many critics have written about the need, as King-Kok Cheung describes it in her discussion of Alice Walker and Maxine Hong Kingston, “to reshape recalcitrant myths glorifying patriarchal values” (“Don’t Tell” 163). Writing about characters in fiction by Bharti Mukherjee, Amy Tan, and Christine Bell, John C. Hawley has said that they express “a universal experience in the closing days of the twentieth century” as they yearn “for a reimagined America that can still be called home” (233). Native Speaker and The Hundred Secret Senses seek to reimagine America through a reinterpretation and reshaping of both American and Asian myths and traditions. Tan’s novel as well as Lee’s foregrounds the role of language in this reimagining of America and so reflects what Sämi Ludwig calls in Native Speaker a “major paradigm shift” (223). Native Speaker and The Hundred Secret Senses envision democratic, Whitmanesque models of America in which individual voices clamor to be heard.3 A “life univocal” (249), what Henry once wished for his son Mitt, is not possible. The cacophony of speech in these novels not only reflects but also forms the very fabric of life in the United States at the end of the twentieth century. Lee’s paean to New York in the final chapter of Native Speaker expresses this concept elegantly as Henry Park describes New York as “a city of words” where the “strangest chorale” echoes endlessly, where in the streets the “constant cry is that you belong here, or you make yourself belong, or you must go” (319), and where Lelia speaks to her students in their “lovely and native languages, calling all the difficult names of who we are” (324).


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5

Love, Destruction, and Wounded Hearts in the Fiction of Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris

Three notable features mark the fiction of Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris. First, their work, at least until not long before Dorris’s death in 1997, was the product of an intense and unusual professional and personal partnership. As both authors told interviewers, they collaborated extensively; both would “do the research, develop the plot and characters, discuss all aspects of the work, and ultimately agree on every word before it is submitted for publication” (Chavkin and Chavkin, Conversations ix–x). Their shared interest in each other’s writings was so intense and their fictional situations were so vividly real for them that they said they would dream about their plots and discuss their characters as if they were part of their everyday lives. Dorris said that while out at a restaurant, “we imagine what so-and-so would order from the menu, and what so-and-so would choose from this catalog, so that we get to know them in a full way” (Coltelli 27–28). This example illustrates only one manifestation of the intimate overlap Dorris and Erdrich experienced between their professional lives as authors and their personal lives as a married couple. Their method of working together demonstrates the communal function of literature as well as a “conversational process of collaboration” (Brady 307). Moreover, the complicated interaction and interdependence featured in the authors’ lives and work also appear in the lives and situations of their characters. The second notable feature of Erdrich’s and Dorris’s fiction pertains to the complexity of establishing identity in a moving world. Perhaps because the authors, complicated people themselves, did, as Dorris said, talk about, dream about, and imagine their characters as completely real people, their characters are shaded to the degree


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that understanding them can be as perplexing as trying to understand one’s own family members. They not only defy simple, easy, or certain definition because of their fullness, but they are also complicated because they are set against shifting points of reference. The narrative structures of Dorris’s and, especially, Erdrich’s novels contribute to this sense of shifting identity because they rely on various voices, often in nonchronologically sequenced episodes, to tell their stories. As a result, the reader discovers the characters from competing perspectives and angles. Beyond their round characterizations or their narrative intricacies, however, the novels of these two authors emphasize complex identities by presenting characters who have murky personal histories, who rely on multiple mythic systems, and whose ancestral memories derive from various ethnic paradigms. Like the authors themselves, their characters move in various communities and acknowledge their multiple and sometimes tangled strands of Indian and European roots. Indian, by the way, is the term of reference used by Erdrich and Dorris, and they have specifically used the word while discussing issues of language, gender, and community. For example, Dorris told Malcolm Jones, “ ‘Love Medicine focuses on the community and not on the conflict between Indians and non-Indians’ ” (Jones 7), while Erdrich commented to Laura Coltelli, “ ‘Almost all American Indian writers speak English as their main language, as their first language, but they all come out of a different heritage, background, a different world view, a different mythology’ ” (Coltelli 24). A third notable feature marking the fiction of Erdrich and Dorris is that virtually all of their characters, despite their depth and complexity, arrive at a crossroads where they must choose between paths that lead toward isolation and destruction or paths that lead toward community and love. Occasionally, some characters travel in one direction or the other without much conscious thought, while, for some others, the tracks to the two destinations run parallel or overlap for a short period. Few manage to stay consistently on a path to love and wholeness, but destruction and unhappiness lie at the end of many paths constructed by bitterness, fraud, hatred, self-deception, cruelty, betrayal, or despair. Even individuals whose hearts turn toward love may face breakdowns or allow their troubles to detour them temporarily. The forces of love and wholeness and the forces of fragmentation and destruction simultaneously attract and repel the various characters. While facing the inevitable sorrows of life, many characters choose to focus on their own losses, problems, or imperfections, while only a few continue to reach for love, hope, and connection.


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These three notable features—the authors’ shared responsibilities for their writings; the complexities with which they present individual identities within an ethnically mixed milieu; and the characters’ difficult choices as they work through their problems and move toward love or destruction—have direct implications for the themes of language, gender, and community, and for the lives of Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris. Scott Bradfield has said of Dorris, “In everything he wrote, he was concerned with the ways people reach out to each other to make an intimate connection” (22), and numerous studies, including, for example, dissertations by Eileen Quinlan, Karen Wallace, Nancy Dayton, and Sarah Aguiar, have commented upon the importance of narrative for building communities and forming identities in Erdrich’s fiction. Although these two authors and many of their characters aim for mutual communication, satisfying crossgender relationships, and a harmonious balance between the self and the group, they achieve such goals only in fleeting moments. More predominantly, Erdrich and Dorris reveal wounded hearts in their lives and in their fiction. The suicide of Michael Dorris in April 1997 stands as evidence of deep pain in their lives but cannot overshadow or obliterate their accomplishments and literary achievements. Michael Dorris, born in 1945, claimed Irish, French, and, on his father’s side, Modoc ancestry. However, questions have been raised about Dorris’s Indian roots. Eric Konigsberg, for example, has noted that Dorris’s “blood connection to the Modoc nation has been challenged by other Native American writers since the publication of Yellow Raft. Dorris is the only prominent Indian novelist to write about tribes other than his own” (37). Konigsberg goes on to say, “Neither the Modoc Nation in Oklahoma nor the one in Oregon has any record of Michael Dorris’s ever having been enrolled” and then suggests that Dorris may have descended from a white man named Dorris who befriended the West Coast Modocs around 1875 (70). In turn, however, uncertainty has been expressed about aspects of Konigsberg’s New York essay; writing in The Washington Post, David Streitfeld refers to it as “a mountain of misinformation” (F1). Nonetheless, many accounts about Dorris’s personal life and family history circulated after his death in popular and mainstream presses, as in, to cite a few, a Time article by Elizabeth Gleick, a People story by Michelle Green, Colin Covert’s front-page article in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, a Newsweek report by Malcolm Jones and Brad Stone, and the report “Friends Struggle.” Many facts about Dorris’s life are not clear, at least not publicly, and there is also no public certainty about what Dorris knew of his


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own family history. He grew up with his mother and her female relatives in Kentucky, his father having reportedly died in Europe while serving in the army at the end of World War II. The circumstances of Dorris’s father’s death, life, and genealogy may have been variously known and understood by Dorris at different points in time. David McNab asserts, based on Dorris’s Paper Trail, that Dorris’s “ ‘Indian’ identity was constructed for him by his female relatives to avoid the reality that he was part African-American to protect him from the racism and race laws of Kentucky” (111). If this were to be the case, his real-life situation would be similar to the “Italian” identity created for Elgin in Cloud Chamber. McNab describes Cloud Chamber as “significant for this story of Dorris’s life and work” and says that in it “he reveals the truth about himself and his family history” (114). What is clear, whatever the complete facts may be, and whether or not Dorris intended to infuse his fiction with autobiography, is that the themes of his life and fiction bear similarities, most especially the themes of shifting identities and the themes of love and destruction. At the heart of those themes lies the fundamental quest for individual and community identity, which can be painful and which can lead to painful consequences. As Catherine Walsh said in reflecting on his death, “One simple, profound lesson that has settled in my soul this week is the realization that human beings—no matter what their accomplishments or level of self-awareness—are vulnerable, fragile, complex creatures who ultimately remain mysteries to one another and to themselves” (7). Scott Bradfield adds that Dorris’s death “robbed everyone . . . of a staunch advocate of the ideal of community” (22). Louise Erdrich was born in 1954 in Minnesota; her mother’s family claimed French and Ojibwa roots, and her father’s family was German. Her maternal grandfather was tribal chairman of the Turtle Mountain Reservation in North Dakota, and she is a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. Her parents worked as teachers in a Bureau of Indian Affairs school in North Dakota when she was growing up. The characters in her novels, from Love Medicine to The Master Butchers Singing Club to The Plague of Doves, depict people of Indian, European, and mixed American heritages. Her public comments about her personal life have been limited since Dorris’s death, but she opened her 1997 convocation speech at Dartmouth by identifying herself as “someone whose biggest accomplishment has been to fail, and fail with all her heart, at many things.” Interviewing Erdrich for a 2001 Time article, Paul Gray noted that she declined to discuss her new baby’s father, saying, “ ‘why would I ever talk about


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the father of my children again? It seems as though to talk about the people you love is almost . . . what did the Greeks believe? You don’t want to incur the wrath of the gods’ ” (78). In a 2003 interview with Jeff Baenen, Erdrich alluded to Dorris’s suicide, but said that when she looked at her children, she saw the best part of him. In a 2009 interview with Diane Brown, she observed that as she gets older she gains more appreciation for the connections that exist between her characters and between her characters and actual events. Erdrich has also said that her 2010 novel Shadow Tag is not about her marriage to Michael Dorris, but the marital issues portrayed in the book have drawn comparisons to her life (Lynn Neary, online). Michael Dorris earned his undergraduate degree in English and classics from Georgetown University and then did graduate work in anthropology at Yale. He joined the faculty at Dartmouth to start the Native American Studies Program in 1972, the year that Erdrich arrived at Dartmouth to study English in the school’s first coeducational class. After completing her undergraduate studies, Erdrich went on to graduate work in creative writing at Johns Hopkins. The two continued to correspond, however, and their relationship bloomed after she returned to Dartmouth in 1979 to give a poetry reading and then again in 1980 to serve as writer-in-residence. They commenced work on a manuscript she had begun previously, and, as Dorris said, “ ‘We started on it in January, fell in love, and were married in October [of 1981]’ ” (Grantham 13). As a single man, Dorris had adopted three children, all of Sioux ancestry, whom Erdrich also adopted following their marriage. During the 1980s, they had more children together as their literary and personal collaborations flourished. Each had achieved some publishing success before their marriage. Dorris had written poems anthologized in Best American Verse and had completed a nonfiction book, Native Americans: Five Hundred Years After. Erdrich had received attention for her short fiction and poetry and had been granted a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship. Shortly after their marriage, they penned stories for a popular audience under the pseudonym Milou North (Milou being a blend of initial sounds in the names Michael and Louise). Then, according to the account they gave interviewer Shelby Grantham, Dorris’s aunt called to their attention a literary prize with an imminent deadline. Despite houseguests, children home on holiday, and Dorris immobile from a sprained back, Erdrich began to write. With Erdrich as primary author and Dorris as critic and editor, they completed the piece just under the deadline. Not only did the story, “The World’s Greatest




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Fisherman,” win the $5,000 prize for the 1982 Nelson Algren Award for fiction, but it also evolved into the beginning of Love Medicine. Much praised and the recipient of many accolades, including the 1984 National Book Critics Circle award, Love Medicine did not get a favorable reception when first sent to an agent, but Dorris refused to give up and, as described in their joint interview in Conversations with American Novelists, established himself as Erdrich’s agent to promote and sell the book (“Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris” 87). Their close and unusual collaboration continued through the publication of subsequent volumes. One might imagine that such a writing environment, combined with the chaos associated with several children, book tours, and academic demands, would be not only hectic but also smothering. As interviewer Dan Cryer wrote, “Sit down for an interview with novelist Louise Erdrich, and you will find another writer by her side, her husband, Michael Dorris. Ask her a question, and he is as likely to answer as she is” (81). But, at least in the interviews they granted until about 1993, they professed to trust and value each other’s input. In talking to Cryer, for example, Erdrich credited Dorris for her success, saying that she was expecting constant rejection slips and had decided, “ ‘I thought I’d give myself a certain amount of time and then I’d quit. And then I got married to Michael and things changed because of our collaboration’ ” (82). Erdrich also asserted to Chavkin and Chavkin in “An Interview with Louise Erdrich” that her ideal reader was her husband (243), and in his interview with Chavkin and Chavkin, Dorris said that Erdrich was his ideal reader (193). Indeed, their union was fruitful, in quality and quantity. Dorris’s A Guide to Research on North American Indians (written with Hirschfelder and Byler) was selected as an Outstanding Academic Book by Choice. His book about his experiences with his first adopted son and fetal alcohol syndrome, The Broken Cord, received the National Book Critics Circle Award and was made into an award-winning movie for television. He also published short story collections, books for children, and two novels, A Yellow Raft in Blue Water and Cloud Chamber, in addition to the novel co-authored with Erdrich, The Crown of Columbus. Critical and popular acclaim has been given to Erdrich’s many novels, especially Love Medicine, The Beet Queen, and Tracks. In addition to winning a Guggenheim Award and receiving numerous honors for her fiction, she has written for children and published volumes of poetry and nonfiction. Happiness did not necessarily accompany these accomplishments, however. Terry Lee has commented that “Scholars have been silent


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about Dorris’s work on the whole” and that “In the media, his work has been well received but treated superficially” (211). Dorris’s work has received less scholarly commentary than Erdrich’s, but hurtful reviews and negative criticism can be found for both. Expressing sentiments well understood by any author, Dorris told the Chavkins, “The only times I have become annoyed with reviewers is when they don’t read what’s on the page or criticize something that isn’t there, bring their own agenda to a review that in a sense manufactures a hypothetical flawed book and then attributes me as its author” (193). He did, however, admit to being “furious” (205) with an article that attacked and, he felt, misrepresented his ideas in The Broken Cord. For her part, Erdrich told the Chavkins that she customarily waits at least a year before reading reviews of her books (240), and, when pressed with persistent questions about harsh comments made by Leslie Silko, finally said, “ ‘What’s all this about Silko? I’ve always liked her work, and especially admire Ceremony’ ” (238). In any case, the taint of success, including news of Harper & Row’s purchase of The Crown of Columbus for $1.5 million on the basis of a five-page proposal (Passaro 158; Madsen, “On Subjectivity” 82), brought a degree of notoriety. Incessant questions about their ethnic identity and the inevitable stress from people expecting them to be spokespersons for Native Americans must have been difficult. In fact, as part of her interview with Chavkin and Chavkin, Erdrich attributed the expectation that she and Dorris should focus on Native Americans to be at the heart of Silko’s remarks about The Beet Queen. Erdrich said, in response to Silko’s criticism, “Honestly, here is what I think happened. Leslie Silko . . . thought the main characters were Chippewa when they were actually depression-era Poles and Germans. It’s no wonder that she wrote a diatribe. They must have seemed shockingly assimilated” (237). Erdrich and Dorris, who drew on their mix of experiences and ethnicities throughout their fiction, expressed to Chavkin and Chavkin “frustration” about “being identified as ethnic writers rather than as writers who happened to be mixed bloods and sometimes wrote about American Indians” (195). Dorris added that their constant identification as ethnic writers constructed a “self-perpetuating literary ghetto that’s totally unnecessary and sometimes very insulting” (195). Some critics have accepted this point. For example, in her discussion of The Crown of Columbus, Susan Farrell observes that “the hard and fast distinction between ‘Indian’ and ‘non-Indian,’ between contemporary American culture and traditional native cultures, seems to be exactly what Erdrich and Dorris work to debunk in this novel as well as in their earlier work”




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(123). Likewise, Dennis Cutchins argues in an extended comparison of Zora Neale Hurston and Louise Erdrich that authors overcome racial stereotyping by moving beyond race as their primary trope and by portraying life fully and wholly (9). Still, public scrutiny must have taken a toll on Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris, and on their personal relationships. In the Chavkins’ collection of interviews dated from 1985 to 1993, a change in the authors’ attitudes is apparent. In earlier sessions, they entertained the interviewers in their home. In the later interviews, they met away from their home and even conducted some conversations by phone or by mail. Such a shift is surely not just a consequence of their increased fame and fortune. Erdrich admitted to finding book tours “excruciating” (Chavkin and Chavkin 240) and added, That’s the reason I end up after three weeks of interviews and readings drinking Maalox from wineglasses, and why I carry sleeping pills along. I don’t know how public people endure the constant pressure of being with and trying to please others. Trying to amuse people, being constantly judged, sizing up interviewers, repeating stories about oneself—all of these things make me acutely nervous. Michael once called me from a book tour and said woefully, “I’m so tired of myself.” I knew how he felt. . . . (240)

In some of their interviews and publications, the authors open up about their private lives, but answering the same questions over and over and being expected to reveal intimate feelings to strangers would be wearying for anyone. The pain of later years would have been particularly difficult, given its contrast with the happy inseparability they projected earlier. The wounded hearts of Dorris and Erdrich themselves are not the focus of this chapter and are not the public’s business, except to the extent that they have affected the writers’ public work, but some context about the authors’ personal situations may help us understand what lies behind the wounded hearts and the themes of love and destruction portrayed in their fiction.

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Collaborations, complex identities, and moments of life decision are foregrounded in Erdrich and Dorris’s 1991 The Crown of Columbus. These features, in turn, undergird the themes of language, gender, and community that figure prominently in this novel. Although the authors have interwoven themes and features artfully, the book


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is accessible on many levels. The story is told, for the most part, in chronological sequence. Various characters narrate individual chapters, but the majority of the novel is filtered through the perspectives of the two main characters: Vivian Twostar and Roger Williams. Both are professors at Dartmouth, she an assistant professor of anthropology whose approaching tenure decision looks uncertain without more publications, and he a senior English professor, a poet well known and critically applauded. He has been working for years on a poem about Columbus; she has been coerced into writing something “from the Native American perspective” for the school’s alumni magazine regarding the quincentennial of Columbus’s arrival in the new world. Roger comes from a patrician New England family and lives alone. Vivian hails from Idaho and lives with her opinionated grandmother and exasperating son Nash. Beyond their shared interest in Columbus, though, they have a more pressing collaboration: during the novel, Vivian gives birth to their child, Violet, though no one outside their closest circle of friends knows that Roger is the baby’s father. The concept of collaboration in The Crown of Columbus relates directly to issues of language, gender, and community for narrators and authors alike. The only novel published under both Erdrich’s and Dorris’s names, it differs from their other books in that here both wrote portions of the original draft. That is, they told interviewer Douglas Foster, the two did not divide their responsibilities so that one person would draft the story and one would revise or critique it, nor did one person write the sections from Roger’s point of view and the other from Vivian’s. Rather, they integrated their separate voices and gendered perspectives to create an imaginary community. As a result, Jamil Khader argues, the novel “articulates a paradoxical and disruptive subjectivity” (81) that poses “in this comic and playful thriller a serious intellectual challenge” and that offers “a much more complicated problematicization of identity production than do the conventional and dull paradigms of authenticity (ethnocentrism) or assimilation” (99). The novel emphasizes the need for adaptation, collaboration, and blending during the process of building community. In the case of building a family community, Vivian must work to include and accommodate her son Nash as she establishes herself professionally, while Roger must learn to accept the disorder of an infant in order to embrace his relationship with Vivian. At least initially, Vivian and Roger are incapable of collaborating on either their Columbus research or on the care of their baby, but they eventually learn to compromise and adapt. Adjustments are also necessary within the




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academic circle at Dartmouth as the college must reevaluate its selfidentity to account for the presence of Vivian and as Vivian must rethink her response to Ivy League New Englanders. When an editor of the alumni magazine first uses the term “Indian” but then changes to “Native American Indian” (15) or when Vivian mistakes Roger for a Catholic when in fact he is “as staunch a Beacon Hill Episcopalian as one was likely to find in academia” (44), the characters are shown using language to envision, with human error but not with malice, ways to categorize and therefore relate to each other. Beyond showing the need for collaboration and adaptation among individuals, The Crown of Columbus demonstrates the importance of collaboration and adaptation in the larger creation of cultural communities. Within the novel, the successes or failures of individual efforts aimed at establishing connections appear to be microcosms of the kinds of success or failure of collaborations related to the existence of larger, even global, communities. On a personal level, when Roger and Vivian fail to collaborate, they risk their Columbus discoveries and their baby. The failure of collaboration on a massive scale can be seen in the Columbus experience—that is, the meeting of multiple cultures that resulted in the destruction of civilizations and the reshaping of the world. Failure to build community has enormous consequences at the individual level as well as at the larger cultural level, yet even the relatively insensitive Roger appreciates the difficulty of making connections due to the sheer size of the world. He frames the problem as a question pertaining to individuals as well as to nations and races: can a person be anything other than disassociated when “the globe is visually revealed each night as a seething anthill, its inhabitants packed tight as Tokyo subway riders? There are too many names to know, too many faces, too many stories” (69). The challenges of identity and community are exacerbated by a large and complex world. The entire plot of The Crown of Columbus hinges on a language issue related to collaboration and community: the translation and interpretation of uncatalogued holdings Vivian discovers in Dartmouth’s archives.1 The materials have been lost for more than a hundred years, much to the distress of the Cobb family, who sent them to the university for verification and translation. The items came into the Cobbs’ possession when a Cobb ancestor traded a ship full of slaves for chests of gold plus a ship’s log alleged to be Columbus’s, along with mysterious shells and a letter said to have been written and signed by Columbus. Decoding these texts becomes the central action of the novel. These rare documents hold different meaning for different


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people. For the last of the Cobbs, the lost pages and inscribed shells contain directions to a buried treasure, a crown “that was the most valuable single thing in fifteenth-century Europe” (262). For Vivian, they offer a claim for Indian rights based on Columbus’s evaluation of one of the natives: “He is clearly a king . . . a Sovereign the equal of Portugal or France, the Lord of all his dominions” (275). Unraveling and reconstructing the meaning of the texts become possible only through collaborative efforts. Miscommunication and competition across lines of gender, age, ethnicity, historical claim, education, and social class nearly block any explications, but some of the message is ultimately understood because of the combined efforts of a diverse group of associates working together. The portrayal of complex identities, highly characteristic of all of Erdrich’s and Dorris’s writings, takes center stage in The Crown of Columbus. Vivian’s Indian heritage forms the core of her identity, but she also internalizes the Eastern philosophy entailed in her son’s martial arts lessons. A figure of public authority as a college professor, at home she is dominated by her strong grandmother and frustrated by her son. Pregnant, unmarried, and approaching forty, she recognizes the value of tenure, but her rebellious spirit will not allow her to curry favor with those of higher rank. These qualities are not just a matter of personality but are also attributed in the text to her mixed-blood heritage: “Coeur d’Alene-Navajo-Irish-Hispanic-Sioux by-marriage” (14). When she goes to the islands to meet with Henry Cobb, she takes on even more contradictions. Of indigenous ancestry, she is a tourist in the Caribbean. By her social and economic position, she is a person of privilege, a status reinforced by the power she holds as possessor of the missing documents, yet her need to handle the situation with care puts her in the position of a penitent. The reader’s understanding of Vivian changes as she is shown in different situations interacting with different people. As Ann Rayson has stated, layers of ambiguity, indecision, and confusion in the novel support the theme of “shifting identities” that emphasizes the multiple forms of expression in the Native American and European American traditions (35). Just as Vivian Twostar surprises everyone she meets, she is upended by her encounter with the eminently complex Christopher Columbus. While the novel was still being written, Dorris told Charles Trueheart that Vivian begins her research with “a very stereotypic view of the inevitability of European and Indian contact . . . And when she goes back and discovers that it could have been different but for a few chance happenings, she and Columbus almost form a relationship” (117). Erdrich and Dorris were impressed with the Columbus they




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discovered. As Erdrich explained to Bill Moyers, who wondered why she and Dorris would even want to write a novel about Columbus, in reading his diary they found the adventurer to be “this truly openhearted man interacting with the natives. . . . Terrible things happened afterward, but the first meeting was genuinely moving, and it intrigued us” (140). Locating the essence of Columbus becomes almost as significant as understanding the documents he left behind. Born in Genoa of Spanish parents, he was, Roger tells Cobb, “ ‘a Jew. He was the son of forcibly converted parents’ ” (295). Columbus’s writings suggest conflicts over the competing sacred and secular aims of his travel, that is, between his mission to convert people to Christianity and his goal of colonizing and finding wealth. Fascinated by the natives he met, he nevertheless enslaved people. While he achieved fame and fortune, he also endured hardship and humiliation, to the point of being returned to Spain in chains during his third voyage. Vince Passaro argues that “the story of Columbus is of an ethnically confused man introducing ethnic confusion to a continent,” that in the novel Vivian identifies with his ethnic diversity, and that “this represents a deeper autobiographical theme” for the authors (165). Passaro may be right, but the authors claimed in their interview with him that the only autobiographical element in the novel is the presence of a crying baby. As for Columbus’s identity, within the novel, Roger frets over locating the truth about Columbus but finally decides, in words that Updike’s Alf Clayton might have uttered regarding President Buchanan or that Lee’s Henry Park might have spoken about Councilman Kwang, “Who he really was was at once irrelevant and crucial, an enigma that, if repeatedly solved, could never be allowed to disappear. He stands for the question mark of history” (318). Perhaps Dorris best explained the Columbus who looms in the background of the novel when he told Douglas Foster, “Columbus is a metaphor. His name stands for a notion of encounter of the unexpected” (169). Although the novel contains elements pleasing to a popular audience, it destabilizes conventionality by making the pursuit of truth, identity, and community relationships fundamentally elusive. Encounters with the unexpected occur throughout, as when Roger, missing and presumed dead, is found trapped in the very cave that hides the crown of Columbus. When he is rescued and learns that baby Violet also survived Cobb’s evil scheme, Roger turns to Nash, who reports, “our eyes connected. More than our eyes” (478). In other words, the intervention of the unexpected makes connection possible on the individual level just as it makes possible


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connections on a broader historical scale. Vivian’s surprise discovery of the Columbus materials represents yet another encounter of the unexpected and shows that some adventures are possible only for those who are open to new ways of thinking. After all, colleagues working for years in Dartmouth’s library are convinced that nothing new remains there. In her seminar on pre-1492 tribes, Vivian explains to her students that language played a vital role in the encounters following 1492 and in modern-day interpretations of those events. Without a writing system, Indians could not record their version of the encounter, so a retrospective analysis depends on reading between the lines of the European accounts (110–11). According to Vivian, the linguistic and cultural diversity of the Indians contributed to their susceptibility to the Europeans. Because of differences in their languages and cultures, she says, the tribes expected diversity and were not threatened by it. But because of their language differences, she adds, they could not easily communicate and collaborate once the threatening possibilities of the European presence became evident. Linguistic diversity cannot be blamed for the Indians’ demise, however, because something unexpected intervened into the already unexpected encounter: the introduction of European germs to which North Americans had limited immunity. Yet, the novel does not present the modern message of the Columbus encounter to be about the relative merits of linguistic diversity or about impediments to the Indians’ biological, social, or political resistance to the Europeans. Rather, as Dorris told Douglas Foster, the contemporary message is about the failure of “rigidity in the face of a dynamic world,” and about the need “to be open to possibility” (170). Within this context, the novel shows, as Thomas Matchie has said, how “America is continually rediscovered in every age” (“Exploring” 249). As does all the fiction in this study, Erdrich and Dorris’s novel establishes language and, in particular, storytelling, to be the means by which people discern truth. It is noteworthy that Columbus’s cosmology and life choices derived from beliefs about language. As Roger explains at one point to Cobb, Columbus had a



reverence for names themselves, for symbols, letters. He believed that when God was about to create the world by His word, His word, mind you, the twenty-three letters of the alphabet descended from the terrible crown of God where they were engraved with a pen of fire. The letters stood at God’s feet and one by one they begged, Create the world through me. (296)


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Columbus’s belief resonates with Vivian and Roger. Having survived Cobb’s attempt to kill them and take the Columbus documents— that act being a deliberate choice of destruction—Vivian and Roger make a choice to change their personal and professional lives. Dorris explained to Vince Passaro, “ ‘We were interested in . . . newness and freshness, the discovery of a lost thing, which is the basis for their relationship’ ” (165). The “lost thing,” which revitalizes the characters’ commitment to each other, is not the Columbus material in the library or even the crown in the cave but, rather, baby Violet. Vivian and Roger decide that their real treasure resides not in their work, as important as that continues to be, but in their child. Critics such as Hans Bak see the novel’s ending as “romanticized and consumerized” in that “the historical motif is made subservient to the personal motif” (113), but others such as Helmbrecht Breinig see sophistication in “the powerful tension between its popular fiction appeal and its thematic and aesthetic complexity” (342). The Crown of Columbus reaches a happier conclusion than the authors’ later fiction. This may be due in part to Crown of Columbus being a more commercial book and in part to the states of the authors’ lives when they wrote their other novels. However, the happiness here can also be traced to the emphasis on baby Violet’s role as a representative of the future who incorporates past and present, Indian and European. Still, even in a novel in which all is well that ends well, a sense of pain lingers through the image of the crown. While Erdrich told Douglas Foster that the novel is more “about the process of discovering than about the discovery itself” (171), the discovery of the crown adds a dark tone to the novel’s happy ending. Inscriptions on the shells turn out to give directions to Columbus’s buried treasure. Puzzles within puzzles about the rumored crown of Columbus have gone unrecognized or misunderstood for centuries, but on the third day—a notable time period for the theme of resurrection—of searching for Roger after Cobb’s attack, Vivian finds herself walking in an area that brings to mind passages written on the shells. By following clues from the shells, she locates the cave containing the hidden crown. That cave also turns out to be the place where Roger is held captive. As Dorris told the Chavkins, when Vivian and Roger emerge together from the cave, they replicate “the Navaho creation myth in which first man and first woman emerge into a new world from an underground place” (209). Here and elsewhere, native and Christian beliefs intermingle. Those who had previously heard of a missing crown had assumed that a jewel-encrusted object would have been the most valued


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treasure of fifteenth-century Europe. What Vivian and Roger find is a sealed glass container that Vivian breaks to reveal a crown of thorns. The ultimate Christian symbol of pain and redemption, suffering and triumph, love and hate, community and division, power and powerlessness, a crown of thorns also represents the consequences of the Columbus experience. Expecting gold and riches, those who came to the new world brought and found pain and suffering. The crown of thorns is not an imperial crown but a “mock version fashioned for Christ by intolerant contemporaries who believed in their exceptionalism and election” (Cid 348). Thus, as Teresa Cid says, borrowing a phrase from Samuel Huntington, “the promise of America . . . turns out to be . . . ‘the promise of disharmony’ ” (348). As Vivian breaks the glass container, a strange wind blows: “Before we could react the Crown was lifted, set down again, but its circle didn’t separate. Only the thorns fell off, every one” (492). The intact circle might represent the cycle of history, the cycle of storytelling, and the unity of all people. Though the reader is led to assume that Columbus believed the crown to be authentic, clues suggest it may have been a fake. A coda, written by Roger months after the events of the story, reports that few scholars maintained interest in the crown, that one thorn was tested with inconclusive results and the Catholic Church decided not to take a position on its authenticity because the crown “was more important as metaphor than as object” (501), but that a Bahamian postage stamp was issued in its honor. And so, while the story ends with Vivian and Roger united and Violet offering hope for the future, the novel also ends with the rest of the world commercializing, misunderstanding, failing to recognize, and unable to know the meaning of a crown of thorns possibly brought by Columbus to the new world.

C LOU D C H AMBER Epitomized by the crown of thorns, a sense of betrayal accompanied by the possibility of redemption underlies The Crown of Columbus. A similar pairing of despair and hope exists in subsequent novels by Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich, though the tone further darkens. Dorris’s 1997 Cloud Chamber depicts many painful experiences, though it does end with an inclusive and healing last line as Rayona invites a friend into the family circle, saying, “ ‘There’s room for everybody’ ” (316). The suicide of Michael Dorris shortly after the book’s publication renders its mixture of hope and despair especially poignant, but, even setting aside the tragedy of Dorris’s death, the




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lives of all the characters within the novel are shaped by emotional trauma. As the plot lines trace a family over several generations, it is almost as if members of the family have an innate drive to choose the most destructive path available. Each generation of the family reacts, sometimes unconsciously, to what has transpired in earlier generations. Rose Mannion, whose actions set the cycle of the book into motion, traces her physical appearance to “a shipwrecked Spaniard off the Armada” who washed up on Irish shores (13), and her rash behavior can be attributed to her loyalty to her father “rotting or worse in an English jail” (21–22). While working in McGarry’s Pub, seventeen-year-old Rose hears the daring Gerry Lynch sing a song in which he imagines her mother warning that he cannot marry her daughter, “ ‘Unless you take her father’s oath/And swear your life to Ireland’ ” (16). The song angers Rose because it speaks lightly of her deceased mother and attributes to her father an oath he never made. Gerry lacks Rose’s reverence for words, defending himself with, “ ‘It’s only a ditty. . . . It’s nothing but a word that fits the meter’ ” (17). Further incensed, Rose vows she will not, in fact, marry until Ireland is free. Though astounded that a young girl would “ ‘swear a man’s oath’ ” (21), the men present join in support of her goal, and Gerry’s ballad becomes their anthem. Rose’s words in a moment of instant decision shape the rest of her life and the lives of her descendants. Gerry later confides to Rose that he supports the English and is acting as an undercover agent against Ireland. She loves him but refuses to keep his secret like “a muzzled nun” (27). Instead, she helps set a trap that reveals him to be a traitor. After he is hanged, she orders a table made from the tree on which he is executed. The table becomes her most prized possession, a constant reminder of her passion and betrayal. Fleeing the English, Rose takes the table to America along with Martin McGarry, the man Gerry Lynch betrayed to the English. Ironically, Martin only volunteered to be a messenger for the Irish because he wanted Rose to notice him; he carried “words I didn’t comprehend . . . to men for whom I was but the echoed voice of my betters” (32). Rose weds Martin but despises him for not being bold like Gerry Lynch. Her first baby, Martin knows, is Gerry’s child. That boy, Andrew, who is his mother’s favorite, becomes a priest. Rose’s second child, Robert, for whom Martin is the biological as well as legal father, marries a bitter woman who despises him for his weakness just as Rose despised his father, and his wife loves his brother just as his mother loved Gerry Lynch. Robert acknowledges that his neighbors in Thebes,


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Kentucky, “observed that by design or accident, I had gone and married my mother” (73). Images in the novel suggest themes of fated entrapment. When Rose looks out the window at McGarry’s Pub, she considers the “sweep and dip of the land bisected and angled into small plots by stone fences” to be “a maze without escape” (14). She manages to escape her village, but she can never escape the limitations of her own personality. In the next generation, Robert resolves “to quit Thebes, to take Bridie and the girls and begin again in a city where my family lacked the curse of a history” (59). He, like his mother, escapes one maze only to be caught in another constructed of the very elements that allowed escape in the first place. Echoes of the past—his mother’s pride and discontent, his wife’s disdain for him and love for his brother, and his own weaknesses—eat away at him. Like Oedipus, the harder he tries to flee, the faster he approaches his destiny. Discovering a stash of love letters from his brother to his wife, he realizes how things stand and thinks, “Memory is paradise denied. The garden was not the same lived as when recalled, and only when the gates forever close does the view between their bars achieve a true perspective” (65). Looking back on his marriage through a permanently closed gate, he can only peer helplessly through the bars. Language figures prominently in the characters’ betrayals and entrapments. Just as his biological father was undone by traitorous words and his confession to Rose, and just as his legal father was undone by his role as messenger of words he never understood, Andrew is undone by his confessions to his sister-in-law Bridie. His declarations of love to his brother’s wife lead him to renounce his priestly vows and take a job with the railroad, where he is killed on his first day at work. When Robert discovers the letters that reveal his wife and brother’s love for each other, his first thoughts are of language; he desires to apologize for “not being all a woman could reasonably expect” (71). He expresses despair where “there’s nothing left, except yourself, sorry, sad, shying from the memories, wincing at the words, guilty, alone, defenseless, worse than before, undone” (71). He even loses his ability to speak after he realizes his mother knew about Bridie and Andrew all along: “She had sucked the voice from me” (72). Raised in an atmosphere charged with resentment between the sexes, Marcella and Edna have heard every cruel word possible about their father Robert and have witnessed for themselves his weaknesses, but still they love him. Their odd upbringing and the tension between their parents and grandmother affect them so deeply that they have




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difficulty establishing relationships with other people. Edna never marries, and Marcella is once so confused about the facts of life that she goes to a clinic thinking she may be pregnant after a man tells her he loves her. Brought up in poverty and strict Catholicism in Louisville, Kentucky, sent out to work at an early age, and forced into sanitariums while still young because of tuberculosis, they thirst for fuller life experience. Occasional vacations provide clues that the language, relationships, and community connections they know are not the only patterns possible. When they travel to a convent in Duluth to visit a friend’s cousin, for example, they are surprised to learn about a maverick saint, Louise de Marillac, who founded “ ‘the Daughters of Charity, a radical sort of religious community. . . . No vows, talk your heads off’ ” (139). In addition to her unique approach to language and community, Louise had different ideas about gender: “ ‘she was a woman’s woman—men had very little part in what she did’ ” (139). The sisters’ outside experiences tantalize them with the possibilities of other life paths. Although Edna accepts her way of life, Marcella makes a choice that changes the direction of the family. In the sanitarium, she engages in a hasty affair with a young man, Earl Taylor, who delivers food from his father’s grocery. They fall in love, her lung condition improves—as Earl tells her, “ ‘Love medicine cures all ailments’ ” (164)—and they run away to be married when she becomes pregnant. They must run because their union would be illegal in Kentucky, for, as Marcella tells Edna, “ ‘Earl is a Negro’ ” (166). At first, Marcella’s letters from California indicate happiness, but then Earl enlists in the army to avoid being drafted, and, just before his European tour of duty is over and he is due to return to the states, Marcella is told that he died in an accident. She returns to Louisville to live with her mother and sister, but everyone’s life is changed by the existence of Marcella and Earl’s son Elgin. Marcella and Earl experience pain because their relationship is forbidden by custom and law, but at least they are acting with free will when they become involved with each other. The isolation and estrangement of their son Elgin are due to forces entirely beyond his control, and he develops a complicated sense of identity to cope with his situation. Elgin realizes, “We shared a wide-ranging secret life, my family and I” (191). On visits to his father’s family, he would live in the black community, but with his mother, he would be part of the white community. Loved by both sides of his family even though they have nothing to do with each other, he is viewed suspiciously by the outside world because of his ambiguous color. He and his mother’s


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family behave “like the remnants of an endangered tribe—hostile to strangers, reluctantly accommodating of each other, in solid agreement as to the external boundaries of our available territory” (194). In addition to growing up without being clearly in or out of either the black or the white communities, Elgin does not develop a sense of how men and women interact in his all-female household. He misses a male presence and feels that he needs to learn how to talk with men, but he is powerless to supply the missing elements: “I knew no men well enough to insert myself into their company and learn” (187). Regarding the language of his mother, aunt, and grandmother, he notes, “there was a constant hum. . . . I lived as if inside a room of benign mosquitoes—all whine and no bite” (186). He knows that their nonstop talk is meant to avoid “the desperately important matters from which we shied away” (187). As he gets older, he can no longer avoid facing those issues: “In eleventh grade no one would be my date for the junior prom. In twelfth grade I was refused service in a restaurant” (195). Doubly hurt, first by prejudice itself but second by his lack of preparation to deal with it, he does not know where to turn until one of his paternal cousins suggests he follow his father’s footsteps and join the army. In the army, Elgin is assigned to be a waiter at an officer’s club not far from where his father had been stationed in Germany. He feels lonely, but a black captain from Seattle befriends him. Other soldiers tease Elgin about having a “ ‘boyfriend’ ” (221), but he sees Paul Jenkins only as a father figure. When Paul hears the story about Elgin’s father, he offers to take Elgin to the site where his father supposedly drowned. Elgin thinks of the trip as a chance to see where his father last lived, but Paul views the trip as an opportunity to develop more than friendship. Neither plan is realized. At the accident site, they find people staring at them, not because they are Americans, not because they are black, and not because they are two men out together, but because Elgin bears a striking resemblance to a girl in town. Someone brings the girl to meet him, and they look enough alike to be twins. The young woman reveals that her father was Earl Taylor, and that Earl, who had died only three years earlier, stayed in Germany to avoid, he said, the racism of America. Their translation skills falter, so Elgin and his half-sister “just looked at each other, shocked and sad, but still with one more human connection than either of us had ever before suspected we possessed” (235). Though Paul tries to comfort him, the two men become estranged out of embarrassment for their awareness of each other’s secrets. Elgin signs up for a second tour “because I wasn’t ready to go home—like father




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like son, I suppose” (237). He talks as little as possible so that people would never guess “my true identity: a son not worth coming home to meet” (237). Disturbing autobiographical connections suggest themselves in light of Dorris’s own family history and suicide. Like Elgin, Dorris was raised by his mother in an all-female household in Kentucky, with, he said, occasional visits to his father’s relatives. Though Dorris publicly claimed that his father died in a jeep accident in Germany, later reports assert that he learned while in college that his father had committed suicide (Jones and Stone 83). In an interview with Dulcy Brainard, Dorris described an upbringing similar to the one he creates for his character Elgin. About his own life, he disclosed, I have this very rich background of grandmothers and aunts and a mother. . . . They could kill me for telling this, but sometimes on Sunday afternoons, they’d lock the door to the house, everyone would dress up and we’d sit at the dining room table and have lunch. If it were later, at night, they’d call it the Stork Club. Everything they did was wonderful. When you don’t have a lot of things, every event becomes special. (136)

This personal history translates directly into the following passage told from Elgin’s point of view in Cloud Chamber: We made the most of our time, turning even the most ordinary event into a production. Before bed at night we’d call the kitchen table “The Stork Club” and pretend that our chocolate milk and cups of tea were dry martinis. Before Sunday dinner we locked the doors, pulled down the shades and dressed up: me in a sports coat and tie, my mother and aunt in evening gowns from their youth now stored in keepsake trunks, my grandmother in her best hat. . . . (194)

In the novel, Elgin feels he was “a son not worth coming home to meet” (237) and sees himself repeating his father’s life path, “like father like son” (237). Dorris may or may not have intended to foreshadow his own suicide, for he rejected most autobiographical interpretations of his work—“ ‘We don’t write autobiographically’ ” he warned Vince Passaro (165)—but the pain of wounded hearts is clear in both his own life and the lives of his characters. One of the truths of life as well as literature, however, is that when everything is over, there is still more. Happily, Cloud Chamber does not stop with the story of Elgin, but continues another generation to end with a powwow, a coming together, a reunion, a naming


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ceremony, for Elgin’s grown daughter Rayona. After separating from the military, Elgin settles in Seattle and meets an Indian woman, Christine, falling in love with her because she is the only person he knows who is “more heart-wasted than I am” (238). The story of Christine and the details of Rayona’s young life are told in Dorris’s first novel A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, which also features intergenerational conflict mixed with interdependence, family secrets, betrayal, and characters with complex identities. A Yellow Raft provides the background for Rayona’s American Indian heritage, while Cloud Chamber fills in the facts of her Irish American and African American genealogy. A product of diverse family lines, Rayona considers herself to be the result of a “DNA lottery” (309). From the information in A Yellow Raft in Blue Water as well as in Cloud Chamber, Rayona has every excuse not to be a grounded, sensible, caring person. Her father Elgin drops in and out of her life. Her mother Christine fights drug addictions and illnesses. Her mother’s mother, Ida, is really her mother’s half-sister, who shortchanged her own life by accepting the responsibility for Christine in order to keep a family secret and avoid scandal; Ida, who usually “will talk only in Indian” (Yellow Raft 35) even if others do not understand her, is a bitter person, who, like Bridie on Rayona’s Irish side of the family, never experienced complete happiness with or without a man and who, like Rose on the Irish side of the family, lost to an early death the child she favored (her son Lee) and never gave her other child (her adopted child Christine) a full measure of motherly love. Rayona grows up in poverty. A priest abuses her. When she runs away from home, no one bothers to look for her. She is not clearly European American, African American, or Native American in her physical appearance or in her cultural identification. Yet, somehow, these circumstances have made Rayona a tough but kind person who sees the need for interdependence, who accepts her various identities, and who clearly chooses, in the last line of the novel, a path toward love and inclusion when she invites Dayton Nickels to sit with the family: “ ‘I brought an extra chair, special. Yours. There’s room for everybody’ ” (316). By taking the name Rose in her naming ceremony, Rayona links herself to her matriarchal line even though she knows nothing about the original Rose Mannion. Cloud Chamber ends with hope because Rayona is, like Rose, a hardy survivor, but, unlike Rose, she is a loving person. Rayona combines the strength of her female ancestors with the kindness of her male ancestors while avoiding the weaknesses that ruined both. Instead of focusing on betrayal, brokenness, and loss, she chooses to live with compassion and love. She accepts people as




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they are, forgiving her family members for their failings, knowing that they were mostly doing the best they could. By including Dayton Nickels, the one person who despite his own outcast status, sexual complications, and miscellaneous problems, stayed loyal to Christine and nursed her in her final illness, Rayona demonstrates the truth of “the big secret: being a family is voluntary duty” (312). She realizes at the powwow that people get their identity from their relationships with each other and weaves together a network of caring people to be part of her family. Just as Rayona knows that her DNA strands are uniquely woven, she realizes that her connections to others are also uniquely braided. The theme of weaving together strands of identity appears commonly in Dorris’s and Erdrich’s fiction. Karen Castellucci Cox is among those who see a weaving theme in Erdrich’s use of multivocal story cycles that the reader must weave together into a coherent narrative. A braiding motif frames A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, and David Cowart credits this novel “with adding fresh inflections to the gendered grammar of weaving,” which, he says, “archetypally, is what women do: they weave, they quilt, they work cloth, they embroider. . . . Women are weavers of their culture and of the world” (6). Cowart argues that in Yellow Raft—and, we might add, in Cloud Chamber—Dorris “seeks to braid more than Indian experience into his novel. He intimates that life on and off the reservation must be understood as part of the larger braiding, the larger weave, of America itself” (1). Listening to family stories, Rayona hears universality in the tales just as she also recognizes the multiple strands of her heritage. According to the tradition of the naming ceremony, Rayona is supposed to give gifts to those who attend, but she actually receives many tangible and intangible gifts. Her father brings himself. Marcella and Edna give her a crystal vase that belonged to her great-great-grandmother Rose. Dayton, who had been her uncle’s best friend, contributes her uncle Lee’s war medal. Ida gives her Indian dress. The jewelry her grandmother presses her to wear on the day of the naming ceremony reflects a mixture of many traditions:


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the earrings, belt buckle, bracelets, clips, and rings have a couple of common denominators. They’re all Hopi or Zuni silver, and they’re all imprinted with some kind of stylized tracks design. The bad news is that these tracks have not been made by the same animal. Badgers roam across one part of me while bears, roadrunners, wildcats, and wolves have left their paw impressions in others. I am decorated like


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The mixture of tribal identifications on Rayona’s clothing and accessories underscores a literary and autobiographical point that Michael Dorris made to interviewer Charles Trueheart: “ ‘There are 300 different tribes and there’s no way we should, or could, be spokespersons for all of them. Plus we’re mixed bloods. . . . So it would be presumptuous to pretend to be more than we are. We can only speak for ourselves’ ” (120). Some readers, though, have been offended by the naming ceremony in the novel. David McNab thinks “the story of the powwow makes a mockery of Indians and their cultures” (117), but in her essay “Where I Ought to Be,” Erdrich describes the devastation of Indian cultures from the 1400s to the 1900s and says, “In light of enormous loss, they [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” (48). Rayona’s mixed apparel does not appear to protect or celebrate the core of any culture except, perhaps, what Thomas Matchie calls a “posttribal” culture (“Posttribal” 33–41). The description of Rayona’s dress and jewelry suggests mixed identities, complex associations, and no small amount of confusion, yet, within the context of the novel, the character Rayona refuses to be limited by other people’s expectations. She recognizes that her garb “might be described as postearthquake Museum of the American Indian,” but, in an epiphany, she also knows that “underneath this chaos I’m still Rayona-soon-to-be-Rose Taylor” (306). The best gift at the naming ceremony, then, is the one Rayona gives to herself, the acceptance of her diverse and unique self. In Rayona’s final line, “ ‘There’s room for everybody,’ ” one member in this family drama finally uses language for acceptance and connection rather than for separation.

TALES

OF

B UR NING L OV E

Toward the end of Michael Dorris’s Cloud Chamber, Ida, prompted by the subject of a talk show she is watching, asks Rayona if she would ever steal a man from her mother. Pausing to look at the motherdaughter panelists on the television screen, Rayona thinks, “I try to imagine the three men who are being fought over. It’s scary” (281). While the women in Louise Erdrich’s Tales of Burning Love are not exactly fighting over Jack Mauser, he is the sun around whom their planets orbit, and their relationships with him are, to use Rayona’s


the gray mud around some forest watering hole five minutes after rush hour. (306)


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term, scary. Whereas Cloud Chamber forms a diachronic study of one family down through time, with the branches clearly arranged as a family tree, Tales of Burning Love presents a synchronic, spokes-ona-wheel, circular exploration of a group of people at the same points in time. Written with more humor than Cloud Chamber, Tales of Burning Love is nevertheless filled with pain and torment for characters seeking love and connection. The book’s title promises scorching sex scenes, which are present, but the polar opposites of fire and ice, both literally and metaphorically, damage lives and wound hearts in this novel. As in other fiction by these two authors, the themes of language, gender, and community emerge through the presentation of issues related to collaboration and interdependence, complex identities, and life-changing decisions. Tales of Burning Love finds its genesis in the same event central to Erdrich’s first novel, Love Medicine, but the differences in the way the two novels develop from that point may be instructive as to the author’s evolving attitudes. In the opening of Love Medicine, the Chippewa woman June Morrissey Kashpaw freezes to death while walking back to the reservation after a sexual encounter with a man she met in a bar. Love Medicine then goes on to present a sweeping view of various relationships between people who were family, friends, or contacts of June, and the power of love is foregrounded in the overall story despite the many traumas endured by individual characters. In the opening of Tales of Burning Love, on the Saturday before Easter, the same event sets the stage for what follows. June meets the mixed-blood Jack Mauser in a bar. His mouth is on fire from a toothache, and he is attempting to dull the pain with alcohol. Without knowing her name—“May? June? Some month” (9)—Jack “marries” June in an unofficial ceremony and drives to the outskirts of town to have sex with her in his truck. “With sinking embarrassment” (9) he finds himself impotent. After trying unsuccessfully to communicate with him, June gets out of the pickup and starts walking into the icy night. Jack continues drinking, the snow continues falling, and a day later when he finally calls the police, they find June frozen in the blizzard. Tales of Burning Love then presents the details of Jack’s subsequent marriages and affairs from various points of view and, except for a relatively hopeful conclusion, the destructive side of love is emphasized in the overall story line. At almost every point in the novel, language, gender, and community intersect with issues of interdependency, complex identities, and choosing a life path toward love or destruction. Just as Cloud Chamber revisits characters from A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, Tales


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of Burning Love incorporates characters from Erdrich’s earlier novels. Thus interlinked, the novels explore sets of exponentially complex repercussions and relationships, a simple outline of which requires several pages in Beidler and Barton’s A Reader’s Guide to the Novels of Louise Erdrich. Even the characters’ drives and destinies are linked in notable ways. In Cloud Chamber, the characters seem to be motivated to choose unerringly the paths most likely to cause them the greatest amount of grief, while in Tales of Burning Love, the characters seem driven to choose the paths that will bring them into the most unlikely human connections imaginable. Margie Towery has observed that Erdrich’s use of interconnections serves to “blur the lines of conventional fiction,” to make the characters “like people you know, whom you might run into at any moment,” and to “deconstruct the novel form” until it comes to resemble oral folklore passed around within a community (108–09). Towery finds that the myriad connections between characters in Erdrich’s work point to a “motif of homecoming . . . typical of Native American novels” (109). Other critics such as Louise Flavin and Robert Silberman have also commented upon the theme of home in fiction by Erdrich and other Native American authors. Silberman, for example, views Erdrich’s presentation in terms of a “dilemma of the individual— home as freedom versus home as trap” (108). William Bevis points out that “In Native American novels, coming home, staying put . . . is a primary good,” but in books such as Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, or Sister Carrie, “American whites keep leaving home” (16). In Tales of Burning Love, the homecoming resolution of the Jack/Dot/Gerry marriage problem brings an end to the ice motif, demonstrates the survivalist strength of all the involved parties, and returns the characters into a proper love alignment. Stories and storytelling, meanwhile, connect the characters to each other and serve as the very means for survival. Events in the novel are framed by two North Dakota blizzards with several fires in between. The first blizzard in which Jack’s first “wife” freezes sets the story into motion, while the second blizzard turns the narrative toward its resolution in a complicated denouement that defies simple summary; as Catherine Rainwater has said, “Erdrich’s texts vex the reader’s diegetic impulse” (415). The second blizzard begins on New Year’s Eve as a fire consumes Jack’s dream house. Drinking because Dot has left him and his construction company is hopelessly in debt, Jack is too inebriated to flee. In imminent danger, he removes his dental work, strips off his clothes, and plunges through a window, falling into the snow just before the




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house collapses. Jack takes refuge in a small building at his company’s headquarters but is presumed dead, some ashy remains identified by dental records. After Jack’s funeral, Dot volunteers to drive the other ex-wives home in a blizzard, but they get stuck together in the snow after picking up what they think is a hitchhiker but is actually Dot’s other husband, Gerry Nanapush, appearing in a preplanned rendezvous. Nanapush, who true to his trickster heritage has escaped from prison, sleeps in the back of the vehicle while the widows tell stories about Jack in order to keep themselves awake and alive during a night of “burning cold” (203). The widows’ stories form the central core of the novel, and through their storytelling they come to understand themselves. In the end, Dot is reunited with Gerry, who eludes the police by driving away in a snowplow. Candice and Marlis, wives three and four, affirm their commitment to each other; to use Jack’s phrasing, they have “gone lesbian” (405). Jack’s creditors, who have suspected his survival, realize they will only get their money back if he goes forward with a plan to build a casino on the reservation, and, after reestablishing his business, Jack returns to his second wife Eleanor in a sizzling sexual encounter. Against the backdrop of extreme elements of fire and ice, people work out their passionate and complicated connections as they make key decisions about their professional futures and personal relationships. Bracketed between dramatic weather and sex in the opening and closing scenes, the characters’ stories reveal their shifting identities, relationships, and attitudes. Karah Stokes has said that “Erdrich’s novels take as their larger subject the act of storytelling itself” (103), and Tales of Burning Love demonstrates what Bill Ott calls “the salvation of love” through “the power of narrative” (1075). Each chapter is written in first person from the point of view of whichever character is telling that portion of the story. The narrative sequencing is circular, sometimes jumping ahead, sometimes backtracking. This technique creates a “participatory narrative” in which the stories “create community and challenge readers to broaden their understanding of both narrative and community” (Hertha Wong 101). Although they contain some archetypal elements, the characters’ stories are mostly detached from tribal legends, cultural myths, religious paradigms, or other symbolic systems found in Erdrich’s earlier novels. As Louis Owens said of The Beet Queen, “there is “no jagged sense of a lost culture. . . . Everyone is in the same boat—Indian or white, heteroor homosexual—and the boat is an emotional dinghy adrift on the mundane sea of mid-America” (54). Eleanor’s voice emerges as the


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most distinct one in the novel, but, as a professor, she is a very verbal person. Eleanor first appears at a Minneapolis restaurant seducing one of her undergraduates. Wearing a red dress and red shoes with four-inch heels, her outward appearance captures the image of the vixen she has become after miserable experiences with many men, fifty or so by her account. After sex with the bewildered undergraduate, Eleanor plans a gender-based, power-leveraged way to humiliate the student in class: “I’ll address a question to him, let a girl answer it” (35). Her thoughts, however, keep returning to her ex-husband Jack Mauser, whom she “missed down through the core of herself. . . . Evidently, she tells herself, Jack matches some hidden paradigm for the way a man should be” (35). After being fired for sexual harassment, she seeks refuge in a religious community in order to live cheaply, practice celibacy, and conduct research on “saintly hungers” (36). At the convent, the object of her study becomes Sister Leopolda, a difficult and cruel person, now one hundred and eight years old, who figures significantly in Erdrich’s other novels. The novel’s title derives from something Sister Leopolda says to Eleanor in an improbable and ironic scene. When Jack learns that Eleanor is staying at a convent adjacent to one of his construction sites, even though he is newly married to Dot, he leaves a note for Eleanor to meet him at midnight in the convent garden. Jack enters the garden in deus ex machina fashion, hoisted aloft by a crane from one of his trucks, but their tryst is interrupted when Sister Leopolda enters the garden to pray. Eleanor places her convent-issued cloak around Jack, who ascends a pedestal from which a cracked statue of the Virgin Mary has recently been removed. Jack’s pedestal placement is undercut as Eleanor begins to speak of her ex-husband, complaining to Leopolda that he was a man who “ ‘wanted everything from me, who was absent half the time, who loved other women, who claimed to love me, but allowed terrible things to happen and could never be counted on’ ” (51). Leopolda replies that these experiences should have given Eleanor practice in loving God and forecasts that Jack will be “ ‘crushed by a woman’ ” who will “ ‘snap his bones like matchsticks and throttle him with her kiss’ ” (51). Perturbed by Eleanor’s persistent pleas for insight, she adds, “ ‘My prayer is a tale of burning love, child, but you aren’t ready to hear it’ ” (53). As the nun prays for death, Jack, whom Leopolda mistakes for the Virgin’s statue, leans over to hand Sister Leopolda a bough of honeysuckle branches and in so doing startles the old woman to instant death. Undeterred by the presence of death, Jack and Eleanor make love




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while a storm brews. Lightning strikes the garden, and Leopolda’s remains are never found. The twisted and burned metal of her walker suggests that a lightning bolt may have vaporized her remains, but rumors of a miraculous assumption proliferate, and official applications for Leopolda’s sainthood are initiated. Jack and Leopolda are not the only characters whose relationships and identities are transformed by burning encounters. The fate of Eleanor’s parents, Anna and Lawrence Schlick, is also bound up in flames that change their lives three times. First, when Eleanor was only six years old, she relates in a story told to the other ex-wives on the night of Jack’s funeral, she was trapped in a burning house, but her acrobatic mother Anna managed to swing from a tree branch into an upper floor of the house to rescue her family. In response to this experience, her father became chief of the fire department only to have his family torn apart by a second fiery incident. In fighting a blaze one freezing winter night, one of his younger firemen, none other than Jack Mauser, became encased in ice from the water of a fire hose, and, to save his life, Anna revived him in a warm bath and then took him into her own bed where she shared the warmth of her body. So Anna became a woman with no shame—“the only woman in North Dakota in that state of grace” (228)—but her relationship with her husband was destroyed, at least until a few years later, when an adolescent Eleanor decided to force a reunion of her parents by the only means she could imagine, that is, by marrying Jack herself. Devoted thereafter to his wife, Lawrence Schlick could not live without her, and, finally, when she died and was about to be cremated, he climbed beside her remains on the automated line into the crematory and so joined her in eternity as they were surrounded by “a thick roar of consuming fire” (435). Even beyond the Schlicks’ flaming exit from life, Leopolda’s vaporization, Jack’s narrow escape from fire, and his ex-wives’ mortal danger during the snowstorm, a sense of death permeates this novel. Robert A. Morace, noting the juxtaposition of sex and death in the novel, believes that what is said of undertaker Lawrence Schlick explains the meaning of the death theme: “familiarity with death had connected him to all of life” (Tales of Burning Love 252). Most of the tales told within the novel end in death or entail a disturbing death wish, though some reflect a fear of death and extreme measures to avoid dying. June’s death by freezing affects all subsequent relationships Jack has with women. At the convent after Leopolda’s death, Eleanor becomes obsessed with ash to the point that “she could actually taste in each mouthful the haunted image of things consumed by


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fire” as an inner voice urges her to “Cut your own throat, now” (66). Jack’s persistent toothaches embody the inevitable decay of mortality, though his dental problems also express the paradoxical comfort of pain that lets us know we are not dead yet. These characters desire yet fear death in the same ambivalent way that they embrace yet reject physical and emotional intimacy. When strong winds carry Eleanor away from the blizzard-entrapped car, she encounters in a near-death experience the deceased Sister Leopolda. Incredulous, Eleanor wonders “whether she was dead now, and she knew if so that death itself was an orgasmic cessation, a deliverance” (372). While imagining death as a sexual feeling, Eleanor hears Leopolda confide a secret of life: “ ‘We are held upon the cross by our own desires’ ” (372). Just then, the wind blows Eleanor to the safety of a building, the airport, where she summons help for the other stranded wives. Eleanor is “frustrated at first, betrayed in every sense” by her escape from death and by Leopolda’s revelation (445). Meditating upon Leopolda’s words, however, she makes a definitive life choice, opting “to act on her desires” (446) and to remap her life’s path. Just as Jack was transformed by his near-death experience in the fire that destroyed his house, Eleanor is transformed by her near-death experience in the blizzard. She settles into a farmhouse on the edge of town to continue her work on saints, “step[ping] into her writing as onto water, buoyed by her decision” (446). In this passage and elsewhere, water is a crucial image and serves as a balancing state between the fires and blizzards. Sometimes the water speaks of unquenched desire, as when Dot drinks glass after glass of water following her marriage to Jack. Sometimes the imagery connotes a need for ritual cleansing, as when Eleanor dreams of water during the hospitalization that follows her physical and mental collapse at the convent: “Tons of water. Pounding, rushing her away” (67). Sometimes the water calls to mind the practice of Christian baptism, after which the believer is said to be given a new life, as when Jack is bathed by Anna Schlick or when the sprinklers turn on too late to save his house from burning but just in time to motivate him to escape the flames. Earth, wind, fire, and water figure prominently as metaphors and motifs throughout Erdrich’s fiction. By emphasizing the four elements, Erdrich defines her literary vision as being in harmony with the essential, elemental forces of life. Writing about The Beet Queen, Gretchen Bataille concludes, “In the end, all of the grotesque characters are redeemed by the natural world. . . . The process of healing has begun, and there is hope that even in this place the future might




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bring communion and community” (284). Catherine Rainwater argues that Erdrich’s “characters are formed through various syntagmatic series of references to natural elements such as air, earth, fire, and water” in “a code which has to do with American Indian concepts of individuation” (421). Louise Westling states that Erdrich’s “landscape is full of active forces, equally associated with males and females” (157) and that her use of water imagery and other natural elements points to “the absence of the gendered landscape of traditional European American fiction” (153). Ann-Janine Morey relates Erdrich’s metaphors to spiritual forces, noting that her novels “take up body/spirit antimonies from a cultural perspective that is not available from within the institutions of white Christianity” (204). In these many ways, the foundational forces and metaphors in Tales of Burning Love link together with Erdrich’s other major themes, creating a dense and richly connected narrative. Freed from “the worst fear, that of extinction” (448), Eleanor is emotionally ready to start over with Jack at the end of the novel. Their passionate sexual reunion closes the novel with their mutual realization of need for each other as Eleanor thinks, “Through you, in you, with you, as long and often as I can stand you” (452). Her phrasing brings to mind the prayer of Saint Patrick: “Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me . . . ” (Cahill 118–19). Eleanor sees Jack as the embodiment of God, that is, as a Christ figure, and Jack experiences at least two resurrections. Not only does he live through the house fire on New Year’s Eve, but he also miraculously survives an accident when the new statue of the Virgin Mary falls on him as it is being placed in the convent garden. Leopolda’s prophecy is fulfilled in that Jack is crushed but escapes harm, much to the amazement of all who witness the accident. Gerry Nanapush also experiences various resurrections from presumed death. On the night of the blizzard, as Jack’s ex-wives worry that they will freeze to death or be overcome by carbon monoxide in the trapped car, Gerry sleeps peacefully in the back of the vehicle, not unlike Jesus sleeping in the boat while his disciples fear the storm around them. Jack’s and Gerry’s positions as Christlike figures underscore the novel’s worship of relationships and its presentation of sexual acts as virtual religious rituals: “ ‘Pretend this car is a confessional,’ ” proclaims Eleanor as she directs the ex-wives to tell their burning tales of love while the blizzard rages (205). Critics have responded in various ways to the religious motifs in Erdrich’s fiction. Karla Sanders notes that community and identity are formed or at least sought as Erdrich’s


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characters use language to work through their religious beliefs. Talking about Anishinabe as well as Catholic traditions, Karah Stokes argues that the stories within Erdrich’s novels are “important for the transaction that takes place between teller and listener, which is often described in terms of the sacrament of confession” (103). Kenneth Millard observes that in Tales of Burning Love, “religious language in Jack’s narrative . . . corresponds with the language of Eleanor’s love for Jack, which is privileged above that of his other wives because of its spiritual quest for divine love” (260). Tales of Burning Love does not invoke American Indian symbols and stories to the degree that Erdrich’s earlier novels do, but the Nanapush name is generally associated with the trickster figure Naanabozho, whom Gerald Vizenor describes as “a comic holotrope” (“Trickster Discourse” 208). Nancy Peterson observes that “episodes in the story of Naanabozho parallel episodes in Nanapush’s story. Both share the ability to come back to life after death or near death. . . . ” (990). Also, when Jack steals his baby, he acts out a trait of Micipijiu, whose characteristics are described in Victoria Brehm’s “The Metamorphoses of an Ojibwa Manido.” Thus, Gerry and Jack are associated with supernatural behaviors portrayed in both native and Christian belief systems. Catherine Rainwater identifies “Christianity versus shamanic religion” to be one of the main conflicting codes in Erdrich’s writings (406–407); those codes, she argues, show “Erdrich’s concern for liminality and marginality” (406) and even “produce a state of marginality in the reader” (422). In Tales of Burning Love, the codes do not so much conflict as run on parallel tracks. Given Erdrich’s lyrical style, the entire novel could be examined as a book about language and how language, particularly storytelling, knits people together and keeps death at bay. Just as Rayona at the final powwow serves as a living text in Cloud Chamber, Jack functions as the central text to be interpreted in Tales of Burning Love. While trapped in the car with the other ex-wives, Eleanor observes that “ ‘Jack probably showed a separate facet of himself to each one of us. . . . In fact, it isn’t entirely far-fetched to say that we each married a different man’ ” (200). Marlis exclaims, “ ‘That’s twisted!’ ” (200), but then “among the women there occurred a shift from antagonism to tentative sisterhood” (200), and they agree with Eleanor’s assessment. In an extended comparison of Tales of Burning Love with Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Thomas Matchie argues that the exwives “might be seen as Hester’s different selves” (114): “the five faces of Hester, so to speak, as reflected in the five wives of Jack Mauser” (“Louise Erdrich” 120). Either way, the disrupted chronologies and




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multiple points of view in the wives’ stories and in the novel as a whole force readers to participate in constructing a coherent text and interpreting its meaning, just as the characters are trying to make sense of their own lives and interpret the lives of others. The ex-wives’ time together in the car is not, as reviewer Mark Schechner proposed, “an estrogen jamboree” (226); these women believe themselves to be in mortal danger, and they are defining themselves, sometimes with humor but often with pain, through their stories. On one level, Tales of Burning Love might be read as a romance thriller, though more sophisticated and more sexually provocative than the ordinary novel of that type. It could be read as a story told with irony about people living at the edge of the century in the contact zone between European American and Native American communities. It could be read as a story about storytelling and the use of stories to heal and to bind people together. Many readings are possible, but any serious interpretation must acknowledge its tragic undertones even in moments of comedy. In the end, redemption cannot be achieved through avenues of language or community, paths to restoration common in late-twentieth-century fiction and particularly dear to many American Indian writers. No longer sustained by tribal identifications, and poorly nurtured by their European Christian heritage, the characters in this novel lack the strong “communal and incorporative” sense of belonging found in Love Medicine (Downes 54) and still partially visible in The Crown of Columbus. Community ties and storytelling build relationships in Tales of Burning Love, but deeper connections are created by sexual passion. As Jack and Eleanor reunite sexually at the end of the novel, Eleanor thinks to herself, “We are conjured voiceless out of nothing and must return to an unknowing state. What happens in between is an uncontrolled dance, and what we ask for in love is no more than a momentary chance to get the steps right, to move in harmony until the music stops” (452). This is a bleak conclusion, especially articulated by a woman in the throes of passion, for a novel with many comic elements. Sadder still is the realization that the music did stop for the partnership of Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris.


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C O Their collaborative writing, their integration of private and public personae, and their incorporation of Native American and European American characters, themes, and perspectives would have made Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich bright and magnetic stars in


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any discussion of language, gender, and community before 1997. However, Dorris’s 1997 suicide and the various problems that came to light afterwards not only complicate discussions of their fiction but also, more importantly, indicate the presence of pain in their lives. Their 1990s fiction still contains humorous elements; the KFC scene in Cloud Chamber, for instance, is hilarious. The authors’ overall visions, though, darkened in their novels at the approach of century’s end. Compared to A Yellow Raft in Blue Water, reviewer John Skow identifies Cloud Chamber as a “darker novel” (88), and Patrick McCormick describes the later novel’s contents as “gritty and dark tales of intergenerational dysfunction and family tragedy” (46). In the 1992 Crown of Columbus, redemptive qualities accompany issues of language, gender, and community. In the later 1990s novels Cloud Chamber and Tales of Burning Love, reconciliations occur, but redemption seems out of the question. That Leopolda would be headed for sainthood and Rayona would name herself after Rose serve as just two illustrations of the more ironic dark visions that dominate the later novels. Erdrich’s The Antelope Wife, published in 1998, further darkens the author’s literary landscape with more stories of death, suicide, family misery, and personal conflict. Thomas Matchie says the novel “may well be a response to Cloud Chamber, which in many ways it parallels. But instead of an uplifting social message that helps disguise a tortured self, its mythic texture captures the deep emotional effects of separation” (“The Antelope Wife” 27). The Antelope Wife ends with everything “all knotted up in a tangle. Pull one string of this family and the whole web will tremble” (239). The narrator concludes the novel by asking of the events that have been portrayed, Did these occurrences have a paradigm in the settlement of the old scores and pains and betrayal that went back in time? Or are we working out the minor details of a strictly random pattern? . . . these questions, they tug at the brain. We stand on tiptoe, trying to see over the edge, and only catch a glimpse of the next bead on the string. . . . (240)

Similar questions could be asked in Erdrich’s and Dorris’s earlier novels, but in the earlier fiction the beads appear to form discernible patterns. In fact, The Crown of Columbus positions itself to suggest that patterns in world history filter down to affect individuals’ choices over the centuries. Teresa Cid argues that The Crown of Columbus “reinstates . . . the myth of discovery by affirming discoveries to be an essential element




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in the ongoing dynamics of self, national experience, history and culture” (348). In the conclusions of Cloud Chamber and Tales of Burning Love, the characters continue to reach, albeit more weakly, toward discovery, connection, and community, as Rayona celebrates her naming ceremony with her family and as Eleanor and Jack reunite. On a personal level, both authors, at least at the time these two novels went to press, continued to reach out to one another. Tales of Burning Love is dedicated “To Michael, ♥Q, ♥J,” while the last sentence in the book’s acknowledgments says, “Michael, so close to these pages, so essential and so much the story, thank you always for your tough and generous attention.” The dedication page of Cloud Chamber reads, “For Louise/Who found the song/And gave me voice,” while the last phrase in the acknowledgments says, “ . . . and to Louise, my love and gratitude for all of it.” Such sentiments render their problems and his suicide all the more tragic and make their later characters’ unfulfilled yearnings for love and connection all the more poignant. Louise Erdrich once told Bill Moyers that “Not having a happyending mentality may be something we need” (150). Despite their darkness, even the later novels of Erdrich and Dorris “spill over with livingness,” to borrow the words of Gail Caldwell (69). The characters in The Crown of Columbus, Cloud Chamber, and Tales of Burning Love approach life with vitality and vulnerability as they relate to one another, struggle with their own identities, and make their life decisions. All three books present “the coherent multiplicity of community” (Hertha Wong 89) by relying on several narrators, giving voice to a variety of points of view, and shifting the points of reference through which the reader interprets the fiction. Cloud Chamber presents the opposite side of Yellow Raft on Blue Water in that it tells about Rayona’s father’s family instead of Rayona’s mother’s family, and Tales of Burning Love presents the reverse of Love Medicine in that, instead of everyone being tied to June, all of the characters are tied to Jack. It is as if both authors are revisiting old territory but seeing it anew, as if they might feel the way Robert McGarry does when, realizing the past he had experienced with his wife Bridie was all a false illusion, he concludes, “Memory is paradise denied. The garden was not the same lived as when recalled, and only when the gates forever close does the view between their bars achieve a true perspective” (Cloud Chamber 65). In these three novels, the characters categorize themselves as marginalized by their own designs, if not by society’s designs. Sometimes language facilitates their connections, even in the later two novels, the best example being the ex-wives’ storytelling during the blizzard,


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but bitter language and punishing silence more often separate men and women in the later books. The Crown of Columbus ruminates on the initial encounters between Europeans and North Americans, but it does not dwell on the devastating damage done afterwards to native populations. Racial or ethnic differences affect Dorris’s characters in Cloud Chamber more negatively than they do Erdrich’s characters in Tales of Burning Love, though in both novels ethnic identities cut both ways. That is, they can provide comfort and refuge, but they can also cause division and difference. In other words, with respect to language, gender, and community, these three novels show authors Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich wrestling with the complexities and ambiguities inherent in late-twentieth-century life. The Crown of Columbus, jointly authored and written earlier, conveys more optimism and joy, but Cloud Chamber and Tales of Burning Love, despite some hopefulness in their conclusions, place a greater emphasis on sorrow. In these three novels, the authors unravel and reweave personal histories and myths as well as larger cultural histories and myths, but, in the Hawthornian tradition of American literature, the focus falls on the human heart and its inevitable wounds.




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6

Contours of the Future in Denise Chávez’s Face of an Angel and Rudolfo Anaya’s Alburquerque

Denise Chávez and Rudolfo Anaya bring distinctive Southwestern perspectives to the portrayal of language, gender, and community in American fiction of the 1990s. Because of its linguistic and cultural dynamics, the Southwest provides an interesting and instructive site at which to consider the evolutions of American identities. What Reed Way Dasenbrock said of Anaya and Leslie Marmon Silko holds true for Anaya and Chávez: “Both are in their very situations between two cultures, neither completely one nor the other. . . . These writers are where their formative cultures meet, and it is precisely for their representation of that meeting ground which can be a battle ground that these writers are Southwestern” (317). Referencing Gloria Anzaldúa’s work, Herrera further explains the impact of the meeting ground that is the Southwest: “Chicanos live ‘on the border,’ the ‘fault line,’ the ‘wound’ between two cultures; although they share aspects of each, ultimately they are dispossessed from both. . . . Chicanos must come to terms with their fractured Mexican past before they can begin to negotiate their present” (193). In their fictional constructs, Denise Chávez and Rudolfo Anaya depict individuals and whole communities in the Southwest building their futures while coming to terms with the past and negotiating the present. Language can be a highly charged subject in the Southwest. English-only movements, bilingual education controversies, and issues of language contact are familiar, of course, in many areas of the United States, but from Texas to California, they have long been part of daily life. In an interview with Paul Vassallo, Anaya identified language as “ ‘the most important element that we have to address as a community’ ” (“Of Cuentistas” 94). In the past, the more typical


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Anglo responses to the Spanish language involved, intentionally or unintentionally, ignoring, displacing, appropriating, or disguising its presence. The figure of the cowboy offers one concrete and historical case study in this process. Despite the Spanish roots of the cowboy culture and even most words related to cowboy life (lariat, rodeo, stampede, and lasso are just a few obvious examples), the cowboy figure is generally seen as an Anglo icon, with limited recognition given in the United States to its Spanish connections and origins. Demographic shifts make such appropriations of language and culture unlikely in the future, however, as people of Chicano/a or Latino/a descent will likely hold majority status in whole states. Regarding the history of the term Chicano, Alfred Arteaga explains, “Chicano derives from Mexicano, which derives from Mexica, the name the Aztecs called themselves. ‘Chicano’ recalls an older, original pronunciation” (9). Preferences vary, of course, and not everyone likes the term Chicano. Sandra Cisneros has said that she prefers the term Latino: “I hate Hispanic. . . . It’s a kind of upwardly mobile type word. That word to me came out of Washington, D.C. I only use it when I apply for a grant” (Jussawalla, “Cisneros” 294). Though the term Hispanic may seem artificial to some, it is gender neutral in that it does not require the choice of a masculine or feminine inflectional morpheme as do Chicano/Chicana and Latino/Latina. Mexican American defines itself on the basis of national borders that obviously do not apply to all Americans of Spanish-speaking heritage. Many differences, including differences of self-perception, exist among people in the United States who identify themselves as being part of Chicano, Latino, Hispanic, Mexican American, or other Spanishheritage cultures. In a mid-1990s survey of students enrolled in Spanish for Native Speakers classes at New Mexico State University, Villa and Villa found the preferred identity label among the surveyed group to be (in Spanish) Hispano or (in English) Hispanic. However, Villa and Villa also found that students who were most comfortable using Spanish were also most comfortable with the identity label Mexican. The top four choices for use when speaking Spanish included Hispano, Chicano, Mexicano, and Norteamericano; the top four choices for use when speaking English included Hispanic, Mexican American, Chicano, and Mexican. The Villa study underscores the caveat that preferences vary and that many factors, including language fluency, affect people’s preferences. Susana Rivera-Mills’s more recent research suggests that Spanish-speaking populations in various locations, including California, Arizona, and Oregon, have different preferences


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for self-referential terms based on age, generational proximity to immigration, family history, and various components of personal cultural identity that are becoming increasingly complex as families from various Spanish-speaking countries, regions, and socioeconomic groups intermingle. It is important to resist or question generalizations that can be embedded in terminology. As Rafael Pérez-Torres observes in Mestizaje: Critical Uses of Race in Chicano Culture, “when we discuss notions of ethnicity and race it becomes too easy to assume an essence of identity” (xv). Gender and language issues are central to Mexican history. Though the account has been presented in various ways, Arteaga casts the situation in the following manner: “the Mexican is the product of the miscegenation of Spanish men and Indian women, and to be so means to be the product of cataclysmic cultural intercourse” (24). He adds, “The sense of being mestizo-Chicano was born in the acts of colonial sex, yet is engendered daily in the conflicts of cultural elements, conflicts that are conceived as sexual interactions” (25). Marta E. Sánchez further explains that “Malintzin-Marina was the concubine of Hernán Cortéz and mother of their son, and by extension . . . she is framed as the mother of the Mexican mestizos’ ” (118). Moreover, says Norma Alarcón, the figure of Malintzin may be “compared to Eve, especially when she is viewed as the Mexican people’s fall from grace and the procreator of a ‘fallen’ people” (278–79). Significantly, though, in Alarcón’s words, Malintzin was known as “La Lengua, literally meaning ‘the tongue.’ La Lengua was the metaphor used by Cortés and the chroniclers of the conquest to refer to Malintzin the translator. However, she not only translated for Cortés and his men—she also bore Cortés’s children” (278). Hence, Malintzin is the embodiment of language, gender, and community in a single figure. Traditionally the object of scorn because of her affiliation with the Spanish conquerors, Malintzin nevertheless retains a position symbolically as the original mother of the Mexican people. Sánchez asserts that “the Chicano movement, primarily male in its political and aesthetic vision, transformed La Malinche into a collaborator of the Anglo oppressors” (118), but that Chicana feminists have “restored the catalyzing power of speech to the historical Malinche” and have transformed her “from a figure of destructive social and sexual agency (a traitor and whore) to one of affirmative agency (a cultural bridge and translator)” (118). Notably, the figure of Malinche exists alongside, and in some ways in opposition to, the figure of the Virgin of Guadalupe, whose significance is described in more detail in the discussion of Face of an Angel.


CONTOURS OF THE FUTURE


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Complex issues of language and gender such as these have strong implications for personal and community identities. Tomás Rivera asserts that “the anxiety to have a community, the urge to feel, sense, and be part of the whole” is “the most constant preoccupation and need” for Chicanos and that “a basic hunger for community” can be found in Chicano literature (9–10). Given that a sense of loss often accompanies a desire for community, the loss of heritage recognition may be a contributing factor in this case. That is, for example, while the Spanish-speaking community predates the English-speaking presence in North America, this fact is obscured by the way U.S. history has usually been taught, from a geographic perspective, east to west and north to south, rather than chronologically. In fact, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca’s La Relación described the American Southwest in 1542, and Gaspar Pérez de Villagrá’s epic poem La Historia de la Nueva Mexico was published in 1610, so, even setting aside letters by Christopher Columbus, texts written in Spanish about the new world predate those written in English, the latter often said to have begun with Captain John Smith’s 1616 A Description of New England. Nonetheless, texts written in Spanish or written in English by authors with a Spanish-speaking heritage have not been widely read in the United States, at least not until rather recently. A growing number of books, however, such as José F. Aranda’s When We Arrive: A New Literary History of Mexican America, are addressing this gap. The literary tradition of the Southwest, which is chronicled in Erlinda Gonzales-Berry’s Pasó por Aquí: Critical Essays on the New Mexican Literary Tradition, 1542–1988, has gained greater appreciation over the past twenty or thirty years. In the 1970s, Chicano novels such as Tomás Rivera’s y no se lo trago la tierra, Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless Me, Ultima, and Rolando Hinojosa’s Estampas del valle earned recognition, and, in the 1980s, national attention began to focus on writers such as Ana Castilla, Denise Chávez, and Sandra Cisneros. Nevertheless, even though Cisneros’s 1984 House on Mango Street and Anaya’s 1972 Bless Me, Ultima now appear prominently on high school and college reading lists, Chicano/a literature in general is still not widely known across the United States, and the cultures and communities portrayed in Chicano/a fiction are often misunderstood. The writings of both Chávez and Anaya have received critical acclaim. Among his many honors, Anaya has won the Premio Quinto Sol award, the Mexican Medal of Friendship, the Before Columbus Award, and the National Medal of Arts. His novel Alburquerque received the 1993 Pen Center West Award for Fiction. Chávez has won the Premio Aztlán award for her novel Face of an Angel, which


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also received the American Book Award. Moreover, these two authors respect each other’s work. When asked what writers had been lifechanging for her, Chávez quickly pointed to Anaya, acknowledging that she did not realize “Mexican-Americans or Latinos or Hispanos could ever write books” until she read Bless Me, Ultima (Wheatwind 7). For his part, and in the context of discussing gender, Anaya praised Chávez, saying, “In her novel Face of an Angel, Denise Chávez explores the role of women in the formation of macho. By exploring the lives of women in the culture, she gives us an excellent, uninhibited view of the woman’s influence on the life of the male.” (“I’m the King” 68). In these comments and elsewhere, both writers have expressed appreciation for each other’s fiction and have drawn attention to the themes of language, gender, and community. Though they write primarily in English, both writers incorporate Spanish in their fiction. Anaya has said that it is important for Chicano writers to “use the rhythms of Spanish in our work” even though “the New World man’s consciousness is language free; he can use any language to express it” (Jussawalla, “Rudolfo Anaya” 251). Eysturoy has called Chávez’s mixings of Spanish and English “textual reflections of a bicultural community” (Daughters 130), while Mariá Gonzáles argues that a “Mexican-American author’s relationship to standard English is a political one” and that “the cultural assimilationist uses standard English; the cultural accommodationist uses some bilingualism; and the revisionist disrupts and abandons standard forms” (53). Chávez’s and Anaya’s characters explore the capacity of language for all three purposes: to assimilate, to accommodate, and to revise. In their fictional presentations of bilingualism, Chávez and Anaya also show that language and culture have the power to entrap just as they have the power to liberate. In an interview, Anaya observed that “cultures can be as binding and enslaving as anything else. But they can also provide the context where you explore your relationships with other people, explore the possibility of being the authentic self” (Jussawalla 250). Language choices, these authors demonstrate, have intimate and complex implications for personal identity and for communal relationships. Chávez and Anaya have frequently discussed autobiographical elements in their writings. Chávez was born in 1948 in Las Cruces, New Mexico. She describes her hometown as having been for a child “a world unto itself” (Eysturoy, “Chávez” 159). Having previously worked in assorted jobs, she has taught creative writing in various settings, including at New Mexico State University. She refers to herself as a “performance writer” who enjoys giving dramatic readings




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(Wheatwind 6). Chávez credits her father, a lawyer, with “wonderful wit” and “impeccable comic timing” (Kevane and Heredia 37). She says that she “grew up in a house of women” after her parents divorced, and that her work has been most influenced by her mother, a Spanish teacher, and her grandmother, whose “English was impeccable” and whose family were among the first Hispanic graduates of Sul Ross University in Texas (Eysturoy, “Chávez” 159). Even so, Chávez notes that growing up in a “ ‘male-dominated, patriarchal society’ ” was hard (García 49). She has also said that in her younger years, when “most of the books I read were by men,” she received narrative training at the hands of her family: “They were writing their own stories in front of me” (Wheatwind 7). Despite a skepticism that dates to her childhood in parochial schools, she told interviewer Elizabeth Brown-Guillory, “ ‘I grew up a Catholic, am still a Catholic, will always be a Catholic’ ” (36). It is not surprising, then, that when asked to identify a unifying theme for her work, she replied that she tries to “impart a sense of acceptance and merciful love” for “one must endure and to do that we have to love and be merciful” (Eysturoy, “Chávez” 168). Paul Vassallo has described Rudolfo Anaya as a “native New Mexican, an accomplished author, a lover of culture and books, a university professor, un hombre muy simpático . . . a man of feeling (it is much better in Spanish: un hombre con ánima)” (Preface x). A sense of history permeates the work of Anaya, who is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of New Mexico. Commenting that “In our Hispanic culture there is a great deal of respect given to older people,” Anaya says, “So when I came to write my novels, which basically have to do with a search for meaning or archetypal journey, the person who can guide the hero turns out to be the older person not only out of the structure of myth as we know it but out of my background, out of my life” (Crawford 85). Anaya was born in 1937 in Pastura, New Mexico, near the town of Santa Rosa, the area that provided inspiration for the setting of Bless Me, Ultima. When interviewer John Crawford observed that “the power of love is the redeemer” in Anaya’s fiction, both “sexual love” and “people pulling together” (89), Anaya agreed and added:


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what the tradition of the community has to teach us is what I’ve already alluded to—respect, love for the family and for the village that is the community. I think that’s where the power of love comes in. I feel it has sustained all those Indian and Mexican pueblos that have occupied this region for such a long time; they must have had it as they


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He further told Ruben Martinez, “I am not only related to my rural New Mexican background, I am related to the world, or I should be” (15). Anaya draws on traditional Catholicism as well as other religions, but always emphasizes community: “I was more interested, I guess, in . . . can we really get together as a community—not because of what’s in it for me, but because of that old sense of value that has sustained all communities on earth throughout history” (Crawford 90). So, Anaya and Chávez convey in their novels the importance of community and identity as general human concerns but also as particular issues for Hispanics in the Southwest. Kessler’s premise is correct: “To understand the literature written by Chicanas, Chicanos, and Mexican-American authors, readers must have a grounding in the basic building blocks that inform the culture: language, the mythical ties between la tierra/the land and the people, gender roles, and sexuality. Underlying all of this is the community” (2503). Notably, community in Chicano/a writing “is marked by its dialectical texture—its tolerance for contradictions and ambiguity” (Neate 260). As do other American writers at the end of the twentieth century, Chávez and Anaya confront language issues, work out gender conflicts, and, in the process of coming to terms with language and gender, explore the construction of self-identity and community identity. Their creativity with these challenges points the way not just for Mexican Americans, but for people of all varieties. As Jean-Luc Nancy has said, “A mestizo is someone who is on the border, on the very border of meaning. And we are all out there, exposed” (123). At the end of the twentieth century, Anaya’s and Chávez’s examinations of fictional mestizo situations show us places where all our humanity is exposed and places where new developments can take root.

F   A Soveida Dosamantes, the lead character in Face of an Angel, is beset by many challenges. She grows up in an abusive family, is mistreated by many men, struggles for an education, supports herself as a waitress, and, at the conclusion of the novel, becomes a single mother. However, Soveida over and over proves herself to be a successful survivor who can handle whatever life sends her way. During the course of the novel, her personal voice becomes stronger until, by the end of


came together and formed their bond—a bond not only of tradition and language and culture and heritage, but of love. (90)


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the story, she demonstrates a high degree of acceptance and satisfaction about her personal and group identity. With her confident bilingual presence and her economic and cultural self-reliance, Soveida Dosamantes not only represents contemporary realities but also embodies hope for the future. The epigraph to Face of an Angel signals the significance of language, gender, and community for the novel: My grandmother’s voice was rarely heard, it was a whisper, a moan. Who heard? My mother’s voice cried out in rage and pain. Who heard? My voice is strong. It is breath. New life. Song. Who hears?

This inscription centers on generations of women, a reference to both time and gender, while it underscores family ties, a community reference of particular importance in Chicano/a culture. The inscription also emphasizes the central role of language. For the older female generations, open speech was prohibited; only whispering found acceptance. Indeed, throughout the novel, the whispering motif appears whenever a topic cannot be discussed freely in the Dosamantes family or in the town of Agua Oscura, usually some topic relating to sexual infidelity or sexual impropriety, even though almost everyone knows the details and the younger generations speak openly of them. If the whisper of the grandmother’s voice reflects the expectation of silence, the moan indicates unacknowledged but deeply felt pain. Soveida’s maternal grandmother, Trancha Loera, “grew up in a house of silent innuendo” (23). “Her parents were both deaf and she grew up without childish rhymes, with an unsure alphabet” (25). Her husband, Primitivo, was “also of few words. Their courtship was one of nods, unspoken agreement” (25), and their daughter Dolly, who is Soveida’s mother, considers that such an arrangement was best, thinking, “Never bother with the words. What can words do but lie?” (25). Trancha’s husband would stay home long enough to impregnate her, then disappear for months. Of her twelve children, only two survived to adulthood. Carrying her pain with her throughout her life, Trancha could not create a happy home for the two children who did survive, so Dolly’s anger should not be unexpected, but Trancha never openly expressed her pain. Soveida’s paternal grandmother, Mamá Lupita, has also suffered from her husband’s lifelong indiscretions, yet never speaks openly of his mistress living nearby in the same town. In fact, Soveida does not even know of her grandfather’s other, illegitimate family


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until she is a grown woman herself and Mamá Lupita’s longtime housekeeper Oralia mentions to Soveida that the “other woman” Doña Maria is dying. Oralia offers the following explanation for the woman’s cancer: “Unless you heal yourself of memories when you are alive, there is no telling what death will bring. That poor woman never had anyone to talk to, it’s no wonder her blood is hot and full of worms” (136). Oralia, far older than any of the women she cares for, knows all of the unspoken family secrets. Only when she thinks she is dying does Mamá Lupita allow herself to complain to God: “you who gave me a husband who hit me. . . . You could have at least allowed me to become a nun, but instead you made me a woman. I could take the infidelities, the son from that woman. It is the beatings I could not sustain” (410). Only when she is an old woman filled with the imminence of death can Mamá Lupita articulate the source of her pain. Dominated, humiliated, and beaten by men, Soveida’s grandmothers have kept silent except for occasional moans. Soveida’s mother openly expresses her anger to her husband Luardo, to their children, to their entire family, and to their whole community. An early chapter in Face of an Angel, chapter five, is set in two competing columns, one expressing Dolly’s words and thoughts, and the other expressing Luardo’s. Word for word, thought for thought, grievance for grievance, Dolly matches Luardo. Unlike women of earlier generations, Dolly and her contemporaries are not silenced. Still, no one pays much attention to Dolly, and her options are limited by the social standards of Agua Oscura, where philandering men are accepted and women, especially full-figured women such as Dolly, are relegated to the role of sex object. Despite her husband’s moral lapses and irresponsibility, Dolly finds herself attracted to him. Even after their divorce, Dolly still fusses over Luardo, does his laundry, and complains about his indiscretions with women. In the end, she cares for Luardo when he becomes ill and after his death remains loyal to his mother. As the text says, “Dolly was Lupita’s Ruth” (407). Luardo’s relatives have looked the other way, knowing that Luardo was a faithless husband, abused Dolly’s niece Mara, and neglected the upbringing of his own children, but still Dolly stays loyal to her husband’s family. Over the years, Dolly is not silent, but she has not been heard, either. Her daughter, Soveida, though, finds her voice over the course of the novel, aided by the community of women that surrounds her. As Deborah Madsen concludes, “The acquisition and articulation of voice is an important theme in Denise Chávez’s work” (Understanding Contemporary Chicana Literature 159), and




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female voices reveal the “strength that derives from the community of women” (145). While the voices of Dosamantes women have grown stronger over the generations, the voices of Dosamantes men have lost their effectiveness. Earlier generations of men were more powerful in language and behavior. The patriarch of the family, Manuel Dosamantes, born in Mexico in 1850, became a prosperous and respected man in Agua Oscura, but did not marry until the age of thirty-five, when he met Elena Harrell, a blond-haired, blue-eyed beauty whose father was a miner but whose mother was “Estrella de las Casas, daughter of Enrique Palomar de las Casas, from Chihuahua, México, scion of one of the wealthiest families in the state of Chihuahua” (9). Although Elena’s parents send her to Agua Oscura to stay with relatives in order “to learn her father’s language” (9), she much prefers Spanish. As the narrator reports, “It was inevitable that Manuel and Elena should be drawn to each other: both were Mexicans hungry for a preservation of language and custom” (9), and at their first meeting they “talked all night long in Spanish” (10). Unlike his male descendants, Manuel Dosamantes found fulfillment with his language, his wife, and his community. Of Manuel’s son Profetario the reader is given little firsthand information, but details are revealed through the stories told by women. Soveida remembers him as a big, blustery man “who lived under the yoke of his father Manuel’s perfectly balanced life. Profetario was a rascal, living with two wives, two families. The Dosamantes name fit him, eternally split between two lovers” (11). During their childhood, Soveida’s cousin Mara confides to a disbelieving Soveida the shocking rumor that their grandfather Profetario would beat Mamá Lupita and then cry himself to sleep. Much later, Mamá Lupita confirms the rumor, repeating what her husband would say as he hit her: “ ‘Damn you, woman, and damn this life of mine for having been born to Manuel Dosamantes. Damn that pinche puta Ismindalia for stealing my inheritance. Damn this earth, its dark water. And damn these hands for being afraid to take my own cursed life!’ ” (396). Frustrated by his own inadequacies, Profetario accomplishes nothing in life other than bullying his wife and his mistress with physical blows and cruel, angry words. Gallo and Miguela have observed accurately that men in Face of an Angel “are womanizing, abusive men, but they are also ‘weak’ and powerless men trying to deny their obvious shortcomings” (89). Luardo, son of Profetario and father of Soveida, also lives a profligate life. He molests his wife’s niece Mara and may have even


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abused his daughter. When asked directly about whether Luardo molested her, Soveida can only answer, “ ‘I’m not sure. But I was always afraid of the dark and of something in the dark touching me’ ” (53). Through his work as an employment counselor, Luardo has had many opportunities to exploit vulnerable young women. Attracted to Dolly because of her voluptuous figure, he seems to enjoy their constant arguments, which neither of them ever wins. The only point on which the two agree is their advice to Soveida that she should never “ ‘marry a Mexican’ ” (38–39). Eventually Luardo has a stroke and cannot communicate at all. As his mother watches him die, she tells Soveida, “ ‘The men in this family are weak. It started with your grandfather Profe and continued with Luardo and then Hector. Who knows what Hector’s sons will be like’ ” (402). Indeed, Soveida’s brother Hector may be the most deplorable of the Dosamantes men because he maintains the misogyny of the past two generations and adds a readiness to deride women in public as well as in private, thereby “making the abjection of women the guarantor of his ethnic and masculine difference”—to borrow a phrase used by Marta Sánchez to describe the behavior of Piri Thomas’s protagonist in Down These Mean Streets (118). Describing his pregnant fiancée, Hector says rudely, “ ‘She has the face of an angel and she likes to fuck’ ” (375). Key to the novel’s premise, the line provides the novel’s title, Face of an Angel. As Chávez explained in an interview, her character Soveida is shocked by Hector’s statement: “In a way she understands too well what he means, but in a way she cannot understand what he means. The fact is that if one enjoys any kind of sexuality, intimacy, for women it is immediately put into a certain category and we have this myth to deal with and these lies, really, these lies that we have lived with for so long” (Eysturoy, “Chávez” 168). Within the novel, men such as Hector brutalize women to mask their own insecurities and to make up for the abuses to which they themselves have been subjected. Even more so, though, men such as Hector abuse women because of a fundamental misunderstanding of women and of human nature, unable to recognize the lingering effects of the Guadalupe/Malinche dichotomy, that is, unable to get beyond the kind of thinking that classifies women in one of only two possible categories, virgins or whores. Traditions and beliefs surrounding Malinche, introduced in the introductory section of this chapter, and surrounding the Virgin of Guadalupe have notable implications for the self-images and social roles of Mexican and Mexican American women and for the entire




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Guadalupe appeared on December 9, 1531, on the spot where the Aztec goddess, Tonantsi (“Our Lady Mother”), had been worshipped by the Nahuas and where a temple to her had stood. Speaking Nahua, she told Juan Diego, a poor Indian crossing Tepeyac Hill, whose Indian name was Cuautlaohuac and who belonged to the mazehual class, the humblest within the Chichimeca tribe, that her name was María Coatlalopeuh. Coatl is the Nahuatl word for serpent. Lopeuh means “the one who has dominion over serpents.” . . . . Because Coatlalopeuh was homophonous to the Spanish Guadalupe, the Spanish identified her with the dark Virgin, Guadalupe, the patroness of West Central Spain. (Borderlands 29)

Since the 1600s, the Catholic Church has recognized Juan Diego’s vision as the Virgin Mary and in the 1700s named the Virgin of Guadalupe as the patroness and protector of New Spain. Today, the Basílica of Guadalupe is a chief religious center of Mexico and the object of thousands of pilgrimages each year. Anzaldúa emphasizes that “la Virgen de Guadalupe is the single most potent religious, political, and cultural image of the Chicano/ mexicano. She . . . is a synthesis of the old world and the new, of the religion and culture of the two races in our psyche, the conquerors and the conquered” (Borderlands 30). The figure of the Mexican Virgin of Guadalupe has ties, of course, to the figure of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Spain, whose image was influential to Spanish conquistadors such as Hernán Cortéz. Docile sufferer to some, enduring survivor to others, the Virgin of Guadalupe “maintains a position of prominence, power, and value” (Eduardo Chavez xxi). She has been interpreted in various ways but has continued to stand over the centuries as a symbol of faith, as the guardian of the new world, and as a harbinger of a new spirituality. Her image remains powerful on both sides of the border between Mexico and the United States. The Virgin of Guadalupe serves in some ways as an opposing image to that of Malinche, but the traditions and beliefs surrounding both are complicated. In referencing the Guadalupe/Malinche continuum, Hector’s statement about his fiancée alludes, albeit vulgarly, to a central theme of this novel: human beings curiously combine a spiritual dimension and a physical dimension. Throughout Face of an Angel, Chávez sets up contrasts between spiritual and physical dimensions of life as she juxtaposes religious concepts and sexual scenes. The novel, in fact,


Mexican/Southwestern culture. Gloria Anzaldúa offers this historical perspective on the Virgin of Guadalupe:


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is organized into sections bearing the names of heavenly beings— angels, archangels, principalities, seraphim, and so on—even though the events described in those sections and the language used for the descriptions are anything but religious or angelic in the traditional sense. Face of an Angel is notable in its portrayal of women’s sexuality alongside women’s spirituality. Women as well as men can be angelic or demonic, sexual or asexual, and various combinations of extremes are possible along a broad range of human behavior. Both women and men seek physical pleasure, spiritual satisfaction, emotional comfort, and intellectual stimulation. For Hector, his fiancée’s behavior gratifies his animal nature, but he is so confined by his desire for pleasure that he cannot venture beyond stereotypes and myths about how women should look and behave. Hector and the other men in Soveida’s life do not seem to appreciate that women as well as men deal with complexities and dualities of their physical and spiritual selves. Without ever really understanding himself or the women around him, Hector marries his fiancée before their child is born but not before he secretly takes on another lover, who also becomes pregnant. Given the hurt that Dosamantes men have caused their wives and children, it is unsurprising that Mamá Lupita and Dolly express no dismay at the end of the novel when Soveida announces that she is about to become a single parent with “ ‘no husband in sight’ ” (449). As her grandmother says to her, “ ‘It shouldn’t frighten you. And in a way, you’re lucky you don’t have the wrong man around. Your mother and I didn’t do so good, maybe you can do better’ ” (450). The father of Soveida’s baby is the brother of her boyfriend, and both her boyfriend and her baby’s father are also her cousins from Profetario’s illegitimate line, a fact not known initially, at least not consciously, by any of them. Before they become romantically involved, Soveida’s boyfriend is her professor, who teaches sociology at the local community college. In her term paper for Dr. J. V. Velásquez, Soveida writes about the language of Mexican American men: “Our men once had a voice, and they could speak. But how long ago was that. . . . Our men, now downtrodden and overburdened, and unhappy with the way things are, beat and abuse the women around them” (316). Soveida then turns to the status of Mexican American women. “In the past,” she writes, “our men had power, and women couldn’t speak. When they did, it was with the Malinche voice, called the voice of the betrayer” (316–17). Referencing the traditional account of Malinche’s betrayal of her people to the explorer Cortés, Soveida concludes that women must act to stop “that endless cycle of




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self-hatred” (317). The key, she says, is for mothers to assume responsibility for bringing up their sons, and she ends her essay with some suggestions for mothers that she attributes to a Families of Survivors of Abuse handbook. For her efforts, Soveida receives a grade of C and a scathing comment from Professor Velásquez about a “feminist diatribe” that lacks a clear thesis (320). But her paper indicates that Soveida will survive because she understands her own family and her personal history. Even though her well-traveled, Stanford-educated professor disregards what she writes, and even though she becomes romantically involved with him despite what he thinks of her ideas, Soveida’s writing enhances her self-awareness and her appreciation for voice and language. Soveida receives little encouragement from others, but her own voice nevertheless strengthens. As Dolly says, echoing a biblical prophecy, “ ‘Just think of it, the strong became weak and the weak became strong’ ” (332). Soveida herself grows stronger over the course of the novel, despite her difficult interactions with men. She describes her experiences with men in terms of their linguistic implications. For example, Soveida’s first intimate encounter takes place at a drive-in theater, where her date, a good-looking, reckless twenty-year-old named Jester, unzips his pants. Soveida is bewildered, not knowing what to do or how to respond. She concludes, “I was Jester’s plaything without a voice” (119). Silenced and humiliated, Soveida’s survival instincts guide her later to reflect: “I now realize that Jester had taught me well. He prepared me for rude men, crude men, the ones without shame, who use women like me and then discard us when they’re done” (121). Soveida’s first husband, Ivan, initially appeals to her because, unlike the other men she knows, he has an awareness beyond himself, with dreams beyond Agua Oscura. As Soveida says, “I had never met anyone before who called himself Chicano. I didn’t know what Chicano meant then” (130). Ivan, who claims to have been part of the farm workers’ movement in California and to have known César Chávez, tells Soveida that he wants “ ‘to do something for my people, I mean, really do something. Not just talk about equality, but make some kind of impact on our life here’ ” (130). However, these lofty statements prove hollow. Ivan, who manages the local Bureau of Motor Vehicles, spends his time dancing and cheating on his wife. Soveida marries her second husband, Veryl, even though she knows he has Peyronie’s disease and cannot engage in ordinary sexual intercourse. As she says, “Somehow I knew things would never be normal, but it was all right. I was never used to normal” (229). Veryl, who


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designs bathroom fixtures for a living, attributes his sexual impotence to a boating accident, though other people later give contradictory accounts of that accident. He relishes pictures taken of himself as Christ nailed to a cross, fears germs obsessively, and finally commits suicide. Bound by Veryl’s odd versions of reality, Soveida tends his grave compulsively until a cemetery caretaker makes a lewd comment to her. Shocked back into reality by the custodian’s language, she flees to Oralia for a cleansing ritual and then is able to move on with her life. By the time she meets Dr. J. V. Velásquez, after her early experiences with men and following her marriages, Soveida has developed enough self-confidence to express her ideas with some degree of assertiveness. Her professor’s remarks on her papers, however, show that he fails to understand. For example, in one of her assignments she interviews Oralia, entitling her quirky report “An Oral History of the Elderly Chicano Community.” Combining Oralia’s practical knowledge of herbs and healing with spiritual advice for living, the paper shows Soveida’s emerging self-awareness. Oralia’s language is simple, but she is anchored by her connectedness with the earth, with her family, and with her community. Pressed to describe her vision for the world, Oralia replies, “ ‘My dream is for everyone to know what it is to belong, to be committed to something, someone, to know they are brother and sister and father and mother to everyone’ ” (311). Entirely missing the point about humanity and community, J. V. responds in red ink: “ ‘ . . . your focus is on purely emotional, non-analytical details of a life spent in small gestures. Where is the grand sweep?’ ” (311). Soveida develops a relationship with J. V. despite his disregard for her opinions and for her desire for connection and community, but, not surprisingly, she searches elsewhere for emotional satisfaction. Her passion finds expression with J. V.’s brother Tirzio, but when she tells Tirzio that she is going to have his baby, his immediate response is to laugh “like a startled young boy, wildly out of control. There was something ugly about it” (456). After Soveida tells Tirzio she plans to have the baby without expecting any kind of support, however, he cries, and then they both cry together. Thanking God “for this grace passing like a cloud,” Soveida realizes, “I would always be the stronger. He knew it as well. We didn’t say anything to each other for a while. And then I gave him a hug and thanked him in my heart for crying. I would always love him for this one moment of mercy” (456). And so, her relationship with her baby’s father ends with a tearful man in silence and a woman cognizant of her own empowerment.




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The relationship between man and woman at the end of the novel has nearly reversed from the male-female patterns seen in previous generations, and, from first to last, Soveida’s experiences with men are portrayed in terms of language. The use of Spanish in Face of an Angel bears significance for gendered relationships and community affiliations in the novel. While Manuel and Elena Dosamantes’s conversations in Spanish mark the special bond between them, subsequent generations of men and women in the family use Spanish less and less except when they are fighting or referring to something taboo. Hector, Soveida charges, knows only enough Spanish to order drinks in Juarez. Soveida does not speak Spanish to any of her husbands or lovers; the one time it is spoken to her intimately is when Ivan once moans in the night, “ ‘Te quiero, te quiero, te quiero.’ I want you. I want you. I want you. In Spanish” (215). With women, however, Soveida freely speaks Spanish or a Spanish-English mix. Her favorite days occur when she and her maid Chata clean the house together. Soveida says, “I love these Mondays with Chata. Talking in Spanish and laughing in no particular language” (215). Spanish fills a need for Soveida, connecting her in a deep way to her family and to her culture. Soveida’s other outlet for Spanish can be found at her workplace, the restaurant El Farol. The employees agree with the owner Larry, who says with affection, “ ‘Hell, this cockroach-ridden, leaky-assed, chile-spattered, greasy-smelling pit of a restaurant is home’ ” (461). The employees fight and argue with each other, share their joys and sorrows, shut down operations for funerals and weddings—including those of their regular customers—all while mixing their Spanish and English. Lavel, the African American cook whose substance abuse problems form a running subplot, is described as “a vato loco . . . who loved to tell dirty jokes in Spanish” (301). A new employee’s inability to comply with Spanish instructions (“ ‘Pégele a ese Tampico hasta que sangre chile’ ” [294]) sends head cook Eloisa into an indignant rage: “ ‘Shame on your mamá! What’s happening to our kids? They don’t speak Spanish no more!’ ” (294). The communal associations provided by El Farol assist Soveida in her personal growth. Beginning her work there at age fifteen, she is taken under the wing of Milia, who gives her what her family never manages to provide: calm, clear instructions about living with other people. Many of these lessons involve language, as does the first: “ ‘Now Soveida, I want you to listen. A person who listens is a good waitress, remember that. Do you hear a cough? It could mean someone is ready to order, or they need water. . . . Silence means the


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customer is either happy or mad. Things could go either way. Learn to know the difference’ ” (106). Eventually, Soveida starts to write a book, which she calls The Book of Service, recording for future waitresses the skills needed to work in a restaurant and be of service to others. Even when the entries in her book set forward concrete directions about developing a soothing voice or setting a table, they are actually instructions in organizing life, lessons in how to make one’s way through the universe as an individual connected in meaningful ways to others. By writing their books, author Denise Chávez and character Soveida Dosamantes claim power—that is, authority—over their language, over their lives as women, and over their relationships with other people. In Chávez’s earlier novel The Last of the Menu Girls, one of the characters asks, “What did it mean to be a woman? To be beautiful, complete? Was beauty a physical or a spiritual thing, was it strength of emotion, resolve, a willingness to love? What was it then, that made women lovely?” (53). Writing about this passage, María González has said that the “ability to write one’s own story and her community’s stories” is what makes women lovely (88). By this or any other definition, in Face of an Angel Soveida grows in loveliness as a person through her writing and through the intellectual and emotional processes that make her writing possible. In addition to her willingness to assume authority through authorship, another of Soveida’s guiding philosophies is summarized in the expression ni modo. The term is defined in the novel as “a phrase meaning that a person accepts what can’t be undone; in other words, there’s nothing you can do about it, let it go, accept it, might as well” (288). Speaking to interviewers Kevane and Heredia, Chávez interpreted the phrase this way: “ ‘You keep surviving. That’s the Mexican spirit. Ni modo, you keep on going’ ” (37). A Spanish phrase that conveys resignation but does not suggest either approval or resistance, ni modo has special meaning for the Dosamantes women, who by the end of the novel achieve a degree of peace in their lives. While talking with her best friend since childhood, the lesbian feminist nun Sister Lizzie, Soveida manages at last to speak of her pregnancy and in so doing gains the confidence to move ahead with her life: “At that moment I knew everything was all right, and would always be all right, because we shared the same story” (446). Thus, Soveida affirms what Yvonne Yarbro-Bjarano has said: “The love of Chicanas for themselves and each other is at the heart of Chicana writing, for without this love they would never make the courageous move to place Chicana subjectivity in the center of literary representation, or




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depict pivotal relationships among women past and present or even obey the first audacious impulse to put pen to paper” (736). And so, with renewed feelings of love for herself, faith in her ability to love others, and security in her connections with other women, Soveida informs her delighted mother and grandmother that she, a middleaged, unmarried woman, is going to have a baby and may become an author as well as a mother. Soveida relays her news in the context of discussing language and story. Mamá Lupita tells Soveida she will get wrinkles if she continues to frown like her grandmother, “ ‘gritting my teeth and trapping words I should have let go of in the first place’ ” (447), whereupon Dolly says she might “ ‘write a book about faces’ ” (449). This exchange prompts Soveida to make her announcement: “ ‘Maybe someday I’ll write my book, too, Dolly. It’ll be about a single waitress who gets pregnant and is about to have a baby’ ” (449). Safe within the bosom of her now matriarchal family, Soveida gathers the strength to live her life and tell her story. In the final scene of the novel, Dolly and Mamá Lupita help Chata and Soveida clean house in preparation for the baby’s arrival. Mamá Lupita speaks the last words of the novel as she orders the three women outdoors for a lunch break: “ ‘Outside, everyone. Woman. Man. I guess we’re all men here. And child. ¡A comer! Like I was telling Soveida, everything will work out. . . . It always does. One way or another. One time or another. It’s all in the way we do things, Dolly. Like your onions in the tuna fish. Finitos. Finitos. Ni modo’ ” (467). Using both English and Spanish and referencing food and family along with language, gender, and community, Mamá Lupita’s pronouncement fittingly concludes the novel with a philosophical benediction: ni modo.

A LBURQUERQUE Whereas Denise Chávez’s Face of an Angel presents a woman’s perspective and examines the intergenerational bonding of women, Rudolfo Anaya’s Alburquerque is written from a man’s perspective and emphasizes the intergenerational bonding of men. A one-to-one correspondence between the two novels does not exist in all details, but Anaya’s novel offers a male point of view about the same themes found in Chávez’s fiction. Because of their different narrative structures, the two novels may seem more different than they actually are. Face of an Angel is presented in first person from the point of view of the main character Soveida Dosamantes, so the reader develops a full identification with Soveida during nearly five hundred pages of


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shared feelings. Alburquerque, on the other hand, is written in third person, and the protagonist, young Abrán González, shares the more tightly written spotlight (fewer than three hundred pages) with the man who turns out to be his father, Ben Chávez. Still, the themes of language, gender, and community are woven throughout Anaya’s novel as Abrán’s conversational exchanges allow him to develop meaningful relationships with other men as well as with women. Through those relationships, he develops his personal and community identity, and, learning from his experiences, Abrán, like Soveida, ultimately achieves a satisfactory degree of unity and harmony for his life. Alburquerque, unlike Face of an Angel, builds around a specific, concrete plot: Abrán’s search for his father. Early in the story, the former Golden Gloves champion learns that he is adopted when his biological mother calls him to her deathbed. The dying woman, Cynthia Johnson, is a well-known artist who gave birth to him when she was only a teenager. Her wealthy Anglo parents had been so alarmed by the prospects of an illegitimate grandchild fathered by a Mexican American from the barrio that they gave their daughter’s baby to household workers after extracting from the childless couple a vow of silence about the infant’s origins. Though he loves his adoptive parents, his adoptive father died many years earlier. So strongly now does Abrán desire to find his biological father that he makes a bargain with a devious politician, a childhood friend of his biological mother, to return to the boxing ring for a promotional political event if the politician, Frank Dominic, will reveal the identity of Abrán’s biological father. Had he been paying attention to details, he could have identified the man himself, for they actually meet in the first chapter when Abrán and his buddy Joe rescue Ben Chávez from a bar, where Ben, a writer who teaches at the university, gets into a fight with some local thugs over a game of pool. From first to last, Alburquerque wrestles with the divisive forces that separate and damage human beings. “The novel’s ultimate message,” says Paul Beekman Taylor, “is a confidential optimism in Chicano art as the most effective weapon against the tyranny of Eurocentric political, technical, and cultural hegemony. . . . The discovery of the secrets of one’s origins is a task which provides the tools for resistance to the dominant culture’s eroding of Chicano identity” (“Chicano Secrecy” 265). Imposed silence, speechlessness, and lack of access to language keep people in the various plot lines from bonding with each other and deprive them of personal and political power. On the other hand, telling stories and legends, participating in conversations, and having access to free expression allow the characters to connect




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with each other and to develop self-awareness and social fulfillment. Communication between men as well as between men and women is shown to be problematic but essential to self-identity. Likewise, acceptance of ethnic, racial, and linguistic diversity is shown to be difficult but necessary in order for individuals to live in community with each other. In the end, the novel celebrates the power, wholeness, and unity that the main characters finally achieve after many challenges and troubles. As the novel opens, the primary male characters face internal and external conflicts. Their lives embody the principle Anaya set forth in his essay “ ‘I’m the King’: The Macho Image” about Chicano manhood: “We learn to carry ourselves as men in our families, in the community, and in respect to women and men. And because we are members of a different cultural group living within the boundary of Anglo America, we learn to carry ourselves in respect to the Other, in this case, other white males” (69). The male characters in Alburquerque learn how to be men in relationship to other men and women, always aware of the contrasts between the ethnic layers in their communities and families. Abrán, pained by the responsibility he feels for a friend who years ago died after boxing with him, must cope with the destabilizing news that he is adopted and only half-Mexican. When he was young and other children taunted him because of his fair skin, he would respond with force: “ ‘I’ll show you I’m Mexican,’ was his battle cry, and he cursed with the best barrio Spanish he knew and went in swinging” (21). Even though he is now a grown man, his instincts are still to fight when challenged. Joe, Abrán’s college friend, has never recovered from traumatic experiences in the military and now struggles with an alcohol problem. Because of his withdrawn and sometimes violent behavior, he is not welcome on his own pueblo. He is ashamed of his past actions and wants to break out of the reputation and living pattern he has established for himself. He still writes to his mother and would like to resume his relationship with his former girlfriend, but his fears at first hold him back. In talking with Abrán, he works out a plan: “ ‘I’d like to see Bea. . . . When I first got back . . . I was drunk a lot. . . . I took it out on her. I don’t ever want to do that again’ ” (14). Using the writing skills he develops in college, Joe reaches toward others through language. Like the residents of William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Louise Erdrich’s Northern Plains, or Ernest J. Gaines’s Louisiana, families and specific characters appear and reappear in the fiction of Anaya. Just as writers from other traditions have done, Anaya blends


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and reworks his characters’ fictional situations to convey his own unique vision of life. In particular, Anaya draws on three distinct typologies, the Meso-American myth, the scriptural story, and the European literary culture (Taylor, “Chicano Translation” 31), to tell the ancient and general human story of displacement, wandering, and searching from the perspective of the Chávez family. Anaya told interviewer Ray González, “there are certain migration routes that are used along what the aborigines of Australia called the ‘songlines of the earth. . . . ’ The Rio Grande valley and the Sangre de Cristo mountains in New Mexico for me are those kinds of places on earth. There is a great deal of spirituality attached to places. The sense of the memory of my ancestors and the memory of the earth is what gives me my power to write and reflect on it” (18). The community of place is powerful for Anaya and for his characters. Ben Chávez and his family figure prominently in Heart of Aztlán and Tortuga as well as in Alburquerque. In Alburquerque, Ben is a mature and successful man who enjoys a solid relationship with his wife Elena, an independent and secure woman, but Cynthia’s death from cancer renews his guilt over not having been able to stand up to her father so many years ago. Once he learns that Abrán is his son, he wants to face the young man and “tell his son that he wasn’t really a coward” (76), but he is bound to silence by his vow to Cynthia that he would never reveal himself as the father of her child. Feeling that he has been a coward, he is sensitive to other people’s opinions and so allows a buddy from high school, the now successful politician Frank Dominic, to manipulate him, just as he allows himself in the opening chapter to be drawn into a brawl when men in a bar call him a chicken. Ben exemplifies the conclusion of Annie Eysturoy, who has said, “Men, even more than women, are fettered to gender roles” (Daughters 84). An inability to articulate their most important feelings, a nagging insecurity about their masculinity, and lingering doubts as to their place in society hinder Ben, Joe, and Abrán in their efforts to develop their self-identities and to connect in meaningful ways with other people. Yet from the beginning, signs point them toward solutions and paths to fulfillment. One of Cynthia’s paintings in Ben’s study, for example, suggests the possibility for successfully fusing language, gender, and community through art. Joe notices the painting in the first chapter, when he and Abrán take Ben home after the scuffle in the bar: “It was the scene of a matanza, the butchering of hogs for winter meat. It was so vivid in detail and color that the people in it seemed alive” (9). The matanza represents a community ritual and an opportunity




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for linguistic solidarity. The event depicted in the painting is also described in Cynthia’s diary; as Abrán’s adoptive mother Sara says of Cynthia, “ ‘She was not only an artist, she could write like a poet’ ” (94). When Abrán reads from Cynthia’s diary entry about the matanza, he learns that his father and Cynthia had been invited to such a fiesta the autumn after they had first fallen in love. Gathered together in a rural village, the people were enjoying the celebration, conversing comfortably in Spanish and occasionally English, when the young men, unfamiliar with the old traditions, began to brag and drink too much, violating the codes of language and behavior expected at a matanza. The old men, however, saved the day by demonstrating how to conduct the ceremony with grace and honor. A sense of nobility and duty then falls over all the men, who spend the rest of the afternoon talking about “the old days when the people of the valley lived in harmony with the earth and their neighbors” (105). Witnessing the matanza proves to be a turning point for Cynthia. Professionally, it establishes the purpose for her life’s work: “to preserve the beauty of those moments. That was the gift and the commitment which came to rest in my soul that day. The life and love of the old people opened my eyes, and I wanted to share that gift” (106). Here the character echoes the author’s feelings, for Anaya has disclosed that “for me art is that place where I go to think, to reflect on myself. Whether it is music, or a painting, or a book or a poem it seems to me that art is what connects me to the rest of the world, to humanity” (Martinez 15). Cynthia’s artistic mission dates to the fiesta when she first experiences the “life and love” of a people sharing their traditions of language, their displays of manhood, and the rituals that mark their common heritage. Personally, the sense of love bubbles over into her relationship with Abrán’s father, and they become lovers. On the fateful day of the matanza, then, the course of Cynthia’s public and private life is set. Sexual relations, personal connections, and artistic inspirations flow from the satisfaction found at the community ceremony. One male character, Lucinda’s father Juan Oso, seems to have achieved the kind of fulfillment Cynthia portrayed in her paintings and journal entries. When Lucinda, who nursed Cynthia in her dying days, takes Abrán to meet her parents in their mountain home during the week of Easter, her father serves as a living model for the level of wholeness possible for a man at peace with himself, his sexuality, his family, and his place in the world. Not always so secure, Juan tells Abrán about the mistakes of his younger days and explains how over time he learned to manage his conflicts and energies until he


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ultimately became a santero, a man who carves images of saints from wood. As Abrán listens to the man who will become his father-in-law, he realizes that “This was what he had missed as he grew into manhood, a man who would tell him stories and talk about the experiences of men” (170). Reaching out for male companionship and male conversation, Abrán loves Lucinda even more because of the connection he makes with her father through language. For their part, the Oso family knows that Abrán lacks their sense of belonging within a community—“generations of living in the same villages of the Sangre de Cristo and roots that went deep into the soil and the spirit of the people” (171), but, as Juan Oso says, “ ‘A man can put roots wherever he finds a good woman’ ” (171). They welcome him into their household and into their lives, blessing his interest in their daughter. In contrast, other minor male characters create false myths for their lives, dominate and abuse women, oppress other men, and generally violate all of the principles that lead to the fulfilling life enjoyed by people such as Juan Oso. For example, Walter Johnson, Cynthia’s father, has no family heritage or ethnic identity to guide him, having moved west alone to escape poverty, illness, and insignificance. Once in New Mexico, he took a new name, married Vera, the first woman who was kind to him, and proceeded to build a fortune out of her insistence that they buy land around Albuquerque before the city boomed. Vera Johnson, an orphan, also has no known past. After a period of childlessness and marital unhappiness, she seeks comfort, unbeknownst to Walter, in a brief affair with a doctor, also from uncertain family origins, who is Cynthia’s biological father. Despite, or perhaps because of, his and his wife’s uncertain backgrounds, Walter Johnson insists on maintaining strict standards of ethnic and class separation. Driving through Albuquerque on his way to the Johnson mansion in order to confront his grandfather, Abrán recognizes that one does not “have to go to El Paso and cross to Juarez to understand the idea of border” (38). Borders that Johnson has erected and zealously maintains keep him from establishing meaningful relationships with everyone. Having carefully guarded his own past, the silence he enforces about Cynthia’s baby obliterates his home life and has longterm ramifications for others as well. Ironically, the unhappiest men are making similar mistakes with their lives but fail to recognize the parallels, which rise like the phallic towers built by Frank Dominic and Walter Johnson in downtown Albuquerque. Dominic, a developer and politician, fantasizes about the beautiful young mayor while promoting his plan to create a Venice-like dream in the desert by running canals through the city.




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Knowing the history of Albuquerque, he knows something of its language and culture, “that it was a gringo stationmaster who had taken the first ‘r’ out of Alburquerque. Because he couldn’t pronounce the ‘Albur’ he dropped the ‘r’ in a move that symbolized the emasculation of the Mexican way of life” (112). Dominic, like Johnson, longs to create another identity for himself, searching for genealogical evidence that might connect him to the original Spanish explorers and colonizers of the Southwest. Erlinda Gonzales-Berry locates the origins of myths about a “ ‘Spanish fantasy heritage’ ” with “a deliberately engineered strategy of political and economic implications” created to facilitate statehood for New Mexico by making “the native population acceptable to a race-conscious Congress” (10). Gonzales-Berry also points out that an emphasis on the Spanish heritage, which derives from the male conquistadors, repudiates the Indian heritage, which derives from the females who interacted with the conquistadors. Making a similar point, Rafael Pérez-Torres has said, “Chicano mestizaje derives from a complex history involving a sense both of dispossession and empowerment, a simultaneous devaluing and honoring of indigenous ancestry” (“Chicano Ethnicity” 154). The character Frank Dominic is exploiting all of these political, ethnicized, and gendered issues for his own personal gain, as he would like to be able to convert a Spanish colonial heritage into political power. In so doing, he keeps secrets and fails to communicate honestly. While trying to promote his schemes, he undercuts what little integrity he has and alienates himself from everyone. Characters such as Abrán, Ben, and Joe sometimes make mistakes, but their lapses differ in intent from the calculated choices of characters such as Frank Dominic and Walter Johnson. Dominic and Johnson intentionally plan the harm they cause others. For example, Dominic hires a private detective to obtain damaging evidence against his political rivals, he steals a lawyer’s briefcase to get a copy of Cynthia’s will, and he negotiates for water rights without regard for the needs and positions of the tribes who hold those rights. Abrán errs, for instance, because of the sexual attraction he and the mayor Marisa Martínez share. Their single episode of lovemaking creates serious consequences for both of them, but they admit their actions and face the consequences. Likewise, Ben and Cynthia’s premature passion for each other was not premeditated and, though incautious, it was aimed at love and connection rather than hate and separation. In Anaya’s novel, both men and women suffer for mistakes of the heart. Abrán feels remorse for the hurt his affair with Marisa


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Martínez causes Lucinda. He is truly sorry that his actions betray the trust and intimacy he and Lucinda have tried to build. Moreover, though he feels “Muy macho” (132) when he initially approaches the mayor’s house the day of their encounter, he learns that interacting with powerful and famous people does not bring him satisfaction. In the case of Ben, his guilt over his inability to stand with Cynthia and claim their child stays with him during his entire life, shaping his personal and professional choices but ultimately helping him to be more compassionate for the failings of others. The lives of various male and female characters, particularly the mysterious curandera Doña Tules, demonstrate that wisdom can develop out of suffering. Redemption awaits those characters, who, like sinners in Dante’s first ring of hell, have fallen because of love, but rejection and isolation await those whose sins are deliberately hurtful and destructive. Art in this novel is shown to offer the best avenue for redemption, and art is not restricted to one medium. In a low moment, Ben worries that he may have “wasted his life writing books” (278) and knows that part of his motivation in being a writer has been to try to “write the one story that would help heal the secret ache in his soul” (278). Cynthia’s paintings have given her an outlet for expression at the same time that they have become admired by critics and buyers, but the scenes and interactions portrayed in her paintings, such as the matanza, are themselves art forms. The rituals and tales, the stories and conversations of the people in the barrios and in the rural villages also represent forms of art. In the end, Ben argues that stories about life demonstrate a higher form of art than painting: “ ‘In a painting you can more or less resolve the interaction of light, create relationships with colors that please, then put a frame around the canvas and move on to another painting. But in a story, there is no frame. It spills over the edges’ ” (258). Such sentiments may reflect a lack of appreciation for visual arts, but they also emphasize the importance of narrative and an awareness of the way that art, like life, overflows its frame. In the conclusion of Alburquerque, Abrán prevails in the boxing ring when he is liberated by the discovery, shouted to him by Lucinda at ringside, that Ben is his father: “Now I know! he kept repeating. I’m free. He should have listed to Doña Tules and his mother, listened to Joe and Lucinda—they had told him all along that he was who he was. Tú eres tú, a free spirit come to create his destiny in the world” (283). The crowd gathered at the boxing match shares Abrán’s victory, “going wild with joy”: “A hero had been born, a kid out of the barrio had beaten a fighter with a reputation. That’s what the people




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wanted, a hero. Someone who came out of their own background to make something of himself. . . . El guërito, the kid who had the gringa mother. He was all right. He was one of them” (284). The power of community emerges from the boxing match, and the fight, a highly gendered activity, becomes the site for connection not only between individual cross-sex and same-sex pairs such as Lucinda and Abrán or Abrán and Ben, but also between the citizens of Albuquerque. At the end of Alburquerque, Abrán finds a path to peace through knowing who he is and by understanding his relationships in community with other people. The potential for harmony exists between and among men and women, between and among Anglos and Mexicans and Indians, and between and among generations. Lines of ethnicity have been blurred, as nearly everyone has been shown to be of mixed origins. A new future is envisioned. As Ben incorporates these ideas into the epic poem he is writing, he hopes that his son “Abrán could find himself in the brotherhood of all men. . . . Abrán, born of the Mexican father and gringa mother, as the new Chicano, and he could create his own image, drawing the two worlds together, not letting them tear him apart. Abrán, the new mestizo” (214–15). This vision of a future begins with the individual, as Abrán realizes when Doña Tules explains the meaning of her oft-repeated anthem “Tú eres tú” to Abrán: “ ‘The person within you is all you have to know. You are your own father. Each man is your father, each woman is your mother. It takes time to understand this, but when you do, your soul will be at peace’ ” (202). Doña Tules in Alburquerque expresses many of the same ideas as Oralia in Face of an Angel. With her moral strength, her desire to mediate between the physical world and the spiritual world, her commitment to healing, and her strength acquired from suffering, Doña Tules exhibits the characteristics of a true curandera (Daghistany 195–206). She shows the way for Abrán and others to become, if not shamans, at least leaders for those around them. Out of the peace that individual characters are seeking, new possibilities emerge for the future. Like Antonio in Bless Me, Ultima, Abrán reflects Anaya’s “search for the New World person. He incorporates the Español and the Indio, the old world and the new,” and shows the truth of Anaya’s claim that “when you find out who you really are, you become a person of incredible power” (Jussawalla, “Anaya” 248).


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major American writer expressing universal values through his own medium” (Waters 6). This assessment would also apply to Chávez. Even more broadly, what Robert Con Davis-Undiano said of Rudolfo Anaya is also true of Denise Chávez, as implied in the title of this chapter: they “name the cultural changes that will be the contours of the twenty-first century” (139). These two authors speak vividly and powerfully about the possibilities for the future, for men and women living in community with each other, and for people trying to connect and communicate with each other. Their messages pertain to the diverse peoples of the Southwest and to all Americans. Like the other authors discussed in this study, Chávez and Anaya convey energy, vitality, and dynamism in their portrayal of American identities at the end of twentieth century and in their treatment of the key identity issues of language, gender, and community. In so doing, they give life to American voices and to American identities that have not necessarily been heard by or known to a wide audience in the past. Chávez notes that she brings her Chicana perspective to her fiction, particularly in “the use of language” (Eysturoy, “Chávez” 168). She adds, “I see myself as somebody who has been given a gift, something I never asked for. [And] . . . there is that peace that no one can give you, really, other than you coming to grips with and confronting your own life and your own destiny, what work you have done and what you need to do (Eysturoy, “Chávez” 168–69). Reflecting on the changes in her writings as she has gotten older, Chávez explains that “sexuality is a very important theme to me, relationships between men and women, women and women, men and men” (Eysturoy, “Chávez” 167). Thus, Chávez identifies as her primary themes the conditions particularly relevant to the search for American identities on the edge of the twentieth century: language, gender, and community. The search for self within the web of one’s relationships takes center stage in Anaya’s work just as it does in Chávez’s. Anaya has commented that “what all of us want to have inside [is] a certain peace of mind, a certain harmonious relationship to our fellow human beings and to the universe. We want to understand why we are here and what our purpose is in life” (Martinez 22). For himself, he says, “The meaning in life to me is not to acquire position or wealth, it is to achieve harmony within myself” (Martinez 23). Like Chávez, he sees his mission in life is to write: “My good in life has been to keep writing, and I have tried to write in as many forms as I can” (Martinez 24). This emphasis on the importance of writing cannot be separated from Anaya’s views on the importance of working “with language, with history, with values” (Martinez 17), and he argues that “there




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are these points of reference that world myths have, that somehow speak to the center of our being, and connect us—to other people, to the myth, to the story, and beyond that to the historic process, to the communal group” (Crawford 86). Anaya sees the Southwest as a special region not only because of its strong sense of place, its unique landscape, and its long history with “cultures that have been here for thousands of years” (Crawford 92), but also because of its multicultural mixture with implications for how the rest of the world might learn to live together. Moreover, he has agreed with interviewer Ruben Martinez that “art is a medium for the moral conscience of a group or a people” and that through many kinds of art we become “aware of our relationship to our community” (16). He has said quite plainly that “ . . . literature has to be subversive. It has to tell the community not only what has occurred historically but what is going on now” so that “our contemporaries . . . can therefore make clearer choices for the future” (Martinez 16–17). Thus, Anaya shares with other late-twentieth-century writers in this study a prevailing concern for the future and for the communities of the future. As Philip Page says in Reclaiming Community in Contemporary African American Fiction, storytelling enables “ongoing reenvisionings of possible futures, futures that are open ended, not necessarily idyllic, and at least partially redemptive of the past” through storytelling’s “continuing and mutual creation of community” (226). Language and literature have a unique role to play in the development of the future and in the creation and understanding of human communities. Anaya and Chávez achieve what Herman Beavers in Wrestling Angels into Song says Ernest Gaines has done in fusing “communal memory and storytelling with resonant force” (127). Through language and through daunting but ultimately successful searches for their own narrative voices, these novelists’ characters develop individual identities and negotiate gendered and ethnically marked relationships as they locate themselves in communities with other individuals engaged in similar personal searches. As Beavers has said of Gaines, all the writers in this study “participate in a wider tradition, one that posits acts of storytelling . . . as sites of intervention (and inventions) in the American dilemma” (ix). Like other novels considered here, Face of an Angel and Alburquerque present characters who have been traumatized but who use their narrative powers to work their way through trauma and through memories and recollections of trauma. These novels show men and women finding their place in their community when they find themselves through the free exercise of speech and writing.


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Anaya has declared literacy to be “the path toward liberation and fulfillment” (“Take the Tortillas” 388), and so it functions in Face of an Angel and Alburquerque. The future looks promising for both Soveida and Abrán: both are about to become parents, both are surrounded by family members who love them, both have finally experienced some degree of wholeness in their expressions of sexuality, and both have developed cross-sex and same-sex friendships. They have made mistakes but have learned from them. Most importantly, though, Soveida and Abrán have witnessed and experienced the empowering and redemptive nature of oral speech, written language, and other forms of art in politically and socially charged environments that have challenged their sexual and ethnic identities. None of this has been accomplished easily, but, as Soveida learns, “adversity has a way of healing us” (459). Such messages contain overtly spiritual overtones, and, indeed, religious and spiritual elements are important throughout these novels. Sandra Cisneros has said that “Mexican religion is half western and half pagan; European Catholicism and Precolumbian religion all mixed in” (Pilar Aranda 67), and the religious tones in Alburquerque and Face of an Angel sometimes appear in unexpected combinations. The matanza scene in Alburquerque, for example, demonstrates the holiness of humble and basic acts while it also encodes cultural and spiritual assessments of men’s roles within their communities. Soveida’s encounter with the Holy Tortilla in Face of an Angel similarly underscores the mystery of human existence with its puzzling blend of animal and spiritual natures. When Soveida visits a shrine where someone claims to have seen the face of Christ on a tortilla, she is surprised by the modest size and appearance of the tortilla: You could see the black gas-burner grill marks on the Tortilla, which formed the image of a face, and it was definitely someone male. But it was hard to say whether the face was Christ’s or any other man’s with a full beard. Never mind, to the owners of the Holy Tortilla, the Tortilla was a sacred sign of God’s appearance on this earth, the mark of God’s grace. But to the side of the supposed Christ image were human bite marks. Someone hungry and in a hurry had obviously chomped down on the Tortilla before it was observed to be holy. (428–29)



The Holy Tortilla episode, which is funny, serious, reverent, and irreverent all at once, shows how a divine presence can intrude


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unexpectedly into the lives of humans, who may be slow to recognize the presence of the sacred but who do participate fully in the physical side of life, “with the gusto of those human teeth marks attempting to grab hold of the divine” (429). The sacred and the profane, the holy and the ordinary, the spiritual and the material mix freely, naturally, and sometimes surprisingly in these novels. A number of scenes not only suggest the importance of inherently spiritual elements and religious ceremonies in daily life, but they also point to the need for mythic vision. In his essay “The New World Man,” Anaya has written, “As I review my writings, I understand that it is the indigenous American perspective, or New World view, that is at the core of my search” (358). Anaya and the other authors in this study have contributed and are contributing their own unique ethnic and cultural and personal perspectives to bear on this search for a “New World view” that becomes, in the end, a worldview that is new. On the verge of the twenty-first century, these authors, male and female, show themselves to be in the process of developing a worldview that incorporates and values the legacies of individuals’ particular cultural histories and yet moves beyond the specifics of the past and the present to imagine a new America. Even Anaya admits that this “is a most difficult proposal, the idea that we can move beyond our ethnocentric boundaries . . . [to] envision the limitations of ethnicity even as we extol our self pride” (“Aztlán” 236). Anaya notes that during the Chicano movement in the 1960s, “the collective soul of the group renewed itself through myth” and that this “is what the tribes of humankind have done throughout history” (“Aztlán” 236). The mythical concept of Aztlán is explained by Rudolfo Anaya as relating to the pre- Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica who recorded in their legends that their original homeland lay somewhere north of Mexico. They called the place Aztlán. The place of origin is very important to Native American thought; after all, the gods often make a covenant with the people at that place of origin. In the 1960s Chicanos discovered the myth of Aztlán. If the land was ‘north of Mexico’ it was the present- day Southwest. (“An American Chicano” 303)


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Aztlán thus functions, especially but not exclusively for Anaya, as a symbol of the New World view. Moreover, the city of Albuquerque functions in his novel as a “contested metropolitan or national space, the quintessential imperial city . . . in which local, national,


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and international versions of historical destiny intersect” (Muller 87). Thus, it stands, at least in an abstract sense, as a type of Aztlán. Rafael Pérez-Torres says that “In refiguring Aztlán, we move towards a conceptual framework by which to explore the connections between land, identity, and experience in relation to Chicana/o populations” (“Refiguring Aztlán” 103). Moreover, when a “mestiza feminist project” (Saldívar-Hull 65) invokes Aztlán, “it is an Aztlán transformed by a mestiza feminist sensibility” (64). In other words, the contemporary concept of Aztlán is not necessarily a male-centered vision. Whether conceived as a new world view or a New World view, the essential issue is one of community. Other scholars and writers in addition to Anaya and Chávez have expressed not so much an “end of era” view as a “beginning of era” view through their work in the 1990s and in the early part of the twentieth century. In her preface to this bridge we call home, a 2002 follow-up to the transformative 1983 collection This Bridge Called My Back, Gloria Anzaldúa compares the outlook of the two volumes in this way: “Twenty-one years ago we struggled with the recognition of difference within the context of commonality. Today we grapple with the recognition of commonality within the context of difference” (2). In her description of the creation of this bridge we call home, co-editor AnaLouise Keating refers to this same recognition as an awareness of “our radical interconnectedness” (18) and quotes Anzaldúa’s “belief that we’re living in a time/place of nepantla, a point we’re exiting from the old worldview but have not yet entered or created a new one to replace it” (19). In his fiction after Alburquerque, most explicitly in his 1996 novel Jalamanta, Anaya has pushed forward with a mythic vision of what Frank Waters recognized as early as 1982 as being central to Anaya’s work: “that inner urge toward realization of our common humanity and its inherent harmony with the entire universe” (Waters 6). Jalamanta describes the teachings of Amado, a desert wanderer who tries to lead people to an understanding of their true natures and a knowledge of how to “reach out and join the community of souls” (67). Like Jalamanta, Denise Chávez’s Face of an Angel and Rudolfo Anaya’s Alburquerque emphasize the desire for community, the search for gendered identity at a time when gender roles are changing, and the use of language as a means not only for articulating independent self-identity and for constructing group identity, but also for bridging the space between the individual and the group and between the past and the present. Chávez and Anaya




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explore what all of the authors discussed in this study confront: the need for the transformative power of language, the transformative power of gender and sexuality, and the transformative power of community in the formation of American voices and American identities.


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7

Twenty-First- Century Ref lections on American Voices and American Identities

Amidst a wide variety of considerations, two primary and related themes have been foregrounded in this analysis of selected 1990s fiction. First, we have observed male and female novelists from various regions of the United States depicting male and female characters from a wide geographic and socioeconomic range using language to negotiate their relationships with each other against a backdrop of changing expectations about gender roles. Second, we have observed late-twentieth-century novelists and their fictional characters using language to define and redefine individual and communal identities against a backdrop of large social reconsiderations of race, ethnicity, heritage, and culture. We have found, in other words, continuous loops of connection between language, gender, and community, with language enabling the construction and performance of complex identities and relationships. Approaching a new century, novelists with a reputation for both popular appeal and critical acclaim have, moreover, been seen addressing some of the major issues of their day in a uniquely American way, by focusing, some might argue in a typically millennial way, on the individual and the needs of the individual self. Yet, mirroring the 1990’s broad cultural concerns about loneliness, each novel’s characters learn that they cannot make it on their own. They find their basic need is to be embedded in a weave of relationships with other people. Sometimes, as in the case of Jefferson in A Lesson before Dying, Tashi in Possessing the Secret of Joy, or Kwan in The Hundred Secret Senses, one character’s profound and sacrificial teachings about human connections become the inspiration for those who survive them. In other situations, as in the case of Henry


CH A P T ER


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in Native Speaker, Soveida in Face of an Angel, or Alf in Memories of the Ford Administration, no act of grand heroism inspires others into satisfying community relationships, but, rather, after loss and disappointment, characters are driven to seek meaningful relationships with others in order to validate their existence and sustain their lives. A self and community theme underlies all of the novels discussed in this study. Notably, complicated balances between or revelations about the self and the group in these novels are all mediated by language, as in Jefferson’s journal in A Lesson Before Dying, Tashi’s verbal articulation of the circumstances of her sister’s death in Possessing the Secret of Joy, the sign unfurled at Tashi’s execution in Possessing the Secret of Joy, the lost letters in Another You, the recovered letter in The Crown of Columbus, or Cynthia’s diary and Ben’s poetry in Alburquerque. Furthermore, the characters are shown to understand themselves and their unique identities through linguistic bridges that enable community. For instance, by writing her papers and starting her book, Soveida in Face of an Angel gains awareness of her personal experiences and what it means to be a woman, while in Memories of the Ford Administration, the conversation between Hawthorne and Buchanan facilitates their understanding of what it means to be a man within the constructs of their surrounding cultures. Thus, the interweaving of language, gender, and community becomes part of the creation of the fundamental American identity. In these 1990s novels, same-sex friendships within families and also among unrelated people emerge as particularly important, as in the case of Soveida’s support system in Face of an Angel, Sonja’s book club in Another You, the ex-wives’ story-telling in Tales of Burning Love, Hawthorne and Buchanan’s conversation in Memories of the Ford Administration, or Paul and Grant’s relationship in A Lesson Before Dying. Such positive human connections, which are neither idealized nor problematized in their depiction, depend on the characters’ ability to speak candidly and to engage in meaningful dialogue with each other. Again, language is shown to be the vehicle for establishing the bonds of human friendship. Of course, language can also provide the means for deception or betrayal in these same-sex situations, as in Henry’s use of language to attach himself to his spy target Kwang in Native Speaker or McCallum’s false friendship with Marshall in Another You. Interestingly, some male characters, including Abrán in Alburquerque and Elgin in Cloud Chamber, express a desire to fill a gap in their social skills by learning how to talk with other men,


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whereas the female characters seem to need no coaching in the art of conversation with other women. In other cases, and sometimes in the same novels as those that emphasize same-sex friendships, cross-sex bonding or the search for a sexualized cross-sex bond shapes characters’ essential identity, as in the case of Abran in Alburquerque, Alf Clayton in Memories of the Ford Administration, or Jack and Eleanor in Tales of Burning Love. In these instances, the primary character’s cross-sex partner is often seen in stereotypical terms, sometimes positively, as in the case of Lucinda and her family in Anaya’s narrative, sometimes negatively, as in The Perfect Wife and the Queen of Disorder in Updike’s novel, and sometimes in a romanticized, mysterious way, as in Erdrich’s Jack, who, in Eleanor’s mind, “matches some hidden paradigm for the way a man should be” (35). Such cross-sex relationships all have a sexual component unless (and sometimes even if) the characters are in the same family or are in mixed couple-friendships. These relationships also depend on conversational exchange as the mechanism for their creation and realization, but, as in same-sex situations, language can also convey hostility or cruelty, as in, for example, Eleanor’s, Alf’s, and Marshall’s conversations with their students or Rosie’s and Bridie’s treatment of their husbands in Cloud Chamber. Though same-sex sexual relationships are not foregrounded in the set of novels considered here, lesbian, gay, and bisexual characters are included, such as Paul Jenkins and Dayton Nickels in Cloud Chamber, Sister Lizzie in Face of an Angel, or Pierre in Possessing the Secret of Joy. These characters are attributed empathetic qualities by the straight people around them but do not appear in enough narrative situations for many broad conclusions to be drawn about their characterizations or their language. Sometimes a type of nuclear family stands as the foundational unit of community at novel’s end, as in The Hundred Secret Senses, The Crown of Columbus, and Alburquerque, but at other times, families of choice appear to be the basis for the modern family, as in Cloud Chamber or Possessing the Secret of Joy. In general, the novels here do not end conventionally with intact, happy marriages. No cross-sex unions exist at the end of Possessing the Secret of Joy; we aren’t sure what will happen with Grant and Vivian in A Lesson Before Dying, as Vivian is still married to someone else; Marshall and Sonja are on shaky terms in Another You; Alfred and Norma seem resigned to their status as a couple, though we don’t hear Norma’s side of things, in Memories of the Ford Administration; Henry and Lelia are tentatively reunited in Native Speaker; Simon and Olivia practice being a family


TWENTYFIRSTCENTURY REFLECTIONS


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with their new baby on weekend visits in The Hundred Secret Senses; Eleanor and Jack are enjoying sex in Tales of Burning Love, but it is not clear if that will be enough for them to sustain a long-term relationship; no cross-sex relationships are emerging at the end of Cloud Chamber; Vivian and Roger seem committed to being together with their baby at the close of The Crown of Columbus, though a traditional marriage seems uncertain, given their independent temperaments; as Soveida says in Face of an Angel, she has a baby on the way but no husband in sight; and in Alburquerque, Abran and Lucinda will probably raise their baby in a traditional family, though the details of marriage are not finalized. As this summary establishes, procreation is alive and well in these 1990s novels, but traditional marriages are not necessarily the norm. Moreover, there is a lingering sense up until the novels’ conclusions and, in some cases, even at the end of the narratives, that whatever the characters have, it isn’t quite enough. This dissatisfaction is not necessarily economic, though economic issues are sometimes at stake, or solely an identity issue, though identity is central in every one of these novels; nor does the dissatisfaction stem only from issues of community, gender, ethnicity, language, or spirituality. The unsettlement that remains at the end is a combination of all such factors, leaving the surviving characters in a partially unfinished status. Nothing is fully wrapped up and finalized in these end-of-century, end-of-millennium narratives. In each one, there is still more on the horizon, but, with all the trauma, loss, and death that the characters have experienced, there are no guarantees about the future. Solutions appear to reside, in part, through narrative, or, as Maya Socolovsky has identified the pattern in Face of an Angel, “balancing traumatic memory and narrative” (202). In what scholars such as John McClure, Phillip Blond, or Hent de Vries and Lawrence Sullivan have deemed a “post-secular” society, narrative may not be the only way to reach beyond and to approach or understand truth, but it is one way. These novels and their ambiguous conclusions reflect the values of a nepantla culture searching for more, though perhaps uncertain as to more of what.1 The themes of discourse, narrative, and longing for meaning entail a certain eroticism, as in, for instance, Henry’s description of the oral nature of his restored relationship with Lelia in Native Speaker or the spicy stories told by the ex-wives in Tales of Burning Love. An appetite for more sex or for more satisfying sex forms an integral part of these narratives. The food motif running throughout these eleven novels also invokes sensuality with an accompanying desire for more. Food and sex appear to bridge the material and


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spiritual realms competing for attention amidst the overabundance of late-twentieth-century America. The conversations over meals, the tea party in Cloud Chamber, the preparing and serving of food in Face of an Angel, the prison dinners in A Lesson Before Dying, and the butchering ceremonies in Alburquerque—all these situations exemplify the link between food and language as opportunities and symbols for self-identity and communal affiliation that reference ethnicity, class, and gender and yet transcend the categories of ethnicity, class, and gender. “And what is more sacred than food, answer me that?” (Face of an Angel 295) declaims Eloisa, one of Soveida’s colleagues, while she defends naming a steak dish in honor of the customer who choked to death eating it. As Denise Chavez describes in A Taco Testimony: Meditations on Family, Food, and Culture, food and sex have many meanings on multiple literal and symbolic levels. Throughout these novels, food, and sex mediate the serious and the comic as they connect the ordinary and the profound, the ritual and the routine, the sacred and the profane in a searching culture. In her study The Female Complaint, Lauren Berlant identifies a “discourse of disappointment” in nineteenth- and twentieth-century women’s cultures. Berlant’s more recent twenty-first-century research further explores the precarious position in which contemporary people find themselves because of their faith in “ ‘promises that have worn away’: upward mobility; meritocratic rewards; restorative national politics; a fulfilling, conventional intimate life” (Gibson online). The seeds of this precarity and the existence of disappointment can be seen in novels of the 1990s, where material and spiritual desires remain incompletely fulfilled while loss and trauma remain somewhat unresolved. As Mary Jo Bona explains in her chapter “What They Talk about When They Talk about Death,” narratives can actually represent death because they do not go on forever, and we know from the beginning when we engage with them there will be a terminus. But narratives also provide continuity—another story will take up where this one left off, or a new story will begin—and so, metaphorically, they provide a symbol of hope. After great loss, still more can remain. Thus, we can add the themes of death, trauma, and loss to the ambiguous and intertwined themes of food, sex, spirituality, and narrative that underlie the primary themes of language, gender, and community in these 1990s novels. Despite the breadth of discussion undertaken in the present study, it must be acknowledged that there is much that is not in this book and much that is not in the novels under consideration. We might echo, with a similar sense of alarm, what Updike said of his own




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books: “But my panicked awareness, as the cut-off age of sixty-five approaches, is of all that isn’t in them—almost everything it suddenly seems” (“Me and My Books” 39). The authors considered here were chosen carefully for their accessibility and compatibility, and for their appeal to the discerning reading public and to the literary establishment, but there are other notable 1990s writers who might have been included. In the future, will Gaines, Walker, Updike, Beattie, Tan, Lee, Dorris, Erdrich, Chávez, and Anaya be assigned the role of geographical regionalists, similar to the position of Sara Orne Jewett or Hamlin Garland at the end of the nineteenth century? Will an attachment to self rather than attachment to place be seen as the distinctive nostalgic feature of the most recent century’s fin de siècle fiction? Will these authors still be read in the twenty-second century or beyond? Surely some will stand the test of time. However, to quote Updike again, there is truth in what he has Hawthorne reply in Memories of the Ford Administration to Buchanan’s hope that “ ‘When passions have evaporated, and what we strive to achieve has been undone by history, the words we write will remain, and will plead for us.’ ” Hawthorne admonishes that such is true only for a few: “ ‘For the rest, books find a grave as deep as any’ ” (275). Not all of the geographic, ethnic, cultural, or gendered communities that comprised the larger American community at the end of the twentieth century have been included here or could be included in any one study. Though members of various ethnic groups, all of the authors represented here are mainstream American writers, and their characters align themselves with ideological notions of American identities, what Orm Øverland characterizes as the immigrant sense that “the ideas we brought with us are American ideas” (19). Not blended in a melting pot by any means, the unique gendered and ethnicized identities described in these novels are, in some paradoxical ways, what make them characteristic of late-twentieth-century American communities. Even as the old categories of gender and ethnicity are being called into question, the component parts remain important for the characters’ individual and communal identities in these 1990s novels. It must also be acknowledged that the novels discussed here have relatively little to say about violence or about science and technology, prominent themes in American culture and in some American fiction at the end of the century. Cormac McCarthy’s 1992 novel All the Pretty Horses or Toni Morrison’s 1997 novel Paradise, her first to be published after she was awarded the Nobel Prize, would be good candidates for a careful examination of violence, especially as related to


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language, gender, and community. Not just science and technology, but also the manner in which males and females are depicted in novels with a scientific or technological underpinning would be interesting topics for study in books as different as Michael Crichton’s 1990 Jurassic Park or Don DeLillo’s 1997 Underworld. In other words, the scope of this study has focused on only a slice of American literature and American culture, and much remains to be said about other aspects of American literature and American culture at the end of the century. What the books considered here do capture and construct are major changes in American society having to do with language, gender, and community and the preoccupation with self and selfreferentiality so characteristic of millennial American culture. As we draw further from the millennial marker that engendered so much anticipation and even anxiety prior to the end of the twentieth century, we can begin to reflect more confidently on American life and American fiction in the 1990s. One first-order observation is that we are still here, and this point bears mention, given the apocalyptic rhetoric that was sometimes associated with Y2K. Earthly time did not end with the year 2000, the human race was not snuffed out, and civilization did not collapse.2 Themes related to linear time and concerns for the finality of death are universal literary subjects, of course, but, as noted earlier, the late-twentieth-century American novels discussed in this volume conclude rather hazily, the optimism typically associated with the American spirit tempered by uncertainty. Major characters are executed or die, marriages and relationships end, and some of those left behind show limited energy for picking up and moving forward. Hope or glimmers of hope for the future remain in the conclusions of all these novels, but those glimmers are often unrealized—as in babies just born or not yet born—or half-despairing—as in Updike’s narrative declaration that “Optimism isn’t a philosophical position; it’s an animal necessity” (359)—or fierce, as in Chang-rae Lee’s narrator’s assertion that in America “you make yourself belong, or you must go” (319). Life ahead, these endings seem to say, may be difficult. Safely on the other side of the year 2000, we can affirm that life does continue, at least for the group as a whole, but many of our essential tensions about language, gender, and community have survived with us. In particular, the fundamental tension between the individual and the group, singularity and pluralism, oneness and manyness stands as strong as ever. From a political and social standpoint, the contested presidential election of 2000 illustrates how twentieth-century tensions about identity continue to affect twenty-first-century Americans’




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self-identities. After millions of votes were cast, the election came down to a handful of votes in a single state. In the immediate aftermath of November 7, 2000, George W. Bush appeared to hold a slim lead in Florida over Al Gore. After disputed ballots in a few counties of Florida were reviewed, Mr. Bush still appeared to win Florida, the state needed to make one or the other candidate the electoral college winner, but by an even slimmer margin. Questions then arose as to whether a more extensive recount should take place and what the time frame for such a recount could be. Finally, more than a month after the election, the controversy reached legal resolution through a decision from the United States Supreme Court overturning a Florida Supreme Court recount order. Even among the nine Supreme Court justices, however, dissenting opinions were expressed. In the end, individual ballots mattered and individual justices’ opinions mattered, but the legal process prevailed. Winning Florida but lacking a majority of the national popular vote, Mr. Bush received one more electoral vote than was needed for the election to be decided. About half the country was pleased or at least satisfied by the outcome, while the other half felt exactly the opposite. The 2000 election is significant for the present discussion because it reflects core values and realities about American self-identities and because it set a tone for the new American century even as it continued the American traditions of the past. After the inauguration, there were still many voters, many states, and many different viewpoints and perspectives. Yet, ultimately, one person became president of one government presiding over one country. The legal or political outcome did not keep citizens from expressing strong and even bitter opinions; indeed, the American system prides itself on each individual’s freedom of expression. While the new president reached out to the opposition for personal reconciliation, he and his team pressed forward with their political agenda. A decade later, pundits still talk about red states and blue states, and the country remains narrowly divided on crucial issues. There are many, but from that many we have one legal entity: e pluribus unum. It is messy and noisy and chaotic, but it is the American way. The e pluribus unum tension has been a defining national characteristic since the founding of the United States. E pluribus unum, the original 1776 motto for the seal of the United States, remains a central and symbolic theme of American identity at the turn of the century and into the new millennium. However, closely associated with the American tension between manyness and oneness is the tension between assimilation and pluralism. In the grand sweep of American culture, as seen in the 2000


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presidential election, a paradox emerges about the coexistence of pluralism (many views and many voices) and assimilation (unity and oneness). While all of the novels discussed in this volume refer in one degree or another to legal or political themes, only some hinge on legal or political situations. But all are, at heart, about the latetwentieth-century competing pulls of pluralism and assimilation. Can Abran or Rayona unite the various strands of their heritage cultures and lead a unified life? Must Grant Wiggins and his students stay in their segregated quarter, or will the lessons of Jefferson’s life and death provide a bridge between races and cultures? Will it be possible for Alfred Clayton or Marshall Lockard to break out of their malecentered academic environments in order to form mutually satisfying relationships with women? Can Henry and Olivia carry their Korean and Chinese influences into their American futures? All of the novels discussed in this volume show their main characters grappling with the iconic and characteristic American tension between individuality and community and between assimilation and pluralism in contexts marked by gender and ethnicity. More than a decade beyond the publication of these novels, analysis of the American community in terms of gender and ethnicity is still a front-burner issue, though some underlying assumptions have shifted. With regard to gender, changes are particularly visible in political terms, wherein one female candidate, Hillary Rodham Clinton, came close to being one political party’s 2008 nominee for president, while another female candidate, Sarah Palin, was the other party’s 2008 nominee for vice-president. Though still in the minority, female politicians increasingly are being elected to high office. In politics and elsewhere, American women have been widely accepted and successful in public roles, but because their female status continues to be commented upon, it is safe to say that gender has not receded into an unmarked or neutral category. Of course, the winner of the 2008 presidential election was Barack Hussein Obama, whose ethnicity has also been universally remarked upon and widely accepted. Many books will doubtless be written about the cultural significance of our first African American president, whose parents met at the University of Hawaii, his father a black African from Kenya and his mother a white American whose parents had moved to Hawaii from Kansas. Mr. Obama spent some of his childhood in Indonesia after his mother remarried, and members of his extended family now live on several continents and lay claim to various racial, ethnic, religious, and national identities. After graduating from Columbia, he completed his formal education at Harvard Law




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School, as did his wife, who graduated from Princeton but had been raised in Chicago in a middle-class African American family. Thus, personally and professionally, President Obama has been looked to as the embodiment of a successful and modern multicultural, multiracial, and multiethnic leader, for whom the pluralism/assimilation tension appears, at least from the present vantage point, to have found resolution happily consonant with the temper of the times. Countless examples could be cited to show that previously stigmatized identities, especially those associated with race, class, or gender, are no longer obstacles to success at the highest levels. At the top of such a list would be political leaders such as President Obama, judicial figures such as Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, college presidents such as Dr. Bobby Fong and Dr. Freeman Hrabowski, or business executives such as Pepsi’s Chief Executive Officer Indra Nooyi. But the fact that our diverse country is filled with personal successes, educational and economic opportunities, and legal protections does not mean that people no longer experience hurtful or discriminatory treatment because of their gender, ethnicity, religious practice, home language, or any number of other personal characteristics. In Possessing the Secret of Joy, Tashi explains that “an American looks like a wounded person whose wound is hidden from others, and sometimes from herself. An American looks like me” (208). Unfortunately, Homeland Security agents might have a hard time applying that standard, poetic and accurate though it may be. The portrayal of gender, language, and community in the novels of this study only begins to reflect the amount of social change that has taken place during the last two decades and that is projected to continue in the future.3 World issues in the early twenty-first century have forced Americans to recontexualize their national identity within a global setting, much more so than during the 1990s. In fiction, international issues play some role in Native Speaker, The Hundred Secret Senses, Cloud Chamber, The Crown of Columbus, and Possessing the Secret of Joy, but are largely absent from A Lesson Before Dying, Another You, Memories of the Ford Administration, Tales of Burning Love, Alburquerque, or Face of an Angel. In life, the Gulf War that followed the invasion of Kuwait by Iraq in 1990 and then the mid-decade deployment of U.S. troops to Europe during the conflicts in Bosnia caused Americans in the 1990s to reconsider their country’s role in the world, especially as the military’s prior downsizing meant that civilian lives were interrupted by the call-up of reservists, particularly those trained in civil affairs and in medicine. Interventions of the 1990s, however, could mostly be described as the application of policies outward to


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other countries, and the interventions affected individual Americans unevenly. American actions abroad in the twenty-first century might continue to be seen as the application of American values and cultures in other countries, but the 9/11 attacks and their aftermath have brought concerns of the world directly home in ways that affect nearly all Americans in their everyday lives and in ways that are entangled with ideas about race and ethnicity. Prior assumptions about privacy and civil liberty, for example, have been altered in pursuit of airport and border security. Thus, two issues seen throughout the novels of the 1990s, the balancing of public and private selves and the delineation of public and private spaces, have been cast into new light. In short, people in the twenty-first century are seeing to a much greater extent than in the 1990s how American initiatives have global repercussions and how what happens elsewhere in the world directly affects Americans at home. Thomas Friedman’s best-selling book The World Is Flat argues that world events from the fall of the Berlin Wall on 11/9 of 1989, to the terrorism of 9/11 in 2001 have resulted in increasing global interconnectedness and in a leveling of the global economic playing field. Another influential author, Richard Florida, takes a different approach, arguing that “The World Is Spiky,” that is, that there are clusters of economic growth and creativity rather than a flattening world. Either way, it is increasingly clear that what happens in one place affects what happens in another. Economic theorists may take issue with the popularizations in both Friedman’s and Florida’s work, but whether one sees the world as spiky or flat, the nation’s and the world’s communities are interconnected, and this has major implications for American culture and American self-image. Domestically, the 1990s were marked by financial booms, with various stock indexes increasing by factors of four and five. In late 1996, Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan famously used the term “irrational exuberance” to describe what was driving the stock market’s acceleration, and his phrase came to represent the nation’s general economic climate at the end of the twentieth century. After the dot-com collapse around the turn of the century and after 9/11, exuberance largely evaporated, replaced by volatility as the dominant market characteristic. In the early part of the twenty-first century, economies in the United States and elsewhere have struggled.4 Following housing bubbles and banking crises around the world, financial conditions in the new millennium have underscored how various parts of the globe are frighteningly interconnected. As Thomas Friedman wrote in a May 2010 New York Times column, “We’re driving bumper to bumper with every other major economy




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today, so misbehavior or mistakes anywhere can cause a global pileup.” Economic conditions and global interconnectedness reverberate in intellectual and literary circles, and they affect social conditions, stability, self-images, and cultural imaginations. The geographic fact that the United States stretches across an entire continent from ocean to ocean has perhaps lent psychological reinforcement for Americans’ historical feelings of exceptionalism, self-sufficiency, and independence. In the early part of the twentyfirst century, however, even environmental evidence has accumulated to convince Americans that they are part of an interconnected world. To some extent, this plays out in economic terms, as when an earthquake or tsunami creates loss of life and suffering in an area far from American shores and then disrupts production or shipping of goods, creating a widespread domino effect that extends beyond purely economic factors. Whether in discussions of global climate, massive oil spills in the seas, volcanic ash carried over continents, or viral pandemics, Americans are increasingly recognizing that environmentally and ecologically, not just economically and politically, what happens with one group affects others and what happens in a far location may have a direct impact on people in their hometowns. Networking tools such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or Skype, as well as the now-ubiquitous e-mail and twenty-four-hour news broadcasts, have contributed to the perception and the reality of interconnectedness in the early twenty-first century. The 1990s saw fears expressed that advancing technology and computer use would exacerbate human isolation, and some scholars, such as Michael Bugeja in his 2005 book Interpersonal Divide: The Search for Community in a Technological Age, continue to express concerns about the effects of technology on individuals and communities. While communication mediated by technology can be more distant, human creativity also has the potential to utilize new media to facilitate rather than hinder interaction. In fact, just as the development of the printing press in the late 1400s opened up the world to written texts, so, too, the development of computers, the Internet, and other technologies, in what will likely be a revolution of similar proportions as that which followed the printing press, has already opened up the world to instantaneous access and communication. With new technologies, we may have less patience for the time, discipline, and reflection required to compose a letter rather than to fire off an e-mail, to make a decision based on a consideration of all the facts rather than on brief clips of edited video posted on the Internet, or to develop deep friendships rather than to accumulate


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wide networks. The use of new technologies can blur boundaries between public and private, but they have mostly increased rather than decreased our opportunities and our hunger for connection and communication. How the digital age and its iPads, Nooks, Kindles, and other hardware will ultimately change the production of and engagement with literary and intellectual capital remains to be seen. In Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture, Jim Collins sees a complete redefinition of what reading literature means in the electronic world. The digital age does not change the fact, as discussed in chapter one and as shown in the texts under consideration throughout all of the chapters in this volume, that voices create identities and that the expression of personal voice can lead to the realization of personal identity. In life and in literature, people define and shape their realities by talking about them. It is an accepted assertion in language and gender studies that the performance of speech in gendered contexts contributes to the creation of gendered roles and gendered expectations. Likewise, the multitude of voices from various geographic, ethnic, and gendered communities also contributes to the creation of those communities. In this fundamental way, and in many others as well, the texts considered here are not just juxtaposed but are closely linked: all demonstrate the construction of American identities through American voices. The themes of language, gender, and community, so artfully woven together in The Scarlet Letter and other classic American novels, find full flower in much mainstream American fiction of the late twentieth century. Despite the woes and worries of the day, authors found hope in the power of narrative. Storytelling appears in these 1990s novels not only as a way to construct identity but also as a way to find meaning and discover truth: truth at the level of the individual, truth about gender and race, truth about the formation of communities, truth about language, and truth about what it means to be an American. The histories of languages and the histories of nations have, for the most part, evolved through blending, separating, changing, struggling, resisting, and adapting. These dynamic processes continue to be seen in action today with regard to ever-changing patterns of languages, gender constructs, and cultural dynamics in the United States. In the multitudes of American borderlands—the various ones described in this study and those left for others to describe—lies the potential for new developments, for creative change, and for growth in many aspects of language, gender roles, and community relationships.




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Fiction, like other forms of literature and art, can assist us as we seek to understand our past, negotiate through our present, and build our future. As Alice Walker writes in the preface of her book The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult, “Art is the mirror, perhaps the only one, in which we can see our true collective face. We must honor its sacred function. We must let art help us” (13).


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1

I

1. Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club has attracted a good deal of critical attention, as in Mark R. Hall’s “The ‘Oprahfication’ of Literacy: Reading ‘Oprah’s Book Club’ ” in College English and Trysh Travis’s “ ‘It Will Change the World if Everybody Reads This Book’: New Thought Religion in Oprah’s Book Club” in American Quarterly. Entire books published by university presses have been devoted to the subject of the Book Club, including Reading with Oprah: The Book Club That Changed America by Kathleen Rooney; The Oprah Affect: Critical Essays on Oprah’s Book Club, edited by Cecilia Konchar Farr and Jaime Harker; and Stories of Oprah: The Oprahfication of American Culture, edited by Trystan T. Cotten and Kimberly Springer, though the latter deals with more than just the Book Club. Much remains to be said about the topic and about these diverse studies, but it may be especially worth noting, in light of the spirituality theme in 1990s fiction, that critics such as Trysh Travis and Kathryn Loftin (whose essay “Reading Religiously: The Ritual Practices of Oprah’s Book Club” appears in Farr and Harker’s collection) discuss in detail the contemporary religious dimensions of Oprah’s approach to reading. 2. A complete bibliography of the history of language and gender research is not within the scope of this chapter, but more information can be found in the texts mentioned within this chapter, in the journal Gender and Language, and in a great many other publications, including the following selected examples: Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell- Ginet’s Language and Gender; Janet Holmes and Miriam Meyerhoff’s The Handbook of Language and Gender; Suzanne Romaine’s Communicating Gender; Deborah Cameron’s The Feminist Critique of Language: A Reader; Mary Bucholtz, A. C. Liang, and Laurel Sutton’s Reinventing Identities: The Gendered Self in Discourse; Susan Philips, Susan Steele, and Christine Tanz’s Language, Gender, and Sex in Comparative Perspective; Dennis Baron’s Grammar and Gender; William Labov’s “The Intersection of Sex and Social Class in the Course of Linguistic Change”; Jennifer Coates’s Women, Men, and Language and her Language and Gender: A Reader; Camille Roman, Suzanne Juhasz, and Cristanne Miller’s The Women and Language


N 


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Debate: A Sourcebook; Deborah Tannen’s Gender and Discourse and her Gender and Conversational Interaction; and Kira Hall and Mary Bucholtz’s Gender Articulated: Language and the Socially Constructed Self. 3. A complete bibliography of stylistics, poetics, or linguistic approaches to literature is outside the scope of the present study, but these two are classic texts: Donald Freeman’s Linguistics and Literary Style and Elizabeth Traugott and Mary Louise Pratt’s Linguistics for Students of Literature. The journal Language and Literature is devoted to the subject of language in literature. Books such as the following can also introduce students to linguistic approaches to literature: Paul Simpson’s Language Through Literature or his more recent Stylistics: A Resource Book for Students; Peter Verdonk’s Stylistics; Laura Wright and Jonathan Hope’s Stylistics: A Practical Coursebook; Richard Bradford’s Stylistics; Derek Attridge’s Peculiar Language; and Jean Jacques Weber’s The Stylistics Reader: From Roman Jacobson to the Present. Studies such as the following aim to build theoretical models for stylistics: Jacqueline Henkel’s The Language of Criticism: Linguistic Models and Literary Theory; Barbara Johnstone’s The Linguistic Individual; Approaches to Corpus Stylistics by David Hoover, Jonathan Culpeper, and Bill Louw; The Text and Beyond: Essays in Literary Linguistics edited by Cynthia Goldin Bernstein; or Sara Mills’s Feminist Stylistics. Still others investigate specific literary topics, such as Mary Jane Hurst’s The Voice of the Child in American Literature: Linguistic Approaches to Fictional Child Language or Janice Stout’s Strategies of Reticence: Silence and Meaning in the Works of Jane Austen, Willa Cather, Katherine Ann Porter, and Jane Didion. Of course, innumerable studies of literature focus on gender issues, but only some, including the following selected examples, are dedicated intentionally to gender and language in literature: Elsa Nettels’s Language and Gender in American Fiction: Howells, James, Wharton, and Cather; Christine van Boheemen-Saaf’s The Novel as Family Romance: Language, Gender, and Authority from Fielding to Joyce; and Deborah Clark’s “Gender, Race, and Language in Light in August.” 4. Literary connections between selfhood and language have been noted in numerous studies, including, for example, Mary Jane Hurst’s “Characterization and Language: A Case Grammar Study of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying,” or Leland Person’s “Hester’s Revenge: The Power of Silence in The Scarlet Letter.” The following exemplify a few of the many book-length studies related to the self and language in literature: Arnold Weinstein’s Nobody’s Home: Speech, Self, and Place in American Fiction; Louise Barnett’s Authority and Speech: Language, Society, and Self in the American Novel; Margery Sabin’s The Dialect of the Tribe: Speech and Community in Modern Fiction; Alphonso Lingis’s The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common; Jessica Berman’s Modernist Fiction, Cosmopolitanism, and


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the Politics of Community; and Kim Worthington’s Self as Narrative: Subjectivity and Community in Contemporary Fiction. 5. Two valuable studies of community with applications for but also beyond literary analysis are Mary Louise Pratt’s “Criticism in the Contact Zone: Decentering Community and Nation” and Lesley Milroy’s Language and Social Networks. The number of explicit analyses of community in American literature is not, however, as large as might be expected. The following represent a few examples in addition to the titles named within the body of this chapter: James Peterson’s “Linguistic Identity and Community in American Literature” in the collection Language in the USA: Themes for the Twenty-First Century; David Bromwich’s A Choice of Inheritance: Self and Community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost; Philip Page’s Reclaiming Community in Contemporary African American Fiction; Stephen Tchudi’s Community in the American West; and Sandra Zagarell’s “Narrative of Community: The Identification of a Genre.” Linda J. Holland-Toll’s As American as Mom, Baseball, and Apple Pie: Constructing Community in Contemporary Horror Fiction shows how strategies of exclusion are used to construct communities in horror fiction. The volume Community at Loose Ends, edited by the Miami Theory Collective, contains essays on community by Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and others, many of whom make connections between language, literature, and community. Overall, no simple summary can be provided about these various studies except that they demonstrate a diversity of responses to the concept of community in literature and in life.

2 F O’ P  F O’ V  E J. G’ A L ESSON B EFOR E D Y ING  A W’ P OSSESSING THE S ECR ET OF JOY 1. Gaines has reported that in retrospect he would have preferred for Vivian’s character to have been named Gloria but did not think of that name until it was too late to change (Lowe, “Interview” 302). The name Gloria has similar connotations as the name Vivian, which has its roots in the Latin verb vivo, which means to live or to be alive, and which is etymologically related to English words such as vivid or vivacious. 2. It is not possible in a short space to do justice to the rich body of research that exists on the topic of African American Vernacular English, but, as a starting point, analyses of the linguistic features of AAVE can be found in the work of researchers named in this chapter (Dillard, Baugh, Rickford, Green, Wolfram, and Smitherman). Numerous articles and books have been written on AAVE’s history; its


NOTES


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lexical features, sound structures, and syntax; its relationships to other varieties of English, especially those in the Southern United States; its relationships to other languages, especially those in West Africa; its socioeconomic and sociopolitical contexts; and its implications for instructional practices. It should also be pointed out, as Phillipa Kafka has observed, that ignorance of specific African/African American rhetorical techniques and traditions in literature perpetuates the invisibility of a rich and vital heritage and that “any hyphenated example of American literature—Asian American or Native American or Chicano or Jewish American or whatever—contains unique rhetorical and aesthetic devices that are not European American alone” (10).

3 L  G   A C  A B’ A NOTHER YOU  J U’ M EMOR IES OF THE F OR D A DMINISTR ATION 1. The name Beattie assigned to her corporation is “Irony and Pity,” a phrase she says she took from a conversation Jake Barnes has with friends in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (Plath, “Counternarrative” 369). Connections between Beattie’s and Hemingway’s writing styles and emotional tones have been noted by a number of critics, including Robert Beuka in a Hemingway Review article. Updike, incidentally, also says in the foreword to his collection The Early Stories that Hemingway was one of his greatest influences. 2. Daniel Maltz and Ruth Borker surveyed a wide range of earlier studies of gender and language and then theorized, on the basis of the findings in those earlier studies, that men and women learn distinctive ways of speaking from their experiences with language in childhood peer groups. That is, according to Maltz and Borker, boys and girls develop sociolinguistic subcultures with different assumptions about language through the very different ways that all-boy groups or allgirl groups learn to use language to hold an audience, maintain group cohesion, signal status, express solidarity, and so on. 3. According to David Rosen, “studies of masculinity show that no definitive masculine ideal exists and that none is embodied in actual practice. Instead, a loosely related set of shared stereotypes and norms exist. Rather than producing conformity, these produce stress in those expected to observe them” (xiii). Some notable booklength studies on the topic over the last two decades, in addition to Rosen’s The Changing Fictions of Masculinity, include the following: Eric Anderson’s Inclusive Masculinity: The Changing Nature of Masculinities; Kenneth Clatterbaugh’s Contemporary Perspectives on Masculinity; Tim Edwards’s Cultures of Masculinity; Richard Howson’s Challenging Hegemonic Masculinity; Peter F. Murphy’s collection


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4

B S  O  S  S  C- L’ N ATIV E S PE AK ER  A T’ T HE HU N DR ED S ECR ET S ENSES 1. Shirley Geok-lin Lim’s “Complications of Feminist and Ethnic Literary Theories in Asian American Literature” provides an analysis of important developments in Asian American literature and literary criticism. Sau-ling Cynthia Wong’s influential essay “Denationalization Reconsidered” calls for new directions and priority setting in Asian American cultural criticism. Responding to Colleen Lye’s plea in America’s Asia for “a dialogue between social constructionist theories of race and ethnic literary studies” (Jerng 185), Mark Jerng interrogates the concept of Asian American in his essay “Nowhere in Particular: Perceiving Race, Chang-rae Lee’s Aloft, and the Question of Asian American Fiction.” Other notable critical accounts that question and consider as well as recover all kinds of Asian American writings include, in addition to the many studies referenced in the text, the following: Amy Ling’s Between Worlds: Women Writers of Chinese Ancestry; Literary Gestures: The Aesthetic in Asian American Writing, edited by Rocío Davis and Sue-Im Lee; The Ethnic Canon: Histories, Inventions, and Interventions, edited by David Palumbo-Liu; Jinqi Ling’s Narrating Nationalisms: Ideology and Form in Asian American Literature; Sheng-mei Ma’s Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures; Rachel Lee’s The Americas of Asian American Literature: Gendered Fictions of Nation and Transnation; Guiyou Huang’s The Columbia Guide to Asian American Literature since 1945; and Helena Grice’s Asian American Fiction, History, and Life Writing: International Encounters. 2. In the analysis of narrative forms, the term coda refers to the postresolution stage of a story that signals the close of the tale and returns the narrative to the present time. Narrative patterns in literature are well known, but the patterns of narratives in natural conversations (abstract, orientation, complicating action, evaluation, resolution, and coda) have also been well described by researchers such as William Labov in Language and the Inner City, Livia Polanyi in Telling the American Story, and Barbara Johnstone in Stories, Community, and Place, all of whom link narrative forms to cultural and community identities as well as to universal features of language.


Fictions of Masculinity: Crossing Cultures, Crossing Sexualities; David Gilmore’s Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity; and the collection Constructing Masculinity edited by Maurice Berger, Brian Wallis, and Simon Watson.


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3. Other critics have also observed Whitman’s presence in Native Speaker. Notably, Christian Moraru writes that in Native Speaker “Whitman is here both an other and a forebear, hence Lee answers—positions his novel—concurrently inside and outside America. Making and remaking himself into a turn-on-the-millennium Whitman” Lee thus revises Whitman “to the next level in the context of ‘postethnic and ‘postnative’ America” (72).

5 L, D,  W H   F  L E  M D 1. The search for five-hundred-year-old documents and the efforts to interpret them are also central elements in Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Almanac of the Dead. In Silko’s “bleakly satiric characterization of millennial America” (Stein 138), the stories “serve to rouse the dispossessed to various forms of combative actions” (Stein 140). A number of authors responded in the 1990s to the five-hundred-year anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in North America. Gerald Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus, unlike The Crown of Columbus, engages in “a radical imaginative revision of history from a native perspective” (Bak 115). The novel’s villain, whom Bak sees as “a viciously ironic intertextual reference to The Crown of Columbus” is named “Doric Michéd (an anagram of ‘Michael Dorris’ and Louse ‘Erdrich’?), a crossblood who serves on museum boards and who is instrumental in the commercial exploitation of tribal cultural remains” (Bak 117). Deborah Madsen contrasts Vizenor’s book, which she describes as a “narrative of survivance” (“On Subjectivity” 71), with the “fundamentally multicultural, or even what Stanley Fish calls a boutique multiculturalist, position” in The Crown of Columbus (77). However, Susan Farrell argues that “much of the critical distaste for The Crown of Columbus arises from expectations of what American Indian literature should be, as well as from misunderstandings of Dorris and Erdrich’s thematic intent and narrative strategies” (121).

7

T-F- C R  A V  A I


NOTES

1. Nepantla is a Nahuatl word referring to a middle time or place. AnaLouise Keating in this bridge we call home refers to Gloria Anzaldúa’s “belief that we’re living in a time/place of nepantla, a point we’re exiting from the old worldview but have not yet entered or created a new one to replace it” (19), and this belief seems to be borne out in many fictional visions from the 1990s.


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2. More information and additional perspectives on the 1990s connections between time and death in American cultural and literary imaginations can be found in a number of sources. In Genealogy and Literature and Millennial Seduction: A Skeptic Confronts Apocalyptic Culture, Lee Quinby addresses the relationship between literature and cultural practice, themes of death and resistance in millennialism, and the absolutism of apocalyptic thinking. Paul Boyer’s When Time Shall Be No More: Prophecy Belief in Modern American Culture also examines the traditions of prophetic belief, and Samuel Cohen’s After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s analyzes the historical self-consciousness and millennial thinking in late-twentieth-century fiction. 3. Issues related to language and community are linked with immigration and population shift, key topics in the early twenty-first century. For instance, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 1990 the Hispanic population in the United States was about 22.4 million, or 9 percent, and about 35.3 million in 2000, or 12.5 percent (http://www.census.gov). In 2008, 25% of all U.S. children younger than five were Hispanic, and the total U.S. Hispanic population stood at 46.9 million, with the 2050 Hispanic population projected to be 132.8 million. In 2000, according to the Modern Language Association, about 18 percent of Americans spoke a language other than English at home, while in 2005 the percentage increased to about 20 percent (www.mla.org/map), though the majority of those speaking a language other than English at home also claimed to speak English well or very well. The greatest recent linguistic growth has been in Spanish, but other languages have also seen increases, including Chinese, Vietnamese, Russian, Korean, Hindi, and Arabic, while other languages have seen decreases in numbers of U.S. speakers, including French, German, and Italian. 4. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which tracks only thirty large companies but is often seen as a general indicator for economic conditions, stood at 2,810 on the first day of trading in January 1990, but by the first day of trading in January 2000 had quadrupled to 11,522. The Nasdaq Composite, an index of technology stocks, reached a high in March 2000 at 5,132.52, five times its 1995 level. The dot-com bubble burst soon after the Nasdaq reached its high, and the index fell back to its 1995 levels but has since recovered to about half of its high point. The Dow, meanwhile, reached a zenith of over 14,000 in October 2007, but plummeted to 6,547 in March 2009, and then recovered some ground to close on the first day of trading in 2010 at 10,543, a figure below where it had stood a decade earlier. More financial information can be found in a number of sources, including the online “Market Data Center” section of The Wall Street Journal (http://online.wsj.com/mdc/public/page/marketsdata.com).


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absence, 24, 74, 80, 174–5 of children, 74, 92, 94, 100, 157, 161 of community, 9, 16–17, 23, 41, 142, 183 of friends, 34, 51 and gender, 129, 132 of global themes, 180 and language, 29, 65, 71 of perfection, 63 of science and technology, 176 of violence, 176 of writing systems, 115 see also longing; loss abuse, 67, 72, 123, 145–52, 154, 161 see also sexual abuse academic culture, 52–3, 54, 60–1, 71, 107–8, 111–12, 129 academic novels, 51–78, 110–17 for creative writing, 22 and male language, 55, 71, 151–2, 179 Adam and Eve, 64, 92 Adam and Evelyn, 25, 38–45 see also creation symbols addiction, 108, 23, 154, 158 see also alcohol adultery, see cheating African American identities, 3, 4, 21–49, 87, 106, 123, 154, 179–80 see also black masculinity; Black Vernacular English; color African American Vernacular English, see Black Vernacular English

age, see fin de siècle; millennial; nepantla; time; specific time period (e.g., twentieth century) agents of change, 33–4, 47 AIDS, 44, 61, 65, 72 Albuquerque, 161, 168–9 Alburquerque, see Anaya, Rudolfo spelling of, 162 alcohol, 25, 27, 54–5, 58, 62, 99, 126, 128, 154, 160 see also addiction Alexie, Sherman, 4 alone, aloneness, 1, 16, 31, 35, 48, 66, 74, 75, 111, 119, 161, 171 lone American, 1, 18 see also American independence; independence; isolation ambiguity, 11, 17–18, 40, 44, 69, 70, 74–5, 93, 96–7, 113, 174 see also language, ambiguity of; speech, ambiguity of America, American discovery of, 111–16, 142 dream, 8 exceptionalism, 6, 117, 182 identities, 4–7, 9, 14–19, 43, 79, 139, 171–84 and language, ix–x, 7, 15–16, 87, 170, 172 in literature, 6, 8, 102, 165, 176, 178 see also identities; specific identities (e.g., Mexican American identities); time and American identities


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INDEX

America, American—Continued imagined America, 14–15, 102, 168, 182 independence, 6, 182 Indian, see Native American identities literary history, 1–19, 142–3 optimism, 6, 177 rediscovery of, x, 115 spirit, 16, 177–8, 183, 191 values, 6, 92, 178, 181 Anaya, Rudolfo, 5, 7, 139–70, 172, 176 Alburquerque, 142, 156–64, 165–70, 172, 173, 174, 175, 180 biography of, 142–5 Bless Me, Ultima, 17, 142–3, 164 ancestry, 26, 70, 77, 105–7, 113, 123, 159, 162, 191 ancestral memories, 104 see also specific individuals or groups (e.g., Dorris, Michael; Chinese American identities) Anglo, 81, 140–1, 157, 158, 164 see also European American identities; white Another You, see Beattie, Ann anxiety, 1, 81, 85, 142, 177 apocalyptic, 1, 177, 191 see also end-of-time arguments, see speech, features of art, ix, 5, 6, 52, 62–4, 75 and community, 18, 157, 159, 166 redemptive power of, x, 21, 26, 35–6, 38–9, 163, 167 sacred function of, 184 artist, 5, 52, 157, 160 role of in society, ix, 159 Asian American identities, 77–102, 189 literary criticism about, 79–80 model minority stereotypes, 80

see also Chinese American identities; Korean American identities assimilation, 81, 84, 87, 91–2, 99, 102, 109, 111, 143, 176, 178–9, 180 see also cultural appropriation; cultural identity and language attachment to place, 176 see also geographical location attachment to self, 178 see also self authority, 49, 113 and authorship, 155, 186 moral authority, 28 Aztlán, 168, 169 babies, see absence of children; children; infertility Barth, John, 7 Beattie, Ann, 51–75, 188 Another You, 51–60, 70–5, 172, 173, 180 biography of, 52 belief, see faith belonging, 9, 23, 102, 134, 153, 161, 177 see also aloneness; communities; identities Bercovitch, Sacvan, 6 Berlant, Lauren, 11, 175 Bible, 33, 47, 132, 147, 152, 159, 180 see also Catholicism; Christianity; Paul; religion; Ruth; spirituality bicultural, 42, 139, 143 see also cultures; multicultural bilingual education, 85, 139 bilingualism, 143, 146, 191 binary opposition, 2–3, 11, 16, 88, 100, 126, 136, 141, 150, 178 biracial, 42 see also passing


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bisexual, 11, 42, 59, 72, 173 see also heterosexuality; homosexuality black masculinity, 21–36, 188–9 Black Vernacular English (BVE), 33, 45–6, 187–8 borders, 83, 139, 140, 145, 150, 161, 181, 183 Borker, Ruth, 13, 59, 188 boxing, see sports brothers, 39, 58, 72, 118–19, 149, 151, 153, 164 see also children; family; masculinity Buchanan, James, 57, 60–73, 114, 172, 176 Cameron, Deborah, 10, 185 capital, see finances, money symbolic, see symbolic capital capital punishment, 21, 23–7, 33–6, 42, 44, 118, 177 Catholicism, 112, 117, 120, 133, 144, 145, 150, 167 see also Christianity; religion censorship, 61, 62 change, see cultural change; gender, changes in Chaucer, Geoffrey, 7, 53 Chávez, Denise, 139–56, 165–70, 175 biography of, 142–4 Face of an Angel, 4, 88, 139–56, 165–70, 172, 173–4, 175, 180 cheating, 40, 52–3, 57, 59, 67–8, 146–9, 152, 162 Chicano/a, 3, 139–45, 146–50, 152, 153 see also Mexican American identities children/childhood, 8, 24, 30, 40, 55, 65, 72, 84, 94, 107, 111, 118, 123, 146, 151, 158, 188, 191 absence of, 74, 92, 94, 100, 157, 161

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in history, 143 and language or voice, 37–8, 67, 91–2, 93, 95, 100, 186 subcultures of, 59 as symbols, 33–4, 111 see also future, symbolized by children see also brothers; family; sisters Chinese American identities, 77–81, 87, 91–102, 179, 189–90, 191 see also Asian American identities Chippewa, see Ojibwa choices about language and identity, 4, 95, 115–16, 125, 140, 143, 154 about morality and identity, 31, 36 in fiction by Anaya, 162, 163, 166 in fiction by Dorris and Erdrich, 105, 116, 120, 131, 136 in fiction by Walker, 41 Christ, 24, 47, 132, 153, 167 Christian, Christianity, 31, 34, 149–50 in Anaya’s fiction, 160 in Asian American criticism, 79, 88 in Chávez’s fiction, 147, 153, 167 in Erdrich and Dorris’s fiction, 114, 116–17, 120, 126, 131, 132–4 in Gaines’s fiction, 24, 27–8, 31, 34–5, 37, 46–7 in Lee’s fiction, 85 in Mexican American criticism, 141, 145, 150–1 missionaries, 25, 40, 96–7 in Tan’s fiction, 96–7 in Updike’s fiction, 65, 66, 69 in Walker’s fiction, 38, 41 see also Adam and Eve; Bible; Catholicism; Christ; communion; confession; faith; religion; sacred; sex and religion; spirituality; symbols


INDEX


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INDEX

church, see Christianity; religion; spirituality circumcision, see female circumcision class, 4, 13, 23, 27, 40, 45–6, 51, 70–3, 113, 161, 175, 180 see also middle class; social construction; socioeconomics Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 179 Cloud Chamber, see Dorris, Michael coda, 99, 117, 189 see also narrative, natural codes, 51, 55, 132, 133, 160, 167 see also cultures; writing collaboration, 103–15, 126, 141 color, 26, 28, 30–1, 43, 48, 84, 120, 158 see also black; racism; white Columbus, Christopher, 142, 190 and community, 112–16, 137, 173–4, 190 Crown of Columbus, 109, 110–17, 135–7, 172, 190 and language, 112, 115–16, 142 and religion, 114, 117 commercialism, 29, 80–1, 116, 117, 190 see also finances commodification, 4, 86 see also ethnicity and commodification; finances; material culture communication, see conversations; language; speech; voice; writing communion, 23, 39, 88, 132 see also Christianity; food; sacrifice communities absence of/need for, 9, 16–17, 23, 41, 142, 148, 183 in American history, 14–19, 142 and American identities, 9, 14–19, 114–15, 124, 176, 178, 187

in American literature, prior studies of, 7–9, 187 as basic human need, 171–2 definitions, 14–19 and ethnicity, 24, 111, 121, 141–5, 169, 176, 179 and gender, see gender and community global, 37, 44, 145, 181 and identity, 16, 23, 124, 127, 164, 172, 176 see also identities imagined, 14–15, 102, 111 interconnections of, 181, 182 and language use, 29, 33, 85–6, 102, 139, 153 see also language constructing community; narrative constructing community; storytelling constructing community and loss or trauma, 16, 26, 90 multiplicity of, 6, 104, 134, 136, 179 and oral traditions, 15, 145 and place, see geographic location and community religious dimensions of, 8, 131–3, 167–8 social idealism of, 18 and storytelling, 15–19, 26, 109, 157–8, 161, 166 studies of, 14–19 and technology, 182 see also social media tensions in, ix, 7–9, 16, 177, 178–9 and time, 139, 145, 166, 169 as transcendence, 18–19, 35–6, 44 and work, 1, 28, 30, 88, 154–5 see also art and community; borders; collaborations; cultures; e pluribus unum; family; food; social constructions; Yin world computers, 16, 182 see also Internet; technology


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confessions of crime, 43, 119 of love/sex, 57, 119, 132 of sin, 69, 132, 133 see also religion, spirituality conflict interpretive, 11, 41, 44, 84, 114, 133 personal, 32, 61, 78, 95, 135, 158, 160 social, 6, 9, 79, 89–90, 101, 104, 123, 141 see also military conflict resolution, 31 conformity, 17, 18, 80, 188 Confucianism, 82 consumption, see food contact zone, 134, 187 conversations cross sex conversations, 53, 56, 58–9, 65–7, 95, 100, 118, 121, 158, 173, 188 same sex conversations, 41, 55, 58–9, 63, 64, 93–4, 125, 155, 161, 172, 188 theories about, 14 see also confessions; discourse strategies; language; narrative; speech; storytelling; voice Coover, Robert, 7 covert prestige, 54 creation symbols, 37, 42, 98, 116, 131–2, 161, 166 and community identity, 125, 141–2, 148, 159, 166, 168–70, 172, 183 see also Adam and Eve; Aztlán; Spanish fantasy heritage crime, see legal issues cross sex, see conversations, cross sex; heterosexual The Crown of Columbus, see Columbus, Christopher; Dorris, Michael; Erdrich, Louise

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cultural appropriation, 3, 140 cultural change, 9, 72, 139, 165, 177, 179, 180, 183 cultural contexts, 1–2 complexities of, 3–5, 92, 109, 112, 141 cultural hegemony, 157, 181 cultural identity and language, 71, 105, 109, 148, 154–5 cultural imagination, 81, 145, 159–60, 182 cultural loss, 115, 142 cultural survival, 144, 157, 159–60, 184 cultures codes and rituals of, 133, 159–60 literary, 109, 183 material, see material culture millennial, 1–2, 5–7, 8–9, 18–19, 177 see also millennium; nineties searching, 6, 106, 174–5 universality of, 5, 78 see also academic culture; American identities; bicultural; borders; communities; e pluribus unum; middle class culture; multicultural; nineties, ambiance and culture of; social construction; socioeconomics; twentieth century, cultures of; violence deception, 58, 75, 77, 83, 94, 104, 172 see also cheating; trust deconstruction, 51, 53, 64–5, 127 DeLillo, Don, 14, 177 desire, see eroticism; narrative and eroticism diary, 33, 35–6, 46, 114, 160, 172 diaspora, 101 difference, 2, 3–5, 12, 13, 17, 79, 149, 169 see also conformity; diversity


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digital age, 16, 183 see also Internet; technology discourse strategies, 11, 14, 82, 175, 187, 190 constructing identity through discourse, 10, 11, 15, 48 see also identities; language and identity see also conversations; language; narrative; speech, features of displacement, 101, 159 disruption, 182 of narratives, 81, 111, 133 personal, 66, 71 due to racism, 45 of social order, 25, 29, 143 distancing, see language diversity, 4, 11, 79, 92, 114, 115, 158, 187 see also difference DNA, 26, 52, 123, 124 see also weaving domesticity, 74, 81, 88, 101, 108, 117, 122, 144, 147, 156, 160–1 see also home doppelganger, 87–90, 92–3, 94, 95, 96, 97, 101 see also duality; split self Dorris, Michael, 4, 5, 106–37, 176, 190 autobiographical issues of, 106, 114, 122, 125 biography of, 106, 123 Cloud Chamber, 106, 108, 117–25, 134–7, 172, 173, 174, 180 The Crown of Columbus, 109–17, 134–7, 172, 173, 174, 180, 190 double, see doppelganger drama, 60, 86–7, 125, 143 duality, 87, 151 see also doppelganger; split self dynamic, dynamism, 6, 11, 14, 19, 58, 81, 101–2, 115, 136, 139, 165, 183

East, East Coast, 79, 100, 142 see also New England Eckert, Penelope, 13, 69, 185 economics, economic issues, 1, 21, 72, 73, 90, 113, 146, 162, 174, 180–2, 191 see also commercialism; finances; money; socioeconomic; stock markets education, as a socioeconomic factor, 2, 13, 46, 113, 180 see also academic culture; bilingual education employment, see work end-of-century, 5–6, 174, 176–7 see also cultures, millennial; endof-time; millennial end-of-time, end of an era, 6, 169 see also apocalyptic; fin de siècle; nepantla English Only, 85, 139 e pluribus unum, 178 Erdrich, Louise, 4, 5, 87, 89, 103–37, 158, 173, 176, 190 biography of, 106–10 The Crown of Columbus, 109–17, 134–7, 172, 173, 174, 180, 190 Love Medicine, 104, 106, 108, 126, 134, 136 Tales of Burning Love, 125–37, 172, 173, 174, 180 erotic desire, 47, 53, 59, 60–6, 72, 91, 98, 126, 128, 132, 134, 141, 149, 151, 162, 174 ethnicity commodification of, 4 difficulty of terminology for, 3–4, 80–1, 104, 140–1 expectations about, 29, 35, 81, 98, 109, 125, 160, 171, 183, 190 see also identities; multicultural; specific ethnic identities (e.g., Asian American identities)


224


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Eucharist, see communion European American identities, 39–40, 51–75, 77, 104, 113, 116, 123, 132, 134, 188 see also Anglo; color; white execution, see capital punishment exploitation of identities, 72, 85, 94, 98 149, 162, 190 exposure, see face; humiliation face, 28, 83, 86, 89, 92, 133, 184 see also humiliation Face of an Angel, see Chávez, Denise faith, 17, 47, 69, 74–5, 99, 150, 175 in language, 9, 91, 102, 115–16, 149 prophetic belief, 167, 169, 190–1 in self, 90 see also religion; spirituality family of choice, 153, 173 as community, 29, 32, 44, 84–5, 102, 111, 117–25, 146, 154, 173 as identity, 37, 42, 79, 88, 94, 111, 118, 136, 147, 152, 160, 173, 179 and language, 93, 154 nuclear, 173 as problematic, 30, 42, 65, 74–5, 93, 105, 135, 145, 147 fathers and language, 42, 59, 68, 84, 93, 95, 100, 118–19, 148, 160–1 paternity issues, 106–7, 111, 118, 120–3, 146, 151, 157–60 see also children; family; masculinity Faulkner, William, 18, 158, 186 female bonding, 8, 44, 58, 93, 133–4, 155–6, 172–3 see also friendship; mentor; women female circumcision, 23, 26, 38–44 feminism, 10–11, 12, 61, 65, 67, 141, 152, 155, 169, 185

225

films, 23, 56, 57, 81 adapted from books, 22, 108 finances, financial issues, 1, 181–2, 191 see also commercialization; commodification; economics; ggeh; money; nineties, economics of; socioeconomics; stock markets fin de siècle, 176 see also end-of-century; millennial; nineties; time fire, 131–2 and language, 115, 127 and relationships, 126, 128, 130 first generation, see immigrant Florida, Richard, 181 fluency, 56, 140 see also inarticulate; inexpressible; unspoken food, 32, 88, 174–5 and consumption, 40, 88, 97, 174–5 and excess, 54, 89, 160, 174–5 and faith/ritual, 130, 159–60, 163, 167, 175 see also communion and family, 27, 34, 88, 91, 122, 156 and home or place, 32, 77 and hospitality, 88 and identity, 27, 58, 88, 145, 159–60, 175 and internalization, 27, 88 and language, 27, 34, 88, 91, 97, 99, 122, 154–5, 160, 174–5 and necessity, 88 and sacrifice, 88 see also communion and sexuality, 32, 58, 89, 91, 120, 160, 174–5 Ford, Gerald R., 60–70 forms of address, see speech, features of Foucault, Michel, 10


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fragility, 10, 53, 68, 106, 119, 149 of community, 28, 57, 74 of language, 53, 71, 119, 148 freedom, 6, 29, 68, 91, 101–2, 118, 127, 132, 163, 168 free expression, 10, 23, 29, 36, 38–9, 45, 71–2, 91, 143, 146, 154, 157, 166, 178 see also language and freedom free will, 120 Friedman, Thomas, 181 friendship, 167, 172–3 absence of, 34, 51 among children, 84, 157 and gender, 66, 117 among men, 56–8, 62–3, 73–4, 121, 158 and race or ethnicity, 26, 32–3, 47, 80–1, 90, 95–6 same-sex, 2, 81, 167, 172–3 among women, 24, 26, 34, 37, 44, 56–9, 72–3, 155 future, 1, 6, 10, 75, 82, 116–17, 128, 139–40, 155, 164–6, 174, 180, 184 hope for, 30, 62, 91–2, 100–2, 104, 117, 123, 126, 146, 164, 176, 177 of literary history, 176 symbolized by children, 31, 84, 91–2, 100, 107, 111, 173–4, 177 see also age; chronology; time Gaines, Ernest J., 4, 21–49, 70, 83, 158, 166, 176, 187 biography of, 21–2 A Lesson Before Dying, 7, 21–36, 45–9, 70, 187 gay, 11–12, 72, 173 see also homosexual gender changes in, ix, 12, 59, 154, 171, 176, 179, 183 and community, 9–14, 59, 143, 147, 179

construction of, ix–x, 10–11, 14, 32, 37, 71–2, 150 see also social constructions frameworks for study of, 12–14 gender roles, 10 and identity, see identities and gender and language, ix–x, 21, 54–9, 65–7, 100, 141–2, 146–9, 151–3, 159–62, 169, 172–3, 185, 186, 188 history of, 9–14 studies of, 9–14, 185–6, 188 see also academic culture and male language in literature, 7–9, 14, 58, 143, 177, 186 and narrative, 48, 61 performance of, 11, 54, 72, 183 and power, 67, 129, 150 and public life, 179 see also public gender roles stereotypes about, 55, 61, 101, 149, 151, 173 see also nineties, popular publications on gender; politics and gender genealogy, see ancestry geographic location, 176 and American history, 142, 190 and community, 17, 26–7, 70, 81, 87, 145–9, 159, 166, 168 and diversity, 1, 4–5, 13, 75, 176, 181 and identity, 6, 21–49, 78, 87, 116, 129, 160, 166, 168 and literary regionalism, 16, 176 see also borders; communities; displacement; specific area (e.g., Southwest) ggeh, 90 see also finances gifts, 35, 90, 96, 100, 124, 125, 160, 165


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GLBTQ, 11 see also bisexual; gay; heterosexuality; homosexuality; identities; lesbian global, 44, 48, 86, 112, 180–2 see also communities; world Gray, John, 56 The Great Gatsby, 1, 7, 86 Guadalupe, Virgin of, 141–2, 149–50 happiness, 49, 65, 70, 98, 110, 116 happy ending, 116, 136 see also optimism; unhappiness Harrison, Jim, 9 Harry Potter, 88 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 7–8, 57, 62–4, 69, 86, 133, 172, 176 see also lurk; The Scarlet Letter; withdrawal Hemingway, Ernest, 188 heteronormativity, 11–12 heterosexuality, 10–12, 47, 59, 73, 91 Hispanic, 3, 113, 140, 144–5, 191 see also Mexican American identities history, 5, 6, 8–9, 11, 16 in Amy Tan’s writing, 99 in Face of an Angel, 152–3 in Memories of the Ford Administration, 60–75, 176 Mexican, 141–2, 162 in Michael Dorris’s life, 105–6, 119, 122 mythic, 168, 191 in Rudolfo Anaya’s work, 144, 145, 162, 165, 166 in The Crown of Columbus, 110–17, 135–6, 190 see also age; chronology; time; world, history of Holy Tortilla, 167–8 home, 127 as community, 18, 32, 102 home language, 86, 88, 180, 191

227

as sanctuary, 40, 43, 57, 78, 143, 160–1 and work, 85, 154 see also domesticity; family; food; geographical location; traditions homecoming, 121–2, 123, 127 homeland, 42, 43, 96–7, 102, 168–9 Homeland Security, 180 homogeneity, see conformity homosexuality, 11–12, 72, 121, 128, 155, 173 see also bisexual; gay; identities; lesbian hope and community, 18, 27, 30, 132 for the future, 30, 62, 91–2, 100–2, 104, 117, 123, 126, 146, 164, 176, 177 and identity, 31, 34, 38, 42, 89, 117, 137 and narrative, 102, 174–5, 183, 185 see also storytelling and hope and sacrifice, 42 housekeeping, see domesticity Huck Finn, 1, 7, 18, 127 human, ix, 10, 16, 36, 46, 145 connections, 2, 5, 19, 23–4, 32, 40, 56, 89, 94, 121, 127, 160, 165–6, 171–2 see also communities heart, 137 history, 6, 89, 145, 159, 177, 182 isolation, 182 language, 44, 45, 46, 55, 62, 91, 112, 168 nature, 70, 106, 149–51, 167 sexuality, 61, 81 subhuman, 26 values, 36 humiliation, 28, 89, 114, 129, 147, 152 see also face humor, 51, 55, 69, 71, 72, 126, 134, 135, 167 see also laughter


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The Hundred Secret Senses, see Tan, Amy hunger, 129, 187 for community, 142, 148, 183 saintly hunger, 129 see also food Hurston, Zora Neale, 17, 22, 110 ice, 74–5, 126–8, 130, 132 identities, 2, 170, 183 and communities, 1, 16–17 in Beattie and Updike’s fiction, 70 in Chávez and Anaya’s fiction, 142, 145, 157, 165, 169 in Dorris and Erdrich’s fiction, 105–6, 109–14, 123–6, 132, 137 in Gaines and Walker’s fiction, 22, 23, 25–6, 36 in Tan and Lee’s fiction, 81, 87, 89, 92, 100 construction of, ix, 49, 162, 169, 171–83 through language, 10, 15–16, 45, 62, 81–2, 87, 91, 92, 143, 146, 157, 169, 171–2, 183, 189 see also language; narrative; social constructions; voice and identity and gender, 10–11, 23, 37, 62, 82, 91, 93, 95, 100, 150, 166–7, 176, 189 in literature, 3, 6–7, 15, 79, 88, 194 shifting identity, 79, 103–4, 106, 113, 128 stigmatized identities, 180 see also academic culture; American identities; cultures; ethnicity; exploitation of identities; gender; public identities; race; specific identities (e.g., Mexican American identities); voice and identity; work and identity

imagined America, see America, imagined immigration, 90, 191 experiences, 78, 84, 88, 89, 90–2 identities, 6, 80, 95, 141, 176, 179 literature, 78, 80, 91, 101 inarticulate, 27, 51, 54, 56 see also fluency; inexpressive; language, inadequacy of; speech, ambiguities of independence, 23, 42, 71, 159, 169, 174 see also American independence Indian, American, see Native American identities inexpressible, 57 infidelity, see cheating ingestion, see food; hunger insanity, 43, 56, 95–6 integration, 21, 82, 84, 111, 134 see also assimilation international, see global; world Internet, 16, 182 and community, 16, 182 see also computers; digital age; technology interpretation, 37–8, 42–3, 136 see also literary criticism; symbols intimacy, 30, 105, 149, 152, 154, 163, 175 emotional, 69, 110, 131 and language, 56, 77, 83, 143 see also privacy irony, 3, 28, 34, 39, 54, 57, 66, 69, 118, 129, 135, 161, 190 and pity, 57, 188 irrational exuberance, 181 isolation, 18, 182 in Chávez and Anaya’s fiction, 163 in Dorris and Erdrich’s fiction, 104, 120 in Gaines and Walker’s fiction, 23, 29, 30, 35, 42, 44 in Lee and Tan’s fiction, 82, 83, 92


228


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in Updike and Beattie’s fiction, 71 see also alone; American independence; independence; solitary James, Henry, 6, 15, 186 Jespersen, Otto, 12 Jewish, 114, 188 Johnstone, Barbara, 10, 14, 48, 186, 189 journal, see diary; writing, personal Jung, Carl, 38 kitchen, see food Korean American identities, 77–92, 101, 179, 191 see also Asian American identities labels, 66, 140 see also naming Labov, William, 185, 189 Lakoff, Robin, 12–13 language ambiguity of, 11, 70, 93, 96, 112–13, 117, 134, 145 bridges self and community, 23, 92–3, 172 and change, 33, 34, 36, 183 and children, see children and language and choice, see choices as a clarifying tool, 56–7 and connection, 2, 10, 27, 54, 58–9, 71, 91, 155, 160 constructing community, ix, 15, 25, 48–9, 58, 112, 142, 172–3, 175 see also community and language use; narrative constructing community constructing gender, ix, 2, 48–9, 141, 152, 183 see also gender and language as a defining human characteristic, ix, 9–10, 36

229

destructive power of, 74–5, 82, 94, 96, 100, 119, 137, 143, 146, 172 as a distancing tool, 54, 59, 85, 96 and empowerment, 26, 35–6, 43, 85–6, 119, 158 and food, see food and language fragility of, see fragility of language and freedom, 6, 10, 23, 29, 36, 38–9, 45, 68, 71–2, 91, 101–2, 118, 127, 132, 143, 146, 154, 157, 163, 166–8, 178 and gender, see gender and language and identity, 25, 41, 82, 86, 102, 165, 175, 183, 186–7 see also discourse constructing identities; identities and communities, construction of inadequacy of, 64 see also inarticulate; inexpressible and insight, 9, 35, 56, 95 lies/false language, 37, 45, 56, 57, 58, 74–5, 82, 94, 96, 100 and literature, studies of, see linguistics and literature and love, see love and language and oppression, 26, 37, 45, 84 and population shifts, 140–1, 191 and power, 10, 38, 43, 58, 67, 71, 85, 141, 156, 170 as redemptive, 21, 45, 49, 134–5, 155, 166–7 and resistance, 44–5, 47–9, 183 reverence for, 87, 115, 118 and separation, 41 and sexual expression, 58, 62, 64, 66–8, 141, 152, 154 shapes reality, 101–2, 183 see also Sapir-Whorf hypothesis veiled, 29, 39


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language—Continued see also Black Vernacular English; confessions; conversations; fluency; inexpressible; narrative; politics and language; speech; storytelling; twentieth century, language of; voice; witnessing; writing Latino/a, 3, 140, 143 see also Mexican American identities laughter, 55, 64, 68, 69, 153, 154 see also humor LBGTQ, 11, 173 see also bisexual; gay; homosexuality; identities; lesbian Lee, Chang-rae, 77–102, 176, 189 biography of, 78–80, 88–9 Native Speaker, 77–92, 100–2, 114, 172, 173, 174, 177, 180, 190 legal issues, 23, 26–7, 30, 43–4 lesbian, 11–12, 59, 128, 155, 173 see also homosexual A Lesson Before Dying, see Gaines, Ernest J. liberation, see freedom linguistic approaches to literature, 2, 7–14, 15, 21, 166, 186–7 linguistic strategies, see conversations; discourse strategies; language; narrative strategies; speech, features of; voice; writing literary criticism, 4, 6–7, 9–14, 22, 63, 69, 79–80, 87, 102, 108–11, 116, 127, 132, 141–2, 185–91 as motif, 86–7, 163 purpose of, ix see also nineties/1990s, literary criticism about

lonely, see alone longing, 16–18, 64, 74, 78, 174–5 see also unsatisfied loss, 17, 65, 75, 91, 100, 104, 125, 172, 174–5 of community, 16, 26, 90, 101, 128, 142 see also absence of community lost, 27, 68, 71, 82, 112–13, 116, 148 see also discovery love and community, 18, 104, 117, 144, 155 and language, 27, 38, 43, 45, 58, 60, 92, 129, 145 love medicine, 120 Love Medicine, see Erdrich, Louise Tales of Burning Love, see Erdrich, Louise see also romance lurk, 86 see also Hawthorne, Nathaniel mainstream, 1, 6–7, 16, 54, 105, 176, 183 see also middle class culture male bonding, 8, 32–4, 57–9, 63–4, 86, 121, 161, 172–3 see also black masculinity; friendship; masculinity; mentor; white masculinity Malinche, Malintzin, 141, 149–51 Maltz, Daniel, 13, 59, 188 marginalized, 13, 16, 54, 136 see also borders marriage, 173–4, 177 in Anaya and Chávez’s fiction, 146–9, 153 of Dorris and Erdrich, 4, 106–10 in Dorris and Erdrich’s fiction, 107, 113, 119, 126–7, 131 in Gaines and Walker’s fiction, 42 in Lee and Tan’s fiction, 77, 82–5, 99–100


230


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in Updike and Beattie’s fiction, 55, 57, 59–66, 68, 72, 74 see also cheating; family masculinity, 10–11, 31, 188–9 see also academic culture and male language; black masculinity; gender; vision, male-centered; white masculinity matanza, 159–60, 163, 167 material culture, 64, 174–5 McCarthy, Cormac, 176 McConnell-Ginet, Sally, 13, 185 Memories of the Ford Administration, see Updike, John Men Are from Mars, Women are from Venus, see Gray, John mental illness, see insanity mentor, 77, 86, 92, 144 see also doppelganger mestizo, 5, 141–5, 162, 164, 169 metaphor, see symbol Mexican American identities, 3, 139–70 see also Chicano/a; Hispanic; Latino/a middle class culture, 51–3, 60–75, 129, 180 see also class; cultures; economics; mainstream; money; socioeconomics migration, 159 see also immigration; songlines military, 1, 123, 158, 180 millennial/millennium, 1, 5–6, 9, 10, 18, 82, 171, 174, 178, 181, 190, 191 millennial generation, 177 see also cultures, millennial; nineties/1990s, ambiance and culture of Milton, John, 7 misogyny, 42, 149 Modoc, 105 see also Native American identities

231

money, 56, 71, 90, 95, 128 see also commercialization; economics; finances; ggeh moral authority, 28, 36, 164 art as moral conscience, 166 see also censorship; symbolic capital moral choices, 18, 36 see also religion; spirituality Morrison, Toni, 4, 176 mothers and daughters, 79, 92, 106, 123, 125, 151, 156 and language, 38, 40, 56–8, 60, 77, 94, 100, 121–2, 146–9, 160, 163 in Mexican history, 141 and sons, 68, 70, 75, 88, 118–19, 152, 157, 164 Virgin Mary, 129, 132, 141, 149–50 see also children; family; women movies, see films multiculturalism, 3, 28, 139, 166, 180, 190 boutique multiculturalism, 190 see also bicultural; cultures murder, 25, 39, 43–4 see also narrative and death; sacrifice; sex and death; suicide myth, mythology, 159 see also symbols; vision, mythic naming, 8, 54, 61, 66, 92, 95, 102, 115, 148, 151, 165, 175, 187 name calling, 27, 28, 80, 84, 92, 158, 159 naming ceremony, 122–5, 136 see also labels; specific names (e.g., Chicano) narrative and authority, 155 constructing community, 18, 26, 79, 86, 105, 111


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narrative—Continued see also community and language use; language constructing community and death, 35–6, 94, 98, 99, 175, 176 of disappointment, 147, 175 and eroticism, 61, 174 and hope, see hope and narrative natural narrative, 189 patterns, styles, and structures, 48, 54, 60, 61, 104, 156–7 perspective, 104, 111, 136 point of view, 24–5, 36, 48, 60, 64, 73, 126, 136 power of, 155, 183 strategies, 73, 187, 190 see also discourse strategies threads, 99, 135 and truth, see truth and narrative see also gender and narrative; language; speech; voice; writing Native American identities, 3, 104–37, 141, 150, 162, 164, 168, 188, 190 see also post tribal; specific tribal names (e.g., Sioux) Native Speaker, see Chang-rae Lee natural narrative, see narrative Navajo, 113 nepantla, 169, 174, 190 New England, 51–75, 96, 111–12 New World, 111, 116, 117, 142, 143, 150, 164, 168, 169 ni modo, 155–6 nine-eleven (9/11), 1, 181 see also terrorism nineteenth century, 6–8, 15–16, 64, 175–6 nineties/nineteen nineties (1990s), 1–2, 6 ambiance and culture of, 54, 73, 176–7, 180, 190, 191 economics of, 1, 174–5, 181–2, 191

and globalization, 1, 180–1, 191 Internet development during, 16, 181, 182–3 literary criticism about, 6, 8–14, 169, 171–7, 183–4, 185–6, 190, 191 popular publications on gender in, 55–60 publishing in, 7 see also millennial; twentieth century; twenty-first century Obama, Barack, 179–80 Ojibwa, 106, 109, 126, 133 Old World, 150, 164, 169, 190 Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club, 7, 185 optimism, 64, 65, 92, 137, 157 see also American optimism; happiness pain, see trauma Paul of the New Testament, 32–3, 47 pessimism, see anxiety; unhappiness photography, see art place, see geographical location pluralism, 5, 16, 177, 178–9, 180 see also cultures; multiculturalism poetics, see linguistic approaches to literature politeness, see speech, features of politics, 1, 17, 41, 47, 62–4, 85, 150, 159–62, 175, 177–8, 179, 182 and gender, 41, 55, 141, 179 and language, 10, 15, 62, 143, 167 and race, 47, 80, 85–90, 115, 150, 157, 161–2, 179–182 see also president Possessing the Secret of Joy, see Walker, Alice post secular, 174 post tribal, 125 power, see language and power; narrative and power


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powwow, 122–5, 133 see also Native American identities precarity, 175 president, 1, 55–6, 60–4, 69, 73, 114, 177, 178, 179, 180 presidential election, 1, 177–9 see also politics prison, 32–4, 39, 44, 118, 128, 175 privacy, 181, 183 private and public, 8, 58, 83, 85, 134, 149, 160, 181, 183 private lives, 110 procreation, 141, 174 see also children pseudonyms, 107 psychospiritual plantation, 81 psychotherapy, 37–9, 57 public gender roles, 8, 58, 81, 179 identities, 31, 34, 86, 89, 110, 134 language, 46, 85, 106, 122 life, 44, 65, 87, 105, 113 and private, 8, 58, 83, 85, 134, 149, 160, 181, 183 readership, 22, 61, 86, 176 Pynchon, Thomas, 7 question, see speech, features of question mark of history, 114 Rabbit novels, see Updike, John race and community, 33, 85, 87, 105, 113, 164 see also communities and ethnicities exploitation of, see exploitation of identities and politics, see politics and race see also biracial; ethnicity; identities; specific identities (e.g., European American) racial consciousness, 83, 88, 98, 109, 125, 141, 158 racial purity, 79–80

233

racism, 23, 26, 28–31, 40, 80–2, 109, 120, 121, 157, 161, 162 connection with sexism, 42, 48, 53, 84, 161–2 see also color redemption, 39, 117 through art, 39 through language and/or community, 21, 26, 45, 49, 134–5, 163, 166–7 see also art, redemptive power of; spirituality religion, religious belief, 28, 31, 38, 65, 88, 96–9, 114–16, 149–50, 159, 164, 167–8, 185 reassessment of, 31, 47 religious exceptionalism, 117 see also art, redemptive power of; art, sacred function of; confession; creation symbols; faith; hope; language as redemptive; sacred; sex and religion; spirituality; specific religious group (e.g., Christianity); truth; unknowable resistance, 44–5 riches, see finances Rip Van Winkle, 7 Ruth in the Bible, 147 sacred, 47, 65, 114, 167–8, 175, 184 art, sacred function of, 184 and profane, 168, 175 sacrifice, 31, 42, 73, 77, 88, 99, 101, 171 sameness, see communities; conformity same sex, see conversations, same sex; friendships; gay; homosexual; lesbian Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, 12


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INDEX

satisfaction in language, 72, 101 in marriage, 59 in politics, 178 in relationships, 30, 53, 72, 105, 160, 163, 172, 179 self, 23, 146, 151, 153, 157 in sex, 101, 174 see also food; sex The Scarlet Letter, 7–9, 57, 63, 64, 86, 96, 133, 183, 186 Chillingworth, Roger, 8, 57, 86 Dimmesdale, Arthur, 8, 86, 96 Prynne, Hester, 1, 8, 96, 133, 186 see also Hawthorne, Nathaniel Scarlet O’Hara, 7 scarring, 31, 38, 41 see also female circumcision science, 176–7 search for more, 174–5 self search for, 165 self confidence, 41, 69, 90, 146, 153, 155 self esteem, 53, 72, 152 self identity, 22, 25, 45, 62, 72, 89, 91, 125, 145, 158–9, 169, 175, 178 self reference, 3, 9, 104, 141, 177 self reliance, 82, 146 see also alone; American independence; attachment to self; identities; satisfaction, self September 11 or 9/11, 1, 181 see also terrorism sex/sexuality, 53, 61, 63, 65, 66, 91, 131, 151, 165, 174–5 abuse, 42, 67, 148–9, 152 affairs, see cheating and death, 61, 64, 82, 91, 126, 129–31, 147 and food, see food and sexuality games, 58, 66, 129 harassment, 129

and identity, 61, 72, 149, 160, 167 and redemption, 144 and religion, 69, 98, 132, 149, 150–1, 153, 168 reunions, 62, 91, 98, 132 and wholeness, 82, 91, 98, 167 see also bisexual; censorship; children; femininity; gender; heteronormative; heterosexuality; homosexuality; identities; language and sexual expression; masculinity; moral choices Shakespeare, William, 7 Showalter, Elaine, 9 silence, see speech, characteristics of Sioux, 107, 113 sisters, 37–44, 68, 69, 92–100, 119–22, 123, 172 in religious orders, 129–31, 133, 155, 173 see also children; family; women skin color, see color social constructions, 34, 171, 177, 189 of community, 14, 15, 16, 18, 51, 187 of gender, 10–14, 37, 62, 172 of identity, 18, 75, 79, 106, 109, 119, 145, 169, 183, 189 of meaning, 41, 57, 113, 134 social media, 16, 182–3 see also digital age; Internet; technology social networks, 16, 183, 187 socioeconomics, socioeconomic class, 4, 5, 13, 141, 171, 185, 188 see also class; economics; finance; money; social construction solitary, see alone songlines, 159 see also migration Southern/the South, 21–49


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Southwest, 139–70 Spanish, 139–70, 291 fantasy heritage, 162 literary tradition in North America, 142–3 in Mexico, 141–2 speech acts, 33 ambiguity of, 154–5 awkwardness of, 56, 95 see also inarticulate; inexpressive features of, 10–11, 46, 154–5, 187, 188 arguments, 119, 147 bilingualism, 85, 139, 143, 146, 191 directives and declarative sentences, 30, 66 forms of address, 29, 54 indirectness, 24–8, 39 in-group, 27, 29–30, 54, 83 interruptions, 58 intonation patterns, 66, 68 listening, 83 muteness, 119, 123 negation, 24 politeness, 27, 29, 32, 54 pronoun I, 24, 27 questions, asking questions, 32, 66 sarcasm, 53 silence, 11, 65, 83, 146, 159, 161 talkativeness, 65, 120, 121 troubles talk, 56 whispering, 146 fluency of, 55–6 lessons, 83–4, 91–2 see also Black Vernacular English; conversations; gender and language; language; narrative; unspoken; witnessing spiritual, 18, 34, 39, 98, 132–3, 153, 155, 159, 167–8, 174, 185

235

and physical, 64, 150–1, 164, 174–5 see also sex and religion see also religion split self, 101 see also doppelganger; duality sports, 28, 157–8, 163–4 stock markets, 181, 191 see also economics; finances storytelling, 37 as autobiography, 69, 96, 106, 114, 122, 125, 143 constructing community, 17–18, 23, 48, 93, 105, 134, 166 constructing identity, 10, 37, 86, 134, 156, 161, 183 constructing relationships, 39, 93, 103, 134 and hope, 117, 123, 165, 175, 185 see also hope and narrative and personal growth, 155 and survival, 9, 38, 43, 97, 128, 133, 155–6, 157–8, 163–6, 184 as theme, 93, 97, 128 and truth, see truth and narrative see also language; narrative; speech; voice; witnessing; writing stress, 29, 31, 83–4, 100, 109–10, 188 stylistics, see linguistic approaches to literature suffering, see trauma suicide, 9, 105, 107, 117, 122, 135–6, 153 see also murder; narrative and death; sacrifice; sex and death survival, 78, 116, 123, 125, 127, 145, 150, 152, 155, 171, 174 survivance, 190 see also storytelling and survival symbolic capital, 28, 69


INDEX


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INDEX

symbols, 31, 49, 55, 88, 96, 132–3, 159–60, 167, 174–5 humans as symbols, 33–4, 38, 84, 88, 111, 116–17, 129, 133, 141 symbolic language, 8, 26, 55, 115, 136, 162, 175 symbolic scripts, 11, 37 symbolic systems, 117, 128, 150, 168 see also creation symbols; future; interpretation; religion; specific symbols (e.g., food) Tales of Burning Love, see Erdrich, Louise Tan, Amy, 4, 77–102 biography of, 78–9 The Hundred Secret Senses, 77–81, 92–102, 171, 173–4, 180 Tannen, Deborah, 14, 55–6, 186 technology, 15–16, 176–7, 182, 191 terrorism, 1, 16, 181 see also September 11 therapy, see psychotherapy time, 60, 144 and American identities, 6 see also age; chronology; communities and time; fin de siècle; future; history; millennial; specific time periods (e.g., nineteenth century) tortilla, see Holy Tortilla transformative power, 5, 32–6, 101, 141, 169, 170 see also language as redemptive trauma, 26 see also communities and trauma; violence trickster, 128, 133 troubles talk, see speech, features of Trudgill, Peter, 54 truth, 8, 39, 40, 57, 69–70, 100, 125 and identity, 24, 36, 83, 106, 114, 164, 176, 183

and narrative, 2, 36, 41, 42, 44, 57, 70–1, 82, 87, 93–4, 99, 106, 115, 118, 174, 183, 184 twentieth century characteristics of, 2, 9, 16, 137, 165–6, 176, 191 criticism of, 11, 12, 169, 182 cultures of, 6, 51, 102, 145, 165, 175, 177–83 see also cultures language of, 64, 92, 102, 171, 183, 191 see also language literature of, 14, 81, 134, 145, 165, 177, 183–4 see also nineties twenty-first century, 1–2, 165, 168, 171–84, 191 see also millennial unexpected, 18, 95, 114–15, 167–8 unfinished, 174 unhappiness, 62, 71, 74, 75, 94, 104, 108, 146, 151, 161, 173 see also absence; alone; loss unitary self, 87 psychological wholeness, 39, 91, 98, 104, 160, 167 unknowable, 95, 134 unremembered, 38, 70 unsatisfied, 136, 153, 174–5, 177 unspoken, 25, 63, 95, 146, 147, 175 see also fluency; inarticulate; inexpressible; speech Updike, John, 5, 17, 51–75, 80, 83, 174, 175, 176, 177, 188 biography of, 52 Memories of the Ford Administration, 51–3, 60–75, 114, 172, 173, 180 Rabbit novels, 51–2 representation of men, 53, 62, 73 representation of women, 61–2, 73


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violence, 176–7 Virgin Mary, 129, 132, 141–2, 149–50 vision, 75, 102, 153, 159, 164, 166, 190 artistic, 131, 135, 141, 190 dark, 135 lack of, 73 male-centered, 11, 169 mythic vision, 168, 169 of the Virgin, 150 tragic, 65 see also worldview voice, 14, 24, 25, 33, 37, 41, 58, 83, 92, 118, 119, 128, 134, 136, 145, 147–8, 179, 186 and identity, 2, 15–16, 21, 23, 45, 49, 87, 102, 104, 111, 146, 151–2, 165–6, 170, 183 see also children and language; conversations; language; narrative; speech; storytelling Walker, Alice, 4, 7, 21–49, 70, 80, 102, 176, 184 biography of, 21–2 Possessing the Secret of Joy, 21– 6, 36 – 49, 171–2, 173, 180 wealth, see finances; stock markets weaving, 37, 124, 137, 172 West Coast, Western, 59, 79, 92–102, 142, 161 see also Southwest whispering, see speech, features of white, 27, 28–9, 34, 39–40, 53–75, 77, 80, 84, 120–1, 127, 132, 158 imagery, 74–5 studies, 62, 73–5 see also Anglo; color; European American identities white masculinity, 53–75

237

Whitman, Walt, 65, 102, 190 Winfrey, Oprah, see Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club wisdom from suffering, 21, 34, 117, 163–4 withdrawal, 16, 57, 64, 100, 158 see also Hawthorne, Nathaniel witnessing, in African American verbal traditions, 33, 45 women, womanhood, 10–11 characterizations of women, 36, 45, 61, 73, 146–7 as sex objects, 61, 67, 147 as texts to be interpreted, 37–8, 133 see also feminism; friendship among women; mothers; sisters work as community, 26, 28, 51–3, 112, 121 see also community and work as family, 85, 154 and identity, 44, 70–1, 85, 89–90, 111, 149, 160–1 and language, 29, 56, 67, 84–5, 97, 112, 129, 154–5 see also academic culture world afterworld, 98 connected to the, 145, 160, 163, 166, 182 creation of, 115, 124 history, 1, 72, 84, 92, 106, 112, 115, 135–6, 169, 180–3 man’s world, 81 moving world, 103 natural world, 131 between worlds, 5–6, 87, 97, 120, 164 see also global; nepantla; New World; Old World; vision; Yin world The World Is Flat, 181 “The World Is Spiky,” 181 worldview, 58, 65, 104, 168–9, 190


INDEX


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INDEX

worldview—Continued new worldview, 111, 116–17, 142–3, 164, 168–9 old worldview, 150, 164, 169 wounded hearts, 105, 110, 122, 137, 159 writing, 5, 6, 81, 115, 143, 165–8, 182 absence of writing systems, 115 as autobiography, 61, 82, 105, 106, 110, 122, 136, 142, 157 and censorship, 62 for immortality, 36, 62–3, 133, 144, 163, 176

to please a critic, 7 as professional necessity, 53, 63, 71, 97, 111, 157, 163 as self-realization, 26–7, 35–7, 58, 78, 86, 103–4, 151–2, 165, 167, 172 as therapeutic, 9, 35–6, 43–5, 155, 163 see also authority; diary; identities; language; speech; storytelling; voice Y2K, 1, 177 Yin world, 92–8


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