Gerald Vizenor's Postmodern Fiction

Alan R. Velie
University of Oklahoma

Gerald Vizenor is an American Indian writer (Chippewa, or as the Chippewa say, Anishinaabe) whose manifold works of fiction and non-fiction (in his case the distinction is very blurry) are clearly postmodern, whatever that is. His first novel, Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart is still his best, and I will discuss it here in an attempt to help pin down the elusive phenomenon of postmodernism.
Postmodernism is an oxymoron. If, as the dictionary tells us, "modern" means "concerning the present or immediate past," there can be nothing extant that comes after that which is modern. As it is used by cultural critics, "postmodern" seems to mean "post modernist;" it describes the art that comes after modern art, although just how it differs, and how much it carries on the previous tradition is a matter of critical debate. But whether postmodernism is a departure from modernism, or the logical extension of it, as Saussure teaches we can only recognize the nature of something by contrasting it to something else, (28) and in the case of postmodernism the something else is modernism.
The problem is that modernism has more than one meaning. The more widely accepted version has it that modernism started just before or after the beginning of the Twentieth Century. What had been simmering for some time in the visual arts on the Continent came suddenly into public awareness in England in 1910 with the opening of the exhibition "Manet and the Post-Impressionists." Writing in The Cambridge Companion to Modernism Glen McLeod states, "The stunning impact of the first post-impressionist show marks the beginning of the British modernist movement." (Levenson 202) Virginia Woolf puts it even more strongly: "In or about December 1910 human character changed." (Levenson 202).
But, as we are aware from Ronald Schleifer's paper, there is another idea about the beginning of modernism. Schleifer puts it at 1618 with the start of the Thirty Years War, which broke up medieval fiefdoms, destroyed the Roman Catholic hegemony in Western Europe, and led to the finalization of royal control of European nations. What Schleifer calls modernism, and others in American academe have called "the early modern," could equally plausibly be said to have begun in 1492 with Columbus's discovery of the New World, which resulted in a new geopolitical paradigm. Or one could choose 1517, when Luther mailed his 95 theses on the church door at Wittenberg, ushering in the Reformation. Protestantism's tenet of the priesthood of the believer led to the led to the individualism which governs life in industrial democracies today. Jacques Barzun begins From Dawn to Decadence: "The Modern Era begins characteristically, with a revolution. It is commonly called the Protestant Reformation." (3)
Whatever we call that period, which culminated with the Enlightenment, I would argue that it ended around 1910. I would also argue that the period that began in 1910 is still going on. Its present phase, the post-modern, began in 1945 and was less of a rupture, to use Foucault's phrase (217) than an extension and modification.
The problem is that we have too many terms, used too loosely. English professors are seldom much good at making distinctions. At bottom what we're up against is the traditions of a discipline that has established categories on the basis of little more than whimsy. Levi-Strauss dignifies the procedural processes of humanities professors when he refers to them as "bricolage." (17) I often tell my students that if English professors were in charge of taxonomy, animals would be classified as "reptiles, mammals, and brown ones." We make distinctions in prose narratives between fiction and non-fiction, and discriminate among fictions by whether they are realistic or romantic, novels or romances. We don't apply these distinctions to poetry or drama: a sonnet is a sonnet whether the poet invents his lover or merely kisses and tells on a real woman, and a tragedy is a tragedy whether it is about Julius Caesar or Oedipus Rex. Whether a play or poem is romantic or realistic has no bearing on its genre, save perhaps in the case of Shakespeare's last plays.
Critics of English literature are as bad at determining periods as they are at genre: everyone in Europe puts all their romantic poets together regardless of whether they began writing in the Eighteenth or Nineteenth Century, but critics of English literature use the category "pre-romantics," probably because it allows them to keep their neat scheme of centuries.
Because of the confusion that already exists it would do little good to invent new terms for periods, or to revise dates generally agreed upon. It seems preferable to utilize the terms that have been around for years-renaissance, baroque, enlightenment, romantic, Victorian, modern-since everyone has an idea of what they mean. One can then argue either that these periods flowed into one another, or that there were ruptures between them, some greater than others. In other words, the fissure between the Victorian and modern periods was much deeper than that between the romantic and Victorian, or the modern and the postmodern.
In this conference it is our task to pin down what is distinctive about the post-modern, and to delineate how it differs from what precedes it, the modern. Because in a short paper we can't waste much space running through the chief characteristics of literary modernism, I will simply cite the characteristics listed in The Cambridge Companion to Modernism:
Within the emerging historical revision there can still be found certain
common devices and general preoccupations: the recurrent act of
fragmenting unities (unities of character or plot or pictorial space or lyric
form), the use of mythic paradigms, the refusal of norms of beauty, the
willingness to make radical linguistic experiment, and all often inspired
by the resolve (in Eliot's phrase) to startle and disturb the public. (3)
The first person to apply the term "postmodern" to literary works was apparently Harry Levin: "Not long ago," he stated in 1979,
my article ["What Was Modernism"] was credited by a German scholarly
journal with having introduced the adjective postmodern into critical discourse. Far from attempting any coinage, I had acknowledged that my
specific applications of the term to literature followed the broad
conception adumbrated by Arnold Toynbee in his Study of History. Post-
modernism had previously been current in the terminology of architecture,
where modernism defined itself so concretely, as well as in the literary
history of Hispanic cultures. (6)
Levin's article appeared in 1960, before the appearance of writers like Robbins, Brautigan, Barth and Barthelme, and was not a celebration of the emergence of a new literary movement, but an elegy to the death of an old one, the modernism of Eliot, Faulkner, and Joyce. By the end of the sixties and the appearance of Trout Fishing in America, The Sot Weed Factor, and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, critics like Ihab Hassan and Gerald Graff were applying the term "postmodern" to a new movement, a new sensibility, in particular as that manifested itself in fiction. Whether the new novels and novelists represented a clean break with the past, as Philip Stevick argues (333), or whether they are a culmination of the modernist tradition as Graff asserts (385), is a complex question, but it seems clear that whatever the case the new novels are distinctive enough to be grouped together for study.
For the purposes of this paper "postmodern" refers to the novels of writers like Barth, Barthelme, Brautigan, Coover, Hawkes, and Robbins in America, and Calvino, Borges, Garcia-Marquez, and Robbe-Grillet abroad. Gerald Vizenor clearly seems to belong to this company.
American Indians have a long history of writing in English, beginning with Samuel Occom's best-selling sermon which appeared in 1772, but until the beginning of the American Indian Renaissance in 1968, Indians had only published nine novels. Since then they have added another two hundred or so. The event that has been subsequently credited with beginning the Renaissance is the publication of Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn, a novel squarely in the tradition of high modernism, betraying the clear influence of Hemingway and Faulkner. It is hard to conceive of writers with more disparate styles than the laconic Hemingway and the prolix Faulkner, yet Momaday manages to pay hommage to both, combining Faulknerian use of stream of consciousness with Hemingway's prose rhythms--the starkly simple descriptions of landscapes, the use of asyndeton--and Hemingway's fondness for seemingly irrelevant details that set the mood of a scene. Momaday also appropriates Faulkner's bear for the hunting scene of House Made of Dawn.
Following hard upon Momaday's successful debut (he won the Pulitzer Prize for House Made of Dawn), came two more Indian novels in the modernist mode, James Welch's Winter in the Blood and Leslie Silko's Ceremony, both of which make heavy use of the myth of the Waste Land. By this time the 70s were well under way, and the modernist phase of Indian fiction inspired a postmodern response: Gerald Vizenor's Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart, published in 1978. Vizenor revised it slightly and reissued it under the title Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles in 1990.
Bearheart is a frame tale, ostensibly the narrative of Saint Louis Bearheart, a functionary in the Heirship Office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. While ostensibly pushing paper for the BIA, Bearheart is secretly writing a book called Cedarfair Circus: Grave Reports from the Cultural Word Wars. When members of American Indian Movement occupy the BIA, Bearheart seduces a young Indian radical and then gives her his manuscript to read.
The account that the young lady reads is the story, set some time in the future, of a group of Indian pilgrims who wend their way from Minnesota to New Mexico to escape the chaos resulting from the collapse of American civilization when it runs out of oil. When the oil is used up, the government commandeers the trees on the Red Cedar Reservation, and Proude Cedarfair, who lives there, sets out with his wife Rosina on a cross-country odyssey. On their way the couple assemble a crew of fellow pilgrims, "tricksters and contrarion clowns," and the ragtag army battles its way across country fighting a series of hideous enemies: Sir Cecil Staples, the monarch of unleaded gasoline, who forces motorists to gamble their lives in the chance of winning five gallons of gas; the food fascists of the Witch Hunt Restaurant of Ponca City, Oklahoma, which has witches hanging from its rafters; and the famous hunters and bucking horse breeders of Orion, Oklahoma, who kill people who espouse terminal creeds-that is, people who believe that their views are the only true and moral ones possible. A female pilgrim dies a gruesome death at every one of these stops: Sir Cecil immolates Lilith Mae Farrier along with her canine lovers, the food fascists decapitate Princess Gallroad and put her head on a stick in front of their restaurant, and the famous hunters poison Belladonna Darwin Winter Catcher with an alkaloid sugar cookie.
A greatly diminished band of pilgrims finally makes it to the ruins of Pueblo Bonito in New Mexico where Proude and his sidekick Iniwa Biwide pass though a vision window in the pueblo into the fourth world. Proude's wife Rosina, who has betrayed him with one of the pilgrims, Bigfoot Saint Plumero, is left behind, looking ruefully at bear tracks in the snow, the tracks that Proude and Iniwa make as they pass into the fourth world.
This brief summary should be sufficient to let everyone know that Bearheart is indeed a post-modern novel: it is a contemporary novel which combines humor and bloodshed, a sort of deadpan Schadenfreude, in a fashion made familiar by Barth, Barthelme, Brautigan, Hawkes et al. To be sure Rabelais and Cervantes do much the same thing, which brings us to the problem of definition of literary periods or movements. What do you do if you establish characteristics of a period and works hundreds older fit the criteria? Jean-Francois Lyotard answers this by decreeing that the postmodern is not a period as much as an impulse, the interval of experimentation that occurs between periods in which there a single aesthetic model dominates. (65)
If this is true, it puts in question our normal conception of periods and movements which is based on the idea that cultural patterns are typical of a particular time, that they are the artistic response to the historical Zeitgeist. To an extent the difference is based on a different perspective, formalist v. historicist: formalists focus on stylistic similarities, historicists believe in characterizing literary periods.
While it is important to recognize that earlier writers-not only Rabelais and Sterne, but even Petronius-share characteristics with the postmodernists, before the Twentieth Century this sort of writer was pretty much sui generis in his time, whereas there were a spate of postmodern writers who surfaced suddenly in the 1960s and 70s, and it seems reasonable to surmise that they wrote the way they did in response to Vietnam, sex, drugs and rock and roll-all the stimuli of that turbulent time.
But, when we try to pin down the characteristics of the postmodernists-their lack of affect, their deadpan retailing of horrors, their fondness for absurdity and fantasy, their blending of comedy and violence--we find no shortage of writers from the early part of the Twentieth Century who do the same thing. Jarry, Kafka, Pirandello, and Capek all seem to fit the description of postmodern writers. This being the case, I see no alternative to seeing the postmodern as an extension of the modern. If you can't make a clear distinction between Jarry et al and the postmodernists, then you don't have much of a rupture.
Probably because its task is to emphasize the distinct nature of postmodernism, the Routledge Encyclopedia of Postmodernism entry on "postmodernity" claims that the period began after WWII. Routledge characterizes it as involving a "radical questioning of the grounds on which knowledge claims are made, and thereby linked to a sense of liberation from limiting earlier practices." But of course it is not the nature of encyclopedias, whose entries are written by a multitude of people, to be consistent. Accordingly, in the entry on "postmodernity," Routledge implies the "earlier practices" postmodernists are liberated from are those of modernism. The entry on "postmodern critique," however, states that postmodernism is the final break from the Enlightenment.
Convenient as it is in allowing us to consider the similarities of works and writers, establishing periods makes for strange bedfellows: Wordsworth and Byron, or Coover and Carver don't seem to have a whole lot in common, yet they are grouped together. Whatever the benefits of discussing similarities, we should not avoid considering differences, considering what makes writers distinctive. In the case of Vizenor, the interesting question is why he finds himself in the postmodern camp. He's there because the humorous approach to violence and the liberation from the verisimilitude of the novel struck a chord with him because of his Chippewa heritage.
While growing up, Vizenor heard traditional Chippewa tales when his mother sent him to stay with his grandmother on the White Earth reservation. These tales, most of which concern the Trickster Manabozho, are usually comic-if a dark sort of humor-and also often bloody. In one tale Trickster kills the Evil Gambler, for instance-a story Vizenor directly incorporates in the Sir Cecil Staples episodes of Bearheart.
Manabozho tales also frequently suspend the laws of nature and probability, and so Vizenor found the magical realism of the postmodernists more congenial than the conventions that generally governed the novel before 1960. Whatever changes Twain and Hemingway had wrought in diction, they never departed from what Henry James had decreed about verisimilitude: "the air of reality (solidity of specification) seems to me the supreme virtue of a novel." (14) Coover, Barthelme et al left that stricture in the dust, ending once and for all the spurious distinction between novels and romances which English speaking people had observed-the French and Germans, for instance using roman for both.
The postmodern novelists departed not only from the realism of the modernists, but also from the seriousness, difficulty, and obscurity of writers like Faulkner, Woolf, and Joyce, although the openness and seeming-simplicity of the postmodernists presents difficulties of its own. Faced with the mock innocence of Barthelme and the exuberant violence of Vizenor, students' minds boggle-they don't know what to make of them. What I always tell my students is that Vizenor is like volleyball in a church. If while travelling through a state far from home you stop for church, and see not a service but a game of volleyball, naturally you would ask, "What's happening." The answer on one level is simple: "They're playing volleyball." The deeper question is, "why are they playing volleyball in church? Is it some arcane ritual?" The answer is "Don't look too deep: recognize volleyball as volleyball, and read Bearheart for the story." Having understood the novel on its surface level, it isn't hard to identify themes-concerns about the menace to traditional Indian life, the depletion of America's resources, the over-occurrence of violence in everyday life, and the obfuscation of academics.
In the zany events in Bearheart, culminating with Proude leaving our third world to sail into the fourth, Vizenor follows South American postmodernists like Gabriel Garcia Marquez in his use of magical realism. In fact, many contemporary Indian writers use magical realism, writers who are in no other way postmodern-Leslie Silko, Louise Erdrich, Scott Momaday. Critic Amaryll Chanady has remarked on the Indian basis of South American magical realism:
The presence of the supernatural is often attributed to the primitive or
"magical" Indian mentality, which coexists with European rationality. . .
Magical realism is thus based on reality, or a world with which the author
is familiar, while expressing the myths and superstitions of the
American Indians. (19)
While Chanaday's use of the terms "primitive" and "superstitious" is objectionable, her point is a valid one. American Indians are drawn to magical realism because it allows them to combine two familiar views of the world, the traditional Indian, and the Euroamerican.
Although Vizenor prefers the term "mythic verism" (1989, 190), he is using a variation of magical realism, the difference being chiefly that the ambiguity of the fantastic of magic realism gives way to fantasy proper in mythic verism. Although it is unfortunate that the terms seem to overlap-"fantastic" appears to be the adjectival form of "fantasy"-the distinction made by Tzvetan Todorov is valid. (25) In the fantastic the reader can't be sure whether events involve the supernatural or can be explained by natural means. In fantasy events clearly involve the supernatural.
Perhaps more than anything else, Vizenor was attracted to the postmoderns because Chippewa stories, with their focus on the Trickster, represent literature at its most playful. Early in the postmodern movement Gerald Graff identified one of the cardinal traits of postmodernism as "the refusal to take art 'seriously' in the old sense,"
(384) Bearheart absolutely refuses to take art seriously, though it obviously makes the point that life, ethics, and politics are very important. Philip Stevick makes much the same point as Graff when he states that what he calls the "new fiction" exemplifies "art as play." (361) Once again, the same could be said of Tristram Shandy. In fact, if we are to believe Johan Huizinga, all literature is play, (119) although some works are more playful than others. It is good to remember that it is not fortuitous that a drama is called a "play," and that in medieval times English players putting on mystery plays talk of "playing a game of the crucifixion."
But in playing a game of the crucifixion actors maintain a serious demeanor, and intend their art to make a serious point. Postmodern writers like Vizenor may have a serious point, but their demeanor is anything but. Their attitude is that nothing (or very little) is sacred. Mockery is their most important trope, and this seems to be the case whether they are boisterous like Vizenor and Barthelme or very understated like Carver.
Like Proude, Vizenor himself is a Trickster. Virtually every article written about him starts with that observation. "Coyote with a word processor" (Hochbruck, 278) is the way Cherokee writer Tom King puts it. Vizenor writes about tricksters as a trickster in the hope of converting his readers into tricksters who will wage the battles against ignorance, cant, and terminal views the way he does, a thoroughly postmodern approach.
` In fact, Vizenor's Indian experience contributes to making him a postmodern novelist. Gerald Graff specifically mentions myth and tribal ritual as sources for the postmodern revolt:
The new sensibility manifests itself in a number of ways. . .the use
of art itself as a vehicle for exploding its traditional pretensions
and for showing the vulnerability and tenuousness of art and language;
in a generally less soberly rationalistic mode of consciousness
one that is more congenial to myth, tribal ritual, and visionary
experience, grounded in a protean fluid and undifferentiated concept of the
self which is opposed to the repressed, uptight western ego. (384)
Vizenor is consciously postmodern, and believes Trickster, long as he has been around, is postmodern too:
The Trickster is a chance, a comic holotrope in a postmodern language
game that uncovers the distinctions and ironies between narrative voices;
a semiotic sign for "social antagonism and aesthetic activism," in
postmodern criticism and the avant-garde, but not "presence" or ideal
cultural completion in narratives. (1989, 192)
Vizenor is always a bit difficult to follow, but the drift of his argument is that
The Trickster, who exists purely in stories, represents the saturnalian spirit of rebellion in tribal narratives. By "holotrope" Vizenor means whole, free-standing, both signified and signifier. (1986, 4) Quoting Bakhtin, Vizenor describes the comic holotrope as a "dialogism," meaning that Trickster can only be understood as part of a greater whole, the "collection of 'utterances' in oral traditions. . ." To Vizenor the tribal world is comic and communal; the comic spirit is centered in Trickster, a figure created by the tribe as a whole, not an individual author. Vizenor argues that,
The opposite of a comic discourse is a monologue, an utterance in
isolation, which comes closer to the tragic mode in literature and not a
comic tribal world view. (1986, 6)
Vizenor sees the postmodern chronotope in fiction as a way to attack the dominant postcolonial world view, his chief weapon being Trickster, the "agonistic liberator."
The Trickster and comic liberator craves chance in agonistic imagination
to lessen the power of social science, and bourgeois humanism. . .the
comic liberator is a healer in linguistic games, chance, and postmodern
imagination; the Trickster, as a semiotic sign, "denies presence and
completion," that romantic "vital essence" in tribal representations and the
instrumental language of social science. (1986, 8)
Vizenor sees the concepts of postmodern criticism, with its linguicentric bias, as a method of demonstrtating that Trickster is not a reductive symbol as formulated by anthropologists. Rather, he is a culturally centered, comunally created, highly complex, comic fugure who cannot be isolated from or understood outside of the context of his discourse.
Vizenor goes on to invoke Charles Russell to make the point that all aspects of postmodern identity are a matter of language, and that postmodern creation, like Trickster tales, glorifies play:
Charles Russell argues that postmodern identities are "recast in terms of
the essential workings of language, especially in the variance of language
and difference, and the shifting grounds of all discourse. . .postmodern
creation is expressed in the acceptance, even glorification, of play,
chance, indeterminacy, and self-conscious performance. (1989, 192)
But Vizenor doesn't stop there. He is the post laureate of mixed-bloods-one of his stories depicts the "Half-breed Hall of Fame"-and he claims that mixed-bloods (whom he calls "crossbloods") are particularly postmodern:
Crossbloods are a postmodern tribal bloodline, an encounter with
racialism, colonial duplicities, sentimental monogenism, and generic
cultures. (1990 vii)
What he means is that the concept of being mixed-blood is a result of spurious ideas about race, imposed by colonialism, and that cross-bloods, by glorying in their polygenetic, polycultural identity, escape through postmodern techniques of playfully deconstructing social constructs, achieving a fuller measure of humanity than the sentimentally monogenetic.
Vizenor argues that Indians (a word he italicizes and begins with a lower case letter [indians] are simulations, inventions of white photographers like Edward Curtis and Indian poseurs like Russell Means. Vizenor wants today's Indian, the Indian in postmodern times, to achieve existential authenticity by reinventing himself, cutting through the simulations and returning to some relationship with tribal traditions:
The indian is a simulation, the absence of natives; the indian
transposes the real, and in the simulation of the real has no
referent, memories, or native stories. The postindian must waver over the aesthetic ruins of indian simulations. (1998, 15)
Whether Indians in general can or even wish to reinvent themselves as postindians is a question. Vizenor himself certainly has.

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CITED

Barzun, Jacques. From Dawn to Decadence. New York, HarperCollins, 2000.

Chanady, Amaryll. Magical Realism and the Fantastic. New York, Garland, 1985.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. New York, Vintage, 1973.

Graff, Gerald. "The myth of the postmodern breakthrough." TriQuarterly 26, Winter, 1973.

Hochbruck, Wolfgang. "Breaking Away: The Novels of Gerald Vizenor." World Literature Today, Spring 1992, 274-278.

Huizinga, Johann. Homo Ludens. London, Routledge, 1950.

James, Henry. The Future of the Novel. New York, Vintage, 1956.

Levenson Michael. The Cambridge Companion to Modernism. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1959.

Levi-Strauss, Claude, The Savage Mind. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1966.

Levin, Harry. Memories of the Moderns. London, Faber and Faber, 1981.

Lyotard, Jean Francois. "Note on the Meaning of 'Post' in The Postmodern Explained: Correspondences 1982-85. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. 64-68.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics. New York, Philosophical
Library, 1959.

Stevick, Philip. "Scherezade runs out of plots, goes on talking; the king, puzzled, listens:an essay on the new fiction." TriQuartlerly 26, Winter, 1973.

Taylor, Victor, and Winquist, Charles. The Routledge Encyclopedia of Postmodernism. New York, Routledge, 2000.

Vizenor, Gerald. Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart. Saint Paul, Truck Press, 1978, revised, 1990.

_____________. Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discussions on Native American Indian Literatures. Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 1989.

------------_____________. Postindian Conversations. Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1999.

_____________. "Trickster Discourse," paper presented at the School of American Research, Santa Fe, June, 1986.

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