Alexie's Nutshell: Mousetraps and Interpenetrations of <em>The Business of Fancydancing</em> and <em>Hamlet</em>

Abstract

Alexie's NutshellMousetraps and Interpenetrations of The Business of Fancydancing and Hamlet Blake M. Hausman (bio) Seymour is a rare beast: an unlikable lead character who nonetheless engages the audience. He's a tragic figure of Shakespearean proportion, and the comparison is not made lightly. Catherine Graham, Santa Cruz Sentinel There's this place I go to.… It's dark there, like inside a machine or in the belly of a whale, and all my dreams are there, and my memories, and my lies, and they all get mixed up, and spin spin spin. That's when the poems happen. Seymour Polatkin, The Business of Fancydancing Sherman Alexie's work "represents an interpenetration of codes between the ostensibly discrete spheres of the Native and the queer," according to Quentin Youngberg's essay, "Interpenetrations," published in the spring 2008 issue of SAIL (60). Youngberg's analysis offers an astute reading of Alexie's second film, The Business of Fancydancing. The film tells the story of a homosexual Spokane Indian poet, Seymour Polatkin (Evan Adams), who returns home to his reservation after ten years of critical and economic success in the largely white cosmopolitan literary circles of Seattle and beyond. Seymour's story pushes multiple audiences to engage problematic expectations about sexuality, tradition, and performance. Youngberg describes Alexie's engagement with such expectations in terms [End Page 76] of coding practices, noting the doubleness and dualism of the codes signified by Seymour Polatkin's character and the contexts in which he appears. Youngberg describes this dualism as a "double valence," enabling Alexie's film to mobilize the twin processes of "queering the Native sphere" and "'Indianing' the (white) literary sphere" (60). Thus, the film becomes a convergence zone where signs from each paradigm simultaneously seep into and affect the other, what Youngberg calls a "double-edged effect" (64). It is this kind of "interpenetration," Youngberg suggests, that enables Alexie's work to serve as a subversive element within both Native and queer circles of signification and meaning. The term "interpenetration" is used by scholars in several fields.1 In chemistry, interpenetration signifies a complex mixture. Simply put, mixtures are different from compounds because the original substances retain their basic properties and could be extracted from each other. This notion of fundamental properties that survive chemical changes has become a rather generative metaphor for those of us in the humanities and social sciences. In anthropology and sociology, interpenetration denotes elements or sites of cultural contact and exchange.2 In economics, it signifies the merger of business and politics, often in regard to a particular identity, market, or niche. Many scholars of politics, philosophy, linguistics, literature, and performance arts have employed the term to describe a situation in which two or more distinct units or paradigms converge, mix, and mutually affect the other(s). An impressively varied and cross-disciplinary archive of scholarship based upon "interpenetration" has emerged at sites of cultural crossing and exchange. Germaine Bryce's 1949 essay in the Modern Language Journal, "The 'Interpenetration' of Literatures," demonstrates how the concept of "interpenetration" enables scholars to engage complex questions that have yet to be asked.3 Bryce engages the possibility of transnational literary study as it was then appearing possible in the post-World War II environment. Bryce uses quotation marks around the term, "interpenetrations," as do several works of scholarship from the twenty-first century. This use of quotation marks suggests that when we discuss "interpenetration," we are most likely discussing something [End Page 77] that is beyond our current vocabulary. Recognizing "interpenetration" can enable one to articulate something genuinely new.4 Youngberg's "Interpenetrations" does precisely this, for it is the first work of literary scholarship about Alexie's film. Youngberg asks questions about The Business of Fancydancing that greatly needed to be asked, and his analysis is insightful. In this essay, I would like to complement Youngberg's argument by demonstrating another "discrete sphere" with which The Business of Fancydancing interpenetrates—the Shakespearean sphere. It is a sphere that defines the canon of English and world literatures, a sphere that has often troubled American Indian narratives. Leo Marx's assertion that "The Tempest may be read as a...