"Open Containers": Sherman Alexie's Drunken Indians

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of content: The American Indian Quarterly 25.1 (2001) 46-72 Ironic and satiric impulses consistently suffuse tone, structure, realization of characters, and vision of contemporary reservation reality in small press collections of poems and stories of Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d'Alene), from The Business of Fancydancing (1991) through The Summer of Black Widows (1996), as well as his mainstream works of fiction, from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993) to The Toughest Indian in World (2000). Much of praise bestowed on Alexie's early efforts and The Lone Ranger and Tonto has focused on author's unflinchingly bold depiction of dysfunctional nature of contemporary reservation life and fragmented, often alienated bicultural lives of characters who daily confront white civilization that encaptives their world - physically, historically, spiritually, and psychically. Clearly, part of attractiveness of Alexie's early volumes of verse and works of prose, at least for many mainstream readers, can be attributed to author's conscious construction of a hyperrealistic hip persona, one that at times might be indistinguishable from his biography. Kenneth Lincoln's recent assessment of Alexie's poetry, for example, voices both puzzlement and concern over Alexie's authorial stance: With Sherman Alexie, readers can throw formal questions out smokehole. . . . Parodic antiformalism may account for some of Alexie's mass appeal. This Indian gadfly jumps through all hoops, sonnet, to villanelle, to heroic couplet, all tongue-in-cheeky. To Lincoln, Alexie is stand-up comedian, Indian improvisator [who himself] is performing text (267). While Lincoln acknowledges that some readers may find meaning in Alexie's performance-art poetry - His firecat imagination plays tricks on reader, for our supposed good, for its own native delight and survival (268) - he also questions Alexie's motives: His is more performance than poem, more attitude than art, more schtick than aesthetic. Definitely talented, deeply impassioned, hyphenated American-Indian, but to what end? Although Alexie's poetry shows an obvious delight in surfaces, Lincoln finds little more beyond facade: Indi'n vaudeville, then, stand-up comedy on edge of despair. A late- twentieth-century, quasi-visionary clown tells truth that hurts and heals in one-liners cheesy as Marx Brothers, trenchant as Lenny Bruce, tricky as Charlie Hill's BIA Halloween 'Trick or Treaty'. (271) Following publication of The Lone Ranger and Tonto and Reservation Blues (1995), however, Alexie also came under fire from certain quarters for his purportedly negative use of irony and satire - namely, literary connections to (white) popular culture and representations of Indian stereotypes that some consider inappropriate and dangerously misleading for mainstream consumption. Despite his early praise of The Lone Ranger and Tonto, for example, Louis Owens finds that Alexie's fiction too often simply reinforces all of stereotypes desired by white readers: his bleakly absurd and aimless Indians are imploding in a passion of self-destructiveness and self-loathing; there is no family or community center toward which his characters . . . might turn for coherence; and in process of self-destruction Indians provide Euramerican readers with pleasurable moments of dark humor or titillation of bloodthirsty savagery. Above all, non-Indian reader of Alexie's work is allowed to come away with a sense . . . that no one is really to blame but Indians, no matter how loudly author shouts his anger. (79-80) In his chapter on American Indian fiction, Owens contends that the most popularly and commercially successful Native American works thus far are marked by a dominant shared characteristic: They are direct heirs of modernist tradition of naturalistic despair, of which Indian is quintessential illustration (81). For Owens, these new American Indian novels articulate in sometimes extraordinarily well-disguised form familiar stereotype...