Escape Stories: Narratives and Native Americans in Sherman Alexie's 'The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven'

Abstract

Abstract Through close study of Sherman Alexie's short story collection, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), this essay aims to explore the dialectics of Native American narrative now. First, the blockage or thwarting of narrative in Alexie is identified and interpreted as a crisis for Native American representation. However, a second section suggests that Alexie queries the centrality accorded narrative within his tradition. Yet the final section finds that the non-narrative or anti-narrative strategies thereby explored are also, in their turn, questioned by Alexie; in postmodern fashion, his work considers the possibilities for Native Americans of 'little narratives'. Writing in 1989, Gerald Vizenor had occasion to object to the paradigms that he felt dominated the study of Native American writing: 'Claude Levi-Strauss and Alan Dundes have been cited more than Mikhail Bakhtin or Jean-Francois Lyotard in critical studies of tribal literature in the past decade'.[1] In his own fiction, besides his editorial and critical work, Vizenor, more than any other single figure, has been responsible for the subsequent reorientation of understanding of Native American texts along the lines he tacitly proposes here. It has become almost a commonplace, for example, to read such texts, older as well as contemporary, under the sign of the postmodern. I will come back later to some advantages and disadvantages of interpreting Native American narrative through the insights of Lyotard. For the moment, however, I want to turn to Bakhtin, the other neglected figure whom, a decade ago, Vizenor offered as a resource for revitalizing 'studies of tribal literature'. Since Vizenor made his observation, Bakhtinian ideas of the dialogic have indeed exercised an influence upon criticism in this field. Narrative Chance, the collective volume in which the claims of Bakhtin were put forward, itself made an inaugural contribution by including Arnold Krupat's essay on 'The Dialogic of Silko's Storyteller'. Krupat argues that Leslie Marmon Silko's text, published in 1981 and comprising fictions, poetry, autobiographical meditations, and photographs, strategically resists any sense of the writer herself as a centrally authoritative or uniquely personal presence; instead, the book demonstrates that Silko's own discourse, traversed by the stories and memories of the Laguna Pueblo community of New Mexico, is actually 'the product of many voices'.[2] Without denying that its weaving of different voices makes Silko's text itself already dialogical, I want here to try to extend and complicate somewhat the dialogue by putting Storyteller into relationship with more recent Native American writing. Specifically, I am interested in how assumptions Silko makes about the nature and power of narrative in Native America may be contested or modified by Sherman Alexie's collection of short stories, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993). To explore a dialogue or intertextual relationship of this kind is, of course, not simply to pursue a specialist literary interest. Rather, in the implicit struggle between these fictions by Silko and Alexie, there may be read not only different senses of the politics of narrative, but, ultimately, different programmes for Native American politics itself late in the twentieth century. Before considering the divergence of these two writers, it is important to register a sense of their shared experience within the contemporary United States. On the dedication page of The Lone Ranger, Silko figures among those 'Native writers whose words and music have made [Alexie's] possible'.[3] If verbal art, in Silko, is understood as fundamental to Native American survival within a polity genocidal in the past and indifferent or assimilationist in the present, then so, too, in Alexie's collection, there appears to be a relationship between aesthetics and endurance. The word 'survival', or its cognates, occurs at least seven times here. …