Gerald Vizenor's Metaphysics

Abstract

Gerald Vizenor's Metaphysics Kathryn Hume The Pennsylvania State University Gerald Vizenor is a challenging, important, and ambitious writer who has gained some following but deserves wider attention. He has published more than thirty books of fiction, poetry, theoretical essays on the "postindian" condition, and journalistic pieces on issues affecting Native American life, such as bingo, capital punishment, and courts deciding whether ancestral bones should be reburied or can be studied as artifacts. He does not pander to Anglo norms. Vizenor claims that three publishers "lost" the typescript of the original version of Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles, and that "the first typesetters of the original manuscript refused to continue after a few chapters because, in their view, the novel was 'too obscene and violent'" (Fugitive Poses 7). Nor does he make his writing easy for readers, as we can see in this passage from a theoretical essay: The "second immediacy" of the essay is a trace of resistance, survivance, and native sovereignty. This "second nature" cocks the ecstasies of the native past over the cause of history. The past is a thesis of creation and culture, the constructions of a "false society." The native past is enacted in theses, the creation of a traditional absence and cultural distance; transcendence becomes a notion as nameable as the myth of mother earth, a metronymic commodity. (Fugitive Poses 24) In short, his writing is difficult, alien to most Euro-American traditions, and hard to describe or grasp. Many of his words have been altered or wrenched from their usual connotations to serve his purposes.1 [End Page 580] This opacity, I shall argue, stems in part from Vizenor's exemplifying a mode of consciousness that Chela Sandoval articulates from studying the theories implicit in the following terms: "hybridity, nomad thought, marginalization, la conciencia de la mestiza, trickster consciousness, masquerade, eccentric subjectivity, situated knowledges, schizophrenia, la facultad, signifyin', the outsider/within, strategic essentialism, différance, rasquache, performativity, coatlicue, and the third meaning" (68; quotation marks around each term removed). These terms, Sandoval says, "entered into intellectual currency as terminological inventions meant to specify and reinforce particular forms of resistance to dominant social hierarchy" (68). What the terms imply is a consciousness different from the Western Enlightenment pattern. Such a consciousness is called for in the American form of postcolonial studies and in minority studies but not yet much seen in multicultural American fiction, which is mostly Euro-American in its construction and narrative techniques. While other writers and theorizers try to explain the necessity for a new consciousness or speculate about what it will look like, Vizenor embodies it without apologies, concessions, or footnotes for those from the Euro-American tradition. Philosophers of American Indian thought provide some useful context for understanding Vizenor.2 So, too, do Chela Sandoval's technologies of the oppressed: semiology, deconstruction, meta-ideologizing, democratics, and differential consciousness.3 These groundings, however, only supplement my primary approach. As Vizenor himself enjoins, one observes or listens to tales, one goes back to them, one gradually builds a framework in which they make sense, a framework that takes one beyond one's own assumptions. The problems posed by Vizenor's writings do not stop with his difficult prose. He rejects all concern with representation and does [End Page 581] without most elements of conventional plot. Development of character and personal interactions do not interest him. He violates stereotypes and angers some Native Americans with satirically negative portrayals of Indians.4 He enjoys proffering zany-seeming history. In Hotline Healers, he places a monastery at the headwaters of the Mississippi a couple of decades before Columbus saw land in the Caribbean. He gives Columbus descendants among the Native Americans, but then depicts Columbus himself as descending from Mayans who came to Europe prehistorically.5 If everyone is ultimately an "Indian," that might be a talking point for one kind of universalizing argument, but then why should readers value American "Indian" stories and creation myths over those cherished by the invading European "Indians"? To get very far...