Otherwise, Revolution! Leslie Marmon Silko’s ‘Almanac of the Dead’ by Rebecca Tillett

Abstract

MLR, .,   characters—a Victorian poet and scholar. While there is much original and compelling discussion here, it is worth considering whether the unusual literary context rather complicates the ultimate meaning of the work in relation to contemporary poetry, and whether this section would have been more profitably given over to the analysis of a handful of stand-alone dramatic monologues by contemporary poets. e subsequent two chapters, which focus on ‘Revisionist Mythmaking’ and postcolonial British identity, provide further well-informed and insightful analyses, both formal and thematic. In tracing the formal and effective features of the genre, Merk astutely observes the diminishing use of ‘setting’ and ‘occasion’, as well as the corresponding feature of ‘dramatic action’ in contemporary examples of the genre. Using Alistair Fowler’s work on literary genres, the final chapter addresses the question of whether the dramatic monologue has passed through the three stages required (formation, development, transformation) to become a ‘modal form’ (p. ). Challenging the temporal dimension of Fowler’s argument, Merk asserts that the dramatic monologue has developed and transformed, without ‘the proper genre having exhausted itself first’ (p. ). She concludes that the dramatic monologue can be seen as a ‘mode’ partly because it has characteristics which are ‘permanently valuable’ (p. ) and that its energies and features manifest themselves in a range of prose works. As this volume demonstrates, the dramatic monologue’s liminal existence is integral to its value. Its ambiguity and slipperiness are the source of its creative power and it continues to influence contemporary writers of prose and poetry alike. ere seems a lot more to be said about the contemporary dramatic monologue, and this is a much-needed and valuable contribution to the field. S H U S R-J Otherwise, Revolution! Leslie Marmon Silko’s ‘Almanac of the Dead’. By R T. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. . vi+ pp. £. ISBN – –––. Rebecca Tillett has been one of the most important and persistent advocates for the study of contemporary Native American and Indigenous literatures (see particularly her essential Contemporary Native American Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, )). roughout Tillett’s work, there is no text that she has returned to with greater frequency than Leslie Marmon Silko’s notoriously difficult Almanac of the Dead (New York: Penguin, ). Following closely on the heels of an edited collection, Howling for Justice: Critical Perspectives on Leslie Marmon Silko’s ‘Almanac of the Dead’, ed. by Tillett (Tucson: Arizona University Press, ), Otherwise, Revolution! represents Tillett’s first monograph devoted solely to Silko’s ‘problematic and contentious’ second novel (p. )—and it is a fitting culmination of her thinking to date on the text. Situating her reading within the history of Almanac’s mixed reception, Tillett builds most explicitly on the previous scholarship of David L. Moore, on witnessing and ethics (‘Silko’s Blood Sacrifice: e Circulating Witness in Almanac of  Reviews the Dead’, in Leslie Marmon Silko: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by Louise K. Barnett and James L. orson (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, ), pp. –) and of Joni Adamson, on Indigenous environmental politics and political activism (‘Indigenous Cosmopolitics and the Reemergence of the Pluriverse’, in Howling for Justice, ed. by Tillett, pp. –). By extending these lines of enquiry, she proposes ‘some useful ways of reading Almanac for the reader who is bewildered’ and offers ‘some potential “remedies” for some of the text’s long-standing and entrenched misreadings’ (p. ). In this, Tillett is lucid; as she argues, Silko guides her reader through the dangerous individualistic wilderness of the text to show how cooperation, community and the ability to acknowledge the human and natural world as a holistic whole provides a clear and sustainable ‘remedy’ for the disposability and sterility of late-twentieth-century capitalist culture. (pp. –) Methodologically, Tillett seeks to follow Silko’s lead, centring her analysis on the Earth. Indeed, Tillett posits from the outset that in Almanac ‘the Earth is the central “character” of an exploration of the ways in which “enlightened” scientific detachment is predicated upon a separation of humanity from the natural world’ (p. ). As such, Tillett’s argument hinges on the ways in which such an Earth-centred reading of Almanac most clearly...