Transmitted Trauma and "Absent Memory" in James Welch's The Death of Jim Loney Jennifer Lemberg There are multiple reasons why the interdisciplinary fields of Holocaust studies and American Indian literary studies have maintained a cautious distance from each other. Wary of critical paradigms that might further “racialist tropes of vanishment,” scholars of American Indian literature have hesitated to embrace a discourse of trauma based in Western theoretical models, while Holocaust studies has only recently opened up to broader explorations of the meanings of the event in relationship to other genocides (Vizenor 96; Rothberg 1240). Yet the fields share a central concern with the effort to understand how genocide is understood and represented as “a catastrophic originary event and a recurrent condition” (Sanyal 3).1 In this essay, I argue for their potential to be mutually illuminating through a reading of James Welch’s 1979 novel, The Death of Jim Loney. The Death of Jim Loney chronicles the life and death of Loney, the son of a Gros Ventre woman and a white man, who becomes overwhelmed by the need to remember his past in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving and Christmas. Living in Harlem, Montana, abandoned by his parents, and lacking ties to the Gros Ventres, Loney feels “like an amnesiac searching for the one event, the one person or moment, that would bring everything back” so that he can “see the order in his life” (20). On a quest for memory he will not find, he spends night after night attempting to “think of all the little things that added up to a man sitting at a table drinking wine” (20). With no community to help him in his task and his few remaining family members meeting his efforts with silence or denials, Loney’s memory is continuously [End Page 67] deferred. He remains burdened by its traces, the continual presence of an absence, like the vision of the dark bird he sees when he is drunk or tired, the meaning of which he cannot discover. The book ends as Loney dies on the Fort Belknap Reservation in what is essentially a suicide: worn down by the larger as well as the quotidian losses he suffers, he is shot by Quinton Doore, a schoolmate of Loney’s now distinguished by “a kind of cruelty” and employed by the reservation police (161). Discussions of Jim Loney trace some of the boundaries of American Indian criticism, where American Indian literature is often evaluated according to whether it offers what Gerald Vizenor calls narratives of “survivance” (15), or intellectual and emotional sustenance, and where depictions of the recovery of cultural memory, rather than its depletion, are praised for furthering the project of American Indian cultural renewal. Paul Eisenstein writes that the “omitted history” of Welch’s 1974 Winter in the Blood creates a “void” in the narrator’s “historical consciousness” that functions by “setting the stage for recovery and . . . becoming,” but it is uncertain whether Loney’s amnesia can be said to work in a similar fashion (12, 6). Comparing Jim Loney to other American Indian novels published at the time, such as N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (1968) and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977), critics have argued either that, like the protagonists of those works, Loney participates in a ritual that restores him to his tribe (albeit through his death) or that in denying Loney the memory he seeks Welch challenges generic conventions favoring a more optimistic conclusion.2 At stake in these debates is whether Loney’s death should be seen as the active choice of a contemporary warrior, or the tragic passing of a stereotypical “breed.” Critics who object to Loney’s character, such as Louis Owens, go so far as to say that he is wholly “deracinated,” deprived of any recognizably Indian qualities (150). Others, like John Purdy, discover the presence of distinct, if subtle, references to Gros Ventre practices in the novel, while Robert Nelson argues that in Welch’s early works, including Jim Loney, identification with the Montana landscape takes place “independent of the mediation of any specific cultural tradition” but consistent with Indian tradition (95). With Nelson, I view...