Gerald Vizenor Short Fiction Analysis
Like much postcolonial literature, Gerald Vizenor’s short fiction refuses to accept the sciencebased worldview of the Occident, instead employing a Magical Realism that fuses Native American religious beliefs with modern images. This was already the case in his early, relatively more conventional short narratives (including Wordarrows) and has subsequently led to even freer fantasy. He is also postcolonial in that his engagé position inclines him toward satire, playful diatribes, and seemingly pedantic documentation that interweave the conventions of factual and fictional literature, so as to comment on actual events but without letting their seriousness constrain his sense of humor.
He undermines the distinction between fact and fiction because it is based on the dichotomy of objective and subjective, which colonialism used to subordinate the supposedly superstitious emotionalism of “primitive” people to its own “objectivity.” Similarly, colonialism (in the guise of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, for example) long tried to replace oral traditions with bureaucratic literacy, taught by a school system that forbade the use of Native American languages. Despite a decreasing market for short fiction (except in poorly paid academic journals), Vizenor produced many brief works, a practice congruent with the oral tradition he seeks to preserve; his craftsmanship cannot be separated from his politics.
“The Psychotaxidermist”
This story is a selfreflexive account of a generation. Its narrator, Colonel Clement Beaulieu, is a persona of Vizenor, who combined the first name of his father with the last of his grandmother. Beaulieu recalls an anecdote about Newcrows, a shaman whose imagination could bring dead animals to life. In a satire of white society, the shaman is arrested for performing this miracle on a golf course. Then, he infests the prosecutor and judge with magical ticks, thereby ending the trial. In an epilogue, Beaulieu begins telling the story to a group of nuns, with its protagonist changed to Sister Isolde. The point is that oral narratives are altered for each audience. Only through such imaginative adaptation can the tales themselves become psychotaxidermists, not merely preserving past forms but reanimating them.
Wordarrows
The preface to this work compares the ancient use of arrows to the modern employment of words in the defense of the tribe. Most of the stories are vignettes from the time when Vizenor was executive director of the American Indian Employment and Guidance Center in Minneapolis. As he has acknowledged, some of these vignettes might seem racist except for Vizenor’s being a Native American. For instance, “Roman Downwind” portrays a teenager who barely passes his driving test on the third try, celebrates until he had exhausted his cash and family, then talks an agency into giving him enough money so that he can meet a white woman and be comfortable for one more day. In “Marleen American Horse,” such selfdefeating behavior is diagnosed as the result of Native Americans’ accepting colonial stereotypes, which produces guilt that leads to substance abuse and more guilt in a vicious circle.
“Landfill Meditation”
First published in a slightly different version in 1979, this story provides a title for Landfill Meditation . The tale’s importance derives from its primary image: society’s treating Native Americans as garbage. A trickster able to profit from this racism, Nose Charmer becomes rich by dumping toxic waste on wetlands he is trying to claim as sacred grounds. His story is being told “backward” by Clement Beaulieu—a pun on the stereotype of “backward” Native Americans. Another of Beaulieu’s anecdotes concerns “Belladonna Winter Catcher.” Her fatal flaw is a predilection for “terminal creeds,” a phrase that Vizenor uses repeatedly to signify any humorless conception of life. The other Native Americans...
(This entire section contains 1179 words.)
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murder her, as they have poisoned many of those guilty of the same fault. After telling these loosely related parables, Beaulieu floats out the window, buoyed by his laughter.
Earthdivers
This collection takes its name from the widely distributed myth that dry land was created by divers who brought it from the bottom of the sea. To Vizenor, the situation of having to create the ground of one’s existence particularly suits “mixedbloods,” who are between cultures. In the preface, where he discusses this myth, Vizenor derides cultural critic Alan Dundes’s Freudian interpretation, which Vizenor considers the quintessence of humorless, colonial reduction of Native American creativity to filth. Vizenor’s stories celebrate trickster figures who manage, for a while at least, to find a place for themselves in the wasteland of urban civilization. In “The Chair of Tears,” for instance, academia is arrayed against the Native American Studies Department, whose chair must have publications and other credentials to please the establishment but quite the opposite to satisfy the radical students. Knowing that he has no safe ground on which to proceed, the seventh appointee makes a series of startling innovations, such as establishing a Department of Undecided Studies, likely, given student procrastination, to become the largest and potentially most powerful unit on campus. The volume concludes, however, not with the success of such mediating tricksters but with a group of stories about a collapse in racial relations because of unsuccessful attempts to halt the execution of a Native American.
“Luminous Thighs: Mythic Tropisms”
This story’s protagonist, Griever de Hocus, also is the center of Vizenor’s novels Griever, a surrealistic fictionalization of Vizenor’s teaching at Tianjin University, and The Trickster of Liberty: Tribal Heirs to a Wild Baronage (1988), largely about Griever’s family. Although Vizenor’s persona in his earlier books, Clement Beaulieu, had appeared in episodes of a Magical Realist bent, he was a more transparent and believable version of Vizenor than Griever, who seeks to turn himself into myth as a defense against the urbanized world. This self-transformation involves “tropisms,” a word previously used by Nathalie Sarraute, who defined them as the psychological patterns with which people jockey for control over one another. To her, these behaviors are futile but to Vizenor, they are “mythic,” bestowing a sense of connection to primordial meaning. “Luminous Thighs: Mythic Tropisms” opens with one of these mythic tropisms. To annoy the man next to him on a train, Griever tells a preposterous story about driving a novelist’s car into a river so that the novelist, after being rumored to be dead, could have the pleasure of publicly declaring himself to be alive. This metaphor of rebirth through water, present in Griever’s other discourses, is meant to unsettle anyone near him (since stereotypes left unsettled are likely to turn against him in a white society). The luminous thighs themselves are sexually unsettling because they are of an androgynous statue. They give a title not only to the story but also to a screenplay Griever hopes to make with actor Robert Redford (Vizenor worked at Redford’s Sundance Institute). The story’s digressive conclusion is a denunciation of the novel Hanta Yo (1979), a book that pandered to the public’s desire for myths and imposed humorless stereotypes on Native Americans. For Vizenor’s tale to wander into a review of it is perhaps more unsettling than any of his previous expansions of the short-story genre.
