SOURCE: "Real Stories: Memory, Violence, and Enjoyment in Gerald Vizenor's Bearheart," in Literature and Psychology, Vol. XXXXI, No. 4, 1995, pp. 1-16.

[In the following essay, Hauss discusses the role of violence and history in Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart.]

From the beginning, there is the violence. Critics have remarked on the shocking, often graphic and extended, depictions of physical violence in Vizenor's 1978 novel, Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart. Louis Owens says he had a hard time getting students to read the novel, part of their objection being that it remained true to Vizenor's remark in the preface that it's just a book of "sex and violence"—and, one should add, a book whose violence is rendered in particularly unsettling ways: traumatic images abruptly emergent within the generally comic current of the narrative. By the third page of the novel's opening genealogy of the "Cedar Circus"—the mythical tribe whose forced exodus from their ancestral cedar grove the novel will follow—the unthinkable violence has already begun. Forced into defensive warfare against "federal forces and tree killers" intent on converting the sacred grove of cedar into lumber for urban construction, the Cedar Nation sustains a rapid series of losses. In the course of combat, the mixed-blood spouse of First Proude Cedarfair, ancient chief of the nation, is raped, tortured and killed:

[She] was raped by whitemen. Her blue eyes were burned with hot coals. Her flesh was pinched and torn. The soft brown hair on her pubic arch was cut and stuffed into her broken mouth by officials of the federal government.

In the following paragraph, a white "surveyor," recently converted to the cause of the cedar circus against the government that had formerly employed him, is captured and bound by federal troops. That night,

while his captors were sitting around a fire drinking near the border of the cedar circus, the surveyor loosened his bonds and ran through the stumps into the darkness of the cedar. He was shot nine times in the back, three in the head, and impaled on a cedar stake facing the circus.

Despite the protest of some readers, this is a violence we know is in the real history of North America and its indigenous peoples, a federally sponsored violence which Vizenor presents as having long produced, indeed as continuing to produce, a particularly excessive history of human and natural loss. The passages suddenly and shockingly render brief moments of this unthinkable, unthinkably routine and extended history, refusing familiar rhetorics of "Indian" melodrama or tragedy at the eruption of this barbaric "other side" of reigning historical texts.

Yet in its recovery of this violent history, the novel never claims to represent the past "the way it really was," the "real story," over against the falsehoods propagated by official historians. For Vizenor, the official histories are certainly false, but what makes them false is exactly such claims to have rendered the historical past, and present, objectively and conclusively. These claims—and the static representations of "Indians" they sustain—are, for Vizenor, the peculiar product of "cultures of death." Their operative discourses are "terminal creeds": ways of writing whose deadliness is directly attendant upon the positing of privileged terms and termini. Terminal creeds legitimize monopolies of coercive force: in this case, writing U.S. history in triumphally democratic terms—as the march of "Progress." Like recent American t.v.'s "real stories of cops," such "histories" insist the essential identities of their players, and the ordained outcome of their encounter, before action even begins. In the passages quoted above, Vizenor renders not only a suppressed violence, but also the discursive terms within which the expansionist culture enacting that violence renders itself. The visibly phallic character of federal violence, in these passages and others—the obscene foregrounding of the phallus in acts of mutilation and destruction—registers expansionist America's proclamation that it acts as bearer of a sacred totem—the final term of history as "Progress." A fantasy of wholeness is thus projected across both the trauma of violent antagonism—what Fredric Jameson calls "the Real of History"—and the signifying action that legitimates it: the "quilting" of a field of historical meanings around the strike of a new master-signifier.

For Vizenor, such rigidly designating symbolic orders not only delimit the possibilities of meaning, they also rechannel desire into superegoic cycles that hyperproduce loss and destruction. To use Slavoj Zizek's terms for the pleasures of superego, such orders—forcibly recruiting subjects whose former lifeways have been shattered—are "permeated by an obscene enjoyment." They channel desire away from inventive and transformative cultural practices into moralistic and punitive repetitions. These are historical conditions within which what Lacan calls the "real of desire" attains a paralyzed and paralyzing formation. The "real of desire" names, for Lacan, that surplus pulsation of "enjoyment" (jouissance) constituted within every social and symbolic order: an enjoyment whose fate may be either a relatively open-ended metonymy along the chains of the symbolic, or the saturation of a particular signifying formation organized around a single "point de capiton." Vizenor's Bearheart studies the deadlocks of enjoyment possible at moments of history when desire's metonymic movements and transformationsare weakened or deadened, and enjoyment is overbalancingly channelled into superegoic functions of the objectification, judgment, and punishment of bodies. What such moments demand, what they in fact are inevitably destined for, regardless of interventionist intention, is renewed eruptions of enjoyment—the eruptive laugh of the bear in Bearheart—making possible new articulations of the socio-symbolic order.

Bearheart emphasizes the crucial functions of eruptive memory in this renewal. Here, the relation of Bearheart to Walter Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History" seems to me crucial. Benjamin's famous passage on the "memory [that] flashes up at a moment of danger" suggests, as does Vizenor in Bearheart, that the eruption of buried memory is a critical event in the reanimation of both desire and discourse. Memory's flashing return blows open contemporary intersubjective orders, large and small, making possible their general reconstitution—to articulate now channels of desire outraged or closed down in the violence of the past.

Bearheart offers a series of vignettes of the transformative interaction of memory and desire in the subjects of history. In Vizenor's novel, the regenerative power of memory has fundamentally two dimensions. First, memories of traumatic assault—often triggered, as in Benjamin, by the contemporary persistence of such assault—reanimate the channels of desire shut down, foreclosed, or destroyed in the original violence. Second, memories of alternative and subcultural forms—what Vizenor calls cultural "holotropes" of an American Indian past—provide alternative terms for the resymbolization of past and present. That is, precisely in the aftermath of the symbolic catastrophes, or "encounters with the Real," that traumatic memories induce, the memory of alternative cultural forms makes possible a rewriting of history itself—as well as of contemporary subjectivities, with their orders of enjoyment. Under pressure of a dominant culture that persistently fails to "account" for this enjoyment in its subaltern populations, memorial "holotropes" may provide the only means of overcoming that other danger Benjamin locates in the "moment of danger": a "conformist" reconsolidation of oppressive cultural formations after their momentary upheaval. It goes without saying that a specific practice of storytelling is itself one of the "holotropes" at issue here: a "comic" or "trickster" storytelling, alternately collapsing and recovering through all these eruptions of the traumatic and impossible—a storytelling that always reconfigures, in its recovery, new possibilities of relation to the real of enjoyment. In this sense, the most real of "real stories" are those that fail, that effectively break down in the face of trauma—beginning again only through a radical resymbolization of past and present.

In Bearheart, the maimed, the deformed, and the diseased—"survivors" of a multiply destructive "culture of death,"—march in refugee formations along the interstate highways of the U.S. All are scarred by a history of violence and destruction. Yet their recovery and reinvigoration, their capacity to both feel and desire again, is predicated upon their return, in memory, to precisely the violence that has scarred them. The "Scapehouse of Weirds and Sensitives" on "Callus Road," in the novel's sixth chapter, is the site of a protected counterculture of "survivors," female victims of unspecified violences who, within the protecting walls of the scapehouse, set out to reconstitute, through poetry, the world around them. But the suggestion of the chapter is that this poetic project cannot recover and reconstitute "enjoyment" itself until the violent traumas survived are themselves revisited. Sister Willabelle considers the scapehouse a place of "survivors protecting ourselves from our fears and past memories." But her own ordeal in the chapter makes clear that precisely this symbolically "protective" dimension of scapehouse culture must be surrendered. Willabelle is the sole survivor of a commercial jetliner crash, witnessing the death of her mother amid the general carnage. Willabelle's own body is now a flesh made entirely of scars, "the skin so tight in places that it turned white when she moved her arms and neck." She invites Rosina Cedarfair to test her "instincts for survival" by joining Willabelle in a storytelling return to the horrors of the crash. They are sharing a bath, Rosina caressing the scarsurfaces of Willabelle's body. "Instincts for survival" are at stake here because the self-protective anxieties they induce mitigate against psychic encounters with traumatic memory. Rosina's characteristic emotional courage is, however, equal to the moment, and she accompanies Willabelle in her terrible descent into memories of death and loss, a descent that ends in a tremulous resurgence of affect and desire. Willabelle's storytelling approach, and surrender, to trauma ends with the two women sinking, in sensuous embraces, beneath the waters of the bath.

The adventure of Benito Saint Plumero, in the same chapter, is analogous. This little-man clown and trickster, whose oversized penis the sisters call his "superlative president jackson," is also a character broken by his past—the loss of the bronze statue/woman of his dreams. This "lifeless" other in whom his desire seemed to find its safety, was taken from him, "drowned" in a river by people who think he's crazy. He seems to the sisters, on his arrival, a clown "put together from broken clowns." His recovery is a tale of accession to a desire that does not give way through fears of loss, death, otherness and change. That is, in Lacanian terms, the point of Saint Plumero's recovery is "not to cede his desire": to recover desire in its most radical dimension, as a "being toward death." Saint Plumero, beating the ground in his grief, recovers this desire the moment he passes through mourning to discover a new materialization of desire in Pure Gumption—the dog who, in a kind of pure and comic accident, occupies the space within which Saint Plumero's desire reawakens; the space where he literally "look[s] up" from his mourning. In the next paragraph, we find Saint Plumero responding to the multiplying erotic demands of the scapehouse sisters. In this new fluency of a desire that had been baffled by the losses of the past, Saint Plumero is

so overwhelmed with love and pleasure … that during the first weeks there he could for the first time in his life accept death. Because of his intense survival instincts he responded with selfish panic whenever he faced thoughts of death, but in the orgiastic arms and legs of the weirds and sensitives he sighed that death, waiting in the space between lips and legs, could take him whenever she found him a place to ride high.

As in the story of Willabelle, "survival" is accomplished through the repression of trauma; contemporary transformation, however—what Vizenor calls "survivance"—is accomplished only through the repressed's traumatic return. The contemporary repetition of trauma recovers a desire that does not fear death, which reckons itself as "death drive" even in the space "between lips and legs."

These examples involve a crucial dimension of what Lacan called "symbolic suicide": a surrender of formerly stable articulations of identity and history that is simultaneously a surrender to the real of traumatic enjoyment. These examples also render the explosive affect attending such surrender. What Bearheart's passages of violence might be said most persistently to gamble for, against a particular range ofideological odds in the U.S. today, is an intensity of affect in the reader—of fear, grief, rage over these unspeakable losses—an intensity that keeps obliterating the simple progress of the sentences themselves, schooling the reader in precisely the unnarratability of what nonetheless will here be narrated. While the sentences persist unbroken, they invoke a repeated caesura of affect. In this sense, it is a novel which keeps obliterating its own narrative progress—a novel that repeatedly demands to be removed from sight: set down, closed, taken up again only after traumatic interruption; but one which at the same time insists on its own continuation, right through the "ending" that is not an ending but an opening to imaginative and interpretive extensions.

Which is to say that the novel's concerns do not end with memory's disruption of reigning texts of the past. The other crucial dimension of memory in Bearheart is its recovery of cultural "holotropes" to be re-imagined, reconfigured, within the particular chance games of the contemporary world. It goes without saying that such reconstitution of contemporary intersubjective orders retroactively rewrites history, and that, in its most fundamental dimension, such cultural rewriting means a reconfiguration of the contemporary orders of enjoyment. Here, Bearheart may be seen as elaborating Benjamin's suggestion that the memory flashing up at a "moment of danger" is not only traumatic, but also potentially reconstitutive. Bearheart suggests, on the one hand, that the memory of violence, as a memory of a former order of enjoyment outraged, makes available to consciousness, in its emergence, the abandoned holotrope of that order itself. On the other, it suggests that the associative chains of discourse attendant upon encounters with trauma can "chance" upon holotropic exigencies.

The story of Lilith Mae, in the chapter "Abita Animosh," may be said to exhibit both these aspects of holotropic recovery. At the end of the story she tells Inawa Biwide—the story of forced sex with her stepfather in childhood—she both recovers the curious, trustful, tentatively exploratory sensuality of childhood, and is guided in this recovery by Inawa Biwide's responsive tale of sacred dogs-become-dream-lovers. Like Benito Saint Plumero and Sister Willabelle, Lilith Mae's desire has been broken by her past. But she is a much purer instance of the re-channelling of enjoyment from play into a routinized superego severity: in her case, a "terminal creed" that locates "evil" in men, penises, and sexuality. The chief symptom is her relationship to her two boxers: attentive, slobbering, sexually frisky males she at one moment distractedly fondles, at the next, rejects with furious contempt. Sexuality, traumatized for Lilith Mae by her stepfather's violence, is cathected now entirely to the controllable relationship with the boxers: "I hate you father fuckers, how I hate you and love you at the same time."

Through storytelling, Lilith Mae returns to the violence of the past:

When I was eight years old, [my stepfather] took me on a camping trip and told me that all fathers and daughters share a secret and then made me suck the head of his fat purple penis until it spit all over me.

Again the crucial memory is one of a destructive phallic prerogative. Lilith Mae's narration of the event is at first rigidly guarded against the traumatic force of memory. Explosive affects of resistance and outraged desire are held at bay by a distancing shame in which the original event has schooled her: "all fathers and daughters share secrets," secrets surrounding which the father soon enacts a ferocious disavowal. The shame internalized in response to her stepfather's abuse locks the adult Lilith in a rigid, humorless relation to sexual enjoyment. The real conflict of this chapter is thus not only between free explorations of desire and their violent foreclosure by others with a monopoly of force, but also between a liberating humor and the shame-binds of a rigidly moralistic culture: shame with its ritual cycles of secret pleasure and disavowal; humor with its releases, transgressions, and pleasures in the unexpected. It is Lilith Mae's "smile" that signals her symbolic transformation, her passage through traumatic memory into a radical reconstitution of her life-history. Accepting the holotropic terms offered by Inawa Biwide's traditional story of human-animal erotic combinations, Lilith, at the chapter's close, surrenders without shame to sexual explorations and strivings with her boxers: a rediscovery of enjoyment that is one of the novel's great little redemptions.

The plot structure of Bearheart underscores the need to recover traditional, visionary materials for contemporary change. The "cedarnation" carries with it everywhere, in its very name, its past: its point of embarcation, both geographic and cultural. Throughout the nation's travels, Fourth Proude Cedarfair returns in visions to the old cedar grove itself, visiting there the bones and still-hovering spirits of his ancestors. In an act of imaginative exploration akin to the novel's own reconstitution of a widening range of past and present experiences, Proude "enters into [his ancestors'] frames of time and place." He returns from these journeys back reinvigorated for the journey forward. Rosina Cedarfair says of their pilgrimage, "We are seeking nothing more than a place to dream again." Any future places must be places still dreaming the past. But of course, every place along the way is a place in which to dream too. The microsociety of pilgrims manifests this insistence on sustaining traditional-tribal "balancing" relations among themselves, between themselves and the animals that travel with them, and between all of these and the natural environments they pass through. A larger American social world of balance is made imaginable through this microsociety's example, and the vision which makes this possible is one actively sustained by the cedarnation from its cedar-grove past.

It should be more than clear, then, that no escapism or defeatism informs this insistence on re-visioning the past. These are visions called up within a consciousness of the contingencies and limitations of contemporary history. The point is not to return to the past in order to remain there, but to return for the symbolic tools with which to reconfigure present and future. Under interrogation at the federal "Word Wards," the pilgrims say, "we are … working out the models and paradigms and experiments on our language to learn where we are and where we will be." The "models and paradigms" that the pilgrims recover from past generations are less structured traditions than traditions of structural upheaval and rebalancing. This is clear in the gambling scene at the narrative center of Bearheart: It is a scene of trickster against gambler with a long traditional background in Chippewa culture. Fourth Proude undertakes the gamble with Sir Cecil Staples, the "tycoon of gasoline," who after years of human and natural depredation in the accumulation of his fortune, hoards the last of the commodity and gambles with those who need it. When the gambler remarks, during play, on the abstract equivalence between himself and his final opponent, Fourth Proude, both gamblers after all in dangerous games of chance where the stakes are, in part, a shared social future, Proude responds:

But we are not equals … we do not share a common vision. Your values and language come from evil. Your power is adverse to living. Your culture is death.

Proude's emphasis on a fundamental difference of "vision" between himself and Staples should not be understood in terms of a simple opposition of "world-views"—of two equally stable and articulated symbolic structures. Staples's "culture" is certainly stable; indeed, it is monotonously repetitive, risking few departures from the familiar routine. Just as Staples risks little materially in the games, offering a few gallons of gasoline to would-be winners, so he risks little symbolically, merely reconfirming his "tycoon"-status with each repetition of play. His opponents, on the other hand, must stake their own lives—the consequent fear paralyzing their play and producing repeated losses. Fourth Proude, however, is ready to risk all—both actual and "symbolic death"—and it is here that the crucial difference of "culture" between Proude and Staples must be located. What Proude sustains in play is not stable cultural gridwork but an openness to radical cultural transformation: his "vision" is a commitment to revision at every eruption of the real. This is why the gambling scene's emphasis must finally fall on Proude's attunement to disruptive powers beyond the comprehension of his adversary, and on his readiness to pass through the abyss of symbolic collapse to new spaces of symbolic configuration. Proude's "low whistle," at the game's crisis, invokes imperceptible winds of chance, in whose path his playing-pieces first catastrophically collapse, before rising to new balance on the gameboard.

Though the evil gambler loses to Fourth Proude—is in fact killed by the pilgrims, in an extended and torturing act of counterviolence—the game is not, nor is it ever over. As the evil gambler himself says to Proude in the course of their game:

… at the end, the end of all games, when we both have the power to balance the world …, we will find a new game, because we are after all bound to chance.

The larger context within which such games are played are, of course, particular contemporary moments of balance or imbalance between "the forces of life and death." In this case, imbalance has been created by precisely the graphic brutalities of a dominant Euroamerican culture intent on seizing, controlling, or destroying anything—sex, nurturance, amusement, mythic identities—desired by those with a monopoly of force from those unwilling or unequipped to resist.

For Vizenor, visions of revision must be redeployed within every "new game." The novel insists on the "necessity of existential engagement," as against all forms of disengaged aestheticism, all "terminal creeds" that let the living die, or indeed actively destroy them, in fetishistic devotion to fantasy-visions of wholeness. This is perhaps the chief reason why the narrative of Bearheart itself always turns over again and faces the future, even amid all this work it must do with the past. It is why, as in the novel's powerful close on the threshold of a renewable social world, Vizenor's text always demands that we imagine a future with the aid of reconfigured visions of balance out of a sustained American Indian past. It is a past virtually, but never entirely, obliterated, in part exactly because of storytelling's ability to recover and reconfigure its urgent cultural visions in the present.

It seems to me possible to talk about a particular range of novels being written in the U.S. today which share the commitment to negotiate the historical traumas of both past and present in contemporary reconstitutions of enjoyment. A brief list of these novels would include Morrison's Beloved, Silko's Almanac of the Dead, Kathy Acker's Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, Kingston's China Men, Paul Auster's Music of Chance, and Julia Alvarez's In the Time of the Butterflies. Working in the tradition of the novel overhastily dismissed by Benjamin, these writers might be seen as now producing, in a kind of loose, sometimes unconscious, alliance, a multiplied series of subcultural narratives that counter, from their varying positions within the race, class and sex hierarchies of our nation, those still dominant narratives of a triumphally democratic "American History." These novels offer a privileged site within which to study both the partially failed interpellations of a strategically shifting dominant American culture, and the elaboration of a whole series of counterhegemonic cultures which begin imaginatively to limn—to "blueprint with words" as Vizenor says—a radically democratic connective culture: one which refuses to simplify or reduce the specific and real experiences of loss and violent repression out of which different contemporary lives emerge.

There is, I think, a specific quality in these narratives which results in precisely the possibility of this nondominative, connective, and democratic imagination: the sense of a traumatic core of human experience which radically refuses symbolization. Contemporary theorists of "radical democracy," Chantal Mouffe, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek among others, discuss the unwriteable "traumatic core" around which every social and symbolic order is structured, and across which most dominating cultural visions project fantasies of social wholeness and completion, denying the inescapability of trauma, desire, and change in the subjects of history. There is an honoring of the unwriteable in both this theoretical work and the contemporaneous novels I've alluded to—a deeply felt awareness of the ultimate unwriteability of all our subjectivities and histories. From this perspective, only racial and sexual essentialisms take the road of confidently and conclusively writing such lives; only a "terminal" historicism claims to have located and catalogued the enormous losses produced in U.S. history, to have "put them to rest," in the dominant-cultural sense of a "past" now "behind us."

But while the traumatic kernel of every history is thus ultimately unsymbolizable for these writers, it is also inescapable: like the Lacanian "real," it "always returns to the same place." For Vizenor, the eruptive return of memories excised from dominant accounts not only disruptively announces the reality of social antagonism, it also opens the spaces for genuine socio-symbolic reconstitutions—what Benjamin calls the "redemption" of outraged desire. Memories of violence—unintegrated within, but repeatedly triggered by, contemporary orders of discourse—summon up in their advent a baffled but resurgent real of desire, with all the intense affect of its bafflement. In such moments, the subject experiences what Lacan called "a parenthesis of time"—Benjamin's "time of the now"—a return of the subject to that moment of possibility in which, this time, violent suppression may be outwitted if not overtly defied. Such resistance involves ultimately nothing less than the radical reconstitution of intersubjective orders of enjoyment, a refusal of desire's foreclosure in rigidly demarcated regions of the social network.