SOURCE: "'Ecstatic Strategies': Gerald Vizenor's Trickster Narratives," in Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel, University of Oklahoma Press, 1992, pp. 225-54.

[In the following essay, Owens considers the role of the trickster in Vizenor's work.]

Born in 1934, Gerald Vizenor has devoted an incredibly prolific career to exploring the place and meaning of the mixedblood in modern America. With more than twenty-five books and scores of essays, poems, and stories published, in addition to a movie (Harold of Orange, 1983), Vizenor is one of the most productive as well as one of the most radically imaginative of contemporary American writers. At the heart of Vizenor's fiction lies a fascination with what it means to be of mixed Indian and European heritage in the contemporary world—in Vizenor's terminology, a "crossblood." And out of this fascination arises the central and unifying figure in Vizenor's art: the trickster. In Vizenor's work the mixedblood and the trickster become metaphors that seek to balance contradictions and shatter static certainties. The mixedblood, that tortured Ishmael of the majority of novels by both Indian and non-Indian authors, becomes in Vizenor's fiction not a pained victim but a "holotropic" and celebrated shape shifter, an incarnation of trickster who mediates between worlds. In Vizenor's fictional world—a coherent and fully realized topography as complete as Faulkner's South or Garcia Marquez's Macondo—the tortured and torturing mixedblood represented so unforgettably in Mark Twain's "Injun Joe" and Faulkner's "Chief Doom" simply refuses to perish in the dark cave of the American psyche but instead soars to freedom in avian dreams and acrobatic outrage.

Harsh laughter is the matrix out of which Vizenor's fiction arises, the kind of laughter Mikhail Bakhtin finds at the roots of the modern novel. "As a distanced image a subject cannot be comical," Bakhtin writes; "to be made comical, it must be brought close." And he continues:

Everything that makes us laugh is close at hand, all comical creativity works in a zone of maximal proximity. Laughter has the remarkable power of making an object come up close, of drawing it into a zone of crude contact where one can finger it familiarly on all sides, turn it upside down, inside out, peer at it from above and below, break open its external shell, look into its center, doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine it freely and experiment with it. Laughter demolishes fear and piety before an object, before a world, making of it an object of familiar contact and thus clearing the ground for an absolutely free investigation of it.

In Bakhtin's words—a remarkably accurate description of a raven examining and dissecting an object of interest—we find a precise definition of the humor and method of the Native American trickster, he/she who brings the world close and directs this "comical operation of dismemberment," laying bare the hypocrisies, false fears and pieties, and clearing the ground "for an absolutely free investigation" of worldy fact. This is the trickster Vizenor has taken to heart and to the heart of his fiction. Bakhtin's explanation of the effects of these parodic forms in ancient art applies equally well to Vizenor: "These parodic-travestying forms … liberated the object from the power of language in which it had become entangled as if in a net; they destroyed the homogenizing power of myth over language; they freed consciousness from the power of the direct word, destroyed the thick walls that had imprisoned consciousness with in its own discourse, within its own language." The liberation of language and consciousness is Vizenor/trickster's aim, particularly the liberation of the signifier "Indian" from the entropic myth surrounding it.

The trickster discourse of Vizenor's fiction resembles Bakhtin's definition of Minippean satire:

The familiarizing role of laughter is here considerably more powerful, sharper and coarser. The liberty to crudely degrade, to turn inside out the lofty aspects of the world and world views, might sometimes seem shocking. But to this exclusive and comic familiarity must be added an intense spirit of inquiry and utopian fantasy. In Minippean satire the unfettered and fantastic plots and situations all serve one goal—to put to the test and to expose ideas and idealogues…. Minippean satire is dialogic, full of parodies and travesties, multi-styled, and does not fear elements of bilingualism.

Vizenor's "parodia sacra" is often shocking, his plots "unfettered and fantastic," "full of parodies and travesties," and designed to serve the one goal Bakhtin defines: to test and expose ideas and idealogues. The result is never nihilistic, a point Elaine Jahner has made well: "Vizenor's consistent contribution has been the way he shows us a way to avoid cynicism; and while he indulges extravagantly in irony, he does so in a manner that finally returns ideals to a purity that leaves no further need for irony." It is the utopian impulse that guides Vizenor's mythic parodies, a quest for liberation from the entropic forces that attempt to deny full realization of human possibilities. Vizenor discovers such utopian potential in American Indian mythologies; and in trickster—who overturns all laws, governments, social conventions—Vizenor finds his imaginative weapon. Simultaneously, his profound identification with the mythic trickster enables Vizenor—who writes even autobiography in the third person—to repudiate that "privileged moment of individualization" Foucault identifies with the "coming into being of the notion of 'author,'" and to write multivocal narratives that deconstruct the egocentric authorial presence conventional in the genre of the novel in favor of an ecocentric voice that springs from liminal thresholds.

Vizenor was born in Minneapolis, the son of a half-Ojibwe father (or Chippewa or, as the tribal people call themselves, anishinaabeg). Vizenor's grandmother, Alice Mary Beaulieu, was born into the crane totem on the White Earth Reservation, a totemic identification that manifests itself throughout Vizenor's work in avian visions and trickster flights. Vizenor has written, "My tribal grandmother and my father were related to the leaders of the crane; that succession, over a wild background of cedar and concrete, shamans and colonial assassins, is celebrated here in the autobiographical myths and metaphors of my imagination; my crossblood remembrance. We are cranes on the rise in new tribal narratives." Moved from the White Earth Reservation to the city as a result of the federal government's ill-conceived Relocation Program, Vizenor's twenty-six-year-old-father, Clement Vizenor, was found with his throat cut, the victim of a still unsolved murder. (Years later while a professional journalist, Vizenor attempted to investigate his father's murder but was told by a police official that nothing was known because no one paid much attention to the murder of an Indian in those days.) Not quite two years old at the time of his father's death, Gerald Vizenor grew up in a series of foster homes in the Minneapolis area close to the White Earth Reservation where his father's anishinaabe relatives lived. It was a peripatetic childhood that would echo the beginning of almost all trickster narratives in Native American tradition: "Trickster was going along." And as he was going along, Vizenor served in the U.S. Navy in Japan, where he became interested in both drama and haiku, studied at New York University, received a degree from the University of Minnesota, did graduate work briefly at Harvard, and carved out a successful career as a journalist and mixedblood provocateur with the Minneapolis Tribune. Always active in Native American concerns, Vizenor headed the American Indian Employment and Guidance Center in Minneapolis, organized protests, and wrote troubling articles and essays about injustices directed at Native Americans. All of this before he began his career as an academic culminating in his acceptance of an endowed chair at the University of Oklahoma.

Mixedbloods, Vizenor has written, "loosen the seams in the shrouds of identities." The mixedblood, he adds, "is a new metaphor … a transitive contradancer between communal tribal cultures and those material and urban pretensions that counter conservative traditions. The mixedblood wavers in autobiographies; he moves between mythic reservations where tricksters roamed and the cities where his father was murdered." Vizenor's poetry, fiction, and essays, and his novels in particular, are surely the products of such a coming of age, the creations of a "transitive contradancer" defining the places of the mixedblood in the modern world. The vision and voice are those of the trickster; the terrain begins with a baronage on the White Earth Reservation and a dynasty of mixedblood tricksters and expands around the globe. In the process, Vizenor shifts American Indian fiction into urban cities as well as reservation woodlands, invading the privileged metropolitan center with mixedblood clowns, detectives, and "landfill reservations" that constitute a kind of Indian reinhabitation of stolen America.

Vizenor's first novel, Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart, is a tale of agonistic celebration that charts a new course for American Indian fiction and American literature. Alan Velie was the first critic to recognize Vizenor's post-structuralist methodology and to point out the central thread in Vizenor's writing: "In this work, Vizenor … tries to celebrate the unique status of the mixed-bloods—to reverse the prejudice that has plagued them, to make a hero of the half-breed." Bearheart is a postapocalyptic allegory of mixedblood pilgrim clowns afoot in a world gone predictably mad. This post-modern pilgrimage begins when Proude Cedarfair—mixedblood anishinaabe shaman and the fourth in a line of Proude Cedarfairs—and his wife Rosina flee their Cedar Circus reservation accompanied by seven clown crows as the reservation is about to be ravaged for its timber by corrupt tribal officials. The nation's economy has collapsed because of the depletion of fossil fuels, and the government and tribal "bigbellies" lust after the Circus cedar.

As the pilgrims move westward toward the vision window at Pueblo Bonito, place of passage into the fourth world, their journey takes on ironic overtones in a parody not merely of the familiar allegorical pilgrimage à la Canterbury Tales but also more pointedly of the westering pattern of American "discovery" and settlement. Very early in their journey, Proude and Rosina are joined by an intense collection of misfits, both mixedblood and white. Benito Saint Plumero, or Bigfoot, is a mixedblood clown and "new contrarion," a "phallophor" descended from "the hotheaded political exile and bigfooted explorer, Giacomo Constantino Beltrami." Like James Welch in Fools Crow, Vizenor's fictional names often echo history and mythology, both Indian and non-Indian. Bigfoot, for example, is the translated name of the celebrated Ojibwa war chief, Ma-mong-e-se-da. This fictional Bigfoot's pride, in addition to his huge feet, is an enormous and exuberantly active penis, named President Jackson by the appreciative sisters in the "scapehouse of weirds and sensitives," a retreat founded with federal funds by thirteen women poets from the cities. Another pilgrim, Pio Wissakodewinini, "the parawoman mixedblood mammoth clown," has been falsely charged with rape and sentenced to a not-quite-successful sex change. Inawa Biwide, "the one who resembles a stranger," is sixteen, "an orphan rescued by the church from the state and the spiritless depths of a federal reservation housing commune." Inawa Biwide will quickly become the novel's apprentice shaman, eventually following Proude Cedarfair into the fourth world. Rescuer of Inawa Biwide from the state is Bishop Omax Parasimo, wearer of metamasks which allow him to pass from Bishop to Sister Eternal Flame and other transsexual metamorphoses. Justice Pardone Cozener, a minor figure in this oddly Chaucerian pilgrimage of the outraged and outrageous, is an "illiterate law school graduate and tribal justice … one of the new tribal bigbellies … who fattened themselves over eating on expense accounts from conference to conference." Justice Pardone is in love with Doctor Wilde Coxwaine, the bisexual tribal historian also along on this journey westward.

One of four consistently female characters journeying with Proude is Belladonna Darwin-Winter Catcher, the daughter of Old John Winter Catcher, Lakota shaman, and Charlotte Darwin, a white anthropologist. Conceived and born at Wounded Knee, Belladonna is a victim of rigid world views. Other female pilgrims include Little Big Mouse, "a small white woman with fresh water blue eyes" who rides in foot holsters at the waist of the giant Sun Bear Sun, "the three hundred pound seven foot son of the utopian tribal organizer Sun Bear," and Lillith Mae Farrier, the white woman who began her sexual menage with two canines while teaching on an Indian reservation.

Unarguably the most radical and startling of American Indian novels, Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart is paradoxically also among the most traditional of novels by Indian authors, a narrative deeply in the trickster tradition, insisting upon values of community versus individuality, upon syncretic and dynamic values versus the cultural suicide inherent in stasis, upon the most delicate of harmonies between humanity and the world we inhabit, and upon our ultimate responsibility for that world. At the same time, through the eclectic lenses of his caricatured pilgrims, Vizenor demonstrates repeatedly the truth of Paul Watzlawick's declaration that the real world "is an invention whose inventor is unaware of his act of invention … the invention then becomes the basis of his world views and actions.

The fictional author of this novel-within-a-novel is old Bearheart, the mixedblood shaman ensconced in the BIA offices being ransacked by American Indian Movement radicals as the book begins. Bearheart, who as a child achieved his vision of the bear while imprisoned in a BIA school closet, has written the book we will read. According to William Warren, writing in 1885, "The No-ka or Bear family are more numerous than any of the other clans of the Ojibways, forming fully one-sixth of the entire tribe…. It is a general saying, and an observable fact, amongst their fellows, that the Bear clan resemble the animal that forms their Totem in disposition. They are ill-tempered and fond of fighting, and consequently they are noted as ever having kept the tribe in difficulty and war with other tribes…." Bearheart, whose totem is the bear, is somewhat ill-tempered in his response to the AIM radicals and, through his novel, to American culture, but, like Proude, he assumes the role of trickster and uses laughter as his weapon in his war against hypocrisy and "terminal creeds." "When we are not victims to the white man then we become victims to ourselves," Bearheart tells a female AIM radical with her chicken feathers and plastic beads, underscoring Indians' inclination to embrace their own invention from "traditional static standards" as "artifacts." He directs her to the novel locked in a file cabinet, the "book about tribal futures, futures without oil and governments to blame for personal failures." To her question, "What is the book about?" Bearheart answers first, "Sex and violence," before adding, "Travels through terminal creeds and social deeds escaping from evil into the fourth world where bears speak the secret languages of saints."

"Terminal creeds" in Bearheart are beliefs which seek to fix, to impose static definitions upon the world. Whether those static definitions arise out of supposedly "traditional" Indian beliefs or out of the language of privileged Euramerica, they represent what Bakhtin terms "authoritative discourse," language "indissolubly fused with its authority—with political power" as a prior utterance. Such attempts to fix meaning according to what Vizenor terms "static standards" are destructive, suicidal, even when the definitions appear to arise out of revered tradition. Third Proude Cedarfair expresses Vizenor's message when he says very early in the novel, "Beliefs and traditions are not greater than the love of living," a declaration repeated near the end of the novel in Fourth Proude's insistence that "the power of the human spirit is carried in the heart not in histories and materials."

Within the idea of trickster that has evolved through Native American oral literatures, Vizenor finds an approach to both the phenomenal and noumenal that is distinctly "Indian." "In trickster narratives," Vizenor has written, "the listeners and readers imagine their liberation; the trickster is a sign, and the world is 'deconstructed' in a discourse." Bearheart is such a liberation, an attempt to free us from romantic entrapments, to liberate the imagination. The principal target of this fiction is precisely the sign "Indian," with its predetermined and well-worn path between signifier and signified. Vizenor's aim is to free the play between these two elements, to liberate "Indianness," and in so doing to free Indian identity from the epic, absolute past that insists upon stasis and tragedy for Native Americans.

While the authorial voice explains that Rosina "did not see herself in the abstract as a series of changing ideologies," most of the pilgrims in this narrative, to varying degrees, do indeed suffer from the illness of terminal creeds. Bishop Omax Parasimo is "obsessed with the romantic and spiritual power of tribal people," a believer in the Hollywood version of Indianness. Matchi Makwa, another pilgrim, chants a lament of lost racial purity, "Our women were poisoned part white," leading Fourth Proude to explain, "Matchi Makwa was taken with evil word sorcerers."

Belladonna Darwin-Winter Catcher, the most obvious victim of terminal creeds, attempts to define herself as "Indian" to the exclusion of her mixedblood ancestry and, more fatally, to the exclusion of change. "Three whitemen raped me," she tells Proude, "three evil whitesavages." Upon learning she is pregnant, Proude replies, "Evil does not give life." Belladonna does not heed the warning Proude offers when he underscores the power of language to determine reality, saying, "We become the terminal creeds we speak."

When the pilgrims come to Orion, a walled town inhabited by the descendants of famous hunters and western bucking horse breeders, Belladonna is asked to define "tribal values." Belladonna replies with a string of clichés out of the "Hiawatha" vein of romantic literature, stating, "We are tribal and that means that we are children of dreams and visions…. Our bodies are connected to mother earth and our minds are part of the clouds…. Our voices are the living breath of the wilderness…." A hunter replies, "My father and grandfathers three generations back were hunters…. They said the same things about the hunt that you said is tribal…. Are you telling me that what you are saying is exclusive to your mixedblood race?" Belladonna snaps, "Yes!" adding "I am different than a whiteman because of my values and my blood is different … I would not be white." She blithers on, contradicting much of what we have witnessed thus far in the novel: "Tribal people seldom touch each other…. We do not invade the personal bodies of others and we do not stare at people when we are talking…. Indians have more magic in their lives than whitepeople."

A hunter responds: "Tell me about this Indian word you use, tell me which Indians are you talking about, or are you talking for all Indians." Finally, after trapping Belladonna in a series of inconsistencies and logical culs-de-sac, he asks the question which cuts through the heart of the novel: "What does Indian mean?" When Belladonna replies with more clichéd phrases, the hunter says flatly, "Indians are an invention…. You tell me that the invention is different than the rest of the world when it was the rest of the world that invented the Indian…. Are you speaking as an invention?" Speaking as a romantic invention indeed, a reductionist definition of being that would deny possibilities of the life-giving change and adaptation at the center of traditional tribal identity, Belladonna is further caught up in contradictions and dead ends. The hunters and breeders applaud and then deconstruct the invention, giving the young mixedblood her "just desserts": a cookie sprinkled with a time-release alkaloid poison. They have recognized their guest's exploitation of language as "the medium through which a hierarchical structure of power is perpetuated," the only difference from the usual colonial impulse being that Belladonna inverts the hierarchy by placing the static "Indian" at the top. "Your mixedblood friend is a terminal believer and a victim of her own narcisism," a breeder says to the pilgrims.

Belladonna Darwin-Winter Catcher is a clear example of what Vizenor has described in an interview as the "invented Indian." In the interview, Vizenor confesses his satirical, didactic purpose:

I'm still educating an audience. For example, about Indian identity I have a revolutionary fervor. The hardest part of it is I believe we're all invented as Indians…. So what I'm pursuing now in much of my writing is the idea of the invented Indian. The inventions have become disguises. Much of the power we have is universal, generative in life itself and specific to our consciousness here. In my case there's even the balance of white and Indian, French and Indian, so the balance and contradiction is within me genetically…. There's another idea that I have worked into the stories, about terminal creeds. I worked that into the novel Bearheart. It occurs, obviously, in written literature and in totalitarian systems. It's a contradiction, again, to balance because it's out of balance if one is in the terminal condition. This occurs in invented Indians because we're invented and we're invented from traditional static standards and we are stuck in coins and words like artifacts. So we take up a belief and settle with it, stuck, static. Some upsetting is necessary.

Belladonna is obviously inventing herself from "traditional static standards." In its association with both beauty and deadly nightshade, Belladonna's very name hints at her narcissistic dead end. That the belladonna, or nightshade, plant is also associated historically with witchcraft implies the nature of evil witchery according to Native American traditions: the misuse of knowledge for the benefit of the individual alone rather than for the community as a whole. Her mixedblood surname, "Darwin," calls to mind also the scientist most responsible in the popular consciousness for the substitution of random event, or evolutionary chance, in place of a world of imagined structure and order. In the wake of Darwinian evolution, we were made capable of imagining ourselves as victims—pawns of chance—instead of creators of order from chaos in the tradition of storytellers. According to the Darwinian origin myth, as conveyed to the modern mind through the vehicle of naturalism, power less humanity inhabits a world antithetical to that evoked in the Native American origin myths in which men and women share responsibility for the creation and care of the world. In her attempt to define herself and all Indians according to predetermined, authority-laden values, Belladonna has forsaken such responsibility. She is a victim of her own words. As Proude explains, "We become our memories and what we believe…. We become the terminal creeds we speak."

Bearheart seems to embody dialectically opposed conceptions of chance, or random event. On one hand, a deconstruction of "terminal creeds," in trickster fashion, represents an insistence upon the infinite proliferation of possibility, including the polysemous text. This is the kind of celebration so common to postmodern literature and theory, an insistence that "coherent representation and action are either repressive or illusionary," and a reveling in what we might call chance. On the other hand, a mere capitulation to chance, or random event, would deny the emphasis upon our ultimate responsibility for ordering and sustaining the world we inhabit that is central to Native American ecosystemic cultures. For example, when Vizenor's pilgrims arrive at What Cheer, Iowa, to gamble for fuel with Sir Cecil Staples, the "monarch of unleaded gasoline," Proude declares flatly that "nothing is chance…. There is no chance in chance … Chances are terminal creeds." With chance, responsibility diminishes, a criticism the novel's author voices early in the novel:

Tribal religions were becoming more ritualistic but without visions. The crazed and alienated were desperate for terminal creeds to give their vacuous lives meaning. Hundreds of urban tribal people came to the cedar nation for spiritual guidance. They camped for a few days, lusted after their women in the cedar, and then, lacking inner discipline, dreams, and personal responsibilities, moved on to find new word wars and new ideas to fill their pantribal urban emptiness, (emphasis mine)

The key to reconciling, or at least containing, this apparent dialectic lies once again in Vizenor's trickster pose. Embodying contradictions, all possibilities, trickster ceaselessly dismantles those imaginative constructions that limit human possibility and freedom, allowing signifier and signified to participate in a process of "continually breaking apart and re-attaching in new combinations." In "Trickster Discourse" Vizenor quotes Jacques Lacan, who warns us not to "cling to the illusion that the signifier answers to the function of representing the signified, or better, that the signifier has to answer for its existence in the name of any signification whatever." At the same time, however, trickster shows by negative example the necessity for humanity to control and order our world. Within the straitjacket of a fixed, authoritative discourse the self is made lifeless, like Belladonna, by stasis; within the unordered infinitude of pure possibility, the self deconstructs schizophrenically, the way trickster's body is continually coming apart in the traditional stories. Through language, stories that assert orders rather than order upon the chaos of experience, a coherent, adaptive, and syncretic human identity is possible without the "terminal" state of stasis. Every such utterance then becomes not "the telling of a story" but "the story of a telling," with responsibility falling upon the teller.

At the What Cheer Trailer Ruins, the pilgrims encounter not only the chances of chance, but also additional victims of terminal creeds, the Evil Gambler's mixedblood horde: "The three mixedbloods, dressed in diverse combinations of tribal vestments and martial uniforms, bangles and ideological power patches and armbands…. Deep furrows of ignorance and intolerance stretched across their unwashed foreheads." In an experience common to Native Americans, the three killers feel themselves, with some accuracy, to be the victims of white America. Cree Casket, the "mixedblood tribal trained cabinet maker with the blue chicken feather vestments," tells the pilgrims, "I was trained in the government schools to be a cabinet maker, but all the cabinets were machine made so making little wooden caskets made more sense." Cree Casket, we discover, is also a necrophiliac, a literal lover of the dead past. Carmine Cutthroat, described by Justice Pardone as "the red remount … with the green and pink stained chicken feathers," cannot speak, the Papago and Mescalero mixedblood having had hot lead poured down his throat by "seven whitechiidren" while he slept. Willie Burke, the "Tliingit and Russian mixedblood" with a "compulsive need to kill plants and animals and trees," is rendered unconscious by Pio before he has a chance to tell his story of victimage. Doctor Wilde Coxwaine, examining the three mixedbloods, labels them "breathing plastic artifacts from reservation main street," declaring, "Here stand the classic hobbycraft mannikins dressed in throwaway pantribal vestments, promotional hierograms of cultural suicide."

Even the Evil Gambler himself is a victim of modern America, having been kidnapped from a shopping mall and raised in a bigrig trailer on the road, his upbringing a distillation of the peripatetic American experience. Being raised outside of any community, Sir Cecil has no tribal or communal identity; he exists only for himself, the destructive essence of evil witchery. From being doused repeatedly with pesticides, he has become pale and hairless, a malignant Moby-Dick of the heartland. He explains, "I learned about slow torture from the government and private business…. Thousands of people have died the slow death from disfiguring cancers because the government failed to protect the public." Sir Cecil, the Evil Gambler, is the product of a general failure of responsibility to the communal or tribal whole.

Among the trailer ruins, Lillith Mae Farrier is selected to gamble for fuel with Sir Cecil, the Evil Gambler reminiscent of the traditional Evil Gambler in American Indian mythologies. Because she "did not know the rituals of balance and power," because she has not been properly prepared according to tradition for her contest with the Evil Gambler, Lillith loses and destroys herself. Proude then tosses the four directions in competition with Sir Cecil and, because chance plays no part in Proude's vision, the Gambler loses and is condemned to death by Saint Plumero. Sir Cecil complains to Proude: "The pilgrims wanted gasoline which is part of the game, but you want to balance the world between good and evil…. Your game is not a simple game of death. You would change minds and histories and reverse the unusual control of evil power."

From the Trailer Ruins, the pilgrims, whose postal truck soon runs out of gas, travel westward on foot, encountering hordes of deformed stragglers on the broken highways. This host of cripples and monsters are, in the words of Doctor Wilde Coxwain, "Simple cases of poisoned genes," all ravaged by pesticides, poisoned rain, the horrors of the modern technological world. The authorial voice describes this national suicide: "First the fish died, the oceans turned sour, and then birds dropped in flight over cities, but it was not until thousands of children were born in the distorted shapes of evil animals that the government cautioned the chemical manufacturers. Millions of people had lost parts of their bodies to malignant neoplasms from cosmetics and chemical poisons in the air and food." Insisting blindly on identifying the cripples as romantic figures, Little Big Mouse is attacked and torn to pieces by a mob of technology's victims.

Following the canonization of Saint Plumero, a ceremony making Bigfoot a "double saint," the pilgrims arrive at Bioavaricious, Kansas and the Bioavaricious Regional Word Hospital, where terminal creeds—language whose meaning is fixed, language without creative play—are the goal of the hospital staff. In an attempt to rectify what is perceived as a national breakdown in language, the scientists at the word hospital are using a "dianoetic chromatic encoder" to "code and then reassemble the unit values of meaning in a spoken sentence." We are told that with "regenerated bioelectrical energies and electromagnetic fields, conversations were stimulated and modulated for predetermined values. Certain words and ideas were valued and reinforced with bioelectric stimulation." The endeavor at the word hospital suggests what Foucault has labeled an intention "to programme … to impose on people a framework in which to interpret the present." The "Bioavaricious Word Hospital" seems suspiciously like a metaphor for the Euramerican colonial endeavor seen from the point of view of the American Indian. Certainly the entire westering impulse of American manifest destiny is indisputably bioavaricious, devouring the continent—and now the third world—as it attempts to re-form the world in its own image. Part of this avaricious attempt to subsume all of creation into its own destiny has involved—particularly from an Indian point of view—an assertion of the absolute privilege of English; "fused with authority" and monologically predetermined. In such a "hospital" the life of language is consumed and destroyed.

Such an endeavor stands in sharp contrast to the oral tradition defined in a description of life among Bearheart's displaced just a few pages earlier:

Oral traditions were honored. Families welcomed the good tellers of stories, the wandering historians of follies and tragedies. Readers and writers were seldom praised but the travelling raconteurs were one form of the new shamans on the interstates. Facts and the need for facts had died with newspapers and politics. Nonfacts were more believable. The listeners traveled with the tellers through the same frames of time and place. The telling was in the listening…. Myths became the center of meaning again.

In the oral tradition a people define themselves and their place within an imagined order, a definition necessarily dynamic and requiring constantly changing stories. The listeners are coparticipants in the "behavioral utterance" of the story; as Vizenor himself has written elsewhere, "Creation myths are not time bound, the creation takes place in the telling, in present-tense metaphors." Predetermined values represent stasis and cultural suicide. Roland Barthes says simply, "the meaning of a work (or of a text) cannot be created by the work alone."

Impressed by the word hospital, Justice Pardoner and Doctor Wilde Coxwaine remain at Bioavaricious while the remaining pilgrims journey onward toward New Mexico. As they move westward, the pilgrims and sacred clowns meet fewer deformed victims of cultural genocide until finally they encounter the modern pueblos of the Southwest and a people living as they have always lived. At the Jemez Pueblo, the Walatowa Pueblo of N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn, the pilgrims encounter two Pueblo clowns who outclown with their traditional wooden phalluses even Saint Plumero himself. The clowns direct Proude and the others toward Chaco Canyon and the vision window where, finally, Proude and Inawa Biwide soar into the fourth world as bears at the winter solstice.

A great deal is happening in Bearheart, but central to the entire thrust of the novel is the identification by the author's author, Vizenor, with trickster, the figure which mediates between oppositions, and in the words of Warwick Wadlington, "embodies two antithetical, nonrational experiences of man with the natural world, his society, and his own psyche." Citing Wadlington, Vizenor stresses the duality of trickster's role as on the one hand "a force of treacherous disorder that outrages and disrupts, and on the other hand, an unanticipated, usually unintentional benevolence in which trickery is at the expense of inimical forces and for the benefit of mankind."

In one of the epigraphs to Earthdivers, Vizenor quotes Vine Deloria, Jr.'s, declaration that life for an Indian in today's world "becomes a schizophrenic balancing act wherein one holds that the creation, migration, and ceremonial stories of the tribe are true and that the Western European view of the world is also true…. [T]he trick is somehow to relate what one feels to what one is taught to think." About this balancing act, Vizenor himself says in the preface to this same collection of trickster narratives:

The earthdivers in these twenty-one narratives are mixedbloods, or Métis, tribal tricksters and recast cultural heroes, the mournful and whimsical heirs and survivors from that premier union between the daughters of the woodland shamans and white fur traders. The Métis, or mixedblood, earthdivers in these stories dive into unknown urban places now, into the racial darkness in the cities, to create a new consciousness of coexistence.

For Vizsnor, trickster is wenebojo (or manibozho, nanibozhu, and so on), "the compassionate tribal trickster of the woodland anishinaabeg, the people named the Chippewa, Ojibway." This is not, according to Vizenor, the "trickster in the word constructions of Paul Radin, the one who 'possesses no values, moral or social … knows neither good nor evil yet is responsible for both,' but the imaginative trickster, the one who cares to balance the world between terminal creeds and humor with unusual manners and ecstatic strategies." Vizenor says in the same interview: "When I was seeking some meaning in literature for myself, some identity for myself as a writer, I found it easily in the mythic connections." Central to these mythic connections is trickster, the shapeshifter who mediates between humanity and nature, humanity and deity, who challenges us to reimagine who we are, who balances the world with laughter.

Near the end of Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart, Rosina and Sister Eternal Flame (Pio in the late bishop's metamask) encounter three tribal holy men "who had been singing in a ritual hogan. It was the last morning of a ceremonial chant to balance the world with humor and spiritual harmonies…. The men laughed and laughed knowing the power of their voices had restored good humor to the suffering tribes. Changing woman was coming over the desert with the sun." Changing Woman is perhaps the most revered of the Navajo Holy People, the mother of the Hero Twins and one of the creators of humankind. Marked by a somewhat fluid identity and eternal youth, she taught humanity the ceremonial ways to keep the natural forces of wind, lightning, storms, and animals in harmony—to balance the world.

Coming over the desert with the sun, from east to west, is Rosina herself, who, like Proude, has achieved mythic existence here near the end. "During the winter," we are told in the novel's final line, "the old men laughed and told stories about changing woman and vision bears." Translated through trickster's laughter into myth, Proude and Inawa Biwide and Rosina have a new existence within the ever-changing stories, the oral tradition. For all peoples, Vizenor argues, but for the mixedblood in particular, adaptation and new self-imaginings are synonymous with psychic survival. Those who would live as inventions, who, like Belladonna, would define themselves according to the predetermined values of the sign "Indian," are victims of their own terminal vision. Bearheart's mocking laughter is their warning.

If Bearheart takes an original path in the thickets of Native American fiction, eschewing the conventional agonies of the mixedblood trapped between cultures, Vizenor's next novel is more radical yet. In Griever: An American Monkey King in China (1987), Vizenor takes the trickster to Tianjin and forges a new fiction of nonmimetic monkeyshines that departs still further from the recognizable traditions of Native American literature while forging even deeper ties between the archetypal trickster figures that populate the literatures of divergent cultures.

In 1983 Vizenor and his wife, Laura Hall, traveled to China, where they served as exchange teachers at Tianjin University. In 1986, Griever, a product of that experience, won the 1986 Fiction Collective Award and was subsequently published in 1987 by Illinois State University and the Fiction Collective. In 1988 Griever won an American Book Award and was described by the New York Times as "experimental and … luminous." Somewhat paradoxically autobiographical while at the same time determinedly nonrepresentational, Griever draws upon Vizenor's experiences within the rigid structures of the Communist state, where, as in Bearheart, it seems that "some upsetting is necessary." To accomplish this upsetting and liberation, Vizenor creates a mixedblood Native American trickster-teacher, Griever de Hocus, from the White Earth Reservation. Merging through dreams with the classical trickster of China, the Monkey King, Griever reimagines the world, attacking the hypocrisies and empty dogma of his host country as well as the foibles of his fellow American exchange teachers and, in trickster tradition, all of humanity.

With Griever, Vizenor participates in reimagining spatial and temporal relations. If, as Foucault implies, the human body is ultimately the one irreducible element in the social scheme, and the body "exists in space and must either submit to authority … or carve out particular spaces of resistance and freedom—'heterotopias'—from an otherwise repressive world," in the figure of Griever de Hocus, an animated hybridization, Vizenor demonstrates the trickster's ability to transcend both spatial and temporal repressions. Soaring through dream-visions, Griever escapes temporal and spatial categories, destroys the "chronological net" and finds his "heterotopia"—or particular space of resistance and freedom—to be the world without map or chronology.

Whereas the allegory of Bearheart is often intentionally obscure, in Griever the author is careful to provide signposts to direct us in our reading of another difficult fiction. The first of these hints comes in the novel's epigraphs. The first epigraph quotes Octavio Paz's The Monkey Grammarian "Writing is a search for the meaning that writing itself violently expels. At the end of the search meaning evaporates and reveals to us a reality that literally is meaningless…. The word is a disincarnation of the world in search of its meaning; and an incarnation: a destruction of meaning, a return to body." And Vizenor follows with a second epigraph taken from James J. Y. Liu's Essentials of Chinese Literary Art: "Chinese drama is largely nonrepresentational or nonmimetic: its main purpose is expression of emotion and thought, rather than representation or imitation of life. In other words, it does not seek to create an illusion of reality, but rather seeks to express human experience in terms of imaginary characters and situations."

Together, these quotations should alert us to the way Griever must be approached: as nonrepresentational, nonmimetic. Despite the temptation to read the novel as a stylized rendering of the author's experience in China—that is, as an imitation of that autobiographical reality—Vizenor wants us to read his trickster's antics as we would approach the mythic: as expressions of "human experience in terms of imaginary characters and situations." Furthermore, the epigraphs serve as a warning to readers not to seek a "meaning" from this novel, the implication being that there are infinite and contradictory meanings coexisting and multiplying toward ultimate liberation in the polysemous text. Vizenor resists closure in his fiction with a determination resembling that of the Mind Monkey himself, of whom Vizenor writes, "He was driven to be immortal because nothing bored him more than the idea of an end; narrative conclusions were unnatural." Lest we be tricked into merely embracing the ephemerality and fragmentation of the text as its sole significance, however, we should bear in mind that it is precisely the resistance to structure, to "meaning" and closure, in the novel that conveys the sharpest political message: the fragmentation of the novel is meant to illuminate the necessity for resistance to the oppressive hegemony of the society depicted in the novel. Bakhtin has written, "A particular language in a novel is always a particular way of viewing the world, one that strives for social significance." In this novel, the language of the text itself asserts its privileged authority—its social significance—over the subjects of the text. In short, Griever is a very political work aimed like an explosive mine at the great walls of totalitarian China as well as the strictures/structures of modernist literature. And, as always, Vizenor finds the source of his explosive force in the "holotropic" trickster of Native American myth.

To further direct us in our fictional exploration, Vizenor—a kind of Indian guide in this textual wilderness—provides an epilogue that informs the reader that the author and his wife indeed served as exchange teachers in Tianjin and did in fact invade Maxim's de Beijing in the guise of interior reproduction inspectors. However, just in case this confession causes us to read Griever as a kind of confessional-qua-trickster novel, Vizenor adds a list of works "the author has considered in the imaginative conception of this novel," including especially The Journey to the West, translated by Anthony C. Yu, and Monkey, translated by Arthur Waley.

Both The Journey to the West and Monkey are translations of Wu Ch'êng-ên's epic story of Tripitaka's pilgrimage to India to bring the True Scriptures of Buddha back to China. Highly featured in the tales is Monkey, the immortal trickster of Chinese mythology who wars against stasis and rigid order on earth and in Heaven. Like his brethren the world over, Monkey is a creature of insatiable appetite and whim, an incorrigible shapeshifter for whom rules exist only as challenges. Powerful and wise enough to challenge the Jade Emperor himself, Monkey nonetheless finds himself repeatedly in trouble brought on by sheer impulse, so that he exclaims, "Bad! Bad! This escapade of mine is even more unfortunate than the last. If the Jade Emperor gets to hear of it, I am lost. Run! Run! Run!" Arthur Waley's description of Monkey might well serve as an introduction to all of Vizenor's fiction: "Monkey is unique in its combination of beauty with absurdity, of profundity with nonsense. Folk-lore, allegory, religion, history, anti-bureaucratic satire and pure poetry—such are the singularly diverse elements out of which the book is compounded." Like Vizenor's American Indian trickster, however, Monkey is at core a satirical litmus test for hypocrisy and false value.

Griever is dedicated "to Mixedbloods and Compassionate Tricksters," an announcement that underscores Vizenor's merging of the two figures that dominate his fiction. For Vizenor the mixing of bloods, cultures, and identities leads to liberation, a freeing of the individual from the masks of a fixed cultural identity. The mixedblood becomes the essential trickster, a transformationist between the icons of identity that limit the imagination. Neither "white" nor "Indian," neither Chinese nor English, the mixedblood is his/her own person, a "socioacupuncturist," to use Vizenor's term, a prick capable of puncturing facades and stereotypes, administering needles to free the flow of energy and balance the whole. Trickster/mixedblood is, therefore, the perfect adversary of a totalitarian state that finds its lifeblood in "terminal creeds."

Like other Native American authors, Vizenor divides his novel into four parts, a number especially powerful in Indian tradition. For Native Americans a four-part structure, paralleling the seasonal cycles, suggests completeness and wholeness as well as closure. Barre Toelken and Tacheeni Scott write that for a Navajo audience the sequence of four parts suggests "an automatic progression ending on something important at the fourth step." From a different perspective, David Harvey notes that "cyclical and repetitive motions … provide a sense of security in a world where the general thrust of progress appears to be ever onwards and upwards into the firmament of the unknown."

Vizenor frames his novel with letters from Griever de Hocus to China Browne, a child of Luster Browne's mixedblood dynasty. China has come to China "to interview a warrior clown about Griever de Hocus, the trickster teacher who liberated hundreds of chickens at a local street market and then vanished last summer on an ultralight airplane built by her brother." A fair-skinned mixedblood from the White Earth Reservation, like Vizenor himself, Griever is the son of a Gypsy who passed through the reservation with a caravan named "the Universal Hocus Crown" which sold "plastic icons with grievous expressions, miniature grails, veronicas, and a thin instruction book entitled, 'How To Be Sad And Downcast And Still Live In Better Health Than People Who Pretend To Be So Happy'." From his itinerant father Griever inherits his name and his practice of "Griever Meditation." From his mother he inherits his identity as a mixedblood Native American.

As a mixedblood trickster, Griever has never fit conveniently into any niche. His tribal grandmother at home on the reservation pretends that she cannot understand him: "His urban mixedblood tongue, she snorted when he graduated from college, 'wags like a mongrel, he's a wild outsider.' Even at home on the reservation he was a foreigner." "Griever has an unusual imaginative mind," a teacher writes of the child, "and he could change the world if he is not first taken to be a total fool." Still another teacher declares, "The cause of his behavior, without a doubt, is racial. Indians never had it easier than now, the evil fires of settlement are out, but this troubled mixedblood child is given to the racial confusion of two identities, neither of which can be secured in one culture. These disruptions of the soul … become manifest as character disorders. He is not aware of his whole race, not even his own name." Griever illustrates the radical dismemberment typical of both trickster and traditional satire. The teachers' words are a satirical echo of the standard lament for the poor mixedblood caught between cultures and identities. Ironically, this is in one form or another the lament of many Native American writers such as Mourning Dove, Mathews, McNickle, and even, to lesser degrees, Momaday, Silko, and Welch. In spite of the fact that Vizenor makes Griever, like Momaday's Abel and Benally, a victim of the federal government's misguided relocation policy, in satirizing the white teachers' words Vizenor once again makes it clear that he will have none of the sentimental posture that mourns the entrapment of the mixedblood.

An actor before the revolution, Wu Chou, whose name means "warrior clown," "is remembered for his performances as the Monkey King in the opera Havoc of Heaven. When he was too old to tumble as an acrobat, he studied the stories of tricksters and shamans in several countries around the world." At the time the novel takes place, Wu Chou is the "overseer of the electronic portal at the main entrance to Zhou Enlai University." The actor/trickster/scholar and keeper of the gateway to knowledge is the perfect character to recognize Griever's own acting out of the role of Monkey King.

"Griever was holosexual," the warrior clown tells China Browne, adding, "Griever was a mind monkey … a holosexual mind monkey." Griever carried a holster "To shoot clocks," Wu Chou explains, a holster containing "pictures from wild histories." When the warrior clown shows the scroll from the holster to China, the pictures she sees on the scroll illustrate the events of the novel we are about to read. Filling out Wu Chou's definition of the trickster teacher, the narrator of the novel explains: "Griever is a mixedblood tribal trickster, a close relative of the old mind monkeys; he holds cold reason on a lunge line while he imagines the world. With colored pens he thinks backward, stops time like a shaman, and reverses intersections, interior landscapes." Through stories, we escape from the tyranny of chronology, history: "The listeners traveled with the tellers through the same frames of time and place," Vizenor wrote of the oral tradition in Bearheart. "The telling was in the listening."

As Wu Chou reconstructs Griever for China Browne, Vizenor adds casually, "Two spiders waited near the narrow crack in the pane." Watching and waiting is the creative presence of Spider, from whom the stories are spun by which, like Momaday's man made of words and Silko's Ts'its'tsi'nako, we comprehend the world. With the incidental touch of Spider's presence, Vizenor underscores the mythic dimension and the underpinnings of the oral tradition.

In the opening letter to China, Griever declares that his fellow exchange teachers are "the decadent missionaries of this generation" and that postrevolutionary China is made up (like Belladonna's Indian identity) of "invented traditions, broken rituals." In Vizenor's fiction invented traditions are trickster's targets, and Griever assaults these inventions with the antic fury of the Monkey King disrupting Heaven. One of the trickster's first acts is to free chickens waiting for slaughter in the free market, a radical performance that the Chinese understand in the context of myth: "Chicken liberation, then, was better understood as a comic opera. The audience was drawn to the trickster and his imaginative acts, not the high cost of chicken breasts. Mind monkeys, from practiced stories, would have done no less than emancipate the birds in a free market. Those who liberate, in traditional stories, are the heroes of the culture." And as they watch Griever's liberation, the people "whispered about scenes in the other mind monkey stories." Implicit in this line is the fact that we are witnessing another in the tradition of mind monkey stories, that the novel we are reading has no more commitment to "realism" than do the traditional stories of mythic heroics.

Like the trickster of Native American stories, Griever is an imaginative shapeshifter and "holosexual." In his imagination, Griever invades the voluptuous Sugar Dee: "He became a woman there beneath her hair, and with thunder in her ears, she peeled the blossoms; she pulled her head down in the lambent heat, down on her breasts, dibbled and sheared her high nipples with the point of her tongue. She towed her flesh back from the cold and heard the cocks and animals on her breath." Becoming Sugar Dee, trickster engages in erotic union with him/herself, an act fully in the tradition of Native American tricksters. And from the moment of his chicken liberation early in the novel, Griever is accompanied by Matteo Ricci, a cock named for an Italian Jesuit missionary. Perched on Griever's shoulder throughout the novel, Matteo Ricci allows Vizenor to pun unceasingly upon the liberated cock that distresses everyone with its refusal to conform to codes. Adding a disturbing element of energy and uncertainty, Griever's outrageous cock—just like that of the trickster in traditional stories—causes every situation to be unstable, unpredictable, fertile with potential. In one scene a female teacher, Gingerie, "brushed her hair back and watched the trickster and his cock circle back to the guest house. She waited at the window and waved to him when he passed. Matteo Ricci spread his sickle feathers and shook his wattles." Hilariously, Gingerie and the trickster's cock appear to respond to one another in the author's word-play.

Surrounding Griever is a cast of nearly allegorical figures, whom the author terms "eight uncommon teachers from east to west":

Luther Holes, the valetudinarian and guest house sycophant; Hannah Dustan, the computer separatist; Carnegie Morgan, also known as Carnie, the tallest teacher with the widest mouth and a rich name; Gingerie Anderson-Peterson, place name consumer with a peculiar accent; Jack and Sugar Dee, the inseparable industrial management consultants; and Colin Marplot Gloome, the retired time and motion scholar.

Hannah Dustan, the "computer separatist," is a "hereditist" who "withstands miscegenation, and neither speaks nor listens to people that she determines are mixedbloods." Hannah explains that "when people can be recognized for what they are, then they do better in the world. Jews, like the Chinese and other races, achieve more and earn more in those countries where there is discrimination, but not mixedbloods because no one knows who they are. Mixedbloods are neither here nor there, not like real bloods." A true believer in terminal creeds, Hannah is not aware of Griever's own mixedblood and thus tolerates the trickster. Hannah's dreams are racially disturbed: "In the first she is haunted by dark children who claim she is their mother; in the second, columns of silent immigrants stand in public welfare lines around her house…. In both dreams the children and immigrants are mixedbloods, their hands soiled and covered with mold."

Like Hannah, Griever has a troubling dream, in the first part of which he hears slogans chanted by men and women who march in circles:

"Remember our national policies, our proud new policies," the voices intoned, "we strive to better our lives, death to cats and dogs, one child, death to criminals, one child, death to venereal diseases, one child, death to capitalist roaders, one child, death to spiritual pollution, one child, no spitting, one child, no ice cream with barbarians, one child, no sex on the road, one child, no bright colors, one child, no decadent music, one child, no telephone directories, one child, the east is red."

An unmistakable indictment, this aspect of Griever's dream underscores the terminal condition of the totalitarian mentality, the state that opposes creation with death. And immediately after this litany in the dream a mute child (one child) appears and follows the trickster through the streets like a shadow, the child's reflection rippling back at Griever from all surfaces. The trickster gives the mute child a pencil and the child draws pictures on the concrete: "First he outlined a prairie schooner pulled by a small horse, then a lake with an island and brick houses surrounded by several oversized swine. Near the screen door he made a man who wore a round mask with a wide evil smile. The man held bones in his hands." The child is surrounded by a pale blue light, and as the dream ends the light shoots from the mute child to the trickster and to the telephone, and Griever explains in his letter to China Browne, "When the light passed through me, I became the child, we became each other, and then we raised the receiver to our ear." A voice on the telephone then asks the awakened Griever if he is alone in his room, protesting that visitors are required to register before entering the guest house. When Griever describes the dream child to Egas Zhang, the corrupt director of the foreign affairs bureau at the university, Egas explains that the child is "Yaba Gezi, the mute pigeon…. Child from old stories, no one sees the mute, from stories before liberation." Later, Griever finds the child's drawings on the concrete balcony.

Ironically, of course, the old stories—like all traditional trickster tales—are stories of liberation, of imaginative freedom opposed by the new "liberation" of Egas Zhang's postrevolutionary China. And as the repeated reflection and mirroring of the child's face suggests, Yaba Gezi springs from within Griever, the child of imagination and creation silenced by the totalitarian state. The mute child's drawings depict key elements in the story we are about to read. The prairie schooner is the cart of the mixedblood, Kangmei, in which Griever will be smuggled to safety. It is also Kangmei who will soar to final freedom with Griever at the novel's end. The island drawn by Yaba Gezi will appear in the novel as Obo Island in the midst of Shuishang Water Park, "a tribal place where shamans gather and dream" and home to those who have escaped the terminal creeds of totalitarianism.

When Griever is welcomed to Obo Island, he discovers one of the inhabitants is the "mute pigeon," Yaba Gezi. In keeping with Native American cosmology, the dream world and the waking world once again are one, without boundaries. Dreams arise from the self defined in dreams. Also living on the island are Kangmei; Shitou, the "stone man"; Pigsie, who teaches his swine to play basketball; and Sandie, the government rat hunter. Both Sandie and Pigsie bear names drawn from the "comic opera" stories of the mind monkey. Sandie had studied at the University of California at Berkeley before falling afoul of the revolution and being demoted to rat hunter. Pigsie had gone to the United States to study the operation of ultralight airplanes and play basketball, but his lasciviousness had caused his downfall to swine herder. In the classic stories of the Monkey King, both Sandie and Pigsie are monsters fallen from grace and redeemed to accompany the monk, Tripitaka, on his journey to bring the holy scriptures to China. Sandie, like the rat hunter, is rather colorless and sincere in the mythic tale, while Pigsie, like his swineherding namesake, is beset by appetites and a fondness for buxom young women. Like Griever, the inhabitants of the island are too liberated to exist easily in a terminal state.

Kangmei is the daughter of Egas Zhang's wife and "Battle Wilson, Oklahoma-born Sinophile, poet, idealist, and petroleum engineer." Like Tripitaka in the Monkey King stories, Battle Wilson comes to China with sacred scriptures. Wilson, however, has stolen his scrolls from the British Museum to return them to their rightful home in China, and Battle Wilson's scrolls will, at the novel's end, turn out to contain not terminal truths but a recipe for blue chicken.

Griever de Hocus overturns the terminal creeds of his hosts, liberating not only chickens in the marketplace but also a caravan of condemned prisoners en route to execution. In a moment of surprisingly undisguised rhetoric for this trickster novel, Griever shouts at the convoy: "I would sooner be dead than submit to tyranny. A legal system that can try thirty people in half a day, and commit them all to their graves as a result of that trial, is a tryannical system."

With his face painted like that of the Monkey King in the comic opera, Griever identifies himself first as "White Earth Monkey King" and then successively as Wei Jingsheng and Fu Yuehua, both actual, historical political prisoners in China, before leaping aboard a truck and racing to freedom with three rapists, a heroin dealer, a murderer, a prostitute, a robber, and an art historian who "exported stolen cultural relics"—a crime familiar to American Indians. Though the prostitute turns out to be simply an organizer of a homework business for nannies, trickster's prisoners prove to be a sordid lot. Only the rapists make a serious attempt to escape, and they are shot by the pursuing soldiers. The others wait tamely to be recaptured. As is often the case with trickster, Griever's heroic gesture results in anticlimax.

When his affair with Hester Hua Dan results in pregnancy, Griever rejoices, giving the unborn child the name of Kuan Yin, the Efficacious Bodhisattva from the Monkey King stories. However, while Griever is delivering mooncakes to the mixedbiood Lindbergh Wang during the Marxmass Carnival, Hester drowns herself in the guest-house pond to escape the wrath of her father, Egas Zhang. A typical trickster, Griever in disguise has been fondling the breasts of Gingerie a few minutes earlier, but now he rages with loss and despair over the deaths of Hester and their unborn daughter. Finally he escapes from the terminal state in an ultralight airplane bound for Macao.

Just as the novel began with a letter to China Browne, it ends with a letter to China that concludes the book on a lyrical note of despondency surprising for a trickster narrative. "China opened in pale blue smoke on the night he arrived and closed now in dead water," the author writes. And Griever tells China: "The Marxmass Carnival was horrible this year, no more carnivals like that for me. No panic holes are deep enough to hold my rage over what happened that night." Redeeming the narrative from despair, however, are both Griever's final words, "This is a marvelous world of tricksters. Love, Griever de Lindbergh," and the fact that Griever and Kangmei soar in ultralight avian dreams toward ultimate liberation. That they have apparently never reached their proposed destination—Macao—underscores the story's refusal to end, Griever's resistance to narrative closure. Trickster is still "going along."

Griever is an intensely political text, both as an incomplete attempt to escape from the "readerly" novel and as a bitter indictment of the totalitarian state. Though he/she may assume the guise of hypocrisy and even repression in comic roles, as a trope, trickster abhors repression and hypocrisy and challenges us to reimagine the world and liberate ourselves in the process. In his epilogue, Vizenor notes that "President Li Xiannian was in the United States to sign an agreement with President Ronald Reagan that allows the People's Republic of China to buy American reactors and other nuclear technology 'designed for the peaceful use, and only the peaceful use of nuclear materials.'" These are the book's final words, another skirmish in what Gerald Vizenor has called the "wordwars." Given the contents of the novel they conclude, their irony is devastating. In this novel, American Indian fiction soars free of rural reservation America, past the privileged metropolitan center, to the other side of the earth.

Vizenor's third novel, The Trickster of Liberty (1988), might be considered a prequel to Bearheart and Griever. In this brief and highly episodic work, Vizenor takes his readers back to the origins of the Patronia Baronage on the White Earth Reservation and introduces Luster Browne and Novena Mae Ironmoccasin, the founders of a mixedbiood trickster dynasty that spawns Shadow Box Browne and his nine siblings. Shadow Box in turn marries Wink Martin and the two continue the trickster line with their own swarm of mixedbloods: China Browne, Tulip Browne, Tune Browne, Garlic Browne, Ginseng Browne, Eternal Flame Browne, Father Mother Browne, Mime Browne, and Slyboots Browne. Part of the extended family through marriage or adoption are Mouse Proof Martin and Griever de Hocus.

Vizenor opens The Trickster of Liberty with a prologue entitled "Tricksters and Transvaluation," in which mixedbiood trickster Sergeant Alex Hobraiser debates the nature of tricksters with cultural anthropologist Eastman Schicer while an implied author provides informative declarations and pertinent quotations from poststructuralists such as Barthes and Lacan as well as various authorities on Indians and tricksters. While the alien anthropologist attempts in the best modernist tradition to discover a "trickster code" in the sergeant's words—that is, to decode the text—the reader is provided with Vizenor's most direct clues to the nature of the (inherently indefinable) trickster presence in his fiction. "The Woodland trickster is a comic trope; a universal language game," the third-person voice of the prologue explains. "The trickster narrative arises in agonistic imagination; a wild venture in a communal discourse, an uncertain humor that denies aestheticism, translation, and imposed representations…. The tribal trickster is a comic holotrope, the whole figuration; an unbroken interior landscape that beams various points of view in temporaral reveries." Perhaps most to the point for Vizenor's trickster narratives, we are told that "the trickster is comic nature in a language game, not a real person or 'being' in the ontological sense. Tribal tricksters are embodied in imagination and liberate the mind; an androgyny, she would repudiate translations and imposed representations, as he would bare the contradictions of the striptease." Quoting Lacan, the narrator points out that "every word always has a beyond, sustains several meanings." The narrator goes on to add succinctly, "The trick, in seven words, is to elude historicism, racial representations, and remain historical."

Though it may strike some as merely ducking a tough issue, it seems readily apparent that any attempt to explain with certainty Vizenor's conception of trickster would foolishly resemble Eastman Schicer's yearning to "decode" a trickster monologue. However, the prologue underscores the essence of the author's identification as trickster "crossblood": the trickster "holotrope" defies terminal creeds, demands a transcendent freedom that negates such reductionist historicisms as the concept labeled "Indian," a codified image that attempts to enforce conformity to preconceived and static concepts, or "racial representations." The "Indian" in the terminal Euramerican imagination becomes an aesthetic artifact frozen on coins, "a designer brave engraved in a cultural striptease," as Sergeant Alex Hobraiser puts it. Tune Browne, an "intuitive scholar" and political candidate posing ironically in braids, ribbons, bones, and fur, explains this terminal state differently, pointing to a staged photograph by Edward Curtis and declaring, "Curtis has removed the clock, colonized our cultures, and denied us our time in the world." Curtis, we might add, aestheticized the Indian, decontextualizing his living models the way sacred fetishes have been routinely decontextualized into iconic "art" in the world's museums—like the Feather Boy bundle in McNickle's Wind from an Enemy Sky. Griever de Hocus, avian trickster and "an adopted heir to the baronage," demands this "time in the world," explaining in The Trickster of Liberty that "we wear the agonistic moment, not the burdens of the past."

Quoting Joseph Meeker's The Comedy of Survival, Vizenor's prologue further asserts that "the comic mode of human behavior represented in literature is the closest art has come to describing man as an adaptive animal." This is the comic mode described by Bakhtin, that which "works in a zone of maximal proximity," drawing the subject "into a zone of crude contact where one can finger it familiarly on all sides … dismember it … making it an object of familiar contact and thus clearing the ground for an absolutely free investigation of it." Vizenor's darkly comic art asserts precisely that syncretic, adaptive, investigative nature, a liberation for the "Native American" from artifact and fact. Characteristically illustrative of this metaphor is Slyboots Browne, "the most devious, clever, and artful of the tricksters at the baronage … a wild avian dreamer who assumes, surmises, and imagines a world with no halters." It is Slyboots who develops a microlight industry on the reservation baronage and who ships two of the microlights to Griever in Vizenor's previous novel, one to facilitate Griever's escape and one to bribe the Chinese cadres.

Moving out from the reservation, Luster Browne's progeny populate the world with tricksters who challenge, moment by moment, the values and creeds of the worlds they invade. Griever, as Vizenor illustrated in his previous novel, goes to China. China Browne goes to China after Griever, and her adventure is recorded in both Griever: An American Monkey King in China and The Trickster of Liberty. Tune Browne graduates from the University of California along with Ishi, the captive, aestheticized "Indian" housed in the Berkeley museum, last of the Yahi and, in phrases Vizenor quotes in Trickster, the "ideal museum specimen" sought by anthropologists. As Vizenor views him, Ishi is the perfect Indian, a modernist icon, the "primitive" decontextualized and thus made an autonomous and collectible artifact. In the museum, Ishi becomes an illustration of the insidious Western impulse James Clifford has described: "We need to be suspicious of an almost-automatic tendency to relegate non-Western peoples and objects to the pasts of an increasingly homogeneous humanity."

Tune founds the New School of Socioacupuncture on the Berkeley campus and liberates dogs from the medical laboratories. Tulip Browne makes windmills and practices her profession as a private detective in Berkeley, where in a Vizenoresque roman à clef she solves the mysterious disappearance of a computer from the Native American Studies offices. Eternal Flame, who also figures prominently in Bearheart, founds a "scapehouse for wounded reservation women," and in a scene from Trickster, Sister Eternal Flame listens as Griever tells the story of the "scapehouse of weirds and sensitives" from Bearheart, to which Sister Eternal Flame responds, "You are the weird one."

One by one, Vizenor chronicles the trickster adventures of each of Shadow Box and Wink Browne's children as they travel their peripatetic paths. The harshest satire of the book is reserved for self-deluding Indians and would-be Indians in a chapter describing the Last Lecture, a "tavern and sermon center" opened by Father Mother. In the tavern, tribal people listen as individuals are allowed to give a final lecture before dropping over a short precipice named the "Edge of the White Earth" into new names and identities with legal papers provided by Father Mother. In the most pointed lecture, one uncomfortably pertinent to all of us who identify as mixedbloods and educators, Marie Gee Hailme, an urban mixedblood, confesses her sins:

We were all mixedbloods, some light and some dark, and married to whites, and most of us had never really lived in reservation communities. Yes, we suffered some in college, but not in the same way as the Indian kids we were trying to reach, the ones we were trying to keep in school when school was the real problem. But there we were, the first generation of Indian education experts, forcing our invented curriculum units, our idea of Indians, on the next generation, forcing Indian kids to accept our biased views.

In addition to chiding Indian educators (and everyone else), Vizenor launches another of his many attacks upon those he sees as hypocritical activists pandering to whites' conceptions of invented Indians, introducing Coke de Fountain, "an urban pantribal radical and dealer in cocaine." De Fountain is a paroled felon whose "tribal career unfolded in prison, where he studied tribal philosophies and blossomed when he was paroled in braids and a bone choker. He bore a dark cultural frown, posed as a new colonial victim, and learned his racial diatribes in church basements." Sharply reminiscent of his published criticisms of American Indian Movement radical Dennis Banks, Vizenor's sketch of De Fountain is the most blunt and effectively uncomfortable moment in The Trickster of Liberty. Comparatively mild is Vizenor's satire directed at Homer Yellow Snow, who gets up to confess in his Last Lecture that he is, in fact, a pretend Indian. Pointedly calling to mind published doubts concerning the authenticity of author Jamake Highwater's claim to an Indian identity, Homer Yellow Snow's confession lays bare the essense of such controversy when he says to his tribal audience: "If you knew who you were, why did you find it so easy to believe in me?… because you too want to be white, and no matter what you say in public, you trust whites more than you trust Indians, which is to say, you trust pretend Indians more than real ones."

In The Trickster of Liberty, as in all of Vizenor's fiction, it is obvious that "some upsetting is necessary" and that the author/trickster is again intent upon attacking terminal creeds and loosening the shrouds of identities. Shapeshifting across the middle ground long reserved for displaced and distraught mixedbloods, Vizenor is the first American Indian author to find "crossbloods" a cause for joyous celebration. The most ambitious and radically intellectual of American Indian writers, Vizenor has taken Indian fiction—and the figure of the mixedblood in particular—into the future. In the irresistible penetration of his satires, Vizenor insists upon ethics beyond aesthetics, upon the immutable values of spirit and heart articulated by Proude Cedarfair, and though he celebrates the liberated play of postmodernism, he nonetheless goes well beyond the "contrived depthlessness" that has been defined as "the overwhelming motif in postmodernism." In so doing, Vizenor has produced one of America's most distinctive literary voices.