[In the essay below, Keady discusses Vizenor's use of language in The Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart, and how his technique emphasizes the importance of a strength of spirit over belief in empty words.]

Gerald Vizenor's book, The Darkness in St. Louis Bearheart, is a comic and brutal satire on all of us who cling to "Terminal Creeds," whose values, and very identities, amount to no more than bundles of words, bereft of meaning. Just as the characters in Bearheart suffer because of their vanities, their attachment to words and "sacred" idiosyncrasies, we too are challenged, and even assaulted by Vizenor's ruthless depictions of bizarre sex and violence, and his consistently crude language. Throughout the book, our expectations are thwarted, our notions of morality are violated, and our desire for resolution (or a little compassion) is overruled again and again. Perhaps as disturbing as the actual events of the book is the offhand and comic manner in which Vizenor presents them. Much of Bearheart is hard to stomach, but Vizenor's fiction is only slightly stranger than truth. His own early life was wrought with violence and under "Acknowledgments," Vizenor writes. "Most of the characters … are real people with fictional names…. "In effect, Vizenor's book is hyper-real—or reality condensed, and the pilgrims' journey across America is an accelerated tour through modern life. Vizenor sets his story in a probable future, taking modern values one step further to reveal their emptiness and the bleakness of the path we are now on. Vizenor's concern with words, the bizarre content of his book and its irreverent telling may mark Bearheart as a distinctly "modern" novel. But at its core, Vizenor's book is more Indian than western, and more saturnalian than satirical with Vizenor as the ultimate clown and trickster.

That Vizenor so often condemns words, that he creates a hero who rarely speaks, and goes on to make a book of words, may seem like a series of contradictions. Like many modern writers, Vizenor is obsessed with words, but unlike them, he is not concerned with the "inadequacy" of words themselves. On the contrary, Vizenor has faith in the power of words to evoke emotion and convey real meaning. The opening chapter of the novel, entitled "The Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart" is chant-like and poetic. Aside from serving as the story's frame, this chapter works as ceremonial prayer; though truly dark itself, the rhythm and poetry of the language is emotional preparation for the ensuing chaos of the novel. All in all, Vizenor seems more concerned with truth than with words, and the rest of the novel shows the folly of those who hold words up like shields to protect them from reality. He goes out of the way, (via the Bioavaricious Word Hospital) to point out the absurdity of those who would dissect the language and discard its meaning. Through Bearheart, Vizenor acts as a trickster/teacher, degrading words and using them to violate and degrade. By desecrating the "sacred" through words, he restores the value of words, and more importantly, the values which words express.

As strange as the events of Bearheart may be, Vizenor's novel is really a teaching tale about truth and choice, about those who are willing to sacrifice their "Terminal Creeds" for real meaning, and those who will not. In the first chapters of the novel, Proude Cedarfair and Rosina Parent adopt a growing number of pilgrims in their journey across America. Each of the pilgrims has his own story, his own bizarre and often violent personal history to which Vizenor devotes many pages. Though comic, or rather, blackly humorous, their stories are all tragic, and certainly many of the pilgrims can be seen as "victims of circumstance." Because the pilgrims are "seekers" and because they have sense enough to recognize Proude as their leader, the pilgrims do seem "better" than the other survivors they meet. But for all their good intentions, only one is willing to give up his sad story for a better life. Instead, the pilgrims cling to words as identities; their personal pasts become self-serving postures, and their sad stories of victimization become excuses for all their actions.

What is perhaps most confusing about Vizenor's novel is that good and evil are so often blurred—that truths and falsehoods are so often spoken from the same mouths and within the same sentences. But such complexity is accurate and realistic. Like Milton, Vizenor shows that evil is not the absence of good, but the perversion of it. Thus, the pilgrims' tories contain much truth and insight, but their distortion of these truths become the "Terminal Creeds" they live by and die by. Likewise, words of wisdom often come from the most despicable characters in the book. On the whole, the Gambler's philosophy is utterly perverse, but within it there are kernels of truth; "biological families are not the center of meaning and identities," and "the government tortured people and sanctioned killing." Though the Gambler mocks the pilgrims as "Terminal believers in their own goodness," his nihilism is itself a "Terminal Creed" and he is a devout believer in it.

Like the pilgrims, the Evil Gambler indulges himself in his personal history. He rejects "biological families" as a source of identity but draws his own identity from the "family" which adopted—or rather, abducted him. His sentimentality is cloying as he quotes his mother's poetry, has her pictures on the wall, and glorifies her and his childhood before the captive audience of pilgrims. Though powerful as he has proven to be, the Evil Gambler is entirely enmeshed in his past and in the material world. His arrogance and materialism are his weakness and his downfall. Unlike Proude, he is not willing "to risk everything"—even to achieve his own evil purpose. Thoroughly cruel and grotesque, the Gambler is "evil incarnate." But his evil, too, has words and "Terminal Creeds" at its source; the evil he demonstrates is the same spiritual weakness that to some degree, each of the pilgrims will succumb to.

When confronted by the Evil Gambler, the pilgrims substitute piles of words for personal strength. The lists of "words that please them" that each pilgrim composes is like a condensed version of their personal stories; a naming of passions and pet-peeves. Lilith Mae lists "cocker, boxer, springer …" while Bigfoot, with his "president Jackson" produces a list of American presidents. That Proude, in contrast, lists the names of the pilgrims themselves demonstrates his more immediate connection to the present reality and suggests his willingness to risk everything in order to conquer evil. In his encounter with Sir Cecil, Proude, both literally and symbolically, saves the lives of all the pilgrims, but he cannot change their wills, or save them from themselves. Thus, as the chapters which precede the "Evil Gambler" section show the accumulation of the pilgrims, the chapters which follow this encounter show the demise and disintegration of the group. One by one, the pilgrims fall victim to their own vanities and those who hold hardest to "Terminal Creeds" are the first to go.

When Proude saves the life of Lilith Mae, her response is to commit suicide. Her death is literally the working of her own will, but also, the manifestation of her "Terminal Creed." In Bearheart, Vizenor twice tells the legend of a child-woman who takes animals as lovers, and these stories work to evoke some sympathy for Lilith Mae. But, as Proude says, "We become our memories and what we believe," and we see Lilith Mae as a firm believer in her "Terminal Creed" long before her suicide. Lilith Mae believes the stories she has been told about herself and acts out of them. Having been mocked by the Anishinaabe women as a "lover of dogs" Lilith Mae goes on to become a lover of dogs. She tells of victimization by her incestuous father, but offers herself as a victim to the Anishinaabe men, and then to the Evil Gambler. Her optimism is superficial, and lacking spiritual strength, she places her faith in words and Vizenor writes "She had known evil in her past and was pushing her thoughts with words of confidence." According to her own "Terminal Creed" when Lilith Mae is not victimized by the Gambler, she must take her own life.

In the chapters that follow, the pilgrims suffer a variety of strange deaths and disappearances as they prove, like Lilith Mae, to be believers in "Terminal Creeds." Vizenor's treatment of his characters may seem cold-hearted, but if the pilgrims' deaths are pointless, they are also appropriate. After the "Evil Gambler" chapter, Vizenor, as trickster, throws up the pieces of his characters' lives, and they fall, neither by chance, nor fate, but exactly where they fit.

When Belladonna Darwin Winter-Catcherexpresses her "Terminal Creed' that "An Indian is a member of a recognized tribe and a person who has Indian blood," (the federal definition) she falls victim to the band of "descendants of famous hunters and bucking horse breeders" at Orion. The cookie that kills her is, in effect, the poison of her own false-pride and superiority. In contrast, Little Big Mouse's "Terminal Creed" proves to be a grotesque and patronizing liberality. She tells the cripples they meet on the interstate that "Parts of bodies do not make the person whole," but becomes blinded by her own big-heartedness. The nude dance she performs for the cripples is pathetically vain and egocentric. Before they tear Little Big Mouse to pieces, the cripples tell her, "You are perfect and now you want our imagination and visions for your own."

Although Judge Pardone Cozener and Doctor Wilde Cozwaine escape violent deaths, and though each seems to have found their niches at the Bioavaricious Word Hospital, the decision to stay there is clearly a choice of nihilism. The fate of Sun Bear Sun is thus unfair in comparison, but it is similarly a direct result of a terminal belief in words. Though truly good-hearted, Sun Bear Sun is "locked in the part without visions." In his effort to explain himself to the soldiers, the tribal leader plays their game and demonstrates his misplaced faith. Sun Bear Sun is trapped by words, and so remains a prisoner as "the honest fool answering unanswerable questions."

In light of this, it is perhaps appropriate that as the novel ends, Vizenor answers few of our questions. It may be Rosina's role as "earth mother" that keeps her bound in the third world, and unlike the pilgrims, she espouses no "Terminal Creed." But in the end of Bearheart, Rosina does seem to share the pilgrims' spiritual weakness and it is appropriate that her mistake takes the physical, rather than verbal form. When she has sex with Bigfoot, it is because he forces her to, but she also allows him to break her will, and it is his aspect of their encounter which makes it particularly repugnant. In her utter submission to Bigfoot, Rosina surrenders her will and undergoes a sort of "death of spirit" which seems to bar her entry into the fourth world. Vizenor writes: "She had traveled with death during the night." Though Rosina's plight is ambiguous, it does seem hopeful. Proude's note suggests his faith in her and the tracks she finds in the snow may very well lead her to join him in the fourth world.

In as much as Bearheart is a tale of the world's end, it is also about the beginning of a new world. The corrupt society has done itself in, but Vizenor tells us that "Myths became the center of meaning again," and that "Oral traditions were honored" by the survivors on the interstate. As Proude says, "… all is not lost. Our world has turned again to hunting and the hunter." The journey of the pilgrims in Bearheart is, in essence, a walking backwards, to beginnings to New Mexico and to the fourth world. But those who cling to words as evidence of their existence will be unable to enter. In the wasted and poisoned America, "survival of the fittest" prevails, but Vizenor points out that, here, as always, it is spiritual strength which makes one fit.