thing that matters is that he says he and I don't have the right to die for each other and that we should be living for each other instead. He says the world hurts. He says the first thing he wanted after he was born was a shot of whiskey. He says all that and more. He tells me to get a job and to grow my braids. He says I better learn how to shoot left-handed if I'm going to keep playing basketball. He says to open a fireworks stand.

Full of practical advice that counter ideas often associated with Christianity, James directly responds to the Christian notion that Christ died for the sins of humankind so that human beings may live, by telling the narrator that "we should be living for each other instead." By mythologizing James as someone who is more interested in helping Indians survive this world than he is in saving their souls for the next world, Alexie responds to the Christian missionaries who were so prevalent on reservations and who helped run their schools. It is James who literally saves the narrator from the ravages of alcoholism, as he is forced to give up the bottle if he is to keep custody of the child. Even Alcoholics Anonymous, which the narrator joins, is built upon the act of storytelling, as members meet to tell stories about how alcohol has ruined their lives and how they are going to stop drinking and change their lives. By listening to the stories of others and telling one's own story, members of AA derive the strength to stay sober.

The idea of salvation is at the heart of storytelling in Alexie's stories—salvation from one's own destructive impulses, salvation from the appropriation of Native-American history and traditions by others, salvation from the onslaught of technology that supplants human connectedness and colonizes family life. A year after he quits drinking, the narrator of "Jesus Christ's Half-Brother Is Alive and Well on the Spokane Indian Reservation," says, "Every day I'm trying not to drink and I pray but I don't know who I'm praying to." Storytelling is akin to praying in these stories. The act alone is enough. In "The Trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire," inspired by Franz Kafka's novel, The Trial, Thomas, after being convicted of absurd charges, finds himself on a bus with convicts heading to prison. After being prodded, he begins to tell his stories, just as he had done at his trial. Thomas is both a tribal visionary and a walking archive of Spokane Indian history, and in Alexie's ironic representations of Indian culture, a parody of the modern Indian who cannot stop talking about his Indian identity and his tribal past. In "Family Portrait," the narrator describes television as a force that eats into his family's emotional life, and something they need to be saved from:

The television was always loud, too loud, until every emotion was measured by the half hour. We hid our faces behind masks that suggested other histories; we touched hands accidentally and our skin sparked like a personal revolution. We stared across the room at each other, waited for the conversation and the conversion, watched wasps and flies battering against the windows. We were children; we were open mouths. Open in hunger, in anger, in laughter, in prayer. Jesus, we all want to survive.

There are so many similarities between the characters in Alexie's stories and Alexie's own life that the collection can also be seen as Alexie's attempt to tell the story of his life by mythologizing it. Such self-mythologizing has become a staple of postmodern writing and can be seen in writers as diverse as John Berryman, Mark Strand, Ann Sexton, Gerald Vizenor, and Mark Leyner. At a time when many consider literary realism to be antiquated and an insufficient way to depict how people live now, creating mythologies around and of oneself has become an effective and provocative way to depict reality.

Source: Chris Semansky, Critical Essay on The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, in Novels for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.
Semansky is an instructor of English literature and composition and writes on literature and culture for several publications.

In Sherman Alexie's story, "A Drug Called Tradition," from his story collection, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, Victor, the narrator, speaks about what he calls the skeletons of the past and the future: "There are things you should learn. Your past is a skeleton walking one step behind you, and your future is a skeleton walking one step in front of you ... Now, these skeletons are made of memories, dreams, and voices. And they can trap you in the in-between, between touching and becoming. But they're not necessarily evil, unless you let them be. What you have to do is keep moving, keep walking, in step with your skeletons ... no matter what they do, keep walking, keep moving ..."

This idea about skeletons, or the hauntings and the remnants of tradition, and the bones absent of flesh, but animate and manifest, is metonymic of the larger ideas and questions Alexie grapples with in this work: that is, how can a member or a performer of a tradition negotiate the seemingly incompatible drives of that tradition—the desire to perpetuate, to conserve, to maintain an idiom and its meaning, but at the same time, to accommodate the need to innovate, to create, and to move forward in a tradition, and explode and shape its word power? How can a participant in a tradition walk with the skeletons and traditions, but walk and innovate at a pace that avoids being trapped by their embrace?

My discussion of Alexie's work challenges the dogmatic and conservative insistence that, while a written, authored work can be considered a folklore text, it is not and cannot be called folklore. This essay is directed toward both scholars entrenched in the study of literary texts and to academic folklorists who insist on conventional and conservative parameters for what constitutes folklore. My aim is to articulate an approach to this particular authored text which would prevent the incorrect and casual identification of folklore in literature, as well as any preemptive dismissal of its presence in this novel. By reading Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven as a literary construction as well as a work born of a particular culture and artistic tradition, I insist on a more complicated understanding of its content, shape, and meanings in a critique of folklore theories which limit and confine our concepts of the power and dimensions of shaped words. I also challenge the popular but simplistic notion that Native-American writing is somehow more "oral" than other texts, and I combat in part the increasingly useless distinction between the written and oral manifestation of verbal art by relying on some ideas of Dell Hymes as well as John Miles Foley. Foley, who considers text a medium for representing parts of an oral traditional performance, argues in The Singer of Tales in Performance (1995) that a text (or the material written representation of folklore) cannot be declared something "different in species" from the oral tradition to which it is related, asking instead "how a given text continues the tradition of reception?" We can achieve an understanding of Alexie's text's reception and its place in a tradition, of course, by understanding the written representation on its own terms, by relying on textual indications of performance, and by learning or understanding the "institutionalized meanings" within the register of the tradition. That is, we can examine Alexie's text for its literary practices which represent those signals of performance, and then we can begin to seek a truer understanding of traditional meanings and ideas. Alexie, of course, relies on our readerly knowledge that we inscribe into his text, and then he uses literary devices that are both conventional and which subvert and disrupt western literary principles. I assert, however, that besides easily dissecting Alexie's story collection and recognizing textual indications of meaning and performance, and beyond identifying keys to performance which indicate how this text might register with people in Alexie's folk group, I also contend that there is a kind of living dimension to the authored, printed word that cannot be summarily discounted unless we are unwilling to examine and enflesh our understanding of word power and a living tradition, and I argue for a more expansive notion of how folklore processes can be exchanged and represented.

Sherman Alexie, a Spokane and Coeur D'Alene American Indian, is an academically trained writer and political activist who wrote and produced the film Smoke Signals, based upon his work The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. Born in 1966, Alexie grew up on the Spokane reservation in central Washington, and attended Gonzaga State and Washington State University, where he earned a BA in 1991. Alexie, who cites Adrian C. Louis, Simon Ortiz, Joy Harjo, and Linda Hogan as models, has published thirteen books, including seven collections of poetry. He asserts that his writing is primarily autobiographical: "It's fiction as autobiography, or autobiography as fiction, I'm not sure which one." This self-described life writing, accompanied by a skewering humor and scathing wit, earned Alexie a reputation as an ego-driven and opportunistic writer. In a feature interview on National Public Radio, Liane Hansen quotes a woman who grew up knowing the author: "What people on the reservation feel is that he's making fun of them. It's supposed to be fiction, but we all know whom he's writing about. He has wounded a lot of people." He has also been criticized by other Native-American and non-Native novelists for his position that only Native Americans can write characters who are Indian, and he is known for vilifying white authors for attempting to do so, particularly Barbara Kingsolver. Kingsolver insists she resents his attitude because it would "limit the scope" of most authors; presumably she resists confining authors to composing characters of their own ethnic and cultural background. Alexie explains, "I write what I know, and I don't try to mythologize myself, which is what some seem to want, and which some Indian women and men writers are doing, this Earth Mother and Shaman Man thing, trying to create these "authentic, traditional" Indians. We don't live our lives that way." I find myself torn between agreeing with his criticism of writers such as Kingsolver or Tony Hillerman, who capitalize on the popularity of the Native-American novel genre and perpetuate romantic stereotypes in their characterizations of Indian people, and my own rejection of the impossibility of non-Natives studying, reading, and writing about Native-American people and culture in ways that are not colonizing and destructive. I think, however, that Alexie's own work is important because of its consumption by a variety of audiences, and I attribute the variety of response to his work to the confluence of traditions and multiple registers he taps in the creation of his art.

Alexie has earned critical acclaim from the literary establishment, but I find book reviews typically misunderstand the forces at work in his writing. Critics frequently praise his work as lyric, humorous and comic, and, of course, make use of the fabulous catch-all phrase critics use for any phenomena they can't easily categorize, "magical realism." In one review titled, "The Despair and Spirit of American Indians," Lawrence Thornton criticizes Alexie's work without considering its Native culture and political context, dismissing all its phenomena as postmodernism. Another critic, Michael Castro, says, "Plot and character, the classical main elements of fiction and drama, do not stick with us after reading these stories," clearly an example of a critic working from a Western literary aesthetic. Another critic, Gramyo Tokuyama, writes, "Using poignant humor he exposes the cultural demise of a nation steeped in sacred tradition and surrounded by a passionless society." Tokuyama, by identifying this as a central theme of the book, seems to venerate the romantic notion that pure and true Native American cultures would still be gloriously uncorrupted if isolated from the surrounding "passionless" society. Of course, Alexie provides a sharp critique of stultifying and isolationist traditional practices as he simultaneously skewers disconnectedness and apathy, demonstrating how these factions consistently intermingle. In Alexie's books, one society doesn't surround another—rather, societies disintegrate together.

Native-American author Leslie Marmon Silko is the only critic who calls The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven a set of interlinked short stories, and examines its folkloric qualities, especially its traditional referentiality; nearly all the other critics treat each stow as a separate piece and judge it using purely literary vocabulary. Silko wrote a review for The Nation in which she explains how traditions of Native-American oral narratives demonstrate a legacy of "lengthy fictions of interlinked characters and events" as commonplace. Silko's comment indicates the importance of tradition to the writing of Alexie's work, and she contextualizes his authored literature in relationship to oral tradition and composition, for, as Silko points out, the structure and chronology of Alexie's book does not reflect standard components of Western literature, because Native-American literature has traditionally taken a different shape which does not necessarily include features like Castro's "plot and character." Silko also points out that Alexie is, in fact, drawing on a canonical Western tradition as well as a native tradition, and she argues that he uses ghosts sometimes in the same way as Henry James or Shakespeare, as symbols instead of real beings, as well as images from Indian culture. She suggests the way he writes about a small town is within the tradition of communities evoked in literary works like The Scarlet Letter, Babbitt, Sanctuary, and The Last Picture Show. I think the vast majority of critics cannot arrive at the same combination of Western and non-Western literary criticism Silko uses to read this work, as the relies on some aspects of folklore theory as well as her training as a literary critic to review Alexie's novel more responsibly.

Louis Owens, another Native-American literary critic who examines the construction of third-wave Native literatures, relates the syncresis of Alexie's work to what he calls the initial problem confronting any Native-American author. Owens argues that a Native-American writer's art is initially problematized by its complicity with linguistic colonization. Owens writes about the complexity of the task confronting a novelist who would write about Indians and Indian concerns: "every word written in English represents a collaboration of sorts as well as a reorientation (conscious or unconscious) from the ... world of oral tradition to the ... reality of written language." While seemingly falling into the trap of polarizing the solely written and the solely oral composition of word art, Owens focuses on the political ramifications of negotiating these multiple registers. Indeed, after understanding the implications of incorporating one cultural form of expression—that is, Native-American verbal art—with a literary genre that has historically and contemporarily dominated and oppressed it, we can more thoroughly comprehend how Alexie simultaneously disentangles himself from what Owens calls a collaboration with a tool of colonization.

Furthermore, Alexie's writing strives to subvert and critique stereotypes about Indians that are maintained by mainstream culture. At the same time, the artistic features of his work undermine the traditional forms of the novel and traditional character types and themes of literature. Alexie creates art that successfully exposes interrupts, and unsettles Western patriarchal notions about Indians and Indian beliefs. Scott B. Vickers explains this artistic innovation: "The most successful Native-American writers have adopted the forms, but not necessarily the traditional motifs, of the Western cannon, and have often brought to these genres the distinctive story-telling traditions of their own culture." Alexie syncretically innovates on myriad traditions to produce work that is revolutionary and transformative, shifting the idiom of his work away from static fiction and toward a tradition of dynamic and audience-altering art. If his work is not conventionally a living performance and communal exchange, its deeply powerful and weighted expressive nature propels his work into an expression that defies containment, definition, and the limitations of existing scholarship to dissect its expressive and affective communicative ability.

Certainly, by relying on current folklore scholarship, we can demonstrate that Alexie's work is undoubtedly a folkloric text. While authored by an individual writer, inked and seemingly fixed, it contains idiomatic and metonymic words, "old-time" stories, themes, and characters, as well as keys to performance, including special codes, figurative language, parallelism, special paralinguistic features, special formulae, and appeals to tradition. We can sort through his work and pick out multiple demonstrations of this text's relationship to the folklores in which the author participates. Furthermore, we can uncover how Alexie percieves his authorial role in relationship to his membership in his American-Indian community; Alexie is a master of literary convention, and the confidence he displays in interviews indicates he is in fact comfortable with the primacy of authorship; however, he explains his complicated role as one which depends on more than singular individuality: "I'm a Spokane Indian who just happens to be a writer. I'm proud of who I am, and it defines everything I do. I think all too often, brown people buy into the Western civilization idea of looking at the artist as the individual. That's only part of it. We are also members of tribes. Nothing gets me madder than a brown person who says, 'I just want to be a writer.' It's denying who you are simply because of the pressures white culture puts upon you."

Alexie refuses to extricate his art from its traditional and community context, and repeatedly claims his creative contribution and his tradition's creative contribution are equitable. Indeed, we can examine his content for the hallmarks of Native-American literature and traditional narrative themes, including repetition, the "recasting of tribal narratives into modern day story lines, a certain admixture of sacred and profane influences, and the enunciation of tacitly Indian worldviews and personal experiences." These are certainly all elements Alexie incorporates in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, and though the end product is a marketable literary work which conforms to canonical values (in that it is shaped like prose, has characters, plot events, a beginning and ending, literary symbolism and metaphor), the actual stories undermine many western literary conventions, in both content and the literary tactics employed.

To outline the work briefly, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is composed of twenty-two short stories; there is no conventional plot connecting them, but they are interlinked, much like Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, a storytelling style some critics characterize, because of the additive development, as inherently oral traditional. This collection is narrated from multiple points of view and replicates traditional pan-Indian myths such as trickster and metamorphosis tales, in addition to many other "old-time" themes and motifs. Alexie, who has also published two novels and one other story collection (Indian Killer 1996, Reservation Blues 1995, and The Toughest Indian In the World 2000), blurs the chronology of the stories and the collection itself does not have a dominant narrative or story frame, causing many critics to label this a collection of short stories (a term Alexie does not use). Two of the characters appearing most frequently, Thomas Builds-the-Fire and Victor Joseph, became the protagonists of the film Smoke Signals. Thomas is a nerdy storyteller who tells stories and seems to serve as a surrogate for Alexie while providing a running commentary on oral tradition in tribal culture. Victor, caught between reservation community and his own individuality, tries to present himself as the stereotypical warrior Indian, and is a habitual persecutor of Thomas and a harsh critic of his stories. However, and despite himself, Victor often enjoys, or is at least fascinated by, Thomas's stories, and on one occasion he wonders whatever happened to "a sense of community."

As for replicating orality in a text, Alexie consistently tries to evoke oral performance by addressing the reader and marking the beginning of a performance with page breaks and snippets of poetry or related traditional narratives. These tactics are Alexie's attempts at ethnopoetics, and change the appearance of the text on the page, dividing the prose into a form that is interrupted and perhaps even conversational. For instance, one performative technique Alexie repeats is addressing commentary or questions toward the reader. In "The First Annual All-Indian Horseshoe Pitch and Barbecue," the story is told in first person, but at the end, a series of questions are posed to the audience by the narrator, a device repeated in several stories: "Can you hear the dreams crackling like a camp-fire? Can you hear the dreams laughing in the sawdust? Can you hear the dreams shaking just a little bit as the day grows long? Can you hear the dreams putting on a good jacket that smells of fry bread and sweet smoke? Can you hear the dreams stay up late and talk so many stones?"

Alexie addresses the reader throughout the work, informing us: "Now, I'll tell you that I haven't used the thing ..."; commanding us: "Believe me, there is just barely enough goodness in all of this ..."; questioning us: "Didn't you know?" These questions are intended to elicit my participation in the telling of the story, as I pause and respond, in my mind or out loud. The call for reader response goes far beyond the provincial "dear reader" that Western canonical writing invokes. Alexie also incorporates specialized language that is reflective of current Indian lexicon, but is also recognizable to readers who are outside the tradition, including the formula "enit," a word used to punctuate sentences which has multiple meanings depending on context, including "true," "yes," "alright," among others. But Alexie refuses to define or explain this usage, insisting that we decode it by visiting for a time in the presence of his Indian characters.

Besides picking out the keys to performance articulated by oral traditional theories, we can locate other evidence that Alexie is pushing toward a kind of "new" tradition. Evidence of innovation on both traditional narratives and the traditions of print journalism is developed by Alexie in newspaper stories throughout the work. First, after the murder trial of Thomas Builds-the-Fire, the text offers us an article describing his conviction, a straight news story in the Spokesman Review, presumably written by a non-Native journalist, with quotes from all parties and conforming to the style and expected uninterpreted content of conventional journalism. Later, we are given another news clipping, this time written by Norma, a reservation Indian, about a basketball game. She reports, "He hit a three thousand foot jumper at the buzzer ..." "I think he was Crazy Horse for just a second," said an anonymous and maybe-just-a-little-crazy-them-selves source ..." Alexie seems to be innovating, through Norma, on both the conventions of print journalism and the traditional hero motif. The contrast between the "straight" news and the more mythic rendering of the Indian-created news suggests the latter is a socially created text which changes between event and transmission, a representation of a dynamism not present in the straight news. Perhaps Alexie recreates a newspaper article in two separate stories to demonstrate the differences between two disparate traditions for recording an event. These two versions indicate that the community news story is a kind of folklore, based on an event and interpreted in a traditional manner by a storyteller who is a member of the oral collective.

The most interesting innovation on a traditional figure is the development of the character Thomas Builds-the-Fire, for as Alexie himself explains in an interview, "Thomas explodes the myth and stereotype about the huge, stoic, warrior Indian. He's the exact opposite of what people have come to expect—the idea of an Indian geek just doesn't happen. He's something of a trickster figure, sort of a coyote figure, and he's mythological in that sense. He's always subverting convention, not only Indian conventions about Indians but white conventions about Indians." Thomas is in many ways very humorous, and the fact that he is a disregarded storyteller who cheerfully tries to maintain the oral tradition of his community, but who frequently offers stories which incorporate new themes, figures, and formula in traditional material, seems to be Alexie's vehicle for commenting on and manifesting the complications of oral tradition. Certainly, the work suggests that Thomas Builds-the-Fire is NOT a valued conduit of tradition; as Victor explains to us, "Thomas was a storyteller that nobody wanted to listen to ... Nobody talked to Thomas anymore because he told the same damn stories over and over again."

In his innovative creation of a literary work Alexie has crafted stories which illustrate the tensions within living traditions (both the oral tradition in which he participates, as well as the literary tradition of authored text). Through his "new-time" storyteller, Thomas Builds-the-Fire, Alexie complicatedly both rages against and replicates what is static and conservative about an oral tradition and what results from that stasis in his Native-American community. Through his treatment of Thomas he suggests that stasis of tradition is part of what continues to oppress and cripple American Indians socially and economically. At the same time, Alexie offers ideas about both the value and the problematic nature of innovation according to tradition—the very innovation needed to overcome the results and effects of stasis is frightening because it is change, and it is new and unrecognizable. This is a fear illustrated in the characters of Norma, an American-Indian woman who rejects alcoholism and unemployment, and who fancydances as well as she boogies. The innovation according to tradition in her own life makes her declare, "Every one of our elders who dies takes a piece of our past away ... and that hurts more because I don't know how much of a future we have." This fear of the new and its impact is manifest in the character of one unnamed narrator, who hopes for innovation but questions its possibility: "Driving home, I heard the explosion of a house catching fire and thought it was a new stow born ... But ... it's the same old story, whispered past the same false teeth. How can we imagine a new language ... and a new life when a pocketful of quarters weighs our possibilities down?" The question for Alexie often seems to be whether the risk and the imperative of innovation on tradition, and the radical and revolutionary disruption his work can wreak on readers who belong to the dominant culture as well as on American Indians is worth the seeming loss or decay of oral tradition and traditional meaning.

In his article "Custer and Linguistic Anthropology," Dell Hymes declares, "One can believe, I do believe, that about the dry bones of print, words heaped up in paragraphs, something of the original spirit lingers. That spirit need not be lost to comprehension, respect, and appreciation. We are not able to revive by singing, or stepping over a text five times, but by patient surrender to what a text has to say, in the way it has to say it, something of life can again become incarnate." Hymes, of course, is arguing for the value in reading and studying the textual remnants of folk traditions, believing that manuscript forms may retain certain keys to performance which allow us to tap into how a text means.

This same idea can be applied to literary works like Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, but I would venture to say that beyond the embodiment of literature or collected texts with traditional meaning lies the prospect that the revivification of the "dry bones" of words incarnates more than the spirit of a living tradition. Those words, I assert, are more than dry bones, but are important genetic material, if you will—those words contain something of the humanity of the person who commits those words to text. I challenge us to expand—to explode—our ideas about what the word is and how it means. I assert that an electronic medium, or inked, printed text retains some essence or skeleton of the human being who committed the text to fixity. We must wonder if the medium of printed text is as limited as we insist. Native-American literary critic Scott B. Vickers explains that, "For Native Americans, writing is an opportunity to re-invoke the poetry of the oral tradition, and thus a whole new cultural ethos, so that oral tradition can once again flourish in a new medium and even change the medium itself." I think, as writers like Sherman Alexie try to innovate on the medium of printed, fixed literature, so too can folklorists innovate on their conventional understanding of the power of text on a page.

Can we argue, then, that when writers like Alexie innovate on both literary conventions and oral traditional narrative conventions, his work becomes caught in "flux," much as, perhaps, our understanding of folklore in literature is? I challenge us to make room for a vision of folklore as a phenomena so powerful and ephemeral that it can transcend the confines of written text in ways we cannot collect and explicitly describe, but the recognition of that possibility, that step over the bones, may open a world of life incarnate that exists too deeply to be seen or touched, but can only be known.

Source: Jacqueline L. McGrath, "'The Same Damn Stories': Exploring a Variation on Tradition in Sherman Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven," in Southern Folklore, Vol. 57, No. 2, 2000, pp. 94-105.