Unsettling the Literary West: Authenticity and Authorship (review)

In one swift stroke, Nathaniel Lewis attempts to turn Western American literature and its critical traditions on their heads. With Western American literary scholars struggling to overcome the perceived second-hand status of their literature in the traditional literary canon, Lewis offers a reason for such status and a way to make these texts more palatable to the East Coast literary establishment. The answer lies in the postmodern theories of Jean Baudrillard. While the application of Baudrillard's ideas on the literature of the American West offer insight into the production and critical reception of such texts, those same theories do little to illuminate Native American texts and critical traditions.

With postmodern theory in hand, Lewis identifies that "[t]he pursuit, production, and marketing of the 'real West,' all but define the history of western literature and criticism" (1). As a result of Western authors' Wdelity to the "real West" or what they perceive to be "real," the West as a place and idea becomes a simulacrum for both writers and readers. Western literature loses its literary force because "[i]magination, style, fancy, and genius were avoided, and any polished regularity of form or sophistication of style became suspect, for they suggested the authorial manipulation of material rather than the faithful recording of region" (35). Although Lewis teases out this argument early in his work, as he discusses the production of early dime novels and travel journals, he provides examples of how a diverse range of writers from Edgar Allan Poe, Joaquin Miller, Frank Norris, Terry Tempest Williams, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Vladimir Nabokov succumb to the authenticity game. Perhaps the most insightful question that Lewis raises in his work strikes at the heart of Western American literature: "[W]hich came first, the West or representations of the West?" (62). Staying consistent with his purpose to "unsettle" the literary West, Lewis offers no answers or conclusions, allowing readers and scholars to come to their own conclusions.

Although Lewis provides new ways of examining Western American texts, his work offers nothing to American Indian literary studies. Lewis tackles the place of American Indian literatures as they relate to Western American literature in his chapter titled, "Inside Out in the Postmodern West," where he lumps American Indian writers in with postmodern writers like Vladimir Nabokov and Peter Handke. During the first twenty-three pages of the chapter, Lewis's hope is to examine "how the idea of authenticity functions in relation to Native American literature and culture" (205). For Lewis the best way to investigate the authenticity of American Indian writers is to "displace Native American literature" (206). Postmodern theory serves to "displace" and deconstruct American Indian authenticity even as Lewis acknowledges that American Indian scholars like Elizabeth Cook-Lynn and Craig Womack Wght the "overlaying [of Native American literature] with an authoritative and ill-Wtting European theory grid" (210). Lewis dismisses the resistance of native scholars to Euroamerican literary theories and forges ahead with the same arguments he uses to deconstruct European and American writers of the West. He contends that because American Indian writers create from a traditional, communal center their work lacks the vibrancy and creative genius that only an individual can bring. Lewis believes the controversy surrounding Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony exemplifies the inherent problems of authenticity in American Indian literatures. Silko parrots back the community's story, which diminishes her talent as a writer and storyteller. This assumption, however, does not account for the fact that stories change according to time, teller, and audience. The Laguna Pueblo lies at the center of Ceremony, yet the telling and the shaping of the story are Silko's alone. At a time when American Indians recover their history and demand more tribally specific criticism, as Craig Womack suggests in Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism, Lewis finds that tribal cultures and their influence on tribal writers seem "rude," "condescending," and "an imperialist opposition to true Native culture" (213). While Lewis asserts that he writes from the...