Colonization as Subtext in James Welch's Winter in the Blood

James Welch's work functions simultaneously as self-exploration, contemporary literary realism, and as a form of anthropology/archeology used to identify and interrogate historic, social, cultural, and political realities. In addition, it contains a fundamental binary composed of a pragmatic, grounded gaze at certain realities of lived experience nevertheless often expressed in abstractions that invite theoretical association.

For example, Welch's Winter In The Blood has been said to exhibit elements including social isolation, an Oedipal complex, censorship, authority, and the failure of written discourse to provide resolution of these aspects of the plot.¹ The failure of written discourse also reflects the limitations of language in general, which, although enormously useful to human beings, is at best a rudimentary tool for accessing the wilderness of reality.

In this sense the frontier still exists, a place wherein there is not only scarcity of buildings, railroads, and other infrastructures by which we deem places civilized, but where there is a kind of scarcity of language and understanding as well. High theory, like a Manhattan skyscraper, is of limited value in this land/mindscape, where utility within a local context is valued above all else. At the same time, there is a need to understand and articulate lived experience that quickly achieves higher levels of abstraction.

There is a tendency to be judgmental about hinterlands, to assume places like New York City are superior to an "Indian reservation," and that, by association, so are their residents. It is likely, however, that were New Yorkers forced to function on their own in the milieu of the average American Indian living in an existing tribal community like those reflected in much of Welch's work, they would soon realize the complexity of doing so. In fact, I have seen visiting medical doctors, capitalists, and academics of all kinds baffled at the ways money, education, or connections failed to facilitate their individual agendas at Fort Belknap.

To begin, in a situation where the language that evolved over millennia to fit a certain place has been destroyed, simple acts of naming become near impossible, to say nothing of achieving understanding. Add to such destruction the enforced substitution of a foreign language used primarily for deception, and it begins to become understandable why history, reality, and language seem to stand so far apart from one another in the tribal community perceived by the narrator of Winter in the Blood.

The assertion that the book "laments the inevitable slippage of signifier from signified" is supported by the fact that neither insiders nor outsiders have the advantage in understanding what is going on.² The infrastructure of stories recounting and explaining what happened in the past has been destroyed; much of what has replaced the past is in total conflict with the warp of colonial distortion; and, as a result of the corruption of the past and present, the means by which tribal people believe it possible to influence the future has been significantly hindered.

Naming and language, the dialectic of presence and absence, and the recurring theme of "distance" have all worked to create what has been described as a contrary doubleness in Winter in the Blood: "the narrator's identification of and desire to abolish 'distance' in order to fuse self and Other coexists with the idea that the 'distance' resulting from spatial and temporal separation becomes necessary to cure his winter in the blood."³ Although usually incompletely developed, this concept of spatial and temporal, or, place versus time separation, is helpful in establishing both the theoretical as well as the pragmatic ground for not only Winter in the Blood, but also for the larger body of Welch's work.

Textual dissonances related to distance and the paradox of desire, desire and its relationship to larger textual disorder, and disorder and its relationship to the productive matrix of Welch's fiction are ways to...