Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence (review)

Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence. By Gerald Vizenor. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. ix + 239 pp. $40.00 cloth, $16.95 paper.

Since the publication of N. Scott Momaday's novel House Made of Dawn in 1968, America has witnessed the emergence of a remarkably diverse and rich field of writing by Native Americans. Gerald Vizenor has been among the leading, and most prolific, contributors here, with more than twenty books published. Vizenor's work ranges with sureness across autobiography, literary and cultural criticism, short and novel-length fiction, journalism, and haiku--though it is worth stressing from the start that conventional generic categorizations fail to do his writing justice. His latest contribution, Fugitive Poses, comprises five interconnected essays framed by an introduction, each concerned in its own way with investigating the construction of the "indian" (as Vizenor has it) in various discourses and representational modes and the exploration of an alternative "Native" point of view and reality. Though the essays draw heavily on current academic and theoretical debates and research, they are not academic in their mode of address or predictable in their structure. They work by paratactic patterns of association, juxtaposition, and digression woven around a set of central thematic concerns. For example, the first chapter, "Penenative Rumors," begins as a meditation on the nature of the essay as genre and its usefulness for contemporary Native American writing and then considers the role of the imagination and the Native American trickster in the light of Girard's theories of the scapegoat; cleverly compares the cultural and psychological meanings in alien abduction narratives and Indian captivity narratives; movingly recollects Vizenor's father's life during the Depression; examines the value of laughter; and discusses the Pueblo revolt of 1680 as the first American Revolution. Each shift seems intended to unbalance the reader in order to keep him or her alert while returning the reader again and again to the complexities of the struggle against reductive taxonomies of cultural or racial identities, particularly as these taxonomies manifest themselves in stereotypes of Native American victimhood or narratives of Native cultural decline.

The remaining four essays follow a similar structure. "Wistful Envies," the second chapter, uses debates about the relationship of the oral and the written as an entry into a discussion of the romanticization of Native Americans. The oral-written debate is well-trodden ground and holds few surprises. Indeed, Vizenor's own obsessive return to it (he has dealt with it in earlier works, too) is often in danger of lapsing into the very romanticization he is apparently attempting to dismantle. On the other hand, the satirical readings of Dickens's American Notes and of Washington Irving's Tour on the Prairies have a lightness of touch and critical clarity that is more representative of Vizenor's best work. The next chapter, "Literary Animals," explores animal-human relations in Native stories, using the material to raise issues about environmentalism and the importance of animals to the human imagination. "Fugitive Poses," the eponymous fourth chapter, is a critical commentary on photographic and other visual representations of Native Americans. At a time when scholars of both postcolonial and minority cultural contexts are paying increasing attention to photographic archives and histories, it is worth noting that Vizenor has turned to the subject several times in his career. Most notably, he made extensive use of photographs, including his own, in The People Named the Chippewa (1984), one of his finest works and, along with Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller (1981), a text representing the most innovative use of photographs in contemporary Native American literature. The concluding essay, "Native Transmotion," tries to redefine Native identity in terms of mobility, hybridity, and an imaginative resistance to closed structures.

Those familiar with Vizenor's previous work will see that the essays continue his exploration of certain key thematic concerns and critical strategies. At the...