Yonder: Life on the Far Side of Change by Jim W. Corder (review)

382 Western American Literature young Brown from his quest. Finally learning of Black Elk’swhereabouts—the Pine Ridge Reservation ofSouth Dakota, Brown loaded his old camper pick-up and departed for the Black Hills. Upon reaching the reservation, Brown learned that the old man was in Nebraskawith hisfamilygleaning potato fields; arriving at the camp, Brown entered the holy man’s lodge offering a sacred pipe. Taking the pipe without aword, the old man and Brown together offered smoke; and while the young scholar grew anxious with anticipation awaiting a reply, Black Elk knocked the ashes from the pipe and declared; “I’ve been waiting for you.”Brown stayed with the elder for four years, the last of the old man’s life, and in 1953 he published The SacredPipe: Black Elk's Account of the Seven Rites ofthe Oglala Sioux. With Animals oftheSoul, the wisdom of Black Elk, Oglala holy man, is richly extended. Pioneering the study of Native American cultures, Joseph Epes Brown became the firstprofessorofNativeAmerican religious traditions in auniversity religion department in the United States. Often citing Black Elk’s wisdom, Professor Brown stresses the essential metaphysic of nature which empowers Native American traditions (see TheSpiritualLegacy oftheAmerican Indian, 1982: 60, 64, 70). In Animals oftheSoul, Brown carefully articulates this wisdom while explaining the sophisticated metaphysical traditions of the Oglala Lakota. It is seldom that we are treated to a book of this quality which intrinsically conveys the rich and complex ecological and spiritual relationships between a Native American people and Nature. In the collaborative genre of Richard Nelson’s rewarding study—Make Prayers to theRaven: A Koyukon View oftheNorthernForest (1983), Brown generates an understanding ofNative American sacred ecology; Animals is a work which matured from a 1970 University ofStockholm disserta­ tion into a realization of the old Oglala holy man’sdream. During hisyearswith BlackElk, Brown noted that the old man often awoke in the night lamenting his inability to realize the great vision of restoring the Nation’s Hoop. Nevertheless, in sharing his vision and wisdom with scholars Neihardt and Brown, as well as with subsequent elders Frank Fools Crow and others, the vision of the Oglala holy man Black Elk lives today and it potently engages us with the ecological insights which comprise Animals oftheSoul JAYHANSFORD C. VEST Arizona State University West Yonder: Life on theFar Side of Change. ByJim W. Corder. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. 233 pages, $24.95.) “After great change”—these words reverberate throughJim Corder’smost recent work with an intensity modulating between elegiac nostalgia and down- Reviews 383 home humor. Corder’s phrase echoes a line from Dickinson—“After great pain, a formal feeling comes”—whose poem provides an interesting gloss on Yonder. ForCorder, the twentieth centuryiscertainly “the Hour ofLead,”a time when “Memory alwaysfails,”as he says in the chapter titled “Speak, Memory.” The “formal feeling”that comes inevitablyto us all, according to Corder, is nostalgia, “whatwe live once we fall into history.” But Yonderdoesn’t indulge in the comforts of a golden age gone by. Instead, with the clenched fist of a resistantprose reminiscent ofJoan Didion’sSlouchingTowardsBethlehem, Corder confronts our longingfor the “far side ofchange”:“Nostalgiaisalwaysaccompa­ nied by a conflict of tongues, by the failure of memory, and by the threat of personal invisibility.” Where these three elements collide, there we encoun­ ter—and perhaps counter—the longing for our misremembered topoi: “the beautiful home that was, that wasn’t.” In his search for “yonder,” Corder gathers together a deliciously eclectic round of conflicting tongues to craft his “scholarly sort of work written in a personal sortofway.” Rangingfrom LesDaniels’sComix:A HistoryofComicBooks in Americaor Peter Bowers’sForgottenFightersandExperimentalAircraft, to Harold Bloom’s The Breaking of the Vessels or Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse, the voices clash in humorous or serious or earnestly bitter “competing rhetorics.” Out of these rhetorical transactions comes Corder’s realized assertion that “After a while and once in a while, you have to find a place where you can speakfor the self.” The heterogeneity of discourse here—elegy, epistle, lyric refrain, Whitmanian catalogue, literary criticism, diary, and more—raises Corder’s book above “memoir or autobiography.” To steal a phrase from Wallace Stevens (another voice muttering from...