Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition by Kimberly M. Blaeser (review)

404 Western American Literature Gerald Vizertor: Writing in the Oral Tradition. By Kimberly M. Blaeser. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996. 260 pages, $29.95.) Kimberly Blaeser loves Gerald Vizenor’s work, his rebellious spirit, and his sense of play. This amazingly thorough discussion of his fiction, autobiography, journalism, and literary critiques will be indispensable for those wanting to bet­ ter understand Vizenor’s elliptical metaphoric style or to ferret out the meaning of a particular piece. Instead of going into an exegesis of Vizenor’s major works, Blaeser focuses on short pieces, which she can analyze in depth, and then shows how the same techniques and beliefs drive his larger works. Kimberly Blaeser’s background enhances her analyses. She is a university professor, a published poet, and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, who are also Gerald Vizenor’s people. Their shared tribal sensibility enables Blaeser to give very sophisticated analyses of Vizenor’s trickster, his English “reexpression” of Ojibway dream songs, and his continual press toward orality despite the printed page. Blaeser’s skills as a poet also enable her to write a very interesting and accessible chapter on haiku poetry, its appeal for Vizenor, and its usefulness as a mode of comprehend­ ing Vizenor’s surprising use of techniques such as juxtaposition, word omissions, and abrupt changes of thought. Her discussion of the functions of metaphor, silence, and ambiguity in Vizenor’s works are also at once lucid and complex. But Blaeser’s most impressive achievement—and it is one that reflects the workings of Vizenor’s mind—is her critical discussion. She draws important lit­ erary theorists such as Mikhail Bakhtin, Jean Baudrillard, Terry Eagleton, Umberto Eco, Wolfgang Iser, Walter Ong, Elaine Jahner, and Susan Griffin into discourse with Native American scholars Arnold Krupat, Louis Owens, Larry Evers, Filipe Molina, Leslie Marmon Silko, and N. Scott Momaday. Historians Ward Churchill, Richard Drinnon, Calvin Martin, and Richard Slotkin and anthropologists Frances Densmore, Julie Cruikshank, and Barbara Babcock also join the discussion alongside critics of photography Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes. This discursive flow enables one to comprehend Gerald Vizenor’s work in the context of American as well as Native American literature and creates the dynamism essential to engage Gerald Vizenor’s discourse. A l a n n a K a t h l e e n B r o w n M o n t a n a S ta te Un iv e r s it y Beloved Land: The World of Emily Carr. Introduction by Robin Laurence. (Vancouver/Seattle: Douglas McIntyre/University of Washington Press, 1996. 104 pages, $17.95.) Sky, moss, fern, cedar, totem pole, and salai: on one level, these are the main ingredients of Emily Carr’s paintings. Yet her “beloved land” is not only coastal ...