Chair of Tears by Gerald Vizenor (review)

The tricky, rapid vignettes that comprise Chair of Tears, Gerald Vizenor’s novel of “native survivance,” create an unsettling narrative, rich in irony, inversion, and, veiled behind the twisted mantras of academic discourse, invective. The stories and character sketches are told by an unnamed cousin of the novel’s central figure, Captain Shammer, grandson of the legendary and mercurial Captain Eighty (nicknamed, indeed, for the atomic number of mercury), and Quiver, a “native maven of poker scenes” (1), who raised their family on a houseboat on Lake Itasca, the headwaters of the Mississippi River in northern Minnesota. Much of the novel’s activity, though, takes place in the almost farcical Department of Native American Indian Studies at a semifictionalized version of the University of Minnesota. Captain Shammer, having “never applied, auditioned, or petitioned for the position,” much less attended a university at all, is nevertheless appointed as the seventh department chair after six failed appointments in as many years (23). This endowed chair is the eponymous “Chair of Tears.”

The novel proceeds to relate stories of Captain Shammer’s ironic—often hilarious—reforms of the department, ranging from his arrival at the first faculty meeting dressed as General Custer (23); to the recasting of the research library as an “academic casino” (46); to raising a litter of “irony mongrels” (with names such as Derrida, Lévi-Strauss, and Nixon) who bark when they perceive the absence of irony (16–19); to establishing the Denivance Press, whose “ironic maxim” is “the absolute denial of manuscripts from the best and brightest authors” (99). Building up and then flipping and disrupting as it does the official codes and structures of the academy, the book shares certain ironic qualities with fellow Ojibwe novelist David Treuer’s The Translation of Dr. Apelles (2006) but quickly becomes a unique trickster testament to “native presence” in the university, as Vizenor extends, with characteristic wit, his ongoing resistance to reductive colonialist narratives of “absence” and “victimry”—all terms that, along with his coinage “survivance,” appear, reappear, and dance throughout the novel.

Indeed, one of the novel’s hallmarks is the lyricism in its ironic academicism. Vizenor masterfully deploys a host of academic terms with panache, studied rhythm, and sonorous texture. At one point, for example, while the irony dogs are sounding their suspicion of religion, Vizenor writes, “the trusty mongrels persisted to bark and warn the world that the absence of irony is terminal and the treacherous end of civilization” (67). Assonant patterns like this one permeate the text and train the reader to look—almost too hard—for ironic twists and unsettling turns of phrase. For the non-Native reader like me the sense of disruptive irony is acute, and it is a potent reminder that despite its claims to the contrary, the academy, too, is ever a shade—or a Shammer—away from exactly the kind of reductive category hunting Vizenor’s tales of Native survivance actively resist. For this reason the laughter Chair of Tears can elicit, especially from the academic reader, is wonderfully and productively uncomfortable.