Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature by Gordon Sayre (review)

Revue canadienne d’études américaines 30 (2000) 113 tute in Copenhagen. He and Lise Meitner are walking in the Swedish countryside; she’s just received a letter from Hahn; his recent experiment shows barium turning up in uranium bombarded by neutrons: “As Frisch and Meitner went past the river and in among the trees, they became more and more excited. Finally they sat down on a fallen tree, and she began to calculate on scraps of paper.” Thus is the walk “interrupted by epiphanies.” Hahn has split the atom. A terrible knowledge is born. (We note the deliberate echo of the flawed adventurer Hemingway as we are troubled by the fallen tree.) The unintended consequences follow as Rutherford’s dark kiwi magic heads westward : “It was a strange instinct that took the bomb to the desert. It is possible to read the flight of the physicists to this remote setting as a kind of Exodus....” Thus Solnit in a resolutely blasphemous riff. The remote setting is Los Alamos. Solnit does not translate the name, although she does translate the Sangre de Cristo/Blood of Christ mountains that tower above Los Alamos, the poplars, their Arcadian innocence forever gone. Solnit’s essay will long dwell in the memory, its quirky trajectory limning what what Anthony Burgess termed “the ripe gorgonzola of evil.” Writing from the edge indeed. Barbara Moon and Dan Obe are the meticulous editors of this refreshing anthology. Banff should do it again. Patrick MacFadden, Carleton University Gordon Sayre. Les Sauvages Américains: Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997. Pp. xxii + 384. Illustrations, bibliographic references, and index. One of the things which always amazes me about the reading process is how a single sentence can fundamentally alter one’s disposition towards the work as a whole. In the case of Gordon M. Sayre’s Les Sauvages Américains : Representations of Native Americans in French and English Colonial Literature, this sentence comes early. With an appropriate frisson of white, male, lefty guilt, I must admit that when I read the subtitle of Sayre’s book, I braced myself to dutifully follow yet another self-flagellating pilgrimage along the circuits and stations of the now well-trodden path of “the representation of (insert Other(s) here) in (insert Eurocentric literature here)” genre. The first page of his pref- Canadian Review of American Studies 30 (2000) 114 ace did little to assuage my anticipatory unease. It begins with the generically perfunctory discussion of Adam’s naming of the animals in Genesis and goes on to make the equally perfunctory claim that the relationship between the power to name and the power to control is at the very root of colonialism. While I would not deny for an instant the power of naming or the ethnocentrism of the colonizing Europeans, I must confess that my predisposition towards the book changed from one rooted in duty to one born of pleasure and curiosity when Sayre followed the above claim with a simple, yet mood-altering, sentence. This sentence runs “it is not always so simple” (xi). It perfectly encapsulates Sayre’s belief that the oversimplified description of colonial literature drawn by many critics solely as an instance of Eurocentric semiotic imperialism is a result of a markedly non-dialectal concept of the “Other,” which overlooks the polyphonic tensions between the codes governing descriptive genres, the intertextual relationship between colonial texts, the often contradictory cultural assumptions of the writer, and his experience of the pragmatics of contact and communication with the Native peoples. In this clash between and within life worlds, Sayre argues, the rhetorical tropes of substitution and negation served as the basis of the writer/explorer’s attempt to expand his interpretive horizon through an engagement with Native culture. Briefly put, Sayre argues that the trope of substitution is at work when explorers describe Native practices in terms of their similarities to those of ‘ancient’ Europeans like the Scythians. The trope of negation, on the other hand, is at work when explorers describe Native practices in terms of the negation of practices institutionalized in European societies (it was common, for...