Gerald Vizenor: Texts and Contexts

4. Wild Word Hunters: Tricky Language and Literary Allusion in Harold of Orange

American Fiction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980). 71. Blaeser, Gerald Vizenor, 107. 4 Wild Word Hunters Tricky Language and Literary Allusion in Harold of Orange John Gamber We are wild word hunters, tricksters on the run. —Gerald Vizenor, Harold of Orange In the line “We are wild word hunters, tricksters on the run” from his 1984 screenplay Harold of Orange,1 Gerald Vizenor illustrates his text’s constant and overt pursuit of linguistic multiplicity, slippage, allusion, and irony. Vizenor hunts these wild words in order to flush out language’s hidden meanings and to illustrate both its taming and its feral implications and powers. This screenplay portrays a band of tricksters, the Warriors of Orange, and their “de facto leader,” Harold Sinseer, as they attempt to con a charitable foundation into giving them money.2 The protagonist’s name itself embodies the irony and wordplay that defines this script; it an example of what Vizenor calls “the tease of a nickname, the visual scene that creates the nickname, and the many stories that turn on that name.”3 In the case of Harold of Orange, however, many stories turn on key words and phrases as well as on names. Harold Sinseer, whose role as a trickster figure is established in the screenplay’s opening scene, might seem at first to oppose “the sincere,” despite his name’s homophonic parallel. Trickster figures pervade American Indian stories, but Vizenor constructs his trickster figures within an Anishinaabe framework. He explains that the Anishinaabe trickster Naanabozho is “related to plants and animals and trees; he is a teacher and healer in various personalities who, as numerous stories reveal, explains the values of healing plants, wild rice, maple sugar, basswood, and birch bark to woodland tribal people. More than a magnanimous teacher and transformer, the trickster is capable of violence, deceptions, and cruelties: the realities of human imperfec67 68 PART ONE tions.”4 In other words, relying on a trickster to be “sincere” is likely to get you into trouble. One of the striking features of Harold as trickster, though, is that he never conceals or denies his identity; even his tricks and duplicities are sincere. But the name “Sinseer” also carries a double meaning, not only punning on sincere, but also on sin seer. Throughout the screenplay, Harold narrates tales of loss, theft, ethnocide, exile, and incarceration. Harold serves as witness to the sins committed against Native people across the Americas. Finally, Harold is a herald, foreshadowing revolutionary trickster possibilities for indigenous survivance. The wordplay present in the protagonist’s name establishes the pattern of linguistic games that operate throughout the screenplay. In this essay, I argue for the importance of looking at Harold of Orange not only on the level of plot, as has been done in a number of interesting essays, but at the level of specific linguistic games operating within it.5 Specifically, I argue that Harold of Orange, in particular its multiple meanings of words and phrases, offers an early insight into Vizenor’s poststructuralist fascination with language. This attention to nuanced phrases and the tensions between multiple meanings (and their supplementary and cumulative effects) illustrates Vizenor’s insistence on understanding and using language as a living, vibrant element of the world rather than a static tool of colonial or tribal power. Finally, I investigate some of the heretofore unexamined literary allusions in the screenplay to illustrate Vizenor’s engagement with historical textual representations of and commentaries about Native people, especially as related to mainstream U.S. culture. I focus on the largely unexamined fringes or margins of this screenplay: the title and protagonist’s name as indicative of Vizenor’s linguistic play, the introduction and Trickster Song that commence the narrative, and the screenplay’s literary allusions to D. H. Lawrence and James Fenimore Cooper, foundational texts about romantic or vilified Indian/white relationships or both.6 These binary constructions of the tragic mode contrast Vizenor’s privileged comic representations of the fluidity , permeability, and possibilities of a North America in which people of almost countless cultures dwell, interact, intermingle, and interbreed. The plot of the screenplay follows Harold and his Warriors of Orange as they attempt to convince “the Bily Foundation” to give them money under the auspices of growing “pinch beans” in order to start a string of coffeehouses on tribal reservations. Harold justifies this venture by opining , “Where there are coffee houses there are tricksters and revolutions” (57). As in the bulk of his work...