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7 Writing in the Fourth Person A Lacanian Reading of Vizenor’s Pronouns Deborah L. Madsen What are the real names, nouns, and pronouns heard in the unbearable simulations of tribal consciousness? How can a pronoun be a source of tribal identities in translation? How can a pronoun be a representation, an inscription of absence, a simulation of the presence of sound, and a person in translation? —Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners Is the little man ready? —Gerald Vizenor, “I Know What You Mean, Erdupps MacChurbbs” Linda Lizut Helstern broke new ground with her 1999 essay “‘Bad Breath’: Gerald Vizenor’s Lacanian Fable,” published in Studies in Short Fiction. In that essay, she uses Lacan’s concept of the “chain of signification,” the endless deferral of meaning in language, to illuminate aspects of Vizenor ’s narrative technique, especially the creation of a trickster space of semantic unfixity: In his fictions, Vizenor aims for nothing less than a change in the American image of the Indian as a savage on the verge of extinction , an image, that has dominated American literature since The Last of the Mohicans. It would seem that Vizenor’s goal is consonant with the theoretical writings of Jacques Lacan, for what Vizenor is attempting is to free the signifier from its Sausseurian [sic] bond to the signified. As Vizenor himself states, Lacan “liberates the signifier; the comic holotrope in trickster narratives. Lacan warns not to ‘cling to the illusion that the signifier answers to the function of representing the signified, or better, that the signifier has to answer for its existence in the name of any signification whatever’” (“Trickster” 189). Constructed through a network of relationships in the process of continual negotiation, according to Lacan, neither language nor subjectivity can ever be fixed.1 130 Writing in the Fourth Person 131 Yet both language and subjectivity are indeed fixed, and Lacan devoted much of his theoretical effort to cases of overconformity to demands for stability. The pursuit of a fixed object that in its ontological stability can be recognized is, in Lacan’s writing, a mystery because we know we cannot achieve the epistemological conditions for knowability. Yet we continue to pursue the goal of recognition despite this knowledge and despite previous experience of frustration and disappointment. Why? Why is recognition so important that we risk all to achieve it? Recognition as Lacan formulates it in “The Eye and the Gaze” is not simply knowledge of an object, but crucially knowledge of ourselves and self-recognition through the agency of language and the language of the Other.2 So when we address another person, in the first or perhaps second person, we are also and always addressing a silent and invisible, all-seeing and omniscient interlocutor: the Other who maintains surveillance over how we speak. On a basic level, it is with this Other that we check the correctness of our grammar, the propriety of our vocabulary, the effectiveness of our rhetoric. In another simultaneous register, the truth value of what we say when we give our word by articulating it to another and to an Other is also at stake. My truth is my effectiveness through rhetoric, vocabulary, and grammar. As Juliet Flower MacCannell observes, “As with the gift, the promise, the word, [messages] are always as much addressed to an unknown, unmanned or unseen ‘other’ as to any co-present or known interlocutor. This ‘Other’ is witness to, guarantor of, their value.” And the lack of response by the Other to this message, far from suggesting that the Other does not exist, in fact confirms its existence , as MacCannell continues: “because it interrupts the message from self to other, the actual absence of a response to his message appears to its sender as if it were an answer: the ‘Other’ provides the missing ‘response.’”3 Certain kinds of literature lay bare this dynamic within the structure of language. In this essay, I suggest that Vizenor’s writing not only performs this deconstructive linguistic work but, further, challenges us to read in the validating power of the Other a trace of “the real names, nouns, and pronouns heard in the unbearable simulations of tribal consciousness .”4 It is in his refusal to make sense according to the dictates of the Other that the difficulty of his writing lies. Most obviously through his neologisms, Vizenor revolutionizes the way we situate ourselves discursively in relation to ourselves and others. Pronouns offer a vehicle for destabilizing and exposing the terms...

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