The Poetry and Poetics of Gerald Vizenor

6: Gaps, Immediacy, and the Deconstruction of Epistemological Categories: The Impact of Gerald Vizenor’s Poetry on His Prose

98 CHAP TER SIX GAPS, IMMEDIACY, AND THE DECONSTRUCTION OF EPISTEMOLOGICAL CATEGORIES The Impact of Gerald Vizenor’s Poetry on His Prose Katja Sarkowsky Gerald Vizenor is one of the most prolific Native writers and scholars, and an important cultural theorist; his coinage (or creative revival) of terms such as “postindian” or “survivance” has become indispensable for contemporary cultural theory and Native American studies. It is, however, Vizenor’s poetry and specifically his engagement with haiku that have stood at the beginning of his long literary and academic career. As Tom Lynch observes, Vizenor’s encounter with haiku was “formative in the development of his literary aesthetic and impelled his political consciousness” (“To Honor Impermanence,” 204). Poetry thus marks a beginning, but certainly not an “early stage” of Vizenor’s work, let alone the more “private” section in relation to his overtly political prose writing (203–4). Rather, Vizenor illustrates some of his theoretical, political, and philosophical agendas both in his poetry and his prose: “In fact, the haiku and free verse poems from this era introduce some of the language and many of the themes that became Vizenor’s trademark. In addition, Vizenor’s work in haiku and the reexpression of Anishinaabe dream songs has had important influence on his later style and philosophy of writing” (Blaeser, “‘Interior Dancers,’” 3). Hence, Vizenor’s poetry can be seen as foundational for both his theory and his narrative texts. Vizenor’s work is characterized by a deconstructionist agenda—a deconstruction of preconceived notions of “knowledge” and “fact,” “terminal creeds,” and “manifest manners,” as he calls them (Manifest Manners, 3–6). Vizenor generally deploys writing strategies that are meant to unsettle the reader’s relationship to language and conceptual thinking, and thus to bring about a more intuitive relationship between language and experience. Central to this agenda and the associated strategies is what he has called “trickster hermeneutics,” “the interpretation of simulations in the literature gaps, immediacy, and the deconstruction of categories 99 of survivance” (15), a hermeneutics of transformation, and a “postmodern condition” (66). The trickster as the central element is combined with a number of other strategies, drawing on various cultural sources, that result in a transcultural language game. Closely connected to this, I argue, is the deployment of “haiku hermeneutics” (“Envoy to Haiku,” 30), a hermeneutics of gaps and immediacy. Both trickster and haiku hermeneutics, by creating open and often even contradictory texts in poetry and prose, can be understood as directly involving the reader. They assign her an active and creative role by staging “gaps” of cognition and perception. As Vizenor has it, “the reader creates a dreamscape from haiku, . . . the real master of the haiku is the imaginative reader who finds a dreamscape in natural harmonies beneath the words” (introduction to Matsushima, n.p.) and the same creative activity is demanded from the reader in his prose. This essay discusses the intersections of Vizenor’s poetry and prose, formally and thematically. I argue that the strategies developed in Vizenor’s haiku and through his engagement with Anishinaabe dream songs are fundamental to understanding the ways in which he puts forth an agenda of unsettling notions of “truth,” an agenda of deconstructing epistemological categories through an invocation of immediacy and strategies of gaps. In the following, I briefly look more generally at Vizenor’s poetry (haiku in particular) and its relation to prose before I turn in more detail to an analysis of this influence in two novels, Dead Voices (1992) and Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 (2003). “ARISING IN SHADOWS”: POETRY AND PROSE Vizenor encountered haiku as an artform (and an attitude) during his time as a soldier in Japan.1 The acquaintance with and growing appreciation of haiku opened for him a way to tribal literary traditions: “That presence of haiku, more than other literature touched my imagination and brought me closer to a sense of tribal consciousness. . . . The impermanence of natural reason and tribal remembrance was close to the mood of impermanence in haiku and other literature. My poems and stories would arise in shadows, the evanescence of interior landscapes” (“Envoy,” 28). Haiku present images and produce “interior landscapes” specifically through the reader’s encounter with the image; as will be shown in this essay, Vizenor uses this strategy not only in his haiku, but also in variations in his prose. katja sarkowsky 100 A haiku is a seventeen-syllable poem of three lines...