"You can't run away nowadays": Redefining Modernity in D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded

When D'Arcy McNickle (1904–77) began work on his first novel in the 1920s, he hoped he would become part of the circle of modernist writers.¹ Inclusion in the American literary canon and incorporation into the greater American culture were not (and still are not) the goals for many Native writers, as Craig Womack argues in Red on Red. By contrast, McNickle, an enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, longed to publish a novel that would reach "a wider audience than any other form of writing," as he described in 1934 his goal of writing fiction (Correspondence).² He traveled to Europe as a young man, where he mingled with American expatriates and began work on his first novel. He even called the manuscript "The Hungry Generations"—a title that invokes (with a difference) Gertrude Stein's "The Lost Generation" (which in turn refers to John Keats's term). Eventually published as The Surrounded (1936), McNickle's novel about a half-blood's return home to the reservation engages in an intertextual dialogue with modernist writers and artists of the 1920s and 1930s, particularly in the novel's thematic focus on the disorientation and disjuncture of the modern era.³

While McNickle was not a part of the modernist literary movement nor should his novel be considered a modernist text, understanding his life and his modernist-era novel enables readers to develop a more historically and culturally nuanced portrait of the modern era.⁴ McNickle, who was raised on the Flathead Indian Reservation in northern Montana but lived all of his adult life off of the reservation, experienced firsthand many of the conditions that led to the modernist demand for new modes of representation, while he also directly experienced the sweeping changes occurring in federal Indian policy in the modern period. Drawing upon but also critiquing modernist concerns, The Surrounded illustrates that while many Native Americans experienced the despair that modernists expressed, its cause was the federal policies to rid the modern world of Indian cultures, not the ontological uncertainty of the period, as it was for many modernists. The Surrounded insists that Native American experiences of forced dislocation from homelands and the attempted eradication of tribal cultures be considered in understanding the modern experience.⁵

Modernity from McNickle's Perspective On and Off the Reservation

Born in the first decade of the twentieth century, McNickle entered a world undergoing dramatic and dizzying transformations on both national and international levels. The advent of modernity meant that people participated in increasingly complicated networks of exchange, occasioned by the spread of capitalism and modernization to a wider range of people globally, accelerating industrialization and its changing modes of production and consumption, rapid technological changes (including electricity, the telephone, movies, automobiles), increased urbanization, and massive immigration and internal migrations.⁶ The United States saw significant changes on economic, cultural, demographic, and political levels. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the nation was experiencing what historical geographer David Harvey has called a "time-space compression" in which it felt as if time were accelerated through the increased organization of production (e.g., Ford's assembly line) and as if space were collapsed with the increasing use of radio and automobiles. The closing of the frontier in 1890, at least in the popular American consciousness, further exacerbated this changing relationship to time and space.⁷

The transformations in the very structures of society led to new epistemological and ontological understandings of the world, with important developments in theories about the human psyche and the brain, culture and race, economics, religion and god, time and space, and the workings of the universe. Such a fundamental paradigm shift in thinking about the nature of human experience, in the very perception of reality itself, in turn led to radically altered ways of representing that world. For the modernist artists and writers of the early twentieth century, the new experience of reality led to a lack of confidence in an objective, external reality and in the ability of...