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  • Apelles’s WarTranscending Stereotypes of American Indigenous Peoples in David Treuer’s The Translation of Dr. Apelles
  • David Yost (bio)

With the possible exception of Dr. Apelles’s full-page sigh, no sentence in Anishinaabe author David Treuer’s The Translation of Dr. Apelles calls more attention to itself than that which ends the “Translator’s Note”—“It was a time of” (2)—and continues in the prologue in bold-faced type—“war” (3). Yet despite the emphasis of this claim, warfare is surprisingly absent from the story of Bimaadiz and Eta. The narrator explains from the beginning that this “war” is not, as the reader might think, “between the people and their enemies across the river” (3); though a “small band to the north” later raids the protagonists’ village (104), the attack forms only a single incident among many. In the Apelles and Campaspe sections, this absence is even more pronounced. While Treuer’s previous novels, Little and The Hiawatha, each contain at least one brutal murder, Dr. Apelles lives a placid life in his solitary apartment and a variety of libraries; his happiness is threatened not by violence but rather by extreme isolation.

The war that gives The Translation of Dr. Apelles its shape, then, does not appear to be a war of nations or tribes. Rather, it is a war of texts. Like Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, The Translation of Dr. Apelles emphasizes the importance of “translating” one’s own story for a lover to “read.” However, Apelles also complicates this process by showing the text that Euroamerican culture has already created for its Indian characters: an idyllic pastoral romance modeled on Daphnis and Chloe, whose protagonists are here disguised under the names Bimaadiz and Eta.1 These sections represent [End Page 59] the simulation of Indigenous life into which Apelles, an Anishinaabe scholar, fears disappearing, and only by writing his life story in explicit counterpoint can he “translate” his life for others as well as for himself.

Despite David Treuer’s rising profile in the national media—including interviews in The New York Times (Smith) and The Washington Post (Charles) and several articles on the popular Web site Slate (Treuer, “Going Native” and “His Home”)—his novels have received surprisingly little academic criticism, and The Translation of Dr. Apelles has yet to receive any scholarly attention beyond its initial reviews. The few articles that exist on Treuer’s other novels, however, provide a useful starting point in approaching Apelles.

In the only full-length academic article on Little yet published, David Stirrup notes Treuer’s now well-known skepticism of “cultural” readings—defined by Stirrup as scholarship that reads texts purely as products of their cultures, without regard to their individual characteristics or “artistry”—and responds by constructing a “double-stranded reading” of Little, examining how it might be read through both “culture-specific” and “literary” lenses (652). Stirrup explores Little’s death in some detail, comparing it to the “resurrective cycle” of both Christian and Anishinaabe mythologies (662), but he also examines how Little situates itself against essentializing “cultural” readings of contemporary Indigenous literatures. Through juxtaposed scenes such as Stan’s and Donovan’s deer hunting and Paul’s slaughtering of a cow, Stirrup argues, the novel works to “teasingly encourage the assumption of stereotypes that deny the personal, local issues these sequences engage with” (656). By luring the reader into these essentialist readings, but then showing the limitations of these readings, Little ultimately “both tempts and resists the cultural reading” (667).

In Padraig Kirwan’s “Remapping Place and Narrative in Native American Literature: David Treuer’s The Hiawatha”—like Stirrup’s, the only article on its subject to date—the author takes a similar approach. He argues that The Hiawatha consciously inverts a common plot of the “Native American novels” that preceded it: the “homing pattern” by which Indigenous characters must return to [End Page 60] their “tribal and individual roots” (2). Listing three “critical preconceptions” for Native American fiction (“that the tribal novel must always tell the story of ‘dispossession’ rather than one of sovereignty; the Indian protagonist must journey home to find his/her...

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