- Chair of Tears by Gerald Vizenor
In Chair of Tears Vizenor returns to the genre of the campus novel. The most obvious comparison is with Chancers (2001), but in this latest return to the world of academia Vizenor offers many more laugh-out-loud moments and a general tone that is much less bleak in a narrative that is no less serious just because it is seriously funny. His irony is as sharp as ever in this rollicking trickster tale that is framed by the auctioning of the failing Department of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota. Indeed, the serious question posed by the novel asks us to imagine how an academic department of American Indian studies would function if its structures and practices were determined by Anishinaabe tribal values. Of course, Vizenor’s satire does not work to propose a utopian alternative to present realities; as elsewhere in his writing, his effort is directed into creative processes of disruption and dismantling through a militant style of satire. The entire rhetorical arsenal of satire is deployed in this narrative: parody, burlesque, outrageous exaggeration, irony, of course, and a sustained analogy between the academic “reservation” known as the campus and the lexicon of historical tribal experience.
The introduction of the opening frame is delayed, preceded by family stories told by the unnamed first-person narrator. While the slender dimensions of the novel suggest at first that this may form the third in a trilogy with Father Meme (2008) and Shrouds of White Earth (2010), the distinctive second-person narrative mode of the earlier novels is supplanted here by a complex narrative voice that is articulated in the style of direct spoken discourse yet lacks a defined “you” that is being addressed. The effect is a narrative that seems to speak in the second [End Page 101] person and yet does not. The issue of speaking is evoked in the long series of epigrams that preface the novel: Emerson on the emancipatory power of nature infused with spirit; William Warren on the crane clan, origin stories, and the fate of such stories when heard as “bona fide belief ” by “white hearers.” These epigrams work to situate the narrative voice within the oral tradition while signaling the liberating power of play that will characterize the entire narrative. The opening story, “Captain Eighty,” situates the narrator as the grandson of the eponymous trickster ancestor and his wife Quiver, a poker-playing genius, establishing, as the narrator describes, the “family traces and the natural currents of our presence [that] were turned to cold blood and racial fractions by federal separatists” (2). The gap between nature and spirit that can only be filled with stories, to which the epigram from Emerson alludes, provides the epistemological space within which the novel does its satirical work. The separation that Emerson identifies is politicized in terms of the racial policies, such as blood quantum, that Vizenor addresses.
In a novel that is preoccupied with deception, imitation, and simulation, the distinctive narrative voice is perhaps the most fundamental level on which the text plays with appearances and expectations. And yet inevitably we are invited to bring a set of expectations to our reading of a latest addition to the Vizenor canon. There are many motifs that will be familiar to Vizenor’s regular readers: the location of Captain Eighty’s houseboat on the headwaters of the Mississippi River; characters like Father Mother Browne, Coke de Fountain, and Almost Browne; Dogroy Beaulieu appears as the cousin of the narrator, and further links with Shrouds of White Earth are represented by the Women of the Creature Arts, allusions to Camus and Chagall, and a prominent return of the “Irony Dogs”: these highly skilled animals, which are trained to sniff out the absence of irony, are let loose to hilarious effect in the seminar rooms of Vizenor’s fictionalized university. Familiar concepts are also deployed in this narrative: chance and gaming, Native survivance, memory, “natural reason,” victimry, the postindian—Captain Eighty creates and sells to tourists “postindian...