Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature by Brian Swann (review)

Book Reviews265 Just as perceptively, she presents stimulating interpretations of art works. Whereas Joyce and Picasso introduce irony into the romance-painting relationship , Seurat and others reflect the conflict between representational and nonrepresentational tendencies as modern art strives to recapture narrativity through the use ofmultiple episodes, repetition ofthe subject, and realist norms. According to Steiner, the logical outcome of this evolution of aesthetic theory and practice is pop art, where vision can once again imply narrativity but at the same time introduce problems of value for modern viewers. Her analysis of modernism's destabilization of the conventions of pictorial realism reveals the developing new relations between design and narrative, the abstract and the representational. The pop artists Warhol and Lichtenstein employ forms ofrealistic repetitions to signal new approaches to reality, identity, and narrative that often undermine narrativity and abstraction in order to criticize the nature of modernist and postmodernist values. Steiner's study represents an excellent example of new interdisciplinary approaches in that it attempts to connect the developments in two different arts on more than just surface formalisms. In turn, Pictures ofRomance should initiate endeavors by others to begin filling in the history of an important topic. Not only is this book well written, but its analyses and interpretations of art and literature deserve consideration by those in both fields. EUGENE R. CUNNAR New Mexico State University BRIAN SWANN and ARNOLD KRUPAT, eds. Recovering the Word: Essays on Native American Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. 644 p. Writing is ... a primary act of the imagination: to articulate, in an instant of time, what is known and felt" (565). Paula Gunn Allen describes literature in those terms in "Bringing Home the Fact: Tradition and Continuity in the Imagination," the next-to-last essay in this scholarly collection. Change "writing " to "editing" and you have a description of what Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat have accomplished. "The essays in this book, we believe, fairly represent a good deal—if, inevitably, not all—of the most interesting work currently being done by social scientists and literary critics on Native American literatures" (7), they say in their introduction. Recovering the Word does seem to "articulate," at this "instant of time, what is known and felt" about their topic. "The primary impulse of the imagination is wholeness," Allen writes. "It is . . . the faculty which relates exterior perception to interior impression" (566). Imaginative editing establishes such relationships in this collection, "addressing the linked and overlapping issues ofpresentation and interpretation of Native American literatures" (5), and should make possible the editors' hope that "students and younger critics . . . will want to build on what appears here," and also "pursue some roads not taken by our contributors" (7). 266Rocky Mountain Review Readers will respond to the book on the basis of what experience they bring to it. For me that meant what I have put together in bits and pieces over the twenty years since I first thought students in a Montana college surrounded by Native American traditions should have the opportunity to learn more about their neighbors through an introductory course in Indian literature. My background in what the editors call "structural-functional anthropology" (6) has been rudimentary; this volume has enlightened me. It has also deepened and confirmed what I have learned from Indian and other sources about the "cultureand -personality" (6) dimensions of the literature. For students discovering Native American work for the first time, I recommend starting with the last two essays in the book: Allen's discussion of the imagination at work and William Bevis's analysis of six Native American novels . Move then to mid-book descriptions of Coyote and other trickster figures, next to the emphasis on performance factors and the role of audience in traditional tales. Finally, read the discussions of language, linguistics, and translation in the theory section with which the book begins. Allen says literature "reflects the deepest meanings of a community ... by carrying forward archetypes within a meaningful structure" (565), then cites N. Scott Momaday's House Made ofDawn as illustration. It is "an act of the imagination designed to heal; it is about the relationship between good and evil" (571). The structure is that...