Reading the Fire: Essays in the Traditional Indian Literatures of the Far West by Jarold Ramsey (review)

246 Western American Literature There is also much that seems brand new in this volume. As one who has had occasion to think and write about Stegner’slife, I was grateful for new insights into the background of The Big Rock Candy M ountain, for a fuller picture of the novelist’s dealings with publishers, a much expanded account of the early teaching career and misgivings about campus politics at Wisconsin and Harvard, a description of the “mock execution” that figured in the research for The Preacher and the Slave (Joe Hill), and abundant new infor­ mation on Stegner’s pivotal role in the conservation movement. There are also several very useful intervals of artistic self-appraisal: the observation, for example, that On a Darkling Plain is “entirely made,” and the rather striking declaration that Bruce Mason’s relationship to his father in “The Blue-Winged Teal” is “absolutely routine, standard Oedipal.” But the most welcome supplement to our understanding of Stegner may well be the gen­ erous handful of observations on the art of fiction that appear scattered through these interviews. He elaborates in familiar ways on the relationship between history and fiction, pays tribute to literary forebears (especially Conrad), expounds on point of view (“the most important basic problem in the writing of fiction”), and takes a stand on the proper purpose of fiction (“the perception of truth, the attempt to get at the concerns of the human heart”). This is vintage Stegner, to be sure. But it is also a salutary reminder of his settled commitment to the ideals of continuity, craftsmanship, coopera­ tion and restraint in life and art west of the hundredth meridian. FORREST G. ROBINSON University of California, Santa Cruz Reading the Fire: Essays in the Traditional Indian Literatures of the Far West. By Jarold Ramsey. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. xxi + 250 pages, $16.95.) In this volume Jarold Ramsey has collected nearly a dozen important essays representing almost a decade of work with Indian oral literatures. Many of these are articles of historical as well as critical importance. “The Wife Who Goes Out Like a Man, Comes Back as a Hero,” for instance, was the first article ever published by P M LA on Native American oral literature. “The Bible in Western Indian Mythology,” first published in the Journal of American Folklore, to my mind is still the best modern introduction to the ways in which Indians have adapted alien materials. Ramsey has substantially increased the utility of his book by sequencing the essays so that their subject matter corresponds roughly to the periods of narrative time by which many Native American tribes organize their concep­ tion of the past. The first essay examines a Blackfeet variant of the EarthDiver creation story, and the second the Trickster/Transformer figure. The next four essays address a variety of myths, usually by trying to assess their cultural significance in terms of the values highlighted therein. The next two, which discuss explicitly historical narratives, are among the weakest in the book, because they do not reflect the great deal of sophisticated work being Reviews 247 done in Native American oral history. There follows a very interesting essay on “retroactive prophecies,” narratives composed after the fact to resemble forecasts of what was to come. This harmonizes nicely with his essay on Biblical material included next. The book concludes with an essay discussing the necessity to provide ethnographic information to help make sense of the text. Despite those qualities for which several of the essays in this book have been justly praised, it isjust this last essay, however, which touches the greatest weakness of the book. In his Introduction Ramsey makes the now almost obligatory confession of faith that there is virtue in accepting the foreignness of Native American texts, “lest we do this literature a disservice, compounded by a show of scholarship, that has been done to it for so long in popular cul­ ture — that is, anglicize it, make it conform to Anglo literary conventions and tastes” (xx). In the next paragraph, however, he plunges right ahead in insisting on recording his observation of “certain odd parallels between, say, The Winter’s Tale and...