Gerald Vizenor (review)

The papers collected in this volume were originally presented at the 2006 conference devoted to the work of Gerald Vizenor, hosted by the Université Paul-Valéry in Montpellier, France. In her editorial introduction, Simone Pellerin explains her desire to capture something of the atmosphere of the meeting by resisting the temptation to transform the presentations into the genre of the scholarly book. Thus, the introduction reproduces, unedited, her welcoming speech to the participants. That she does not entirely succeed in the effort to resist crystallizing the conference into book form is no bad thing. For this is certainly a scholarly volume and one of considerable importance. Surprisingly, for a writer of Vizenor's stature and one so frequently written about in journal articles, book chapters, and other publications devoted to the broader field of Native American literature, few book-length studies devoted exclusively to his work have appeared. While Vizenor's prominence and importance in the field of Native American writing is universally acknowledged, his challenges to received thinking may have repositioned the interpretation of Native life and art in such a fundamental way that scholars in the field have forgotten where these shaping influences originated. Edited volumes drawing our attention to the foundational significance of Vizenor's work are limited to A. Robert Lee's landmark volume Loosening the Seams: Interpretations of Gerald Vizenor, two special issues of Studies in American Indian Literature, one special issue of American Indian Quarterly, and Gerald Vizenor: Texts and Contexts, coedited by Deborah L. Madsen and A. Robert Lee. Single-author monographs devoted to Vizenor are even fewer, comprising Kimberly Blaeser's Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition and my own Understanding Gerald Vizenor. It is in the context of this rather scandalous paucity of books about Vizenor's work that Simone Pellerin's volume must be welcomed, and it is from this context that the book derives much of its importance.

This is not to suggest that the essays published here are not valuable in their own right. Indeed, this collection brings together an admirable range of approaches to Vizenor's work by both established and younger scholars from both sides of the Atlantic. Some of the essays focus upon a specific text: Helmbrecht Breinig on genre transdifference in The Heirs of Columbus, Bernadette Rigal-Cellard on the doubling of history in Hiroshima Bugi, John Purdy on the ecological vision of Bearheart. Both Lionel Larré and Elvira Pulitano write on Interior Landscapes but from quite different perspectives: Larré focuses on the twin issues of power and resistance while Pulitano offers an account of the self-reflexive style of Vizenor's "theoretical autobiography." Others address the generic aspect of his writing: A. Robert Lee writes about Vizenor as poet, James Mackay situates him as a campus novelist, Wolfgang Hochbruck addresses Vizenor as dramatist, and Kimberly Blaeser engages the underdis-cussed early journalism. Thus, the volume offers a valuable range of engagement with Vizenor's very considerable oeuvre. Perhaps most interesting, however, are the essays that range widely across Vizenor's literary achievement, often highlighting unexpected and illuminating connections: Linda Lizut Helstern on the concept of disability in Vizenor's fiction, Chris LaLonde on the trope of the telephone, and Lee Schweninger on Vizenor's "environmental ethos."

The collection as a whole offers a wealth of interconnections and mutually illuminating cross-references among the essays. For example, in the essays on Interior Landscapes Pulitano links the autobiography to Augustine's Confessions in terms of their common "autocritical" quality and concludes with a discussion of photography in Vizenor's life writing, though it is an unfortunate historical circumstance that her essay was written before the publication of the second edition of Interior Landscapes with its expanded sets of photographs, while Lionel Larré uses Foucault's concept of biopolitics to engage the mixed-blood's embodiment of mechanisms both of social discipline and control, and also of resistance, captured in the trope of "wicked...