Gerald Vizenor: Texts and Contexts (review)

In Understanding Gerald Vizenor (2009), Deborah Madsen crafts a truism of utmost economy: "Reading his work is difficult." Although the present volume does not purport to elucidate like Madsen's earlier text, neither does it dwell, in the main, on what is difficult about Vizenor. Instead, the majority of contributors understand that difficulty in the context of "[h]is challenges to received thinking," while the volume as a whole "seeks to give due evidence of the complexity of his work and the richness of the diverse critical responses to it" (2). It does so, on the whole, with reassuring clarity and insight.

The volume is divided into "Texts," "Contexts," and "Vizenor Texts," the distinction between the first two sections largely one of coverage. While the six essays listed under "Texts" examine single works, the seven under "Contexts" seek to develop broader thematic and contextual readings of both Vizenor and the works of others—notably Kimberly Blaeser (Doerfler) and William Apess (Lopenzina). Under "Vizenor Texts" we find a new interview between Lee and Vizenor; Vizenor's own essay on the proposed Constitution of the White Earth Nation; and the constitution itself. Overall, the volume draws an effective compromise between discussion of new works (including the novels Hiroshima Bugi [Breinig] and Father Meme [Lee, Madsen, and Shanley]) and new treatments of older works (including Gamber's lively foray into the multiple significations of nouns in the screenplay to Harold of Orange).

Absent from this lineup is extended consideration of the recent Bear Island: The War at Sugar Point (2005), and Almost Ashore (2006)—although a range of poetry features in Moore's excellent analysis of Vizenor's poetics of presence. Similarly absent is the newest novel, Shrouds of White Earth (2010). But the misadventure of competing with Vizenor's productivity aside, the editors rightly hope to establish "the latest evaluation of Vizenor's achievements and contributions to contemporary cultural life" (1). The key lack in the introduction—an otherwise committed set of claims for Vizenor's importance—is that neither those established contributions nor the "new directions in which Native Literary scholarship is tending" (9) are fully spelled out. Looking down the list of chapters, we are left wondering how the range of poststructuralist, psychoanalytical, and formalist readings will prove entirely new, embody the directions of Vizenor studies of the last decade, or indeed represent a likely future direction. Readers would benefit from more commentary on this, particularly in relation to recent shifts in Native studies.

Lacan, Derrida, Bataille, among other "postmodern" thinkers, take their places (in essays by Madsen, Snyder, Moore, and Shanley, in particular) alongside Vizenor's Japanese influences (Lee, Velie, Moore), a two-hundred-year history of American satire (Breinig), elaborations of the connections between Father Meme and holocaust writing (Lee and Shanley), and Vizenor's commitment to questions of education (LaLonde) and repatriation (Helstern). Most contributors remind us of Vizenor's resistance to "discourses of dominance," and the volume refuses to compromise his own expansive intellectual and cultural reach. But its major strength is that it also refuses to entertain notions of separation or exclusivity between the theory-driven and the tribal-centric.

The volume's highest points in that regard include Snyder's "Gerald's Game: Postindian Subjectivity in Vizenor's Interior Landscapes," reconciling the nationalistic lenses through which Vizenor's prose can be read with Vizenor's own vehemently antinationalistic (antitotalitarian) critical stance. Similarly, in "'He Made a Teasing Whistle on the Wind': Situating the Literary Activism of Gerald Vizenor" LaLonde presents a lucid account placing the genesis of Vizenor's political commitment very squarely at White Earth. These two essays—the situatedness of which has resonances in many of the other contributions—are further complemented by Doerfler's clear assessment of Vizenor's neologistic bent and its application to the White Earth Nation. Largely foregoing theory for a historically located understanding of terms, Doerfler "reads" Blaeser's poetry through a Vizenorean...