The New North American Studies: Culture, Writing and the Politics of Re Cognition

The New North American Studies

‘This is a serious rethinking of American Studies in both method and content. It moves the debates about multi-culturalism and canon formation in exciting new directions.’ Linda Hutcheon, University of Toronto ‘Winfried Siemerling’s The New North American Studies offers a fresh, critical analysis of the major figures and trends in US and Canadian criticism of the multicultural era.’ Werner Sollers, Harvard University In this original and ground-breaking study, Winfried Siemerling examines the complexities of recognition and identity, rejecting previous nationalized thinking to approach North American cultural transformations from transnational and interdisciplinary perspectives. Using material from the United States and Canada as case studies and drawing on a wide range of texts and theorists, he examines postcoloniality and cultural emergence from the sixties to the present against earlier backgrounds. Siemerling’s argument for a retheorization of the field takes on the full history of multiculturalism debates, including radical readings of W. E. B. Du Bois and Charles Taylor and their relation to G. W. F. Hegel, and challenging many of the models of multiculturalism in use today. Tackling controversial subjects such as identity politics, The New North American Studies proposes a fresh outlook on the most central issues of North American cultural politics, from debates on canon formation to the role of racial and linguistic difference. Concluding with a look at the future of cultural difference, Winfried Siemerling’s study is an innovative rethinking of the whole field of North American Studies. Winfried Siemerling is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Université de Sherbrooke in Canada and is affiliated with the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard. His book, Discoveries of the Other (1994), was nominated for the René Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association and the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies (MLA).

The New North American Studies Culture, writing, and the politics of re/cognition

Winfried Siemerling

First published 2005 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor &Francis or Routledge ’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2005 Winfried Siemerling All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Siemerling, Winfried, 1956– The new North American studies : culture, writing and the politics of re/cognition / Winfried Siemerling. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. American literature–History and criticism–Theory, etc. 2. Canadian literature–History and criticism–Theory, etc. 3. National characteristics, American, in literature. 4. National characteristics, Canadian, in literature. 5. Politics and literature–North America. 6. North America–Intellectual life. 7. North America–In literature. 8. North America–Civilization. 9. Criticism–North America. I. Title. PS25.S55 2004 810.9⬘358–dc22 2004012502 ISBN 0-203-42052-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-415-33597-3 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-33598-1 (pbk)

In memory of Elke Siemerling and Kai Siemerling

Contents

Acknowledgments 1 Introduction New World returns 1 “Who cuts the border?”: national approaches, comparative literature, postcolonial studies 8 Cultural difference and national canons 12 Orality and emergence 13 2 Comparative North American literary history, alterity, and a hermeneutics of non-transcendence The “newness” of the New World 16 From conscience excluante to the anxieties of comparison 19 Sacvan Bercovitch and the inclusions of dissent 20 E. D. Blodgett: dialogues of reorigination and negotiation 26 Pierre Nepveu and the (re)reading of national culture 28 3 W. E. B. Du Bois, Hegel, and the staging of alterity Du Bois and Hegelian teleology 31 “Assimilation” and recognition 34 Relation and non-transparency 36 4 Double consciousness, African American tradition, and the vernacular: Henry Louis Gates and Houston Baker Doubled doubles: the sentence of tradition and double consciousness in Henry Louis Gates 39 Democratic blues: Houston Baker and the representation of culture 54 5 Native writing, orality, and anti-imperial translation: Thomas King and Gerald Vizenor Anti-imperial translation 59 Thomas King, Coyote, and Columbus: “two different dimensions of time or consciousness” 64 Gerald Vizenor: the postindian and The Heirs of Columbus 92

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6 Genealogies of difference Multiculturalisms, transculturalism, difference in North (of) America 116 From narratives of emergence to transculture: Parti pris and Vice Versa 120 Charles Taylor, desire, and the limits of self-certainty 133 Cultural difference: the future of an illusion? 145 Notes References Index

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Acknowledgments

I’d like to thank at the outset my students over the last few years in courses on race, ethnicity, migrancy, and postcoloniality, and on American, Canadian, Québécois, and comparative literature; much of the material that is the subject of the following pages (and much more that didn’t make it into this particular book) benefited from their critical response in the classroom. Un grand merci especially to all the cultural and linguistic polyglots in the Graduate Programmes in Comparative Literature. This study of North American literatures and cultures wouldn’t have been possible without a number of scholars, colleagues, and friends who at various stages helped to shape it through discussion, commented on proposals, or read earlier versions of chapters or the entire manuscript. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Linda Hutcheon, Werner Sollors, Winfried Fluck, Heinz Ickstadt, Hortense Spillers, and E. D. Blodgett in this respect, and to W. H. New, Janet Paterson, Brook Thomas, Robert Lecker, Denis Saint-Jacques, Patrick Imbert, and Donna Heiland for invitations to contribute to projects and publications. The late Joseph Bonenfant helped open windows on Parti pris; my thanks go also to Patricia Godbout for providing the French–English translations and for her kind interest in the project; to Alessandra Renzi for sharing expertise and material on Vice Versa; to my colleagues in the Bibliography of Comparative Studies project, Antoine Sirois, Robert Edwards, Pamela Grant, Kathy Mezei, Gregory Reid, and Maria van Sundert; and to Russell Brown and Donna Bennett for those occasional conversations over the years. Equally important has been the friendship and scholarship of Katrin Schwenk, Wolfgang Hochbruck, Ernst Rudin, Ajay Heble, Graham Huggan, and Monique Tschofen. I am grateful to Liz Thompson, my editor at Routledge, who provided vital support for the project, and to Diane Parker, Kate Parker, and Linda Paulus at Routledge and to Gail Welsh at Wearset for seeing it through. Sue Armitage, my copy editor, merits particular credit for turning an unruly manuscript into the final text. Henry Louis Gates and Anthony Appiah deserve my gratitude for extending the stimulating hospitality of the Du Bois Institute to this undertaking, as do the other institutions that were my hosts while I was writing: the Department of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard, the John F. Kennedy Institute at the Freie Universität Berlin, and the McLennan-Redpath Library at McGill. Work on this book and on related projects was made possible by funding from

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several organizations. I wish to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, and the Fonds pour la Formation de Chercheurs et l’Aide à la Recherche (Quebec) for their assistance, as well as the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Fulbright Commission for support administered through the American Council of Learned Societies. Other help came from the Faculté des lettres et sciences humaines and other sources at the Université de Sherbrooke in the form of a start-up grant, travel support, and a publication subsidy; and for a contributory project from the Harvard Ethnic Studies Committee and the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade of Canada. My appreciation is also due to research assistants in related research projects, and in particular to Stefan Gillian, Martin Hicks, Robert Rembold, Rémi Boucher, Carole Fontaine, Natasha Dagenais, Peggy Devaux, Marielle Mencé, Catherine Campbell, Christine Hopps, and Joanna Daxell. For permissions, I would like to thank the publishers of the following articles: 1

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Earlier versions of parts of Chapter 2 have appeared in “Comparative North American Literary History and Alterity: Bercovitch, Blodgett, and a Hermeneutics of Non-Transcendence.” Tendances actuelles en histoire littéraire/Contemporary Trends in Canadian Literary History, ed. Denis St-Jacques and E. D. Blodgett. Québec: Nota Bene, 2003, pp. 27–51. Earlier versions of parts of Chapters 2 and 6 have appeared in “Rereading the Nation: Cultural Difference, Transculture, and Literary History in Canada and Quebec.” In REAL – Yearbook of Research in English and American Literature, Vol. 14: Literature and the Nation, ed. Brook Thomas. Tuebingen: Gunter Narr, 1998, pp. 179–200. Chapter 3 has been published as “W. E. B. Du Bois, Hegel, and the Staging of Alterity.” Callaloo: A Journal of African American and African Arts and Letters 2001, 24(1):325–33. An earlier version of the last part of Chapter 4 has appeared as “Democratic Blues: Houston Baker and Representation of Culture.” In Cultural Difference and the Literary Text: Pluralism and the Limits of Authenticity in North American Literatures, ed. Winfried Siemerling and Katrin Schwenk. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996, pp. 40–8. Sections of Chapter 6 have appeared in an earlier version in “North American Multiculturalisms: Introduction” in “US/Canadian Writers’ Perspectives on the Multiculturalism Debate: A Roundtable Discussion at Harvard University,” ed. Graham Huggan and Winfried Siemerling. Canadian Literature 2000, 164:82–111. Sections of Chapter 6 have appeared in an earlier version in “Writing Ethnicity.” In Writing Ethnicity: Cross-Cultural Consciousness in Canadian and Québécois Literature, ed. Winfried Siemerling. Toronto: ECW Press, 1996, pp. 1–32. An earlier version of part of Chapter 6 has been published as “Alterity and Recognition: Charles Taylor and the Limits of Self-Certainty.” Texte: Revue de Critique et de Théroie Littéraire 1998, 23/24:63–82.

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New World returns The following study approaches North American cultural transformation from transnational, comparative, and interdisciplinary perspectives. It examines cultural emergence from earlier backgrounds through different multiculturalism debates and beyond in Canada and the United States. It works thus across boundaries that in Gregory Jay’s words “are less the origins of our history than the products of it” (1991:268; 1997:182). Jay’s remark is part of an ongoing debate about the role of national boundaries in the study of literature and culture, a debate that in the case of the United States includes the question of “America.” John Carlos Rowe, in his call for a “new” American Studies as a comparative discipline beyond national borders (Rowe 2002:xiv–xv), thus emphasizes that “the United States is not synonymous with America or the Americas” (xvi).1 His comment echoes interventions like Carolyn Porter’s 1994 critique of “the synecdoche of a US read as ‘America’ ” (Porter 1994:468)2 or Janice Radway’s “What’s in a Name?” (Radway 1999). Radway’s article, based on her 1998 Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, accelerated an entire field’s self-questioning whether collectively it “had compounded the imperial gesture whereby the United States had appropriated to itself synecdochally the name ‘America’ ” (Pease 2001).3 While answers to such questions are less than unanimous and vary across geographical, ideological, and institutional contexts, the multiple challenge remains of actually reading across borders, charting their uneven implications, and “figuring” what is articulated within, between, across, and through them. The work that follows here, conducted out of several national locations, pilots a route purposefully different from the one that heads straight for the wide narrows of the engulfing synecdoche of “America.”4 The choice of focussing here instead on contexts of “North America” evokes the very limits whose occultation is one of the burdens of United States Studies conducted under the name simply of America. In the collocation “North America” the second word refers clearly to a continent, not a country, and it includes cultures in North (of) America like those of Canada. North America is a relational designation that marks it as Northern part of a larger entity, which it does not claim to stand for or represent – yet which it could certainly draw on for contextual and differential self-understanding alike. This very emphasis on relational articulation invites as well other relational locations, for example in various Atlantic perspectives or those of the Pacific Rim. Not associated with any particular nation, North America sheds

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light on “America’s” shadows by evoking the limits of “nation,” and the liminal spaces of its borders. Such differential limiting of the projective reach of “nation” not only relativizes the entities in question, it brings them also into sharper focus. It delineates national articulation in its wider context, and in this process also brings it closer to similar issues in “hyphenated” identities within and across nations – such as questions of essentialism or the treacherous “recognition” that “takes place” in mainly pre-scribed patterns of cognition. While North American perspectives can bring national cultures in relational view where otherwise they may not be seen or heard, they offer genuine differentiation mostly where they work “through” particular and distinct contexts, and these certainly include national ones. Gregory Jay, who calls for “The End of ‘American’ Literature” in favour of “Writing in the US,” responds to Porter’s critique of that rearticulated but still nationally circumscribed field with relevant questions about “nation” in the revised version of the essay (Jay 1997:169–213): calling for an end to the study of a national American literature means calling for an end to the study of a national Mexican or Canadian or Columbian literature as well. Do “we” in the United States want to prescribe such an abandonment of local and regional cultural traditions? Do we have the right? Would this call for postnationalism return us to the widely discussed observation that the criticisms of identity politics arise just at the moment when those whose identities have been marginalized demand recognition? (Jay 1997:182) I think it is important to remember that identity formations, including articulations of national culture, have changing functions and relative values (as evidenced in Fanon’s reflections on national consciousness and culture, 1963:148–248, or Gregory Jusdanis’ The Necessary Nation, 2001). Such ambivalences of identity and recognition and their discursive formations are indeed at the very heart of this study. Patterns of possibilities in which to think North American culture(s) are created in stories of cultural emergence, difference, and transformation. These articulate cultural change within North America, but also speak about the emergence of North American cultures against other backgrounds. I have placed here a number of such narratives in the magnetic field force of questions of “recognition,” and of a metaphor that has often served to recognize and reference the Americas, the “New World.” The “new” is, like “emergence,” a term of relation; it is also an incomplete translation of the unknown, limiting it to articulations of difference with respect to the old. This “translation,” as we will see, usually speaks in the recognized and recognizable language of the old, and thus displays, for better or worse, curious ironies or even outright contradictions. Such doubleness, I will try to show, has been a longstanding feature of the emergence of the new and of North America, from the irruptions of the difference and radical otherness of the “New World” beyond the shifts of what has been called “the age of multiculturalism” (Bernheimer 1995). I am thinking here in particular of constellations that resist happy dialectic sublation in some “developmental” concept of emergence. Doubled texture and complex joining of often contradictory or paradoxical forms of cognition, combining recognition and re-cognition of categories in what I will call here re/cognition, seem to

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be the hallmark of cultural shifts and emergence. Discussing a problematic that will recur at several junctures below, for instance, Anthony Appiah thus qualifies as an “impossible project” the lifelong attempts of W. E. B. Du Bois – justly famous in this context for the phrase “double consciousness” – to come to terms with the contradictions of “race.” Yet Du Bois was not alone in being “unable to escape the notion of race he explicitly rejected”; Appiah registers a recurrence of “this curious conjunction of the reliance on and the repudiation of race” (Appiah 1992:46) in other contexts. A curious “con-junction” indeed, a coexistence of elements that seem to contradict and exclude each other, yet continue to emerge in a paradoxical double “unit.” Arnold Krupat, as I discuss in Chapter 5, critiques a related doubleness in the conjunction of ratio and natio in The Heirs of Columbus, Gerald Vizenor’s redeployment (from a “crossblood” Native perspective) of “Columbus,” that foundational signifier of the “New” World but also of colonization and oppression. While one can point to the contradictions, as these commentators do, it is also possible to detect and emphasize, in this curious bifocal mode of doubleness, a structure of translation that articulates the contradictory mode by which the “new” surfaces first through the structures of the “old.” In my exploration of the apparently inevitable, even necessary, contradictions of recent and current cultural emergence, I will reference and query repeatedly both Du Bois’ paradigmatic attempts to think doubleness and contradiction, and the liminality of the “foundational” sign of “Columbus” and the metaphor of the “New World.” Bartolomé de las Casas, whose digest of Columbus’ log-book from the first voyage remains our sole access to that lost document, stressed the lack of usable comparison when he referred to the world after 1492 as “that time so new and like no other” (quoted in Todorov 1999:5, emphasis added). Tzvetan Todorov speaks of the “radical difference” of this “discovery” with previous European ones, in which some earlier knowledge always existed (Todorov 1999:4); and Stephen Greenblatt, as I will discuss in Chapter 2, sees the “incommensurability” of this moment of contact as an “absolute break” with “nothing comparable” before Columbus (Greenblatt 1991:54–5). To read discourses of emergence in such contexts today is to suggest that in some form the “New World” continues as such,5 together with cognitive predicaments and possibilities that contradict identical recognition, and suggest voyages of re-cognition and partial non-return. “Recognition” restricted to the terms of the known – deductive predication – blurs and rescinds the newness of the new as such. It assimilates emergence as stage in the development of the known, and elides new con-stellations that announce themselves in incommensurability and contradictory doubleness. Raymond Williams helpfully contrasts “the emergent” not only with the “dominant” and the “residual,” but also with forms of incorporation into the dominant culture that resemble – but do not constitute – genuine recognition. The process of emergence is for him a constantly repeated, and always renewable, move beyond a phase of practical incorporation: usually made much more difficult by the fact that much incorporation looks like recognition, acknowledgement, and thus a form of acceptance. In this complex process there is indeed regular confusion between the locally residual (as a form of resistance to incorporation) and the generally emergent. (Williams 1977:125)6

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Recognition based on the categories of the dominant, in this respect, potentially and paradoxically can be residual. Williams thus problematizes the question of recognition – a problematic central, as we will see, to Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk – in ways that link it directly to the instability of double consciousness and its attendant cognitive uncertainty. While recognition depends on a stable system of reference that establishes perspective, hierarchizes foreground–background relations, and allows for pattern matching, double consciousness on the contrary implies continuing vacillation between at least two frames of reference, a state of doubling, doubt, and unresolved encounter. In alternating perspectives and forms of parallel processing, elements of each system are here mutually re-utilized, re-functionalized, and re-cognized through the other system without terminal reconciliation.7 The necessity and possibility of such processes as a form of the “new” produces what I reference here as re/cognition. Narratives of emergence, I contend, routinely attempt recognition of the new by means of the old (and initially try to be recognized themselves in terms of the old) yet in that process exceed such replication, often in forms of double consciousness;8 if “successful,” they are failed attempts at identical return. To think about the “New World” in terms of “newness” is profoundly paradoxical. As the terms “colony,” “return,” or “errand into the wilderness” suggest in aspects of their meaning, the enterprise of European settlement in the “New World” was directly predicated upon the assumption of replication of identity and sameness. If I base my account and analyses in the following pages to a considerable extent on the trope of “double consciousness,” it is partially because I think that the “New World” signifies both the persistent and successful attempts at replication that have motivated it as project, and at the same time the spectacular and productive failure (to borrow a term from the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins) of a “meme”9 – the combination of sameness (fr. même), memory, and repetition that seems to guarantee the replication of circular return and certainty. Circularity and replication are to some extent implicit in the Latin colere (“to cultivate”) and its past participle, cultus, from which the words colony and culture are derived; our understanding of “colony” adds the move in space that projects the replication of sameness elsewhere. Inaugurated in expectations of replication, the “New World” was as much “discovered” as it was articulated through colonial projections that sought to decipher and recognize familiar patterns. These cognitive maps often consisted of texts. Perceptual constructions of the New World, natural as they may appear today, developed in figurative or literal acts of reading with particular histories and intertexts (e.g. Grafton 1992). These processes of interpretation and projection were an integral part of voyages out in which discovery was undertaken with expectations of return; a physical return to the port of departure, initially, and often a commercial and political one in terms of goods and influence; in another sense, however, these expectations of return concerned also the intellectual, epistemological, or spiritual assumptions that had initiated the exploration: a search for confirmation of its reason and experiment, and for recognition of its guiding assumptions. Yet this search produced often multiple “returns” and forms of cognition. If navigators read the sky’s natural constellations and the horizon around them, they were also interpreters who combined their own assumptions with the charts

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that had been drawn and narrated by others, and produced in various combinations of observation, imagination, and belief. One of the most influential narrative records of such acts of reading, Christopher Columbus’ log-book and reports addressed to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, demonstrates vividly the drive for confirmation and recognition of “reading” patterns, for example in the quest for China, or for the resources for another “crusade to liberate Jerusalem” (Todorov 1999:11). (By all accounts a devout Christian,10 Columbus also expected to read God’s work and writing in all creation). His (de)ciphering of what we call the New World produced thus a strange layering of, and oscillation between, his expectations and the experience of a recalcitrant reality that resisted such “recognition.” His voyage west followed his reading of Marco Polo’s voyage east narrated in the Travels.11 Like the Bible, Polo’s book was one of the main intertexts that “coauthored” Columbus’ narratives, in which he sought to recognize and confirm the prefiguration of Marco Polo’s Orient; at the same time he “recognized” and rewrote the “New World” in the language and with the names of Christianity and Spain, beginning with San Salvador (Guanahaní), Santa Maria de Concepción, Ferdinanda, Isabella, Juana (after Ferdinand’s son, Prince Juan) (Cohen 1969:115; Todorov 1999:27).12 Guided by Polo’s Travels, Columbus “recognized” Hispaniola as Polo’s Chipango (Japan), assuming Cuba to be the Asian mainland: “Whether to the last he still believed that the coasts of Panama, and Costa Rica and the Mosquito coast of Nicaragua, which he explored on his fourth voyage, were also parts of Asia is uncertain. But it would seem so” (Cohen 1969:16). Yet while Columbus tried to hold on to his topography and the belief of having recognized what Polo had made known, the multiple cognitive departures and overdetermined returns of his enterprise pointed elsewhere. As Todorov remarks about “his crusading obsession”: “Paradoxically, it will be a feature of Columbus’ medieval mentality that leads him to discover America and inaugurate the modern era” (1999:12). The most influential foundational narrative from the anglophone record of the New World, the Puritan search for a New Jerusalem and exodus to New England, also reread and projected previous Christian narrative and topography. The Puritans left the Old World to recognize in “New” England their unfulfilled project of the old one. In Sacvan Bercovitch’s rendering of Perry Miller’s “Errand into the Wilderness,” (1956) they “first saw themselves as an outpost of the Reformation. Their New England Way was to be a detour (and they hoped a shortcut) on the road leading from the Anglican establishment to a renovated England” (Bercovitch 1978:5). With changes in England and the perceived moral failures in their own communities, however, the dissenters’ hope for a “simple return” soon faced realities beyond recognition. Yet in the “American jeremiad” arises, again paradoxically, a form of the new, as Bercovitch points out in his re-interpretation of Miller. This form thrives on the cognitive dissonance resulting from the disjunction between expectation and experience, only to reinforce the American Dream in the face of its worst failures. This form is self-reinforcing in an ingestive dialectic, the self-fashioning of part of the New World feeding on contradiction, like Hegelian Spirit, to the point of swallowing all in its guise – and turning blind (as I will discuss in Chapter 2) to what remains outside the dialectic of this “patent fiction” (Bercovitch 1993:29). Later in New France, with comparable energies if inverted values, the ultramontane “Movement littéraire” of 1860 similarly launched a national literature by

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seeking here a return to the values of an earlier France; in the process, its writers disseminated articulations of French Canadian difference that remained influential until the Quiet Revolution in the 1960s, the “messianisme canadien-français.”13 Octave Crémazie, celebrated “national poet” and one of the movement’s founders, lamented in patriotic poems such as “Le vieux soldat Canadien” (1855)14 and “Le drapeau de Carillon” (1858) France’s indifference to the fate of its former colony after the British conquest in 1759. Beyond such regrets, however, the “messianisme” per se saw the francophone community on the St Lawrence River as the true repository of the religious values betrayed by the French Revolution, and by what these writers saw as the reprehensible later literature in France.15 The abbé HenriRaymond Casgrain, another co-founder, anti-Enlightenment “luminary” and chronicler of “Le Mouvement littéraire en Canada” (Casgrain 1866), reached back, as Columbus had done, to the crusades in his violent casting of the “New World,” opening his book on Marie de l’Incarnation with the claim:16 “La découverte du continent américain fut l’oeuvre des croisades” (Casgrain 1866:15; quoted in Nepveu, 1998:43; “The discovery of the New World was the achievement of the Crusades”).17 The case of Casgrain and the “messianisme,” like those of Columbus and the Puritan enterprise, demonstrates that one thing the “New World” never was to the expectant imagination: a tabula rasa, unwritten, empty, or void. To the extent that European languages and discourses produced this seemingly limitless new world, it was often a ruthless re-inscription of the known (soon-to-be-called “Old”) world with its creeds and greeds. Yet it often also invoked and marked the stubborn limit of knowledge – and often the abyss in its middle. In his remarkable comparative study, Intérieurs du Nouveau Monde, Pierre Nepveu cites Casgrain’s book on Marie de l’Incarnation as an example of the repression of the subject’s encounter with the “New World” (Nepveu 1998:43–4), in the interest of an all too recognizable script of quest and conquest that eclipses what it claims to render.18 He contrasts this compulsive repetition and return of seamless recognition with the re-examination of the contradictions, irrationalities, and dramas of consciences that Casgrain’s contemporary, Hawthorne, undertakes in The Scarlet Letter with the powerful means of fiction (Nepveu 1998:46). In his own reading of Marie de l’Incarnation’s Relation (1654), Nepveu evokes the startling hiatus and break that suspends certainty, the awareness of a sudden void that displaces the initial rush of discovery and causes a “retour sur soi” (31; “turning in on oneself”).19 This hesitation and refusal, however, signals also the limit of the self, of the synthesis that otherwise reconstitutes the subject continually in the certainty of itself and its world. This sudden perception of a void alerts the subject to the limited validity of its assumptions, the limit of its capacity to perceive, read, and integrate the new in terms of the old. Whatever the consequences and forms, the lack and limit of self-certainty often produces more, not less; the hesitations that interrupt and derail successful, habitual synthesis either force retrenchment, or compel awareness of potential alternatives to previous certainties. With the failure of seamless, ceaseless circuitry begins another story. The continuous function of identitarian self-consciousness is doubled by forms of the divided self, forms of double consciousness that model, in their superimposition and con-stellation of incongruent patterns, the translation of the unthinkable into paradoxical cognition. These are the limits and outskirts of self-

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certainty, the very space and moment that some philosophies are invented to describe, and others to render nil; and the target of the self-replicating, voracious drive for certainty of one of the most comprehensive and insistent narratives of cognition, recognition, equation and return that modernity and the Old World have produced, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807).20 As Hegel (1977:51) wrote in the “Introduction”: But the goal is as necessarily fixed for knowledge as the serial progression; it is the point where knowledge no longer needs to go beyond itself, where knowledge finds itself, where Notion corresponds to Object and Object to Notion. Hence the progress towards this goal is also unhalting, and short of it no satisfaction is to be found at any of the stations on the way. Yet short of such equation (or the recognition of a whole from which heterogeneity is parcelled as its parts), the new emerges as such: as incongruence rather than more of the same, as returns that both disappoint and exceed expectations of identity, opening or leaving spaces between recognition (both as Hegelian category and in terms of cultural capital) and re-cognitions that continue to question available norms, knowledges, and certainties. Where the Phenomenology of the Spirit treats of the singular “Spirit” that gathers and returns myriad differences into the absolute, Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk (original 1903) declares an unsublated plural already in its title. In his essay “Strivings of the Negro People” (1897), which under the title “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” will become the first chapter of his ground-breaking book in 1903, Du Bois uses the term “double consciousness” (employed previously for instance by Emerson and William James in other contexts) to describe a duality of “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings” (Du Bois 1897:194; 1986a:364) that continues to resist, 90 years after Spirit, the fulfillment of its synthesis. Shamoon Zamir in Dark Voices (1995) justly focusses on Du Bois’ complex engagement with the Phenomenology (which Du Bois studies in 1889–90 at Harvard) and its evocative themes of recognition, lordship, bondage, and “unhappy consciousness.” Yet Du Bois’ ultimately antiHegelian stance, as I argue in Chapter 3, produces less synthesis than a persistent and productive doubling of central terms – including “assimilation,” “recognition,” and “double consciousness” itself – that signals his resistant engagement with Hegel’s model of cognition. If Du Bois is tempted and seduced by the inclusive tendencies of Hegelian sublation, his own experience leads him to resist its totalizing movement. Insisting on historical and positional specificity of cultural experience and expression, Du Bois in his formulations complicates the desire to “merge” double consciousness into “true” consciousness. Recognition turns out to be contextually double-edged: inside the framework of the dominant (as Williams suggests), recognition assimilates and obviates genuine emergence; re-cognition from other vantage points, however, opens the available terms of synthesis and knowledge to new hopes, despairs, and possibilities. Doubled, contradictory re/cognition marks the translative communication between both. Such circumstances cause Du Bois’ strategies of double articulation, and the epistemological necessity of double consciousness in contexts of emergence. Despite many differences, such doubling, reworking, and appropriation of dominant terms will recur

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Introduction

time and again in narratives of emergence across North America. The dialectic perspectives of Hegelian teleology and recognition find their counterpart here in dialogic configurations that emphasize persistence of unsublated difference. Because of the obvious predicament that double consciousness presents, the positive potential of its cognitive disposition has often been eclipsed. In exploring the heuristic value of Du Bois’ evasion of equation for the reading of unavoidable contradictions in later North American narratives, I seek to recover in particular Du Boisian double consciousness not only in its necessary but also in its trailblazing and innovative dimensions. Both problematic and enabling, predicament and chance in situations of cognitive instability and asymmetrical power, double consciousness produces multiple accents and contra-dictions; in a kind of parallel processing, it shifts from exclusively replicating recognition and the return of the dominant to re-cognitions and cultural and cognitive simultaneity. It also suggests that perspectival multiplicity and multiple belonging – at times perceived as the exclusive domain and predicament of diaspora cultures – is neither external to any culture in transformation, nor likely to diminish in importance in a multicultural global future of “translocal solidarities” (Gilroy 2000:8). Engaging Du Bois’ critical conversation with, and appropriation of, recognition in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, I read Du Bois’ counter-discursive dialogic re/cognition of one of modernity’s pre-eminent Old World accounts of recognition as paradigmatic trope of New World cultural emergence, and a continuing challenge to North American thinking about multiculturalisms and postcolonial difference. In addition, Du Bois’ attention to the importance of “the sorrow songs” signals the role of orality in cultural emergence that is crucial to many of the contexts studied in Chapters 4, 5, and 6 below.

“Who cuts the border?”: national approaches, comparative literature, postcolonial studies It may be only fitting to approach North America comparatively, since it is part of a “New World” that contributed to a sense of an “irremediable human plurality” (Anderson 1983:67). Yet, as we have seen, the gap and limit opened by that world was routinely “covered up” by unduly projective modes of cognition. Hortense Spillers, in her introduction to Comparative American Identities, suggests that “America” was “ ‘made up’ in the gaze of Europe”; it was “as much a ‘discovery’ on the retinal surface as it was the appropriation of land and historical subjects,” an “orientalized, Europe-fabled ‘America’ ” (Spillers 1991:5). “Orientalism,” as Said demonstrated, “has less to do with the Orient than it does with ‘our’ world” (Said 1978:12); he thus insisted that “it needs to be made clear about cultural discourse and exchange within a culture that what is commonly circulated by it is not ‘truth’ but representations” (Said 1978:21). Or “meaning” rather than “reality” (Baker 1984:22), as Houston Baker puts it in his African American critique of an AMERICA produced in “American historical statements such as ‘religious man,’ ‘errand’ and ‘wilderness’ ” (Baker 1984:17). Baker adds that “the mystery and sacrosanctness that often surround ‘bodies of knowledge’ or ‘disciplines’ have been replaced . . . by an acknowledgement of such bodies as linguistic constructs.” This remark applies of course equally to Baker’s own articulation of emergence on the basis of the vernacu-

Introduction

9

lar (to which I will return in Chapter 4). Appropriately, and with reference to José Marti’s account of “Our America,” Spillers (1991:16) asks: “So, who cuts the border?” As she suggests with respect to gardening negotiations with a neighbor (a church, it happens), “regarding the shifting position of the socionom, there are days when her household cuts the border, then there are days when someone else does” (Spillers 1991:16). Historically, the gardening and border cutting has been carried out by disciplines as regulated practices of knowledge and cognition; they have conditioned, for better or worse, our access to the New World and North America. While comparative approaches to North America are hardly “free” of cognitive constraints, they offer nonetheless a privileged space to work at the limit(ation)s of these disciplines. Crucial among these arguably necessary “limits” has been the constitution of a national subject, and its emergence in cultural description often through literary history. Much comment about the limits and (im)possibilities of literary history has focussed on the question of national literary history,21 and indeed literary historians and theorists of North American national literatures have keenly registered challenges to conventional and elementary assumptions governing their work. I will look here in Chapter 2 at three theorists whose reflections illuminate contradictions, problems, and possibilities of national literary history in North America. Sacvan Bercovitch, originator of one of the most influential theories of American literature and culture and general editor of the Cambridge History of American Literature, concedes that “the risk we run in undertaking an American literary history now is that it will be perceived . . . as being neither history nor literary nor American” (Bercovitch 1986:633). Voicing related concerns in his ongoing reflection on the literatures of Canada, E. D. Blodgett riffs on Perkins’ Is Literary History Possible (1992) to ask, “Is a History of the Literatures of Canada Possible?” (Blodgett 1993). And in his influential L’Ecologie du réel (1988), Pierre Nepveu reconstructs the horizons of readings that led to the emergence of a national Quebec literature. Like Gregory Jay in his call for an end of “American” literature, Nepveu critiques an essentialized national subject in his thinking about “la fin de la littérature québécoise” and a “littérature post-québécoise” (Nepveu 1988:14; “the end of Québécois literature” and a “post-Québécois literature”). In addition, the relationships of national narratives both with internal and external difference are here at issue. Bercovitch cites his Canadian immigrant perceptions at the beginning of his scholarly engagement with “The Music of America” (1993:1–28); in his hope for an “end of American parochialism” (1986:652), he calls for a dialogue between United-States trained Americanists in search of new angles and “ ‘foreign’ scholars, trained in ‘un-American’ forms of discourse who can bring to bear upon the American literary tradition viewpoints from outside the culture” (1986:652).22 Blodgett explicitly frames his recent Five-Part Invention: A History of Literary History in Canada (2003) with perspectives on Canada from the outside. These scholars, like Jay, Rowe, Pease, or Nepveu in his 1988 study, seek to multiply perspectives on an object that is overtly constructed as discursive multiplicity but nonetheless circumscribed by national space; ten years later, however, in Intérieurs du nouveau monde (1998), Nepveu has shifted to North American perspectives and concerns of a wider “Americanité” that reaches into Latin America. The restriction to the circumference of one national literature

10

Introduction

or one single language practiced by many scholars of United States, Canadian, or Québécois literature has the advantages of selective specialization, invokes legitimate limits of learning, and is partially reinforced by the training, teaching, funding, and employment patterns of nationally organized literary institutions, originally nurtured by the needs of national emergence and its reliance on literary history. Yet the costs and losses of such a découpage can be fully gauged only from larger comparative perspectives. This observation is pertinent not only across but also within national borders. While the problematic of monolingual constructions of Canada for instance is immediately evidenced by its official bilingualism, the literatures of the United States are hardly written in one language either.23 Mary Louise Pratt reminds us that the history of Spanish predates that of English in the United States, and that here “ ‘foreignness’ equally misapplies to French, Cantonese, Italian or Japanese – to say nothing of Lakota, Navajo, or Cree” (Pratt 1995:64). Restriction to one language here has not been a timeless rule,24 and is now beginning to be alleviated by studies in United States literatures in languages other than English, often conducted not only by scholars of the United States but also by comparatists (e.g. Shell 1993) and Americanists in the larger Latin American sense (e.g. Sommer 1998).25 Yet even forms of the very disciplines that offer alternatives to nationally or linguistically circumscribed approaches to North America have also often had limiting effects. Comparative literature, in its emergence as a discipline and its subsequent self-definitions, has traditionally called upon linguistic difference as hallmark of its specificity; intralingual comparisons – such as those between American and English Canadian literature or between Native and African North American writing in English – were thus regarded for a long time as peripheral to or even not part of the discipline’s business. Susan Bassnett suggested a different route when she defined in 1993 the field with reference not to linguistic difference, but “the study of texts across cultures,” interdisciplinarity, and “patterns of connection in literatures across both time and space” (Bassnett 1993:1); in her Comparative Literature: A Critical Introduction, she offered thus a chapter on “Comparing the Literatures of the British Isles” (48–69).26 The controversial 1993 “Bernheimer Report,” in its inclusion for example of comparisons “between the pre- and postcontact cultural productions of colonized peoples” or “between racial and ethnic modes of signifying” (Bernheimer 1995:42), or of media comparisons “from early manuscripts to television, hypertext, and virtual realities” (45), also encouraged comparative domains not primarily defined by linguistic difference.27 Despite these programmatic openings, however, comparative literature as a discipline has in the past not always increased crossnational access in the specific case of North America. On the other hand, much recent work on intralingual relations and emergence generally has been produced under the heading of postcolonial studies rather than comparative literature. Postcolonial studies works comparatively across lines of unequal power or juxtaposes situations of “common sociohistorical conditions”28 and is often considered a specific form of comparative literature.29 Theoretically it also holds, like comparative literature in general, great promise for approaching contexts of emergence and cultural transformation in North America. The authors of The Empire Writes Back, the text that popularized this perspective in the field of English studies, proposed “the term ‘post-colonial’ . . . to cover all the culture

Introduction

11

affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day” and suggested “that it is the most appropriate term for the new cross-cultural criticism which has emerged in recent years and for the discourse through which this is constituted” (Ashcroft et al. 1989:2);30 they added that along with a host of other literatures not only that of Canada but that “of the USA should also be placed in this category.” This last recommendation has not often proven popular to date either in United States or postcolonial studies. Again, because of several factors the impact of this field on the study of North America has in practice often been restricted, at times even restricting. The authors of The Empire Writes Back already surmised that with respect to the United States perhaps “because of its current position of power, and the neo-colonizing role it has played, its post-colonial nature has not been generally recognized” (Ashcroft et al. 1989:2). Indeed, while scholars in postcolonial studies have been interested in minority cultural formations within the United States, there have been few examples of explicitly “postcolonial” work in American studies concerned with the emergence of its national literature.31 While Canada is in a different position, it also partakes of the ambigious status of white settler cultures in general as both colonizers and erstwhile colonies. Settler cultures previously studied in a “Commonwealth Literature” paradigm certainly played a crucial role in The Empire Writes Back. Yet many Canadian scholars quickly complicated postcolonial perspectives on the emergence of Canadian culture against British and then United States dominance by pointing to its own colonizing or dominant position with respect to Native and minority cultures.32 Stephen Slemon argued nonetheless in “Unsettling the Empire: Resistance Theory for the Second World” that it is precisely the in-between status of Canadian culture or the “Second World” (Lawson 1991) that makes it an ideal laboratory for the necessarily ambivalent double articulation of postcolonial literary resistance “between systems, between discursive worlds” postulated by postcolonial theorists like Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha, or Jenny Sharpe (Slemon 1990:37). Slemon, like others (Brydon 1995:9–13), thus argues against an excision he sees as “remarkably purist and absolutist in tenor” and based on a binary center/periphery model (Slemon 1990:33–4) which would restrict, indeed, the access of postcolonial studies to North America to “black, and ethnic, and First-Nation constituencies within First-World terrain” (Slemon 1990:32).33 Complicating those restricted areas is the fact that commentators on these very cultures (for instance Krupat, 1996:30, as we’ll see in Chapter 5) have at times strongly objected to the slippage in the term postcolonial that invites mistaken assumptions that colonization is over, and thus may facilitate “prematurely celebratory and obfuscatory” (McClintock 1992:88) investments that may have contributed to the term’s popularity. In addition to these issues, however, it is particularly striking that to the extent that postcolonial studies do turn their attention to North America, they often are not only again nationcircumscribed (e.g. Postcolonial Theory and the United States, by Singh and Schmidt 2000), but also function to a surprising extent monolingually. Despite the huge attention to Fanon – indeed, “Critical Fanonism” (Gates 1991a) – it is hard to find work, for instance, that would consider the astonishing time lag between the Québécois reception of theories of decolonization (Fanon, Berque, Memmi) in the 1960s and 1970s (see Chapter 6) and the belated attention to this work in anglophone postcolonial criticism. If comparative literature and postcolonial studies offer

12

Introduction

important chances, they have also as disciplinary access routes at times overlooked busy North American intersections.

Cultural difference and national canons As the work of the theorists discussed in Chapter 2 suggests, national cultures in North America have been increasingly understood as constituted by internal diversity or difference. Cultural difference itself was never absent; it marked the moment of European contact, had existed in the New World before it was named such by Europeans, and continued hence in myriad forms. In the history of New World difference, however, forms of national ethnogenesis that articulated differentiation from European imperial cultures overrode and outperformed, in locally different ways and rhythms, other identifications, turning previous “ethnos” into ethnicity and race, in processes that de-emphasized internal difference, created new “ethnos,” and the grounds for national literary stories and histories (Anderson 1983; Sommer 1991). The repressed of these narratives, and the fact that they were artefacts, hard-won and necessary but constructs nonetheless, returned in the canon and multiculturalism debates. The simultaneous if contradictory impulses of deconstruction and identity, often in strange “con-junction,” articulated here new narratives that re/cognized emergence and brought entire disciplines into existence or to prominence.34 These disciplines and fields that recognized, and then began to re-cognize, such internal difference, have afforded different access routes to North America. Yet they have constituted not only their own dynamics, but also counter-discursive problems and paradoxes. The “case studies” in Chapters 4–6 explore in some of these narratives the “translational” implications of the “new” I have already discussed, and forms of double consciousness seem the inevitable mark of their trailblazing articulations. These contradictions are seen here as necessary elements of emergence, which is perceived as such precisely because it cannot be “adequately” recognized, or theorized contradiction-free within available frames of cognition. Theoretical narratives that play a central role in the construction and emergence of new fields regularly incur debts (and produce complicated figures of return) by replicating aspects of previous narratives they seek to counter. These re/cognitions include three related issues that are familiar from discussions of the national subject: the question of essentialized, homogenized, and “naturalized” group identities;35 the (re)functionalization of literary texts in the interest of “representation” and the emergence of such a subject;36 and the teleological and organic narrative patterns of literary history (origin, influence, tradition, development, etc.).37 Henry Louis Gates, as we will see in more detail in Chapter 4, thus remarks that “Ironically . . . the cultural mechanism of minority self-construction must replicate the mechanism responsible for rendering it marginal in the first place” (1992a:312). The cost of such “recognition” – recognition both given to available structures and received through them – 38seems inevitable.39 The simultaneity of the reconstructive needs of narratives of emergence and the deconstructive enterprise they rely on in one form or another constitutes a form of irony, as Gates suggests, but also a “translational” double consciousness that formulates contradictory discourses together in a new constellation that replaces a previous “either/or” with an emergent, if contra-

Introduction

13

dictory, “both/and.” This simultaneity of contradictory patterns also ends up affecting all the participant perspectives, and thus transforms simple replication of either one of them. This is borne out by the fact that nationally circumscribed studies have been irrevocably altered by the canon and multiculturalism debates,40 whereas the narratives of emergence that wrought this change have clearly included detailed reflections on the problematic yet also necessary inheritances from previous paradigms (the subject of the chapters below). Forms of double consciousness are part and parcel of the “liminality” of any specific “subject” – be it nationally, intranationally, or transnationally defined – in which an emergence is articulated that is (not yet) available as the totalized knowledge of “the pedagogical.”41

Orality and emergence Strikingly, although many of the problems faced in the specific disciplines and access routes to North America are not at all unique to them, there exists not sufficient work that would place these questions in North American perspectives that cross both national and linguistic boundaries. The limits of the disciplinary ways of seeing I have discussed suggest the possibility and even necessity of strategies approaching these disciplines themselves comparatively, in a dialogue of mutual impact, relativization, and transformation. If I use the related problematics of emergence, the “new,” and double consciousness here as a relativizing framework to loosen disciplinary, linguistic, and national seams, I do not mean to suggest that the category of “nation” should be neglected. Proceeding from the insufficiency of the category of “nation” as dominant organizing principle suggests on the contrary, I think, re/cognition of and careful attention to its discursive effects. This is perhaps nowhere clearer than in the borderlands themselves; “Tracking Borders” is the fitting subtitle of the introduction to José David Saldívar’s Border Matters (1997), a study of Chicano/a perspectives that work beyond and “through” the border between Mexico and the United States. Yet even where “nation” appears a residual force, it is nevertheless often the basis for revision.42 Proceeding “at the limits” of several disciplines, this inquiry is certainly not free of the disciplinary restrictions I have discussed; on the contrary, again, it is marked by the resources, assumptions, and problematics of the disciplinary backgrounds that are at work here, and that reflect my own training and disciplinary itinerary from “English” and “Romance Languages” – mostly French, with a small component of Spanish – through American Studies, Canadian Studies, “Theory,” and comparative literature, to the concerns with race, ethnicity, multiculturalism, multilingualism, postcoloniality, and cultural studies. This study is “post” any of these disciplines only to the extent that they have been brought together here in mutually qualifying con-stellation, contradiction, collusion, and collision. This strategy can hardly aim at “covering” North America in any geographical, linguistic, or disciplinary sense. Yet I hope that the following pages will highlight limits as constitutive of possible strategies,43 and thus contribute to research strategies that facilitate and invite related work from other angles and research itineraries in response. The “case studies” below from the three broad areas of African American, Native North American, and Canadian/Québécois studies suggest some of the possible implications that can result from questioning and crossing disciplinary borders.

14

Introduction

They are obviously selective yet I believe important examples, and their choice and constellation bring with them their own specific limits but also further possibilities. One of the issues that recurs here, for example, from Du Bois to the emergence of Québécois literature, can help to suggest some of the ways in which the problematics I discuss in these cases interact with other areas of North American cultural transformation. Attempts at understanding emergence in North America draw forth time and again the question of orality, a medium central to pre-contact North American cultures,44 to their subsequent negotiations with European writing, and to the ongoing issue of the “vernacular.” The role that orality plays in African American and Native North American cultures, for example, has many intersections with that of orality in the balancing acts of Chicano/a culture.45 The corrido,46 a ballad form often used to express Mexican/United States cultural conflictuality, has thus in Mexican American culture an importance similar to the Blues in African American culture (Paredes 1988:802; see Chapter 4 for a discussion of Houston Baker’s Blues aesthetics). Referencing Paul Gilroy’s consideration in The Black Atlantic (1993) of ethno-racial music forms, José David Saldívar thus structures his chapter “Tracking Borders” around a discussion of a corrido by the Grammy Award-winning Los Tigres del Norte that thematizes migration, segregation, code-switching, and generational difference in this context (1997:1–14). But also orality that is simulated or “cited” in Chicano/a texts frequently represents the Mexican/Hispanic side in culturally conflicted contexts.47 This makes English, as in the case of much Native writing, an often ambivalent medium for Chicano/a writing. When mythical figures of the Mexican oral tradition – like La Llorona or la Malinche (Cypess 1991) – are evoked in written Chicano/a texts, as for instance in Rudolfo Anaya’s Bless me, Ultima (1972) (see also Anaya 1984; Rogers 1998) or Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands (1987), oral memory is reconfigured in cultural resistance that evokes the oral–written problematic ubiquitous in the contexts explored below. In addition, the renewed emphasis on an Indian/Aztec heritage (that also played an – albeit different – role in earlier Mexican nation building and literary history [O’Connell 1994:2]) and the importance of Aztlán for Chicanos/as from the 1960s on (Anaya and Lomelí 1989; Noriega et al. 2001) voices a sense of belonging and anteriority in the face of exclusion and marginalization (instituted here with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848) that is evidenced also in Houston Baker’s insistence on the anteriority of the Blues to the exclusions of AMERICA: “I ain’t no stranger, I been here before” (Baker 1984:65). As Raymund Paredes writes: “The notion of Aztlan, the Ancestral home of the Aztecs believed to be located in the American Southwest . . . freed Mexican Americans from the onus of being recent, displaced immigrants” (Paredes 1988:807). The more specific case of the use of caló – Spanish/English slang – in Chicano/a writing shares issues not only with the anglicized joual (the oral, joual version of French cheval in Quebec, see Chapter 6), but also with the vernacular in general as potential agent of transformation and emergence.48 Edouard Glissant, who sees in aspects of the Caribbean a sort of preface to the American continent (“une sorte de préface au continent américain,” 1995:12), comments on the role of orality as the medium of specific communities against the seeming transcendence of universality.49 Yet in the case of cultural emergence after print, the vernacular also emerges “through” the written codes of the dominant, a hybridized written orality that simu-

Introduction

15

lates features of orality.50 “Written orality” is of strategic importance, for instance, in the transcribed bars of the “sorrow songs” that in the epigraphs of Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk follow lines from the Western tradition; it is instrumental again in the role of the “vernacular” in subsequent attempts to define African American written tradition, and a crucial hinge in Native writing; and it is central to the intense debates about joual in articulations of North American francophone specificity in Quebec and the emergence of a “littérature québécoise.” The selected fields thus highlight relations between orality and cultural emergence that are important generally, but also reflect other con-stellations of North American cultural difference and emergence. While issues of Native cultures, primordial to any consideration of North American (post)coloniality inaugurated by European contact, in important aspects precede and transcend national boundaries,51 articulations of African American and Québécois cultural emergence also draw attention to historically different debates and genealogies of difference in the United States and Canada, which proceeded from specific contexts rooted in issues of slavery race on the one hand, and those of language on the other. Both contexts currently show convergences; race now plays an increasingly important role in scholarship on Canadian culture,52 and language, as already mentioned, comes increasingly to the fore in recent discussions of American literatures.53 In addition, the growing importance of Hispanic contexts, often both linguistically and racially coded, is again relevant here; according to the 2000 United States Census, Latinos have surpassed earlier than expected African Americans as the largest minority in the United States,54 inherently also modifying the balance between language and race as factors in models of multiculturalism. Yet, as I will discuss in Chapter 6, both the contexts of race and language also pose, in their different ways, further questions about re/cognitions and future states of cultural difference in North (of) America. Prominent theorists such as Appiah, Gates, or Gilroy put “race” under erasure because of its non-scientific status and the uses made of it by racist causes. Linguistic difference is not similarly critiqued, yet pressures of economic globalization weaken its role in preventing an undifferentiated, homogenizing monoculturalism. The need for differential identifications, however, is not likely to disappear; the dynamics and ambivalences of double consciousness will continue to call for new articulations.

2

Comparative North American literary history, alterity, and a hermeneutics of non-transcendence

Le moment des découvertes est souvent trompeur: le paysage s’y donne comme un champ infini de possibilités, on le traverse comme l’a fait Jacques Cartier, dans une sorte d’enchantement et d’avidité sans cesse comblée. Mais bien vite, dès qu’il faut s’arrêter et s’installer, c’est tout ce qui manque qui apparaît soudain sous un jour impitoyable. Alors, ce qui avait été un mouvement irrésistible vers l’avant se transforme en besoin de refuge, en repli sur les choses les plus simples, en retour sur soi, sur ce que je deviens dans ce monde étranger et hostile. Pierre Nepveu (1998), Intérieurs du nouveau monde (The moment of discovery is often deceptive: the landscape appears like an infinite expanse of possibilities. One crosses it, as Jacques Cartier did, in a state of enchantment and endlessly fulfilled avidity. But very quickly, as soon as one must stop and settle down, everything that is missing looms up in the crudest light. What was until then an irresistible move forward is transformed into a need for a refuge, a withdrawal toward simple things, a turning in on oneself, on what I become in that unknown and hostile world.)

The “newness” of the New World The “New World” constitutes a privileged chapter in the history of difference and its recognition. If the “New World” as such is an invention produced in European discourse, it also produced time and again gaps and hesitations in this discourse. In such moments of disjunction, a discontinuous and often doubled consciousness was separated from projections of European continuities. The extensions of certainty and sameness, the expectations of accumulative imperial and empirical returns, met with differences that often produced hesitations or temporary retreat, a moment of reversal traced in Pierre Nepveu’s passage from Intérieurs du nouveau monde. Articulations of the sudden incongruity of the known world with another world – and the “first voyages west by Europeans expressed an interest not in finding a new world . . . but in finding a known world, the Orient” (Turner 1995:3) – evidenced many perceptual continuities with available models, among them the Greek ethnographic tradition (the elder Pliny or Herodotus) that yielded “monstrous races” (Grafton 1992:35–48) and the notion of “barbarians” as those who speak another language (Greenblatt 1991:10). Continuity varied, however, in attitudes and strategies that were based on superiority, alienation, assimilation, or wonder: a writer “could insist

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17

that other cultures were both similar and different at once – or he could argue that they belonged to a world of their own” (Grafton 1992:48). In Marvelous Possessions, Stephen Greenblatt isolates in particular the ambiguities of wonder: “What are its origins, its uses, and its limits? Is it closer to pleasure or pain, longing or horror? Is it a sign and an agent of renunciation or possession?” (Greenblatt 1991:14). Greenblatt takes us to a passage in Léry’s History of a Voyage (1578) in which, he says, the “experience of wonder seems to resist recuperation, containment, ideological incorporation; it sits strangely apart from everything that gives coherence to Léry’s universe, apart and yet utterly compelling” (Greenblatt 1991:17, see also Turner 1995:6). Michel de Certeau describes this moment as “a stolen instance, a purloined memory beyond the text” that “opens a rift in time” (de Certeau 1988:213, quoted in Greenblatt 1991:19). This incongruity signals a difference that resists incorporation; it is not a function or derivation of the known, but forces the writer to acknowledge another world, a world imposing a different vanishing point that nonetheless coexists together with that of the old. This sense of alterity and incompleteness is central to the “newness” of the “New World.” Greenblatt (1991:19) writes: “This rift, this cracking apart of contextual understanding in an elusive and ambiguous experience of wonder, is a central recurring feature in the early discourse of the New World.” The experience of unexpected non-identity will contribute decisively to a modernity that begins to conceive of a relativity of time and space and culture, and eventually posits different histories and their comparability. Erich Auerbach evokes in Mimesis the early humanists’ growing sense that their present was substantially different from “the events of classical history and legend and also those of the Bible,” separated not “simply by an extent of time but also by completely different conditions of life.” Thus emerges “a historical perspective in depth such as no previous epoch known to us possessed” (Auerbach 1957:282, quoted in Anderson 1983:67, Anderson’s emphasis). Benedict Anderson suggests that “comparative history” eventually leads to the idea of a modernity explicitly different from “antiquity,” and capable of surpassing it. The Querelle des anciens et des modernes from 1689 introduces the idea of progress, and of an inherently different, new time (Anderson 1983:67). This temporal alterity interacts with the spatial one that comes with the European discoveries of other civilizations, producing a sense of what Anderson calls “an irremediable human pluralism” (1983:67). In time, such a sense of possible, divergent vantage points will also relativize an “overarching poetic [that was] one, indivisible, normative, imperious, all-encompassing,” thus contributing eventually to the emergent conditions of comparative literature (Guillén 1993:24–8). Articulations of the “newness” of the “New World” in particular have been crucial to reflections on North American culture and literary history, perceived in their emergence against a background of previously existing models. How would one think of the “newness” of the “New World” as a relation and a story of non-identity? As a relation of difference for example with the Old World, and not a projection of the Old World onto the New? In terms of the predicament of Columbus (as evidenced in his diary entries of 21, 23, and 24 October 1492): how not to mistake Cuba for Cipango (Japan), as the island re-announcing the supposedly already known, the Cathay (China) described by Marco Polo?1 The difference of the new, and the alterity of what will be called the New World, expose the liminality of consciousness and knowledge. The threshold marks movements back and

18

Comparative North American literary history and non-transcendence

forth between “recognition” that repeats and projects previous certainty and knowledge, and a disorienting “re-cognition” that makes this liminal consciousness of discovery see, and think, at least twice or double.2 Indicative of some of the less “wonderful” responses to this experience of “irremediable human pluralism” is again Greenblatt’s observation that throughout the early discourse of the New World, the reassuring signs of administrative order . . . are deceptive; . . . they draw away from a sense of all that is unsettling, unique, and terrible in the first European contacts with the peoples of America . . . in the face of the unknown, Europeans used their conventional intellectual and organizational structures . . . and . . . these structures greatly impeded a clear grasp of the radical otherness of the American lands and peoples. But this should not, he says, “efface the incommensurability, the astonishing singularity, of the contact initiated on October 12, 1492” (Greenblatt 1991:54–5). Such “incommensurability” was rarely accounted for in the acts of translative violence that dominated the history of interpretation and understanding of a New World that figured often mainly as an object of possession. As Arnold Krupat writes (with reference to Greenblatt) in The Turn to the Native: To say that the people indigenous to the Americas entered European consciousness only by means of a variety of complex acts of translation is to think of such things as Columbus’s giving the name of San Salvador to an island he knows is called Guanahani by the natives – and then giving to each further island he encounters, as he wrote in his journals, “a new name.” (Krupat 1996:32) Incommensurability addresses questions of alterity that the current moment of globalization again so clearly poses. Greenblatt studies the fate of such incommensurability in the first contact of the soon-to-be “Old” World with the “New” World (1991:54), which he sees “as an absolute break” and as substantially new and different compared with previous encounters with other cultures. This moment participates, as we have seen, in a series of developments that contribute to a sense of relativism, cultural pluralism, and alterity that seems primordial to any concept of the modern; one could argue, in fact, that many philosophical systems that have marked modernity (such as Hegel’s) were attempts to overcome this sense of relativism and uncontained alterity. This moment, pivotal for thinking about postcoloniality, is crucial also, I will suggest here with reference to three contemporary theorists of literary history, for problems of literary history in North America and a New World that, from the beginning, had to perceive of itself as relative: in relation to cultural definitions that preceded it and against which it had to work out its differential definitions of emergence. How, again, to think the “newness” of the “New World” as a relation of nonidentity? In some sense, New World narratives all seem to begin as cultural translation, into what Greenblatt calls the “reassuring signs” of a known order. To the extent that literary histories are part of a culture, and help to weave what Sacvan

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Bercovitch, in his discussion of the culture of American Puritans, calls “the ‘webs of significance’ spun out by successive generations . . . in order to justify their way of life to themselves and to the world at large” (1978:xiv), they participate in this process of translation into a known order, or perhaps at least a reassuring one. In his study The American Jeremiad, Bercovitch sets out to examine in the American case “one major thread in that process of self-justification, the myth of America” (1978:xiv). I want to explore here the relation such myths might have with alterity, and to what extent a relationship of myth to non-identity has relevance for literary history. I will try to distinguish between three modes of liminality: a mode of exclusion, a mode of inclusion and incorporation that evokes also the possibility of cultural voracity (and anthropophagy), and finally a third mode that emphasizes non-transcendence and a recognition of the limit.

From conscience excluante to the anxieties of comparison Can one think about literary history in terms of what Edouard Glissant calls the “destin des grands livres qui ont marqué le début des communautés humaines” (1995:28; “fate of the great books that marked the beginnings of human communities”)? Societies begin with what he calls the “cri poétique” (“poetic cry”) of an epic literature. He comments: Hegel au chapitre trois de son Esthétique caractérise cette littérature épique comme une littérature de la conscience de la communauté, mais de la conscience encore naïve, c’est-à-dire pas encore politique, à un moment où la communauté n’est pas sûre de son ordre, à un moment où elle a besoin de se rassurer sur son ordre (que ce soit avec l’Iliade, la Chanson de Roland ou l’Ancien Testament). Ce cri poétique de la conscience commençante est aussi le cri d’une conscience excluante. C’est-à-dire que l’épique traditionnel rassemble tout ce qui constitue la communauté et en exclut tout ce qui n’est pas la communauté. (In the third chapter of his Esthetics Hegel characterizes this epic literature as that of the consciousness of a community, but it is a naive consciousness, that is to say not yet political, at a time when the community is uncertain about its order and needs to reassure itself about that order (be it with the Iliad, the Chanson de Roland or the Old Testament). This poetic cry of the arising consciousness is also the cry of an excluding consciousness. In other words, the traditional epic includes everything by which the community is defined but excludes everything by which it is not defined.) For Glissant, this “cri poétique” exists precisely because the community is not sure of itself; it is not the sign of a triumph, but a reassuring assertion that excludes what is not community in the face of uncertainty, menace, or ambiguous victory, as Glissant (1995:29) elaborates with reference to Charlemagne’s defeat at Roncesvalles or the Greeks’ victory at Troy, possible only by means of a subterfuge. Such narratives, however, are bound to malfunction in a globalized context of interdependence. Glissant rightly suggests that we do not have this option any longer since “nous ne pouvons pas faire comme si le politique n’était pas passé par là” (1995:30; “we

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cannot act as if the political hadn’t intervened in the meantime”). Instead of the transformation of non-being and ambiguity into the “cri poétique,” and after communal self-assertions that are often postcolonial (and this is endlessly important if we do not wish to short-circuit difference), we have “The Anxieties of Comparison” (Bernheimer 1995:1). Glissant gives convincing reasons for the assertion that “Comparative literature is anxiogenic” (Bernheimer 1995:1); yet at the same time his arguments explain why comparative perspectives – or varieties of comparative literature that are dialogic rather than essentialist and identitarian – are not only best suited to current contexts but may also be unavoidable: Nous n’en avons plus une conscience naïve mais une conscience angoissée. Pourquoi cette angoisse devant la réalité du chaos-monde dont il semble qu’il soit l’objet le plus haut de littérature aujourd’hui? Parce que nous voyons bien que la conscience non naïve de cette totalité ne peut plus être excluante, ne peut plus passer par cette sécurisation que procurait, dans L’Iliade ou l’Ancien Testament, la certitude de la communauté élue s’établissant sur une terre élue qui ainsi devient son territoire. Car à la conscience non naïve de cette communauté nouvelle et totale se pose la question: comment être soi sans se fermer à l’autre et comment consentir à l’autre, à tous les autres sans renoncer à soi? (Glissant 1995:30) (Our consciousness is no longer naive; it has instead become anguished. Why this anguish toward the reality of the chaos-world which seems to be the highest object of today’s literature? Because one can clearly see that a non-naive consciousness of this totality can no longer be excluding, that it can no longer be obtained through a sense of security derived from the certainty of the chosen community settling down in a chosen land which then becomes its territory, as in the Iliad or the Old Testament. The non-naive consciousness of this new and total community is now faced with the following question: how can one be oneself without shutting the other out, and how can one consent to the other, to all the others, without renouncing oneself?) How, in this light, has the experience of limit and alterity fared in narratives governed by the task to ascertain community over the uncertain ambiguities of exodus from the Old World and settlement in the New, in narratives that thus modeled the outlines of communal literary selves and of the histories that would tell their tale?

Sacvan Bercovitch and the inclusions of dissent Sacvan Bercovitch’s work on the American Jeremiad can be seen in this context as a critique – albeit a complicitous one – of a community’s epic narrative whose “errand into the wilderness” and search for the new Jerusalem is that of a communauté élue – a narrative and an errand perpetuated in the myth of American exceptionalism and the American dream. If the conscience excluante limits, in fact, liminality – if it works to close the limen to operate identity through exclusion of the other – the mode analyzed by Bercovitch, by contrast, continually breaches and crosses it. Colonization and westward expansion are the literal and historical forms of that mode; a

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rhetoric of massive “in-corporation” that fuels the American dream is the ideological form, perpetuated in the genre of the American Jeremiad. This political sermon or “state-of-the-covenant-address” reminded the settlers of their special obligations to a God who would punish harshly the failings of his chosen people. Yet the Puritans’ “errand into the wilderness,” as Perry Miller explained, produced a double sense of betrayal. The end of Cromwell’s protectorate in 1660 and the Restoration left the Puritan errand with no place of ideological return, and dashed whatever hopes of any future role in the affairs of England might have existed (Miller 1956:11). This new situation forced upon the settlers an obligation of spiritual self-reliance (a situation comparable in several ways to that of the Catholic francophone settlers on the shores of the St Lawrence, who felt abandoned by France and the revolution in their land of origin); in Miller’s words: “Having failed to rivet the eyes of the world upon their city upon the hill, they were left alone with America” (Miller 1956:15). In addition, the colonists’ many transgressions added a further sense of failure; in Bercovitch’s recapitulation, “they had been twice betrayed. Not only had the world passed them by, but the colony itself, the city set upon a hill as a beacon to mankind, had degenerated into another Sodom” (Bercovitch 1978:5). Miller had thus interpreted the Jeremiad mainly as a “literature of self-condemnation” (Miller 1956:15, quoted in Bercovitch 1978:5) predicting doom for the new chosen people (communauté élue) as Jeremiah had for the old if no change was to occur; Miller already noted, however, in these texts “bewilderment, confusion, chagrin, but there is no surrender” (1956:15). Moving further in that direction, Bercovitch (1978:7) re-interprets this narrative of community and first distinctive American literary genre; he finds its distinctiveness not in the vehemence of its complaint but in precisely the reverse. The essence of the sermon form that the first native-born American Puritans inherited from their fathers, and then “developed, amplified, and standardized” (Miller 1961:29), is its unshakable optimism. In explicit opposition to the traditional mode, it inverts the doctrine of vengeance into a promise of ultimate success, affirming to the world, and despite the world, the inviolability of the colonial cause. Where Miller brilliantly anatomizes the breakdown of the circularity of return, Bercovitch describes a mode of identity built on the permanent experience and breach of liminality – built even on the need for it, as the fear of a vanishing last frontier suggests. With reference to Victor Turner’s discussion of liminality in The Forest of Symbols (1967), Bercovitch suggests that the New England saint, like the character Christian in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, is constantly in a state of potential transition, in a process of translation and alteration of the self. The Jeremiad’s function, however, is to contain such alterations: it seeks to ensure that such alternatives (or alterNatives as it were) strengthen rather than weaken the community, are part of its development rather than its dissolution: Both Bunyan’s Christian and the New England saint are on an errand – constantly “betwixt and between,” forever at the brink of some momentous decision – but as rituals their errands tend in opposite directions. The ritual

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Comparative North American literary history and non-transcendence that Bunyan adopts leads Christian into what anthropologists call a “liminal state,” a cultural no-man’s land, where all social norms may be challenged. And given the Calvinist tenet that salvation is a lifelong enterprise, it is an errand fraught with all the religious and economic dangers of unfettered individualism: the excesses both of antinomianism and of self-interest. The American Puritan jeremiads seek (in effect) to prevent these excesses by turning liminality itself into a mode of socialization.3 (Bercovitch 1978:25)

Issuing initially from dissent and then exodus – a moving out of a body of consensus and place of containment – this form paradoxically and inversely becomes a mode of incorporation and ingestion. It stabilizes community as ever more expansive and inclusive. As a mode of liminality, it turns violent and voracious: The ritual of errand . . . identifies the community’s “true fathers” not by their English background but by their exodus from Europe to the American strand; . . . and it implies a form of community without geographical boundaries, since the wilderness is by definition unbounded, the terra profana “out there” yet to be conquered, step by inevitable step, by the advancing armies of Christ. (Bercovitch 1978:26) The ritual of the jeremiad continues the errand and signals a consensus based on erstwhile religious and then liberal forms of contained dissent, a consensus of dissent Bercovitch identifies as well in “America’s classic writers,” and in particular in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson.4 This consensus, which he describes also as the “concordia discors” he experiences in his own “discovery” of America as an immigrant from Canada (1993:29–30), is for Bercovitch central to the symbolic power of “America.” At a decisive stage in the enterprise of “American Literature,” it once could serve as one of the three foundational terms of “American Literary History” – a trinity that appeared to have transcendental value. The limits of “American literary history” The “myth of nationhood” and the “ideal of personal freedom” (Bercovitch 1993:354) that Bercovitch traces in Emerson’s work (or also in the historian George Bancroft)5 marked likewise the “devotion to the possibilities of democracy” (Matthiessen 1941:ix) that served F. O. Matthiessen as a criterion of inclusion to unite the five writers he chose to emphasize in The American Renaissance (1941). This book was to define subsequent American literary studies. Matthiessen located these possibilities, as Bercovitch points out, in the Emersonian key terms of “self-reliance, individualism, initiative.” This commitment to values that were also those of the American Revolution guided again the standard 1946 Literary History of the United States by Robert Spiller et al. (which, as Bercovitch [1993:354] observes in a note, “proceeds teleologically, from ‘The Colonies’ through ‘Democracy’ and ‘Expansion’ to ‘A World Literature’ ”). Because of their historical moment, “both Matthiessen and Spiller assumed that American literary history transcended ideology” (Bercovitch 1993:357, emphasis added).6

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In “The Music of America,” however, Bercovitch reflects on his own initiation and liminality in “America” to critique a “hermeneutics of transcendence” that would hope to identify the “laws and rules” governing the strange, unknown object of discovery, “America.” To interpret, he suggests (in terms reminiscent of Greenblatt’s commentary on the original “discovery” of “America”) is not to come to terms with the new or unexpected. It is to domesticate the unknown by transferring the agency of meaning from the mystery “out there” to realities we recognize, and so to invest the familiar – ourselves, or our kind – with the powers of a higher reality: “universal laws,” the view of eternity, the canine principles of music. (Bercovitch 1993:4) The reference here is to Kafka’s “Investigations of a Dog,” whose canine narrator’s pursuit of forever elusive aspects of “dogdom” serves Bercovitch as parable for the limitations of interpretation and cultural critique (1993:3). Bercovitch urges a recognition of limit and limitation, that is, a mode of liminality that re-cognizes “universality” as rather particular product of specific kinds of translation: “To establish the laws and rules of that higher reality is not to break through the limitations we experience. It is to deny our conditions of dependency by translating those limitations into meta-structures of culture, history, and the mind” (1993:4, emphasis added). The procedure of translation that produces the ideologically useful – but of course treacherous – appearance of boundless validity is the “hermeneutics of transcendence.” This insight itself, however, hardly affords a “safe,” non-relative or again “universal” ground for judgment, let alone a facile stance of moral superiority; on the contrary, as Bercovitch makes perfectly clear, we “have no choice but to interpret.” Nonetheless, while for him “to magnify the categories of our containment is to diminish our capacities for understanding,” the “recognition of universals as culture-specific barriers to understanding” makes it possible to see that “barriers, so specified, may become (within limits) avenues of discovery” (Bercovitch 1993:4–5). With reference to the ambiguous title “Investigations of a Dog,” Bercovitch suggests that the story provides a model for limits and possibilities that pertain necessarily to mutual interpretation. Its enabling “re-cognition of limitation” (1993:5) lies in its implied reciprocity that reflects on the contingencies of both sides. For Bercovitch, this reflection describes a “hermeneutics of nontranscendence”7 that is relevant to cross-cultural interpretation and comparative literature: As the title suggests, “Investigations of a Dog” points not only to the dog’s attempts to describe Kafka’s world, but, at the same time, to Kafka’s attempts to describe dogdom. And the result, as I interpret it, is not a double impasse. It is a model of cross-cultural criticism. Its terms are reciprocity, as against dichotomy: not canine or human, but the contingencies of both, as revealed (in degree) through the re-cognition of limitation. We might call this the hermeneutics of non-transcendence. It may be said to reverse traditional comparativist methods by its emphasis on the historicity of archetypes and essences. Its aim is not to harmonize “apparent” differences (in the manner of pluralist

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Comparative North American literary history and non-transcendence consensus), but on the contrary to highlight conflicting appearances, so as to explore the substantive differences they imply. This entails the recognition of universals as culture-specific barriers to understanding; it is grounded in the faith that barriers, so specified, may become (within limits) avenues of discovery . . . ; its logic may be briefly stated. If dreams of transcendence are indices to the traps of culture, then inquiry into the trapping process may provide insight both into our own and into others’ actual non-transcending condition. Such insight is problematic, provisional, and nourished by a frustrating sense of boundaries. It denies us access to the apocalypse, but it helps make our surrounding worlds visible. (Bercovitch 1993:5)

Bercovitch describes thus a mode of liminality whose acceptance of relational perception and of non-transparency as structurally necessary elements of cultural cognition signals a recognition of the blinding problems of projection. In this view, the belief in a transcendent reality of such terms as “American,” “literary,” and “history” appears, not as norm and natural fact, but as factum and exceptional fiction whose existence (rather than absence) requires explanation. From transcendence into history In Bercovitch’s reflection on the possibilities of American Literary History, belief in such transcendence turns out to be conditional on temporary consensus; it is contingent on moments in history when contradictions are eclipsed. “American” “literary” “history” was made possible by such a consensus. Matthiessen and Spiller could assume that “American literary history transcended ideology” because “American for them stood for the universal possibilities of democracy; history, for a more or less impartial account of the facts; and literary for great art, to be judged in its own timeless terms.” The consensus that supported these terms, however, eventually gave way to intense debate and led to what Bercovitch calls a “quandary” (Bercovitch 1993:357). “History” fell from transcendence in the discussions about historiography; aesthetic (e)valuation of the “literary” was recognized to be contingent on socially defined terms (such as race, ethnicity, and gender), a perspective emphasized in particular in the sweeping debates about literary canons. With respect to the identity and American-ness of American literature, finally, the very values that appeared to underwrite the expansion of the possibilities of American democracy were then re-cognized to have energized also the brutal practices of imperial dispossession of Native peoples (as Henry Nash Smith’s self-evaluation of his seminal Virgin Land acknowledges; see Smith 1986). As a result of what Bercovitch (1993:357) calls “the fall from transcendence into history,” the foundational, organizing signs “American,” “literary,” and “history” all now appear in quotation marks that signal their constructedness and historical contingency. The Cambridge History of American Literature, which has appeared under Bercovitch’s general editorship since 1994, has been designed to recognize this “fall from transcendence into history,” a “fall” fully consonant for Bercovitch, as we have seen, with limits of interpretation that are also limits of projection, and thus actually increase understanding. Devices utilized in the History to avoid the pitfalls of trans-

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cendence include an explicit self-positioning that emphasizes the historical and ideological contexts of the project, as well as an overtly advertised “multiple-draft” model of overlapping contributions by different authors. This framework aims at fragmenting any single ideological point of view that could claim overarching or “transcendental” status as organizing principle of the History. In the preface to the volumes published so far, Bercovitch introduces the project as a generationally defined, multi-perspectival, open-ended collection of narratives that turns around nationality as a “rhetorical battleground” of various inclusions and exclusions (1994, Vol. 7:xv). Yet one might also want to register some reservations: if this project is consistent with Bercovitch’s critique of the symbol of “America,” how does it differ from the “voracious” mode of liminality of “America” that is operational in particular through the very perspective of “dissent”? Since a model of dissensus is also part of America’s “consensus discors” (which defines the “dynamics of oppositionalism” (Bercovitch 1993:308)), there seems to be no outside to Bercovitch’s model of dissensus on the grounds of “America,” which thus becomes indistinguishable itself from forms of transcendence. We do know, however, that there is an outside to “America.” Who defines when dissensus is a recognition of the limits of the hermeneutics of transcendence, and when it is part of the seemingly transcendent American consensus of dissent? The problem becomes obvious when Bercovitch suggests (towards the end of Rites) that United States trends toward multiculturalism propose “unearned solutions” that dissensus could prevent, describing multiculturalism as already inscribed in the US symbology and as yet another “re-trend toward pluralism, for the ideal of heterogeneity is integral to the American symbology” (Bercovitch 1993:372). The passage suggests an assimilative rhetorical technique that interprets heterogeneity on the defined and known ground of American dissent, and thus arguably flies in the face of a “hermeneutics of non-transcendence” as conceived by Bercovitch himself. This is Bercovitch’s own reproach to what he calls “the recent trend toward multiculturalism” (1993:372); but the implication of this very reproach is that this trend’s difference is known and understood beforehand, and that it is pre-emptively translated into the “reassuring signs” (Greenblatt) of a known order. The aim of a hermeneutics of non-transcendence, as we have seen, is not “to harmonize ‘apparent’ differences . . . but on the contrary to highlight conflicting appearances, so as to explore the substantive differences they imply” (1993:5). While the association of multiculturalism with “unearned solutions” could perhaps be seen as an understandable critique with respect to some forms of multiculturalism, it fails as an attack on multiculturalism tout court – for instance on versions of it that could draw the United States and America outside of “America.” I think there is a substantial risk that Bercovitch’s view of heterogeneity here reduces it to forms of difference that are already pre-coded in the “symbol of America,” as internal American plurality. It might thus, in fact, restrict difference to a “transcendent” interpretation. If the aim of a “hermeneutics of non-transcendence” is indeed to “highlight conflicting appearances” and “explore the substantive differences they imply,” how can one arrive at another mode of liminality and alterity that does not immediately proceed to pre-cognize, pre-scribe, and ingest difference as yet another form of typically liberal American dissent? “American dissent” itself, it seems, is one of the notions that would stand to benefit from

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further “recognition of universals as culture-specific barriers to understanding” (Bercovitch 1993:5), in cross-cultural and comparative perspectives.

E. D. Blodgett: dialogues of reorigination and negotiation Problems similar to those articulated by Bercovitch are named already in the title of E. D. Blodgett’s (1993) “Is a History of the Literatures of Canada Possible?” (which draws on David Perkins’ title Is Literary History Possible? (1992)). Both Blodgett’s and Bercovitch’s examinations of the (im)possibilities of national literary history seek to formulate versions of a “hermeneutics of non-transcendence,” and indeed assume such a reflection on the limits of understanding, on liminality and alterity, as the necessary ground for any redeployment of literary history. While Bercovitch’s analysis of dissent at times risks “pre-scribing” alterity in terms of American dissent, Blodgett avoids a similar reading of cultural difference as differential dissent from a common norm. By contrast, he considers multiple “reoriginations” that arise in the contact zones of North (of) America but proceed from entirely different points of departure. Here “reorigination” (Blodgett 1993:16) produces consciousness of the border, a consciousness that constitutes a recognition of limit and liminality very much in the sense of Bercovitch’s hermeneutic of non-transcendence, but results in multiple, dialogic rather than dialectic forms of consciousness that neither exclude nor voraciously ingest. For Blodgett – as for Bercovitch – the nation is a “series of negotiations in which a plurality of ideologies is at issue” (Blodgett 1993:3). It is also – as for many other theorists from Benedict Anderson to Homi Bhabha – a discursive performance and a “necessary fiction” (Blodgett 1993:3) that links speaker and rendered subject(s) with an intended audience. “Canada” can thus be seen to begin with Jacques Cartier’s “clearly interventionist text that would construct the unknown country and its Aboriginal . . . peoples for consummation and realization by Cartier’s French audience” (Blodgett 1993:6). Origin is in this perspective “not so much a moment of beginning as a moment of intervention” (1993:5). In this inter- and counter-discursive process of continuing encounter, Blodgett (1993:8) locates “one of the few valid origins that would transpose Canada from what is perceived as its geographical and historical place into a nation of discontinuous origins, the moments of its writing and rewriting marked by the character of their contestation.” While this narrative of contestation and negotiation has parallels with Bercovitch’s account, it avoids the continuous dialectic of inclusive dissent, with its origin in the all-encompassing mission that is expressed in teleological narratives. If “acts of origination are ubiquitous in New World histories,” Blodgett points out that only “origination in the United States” – although it may be seen to function as part of the continuing “errand” upheld and recirculated in the American Jeremiad – constructs itself without an outside to itself. The dissent (from an actual America) of a Whitman or Emerson that insists on a “true” and all-inclusive America is thus capable, as Blodgett puts it, “to include by radical exclusion” (1993:9). This is the myth and symbol of “America” that Bercovitch also critiques, yet, as he states, from a non-transcendent position whose critical limits seem predetermined by the “dynamics of oppositionalism” already implied by American dissent. If a “hermeneutics of non-transcendence” is equated, however, with the circumference of dissent and the suggestion that American ideology can only be critiqued from within itself, it would

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allow only for “non-comparative” negotiation between positions that are always understood as already internal and commensurable. Blodgett’s model is rather that of a continual translation between perspectives not previously derived from an encompassing entity, a process that alters both perspectives (as well as the entity that is the result) and thus registers alterity beyond dissent. If “every act of origination that is somehow aware of being such is a bordering gesture [that] declares itself by the use it makes of its frame” (1993:9), Emerson’s and Whitman’s deletion of the border, an act that declares any alterity as contained by the self, constitutes “an act of translation that claims the lack of the necessity of translation” (1993:9–10); by contrast, Blodgett suggests, “the cultures of Canada state their difference . . . by privileging the border” (1993:10). Cultural “self” is defined here as liminality that is neither the “conscience excluante” Glissant cites with reference to Hegel’s account of the epic, nor the ingestive inclusion Bercovitch explicates with reference to the American dream. Instead, a doubled consciousness comes to the fore that re-cognizes alterity as liminal modality that translates the self also from the outside, in contrast to a “recognition” that finds in alterity only the “reassuring signs” that are already part of the self (a part defined by that “partiality” rather than its own). Such a hermeneutics of re-cognition and non-transcendence seems better prepared to respond to heterogeneity than the formula of dissensus that claims heterogeneity as a constituent part, a containing dialectic always defined by the initial terms it seems to dissent from and negate, yet in the end always assents to (in its “true” form) and sublates. If articulations of the “newness of the New World” need a non-transcendent account of alterity, they also have to exceed any single logic such as the model of American dissent. Blodgett’s recent history of literary history in Canada, Five Part Invention: A History of Literary History in Canada, aims at an account that “possesses more than one vanishing points” (2003:4). The purpose of this undertaking resembles to some extent the goal of the literary history edited by Bercovitch, yet avoids any attempt to contain such multiple vanishing points in a single dialectic (such as “dissent”). Blodgett begins and ends with perspectives that read Canada as other from the outside, in order to “dismantle the essentializing tendencies of the two dominant cultural groups” – a triangulation already used in his earlier Configuration (1982) that is “designed to place our thinking of Canadian culture outside the limits of all cultural exclusivity.” The overall aim of his project is “to open [Canada] to its several selves” (Blodgett 2003:20). But if these several selves are thus not left in their respective states of “conscience excluante,” neither are they submitted to a process of a sublating “conscience incluante” and its ingestion. They are conceived instead as entering into a process of continual translation that makes them communicate, but also leaves them in a non-transcendent relationship of multiple consciousness and vantage points (with the barriers specified by Bercovitch). Blodgett compares this multiplicity with the juxtapositions of possible selves in the Bildungsroman, a multiple consciousness of potentiality that often remains unresolved. I see this refusal of sublation as an insistence on the “newness” of the New World, or as its answer to a Hegelian dialectics of “return” with its sublation in one vantage point or “Spirit.” It also articulates a hermeneutics (or poetics, as Glissant says) of nontranscendent relation which would seem to offer an alternative to any single, totalizing story of globalization.

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Pierre Nepveu and the (re)reading of national culture Working like Blodgett (and Bercovitch) out of a hermeneutic tradition, Pierre Nepveu explores alternative narratives of Québécois culture in a globalized context in his 1988 study, L’Ecologie du réel: Mort et naissance de la littérature québécoise contemporaine.8 He situates himself from the beginning after the project of a Quebec literature that had to read and “remember” the French-Canadian tradition in specific ways in order to formulate its own national identity (Nepveu 1988:16). Nepveu retraces that earlier act of communal identification from a horizon that is no longer defined by the concept of nationalism. He thus envisions the “end” of a Quebec literature defined by pure identity, substance, and essentialism. Such an end does not suggest its disappearance but rather the idea that the designation itself “ne recouvre plus rien d’essentiel ou de substantiel” (“no longer encompasses anything essential or substantial”). This perspective might induce us to speak, he suggests, “avec un certain à-propos, d’une littérature post-québécoise” (Nepveu 1988:14; “with a certain aptness, of a post-Québécois literature”). Nepveu combines here a specific cultural location with a refusal to seal it in identitarian discourses, or in binary opposition to “the other.” In his 1989 essay “Qu’estce que la transculture?” (“What is transculture?”), he indicates even more clearly (with reference to Alain Finkielkraut’s La Défaite de la pensée [1987]) why a new culture that appeared to many as a postmodern “culture du déracinement” (Nepveu 1989:16; “culture of uprooting”) could be seen, on the contrary, as the prolongation of a counter-universalist logic of “enracinement” (“rootedness”): the very argument that there are specific cultures (rather than one single, universal “Culture”) that have specific value different from other cultures (an idea originally proposed by Johann Gottfried von Herder) implies the possibility of the equal value of all cultures, and thus also the notion of relativism. Similarly the transcultural impact of other cultures on francophone Quebec culture – in what Nepveu calls “le tournant de 1980” (“the turning point of 1980”) – does not so much interrupt as consequently extend a logic of emergence that is older than the “Revolution tranquille” (Nepveu 1989:17) – except that now it comes from several angles. Nepveu illustrates this perspective by invoking a vision of culture that sees it defined, above all, by its propensity for change, the new, and the unknown; a culture defined “par sa capacité d’auto-altération, de dépaysement, de migration. La culture, c’est l’expérience même de la rupture et de l’indétermination” (Nepveu 1989:19; “by its ability to alter itself, to encounter strangeness, to migrate. Culture means at its very core the experience of rupture and uncertainty”). Nepveu shows in particular the convergence in this respect between the “canonical” works of Quebec literature and its migrant writing under the signs of exile and uncertainty, which they share (1988:200–1), and points to a correspondence between “littérature immigrante” (“immigrant literature”) and cosmopolitan literature within Québécois culture and literature (1989:24). He develops the “cosmopolitan” aspect of Québécois culture9 with reference to the theatre of Robert Lepage, Yolande Villemaire’s La Vie en prose, the work of Nicole Brossard and, in particular, Jacques Poulin’s Volkswagen Blues (Nepveu 1989:24–7). For Nepveu the idea of “transculture” offers a chance to rediscover an anterior “québécité elle-même transculturelle” (1989:27; “Quebecness that is itself transcultural”). This redefinition of a Québécois cultural

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“identity” and of a “ ‘centre’ québécois” (1989:29) with respect to an alterity at its very core (rather than on the outside) has significant parallels with the discourses of Canadian non-identitarian “identity” discussed above, and similarly highlights a potential at the moment of globalization. Nepveu cites in this context the comment of one of the founders of the transcultural journal Vice Versa, Fulvio Caccia (discussed in more detail in Chapter 6), that it is precisely the non-dominant position of Québécois francophone culture in North America that offers it a privileged access to alterity and transformation (both in the experience of itself and of other cultures) that for him is the very foundation of culture (Caccia 1986:45; quoted in Nepveu 1988:202; 1989:20). Nepveu indeed reads this idea, from the obvious elements in current writing, back through the Québécois literary tradition, from Emile Nelligan through Alain Grandbois and Hector de Saint-Denys Garneau, to the tensions in Hubert Aquin’s work. And this repositioning of a central perspective finds its fitting conclusion in the citation of two famous lines by one of the poets most closely identified with Quebec, Gaston Miron: “Je ne suis plus revenu pour revenir/je suis arrivé à ce qui commence” (“I have returned no longer to return/I have arrived at that which begins”) – the closing lines of the title poem of L’Homme rapaillé (Miron 1994:15; quoted in Nepveu 1989:30).10 Nepveu’s reaction to the impact of transculture results first and foremost in a hermeneutics that reads the literary tradition through a shifted horizon of expectation.11 Both the position of reading and the understanding of what is read have changed. To clarify this double transformation, Nepveu refers to Jean Lamore’s discussion (again in Vice Versa) of the concept of transculture in Fernando Ortiz’s Contrapunteo Cubano del Tabaco y Azúcar (Ortiz 1940), which emphasizes mutual alteration of cultures with the result of a new reality, different from a mosaic or the sum of its constituent ingredients (Lamore 1992; quoted in Nepveu 1989:18). Readings of the reciprocal impact of “transculture,” like Nepveu’s, can at times move toward Hegelian sublation (although here it is an assimilation to a whole that is not absolute, but itself changeable). Yet while Nepveu thus seeks to avoid the segregation and reification of “immigrant” culture, a more multicultural (rather than transcultural) logic appears when Nepveu discusses the possibly tragic dimensions and the loss of memory that threaten the migrant subject denying its origin; this issue is at stake for instance in a section of Fulvio Caccia’s Irpinia (Nepveu 1996:106). Forgetting and assimilation would seem to Nepveu as problematic as a culture of undifferentiated citation and otherness, which seems to be his construction of a postmodernity he rejects as ultimately just as homogenizing. Nepveu therefore rather opts for a “pluralité des centres” (Nepveu 1988:219; “plurality of centres”; also the subtitle of the last chapter of Ecologie) inspired by Brecht (and his Galileo), and suggests that “[i]l faut parier pour un pluralisme qui ne soit pas le triomphe de la confusion” (1988:215; “one must wager on a pluralism that doesn’t equate with the triumph of confusion”). The previously cited, sometimes dialectically contoured concept of transculture coexists here – a constellation of doubleness itself – with the formula of a “pluralité des centres” that maintains the dialogue of several containing dialectics. These dialectics all function themselves like Poulin’s old bus in Volkswagen Blues: a mobile and open vehicle that moves through and collects traces of other cultures, yet

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Comparative North American literary history and non-transcendence

becomes a container nonetheless. While Nepveu sees this vehicle specifically as the “métaphore même de la nouvelle culture québécoise” (“very metaphor of the new Québécois culture”) in that it is “indéterminée, voyageuse, en dérive, mais ‘recueillante’ ” (1988:217; “indeterminate, wayfaring, adrift, but also ‘gathering’ ”), one would have to imagine its movement – in the perspective of a “pluralité des centres” – as negotiating traffic with other such vehicles, resulting in an endless number of itineraries. It is remarkable that its movement exhibits, in Nepveu’s interpretation, a striking similarity with the act of reading: “Le Volks de Jack Waterman permet non seulement de suivre des traces, de les repérer (il s’agit d’un voyage sur ‘la piste de l’Oregon’ vers la Californie), mais il est lui-même un faisceau de souvenirs. Signes divers, parfum, graffiti, tout cela est concrètement recueilli par le véhicule et par la conscience qui l’habite” (1988:217; “Not only Jack Waterman’s Volks makes it possible to follow some tracks, to locate them [the novel is about a trip to California on the “Oregon trail”], but it is in itself a network of memories. Signs, perfume, pieces of graffiti, all this is gathered by the vehicle and by the consciousness that dwells in it”). The trajectory of the old Volks follows multiple maps in the novel, which superimpose and deconstruct the familiar mindmaps of North America with reference to those of francophone exploration and, in turn, to Native perspectives and the moment of contact. This kind of movement simulates the reading of versions of history that are woven together yet remain dialogized. The two occupants of Poulin’s old Volks part company at the end of the voyage: the old owner returns to Quebec City, while his mixedblood co-traveller and new owner of the bus chooses not to return and to explore instead new directions. Poulin’s novel thus also invites us to ask to what extent the narratives that are read here as a “pluralité des centres” articulate themselves in their own right, or appear as relative voices of dissent that nonetheless confirm an ultimately unified voyage and dialectic of return. In the next chapter, I will turn to the staging of alterity in Du Bois’ attempt to read historically different itineraries in the unifying perspective of the American nation – an attempt that ultimately points to the failure of that dialectic.

3

W. E. B. Du Bois, Hegel, and the staging of alterity

Du Bois and Hegelian teleology In Dark Voices: W. E. B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888–1903, Shamoon Zamir provides us with one of the most detailed accounts to date of what he calls the “drama of alterity” (1995:115) that Du Bois stages in The Souls of Black Folk. Zamir offers us in particular a fascinating analysis of the role which Du Bois’ complex encounter with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit played in his scripting of a drama that has become one of the most important models for thinking about cultural difference today. In 1897 Du Bois first published “Strivings of the Negro People” in the Atlantic Monthly, which, in revised form and under the title “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” became the first chapter of The Souls of Black Folk in 1903.1 As is well known, Du Bois in this opening chapter describes a differential duality of “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings” (Du Bois 1986a:364), a duality which the title associates with “black folk” in general, and which has been related in particular to the black elite that Du Bois describes elsewhere as the “Talented Tenth” (Zamir 1995:116, 147–). What I am interested in here is a certain ambivalence in the staging of the very terms of duality, “twoness,” “doubleness,” and “double consciousness.”2 I will trace a shifting of semantic bonds and valencies of these terms themselves, read through the context of Du Bois’ appropriation of Hegel as it has been outlined by Zamir. Eventually, I will extend this analysis to the language of visibility and ambivalent identification that Du Bois expresses through the metaphor of the veil. The Biblical conceit of the lifting of the veil or drawing aside of the curtain is used as a metaphor for the progression from appearance toward self-consciousness in Hegel’s Phenomenology (Hegel 1977:102–3);3 by contrast, as Zamir points out, in Souls the veil descends (Zamir 1995:135–6), for the first time in a scene from Du Bois’ childhood in which another child refuses “with a glance” an exchange of gifts (Du Bois 1986a:363–4).4 This is a scene of initially negative and then ambivalent identification that marks here the beginning of self-consciousness: The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card, – refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held all beyond it in common

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W. E. B. Du Bois, Hegel, and alterity contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. (Du Bois 1986a:364, emphasis added)5

I will argue that a model of transparency that would undo the descending of the veil is not easily available to Du Bois inside a Hegelian frame of reference of increasing visibility and identification. This problem will keep closure in abeyance and doublecode, at the very end of Du Bois’ text, the language of visibility – a moment I will seek to locate with reference to another, quite different, reading of Hegel and a model of relation offered by Edouard Glissant that problematizes pure transparency and predictability in recognition. The terms I will trace here are overdetermined, double-coded, and partially resemanticized because of shifting, but often unresolved, frames of reference and of recognition – a problematic that speaks to many other narratives of collective emergence and cultural positionalities marked by multiple perspectives. “Double consciousness” emerges in Du Bois’ text in typically ambivalent fashion. It can carry negative but also positive connotations, according to the stage of the argument and the envisaged totality. On the one hand, double consciousness appears in many formulations as an incomplete stage of reason. On the other hand, Du Bois articulates African American difference as a surplus when relating it to the official values of the American nation. His attempts to combine the words “American” and “Negro” harmoniously in a collective self-assertion of the “American Negro” are staged, particularly in the first chapter but also elsewhere in Souls, within a logic of recognition that is defined by “American” values; for Du Bois, “there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes” (1986a:370). Yet this surplus is not only insufficiently recognized in the incomplete project and reason of the nation; while the terms America and Negro appear equalized in this formulation, Du Bois has earlier stressed the productive difference of the contributions made by America’s races.6 This ambivalence and surplus of meaning, I will argue, appears also in the making and unmaking of such terms as “self-consciousness” (1986a:364) or “assimilation” (1986a:397). Full self-consciousness, in one frame of reference, can actually imply full assimilation to dominant values, and thus a kind of disappearance of specificity and difference; full self-consciousness in another frame of reference will lead, in Du Bois, to a very different notion of assimilation. Du Bois’ reworking of Hegelian teleology is outlined in Zamir’s Dark Voices: W. E. B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888–1903, which is the first major attempt to reconstruct in detail Hegel’s role in Du Bois’ thought at this stage of his career.7 Zamir shows the relationship between Hegel’s Phenomenology and Du Bois’ famous description of double consciousness. He argues that Du Bois probably read the Phenomenology when he studied Hegel at Harvard in 1889–90 with George Santayana (Zamir 1995:113, 248–9n2), possibly already in German.8 Zamir analyzes in particular how Du Bois’ position differs significantly from the dominant American Hegel reception at the time, which appropriated Hegel to emphasize a specific teleology in the American context: “His use of Hegel can be read against the widespread adoption of Hegel in support of American nationalism and manifest destiny in America in the nineteenth century, from the voluminous productions of the St.

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Louis Hegelians to the essays of the young John Dewey” (Zamir 1995:13). By contrast, Du Bois concentrates on Hegel’s account of the “unhappy consciousness,” early on in the Phenomenology, as a resource for his description of African American “double-consciousness” (1995:13). Du Bois therefore de-emphasizes the synthesis of a singular Geist (or “soul” in the singular, rather than the plural of Du Bois’ title) later in the Phenomenology (Zamir 1995:114–15). Zamir thus argues that Du Bois’ appropriation of Hegel takes a rather un-Hegelian or, perhaps better, post-Hegelian form: “In focusing on the ‘unhappy consciousness’ rather than on the metaphysical schema of history in the Phenomenology,” he writes, “Du Bois is . . . rejecting idealist teleologies” (1995:13). Yet despite this shift that sets Du Bois’ reading of Hegel clearly apart from that of most of his American contemporaries, numerous passages in The Souls of Black Folk are nonetheless clearly teleological in many respects. A ubiquitous negative prefix marks telos, for instance, e contrario in a long list of words in Souls, including “unanswered,” “unanswerable,” “unattained,” “uncalled,” “uncertain,” “unreconciled,” “unrequited,” “unrewarded,” “unsatisfied,” – and then “unknown,” “un-reasonable” and, finally, “unresting.” The resolution of these terms is, at least in Souls, sought in the context of a fulfillment of the nation, in the completion of “America” and the American nation as a project and a goal. While Zamir is certainly right to state that Du Bois “radically adapts Hegel’s Phenomenology” (1995:113), I would suggest that Du Bois’ emphasis on the “unhappy consciousness” shifts the diagnosis of the current state of the national project and synthesis, yet does not – at this stage of his thinking – abolish its teleology as such. Teleology of the Hegelian kind is certainly at work when Du Bois expresses his hope “that some day on American soil two world-races may give each to each those characteristics both so sadly lack” (1986a:370), and then states – as we have already seen – that “there are to-day no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes” (1986a:370). The continuation of this passage is well-known: there is no true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave; the American fairy tales and folk-lore are Indian and African; and, all in all, we black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness. Will America be poorer if she replace her brutal dyspeptic blundering with light-hearted but determined Negro humility? or her coarse and cruel wit with loving jovial good-humor? or her vulgar music with the soul of the Sorrow Songs? (Du Bois 1986a:370) “America,” indeed, is invoked in the last paragraph of Souls (which I will examine later) as the very subject and agent that – under certain circumstances and in the future – “shall rend the Veil” (1986a:545). The ideal “pure human spirit” Du Bois sees embodied in the Declaration of Independence will come into its own, however, only in a difficult and complex relationship: The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife, – this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer

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W. E. B. Du Bois, Hegel, and alterity self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. (Du Bois 1986a:365)

While the merging of a “double self into a better and truer self” seems to indicate a dialectic synthesis and teleology, this merging implies here also, on the contrary, a stubborn maintenance and separation of the particulars. The same unresolved ambiguity between dialectic sublation and dialogic difference returns with the notion of “assimilation” in Du Bois’ text. It appears here as an assimilation of both parts to a higher entity, not of the emergent (Negro) part to the (white) dominant.

“Assimilation” and recognition Different relationships between emergence and assimilation are discussed in the third chapter of Souls, “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others.” In his analysis of the choices made by previous black leaders, Du Bois suggests that “the attitude of the imprisoned group may take three main forms, – a feeling of revolt and revenge; an attempt to adjust all thought and action to the will of the greater group; or, finally, a determined effort at self-realization and self-development despite environing opinion” (1986a:395–6). Du Bois equates assimilation not, as might be expected, with the second option here – identified with Booker T. Washington’s agenda of adjustment and submission – but rather with the third. This agenda of an assimilation which maintains difference is typified for Du Bois by Frederick Douglass: “Douglass, in his old age, still bravely stood for the ideals of his early manhood, – ultimate assimilation through self-assertion, and on no other terms” (Du Bois 1986a:397; emphasis in the original). This formulation balances the maintenance of a different self on the one hand with a clear goal of “ultimate assimilation” on the other hand, and thus with a teleology in which the self also recognizes itself through the recognition of another, larger entity. Zamir suggests that Du Bois refuses to subsume the “particularity of AfricanAmerican experience into historicist teleologies” (1995:126). However, he also maintains “that Du Bois’ psychology of alterity works within idealist frameworks. Its primary concern is with recognition” (Zamir 1995:117; emphasis added). Both comments seem accurate. Yet I would argue that these two assertions point to a contradiction that complicates significantly the dialectic of visibility and the hope of redemption implicit in the metaphor of the veil and of its rending in the future. A recognition of particularity beyond its current, confined status cannot be fully and transparently mediated in a totality derived from the visible status quo; this would lead to a form of “assimilation” that is not in Du Bois’ sense. If the reality expressed as “particularity” is to develop a sense beyond the posited, constraining definition that defines it as particularity, it can only be “recognized” from the point of view of a totality that is not yet visible (or cannot be recognized) from inside the current one. This argument hinges on the limits and potential pitfalls of a politics of recognition. It is premised on the assumption that an absolute transparency in which all

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contradictions are sublated could only be guaranteed from the point of view of one dominant, universal standard. This leads to the obvious question: what is the frame of recognition, and who defines the terms that set the stage? Hegel discusses recognition in the Phenomenology in the section on selfconsciousness, and in particular in the chapter “Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage.” Recognition is symmetrical before it enters into the dialectic of master and slave (or lord and bondsman in A. V. Miller’s translation). In this erstwhile symmetry, self-consciousness, recognizing the other first as object among objects, projects this same recognition onto the other who thus becomes a symmetrical subject: “They recognize themselves as mutually recognizing one another” (Hegel 1977:112). Such symmetrical, transparent identity triggers the fight for dominance which in the Hegelian dialectic produces Master and Slave, and a subsuming of erstwhile equal parts to a hierarchized whole. This can hardly be the totality which for Du Bois, in most formulations in Souls, remains a national American entity. And indeed the process of recognition in Hegel moves beyond this point, since recognition after this struggle is validated merely by the one who has lost it.9 Only the reciprocal recognition of equals can validate both sides, and result in the kind of recognition Du Bois seems to have in mind when he formulates the “end of this striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture” (1986a:365).10 The rending of the veil would be equivalent to this level of recognition. This perspective, however, has at least two implications: first, if “assimilation” to an ideal of equal co-workers is possible, as Du Bois hopes, but if this ideal is yet invisible, a model of immediate transparency would equal assimilation to the currently visible reason of the nation. This would lead to the second option laid out by Du Bois – the agenda of adjustment and submission he identifies with Booker T. Washington – and not to a “politics of transfiguration” which Du Bois would arguably judge indispensable for any “politics of fulfilment” (see Gilroy 1993:112, 37–8).11 Secondly, if Hegel’s model is logically continuous, then even an emphasis on the early, unresolved stages of a dialectic whose parts have been identified and defined by the dominant other of the status quo would ultimately lead to a model of sublation and incorporation in which only that part of the self can be asserted that can be mediated in reciprocal recognition with the other. In whatever shape the dominant other will be revealed in the future, this mediation will not correspond to an independent “self-realization and self-development despite environing opinion,” since part of this self will by necessity remain obscure in this specific dialectic of recognition. The hope for “true self-consciousness” in a Hegelian model of symmetrical transparency thus offers a difficult answer to the condition Du Bois describes with the notion of double consciousness, and problematizes the metaphor of the rending of the veil at the end of Souls. Certainly with respect to a status quo of dominance, fully transparent self-mediation through the other is problematic. Yet the following famous evocation of the metaphor of the veil in the first chapter of Souls, identifying “double-consciousness” with the absence of “true self-consciousness,” clearly aims at a sublation of the terms Negro and American in a full, visual transparency of “true self-consciousness”: After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with

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W. E. B. Du Bois, Hegel, and alterity second-sight in this American world, – a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings. . . . (Du Bois 1986a:364; emphasis added)12

The gift of second sight partially offsets the negative side of the veil (see Bambara 1993:309–10; Chandler 2000:271–4),13 and, one could argue, is an element that is ultimately unsublatable into a dominant vanishing point. Yet true self-consciousness and the rending of the veil would nonetheless depend upon a fully transparent selfmediation in a context that is named as the American nation in this passage. This connection is also essential to most of the other (roughly two dozen) passages in Souls that seek to conjoin the words Negro and American. This account of double consciousness and its implications is also essentially a narrative of the nation: the achievement of true self-consciousness is the equivalent of the reasonable nation. Yet this full transparency of the self to the self, “this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self,” as I have tried to argue, is problematic in a Hegelian model of recognition. Consequently, criss-crossing at various angles the Hegelian stage of Du Bois’ “drama of alterity,” the attempt at mediating a (collective) self in the context and teleology of a problematic nation produces a double mask – or a double veil – throughout the text (which is often expressed in the prefixes of negation that I have mentioned): the mask or veil concealing a self that cannot be fully mediated in that nation on the one hand, and on the other hand the mask or veil of the “whirl and chaos” behind which – in Du Bois’ redemptive hope at the end of the text – might reside the principle that would reveal another America. This two-fold opaqueness and non-transcendence, it seems to me, is itself doubleedged or double-faced. It expresses, on the one hand, the uncompleted mediation of the terms “American” and “Negro” that Du Bois stages and seeks to remedy throughout the text. On the other hand, it maintains African American specificity and particularity as an unsublated gift not aligned with the vanishing point of the reason and teleology of the factually existing America and its recognition. This America, for Du Bois, masquerades as the one that in reality is yet hidden and invisible.

Relation and non-transparency In this respect, the evasion of equation, the maintenance of difference seems essential. Zamir (1995:115) describes clearly Du Bois’ temptation to resolve a difficult relation: “Du Bois’ own project of a possible resolution of historical division in a ‘kingdom of culture’ may seem like a utopian negation of the tragic substance of historical particularity and multiplicity.” According to Zamir, Du Bois tests this idealism through historical location of his own drama of alterity (1995:115). Yet it is also

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in Du Bois’ re-coded terms of assimilation, self-consciousness, and an overdetermined double consciousness (which is both incomplete and also richer), that this opaqueness keeps asserting itself against the tempting resolutions of Hegelian teleology, the nation, and recognition defined in its terms. In this perspective, the notion of double consciousness not only appropriates Hegel’s formulation of the “unhappy consciousness” by shifting emphasis away from the end-point of Hegel’s teleology to an earlier point in the dialectic; it also maintains another model of alterity beyond – and against – even the reconstructed Hegelian stage that seems to provide the setting for Souls. For another articulation of this resistance to resolution and in order to accentuate these less Hegelian elements in Souls, I will invoke here briefly another (un-)reading of Hegel. In Edouard Glissant’s “poetics of relation” as it is formulated, for instance, in his Introduction à une Poétique du Divers (1995), the insistence on relation contrasts with systems of thinking in which being is absolute and fully transparent. The term “relation” for him involves not the transparency of what he calls the false universality of systems, but a certain opaqueness in which difference and otherness are recognized as such and respected. A certain indeterminacy and unpredictability are for Glissant signs of relation and difference that he sees as an alternative to subsuming all particularity under a centralized, projective system of thinking. Glissant actually formulates a right to be recognized on different terms, or not to be recognized only in universalized terms of recognition and sameness, as an alternative to a certain kind of barbarism: “Le droit à l’opacité serait aujourd’hui le signe le plus évident de la non-barbarie” (Glissant 1995:54; “The right to opaqueness would be today the most evident sign of non-barbarism”). If particularity and difference are not constructed from one single perspective afforded by a specific system of thinking, the resulting opaqueness may appear as “chaos” rather than as systematic order and transparency. Yet this “chaos” can therefore also designate the relation between given teleologies on the one hand, and that which is not yet visible in given systems of understanding on the other hand. Glissant calls this globalized condition “chaos-monde” – a chaos-world which, for him, does not signify the apocalyptic end of the world (1995:53) but rather carries positive connotations. In Du Bois’ Souls, the word “chaos” occurs once, significantly in the closing paragraph of the last chapter, “Of the Sorrow Songs,” before the transcription at its end of the chorus of “Let Us Cheer the Weary Traveller.” Chaos appears here, ambiguously, both in opposition to the nation of reason and simultaneously as the veiled place of the solution that would lead to true self-consciousness: Even so is the hope that sang in the songs of my fathers well sung. If somewhere in this whirl and chaos of things there dwells Eternal Good, pitiful yet masterful, then anon in His good time America shall rend the Veil and the prisoned shall go free. (Du Bois 1986a:545, emphasis added)14 While the “sorrow songs” and the voices that perform them are a source of hope, the agent of this narrative is here still the liberating nation, America, that “shall rend the Veil.” The possibility and condition of this agency, however, dwell in

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W. E. B. Du Bois, Hegel, and alterity

“chaos.” In Glissant’s terms, the potential for relation would indeed reside in a chaos-monde, rather than in a nation formulated along the lines of a telos which would resemble that of the epic. With reference to the third chapter of Hegel’s Aesthetics, as we have already seen, Glissant characterizes the epic as the as yet naïve consciousness that articulates the narrative of a chosen community or chosen people (communauté élue). Such epic narrative operates an inherently exclusive principle that is bound to malfunction in multiple contexts such those explored by Du Bois, since its teleology and its hero tend toward a being that is absolute. This being has therefore a tendency to exclude internal relation: “la notion d’être et d’absolu de l’être est liée à la notion d’identité ‘racine unique’ et d’exclusivité de l’identité” (Glissant 1995:25). This kind of nation negates the opaqueness that for Glissant is inherent in relation, and a national narrative of this kind would thus in fact silence “the ‘other’ Du Bois” located by Zamir in The Souls of Black Folk. This is the not-soteleological Du Bois who cuts across the Hegelian stage in Souls and who refuses the subsuming of particularity. This Du Bois seems closer to Glissant’s notion of “chaosmonde” and the poetics of “Relation” than to Hegelian being as transparent selfconsciousness and the concomitant teleology of nation.

4

Double consciousness, African American tradition, and the vernacular: Henry Louis Gates and Houston Baker

Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around. Ralph Ellison (1952), Invisible Man

Doubled doubles: the sentence of tradition and double consciousness in Henry Louis Gates Signifying assumptions Re/cognition, relation, and difference are central to the analyses of black cultural emergence articulated, from the late 1970s and 1980s on and with frequent reference to Du Bois, by Henry Louis Gates and Houston Baker (discussed below). Their strategies offer instructive engagements with the “emergent” as we have seen it articulated by Raymond Williams, as “a constantly repeated, and always renewable, move beyond a phase of practical incorporation.” While Gates posits terms and categories that can lend themselves to incorporation, they often appear here soon in quotation marks and under erasure. This tendency marks the negativity of the emergent, which raids the existing terms but is driven by a process of “dissonance” that has yet to find “its text,” maintaining nonetheless a relative autonomy.1 Along with “race” and “blackness,” Gates locates the term “tradition” in a process of relational signification that marks it as provisional and in need of critical re-reading. This may appear odd, given the fact that the construction and narration of a “black tradition” arguably has been one of the most ardently pursued, ingenious, and successful endeavours in Gates’ work. Yet he has also spoken of the “tyranny of tradition,” argued against “culturalist bubbles,” and called his theory of tradition a “myth of origins” and “my metaphor for literary history” (Gates 1987a:247). I will focus here in particular on “The ‘Blackness of Blackness’: A Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey.” The essay is the last chapter in both Gates’ edited collection Black Literature and Literary Theory (Gates 1984:285–321) and the first volume of his own essays, Figures in Black (Gates 1987a:235–76); it then becomes, with repetition and revision, Chapter 6 of The Signifying Monkey, “On ‘The Blackness of Blackness’: Ishmael Reed and a Critique of the Sign” (1988:217–38).2 Gates

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speaks of the theory of signification and tradition in this essay as “synthesis” (1987a:xxx) of previous stages in his work; not coincidentally, the essay itself closes with comments on Du Bois’ passage that expresses his double-coded wish of “merging” (already discussed). Yet the Hegelian language of “synthesis” fits the notion of a “transcendental signified” much better than the concept of continual signification deployed here by Gates,3 or the ambiguity in the cited passage by Du Bois. As in the case of Du Bois, Gates’ essay and his critical strategy in general, I will argue, move against the grain of the Hegelian concept, which is invoked yet also diacritically doubled: in Du Bois’ case by the shift of emphasis from Hegel’s synthesis and Spirit to contradictions it cannot seem to overcome; in Gates’ case, by the very theory of signification that underwrites his theory of “tradition.” This problematic and contradiction, brought forth in the space of emergence, marks the essay’s coda, where Gates critiques double consciousness – that antonym of synthesis – as something to be overcome. Yet as we have seen in Du Bois, the trope itself is double, and signifies twice. Du Bois thus signifies on Hegel, with the double knowledge and second sight that arises outside of the self-certainty and concomitant blindness of the dominant. In the “Introduction” and the first chapter of Figures in Black, Gates works through a series of historical assumptions that have governed black writing. In the first chapter, “Literary Theory and the Black Tradition,”4 he points in particular to a repetitive process in which “the strategies of negation, so central to Black Aesthetic criticism, where locked in a relation of thesis to antithesis to a racist discourse embedded in Western philosophy” (1987a:14). From Bacon’s New Organum (1620) through Hume’s, Kant’s, and Hegel’s infamous remarks on African culture, he traces here the “equation of ‘the rights of man’ and the ability to write,” perpetuated as a cognitive loop that “affected even those vehemently opposed to slavery” (Gates 1987a:21) in the attempts to counter its pernicious implications. Gates offers passages from William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist Liberator, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s anniversary speech on the emancipation of Haiti, and William Dean Howells’ review of Laurence Dunbar’s Majors and Minors to show the persistence of an equation that left its trace also on the Harlem Renaissance and beyond to the militant functions ascribed to literature in the 1960s Black Arts movement and the Black Aesthetic. “It remains difficult for me to believe,” he comments, “that any human being would be demanded to write himself or herself into the human community”; yet “the black tradition’s own concern with winning the war against racism had led it not only to accept this arbitrary relationship but to embrace it, judging its own literature by a curious standard that derived from the social applications of the metaphors of the great chain of being” (Gates 1987a:xxiv). Citing James Weldon Johnson’s affirmation “that nothing can go further to destroy race prejudice than the recognition of the Negro as a creator [of] and contributor to American civilization,” Gates speaks of the “arbitrariness of this purported relation between race prejudice and the creation of art as a sign of civilization” (1987a:xxiii, emphasis added). Gates draws here on structuralist theories of the sign and the critique of an apparent immutability of significations. In one of the senses of a vernacular-derived “signifyin(g)” that he develops in Figures in Black, Gates suggests that subscribing to this “arbitrary” association – rather than recognizing it as signification and conven-

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tion – means to be “signified upon” by inventions of race from the European Renaissance and “Enlightenment.” To be “signified upon” in this vernacular sense means to be duped by misleading and treacherous signs. The consequences here are the costs that come with the functionalization of black art to counter race prejudice; it reduces art to its pragmatic function, dictates the terms, and mandates the point of departure. A normative poetics in this sense provides purpose but it also narrows artistic possibilities, thus aiding and abetting ironically those who doubt the possibilities of black culture. What Gates formulates as a paradox of the Harlem Renaissance reflects dual necessities that exemplify the double consciousness of emergence: I learned that this particular theory of the function of art not only was shared by most writers and critics of the New Negro Renaissance but also gave that literary movement its peculiar and paradoxical stance of postulating on one hand a direct social and political relationship between art and life, between black political progress and the creation of formal literature, but on the other hand debunking the propaganda function of black art and advocating ideas of literary excellence derived often from late Victorian standards. (Gates 1987a:xxiii) Gates describes his own work as responding in several stages to the prolonged impact of that situation. In their suggested typicality (1987a:xxiv), these stages could be seen as one possible grammar of emergence; each stage marks important differentiations, and represents what I have called an “evasion of equation,” which in turn produces further emergenc(i)es and possibilities. Gates names these stages as four “moments”: “the Black Aesthetic, Repetition and Imitation, Repetition and Difference, and Synthesis” (Gates 1987a:xxiv–xxv). The clean closure suggested by the naming of the last stage, as I have already suggested, seems dubious in the context of Gates’ own arguments. Critiquing the emphasis on the “propaganda function of black art” in the Black Aesthetic of the 1960s and the early 1970s, Gates’ second stage or “moment” invokes theories of literary specificity against the equation of art and life.5 This critique parallels the linguistique critique of pre-Saussurian assumptions about the sign. In particular, Gates (1987a:xxiv) seeks to evade the equation that reduces the text to a container of experience: . . . because of these arbitrary presuppositions, the belief that Afro-American literature existed primarily to “contain the Black Experience” meant that a myth of familiarity obtained when the black critic read a black text. I wanted to draw upon theories of interpretation that would enable me to defamiliarize the black text – in the words of the Russian Formalists, “to make the text strange.” . . . I felt it necessary to do this so that I could see the text as a structure of literature and not as a one-to-one reflection of (my) life. In the equation of art and life that reduces a text to a container of experience, it is in a sense “already known” before it is read – and would need neither reader nor critic. The Russian formalists postulated a difference between artistic and everyday

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language, demonstrated the transformations of story through plot construction, and insisted that poetic images complicate and “roughen” rather than simplify perception (e.g. Eichenbaum 1965; Shklovsky 1965). To neglect the process of signification itself and the text’s work of defamiliarization is to replace the text with something else and to “repress” its language. The assumption that familiarity with the experience presumably contained in the text equals an understanding of the text means, ultimately, not to read at all. The use of mainly Russian Formalist, New Critical, and structuralist techniques and arguments to insist on the literary specificity of African American texts and the relative autonomy of the literary series, however, has further consequences; it necessitates avoidance of another equation, the simple identification of existing literary theory with African American literary theory. This further moment of emergence – the third in Gates’ description (1987a:xxiv–xxv) – seeks to avoid the simple “application” of theories based on texts from the very “Western” tradition that produced the targeted assumptions. Critiquing two opposed patterns of cognition, then, the suggested double re-cognition emphasizes the specificity of both black literature and black literature. Both of these “moments” maintain a critical relationship with the stages to which they respond in intertextual, “signifyin(g)” relationships. These counterpositions produce further unresolved remainders, “negativities” that remain transversal to given solutions and drive the as yet unfinalized, un-incorparated process of emergence. The combined outcome leads here to a further critical stage in the essay on the “Blackness of Blackness” and the signifying monkey, which Gates describes as a moment of “synthesis” that both uses and critiques other contemporary literary theory by drawing on principles from within black speech. The signifying monkey “The ‘Blackness of Blackness’ ” is an essay on doubleness and difference that critiques essentialist notions of “blackness,” yet explicitly sets out to furnish a methodological principle for constructing an essentially “black” tradition. The theme of doubleness, which in Du Bois’ brilliant treatment was itself doubly configured as both a psychological disadvantage to be overcome and a visionary vantage point and “gift” of second sight not to be surrendered, is reconfigured here in complex ways. While doubleness as such, and in particular the “doubled doubles” in Ishmael Reed’s (1972) novel Mumbo Jumbo, are valued by Gates as means of critique, Du Boisian double consciousness is thematized in the coda of the essay only as something to be “overcome” (Gates 1987a:276), a characterization that restricts radically the rich ambivalence of Du Bois’ concept. Like “blackness” constructed as a signifier rather than an essence, double consciousness is presented as a trope to believe in which means “to be duped by figuration, just like the Signified Lion” (who is trounced by the elephant for having taken the monkey’s words literally) (1987a:276). This reading of the ever-present trope of doubleness selects one of the connotations of “signifying” – to “signify upon” someone mischievously – over the other ones mostly used throughout the essay, namely to produce meaning relationally with reference to other signs or texts (i.e. intertextuality, parody, repetition with difference, call and response, the differential work of the signifier); it also isolates

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only the negative side of Du Bois’ necessarily and richly complex constellation, short-stopping its signification with the arresting efficiency of synthesis. Yet while Gates seems negative on double consciousness (which will lead to a curious added sentence on Ellison in the revised 1988 version of the essay), like Du Bois he does not wish to abandon black specificity, and asserts a “black” tradition derived from the vernacular despite theoretical paradoxes of what he calls later the “tyranny” of tradition.6 Gates begins by observing the anteriority of the notion of signifying in the black vernacular tradition with respect to Saussurian theories of signification. Having noted the ubiquity of the signifying monkey in vernacular tales and black music, he offers the following outline: My theory of interpretation, arrived at from within the black cultural matrix, is a theory of formal revisionism, it is troplogical, it is often characterized by pastiche, and, most crucially, it turns on repetition of formal structures and their differences. Signification is a theory of reading that arises from Afro-American culture; learning how to signify is often part of our adolescent education. That it has not been drawn upon before as a theory of criticism attests to its sheer familiarity in the idiom. I had to step outside my culture, to defamiliarize the concept by translating it into a new mode of discourse, before I could see its potential for critical theory. (Gates 1987a:235) The signifying monkey is the Afro-American, more profane New World relative of “the trickster figure of Yoruba mythology (Esu-Elegbara in Nigeria and Legba among the Fon in Dahomey)” (Gates 1987a:237). Gates offers several critics’ accounts of the verbal practice of signifying, which Roger D. Abrahams calls a “technique of indirect argument or persuasion” and “a language of implication” (quoted in Gates 1987a:239).7 Yet ultimately, Gates suggests, “the monkey . . . is not only a master of technique . . . he is technique, or style, or the literariness of literary language; he is the great Signifier” (Gates 1987a:239). Gates moves here to other definitions, in particular those by Zora Neale Hurston and Ralph Ellison, “for what they reveal about the nature of Afro-American narrative parody” (Gates 1987a:240). He discusses Hurston’s extensive use of signifying in Their Eyes Were Watching God;8 in addition to Janie’s apprenticeship and mastery of it, Gates points here to Hurston’s staging of other texts through a process of intertextual repetition, reversal, and difference. This is for Gates another, central feature of signifying, and the defining operating principle of the black tradition: “It is clear that black writers read and critique other black texts as an act of rhetorical selfdefinition. Our literary tradition exists because of these precisely chartable formal literary relationships” (1987a:242). Gates locates this pattern also in Ralph Ellison’s discussions of signifying and jazz and in Ellison’s own explication of intertextual revision. Considering the notion of “protest,” Ellison suggests that “it does not necessarily take the form of speaking for a political or social program. It might appear in a novel as technical assault against the styles which have gone before” (Ellison 1995:137). Gates emphasizes the phrase “technical assault against the styles” and comments: “This form of critical parody, of repetition and inversion, is what I

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define to be critical signification, or formal signifying, and is my metaphor for literary history” (1987a:247). Gates thus demonstrates the fact that intertextuality – sometimes highlighted in particular as postmodern practice – pertains extensively to the black vernacular and black texts, and he returns a decidedly vernacular and oral dimension to intertextuality that is still present in Bakhtin’s elaboration of interdiscursivity9 (from which Kristeva develops the concept of intertextuality). Gates thus carries out his dual strategy of “blackening” theory and of theorizing “blackness.” Yet in practice, the basic vernacular definition of signifying derived from the mischievous doings and sayings of the monkey as illustrated for instance by Abrahams, is less important for Gates’ interpretive practice than the meaning derived from jazz and the cited passages by Ellison on intertextual relations to other texts and styles.10 The vernacular itself will play in The Signifying Monkey a decisive role mainly in the chapter on Hurston (where it is crucial to Gates’ analysis in terms of both content and narrative form). Even in his analysis of Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, which, as Gates points out, shares with Hurston’s novel among other things the fact that it is a “speakerly” text and gives prominence to the simulation of spoken language, Gates concentrates mostly on the formal intertextual relationships with other texts rather than on the vernacular itself.11 And here, while Gates does not repress general intertextuality (he suggests that all literary texts engage in “signifying” (1988:xxiv–xxv, see below)), he concentrates not surprisingly on intra-communal intertextuality as medium of tradition. Although the principle of relation is (inter)textual and intra-literary, the principle of selection is also largely extratextual and extra-literary (not entirely unlike the concepts “American” or “Commonwealth literature,” which he attacks elsewhere). While Gates claims that his main category is derived from inside the black literary tradition, he indicates as well that its premises are not only found but also created when he speaks of his “metaphor” of literary history, and queries subsequently, as we will see, the implications of such moves and constraints. Like all narratives of cultural emergence, Gates’ theory of tradition articulates the communal subject on the basis of inclusions and exclusions that produce remainders and contradictions calling for further response. These include the implications of an “intra-communal” model of intertextuality and tradition that deemphasizes the wider intertextuality of the texts upon which it bases its claims;12 and the implications of restricting double consciousness to its negative aspects, which flattens a dialectic of doubleness and re/cognition that served Du Bois to revise “America,” “assimilation” and Hegelian synthesis, and to insist on a particularity that subtends the very “tradition” Gates theorizes. Intertextuality and the “tyranny of tradition” The first issue involves the complex relationship between interdisciplinary fields like “Black Studies” and literary studies, and can be explored with reference to the relationship between Gates’ own enterprise and that advanced in Robert Stepto’s From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (1979a), a text Gates read and responded to when still in manuscript. Stepto develops similar points also in his programmatic contribution, “Teaching Afro-American Literature: Survey or Tradition,”

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to Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction (edited by Stepto himself and Dexter Fisher, also in 1979), a collection that features also three essays by Gates.13 Stepto suggests here that often “Afro-American literature is still an agreeable entrée to black history, sociology, and politics” (1979b:9). Literary texts, he hypothesizes, for better or worse serve mainly as entrance point to “The Big Questions” (1979b:15). As a consequence, for instance, a poem is not read as poem at all, and since the next author is presumably discussed in similar fashion, students cannot possibly situate works and authors “in the continuum of Afro-American artists who have wrestled with the very same questions of form, verbal and tonal metaphor, authorial posture, textual control, and shared tradition” (1979b:14, emphasis added). Stepto posits an “Afro-American canonical story or pregeneric myth” (Stepto 1979b:18) which he defines as “the quest for freedom and literacy.”14 Hence Stepto’s understanding of literary history and tradition: If an Afro-American literary tradition exists, it does so not because there is a sizeable chronology of authors and texts but because those authors and texts seek collectively their own literary forms – their own admixtures of genre – bound historically and linguistically to a shared pregeneric myth. The historicity of the Afro-American literary tradition is, then, not the chronology of authors and texts but the history of the pregeneric myth in motion through both chronological and linguistic time in search of its form and voice. Thus, the history of tradition differs massively from that of survey in that surveys destroy linguistic time and the continuity of literary history by moving systematically from texts to nonliterary structures and passively allowing those structures to become collectively the “history” of a literature. (Stepto 1979b:19; an equivalent formulation can be found in From Behind the Veil [1979a]:ix–x) Stepto refers to Geoffrey Hartman’s “Toward Literary History” (1970:356–86), in which Hartman reminds the literary “historian to be conscious of his debt to fiction and rhetorical configuration” (an advice heeded by both Stepto and subsequently Gates) and cites the chapter “Literary History” in Wellek and Warren’s (1956) Theory of Literature: Is it possible to write literary history, that is, to write that which will be both literary and a history? Most histories of literature, it must be admitted, are either social histories, or histories of thought as illustrated in literature, or impressions and judgments on specific works arranged in more or less chronological order. (Wellek and Warren 1956:252, quoted in Hartman 1970:356)15 Stepto’s insistence on attention to the text itself and the qualities derived from the literary series seeks to free texts from the documentary tasks and functionalization that can come with area-based interdisciplinarity, and with the strong tendency in discussions of emergent literatures to return to the pre-literary principles progressively abandoned by twentieth-century theoretical developments: what would initially seem more important in ethnically or racially defined writing than the author,

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resurrected from a theory-pronounced death? Yet in practice Stepto’s approach does not find its final goal in an explication of the structural ambivalences inside a given text, or in the analysis of literary devices that “roughen” its language and thus draw attention to its “literariness”; since Stepto, in a variation of Frye’s theories (quoted passim), sees texts as developing variants of a pregeneric myth, he adumbrates an intertextual model of literary tradition that is based on the hermeneutic principal of question and answer, and on the musical practice of call and response. He thus offers an account of “black” intertextuality that, in his own terms, “prefigures” Gates’ account (or response). Stepto divides his text into two parts, entitled “The Call” and “The Response.” In the first, he explicates four types of slave narratives and concludes by describing “how Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery and W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk revise and revoice the latter two slave narrative types” until in The Souls “all of the prefiguring forms and tropes that will develop another literary period are finally on display” (Stepto 1979a:x, emphasis added). In the second part, Stepto demonstrates not only how texts by James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison “answer the call of certain prefiguring texts,” but also how in these sequences the later texts, time and again, “revoice” the earlier ones. This intertextual model and continuum – in which the basis for Gates’ reading of repetition and revision as narrative parody and signifying is recognizable – seems splendidly capable of rescuing literature from the “documentary” role and functionalization imposed upon it. Stepto draws attention to the literary series and aspects of its own dynamic and relative autonomy, and relieves it of a superstructure role deterministically “known” in advance of actual reading and interpretation. And yet the question posed by Wellek and Warren (and other literary historians) remains. While the texts discussed here are shown to respond to other literary texts, the principle that selects intertexts for discussion obviously also chooses among the contexts and intertexts that guide writers directly;16 the sequence of tradition here, while it eschews the pure chronology of the survey, is itself doubly determined, both by the ground of the field whose non-literary impositions it negates dialectically and by a continuum modeled upon Northrop Frye’s notion of myth – the “pregeneric myth . . . of the quest for freedom and literacy” (Stepto 1979a:ix). This myth is of course highly appropriate in any discussion of texts by black writers; yet Stepto’s wording explicitly postulates that the myth precedes actual texts, which thus serve again to illustrate a non-textual precedent. As a result of de-emphasizing the double-reference system of intertextuality that produces many African American texts, the tradition constructed out of them restricts intertextuality to an “intra-communal” factor. Most famously, of course, The Souls itself orchestrates this dual reference, from the epigraphic combination of “Western” lyrics with the notation of spirituals to the famous passage that serves Stepto as an epigraph (and is quoted by Gates at the end of his introduction to the Bantam edition of The Souls (Du Bois 1989:xxiv)): I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the stronglimbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and

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what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn or condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Gates is perfectly aware of this constitutive duality of African American literature. In the preface to The Signifying Monkey in particular, he emphasizes a doubled doublevoicedness that comprises both the “intra-communal” one highlighted once the field is instituted successfully and the instituting, cross-cultural double-voicedness and intertextuality that irremediably necessitates comparative literature: “A novelist such as Ralph Ellison or Ishmael Reed creates texts that are double-voiced in the sense that their literary antecedents are both white and black novels, but also modes of figuration lifted from the black vernacular tradition” (Gates 1988:xxiii). As a consequence, anyone “who analyzes black literature must do so as a comparativist, by definition, because our canonical texts have complex double formal antecedents, the Western and the black” (1988:xxiv, emphasis added). Expanding this comparativist logic, Gates argues further that the intertextual principle of repetition and revision that he traces in African and African American vernacular traditions and identifies as constitutive of a black tradition, is not a specifically African American principle; in order to isolate specific difference, it thus not only invites, but actually demands comparative study: I decided to analyze the nature and function of Signifyin(g) precisely because it is repetition and revision, or repetition with a signal difference. Whatever is black about black American literature is to be found in this identifiable black Signifyin(g) difference. That, most succinctly if ambiguously, describes the premise of this book. Lest this theory of criticism, however, be thought of as only black, let me admit that the implicit premise of this study is that all texts Signify upon other texts, in motivated and unmotivated ways. Perhaps critics of other literatures will find this theory useful as they attempt to account for the configuration of the texts in their traditions. (Gates 1988:xxiv–xxv, second emphasis added) Neither the comparative possibilities implied by this last remark nor the comparative necessities implied by the hybridity of African American writing, however, are the subject of the book thus prefaced. Yet while both of those contextualizations are possible and necessary, Gates’ focus here on one line of connection is equally not just possible, but also necessary to articulate critical discourses of the emergent in response to norms projected by the dominant. If Gates is aware of a “doubled double-voicedness” – intertextualities both “inside” and “across” two differing orientations necessarily implicit in every process of emergence – he is equally aware of that other instituting, necessary doubleness of deconstructing one tradition in order to construct another one. Only a few years later, (1992a:312) he delineates the inevitable contradiction of identitarian selection that is necessary for emergence: Inevitably, the process of constructing a group identity, at the margins as at the very centre, involves active exclusion and repudiation; self-identity requires the homogeneity of the self-identical. Ironically, then, the cultural mechanism of

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In this context of emergence the concept of “tradition” becomes clearly overdetermined and double (a problem and a positive specificity as in Du Boisian double consciousness, although here in inverted order). In Gates’ cogent survey account, “African American Criticism,” tradition thus acquires its richly deserved quotation marks, moving to “tradition” in the space of only a few pages. Proceeding from the abandoned essentialist concept of a tradition based on innate characteristics of its authors (Gates 1992a:308) to the intertextual connection of repetition and revision17 – a connection between texts which allows us “to think of them as forming literary traditions” – Gates moves also to display the cost of a model of tradition based on what I have called here “restricted intertextuality.” In a section entitled “Canon Formation and the Construction of Cultural Identity” he begins to highlight the negative connotations of the term tradition, and discusses the “twin problematic of canon formation and nation formation” that “sponsors the ideology of tradition that has long been in the service of minority legitimation” (1992a:310–11, emphasis added). These observations, which pertain directly to Gates’ own theory and critical practice of tradition, name the repressed of the construction of tradition, without, however, leading to any obvious “remedy.” They exhibit an unavoidable contradiction and doubleness – tradition as restrictive ideology and necessary narrative of identity – that is not readily amenable to sublation. The fact that the “margins” replicate, in the process of emergence, mechanisms of the very national identities which they seek to deconstruct has been noted by other scholars (as discussed in Chapter 1), and would signal in Gates’ own grammar of emergence a moment of “repetition and imitation.” Yet he states unequivocally: Clearly, the endless reconstruction of a “national literature” . . . remains the hidden object of much of our literary criticism. It would be easy to demonstrate its operation through the ideology of “tradition,” whose tyranny remains little abated even today. And, for better or worse, the margin has borrowed this instrumentality. (Gates 1992a:311, emphasis added) Tradition is patently one if not the central term in The Signifying Monkey; Parts One and Two are entitled “A Theory of the Tradition” and “Reading the Tradition” respectively. Yet tradition appears here also in a second, initially perhaps surprising, context, distanced by quotation marks and in terms of ideology and tyranny, associated with the sovereignty exercised by an unlawful ruffian who brooks no other power. Gates references Robert Weimann’s observation here that “tradition” is defined “not only by what is preserved but also by what is repressed,” a fact that makes it “appear more deeply heterogeneous and contradictory” (Weimann 1984:272, quoted in Gates 1992a:311). This heterogeneity and contradiction is what narratives of identity either sublate or repress, producing a univocality questioned or revoked only at the price of an increased anxiety. Gates indeed suggests that if “minority discourses in America

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seem to embrace the ideology of tradition, it is because they remain at a stage where the anxiety of identity formation is paramount” (1992a:311, emphasis added). In the same context, Gates also aligns the insistence on the vernacular with the identitarian function of the constructions of “tradition” and enters it equally here into a column of problematic “cost”: “Such concern shows up, for example, in African American literary criticism and theory as privileging of the ‘vernacular,’ which is frequently exalted as its fons et origo” (Gates 1992a:311, first emphasis added). While this critique may appear surprising in that it targets some of the most sustained concepts that have facilitated the construction of a black tradition – including Gates’ own emphases as well as those of Houston Baker – it is consistent with the critique of essentialist identity; as Gates notes the following year in “Beyond the Culture Wars: Identities in Dialogue” (1993:8): there’s another paradox. In a critique of liberal individualism, we debunk the supposed “stability” of the individual as a category, and yet we sometimes reconstitute and recuperate the same essential stability in the form of an ethnos that allegedly exhibits all the regularities and uniformities we could not locate in the individual subject. Gates is right to note this discrepancy that signals a theoretical clash in the late 1980s between deconstruction and processes of emergence driven by requirements of agency and identity. Critiquing narratives of identity and thus “debunking” also the supposed “essential stability” of narratives of tradition, Gates highlights effectively a paradox not restricted to discrepancies in the critiques of individual and communal identity formation. Gates’ own double strivings, both contributing to the development of “tradition” and debunking it as essentialist and even repressive ideology, constitute themselves a para-doxa, a dual perspective that is not sublatable without losing one of the two sides of this doubleness and contradiction. If narratives of identity are needed to ensure emergence and combat the anxieties of heterogeneity and contradiction, Gates’ ability to name the repressed of this process suggests not only an increase in institutional security and decrease of that anxiety; it also suggests the possibility of sustaining contradiction and thus a certain amount of non-identity and incongruity. This positionality liberates additional perspectives eliminated otherwise by the sublating, unifying, and repressive necessities of anxiety. Doubled doubles Sublation would force a foreground/background decision between the two frames of perception that function here together, in conjunction; there is no clear solution to the fact that both sides can be developed with internal consistency, and that yet their end results remain heterogenous. This simultaneity of these divergent “souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings” is not “synthesis” (or an orchestration of one voice for the purposes of another voice); rather, I would like to suggest, it participates in a logic of double consciousness beyond currently available solutions (although it can speak from a historically stronger position than the one afforded by Du Bois).

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The double, doubtful aims of Du Bois’ double consciousness responded to contradictory sets of needs and expectations. While under the historical circumstances these contradicting demands weighed heavily on Du Bois himself, we have seen in Chapter 3 that he did not give up either one of them, and that for him double consciousness held also positive values despite its predicaments. While there are close rhetorical similarities with Hegelian formulations of doubleness and synthesis, the opening essay of Souls in practice undermines the very “merging” it confesses to desire, just as Du Bois’ agenda of “assimilation,” as we have seen, is crucially overdetermined in that it maintains rather than sublates difference. Hegel’s synthesis-driven perspective seeks to unite all moments of reality in the one principle of the Absolute Spirit, like the “Atonist mind” in Mumbo Jumbo, “which sought to interpret the world by using a single loa. Somewhat like filling a milk bottle with an ocean” (Reed 1972:24). The absence of synthesis appears in Hegel as “the Unhappy Consciousness [which] is the consciousness of self as a dual-natured, merely contradictory being”: This unhappy, inwardly disrupted18 consciousness, since its essentially contradictory nature is for it a single consciousness, must for ever have present in the one consciousness the other also; and thus it is driven out of each in turn in the very moment when it imagines it has successfully attained to a peaceful unity with the other. . . . The Unhappy Consciousness itself is the gazing of one selfconsciousness into another, and itself is both, and the unity of both is also its essential nature. (Hegel 1977:126) While Du Boisian double consciousness operates very much like Hegel’s “unhappy consciousness,” Du Bois, even in the utopian, seeming synthesis of the “kingdom of culture” (1986a:365) saw the “end of his striving” not in the synthesis of Absolute Spirit. Du Bois reversed the subsuming direction of Hegelian synthesis – hence his particular notion of “assimilation” that produces more, not less. Gates’ own move to restore the contradictions of emergence similarly restores a dialogicity of contradicting perspectives (the need for, and the cost of, identity), even if the result appears paradoxical or ironic, indeed Signifyin(g) on his own previous positions in a move of “unmotivated” theoretical narrative parody. In this light, it is interesting to consider Gates’ references to double consciousness. As in the case of Du Bois, whose essay “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” seems too long for synthesis and the overcoming of double consciousness yet also effectively overlays the Hegelian narrative with a doubling counter-narrative, we see Gates characterize “double consciousness” as a stage to be overcome, yet also in his critical practice emphasize doubles and dialogicity, sustain contradiction, and expose the anxieties of identity formation that insist on foreclosure. Gates’ own construction of doubleness constantly stresses a non-dialectic doubling in contrast to the unifying, single logic of what Reed names “Atonists.” Gates draws attention to doubling in Reed’s novel on thematic, structural, and philosophical levels (Gates 1987a:253–5). Examples range from the “doubled double” on the original cover, which shows the repeated and reversed figure of Josephine Baker

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superimposed on an image of a rose, the frequent occurrence of “22” (Gates 1988:222) as the doubled double of the “1” of “Atonist”/Western thought which seeks “to interpret the world by using a single loa” (Reed 1972:24), to his analysis of the doubled narration typical of the detective story: the story of the evil deed and the story of its investigation combined in a double structure (though here not leading to resolution, but parodied under the sign of indeterminacy). In the figure of the doubled double (rather than the binary double) Gates identifies the “critique of dualism and binary opposition that serves as a major thrust to the text of Mumbo Jumbo itself” (1987a:254).19 In the revised version in The Signifying Monkey, Gates also cites the case for the importance of the triad in the novel, yet refers specifically to Reed’s parody of a tripartite Western topography undermined quite literally by another level in the basement, where the repressed of Western culture supplements the triple dance-step of synthesis to arrive at the number of doubled doubles. At work here are the Mu’tafikah “art-nappers” (Reed 1972:15), whose aim it is to restore stolen culture from Western museums to their original cultures:20 The Mu’tafikah are holding a meeting in the basement of a 3-story building located at the edge of “Chinatown.” Upstairs is a store which deals in religious articles. Above this is a gun store; at the top, an advertising firm which deals in soap accounts. If Western History were a 3-story building located in downtown Manhattan during the 1920s, it would resemble this little architectural number. (Reed 1972:82, quoted in Gates 1988:222) Gates points out in the first chapter of The Signifying Monkey that “the number 4 and its multiples are sacred in Yoruba metaphysics.” In particular in the characterization here of “Esu [as] a figure of double duality, of unreconciled opposites, living in harmony” (1988:30), Gates emphasizes a non-dialectic model. Such a model is also operative, as I have argued, in Du Bois’ doubling of Hegelian terms and of “double consciousness” itself, which repeats Hegelian themes with a difference and a vengeance, and thus signifies on one of the most powerful unifying texts of the Western tradition. The fact that, at the end of Mumbo Jumbo, the text of Jes Grew remains missing, points for Gates to its indeterminacy. “Once the signs of its presence have been read, the text disappears in what must be the most humorous anticlimax in the whole of Afro-American fiction” (1987a:270; 1988:233–4). The text’s antagonist – which we can equate with the Hegelian impulse toward synthesis – is represented in Reed’s novel, as Gates points out, by the Atonists’ “urge for the reduction to unity. . . . He is an Atonist, the novel maintains consistently, who attempts to tie down the sheer plurality of signification to one determinate meaning” (1987a:270–1; 1988:234). It is “Jes Grew’s text, in other words, [which] is not a transcendent signified but must be produced in a dynamic process and manifested in discrete forms, as in black music and black speech acts” (1987a:272; 1988:235). Gates here invokes the critique of an essentialist notion of blackness in the prologue of Ellison’s Invisible Man, with the preacher’s sermon on the “Blackness of Blackness,” a parody of Melville’s “blackness of darkness in Moby Dick” (1988:236, 279fn21). As Gates suggests, both Ellison and Reed after him “critique

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the received idea of blackness as a negative essence, as a natural, transcendent signified” (1987a:274; 1988:237), which implies also the critique of blackness as a positive essence (and thus of the central insistence of the Black Arts movement). For Gates, Reed at first only makes explicit what is in Ellison’s text already implicit, a critique of the nature of the sign itself. Their “formal relationship” for him “can only be suggested by the relationship of modernism to postmodernism” (1987a:275; 1988:237). Yet in a further step, in a short coda of the essay, Gates quotes Reed’s poem “Dualism: in ralph ellison’s invisible man,” to suggest that Reed here parodies the epilogue of Ellison’s Invisible Man; these passages in turn lead back to Du Bois’ famous passage on double consciousness in The Souls, which Gates quotes here in full. Perhaps more than on double consciousness, Reed’s poem seems to comment, first of all, on the division between engagement in history and the withdrawal, the “hibernation,” of the invisible man. Yet the invisible man’s withdrawal is related to his insight in the absence of uniform, universally effective perspectives of interpretation, an insight which he has come to value, and now wants to maintain against pressures of conformity (a resistance directed here also against the “brotherhood” of the Communist Party): I’ve come a long way from those days when, full of illusion, I lived a public life and attempted to function under the assumption that the world was solid and all the relationships therein. Now I know men are different and that all life is divided and that only in division is there true health. Hence again I have stayed in my hole, because up above there’s an increasing passion to make men conform to a pattern. (Ellison 1990:576) This insistence on individuality and particularity (although to insist on any group particularity can in turn diminish individuality) indeed correlates, as Gates suggests, with Du Bois’ perspective, as Ellison’s following passage against the “tyrant” of mono-perspectivism underlines: Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway? – diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you’ll have no tyrant states. Why, if they follow this conformity business they’ll end up by forcing me, an invisible man, to become white, which is not a color but the lack of one. Must I strive toward colorlessness? But seriously, and without snobbery, think of what the world would lose if that should happen. America is woven of many strands; I would recognize them and let it so remain. . . . Our fate is to become one, and yet many – This is not prophecy, but description. (Ellison 1990:577) This passage almost paraphrases Du Bois’ overdetermined “merging” in which “he wishes neither of the old selves lost,” his insistence on particular cultural contributions, his rejection of “colorlessness,” his notion of “assimilation” as composite and double, and his emphasis on recognition. The passage is preceded in Ellison’s epilogue by another one that highlights a side of double consciousness that allows Du

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Bois, for instance, to think Hegelian Synthesis while simultaneously moving in the opposite direction of doubling (just as Gates himself thinks synthesis and tradition while writing another text through quotation marks): “There is, by the way, an area in which a man’s feelings are more rational than his mind, and it is precisely in that area that his will is pulled in several directions at the same time” (Ellison 1990:573). Such feelings seem significant and meaningful yet cannot be translated in noncontradictory representations, producing instead “doubtful strivings” and the double thoughts and aims by which the “will is pulled in several directions at the same time.” This is the contradictory moment of emergence, where systems of thought overlap and categories are drawn from the possible repertoire, the existing store of discourses, producing contradictory moments transversal to those discourses, yet expressing meaningful “feelings” nonetheless. After quoting Du Bois’ passage, Gates concludes: Reed’s poem parodies profoundly both the figure of the black as outsider and the figure of the divided self. For, he tells us, even these are only tropes, figures of speech, rhetorical constructs like “double-consciousness,” and not some preordained reality or thing. To read these figures literally, Reed tells us, is to be duped by figuration, just like the Signified Lion. Ellison, we know, fully understands the nature of this figure, even if some of his less imaginative readers have not done so. Reed has secured his place in the canon precisely by his critique of the received, repeated tropes peculiar to that very canon. His works are the grand works of critical signification. (Gates 1988:238; emphasized passage lacking, 1987a:276) Gates is right to want to “overcome” one side – the segregationist, isolating one – of double consciousness; but double consciousness itself is overcoded, double, because it also has its positive side. Gates’ interpretation would minimize another way of seeing that is indeed specific to a historically determined experience, and which is also a critique of universalism, not bound by the blind spots that have marked perspectives of domination. There is a positive “second sight” afforded by emergent specificity. In particular, the sentence Gates adds in the 1988, revised version is revealing here. If Ellison’s invisible man stands for “dualism” as a negative, restricted double consciousness, then he needs to be “signified upon” in “motivated,” critical ways, and that reading of double consciousness produces the first version of the essay’s ending. Yet this means calling Ellison himself “duped by figuration, just like the Signified Lion,” an odd assertion in light of the fact that his explication of formal innovation as signification is also cited – together with Reed’s novel – as one of the inspirations of Gates’ theory, as we have seen. With the sentence added in 1988 to correct this problem, however, it is now Reed who (involuntarily) is designated one of the “less imaginative readers” since, while Ellison “fully understands the nature of this figure” (of double consciousness), Reed’s motivated “critique of the received, repeated tropes peculiar to that very canon” would be misplaced here. Du Bois himself, as I have tried to show, in his criss-crossing of the Hegelian stage of alterity and synthesis, is more engaged in overwriting and doubling what Gates calls the “Atonists’s” “foolish emphasis on unity, on the number 1” (Gates 1988:234). His

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treatment of this “urge for the reduction to unity” yields indeed a doubling, not a synthesis, of Hegel’s doubles. Du Bois is thus more “Reedian” and, indeed, more “Gatesian” than Gates here suggests. Du Bois’ version of double consciousness also implies a full intertextuality, intra-communal and extra-communal lines of dialogicity, like Gates’ “comparatist” intertextual doubling in which Afro-American writing refers always to two traditions. Inversely, however, Gates himself, in his innovation and doubling, in his ability to pursue seemingly contradictory perspectives out of a consistent feeling for the needs of emergence and the extension of democracy, is more Du Boisian than his critique of double consciousness would seem to suggest. Yet “overcoming” double consciousness and the doubled valency that it has itself in Du Bois would also eliminate its potential to overcome unitary consciousness, the self-certainty of the given as already total(ized) knowledge. In double consciousness, new ways of seeing and speaking borrow from existing ones in contradiction, and words and meanings double through visible or invisible quotation marks that suggest multiple, overlapping frames of reference.

Democratic blues: Houston Baker and the representation of culture If the vernacular provides Gates with one of the principles of his “metaphor for literary history,” another sound and aural culture comes to the fore in Houston Baker’s blues criticism. In the same year the first version of Gates’ “The Blackness of Blackness” appears, Baker deals with the implications of available categories of cognition and recognition in Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (1984). In particular the essay “Discovering America: Generational Shifts, Afro-American Literary Criticism, and the Study of Expressive Culture”21 invites consideration of the ambiguous performative potential inscribed, in such words crucial to cultural emergence as “representation” or “recognition,” in a prefix that may signal sameness, but perhaps also petition for a re-petition with a difference. Baker invokes the blues as a matrix of cultural expression and as an original American form that, although it has been inscribed from the beginning of American times into the membranes of America, he claims has not been heard in an AMERICA that he writes in continuous capitals. This AMERICA is for Baker the governing sign of a discourse that “imposes a problematical unity and stasis on an everchanging American scene” (Baker 1984:66). In the words of one of his epigraphs, from the Mexican historian Edmundo O’Gorman’s (1961) The Invention of America, it proceeds from the assumption that “the lump of cosmic matter which we now know as the American continent has always been that, when actually it only became that when such a meaning was given to it” (quoted in Baker 1984:64). The discourse of AMERICA also controlled the strategies of a generation of black theorists and writers at a certain stage of Afro-American emergence who, in Baker’s opinion, thus removed themselves from one of their main resources. Baker re-presents the blues as an example of forms of the black vernacular that have been relegated to the margins by this seeming discourse of inclusion: “(. . . What has been estranging has been AMERICA),” Baker “riffs,” in a typographically marked voice in the break, on the blues lines “I ain’t no stranger/I been here before” (1984:65).

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Richard Wright’s essay “The Literature of the Negro In the United States” serves Baker as an example of a critical attitude in the fifties and early sixties that sees black writing headed for the American mainstream. Baker calls such an orientation towards a single horizon and standard in art an “Integrationist Poetics” – a perspective that is usually described as a universalist position with respect to emergent literatures, and that Elaine Showalter has compared, in a discussion of Baker’s essay, with “androgynist” positions in the area of women’s writing (Showalter 1989:359–61). For black culture, Baker insists that the integrationist paradigm, which he equates with democratic–pluralistic values (1984:69), actually produces “an epistemology with sharply exclusive horizons” (1984:69) – a very specific blindness and deafness to vernacular levels of Afro-American mass culture which are thus written off as “a pre-AMERICA soon to be superseded” (1984:69).22 Baker opposes an Integrationist Poetics as a segmentation and narrative of culture that fails to hear such forms except as negative background to forms of “high art” defined according to criteria developed for other purposes and in different contexts. Baker’s model for a move from pre-scribed recognition to emergent forms of recognition comes from Thomas Kuhn’s notion of paradigm shifts. According to Kuhn, scientists recognize and legitimate objects in communally defined, normalizing frames of expectation. Change occurs not through a linear increase in knowledge, but rather in wholesale shifts that redefine entire sets of accepted norms in a field. He compares the perceptual shift between frames of reference with optical experiments that show inverting lenses initially to cause extreme disorientation which is overcome, however, when the whole visual field flips over into a new pattern of perceptual interpretation. Along similar lines, Baker visualizes a shift from integrationist patterns of recognition to a foregrounding of the vernacular, mass level of black culture by evoking the foreground/background re-cognition that reveals the silhouette of two opposing faces in the outline of a vase; while the Greek hydria symbolizes here the “Ode on a Grecian Urn” constituted by classical Western values, the silhouettes emerge like those of “black ancestral faces.” “From an integrationist perspective,” Baker suggests, “a scholar could not ‘see’ that ‘Negro music’ qua ‘Negro music’ constituted art” (1984:77). In his book from 1980, The Journey Back, Baker already emphasizes in particular Amiri Baraka’s references to music as a model in order to avoid “the subtle incarcerations entailed by language” (1980:101) and “the traps that the English language and the general public discourse about black America” (1980:88) have presented. It is no coincidence that Baker valorizes the blues – music that relies on the vernacular as a specific kind of language – as matrix for a shift from pre-scribed patterns of recognition to emergent possibilities of re-cognition that he analyzes in the development of the Black Aesthetic in the 1960s. The problem of a particular language, or at least of particular forms of language, has traditionally furthered or hampered – as the case may be – most efforts to define cultures or literatures in terms of an emergent specificity. Baker’s strategic choice of focussing on the vernacular has thus very specific reasons; it constitutes also, however, a particular form of representation that positions him with respect to other discourses potentially relevant to projects of emergence. One of these is deconstruction. While Baker refers to “the sound lessons of

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poststructuralism” in Blues (1984:1),23 deconstruction subsequently comes in for severe criticism, or is entirely dismissed (for example in the introduction to his 1988 Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of the Harlem Renaissance). For one, it seems to remove its practitioners from questions of the vernacular – a reproach Baker levels at Gates’ introduction to his edited volume “Race,” Writing, and Difference (Baker 1986:383–4). But according to Baker, deconstruction is not only a professional discourse more interested in recognizing again European (theoretical) faces rather than black ancestral ones; it has also questioned the entire issue of representation that appears with an emphasis on such faces. Yet in Workings of the Spirit, his 1991 book on Afro-American women’s writing, Baker also warns against a mode of representation that he calls a “subjection to historical incorporation” (Baker 1991:18). With reference to Hortense Spillers’ naming of liberated and captive subject positions, in which “the flesh” as a “zero degree of social conceptualization” (Spillers 1987:67) is distinguished from the captive “body,” Baker draws a parallel between the academic “incorporation” of Black Studies facilitated by new-left academics in the sixties (Baker 1991:15) and the “Negro exhibit” of abolitionist meetings, where the scarred, silent body of the fugitive slave was shown in the context of a northern, predominantly white reform movement. As in the case of Integrationist Poetics, Baker diagnoses a discursive trap sprung, in this case, by a historically oriented mode of representation he sees encouraged for an emergent generation of black women theorists at that time. Baker equates this discourse that resists theory in an age of theory with a black studies paradigm rather than with Black Power. A discourse producing an important yet “theoretically silent body” (1991:18), he suggests, may well fail to “alter the rhetorical power ratios” (1991:18) between emergence and the status quo. Baker thus refuses a resistance to theory as yet another silence, which fails to “flesh out the funkiness that reveals a traditional and embodied history and historiography as the prison house of an inside containment” (1991:18). But we have also seen that “theory” in the shape of deconstruction, as a rhetorically self-conscious alternative that is hardly naive about historical discourse (if perhaps sometimes forgetful of history) appears – to Baker – as another language trap from a vernacularbased perspective. The vernacular, of course, does not constitute itself a theoretical discourse, and Baker trusts deconstruction enough to know that theories based on the vernacular cannot simply recuperate it as a presence unaltered by the context and event of its theoretical evocation. As theories, furthermore, they are inevitably entangled, to an extent that remains to be analyzed in each particular instance, with other available discursive options. One strategic response to this predicament can be seen in Baker’s ongoing archaeology of representations. Another one is his reference to the vernacular in the specific form of the Blues. The exploration of some form of a specific language or “vernacular,” as I have noted, is endeavored by many narratives of cultural emergence; in this case, however, it has also provoked comments like those by Diana Fuss, who sees in Baker’s and Henry Louis Gates’ work “a romanticization of the vernacular” (Fuss 1989:90) that displaces a certain essentialism from sight to sound. While it seems to me that such a critique can be more validly applied to Baker than to Gates, Baker’s blues matrix, however, suggests also a discursive orchestration that

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draws particular attention to the performative aspect of representation itself, in a space between what Baker calls “mastery of form” and “deformation of mastery.” While “mastery of form” works available discourses of representation over from the inside, deformation marks the self-assertion of a distinct voice that clears its own space. In Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, Baker comments on the fact that the chapters of Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk are prefaced by score fragments of spirituals (Baker 1987b:58–61), a “sounding” of “Caliban’s singing” that in Baker’s ear erases Prospero’s “written letter” appearing in the preceding lines from Western poets; for him, Du Bois’ own voice does not so much speak on behalf of the folk as it constitutes a cultural performance resulting in a “singing book” (1987b:68). In Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature, Baker himself frames his chapters of analytic discourse by a kind of theoretical blues voice. In his reading of available discourses of AMERICA, Baker simultaneously clears here the space for a vernacular voice and responds to theoretical notions of the presence of an absence when he “riffs” between chapters, in a lyrically assertive voice, on both the “always already” of deconstruction and the blues theme, “I ain’t no stranger, I been here before.” Similarly, Baker responds to theoretical notions of “gaps” when he suggests the cultural “blues critic” must show improvisational skills in “the break between propositional words and processual actuality” (Baker 1984:112) – that is, in the space between the global conceptualizations offered by available discourses of representation and an AMERICA, in Baker’s words, not so much to be deciphered as to be enciphered. Baker puts great emphasis here on “cultural performance” (1987b:58–69 passim)24 and evokes a theoretical voice that responds in the break between available theoretical options and representations of culture, speaking on its own behalf yet linked, if only by its individual difference, to experiences and forms of expression of a specific community. In such a performance, rather than in a claim to represent an essentially defined reality, can be seen the discursive mode when Baker speaks, in Afro-American Poetics: Revisions of the Harlem Renaissance, of “writing a revisionary tale or countermyth” (1988:6) that “provides coherence for both the autobiographical self and the general Afro-American cultural enterprise” (Baker 1988:7). Baker’s claim here that “[c]ritics eternally become and embody the generative myths of their culture by half-perceiving and half-inventing their culture, their myths, and themselves” (1988:8, emphasis original), hardly denies a relative autonomy of the transforming work of cultural representation with respect to essentialist definitions of the represented; despite his insistence on the vernacular, Baker draws our attention to the specific performative aspect of the representation of culture, which constantly helps to create new cultural references and social constellations as it responds to previous ones. This doubled mode draws here on performance, the musical notion of the “break” as chance of improvisational alteration, and orality as resources to intervene in modes of non-recognition or the problematic recognitions of a pre-scribed form of America. Master-scripts of America and the New World that unfold from Columbus’ notions and notations onwards, with the consequence of slavery first for Native peoples and then for Africans in this New World that violently overwrote theirs, are re-written here – as they were by Du Bois – through both a mastery of the available, written forms of recognition and their re-cognition in the oral deformation of their

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scripted masterform. The space in between offers new chance, altered temporalities, and different vistas; as Ellison’s narrator says about the chrono-topos of doubleness and change that can emerge in the midst of apparently unequivocal perceptions of the world: “Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around” (Ellison 1990:8).

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Native writing, orality, and antiimperial translation: Thomas King and Gerald Vizenor

You don’t have anything if you don’t have the stories Leslie Marmon Silko (1977), Ceremony “There are no truths, Coyote,” I says. “Only stories.” Thomas King (1993a), Green Grass, Running Water “Sherman,” asks the critic, “how does your work apply to the oral tradition?” “Well,” I say, as I hold my latest book close to me, “it doesn’t apply at all because I type this. And I’m really, really quiet when I’m typing it.” Sherman Alexie (2000), The Unauthorized Autobiography of Me

Anti-imperial translation Self-perceptions and ascriptions are recreated – often violently – in cultural contact zones, from which they emerge as relational processes, cor-relations, and translations. The contact of Europeans with what for them appeared as a “New World” was mediated by images and ideas that also became obstacles in the self-perceptions of those who emerged as “Indians” in these ascriptive translations (which carried names across from a world itself subsequently re/cognized as “Old”). As Arnold Krupat observes, “the people indigenous to the Americas entered European consciousness only by means of a variety of complex acts of translation.” These began with Columbus’ obliteration of original place names, discarded in a systematic ritual of renaming initiated by the literal “christening” of Guanahaní as “San Salvador.” Such linguistic dispossession and appropriation foreshadowed the project of colonization and the physical brutalities of later Indian removals. In addition, Columbus also “materially ‘translated’ (trans-latio, to carry across) some of the Natives he encountered, taking ‘six of them from here . . . in order that they may learn to speak’ ” (Krupat 1996:32).1 By dint of such forced “trans-lation” and his “carrying across” the Atlantic a world of European assumptions, desires, projections, and mismappings, Columbus and his voyages came to symbolize the beginnings of what storytellers and writers like Gerald Vizenor and Thomas King call the “invention of the Indian.” Such inventions and trans-lations, such impositions and superimpositions of different worlds of consciousness mark later conditions for revision that Vizenor situates with the term “postindian.” In Vizenor’s reference to both a new

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freedom and the ineradicable factuality of European contact, “we are long past the colonial invention of the indian. We come after the invention, and we are the postindians” (Vizenor and Lee 1999:84). Like all emergence in the contact zone, however, the revisionary re-articulation of speech, thought, and consciousness of Natives in contexts of European/Western languages and writing is not an unmediated emergence as such of the “natural reason of the tribes [which] anteceded by thousands of generations the invention of the Indian” (Vizenor 1994a:5); it is a relational process, a correlation of two forms of consciousness and expression.2 In this kind of trans-lation, Native cultures make erstwhile non-Native writing and languages their own from different angles and perspectives. In the indeed complex and varied history of translation from Native languages, the process has traditionally been initiated by non-Natives;3 yet Native writers from what has been called the Native American Renaissance4 on have increasingly “carried across” features of the oral tradition into erstwhile non-Native languages and writing, “drawing from the vast body of oral stories relationships that described the world as many tribes understood it” (King 1986:iv). Such works “employ English to signify tribal experiences and identities that reincorporate the tribal worlds that English displaces” (Christie 1997:360). Native and black intersections Columbus’ abduction and forced “translation” of Natives from West to East shares the fact of violent displacement with the massive dispossessions of slavery and the middle passage that his voyages helped to make possible. There are also similarities between the slow emergence and cultural recognition of the Native North American and African American in the face of European assumptions that were based, in Gates’ words, on the equation between the “rights of man” and the “ability to write.” In the case of Native cultures, a similar lack of recognition concerns first the languages themselves, and then fastens again on the absence of writing. As Brian Swann remarks: “The fact that Indians were humans took some time to sink in. The fact that their languages had value took longer” (Swann 1992:xiii). Krupat notes how again the absence of written texts served as criterion in such valuations: “any people who are perceived as somehow unable to speak when they speak their own languages, are not very likely to be perceived as having a literature – especially when they do not write . . .” (Krupat 1996:32). The value of writing, however, plays in many respects a different role in African American and Native American contexts. In Frederick Douglass’ (1845) Narrative, access to literacy and specifically to writing is a precious good that is memorably acquired; it is considered so valuable that its conveyance by the master and its possession by the slave are punishable under the laws of slavery. As we have seen, Robert Stepto identifies “the quest for freedom and literacy” as the “Afro-American canonical story or pregeneric myth” (1979b:18). Native writers, on the other hand, view the merits of their medium at times with ambivalence. Writing evokes the encounter with European culture, and is a newcomer with respect to long and continuing traditions of orature. This ambivalence is demonstrated by an author like Vizenor, where it is compounded by the general ambivalence of postmodern writers towards the written text.5 As Elaine Jahner remarks, Vizenor originally “saw

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all writing as an act that destroys the life of the oral exchange. Over time he has come to a more accepting view of what writing is and can be if it avoids the constraints of single interpretations which are then easily turned into instruments of domination” (Jahner 1985a:25, quoted in Blaeser 1996:74). Alessandro Portelli (1994:211) comments on the different relationships between writing and orality in Native and African American literature: Native American authors endeavour to overcome the opposition of writing and voice, and to include writing as an extension and continuation of a unitary history of language. African-American literature, instead, goes through a phase of problematic appropriation of writing and critique of the limitations of orality; and then, from the vantage point of a full possession of writing, goes back to claim its oral origins and foundations. Despite differing strategic valuations and temporalities, there are significant parallels between the Native insistence on the importance of orality and the African American preoccupation with the vernacular. While not based on a “pre-contact” language, the African American vernacular is part of an oral tradition whose crucial importance is suggested, for instance, by the centrality of the “sorrow songs” in Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois renders this orality in musical notation that, as a system of writing, shares aspects of the problematic of the transcription of Native orality;6 it is also a constitutive part and sign of the very double consciousness Du Bois alludes to in the title of The Souls of Black Folk. Orally transmitted material provides another tradition upon which a multi-voiced discourse can draw, but it also represents a modality of expression that requires another frame of perception. To “view” orality on the page (and the social and cultural relationships it expresses and mediates) as integrated quotation in a written text is different from “hearing” a written text through an oral frame of perception – or as a “singing book,” as Baker put it in reference to The Souls of Black Folk. Both perceptual modes coexist here in varying foreground–background relationships. Similarly, the “centrality of ‘tribal stories’ and storytelling” in the writing of Vizenor and other Native authors (Krupat 1996:37)7 also marks complex systems of multiple reference.8 As in Du Bois’ famous formulation, a doubled matrix of two largely contradictory forms of cultural consciousness evokes here connotations of both double bind or schizophrenia, and extended possibility and doubled, “second” sight. The options to draw on several traditions and to extend principles of Native culture to new worlds is amply pursued by Vizenor, and consistently chosen by King for instance in his “signifying” on several English language traditions in Green Grass, Running Water (discussed below). Vizenor especially, however, has also elicited strong comments in response to strategies of meaning that sustain contradiction in his writing, dualities that avoid “purity” and exclusion but also syntheses that would minimize contradictions. I will discuss below one such comment, Krupat’s essay “Ratio- and Natio- in Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus” (Krupat 1996:56–69), in the light of what Appiah calls Du Bois’ “impossible project.” Appiah suggests that Du Bois in his later writings “was unable to escape the notion of race he explicitly rejected” and that “this curious conjunction of a reliance on and a repudiation of race recurs in recent

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African theorizing” (1992:46). Yet such “impossible” doubleness has also been read more positively (and Appiah himself later distinguishes between “race” and “racial identity,” as discussed in Chapter 6). Anita Haya Goldman, for example, comments: “Rather then minimize parts of Appiah’s argument, I wish to point out what is at stake in Du Bois’ refusal to disavow either the claims of race or those of rights; and that this balancing act – Du Bois’ attempt to stand forever posed between the poles of contradiction – is a deliberate gesture of critique and not a conceptual limitation, as Appiah suggests” (Goldman 1994:173). Vizenor evokes a related balancing act by opening his Earthdivers: Tribal Narratives on Mixed Descent with an epigraph by Vine Deloria: No matter how well educated an Indian may become, he or she always suspects that Western culture is not an adequate representation of reality. Life therefore becomes a schizophrenic balancing act wherein one holds that the creation, migration, and ceremonial stories of the tribe are true and that the Western European view of the world is also true . . . the trick is somehow to relate what one feels to what one is taught to think. (Deloria 1979, quoted in Vizenor 1981a:viii) For Louis Owens, who quotes this passage in his essay on Vizenor’s Bearhart (Owens 1989), this “trick” is clearly related to the figure that mediates antithetical experience or reason – i.e. double consciousness – in Native terms, the trickster (Owens 1989:151). This trickster shares many of the mediating functions described by Gates for the African trickster figure Esu and the New World signifying monkey.9 In contrast to Paul Radin’s characterization of the trickster as devoid of “values, moral or social” (quoted in Vizenor 1981a:xii), Vizenor evokes a “compassionate trickster – outrageous, disturbing, challenging” (Owens 1989:151), but who is also “the imaginative trickster, the one who cares to balance the world between terminal creeds and humor with unusual manners and ecstatic strategies” (Vizenor 1981a:xii). In this case the balancing act is one between Native humor and the “terminal creeds” of what Vizenor calls the “social science monologues” about Indians, but it is also about the need to balance closed interpretations that are associated with writing more generally (as Jahner notes) with principles derived from Native stories and orality.10 The simultaneity and encounter of two systems of reference – a duality and form of double consciousness – leads to trickster performances and strategies that mark many written texts by Native authors. Anti-imperial translation While such encounters are generally a subject of postcolonial studies, King, Vizenor, and Krupat all suggest specific reservations with respect to the term “postcolonial” that are voiced also by other theorists more generally. Vizenor uses the term – if at all – in phrases like “postcolonial domination” (1989a:11), as if to drive home Anne McClintock’s critique of the term as “prematurely celebratory” (1992:88). Thomas King’s (1990a) article “Godzilla vs. Postcolonial,” which I will examine in a moment, goes further by discussing how the term actually (re)imposes the temporality of European contact and thus “frames” Native cultures through problematic recogni-

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tion. Arnold Krupat notes in his essay “Postcolonialism, Ideology, and Native American Literature” that the term is tempting in the context of contemporary Native American literatures; yet after having examined the glosses offered in Arif Dirlik’s (1994) essay “The Postcolonial Aura” that locate postcolonialism indeed after the end of colonialism, he finds it of little use here (Krupat 1996:30).11 In this sense of the term, as Krupat points out, with some notable exceptions “the material condition of contemporary Native ‘societies’ is not a postcolonial one” (1996:31). Nonetheless, he concedes that Native American fiction, albeit “produced in a condition of ongoing colonialism,” often “has the look of postcolonial fiction” and also “performs ideological work that parallels that of postcolonial fiction elsewhere” (Krupat 1996:32). Instead of the “postcolonial,” he proposes the category of “anti-imperial translation,” which is here directly linked to the function of the oral tradition. Anti-imperial translation, as Krupat suggests with reference to a passage by Rudolph Pannwitz (taken up also in Benjamin’s (1969) “The Task of the Translator” and Talal Asad’s (1986) “The Concept of Cultural Translation in British Social Anthropology”),12 creates perturbance in the target language and culture.13 In the case of Native writing, this kind of cultural translation, although it produces “texts that look like novels, short stories, poems, and autobiographies” (Krupat 1996:36), produces them in an English powerfully affected by tongues that are, in this case, not foreign but rather indigenous (either literally other languages, or figuratively other cultural practices): “The language they offer, in Asad’s terms, derives at least in part from other forms of practice, and to comprehend it might just require, however briefly, that we attempt to imagine other forms of life” (Krupat 1996:36). Krupat’s category of “anti-imperial translation” means transformation and doubling of both “target” and “source” cultural practice. Although the “target language” of many written Native texts may be English – where anti-imperialist cultural translation produces a critical perturbance and ironic doubling – the translation can simultaneously be seen to proceed in the opposite direction, as an adaptation and integration of Western forms into Native practices. The process of “translation” and transformation is here a two-way street: what for one audience looks only like a transposition of Native culture into a non-Native, “Western” medium is also, in many ways, a curative integration of what King calls “the anomalies such as the arrival of Europeans in North America or the advent of non-Native literature in this hemisphere” (King 1990a:12) into a Native frame of reference or, as we have seen Portelli put it, an “extension and continuation” of Native verbal and social practice. This reverse perspective becomes clearer if we look at Thomas King’s discussion of Native oral traditions and creation stories, their specific difference from Genesis as their biblical equivalent, and the role of orality in Native writing. This problematic informs both King’s consideration of the term “postcolonial” and the approach in his fictional texts to the availability of multiple traditions – oral and written ones – which we have seen to underlie constructions of duality and emergence also in Du Bois and elsewhere.

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Thomas King, Coyote, and Columbus: “two different dimensions of time or consciousness” Inventing the Indian Inventing the Indian: White Images, Native Oral Literature, and Contemporary Native Writers, King’s doctoral dissertation from 1986, analyzes material, themes, and principles that appear in various guises throughout his subsequent theoretical and fictional work, from his introduction to The Native in Literature (King et al. 1987), his essay “Godzilla vs. Postcolonial” (1990a), and the introduction to his anthology All My Relations (1990b) to many of his stories, poems, and novels that include Medicine River (1989), Green Grass, Running Water (1993a), and Truth and Bright Water (1999b), or his recent Massey Lectures.14 In the first part of his dissertation, King surveys acts of “inventing the Indian” by white writers, from exploration and colonization to the American Romantic period. He traces in particular two images; that of the inferior Indian and that of the dying Indian.15 As he will remark later in his introduction to All My Relations, non-Native writers “prefer to imagine their Indians as solitary figures poised on the brink of extinction” (1990b:xiv). While Native writers initially work with such images as well, King looks at a subsequent process in which Native writers begin to draw on elements from oral traditions for integral structural principles that mark their bridging of oral and written traditions. The same process is at work in their creation of new types of characters and of worlds in which these characters are shown to live, a process he studies in Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, James Welch’s Winter in the Blood, and Leslie Silko’s Ceremony. This process of drawing on both Native oral and non-Native and later Native written traditions makes for an intertextuality and interdiscursivity that is comparable in this respect to the one analyzed by Gates in the case of African American double heritage, and is not only multi-voiced but also driven by a dynamics of double consciousness. More specifically, we will see that in the structure of oral creation narratives King locates translative principles that allow for a double process of writing: in the midst of the transposition of structural and thematic elements of orality onto paper, aspects of non-Native culture and its disruptions and imbalances are recoded and re-allocated space and place in a logic of Native creation. King points out that in the oral materials (often collected by ethnographers and anthropologists to document cultures thought to be on the point of vanishing) relationships were formulated that delineate an Indian world “substantially different from that of the Europeans.” Such differences, King suggests, can be studied most clearly in the accounts that cultures give of their beginnings: “Within most creation stories are essential relationships that help to define a culture” (1986:69). Based on his examination of 150 oral creation/origin stories (74), King compares biblical and Native accounts of creation according to four crucial aspects and relationships: the nature of the deity and its relationship to humans; the relationship between humans; relationships between them and animals and the physical world; and finally the nature of, and relationship between, good and evil (70).16 King offers a comparison at a very general level of these features that will be recognizable in many ways in his later fictions:

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This contrast might be summed up in a very simplistic manner by saying that, within Genesis, most of the relationships that are developed are either relationships of superiors to inferiors or relationships of conflict. In Indian creation stories, the idea of superiors and inferiors is not as distinct and, in many cases, is missing, while the relationship of conflict, especially the conflict between humans and the land, is almost totally absent. (King 1986:93)17 In particular, the mutually exclusive principles of good and evil, or God and Devil, in the Bible contrasts with a vision here of complementary necessity: In these stories, there is the sense that the events that occur are part of an order that exists in the world, that good and evil are tied to one another, that they are part of a balance. To try to destroy the one and preserve the other would simply upset the balance and plunge the world into chaos. (King 1986:93) Yet while these stories were available as part of the ethnographic record, King points out that not only white writers made little use of them. Native writers as well employed initially conventional literary forms and themes until in “the second half of the twentieth century . . . the sense of the world contained in Indian oral literature began to influence writers, particularly Native writers” (King 1986:97). King suggests that it was the development from the civil rights movement in the fifties to the “ethnic movement” it facilitated in the sixties that created a “demand for an ethnic literature” which produced the context for the publication of a novel like Momaday’s (1968) House Made of Dawn (King 1986:105). Native writers faced at least two substantial problems: how to translate specific cultural forms such as orality into the medium of the novel, and how to deal with the images of Natives already produced and put in place by white writers: There was the problem of trying to translate concepts which had no apparent counterpart in non-Indian culture. There was the loss, within written literature, of many of the essential qualities of oral literature such as the performance itself and the loss of the accompanying music and song. Added to these difficulties was the lack of a recognizable structure which would allow for the synthesis of oral material within a written format. But quite possibly, the main difficulty that confronted Indian writers was the well-defined, well-rooted images and assumptions that had, over the years, been constructed by non-Indians, authenticated by history and literature, and sanctified by the popular mind. (King 1986:101) King, whose own work engages these very problems with remarkable success and ingenuity, suggests that Momaday’s House Made Of Dawn (1968) offered for the first time Native characters and a Native world not inferior or dying, and without falling into the opposite trap of Romantic hyperbole (King 1986:108). It also “successfully bridged the gap between oral literature and written literature, allowing the strength

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and the vision of the one to manifest itself in the other” (106). Drawing on Native culture and oral literature, Momaday’s novel produced a multi-vocality (or intervocality and intertextuality) as the result of a massive and complex overlay of traditions and influences. It set the canon of American and European literature alongside Native oral traditions and juxtaposed the works of writers such as Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, William Faulkner, Isak Dinesen, and Yvor Winters against the creative minds and voices of Kiowa, Pueblo, and Navajo storytellers. (King 1986:105–6) King initially speaks here of the “merging, in the novel, of two distinct literary traditions, Native American and European, the oral and the written” (1986:107). This merging, however, as in the case of Du Bois’ formulation, withstands synthesis and maintains the logic of the dialogic. In his subchapter “The Bridge between Oral and Written Literature: Momaday, Welch, and Silko,” King offers an uncanny replay of the ambivalent, double-coded simultaneous existence of merging and emergence that we have seen in Du Bois’ hope for a “merging [in which] he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost”: The bridges that each writer creates are organizing elements that help to establish the distance and difference between Indians and non-Indians, between the natural universe and the technological world. They function as metaphor, suggesting the link that each writer makes between the two literatures that merge within the novel. This merging is not a complete synthesis. It is a piecemeal affair at best, where each author borrows elements and structures, such as ceremonies and storytelling techniques, from oral literature and adapts them to the novel. (King 1986:116, emphasis added) Although King uses the word “merging” throughout his discussion, the envisaged effect is a form specifically framed by Native cultural perspectives, that nonetheless also functions as a novel in non-Native culture. Many of the elements and structures discussed by King (ceremonies, storytelling structures) provide an overall frame like the ritualistic opening and closing words “dypaloh” and “qtsedaba,” and like Abel’s runs at the beginning and end of House Made of Dawn: these “give the novel a circular structure allowing the story to fall between the storyteller’s voice and a ceremony” (King 1986:119–20). King notes how repetition and ritual in James Welch’s Winter in the Blood create an implied link with oral stories; Momaday employs formulas from Pueblo culture, and Silko “first creates a traditional storyteller, Ts’its’tsi’nako, the spider, who tells the story that the narrator relates” – a story whose cyclical nature Silko underlines by setting “her work between sunrises” (King 1986:121). As we will see, many of these features appear directly in King’s fictions. One could think here of the function of orality and the presence of trickster figures in all of them; of the function of the gift from father to child that frames Medicine River (circling from failed promise at the beginning to mended ritual at the end); of the opening oral formula in Green Grass, Running Water;18 or the function of Lum’s runs in Truth and Bright Water.19

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In his exploration of orality and creation/origin stories, King also emphasizes a related aspect that is directly relevant to his own work. At issue here is how knowledge is acquired, how language creates reality, and how the use of language is related to processes and ceremonies of healing, central to House Made of Dawn and Ceremony as well as to King’s own writing. This aspect of the orality of creation stories offers patterns of knowledge and temporality that are at odds with those of modernity; it maintains another consciousness at work at the same time and within the sophisticated postmodern and multimedial “hyper-literacy” operative in King’s work, a fact that one critic has sought to express by calling King a “neo-premodern” rather than a postmodern writer (Ridington 2000:105). On one level, this aspect arises from the narrative plot of oral creation stories; on another level, it is related to the re-creation that is operated in storytelling as a means of healing and balancing. King contrasts the conceptual structure that relates the acquisition of knowledge to the conflict of disobedience and the expulsion from the garden in Genesis, with a different pattern in Native creation stories. Here, the plot is considerably flatter. . . . The process of creation that is described here is a quiet, ordered one, devoid of spectacular successes and monumental disasters. Native creation stories are, by modern literary standards and tastes, boring. There is nothing to be resolved, corrected, or changed, because there is nothing wrong. Native creation stories are concerned with understanding the nature of the world. Each story is structured like a chain, where one creation leads to another, one understanding to the next. None of the links is any more important or dramatic than the last or the next. The three novels in question use this same basic structure. (King 1986:122) And just as “each story is structured like a chain” and the creation of subjective worlds occurs by relating links and steps produced by that chain and code of instruction to the individual, the process of balancing or healing after disruption is a formal and ceremonial rebuilding of link after link of a sequence that allocates places to bits of experience and knowledge. Stories in this sense resemble the genetically programmed regeneration of a severed part of a starfish that King mentions elsewhere in the dissertation (1986:182), and that serves as a metaphor for Harlen Bigbear’s community-mending activities in Medicine River (1989:31). King clearly emphasizes such sequential, non-conflictual, and integrating reallocation in the three works under consideration in his study. For Momaday’s protagonist Abel, the process of regeneration is an issue of whether or not he will come again to an understanding of the world in which he lives. As in the creation stories, the process of coming to knowledge is a slow, ordered one. There are no dramatic flashes of insight, no sudden realizations, no brilliant twists of plot that present the protagonist with the object of his quest. (King 1986:123) As King remarks with respect to a similar absence of dramatic change at the end of Welch’s Winter in the Blood: “The only differences lie in the character’s knowledge of

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himself and his place in the world” (1986:124). The process of ordering is emphasized again in Ceremony: “Tayo’s recovery is a long, slow process of relearning the essential truths that he once knew but has lost. These are presented to him piece by piece until Tayo has what he needs to take his place in the world again” (124–5). King summarizes the innovations derived from principles of oral stories by citing the “ceremonies and rituals that each writer uses, the circular structure of the story, and the borrowing, from Native creation stories, of a structuring plot which emphasizes the acquisition of knowledge rather than the resolution of conflict” (125). Crucial to much of King’s own work – as well as Vizenor’s – is the role of the character who guides Tayo through this process of balancing and healing, integration and re-creation. King suggests that Silko has created a “new Indian character” with the figure of Betonie. Betonie is located at the crossroads between cultures, a practitioner of cultural translation and transcoding. He lives between the white community of Gallup and the reservation, and is a mixedblood who occupies “a position that no other Indian character has held”; different from the traditional old, wise Native character who is “impervious to white influence,” Betonie “stands in opposition to this fixed description of Indian civilization” (King 1986:142). King offers here a passage spoken by Betonie that serves also as epigraph in Vizenor’s Earthdivers and is highly suggestive of common concerns shared by both writers: “But after the white people came, elements in this world began to shift; and it became necessary to create new ceremonies. I have made changes in the rituals. The people mistrust this greatly, but only this growth keeps the ceremonies strong” (Silko 1986:126, quoted in Vizenor 1981a:v and in King 1986:142). King in fact cites this important passage again (1986:186), after his analysis of the all-important double-bind that time and again lures articulations of cultural specificity into patterns of assertion and “recognition” that are pre-scribed negations of their own dynamic: Most writers who deal with Indian culture insist that, in order to maintain its purity and power, Indian culture must remain unchanged. Any deviations in the ceremonies or rituals are not signs of growth but signs of decay. Since it is impossible for a culture to stand still, the two options which writers give Indian culture are both untenable. If the culture remains static or if it changes, it is seen as being in the process of dying. Within many novels, the word “traditional,” used to describe Indian culture, becomes a semantic trap, for to be traditional, Indians and Indian culture have to stand absolutely still. (1986:185) In the context of Betonie’s ceremonial practices, his physical surroundings that contain “ingredients” from both the Native and the white world, and his ancestry, King speaks repeatedly of a balancing of the world that is produced by a “merging”: “Betonie himself represents this merging. Like Tayo, he is a mixedblood, a man with green eyes, a product of both worlds” (1986:187). Yet Tayo’s mixedblood reality does not as such integrate aspects of a consciousness that remains in need of the new healing ceremonies of Betonie, as demonstrated by his family situation and the circumstance of his attack on Emo, another War veteran. The “merging” of double consciousness works as recontextualization that re-cognizes opposing ele-

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ments without denying either one of them. It does not, in fact, abolish double consciousness as such, but turns it into an ongoing liminal space and interaction. This process drives constant new creation in the verbal, ceremonial act of balancing and re-creation, the act that describes perhaps best the character of the “new attitudes towards ceremonies and rituals” and the verbal practices that are the works of both King and Vizenor. King speaks thus of the “second section of the novel [which] describes the balance that allows both worlds to merge” and “describes the origin and nature of the evil which Tayo faces” (187). In a passage that is richly suggestive for instance of King’s own “Coyote Columbus Story” and the beginning of Green Grass, Running Water (to which I will turn shortly), King (1986:187–8) emphasizes here an important break with tradition in Ceremony: Writers dealing with Indian and white worlds generally put the blame for any corruption of the Indian world on the white. The white world is pictured as powerful and corrupt; the Indian world is pictured as powerless and pure. Silko has none of that. Instead, Betonie explains to Tayo that white people and, hence, white mischief were created by Indians, that the danger to the world does not come from the white world but from the witchery that promises to destroy both worlds. . . . This perspective maintains responsibility and agency for Natives, as the subsequently quoted passage by Silko emphasizes.20 It also informs King’s approach to what in a “biblical” perspective would be the Native equivalent to the Fall and expulsion from the Garden: the event of cultural contact initiated by the voyages of Columbus, and the subsequent postcolonial reality (in the sense of after the beginning, not the end, of colonial/imperial contact). While Native creation is not structured in lapsarian fashion, such “anomalies” call for the healing and re-creation that is oral storytelling (or, for the writer engaged in new ceremonies, another day at the office). “Godzilla vs Post-colonial” Analyzing assumptions and frames of reference implicit in the term “postcolonial,” King (1990a) explains in his essay “Godzilla vs. Post-colonial” why the term itself potentially aggravates cultural impositions it supposedly critiques.21 His argument flows from the analysis of the difference between Native creation stories and patterns in Genesis that see creation and the human condition defined by relationships of superiority/inferiority and conflict, beginning with the Fall and the expulsion from the Garden. To choose the postcolonial story of the dispossession and expulsion of Natives from their lands as a foundational frame of reference over the patterns of Native oral creation stories would replicate the Biblical pattern and add spiritual colonialism to the historical violence of physical colonialism. King’s argument, while it is counter-discursive in its critique of the notational colonialism of the term “postcolonial,” clearly seeks to avoid the logic of “reverse discourse” (Gates 1992a:314); it uses the tradition of orality as a frame and ground that bypasses “recognition” of Native culture on the basis of “postcolonial” assumptions. While it is possible to see Native cultural practices as response to the imposition of colonialism, King’s “re-cognition” casts European contact as an imbalance to be recognized

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and balanced according to Native explanatory principles that continue their creation and are not grounded in this event. For King, the term “post-colonial” defines perspective problematically since “the starting point for that discussion is the advent of Europeans in North America” (1990a:12). Such segmentation assumes a certain type of narrative; yet as King remarks: “Assumptions are a dangerous thing” (1990a:10). This warning aptly highlights his strategy here and in much of his other work. The implicit sequence of precolonial, colonial, and post-colonial, pivoting around contact, King argues, suggests a relationship of part to whole and projects assumptions on pre-colonial culture that are based on factually inexistent relationships. It floats the connotation of progress and improvement (King 1990a:11–12), and assumes (as King puts it in a formulation relevant to his strategy in Green Grass, Running Water) that “the struggle between guardian and ward is the catalyst for contemporary Native literature, providing those of us who write with method and topic” (1990a:12). While King concedes that “post-colonial” might be a valid adjective to describe Canadian Literature, he feels that it cuts Native writers “off from our traditions, traditions that were in place before colonialism ever became a question, traditions which have come down to us through our cultures in spite of colonization,” and it supposes that contemporary Native writing is “largely a construct of oppression” (12). King opposes the emphasis on a Native tragic, dying, or inferior individual that is often forced by such a frame, an issue recurring also in his introductions to both the 1987 edited essay collection The Native in Literature (King et al. 1987) and the 1990 Native Canadian anthology All My Relations. Like Vizenor, who insists on the trickster as a “communal sign in a comic narrative” (Vizenor 1989b:9), King upholds the comic and insists on the communal. In “Godzilla vs Post-Colonial,” he explains his preference for a set of “vantage points” that “do not, within the terms themselves, privilege one culture over another,” that refer to a “cultural and literary continuum for Native literature,” and that do not “depend on anomolies [sic] such as the arrival of Europeans in North America or the advent of non-Native literature in this hemisphere” (1990a:12). Instead of “post-colonial” (which for him remains “a hostage to nationalism”), he discusses the terms tribal, interfusional, polemical, and associational in order to describe Native writing (1990a:12). While tribal literature is mostly shared by the members of the community, “presented and retained in a Native language” and “virtually invisible outside its community” (King 1990a:13), polemical literature in either language concerns itself indeed “with the clash of Native and non-Native cultures or with the championing of Native values over non-Native values.” In many respects, polemical literature comes closest to what is implied in postcolonial perspectives: it “chronicles the imposition of non-Native expectations and insistences (political, social, scientific) on Native communities and the methods of resistance employed by Native people in order to maintain both their communities and cultures” (13). Yet King explains in more detail the two other terms, the interfusional and the associational. The interfusional refers to the blending of oral and written modes as it occurs most successfully, for King, in the oral syntax of Harry Robinson’s prose (see Chester 1999). One of the characteristics of interfusional literature in King’s understanding is that by creating a kind of oral syntax (rather than using a dialect or vernacular; 1990c:73), it forces the reader to read aloud, and thus compensates partially for a loss by “re-

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creating at once the storyteller and the performance” (1990a:13). “Associational literature,” finally, describes a Native community. While it may also describe a non-Native community, it avoids centring the story on the non-Native community or on a conflict between the two cultures, concentrating instead on the daily activities and intricacies of Native life and organizing the elements of plot along a rather flat narrative line that ignores the ubiquitous climaxes and resolutions that are so valued in non-Native literature. In addition to this flat narrative line, associational literature leans towards the group rather than the single, isolated character, creating a fiction that de-values heroes and villains in favour of the members of a community, a fiction which eschews judgements and conclusions. (King 1990a:14) While this kind of writing reminds Native readers of the “continuing values of our cultures” including those embodied in oral literature, King emphasizes the fact that the narrators in his examples (Basil Johnston’s Indian School Days and Ruby Slipperjack’s Honour the Sun) grant responsibility and choice to characters independently of their communal affiliation, and neither posit “the superiority of Native culture over non-Native culture nor suggests that the ills that beset the community come from outside it” (King 1990a:15). This perspective avoids the criteria imposed by an antagonistic alterity and the inverse maintenance of pre-scribed “superior/inferior relationships” (King 1990c:72), articulating agency in its own frame of reference; nonetheless it has to function under the circumstances of a colonization that, as King points out, has not stopped (1990c:74). Medicine River King’s first novel, Medicine River (1989), can be clearly read in the context of the associational and its important link with orality. The text concentrates on an Alberta Blackfoot community on a reservation and in the nearby small town of Medicine River. This communal context is mediated by the experiences of the mixedblood narrator and photographer Will, who has returned from Toronto to the Prairies, his friendship with the sympathetic if meddling trickster figure Harlen Bigbear, and other individual characters in the stories. Harlen’s main activity is mending tears in the web and fabric of the Native community. Although he does so with uneven success, and consequences not always appreciated by those concerned, this community-oriented perspective also characterizes the overall narrative perspective. The associational aspects, concerned with the description of the Native community and its intricacies, are the focus; the clashes that do occur are mostly shown within the Native community, although they are often juxtaposed with similar clashes elsewhere, with the result of problematizing and dismantling automatized, stereotypical assumptions. The impact of principles of orality, while they are, outside of the dialogues, not as overt as in the later Green Grass, Running Water, are both subtle and pervasive. Written before King’s encounter of the interfusional texts of Harry Robinson (Robinson 1989, 1990; see King 1999a:72, Chester 1999), Medicine River does not yet deploy the syntactical structures that begin to appear in some of the stories

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collected in One Good Story, That One (1993b), such as the title story (originally published in 1988), “Magpies” (1989), “The One About Coyote Going West” (1989), and “A Coyote Columbus Story” (1992), all of which employ syntactical devices that simulate oral storytelling. Yet Medicine River clearly employs a number of structures and devices derived from Native oral traditions. As a short story cycle Medicine River is very much aligned with a highly successful form strongly represented in non-Native Canadian writing (for instance that of Alice Munro or Rohinton Mistry). Yet at the same time, the text extends in many ways principles of orality as King explicates them with respect to origin and creation stories. This aspect emerges in greater detail in comparison with aspects of Silko’s Ceremony, one of its intertexts.22 I will look here at four related structural features, in order to adumbrate elements that show King clearly inserting himself into the tradition he has analyzed in Inventing the Indian. This tradition continues to embody another consciousness that is heterogeneous with respect to postcolonial strategies operating from a segmentation of events and a set of assumptions imposed by colonialism. This consciousness does occasion vacillating moments of double consciousness because it exists together with postcoloniality, yet is not defined by it as its primordial ground. I will focus first on the position of the narrator between two cultures, then on the function of the trickster figure Harlen Bigbear, thirdly on the related circularity of the text (which functions here as a balancing), and finally on perhaps the most conspicuous formal feature of the text, the juxtaposition, inside each story which thus becomes double, of two intricately intercut stories. Will, the narrator of Medicine River, is a mixedblood like Tayo, the main character in Silko’s Ceremony, and returns to Native culture after having lived in contexts defined by white culture. Will’s experience is hardly as dramatic as Tayo’s war experience, yet the circumstances of his departure from the reservation mark a disturbance and the beginning of an imbalance that will be followed by the re-creation of a more balanced world. In the first chapter, excerpts of letters by the narrator’s ever-absent father are used to juxtapose two stories: one in the past, in which the narrator first reads these letters against the will of his mother, and one in the present, in which these letters are restored to the narrator after they have circulated through the community. The letters will be reread and re-cited in the act of telling the story as a whole, and the act that conjoins the two stories into one. King’s text thus begins not with a marker of orality like Ceremony or House Made of Dawn, but with an excerpt from a written document that marks several absences: not only that of a spoken voice, but also that of Will’s father, whose imminent presence his letters wrongly continue to announce. In addition, the letters explain further absences: the third letter refers to the loss of Native status of women who marry whites,23 and thus explains why Will and his brother grow up removed from the reservation and from most of their relatives (King 1989:4). The fifth letter, finally, announces a Christmas gift that will never arrive and becomes an enduring sign of the father’s absence: a musical top for the children, which King will use again as thematic device at the end of Medicine River to complete the round of his creation and re-created world. The character who makes these letters from the past re-appear, Harlen Bigbear, marks the appearance, re-creation and continuation of what King calls the “traditional past” (1986:180); as King has commented: “Harlen is very much a traditional character. He’s the trickster figure, rearranged in some ways. . . . He’s creator and

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destroyer. . . . He just sort of appears” (King 1990c:67). Much like the trickster dogs, the “Cousins,” in King’s later Truth and Bright Water (1999b), Harlen Bigbear in Medicine River often appears out of nowhere and unpredictably, which makes him “like the prairie wind. You never knew when he was coming or when he was going to leave” (1989:1). Harlen’s initial appearance, dedicated it turns out later to the delivery of the letters, announces a complex web of lines in the text. The letters also evoke Will’s ambivalence towards their author; they prompt Will to state his aversion (“The guy was a jerk, Harlen”) but also to remember, in an interpolated episode from his childhood, his erstwhile determination to claim and read them against his mother’s will. Harlen’s purveyance of the letters is also an attempt to reconcile Will with his father, fulfilling “One of the roles of the trickster [which] is to try and set the world right . . .” (King 1990c:68). Ignorant of the father’s death, Harlen fails in his immediate attempt at getting Will to reconnect with him. Yet the episode initiates Will’s reconnection with both paternity and community in several ways. Through an interesting intertextual reworking of an image in Michael Ondaatje’s poem “Bearhug,”24 King associates Harlen Bigbear with a long-awaited paternal embrace. It is an image of welcome at a moment of Will’s return to the Native community, facilitated by Harlen. Significantly, that return is narrated after a chapter rendering Will’s serial inventions, in protracted bouts of family romance, of imaginary, wonderful fathers. And community works here also in other ways. While Will’s mother had objected to his illicit childhood readings of the letters by scolding, “don’t you know about private,” Harlen turns out to be only the last link in a circular chain of community members who have transmitted and read the letters (some of them with tears in their eyes, he claims); they return to Will as a sign that his presumed “private” life has been shared by, and become a part of, the community. The letters also remind Will of the Christmas, the musical top as an image of sound and circularity that had failed to arrive from his father; this is the gift he will make, in his own adoption of a child, paternity, and community (again induced by Harlen, who “tricks” him into his first date with Louise) at the very end of the text: “It made a sweet humming sound, the pitch changing as it spun in its perfect circle: red, yellow, blue, green” (King 1989:260–1). Harlen’s interventions that aim at communal reconnection point to Silko’s Ceremony with its regenerative patterns as one of the crucial intertexts of Medicine River (and also Green Grass, Running Water): Helping was Harlen’s specialty. He was like a spider on a web. Every so often, someone would come along and tear off a piece of the web or poke a hole in it, and Harlen would come scuttling along and throw out filament after filament until the damage was repaired. . . . “People are fragile. Doesn’t take much to break something. Starfish are lucky, you know. You break off one of their arms, and it grows back. I saw it on television.” Harlen poured himself another cup of coffee. (King 1989:31) In Inventing the Indian, King discusses the spider web’s fragility and the starfish’s regenerative ability as images of the creative process in the context of Ceremony’s

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dual temporal structure. While the world of Momaday’s House Made of Dawn is “able to transcend the mistakes and foolishness of one individual,” it “depends on the oral voice, the passing on of information from one generation to the other”; it is thus “a tenuous thing, always near the edge of oblivion” (King 1986:178). This is where Silko begins. King cites the first sentence of a passage that renders the words of Ku’oosh, the traditional medicine man who undertakes the first effort to help Tayo: The word he chose to express “fragile” was filled with the intricacies of a continuing process, and with a strength inherent in spider webs woven across paths through sand hills where early in the morning the sun becomes entangled in each filament of web. It took a long time to explain the fragility and intricacy because no word exists alone, and the reason for choosing each word had to be explained with a story about why it must be said this certain way. That was the responsibility that went with being human, old Ku’oosh said, the story behind each word must be told so there could be no mistake in the meaning of what had been said; and this demanded great patience and love. (Silko 1986:35–6)25 This passage offers both a “strong sense of weakness” and the description of a “world constantly in the process of recreating itself,” as King suggests (King 1986:179); he relates it to Ceremony’s opening lines about the creation of the Universe by Thought-Woman, the spider, whose naming of things make them appear and whose thoughts the narrator of Ceremony relates to the reader (Silko 1986:1). As King remarks also with reference to the following section, “Ceremony,” which insists on the indispensable, regenerative power of stories “to fight off illness and death” (Silko 1986:2): “The creative process is clear. Words create stories and stories create worlds” (King 1986:179). This is the process of an “organic re-creation” King compares here with the starfish’s ability to re-create a lost part of itself, a process of creation and re-creation that works in Ceremony through the retelling of oral stories through which “relationships are understood and balances maintained” (King 1986:180). This context creates a dual temporal structure in which the disturbances and imbalances in the contemporary present and immediate past of Tayo’s life can be read with reference to equivalent events in the “traditional past” in oral stories; here it is the event in the story of Reed Woman and Corn Woman that causes the disappearance of the rain (Silko 1986:13), followed by the long and complex curative recreation of the original balance that has been disrupted as the “result of individual carelessness” (King 1986:180). This structure is in Ceremony maintained through the repeated interpolation of segments of the traditional story, which also closes the text before the final invocation of the sunrise. King refers to this pattern as a continual movement between “two different dimensions of time or consciousness” (King 1986:180). This dual structure of comparison, interpretation, and translation, which King uses again strikingly in Green Grass, Running Water, is also at work in the juxtaposition and interpolation of stories in Medicine River. Harlen can be seen as the mediating agent of a traditional dimension, just as his delivery of the letters connects Will’s

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individual and “private” situation with that of a wider context of conveyance and communal knowledge. Harlen’s intervention is part of his web making, and as such brings Will’s life in contact with the patterns of the “traditional past.” It also creates in other ways a movement between “two different dimensions of time or consciousness” (King 1986:180), connecting Will’s childhood as part of a “nuclear” family without father and apart from the Native community (occasioned by an uncle’s “mistake” of introducing his parents to each other) with his present life that is marked by a slow process of reintegration. Not all juxtapositions of stories within King’s stories in Medicine River follow precisely this pattern, yet most offer a re-creation and retelling of stories that in their connection create comment, translation and interpretation, and aspects of balancing and healing that often turn a choice of either/or into a vision or acceptance of both/and. Chapter 15, the double story of two family portraits, is an instance of this interaction between “two different dimensions of time or consciousness,” which are made to communicate, again, through the initiative of Harlen. Significantly, it follows three other stories that rely on the narrator’s profession and metafictional function as portrait photographer to touch upon issues of identity and community (the last one juxtaposes, like Chapter 15, a story from Will’s childhood with one from the present that thematizes his position as part of a Native community). The “traditional” past is present again in the form of Harlen, whose mediating trickster appearance begins here with his interest in the “time delay” button on Will’s camera. It is Harlen who initiates Will’s family portrait special, special not only in its price but also in its effect on Will. With the appearance of Joyce Bluehorn’s over 50 family members, and the subsequent extension of the portrait to include an even larger community that exceeds the capacity of Will’s studio, the Harlen-induced “family special” reintroduces Will to a notion of extended family relations that contrasts vividly with his childhood family experience, his life with his mother and his brother in the city and away from the reservation. Will’s inability to interpret correctly his Native customer’s reference to her “big family” shows his cultural alienation, and his movement between two forms of consciousness that associate the words “big family” with quite different concepts and numbers. The words cause Harlen and Louise immediately to laugh in anticipation of the space problems in Will’s studio (King has suggested that the same interpretive difference occurs when he reads the passage in front of Native and non-Native audiences). Harlen not only initiates the occasion; he also remembers in time the “time delay button” that allows for Will’s inclusion in the two dozen photographs he ends up taking for the portrait. Harlen’s intervention thus produces Will’s continual movement between the position of the portraying photographer – also his position as an individual and observer on the margins of the Native community to which he has returned – and that of a member of the portrayed community. Will’s inclusion is underlined by his position, in this family portrait, next to an old woman who seems to adopt him symbolically in lieu of her oldest boy who has died; this act of recreation mirrors Will’s own adoption of a role that not only gives a child the presence of a father, but also re-creates and heals his own fatherless childhood in a balancing sequence. In this respect, the time delay button, brought into play through Harlen’s intervention, reconnects Will to a circular temporality in which seemingly lost elements are replaced and re-created. Harlen’s function as the

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web-repairing spider provides again and again the connective stories and introductions. This temporality is different from the linear one of modernity and progressive development that King associates also with the sequence deployed by the term postcolonial. The “time delay” button, however, develops a double exposure and double temporality also in another sense. It alters the way and time of recording and perception, allowing Will to catch up with the temporality of community from an observing outside position – only to return each time again to that other position, another experience and consciousness that is re-created and recontextualized in such connective movement, but not obliterated or forgotten. This aspect is emphasized by the interpolated story from Will’s childhood that has also a family portrait as its subject. It is equally a portrait after a family member’s death: “Dad died,” Will informs his brother, “and Mom wants to get a picture in case something happens to us” (King 1989:213). This portrait, in a static pose, in new, uncomfortable clothes, has none of the qualities of the later portrait taken by – and of – Will. While it seems to have been prompted by loss, it has none of the integrating aspects of the portrait as social occasion in which the web is woven and repaired, and structures of belonging re-created like the arms of the starfish. Despite all this, the integrative later moment of the larger family portrait is not an occasion for the rejection of the earlier one in King’s story. On the contrary, it prompts Will to restore the other picture and put it on his kitchen wall, in juxtaposition and dialogue with the portrait of the larger community in the present. The moment and retelling that offers restitution of the lost family does not eclipse the previous story of absence and disruption; both pictures remain side by side, one balancing perhaps the other, but not negating it. The moment of restitution – an event defined by the story of disruption or lack – includes both stories and assumes both creations, a doubling rather than a sublation. Green Grass, Running Water: orality and double temporality The rich array of mythological, literary, cultural and historical references of King’s second novel, Green Grass, Running Water (1993), challenges and teases readers with its jokes, narrative blanks, allusions, riddles, and the implications of “written orality” on the page. The text opens strategic gaps that bring assumptions, knowledges, and practices from different cultural contexts into contact and collision.26 Like Du Bois’ epigraphs that in The Souls juxtapose “Sorrow Songs” and Western literary tradition, King’s text calls for a multiple cultural “literacy.” This hyperliteracy references – again like Souls – traditions differentiated by their predominant reliance on orality and writing respectively, and mediates forms of subjectivity akin to Du Boisian double consciousness. Like the texts of the black tradition that draw (as Gates explains) by definition on several traditions, King’s text interacts with Native oral and written as well as United States and Canadian literary traditions, and dialogues also intensively with popular culture. In a further parallel with issues in the black tradition, King’s novel also aims at a re-cognition of the event that conditions a complex literacy and pedagogy, and institutes the possibility of double consciousness: here not the middle passage, but the crossings of Christopher Columbus that initiate slavery in the New World, first for Natives and then Blacks, with irreversible consequences for all groups involved. King evokes this nexus in the figures of Babo

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and Sergeant Cereno, his parody of Melville’s 1855 pre-civil war treatment of the relationship between master and slave that is as conscious of the power of the slave as Hegel’s dialectic – after the French Revolution and at the moment of the Holy Empire’s fall to Napoleon – was of its necessity. Melville’s “Benito Cereno” evokes, like Hegel’s drama of recognition that is portrayed in the master–slave dialectic, the theme of death – here with the slain slaveship owner, whose corpse replaces the portrait of Columbus as his ship’s figurehead (and with Babo’s and Cereno’s deaths at the end). King, however, replaces this logic of death with a doubled temporality. One of the most important consequences of Columbus’ arrival for Native selfunderstanding was the imposition of Christianity, with its temporality premised, as King emphasizes, on the Fall. In his parody, the Fall appears not as the introduction of Christian temporality, but as the fall of the Christ-bearer Columbus’ ships over the edge of the world, a parodic fall that restores here the flow of water and the circle of life. The text’s doubled temporality reframes the Christian account of origin not as beginning, but as secondary effect: an imbalance or “mistake,” to be handled within Native mythology (King speaks, as we have seen, of “empire” not as foundational moment but as “anomaly” in the course of Native life). While the text responds to the consequences of an event that opens both the future North America and Europe to unprecedented scales of change and will eventually emerge as the beginning of a temporality of “progress” and modernity, it re-interprets this event through a counter-temporality of return and re-integration. This double temporality hearkens back to the dual temporal structure King explicates with reference to Leslie Silko’s Ceremony, and functions similar to the “time delay button” brought into play, in Medicine River, by the trickster figure mediating the “traditional past,” Harlen Bigbear. This feature allows for the continual movement between “two different dimensions of time or consciousness” (King 1986:180) that King also observes in the continual interpolation of segments of the traditional story of Reed Woman and Corn Woman in Ceremony, where the focus moves back and forth in a parallel curative re-creation of a state that has been disrupted as the “result of individual carelessness” and the subsequent disappearance of the rain (1986:180). In Ceremony, this traditional story leads to a purification that proceeds through four directions from sunrise to darkness, from east, south, west, north (Silko 1986:255–6),27 and concludes the text with the death of witchery (261) before the final invocation of a new sunrise (262). Toward the end of Green Grass, Running Water, Eli Stands Alone indeed also “watched the sun appear” (King 1993a:340) as he is approached by the four old Indians (associated with these directions), and the obstacle to the flow of water that nourishes the cottonwood is about to disappear. King’s novel in fact engages most of the central issues he has laid out in Inventing the Indian, and can be read in particular with reference to his comments there on Ceremony. To begin with, Ceremony’s story of rain lost and regained, rendered here both as oral story from the “traditional past” and in Tayo’s story in the “contemporary present,” echoes throughout Green Grass, Running Water, from the waterworld beginnings of its Native creation stories to its regenerative flood that restores a world sacred and balanced “as long as the grass is green and the waters run” (1993a:224). Like Ceremony and Inventing the Indian, Green Grass, Running Water also insists on the curative and ceremonial power of storytelling and Native creation

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stories. Most of the differences King had formulated in Inventing the Indian in his comparison between these stories and the biblical creation story are recognizable in Green Grass, Running Water, which sets both tales with their temporalities and values into witty dialogue (and offers parodic Gospels according to the Lone Ranger, Ishmael, Robinson Crusoe, and Hawkeye). Animals and things are not inferior here to humans, and correct the names given to them by Ahdamn; the fact that trees can speak leaves God to ask: “What kind of a world is this?” (King 1993a:33). But more importantly the relationship between good and evil that King observes in Native creation stories obtains here as well, a non-exclusive relationship in which both are “tied to one another” and “part of a balance” in which it makes no sense to “destroy the one and preserve the other” (King 1986:93). God is not destroyed, but recast, albeit in Native terms; and the limits of his universe – transformed by orality into Joe Hovaugh’s hospital and garden28 – are permeable for the resident but undetainable Old Indians, who retain the power of storytelling and re-creation of the world. This perspective accounts for two worlds and the double consciousness that results from the fact, as Ceremony puts it, that “all of creation suddenly had two names: an Indian name and a white name” (Silko 1986:68). Green Grass, Running Water also follows Ceremony in its break with previous conventions that distribute good and evil cleanly on the inside and the outside, where the “white world is pictured as powerful and corrupt; the Indian world is pictured as powerless and pure”; as we have seen in King’s reading of Betonie, “he explains to Tayo that white people and, hence, white mischief were created by Indians, that the danger to the world does not come from the white world but from the witchery that promises to destroy both worlds” (King 1986:187–8). “A Coyote Columbus Story” King’s world in Green Grass, Running Water is indeed not a fallen world,29 but a world that has come about through “individual carelessness” and a mistake. King’s semiotics of “mistake” (or mis-take) in Green Grass, Running Water can be usefully explored with reference to his short “A Coyote Columbus Story,” a text he has connected directly with the witchery in Ceremony and the power of both orality and Coyote mischief. Published originally in slightly different form and with illustrations as a children’s book in 1992, and then included in King’s collection One Good Story, That One (which appeared, like Green Grass, Running Water, in 1993), “A Coyote Columbus Story” comments on the quincentennial as a “party for Christopher Columbus . . . who found America [and] . . . who found the Indians” (King 1993b:121). The anonymous I-narrator employs a number of techniques to simulate orality, using the ubiquitous interjection “I says” to cast him- or herself and the reader in a situation of oral storytelling, and indeed tells a story within the story. The first story relates Coyote’s visit with the narrator, the occasion of another story. told to correct Coyote’s mistaken beliefs that are informed by a history book “about how Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue looking for America and the Indians” (1993b:121).30 In the narrator’s version, fault lies not with Columbus but with Old Coyote, who “doesn’t watch what she is making up out of her head” (1993b:123); she inadvertently “makes three ships” and then creates Columbus. When Columbus’ initiation of slavery turns out to be anything but a joke, she recog-

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nizes her mistake but cannot take it back once it has been set loose in the world.31 Rather than perceiving the plight of Indians as an inevitable and unalterable result of Columbus’ action, the story explains colonization as an imbalance and mistake created by coyote mischief, to be healed by different stories. Native terms are thus reaffirmed, and agency reverts to the creative principles and actors identified by them. In an interview with Marie Davis, King discusses principles effective not only in this story but also, as we will see, in Green Grass, Running Water, including the function of orality, the role of Coyote, and two different dimensions of time. With respect to the simulation of orality and its function, King describes a learning process triggered by Harry Robinson’s stories (encountered while editing the anthology All My Relations). Robinson’s use of rhythm makes King pay “attention to that more than to the story, because if you read Robinson’s stories the damn things go all over the place and at the end you’re left with a tonal piece almost and it doesn’t have to make sense particularly” (Davis 1996:50). Repetitions and rhythm, pauses and asides contribute to structures of expectation and response for an audience that is here factored in as part of the storytelling process. This process also offers an explanation for the “I says” in both “A Coyote Columbus Story” and Green Grass, Running Water; King explains that Robinson “remembered always that his audience was a part of the story – that he wasn’t telling the story to people, he was simply participating in the story and he happened to be the one who was leading the participating, if you will” (Davis 1996:50). Connected to the sense of rhythm, repetition, and orality is thus a sense of participation, anticipation, and imagination that is communal, and located in a sense of dialogue. “Trying to deliberately duplicate the sound of the storyteller,” King is concerned about a voice that “anticipates the audience and anticipates some of the questions and knows enough about the storytelling, one would hope, that you keep the person interested as the story goes along” (Davis 1996:51). In addition, the appeal to participation has to rely also on the audience’s imagination, “and in that regard the worst thing that you can do as a storyteller, I think, is to give the reader too much, to the point where your imagination does not get engaged” (Davis 1996:51). King’s comments on the simulation of orality on the written page offer a poetic that adds a second dimension of consciousness to writing as an extension of the culture of orality. In addition, King’s comments on Coyote are also part of the perceptual “flip” that not only re-functionalizes writing from perspectives of Native orality but also insists – within the “host medium” of the novel that historically has played an instrumental part in the ascendancy of colonialism – on the primacy of Native patterns of explanation that refuses a “post-colonial” derivation of Native culture and victimry as function of European “discovery.” Coyote is, in contrast to a god figure, both “one of the creative forces in the world and one of the destructive forces in the world” (Davis 1996:53). In particular, King points out, Coyote for him is also a force of mischief. And it is here that he compares Coyote’s “mistake” of creating Columbus in “A Coyote Columbus Story” with Leslie Silko’s passage in Ceremony “where the witches have this contest to see who can tell the scariest story, and the one who tells the scariest story is the one who brings that story into being in the telling. As she tells it, the story comes to life and she can’t take it back” (Davis 1996:53–4). Thus, as King’s interlocutor comments, “the word is the creation,”

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although King adds that Coyote in his story is also “not infinite” (Davis 1996:54) and has no unilateral control over the trouble she has brought upon herself. Negativity here is not destroyed. It has to be accounted for and balanced, and in this process the worlds double in dialogic creation rather than dialectic sublation and negation. The creative and destructive forces in Coyote do not equal God and the Devil “as polar opposites to each other” with the “sense within Judeo-Christianity that good will triumph over evil . . . and that evil must be destroyed,” with the implied assumption that “the more evil is destroyed the better world you are going to have . . .” (Davis 1996:54). In Ceremony, Tayo foils the forces of witchery because he refrains from the destruction of evil (unlike Abel in House Made of Dawn, who kills); his barely avoided murder of Emo, the evil incarnate in Ceremony, would have been according to “the way the witchery wanted” and made himself “another victim, a drunk Indian war veteran settling an old feud” (Silko 1986:253). King points out that rebalancing of necessary elements, for instance in medicine, is actually made impossible by the destruction of one of them (Davis 1996:54). This perspective operates outside the utopian dimension of Judeo-Christian and modern time, and its sense of progress that develops towards the annihilation of evil. King announces a counter-temporality that goes hand in hand with his claims that he is “not big on plot” and “not big on time” (Davis 1996:51). A writer exquisitely conscious of timing in repetition and anticipation, he can nonetheless declare with respect to the anachronisms he uses in “A Coyote Columbus Story”: “The vision of time is that there really isn’t such a thing” (Davis 1996:56). King’s understanding here is that the “mistakes” of the past have not really been erased by any meliorative, progressive development in time, but persist as actual or possible realities, just as the colonization of Natives and the effects of Columbus are not realities and events that can be safely stowed away as “past” (or as contained objects of the “pedagogical,” as Bhabha would say). King thus tries “to tie the past with the present” and prevent a distance that furthers the perception that “that’s the way things were way back then” (Davis 1996:56–7). The effects of a double temporality – between a culture of “tradition” and orality, and an at first differently perceived “contemporary present” – that occasions the continual movement between “two different dimensions of time or consciousness” are also at work in Green Grass, Running Water. I will look here at three related areas in which several modes of dual or even multiple time are discernible. First, multiple time and ontological levels are traversed by “trickster” time in which indeed “there is no such thing” as time, in the modern sense of progress, when it comes to the ever-present task of balancing “mistakes” through stories and creation. Secondly, there is the problematic represented by the character of Eli Stands Alone, whose name responds not only to a political story in Canada (see Flick 1999:150) but also to a classical dilemma of double consciousness reminiscent of Du Bois’ formulations; while in the first problematic the “traditional past” comes to inform the “contemporary present,” Eli’s itinerary articulates, as we will see, another temporality that marks Eli as the one who returns – with aspects of a revenant or ghost. Finally, the story of Babo offers a further mode of dealing with the world of Columbus that avoids victimry, and parallels the model of Ceremony. This productive mode of double consciousness is worked out in a parodic inversion of Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” with its tale of slavery, insurrection, and symmetrical destruction.

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Mistakes in trickster time The various dimensions of time or consciousness in Green Grass, Running Water are pervaded by stories of mistakes that disrupt, as a “result of individual carelessness” (King 1986:180), the flow of life and water, followed by a curative re-creation in the process of storytelling and events in which balance is regained and fertility resumes. This theme links the various parallel stories and is reminiscent of the parallel accounts of rain lost and regained in Ceremony. The story of the contemporary present is thus juxtaposed and interacts with similar events at various other levels. As King states in an interview with Peter Gzowski, he wanted to use Native oral stories and oral Creation stories – elements of the “traditional past” – and carry “that myth through Christianity, through Western literature and Western history . . . as Native culture’s been pushed through that sort of North American grinder.” As a result, there is a “movement through an oral Creation story, through a biblical story, through a literary story, through a historical story, and that repeats itself each of the times in the four sections” (King 1999a:70–1).32 King uses repetition of phrases with the word “mistake” (or semantically related terms) in particular to connect the different stories in section I; he then shifts to the repetition of key words such as “trouble” and “itch” in section II, and finally uses, in sections III and IV, repetition around the word “light.” Light appears here, significantly, in a Coyote-activated “fiat lux” (King 1993a:192), and in the parodic inversion that pairs George “Morningstar” Custer with the Christian Nativity story and its omen announcing the miracle of Christ’s birth (King 1993a:199). The prologue of the novel prefigures the subsequent stories of “mistake,” “trouble” (King 1993a:2), and re-creation, which circle back to the state at the beginning in which “there is water everywhere.” A short oral Creation story, the prologue features Coyote not as one of God’s creations, but as the creator of a mistake that turns into God. As in “A Coyote Columbus Story,” Coyote’s thoughts and dreams take on a reality s/he cannot control; mischief, trouble, and God are part of a Native world that is responsible for their creation and the subsequently necessary balancing. With the opening connective “So,”33 the self-referential assertion “I can tell you that,” or the repeated “I says,” King simulates again an oral storyteller on paper, who once more (re)creates time through “anachronisms” (Coyote “in the beginning” is for instance invited by the speaker to watch television). As in “A Coyote Columbus Story,” which abolishes temporal distance to mark our contemporaneity with the colonial consequences of Columbus, King’s point here seems to be that both Creation stories and Coyote’s mistakes are alive and well in the present. The four creation figures First Woman, Changing Woman, Thought Woman, and Old Woman34 thus pervade the various time and story levels of Green Grass, Running Water as the four old Indians of indeterminable age aka Hawkeye, the Lone Ranger, Ishmael, and Robinson Crusoe, together with Coyote and the logic of “mistakes.” This is the temporality of the “traditional past” in the midst of modern mythologies and the present, a vision reinforced by the circularity of the novel’s ending that calls for a new round of storytelling to fix the world yet again. Mistakes dominate the narrative in the “contemporary present” from the outset. Problem-prone Lionel is informed by his aunt Norma: “You make a mistake with carpet, and you got to live with it for a long time” (King 1993a:5). Yet “mistakes” loom in Lionel’s life as in the “traditional past” of the storytelling Old Indians, levels linked by King’s connective repetitions:

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Native writing, orality, and anti-imperial translation “Everybody makes mistakes, auntie.” “Best not to make one with carpet.” (1993a:5) “Everybody makes mistakes,” said the Lone Ranger. “Best not to make them with stories.” (1993a:10)

The Lone Ranger’s mistake consist of choosing wrong beginnings, such as Genesis; according to Ishmael, this is not only “the wrong story,” but also “comes later.” Furthermore, the Lone Ranger is informed that “you can’t tell it all by yourself” (10). Lionel’s own mistakes seem comparatively harmless, yet the longevity of their consequences rivals that of carpet-choice errors: “Lionel had made only three mistakes in his entire life, the kind of mistakes that seem small enough at the time, but somehow get out of hand. The kinds that stay with you for a long time” (1993a:25). An attempt to play hooky thus leads to a trip to Toronto for a heart operation and a lifelong data shadow of documented if inexistent heart problems; replacing his supervisor in the Department of Indian Affairs, a certain Duncan Scott,35 as a speaker on Indian boarding schools (an equivalent to Dr Joe Hovaugh’s hospital), Lionel ends up at Wounded Knee and with a criminal record; finally, having lost his position after these events, he accepts work at “Bill Bursum’s Home Entertainment Barn” instead of going to university. King’s repetitions of the word “mistake” occur also in the stories of Lionel’s sister Latisha and his love-interest Alberta, where it refers to their marriages (111, 70), or in Sergeant Cereno’s disbelief about the Old Indians’ gender: “ ‘Are you sure they were women? You must be mistaken’ ” (45). Babo’s reply, “ ‘Pretty hard to make that mistake’ ” in turn contrasts with Joe Hovaugh’s mistaken counter-claim, “We hardly ever make that mistake” (62). Babo’s own name, as we will see, participates crucially in this series of mistaken assumptions and changes; as she points out, her name is often assumed to be a man’s name (20) – as it is in Melville’s intertext (discussed below). If the pervasive reality of “mistakes” connects different levels of time in the first section, the second section relies again on repetition to emphasize the timeless sequence in which mistakes are followed by “trouble.” “Trouble” is here often related to unruly flows of water; the biblical story of Noah and the flood (King 1993a:89–) is thus conjoined by Lionel’s stepping into an unexpected puddle (90, 103), and overflowing water from a backed-up toilet in Latisha’s restaurant (91, 114) is a sign of more trouble; her persistent itch (91–3) is related to her earlier mistake of getting pregnant by George Morningstar, a character identified through his fringed leather jacket with George “Morningstar” Custer (see Flick 1999:146, 149, 160), whose trouble-provoking return announces itself in phone calls: “Trouble, thought Latisha, scratching at her ear. That’s what was coming. Trouble” (93). On the next page, Eli Stands Alone reflects on the water levels of a dammed river that have been raised to intimidate him: “A lot of trouble for nothing.” King continues with a segment featuring Charlie Looking Bear, trouble incarnate not only for Alberta but also as Indian lawyer hired to defend “Parliament Lake,” water backed up and occupying Native land because of a dam (and the descendants of Ahdamn) that reminds Eli later of a toilet (115). While “trouble” pervades, links,

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and unites the various time levels in section II, Charlie’s next move announces the repeated theme in the following sections: guided by the vision of a “light” (102) he will go to Blossom and its Lodge that attracts also the four Old Indians and everyone else, like Bethlehem and its barn and manger the three holy men, before they all witness a new sunrise that announces the return to a new beginning. Appropriately enough, as a character from the “contemporary present” about to meet forces of the “traditional past,” Charlie books with “Time Air. When you fly with us, you fly on time.” While waiting to speak with a representative, he looks out “at the clouds and the light” and then inquires: “When’s your next flight to Blossom?” (King 1993a:102). Light appears throughout the last two sections of the novel, III and IV; like water, it is essential and beneficial – in the absence of “mistakes.” While the cycle of light and darkness signals here also creation and the cycle of life and death, the light of the sunrise has its brightly lit, dark other in this doubled world: the westwardmoving, technological “flood” lights of advancing Western civilization that help to dam(n) the flow of life. Yet the flood will also produce a new creation. Good and evil are never separate, as the narrator reminds Coyote, who is about to forget the good points at the end of section III (1993a:270). Coyote, who would “like a turn” in the storytelling and (re)creation of the world at the beginning of section III, is refused. As one of the Old Indians points out, this “doesn’t sound like a good idea,” it “sounds like a Coyote idea.” Instead, he is allowed to “turn on” the light, with tricky consequences. “Watch me turn on the light” (1993a:192): at one level, Thought Woman steps into a river for a bath in the morning and is swept over the edge of the world and into the sky by a tricky river who sounds like Coyote (193–4), a version of a creation story that foreshadows things generally going over the edge in stories from now on, and Eli’s fate at dawn at the end. Coyote’s dance and turn on the light has begun. As the old Indians watch in the Blossom Lodge parking lot, “the universe gently tilted and the edge of the world danced in light.” The light is beautiful as “in the east the sky softened and the sun broke free”; yet the casual question, “Did Coyote turn on the light?” takes on particular meaning when it becomes clear that the creation of this day and world is his: “I believe he did” (1993a:195). Light first flows in a river but will eventually grow into a flood: “The light ran west, flowing through the coulees and the cutbanks and into the river. In the distance a star settled on the horizon and waited” (195); yet the light flood is imminent. Babo, on her way to Blossom with Joe Hovough, watches “the morning light flood the prairies. It rose and floated over the road, catching the Karmann Ghia at angles and washing the car down the hill to the border” (197). Light comes also from a source that is associated here with the Morning Star but leads not to Bethlehem, but to Blossom and the dam: “In the distance, Babo could see a point of light, a star in the morning sky” (King 1993a:197). Appropriate for a “star” that has two names (like all post-contact creation in Silko, as we have seen) depending on whether it appears in the east or the west,36 Babo and Hovaugh consider the potentially dual nature of the light: “Omen or miracle?” (199). Later, this star is clearly associated with signs of trouble, both with George Morningstar (who appears at the Sun Dance to take prohibited pictures) and with George “Morningstar” Custer – re-enacted by the “guiding star” John Wayne, Lionel’s erstwhile

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identification figure (202–3) – who led a flood of destruction and Christianity west over Native land: “Babo looked to the west: the light was still there. Westward leading” (230). This light turns out to be electric, associated with dam(n) technology. Like Lionel, whose experience with electric light is that the “effect was startling and much worse than he had imagined” (201), Eli is not delighted by such unnatural light: At first Eli supposed it was the dawn that woke him, but as he rolled away from the light, he saw the sky out the front window was still black. The floodlight. They had turned the damn thing on again. Almost as soon as the construction of the damn began, Duplessis brought in half a dozen generators and hung a series of floodlights. . . . As the dam took shape, the smaller floods were exchanged for larger floods until the entire array was reduced to a single floodlight, a giant metal ball that floated above the dam . . . like a miniature sun. (King 1993a:217, emphasis added) Just as Coyote’s small mistake at the beginning leads to the big mistake of inadvertently creating God, and as Lionel’s small mistakes turn into major problems, small floods, whether of water or of light, lead here to large ones. To one of the Old Indians, intent on fixing and balancing the world, Coyote’s dance seems “not the right dance at all” (228).37 Indeed, it produces storm clouds, lightning, and rain, and makes puddles grow into floods that will eventually break through the dam. In the same way, the small floodlight – a consequence of technological domination that comes with Western civilization as part of Coyote’s mischief – turns into a large floodlight and man-made sun. But technological control fails. As Eli points out, it is the very idea of blocking the flow of things, “the idea of a dam” that’s dangerous (217). In fact, Eli’s own blocking of the blocking of water will turn out to be beyond control, correcting his mistaken assumption of any one-sided simplicity: “ ‘It’s real simple,’ said Eli, ‘You can’t flood me out, and you can’t turn on that light at night’ ” (218). Yet the “witchery” and two-sided mischief worked by Coyote indeed can. Babo clearly identifies Coyote’s light as the trickster’s work when she first sees it: “isn’t that the trick” (200). Before technology fails and the dam breaks, Eli thus perceives the floodlight as “hard white light” (331), Bursum sees a flash of light on the lake that comes from the three floating cars (336), and Babo comments again on the trickster’s creation: “Well isn’t that the trick’ she said. ‘Isn’t that just the trick’ ” (King 1993a:338, 357). The dam(n) of technology indeed eventually fails. As Lionel’s boss Bill Bursum notes, helplessly shaking the remote that fails to control TV screens when trickster movie conversions break through “Western” representations of the flows of Native life: “Damn. You put your faith in good equipment and look what happens” (268). As all characters of the novel independently watch John Wayne as (Morningstar) Custer, shoot Indians, the four Old Indians “fix” the film, “supposed to be black and white” (268). Instead, “Everywhere was color” (267). A “great swirl of motion and color – red, white, black, blue” (267), synonymous with the names of the four Old

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Indians (44) and King’s section headings – hastens the decline of the Western (Morning) “star” at the end of section III. Section IV, which describes the Sun Dance, offers a new turn of the light. In a scene that echoes the Old Indians’ previous witnessing of the morning which turned out to be Coyote’s “turning on” the light (195), they now have Coyote with them (“ ‘We always feel better knowing where you are’ ”): “Look,” said Robinson Crusoe. “The grass.” “Look,” said Hawkeye. “The light.” The clouds had moved away from the mountains, opening a path to the sky. From where they sat, the old Indians and Coyote watched the prairies lean away and turn blue and green and gold as the edges of sunlight touched the storm. It was as if a bright fire had sprung up in the deep grass, running before the wind, setting the world ablaze with color. “How beautiful it was,” said the Lone Ranger. “Yes,” said Ishmael, “How beautiful it is.” “It is ever changing,” said Robinson Crusoe. “It remains the same,” said Hawkeye. (King 1993a:297) The world is here set ablaze with colour, just as the movie appears all of a sudden in color after John Wayne/Custer/Morningstar dies. Similarly the subsequent appearance of George Morningstar to capture the Sun Dance in illicit photographs is followed by his discovery and forced departure. The four Old Indians interpret this event as their contribution to help Lionel with his life – who during the confrontation indeed returns a John Wayne jacket to George Morningstar (320, 322). Another turn of the light is announced as “Lionel stood with Alberta as the afternoon cooled and ran to evening. In a while, the dancers would return to the center lodge and the families would go back to their tepees and tents. And in the morning, when the sun came out of the east, it would begin again” (323). On this day, Eli also “waited for the sunrise,” after having been woken by the dam(n) floodlight. Watching “the sun appear” (1993a:340), he is visited by the four Old Indians and Coyote, the agents of change. At that moment, three cars whose names sound the ships of Columbus – Nissan, Pinto, and Karmann-Ghia – sailing on waters turned from puddles to floods as a consequence of Coyote’s dancing and singing hit the dam, which “gave way, and the cars tumbled over the edge of the world” (346). The waters also sweep Eli away in this reconfigured creation story. At the same time in the Sun Dance camp, Alberta, as she “watched the sun rise” (344), is vomiting because of her Coyote-induced pregnancy. As a consequence of the breaking of the dam, “water rolled on as it had for eternity” (347) and the “river comes back to live” (352), securing once again the nutrients for the cottonwood that provides the Sun Dance tree (312). Even Joe Hovaugh observes that in his garden now “everything’s green. Everything’s alive” (355). Yet he perceives only from his particular vantage point a circularity that precedes Judeo-Christianity. King’s ending is reminiscent again of Silko’s invocation of the sunrise at the end of Ceremony (262), after the fourfold ceremonial confirmation that witchery is “dead for now” (261). This wording suggests that every

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time “the witchery” returns, the stories also have to resume their re-creation, as indeed they do on the last page of Green Grass, Running Water. And as George Morningstar, with all the connotations of that signifier, is forced out of the Sun Dance camp in this novel, Emo is forced to leave Laguna. The comments of Old Grandma, at the end of the story of the “contemporary present” in Ceremony, could also apply to the circular, traditional temporality in King’s novel: “I guess I must be getting old,” she said, “because these going-ons around Laguna don’t get me excited any more. . . . It seems like I already heard these stories before . . . only thing is, the names sound different.” (Silko 1986:260) This “timelessness” of the circularity of change that represents the temporality of the traditional past as recurring also in the contemporary present illustrates a consciousness in which there is “no such thing as time.” Yet if such a temporality with its naturalizing tendency runs the risk of dehistoricizing and dissolving time into nothing but mythological repetition, this model is complicated by Eli’s “homecoming” from the big Eastern city. Eli’s “return” Eli’s “return” enacts a circle but also shares in the double cultural consciousness that makes the novel possible and necessary. His character explores in particular predicaments of living in two worlds that are suggested by the French revenant, which literally signifies “the one who returns” but also means “ghost.” As a professor of English literature steeped in Western culture, Eli seems to rejoin Native culture entirely only at the moment of his death. The disappearance of Eli Stands Alone at the end is also his end as revenant. What is swept over the edge of the world in this story of a new creation is not only a dam that submerges and “de-creates” Native worlds that disappear again under water (and thus stops the flow of Native life, green grass, and running water) but also a state of mind that lives the line and dam between worlds as revenant (or living dead) and separation. As long as different worlds, coyote, and mistakes persist, this moment of a new creation will be ceaseless; it never ends, as the circular invocation of a repeated beginning suggests at Green Grass, Running Water’s “end” (King 1993a:360). Eli’s homecoming – a theme that evokes the return of Tayo and other figures in the Native tradition that King discusses in Inventing the Indian – is again associated with the absence of time. The narrative of Eli and his wife Karen begins with his reading of the stereotypical Western (which corresponds to the movie the other characters are watching) about a tragic love story between an Indian chief and a captive white woman, “The Mysterious Warrior” (137).38 Reminiscences about meeting Karen in Toronto emerge during his reading, in which he “imagined for a moment galloping through the tall grass on a glistening black horse with Karen flung across the saddle” (136) and she calls him “my Mystic Warrior” (138). While living in Toronto, Eli tries to avoid returning to the reservation, whereas Karen wants to meet his parents and eventually gets her way. She describes her experience of seeing the circle of lodges at sunrise, ready for the Sun Dance, initially in terms

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of a temporality that emphasizes a “pastness” represented by, and re-presented only in, movies: “ ‘That’s beautiful. It’s like it’s right out of a movie.’ . . . ‘It’s like going back in time, Eli. It’s incredible’ ” (169). Yet what the movie image presents as reality of the past asserts its continued cultural vitality in the present. Karen, who initially talks “in short, abbreviated conversations that began apologetically and ended in midsentence” (170), finds her voice by the third day in camp (170–1). Karen’s learning experience is in keeping with the slow ordering and presentation of knowledge that King emphasizes in Inventing the Indian: At first Karen was silent, content to listen as Eli’s mother ran through the families. The babies who had been born, the young people who had gone away or come back, the elders who had died or were sick. Each one was a story, and Eli’s mother told them slowly, repeating parts as she went, resting at points so that nothing was lost or confused. And then she would go on. (King 1993a:170, emphasis added) This re-creation of community, in which Karen finds her place, appears also in Eli’s memory of his previous homecoming, again associated with the absence of time: What Eli remembered were the People. . . . People who greeted him as if he had never left. . . . And he remembered the afternoon when the men came out of the double lodge at the center of the camp and danced for the first time, how, as they moved in the circle, Eli began to recognize them. (King 1993a:218, emphasis added) As Karen’s voice does during the Sun Dance, his sense of the word “home” changes. In a world where everything has two names, names also refer here to two things, and home has become associated, not with the Sun Dance, but with the lights of the city: “Are you afraid, Eli?” “Of what?” “Of going home” Eli shook his head and watched the lights of the city pool up on the wet sidewalks and slide across the road. “I am home,” he said. (King 1993a:286)39 When Eli returns to his earlier home, he settles in a cabin at some (not only physical) distance from the community, but very close to the dam. He finds himself partially in a “ghostly” space of the revenant between two worlds that do not connect. Eli’s decision to turn his cousin Lionel’s birthday into a visit to the Sun Dance comes only after he has remembered his conversation with Karen about “home” and a return to the Sun Dance. When she is ill, she chooses this as the most important of all the things she could do before she dies (285). Now Eli asks: “Tell me, nephew, if you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go?” . . . “Where would you want to be?” (286, 302). Earlier, he had seen little merit in Norma’s request of instructing Lionel: “ ‘Nothing wrong with Lionel selling televisions,’ he

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had told Norma” (240). Now he ponders his position between cultures, while his car already behaves like other cars about to sail over the edge of the world: The truck slid off the hill, picking up speed, and Eli let it run down into the river bottom, the wind rattling all around, the rain tumbling after him like a flood. . . . He had seen little of his family since he came home. . . . Eli had surrounded himself with space and silence. An Indian Thoreau. . . . What had Eli become? What had he wanted to be? (King 1993a:238, emphasis added) As the continuation suggests, he has become a ghost, a revenant between two worlds that leaves him neither alive nor dead (239): “People ask about you,” Norma told him. “What should I tell them?” “Tell them I’m home.” “Everybody knows that, Eli. People want to know if you’re alive or dead.” “Tell them I’m dead.” “Been telling them that for years. Nor one believes me anymore.” “Then tell them I’m alive.” “Nobody believes that either,” Norma said. This ghostly status describes the negative side of double consciousness here as the dilemma of an almost impossible return. This is indeed the subject of Eli’s reflection on his initial resistance to his wife’s wish for them to return (239): The Indian who couldn’t go home. It was a common enough theme in novels and movies. Indian leaves the traditional world of the reserve, goes to the city, and is destroyed. Indian leaves the traditional world of the reserve, is exposed to white culture, and becomes trapped between two worlds. Indian leaves traditional world of the reserve, gets an education, and is shunned by his tribe. Indians. Indians. Indians. Ten little Indians. “I want you to be happy, Eli.” The Indian who couldn’t go home. Eli’s inability to “return” obviates his happiness; indeed, this state corresponds closely to Hegel’s “unhappy consciousness” that is one aspect of Du Bois’ “double consciousness.” His name, Stands Alone – beyond the historical reference to Elijah Harper’s holdout against the Meech Lake accord (see Flick 1999:150) – also finds another dual motivation in this situation: he can share his feelings in this respect neither with his wife nor with the community to which he has returned. Norma’s comments are not inappropriate; in his cabin, Eli lives alone and reads alone (“The Mysterious Warrior”). After joining in the Sun Dance, he dies as a figure apart from the community gathered in the camp, although in the company of the tricksters: “He was sorry he was not at the camp to see the sun come among the lodges, to be among the people as it came” (340).

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Eli participates in two temporalities and cultural literacies, and is successful in using white writing and white law against white power. Yet despite this “supraliteracy,” the communication between contradictions is dam(n)ed until he joins the Sun Dance and disappears as Stands Alone. It is thus significant that he is joined, when the dam breaks, by the Old Indians and Coyote, aspects of the trickster as doublesided figure of change, life and death, and of the translational space which, to some extent, pervades all reality after contact and Columbus. Babo Yet Green Grass, Running Water features another character, Babo, who negotiates dual worlds, and offers comments on the consequences of Columbus and on the containment by discourses of dominance. A revenant in another sense, Babo marks the intertextual return of Melville’s African American character and his originally deadly fight for recognition, to negotiate now orality’s evasion of being dammed (damned) by writing, scripture, and recording. In this “come-back,” King changes not only Babo’s gender but also the logic of either/or and of death that is thematized both in Melville’s “Benito Cereno” and in Hegel’s account of recognition in the dialectic between master and slave. In her way of using language, Babo articulates a mode of being heir to colonialism that circumvents victimry. She is also another kind of balancing trickster, who starts her day in Joe Hovaugh’s institution by surveying “the messes I got to clean up” (King 1993a:22), just as the Old Indians attempt to “fix the world.” As an intertextual figure her name changes gender like the Old Indians, whom she understands better than doctors or the police. She recognizes the work of Coyote when she sees it, commenting repeatedly, “isn’t that the trick”; and like the Old Indians she likes to tell stories, and indeed tries to retell their creation stories, albeit with limited success (75–6). Like them, who pervade all time and who cannot be detained by the Judeo-Christian hospital and garden, she works both within and “through” Joe Hovaugh’s institution, and cannot be caught in Cereno’s questioning and tape recording. And in opposition to the case of Eli, who travels between forms of consciousness and temporalities but does not survive, her trickster-like mediation of antithetical consciousness is not related to the theme of death. The form of double temporality and consciousness articulated in Babo thus reworks and re-cognizes Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” and its thematization of Columbus, slavery, and insurrection. Melville’s tale, written in 1855, makes the connection between slavery and the story of Columbus as representative of the Spanish and the Church explicit.40 This is evident in Melville’s changes with respect to one of his main sources, the 1817 Narrative by Captain Amaso Delano; he thus backdates the narrated events from 1805 to 1799 and renames Cereno’s ship from the original “Tryal” to “San Dominick.” As commentators have pointed out, “the revised date and name link the slave revolt on board the San Dominick with the most famous slave revolt in history, the Santo Domingo uprising of 1791–1804, led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, who began extending his rule over the entire island in 1799” (Karcher 1994:2497). But San Domingo or Santo Domingo, the name of Haiti before 1804, refers also to “the principal city founded by the Columbian expeditions and named in memory of

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Columbus’ father, Dominick” (Sundquist 1993:140), and “to the sacred bones of Columbus, rumored still in 1830 to have been lodged in the cathedral of Santo Domingo” (Sundquist 1993:138). Melville further emphasizes Columbus’ role in the introduction of slavery by having the bones of the slaveship’s owner (who was originally thrown overboard) substitute for an image of Columbus as the ship’s figurehead, next to the words “Seguid vuestro jefe” (follow your leader) chalked by the insurgents. At the end of the story, the skull of the dead slave faces the remnants of the slaver, in a symmetry of death that Melville makes stare in the face of the public (and in particular of Northerners who, with the acceptance of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Bill, had accepted to enforce Southern slave ownership).41 In King’s parodic reversals of Melville’s story and of history, the assumptions of slavery are voiced by a Canadian customs official who asks Joe Hovaugh: “Are you bringing anything into Canada that you plan to sell or leave as a gift? . . . What about her? . . . All personal property has to be registered” (King 1993a:198). Dr Hovaugh himself assumes that Babo’s ancestors were slaves, but is corrected: “ ‘Nope,’ said Babo. ‘But some of my folks were enslaved . . . There’s a difference’ ” (261). There are of course abundant references to the slave Babo and the famous shaving scene in Melville’s story: we learn that her “great-great-grandfather was a barber on a ship” (75) who “shaved faces with the best of them” (261), and Babo politely offers Dr Hovaugh the same treatment that Benito Cereno receives from her forebear: “I have his razor. His name was Babo, too. . . . You should let me give you a real shave with a real razor” (262). At some point Babo indeed drapes “the towel over Dr. Hovaugh’s head” (228), and when she “finds the chili omlet a touch on the dry side” (332) we are reminded that the events in Melville’s story take place off the coast of Chili, and the San Dominick is short of water. In addition, the police officers who interview her after the disappearance of the supposedly captive Old Indians are patrolman Jimmy Delano and “Ben” (22) Cereno. Yet despite these allusions to a very violent story, in King’s version Babo’s relationship to Cereno, Delano, or Joe Hovaugh is not a story of master and slave. This is clear in King’s handling of questions of discursive control and power over representation, which are crucially at stake in Melville’s shaving scene. In “Benito Cereno,” Babo has wrested from his master control over speech and the representation of the “Dominick’s” situation, and even forces at some point the production of a written document; yet the written documents of the court that will tell the story for those who come later are produced again without his control. King parodies historiography, ethnography, and dominant discursive control when his Delano uses a tape recorder to question Babo about the vanished four Old Indians – the instrument used by anthropologists for “Native-informant” representations of “vanishing” cultures. Like his namesake’s inquiry about the state of the “Dominick” in Melville’s story, Sergeant Delano’s search for the comprehensive knowledge of anthropology comes up short: “ ‘What do you want to know?’ ‘Everything,’ said Sergeant Delano” (20); yet his failure is heralded by the sounds of the recording device: “The tape recorder was making squeaky noises, as though something deep in the mechanism was slipping” (42). Babo is open to communication in a participatory mode of storytelling and mutuality: “We’d trade stories too, the Indians and me” (44, 75).42 While she offers to include Cereno by volunteering her own version of the Old Indians’ creation

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stories and her own preoccupations, she effectively derails the informationgathering mode of Cereno’s interrogation. This successful sabotage of discursive dominance begins with the mode of address, with Cereno insisting on the title Sergeant and Babo directing him from Mrs to Ms Jones; she then forcefully redefines their relationship with a double echo of “Benito Cereno” and of the opening of Melville’s most famous novel: “ ‘You can call me Babo’ ” (20). King employs here with particular pertinence one of his most effective dialogue techniques, in which both speakers stubbornly continue their own thread of speech (19–23, 42–5). Abandoning his discursive enterprise with Babo to interrogate Joe Hovaugh himself, Cereno is offered again the beginning of a creation story (79). Joe Hovaugh’s own attempts at establishing discursive control with respect to Babo mirror Cereno’s failures. At the Canadian border, Hovaugh seeks unsuccessfully to ensure his control over speech: “Remember . . . let me do all the talking” . . . “Good morning,” said the border guard. “Good morning,” said Babo. “Hummph,” said Dr Hovaugh. . . . “Did you notice,” said Babo to the Canadian border guard, “that your flagpole is crooked?” (King 1993a:197–8) Joe Hovaugh’s speech in the presence of Babo seems to share the precarious status of Benito Cereno’s speech under Babo’s razor in Melville’s story; this is how they appear to Alberta in King’s novel (235–7): . . . a black woman and a white man were having breakfast. The man was talking. . . . The black woman was laughing. . . . There was something disconcerting about the way the woman drew her nails across her skin, as if she were scratching. Or shaving. Yet while Babo offers Joe Hovaugh a shave, she does not insist on it; and while she can communicate with and share in the world of the Old Indians, she can also work through Joe Hovaugh’s institution and yet control his movements. It is Babo who puts him on the bus to witness the breaking of the dam (with its symbolic implications). Like the pre-revolutionary servant in Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste et son maître, she already controls the realm of praxis in contrast to the master’s illusion of control. In her communication with the world of the Old Indians and her ability to perceive the effects of Coyote, Babo participates in the world of the “traditional past”; in her knowledge of the stories of her intertextual ancestor Babo, she is familiar with strategies of insurgency; unlike Melville’s character, but like Tayo in Silko’s Ceremony, she avoids victimry. In this respect, King’s handling of good and evil follows the pattern he has derived from Silko’s Ceremony, with the assumption that evil can be balanced, but not destroyed. As King makes clear in his comments on his “A Coyote Columbus Story,” once Coyote has created Columbus (inadvertently, through “individual carelessness”) the “mistake” cannot be simply taken back, but has to be dealt with.

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King’s novel balances the temporality and consciousness of progress, historical linearity, and writing with a counter-temporality of the coexistence of good and evil, a vision of time in which “there is no such thing,” and a re-creation through orality. This balancing does not abolish double consciousness, but makes it part of a project of re-cognition that extends orality and its temporality into the realm of writing. The circularity of this counter-story does not signify a nostalgic return; it accounts for the forces of change, which alter its form, contents, and strategies. The consequences include here the transposition of oral structures into written texts, and the intertextual engagement with non-Native mythology, literary history, and popular culture. In this respect, Green Grass, Running Water shifts from the greater emphasis on the “associational” in Medicine River to a strategy more obviously related to double consciousness; it seeks to maintain a portrayal of the intricacies of Native community, but at the same time offers “anti-imperial translation” and narrative balancing of assumptions and “anomalies” caused by Coyote through Columbus. Green Grass, Running Water thus uses and maintains elements of oral storytelling together with values emphasized in oral creation stories, but activates them in contexts of writing and extended cultural critique. As parodic and counter-discursive instruments, these fictionalized elements of orality change some of their original purposes and connotations; at the same time, however, the result exceeds any presumed pure “fictionality” of literature, and becomes part of a cultural practice that emerges here in writing with considerable power of creation and re-cognition.

Gerald Vizenor: the postindian and The Heirs of Columbus . . . to try to come up with a single idealistic definition of tradition in tribal cultures is terminal. Cultures are not static, human behavior is not static. We are not what anthropologists say we are and we must not live up to a definition. Gerald Vizenor, “Gerald Vizenor” (1990c)) Christopher Columbus . . . carved the name indian on a cruise, a new slave name. Gerald Vizenor, Postindian Conversations (Vizenor and Lee 1999) Connective metaphors As Vizenor’s phrase “postcolonial domination” (1989a:11) suggests, his extended experiments on the boundaries between essay, autobiography, and fiction decompose any sense of postcolonialism as end of the colonial. Even in the “transvaluation of roles that turns the despised and oppressed into symbols of salvation and rebirth,”43 the very terms of recognition are colonial projections in need of recognition: “we are invented from traditional static standards and we’re stuck in coins and words like artifacts” (Vizenor 1981b:47).44 Vizenor’s invocation of Charles Taylor’s influential essay on recognition (see Chapter 6) thus ends with a twist that places emphasis on the problem of projective mis-recognition: “My own identity crucially depends on my dialogic relations with others,” observes Charles Taylor in “Multiculturalism and the Politics of Recognition.”

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. . . Taylor points out that “our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being.” This misrecognition of natives as indians is both oppressive and a prison of false identities. (Vizenor 1998:22). For Vizenor, resistance to imposed identification and mis-recognition has to overturn the romantic figure of the Indian created by white culture. What he calls the “manifest manners of dominance” invent the “Indian” (or indian, in Vizenor’s later notation) as tragic other and victim of American manifest destiny. Already in an interview in 1980, Vizenor thus states that “about Indian identity I have a revolutionary fervor. The hardest part of it is I believe we’re all invented as Indians” (Vizenor 1981b:45). While the “indian is a simulation, the absence of natives,” and has “no referent, memories, or native stories,” the “postindian must waver over the aesthetic ruins of indian simulations” (1998:15). If access to subjectivity under dominance is mediated by this simulated other, one move towards healing leads through the creation of an other of this “Indian” other (or indian) in language and stories: “Truly, the shamanic double others are the ironic absence of romantic antiselves” (1994a:45). Vizenor’s counter-inventions, however, avoid what he calls separations; they work instead through highly mediated, connective metaphors. The “postindian” itself is translative double consciousness, its “uninvention” of the “indian” implies, as in the case of the poststructural, the postmodern, or the postcolonial, not unrelatedness but complex difference with the term it modifies. Such double texture marks the role of “heritage” in Vizenor’s crossblood poetics, which transposes different fields of meaning and previously separated entities, often through the doubling and defamiliarizing work of metaphor. Translative double trickster texture enacts here the dialogic and responds with tribal stories, myths, and views to Bakhtin’s often cited insight that “language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other” (Bakhtin 1981:293). One of these “con-textualizations” appears in Vizenor’s view of dualities as “contradictions, or trickeries” (Vizenor 1981b:43), which find resolution not in terminal solution or “terminal creeds”45 but through balance: The Christian objective is to rid the self and the soul, the family, and the community, of evil, to isolate and destroy it. It’s a war, a holy war to end evil. The same language is a part of American consciousness – the war on poverty, the war against ignorance. The objective is completely to end and destroy it [the enemy]. But the experience expressed in tribal culture is not that complete elimination or annihilation of anything. It’s a balance, not a terminal creed. The balance is the resolution which grows out of trickeries, of outwitting, or the modulation of experience. (Vizenor 1981b:44)46

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Vizenor suggests that “life is not a separation but a connection. . . . In American consciousness, the separation of life has been so complete it seems cliche [sic] now that one can kill whatever is judged not to be useful. It’s not all right, because one kills oneself” (Vizenor 1981b:44). In Fugitive Poses, Vizenor discusses the issue of separation with reference to the same passage on witchery in Silko’s Ceremony – a text in which Tayo avoids his own destruction by not killing evil incarnate, Emo – that we have also encountered in King’s discussion.47 Significantly, Vizenor discusses this passage in the context of the connective powers of metaphor: Leslie Silko encircles the reader with mythic witches, an ironic metaphor of motivation in the creation stories of Ceremony. Alas, the hardhearted witches invented the white people in a competition, a distinctive metaphor that overcame the similative temptations of a mere comparison of natives with the extremes of dominance. (Vizenor 1998:138) Vizenor here also quotes Betonie’s words: They want us to believe all evil resides with white people. Then we will look no further to see what is really happening. They want us to separate ourselves from white people, to be ignorant and helpless as we watch our own destruction . . . we invented white people; it was Indian witchery that made white people in the first place. (Silko 1986, quoted in Vizenor 1998:138; my emphasis) Both Betonie’s speech and the story of witchery itself, as Louis Owens emphasizes in a comment cited by Vizenor, “ ‘underscore an element central to native American oral tradition and worldview: responsibility. To shirk that responsibility and blame whites, or any external phenomenon, is to buy into the role of helpless victim’ ” (Owens 1992:184, quoted in Vizenor 1998:139). Vizenor overdetermines both the often critiqued equalizing power of metaphor and the obverse emphasis on “collision rather than collusion” (Harries 1979:71); in his interpretion of the trope as interactive and deconstructive “move,” both Natives and whites are seen as results of the same (separating) process, and the dichotomized meaning of both identifications is undermined: “This sense of responsibility, of course, is a metaphor that denies closure; the actions, connections, and intentions, are not causal, but obscure ceremonies” (Vizenor 1998:139). King, as we have seen, cites Silko’s story when commenting on Coyote’s responsibility for Columbus in “A Coyote Columbus Story.” In The Heirs of Columbus, Vizenor articulates a postindian con-text in which native creation stories similarly take responsibility for Columbus and re-create the “white” story of Columbus and the “New World” (as told, for instance, by Samuel Eliot Morison). Vizenor’s modulation of post-contact heritage and double consciousness appears in the novel’s title, and again strikingly in its epilogue: Columbus, the instigator of slavery in the “new world” and originator of the simulation of the “Indian,” “arises in tribal stories that heal with humor the world he wounded; he is loathed, but he is

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not a separation in tribal consciousness. The Admiral of the Ocean Sea is a trickster overturned in his own stories five centuries later” (Vizenor 1991a:185, emphasis added). This nexus between responsibility that refuses victimization and “victimry” and the connective move of metaphor that refuses separation but defamiliarizes, deconstructs, and doubles terms in the collisions of encounter animates Vizenor’s heirship theme, evoked in titles from The Trickster of Liberty: Tribal Heirs to a Wild Baronage and Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles to The Heirs of Columbus (Krupat 1996:56). The connecting trickster move of metaphor “that denies closure” by asserting both identity and difference, leading meanings across and astray in antiimperial trans-lation and metaphorical trans-position (meta phorein), is the subject also of Vizenor’s preface to his 1981 Earthdivers: Tribal Narratives of Mixed Descent.48 One epigraph cites Deloria’s already quoted remark that life “becomes a schizophrenic balancing act wherein one holds that the creation, migration and ceremonial stories of the tribe are true and that the Western European view of the world is also true” and that “the trick is somehow to relate what one feels to what one is taught to think” (emphasis added); this tricky relation is expressed in Vizenor’s description of his stories in terms of the movement of metaphor: Earthdivers, the title of this book of tribal narratives on mixed descent, is borrowed from a traditional theme in tribal creation myths and dedicated here as an imaginative metaphor. The earthdivers in these twenty-one narratives are mixedbloods, or Métis, tribal tricksters and recast cultural heroes. . . . The Métis, or mixedblood, earthdivers in these stories dive into unknown urban places now, into the racial darkness in the cities, to create a new consciousness of coexistence. (Vizenor 1981a:ix, emphasis added) Yet while Vizenor names the word Métis and the Métis leader Louis Riel49 as “a source of notable and radical identification,” he offers already here a comment that is relevant to later debates discussed below: the “words Métis and mixedblood possess no social or scientific validation because blood mixture is not a measurement of consciousness, culture, or human experiences” (1981a:ix). It is in Vizenor’s metaphor of the mixedblood, Métis earthdiver that the white settlers’ move across water for land is connected with the vertical downwards move of earthdiver creation: In the traditional earthdiver creation myths the cultural hero or tribal trickster asked animals and birds to dive for the earth, but here, in the metaphor of the Métis earthdiver, white settlers are summoned to dive with mixedblood survivors into the unknown, . . . and to swim deep down . . . in search of a few honest words upon which to build a new urban turtle island. (Vizenor 1981a:x–xi) The movement of creation is here the movement of metaphor itself, linked to the performance of speech: “the creation takes place in the telling, in present-tense metaphors” (xii), and “the mixedblood earthdiver is a metaphor in a timeless tribal

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drama. Turtle island is an imaginative place; not a formula, but a metaphor which connects dreams to the earth” (xv–xvi). Métis consciousness, between identities, for Vizenor signifies chance: the Métis “are divided in white consciousness, denied an absolute cultural corner, and, therefore, spared from extinction in word and phrase museums” (xvi). Vizenor finds similar openings in metaphor as discussed by Karsten Harries; listening “more attentively to the many voices of the earth,” Harries suggests, is difficult because “as members of a community we are necessarily caught up in already-established and taken-for-granted ways of speaking and seeing.” Chances occur “when language seems to fall apart and falling apart opens us to what transcends it” (Harris 1979, quoted in Earthdivers xvi). Vizenor makes it clear that his heirship stories work as reconnection and re/cognition through metaphor: “Métis earthdivers speak a new language, their experiences and dreams are metaphors” (xvi); and, as he will add, “Métis earthdivers are the new metaphors between communal tribal cultures and cultures that oppose traditional connections, the cultures that would own and market the earth” (xix). The Heirs of Columbus Much of creative literature is shamanic because it is a visionary journey, creating a time and a place that did not exist before . . . Gerald Vizenor in Postindian Conversations (Vizenor and Lee 1999) The centers of civilization are not originary and exclusive but are everywhere on the earth. Gerald Vizenor in Postindian Conversations (Vizenor and Lee 1999) Stone Columbus Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus (1991a) performs Métis creations of a New World out of striking contradictions. Mixedblood descendants of those invented as “Indians” by Columbus discover here Columbus as both their forebear and their inheritor, a mixedblood himself arising in postindian connections and oral creation stories mediated by paper. If in Silko’s Ceremony Tayo is told that whites are created by “Indian witchery,” and in King’s creation Coyote is responsible for the mis(-)take of Columbus, Vizenor’s tricky stories cast Columbus as trickster and as Mayan. In the process, agency is reappropriated, and ascriptions and identifications are recognized and translated in new re/cognitions and creations. The beginning of The Heirs is double. As in King’s Green Grass, Running Water, in the beginning, there is water;50 but in the creation of a new world, the search of the mixedblood earthdiver begins here with the written account of Columbus’ search for land: “Christopher Columbus saw a blue light in the west, but ‘it was such an uncertain thing,’ he wrote in his journal to the crown, ‘that I did not feel it was adequate proof of land’ ” (Vizenor 1991a:3). As the opening chapter title “Santa Maria Casino” suggests, this double-textured search for land is a gamble of creation. Vizenor’s game of narrative chance raises the stakes of its doubled narration as Columbus’ text is cited and commented upon in a new con-text: “That light was a torch raised by the silent hand talkers, a summons to the New World. Since then,

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the explorer has become a trickster healer in the stories told by his tribal heirs at the headwaters of the great river” (Vizenor 1991a:3). The summons reverses agency and direction: initiative flows here from West to East. The invader and bearer of death and destruction who figured as discoverer of a New World in Western written accounts is transformed into a transforming trickster healer resurrected, recreated, re/cognized in the oral stories of his heirs at the headwaters of the Mississippi.51 The long-time standard written account of Columbus’ life, Samuel Eliot Morison’s Pulitzer-winning 1942 Admiral of the Ocean Sea, is re/cognized in the third sentence, re-contextualized in ways that multiply questions and chances: “The Admiral of the Ocean Sea, confirmed in the name of the curia and the crown, was an obscure crossblood who bore the tribal signature of survivance and ascended the culture of death in the Old World” (1991a:3). The space within quotation marks – the arena of the original or authoritative voice – belongs to Columbus’ written log at the opening of Vizenor’s text; but suddenly that zone doubles and is redefined, as the object of discovery turns into the agent and subject of another voice (4): Samana was an island in the Ocean sea that would be imagined but never possessed in the culture of death. Five centuries later the crossblood descendants of the explorer and the hand talker declared a new tribal nation. “Samana swam out to touch the man from heaven that first night in our New World and here we are on radio,” said Stone Columbus. And thus the island of Columbus’ log is voiced as a transformative agent at the beginning of the mixedblood lineage of the “Heirs of Columbus,” who recreate a New World and transform Columbus’ written record in their stories. Stone Columbus, one of the heirs, doubles the figure of his namesake ancestor in his role as captain of the floating bingo caravel “Santa María,” a ship of heirs that fools United States and Canadian taxations and offers “games of chance on the ocean seas of the woodland”: “the Santa María Casino, the decorated Bingo flagship, was anchored on the international border near Big Island in Lake of the Woods” (6). Broadcasting from the woodland waters, the new discoverer and creator amends omissions in the missions of his forebear, supplementing the written record by insisting in no uncertain terms on the oral medium of his stories: “ ‘Radio is real, television is not,’ he reminded the radio listeners” (8). His name reiterates not only that of the “discoverer” and inventor of “indians” and the “New World” in the Western record and tradition; it operates at the same time a juxtaposition, inversion, and translational connection of two seemingly contradictory and separate cultural practices. While the last name recreates that of the “christbearer” Christopher Columbus, the combined name adds, in collision and collusion, the stone as a sign of Native creation. Each autumn the Heirs of Columbus tell their stories at the stone tavern, a “wondrous circle of warm trickster stones” (4) founded by the Anishinaabe who “remember that Naanabozho, the compassionate tribal trickster who created the earth, had a brother who was a stone: a bear stone, a human stone, a shaman stone, a stone, a stone, a stone” (5). Vizenor tells the story and recreates the stone in several of his other texts;52 as he explains in a discussion of Heirs:

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Native writing, orality, and anti-imperial translation Stones are the presence of native stories. . . . Stone has no sense of adventure but in his brother’s stories. He is content, at first, to listen to stories, but he knows his brother is bothered that he cannot move. The trickster teases the stone about his permanence, about his place. So the stone decides to outwit his brother Naanabozho, and he does it with fire. “I know what you can do to get rid of me,” says the stone. “I know it bothers you that you must come back and honor me as your brother, and you would rather not do this. So I want you to carefully follow my instructions so you can get rid of me forever. I want you to heat me up and then throw cold water on me.” So Naanabozho does this, he heats his brother the stone in a fire, and when he pours water on him, the stone shatters into billions of pieces and covers the earth. Everywhere there are stones of that first fire of the tricksters. So no matter where you look, you can find a stone that is a trickster with a story. Stones are native stories, and stones are everywhere. (Vizenor and Lee 1999:130–1)

The stories told and accumulated by the Heirs of Columbus at the stone tavern, like those told by Vizenor in The Heirs of Columbus, thus build on earlier stories; (re)creating stories, they pile stone upon stone.53 The Heirs and The Heirs create a critical amount of stones with the founding of a new sovereign nation in the second part of the book, entitled “Point Assinika.” As Vizenor explains, “Assinika, or asiniikaa, means ‘many stones or rocks’ in the language of the anishinaabe, and the brother of Naanabozho the trickster is a stone. I am a stone, and stones are native stories” (Vizenor and Lee 1999:130). The relation between the sovereign nation at Point Assinika, arising at Point Roberts54 in the coastal waters between Canada and the United States, and the stones and stories of creation is crucial for Vizenor’s notion of Native “sovereignty” and what he calls “the metaphor of native blood” (Vizenor and Lee 1999:150), to which we will return shortly. In an extraordinary hearing that Vizenor imagines in the chapter “Bone Courts” (immediately preceding “Point Assinika”), a federal judge sympathetic to the cause of the Heirs summarizes evidence by noting that “Stories, then, are at the core of tribal realities” (Vizenor 1991a:80). The specific quality of these stories, however, lies in their performative character. I have already cited Vizenor’s remark that “Creation myths are not time bound, the creation takes place in the telling, in present-tense metaphors” (Vizenor 1981a:xii). As Vizenor explains elsewhere: the stories of creation are survivance, as the creation takes place in the performance of the story. Not a comment on creation, and not a reduction, but a sense of native presence in the telling of the story. In other words, the creation takes place in the story. Natives are created in stories, and natives have always been on the road to revitalization. (Vizenor and Lee 1999:98) In the spirit of this sense of performative presence, Vizenor’s judge in The Heirs of Columbus can declare that the “essence of sovereignty is imaginative, an original tribal trope, communal and spiritual, an idea that is more than metes and bounds in treaties” (1991a:7).55

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The sovereignty and survivance of Point Assinika, a place of many stones by the water, is accordingly created in the performance of stories of creation: Places are created in stories, and memories of our presence in places are never easy to abandon. . . . Assinika, a new native nation, was created in stories at a place on the map named Point Roberts, Washington. Memories may go with the stories of a native presence and with the places named on maps. Assinika is in the book, a much better place than a map. Places on this continent are native creations in the sense that the heart of stories is never an absolute history. So the creation of a native place is in the memory of the story. Places are not passive, and so the creation of a new native nation in my novel is more memorable than a mere name on the map. The place we create is the place we remember, the place we continue in stories. The anishinaabe creation is out of water, the presence of water as a place. We are water, and there is no presence without water and trickster stories of that creation. (Vizenor and Lee 1999:135) In the earthdiver creation story evoked here again by Vizenor, creation is a trickster gamble. Naanabozho sends animals to dive in the water, in a bid for earth that fails repeatedly before it comes up with success (see Vizenor 1981a:xii–xiv).56 The earthdiver story appears as well only a few pages into Heirs, where Naanabozho the trickster is also introduced as the first opponent of the “evil gambler” (1991a:5): The trickster created the new earth with wet sand. He stood on his toes as high as he could imagine, but the water rose closer to his nose and mouth. He could dream without a mouth or nose, but we would never leave the world to the evil gambler and his dark water. . . . The trickster created this New World with the sand a muskrat held in her paws. Gambling and creative chance The themes of gambling and chance are re-created time and again in Vizenor’s works and titles, and situate postindian heirship and survivance. On a thematic level, the traditional theme of the evil gambler tropes the threat of tribal extinction (balanced in The Heirs of Columbus by the chances of the sovereign Santa María casino and then Point Assinika).57 Like the “great gambler” in Vizenor’s edition of Anishinaabe lyric poems and stories, Summer in the Spring (Vizenor 1981c:129), or the Gambler who locks up the storm clouds in the Pueblo story in Silko’s Ceremony and causes the starvation of animals and people (Silko 1986:170–6), the evil gambler in Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles plays successfully for the life of his hapless victims before finally being outwitted himself (Vizenor 1990a:123–33).58 The evil gambler is also ever-present in The Heirs of Columbus; he frames the narrative from the above-cited passage on and then in stories of “the last game with the wiindigoo, the evil cannibal, on the one side, and the ice woman with the tribe on the other side” (Vizenor 1991a:20). Ice woman freezes the evil gambler at the last moment, but he will see another season at the end of the novel, threatening the survival of the sovereign tribal nation founded by Stone/stones at Point Assinika. Stone

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Columbus outmaneuvers the wiindigoo at “the end of the marina” (178) to save creation and the New World.59 Like the other Heirs of Columbus, who at the stone tavern “created one more New World in their stories” (5), Stone thus proves the worthy brother of Naanabozho, the first opponent of the “evil gambler.” At the level of enunciation and narrative performance, the contest with the evil gambler is a fight of creation against the “extinction in word and phrase museums” that Vizenor evokes in Earthdivers (1981a:xv–xvi). In a thematic equivalent, one of the subplots of The Heirs of Columbus concerns the liberation and repatriation of sacred tribal objects and native remains from museums and collectors; the evil gambler here is a member of the “Conquistador Club,” and turns Native sacred objects and the remains of Columbus and Pocahontas into collectibles and dead “artifacts.” In the realm of language, tribal cultures similarly “have been invented as ‘absolute fakes’ and consumed in social science monologues” (Vizenor 1989b:5). Such “word and phrase museums” partake, as Vizenor formulates with reference to Umberto Eco and Jean Baudrillard, of the “hyperrealities of neocolonial consumerism” (1989b:5).60 They are simulations and inventions that function without referent, even require the very absence of their alleged referent. The invention of the “Indian” (or indian in Vizenor’s later notation) as signified hyperreality of “social science monologues” and colonial discourse implies the absence of natives: “The word Indian . . . is a colonial enactment . . . and the dominance is sustained by the simulation that has superseded the real tribal names. The Indian was an occidental invention that became a bankable simulation; the word has no referent in tribal languages or cultures” (1994a:11). For Vizenor, the “Indian” as signified of the social sciences offers “consolations in the dominant culture”; it caters to psychological needs of representations of the “other” that serve the dominant culture’s modes of knowledge, determination, and classification: “Social science theories constrain tribal landscapes to institutional values, representationalism and the politics of academic determination” (1989b:5). Such practices of knowledge mask their own social performativity with claims to objectivity; yet their representations eclipse in particular the transformative aspects of Native creation and narrative performance. With reference to Stephen Tyler, Vizenor insists in his Narrative Chance: “Tribal narratives are discourse and in this sense tribal literatures are the world rather than a representation” (1989a:4). For Vizenor (as for King), representations of the “Indian” focus on the tragic, the individual, and extinction, to the detriment of the communal, the comic, and survivance. Such representations signify “victimry” and abet, as we will see, the terminal determinacies of “the nasty and treasonous business of racial blood quanta” (Vizenor and Lee 1999:153). A sense of signification as performance and creation of a new world, not the representation of an already given one, inform also Vizenor’s use of the terms “native,” “postindian,” and “presence.” These terms translate here resistance to representations and inventions of the “Indian,” and appear often in the context of anti-representational qualifying phrases. In Fugitive Poses, Vizenor speaks thus of the “curvature” and “trace” of presence in opposition to “indian” absence: “The indians are cultural narratives of an absence, the absolute misnomer of a native presence and the originary. Natives are the curvature of presence, an eternal trace of presence; the mimetic representation of that presence in other situations is either sophistic or a parody” (1998:28). If the “Indian” (or indian)

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signifies the absence of Natives, the “postindian is the absence of that invention, and the end of representation in literature; the closure of that evasive melancholy of dominance” (1994a:11). The term “postindian” signifies a condition and narrative chance, not a representation of identity. As Vizenor states in Postindian Conversations, it: says . . . nothing about who we are or might become as postindians. Natives, of course, use simulations too, but for reasons of liberation rather than dominance. Postindians create a native presence, and that sense of presence is both reversion and futurity . . . the reversions are tricky and ironic, as they have always been in native stories, but never so easy as cultural victimry. (Vizenor and Lee 1999:84) Gambling against the representations and (de)terminations of the “Indian” requires moves that, under postindian conditions and circumstances of “postcolonial domination” (Vizenor 1989a:11), cannot rely on yet have to deal with representations of “Indians” from colonial archives and “word and phrase museums.” Vizenor’s “native presence” is creation in motion, or, in terms of language and the performance of stories, the deconstructive move of signification that undoes Old World representations to create a New World: Native motion is sovereignty; and native stories of survivance are transmotions, not the mere imitation of motion or action in the tragic mode of literature. The choices of identity, then, are redoubled in the critique of tragic victimry. The native, an inscrutable persona, is a referent in stories: the indian, a mimetic representation of the other as scapegoat. The native is the trace of ethical transmotion and sovereignty. (Vizenor 1998:33) Glossing his term “survivance” as “the idea of survival and resistance,” he suggests that “maybe upsetting binaries and resistance are the same as survivance, but a tricky, visionary resistance is more than a structural revision” (Vizenor and Lee 1999:79). Most of Vizenor’s characters “outwit, reverse, and overturn the wiles of dominance” (1999:79). In this movement of creative sovereignty, they are heirs to the creative figuration of the first tricksters, Naanabozho and his brother. The trickster opposes the evil gambler thematically; yet for Vizenor it is first and foremost also a figure of language and a movement in its game. As Lappet Tulipe Brown puts it in Heirs: “Tricksters, the court must strain to understand, are not real people, tricksters are figures in stories, no more than the language games of a rich and wild imagination” (1991a:80). Vizenor references Bakhtin to imagine the trickster not on the level of propositional content, but in the dialogic figuration of utterances and their positionalities: in Bakhtin the “translinguistic” level (Vizenor 1989a:191), or in later linguistics pragmatics and enunciation, i.e. performance. Trickster stories thus require the communal dimension in several ways: “The interlocutors in the trickster narratives are the author, narrator, characters, and audience. These points of view, these utterances are dialogism, or the relation to other utterances” (1989a:191). As opposed to the tragic descriptions and determinations of the “Indian,” the “trickster

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is a comic discourse, a collection of ‘utterances’ in oral traditions; the opposite of a comic discourse is a monologue, and utterance in isolation, which comes closer to the tragic mode in literature and not a comic tribal world view” (1989a:191). Participants in this communal relation in language elude the determinative propositions of the social sciences; for Vizenor, science in general “is closure, a monologue in theoretical contention” (1989a:194). Instead, in Vizenor’s language moves Bakhtinian notions of the dialogic mingle with deconstruction and even Sartrean indetermination as (ineluctable) freedom: In trickster narratives the listeners and readers imagine their liberation; the trickster is a sign and the world is “deconstructed” in a discourse. . . . The trickster narrative situates the participant audience, the listeners and readers, in agonistic imagination: there, in comic discourse, the trickster is being, nothingness and liberation; a loose seam in consciousness; that wild space over and between sounds, words, sentences, and narratives. (Vizenor 1989a:194, 196) Vizenor calls such figurations of narrative chance “comic holotropes.” In Narrative Chance he thus evokes the trickster (again with Sartrean intertextual overtones) as “nothingness in a narrative voice, an encounter that centers imagination in comic holotropes, a communal being” (1989b:13); and in The Trickster of Liberty he greets the tribal trickster as “a comic holotrope: the whole figuration; an unbroken interior landscape that beams various points of view in temporal reveries” (1988:x). Vizenor’s creations and performances of narrative chance thus work across deterministic identifications and concepts of identity, the “terminal creeds” and “seams” or “anthroseams” of social science representations that for him are simulations of dominance. The seams are sewn over and over by social scientists and other inventors of the American Indian. And the invention is a conservative, national allegory of cultural difference and distinction. . . . These are the anthroseams, the ironic cultural representations of the other. The great spirit told me to loosen the seams and tease survivance in my name. (Vizenor and Lee 1999:79) Vizenor’s stories, as he suggests with reference to his Earthdivers, “loosen the seams and outwit the weavers of terminal cultures. That, a trickster hermeneutics, and a tease of presence, is my sense of native creation and survivance” (1999:81). Mixed “blood” and “universal identity” Mixedblood, crossblood, or Métis are recurrent terms in Vizenor’s loosening of anthroseams and “terminal creeds.” Stone Columbus is the mixedblood heir and namesake of both Columbus and the first tribal tricksters, and Columbus himself is imagined as a crossblood descendant of Mayan discoverers of the Old World (1991a:9) and of Sephardic Jews. Vizenor’s creative gamble that the trickster operates as “loose seam in consciousness” (1989a:196) consists not only of a mixing of “blood identities” on a thematic level;61 it also confounds figuratively the very identity of

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“blood” as marker of determinate racial identity in “that wild space over and between sounds, words, sentences, and narratives” (1989a:194). Narrative chance re/cognizes antithetical terms of reference by breaching, for instance in oxymoron and metaphor, sanctioned rules of association and identification.62 Vizenor emphasizes, as we have seen, that his “mixedblood earthdiver is a metaphor” (1981a:xv). Like the urban mixedbloods who dive “into the racial darkness . . . to create a new consciousness of coexistence” in Earthdivers (ix), Stone Columbus faces the evil gambler in stories of creation that double and deconstruct notions of identity and blood. In one of Vizenor’s most controversial gambles, Stone Columbus and the other mixedblood Heirs of Columbus create their New Worlds by “remembering” their mixedblood “stories in the blood” and their “genetic signature that would heal the obvious blunders in the natural world” (1991a:4). These “beats of memories, the genetic signatures of survivance” (132) make up the “genetic code of tribal survivance and radiance” (132) that the Heirs of Columbus isolate at Point Assinika, a “signature” that is reported to be “ ‘an estate antidote to terminal blood quantum creeds’ ” (132). The phrase “stories in the blood” occurs here “approximately fifty-three times in a novel of 189 pages,” as Arnold Krupat observes in his 1996 The Turn to the Native. In his chapter entitled “Ratio- and natio- in Gerald Vizenor’s Heirs of Columbus,” Krupat cites Marc Shell’s discussion (Shell 1991) of the 1449 Toledo “Statutes of the Purity of Blood” and Spain’s subsequent expulsion of Jews in 149263 to suggest that such “ ‘blood’ reasonings” in which “only my directly traceable blood kin are my brothers . . . were to be left behind by a modern or ‘enlightened’ worldview in which one identifies one’s brothers and sisters as citoyens and citoyennes” (Krupat 1996:57–8). From a perspective in which “not natio- but ratio-” serves to identify kin on the basis of values, “all natio-nalisms – appeals to birth and blood as the basis of kinship and heirship” appear retrograde: “Thus, for a progressive politics of invention, modernist or postmodernist, it would seem necessary to reject the logic of natio- in all its forms” (Krupat 1996:58). Vizenor’s mixedblood Stone Columbus, however, not only “was heartened by his esoteric genetic signature and the stories in his blood” (1991a:6); he also leads the Heirs, who, 500 years after Columbus, parody Columbus’ landfall by taking possession of Point Assinika “in the name of our genes and the wild tricksters of liberties” (1991a:119), and found “the first nation in the histories of the modern world dedicated to protean humor and the genes that would heal” (119). Krupat summarizes: “So the healing that is to take place in this ‘natural nation’ ([1991a:] 126) is to be achieved both by the humor in stories and by advanced genetic therapies – ratio and natio- in tandem it would seem, as these are conjoined in the key phrase to which I have already alluded, ‘stories in the blood’ ” (59). What Krupat calls “ratio- and natioin tandem” points in the same direction as the recurrence registered by Appiah of “this curious conjunction of the reliance on and the repudiation of race.” Krupat cites the equation of the phrases “stories in the blood” and “racial memories” in Heirs: “‘The genome narratives are stories in the blood, a metaphor for racial memories, or the idea that we inherit the structures of language and genetic memories’” (Vizenor 1991a:136, partially quoted in Krupat 1996:60). For Krupat, the relationship between the two phrases is one of synonymy, not metaphor; the main problem is the implication that “blood” can circulate “stories”: “I admit to having found this a troubling locution. This is because I do not believe that there is any gene for narrative orientation or preference or that stories can be inherited ‘naturally,’ remembered, listened to, or

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heard ‘in the blood’ ” (1996:60). Krupat underlines Vizenor’s endeavors “to free Indian identity questions of what Vizenor calls ‘the manifest manners of dominance’ – enrollment cards, blood quantums, and the like” and points to the Heirs ratio-nalist commitment to “heal rather than steal tribal cultures” (Vizenor 1991a:60); yet “when Stone Columbus very early in the novel announces that ‘the truth is in our genes’ (10), what is one to think?” (Krupat 1996:60) Formulating the question more explicitly as a constellation of double consciousness, Krupat asks again: “What . . . are we to make of this apparent embrace of the logic of natio-, of race and blood, in a writer all of whose work has been militantly antiracist?” (60). Before exploring Krupat’s response to this question, a look at Chadwick Allen’s essay “Blood (and) Memory” (1999) can help us to locate Krupat’s reading of Heirs in a larger exchange. Allen examines passages in Heirs that respond themselves to earlier comments by Krupat, in his 1989 The Voice in the Margin, on the work of N. Scott Momaday. Allen signals “the controversy generated by the signature trope of N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), memory in the blood or blood memory,” and suggests that from Momaday’s first novel, House Made of Dawn (1968), on, “blood memory achieves tropic power by blurring distinctions between racial identity and narrative” (Allen 1999:93–4). He notes Krupat’s objections to the trope, who responds in The Voice in the Margin in particular to a passage in Momaday’s essay “Personal Reflection.” Momaday here speaks of “the existence of intrinsic variables in man’s perception of his universe, variables that are determined to some real extent on the basis of his genetic constitution” (Momaday 1987:156); in response to a child’s question of where the sun lives, Momaday evokes the duality (also referenced as “balancing act” in the already cited passage Deloria) by which in his “ ‘educated’ brain” the answer “more acceptable to the logic of my age” emerges, according to which “the sun and the earth are separated by an all but unimaginable distance” and the sun is “to be observed in the sky and not elsewhere”; yet this answer, Momaday states, “is not true to my experience, my deepest, oldest experience, the memory in my blood” – according to which “ ‘The sun lives in the earth’ ” (Momaday 1987:157). In terms similar to those in the later comments on Heirs we have just seen, Krupat here objects: “Now, there is no gene for perception, no such thing as memory in the blood” (Krupat 1989:13). He objects to such terms as “racist” (13–14n7), and suggests that this aspect of Momaday’s work “places unnecessary obstacles in the way of a fuller understanding and appreciation of Native American literature” since his account “of Jemez and Navajo senses of where the sun lives (it lives in the earth, not in the sky) in no way requires Indians to have some special ‘genetic constitution,’ for such a sense, nor to acquire that sense from any ‘memory in [the] blood’ ” (1989:13). Allen both recognizes the potentially racist implications of Momaday’s assertions and seeks to contextualize the debate by reading the trope as obvious appropriation and redeployment of the U.S. government’s attempt to systematize and regulate American Indian personal and political identities through tabulations of “blood quantum” or “degree of Indian blood.” The trope’s provocative juxtaposition of blood and memory transforms that taxonomy of delegitimization through genetic mixing into an authenticating genealogy of stories and storytelling. (Allen 1999:94)

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“Blood,” as Allen points out in regard to United States local, state, and federal policies, regulates enforced racial identification both in the “one drop” rule of blackness and in the federal standard of Indian blood quantum. Citing M. Annette Jaimes (1992), he traces the role of the federal blood quantum standard from the 1887 General Allotment Act (or Dawes Act) to its development “into a taxonomy of variable Indian identity that came to control Indian access to all federal services, including commodity rations, annuity payments, and health care” (Allen 1999:96–7). But while under the one drop rule “any known” minimal trace of “negro blood” or ancestry suffices for racial identification, the Dawes Act required “Indians . . . to prove one-half or more Indian blood in order to receive preset allotments of their tribal estate” (97). With the help of such criteria of identification, as Allen explains with reference to Jaimes, “ ‘surplus’ lands” were then transferred to non-Native settlers and Native territory was even further reduced (Allen 1999:97; Jaimes 1992);64 in the process, “Indian identity became subject to a genetic burden of proof” (Allen 1999:97). In opposition to such identifications enforced through standards of blood quantum that for many “represent a fundamental attack on the sovereignty of American Indian nations” (97), Momaday’s trope of blood memory, Allen argues, articulates “acts of recuperation” by “seizing control of the symbolic and metaphoric meanings of American Indian ‘blood’ ” (98). Reading Momaday’s references to the trope as part of a project to imagine “contemporary American Indian identities based in indigenous memory” (98), he follows Momaday’s imaginative projections of himself, in The Names, into the stories heard from his father about his grandfather, and traces the “conflating of storytelling, imagination, memory, and genealogy into the representation of a single multifaceted moment” troped by blood memory. He finds this process again in the chain of associations by which Momaday projects himself into the world of his grandmother Aho (a world related itself to stories from the Kiowa oral tradition) in the introduction of The Way to Rainy Mountain (Allen 1999:101–2); in his relating to Kiowa memories through the old Kiowa woman Ko-sahn in the epilogue; and finally again in Momaday’s narrating of his naming through a Kiowa story, an account he prefaces in The Names with the United States document establishing his blood quantum (Momaday 1976:42). “The juxtaposed government document and ‘stories within stories’ of how Momaday received his Kiowa name represent culturally divergent ways of defining his ‘authentic’ indigenous identity” (Allen 1999:104), Allen observes, but it “is not Momaday’s blood quantum, inscribed by the U.S. government in official documents, that confers Kiowa identity; rather, it is his blood memory, the story of his being situated in ongoing Kiowa narratives of their identity as a people in the American landscape” (105). Such imaginative self-determination “liberates Momaday’s own and other contemporary American Indians’ identities from imposed definitions of Indian authenticity, including standards of blood quantum and/or standards that demand the uninterrupted and uncontaminated inheritance of indigenous languages, lifeways, or habits of art” (Allen 1999:98–9). Nonetheless, as Allen acknowledges, the way in which Momaday bases his narrative strategies on references to blood and genes without any signs of irony or distance has offended many readers (108). Neither Allen’s nor Krupat’s arguments end here, and we will return to them in a moment. Vizenor’s stance on blood quanta and “Indian blood” (as opposed to

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metaphors of crossblood) is clear; if anything, perhaps also in response to critiques like Krupat’s, he has expressed it in increasingly forceful terms. In Fugitive Poses, he thus speaks of “eugenic blood counts and other fascist certitudes of identity” (1998:69). In his 2000 novel Chancers, in a section entitled “Terminal Indians,” he offers a rereading of a speech on indian65 values, initially delivered by Belladonna Winter Catcher in the chapter “Terminal Creeds at Orion”66 of his earlier novel Bearheart (1990a:189–204; originally published 1978); here a poison sugar cookie is served by the inventors of “Indians”67 as “Just desserts” (Vizenor 2000:96) to those who base “terminal,” separate identities on “Indian blood.” Yet it is clear at the same time that Vizenor also builds on Momaday’s work: Listen, the best stories are shamanic, and more visionary than victimry. I mentioned the visual stories of Momaday’s grandmother in The Way to Rainy Mountain. My characters create their stories in this way. Columbus, you see, is a native story of shamanic investigations, transmutations, and many, many heirs. (Vizenor and Lee 1999:134) In Heirs, some of the visions of Stone Columbus, and in particular his views on blood, come to us through investigative reports by Chaine Riel Doumet; he has earned his given name from a football coach who “called me chain lightning because of my zigzag runs down the field,” and his “middle name is inherited from the Métis insurgency leader Louis Riel” (1991a:74–5).68 In the chapter “Blood Tithes” (1991a:159–67), Vizenor prefaces Chaine Riel’s reports by contrasting the heirs’ new beginnings with Louis Riel’s end (through execution), noting that “Stone Columbus was inspired by his resistance but not his tragic creeds. The heirs pursued the same mission of resistance and tribal independence, but theirs liberated the mind with the pleasures of trickster humor, and held no prisoners in the heart” (160). Riel’s heir Chaine Riel traverses all lines in unstoppable zigzag fashion; a crossblood crosscultural double agent who uses a “portable word processor and modem,” he separates his documents by reporting as Chaine to the tribe concerned about the crossblood heirs originating on its reservation, and as Riel to federal military intelligence worried about Point Assinika (160–1). Chaine Riel thus communicates intelligence to both sides – who seem equally worried – about the “ ‘new identities’ ” (161) created at Point Assinika by Stone: he “ ‘has initiated tribal enrollment records for crossblood artists and others’ ” (161) and “ ‘created identity cards for tribal artists that were based on the recognition of peers, rather than the choice of tribal politicians’ ” (162). Not surprisingly, Stone holds related views about blood (162): “Stone resists the notion of blood quantums, racial identification, and tribal enrollment. The heir is a crossblood, to be sure, but there is more to his position than mere envy of unbroken tribal blood. Indians, he said, are ‘forever divided by the racist arithmetic measures of tribal blood.’ He would accept anyone who wanted to be tribal, ‘no blood attached are scratched,’ he once said on talk radio.” The division “by the racist arithmetic measures of tribal blood” leads to Chaine Riel’s recommendation that “tribal governments should consider the scenarios of

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identity because the measures of blood quantums have reduced the tribes to racist colonies” (162). As Allen writes (citing a 1997 Associated Press report), whether the fact is lamented or celebrated, “some tribes are reducing blood quantum requirements of one-half, one-quarter, or even one-eighth down to one one-sixteenth,” among other reasons, to ensure that despite intermarriage “their own children and grandchildren will qualify as tribal members” (Allen 1999:114n15). Yet Stone’s position is more radical, and exceeds even a reverse kind of “one drop” rule: “His point is to make the world tribal, a universal identity, and return to other values as measures of human worth, such as the dedication to heal rather than steal tribal cultures” (Vizenor 1991a:162, emphasis added). If there is some kind of “assimilationist” drive involved here, it is hardly the traditional kind. Indeed, the juxtaposition of “tribal” and “universal identity” offers variations of Du Boisian double consciousness, where identities are founded simultaneously on difference and universality. To both confirm and tease yet again this duality, Vizenor has Chaine report “to the tribal president that he should be concerned, but the notion of the universal tribe could cause no harm, ‘because there was nothing to lose but racial distance’ ” (162, my emphasis). The combination of universality and particularity in the notion of “the universal tribe” (to which we will return) participates in the escape from “extinction in word and phrase museums” on thematic and figurative levels; the strategy of teasing opposites by thinking them side by side, in dialogical collision rather than dialectic sublation, is also central, as we will see, to Vizenor’s understanding of humor; it appears too in the subversion of determinacy by freedom of choice, a paradoxical possibility that Stone and the heirs offer by creating freely available biological inheritance and transplantable racial identity. As Riel reports about Stone from Point Assinika (162): his most disputable promise is a genetic implant that could be used to prove not only paternity, but national and racial identities, and forensic genetics. Their scientists have established a genetic signature of most of the tribes in the country, so that anyone could, with an injection of suitable genetic material, prove beyond doubt a genetic tribal identity. Germans, at last, could be genetic Sioux. . . . This doubtful treatment of proof “beyond doubt” of tribal identity through designer genetics is as hilarious as the possible implications of genetic racial engineering are horrendous. One of the effects, however, is to keep the opposition of determinate and chosen – or re-created – identity open (zigzagging Chaine Riel calls it a “most disputable promise”). “Blood” and “genetics” would “beyond doubt” not prove anything in this scenario, since they would be subject to free will; at the same time, they continue to function here as metaphor for values “such as the dedication to heal rather than steal tribal cultures.” It is important to retain Vizenor’s insistence on the openness of metaphors (and in particular “mixedblood earthdiver metaphors” that create New Worlds), and the role of the maintenance of opposition in this process. Vizenor stresses, as we have seen, that the “words Métis and mixedblood possess no social or scientific validation because blood mixture is not a measurement of consciousness, culture, or human experiences” (Vizenor 1981a:ix); emphasizing the metaphoricity of native blood

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again in Postindian Conversations, he explains that “Native blood is not the same as experience or imagination, and the metaphor of native blood is certainly not measured by the liter or even the reservation colonial pint” (Vizenor and Lee 1999:150). The “combined word and metaphor” thus point to something that cannot be named; as he quotes George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (relating to animal metaphors): Metaphor is one of our most important tools for trying to comprehend partially what cannot be comprehended totally: our feelings, aesthetic experiences, moral practices, and spiritual awareness. These endeavors of the imagination are not devoid of rationality; since they use metaphor, they employ an imaginative rationality. (Vizenor 1998:122) The entities used in the process are recognizable, but are each re-cognized in their combination to arrive at something new that cannot be recognized in a known term.69 Known terms in opposition lead to new creation, and create New Worlds. Allen calls this dialogic maintenance of opposition (rather than dialectic sublation and solution) “bricolage.” He invokes – and here we pick up his reading of Vizenor’s response to both Momaday and Krupat – Stone’s words towards the end of Heirs: Vizenor’s narrative bricolage suggests that dialogue between disparate ways of perceiving and engaging the world is not only possible but desirable. “We heal with opposition,” the character Stone Columbus says toward the end of the novel; “we are held together with opposition, not separation, or silence, and the best humor in the world is pinched from opposition” (176). (Allen 1999:110–11) Allen’s remarks come in conclusion to his analysis of a passage in Heirs that shows Vizenor’s awareness of Krupat’s comments on Momaday, and stages “his rejoinder to Krupat’s critique as the unlikely dialogue between Momaday’s and Krupat’s disparate projects” (Allen 1999:96) literally in the margins of The Voice in the Margin. In that sequence (Vizenor 1991a:110–11), Felipa Powers, one of the Heirs and Stone’s partner, meets with the book collector Pellegrine Treves in London in order to repatriate the bones of Pocahontas from Gravesend to the Heirs’ burial ground. Allen points to positional parallels in this “dialogue between Felipa Powers, an American Indian crossblood in search of tribal bones (read Momaday) and Pellegrine Treves, a sympathetic European collector of American Indian texts who turns out, like Columbus, to be related to ‘tribal’ Sephardic Jews (read Krupat)” (Allen 1999:110). More directly, however, they discuss an “association edition,” in Treves’ possession, of Krupat’s The Voice in the Margin, with marginal annotations in which another, unnamed novelist simulates Momaday’s comments: “Krupat’s discussion of ‘racial memory’ drew the sharpest marginal notes. . . . The novelist noted, ‘Krupat gives head to footnotes, how would he know about tribal memories’ ” (Vizenor 1991a:111). Allen unpacks the “bawdy humor at Krupat’s expense” in the first part of the note (Allen 1999:108), only to show that the subsequent phrase “how would

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he know about tribal memories” immediately undercuts that humor in the context of the novel’s “arguments that Christopher Columbus was related to Sephardic Jews through his mother’s line and that Sephardic Judaism represents an Old World ‘tribalism’ that has survived for over five centuries in what is now the United States”; the Heirs indeed claim both “New and Old World tribalisms” and their burial ground, as Allen points out, carries the Jewish designation “House of Life” (Allen 1999:109). Allen sees Vizenor’s concern here with “Krupat’s critique of the trope blood memory and Momaday’s comments about intrinsic variables” in the light of “post-Holocaust anxiety over fixed racial, ‘blood,’ or tribal categories” (Allen 1999:109) – the knowledge that blood and race have been invoked in the name of both tribal survival and brutal racism, extinction, and genocide. Indeed, Felipa Powers comments that “Krupat would be the trickster on the margin,” and Pellegrine Treves answers: “The book is great, and the notes are cruel” (Vizenor 1991a:111). As Allen summarizes the exchange: “in Vizenor’s text, no one walks away clean.” Not only has “Momaday’s great poetic voice . . . been rendered adolescent and profane,” his position has “been characterized as ignorant of his work’s larger crosscultural implications,” and “Krupat’s pioneering scholarship . . . has been mocked as absurdly academic”; in addition, Vizenor’s own “trickster discourse has been shown as fickle and cruel.” Nonetheless, “the argument has been genuinely furthered through upset rather than provisionally decided through partisan association. Vizenor has played many of the roles traditionally associated with American Indian tricksters: lecher, clown, and – most importantly – bricoleur” (1999:110). The exchange between Felipa Powers and Pellegrine Treves, and in particular the reference to footnotes, however, invoke also an entire argument again not only on the thematic, propositional level but also on that of discursive texture and Bakhtinian dialogism. This becomes clearer if one follows the intertextual reference to The Voice in the Margin a bit closer, and to Krupat’s own remarks there about footnotes. His attack on Momaday’s views comes in the context of his critique of Calvin Martin’s call for a scholarly discourse that would seek to emulate in its own articulation “the Indian ‘biological’ view” (Krupat 1989:12). Krupat professes his inability to find any logical merit in that proposition; he sides with a dual goal70 that requires a capability “to work with both an Indian and a Western perspective” and of “resisting the temptation . . . of trying to be an Indian” (Krupat 1989:12).71 From there Krupat turns to his own “quite modest techniques for including otherness and difference” (16) and the “call to dialogism and polyphony” (16), which urges “the refusal of imperial domination” and “to proceed humbly and with care” (19). Yet this does not imply the requirement (17): that we refrain from writing in certain ways, (e.g. that we avoid all indirect discourse, or refrain from hitherto-conventional methods of documentation – notes, bibliography, and the like). Some radical polyphonists have not sufficiently understood this. Krupat adds that he has chosen footnotes over the more usual endnotes and “assure[s] the reader that most of what is in the notes is substantive: that is where a number of other voices speak, where I worry and qualify my own statements in

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relation to those of other writers who, often enough, disagree” (18). It follows a discussion of critics who write in the “magisterial manner of Barthes, Foucault, or Derrida whose texts rarely deign to cite any but other great masters” (19). Vizenor, who always attributes citations and ideas (either in multiple epigraphs, in the text itself, or for instance as the “Epilogue” in The Trickster of Liberty or Heirs) but mostly refrains from notes or page references, continues the dialogue in Heirs by having Pellegrine Treves cite a later passage from The Voice in the Margin; it is from Krupat’s Bakhtinian discussion there of Momaday, in a chapter significantly entitled “Monologue and Dialogue in Native American Autobiography”: “Krupat wrote that Momaday offered an ‘invariant poetic voice that everywhere commits itself to subsuming and translating all other voices,’ and so on, to which the novelist made a marginal note, ‘but not enough to subsume your arrogance and dialogic domination’ ” (Vizenor 1991a:111, quoting Krupat 1989:181). Felipa’s remark about the “noted critic” and the following “Krupat gives head to footnotes” take on additional meaning through the intertext by Krupat; yet we have also seen that the discourse in the margins of Krupat’s The Voice in the Margin finds itself undercut in the following turn of the conversation, and that Krupat in turn is given the status of trickster.72 Orchestrating “disparate ways of perceiving” (Allen), the sequence practices double consciousness as transformation. Citing Vizenor’s remark that the “trickster is a communal sign, never isolation; a concordance of narrative voices” (Vizenor 1990e:284), Allen notes Vizenor’s insistence “on his right and his ability, possibly his necessity as trickster, to speak from several positions simultaneously” (Allen 1999:107). Vizenor’s trickster conversation with Bakhtinian views of the novel sits well with his multiple “investigative” reporters in Heirs, his quotational techniques, and Chaine Riel Doumet’s multiple reports in dialogue with different addressees; and Vizenor reiterates the importance of contradictions, in an interview one year after the publication of Heirs, when he remarks: “I don’t work with material to serve ideology. . . . I concentrate on all the contradictions and . . . I don’t choose one voice over another” (1993b:46).73 It is with reference to statements like this that Krupat approaches the conundrum we have seen him formulate in his “Ratio- and Natio- in Vizenor’s Heirs of Columbus,” his discussion of the novel that features his own earlier take on a related issue in Momaday’s work. Noting the inclusiveness of The Heirs’ “universal tribe” that is genetically determinate only on the basis of genes that are subject to choice and free will, Krupat poses the problem again: “Thus it seems unequivocally clear . . . that any racialist argument in The Heirs of Columbus is set squarely against racism. But why, then, does The Heirs embrace natio- as equal to or even more important than ratio- in the conceptualization of heritage and community”? (Krupat 1996:61). The answer, Krupat suggests, “has to do with Vizenor’s self-conscious, indeed, militant adoption of a postmodern strategy marked, in Linda Hutcheon’s phrase, by ‘a deliberate refusal to resolve contradictions’ (Poetics x)” (Krupat 1996:61; Hutcheon 1988b:x). In a footnote he adds his reservations: In interview after interview, from early in his career until just recently . . . Vizenor has insisted on his own “refusal to resolve contradictions” as a deliberate device in the interest of freedom defined as the infinite multiplication of

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possibilities. For all of that, as I discuss below, it is not a technique or an ideology consistent with the definition of freedom as adherence to specific liberatory arrangements, that is, to the establishment of healing communities. And yet, as we have seen, Stone Columbus insists that “We heal with opposition, we are held together with opposition . . . and the best humor in the world is pinched from opposition” (Vizenor 1991a:176); Vizenor himself indeed claims that humour creates community.74 His insistence on contradiction is the corollary of his mistrust of “terminal beliefs,” or, in postmodern language, his “incredulity towards metanarratives” (Lyotard) that doubts the availability of unproblematic, contradictionfree grand narratives – such as freedom. Krupat invokes The Heirs’ epigraph by Sartre, whose “sense of cultural politics, to say the obvious, bases itself on distinctions between ‘authenticity’ and ‘inauthenticity’ ” (Krupat 1996:67).75 Precisely such terms, however, have lost any sense of simplicity one might once have imagined them to possess. While Vizenor attacks the “inauthenticity” of the “Indian,” he does so in terms of “simulations” that he takes from Eco and Baudrillard, and, refusing representational counterimages, insists on postindian metaphors. As Krupat observes, “these distinctions and differences are only an illusion from the antifoundationalist perspective of the Baudrillardian, DeLeuze and Guattarian postmodernism with which Vizenor has again and again linked his practice; they are closures of the sort Vizenor has always abhorred” (Krupat 1996:67). Yet Vizenor’s postmodern strategies are clearly political: they engage and overturn historically produced representations of the “Indian” – for him an ideological means of control, a “linguistic slave name” (Vizenor and Lee 1999:153) and a “new slave name of discovery” (Vizenor and Lee 1999:156). Postindian alternatives for Vizenor consist not of representations, which would fall back on known, recognized terms and identities, but re/cognitions in trickster language,76 and in particular metaphors like the “crossblood earthdiver” that create new worlds in stories (or stones). Vizenor thus states emphatically: I must resist any easy reference to crossbloods, as if that combined word and metaphor were a recognizable entity. The cross and the blood are unnameable. The tease of a crossblood presence in native histories is over the simulation of a seam, a double seam, as you suggest, of established poses, appearances, interpretations, and loose assertions of identity. (Vizenor and Lee 1999:82) To “tease,” according to the OED, is to “pull asunder the fibres of, to comb or card . . . in preparation for spinning”;77 and metaphors, as we have seen Vizenor quote Lakoff and Johnson, are “tools for trying to comprehend partially what cannot be comprehended totally” (Vizenor 1998:122). Krupat confesses that he, like one of the characters in the novel, is “impatient for conclusions,” and in possession of a “ ‘worldview that was frustrated by the heirs who imagine all the starts but never the ends’ ” (Vizenor 1991a:173, quoted in Krupat 1996:62). The statement is all the more significant since the cited phrase, for all its seeming simplicity, references the importance of creation stories and “stones” in Vizenor’s visionary sovereignty (“all the starts”), as well as his convictions about

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terminal creeds (“but never the ends”). Despite these misgivings, Krupat feels that Heirs “commits itself in quite unambiguous and unironic fashion to the vision . . . of a posttribal community dedicated to healing” (Krupat 1996:67). This stance is illustrated for him in the “final sentence-image” (69) of the novel (before the “Epilogue”): “The children danced on the marina, and their wounds were healed once more in a moccasin game with demons” (183, quoted in Krupat 1996:67). Yet for him, such “a conclusion cannot come from postmodernist proliferations of relativism or ironic celebrations of irresolution” (67); in his view, “this commitment cannot logically be derived from anything that has preceded it” (69) in the novel. Thus, in a work resolutely committed to relentless realities of contradiction, Krupat at the same time registers an unequivocal partisanship, whose source he locates in a “certain simple respect for human suffering” (Appiah 1992:152; 1991:353, quoted in Krupat 1996:67). The phrase comes from Appiah’s chapter “The Postcolonial and the Postmodern” of In My Father’s House (the book in which Appiah probes Du Bois’ “impossible project”).78 Krupat is in particular interested in Appiah’s argument here that Yambo Ouologuem’s Le Devoir de la violence is “postrealist,” mainly because it “identifies the realist novel as part of the tactic of nationalist legitimation” (Appiah 1992:150; 1991:349), a tactic it opposes and dismantles as part of its resistance to a misguided, postcolonial national bourgeoisie-turned-kleptocracy (1992:150; 1991:349). Postmodernism, Appiah points out, is postrealist as well (1992:150; 1991:349), yet for him “Ouologuem’s postrealism is surely motivated quite differently from that of such postmodern writers as, say Pynchon” (1992:150). Hence flows what Appiah calls a misleading impression of postmodernism, a scenario Krupat finds relevant in his reading of Heirs; writes Appiah: Because this is a novel that seeks to delegitimate not only the form of realism but also the content of nationalism, it will to that extent seem to us misleadingly to be postmodern. Misleading, because what we have here is . . . not an aesthetics but a politics. . . . And, so it seems to me, the basis for that project of deligitimation is very much not the postmodernist one: rather, it is grounded in an appeal to an ethical universal; indeed, it is based . . . in an appeal to a certain simple respect for human suffering, a fundamental revolt against the endless misery of the last thirty years. (Appiah 1992:152; 1991:353; second emphasis added) Both postmodernism and postcolonialism challenge legitimating narratives, yet the latter “challenges them in the name of the ethical universal. . . . And on that ground, it is not an ally for Western postmodernism but an agonist, from which I believe postmodernism may have something to learn” (Appiah 1992:155). Krupat invokes Appiah’s reading of Ouologuem at the end of his own discussion of Heirs; with reference to the already cited final “image-sentence” of the novel, he suggests that in the end (indeed, literally at the end of the Heirs of Columbus) Vizenor, like Silko, like Ouologuem, may turn out to be “misleadingly postmodern” (Appiah 353), or quite simply, it may be that Vizenor’s postmodernism can serve as an antagonist to Western postmodernism rather than an ally. In its sensitivity to a

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pervasive human suffering and its desire to act, in the Sartrean manner, on behalf of that suffering, this is a postmodernism that takes a position far less ambiguous than anything possible in the more usual postmodernisms of Europe and America. (Krupat 1996:68) The debate about postmodernisms and their liberatory potential has of course been extensive, and many erstwhile “postmodern” texts have subsequently been reread as “postcolonial” texts.79 While Krupat cites Hutcheon’s formulation, “deliberate refusal to resolve contradictions,” he also quotes her affirming that postmodernism is “certainly political” if “politically ambivalent, doubly encoded as both complicity and critique” (Hutcheon 1989:168). Such “complicity” acknowledges the conviction that critique is inevitably enmeshed in the very language and binaries of thought that constitute also that which is to be critiqued (a principle we have seen also in Gates’ construction of tradition despite the tyranny of tradition, and in the very use of the word “race” in quotation marks). Krupat reads the simultaneity and doubleness of complicity and critique, that Hutcheon discerns in postmodernism, in Heirs in ways that partially emphasize the text’s maintenance of contradiction, and partially attribute to it an engagement with agency that Hutcheon actually sees absent in postmodernism (1989:168). Krupat writes: “It is the apparent embrace of natio-, or blood reasoning, I shall argue, that is the complicitous part of a critique that is carried by a commitment to ratio-, the reasoned decision to accept into the community any who have chosen to heal rather than steal” (1996:61–2). Krupat tries to give that critique weight here with Jameson’s argument, in his Postmodernism (1991), that postmodern fiction may “ ‘by its very invention and inventiveness endorse . . . a creative freedom with respect to events it cannot control’ . . . thereby stepping ‘out of the historical record itself into the process of devising it’ ” (Krupat 1996:63); yet although narrative invention can thus for Jameson “become the figure of a larger possibility of praxis” (quoted in Krupat 1996:64), the duality remains even if Krupat sees it “oriented . . . toward” the second side, the critique of essentialist identitarianism through non-essentialist reasoning: “As I read The Heirs, then, the complicitous side of Vizenor’s project is the acceptance without criticism (without, that is, the usual undercutting irony) of a logic of natio-, a logic oriented, however, toward the critical effect of upholding a logic of ratio-” (64). But how can the two logics “in tandem” (Krupat 1996:59) – the “dialogue between disparate ways of perceiving and engaging the world” (Allen 1999:110) – work towards the result Krupat hopes for? How can one logic that is deplored actually “be oriented toward the critical effect of upholding a logic” that seems to designate actually its opposite? My reading would differ somewhat from Krupat’s, but also underline and extend one of his main observations. First, it seems to me that the logic of natio- and of blood is indeed made instrumental here, yet also, at the same time, undercut and shot through with a certain form of irony. What Krupat refers to as the “democratic distribution of what we might call ‘designer genes’ ” transforms, as I have argued, the substance of what “genes” are supposed to mean – their ability to prove “beyond doubt” identity, which Vizenor’s phrasing further undercuts and ironizes. And if “blood” has become the symbol that it is through racist appeals that hypostatize

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purity and exclusion, Vizenor’s uses of “blood” also dismantle it by devalorizing its central, racist connotations; as Krupat himself argues: “Though blood may count in The Heirs of Columbus, ‘good’ blood is not the mythical sangre pura privileged by racists of every stripe but is always already-mixed blood” (65). Yet “blood” it certainly is, as Krupat says, even if only explicitly metaphorical and mixedblood. And so the other, reverse look at this doubleness has to account for the fact that although it is problematized and undercut, this altered and mixed “blood” is nonetheless also used and made to signify. This signification does not aim at a physical referent (of blood), I would argue, but rather at a communality of experience. Like the word “race” employed, by Gates and others, in quotation marks that call for a double reading, Vizenor’s (cross)“blood” invokes the imposition by which, with European contact, people became “Indians” identifiable later through “blood quanta,” and signifies a communality of experience whose reality is anything but metaphorical. “Blood” functions here, I would suggest, like “race,” in quotation marks: a double reading that “works through” (both by means of and beyond) double consciousness in that it cites experienced reality (and reality experienced through the language of the colonizing other), only then to “unread” the attributed meanings in the creation of new meanings – and, in the language of The Heirs of Columbus, of “New Worlds.” If Gates, Appiah, and others put “race” under erasure because it does not have an accreditable physical referent (although a socially effective signified), determinate “blood” identity is under erasure in The Heirs of Columbus because here everybody can have it (beyond doubt) and choose it too. At the same time, “race” and “blood” respectively are used to signify a communality of experience that loses none of its social reality because of the constructedness of “race,” or of the “Invention of the Indian” critiqued by Vizenor and Thomas King. Stone Columbus’ seemingly paradoxical aim “to make the world tribal, a universal identity” (Vizenor 1991a:162) in which there is nothing to “lose but racial distance,” his project that seeks to further both particularity and universality is thus related to the problematic of Du Bois’ janus-faced dualities, be it the “assimilation” to a higher unity that dialogically maintained rather than sublated race, or later what Appiah calls his inability “to escape the notion of race he explicitly rejected” that brings forth “this curious conjunction of the reliance on and the repudiation of race” that Appiah also finds recurring elsewhere (Appiah 1992:46). Appiah’s argument in his essay on Du Bois is that “there are no races” (1992:45). Yet in a later volume, significantly entitled Color Conscious, the first part of his contribution, entitled “Analysis: Against Races” (in keeping with the universalist appeal of In my Father’s House), is conjoined by a second part, “Synthesis: For Racial Identities.” I would like to return in the last chapter to his discussion there and to this (con/dis)junction, which, I think, is also what drives Krupat’s formulations of “natioand ratio- in tandem,” and of a “logic of natio-, a logic oriented, however, toward the critical effect of upholding a logic of ratio-” (Krupat 1996:64). Before examining Appiah’s expanded argument in Color Conscious, however, I will look at another genealogy of difference that is crucial to attempts at thinking opposed logics simultaneously, Charles Taylor’s (1994) “The Politics of Recognition.” Taylor discusses how the recognition of specific communalities of experience and the “substantive goals” that are defined by such experience can be conjoined with the “universal” appeal of equal recognition in “procedural” democracies. Not

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coincidentally for a Quebec-based Canadian philosopher, Taylor discusses this question centrally with respect to linguistic difference, which has already appeared here in the connection of “race” with questions of the vernacular, orality, and translation. His discussion of recognition hinges, in one of its most important examples, on a linguistic difference between groups that in older vocabularies were often also called “races”: the relationship between (the) “French” and “English,” and in particular the status of French, less powerful than English in Canada yet the majority language in Quebec. I will look here again at the role that vernacular orality has played at a crucial stage in attempts to define a culturally viable New World medium, and an alternative to both English and Old World French. As in the case of African American and Native cultures, forms of orality and the vernacular were invoked in support of Québécois emergence. Québécois “joual,” a heavily anglicized vernacular constituting an intra-language diglossia with “international” French, appeared in controversial but often successful literary works from the 1960s on. Double consciousness has been generally perceived as an inherent condition of French in Quebec, often analyzed with respect to its vulnerability to English, but traditionally also expected to express cultural difference (erstwhile of the âme canadienne (Canadian soul)) from France. I will explore here ambivalences of double consciousness and re-cognition in particular in two important journals that promoted “joual” and transculture respectively, before examining in detail how Taylor’s essay and Appiah’s discussion in Color Conscious configure the “curious conjunction” and contradictions by which all worlds of universals are heir to our particularities.

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Multiculturalisms, transculturalism, difference in North (of) America English and French Canadian difference Because of the historic legacy of slavery, the power of race has been primordial in shaping thought about difference in the United States, and neo-ethnic identifications were often modeled on the more radical positions that developed out of the civil rights movement since the 1950s (Fisher 1992:242). In Canada, by contrast, the historic legacy of French and English has made language an originally more important factor in the modeling of difference. Linguistic difference here has defined the nation state of Canada from its very beginning. Historically, of course, the problem for both anglophone and francophone cultural emergence in what is now Canada was the absence of linguistic difference with respect to the colonial powers. It made the equation of Romantic nationalism – the Herderian congruence and trinity of culture, language, and nation – difficult in English and French Canada alike. Even more so than in the United States, national culture and identity were hard to come by on the basis of a national language and linguistic difference with other nations.1 The double need for Old World recognition and New World difference and re-cognition is evident in an often quoted letter by Octave Crémazie that strikingly invokes Indian languages as desirable tokens of originality and Romantic literary New World nationhood.2 From France, where he has been exiled since 1862 after bankruptcy and the loss of his Quebec city bookstore whose backroom had been the site of the “Mouvement littéraire de Québec,” he writes to Casgrain about French Canada’s perennial literary coloniality because it shares French with the nation of Racine and Bossuet: Ce qui manque au Canada,3 c’est d’avoir une langue à lui. Si nous parlions iroquois ou huron, notre littérature vivrait. Malheureusement, nous parlons et nous écrivons d’une assez piteuse façon, il est vrai, la langue de Bossuet et de Racine. Nous aurons beau dire et beau faire, nous ne serons toujours, au point de vue littéraire, qu’une simple colonie, et quand bien même le Canada deviendrait un pays indépendant et ferait briller son drapeau au soleil des nations, nous n’en demeurerions pas moins de simples colons littéraires. (Crémazie 1984:58)

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(What Canada is lacking is a language of its own. If we spoke the tongues of the Iroquois or the Huron, our literature would live. Unfortunately, we speak and write, and quite pitifully one must say, the language of Bossuet and Racine. Whatever we do or say, we shall forever remain a mere colony from a literary standpoint, and even if Canada became one day an independent country and saw its flag shining under the sun of all nations, we would nevertheless remain literary colonists.) I have mentioned in the introduction what kind of ideological resentments towards imperial France accompanied this wish for both recognition and differentiation. The inaugurator of professional French Canadian literary criticism, Camille Roy, makes some of these assumptions explicit in his “La nationalisation de la littérature canadienne” (“The Nationalization of Canadian Literature,” 1904, see 1979), where he discusses both thematic but also linguistic aspects of desirable difference. Roy wants to protect (French) Canadian literature from foreign subjects and exotic procedures (“il ne faut pas’égarer sur des sujets étrangers, ou gâter par des procédés exotiques notre littérature canadienne” [65; “one must not go astray and choose foreign subjects, or spoil our Canadian literature with exotic procedures”]), but also shield the French Canadian language from French negative influences (“protéger notre langue contre les influences qui la pourraient corrompre” – “protect our language against influences susceptible of corrupting it”). Not surprisingly, Roy suggests that “notre plus grande ennemie c’est la littérature française contemporaine” (68; “contemporary French literature is our greatest enemy”); familiarity with it causes absorption of “les moins heureuses nouveautés de la langue que l’on écrit à Paris” (“the least desirable novelties of the language written in Paris”), product of “les écrivains malades de Paris” (69; “sick writers from Paris”).4 This is the image of the negative other that will subtend for the following decades the positions of the “régionalistes” (“regionalists”) in their extended polemic against the “exotiques” (“exotics”; Garand 1989:93),5 a polarity that Dominique Garand has described as the most important factor dominating the French Canadian literary debates from 1900 to 1930 (Garand 1989:92–3; Hayward 1988:41). Urging resistance to French literary innovation, francophone commentators in Canada thus hoped for a “littérature originale” (“original literature”) that would be able to understand and express an “âme canadienne” (“Canadian soul”) which they often sought in local topics and legends. New World originality was similarly a problem for anglophone writers. As with Crémazie, the need to add novelty to Old World Romantic conventions often directed their hopes towards “Indians.” In The Backwoods of Canada (1836), Catharine Parr Traill discusses an absence of Canadian “ghosts or spirits” (Traill 1929:163) and cites, in Letter X, the complaint that Canada: is the most unpoetical of all lands; there is no scope for imagination; here all is new – the very soil seems newly formed; there is no hoary ancient grandeur in these woods; no recollections of former deeds connected with the country. The only beings in which I take any interest are the Indians, and they want the warlike character and intelligence that I had pictured to myself they would possess. (Traill 1929:164)

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In a vein similar to Roy’s later critique of Nelligan’s “exoticism” (i.e. his affiliation with Parisian modes of writing), Daniel Wilson for example critiques in 1984 Charles Sangster’s The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay and other Poems (1856) for its indebtedness to European writing, and again the “Indian” is at issue. Canada’s “national bard” at the time (Pacey 1958:1) had chosen to write his travel account mostly in Spenserian stanzas and modeled it on Wordsworth’s “The River Duddon.” Echoing Emerson in “The American Scholar,” Wilson complains that “Our schooling has been too much alongside of the elder of Europe’s nations” (1984:45) and suggests that, like other Canadian writing of the period, Sangster’s poem too often “re-echoes the songs that are to be gathered amid the leaves of the library-shelf” (46); Sangster’s Indian is either a transplanted “old painted British Druid” or “the white man dressed in his attire; strip him of his paint and feathers, and it is our oldworld familiar acquaintance” (47–8). The debate that opposes local particularity to “universal” criteria of writing continues through subsequent stages of English Canadian cultural emergence. Similar in this respect to the polemic between regionalistes and exotiques in francophone writing, it leads here to a debate of “native” vs “cosmopolitan” values and standards. Interestingly, the proponent of cosmopolitan modernism, A. J. M. Smith, is attacked for his colonial orientation towards the “imperial” centres, the universalist “elsewhere.”6 Cultural nation-time and the discourses of plurality Yet while both literatures articulate their emergence in the constant dualities of seeking “international” standards of recognition and emphasizing differentiating recognitions of their own specificity, language continues to play a particular role in the francophone development.7 This is again in evidence when cultural nation-time truly arrives in the 1960s (most dramatically with Expo 1967).8 In 1965, The Literary History of Canada appears under the editorship of Carl Klinck, and the efforts to formulate a unity of national literature culminate in its “Conclusion” by Northrop Frye. Frye proposes here elements of a Canadian thematic – conceived as unity rather than plurality – that will be dominant in constructions of Canadian literature for at least a decade to come, until Frank Davey’s “Surviving the Paraphrase” announces an attack on thematic criticism and a counter-move towards other orientations in 1976. Francophone cultural emergence is voiced for instance in a title like Gilles Marcotte’s 1962 Une Littérature qui se fait: Essais critiques sur la littérature canadienne-française, but also announces itself as specifically Québécois literature in a journal like Partis pris. Here, where Hubert Aquin discusses in his important essay “Profession: écrivain” (1964) the dangers of recognition and (im)possibilites of literature under cultural domination (Siemerling 1994:77–9), appears in 1965 the manifesto issue “Pour une littérature québécoise”; and here the effort to establish the vernacular “joual” as the literary language of Quebec finds one of its most important venues – an effort which produced significant results until the midseventies.9 But if the sixties were marked by a search for cultural cohesion and national cultural homogeneity, the period simultaneously helped to produce the canons and conditions against which discourses of cultural plurality, later also related to those of post- or transnationality, could begin to articulate themselves.10 Of particular

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importance in this respect is the development of Canadian multiculturalism as administrative policy. The Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism in the sixties was to accommodate French difference; or – as other interpretations had it – to silence Quebec nationalism. Yet the Commission promoted not only the formal recognition of both French and English, but also the contribution of other ethnic groups and what the Commission called their “collective will to exist.” The historical background of bilingualism not only excluded American solutions like the melting pot (Paquet 1994:61), it also opened the way to multiculturalism and beyond. While there are now many convergences between the multiculturalism discussions in Canada and the United States, multiculturalism thus has different backgrounds in both countries.11 The term itself arrives later in the United States than in Canada, and has from the beginning a more activist yet usually surprisingly monolingual agenda. As opposed to terms like “cultural pluralism,” which has been traced to Horace Kallen in 1924 (Sollors 1986a), discourses of or about “multiculturalism” appear in American debates, linked to university education, mainly from the 1988 Stanford curriculum debate on and a number of anti-multicultural books around that time. Although related questions were negotiated in early phases of the canon debates from the late 1970s on (Jan Gorak [1991] points to Fiedler and Baker [1981] as an important marker), references to multiculturalism seem inexistent in US newspapers before 1989 and then increase rapidly and steadily until 1994 when they reach a plateau or even begin to level off (Glazer 1997:7). Canadian multiculturalism, on the other hand, begins as national administrative policy in 1971, two years after the 1969 Official Languages Act that legislates bilingualism, and becomes a law in 1988. Canadian multiculturalism thus extended and responded to a policy of biculturalism and bilingualism initiated to accommodate French difference (and/or to silence Quebec nationalism). As Francesco Loriggio has observed, in Canada the combination of adjectives like “resistant” or “insurgent” with the word “multiculturalism” is much less likely than it is in the United States (Loriggio 1996:191–2; also Gunew 1994:16). However, multiculturalism in Canada has also received a variegated press, and has been interpreted differently by various interests and from numerous perspectives.12 Frank Davey has suggested that a multicultural agenda was favoured for instance by Western Canadian regionalisms in order to counter-balance francophone and exclusively bicultural claims (1995:103–5). Davey distinguishes here also between a largely “white” multiculturalism of the seventies and an activist multiculturalism later (105). He portrays the former as western Canada’s response to bilingualism, a multiculturalism “in which Canadians of Ukrainian, German, Swedish, Icelandic and similar descent challenged the right of Canadians of French descent to specific claim and statutory privilege, without necessarily wishing to distinguish themselves from general Anglophone-Canadian culture” (105). While he sees merely “an increased consciousness of ancestry” and attempts to “rehabilitate First Nations and Métis historical figures” in the works of writers like Rudy Wiebe, Andy Suknaski, Eli Mandel or Margaret Laurence, Davey characterizes the later, activist multiculturalism as marked by the claims of a wide variety of groups for special status. In this context, Davey offers his analyses of paraliterary “scandals” related to this stage of multiculturalism, such as the controversial Canada Council statements concerning funding priorities, the

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debates about “appropriation of voice,” the disputes about representation at the 1989 PEN International Congress, and equations of multiculturalism with Orwellian coercion (106–12). Yet despite all the controversies it caused (e.g. Bissoondath 1994), it is clear that multiculturalism has had a significant impact on writing, publishing, and academic and public reception since the seventies.13 Although potentially catering to the static structure and cementing qualities implicit in the very image of the mosaic, multiculturalism has facilitated critical constructions of Canadian literature that see internal difference as its central quality – in other words, that view its seeming non-identity as its identity and greatest strength. In Quebec, however, the evolution of cultural pluralism and of ethnicity followed a different logic. While bilingualism may have drawn attention to ethnicity in English Canada, the application of this term in its earlier valency to all of French Canada (rather than to cultural diversity inside Quebec) had specific implications, since notions of ethnicity and multiculturalism could be understood, as René Lévesque put it, “to give an impression that we are all ethnics and do not have to worry about special status for Quebec” (Lévesque and Chaiton 1997:178, quoted in Harney 1988:75). The concept of ethnicity was devalued in the sixties and seventies in sociological perspectives that refused to see Quebec mainly in relation to English Canada and under a cultural angle, rather than in social and economic terms and as a society that had chosen its own terms of reference (Fortin 1968; Simon 1991b:26–38). In a research report published in 1994, however, Sherry Simon and David Leahy observe the beginnings of a new artistic and critical discourse in the early eighties in Quebec. In 1983, Gary Caldwell’s Les études ethniques au Québec set the stage for a resemanticization of the term ethnic “away from its previous sociological use to designate French Canadians” to “populations other than FrenchCanadian in Quebec” (Simon and Leahy 1994:387). The same year saw the publication of Régine Robin’s La Québécoite, of the volume Quêtes (a collection of Italo-Québécois texts, edited by Fulvio Caccia and Antonio d’Alfonso), and the first issue of Vice Versa, a journal that was to help articulate the notion of “transculture.” While there is by now substantial research on cultural difference within Québécois literature and on “néo-québécois” writers,14 transcultural discourses in particular have here been pioneering in designating Québécois cultural spaces as phenomena of the “contact zone” (Pratt 1992:6). Against this briefly adumbrated background I will look now in more detail at two crucial sites of the articulation of difference in Quebec, Parti pris and Vice Versa.

From narratives of emergence to transculture: Parti pris and Vice Versa Alien nation and Parti pris: whose tradition, which dialectic? “Freedom from the burden of tradition” Northrop Frye (like Margaret Atwood) often credited French Canada with leadership in matters of cultural emergence. In a well-known statement in the 1976 “Second Conclusion” to the Literary History of Canada, Frye (1982:74) thus attributes to French Canada a role of catalyst for English Canadian cultural nationalism:

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I begin with French Canada because it seems to me that the decisive cultural event in English Canada during the past fifteen years has been the impact of French Canada and its new sense of identity . . . it took the Quiet Revolution to create a real feeling of identity in English Canada, and to make cultural nationalism . . . a genuine force in the country, even a bigger and more significant one than economic nationalism. For Frye, the Quiet Revolution constitutes “as impressive an achievement of imaginative freedom as the contemporary world can show: freedom not so much from clerical domination or corrupt politics as from the burden of tradition” (73). The former kinds of freedom are generally attributed to the victory of Jean Lesage’s liberals in the 1960 provincial elections. Exeunt the Union nationale of Duplessis (who had died in 1959), and the “Grande Noirceur” (“Great Darkness”) with its “idéologie de conservation” (Rioux 1975:5; “ideology of conservation”); arrive the modern state, the creation of ministries of education and of cultural affairs, the nationalization of electric companies (resulting in Hydro Quebec), corrections to the judicial status of married women, the Quebec Pension Plan, and the Caisse de Dépôt. Yet Frye emphasizes in particular the liberation of the imagination from the burden of tradition, a feat he gives equal standing – no small fry – with any other imaginative revolution of a period that is not generally considered lacking on that count. Freedom from the burden of tradition! But which tradition? Exalting the Quiet Revolution’s liberating power, Frye submits it in the same breath to another logic of development: its capacity to incite a “feeling of identity” is a catalyst for English Canada. While catalysts remain themselves unchanged in chemical reaction, Quebec’s Quiet Revolution here plays part to another whole. That this development and tradition is a Canadian one Frye makes clear when he states that separatism “even if it achieves its aims it will do so in a historical vacuum” (1982:74). One hand giveth and the other taketh: Frye’s adroit rhetoric supports the view that the negation of Quebec clericalism and corruption is negated in another, “higher,” more important synthesis. Frye was not alone, however, in looking for a larger context of the “Quiet” Revolution. Those writers in Quebec who made the journal Parti pris their forum from 1963–68 also assumed a larger dialectic. Yet they looked for a quite different sequel and negation, one that would address more specifically the “quietude” of Quebec’s revolution. For these students of Sartre15 and the classics of decolonization – Fanon, Memmi, and Berque – the next stop in the dialectic was not Canada. Their Prochain Episode (as Hubert Aquin’s (1965) title put it) was another kind of revolution: decolonization and a secular, socialist, and independent state. For them the end of alienation meant freedom from an alien nation: their next step was not Canadian but Québécois nationhood.16 Alienation and revolution: Sartre and Fanon October 1963 to October 1968.17 Five short years it lasted, and yet Parti pris became one of the most important sites for the emergence of the discursive project of a “littérature québécoise” (Major 1979:6; Nepveu 1988:13). The titles of the inaugural issue proclaim all the beginnings: “de la révolte à la révolution,” “du duplessisme au

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F.L.Q [Front de libération du Québec],” and “vers une révolution totale” (“from revolt to revolution,” “from Duplessism to the F.L.Q [Quebec Liberation Front],” and “toward total revolution”); the “poèmes” (“poetry”) section includes Paul Chamberland’s “poème de l’antérévolution” (“ante-revolution poem”) and André Brochu’s “un enfant du pays” (“a child of the land”); in another section we find “chronique d’une révolution” (“chronicle of a revolution”), and “chronique du rassemblement pour l’indépendance nationale (R.I.N.)” (“chronicle of the union for national independence”). Among the authors of this first issue are Pierre Maheu, Jean-Marc Piotte, Paul Chamberland, André Brochu, Pierre Vadeboncoeur, Denys Arcand, Jacques Ferron, and Jacques Godbout. As the opening “présentation” specifies, “Prendre parti” (“Taking sides”) means for the editorial collective above all a distancing from the values of “objectivité” (“objectivity”), “universalisme” (“universalism”), or “Vérité éternelle” (“Eternal Truth”) seen as typical of a previous generation’s project (Parti pris I.1:2).18 By contrast, “Prendre parti, essentiellement, c’est assumer une situation telle qu’on la vit. C’est découvrir en l’inventant le sens de cette situation” (I.1:2); “Taking sides essentially means to take on a situation as we live it. It means to discover what this situation signifies while inventing it at the same time.”) And such positionality implies here partiality and action. From the very beginning, Parti pris speaks of the colonized and exploited, of degeneration and inferiority, of political control, national liberation, and independence. Independence is named not as a goal in itself, but as a means towards more radical objectives: L’essentiel pour nous est de nous libérer de ceux qui, à l’intérieur comme à l’extérieur du Québec, nous dominent économiquement et idéologiquement, et qui profitent de notre aliénation. L’indépendance n’est que l’un des aspects de la libération des Québécois par la révolution. Nous luttons pour un état libre, laïque et socialiste. (Parti pris I.1:4, emphasis added) (What matters most to us is to free ourselves from those who, outside as well as inside of Quebec, dominate us economically and ideologically, and who benefit from our alienation. Independence is but one aspect of Québécois’ liberation through revolution. We are fighting for a free, secular, and socialist state.) The call for a decolonized, secular, and socialist state made possible by independence will become the hallmark of Parti pris, combining aims pursued by previous separate initiatives such as the Institut canadien (founded in 1845 and promoting the separation of Church and State), the famous manifesto Refus global (1948), or journals like Cité libre (see Gauvin 1975:22–32). If the terms “libre, laïque et socialiste” (“free, secular, and socialist”) name a trinitarian solution, “alienation” designates Québécois predicaments generally, specified on economic, political, and cultural levels in the “présentation.” “Alienation” structures the task ahead, a work of analysis “à partir de ces deux thèmes centraux (aliénation et possibilité objective de son dépassement)” (Parti pris I.1:2; “from our two central themes [alienation and the objective possibility of surpassing it]”), and heads again the lists that itemize anamnesis and rehabilitation: “1 – L’aliénation

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dont nous souffrons . . . 2 – Nous nous libérerons bientôt de cette aliénation . . .” (I.1:3; “1 – The alienation we are suffering from . . . 2 – We shall soon be freed from this alienation . . .”). The term will recur throughout the discourse of Parti pris. If “alienation” is cited here as part of the raison d’être of Parti pris and its analytical work, the aim is its abolition: the nations’ homecoming from alien nations’ haunting. Analysis must partake of political practice (praxis, in Sartre), the action of national revolution, and the emergence of self-consciousness and group identity. Indeed, in Parti pris the theory of practice allows for “theoretical practice”19: theory and the movement of consciousness are considered as practice themselves. What will turn later into an explicitly Althusserian reflection appears in the first issue in the guise of reader recruitment: . . . simplement s’abonner à Parti Pris, c’est déjà avoir une action efficace: c’est contribuer à prouver, dans les faits, l’émergence à la conscience de soi du groupe révolutionnaire, s’y intégrer, et rapprocher le jour de la victoire de la révolution nationale et économique au Québec. (Parti pris I.1:4, emphasis added) (. . . simply subscribing to Parti Pris is in itself an effective action: it contributes to demonstrate, in concrete terms, the emergence to self-consciousness of the revolutionary group, it is a way of joining it and of bringing nearer the victory of Quebec’s national and economic revolution.) Such émergence à la conscience de soi is here part and parcel of a revolutionary practice that, in one of its aspects, consists of self-discovery and self-repossession. For Parti pris, the emergence of a successfully reflexive self-consciousness is necessary to end the practical and cognitive dualities of alienation in a colonized Québécois society and culture. This call for a different, emergent self-recognition clearly evokes echoes of the divided consciousness’ “longing to obtain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self” in Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois references the same Hegelian philosophical tradition that is at work here in his famous riff on Hegel’s “unhappy consciousness” (in addition to various American accounts of doubleness from Emerson to William James) that speaks of “doubleconsciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eye of others” (Du Bois 1989:364). Such a sense of double consciousness, conversing with itself in split articulation through the interiorized gaze of the other, also governs a novel that becomes an instant Québécois classic in 1965, Prochain Episode. Hubert Aquin, loosely associated with Parti pris (he published twice in it), stages here the frantic chase for freedom of a narrator-hero obsessed by the fear that even his most original move is predetermined by the other.20 For one of the main mediators of Hegel and later phenomenology in Quebec, Jean-Paul Sartre, “the original fall is the existence of the other” (1956:352).21 Sartre’s influence on Parti pris exceeds the direct impact of his own writings, since he also marked – and often prefaced – some of the other sources of partipriste inspiration: thinkers of African decolonization such as Jacques Berque, Albert Memmi, and Frantz Fanon. Already in 1948, Sartre had prefaced one of the most important documents of “négritude,” Léopold Sédar Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle Poésie

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nègre et malgache (in a series called “Colonies et Empires”). His influential preface, “Orphée noir,” however, will be experienced as transfixing objectivization by a despairing Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth (1963; orig. Les Damnés de la terre, 1961). In Fanon’s earlier Black Skin, White Masks (1967; orig. Peau Noire, Masques Blancs, 1952), the theme of the transfixing gaze of the other is equally central to his often quoted account of the traumatic drama of black experience in Chapter 5, “The Fact of Blackness”: “I was an object in the midst of other objects. . . . the movements, the attitudes, the glances of the other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye” (1967:109). Fanon recommended himself to the writers of Parti pris in particular because he so clearly insisted on the importance of “nation” in the struggle for decolonization (over against transnational agendas such as négritude and Pan-Africanism).22 By analogy, specifically Québécois nationhood could be emphasized in addition to more general claims in the name of the French language.23 But I want to turn here in particular to a question close to Parti pris’ allimportant concerns with identitarian language, an issue Fanon explores in his own quest for a voice of identification in “The Fact of Blackness.” Fanon describes here his experience of a crucially transfixing juncture that is caused by the perspective of the interiorized other. Where Frye relativizes the Quiet Revolution in a larger Canadian dialectic, the liberating power of “négritude” poetry is here similarly refunctionalized by a sympathetic yet disempowering dominant gaze and dialectic. In this case, the critical site is Sartre’s “Orphée noir.” The equivalent of Frye’s encompassing dialectic of the nation is here Sartre’s dialectic of the proletarian revolution. Fanon experiences the effect as devastating: “And when I tried . . . to reclaim my negritude, it was snatched away from me. Proof was presented that my effort was only a term in the dialectic.” He quotes Sartre: The Negro . . . seeks the abolition of all ethnic privileges . . . he asserts his solidarity with the oppressed of all colors. At once the subjective, existential, ethnic idea of negritude “passes,” as Hegel puts it, into the objective, positive, exact idea of proletariat. . . . But that does not prevent the idea of race from mingling with that of class: The first is concrete and particular, the second is universal and abstract. . . . In fact, negritude appears as the minor term of a dialectical progression: The theoretical and practical assertion of the supremacy of the white man is its thesis; the position of negritude as an antithetical value is the moment of negativity. But this negative moment is insufficient by itself, and the Negroes who employ it know this very well; they know that it is intended to prepare the synthesis or realization of the human in a society without races. Thus negritude is the root of its own destruction, it is a transition and not a conclusion, a means and not an ultimate end. (Sartre 1948:xl, quoted in Fanon 1967:132–3) Fanon describes the effect of this perspective as the transfixing power of this alien(ating) dialectic: When I read that page, I felt that I had been robbed of my last chance. . . . And Sartre’s mistake was not only to seek the source of the source but in a certain sense to block that source. . . . And so it is not I who make a meaning for myself,

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but it is the meaning that was already there, pre-existing, waiting for me. . . . Jean-Paul Sartre, in this work, has destroyed black zeal. (Fanon 1967:133–5) Consider by comparison the struggle of Aquin’s writer-narrator in Prochain Episode (1965) to continue his quest for a next step in the face of his opponent: Rien n’est libre ici: ni mon coup d’âme, ni la traction adipeuse de l’encre sur l’imaginaire. . . . Rien n’est libre ici, rien: même pas cette évasion fougueuse que je téléguide du bout des doigts et que je crois conduire quand elle m’efface. Rien! . . . Quelque chose me dit qu’un modèle antérieur plonge mon improvisation dans une forme atavique et qu’une alluvion ancienne étreint le fleuve instantané qui m’échappe. Je n’écris pas, je suis écrit. Le geste futur me connaît depuis longtemps. . . . Ce que j’invente m’est vécu. . . . Tout m’attend. . . . Me voici donc au fond d’une impasse où je cesse de vouloir avancer. (Aquin 1995:85–7) (Nothing is free here: neither my compulsion, nor the greasy traction of ink on the realm of fancy. . . . Nothing is free here, nothing: not even this impetuous escape that I’m manipulating with my fingertips and think I’m controlling, when in fact it is obliterating me. Nothing! . . . Something tells me that an earlier model is transforming my improvisation into some atavistic form, that an ancient alluvium is embracing the instant river that escapes me. I’m not writing. I am written. The future act has long since known me. . . . I live my own invention. . . . Everything is waiting for me . . . here I am, deep in an impasse where I no longer want to move forward.) (Aquin 2001:61–2; trans. Sheila Fischman) Liberation from the internalized other staged in this double soul becomes possible only with a wholesale change of perspective, and simultaneously of the implied addressee. When Sartre comes to preface Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, this is indeed what he notes for his European readers: “Fanon speaks of you often, never to you. . . . For the fathers, we alone were the speakers; the sons no longer even consider us as valid intermediaries: we are the objects of their speeches” (Fanon 1963:10). The question of address – with its power over speech and silence – also marks options for Québécois writing that Parti pris explored against the threat of dialectic containment. These included the temptation to fall silent in response to a dialectic that is perceived to functionalize creativity, as well as the use of simulated orality either allied with improvisation (seen as escape from such predetermined, negative functionalization) or in the form of the vernacular “joual,” as a literary device that substitutes local community for the previous European (French) addressee.24 Aquin’s Prochain Episode, finally, could be understood to spring from the dual refusal of both of these possibilities, resulting in a metafictional text that makes ambivalence and double consciousness its very subject. All of these options – even the literary figuration of orality – spring from the dual and contradictory reference

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to two cultural systems with unequal power, and constitute thus double consciousness and postcoloniality (in the sense of an ongoing process of overdetermined reference, not of posteriority).25 I will here look at a number of choices closely associated with Parti pris, including a refusal to write, “joual,” and improvisation. Writing alien nation, simulating orality: “refus de la littérature,” “divaguer,” “écrire mal,” “joual” 26 One of the reactions to the daunting dialectics of alien nation consists of literal silence or other forms of a “refus de la littérature” (Major 1979:56; “refusal of literature”). Hubert Aquin’s essay “Profession: écrivain,” published in 1964 (one year before Prochain Episode) in Parti pris (I.4), expresses this problematic forcefully. Aquin proclaims himself here “non-écrivain absolu” (I.4:23; “absolute non-writer”). Under colonization, Aquin reasons, writing creates a predictable illusion of freedom: “Artiste, je jouerais le rôle qu’on m’a attribué: celui du dominé qui a du talent. Or, je refuse ce talent, confusément peut-être, parce que je refuse globalement ma domination” (I.4:25; “As an artist, I would play the role that was assigned to me: that of a dominated man endowed with talent. Now, I refuse this talent, in a confused manner perhaps, because I globally refuse my domination”). Hence Aquin’s assertion that his paradoxically continued act of writing (barely) contains a deadly threat to both writer and medium: “Ecrire me tue” (I.4:23; “Writing kills me”); yet the medium in which the writer lives and dies can also come undone in turn through him: “j’ai l’intention de faire payer cher à sa majesté ma langue à moitié morte, mon incarcération syntaxique et l’asphyxie qui me menace; oui, je projette de me venger sur les mots déliés, de cette belle carrière qui s’ouvre devant moi à la manière d’une mine qui se referme sur celui qui l’approfondit” (I.4:23; “I intend to make her majesty, my language, barely alive, pay dearly for my syntactic incarceration and the asphyxia that threatens me; yes, I plan to take my revenge, with loosened words, for this brilliant career lying ahead of me, like a mine which closes in on you when you try to go deeper”). As it turns out in his subsequent texts, Aquin’s strategy will be directed not against syntactical logic but against the logic of predetermined positionality. This strategic paralogy is adumbrated here in the conclusion: “faire la révolution, c’est sortir du dialogue dominé-dominateur; à proprement parler, c’est divaguer” (I.4:27; “to make the revolution means to get out of the dialogue between the ruler and the ruled; strictly speaking, it means to ramble”). The dictionary glosses “divaguer” not only as “errer” (“to wander”) but also as “parler sans sujet précis” (Petit Robert; “to talk without any clear thread”) – a definition that yields a pertinent pun on the indeterminacy of the flee(t)ing subject in Aquin. Gaston Miron similarly suspects a possible double speak of literature under cultural and colonial alienation. For a prolonged period he refuses to have his poetry published (except in some small journals) or collected. In the 1965 Parti pris issue “Pour une littérature québécoise,” he remembers a point at which silence alone offered a “forme de protestation absolue, refus de pactiser avec le système par le biais de quoi que ce soit, fût-ce la littérature” (“un long chemin,” II.5:27; “a form of absolute protest, a refusal to take sides with the system in any shape or form, even literature”). In Lise Gauvin’s words, “Comme Aquin, Miron refuse de faire le jeu du

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dominé qui a du talent” (Gauvin 1975: 43; “Like Aquin, Miron refuses to act like a dominated man endowed with talent”). Miron eventually returns to publication, as he relates in “un long chemin” (II.5:30). His case offers interesting comparisons in this respect again with Dennis Lee’s silence and return to voice mentioned earlier. Paul Chamberland – co-founder and one of the most important poets and essayists of Parti pris – even associates monstrosity with his own initial attempts to write beautifully in ugly circumstances: “Mais j’allais devenir ce monstre qu’est l’écrivain canadien français” (II.5:34; “But I was to become this monster: a French-Canadian writer”). In his forceful essay “dire ce que je suis” (“to say what I am”), first published in the same issue as Miron’s “un long chemin,” he tells his readers: “Je l’ai appris de Miron: il n’existe pas de salut individuel” (II.5:37; “I learned from Miron that there is no individual salvation”). From this shared premise, however, he arrives at a very specific argument: “Ecrire, c’est alors choisir de mal écrire parce qu’il s’agit de réfléchir le mal vivre” (II.5:35; “Thus, to write, means choosing to write badly because one needs to reflect the fact that we live badly”). If Chamberland claims like Aquin the necessity of articulating non-sense and un-reason, his choice (unlike that of Miron or Aquin) is directly related to a certain kind of linguistic reality, that of the vernacular “joual” (named thus after the “joual” rendering of “cheval”). Chamberland concentrates on what he calls “le quotidien langage” (“the language of the everyday”): “Mais le langage que nous parlons est un néant de signification, à l’image même de l’abrutissement, de l’inconsistance canadienne-française. Mais c’est aussi notre seule vie, notre seule vérité: il faut la dire, il faut dire l’informe, il faut faire parler le non-sens, il faut déraisonner” (II.5:36; “But the language we speak is an emptiness of signification, mirroring the very weakness, the very mindless state of the French Canadians. But it is also our only life, our only truth: we have to voice it, to voice shapelessness, to give a voice to meaninglessness, we have to talk non-sense”). Gérald Godin, later the Quebec minister for immigration and culture, titles his essay in the same issue directly “le joual et nous” (“joual and us”; Godin 1965a). Like Chamberland’s essay, this eloquent defense of “joual” is presented, apart from a number of illustrative examples, in “standard” French. The medium of the dominant language serves here a “bilingual” writer to conduct a spirited defense of the “truth” of his other language, the vernacular “bad writing” (or “writing bad”) employed in literary practice: “nous répudiions nos origines, notre cours classique, nos soirées passées à gratter les classiques et surtout notre langue française pour choisir délibérément d’écrire mal. Non pas mal, mais vrai!” (II.5:19; “we repudiated our origins, our high school diplomas, our evenings spent deciphering the classics and above all the French language, and we chose instead to deliberately write badly. No, not badly, but truly!”). If truth be told, its language cannot be denied: “Je serai d’ici ou je ne serai pas. J’écrirai joual ou je n’écrirai pas et comme à joual donné on ne regarde pas la bride . . .” (II.5:19; “I will belong here or I will not be. I will write in joual or I will not write at all. And as one doesn’t look a gift joual in the mouth . . .”). Similarly for Jacques Renaud, the author of Le Cassé (1964), the “language of Camus” is simply inappropriate to communicate his culturally specific circumstance. When it comes to revolt, one man’s medium is another’s prison: “Mais moi, je n’arrive pas à me révolter dans la langue de Camus. Ni à y souffrir. . . . Ma révolte est celle d’un Canadien-français, ses mots et ses tournures de phrases sont

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Canadiens-français, plus spécifiquement montréalais, jouaux” (Parti pris II.5:23; “As for me, I am unable to be rebellious in the language of Camus. Nor to suffer in that language. . . . My rebellion is that of a French Canadian, its words and turns of phrase are French Canadian, more specifically from Montreal, joual”). Godin emphasizes that his own choice of “joual” as medium of literary expression says little about a desired norm of language. What is at stake is rather the necessity to lend an ear and give a voice to the reality of everyday language in the context of colonial circumstance: “Le bon français c’est l’avenir souhaité du Québec, mais le joual c’est son présent. J’aime mieux, pour moi, qu’on soit fier d’une erreur qu’humilié d’une vérité. La rédemption du joual et de ceux qui le parlent est en cours” (“le joual et nous,” Godin 1965a: Parti pris II.5:19; “Standard French is the desired future for Quebec, but joual is its present. Personally, I prefer to be proud of an error than humiliated by a truth. The redemption of joual and of those who speak it is taking place”). The issues of colony and language are of course complicated by those of class, as Fanon so carefully demonstrated in his reflections on nationhood in The Wretched of the Earth. Godin points to the treacherous temptation of using his educated middle-class French to cover up the language spoken by the majority of people (II.7:57) – and thus agrees in his own way with Aquin, Chamberland, and Miron in their respective arguments that the attempted mimicry of dominant standards only feeds into a falsely meliorative dialectic of an alien nation. But Godin also draws attention to a wider underlying function of orality in contexts of asymmetrical power and cultural overdetermination. He compares the use of “joual” in Quebec with the role of the black vernacular: Les Noirs d’Amérique étant plus politisés que nous, c’est devenu un réflexe commun chez eux que de tenter d’égarer le blanc dès qu’il s’approche d’eux, par l’utilisation du “jive-talk”. Notre accession au joual n’est que la répétition d’un mécanisme qui a fonctionné chez eux il y a bien longtemps. (“le joual politique,” Godin 1965b: Parti pris II.7:59) (American Blacks being more politicized than we are, it has become a common reflex among them to try and lead astray any white who comes close to them, by using “jive-talk.” Our accession to joual is but the repetition of a device that worked for them a long time ago.) Orality is a medium of cultural practices and systems quite different from those dictated by writing or the implications of publishing. For those who do use writing as artistic medium, orality can represent additional resources or a choice to fall back on under difficult circumstances. Miron thus remains for a certain period “vouée à l’oralité seule” (Gauvin 1975: 44; “devoted solely to orality”). Yet orality represents also one of the most important and typical strategies in situations of cultural emergence, in the encounter of new signifying practices with established ones. In particular the simulation of orality in the very act of writing – a double sign-ature and discourse – often designates here the emergence of presumably authentic identity through the very medium of the dominant symbolic – writing. In the case of “joual” as simulated orality on paper and “autonomous” literary device, this process also undercuts international French as dominant standard held up to the colonial subject.

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“Joual” and orality are joined by related strategies that trouble normative systems of the alien nation. The issue of improvisation for example is often articulated in Quebec literary history through vocabularies drawn from musical forms like jazz, as well as from various surrealist practices and forms used to unsettle the controls of consciousness and its mediation of societal norms (see Bourassa). Such strategies had been engaged already by the “automatistes” and surrealists of Refus Global (1948), that important earlier protest against “la Grande Noirceur” (“the Great Darkness”) in Quebec. In “dire ce que je suis” (“saying what I am”), Chamberland discusses thus not only vernacular language but also jazz, improvisation, and what he calls the “simple verbal automatism of the surrealists.” The absence of “premeditation” in particular seems to him a way of short-circuiting the alienating mediations of socially dominant norms that interpose themselves between “l’imagination quotidienne” (“daily imagination”) and “l’impulsion vers le merveilleux” (Chamberland 1965:II.5:41; “the impetus toward the supernatural”) (an escape chart that would require another essay). The adaptation of poetic rhythm to breath (similar to Black Mountain poetics) seems to offer here an access to “authenticity” even more direct than that through spoken language (which after all cannot avoid the symbolic).27 Depoeticization becomes for Chamberland authentication of poetry. Among various strategies of depoeticization in this context, however, it is first and foremost “joual” as a written form of resistance that has become associated with Parti pris (and also with the allied publishing effort through Les Editions Parti pris). In the simulation and creation of “joual” as literary device, double consciousness creates productive forms of multiple cultural translation with often unforeseen outcomes. On the one hand, a heavily anglicized vernacular is functionalized to underwrite francophone, Québécois cultural authenticity; at the same time, the self-assertion of orality transforms a practice of writing which now challenges another “alien” norm, in this case the Old World standard of literature in “international” French. Joual as literary phenomenon is often associated with an important phase of the emergence of a “littérature québécoise,” evoking Parti pris, works like Jacques Renaud’s Le Cassé (1964), and in particular Michel Tremblay’s play Les Belles-soeurs (1968). Lise Gauvin will observe in 1983 that “from 1968 to 1976 the practice of joual spread” (1983:41); yet with the one exception of the performance of Denise Boucher’s Les Fées ont soif (1979), she states: the question of the language of writing has deserted the contemporary literary scene. One cannot help noticing that this disappearance coincides with the firm-handed intervention on the part of the state, and with the establishment of French as the only official language of Québec (1977). The role of stewardship which was assumed by writers in this field up until then, came to an end. (Gauvin 1983:45) Yet while joual might thus be considered not as a goal in itself but – yet again – as part of a larger dialectic, this wider development was not assimilative but rather created its own logic, tradition, and cultural self-definition. Parti pris constituted an important stage of this re/cognition of a “littérature québécoise.”

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Vice Versa: nation’s alien as transcultural transformation If oral culture and the vernacular are associated here with identitarian national culture that seeks to undo double consciousness, alienation, and an alien nation, Pierre Nepveu cites Parti pris not coincidentally in the context of a “commencement d’une fin” (1988:13; “the beginning of an end”). This “end,” as we have seen in Chapter 2, carries in this case the double sense of a goal and of the subsequent possibility to think twice: both with and beyond – “through” – its limit, that of a unitary and identitarian culture, and of an essentialist idea of “littérature québécoise.”28 While for the partipristes “alienation” designated – as for Sartre – the original fall, the alien nation is by contrast both arrival and continual “point of departure” for many contributors in a journal appearing in 1983: Vice Versa: Magazine transculturel. The first issue describes its staff as having “one foot in the Italo-quebecois reality and the other two feet in North America” (Vice Versa 1.1:3). Its project is announced as “intervention on a terrain which represents the cross-road of various cultural universes,” from “a shifting perspective which may carry different marks” and “whose boundaries are as wide as those of emigration” (1.1:3).29 Whereas for Parti pris lack of control figured francophone North American culture under the sign of alienation, for this immigrant discourse in the 1980s the existence of a developed and functioning Québécois culture is not in question. This certainty does not prevent many of these writers from recognizing here a familiar sense of incompleteness. To them, however, such lack can appear as positive possibility: as the enabling side of a presumably “New World,” and as the promise of transformation.30 In his 1986 article “L’Altra Riva,” the poet and co-funder of Vice Versa Fulvio Caccia31 thus begins a section tellingly entitled “Devenir” with a passage we have already seen partially cited by Nepveu: Bien qu’accentuant leur condition minoritaire, l’incapacité des Québécois à recréer la totalité de la francité perdue sur le territoire américain est paradoxalement leur salut. Car cet échec garde ouverte la blessure originelle qui leur permet de reconnaître l’autre, d’être l’autre. L’inachèvement de la francité rend ainsi possible ce devenir autre présent dans toute culture et dont il est le fondement véritable. (Caccia 1986:45) (Even though it emphasizes their minority status, the Québécois’ inability to recreate on the American continent all of their lost francité [or “Frenchness”] is paradoxically their salvation. For this failure leaves open the original sore which enables them to recognize the other, to be the other. Francité’ s incompletion makes it possible to become other, an element present in all culture and its true foundation.) Like Chamberland, Caccia insists here that only full acceptance of a given situation will allow productive access to cultural predicaments: “L’assumer pleinement, sans regret ni amertume, tel est le choix qui se pose à celui qui veut éviter la tentation du mineur, la complaisance des formes mineures, du ressentiment qui hante toute com-

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munauté incertaine d’elle-même” (1986:45; “To take full responsibility, without any regret or bitterness, is the solution for those who wish to avoid the temptation of the minor, the complacency of minor forms, and of the resentment haunting any community uncertain of itself”). Yet Caccia arrives at a more positive re/cognition of lack as the possibility of luck by re/cognizing creative chance in alterity and transformative incompletion: “Car c’est dans l’altérité que réside la créativité dont chacun a besoin pour se renouveler, se transformer” (1986:45; “For the creativity one needs to renew and transform oneself is to be found in alterity”). Alterity here is not the Sartrean gaze of the other that subjugates the subject and reduces it to shame. In his 1984 Vice Versa review article “L’ethnicité comme postmodernité” (“Ethnicity as post-modernity”),32 Caccia identifies the very relativity and multiple alterity of Québécois culture itself as possibility and chance. Recognition of the double position as both colonized by others and colonizer of indigenous cultures – the position of white settler cultures – suggests reference, not to an assumed territory, but to specific relation and experience: Il convient ici de rappeler le rapport de réversibilité existant d’une part entre le Québec et le Canada et d’autre part entre le Québec et ses propres minorités ethniques et amérindiennes, l’un étant critique de l’autre dans une suite ininterrompue. . . . Si elle affaiblit les discours nationaux, cette minorisation à la chaîne est paradoxalement la véritable force de ce pays. Car au lieu de fonder le pays sur le territoire, l’ethnie la fonde sur elle-même en développant sa spécificité. (Caccia 1984:13) (One should point out the reversibility relationship between, on one hand, Quebec and Canada, and on the other, Quebec and its own ethnic and Amerindian minorities, one being endlessly critical of the other. . . . This assembly-line minorization may weaken national discourses, but it is paradoxically the real strength of this country. For instead of basing the country on territory, the ethnic group bases it on itself by developing its specificity.) Caccia refers in this context to Michel Morin and Claude Bertrand’s Le Territoire imaginaire de la culture (Morin and Bertrand 1979), a text that insists on the individual’s encounter with circumstance (rather than the intervention of a state) as the base of cultural territory. In a subsequent comment in Vice Versa, Bertrand and Morin disassociate the writer from the very act of identification – an act that had appeared primordial in Parti pris. For them, creators are marked by the opposite: dis-identification. They produce by definition deviance from a norm: “Le créateur est toujours un déviant, c’est-à-dire un être défaillant par rapport à la norme” (Bertrand and Morin 1987:10; “The creator is always deviant, that is to say faltering in relation to the norm”). In this view, “America” remains to be invented by creators of culture, a privileged territory of experimentation that breaks with old forms and values, including historical and national ones (Bertrand and Morin 1987:11). Elsewhere Morin denounces identitarian strategies in general as inimical to culture: “Toute revendication identitaire est déplacée d’un point de vue culturel. On ne crée pas pour se donner une identité, mais pour signifier cet ailleurs où l’on est en

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même temps que l’on est ici” (Morin 1988: 132, quoted in Lauzon 1991:37; “Any identity claim is out of place from a cultural viewpoint. We don’t create to give ourselves an identity, but to signify that we are elsewhere while at the same time being here”). The vision of alterity in the writings of Morin and Bertrand, however, is also more than problematic, as evidenced by the resonances of their notion of a “territoire vierge de toute identification préalable” (“territory devoid of any previous identification”)33 (a notion that carries at least some of the overtones of real and epistemological violence identified by Henry Nash Smith in his autocritique of the Virgin Land [Smith 1986]). Ian Lauzon thus critiques the elision of the other in Morin’s “Puissance d’une culture,” an essay in which Lauzon espies une même violence. La dernière chose que l’autre doit souffrir: servir de joker rhétorique à une ‘philosophie’ dont il est le premier à faire les frais. Dans son article, Morin n’abordait pas la question de l’autre. Ce n’est qu’au débat qu’il dut suppléer à cette ‘omission’ en expliquant, innovation radicale par rapport au texte, que la puissance d’une culture procédait de son ouverture à l’Autre. (Lauzon 1991: Vice Versa 33:36) (the same violence. The last thing that the other must suffer is to serve as a rhetorical joker in a “philosophy” that he is the first to bear the brunt of. In his article, Morin didn’t discuss the question of the other. It was only at the debate that he had to make up for this omission by explaining that the power of a culture proceeded from its openness to the Other, a radical innovation in relation to his text.) Caccia is hardly interested in an elision of alterity, or a non-reflexive, unilateral relationship with it. Instead, he seeks to uncover multiple articulations of agency made possible by what he calls “le pari de toute situation transculturelle” (Caccia 1986: Vice Versa 16:45; “the challenge of any transcultural situation”). Yet what he does retain from Le Territoire imaginaire de la culture is a formulation that finds its echo also in Nepveu’s title Intérieurs du nouveau monde: “L’avenir de la culture ici, il faut plutôt le chercher du côté d’un mouvement d’intériorisation. . . . L’individu y trouvera le dehors non pas comme l’autre pur, l’étranger, mais plutôt comme l’étrange . . . qui lui permettra de se lancer à corps perdu dans l’invention d’un autre monde” (quoted in Caccia 1984: Vice Versa 2.1:13, 22; “The future of culture here, one must look for it in a move toward the inside. . . . That’s where one will find the outside, not as a pure other, a stranger, but rather as the strange . . . which will enable one to throw oneself headlong in the invention of another world”). The encounter with the strange, the new, the alien is read here as positive “alienation” and “becoming other,” closer to the Russian formalists’ “making strange” or Brechtian “Ver fremdung” than to existentialist alienation and “Ent fremdung.”34 Cited and expressed in this way by the migrant subject, such will to metamorphosis and transformation – which is implicit also in transculturation – could perhaps be interpreted by an “atavistic” (Glissant 1995:19) host culture as a wish of assimilation. This is not, however, in keeping with Jean Lamore’s 1987 examination of the history of the word “transculturation” in Vice Versa, in a passage that has proven

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influential. Lamore insists here on a rehabilitation of Fernando Ortiz’ original concept in his study of Cuba, Tabaco y azucar (1940): En fait, le sens exact et créateur de la transculturation selon son “inventeur,” F. Ortiz, est clair et doit être réhabilité: la transculturation est un ensemble de transmutations constantes; elle est créatrice et jamais achevée; elle est irréversible. Elle est toujours un processus dans lequel on donne quelque chose en échange de ce qu’on reçoit: les deux parties de l’équation s’en trouvent modifiées. Il en émerge une réalité nouvelle, qui n’est pas une mosaïque de caractères, mais un phénomène nouveau, original et indépendant. (Lamore 1987: “Transculturation: naissance d’un mot,” Vice Versa 21:19) (In fact, the precise and creative meaning of transculturation according to its “inventor,” F. Ortiz, is clear and it needs to be restored: transculturation is a series of constant transmutations; it is creative and never-ending; it is irreversible. It is always a process in which something is given in exchange for what is received: the two parts of the equation are therefore altered. A new reality emerges, which is neither a mosaic of characters, but a new, original, and independent phenomenon.) Partially through their articulation in Vice Versa (until its demise in 1996), similar concepts of transculture have made substantial headway in many areas of Quebec cultural critique (although they do not reflect Quebec’s official position of “interculture” towards its “communautés culturelles” [“cultural communities”; see Helly 1996]). Such views of cultural change can indeed help to account for the many actual cultural practices “d’ici” and the new but still local realities resulting from their interactions, without subsuming a specifically Québécois cultural dynamic under an externally defined teleology or dialectic. As anti-essentialist narratives, Québécois concepts of transculture invite exploration of the specificity of writing in Quebec as it is constituted in transcultural processes.

Charles Taylor, desire, and the limits of self-certainty Alterity and recognition Francophone cultural difference in Canada and North America is one of the crucial issues in Charles Taylor’s “The Politics of Recognition.” Published originally in 1992 and re-issued in 1994 with responses by Anthony Appiah and Jürgen Habermas (and the subject of much further comment since), the essay analyzes the implications of linguistic difference and identity together with considerations of multiculturalism. Taylor chooses as common ground and interpretive key the very concept of “recognition” that constitutes, in its negativity, also the experience of double consciousness. Taylor’s essay was quickly greeted in the United States as “the first major statement of a distinctly philosophical approach to the issues of multiculturalism that engages directly with the current controversies on campus” (Blum 1994:175). Among the critical voices, however, writers like Appiah and Habermas concentrated

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in particular on Taylor’s willingness, elaborated with the role of French in Canada as central example, to make room for a model of liberalism that would take into account differences in cultural experience and history in its articulation of rights and freedoms under a given constitutional system (Appiah 1994; Habermas 1994). I will examine here Taylor’s deployment of the concept of recognition itself, its relation to different positions in processes of emergence,35 and the limits, or (sub)liminal implications, of its inherent staging of alterity. Taylor’s emphasis on recognition defines identity from the beginning as relational and a function of alterity. Identity is conceived with reference to the instance from which recognition is sought, and which is perceived to be able to dispense such recognition. It appears thus not as a state, condition, or the sum total of essentially defined qualities, but as a relational phenomenon that is mediated through complex processes of alterity. In this perspective, the term “identity” serves as a kind of shorthand for a process in which the subject is not identical at all (either with itself or in identification with some other), but rather split in its interactions with the other. As a trace of this process, the subject constitutes its corresponding selves, or, in a further consolidation, recollects its self. This widely accepted formalism of alterity, however, says little as such about the contents of this process. Taylor’s discussion hinges on the argument that the desire for self-certainty relies on a process of reciprocal recognition, in which self-recognition depends crucially on recognition of the other (an argument developed in Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave). Taylor himself points to a necessary limit of the fulfillment of this desire for self-certainty, in one context with reference to historical praxis, but also more generally in his construction of cross-cultural hermeneutics. This limit suggests both a lack of absolute knowledge and the possibility of alterity beyond the projection of the self; in Taylor’s words, it allows to “let the other be” (Taylor 1995:150).36 I will argue that, if a non-transparent limit remains37 in the process of reciprocal recognition that would fulfill each actor’s or participant’s desire for complete self-certainty, then it matters crucially who posits self and other, and how self and other are posited. I will suggest that it is here that Taylor’s argument deserves more scrutiny. How is the “we” conceived? How is the ground of alterity chosen? What is the point of reference that has been selected which allows us to perceive the posited participants in relation to each other? Such questions assume that even in a formal description, the positing of identity exceeds recognition because the perception of recognition requires that a perception of the other is formed. The identitarian act implies, at the very least, a process of double and complementary positing of self and other.38 In the act of imagining the other, the communal “we” or the self’s “I” is conceived; in the process of positing the “I” or “we” (how could this be done without imagining the other?), the other is apprehended. What initiates, and ultimately initials, this process has to do with the positionality of the participants. And previous experience and perception determines in this process the subsequent hypotheses and expectations, while these in turn will have significant impact on the subsequent experience. In order to determine whether, and what kind of, recognition has been given or withheld, it is first necessary – to modify Benedict Anderson’s formulation – to study the style in which recognition is imagined.

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Recognition between authenticity and equal dignity Taylor derives the problematic of recognition, which for him governs as a conflict the current multiculturalism and identity politics debates, from a notion that characterizes modernity in general, the notion of authenticity. In contrast to the socially predetermined identities in premodern hierarchical societies, the new “ideal of authenticity” can “decisively undermine this socially derived identification” (Taylor 1994:31). Taylor illustrates this development with reference to Rousseau and Herder. Rousseau sees the issue of morality “as that of our following a voice of nature within us” (Taylor 1994:29); Herder formulates the notion that both individuals and nations have, and have to live up to, their “own measure” rather than preordained universal norms (1994:30–1). But this potential freedom has its risks and latent downside. While the new identity, “inwardly derived, personal, original” eventually also has come to be perceived as dialogical and in need of recognition, this recognition has ceased to be granted a priori as it was in a system of stable and preordained identities; it can therefore fail (1994:34–5). What is worse, there is an inherent reason why the quest for recognition risks (and courts) failure in postulating a specific cultural difference of the singular or communal subject. Such a discourse of specific difference and recognition will collide with the democratic discourse of difference-blind recognition and with the “politics of universalism” (1994:37) implicit in the notion of equal dignity that has replaced the pre-republican systems of preferential honour. Taylor writes: “These two modes of politics . . . both based on the notion of equal respect, come into conflict. For one, the principle of equal respect requires that we treat people in a difference-blind fashion . . . For the other, we have to recognize and even foster particularity” (1994:43).39 Hence flow the controversies over multiculturalism, affirmative action, racially determined university admission quotas in the United States, and, in Taylor’s further discussion in this particular essay, the hotly debated question of whether the “distinct society” status for Quebec can override, in certain cases, the 1982 Canadian Charter of Rights (a proposition not validated with the 1990 ratification failure of the 1987 Meech Lake Constitutional Accord). Taylor will ultimately side against a purely difference-blind liberalism, which he characterizes, with reference to Ronald Dworkin’s work, as “procedural” in a Kantian tradition.40 He will defend a differential handling of rights that would allow some of them to be restricted in the name of certain substantive goals; he thus discriminates between untouchable “fundamental liberties” (such as habeas corpus) on the one hand, and “privileges and immunities . . . that can be revoked or restricted for reasons of public policy” (1994:59), as for example in the context of the survival of the French language in Quebec, on the other. Taylor here recognizes considerations that pertain also to some extent to most constructions of multiculturalism; and he will indeed reference this situation (which is usually discussed in Canada as biculturalism/bilingualism rather than multiculturalism) with respect to a globalized condition of multiculturalism that may render the “rigidities” of purely procedural liberalism “impractical in tomorrow’s world” (1994:61). I will argue, however, that he resorts to a different modeling of multiculturalism when he subsequently proceeds to a discussion of recognition and equal worth in the context of the culture

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and canon debates that have operated inside given cultures rather than between different cultures inside a nation-state. In order to understand better the two models of recognition that seem to be at work in this incongruity, I will first follow in more detail Taylor’s staging of alterity and trace its presuppositions, before then considering what I take to be a paradoxical stance that allows for certain substantive goals in one case but arguably misrecognizes or mis-places similar goals in other multiculturalism debates. Recognition as reflection? The desire for self-certainty and the limit of absolute spirit Taylor formulates the link between (mis)recognition and identity in the following premise that he offers at the beginning of his essay (1994:25): The thesis is that our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or a group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. Non-recognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being. Taylor then draws our attention to the important dimension of internalized negative images that can persist even after external obstacles have ceased to produce negative mediations. Certainly Taylor points to an important issue here. The disruption of self-perpetuating internalized processes of alterity has been among the most vital aims of cultural criticism. Yet the “reflectionist” metaphor of the mirror seems to assume the existence of another, correct, undistorted, and unreduced image that could be neutrally reflected and “mirrored back.” The very absence of such an image, however, is at stake if all images are mediated by available registers. This absence drives attempts to go beyond the oppositions generated by given norms, and to explore possibilities and “New Worlds” that would differ from the containments of “reverse-discourse” (Gates 1992a:314). A reflectionist model of recognition remains tied to an already existing imaginary, and de-emphasizes the unpredictable re-cognition and potential of mediation. Such a model elides precisely the process of social and cultural mediation and alterity itself that Taylor proposes to elucidate; any process of “mirroring back” projects the codes and norms that regulate “recognition.” Recognition, in this perspective, would indeed invoke an act of identical repetition: the second cognition of an already established instance. Recognition would receive the meaning of its prefix “re-” in analogy to the identifying standards of re-flection. How can we situate this aspect that seems to intervene problematically in Taylor’s perspective? And what are the consequences of this aspect in Taylor’s further argument? Taylor refers at various points of his argument to the concept of recognition that Hegel proposes in the Phenomenology of Spirit. He begins his account of the rise of a “discourse of recognition and identity,” in fact, by directing our attention to Hegel’s dialectic of the master and the slave (1994:26). He then first explicates, as we have seen, the ideal of authenticity with reference to Rousseau and Herder (1994:28–32),

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delineates its dialogical dimension and thus the possibility of recognition to fail (1994:32–4), and then shows how two forms of the politics of equal recognition in the public sphere come into conflict (43) – the “politics of universalism” (37) derived from dignity, and the “politics of difference” (38) derived from a modern form of identity based on authenticity. Taylor returns to Hegel and shows how his account of recognition, “its most influential early treatment” (1994:36), follows Rousseau’s new modeling of selfother relationships, who “begins to think out the importance of equal respect” (1994:45). On the one hand, Rousseau critiques other-dependence that results from the need for esteem: “The other-dependent person is a slave to ‘opinion’. This idea is one of the keys to the connection that Rousseau assumes between otherdependence and hierarchy” (1994:45). Yet Taylor suggests that “these two things would seem separable. Why can’t there be other-dependence in conditions of equality?” (1994:45). And indeed he adduces passages by Rousseau about the role of public games in ancient Greece in which glory and public recognition have a positive value (1994:46–7). In contrast to preferential honour in non-republican society, the solution here lies in “the balanced reciprocity that underpins equality. One might say (though Rousseau didn’t) that in these ideal republican contexts, everyone did depend on everyone else, but all did so equally” (1994:47). Taylor thus finds in Rousseau a model of “perfectly balanced reciprocity [that] takes the sting out of our dependence on opinion,” a model that is compatible with both freedom and being true to oneself (authenticity): “Complete reciprocity, along with the unity of purpose that makes it possible, ensures that in following public opinion I am not in any way pulled outside myself. I am still ‘obeying myself’ as a member of this common project or ‘general will’ ” (48). On this basis, Taylor (1994:50) moves to the Hegelian conception of recognition in the dialectic of master and slave: This new critique of pride, leading not to solitary mortification but to a politics of equal dignity, is what Hegel took up and made famous in his dialectic of the master and the slave. Against the old discourse on the evil of pride, he takes it as fundamental that we can flourish only to the extent that we are recognized. Each consciousness seeks recognition in another, and this is not a sign of a lack of virtue. But the ordinary conception of honor as hierarchical is crucially flawed. It is flawed because it cannot answer the need that sends people after recognition in the first place. Those who fail to win out in the honor stakes remain unrecognized. But even those who do win are more subtly frustrated, because they win recognition from the losers, whose acknowledgment is, by hypothesis, not really valuable, since they are no longer free, self-supporting subjects on the same level with the winners. The struggle for recognition can find only one satisfactory solution, and that is a regime of reciprocal recognition among equals. Hegel follows Rousseau in finding this regime in a society with a common purpose, one in which there is a “we” that is an “I”, and an “I” that is a “we”. At least, with respect to Rousseau, Taylor goes on to point out that the inseparability of three elements in his model, “freedom (nondomination), the absence of

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differentiated roles, and a very tight common purpose,” have provided “the formula for the most terrible forms of homogenizing tyranny, starting with the Jacobins and extending to the totalitarian regimes of our century” (1994:51). Rejecting Rousseau’s model of citizen dignity, he examines other “politics of equal dignity,” first Kantian models that neither link equal freedom to a general will nor speak to the issue of differentiation of roles (models which he will also find “inhospitable to difference”) and then forms of liberalism that allow for “substantive” goals that can differ in a wider frame of reference. Taylor does not delineate here to what point he would implicate Hegel’s entire Phenomenology41 in his verdict on the consequences of Rousseau’s model,42 but Hegel’s construction of recognition (minus the “common purpose”) constitutes an unavoidable reference point in his discussion of the politics of recognition. Taylor cites it at three different junctures in his essay (1994:26, 36, 50) as an enabling dialectic because it seems centrally relevant to any construction of a “politics of equal dignity.” Yet it also provides a certain limit because Hegel’s dialectic of recognition is simultaneously the dialectic of a desire for absolute self-certainty or “complete self-clarity” (Taylor 1975:569); in Taylor’s words elsewhere, it is part of Hegel’s “central ontological thesis, that the universe is posited by a Spirit whose essence is rational necessity,” a synthesis which, as Taylor says, “is quite dead” (Taylor 1975:538).43 In this perspective, Hegel’s dialectic marks both a crucial limit and a necessary stage in concepts of self–other relationships; to the extent that the search for a situated subjectivity takes philosophical form, Hegel’s thought will be one of its indispensable points of reference. For although his ontological vision is not ours . . . Hegel’s writings provide one of the most profound and farreaching attempts to work out a vision of embodied subjectivity, of thought and freedom . . . finding expression in the forms of social existence, and discovering themselves in relation to nature and history. (Taylor 1975:571) Taylor’s construction of recognition can be read with respect to this space and this limit. The beginning of Taylor’s discussion of recognition resembles partly the beginning of Hegel’s sub-chapter on the dialectic of master and slave in which he develops his analysis of the logic of recognition. Hegel writes: “Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged. . . . The detailed exposition of the Notion of this spiritual unity in its duplication will present us with the process of Recognition” (Hegel 1977:111; emphases added).44 Yet this process entails also a built-in dialectic of desire (Butler 1987; O’Neill 1996). Hegel develops the consequence of the fact that self-consciousness can only recognize itself through recognition of an other in a complex process of several projections that produce the self as mediated through the other: Self-consciousness is faced by another self-consciousness; it has come out of itself. This has a twofold significance: first, it has lost itself, for it finds itself as an other being; secondly, in doing so it has superseded the other, for it does not see the

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other as an essential being, but in the other sees its own self. . . . It must supersede this otherness of itself. . . . First, it must proceed to supersede the other independent being in order thereby to become certain of itself as the essential being; secondly, in so doing it proceeds to supersede its own self, for this other is itself. (Hegel 1977:111; emphasis original) In his 1975 study Hegel, Taylor himself gives a clear summary of this Hegelian project in the Phenomenology as a project of desire. He delineates Hegel’s attempt to demonstrate the movement from an “ordinary conception of knowledge” through an itinerary that will lead “to a form of consciousness which will no longer be a prey to contradiction, but will be able to hold it reconciled within itself. This will be real, or absolute knowledge.” This trajectory will be the phenomenology of Spirit, in which consciousness will fight through and eventually overcome the point of view from which it seems to be involved with what is foreign to it . . . and come to see itself as the self-knowledge of Geist. . . . Thus alongside the dialectic of knowing, that of “consciousness,” we see a dialectic of desire and fulfilment, of “self-consciousness.” The root of this latter is what Hegel calls our “certainty of self” (Selbstgewißheit), a rich concept which designates at once our notion of ourselves and the state for which we strive. (Taylor 1975:136–7) Hegel’s “absolute spirit” is thus conceived as a form which is able to recognize – and recognize itself in – all contradiction. This form of self-certainty will have integrated everything that was once outside of its purview; there will be nothing left beyond its ken. No outsidedness will persist whose opaqueness would hold out against the “spiritual daylight of the present.” This is, in another perspective, the struggle between “phenomenon” and “thingin-itself” – which the Phenomenology ultimately seeks to decide in favour of fulfilled desire, an absolute incorporation of the “thing-in-itself” into the realm of the phenomenon. Taylor describes thus the Hegelian attack on Kant which ultimately identifies the unknown with the knowable: The epistemological gap between man and nature expresses itself in its best known form in the Kantian distinction between phenomena and things-inthemselves. The latter were for ever and in principle unknowable. Hegel directs a powerful polemic against the Kantian thing-in-itself. And the final argument is this: how can there be anything beyond knowledge, that is beyond mind or Geist, for Geist turns out ultimately to be identical with the whole of reality? (Taylor 1975:117) And yet this model and staging of alterity does remain liminal; at least it can be seen, even outside a Kantian position, to have limits that may prevent it from ever reaching the absolute, as Taylor points out later when he discusses the limits of stoicism:

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In a sense, the “reflection of self in other” in this second passage – in contrast to the automatically assumed possibility of equating Spirit and reality cited in the first passage – only ceases to be projection of the self upon the other (and thus ceases to be “recognition” in a normative sense of verifying the conformity of the recognized with the certifying standards of the recognizer) if it resolves all contradiction; any remainder upholds outsidedness over the illusions of projected identity. The project of “certainty of self,” which drives self-consciousness in its desire and quest for self-fulfillment, can thus function in two different ways in its attempts at mediation. In a first sense of recognition, by given standards, it is a normative, repeated cognition, that is, a matching process and recognition of sameness attributed to the other. In another sense of re-cognition, it would be cognition of self and other in a different way that cannot retain the same ground of cognition; at least from the present point of view of the cognizer, this model implies a certain non-transparency, the “opacité” we have seen Glissant name as “le signe le plus évident de la non-barbarie” (1995:54). We have already also seen Taylor invoke a historical liminality that implies that self-recognition and embodiment of spirit is not unconditionally possible or successful (as in the first passage), but at the very least contingent on history and praxis; in addition, Taylor will adduce hermeneutic reasons, which I will examine later, to suggest why for him there remains a categorical, unbridgeable remainder in other-understanding. Models of re-cognition ultimately take risks of a more-than-temporary non-transparency, question the equation of the unknown with the knowable, and assume a notion of “cognition” that maintains “negativity” as necessary category against a potentially treacherous perception of transparency and projections of a “home-understanding.”45 My hypothesis is that Taylor’s staging of alterity moves in an ambivalent space between these two models of recognition when he returns to the question of multiculturalism in section V of his essay. More precisely, in his presentation of the main argument that he seeks to refute, he constructs multiculturalism to suggest that its proponents desire only standard recognition. Yet, in fact, multiculturalists would be hardly worth the name if they did not, indeed, propose a model based on some kind of re-cognition. Up to a point, this is indeed also Taylor’s model; my dual suggestion is that Taylor’s “multiculturalists” do not represent the strongest version of the argument (unlike in most other cases of Taylor’s discussion, where he seeks to counter precisely the strongest version of the opponent’s case), and that Taylor “misplaces” the question of positionality in his positing of “we” and “they,” effectively underestimating the vector of desire implicit in the dialectic of selfconsciousness and recognition.

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Multiculturalism; or who is “we”? In the fourth section of his essay, as we have already seen, Taylor discusses and compares purely procedural versions of liberalism and those that maintain “substantive” goals and are thus willing to distinguish between unassailable fundamental liberties and “privileges and immunities that are important, but that can be revoked or restricted for reasons of public policy” (1994:59).46 He calls the former “inhospitable to difference” because they are “suspicious of collective goals” (such as ensuring the survival of the French language), and sides with the latter. These different forms of liberalism “are willing to weigh the importance of certain forms of uniform treatment against the importance of cultural survival, and opt sometimes in favor of the latter” (1994:61). Taylor uses the Canadian constitutional debates and the role of the 1982 Canadian Charter of Rights to exemplify the differences between these two models of liberalism, and ends this section by extending these issues of biculturalism in a concluding reference to multiculturalism: “Indisputably . . . more and more societies today are turning out to be multicultural, in the sense of including more than one cultural community that wants to survive. The rigidities of procedural liberalism may rapidly become impractical in tomorrow’s world” (1994:61). In the subsequent discussion of multiculturalism, however, Taylor shifts to a quite different scenario and model of alterity. The following section V discusses multicultural societies that become more “porous” with respect to the outside: “Their porousness means that they are open to multinational migration; more of their members live the life of diaspora, whose center is elsewhere” (1994:61). Beyond the question of survival (and surprisingly in opposition to the case considered in the previous discussion), Taylor claims that “the further demand we are looking at here is that we all recognize the equal value of different cultures; that we not only let them survive, but acknowledge their worth” (1994:64). Against this background, Taylor constructs the demands for canon revision in universities and schools on the model of “distortion” that we have encountered at the beginning of his essay. He writes: “The claim is that the judgments of worth on which these latter [traditional curricula] were supposedly based were in fact corrupt. . . . The implication seems to be that absent these distorting factors, true judgments of value of different works would place all cultures more or less on the same footing” (1994:66). While Taylor attributes a certain validity to a presumption of equal worth as an act of faith and appropriate working hypothesis in the study of other cultures (1994:66–7, 72–3), he suggests that the true claim implicit in multiculturalist canon debates goes much further: “The claim seems to be that a proper respect for equality requires more than a presumption that further study will make us see things this way, but actual judgments of worth applied to the customs and creations of these different cultures” (1994:68). Constructing multiculturalism in this way, Taylor sees here a request for positive value judgments “on demand” (1994:70), requests for recognition of equal value that would come without valuation. Taylor points out, correctly I believe, that a judgment prior to any work of mediation can only result in the homogenizing imposition of already given, i.e. dominant values. Cognitive procedure of this kind “implies that we already have the standards to make such judgments. The standards we have, however,” Taylor claims, “are

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those of North Atlantic civilization. And so the judgments implicitly and unconsciously will cram the others into our categories”(1994:71). Yet for this very reason, “multiculturalists” of the type sketched by Taylor – while they undoubtedly exist – do not represent a strong version of the multicultural argument. Precisely because a transparent mediation or cognition of same value in a given system – recognition by given standards – implies normative judgment, the desire for this kind of recognition has usually been equated, not with multiculturalism, but with assimilation. Houston Baker, one of the early active participants in the canon debates (Fiedler and Baker 1981; Baker 1982), as we have seen, thus speaks of an “integrationist” discourse which cannot recognize elements outside its boundaries (Baker 1984:77). Baker suggests here that a crucial step in the emergence of black writing and culture in the United States was arrived at, not by the dispensation and acceptance of recognition under an integrationist norm, but by a shift in position and thus in perspective that helped to construct the entire field of perception and its objects in a different way. What Baker proposes is not recognition by dominant values, but a cognitive paradigm change, or a version of re-cognition. This kind of difference does not settle for recognition in the normative sense, which would imply its verification and authentication as a conform copy, and thus flatten any dialectic in simple assimilation. On the contrary, “re-cognition” in this case implies that normative or habitual consciousness and judgment (including what Vizenor calls “victimry”) move out of their own sphere. Yet re-cognition turns again into a copy – this time inverted – of the kind of monocultural norm from which it set out to differ, if it does not manage to maintain, or regain, some limit to self-certainty; otherwise, the projective illusion of “Absolute Spirit,” of complete transparency and limitless assimilation of all other standpoints and cognitive dialectics, takes back over and reverts, for self-certification, to a new version of standard recognition. I agree in fact with Taylor’s own reconstruction elsewhere of intercultural hermeneutics, which attests to a certain necessary non-transparency. Yet Taylor here looks at remaining liminality as an (ever-diminishing) object of continuing controlseeking self-certainty; I think its unavoidable necessity is not just a question of quantitative diminuation. I will quote here at some length the development of his argument in the essay “Comparison, History, Truth”: other-understanding is always in a sense comparative. That is because we make the other intelligible through our own human understanding. This is always playing a role, and can’t just be put out of action. The more we think we have sidelined it or neutralized it, as in the natural-science model, the more it works unconsciously and hence all the more powerfully to ethnocentric effect. In a sense we only liberate the others and “let them be” when we can identify and articulate a contrast between their understanding and ours, thereby ceasing in that respect just to read them through our home understanding, and allowing them to stand apart from it on their own. . . . The hope that we can escape ethnocentrism reposes on the fact that these contrasts transcend and often incommode the previous home understanding. But we might object: the new understanding is also “ours” in an important sense. It belongs to the community of scholars who are usually confined to the home culture . . .

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There is no answer in principle against these charges. . . . On my account, there is no way to go except forward; to apply, that is, further doses of the same medicine. We must try to identify and place in contrast the new limit, and hence “let the other be” that much more effectively. This process may go on indefinitely, but that doesn’t make the earlier stages without value: severe distortions may be overcome at any of them. But, in a sense, understanding on this Gadamer view is always, in one way, from a limited perspective. When we struggle to get beyond our limited home understanding, we struggle not toward a liberation from this understanding as such (the error of the natural-science model) but toward a wider understanding which can englobe the other undistortively. (Taylor 1995:150–1) This model of understanding suggests that while modes of interaction can be productively refined, there remains also a distinct and specific difference if the starting points of these cognitive itineraries are really different (rather than projected variants or different parts of the same dialectic). Yet in that case, judgments of “great value” indeed necessitate the question, “great value for whom?” Positionality and posited presuppositions will then determine judgments that reflect stages in substantially different dialectics, and thus in different attempts at self-certainty that may remain incommensurable inside one given dialectic. I do not believe that in strong formulations of multiculturalism and in multicultural canon debates requests are made to deliver automatically positive value judgments that would imply, in this sense, one unitary perspective and value standard for all sides involved; the difference of perspective could be taken, in fact, to be the very point of genuine multiculturalism. The implication is that processes of selfcertainty and self-certification are different, and signify differently; if there are several perspectives – not one – from which “we struggle . . . toward a wider understanding which can englobe the other undistortively,” then there are clearly several “we”s, and the remainders in the hermeneutics of cross-cultural dialogue may not dissolve in reciprocal self-mediation that can be transparently and identically retraced and recognized from all sides. In this respect, the identification and self-recognition invited by the “we” that Taylor posits in the last section deserves particular attention. This “we” differs from the communal identifier in the previous sections (“if we think of,” “we might well agree”) in its opposition to a “they.” Taylor defines for example, in the passage already cited above, the “standards we have” as “those of North Atlantic civilization.” Yet the paradigms that meet and compete in the canon and multiculturalism debates, some of which Taylor adduces at several points in his essay, are hardly exterior to this space. As Henry Louis Gates remarks, “the periphery is never someplace else” (Gates 1992a:316). And as Ian Angus points out in his discussion of Taylor, in multiculturalism especially the construction of “external” borders hardly works since subcultures are not simply other cultures (Angus 1997:153).47 This is emphatically clarified, as we have seen, by Baker’s demonstration that African American culture is not exterior to America, but that the discursive formation of American culture – AMERICA – has exteriorized it: “The song is no stranger. . . . What has been estranging has been AMERICA” (Baker 1984:64–5). Similar perspectives can be found

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already in W. E. B. Du Bois’ remarks that the truly original components of American culture issue from black culture (for instance the blues or “sorrow songs”) (Du Bois 1986a:370). Other examples emerge generally from the study of the elements excluded from the various processes of New World ethnogenesis, for example the languages (Kirkconnell 1936, 1941; Shell 1993; Sollors 1998; Shell and Sollors 2000; Batts 2002) or cultural traits that have not been selected in the various narratives of nationhood that have been formulated, yet which nonetheless are part and parcel of the fabric. Finally, one can also consider in this respect the case of other so-called hyphenated Americans who more likely than not consider themselves first American and only secondly ethnic, which indeed implies boundaries of “Americanness” that differ substantially from those perhaps accepted in the post-war decades,48 and from those that seem implied by Taylor when he speaks of “North Atlantic civilization.” It is clear in this context that the “we” Taylor ushers in in the last section of his essay is indeed not the “we” of “North Atlantic civilization,” but rather designates a specific positionality within that civilization.49 Such an insistence on locating the specificity of the “we” enunciated here hardly denies the validity of many aspects of Taylor’s complex argument. But it does help to locate the ambivalence in the staging of alterity that arises in a dual construction of “multiculturalism.” On the one hand, Taylor is ready to move beyond purely “procedural” perspectives in defense of certain “substantive” goals such as the survival of a language other than English in North America, and thus accepts certain facets of a multicultural logic. Recognition in this case seems based on the nonexclusion of something already familiar to “Western” cognition – French – and it thus functions inside the model of standard recognition; this seems to leave open the possible sublation in a communal “we.” But Taylor arguably underdetermines other claims by attributing to them initially claims for standard recognition on demand, although his own objections to this logic call for a much more complex process of understanding and interpretation. Ultimately Taylor accepts that the dialectic of self-certainty does imply a necessary limit and that its entirely transparent resolution seems impossible. But this potentially limitless process is unpredictable because it cannot be conceived inside one dialectic. While Taylor emphasizes the gains in each new mediation of what he calls the “home understanding” (1995:150), he concedes that this process only extends one perspective; it does not lead to dialectically transparent self-certainty in its recognition of the other, but fosters more of the same. Perhaps this prospect of limitless “unhomeliness” inside the “home understanding” that is evoked by processes of re-cognition – which challenge perspectival boundaries and alter the reference of self-certainty – is related to Taylor’s initial closure of a “we” in opposition to an external “they,” and his emphasis on a multiculturalism with “external” sources. Taylor’s subsequent recognition of a meaningful “presumption of equal worth” that he seeks to base, at the very end of his essay, on moral grounds – “it would take a supreme arrogance to discount this possibility a priori” (1994:73) – still operates with the negation of multiculturalism as such inside the home understanding, while waiting for an elusive, as yet invisible “ultimate horizon from which the relative worth of different cultures might be evident” (1994:73).

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Cultural difference: the future of an illusion? What are the limits of the historicist criticism of false universals? Is it not much more productive . . . to maintain the paradoxical notion of the Universal as simultaneously impossible and necessary? Slavoj Zˇ izˇek (2000), “Questions from Slavoj Zˇ izˇek” Particularity is not the opposite of universality but its condition, as universality is not the transcendence of particularity but its articulation. Ian Angus (1997), A Border Within Taylor’s cross-cultural hermeneutics, necessarily and admittedly extending one particular process of self-certainty from its presuppositions, emphasizes more the possible refinements of its endless dialectical revisions than the inevitable limit of this process. This seems “understandable” since the limitless “unhomeliness” inside what Taylor names “home understanding” cannot be absolved from within this “home.” What is beyond its conceptual confines, what refuses recognition and forces re-cognition, cannot be gained by negation of a given thesis in the same process of self-certainty. Admittance of a position that cannot be subsumed under the home understanding threatens the very process of self-certainty. Such prospects can evoke the ambivalences of the sublime – the domesticated attractions of exoticism (Bongie 1991; Huggan 2001) together with fears in the face of the unknown that have to be calmed by “reassuring signs” (Greenblatt 1991:54). As Zˇ izˇek notes in The Sublime Object of Ideology about the distinction between beauty and sublimity by Kant (also employed by Hegel), one is shaped and bounded, whereas the other is shapeless and boundless: “Beauty calms and comforts; Sublimity excites and agitates” (Zˇ izˇek 1989:202). Because the sublime surpasses containment, the sentiment of sublimity “is attached to chaotic, terrifying limitless phenomena (rough sea, rocky mountains)” (Zˇ izˇek 1989:202). But limitless unhomeliness inside a “home understanding” can also appear as the more distinct threat of objecthood: in search of self-certainty, the subject here perceives itself as object of an other’s process of selfcertainty, potentially beyond the control of the self, rather than a stage to be overcome in the next dialectial refinement of self-certainty. This also describes one side of double consciousness. Du Bois’ thinking about double consciousness, I suggested earlier, referenced reluctantly the possibility that Hegel’s “Spirit” was designed to eradicate: an unthinkable relationship between contradictory systems of reference and their continuing coexistence. At the same time, this refusal of “recognition” within given terms, this double consciousness and evasion of equation constitutes the process, I have argued, in which explorative emergence proceeds. Qua understanding and self-consciousness, such awareness of incongruity and deferral of (rather than deference to) available recognition tends towards its selfabolition; to proceed otherwise appears to abandon the attempt “to make sense” of it all. And yet precisely when it all makes sense to one understanding, all other (and others’) understanding is eclipsed by the projection of this singular, homogenous totality. While the necessity of some form of double consciousness therefore “makes sense” in theory, it resists understanding as teleological progress, and is resisted by

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it. Cross-cultural hermeneutics aware of this limit therefore often bets on the infinite refinability of its approximative dialectic appropriations, and hopes for final convertibility and completed understanding. Du Bois’ own insistence on particularity, born out of lived experience, aimed at the same time also at a communicable “universality” – one that would not, however, eradicate particularity either. This attempt to join and mix encompassing universalist dialectics with differential dialogics, I think, resonates also in the double desire of Vizenor’s dually named Stone Columbus: to “make the world tribal, a universal identity,” a program in which Krupat, via Appiah, sees in the end “a logic of natio-, a logic oriented, however, toward the critical effect of upholding a logic of ratio-” (Krupat 1996:64); and it is part of Taylor’s attempt to conjoin particularist “substantive” goals with a “more or less” universal, difference-blind perspective. Taylor thus attempts to maximize difference within a system of mostly equal rights, partially since the “absence of differentiated roles” in rhetorics of freedom, together with a “very tight common purpose,” provides for him “the formula for the most terrible forms of homogenizing tyranny” to our very present (Taylor 1994:51). Yet his important attempt to give desired difference theoretical breathing space is conducted prominently here with reference to “recognized” languages, and moves differently beyond that “homely” ground. While articulations of race and those of linguistic difference have many contexts in common (as various conjunctions examined in the previous chapters demonstrate) and their meeting is thus useful in Taylor’s discussion, their ability to comment on each other is diminished without respect for their profound differences. It is true that the difference of erstwhile linguistic “races” has its own ostracizing history and ongoing problems – the past of French in Canada and Quebec, of Native languages in boarding schools, of vernaculars in normative environments offer some examples, and, more generally, “barbarians” are etymologically those who speak another tongue, as Greenblatt reminds us (1991:10). On the other hand, while similar scenarios certainly persist, possibilities of the acquisition of several languages and translative necessities make such forms of cultural difference also highly valued in many current contexts. By contrast, “race,” in today’s sense of visible difference, while it is often positively prized without the “hyper-visibility” of corporate multiculturalism (Gilroy 2000:21), is still directly and closely related as a category to the history of racism. This point has been centrally argued again in Against Race (2000) by Paul Gilroy, a book whose United States title50 is almost identical with Appiah’s subtitle “Against Races” in the text I have already mentioned, “Race, Culture, Identity” (1996). As opposed to Taylor’s attempt to maximize the space of difference, such projects in various degrees seek to minimize difference because of the horrendous causes from slavery to Nazism and other genocidal atrocities that have drawn on race. Gilroy thus states: “The idea that action against racial hierarchies can proceed more effectively when it has been purged of any lingering respect for the idea of “race” is one of the most persuasive cards in this political and ethical suit” (2000:13).51 Appiah, in a somewhat different but related vein, expresses his suspicion “that Taylor is happier with collective identities that actually inhabit our globe than I am, and that may be one of the reasons why I am less disposed to make the concessions to them that he does” (1994:156). Yet these different projects are certainly not interested either in an old-style universalism of the European kind. This is

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obvious for instance from Appiah’s reference to possible hauntings of Hegel’s “singular” Geist or spirit (Appiah 1995:52) in “Geist Stories,” his response to the Bernheimer report on comparative literature, or from Gilroy’s elaboration of what he calls The Black Atlantic (Gilroy 1993). In Against Race, Gilroy evokes humanism’s less than wholesome history, and the fact that “previous incarnations of exclusionary humanity were tailored to racializing codes and qualified by the operation of colonial and imperial power” (2000:30). Nonetheless he references ex negativo an “alternative version of humanism that . . . cannot be reached via any retreat into the lofty habits of unamended assumptions of liberal thinking, particularly about juridical rights and sovereign entitlements” (30). Yet while Against Race52 voices with a certain utopianism “the political will to liberate human kind from race-thinking” (Gilroy 2000:12), it cannot avoid or transcend a dynamic that Appiah examines as well though with different consequences: the dynamic of positive identifications that successfully appropriate erstwhile negative ascriptions. Gilroy writes: people who have been subordinated by race-thinking and its distinctive social structures . . . have for centuries employed the concepts and categories of the rulers, owners, and persecutors to resist the destiny that “race” has allocated to them and to dissent from the lowly value it placed upon their lives. Under the most difficult of conditions and from imperfect materials that they surely would not have selected if they had been able to choose, these oppressed groups have built complex traditions of politics, ethics, identity, and culture. . . . They have involved elaborate, improvised constructions that have the primary function of absorbing and deflecting abuse. But they have gone far beyond merely affording protection and reversed the polarities of insult, brutality, and contempt, which are unexpectedly turned into important resources of solidarity, joy, and collective strength. When ideas of racial particularity are inverted in this defensive manner so that they provide sources of pride rather than shame and humiliation, they become difficult to relinquish. For many racialized populations, “race” and the hard-won, oppositional identities it supports are not to be lightly or prematurely given up. (Gilroy 2000:12) Whereas Against Race is an attempt to persuade its audience nonetheless right out of race-thinking (as mainly another version of what we have seen Gates (1992a:314) call “reverse-discourse”), Appiah proceeds differently and arrives at other conclusions. Appiah argues consistently “against race” as an objective biological reality, for instance in “The Uncompleted Argument: Du Bois and the Illusion of Race,” in In My Father’s House (1992), which integrates that essay, and in “Race, Culture, Identity” in Color Conscious (1996).53 Yet in his response to Taylor (Appiah 1994, integrated in “Race, Culture, Identity”) he also speaks more positively of “collective identities” as “scripts” that can play various roles in “personal dimensions of identity” (1994:159–60). Appiah agrees here that “There can be legitimate collective goals whose pursuit will require giving up pure proceduralism” (1994:152). He takes issue, however, with the downplaying of difference between the collective and

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individual aspects of “authenticity” in Taylor’s reading of Herder (Appiah 1994:152–4; 1996:93–4): “. . . the way much discussion of recognition proceeds is strangely at odds with the individualist thrust of talk of authenticity and identity. If what matters about me is my individual and authentic self, why is so much contemporary talk of identity about large categories – gender, ethnicity, nationality, ‘race,’ sexuality – that seem so far from individual?” (1994:149). He agrees “with Taylor’s objections to proceduralism” (159) because the state should, and actually does, promote certain “substantive” goals, which involve here for Appiah, however, not collective ones of particular communities, but the protection of the autonomy of individuals against the claims and prescriptions of their parents, churches, and communities (159). Among his examples are forced arranged marriages in some communities (157–8), but also “the desire of some Quebecois” to impose the language of schooling (163) in certain cases on children who might want to resist that path. I think Appiah considerably underestimates here the problematic in which Taylor tries to defend the at least temporary validity of a position that seeks to maintain the very availability of a script (i.e. a logic also defended by certain affirmative action goals), but his valid point is that collective identities should be treated as available scripts rather than constricting norms. Unreconstructed “recognition” is thus problematic; in his words, “the politics of recognition requires that one’s skin color, one’s sexual body, should be acknowledged politically in ways that make it hard for those who want to treat their skin and their sexual body as personal dimensions of the self” (1994:163); or, as he puts it in conclusion: “Between the politics of recognition and the politics of compulsion, there is no bright line” (163). Appiah produces parallel accounts here of “the sort of story Taylor tells, with sympathy, about Quebec” (162) and gay and black scripts he finds himself in sympathy with, yet which he also finds pre-scriptive and restrictive. His account of one form of “blackness” resembles that of Gilroy: . . . we live in societies in which certain individuals have not been treated with equal respect because they were, for example, women, homosexuals, blacks, Catholics. . . . One form of healing the self that those who have these identities participate in is learning to see these collective identities not as sources of limitation and insult but as valuable parts of what they centrally are. . . . In order to construct a life with dignity, it seems natural to take the collective identity and construct positive life-scripts instead. An African-American after the Black Power movement takes the old script of self-hatred . . . and works . . . to construct a series of positive Black life-scripts. In these life-scripts, being a Negro is recoded as being Black, and this requires, among other things, refusing to assimilate to white norms of speech and behaviour. . . . It will not even be enough to require being treated with equal dignity despite being Black, for that will require a concession that being Black counts naturally or to some degree against one’s dignity. And so one will end up asking to be respected as a Black. (Appiah 1994:160–1) Although he has argued throughout his response to Taylor against the prescriptive and restrictive implications of such identities, Appiah’s sympathy for them issues, he says, from an understandable, even necessary dialectic: “I see how the story goes. It

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may even be historically, strategically necessary for the story to go this way” (1994:162; 1996:98). Elsewhere Appiah designates as a “classical dialectic” (1986:25) a somewhat different but similar sequence in which the thesis of a “denial of difference” is answered by Du Bois’ acceptance of difference; in his response to Taylor, he invites us to compare the described sequence to Sartre’s dialectic we have encountered before: “Compare what Sartre wrote in his ‘Orphée Noir’. . . . Sartre argued, in effect, that this move is a necessary step in a dialectical progression. In this passage he explicitly argues that what he calls an ‘antiracist racism’ is a path to the ‘final unity . . . the abolition of race’ ” (Appiah 1994:162n12; 1996:98n94). This very passage by Sartre, however, as we have seen in Fanon’s comments, proves extremely problematic. In its perfect Hegelian sublation (of blackness in the proletariat and hence the freedom of revolution) towards a “final unity” and “the abolition of race,” the passage “sublates” something obviously negative (in the evaluative sense), yet also eclipses in its dialectic projection something else – as Fanon’s vivid reaction demonstrates. It loses sight of the positive side of choices for which both Gilroy and Appiah, in their different ways, express understanding; yet for equally understandable reasons – we see how this story goes due to the connection between race and racism – they try to circumvent the medium of these choices, “race.” Appiah’s story in “Race, Culture, Identity: Misunderstood Connections” indeed does not end here, but rather seeks to recover that contra-diction in ways that go beyond his reading of Du Bois in “The Uncompleted Argument” (1986), or his initial response to Taylor. He anticipates this outlook here at the beginning: “Finally, I will argue for an ethical conclusion: that there is a danger in making racial identities too central to our conception of ourselves; while there is a place for racial identities in a world shaped by racism . . . if we are to move beyond racism we shall have, in the end, to move beyond current racial identities” (1996:32). I think there is a certain ambivalence in that last phrase: does it mean we have to move beyond racial identities, or only the current ones? Such ambivalence – which I will try to make clearer in a moment – is a relative of Du Bois’ inability to “escape the notion of race he explicitly rejected” (Appiah 1992:46). This is not, I think, in any way because Appiah’s analytic logic and procedure fall short. On the contrary, as should be clear by now, I would suggest that it is adequate to the logic of re/cognition and emergence as an evasion of equation that plays itself out as well in Du Boisian double consciousness. In “Analysis: Against Races,” the first part of the essay, Appiah continues his earlier arguments against the existence of factual “races.” Distinguishing between “ideational” and “referential” theories of meaning, he finds that ideationally the use of “race” in Thomas Jefferson and Matthew Arnold requires “significant correlations between the biological and the moral, literary, or psychological characters of human beings” to be “explained by the intrinsic nature (the ‘talents’ and ‘faculties’ in Jefferson; or the ‘genius,’ in Arnold) of the members of the race” (Appiah 1996:71). Yet in particular modern theories of inheritance, Appiah observes, have discredited the belief in correlations between skin color and personality: “people are the product not of essences but of genes interacting with one another and with environments, and there is little systematic correlation between the genes that fix color and the like and the genes that shape courage or literary genius” (72).

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Following then “referential” theories of meaning and trying to identify possible objects “out there” that “race” might actually refer to, he finds no options relevant to the discussion at hand.54 He sums up: “you can’t get much of a race concept, ideationally speaking, from any of these traditions; you can get various possible candidates from the referential notion of meaning, but none of them will be much good for explaining social or psychological life, and none of them corresponds to the social groups we call “races” in America” (74). This part of his essay updates his previous point (1986) that “race” does not work as a scientific category because variation within alleged “races” is not substantially different from the variation between them. Yet in the second part of the essay, “Synthesis: For Racial Identities,” Appiah concedes more merit than he had previously to a “sociohistorical view” (75), and sets out to offer a “sociohistorical account of race” (76). He cites in this context a passage from Du Bois’ 1940 autobiography Dusk of Dawn: The Autobiography of a Race Concept: But the physical bond is least and the badge of color relatively unimportant save as badge; the real essence of this kinship is its social heritage of slavery; the discrimination and insult; and this heritage binds together not simply the children of Africa, but extends through yellow Asia and into the South Seas. It is this unity that draws me to Africa. (Du Bois 1975:116–17, quoted in Appiah 1996:75) The effects of the “badge” and label, the signifier rather than the signified that Du Bois rightly focussed on, says Appiah, are not causally related to biological races, as Du Bois “almost saw” (81). Instead, racial labels are constructed signifiers that lack an essence (or referent) yet possess reality (and a signified) in that they have social and psychological effects. With Ian Hacking, Appiah refers to this reality as “dynamic nominalism”: “numerous kinds of human beings and human acts come into being hand in hand with our invention of the categories labelling them” (Hacking 1986, quoted in Appiah 1996:78). Races are thus not a matter of naturally existing identities, but of identifications. Massive errors in the assumptions about race notwithstanding, “the label works despite the absence of an essence. . . . In fact, we might argue that racial identities could persist even if nobody believed in racial essences, provided both ascription and identification continue” (1996:81–2).55 As Appiah suggests, such labels and identifications can be ascribed from the outside, but also motivate psychological self-identification: ideas about what [the racial label] refers to shape the ways people conceive of themselves and their projects. In particular, the labels can operate to shape what I want to call “identification”: the process through which an individual intentionally shapes her projects – including her plans for her own life and her conception of the good – by reference to available labels, available identities. (Appiah 1996:78) While racial ascriptions by others are hard to avoid (80), Appiah suggests a different relationship of the self to racial identities and identifications. In a section “Why Dif-

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ferences between Groups Matter” (99), he advocates measures to mitigate unfairness (99–102) but also suggests that the costs of some of these measures can include “cultural assimilation” (103). In general, these strategies point towards what he calls “a more recreational conception of racial identity,” one which would make “ethnoracial identities” less central to the “lives of those who identify” with them (103). This view of difference still repudiates biological “race,” but also accounts for a measure of positive racial identification; it leads Appiah to the following “positive proposals”: “Live with fractured identities; engage in identity play; find solidarity, yes, but recognize contingency, and, above all, practice irony” (104). Such irony, however, differs from what Wayne Booth called “stable” irony (1974:1–31) – one in which intended meaning is ultimately beyond doubt56 – if the differing perspectives orchestrated in that irony are not conceived as steps in one dialectic and singular spirit, but accounted for as historically distinct horizons and dialectics. And indeed Appiah confirms that he has “only the proposals of a banal ‘postmodernism’ ” (104) – a form and strategy often critiqued as apolitical because of its very insistence on contradiction and its refusal of accepting one point of view. I hardly find Appiah’s strategies, however, apolitical, or without a point of view. On the contrary, I think they offer meaningfully several, and maintain simultaneously – for good reasons yet against single reason – often opposing goals and perspectives. One of these is to minimize racial differences and in particular the inequalities they underwrite. Yet at the same time individuals should be able to choose and identify with different identities (albeit “fractured” ones); choose different dialectics that might indeed contradict each other, contradictory “spirits” in contrast to a singular, Hegelian one. In closing, Appiah fittingly not only invokes “the fruitful imaginative work of constructing collective identities for a democratic nation in a world of democratic nations,” but also offers his own formulation of double consciousness in suggesting that these identities “will have to recognize both the centrality of difference within human identity and the fundamental moral unity of humanity” (105). Both the double emphasis and the evocation of nationhood recall here Krupat’s reading of Vizenor’s contradictions; while Krupat sees the logic of natioand particularity “oriented, however, toward” upholding its opposite, Appiah’s final formulation is perhaps even more clearly “balanced” between the “centrality of difference” and “the fundamental moral unity of humanity” (unless one wishes to argue that “fundamental” overrides “centrality”). Appiah’s dual goal and strategy combine reaffirmed if re/cognized identities and a strong tendency towards an elimination of group difference that dominates Gilroy’s argument. Because of the racist genealogy and continuing negative potential of race, however, group difference appears even in Appiah’s “sociohistorical” revalorization of racial identities mostly important as a negatively defined vector; it has future value chiefly in undoing injustices and consequences of historical legacies such as those of slavery. This vantage point is also crucial to Appiah’s critique (both in 1994 and 1996) of the defense of collective identities that Taylor conducts with central reference to linguistic difference; the projection of francophone identity on future generations appears to Appiah as undue restriction (1994:157–9, 163). Writing out of the realities of Quebec, Taylor has to contend with quite different burdens of linguistic difference there. Yet Appiah explicitly compares both contexts nonetheless (as does Taylor, though from his vantage point and thus with different

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results); and as a result of the legacy that has produced the most important paradigm for modeling difference in the United States, negative connotations important in that model are transferred by Appiah through the parallelism of both contexts. (Appiah’s next step would not work for Taylor, since turning French into a “recreational” linguistic identity is seen by those whose differing position he seeks to accommodate as triggering its demise.) What are the costs and consequences of a focus like Appiah’s for other projects of difference? To what extent do tendencies of turning away from group-based projects of difference – tendencies that rightly seek to elude racism’s defining impact on the foundational categories of attempts to abolish it – also make it difficult, for instance, to critique the dangers of “universalisms”? Universalisms are in the business of projecting their very own “common” sense – a reproach inevitably leveled also against Gilroy’s version of it (Gikandi 2002:598–9); and they project the apparent transparency and transcendence of their particular reason(ing)s with various and often brutal consequences, giving meaning to Glissant’s claim that “Le droit à l’opacité serait aujourd’hui le signe le plus évident de la non-barbarie” (Glissant 1995:54; “The right to opaqueness would be today the most evident sign of nonbarbarism”). In a wider context, this is one of the reasons why opposition to current processes of globalization has been strong and sustained.57 These processes seek to extend more and more homogeneously, and without difference (or democratic accountability to different constituencies), not only economic principles but – since these often relate directly to those of cultural production, conveyance, and reception – also definitions and principles of culture. The stakes in debates of race are different, but not entirely separate either, from those around globalization, and we have seen that important critiques and models of difference and recognition almost routinely invoke issues of language that also come to the fore in questions of globalization. If specific legacies lead to relevant and important tendencies of de-legitimization of certain kinds of difference, the consequences have to be kept in view for other articulations of difference that maintain dialogic spaces of culture and work against the totalization of one paradigm (which the critique of “race,” I think, would also seek to prevent). By contrasting contexts in which cultural emergence and difference are articulated and differing strains of multicultural genealogies develop, comparative explorations (such as this one) can make different codings of cultural difference conspicuous, and foster alternative conjugations of the inevitably necessary if projective confirmations and conformities of recognition with the equally urgent cognitive chances of re-cognition. The relationship between factors that model difference in Canada and the United States of course continues to change significantly. Race has become also in Canada not only a high priority for official Canadian multiculturalism (Canada 1992/93–), but also an increasingly relevant critical category in the consolidation of institutionalized fields of Asian Canadian, African Canadian, and Native Canadian studies. These fields, despite the earlier presence of “significant work in the various racialized literatures,” as Coleman and Goellnicht remark in their survey of these developments in 2002, “did not exist ten years ago” (15). On the other hand, linguistic difference has taken on renewed significance in United States Studies as I have already suggested (Sollors 1998; Shell and Sollors 2000; Rowe 2002:51–64),

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reminding an often still monolingual field of the fact, emphatically stated by Mary Louise Pratt, that “foreignness” simply misapplies to so many languages inside the United States, Native or now native to it, many of which predate English here (Pratt 1995:64). Linguistic difference, however, although its historical implicitations differ from those of race, is also facing pressures; these include not only the continuing “nationalizing” linguistic pressures that have recurred at different times and places with various intensities in both Canada and the United States, but also everincreasing global economic pressures (Gilroy 2000:24). Articulations of difference on the basis of race can be opposed with excellent arguments, as Gilroy demonstrates. Yet projects like Appiah’s that argue for similar reasons “Against Races” continue at the same time, as we have seen, to engage articulations of racial identities, thus taking into account the dilemma of dual tendencies that respond to the same situation. I think Appiah’s re/cogniton that “the identities we need will have to recognize both the centrality of difference within human identity and the fundamental moral unity of humanity” (1996:105) has excellent reasons. Cultural models that seek to respond to past and ongoing atrocities perpetrated in the name of absolutized or “pure”58 difference cannot avoid such reasons without risking potential totalizations of “pure” universalism or particular “humanisms” that claim universal validity. Such re/cognition is also at work, I believe, in the composite forms of double consciousness that I have tried to explore in this study. Ultimately both processes are needed in their contradiction. A maximized “universalism” and the minimization of difference risk at the same time the greatest possible extension of projection. This is why the most extreme “universalisms” and rhetorics of freedom – to follow Taylor’s indictment of undifferentiated equality in combination with a tight common purpose – are perhaps also the ones that deal most intolerantly with others: otherness threatens the projected transparencies of self-certainty. The totalization of pure difference, on the other hand, designates the projections of several “universalisms” in the separations of racism. The drive of consciousness to make sense – its sense – out of contradiction (that often appears to contradict it and thus for it constitutes non-sense), and favours the extension of either one of these dialectics to their maximum. Yet the point of fulfillment of that desire as complete self-certainty is at the same time either dialectic’s completed projection over the other. As Bercovitch so convincingly argues, the recognition of the limit and thus forms of re/cognition, not the apparently easily available “recognition” by the standards of identity and sameness, increases the chances of avoiding pitfalls of projection. This implies moving not within but constantly across the borders and against the dict(at)ions of a “home-understanding.” Du Bois’ “double consciousness,” I think, indeed articulates this uncomfortable and “un-homely” contradiction to a single logic and dialectic beyond the historical constellation of its genesis, as I have tried to explore here in various figurations. Such composition of contradictions is perhaps not what pragmatic varieties of consciousness – those that steer us individually and communally through our daily praxis – would easily like to maximize; yet without it consciousness, as Appiah says of group identities, would “go imperial” (1996:103). And despite all necessary strikes against difference, forms of universalism risk, as ever before, being defrocked as disguised particularisms. The need to diminish and abolish non-egalitarian difference

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is thus persistently conjoined and contradicted by the wish to accentuate specificity in a non-homogenized culture of relation. These differential articulations continue to rework Du Bois’ ambivalent valencies of double consciousness and recognition over and against the Hegelian absolute. Such double valencies remain as relevant as ever in current and future reconfigurations of culture in North America and elsewhere.

Notes

1 Introduction 1 This reminder bears repetition, although projects like the 1991 Columbia History of the American Novel have indeed given a wider reference to the geographical identification of America (Elliott 1991:xiii–xiv). 2 Porter’s (1994) “What We Know That We Don’t Know: Remapping American Literary Studies” is an extended review essay that responds to Carafiol (1991), Fisher (1991), Jay (1990), and Saldívar (1991). 3 Pease’s (2001) essay “The Politics of Postnational American Studies” offers a good survey of the various responses to Radway, and of other positions in this context. 4 The term is of course not everywhere or necessarily used with this connotation – José Martí’s 1891 Nuestra América (Our America) is often referenced as a reminder of this fact (Martí 2002; Martí 2003:223–32). Renegotiations of the uses of “America” are underway for instance also in contexts like the International Association of American Studies (IASA), which held its first Congress in 2003. 5 In the words of the Canadian poet, novelist, and theorist Robert Kroetsch, “The Moment of the Discovery of America Continues” (Kroetsch 1989:1). 6 In other words, emergence is transversal to negation in the Hegelian dialectic – it is not the other term that awaits incorporation in the next step of the dialectic. One could rather read it in terms of what Julia Kristeva calls, in Revolution in Poetic Language, “The Fourth ‘Term’ of the Dialectic” (1984:109), a certain kind of negativity – a reading closer to Slavoj Zˇizˇek’s understanding of dialectic (e.g. 1989:202). Hegel’s dialectic is read directly in imperial contexts by Robert Young (1990:3) concurring with Hélène Cixous (Cixous and Clément 1986), and as imperial “identification” by Diana Fuss (1995:145). 7 This situation pertains to liminal moments generally between two cultural systems or two frames of interpretation, in which the subject’s learned decoding processes initially seek recourse to the known, default system of reference to the point of cognitive failure. Adopting an alternative frame, however, will render the old self and value system as – now devalued – objects among others. This realization often prompts the re-affirmation of a previous frame, or produces a search for new solutions. Individual and collective narratives of emergence or continuing liminality depend on the way in which this interplay will be regulated. Diametrically opposed solutions to this predicament are represented by attempts at unconditional assimilation to the new (and thus alienation from the old self) and utter rejection of the new frame of reference. Solutions that avoid either of these choices have to be able to operate several frames without losing cognitive capacity or abandoning entirely either the powers of the previous self or the options of the new one. For a discussion of processes of doubleness in the context of “Post-Colonial and Postmodern Ironies” see Hutcheon (1991:80), and my discussion of Appiah in Chapter 6; for another critique of dialectical attempts to capture newness see, for example, Bhabha’s “How

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Notes Newness Enters The World” (Bhabha 1994:212–35); Fluck (2000) offers a survey of cognitive constitution and negativity in the work of Iser. Wlad Godzich thus distinguishes between emergent and emerging literatures: “ ‘Emergent literatures’ are not to be understood . . . as literatures that are in a state of development that is somehow inferior to that of fully developed, or ‘emerged,’ literatures – our own disciplinary version of ‘underdeveloped’ or ‘developing’ literatures, if you wish, with attendant ‘Third-Worldist’ ideologies – but rather as those literatures that cannot be readily comprehended within the hegemonic view of literature that has been dominant in our discipline. . . . Emergent literatures represent a different conception of field and of object than that represented by the often used expression ‘emerging literatures.’ The latter reflects a Hegelian conceptualization according to which the new literatures are viewed as representing less-mature stages of canonical literatures . . .” (Godzich 1994:291). “. . . a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. . . . It could alternatively be thought of as being related to ‘memory’ or to the French word même. . . .” (Dawkins 1989:192; 1976:206; quoted in Dennett 1995:344). According to some theories he was also partly of Jewish background (Cohen 1969:19; Sale 1990:51n), a conjecture we will encounter again in Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus (Vizenor 1991a:186). Columbus owned Franceso Pipino’s Latin translation (the original text Polo dictated during his captivity in Genoa was in French), De consuetudinibus et conditionibus orientalium regionum and his Italian summary Il milione (1485); for Columbus’ personal volumes preserved in the Biblioteca Colombina in Seville, see Sale (1990:15n). Santo Domingo (Hispaniola/Haiti) was named after his father, Dominick (Sundquist 1993:140). Réjean Beaudoin (1989) gives a comprehensive account of this development in his Naissance d’une littérature: essai sur le messianisme et les débuts de la littérature canadiennefrancaise, 1850–1890. For an excellent study of the emergence of the literary institution in Quebec, see Robert (1989), or the exhaustive literary history La Vie littéraire au Québec (Lemire 1991; Lemire and Saint-Jacques 1996). The term Canadien (“Canadian”) referred originally to La Nouvelle France; see Sarkonak (1983:4–8) for the development of the term French Canadian. Lucie Robert (1988:139) writes about the end of the nineteenth century: Partageant les mêmes origines historiques, parlant la même langue, professant la même réligion, les Canadiens n’en sont que plus heureux de se considérer humblement comme des “provinciaux” et de voir leur production comme une branche de la littérature française. En même temps, ils reconnaissent que la France a trahi sa mission, que sa littérature au dix-neuvième siècle est “immorale” voire “décadente.” . . . Cette littérature, définie pas sa frivolité, son caractère marchand et la domination de la fiction est aux antipodes de ce que l’on espère lire. (Sharing the same historical origins, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, Canadians are nevertheless all the more happy to considered themselves as humble “provincials” and to view their literary works as a branch of French literature. At the same time, they recognize that France has betrayed its mission, and that its literature of the 1800s is “immoral,” not to say plainly “decadent.” Considered frivolous, mercantile and unduly dominated by fiction, this literature is the opposite extreme of what one wishes to read.) Unless indicated otherwise, all translations from French into English have been provided by Patricia Godbout.

16 Marie de l’Incarnation’s writings constitute the earliest substantial francophone testimony of La Nouvelle France after those of Jacques Cartier (Cartier’s original text,

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however, was lost, and is ironically available today only as back-translation of its Italian or English translations by Giovanni Ramusio and John Florio respectively). Camille Roy, often referred to as founder of professional literary criticism in Quebec, repeats in 1904 that French Canada is closer to the spirit of the explorers and founders of the seventeenth century and “la France des croisades”; for him, Cartier Champlain, and Laval (i.e. the francophone explorers). have crossed the ocean to complete that mission (1979:71). “Le texte du Nouveau Monde sera ainsi pour nous, trop souvent, écrit d’avance et il se conformera à l’intrigue la plus prévisible qui soit” (Nepveu 1998:43; “Thus, our New World narrative will too often be written in advance and match the most foreseeable plot of all”). See the epigraph of Chapter 2 below. The Phenomenology begins with Hegel’s “Preface: On Scientific Cognition” (“Vorrede: Vom wissenschaftlichen Erkennen”). Two of the most often cited texts are Jauss’ “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory” (Jauss 1982:3–45) and Perkins’ Is Literary History Possible? (1992). See in particular Hutcheon and Valdés (1994 and 2002). Northrop Frye similarly emphasizes, in his 1976 second “Conclusion” to the Literary History of Canada, the “great importance to the United States to have a critical view of it centred in Canada, a view which is not hostile but simply another view” (Frye 1982:74–5). As Sommer reports: “One response to English-only campaigns in the United States was a 1992 gubernatorial campaign in Puerto Rico” that would have made “Spanishonly” the official language of the island (1998:297). Werner Sollors writes in his editor’s introduction to Multilingual America: “After World War I, with all its efforts at Americanization, there was still a sense left in the world of scholarship that ‘language and literature of the United States’ was a field not limited to English. Thus the old Cambridge History of American Literature of 1917–21 stressed that the ‘language of the people of the United States has been English even more prevailingly than their institutions and their culture’ – yet it included more than 60 pages on ‘Non-English Writings’ ” (Sollors 1998:5). For a good survey of United States literary histories in this respect see Cagidemetrio (1998); see also the discussion in Patel (2000). Since individual linguistic possibilities are limited – scholars like Watson Kirkconnell, who “translated poetry from over 50 languages” (Craig 1997:598) and reviewed from 1937 to 1965 in University of Toronto Quarterly Canadian literature in languages other than English and French, are rare exceptions – this situation is ideally addressed in large-scale collaborative projects; Harvard’s Lowinus project and Longfellow Institute offer one such example (Shell and Sollors 2000); the Encyclopedia of Literature in Canada (New 2002) covers “literature in English and French, and also in such other languages as Yiddish, Spanish, Haida, and Cree” with the help of 300 Canadianists (dust jacket). Bassnett writes: “The notion of languages as the fundamental distinction that enabled comparison to take place was probably the most widely accepted principal of all, and as late as the mid-1970s. . . . I had clear instructions at first not to admit English–American comparative projects and to insist on all students having at least two languages” (1993:29). Her chapter on “Comparing the Literatures of the British Isles” (1993:48–69) discusses both intralingual and interlingual comparison. The report registered resistance to monolingualism in reiterating “the necessity and unique benefits of a deep knowledge of foreign [sic] languages” yet also recommended that “the old hostilities towards translation should be mitigated” (Bernheimer 1995:44). This is one of the three forms of supranationality in Guillén’s discussion of comparative literature (1993:70). Its precursor, Commonwealth Studies, also worked intralingually across national

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Notes lines, yet excluded the United States; as a consequence, at some universities Canadianists and United States specialists are found in different departments, an arrangement less than hospitable to North American Studies. Bassnett comments: “What is this but comparative literature under another name?” (1993:10). Lawrence Buell, whose “American Literary Emergence as a Postcolonial Phenomenon” (Buell 1992) represents such an example, discusses this situation with reference to critical response to this essay, in the revised version, “Postcolonial Anxiety in Classic U.S. Literature” (Buell 2000). See also Kaplan (1993:17, 21n17), Sharpe, “Is the United States Postcolonial?” (1995) and especially Singh and Schmidt (2000); the term postcolonial is mentioned a few times in passing, but is otherwise strikingly absent in the collective volume The Futures of American Studies (Pease and Wiegman 2002). Hutcheon (1991), Söderlind (1991), Bennett (1994), Brydon (1995). For a more recent survey and discussion, see Sugars’ “Can the Canadian Speak?” (Sugars 2001); see also the collections by Moss (2003) and Sugars (2004). The year 1979 seems to highlight this conjunction in the United States. In the very year that sees the publication of Paul de Man’s Allegories of Reading, Leslie Fiedler and Houston Baker organize sessions of the English Institute that for several later observers mark the formal beginning of the American canon debates (Fiedler and Baker 1981; Gorak 1991:222; Guillory 1993:343n5). In 1979 begins also the project “Reconstructing American Literature” that leads to a seminal 1982 summer institute at Yale, the Volume Reconstructing American Literature (Lauter 1983) and eventually the Heath Anthology in 1989 (Lauter 1994, I:xxxi–). In his article “The Function of Literary Theory at the Present Time,” published in 1989 and echoing in many points his Modern Language Association Presidential Address from 1986, J. Hillis Miller was to observe (and regret from his point of view) that “there has been a massive shift of focus in literary study since 1979 away from the ‘intrinsic,’ rhetorical study of literature toward study of the ‘extrinsic’ relations of literature, its placement within psychological, historical, or sociological contexts” (Miller 1989:102). I.e., the frequent “forgetting” of the fact that communities are not only “imagined” (Anderson 1983) and that their “boundaries are relational rather than absolute” because they “mark the community in relation to other communities” (Anthony Cohen 1985:58), but also of their contradictory discursive production and performance. Bhabha thus contrasts the perspective of “the pedagogical” – which takes the people for granted as “an a priori historical present” and treats it as a given object available to the categories of knowledge and representation – with the interruptions of a continual performance of narrative – the “enunciatory present” – in which internal differences come to the fore and seek to establish themselves, emerging in what Bhabha refers to as “the perplexity of the living in the midst of pedagogical representations of the fullness of life” (1990:307). Bhabha thus shifts attention from the definition of the national community with respect to the outside – described by Anthony Cohen – to the process of its internal becoming, a process of internal liminality and transformation of the national subject in which it crosses the borders of what it has been, towards something that is not yet known. As John Guillory observes, the “value of the work as representative of a given constituency and its ‘values’ can always be set against the value of the work as aesthetic artifact. At the extreme point of the former position the work as ‘literature’ tends to disappear into a purely anthropological domain of culture. At the extreme of the latter position aesthetic values mask by their transhistorical prestige the value of aesthetic value itself to particular strata of a given social formation. Such are the antinomies of value . . .” (1987:486). Henry Louis Gates (1993:8) notes in this context: In place of hermeneutics . . . some might prefer ethnography. That is, under the sign of multiculturalism, literary readings are often guided by the desire to

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elicit, first and foremost, indices of ethnic particularity, especially those that can be construed as oppositional, transgressive, and subversive. Sherry Simon similarly insists on the specific work of language: La spécificité culturelle de l’origine devient une matière privilégiée à exploiter, oui, mais elle ne détermine en rien le charactére de l’écriture. L’écriture n’est pas l’expression d’une identité pré-existante, pré-discursive; elle est au contraire le dévoilement et le travail des difficultés identitaires. (Simon and Leahy 1994:394) (Although the cultural specificity of origin may become a privileged material to use, it determines in no way the form of writing. Writing doesn’t express a preexistent, pre-discursive identity; on the contrary, it unveils and stirs identity problems.) 37 Brook Thomas notes that such narratives “too often . . . reoccupy the narrative structures employed by a nationally based historicism” (Thomas 1991:13–14). 38 Werner Sollors thus problematizes “ethnic literary history . . . which views writers primarily, if not exclusively, as members of various ethnic and gender groups. . . . Taken exclusively, what is often called the ‘ethnic perspective’ . . . all but annihilates art movements such as the Beat Generation or New York poetry” (1986b:14). In his “Critique of Pure Pluralism,” he asks: “should the very same categories on which previous exclusivism was based really be used as organizing concepts?” (1986a:255). 39 Brook Thomas (1989:191–2) points out that it may be more than an irony of history that precisely at the moment when women and ethnics in this country sense the possibility of emergence and the establishment of a somewhat autonomous self, a theory is imported from the still predominantly white, male European academy declaring that notions of emergence and a centered self are bourgeois and reactionary. Perhaps those segments in our society that have previously been denied representation feel a need for narratives of emergence that continue to prove so effective in drawing people into a united movement. In a similar vein, Linda Hutcheon (1998:417) comments that the stubborn persistence of an evolutionary national model in current (self-critical) literary-historical thought is . . . not necessarily a worrisome sign of either retrogressive nostalgia or, in an age of theoretical self-reflexivity, political naïveté about the ideology of historiography. From the point of view of newly decolonized nations or marginalized groups, such a model may have real practical advantages. . . . Instead, their open-eyed decision at times to retain the developmental model of evolution can be interpreted as a strategic, pragmatic acknowledgment of, first, the shared interventionist drive at the heart of both emerging nations’ politics in any century and the politics of identity today and, second, the ongoing validating structures and continuing ideological power that utopian narratives of progress possess in the struggle to articulate a usable past. 40 As Gates suggests, “Black studies has functioned as a strategic site for autocritique within American studies itself” (1992a:309). 41 Critiquing Fredric Jameson, Homi Bhabha writes in “How Newness Enters the World”: “And, paradoxically, it is only through a structure of splitting and displacement – ‘the fragmented and schizophrenic decentring of the self’ – that the architecture of the new historical subject emerges at the limits of representation itself” (1994:217); Bhabha suggests that Jameson’s insistence on taking recourse to dialectical sublation occludes these “interstitial, conflictual temporalities, that may be neither developmental nor linear” (1994:219).

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42 The relational entanglement of any “post-,” for instance, with the term it negates has to be taken seriously, and I think many “postnational” approaches risk remaining caught in self-enclosed forms of that entanglement without serious comparative engagements. 43 I agree with Blodgett and Bercovitch who, in different ways (as we will see in the next chapter), both suggest that the awareness of (work at) limits increases understanding since it decreases the projections of universals and “transcendence.” 44 This is also the case, for example, in pre-Columbian Mexican and Mesoamerican cultures that relied in substantial ways on writing, which functioned, however, in contexts of oral recitation and performance (O’Connell 1994:8–9); a very few of these documents known as “codices” have survived: “Of the almost five hundred codices known to exist, only fourteen are considered pre-Hispanic.” 45 Chicano/a culture is only one example of Hispanic cultures in the United States. Doris Sommer, for instance, discusses the cultural situation of Puerto Ricans and their linguistic choices explicitly in the framework of Du Bois’ double consciousness (Sommer 1998). The Handbook of Hispanic Cultures in the U.S. offers a wider survey (Kanellos and Esteva-Fabregat 1993). For Latin American Canadian writing see Hazelton (1996, 2002). 46 As Raymund A. Paredes writes, “the corrido – a ‘poem set to music’ – flourished amid cultural conflict” (Paredes 1988:801); such conflict is expressed also in currently popular Narco-Corridos about romanticized smuggler culture (Hermans, forthcoming). See Américo Paredes’ study of the subject in general (1958), and José David Saldívar’s discussion of Paredes (1997:36–56). 47 See Rudin (1996) for an in-depth analysis of the role of Spanish and code switching in Chicano/a novels written in English. 48 “Vernacular” is the language of “a slave born in the house”; Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave/lordship and bondship (as well as Diderot’s pre-revolutionary Jacques le fataliste et son maître, which has been cited among Hegel’s inspirations), or the development of such erstwhile Latin vernaculars as French or Spanish are among the examples that substantiate such vernacular potential. 49 Glissant (1995:30–1) speaks of “un autre passage, qui n’est plus de l’oral à l’écrit mais de l’écrit à l’oral. . . . L’écriture, la dictée du dieu, est liée à la transcendance, elle est liée à l’immobilité du corps et elle est liée à une sorte de tradition de consécution que nous appellerions une pensée linéaire. L’oralité, le corps est donné dans la répétition, la redondance, l’emprise du rythme, le renouveau des assonances, et tout ceci éloigne de la pensée de la transcendance.” (“another passage, not from orality to writing, but from writing to orality. . . . The written word, dictated by God, is linked to transcendence, it is linked to the immobility of the body and linked also to a kind of consecutive tradition that could be called linear thought. In orality, the body is given to repetition, redundancy, held by rhythm, the renewal of assonances; all this moves one away from the thought of transcendence.”) The question of relation “et du relativisme par opposition à l’absolu” (“and of relativism as opposed to the absolute”) is carried forward by a form of orality, “celle-ci frémissante et créatrice, qui est celle des ces cultures qui surgissent aujourd’hui sur ‘la grande scène du monde’ ” (1995:30–1; “of a quivering and creative kind, the orality of cultures which are suddenly appearing today on the ‘world’s big stage’ ”). 50 Goetsch (1985, 1990), Hochbruck (1991:3–5; 1996b). 51 As we will see in Chapter 5, Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus (1991a) thus emphasizes settings on the international border between Canada and the United States, and Thomas King satirizes borders for instance in Green Grass, Running Water and in his story “Borders” (1993b:129–45); the international border also separates the eponymous communities in Truth and Bright Water (1999b). 52 The special issue of Essays on Canadian Writing 75 (2002) on “Race” gives a sense of recent developments, and the editors’ introduction lists many of the relevant

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anthologies; besides anthologies, other important recent volumes include Philip (1992); Brand (1994, 2001); Maracle (1996); Chao (1997); Bannerji (2000); Wah (2000); Hill (2001); Hoy (2001); Clarke (2002); Walcott (2003). 53 The annual convention of the Modern Language Association thus features now a permanent discussion group on “Literature in the United States in Languages Other Than English.” 54 The trend is uncontested despite census imprecisions in the range of several million (Schmitt 2001:A13) and the complicating fact that the 2000 census allowed for the first time multiple racial self-identification, the choice of nearly 7 million respondents (Schmitt 2001:A1, A14). The census counted 35.3 million Latinos and 34.6 million African Americans, but “an additional 1.8 million blacks also indicated at least one other race on census forms, and thus were not included in the 34.6 million figure” (Rodriguez 2001:A1). Another factor is the high numbers of undocumented Latinos who are thus ineligible to vote. José David Saldívar offers for the United States a conservative estimate of “four million undocumented workers, more than half residing in California” (1997:6); of which 78 percent are of Mexican origin according to information cited by Saldívar (1997:200n3); other numbers are substantially higher (Rodriguez 2001:A24); on some of the consequences of the shift, see Navarro (2004). 2 Comparative North American literary history, alterity, and a hermeneutics of non-transcendence 1 As Grafton (1992:75) points out, Columbus was an active reader who “peered through tightly woven filters of expectation and assumption from the past.” Bartolomé de Las Casas, to whom we owe the abstracted notes of Columbus’ lost journal of his first voyage, “saw Columbus as a great reader . . . [and] showed in detail, using the primary sources, that Columbus had read and annotated a number of books” (Grafton 1992:77). These included Marco Polo’s Orientalium regionum (Sale 1990:15). 2 This departure also poses the question of return, both as nostos and as gain. For the old and the Old World to “gain” (thus instituting coloniality and the subsequent conundrums of postcoloniality), consciousness also has to return and come home, as in the many returns of the Hegelian Absolute Spirit; for the new in the New World to gain, consciousness has to depart both the Old World and unity and synthesis, and acknowledge doubleness and non-transcendence of its principles. An uncertain sense of the mission’s “gain” may be gleaned from Stephen Greenblatt’s remark that “the grant Columbus received from Ferdinand and Isabella speaks of Columbus as ‘going by our command . . . to discover and to gain certain islands and mainland in the Ocean Sea. . . .’ This language – descobrir é ganar – suggests something more than a diplomatic or commercial voyage, but neither the sailors nor the ships of the first expedition were appropriate for a serious military campaign, so that it is difficult to envisage what kind of ‘gaining’ the monarchs had in mind” (Greenblatt 1991:53–4, emphasis added). 3 See Bercovitch’s “The Return of Hester Prynne” (1993:194–245) for a reading of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter as a “domestication” of antinomianism (associated with the teachings, excommunication, and exclusion from the colony of Anne Hutchinson). 4 For Bercovitch, the “ritual of the jeremiad bespeaks an ideological consensus” that is “nowhere more evident than in the symbolic meaning that the jeremiads infused into the term America” (1978:176), a symbol that marked America’s classical writers. They had invested their commitment “in a vision designed to contain self-assertion. I mean containment in its double sense, as sustenance and restriction. The symbol set free titanic creative energies in our classic writers, and it confined their freedom to

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Notes the terms of the American myth. The dream that inspired them to defy the false Americanism of their time compelled them to speak their defiance as keepers of the dream” (Bercovitch 1978:180). The American writer’s identification with America as it ought to be impels the writer to withdraw from what is in America. . . . In effect, the ideals that prompt his isolation enlist individualism itself, aesthetically, morally, and mythically, into the service of society. Most explicitly, this process is manifest in Emerson’s thought. No one made larger claims for the individual than Emerson did, no one more virulently denounced corruption in America, and no one more passionately upheld the metaphysics of the American system. His career exemplifies the possibilities and constrictions of the nineteenth-century jeremiad. . . . “America” wed the ideals of individualism, community and continuing revolution. It was a marriage . . . that was particularly suited to Emerson’s society . . . his jeremiads were couched in terms that reaffirmed the basic tenets of the culture. Far from pressing the conflict between individual and society, Emerson obviated all conflict whatever by defining inward revolt and social revolution in identical terms, through the bipolar unities of the symbol of America. (Bercovitch 1978:181–4)

5 See “Continuing Revolution: George Bancroft and the Myth of Process,” in Bercovitch 1993:168–93. 6 Bercovitch outlines his position on the issue of ideology already in the 1986 article “The Problem of Ideology in American Literary History,” where in conclusion he invited a relativizing, comparative perspective: “We do not need still another variation, however ingenious, on the theme of America. We would benefit enormously from a fresh perspective, however raw or tentative, on the limits of nativist modes of analysis” (Bercovitch 1986:652). (Northrop Frye offered a similar argument from his own perspective to suggest that “it is of great importance to the United States to have a critical view of it centred in Canada, a view which is not hostile but simply another view” ([Frye 1982:74–5].) In The Rites of Assent, Bercovitch returns to the issue of ideology as both problem and possibility: “I mean by ideology the ground and texture of consensus – in this case, the system of ideas inwoven into the cultural symbology through which ‘America’ continues to provide the terms of identity and cohesion in the United States.” Ideology is here not “merely repressive” since “the terms of cultural restriction may become a source of creative release” (Bercovitch 1993: 355). Ideology arises out of historical circumstances, and then represents these, rhetorically and conceptually, as though they were natural, universal, inevitable, and right; as though the ideals promulgated by a certain group or class (for example Spiller et al’s “virile” standards of individualism) were not the product of history but the expression of self-evident truth. The act of representation thus serves to consecrate a set of cultural limitations, to recast a certain society as Society, a certain way of life as utopia in process. Ideology denies limitation, conceptually, in such a way as to facilitate social continuity. (Bercovitch 1993:356) While ideology can entrap, texts like Emerson’s “The American Scholar” or “its Emersonian offspring, Thoreau’s Duty of Civil Disobedience and Whitman’s 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass, may open new vistas of thought and action in history” (1993:356). 7 This term offers important connections with Edouard Glissant’s insistence on opacité as barrier to totalization and the absolute (see Chapter 3 below). 8 For another discussion of Nepveu’s text, see Simon (1991a).

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9 The notion of “cosmopolitisme dans la culture québécoise,” developed and demonstrated in particular in Simon Harel’s study Le Voleur de parcours (1989), differs thus from the notion A. J. M. Smith relied on in his opposition of “native” and “cosmopolitan” writing (Smith 1943; see Chapter 6 below). 10 Nepveu began to elaborate this perspective on Miron’s work already in his earlier Les Mots à l’écoute (1979). 11 Nepveu announces his debt to the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and to the reception aesthetics of Wolfgang Iser and Hans Robert Jauss at the beginning of L’Ecologie (1988:10).

3 W. E. B. Du Bois, Hegel, and the staging of alterity 1 See Stepto (1979a:53–6) for an analysis of some of the changes made by Du Bois. 2 These terms are also closely related in Souls to the thematics of doubt; Mark Taylor points out the etymological relation between “double” and “doubt,” which is even clearer in the German “Zwei” and “Zweifel” (Taylor 1987:xxii–xxiii). 3 In the first instance, the German “in sinnlicher Hülle” (Hegel 1973:134) is rendered by Miller as “in a sensuous covering” (Hegel 1977:102), while the translation by Baillie offers “in a covering veil of sense” (quoted in Zamir 1995:135). 4 After the triple appearance of the word “veil” in the “Forethought,” this is the first occurrence in the main text. 5 See Zamir (1995:139–40) for an analysis of the gaze in this scene in terms of the master-slave struggle, and with appropriate reference to this theme in Sartre’s (1956) Being and Nothingness and Frantz Fanon’s (1967) Black Skin, White Masks. For another analysis of this “primal scene” and drama in Fanon see Bhabha’s discussion in “The Other Question – the Stereotype and Colonial Discourse” (Bhabha 1994:75–); see also Siemerling (1994:63–4). 6 Cornel West suggests that Du Bois is here “following his mentor [and Harvard supervisor Albert Bushnell] Hart’s racialist view of history in which each ‘race’ possesses certain gifts and endowments” (West 1989:143). Du Bois discusses the same issue in greater detail in his essay “The Conservation of Races,” which appeared in 1897 (the year in which “Strivings of the Negro People” was published). He writes: We are apt to think in our American impatience, that while it may have been true in the past that closed race groups made history, that here in conglomerate America . . . we have changed all that, and have no need of this ancient instrument of progress. This assumption of which the Negro people are especially fond, can not be established by a careful consideration of history. (Du Bois 1986b:817) Du Bois continues: “. . . the full, complete Negro message of the whole Negro race has not as yet been given to the world. . . . The question is, then: How shall this message be delivered . . .? The answer is plain: By the development of these race groups, not as individuals, but as races” (1986b:820). For a detailed reading of this essay, see Appiah (1986) and his later discussion (Appiah 1996), considered in Chapter 6 below. Adolph L. Reed, Jr interprets Du Bois’ position in the context of the “neo-Lamarckian thinking about race, evolution, and social hierarchy that prevailed in a strain of reform-oriented, fin-de-siècle American social science” (Reed 1997:91). Zamir, however, sees “the idealist philosophy of history that is proposed in the ‘Conservation’ essay” challenged in “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” in particular because Du Bois’ reworking of Hegel here “is closer to Marx’s, Sartre’s, and Alexandre Kojève’s existentialist and materialist commentaries on Hegel than any other accounts of Hegel” (Zamir 1995:14; see also 108–9).

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7 See also Williamson (1984:399–413); Gooding-Williams (1987); Gilroy (1993:134); Lewis (1993:139–40); Adell (1994:11–19); Lindberg (1994:284–6); Lemke (2000: 59–60). 8 Zamir points out that Santayana preferred teaching texts in the original language, and that Du Bois had learned German at Fisk and was able to do graduate work in Berlin (Zamir 1995:249n2). 9 See Sundquist (1993:40–1, 123–4, 156) for further examples of this dialectic of master and slave. 10 See Zamir (1995:114, 249n3) for his mapping of the parallels between Du Bois’ narrative in “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” and Hegel’s Phenomenology. 11 Gilroy writes: “The first [the politics of fulfilment] involves being a social movement, oriented towards the rational pursuit of a good life, while the second [the politics of transfiguration] can best be described as accepting the fact that in a racially structured society this movement is going to be somehow anti-social and probably defensive in character” (Gilroy 1993:112). Gilroy earlier on credits Seyla Benhabib’s Critique, Norm and Utopia with this distinction (Gilroy 1993:37, 230n84), characterizing it as follows: The politics of fulfilment is mostly content to play occidental rationality at its own game. It necessitates a hermeneutic orientation that can assimilate the semiotic, verbal, and textual. The politics of transfiguration strives in pursuit of the sublime, struggling . . . to present the unpresentable. Its rather different hermeneutic focus pushes towards the mimetic, dramatic, and performative. (Gilroy 1993:38) The second case would certainly seem to apply to Du Bois’ Souls (and its strategy of contrapuntal deployment of music scores) which Houston Baker has called a “cultural performance” (Baker 1987b:53–69) and a “singing book” (1987b:68). Eric Sundquist has suggested that Du Bois “structured his volume on the basis of a culturally coded, almost subliminal language that challenged the ability of his audience, whether white or black, to comprehend his book” (Sundquist 1993: 537–8). 12 Critical discussions of this passage are too numerous to list here; Reed (1997:91–9) surveys a substantial number of comments; see also Lewis (1993:280–3, 603n50) for several important interpretations of philosophical influences on Du Bois and relevant texts by William James; the connection with Emerson (who speaks of “double consciousness” in both “Fate” and “The Transcendentalist”) is discussed for instance in Goldman (1994); Sommer (1998:301–3); West (1989:esp. 142–3): for a reading in the context of a psychoanalytic investigation of race, see Spillers (1996:104–5; 2003:397–8); Gilroy suggests that the list of “world-historic peoples” at the beginning of this passage pointedly supplements Hegel’s (somewhat different) enumerations in The Philosophy of History, the very text that excludes Africa “from the official drama of historical movement” (Gilroy 1993:135); for more recent discussions of Hegel and Africa see Bernasconi (1998) and Krell (2000). 13 Chandler (2000:272–3) writes: Du Bois names the structure of “second-sight” as also a gift in the very locution of his announcement of its formulation. And despite his concern for the difficulty, the violence, and the paralysis that can attend this movement of the double, within the very next paragraph of this essay, Du Bois refuses to disavow either term of the double reference that configures this movement of “double consciousness.” In “Deep Sight and Rescue Missions,” Toni Cade Bambara (1993:309–10) reports that

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I’d learned early on through Eldersay . . . that the seventh son (or seventh son of the seventh son) who was born with a “veil” (some said “caul,” which I heard as “call” as in having a calling) was enhanced by it, was gifted, not afflicted. . . . Second sight enabled the person to see things others couldn’t see. Persons born with the veil were, if not clairvoyants, at least clearseeing. They could see through guise and guile. They were considered wise, weird, blessed, tetched, or ancient, depending on the bent of the describer. But they were consulted in the neighborhoods, occasionally revered. It was a vice-versa thing too – that is, people in the community known for unusually imaginative good sense were said to have been born with second sight, born with a veil . . . 14 See Zamir (1995:181–8) for his reading of the entire paragraph. He concentrates on the subsequent passage in which Du Bois listens to the singing “fresh young voices welling up to me from the caverns of brick and mortar below.” Zamir reads this passage as a complex double revision of both the initial hope for transcendence in Du Bois’ “own description of his hearing the spirituals at Nashville’s Jubilee Hall that opens the chapter on the spirituals and of Plato’s well-known allegory of the cave in his Republic, with Du Bois as Plato’s enlightened man caught between the light of the sun and the darkness of the caverns” (Zamir 1995:182). Zamir here focusses on Du Bois’ own complex relationship to the tradition and promise offered by the “Sorrow Songs,” which for him creates a “paradox of desired immersion and identity and the distance of interpretive authority” (Zamir 1995:182). For a detailed consideration of the role of the songs in Du Bois, to which I will return in the discussion below of Houston Baker and the vernacular, see Sundquist’s chapter “Swing Low:The Souls of Black Folk” (Sundquist 1993: 457–539). 4 Double consciousness, African American tradition, and the vernacular: Henry Louis Gates and Houston Baker 1 In his study of the Harlem Renaissance, George Hutchinson thus paraphrases Robert Wuthnow to suggest that “a cultural movement . . . must relate closely enough to its social environment to be recognizable, yet maintain relative autonomy from it” (Hutchinson 1995:3; Wuthnow 1989:5). 2 The quotation marks of the phrase “Blackness of Blackness” are first added in the table of contents of the 1987 version, emphasizing the citational reference to the “Prologue” of Ellison’s Invisible Man and its Melvillian intertext. 3 See also Adell’s discussion of Gates’ theory of tradition (1994:134–7) in which she concludes by contending that it “is not hard to see . . . that Gates is closer to the Master of dialectics, Hegel, than to the Masters of rhetorical disruption”; while many signs point indeed in that direction, I will come to a somewhat different conclusion here. 4 “Literary Theory and the Black Tradition” is a revised and extended version of Gates’ “Preface to Blackness: Text and Pretext,” which appeared in Dexter Fisher and Robert Stepto’s The Reconstruction of Instruction in 1979; that year, Gates received his Cambridge PhD, earned with a thesis on “The History and Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism, 1773–1831: The Arts, Aesthetic Theory, and Nature of the African,” presumably also the basis for a book Gates announces in Figures as forthcoming under the title of Black Letters in the Enlightenment (1987a:xxxii). 5 Gates identifies this phase with the 1977 “Afro-American Literature” Yale conference and the subsequent 1979 volume Afro-American Literature: The Reconstruction of Instruction, edited by Dexter Fisher and Robert Stepto, and containing three essays by Gates (see note below). This collection is singled out in Joyce A. Joyce’s “The Black Canon: Reconstructing Black American Literary Criticism” (Joyce 1987a:338), in which she charges Gates with the “denial of blackness or race as an important element of

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literary analysis of Black literature.” Her article triggered the well-known exchange in New Literary History with Gates (1987b) and Baker (1987a), followed by her reply (Joyce 1987b). The texts are reprinted in Napier (2000:290–330). 6 His attempt is interesting in a comparative perspective since it is one of those contradictory but necessary simultaneous deployments of deconstruction of (ascribed) essence together with a (re)construction of communal “identity” typical of contexts of emergence and re/cognition. 7 Abrahams writes: Signifying . . . can mean any number of things; in the case of the toast about the signifying monkey, it certainly refers to the trickster’s ability to talk with great innuendo, to carp, cajole, needle, and lie. It can mean in other instances the propensity to talk around the subject, never quite coming to the point. It can mean making fun of a person or situation. Also it can denote speaking with the hands and eyes, and in this respect encompasses a whole complex of expressions and gestures. Thus it is signifying to stir up a fight between neighbors by telling stories; it is signifying to make fun of a policeman by parodying his motions behind his back; it is signifying to ask for a piece of cake by saying, “my brother needs a piece of cake.” (Quoted in Gates 1987a:238–9) 8 Hurston’s novel, crucial for any consideration of written simulated orality, which Gates identifies in The Signifying Monkey with the Russian formalists’ skaz – “when a text seems to be aspiring to the status of oral narration” (1988:xxvi) – is discussed there in detail in Chapter 5. 9 Gates discusses Mumbo Jumbo here with reference in particular to Bakhtinian doublevoiced discourse in “Discourse Typology in Prose,” the selection in Matejka and Pomorska (1971). 10 Gates speaks in The Signifying Monkey of “unmotivated” Signifyin(g); pastiche represents thus an “unmotivated” version not because “the absence of a profound intention but the absence of negative critique. The relation between parody and pastiche is that between motivated and unmotivated Signifyin(g)” (Gates 1988:xxvi). 11 Despite its emphasis on the vernacular sources of signifying, Gates’ essay shares the post-structuralist critique of this valorization of the oral over the written, and draws our attention to Reed’s parody of the “so-called oral tradition” (Gates 1987a:255). As Gates discusses, Mumbo Jumbo thematizes positively the myth of Toth and the introduction of writing in Egypt; Plato’s use of the myth to deplore the memory-weakening effects of writing in the Phaedrus is discussed by Derrida in “Plato’s Pharmacy” (Derrida 1981:61–171, esp. 84–94). 12 In his study of the Harlem Renaissance, George Hutchinson thus writes that “Henry Louis Gates and Houston Baker . . . both define an ‘autonomous’ African American literary tradition in ways most Harlem Renaissance authors explicitly rejected, even as they contributed to the tradition(s) Gates and Baker seek to explicate – or, more accurately, invent.” While Hutchinson is “not arguing against the value of such invention,” he agrees with Hazel Carby in pointing to the dangers of a “deceptively transhistorical, intraethnically ‘universal’ problematic” (Hutchinson 1995:4–5; Carby 1989:41–2). 13 One is Gates’ exploration of dialect, “Dis and Dat: Dialect and Descent”; “Preface to Blackness: Text and Pretext” (1979) is an earlier version of “Literary Theory and the Black Tradition,” the opening essay in Gates’ (1987a) Figures in Black; the third one is Gates’ study “Binary Oppositions” in Chapter 1 of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, (Douglass 1845). 14 This assumption is also the starting point of his From Behind the Veil (1979a), a book he characterizes as “far more critical, historical, and textual than biographical, chronological, and atextual” (1979a:ix).

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15 Wellek, an erstwhile member of the Prague Linguistic Circle, can draw directly on Russian formalist assumptions about literary history; see, for instance, that chapter’s discussion of Russian formalist theory as a description of the process of automatization: One type of solution proposed assumes that within the literary development a stage of exhaustion is reached requiring the rise of a new code. The Russian formalists describe this process as a process of “automatization,” i.e. devices of poetic craft effective in their time become so common and hackneyed that new readers become inured against them and crave something different, something, it is assumed, antithetic to what has gone before. A see-saw alternation is the scheme of development, a series of revolts ever leading to new “actualizations” of diction, themes, and all other devices. But this theory does not make clear why development has to move in the particular direction it has taken: mere seesaw schemes are obviously inadequate to describe the whole complexity of the process. (Wellek and Warren 1956:266) 16 See, for example, Ellison’s remarks in “Remembering Richard Wright”: Wright’s spirit was such, and his sense of possibility was such, that even during the time when he was writing Native Son he was concerned with learning the stylistic and dialectical fine points found in the work of Steinbeck, of Hemingway, of Malraux, and of Thomas Mann; for these he viewed as his competitors. (Ellison 1995:207–8) 17 The course description in the Harvard Calendar 2000–01 has the word “tradition” both with and without quotation marks: “English 90vl . . . African-American Literary Tradition . . . Explores the emergence and formal development of the AfricanAmerican literary ‘tradition’ from the 18th to the 20th century. Close reading of the canonical texts in the tradition and their structural relationships is stressed, as is the very idea of ‘tradition’ itself” (320). 18 The original reads: “unglückliche, in sich entzweite” (Hegel 1973:163). 19 He adds: “As we shall see, Reed also parodies this dualism (which Reed thinks is exemplified in Ellison’s Invisible Man) in another text” (Gates 1987a:254). 20 This theme is featured also in Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus (see Chapter 5). 21 An earlier version appears in Black American Literature Forum 15 (1981:3–21). 22 Attacking in this context also the integrationist position in the introduction to The Negro Caravan, edited by Brown et al. (1984:69–71), Baker fails to discuss, however, the fact that The Negro Caravan does include significant representations of vernacular expression as integral and constituent parts of black culture. 23 For a critique of his methodological engagement here with poststructuralism see again the article by Joyce (1987a) in the already mentioned debate in New Literary History, or Adell (1994:119–30); like the other texts, this chapter of Adell is reprinted in Napier (2000:523–39). Adell also comments on the debate, as does DuCille in her discussion of Afrocentricity (DuCille 1996:120–35, here 132). 24 “Performance” is again a key term in his rethinking of his view of Booker T. Washington in Turning South Again (Baker 2001). 5 Native writing, orality, and anti-imperial translation: Thomas King and Gerald Vizenor 1 Greenblatt comments not only on Columbus’ Christian Imperialism but also his vision of large-scale enslavement of Natives. The slave trade initiated by Columbus (on his second trip, he took hundreds of captives to be sold on the market in Sevilla) was eventually halted by Isabella (Greenblatt 1991:71–2, also King 2003:72), but later

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Notes replaced by African slave trade. For a discussion of the role of Las Casas in this development, see Benítez-Rojo (2001:85–111). Krupat observes that “Native American writing, whether in English or in any indigenous language, is in itself testimony to the conjunction of cultural practices, Euramerican and Native American,” although Momaday and Silko “insist on the possibility of a recuperation of the traditional” (Krupat 1996:17, 44). See Swann’s edited volume on translation (1992), and Krupat’s discussion there of variations on a spectrum from target- to source-oriented approaches (Krupat 1992a). Krupat refers also to “bi-cultural composite authorship”; Hochbruck (1996a) discusses the example of Black Elk Speaks. On the invocation of “the oral tradition” by writers, see Krupat (1996:37–8). The beginnings are usually associated with N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn (and its winning of the Pullitzer Prize in 1969), although Chadwick Allen points also to a number of events in 1964 (Allen 1999:113n12). As Linda Hutcheon has pointed out, despite their allegiances to post-structuralism and its critique of a Romantic credulity concerning the presence of voice, many postmodern writers are “despite themselves . . . McLuhan’s true spiritual heirs” (1988a:52). See also Krupat (1996:81–2) on the tension between poststructuralism and orality in Vizenor, and more generally his “Post-Structuralism and Oral Literature” (Krupat 1987). For an extensive discussion of the problem of transcription in Souls see Sundquist’s chapter “Swing Low: The Souls of Black Folk” (Sundquist 1993:457–539). In one famous instance Du Bois does offer also a transcription presumably of an African language, of the syllables of the song by Du Bois’ forebear that he renders, like the songs in English, with musical notation and text, although in this case “knowing as little as our fathers what its words may mean, but knowing well the meaning of its music” (Du Bois 1986a:539); David Levering Lewis states in his biography of Du Bois that the language and meaning of these lines have yet to be identified (Lewis 1993:585n7). Whereas some Native writers still converse directly with oral traditions in Native languages, in many cases this connection pertains – as in the case of the African American vernacular – to a culturally inflected tradition in English. The influence of the transcriptions of the English-language storytelling of Harry Robinson on Thomas King’s writing after Medicine River (1989) is a case in point; see King (1999a), Robinson (1989, 1990). Commenting on an aspect of Momaday’s work that will be relevant to the discussion of Vizenor below, Portelli (1994:215–16) thus remarks: By rooting language in the land (or, more ambiguously, in “racial memory”), Momaday runs the risk of naturalizing the native voice out of history. From the Native American point of view, in fact, the identification with nature means inclusion in the cosmos, but from the point of view of Western culture, it means exclusion from history. Momaday, straddling the two worlds, reflects this ambiguity in the form of a discrepancy, within the same text, between his critical discourse and his artistic practice. As a critic, Momaday defines writing as “recorded speech.” He speaks of orality as “pre-literate storytelling” and of literature as the “end product of an evolutionary process” in which “the so-called ‘oral tradition’ is primarily a stage,” necessary and, of course, “originary,” but implicitly primitive. Thus, he seems to subscribe to a conventional concept of linear, typographic, progressive time. As an artist, however, he paints – through the character of Ko-sahn – a relationship between orality and writing based less on linear succession than on expansion, simultaneous interaction, and mutual change.

9 In Griever: An American Monkey King in China, Vizenor (1987) also makes connections with “The Chinese Monkey King, or Mind Monkey [who] was a transformational

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character related to Naanabozho the anishinaabe trickster. Clearly, these two wonderful trickster characters are cousins, and that coincidence of transmotion was the start of my novel. I decided then to bring these two fantastic characters together in name, creation, irony, cultural play, and cousinry” (Vizenor and Lee 1999:116). 10 See also Chapter 4 of Krupat’s Turn to the Native for a reading of Vizenor’s (1992a) Dead Voices that contrasts his staging of orality with the critique of orality as “originary” in post-structuralist views he nonetheless also invokes (Krupat 1996:70–87). 11 Dirlik (1994:332) writes: Three uses of the term seem to me to be especially prominent (and significant): (a) “as a literal description of conditions in formerly colonial societies . . . (b) as a description of a global condition after the period of colonialism . . . and (c) as a description of a discourse on the above-named conditions that is informed by the epistemological and psychic orientations that are products of these conditions.” By contrast, Ashcroft et al. (1989:2) use “the term post-colonial . . . to cover all culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day.” 12

Our translations, even the best ones, proceed from a wrong premise. They want to turn Hindi, Greek, English into German instead of turning German into Hindi, Greek, English. Our translators have a far greater reverence for the usage of their own language than for the spirit of the foreign works. . . . The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by a foreign tongue. (Pannwitz, quoted in Benjamin 1969:180–1, and Krupat 1996:35)

13 This is in line with a tradition of arguing that translation in the literal sense should not minimize idiosyncratic and specific features of the source language in a perfect assimilation to the target language that makes the former disappear as other (Venuti 1995). A similar problematic unfolds in the two different approaches to translating Native texts, where curiously the social science oriented renderings (rather than the more literary ones) leave specific features of Native verbal expression intact, but for that very reason prevent the production of target-language oriented effects that would have made such practices amenable to Western literary reception: “Translators with attachments to the arts or humanities have rendered Native verbal expression in such a way as to make it appear attractively literary by western standards of literariness, thereby obscuring the very different standards pertaining in various Native American cultures” (Krupat 1996:34–5). 14 His fourth novel, DreadfulWater Shows Up (King 2002), has been published under the nom de plume Hartley GoodWeather. The 2003 Massey Lectures by King were published as The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. For another discussion of King’s doctoral thesis, see Davidson et al. (2003:5–6). 15 He follows such images of inferiority from the journals and letters of the explorers on to Mary Rowlandson’s A Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration of Mrs Mary Rowlandson, and tracks the image of the dying Indian in Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, or John Augustus Stone’s play Metamora; or, The Last of the Wampanoags. 16 King thus contrasts a biblical God who derives all power from himself and is omnipotent and patriarchal (1986:70) with the Native deities who are usually limited supernatural figures (1986:89) with less of a distance to humans, or where “there is little difference between the creators, and the animals, and humans”; here, the creation of the world is a “joint project” (1986:89). While the biblical relationship of “humans to animals is an extension of the relationships of humans to the deity” (1986:71), in

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Native creation/origin stories “all animals have the power of speech” (1986:90), and they are often closer to the deity than humans and play important roles in the creation process. The biblical split between the Garden and the harsh world after the Fall that must be conquered and subdued is missing, as is the conflict between that world to be conquered and humans. None of the creation stories “talks of a perfect world which is lost. . . . There is no sense of disharmony between humans and the world, and there is no sense that there is a better world elsewhere” (King 1986:92). 17 King takes these themes up again, in particular in Chapter 1 of The Truth About Stories (2003:1–29). 18 “ ‘Gha!’ said the Lone Ranger. ‘Higayv:ligé:i’ (King 1993a:11). The first words in Cherokee by the Lone Ranger are the ceremonial opening of storytelling in a Cherokee divining ceremony, divining for water and so in a sense for the future [Helen Hoy]” (Flick 1999:144; see also Goldman 1999:31). 19 Prevented from running during Indian Days, at the end of the novel he is “going to keep on going until I feel like stopping” (King 1999b:258). 20

“That is the trickery of the witchcraft,” he said. “They want us to believe all evil resides with white people. Then we will look no further to see what is really happening. They want us to separate ourselves from white people, to be ignorant and helpless as we watch our own destruction. But white people are only tools that the witchery manipulates; and I tell you, we can deal with white people, with their machines and their beliefs.” (Silko 1986:132)

21 Like Vizenor, King also emphasizes that for Native cultures colonialism is hardly over; yet his critique here aims at the pre-figuration of resistance implied in the term “postcolonial” itself. 22 In addition, one can contrast one of the most crucial images that establishes this intertextuality directly – the comparison of Harlen with a spider mending a web – with the use of the spider web by another writer – Michael Ondaatje – whose poetry King mentions as a direct intertext for the story relating the narrator’s first meeting with Harlen. 23 Until 1985, under the federal Canadian Indian Act the Native status of women was defined by that of their husband. 24 “Griffin calls to come and kiss him goodnight/ . . . /He is standing arms outstretched/waiting for a bearhug. . . . How long was he standing there/like that, before I came?” (Ondaatje 1992:75). King comments on the connection: “. . . how long has that child been standing there with his arms open, waiting for his father’s hug? . . . [Harlen is] Bigbear too. . . . So there he is with that bear hug. . . . I wanted that image you know, wondering how long Harlen had been standing there like that, to let the reader know that he hasn’t moved in all that time. Harlen’s been there waiting . . .” (King 1990c:68–9). 25 This passage has also been cited by Arnold Krupat to critique assumptions of the unchangeability of meaning in oral stories. He observes that while the beginning of the passage sits well with post-structuralist accounts of signification, the last sentence does not: “Ku’oosh – or Leslie Silko – may really be thinking of the closure of the printed text while trying to define some quality of oral storytelling” (Krupat 1987:120); yet he proposes that Silko, and the book as a whole, may suggest other possibilities “for her novel shows that there may be more to efficacious storytelling than what Ku’oosh can imagine” (1987:118). The necessity of change in order to maintain the reality of ceremonies is embodied in Betonie’s practices and comments on change, which King cites prominently in his dissertation; and King’s Harlen, certainly a storyteller and spider who throws “out filament after filament” to repair the broken web, has gleaned his information about the healing abilities of starfish from watching TV.

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26 As Margery Fee and Jane Flick put it: “The most striking effect of Green Grass, Running Water is its ability to arouse readers’ desire to ‘get’ the in-jokes, to track the allusions, and to find answers to a whole series of posed but unanswered questions” (Fee and Flick 1999:131). Besides their own responses, see for instance Walton (1990); Davidson (1994); Ridington (1998, 2000); Flick (1999); Goldman (1999); Wyile (1999); Davidson et al. (2003). 27 This sequence corresponds to the four section headings of Green Grass, Running Water; see Flick (1999:143) for the translation of these headings. 28 Dr Hovaugh is named as Joe Hovaugh by his colleague John Eliot (whose namesake [1604–90] was the translator of the bible into Algoquin [1661/1663]), echoing the same play with the signifier in “A Seat in the Garden.” We learn that “he was pleased” with his garden/creation (King 1993a:12), and Babo calls him directly “Dr. Joseph God Almighty Hovaugh” (1993a:184). 29 While First woman falls from the sky and the orally transformed and “modernized” Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria sail over the edge of the world, these falls signal here creation and a new beginning. 30 Coyote has presumably been reading Samuel Eliot Morison’s Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus (Morison 1942). 31 See also King’s comments on slavery in his interview with Davis (Davis 1996:57, 58). 32 For example in Section I, launched by the testimony if not testament “according to the Lone Ranger,” we hear thus the story of First Woman in encounter with the biblical story of the Garden of Eden, the literary story of Melville’s “Benito Cereno,” and the historical story of the incarceration of Natives at Fort Marion and the creation of the Plains Indian Ledger Art. 33 This is an “agrammatical” move on paper since it assumes a preceding context that is lacking; yet it is highly appropriate in what Robin Ridington calls “contexted discourse,” which assumes the physical presence of teller and listener and a context of group knowledge that links them (Ridington 2000). 34 King draws on a number of different native cultures; as Chester observes, he “connects Robinson’s Okanagan Coyote with stories from the Blackfoot of Alberta, and the traditions of Thought Woman (Pueblo), First woman (Navajo), Old Woman (Blackfoot, Dunne-za), and Changing Woman (Navajo)”; they appear “in slightly different forms and guises in other Native traditions” (Chester 1999:46, 60). 35 Duncan Campbell Scott, one of the Canadian Confederation poets and, inter alia, author of “The Onondaga Madonna,” which ingeniously replicated in its poetic form (and title) Scott’s belief in the slow but inevitable assimilation of Natives as a dying race, worked also in the Department of Indian Affairs (see also Flick 1999:148). 36 The morning star designates Venus, the brightest star in the sky, when it is visible at sunrise in the east, whereas the evening star refers to Venus when it is in the west. The morning star was also called Lucifer in ancient times (“Venus,” Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia, 1996). 37 These mistakes will later be balanced during the Sun Dance, which is addressed to the natural sequence of light. 38 As Flick points out, the “title alludes to The Mystic Warrior (1984), a television movie based on Ruth Beebe Hill’s Hanta Yo” (Flick 1999:158), which Hochbruck also refers to as Hill’s “sick saga” (Hochbruck 1996a:26). 39 This conversation is directly linked, in Eli’s memory, to the moment of Karen’s death in a car accident, and his later sense of homecoming is related to the perception of light during the Sun Dance, which is also the moment of his own death. 40 The story alludes to the role of the Dominican “Black Friars” and Charles V in the introduction of black slaves to the New World (Sundquist 1993:136–7). In 1517, Charles V, who succeeded Ferdinand and Isabella, initiated the African slave trade to the American colonies; Las Casas, who was instrumental in this process, was himself a Dominican.

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41 His own father-in-law, Supreme Court Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, favored the Bill. 42 Before trying to tell “patrolman” Jimmy Delano the Native creation story she has heard from the Old Indians, Babo also evokes her intertextual ancestry: “Now, my great-great-grandfather could handle a blade. Have I got stories –” “Those things are pretty dangerous, aren’t they?” (King 1993a:76). 43 Vizenor cites this passage from Robert Bellah’s The Broken Covenant repeatedly, for instance in “Double Others” (1994a:46) or The Trickster of Liberty (1988:49). 44 For an illustration see the beginning of “Prologue: Tricksters and Transvaluations” in The Trickster of Liberty (1988:ix). 45 Vizenor explains elsewhere that Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer taught me about ecstatic dominance and mass movements and the fanatic causes of those who believe in the absolute. The notions and simulations of true believers fascinated me . . . My thoughts about the native true believer, and those who truly believe in indians, focused on the idea of terminal creeds. Terminal, rather than true, because of federal termination policies and the absence of natives in history, and creed, rather than believer, because of the romantic pursuit of native spiritualism. Eric Hoffer taught me about true believers and fanaticism, and his ideas took shape in my own thoughts about natives and the ambiguities of those who must possess the other by simulations. (Lee and Vizenor 1999:80–1) 46 This suggestion comes with reference to Vizenor’s experience of living in Japan and to Asian philosophies (1981b:43–4). Vizenor’s interest in such philosophies (and in Haiku, evidenced by several volumes of Haiku he has authored) is another example of his practice, discussed by Elaine Jahner with respect to poststructuralism, of “remaining close to a traditional mythic system and seeking its points of connection with other systems” (Jahner 1985b:65); for a discussion of Vizenor’s Haiku writing, see Blaeser (1996:108–35). 47 King uses the example again in The Truth About Stories (King 2003:9). 48 See also Blaeser (1996:187–90) for a discussion of Vizenor’s use of metaphor. 49 Louis Riel was the leader of the Red River rebellion, founder of an independent nation, and was executed in 1885 for treason. 50 Green Grass, Running Water begins: “So. In the beginning there was nothing. Just the water.” 51 The headwaters of the Mississippi are located in the White Earth Reservation where Vizenor is an enrolled member. 52 Retelling the story in an interview in 1993, Vizenor references his Griever: An American Monkey King in China to point out that “the first version of the Chinese trickster, was born from a stone . . . the character in Dead Voices [the novel to follow Heirs] collects stones, which represent the metaphors of the stories. They fit the stories, allow her to tell and imagine stories, and give her presence and existence in a story. That’s everywhere, always” (Vizenor 1993a). 53 Vizenor’s work not only builds on traditional stories, but also recreates characters and episodes from his own earlier texts in later ones. 54 See Christie (1997) for a discussion of the relationship between the actual Point Roberts and Vizenor’s novel. 55 In Fugitive Poses, Vizenor emphasizes sovereignty as the non-representational quality of this work on representation: “Native motion is sovereignty; and native stories of survivance are transmotions, not the mere imitation of motion or action in the tragic mode of literature” (1998:33). Chapter 5 of Fugitive Poses, entitled “Native Transmotion,” offers an extended discussion of sovereignty and citizenship. 56 Vizenor references here Victor Barnouw’s Wisconsin Chippewa Myths and Tales; he also quotes the beginning of this earthdiver story and the story of the birth of a stone

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60

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from the same collection in his essay “Trickster Discourse” (1989:187–211, here 197–8). Vizenor has also repeatedly commented on the problems and chances of tribal casino politics, for instance in his essay “Casino Coups” in Manifest Manners (1994a:138–48) and in Postindian Conversations (Vizenor and Lee 1999:130, 163–73). See Barry (1993) for a discussion of the Gambler in Vizenor. Vizenor presents “Naanabozho and the Gambler” in Anishinabe Adisokan: Tales of the People, reprinted in Summer in the Spring: Anishinaabe Lyric Poems and Stories, New Edition (1981c:129–31). He uses Theodore Hudon Beaulieu’s translations of oral stories published in 1887–88 in The Progress on the Minnesota White Earth Reservation (1981c:14–16). Barry draws in particular on this material in her reading of the evil gambler in Bearheart. Barry draws attention to the “whistling on the wind motif” when ice woman “blows a cold wind . . . and freezes the wiindigoo” (Barry 1993:19), a motif that accompanies for instance the defeat of the evil gambler in Bearheart (Vizenor 1990a:132), and appears again obliquely in the penultimate sentence of Heirs: “Admire whistled a tune from the New World Symphony by Antonin Dvorák” (Vizenor 1991a:183; Barry 1993:18–20). Barry (1993:18) writes: “Vizenor’s variations on the gambler myth always include the wind motif, associating his protagonists clearly with Manabozho, whose mother was impregnated by the wind, and, in some versions of his life, Manabozho is the east wind or helps finish off the world through blowing on sand.” Vizenor cites Eco’s description of the “journey into hyperreality, in search of instances where the American imagination demands the real thing and, to attain it, must fabricate the absolute fake” (Eco 1986:8, quoted in Vizenor 1989b:5). Quoting passages by Baudrillard, Vizenor comments: “Indians are simulations in the social sciences, conceivable models of tribal cultures. ‘For ethnology to live, its object must die.’ The posthumous savages, [Baudrillard] writes, have ‘become referential simulacra, and the science itself a pure simulation.’ ” (Baudrillard 1983:13, 15, quoted in Vizenor 1989b:14–15). The theme of mixedbloods is announced by several of Vizenor’s titles (1981a, 1990b, 1991b); it is evidenced also by the ubiquity of mongrels in his texts. This corresponds to Vizenor’s reading in “Trickster Discourse”: Warwick Wadlington argues that the trickster straddles oppositions and “embodies two antithetical, nonrational experiences of man with the natural world, his society, and his own psyche: on the one hand,” he explains that there is “a force of treacherous disorder that outrages and disrupts, and on the other hand, an unanticipated, usually unintentional benevolence in which trickery is at the expense of the inimical forces and for the benefit of mankind.” Structuralism, structural linguistics and various semantic theories reveal more about trickster narratives (the texture of language, and the structure of sentences) than do theories in social science . . . The emphasis here, however, is semiotics, the reader, the listener or audience, and the consciousness of signs in literature (signs, myths, and metaphors) than on linear and causal theories. (Vizenor 1989a:188–9)

63 “Columbus,” Krupat points out, “in his log for the day he set sail, remarks on the heavy traffic in the harbor caused by the many ships bearing Spain’s Jews away” (Krupat 1996:57). 64 Vizenor refers to the Act for instance in the context of The Progress, the newspaper operated by his ancestors on the White Earth Reservation, which “was the first tribal newspaper to be seized by federal agents. The editors published controversial stories and opposed the Dawes Severalty Act, or General Allotment Act, the federal legislation that allotted collective tribal land to individual reservation members” (Vizenor 1990d:11).

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65 Vizenor has shifted in this retelling to indian as a marker of this consumable invention. The professor conducting the reading of Vizenor’s previous text is nicknamed “Round Dance,” and teaches by variation: “His stories were overtures to a native presence and, by turns, reworded so that the students on the circuit related to a variation in his lecture” (Vizenor 2000:81); see Krupat’s comments on the same practice in traditional storytellers (1989:15–16; 1996:62). The tourists who attend the professor’s class respond to Belladonna’s “Indian blood” rhetoric like Eco’s tourists to hyperrealities, with requests for “more, more” (Vizenor 2000:93). 66 Orion is the star to be guessed in the contest with the evil gambler in Ceremony (Silko 1986:174), yet Belladonna loses here to terminate creeds 67 As one of the hosts remarks: “We invented you and that must be why you hate us so much, because you were taken in by the same invention . . .” (Vizenor 1990a:195; Vizenor 2000:92). 68 His first name, in its spoken sound moving between Chain and the French chaîne, repeats his bearer’s zigzag moves on the field by crossing French–English lines, like Vizenor’s own Canadian Métis name, Vezina (1990d:17). Cross-linguistic pronunciation of Chaine Riel produces here also chaîne réelle, the chain and sequence of the real. Riel had already testified in a previous chapter that “some tribal people would say that the real world exists and is remembered nowhere else but in stories” (Vizenor 1991a:75). His last name, Doumet, could be an incomplete transposition of that other French-named investigator in the anglophone detective canon created by Poe. 69 Blaeser suggests that “the ultimate goal . . . of Vizenor’s metaphors is to bridge the boundaries of conventional references and conventional understanding and arrive at another arena of meaning” (Blaeser 1996:189). 70 Krupat cites Larry Evers and Felipe Molina, who work “for two goals: for the continuation of deer songs as a vital part of life in Yaqui communities and for their appreciation in all communities beyond” (Evers and Molina 1987:8, quoted in Krupat 1989:14). 71 This phrase is echoed in the opening of the exchange between Powers and Traves in Heirs: “ ‘Krupat said he was an Indian?’ ” 72 In Felipa’s subsequent words in the dialogue: “The politics of tribal creation stories never ends,” to which Treves adds the final replique in this exchange: “Most of the editions in my collection are valued for their association rather than racial politics” (Vizenor 1991a:111). 73 Vizenor’s comments here come after a 1993 MELUS session on his “Thomas White Hawk.” 74 See his statements in “Mythic Race and Laughter” (Vizenor 1995:80). 75 Sartre’s own definition of freedom, of course, turned from one of negativity in L’étre et le neant to one of dialectical negation in the name of a political conviction and a party whose own members tend now to be postcommunists rather than communists; perhaps one could say that even Sartre might be post-Sartrean today. 76 Escape from the “Invention of the Indian” requires the trick “to elude historicism, racial representations, and remain historical” (Vizenor 1988:xi). 77 The heirs descend after all from “Domenico Colombo, a wool carder and weaver” (Vizenor 1991a:28); and Stone Columbus’ father is “a pale weaver with a doctorate in consciousness studies from the University at California” (Vizenor 1991a:118), i.e. a graduate of the “History of Consciousness” program there. 78 The chapter is adapted from Appiah’s earlier article “Is the Post- in Postmodernism the Post in Postcolonial?” (1991), which Krupat also quotes at one point. 79 Appiah’s claim that postmodernisms would not also delegitimate the content of nationalism can only be defended with reference to an extremely restricted corpus of “the postmodern”; more acceptable is the contention that postmodern strategies are not “backstopped” by concrete positive counter-images and claims, taken to be exempt from the logic of signification.

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6 Genealogies of difference

1 The success and acceptance of Noah Webster’s 1783 Spelling Book – the ancestor of all Webster’s – reflect the early desire for such differentiation in the United States, and the de facto possibility of formalizing it. By contrast, J. K. Chambers writes in the introduction of the Canadian Oxford Dictionary: “In 1998, we can assert with pride the aspects of Canadian English that distinguish us from other speakers of English worldwide. But in the Victorian era, Canadians were thought to be – nay, expected to be – basically British, and to speak British English” (Chambers 1998:ix). 2 See King et al. (1987) for a wider discussion of the nexus between the nation and the Native, and in particular Fee (1987). 3 As mentioned above, the word designated originally La Nouvelle France (Sarkonak 1983:4–8). 4 Roy’s attack on Emile Nelligan in this context has been often cited: “faire des poésies où le sentiment est purement livresque, et soutenu de réminiscences toutes françaises, comme, par exemple, il arrivait trop souvent à ce pauvre et si sympatique Emile Nelligan . . . voilà ce qui n’est pas canadien, et voilà donc ce qu’il faut condamner”(1979:69; “writing poems in which the sentiment is purely bookish, and based solely on French remembrances, as, for instance, this poor and very sympathetic Emile Nelligan too often did . . . that is what is not Canadian and what needs to be condemned”). These remarks initiate the reception of Nelligan as paradigmatic case in the régionalisme/exotisme debate (see Michon 1988). 5 Garand suggests that “le régionalisme littéraire a forgé les caractéristiques de son Autre principalement à partir des ‘excès de la littérature parisienne’, c’est-à-dire des décadents et des symbolistes” (1989:93; “literary regionalism mainly based the characteristics of its Other on the ‘excesses of Parisian literature,’ that is to say those of the Decadents and Symbolists”). 6 See Hayward (1981, 1988) and Garand (1989:83–224) for the régionalisme/exotisme controversy, which comes to a point around 1918; Kokotailo (1992) gives an account of the native/cosmopolitan debate, which is launched by John Sutherland’s attack, in “Literary Colonialism” (Sutherland 1944), on A. J. M. Smith’s use of that distinction in the introduction to his 1943 Book of Canadian Poetry (Smith 1943). 7 For a more detailed comparative account see Siemerling (1998). An excellent study of the importance of language and joual in particular in Québécois literature is available to the anglophone reader in Gauvin (1983), translated here for the special issue of Yale French Studies 65 that in its entirety offers a good introduction in English to Québécois difference; a good standard survey of the history of Québécois literary criticism is Jacques Allard’s “Brève histoire de la critique littéraire au Québec (Allard 1991:15–74), a version of which has appeared in English as “Criticism in French” in The Oxford Companion to Canadian Literature (Oxford University Press 1983/1997). 8 For an account of the sixties, see the special issue “Remembering the Sixties,” Canadian Literature 152/53 (1997); for a discussion of Expo ’67 in that issue, see Kröller (1997). 9 While the issue of coloniality and language is ubiquitous in francophone discussions, it is not absent in English Canada. Related reflections here include Dennis Lee’s 1973 essay “Cadence, Country, Silence: Writing in Colonial Space,” in which he recounts his discovery during the Vietnam war of the American content transported by the language that served as medium of his poetry, leading to a period of silence and then rewriting; the essay also mentions the question of “joual” and Gaston Miron’s poetry (see also Lee’s 1998 “Memories of Miron”). Robert Kroetsch, discussing such problems in particular as a Prairie writer, points to the presence of several languages inside the English language in Canada and reads the English Canadian indebtedness via language to both British and American experience in the

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11 12 13

14 15

Notes context of Heidegger’s remarks about the concealed presence of the Greek word in the Latin one (Kroetsch 1989:50–1, 58). The category of ethnicity constitutes a telling example. Ethnicity emerges hesitantly as a factor in the discursive construction of Canadian literature. One of the reasons, I would argue, is the slow institutionalization of the Canadian and Québécois literatures themselves. Donna Bennett associates the emergence of “ethnically identified writers” with the appearance of A. M. Klein’s early work in the 1930s, but emphasizes that ethnic writers in the 1920s like Grove, Ostenso, and Salverson “were not perceived as concerned with questions of immigrant or ethnic identity but accepted into the mainstream because they were recording a settlement experience common to all Canadian immigrants” (Bennett 1994:186). Sherry Simon and David Leahy, in their observations about the situation in Quebec, comment both on the Montreal Jewish writers of the 1940s and 1950s (Cohen, Richler, Klein, Layton) and on francophone authors in order to demonstrate ethnicity’s slow emergence; they “wrote in English and considered themselves part of a larger Canadian writing context; writers like Alice Parizeau, Naïm Kattan, Michel Salomon and Jean Basile who wrote in French, were not necessarily given special consideration as immigrant writers” (Simon and Leahy 1994:387). In the post-war years when William Lyon Mackenzie King initiated renewed mass immigration to Canada and the criteria were ardently debated by the public (Harney 1988:54–5), the institutional base for a Canadian or Québécois discourse of a national literature was not yet established. For a comparative discussion of Canadian and United States multiculturalism, see Weisman (2000). For a book-length examination from a literary and cultural perspective, see Kamboureli (2000). One could point to the 1979 conference at the University of Alberta, Identifications: Ethnicity and the Writer in Canada (ed. Jars Balan 1982), John Miska’s massive bibliography Ethnic and Native Canadian Literature (which appeared in 1980 in microform before it was printed in 1990), the 1988 University of Alberta conference Literatures of Lesser Diffusion/Les littératures de moindre diffusion (ed. Joseph Pivato 1990), Joseph Pivato’s Echo: Essays on Other Literatures (1994), the anthologies Other Solitudes (1990) by Linda Hutcheon and Marion Richmond and Making a Difference (1996) by Smaro Kamboureli, or edited volumes like Writing Ethnicity (Siemerling 1996a), Literary Pluralities (Verduyn 1998), or the special issue of Mosaic, Idols of Otherness: The Rhetoric and Reality of Multiculturalism (Hinz 1996). Kamboureli’s Scandalous Bodies also offers a discussion of the numerous ethnic anthologies from the mid-1970s on (Kamboureli 2000:131–74). See, for instance, Helly (1993); Lequin and Verthuy (1996); Moisan and Hildebrand (2001); Bernier (2002); Chartier (2003). Looking back at Parti pris in 1972, André Brochu suggests that Sartre was for them “ce que [Jacques] Maritain avait été pour les rédacteurs de la Relève” (Brochu 1972:26; “what [Jacques] Maritain had been for the directors of La Relève”; Maritain contributed occasionally himself to Robert Charbonneau and Claude Hurtubise’s important Catholic journal La Relève [later La Nouvelle Relève], which appeared from 1934–48 and counted among its contributors Hector de Saint-Denys-Garneau). The continuing impact of the French scene on Quebec cultural and political discussion constitutes in itself a complex problematic. If Gaston Miron, that icon of Québécois culture, locates in Robert Charbonneau’s 1947 La France et nous the moment “où l’on s’est détaché de l’altérite française” (Gauvin 1975:22n4; “when we grew apart from French alterity”), the influence of Sartre on the generation of Parti pris accentuates a question that returns again with the impact of Charles De Gaulle’s in/famous “Vive le Québec libre” (“Long Live Free Quebec” – which happened to be also the slogan of the terrorist Front du libération du Québec) from the balcony of Montreal City Hall in 1967. For Frye, De Gaulle’s utterance was a “monumental gaffe” (1982:73)

Notes

16

17

18

19

20

177

that fed “anti-English and separatist feelings, which among the more confused took the form that de Gaulle was interested in, a French neo-colonialism” (74). Parti pris, on the other hand, greeted the event (which left officials on both sides scrambling) enthusiastically as liberating moment with an issue entitled “De Gaulle!” (V.1, septembre 1967). The “éditorial” (“Editorial”) invested the “French connection” with even higher importance: “La visite du Général De Gaulle a accéléré la marche vers l’indépendance” (V.1:5; “General de Gaulle’s visit speeded up our march toward independence”). Nationalism was hardly an easy or obvious choice for left-leaning or social democratic intellectuals in Quebec because of the socially conservative values that had often driven traditional French Canadian nationalism. Gérard Pelletier, the labour activist, journalist, co-founder of Cité libre, and later member of the Trudeau administration, thus wrote in “Parti pris ou la grande illusion”: “Des hommes d’âge mûr qui auraient trouvé indécent de devenir séparatistes avec Barbeau, Chaput ou même Bourgault, font le saut dans Parti pris . . . sans éprouver le moindre malaise apparent à troquer la primauté du social contre la primauté de la nation” (quoted in Gauvin 1975:189; “Middle aged men for whom becoming separatists with Barbeau, Chaput, or even Bourgault would have been considered indecent are now taking the plunge with Parti pris . . . without appearing to be in the least embarrassed to trade the primacy of the social for that of the nation”). The editorial committee of Parti pris was certainly aware of this problem, and tried to distance itself, for instance in the editorial to the special issue “portrait du colonisé québécois” (“Portrait of the Colonized Québécois”), as much as possible from the reactionary sides of previous French Canadian nationalisms (I. 9–10–11, été 1964). Gaston Miron comments the following year on his initial difficulties about siding with separatism “en raison des origines de droite des premiers mouvements d’indépendance” (1982:II.5:30; “due to the rightist roots of the first independence movements”). Aquin delivered a classic defense of French Canadian nationalism in his attack on Trudeau in “La Fatigue culturelle du Canada français” (Aquin 1977, orig. 1962; see also Siemerling 1994:72–3). A complete set of the issues of Parti pris was given to me by a colleague, the poet and critic Joseph Bonenfant. He had guided many important Québécois writers to a PhD in creative writing, among them one of the founders of Parti pris, Paul Chamberland. When I opened the first volume, numéro 1, octobre 1963 – prix 50 cents – I found the inscription: Joseph Bonenfant – Paris, and the address of the editor circled in anticipation of further numbers of this new journal. Attached was a short clipping from the 30 October, 1968 issue of Le Devoir, announcing the suspension of Parti pris’s publication. I dedicate this chapter to the memory of Joseph Bonenfant. Gérard Pelletier, however, rejects this antithesis as artificial in his already cited 1964 essay in Cité libre, “Parti pris ou la grande illusion,” and points to that generation’s engagements in political confrontation and labour struggles (Pelletier 1964, quoted in Gauvin 1975:190). Charles Taylor will judge even harder in Cité libre (aoûtseptembre 1964): “Parti pris refuse, non seulement la démocratisation actuelle, mais la démocratie même” (quoted in Gauvin, Parti pris littéraire 191; “Parti pris rejects not only the current democratization, but democracy itself”). Althusser develops his notion of a “pratique théorique” in “La dialectique matérialiste,” which appears in La Pensée in August 1963 (reprinted in his 1965 Pour Marx) – just before the first issue of Parti pris is published. We have to wait, though, until volume IV.1–2 (Sep–Oct. 1966) and Paul Chamberland’s “exigences théoriques d’un combat politique” for an explicit reference to Althusser. Chamberland quotes here at length precisely this definition of “pratique” (10; he cites the 1965 book, not the earlier article). For an analysis of this problematic as a driving force in Aquin’s Prochain Episode and Trou de mémoire, see Siemerling 1994:62–105.

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21 Sartre writes: Thus suddenly an object has appeared which has stolen the world from me. Everything is in place; everything still exists for me; but everything is traversed by an invisible flight and fixed in the direction of a new object. The appearance of the Other in the world corresponds therefore to a fixed sliding of the whole universe, to a decentralization of the world which undermines the centralization which I am simultaneously effecting . . . it appears that the world has a kind of drain hole in the middle of its being and that it is perpetually flowing off through this hole. (Sartre 1956:343) 22 In “On National Culture” (1963:206–48), for instance, Fanon suggests that the “historical necessity in which the men of African culture find themselves to racialize their claims and to speak more of African culture than of national culture will tend to lead them up a blind alley” (214). For Fanon, the test cases of civil liberty whereby both whites and blacks in America try to drive back racial discrimination have very little in common in the principles and objectives with the heroic fight of the Angolan people against the detestable Portuguese colonialism. . . . Negritude therefore finds its first limitation in the phenomena which take account of the formation of the historical character of men. Negro and African-Negro culture broke up into different entities because the men who wished to incarnate these cultures realized that every culture is first and foremost national, and that the problems which keep Richard Wright or Langston Hughes on the alert were fundamentally different from those which might confront Leopold Senghor or Jomo Kenyatta. (Fanon 1963:216) 23 This insistence in the chapter “On National Culture” is preceded by Fanon’s analysis of the ambiguous role of the bourgeoisie in the battle against colonialism in “Pitfalls of National Consciousness,” a skepticism often also voiced by the writers of Parti pris (e.g. also in the “De Gaulle” editorial, V.1:3–6). 24 Lise Gauvin observes: Le choix du joual a comme conséquence immédiate de fermer l’oeuvre à tout lecteur non initié. . . . Pour la première fois au Québec, il s’agissait, avec Parti pris, non pas de promouvoir une langue et de s’en glorifier . . . ou d’ajouter simplement au réalisme des personnages par l’usage d’un parler régional, mais de provoquer le lecteur, de dénoncer et surtout d’assumer l’image d’une dégradation afin d’agir sur elle. Alors qu’Aquin choisissait de “rompre avec la cohérence de la domination,” que Miron se cantonnait dans un silence de l’écriture, d’autres préféraient recourir à cette arme à double tranchant qu’est le joual. . . . Solution de désespoir . . . le recours au joual est, en 1965, une forme active de résistance. (Gauvin 1975:71, 74) (Choosing joual had as an immediate consequence the shutting out of any uninitiated reader. . . . For the first time in Quebec, Parti pris’ aim was not to promote a language and to take pride in it . . . nor to merely add to the characters’ realism by using regional speech, but rather to challenge the reader, to denounce, and above all to take on an image of degradation in order to act upon it. At a time when Aquin was choosing to “break up with the coherence of domination,” and Miron was confining himself to a period of silence in his writing, others preferred to resort to joual, this double-edged weapon. . . . A despairing solution . . . the resort to joual is, in 1965, an active form of resistance.)

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25 In his essay “Critical Fanonism,” Henry Louis Gates offered the suggestion that “we . . . may be fated to rehearse the agonisms of a culture that may never earn the title of postcolonial” (Gates 1991a:470). 26 (“refusal of literature,” “to ramble,” “to write badly,” “joual.”) 27

L’élément irréductible qui donne sa forme à la poésie est le rythme. L’attitude de non-préméditation propre à la poésie-improvisation s’incarne, à ce niveau, par le désir, moins de calquer le langage parlé, que d’en reproduire la respiration, le plus étroitement possible: ses heurts, ses irrégularités, ses syncopes, ses illogismes, ses faiblesses et ses à-coups. Notre langue parlée, cela va de soi. Ici la dépoétisation devient authentification de la poésie: l’image vient d’un seul tenant, les racines encore toutes fumantes de la terre nourricière du quotidien. (Chamberland 1965:II. 5:42) (The irreducible element giving poetry its form is rhythm. The non-premeditated attitude typical of poetry-improvisation is embodied, at that level, in the desire, not so much to copy spoken language, than to reproduce breathing as closely as possible: its ups and downs, its irregularities, its syncopated rhythm, its illogic nature, its weaknesses, its jolts. Our spoken language is self-evident. Here, depoeticization authentifies poetry: the image comes all in one piece, carrying with it the nourishing earth’s steaming roots of everyday life.)

28 For a pertinent examination of “l’identitaire” (“the identitarian”) and “l’hétérogène” (“the heterogeneous”) in Quebec see also Simon (1991b). 29 The early issues carry advertisements from both Multiculturalism Canada (1.1:11) and the Quebec “Ministre des communautés culturelles et de l’immigration” (accompanied by a photograph), Gerald Godin, the former key player of Parti pris. But for Vice Versa the independent state seems less important than a relationship to alterity that drives culture, writing, reality and transformation, and that often seems diametrically opposed to an identitarian essentialism (which it nonetheless also seems to invoke when it flirts with nostalgic evocations of cultures of origin). 30 For a recent detailed study of Vice Versa, see Renzi (2003). I would like to thank the author for her helpful comments, and for her sharing of materials and information about Vice Versa. 31 Caccia is also the poet of Irpinia (1983) and Aknos, Poésie (1994), for example, the editor of Quêtes: textes d’auteurs italo-québécois (1984), of Sous le signe du phénix: entretriens avec quinze créateurs italo-québécois (1985), and later (with Michel Lacroix) of métamorphoses d’une utopie (1992), and the author of La République mêtis. 32 Caccia’s discussion here includes for instance William Boelhower’s Immigrant Autobiography and Régine Robin’s L’Amour du Yiddish. 33 “Rompre en connaissance de cause et en toute conscience, récupérer pour soi la puissance de nomination, être père et mère tout à la fois d’un territoire vierge de ce toute identification préalable, lieu d’expérimentation de toutes les singularités orphelines, territoire largué, livré aux enfances improbables. Ce que nous avons appelé jusqu’ici le territoire imaginaire de la culture” (Bertrand et Morin 1987, “Imaginer le territoire,” Vice Versa 17:12; “To break off wilfully and consciously, to recover for oneself the power of naming, to be at once father and mother of a territory devoid of any previous identification, a place of experimentation of all the orphaned singularities, cast off territory given over to improbable infancies. That is what we have called until now the imaginary territory of culture”). 34 Both German terms are often rendered by “alienation.” Brecht’s “Verfremdungseffekt” or “V-Effekt” becomes thus, strangely, the “A-effect” or “alienation effect” (see for instance Brecht 1964:191–3). 35 Linda Nicholson (1996:3) offers a useful reminder of the very different and often

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Notes opposing attitudes towards recognition and identity that are potentially eclipsed by Taylor’s wide frame of reference: Within modernity, for many groups and in many contexts, a recognition of difference is actively avoided. Secondly, even in certain contemporary struggles where an affirmation of difference is sought, the abstractness of Taylor’s account obscures crucial differences among such struggles concerning how identity and recognition are understood. In other words, by claiming a common cause to many contemporary social struggles – a “modern” need for the recognition of difference – important differences in such struggles are obscured.

36 At issue here is also the interpretation of the role of recognition in Hegel himself. Habermas for instance argues that Hegel increasingly abandons the communicative approach potentially opened up by the concept of recognition and develops the absolute solely out of the foundational category of modernity, the subject (Habermas 1985:34–58). Robert Williams, on the other hand, maintains in Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition that recognition remains a central category also in the later Hegel. 37 See also Glissant’s remarks on “opacité” quoted in Chapter 3. 38 For an account of the positing of the subject in this sense see Kristeva (1984:36); see also the discussion of this passage in Siemerling (1994:7–8). 39 Taylor continues: “The reproach the first makes to the second is just that it violates the principle of non-discrimination. The reproach the second makes to the first is that it negates identity by forcing people into a homogeneous mold that is untrue to them” (1994:43). Yet Taylor also cites the perhaps more decisive critique of universalism in which the “supposedly fair and difference-blind society” is accused of reflecting a particular and hegemonic culture, “a particularism masquerading as the universal” (1994:43–4). 40 Taylor refers to Dworkin (1977, 1978). 41 In Hegel, the dialectic of master and slave will eventually lead to the incomplete freedom of stoicism, and later come to a form of resolution and embodiment in the notion of Sittlichkeit and the State at the beginning of the section on Spirit. The notion of Spirit is what Hegel anticipates in the passage that contains the words quoted by Taylor, immediately preceding the development of the dialectic of master and slave: With this, we already have before us the notion of Spirit. What still lies ahead for consciousness is the experience of what Spirit is – this absolute substance which is the unity of the different independent self-consciousnesses which, in their opposition, enjoy perfect freedom and independence: “I” that is “We” and “We” that is “I.” It is in self-consciousness, in the Notion of Spirit, that consciousness first finds its turning-point, where it leaves behind it the colourful show of the sensuous here-and-now and the nightlike void of the supersensible beyond, and steps out into the spiritual daylight of the present. (Hegel 1977:110–11) 42 For Taylor’s evaluation in 1975 of Hegel’s continued relevance, see the Conclusion of his Hegel, entitled “Hegel Today” (Taylor 1975:537–71). 43 This is mainly because we cannot accept the role of nature attributed to it by Romantic thought: “In a sense, the modern search for a situated subjectivity is the heir of that central aspiration of the Romantic period which Hegel thought to answer definitively – how to unite radical autonomy with the fullness of expressive unity with nature. Because nature cannot be for us what it was for that age, an expression of spiritual powers, the syntheses of the time can no longer command our allegiance”(Taylor 1975:570–1). 44 This is the sub-chapter entitled, in Miller’s translation, “Independence and Dependence of Self-Consciousness: Lordship and Bondage” (Hegel 1977:111–19).

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45 Readings of Hegel that seek to defend his brand of dialectics against the critique of totalizing, omniverous other-incorporation insist on the moment of negativity rather than negation in his work – for instance, Kristeva (1984, especially section II) or Zˇizˇek: “the very movement of dialectics implies, on the contrary, that there is always a certain remnant, a certain leftover escaping the circle of subjectivation, of subjective appropriation-mediation, and the subject is precisely correlative to this leftover: $ 苷 a” (Zˇizˇek 1989:209, emphasis in the original). 46

We all have views about the ends of life, about what constitutes a good life, which we and others ought to strive for. But we also acknowledge a commitment to deal fairly and equally with each other, regardless of how we conceive our ends. We might call this latter commitment “procedural,” while commitments concerning the ends of life are “substantive.” (Taylor 1994:56)

47 In particular, Angus contends, Taylor errs in turning multiculturalism into a question of intercultural understanding (Angus 1997:153). Building on George Grant’s reflection on particularity in Technology and Empire (Grant 1969), Angus suggests that an internal subculture, rather than a “ ‘culture’ in the sense of a self-sufficient formation with external borders” (Angus 1997:153), posits the issue of one’s own access through particularity to a shared civic nationalism (1997:148) and universality beyond (1997:153–62). 48 Consider for instance Ranu Samantrai’s deconstruction of old-style Americanness in her opening passage of another essay on Taylor: “I give my name to a telephone operator, a salesperson, a secretary, and wait for the inevitable question: ‘What kind of a name is that?’ Increasingly I find myself answering, ‘It’s an American name’ ” (Samantrai 1996:33). Similar points are made by Blum (1994:186) and Susan Wolf (1994:80–1). 49 Angus thus wonders about Taylor’s “us”: Does it refer to the us that I share with those of my ethno-cultural group? Does it mean the us who inhabit the multicultural context as such, namely, all the members of the different ethno-cultural groups? Or does it refer to the ethnocultural roots of the traditional elite that the policies of multiculturalism were meant to displace? . . . An us/them relation in this context could refer to an attempt by someone from the traditional elites to expand the basis of their understanding when the conditions of their own belonging are not in question. Taylor’s reference to “our” standards of North Atlantic civilization indicate that this is the standpoint of his theory. (Angus 1997:153–4) 50 Against Race (Gilroy 2000) was published in the UK as Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race (London: Allen Lane, Penguin P, 2000). 51 Gilroy (2000) champions “a universality” (17) in which he believes supposedly “Minor differences become essentially irrelevant” together with the “forms of narcissism they support” (16). The recurrence of suffering, he avers, can “contribute to an abstract sense of a human similarity powerful enough to make solidarities based on cultural particularity appear suddenly trivial” in a “pragmatic, planetary humanism” (17). Such reference to universal suffering, however, hardly answers particular claims against specific injustice, and to my mind constitutes a simple negation rather than a form of re/cognition of categories of resistance. For some responses see, for instance, Aronowitz (2000); Judy (2001); Palumbo-Liu (2001); Gikandi (2002); or the Review Symposium published by Ethnicities with contributions by Patricia Hill Collins (2002), Robert Young (2002), Troy Duster (2002) and a response by Gilroy (2002). 52 As Robert Young suggests, the title “is startling in the context of the country of the

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‘ethnic absolutism’ of the Nation of Islam; in Britain, such a position would appear obvious. It is hard to find anyone who is for race outside the far-right fringes of the British National Party (BNP)” (2002:544); Hortense Spillers makes the same point generally: “one would be hard-pressed to find anyone who is ‘for’ ‘race’ so that being ‘against’ it doesn’t say much while it makes a very impressive scarecrow” (2001). 53 Appiah concedes disagreement among biologists about the existence of human races yet argues that most common assumptions “about the significance of ‘racial’ difference is quite remote . . . from what biologists are agreed on. Every reputable biologist will agree that human genetic variability between the populations of Africa or Europe or Asia is not much greater than that within those populations” (1986:21; he references Nei and Roychoudhury 1982). The Canadian novelist Lawrence Hill quotes more recently the French geneticist Albert Jaquard about the concept of race: The reason why the concept is not valid is well known. If a genetic inheritance is to acquire a certain originality, if it is to distinguish itself significantly from that of neighbouring groups, it has to remain in complete isolation for a very long period. . . . That kind of isolation can exist in the case of animals, but is barely conceivable for a species as nomadic and as keenly curious as ours . . . the proportion of the total genetic diversity of the human species that can be put down to differences between the four traditional “races” is only 7–8 percent. In the case of differences between nations within these races, it is also only 7–8 percent, while the remaining 85 per cent is due to differences between groups belonging to the same nation. In other words, the essential differences are not between groups, but contained within them. The concept of race consequently has so little content that the word becomes meaningless and should be eradicated from our vocabulary. (Jacquard 1996, quoted in Hill 2001:202)

54

55

56 57

58

See also Rotman (2003) or Cooper et al. (2003) for scientific discussions that take the recent mapping of the human genome into account. Appiah points out for instance that the criteria used for “populations” in Darwin’s sense do not apply to humans (1986:72), and that “groups defined by skin color, hair, and gross morphology . . . would encompass many human beings quite adequately and some not at all” (73–4). This position both allows for the inexistence of biological race and can take into account, for instance, Baker’s protest in “Race,” Writing, and Difference; recounting a racist incident with a cab driver in Philadelphia, Baker asks: “if even a mad white man in the City of Brotherly Love knows that race, defined as gross features, makes all the difference in the world, what is it that Professor Appiah and evolutionary biology have done?” (Baker 1986:385). For a thorough examination of theories of irony, see Hutcheon (1994). In the light of some postnationalisms it is worthwhile pointing out that many of these protests insist on democratically accountable control, contrasting nationally elected representation and thus nationally based legislation and public spheres with unrestricted, purely “procedural,” models of commercial exchange. Sollors’ “A Critique of Pure Pluralism” (1986) offers cogent reasons to question “pure” difference as much as I question here “pure” recognition on the basis of sameness.

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Index

Abrahams, Roger D. 43 African American studies 13, 15, 42, 46–7 African Americans: cultural recognition 60; Declaration of Independence 32, 33–4; literary tradition 45; oral tradition 61; selfconsciousness 33–6; vernacular 61, 168n7; women’s writing 56 Alexie, Sherman 59 alienation 122–3, 130, 132 Allen, Chadwick 110; “Blood (and) Memory” 104–5, 108–9 alterity: Bertrand 132; Caccia 131; drama of 31; Du Bois 36–8; Hegel 53; Morin 132; multiculturalism 141; narratives 20; New World 17–18; recognition 134; Taylor 136, 139–40; see also other Althusser, Louis 177n19 AMERICA discourses 8–9, 54, 57, 143, 155n4 American Jeremiad 5, 20–2, 161–2n4; see also Bercovitch The American Renaissance (Matthiessen) 22 American Revolution 22 Americanization 157n24 Anaya, Rudolfo 14 Anderson, Benedict 17, 26, 134, 158n35 anglophone writers, Canada 117 Angus, Ian 143, 145, 181n47, n49 Anishinaabe 97–9 anti-imperialism 59–60, 62–3 Anzaldúa, Gloria 14 Appiah, Anthony: “Against Races” 114, 149, 153; blackness 148; Color Conscious 114, 115, 147; difference 151–2; on Du Bois 61–2; In My Father’s House 112, 147; nominalism 150; postcolonialism 112; postmodernism 174n79; race 3, 15, 103; “Race, Culture, Identity” 146, 149; race concept 182n53; racial identity 150–1; recognition 148; “Synthesis: For Racial Identities” 114, 150; and Taylor 133–4; “Why Differences between Groups Matter” 151

Aquin, Hubert: colonization 126; Prochain Episode 121, 123, 125–6; “Profession: écrivain” 118, 126 Arcand, Denys 122 Arnold, Matthew 149 Asad, Talal 63 Ashcroft, Bill 11, 169n11 assertion 68 assimilation: Du Bois 32, 34–6, 50, 114; multiculturalism 142; recognition 34–6; Vizenor 107 Assinika, Point 98–9, 103, 107 associational literature 71 Atwood, Margaret 120 Auerbach, Erich 17 authenticity 135–7 Babo 76–7, 82, 83, 89–92 Bacon, Francis: New Organum 40 Baker, Houston 39; Afro-American Poetics 57; AMERICA 8–9; blues 54, 55, 56–7; deconstruction 55–6; Integrationist Poetics 55, 142; orality 61; poststructuralism 56; re-cognition 142; representation 57; tradition 49; vernacular 56 Baker, Josephine 50–1 Bakhtin, Mikhail 44, 93, 102, 109–10 Bancroft, George 22 Baraka, Amiri 55 Bassnett, Susan 10 Baudrillard, Jean 100, 111, 173n60 beauty/sublimity 145 Benhabib, Seyla 164n11 Bercovitch, Sacvan: American Jeremiad 5, 21–2, 161–2n4; ideology 162n6; liminality 20–1, 24; literary history 18–19, 22–6; “The Music of America” 9, 23; re-cognition 153 Bernheimer, Charles 2, 10 Berque, Jacques 121, 123 Bertrand, Claude: Le Territoire imaginaire 131–2

204

Index

Betonie 68, 94 Bhabha, Homi 11, 26, 158n35, 159n41 biculturalism 119 Bigbear, Harlen (Medicine River) 67, 71, 72–3, 75–6, 77, 170n24 bilingualism 10, 119, 120 Black Aesthetic 40, 41, 55 Black Arts movement 40 Black Power 56 Black studies 44, 56, 159n40; see also African American studies blackness: Appiah 148; Gates 52, 165–6n5; Gilroy 148; Hegelian sublation 149; race 39 Blodgett, E. D. 26; Five Part Invention 27; “Is a History of the Literatures of Canada Possible?” 9, 26–7 blood: identity 102–3, 105–6; memory 104, 109; natio- 113–14; race 105, 106–7, 109, 113–14 blood kin 103 blues 54, 55, 56–7, 144 Bonenfant, Joseph: Parti pris 177n17 Booth, Wayne 151 borderlands 1–2, 13 Boucher, Denise 129 bricolage 108, 109 Brochu, André 122 Brossard, Nicole 28 Brown, Lappet Tulipe 101 Bunyan, John: Pilgrim’s Progress 21–2 Caccia, Fulvio 29; “L’Altra Riva” 130–1 Caldwell, Gary 120 caló (Spanish-English slang) 14 Cambridge History of American Literature, The 24–5 Camus, Albert 127 Canada 13; anglophone writers 117; bilingualism 10; ethnicity 176n10; Francophone culture 117, 120–33,133–4, 156n15; Frye 118; identity 121; languages 115, 116–17, 148, 175–6n9; literary canon 141; literature 9, 70–1, 72; multiculturalism 119; national literature 118; original literature 117; postcolonialism 11; race 152; vernacular 146; see also Quebec; Québécois culture Canada Council 119–20 Canadian Charter of Rights 135, 141 Caribbean 14 Cartier, Jacques 16, 26 Casgrain, Henri-Raymond 6, 116 Certeau, Michel de 17 Chamberland, Paul 122, 127, 129 chance theme 99–102 chaos-world 37, 38

Chicano/a perspectives 13, 14, 160n45 Christian Nativity story 81 Cité libre 122 Cohen, Anthony 158n35 Coleman, Daniel 152 colonization 4, 20–1, 116, 126, 175–6n9 Columbus, Christopher: abduction 60; blood identity 102; Christian imperialism 167n1; Coyote 91; Jews 109; New World 3, 5, 57, 94; place names 59; as reader 161n1; slavery 76, 78–9, 90, 167–8n1; Vizenor 96–7 Columbus, Stone 99–102, 106, 111, 114, 146 community: imagined 158n35; posttribal 112; re-creation 87 comparative literature 10, 11–12 consciousness: cultural 61; language 93; national 2, 7; Native/non-Native 60; nonnaive 20; unhappy 33, 50, 123; see also double consciousness corrido 14, 160n46 Coyote 91, 96; see also trickster character creation stories: King 63, 169–70n16; metaphor 95–6; Native Americans 65, 67, 69, 77–8; oral tradition 63; Vizenor 98, 111–12 Crémazie, Octave 6, 116 cri poétique 19–20 Cromwell, Oliver 21 culture: Americanization 157n24; biculturalism 119; black 39; consciousness 61; death 97; dominant 3–4, 7–8, 14–15; emergent 3, 7–8, 13, 14–15, 39, 120–1, 128; Francophone 117, 133–4, 156n15; globalization 152; Indians 68; language 15; liminality 155–6n7; Native American writing 63; orality 128; performance 57; pluralism 118, 119, 120; race 15; recognition 60; re-cognition 92; representation 57; residual 3; translation 63; tribal 100; see also multiculturalism Davey, Frank 118, 119 Davis, Marie 79 Dawes Severalty Act (General Allotment Act) 105, 173n64 death 97 Declaration of Independence 32, 33–4 decolonization 11, 121, 123 deconstruction 49, 55–6, 102 Delano, Amaso 89 Deleuze, Gilles 111 Deloria, Vine 62, 95 Dewey, John 33 dialectics, Hegel 27, 155n6, 180n41, 181n45 dialogism, Bakhtin 102, 109–10 Diderot, Denis 91

Index difference 137, 151–2 Dirlik, Arif 63 dissent 25 dissonance 39 dominance 102 double consciousness 15; Du Bois 7, 8, 31–8, 42, 48, 50, 52–3, 54, 61, 107, 123, 145, 153–4; French in Quebec 115; Gates 50, 53; merging 68–9; New World 4; postcolonialism 72, 126; recognition 32; re-cognition 76, 153; return 88; shamanic 93; transformation 110; translational 12–13 doubling 2, 93 Douglass, Frederick 34; Narrative 60 Doumet, Chaine Riel 106–7, 110 Du Bois, W. E. B. 3; alterity 36–7, 38; Appiah on 61–2; assimilation 32, 34–6, 50, 114; “The Conservation of Races” 163n6; double consciousness 7, 8, 31, 32, 36, 37, 42, 48, 50, 52–3, 54, 61, 107, 123, 145, 153–4; Dusk of Dawn 150; and Hegel 32–3; “Of Our Spiritual Strivings” 50; particularity/universality 146; race 61–2; sorrow songs 8, 37–8, 144; The Souls of Black Folk 7, 31–8, 46, 52, 61, 123; “Strivings of the Negro People” 7; “The Uncompleted Argument” 149; Zamir on 32–3, 163n6, 165n14 Dunbar, Laurence 40 Dworkin, Ronald 135 Eco, Umberto 100, 111, 173n60 Ellison, Ralph: double-voiced texts 47, 58; Invisible Man 39, 51; parody 43; Stepto on 46 emergence: culture 3, 7–8, 13, 14–15, 39, 120–1, 128; deconstruction 49; dialectics 155n6; dissonance 39; merging 66; narratives of 4; Québécois literature 9–10, 14 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 7, 22, 27, 40 Empire Writes Back, The 10–11 epic literature 19–20, 27 ethnic literary history 159n38 ethnicity 120, 176n10 Europeans 12, 59, 70 expansion westwards 20–1 Fanon, Frantz: Black Skin, White Masks 124; decolonization 11, 121, 123; “The Fact of Blackness” 124; national consciousness 2; “On National Culture” 178n22; on Sartre 124–5; The Wretched of the Earth 124, 125, 128 Ferdinand, King of Spain 5 Ferron, Jacques 122

205

Finkielkraut, Alain 28 Fisher, Dexter 45 Five Part Invention: A History of Literary History in Canada (Blodgett) 27 footnotes 109–10 Francophone culture 117, 118, 120–33, 133–4 French Canada 6, 117, 156n15 Front de libération du Québec 122 Frye, Northrop: Canada’s unity 118; intertextuality 46; Literary History of Canada 120–1, 157n22; myth 46; Quiet Revolution 124 Fuss, Diana 56 Gadamer, H.-G. 143 gambling theme 99–102 Garand, Dominique 117 Garneau, Hector de Saint-Denys 29 Garrison, William Lloyd 40 Gates, Henry Louis: black cultural emergence 39; Black Literature and Literary Theory 39; Black studies 159n40; blackness 52, 165–6n5; “Blackness of Blackness” 42; double consciousness 50, 53; double heritage 64; Figures in Black 39, 40; intertextuality 44; multiculturism 158–9n36; parody 43–4; periphery 143; “race” 15, 114; recognition 12; signification 43, 47; The Signifying Monkey 39, 47, 51; structuralism 40–1; trickster figure 62; vernacular 56 Gauvin, Lise 126–7, 129, 178n24 General Allotment Act (Dawes Severalty Act) 105, 173n64 genes/identity 113–14 Genesis 63, 65, 67, 69, 82 Gilroy, Paul: Against Race 146, 147; Benhabib 164n11; The Black Atlantic 14; blackness 148; politics of fulfilment 35; “race” 15; translocal solidarities 8; universalism 152, 181n51 Glissant, Edouard: cri poétique 19–20; opacity 140, 152; orality 14; relation 32, 37–8, 160n49; self 27; transculturation 132 globalization 152 Godbout, Jacques 122 Godin, Gérard 127, 128 Godzich, Wlad 156n8 Goellnicht, Donald 152 Goldman, Anita Haya 62 good and evil 65 Gospel parodies 78 Grandbois, Alain 29 la Grande Noirceur 129 Greenblatt, Stephen 3, 17, 18, 146, 167–8n1

206

Index

Guanahaní (San Salvador) 59 Guattari, Félix 111 Guillory, John 158n36 Gzowski, Peter 81 Habermas, Jürgen 133–4, 180n36 Hacking, Ian 150 Haiti 89 Harlem Renaissance 40, 41, 165n1, 166n12 Harper, Elijah 88 Harries, Karsten 94, 96 Hartman, Geoffrey 45 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 6 healers 97 Hegel, G. W. F.: Aesthetics 38; African culture 40; alterity 53; dialectics 155n6, 180n41, 181n45; dialectics of return 27; Du Bois 32–3; Esthetics 19; master/slave dialectic 35, 77, 134, 137, 180n41; modernity 18; Phenomenology of Spirit 7, 8, 31, 32, 33, 35, 136, 138, 139; recognition 36, 137–8, 180n36; self-consciousness 138–9; transculture 29; unhappy consciousness 33, 50, 123 Herder, Johann Gottfried von 28, 135, 136, 148 hermeneutics 26–7, 142–3, 145, 146 Herodotus 16 Hill, Lawrence 182n53 Hispaniola 5 history, racial view 163n6 Hovaugh, Joe 85–6, 91 Howells, William Dean 40 Hume, David 40 humour 107, 108–9, 111 Hurston, Zora Neale 43, 44 Hutcheon, Linda 110–11, 113, 159n39, 168n5 Hutchinson, George 165n1, 166n12 identity: blood 102–3, 105–6; Canada 121; collective 147–8; difference/universality 107; ethno-racial 151; formation 49; genes 113–14; group 47–8; Indians 104; language 159n36; narratives of 48–9; Québécois culture 29; race 62, 102–3, 105, 149, 150–1; recognition 93, 136, 153, 180n35; self-recognition 143; transparent 35; tribal 107 identity formations 2, 21 identity politics 135 ideology 48, 162n6 imperialism 24, 117 improvisation 129 incommensurability 18, 143 Indians: culture 68; European invention 59–60, 72; identity 104; languages 116–17;

representation 101, 114; self-perception 59; see also Native Americans individuality 52 integrationism 55, 56, 142 intermarriage 72 intertextuality: African American texts 46–7; Frye 46; Gates 44; King 170n22; Native American writings 64; Ondaatje 73, 170n22; tradition 44–9 invisibility 39 Isabella, Queen of Spain 5 Jahner, Elaine 60–1, 172n46 Jaimes, M. Annette 105 James, William 7 Jameson, Fredric: Postmodernism 113 Jaquard, Albert 182n53 Jay, Gregory 1, 2, 9 Jefferson, Thomas 149 Jews 103, 109 Johnson, James Weldon 40, 46, 111 Johnson, Mark 108 Johnston, Basil 71 joual 115, 127, 128, 129, 175n7, 178n24 Jusdanis, Gregory 2 Kafka, Franz: “Investigations of a Dog” 23–4 Kallen, Horace 119 Kant, Immanuel 40, 145 King, Thomas: All My Relations 64, 70; Babo 89–92; biblical God 169–70n16; Canadian literature 70–1; “A Coyote Columbus Story” 69, 72, 78–80, 91, 94; creation stories 63, 169–70n16; “Godzilla vs. Postcolonial” 62, 64, 69–71; Green Grass, Running Water 61, 64, 66, 69, 71–2, 74, 76–8, 81–92; Indian as invention 59–60; intertextuality 179n22; interview 79, 81; Inventing the Indian 64–9, 73, 78, 87; light/darkness 83–5; “Magpies” 72; Massey Lectures 64; Medicine River 64, 66, 71–6, 77; merging/emergence 66; on Momaday 67; The Native in Literature 64, 70; as neopremodern 67; “The One About Coyote Going West” 72; One Good Story, That One 72, 78; oral tradition 63, 64–5, 70–1; orality 71–2; parody 77, 80, 90; postcolonialism 70; on Silko 69; storytelling 92; temporality 75–8, 80; Truth and Bright Water 64, 66, 73; on Welch 67–8 Kiowa people 105 Klink, Carl 118 Kristeva, Julia 44, 155n6 Kroetsch, Robert 175–6n9 Krupat, Arnold: blood/stories 103; doubleness 3; footnotes 109–10;

Index indigenous peoples 59; oral stories 170n24; “Postcolonialism, Ideology and Native American Literature” 63; “Ratioand Natio- in Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus” 61; on Sartre 111; The Turn to the Native 18, 103; on Vizenor 95, 112–13, 151; Vizenor on 108–9; The Voice in the Margin 104, 110; written language 60 Kuhn, Thomas 55 Lakoff, George 108, 111 Lamore, Jean 29, 132–3 language: bilingualism 10, 119, 120; Canada 115, 116–17, 148, 175–6n9; colonization 175–6n9; consciousness 93; culture 15; difference 151; identity 159n36; Momaday 168n8; music 55; “race” 115; reality 67; for schooling 148; USA 152–3; written/spoken 60–1; see also vernacular Las Casas, Bartolomé de 3, 161n1, 168n1, 171n40 Laurence, Margaret 119 Lauzon, Ian 132 Leahy, David 120 Lee, Dennis 127 Lepage, Robert 28 Léry, Jean de 17 Lesage, Jean 121 Lévesque, René 120 light/darkness 83–5 liminality: Bercovitch 20–1, 24; culture 155–6n7; identity formations 21; modes of 18, 19; Taylor 140 literacy 60, 76–7 literary canon 12-13, 24, 28, 48, 118–19, 141, 158n34 literary history 18–19, 22–6, 45 Literary History of Canada, The 118, 120–1 Literary History of the United States 22 literature: Canada 9, 70–1, 72; emerging/emergent 156n8; Québécois culture 118; written/oral 61, 63, 65–6, 70–1, 170n24 La Llorona 14 La Malinche 14 Loriggio, Francesco 119 McClintock, Anne 62 Maheu, Pierre 122 Mandel, Eli 119 Marcotte, Gilles 118 Marie de l’Incarnation 6, 156–7n16 Martí, José 155n4 Martin, Calvin 109–10 master/slave dialectic 35, 77, 134, 137, 180n41 master-scripts 57–8

207

Matthiessen, F. O. 22, 24 Meech Lake Constitutional Accord 135 Melville, Herman “Benito Cereno” 77, 80, 89–91, 171n32; Moby Dick 51 Memmi, Albert 121, 123 memory 104, 105, 109 merging 34, 66, 68–9 messianisme canadien-français 6, 156n13 metanarratives 111 metaphor 94, 95–6, 103, 107–8 Métis 95–6, 102, 106–7; Métis people 96; see also mixedblood category Mexico 13, 14 Miller, A. V. 35 Miller, J. Hillis 158n34 Miller, Perry 5, 21 minority discourses 48–9 Miron, Gaston 29, 126–7, 128 mistake stories 81–2, 84, 91, 96 Mistry, Rohinton 72 mixedblood category 68, 71–2, 95–7, 102–3, 114, 173n61 Momaday, N. Scott 67; House Made of Dawn 64, 65–6, 67, 72, 74, 80, 104, 168n4; language 168n8; The Names 105; “Personal Reflection” 104; Pueblo culture 66; regeneration 67; The Way to Rainy Mountain 105–6; Vizenor on 108–9 Morin, Michel 131; Le Territoire imaginaire 131–2 Morison, Samuel Eliot 94; Admiral of the Ocean Sea 97 Morningstar, George 84–5, 86 Mouvement littéraire de Quebec 5–6, 116 multiculturalism 2, 15, 25, 29, 152; alterity 141; assimilation 142; Canada 119–20; Canada Council 119–20; corporate 146; Gates 158–9n36; identity politics 135; recognition 140; Taylor 133, 135–6, 141–4; United States 119 Munro, Alice 72 music 55, 61 Mu’tafikah art-nappers 51 myth 22, 46 Naanabozho 97, 98, 99, 169n9 naming 59, 95, 97–8, 174n68 narratives 4, 12, 48–9, 103 natio-/ratio- 113–14, 146 nation 1–2, 13, 22, 32–3, 35–8, 97–9, 116–18, 124, 151 national culture 2, 28–30 national literary history 9–10, 19–20, 22–7, 157n21 national literature 5–6, 9, 20–2, 28–30, 118 nationalism 119, 174n79, 177n16 Native American Renaissance 60

208

Index

Native American studies 13 Native American writing 60–1, 63–71, 104, 168n2 Native Americans: abduction 60; creation stories 65, 67, 69, 77–8; cultural recognition 60; imperialism 24; postcolonialism 69–70; reintegration 75; slavery 57 navigators 4–5 negritude 123–4 Nelligan, Emile 29, 118, 175n4 neocolonialism 100 Nepveu, Pierre: Casgrain 6; L’Ecologie du réel 9, 28–30; “Intérieurs de nouveau monde” 16, 132; national culture 28–30; Parti pris 130; Québécois culture 9 New Critical approach 42 New France 5–6 New World 2, 8; alterity 17–18; colonialism 4; Columbus 3, 5, 57, 94; concepts 16–17; double consciousness 4; Europeans 12, 59; newness 16–17, 18–19, 27; Old World 161n2; originality 117; re-cognition 116; re-inscription 6; slavery 171n40 Nicholson, Linda 179–80n35 nominalism 150 North America 1–2, 8; see also Canada; Mexico; United States of America Official Languages Act 119 O’Gorman, Edmundo 54 Old World 109, 116, 161n2 Ondaatje, Michael 170n22; “Bearhug” 73 opacity 140, 152 oral tradition 60; African Americans 61; creation stories 63; King 64–5, 70–1; Krupat 170n24; performance 65; postcolonial studies 63; vernacular 130 orality: Baker 61; cultural emergence 128; Glissant 14; joual 129; King 71–2; music 61; re-cognition 92; simulation 79; written 14–15 Orientalism 8 originality 117 Ortiz, Fernando 29, 133 other 124, 125, 178n21; see also alterity Ouologuem, Yambo: Le Devoir de violence 112–13 Owens, Louis 62, 94 oxymoron 103 Pannewitz, Rudolph 63 Paredes, Américo: With a Pistol in His Hand 160n46 Paredes, Raymund 14, 160n46 parody: Christian Nativity story 81; Gates

43–4; King 77, 80, 90; of Melville 77, 80; Reed 51 Parti pris: alienation 130; Bonenfant 177n17; Chamberland 127; Nepveu 130; Québécois literature 18, 121–2, 125–6, 129; revolution 122, 123; Sartre 123, 176–7n15 particularism 52, 146, 153 PEN International Congress 120 performance 57, 65, 71, 98 Perkins, David 9, 26 Piotte, Jean-Marc 122 place names 59 Plato 165n14 Pliny 16 poetics of relation 37 polemical literature 70 politics of difference 137 politics of universalism 135, 137 Polo, Marco 5, 17, 161n1 Portelli, Alessandro 61, 168n8 Porter, Carolyn 1, 2 postcolonial studies 10–12, 62–3; Canada 11, 158n32, 158n33; United States 11, 158n31 postcolonialism: Appiah 112; Ashcroft 169n11; Canada 11; double consciousness 72, 126; King 70; Native culture 69–70; Vizenor 92–3 postindian concept 59–60, 93, 99, 100–1, 111 postmodernism: Appiah 174n79; banal 151; metanarratives 111; nationalism 174n79; Nepveu 28–9; postrealism 112; Vizenor 112–13 postnationalism 118, 182n57 postrealism 112 poststructuralism 56, 168n5, 172n46 Poulin, Jacques 28, 29–30 Powers, Felipa 108, 109 Pratt, Mary Louise 10, 153 Progress, The 173n64 Pueblo culture 66, 99 Puritans 5–6, 21–2 Quebec: la Grande Noirceur 129; nationalism 177n16; nationhood 124; Quiet Revolution 6, 121, 124; studies 13 Québécois culture: alienation 122–3; emergent 15, 115; identity 29; literature 118; Nepveu 28; self-recognition 123; transcultural discourse 120 Québécois literature: emergence 9–10, 14; joual 129, 175n7; Parti pris 121–9; Sartre 121, 123; Vice Versa 130–3 Quiet Revolution 6, 121, 124 race: Appiah 3, 15, 61–2, 103, 114, 147–52, 182n53; blackness 39; blood 105, 106–7,

Index 109, 113–14; Canada 152; culture 15; Du Bois 32–3, 61–2; Gilroy 146–7; identity 62, 102–3, 105, 149, 150–1; inventions of 41; ‘one drop’ rule 105, 107; self-identification 161n54; slavery 116; USA 116; see also Métis; mixedblood “race” 15, 114, 115 Radin, Paul 62 Radway, Janice 1 reality/language 67 recognition 2–8, 12; alterity 134; Appiah 148; assertion 68; assimilation 34–6; cultural 60; double consciousness 32; Du Bois 32, 34–7; Hegel 36, 137–8, 180n36; identity 93, 136, 153, 180n35; master-scripts 57–8; Old World 116; reciprocal 134; and recognition 18; self-consciousness 140; Taylor 92–3 re-cognition: Baker 142; Bercovitch 153; culture 92; double consciousness 76, 153; hermeneutics 27; master-scripts 57–8; merging 68–9; multiculturalism 140; narrative chance 103; New World 116; orality 92; postindian concept 111; and recognition 18 Reed, Ishmael: double voice 47; “Dualism: in ralph ellison’s invisible man” 52; Mumbo Jumbo 42, 44; parody 51 Refus global 122, 129 regeneration 73–4 reintegration 75 relation: absolute 160n49; Glissant 32, 37–8, 160n49; poetics of 37; Zamir 36–7 renaming 59 Renaud, Jacques 127; Le Cassé 129 repetition/ritual 66 representation 12, 57, 101, 102, 114 resistance 129, 178n24 return concept 86–9 revenant 86–9 Ridington, Robin 67 rights of man 60 ritual/repetition 66 Robert, Lucie 156n15 Robinson, Harry 70, 71 Romanticism 180n43 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 135–8 Rowe, John Carlos 1 Roy, Camille 117, 118, 157n17, 175n4 Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism 119 Russian Formalism 41–2, 132, 166n8, 167n15 Said, Edward 8 St Lawrence River 21 Saldívar, José David 13 Samana island 97

209

Samantrai, Ranu 181n48 San Salvador 59 Sangster, Charles: The St. Lawrence and the Saguenay 118 Santayana, George 32 Santo Domingo 89–90 Sartre, Jean-Paul: Being and Nothingness 178n21; Fanon on 124–5; negritude 124; “Orphée noir” 124, 149; other 178n21; Parti pris 123, 176–7n15; Quebec writers 121, 123; and Vizenor 102, 111 self, decentred 159n39, n41 self-certainty 6–7; incommensurability 143; Taylor 134, 140, 142–3, 144 self-consciousness 31–2; American Negroes 33–4, 35–6; Hegel 138–9; recognition 140; understanding 145–6 self-identification 59, 143, 161n54 Senghor, Léopold Sédar: Anthologie de la nouvelle Poésie nègre et malgache 123–4 sermon form 21 settlers 21 shamanism 93, 96–9, 106 Sharpe, Jenny 11 Shell, Marc 103 Showalter, Elaine 55 Siemerling, Winfried 118, 175n7 signification 43, 47, 166n7 Silko, Leslie Marmon: Betonie character 68, 94; Ceremony 59, 64, 67, 69, 72, 73–4, 77, 78, 79–80, 93; King 69; Pueblo culture 66, 99; storyteller 66; witchery 170n20 Simon, Sherry 120, 159n36 slavery: Columbus 76, 78–9, 90, 167–8n1; Native Americans 57; New World 171n40; race 116 Slemon, Stephen 11 Slipperjack, Ruby 71 Smith, A. J. M. 118 Smith, Henry Nash 24, 132 Sollors, Werner 157n24, 159n38 sorrow songs 8, 37–8, 144 Spain 103 Spillers, Hortense 8, 9, 56, 182n52 Spillers, Robert 22, 24 spiritualism 172n45 Spivak, Gayatri 11 Stands Alone, Eli 86–9 state-of-the-covenant address 21 Stepto, Robert 44–6, 60 storyteller figure 66, 71 storytelling 61, 77–8, 81, 92 structuralism 40–1, 42 sublimity/beauty 145 Suknaski, Andy 119 Sundquist, Eric J. 164n11 survivance 99, 101

210

Index

Swann, Brian 60 Taylor, Charles: alterity 136, 139–40; “Comparison, History, Truth” 142–3; Hegel 138; Hegel 139; Herder 148; identity/recognition 180n35; intercultural hermeneutics 142–3; liminality 140; misrecognition 136; multiculturalism 141, 143; “The Politics of Recognition” 114–15, 133–4; recognition 92–3; self-certainty 134, 140, 142–3, 144 technology 84–5 teleology 33 temporality 75–8, 80, 81–6 Thomas, Brook 159n39 Los Tigres del Norte 14 time delay button technique 76, 77 Todorov, Tzvetan 3, 5 Toledo Statues of the Purity of Blood 103 Toussaint L’Ouverture 89 tradition: black 39; ideology 48; intertextuality 44–9; literary history 45; as tyranny 43 Traill, Catharine Parr: The Backwoods of Canada 117 transculturation 29, 120, 132–3 transformation 63, 110 translation 63 transnationality 118 Tremblay, Michel: Les Belles-soeurs 129 Treves, Pellegrine 108–9 tribal culture 100, 109 tribal literature 70 tribal stories 61, 94–5 trickster character: Babo 89–92; Gates 62; Harlen Bigbear 71, 72–3, 75–6, 77; healer 97; metaphor 95; survivance 101; temporality 81–6; translative double 93; Vizenor 70, 109; Yoruba mythology 43 trickster dogs 73 trickster stories 101–2 trouble stories 81, 82–3 Turner, Victor 21 Tyler, Stephen 100 understanding 145–6 United States of America: American Studies 1–2; language 152–3; Mexico 13, 14; race 116 universalism: Gilroy 152, 181n51; identity 107; particularism 146, 153; politics of 135, 137 Vadeboncoeur, Pierre 122

vernacular 14–15, 160n48; African Americans 61, 168n7; Baker 54–7; Blacks 128; Canada 146; Gates 56; oral culture 130 Vice Versa: Magazine transcultural 130–4 victimization refused 95 Villemaire, Yolande 28 Vizenor, Gerald: Bearheart 62, 99, 106; blood/identity 105–6, 114; bricolage 108; Chancers 106; Columbus 96–7; creation stories 98, 111–12; Earthdivers 62, 68, 95, 99, 100, 102; footnotes 109–10; Fugitive Poses 93, 100–1, 106, 172n55; “Gerald Vizenor” 92; The Heirs of Columbus 3, 94, 96–101, 103, 106, 110; humour 108–9, 111; Indian identity 59–60, 104; interviews 110–11; Jahner on 60–1; on Krupat 108–9; Krupat on 95, 112–13, 121; metaphor 94, 103, 107–8; Narrative Chance 100, 102; postcolonialism 92–3; Postindian Conversations 92, 96, 101, 108; postmodernism 112–13; Sartre 102, 111; spiritualism 172n45; Summer in the Spring 99; trickster character 70, 109; “Trickster Discourse” 173n62; The Trickster of Liberty 102, 110 Warren, Austin 45, 167n15 Washington, Booker T. 34, 35, 46 Waterman, Jack 30 Weimann, Robert 48 Welch, James: Winter in the Blood 64, 66, 67–8 Wellek, René 45, 167n15 West, Cornel 163n6 whistling on wind motif 173n59 Whitman, Walt 27 Wiebe, Rudy 119 Williams, Raymond 3–4, 7, 39 Wilson, Daniel 118 witchery 94, 96, 170n20 women’s writing 56 Wordsworth, William 118 Wright, Richard 46, 55, 167n16 writing, value of 60–1 Yoruba culture 43, 51 Young, Robert 181–2n52 Zamir, Shamoon: Dark Voices: W. E. B. Du Bois and American Thought 7, 31, 32; Du Bois 32–3, 163n6, 165n14; Hegel 32–3; relation 36–7 Zˇ izˇek, Slavoj 145, 155n6