Red Matters; Arnold Krupat, Grave Concerns, Trickster Turns: The Novels of Louis Owens; Chris LaLonde

Red Matters; Arnold Krupat; Philadelphia; University of Pennsylvania; 2002; xiv, 167; cloth $47.50; paper $18.95.

Grave Concerns, Trickster Turns: The Novels of Louis Owens; Chris LaLonde; Oklahoma; University of Oklahoma Press; 2002; 220; cloth $34.95.

Arnold Krupat's Red Matters and Chris LaLonde's Grave Concerns, Trickster Turns: The Novels of Louis Owens seek to emplace centrally Native Indian literature and cultural production within American studies.  While Krupat addresses a variety of Native texts--from the narratives of Sherman Alexie, Charles Easton, and Mourning Dove to oral histories, and translation theory--and LaLonde focuses exclusively on the novels of mixed-blood author, Louis Owens, their goal is the same: To use a variety of theoretical methods from Derridean informed poststructuralism to formulations of trickster metafictional techniques to enrich and complicate our understanding of Native identity and experience.

In Red Matters Arnold Krupat aims to develop what he identifies as a "cosmopolitan comparativism" (ix) that will acknowledge nativist scholarly and political endeavors (the reach for tribal sovereignty), embrace an indiginist, earth-affirming non-Western knowledge system, and employ a poststructuralist understanding of language (the indeterminate sign) and a postcolonial subaltern that speaks within and against master narratives of colonialism.  The aim for Krupat is to develop an all-inclusive, post-native "ethnocriticism" that will displace "colonial knowledge" systems that continue to erase and/or contain Native peoples. Here, Krupat balances a series of close readings of a variety of texts--from Mourning Dove's Cogewea to Sherman Alexie's Indian Killer--with the social, judicial, and political struggles within a long history of genocide.  For example, in his reading of mixed-blood representation, he explores the varying narrative engagements throughout the twentieth-century with larger social and political concerns.  Mourning Dove's 1927 novel Cogewea must be read within its socio-historical context not as a tragic story of "selling out", but as a text that affirms the "betwixt-and-betweenness of mixed-bloods of different blood types and quanta in the period" (95).  And, he reads Charles Eastman's autobiography as the cutting-edge of race-representation; forcefully not participating in the melting-pot ideals of his day nor in the notion that mixed-bloods are the only ones that face confusion and conflict, Krupat's Eastman is a cosmopolitan, postethnic author who anticipates much of the writing that affirmed hybrid identity--and moves from a biological to a social constructionist purview--that would pour forth from Native authors and theorists in the 1980s.

Krupat, however, is careful not to wallow in readings that uncritically romanticize the Native as hybrid, carefully noting how this representation and rhetoric can also have a destructive absenting effect for Natives peoples.  For Krupat, Sherman Alexie's power as a writer lies in his unromantic depictions of Natives such as John Smith in Indian Killer  (1996).  Though set during the Vietnam war, Krupat is careful to mention that  the real war is being fought closer to home "in American Indian Country; and this is a war to end domestic colonialism rather than a war to preserve foreign colonialism" (98).  Alexie invests John Smith's with a "murderous rage" toward whites that, according to Krupat, shows the complex process of Native channeling of U.S. society's violent xenophobia.  For Krupat, this Smith's conscious act of rage represents a powerful form of reterritorializing of otherwise colonized Native lands and subjects.

While Krupat proposes a new, post-Native critical method, Chris LaLonde simply uses a number of different critical tools--nativist and poststructuralist--to uncover the complex layers of meaning in the novels of Choctaw/Cherokee/Irish/Cajun author, Louis Owens.  LaLonde grounds his eclectic analytic approach in an understanding of the power of stories to create resistant communities and cultural identities.  For example, he interprets Tom Joseph's mind/body journey in Wolfsong (1991) as simultaneously re-discovering Home and coming into a sense of counter-consciousness.  Here, as in other of Owens's fictions, the character bust discard Western conceptions of time and space and embrace his trickster spirit in order to radically "reexamine the world" (22).  As the character discovers a new way of being in the world, so too does the reader.  According to LaLonde, a novel like Wolfsong ultimately "destablizes referents and readers in order to compel the latter to see the world anew" (36). And, LaLonde reads Owens's use of metafictional mirrorings in The Sharpest Sight (1992) as a self-reflexive concern for how his characters and the reader are reminded not to get stuck in romantic notions of a Indianness frozen in the past, but that Native identity and experience is very much alive in the present.

Krupat and LaLonde certainly provide fresh and nuanced insight into Native literature.  And, their readings Native authors' sculpting of language and reforming of generic convention (the quest narratives in Huckleberry Finn and Moby Dick, for example) vastly expand the contours of Native and American literary and cultural studies.  However, unfortunately, Krupat and LaLonde might re-consider the importance poststructuralism ultimately comes to play in their analyses.  It often occludes diminishes the power of the fiction.  LaLonde writes, for example, "Via trickster, we are in a position to recognize and adjudicate our anxiety within the postmodern world of pragmatics and language games articulated by Lyotard in Just Gaming. In the playfully serious world we recognize that we judge based not on matters of truth or ontology but on matters of  opinion" (41).  Namely, both variously make the misstep of confusing the fictions they analyze with the real historical, political, and judicial acts that inform the real world hors texte.  Here, I ask, for example, if Krupat's insistence that narrative fiction and myth are in truth equal to the bloodshed of millions of Native peoples that inform their history?  Of course, narrative fiction and history are discrete entities governed by distinctly different referential relationships to truth.  Although the cited theorist, Hayden White, brilliantly blurs the boundaries between the two, he does so by reducing the complex organization of elements of narrative fiction (mode, tempo, point of view, theme, and characterization) to simple plot.  Krupat and LaLonde might do well in asking whether the historical text's referential organization that provides a one-to-one correspondence between the facts represented and the verifiable reality of the world is the same as narrative fiction.  I would also ask if it isn't dangerous for LaLonde to propose that Owen's novels are expressions of a "Trickster activism" that will effect real change and allow Native peoples "to have a home" (192).  I ask, is it really possible for narrative fiction--and history already tells us that it is not that case--to produce, as LaLonde asserts, in-between "aesthetic activism" from which to counter and supplement the violence and violation done to the Native" (18)? Finally, Krupat and LaLonde need to ask themselves seriously if the narrative fictions they analyze really have the power to effect real Native people's mobility and social agency.  Perhaps, the power of a Sherman Alexie or a Louis Owens' novel lies in their ability to open their reader's eyes to the brutalities of colonialism. Perhaps, the power of Native narratives lies within their creative and rich fictional representations of other ways of experiencing and imagining the world? 

--Frederick Luis Aldama, University of Colorado at Boulder