[There] are words we no longer use, phrases that used to anchor us to our trees and our river that we don't speak anymore. Maybe that's what this is here, because words get lonely like people do, get hungry like we hunger. They get jealous, they scheme. Maybe this is the words struggling to break the surface of the rippled long stretch of calm.Footnote 1
The appearance of David Treuer's novel Little in 1995 was a significant contribution to the canon of Native American Literature, and signalled the arrival of a fresh voice to the American literary scene. While undoubtedly broadening the list of tribal fiction, Little went further than that, engaging narrative theory in a way that challenged and refigured notions of identity, writing and voice in the wider field of American letters. A subsequent European book tour continued the lively discourse initiated by the author, and extended evolving understandings of contemporary Native American and American fiction. It also intensified interest in a group of Ojibwe authors that already included Louise Erdrich, Gerald Vizenor, Kimberly Blaeser and Jim Northrop. Appearing in several capital cities on the continent, Treuer read from his novel in Dublin, Ireland (Thursday 27 May 1999) and this conversation began there. Our dialogue has continued across the years, and across the Atlantic, ever since. In the decade since 1996, Treuer has published two more novels, The Hiawatha (1999) and The Translation of Dr Apelles (2006), both of which are currently receiving extensive critical attention.Footnote 2 He has also written a collection of critical essays, Native American Fiction: A User's Manual (2006), the appearance of which has electrified discourse within American literary studies and the field of Native American writing.
A contentious intervention into current debate surrounding interpretations of Native American writing, A User's Manual implores readers to reassess the existing modes of reading applied to indigenous fiction. Arguing that existing logic often assumes that cultural and historical information is easily disseminated by the text, the Ojibwe author suggests that these analyses usually set about locating a specific ‘Indianness’ within tribal fiction. The result, Treuer argues, is that the artistry of tribal fiction has been largely ignored, and the novel has been understood as an ethnographical sourcebook that “says more about politics and identity than it does about literature.”Footnote 3 His particular response to this dearth of literary nuance is to critically dissect the novel form and slice away easy suppositions or stereotypical notions concerning the fiction in question. Reemphasizing the complex and intricate ways in which style, structure and theme coalesce within the genre, A User's Manual locates a line of reasoning whereby the indigenous writing is distinct, but is appreciated as literature and not only for its difference. What is instigated here is a meeting of form, content and context; novels are thickly imagined and move beyond the “prescribed [cultural] issues or subjects” that are often understood as being “really ‘Indian.’”Footnote 4 For Louis Owens the reader's obsession with traditional imagery had the effect of reducing spiritual and cultural information to the status of mere “signifiers of essentialist discourse.”Footnote 5 Treuer repeats this assertion that such a response to the writing prevents a fuller understanding of the aesthetic means by which tribal writing presents “different worlds”, creates “other ways of imagining the world”, and perhaps constructs a form of aesthetic sovereignty with Native American fiction.Footnote 6 Along these lines, Treuer's fictional work suggests a level of indigenous autonomy – artistically and culturally – whereby the prying gaze of those “voraciously interested in the exotic aspects of Indian ways” is actively disrupted.Footnote 7
Applying an affecting energy to the task in hand, David Treuer attempts to blend his experience as a creative writer with that of scholarly commentator. Although emotionally invested in creating the novel form, he nevertheless rationally and succinctly – not to mention wittily – deconstructs standard suppositions of “Indianness.” He does so by reading novels as things that deftly create emotion instead of being little more than touching or exotic work, while sentimentally, and simplistically, recalling Native American “home,” longing or tradition. Reinterpreting tribal fiction as a genre of writing that can generate varying sentiments in this way, A User's Manual prioritizes the indigenous author's choice and ability to construct a particular feeling. In turn, Native American writers are not only guaranteed their own sovereignty, but the design of their writing, the sharpness of their vision, and the effect of their novels are all the more starkly evidenced when the invention of narrative is fully recognized. Set against the current critical context, in which Native American novels can be perceived as belonging to one side or another of a fractious debate – either as being nationalistically detached from other forms or as being interculturally mixed – Treuer's potential critique enters the fray at the point where separatism and literature can, and do, meet.Footnote 8A User's Manual, and the examination of narrative found within, introduces the reader and critic to a literary space in which the novel is read as an artistically autonomous entity, and not shackled by limiting convention.
His emphasis on artistic sovereignty therefore reflects rather than contradicts the political sovereignty insisted upon by American Indian nationalists, and displays how fiction can indirectly suggest the ways in which spiritual and tribal communities conceive of tribal values today. This work underlines the simple fact that indigenous authors need not assume the “Indian” voice to write, or gift non-Natives with certain information concerning indigenousness in order for their narratives to have value or pertinence. Instead, Treuer believes, such information, where given, is presented as a result of the author's wish to create artistically a certain understanding or emotion within the text. If that emotion is politically motivated, as it is in, say, the work of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, then it can be read as such. If it is culturally based, as it is in, say, N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn, then an understanding of Kiowa values should undoubtedly figure in critical responses. If, however, the novel in question is concerned with neither of these subjects, then the continual, selective and narrow reading of it as politically or culturally motivated only serves to limit the readings offered and stunts criticism of the same. In the final event, A User's Manual can be interpreted as a move to refute or wipe away romanticized interpretations of Native fiction, prioritize indigenous independence through literature, and simultaneously ask that we place these novels on the same footing as all other writing and accept its difference from the American canon, thereby neither fixating on nor ignoring that difference. If we fail to make this move, Treuer argues, we risk treating the Native American novel simplistically as being either “less than” or “the same as” other works of American Literature.
In the interview below the author discusses these issues. Delving into the questions surrounding American fiction, institutionalized racism, cultural studies and the writing of his three novels, the interview covers an array of topics and considers many of them within the context of literary studies. The conversation is by no means exhaustive, and the printed words below cover only a fraction of the many topics and themes that might have been discussed. In light of the recent and fractious debate within the field of Native American Literary Studies, and a need to establish cross-cultural and scholarly understanding in the wake of a huge surge of interest in indigenous writing, we hope that the focus of this conversation will bring about a greater exposition of just some of the key themes within Native American literary studies today.
David, a while back, your article “Reading Culture” was published, and it has been followed by Native American Fiction: A User's Manual.Footnote 9You say some really interesting things in both works about the critical approach taken to the work of Native American writers. You suggest that tribal literatures are often read as being representative of Native American lives instead of functioning as art. This argument seems to underline the challenge facing the indigenous author concerning the classification of their work in terms of binaries – being either Native American or American literature, depending on whether they explicitly include tribal themes or not. A related issue is the classification of a work of contemporary writing as “Native American Literature” because its author has tribal heritage, regardless of whether or not the authors themselves would describe their work in this way. It's a complex debate, this question of classification and Native perspective. How do you feel about these issues and the classification of your own work as Native American or American?
The debate gets to be kind of a closed circle in that you can debate what you intend as a writer for an eternity and very few will question the validity of those statements. You can say, “Oh, I write from the perspective of a Native American centrality.” Most of the time I think that that position is problematic. It usually comes from people who don't speak their tribal languages, don't live in their communities and so on, and that's not an attack on particular authors – it's just a fact. But the way I try to see it and the most fruitful way I think it can be conceptualized as an artist is that regardless of where we write from, our work is, by virtue of its simply being in English, in conversation with, inextricably in conversation with, American English literature. Our “signs” are at play in the field of signs – not in the field of culture. And so regardless of where we think we're writing from, regardless of how much we clamor to claim that there's some sort spiritual, mythical, cultural input – and there very well may be, whether it's Silko or me or anybody else – our projects are by far overshadowed by a legacy of our imagined presence in American literature. And there's nothing we can do about it except admit that fact and then engage in more guerilla-type warfare. And so that's how I like to see it. I mean, whether I'm a Native American novelist or a novelist is of less importance than the conversations that I'm having in my novels with other novels.
I like the idea of “signs,” in a Saussurian way, and the idea that signs are more important to the text than one-dimensional images of Native cultures. Do you think readers of Native American literature tend towards reading culture rather than reading the narrative? How do those limited readings affect the way that you understand and deal with the stereotypes in your writing?
Personally and artistically speaking, I don't like stereotypes and I don't like racism. It's a drag. And limiting. But what's equally as limiting, and I think this affects most Native American writers, whether they like to admit it or not, what's equally limiting is always putting ourselves in the position of being correctors or enforcers. I don't think that's much fun. My novels only seek to subvert stereotypes in order to gain the type of aesthetic and artistic freedom guaranteed non-Native writers just by fact of their whiteness. And to do that I have to do a lot more careful guerilla-type work. But I don't see my goal or my project as that of correcting stereotypes.
So, then, what about the debate surrounding “Indianness,” and blood-quantum level, a debate that really came to the fore during the 1990s? The dialogue concerning blood-quantum concerned both non-Native scholars who sought tribal authenticity and Native scholars who sought to refute spurious claims to Indian heritage from less than scrupulous quarters, amongst others. What's your own personal perception of the attempts to define Native identity?
It's interesting, you know? I mean, historically speaking – and the stakes are different now – historically speaking, and no one seems to carry this forward in the consciousness at all, there was an incredible amount of intermixing, not only between tribes, but between whites and natives and so on and so forth. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, if you were white and you were going to survive anywhere away from urban centers, you not only had to have a knowledge of the cultures and the people you were dealing with, but the languages and customs as well. You were necessarily integrated, in sometimes peripheral and sometimes central ways, into Indian culture. That was the dominant world. That's changed. Now, the white world is the dominant world and we are being integrated into that. That said, I think there are more interesting ways … I think that by focussing on blood-quantum, which is a losing argument. (Of course this is something I can say – looking like Opie Taylor from American television, but coming from a family where I'm the whitest person in the family. My brother's very dark and my mum's dark. Everyone's dark except for me! And my younger sister.) That said, it's a losing argument. I mean, blood-quantum was brought about, was instigated, and was instituted by the Bureau of Indian Affairs as a way to make us fight one another. I think there are more interesting ways … more interesting ways to hold one another accountable. Mainly involvement in community, where you live, how you live. These are personal questions, with an amount of social significance, but many current discussions of blood-quantum are tired and simple. And interestingly, I think discussions about blood-quantum are dangerous at a time when our languages are threatened with extinction. Arguments about blood quantum are more divisive than helpful. And I think, for that matter, there have been novels by a woman named Melanie Ray Thon, a book called Iona Moon, which has an Indian character. There's Brady Udall, who's a Mormon from Utah (the authors of these books are white) who's got a book of short stories, Letting Loose the Hounds, and a novel entitled The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint in which there are Indian characters. I think their Indian characters are far more convincing than Indian characters created by many Native writers, whose characters often end up functioning as types, not stereotypes but types, stock characters, whose job it is to “set the record straight” or to “truth-tell” about cultural issues. They are mouthpieces, not whole organisms. Most of the time, novels by non-Natives end up falling short of the mark in terms of their treatment of Native people; but not all the time, and it's not necessarily because [those authors] are white.
Well, isn't it true that some schools in the Southwest are using Tony Hillerman's novels to teach traditional “ways of knowing” …
Oh no! I didn't know that.
Yeah, I went to a lecture a while back …
(Laughter) No way!
… of a scholar who has tracked this phenomenon.Footnote 10So there you go! The arguments that we've just talked about are becoming central to the experience and formation, or even evolution, of Native American expression at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Before his death I heard Vine Deloria Jr spoke at the University of Minnesota about this new community in 2000.Footnote 11During that talk he mentioned the demise of anthropology, saying, “I believe it's over for the anthros.” Of course there has been this drive within Native American studies towards not only a reassessment of certain areas of the humanities, but – perhaps more interestingly – a reassessment of methodology and territorialization.Footnote 12Intriguingly enough, your own Ph.D. is in anthropology, and not literature.
Oh yeah, and my undergraduate degree.
Really?
Yeah.
Presumably your work is anything but mainstream [anthropology]. How do you feel that your research crossed divides and how do you think it might have, you know, influenced your novels?
Anthropology these days is anything but mainstream. I love Vine's description in … I forget which one it is, probably Custer Died for Your Sins, where he blames anthropologists for Indian drinking. I never knew that anyone read anthropologists, so that to me was an amusing argument! One I'm sure he moved away from in the years before his passing. But as [an] undergraduate my concerns about becoming an anthropology major were very local. I looked around the different departments in Princeton and I felt the most interesting work was being done in anthropology by a number of committed, nuanced, and well-informed, well-read, brilliant professors and the student body in the anthropology department was also socially active, liberally minded, political, and interesting. Therefore it was the most intellectually exciting place to go. What was exciting about it – and this became increasing less exciting when I was a graduate student – was that anthropology, being the mongrel dog of colonialism that it is, avails itself of every opportunity and every tool to tell a story. It didn't lock you into as many overdetermined ways of talking about books that English departments did at that time. It seemed to me that English departments didn't read novels any more – they read criticism. History departments left little to the imagination. Anthropology had the ability, has the ability, in more ways than most disciplines, to tell a good story. That said, most of the stories that get told most of the time are infuriating, but I think it was silly to bash in anthropology, even though its all-knowing aspect, its “I know better than you” attitude toward Indian people, is oftentimes infuriating.
My work in it was varied. As an undergraduate I wrote two senior theses, I wrote a novel in the creative-writing program, which ended up being Little, and I wrote another academic thesis in the anthropology department, which was a treatment of the American Indian Movement [AIM]. I used Walter Benjamin's essays to talk about how AIM created itself through the manipulation of stock images of plains warriors. And you notice, of course, that they picked this image of the strong Plains warrior, as opposed to, say, a woodland fruit and berry gatherer, but then of course they ignored the fate of the strong Plains warrior who always, eventually, in myth and in fiction falls under the heel of the even stronger US cavalry. That is the myth, and they forgot the second part. That's certainly what's happened to AIM, frankly. Anyway, I was interested in what images they used to promote themselves. I was interested in how they constructed an identity out of a certain set of stock images. As a graduate student my work was hardly anthropological, it was a lot of translation, not of original stories or anything of that sort. It was about a story about … it was actually about storytelling, frankly, both oral and written and across the linguistic divide from Ojibwe to English. About adventure, really. So it's very different, hard to sum up.
To the extent that when we write, we do so with a personal conviction and experience that inevitably shapes our work, do you feel that this is true of Little and The Hiawatha? Footnote 13
Well, yeah! (Laughter).
(Laughter) Maybe I should clarify?
No, I know what you mean. In the sense that I invested my time and energy and imagination and inspiration and all that, of course. But if the question is, did I invested a lot of myself in the action and thematics of the novel …
Yeah, I meant in comparison with authors like Momaday, who explains that he has an investment in the land, and the land has an investment in his work. That's kind of what I was thinking of as I asked that question.
That's both beautiful and bit solipsistic, if you ask me. Gosh, I'm not sure how I can answer that question.
I'm not suggesting that you discuss your work in terms of Momaday's expression of an investment in the land, but rather the manner in which Little is a novel with a reservation setting, whilst The Hiawatha is based in an urban setting.
There are two ways you can look at that. Little is the product of my young imagination; I started it when I was nineteen, and finished it when I was twenty-three. At that time the reservation was the only place I could imagine, so you could write off that as inexperience. Or, I think that in Little the landscape has a certain kind of privacy and secrecy I see as reflected in the makeup of the community and the way the members of that community communicate with one another; a certain kind of private sorrow that I was particularly interested in exploring at the time. In The Hiawatha the stakes changed and I wanted to try something different. What I was really interested in was how to make use of everyone else's starting points in their assumptions about Indian fiction. I wanted to see if I could take Indians out of nature and off the reservation and still have them function as fully realized Indian characters. In The Hiawatha, the reservation is as dangerous as the city – which makes it very different from Ceremony or House Made of Dawn or Love Medicine. And his [the protagonist's] culture is as available to him as a life in the city. A good life. I was trying to create a character – an identifiably, culturally, socially, historically, identifiable Indian character – who is not freighted with or invested in carrying on for his people. You get the sense that in Ceremony if Tayo fails his culture fails too. If Abel fails his culture ceases to continue. I mean, cultural life continues regardless whether Simon succeeds or not. So what I was really after, which is the most basic thing for an Indian novelist, I wanted to create a character that had personal failings, not cultural ones. But no one really seemed interested in that at all.
Sure. Do you think that the lack of interest in that element of the novel comes by in large because they pick up your book and don't say, “David Treuer, novelist,” but rather “David Treuer, Native American novelist,” and then begin looking for all of the usual hallmarks of a “Native” text?
Possibly. Yeah. They're looking for what most people are looking for in Native fiction, which is allegory, for either culture or history or both. And it's awful. I really agree with Brecht on alienation.Footnote 14 The alienation effect is what he calls it. He writes that most theatre and most novels work in this Aristotelian mode, which is, in theatre, like a room with one wall removed and the viewers get to peek in on action that would go on without them, but he says what's needed to revive theatre which has become very dull is what he calls the alienation effect. He says that – and I try to live by this principle and I have written some short stories that explore this – “in theatre, the manner in which a black man,' and he [Brecht] used the word Negro, “the manner in which a black man and a white man fall in love is the same as if you reverse the races.” You could say the same thing about Native American literature. Race and culture do not function differently than those of the non-Native characters. If they were truly different and if the novels were truly “Native” they would function, in the syntax of their emotions or their behavior, differently. But they don't, usually. And so culture and history are merely stage dressing. They have nothing to do with the action. The way Caesar feels betrayed is the same way that maybe Tayo feels betrayed by his people. Emotionally it's the same template. And so I've been after in some short stories, and I'm exploring this in a subsequent novel that has not been published, what would really be different? What would be, whether it's written in English or not, what would be truly a different way of approaching the very basics that we take for granted in literature? Tayo functions much like Odysseus; Tayo is Odysseus – questing for home. He is much less trickster than he is a Homeric figure. That doesn't make Ceremony a weak book; it makes it stronger if we can recognize that [fact].
Do you think that in between all the arguments surrounding multiculturalism in American academia we have lost the humanistic argument? Everything is pigeonholed in a very limiting and determined way?
Yeah. Seamus Heaney talked about this in his new introduction to Beowulf, he said in his own, what did he call it … what did he say? In his own … the loss of his language he said that he went around thinking that of course English [language] would crack in his throat, the language he was speaking instead of his own patrimony, which had been taken from him. And in order to become a good poet he had to get over that divide and see the friction around language as a place where he could go further into language, a place where language and culture weren't simply badges of cultural difference. And that's a place, I think, where Native novelists need to get. They use language as badges of cultural difference, to have the authority to do what they do. Ceremony is held up as a model for non-linear, circular, Native American oral storytelling. But I think it follows very tried Western thematic principles. It, like the witches it evokes in the book when Tayo goes to Betonie, it is a Western narrative form which has crawled inside of the skin of a Native ceremony and is pretending to be something it is not.
I think that's true. Isn't it even the case that Heaney spoke about the translation, that his own childhood in the North of Ireland and Beowulf offered a commentary upon each other?
Yes. Once he got beyond, you could see that, once he got beyond the idea of the partition intellect. But the really funny thing that he says in there that I want to tell him is just really silly is that, when he's talking about the tonal qualities that he tried to give the poem he says he tried to give it a Native American solemnity of speech.
Oh dear!
Yeah! He says that where you get the idea that people aren't making small talk. Where even if they're talking about the weather it's of great importance. That's not how I think of me talking to my friends, and I said to myself, “Oh, so that would be opposed to the inherent Irish jocularity of speech!” I want to say that to him some day.
Yeah, get stoic, David!
I know! I know! I'm not stoic enough. It's really a buzz kill … horrible.
The setting for the primary plot development in Little is a reservation, albeit with notable exceptions in the dramatic action. In The Hiawatha, the setting oscillates between rural and urban settings but with a definite emphasis on the urban. To what extent is this progression important – and I use the word “progression” very tentatively. More to see your reaction than anything else! I don't think it needs to be seen as a progression personally. They are very different novels. Little is definitely more elegiac – it's a ponderous novel.
Yeah, that's right. It's a funeral song in a sense. I wouldn't see it as a progression between the two novels. I wouldn't say it's from rural or pastoral – even if it's a wrecked pasture – to urban and then from there to the beyond, to whatever I do next. It's certainly a jump. What they have in common is how they both try to shield themselves from the kinds of scrutiny people are used to bringing to bear on Native American fiction, in that Little, for all its funeral tones – it is kind of like an argosy floating out to burn, you know, with Arthur on board – withholds from its readers any sense of a spiritual and cultural sensibility per se; it refuses to draw attention to those aspects of the characters lives that they live in secret. In The Hiawatha, the theme – or, rather, the absence of spirituality and culture – continues in that culture and spirituality function as hidden potential in the characters, which they don't realize. But theirs is a choice, and the choice is not a damning one. They are not damned simply because they don't choose their culture. Just as they are not damned because they don't chose the city, ultimately. They are damned because Simon one rainy day made a simple human error and killed his brother. So I'm trying to crawl out from under all the weight of these expectations, while still reserving the rights of these characters to be who they are. So that progression was necessary in the sense that I needed to remove the spiritual crutch in Little, from the identity of my characters [in The Hiawatha]. And I wanted to remove the pastoral crutch as well and see if these characters still function as “authentic” Indian characters – without recourse to nature. So there is a progression in that sense.
The identification with a specific landscape, be it urban, rural, or other, is largely universal, or at least if that's not so, then the converse very often is, i.e. alienation from that home-place. Do think that there are important elements of home in your work, and here I'm really trying to push you on ideas of home as found in Momaday's work or in Silko.
Yeah, and Louise Erdrich thematizes home, too. Remember in the end of Love Medicine? There's a sense in which home in Little is a very fragile, very temporal thing. The homes in Little, I mean they burn down, they fall in, they cave in, they're made in cars, they move. It's very shaky ground, literally, but what becomes timeless and permanent in Little, not as much in The Hiawatha, is the way in which the people give one another shelter. And that's a kind of continuance that you don't see in other Native American novels. In The Hiawatha it's different. In The Hiawatha I wanted to really cut Simon free from all of those anchors; his home in the city isn't much of a home at all, it hasn't been much of a home to Betty [Simon's mother]. His home on the reservation hasn't been much of a home either. What they're looking for is not so much home as it is respite, and grace. Simon never quite finds it. There's a moment when he [Simon] can fight for it with his mother, at the end when Lincoln is dying on the couch, and he doesn't.
You've noted in previous conversations that for the main in Native American literature, specifically the work of Momaday and Silko, the city is often portrayed as diseased, evil, disconcerting, disorientating for the Indian who has wandered away from home. Has that portrayal informed your own work and that of Alexie to a significant degree? Actually, I think you've really just answered that question, haven't you?
Well, I can speak to that some more. It's important to say that I would never want to do what they do. I think Sherman does, I think he falls into it.
I think you're right. When I first saw Smoke Signals for the first time I had a real problem with the Suzy Song character. Footnote 15We don't know enough about her; she's just a generic character. There could be a perfectly good reason why she lives in a trailer, but it's never explained and the audience then relies on their own stereotypically founded images in response.
Yeah, that's right! Or maybe she likes little trailers! (Laughter).
I can't recall right now, but is that character even in the short story “This Is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona” or The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven?
They probably just needed a beautiful, breasty Native woman!
Many of the characters and often the prose style of Little seem to suggest a Mid-western commonality of experience. On page 80 you recount the hardships of white farmers struggling financially and personally, an awareness that seems to suggest a bond of class and status beyond that of race. Is this fair to say? Is your work the first to widen the perspective in your own mind, in so far as it envisages a common community? You take on characters, I feel, that Alexie would shy away from, lest they contaminate his Indian voice!
(Laughter) Yeah, they would. Like a plague!
In so far as he doesn't write complex white characters?
He has white characters in Reservation Blues, but they're not complex, they're just groupies. When I was writing Little my adviser at school was Toni Morrison, and we worked together for a year and a half, and I was supposed to be completing that draft of the novel, and I was supposed to be wrapping things up and tying things together and smoothing them out, and all of a sudden the character Paul showed up. I wasn't sure why and Morrison's advice was to trust my instincts but to endeavor to reveal them – to make conscious what was, then, unconscious. Eventually it became very clear that Paul's travels described a sort of a very elliptical orbit, much like some sort of expeditionary satellite that we send to Mars – a long curved trajectory toward the target, accelerates around it, only to slingshot further off into the solar system. Which is very much like Paul's travel. He makes it from the city to the reservation, makes a tight loop around the reservation and gets spun off into a new orbit. And it become so clear to me later on, much later on, that Paul's character had no direct impact on the plot, per se. He comes long after all the significant action has taken place and leaves long before the entire novel is resolved. But he delineates the exterior dimensions of this world; his footprints, whether in the tundra or else in the Iowa soil, serve to set the boundaries of this world. Without him it would be a very different novel. Whether there's a commonality of experience or not, it's hard to say. There's certainly a counterpoint of experiences.
Okay, that's interesting. Moving on to language and translation. I'm just thinking about Euro-American historical texts and literatures in which Native languages are often transliterated rather than translated, in what seems to often be a way to devise or project Native American expression as threatening or subversive, essentially othering the language as well as the individual. Much the same approach continues today – and I'm thinking here of Ron Howard's 2003 movie The Missing, where the most threatening Native character rarely speaks at all. I find it interesting that you use Ojibwe in The Hiawatha and leave it untranslated, something that other authors have also done …
Barely.
I was thinking of Erdrich.
She translates most of it. In fact, in The Antelope Wife there's a section where they take a German prisoner, if you remember, and in that section the Ojibwe is translated – the German is not translated. Why does the German go without saying, but the Ojibwe doesn't? Very few Native authors refuse to translate except for names and a phrase here and there and that's the extent, in my opinion, of Native language in Native literature. Except for poets such as Rex Lee Jim, a Navajo poet who writes exclusively in Navajo, but we have no way to judge the content and his artistic ability. I was pressured by my publisher a lot to translate.
Really?
Absolutely. Friends pressured me, I was pressured by a lot of folks to translate that section, and I refused. And they all … I said, “Look, I'll give you two reasons why this will not be translated.” I said, “First of all, have you read Lolita?” I said, “There's barely a page without French in it and it's never translated. Have you read The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy? Half the book's in Spanish. It's not translated.” I said, “In the respective cases, the French is necessary to show a certain kind of perverse, I don't know what the word is, snobbishness on Humbert Humbert's part. The Spanish of Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing and All the Pretty Horses serves to show the alien landscape which the characters are in the process of translating and transforming into experience.” I said, “So it can't be translated.” I said, “First of all, other people do; it's worked fine. Joyce did it, others do it, and it works fine. And I refuse to do it.” And secondly, for Betty in particular, her life's been a series of hardships, her life sucks, and her life's been horrible and painful. The one really great thing about her life, in the distant past of her youth, is her courtship and marriage to her wonderful husband, which was too short-lived because he died. So, for her, that experience is separate from everything else and she doesn't want to contaminate the rest of her life, she doesn't want to contaminate that experience with the rest of her life. So she thinks of it in Ojibwe, she experiences it in Ojibwe, and she refuses to translate it. And so for that reason it can't be translated. And I said, for that matter, and this is where anthropology should be slapped, but novelists should be slapped more than anthropologists, we novelists have inherited an ethnographic impulse – there's an equation in ethnography where you have the ethnographer and you have the informant, and novelists have inherited that, so that the world is the ethnographer, we feel compelled to explain ourselves out into the world, and why should we? Why shouldn't the world reach a little closer and push a little harder, dig a little deeper, towards us? And so that's why I won't translate.
Good answer! (Laughter). Vera's relationship with Lester, why doesn't it last? Obviously we know why in the novel. But did you have any particular leanings towards this plot? Simon is your central character, and he has this profound impulse that regulates his life. I guess that's the main framework of the plot, and Lester and Vera are in the background. But when are we going to see a mixed relationship that works? Namely a relationship where interracial couples are not doomed and the races gravitate towards each other?
(Laughter). Yeah. But I suppose it wasn't in the sense that the couple was interracial, but more in the sense that all young couples in literature are doomed. And it's the one thing I'm most dissatisfied about in the novel. What Tolstoy said in the beginning of Anna Karina, which is that all families are unhappy in their own fashion, which has been taken as the rallying cry of literature, which is simply that happy stories don't make good stories. I don't think that's necessarily true, in fact in his last collection, Sherman actually had happy characters in his story and they did well.
Is it from The Toughest Indian in the World collection?
That's it! Yeah, it's in there. So I'm a little dissatisfied with my universally doomed lovers. And that is my failing. If I wasn't able to make them live outside of this assumption that interracial relationships are doomed then I failed and I'm not happy about that part of the novel.
Well, I think it can be very much understood. Taking literature as literature. Little and The Hiawatha, Little himself and Lincoln respectively in the two works. Between the two there is a profound question placed upon knowledge. With Little it's omniscience, he forces the people around him to be introspective; with Lincoln he doesn't know, ultimately that results in his death.
What you don't know can kill you!
True! But you seem to be asking harder questions concerning Native place and determinacy.
Yeah. I mean, Little is sort of a living breathing, little darker, little deformed version of Stendhal's “walking mirror” (if you remember from The Red and Black). Little is that mirror for his community, and what's added to that in a sense, I suppose, is a certain inscrutability in him – there's a refusal in both characters and in both novels to really inspect causal relationships. There's a refusal to look at origins, which inform most Native American novels. Silko's concerned with origins, the origins of problems in Ceremony, the origins of Tayo's hardship, and so on. For Lincoln, he takes, if “You” is a bullet that Little shoots at everyone and shoots out of the book Little towards the book The Hiawatha, Lincoln sidesteps it and manages to be the same bullet where he's constantly probing the people around him while Little seemed to care less about it, knowledge didn't seem to him something that was particularly fruitful and he was probably all the wiser not to think it was. Lincoln fell into that trap and desperately wanted to know, gorges in things, and it ended poorly on him as a result.
I had one question about that brilliant chapter in The Hiawatha where Simon ends up floating down the river and he has a bird's nest on his head by the end. Were you deliberately trying to invert trickster narratives?
Oh yeah, kind of like [Shakespeare's King] Lear.
Was that conscious?
There was a conscious disruption of this natural association we have with Indians in the woods and travel and the reservation and I reject in toto the use of trickster figures and trickster narratives. I refuse to believe in the very existence of the category of trickster figures. As I've said elsewhere, in Ojibwe we don't have a word for figure, we don't have a word for category. We have a very specific historical figure, or rather person, with a very particular name, who does very particular things and not other things, and he's very real, at least to me. He's very real, it's part of faith, spirituality, culture; he's not a figure, and he's not a type. We don't have types like that. For that matter Odysseus is a trickster figure, and there's nothing … it's really one of these easy things people grasp at to make sense of Native American fictions and the Native American world.
And of course people like Vizenor play up to that. Vizenor really set it up.
I reject, just for the sake of having a new conversation, trickster interpretations. But then again, maybe I'm just being a trickster.
And Simon's definite affinity with the IDS [building in Minneapolis], I mean it's obviously almost a home although I don't want to say that or use those terms.
Well, he's definitely in his element; he's at his most comfortable in danger, frankly. The irony being that I'm married to a woman who's Seneca. In her family there's two steelworkers. Well, there are lots of steelworkers, but she has two aunts who are steelworkers.
But Gretchen [Treuer's wife] hasn't gone into the business?
(Laughter). No, she hasn't. All the same, I'm out of my league! So it's a great ironic twist.
Okay, we should leave it there; I've taken up enough of your time. Before we do, however, what has been the reception to the new novel, The Translation of Dr Apelles?
It's been great! That novel was with me a long time and I am terribly excited to finally have it out there. It marks a whole new direction for me and for my writing. It is about an Indian translator who works in a very strange library in an unnamed eastern US city. At the beginning of the novel he finds a manuscript in a Native language only he can speak that he thinks can change his life, and he also realizes, at the same time, that he has never been in love. So, the novel is split between what seems to be his translation and his life, and becomes a double quest – to translate this thing and to fall in love. It is, at heart, a love story. Parts of it read like a valentine and other parts are more hard-edged, experimental. But it is personal, too. So often the characters in Indian fiction are so idealized as to be remote from modern life – how many Indian novels have you read where the characters drink coffee at Starbucks, have cell phones, or even jobs, for that matter? Anyway, it's out there, along with Native American Fiction: A User's Manual. Let's see what happens from here. Thanks for the chat.
