Narrative Ambivalence and the Creation of Meaning: Genre Transdifference in The Heirs of Columbus
p. 31-46
Résumés
Gerald Vizenor’s novel The Heirs of Columbus (1991) is an outstanding example of literary and intellectual postmodernism in Native American writing. By blending fiction, historiography, myth, comedy, satire, and utopia, Vizenor manages to subvert reading expectations associated with narrative genres and particularly the truth claims carried by textual forms. The reading experience therefore is that of transdifference: the cognitively or affectively dissonant co-presence of different or even oppositional properties, affiliations or elements of semantic and epistemological meaning construction (Breinig/Lösch, “Transdifference”, Journal for the Study of British Cultures, 13: 2, 2006). This does not make for a disappearance of ethical claims, however. Vizenor’s re-examination of European and Native American interaction since the days of first contact (which in his account lies before Columbus) deconstructs any one-sided approach while insisting on basic principles of responsible human behavior of Natives, non-Natives and “crossbloods” alike.
Le roman de Vizenor Heirs of Colombus (1991) est un exemple éclatant de postmodernisme littéraire et intellectuel dans la production amérindienne. En mêlant roman, histoire, mythe, comédie, satire, utopie, Vizenor parvient à dérouter les attentes du lecteur et en particulier à disqualifier toute prétention des genres à une véracité. Ainsi le lecteur fait l’expérience de la « transdifférence », c’est-à-dire la présence simultanée et dissonante d’éléments différents, voire contradictoires, de construction du sens sémantique et épistémologique (Breinig, Lösch, « Transdifference », Journal for the Study of British Cultures, 13 : 2, 2006). Cependant le souci éthique ne disparaît pas pour autant. La révision vizenorienne des interactions entre Européens et Amérindiens depuis les premiers contacts déconstruit toute perspective unilatérale et met en avant des principes élémentaires d’humanité valables aussi bien pour l’Amérindien que pour le blanc et le « crossblood ».
Texte intégral
1A short while ago the National Geographic Society announced that it had acquired the exclusive right to publish a document of incredible value, nothing less than a new version of the story of the last days in the life of Jesus, the so-called “Gospel of Judas.” This 1700-year-old manuscript was found by Egyptian farmers in the 1970’s and passed through the hands of a number of dealers in Europe and the United States until the right to the text and the history of its discovery were sold to the Society by a Zurich art dealer, a Greek born in Egypt and, according to the New York Times, a businesswoman of less than spotless reputation. The manuscript itself was turned over to a foundation that is run by the dealer’s lawyer who says that it will eventually be returned to Egypt. Nonetheless, the president of the Archaeological Institute of America calls the whole transaction “dealing with a looted object” (Meier/Wilford). Needless to add that the Gospel of Judas presents the story of Jesus from a different angle. Judas turns out to be Jesus’ favorite disciple who betrayed him on Jesus’s own behest in order to enable him to shed his mortal body and return to the realm of the Spirit.
2No, this is not a chapter from Gerald Vizenor’s novel The Heirs of Columbus, but it might easily provide the material for one. The issues look very similar: There is the question of the property rights concerning cultural objects. There are societies and foundations established with the purpose of furthering exploration, research, and the preservation of culture but whose members are not above the suspicion of seeking profit in the shape of money or of symbolic capital—and indeed the whole affair presents a wonderful example of Pierre Bourdieu’s types of mutually convertible capital. The case of “The Gospel of Judas” makes the respective parts of The Heirs of Columbus look surprisingly realistic. And then there is the further issue of the status of narratives, of the truth of myth as well as of supposedly factual stories of discovery, in a word, the nature of narrative truth and of cultural meaning as it is developed in narrative texts.
3The Heirs of Columbus deals with such questions in a much more convincing way than many other literary texts that were published in the context of the Columbus quincentennial in 1992, more than, say, Michael Dorris’s and Louise Erdrich’s The Crown of Columbus, whose titular object and aim of a veritable treasure hunt, namely Columbus’s gift to the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas, turns out to be Christ’s crown of thorns—a book that might therefore gain some new elements from the Judas version. As I have argued elsewhere, The Crown of Columbus is not just the potboiler and adventure story many critics have taken it to be. It is a parody of the counter-historical text that many expected of Native American writers on the occasion of the quincentennial. Its romance plot is also its main metafictional feature and forms a commentary on the nature of narrative to cater to our longing for emotional entrapment, for wish-fulfilment and closure. It satisfies our interest in discoveries on every level of the plot, including missing manuscripts that change current assumptions about history as well as cultural myths (Breinig, “(Hi) storytelling”).
4The Heirs of Columbus also pokes fun at the dominant Western version of the history of the so-called discovery of the New World, and in addition at Native American essentialist counter-histories; that type of history that cannot but be a narrative of victimization. Yet all the fun aside, it is also a very serious work that challenges what Vizenor seems to consider all-too-glib narrative representations of what it means to live as a Native American and in particular as a person of mixed descent in contemporary Euro-America, and yet to partake of portions of the indigenous cultural heritage. The novel abounds in intertextual allusions and roman-à-clef elements. The villain of the novel, Doric Michéd, a stylish member of the Brotherhood of American Explorers and a mixed blood of vague Native ancestry, shares most components of his name with the late Michael Dorris, as Christoph Irmscher pointed out in the best piece of criticism on The Heirs of Columbus to date (Irmscher 93). One might add that Michéd seems to share some elements of Dorris’s public role as well. Hans Bak even sees an anagram of the names Michael Dorris and Erdrich. That Michéd becomes the murderer of the female protagonist, Felipa Flowers, who in her ex-model glamor may embody some features of Louise Erdrich, can thus perhaps be read as a commentary on the ends and dead ends of contemporary Native American literature.
5The Heirs of Columbus is therefore to be read as a novel dealing with many unsolved conflicts in contemporary ethnic America and beyond. It reveals that David Hollinger’s concept of postethnicity as the freedom of the individual to choose between a variety of ethno-cultural affiliations may be too optimistic and therefore less adequate than Vizenor’s own notion of the postindian which acknowledges both the existence and the inadequacies of the Columbian “simulation” indian (Vizenor, Fugitive Poses 15). The simultaneity of absences and presences (to echo the subtitle of Vizenor’s book) in the context of inter-ethnic relations and discourses and the omnipresent practice of binary differentiation in spite of its shortcomings result in a network of tensions. They belong to the sphere of what I have called “transdifference,” the simultaneous relevance of conflicting properties or affiliations. I quote from a recent paper that explains the concept more fully, including its relevance in intercultural studies:
The term transdifference refers to phenomena of a co-presence of different or even oppositional properties, affiliations or elements of semantic and epistemological meaning construction, where this co-presence is regarded or experienced as cognitively or affectively dissonant, full of tension, and undissolvable. Phenomena of transdifference, for instance socio-cultural affiliations, personality components or linguistic and other symbolic predications, are encountered by individuals and groups and negotiated in their respective symbolic order. As a descriptive term transdifference allows the presentation and analysis of such phenomena in the context of the production of meaning that transcend the range of models of binary difference. It is not to be confused with de-differentiation (as in concepts of synthesis, syncretism, transculturation) or with a temporalized deferral of difference (différance). (Breinig/Lösch, 107)
6In The Heirs of Columbus, elements that normally serve to bring order cannot fulfil this function but contribute to ambivalence and, indeed, create a reading experience of transdifference. One such element is genre. Generally speaking, literary genres are important means of structuring communication and hence of meaning construction. To say that The Heirs of Columbus is a postmodern novel and therefore inevitably combines a large number of genres or textual types and modes is begging the question. What deserves our attention is the function of this very combination. In Vizenor’s text the play with literary and extra-literary genre components and traditions, the oscillation between fiction, nonfiction and metafiction do not lead to the total relativity of meaning and values that we find in a great number of postmodern texts. Rather, the author manages to have it both ways: the skepticism regarding the stability of order and evaluation systems is offset by an insistence on the ability of human beings to distinguish between the good and the bad, the useful and the useless. I will use the term genre here in the loose sense of a category for a set of texts sharing significant components of form or content, or certain societal functions (like the postcolonial novel), or of their reality status (like fiction), but also as a category for certain modes of presentation like satire or romance.
7Perhaps in the first place The Heirs of Columbus is a historical novel, because it deals, among other things, with historical events like Columbus’s voyages of discovery and the fate of Pocahontas or that of the Sephardic Jews. It is also a mock-historical novel because in a surprise twist avails himself of the theses of Augustus Le Plongeon concerning the Maya as originators of all civilization. The novel presents Columbus as a descendant of the ancient Maya who are said to have brought their culture and their genetic “signature of survivance” (Heirs 3) to the Old World, so that Columbus’s voyage can be shown to be a return to his origins.1 But the difference between history and mock-history may be negligible when we consider that in Vizenor’s opinion the distinction between good and bad stories is much more important than their generic category and their factuality.2
8When we turn to the contemporary plot, The Heirs of Columbus moves through a whole range of genres. It is a postcolonial satirical novel because on the level of its main action a group of tribal persons by means of their trickster methods subvert and ridicule the power, practices and representatives of the dominant society. Like their leader, Stone Columbus, they claim to be genetic heirs of Columbus by way of his sexual union with a beautiful shaman and tribal healer, Samana, and hence they are crossbloods, to use Vizenor’s term. The postcolonial subversion involves the economic exploitation of non-tribal people: Stone runs a bingo hall on board of their flagship, the Santa María Casino. His partner Felipa Flowers acquires not only economic but cultural capital by “repatriating” (8) stolen cultural objects from museums, art collections and so forth. The world of the culture capitalists is satirically exposed when she meets the elegant but shady art dealer Doric Michéd and, with the magic tricks of a young tribal shaman (an element of fantasy? Or myth?) manages to get hold not only of several medical pouches but also of a portion of the bones of Christopher Columbus. The heirs bury these at their headquarters, the so-called Stone Tavern near the headwaters of the Mississippi—an act that one may read as a narrative rejection of any essentialist ownership claim the Maya or other tribes involved might make. The action is turning utopian when Michéd’s legal action against Felipa is just as unsuccessful as that of the state against the casino because the heirs win the help of a federal judge, Beatrice Lord, a representative of a better American social order (the novel also contains elements of that popular American genre, the courtroom narrative). An element of tragedy enters when the casino ships sink in a storm and especially when Felipa tries to recover the bones of Pocahontas from England and is killed by Michéd. However, comedy must prevail, and so Stone and the others buy land at Point Roberts between Seattle and Vancouver Island, another Foucauldian heterotopia after the ship and the stone tavern. They call it Point Assinika and, on October 12, 1992, five hundred years after Columbus’s landing in the New World, declare themselves a sovereign tribal nation. There, they finance genetic research which will heal disabled children by the “genetic code of tribal survivance” (132), an even stronger utopian element, which is emphasized by Vizenor’s having the final part of the book take place in 1992, one year after the publication of the novel. Since the reform model envisioned at the end, namely of endowing all of humanity with tribal qualities, requires a scientific innovation, The Heirs of Columbus is also a science fiction novel.
9The Heirs of Columbus also contains qualities of the traditional myth because the action is presented as part of the age-old fight of good versus evil, enacted on the contemporary level by the struggle of Felipa and Stone against Michéd and his like, and on the level of traditional Anishinabe mythology by the mocassin game the heirs have to play against the wiindigo, the Anishinabe evil spirit, a contest that can never be won but where the catastrophic, nay, apocalyptic defeat can always be put off.
10Finally, The Heirs of Columbus is a postmodern piece of metafiction because its genre mix and its high degree of intertextuality again and again amount to a reflection upon the nature of literary and other narratives. Obviously, this genre mix creates narrative ambivalence, for instance when our ordinary sense of the progress of time is called into question by the sudden shifts between historiographical passages, contemporary action and proleptic excursions into a utopian future. It is no oversight that the narrative past tense is sometimes exchanged for the present or perfect, like in “Since the Santa María Casino sank Felipa has lived in a house trailer [. . .]” (46), thereby taking us outside the world of fiction altogether and tying the action to our real-life temporal order—at least if we follow narratological theory in the distinction of, on the one hand, narrative past as a fictionality marker where it occurs in a novel and, on the other, (non-dramatizing) present or present perfect as references to the “real” world, again when they occur in a work of fiction. Thus, the truth value of the second part of the sentence has to be measured against other reality statements. The simultaneous experience of fictionality and non-fictionality appears to refer to a drastic case of ontological transdifference.
11In the following I will focus on the genre aspects of history, fiction, and myth. Hayden White has commented upon the relatedness of myth, history and fiction which he explains on the basis that
the systems of meaning production shared by all three are distillates of the historical experience of a people, a group, a culture. And the knowledge provided by narrative history is that which results from the testing of the systems of meaning production originally elaborated in myth and refined in the alembic of the hypothetical mode of fictional articulation. (White, Content 45)
12In Western society and thinking, however, myth, history and fiction are often associated with typical forms and rules of communicational pragmatics. If taken not in a metaphoric sense but according to their respective position in the order of genres and speech acts, they are hard to reconcile. All three occur as narratives in one sense of each term. And yet, in Western literary communication, they differ because of the respective notions of truth and the real as well as the corresponding speech-act patterns at work.
13Webster’s Third New International Dictionary defines history as “a branch of knowledge that records and explains past events as steps in the sequence of human activities; the study of the character and significance of events” (1074). Now for most people even outside the Western tradition, the so-called discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus counts among historical events of outstanding importance. It forms the climax of Columbus’s life story, and according to what Alfred W. Crosby has called the “bardic version of the Columbian voyages and their consequences” (1), the event is a decisive step in the providentially ordained rise of the West, particularly of North America. But, as Crosby pointed out, this event yields a number of highly divergent stories, depending on the values that are centrally negotiated. As an economic event, it resulted in the rise of capitalism with its dark underside of exploitation, slavery and colonialism. The nutritional narrative sees Columbus as “the greatest benefactor of all time” (Crosby 17) because he brought the agricultures of the Old and the New Worlds together, but the complementary ecological narrative is disastrous. Obviously, the demographic story branches out into the most controversial strands. Due to the opportunities offered by the New World, between 1750 and 1930 the Caucasian population on earth rose 5.4 times, while the American Indian population dropped from an estimated high of up to 100 million at the age of “discovery” to a nadir of 4.5 million.3 It seems natural therefore that Native American writers and intellectuals should focus on this last aspect. The decimation and sometimes extermination of the Native population, the dispossession, enslavement, the forced assimilation and hence ethnocide in both Americas is a macro-event of such proportions that it cannot be ignored by any Native American author dealing with American history and its effects on the present.
14Or can it? In The Heirs of Columbus there is very little mention of this aspect. A quotation from the very beginning: “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” (3). Columbus’s title “Admiral of the Ocean Sea” is best known from Samuel Eliot Morison’s monumental biography, Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus. In the sentence quoted, is it used affirmatively, in bardic recognition of Columbus’s rise from obscure origins to the status of explorer with access to royalty and ecclesiastical leaders? Or ironically, either as an allusion to the later negative reversal of his fortune or to indicate the relativity of his greatness in view of its aftermath? The “tribal signature of survivance,” we find out later on, may be Columbus’s major asset and legacy, a feature that might redeem the world. So, may there be greatness in his career, after all, albeit contrary to his beliefs and aims? That is, did he not only ascend, but transcend what is here summarized as “the culture of death,” the sum-total of the negative effects of European domination? As modern narratology has pointed out, we create meaning and make sense of the world by telling stories, history being traditionally the dominant type of narrative. However, poststructural theory has attacked totalizing notions of history, concepts of first origins and Hegelian teleologies from a number of angles and thus helped to destroy the superior truth claim of historical narratives. The Columbian voyages are a particularly good example for the observation that it is not the higher or lower degree of scientifically verifiable factuality which turns facts into events and thus into story elements but the systems of sense-making and evaluation informing this process. And these are anything but truth-oriented in an absolute sense. Hayden White’s studies in the constructedness and literariness of historiography have made the quasi-fictionality of history a common concept, and there appears to be a critical consensus about the basic similarity of all kinds of narrative with regard to their teleological, value-ruled selectivity and their shared techniques of dramatization and characterization. But again, what kind of narrative do we have here? As will be remembered, White avails himself of Northrop Frye’s types of narrative emplotment. He points out that any historical event can find its place in a variety of macro-genres or archetypal story patterns: tragic, comic, romantic or ironic, in Frye’s terminology. This insight can easily be applied to the event and the narratives of the Columbian discoveries, according to one’s focus on wish fulfilment and the successful mastering of adverse circumstances, or on Columbus’s personal disasters or the destruction of peoples, cultures, and ecological systems; on the rise of the West; or on the ironic reversal of fortune and expectations.
15But the sentence from The Heirs of Columbus quoted above seems to indicate that Vizenor is writing in all of these macro-genres at the same time. For him, the choice of focus does not depend on the historian’s perspective, but apparently all approaches are valid and therefore applied simultaneously. The question which history The Heirs of Columbus has incorporated is relevant because this is a historical novel dealing, albeit only in some portions of the text, with historical persons and events and containing numerous quotations or paraphrases from historiographic texts like Morison’s biography or historical sources like Colombus’s diary. But of course, this is not a traditional historical novel in the tradition of Walter Scott, as Georg Lukács defines it, a genre whose aim it is to uncover the true essence of historical change and the teleological inevitability of the process. Rather it belongs to the type of novel which Linda Hutcheon has called “historiographic metafiction” and which I would prefer to name “metahis-toriographic fiction” because it reflects upon the very conditions of writing history. In this as in other respects its demands on the reader are extraordinary because the text constantly runs against our expectations. The result is not another novel of victimization but a narrative of survivance, to use one of Vizenor’s best-known quasi neologisms.
16The material on Pocahontas provides a good example. It consists of very few pages of biographical information from contemporary and modern sources, often as quotations with sources given and without authorial commentary, for instance this passage concerning Pocahontas’ reception at the English court:
Pocahontas was presented at a performance of The Vision of Delight and Christmas, his Mask, by Ben Jonson, on Twelfth Night at the end of the Christmas season in the Banqueting Hall of Whitehall Palace. King James and Queen Anne danced at the masque in honor of Rebecca Rolfe. Prince Charles, the new Earl of Buckingham, the Earl of Montgomery, Sir Dudley Carleton, ambassador to the Netherlands, John Chamberlain, and others in royal favor attended the masque. Chamberlain wrote to Carleton that “the Virginian woman Pocahontas, with her father’s Counsellor hath been with the King, and graciously used. And both she and her assistant well placed at the Masque.” (97)
17The brutal eurocentrism of the event is left for the reader to discover. Only rarely do we find direct evaluative statements, as in “Felipa Flowers [. . .] was determined to rescue the remains of a young tribal woman who had died in service to the religious politics of the colonies; she had died in tribute to the noble fashions of the seventeenth century and would be buried at last in the tribal House of Life” (97). Even this sympathetic approach may be attributed both to an authorial voice or to Felipa’s point of view. While the latter’s solidarity with victimized tribes or individuals moves the reader to sympathize not only with Pocahontas but also with her, the novel as such progresses beyond situations of vicitimization and will not let us rest too long on such sentimental feelings. If we want to find out about an authorial perspective behind the mosaic of quotations and paraphrases of historical and historiographical material we have to notice, for instance, that Vizenor’s version of Pocahontas’ biography skips the most notorious episode: Captain John Smith is not even mentioned. By selecting and by adding his own imaginations he moves away from the stereotyped versions common in popular notions of history. By creating a collage of quotes he gives the impression of historical factuality. In an interview he said: “I don’t consider Columbus a good story and I don’t consider it healthy after such a long time to continually tell a bad story that victimizes me” (“The Trickster Heirs of Columbus” 102). To turn this bad story into a good one, he combines the borrowed material with his own additions and replacements which thereby claim an authority of at least equal weight to that of the historiographical tradition.
18The first narrative paragraph of the novel gives a good impression:
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.” That light was a torch raised by the silent hand talkers, a summons to the New World. Since then, the explorer has become a trickster healer in the stories told by his tribal heirs at the headwaters of the great river. (Heirs 3)
19The first fictional word in this text is “blue,” a significant addition to Columbus’s testimony because blue turns out to be the leitmotif color of the novel. But drastic things follow two lines down: Vizenor’s fictional hand talkers are given the same semantic status as Columbus’s observations and their classification as “journal to the crown.” So: are these hand talkers fictional or real or both? This is the point at which I have to talk about the theory of fictionality.
20Novels belong to the genre group of fiction, not in the sense of inventedness, but of fictional text—fictionality here meaning, in terms of semantics and speech-act theory, the suspension of some of the rules of ordinary language, for instance the conditions that an assertion is meant to be true and that the speaker believes in its truth—unless he/she is lying (Gabriel). When Columbus says in his journal that he saw a light, he asserts that this is true. When Vizenor, I mean the narrative function I conveniently identify with the author, says “That light was a torch raised by the silent hand talkers,” this is a pretended assertion. For John R. Searle, fictional texts consist of pretended “illocutionary acts, normally of the representative type,” that is, of “statements, assertions, descriptions, characterizations, identifications, explanations, and numerous others” (Searle 325). A fictional text can contain serious, factual utterances, for instance about historical events, like “Columbus was two years old when Muhammad II, the founder of the Ottoman Empire, captured Constantinople [. . .]” (Heirs 29). By placing such sentences in the vicinity of autobiographical quotations from the admiral’s journal, Vizenor makes us jump back and forth between history and fiction, between real (but possibly false) and pretended (but possibly true) assertions. But by adding silent hand talkers or by making Columbus a descendant of the Maya, the generic binaries he makes us digest in one dish contain history of the most factual, place-and-date-governed kind and fiction of an overwhelmingly fantastic variety. Since the fictional assertions are linguistically indistinguishable from non-fictional ones, the applicability of the truth question rests on genre markers and on contextual interpretation and results in numerous ambivalences as to the question of truth. Such tensions apply not only to the micro-structure but to the level of macro-statement as well. The novel’s assertion that the Maya brought civilization to Europe and that for instance the Jews and hence Columbus (by way of de Madariaga’s thesis concerning his Jewish background) but also Jesus Christ carry what is called the Maya “signature of survivance” makes Columbus’s voyage a homeward trip.
21If fiction and historical narrative are sometimes difficult to unite, so much more are fiction—be it historical or other—and myth, if the unification involves not just the mythic world view of some fictional character but also the conflation of the contradictory claims of “truth” in both types of text. The worldview of myth is characterized by the undividedness of reality (cf. Cassirer 47 ff.), by the unity of “subjective” and “objective” truth as well as of the physical and metaphysical spheres. The truth of myth does not require evidence in the same way that historiographical narratives do. Whatever philosophical, anthropological, and psychological theories of myth have come up with, on a pragmatic level myths have to be believed. For the members of the respective community of belief, the text of a myth consists of illocutionary speech acts, notably assertions, a type which by definition is intended to be true.4 However, contrary to the semantic and pragmatic rules for assertions, the speaker of a myth need not “be in a position to provide evidence or reasons for the truth of the expressed proposition” (Searle 322), because belief replaces proof and does not depend on it. On the other hand, the speech acts of myth are not pretended as are those of fictional texts.
22The myth background for The Heirs of Columbus is Anishinaabe, and so it is an evil wiindigo who threatens to annihilate the tribe if he should win the final moccasin game. He is only stopped by Stone’s hint that this would mean the end of the world and thereby of the game, too, since Stone is in possession of a powerful war herb whose use would bring about total destruction and which he has made part of the contest of good and evil. “‘The game never ends,’ said the wiindigo. He paused over the blue moccasins, raised his hand, and then moved back into the shadows. The mere mention of the soldier weed caused the cannibal to reconsider his choice of moccasins” (183). That is, where Native American authors like Leslie Silko in her short story “Yellow Woman” create a delicate balance of a mythological and a psychological level of the text and allow the reader to choose one over the other (Breinig, “Hybrid” 320-21), Vizenor bluntly yokes (fantasy) fiction and—tribally specific—myth together, and in addition, as we have seen, history.
23As readers, we have to accept the simultaneous validity of all three types of genre discourse. We can find no escape in saying that “this is only a novel” because what is at stake is the survival of the human race and a number of lesser but none the less significant issues like the chances of the genome project, the question whether cultural memory can be transmitted by “the blood,” the benefits and dangers of Indian casinos, the question of cultural property, and the responsibility for the genocide in the New World. For those who have the right view of reality, these things go together, although not without considerable tension, just as animals like Memphis the panther can appear “disguised as humans” (70) but remain animals if only you have the proper perception. In a court hearing exchange, Judge Lord insists that the “‘Evidence is rational and reason has precedent,’” but Lappet Tulip Browne, one of the tribal group, counters: “‘The rules of a legal culture rule out tribal stories and abolish chance in favor of causative binaries.’ ‘Even languages must have rules,’ said Lord. ‘The languages we understand are games,’ said Lappet. ‘Language can be a prison,’ said Lord. ‘Trickster stories liberate the mind in language games,’ said Lappet. ‘Touché,’ said the judge.” (82). In this play on Wittgenstein and Jameson, the position favored by the tribal speaker and obviously supported by the author is that of openness, chance, play, but that does not mean replacing the binaries of the “either/or” by a synthesis, the harmonious blending of some models of hybridity, but by another binary, the “either AND or,” the persistence of difference in all its shortcomings and its suspension.
24This is to say, once again, that the textual structure as a whole and particularly those elements of meaning construction that are carried by genre are shaped by transdifference. Indeed, I know of no works of fiction that better represent this concept than Vizenor’s novels, and The Heirs of Columbus is a wonderful example. As Lappet Tulip Browne asks the court to “strain to understand” (80) the transdifferent status of the trickster, who in this novel turns out to be a “real” figure, a mythic character, and a figure of speech, so we must strain to understand, and feel, the simultaneous validity of genres, ideas, social affiliations or moral positions that are ordinarily thought of as mutually exclusive. It is a text where oppositions mean healing, where the antinomies of biography vs. fantasy, history vs. myth, history vs. utopia, tribal vs. postethnic and universal, gambling income and humanitarian spending, genetic engineering and chance, power and imagination, gender and transgender are brought together in a combination of manifold transdifferent ambivalences, or, as Vizenor would say, a complex of stories and humor, humor which eventually even keeps the apocalypse just one sentence away. Accepting such transdifference will not allow us not to take sides, but in a further step it makes choice not just a causal necessity but an act of liberation. To see reality as simulation and yet to assume and act upon the premise that the human condition can be improved upon turns the strain of undecidable elements into a creative force. The free acceptance of the transdifferent nature of many aspects of human reality but also of individual decisions of one aspect over the other makes The Heirs of Columbus a text of multiple liberations: of language, culture, people, land, objects, and ideas. Although not another gospel, it contains messages for a whole generation of wanderers in the inter-cultural contact zones of not only the New World.
Bibliographie
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Works Cited
10.1007/978-3-0348-7744-2 :Bak, Hans. “The Kaleidoscope of History: Michael Dorris and Louise Erdsrich’s The Crown of Columbus (with a coda on Gerald Vizenor’s The Heirs of Columbus).” In: Gert Buelens and Ernst Rudin (eds.). Deferring a Dream: Literary Sub-Versions of the American Columbiad. Basel: Birkhäuser, 99-119.
Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Forms of Capital.” Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education. Ed. John G. Richardson. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986, 241-58.
Breinig, Helmbrecht. “(Hi)storytelling as Deconstruction and Seduction: The Columbus Novels of Stephen Marlowe and Michael Dorris/Louise Erdrich.” In: Bernd Engler and Kurt Müller (eds.). Historiographic Metafiction in Modern American and Canadian Literature. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1994, 325-346.
Breinig, Helmbrecht. “Hybrid Retrospections: Myth, Fiction, History and the Native American Historiographic Short Story.” In: Bernd Engler and Oliver Scheiding (eds.). Re-Visioning the Past: Historical Self-Reflexivity in American Short Fiction. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1998, 313-341.
Breinig, Helmbrecht and Klaus Lösch. “Transdifference.” Journal for the Study of British Cultures, 13.2 (2006), 105-122.
Cassirer, Ernst. Philosophie der symbolischen Formen. Zweiter Teil: Das mythische Denken (1924). Darmstadt: Wissenschaftlicher Buchgesell-schaft, 1973.
Cockburn, Andrew. “The Judas Gospel.” National Geographic 209.5 (May 2006), 78-95.
Crosby, Alfred W. The Columbian Voyages, the Columbian Exchange, and Their Historians. Washington, D.C. : American Historical Association, 1987.
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Notes de bas de page
1 “[T]he French-American self-styled archaeologist Augustus Le Plongeon (1826- 1908) [. . .] in the course of his extensive travels and excavations in Yucatán and after living for years in the midst of the Yucatec Maya, came to see the Maya not just as the founders of Atlantis and colonies in the Nile Valley, Mesopotamia and Egypt more than 11,000 years ago, but as the ‘source of all world civilization’” (Irmscher 89, quoting from Desmond/Messenger).
2 Vizenor has always linked the formal and aesthetic qualities of storytelling with its social and moral function. In an interview with Klaus Lösch and myself he commented extensively on the superiority of tribal narratives over Western literature, for instance in their ability to accommodate contradiction and in their figurative over against a merely representational potential. In the interview with Laura Coltelli, “The Trickster Heirs of Columbus,” he uses this approach to criticize the story of Columbus for its contribution to the victimization of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. Cf. below, on pages 41–42.
3 If one adds the nadir populations in the various parts of the Americas, the respective nadir having been reached there at different points in history, of course.
4 The epistemological skepticism of our age will lead to a restricted validity of the term “truth.” An assertion can be said to be “true” only in (a) the trivial, commonplace usage of the word and (b) only within the knowledge system of a given society.
Auteur
Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
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