1Gerald Vizenor is, of course, a writer whose work gleefully summons up contradiction, contraimage, contradance, a contrarian whose range of reference is, to use a good old phallogocentric image, bigger than yours, and whose teasing, tricksy prose, poetry and rush of theoretical and political writings defies, in his famous quote, all attempts at analysis.1 Few writers, academic or creative, give you, as Vizenor generously does, the tools with which to unpick their work—coinages like postindian, penenative, holotrope (Fugitive Poses 14-15)—plays with language such as survivance and lower case italicized indian—a host of terms referenced to French philosophers such as Baudrillard and Derrida—différance, simulation, hyperreality—and finally (probably least referenced in the critical work) specific conceptual terms from the Anishinaabe— naanabozho, odoodemi, manidooke.2 His major novels may take up religious beliefs and customs from China and Japan, but they also find use for histories of the shopping trolley, the skeletal structure of bears, and the intellectual foundations of Flat Earth theory.

2Faced with this bewildering profusion, the critic (well, this critic, anyway), feels the need to fix upon common tropes, chronotopes, repeating series of images, and indeed anything else that provides a ready handhold. This essay will suggest that such a handhold is to be found in one of several settings that recur throughout Vizenor’s novels. The White Earth Reservation, Minnesota (along with its near cousin the Barony of Patronia) is one of these settings. Another is the law court, albeit often a law court that allows laser holograms and in which evil can be defeated with a box of ticks. But here I intend to concentrate on the third place that recurs in almost every Vizenor novel up to and in many senses culminating in Chancers (2001): the university campus and its close relation, the museum.

3The campus is, of course, hardly unexplored territory in Native American fiction. Sherman Alexie’s Indian Killer (1997), though it roams throughout the city of Seattle, makes extensive use of a university setting. Michael Dorris and Louise Erdrich’s co-written Crown of Columbus (1991) begins as a campus romance before taking on elements of Indiana Jones. Carter Revard’s poems, as might be expected of a Rhodes Scholar, return several times to the sights and spaces of Oxford.3 And the reason that the university might hold such sway over the imagination of Native writers is not terribly difficult to guess. A number of American universities have included Native American Studies programmes, either as self-contained schools or within departments of Ethnic Studies, since the late 1960’s (Kidwell & Velie 131-3). At the same time, the trend towards having professional writers of fiction as members of staff, begun just after the Second World War, has only intensified. The result of these overlapping trends is that by far the majority of Native writers producing today are or have been employed at American universities. Indeed, this is partly the reason that Native American writing has enjoyed such an astonishing, productive flowering—as Diane Glancy has noted, her job has been essential in allowing her to write (Andrews 645).

4What does seem strange to me, however, is how little consideration is given to the reciprocal effect such a setting might have on Native fiction. Louis Owens’ Bone Game (1994), for example, does not seem to me to make sense until it is considered within the subgenre of the campus murder mystery, examples of which range from The James Joyce Murder (1976) to Murder at the M.L.A. (1993). Sherman Alexie could be productively placed alongside Philip Roth’s The Human Stain (2001) to examine the ways that both look at the balance of power on campus. That neither of these obvious critical moves has taken place is perhaps symptomatic of the way in which criticism of Native American fiction so often seems to take place in a separate space to criticism of other literatures in English. In this essay, however, I intend to demonstrate the ways in which Gerald Vizenor makes use of certain tropes of the campus novel to further his literary and political goals. I will argue that, far from being the somewhat precious and inward-looking exercise in narcissism that so many critics have suggested (for example, Ian Carter’s complaint that every campus novel is exactly the same as every other campus novel (15)), in the hands of Vizenor campus fiction becomes a space where competing and even contradictory regimes of signification can be brought together.

5Chancers, typical of a Vizenor text, both exhibits and subverts every one of the genre conventions of the academic novel. Ever since the American campus skit was initiated with the publication, in the early 1950’s, of Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe (1953) and Randall Jarrell’s Pictures From An Institution (1954), the basic ingredients have remained largely the same. Satire of one’s colleagues is positively encouraged: as Malcolm Bradbury’s narrator observes in his 1965 campus novel Stepping Westwards:

The university like[s] to have writers-in-residence around. . . [T]heir traditional obligations are to write a novel in which the faculty appear only faintly disguised, resulting in enormous publicity for the college. (14)

6Equally in keeping with their authors’ position within their universities, almost all campus novels are set among academics rather than the cleaning or administrative staff. Among these fictional academics, most work in Humanities rather than the Sciences or vocational subjects (Michael Frayn’s The Tin Men (1965) is one of a handful of honourable exceptions). And among these, the vast majority either work in literature departments or very closely related subjects. Entirely in keeping with this narcissistic tradition of in-house in-jokes, Vizenor’s campus stories are set at named, identifiable institutions, or faintly disguised versions of the same, and are inhabited by delicately drawn caricatures of real, identifiable academics (and people in related professions, such as publishers), alongside faintly disguised versions of real people. Pardone de Cozener, the radical academic forced out after his claims to native ancestry are questioned, is easily identified as Ward Churchill, for example, especially as his defences against his accusers are all but word-for-word the same as those employed by Churchill when he was first accused of faking his background.4

7Of course, this may seem an obvious point: most writers plunder the scenery around them, after all. But an inherent quality of humanities departments is that they are extremely abnormal situations. They consist, after all, of a group of highly competitive persons, often with passionate and incommensurate beliefs, forced into jockeying for position in what is both metaphorically and, usually, literally a very confined space. And the moment that the campus novel emerged as a genre in its own right was a particularly pressured one. Academics in the 1950’s and 60’s faced the end of a Golden Era of lifetime employment, respectful students and low workrates, being challenged by feminists, by ethnic minority activists demanding an end to institutional discrimination, by student revolutionaries demanding an end to traditional teaching, and, always, by the continuing, relentless erosion of wages, of funding, of respect in the wider community (Showalter 42, 60 & 145-6).5

8I have already mentioned the fact that there is a large subgenre of university-set murder mysteries: in addition to the detective stories, death haunts more highbrow novels such as Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962) and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (1992). The pressures I have outlined above, I argue, go some way to explaining the roots of this fascination with blood on the campus floor. And when death isn’t stalking the university novel’s corridors, the inhabitants are engaging in erotic activities of one kind or another. Kenneth Wom-ack argues that “the role of erotic love in university fiction [is] as an emotional transaction that provides its consumers with a distraction from the intellectual rigors of the academy and its inability to satisfy their desires for human interconnection” (78): a neat way of saying that people in solitary professions like academia tend to think about sex a lot, and occasionally transmute their thoughts into fiction.

9All of this, of course, is meat and drink to Vizenor. The novel starts with the wiindigoo solar dancers, a group of students obsessed with tales of victimry, kidnapping and beheading the provost of the college. Several more people die during the course of the novel, including most of the solar dancers, and their deaths are every bit as inventive as those in the average pulp horror novel: eaten alive by mutant carnivorous worms, speared with a stone arrow in the act of copulating on a museum bench, or burnt to a wicked cinder in the ruins of a commencement ceremony stage. Equally, the novel contains, as they say on video warning stickers, “scenes of an adult nature,” with explicit, pornographic intercourse among the bones of long-dead tribal peoples (including a novel use for the human skull). It also contains a hero, Professor Peter Roses, who is identified with the authorial position when he teaches a chapter from Vizenor’s own Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles (1990).6 Roses gets through at least three blondes a week during what he terms his regular “orifice-hours,” with the narrator and other members of staff listening in through thin partition walls (Chancers 84). Naturally, this fits within the tradition of the priapic, strutting trickster-figure, and the trickster-tale of casual deaths and ever more over-the-top sexual conquests. This has echoes of one of Vizenor’s earliest campus stories, in Griever: An American Monkey King in China (1987), which has a good claim to be the first American-authored campus novel set in Asia. Early in the novel, Griever rescues chickens from a slaughterman, and is befriended by one large arrogant male, which he names Matteo Ricci. This means that when Griever makes his first entrance to the campus of Tiajin he is, in one of Vizenor’s nicest puns, preceded by a proudly enormous cock (Griever 34-47 and 54-5).

10But it also fits exactly within the generic expectations raised by the campus setting. Which is not to say that Chancers is simply the heir of Lucky Jim (1954). For the question must now be asked, why use the vehicle of the campus novel at all? Appeals to biography simply won’t do: even if Vizenor were not so fond of endlessly re-staging the death of the author and defying analysis, his life encompasses periods in the Army, in social work, in journalism. It is almost inevitable that the reservation is a key element in almost every Native writer’s work, but none of the other Native writers I listed at the beginning of this essay has the university anything like as central to their fictions. The answer, I believe, lies partly in the caricatures that, as I mentioned before, lie at the heart of the university tradition. If it is obvious to anyone who knows the Ward Churchill case who Pardone de Cozener is, it is much less obvious who Hildie Harridan might be.7 After all, professors in the field of Native American studies are not global superstars whose every tic is covered in Hello! magazine (not yet, anyway). And even if we can identify Willie Trainor, the sex pest professor with the tiny niinag (manhood) from Hotline Healers, there are many more caricatures on the Vizenorean campus, not all of them academics, not all of them American.8

11And there is a reason—a reason beyond fear of the law of libel—that identifications in the critical literature on Vizenor needs must be tentative, such as David Murray’s guess that Matchi Makwa in Wordarrows “seems to be” Dennis Banks (Murray 30). For Vizenor is determined, as he states in a 1991 interview with Hartwig Isernhagen, not to be tied to the simple one-to-one causal representation that is implied by satire (114-6). He achieves this by taking his caricatures a step beyond the simple lampoon, by giving them exaggerated gestures, tics, smells, personal habits, by mixing together two or more people’s characteristics. Typically of the postmodern novel, but equally typical of satirical caricature, the characters this process produces are all surface, lacking the customary pretence of an interior life, a psychology. Vizenor repeats a trick from fellow postmodern William S. Burroughs, in constantly interpolating identifiable elements from his own biography (Morgan 352-4), and processing them in such a way as to produce caricatures recognizable only to his closest confidants (and, one suspects, in many cases not even to them).

12What, then, does all of this achieve? In the ordinary run of the campus novel, as the Bradbury quote above shows, part of the pleasure of the text is that of the roman à clef: the novel becomes a puzzle. David Lodge’s character Morris Zapp is Stanley Fish: Laurie Taylor is The History Man, Howard Kirk.9 But the postmodern trickster plays I have described destroy this neat one-to-one paralleling of real and fictional worlds. In their excess of characteristics without depth, in their frenzied ruttings and killings cartoonishly beyond the reach of the normal, essentially cosy, campus novel, the novels create an excess of signification. Vizenor further ramps this up by inserting, over and over again, anecdotes that are identifiably autobiographical, and reusing old characters, situations, or entire stories from other books. Indeed Chancers is more reuse than original material, a Burroughsean cut-up of old stories that begins with “Four Skin Documents,” a short story from 1991’s Landfill Meditation, and continues by including remixed samples many pages in length from Bearheart (1990), Griever and even the supposedly non-fictional essay “Trickster Discourse” from Vizenor’s collection Narrative Chance (1989).

13What effect this has on the reader may be easily guessed. To understand most novels, campus or otherwise, at their most superficial level is a relatively straightforward affair. But to understand many of Vizenor’s narrative moves demands, deliberately demands, too much from the reader. One would need to know not just Vizenor’s work, but also his autobiography to a stalker-ish level to come close to understanding the obvious private jokes about pigeon toes and mosquito ranches when real-life scholars A. Robert Lee and John Purdy appear as characters in Hotline Healers (42-3). Even that difficulty fades into insignificance when considering the later debwe heart dance, where the (real life) novelist Ishmael Reed, who Vizenor knows well, dances with fictional tricksters such as Cozzie Browne, from Vizenor’s Trickster of Liberty (1988), accompanied by partly real caricatures such as Willie Trainor (a disguised version of a real academic) and anonymous figures wearing masks that simulate but do not become well-known people such as Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jean Baudrillard. These last of course bring a further level of complicated ironies, one inherent in the campus setting, as Vizenor brings into play all those elements that normally inform critical readings of texts rather than appear within them. The simulation of anthropologist Clifford Geertz, speaking entirely in quotations from Geertz’s writings, argues with the simulation of Alfred Kroeber about the meaning of the events around them, only to be confronted with double simulations of Umberto Eco, who debate the meaning of otherness and reality. All of which, remember, is taking place in the same fictive space as the magical crystal phallus that impregnates all who approach it. Vizenor never forgets to include the earthy alongside and mixed up with the intellectual: the academics’ comments are recorded by the same satirical author who has LaVonne Brown Ruoff, in the same scene, walk down the hallway with toilet paper trailing from her skirt.

14Then there is the question of seasons. Alan Velie’s excellent essay “The Trickster Novel” analyses Vizenor’s novel Darkness in St Louis Bearheart through the prism of Bakhtinian theory, and in the process shows that Vizenor contrasts the mythic time of the traditional trickster tale with the specific, everyday, ongoing time of the novel’s narrative to create a postmodern chronotope (121-40). Along with natural, everyday, cyclical time, and the mythic, extra-temporal time of the trickster, Vizenor makes an unusual use of what Elaine Showalter calls “academic time” in both Chancers and the earlier Griever (Showalter 9-16). For in traditional Anishinaabe tales, the wiindigoo Ice Giant or evil spirit is a figure of winter, of deadly cold with ice for bones. As E. Donald Two-Rivers describes them in his poem “Time of the Windigo”:

They are Ice Giants with frozen evil hearts. . .
Strange happenings, moving kettles:
Windigo stalks the winter night. (11)

15However, Vizenor in Chancers places his wiindigoo killers in the hot heart of the Californian summer term. Such a move echoes Griever, in which, as Linda Lizut Helstern notes, “the novel’s time frame is an exact reversal of the winter period when traditional stories are allowed to be told” (151). This is all, of course, yet another trickster reversal, but at the same time it illustrates a truth about campus life, which is that summer, not winter, is the time of endings. Academic time is also invoked in another appealing paradox. Graduation ceremonies are parodied on multiple occasions in Vizenor’s novels, in every case signifying the final part of the novel to be set on campus, and forming the climax to Chancers. In a strange lexical twist at American universities, this final ceremony is known as the commencement: Vizenor ends on a beginning.

16To follow the three orders of parody I identified earlier would be difficult enough: the addition of three overlapping and competing models of time surely, finally, makes any clear reading impossible. This is more than an excess of signification, this is a positive crisis, a perpetual breakdown of meaning. Vizenor’s work pits competing or mutually exclusive orders of signification against one another, a process designed to create readerly confusion. There is the closed level of signification that was described at work in the paradox of the unknowable caricatures, the basic level of the light “sex and murder” comic skit “designed to bring enormous publicity to the college,” and the complex, self-questioning textual theories that disrupt the critic’s own reading by forcing an engagement with anthropology, critical theory and history. All of these are inherent in the campus setting, where public quarrels mix with private workplace jokes—and what else is the academic skit but a better class of private workplace joke?—which mix in turn, in the humanities classroom, with theories that question the meaning or indeed existence of anything beyond the text. Vizenor, campus novelist par excellence, brings all this to the fore at the same time, realizing the campus as an assemblage of competing or incompatible regimes of signification, co-present and without hierarchy. In other words (to be precise, a single word, taken from Deleuze and Guarrati), a rhizome.

17Using Deleuzoguattarian terminology to help conceptualize and clarify a Native American mixedblood novelist’s strategies can never be entirely unproblematic. After all, A Thousand Plateaus includes some grotesque anthropological oversimplifications of Hopi and Crow culture, on which the authors partly base their philosophy of “nomadology” (113). This move, which assumes that all Fourth World peoples can be thought of in the same terms, is exactly the sort of lazy pseudoanthropological thinking Vizenor has spent a good portion of his writings trying to overcome. Nevertheless, the rhizome, that multiplicitous, endlessly branching model of the book, is a useful metaphor10 for Vizenor’s works, with their curious mixtures of high poststructural theory, Anishinaabe traditional religion, political journalism, and masturbating otter monks (Hotline Healers 170-1). “Principles of connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be connected to any other, and must be,” as A Thousand Plateaus observes; equally, as we have already observed, Chancers is an assemblage formed almost exclusively from previously published works, a greatest hits of Vizenorean campus sketches and theoretical essays.

18The difference between Chancers and the conventional campus novel—David Lodge’s Nice Work, say—is to be found precisely in this rhizomatic construction. Lodge can satirise feminist theory-speak in a sex scene (293), but the satire draws on the separation between thought and action. In Peter Roses’ lecture (Chancers 84-96), however, there is no such separation: the students talk directly to the characters in a repeated (remixed?) scene from Bearheart. Cedarbird (the narrator) reminds us that what we are reading is anyway only one of three possible accounts of the narrative of Chancers, created for three different audiences: a secret account of affairs known only to himself; a story written for “Random Nation Books”; an intelligence report written for “ethnic emissaries” (Chancers, 11-12). The question this implicitly poses is “Which account are we reading?,” and Vizenor goes on to further confuse the issue with an implication that the latter two narratives are in fact the same account decoded differently.

19But the rhizome effect is never content with remaining merely on the page. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, the assemblage-book “forms a rhizome with the world.” And here we arrive at a possible reason for Vizenor’s unacknowledged engagement with the campus tradition. Louis Owens in the introduction to Other Destinies writes perceptively that:

Vizenor. . . is fond of citing such theorists as Foucault, Lacan, Derrida, Roland Barthes, Bakhtin, Tzvetan Todorov, and Paul Ricoeur among a multitude of others. . . [He] anticipates this somewhat narrow “apperceptive background” as essential to the dialogic of his text and. . . agrees to the inevitable narrowing of audience for the sake of intensification of effect. (15-16).

20I would submit that the intended audience that Owens here refers to—one with at least a partial understanding of the various ironies attendant upon the signifier indian, one with at least a partial knowledge of semiotic discourse, anthropology, haiku, kabuki, one with a strong stomach for graphic violence and sex with animals, one willing to strive to understand sometimes incomprehensible texts—such an audience can only be an audience of academics. Vizenor’s readership is circumscribed, deliberately, to a tight circle of professors, students, and other people with a strong relationship with the academy.11 By including incidents taken from the academic world in his fiction, he makes the real academy, his readers’ real campuses, part of the rhizome of his texts.

21There is, notoriously, no greater lover of scandal than the academic gossip; as Showalter observes, “there is an insider’s gossipy pleasure in recognizing portraits, usually unflattering, of colleagues and friends” (5). So these anecdotes are intended to be uncovered, and uncovered in conversation. Kimberley M. Blaeser’s still-definitive study of Vizenor poses in its title the question of how to write “in the oral tradition” and she writes of his “dialogic style” that it “engages his reading audience in discovering his revolutionary message and becomes itself a revolutionary act that might implicate the reader” (196). Writing in a campus tradition allows Vizenor to engage a particular academic audience, to draw us into his rhizomatic discourse. He thereby implicates us in his endeavour to expose the numerous abuses of power on our campuses. If we find the sex between nonexistent people in Chancers problematic, why do we not find the bones in our campus museums offensive? (If we do, then why are they still there?) The campus novel, far from being an inward-looking narcissism, in Vizenor’s hands turns into an entirely outward-looking genre. It denies its academic readers the pleasure of assuming that the problem is in any way elsewhere, that our own institutions are free from scrutiny. Given that the penalties for ignorance in the novel involve death by mutant worm and other horrors, it is not in any way a comforting vision.