Native stories are sound and vision, and both are survivance. My presence is written in stories, and we must come together in the book or be lost to manners and discoveries.
Postindian Conversations

I have a disease: I see language. What I should simply hear, a strange pulsion. . . reveals it to me as a “vision”. . . . The primal scene, in which I listen without seeing, is followed by a perverse scene, in which I imagine seeing what I am hearing. Hearing deviates to scopia: I feel myself to be the visionary and voyeur of language.
Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes

1Reading through the 2006 Spring issue of the M.L.A. Newsletter, I noticed a call for papers on the subject of “Theorist Autobiographers” described as “Autobiographical works by writers known as theorists. . . that develop theoretical arguments.” I was immediately struck by the list of examples provided as a model of theoretical autobiographies—Augustine’s Confessions, Montaigne’s Essays, Wordsword’s Prelude, Derrida’s Circumfession among others—and I wondered what kind of topics would make it to the panel at the 2006 M.L.A. convention in Philadelphia. The text I would have liked to add to such authoritative established models of Western life writing is undoubtedly Gerald Vizenor’s Interior Landscapes (1990), a text that in its blending of “autocritique and everyday life writing” (Smith and Watson 155) adds to the rich variety of autobiographical practices that in the past decades have visibly expanded and challenged the boundaries prescribed by critics and practitioners of such a vibrant literary genre.1 While previous critical interpretations of Interior Landscapes have focused on the overall significance of the text within the wide range of Vizenor’s oeuvre, in what follows I am going to look at Vizenor’s autobiography in the context of current debates on autobiographical writing and practices. Specifically, I am going to discuss the interaction between the creative writer and the critic, Vizenor becoming at once both a creator and theorist of the genre of autobiography along the lines of other contemporary and not-so-contemporary theorist autobiographers. I intend to explore the ways in which a text such as Interior Landscapes adds to the current discourse of life writing at the same time as I interrogate Vizenor’s intriguing ideas on the self in light of his return to the autobiographical motif in his recent poetry.

2Subtitled “autobiographical myths and metaphors,” Interior Landscapes, as it has been noticed among others by Kimberley Blaeser and Richard Hutson, challenges all the conventions of Western autobiography and becomes one more narrative in Vizenor’s project of writing down oral discourse. Employing first and third person pronouns and enfolding simultaneously Anishinaabe family history, individual episodes of the author’s life, and locales as diverse as city, reservation, America, and Japan, Vizenor would seem to follow closely his fellow contemporary Native writers who, along with other major ethnic writers in the U.S. and postcolonial writers around the world, have in the past few decades significantly redefined the genre of life writing. More important, Vizenor’s text testifies to an increasing critical consensus on autobiography as an ambivalent and heterogenous kind of discourse in stark contrast with Philippe Lejeune’s understanding of the genre as a “récit rétrospectif en prose qu’une personne réelle fait de sa propre existence, lorsqu’elle met l’accent sur sa vie individuelle, en particulier l’histoire de sa personnalité” (Le pacte autobiographique 14).2

3In the last chapter of Interior Landscapes, Vizenor articulates his ideas on autobiographical theory at the same time as he presents a cogent style of short, interrelated stories of memory that unfold without following a linear way of cause and effect. While such a strategy might appear rather unsettling to those readers looking for “a narrative development of personality” (SAIL Review, 1991), I argue, that Vizenor’s auto/biography becomes a form of auto/criticism, the line between the two discourses constantly blurring in an endless process of transformations and trickster turns. But the dialogue with theoretical approaches to the genre of autobiography begins in the very title of Vizenor’s text, the myths and metaphors of the subtitle clearly alluding to James Olney’s Metaphors of Self (1972) and George Gusdorf’s definition of autobiography as “the effort of a creator to give the meaning of his own mythic tale” (Olney 1980: 48). Vizenor himself in conversation with Robert Lee acknowledges the influence of Olney’s groundbreaking edited collection, Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical (1980): “Most of my questions were answered by the essays, or at least my concern and resistance had a critical context that other writers had thought carefully about” (58), Vizenor claims in Postindian Conversations adding how, by overcoming a certain resistance to a “literary form” in autobiography, to “this idea of absence,” he created [his] own style. “I created myself as one of many characters, in many situations, and gave voices to others who might have something to say about me” (58).

4According to Olney, the contemporary study of autobiography begins with Gusdorf’s essay “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography” (1956) in which the critic argues that “the individual does not oppose himself to others” (Olney 29). While Vizenor seems to subscribe to such a view, he does nonetheless insist on “the presence of a voice, and a pose of the self” in life writing, clearly making a stance on the ongoing debate of Native autobiography as a communal genre. Responding specifically to Arnold Krupat’s argument on the synecdochic self in native autobiography,3 Vizenor boldly claims that “natives are not as communal as [Krupat] might want them to be in theory” (Postindian Conversations 62). While acknowledging that native autobiographers, including himself, often begin with some reference to a larger community or tribal association, Vizenor argues that “the autobiography does not speak for community, and stories do not represent the self” (Postindian Conversations 61). More precisely, Vizenor suggests that communal practices have a very distinct meaning in native communities and warns us against “romantic reductions of tradition and community as common sources of native identity” (62). Granting Krupat’s originality in his interpretations of native life stories and autobiographies, Vizenor, however, seems to be puzzled by the use of terms that do not translate cultural and epistemological worldviews. Vizenor’s autobiography begins with anishinaabe family history and in that sense might indeed be defined as “synecdochic”; however, his understanding of the self and the way it is expressed through communal and individualistic stories goes beyond literary tropes and restrictive categories. Vizenor’s use of pronouns in Interior Landscapes testifies to this complex interaction and the difficulties occurring in the translation of memory.

5In Manifest Manners, Vizenor points out how pronouns are never authentic representations of people, cultures, and environment. He uses the metaphor of translation and Derrida’s concept of différance to describe the “untranslatable” nature of identities. He writes:

The stories that are heard are the coherent memories of natural reason; the stories that are read are silent landscapes. Pronouns, then, are the pinch hitters in the silence and distance of translation, and at the same time pronouns are the différance that would be unheard in translations. The shadows of tribal consciousness, and the shadows of names and natural reason are overheard in tribal stories and autobiographies; in this sense, stories are shadows, shimmers of coincidence, and tribal traceries in translation. (96)

6As “unheard différance,” pronouns for Vizenor transvaluate and minsconstrue memories while elusively inviting us to a sense of presence. His personal dissatisfaction with pronouns clearly reveals an overall more general dissatisfaction with the English language and with the (im) possibility to convey in writing the consciousness heard in tribal stories. Discussing the nature of Vizenor’s self-authoring in Interior Landscapes, Blaeser points out “the degree to which the autobiographical in Vizenor is engaged not with the personal but with the mythic, the metaphorical, the theoretical, particularly the degree to which it is engaged with the mythic Anishinaabe trickster” (Gerald Vizenor 104). Readers of Vizenor’s autobiography then realize that the “I,” “me” and “he” of autocritical stories are part of his ongoing attempt to find “mythic connections” (Vizenor qtd. in Owens, 1991: 239), a strategy Vizenor further articulates in the intriguing concept of “pronounance”: “The pronounance combines the sense of the words pronoun and pronounce with the actions and conditions of survivance in tribal memories and stories. The pronounance of trickster hermeneutics has a shadow with no person, time, or number. In the absence of the heard the trickster is the shadow of the name, the sound, the noun, the person, the pronounance.” (Manifest Manners 97-8). Vizenor’s use of first and third person pronouns in Interior Landscapes must be seen within this overall artistic scheme of finding new pronouns that would misconstrue essentialist definitions of tribal identities and more significantly, that would bring to the written page some of the elusiveness of oral discourse.

7From the beginning, then, Vizenor’s autobiographical gesture is one of resistance and subversion. While starting from Olney and Gusdorf, Vizenor ultimately undermines the latter’s sense of autobiography as an essentially Western genre, a genre that, as such, cannot exist among those societies that “subscribe to mythic structures” (Olney 29-30.). Deeply inspired by Anishinaabe “mythic structures” and stories, Vizenor, in Interior Landscapes, gives voice to his “crossblood” remembrances that bring him back to mythic time, to those families of the Crane that are an affirmative presence in the history of the Anishinaabe and that constitute the pre-text of his autobiographical mythic tale.4

8The last chapter of Vizenor’s autobiography bears the title of “September 1989: Honor Your Partner.” It opens with a quotation from one of Vizenor’s earlier autobiographical essays, “Crows Written on the Poplars” (published in I Tell You Now, the edited volume by Krupat and Swann), an autocritical collage written in the third person singular pronoun: “Gerald Vizenor implies that autobiographies are imaginative histories; a remembrance past the barriers, and wild pastimes over the pronouns” (262). A few key concepts from this same essay, which presents citations from scholars of autobiography along the author’s memoir of violently killing a squirrel, are interspersed in this final sequence, and the metaphor of hunting is used to describe the autobiographical act. “My survival is mythical, an imaginative transition, an intellectual predation, deconstructed as masks and metaphors at the water holes in autobiographies” (Interior Landscapes 265), Vizenor writes, clearly alluding to the power of language and imagination to liberate our minds. The chapter then proceeds with an array of quotations from theorists and critical readers of autobiography: Avrom Fleishman (Figures of Autobiography), Paul John Eakin (Fictions in Autobiography), Vizenor himself (Growing up in Minnesota), but also George Steiner (After Babel), and John Berger (And Our Faces). As I have discussed elsewhere, elaborating on Kimberley Blaeser’s groundbreaking study of Vizenor’s work, Vizenor’s magpie strategy of gathering attractive fragments responds to his overall ideological message of Native survivance as well as to his attempt to convey in writing the liberatory power of oral discourse, a discourse that is open, dynamic, and communal (Pulitano 154). In Postindian Conversations Vizenor argues that “trickster stories, oral or written, and contemporary theories are not developmental ideas. . . [because] the pleasures of tricky language have always been with us and could be more established than manners, in the ironic sense that the earliest uses of language might have been more tricky and deceptive than representational” (59). In Interior Landscapes, Vizenor refers to Steiner’s concept of language as “deception” or more precisely language as “the main instrument of man’s refusal to accept the world as it is,” unsaying it and speaking it otherwise (265). In the context of the autobiographical act, Vizenor’s discursive strategy forcefully responds to his refusal to accept Native identity as a static, cultural artifact and liberate it from the strictures of anthropological discourse.

9Readers might indeed wonder why a book intended to be Vizenor’s autobiography, and which begins with Anishinaabe creation and trickster stories, is prefaced with quotations from Eudora Welty, Primo Levi, and Michel Foucault among others. How do these fragments of lives interact with Vizenor’s own life? And how do we make the transition from these literary figures to that trickster consciousness that, according to Blaeser, is such a distinctive signature of Vizenor’s work?5

10An author who has had a significant influence on Vizenor’s writing and whose “autobiography” Vizenor had read when composing the twenty-nine episodes that make up Interior Landscapes is the French critic and semiotician Roland Barthes. In La chambre claire, translated into English as Camera Lucida, Barthes writes of the “uneasiness of being a subject torn between two languages, one expressive, the other critical” (8).6 Readers familiar with Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes might remember the intriguing mixture of photographs and narrative fragments (the photographs bearing no direct relation to the text itself). This kind of “self-portrait,” characterized by a “present-oriented” narrative in which the self can never be “fixed,” would later become a model for postmodern forms of autobiographical writing (Smith and Watson 202-3).7 While Vizenor might have had in mind the discursive split enunciated by Barthes and postmodern theories of subjectivity in general, his act of “dispersion” between the critical and the expressive, I argue, takes on a rather different meaning.8 In the preface to his edited collection, Narrative Chance, Vizenor writes that “oral cultures have never been without a postmodern condition that enlivens stories and ceremonies, or without trickster signatures and discourse on narrative chance—a comic utterance and adventure to be heard or read” (x). He suggests that oral cultures have never been without a critical condition and the act of telling stories is essentially a theoretical gesture. Regardless of the genre in which he is working, Vizenor’s main concern in writing is the primary role in language, which, as in oral discourse, should set people free. Whether we call his fiction metacritical (as critics have done) or his autobiography autocritical (as he has done), we should keep in mind that the blurring of discourses and genres in his work ultimately reflects his ideas on the oral nature of language and more importantly perhaps his attempt to mediate between the oral and written expressive modes.

11As I am thinking further of that MLA panel on theorist autobiographers and the natural connections between Vizenor’s and Derrida’s writing,9 I am nonetheless intrigued by unexplored links and resonances across distances and times. Within the tradition of Western literary autobiography, Vizenor’s conception of theoretical autobiographies, I argue, is perhaps closer to Augustine than it is to postmodern and poststructuralist examples of autobiographical modes, all the more so if we follow recent interesting interpretations of such earlier literary masterpieces. Though considered “the architexte of Western autobiography,” Confessions, Françoise Lionnet argues in Autobiographical Voices, is the literary expression of a man living on cultural and linguistic borderlines (18-20). Born in North Africa, speaking Numidian (a Berber language) at home—in the town of Thagaste, near Carthage, a colony of the Roman Empire—learning Latin at school, the language that he would later come to use as a writer, Augustine would for the rest of his life strive for a state of metaphysical communion in the attempt to reach a form of discourse that would transcend language itself. The non-narrative quality of the last four books of Confessions, which abruptly shift to the sphere of interpretation and theoretical practices—a subject of controversy for many critics and editors of Augustine’s text—might ultimately convey echoes of the struggle between orality and literacy that Augustine lived in his own experience. In adopting a “relational” approach, one that would resist a Manichean worldview in favor of a Neoplatonic Christian theology, Augustine, according to Lionnet, ironically becomes the predecessor of contemporary autobiographical women writing and their strategies of métissage (Autobiographical Voices 37). Departing from a crucial episode in Book 13, a passage in which the converted Augustine criticizes Manicheans, whom he called insani or madmen, for failing to see God’s harmonious creation of the world,10 Lionnet detects distinctively “feminine elements” in the poetics of the Confessions. She writes: “It is thus extremely appropriate to begin my book with a detailed analysis of the Confessions. . . and to attempt to reread it in light of my own contemporary feminist commitment to eliminate the artificial boundaries that centuries of Manichean—indeed phallogocentric—thinking have helped to erect. . . . My approach to Augustine seeks to free the Confessions from the philosophical and theological traditions that have appropriated it” (36-7). Augustine’s “poetics of harmony,” Lionnet maintains, ultimately relies on valorizing “aural forms of knowledge” (59) confiding in the power of God’s word to unify and transform the human aspect of his life narrative.

12Upon considering that from Carthage to Anishinaabe country, the road is indeed far, and that any attempt to link Neoplatonism with Vizenor’s re-enacting of Anishinaabe myths and metaphors might seem pretentious, to say the least, Lionnet’s re-reading of Augustine’s text nonetheless strikes an important chord in the context of my re-reading of Vizenor’s autobiography. “These critical ideas,” Vizenor comments in response to a personal question on the nature of orality in his autobiography, “are in the very play of oral and written language. The sound of the word, and the image of the sound of the word, does not play, at times, rightly on the page, and must be teased by a wider gesture, or season of meaning. . . . My interest, always, has been in the story. And the problem, almost always, has been that gesture of the oral turned over on the written page. How do the words transform the images of memory” (Personal correspondence, 8 May 2006).11

13Transformation and re-expression are at the center of the Anishinaabe oral experience. In Earthdivers, Vizenor reminds us that Wenebojo (the trickster figure also known as Naanabozho) brings up five grains of sand from the water, lets them dry up to the sun, and starts throwing earth around to create “a little island” (xiii-xiv). For Vizenor, contemporary mixedblood trickster writers are the new mythic earth-divers. Like Wenebojo, they must create a new space, a new “turtle island” on the written page in the attempt to translate the elusive but liberatory power of the spoken word into the written text. Perhaps Vizenor’s most effective attempt to articulate the harmonious nature of the oral and the written is to be found in his use of the metaphor of the shadow. “The shadow is that sense of intransitive motion to the referent; the silence in memories. Shadows are neither the absence of entities nor the burden of conceptual references. The shadows are the prenarrative silence that inherits the words; shadows are the motions that mean the silence, but not the presence over absence of entities” (64), Vizenor writes in Manifest Manners, clearly resisting a tradition of Western literary discourse based on mutually exclusive categories—most notably the split between voice and silence, word and text. Such resistance, critics today maintain, might indeed have been a crucial concern, albeit for significantly different reasons, in the work of one of the founding fathers of the genre of autobiography, Augustine of Hippo.

14At the same time as he engages in conversation with theorists and critical readers from the contemporary cultural and intellectual scene, Vizenor, however, always reassures us that he is indeed writing autobiographical stories, stories reflecting the performance of everyday practices and that his multi-faceted self ultimately establishes a presence in the telling: “I am a storier, and my stories enfold the creation of a voice, a time, and a place that is always in motion, or visionary transmotion. And the stories create me” (Postindian 61).

15Interior Landscapes ends with eight autobiographical stories marked by locales as diverse as California, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Wisconsin and by events that in some cases would make a reader wonder whether these are indeed believable experiences. Vizenor himself writes how a professor at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN, once told him that his stories “were not true” (266). In those eight autobiographical episodes Vizenor tells how, upon meeting James Baldwin at UC Berkeley, he was mistaken for the black author by a boy eager to deliver his practiced speech to the great writer. Next he writes about his editorial essays on the AIM, his role in the James White Hawk’s case (a photograph of White Hawk is also included among other personal and family photographs in Interior Landscapes), and his experience with a young Native American student suffering from terminal cancer and whose life he almost ended up making even more miserable. This cycle of ordinary life occurrences ends with a story set in Bena, Minnesota, a story linked to the genealogies of his Anishinaabe family, and with two additional episodes related to his experiences as a University student and later a writer. The man, the journalist, the writer, the University Professor nicely converge in these narratives that create a character in a communal scene while reflecting some of that split intentionality (the “I” becoming a “he”) that Louis A. Renza has outlined in his reflections on the theory of autobiography (“The Veto of the Imagination,” qtd. in Olney, 279). Within the context of contemporary theorization of performativity, these stories also reveal how the autobiographical speaker, far from expressing an inner self that is “ontologically whole, seamless and ‘true’” (Smith paraphrasing Judith Butler, 108), is constantly engaged in a performative act, in a theatrical recitation of the self which is ultimately the essential aspect of living a life.

16A life lived performatively inevitably gets narrated in a “purely fragmentary, incomplete literary project” and such life narrative becomes “an endless prelude, a beginning without middle. . . or without end” (Renza qtd. in Olney, 295). Interior Landscapes is not Vizenor’s last book, one that would give us a sense of closure. On the contrary, the final stories told at the end testify to future narratives, a proliferation of more stories to come. More importantly perhaps, the final stories affirm the ubiquitous presence of trickster elsewhere defined by Vizenor as “a comic holotrope in a language game” (“Trickster Discourse” 200). Elements of trickster humor permeate the final story about Melvin McCosh, the owner of a bookstore near the University of Minnesota at the time when Vizenor was a sophomore there, in the late fifties. Vizenor writes how students would frequently wander into this bookstore asking for required textbooks:

“Do you have psych one?”
“Would you be asking for a book?”
“Yes, for my class.”
“Would you happen to know the title?”
“Intro to psych,” the student would answer.
“Never heard of that book.”
“It’s on the list,” the students would plead.
“Did someone write this book?”
“I don’t know.”
“What is the book about?”
“Psych one.”
“Never heard of that book.”
“But it’s on my list.”
“The University bookstore has introductions,” he would announce and then touch his wild white beard. (278)

17In perfectly trickster fashion, McCosh (alias trickster Vizenor) would tease students challenging their imagination with the liberatory power of language. “The University of Minnesota was a new world to some students from rural communities where there were no bookstores. McCosh might have been their first humane encounter with a trickster at the university” (278), Vizenor writes in visibly self-referential mode. McCosh (alias trickster) would challenge aspiring writers as well. Vizenor recounts how upon commenting on his first collection of poems, South of the Painted Stones, McCosh had urged young Vizenor to protect those poems with copyright.

“Indeed, you must copyright these poems.”
“Thank you, McCosh.”
“Do you want to know why?”
“Well, yes of course.”
“These poems are bad, so bad, that one day, when you are a better writer, you’ll need the copyright to protect your reputation, to keep these poems out of circulation,” said McCosh. (279).

18Again and again in his work Vizenor has pointed out how trickster cannot be confined within the strictures of anthropological discourse. Against static definitions of trickster as an amoral, individual figure, one who, in the words of Paul Radin, “knows neither good nor evil yet is responsible for both” (qtd. in Earthdivers, xii), Vizenor affirms that trickster is not representational. As Blaeser points out, Vizenor’s trickster consciousness “arises from a certain state of mind, an anarchical energy, a liberating humor” (Gerald Vizenor 137). When translated into Vizenor’s writing, such trickster energy results in a style that refuses the logic of cause and effect. It’s a style that embraces chance, celebrates play, relishes ambiguity, breaks rules, confounds expectations, and invites involvement. “The most active readers, Vizenor writes, become obverse tricksters” (“Trickster of Liberty” x).

19According to Richard Hutson, Vizenor’s trickster signature “sounds like the very muse of autobiography” if we consider the genre as marked by contradictions and ambiguity (“A Crossblood at the Scratch” 112). More importantly, perhaps, within the context of a theoretical approach to autobiography, as I have attempted to outline so far in this essay, a text such as Interior Landscapes might contribute original insights to this fascinating topic that since Augustine’s Confessions has generated a significant amount of critical investigation. For the purpose of my discussion, I have decided to focus on the last chapter of Vizenor’s autobiography, for in it we see the most effective strategies of autocritical life writing. And yet, I would argue that almost any chapter of Interior Landscapes can be approached in such a dialogic mode with stories that read as simply self-enclosed narratives or, as Hutson suggests, “as tales with extensive ramifications and resonances” (“A Crossblod at the Scratch” 112) into Vizenor’s complex mythic universe. One of such stories is undoubtedly the mystery surrounding the death of his father, Clement William Vizenor. Given the central role this story occupies in Vizenor’s text, I deem appropriate, at this point, to include it in my discussion on autocritical autocritique.

The mixedblood wavers in autobiographies; he moves between mythic reservations where tricksters roamed and the cities where his father was murdered.
“Crows Written on the Poplars”

20Already in his earlier autobiographical essay Vizenor refers to his father’s tragic death in urban Minneapolis and to the legacy of mixedblood memories that Clement William Vizenor left to his son. “Tricksters,” Vizenor writes in the section of Interior Landscapes titled “The Trickster and Libertina,” “eased the pain in stories” (74), clearly alluding to his refusal to act as a victim among the most severe forms of desolation, violence, and trauma that characterized his childhood. “Clement William Vizenor lost the game with the evil gambler and did not return from the cities. He was a house painter who told trickster stories, pursued women, and laughed most of his time on earth. He was murdered on a narrow street in downtown Minneapolis” (27), Vizenor writes in the opening sections of Interior Landscapes, a section interspersed with quotations from the journalistic account of his father’s murder, on June 27th, 1936. Vizenor was not even two year-old when his father died by “accident” as his family used to say throughout his childhood. It was not until over twenty years after the fact that Vizenor discovered, by chance, that Clement William Vizenor had actually been murdered and that the case had been filed as “a case of unsolved homicide.” If autobiography is, in Vizenor’s terms, a series of “imaginative histories and a remembrance past the barriers,” the episode of his father’s death re-imagined in trickster fashion allows Vizenor to go past the barriers of absence, illegitimacy associated with the mixedblood status, and confusion surrounding his father’s mysterious death and the difficult times that would follow.

21“Measuring My Blood,” the section in Interior Landscapes devoted to Vizenor’s father contains a poem titled “The Last Photograph,” a clear articulation of the photograph reproduced in the book cover and on the inside, following the table of contents.12 According to Jack Foley, the poem conveys the feeling of the presence of Vizenor’s father, “even in absence,” a feeling, he suggests, that we find at the core of all of Vizenor’s work (“A Chance of Survivance”).

clement vizenor would be a spruce
on his wise return to the trees
corded on the reservation side
he overturned the line
colonial genealogies
white earth remembrance
removed to the cities at twenty three
my father lived on stories
over the rough rims on mason jars
danced with the wounded shaman
low over the stumps on the fourth of july
my father lied to be an Indian
he laughed downtown
the trickster signature to the lights
. . . . . .. . . . . .. . . . . .. . . . . .. . . . . .. . .
clement posed in a crowded tenement
the new immigrant
painted new house pure white
outback in saint louis park
. . . . . .. . . . . .. . . . . .. . . . . .. . . . . .. . .
my father holds me in the last photograph
the new spruce
with a wide smile
half white
half immigrant
he took up the cities and lost at cards

22Written in a style reminiscent of Vizenor’s haiku, which in turns combines the tradition of Ojibway dream song and Japanase poetry form (Blaeser 108), the poem offers vivid images with very little interpretation. The ambivalence set in motion by the term “spruce”13 immediately establishes the idea of “presence” despite Clement’s tragic death. The poem moves back and forth between the third person “clement” and the much warmer and personal “my father,” as Clement himself moved back and forth between city and reservation. The prototype of what social scientists would label as “an urban Indian,” Clement nevertheless, Vizenor writes, was already “overturning colonial genealogies” with his Anishinaabe memories and trickster stories. His is not a story of the tragic mixedblood caught up in two worlds and unable to relate to either of them. Clement would dance with the shaman at the same time as he would pose as a new immigrant in a “crowded tenement” informing and transforming his life within a trickster story that would allow him to survive until the final game with the evil gambler, when “he took up the cities and lost at cards.”14

23Through the photograph picturing Clement William Vizenor and his son, a photograph taken a few weeks before Clement’s death, Vizenor attempts to remember that moment, or rather re-member the shadows of that moment, the last time together before the abrupt separation. He writes: “I hear my father in that photograph and imagine his touch, the turn of his hand on my shoulder, his warm breath on my cheek, his word trickeries, and my grandmother behind the camera” (32) as if attempting to bring to life the “suchness” of the moment, something that “the interimage simulation” of the camera cannot do. Even though it has been argued that photographs are a confirmation of an existence, cultural artifacts that allow us to get closer to the subject, Barthes promptly reminds us that in photography the body “can never find its zero degree” (27). In Camera Lucida, written shortly after the death of his beloved mother, Barthes describes the painful moment of going through his mother’s pictures in the attempt to find a photograph of her in which he could find her, and find a mark of a past presence: “Photography therefore compelled me to perform a painful labor; straining toward the essence of her identity, I was struggling among images partially true, and therefore totally false” (66). Whereas in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, the move to photography and to the autobiographical—the two cannot be considered apart from each other in Barthes’s experimental text—is clearly announced before the title page, through a picture of his mother, and immediately following the opening narrative, through a picture of his mother holding him (and captured under “the demand for love”), Camera Lucida, a meditation on the absence inherent in photography but also a personal account about Barthes’s recent loss, deliberately omits any picture of the author’s mother. As much as photographs, as approached by sociologists, are “nothing but the trace of a social protocol of integration, intended to reassert the Family” (Camera Lucida 7), Barthes is painfully aware that what has been cannot be called up: “in short, I found myself at an impasse and, so to speak, ‘scientifically’ alone and disarmed” (7).

24If we follow Vizenor’s commentary on photography in Fugitive Poses, which weaves statements by Jean Baudrillard, Susan Sontag, John Berger, and Barthes himself among others, we might wonder about Vizenor’s decision to make “the last photograph” such an important thematic and structural component of his autobiography. “The notion that a photograph is worth a thousand words is untrue in any language. Native stories create a sense of presence, a tease of memories, and a resistance to pictures of victimry” (FP 154), Vizenor writes in “Occidental Surveillance,” a section exploring how photographic representations of Natives became evidence of a vanishing race and the ultimate affirmation of theories of dominance and racialism. Vizenor’s reflections on “portraiture” allow him to elaborate further his notions of presence and absence and the contradictions and ironies inherent in trickster stories. Vizenor’s last photograph in Interior Landscapes undoubtedly reveals some of these contradictions. Despite a postmodern tendency to consider the use of photographs in autobiography a confirmation of the central role of “visibility” in contemporary life (Prosthetic Culture 2) and with all the influence that postmodern writing has on Vizenor’s work, his “pictorial turn” in Interior Landscapes, I argue, goes beyond mere postmodernism and celebrations of visibility in the culture of simulacra.

25At the end of “Occidental Surveillance,” Vizenor writes: “Watch the eyes and hands in fugitive poses to see the motion of natives, and hear the apophatic narratives of a continuous presence” (Fugitive Poses 165). What did Vizenor see in those eyes and hands holding him as a twenty-month-old infant in that last photograph reproduced in his autobiography? What narrative did he hear in his father’s “wide smile”? “Photographs in themselves do not write,” John Berger claims in About Looking; “they preserve instant appearances” (qtd. in Fugitive Poses 158). Clement’s instant appearance in the photograph cannot give the narrative and presence of his life. But the poem “The Last Photograph,” the only one of its kind in Vizenor’s entire autobiography, and the story it narrates most certainly can. It could be argued that the poem “stories” into the photograph to make us hear the continuous presence of the persona in the picture. As a “half white,” “half immigrant,” urban mixedblood removed to the cities at twenty-three, Clement William Vizenor was imprisoned in the simulation of indianness, a misnomer, Vizenor has pointed out, that erases a native presence while affirming a logocentric absence. Employing Derridean terminology, Vizenor, in Fugitive Poses (1998), discusses how in colonial discourse Natives have become the absent Others, simulations of racialism serving the scientific discourse of modernity. Writing specifically about his father, Vizenor argues that “Clement William Vizenor was anishinaabe by reservation ancestors and indian by simulation” since “the census counted him as an indian, the absence of a native presence in the city” (50). Nevertheless, Vizenor concludes, “Clement and his brothers, and other natives in urban areas were indians by simulation, transethnic by separation, but natives in their stories of survivance” (51). The persona honored in “The Last Photograph” is a storier and his stories are stories of survivance. As much as Interior Landscapes is a book about Vizenor and Vizenor’s life, it is also the autobiography of his father, Clement William Vizenor who did not write but whose life stories remain contained within the memory of his Anishinaabe family. An absent other in official colonial discourse, Clement becomes an enduring presence through his son’s imaginative powers and autobiographical gestures.

26In the last chapter of Interior Landscapes, Vizenor quotes Paul John Eakin: “When we settle into the theatre of autobiography. . . what we are ready to believe. . . is that the play we witness is a historical one, a largely faithful and unmediated reconstruction of events that took place long ago, whereas in reality the play is that of the autobiographical act itself, in which the materials of the past are shaped by memory and imagination to serve the needs of present consciousness” (263). In creating his autobiographical “myths and metaphors,” Vizenor unsettles the theater of autobiography, apparently playing the role of the faithful reconstruction of salient events of his life but ultimately and inevitably playing with the autobiographical act itself. His crossblood remembrances take the form of differing discourses, pronouns, and voices, and much like trickster, they remain ultimately and inevitably untamed. As a creative and theoretical text, Interior Landscapes offers an additional example of the essential ambiguity and open nature of the autobiographical act as it has been elucidated in the criticism of autobiographical narratives particularly in the last two decades. More importantly, perhaps, Interior Landscapes offers an example of autocritical writing through which the author continues to wage his cultural word wars on restricted views of mixedblood identity while confirming his dedication to stories and narratives of survivance.