Helena Suess

12 May 2010 

Final Essay # 1:

Politics, Aesthetics, and Mentality toward Minority Literature

Some time ago I was working through Faulkner’s corpus, congratulating myself for being so good an American as to digest a native genius, particularly one celebrated for his deconstruction of this country’s brutally racialized history. Around about Light in August, it dawned on me that I was still only getting a picture of the Object on the Subject’s terms. So I worked through some “classics” of “minority” literature, in the naïve, ivory-tower hope that I could through art get a better idea of the “real” humanity behind Ned McCaslin and Lucas Beauchamp. I re-read Douglass and Hughes, picked up Invisible Man and Beloved and Their Eyes were Watching God. Wonderful books, but I was still approaching what I thought of as a “them” in terms of myself as a “not-them.” I was, at least at first, only reading black authors because they were black, and then only ones that I had heard of. My ego as a humanist and cultural pluralist could not in its current state absorb the blow of this second realization, so I did what I always do when my mind needs real changing. I took a class.

It wasn’t all negative. I was and still am genuinely interested in America as a catholic nation, and hoped that a class on minority literature would synthesize that interest with my love for fiction. That hope was answered, and that synthesis informed my second essay for this final. The real benefit I take away from our survey is not so much the exposure to books I could pick up in a library, but in learning how to approach the texts on their own merits, however informed by the problematics of their authors’ communities.

Not that I found those problematics immaterial; far from it. For example, I expect I would have picked up on the tension between Antonio’s possible futures in Bless Me Ultima, that tension being central to the story, without any sociological or historical understanding of ambiguity in Mexican-American communities. Such analysis would be academically interesting, but indulgent without referent, if not useless or even revisionist wherever my assumptions about “Mexicans,” however politically correct, entered in. As intimated above, fueling my interest in this course was desire for the deconstruction of those assumptions: the ability to read the problem “as is,” rather than what I think it is or want it to be.

Our analyses of society and history, however fundamental they had to be in order to fit into one short semester, got me off to a very good start. At least I feel I am more aware of the complexities within which the authors were writing, and more wary of what I had thought I had learned from mass media. But it was the discussions that really did it for me. From that back-and-forth of ideas about function and form in what I had wanted to take for philosophy couched in metaphor, á la Plato’s cave, I feel that I can now make a much more nuanced connection, as Stephen Greenblatt suggests, “between artistic production and other kinds of social production” (2254). That is, I can open a book by a “minority” author without expectation that what I am about to read is just sociology or history or politics told in an interesting, fictionalized manner; or just fiction with some cultural color. Rather, I can now take it as fiction informed by culture, couched within a milieu where whatever didactic function and whatever “values it projects are aesthetically induced,” as Heinz Ickstadt says (269).

In my second essay, I go into far more specific detail about form and function with regard to the post-midterm texts. For now, here follows a brief illustrative summary of the semester’s effect on my approach. My midterm, on secrecy and master/slave relationships in slave narratives and Song of Solomon, reflected my then-primary interest in the politics and philosophy informing those texts. While I performed acceptably in that regard, I received the critique that a promise I had made to investigate narrative technique did not sufficiently deliver. That response hit a nerve. I was at the time feeling a terrific amount of anxiety regarding my research project, which, though eventually completed to my satisfaction, frustrated me for how much my chosen topic—class politics in soldier’s memoirs—was keeping me from fiction. I had to ask myself why in a literature class, as a grad student of literature, I was focusing on politics to literature’s exclusion.

I could make no answer to my satisfaction, except that I still suffered from the naivety that had impelled me to take this class, that naivety I wanted gone. When we got to Black Elk Speaks, the desired change started to accelerate. The lecture portion of that class had much to do with Neihardt’s motives and methods in the way he wrote the story. I saw there a connection with my anxiousness about the research project, in which I was dealing to some extent with a similar problem: what, in an ostensibly historical work, was being said by whom for what reason. Later in discussion it came up that Elk uses a great deal of Western literary tropes, and that the story itself unfolds like a tragic epic. I had while reading it noticed this in the most abstract way, but that vocalization and the subsequent conversation subtly redirected my interest, so that as the semester went on I looked more and more to not only what the texts said, but how they said it.

When I presented Ultima I still felt I was on shaky ground with the literary aspects, and made reference only to magical realism as a possible (and as it turned out, unlikely) device Anaya might have used, while trying otherwise to make sure I did not go too much into theory as such. But while reading it I had become fascinated with its structure, which ordered a plenitude of doubles and triples that seemed to me exactly of a piece with the thematic ambiguities that tied it to the course objectives. When some students complained that Woman Hollering Creek was tough to digest, I got to thinking about its structural difficulties, which I had found invigorating, like an eclectic puzzle. And for all my excitable railing about queer theory when we discussed Best Little Boy in the World, it was in the previous week’s Whitman poem, its form and beauty, that I found real enjoyment.

Still, consciousness of that mounting change—in actuality not so much a change as a return to fundamentals, the why of my love of literature—eluded me until the last week of class. I sat at home kicking around ideas for the final, mostly political, happy with none. In an effort to cure writer’s block I pulled up the web page and looked over some of the old finals, the midterms and research posts. As I read over Barbara’s post, “Minority Literature as Epic,” it clicked: form and function, aesthetics and context; neither necessarily in primacy except in how it mediates the other. No need to read black—or Indian, or Mexican-American, or whatever—authors simply because of their community, but for the way the authors—the way all talented authors—put forth their unique perspective through the “communal function” (Ickstadt 270) of aesthetics.

I have to admit it was not just this class that spurred the change of mind. The moment of crisis, around midterms, was also about the time when Kevin McNamara dropped the bombshell on his Literary Theory students that literature had no agreed-upon definition and in fact did not even exist as a “thing.” That pronouncement forced me to reconsider not just my approach to “minority literature,” but every motive I had for studying literature and everything I thought about it as a discipline. Yet the testing of expectations already underway in this course provided a microcosm in which I could reevaluate those broader assumptions. It was in this course that I put theory to application, and set myself toward the reform of my entire praxis.

Helena Suess

12 May 2010

Final Essay # 2:

The Functional Form of Minority Literature

In “Toward a Pluralist Aesthetics,” Heinz Ickstadt argues that critics of “recent ethnic writing” ought to “expect an awareness of the problematics implied in the concepts of a collectively grounded art.” As an example of a claim for ethnic collectivism, he cites Toni Morrison’s self-conscious desire “to be accepted by ‘her people’ as their voice” (Ickstadt 272). But who says Morrison is the voice of a people, except Morrison and her disciples? How can there even be a totally unifying voice in a plurality? Please see question 9a on your census: Literary Voice of your Race. The authors of this semester do not so much represent “their” people in the world of letters as they represent themselves as significant modern talents, who through their art exploded aesthetic and political interest in underrepresented communities of which they are part. I am therefore interested, as was Ickstadt, not so much in the values and voice of a “people” per se as in aesthetics as the mediator of those values (269). Black Elk Speaks, Bless Me Ultima, Love Medicine, and Woman Hollering Creek each demonstrates a unique form that relates to the social and historical situation of its author, the audience the author is trying to reach, and the community or “people” he or she is trying to represent. In the interest of space, I will concentrate on the general form of each work, how each author used form in order to tell his or her story, while tying together similarities in form, function, and intention wherever appropriate.

Ruth Helflin effectively writes that in order for Elk to sell, “it had to be well told” by Euro-American standards. Whether or not Black Elk himself was “consciously looking for a larger audience” (4) in white America, the story that Neihardt chose to publish was one crafted to be palatable to white Western sensibility. Elk borrows formal elements from Western poetry, especially epic and romantic. Like Odyssey or Inferno it is organized into chapter-episodes (I will refer back to these “cantos”), and its structure trades in the narrative archetypes emphasized by Northrop Frye. The hero has during childhood a vision which gifts him with special powers in order to save his people from destruction, a narrative resembling Frye’s “archetype of romance” (Frye 1452). The story turns on the death of Crazy Horse, a romantic hero who could die only from betrayal, which thematically signals the breaking of all promises and the doom of hope. Afterward, the narrative moves into the tragic mode of the “sunset, autumn, and death phase” (Frye 1453) that reaches its climax at Wounded Knee, where “the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered” (Neihardt 270). Figurations like “when the grasses were beginning to show their tender faces again” (Neihardt 161) resemble the Romantic infatuation with nature, while classical poetic style arises in evocative similes such as the two men who come “head first like arrows flying” (Neihardt 43).

Throughout, Elk follows patterns that any disciple of canonical Western literature will find familiar, even if the specific circumstances, settings, and idiom are removed from European comfort zones. Paula Gunn Allen’s “Kochinnenako in Academe” describes significant narrative and structural disparities between Keres storytelling and Euro-American, and I suspect that disparities of similar significance exist between Euro-American and Lakota. It may then be with Elk, as with Allen’s story of Kochinnenako, that “western colonial content” of anglophone literature “reveals more about American consciousness when it meets tribal thought than it reveals about the tribe” (Allen 2122). Elk has the effect of reminding the sympathetic Westerner that the “vanishing Indian” of Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales yet survives in his nobility and mystery. How “the Indian” him/herself feels about the dwindling forced by those Westerners, what kind of nobility is available with which to face that destruction, and the mystery in which s/he is kept remains suspect from Neihardt’s documentation.

Something of a revision of the “story of a vanishing people” found in Elk, Love seems set out to challenge not only the narrative conventions of that story’s zeitgeist but also to deconstruct the myth of the “vanishing Indian” as evinced by Elk’s tragic mode. Separately, Erdrich’s Kashpaw stories are self-contained modernist fables. Put together in Love, which superficially adopts the epic canto organization and (very) roughly follows a chronological organization, the episodes do not so much build upon one another into a clear unity as they interrelate, sometimes in dialectical ways. For example: “The Tomahawk Factory” and “Lyman’s Luck” juxtapose two master narratives of the modern era, the revolution of the workers and the American Dream, in such a way as to reconfigure them into a postmodern counter-narrative of simulation and controlled chaos. In “Tomahawk,” Lyman Lamartine runs a factory that makes ersatz “symbol[s] of America’s past,” replica Indian artifacts, by an assembly line of “Tribal Members” (310) who would otherwise be unemployed. The workers chafe and rebel, tearing down the machinery and fleeing the factory. In “Luck,” as Lyman cleans “the factory that had once been his hope” (325), he determines to recoup his loses by building a gambling house, a “monolith of chance.” Thus will he attract and “take money from retired white people who had farmed Indian hunting grounds” (326), while again bringing employment to the reservation. Revolt of the proletariat alongside rags-to-riches, united by a tragicomic structure of fall and rise, in which the illusion of control gives way to the exploitation of chance.

Lyman’s stories, while not specifically representative of Love as a whole, summarize the collection’s modus operandi: each “canto” is its own complete narrative that a reader can digest more or less without reference to others, while a full reading puts flesh on the bones of allusions such that the entire text feels of a piece. This formalization creates an off-center  effect that brings the reader into sympathy with the unified disunity of the Kashpaw clan, with its Lamartines and Lazarres, an internecine aggregation of relatives which unlike the Dead family of Song of Solomon achieves at most an ambivalent concession between its past and present. In a broader social context, the novel’s formal and dramatic dissociations of past, present, and future reflect the perpetually diasporic condition of relocated tribes. Returning to the example of Lyman, the conflict between his desires for (Indian) community and (white) wealth collapses into a thoroughly cynical late capitalist vision of “greed and luck” (328). That he justifies himself by appealing to “the old traditions” (326) perhaps signals an increasingly simulated Indian future, in which not just the symbols of the past but the very qualities of the “vanishing” way of life transform into commodities, themselves subject to vicissitudes of chance.

Like Elk and Love, Anaya’s Ultima and Cisnero’s Creek confront the problematics of a particular “people,” in their case Mexican-Americans, in different ways. We discussed in class a great deal about the historically ambiguous status of Mexican-Americans, and Ultima takes a literal approach. Anaya’s bildungsroman, like Elk, exemplifies what Deleuze and Guattari call “a root-book,” its episodes arranged to build around and upon a central story, as opposed to Love’s “radicle-system” in which “unity subsists, as past or yet to come, as possible” (Deleuze 4). Ultima’s subject matter and approach are otherwise modernist, treating the desire for unification in a reconfiguration of old tropes, such as mythic/Romantic dream visions and the heroic “chosen son” (again, cf. Elk), within new contexts. Antonio occupies a confusing position as the prize or third term between two different ways of life, which he with Ultima’s help concludes are not in fact opponents but parts in a cycle, he himself constituting both ambiguity and its resolution. Anaya supports content with form: Ultima is obsessed with structural as well as thematic and symbolic doubles and triples, ordering by divisions of twos, threes, and tens as Dante trisected Commedia. “Binary logic is the spiritual reality” (Deleuze 5) of Ultima:  the novel contains twenty-two chapters, dramatically separated into a triad of two tens and a two by the magical cures of Ultima, performed in the tenth and twentieth chapters. Violent mobs seek retribution in chapters two and twelve. The Golden Carp surfaces twice, in the eleventh and the twenty-first chapter, and in these chapters also appear two circling hawks alongside the words “something dead on the road to Tucumcari” (118, 256). A single death occurs in each of the sets of ten, Lupito and Narciso respectively, both veterans and reputed drunks. The final two chapters signify that “harmony will be reconstituted” (275) by a trinity of deaths: first of Antonio’s contrarian schoolmate Florence, then his mentor Ultima and her nemesis Tenorio.

These numerological motifs result in a largely unambiguous story about ambiguity, told chronologically and episodically. I do not wish to propose a point-by-point parallel between Anaya’s and Neihardt’s methods and intentions, but both Elk and Ultima in their own ways tell stories that are, if not precisely familiar, full of familiar conventions recontextualized. At the very least Ultima’s treatment of a Mexican-American arch-problematic—ambiguous status—seems more than Creek crafted to be accessible and digestible, even to a reading public that had canonized Faulkner and Joyce.

Ironically, for all the connections that one could draw between Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist and Ultima, Creek more closely resembles the experimental later works of that author. Where Ultima is arboreal and modernist, Creek threw some students for a loop with its postmodern, rhizomatic form. Cisnero’s writing style overall resembles prose poetry, and the individual stories come in a variety of eclectic structures such that the collection recalls high modernist style aggregates like Ulysses. However, the stories are not at all organized cantonically, as was variously the case with Elk, Love, and Ultima (and Ulysses), but at most stylistically or thematically, and then not obviously or unilaterally. As a Deleuzian rhizome-book, Creek is “reducible neither to the One,” an avataristic story or set of stories, or the text as unity, e.g., a novel like Ultima; “nor the multiple” (Deleuze 21), the text as collection of interrelated stories, like Love. One might be tempted to write this off as a consequence of each story being its own separate node; there exists in Creek not even the familial (dis)unity that tied Love together. Yet I would argue that altogether Creek as much plays wildly with ambiguities, perhaps remaining truer to the very nature of ambiguity, as Ultima tries to collapse it directly. Its rhizomatic anti-structure should therefore not be immediately dismissed as the unintended effect of publication, which in fact seems to be deliberately trying to achieve structure in organizing by parts.

Horizontal lines (i.e., which relate but do not build) can be drawn between the stories in various ways that demonstrate an assortment of associated ambiguities. For example, in various entries of Part III, notably “Remember the Alamo” and “Eyes of Zapata,” past, present, and future are indistinguishable. Return to Part I, and find the collapse of chronological time described explicitly in “Eleven:”

What they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, [etc.]. . . . (Cisneros 8)

Many stories—“Barbie-Q,” “My Tocaya,” “Los Boxers,” to name a few—are written as though being told to a particular someone, but the who of the addressee is never totally clear. “Barbie-Q” reminisces to an old friend. “My Tocaya” speaks as if to a stranger who might yet be familiar with the circumstances—“Have you seen this girl? You must’ve seen her in the papers” (36). “Los Boxers” both gives advice and reveals intimacy in a casual laundromat encounter with a mother and child. These and other “fourth wall” stories relate stylistically to Joycean dialogic forms, i.e., without quotation marks to separate the speakers, in “Woman Hollering Creek” and “Anguiano Religious Articles.” “Anguiano,” incidentally, recalls “Lucy Anguiano, Texas girl who smells like corn” (3), whose story rejects quoted for italicized dialogue. All of these map lines off of “Little Miracles,” an epistolary collection of (one-sided) dialogues with God, that ultimate ambiguity. The only two stories to share an unambiguous connection, “Tin Tan Tan” and “Bien Pretty,” reveal their relation in an object lesson on the ambiguity of time: the reader going through Creek from start to finish must look back from “Bien” to “Tan” and compare “He wrote poems and signed them ‘Rogelio Velasco’” (138) to “Rogelio Velasco loved you” (136).

A final critique to be made of Ultima vis-à-vis Creek is that the tropes of womanhood that Anaya takes for granted—the mother, the witch, the whore, the virgin—Cisneros aims to deconstruct. As Anaya attempted to collapse dualities of manhood in his protagonist, Cisneros alludes to an even more comprehensive collapse of dualistic gender roles. Flavio compares Lupe’s yin/yang binary, itself a totality, to the single “mexicano word ‘sky-earth’ for the world” (149). Lupe later reverses gender tradition in El Pipi del Popo (163). The final supplicant of “Little Miracles” insists “I don’t want to be a mother” (127) and laments “being called a traitor” for “acting like a white girl” (128). The narrator of “Eyes of Zapata” stoically resolves, “If I am to be a witch, then so be it” (106), and flies out of her body. This thematic disorganization of hierarchy and expectation, which seeks the disintegration not only of false binaries that reify ambiguity but the boundaries of physical bodies themselves, reflects the structuralized disunity of Creek’s formal rhizome.

Ickstadt concludes that “to view fiction functionally would do away with a number of false oppositions that have marred canon and curriculum” (274). I have tried to follow his assertion here: to relate the functions of several works of fiction to their forms, works that as yet require a special curriculum of “minority literature” for close study, yet for their aesthetic and didactic power are as deserving of a place in canon as any. Or perhaps, their power rather suggests the fallibility of canon. Putting even these works up as canonical of anything—as “American” literature, “minority” literature, literature of a “people”—may ultimately, as canon often does, relegate other, equally powerful works to a minority state.

Bibliography of External Sources

·       Allen, Paula Gunn. “Kochinnenako in Academe.” Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 2001. 2108-26. Print.

·       Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus. 1987. Tr. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: U of Minnesota P, 2005. eBrary. Web. 3 May 2010.

·       Frye, Northrop. “The Archetypes of Literature.” Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 2001. 1445-57. Print.

·       Greenblatt, Stephen. “Introduction to The Power of Forms in the English Renaissance.” Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Vincent B. Leitch. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., Inc., 2001. 2251-4. Print.

·       Heflin, Ruth J. “Black Elk Passes on the Power of the Earth.” The Black Elk Reader. Ed. Clyde Holler. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse UP, 2000. Print.

·       Ickstadt, Heinz. “Toward a Pluralist Aesthetics.” Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age. Ed. Emory Elliot, et al. New York: Oxford UP, 2002. 263-278. Dr. McNamara’s Place. Web. 2 May 2010.