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The Indian Removal Act of 1830 presents a series of images rhetorically figured, and a story about the Indian, a particular narrative construction of Indian-white relations—both of which work together to make certain kinds of sense of the material they organize: the tropes in which images are presented, and the stories that presentation narrates, having, in a phrase of Hayden White's, explanatory force. Or, as Edward Said even more tellingly puts it, not merely explanatory force. In a brilliant discussion of what he calls "images of centrality," Said speaks of the power of these images to give "rise to semi-official narratives with the capacity to authorize and embody certain sequences of cause and effect, while at the same time preventing the emergence of counter-narratives" (1988 58). Finally, Said writes, "centrality is identity," determining "what is powerful, important and ours" (1988 57), and so, too, what, defined as "theirs," is precisely not important, is powerless. Said's "images of centrality" are, of course, cultural productions, of the "superstructure," as an older Marxism would say, and thus they can only be "semi-official" in their capacity to authorize. But the law of the land is most certainly official; and the "sequences of cause and effect" it authorizes, and the identities it recognizes as "powerful, important and ours," through the images it provides and the stories it tells,

have predictive efficacity, for the law permits the state to compel compliance by means of force.

As is well known, the idea of "trans-lating" the eastern Indians westward so that an expanding Euramerican population might "improve" and more productively use Indian lands had already been considered by Jefferson and Monroe as a sort of permanent solution to America's Indian problem. This solution seems to have become an urgent national priority at the time of Jackson's presidency not only because (I am largely persuaded by Michael Rogin's arguments)^[3] Jackson was obsessed with Indians; not only because it took until the latter 1820s for the white population's need or, as seems more substantially the case, greed for land to grow sufficiently to exert acute pressure upon Indian holdings; not only because gold was discovered in 1829 in Georgia at Dahlonega on the western boundary of the Cherokee nation; not only because even some clergy and laypersons sympathetic to the Indians became convinced they would do best beyond the corrupting influences of frontier whites. Important as all these factors were, there is also a narrative dimension to the history we are considering.

This is to say that Indian removal could finally be written into law and enforced in the 1830s because by that time, a certain story about America and about "civilization" had become sufficiently acceptable that it could be used as ideological justification for "certain sequences of causes and effects," for the policy of—to cite Berkhofer again—"expansion with honor" (145ff). This story, as numerous

[3] See Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian.

commentators have remarked—and it is a story that has been reinvoked from the invasion of Massachusetts to the invasion of Panama and the recent war in the Gulf—organized images of the white man and the Indian in such a way as to satisfy Americans that they might not only have their way, but have it—in Alexis de Tocqueville's phrase, which I shall cite more fully below—in complete conformity and with "respect to the laws of humanity" (339), naked self-interest clothed with justice and sanctity.

The particular story to which I am referring has been told many times, by no one better than by Roy Harvey Pearce, who, more than thirty-five years ago, in Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind , described the way in which "the history of American civilization would . . . be conceived of as three-dimensional, progressing from past to present, from east to west, from lower to higher" (49), with the acutely developing problem, therefore, as Pearce stated it, "of understanding the Indian, not as one to be civilized and to be lived with, but rather as one whose nature and whose way of life was an obstacle to civilized progress westward" (41). To achieve this "understanding" required, in Pearce's careful distinctions, a very particular "Idea, [a] Symbol, and [an] Image" (vi–vii). The idea was that of the savage and his savagism; the symbol was the Indian, as represented in a series of images whose functional purpose would be, on the level of culture, to reconcile our national interests with our national ideals. These images , I suggest, in order that they might represent the Indian symbolically in a manner consistent with the idea of his savagery, must be figured ironically , from a tropological perspective, and, from the perspective of narrative, must be emplotted, structured as a story tragically .

The story of Indian savagery must be structured as a trag-

edy because the story of Euramerican civilization—the Euramerican narrative of identity, in James Clifford's phrase—was structured as a comedy. Comedy is the name the West gives to stories that organize images in terms of a progress toward reconciliation and integration; in the Classical period, or in Shakespeare, for example, comic plots end with a dance, or a dinner, or both of these at a wedding. In general, the tale America seems to have told of itself, the story that gave the Euramerican self-images and an identity in the nineteenth century, was a narrative of the inexorable advance of civilization toward the fulfilment of its manifest destiny, the extension of the frontier ever westward, ever forward, to establish a continental arch from sea to shining sea.

The "civilized" protagonists of the American comedy, as in any comic story, encountered opposition and resistance, in this instance on the part of those they called Indian "savages." It is in the nature of comic plots that any regressive "blocking characters," in Northrop Frye's phrase (167), those who would stand as "an obstacle to civilized progress westward," in Pearce's phrase (1989 41), must be overcome—but the comic mood is such that no pain, no pity, or terror, is to be felt at their defeat. What I want to show is that the Indian Removal Act inscribes the narrative of the Indian as a tragedy, and that the tragedy of the Indian stands in relation to the comedy of the Euramerican as figures of the savage stand to figures of the civilized man.

If comedy is an integrative structure which cheerfully reconciles and unites its characters, tragedy is a dispersive structure which fearfully casts out and severs its characters from the places and persons they would be near. Terrible as such exile is, still, it is tragedy's insistence, it is just; the climactic moment of tragedy comes in the recognition of

the wisdom of resignation to the existing order of things—an order that is presented as necessary and unalterable. To tell a particular kind of story, comic or tragic, as White has shown—as also to refuse to tell any one kind of story, as I have tried to show—is always to offer a particular kind of explanation of the world as experienced, or, to refer again to Said, to authorize a particular sequence of historical causes and effects (1988 7).

As it is on the macro-level of narrative structure or plot—tragedy, comedy, and so on—so, too, is it at the micro-level of sentence structure, or style. I return here to the subject of the figures of language, which themselves present some human beings as "in" and "us," other human beings as "out" and "them." Ironic tropes such as antiphrasis or negation, catachresis or misuse, oxymoron or paradox, and aporia or doubt, all work at the level of style to deny and to disperse. And these are the tropes, I suggest, which govern the representation of the Indian savage in the Indian Removal Act as in much discourse of the period. (Such representations, it should be noted, have particular effectivity in determining the kind of tragic emplotment in which they appear.)