5—
Local, National, Cosmopolitan Literature

I have claimed that the canon of American literature must substantially include the literary production of Native American and Afro-American peoples quite as well as those of the Euramerican peoples whose culture came to dominate the United States. That, for good historical reasons, is what American literature, as a national literature, should, empirically, be. But what of the theoretical status of "national literature" itself, not only as an empirical but as a conceptual category? How might we define national literatures in relation to, on the one hand, local, or regional, or ethnic literatures (the appropriate designation is not immediately apparent), and, on the other, to an international, or—as I shall further attempt to define this as the horizon of these considerations—to a cosmopolitan literature? If it is a heterodox canon that is wanted for American literature, how would such heterodoxy stand in relation to and/or itself define a cosmopolitan or world-literary canon?

In these regards, it might suddenly appear as though formalist critics, New Critical or New Rhetorical, did not and do not ignore or scorn national literary production, as I earlier accused them of doing, so much as they consciously choose to promote only those texts that could be accommodated to the wider context of international, or, more exactly, Western literary production. To the extent that this may be true, it must be said that their notion of Western internationalism is

defined independently of any actual sociotemporal reference, as if one actually could read universally and eternally, avoiding the "mean and ordinary" details of time and place to pass directly to the highest levels of generalization—as if literary language, rhetorically considered, were a matter of figures only, independent of real occasions. Still, if one wishes to discredit this version of an international (or, again, a Western) literature, it is necessary to offer some alternative in its place.

A current visibility to such matters has recently been provided by Fredric Jameson's discussion of what he has called (reluctantly, it would seem, and in full awareness of the problematic nature of such a category) "third world literature":^[1] Jameson also considers what he calls national literature, first and second world literature, and world literature, as well. He does not in this essay, as he does not elsewhere, make reference to Native American literature—which might, of course, be considered among third world literatures. Such consideration, admittedly, would then make it difficult to include Native American literature in the national canon of American literature, the most powerful of first world literatures! These questions are fruitfully complicated in Jack Forbes's interesting polemical essay, "Colonialism and Native American Literature: Analysis," in the Wicazo Sa Review, an essay that takes up some of the same issues as Jameson's, albeit from a very different perspective.

Before going any further, it seems important to note that, whatever its value, Forbes's essay will not have the circulation (and so it will not have the influence) of Jameson's. Socializing the classic Jakobsonian paradigm, Forbes himself remarks that "we must also view literature not as a series of artistic or creative

[1] See "Third-World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital."

acts only, but as a social transaction, a transaction involving the process of dissemination as well as reception by a specific audience" (1987, 23), and the same point must be made—made or reiterated—for the social circulation of criticism. Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis, Jack Forbes is a mixed blood of Powhatan-Lenape-Saponi background. He has published fiction and poetry as well as scholarly articles, autobiography, and a book-length study of Indian policy in the Nixon administration^[2] that was singled out for blame by the venerable Wilcomb Washburn of the Smithsonian Institute—who damningly dubbed Forbes "a redoubtable warrior of the radical left" (1987, 93). The very fact that Forbes has chosen to publish this piece in Wicazo Sa, as I hope to show, is an illustration of his thesis concerning Indian literature—and its (his) dilemma.

For Wicazo Sa is a journal whose purpose is "to serve as a publishing outlet and . . . resource for Native American scholars and readers" (n.p.). Edited by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn, it comes out of the Native American Studies Center of Eastern Washington University, Cheney, Washington, and circulates among a readership quite different from the readership of Diacritics, Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, and Social Text, the places where Jameson is most often to be found.^[3] Understandably, the modes of discourse usual to the articles in Wicazo Sa are also different from the continentally influ-

[2] See Native Americans and Nixon: Presidential Politics and Minority Self-Determination, 1967–1972 .

[3] Some comparative circulation figures may be of interest. As of November 1988, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn told my research assistant, West Moss, that Wicazo Sa had just under 500 subscriptions and rent out over 100 complimentary copies. Diacritics has a circulation of 1350; Social Text about 2000; New Literary History, 2079; and Critical Inquiry, 4000. PMLA has a circulation of some 30,000 copies, including library sales. For comparison sake, circulation figures for the Reader's Digest, subscription and newsstand sales, as of June 30, 1988, were 16,964,226.

enced discourse of the journals of high theoretical criticism. Yet Forbes has something important to offer to the developing discussion of these matters, and theorists would do well to read him (as Indianists—to reiterate a point of some importance to me—would do well to read the theorists).

Further to anthropologize our own discourse and place it in the appropriate contexts of knowledge/power, let me cite, as of more than anecdotal interest, some of the historian Robert Berkhofer's recent recollections. Berkhofer writes,

When I entered the field of American Indian history as a graduate student in the 1950s, I was told by a noted historian of the United States's past that Indian history was not part of American history. If I persisted in writing a dissertation on Protestant missionaries to the American Indians from the 1770s to the 1860s, he said, I would never gain acceptance in my chosen profession of American history. (35)

Although Berkhofer completed the dissertation and requested that it be listed in Dissertation Abstracts "under American religious history, it was placed under the anthropology heading. The anonymous classifier knew . . . that anthropologists, not historians, studied Indians" (35). The situation, Berkhofer says, is better today in the field of history. In the field of literature and cultural studies, however, as I have remarked earlier, improvement seems only negligible; the subject of the past history and present practice of Native American literatures, as well as the theoretical questions that consideration of that literature can acutely focus still remain at a tangent to or at a considerable distance from the circles where cultural and social values are determined and major careers established (perhaps, now, this is true even for anthropologists).

Forbes begins with the question, "What is a national or ethnic literature? " (1987, 18) as a way of considering, "What is Indian

Literature?" His answer insists upon the local constitution of such literature, which he says can only be "determined by the particular culture, from an internal perspective, and by the forms which are current within that culture." "The crucial element, " Forbes continues, "is whether the work is composed or written to be received by a particular people. Is it internal to the culture? " Focusing, thus, first on the "primary audience," and then on the author—"Native American literature must consist in works produced by persons of Native identity and/or culture . . ." (19)—he concludes that most of what would fit his criteria for contemporary Indian literature tends to be not what Western culture would call "literature" at all so much as the discourse appearing in "Indian published periodicals" (20)^[4] —poetry and

[4] Forbes, for example, names Akwesasne Notes as one of the specifically Indian periodicals he has in mind. In "An Open Letter on Recent Developments in the American Indian Movement/International Indian Treaty Council" (1980), the Cherokee poet, painter, and activist Jimmie Durham writes that Akwesasne Notes was founded in 1969 by "a white man named Jerry Gamble (who gave himself the Indian name of 'Rarihokwats')" and that throughout its history, at least to 1980, it "has been mainly written, produced and read by white people, who carried on the tradition of white romantics defining Indian culture." Durham nonetheless acknowledges Akwesasne's influence "among some urban Indians, and in determining how the left and counterculture see the Indian struggle" (4). A suspicious fire on January 8, 1988, nearly destroyed A.N. According to Joseph Bruchac (quoted in the March, 1988, ASAIL NOTES), they "lost everything . . . all their back issues, the plates for their books, the works" (2). If Swann's criterion of acceptance by other Native Americans (see n. 5, just below) is to apply to journals as well as to individuals, the June 6, 1988, benefit for Akwesasne Notes in New York certainly testifies to the devotion of "representatives of the New York City Native American Community" (Program Notes: n.p.) to the journal. Forbes's claim that the journals he lists "are read by Indians" (1987, 20) might be supported by the circulation figures I've managed to obtain for some of these. Akwesasne Notes reports a circulation of 10,000, the same figure given by the Yakima Nation Review out of Toppenish, Washington. Talking Leaf, published by the Indian Center, Inc., in Los Angeles, claims a circulation of 6000. Wassaja: the Indian Historian, more nearly a professional journal than these others, has a circulation of 82,000.

fiction, some of the time, to be sure, but most often nonfictional, topical writing. Forbes also notes, as I have earlier, the ongoing production of traditional oral literature—this almost never circulated much beyond the boundaries of its actual performance. He is well aware that this definition of Indian literature excludes the work of those considered by the dominant Euramerican culture to be the most notable contemporary Native American authors; nonetheless, it is the oral and periodical literature that is for him the only discourse being produced today that may appropriately be called Indian literature because these alone are primarily for an Indian audience by authors whose primary self-identification is Indian, working in forms historically evolved by or at least currently most readily accessible to that primary audience.

Forbes's is a pretty restrictive definition—and one replete with problems. First is the problem of defining the producer of Indian literature as an Indian on the basis of her Indian "identity or culture." While this is somewhat more useful than N. Scott Momaday's hopelessly vague definition of an Indian as the "idea a man [sic] has of himself," it is still less than rigorous. For one thing, an Indian "identity" cannot be used to define an Indian until the concept of "identity" itself has been defined. Forbes occasionally has recourse to the racial sense of identity, as, for example, in his references to Indians as not currently "a free and independent race of people" (19). But in the contemporary American world such reference is not only largely useless (e.g., a great many Indians, as a great many others, are persons of mixed racial origins), but obnoxious (e.g., it can tend to distinguish different percentages of "blood," ranking each a "higher" or "lower" type, depending on the context of concern). In the end, then, it would seem that Indians must be culturally Indian, with

such cultural "identity" not a wholly random or arbitrary choice (e.g., the Indian person having some actual heredity link to persons native to America).^[5] Yet Forbes does not indicate (this would be no easy task) what one has to do to be culturally Indian: one does not, for example, have to understand or speak a Native language.

Then there is the problem of just how "internal to the culture" the forms of the journalistic discourse Forbes nominates as the major part of a strictly Indian literature actually are. For, regardless of their producers' and their audiences'—but here one might want to say their consumers' —identities (let us say they will indeed both be "Indian"), these texts are, in actual fact, thoroughly saturated by the most degraded forms of the dominant culture. Even more, I suspect a sociological study of this subject would reveal that, so far as circulation is concerned, more Native Americans read the National Enquirer, TV Guide, car and motorcycle publications, and movie or assorted popular culture magazines than read some of the Indian periodicals Forbes mentions. (More non-Native Americans read these periodicals than read the American Poetry Review or Fiction magazine, but most definitions of American literature are not set up in such a way that this statistic is crucial.) This is, to be sure, the consequence, as Forbes notes, of the fact that any consideration of Indian literature today—texts written by and read by Native people—must take into

[5] Citing the absurdity of the Bureau of Indian Affairs' standard for enrollment in a tribe, that "one must possess one-quarter Indian blood," inasmuch as there is no chemical analysis for "Indian blood," Brian Swann reasonably decides that "Native Americans are Native Americans if they say they are, if other Native Americans say they are and accept them, and (possibly) if the values that are held close and acted upon are values upheld by the various native peoples who live in the Americas" (1988, xx). Loose as this is, it is about the best one can do for a contemporary working definition.

account the historical status of Indians as a colonized people. The positive side of this—for Indians, like other colonized peoples, do not merely suffer their condition passively but actively respond to it with energy and ingenuity—has to do with the language mix often to be found in these periodicals, where Native language articles often coexist with articles in standard English and, as well, with writing in that curiously fascinating hybrid called "Red English."^[6] I will come back to this later.

So far as the category of an Indian literature—and along with it the general category of local literature—may be useful, it would seem to be necessary to define it pretty exclusively by reference to the ongoing oral performances of Native people. These, too, are aware of the standards and productions of dominant culture, aspects of which they may, indeed, incorporate (so that to speak of an Indian literature is in no way to go in search of some pristine, aboriginal purity of form and content). Nonetheless, inasmuch as they are spoken/sung rather than written in a Native language, and controlled by traditional forms "internal to the culture," oral performances seem the best representatives of what might be meant by an Indian literature. I am unable to say what the circulation of such literature among Indians might be, although, as with Euramerican literature, numbers do not, here, determine importance in any absolute way. The circulation of oral Native literature among non-native Americans, predictably enough, has not been very great, nor has this literature very often been taken up as a source of analysis and imitation by students of

[6] I take the term from Anthony Mattina, most particularly. He has defined it as an "English dialect," and a "pan-Indian phenomenon, with various subdialects" (1985, 9), and defended it as an option for translators in his Introduction to The Golden Woman .

literature and by non-Native artists. Outside Indian communities it has attracted the attention predominantly of social scientists. A clear statement of the problems and possibilities here has been given by Larry Evers and Felipe Molina in their recent study of Yaqui deer songs. I have quoted them to somewhat different purpose in my Introduction, but I trust it will not be amiss to cite them again here. Evers and Molina write,

In all, we work for two goals: for the continuation of deer songs as a vital part of life in Yaqui communities and for their appreciation in all communities beyond. Most of the time these goals coincide. (8)

Just what form that "appreciation" may take in "communities beyond" Yaqui communities remains, of course, to be seen. The work that Evers and Molina are doing, however, is absolutely essential if there is to be any chance at all for traditional, local, Indian literary expression to influence the literature of the dominant culture.

The ongoing production of traditional Indian literature, of course, is not limited to the United States. For it is not only possible but necessary, as Forbes writes, to "regard the Americas as a single unit for literature study, " and thus to see that "Native American literature is an international body of literature " (1987, 18), "hemispheric in dimension " (1987, 23). It seems then that we have Native American literature, on the one hand, as what I have called a local literature—as ethnic, or national literature, in Forbes's account—but also as an international literature, on the other, at least so far as the Americas may mark an inter-national site for the circulation and reception of locally produced Indian literary expression. Forbes does not consider Indianness, ethnicity, nationality, and international-

ity beyond the Western hemisphere, or as these might connect with the literary production of indigenous people elsewhere;^[7] he offers no concept roughly equivalent to what is conveyed by the term "third world literature," a global conception encompassing the national literatures of the recently independent third world states.

Indeed, Forbes never takes the term "national" as having reference to nation-states at all, perhaps because such reference is entirely non-Indian. His understanding of the national equates the term, as I see it, with a certain traditional American understanding of the tribal, as in Chief Justice John Marshall's well-known description of Indian sociopolitical units as "domestic dependent nations." But Forbes does not either speak of tribes or the tribal, perhaps now (I can only guess at this) to avoid the divisive question of the political implications of tribalism and nationalism.

Here we may return to Fredric Jameson, and suggest that his essay may not mention literature by Native Americans as available for inclusion in the category "third world literature" precisely because, as we shall note in a moment, he finds third world literature to be marked by nationalism, something Eurocentric thinkers tend to distinguish rigorously from the tribalism that marks the literature of Indians. Jameson posits the categories of first, second, and third world literature, of national, and of world literature. World literature, according to Jameson, is a category that has yet to be reinvented (largely

[7] Some sense of indigenous peoples' self-conscious awareness of themselves as such may be had from the "Declaration of Principles adopted by the Indigenous Peoples Preparatory Meeting, held at Geneva, 27—31 July 1987," Annex V of the Study of the Problem of Discrimination Against Indigenous Populations, a Report of the Working Group on Indigenous Populations on its fifth Session, sponsored by the United Nations Economic and Social Council.

as a result of the thrust of current cultural studies); he says little else about it. National literatures are constituted by a national sense, or, what may or may not amount to the same thing, by a sense of nationalism. Thus national literatures are not necessarily present (not prominent or dominant) in all nation-states, nationalism having been largely discredited and/or abandoned in the first and second world states;^[8] national literatures are, however, characteristic of the newly independent states of the third world. These latter are defined by—no doubt their nationalism is fueled by—an experience, the experience of imperial and colonial domination; this in contrast (as Aijaz Ahmad has pointed out)^[9] to the definition of first and second world states that are to be known by their modes of production, not by their historical experience. Of course this definitional discrepancy can be corrected, at least in theory, by specifying the mode of production of third world countries (no harder and no easier to do, when, once again, one descends to specific details, than indicating that of first or second world countries), or by identifying the typical experience of first and second world countries (imperial dominance? national humiliation at the end of colonialism? there are difficulties here, too, at the level of specifics).

In this particular essay, what seems to interest Jameson most about third world literature is not its production, circulation,

[8] I have some trouble with this particular generalization inasmuch as I recall vividly American reaction to such things as the hostage situation in Iran during the Carter administration and the jingoistic response to the invasion of Grenada during the Reagan administration, not to mention the ABC coverage of the 1984 Olympics with its unrelenting orientation toward nothing but the accumulation (Or failure to accumulate same) of medals for the United States. I tend to think that these are instances of first world nationalism, of however a degraded and anachronistic type.

[9] In "Jameson's Rhetoric of Otherness and the 'National Allegory'."

and reception (locally, nationally, internationally), but, rather, its thematic content. Whoever the third-world literary author may be, whatever the nature of her primary audience, she produces texts that "are necessarily . . . allegorical" (1986, 69), that are to be read as "national allegories," so that—in this, unlike the most typical case in the first world—"the story of the private individual destiny is always an allegory of the embattled situation of the public third world culture and society " (1986, 69). In third world literature, libidinal and political investments are thus typically joined in ways unusual in first and second world literature. (It would seem to no useful point, here, to focus on Jameson's use of "necessarily" and "always," as these may well mark a determinism he might not wish to defend; his argument is sufficiently suggestive as an heuristic.)

Jameson does not discuss questions of form or language in third world literature, except for a fascinating equation (presented, alas, only in passing) between the difficulty for the Chinese intellectual in the period "shortly after the founding of the Chinese Communist Party" (75) or the African intellectual "after the achievement of independence" of discovering "political solutions . . . present or visible on the historical horizon" (75) and "the possibility of narrative closure" (76). The texts Jameson analyzes from Lu Xun and Ousmane Sembene indicate that the forms of third world literature he has foremost in mind are narratives based upon realist paradigms—these, now, like nationalism, somewhat outmoded in the West. The forms of third world literature, then, as Jameson appears to think of them here, are not national (or ethnic) in Forbes's sense of being internal to the culture or cultures of formerly or currently colonized peoples. Rather, they resemble the sort of writing Forbes explicitly excludes from the category of Indian literature, writing of the sort done by Momaday and Silko and

Forbes himself, writing influenced in very substantial degree by the central forms and genres of Western, or first world literature. Forbes has no name for this kind of text; Jameson 's "third world literature" might do except for the fact that, as I see it, it tends to obscure the importance of local, internal, or Indian modes of literary expression within texts that externally appear to fit the Western typology of "novels," "poems," and "short stories." Let me call this kind of mixed breed literature indigenous literature .

Indigenous literature I propose as the term for that form of literature which results from the interaction of local, internal, traditional, tribal, or "Indian" literary modes with the dominant literary modes of the various nation-states in which it may appear. Indigenous literature is that type of writing produced when an author of subaltern cultural identification manages successfully to merge forms internal to his cultural formation with forms external to it, but pressing upon, even seeking to delegitimate it. (The parallel term for the literature of other minority populations not historically indigenous to the territory of the nation-states in which they reside, as this is also marked by traditional/local modes of expression interacting with the modes of the dominant culture, might, I suppose, be ethnic literature: I mention this for the sake of a certain comprehensiveness, with no wish, however, to intervene just here in the current debates as to the empirical or theoretical constitution of an ethnic literature, or, indeed, to comment even on the usefulness of the term. Ethnic literature, for example, does not seem to me the best way to categorize Afro-American literature; but I must leave greater wisdom on this matter to others.) Indigenous literature exists not only in the Americas, of course, but globally, inasmuch as what I have said for Native Americans can be said for natives of the Philippines and Japan,

of Basques in Spain, and Welsh in Britain; indigenous literature is a term that can probably apply to much of the recent production of African writers, as well. These need study, in themselves and comparatively, that is, study as indigenous literatures in relation to one another and in relation to the various national literatures of which they are a part.

This is to say that I would define the term national literature, in contradistinction to Forbes and Jameson, as the sum of local (traditional, "Indian"), indigenous (mixed, perhaps "ethnic"), and dominant literary productions within the territory of the given national formations. Any national literary canon, therefore, will be a selection from all the available texts of these various kinds, and it may thus be thought to stand as the heterodox, collective autobiography of any who would define themselves in relation to a particular national identity—literature as a kind of multivoiced record of the American, for example.

An international literature, then, becomes the sum of these national literatures, in actual practice no doubt the sum of the national canons of these nation-states. The categories of national and international literature as so defined carry a commitment to dialogism and heterodoxy, and the movement from one to the next—as I believe, the progression from one to the next, this latter term denoting a moral and political position—is a movement to a wider and more comprehensive sense of what literature can do and be. But inasmuch as I have projected international literature as no more than the sum of national literatures, some further category, one that involves interaction and mutual influence, not only mere addition, is necessary. One might call this category, after Jameson's suggestion, world literature; I prefer to call it cosmopolitan literature .

A cosmopolitan literature would be constituted not only by the simple sum but by the complex interaction of national literatures. Such a literature of course does not yet exist—nor can it fully exist short of a cosmopolitan world order. In the meantime, it may be useful to work toward it on the theoretical as well as on the material level, reading the social and the cultural in tandem, as I tried to do in the last chapter. The concept of a cosmopolitan literary canon may seem as utopian as that of a cosmopolitan world order, the polyvocal polity; but it, too, I will repeat, is utopian only to the extent that it is not yet imminent. The project of a cosmopolitan literature is not to overthrow the Tower of Babel but, as it were, to install a simultaneous translation system in it; not to homogenize human or literary differences but to make them at least mutually intelligible. As Allon White has written in relation to Bakhtin,

Though our current fashion is to prioritize difference, and rightly, in the struggle against the false universalism and essentialism which has so oppressed all those who do not conform to the European, white, male, heterosexual shape which "Man" is evidently supposed to have, nevertheless, an ultimate political perspective of humanity as a unity-in-difference, a complex of co-existing and mutually understanding cultures, is just as important to any radical politics. (233)

It seems to me that the achievement of human "unity-indifference" in practice not only in theory may well depend upon whether cultural variation can ultimately be treated—to refer to the metaphor I mentioned in passing in the Introduction—as a matter of the analog (more/less, louder/softer, hotter/colder, etc.), rather than the digital (on/off, either/or, etc.). While it is important to avoid the mistake of

poststructural deconstructionism, which digitalized the analog functions of communication and meaning, it is important as well to recognize that some cultural practices may not merely be the variants of others but their negatives or opposites.^[10] It is not yet clear, as I noted in regard to Yaqui deer songs, just how certain literatures can—if they can—interact with others, whether some mediation or "translation" can be effected to permit such interaction. While I take such interaction, the cornerstone of that polyphonic cosmopolitanism I have imagined, as a salutary thing, others, with different moral and political values, may disagree.

For it is certainly the case that local, Indian literature is quite sufficient unto itself, adequate, that is, to the purposes of its performers and its immediate audiences. Why should outsiders intrude upon it and try, as it were, to carry it away? Scholars, like missionaries and settlers and mercantile capitalists before them, after all, have their own history of violence and expropriation. Isn't culture best left to those who are of it? As a matter of practical fact this simply will not be. But as a matter of principle, ought it to be? Let me quote Dell Hymes on this subject. Hymes writes,

[10] In this regard, I am in substantial disagreement with students of Native American literature like Karl Kroeber and Jarold Ramsey who have claimed that (this is Kroeber) a "reader can rewardingly apply to traditional Indian narratives the kind of critical attitude he brings to other literatures" (1981, 9), or (this is Ramsey) that "the most valuable ethnographic resources we can turn to on behalf of modern Indian writing arc the transcribed oral-traditional literatures of the tribes or groups in question" (1983. 189). Their universalist premise is that art is art everywhere and that any sensitive person of goodwill can always appreciate art. Like most extreme universalisms, this position slights the particular cultural codes that make art recognizable as art with considerable differences from people to people. It happens also to be the case that their own practice in interpretation frequently runs counter to their stated principles, as I have tried to show in my "Identity and Difference in the Criticism of Native American Literature."

A world in which knowledge of each people was owned exclusively by that people itself would be culturally totalitarian. Just as it is indefensible to have an anthropology in which only outsiders know, and insiders are only known, so it is simply to reverse that inequity. None of us is able to stand outside ourselves sufficiently to know ourselves comprehensively. (1987, 42–43)

Hymes operates here as a secular critic concerned to achieve a knowledge which all humankind may equally share. Such knowledge as it may be contained in traditional Native American literatures requires study both by "insiders," familiar with them "naturally," as their own, and by "outsiders," familiar with them "culturally," as subject/objects of study. Only to the extent that such persons can find terms to effect the mediation and translation I have referred to above, conveying both their similarity to and difference from the literature of the dominant culture, will they be available for inclusion in the national canon and in any cosmopolitan canon.

Still, as Heisenberg's principle showed the case to be with the mass and velocity of particles at the atomic level, so, too, is it with the presentation of oral materials at the textual level: for every gain there is a certain loss. A nearer approach to authenticity is likely to take us further from comprehensibility, while the privileging of comprehensibility cannot help but sacrifice some of the strangeness and difference of Other cultural production. For all of this, I take the ongoing work of scholars like Donald Bahr, Richard Bauman, William Bright, Regna Darnell, David Guss, Larry Evers, Dell Hymes, Leanne Hinton, M. Dale Kinkade, David MacAllester, Anthony Mattina, Joel Sherzer, Dennis Tedlock, and a number of others, as extremely promising. But, again, that is because I desire the interaction of traditional Indian literatures with the other literatures of the

United States, and desire their interaction with Western and other world literatures in the interest of producing a cosmopolitan canon. It is as a consequence of this desire that I turn next to some local/"Indian" and indigenous/mixed examples of Native American literature, considering them in relation to the questions I have raised thus far in this chapter.

On the local level, consider first the ongoing performances of traditional singers like Vincent Lewis (Tohono o'odham), Guadalupe Molina and Don Jesus Yoilo'i (Yaqui), Frank Mitchell (Navajo), among others; and traditional storytellers like Peter Seymour (Colville), Andrew Peynetsa (Zuni), Nick Thompson (Apache), and Yellowman (Navajo) among many, many others. Their performances, as I have already said, seem to me the best candidates for a specifically American Indian literature. Like Western literature in its generalized, pre-nineteenth-century sense, these performances, in cultural context, are not necessarily oriented functionally toward pedagogy and pleasure, teaching and delighting. Some songs are specifically for curing, marked by a strictly functional "dominant"; some stories are largely anecdotal, to be funny. But a very great many performances, sung or spoken, are precisely literary in the post-nineteenth-century sense. "Yaqui deer songs," Felipe Molina and Larry Evers write, "tell a continuing story of life and death in the wilderness world of the Sonoran desert" (8), which is paralleled by life "in that mythic, primeval place called by Yaquies sea ania, flower world" (7). And these songs are also "regarded by Yaqui people . . . as containing some of the most aesthetically pleasing Yaqui language spoken or sung" (10–11). As Anthony Mattina says of Colville stories, they "contain principle by principle the secrets

of how to be Colville—what it means to have been preceded in life by Coyote, by the other animals of their land, and by the birds of their sky, and by the fishes of their waters" (1985, 16). As Mattina also points out, unless the storyteller manages to give pleasure—to keep interest alive—the audience (most of these tales being told at night) responds by simply falling asleep, children first, others after. Barre Toelken has quoted the Navajo storyteller Yellowman as saying, "If my children hear the stories, they will grow up to be good people; if they don't hear them, they will turn out to be bad" (80). For all the seriousness of this storytelling business, however, as Toelken notes, the Coyote stories told by Yellowman nonetheless make "everyone laugh" (80). So far as traditional narrative is concerned, something of this sort—that they are instruments of socialization and that they are pleasurable—can be said of a great many of them as they function in the cultural maintenance system of Native peoples throughout the United States (and, no doubt, of the Americas overall).

I want to ask of these traditional songs and stories, following Jameson's lead, whether they show sufficient similarity in their concerns, if not their forms, so that one might generalize and claim them "allegorical" in relation to some specific theme. I have a tentative suggestion to make that I hope will prove useful, but this is not to imply that local, Indian literature is as homogeneous a body of work as Jameson (unintentionally, I believe) implied "third world" or "national literature" to be. Thus I could not even tentatively specify a commonality of theme among Indian song types; there simply are not yet enough individual and comparative studies to allow for that. Story types, concerning which a great deal of work has recently been done, are also many and complex; nor are genres and subgenres uniform from tribe to tribe.

Among the Western Apache, for example, Keith Basso counts "four major and two minor genres. . . . The major genres include 'myths' . . . 'historical tales' . . . 'sagas' . . . and stories that arise in the context of gossip" (1984, 34). Coyote stories, however, are one of the minor genres, along with "seduction tales." Thus it would seem that Coyote stories are not to be classed among "myths" for the Western Apache—although they might well be so classed among Yellowman's Navajo people. Among the Swampy Cree, Howard Norman writes, "Wesucechak is the . . . Trickster" (1987, 402), one of the "'human-like' beings" (403), like Coyote—or Mink, or Raven—about whom many stories exist. "Narratives concerning Wesucechak are categorized as atuyookao" (403), or legends of a hero. But these may concern "a time before the earth was in its present, definitive state (many Cree refer to this as 'before people'), . . . be contemporaneous with otowemak, ancestors . . ." (403), or involve life today. Are all of these to be considered myth? only the first type? the first two?

If the possibilities are so complex among story types with which we are relatively familiar, they become even more so when we turn to types we know less well, stories such as those Norman has collected as Swampy Cree "Windigo tales," for example. These can be told formally as "part of 'announced' performances" (Norman, 1982, 21), in the way that myths are frequently told, but they also exist in anecdotal, informal variants. What Keith Basso has called Apache "sagas," a major literary genre, are literally "nit'eego nagoldi  . . . 'to tell of pleasantness' . . ." (1984, 34): do other peoples have parallel forms or transforms of this kind of telling? Then there are stories like that told by Peter Seymour, which Mattina has transcribed. Dealing with kings, restaurants, and printed no-

tices, this is an instance, in Donald Bahr's view, of a "genre that we would call 'folktale' rather than 'myth'" (1988, 83), a genre that may be a subcategory of the possibly broad grouping of tales that make up what Bahr terms "Red Literature" (1988, 83). Bahr himself has recently reread a group of Yuman myths formerly studied by the great Alfred Kroeber as what he calls "romances." And, in "The Bible in Western Indian Mythology," Jarold Ramsey has examined stories that show similar borrowings from Euramerican culture, for all that they are incorporated into ancient forms; these stories are probably best not thought of as "mythology" at all. Similarly, in South America, David Guss has collected stories among the Yekuana of Brazil, which, entirely traditional in motif and manner, nonetheless take up the origin of the tape recorder.^[11] Examples of this sort could easily be multiplied—although it is likely we would in the end conclude with Alan Dundes that "myth and folktale are not structurally distinct genres. . . . The distinction between them is wholly dependent upon content criteria [e.g., setting, time, and dramatis personae] or totally external factors such as belief or function" (in Wiget, 1985: 3) that differ from tribe to tribe. Thus the attempt "to find some clear and universal criteria for distinguishing different types of narratives," as Andrew Wiget has written, has been—and I would add, will probably remain—an "ever-elusive goal" (1985, 3).^[12]

For all that, I would still chance a return to the question, in the manner posited by Jameson for "third world" or "national literature," whether there might be for large numbers of traditional stories, whatever their particular genre, some single dominant theme. And I will answer, in a tentative way, Yes,

[11] See "Keeping it Oral."

[12] Wiget's chapter on "Oral Narrative," in his Native American Literature, probably offers the best brief summary of these matters.

suggesting that they may be read as tribal allegories whose central concern is kinship relations .

Consider, first, the southwestern myths of Yuman peoples which Alfred Kroeber, near the end of his life, analyzed at length, only to conclude that they "revel in acmes of purposeless contradictions," show "deliberate or artistic incoherence," and treat as inconsequential "ordinary rules of satisfaction and moral proportion" (in Bahr, MS, n.p.). Donald Bahr's rereading of these stories as "romances," which I noted just above, sees them as concerned with "the theme of unbridled willfulness." Thus, Bahr writes, "I reject Kroeber's perception of deliberate artistic incoherence because I find the myths coherent." In a more generalizing fashion, Bahr adds that, "Myths are essentially about genealogical deformations or abnormalities. They are cosmic soap operas, they are family histories about times when there were no families." This, for him, is "the coherence behind what [Kroeber] misperceived as incoherence." and, as I should say, perhaps the central theme of myth narratives generally.

As one more piece of evidence in support of this hypothesis, let us consider a myth from the northwestern Clackamas Chinook, called, in its most recent translation by Dell Hymes, "Seal and Her Younger Brother Lived There." Jarold Ramsey's essay, "The Wife Who Goes Out like a Man, Comes Back as a Hero: The Art of Two Oregon Indian Narratives," summarizes the commentary on this story by Melville Jacobs, who first transcribed it, and by Hymes who retranslated it (and explained its verbal form) and alludes to others—Alan Dundes, Frank Kermode, J. Barre Toelken—who have referred to it, offering, as well, his own interpretation of it. Short of summarizing this material, let me say only that all the readings, however much they may differ—and Ramsey finds

those by Hymes and Jacobs "mutually exclusive" (1983, 80)—have in common the familial focus of the story. All of them might be said to read it as a family history about the time when there were no families. This would seem to be true as well for the second Oregon narrative Ramsey's essay considers, one translated by Leo. J. Frachtenberg from a 1903 narration, called "The Revenge Against the Sky People."^[13]

To the extent, then, that Native American myth narrative presents some form of tribal allegory, it is as with Jameson's national allegory: libidinal investments are most certainly tied to kinship responsibilities and the individual destiny bound up with that of the larger social unit, tribe or nation. Whether it is an adventuring male or female, or some newly arrived relative by marriage who is the protagonist, the story will have a bearing upon how kin are to behave toward one another so that not merely survival, but a good life as defined by the particular culture can be maintained. (It should be said, if only parenthetically, that the tribal allegory also always importantly includes or implies the issue of right relation to supernaturals—"Above Beings," or "gods"—a dimension absent from the generally secularized national allegories.)

The value of these generalizations, of course, lies in their claim to provide an overview, accommodating the apparently disparate details of a wide range of texts to a pattern of sameness. That is also the danger of these generalizations, inasmuch as they can only be achieved by a certain suppression of difference. Anthony Mattina is no doubt correct in saying that "ethnography, the study of different cultures, attracts more nominalists than universalists," while "literature . . .

[13] One might add here Keith Basso's gloss on a historical tale told by Mrs. Annie Peaches, that it "deals with the harmful consequences that may come to persons who overstep traditional role boundaries" (1984, 37) as these relate specifically to parents and in-laws.

[attracts] more universalists than generalists" (1985, 6), but perhaps modern cultural studies will be the field that attracts those committed to dialogue and a dialectical relation between the particular and the general.

It is at this point that, having said this much (or little) about the themes of Native American local narrative, I ought to consider their forms. Jameson's observation, noted earlier, that the theme of political solutions to third world problems tends to manifest itself formally in problems of narrative closure, is an attempt to establish a relationship between a typical theme and its (typical) formal expression as this relationship appears historically in a particular literary category, that of third world literature. Can we correlate the typical theme of Indian narrative as I have specified it to any typicality of form?

I must answer, speaking only for myself, Not now, not yet. For one thing, we don't know what traditional story telling sessions were actually like; we don't even know what a "real" telling even of some stories we have on tape or in translation (e.g., a telling to a culturally prepared audience, which, as we've noted with Silko, and can confirm with reference to many others, means an audience prepared to respond) would have been like. We certainly do know that narrators telling a story to an anthropologist or linguist, an audience of one, would react to that fact, sometimes offering just a bare outline or summary as the "whole" story. Even for a culturally prepared audience, narrators always modified and adjusted their tellings. Coyote stories, for example, could be longer or shorter, the episodes multiplied or not, so that it becomes difficult to speak of form with these narratives. The revival of traditional storytelling among contemporary Indians provides much material for study—which is currently progressing.

For all of this, questions of form in Native American narrative are in any case contingent upon questions of format, the

necessity to translate not only one language into another but one medium (speech, the voice) into another (writing, the text). Anyone who would present these materials for study has the problem not merely of what words to offer by way of translation of one language to another, hoping to convey (at least not entirely obscure) the linguistic structure of what is said, but also of what transcriptional strategies—what layout on the page—to offer so as to convey (at least not entirely obscure) the immediate and dramatic feel of oral performance. Much has been done in both these regards, yet it must be said that there is no way to translate and present Indian oral performance in any completely satisfactory way, inasmuch—as I have tried to show elsewhere—every fullness here entails its inevitable emptiness, presence its inevitable absence.^[14]

Those in any regard familiar with Native American literatures will be aware of the debates that have raged and continue to rage over these matters. They will be aware, too, of the major contributions to these debates over the last twenty years of Dell Hymes and Dennis Tedlock foremost among others. So far as these can be summarized—and I don't want, here, too much to go over ground others have already covered—one might speak of the particle-pause argument, Hymes attempting to indicate dramatic structure in a narrative by means of linguistic markers in the text (Hymes for the most part working not from actual performances or tapes but from transcriptions of earlier recorders), Tedlock attempting to indicate dramatic effect by dynamic shifts (volume changes, or vowel lengthening, rising or falling pitch; Tedlock works from tape recordings he has made).^[15] William

[14] See my "Post-Structuralism and Oral Literature."

Bright has noted that there appears to be, in point of fact, a high correlation/correspondence between the two methods,

which others (Bright, Kinkade, Sherzer, Toelken, et al.) have adopted and/or adapted. There is no doubt that the work of Hymes and Tedlock has revolutionized this field. What also seems to be the case is that their procedures, powerful as they are, are not inevitable. If Hymes privileges narrative structure linguistically marked by particles (etc.); if Tedlock privileges performative dynamics marked by pauses (etc.)—orientations toward the language and toward the speaker—then we might also instantiate Mattina's orientation toward the translator, which privileges neither the linguistic structure of the original nor its delivery in performance but, rather, the translator's feel for what an "Indian" version in English might be like. Mattina's commitment to "Red English" versions of Native narrative provides another option for understanding the particular artistry of local, Indian literatures in addition to the major initiatives of Hymes and Tedlock.^[16] In each case, we have a transcriptional and translational "solution" that may serve as a type of mediation between the local and the national, rendering the former in terms more or less comprehensible to the latter.

[16] I give as an example the conclusion to Mattina and deSautel's translation of Seymour's "The Golden Woman":

He said: "This here is the Golden Woman. Maybe you've heard about her in a story, in some other country that I never seen where she popped out of the water. That's your daughter-in-law, that's the one I married. Right now we're married. I was the one that got her and then I brought her and then we got married and then we came back."

Now I'm going to walk away. The one I'm teaching [reference is to Mattina], I'm teaching him, and then we wanted fairy tale stories, and then I told him: "All right. I'll tell you about this Golden Woman." And now it's two weeks and I'm talking all this time, and it's just now that I ended the story. Now I quit talking. (52)

I will conclude with a turn to some North American examples of indigenous literature, at least to remark their occasional thematic relation to the tribal allegory concerned with kinship relations I have ascribed to the myth-narrative part of traditional Indian literature. Here, perhaps because the influence of the Euramerican tradition tends to loosen the constraints that traditionally allied particular themes to particular genres, it seems reasonable to move back and forth among the types of literature the West defines as not so much song, story, and oratory, but more nearly poetry, fiction, and autobiography. What attachments to kinship concerns may mean formally for a given poem, story, novel, or autobiography remains to be worked out.

Let me return to Wendy Rose's "What My Father Said." Perhaps it will not be amiss to quote it in its entirety.

What My Father Said

when lightning danced
west of the mesa
was this: that for us
among the asphalt
and black shadowed structures
of the city
there is some question
about living our lives
and not melting back
to remembered stone, to adobe, to grass,
innocent and loud, sweetly singing
in the summer rain
and rolling clouds.

Begin, he said, by giving back;
as you eat, they eat
so never be full.

Don't let it get easy.
Remember them
think of those ones
that were here before,
remember
how they were hungry,
their eyes like empty bowls,
those ribs sticking out,
those tiny hands.

Your grandmother is singing
that as your feet fold
and your apron wrinkles
kneeling by the stove
you may hear your clan
in the sound of stirring,
find magic stored
in the bottom
of the basket.

Remember the spirits
lying in the scrub,
remember the spirits
in the tree tops huddled,
remember to speak,
to smile, to beckon,
   come and eat
   come and eat
   live in my tongue
   and forget
   your hunger.

"[A]s you eat, they eat," says the speaker's father, "Remember them"; think of grandmother; "you may hear your clan," as well as the spirits in the tree tops. To live is to live familially, tribally. A great many Native American poets develop

themes of this nature, as a look through Duane Niatum's recent Harper's Anthology of 20th-Century Native American Poetry will show. It will also show that this theme is by no means ubiquitous, replaced in a great many instances by concerns more typical of the dominant culture.

The same is probably true of indigenous fiction. Ralph Salisbury's "The Sonofabitch and the Dog," as I noted earlier, presents an individual protagonist whose adventures may serve as an allegory of Native people's experience throughout the Americas, inasmuch as Native people often were forced, like the narrator, to seem crazy and dumb to the dominant culture if they were to survive. Native Americans, like the unnamed narrator of Salisbury's story, might well survive as Indians, but not quite or not yet as people free of the colonial experience. If Salisbury's story is a tribal allegory, however, it is a tribal allegory of posttribal experience, where no kin are present. Still, some of the best-known centemporary Native American novels—I am thinking, here, of Momaday's House Made of Dawn and Silko's Ceremony, of James Welch's Winter in the Blood, and Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine —are very much concerned with the tribal as it can indeed be experienced in terms of the family.

Given the dominant culture's insistence upon singling out the individual, and requiring separation from the familial nexus for the achievement of a unique identity, the Native American autobiographer committed to his or her Indianness has sometimes found it necessary to discover metaphors for family, to shift from the tribal allegory concerned with kinship relations to part-to-whole relations of one sort or another (e.g., not strictly of the individual to his kin). That Native American autobiographers have adopted this synecdochic mode (part-to-whole) rather than the metonymic mode (part-

to-part) of modern Western autobiography seems evidence of the persistence of traditional forms of self-conception among educated and sophisticated contemporary Indian writers,^[17] whatever distance they may feel from the "cosmic soap opera" of traditional, mythological family orientations.

Some of these indigenous texts, as well as some of the textualizations of local, Indian literature ought to be included in the canon of American literature so that they might illuminate and interact with the texts of the dominant, Euramerican culture, to produce a genuinely heterodox national canon.

[17] See my "Native American Autobiography and the Synecdochic Self."