5.
Literary "Criticism" / Native American "Literature"
I embrace the world. I am the world. The white man has never understood this magic substitution. The white man wants the world; he wants it for himself alone. . . . He enslaves it. An acquisitive relation is established between the world and him. But there exist other values that fit only my forms.
—FRANTZ FANON
The nearer a study comes to live performances (the orator's breath, the speed at which he talks, where he raises his voice), the finer becomes the distinction between being a student and becoming an orator. In studying a religious art, where breath has overtones of "strength" and "spirit," this ground must be traversed cautiously.
—DONALD BAHR
In order for criticism to be responsible, it must always be addressed to someone who can contest it.
—TALAL ASAD
The criticism of Western literatures, as is well known, is more than two milennia old, extending at least from Plato to the present. Criticism of Native American literatures,
however, is at best little more than two centuries old. This is to say that although as early as 1612 William Strachey produced a rough transcription and a paraphrase of what he called a "kind of angry song against us" (78–9) by the Powhatans, it was not until the European "Romantic" period (1760s or so) that the conditions of possibility existed for the recognition that Native American people did in fact produce and circulate something like what Westerners call literature, something that might be worthy of critical attention.
Having discussed this matter on a number of occasions,[1] I will only briefly recall to the reader, here, that the indigenous people of the present-day United States, inasmuch as they did not rely upon alphabetic writing as a means of information storage and transmission, initially seemed, in the eyes of the European invaders, barred from possessing a littera-ture , defined as the culture of letters (littera , letter). But in the second half of the nineteenth century, the meaning of literature shifted away from an emphasis on the form of presentation (writing) toward an emphasis on the content of the presentation (imaginative and affective material). By the time, for example, Bishop Percy's collection of Scottish ballads appeared (1765) to impress such as William Wordsworth with the expressive powers of illiterate, rustic men who, as Wordsworth put it in the preface to Lyrical Ballads , "convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborate expressions" (446), it increasingly became possible to speak of an "oral literature" as something other than a contradiction in terms.
Although as late as 1823, according to Victor Barnouw,
Lewis Cass, Governor of the Michigan Territory, "sent a questionnaire about Indian customs to traders, military men and Indian agents under his jurisdiction," which included the question, "Do [the Indians] relate stories, or indulge in any work of the imagination?" (Barnouw in Norman in press), his curiosity in this particular area seems to have been somewhat retrograde. For by the time Cass sent out his questionnaire, it had not only been noted that the Indians did, indeed, produce literature , but it was as well the case that this indigenous literature was increasingly becoming available for criticism . By 1823, that is to say, there were already some few texts of Native stories, songs, or other "work[s] of the imagination," translations into English of one sort or another.
What I am trying to say is simply that the first condition of possibility for a Western literary criticism of Native American literatures is the recognition that Native Americans do, indeed, produce discourse that might be called literature; and that the second condition of possibility for a Western literary criticism of Native American literature is the availability of texts of that literature. The relation between a criticism that is absolutely and unequivocally textual in orientation, and a literature that is oral (and so entirely independent of, indifferent to, and both historically and in the present frequently resistant to all forms of textualization) is, of course, highly problematic—to the degree that any possible "relation" between Western criticism, even ethnocriticism, and Native American literatures may be wishful and naive. I will return to this complex and difficult matter. For the moment I will only repeat that Western literary criticism has been and—so long as it remains Western literary criticism—will continue to be text-based
(regardless of the existence of audio and videotapes, etc.), while reminding the reader that Native literatures are and continue to be oral and performative.
To produce the texts of an Indian literature requires the work of transcribers (because Indian literary performances are oral performances) and of translators (because it has always been, and, unfortunately, remains the case—with, to be sure, significant exceptions—that a majority of the literary critics of Indian literatures, myself included, have little or no competence in Indian languages). The first full textualization and translation of a Native American performance I know in the present-day United States is that of Lt. Henry Timberlake in the eighteenth century. Here are a few lines of Timberlake's "Translation of the WAR-SONG , Caw waw noo dee, &c ":
Where'er the earth's enlightened by the sun,
Moon shines by night, grass grows, or waters run,
Be't known that we are going, like men, afar,
In hostile fields to wage destructive war;
Like men we go, to meet our country's foes,
Who, women-like, shall fly our dreaded blows. (81)
Timberlake's verse translation—a typical instance of a new matter ("primitive" war songs) initially appearing in an older manner (heroic couplets)—are bound to strike the contemporary reader as inevitably very distant from what any eighteenth-century Cherokee warriors might actually have sung.
Nor is it at all clear how much of the Cherokee language Lt. Henry Timberlake knew. His Memoirs (1767), in which this "translation" appears, suggest that he had spent enough time among the Cherokee to achieve some linguistic com-
petence in their language. Still, it is altogether likely that Timberlake, working from the Cherokee (and working, probably, with an Indian who knew some English; working, as well, either from memory or from whatever rough notation of the original he or another had made), had not the linguistic "control" of the original language, in Dell Hymes's term,[2] that we assume, say, a Pope or a Johnson, translating in roughly that same period from the Greek or Latin, would have had of those tongues. And Timberlake did not have (he could not have had, as I have noted) a fixed or authoritative text of the original upon which to base his translation.
Thus, in retrospect, at least, we may see Timberlake as presenting a founding instance of what would become the paradigmatic situation for subsequent translators of Native American literatures, a situation that finds them somewhere between the typical position of translators from Indo-European languages able to work from a given/fixed/authoritative text, and that of anthropological translator-investigators who encounter, as Talal Asad puts it, not society/culture as texts but, rather, "people who speak" (155)—which "speaking," of course, is eventually textualized in ethnographic discourse.
Although Native languages were already being studied in the seventeenth century (so that the Bible might be translated into Indian), and no less than George Washington and Thomas Jefferson collected Indian wordlists for learned societies in the eighteenth century, detailed comprehension of Native languages seems to have reached a first plateau of relative sophistication only after the middle of the nine-
teenth century. Samuel Worcester's earlier labors among the Cherokee, to be sure, included work on the Cherokee language, and later clerics like Bishop Riggs in the Dakotas, and H. R. Voth among the Hopi, or ethnographic workers like Washington Matthews and Frank Hamilton Cushing in the southwest, and Horatio Hale in the northeast, among others, provided a base—syllabaries, dictionaries, grammars, and the like—which was built upon "scientifically" in the twentieth century by the academic, anthropological linguistics largely founded by Franz Boas. Systematic study of the indigenous languages of the Americas continues to develop today, and there remains a very good deal of work to be done (as well as a good deal of work that can never be done, because there are no more speakers of a number of Indian languages). Thus, if texts are needed for the Western criticism of Native American literatures, and if most of those who have written criticism of Native American literatures have needed texts in English, then the trustworthiness of the available translations is, as Dell Hymes has pointed out in detail, a matter of considerable importance. I agree with Hymes and others that the accuracy of translations is a matter of major concern, although I would suggest that it may be possible to judge at least some few English texts of Native American literatures "bad" translations while yet judging them to be at least potentially "good" criticism. This distinction first requires one to take a position as to what "good" translation is (I have been throughout trying to take a position as to what "good" criticism is), and I will reserve this matter, too, for further discussion.
For a Western criticism of Native American literatures to develop, I have said, there must first be the recognition that there is such a thing as indigenous literature, and, second, there must be a minimal control of the languages in which
these literatures are expressed for their textualization in various forms of translation. Yet one more condition for criticism must be met, and that is a knowledge of the cultures whose concerns Native American literatures—like any literatures the world over—address and express. This may perhaps most easily be illustrated by citing an anecdote presented by the anthropologist Laura Bohannon in an essay called "Shakespeare in the Bush." In it, Bohannon recounts her attempt to offer a plot summary of Hamlet to the Tiv people of West Africa when, Bohannon having often asked them to tell their stories, they asked her to tell them one of hers. At every point in Bohannon's summary, the Tiv interrupted to assure her that she must be getting the story wrong—for no son would act as Hamlet did toward his mother, no young person speak as Hamlet did to an elder, no spirit behave as she said Hamlet's father's ghost did, and so on. However "timeless" and "universal" we might think Shakespeare to be, Hamlet as he wrote it made little sense to the Tiv.
In just the same way, we may well recognize that Native American stories that include instances of mother-in-law avoidance may make the wrong kind of sense to Westerners, as mother-in-law jokes may confuse or disturb many Indian audiences: all narratives that involve kinship relations are sure to be somewhat baffling if one does not know how a given culture expects kin to behave toward one another (and most Native narratives deal substantially with kinship relations). Frequent patternings of fours and fives in Plains and Northwest Coast stories will seem odd to people whose own pattern numbers are three or seven. Those used to looking others in the eye, vigorously shaking their hand, and inquiring casually of their health will not readily understand why such behavior causes laughter or consternation among
the Hopi and other Indian people. To develop any critical approach whatever to Native American literatures that deal with such matters—and all songs and stories, all literatures everywhere, deal with such matters—one needs an understanding of that people's cultural assumptions.
While no one disputes this in an absolute way, nonetheless, a certain rejection of the need for detailed, culture-specific information has arisen recently from two different versions of a perspective I will call "esthetic universalism." Both versions, in their strong forms, are obstacles in the way of any approximation to an ethnocriticism.
The first type of esthetic universalism holds that for all the differences in cultural custom all over the world, art is, nonetheless, essentially the same everywhere. Thus Karl Kroeber writes that
even an inexperienced reader can rewardingly apply to traditional Indian narratives the kind of critical attitude he brings to other literatures. When one does this, the primary discovery one makes is that diversity of interpretation is possible because the narrative truly is a work of art. (1981 8)
"A majority of Indian stories," Kroeber continues,
appeal to enough common features in human nature to allow us at least entrance to their pleasures—if only we can relax sufficiently to enjoy them. (1981 9)
Kroeber here replicates the worst aspects of Lévi-Straussian idealism as in such comments as the following:
The mythical value of the myth is preserved through the worst translation. Whatever our ignorance of the language and cul-
ture [!] of the people where it originated, a myth is still felt as a myth by any reader anywhere in the world. (Lévi-Strauss in Berman Ms. 1)
As Judith Berman has shown in a careful reading of one of Boas's translations from the Kwakiutl, even Boas, who most certainly was not ignorant "of [Kwakiutl] language and culture," could produce a text that leaves us "wondering how much of the 'mythical value' of a myth really does emerge in a bad translation" (ms. 1).
In the same idealistic vein as Lévi-Strauss and Kroeber, we have Jarold Ramsey's citation of the Nez Percé translator, Archie Phinney, to the effect that
Any substantial appreciation of these [Nez Perce] tales must come . . . from vivid feelings within oneself, feeling as a moving current [of?] all the figures and the relationships that belong to the whole myth-body. (Ramsey 1983 xxi)
Ramsey rhetorically asks, "Doesn't Phinney's formula ring true for us, too, literature being what it is, and our imaginations of life being what they are?" (xxi). The difficulty, of course, is that just what literature "is," as I have noted, not to say what "our imaginations of life" in different languages and modes of presentation "are," may not be so clear or universal as Ramsey assumes. As a participant in Nez Percé culture, a speaker of the language, and a fully prepared auditor of mythic stories, Phinney may well judge the effectiveness of any given telling as it does or does not produce "vivid feelings" in him. For Ramsey to appropriate Phinney's criteria as so easily available to the Western reader is naive at best, and even then a naivete perpetuating the worst imperial arrogance.
Even Kroeber's ideally "relaxed" reader, for all that she may spot "common features in human nature" in Indian literatures and permit herself the very greatest "diversity of interpretation," may find her readings either banal or simply mistaken. A reading of Indian literature that discovers in it, for example, the observations that people age and die, or that spring brings renewal to nature, would produce the identity of Indian literature to all other literatures by ignoring the particular, different, and other manner—the culturally-specific modes and codes—by and in which such observations are presented. And such a reading may simply be misinterpreting particular cultural details, taking them in ways that would be quite appropriate to Western literary art but which are not at all appropriate to Native American literary art. "Diversity" of interpretation is certainly possible for any rich literature, but it is not the case that anything goes; egregiously mistaken interpretations are the most usual consequence of an "inexperienced" reader applying "the kind of critical attitude he brings to other literatures" to the literatures of a very different culture. This is one more instance of—to take a well-known phrase from William Bevis—assuming "we" will get Indian literature as cheaply as we got Manhattan.[3]
The second type of objection to an insistence on the importance of ethnographic information in the understanding of Native American literatures is more recent, and more complex in its implications. This objection derives its force from the context of postmodernism. Gerald Vizenor, the Anishinabe (Chippewa) poet, novelist, and critic is the foremost proponent of an anti-social-scientific, postmodernist approach to Native American literatures. Vizenor's sense,
more or less similar to that of postmodernist anthropologists like Stephen Tyler, as I have noted above, is that social-scientific "knowledge" is predominantly knowledge of its own rules, codes, and concepts for making sense of culture, not of culture itself. Human linguistic behavior—"literature"—like human behavior generally, for Vizenor is best exemplified by the figure of the trickster, whose shape-changing, limit-transgressing antics provide the best guide—it is inherent in the nature of the trickster not to provide a model —to who and what we are, and, as well, to how we ought to read.
Although there are a good number of Native American narrative types that neither deal with tricksters nor court their style and mode, for Vizenor the trickster is everywhere: "The trickster is a communal sign in a comic narrative: the comic holotrope (the whole figuration) is a consonance in tribal discourse" (1989a 9). Whatever is "evoked" (I make reference again to Tyler, whom Vizenor approvingly quotes) by the sentence above, there is also the following to consider: "The instrumental language of the social sciences," Vizenor writes, "are [sic] tragic or hypotragic modes that withhold communal discourse" (1989a 9). A couple of pages later in the same essay, however, Vizenor remarks that
social science studies reproduced new theories and contributed not so much to the doom of tragedies, but to a new insolence in tribal literature, an outbreak of hypotragedies . (1989a 11)
Grammatically, the "new insolence in tribal literatures" would seem to stand in apposition to—to be virtually synonymous with—"an outbreak of hypotragedies ." If that is the case, then it becomes difficult to understand how "hy-
potragedies," typical of the social sciences, are actually inimical to that "communal discourse," which surely marks "tribal literatures." It may be that Vizenor means "hypotragedies " to be in apposition to "new theories" in "social science studies." In any case, the passage quoted above continues, "The trickster, a semiotic sign in a third-person narrative, is never tragic or hypotragic, never the whole truth or even part truth" (1989a 11). The terms hypotragic and hypotragedy come up again and again, not only in Vizenor's preface and introduction to Narrative Chance , and in his "Trickster Discourse: Comic Holotropes," the essay which concludes the book, but as well in his later "Trickster Discourse," in which the hypotragic is tied to monologue, the unpardonable sin of the social sciences. Most recently, tricksters are explicitly tied to the postmodern: "Crossbloods hear the bears that roam in trickster stories, and the cranes that trim the seasons close to the ear. Crossbloods are a postmodern bloodline" (1990 vii), Vizenor writes. What is valorized here is the "comic and communal, rather than [the] tragic and sacrificial; [for] comedies and trickster signatures are liberations" (1990 viii).
Vizenor's sense of postmodern/trickster/comic "liberations," if I have at all gotten the point, insists upon the absolute difference of all linguistic acts and all texts one from another, a form of radical epistemological relativism that, in its own way, can lead to another type of esthetic universalism, in this case, one that would emphasize the absolute irreducible distinctiveness of all phenomena, one from another, rather than their ultimate sameness—an esthetics, as I think, in the ironic mode. Like Stephen Tyler's postmodern ethnography, which "describes no knowledge and produces no action," transcending both "by evoking what cannot be known discursively or performed perfectly,"
something "beyond truth and immune to the judgment of performance" (123), Vizenor's critical remarks resist semantic clarity in the interest not of logical but, rather, of rhetorical and evocative force, his prose offering itself as the concrete embodiment and illustration of any doctrine it would at once uphold and subvert. What I believe it cannot claim is to offer a superior, a "better" account (according to any criteria whatsoever) of Indian literatures ("tribal narratives," trickster narratives, "communal discourses," and so forth) than social-scientific accounts. Nonetheless, as I have already suggested in chapter 3—and this is a matter to which I shall return soon—I believe Vizenor's critical writing may well be adapted for the development of an ethnocriticism of Native American literatures.
Western criticism, I have said, must constitute itself by work on texts rather than on actual performances and this, as I have also said, is a problem of major proportions for someone like myself who is interested not only in Western critical approaches to Indian literatures but in the development of an ethnocritical approach. Ethnocriticism, as I have been trying to define it and, in whatever degree, to practice it, cannot strictly be just a further development of Western critical practice. Rather, it must be a practice which seeks, to cite Jana Sequoya's formulation, a "convergence—which does not, however, comprise an identity—of indigenous and Western epistemes" (3); in Talal Asad's sense, it must be no less than an attempt, in language, at "learning to live another form of life" (149).
The problem is how to achieve this "convergence" or "learning" when the ethnocritical encounter is one between "competing ways of having stories," ways in which capitalist/individualist "ways" confront Indian sacred or "communitarian ways" (Sequoya 14), or, to refer again to Asad, of
"different uses (practices), as opposed merely to different writings and readings" (160) of the work in question.
To take these matters into account is to question not only the possibility of a criticism of Native American literatures, but as well of an ethnocriticism, inasmuch as—in Sequoya's development of her argument, one to which Asad's commentary has particular relevance—indigenous literatures in the postcontact period must actively seek to distance themselves from Western (textual) critical practice in order to maintain their value and integrity. For all that ethnocriticism wishes to engage on an equal footing with Native literary practice, it cannot help but do so in a context of vastly unequal power relations. Thus, for all that the ethnocritic may decently and sincerely attempt to inquire into and learn from the Otherness of ongoing Indian literary performances, the sociopolitical context being what it is, she or he cannot help but threaten to swallow, submerge, or obliterate these performances. This is not to say that nothing can be done; but good-will or even great talent alone cannot undo the current differential power relations between dominant and subaltern cultural production.
Sequoya's comments come in a penetrating critique of Leslie Marmon Silko's highly acclaimed novel, Ceremony . And, indeed, it is likely that what most readers will know of Indian literary production today is the poetry and fiction of what may justifiably be called—the phrase is Kenneth Lincoln's—the recent "Native American Renaissance." This is work written in English for publication, and even though a very good deal of it appears under the imprint of small presses with limited means for advertisement and distribution, it nonetheless has a circulation far greater than the performances of contemporary-traditional (this adjectival phrase must not be taken as oxymoronic) Native singers and
storytellers. These latter, as is inevitably the case for oral literature, even in an "age of mechanical reproduction" far more complicated than any Walter Benjamin imagined, do not circulate very far beyond the community of their intended (and culturally prepared) auditors. I do not know whether the singing and storytelling in which a fair number of Native people are, today, actively engaged is sufficiently abundant to justify speaking, in this regard, too, of some sort of "Renaissance." (But there is the whole question of the very specific Western implications of that term, in any case, implications which, obviously enough, imply analogies to the rediscovery of "lost" "classical" traditions which tend to distort the history of Native literary production. Lincoln, it seems to me, intends the term in a vaguely honorific sense, and it is in that sense, and that sense only, that I have invoked and found it acceptable.) I think I do know that any indigenous criticism of this work will mostly appear in this work, so that it, too, will not circulate much beyond the storytelling communities.
I mean to say that contemporary singing and storytelling goes on in communities that use those performances as means of affirming and validating their identities as communities—communities, which, insofar as they are traditionally oriented, do not separate those stories from their performers, audiences, and occasions, and so have no reason to develop any distinctive category of "criticism" about them. This is not in the least to say that Indian people have no ideas or thoughts about the "literature" they perform or participate in; it is to say that they have no need to produce a body of knowledge about it that is separate and apart from it. As a point of fact and an illustration of that point, let me note that my pronominal uses of "it" in regard to Native peoples' understanding of their literature is a Western con-
vention that probably accords very badly with what I understand to be the actual ways Indians think about these things: for there is no abstract category like "literature" or "knowledge" that might be the antecedent of such an "it." (This is not , I should say, an instance of Spivak's catachrestical criticism: rather it is a fairly common problem of cross-cultural criticism).
In the West, there is a more or less (the issue is currently much contested) distinctive category of discourse that can be referred to as "literature," and its knowledge, indeed, knowledge it self, exists as a reified object, a commodity, an "it." The Western literary critic tries to know literature and to obtain knowledge about it , which he or she then has—in the best of cases, to teach it , and share it , and pass it democratically on to others. But in any event, a virtual thing is involved, one that is alienated from its lived experience precisely to become alienable, i.e., transferrable or translatable (and, again, for ostensibly "good," disinterested, even transcendentally Kantian purposes, as well as for "bad," and economically interested ones). This is, to repeat, not the case for traditional Indian people both today and in the past.
It may be helpful here to mention, by way of illustration, the work of Harry Robinson, a contemporary Okanagan storyteller.[4] Because so few in the Similkameen Valley in Southern British Columbia where he lives speak Okanagan any more, Robinson, who learned his stories in his native language, nonetheless tells them today in English. Wendy Wickwire, who has published some of Robinson's stories, notes that
in speaking English Harry uses pronouns indiscriminately. "He," "she," "it," and "they" are interchangeable, no matter what the antecedent. In most cases, Harry uses the plural neuter "they," rather than the singular "he," "she," or "it." (Wickwire 15)
Wickwire adds, "This is common in the speech of native elders" (15), and this may or may not be related to the few remarks I have offered about Indian ways of "having" stories. (I would not want to engage the problematics of any Whorfian linguistic determinism; but, again, see Asad's discussion of uses/practices.)
Wickwire sums up a good deal of what I have been trying to say when she writes of her decision not to edit out of Harry Robinson's "traditional" stories some "'modern contaminants.'" I will quote her at some length:
The purist might edit some or all of the "modern contaminants" out of Harry's stor[ies], believing these to be tarnished post-contact influences on an otherwise traditional body of knowledge. This is typical of the scientific tendency to crystallize living, evolving oral culture—to transform myth into a static artifact, an "urtext" which contains the purest essence of what, to the Western mind, a native North American culture is (was). To do so is to miss the point entirely. In an oral tradition such as Harry's, where nothing is fundamentally new, and where creation is not some moment in the past, but remains present as the wellspring of every act and every experience in the world, the body of what is known is an integral part of creation. (23)
Thus "to crystallize Harry's stories, either on tape or in book form," as Wickwire is fully aware, is to "fix . . . these living
stories in time. They will now no longer evolve as they have for hundreds of generations," and so her "book might be criticized for Homerizing Harry." By "criticized," of course, Wickwire means blamed, disapproved of. But it is only by "Homerizing Harry" that her book—and, most particularly, his stories—may indeed be criticized: by which I mean that his stories may be turned into subject/objects of a Western criticism of Native American literature. So far as Harry Robinson's stories do live and evolve, their evolution would contain within them any "criticism" of them, revisions, and variously selected "contaminants" serving as implicit commentary, and serving as an integral part of—to return to Sequoya's discussion—the "particular relationships with the conditions which produce them and specifically position the audience with respect to those [conditions]" (Sequoya). It would seem, then, that what is necessary for Native American oral literatures to become subject/objects of criticism is, to put the matter baldly, that they die.
To the extent that this is, however, unfortunately, true, it bears upon the prospects for a properly ethnocritical account of Native American oral literatures, calling into question, as I have fully tried to acknowledge, the practice of the project I have been defining in theory. For it may well be the case that the Western view of history, for example, as compared or contrasted with the historical view of High Plains (and, I suspect, other Indian) people (see p. 16), like the Western view of literature and of criticism as compared or contrasted with the view of traditional people, cannot "converge" or satisfactorily be mediated—or, as I shall take the matter up, "translated." It may be that unless one is quite willing "to murder to dissect," the differences are irreconcilable. Short of reaching such a conclusion—but also, I admit, quite short of the specific outline of a practice—I
can only offer the following speculations. And, in Eric Cheyfitz's phrase, "Only the other has the right to decide if these figures touch his or her facts" (xix).
Although I have been critical of Gerald Vizenor's trickster criticism just above, a criticism located explicitly by Vizenor within the Western postmodern episteme (postmodern, over the past several years has, indeed, become one of Vizenor's favorite words), there may—again, as I have noted above and in chapter 3—be ways in which Vizenor's "loosening the bounds" of Western discursive categories could be reoriented for ethnocritical purposes. I would once more cite the extremely fascinating conjunction of Vizenor's commitment to postmodern "trickster" fluidities with their ostensibly comic, infinite openness, and his commitment to what I have called premodern tribal identities, with their strong sense of natural rights and responsibilities—and as well to a view of the natural world utterly and entirely different from the postmodern alienation of late capitalism. Vizenor, at any rate, is at the height of his powers, and his very special work is clearly worth watching in its ongoing development.
It also seems to me—I admit to tentativeness and unsureness here—that there may be possibilities for the development of a nonviolent, anti-imperial ethnocritical practice for Native American song and story, not directly but indirectly—I will discuss another indirect route in detail just below—through the study of Native American oratory. Oratorical performances, like narrative or lyric performances, are always ritualistic, in varying degrees sacred—if, as I think, one can indeed speak of degrees of the sacred—and, like the songs and stories, committed to defining, affirming, and sustaining the communal life. But oratorical performances are those developed for specifically
public occasions, and some of these, in post-contact times, increasingly have had to be adapted, far more than the songs and stories, to the pressures of nontraditional—which is, of course, to say Western, pressures. The Cherokee Memorials responding to the Indian Removal Bill, which I have attempted to analyze as rhetorical writing , had, as they continue to have, oral analogues. In the present, Native oratory ranges from the ritual oratory of the Pima and Papago (Tohon O'odham) analyzed by Donald Bahr, to that of the Iroquois longhouse ceremonies analyzed by Michael Foster, to oratory for the dedication of fish hatcheries analyzed by Anthony Mattina and his student, Donovan Lytle, to the Tlingit speech acts studied by Richard and Nora Dauenhauer.[5] I am admittedly offering no more than general intuitions here, but it seems to me that in the current revival of interest in Native American oratory there are possibilities for the development of an ethnocritical practice that may in time be adjusted to produce, as well, an ethnocriticism of Native American song and story.
Bahr's broadly suggestive (and rather overlooked) study of 1975 (one of the epigraphs to this chapter comes from this text) may offer some important possibilities in these regards, contending, as it does, "that the original collections of ritual oratory should be returned to the Pimans in written form and in a manner that will facilitate their use" (1975 3); that the "methodological eminence [Bahr] assigned to the written Piman version is a lonely eminence . . . because no reader of the next pages will be able to relate to it in a familiar manner" (28); and, thus, that his "written text is a
product without a public at the present time, pure scholarship" (28). Moreover, Bahr writes that its methodological base or "theory was 'made up' by [him] and is not the product of any orator" (30). "No Piman orator," Bahr affirms, "is presently known to be interested in the problem of writing and very little is known about how orators think or theorize about their oral art" (30). But perhaps out of these awarenesses something further can come—especially if it should turn out, as Bahr tentatively dares hope, that Pimans might, indeed, become interested in the "returns" he and others have made. Nonetheless, as Sequoya has once again pointed out (personal communication), any specifically ethnocritical approach to Native American oral literary practice, even to oratory, will have to take into account the enormously different visibilities and powers of the dominant culture and the Native American minority, Asad's specification of what he calls "unequal languages" (156).
To the extent that any sort of critical practice consistent with ethnocritical aims already has some actual if incipient existence, I would suggest it may be found not in the formal discourses of Western criticism, but, rather, as one might perhaps guess from the discussion thus far, in the practice of translation from Native American literatures into English. It should be clear that I am not thinking, here, of Henry Timberlake's procedures or of their later analogues. Instead, I am thinking of those moments in the history of translation when the intentions of poet-translators from the dominant culture more nearly seemed to approach the intentions of Indian performers than anything Timberlake could have imagined. I think these might be examined for another indirect route toward an ethnocriticism of Native American literatures.
By way of illustration, let me only mention the translation
versions of Indian songs done by Mary Austin in the twenties and thirties of this century, before turning to the translation versions of Jerome Rothenberg from the sixties to the present. It has been said by some that so far as these two consider themselves actually to be doing translation, they do "bad" translation, and I believe there may be a measure of justice in that judgment.[6] I would like to argue, however, that "bad" as these texts may be as translations, they nonetheless may be quite "good"—at least useful—as criticism. (In this I differ from Talal Asad insofar as he differentiates clearly between translation and criticism .) Further, the fact that translation-as-criticism to some extent mirrors the Native American way of doing "criticism"—critical practice, that is, only as internal to an evolving literary practice—it may do somewhat less violence to the literatures it "criticizes."
Before going on to develop this point, I suppose I must say something about how I understand the distinction between "good" and "bad" translation—and I continue to print these two words within quotation marks for obvious reasons—although even to approximate an adequate account of this matter would take us far out of our way. Because my critical orientation is more nearly cultural-materialist than idealist, I am largely in agreement with Bahr's view (although I don't mean at all to suggest that he shares my critical orientation) of "good" translation. I agree, that is, with his "simple but somewhat extreme position that English translations of non-English poetries ought to reflect the style of the original even at the expense of looking or
sounding odd in English" (1975 2). Consistent with this is Robert Brightman's recent observation that "By common consensus," there are "two necessary requirements" for translators. First is "some control of the original language from which the English translation is rendered," and second is the "explicit specification of the syntactic, semantic, lexical, prosodic, or other parallelisms that are used to delimit the text into lines and/or more inclusive units of poetic measure" (179). This sort of view would exclude Mary Austin entirely and Jerome Rothenberg at least partly as potentially "good" translators , as it also seems to exclude Howard Norman, a study of whose The Wishing Bone Cycle provides the occasion for Brightman's remarks.
Of course, there have been radically different views of "good" translation, ones that privilege the translator's ability to rise above fidelity to the letter of the original's style in the interest of capturing its "essence" or "spirit." Somewhat less usual are the views of Rudolf Pannwitz, Walter Benjamin, and Maurice Blanchot (I shall turn to them soon), attempting, in Benjamin's words, to make "both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel" (78). The standards according to which one may judge the degree to which any given translation may or may not have fulfilled this task remain mysterious to me, although Asad's instantiation of Benjamin's commitment to the "intentio " of the original demystifies the matter to a great extent.
One of the reasons Jerome Rothenberg's work is so interesting is that—and the reader has already many times encountered my attraction to this sort of endeavor—he importantly mediates idealist and materialist concerns, paying at least some measure of attention to "syntactic, semantic, lexical, prosodic" (Brightman 179) elements of the original,
while feeling quite unconstrained to cut loose from those elements in search of the essentially (perhaps he would say "universally") "poetic" dimension of the original (Asad's/Benjamin's "intentio" ). In a recent essay, called "'We Explain Nothing, We Believe Nothing': American Indian Poetry & the Problematics of Translation" (1991), Rothenberg not only defends his translation practices (in a tone and manner that are not at all defensive), but demonstrates his awareness of the ways in which translation is inevitably criticism. The particular kind of criticism Rothenberg's "ethnopoetic" translations perform is about the nearest approximation to anything I know of an ethnocritical practice for Native American literature already in place.
Rothenberg begins with an epigraph from an essay of Maurice Blanchot. Blanchot writes:
Likeness, as [Walter] Benjamin rightly says, is not at issue here: if one requires that the translated work resemble the work to be translated, no translation is possible. What is involved, rather, is an identity that takes off from an alterity: the same work in two languages foreign to each other, and this mutual foreignness thus making visible the movement by which this work always becomes other , the very motion from which must be drawn the light which will transparently illuminate the translation. (84)
Without endorsing Blanchot's commentary as a whole (I balk, for example, at the notion of any form of transparent illumination, as well as, in the context of imperialism—which does not seem to concern Blanchot—the notion of "mutual foreignness"), still there is much that is useful here. Blanchot has in mind a famous passage in Benjamin's essay, "The Task of the Translator," in which Benjamin cites ("as
the best comment on the theory of translation that has been published in Germany" [Benjamin 80]) some remarks of Rudolf Pannwitz. Pannwitz is quoted as follows:
Our translations, even the best ones, proceed from a wrong premise. They want to turn Hindi, Greek, English into German instead of turning German into Hindi, Greek, English . Our translators have far greater reverence for the usage of their own language than for the spirit of the foreign works. . . . The basic error of the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue. (In Benjamin 80–1, my emphasis)[7]
Now Benjamin, like Blanchot, isn't in the least interested in the imperial relations between European metropolitan powers and others; his project, the mystico-theological side of Benjamin which some (not I) admire, is a kind of impossible imagining of a totalized and unitary language, what must have been before the Tower of Babel; what God would speak or think. Eric Cheyfitz, in his study of the relations between translation and imperialism, also cites Pannwitz/Benjamin, and does so for purposes much closer to my own, as, with significant differences, does Talal Asad. (See also David Murray.)
This is to say that so far as translation may be imagined as a critical practice that seeks to undo its largely imperial history—its claim to speak for those who have no eloquent language of their own, its domination of the foreign figure of speech (Aristotle's definition of metaphor) by domesticating it, siting-by-citing it within one's own discourse, and so on—Pannwitz's is an exemplary conceptualization. According to Cheyfitz, Montaigne, in his essay on the cannibals, attempts "to displace the univocal opposition between the proper and the figurative with an equivocal, or kinbased relationship, where mastery [based in such an opposition] is impossible" (Cheyfitz 155). In much the same way, Rothenberg affirms the view that
translation . . . involves . . . a discourse on its own problematics. . . . [I]t functions as a commentary on the other and itself and on the differences between them. It is much more a kind of question than a summing up. (1991 2)
Inasmuch as translation from Native American literatures raises questions "that center on orality, . . . on the sacred, and . . . on the question of imperial displacement" (1991 3), Rothenberg claims "that translation as a process is a principal means by which [these questions] can be explored" (3).
As Montaigne, in Cheyfitz's analysis, "uncannily imagines the language of the cannibals so he can alienate his own language in it" (Cheyfitz 163), as Asad insists that translation must be "learning to live another form of life" (149), so, too, does Rothenberg cite the Brechtian term "Verfremdung " to speak of his "own urge" in what he has called "'total translation"' (14), "as much to cultivate the mystery [of otherness, difference, alterity] as to dispel it" (14), or to take that
"mystery" into his own language. If, to return once more to Cheyfitz's discussion of Montaigne, the project of anti-imperial translation—this might, indeed, better be called sublation —is "to blur the frontier between the proper ['literal'] and figurative meanings of essential ethnological vocabulary" (Cheyfitz 155), this project, in Rothenberg's practice, seeks inevitably to challenge "the dominant assumptions" in the West "about the form and function of the poetic act" (11), in Asad's account, to cause the translator critically to examine "the normal state of his or her own language" (157). Thus translation can become "a calling into question of dominant attitudes in the colonizing culture" (31), and perhaps "help foster [in the dominant culture] the conditions for a new, even a newly sacred sense of poetry and of life" (31)—a sense that might, in fact, learn a good deal from traditional Indian peoples.
Of great importance to Rothenberg's view of translation is his determination, as he has said again and again, to get as far away as he can from writing (1968; 1991). Just as his former colleague and fellow translator Dennis Tedlock has committed his translation procedures to the production of what Tedlock calls a "performable translation" (13), so, too, does Rothenberg also—often at least, if not always—produce performable translations, translations, indeed, which he has on many occasions performed. (And, I might note, my own response to his performances, a response that seems to be consistent with what I have heard from others who have heard him, finds them to have great power.) This is not to say, unfortunately, that I believe the translations from Native American literatures Rothenberg has done fully achieve the goals he has stated. On the page, for example, Rothenberg privileges the visual in ways that do not, in my opinion, provide parallels for the aural. There is also a thor-
oughly Western subjectivistic individualism—e.g., as he admits, he does things frequently as they feel right to him —to his work that is probably all but inescapable but which nonetheless obtrudes upon any close approach to the cultural bases of tribal performances. And, as Sequoya has pointed out in a comment on Rothenberg's essay (personal communication), there remains in the forefront of his project the desire for self-transformation which (without denying the integrity of Rothenberg's commitment to social transformation as well) is quite alien to traditional performers. All of this notwithstanding, I would still say (or perhaps merely repeat) that Rothenberg's translations may nonetheless have possibilities, tentative though they may be, for the material practice of an ethnocriticism—so far as this may be possible for Native American literatures.