An Abstract of the Thesis Of

AN ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS OF

Ryan Lackey for the degree of Master of Arts in English presented on April 11, 2018.

Title: Leslie Marmon Silko and the New Sincerity.

Abstract approved: ______Raymond J. Malewitz

One reading of the post-postmodern literary period argues that as formal aesthetics have (re)engaged with ethics there has been a concomitant move to treat literature as a space of ethical potential. Adam Kelly has called this attitude, when combined with the appropriation of certain metafictional and postmodern techniques, the “New Sincerity”; associated authors coalesce around a common response to the solipsism of postmodernity as literary mode and cultural episteme. New Sincerity fiction attempts to restore nonironic engagement with spiritual and ethical concerns through affective, polyphonic, and performative avenues.

But the New Sincerity fails in its rehabilitation and redirection of contemporary aesthetics and has thus invited criticism regarding its inability to address the urgency of minoritarian identities. We ought to refigure New Sincerity, reaffirming its efforts towards reparative and non-subjective discourse without re-inscribing the white and male. To this end, a thorough reading of Leslie Marmon Silko’s work illuminates a minoritarian critique of postmodern that predates other New Sincerity authors and encourages an expansion of the definitions and canons of the post-postmodern and New

Sincerity.

Leslie Marmon Silko and the New Sincerity

by Ryan Lackey

A THESIS

submitted to

Oregon State University

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

Presented April 11, 2018 Commencement June 2018

Master of Arts thesis of Ryan Lackey presented on April 11, 2018

APPROVED:

Major Professor, representing English

Director of the School of Writing, Literature, and Film

Dean of the Graduate School

I understand that my thesis will become part of the permanent collection of Oregon State University libraries. My signature below authorizes release of my thesis to any reader upon request.

Ryan Lackey, Author

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author wishes to thank his thesis advisor, Ray Malewitz, and his thesis committee members, Neil Davison and Anita Helle. The author also extends his thanks to Susan Bernadin, graduate council representative, as well as the collected faculty and staff of the Oregon State University School of Writing, Literature, and Film. The author would like also to acknowledge the community of graduate students who have made Oregon State University a wonderful place to live and work.

This project would have been impossible without the ongoing and unwavering support of Russel Laubscher, Isabella Anderson, and Nathan Jordan.

Likewise, this project rests upon the teaching and guidance of the George Fox University English Department: Bill Jolliff, Melanie Mock, Gary Tandy, Kathy Heininge, and Abigail Favale.

Finally, this project is for Ashley Geissler, from whom all the best things originate.

Lackey 6

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Introduction.………………………………………………………………………..1

Chapter One.……………………………………………………………………...... 7

Chapter Two………………………………………………………………………..27

Conclusion………………………………………………………………………….51

Notes ……………………………………………………………………………….58

Works Cited ………………………………………………………………………..64

Lackey 1

Introduction

Leslie Marmon Silko and the Postmodern

In “Here’s an Odd Artifact for the Fairy-Tale Shelf,” her review of Louise Erdrich’s novel

The Beet Queen, Leslie Marmon Silko censures the postmodernism she sees as underpinning the novel. While she commends Erdrich for her deft exploration of her characters’ interiorities, Silko finds fault with the perceived inaccuracy of the Native American experience in The Beet Queen, which displaces the complexities of historical and political oppression in favor of a neoliberal fantasy in which difficulties for Native Americans arise only from the failures of individual willpower. What’s more, she contends, in Erdrich’s world, reservation life remains conveniently off-stage, with Native characters happy to either assimilate or disappear. As she contends, The Beet Queen is built upon a

Reaganite cosmology, in which “all misery, suffering, and loss are self-generated, just as conservative

Republicans have been telling us for years,” and so Silko designates The Beet Queen as an “eloquent example of the political climate in America” (181, 184). Preoccupied with its own complex machinery of character and formal technique, The Beet Queen deflects its ethical imperative to accurately present the complexities—and oppressions—of Native life, and so forfeits its narrative power. By characterizing Erdrich’s prose as all veneer—“sleek” and “polished” and “pared lean”1— and positioning such prose as paradigmatic of self-referential, neolatrous postmodern fiction, Silko questions the depth of all such postmodern writing, as well as its influences: “Erdrich’s prose is an outgrowth of academic, post-modern, so-called experimental influences” (178, 179).

Critics including Susan Castillo have taken Silko to task for a narrowly bounded definition of the “authentically” Native and a subsequently deluded notion of ethnicity as “a stable, unchanging category” (18). As Castillo argues, Silko’s inflexibility makes little sense; Silko is a mixed-heritage writer (as is Erdrich, who holds membership in the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa), and

Ceremony is centered on two mixed-heritage characters—anhedonic veteran Tayo and unorthodox

Lackey 2 healer Old Betonie—who freely modify traditional healing ceremonies in order to better respond to contemporary urgencies.

Moreover, given that Silko asserts that “self-referential writing is light-years away from shared or communal experience that underlies oral narrative and modern fiction,” so solipsistic it might be incapable of “refer[ing] itself to any world beyond,” what are we to make of the postmodern influence that Castillo spotlights in Ceremony (179, 180)? As she notes, Ceremony exhibits the same “ontological flicker” of the postmodern— “an aesthetic of discontinuity, heteroglossia, and difference”—that Silko dislikes in The Beet Queen (although Castillo allows that Silko “would probably reject the label ‘postmodern’ in no uncertain terms”) (20). Indeed, Ceremony’s nonlinearity, sense of fragmentation, and multimodality (prose, poetry, and visual art all appear in the text) seem to qualify Ceremony, at least formally, for membership in the American postmodern tradition. Silko’s major novels fit chronologically, too: the publication of Ceremony in 1977 followed Gravity’s Rainbow by four years and preceded John Barth’s LETTERS by two. Appearing at the far end of the postmodern arc, 1990’s Almanac of the Dead seems a close cousin to any encyclopedic postmodern novel, an 800-page doorstopper whose vignette-chapters wind through drugged-out bacchanals, multitudes of complexly associated characters, and DeLillo-esque explications of technology and visual culture.2

That Silko’s work fits so well into—or, at the very least, seems proximally related to—the

American postmodern tradition makes the movement’s absence from Silko scholarship especially surprising. While scholarship on Silko’s work has done much to expound the confluence of the

Laguna and American narrative traditions, as well as the complexities of her formal and multimedia storytelling techniques, relatively little work has explicitly positioned Silko’s work as a response to postmodernism.3 Many of the critical voices who do engage Silko’s work within the contexts of postmodernism usually do so as part of postcolonial paradigms that either attempt to rebuke the

Lackey 3 ongoing and oppressive influence of Western discourses on Native cultures or pursue reconciliatory possibilities.4 For example, in his argument for “dialogic” over “dialectic” critical attitudes towards

Native texts, David Moore articulates a “positive, postcolonial postmodernism” as an escape from the inflexibility of Native/European and colonized/colonizer binaries (“Decolonizing Criticism”).

Similarly, Elvira Pulitano’s excellent Towards a Native American Critical Theory advocates a syncretism between the “oral tradition” of Native American narrative and “Western” critical theory as a productive method of reading, which is founded on her observation that “a number of Native

American writers have developed discursive strategies” that together form “the beginning of . . . a complex, hybridized project” rooted in “Native American oral tradition and Native epistemology” as well as Western critical theories (3).5 But while Pulitano admires Ceremony (which she quotes to conclude her book) as the “Native American text [that best] explores the complex interplay between women, land, and ritual,” she denies Silko a chapter; in fact, her text contains only three references to Silko or her texts (46).

This critical oversight might be understood as a phenomenon of critical history. Much of the extant scholarship on Indigenous texts was written before the emergence in the late 1990s and early

2000s of suppositions regarding what the post-postmodern might be. It might even predate, one might argue, a definitional solidification of postmodernism proper, if such a thing is possible;

Moore’s essay appeared in 1994, Karl Kroeber’s in 1987, and the collection Narrative Chance:

Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures (edited by Gerald Vizenor) in 1989. Critics have yet to place Silko alongside other contemporary authors such as David Foster Wallace, George

Saunders, Jennifer Egan, Helen Oyeyemi, and Hanya Yanagihara, who, as they coalesce around the twilight of late postmodernism, pursue what Adam Kelly calls a “postmodernism, then” (“Beginning with Postmodernism” 392). As a result, although Silko (as well as other Native authors, including

Vizenor, Sherman Alexie, and Paula Gunn Allen) has rightfully enjoyed an increased visibility in

Lackey 4 anthologies and collections of contemporary and postmodern American literatures, a fuller explication of Silko’s location within that assemblage remains necessary.6 While other critics have positioned the Indigenous fictional mode as “pre-postmodern,” if we mean to modify our discussions that see “mainstream” post-postmodernism—or postmodernism, then—as a development arising only from within the postmodernism it critiques, we must cease ignoring texts and voices who stand adjacent to postmodernism and dominant literary culture.

Among the contemporary writers of the “postmodernism, then” moment referenced above,

David Foster Wallace is most frequently cited as the ur-post-postmodernist, particularly for his novel Infinite Jest and his work that followed. As it happens, Silko’s Almanac resembles no other novel so much as Infinite Jest. Amidst the debauchery and moments of bleak humor, both novels depict battles against solipsism, which is epitomized as a force of destruction and spiritual nullification: the

Entertainment, in Jest, and the “devourers” in Almanac. As in Jest, a thematic key to Almanac is its relationship to its gnomon, its namesake; the appearance of texts-within-texts is a metafictional hallmark. In Jest this relationship is heterocosmic; Jest attempts to bring about the opposite of the solipsistic void exemplified by the Entertainment (a video titled “Infinite Jest”) creates, while both

Almanac of the Dead and its interior “Almanac of the Dead,” based on the K’iche’ Popol Vuh, predict, and perhaps offer a resolution to, the devourers’ “sorcery.”7 This likeness between Wallace and Silko is especially relevant to considerations of Silko’s location in the development of American literary aesthetics. After all, Adam Kelly uses Wallace’s work to ground his description of the “New

Sincerity,” a group of contemporary writers who seem to share a set of literary principles: an adoption of “single-entendre principles” and a rejection of wry irony. For Kelly, the authors of the

New Sincerity attempt to identify and alleviate the shortcomings of literary postmodernism: its tendency towards solipsism, its fatuous excesses, and its inefficacy in providing substantive cultural critique. While retaining something of the postmodern aesthetic—particularly its metafictional

Lackey 5 techniques and the collision of the banally pop and the absurd—New Sincerity writers advocate for what Wallace calls the “single-entendre” principles of sincerity, the rejection of irony and suspicion in favor of the serious treatment of the “truly valuable in human life—traits such as love, trust, faith and responsibility” (139). Such refigurations, according to Kelly, demands a sincerity rooted not in individual expression but social performance and uncertainty.8

Given the New Sincerity’s scrutiny of postmodernism, the interesting but circumstantial resemblance between Almanac and Jest betokens deeper resonances between Silko’s work and

Wallace’s in their analyses of and responses to postmodernism. When read together, Silko’s critique of Erdrich and Wallace’s polemic against postmodernism in his early essay “E Unibus Pluram” embody this harmony. In “E Unibus,” Wallace catalogues the shortcomings of postmodernism, including the aforementioned irony and self-satisfied self-referentiality, as well as a paranoiac fear of vulnerability and ridicule. Together, these phenomena constitute the solipsism (the “great despair and stasis”) that saturates American culture both pop- and literary (49). Assuming that ironic and self-conscious writing, which was once “used so effectively to rebel,” has been co-opted by the very culture it once critiqued and so has become “dilute and malign” (68), Wallace questions postmodernism’s capability for anything other than impressive superficiality—what he calls “verbal stunt-pilotry” (“Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness” 62). In a similar vein, Silko maintains that such fiction retains the appearance of power but directs that power nowhere, or toward the wrong ends. This sort of fiction—which alludes to but is not itself something that can “alter our experience of time and reality” is rendered solipsistic (Notes on Almanac of the Dead 140). As Silko maintains,

“Self-referential writing has an ethereal clarity and shimmering beauty because no history or politics intrudes to muddy the well of pure necessity contained within language itself” (“Odd Artifact” 179).

So concerned with arranging and exploring the “possible relationships” between words, this solipsistic fiction “reflects the isolation and alienation of the individual” but can do nothing to

Lackey 6 alleviate it, having lost its referential power (179). To combat such tendencies, Wallace calls for a generation of American writers identified as “anti-rebels,” who embrace what he terms in Infinite Jest the “après-garde” and thereby “endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles” and embrace

“reverence and conviction” over “hip fatigue” (81). With this definition in mind, we read with some irony Susan Castillo’s admonishment of writers (perhaps, in her mind, like Silko herself) who evince a “nostalgic desire to return to nineteenth-century aesthetic standards” (19), as this is precisely the accusation Wallace predicted: “The new rebels . . . risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity” (81).

This sentiment is not unique to Castillo. Sven Birkerts, in his unenthusiastic review of

Almanac, contends that Silko’s belief in the political power of narrative and prophecy is “tethered to airy nothing . . . naïve to the point of silliness” (352). Again, such derision is precisely what Wallace expected post-postmodern “anti-rebels” to garner. What’s more, if we consider Birkerts’s critique of

Silko alongside his adoration of Infinite Jest, we find that he associates Wallace not with the anti- rebels but the postmodern, first-order rebels, lauding Jest for “carrying on the Pynchonian celebration of the renegade spirit” (“The Alchemist’s Retort”). Contrary to Birkerts’s readings, I posit that, as Wallace unfolds in Jest the break with postmodernism he describes in “E Unibus,”

Silko suggests that postmodern fiction, while apt at constructing labyrinthine subjectivities, is too superficial, individualistic, and ahistorical to accurately contain and present the cyclical and communal narrative she champions.9 This low appraisal of postmodernism extends beyond her critique of Erdrich’s novel and appears throughout Silko’s oeuvre. Accordingly, I suggest that Silko, in her acknowledgement of the limitations of postmodernism and her attempt to reinvigorate fiction through the grafting of postmodern techniques and the Laguna oral tradition, consequently shares the concerns and aims of New Sincerity fiction.

Lackey 7

Thus, the following two chapters are divided into, borrowing a binary of Wallace’s, diagnosis and cure. The first chapter explores how Silko levels a New Sincerity critique towards attitudes of suspicion and modes of expression predicated on rigid subjectivity. The second examines how

Ceremony offers performance and improvisation as reparative modes, depicting, and offering the reader participation in, these modes through metafictional techniques.

Chapter One

Diagnosing Ceremony

Ceremony tells the story of Tayo, a Laguna veteran of the Pacific theater who returns home in a physical and spiritual malaise. The novel is rife with examples of storytelling and narratives, not all of which are positive. Early in the novel, Tayo—still emotionally sickly, disaffected, and anhedonic—gathers with the other Laguna veterans at a bar, and together they attempt to tell stories. As the narration shows, the veterans’ goal is to establish a community and thereby rediscover a sense of identity through the act of storytelling: “Here they were, trying to bring back that old feeling, that feeling they belonged to America the way they felt during the war” (43). But this attempt to claim membership in a narrative community fails. The stories work no restorative power; instead, Tayo breaks down and cries, and eventually, after arguing with his ostensible friend Emo, stabs him with a broken bottle.

In this chapter, we turn to the terminology of diagnosis to investigate similar examples of failed narrative. Both Wallace and Silko express a New Sincerity critique of postmodern fiction as failed narrative, insofar as its formal innovation does little to either critique or restore. It can neither

“comfort the disturbed [nor] disturb the comfortable,” terms Wallace uses in his interview with

Larry McCaffery to describe his ideal fiction (McCaffery). In the same interview, Wallace describes his essay “E Unibus Pluram” as “a try at a comprehensive diagnosis” of the state of American

Lackey 8 fiction and its relationship to popular culture, and the earliest critical responses to Wallace seized upon the statement (McCaffery). In Understanding David Foster Wallace (2003), Marshall Boswell claims that Wallace’s overarching goal was always to provide texts capable of operating “both as diagnosis and cure” (17). Eventually, this reading solidified into what Kelly deems “the implicit agreement among so many critics with Wallace’s professed premise that fiction should act as both “‘diagnosis and cure,’ that it should be viewed not primarily in terms of aesthetic representation, but of ethical intervention” (“Birth of a Discipline”). Silko makes the same diagnosis. As I’ve argued, Silko agrees that postmodernism offers little solace from solipsism, and she contends it lacks the ethical rigor needed to address the ongoing injustices suffered by Native communities. Nor, she contends, can postmodernism fully present those communities and their cultural and narrative vibrancy. To correct this problem, Silko gestures towards a refigured relationship to narrative and language that is less concerned with subjectivity and that prefers externality to internality. From this argument, we understand the familial resemblance between Silko’s disapproval of Erdrich’s stylistic obsession with subjective interiority, and Wallace’s declaration to McCaffery that “[r]ecursive metafiction worships the narrative consciousness, makes it the subject of the text” (“A Conversation with David Foster

Wallace”).

Thus, we can say that Wallace and Silko share a concern with narratives that do not offer some escape from the interiority of the subject. Ceremony associates these failed narratives with certain techniques of production and reception, storytelling and story-listening. On one hand, these failed narratives, emerging from positions of expressive subjectivity, evince no concern for the listener or the larger community. On the other, they encourage suspicious and paranoid patterns of reading. As we will see, Ceremony literalizes this suspicious, antagonistic reading through the image of the uranium mine: an image both of extraction and of the suspicious asphyxiation of narrative possibility. Approached antagonistically, argues Ceremony, the power of narrative is, at best, nullified,

Lackey 9 and at worst failed narrative can become dangerous, a tool of the witchery, the spiritual malevolence that haunts Ceremony. As phenomenologist Wolfgang Iser observes, if narrative power, “the very heart of the work, can be lifted out of the text, the work is then used up—through interpretation, literature is turned into an item for consumption” (4). Such a nullification is the goal of the witchery, which seizes upon failed narrative to achieve further division between peoples and cultures. The chief sign of the influence of the witchery on the white people, claims the text, is the “sterility of their art,” which it likens to a predatory drive that “continue[s] to feed off the vitality of other cultures” and which brings about “the dissolution of their consciousness into dead objects . . .

Hollow and lifeless as a witchery clay figure” (204). By “destroying the white people faster than it was destroying Indian people,” the witchery smothers white art, and the result, significantly, resembles Wallace’s account of postmodern literature as arrested, “dilute and malign” (“E Unibus”

68). The white art is like “a fragile, pale leaf stem, perfectly formed and dead,” technically and formally irreproachable but without affect, power, or life (204).

In Wallace’s opinion, literary criticism suffers from the same myopia. Self-absorbed fiction, he finds, encounters a similarly insular audience. Like fiction, critical discourse reveals a solipsistic impulse insofar as it maintains a concern with its own stylistics to the detriment of communicative clarity. He takes Fredric Jameson to task in “Authority and American Usage” as an exemplar of this academic incomprehensibility, which Wallace figures as a symptom of fear (115-116).10 Thus

Wallace’s diagnosis encompasses both the production of literature and its consumption, both writing and reading. The postmodern falters as strategy of authorship; associated methods of reading— especially the suspicious and paranoid forms, which posit an antagonistic reader-text relationship— also limit our ability to understand and experience how texts, postmodern or otherwise, point towards and enact cure. For this reason, New Sincerity is aligned against these antagonistic hermeneutics that Paul Ricoeur and Rita Felski call suspicious and which Eve Sedgwick terms

Lackey 10 paranoid. If American fiction means to tussle sincerely with what Wallace calls “the stuff that’s really important”—including “greed, freedom, obsession, reason, faith”—then the ways of reading that fiction must similarly be prepared to lower defenses (“Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky” 265). Silko, too, finds that these suspicious and paranoid attitudes at best are incapable of accessing communal and spiritual ways of knowing—and, at worst, perpetuate oppression. And, like Wallace, Silko finds fault with the academy, suggesting that there is something specifically “academic” about the sort of postmodern writing that “reflects the isolation and alienation of the individual who shares nothing in common with other human beings” (“Odd Artifact” 179).

Once sustained by attitudes of irony and the self-conscious techniques of postmodernism, the distance between mass culture—the zeitgeisty sensibility of a generational moment—and literature necessary for effective commentary collapses as those very attitudes and techniques are enfolded into the prevailing culture itself. Because of this intermingling, American fiction can respond only feebly to the unchecked ascendency of freedom as self-evident virtue whose increase we ought to invariably pursue. Increasingly, Kelly has come to use the term “neoliberal” to describe this “autonomy that has come to serve an ideological function under neoliberal capitalism” (“David

Foster Wallace and New Sincerity Aesthetics: A Reply to Edward Jackson And Joel Nicholson”).

This neoliberal concept of the subject gathers together not only post-Reagan economic and political libertarian freedom but also more generally individualistic (what Wallace might call solipsistic) effects of American culture. As Wallace describes in The Pale King, these effects have their roots in the economic co-option of 60s-era individualism, and the appearance of economic and advertising rhetorics in political and popular discourses. While Kelly favors the term “neoliberal” to name this cultural attitude that, as R. Jay Magill describes it, reifies the Romantic ideal of the “real, authentic person, some fundamental being who exists prior to society” (Magill 19), Wallace prefers the appellation “solipsism,” denoting not only its strict philosophical sense—selfhood-as-ontology—but

Lackey 11 a figurative and spiritual solipsism in which the subject, discretely and firmly bounded, relegates everything exterior to it as mere means to some personal end. In Zadie Smith's words, “Wallace has both [of solipsism's] Latin roots (solus, “alone”; ipse, “self”) and philosophical history in mind (the theory that only the self really exists or can be known)” (Smith 266). Wallace's addicts in Infinite Jest form solipsistic lives through their various addictions, and Kelly calls such solipsists “neoliberal entrepreneurs of the self” (“Reply to Edward Jackson and Joel Nicholson-Roberts” 8). These dangers of neoliberalism hidden in the form of the discrete subject inform the New Sincerity’s preference for performance over expression—and Silko, likewise, associates what Kelly calls

“expressive subjectivity,” the cultural and discursive priority of the individual and the reification of purity and authenticity, with the exploitation of Indigenous cultures, peoples, and lands.

As an example, we can look closely at the first story shared at the bar, an unidentified speaker’s memory of an old seduction, we note the frequency of the “I” as the speaker insists, again and again, on his subjectivity: “I put on that uniform”; “by God I was a U.S. Marine”; “I was a big spender” (40-41). It seems the speaker, so obsessed with the definition of his own identity, cannot attend to his audience. That is, the unnamed veteran is not a storyteller but rather a speaker, concerned with the expression of his personal discourse, not with the establishment of community through a cooperatively formed narrative. At the same time, we cannot miss the veterans’ appeal to nationalistic identity. Both the veterans’ wish to recover “that feeling they belonged to America” and the declaration “by God I was a U.S. Marine” suggest a double failure of narrative. In the immediate sense, the veterans’ stories, as subjective expressions, fail to enact any sort of restorative power; simultaneously, the metanarrative in which these smaller stories are subsumed—the historical and mythic nationalism of American exploitative violence—is revealed as equally hollow. Unsurprisingly, these stories, far from working a restorative power, stoke distrust and anger between the veterans— feelings of suspicion that mirror the antagonistic reading attitudes that coincide with expressive

Lackey 12 subjectivity. In the dark congruence of the production and the reception, solipsistic storytelling is met with a solipsistic reading.

These, then, are the two diagnoses on which this chapter focuses: the primacy of the (“pure” and “authentic”) expressive subject, and the malignity of suspicious and paranoid hermeneutics. As

Ceremony moves through Tayo’s attempts to awaken from his affective, social, and spiritual torpor after the horrors of the Bataan Death March, and his subsequent work with Old Betonie to combat the spiritual malevolence called the witchery, the text lays out its critique, positioning expressive subjectivity and suspicion as obstacles at best—and at worst, implements of violence, division, and oppression.

Expressive Subjectivity

Fundamental to Kelly’s description of the New Sincerity is the ethos of neoliberalism under which New Sincerity writers work and to which they respond. For Kelly, neoliberalism extends beyond David Harvey’s political-economic definition to include a hegemonic cultural assumption of the discursive priority of the acting and speaking subject, hence New Sincerity’s dismissal of the expressive subject as the locus of sincerity.11 Kelly points to George Saunders’s fiction as an example of stories that manipulate characters’ access to language to avoid this “expressive subjectivity,” which he associates with Trilling’s old, inner-outer sincerity (46). Striving for sincerity in a postmodern and neoliberal context entails weakening the borders of the discrete subject, who then might engage in a discursive or narrative community. Insincerity then becomes associated with a strong subject position and attitudes of manipulation and acquisition. Indeed, Kelly characterizes the insincere, and the insincerely sincere, as those who “exhibit only motive” rather than other-directed

“intent” (8). Unflatteringly, they are “neoliberal entrepreneurs of the self” (8).

Lackey 13

For Silko, the mutual reinforcement of neoliberalism and the expressive subject are especially dangerous, given neoliberalism’s ability to capitalize upon notions of cultural authenticity.

To assert a definitive, personal claim on cultural authenticity means assuming a position of expressive subjectivity, a position of privilege and, oftentimes, a function of neoliberal (that is, hegemonic and oppressive) interests.12 Closely tied to notions of authenticity are discourses of purity, against which Kelly aligns New Sincerity. While purity and contamination constitute a useful conceptual binary for New Sincerity thought, they assume heightened significance for Silko and her denunciations of cultural and political oppression.13 Importantly, Silko affiliates postmodernism with hegemonic discourses of separation and boundary, and so New Sincerity’s celebration of contamination offers a narrative method of combating discourses that perpetuate oppression. As

Kelly sees it, not only does postmodernism, specifically the solipsism of fragmentation and self- referentiality, blunt narrative’s restorative power; this solipsism or internality also reinscribes the discourses of neoliberal purity most in need of restoration. In her review of The Beet Queen, Silko makes this point by associating “white blood” with the “abstract mental activity—fantasy, desire and willfulness” that characterizes the internality of contemporary literature (183). Ultimately, Silko finds, these interlaced discourses of purity, authenticity, and subjectivity render narrative inert; in her novels, those who would find or restore narrative and so re-enter into community must slough off such temptations, while her villains act consistently within these discourses.

We see the commingling of these discourses of purity with hegemonic, structural power in

Almanac of the Dead. The novel’s villains are nearly unanimous in their obsession with purity and pedigree, and the text gorily illustrates the dangers of such obsessions. In particular, the golf-course cabal of upper-class men, whose members represent literal social and political institutions (they are judges, police chiefs, senators), suggest in their obsession with purity (and the hyperviolence it generates) the implication of those institutions in historical and ongoing oppression, which often

Lackey 14 relies upon discourses of boundary, purity, and invulnerability. For example, one member, Judge

Arne, meticulously breeds purebred hounds—whom he proceeds to rape. This investment in pedigree is reflected more generally in the cabal’s shared concern with “blue bloods,” an imagined conflation of racial purity, political power, and wealth. Fittingly for these institutional men, their cruelties and fetishes revolve around power, violence, and control manifested both firsthand

(though, for example, rape) and more subtly, systemically (through manipulations of the legal system).

But Silko’s work illustrates the vampiricism of neoliberalism on an individual scale, too, apart from the maneuvers of the ultra-rich and ruling classes. Indeed, both Ceremony and Almanac are rife with examples of the ironic results of neoliberal logic, which ultimately consumes the subjects whose freedoms it claims to safeguard. The most obvious of these examples are the direct and indirect transmutation of bodies into capital; physical bodies, the animated land, and the body of cultural tradition all promise value as resources. We can return to the image that began this chapter—Tayo and the other veterans at the bar—as an example: especially pertinent are the war checks the Laguna veterans receive, the “[c]ash from disability checks earned with shrapnel in the neck at Wake Island or shell shock on Iwo Jima; rewards for surviving the Bataan Death March” (40). These checks bankroll the veterans’ bar tabs, “good times . . . courtesy of the U.S. Government,” with which Tayo and the others wall themselves off from each other and the outside world. The veterans have survived the war only in a strictly biological sense; though functional, the bodies of the veterans have been sacrificed and reduced to capital, rendered hollow and insensate. That is, a resource has been extracted—both flesh in the material sense, as wounds and scars, and the spirit, which is replaced by the influence of the witchery.14 In exchange, the veterans receive checks rather than medical attention or care, and so are considered economic expenditures rather than human beings. With their veterans’ benefits they are “free” to participate and act economically, and are thereby

Lackey 15

“restored” to wholeness in a neoliberal logic. But this sort of freedom is materially insufficient and spiritually irrelevant. Similarly, Tayo’s constant vomiting is a sort of extraction—his vomiting is an effect of the war, and so is also an effect of the postwar American economy: the profitability of war and the military-industrial complex. While the other veterans, like Emo, do not retch as often as

Tayo, they, too, become literally less substantial and hazy with constant drinking—Tayo notes that

Harley does not “seem to feel anything at all” (23).

A similar—and similarly gruesome—instance of the (almost Faustian) flesh-for-cash bargain appears in Almanac, in which Trigg harvests organs and fluids from Tucson’s homeless. Trigg subscribes to the ethics of the especially malevolent neoliberalism Kelly describes, in which the subject, in his effort at economic viability, is and ought to be free to act upon his environment

(including other subjects) as resources. In a text whose characters are divided by their allegiance or opposition to the influence of the destroyers, the witchery, Trigg stands out as an archetype of neoliberal cruelty, loyal only to himself. In his solipsism he plans to build an empire of organ- harvesting facilities on the backs (or, more literally, on the organs and plasma) of the underclass.

Whereas in Ceremony the transmutation of life into capital operates symbolically through government funds, Almanac makes it revoltingly overt. What’s more, we cannot forget that Trigg, through the funds and research his harvesting garners, means to cure his paraplegia: Trigg attempts to restore the

“purity” of his subjectivity, to return to (we might say) “whole and authentic” personhood.

Not only physical bodies but also more abstract concepts of authenticity and cultural performance are vulnerable to co-option by economic power.15 Below Old Betonie’s house is the space in which this sort of “authentic” ceremony occurs: the Gallup Ceremonial, a sort of faux-

Native carnival and an unabashed economic spectacle. The Ceremonial is “good for tourist business” because the white tourists enjoy seeing “Indians and Indian dances” and the “chance to buy Indian jewelry and Navajo rugs” (116). Of course, the Ceremonial is “organized by the white

Lackey 16 men there,” and it becomes a spurious, shadowy version of cultural encounter, corrupted by racist appropriation (116). The text is careful to list tribal affiliations, noting that “[d]ance groups from the

Pueblos were paid to come,” and “they got Plains hoop dancers, and flying-pole dancers from

Northern Mexico” to perform alongside “Indian cowboys [riding] bucking horses and Brahma bulls” (116). Thus, in place of the sincere cultural plurality embodied by Tayo and urged by Betonie, the Gallup Ceremonial is merely authenticity-as-simulacrum, flattening myriad cultural identities and traditions into pure spectacle.16 All tribal affiliations are reduced into orientalized exotica, generalized alterity: a lucrative spectacle. In other words, the Gallup Ceremonial displays only a reductive, even pop-media sense of “Indian-ness,” because to do otherwise would be to introduce the historical specificity of oppression and genocide, and would therefore be economically untenable. Thus the

Ceremonial destroys authenticity with a spectacle of faux-authenticity, replacing the authentic cognizance of history with the “authenticity” of scopophilia and economic exchange. The white tourists pay not for a moment of cultural dialogue, but rather to have their expectations of abjected, falsely monolithic Native culture fulfilled; there is no sincerity possible. The text mirrors this reduction of diverse traditions and cultures by employing the false catchall “Indian” to describe the peoples and cultures the Ceremonial presents. This reduction is undertaken in the name of economic virility: “[t]he Gallup merchants raised prices in motels and restaurants all Ceremonial week, and make a lot of money” (116). In this way, the Ceremonial becomes an instance of postmodern pastiche17 as capitalist initiative, what Jameson calls “the random cannibalization of all the styles of the past” into a “new spatial logic of the simulacrum” (18). Of course, even the “styles of the past” here carry an invented authenticity, as the colonial, atavistic view of the Ceremonial transforms Native culture into the white cultural imaginary of John Wayne westerns.

The Ceremonial’s audience demonstrates the effects of the witchery: transmuting culture from messy and multiple into purified spectacle. Similarly, the text discriminates between

Lackey 17 communitarian ceremony and the spectacular “salvation” of Christianity, which “separated the people . . . encouraging each person to stand alone, because Jesus Christ would save only the individual soul” (68). Thus Ceremony posits Christianity as a neoliberal religion, in which salvation assumes the discrete, expressive subject.18 Meanwhile, Tayo’s Aunt, who serves as a foil to elders like

Grandma and Ku’oosh who continue to observe ceremonial practice, does not appear especially concerned even with the state of her personal soul but, rather like the Ceremonial, transforms

Christianity from a spiritual engagement, however individualized, into a social spectacle. Through adherence to a spectacular Christianity, her performance of which is not liturgical but superficial, she pantomimes belief for the sake of social currency.

The pitfall of neoliberalism is why Old Betonie refuses Tayo’s offer to pay for his first healing ceremony—not merely out of generosity but because the ceremony Tayo is to complete rests upon a dynamic of exchange crucial to New Sincerity: the gift. Drawing upon Derrida’s work on the gift’s signification, Kelly theorizes that New Sincerity finds a double operation in the image of the gift: uncertainty and intent. As Kelly postulates, “sincerity has the same structure as the gift: it can always be taken for manipulation, and this risk is fundamental” (“David Foster Wallace and the New

Sincerity” 140). That is, the motivational gymnastics of gift-giving—am I giving this gift altruistically, or as manipulation?—distill the same tension within the indeterminacy of sincerity after postmodernism. Such questions, says Kelly, have no certain answers, but uncertainty itself establishes a potential space for self-conscious attempts at sincerity: “true sincerity happens, is in fact made possible by the impossibility of its certain identification” (140). If sincerity were enacted through a simple and perfectly known causality, its ethical power would dissipate. Against the omnipresence of neoliberal logic, New Sincerity emphasizes the irreconcilability between acts of sincerity figured as gifts and the acquisitive principle behind economic exchange.19 To pay for the

Lackey 18 ceremony would invoke the neoliberal logics of exchange that rely upon individual subjects and which motivate the sort of lucrative extraction that occurs at the uranium mine.

According to Ceremony, the emphasis on authenticity, in addition to its easy cooption by neoliberalism, perpetuates the artificial boundaries the ceremony works to disassemble. This discourse of boundaries is western and colonial, epitomized historically by the rectangular division of land into homesteads. Tayo engages in boundary transgression when he slices open a fence built by a white rancher in order to free his family’s cattle.20 When Tayo’s illness turns especially acute,

Auntie balks at Old Grandma’s suggestion of a medicine man: “Someone will say it’s not right.

They’ll say, ‘Don’t do it. He’s not full blood anyway’” (33). In this reference to authenticity-as- bloodline we recall Susan Castillo’s assertion that Silko’s pan of The Beet Queen presupposes an overly reductive notion of authenticity. In quite the opposite way, I argue that Silko rewrites cultural authenticity as narrative sincerity, defining groups by their relationships to restorative narratives and thereby their resistance to oppressive forces. Hence Tayo’s identity is multiple and dispersed rather than conventionally authentic; not only is he mixed-heritage, but, as Jude Todd points out, Tayo is also the name of a mythic Laguna hero and carries a sense of androgyny or berdachism (162). In his very name, therefore, Tayo suggests a fluidity, or at least non-binaristic, form of identity. Similarly,

Tayo operates metatextually as character and a mythic archetype, personifying one of the pathways between Ceremony as a single novel and the network of narratives—Silko’s “web”—in which it operates. We might consider this operation a sort of translation in form, as Tayo’s double-status connects the oral mythology and the written novel.

In a comparable way, narrative links the various groups of Almanac, who maintain internal cohesion and cooperate (often unknowingly) through communal relationships to various texts as resistance to oppression. Oftentimes, these texts are translated, adopted, and interpreted, and this play with texts reinforces the turn away from the traditionally “authentic.” On one hand, Lecha and

Lackey 19

Seese translate the Almanac, the homeless revolutionary Clinton translates the material from his class on African history for the radio, and guerilla leader La Escapia translates Marx—who, the text claims, himself translated an Indigenous notion of justice for his European readership. On the other hand, the golf-course cabal, gangster matriarch Leah Blue, and drug-dealer Beaufrey—the agents of witchery and destruction—either ignore narrative entirely or, in the case of the interrogation-torture videos produced by the police department or David’s voyeuristic photos of Eric’s suicide, repurpose forms of narrative and media for cruelty and violence. And, of course, the emphasis on the authenticity of bloodline Auntie epitomizes in Ceremony reappears chillingly in Almanac, whose villains obsess over similar concerns with authentic and pure genealogy. Importantly, this is a sense of purity and authenticity rendered legible in the physical body; these concepts never remain merely concepts but are pursued and coveted as material manifestations. Similarly, Leah Blue works to secure a source of fresh, pure water for her planned city of Venice, Arizona. This source, as it turns out, is a deeply drilled well, another example, like the uranium mine (whose raw material, we note, must be refined), of antagonistic extraction—the image to which we now turn our attention.

Suspicion and Paranoia

In the previous section, we addressed harmful modes of narrative production; now, we turn to parallel modes of reception: namely, suspicion and paranoia. By way of critics Rita Felski and Eve

Sedgwick, we can link these modes to the metaphor of extraction.21 In “Digging Down and Standing

Back,” the second chapter of her book The Limits of Critique, Felski extends a popular metaphor for the reading attitudes of suspicion and paranoia that Paul Ricoeur terms the hermeneutics of suspicion: “uncovering” or “excavating” truth from a text.22 Both these suspicious readings and post-Foucauldian “surface” readings (which, like suspicion, render the text inert and enforce a demilitarized zone between text and reader) use “spatial metaphors of surface and depth” and

Lackey 20 assume “meanings are hidden from sight,” which means “[d]igging is necessary” (56). Such readings are “antagonistic” towards the text, which is positioned as an artifact of psychological repression, hegemonic ideology, or some other force whose existence demands we never take the text at its word—or let it act upon us—lest we be duped and infected. In Wallace’s terms, this “congenital skepticism” has meant artists and critics “have abandoned the field” of moral and ethical engagement (“Joseph Frank’s Dostoyevsky”). Kelly designates this negative hermeneutic as “the prevailing approach to literature and culture that emphasizes what it sees as the blindnesses caused by ideological investment, historical ignorance, and psychological repression” (“David Foster

Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction” 138).

The New Sincerity resists such readings, which fail to either construe the reparative, affective, and spiritual possibilities of texts—or even their ability to convey the basic, “single- entendre” principles like “love, trust, faith and responsibility” (139)23—or to identify the obvious or superficial signs of hegemonic influence, which may no longer be properly hidden.24 As Kelly asserts, truth can “no longer be understood as simply existing beneath the surface, a contingent absence that can be rendered present via the processes of critique” (138). In other words, this presumed canniness of critique to overturn attempts to conceal truth not only fails to recognize the flexibility of hegemonic and oppressive forces but also appears feeble against truths and untruths spoken without apparent feint.25 As Eve Sedgwick suggests, we inhabit “a world where no one need be delusional [or suspicious] to find evidence of systematic oppression” (125), and so “to practice other than paranoid forms of knowing does not, in itself, entail a denial of the reality or gravity of enmity or oppression” (128).26 Or, as Maggie Nelson writes in The Art of Cruelty, “an intelligence focused solely on puncturing . . . may end up deaf, dumb, and blind to other ways of knowing”

(224). Wallace intimates that attitudes of reading designed to dissect the text and either extract its subterranean meaning or dissolve meaning entirely in the always contradictory, post-Foucauldian

Lackey 21 field of discourse accomplish at best half the work. When working in this mode, critics incorrectly conclude “that diagnosis [is] the same as cure,” having mistaken the shattered illusion for a truer mirror (The Pale King 486). In Silko’s work the implications of antagonistic reading are wider and even more serious. Not only damaging the relationship between individuals and narrative, antagonistic reading in Silko’s worldview also pose ontological and cosmological danger when those concepts take narrative forms. Read optimistically, this implies that the restoration of a sincere relationship to narrative is health-granting and regenerative, even soterial.

Interestingly, Silko not only literalizes the suspicion-as-depth metaphor through the terror of the atomic bomb; she also associates suspicion with western epistemology that foments violence and division. Throughout her oeuvre, Silko addresses the fact that the uranium Little Boy—the bomb dropped on Hiroshima—came from a mine on Laguna land, and Ceremony’s climatic (but ultimately bathetic) scene occurs at this mine. In fact, the uranium mine becomes both symbolic image and literal center of the witchery’s malevolent ceremony, “the middle of the witchery’s final ceremonial sand painting . . . a circle of death that devoured people” (246). As Tayo flees the other Laguna veterans, who are hunting him under the influence of the witchery, he arrives near the mine’s entrance and realizes “the pattern of the ceremony was completed there” through the extraction of the uranium ore to form “a monstrous design”; far from hidden or buried, these signs of the witchery are overt and obvious (246). Applying the idea of suspicion as extraction, we see that through a certain sort of epistemogy—western in its science and violent in its ends—the witchery manages to unearth a sort of truth, the destructive power-knowledge of atomic fission, through an antagonism to the land. In the Laguna ontology, the land is itself a sort of a text—Silko cites the land as an indispensable part of the animated narrative of being. As critics of suspicion claim, suspicious and antagonistic reading can only bring about a deconstruction or nullification, an image that realizes a loathsome corporeality in the atomic bomb. In this way the suspicious western

Lackey 22 epistemology forms a dark antithesis to the Laguna narrative epistemology; in Off the Reservation,

Paula Gunn Allen makes the same conclusion, noting that “the making of the Bomb eerily echoes the ancient ritual practices” (107).27 In place of the narrative cycle, we have the circular structure of the Little Boy atomic bomb, ringed with smaller explosives to achieve the sufficient density of critical mass (the “circle of death”). Likewise, the witchery’s ceremony realizes the destructive potential of the bomb rather than Tayo’s restoration of communal health. In place of the sunrise that opens and closes Ceremony, and the nuclear fusion that drives the sun’s glow, we have the nuclear fission of the bomb, which Old Grandma likens to “seeing the sun rise again,” and which enacts on an atomic level the division and separation of western epistemology generally (245). In another sense, the violence of nuclear fission speaks to the ongoing precariousness of the world; even the sun and the sunrise, when put to certain epistemological screws, reveal a shadow-side.

Penelope Kelsey calls this western epistemology, rooted in the literal separation of the earth from itself by the “resource extraction economy,” the philosophy of separation, which she argues is

“a salient feature of EuroWestern epistemology that is antithetical to Indigenous ways of knowing”

(126). Paula Gunn Allen makes this connection explicit, writing that “it is natural . . . to perceive the otherworldly correlations between the Bomb, the mines, and the stories” (104).28 Echoing this sentiment in her essay “Fifth World: The Return of Ma Ah Shra True Ee,” Silko overtly associates the extraction of the mine with the propensity for violence, insinuating that the capacity for violence itself increases with the depth of our digging: “violence in the Americas—against ourselves and against one another—can run as deep, but only as deep, as the deepest shafts with which humankind has pierced the earth” (132). Importantly, these shafts suggest, all at once, an antagonism towards the land, towards the ongoing narratives in which the land participates, and towards the peoples united in and through those narratives. The textual, we might say, is the ontological.

Lackey 23

The effects of extraction are manifested physically on Tayo’s body and symbolically through associations with emptiness and solipsism. Like Hal Incandenza in the unsettling opening scene of

Jest, Tayo begins the text trapped within his hollow interiority, denied an affective experience of the world: “he could not feel anything except a swelling in his belly, a great swollen grief” (8-9).29

Although Tayo is rendered solipsistic not, like Hal, by either hallucinogen, deadly videotape, or especially funky fungus, the interior vacancies the witchery carves into people resemble the voided, intent-less husks who view the Entertainment: “the lies devoured white hearts, and for more than two hundred years white people had worked to fill their emptiness; they tried to glue the hollowness” (191). Thus, when Tayo is beset by temptations towards suspicion, his symptoms—like his frequent vomiting—suggest an emptying-out, an effect of excavation; Tayo, we might say, has been mined. Jude Todd reads Tayo’s unsettled belly as a series of necessary emetic actions on his healing journey, citing the belly as the metaphorical bridge between “the lies fed” to Tayo and his re- ingestion of “the healing stories that will rebalance his life,” and, eventually, Tayo’s pregnancy with new stories (157-158). But we should also note that Tayo’s illness recreates the symptoms of radiation poisoning, the fruits of the extraction: Tayo wastes away. One moment of doubtful suspicion causes Tayo to feel “a strange paralysis” and a “sudden overwhelming fatigue” as “his body [becomes] insubstantial” (194-195).

Importantly, as in Felski’s metaphorical association, Ceremony equates excavation and suspicion as positions of antagonism towards narrative. Unsurprisingly, Tayo’s mere proximity to the mine catalyzes his return to suspicious thinking directed towards the ceremony, the narrative, he means to realize. Throughout the story, Tayo struggles with moments of doubt, during which he levels the sort of criticism towards the ceremony expected from a suspicious paradigm of reading:

He thinks the ceremony “meant nothing at all; it was all in his own head,” and he wonders whether it is not all “crazy, the kind of old-time superstition they teachers at the Indian school used to warn

Lackey 24 him and Rocky about” (194). As he nears the mine, these feelings threaten to overwhelm him. After one such attack—“It was easier to feel and to believe the rumors. Crazy. Crazy Indian. Seeing things.

Imagining things” (242)—Tayo realizes “why he had doubted the ceremony . . . this was their place, and he was vulnerable” (243). This vulnerability is not only a threat of his bodily harm but, more importantly, the possibility of Tayo’s return to suspicion and solipsistic subjectivity. The homonymic relationship between the “mine” dug into the earth and “mine” as a claim to personal ownership is appropriate; the same science that occasioned the uranium mine perpetrates the turn to subjectivity that cleaves the people from the narrative, and which brings about the neoliberal economics of the

Gallup Ceremonial or the war checks, in which stories and bodies are exchanged for cash. These modes of thinking are instilled from Tayo’s childhood; he recalls that “in school . . . science books explained causes and effects,” but failed to inspire like the ceremonies and stories, to do rather than explain (93). That is, unlike the Laguna epistemology built upon story always “alive, always changing and moving,” static Western epistemology lacks the flexibility necessary to combat the witchery (95).

The text makes this opposition crystalline, noting that Tayo “had believed in the stories for a long time, until the teachers at Indian school taught him not to believe in that kind of ‘nonsense’” (19).

Not only does the empiricism of the Indian school deride stories as mere “superstition.”

Tayo remembers that the teacher “held the science textbook up for the class to see the true source of explanations,” suggesting that in order to be visible, truth must be uncovered, and therefore known by the subject. In the same way, the science textbook—a sort of neutered narrative—is held up and presented for the class to see as object firsthand, before it is read or experienced. This attitude encourages an epistemology of only “causes and effects,” an affectless paradigm that confirms an antagonistic stance towards both narrative and the natural world, both of which are relegated to the status of objects. This epistemology stands opposed to the traditional stories, which assume an affective and less positivist knowledge; as Tayo notes, he “never lost the feeling he had in

Lackey 25 his chest” the stories evoked, which “he still felt [were] true, despite all they had taught him in school” (95). Thus, while apparently oppositional, the certitude of scientific empiricism and the solipsistic effects of suspicious reading are mutually reinforcing, and Ceremony brings both together under the terms “European” and “white” as effects of the witchery.

As Eve Sedgwick describes, attitudes of suspicion feed solipsistic impulses.30 Suspicion (or its close cousin paranoia, the term Sedgwick prefers) works to isolate the reader, who is restricted by paranoia’s temporal and epistemological anxieties, to avoid feelings of vulnerability. According to

Sedgwick, paranoia demands “there must be no bad surprises, and because learning of the possibility of a bad surprise would itself constitute a bad surprise, paranoia requires that bad news be always already known” (130). Thus, paranoia is fundamentally solipsistic. Faced with the uncertainty of the future and the threat of reliving the past, paranoia clamors after ahistoricity and the smallest possible ontology; only through the omniscience of solipsism might the paranoid escape uncertainty and concomitant vulnerability. Solipsism is flight from vulnerability and the pursuit of positivism. The goal is not the expansion of knowledge but the reduction of what there is to be known. If positivism proves unsurprisingly elusive, one might attempt the restriction of the ontological (and thereby the epistemological) field into a singularity: the self. Through the solipsistic reduction of all reality into the self, goes the logic, (the illusions of) control and the knowable might again be accessible. Such an agoraphobic finitude, of course, leaves no room for the external, the dialogic, or the spiritual— nothing at all that can act upon the subject.

No reconciliation is possible between this paranoid solipsism and the essential aporia of the

New Sincerity, in which the subject is forever denied certainty and is rendered always vulnerable.

Nor can this paranoia prop up Silko’s sense of nonlinear time, or the work of translation Tayo (and

Lecha and Seese, in Almanac) tackles. A wide and interspersed time is required for the narrative to present “‘versions’ of the same story” that do not “limit experience to “single episodes at single

Lackey 26 times” but rather open space for “any number of things . . . happening at the same place at the same time” (Delicacy 86-87). Thus, at the opening of Ceremony when Tayo sees Josiah’s face affixed to a

Japanese soldier, he confronts headlong this epistemological exclusivity: “all the facts, all the reasons made no difference any more . . . he could follow the logic . . . but he could not feel anything” (8).

Importantly, this confrontational moment is also the catalyst for his eventual healing; as he perceives firsthand the limitations of western epistemology, he subsequently experiences “a swelling in his belly,” an image which recalls Jude Todd’s characterization of Tayo as eventually pregnant with narrative, and which, notably, reverses the expulsive, hollow ethereality haunting Tayo through most of the text.

This healing Silko points towards is explicitly narrative—a healing of narrative, through narrative. As Sedgwick suggests, on the far side of suspicion lies reparative possibility: belief, credulity, even enchantment. Thus, to attend only to Silko’s critique of suspicion, of the subjective mode, is to adopt a shuttered view. We also ought to examine how Silko supplants suspicion and subjectivity with performed, communal, and spiritual possibilities. In doing so, Silko offers a New

Sincerity built upon the restoration of a relationship to a narrative view of reality, not subjective expression or avowal. As Kelly argues, New Sincerity maintains a responsibility for renewal—to merely critique, or deconstruct, or destabilize the postmodern would be to reiterate the same suspicious, negative conceit it finds unfulfilling. Hence New Sincerity’s formal, technical, and experimental attempts to capitalize upon and transform the potential of the act of reading as a space for and performance of empathy, intimacy, redistributed attention—of sincerity.

But while, for Wallace, this reformation concerns itself primarily with postmodern culture,

Silko contends also with the historical reality of sociopolitical oppression that, in her work, is a manifestation of the violent, entropic influence variously named the witchery, the devourers, and the sorcery. In both Ceremony and Almanac, the witchery is linked with the protracted oppression of

Lackey 27

Native populations by European colonizers (and, later, their governments and economic systems).

Thus, like other New Sincerity writers, Silko pursues a fiction charged with ethical and intersubjective concerns. But for Silko, a member of a minoritarian culture and people, the restoration of narrative’s sincere, ethical capacity also shimmers with a heightened urgency, a narrative foundation for political and cultural resistance and restitution. We might say that, whereas many of the canonical New Sincerity authors encourage the possibility of the return to sincere ways of being for those in positions of power and privilege,31 Silko positions a New Sincerity of restoration for those on the far side of power, those disenfranchised and hounded by contemporary discourse. At times, especially in Almanac, this restoration takes the form of explicit resistance, the disavowal of Western boundaries and violence. But, at other moments, Silko advances what David

Moore terms a “dialogic” mode over a “dialectic mode,” which leaves open the possibility of enfolding whatever aspects of Western narrative, epistemology, or culture remain viable into a restored ethics without claiming epistemological priority or certitude. Moore terms this a “positive postmodernism” of cross-cultural flow (“Decolonizing Criticism” 30). And this dialogic quality informs the positive side of Silko’s New Sincerity, which not only posits a performed and improvised mode of ceremonial and narrative knowing, but also attempts to open a middle space in which the reader might participate. To her diagnosis, then, Silko offers this cure, to which we now turn.

Chapter Two

Towards Cure

We began the first chapter with an example of failed narrative; now, we look to an example of a successful ceremony. Even before he begins his work with Betonie, Tayo begins to embrace a performative, quasi-improvisational—that is, a newly sincere—methodology. Before the war, during

Lackey 28 an interminable drought, Tayo undertakes his own rain dance, relying not on prescribed structure nor entirely unstructured improvisation, but rather an uncertain introduction of his own voice into the ceremonial tradition. While Tayo acknowledges that he knows “the holy men had their ways during dry spells,” he reflects, “Josiah never told him much about praying, except that it should be something inside himself” (93). This appeal to interiority, while at first recalling subjective discourses of authenticity, becomes a ceremonial performance whose success is realized only when its audience, its community, responds. As Tayo sprinkles pollen, he attunes himself to the animism of the land around him, and he imagines himself within a ceremonial tradition about which he knows relatively little: “The things he did seemed right, as he imagined with his heart the rituals the cloud priests performed during a drought” (94). Thus the viability of Tayo’s ceremony surfaces not only from what he does or thinks. Rather, Tayo’s ceremony draws power from his integration into the historical and communal tradition of the cloud priests; in other words, his contribution to the ceremonial network (however imperfectly imagined by Tayo) allows him the sensation of profound interconnectivity.32 Tayo is working in concert with the land, priests performing past ceremonies, and the living creatures around him. Thus, Tayo attempts a sort of translation, positioning himself as a reader of a partially obscured text, the ceremonial tradition. The incompleteness of this text demands not suspicion but, instead, imaginative response. Tayo neither blandly reiterates old ceremonies nor speaks from a subjective position that relies on his own power.

Unlike the bar stories, Tayo’s ceremony succeeds. A chorus of wildlife arrives to participate in, to bless, and to confirm Tayo’s efforts. First the spider, the mythological storyteller, appears.

Frogs and dragonflies and the hummingbird follow, and Tayo has realized a community. Amidst this unlikely gathering, the text explicitly disassociates Tayo’s ceremonial performance from the scientific

“causes and effects” taught to Tayo in Indian School, where he realized “he had no reasons to believe the stories any more” (94). Now, Tayo relies not on reasons but on feelings, history, and

Lackey 29 community, a web of stories and affects, to finish the rain dance: “He never lost the feeling he had in his chest . . . and he still felt it was true, despite all they had taught him in school” (95).33

The question of Ceremony is how Tayo might sustain that sort of storytelling—how he might seek out and enact cure. Tayo cannot simply re-perform his actions again in exactly the same way; the ceremony is always contingent and must continually adapt. In this way, Tayo’s journey recalls

New Sincerity efforts to reintroduce to fiction ostensibly “old” (that is, cliché or platitudinous) ethical values in new forms by new techniques. The challenges posed by this transition from diagnosis to cure arise from the destabilization of “classical” sincerity by poststructuralist theory, which makes New Sincerity both necessary and possible. Kelly grounds New Sincerity in the “old” sincerity described by Lionel Trilling’s 1971 Sincerity and Authenticity, in which Trilling points to the movement from the former to the latter as an illustration (or perhaps a symptom) of the modernist preoccupation with interior subjectivity. With Hamlet’s Polonius as example, Trilling defines sincerity as a “congruence between avowal and actual feeling” (2), and describes it as a social act, an accurate expression of the self meant to safeguard the truthful expression to another. He notes that Polonius exhorts Laertes, “to thine own self be true,” so that he “canst not then be false to any man,” and that despite Polonius’s general foppish absurdity, here his “lucid moral lyricism” confirms sincerity

“as an essential condition of virtue” (3). Sincerity thus figured is an ethical and relational concept, dialogic. Alternatively, modernist authenticity prioritizes self-expression per se, disavowing the responsibility of the subject to the interlocutor. Unlike sincerity’s understanding of “truth to one’s own self . . . as a means of ensuring truth to others,” authenticity “conceives truth as inward, personal, and hidden, the goal primarily of self-examination rather than other-directed communication” (“The New Sincerity” 199).

Importantly, these models of sincerity and authenticity rely upon a post-Enlightenment,

Cartesian-humanist understanding of the discrete subject: bisected into inner and outer, the private

Lackey 30 and the public, but nevertheless whole and eminently knowable.34 In Kelly’s terms, “[b]oth sincerity and authenticity, as Trilling defines them, assume wholeness to the inner self, a lack of internal division” (“David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction” 135)—hence authenticity’s reification of knowable and expressible “truth as something inward, personal, and hidden” (131).35 Both the subject’s access to precise self-knowledge and her ability to transmit that knowledge are presupposed. (We note that Tayo, during his rain ceremony, lacks precisely this certitude.) To describe classical sincerity, Trilling invokes Wordsworth’s “definition of the poet, men speaking to men,” an illustration devoid of any skepticism qualifying the ability of the poet to perfectly transmit his interiority to the listener, or the listener’s to translate and experience that interiority (7), and so Trilling’s sincerity rests on assumptions of a whole and knowable self, and of a language capable of precise, even mathematical, representation.36 Influenced by high theory—the postmodern and poststructuralist, rather than the modern and structuralist—New Sincerity presents a more complex and contingent model of the relationships between subjects, language, and sincerity.

The effect of this theory is the demolition of the assumptions on which Trilling’s sincerity relies; no longer can we presume the integrity of the subject, the stability of the subject over time, the subject’s ability to obtain and interpret self-knowledge, or the subject’s agency over language as a faithful medium by which to transmit that self-knowledge sincerely.

All expressions of sincerity are thereby rendered suspect, and “the promise of truth . . . is always contaminated by the threat of manipulating the other, and this threat cannot be eliminated though appeal to intention, morality, or context” (201). As an illustration of this recursive bind,

Kelly offers the image of the gift, employed also by Lewis Hyde, Marcel Mauss, and Derrida. In gift- giving, our intentions remain forever unknowable, even to ourselves, constituted by always- commingled altruism and self-service.37 This uncertainty, combined with postmodern obsessions with self-consciousness and mise-en-abyme, means “[f]ormer divisions between self and other

Lackey 31 morph into conflicts within the self, and a recursive and paranoid cycle of endless anticipation begins” in which self-consciousness regarding the ability to act sincerely towards others impedes any fulfillment of sincere action (136).38 As Kelly surmises, it is this “legacy of post-modernism” and deconstructive theory that “substantially complicates any revival of the expression of ‘one’s deepest self’ in literary form” (“The New Sincerity” 201). Any New Sincerity advocacy for “a renewed taking of responsibility for the meaning of one’s words,” or an “embrace of ‘single-entendre principles,’” must confront poststructuralist theory and its contention that “language is inescapably public,” which means a “writer’s distance from this corrupted language is no longer assumed” (“The New

Sincerity” 198, 202).

But without a stable, subjective interiority, how might we perform sincerity, and how do we locate and enact a cure from within the deconstructive tension? And, after all, if suspicious and paranoid attitudes of critique are inevitably limited and vulnerable to cooption, as I have argued in chapter one, on what grounds do we suspect the suspicious, or critique the critique?

The escape for the New Sincerity lies in the familiar postmodern position of the in-between.

As Kelly asserts, this revised sincerity occurs “in the aporia between the conditional and the unconditional. Or in Wallace’s terms, sincerity must involve ‘intent’ but cannot involve ‘motive’”

(140). In other words, we must self-consciously decide to be sincere, but must not decide to be sincere in order to fulfill some prerogative. But these states, constantly encroaching on each other, persist in their indistinguishability. If sincerity was once merely the maintenance of homogeneity between inner and outer, sincerity after postmodernism requires complex and Mobius-like self- consciousness. Devilishly, that very self-consciousness can ensnare the subject in the recursive spirals of self-suspicion: Am I trying to be sincere, and is my wondering if I am sincere itself sincerely wondered? Impossible questions—but also, as Kelly posits, miraculously salvific, as “true sincerity happens, is in fact made possible by the impossibility of its certain identification” (140). We

Lackey 32 recall Tayo’s rain ceremony again, which succeeds not in spite of but due to the uncertainty of his performance.

The significance of sincerity now lies in its difficult, uncertain ambiguity, the discomfort inherent in acting from a position of aporia, and the struggle to persist in sincerity nevertheless. New

Sincerity therefore emphasizes interaction within community and established frameworks—in

Kelly’s terms, a performance meant to “[hollow] out of the ideal of sincerity as expressive subjectivity” (“Language Between Lyricism and Corporatism: George Saunders’s New Sincerity” 46).

Indeed, much of Kelly’s more recent work has championed the New Sincerity as “an aesthetic response . . . to the challenge to older forms of expressive subjectivity,” the discrete, rational,

Enlightenment model of the self (“David Foster Wallace and New Sincerity Aesthetics: A Reply to

Edward Jackson and Joel Nicholson-Roberts” 5). These performances act as New Sincerity’s notion of cure—a reparative possibility realized after the rejection of subjectivity and suspicion.

In a similar way, Ceremony points towards cure through its depiction of Tayo’s journey of narrative and spiritual healing. Like Tayo and Old Betonie’s labors to unite traditional ceremony and extemporaneous performance as a means to induce an inclusive, rather than a culturally specific, restoration, the text interweaves postmodern techniques and Laguna mythology in an attempt to introduce a hybridized, ceremonial power into literary discourse. As Silko writes to the poet James

Wright, “it is imperative to keep up with the latest stories, and it is imperative as well to listen to

Grandma, in case she recalls a very old story” (Delicacy 69); this is just the sort of convergence the

New Sincerity employs to re-invigorate fiction after postmodernism with a sense of interpersonal and ethical urgency. This is also a close rephrasing of Betonie’s advice to Tayo: change and adaptation keep ceremonies effective. Deborah Horvitz identifies a similarly confluential spirit in

Almanac of the Dead, in which “Silko . . . integrat[es] tribal customs with Western philosophies” in the service of “multivocal truths” (49). Likewise, Silko describes how at the “root of every Navajo

Lackey 33 healing ceremony is a particular story . . . certain stories at certain times have a healing property, especially with your friends and family around” (69). In presenting this restoration through metafictional techniques, Ceremony attempts to include the reader into the activity of the ceremony in the same way that Wallace introduces the reader into the institutional sincerity of AA in Jest.39

This amalgamation of narrative techniques informs the confluential spirit that lies at the text’s heart. As myriad critics have pointed out, Tayo’s efforts to make new the healing ceremonies rely upon in-between and mixed-up spaces and identities. For example, Tayo visits both the

“traditional” healer, Old Ku’oosh, and the Old Betonie (whose house is “halfway underground”), who reminds Tayo it is “necessary to create new ceremonies” because only “growth keeps the ceremonies strong” (119, 126).40 These new ceremonies are neither a healing of the individual nor a restoration of the community brought about by individual, heroic action. Instead, the ceremony

Tayo enacts relies upon a sense of vulnerable performance rather than authentic subjectivity, and

Tayo replaces suspicious and antagonistic attitudes towards narrative in favor of sincere and cooperative positions. Ultimately, Tayo is a translator—like the reader of metafiction, author and reader at once—who restores the ceremonial narrative discourse, pursuing not a more precise meaning or explication but, rather, a certain effect of narrative upon the inclusive community of all humankind. Not only a progression from illness to health, Tayo’s arc moves from subjectivity to community, and towards more sincere frameworks of narrative and knowledge. In this way, Tayo’s work with Old Betonie to contemporize the healing ceremonies—themselves instances of narrative—further recalls the New Sincerity’s reinvigoration of fiction; both reject discourses of paranoia and purity in favor of credulity and contamination. Tayo chooses attitudes of credulity despite his education in (or, rather, indoctrination into) suspicious epistemologies, and grows comfortable working the new ceremony within discourses of uncertainty and vulnerability.

Lackey 34

Performance and Improvisation

With this focus on performances within social contexts, the neoliberal subject is supplanted by structures of community, responsibility to which grounds Trilling’s model of sincerity. Through a reading of Jest’s AA meetings as performative social spaces, Kelly argues that the New Sincerity champions performance over expression, shifting sincerity from the subject to the community, from expression to performance. Thus, finds Kelly, “success in the AA recovery program means finding a way to speak sincerely using a formula that possesses no originality as an emanation from the self,” a sincerity rooted “in its social dimension” (“Dialectic of Sincerity”). This social performance is predicated on “the embrace of a range of learned behaviors that connect one to one’s community, and the adoption of a new set of values that can be held sincerely without that sincerity presuming the rejection of communal and institutional influence” (“Dialectic of Sincerity”). This is sincerity without an emphasis on the discrete subject, which takes for granted the “contamination” of the subject that invalidates the presumed “purity” of the neoliberal, expressive subject (“Dialectic of

Sincerity”). Kelly suggests that Wallace’s characters in Jest work within the institutional frameworks of Alcoholics Anonymous, its established forms and grammars, in order to enact sincerity without resorting to the model of the expressive subject.

These communities or institutions tend towards both the polyphonic and the anonymous;41 not only is the subject relegated to a place in the chorus, one voice among many, but much of the discourse itself originates from shared material, rather than the creative interior of the subject. In this way, argues Kelly, “the dialectical move on which New Sincerity is premised involves a deconstruction of these two poles—the pure and the contaminated—so that the former is no longer the positively valued term” (“Reply” 24). This promotion of contamination illuminates the usefulness of metafictional techniques—as Kelly sees it, in “New Sincerity fiction, the writer articulates a desire for contamination . . . by invoking a reader who can acknowledge and even co-produce the gift of

Lackey 35 writing” (25). Contamination, in other words, is cooperation. This embrace of sincerity as community performance reinforces the AA dictum that subjectivity and self-will—what the text calls

“your own best thinking”—must be staunched before healing can occur. Thus, by positing the sharing of stories not as expression or confession but as the opening of empathetic space for the audience, AA offers its attendees an experience of community through the mutual empathy of storytelling while guarding against the dangers of subjective expression. The storyteller does not reveal his interiority but, instead, performs a service for the collective, rather like a priest performing liturgical rites: though there is, technically, a speaker, the narrative clearly is not a product of his personality.

Like Wallace, Silko emphasizes performance as a reparative strategy. Overtly in Ceremony and with a subtler complexity in Almanac, Silko characterizes the Laguna narrative tradition as capable of incorporating cultural and discursive difference while reaffirming the necessity for the narrative to work as a means to achieve certain ends: the return of the rain, the healing of the individual and the community, the reduction of destructive influences. As she explains in another seminal essay,

“Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective,” in the Laguna tradition “the words most highly valued are those spoken from the heart, unpremeditated and unrehearsed” (48). At first, this sounds like Trilling’s old, inner-outer sincerity. But Silko elaborates that given the “emphasis on the story itself,” the story is understood not as expression but, rather, an instance of a greater, mythic narrative. Storytelling, argues Silko, “comes out of an experience and an understanding of that original view of Creation—that we are all part of a whole,” and “a great deal of the story is believed to be inside of the listeners,” who participate in the narrative’s engendering (49-50). The

Laguna model of narrative as a cooperative and “ongoing process, working on many levels” abolishes the subjective expression the New Sincerity tries to escape. Put slightly differently, this paradigm of the expressive subject is introduced, rather than inherent, to Laguna storytelling—by the

Lackey 36 influence of witchery (and, thereby, western narratives and epistemologies) in Ceremony. In the

Laguna model, the listener gathers not an impression of the speaker’s interiority but an impulse of the interconnected web of narrative and myth. Even individual words have associated narratives, explains Silko, which forms the “Pueblo experience of language” as itself ontological (53, original italics). Moreover, not only is language ontological, but it also works theologically and spiritually. As

Paula Gunn Allen explains, “the old Indian peoples” understood “the intrinsic identity of text and human consciousness” as always entangled; language and storytelling, “whether narrative or argumentative . . . describe and define the constraints of the possible” (11). Through this paradigm of language, the realization that “everything is sacred or infused” makes possible not individual transcendence but a belonging in a communitarian (and narrative) ritual (47). This ritual does not pursue “emotive personal experience” but rather a communal and material power, an “effect in the physical” (47). While individual transformation is possible, even sought—as Allen explains, “The sick have an obligation to become well . . . [and] the selfish must become able to share”—these individual revivals arise from, and are meant to realize, the community as experienced through ritual.

In this way, ritualized Laguna narrative stands in for the performative, quasi-spontaneous communities42 as the center of the restorative power by which the discrete boundaries of expressive subjectivity are dissolved and the subject performs sincerity. In other words, within Silko’s Laguna worldview, the porous borders of the subject—the presumed interconnections to other people, to the animate world, and to the greater cosmological narrative—anticipate the efforts of other New

Sincerity writers at limiting subjectivity. Though AA is meant in one sense to encourage abstention from alcohol and the necessary spiritual fortitude or serenity in the individual, AA can only operate within a specifically communal framework. The focus must remain on the group. And each group or meeting of AA operates narratively; members share their stories not as expressions—“listen to my story”—but as rituals meant to manifest a collective response. Upon the completion of successful

Lackey 37 narratives, it is understood that a “certain Message has been Carried”—not expressed, but carried. In their cyclicality, these narratives do not mean to hypostasize each individual speaker’s identity in the collective consciousness but instead reiterate the same story as a sort of metanarrative. Within the operation of the AA meeting, the only ontology is narrative, which is extended a sacred function

(especially considering the ritualized prayer that AA recommends), capable of generating remarkable physical effects, transformations. At the same time, individual self-assertion always brings about failed narrative, even when these stories in other contexts would evoke remarkable pathos. Jest illustrates this through a horrific AA narrative of pedophilia that, because the speaker remains obsessed with “Self-Pity and Denial,” with personal absolution, fails as transformative narrative. As

Kelly argues, through the scaffolding of the AA meeting, in which narrative is communal and cyclical rather than individual and expressive, glimpses of a sincerity, however fraught with uncertainty and anxious self-reflexivity, are possible. In this way the AA stories are not what we typically call personal narratives. Rather, they serve a sort of liturgical function; they resemble homilies. Hence the relevance of Sedgwick’s call to examine what knowledge does to the project of the New Sincerity; the AA attendees do not require a blueprint of how AA works, and, indeed, to redirect energy from maintaining a sincere and supportive social environment to an investigation of

AA’s mysterious clockwork would be a return inwards, an attempt to satisfy a personal and suspicious desire for certainty and security.43

Like this communal sincerity Wallace evokes and describes, Silko’s sincerity dissipates subjectivity, as it moves from expression to performance. Indeed, Silko steps further, tangling with the impossibility of purely subjective expression itself, and positing all narrative as a sort of cooperative translation that sits somewhere between iterations of the traditional and improvisations of new performance. David Moore has addressed the centrality of translation for Silko’s concept of cultural authenticity, holding that, in fact, all “authenticity in Silko’s work becomes translation,”

Lackey 38 especially through “the authenticity of translation as a mixedblood” that Tayo and Old Betonie epitomize in Ceremony (That Dream Shall Have a Name 248). I argue that this concept of translation informs Silko’s version of New Sincerity through a reformulation not only of authenticity but also of authorship and sincerity. For Silko, all conceptions of “authenticity” necessarily refer to narrative. As translation, narrative does not originate in the subject as speaker or author but moves through the subject, invoking in the audience (as Silko explains) diverse associations and memories not only of previous instances of the story but the myriad narratives and significant associations attached to each word. In the Laguna cosmology, a narrative exists, and is experienced, in multiple moments in time simultaneously. In this sort of translation, the stories are spoken but do not originate within the speaker, which means that the story exists between the speaker and the audience and are not the speaker’s proper. Silko thereby espouses a New Sincerity imperative, the de-privileging of the individual subject and the reconstitution of sincerity as communal and dialogic. This effect comes about through the act of translation, which works to bring together the subject, the narrative tradition, and the audience in a similar network (or, to use Silko’s term, a web).

As an alternative to suspicion, Tayo’s burgeoning narrative epistemology emphasizes partiality; its knowledge is contingent and fluid. As Betonie urges Tayo during their first meeting,

“don’t try to see everything” because it’s all “[t]oo big to swallow all at once” (120). This is why

Tayo—as much as he is able—does not work to determine the etiology of the witchery. Nor does the text itself—while Ceremony associates the witchery with the colonial presence of Europeans, it refuses an easy, causal relationship, sometimes citing Europeans as literal manifestations of witchery called forth by disharmony, but other times presenting Europeans as fellow victims, noting that

“you don’t write off all white people,” and that the witchery wants the Native communities “to believe all evil resides with white people . . . to separate ourselves” (128, 132). The point here is that

Tayo does not pursue a thorough dissection of the witchery, its causes and origins. To identify the

Lackey 39 witchery, to locate its influences and remain cognizant of its threat, is necessary but insufficient; no examination of the witchery can itself roll back the witchery’s creeping encroachment. In fact, the paradoxical witchery is both superficial and inscrutable—the effects of the witchery are plain, but to construct an exhaustive catalogue or taxonomy of its evils and intrinsic motivations is absurd. The witchery is idiopathic and thereby immune to antagonistic paradigms. In this way, Tayo’s response to the witchery dovetails with the advice dispensed by Jest’s Crocodiles, the grizzled AA members who implore Don Gately to forget questions of how AA works (that is, they divert his attentions away from suspicion, away from the urge to disassemble and analyze).44

In this way, Tayo prioritizes cure over diagnosis. Tayo prefers New Sincerity’s sense of social performance that emphasizes communal efforts at restoration over a subjective attitude of suspicion, of uncovering a stable “truth.” In fact, Ceremony suggests the act of diagnosis itself is superfluous, perhaps even impossible. Early on, Old Ku’oosh admits “some things we can’t cure like we used to .

. . not since the white people came,” and he confesses he cannot explain Tayo’s illness and his anhedonia. Apart from the generalized effect of the witchery, that explanation never arrives—such knowledge is extraneous to the ceremony Tayo and Old Betonie create. The treatment, rather than the etiology, demands attention. Only through story can Tayo approach and confront the witchery, and his intention prioritizes restoration (of the narrative ceremony) over confrontation (with the witchery as such). Meanwhile, efforts at the stable knowledge of diagnosis risk the return to suspicious and thereby subjective paradigms. Lewis Hyde suggests this individualistic impulse emerges from Western culture itself; to redirect our attention away from the subject “goes against the grain of our civilization” (7). In “The People and the Land are Inseparable,” Silko makes the same point: “To be a people, to be part of a village, is the dimension of human identity that anthropology understands least . . . [it is] not easily understood by American-born Europeans” (90).

Lackey 40

Furthermore, Hyde suggests there is a paradoxical power in the realization that “the admission of powerlessness does not lead to slavery or obliteration, but the opposite. It leads to revaluation of personal power which is human, bounded, and authentic” (Hyde 8).45 Such an elevation of powerlessness and its concomitant denial of subjectivity allows an especially positive reading of Ceremony’s faux-climactic scene, in which Tayo, hunted by Emo and the other veterans as he hides at the uranium mine, chooses not to act as Harley, another Laguna veteran and Tayo’s close friend, is tortured. Instead of intervening, Tayo remains “on his knees in the shadows” as he realizes that, had he “jammed the screwdriver into Emo’s skull the way the witchery had wanted,” the

“deadly ritual” of the witchery would have reached completion (253). By denying subjective action and abiding in a position of powerlessness, Tayo affirms the preeminence of the narrative, choosing not expression but reception, vulnerability, by which he “arrive[s] at a convergence of pattern” and sees clearly that “the story goes on . . . lasting until the fifth world ends, then maybe beyond” (254).

At the moment, it might appear to the reader—as it likely does to Tayo—that decisive action to save

Harley would be morally defensible—even morally necessary. But such a reading is necessarily perspectival and works from a paradigm of linear time and Western epistemology. Intervening for

Harvey’s sake would be an act of individualistic violence, and it would endanger Tayo’s ability to return and share the story—it would also force the novel to conform to the constraints of western literary structure. Regardless of the success of Tayo’s hypothetical heroism, the act would be climactic; something would come to an end. But Tayo’s ceremony does not reach its conclusion with a decision to save Harvey by killing Emo—nor even with his refusal to do so. Instead, his ceremony closes its circle only when he shares the story with Ku’oosh and the other elders. And it is the ceremony, not its executor, that holds priority. Tayo seeks an uncertain, ongoing knowledge of how performed narrative ceremonies can heal fracture. In doing so, he decides against the “obvious”

Lackey 41 choice of direct, subjective action. Tayo trusts the narrative rather than, in the terminology of Jest’s

AA, “his own best thinking.”46

Sedgwick’s distinction between suspicious knowledge, which is, and reparative knowledge, which does, is relevant here. In Touching Feeling, she advocates “moving from the rather fixated question Is a particular piece of knowledge true and how can we know? To the further questions:

What does knowledge do” (124). With this distinction in mind, we can differentiate Tayo’s ceremonial narrative from its opposite, the “ritual” the witchery attempts to complete. Although nearly synonymous—at least connotative cousins—upon first glance, ceremony and ritual serve as indicators of the narrative and epistemological differences Tayo negotiates. Besides its obvious teleology of destruction, the witchery’s “deadly ritual” is a means, implying a destination, and is thereby bounded—Tayo, like Harley and Emo, plays a part as the ritual nears “completion.”

Considering New Sincerity’s recursive anxieties regarding intention and the dangers of capitalizing on language, truth, and other people as means to some self-serving end, we find that ritual, therefore, can never approach sincerity. Its arc is fixed, moving towards climax and then conclusion.

Thinking formally, we might liken ritual to Freitag’s triangle. Ceremony, on the other hand, is open and unbounded, in the same manner that the ongoing narrative, carrying its restorative power, remains an end itself. Unlike synchronic ritual, occurring in a specific moment in time, ceremony is diachronic. Thus, ceremony, like an adaptive immune system, must remain flexible. Hence Betonie’s exhortation to both remember old stories and create new ones, and Silko’s own encouragement to

James Wright: “it is imperative to keep up with the latest stories, and it is imperative as well to listen to Grandma, in case she recalls a very old story” (Delicacy 69). This coeval adoption of the future and the past resembles both New Sincerity’s adoption of postmodern techniques and Wolfgang Iser’s notion of phenomenological reading as unceasing synthesis of the past and the imminent. As Iser explain, reading a text means simultaneously affecting past readings and building the foundation of

Lackey 42 future readings. As a reader encounters a text, previous readings (of both the text at hand and all other texts; of the previous sentence and the very first) impinge on the process of meaning-making; at the same moment, our recollections of those past readings are altered by the text at hand.

Crucially, this reading is reciprocal, reforming the reader through the textual encounter itself. Against this ceremonial attitude towards narrative we can place the witchery’s ritualistic attitude. The ritual’s performer wields narrative, rather than participating within narrative, and this relegation of narrative to object-status not only resembles the suspicious mode (there is something ritualistic in the parlance of “running a story through analysis”) but also maroons the performer in his subjectivity. Again, there is no sincerity possible in the ritualistic mode.

Similarly, Tayo’s ceremony demands a narrative epistemology that privileges performance over suspicion and certitude. Unlike the isolative suspicion or the rigid science Tayo learns in school,

Laguna narrative epistemology is, Silko explains, a “continuously developing body of . . . stories that reject any decisive conclusion in favor of ever-increasing possibilities” (“Fifth World” 133). In this construction of “multiple meaning,” the stories that make up “Pueblo cosmology in general” must be told and exist in community, and so through its telling the story, complete with variations and the multivocal participation of the audience, changes without suffering a dilution of its potency (“Fifth

World” 133). In this way, translation becomes evocative performance. From the outset of his cooperation with Tayo, Betonie emphasizes performance over static knowledge; when Tayo admits,

“I don’t know anything about ceremonies . . . I don’t know how long anything has been going on,”

Betonie responds, “The people must do it. You must do it” (125, emphasis mine). Only then does

Tayo begin to move out of his circumscribed subjectivity, repressing the urge to “yell the things the white doctors had yelled at him—that he had only to think of himself,” and instead affirming that

“his cure would be found only in something great and inclusive” (125-126). As he explains the necessity for a renewed ceremony capable of adapting to the developments of history, Betonie

Lackey 43 reiterates the necessity of flexible performance. While once “the ceremonies as they had been performed were enough,” he tells Tayo, after “elements in this world began to shift . . . it became necessary to create new ceremonies” because “only this growth keeps the ceremonies strong” (126).

Thus the inclusivity of the ceremony, its ability for boundary-transcendence realized by the multilingual and multimodal ceremony the mixed-heritage performers Tayo and Betonie will soon enact, relies upon adaptation—not necessarily a forward-looking dialectic but a constant reconfiguration reaching through all directions in time. This inclusivity is accomplished through the

“contamination” of narrative through the constant introduction of translation or performance. By encouraging suspicion, fomenting blame directed against “only the whites,” the witchery attempts to proscript such flexibility and encourages the people to “cling to ritual without making new ceremonies” (249).

But if the ceremony must continue changing, then efforts to perform the ceremony

“correctly” encounter an immediate problem. How ought the ceremony change, and by what degree? How does the performer ensure the ceremony comes about in the proper manner? The efficacy of the ceremony rests upon its sincerity; the ceremony cannot exist for the personal gain of the performer(s), for division or violence—such is the ritual the witchery intends. But this sincerity is, again, a quality of a social group built around the ceremonial narrative, which is always cooperatively told. As evidenced by Tayo’s tense ebb-and-flow relationship with ceremony and doubt, this sincerity cannot be firmly or permanently established but instead must be constantly revisited and renewed. Likewise, Betonie’s healing ceremony for Tayo rests upon the cooperative efforts of Betonie, Tayo, and Betonie’s assistant Shush, and it moves through variegated discourses.

For example, the healing ceremony Betonie organizes for Tayo relies on a triangulated cooperation.

Betonie organizes the sand painting and paints the mountains, his assistant Shush erects hoops, and

Tayo walks through the hoops. As the text notes, “They finished it together” (142). What’s more,

Lackey 44 this cooperation is not limited to the immediate moment; in one of his stories to Tayo, Betonie remarks, “We have to depend on people not even born yet,” and, before Tayo leaves, reminds him,

“One night or nine nights won’t do it anymore . . . the ceremony isn’t finished yet” (150-152). By the time Tayo “finishes” the ceremony by passing the story on to Ku’oosh, more voices—Ts’eh and the mountain lion—will join. In this cooperative and temporally unbounded authorship, Ceremony presents a model for sincere narrative freed from the confines of an expressive subject. Through the dispersal of authorial agency, this model demands the subject’s credulity and faith, a willingness to act without certainty. It also renders the subject vulnerable, capable of being acted upon by the narrative cooperatively told. To use Sedgwick’s binary, this constitutes reparative over paranoid reading—both for Tayo, the character, and the literal reader.

In this way, Ceremony promotes a sort of active, cooperative reading not unlike Iser’s phenomenological model, in which the reader and the text meet again and again and again to form a

“work.”47 Like Silko and New Sincerity, Iser disparages suspicion as a limited form of reading. As he argues, “in discovering the hidden meaning, the critic has, as it were, solved a puzzle, and there is nothing left for him to do but to congratulate himself on this achievement,” and so, he asks, “what can one do with a meaning that has been formulated and put on display, having been stripped of all its mystery?” (4). Thus, Iser champions a reading that, like the healing ceremony, attends to the affects and ends of narrative. As in Tayo’s creative prayer songs, the reader’s imaginative function refracts and is constricted by the construction of the text itself; the act of reading is personal but not subjective, creative but bounded by the textual field. Importantly, like Betonie’s ceremony, the reading act necessarily implies a wide temporality, extending beyond a mere reading moment, as “the whole text can never be perceived at any one time” (108). No one “reading” of a text ever reiterates a previous reading, given not only the change in the reader over the time between reading, but also the inevitable change that any particular reading itself works upon the reader. As Iser explains, “the

Lackey 45 reader, in establishing these interrelations between past, present, and future, actually causes the text to reveal its potential multiplicity of connections” (278). Given that “the reader is bound to open himself up to the workings of the text” in order to engage imaginatively, the reader’s position is vulnerable rather than suspicious (291). As Iser notes, “we have the apparently paradoxical situation in which the reader is forced to reveal aspects of himself in order to experience a reality which is different from his own” (281-282). Without vulnerability, then, the fullness of the reading experience cannot occur, and one cannot hold oneself at a remove from the text. The reader works and is worked on, and since these states cannot be disentangled, the reader assumes something like the quantum superposition, the photon before the collapse of the wave function: both subject and object at once.

Sincere Aesthetics, Metafictional Ceremonies

With the aforementioned sense of the reading experience occurring in cooperative and necessarily vulnerable ways in mind, we can turn our attention to Ceremony’s complex deployment of language and narrative technique meant to shape that experience in certain ways. This influence, what we might call the creation of a ceremonial reading, occurs overtly and with a metafictional self- consciousness. In Betonie’s first appearance in Ceremony, we find him literally straddling the border between the Gallup Ceremonial—a insincere ritual—and the sincere ceremony he begins with Tayo, during which he becomes an image of the self-consciousness New Sincerity deems necessary. David

Moore makes much of the concept of standing “witness” in Silko’s work, which with its close counterpart “testimony” “forms the “gateway . . . foundational to her work” (“Linked to the Land”

13). According to Moore, to witness evil and oppression and then to testify one’s observations bestows the power to realize change and to engender justice, because the “witnessing act itself, expresses agency and alters reality” (15). Of course, Moore presupposes sincerity here, asserting that

Lackey 46

“the witness does not filter the truth” (20). But, according to the New Sincerity, this sort of subjective objectivity has been abolished, and so under a New Sincerity paradigm this idea of witness becomes the self-consciousness necessary for inhabiting the uncertain space between intent and motive—or, to return to Trilling, sincerity and insincerity. Thus Old Betonie’s liminality, which the text highlights during his first appearance, is a position of self-consciousness. Only by watching the watchers can Betonie attempt to retain for the healing ceremony the sincerity Gallup has renounced.

“People ask me why I live here,” Betonie says to Tayo, “[and] I tell them I want to keep track of the people” (117). Betonie keeps watch over two cultures and two instances of attempted ceremony, a doubledness his mixed-race heritage reflects.

Some of Betonie’s work to “keep track of the people” involves maneuvering through multiple languages, and the text gives special attention to Betonie’s speech, mentioning his “good

English” and that there is a “special meaning the old man had given to the English” (117).

Throughout Silko’s work, the introduction of English into Native discourse assumes both positive and negative significance, and here it suggests Betonie’s efforts to reclaim the efficacy of the ceremony through the self-conscious inclusion of English (117).48 He tells Tayo, “It is carried on in all languages now, so you have to know English too,” and in Betonie’s reappropriation of English there is a semblance of the New Sincerity’s adoption of postmodern and metafictional forms. In order to enfold English, a hegemonic language of historical oppression and metaphysical destruction, into the healing ceremonies—in order to ensure its application for ethical and restorative ends—Betonie maintains witness over himself. That is, Betonie must “keep track” of his own utilization of English, his motivations and his actions’ ramifications—despite only ever possessing, at best, a partial knowledge thereof. Betonie does not deconstruct English; or, if he does, he also adapts it towards new ends. His attitude is reparative rather than suspicious. New Sincerity suggests that the self-conscious, paradoxical uncertainty of concerns of means, ends, intents, and

Lackey 47 motives allows, if not an escape from the paradox, at least a way to pursue sincerity. Similarly,

Betonie cannot erase the history of oppression perpetrated through the English language, nor can he inoculate the people against its ability for future harm. Instead, he capitalizes on its ability to help create the narratives and ceremonies. In doing so, Betonie not only solidifies the efficacy of the ceremony but also demonstrates the necessity to transgress divisions and boundaries, which are always the milieu of the witchery. After all, if “Indian witchery made the white people in the first place,” then English is an appurtenance of witchery’s destructive narrative—one that might be, if not redeemed, at least useful. Betonie, therefore, undertakes a translation of English into the ceremony he constructs with Tayo, a translation possible through his careful self-consciousness; witchery, the text notes, “won’t work / if someone is watching” (247). Still, the equilibrium is fraught. Examples of destructive English and restorative English, rituals of witchery and ceremonies of healing, share an uncanny resemblance.49

This invocation of self-consciousness returns us to Susan Castillo, who finds hypocrisy in

Silko’s critique of Erdrich’s deployment of postmodern technique. Indeed, Ceremony is a clearly metafictional text, consciously and playfully manipulating form and formal expectations, dragging the reader through a nonlinear temporality and occasionally confusing jumps in perspective.

However, my argument holds that Ceremony is not a metafictional or postmodern text but a New

Sincerity text, and therefore capitalizes on the potential of formal and narrative creativity to work a certain effect upon the reader. As Kelly asserts, the New Sincerity text reaches outwards towards the reader. He adopts a model of the reader-text-author relationship that appears not just démodé, denying the New Critics and Barthes and Foucault, but explicitly phenomenological: “It is only . . . off the page that dialogue can be engaged, and that both reader and writer can be challenged by the dialogic dimension of the reading experience. This call for a two-way conversation characterizes not only Wallace’s work, but all the fiction of the New Sincerity” (145).50

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According to Zadie Smith, Wallace’s “stories simply don’t investigate character,” insofar as they are not interested in the subjective interiority for which Silko’s impugns Erdrich (273). Instead, writes Smith, Wallace’s fiction is “turned outward, toward us. It’s our character being investigated”

(273). In the same way, Silko both depicts and evokes (perhaps even, like Wallace in his short story

“Octet,” interrogates).51 As Tayo continues his movement towards the regeneration of the ceremonial narrative, the reader, too, accumulates the same stories, voices, and rhythms. In other words, just as Wallace’s fiction attempts to use “spiral sentences, the looping syntax, the repetition, the invasion of clinical vocabulary” in order to “run a procedure—the procedure of another person's thoughts!—through your own mind,” so too is Ceremony aware of its own attempt to be a sort of ceremony for the reader (Smith 277). Like other New Sincerity writers, Silko endorses the “morally passionate, passionately moral” fiction that attempts to fulfill the old Aristotelian idea of delight and instruction (“Joseph Frank”). Given the Laguna narrative ontology, it follows that Silko posits her texts as imbued with power over the off-the-page. If reality is narrative, to live is to read, and so

Ceremony trains readers to approach texts like Tayo approaches his ceremony: with an emphasis on community, multimodality, and ethical gravity. Almanac of the Dead enacts a similar re-training of the reader and her reading method. Like Lecha and Seese, who must decipher and reinscribe the ancient almanacs, the reader must sift through the jigsaw-puzzle narrative, reading across time and distance in order to realize a similar return to narrative.52 As Beth Piatote figures it, “Almanac demands that readers decode its complex, interwoven plots by learning to recognize signs and characteristics of the “days” that circulate through the book” (156). Similarly, Bernard Hirsch writes that “[i]n [Silko’s collection] Storyteller, the reader learns by accretion” (3). This same work of decoding and retrained reading occurs in Ceremony, particularly during Tayo’s hoop ceremony with Betonie, at which point the narrative fragments, transitioning from a relatively straightforward (albeit chronologically tangled) prose narrative to an assemblage or collage of prose, poetry, and myth. Just as Tayo is re-

Lackey 49 inducted into a communal and spiritual Weltanschauung, the reader likewise must exchange a linear, causal reading methodology for a paradigm of vulnerability. The reader must be willing to be worked upon by the text. This induction into a new and likely unfamiliar reading position, is a renunciation of subjectivity, an acknowledgement of epistemological and hermeneutic humility. Thus, the cooperative models Betonie employs and Iser describes also undergird the dynamism between

Ceremony or Almanac and their readers, who are asked to approach the texts from Tayo’s position of credulity and vulnerability.53

Similarly, Ceremony is rife with poems and stories presented to the reader without the framework of attribution: the story of the origin of the witchery, which Betonie tells Tayo during the hoop ceremony, and the story of the Gambler, which resembles Tayo’s own. These stories, arranged like poetry on the page, induct the reader into the Laguna narrative mythos and worldview; the story of Ceremony is not only Tayo’s, because Tayo’s story happens concurrently with the stories of Sun

Man and Arrowboy. Likewise, Ceremony is (at the risk of tautology) a text about rather than representative of a metanarrative. The text is about itself, and it attempts to epitomize what it depicts. Ceremony is a ceremony depicting ceremonies. What’s more, by acknowledging its two influential traditions—the Laguna oral mythology and the western novel—Ceremony manages exactly the convergence that Betonie describes; Silko is “updating the ceremonies.” As Hirsch suggests, by incorporating the techniques of the oral tradition, Silko “makes the reader’s responses . . . a part of the larger, ongoing story,” and so “both the story and the reader are renewed” (3).54

Silko emphasizes this metanarrativity by linking the progression of Tayo’s ceremony with the reader’s progression through the text. At nearly the novel’s exact center, Betonie tells Tayo, “You’ve been doing something all along. All this time, and now you are at an important place in this story”

(124). A similar moment occurs towards the text’s conclusion, when Ts’eh urges Tayo onwards:

“The end of the story. They want to change it. They want it to end here, the way all their stories end,

Lackey 50 encircling slowly to choke the life away. The violence of the struggle excited them . . . [a]nd they would end this story right here, with you fighting to your death” (232). Here, Ts’eh describes both how Tayo’s ceremony must progress and the direction of Ceremony’s narrative arc. In another novel, we might expect at the signaled climax, which in Ceremony is Tayo at the uranium mine, a moment of drastic action: Tayo saving Harley and killing Emo. But the climax is decidedly anti-climactic, Tayo remains hidden, and the text rolls on for another fifteen pages as Tayo retells his story to Ku’oosh and the other elders. This anticlimax forces readers to look for another structuring principle to the novel, which can be found in cyclicality and phenomenological experience. That is, as a ceremony itself, the novel assigns value according to ceremonial logics; no particular moment carries ceremonial power more than any other. And, noting Tayo’s recollection that “the Dawn people began and ended all their words with ‘sunrise,’” we can read Ceremony both as enacting a ceremony and perpetuating bigger, cosmically scaled ceremonies—a wheel within wheels, in an ecclesiastical sense (182). Of course, Ceremony itself begins and ends by addressing the sunrise, and so, recollecting that even individual Laguna words imply associated networks of narratives, we can position Ceremony as both alluding to the cosmic and also as a single “word” of the Dawn people. The scale expands and retracts all at once. The reader is inducted not only into a ceremonial epistemology but also a narrative and spiritual language, and to read Ceremony ceremonially opens an experience of non-linear time, within which typical assumptions of beginnings and endings, climaxes and denouements, fail to signify.

As another example, Old Grandma remembers that seeing the old nuclear tests was like

“seeing the sun rise again” (245), and so the uranium mine, the false sunrise, only prefigures the authentic sunrise on the novel’s final page: “Sunrise, / accept this offering, / Sunrise” (262). Earlier in the text, Ts’eh says to Tayo, “You can see the stars tonight,” and Tayo spots the pattern Betonie predicted: “Old Betonie’s stars were there” (178). This is the last line of the page, and the opposite

Lackey 51 page features a full black-and-white print of the pattern: We see through Tayo’s eyes, an experience of radical empathy.

Through this visual moment, not a looking-at but a looking-with, Ceremony invites the reader in; the off-the-page and the in-the-text collide. While the import of the star pattern becomes clearer to Tayo, and eventually the reader, its precise significance remains a mystery to both. The reader is not suspending disbelief but is rather forced into a space of not-knowing. In this way, Ceremony is the ceremonial retelling of Tayo’s own ceremonial retelling, adopting the cyclical shape of Laguna narrative within the linear, cover-to-cover structure of the novel. Along with its invitation of participation in a ceremonial narrative, the novel’s metastructure allows it to operate like other New

Sincerity texts. Notions of speech, language, and time are radically refigured, and models predicated on the individual subject are disavowed. If Wallace’s texts, recalling Zadie Smith’s suggestion, run algorithmically on the reader,55 then Silko’s incite a ceremonial sensibility in the reader no less significant or complex for its mysticism.

Conclusion

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I would like to return, in conclusion, to New Sincerity’s developmental context, a convergence of several historical trends. The first, described by Amy Hungerford in her essay “On the Period Formerly Known as Contemporary,” concerns the gradual fade of the division between the experimental postmodern formalism associated with canonical white men (Pynchon, Nabokov,

Barth, and company) and the fiction of women and writers of color, often dismissed as polemically rather than aesthetically oriented (411).56 Working to erase this division, young scholars in the late eighties and nineties “crystallized a critical consensus that the categories produced . . . a misleading opposition between these two kinds of writing” that, at its worst, “suggested a hierarchy of value” that lionizes the “’postmodern’ avant-garde” (411). From this deconstruction of literary stratification we’ve emerged into a status quo that assumes a confluential, reconciliatory mode in which “mix[ing] up the categories” is “the standard practice” among young critics,” and which validates historicist approaches to even the most diverse range of texts (411-413). Citing Mark McGurl’s influential study The Program Era, Hungerford attributes much of this convergence to the university, the location of mixing-up. Thus, the writers of the New Sincerity—many of whom, like Wallace, apprenticed in the university—arrived in an atmosphere more willing to step beyond postmodern and metafictional formalism or to adopt those forms and techniques for the sort of socially or ethically minded ends formerly repudiated as less than serious artistry. Furthermore, scholars like

Kelly and Hungerford, left with a “vastly expanded canon” and the anticipated “task of defining the second half of the twentieth century,” seized these expanded borders to treat seriously these writers’ serious treatment of such ethical considerations (411).

Thus, for the burgeoning writers of the New Sincerity, this atmosphere of mutability in academia served as one of several contexts that formed the postmodernism in which they came of age and to which they respond. In his essay “Beginning with Postmodernism,” Kelly points out that the high postmodernists were the au courant literature for the matriculating writers of the New

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Sincerity, and, crucially, that these postmodern texts were encountered specifically in the classroom.

From the outset, New Sincerity writers “begin with the academic construction of American literature and society specifically as ‘postmodern’—in other words, they begin with the phenomenon of

‘theory’” (396). Wallace makes this point himself in his 1997 interview with Charlie Rose: His was

“the first generation of writers who’d actually read a lot of criticism, and there was a certain schizophrenia about it” (“David Foster Wallace”). Investigations into the New Sincerity and its generation must historicize, and to historicize the New Sincerity means to address the influence of concomitant academic trends. When Kelly sums up the general project of Wallace’s fiction as a restoration “to literary narrative a concern with sincerity not seen since modernism shifted the ground so fundamentally a century before” (133), that concern refracts through the fragmenting, deconstructive lens of poststructuralist theory.

And so we might ask: why, exactly, establish this intersection between Silko’s work and the

New Sincerity? As I state in my introduction, my goal is not to “redeem” Silko from the margins of what Hungerford might call the “merely cultural” or “ideological-postcolonial” genres and thereby

“elevate” her into some nascent canon, nor do I mean to disavow the indivisibility of her published work and her Laguna heritage and tradition. As Hungerford notes, scholarship after the zenith of theory has done much to overturn these divisions between high, canonical postmodernism and the fiction (usually written by women and people of color) disregarded “as naively realist or concerned more with social issues” than formal aesthetics (411), and my argument assumes that, in fact, Laguna concepts of narrative and community fundamentally inform Silko’s New Sincerity. Instead, I present another configuration through which we can examine both how Silko’s fiction resembles and modifies other attempts to reinscribe values of sincerity, community, and serious spiritual practice in

American literature, as well as what it means to write out of the postmodern period. In this way, I mean to extend the synthetic practice Hungerford and Kelly describe as the dominant mode of late-

Lackey 54 postmodern and post-postmodern scholarship—both writers and critics unraveling “the problem of historicizing the postmodern” by paying attention to “both the American society termed postmodern and the literature produced by that society” (392).

Of course, Silko overtly undertakes this historicization, positing the failures of postmodernism as historically and politically (as well as geographically and spiritually) rooted—and we, for our part, can insist upon Silko’s relevance to critical projects designed to investigate the still- emerging post-postmodernism that includes the New Sincerity. As I suggested earlier, little scholarship has attempted to accomplish this task. Additionally, directing attention towards Silko helps us revise New Sincerity as a useful and credulous paradigm, which is necessary work. Recent opprobrium aimed at both Kelly’s elucidation of the New Sincerity proper and Wallace’s texts, which underpin much of Kelly’s own work, intimates as much. As Edward Jackson and Joel

Nicholson-Roberts argue in “White Guys: Questioning Infinite Jest’s New Sincerity,” Wallace’s novel advances a New Sincerity that “presents as universal an experience that it in fact implicitly codes as white and male,” through which coding white men (re)assume power “in ways that denigrate . . . the novel’s black and female characters” (2-3).57 Though Kelly has published a lengthy defense, and while one of his early essays includes a thorough analysis of Jennifer Egan’s Look at Me as a New

Sincerity text, the discourses of New Sincerity and New Sincerity studies, nevertheless, have indeed typically emphasized white male authors and instances of sincerity manifesting from positions of privilege and power. In Wallace’s work, particularly, the agonies of recursive self-consciousness and the struggle to enact sincerity within aporia emerge consistently from characters who enjoy implicit and explicit systematic privileges; a similar observation is possible with Saunders’s work, which, though artful in its elocution of the tension between dignity and despair among characters inhabiting lower socioeconomic strata, noticeably trots out a long train of white men.

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Though the choice of characters peopling Wallace’s or Saunders’s texts does not necessarily belie an ideological rot, much valuable work has been done, and still is required, in mapping out those texts’ sometimes problematic racial, gendered, and socioeconomic networks—Clare Hayes-

Brady and Mary Holland have broken impressive ground to that end. What’s more, much of our postmodern and post-postmodern scholarship has been rather white, male, and heteronormative— and have hailed texts and authors from similar identity-positions as “technically innovative” (or, in to recall Hungerford, “high” or “aesthetic”), including Mark Z. Danielewski, Joshua Cohen,

Matthew McIntosh, and Adam Levin.58 While Silko’s inclusion in the New Sincerity only begins to correct its skew towards the male and the white, my primary aim is not to redeem the New Sincerity or to pursue merely a tokenism of diversity. Instead, I mean to fill the historical lacuna of the New

Sincerity, which has overlooked authors and texts as influences on the movement to reinvigorate

American literature. Ideally, this might redirect some of New Sincerity’s ethical interest towards the day-to-day, systemic, historical oppression Silko’s work details. I also note Kelly’s assertion that

“contemporary American fiction foregrounds a theory and practice of sincerity that is forward rather than backwards looking, new rather than old” (Kelly 198); not only does this explanation of the New

Sincerity fail to cast a sufficiently wide net in its definition of “contemporary,” it also fails to account for configurations of sincerity planted in the past, and which circle around rather than strive forwards—like, for example, the cyclical Laguna narrative-time Silko employs. If the New Sincerity means to identify “broader cultural trends and to highlight the special characteristics that enable literary fiction to engage those trends in an urgent, complex, and dialectical manner” (198), such a program requires a familiarity with how Silko, from her remarkable vantage contiguous with but not entirely within American and postmodern traditions, manages to lambast the brutalities of American culture while reaffirming and attempting to limn in her readers an experience of the restorative power of narrative.59

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Importantly, unlike the current model of the New Sincerity, which urges a transition from subject-oriented to performance-oriented sincerity, Silko’s New Sincerity describes a return to traditional (but, crucially, modified) forms of narrative, rather than a progressive dialectic in which

“old” sincerity is discarded for (or synthesized into) the new. Unlike Wallace and many other authors cited as Newly Sincere, Silko stands with one foot outside American and academic postmodernism. Silko’s literary maturation was informed not only by the postmodern-academic context Hungerford and Kelly describe but also the rich Laguna tradition. With this in mind, and given her time spent in the academy and her familiarity with (and deployment of) modern and postmodern techniques, we see that Silko occupies a fittingly liminal position with respect to the maladies of American culture the New Sincerity identifies: solipsism, ethical vacuity, vapid and indulgent art. While all New Sincerity authors, Silko included, only return through postmodernism, an appropriation (or rehabilitation) of its techniques, from Silko’s liminal position it constitutes more convergence than return, a melding of the Indigenous and postmodern that Elvira Pulitano theorizes as “a complex, hybridized project . . . that uses indigenous rhetorics along with the instruments of Western literary analysis” (3).

Ceremony encourages its reader to, like Tayo, read differently, to adopt a changed position to text and story that displaces suspicion in favor of an affective and communal sincerity, and through a reading of Silko, we expand the template of New Sincerity to include marginal and Indigneous discourses, as well as a cyclical, rather than a dialectic, movement towards sincerity. We might also include a renewed sense of the spiritual. While Kelly and other New Sincerity critics have paid much attention to the operations of discourse, subjectivity, and performance within New Sincerity texts, we ought to note that the sincerity of New Sincerity is itself built upon a sense of faith, the acting- from-uncertainty that Kelly describes, a fact that remains unexplored.60 While Hungerford and John

McClure have advanced their notion of postsecularism as the spiritual experience made possible by

Lackey 57 postmodernism’s skepticism towards empirical and rational ontologies, we have yet to describe how these spiritualties informed by this “open” ontology might take new shape as the postmodern moment gives way to something different. I suggest that the New Sincerity implies a spiritual understanding that—unlike the “faith-in-meaninglessness” Hungerford describes, the partial and fragmented spiritualties of postsecularism—restricts and impels the subject (Postmodern Belief 3). Both a denial of subject-oriented epistemology and a refutation of solipsism, Wallace calls this a

“harrowing spirituality” (“Joseph Frank” X).61 This resembles one operation of the spiritual in

Silko’s work, as the imminence of the land makes ethical demands on proximate subjects. As New

Sincerity studies progresses, an attention to spiritual performance and mystically inflected epistemologies may coincide well with a commitment to diversity.

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Notes

1 John McClure similarly characterizes Erdrich’s work as “[d]rawing on postmodern values and postmodernist narrative strategies . . . that closely resemble, in many ways, the visions . . . [of] Kushner, Pynchon, and DeLillo” (137). 2 David Moore calls Almanac a transcription of “the brutal chaos of modern culture” (“’Linked to the Land’: An Introduction to Reading Leslie Marmon Silko” 9). 3 One recent exception is Linda Krumholtz’s essay “The Web of Stories: Reading and Change in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller,” which appears in Catherine Rainwater’s edited collection Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller: New Perspectives. Through a consideration of the “metafictional elements” of the narratives in Storyteller, Krumholtz concludes that “poststructuralist theories . . . can be useful to and absorbed within Laguna Pueblo epistemologies” (115). Few scholars have yet applied this sort of convergent move to Silko’s novels. 4 Post- and decolonial projects, of course, are still necessary and intensely relevant—now, perhaps, more than ever. Much of the best recent scholarship has taken on projects meant to elucidate innovative and promising critical paradigms capable of doing justice, in every sense, to Indigenous peoples and cultures in academic inquiry, including Linda Tuhiwai Smith in Decolonizing Methodologies. However, there remains a dearth of extensive research into the relationship between Native texts and literary development in the post-45 period—the postmodern and the postpostmodern—with a few exceptions, notably Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures, edited by Gerald Vizenor. I hope not to change the vector of Silko studies specifically or Indigenous studies generally, but rather to begin to fill a gap in the scholarship and illumine the necessity for a wider inclusivity in discussions of contemporary literature. 5 Pulitano follows a critical track opened by Karl Kroeber, who in his 1987 essay “Post-Structuralism and Oral Literature” offers his own theorization of how theory and traditional narrative might be co-illuminative. 6 As an example, on the rear-cover paratext of Norton’s 1994 anthology Postmodern American Fiction Silko sits with Mark Leyner and William Vollman, whose work only obliquely recalls Silko’s, if at all. In his essay “E Unibus Pluram,” David Foster Wallace eviscerates Leyner’s My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist as an apical work of vacuously ironic postmodern self-referentiality. As I aim to prove, Silko (like Wallace) attempts to move beyond this sort of negative postmodern aesthetic. 7 Probably “Infinite Jest V,” to be precise, although Jest leaves the exact nature and mechanism of the Entertainment at least partially obscure. 8 I offer a fuller explication of New Sincerity aesthetics in my subsequent chapters, as I chart how Silko’s work corresponds to and further illuminates the New Sincerity position. Besides Wallace, whose early essay “E Unibus Pluram,” as well as its precursor “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young,” serves as something like the New Sincerity’s manifesto, Kelly has examined texts by Jennifer Egan and George Saunders, and the rough canon of New Sincerity also includes Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, and Ben Lerner. Recent criticism has pointed out that inclusion in New Sincerity tends generally towards white, cisgendered, male authors, and that New Sincerity might be read as a reinscription of the priority of the white male subject position. I discuss these concerns more thoroughly in my conclusion, but I emphasize that my attempt to bring together Silko and New Sincerity is meant neither as a tokenism nor as an attempt to “reclaim” Silko from the “merely ideological” margins into which, as Amy Hungerford points out, texts by women and writers of color are relegated.

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9 Wallace scholarship usually identifies his novella “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” that immediately preceded Jest as his first explicit response to metafiction and postmodernism, but Jest is the fuller and more mature work. 10 Ironically, given Jameson’s exalted position among the suspicious critics who uncover and exhume hidden or repressed ideology, Wallace surmises that the meaninglessly rococo “Academic English” exemplified by Jameson, “its real motivation fear,” strives towards “concealment,” and is therefore a product both of erudition and deep discomfort with any semblance of vulnerability (“Authority and American Usage” 116). 11 Harvey constructs a thorough and accessible definition of neoliberalism as political, economic, and cultural ideology in A Brief History of Neoliberalism. 12 We should recall here Silko’s specific ire at Erdrich’s The Beet Queen as a quintessentially Reagan-era text, and her subsequent implication that neoliberal ideology reinforces—or, at the very least, can do little to combat—the oppression of Native and other displaced peoples. 13 For example, we note Silko’s use of terms like “pure” and “clarity” and “muddy the waters” in her review of Erdrich to describe postmodern fiction; we cannot miss the racial and colonial connotations. 14 My next section addresses the significance of this image of extraction at length. 15 Contrary to Castillo’s suggestion that Silko holds a narrow opinion of the “authentically” Native, this suggests that Silko realizes any application of terms like “authentic” and “pure” are necessarily entangled in neoliberal ideology, and so she indicates, in David Moore’s terms, that “Indian lives can be shown accurately in an intercultural rather than an authentic, pure, or ‘aboriginal’ context” (“Decolonizing Criticism” 12). 16 As pure spectacle, the Ceremonial resembles “The World’s Most Photographed Barn” in Don DeLillo’s White Noise: the object cannot be separated from its status as spectacle, its watched-ness. 17 We might productively juxtapose Jameson’s critical view of vacuous pastiche with the celebratory paradigm of recombination and collage that many critics have read in Indigenous texts generally and Silko’s work specifically—for example, Lee Schweninger claims, “It is necessary for Native artists to cut and paste, borrow and modify to get at a reliable representation and a reliable story” (77). 18 The claim is persuasive, given the American Evangelical emphasis on “personal relationship” with God and the centrality of the avowal (that is, the subjective expression) of belief. Also relevant are both the remarkable livelihood of the prosperity gospel and the cultural influence of megachurches and their well-to-do leadership. 19 In his response to Jackson and Nicholson-Roberts, Kelly explains at length how the reality of economic exchange involved in marketing and publishing books adds another layer of self- consciousness, in a material sense, for New Sincerity writers. 20 Fittingly, these cattle realize Josiah’s experiments in cattle hybridity, his breeding of Mexican and American cattle together, and so are themselves transnational. 21 Although I employ Felski and Sedgwick as voices of the shift away from suspicion and antagonistic readings, they are, of course, far from the first to emphasize the point. As an example, Susan Sontag’s essay “Against Interpretation” from her eponymous 1966 collection advances a similar, though perhaps more radical, argument—that any hermeneutics is an application of violence to a text—and concludes with her famous pronouncement: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art” (10). We might also consider Elaine Scarry’s On Beauty and Being Just, in which she argues for beauty as the grounding for an ethics, as an exercise in this sort of reparative, nonsuspicious criticism (5). 22 It’s worth noting that Ricoeur himself envisions the collection of suspicious strategies he named more generatively, as establishing “a new reign of Truth, not only by means of a ‘destructive’ critique, but by invention of an art of interpreting” (33); Felski borrows a term from Jameson and calls

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this Ricoeur’s “positive hermeneutic” (64). Similarly, in her article “Marx on Ruthless Critique,” Judith Butler interprets Marx (a foundational figure for the hermeneutics of suspicion) as establishing a sort of critique that constructs, even “forgives,” as it deconstructs (467). 23 Furthermore, and perhaps more pressingly, suspicion can do little to combat untruths laid bare blatantly by their speakers; Kelly offers the example of Jest’s Johnny Gentle, but with the rise, election, and Teflonic presidency of Donald Trump, suspicion’s deflation is shown, ironically, through its proliferation: What use is suspicion or paranoia as serious modes of inquiry and critique when the public and media discourses treat seriously talk of “alternative facts” and moments of astounding rhetorical and political hubris? 24 Indeed, the political rhetoric of the U.S. post-Trump seems to mock ideas of falsehood and deception as hidden, obscured, or ashamedly denied. 25 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri make a thorough argument to this effect in Empire. 26 Recalling David Moore’s essay “Decolonializing Criticism,” we find that he makes a similar point as he calls for the ethically serious critic to, in perpetrating the postcolonial goal, posit “blurring of categories” between colonizer and colonized, rather than a simple, and simply suspicious, antagonism (11). 27 It is worth noting that Allen conceives of the atomic bomb as possessing transformative political and spiritual potential—a position unlike Silko’s cynical attitude. In Off the Reservation, Allen writes, “I’d say the Bomb is as likely to result in the liberation of the Native people as in their (continued) demise” (106). Contextually, we may want to remember that Allen’s thought deviates from Silko’s on various fronts, a fact Allen notes in multiple texts, including her article “Special Problems in Teaching Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony.” 28 To further emphasize the image of the (faux) sunrise, Allen also notes that raw uranium ore is called “yellowcake,” while the mythical Yellow Woman carries associations with yellow corn, and that “the Mayan word for corn is the same as for dawn” (105). 29 The other Laguna veterans are similarly afflicted by this anhedonia; Tayo notes that Harley “didn’t seem to feel anything at all” (23). 30 Kelly references Sedgwick in his reply to Edwin Jackson-Roberts and Joel Nicholson’s article questioning the utility and inclusivity of New Sincerity—both Kelly’s reply and the original critique were published in Orbit. 31 This is a charge, as previously mentioned, that Jackson-Roberts and Nicholson make in their missive against the present construction of New Sincerity. 32 Notably, Tayo’s acts of prayer resemble Don Gately’s in Infinite Jest. Though Tayo is not, like Gately, a part-time agnostic, they enact a willingness to give precedence to action over intention—to allow prayer to limn feeling, rather than emerge from it—that unites them in ad-hoc spiritual praxis. 33 Although the sudden arrival of cooperative animals might strike the reader as cheesy or cliché, we should keep in mind that Wallace advocated for the serious relevance and importance of cliché. We should also note this concern with cliché would make little sense within the animist Laguna view of nature and ecology. 34 Hence Trilling’s decision to laud Horatio as Hamlet’s shining, sincere star, as “a mind wholly at one with itself, an instance of sincerity unqualified” (4). 35 This positing of truth as “inward” and therefore “hidden,” necessitating uncovering and excavation, anticipates the suspicious epistemologies the New Sincerity denies, and which Silko (as we will see) associates with the destruction of the witchery. 36 We think here of Eliot’s objective correlative, positivist structuralism, or early Wittgenstein. 37 Besides Hyde and Derrida, Harvard law scholar Lawrence Lessig and novelist Jonathan Lethem have both written profitably on the contemporary relevancy of gift economies.

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38 We might lightheartedly call this pattern mise-en-abysmal, and it is scattered generously throughout Wallace’s texts. Examples include the monologue-stories “The Devil is a Busy Man” and “Good Old Neon.” 39 In his later fiction, especially the short stories in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and Oblivion, Wallace makes this participation even more blatant; in “Octet,” Wallace strips away the division between reader and writer and demands a remarkable consideration of sincerity from the reader, who is inhabiting both positions at once. 40 The importance of mixed heritage for Tayo and Betonie, as well as the confluential nature of their reformed ceremony and the text’s inclusion of all humankind as “one clan again, united by the fate the destroyers planned for all of them” (246), recalls Kelly’s operation of purity/contamination in his reply to Jackson and Nicholson-Roberts. The New Sincerity, writes Kelly, elects for contamination over purity as it works to break down notions of the “pure,” discrete expressive subject as the center of discourse. To be Newly Sincere means recognizing and reveling in the multiply influenced, polyphonic essence of one’s “own” words, thoughts, and identity. 41 No pun intended. 42 In Jest, these communities are epitomized by AA meetings, especially the White Flag group Don Gately attends. In fact, Gately, a former Demerol addict who is the closest thing to Jest’s hero, follows an arc not unlike Tayo’s: from illness to recovery, from individuality to community, from solipsism to sincerity. 43 In Jest, recovering addict Tiny Ewell makes this very mistake; several scenes depict his near-manic desire for an explanation of AA’s success to rather comic effect. 44 In a similar fashion, Lewis Hyde describes alcoholism as a disease “whose etiology is so complex that attempts to describe it do not yet help us heal” (7). Hyde’s book on the aesthetics of gift economies, The Gift, is cited by Kelly and carries a blurb from Wallace. 45 In her work of “autotheory,” The Argonauts, in which we can detect a sense of New Sincerity, Maggie Nelson similarly lauds the relinquishment of subjective power, citing the “pleasure of dependency,” and employs the circular image of the paradox to illustrate the further joy of revisitation; in place of linearity, Nelson advocates for a cyclicality of encounter and re-encounter. 46 David Moore remarks on the significance on Tayo’s non-action in “Accept this offering,” his introduction to the first section of a recent collection of essays on Silko’s three novels he edited. Moore notes the “blank space” on the page that coincides with the moment of action passing unseized (30). If we consider Tayo’s inaction a sort of agential silence, we find relevance in another of Moore’s essays, “Rough Knowledge and Radical Understanding: Sacred Silence in American Indian Literatures,” in which he describes silence as a political and epistemological strategy, a “rough mode of knowledge that allows for uncertainty, for relationality in understanding, for fallibility” (634). 47 This cooperative view of reading resembles Laguna communal storytelling, in which, as Roumiana Velikova describes, the “relation between narration and metanarration . . . is blurred” (69). 48 While English is, of course, the language of the European colonizers through whom the witchery acts in Ceremony, in Almanac, for example, the introduction of English into the Almanac, formerly verboten, can be read as an introduction of new narrative and spiritual vitality. 49 We see another example of self-conscious fictionalizing in Almanac and the story of the cohort of Geronimos, which seizes upon Geronimo’s mythic status to spin complex stories—again, in English—and layers of shared identity that confound the pursuing U.S. Army. This, notably, is an overt example of subjective identity dissolved, almost literally, into a shared and performed narrative, an implement of resistance. 50 Recently, in his response to Jackson and Nicholson-Roberts, Kelly has posited this reader-writer encounter as figurative, the implied reader as the necessary and imaginative projection of the New

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Sincerity author meant to position the text in a dialogic space. However, my argument assumes the literal presence of the reader and the phenomenological interaction of the act of reading—as does, it would seem, Ceremony. 51 “Octet,” which appears in Wallace’s collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, speaks directly to the reader as if the reader were the writer. The story’s narration is a deliberation of whether or not talking directly to the reader about sincerity is possible or effective—which, of course, is exactly what the story is doing. The final line, “So choose,” is both a call to the imaginary reader/writer to decide whether or not to address the reader and (more importantly) an interrogation of the literal reader; this last line demands the reader choose whether or not to believe in the sincerity of the story. 52 As Deborah Madsen notes, there is an especially vertical metafictional pattern, an image of the mise-en-abyme, in Almanac that, I suggest, recalls John Barth, particularly Chimera: “the structure [of Almanac] consists of the narrator telling the stories that characters are telling about stories and the organization of these stories is captured self-consciously” (142). 53 Throughout his fiction, Wallace presses the reader into these participatory moments of vulnerability. In Jest’s presentation of the “exotic new facts” about Ennet House presented in the second person, Kelly finds that “the reader is made to participate in this process” of community- based, performative sincerity (“Dialectic of Sincerity”). All referring to the opening phrase “You will find out,” these anaphoric statements describe the travails, small graces, and moments of humor inherent to halfway-house life and drug recovery directly to the reader: “You will find out . . . That in metro Boston . . . That certain persons . . . That no matter how smart . . . ” (200-201). That is, the “facts” about Ennet House and recovery move to the very surface of the text, meant for the reader with only a minimal membrane between; the reader approaches the facts like an Ennet House resident—like a character. This is the same technique Wallace uses in “Octet” as he collapses the writer/reader boundary; the story’s central question—is the sudden vulnerability of sincerity worthwhile?—is literally posed to the reader. 54 Echoing Hirsch, Madsen posits that Almanac’s narrator “creates a relationship with the reader that, for Silko, is fundamental to her project” (135). 55 A fitting metaphor for Wallace, given his training in formal logic and interest in mathematics. 56 Any discussion of Hungerford’s work alongside Wallace’s must mention Hungerford’s essay “On Not Reading DFW,” collected in Making Literature Now, in which she defends the notion of not- reading generally with a specific critique of Wallace and “how different practices of reading shape literary culture in the present” (141). 57 In his 2015 Critique article “(New) Sincerity in David Foster Wallace’s ‘Octet’,” Iain Williams sets forth an earlier rejoinder to Kelly and New Sincerity, concluding that “Wallace’s expression of sincerity is—although not reactionary or reductive—a profoundly conservative position” (311). 58 As it happens, these authors also happen to carry, like Wallace, deserved or otherwise, a connotation of complexity, length, and density. And indeed, Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Joshua Cohen’s Book of Numbers, Matthew McIntosh’s themystery.doc, and Adam Levin’s The Instructions all boast arboreally intimidating page counts. 59 Along these lines, if we take for the roughest definition of postmodernism Jean-Francois Lyotard’s suggestion that it constitutes the shared skepticism towards metanarrative, Silko’s deployment of postmodern technique in order to advance a sort of explicitly narrative metanarrative becomes doubly intriguing. Silko makes a distinction between the suspicious epistemologies of government Indian schools—associated with “science”—and the narrative-based epistemology of traditional ceremony, which recalls Lyotard’s own investigation into the interplay between “scientific” and “narrative” knowledges.

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60 Similarly, relatively few critics have taken a religious approach to reading Wallace, despite his clear investment in religious and spiritual questions. As Tom Bissell writes in the introduction to Jest’s 20th anniversary edition, “it is a mistake to view [Wallace] as anything other than a religious writer” (xii). Among the critics who have taken up this line of inquiry is Lee Konstantinou, who argues in his essay on postironic belief that the “antirebel” for whom Wallace famously advocates in “E Unibus Pluram” is “a type of believer” (93). In addition, David Evans figures Jest as “a kind of Purgatory” and presents Wallace as a Jamesian pragmatist (181). Elsewhere, Allard Den Dulk illuminates parallels between Wallace and Kierkegaard’s Christian existentialism (43). Though it reads more as a devotional than a typical critical text, Adam Miller’s The Gospel According to David Foster Wallace is also worth mentioning. 61 Wallace may well have Kafka in mind here—particularly his story “In the Penal Colony,” in which a sort of justice is written upon the penitent’s body with a “harrow”; the story ends with an inverted, grotesque crucifixion.

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