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The Animal Nature of Words in the Writing of Gerald Vizenor and Barry Lopez

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The Animal Nature of Words in the Writing of Gerald Vizenor and Barry Lopez University of Montana ScholarWorks at University of Montana Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers Graduate School 2007 Tracking the Trickster Home: The Animal Nature of Words in the Writing of Gerald Vizenor and Barry Lopez Steven Jubitz Hawley The University of Montana Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Recommended Citation Hawley, Steven Jubitz, "Tracking the Trickster Home: The Animal Nature of Words in the Writing of Gerald Vizenor and Barry Lopez" (2007). Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers. 1132. https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/1132 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at ScholarWorks at University of Montana. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at University of Montana. For more information, please contact [email protected]. TRACKING THE TRICKSTER HOME: THE ANIMAL NATURE OF WORDS IN THE WRITING OF GERALD VIZENOR AND BARRY LOPEZ By Steven Jubitz Hawley B.A., English Southern Oregon State College, 1991 M.A., Teaching, Lewis and Clark College, 1996 Thesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Literature from The University of Montana Missoula, MT Autumn 2006. Approved by: Dr. David A. Strobel, Dean Graduate School David L. Moore, Associate Professor, English, Thesis Committee Chair Louise Economides, Assistant Professor, English Dan Flores, Associate Professor, History Hawley, Steven, M.A. Autumn 2006 English Tracking the Trickster Home: The Animal Nature of Words in the Writing of Gerald Vizenor and Barry Lopez. David L. Moore, thesis committee chair. This thesis examines tropes of the trickster in two different aspects; as a character in literature, and as an elusive semiotic sign, what Gerald Vizenor has playfully termed a “comic holotrope.” Vizenor’s neologism eschews mere linguistic representation, and relies on the personal and cultural context of both author and reader to connect the individual consciousness to the collectively social; the solitary mind to an animate world of relationships. Central to this postmodern conception of the trickster is a traditional Native American conception of community, which generously includes all of the elements in a given landscape as those that comprise social relationships. The trickster character’s lewd, comic antics are playful reminders of this landed sense of the communal. In the trickster mythology, the distance between theory and practice is measured by what can be sensualy experienced in the landscape. In Vizenor’s holotrope, these direct experiences, what can be seen, heard, or otherwise felt and remembered in the land is that which holds the potential to bring language to life. Vizenor’s writing plays at unraveling the tightly wound fabric of meaning—the intransigent hegemony of text that the postmodern project takes to task—as the continuance of an ancient cultural imperative to maintain and restore communal ties through narrative art. Barry Lopez’s engagement of the trickster pursues a similar evocation of communal ties to land and culture through language. However, Lopez works from within his own Euramerican cultural context. Establishing ties to the American landscape conjures with it a dark and sometimes violent colonial history. Lopez recasts the purpose and scope of American nature writing to reckon with this past, and begins to shape a foundation for Euramerican residency, as opposed to occupation, in the North American continent. Juxtaposing the work of these two writers reveals the network of pathways the trickster illuminates between the individual and the community, nature and culture, and landscape and narrative art. ii Acknowledgments I would like to thank family and friends for their companionship and conversation on journeys near and far from home. It was from these experiences that the basis for many of the ideas in this thesis were formed. Others deserve my gratitude and a mention here as well. Teachers: especially Michael Baker, Michael Baughman, Greg Smith, and David Moore. Each with patience pointed me toward the wisdom in books, and offered on occasion their own considerable insight on matters literary and otherwise. Students and faculty in the English Department at University of Montana: there are too many instances to recognize here, but at least one deserves mention. The informal LARC (Literature and Research Colloquium) gatherings on Friday afternoons throughout the year has been an especially fertile venue for creating, crystallizing and clarifying drafts of this thesis, and an edifying and enlightening experience in listening to and discussing writing outside my area of interest. Thanks to Ashby Kinch and Lynn Itagaki for organizing these gatherings. My thesis committee, David Moore, Louise Economides and Dan Flores: Their editorial insights, questions and suggestions inspired me to rethink, rewrite, and review, at times with a frenzied enthusiasm. Lastly, the person with whom I have logged the most miles on many trails, my wife Kathy, I owe the greatest portion of gratitude. Putting work aside long enough to walk with her and our son Elliot in every season here in Missoula has been, and with any luck will continue to be, the finest way I can think of to trace our own steps toward home. iii Tracking The Trickster Home: The Animal Nature of Words in the Writing of Gerald Vizenor and Barry Lopez Table of Contents Introduction: 1 Chapter 1: From Comic Shit to Comic Holotropes: A Natural History of Some Tricksters 16 Chapter 2: Whiteness, Wildness, and Tricksters Black, Brown and Green: Earthdiver Reciprocity in the Clan of the Hairy-Breasted Nut-scratcher. 48 Chapter 3: Dead Voices, Naturally: Haiku Hermeneutics and Textual Tricks in Gerald Vizenor’s Urban-Wildland Interface. 87 Chapter 4: Paws for Effect: Trickster Bears, Pronouncement and Silence 130 Coda: 162 Bibliography: 173 iv Introduction The land is like poetry: it is inexplicably coherent, it is transcendent in its meaning, and it has the power to elevate a consideration of human life. -Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams The tracking that any text instrumentalizes is an adventure that is always immediate, happening now, registering the dynamics of belief. -Elaine Jahner, “Trickster Discourse and Postmodern Strategies.” In The Dispossessed, Ursula LeGuin writes, “You can go home again, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been” (157). What does this mean? Not being “at home,” implies the condition of always traveling, or worse, perpetually being lost. I think of two senses of the word; of being unable to verify one’s location in time and space, and of irretrievably missed opportunity, a hopelessly gone possession, the empty ache of suddenly remembering having left an invaluable something on top of the car after hours on the freeway. Not too long ago, I got lost in Kyoto, Japan. I had left the hotel there at five in the morning on what I loosely planned as a ten mile run toward Nanzen-Ji, one of the more spectacular Zen monasteries in Kyoto. I wanted to catch the monks chanting morning prayers, and then run on up into the hills above the monastery grounds, where I’d heard Shinto rites were still performed at an old waterfall up a dirt path. All went according to plan, all the way to the waterfall. By sunrise I was at the great hall. The deep hum of monks chanting prayers echoed into the mountains. The hair stood on my neck as I found the stairs leading to the path into the woods. A mile or two up the trail, I found the waterfall, and an old couple lighting candles there 1 smiled as I bowed and took a drink with a dipper from the cistern at the base of the falls. I rinsed my hands before drinking as I had been taught, but the amused grins on the faces of my hosts made me think I’d gotten something wrong. Back down the trail—I could follow the voices from the monastery about half-way down—I fell into that rhythmic easy lope runners always hope for, and found myself thinking of resonances between tricksters and what little I know of Zen Buddhism (tales of beggar-monks and Old Man Coyote always traveling; Tripitaka and the Monkey King headed over the mountains) of how some cities, ancient ones lucky enough to have avoided the ravages of modern warfare (Prague, Kyoto) fit neatly into their given landscapes, buildings and people included, and finally, what a finely-honed sense of direction I had developed over the years as a traveler myself. It was about then I realized I was lost. After a series of comic missteps, I realized the only way I was going to find my way back to the hotel was to return to Nanzen-Ji and try to retrace my steps from there. That was back uphill, and by now, tourists were afoot on the monastery grounds, but no European or American- looking ones. I ran along a canal, trying to pretend I was not extremely thirsty, and that, like a homing pigeon rather than a coyote or monkey, I would find my way back, no questions asked. An old man sitting serenely on a bench overlooking the canal smiled and raised his hand at me, and I took this gesture as an opportunity to speak a dialect of tourist English, loathed by residents of non-English speaking countries and waitstaff at ethnic restaurants everywhere. It consists mainly of speaking more loudly and slowly than one normally would, hoping by some miracle of osmosis or Jesus or praxis of Bakhtinian dialogics that English Will Suddenly Be Understood By Every One. No luck. We smiled and bowed at one another, and I ran to the end of the canal, mustering the will to face my dragons.
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