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THROWING BOOKS INSTEAD of SPEARS: the Alexie-Treuer Skirmish Over Market Share

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THROWING BOOKS INSTEAD of SPEARS: the Alexie-Treuer Skirmish Over Market Share THROWING BOOKS INSTEAD OF SPEARS: The Alexie-Treuer Skirmish Over Market Share Ezra Whitman Critical Paper and Program Bibliography Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the MFA (Master of Fine Arts) in Creative Writing, Pacific Lutheran University, August 2011 1 Throwing Books Instead of Spears: The Alexie-Treuer Skirmish Over Market Share Following the 2006 publication of David Treuer’s Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual, Minneapolis-based publication Secrets of the City interviewed Spokane/Coeur D’Alene Indian writer Sherman Alexie. This gave Alexie an opportunity to respond to the User’s Manual’s essay “Indian/Not-Indian Literature” in which the Ojibwe writer points out the tired phrases and flawed prose of Alexie’s fiction. “At one point,” Alexie said in his interview with John Lurie, “when [Treuer’s] major publishing career wasn’t going well, I helped him contact my agent. I’m saying this stuff because this is where he lives and I want the world to know this: He wrote a book to show off for white folks, and we Indians are giggling at him.” Alexie takes the debate out of the classroom into the schoolyard by summoning issues that deal less with literature, and more with who has more successfully navigated the Native American fiction market. Insecurities tucked well beneath this pretentious “World’s Toughest Indian” exterior, Alexie interviews much the way he writes: on the emotive level. He steers clear of the intellectual channels Treuer attempts to open, and at the basis this little scuffle is just that—a mismatch of channels; one that calls upon intellect, the other on emotion. Treuer’s approach is a heady one concerned with what has gone awry in the genre of Native American fiction. Alexie would rather stick with the wisecracks which have, in essence, cracked the code for success for him in the same genre. What this skirmish between Treuer and Alexie opens up is a much needed discussion on what has become of the Native American fiction genre. 2 For Alexie, the genre is a comfort zone, a well-grooved rut in style that has awarded him handsomely. For Treuer, Native American fiction is a genre experiencing self-inflicted disservices, and its market has been less receptive to his work. The skirmish comes down to who has managed to dig in and exploit the Native American fiction market, and who has not. It is a question of selling the Indian. Buried within each stance of the Treuer vs. Alexie skirmish is a cautious non- acknowledgment of the possible tactics used by best-selling authors to best-sell the Native American experience. There is a deeper—and simpler—disservice to their arts: a market that expects and responds to a certain, generic Native American story. This is at the base of what undermines Native American fiction as literature. In Native American Fiction: A User’s Manual, David Treuer’s core argument is that a sincere longing for cultural artifact by both writers and readers undermines the art of Native American fiction. Native artisans whose medium is that other than the written word specifically create objects to be sold as an authentic, and most importantly, tangible pieces of Native America. The fallacy is that stories written in English using Western literary devices belong to this category of Native American cultural art. The misconception by both Native writers and critics is that written English has successfully produced relics of Native cultures, when it has not. Treuer is convinced that some of Native American fiction’s defining voices, writers like James Welch, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Sherman Alexie, are undermined by both audience desire for and authorial willingness to provide relics or extensions of Native American culture. Treuer suggests that Native American fiction be 3 examined and held accountable for stylistic and artistic use of the English language, not as sacred testaments or cultural artifacts. The art is derailed by a boasted authorial intention different from what actually exists on the page. Alexie doesn’t seem to care whether or not the written word of the Native American is presented as cultural artifact. His primary concerns seem to rest with issues of his own Nativeness, socioeconomics, and just how far he’s come from “rez” to high rise. Any interview or review spends word count running down the emotions evoked in his work, or reaffirming how he tuned into the Native American experience he is, followed by a congratulatory rundown of his accomplishments. For Alexie, if a reader criticizes his work in this regard, it is simply an attack that denies the height of his art, and overlooks how “books work in the world” as he states in an article by Dinitia Smith for the New York Times. James Welch’s Fools Crow, The Heartsong of Charging Elk, Winter in the Blood; Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony; Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine; most of Sherman Alexie’s work; and David Treuer’s Little and The Hiawatha, all come furnished with similar aspects of the Native American experience. These features include mention of or the direct involvement of the U.S. government’s betrayal; the reservation; poverty; and the wandering protagonist who, if not grief-stricken throughout the length of the story, is burdened with the need to come to terms with the death or absence of a family member; in short, varying doses of landscape, poverty, and victimhood. As a fan of both writers (for different reasons, and in varying degrees), I know that Treuer and Alexie could be doing ever-changing, evolving, and progressively more 4 meaningful work if they only didn’t feed into this market (which Alexie so far has done more successfully than Treuer). Since they’ve felt compelled to do so, the market has consequently undermined their literature more fundamentally than the culprits Treuer names. Though Treuer overlooks that his own work has fed into marketed norms of the Native American experience, his argument that Louise Erdrich undermines the art of her debut novel Love Medicine by claiming it functions as a piece of Chippewa culture rings blatantly true. However enthralling and eye-opening his essay “Smartberries” is, he still overlooks the market motivations that might have prompted her frivolous claim. Love Medicine is arguably one of the most recognizable and cornerstone works of the genre, and Treuer establishes his admiration for the literary achievement it is, but before long he veers a bit to focus on the claims Erdrich makes that the novel uses a storytelling technique of multiple voices or “polyvocality” operating in a non-linear fashion, and that this combination is something authentically “Chippewa.” What Treuer uncovers is that this technique is not Chippewa or even Native in origin. Moreover, there is no “polyvocality” at play, just first-person narratives that all contain the same authorial consciousness or voice using identical rhythmic devices in structure and form to create their own stories (Treuer 46). So what is boasted as being many voices is actually a singular one through the course of the novel, and the structure has nothing to do with Native techniques in storytelling but has its basis in Western literary device. What has been lavishly labeled as a Chippewa sensibility is actually a more general ambiguity, “intercutting” and a tandem of figurative and literal language (Treuer 34-48). 5 My concern is that Treuer stops short of suggesting market motives behind Erdrich’s claims. After all, Love Medicine experienced its own fair share of rejections before eventually being published in 1983. In notes from an interview included in a revised edition of the novel, Erdrich is quoted as saying the novel was “a leap of desperation” and that she “had to write something and get it published before [she] was thirty” (Farry 31). Was “Chippewa polyvocality” a way to fine tune the literature or dress up the query letter for acceptance into a market? This alters somewhat how I’ve viewed Erdrich’s own artistic intentions, which now seem slightly fraudulent and more of a sales pitch than art. I still admire her craft, but I wonder why Erdrich felt the need to make these claims. The craft alone should have been enough. Did Erdrich sincerely feel she was summoning aspects of Chippewa culture? Whatever the case, using this extra push over- markets—and thus undermines—what is otherwise astounding literature. This is what Treuer does not directly voice. Perhaps as a reader, I am supposed to take my cue from him, and make this connection on my own. This example suggests that the author of Native American fiction is aware of something that drives the market. It is part of the reason why for all his talent, the originality of his voice and poetic prose—captivating at the sentence level—his flare for linguistics, Treuer’s own fiction might also be a laborious read for a market that prefers more easy- to-follow recipes for conjuring the Native American experience. His pace is both constant and relentless, meandering through this recipe of what has worked in the Native fiction 6 market: poverty, crime, displacement, death, a haunting past, the longing for tribally ancient values; in short—landscape, poverty and victimhood. Selling The Experience: Landscape, Poverty And Victimhood As Sellable Features Landscape. The Native experience in fiction is based on characters seeing and watching the world in nostalgic and contemplative ways. Characters tend to have a strong tie to a climate, a region, or the landscape or formations of a particular region. The Native character always feels some unrelenting connection (positive or otherwise) to a well- defined area, and it is this connection that adds to the tension of the story.
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