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Abstract
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The American Indian Quarterly 25.1 (2001) 46-72 Ironic and satiric impulses consistently suffuse the tone, structure, realization of characters, and vision of contemporary reservation reality in the small press collections of poems and stories of Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d'Alene), from The Business of Fancydancing (1991) through The Summer of Black Widows (1996), as well as his mainstream works of fiction, from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993) to The Toughest Indian in the World (2000). Much of the praise bestowed on Alexie's early efforts and The Lone Ranger and Tonto has focused on the author's unflinchingly bold depiction of the dysfunctional nature of contemporary reservation life and the fragmented, often alienated "bicultural" lives of characters who daily confront the white civilization that encaptives their world - physically, historically, spiritually, and psychically. Clearly, part of the attractiveness of Alexie's early volumes of verse and works of prose, at least for many mainstream readers, can be attributed to the author's conscious construction of a hyperrealistic "hip" persona, one that at times might be indistinguishable from his biography. Kenneth Lincoln's recent assessment of Alexie's poetry, for example, voices both puzzlement and concern over Alexie's authorial stance: "With Sherman Alexie, readers can throw formal questions out the smokehole. . . . Parodic antiformalism may account for some of Alexie's mass appeal. This Indian gadfly jumps through all the hoops, sonnet, to villanelle, to heroic couplet, all tongue-in-cheeky." To Lincoln, Alexie is "A stand-up comedian, the Indian improvisator [who himself] is the performing text" (267). While Lincoln acknowledges that some readers may find meaning in Alexie's performance-art poetry - "His firecat imagination plays tricks on the reader, for our supposed good, for its own native delight and survival" (268) - he also questions Alexie's motives: "His is more performance than poem, more attitude than art, more schtick than aesthetic. Definitely talented, deeply impassioned, hyphenated American-Indian, but to what end?" Although Alexie's poetry shows an obvious delight in surfaces, Lincoln finds little more beyond the façade: Indi'n vaudeville, then, stand-up comedy on the edge of despair. A late- twentieth-century, quasi-visionary clown tells the truth that hurts and heals in one-liners cheesy as the Marx Brothers, trenchant as Lenny Bruce, tricky as Charlie Hill's BIA Halloween 'Trick or Treaty'. (271) Following publication of The Lone Ranger and Tonto and Reservation Blues (1995), however, Alexie also came under fire from certain quarters for his purportedly negative use of irony and satire - namely, literary connections to (white) popular culture and representations of Indian stereotypes that some consider "inappropriate" and dangerously misleading for mainstream consumption. Despite his early praise of The Lone Ranger and Tonto, for example, Louis Owens finds that Alexie's fiction too often simply reinforces all of the stereotypes desired by white readers: his bleakly absurd and aimless Indians are imploding in a passion of self-destructiveness and self-loathing; there is no family or community center toward which his characters . . . might turn for coherence; and in the process of self-destruction the Indians provide Euramerican readers with pleasurable moments of dark humor or the titillation of bloodthirsty savagery. Above all, the non-Indian reader of Alexie's work is allowed to come away with a sense . . . that no one is really to blame but the Indians, no matter how loudly the author shouts his anger. (79-80) In his chapter on "new" American Indian fiction, Owens contends that "the most popularly and commercially successful Native American works thus far are marked by a dominant shared characteristic: They are the direct heirs of the modernist tradition of naturalistic despair, of which the Indian is the quintessential illustration" (81). For Owens, these new American Indian novels articulate in sometimes extraordinarily well-disguised form the familiar stereotype... |