Vizenor Concordance: On MOCKERY

“My experiences as a writer were more about chance and coincidence than any other single concept, strategy, or literary objective.  The chance discovery of A Stone, a Leaf, a Door and Look Homeward, Angel inspired me to be writer.  Call it Sleep inspired me to create more crucial situations of cultural separatism with native mockery, irony, and shamanic rage.  The haiku experiences were extraordinary, the chance of military service at a post near Matsushima and thirteen years later the experience was enhanced by the translation and publication of The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Sketches by Matsuo Basho in 1966.  My automatic overnight novel in the military was lost, and my second novel, Fate in August, has never been published.  My first haiku poems were published in the early sixties, and most recently in Favor of Crows: New and Collected Haiku, Wesleyan University Press, 2014.” (1.1)

“Natives and suicide are two words that forever burden my memories with the sentiments of misery, the separatism of treaty reservations, casino cultures as sardonic salvation, and reveal the mockery and weary stories of native continental liberty in the ruins of civilization.  One crucial story that has haunted me for more than fifty years is my report on the suicide of Dane White, an abandoned and lonesome thirteen year old native who had been confined in a county jail for more than six weeks for the crime of truancy from a public school.  My story about the funeral services and burial was published on the front page of the Minneapolis Tribune on November 21, 1968.” (1.1)

“The devious political structures of separatism on treaty reservations once denied natives the ordinary right to publish books or newspapers.  My direct relatives published the first independent newspaper on a treaty reservation on March 25, 1886, and the federal agent seized the press and ordered the native publisher and editor to vacate the reservation.  They refused to leave and a year later a federal court judge ruled that The Progress could be published anywhere in the country and on the White Earth Reservation.  The separatism of natives was once equally devious in the translation of native stories as cause and effect and with no sense of natural motions or totemic associations.  Native storiers continue the resistance of separatism and the cultural romance of discovery and victimry with mockery and characters of survivance.” (1.4)

“My critical essays advance the literature of survivance and mock the commercial themes of native separatism and victimry.  From my first published novel Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles to my most recent novel, Theatre of Chance: Native Celebrities of Nothing in an Existential Colony, the native manners and themes of resistance, survivance, and mockery counters the literary commerce of native victimry. My recent series of five interrelated native historical novels, Blue Ravens, Native Tributes, Satie on the Seine, Waiting for Wovoka, and Theatre of Chance, present hand puppet parleys that advocate native survivance and tease the agents of victimry. My first critical and historical discussions of native victimry and survivance were in academic essays and in Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance, 1990.” (2.1)

“Some of my stories are created with shamanic rage and others with a sense of totemic shadows, mockery, and diverse associations of ironic trickster stories.  Characters in my stories observe relations, contradictions, and cultural simulations, and carry out these diversions in the same obscure sense of time and course of irony.  Native relations and characters in stories or critical essays must show some sense of resistance and mockery of the cultural models of ethnography and the pretentions of popular culture.” (2.2)

“My characters enact scenes of natural motion, totemic shadows, resistance, and mockery of popular and commercial expectation of indian cultures and literature.  The characters in my novels carry out the irony, mockery, and sense of native presence over victimry and the absence in history.” (2.2)

“The creation of native stories in the structure of a written language is never the same as the elusive characters and strategic hesitations and gestures of oral stories, yet it was necessary for me to create a sense of natural motion, tease, totemic temper, and the visual sensations of oral stories.  The silent printed words are no comparison to the company of generous and responsive native storiers.  Some natives never learned to recognize the subtle hesitations of an oral storier.  The characters in my stories create the memories and hesitations of native storiers with elusive gestures, dream songs, and the shamanic presence of hand puppets in obscure parleys.  Oral storiers and some creative literary authors have carried out the sensations of natural motion with no structures of time or possessive pronouns, and these conventions were centuries ahead of the existential theatres of the postmodern.  The elusive sense of time, natural motion, totemic shadows, mutable characters, and the generous tease of native nicknames and mockery in oral stories is surely evidence enough that natives could have been reviewed as an ironic deconstruction of monotheism and the narratives of mercenary commerce and culture.” (2.3)

“The early native parodies and mockery of ethnographic models of cultures could serve as a second notice of postmodern perceptions.  More, some native leaders and storiers mocked the gestures and service manners of federal agents in their absence.  Natives might consider that the creative literature of survivance, mockery, irony, and strategic satire outshine the early theories of postmodernism.” (2.3)

“The fascist agents of pretendians apparently did not consider that the federal arithmetic of blood quantum was unreliable for various reasons, including the deliberate arithmetic reduction of native blood.  The notion of an authentic political bloodline is a crude simile of separatism.  The authentic bloodline indians diminish day by day.  The ludicrous course of arithmetic divisions of blood as reveals of character and dedication deserves eternal shamanic mockery.” (2.4)

“A more humane practice would consider a native presence based on blood relations and families, not on the arithmetic deceptions of federal agencies that would rather reduce the number of natives for any reason, such as the aberrant arithmetic reductions of indian blood to show that natives are closer to civilization. The miscalculations of navigation and simulations of indians with an absurd dose of serviceable blood is the grand puppet parley of shamanic mockery.” (2.4)

“The literary designation of “authentic” native authors should not be determined by the fascist actions of pretendian agents or commercial publishers but instead editors and readers should be more critical of the way authors create characters in natural motion and reveal the presence of animals and birds and critically evaluate the use of pronouns and references to totemic associations that have a distinct presence in the novels of many native authors.  Leslie Silko, N. Scott Momaday, and many other authors, for instance, create animals in their stories that have essential associations and a sense of presence.  Native mongrels and other animals are teased with nicknames as personal relations in my creative stories.  Other critical considerations of native literary empathy would include the distinctive narrative scenes of survivance and critical mockery of treaty separatism and victimry.” (2.4)

“My stories at the time were never decided with possessive pronouns and certainly not the consciousness of singularity in the ruins of civilization.  My sense of native presence and recognition in a world of literary envy and trickery was never secure in a dominant monotheistic culture.  Treaty reservations and native existential colonies in cities revealed cultural separatism but not a “specific civilization.”  The communal pleasure of mockery and irony in trickster creation stories and the elusive native stories of chance, totemic shadows, shamanic mockery and irony are not comparable to “metaphysical preconditions.”  Gusdorf declared that “Autobiography becomes possible only under certain metaphysical preconditions. . .humanity must have emerged from the mythic framework of traditional teachings and must have entered into the perilous domain of history.  The man who takes the trouble to tell of himself knows that the present differs from the past and that it will not be repeated in the future.”” (2.5)

“MacChurbbs easily provided a steady course of nicknames in my stories, and every native nickname was a tricky chance in creation stories.  He was a miniature puppet and mighty at the same time, with no bloodlines, no terminal divisions of identity, and yet he is an imagined shaman that roams in the memory of an imagistic poet and storier.  He told me to “free yourself from the customs of civilized measurements.  We are so big, and so little at the same time.  You have learned only one way to measure the world.  Puppets of imagination vanish in culture of terminal creeds.  Mockery and irony never expire, but some people exaggerate their presence and reach for cultural perfection through the exalted structures of possessive pronouns of the past.”” (2.5)

“German Marxism and Critical Theory at the Frankfurt School first focused on cultural materialism, communism, and the politics of fascism and consciousness.  Critical theories are creased and complicated by expositions, analytical translations, violence, political and cultural events, and creative perceptions.  Shamanic favors and the recognition of critical theories become a clever chase of native consciousness.  The consideration of native totemic shadows, trickster cosmology, the chance of irony and mockery on separatist reservations and in existential colonies, are seldom the subject of critical theories.” (3.2)

“Native storiers have never been easy to consider in the anonymity of existential colonies in cities or at universities, but a grand theory of totemic sensations of mockery, chance of healers, and elusive totemic shadows created by oral storiers continue in some native nations that are not casino cultures.  The native grand theories of mockery and irony easily deconstruct digital images and artificial intelligence as nothing more than evasive agency decoys and analogue simulations of futuristic reservations of victimry.  The sense of presence and ironic manner of native storiers is elusive and never a digital memory.  Digital depictions and other enactments of artificial intelligence depose the native novels that have not created totemic shadows and the ironic presence of storiers.  Benjamin would surely salute the grand theories of mockery and irony as restorations of the last native stories of shamanic hesitations and liberty on the continent.” (3.2)

“The native essays of resistance, and the grand theories of mockery and survivance, are not traditions.  The native essay is contention not a meditation, not separatism, not cultural absence, or the mastery of natural motion.  The essay is an ironic venture, a tease of creation stories, and the native essay is a tease of Theodor Adorno and his theory of the essay cited in a collection of my essays, Fugitive Poses: Native American Scenes of Absence and Presence, University of Nebraska Press, 1998.  The “essay retains, precisely in the autonomy of its presentation, which distinguishes it from scientific and scholarly information, traces of the communicative element such information dispenses with,” observed Adorno in Notes to Literature.” (3.2)

“The coureurs des bois of the mercenary fur trade and the kitschymen of the media, casino cultures, and digital simulations are the merchants of resistance with no natural hesitations or memorable stories.  The considerations are casual and repetitious, at best, and the stories are the mere enterprise of resistance.  The kitschymen are the simulations of natives with no sense of an actual presence, only the objects of mockery.  The kitschymen are noted as a native pretense not a presence, and with no gestures of imagination, no native mockery, or recognition of irony.” (3.4)