There was a certain truth about the medieval and early modern conception of the body politic that finds a literary corollary in a few examples of postmodern literature. Certainly we can come to understand identity as functioning as a network of social relations and a panoply of interpellations and responses creating a sense of the collective political space of a population in a heteroglossiac manner in order to allow legitimate readings of collective negotiations of identity, such as occur within national or ethnic definitions. While the general trajectory for the development of the modern state traces the supremacy of the individual subject over the agency of the social collective, it should be understood that the autonomy (the “rights”) of the modern subject is ontologically dependent on the increasingly complex interconnection of mutual social dependencies. This concept of individual agency, as functioning within an interconnected network of multiplicities, informs the identity of the subject in a complex manner. What is frequently described as ‘personality’ (genetic potential, etc) does not exist hermetically sealed from political elements of existence. Individuals can only realize their personalities according to the means available to them – the ability to adequately perform (as) a locus for power in social discourse, in turn affecting the abilities of other individuals to act – and consequently identity involves a history, a means of charting Will to Power (as such it is...) within the pragmatic terms of socio-economic discourse. This complex relation of essentialist discourse and the temporal concerns of political existence (life in a society) is only jovially referred to here in order to disavow its legitimacy, as it is otherwise beyond the aims of this paper. It should be taken a priori that identity will not function in essentialist terms for the simple reason that such a position returns the subject back to the one word of creation, the divine performative that inaugurated with its utterance all of existence from the veil of darkness. Such will not be adequate, for identity is realized in a much more playful manner. Adaptation, which is fundamental to life itself, requires a degree of subjectivity, exclusion, and most importantly judgement. More importantly in the context of this present examination, the body metonymically stands as a figure symbolizing the reification of national identification. The body is where ideology is inscribed upon a subject; it is the space where materiality and ideology intersect. The psyche vests a nostalgic interest in a specific location: body = identity = rhizome of social relations. We can link this sense of nostalgia by means of Freud’s death drive to adaptation itself, and thus by extension to the performance of identity. In a rather melodramatic sense, every time we perform a given social relation, we return to the womb, to a state in which there is only immanence and no Other.
I
The history of colonialism belies such power relations, as overt distinctions were made concerning those who could and those who could not wield authority (or even citizenship). In order to authorize the dominant culture, a gesture is made to a transcendent moral obligation (the Law, religious or otherwise; education; “civilization” itself, etc), which subsequently becomes a justification for the imposition of justice (the epitome of Self in the discourse of ethics) onto another population. Spivak refers to this gesture as the “truth of culture”, operating as a “battle for the production of legitimizing cultural explanations” (Spivak 1999: 340). Psychological defences are created by the dominant culture in order to deal with the loss of identity inscribed onto subjugated peoples by virtue of their subjugation. Most prominently this process figures as repeated attempts to deny the legitimate identity of the oppressed, of categorizing them as ‘subhuman’ and denying citizenship (or even what can be termed basic human rights). There exists an erasure of bodies within cultural discourse simultaneous to an emphasis on the distinguishing elements of bodies in racist politics. While such ideological positions can be categorized as false and rejected accordingly, an imbalance of power ensues, which must be categorized as an injustice, when there is a certain degree of institutional authority acting to legitimate such discourse . The dominant Self negates the existence of the feared Other. At the same time, differences among Self-identification and recognition of the Other are aggrandised to irrational extremes in order to demonstrate their alien-ness.
I have focussed my present discussion largely on one novel by Tom King in order to demonstrate such cultural politics within a (dis)functioning society. One of the principle elements of the text is the fundamental fluidity of culture that is expressed in otherwise circumscribed manners. As King stated concerning his Native heritage during an interview with Jeffrey Canton, “for Native people, identity comes from community, and it varies from community to community. I wouldn’t define myself as an Indian in the same way that someone lying on a reserve would. The whole idea of ‘Indian’ becomes, in part, a construct. It’s fluid. We make it up as we go along”. Identity can be seen to be the playful adaptation to environmental criteria which are themselves functioning in a heteroglossaic manner. Seen in this light, identity must always-already be a hybridized construction. It is possible to locate this within Bakhtin’s notion of discourse, as a socially hybrid construct in which speech never entirely and exclusively originates with the speaking subject, but instead it is always heteroglossic and polyvocal, formed always in relation to the discourse of the Other. It is my belief that in this capacity Derrida’s archontic function, as elaborated in Archive Fever, operates in a slightly inverted fashion as the playful negotiation of multiplicity of identities which informs the performance of a singular identity by individual actors. Briefly stated, Derrida elaborates a conception of the archive as being the site of violence between affirmation and censorship, and it is this site where ritualized discourse allows a trace of the archon itself to enter the archive as the jouissance of its excising function. This function of the archons circumscribes identity to the point where the desire to exclude becomes the ontological priority of the act of archiving. In the case of Archive Fever itself, this function is allegorized as the ritualized act of circumcision. Consequently, the creation of a site of knowledge is a project more concerned with negation rather than a creative gesture. In terms of the performance of identity, it seems evident that a particular identity is chosen by a process of social interpellation. The individual actor cannot be categorized as an archon – an agent who negotiates the performance of individual identities – for their own behaviour. And yet, the enacting of an identity is itself an instance of jouissance, a pained creation signalling the termination of the subject from the infinitude of possibility. As such, the individual can be located in terms of the mark of violence, their bodies representing the Derridian gesture of circumcision. Thus individual identities can be observed as the negotiated compromise between the violence of absolute interpellation from external forces and personal agency.
National identity is a united and organically produced entity which traces its roots to the psychology of the individual. This functions in terms of a collective narration or an imagined group consciousness signified by ‘nationality’, and also in terms of conceptualizing the Self – an extension of the Lacanian not-I projected to its most logical extension. In a sense there is no individual without a collective; it is obvious that the inverse is true as well. In order to more adequately describe the sense of identity to which this paper refers, I wish to here invoke the conception of rhyzome as elaborated by Deleuze and Guattari in Mille Plateaux as the theoretical locus for the distribution of power within social relations. Power and identity function not in linear, hieratic terms, but rather in the mode of an infinite number of distributed centres, which represents a continuity of dislocalizations and multiplicities each acting independently and in relation to every other simultaneously. It is evident that identity is the performance of a meta-narrative gesturing towards an idealized conception as inscribed upon individuals by social structures. At the same time, these structures are themselves informed by the body; the Law, for example, can be construed as the means by which bodily impulses are controlled and consequently more precisely located and traced. Yet I do not wish to posit the body as the original site of power within civil discourse, as such would be a gesture towards a sense of universalism that I do not wish to make. It is more likely that there are as many “sites” of power as there are bodies, and consequently the performance of power has more to do with the relation of bodies than bodies themselves as such. And yet certain bodies are made as exemplary for the system as a whole. In particular, the asexualized representation of the white male body signifies its normalizing tendencies: this form becomes the ritual, both legitimating the archon in his own eyes and inscribing itself into the archive as a negation akin to the Freudian castration complex. Citizenship can itself be viewed as the mark of jouissance inscribed on individuals who ascribe to a certain performative ideology. While it has the capacity to enable an individual to express itself, simultaneously it is a circumscription of available options for actualizing identity. The citizen carries the letter of the Law (and is indeed therein inscribed avant la lettre) with them, and consequently is contaminated, in the Freudian sense, with its structural concepts, be they limitations of gender or ethnicity.
Every single instance of the performance of identity refers to (every) other performances, and consequently identity is constructed in an unconscious manner using appropriated cultural symbols and means for discourse. While there is a degree of variance among the interpellative responses elicited in various subjects, a common sense of belonging does emerge from such a multiplicity. Each citizen to a greater or lesser degree shares in a discourse of “home”-ness, of locating identity within geographical boundaries by means of a nostalgic positioning of origins. For Freud, the realm of the uncanny is the locus of a sense of “home” in the psyche. This is undertaken by hiding from the psyche what is most familiar, which is an act to rationalize and normalize a subject’s environment. Thus, the normative social and cultural forms are taken for granted while that which deviates from the norm is emphasized for precisely this deviation. Following certain interpretations of marginalised ethnicities within the rhetoric of Marxist discourse, it is possible to locate the schizophrenic Self, a conjunction of fractured “desiring Others” as interpellated by advanced capitalist ideological structures, aligned with absolutist principles of representation; signifier and signified are conflated in a form of semantic fundamentalism. Social relations manifest as relations of immanence: “The [Body without Organs] is the field of immanence of desire, the plane of consistency specific to desire (with desire defined as a process of production without reference to any exterior agency, whether it be a lack that hollows it or a pleasure that fills it)” (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 154). In relations involving the intersection of cultures – itself a rhizome of inclusion and exclusion of symbols – marginalised cultural voices are frequently erased from the perceived purity of the ethnic archive, a subject position imposed in order to sanctify the Self of the subjects of the dominant culture. While individuals themselves function from origins, power itself does not. As mentioned above, this present examination will operate on the assumption that identity is created by a shared performance of power operating as a rhizome. If identity functions within the boundaries of discourse, then one cannot essentialize that discourse: “there is no mother tongue, only power takeover by a dominant language within a political multiplicity” (Deleuze & Guattari: 7). Identity is wholly dependent on the fictions which negotiate difference among a multiplicity of Others. And indeed, psychoanalysis since Freud has demonstrated that the fractured, multivalent Self is itself a fiction which is utilised by the unconscious mind as the vehicle for consciousness. Thus with national identification we are dealing with a heteroglossia of fictive constructions each informing a conception of the Self. I wish to use Kristeva’s development of Freudian discourse as a means for negotiating concepts such a Self and Other in relation to identity. It is my belief that for a legitimate formulation of justice – itself dependent on the transcendent authority given the rights of humanity – to emerge, a national identity lacking the violent repression of a clear Other requires an expression of Will to Power not usually found at the level of public discourse. The schizophrenic Self requires that perceived oppositions be overcome in terms of agency, for “hatred makes him [sic] real, authentic” (Kristeva 1991: 13). Citizenship requires a excising of the non-Citizen, the foreigner: “in order to found the rights that are specific to the men [sic] of a civilization or a nation – even the most reasonable and the most consciously democratic – one has to withdraw such rights from those that are not citizens, that is, ither men [sic]” (Kristeva: 97). In other words, there has yet to emerge a self-legitimating central authority, functioning as a transcendent archon for the creation and inscription of the Law (avant la lettre, in Derridian terms), that performs its function without resorting to the violent exclusion of those interpellated outside of citizenship.
Certainly a colonial heritage remains an inherited present for many populations at the beginning of the 21st century, and indeed this legacy can be seen to be ritualistically inscribed in the social relations of advanced capitalism, representing a desire for socially unified interpellations of citizenship, nationalism, and engendering. Ritual provides a means of negotiating difference by levelling the interest of parties involved, as bodies are interpellated in a specific and mutually understood manner. All parties involved reify their own authority by involving themselves as legitimate actors in the ritual. In this capacity ritualized behaviour serves to ground all the actors on a level topography of power relations, while at the same time demonstrating the arbitrariness of all ritualization. The ritual functions as a means by which the power of the performative utterance, of the break of speech into silence, is given its transcendent origin by means of consecrating an immanent subjectivity between a subject and a concept. As Deleuze states, there is infinite variation in the repetition of sameness: “difference becomes an object of representation always in relation to a conceived identity, a judged analogy, an imagined opposition or a perceived similitude” (Deleuze 1994: 138). It is important that ritualized behaviour be enacted in an explicit manner, however, as only then will the arbitrariness of the nostalgic feelings that it evokes be properly contextualized. It is upon these principles that citizenship functions as an interpellative gesture. It is the ritualized invocation of an archive, or more precisely a reading of that archive, in a specifically delineated manner. Identification involves the assumption of masks; as Deleuze comments on Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, “the disguises and the variations, the masks or costumes ... [are] the internal genetic elements of repetition itself, its integral and constituent parts” (17). Ritual is tied to death drive as a repetition of the archival function, of jouissance: all of the pleasures and acts of violence inherent in the project are inscribed as the archon’s act of inscription, the generative mark which reifies both archon and archive. This should not suggest, however, that there is no way out of the system produced by such processes. Identification involves both a conscious and unconscious accedence to certain societal obligations, certain of which are fundamental to citizenship, for example. Yet individual actors may find themselves in a position to renounce the ritual invoking the full mark of the archive into presence. As I will describe below, King’s text is remarkably exemplary for demonstrating the arbitrary nature of all masks, inscribed consciously or not.
National identification requires a rejection of the Other. The Self is reified by a realization of what it is not, and in a very real sense a hiding within the Self – returning to the Freudian heimlich – is the fundamental gesture of all consciousness. At the same time as being a constructive act, however, it is a defensive one, and as such is easily misinterpreted as there is little other than a subject’s pleasure response to distinguish a rejection of the Other as a Not-I and the desire to cause pain and suffering in the Other. I mean to involve pleasure in this formula as a means to negotiate the complex moral dimensions involved in negating the Other. No properly functioning organism will seek to affect the suffering of another without beneficial consequences to the Self. When this principle is disregarded, the subject has transferred his pleasure drive to that experience of violence actuated toward the Other. And yet negation is fundamental to the protection of the Self. The psyche hides what is most familiar in order that it only sees what is new: “protection against stimuli is an almost more important function for the living organism than reception of stimuli. The protective shield is supplied with its own store of energy and must above all endeavour to preserve the special modes of transformation of energy operating in it” (Freud 1989: 30). It is this transformation of energy which is key to my present formulation of identity. For it is my belief that identity is that liminal space between performance (adaptation to stimuli) and interpellation (inscription of particular stimuli onto a body). It is fundamentally a hostile gesture which finds an origin in the negation of the parents by the child as fundamental to identity construction. In order to realize the Self, the infant must make a hostile signal to its parents, a sign marking the “no” that exists as the liminal space between Self and Other. When logical discourse has been cast aside, it is with this negating gesture that xenophobia and intolerance emerge as a defence mechanism for the psyche. This negation allows the erasure of a culture under the guise of Self-defence, for it is a gesture projecting the irrational into the Other in order to dominate and inscribe order upon it.
Identity involves both the differences and similarities of a given subject. To identify – within language, to recognize the singular usefulness of a concept among the near-infinite variations of meaning within symbolic play – is to give quantity to a otherwise ephemeral cultural construction. In this capacity, identification has more to do with judgment (in Kantian terms) than with any notions of essentialist characteristics of a given subject. Principally, the process of identification requires an interpellative gesture originating with a materially real authority. Identification along national lines functions by inscribing upon a population “their demands in advance in a sense of belonging in the double sense of the term – both what it is that makes one belong to oneself and also what makes one belong to other fellow human beings” (Balibar 2002: 224).
Of course, it should be understood that individual subjects will react to interpellation into the discourse of nationalism in an individualistic manner. And yet they will do so within the boundaries that their historical localization will allow; their discourse cannot exceed the limits imposed by “a field of social values, norms of behaviour, and collective symbols” (Balibar: 221). There is no singular construction of national identity with which one can ascribe, but rather nationalism emerges as a group function always-already in the process of negotiating shared differences. There can be no national identity which does not involve the submission of the subjects to a centralized agent. There can, however, exist a national body lacking whose individual members lack (the function of) citizenship, an area of interest to which I will return momentarily. It is this juncture which marks the entrance of the body into national discourse. The streams of nationalist narratives emerging from the citizenry combine as a river of national identity both more powerful and more easily controlled: “The nation as a series of differences consequently demands that particular rights be highlighted while they are being absorbed into the lay aggregate of the nation where such differences, which are acknowledged, nevertheless give way before the ‘general interest’” (Kristeva 1993: 41). The body is the region where narration finds a material entrance into social discourse. To continue the metaphor cited earlier, if the population can be seen as the body politic, then body language emerges with the structures locating power within the state. More precisely, the language of this body is one of exclusionary gestures, of negatory conceptions of Otherness. That which is included in the legitimate jurisdiction of the state is that which accedes to its exclusions, for this is the most facile mode of negotiating difference among individuals.
It is important to note that I do not wish to imply with this line of reasoning that cultural differences can be fully negotiated when power is equitably distributed. Inter-ethnic conflict will remain a part of pluralist societies so long as exclusionary defences are associated with nostalgia toward the heimlich. Certainly difference itself represents a transference of power between actors. Perhaps it is impossible for humans to overcome this imbalance of power within difference itself. Appeals to racial essentialism do not serve this purpose as they seek a transcendent universal functioning outside of power structures, and consequently must only be regarded as an aporia. Difference needs to be negotiated in a playful, and not in a hostile, manner for subjectivity to be a positive [sic] experience.
Tangent
The first poem in Dionne Brand’s collection No Language is Neutral examines the relationship between identity and geographic space. A form of ode (love is usually the bridge between signifiers), ‘Hard Against the Soul’ likens the sublime intensity elicited by a lover to the organic beauty of a landscape:
this is you girl, this cut of road up
to Blanchicheuse...
this is you girl, this is you all sides of me
hill road and dip through the coconut at Manzanilla
this sea breeze shaped forest of sand and lanky palm
this wanting to fall, hanging, greening
quenching the road
Indeed, there is much in which demonstrates a desire to collapse all subjectivities into themselves. Most prominent and relevant to this present examination, however, is the equation of desire for immanence in subjective experience with a nostalgic localisation for a proximal geographic locale. Potential, desire, and longing are all brought into the realm of the heimlich, informing the sense of “home”-ness necessary for identity construction. Brand has with this poem captured the moment of desire, and transfigured it into a metaphor for the creation of the Self-as-realization-of-Otherness. This moment of immanence, found within relational experience, is identity reifies itself, in performative terms, as a Self by recognizing the power in Otherness. There is no net imbalance of power in this figurative system and no irrelevant subject-positions, and thus it can be seen to operate on non-linear, rhyzomatic principles. It is this subjective relation between bodies which lies at the heart of all political activity and social relation.
II
Fundamentally, Tom King’s Truth & Bright Water is an examination of a Native heritage and culture which is continually under erasure. Identity, formed partially as the process of a subject’s continual interpellation by an archival authority, is measured within a topography which encourages sameness. Success must always be equated with likeness, and any traces of disruption are ignored. Whiteness is consequently a normative characterization, functioning as a symbol to be appropriated with the right performative gesture: “no one gives a damn about Indians but everybody likes blonds. Even Indians. ... being white was the same as being blond” (King 1999: 23). It is the art community which rescues Native identity from cultural appropriation by re-appropriating white constructions of Native identity. This is seen for example when Lucy performs her Marilyn Monroe (gone Native) and when Lum paints his face and cuts his hair reproducing “the Indians you see at the Saturday matinee” (King: 238). But King in no way makes such identifications absolute in any sense except to parody the absurdity of their claims to absolute legitimacy. Officially sanctioned marks of status are juxtaposed to the status assumed by a sign. Scenes such as the conversation concerning Marilyn Monroe’s ‘Native heritage’, and the nostalgic historic detail in chapter twenty-three in which Tecumseh’s dog Soldier is legitimized with “status papers”, imply certain ontological connotations which elevate the sequences beyond mere ironic juxtaposition. King continually examines the manner in which characters negotiate their marginalised societal positions and affirm some degree of authenticity for themselves. Throughout the text, characters perform a given identity in relation to societal expectations, particularly when economic transactions are involved. This can be evidenced in the inability of Tecumseh’s father to fulfil his parental obligations to his son during, in particular when Elvin is ‘on the job’, which is, as with the ‘careers’ of many opportunistic personalities such as himself, sporadic and unpredictable. It appears as though identity is not so concretized as some would imagine it to be elaborating the point made by Kertzer that “the object of theoretical inquiry in Canadian literary studies – Canada – no longer functions as it once did” (Kertzer 1998: 3).
The towns Truth and Bright Water themselves occupy a liminal space, and thus signifies a certain foreign-ness to itself in terms of the subjectivities interpellated among its population. There are both clear divisions between them – evidenced by the anger of the firemen from Truth towards the adventurous children of Bright Water – and similarities – Tecumseh’s father fails to distinguish the two countries in chapter eleven – between the two cross-border towns. In the mutually dependent and semantically problematic cities of Truth and Bright Water there are no national identifications in absolute terms. With no character occupying a single national or ideological space, there are no concrete identifications that can be made in the topography of this post-modern, genre-crossing text.
The protagonists Tecumseh and Lum are both themselves searching for origins throughout the novel – reasons for the disunity of their family, the importance of traditional native culture on present experiences, among others. Indeed the search for origins is invoked in a humorous manner with the conversation about the scientists who are searching for the root of Native existence by genetic means in chapter twenty-one. And yet Tecumseh himself does not fall prey to the naive idealism which leads Lum to a young death. Lum seeks a masculinity which he cannot perform in light of the abuse he must endure from his father. Perhaps it is somewhat reductive, but it seems likely that general economic depression leads to increased instances of domestic violence. Regardless, it is clear that the failed masculinity – individual strength and agency, determinism, bodily purity – which Lum seems desperate to properly invoke signals the violence of Native exclusion from the dominant cultural archive. Agency had been removed from the realm of possibility for the Native subject by colonialism, and yet a certain form of ‘Native’ is continually inscribed onto Native subjects, forcing them to act (as I will further elaborate below) in a manner contrary to their self-interest. Lum’s self-destructive behaviour is simply the performance of the initial mark of negation always-already inscribed on his existence, and more broadly it is impressed on the Native population as a whole. His manic antisocial behaviour reflects a broken negotiation of the heteroglossia of interpellative discourse. This process is for Lum a catachresis – “one mouth too many, incomprehensible speech, inappropriate behaviour” (Kristeva 1991: 6) – and his death signals the mistaken interpellative uptake inherent in his lack of performative ability in the sense of being a citizen. In the ironic melodrama of the text as a whole, his schizophrenia is in a small manner a triumph of Lum’s will.
The concept of cultural erasure and restoration is best represented, however, by the character-cum-deux-ex-machina Monroe Swimmer, a self-proclaimed “famous Indian artist” who throughout the text remains the most lucid and socially autonomous of the novel’s inhabitants. Monroe can be interpreted as a locus for the rhizome of various threads that run through both the narrative and the towns of Truth and Bright Water themselves. His most important function within the narrative is to challenge authoritative forms of social interpellation. Monroe is a play on the trickster character, the Coyote crucial to King’s previous works, and as such occupies a hybridized position in the text. Robin Ridington has pointed out that his very name reflects a conflation of disparate identities (Ridington 2000, 2001). Additionally, in this context his involvement in the transformation of Natives “from the subjects of removal into agents of their own recreation” (Ridington 2001: 227) is key to understanding the central importance of his character to one of the novel’s main thematic traces. Native culture (and literature) had been categorized as “myth or folklore and relegated to anthropology departments” (Hulan / Warley 1999: 71). King seems to himself be operating much like Monroe, rescuing culture from certain forms of archivization – specifically from certain archons, or more precisely in reference to Archive Fever, to the archontic function. The depiction of the ‘Native’ Snow White is fraught with ambiguous politics: not only is the Disneyfied, and hence ‘whitewashed’ in the pejorative sense of the term, setting inverted by making the characters Native, Aunt Cassie implies a gendering of power relations in the play when she suggests that she should take the role of the evil prince (see King pp. 172-3). These “mythologies” are returned to their proper function, as living narratives. Monroe’s performance of “famous” artistry is a hybrid between object and gesture, between the ephemerality of immanence and the alienating constancy of inscription. Of course, the permanence of the recorded mark does not deny it a degree of plasticity in terms of representation of that mark, evidenced by the austere humour of his “platform” ‘Teaching the Grass Green’ and the project involving the specifically aesthetic placement of numerous metal buffalo sculptures (itself an ironic homage to the erasure of a species, a culture, and a language all intimately interconnected with one another.
Once Monroe was like Tecumseh’s father – they dressed alike in school and, indeed (in a rather playful moment on King’s part) Tecumseh’s mother and Monroe used to date – they were akin in many respects, and now it is he who stands outside of the legitimating authority (of citizenship) in order to challenge cultural and social practices which serve to ritualistically interpellate subjects as always-already inscribed into normative ideologies. Monroe’s resistence, his desire not to adhere to traditional cultural and social expectations, is a challenge against the lifestyle and politics which led to the current social conditions of his particular locale, itself a creation of an interpellative gesture of identification (a citizenship) reflecting a sublimation of identity through colonization. He seeks to re-appropriate agency for himself and his function as artist, and by extension perform as an ostensible voice for a people who lack the means to be heard. It is for this reason that he paints the church invisible: this is a re-appropriation of a culture which he has inherited against the wishes of his ancestors, a means of creating a new space for identity. The church represents the mark of colonialism upon both a geographical landscape and a marginalised people.
Over the course of the novel, Monroe paints this cultural artefact invisible, making it blend with the landscape until it is no longer seen. The nature of this act of resistence can be understood in terms of the interpellative gestures the church itself signifies. Native subjects were expected to assimilate into white Canadian culture, and initially this was realized with openly violent means. In a very real sense the Native subject had to be reborn, to completely cast off his identity, in order to assume the mantle of citizenship (or what in a rather limited manner amounted to an approach toward such a position). After Monroe’s manipulation the church occupies a volumetric space but not a visible one, and in this sense the gesture of the structure’s interpellative power has been translated from signifying a hostility to the Native Other to itself becoming an agent of Native empowerment. It has been transformed from church to church, and in the process Monroe has reified himself as artist and interlocutor for King himself (an ironic telescoping of the arbitrary positioning of various archons for the text). This is prefaced by the description in the text of Monroe’s prior occupation with various museums and galleries all over the world. In the service of such official archival authorities, Monroe was required to restore paintings to allow them to be more authentically represented, ostensibly in the best interest of those institutionalised archons. His idiosyncratic resistence to the suppression of Native culture signals the triumph of a subject achieving a great deal of individual agency. In a more pragmatic sense, that Monroe is a gifted artist is demonstrated by the sheer pleasure and confusion Tecumseh experiences in his presence. Every moment seems to be for Tecumseh an instance of expectation, or (to steal a phrase from Jameson) a future-nostalgia for grace and redemption: witness Monroe’s attempt to ‘interpellate’ Tecumseh as a shark in chapter sixteen. Monroe wishes Tecumseh to act as archon sense for the ‘art’ which is his life as “the greatest artist who has embodied the greatest number of the greatest ideas” (134): “I’m the hero, and you have to make up songs and stories about me so no one forgets who I am” (203). As an ironic gesture to an interpellation as a ‘Native’ subject, it is interesting to note that this occurs without inscribed documentation; so “the oral tradition it is” (204). In a very real sense of his own identity construction, Tecumseh expects Monroe to provide him a future, and accordingly he venerates the artist almost as a messiah.
Monroe acts as a point of intersection for several of the narrative paths that run through the novel. In a sense he can be seen to be the reification of a rhizomatic system, his self-empowerment serves as the unintentional locus of a decentralized power. “Between the man and the citizen there is a scar: the foreigner” (Kristeva 1991: 98). Within the bounds of the text, Monroe Swimmer serves as the foreigner, an exile from both his own people and the dominant white culture which requires his services. King playfully examines national affiliation as an expression of nostalgia transferred to a geographic space – a sense of the hemlich functioning on the interpellative dictates of nationalist discourse. The home is given materiality through Tecumseh’s mother. Throughout the text, she is making a quilt, itself a topography locating historical occurrences, articles of personal affiliation such as earrings, and cultural symbols – “she’s linked safety pins ... around a yellow diamond so that they look like an old-time headdress” (King: 218). It is clear that an self-defining individual subject is delineated within the cultural-continuity-as-textile of quilt-making. In a very real sense, domestic production represents a secondary pregnancy for the female, and thus like her primary (biological) period of gestation her female body becomes a fold between culture and biology, between existence and language. Indeed, the importance of Tecumseh’s mother and grandmother to the continuation of traditional forms of their culture should not be ignored. Simultaneous to this must be a recognition that Tecumseh himself feels most secure by the fact that this quilt is covered with needles, and he sensually enjoys his porcupine defences.
Perhaps this can best be explained in terms of King’s playfully post-modern depiction of the moral ambiguities of his characters, as conversations are continually being differed and questions passed over. Throughout the text, there are instances where two characters are talking to each other but having two distinctly separate dialogues that neither are able or motivated to respond during their interactions. Tecumseh has discovered, for example, that indirection is the best conversational tactic to employ with his mother as “it starts her mind moving in a different direction, and after a while, she may forget about what she didn’t want to tell me” (216). Tecumseh’s questions to his father, in particular about his family situation, are repeatedly ignored or delayed. And yet for King delay seems to be at the heart of the drive for playfulness. There is a kind of sexual libidinousness associated with the postponement of the expected. Perhaps this element of the text can best be described by an instance of sexual awkwardness between Tecumseh and his Aunt that ends in the differal of sexual tension over the course of several interruptions describing other temporalities (see pp. 57-61). While the mother figure for Tecumseh is clearly delineated in the novel, Aunt Cassie in many respects acts as a surrogate for the transfer of maternal signification. Early in the text she enables a situation with Tecumseh in which she, Tecumseh, and another woman are sexually flirtatious. It is she who later gets pregnant, and her body thereafter is rather enigmatically observed by Tecumseh. This immanence is an experience of absolute Otherness-as-feminine, which serves to bring origins to light as Tecumseh nostalgically invokes the feminine as a site for the heimlich. As Lum tells Tecumseh, those who return to a place they once left (or at the least in terms of the novel, this particular “centre of the universe”) are not authentic subjects: “nobody comes back to Truth and Bright Water unless they’re crazy or dying” (70).
Interestingly enough, the tourists are not themselves unwelcome in this fashion, but are instead greeted enthusiastically by the local merchants (who, during Indian Days seem to be notably indistinguishable from the general citizenry). Monroe’s gestures of cultural resistence seem wholly enfeebled by the almost predatory consumptive faculties of the non-Native visitors. “The tourists who show up for Indian Days can get almost anything they want.... All of it, according to the signs that everyone puts up, is ‘authentic’ and ‘traditional’” (221). Power distinctions between Native and Other are resolved by appropriation of the tools of capitalist (colonial) discourse, as white stereotypes of Native culture are sold to tourists as artefacts of consumption. The taboo of this form of cultural representation – its absolute banality in moral terms – is itself provides energy for consumption, as demonstrated by the acute interest of the Ontario couple who do not know a vocal Native subject: “All the ones we hear about ... are in the penitentiary” (247). Thus it is not surprising to note that new performances are enacted to inhabit the space of the consumable product. Edna performs “Indian face” (223) in order to convince some fetishistic German tourists of the validity of her claims to Native citizenship (or more precisely citizenship in the form of the topography of their stereotyped views of Native existence), which would add value to the commodity that she had produced. Additionally, Tecumseh’s father has taken the metonymic inscription of a mask to its most logical extreme by dressing himself as Elvis, gyrating in a rather apathetic performance to make the sales at his stall more brisk.
Another of the societal fictions, as operating tangentially to Monroe, which the text examines is the border and distinction between Canada and the United States. That this border is an imagined space is initially signified by the almost symbiotic connection of Truth and Bright Water to each other. People and goods move back and forth with little distinction in terms of political geography or national affiliation. Simultaneously however, the border has real material implications, as evidenced by the fact that by smuggling goods Tecumseh’s father can benefit from this difference. The border itself seems to be the marker for a historical occurrence, a scar from an old would which is not currently affective in its truest sense. It signifies European conquest and the consequent politics of white North Americans. Despite the fact that the inscription of this line – the forty-ninth parallel – invokes the violent removal of previous Native cultures inherent in the idealization of the New World as a tabula rasa, there is a subtext to its depiction in the novel which elaborates the temporality, the ephemerality, of this line. This notion is best signified by the river ‘Shield’ dividing the two countries, which has, as Tecumseh’s mother says “been here since the beginning of time” (54). The name of the river is a double invocation. of the border between Self and Other, hostile and friendly, and ultimately between life and death. Simultaneously, the name invokes the Plains Indian tradition of painting shields with medicinal symbols “that realize the owner’s empowering visionary experiences” (Ridington 2001: 227).
The river is also the spot where Monroe Swimmer performs an ad hoc ritual for the ceremonial re-burial of the Native bones which he has rescued from various anthropological archives. At the same time, it is at the river where Lum performs his suicide (in a sense, a Quixotic act). That the river serves as a locus for so many elements of the text demonstrates its ritualistic importance. It is a altar upon which characters focus a great deal of their energies. Monroe himself performs a burial ceremony for the Native bones that he has rescued from various museums. It is important that he perform a new ceremony and not try to return the bones to the earth in a more traditional manner, for it signifies the fact that the legitimacy of the old customs has passed with their silencing by the dominant (invading) culture. The old ways are no longer authentically tied to the people as they no longer represent an unbroken history necessary for their continuation as cultural signifiers. The break, the rupture here reified by the double theft of the ancestral bones, requires the establishment of a new tradition in order to return the cones to the degree of cultural immanence required for consecration. By invoking new traditions and not parodying older customs, Monroe maintains the sanctity of the silence that was itself inscribed into the archive of Native existence after colonization with his own re-inscription. King’s laissez-faire depiction of the ritual itself demonstrates ambiguity to itself be a potent stylistic device of the post-modern writer. As during many of the “famous artist’s” endeavours, Tecumseh and Monroe engage in a rather casual conversation; the sacred finds a counterbalance in the profane in a rather whimsical manner:
Monroe climbs into the back of the truck and sits down at the piano.
“Classical or traditional?” And he plays a piece that sounds particularly gloomy. Soldier and I wait around to see if it gets any better, but it doesn’t....
“Why do you throw them in the river?”
“No good reason”
“So it’s not traditional”
“Don’t think so”
(King: 266)
It seems that in this instance both the classical (Western heritage) and the traditional (Native heritage) are equally bankrupt of significance. In this capacity Monroe is performing under the guise of several identifications: shaman, thief, artist, (re)appropriator of culture. His actions signal both the Bakhtinian rhyzomic operation of language – of cultural signs functioning as distinct entities apart from their signifieds – and the political gesture of reclaiming agency against a dominant culture that has historically illegitimately removed that power from Native peoples. By stealing the bones from a variety of museums, his actions reflect upon the original theft of the bones from their original cultural locales. That the objects in question are not simple cultural artefacts but rather the remains of actual people reifies the historical indenture of the Native peoples. The trace in the archive is one of suffering and oppression that frequently manifests as the jouissance of the involvement in anthropological discourse. It is almost if though the motto held by the dominant culture for negotiations with the Other is ‘we have agency only not only your present body, but your past as well as your future’.
Monroe himself recognizes that with this gesture he is not only returning the past (here in material form) to its proper location, but also introducing a new future in which the rituals of culture can be performed. It is not solely for the presumed age of the bodies that he calls these bones “the children” while returning them to their ascribed home: “This is the centre of the universe. Where else would I bring them? Where else would they want to be?” (265). This gesture is the act by which immanence is returned to the subject. The brutal subjugation which informs Native culture is folded upon the present as a mark, an inscription in an archive which cannot interpellate those who do not wish to participate in its invocation. This ritual burial is, within the narrative of the text, the culmination of Monroe’s reclamation of agency from the dominant culture back onto the Native subject by removing its interpellative gesture of Native cultural erasure. With this absurdly post-modern ceremony, history is absolved by the present and all are forgiven.
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