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Performing the Narrative

In my analyses of these formal strategies—both in this chapter and in the preceding ones—I have relied heavily on de Certeau’s theories on reading as a spatial practice that situates readers as producers of space and, more specifically, producers of meaning; any immersive encounter with text inherently involves an element of “embodiment,” in which readers, more than just encountering words on a page, “practice space” within the text, interpreting signs and creating meaning as they go. De Certeau’s chapter on “spatial stories,” in fact, operates alongside Barthes’ commentary on writerly texts; each concept relies on an interactive relationship between the reader and the text, in which readers utilize the text as a discursively-productive interpretive space. In this regard, readers are political bodies that inhabit texts. By this logic, establishing oneself in textual space involves engaging in performative practices stemming from the insertion of a reader’s subjectivity into a textual domain.

If this is true, then many of the critical spatial practices that Diana Taylor describes in her writings on archival and performative memory may also apply to the experience of reading, particularly to our encounter with texts that tactically remove readers from conventional narrative structures. This final section brings these theories on textual space to their logical endpoint, working under the somewhat radical assumption that reading is an embodied, performative practice, and that in fostering performative engagement with text, literature may challenge archival, institutional power embedded in narrative. Leslie Marmon Silko’s

Ceremony, a novel heavily invested in challenging institutional narrative structures and the political violence they inflict on marginalized groups, here, indigenous Laguna Pueblo Indians, utilizes textual tactics that encourage performativity. By engaging a Native American oral tradition and subverting conventional narrative through the frequent incorporation of song and poetry, Silko encourages readers to remove themselves from white, hegemonic narrative structures; in performing the text—by this I mean singing and reciting poetry as an embodied practice—the book provides critical avenues for political assertion and the processing of political trauma, a concept all too familiar to many Native Americans, even here in the twenty-first century.

In the third chapter of this study, which deconstructed the politics of urban space in post-Katrina New Orleans, I described the ways in which embodied performance provided vital means of contesting institutional power and confronting trauma for those affected by the hurricane. Utilizing Diana Taylor’s theories on performance, I demonstrated that street-level spatial practices enabled an important “acting out” of trauma, which stood apart from the static discourses of power embedded in city space. More than just denoting the subversive potential of performance, Taylor’s study makes important distinctions between “the archive” and “the repertoire,” two concepts that help to explain how knowledge and political discourse are produced, disseminated, and exchanged. “‘Archival’ memory,” she explains, “exists as documents, maps, literary texts, letters, archaeological remains, bones, videos, films, CDs, all those items

supposedly resistant to change…[and] we might conclude that the archival, from the beginning, sustains power” (Taylor 19). Institutional power reproduces itself through the archive, preserving self-affirming discourses and, in the same breath, rendering those discourses static and inert. Taylor goes on to explain, “The repertoire, on the other hand, enacts embodied memory: performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing—in short, all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge…The repertoire requires presence: people participate in the production and reproduction of knowledge by ‘being there,’ being a part of the transmission” (20). Embodied performance therefore provides alternate avenues of political expression that resist being co-opted by the archive; discourse remains dynamic insofar as it circulates through modes of transmission that are never fixed by and assimilated into institutional, archival memory.

Narrative, too, is implicated in the archive/repertoire dialectic that Taylor describes. Conventional narrative structures, and more broadly all narrative structures that fix meaning in a static, printed text, are instruments of archival memory. Narratives, whether appearing in canonized literature or positioned within more opaque structures (genre, form, medium, etc.) that respond to readers’ expectations and desires, are always involved in processes that package and, therefore, politicize the text as an article of consumption. We saw this process played out most clearly in the revanchist and redemptive narratives discussed in chapter one. Taylor notes the tension between writing and performance, arguing that “writing has paradoxically come to stand in for and

against embodiment” (16). If texts produce space, however, and if they encourage immersive, performative participation from the reader, then perhaps these texts may resist the archival forces that threaten to sap their political vitality. Silko’s novel, for one, comments explicitly on narrative as a political instrument of white, hegemonic power. Continually resisting the pull of conventional narrative, Ceremony challenges archival narrative conventions that implicitly endorse a culture of violence and destruction. These narrative conventions, Silko suggests, are instruments of political trauma, as, in normalizing whiteness (and the political violence associated with it), they alienate indigenous peoples from their tribal communities. Ceremony provides crucial opportunities for embodied performance that locate the book’s rhetorical power in the repertoire rather than the archive, providing valuable means for situating readers outside of linear, white-hegemonic narratives.

Silko’s novel tells the story of Tayo, a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe and a survivor of World War II’s Bataan Death March, one of the most horrific events occurring in the South Pacific during the war. Returning home to the reservation, Tayo, traumatized by his experiences, has difficulty adapting to his old life and his old friends, who, grappling with their own demons, repeatedly perpetrate violence against themselves and Tayo. The trauma of the war, of course, stands in for the long-standing trauma experienced by Native Americans dealing with the erosion of their culture and the disappearance of their land. On a formal level, the book both represents and simulates the ceremony Tayo practices

in order to repair his damaged psyche. Many critics have addressed the formal strategies Silko uses to engage this process. Carol Mitchell argues that “Silko’s novel is itself a curing ceremony” (28). Expanding this idea, Joanne Lipson Freed writes, “Silko’s novel does not merely describe the ceremony that Tayo carries out but also enacts a ceremony in which we as readers participate” (emphasis in original, 229). Along these lines, Gloria Bird remarks on “our ability as readers to enter as participants of the story” (4). Each of these accounts correctly locates the text’s ability to simulate the experience of the ceremony; as Tayo embarks on his quest for psychological healing, we, too, are invited to participate in a process that removes us from white, hegemonic discourse. Silko’s strategies, however, are more radical than these accounts would suggest. By inviting the reader to embody the text—through performative chants, songs, and poetry—Silko generates spaces for cultural and political positioning that exist beyond the reach of the archive.

Before analyzing these performative moments in the text, it might be best to examine Silko’s view of conventional narrative structuring as an instrument of white hegemonic power. Midway through the novel, Betonie, an old medicine man, tells Tayo the story of how witchery was unleashed on the world. White people, and the destruction that they represent for Tayo’s community, we come to learn, are the product of an ancient witch “conference.” In this conference, the story goes, the witches hold “a contest in dark things,” which begins innocently enough, until one witch comes forth, stating simply, “What I have is a story” (135). This story, in its telling, presumably unleashes what the Western

imagination might locate as “evil” on the world. What is significant, here, is that narrative—and specifically narrative as a linear construction—represents the source of world destruction. Unlike Tayo’s ceremony, which is “a continuing process” (35), and unlike the novel itself, which begins and ends, cyclically, with a sunrise, the witch’s story adopts a terminal, linear narrative trajectory: “It can’t be called back,” explains the witch at the story’s conclusion. In another telling moment, the witch declares, “[White people] will lay the final pattern with [the uranium found on the reservation] / they will lay it across the world / and explode everything” (emphasis mine, 137), implying that white culture will fulfill the structure of a terminal narrative by destroying the world. Silko makes two important gestures with this story. First, she designates linear narrative as simultaneously generative of political power (that is, the story created white people) and inherently destructive, insofar as it sets in motion a series of events that ends in apocalypse. Second, Silko draws the connection between nuclear destruction—symbolized by the uranium mines—and narrative; the “final pattern,” fulfilled by the atomic bomb, represents an apocalyptic end to a linear narrative linked to white institutional power. The Laguna Pueblo storytelling tradition, on the other hand, is cyclical and therefore can accommodate neither the “final pattern” nor the apocalyptic narrative ending that it implies.

This distrust of linear narrative also plays a significant role in the novel’s narrative climax (if one indeed exists), where Tayo is given the opportunity to kill his former friend, Emo, who has disinherited his tribal heritage. Awaiting Emo

and his drunk companions, Tayo observes that “they were coming to end it their way” (Silko 235) by murdering Tayo and fulfilling a terminal narrative of destruction. Moments later, forgoing the opportunity to murder Emo (an act that would hardly provoke the reader’s disapproval), Tayo “moved back into the boulders. It had been a close call. The witchery had almost ended the story according to its plan” (253). Recognizing that killing Emo would fulfill the demands of a linear narrative—with a rising action, a narrative climax, and a denouement that would feature Tayo either in jail or in a mental institution—he refuses to provide the expected narrative conclusion, one which, Silko makes clear, is implicitly linked to whiteness and violence. In shirking this narrative convention, on a formal level, the book defies the reader’s novelistic expectations, which are caught up in processes of narrative production and consumption. If we feel disappointed by the novel’s anti-climax, it is only because we find ourselves implicated in what Silko would argue is an inherently violent culture dependent on narrative resolution and, symbolically, death.

In his groundbreaking study of narrative theory, The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode describes the relationship between narrative and what he sees as an inherently human desire for closure, which we engage through linear narrative structures that are bounded by “beginnings and endings.” In “the ending,” readers achieve a moment of narrative closure, and this, Kermode argues, satisfies a deep- rooted desire for the apocalypse, or the sense of an ending that moves far beyond the work itself. Although Kermode’s theories are more or less foundational at this

point, his study focuses exclusively on a Western literary tradition and implicitly privileges distinctly Western literary and cultural imaginations. This is important to consider when situating his theories among literatures and cultures that abide by indigenous, non-white cultural assumptions; the Laguna Pueblo culture, for instance, favors circular narratives and an ongoing performative storytelling tradition, neither of which is intended to fulfill humans’ “need in the moment to belong, to be related to a beginning and to an end” (Kermode 4). These are distinctly Western concerns, and Kermode has correctly described how they permeate and define a particular Western conception of narrative.⁸ When Emo and his friends come “to end it their way,” they align themselves within this narrative tradition and in doing so slough off their tribal identity, situating themselves within a linear narrative of self-destruction. Recognizing that this narrative tradition is intrinsically violent (that is, apocalyptic) and simultaneously an instrument of white political oppression, Silko produces textual spaces that enable the reader to confront narrative in non-archival, indigenous terms.

In order to bring this indigenous reading to the surface, Silko complements Tayo’s narrative with a series of tribal stories, songs, poems, and chants gleaned

⁸ Resisting reader expectations through experiments in narrative structuring is certainly not unique to Native American literature, as both modern and postmodern writers, from Gertrude Stein to Thomas Pynchon, have denied narrative closure in their fiction. Despite these important experiments in narrative form, mainstream American culture is still deeply invested in narratives that demonstrate structural unity. The top-grossing Hollywood films and the majority of bestseller fiction still adhere to narratives that provide closure. Silko’s commentary on white culture and its desire “to end it their way” addresses an American public that desires non-disruptive modes of narrative, packaged for easy consumption. These narratives confirm Americans’ political beliefs under

the guise of apolitical entertainment.

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from the Laguna Pueblo oral tradition.⁹ The most significant of these is the central oral narrative, which concerns the departure and return of Nau'ts'ity'i. Working alongside Tayo’s narrative of psychological healing, this story describes the cyclical processes and rituals that must be performed in order to bring an end to a terrible drought on the Laguna Pueblo. Orbiting this narrative are a series of satellite stories featuring mythic figures such as The Gambler (Kaup'a'ta), Spider Grandmother (Ts'its'tsi'nako), and Corn Woman (Iyetiko). More significant than the content of the stories—and this is where my argument sidesteps the Gunn/Nelson debate—are the performative modes implicit in their rendering on the page. In interviews, Silko has been forthcoming about her desire to simulate orality, remarking on her effort to produce “the feeling or the sense that language is being used orally. So I play with the page and things you could do on the page…so that the reader has a sense of how it might sound if I were reading it to him or her” (Silko, “Interview” 87). Despite recognizing some of the oral qualities of her text, Silko seems somewhat oblivious to the novel’s performative dimensions.

Along these lines, Konrad Groβ writes, “Silko’s attempt at integrating oral traditions into her novel is therefore a highly risky venture since the printed text

⁹ Paula Gunn Allen’s now-famous critique of Silko’s novel centers on her disapproval of her fellow tribeswoman’s lack of disregard for the tribe’s sacred oral tradition. Robert M. Nelson, in response to Allen, argues that Silko’s presentation of her tribe’s stories represents a tactical effort to reclaim the oral tradition from ethnographers who had already transcribed the stories decades earlier. See Allen’s “Special Problems in Teaching Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony” and Nelson’s “The Embedded Texts in Leslie Silko’s Ceremony” for

more on this important critical debate.

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means a removal of the oral material from the originally dramatic and performance-oriented context where the immediacy of the situation and the direct participation of the audience were of equal, if not greater importance than the message itself” (88). The narrative interruptions, as I read them, require the reader not to “hear” the stories, as Silko and Groβ suggest, but rather to “perform” them through verbal participation; Silko’s ideal reader uses the written word as a script for vocal, ceremonial performance. With the frequent incorporation of what are clearly vocal incantations that move us beyond the written word, Silko invites this kind of participation. For instance during Betonie’s ceremony, she involves us in the execution of the ceremony itself, encouraging us to vocalize the text: “en-e-e- ya-a-a-a-a! / en-e-e-ya-a-a-a-a! / en-e-e-ya-a-a-a-a! / en-e-e-ya-a-a-a-a!” (142) and later, “Hey-ya-ah-na-ah! Hey-ya-ah-na-ah / Ku-ru-tsu-eh-ah-eh-na! Ku-ru-tsu-eh- ah-eh-na!” (206). Anyone who has taught Ceremony in the classroom and who has read these passages out loud will attest to the performative dimensions of such language; when vocalized, these chants exert a powerful force on both the reader- cum-speaker and on those experiencing the performance, in my personal example, my students. The text, all of a sudden, is activated, made dynamic by a vocal performance that moves reader and listener into an experiential zone altogether dislodged from the archival confines of textuality.

In this way, Silko perhaps underestimates the performative and political power of her novel. Incorporating an oral tradition into her text speaks to the tension existing between the written text and oral performance, between the

archive and the repertoire. She explains in an interview, “Stories stay alive within the community…because the stories have a life of their own. The life of the story is not something that any individual person can save and certainly not someone writing it down or recording it on tape or video” (Silko, “Interview” 88).

Interpellating the reader as a performer reveals the possibilities for liberating textuality from the disciplining power of the archive, suggesting that texts, in their ability to create and enable spatial practices (here, performance), are not by definition caught in the grips of institutional power. Tactical texts like Silko’s produce immersive spaces that remove readers from the conventional narrative structures that—as Silko demonstrates in Ceremony—are intimately tied to institutions that generate and perpetuate political realities at the expense of underprivileged peoples and communities. The same impulse to challenge institutional power through narrative informs my reading of Smiley’s A Thousand Acres, which, rather than contesting a tradition of whiteness, challenges patriarchy and its investment in conventional narrative structures. Less concerned with the political dimensions of narrative, Danielewski’s book does much to reveal the spatial possibilities embedded in textuality; following his lead, future critics and novelists alike may seek to exploit the political dimensions of narrative in order to produce and foster critical sites of resistance for readers to inhabit.

These critical approaches to contemporary fiction, far from providing answers to the enduring problems of representation, authorship, and politics that complicate literature here in the twenty-first century, merely suggest the possibility of

engaging literature through what I have shown are potentially-productive spatial lenses.

Coda

Election years are robust times for the study of narrative. On a recent walk around the neighborhood with my big, furry golden-retriever, I came upon a sticker pasted across the bumper of an old pickup truck: “Nobody lies so much as after fishing and before an election,” it said. Well intentioned, and no doubt politically cognizant, my neighbor seems to miss the more subtle mechanics of political production and institutional power here in the twenty-first century. It’s not that politicians lie, or that the news media puts a spin on political issues, it’s that the very modes of narrative that inform political reality are, on a formal level, instruments of political power. Worse yet, the invisibility of narrative production as a formal strategy more often than not renders the source of political oppression—the politics of homeland security, the socially-corrosive infrastructure of the postmetropolis, the national response to terror attacks, etc.— below our political horizons, inaccessible because of the extent to which they are normalized and written into our experience of everyday life.

Foucault’s writings on “technologies of the self” describe the ways that individuals, as extensions of the state, unknowingly internalize and act out biopolitical narratives. As I have demonstrated, embracing the politics of domestic space and endorsing urban models that discourage the production of space make it difficult for individuals to achieve critical distance from the

narratives of the state, narratives that they, themselves, put into practice in their everyday lives. This entrenchment of narrative in our very experience of reality has made political trauma an increasingly problematic and slippery theoretical concept. Unable to locate the source of our disenfranchisement and often deprived of a traumatic referent, we experience trauma in ways that prevent the modes of processing and “working through” that Freud described over a hundred years ago. This is why the writings of Jenny Edkins, Kali Tal, Ana Douglass, and Thomas Vogler have featured so prominently in this study; their theoretical approaches to trauma recognize that in order to process the traumatic event, individuals must break through the psychological and political barriers that often preclude such confrontation. Accessing trauma, then, peeling away the sedimented layers of political discourse and probing our psychological depths, signifies an intensely political and often subversive act of political empowerment. In the traumatic moment, as Edkins makes clear, exists the opportunity to deconstruct the complex relationship between the individual and institutional power.

How, though, is one to “access trauma?” If the traumatic referent is inaccessible, how can one come to terms with and confront “an absence?” How can literature facilitate this process? These are the questions I have grappled with in the preceding chapters, and I have demonstrated, first, how trauma is often subtly exerted through spatial politics and, second, how space, specifically the “production of space,” provides avenues for the cultivation of political subjectivity. Producing space—in the manner described by Foucault and

Lefebvre—creates opportunities for situating oneself outside of mainstream institutional discourse, which is often inscribed on hegemonic spaces of the city and the home, both highly political zones manufactured at least in part by the cultural imaginary. “Walking in the city,” “producing space,” generating “heterotopic space”—these spatial practices promise some degree of political agency for those affected by institutional politics in space.

The first four chapters of this dissertation follow a trajectory of political violence in America in recent memory, from the processes of narrative production after 9/11 to the domestic dimensions of homeland security to the restructuring of urban space after Hurricane Katrina and finally to the emergence of the socially- corrosive postmetropolis, where institutional power inscribes itself in the very structure of our lived spaces. In each chapter I have paid particular attention to the enduring tension between the institution and individual, noting how processes of narrative production embed themselves in the spaces of everyday life, precluding both the confrontation with trauma and the exercise of political voice. Equally important, these chapters have discussed literature as a narrative medium that introduces opportunities, through the production of textual space, for individuals to achieve critical distance from institutional narratives. The post-9/11 political satires discussed in chapter one challenge state-endorsed narratives that circulated in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center, narratives that rendered Americans complicit in the political and military campaigns of the state. As a formal strategy, satire provides a heterotopic textual space that positions readers

outside of these pervasive institutional discourses. In the years following the attacks, these discourses would embed themselves in domestic space, dissolving boundaries that traditionally separated the public from the private. Our psychological attachment to domestic space, which I address in chapter two, enabled the politics of the state—specifically in regard to discourses on homeland security—to intervene on our private lives, interpellating Americans as complicit supporters of state violence. These discourses of homeland security were similarly intertwined with the institutional response to Hurricane Katrina. After the hurricane, institutional power—embodied most directly by the Department of Homeland Security—inscribed itself on the urban space of New Orleans, transforming a free space of cultural performance to a site of institutional discipline. However, the tension between the individual and institutional power in urban space is certainly not unique to post-Katrina New Orleans; the new American metropolis, as I explain in chapter four, is a highly political site of institutional discipline that, in its spatial organization, precludes opportunities for politically productive spatial practices.

As institutional narratives embed themselves in these urban and domestic spaces, they likewise enact political violence on individuals who, lacking the means to contest these processes, are exposed to political trauma. In addition to describing the political dimensions of space, these chapters have suggested narrative strategies that utilize textual space to position readers outside of these otherwise pervasive institutional narratives, giving them opportunities to confront

trauma in politically productive ways. Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, for instance, requires viewers to step outside the film’s narrative to reflect on their own desire for violence and how this desire manifests itself in processes of narrative production and consumption. In Their Dogs Came with Them, Helena María Viramontes’ narrative strategies simulate urban space, sending readers along narrative freeways that intersect in violence. Here, simulating urban space through formal strategies requires readers to reflect on the deleterious social consequences of urban growth and the loss of social spaces in contemporary cities. By providing readers with the opportunity to inhabit these “other spaces” that exist outside of conventional narrative structures, the texts under consideration in this study reveal the potential for literature to address issues of trauma and politics in immediate and productive ways.

This final chapter has extended this methodological approach to new zones of inquiry, suggesting that experimental narrative strategies that remove readers from conventional narrative structures may be employed in a variety of ways that are not confined to urban and domestic spaces. As much as I have argued throughout this study that inhabiting physical space and engaging in spatial practices holds critical opportunities for political engagement, our negotiation of space should not be limited to the physical sites that we occupy; rather, we should, following de Certeau, think of text as a spatial environment that enables subversive spatial practices. If it is true that narrative production is the single most pernicious and transparent form of institutional discipline and trauma

in contemporary life, then our ability to generate, sustain, and occupy textual spaces that remove us from institutional narrative is of supreme importance. Textual space provides us with opportunities to distance ourselves from and contest the politics of the state; furthermore, in simulating the experience of trauma through textual space, as we see in House of Leaves and A Thousand Acres, literature offers individuals the opportunity to confront the deeply- embedded, traumatic discourses underlying our contemporary political landscape.

The question, then, in an election year, in any year for that matter, isn’t whether politicians are telling the truth, or whether the media is manufacturing reality, or whether the public is savvy enough to engage political discourse; the question is how to locate material and textual spaces that give us critical distance from the very structures of narrative. This study has outlined strategies for political positioning that depend on literature for critical engagement. As a literary scholar, these forms of narrative interest me most, but room certainly exists in other disciplines to pursue narrative through the lenses of trauma and spatial theory. Our globalized, hyper-mediated political landscape, to say the least, demands such critical interrogation.

WORKS CITED

Adams, Elizabeth Tarpley. “Making the Sprawl Vivid: Narrative and Queer Los Angeles.” Western Folklore 58.2 (1999): 175-193. Print.
Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. Print.
Allen, Paula Gunn. “Special Problems in Teaching Leslie Marmon Silko’s