Hogan/Haints/ReelInjun

Today I read the next fifty pages of Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit. In this section of the novel Hogan draws some very effective contrasts between life-affirming events and the continuing presence of death. In doing so, she suggests not so much (or not only) that death is never very far away, but that life and death are inevitably intertwined. For example, when Nola agrees to marry Will Forrest (despite the fact that she is only 13 years old), she does so not primarily because she loves Will (although Hogan suggests that she does) but because she knows that by moving out of the Graycloud house she will save her family from the danger that continues to surround her as Grace’s heir. Similarly, on the day after Benoit and Lettie get married (a marriage that is partly inspired by Lettie’s feeling that Benoit will spend the rest of his life in jail), Benoit is found hanged in his cell, an apparent suicide but very possibly yet another murder victim. Apart from the identity of the killer(s), the other mystery is what exactly Hogan is going to do with the character of Stace Red Hawk, the Lakota Sioux federal investigator who has come to Oklahoma to try and get to the bottom of what is going on, but who has so far played a very minor role in this first part of the novel.

I also read the next fifty pages of Arthur Redding’s Haints. In this section of the book, Redding discusses the crucial and persistently undervalued work of Toni Cade Bambara (specifically her novels The Salt Eaters and These Bones are Not My Child) and makes a very interesting point about her use of the conditional ‘might have’ form: “This might have too is a kind of ghosting, the haunting of what exists by the alternate paths, the choices not taken, and these alternative futures too fully inform the present and must be honored and recognized as such.” Redding’s words not only indicate the complex temporality of his notion of the gothic that I discussed in yesterday’s post, but also address his persistent emphasis on possibility as a function of the gothic. This is why he resists Mark Edmundson’s suggestion that “American gothic is destined to be politically debilitating or sterile.” To this end, Redding emphasizes the open-endedness of contemporary gothic texts, minimizing the extent to which they are healing or reparative, and instead emphasizing how, even in their apocalyptic variant, they envision “the living productions and productivity of bleakness, of despair, far beyond anything we might envision as hope.” This emphasis on the productive dimensions of catastrophe provides Redding with a way of contextualizing the seeming nihilism that animates such texts as Gerald Vizenor’s Bearheart, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, and E.L. Doctorow’s City of God.

I also watched Neil Diamond’s 2009 documentary Reel Injun, a thorough, thought-provoking, and moving study of the representation of Native Americans in film. Diamond acts as the film’s narrator as he travels across the US visiting iconic sites in both Native American history and cinematic history. The travelogue format works really well, as Diamond intersperses clips from various films with interviews with luminaries such as Russell Means and Sacheen Littlefeather, as well as with other lesser-known Native American film critics and filmmakers. The arc of the film is optimistic in the sense that it traces a gradual progression in how Native American culture has been represented in film, but its closing celebration of the film Atanarjurat may be a little too uplifting for some, considering the many problems that native communities are still struggling with. High points for me included the surprising claim that the silent era was, oddly enough, a kind of high point for the representation of Native Americans in film, along with an interesting question that get asked but not answered in any detail: why did Native Americans more or less drop out of American film during the 1980s?