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Reading the Historical Novel: Reworking the Past and the Relation of Blackfeet History in James Welch's Fools Crow
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 May 2009
Abstract
The article considers the political impact of the historical novel by examining an example of the genre by Native American novelist James Welch. It discusses how the novel Fools Crow represents nineteenth-century Blackfeet experience, emphasizing how (retelling) the past can act in the present. To do this it engages with psychoanalytic readings of historical novels and the work of Foucault and Benjamin on memory and history. The article concludes by using Bhabha's notion of the “projective past” to understand the political strength of the novel's retelling of the story of a massacre of Native Americans.
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- Copyright © 2009 Cambridge University Press
References
1 Peter Nicholls, “The Belated Postmodern: History, Phantoms, and Toni Morrison,” in Sue Vice, ed., Psychoanalytic Criticism: A Reader (Cambridge: Polity, 1996), 50–74, 55–56.
2 James Welch with Paul Stekler, Killing Custer: The Battle of the Little Bighorn and the Fate of the Plains Indians (New York: Penguin, 1994). Robbins, Kenn, “A Conversation with James Welch,” South Dakota Review, 28, 1 (1990), 103–10Google Scholar.
3 Welch with Stekler, 22–23.
4 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in idem, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1992), 245–55, 258. Arendt states that the essay was “completed in spring 1940, first published in Neue Rundschau, 61, 3, 1950.”
5 Ibid., 247.
6 Ibid., 248.
7 Ibid., 252.
8 Michel Foucault, “Film and Popular Memory,” in idem, Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961–1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), 122–32, 124. The interview was conducted by Pascal Bonitzer and Serge Toubiana and first published in French in 1974 and in English in 1975. The translation is by Martin Jordin.
9 Benjamin, 247, original emphasis.
10 Ibid., 252–53.
11 Ibid., 254, emphasis added.
12 Ibid.
13 Bevis, William W., “James Welch,” Western American Literature, 32, 1 (1997), 33–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 47.
14 Ibid., 46.
15 James Welch, Fools Crow (New York: Penguin, 1986), 4.
16 Ibid., 25–26.
17 Orlandini, Roberta, “Variations on a Theme: Traditions and Temporal Structure in the Novels of James Welch,” South Dakota Review, 26, 3 (1988), 37–52Google Scholar, 46.
18 Welch, 61.
19 Orlandini writes that “projected as it is into the future, the novel, as it progresses, becomes richer in anticipations of the dreaded catastrophe.” Orlandini, 47.
20 Barry, Nora, “‘A Myth to Be Alive’: James Welch's Fools Crow,” MELUS, 17, 1 (1992), 3–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 7.
21 Welch, 350.
22 Ibid.
23 Barry, 14.
24 Welch, 350.
25 Barry, 13.
26 David L. Moore, “Return of the Buffalo: Cultural Representations as Cultural Property,” in Gretchen M. Bataille, ed., Native American Representations: First Encounters, Distorted Images, and Literary Appropriations (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), 52–78, 74.
27 Nicholls, “The Belated Postmodern”, 53, 54.
28 Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Karnak, 1988), 488–89. First published in France in 1967.
29 Barry, 10.
30 Welch, 359.
31 Barry, 15, 4.
32 Welch, 386.
33 Welch, 390.
34 Ibid. Robert Silberman reads the end of the novel rather less positively than I do, referring to “the bitterness at the end of Fools Crow when the title character realizes that change, loss and unhappiness are to be the fate of his people, and that their only consolation will be in stories telling them of ‘the way it was.’” Robert Silberman, “Opening the Text: Love Medicine and the Return of the Native American Woman,” in Gerald Vizenor, ed., Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Literatures (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 101–20, 115. This reading is unduly pessimistic. Moore, for example, reads the ending more affirmatively, stating that, “by reclaiming … representational property, Native writers are redefining the possibilities of American history.” Moore, 75.
35 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 252.
36 Ibid., 255.
37 Ibid., 254–55.