Soul at the White Heat: Inspiration, Obsession, and the Writing Life

by Joyce Carol Oates

  I had seen and known Negroes since I could remember. I just looked at them, as I did at rain, or furniture, or food or sleep. But after [the deaths] I seemed to see [Negroes] for the first time not as a people, but as a thing, a shadow in which I lived, we lived, all white people, all other people. I thought of all the children coming forever and ever into the world, white, with the black shadow already falling upon them before they drew breath. And I seemed to see the black shadow in the shape of a cross. And it seemed like the white babies were struggling, even before they drew breath, to escape from the shadow that was not only upon them but beneath them too, flung out like their arms were flung out, as if they were nailed to the cross. . . . The curse of the white race is the black man who will be forever God’s chosen own, because He once cursed Him.

  Speaking like this to her lover Joe Christmas, Johanna Burden assures her doom at Christmas’s hands, for surely the last thing the “mulatto” Christmas wants to be told is that his existence has meaning only in relation to the guilt of the white oppressor.

  In Erdrich’s cycle of North Dakota novels, her equivalent of Faulkner’s cycle of Yoknapatawpha County, the perspective that is dramatized is that of the violated, and not, as in Faulkner, the violator; not guilt but rage is the appropriate emotion. (Indeed, the guilt of Faulkner’s privileged whites may strike our twenty-first-century ears as condescendingly racist.) For Erdrich, the original and irrevocable crime of marauding European invaders is the theft of Native American lands and the displacement of Native American tribes onto “reservations”—(inevitably in regions in which whites had no commercial interest); this is the primordial theft that lodges deep inside all her Native American characters, not an original sin but the outrage of sin perpetrated upon them. The quotation that begins this review is, more fully:

  I saw that the loss of their land was lodged deep inside them forever. This loss would enter me, too. Over time, I came to know that the sorrow was a thing each of them covered up according to their character—my old uncle through his passionate discipline, my mother through strict kindness and cleanly order. As for my grandfather (“Mooshum”), he used the patient art of ridicule.

  These words are spoken by a girl named Evelina, one of the principal narrators of The Plague of Doves, whose relationship with her parents suggests the closeness, respect, and mutual love of Joe Coutts and his parents, as her role as clear-sighted observer within a maelstrom of adult confusion resembles his:

  [My mother’s] face, and my father’s face, were naked with love. It wasn’t something we talked about—love—and I was terrified of its expression from the lips of my parents. But they allowed me this one clear look at it. Their love blazed from them.

  The risk for the culturally displaced is that family life, the core of their existence, will be undermined by the malevolent, rapacious, larger society—beyond the reservation.

  Displacement presages more specific crimes, like the lynching of (blameless) Ojibwes in The Plague of Doves by white men intent upon revenging a vicious crime that had been committed, in fact, as we eventually learn, by a white man and not by Ojibwes; this second, vicious crime echoes through decades and generations, even as natives, mixed-bloods, and non-natives intermarry beneath a North Dakota sky that constitutes “one gigantic memory for us all.”

  In The Round House, immediately following the rape, Geraldine Coutts sinks into clinical depression and refuses to leave her bed. It isn’t so much the assault itself, terrible as it is, that precipitates this reaction as the victim’s sense of helplessness and passivity: she doesn’t want to tell even her husband the identity of her rapist, for fear that the psychopath-rapist will murder her family, as well as her. The exasperation Joe begins to feel for his mother in this inert state is entirely believable: “It was as though I had been locked up with a raging corpse.” Perhaps less believable is the absence in the text of an acknowledgment of a community of rape victims, so to speak. Both Bazil Coutts (one of the multiple narrators of The Plague of Doves) and his wife would be acquainted with numerous rape cases, hardly a rarity on Native American reservations, as it is hardly a rarity in the United States generally. But Geraldine Coutts appears to be unnaturally isolated—like someone suffering from a rare disease of which no one else has heard.1

  Not all whites are “skins of evil” (RH, p. 242), but an unforgiveable majority of whites are indifferent to the sins of other whites, perpetrated against native peoples; or, they shield such whites, like the villainous psychopath of The Round House, who would go unpunished by “white” law. Evoked in both The Round House and in The Plague of Doves is a tale of a cannibal white man, Liver-Eating Johnson:

  [Mooshum] related the horrifying tale of Liver-Eating Johnson’s hatred of the Indian and how in lawless days this evil trapper and coward jumped his prey and was said to cut the liver from his living victim and devour that organ right before their eyes. He liked to run them down, too, over great distances.

  [Mooshum] said, I ever tell you boys about the time I outran Liver-Eating Johnson? How that old rascal used to track down Indians and kill us and eat our livers? That was a white wiindigoo, but when I was young and fleet, I run him down and whittled him away bite by bite and paid him back. I snapped off his ear with my teeth, and then his nose. Want to see his thumb?

  Liver-Eating Johnson is but one example in Erdrich’s Indian lore of a white “wiindigoo”—a soulless creature who must be killed in self-defense. But there is a technique to successfully killing a wiindigoo: “You couldn’t do it alone.” (RH, p. 180) In The Round House, the acts of the psychopath rapist (who is revealed as a murderer as well as a rapist) “cry out to Heaven for Vengeance.” Interlarded through The Round House are references to law books—(“the law book my father called The Bible. Felix S. Cohen’s Handbook of Federal Indian Law”)—and court cases in which Joe’s father has ruled—(in very few of which the Native American judge is able to claim “limited jurisdiction over a non-Indian” subject). Clearly it’s the case, Erdrich suggests, that Native American criminal justice should not be subordinate to state or federal U.S. law; in an interview she has said that the “survival” of Native Americans depends upon their young people becoming lawyers. But there are instances in which even tribal law is irrelevant, for the killing of a “wiindigoo” has precedence, as Joe’s father tells him, in a “very old law,” that supersedes and nullifies merely human law.

  Rendered impotent by federal law, which forbids arresting, indicting, and trying U.S. citizens in tribal courts when they’ve committed crimes on Native American reservations against Native Americans, Bazil Coutts explains his moral position to his son:

  I ask myself in this situation, as one sworn to uphold the law in every case, what would I do if I had any information that would lead to the identity of the killer. . . . [of the rapist] I’ve decided that I would do nothing. Any judge knows that there are many kinds of justice—for instance, ideal justice as opposed to the best-that-we-can-do justice. . . . There was no question of [the rapist’s] guilt. He may even have wanted to get caught and punished. We can’t know his mind. [The rapist’s] killing is a wrong thing which serves an ideal justice. It settles a legal enigma. It threads that unfair maze of land title law by which [the rapist] could not be prosecuted. His death was the exit. . . .

  It could be argued that [the rapist] met the definition of a wiindigoo, and that with no other recourse, his killing fulfilled the requirements of a very old law.

  Thousands of years after Aeschylus’s The Oresteia, in which the impersonality and durability of law is shown to supersede the ferocity of blood-vengeance, it would be a rare work of literary fiction that shrank from condoning some sort of vigilante law in the face of the failure of impersonal law; popular wisdom concurs that these are not base motives for revenge, but the stirrings of a higher morality, a “higher law,” to which one has the right to appeal if the law ordained by governments fails or is corrupt. (Hamlet is the great “revenge” play—young Hamlet’s relucta
nce to exact vengeance is felt by him, and by the spectator, as a moral failing and not a lofty, Kantian virtue.) Except for the young age of the individual who exacts the vigilante justice, The Round House is not revolutionary or original in this regard, and does not appear to have aroused controversy since its publication in 2012. Certainly the execution of the rapist/“wiindigoo” is not an easy task for the boy, and is not carried out alone but with at least two collaborators of whom one is the (female) twin of the rapist; and the aftermath of the killing is fraught with wholly credible guilt and unease, as well as the accidental death of one of the collaborators. Joe is made to think: “There was in me . . . a disconnect so profound I could think of nothing but obliteration. I would somehow find the means to get drunk. The world would take on that amber tone. Things would soften to brown as if in old photographs.”

  The Round House is not, like time-shifting The Plague of Doves, a “whodunit”—we soon learn the identity of the perpetrator of the despicable rape; what is indeterminate is the punishment—if there will be punishment, and what its nature will be, and its aftermath, arguably the most interesting phase of any act of violence. As usual in works of fiction by Louise Erdrich The Round House contains passages of Catholic theology, morality, and reasoning—the author was brought up Catholic and attended a reservation Catholic school: “I’m so full of fury that it doesn’t even register anymore”—which confronts Joe’s anguish only abstractly, as in this exchange with the (white) Catholic priest Father Travis:

  We’ve got to address the problem of evil in order to understand your soul or any other human soul. . . . There are types of evil, did you know that? There is material evil, which causes suffering without reference to humans but gravely affecting humans. Disease and poverty, calamities of any natural sort . . . These we can’t do anything about. . . . Moral evil is different. It is caused by human beings. . . . Now you came up here, Joe, to investigate your soul hoping to get closer to God because God is all good, all powerful, all healing, all merciful. . . . So you have to wonder why a being of this immensity and power would allow this outrage—that one human being should be allowed by God to directly harm another human being. . . . The only answer to this, and it isn’t an entire answer . . . is that God made human beings free agents. . . . And in order to protect our human freedom, God doesn’t often, very often at least, intervene. God can’t do that without taking away our moral freedom. Do you see?

  Joe half-sees, but clearly the answer isn’t satisfactory in the face of his mother’s suffering, his father’s humiliation and his own misery. More ambiguously, Father Travis tells him, “We are never so poor that we cannot bless another human being, are we? So it is that every evil, whether moral or material, results in good. You’ll see.” The priest seems to know what Joe is planning to do but makes no urgent attempt to dissuade him. As his parents, who realize after the fact what he has done, do not speak to him about it at all: “There was nothing to be said. . . . Nobody shed tears and there was no anger.” One has the sense of a tragic condition made worse by an obtuse and seemingly irremediable criminal justice system in which individuals must follow their own consciences and hope to survive. For Joe and his family, “The sentence was to endure.”

  The Round House

  By Louise Erdrich

  NOTE

  1.In fact it is estimated that one in three Native American women living on tribal lands are raped, or sexually assaulted, in their lifetimes, more than twice the number of non-native women. A high percentage of these rapes are committed by non-native men, and are rarely prosecuted. In 2011, the Justice Department failed to prosecute 65 percent of all reported rape cases on tribal lands, and it is estimated that a low percentage of rapes are actually reported. The Indian Health Service is tragically underfunded. Crimes of various types on tribal land—domestic violence, child abuse, drug use (especially methamphetamine), robbery and murder, as well as rape—are so frequent, the Justice Department seems to have virtually given up prosecuting them, as tribal police frequently make no arrests when crimes are reported. A Native American woman advocate for victims of sexual violence (herself a rape victim) is quoted saying that sexual assault was “virtually routine” in her community. See “For Native American Women, Scourge of Rape, Rare Justice” in the New York Times, May 22, 2012.

  IN OTHER WORLDS:

  MARGARET ATWOOD

  Science fiction is a mode of romance with a strong inherent tendency towards myth.

  —Northrop Frye

  Margaret Atwood’s eclectic and engaging miscellany of essays, reviews, introductions, and “tributes” is a literary memoir tracing the myriad links between science fiction and literature, and relating both to those archetypal forms and structures so famously anatomized by her University of Toronto professor Northrop Frye in The Anatomy of Criticism (1957). It is simultaneously a self-portrait of the artist as an inquisitive, questing, impressionable and avid reader since childhood of a remarkable variety of popular and esoteric entertainments—from comic strips and comic books to classics of the genre by Jonathan Swift, H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell. Atwood’s intention is to break down the artificial distinctions between science fiction and “serious” literature by close readings of works by these writers as well as H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887), enormously popular in its time, Bryher’s Visa for Avalon (1965), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (2002).

  The primary impetus behind In Other Worlds seems to have been a public debate between Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin on the subject of science fiction, initiated by remarks made by Le Guin in the Guardian in a review of Atwood’s The Year of the Flood (2009):

  To my mind, The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, and now The Year of the Flood all exemplify one of the things that science fiction does, which is to extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and events to a near-future that’s half prediction, half satire. But Margaret Atwood doesn’t want any of her books to be called science fiction. . . . She doesn’t want the literary bigots to shove her into the literary ghetto.

  In her admiring essay on Le Guin—“The Queen of Quinkdom”—Atwood notes that Le Guin speaks of science fiction as a genre that “should not be merely extrapolative” and should not attempt “prophetic truth”—“Science fiction cannot predict, nor can any fiction, the variables being too many.” Atwood concurs with Le Guin that “the moral complexity proper to the modern novel need not be sacrificed . . . thought and intuition can move freely within bounds set only by the terms of the experiment, which may be very large indeed.” (Certainly this is true of both Atwood and Le Guin, as very fine writers who have undertaken to explore the imaginative possibilities of “science fiction” and in the process have added inestimably to the riches of the genre in twentieth-century American fiction; but it is probably not true of most practitioners of the genre.) Both writers would describe their fictions as “thought-experiments”—ways of describing “reality, the present world” by way of original metaphors. Both writers would argue that “a novelist’s business is lying”—as a “devious method of truth-telling.”

  With the good-natured patience of a teacher who has made a point repeatedly, yet is still being misunderstood in some quarters, Atwood sets forth her particular set of beliefs regarding science fiction in the introduction, stating her aversion to misleading readers who might be drawn to her speculative novels with the expectation of reading more typical genre work, and being disappointed—“I would like to have space creatures inside [my] books. . . . But, being unable to produce them, I don’t want to lead the reader on, thus generating a frantic search within the pages—Where are the Lizard Men of Xenor?” Atwood draws a distinction between the more typical genre work and her own predilection for “thought-experiment” fiction:

  What I mean by “science fiction” is those books that descend from H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, which treats
of an invasion by tentacled, blood-sucking Martians shot to earth in metal canisters—things that could not possibly happen—whereas, for me, “speculative fiction” means plots that descend from Jules Vernes’s books about submarines and balloon travel and such—things that really could happen but just hadn’t completely happened when the authors wrote the books. I would place my books in this second category: no Martians.

  The daughter of a prominent forest entomologist at the University of Toronto, and an undergraduate at that university in the heady era of Northrop Frye, Atwood is more concerned with taxonomy than most writers, ever-elucidating definitions and sub-classifications: