Abstract
Sorensen explores the reception history of D’Arcy McNickle’s The Surrounded to show that recent developments in Native American literary studies have undermined the novel’s status as the preeminent work of native writing before 1968. In response Sorensen develops an alternative account of McNickle’s career, calling attention not only to the different political commitments that emerge from his career as an activist and scholar who helped develop Native American studies, but also to those that manifest themselves in his earlier fiction. The result is a fragmentary recovery that produces multiple contradictory McNickles, some of whom are not desirable as precursors. The chapter reads The Surrounded against the grain by focusing on the minor characters, which stand as undeveloped alternatives to the tragedy of individualism that McNickle composed.
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Notes
- 1.
Warrior’s Tribal Secrets (1995), Weaver’s That the People Might Live (1997), and Womack’s Red on Red (1999) are the foundational texts of this movement that introduce the concepts of intellectual sovereignty, communatism, and literary separatism, respectively.
- 2.
I will refer to the manuscript held in the Newberry Library as “The Hungry Generations” and the published version of the draft, edited by Brigit Hans, as The Hungry Generations.
- 3.
Charles Larson, American Indian Fiction (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1978), 37. Although Larson does not address Cogewea at length in his chapter devoted to these texts, he makes it clear that his criticism of Oskison and Mathews extends to Mourning Dove as well.
- 4.
Ibid., 67.
- 5.
Ibid., 78.
- 6.
Louis Owens, Other Destinies, 60.
- 7.
Ibid., 77.
- 8.
Ibid.
- 9.
Robert Allen Warrior, Tribal Secrets, 56.
- 10.
Ibid.
- 11.
See Teuton, Red Land, Red Power: Grounding Knowledge in the American Indian Novel (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).
- 12.
“Forgetful Remembering,” in Memory Against Culture, 79.
- 13.
For discussions of The Surrounded’s textual history see Owens, “The Red Road to Nowhere,” American Indian Quarterly 13.3 (Summer 1989): 239–48; Birgit Hans, “Rethinking History: A Context for The Surrounded,” in The Legacy of D’Arcy McNickle: Writer, Historian, Activist, ed. James Purdy, (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 33–52; and Hans, “‘Because I Understand the Storytelling Art’: The Evolution of D’Arcy McNickle’s The Surrounded,” in Early Native American Writing: New Critical Essays, ed. Helen Jaskoski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 223–38.
- 14.
Owens, “The Red Road to Nowhere,” 239–40.
- 15.
Warrior, Tribal Secrets, 56.
- 16.
For accounts of McNickle’s role in directing the Boulder workshops and at the Newberry, see Dorothy Parker (194–7, 239–47).
- 17.
Foucault, “What Is an Author,” 120. Warrior, Weaver, and Womack most clearly voice their shared sense of the need for “Native voices articulating literary criticism” against a poststructuralist argument that such a commitment is only a nostalgic desire for false authenticity in their coauthored American Indian Literary Nationalism (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006), xxi.
- 18.
Womack, “A Single Decade: Book-Length Native Literary Criticism between 1986 and 1997,” in Reasoning Together, 9.
- 19.
Dorothy Parker, Singing an Indian Song, 39–58. Henceforth cited parenthetically as Singing.
- 20.
Hans, Introduction, D’Arcy McNickle’s The Hungry Generations: The Evolution of a Novel, ed. Birgit Hans (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007), 20.
- 21.
Ibid.
- 22.
Before becoming the version published as The Surrounded, the manuscript was revised under the working title of “Dead Grass.” This interim draft has not been preserved; we only know of it from McNickle’s correspondence.
- 23.
This correspondence is held in the McNickle papers at the Newberry Library.
- 24.
Letter from Ruth Rae to McNickle dated November 26, 1935; letter from E. H. Dodd dated December 4, 1935; McNickle Papers.
- 25.
Rae’s strategy for marketing The Surrounded was to rely on the novel’s success with critics to drive sales. She circulated review copies to major publications across the nation and tracked the reviews carefully. The clippings of reviews Rae had sent to McNickle are held in the McNickle Papers.
- 26.
Chamberlain, “Books of the Times,” New York Times, February 15, 1936.
- 27.
In the Saturday Review, Oliver LaFarge writes of McNickle and Mathews: “So far two men of a degree of Indian blood have come forward to show, at least, a situation of great promise” (LaFarge, “Half Breed Hero,” Saturday Review, March 14, 1936, p. 10). A review in The Oklahoman signed by K.C.K. concludes by saying that The Surrounded is “[a] book to put beside John Joseph Mathews’s ‘Sundown.’” (“Poignant Story of Hapless Indian Is ‘The Surrounded,’” The Oklahoman, March 8, 1936).
- 28.
Hurston’s article “What White Publisher’s Won’t Print” appeared in The Negro Digest in April 1950.
- 29.
Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, 229.
- 30.
For the importance of comparable titles, or comps, to marketing, see John B. Tompson, Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century, second edition (New York: Plume, 2012), 202–4.
- 31.
Pfister, Individuality Incorporated, 213.
- 32.
Thompson, Merchants of Culture, 204–5.
- 33.
D’Arcy McNickle, Native American Tribalism: Indian Survivals and Renewals (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), vi.
- 34.
Posnock, “The Dream of Deracination: The Uses of Cosmopolitanism,” American Literary History 12.4 (Winter 2000): 802–18.
- 35.
D’Arcy McNickle, D’Arcy McNickle’s “The Hungry Generations,” 252. Subsequently cited parenthetically as HG.
- 36.
See Walter Benn Michaels’s “Race into Culture” for a polemic argument that the division between these terms is largely specious. For opposing views see Daniel Boyarin and Jonathan Boyarin, “Diaspora: Generation and the Ground of Jewish Identity,” Critical Inquiry 19.4 (Summer 1993): 693–725 and Avery Gordon and Christopher Newfield “White Philosophy,” Critical Inquiry 20.4 (Summer 1994): 737–757.
- 37.
See Edward Sapir, “Culture, Genuine and Spurious,” The American Journal of Sociology 29.4 (January 1924): 409–18. This is not to suggest that McNickle is adopting Sapir’s argument as a whole. Sapir argues against the “curious notion afloat that ‘new’ countries are especially favorable soil for the formation of a virile culture” (418).
- 38.
For McNickle’s personal connection to the Dawes act, see Singing 11–13.
- 39.
S. Teuton, Red Land, Red Power, 138.
- 40.
Diary entry dated Thursday August 11, 1932, McNickle Papers.
- 41.
Diary entry dated August 23, 1932. McNickle Papers.
- 42.
Enrique Lima similarly sees The Surrounded as a bildungsroman in which “the colonial fragmentation experienced by the novel’s Salish community makes…socialization impossible” in “The Uneven Development of the Bildungsroman: D’Arcy McNickle and Native American Modernity,” Comparative Literature 63.3 (Summer 2011): 292.
- 43.
Diary entry dated August 23, 1932. McNickle Papers.
- 44.
For an analysis of how siblings demonstrate the individuality of the central character, see Woloch on Pride and Prejudice (The One vs. the Many, 68–77).
- 45.
It is telling that many tribalist critics celebrate Silko’s Almanac of the Dead, a sprawling novel that refuses to grant any character centrality.
- 46.
Parker, The Invention of Native American Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 78.
- 47.
Ibid., 79.
- 48.
In his journal, McNickle wrote that during the Depression, “The world rocked before my eyes. The impossible became the accomplished fact” (entry dated August 23, 1932).
- 49.
See his “Theorizing American Indian Experience,” Reasoning Together, 353–410. For related theorizations of experience that defend this frequently maligned concept from charges of naïve essentialism, see Paula M. L. Moya, Learning From Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), Moya and Michael R. Hames-García, eds., Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), and Satya P. Mohanty, Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).
- 50.
Alicia Kent also notes the tension between Mike and Narcisse’s escape and containment of alternative modes of modernity in “‘You can’t run away nowadays’: Redefining Modernity in D’Arcy McNickle’s The Surrounded,” Studies in American Indian Literature 20.2 (Summer 2008): 38.
- 51.
As Pfister notes of Mike and Narcisse’s prospects, “[n]ot much in the novel leads one to believe that they will be any less ‘surrounded’ by institutions, stereotypes, and racism than Archilde” (Individuality Incorporated, 219)
- 52.
Journal entry dated July 31, 1932.
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Sorensen, L. (2016). 7 The Threat of Unrecovery. In: Ethnic Modernism and the Making of US Literary Multiculturalism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57019-2_9
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