Diablevert: When you get a chance check this link out. I was struck by the passage about Momaday (the three paragraphs or so starting with “the absorption of fiction,” excerpt here). I was interested in that bit as a launching off point for Laughing Boy
Dreadful Penny: “authenticity is a snark”… damn. I feel like I’d really have to read this to absorb it.
Diablevert: Don’t feel you have to read the whole thing (most of the article is about creative writing programs qua creative writing programs). But I thought it was interesting that Menard points out that Momaday was criticized for writing modernist Indians. And I thought that was especially striking because here’s La Farge writing modernist Indians, three decades previous.
Do you any of think the other Pulitzers were modernist?
Dreadful Penny: I don’t think that any of the Pulitzers we’ve read to date have been particularly modernist until Laughing Boy. Maybe One of Ours was, in that Cather’s style is fairly internal.
Diablevert: Bit odd, isn’t it? That the anthropologically-based one set on a Navajo reservation in 1915 should be he most stream of conscious-y, with the old “the angst of modernity overwhelms and tortures me” bit, eh?
Or maybe not odd….Laughing Boy is centered around a conflict between old and new ways
Dreadful Penny: The Bridge of San Luis Rey isn’t really modernist, but it does feel the most contemporary in style out of all of them. I think you’re onto something there.
Diablevert: I guess, but if I were to play Devil’s advocate I’d say that’s because nouveau-fabulist is a recent fashion
Dreadful Penny: I don’t know that I would call it fabulist… no early fantasy or science fiction that I know of reads like that.
Diablevert: Fabulist like, Aesop’s fables. Like the Grimm Brothers.
Dreadful Penny: It’s more like Borges than George MacDonald or H.G. Wells or anything like that. I think that’s conflating content with style slightly. Fables don’t have that level of specificity and attention to place… they can’t, or they don’t function particularly well as fables. Anyway…. Bridge isn’t modernist, either, but Laughing Boy certainly seems to be.
Diablevert: Sure. But there’s still and aspect to that style…a kind of dreamy far-awayness where every character is less person than archetype. Everything is mythic and monumental, that’s what enables strange or fantastic things to happen and pass unremarked on in the story-–like Garcia Marquez’s characters living to be 100-bajillion or whatever it was in One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Dreadful Penny: Yeah… Bridge could have been written by Borges or Marquez, I think, and it would pass completely for their other writing.
Diablevert: Whereas Laughing Boy is deliberately, stiltedly simplified, but Laughing Boy and Slim Girl are modern people underneath the mythic language. La Farge follows the petty streams of thought, more like a modernist than a fable writer.
Dreadful Penny: Exactly. It’s the first Pulitzer that I think deploys stream-of-consciousness with any regularity or success.
Diablevert: Mmmm. So does that make it late or just in time? Cather probably comes closest otherwise – there’s a lot of time spent in Claude’s head – but there’s still the old structure, the hand of the author, visibly holding everything together.
So discounting Cather, is 1930 late for a major book to show modernist influences?
Dreadful Penny: Well, the major modernists were writing only slightly earlier in Europe, right? Joyce and Woolf notably…But we haven’t hit the high modernism of Faulkner chronologically, right?
Diablevert: Contemporary, almost. A little earlier. I forget exactly when the saga of Ulysses’ ban took place, but it’s a little before or right around this time. Of course, the hip heads had been reading excerpts for ages. And Portrait was out
Dreadful Penny: Strike that… Sound and the Fury came out in 1929, followed by As I Lay Dying in 1930. Oh, man, that makes the Pulitzer committee look like schmucks for picking this book.
Diablevert: Well, they look like schmucks a lot of the time anyway
Dreadful Penny: Good call… so I’d say this is nearer the leading edge of American modernism than European, anyway… so La Farge might not be super-behind-the-times for this side of the pond. It might be, perhaps, unfair to compare the poor guy to Faulkner.
Diablevert: Yeah, Pulitzer felt guilty over it, too…
Dreadful Penny: I think this passage from the link you sent is most relevant here: “And though some readers are devoted to fiction about ethnic minorities because it tells “their story,” there is a degree to which such literature is for outsiders, a variety of anthropology in which natives “inform” on their own cultures to literary tourists. The rest of the natives are often not thrilled to find their practices paraded before the gaze of outsiders.”
Diablevert: Word.
Dreadful Penny: So Laughing Boy is an anthropological study written by an outsider in a new-wave European literary style?
Diablevert: I think you could say that. It reminds me of the brief reminiscence I linked to from Tony Hillerman they other day. He talked about how he knew these two New Mexican writers who had this wider reputation, and how one loved the land and one–La Farge–the people. It was a matter of interest as much as style; the landscape was just a pile of trees and rocks, the inside of people’s heads, he cared about deeply.
Dreadful Penny: That’s a great observation… the landscape writing in Laughing Boy seems perfunctory to me, but the characters are very carefully drawn.
Also, this isn’t a book with a great supporting cast. It’s like he only had room (or scope) to get into two people’s heads.
Diablevert: but I guess what gets me is, is that right? Even in La Farge’s book he acknowledges that the Indian way of metaphor is very different from a white man’s when he talks about poetry and song. So does a modernist rendering of their inner lives make sense? Is modernism a “truer” representation of a universal human experience of thought, or is it just a filter, a flavor?
Dreadful Penny: I feel like modernism is a pretty accurate representation of the average state of mind, or maybe just my state of mind most days. But I couldn’t quote you chapter on verse about whether or not that’s a widely held critical opinion.
Diablevert: I dunno, do you think the book is successful in its attempt at Indianess?
Dreadful Penny: That I don’t know if I can say.
Diablevert: Fair enough.
Dreadful Penny: I don’t know enough about “Indianness” or the Navajo or any of these cultures to judge La Farge’s authenticity here. What do you think?
(I mean, I think Sherman Alexie is a great representation of “Indianess,” but maybe that’s because I love his style and HIS sense of his own culture, not that it’s an accurate representation of anything.)
Diablevert: I’m not sure. I think the book is criticized for not being authentic.
Dreadful Penny: To be honest, I just can’t imagine that it is authentic, just because of the circumstances of its creation. That a first-time novelist from outside a culture would be able to capture it with any sense of authenticity seems like trapping lightning in a bottle.
Diablevert: It’s funny, I just came across an article in my background googling that appears to be making the argument that Momaday isn’t authentic with his Pulitzer Prize–winner, because he’s Kiowa and the characters are Navajo or something. But I’m afraid to read it so I don’t ruin the book before I come to it.
That’s a bit of what Menard is getting to in his aside in the writing workshops article – to an extent, is it not the case that any attempt to “make literary” such a experiment has an inauthenticity?
Dreadful Penny: I don’t believe that you need to be of a certain ethnicity to write about that ethnicity, but I do think it’s an enterprise that should be undertaken with great care. But, essentially, folks is folks.
Diablevert: Sure. But how do you know if you did it right?
Dreadful Penny: If you don’t get strung up by the public and lambasted by critics?
Diablevert: Gotcha.
Dreadful Penny: I don’t think Laughing Boy is a great work of art, but I don’t think it’s an ill-intentioned one, and all I have to base that judgment on is the quality of his prose and his characterization, and how it resonates with my sense of human experience and my personal boundaries of how one should approach another culture (which are themselves, of course, culturally constructed).
Diablevert: Yeah, I’d agree with that. I did like the scene in the trading post where all the Indians just dick with the newbie. That felt authentic, and that guy, the shop owner, felt like–-of course that guy would have existed, but I just hadn’t imagined him before. The guy who goes out west thinking he’ll put one over on the dumb Indians.
Dreadful Penny: That felt authentic to me, too… maybe humor adds to a sense of authenticity? Like, for a joke to be good, it needs to be plausible? (That would be a decidedly unliterary way to ascertain authenticity… is it funny?)
Diablevert: Might still be a good way, though. Anything else bugging you about Laughing Boy?
Dreadful Penny: We’ve already come up with much more than I ever thought I would have to say about Laughing Boy. You?
Diablevert: Nah, I’m good
