Against commodification: Zuni culture in Clarence Major's Native American texts.

Not too far gone are the days when any county museum served the naively colonial role of representing Native American cultures to all who ventured in. The centerpieces of such exhibits were the dioramas, all of which, no matter the tribe (if, indeed, any gestures toward tribal variation were made), seemed to ensure that every scout troop and picnicking family passing by would leave with a few central notions of what Native American life meant.

The characteristics of the diorama are telling in regard to the dialectics of representation and colonization facilitated by commodification. The diorama is dependent upon freezing time and neutralizing distinctions in space, the "Indians" always resemble no one but other diorama Indians and diorama cave-people. While freezing the latter in a specific time is viable due to the extinction of those ancient cultures, casting the former in similar pre-technological settings suggests a similar extinction or, at best (for the viewer), a delightfully nostalgic primitiveness. At the same time, temporal freezing isolates the figures in the diorama into single, typically stereotyped, actions, thereby containing and enabling viewers to generalize the whole of Indian life. The diorama, like so many "Western" films, levels the specificity of tribal location and, thus, of tribal identity and culture. For both, an exigence exists for establishing the stock-ness of the Indian. Motives for this leveling likely stem from a need to depersonalize the humanity of the Indian, though museums could be driven by such added material factors as a lack of artifacts or the inability to identify one culture from another.

The diorama elicits the charm of an artifact masquerading as something built by invisible, supremely objective, quasi-divine hands. It suggests an unmediated and pristine correspondence between its subjects and what, within the terms of the epistemology operant in the production of the diorama, objectively exists in a real, outside world. Who but a god is capable of building life, let alone a whole village? The lack of any obvious nod to the subjectivity and interestedness of the maker is indeed suspicious. Its final quality, the erasure of any indications of construction and the illusion of objectivity implicit in such an erasure, makes the diorama a serviceable paradigm of the type of representation to which Clarence Major's two volumes built around the Zuni culture sit in opposition.

In contrast to the dioramic paradigm, Clarence Major's Some Ob- servations of a Stranger at Zuni in the Latter Part of the Century and Painted Turtle.- Woman with Guitar resist commodification and what I would like to call dioramafication. In my examination of Major's Zuni texts, I will pay particular attention to the thematized subjectivities of the two texts, and the similarities of these two aspects to those that Walter Benjamin found in Brechtian theater. In so doing, I hope to describe Major's postmodern response to the artist's representational paradox: How is it possible to follow the will-to-represent, without falling into a colonial will-to-dominate?

One way of approaching this reading is by looking at Major's work in light of the notion of authority. We can accept, at least in part on etymological grounds, the comingling of authorship with authority.(1) And certainly this sense of authority inherent in authorship is facilitated by the guises of objectivity created in so many texts. Major resists this connection in two ways: by insistently foregrounding the fundamental subjectivity of both his characters and himself in a way which suggests a certain hierarchical set of qualifications which condition the accuracy and value of a given character's, speaker's, or author's speech/writing; and by thematizing the obfuscation which occurs when those who aren't qualified to speak do so.

To a large extent, both Some Observations and Painted Turtle engage a form of the question of subalternity. Who has the authority to speak about and create representations of marginalized cultures? In Some Observations, Major provides an elaborate discussion of this question in the form of a poem titled "In Hollywood with the Zuni God of War." The title allude an incontrovertible example of the ways in which, in this case at the bands of the Hollywood film industry, once vital cultural information is so readily ground up and represented as kitsch. First to go in this hegemonic cultural reinvention are distinctions among various tribal identities and narratives. When one of the Zuni actors points out his Zuni-ness, presumably to suggest ant something is gravely wrong with a Zuni playing in a film about Cochise and other Apaches, Major's director replies, "Do you wanna wok or not?" (17). This mocking interrogative response in the vernacular clearly exemplifies the dilemma faced by native workers in an economy of cultural commodification. The Zuni actors must either be the desired stereotypic Indians or be unemployed.

For "Zugowa," the key figure in the poem, who may well be the personification of the God of War, as well as for the nameless speaker and all the other Native Americans employed by the film industry, the pain at this erasure of tribal identity and culture is mediated, if not anesthetized, by the need for income. As Zugowa states:

They did not care which tribe we came from." Zugowa swore this was true in the name of Awonawilona, by his own mill We all looked alike. Being herded and shot paid better than oranges in S.D. County, or the H.D. in Arizona - that is, if you could get yourself shot at least once per month (20-21)

Here is a scathing critique of the nature and psychology of the colonizing economies Native Americans have no choice but function within. To survive colonization requires the colonized either to sell their bodies in one of many forms of grueling manual labor or to sell their likenesses for representations designed to serve the purpose of reaffirming the hegemony of the colonizers themselves, by recreating the "glory" of the genocidal acts which secured their power to begin with. Major makes this last point vivid in the lines:

A liberal form back east wanted to make a flick on Cherokee Gatumlati till somebody told him she was half Negro. Studio puffed the plug out of his oxygen tent: white audiences in the South might not buy it. (21)

These lines demonstrate the intricacies of racism witnessed through the economics of film production.

The profit motive sanctions and perpetuates the politics and psychology of "racial" stereotypes. While it is good business to reconstruct homicidal/genocidal representations of ignoble Native American "savages" on the screen, African Americans, for a Southern audience, are below the gaze of even homocidal/genocidal representation. AU of these points are wrapped up dramatically when Major closes the poem with Zugowa and the "speaker" being " farmed out / parking cars for peanuts in South L.A." (23-24), leaving the cost of the film industry on Native Americans clear: In the picture business, even the gods are reduced to being lackeys.

It seems viable at this point to describe "In Hollywood with the Zuni God of War"' as a type of perspectival reversal, in which those who typically are represented take on the (superior?) position of being the ones doing the representing. The poem is a look at the exploitative practices of the economy of a certain type of filmmaking, through the eyes of those, in this case Native Americans, who are exploited. On first analysis, this would make the poem akin to other genres in which the victim/witness tells the story of whatever violence the perpetrators have inflicted. Survivor narratives from the Holocaust and countless other attempts at genocide, victim statements taken by police, courtroom testimony from battered spouses and children - all of these share a key factor: Each demonstrates a move toward a usurpation of power inherent in authorship, allowing each, for what may be the first time, to engage in a Rortian redescription of those who have for so long described them in ways which facilitate domination and terror.(2)

To play with this idea further, it is possible that poems like "In Hollywood . . .," as well as those texts found in the various genres mentioned above, aspire to shatter the barriers of silence created by those like the Hollywood producers, barriers which foster the "agreement - or at least the determination - of all executive(s) not to produce or sanction anything that in any way differs from their own rules, their own ideas about consumers, or above all themselves" (Horkheimer and Adomo 122). When Major produces works such as the volumes under examination here, or when any of the other producers of similarly engaged texts do the same, they are, in a sense, effecting a revolution in the economy of cultural production/reproduction, thereby enabling themselves to influence ideologies being disseminated by the various vehicles of production.

But revolutions of this type are not simple either in practice or on paper. The types of engaged texts we are discussing indicate authorship by those who have typically been written about, but who have themselves been denied the right to write. J will focus on this issue in Major's work shortly.) But as Horkheimer and Adomo stress in their critique of "the culture industry," authorship is a necessary but insufficient step in the production of cultural materials. While it may be possible for the "represented" to write, writing is mute without the involvement and sanction of some form of monied person or persons with access to, and the ability to pay for, the material production of texts. These persons or groups are situated in the same genealogies as are those at "Chrysler and General Motors" and "Warner Brothers and Metro Goldwyn Mayer," all of whom function to reproduce themselves, in part, by stifling any challenges to their health and by fostering a sameness in all their products, a move beneficial to the entire class (123).

Then what of the texts mentioned earlier? A closer inspection of du relation between the texts themselves and their various means of production suggests that what initially appeared as a disruption, a revolutionary tension, may be alternatively described as a graceful cohabitation. The atrocities each describes preserve the anonymity and innocence of the publishers: The police report points to a single, aberrant individual who committed the type of direct violence all may safely condemn. The survivor narrative is similar, only there it is a group and an historical period which may safely be condemned. What these share, for the publisher, is a safety in knowing that the finger in each of these crimes will never turn them. In fact, the publishers stand to be valorized for their courage in publishing these texts, a fact that could lead to an increase in their sales and thus their profits. All the while, their true crimes, the economic injustices committed in comparative invisibility by the publishers and others of their economic position, as well as texts which could serve to expose their involvement in both economic and cultural hegemonies, remain unprinted, silenced in the very way alluded to by Horkheimer Adorno.

Now that these difficult questions are on the table, what of Major? More specifically, how does he deal with the tensions of the aporia of artistic/cultural production? How do his texts, Some Observations and Painted Turtle, avoid becoming what we may now describe as just more fuel for the blast furnace of the industry of textual production, or, to use one of Major's descriptions, another Hollywood film, or, to use one of mine, another diorama? One result of such an inquiry, and one which is persuasive on a number of counts is that Major's texts finally cannot avoid becoming more mw material for the culture industry - a point made clear by the dialogue carried out between Benjamin and Adorno over Brechtian theater, which I will discuss shortly. Thus, the lowest common denominator of an economic analysis of the production of these texts reveals the impossibility of Major's escape from the aporia Adorno articulated. First, the nature and presence of the texts in my hands suggests an important point: Money was made in their production, both by Major and by the publisher, Sun and Moon Press. As for the latter, while I have not seen a report on their ownership, I can safely assume that the press is not a tribally owned entity, which means the nature of the economy in which these books are a commodity is one in which engaged, committed texts, in Adorno's sense, are being commodified by those somewhere in a line outside that of those who have a need to be engaged.

Having said this, I can offer a cogent counterargument.

While it is in all likelihood true that the means of publication of the two works are not Zuni-owned, it is also true that Sun and Moon Press is a small independent entity. As suck its links to the likes of Warner, et aL, are greatly diminished. Further, it is quite likely that the Zuni tribe owns no press, and if it does, it does not own one capable of distributing texts on the scale of Sun and Moon, which itself is very small. I accept these points, and will abstain from the counterpoints, because, as is the nature with aporia, such cross-examinations may continue ad infinitum.

Having looked at, and tenuously put to rest, the role of the press in the production of the two texts, I win now turn to the role of the author himself. Major seems well aware of all of these tensions endemic to the relations between a text of commitment and the material means of textual production. Further, while his interestedness, in the economic sense, in the books' production needs to be viewed through his claim - on the books' dust jackets - of partial Native American, if not specifically Zurd, ancestry, he makes concerted efforts in both texts to highlight his "take" as author on works built of Zuni cultural information. The remainder of my work will focus on Mm attempts, and offer discussion of their effects.

Apparently aware of the difficulties inherent in creating culturally informed, committed texts, Major creates a number of measures in Painted Turtle and Some Observations which mediate the dilemmas inherent in his undertaking. The texts seem bent on problematizing any sense of commensurability between themselves as texts and all notions of the "real," "outside" world. By overtly rendering suspect any hope at correspondence between the text and the world which they describe (in this case, the world of the Zuni), Major is in effect de-fetishizing the texts by highlighting their text-ness. In so doing, he devalues the books in the economy of artistic/cultural commodification.

Before discussing the various tools with which Major carries out this economic deconstruction of his own works, I would like to present an analogy and vocabulary with which to describe Major's undertaking. For this, I turn to Walter Benjamin's discussion of Brechtian theater, for in it I find a number of parallels to the works under discussion. Benjamin quotes Brecht on the subject of the dialectic between the means of production and the work.

The lack of clarity about their situation that prevails among musicians, writers and critics ... has immerse consequences that are far too little considered. For, thinking that they are in possession of an apparatus which in reality possesses them, they defend an apparatus over which they no longer have any control and which is no longer, as they still believe, a for producers, but has become a against the producers.(265-66)

Benjamin adds that the theater of the Brechtian moment, "whether in its educating or entertaining role - both are complementary - is that of a sated class for which everything it touches becomes a stimulant. Its position is lost" (266). In a way which for today's reader may seem a bit too party-line Marxist, Benjamin describes the mechanisms of cultural commodification operant in Brecht's Europe. In an economy in which the means of production are owned and controlled by the "sated," all that can be created through such means serves as pleasantly reaffirming barbiturates for those who own the machinery. This analysis seems to offer a useful template through which to view Major, a point already made in the discussion about Major's relation to his means of production.

Interesting for our purposes is Brecht's response, according to Benjamin, to this bind. Facing a situation in which the "theater," with all of the implications of the material and economic underspinning of that institution, would effectively cancel out any attempt at cornmitted work, and in which all such work would in fact serve the counterpurpose of reassuring those sitting in the audience of their self-perceived rightful hegemonies, Brecht sought to "enter into debate with" the theater itself (266). His approach to this - an approach which Major parallels, albeit via a different genre - was to expose at all turns the thematize of the theater itself, to thematize the act and economy of theatergoing in a manner which would leave viewers keenly aware of the ramifications of their role and involvement as audience (Benjamin 266-69).(3) For both Brecht and Major, this problematizes the viewer/reader's commodifying relation to the work itself, transforming the work's original commitment into a mere anesthetic for a bourgeois status quo.

I see at least three ways in which Major parallels Brecht's response to cultural commodification: by identifying and qualifying the nature of his subjectivity as author in the books, by foregrounding the textual-ness and Derridian written-ness of the texts, and by relying on a visibly fragmented under-standing of Zuni language, and thus of Zuni culture in general.

The title Some Observations of a Stranger at Zuni in the Latter Part of the Century names the insistent perspectivalism Major underscores in the book. Nothing is promised in the title - except uncertainty. Rather than offering anything of epistemologically bloated as, say, reports or studies or interpretations, Major offers only the comparatively random and far less certain "observations." While "observations" are frequently thought to be made by those operating through an epistemologically sound platform of science, Major destabilizes this idea by pointing out that these are but "some," presumably among many, of the observations. A shadow of randomness is cast over the process of selecting which of these many epistemogically grounded "observations" to include. Further, any claim to objectivity, a claim underlying so much anthropological work and other texts assuming documentary postures, is shattered from the outset by the fact that these random observations are being made via the perspective of "a stranger."

If the title of Some Observations makes the suggestion that identity, in all the ramifications of the word, influences perspective and claims of what is seen - that the nature of the observer and of observations is one conditioned, if not controlled, by subjective perspective- the books themselves develop this time. For this, Major develops the notion of what I would like to call mudhead subjectivity/perspectivalism. The mudhead is Major's, and according to the texts, Zuni culture's personification of something like the postmodern ethnographer, who is candidly aware of the outsiderness of his/her presence, outlook, and observations. This status, though, cannot be had except through ancestral inheritance, and thus is inextricable from ancestral identity. Specifically, according to Major, mudheads are "children of incest" (Painted Turtle 18), who, due to the nature of their background, spend their lives on the outskirts and perimeters of Zuni culture. Major literally situates them there in a number of dances and ceremonies, at which they can be found "stumbling along the walls of Sacred Plaza" in roles which seem vaguely reminiscent of those of rodeo clowns (Some Observations 33). Without clan, these tribal buffoons - portrayed variously as mystical and terrifying - are barred from full access to the rights of tribal membership and Zuni life, as is clear in the lines" |even if you become a priest (they told her) / you will never make the prayersticks / or enter the kiva'" (Some Observations 26). But this alienation goes beyond the religious, for mudheads "had no claims on the pueblo" (27).

In both texts, the mudheads not only serve the role of metaphoric personification of the perspectival outsiderness which characterizes Major's speakers and narrators, but also offer a meta-commentary on Major's role, reader's roles, and the nature of the texts themselves. This can be seen if we trace the theme of cultural ostracism manifest in the mudheads into other areas in the texts.

From the start of an analysis of ostracism in the texts, one point becomes clear: Major is intent on underscoring the primacy of ancestral and cultural authenticity among the Zuni he has created. Thus, when Painted Turtle drifts too far into what for a Zuni would constitute otherness, specifically into the bars and honkey-tonks of Gallup, New Mexico, she is required to undergo a form of cultural reintegration in order to gain permission to leave the reservation after returning for a visit.(4) When she is preparing to leave,

... the councilmen sent word that she could not leave the reservation till she learned how to make the Sayatasha belt to perfection. In their message they told her that if she left without permission she would be picked up and would thereafter have to learn to do many things, many other, more difficult things commonly expected of women. (Painted Turtle 97)

When Painted Turtle satisfies the men and leaves, her next attempt to return fails, even though she recites a litany of her cultural background to the "line guards" who negate each claim in succession:

She told them she was born at the Middle Anthill and they had no right to keep her out. They told her her family was doing well and did not miss her. She showed them her old headband They shook their heads and said it didn't matter. She told them she used to get up at five to help her mother bring in the firewood. It didn't mean anything now. When they had a goat, she fed it. When they had two hogs, she fed them. She went to sheep camp with her father. They told her to stick it in her ear. (100)

Major's point is that, among tribal peoples, any complicity in leveling or erasing specific tribal distinctions is grounds for tribal/cultural obstracism. For Major's Zuni, to have someone say," |But you have lived among / the anglos / and your ways an not so different from theirs'" (Some Observations 31), is to be reduced to the status of the mudhead - or worse, since the mudheads are at least granted access to the reservation and many, though not all features of community life.

If those who forgo the traditional ways are reduced to quasi-mudhead status, cast to the perimeter of the tribe, and feared and ridiculed by those at the center, Major ascribes a roughly parallel status to members of other tribes, in particular to tribes who five near the Zuni. Considering that Some Observations and Painted Turtle function as companion texts, it is fair to assume that the identity of the "Stranger"/ speaker in the former is homologous to "Baldwin Saiyataca," the narrator in Painted Turtle. "Baldy," as he lets us know his friends call him, identifies his tribal ancestry in the prologue by stating, "Even us Navajos (and I'm part Hopi) never went in for good old American charm" (7). Later, in a chapter devoted to Baldy's self-reflection, he states,

Having a Navajo father in Hopi land wasn't exactly a picnic. Hopis had nothing but a history of trouble with them Navajos. My mom had trouble with my dad. So it goes. (144)

If this ancestral division renders Baldy into a parallel of a mudhead on his own reservation, it no doubt exacerbates his responses to Zuni castigation of all tribal "others," exemplified in Baldy's observation of a Zuni woman:

She gave me only a half-smile - not even that, really. Zunis are like that, especially toward us Navajos. I saw her sizing me up right away. But I didn't let that coldness stop me. (8)

Baldy's use of the phrase us Navajos is of course a tenuous one, given his history and identity, for in all likelihood, among Navajos his use of the same phrase would raise more than a few eyebrows, given his partial Hopi ancestry. (Further, the passage can serve as evidence for the vehemence with which Native Americans might respond to the tribal leveling inherent in the diorama.)

Major's insistence on the outsiderness of both Baldy and the "Stranger," the nature of his speakers' insistent and acknowledged subjectivity, and mudheaded-ness, leads both to resemble that Heideggerian notion of Dasein, a consciousness bound to and aware of its own subjective perceptions of events over which it has no influence. If we can apply Rorty's description of Dasein as that which "knows ... that it is only contingently there where it is, speaking as it does" (109) to Baldy and the Stranger, we now have the means with which to question the nature of their narratives. Simply, all that these voices speak is suspect, by the nature of being radically subjective, as well as by the nature of the correlation to tribal authenticity, to the perspective described in the text itself. Given the terms of what it takes to "know the customs" of Zuni those subjectivities through which our view into the culture is mediated are by no means ideal for the task.

Major's highlighting this renders the very nature of narration suspect, in a way which parallels Brecht's moves in the theater to highlight the theatricality of the performance. Both serve to rupture the aesthetic of art by foregrounding the material nature of its creation; for Brecht, according to Benjamin, this took the form of reducing the illusions inherent in the theatrical set, and by interrupting the progress of the epic as a reminder that what was on stage was just that - on stage, and not in the "world." One of Major's parallel moves is to underscore the subjectivity, and hence the fundamental contingency, of his narrator's work.

This analysis clearly begs a bit of problematization, particularly in the analogy between the two texts at band and Brechtian theater. To do so, allow me to mention that, while we have seen how Major reduces his narrators to Dasein/mudhead/call-them-what-you-will, we have yet to explore what, if anything, he does to render the notion and role of "narrators" similarly suspect. Certainly the analogy between Brecht and Major warrants this move; Brecht, we know from Benjamin engaged the totality of theater in a dialogue, with the purpose of exposing the material sources of the venue. In so doing his eye fell on everything from the physical accoutrements of the theater to stage directions. To create a parallel our analysis to this point has shown how Major makes the actor on his stage, and those viewing him, aware of the limits of perceptions and statements. We have not seen, though, if Major's indictment of textual/cultural commodification modification reaches the scope of Brecht's.

Let us begin this stage of our analysis with an examination of the nature of Major's identity and relationship with his ostensible subjects. As we have seen, Major portrays a Zuni culture very aware of the implications of the ancestry and identity of those operating in and around the community, as well as of those using the culture as the basis for commodities. ("Inkpen," Baldy and Painted Turtle's agent, is the exemplar of those Anglo outsiders profiteering via Zuni cultural goods.(5)) Given the degree to which Major thematizes these issues, it seems within the terms of the works to turn our study of the dialectic of identity and subjectivity in cultural representation back onto Major himself.

Knowing that Major, like the "Stranger," has "lived among the anglos"; knowing too, that, while Major makes claim on partial Native American ancestry, he certainly is not as Zuni as, say, the councilmen expect Painted Turtle to be, and also knowing, from what is on the dust jacket, that Major's knowledge of Zuni comes from having spent time with Zuni people, we can safely make the claim that not only Baldy and the Stranger, but Major, too, as author, are radically subjective mudheads, in the sense that I have been using the term. This leads us to extend the haze of uncertainty that we have for the narrators to the texts themselves. To map these relations would sound something like: Major, himself a mudhead, writes about mudhead Baldy/Stranger writing about Painted Turtle/an unidentified woman, both of whom are ostracized from Zuni. There are three layers/filters of subjectivity in these texts through which readers must navigate, assuming that they, by the end of this process, still have faith that anything like a diorama of Zuni exits to be found.

I turn now to the fact that Major's work resembles Brecht's epic theater in its thematized written-ness. While not dismissing the notions of textual fluidity developed by a number of postmodern theorists, I will rely on a notion of the text as a product or commodity which is traded with, for, and so on, in the economy of a "Culture Industry" as described by Adorno and Horkheimer.

We have seen the nature of Major's identity, and its effects on the work itself. Major asserts his authorial (mudhead) presence in the work in a number of places. If the effect of interruption in Brecht's work was one of reasserting the theater-ness of the performance by thematizing the act of textual composition itself, Major is effecting a similar interruption, a sort of on-line reminder that the text is just that - a text, a product of a certain writer's labor, and not a vehicle for a seamless correspondence between itself and a "real," "outside" world.

Major intersperses these reminders of the texts' written-ness throughout. At times, these reminders may better be described as reminders of the texts' narrativity, as when Baldy states,

In my mind I saw her mother as she washed the Little Turtle. When she finished she placed her in the sandbed. The mother's hands were crusty and strong and warm. (Painted Turtle 9)

Phrases like In my mind I saw have the effect of destabilizing any attempt at assuming commensurability between the text and "real Zuni" people, because they highlight the fact that the text is the product of what may be described as sitting in the same genealogy as daydreams and hallucinations. These reminders of Baldy's condition as narrator are placed frequently in the text, often enough that, when a reader may begin to nod into the veil of commensurability between the text and the "world," a reminder along the lines of "Close your eyes. Try to imagine this" (32) jars the reader awake into the full light of the text's essential textuality. The nature of Baldy's perspective and subjectivity further contributes to this destabilization; Painted Turtle, in short, is being told via a non-qualified narrator who invents most of the story in his head.

The thematized written project and narrativity of the text continue throughout. In a place where Baldy is left stumped as narrator, he simply announces, "Now, at this point we must return to my reliance on imagination" (132). Such gaps serve to authenticate the notions of perspectivalism and subjectivity in narration and authorship presented elsewhere. Baldy is an outsider, and as an outsider is left in a position of writing/consulting the culture from a distanced and ostracized perspective.

But if one of Baldy's role is to deconstruct any claim to objectivity and control over the cultural other, who/what deconstructs Major? Major deconstructs Major, albeit in a less visible way. He does so by more explicitly addressing the actual writtenness of his texts within the text themselves. For example,

One winter her aunt - on her father's side - was selected to go up to the top of Corn Mountain to bring the winter flame back from the burning light there and her sisters and grandmothers and other aunts cleaned the winter stoves and fireplaces and ovens and fasted for four days and the sword swallowers that winter were wonderful as they held forth quite seriously in the plaza. Phew! - what a sentence!(18)

Phew! - what a sentence! seems to evoke a Wizard of Oz-ian reversal by claiming to "pay full attention to the man behind the green curtain," a.k.a. the writer - Clarence Major. It is writers who release sighs of meta-commentary over the immensity of their sentences. When Major as writer makes these little cameos, another layer of textual calcification forms. Now, we have a Baldy who is not only, due to features of his subjectivity, hindered from offering a commensurable representation of Zuni, but who also, we learn late in the text, "met Painted Turtle in the Blackbird Cafe in Cuba during her opening night" (108), and therefore must have invented much more about her life than he has let on and who finally is a figure written by Major, an author just as distanced from Zuni as Baldy, if not more so. Phew! - what a sentence!

Major's underscoring of the written-ness of the texts is further visible in the manner that he uses Zuni and other tribal vocabularies. Both texts are steeped in what seems to be a Native American lexicon and phraseology, so much so that certain pages appear to be bilingual:

... and this Navajo hombre said why did the Navajo need a Bilagaana - must have been Kit Carson's face! or did your ancestors screw that many blue-eyed settlers? and the black gods? What's with the black gods - Bitsiislizhims? And you say we shot down our black savior!

He was no savior, Saiya! (Some Observations 22)

Reading this would be next to impossible, if by "reading" we included a need to understand all of the allusions present. Fortunately, a reader Major has included a "Glossary" to explain these references. This is where things get interesting: While Major provides a glossary, thereby giving his text a feature similar to, say, an anthropology text or a travel guide, the glossary itself is very fragmented and incomplete. None of the non-English terms in the above passage are defined there. Because of this fracture, there is no way to feel "certain" that those words actually in the glossary are defined as indicated. Thus, a reader is left simply without a clue about a good many terms, and left suspicious of those apparently "translated." Major leaves what seems to be Zuni language on the pages, but effectively denies access to it, in effect circumscribing the language from the machinations of cultural commodification.(6)

The effect of all this is one of defetishization of the texts themselves. In economies of cultural commodification, like those within which Brecht operated and Major still does, threats in the form of engaged and committed art are neutralized by the material means in which they are produced, and especially by the nature of their consumptions. Adorno, in an extended comment on Sartre's

"What is Literature?," writes,

A work of art that is committed strips the magic from a work of art that is content to be fetish an idle pastime for those who would like to sleep through the deluge that threatens them, m an apoliticism that is in fact deeply political. (301)

Major strips this magic away, precisely by creating barriers to the types of reading those who sleep enjoy the most - an uncomplicated/non-implicated look at what, for them, is taken as an equivalent of the culture represented in the text. What is "deeply political" in this is the assumption that owning the text which corresponds to and is commensurable with the culture is equivalent to owning the culture itself. Major's work is a critique and disruption of precisely this chain of logic. Only the sleepiest of readers could read these texts without feeling, at some even pre-verbal level, that they are being subjected to a critique of the way they read. We may now have a new understanding of why Major is thought by some critics to be underappreciated: His texts challenge and subvert conventional readings that commodify culture in the manner of the stagnant controllability of the diorama.

I would feel disingenuous, however, were I to conclude without problematizing the claims made in the preceding paragraph. To do so, I need only turn self-reflective, and acknowledge the nature of the economy in which I write and in which I use Major's texts as the raw material for my work. In so doing I see that Major's texts have in effect been appropriated by a type of writing endemic "to the seminar rooms in which they inevitably end" (Adorno 301). This doesn't mean that we should stop what we are doing; rather, it suggests a need to acknowledge the nature of the economies, politics, and interestedness of our work.

Notes

(1.) Foucault comes to mind as a writer who, in "What is an Author?," explores the co-mingling of authorship with authority over that which is written about. While it is trus that Foueault describes authorship as a collective, rather than an individual, function, his point is nonetheless demonstrative of this type of thinking, which is popular in various forms among many of Foucault's oontemporaries. (2.) My notion of re-description is derived from Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, ch. 1, passim. (3.) While Benjamin's analysis of Brecht focuses specifically on epic theater, the section seems equally applicable to poems and novels, as is suggested by his discussion of Rend Maubtanc at the end of the essay. (4.) In a point which offers a fascinating de-stabilization of what Major portrays as a Zuni primacy of cultural and ancestral heritage, he mentions in the interview presented in this issue that "a black man - a huge African - apparently visited the Zunis in the 16th century with a group of Spanish explorers and then stayed on. He must have seemed extremely commanding to the Zuni because he became some kind of god for them - he had dozens of wives, and he appears in a lot of early Zuni legends, stories, and so on" (127). This legend mediates Zuni claims regarding the importance of purity. Although Major doesn't mention any descandants of this man, he does mention multiple wives. (5.) Major thematizes Zuni involvement with the likes of Inkpen also in his description of the seemingly farcical "Olla Maiden Dance." Seeing the dance with Painted Turtle, Baidy states, "This, the Turtle told me in a whisper, was in no way a sacred dance. The Zunis share it all the time with strangers. I had seen it before, without a great deal of interest (142). It is this dance which is characterized by the statement," |We march with pots on head. White sponsor makes money'" (143). (6.) An interesting exploration, though tangential for the present work, would be had by examining Major's use of Zuni and other Native American languages in light of Delauze and Guattari's chapter "What is a Minor literature?" in Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986). Concievably, use of such languages could signify for the minor linguistic option rather than the major. Still, having access to this option may render Major something other than minor. (7.) My reading of Adorno stems from to section "Kafka, Beckett and Contemporary Experimentalism" and "The Politics of Autonomous Art" in the essay "Commitment."

Work Cited

Adorno, Theodor W. "Commitment." Arato and Gobhardt 300-18. Arato, Andrew, and Eike Gebhardt, eds. The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. New York: Continuum, 1987. Benjamin, Walter. "The Author as Producer." Arato and Gobhardt 254-68. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Trans. John Cumming. New York Continuum, 1989. Major, Clarence. Painted Turtle. Woman with Guitar. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1988. ____. Some Observations of a Stranger at Zuni in Latter Part of the Century. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon, 1989. Rorty, Richard. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1989.