Naming Reality in Native American and Eastern European Literatures

Timothy Laskowski University of Montana This morning the snow, The soft distances Beyond the trees In which nothing appeared -- Nothing appeared -- The several silences, Imposed one upon another, Were unintelligible. I was therefore ill at ease When the crows came down Whirling down and calling Into the yard below And stood in a mindless manner On the gray luminous crust, Altogether defined, composed, In the bright enmity of my regard, In the hard nature of crows. N. Scott Momaday "Crows in a Winter Composition"(1) And so there's no longer any question of saying, Fine, but what does the text have to do with reality? The entire question loses its meaning, because there is no reality. Reality disintegrates into the means of expression. Even the idea of truth, or untruth, disappears. All means of depicting reality are equally valid. The means themselves become the subject of study. But there's the basic and utterly simple question: What does that have to do with the cow over there in the meadow? There is no cow -- only the word "cow," which enters into combinations with other words. But its relation to that animal with the horns and the hoofs, that we don't know. Czeslaw Milosz from Conversations with Czeslaw Milosz(2) Crows and cows disturb the writings of Momaday and Milosz. And though post-structuralists appear comfortable with the impossibility of fixing meaning or with naming reality, the stubborn presences of irreducible crows and cows continue to haunt. That these two -- Momaday, a Kiowa Indian, and Milosz, a Polish-Lithuanian exile in America -- express similar concerns about "reality" should not be surprising. Indeed, significant parallels can be found between the recent literatures of American Indians and of Eastern Europeans: primarily, a common theme of searching for re-integration of alienated selves while enduring absurdist governments who deconstruct their past and reconstruct their present "reality." For hundreds of years, both Native Americans and Eastern Europeans have lived with the threat of extinction. Foreign occupiers -- whether they be Russian, German, or "American"; communist, fascist or capitalistic individualists -- have been deconstructing their nations and cultural identities (though in recent years the Russian satellites and republics have broken free, the brevity of past experiments in autonomy remind them that Russian imperialism may not remain dormant for long). While under centuries-old threats, the literatures of these peoples have helped to keep their societies "constructed," that is, protected from the occupying cultures's misperceptions, distortions, reductions, and outright falsehoods. As noted by Russian history scholar Geoffrey A. Hosking, Eastern European writers have, during foreign occupation and enforced assimilation, "played a key role in crystallizing the sense of nationhood by establishing a language, identifying and affirming national myths" (3). Cherokee-Chickasaw Geary Hobson makes the same point for Native Americans when he states that tribes preserve "their histories and ways of life through intricate time-proven processes of story-telling" ("Introduction" 2). In the United States today, most writers and critics (as members of the dominant culture) never directly experience censorship, let alone imprisonment, torture, exile, and the threat of cultural annihilation. Post-structuralist theorists abound, fooling themselves that we have the luxury of banning historical, political, and social realities from discussions of literature. Post-structuralists enable themselves to posit such airy abstractions as: language precedes reality; there cannot be a signified without a signifier; thought is non-existent without words. There are no absolutes in the post-structuralist world and no objective entities. Because all meanings are declared arbitrary, communities yield their power to formulate shared meanings. …