Watona, Oklahoma is a psychological as well as literal border
town, a kind of confused purgatory that exists somewhere
between the white world and the Indian world, not fully
part of either. The jargon term for this is 'cultural polyvalency',
though, here, it doesn't really have positive connotations
or repercussions. Grace Blanket is an oil-wealthy Indian,
made fantastically rich by the discovery that turns her
allotment of land from Barren into Baron Land. The
novel depicts her murder early on. Hogan immediately establishes
the sense of the Hill Indians—people who moved out
of the mixed blood towns and back into the bluffs above
the town; they are people of the Earth, who sleep outdoors.
This
Web site provides excellent pictures of the area, and
dwelling upon those pictures...reflecting vividly...allows
us to put an ear to the cosmos and listen for the music
of meaning. Belle Graycloud, a character through whose point
of view we witness much of the story, is one such, but "The
rest of her family believed, in varying degrees, that they
were modern, so they remained inside the oven-hot walls
of the house." Here's a point that is hammered at again
and again: What's so 'modern' about deliberately courting
discomfort? This is a Caucasian idea, a North American/European
custom, but it makes no particular sense to the Hill Indians.
Why? Because the Indians see themselves as one with—as
a part of—nature, while the whites see themselves
as being 'in' nature, just as you might be in a theater,
or in a car:
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Given
half a chance, the vines and leaves would have crept up
the beds and overgrown the sleeping bodies of people.
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It's as if the vegetation is sentiently trying to reclaim those
who keep the traditional tribal ways, as opposed to Watona,
which is "a magnet of evil".
Grace's murder is described in pretty graphic, lurid detail.
She's an important character for many reasons, even though she's
killed at the start of the narrative. Hogan uses her as a symbol
of what can happen when contrasting ways of life endeavor to
blend together smoothly. The implication is that, ultimately,
any such attempts will fail. Grace's mother, Lila, is a river
prophet ("A river never lied. Unlike humans, it had no
need to distort the truth..."). She sends Grace to live
among the whites in Watona because
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Some
of our children have to learn about the white world if
we are going to ward off our downfall...We've got too
far away from the Americans to know how their laws are
cutting into our life.
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But Grace isn't interested in this, nor is she interested in
becoming an American. In fact, all she ever really cares about—even
before oil is discovered on the land she owns—is money
and the high life. Completely hedonistic and Epicurean, she
spends lavishly, takes many boyfriends (even the Hill Indians
believe the lie that her white killers spread—that her
death was due to a lover's quarrel), and generally shows great
indifference to anything that can't personally benefit her.
In another tell-tale piece of symbolism, she's absolutely enthralled,
from childhood, with the songs she hears white women in town
singing and playing on the piano. When she acquires her vast
sums, she buys the grandest grand piano available, only to find
it too hard to play. She abandons it outdoors, where it becomes
covered with moss. The piano = the ways of white civilization,
clearly—at least, as far as the good it may do Grace and
her people. Her effort to live life on the fence is rewarded
with murder. Again, a symbol: the blending is hopeless. (At
the story's conclusion, after a seemingly endless series of
brutal killings, frameups, and kangaroo court trials, the rest
of the Watona Indians realize this and return to the hills.)
Let's be clear: in this work, we have a situation in which white
men are marrying Indian women so that they can kill them and
take their land or cash in on the insurance policies, or similar
deplorable activities, and this has become the norm,
a way of life. The spiral of evil that the oil man Hale, the
sheriff Gold, and their thugs perpetuate, ad nauseam, is attributable
to just one thing—greed. No other explanation is offered,
nor does any other seem possible. But there has to be something
else motivating the motivation, if you will; otherwise, we're
just throwing our hands up and saying "Just chalk it up
to evil." It's evil, yes, but it stems from some root which
I think may be explained by referring to some of the sources
I mentioned at the beginning.
Pedagogy of the Oppressed discusses what Freire calls
'cultural invasion'. Invaders clash with other groups and try
to impose their own worldview upon those whose cultures they
invade; finding the new people to be strange and different,
they try to impose their 'better' systems of culture and ways
of seeing the world upon them. That this is true in the case
of Indians and whites in North America goes without saying;
and, in Mean Spirit, the gaps of misunderstanding that
lead to such an "inferior/superior" relationship are
brilliantly demonstrated in those sequences that deal with bats.
The white oil people—indeed, Americans, as a whole—think
of bats as being, essentially, rats with wings—disgusting,
repulsive, creatures of fear and evil. In reading the text,
I kept feeling that these creatures are something much more
meaningful to the Osage people, but I couldn't quite put my
finger on it. Later, I found an academic paper by Donelle Dreese
("The
Terrestrial and Aquatic Intelligence of Linda Hogan"),
that discusses this very issue. Without going into the specifics
or the theory on which its writer elaborates, the conclusion
is that, for Hogan, "The bats, therefore, are guides to
a more spiritual existence, as opposed to being creatures from
a horrifying darkness." I ask: Are two groups of people
who see, virtually, the entire universe as differently as they
see, say, the bats in this example, capable of harmonious relationship?
My answer—and, I believe, Hogan's—is that it's tremendously
hard, if not impossible.
This concept of the group that (mistakenly) believes its own
standards, traditions, and views to be superior is even more
forcefully brought to the fore in the school of post-colonial
criticism that was introduced to the world by Edward Said. In
her primer
on Said, Valerie Kennedy wrote:
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Although
Said does not explicitly define imperialism and colonialism
in Orientalism, it is clear that he uses the first to
mean the domination of a distant territory by a Western
metropolitan center, which implies varying degrees of
economic, political, and military control, as well as
cultural dominance.
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Mean Spirit lays bare a textbook illustration of this
attitude (the conspiracy to kill Osage Indians is revealed to
stretch back not only to Washington,
but to Europe!)
A lot of Said's work, in both Orientalism and Imperialism and
Culture, can cast a good deal of light on the goings on in Hogan's
novel, and is, therefore, a great accompanying text.
Lastly, I mentioned new historicism, the type of literary criticism
that advocates reading a work of history alongside a fictional
work and not giving either one primacy, but holding each somewhat
acocuntable to the other. (For example: We may take a work of
history written in 1995, about the subect of drama in the Elizabethan
Age, and read it concurrently with a play by Shakespeare, cross-checking
and comparing.) In our case, there's no shortage of historical
works on the topic at hand, but I suggest that, to start, all
a reader need consult is the court case on which I touched,
at the very outset, and keep it in mind as he/she reads the
novel. It's hard to imagine that anything can make Hogan's tale
more shocking and repulsive—and, ultimately, joyous-in-realization—but
the records of this case help ground one's understanding even
more.
Mean Spirit is absolutely vital. I haven't even begun
to scratch the surface of the richnesses it contains, instead
electing to simply, perhaps, show how one of its most obvious
points may be related to some recent trends in literary studies
and cultural observation, but it can be explored for many other
things, as well. Hogan's sense of nature and its bounty, and
human communion with it, is not something many other writers
of ficiton approach. Her sensitivity to words and language and
how they reveal, rather than tell, is perfectly suited
to her subject matter, too. I could go on, but maybe it's just
better to go right to the source.
