In Arnold Krupat’s Ethnocriticism: Ethnography, History, Literature is an interesting perspective on Native American construction of identity. Granted, the chapter I’m looking at is titled, “Native American Autobiography and the Synecdochic Self,” and our novel is not an autobiography; still, Krupat’s analysis of the “nature of the ‘self’” (201) is a good one, and I think useful in evaluating the novel.
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Krupat maintains that the Native American “self would seem to be less attracted to introspection, expansion, or fulfillment than the Western self appears to be […and] relatively uninterested in the ‘I-am-me’ experience” (209). He defines the “synecdochic self” as one who “understand[s oneself] as a self only in relation to the coherent and bounded whole of which [one is] a part” (210). Thus, for the Native American, there is “little or no explicit mention of who-I-am, little or no mention at all of the self as the object of conscious and developed concern” (211). I find this interesting in reference to our novel because so much of it is description of what happens, not necessarily how Charging Elk feels or what he thinks. Krupat notes Carter Revard’s belief that “the notions of cosmos, country, self, and home are inseparable” (210), which is evident in the narration. For example, when we are given access into Charging Elk’s mind, his focus is on memory and dreams—of what happened to him as a child, of how he came to be in France, of his short experience with the Buffalo Bill show. Certainly he is frightened, in a strange country and completely isolated—without any knowledge of people or language—but as we read, particularly in the beginning, the narrator gives only dreams, memory, immediate fears (where to go), and concern about primary needs (what to eat). Charging Elk’s construction of himself is fundamentally based on the memory and the dreams. <>
As ‘Westernized’ as he becomes, which is arguable anyway, even at the very end of the book, Charging Elk retains elements of Krupat’s ‘synecdochic self’. He is “surprised” when a thought about himself comes to him: he realizes that it was just about sixteen years ago that his accident occurred. That Charging Elk is surprised by a thought about himself is not unusual, according to Krupat’s view, insofar as Charging Elk is not given to that type of individual and self-conscious introspection. In fact, thinking solely about himself—more specifically, about himself as disconnected from the whole (his family, his people)—is something Charging Elk must “force” himself to do, as he does when in order to push away his disturbing dream about his family, Charging Elk “forces himself to think of Marie” (Welch 252). Marie has nothing to do with Charging Elk’s memory or dreams—the connections he as synecdochic part has to the whole, and so he is able to use her as a mechanism by which to distance himself from them. Even in this act, however, Charging Elk still does not focus on himself as the object of his thoughts; rather, he focuses on Marie. Furthermore, as Charging Elk waits in prison, with time to think about himself, he does not do so past basic needs. He worries over whether he will reach the spirit world, how he will make himself known to his people—in short, how he will be part of the whole. Thus, Charging Elk, although to a certain extent Westernized, remains more of a “person as a bounded entity invested with specific patterns of social behavior, normative powers, and restraints” as opposed to the individual, “an entity with interiorized conscience, feelings, goals, motivations, and aspirations (Krupat 210).
It is of great interest to me that in light of how little Charging Elk is depicted as engaging in self-conscious introspection, beyond concerns of meeting basic survival, he is consumed by guilt for what he considers selfishness. As he sits in the tent with the young Lakota man, he comments, “I failed him [my father]—and my mother. For a long time I have thought only of myself” (Welch 431). The novel, however, does not in any way support this, so how can this be true? First, Krupat notes the importance of a shared experience and the telling of tales to celebrate the shared experience. As he puts it, “I am granted a vision, but the vision is not just for me, nor is any of it usable or functional until it is spoken, even performed publicly” (Krupat 217). Charging Elk clearly considers himself to have been selfish because of his inability to share experiences and tales of his experiences. He has had dreams / visions, but has not been able to pass them on; furthermore, he has, at times wanted to distance himself from them or ignore them, thereby refusing their use and negating their functionality. And, as his self is synecdochic, this refusal of the whole is actually refusal of his own part, too. He feels, then, a failure to his parents and himself, all part of the whole. Second, Krupat asserts that a Native American “conceives of individual identity only in functional relation to the tribe”; hence, “[one] is what one does to sustain [one’s] community” (Krupat 230). What has Charging Elk done to sustain his community? As far as he is concerned, nothing. He has not contributed, which causes him to consider himself a “failure.”
Charging Elk’s conception of identity is also the reason he does not initially tell his story to Joseph. It would not be a shared experience and therefore something to celebrate; moreover, to Charging Elk, nothing he has done in the intervening years has been for the benefit or sustenance of the community. Only after Joseph describes to Charging Elk what has happened to the people does Charging Elk tell of his dream, and at this point, he is able fully to regain his synecdochic self. He is able to interpret the dream and accept the position of elder to the family in the tent. He also assumes the role of encourager to his people, a prophet of sorts who tells Joseph, “you tell me that we have survived, pitiful and powerless as we are. But it doesn’t have to always be this way. You three young ones fill my heart with your strength. And I see the little one asleep in Sarah’s arms. We will go on because we are strong people, we Lakotas” (435). And as he walks out of the tent, Charging Elk blesses the baby. The stone that Joseph offers to him, Marie and the coming child, his memories, his dreams, the knowledge that his mother remembers him still and his father rode his horse until death—all of these aspects of self: cosmos, country, self, and home that are inseparable are no longer in conflict in Charging Elk’s synecdochic identity.
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