E3W Literature | University of Texas

James H. Cox
Muting White Noise: Native American and European American Novel Traditions
University of Oklahoma Press, 2006
338 pages
ISBN: 0806136790
$29.95

Reviewed by Coleman Hutchison

In one of his first appearances, Almost Browne, Gerald Vizenor’s recalcitrant Native trickster character, finds great success selling blank books—almost blank books:
Our books were blank except on one page there was an original tribal pictomyth painted by me in green ink, a different pictomyth on a different page in every blank book. Yes, pictomyths, stories that are imagined about a picture, about memories. So, even our blank books had a story. I think those college students were tired of books filled with words behind double doors that never pictured anything. Our blank books said everything, whatever you could imagine in a picture.
For James H. Cox, the Native American novel is itself something of a blank book, an under-studied and little understood tradition that, read in the right light, “[says] everything” about the purported conquest of Native America by colonial Europeans. Casual or indifferent readers may miss the stories told on the pages of these “blank books,” but critical readers find on those pages a liberating story of cultural resistance.

Muting White Noise: Native American and European American Novel Traditions, Cox’s learned and sinewy new book, limns a Native American novel tradition that is deeply engaged with, and resistant to, the dominant European American storytelling traditions. Cox’s ambitious study considers the specific narrative strategies that Native novelists use to “critique and revise” European American narratives about Native America.

At the heart of this study is a keen understanding of the power of narrative to both liberate and dominate human actors. Cox contends that “Americans of European descent live within particular narratives, that they often act according to plots constructed in their collective pasts, and that any intervention in these narratives has the potential to remake a colonial world that relies on these storytelling traditions to justify the continued domination of Native people and their communities.” Thus, in Cox’s reading, Native revisions of both specific colonial genres (e.g., discovery and emigration narratives) and specific European American texts (e.g., Moby-Dick) become “act[s] of liberation from the imaginative foundations of colonialism.”

As Muting White Noise ably demonstrates, one such foundation is the absent or vanishing Indian. Against images of the tragic Indian, doomed to extinction, the Native novelists Cox studies force readers to acknowledge a persistent Native presence. Such a presence “disables” a European American storytelling tradition that would make the Indian disappear so that European Americans “will never have to confront either the colonized population or the violence of their own colonial history.” The stakes of such revision are, of course, high. As Cox avers, novels that flaunt a Native presence become “functional mythologies that generate life, or, more specifically, generate liberation, the opposite of conquest and domination.”

The burden of Cox’s project lies in its dual mandate: to define a Native American novel tradition and to show its engagement with a more familiar, if more diffuse, European American novel tradition. On this account, Cox acquits himself ably. He keeps the Native novels in close conversation with one another, doing justice to both the diversity and the complexity of their respective narrative strategies. In turn, his readings of European American novels reveal a capacious knowledge of both canonical and non-canonical texts. Throughout, Cox defines his terms with great precision, and writes with a refreshing cogency and clarity. Importantly, the book concludes with a valuable “Selected Bibliography of Novels by Indigenous Authors in the United States and Canada,” a document that helps to codify the novel tradition announced by Cox’s study.

Methodologically, Cox relies heavily on Native sources for the book’s theoretical and critical vocabularies. He does so both “out of respect for Native voices and in an effort to avoid perpetuating, implicitly or explicitly, an academic version of colonialism: the presumption that non-Natives know more about or what is most important to Native people.” Thus, though there are passing references to Edward Said, Albert Memmi, and Jacques Derrida, the theory at work in Muting White Noise is resolutely Native. In this, Cox’s methodology owes a great debt to the Native critics Craig Womack (Muscogee Creek and Cherokee) and Robert Warrior (Osage), both of whom have called for a Native intellectual history written in and on its own terms.

But Muting White Noise goes further than that. Cox holds that contemporary novels by Native authors are themselves forms of literary and social criticism, since they “efface the boundaries between story and literary criticism, as well as between story and those discourses categorized as history, anthropology, and popular culture.” Thus, what one finds in Cox’s study is a truly novel approach to theory, one in which the primary text provides ample commentary on itself. While this methodology risks critical insularity—at times, one wants Cox to locate Native American novel traditions in a broader geographical or historical context—it also elegantly manages the problem of representation at the heart of any “post-colonial” criticism. Cox refuses to speak for Native novelists; in Muting White Noise, Thomas King, Gerald Vizenor, and Sherman Alexie speak resoundingly for themselves.

Indeed, Muting White Noise makes its signal contribution through three incisive and commanding chapters on King, Vizenor, and Alexie, respectively. In wide-ranging and aggressive readings, Cox demonstrates how these three novelists revise “Eurowestern stories” about the “conquest” of Native America. Cox thereby shows that said conquest was itself a fiction, something that “always existed only in the invaders’ imaginations.”

First, Cox traces King’s revision of Judeo-Christian sacred stories, canonical European American literary texts, and any number of national mythologies. Next, Cox turns to Vizenor—the prolific critic, novelist, and activist who edits the American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series, of which Cox’s book forms a part—and his revisions of the discovery and migration narratives that render Native America a savage, “undiscovered country,” prime for colonization. Cox argues persuasively that in Vizenor’s writing imagination becomes a “sovereign space—beyond the domination of texts—where both Natives and non-Natives can reimagine and therefore begin to remake, the colonial world.”

Cox’s best chapter, “Muting White Noise: The Popular Culture Invasion in Sherman Alexie’s Fiction,” studies the ways in which popular culture “literally occupies and dominates Alexie’s fictional Spokane Reservation and the imaginations of his characters.” For Cox, Alexie’s fiction offers a damning critique of the “oppressive noise of white mass-produced culture, the loud demand to abandon all that is Indian and conform to the dictates of the invader’s cultural belief system and storytelling traditions or be destroyed.” This chapter offers a superb introduction to Alexie, encouraging the reader to look anew at his potentially bewildering fiction. It also offers a remarkable account of resistant reading practices, particularly through Cox’s deft discussion of television—one significant source of “white noise.”

It is a testament to the strength of Cox’s single-author analyses that readers may find themselves less patient with the book’s introductory and concluding chapters. Muting White Noise’s first chapter surveys several of the “at least nineteen novels” published in English by Native authors before 1968: John Rollin Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta (1854), S. Alice Callahan’s Wynema (1891), Mourning Dove’s Cogewea (1927), and D’Arcy McNickle’s The Surrounded (1936). Rather than offer a Watt-ian rise of the Native novel, Cox explores the ways these novels “incorporate texts by non-Native authors … in order to explore what those texts actually do to Indians.” Here Cox draws attention to the critical reading practices that Native characters utilize when they engage “dangerous and even deadly” non-Native texts (e.g., the Bible, William Shakespeare, Alexander Pope, the early-twentieth-century popular novel The Brand). This brisk chapter proves adept, if overly ambitious in scope.

Indeed, if Muting White Noise has a weakness, it lies in its ambition. The book’s final chapter, “Unmaking the Conquest: Red Readings of the European American Novel Tradition,” tries to do too much. In the opening pages of the chapter, Cox identifies two imperatives in the early European American novel: 1) an annihilation imperative, “an apparently irresistible drive of biological, cultural, or divine origins—to kill Indians”; and 2) a domestication imperative, “an apparently irresistible absorption of Native people into the non-Native world.” Cox sees these imperatives played out along lines of gender, with women writers embracing the domestication imperative and men the annihilation imperative. This is a hugely provocative and exciting formulation, one that demands a book-length study. Unfortunately, Cox can only give it passing consideration, since the primary goal of the chapter is to show the ways a European novel tradition “prepare[s] the way for the advance of European American empire by imagining a landscape clear of Native Americans.”

Cox offers pithy readings of a series of early European American novelists. Despite the diversity of their thought—the apposition of Lydia Maria Child, an ardent abolitionist, and William Gilmore Simms, an equally ardent pro-slavery advocate, is particularly jarring—Cox concludes that these novelists show “no interest in challenging the cultural expectation that their stories should end in Native absence.” This is in no way a self-evident conclusion, particularly in the case of Child, whose advocacy on behalf of Indian rights is well-documented, and some critics might take exception to Cox’s reading. Yet one also suspects that Cox could convince many critics if only he had sufficient space to develop this interpretation.

This final chapter is anchored by a stunning reading of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), a text that King, Louise Erdrich, Louis Owens, and N. Scott Momaday have all revised in their fiction. Cox reads the novel as “a narrative of conquest that plots the absence of Native Americans and all extra-Europeans.” This significant and quite original reading of Melville’s wonderful mess of a novel demands a lengthy exposition—something that one cannot possibly accomplish in the twelve pages Cox budgets for his reading. The challenging claims broached here leave the reader wanting more, a desire that testifies to the provocative nature of Cox’s claims and his compelling style of argumentation. Cox is on to something in this final chapter; one sincerely hopes that he will return to these issues and texts in a future study of European American representations of Native absence.

As all of this suggests, there is nothing “academic” about James H. Cox’s project. He believes earnestly that “stories and storytelling have real-world, or extratextual, consequences.” Muting White Noise keeps those consequences at all times in the foreground. In so doing, Cox has written an important and at times quite moving account of the potentially liberating power of new and alternative narrative traditions, of the ways that critical reading and revision can in fact remake the world.