"Bad Breath": Gerald Vizenor's Lacanian fable

Gerald Vizenor, suggests Louis Owens, is both the most traditional and the least traditional of the Native American authors writing today (Owens, "Ecstatic" 143). An enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa tribe from the White Earth Reservation, Vizenor has distinguished himself as a satirist. Not only has he made use of this traditional tribal teaching technique, he has incorporated a wealth of traditional story types--family stories, priest stories, and stories drawn from anishinaabe myth--into his fictions. Vizenor especially remembers two story types told by his uncle: "stories of magic and faith healing and how things just mysteriously happened, how people appeared and disappeared;" and "stories of resolution of tensions and the play between the colonists--and I would include the government and the Church--and Indians" (Bruchac 302). Perhaps more than any other contemporary American Indian writer, Vizenor makes use of the trickster story. While tricksters manifest themselves in a variety of guises in traditional orature of virtually every American Indian tribe, Vizenor's departure from traditionalism is nowhere more evident than in his definition of the trickster. Rather than defining the trickster in terms of his greedy, lustful, lazy, and amoral character, Vizenor defines the trickster in terms of his function. Recognizing his role in constellating change in rulebound traditional cultures, Vizenor describes the trickster as a "comic holotrope and a sign in a language game," a "semiotic being in discourse" (Vizenor, "Trickster" 187, 189).

In his fictions, Vizenor aims for nothing less than a change in the American image of the Indian as a savage on the verge of extinction, an image, that has dominated American literature since The Last of the Mohicans. It would seem that Vizenor's goal is consonant with the theoretical writings of Jacques Lacan, for what Vizenor is attempting is to free the signifier from its Sausseurian bond to the signified. As Vizenor himself states, Lacan "liberates the signifier; the comic holotrope in trickster narratives. Lacan warns not to `cling to the illusion that the signifier answers to the function of representing the signified, or better, that the signifier has to answer for its existence in the name of any signification whatever'" ("Trickster"189). (1) Constructed through a network of relationships in the process of continual negotiation, according to Lacan, neither language nor subjectivity can ever be fixed.

In his short story "Bad Breath," Vizenor offers his readers, among other things, a Lacanian fable. On one level, he depicts the creation of the subjectivity of Mildred Fairchild, beginning precisely where Lacanian subjectivity always begins--with separation of the child from the mother. In the mirror stage posited by Lacan, which may occur at any time between six and eighteen months, a young child develops a sense of his or her own wholeness. The idea of the self subsumes previous perceptions of an assortment of unrelated body parts and functions, reflecting the wholeness of the subject just as a mirror does (Campbell and Slethaug 593). This new unity, however, is predicated upon a loss--the loss of the original unity with the mother. It is a loss the child will never recuperate, a gap that can never be bridged. In this gap, Lacan sees the origin of all desire as the child's desire to regain this lost unity, which is transferred metonymically from one object to another throughout his or her life. Fulfillment will never be achieved (Slethaug 531).

Although "Bad Breath" begins with the death of Mildred's mother, it is not through her mother's death that Mildred experiences this sense of loss. Her first role in the story is pre-spectral, a veritable mother/child who promises to "serve the survivors" (68). Household chores and caring for the family take priority, but Mildred does study to become a teacher. Fearing another death caused by bad breath, this time a death explicitly associated with sensitivity to words in the person of her chosen professor/poet, Dred, as she is known to her family, decides to head west alone. Vizenor has already made the mirror a key to the resulting change in her life experience: "... she never searched her smile in a mirror until she moved to the reservation," he tells us at the end of the story's second paragraph (68). It is significant that the mirror stage parallels the emergence of language, where Lacan sees a similar split between the signifier and the signified. The gap leaves room for free play and linguistic slippage, and Dred's new role in life is predicated upon just such a slippage. The survivors she will serve are no longer those who have survived her mother's death but "tribal children" (69). This association is not explicit but exists as an absent presence in the text. Vizenor is here consistent with Lacan's definition of the signifier as "being by nature symbol only of absence" ("Seminar" 39). The term survivor is often used to signify Indians in their role as victims of white atrocities, a role assigned to them by white narratives, or "simulations of dominance," as Vizenor calls them in the first essay of Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance (4).