SOURCE: "Real Stories: Memory, Violence, and Enjoyment in Gerald Vizenor's Bearheart," in Literature and Psychology, Vol. XXXXI, No. 4, 1995, pp. 1-16.

In the following essay, Hauss discusses the role of violence and history in Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart.

From the beginning, there is the violence. Critics have remarked on the shocking, often graphic and extended, depictions of physical violence in Vizenor's 1978 novel, Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart. Louis Owens says he had a hard time getting students to read the novel, part of their objection being that it remained true to Vizenor's remark in the preface that it's just a book of "sex and violence"—and, one should add, a book whose violence is rendered in particularly unsettling ways: traumatic images abruptly emergent within the generally comic current of the narrative. By the third page of the novel's opening genealogy of the "Cedar Circus"—the mythical tribe whose...