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Chapter Two

Content and Form: Juxtaposition and the Second-Person Narrative

We have to know our stories.

We have to tell our stories.

We have to retell our stories in our own way.

We have to know stories we don’t know.

We have to know stories they make about us.

We have to know their stories.

(Kimberly Blaeser, qtd. in Glancy WP 63)

In Stone Heart, Glancy attempts to fashion a novel that gets into the voice and experience of Sacajawea. Without duplicating the common narrative structure and arrangement of the novel, Glancy uses juxtaposition in the printed layout and the second-person narrative in the imagined accounts of Sacajawea. The former appeals to the eye while the latter appeals to the ear. The former enhances the difficulty of reading the novel while the latter has the power to engage the reader. Nevertheless, paradoxically, both enhance the active participation from the reader.

In this chapter, I will first attempt to demonstrate that content and form are inseparable by drawing on the works of the contemporary theorists M. M. Bakhtin and Stuart Hall. Based on such a notion, I would like to suggest that Glancy’s use of juxtaposition and the second-person narrative mirror her thematic concerns.

Since Glancy juxtaposes the “historical” journals of Lewis and Clark against the imagined accounts of Sacajawea, I will draw on Kimberly Blaeser’s notion that

“history forms native writing” to examine Glancy’s intention of composing a

juxtaposition of the “historical” and the “fictional.” Such juxtaposition leads to the

erasure of boundaries and evokes a “dialogue” between the two texts. Therefore, I will

employ Bakhtinian notion of the “dialogic” to examine the dialogic nature within

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Stone Heart, along with textual analysis of the “dialogic.” Then, given that the juxtaposition reveals two epistemological frameworks on the same page, I will draw on James Ruppert’s idea of “mediation in native American writing” to explore the condition of walking in the middle ground of two cultures. Moreover, Glancy’s idea of “margin writing” will be instrumental to my approach to the novel.

Later on I will focus on the second-person narrative, which I refer to as the

“Sacajawea Imaginary.” I will draw on DelConte’s essay “Why You Can’t Speak:

Second Person Narration, Voice and a New Model for Understanding Narrative” to examine the definition of the “second-person narrative.” With regard to its use in Stone Heart, I incorporate “the reader” based on DelConte’s triad of narrator, narratee, and protagonist, and then I propose another model of the triad in an attempt to explore the significance of the second-person narrative in Stone Heart. I seek to extract rhetorical and thematic effects of the second-person narrative in Stone Heart.

I. Juxtaposition in Stone Heart

The framework of the Stone Heart is engaging but challenging as the reader

will observe that Sacajawea’s thoughts—the imagined diaries of Sacajawea—occupy

the left half of each page whereas the entries from the historical journals of Lewis and

Clark appear on the right. Such printing layout of paragraphs frames the reader in the

binary of Sacajawea’s voice and the explorers’. As a result, the reader experiences the

same events in two different voices. Margaret Flanagan suggests, since Stone Heart is

told through the heart of a woman and through the spirit of a Native American, the

Lewis and Clark expedition takes on an entirely new contour. She writes, “Lewis and

Clark see with their eyes and record their observations diligently whereas Sacajawea

is blessed with an inner vision that puts an earthy and vibrant spin on each individual

experience and encounter” (987). Here, the tension between the explorers’ written

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journals and the intuitive reactions of Sacajawea is revealed with a view to interrogating the notion of historical objectivity.

History, Glancy comments, can be perceived as “the writing of one’s own story into the fabric of written text,” or “maybe even the rewriting of one’s own story into the rewritten text” (WT 115). Glancy thinks of history in terms of “chewing the language” (WT 115); in Stone Heart, “taking the journals and opening the erasures”

(WT 122) is her way of coping with the hegemonic discourse imposed and inflicted on the Native people.

Such a study begins with a close reading of the text and consideration of its unique configuration. The complicated structure of Stone Heart may initially baffles the reader for the central portions are composed of the second-person narrative and the dated excerpts. According to Kirkus Reviews, some readers may in the beginning resist Glancy's strategies, since she has once again, as in The Mask Maker (2002),

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adopted a distracting layout that has Sacajawea's present-tense voice broken constantly by framed inserts from Lewis and Clark's journals. Faced with such a challenge, while reading the novel, the reader is encouraged to look not only at the content of the text, but at the verbal texture as well.

Bakhtin contends that “the study of verbal art can and must overcome the divorce between an abstract ‘formal’ approach and an equally abstract ‘ideological’

approach” (259). He continues to explain that “Form and content in discourse are one,

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The novel alternates between problematic interludes at school and scene with the

protagonist Edith Lewis, a Native American woman at home in Pawnee with her

erstwhile boyfriend Bix and her two sons, with virtually every aspect of each scene

processed according to Lewis’ ability to transform the interaction into an appropriate

mask. According to Debbie Bogenschutz, off to the side of nearly half of the page,

Glancy quotes poetry and the Bible or offers Edith’s internal dialogue and

reminiscence. Given the page layout, the reader is never sure when to read these

passages, and it appears that each reader will experience quite differently. However,

Bogenschutz claims, the technique may annoy some reader, but far from being

disruptive, it is truly dynamic, revealing inner action simultaneously with outer action.

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once we understand that verbal discourse is a social phenomenon” that is “social throughout its entire range and in each and every aspects of its factors, from the sound image to the furthest reaches of abstract meaning” (emphasis added, 259). Bakhtin reminds us that when studying a text, we should not separate “form” from “content”

since they are interrelated and interwoven to formulate a discourse.

Likewise, Glancy emphasizes the importance of content and form as a writer. In Claiming Breath (1992), she writes that writing should involve externalizing the thought process, finding form and content, using language for a creative, expressive purposes. In this way, there will be “the revelation of words […] the imaginative impact of combined images [and] of seeing the familiar things in a new way” (CB 53).

In “Ethnic Arts: The Cultural Bridge,” Glancy further contends “Art must connect. &

we must tell our story with the craft form & content” (CB 61). “Form” appeals to the eye, while “content” appeals to the mind. However, when skillfully maneuvered, form will begin to exercise its influence on how the reader perceives the content in a text.

In “The Spectacle of the ‘Other,’” Stuart Hall writes about one of the strategies for contesting a radicalized regime of representation is the attempt to “[locate] itself within the complexities and ambivalences of representation itself and tries to contest it from within. It is more concerned with the form of racial representation than with introducing new content” (Hall 274). Here, Hall explicitly proposes that the counter-strategy of representation is to contest from within by introducing new form rather than content. By doing so, he attempts to make the radicalized regime of representation to work against itself.

As mentioned above, the form of Stone Heart is intriguing, especially the

Bakhtinian juxtaposition of “two texts of enunciation,” which I believe, will

contribute to the thematic concerns of the novel. I argue that by means of the binary

juxtaposition of documented and imagined texts, Glancy attempts to disclose those

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historical contexts surrounding the Expedition of Lewis and Clark.

2.1.1 History Forms Native Writing

In this section, I would like to examine the significance of using juxtaposition in the novel. Blaeser’s notion that “History forms native writing” is critical in my discussion. I maintain that the use of juxtaposition will provide the marginal with a space to voice an alternative history. Glancy’s way of juxtaposition reveals that her concern is not to repossess the history, but to give a voice to those who are subjugated in the history.

Blaeser in her essay “The New ‘Frontier’ of Native American Literature:

Dis-Arming History with Tribal Humor” writes about the way that “history forms native writing”; that is, how the “consciousness of historical continuum is sounded in the voice of native writers and traced in the form and methods of their literary expression” (37). She discusses how Native American writers reappropriate their story, regaining possession of the stories of their land and their peoples. Particularly, she focuses her discussion on Carter Revard, Gerald Vizenor, and Gordon Henry, who uses humor to “force a reconsideration of the processes and powers of historical reckoning” and thus “liberate the reader from preconceived notions” and incite them to “an imaginative reevaluation of history” (39). According to her, the very literary style of these native “writes itself against the events of history and the forms of history’s recounting to contest their dominance and to claim and enact liberation and healing from the past tyranny of history” (49).

In her opinion, Revard, Vizenor, and Henry are keenly aware of the “the

contested versions of history” (38)--the conflicting nature of historical versions, and

they undertake “to unmask and disarm history, to expose the hidden agendas of

historiography, and thereby, remove it from the grasp of political panderers and return

it to the realm of the story” (39). Blaeser claims that these writers flesh out the

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frontier in all immense complexities:

They shift and reshift their story’s perspectives, turn the tables of historical events, unmasks stereotypes and racial poses, challenge the status of history’s heroes and emerge somewhere in a new frontier of Indian literature, somewhere between fact and fiction, somewhere between the probable and the possible, in some border area of narrative which seems more true than previous accounts of history. (39)

It is by shifting and re-shifting their story’s perspectives that the reader is liberated from preconceived notions and incited to an imaginative reevaluation of history. It should be noticed, as Blaeser states, that the intention of these writers are neither to re-possess history nor to replace one historical account with another; rather, their intentions are to “incite the reader to an imaginative reevaluation of both the accounts and the processes of history” (42).

I attempt to employ Blaeser’s the conception that “history forms native writing”

to discuss Glancy’s use of juxtaposition in Stone Heart. I would like to perceive Lewis and Clark’s journals as “enshrined accounts of history.” Glancy plays with the possibilities of diverse accounts of history, and the novel writes itself against the past accounting of those events recorded in the journals. She reforms the explorers’

historical documents into personal story of Sacajawea. In this way, Glancy liberates the reader from alleged facts of history and allow them to go “on a journey to the ani-yun-wiyu.”

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According to Blaeser, Vizenor, in accounts of history, emphasizes the presence of shadow and the engagement of the reader in settling the historical story in motion;

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I take the phrase “the journey to the ani-yun-wiyu” from Glancy’s essay named

“Fragments\ Shards” in Claiming Breath (1992). Glancy writes that she picked her

Indian heritage & began a journey toward ani-yun-wiyu, or translated from the

Cherokee, “real people.”

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he rejects “the static, the formal, and the monologic” methods in historical accounts, and invokes the voices and traces uncovering the story in history (Gerald: 82).

Blaeser suggests that Vizenor’s objections to conventional accounts of history center on three major issues:

the deliberate or inadvertent slanting of the accounts as a result of political, religious, or cultural agendas; the limited vision of conventional history reflect both in its failure to admit certain kinds of evidence or ways of knowing and in its linear, monologic form of presentation; and the various ways in which history becomes a tool of containment and domination. (Gerald: 83)

She believes that the most compelling and rewarding literary representations of history by Native American writers are those who “work to unmask and disarm history, to expose the hidden agendas of historiography and thereby remove it from the grasp of the political and return it to the realm in the story” (Gerald: 85).

While discussing Vizenor’s method of exposing the hidden agendas in the historical accounts, Blaeser argues Vizenor’s method combines a narrative structure that can be termed “documentary collage,” in which he brings imagination into the telling of history. Such a narrative method allows him, Blaeser suggests, to “imbue the facts with suggestion, implication, and possibility—with the shadows of history—thus invoking a fuller truth” (Gerald: 86).

In Stone Heart, Glancy also employs a narrative structure which brings imagination into history and attempts to expose the cultural bias of historical accounts.

By juxtaposing the “Sacajawea Imaginary” with what is regarded “official” history

written by Lewis and Clark, Glancy unmasks the bias of historical accounts. Glancy

carefully selects some of historical manuscripts and juxtaposed against her rewriting

and thereby creates her multilayered manuscript in order to bring the texts into

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dialogue with one another and ultimately challenge the authority of official accounts.

By adding the unrecognized or undervalued native perspectives to the “official”

accounts, Glancy exposes the “shadow silences of history.” Blaeser contends that the survival “depends on recognition of the lie of history and the truth of imagination”

(Gerald: 89). Glancy’s imaginative style of refashioning the Sacajawea legend manifests her refusal to accept the invented historical accounts and reveals her attempt to situate the tale in a tribal context. By juxtaposing “two texts of enunciation” the underprivileged Sacajawea is provided with a chance to “say” back to the explorers.

The reader is therefore offered a chance to reconsider the explorers’ representation of Sacajawea, Native people, and the land. By incorporating “the shadows of history,”

Glancy demonstrates that the “historical accounts” are possibility and probability, not actuality.

In The Heirs of Columbus, Vizenor embellishes history’s staid accounts of Columbus with the wild irreverence. His goal, however, is not to replace one historical account of Columbus with another, not to “repossess” history, but to place the realm of history beyond the reach of what he calls the Western gaze (Blaeser Gerald: 96). Similarly, Glancy in Stone Heart does not attempt to repossess history, to replace the previous historical accounts with her retelling. Nevertheless, Glancy concerns herself in incorporating what is left out of historical accounts, “the shadows of history” and give a voice to those who are unrecognized underprivileged, excluded from history.

2.1.2 Dialogic Nature

This section will incorporate Bakhtinian theory of “dialogic” to explore the

juxtaposition. I contend that in Stone Heart, the dialogic nature can be revealed in the

juxtaposition of “two texts of enunciation.” Thus, the stereotypes or the preconceived

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notions imposed by the dominant groups can be revealed, negotiated, and challenged.

Bakhtin contends that meaning is established through dialogue:

As a living, socio-ideological concrete thing, as heteroglot opinion, language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and the other. The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes ‘one’s own’ only when the speaker populates it with his own meaning, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral or impersonal language, […], but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that must take the word and make it one’s own. (emphasis added, 293-4)

It is the excerpts from Lewis and Clark’s diaries that Glancy brings the reader an

“imaginative reevaluation of history.” Glancy imagines Sacajawea observing Lewis and Clark as they scribble in their journals, drawing things and naming the animals and rivers, and she imagines Sacajawea wondering how they can give names to things that they don't even know.

Bakhtin suggests that, “the linguistic significance of a given utterance is understood against the background of other concrete utterances on the same theme, a background made up of contradictory opinions, points of view or value judgments”

(281). In the novel, Sacajawea’s thoughts are in the foreground, while the framed

excerpts from Lewis and Clark journals serve as a background. Lewis and Clark’s

journal entries make the novel difficult to read since one has to decide where to stop

reading Sacajawea’s narration and move on to that of Lewis and Clark’s. However,

the juxtaposed excerpts do provide the reader with the contextual background of

knowledge. As a result, the two texts of enunciation “mutually supplement each other,

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contradict each other and are interrelated dialogically” (Bakhtin 292).

In Stone Heart, the dialogic nature can be revealed in the contradictory and challenging binary accounts which concern the stereotypes of Indians as thieves, villains, and savages. Glancy “takes the jouranls and opens the erasure” (WT 122), probing the probable and possible interpretation opposed to the journals, in an attmept to challenge the validity of the explorers’ accounts and liberate the reader from preconceived notions of the Indians and incite them to an imaginaive figuration of those accounts. The preconceived stereotypes is revealed, negotiated, and even negated in the novel. In the following I will discuss those accounts and Glancy’s imagination of the texts.

On October 8

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Tuesday 1805, Clark writes “[…] had everything opened, and two Sentinels put over them to keep off the Indians who are inclined to theave having Stole Several small articles those people appeared disposed to give us every assistance in their power during our distress” (SH 80). Here, Clark implies that though Indians appear friendly and likable to give them assistance, they are inclined to steal and should be kept on guard. Juxtaposed against Clark’s journal, the Sacajawea Imaginary reads “You see the Indians take Lewis’ tomahawk. With sign language you tell them not to steal” (SH 80). These lines told through the eyes of Sacajawea supplement what Lewis writes, which might be likely to lead to the direction which Glancy does not intend to. However, the reader also reads lines which contradict the framed excerpts and opens up the erasure from within.

Juts three pages after the event of Indians taking Lewis’ tomahawk, ironically, Lewis and Clark are caught doing the same thing—taking the Indian’s wood without their consent: “On the shore is a parcel of split timber left while the Indians are out hunting Antelope in the Plains. Here you see Lewis and Clark take the Indians’ wood.

For the first time they take the property of the Indians without their consent” (SH 83).

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Here, the narrator exposes Sacajawea witnessing explorers’ stealing Indians’ wood when the latter are out hunting, yet intriguingly, without using the terms “stealing.”

Rather, Glancy uses the word “take” but calls the reader’s attention to the fact that Lewis and Clark take without the consent of the Indians.

Later, the narrator depicted Lewis and Clark trying to camp away from the natives who stay constantly with them, for the Indians are thought to usually to steal their goods. Glancy writes that “Before the Great Falls, [Lewis and Clark] wanted to see the Indians. Well, now they are here” (SH 92). It’s ironic if we take the following words by Vizenor into consideration. Vizenor in Manifest Manners (1999) writes that

“Lewis and Clark reported in their journals that they wanted to be seen by tribal people on their expedition […] and they were certain that their mission would have been threatened not by the presence of the other, but by the absence of the tribes” (1).

The reader will understand the irony implicated in the lines that the explorers are eager to see the Indians when they set out on their expedition, but when they can, quite paradoxically, Lewis and Clark focus as much on protecting their own trade goods from the Indians, whom they perceived as thieves.

Again, Lewis comments on the stealing committed by Indians, writing that

“three of this same tribe of villains the Wah-clel-lars, stole my dog this evening, and took him towards their village […] sent three men in pursuit of the thieves with orders” (SH 112). Side by side along with the excerpts, the narrator writes about the same incident, which, nevertheless, simultaneously supplements and contradicts what is recorded in Lewis’ journal:

At one point, there is an Indian canoe on shore, Lewis takes it without asking. Is this Lewis who steals again? / The civilized acts like a savage?

/ Then can the savage act like a civilized. / As you descend the Columbia

River, the Wah-clel-lars throw stones at the men trying to pull the canoes

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up a steep bluff/ Later they decoy Seaman, leading him with pieces of meat. He follows until they have a rope around him. / Captain Lewis is in a rage over his dog, Seaman. Lewis sends his men to retrieve him. (SH 111-2)

From the framed excepts from Lewis and Clark, the reader is told that Lewis’ dog is stolen by “villains the Wah-clel-lars,” and the reader may be again persuaded to falsely believe that the Indians are greedy and inclined to steal and that they take what is not theirs without consent. But by using juxtaposition and providing native interpretation, Glancy ridicules the “actual” accounts written by Lewis, who claims that the Indians steal his dog but actually takes the Indian canoe without asking the Indians. If carefully reading the lines, the reader will find that Glancy excuses Indians’

taking of Lewis’ dog. It seems that the Indians decoy Lewis’ dog for revenge on Lewis taking their canoe. It is ironical that Lewis accuses Indians of stealing his dog without mentioning a word on his taking the Indian canoe without permission.

The line between civilization and savagery is blurred with the subversive lines in the Sacajawea Imaginary: “The civilized acts like a savage? Then can the savage act like a civilized.”

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Lewis is alleged to steal the Indians’ canoe; such stealing makes a slight difference from Indians’ stealing his tomahawk. The narrator employs a rhetorical question to achieve a greater expressive force than a direct assertion. The narrator asks a rhetorical question: “The civilized acts like a savage?” which functions as a forceful alternative to the assertion “The civilized acts like a savage.”

The narrator explicitly indicates that Lewis, the “supposed civilized,” acts like a savage—which is often falsely associated with the native people. Then another rhetorical question, “Then can the savage acts like a civilized.” can be more

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Glancy sometimes uses untraditional punctuation in her writing.

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subversive, engaging the reader to critically examine the notion of savagism inflicted on the native people. If the civilized can act like a savage and vice versa, it seems unnecessary to distinguish the civilized from the savage. There will be no reason for the explorers to designate themselves the lofty status of the civilized, nor is there any reason for the Indians to be perceived as a fierce, barbarous, and wild species.

2.1.3 Mediation in Writing: Between Two Worlds

By mediation, James Ruppert—currently a professor of English and Alaskan native studies at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, means “an artistic and conceptual standpoint, constantly flexible, which uses the epistemological frameworks of Native American and Western cultural traditions to illuminate and enrich each other” (8). This is the term Ruppert uses to describe his theory of reading Native American fiction in Mediation in Contemporary Native American Fiction (1995).

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In the book, Ruppert analyses the ways mixedblooded Native writers draw upon their bicultural heritage, guide their native and non-native readers to an expanded understanding of the other’s worlds. In the following, I will attempt to approach the novel with Ruppert’s idea of “mediation.”

Stone Heart, by means of juxtaposition, employing two “epistemological frameworks” to illuminate and enrich each other. It allows the reader to see the many differences and similarities of cultures. In her poem in Claiming Breath,

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Glancy writes about her struggle between two worlds: “I often write about/ being in the middle/ ground between/ two cultures, not/ fully a part of/ either. I write with/ a split

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In Mediation in Contemporary Native American Fiction (1995), Ruppert focuses his reading on novels of six major contemporary Native American writers, inclusive of N.

Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Silko, Gerald Vizenor, D’Arcy McNickle, and Louise Erdrich.

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The poem is placed in the beginning of the collection of the essays, with no page

number.

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voice, often experimenting/ with language/ until the parts/ equal some sort of/ a whole.” Glancy’s notion about “writing in the middle ground between two cultures”

can be correlated to Ruppert’s concern with “mediation.” In the novel, Glancy attempts to build a middle ground between the white and Native cultures and the reader will be incited to walk in the middle ground between two worlds, “having no sense of anything definite except the juxtaposition of fragments around a moving boundary.”

Ruppert explores the bicultural nature of Native American writers and discusses the strategies they employ to address their diverse audiences. He argues that Native American writers as participants in two cultural traditions—Western and Native

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— have the liberty to “use the epistemological structures of one to penetrate the other, to stay within one cultural framework or to change twice on the same page” (Ruppert 11). Ruppert describes the mediation in the Native American writing in the following way,

As meditative texts moves back and forth between “ways of encoding this reality,” implied readers reevaluate interpretation, are formed, and can be changed as they try on alternate epistemology, different cultural goals, and different notions of reality and truth. While readers attempt to encode those phenomena which resist incorporation into their predisposed beliefs, the Native American writer offers reconstructed ways of encoding experience based on traditional and contemporary insight into both cultures. (13)

Such “mediation” is also to be found in Glancy’s Stone Heart. According to

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By “Western,” Ruppert refers to those cultural backgrounds in common with the

various groups of Europe and America. By “Native,” he refers to the specific Native

American cultural traditions with which the Native writer identifies.

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Ruppert, it is through one’s “artistic choices” that mediation is expressed (11). By means of the juxtaposition of “two texts of enunciation” and its page layout, Glancy requires her reader to move back and forth between cultures and interpretations, from one worldview to another, to shift back and forth between the two perspectives.

Presented with dynamically alternate epistemology from Native American and Western accounts, the reader will come to the realization of the contested versions of the epistemological structures and may be very likely to undergo an epistemological reconstruction through the reciprocity between text and interpretation. As Ruppert claims, the reader of meditative texts “[is] brought to adopt a perspective on the meaning of the text, but this perspective is constantly changing, constantly being modified by a completely different set of epistemological codes” (14).

Ruppert suggests “the mediational text uses, at least, two perspectives (18)” in this way, neither of the perspectives will be “subsumed” and these perspectives will exist in a “dynamic confluence (18)” that encourages the reader to constantly challenge the cultural assumptions provided. Such “dynamic of mediation,” as Ruppert states, is similar to Michael Holquits’s interpretation of Bakhtin’s

“dialogism” as a condition in which “everything means, is understood, as a part of a great whole—there is a constant interaction between meanings, all of which have the potential of conditioning others” (Bakhtin 426).

Stone Heart, perceived as a mediational text, does not aim to subsume the historical accounts, but rather it has two different perspectives juxtaposed while retelling the story of Sacajawea. If the reader is open to such a mediational text, there will be a dynamic of mediation by which the reader will move from one perspective to another and then come to constantly interrogate the previous cultural assumptions provided.

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2.1.4 Writing in the Margins

And I think it should be the return of missing Connectives

The out-of-order animal words, ghost words Angel’s words

Indivisible and

Indecipherable as pastel chalk marks of children on the walk

The margins moved to the middle of a clean bright page.

Diane Glancy, “Furniture” (CB 81)

Glancy talks about “margin writing” in Claiming Breath, she writes that

“Writing in the margins of a book. Just as the Irish poet visiting said the monks used to write in the margins of the manuscript they copied […] He’d write the outpourings of himself right next to the awful outpourings of God” (76). I perceive Glancy as someone who writes in the margin of the journals of Lewis and Clark just as the monks do. As she expresses, she listened to the Lewis and Clark’s journals on tape as she drove along different parts of the Lewis and Clark’s expedition. While she was visiting the historical sites, she imagined Sacajawea’s voice from the little the explorers said about her, “filling in the rest with research and imagination” (SH 151).

Lewis and Clark’s journals are deliberately framed in the box, which creates the

boundary between the documentary journals and imaginative flowing lines. Glancy

imaginatively and critically writes back to Lewis and Clark’s journals, and her

imaginative reevaluation of the manuscript finally moves to the center of the page and

expands into a second-person imagined diary. As a result, the “actual” excerpts from

Lewis and Clark’s journals are pushed to the margin of the book, sheltered on the

right side of the printed book. Sometimes, the actual journal excerpts are even out of

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sight and the novel is dominated by the Sacajawea Imaginary.

Stone Heart uses two perspectives in order to exhibit the connections and contradictions between two worldviews. I maintain that, by means of juxtaposition of two distinct perspectives, the in-between rupture is disclosed. I will explore the relationships between the Lewis and Clark’s journals and the Sacajawea Imaginary in order to see hidden implications behind their juxtaposition. The following discussion will focus on the contrasts between their attitudes toward the land, their medical treatments of sickness, and the ways they explain the ominous in life.

Meriwether Lewis is noted for his keen interest in plants, animals, and nature in general; during the arduous journey, Lewis constantly documents his observation of botanical, zoological and anthropological objects. However, in the novel, Lewis becomes the object of Sacajawea’s observation. In the Sacajawea Imaginary, the reader reads: “Lewis makes the likeness of a bird with his words. You are called Bird Woman. Does he write you on the page? Why does he draw the bird? Not for power.

Not to honor. But to copy its likeness? To separate its parts?” (SH121). Intriguingly, while Captain Lewis makes his keen observations of the bird, he is under Sacajawea’s observation as well. Sacajawea’s watching the explorer’s record-keeping, thus, overturns the western gaze. Captain Lewis is ridiculed and challenged for copying the likeness of a bird either with words or with drawing.

Native Americans “sing the world into being.” Glancy writes that, “speech had

the power to become physical property […] It seemed to be connected with oral

tradition” (WP 65). She further states that in their tradition, “people do not simply

speak about the world, they speak the world into being” (WP 66). When Sacajawea

gives birth to the baby, she is surrounded by other native women who come to sing

their prayers to tell the baby to come. The voice of the Indian women is trying to sing

the baby into being. In the novel, the narrator also addresses to Sacajawea in this way:

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“You speak to the baby. You tell it to come. The women gather around you. You hear their prayers. The women come and go for several nights. Finally, you feel the baby”

(SH 20). But Lewis, failing to acknowledge the distinct rituals involved in delivery, writes “The Sergt of the guard reported that Indian women (wives to our interpreters) were in the habit of unbarring the fort gate at any time of night and admitting their Indian visitors, I therefore directed a lock to be put to the gate” (SH 21). The excerpt of his journals shows Lewis’ misunderstanding over the Native American women who come to sing their prayers to Sacajawea. Moreover, it exposes the fact that Lewis implicitly shows his annoyance and unintentionally documents these native women as violators of the curfew. Lewis’ inadvertent slanting of the historical occurrence might possibly become the tool of domination for its failure to acknowledge Native way of knowing. This will thereby lead to the misrepresentation of tribal people and add to accumulate the cultural bias of historical accounts. However, by means of juxtaposition of two distinct perspectives, the rupture emerges and the bias is challenged and probably dismantled, and the shadow silences of history are exposed.

As we know, Native Americans have an intimate as well as spiritual relationship with the land. They believe, if they listen carefully, they can hear the land talk to them, able to hear the land and the voices it carries. This is the prerequisite for our understanding of the irony implicated in the following paragraphs which the narrator addresses: “You watch the men write in their journals. What do they say with the gnarl of their letters? How can they say what the land is like with their marks?”

(SH 25). Glancy continues “They come to see the land but they do not know the land.

They give the animals names that do not belong to them. That do not say what they

are. That do not fit. They do not hear the birds. They do not see the ghost horses” (SH

25-6). The explorers were under orders to keep the journal. As long as they have time

to give accounts of the incidents which happen or their observations of nature, fauna,

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etc. However diligently they write, the narrator suggests the land cannot be simply duplicated with the explorer’s “gnarl of letters.” The narrator even ridicules the explorers’ ability to access the land, contending the explorers seeing the land without knowing it. The irony is even intensified for if the explorers cannot see the land, how can they say the land is like. It is the same case as their records of birds and other animals. They are in lack of certain ways of knowing and how they can name things they actually have no ideas of.

On the contrary, the protagonist Sacajawea is portrayed as endowed with the ability to hear the voices of the plants, ghost horses, ancestors, and the land. She hears the voices of the plants as she walks, knowing where they are and what they say. She remembers how her mother and her grandmother have taught her to listen (SH 30).

Sacajawea even hears the hooves of the horses on the rocks which the explorers do not hear at all. The narrator says, “You hear the pecking of a rock against a tepee stake.

Clack. Clack. You know [the explorers] don’t hear. You watch the white men write.

You see they number their days in journal” (SH 32-3). The Explorers number their days in the journal under the linear notion of time, but even so, they fail to hear the hidden cyclic world. However, there is one time the explorers describe they hear a loud noise and could not figure out where the noise comes from. Clark writes,

“During the time of my being on the plains and above the falls I as also all my party repeatedly heard a nois …a loud [noise] and resembling precisely the discharge of ordinance of 6 pounds […]” (SH 55). This time, Clark hears the voices from the land;

however, he is not capable of relating the voices to the land. Nevertheless, an

immediate interpretation of the noise comes from the Sacajawea Imaginary. Unlike

Clark or Lewis, Sacajawea hears the voices of the land and knows the meaning behind

those voices, the narrator says, “You hear a noise in the distance. You hear the ghost

horses running. They click their hooves against the rocks that sounded like guns. They

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come to war. They come to fight” (SH 55). Sacajawea recognizes the noise from ghost horses,

7

and its implication.

As mentioned, the interest in retelling lies in the contrast between the two parties' journals: for instance, while Lewis and Clark present accounts of bringing white man's medicine to the natives, Glancy complements Sacajawea’s tribal worldview in dealing with illness. There are intriguing episodes which describe Sacajawea’s and her son Jean Baptiste’s sickness between the two narratives. The reader is left to his/her own judgment to contemplate the contrast between the two narratives.

When Sacajawea is in sickness, Clark notes in his journal that, “The Indians woman verry sick, I bled her which appeared to be of great service to her […]” (SH 46). However, the narrator adds Sacajawea’s thoughts on the event, writing “When you are sick you hear the voices from the next world. You hear their rattles and drums.

They say they come to help you” (SH 46). It appears that Clark believes that Sacajawea recovers from the illness because of his medical treatment. Nevertheless, Sacajawea’s voice gives Lewis’ conjuncture a twist. In rounding out the accounts of Clark, Glancy simultaneously discloses Native American perspectives on medicine in the Sacajawea Imaginary. The reader is exposed to accounts of tribal vision which suggest perhaps the voices form the next world, by means of their “rattles and drums,”

come to heal Sacajawea of her illness. The accounts remind the reader to recognize the spiritual power in Native “medicine” can be communicated to human beings by guardian spirits and thus empower the sick.

Glancy’s accounts on Jean Baptiste’s bad health convey another notion of

“medicine” in Native American culture. There is a time that Jean Baptiste is described

7

The image of ghost horses is throughout the novel, forecasting coming of ominous

things.

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to cry at anything and his jaw and neck are swollen. Captain Lewis writes in his journal that, “the Child is more unwell than yesterday. We gave it a dozen creem of tartar which did not operate, we therefore gave it a clyster in the evening…” (SH 118).

Like Clark, Lewis provides a medical treatment; nevertheless, Baptiste does not seem to regain his health after taking their prescriptions. Sacajawea therefore summons Otter woman to perform a healing ritual to sustain her son in this world. Juxtaposed against the excerpt from Lewis’ journals, Glancy writes that “You think of Otter Woman. There are thoughts that travel over the distance. You tell her Jean Baptiste is sick. You ask her help. You tell Jean Baptiste stories of Beaverhead. You tell him of the long journey her still has to make” (SH 118). Sacajawea’s summoning Otter Woman as well as her telling stories of Beaverhead, again, relate to aspects of Native American medicine. The difference between the two narratives, again, informs us of different epistemological frameworks. Besides, Sacajawea’s asking help from Otter woman incites the reader to the image of “medicine women” in the tribal context.

More importantly, the reader will recognize Sacajawea’s use of storytelling as a healing technique and will probably be tempted to explore the spiritual healing power of storytelling.

On Thursday 12

th

August 1806, Lewis was mistakenly shot by Cruzatte, also a

member of the Corps of Discovery. Clark documents, “Capt Lewis was shot by

accident. I found him lying in the Perogue” (SH 138). The juxtaposed narrative gives

the impressions of being faithful to the historical account written by Clark, but

supplements it with an imaginative nuance: “You see Lewis has been shot. Cruzatte

mistook his buckskin for a deer and shot him through the hip. He will be all right, he

tells Clark. Just give him some time to recover. / You pull back from Lewis. You see a

ghost horse standing by him” (SH 138). The imaginative interpretation can be related

to the exiting epistemology of Native American way of interpreting the ominous

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incidents in their life.

II. Second-Person Narratives in Stone Heart

hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hi

You see horses coming from the sky.

You see them change into canoes and you are rowing.

You see your oars are wings.

You hear the clouds talking.

They talk until they are shouting.

Their voices are hailstones pounding the river.

The water is turbulent and hard to row.

You shake your oars which are wings but you do not fly.

Diane Glancy, Stone Heart (11)

Stone Heart is a view of Sacajawea’s trip with the Corps of Discovery and told

poetically with the use of second person point of view. It is critically acclaimed

because the narrative of Sacajawea is told through second-person narrative in which

the narrator tells the story of Sacajawea to the protagonist Sacajawea, that is,

Sacajawea is positioned as a narratee as well as a protagonist. In the Sacajawea

Imaginary, Sacajawea is the main focalizer, thus the reader is privileged to hear the

voice of her and see through her eyes. However, Sacajawea is positioned receiving

instead of speaking. It takes a few pages to get used to Glancy’s second-person

narrative of Sacajawea since it is unusual to read a novel in the present-tense

second-person narrative. Glancy indicated in an interview that neither the first nor the

third person point of view would be right. Nevertheless, some readers may argue that

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the second person narration in Stone Heart makes the novel too literary, leaving the reader bored by its simplistic syntax and mundane detail. However, I would argue that the second-person narration produces an exceptionally distinct effect and that Glancy makes use of the second-person narration to underscore her thematic concerns.

I argue that the use of the second-person narrative has its thematic and rhetorical effect. It is not only adequate in terms of “truth” concerning Sacajawea’s lack of enunciation, but also is relevant to Glancy’s intention to give a voice to Sacajawea. Before attempting to account for the thematic and rhetorical effect of the second person narrative, I will define what a second-person narrative is.

2.2.1 Definition of the Second Person Narrative

In the second person narrative, the story is told solely or at least primarily, by

the narrator to someone the narrator calls by the second-person pronoun “you.” This

form of narration is used occasionally in fiction, but has been exploited in a sustained

way only during the latter part of the twentieth century. In Matt DelConte’s “Why You

Can’t Speak: Second Person Narration, Voice, and a New Mode for Understanding

Narrative,” he points out that second person narration is not a commonly employed

mode of narration. It suggests a distinct and exclusive narrative from first- and

third-person narrations. As he indicates, unlike either the first- or third-person

narrations, which are defined along the axis of narrator, the second person narration is

defined along the axis of narratee, more precisely, by the coincidence of narratee and

protagonist. Second person narration, interestingly, is not defined by who is speaking

(the narrator) but by who is listening (the narratee). However, he contends that second

person narration still deserves its own category for its own place in typologies of

narration because of its particular rhetorical effects.

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As a matter of fact, much of the confusion regarding the definition and positioning of second-person narration arises nowadays. DelConte expresses that he formulates his ideas of second person narrative based on what Gerald Prince, Brian Richardson, and Monika Fludernik have proposed. DelConte’s statements on second-person narrative help shed light on our understanding of the second person narrative:

[Second person narrative is] a narrative the NARRATEE of which is the PROTAGONIST in the story s/he is told. (Prince 84)

Second person narrative may be defined as any narration that designates its protagonist by second pronoun. The protagonist will usually be the sole focalizer and is generally the work narratee as well. (Richardson, “Poetics and Politics” 311)

I will propose a preliminary definition of second person narrative as narrative whose (main) protagonist is referred to by means of an address pronoun (usually you) and add second-person texts frequently also have an explicit communicative level on which a narrator (speaker) tells the story of the “you” to the you” protagonist’s present-day absent or dead, wiser self. (Fludernik, “Introduction” 288)

As we may observe from the quotes, Prince’s, Richard’s, and Fludernik’s

definitions agree that the second person narrative is narration in which the protagonist

is the narratee as well, designated by the second person pronoun “you.” However,

DelConte argues that their definitions suggest a definable and singular

narratee-protagonist, which excludes several other narratives that address their

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narratee as “you.” DelConte argues that the pronoun “you” may refer to a general or undefined narratee-protagonist. In the essay, DelConte argues that we should think about second-person narration in terms of the relationships among the narrator, characters, and the narratee. DelConte, therefore, proposes a more comprehensive definition, writes that “second-person narration is a narrative mode in which a narrator tells a story to a (sometimes undefined, shifting, and/ or hypothetical) narratee—delineated by you--who is also the (sometimes undefined, shifting, and/ or hypothetical) principal actant in that story” (207-8).

In a second-person narrative, the speaker him/herself could be addressing to him/herself; the speaker could be addressing to a general audience; yet, there is still another possibility that is the speaker is addressing to the fictional character in the speaker of text world. Bruce Morrissette in his article, “Narrative ‘You’ in

Contemporary Literature” aligns the “you” of second person narrative with the narrator, making the analogy to the first-person, the only difference being that the I is substituted by you. He claims that “’you’ forms [invites] the reader to imagine himself in the narrator’s place” and “the descriptions of the ‘you’ are specific past actions of the speaker” (10). While DelConte claims that “Morissette’s analysis is limited in that it does not account for narratives in which the ‘you’ narratee is distinct from the narrator” because Morrissette “only references texts in which the ‘you’ is self-address” (208).

M. H. Abrams, while discussing the story with “you” as the narratee, notes his observation of the nature of the second person in Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City (1984). He expresses that the second person “you” may turn out to be “a specific fictional character,” or “the reader of the story,” or “even the narrator him/herself,” or

“not clearly or consistently the one or the other” and the story may “unfold by shifting

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between telling the narratee what he or she is now doing, has done in the past, or will or is commanded to do in the future” (234). Second person narrative complexly provokes the reader’s participation in the novel in an ambiguous reader-narrator-character relationship in which the reader oscillates in identifying between the implied listener “you,” the voice speaking the “you” and the

“you”–protagonist (Oppenheim 33).

2.2.2 Second Person Narrative in Stone Heart

In Stone Heart, the Sacajawea Imaginary begins with the “YOU” pronoun.

Such a “you” narrative invites the reader to imagine him/herself in the narratee’s place.

In this way, the inclusiveness of you-pronoun tends to lump the reader and the protagonist together; that is, the reader may have the illusion of identifying with the protagonist. If the reader has the illusion of being in the place of Sacajawea, then the words may appear to be perceived somehow in a first-person narrative in the reader’s mind. The following is how the reader may tend to get from the reading:

[I] see horses coming from the sky.

[I] see them change into canoes and [I am] rowing.

[I] see [my] oars are wings.

[I] hear the clouds talking.

They talk until they are shouting.

Their voices are hailstones pounding the river.

The water is turbulent and hard to row.

[I] shake [my] oars which are wings.

But [I] do not fly. (SH 11)

Actually, the above passages are exactly what Sacajawea is made to say in the

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beginning of Glancy’s play Stone Heart: Everyone Loves a Journey West.

8

As the story goes on, the reader may soon realize the second-person pronoun refers to the narratee-protagonist in the story, and then he/she would have problems of identifying with the narratee. For instance, when the reader reads the following paragraph near the very beginning, he/she immediately realizes that he/she cannot put him/herself into the position of the narratee:

YOU COME TO the Mandan village with Toussaint Charbonneau and Otter Woman […] Otter Woman and you are Shoshoni from the headwaters of the river. You were kidnapped by the Hidatsa. Toussaint bought Otter Woman and you from the Hidatsa. You want to return to the headwaters of the river. You want to return to the Shoshoni. (emphasis added, SH 12)

As the text progresses, the reader begins to uncover specific details or circumstances, which will cause the reader to distance him/herself from the identity of the intended addressee of the text, and in effect, to view the “you” as referring to another character much like the third person pronoun. As the reader may realize, the addressee “you”

refers to someone who comes to the Mandan village with Toussaint Charbonneau and Otter Woman, someone who is Shoshoni, someone who is kidnapped by the Hidatsa and bought by Toussaint from the Hidatsa. Therefore, the reader may shift his/her own position of reading, he/she may begin to regard the pronoun “you” as “she /her” since all the information contributes to the fact that she is a Shoshone girl who, with her husband, Toussaint Charbonneau, accompanies Lewis and Clark on their expedition to the West. Then reader might perceive the paragraph mentioned above more in this way:

8

Stone Heart: Everyone Loves a Journey West is Diane Glancy’s play for Native

Voices. The play is based on Glancy’s novel Stone Heart: A Novel of Sacajawea.

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[SHE COMES] TO the Mandan village with Toussaint Charbonneau and Otter Woman […] Otter Woman and [she] are Shoshoni from the headwaters of the river. [They] were kidnapped by the Hidatsa. Toussaint bought Otter Woman and [her] from the Hidatsa. [She wants] to return to the headwaters of the river. [She wants] to return to the Shoshoni. (SH 12)

As the reader of the Sacajawea Imaginary, he/she will oscillate in a complex way between being a participant in the fictional world and in the literary world, moving back and forth between distinct locations, as speaker, listener, or even someone who overhears. Even though the positioning of the reader is indeterminate and shifting, the narrative “you,” that is, the narratee-protagonist, Sacajawea, is most of the time at a point of reception, or listening, rather than at a point of speaking.

Actually, in terms of the triad (of narrator, protagonist, and narratee) which DelConte proposes, I wonder whether Stone Heart is a novel with the coincidence of narratee, protagonist, narrator, or it is a novel with a coincidence of narratee and protagonist but a distinct narrator. Does the novel present the completely-coincident narration among narratee, protagonist, and narrator, or does it just exhibit the partially-coincident narration? If the role of the “narrator” is indeterminate, then there will be two possibilities: one is that Glancy tells Sacajawea’s story to Sacajawea; the other is that Sacajawea addresses to herself by substituting the “I” with you. We need to compare the relationships between narrator and narratee-protagonist in order to articulate the connection between narrative voices and thematics.

Besides, I believe it is important to incorporate the role of the “reader” into discussion over the relationships between the narrator and the narratee-protagonist.

Therefore, developed from DelConte’s model of the triad, I would like to propose a

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model of the triad of narrator, narratee-protagonist,

9

and the “reader.” In this way, I argue that the indeterminate relationships between them will engage the reader in different positioning of interpreting the text differently as well. Each of them, I believe, intriguingly contributes to Glancy’s concerns.

In Stone Heart, the “you”—narrative produces very distinctive rhetorical effects, which privilege the reader to access Sacajawea in several different ways. In “Why You Can’t Speak,” DelConte proposed a model based on the triad of narrator, protagonist, and narratee. According to him, this may correspond to the elements of traditions rhetorical model, speaker, text, and the audience (210). Nevertheless, I would argue it is essential to incorporate the audience “outside” the text, by which I mean the “reader”—the audience who undertakes reading Stone Heart—into the discussion of the novel for Glancy’s Stone Heart, in a way, addresses two distinct audiences, one internal to the story and the other external. In the following, I will explore the triad relationships between narrator, narratee-protagonist, and reader in Stone Heart. I will demonstrate the indeterminacy implicated in the use of second person narrative. I will view from two ways of narration: one is partially-coincident narration of narratee and protagonist, while the other is completely-coincident narration. I will incorporate the role of the “reader” into my discussion on the rhetorical effects of second person narrative in Stone Heart.

First, the reader may identify with the narrator, that is, the reader imagines him/herself in the position of the narrator who addresses to someone who calls by the second person pronoun “you.” In such a case, the “you” narrative invites the reader to imagine him/herself in the narrator’s place and imagine him/herself in the position of

9

The Sacajawea Imaginary is a narrative in which Sacajawea is the narratee as well as

the protagonist in the story she is told. Because of the coincidence of narratee and

protagonist, I would like to see the two as one.

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speaking, having a dialogue with Sacajawea.

Second, the reader may identify with the narratee-protagonist, that is, the reader may imagine him/herself in the position of listening, addressed by the narrator that Glancy represents. In this case, the reader will feel empathic with Sacajawea. The inclusiveness of the “you” pronoun lumps the reader and the narratee-protagonist together. Glancy, the narrator, uses the “you” to address to Sacajawea and emphasizes the existence from the outside. The narrative technique manifests the notion that someone or something outside of yourself dictates your thought and action. In such a form, Glancy addresses the reader directly and, furthermore, forcefully draws him/her into the story as if he/she is experiencing Sacajawea’s life.

Third, the reader imagines him/herself neither in the position of the narrator, nor in the position of the narratee, but as someone who overhears a narrator addressing to a narratee. In other words, the reader overhears and witnesses what Glancy addresses to Sacajawea. Here, it seems that the narrator shares with the narratee a private conversation with the reader happening to be present.

In the condition of completely-coincident narration, likewise, the reader imagines him/herself neither in the position of speaker, nor in that of listener. Rather the reader imagines himself/herself as someone who overhears the narrator talking.

The reader is, at this instance, “other” to this fiction, overhearing Sacajawea’s thoughts directed to herself. This is probably the case as some critics have commented.

Zaleski contends that “Glancy has fashioned an imaginative, second-person diary by the legendary Shoshone guide” (emphasis added, 987). Likewise, Flanagan writes that

“Sacajawea, the Shoshone heroine native who accompanied Lewis and Clark on their

framed expedition, narrates this fictional version of the magnificent, yet harrowing,

journey” (emphasis added, 987). Zaleski and Flanagan both believe that the voice of

the poetic account of Sacajawea’s experience is told through Sacajawea. I argue that

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such a second-person narrative reveals the internal thoughts of Sacajawea through her interior monologue to herself. That is to say, the reader overhears Sacajawea’s self-address to herself and therefore enter the state of mind of Sacajawea.

Incorporating the role of the reader into the processing of the novel will complicate the reading of Stone Heart, but it reveals a sense of indeterminacy while reading the novel. This sense of indeterminacy resulted from oscillating between the narrator, the narratee-protagonist, and the observer, engages the reader in a process of active reading even more. In the following, I will focus on the effects of Glancy’s use of the second-person narrative.

2.2.3 Rhetorical Effects

The second-person narrative is distinct from the “first-” or “third-” one. It emphasizes not the point of “listening,” but that of “speaking.” Bruce Morrissette analyzes the second-person narrative in his essay "Narrative 'You' in Contemporary Literature") and distinguishes its potential effects from the first- and third-person:

Far from constituting a technical “trick” […], narrative “you,” although of comparatively late development, appears as a mode of curiously varied psychological resonances, capable, in the proper hands, of producing effects in the fictional field that are unobtainable by other modes of persons. (emphasis added, 2)

The reader should be sensitive to the physiological resonance produced by Glancy’s use of the second person pronoun “you.” Written in the present tense, the narrative puts the reader right in the midst of the action. The Sacajawea Imaginary is invested in an effective use of the second-person narrative, which is known for an engaging sense of immediacy and lyricism.

In Stone Heart, as I have argued, the reader seems to oscillate between the

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narrator, the narratee-protagonist, and the observer, which contributes to the sense of indeterminacy in the process of reading. But it should be noted that, the rhetorical pronoun “you” confounds the reader and the narratee-protagonist, thus creating an engaging sense of immediacy on the reader’s mind. Therefore, the careful use of the second-person narrative will involve the reader in the narrative. In Stone Heart, Glancy’s use of the second-person narrative integrates the reader with the Sacajawea’s story so effectively that her journey becomes extremely intimate and personal. Since the Sacajawea Imaginary communicates her experiences and thoughts, it is endowed with personal nuances. Sacajawea‘s experience is made all the more vivid by such a lyrical voice that it creates an engaging sense of involvement on the part of the reader.

Despite the effects of engagement, the second-person narrative is paradoxically embedded with the effects of alienation which distances the reader from the narratee-protagonist. James Phelan points out that “the fuller the characterization of the “you,” the more aware actual the reader will be of their differences from that you, and the more fully they will move into the observation role […]” (351). In the Sacajawea Imaginary, the sharply observed details provide intimate observations and mystical interpretations from Sacajawea’s Native eye. Hence, the reader of the novel will be aware of their difference from the narratee-protagonist Sacajawea, and therefore move from the role of enunciatee to that of observer. Such second-person narrative provides us with a dual perspective: one from the enunciatee position and the other from the observer position. As Phelan contends:

some of what happens to us when we read, depends upon our dual

perspective inside the fiction, on the way that we step into and out of the

enunciatee position, when we remain in the observer position and

discover what the narrator assumes about our knowledge and beliefs in

the enunciatee role. Furthermore, moving into the enunciatee role means

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that we move into the ideal narrative audience the narrator tells us what we believe, think, feel, do while in the observer role we evaluate our position in the ideal narrative audience. (emphasis added, 356)

Moving in and out of the role of enunciatee, the reader oscillates between the ideal narrative audience and the role of observer. In the Sacajawea Imaginary, although the reader is lured to participate in the fictional world of Sacajawea, he/she might move out of the enunciatee role and pose as an observer, who evaluates what is thought and experienced by Sacajawea. Paradoxically, such an alienating effect, I believe, contributes to the process of active reading. In other words, the reader will not passively accept everything the narrator assumes about Sacajawea, but actively negotiate the meaning behind such knowledge and beliefs.

2.2.4 Thematic Effects

In Stone Heart, the reader is exposed to the lyrical and engaging second-person narrative of Sacajawea. Although the Sacajawea Imaginary originates from the journals of Lewis and Clark, it does not duplicate its way of presentation. Unlike the Lewis and Clark journals, the Sacajawea Imaginary is written in the second person with the present tense. With regard to the thematic effects, I would like to argue that the “you” narrative not only reveals Sacajawea’s lack of speech, but also bring her voice to the reader’s mind. Besides, the use of the second-person narrative manifests the poetics of storytelling.

The novel, instead of being told in the first person through Sacajawea’s voice, is

told “through” the eyes of Sacajawea. By means of the second-person narrative,

Sacajawea is positioned as a narratee and a listener. It seems that Sacajawea cannot

get rid of the destiny of being silenced; she listens rather than speaks. Some may

argue that Stone Heart is a novel with the completely-coincident narration, that is, the

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narrator overlaps with the narratee-protagonist and it is Sacajawea who addresses to herself. Therefore, they suggest, by presenting Sacajawea’s voice in the form of a diary, Sacajawea can occupy the position of speaker and have her voice heard. I would argue that even so, the narrative just shows Sacajawea’s position of having no one to talk to. It manifests her silence in the history of The Lewis and Clark Expedition.

The reader, metaphorically, “hears her voice,” for all the objects seen and touched are through her. The point of view is limited to the consciousness of Sacajawea, and gives the reader the illusion of experiencing events that evolve before their own eyes (Abrams 233). No matter how the reader accesses the Sacajawea Imaginary, the reader may find that it is filtered through Sacajawea, and the reader is invited to experience the events as if he or she is looking through Sacajawea’s own eyes. Sacajawea never “speaks” in the narrative; her voice, however, is heard through the narrator. The reader has access to Sacajawea’s state of mind and emotions. For instance, the narrator addresses to Sacajawea, “you know the explorers will change what you are, that you will be taken into them, that they can look past you without thinking. You know you are nothing they want. Yet you take them buffalo robes” (SH 14-5). The reader does not actually hear Sacajawea speak; nevertheless, it is through the particular perceptions, awareness, and response of Sacajawea’s that the reader gets to know the Lewis and Clark Expedition. The reader does not hear her “actual” voice, but by means of the second-person narrative, the reader is able to identify with her and imagine how it might be like to travel with the Lewis and Clark on the arduous journey.

Besides, in the novel, there is not only the narrator speaking, but the narratee

and the reader listening. The give-and-take relationship between speaking and

listening implicitly emphasizes the significance of “voice” in storytelling. Simon

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Ortiz explains, “[a] story is not only told but it is also listened to; it becomes whole in its expression and perception” (Song 57). Likewise, Blaeser contends, “storytelling involves more than speech; […] it is both ‘to utter’ and ‘to hear’” (Gerald: 25). By integrating the second-person narrative and reader’s participation, Glancy demands the reader to listen actively, not to read passively.

The second-person narrative involves “orality” with its grammatical use of the pronoun “you.” As a result, the reader feels the participatory force to get involved and listen. The reader will then develop an insight into Sacajawea’s feelings and thoughts.

In addition, the use of the second-person narrative reveals Glancy’s ambition to make use of oral traditions in the written narrative. By doing so, she wants to give the written words, in Ortiz’s words, “the same participatory force and vitality as words spoken and listened to” (GJ: 9).

To conclude, by examining the juxtaposition of two texts of enunciation, and

the second person narrative, Stone Heart is found to be invested in thematic

implications, which are closely related to Native American oral traditions. In Stone

Heart, there is not only a visible dialogue between two texts of enunciation, but also

an invisible dialogue between the reader and the text. Both involve the reader’s active

participation in negotiating the meaning of the novel.

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