It isn’t a quantum leap from Scott
Bakula’s television series to Sherman Alexie’s
new novel, Flight. In Alexie’s narrative,
Zits leaps into a variety of historical identities as he
"time travels" through history. Indeed, the novel
uses television and film as a starting point for examining
truth
in a narrative.
Flight has the tone and pace of Quantum Leap while
a thread of Back To The Future is embedded in its
epiphany, that key moment in which Zits comes to understand
the reasons
behind
his father’s abandonment. Like Dr. Sam Beckett in Quantum
Leap, Zits is given the opportunity to change small
events in history as he reacts to specific historic experiences,
including his abandonment by his father. Flight is thus a
journey novel in reverse, a road story, and a traditional
Indian hero tale. Elements of the latter are present in the
phantasmagoric plot, which John Huber Cornyn labels as the
hallmark of a hero story: “The Indian hero, in the
most natural way in the world, performs miraculous deeds
and defeats opponents hitherto unbeaten; or he attains ends
hither to seldom or never attained.”
It is undeniable that forces beyond Zits’ control
save him from annihilation, but in this layered vision quest
anything can happen as tricksters intrude upon his journey,
making self-discovery more arduous and convoluted. The words
and images that surround Zits mimic the paradox and multiplicity
that is a part of life in the modern world as well as the
challenges highlighted by Native American folklore in which
eternal truths elude the hero undertaking a traditional challenge.
He is limited and mislead by the charismatic words of the
fast-talking Justice and deluded by insubstantial images
that are displayed on his television screen. Hurtling backwards
through time, he hasn’t even the simplest clue of what
path to take as he faces more challenges than an Alice and
more devastation and confusion than a Billy Pilgrim.
Indeed, Flight may appear to be a simple book,
but its message is complex. People cannot stand alone,
and in much
the same way, neither can words nor images. Words
alone cannot make events real for us, while images have their own limitations.
They can deceive and obscure the truth by turning villains into heroes or by
sanctioning and legitimatizing genocide. The entire novel is a tribute to the
blur that is our reality and a tribute to how the word, and the image, and
the reader can lift that penumbra. As we read, we realize
that Henry James perhaps
phrased it best. Noting that to “live over people's lives is nothing
unless we live over their perceptions, live over the growth, the change, the
varying
intensity of the same since it was by these things they themselves lived."
James credited art with extending our understanding and encouraging our
personal growth. In Flight, Zits learns
that media-based perceptions are often skewed and that words can limit
the breadth and scope of our knowledge if they are divorced from experience.
It is our immersion into event that ferrets out truth from the layers of mythology
that shape thinking. This immersion reshapes our images and oral tales. It
enhances our understanding. It brings together words, images, and thoughts.
Like a trickster, Flight, a novel that questions
visual imagery, humorously uses visual associations as
a means
of sustaining reader interest, moving the
plot
to its final conclusions and instructing us as to how the images around us
contribute to stereotypes and clichés. Quickly
paced like a television show, with the swift cuts of
a carefully edited movie, the novel is Mr. Alexie’s
most cinematic fiction work thus far. In a recent interview, he admits that
his work on screenplays
has made him acutely aware of how the visual imagery can add continuity to
complex plotlines: "The more direct plotline of Flight is
probably related to my film work, just because I’ve been doing that
in lieu of writing novels for ten years."
In truth, this is not a new concern; the visual image has always mattered
to this craftsman.
He has, on other occasions, acknowledged it as society’s most important
propaganda tool since films and television shows provide a government with
a means of shaping the common man’s perception of an event. Alexie
underscores this link between belief and image, between the event and the
picture of the
event that society imparts to its public. Observing that even he “hated
those savage Indians just as much as John Wayne did,”
the author acknowledges the media’s power to persuade
and define. It is this power that he wishes to exploit to his own purposes.
It is
this ability to shape opinions that Alexie employs in his own work as he
corrects faulty perceptions of Native Americans held by a viewing public
that grew
up on The
Lone Ranger and westerns that featured John Wayne.
As an artist and writer, Alexie knows that television “is
the only thing that keeps us vaguely in democracy even
if it’s in the hands of the corporate
culture." Because it can level the
playing field, he also knows that he must make his Native Americans multidimensional.
Turning them into flawed heroes and thus real human beings, Alexie
takes full advantage of today’s
media, which shapes the minds and definitions of the masses. Entrusted
with its “cultural
currency,”
he knows that he must spend it wisely.
He's a Native American going where no Native American until now has dared
to go. Engaging Native American
actors
and Native American production staffs, he attempts to lay bare a life that
white America has chosen not merely to overlook, but also to denigrate.
Traditional
cinematic productions offered up the Native American as the enemy, a laconic
or bloodthirsty impediment in the race to the frontier. As political correctness
began to dominate the industry, movies like Dances With Wolves (1990)
and
PowWow Highway (1989) did their best to humanize Indians, but
they were limited in scope
and too few in nature. Mr. Alexie is a man of this millennium. His films
are about that “emblematic figure: the Other, the Alien, the non-generalized
European" who reacts to real world situations
in a manner that is uniquely his or her own. In Flight, Zits’ anger
spills out onto the pages that recount his fate in twenty-one foster homes.
In
this movie
script of a book, we come to understand how that experience produced
in him a profound sense of unease, a lingering inability to understand
his status
as an orphan and half-breed. In Mr. Alexie’s rendering,
the protagonist's personality is distilled into specific primal forces:
anger, despair, self-doubt, and personal
uncertainty.
The central character in the movie that the author screens
upon the written pages of the text explodes our societal
myths as his life plays out in
front of our
reading/viewing eyes. This is not a youth who “dresses in feathers,"
as Elizabeth Bird has phrased it. Laconic Zits is no Tonto, nor is he
the bloodthirsty redskin that
Ford portrayed in The Searchers. He is angry with good reason,
made ever more hostile
by a landscape that is as barren as Ford’s frontier. He lives in
a world riddled with shifting shapes and impending violence. Drunken
Indians may roam
the streets, but police cruisers on routine patrol are looking for other
violators of the peace to pass along to social workers who, smelling
of cinnamon gum, utter
pronouncements their clients cannot understand.
Because the media contains society’s messages, it
can never be forgotten or overlooked. In The Lone Ranger
and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, an earlier effort,
Alexie intimates that television is directly responsible for the social
and emotional malaise that affects his characters. Indian
children grow up wanting to be cowboys
because to be indigenous acknowledges a life tied to either loss or
extermination. He tells us that feeling worthless is a
part of being an Indian in white America.
When Victor tells a woman that he meets at the pow-wow that she is
not important because she is just another Indian,
he is just reiterating a message carried into homes by
televisions that are "always too loud"
and consistently intrusive, "until every conversation was distorted,
fragmented" by their presence. Television gives the Indians on
the reservation nightmares:
"Last night I dreamed about television. I woke up crying,"
a character confesses in this narrative.
Small wonder then that the Spokane community that he describes
suffers from "unemployment,
poverty, hunger, inadequate housing, violence, drugs, alcoholism,
and premature death in a culture removed from its traditional
moorings," as Gordon Slethaug has described it in
his essay "Hurricanes
and Fires." If the white world is responsible for feeding
the Indian the wrong information, the Indian is responsible for imbibing
it as readily as he
downs the alcohol that flows freely in Alexie's haunting stories.
Fathers are invariably absent because of their reliance upon alcohol,
and as a result
of their actions, their children are left rudderless in a world that
can throw them no buoy. Zits, the offspring of a deceased Irish mother
and an absent Indian
father, can only learn about Indians from politically correct documentaries
produced in the eighties and nineties: "Everything I know about
Indians (and I could easily beat 99 percent of the world in a Native
American version of Trivial Pursuit)
I’ve learned from television. I know about famous chiefs, broken
treaties, the political activism of the 1960’s and 1970’s,
and the Indian wars of the nineteenth century."
His knowledge, although improved by the quality of politically correct
programming, is incomplete because it's
disjointed learning; nothing about what he knows is connected to
real people and real events. Observing that he’d love a "television
in [his] bedroom" because "[he's]
never met any person who is as interesting as a good TV show," Zits
lets the reader know that he likes entertainment more than he prizes
human contact.
What is troubling about his vision of the world is his dependence
upon celluloid that he thinks will tell him how to define himself:
"Yes, I am Irish and Indian, which would be the coolest blend in
the world
if my parents
were around to teach me how to be Irish and Indian. But they’re
not here and…I’m a blank sky, a human solar eclipse."
In The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven,
Alexie links white hegemony to the images television produces
which uphold one value system
over another.
The small screen is filled with happy families that contrast with
life on the reservation, where broken families are as
common as stars in
the western
sky.
In Flight, his more mature effort, the media is more dangerous
and insidious. Inhabiting the body of FBI agent Storm, Zits learns
that
the media can
create false heroes, turning enemies into lionized saviors. Finding
out that the
IRON activists idealized in a documentary were really double agents,
he discovers that they are capable of murdering fellow Indians as
easily as
the FBI agent
who shoots an Indian dead in what he calls the line of duty. What
Zits discovers is that the images presented to viewers
in news reports or
in documentaries
are often manufactured truths, shaped by a government’s attitude
or by the bosses at Paramount, CBS, and ABC. Heroes are made to fit
a definition or need,
chosen because they fill a propagandizing void. What becomes evident
to Zits becomes evident to us. Those short clips that we see on our
flat panels are the
tricksters, teasing us into common mis-beliefs about a reality that
is as relative as an individual’s perspective. In Flight,
an author who uses reality for his own purposes raises a significant
question about how we examine history
without adding to the so called facts our personal biases, or individual
prejudices, our egocentric slant upon another culture’s actions.
Flight is thus a novel about storytelling and how storytelling
relates to things experiential. It is about those age
old mythic stories Joseph
Campbell
analyzed.
It is also about American tales and Indian narratives. Alexie’s
novel is a chronicle that analyzes how the varying historical narrative
threads that document
our past and present fail to give us the full framework that we need
to honestly judge our actions. Flight is about what we see
and what we choose not to see
about who we were in the past and how who we were then has turned
us into who we are in the present. What Zits discovers as he flies
through history is that stories
are the coyote messenger. Like the Indian trickster, tales are charming
representations, but they can also confuse and befuddle, casting
dark shadows rather than illumination
upon prevailing truths. The novel takes us on a visual odyssey that
ultimately proves to us that we never know the whole truth, even
if we live through it.
What Zits learns as an FBI agent on the Nanapush reservation is reiterated
in his reincarnation as an Indian at Custer’s last stand, in
his metamorphosis into a tracker in the early West, in his identification
as a flight instructor
who has been betrayed by a friend, and in his penultimate leap into
his father’s
identity. Individuals who rely on tales of any form may not experience
truth. Every man or woman’s experience is relative, the handmaiden
of their perceptions, their upbringing, or their prejudices.
To drive this message home to the reader, Alexie employs
techniques drawn from the media he is intent upon understanding.
TV addicts will
agree
that Flight is keenly similar to Quantum
Leap (1988-1993). In this made for TV,
science fiction, drama series, Dr. Sam Beckett, who is swept back
into the past, uses
his reincarnations in order to change the past for the better. Al
states this
thesis: "God,
or Time, was just waiting for your quantum leap to… correct
a mistake." In
Flight, Zits is handed Beckett’s power. Embedded in
Sullivan’s
body, he delays the cavalry’s approach, allowing the young
soldier to save the Indian boy he is removing from battle. But he
can only change events just so much.
When Zits leaps into his father’s body, in a moment similar
to Back To The Future, he cannot change what his father
does. He can only understand who
his father was and how those limitations contributed to their alienation.
Flight intimates that anger, hate, and violence serve no real purpose
in society. Understanding
is what is needed as we make our vision quest, moving forward into
the future, into the world that is yet to come.
Thus Flight is not just a novel endowed with a Quantum
Leap teaser as a chapter break. It is a most untraditional
traditional buildingsroman
that
has layers
of meaning. The denouement is understandable in terms of the journey
that has been portrayed, and the epiphany is acceptable to us because
we too
have been
trapped inside the frames of the movies that have been Zits’ experience.
Flight’s format draws upon not only Campbell’s
hero quest, but the three aspects of an Indian initiation rite. There
is separation,
testing, and
reintegration, with Justice, the elder, precipitating the action
by his demands. Zits’ time travel becomes the test, the method
by which he pits himself against the elements, the way in which he
separates out who he really is from
the celluloid images he would otherwise embrace. This is his forest,
his desert, his mountain peak. N. Scott Momaday has written of the
Indian hero that "you
cannot understand how the Indian thinks of himself in relation to
the world around him unless you understand his conception of what
is appropriate; particularly
what is morally appropriate within the context of that relationship."
At the end of Zits’ trial, he takes from his
environment what he needs to enrich himself in the ordinary adult
world. He finds what is
appropriate in the swirl of events that have challenged him, in the
violent history of the American past that pitted whites against Indians,
whites against whites,
Indians against Indians. What is appropriate is found within himself,
within each significant gesture he makes towards another person,
who weeping, begs for
mercy, understanding, or love. In finding this truth, Zits moves
beyond the truisms embedded into news stories, soaps, tabloid scandals,
and escapist fare that masquerades
as reality. He becomes the Indian hero Momaday describes. He becomes
an actualized adult.
Ultimately, the repetitiveness of Zits’ journey through
the American experience symbolically underscores Alexie’s
message. Zits’ time travel involves
different time frames and different social stratums, and yet each
experience is not a scrap of random information, but a
pane in the larger patchwork quilt
of life that is iterative and ultimately unifying. In Mr. Alexie’s
"tribe, and in the Native American world, in general, repetition
is sacred,"
we read in Diane Thiel's "A
Conversation with Sherman Alexie." Flight thus advances
to us a sacred traditional truth: we should never use our differences
as
a justification
for
violent action. As
Michael morphs into Zits, he logically observes that we are in this
thing called life together. If we cannot love and respect one another,
we will never be anything
more than isolated selves angry at the world for being a cold and
cruel place in which children will always be targets. His leap
backwards offers him
the courage to hope that the next person who offers him the prospect
of kindness and understanding will be the one who will help him learn
to love.
The past and the traditions embedded in it are always characters
in Alexie’s
novels and movies, subtly influencing the outcome of each character’s
conflict as he journeys forward into the conflicted American future. “As
a colonized people, I think we're always looking to the past for
some real and imaginary
sense of purity and authenticity,” Alexie confesses in one
interview. In Flight, Zits’ journey reconciles
the two aspects of his troubled personality. His Indian and Irish
selves
seize some remnant of
purity and authenticity from America’s unsavory past. As readers,
we can appreciate his discovery and hope that it will endow him with
a new tradition,
one of hope and trust for a less troubled future. Without this expectation,
without this understanding of whom we should be, we will all fistfight
on earth and fistfight
in heaven.
July 2007
From guest contributor Susan Orenstein