When All Boundaries Fall Apart

87 Pages·2017·1.61 MB·English

CAROLINE GARCIA DE SOUZA

When All Boundaries Fall Apart:
The Experience of Time in Linda Hogan’s Power and Solar Storms

Porto Alegre
2017
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul
Instituto de Letras
Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras
Estudos de Literatura
Sociedade, (Inter)Textos Literários e Tradução nas LEM

When All Boundaries Fall Apart:
The Experience of Time in Linda Hogan’s Power and Solar Storms

Caroline Garcia de Souza
Orientadora: Dra. Rita Terezinha Schmidt

Dissertação de mestrado apresentada ao
Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras da
Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul
como requisito parcial para a obtenção do
título de Mestra em Letras.

Porto Alegre
2017

To all Indigenous peoples
EARTH
Wholeheartedly, I thank my parents and sister for providing me with a sustaining
ground, in this and all other occasions.

WATER
I thank my friends and the Sangha for reminding me of the fluidity with which
apparent obstacles can be overcome.

FIRE
To all Indigenous peoples throughout the world, past and present,
I bow in reverence and gratitude.
Thanks for helping me see, like never before, the incessant flame of life and creation.

AIR
A special thanks to my advisor, Professor Rita,
whose company and words have helped me expand my horizon of knowledge.
Your wisdom is an inspiration.
ABSTRACT

Linda Hogan is a Chickasaw author whose extensive work includes novels, short stories,
plays, poetry, and essays. She is also an environmentalist whose activism is built upon a
Native understanding of nature and the relations between human and nonhuman beings.
This thesis focuses on two of her novels, Solar Storms (1995) and Power (1998), and
explores the healing processes of their protagonists, Angela and Omishto, respectively. In
both novels, the characters engage in a movement of abandoning a mainstream American
way of being – a way of being highly informed by the ideology of Manifest Destiny –
toward a reconnection with their Native ancestry and a tribal apprehension of life and the
world. Specifically, this work explores the characters’ gradual engagement in what Laguna
author Paula Gunn Allen (1992) defines as a ceremonial time sense, a particular experience
of time that engenders a psychic integration, as opposed to a mechanical, clock-based time
sense, which generates fragmentation and enhances a separation between time and space,
person and place, nature and culture. This work explores how the characters’ movement
toward a rich self-recognition as Indians (OWENS, 1994) represents a movement of
opening to the motions of the lifeworld, as well as the dissolution of deep-rooted
categories such as subject and object, internal self and external world. Furthermore, this
thesis examines how a ceremonial time sense is connected to the Plains tribes’ conception
of a sacred hoop – an all-encompassing unity that contains the whole of existence, and in
which all movement is related to all other movement.

Key-words: Native American literature, Linda Hogan, Solar Storms, Power, Native time
sense
RESUMO

Linda Hogan é uma autora Chickasaw cuja extensa obra inclui romances, contos, poesia,
drama e ensaios. Da mesma forma, ela é uma ambientalista cujo ativismo se baseia em
uma compreensão Nativo-Americano da natureza e das relações entre os seres humanos e
não-humanos. Focando em dois de seus romances, Solar Storms (1995) e Power (1998), a
presente dissertação explora os processos de cura de suas protagonistas, Angela e Omishto,
respectivamente. Em ambos romances, as personagens se engajam em um movimento de
abandono do modo de ser Euro-americano – um modo de ser fortemente orientado pela
ideologia do Destino Manifesto –, em direção a um reencontro com sua ancestralidade
nativa e a uma apreensão tribal da vida e do mundo. Especificamente, esse trabalho
explora o gradual engajamento das personagens no que a autora Laguna Paula Gunn Allen
(1992) define como um senso de tempo cerimonial – a ceremonial time sense: uma
experiência temporal particular que engendra uma integração psíquica, e se opõe à
experiência cronológica e mecânica do tempo, a qual produz fragmentação no sentido de
fortalecer a sensação de separação entre tempo e espaço, pessoa e lugar, natureza e cultura.
Esse trabalho analisa como o movimento das personagens em direção a um rico
autorreconhecimento enquanto indígenas (OWENS, 1994) representa um movimento de
abertura aos fluxos do mundo, bem como um processo de dissolução de categorias
fortemente enraizadas, tais quais sujeito e objeto, eu interno e mundo externo. Além disso,
a presente dissertação examina de que forma um senso de tempo cerimonial se conecta à
noção de sacred hoop (Plains tribes) – uma unidade abrangente que abarca a existência
como um todo, e na qual todos os movimentos estão conectados e se relacionam entre si.

Palavras-chave: Literatura indígena norte-americana, Linda Hogan, Solar Storms, Power,
Tempo ameríndio
“Ts’its’tsi’nako, Thought-Woman,
is sitting in her room
and whatever she thinks about
appears.

She thought of her sisters,
Nau’ts’ity’I and I’tcts’ity’I,
and together they created the Universe
this world
and the four worlds below.

Thought-Woman, the spider,
named things and
as she named them
they appeared.

She is sitting in her room
thinking of a story now

I’m telling you the story
she is thinking.”

Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony
Table of Contents

Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………………………………..11

1 Opening a Hole in the Sky: A Necessary Emergence………………………………………….18
1.1 Nature and Knowledge……………………………………………………………………………………………19
1.2 The Creative Potential of Thought…………………………………………………………………………23
1.3 Time and Space………………………………………………………………………………………………………27
1.4 A Cosmological Turn: The Perspective of Manifestation……………………………………….32

2 Trajectories of an Awakening:
Explorations through Solar Storms and Power…………………………………………………….37
2.1 Linda Hogan…………………………………………………………………………………………………………..37
2.2 The Novels: Where Fiction and History Overlap…………………………………………………..39
2.3 As the Boundaries Fall Apart…………………………………………………………………………………40
2.4 Pestering Time Apart: Actualization and Manifestation in Solar Storms……………….50
2.5 The Experience of Event in Power………………………………………………………………………....53
2.6 The Ceremonial Dimension of Power…………………………………………………………………….62

3 An Epistemology of Engagement………………………………………………………………………….67
3.1 The Native Ethically-Informed Epistemology…………………………………………………………67
3.2 Ingold’s Meshwork and the Sacred Hoop……………………………………………………………….71
3.3 An Epistemological Clash in Solar Storms……………………………………………………………..77

An Open-Ended Closing…………………………………………………………………………………………..81

Works Cited………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..84

Annex….………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………87
List of Illustrations

Figure 1: “American Progress,” by John Gast (1872)……………………………………………………14

Figure 2: Image extracted from Being Alive, by Tim Ingold (2011)…………….………………...75

Figure 3: Image extracted from Being Alive, by Tim Ingold (2011)…………….………………...75