Yesterday, I wrote that at this point in the semester I only have time to read books I’m teaching. That wasn’t entirely true. I managed to finish Tommy Orange’s There There last night. Jenna Hunnef, a colleague from the University of Saskatchewan, is coming down to Regina on Friday to give a talk on this novel, and since I’m the organizer, I thought I needed to reread There There so I could ask an intelligent question during the discussion–or at least a question informed by something beyond a reading from six years ago.
For some reason, I have a copy of the hardcover edition of There There. I don’t recall why I was so eager to read this book, but I think there may have been a positive review in The New Yorker. Before rereading it over the past week or so, all I could remember was that I liked this book. Now I remember why.
Jenna’s paper is about neomodernism in this novel, and there are signs of modernism everywhere in it: in the quotations that begin the book’s four sections (from Bertolt Brecht, Javier Marías, Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, and Jean Genet); in the title’s allusion to the famous remark of Stein’s about Oakland, California, having “no there there,” which one of the novel’s characters, Dene Oxendene, explains to us, which is also the title of a Radiohead song; and in the narrative structure. The book is a collage of voices, almost all of which belong to urban Indigenous people living in Oakland or with some connection to that city. For the first half of the novel, those characters speak to us in third person, tightly focalized on their thoughts, feelings, and experiences; in the second half of the novel, that narrative mode opens up a little to include chapters in first-person and also (the quite rare) second-person narration. To me, the term “collage” is essential to understanding how this novel works, partly because part of its collage includes two collage essays (one in the prologue, one in a chapter identified as an “interlude”). Sometimes, when characters appear, I wasn’t sure if I had met them before, and I would flip back through the book looking for them; sometimes I’d find them, sometimes not. My bad, really, for not tracking the characters on a sheet of paper as they appeared. This novel demands that kind of attention. Modernist texts tend to require effort. That’s okay. We all need more cognitive friction in our lives; it’ll help us deal with the other kinds of difficulty we experience.
There There is also the story of a heist, kind of like Stanley Kubrick’s film noir The Killing, which is (I think) an intertext here, although There There‘s structure is so much more complex than the one in that movie. I’m not going to say anything else, because I don’t want to spoil anything for anybody, but I think it’s fair to say that signs of doom are everywhere, from the first chapter, where Tony Loneman (a 21-year-old Cheyenne man with FASD) tells us that his favourite rapper is MF Doom. The robbery, though, is important in two other ways: as a version of the lateral violence that colonialism has left the Indigenous characters with, and also as a version of colonialism itself, which has led to multiple thefts from Indigenous Peoples: of land, of resources, and through boarding schools and residential schools, of languages, cultures, and ceremonies. Colonialism doesn’t define these characters, even as they struggle to survive and resist it, but it’s their world. If they were fish, it would be the water in which they swim, something omnipresent but also, perhaps, hard to identify. It’s easier to see their struggles as personal. They are personal, sure, unique to them, but they’re part of that broader reality.
If you’re in Regina, and you want to know more, come to La Cité 215 on Friday afternoon at 2:30 to hear what Jenna has to say. There will be cookies–the good kind. You don’t need to have read the book beforehand, although you might be inspired to get a copy afterwards.