Irr’s essay “The Timeliness of Almanac of the Dead, or a Postmodern Rewriting of radical Fiction” clarified for me the most important aspects in the differences Almanac highlights between Indian and Euro-American ideologies or mentalities, those being the ways in which each group supposedly views time and history. The Native American supposedly views time in its full scale, taking into account past, present, and future; although there are epochs that delineate history, such as the current Reign of Dog Eat Dog, Indian mythology encompasses them all in an overlying understanding of the continuity and connectivity of time via the gods. In contrast, the book criticizes the Euro-American, or white, conceptualization of time as overly focused on the linear present and future. Not only do the European “aliens”, both in the present and the past timelines, ignore their past, they essentially have none since they were born to a land that is not “rightfully” theirs and has only been inhabited by them for a relatively short period of time.
In particular, Irr’s explanation of how this concept of Euro-American time as it applied to homosexuality in the novel alleviated much of the possible homophobia in the book for me. After reading the detailed fetishes of another villainous gay or closeted male character for the sixth time, I had to wonder whether Silko aims for some kind of homophobic message, perhaps in connecting with the cruelty and emotional indifference Silko imparts to many white characters as ailments of the whole European race and the Reign of Death-Eat Dog. She could intend this, but the issues of fetishes and control that plague these homosexual white characters more importantly connect to her books grander theme of the European conception of time as based off “fresh starts” and the denial of the past. Irr points out that, although most of the homosexual men of the novel have fetishes, none compare with the grotesque videos of the heterosexual police chief, whose denial of his own pleasure in creating the films only greatens the perversion of the act. Not only is perversion present across sexual orientation lines, it shows an aspect of sexual arousal in the act of torture: “…it is suggested that there is a link between repression and arousal, between denying one’s history and torturing those who remind you of it, and this link occurs in both hetero- and homosexual contexts.” (237) As most homosexuals in the book do not actually identify as such or are not “out” in society, torture, or other fetishes, act as a way of physically punishing and denying impulses that the character cannot come to terms with. Judge Arne, for instance, does not like to identify as bisexual though he clearly is attracted to both sexes; instead, he reverts to bestiality, which he seems to feel less guilt over, and refuses to put on a name, or cap, on his sexual desires. Similarly, Serlo is obviously attracted to men, but refuses to act on any sexual desires as a result of both self-denial and self-superiority. Cases of repressed or denied homosexuality, and the resulting fetishes and torture that come from this repression, highlight Almanac’s underlying theme of white men ignoring their past, in this case past desires, and consistently trying to start afresh. Almanac’s are not so much evil or sadistic as they are examples of the white man’s aversion to his full temporal identity, and victims to the consequences of the repression this aversion causes.
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