The Native sensibilities of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony that influence overall design, point of view, and character development, challenge the classically accepted definition of novel. Ceremony is a war story, and, like many others of its genre, revolves around the returning shell-shocked World War II soldier. It is also a protest novel about cultural and racial misunderstanding as well as of Native American oppression. In this sense, as emblems of political protest, the characters are narrowly developed, some approaching allegorical representation. These fictional American Indians signify various levels of victimization and alienation. The Anglo characters in the novel, the army doctors and the ranchers, portray ignorance and hatred. Ceremony also incorporates universal mythic properties. The novel’s protagonist, Tayo, might be compared to such other wandering fictional heroes as Ulysses of Homer’s Odyssey or Beowulf of the Norse myth that bears his name. They share common traits: orphaned in youth and possessing special talents, they are able to overcome perilous odds with the help of mentors and magical friends, and return home to their people older, wiser, and fit to lead.
Above all, Ceremony is an American Indian novel. Silko, of Laguna Pueblo, Mexican, and European descent, uses the Native concepts of harmony and balance as both thematic and structural anchors. The principal story begins with Tayo, broken in spirit and physically ravaged after fighting in the Pacific jungles, returning to his Auntie’s drought-ridden New Mexican ranch. Tayo is ill with nightmares and night sweats, disorientation and depression. He is also ill in the tribal sense: Tayo is out of balance, and can be cured only when he, along with his community, are set right. His war venture, as soldier and killer, ends in sickness, and so requires a journey to wellness and reconciliation.
Unlike Rocky, his full-blooded Laguna cousin, who lost his life during the Bataan Death March, Tayo is a hazel-eyed mixed-breed survivor destined to reconcile, among other things, his own warring selves. There is the unknown father, possibly Caucasian and Mexican, who contributes to Tayo’s cultural and genetic mix but to no tangible memory. His mother, “Sis,” is full Laguna Pueblo, but, uprooted and alcoholic, dies at an early age, leaving young Tayo with her sister, “Auntie.” It is Tayo’s blind Grandma who exerts the matriarchal spirituality that starts his cure when she intones at the sickbed, “‘A’moo’oh, a’moo’ohh’” (33).
Tayo’s community is also sick and broken, torn apart by war, unemployment and drought. It is made whole when Tayo returns from his quest a spiritual leader, bringing with him the lost cattle and earth-replenishing rain. The concepts of wholeness and balance challenge the traditional western perspectives of right and wrong, one versus the other. Ts’eh, the young female agent who works on behalf of Tayo’s cure, and Night Swan, her older counterpart, are two sides of the same coin, as are the Laguna spirit helpers, Corn Woman and Reed Woman. Tayo’s guardian uncle, Josiah, dies before Tayo returns from war, but Tayo vividly recalls Josiah’s words: “Nothing was all good or all bad either; it all depended” (11). During his recovery, Tayo himself learns to accept this philosophy.
Ceremony does not have a traditional linear plot. The action does not follow calendar time; instead, events are conjured up through memory, or reenacted, as in ritual. The first few pages of the novel constitute the reenactment, or spinning out, of an older, larger, creation story; the lines are arranged like poetry. Throughout the novel, similar “poetic” sections look in silhouette like Pueblo kachina dolls, figurines carved from cottonwood root made to invoke ancestral spirits. The poems are narrated, in fact, by ancient voices that comprise a chorus of Spider, Buzzard, Bear, Trickster, Grasshopper, Fly, and Hummingbird, to name a few. These creatures are examples of animism, a native perspective that gives equal status to all living beings. The tale that Spiderwoman spins not only runs parallel to Tayo’s story, but also literally contains his story. The various healing ceremonies in which Tayo partakes along his route are really initiations. His processes of rebirth, which take place on sacred grounds, reenact the creation of his people and the replenishment of the earth.
The physical land of the Southwest ranch and surrounding desert plays a role in Ceremony. The novel is about cycles, including seasons and farming. The ancient agricultural myths, passed down from Silko’s Anasazi forebears, are the sources that underpin her work. When Tayo’s friends become drunk and disoriented, careening around the desert in a dirty truck, they act against their own basic nature as Native people who have a sense of place and know how to make that place productive. Conversely, Tayo grows to understand and respect the land. He knows that Josiah’s spotted cattle have wandered south. When he and Ts’eh, a reappearance of the Yellow Woman figure of Pueblo lore, briefly live together in the canyon, Tayo learns a way of life from her loving communion with the herbs and insects.
This instructive quality constitutes another attribute of American Indian storytelling. The reader learns that the story is larger than any single quest for balance and belonging, and that the curative power of Ceremony encompasses all who partake of it, including the listener. The life-enforcing lessons of vigilance, hard work, respect for place and respect for each other radiate outward from the novel to include all readers within the sacred circle of story.
Sources
Hailey, David E., Jr. “The Visual Elegance of Ts’its’tsi’nako and the Other Invisible Characters in Ceremony,” Wicazo SA Review 6, no. 2 (1990): 1–6.
Kroeber, Karl. Artistry in Native American Myths. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998.
Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Penguin, 1986.
Swann, Brian, ed. Smoothing the Ground. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983.
Swann, Brian, and Arnold Krupat, eds. Recovering the Word. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.
Categories: Literature, Novel Analysis
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