784 The American Century: Literature since 1945these themes is the book that preceded The Way to Rainy Mountain by a year, that
first established Momaday’s reputation and influence – and that, by common
consent, remains his finest work: House Made of Dawn.
Set circularly in Walatowa, a fictional version of Jemez Pueblo, Los Angeles, and
then by eventual return, the pueblo again, House Made of Dawn tells the story of
Abel, a Pueblo Indian. After fighting in World War II, Abel returns alienated from
white America and from Pueblo culture. “He had tried to pray, to sing, to enter into
the old rhythm of the tongue,” the reader is told, “but he was no longer attuned to
it.” Abel is described, several times, as “unlucky.” In an interview, however, Momaday
has described his hero perhaps more accurately as tragic. The trauma suffered by
Abel, Momaday explained, was shared by a “tragic generation” of Indians who
suffered “a dislocation of the psyche.” “Almost no Indian of my generation or of
Abel’s generation escaped that dislocation,” Momaday observed, “that sense of
having to deal immediately with, not only the traditional world but with the other
world that was placed over the traditional world so abruptly and with great violence.”
What Abel representatively has to do, and in the end manages to do, is to renegotiate
his Indian identity through an empowering embrace of ritual and mythical
precedent. And the prologue to the novel reveals how he will do it, as it anticipates
the end by showing Abel running in a ceremonial race. As he runs, we are told, he
appears to have become one with the “still and strong” land around him. The
prologue also begins with the traditional invocation, Dypaloh, of a Walatowa or
Jemez Indian storyteller. It then announces: “There was a house made of dawn. It
was made of pollen and rain, and that land was very old and everlasting.” The motif
that gives the book its title is taken from the songs of the Navajo Nightway ceremony,
a long healing ritual. From the beginning Momaday alludes in this way to traditions
of storytelling and healing within quite separate Indian cultures of the Southwest.
House Made of Dawn consequently becomes a continuation of each tradition, as well
as, in its alternately terse and densely referential prose, a continuation of the more
Anglo-American lines of Hemingway and Faulkner.
In the prologue, Abel is running seven years after the time of the first section,
“The Longhair.” Set in the pueblo in 1945, this, the first of four sections into which
the book is divided, introduces Abel as he stumbles drunkenly off a bus bringing
him home from military service. Haunted though he is by war memories, it is clear
that his sense of separation from the pueblo community occurred before he entered
the army. And his vulnerability to pressure is measured in two key moments or
experiences: his involvement with a privileged white woman who is attracted to his
“primitive” masculinity, and his murder of an albino Indian whom he takes to be an
incarnation of evil. The second section of the novel, “The Priest of the Sun,” is set in
a miasmic Los Angeles. After a trial in “their language,” the language of a white
society that does not even begin to understand the terms and conditions of his life,
Abel has been imprisoned and now relocated to the city. He has become one of any
number of Native Americans who have been not so much relocated, in fact, as
dislocated – set adrift in an environment where they seem to lack the simplest words,
the most basic tools required to cope. The third section, “The Night Chanter,”GGray_c05.indd 784ray_c 05 .indd 784 8 8/1/2011 7:31:45 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 45 PM