786 The American Century: Literature since 1945medicine man in Silko’s finest novel, Ceremony (1977). Silko registers this, the plural,
changing nature of the ceremonies that underpin Laguna society. She also catches,
as Momaday does, Native American culture as continuous with language and
landscape. Silko describes what she calls, in Ceremony, “a world made of stories.”
“You don’t have anything / if you don’t have the stories,” the poetic prologue to this
novel announces. “In the belly of this story / the rituals and the ceremony / are still
growing.” Repetition and recurrence are the vital elements of ritual and narrative, a
rhythm of continuity and change that links word to world, language to life, and the
Laguna people as they tell their stories and perform their ceremonies to the earth
that is their “mother” and the sky that is their “father.” “It seems like I already heard
these stories somewhere before,” declares a character called “old Grandma,” in
Ceremony; “only thing is the names sound different.” For Silko, as the title of her
1991 novel Almanac of the Dead intimates, fiction is a continuation of the oral
tradition, in that it renews and retells old tales, marrying the fresh to the familiar, the
signs of the past to the settings of the present so as to make “the names sound
different.” “In the belly of this story / ” the prologue to Ceremony announces, “the
rituals and the ceremony / are still growing.” Like “a good ceremony,” a good story,
such as the one these lines preface, is curative because its element is growth; it both
explores and enacts those compulsive, repetitive, but constantly revitalized rhythms
that are the determining characteristics of life.
Like House Made of Dawn, Ceremony has a veteran of World War II as its
protagonist. Tayo, a man of mixed blood, returns to postwar New Mexico feeling
dispossessed and disoriented. During the war, he and other Native American
combatants had felt, “they belonged to America”; now he, and they, have lost that
“new feeling.” The place to which he returns is a disconcerting mix of the old and the
new. “The fifth world had become entangled with European names: the names of
the rivers, the hills, the names of the animals and plants,” the reader is told; “ – all of
creation suddenly had two names: an Indian name and a white name.” There is
poverty and homelessness, white tourism and “the dirty walls of the bars along
Highway 66.” There is significant tension, too, between the new, urban Indians cut
off from their tribal cultures and the perpetuation of ceremonies by the medicine
men. “I’m sick,” Tayo admits. He goes to see a medicine man called Betonie, a man
who, with all his allegiance to the ancient rituals, acknowledges the ineluctable
nature of the new. “Ceremonies have always been changing” since the arrival of the
whites, Betonie tells Tayo, and “only this growth keeps the ceremonies strong.”
“Bundles of newspapers,” “telephone books,” “Coke bottles” are all “part of the
pattern,” Betonie says, “all these things have stories in them.” “Nothing is simple.”
The ceremonies have to reflect this, accommodate change and complexity and not
resort to a binary split of white against red, new against old. As a “half-breed” Tayo
is part of this hybrid culture. As a man in search of healing, he finds restoration in
the hybrid rituals of Betonie, who teaches Tayo the difference between “witchery,”
red or white, that treats the world as “a dead thing,” and ceremony through which
Tayo came to learn “the world was alive.” A sign or symbol of witchery is the atomic
bomb. The first atomic explosion occurred, historically, little more than a hundredGGray_c05.indd 786ray_c 05 .indd 786 8 8/1/2011 7:31:45 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 45 PM