Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony and the Invisible Realms of Reality
“The title of the novel, Ceremony, refers to the healing ceremonies based on the ancient stories of the Diné and Pueblo people…I was conscious of constructing the novel out of many different kinds of narratives or stories to celebrate storytelling with the spoken as well as the written word.”
-Leslie Marmon Silko
There are those among us who are attuned to the invisible frequencies on the radio dial of reality. Many of these people become artists and create cutting-edge works that convey these extraordinary dimensions to the less delicately attuned of us. My favorite artists are almost always among these: the ones who tune us in to the invisible dimensions of reality. I am drawn towards their works as if by a magnet, and my love for these works paired with my desire to dive deep into them, and to share them with others has led me to my vocation.
“Ceremony is the greatest novel in Native American literature. It is one of the greatest novels of any time and place. I have read this book so many times that I probably have it memorized. I teach it and I learn from it and I am continually in awe of its power, beauty, rage, vision, and violence.”
-Sherman Alexie
Leslie Marmon Silko is one such individual who perceives more colors on the spectrum of reality. I’ve been thinking a lot about Silko and her awesome book Ceremony (1977) lately because this semester I have the privilege to teach Ceremony for the first time in my “Perspective in Artistic Eras” class. We will read Ceremony as a Postmodern novel while we also consider PoMo poetry, visual art, and music: all to get at the nebulous and wide ranging “conventions” of what makes a work of art characteristically “postmodern.” A difficult task, I know, and Postmodern characteristics are surely more divergent than they are homogenous. But, Ceremony’s narrative style strikes me as an apt piece to discuss one type of Postmodernism with my students. In her novel, Silko weaves together poetic passages that convey ancestral stories with fragments of prose narrative. The poetic passages are meticulously crafted, and there is a tension and conversation sustained between the poetic and narrative shards.
One of twenty-eight story-poems found throughout Ceremony.
Ceremony may be an apt example of Postmodern innovation, but it also stands out to me as a masterpiece by an artist who is attuned to the invisible dimensions of reality, and I think Silko’s formal developments are designed to reflect this extraordinary perception. When I first read it almost a decade ago, the book hit me like a lightning bolt to the forehead, and it stayed with me. I continually return to it, or rather it draws me back. It is an important book to me: so important that I included a chapter about it in my dissertation, and I’m refining that work for a book project. Ceremony is also a really important book in American literature, and teaches us a lot about interstitial identities in American culture; her protagonist, Tayo, is a mixed-race Native and white man who feels ostracized from both sides of his identity. But most importantly, this is a pivotal work of Native-American literature. Silko published Ceremony in 1977 and it is best known as a vanguard work of the Native American Renaissance.
I’m very fond of Native-American literature. In fact, I find this branch of the American literary tree riveting. Native-American storytelling began in orality, with stories passed down through generations. When we read Native-American literature we often encounter works whose authors have ingeniously adopted the conventions of western written literature to the purposes of oral storytelling. And so, throughout the Native American Renaissance, many Indigenous authors were at the cutting edge of genre-breaking formal conventions as the melded together Native traditions with western literary conventions to serve the objectives of oral storytelling in their written literature. An instance of this innovation occurs in Ceremony.
The book itself documents a healing ceremony conducted by medicine man Betonie and other spirit-helpers to heal Tayo of the witchery and dissociation that have plagued him since his return from World War II. Tayo survived the Bataan Death March and suffers from what we now know as PTSD. As Tayo’s ailment is novel—a product of his contemporary experiences—the traditional healing ceremonies—meant to address traditional ailments—no longer work. So Betonie fashions a distinctly Postmodern, hybrid, fragmented-yet-whole, intercultural ceremony for Tayo. Betonie’s ceremony mirrors Silko’s method of blending elements of her oral tradition with western literary conventions to tell a tale that suits her contemporary milieu.
In Ceremony Silko finds a way to maintain an important aspect of Laguna oral storytelling culture while shifting to a written medium, and I find it endlessly interesting. In an interview with Per Seyersted shortly after Ceremony’s publication, Silko informs us that when she was young and an ancestor would begin to tell a story, they would ask for someone to open the door, to let the spirits in:
“One of the older women—we called her Aunt Susie—who told me a lot of the stories, and who in some sense trained me, if that’s what you want to call it, helped me to love the stories and learn them—she always said when she told the stories that there was an old custom, long ago, where the storyteller would say to one of the persons in the room, ‘Go open the door, go open the door so that they can come in,’ and it was as if ‘They,’ being ancestors, can come in and give us their gifts which are these stories, and that through the stories, somehow, even though people may be dead or gone or time is gone a long way in the past, that through the storytelling there was a belief that it all came back very immediately, that it came right back in the room with you. And so the storytelling in that sense was an act of [Silko pauses] so that there wasn’t anything lost, nothing was dead, nobody was gone, that in the stories everything was held together, regardless of time”
In Laguna culture, a story being told is a conduit to the spirit realm. That realm is represented in Silko’s stories as “Time Immemorial.” But Time Immemorial is not “a long time ago,” or “far far away.” It is here and now. Always. The story being told softens the boundaries between physical reality and the spiritual reality of Time Immemorial. As the story ensues, the spirits join the party. This is one way in which the actual vocalization of a story is really important to Laguna culture. It is a sacred act. This tautological mindset is characterized by a mystic state of communion with the ever-present realm of spirits. Such communion is induced by the telling of stories. It defies “ordinary” temporality and spatiality. In their stead, a state of timelessness ensues and the membrane between the physical world and spirit world becomes discernably more permeable. So, how to replicate this sacred act in a written text that is unlikely to be read out loud? How can authors invoke the spirits from that invisible realm of reality that is ever present around us: Time Immemorial? Leslie Marmon Silko found a way, and it involves Ceremony’s innovative story-poem sections.
David E. Hailey Jr. has shown that Silko literally embedded the spirits in the poetic Laguna story sections in Ceremony: “It is possible to demonstrate that in all the story-poems the texts… act as skeletons for a series of illustrations that provide the final ingredient necessary before Ceremony can become a ceremony; the spirit helpers” (Hailey Jr. 3). By tracing outlines around the skeletal story-poems, Hailey has shown that each of the twenty-eight stories forms the figure of a kachina spirit. “It is arguable that there is even more happening in Ceremony beyond the visible; invisible characters seem to move through the text, carrying with them totems of goodwill and evil” (Hailey Jr. 1 my emphasis). So, the invisible spirits who are traditionally ushered in through the door during a Laguna story are still present in Ceremony, but in a distinctly new way: enmeshed in the form of the book itself. For instance, Hailey points out that the Thought Woman poem that begins the novel, wherein Ts’its’tsi’nako, a prominent spirit actor thinks the story of Ceremony into being—actually forms two figures: both a spider, and a woman. Combined, they form the Thought Woman:
Hailey Jr.’s tracing around the Thought-woman poem shows the Ts’its’tsi’nako kachina.
By tracing around her skeleton to make her manifest, Hailey Jr. shows how Ts’its’tsi’nako is literally interwoven into the story. But, not all the spirits in Ceremony are benevolent, and not all the spirits fleshed out around the poem skeletons are either. Hailey Jr. shows that in stories evoking or describing witchery, the kachina figures appear upside down. In the Ck’o’yo (magic practiced by sorcerers throughout time to inflict disjuncture in a harmonious world) origin story, the kachina appears mirrored.
A mirrored Ck’o’yo kachina.
Hailey Jr. has shown that the conflict between witchery and the ceremony extends beyond the surface narrative of Ceremony into the spirit-world of Time Immemorial. The diversity of, and relevance of each fleshed out spirit-sketch to its skeletal story poem suggests the deliberateness with which Silko crafted her story-poem skeletons:
“Silko has added life to her novel, below the ink, with the ink… [T]here is no indication that anybody but Silko knows about the spirit helpers. Still, like the elders, she brings a conceptual form of life into the universe. Silko fills Ceremony with a new dimension of conceptual life. She adds more stories, being lived under the stories that are lived on the surface. These stories, like the ones on the surface, involve battle between witchery and the better way, and like the ones on the surface, some of the stories under the surface go the way of witchery. Because nobody ever sees them, the stories happening under the surface of the story-poems don’t in the usual sense add to the poems or the novel. But one needn’t see Laguna spirit-helpers to know they are there, doing their jobs; neither need one see the spirits under Silko’s Ceremony to know they are there doing their jobs”
Tayo’s journey in his physical reality accords with the dramatic unfolding of events in the spirit world. As he comes to understand this, he approaches the completion of the ceremony, and a return to wholeness (completion is a relative word here, for the ceremony is endlessly unfolding. Perhaps balance is a more appropriate word). As readers, when we come to perceive this delicate layering, we begin to see the novel, and the world blossoming in a new way. The spirits of our ancestors and loved ones are never far away, in the past or elsewhere. They are ever present around us in Time Immemorial which is here and now always. This perspectival shift is intended by Silko. The ceremony is not just conducted for Tayo; it is conducted for Silko, and it is conducted for the reader:
“In...all things related to the writing of Ceremony, I feel I was blessed, watched over, and protected by my beloved ancestors, and the old ones who told me the stories—Grandma A’mooh, Aunt Susie, and Grandpa Hank. May the readers and listeners of this novel be likewise blessed, watched over, and protected by their beloved ancestors”
Hailey Jr. illuminates a deeper meaning in Silko’s claim that she has adapted oral tradition into the form of the novel. From Aunt Susie’s perspective—inherited by Silko—the stories are not complete without the invisible spirit helpers that become present when Time Immemorial is evoked. This means that to adapt that oral tradition one must find a way to include the spirits, which Hailey Jr. helps us see that Silko has done.
Reed Woman kachina.
Works Consulted
Hailey, David E., Jr. “The Visual Elegance of Ts’its’tsi’nako and the Other Invisible Characters in Ceremony.” The Wicazo SA Review, vol. 6, no. 2, Fall 1990, pp. 1–6.
Seyersted, Per. Leslie Marmon Silko. Boise State University Western Writers Series, 1980.
Silko, Leslie Marmon, and Larry McMurtry. Ceremony: Anniversary edition, Penguin Books, 2006.
