Tradition in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony

"Thought-Woman, the spider,
named things and
as she named them
they appeared.
She is sitting in her room
thinking of a story now
I'm telling you the story
she is thinking." (Silko, p.1)

This poem is taken from the introductory page of Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony. It serves not only as an introduction to the take of our protagonist, Tayo, but also as an initiation to the Pueblo oral culture. The poem sets the stage for Silko to create her intricate narrative, using the first page of her novel to elucidate the correlations between traditional Pueblo stories and the modern methods of novel writing. Silko is preparing to tell the story of Tayo- a tale that the Thought-Woman, a cultural and artistic muse, has bestowed upon her.

On the intimacy and communality of the Pueblo oral culture, Silko has written, "We don't think of words being isolated from the speaker...we don't think of words as being alone: words are always with other words, and other words are almost always in a story of some sort" (Silko, "Cultural Fictions"). Clearly, Silko has come to utilize the technique of interrelating language and narrator- Ceremony is a uniquely complex reading experience. The apparent convolution of her work is based primarily on the way Silko creates multifarious structural transitions. These narrative fluctuations alternate between the past and present, and particularly between the traditional Native stories and the more conventional narrative of Tayo's tale.

Silko forms her complex plot as a dissonant combination of the modern and antiquated, linking the two through shared allusions to the ideas of tangles and webs. The novel's beginning is an elaborate tangle, with threads of flashbacks, Native American tales, and a present day storyline woven together so intricately that the reader can virtually experience a psychological confusion similar to the one plaguing Tayo. This is contrasted elegantly by the novel's denouement- presenting a culmination of Tayo's untangling of these complexities, and thus illuminating the story for both the reader and himself. This final sense of enlightenment is heightened by the reference to the sunrise at the text's end. Tayo experiences this elucidation only as he begins to recognize that what seemed to be a confused and tangled web was, in actuality, an intricate pattern of tradition, eternally tying him to his people and their customs.

In Ceremony, Silko writes that the world is filled with "a strength inherent in spider webs woven across paths through sand hills where early in the morning the sun becomes entangled in each filament of web" (Silko, p.35). The aforementioned Native American stories of Ceremony are appropriately introduced to the reader via a tale about the Thought-Woman. Since she has the ability to materialize her thoughts, leading to her being known as a "spider" or "web-weaver", the Thought-Woman character refers to the author. Silko is the one spinning and weaving the complex web of Tayo's journey, by creating a written portrait of that which she envisions. Each of the snarled structural knots that at first seemed so bewildering in Ceremony, slowly and methodically untangle themselves, to the point where Silko has created a story with an inherent pattern, much like that of a spider's web. The words on the page are merely a jumbled visual without the contextual significance imbued into them by the author.

"It took a long time to explain the fragility and intricacy [of the world] because no world exists alone...each world had to be explained with a story..." (Silko, p.35)

Though the story of Ceremony may detail the significance of Native American oral customs, the traditional tales inserted sporadically throughout the novel also harbor structural importance. On the surface, the stories offer fascinatingly distinctive paradigms of the genre. However, they also provide a loose alliance with the basic plotline of the novel. For instance, the stories, which speak about "Fly and Hummingbird", can be said to correlate distinctly with Tayo's journey. Fly seems to draw a parallel to the character of Tayo, with his impatient nature, just as Hummingbird mimics Rocky in the way that both hold traditional and ceremonial values in high regard. Also, the manner in which Fly and Hummingbird ask Mamma and Buzzard to purify their town alludes to the way Tayo solicits the help of the medicine men- Betonie and Ku'oosh. The construction of this tale also mirrors the general progression of the story, as Tayo begins to realize the necessity to return to the traditional values of his people.

Additionally, the Fly and the Hummingbird accept the need for ceremonial customs, as they depend on such actions to help bring food and rain back to their land. However, their quest was not as simple as appearances would suggest, harkening back to the theme of knots and tangles. On the surface, a knot can appear much less entwined than in actuality, just as the truth tends to be much more complex than the outward facade would have you believe. One cannot untie a knot all at once, one must disentangle it piece by piece, strand by strand. Similarly, Silko likes to peel off each layer of story, or unravel it thread by thread, until clarity is achieved. In this same manner, Tayo must untie the knots of his consciousness, deconstructing himself as well as his existence, in order to eradicate the confusion and anguish that plague his life. Though it may be a slow progression, Tayo needs to return to the simpler, more traditional facets of life, no matter how tedious a journey he faces.

There are definite correspondences between the way that Ceremony's modern-day narrative is presented, and the fashion in which the entrenched Native stories are related. Though the majority of the novel is written in prose and the stories have a structure more similar to verse, both have a similar feel and parallels in their rhythms. The sections of prose reveal a great stylistic contrast to the more traditional sections of verse. This portrays an evolution in the storytelling styles of the Native American culture, from the more traditional stories to the more modernist Ceremony. It is as if Silko's novel functions as a new take on the classic storytelling technique. The novel is satiated with such polarities; between ceremonies and Tayo's loss of faith, religion and witchery, war and salvation, tradition and evolution, memory and reality. Perhaps most importantly, Ceremony showcases the differences between old and new cultures, explaining that while such disparities may be difficult to reconcile, they are a necessity for progression. Growth comes only from the ability to learn from the history, traditions, and even mistakes of the past.

Source:

Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko, 1977 pays homage to the tradition of Native American storytelling, presenting the reader with examples of the culturally significant tales, but also by weaving a brand of story within itself. Ceremony serves not only as a loving tribute, but also redefines the genre itself.