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Sue Bull

Dr. Debbie A. Hanson

English 340

5 December 2003

The Sunrise: Beginning to Beginning in Silko’s Ceremony

To call Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1977 novel, Ceremony, the story of one day in the life of

her protagonist, Tayo, might seem simplistic, incomprehensible, or even ridiculous. At a

minimum, it asks the typical Western-oriented reader to set aside a linear concept of time and

embrace another way of thinking. Silko’s presentation will ask the reader to do much more than

is minimally required, however, to understand Tayo’s day. Among other creative choices, she

shares authorship with the person of Thought-Woman, she uses multiple points of view, and

most noticeably, she combines genres in order to tell this story, incorporating traditional Pueblo

myths in poetry form with narrative prose. The poems are representative of the Native American

oral tradition of storytelling, while the prose represents a typical Western written tradition. In this

way, the novel retains the essential elements of Pueblo mythology while integrating

contemporary experiences. Which of these approaches best represents reality becomes a central

question for Tayo and for the reader. From the first one word poem, “Sunrise,” to the closing

poetic prayer, “Sunrise, accept this offering, Sunrise,” Ceremony, with its distinctive structure,

will hold Tayo in its center and heal him in those hours between dawns (Silko 4; 262). By

combining storytelling techniques, Silko causes an interaction between two cultures, resulting in

a synergistic novel, one greater than the exclusive use of either tradition might achieve.

The term novel, as defined in the Euroamerican classification, is generally used to

describe “any extended fictional narrative almost always in prose” that is held together by “some
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organizing principle—plot, theme, or idea” (Harmon and Holman 342). Novels can be classified

according to subject matter, such as historical novel or psychological novel, adding further

complexity to a comprehensive meaning (Harmon and Holman 344). The development of the

Euroamerican novel has undergone numerous transformations over time, as characterized by

different movements, such as realism, romanticism, or naturalism, giving the genre term a

dynamic definition. The same could be said for other genres. According to A Handbook to

Literature, “Genre boundaries have been much subject to flux and blur in recent times, and it is

almost the rule that a successful work will combine genres in some original way” (Harmon and

Holman 226). Silko does so in Ceremony. The novel is replete with the usual organizing

principles of plot and themes, but the structure of Ceremony is atypical in that it is non-linear,

adding further depth and richness to the melding of genres. The construction may, initially, seem

confusing and disassociated to readers, obscuring for the Western mind, to varying degrees, the

ideas Silko presents.

Her mix of literary choices about the arrangement of Tayo’s story certainly reflects her

own mixed ancestry—Laguna Pueblo, white, and Mexican—but she draws most heavily on her

Native American heritage and upbringing to craft Ceremony. In contrast to linear novels in

which the plot is typically revealed by the author as one event follows another, in Ceremony, the

plot is discovered by the reader. The reader is compelled to become active in making sense of the

various plot devices used by Silko and the order in which they are presented. Karen Piper, in an

article for American Indian Quarterly, explains this as “a spatial and chronological enigma in

need of understanding or ordering” (485). The book is not organized by chapters, but sections of

the text, generally brief, are simply separated by gaps in the print between paragraphs. Other

section breaks occur with the insertion of poems of Laguna Pueblo mythology. There is one
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visual image in the novel, a black and white depiction of stars. Some prose sections are no longer

than a single paragraph; a single word constitutes a poem. Each section tells at least a piece of a

different story. Some stories seem self-contained. Furthermore, Silko’s use of pronouns can be

ambiguous, forcing the reader to consider if their antecedents are in the immediately preceding

section or elsewhere in the text.

Silko’s sequencing of stories suggests that events which exist in memory are experienced

with the same intensity as events of the present. In other words, stories remembered live in the

present as much as any story of the present lives in the present. In this way, Silko creates what

numerous scholars have described as a circular, or webbed, structure, a configuration that is

indicative of her Native American culture, as explained by Silko in a 1979 speech about her

book:

For those of you accustomed to a structure that moves from point A to

point B to point C, this presentation may be somewhat difficult to follow

because the structure of Pueblo expression resembles something like a

spider’s web—with many little threads radiating from a center,

criss-crossing each other. As with the web, the structure will emerge as

it is made and you must simply listen and trust, as the Pueblo people

do, that meaning will be made. (qtd. in Brown 171)

While there are traditional Western elements of plot contained in Silko’s webbed novel, she

seems to rebel against the requirements of Aristotle’s Poetics for a beginning “which does not

itself follow anything by causal necessity” (qtd. in Harmon and Holman 386). Yet, her novel

does, in fact, begin with a very essential beginning, a creation myth spun about Thought-Woman,

a spider. It may be tempting for the reader to set aside this poem as a piece of the plot and start
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with the prose narrative in which the main character, Tayo, is introduced. To do so, however,

would mean missing an important clue about meaning. Attributing the story of Ceremony to

Thought-Woman puts the novel into a proper Native American framework, according to Adam

Sol. In an essay for American Indian Quarterly, he writes:

Ceremony opens with the invocation of Thought-Woman, who “is sitting in her

room and whatever she thinks about appears.” The novel itself is put into an oral

context: “I’m telling you the story she is thinking” (1). There is the link between

narrative and spirituality but also between the power of story and the very making

of the world: if Thought Woman called the world into being by thinking, as

Pueblo tradition has it, and if Thought Woman is similarly thinking this story into

being, then the story itself is a kind of world, or has the power to create one. (Sol

30-31)

Subsequent poems on pages two and three reinforce this idea, educating the reader about the

essential importance of story to life. Tayo’s story is the basic plot of the novel in the Western

sense: it could be summarized as the healing of Tayo, a traumatized World War II veteran who

returns to his Laguna Pueblo reservation home after being hospitalized for, but not cured of, a

debilitating illness. But it is Silko’s embedding of stories within stories that carries the main plot,

not from beginning to middle to end as Aristotle would have it, but from beginning to end to

beginning with a masterful use of middles throughout, a non-Western approach. This circular

organization is further manifested in the structure of the healing ceremony that medicine man,

Betonie, performs for Tayo, as critic Robert C. Bell explains: “Through repetition and

recapitulation, the novel itself describes a circular design going into and out of the hoop

ceremony at the center of the book” (25).

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The presentation of time as Tayo experiences it in the story, and consequently, as the

reader must be willing to experience it, is due in great part, to the merger of the two major types

of stories Silko incorporates. These types are, as critic Elaine Jahner describes, “timeless and

time-bound” or “contemporary and mythical” (43). Along with Tayo, the reader must make

connections between the events of the myths and the events of his life, between the events of the

past and those of the present. Silko thereby promotes the Native American worldview that the

chronological aspect of time is of little importance (Weaver 217). In an interview Silko remarked

on the concept of historical time: “I just grew up with people who followed, or whose world

vision was based on a different way of organizing human experience, natural cycles” (Coltelli

242). She continued by explaining how her use of “narratives within narratives within narratives”

takes the “ultimate control” out of the hands of the narrator and puts it into the hands of the

stories themselves (Coltelli 244). The readers can then become actors in the stories, not merely

passive audiences. Silko explains how her upbringing influenced how she wishes her stories to

be experienced by the reader:

One of the things I was taught to do from the time I was a little child was to listen

to the story about you personally right now. To take all of that in for what it

means right now, and for what it means to the future. But at the same time to

appreciate how it fits in with what you did yesterday, last week… (Coltelli 244)

Silko would have her readers take Tayo’s story personally, communing with her character and

his stories, experiencing Tayo’s reality with him.

In addition to the embedding of stories, Silko associates the circular structure of the novel

to the Laguna concept of time in other ways. Critic Louis Owens points to several examples: the

Mexican infinity symbol branded on the mixed blood cattle; the layers of old calendars, which
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are out of chronological order; and the assortment of Betonie’s belongings, which form a pattern

of circles around the room (183). Richard Fleck, in the introduction to his Critical Perspectives

on Native American Fiction, writes that Silko also uses stream-of-consciousness to give the

reader a sense of a non-linear “geological layering of time through Tayo’s river of thoughts” (3).

Perhaps the linkage of Pueblo concept of time and the webbed stories are best explained in

Tayo’s own thoughts. He is remembering a day before the war when he and his uncle Josiah

were in the valley. Tayo woke early to meet the sunrise and performed his own created ceremony

to induce rain:

Everywhere he looked, he saw a world made of stories, the long ago, time

immemorial stories, as old Grandma called them. It was a world alive, always

changing and moving; and if you knew where to look, you could see it, sometimes

almost imperceptible, like the motions of the stars across the sky. (Silko 95)

As he observes the world around him, alive with blue dragonflies and pregnant spiders, Tayo

feels the truth of his grandmother’s teaching.

Just as Silko’s distinctive literary techniques in Ceremony challenge the reader to

discover the plot, her choices also help the reader to explore some important themes. For

example, her use of mixed genre complements her ideas about mixed-blood American Indians

who often struggle with greater difficulty, or at least differently, than full-bloods do. Racism

prevails against them both on and off the reservation. On the reservation, Tayo is keenly aware,

thanks to Auntie’s constant reminders, of the shame his mother brought to the family for mixing

with white men, including Tayo’s unidentified father, and Tayo’s fellow war veteran Emo taunts

him for possessing white blood (Silko 57). Off the reservation, especially in riverbanks near

Gallup, New Mexico, Tayo witnesses the racist oppression of Native people, many of them
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mixed-bloods (Silko 115). However, Owens observes that, although Tayo is typical of many

mixed-bloods depicted in American Indian literature who are “lost between cultures and

identities,” Silko ultimately portrays this mixed-blood as “a rich source of power and something

to be celebrated rather than mourned” (26). Likewise, Old Betonie, also a green-eyed, mixed-

blood Navajo Indian, is a more powerful medicine man in healing the World War II veteran than

the Laguna traditionalist, Old Ku’oosh, who initially tries a Scalp Ceremony even though it has

already proven unsuccessful for other war veterans (Silko 38). Betonie, who lives on the edge of

several worlds—the Pueblo and Navajo reservations and the American city of Gallup—

recognizes the contemporary world in which Native Americans live and incorporates things from

the White world into his curative ceremonies, such as calendars and telephone books. Silko does

credit Ku’oosh with enough wisdom to know his traditional practices to be inadequate, but she

uses the wisdom of mixed-blood, non-Pueblo Betonie to promote the idea that ceremonies and

stories must change in the same way that the people’s circumstances change. The cures must

keep pace. Betonie knows this; Tayo learns it from him:

The people nowadays have an idea about the ceremonies. They think the

ceremonies must be performed exactly as they have always been done…But long

ago when the people were given these ceremonies, the changing began, if only in

the aging of the yellow gourd rattle or the shrinking of the skin around the eagle’s

claw, if only in the different voices from generation to generation, singing the

chants. You see, in many ways ceremonies have always been changing. (Silko

126)

Betonie’s adaptation of the traditional ceremonies reflects his willingness to risk the “mistrust”

of the people, but he tells Tayo that “only this growth keeps the ceremonies strong” (Silko 126).
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As part of the curative ceremony for Tayo, Betonie urges him to seek Josiah’s runaway cattle.

This stronger breed of cattle is a surviving breed, a mixed-breed, symbolic of Tayo’s strength

and survival, and perhaps offered by Silko as a key to the survival of the Laguna or other Native

people. Betonie, in “a vision of stars, cattle, a woman, and a mountain,” lays out a story for Tayo

to live (Silko 186). Tayo proceeds to follow Betonie’s vision, “not expecting to find anything

more than the winter constellation in the north sky overhead; but suddenly Betonie's vision was a

story he could feel happening - from the stars and the woman, the mountain and the cattle would

come” (Silko 186). Bell suggests, “Tayo’s search for the cattle becomes the mythical hero’s

quest for wholeness,” demonstrating that “natural and supernatural” worlds, temporal and

mythical worlds meld in Tayo’s completion of the healing ceremony (26). The mixing of blood,

of cultures, of worlds combines to create strength and power for those willing to live the stories.

As Tayo lives Betonie’s vision, he realizes the power of stories to bring forth reality, a

traditional way of being and understanding that Silko’s mix of myth and narrative perpetuates.

The stories, considered in this context, compete for Tayo’s life, pitting lovers against liars,

creators against destroyers. Tayo recognizes Emo as a destroyer. A man who plays with the

human teeth of an enemy soldier and delights in his identification, no matter how tenuous, with

the United States Army and its mortars, grenades, and flame-throwers (Silko 62), “Emo fed off

each man he killed” (61). Silko creates a new poem for the Emoes—the destroyers and liars—of

Tayo’s world, a poem that does not affirm the Laguna Pueblo’s identity, but denies it when the

main character in the poem, presumably Emo, lies in order to seduce the white women in the bar

(57-59). Owens writes that Emo and other destructive forces in the novel weave “overall

witchery” ceremonies which are “conducted in places such as bars and pickup trucks” and serve

to prevent Tayo from healing (171). But Tayo has a spirit that is often able to recognize and
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name evil even though he may not know what to do about it. Betonie defines evil for Tayo as

“trickery of the witchcraft” (Silko 132). He explains that white people, whose cities, machines,

foods, and innate respect Emo covets, were inventions of “Indian witchery” (Silko 132). A

mythical poem, which Lori Burlingame writes “is the only myth in the novel that Silko

originated and that does not have a counterpart in Pueblo mythology” (8), relates the origins of

white people, saying that whites were created as part of a “contest in dark things” (Silko 133). A

variety of witches from different tribes competes for the greatest display of witchery. Some boil

babies in blood, others display amputated human parts of a most intimate nature, but one witch

does not use material manifestations of power. Instead, the winning witch tells a story. As stories

have the power to do, the witch’s tale brings the destroyers of the earth, the white people, to life

(Silko 131-38). Yet, Betonie relates this myth, not to confirm a misguided and detrimental but

common idea among Native people that whites are the root of evil and the cause of all Indian ills,

but rather to reinforce what Tayo has already grown to suspect. To continue to blame whites for

the troubles of Native Americans is to aid and abet his people’s bewitching. Betonie reassures

Tayo that they “can deal with the white people” who are a creation of the Indian stories, and that

the solution will not be found in separation from them as that only leads to destruction (Silko

132).

Silko’s combination of narrative and poetry depicts another powerful symbol of

destruction and its significance to Tayo’s healing. It is the place where Tayo rejoices at “finally

seeing the pattern,” and where he will conclude his ceremony in triumph over the witchery (Silko

246). This site, an abandoned uranium mine, is located between two additional prime sites of

destruction: the place where the first atomic bomb was invented and the place where it was

tested. In this place, a “circle of death that devoured people in cities twelve thousand miles
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away” unites all of mankind—Indians, whites, Japanese, all races—with the common threat of

destruction (Silko 246). When he arrives at this place after escaping from the potentially deadly

clutches of Emo’s thugs, Leroy and Harley, “the old stories, the war stories, their stories” and the

story “that was still being told” all come into perspective for Tayo (Silko 246). He believes he

only needs to “keep the story out of the hands of the destroyers” a little longer in order to

complete his ceremony (Silko 247). Like Jesus in the wilderness, Tayo, during his night watch, is

tempted by the witchery. It would ask him to become a destroyer himself, to bash in Emo’s skull

the way that the Japanese had bashed in his brother/cousin Rocky’s skull in the beginning of the

novel, to fight evil with evil as he witnesses his so-called friends obliterate one another in their

own ceremony of destruction in this anti-holy place. He knows to succumb would give the

destroyers more excuses to condemn the Indian, and would give the Indian more excuses to

condemn himself. He would be responsible for completing a ceremony of witchery. In one of her

less enigmatic discourses in the book, Silko’s narration describes Tayo’s conclusions:

Their deadly ritual for the autumn solstice would have been completed by him. He

would have been another victim, a drunken Indian war veteran settling an old

feud; and the Army doctors would say that the indications of this end had been

there all along, since his release from the mental ward at the Veterans’ Hospital in

Los Angeles. The white people would shake their heads, more proud than sad that

it took a white man to survive in their world and that these Indians couldn’t seem

to make it. At home the people would blame liquor, the Army, and the war, but

the blame on the whites would never match the vehemence the people would keep

in their own bellies, reserving the greatest bitterness and blame for themselves, for

one of themselves they could not save. (253)

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But Tayo, now seeing the patterns, diagnoses himself as never having been crazy (Silko 246). He

also sees himself as part of something much larger than one individual’s struggle for survival;

therefore, he does not participate in the cycle of destruction in the novel’s climax. Silko’s

interjection of a Laguna myth at the point in the novel when Tayo knows he must protect the

story from the destroyers for the night correlates Tayo—the witness and watchman, the one who

can tell the story, the one with memories—with the observer in the poem who prevents the

witchman’s evil magic from being more than partially fulfilled: “‘Something is wrong,’ [the

witchman] said. ‘Ck’o’yo magic won’t work if someone is watching us’” (Silko 247). The evil

circles back on itself in the end: “Its own witchery has returned all around it” (Silko 261). This

place becomes holy, now a chief part of Tayo’s ceremony.

Competing with powers of lies and destruction are stories of creation and love that are

essential to Tayo’s ceremony. Besides Ku’oosh and Betonie, there are a number of persons who

help Tayo on his journey, most significantly, a woman whom Tayo encounters as Betonie

envisioned. She is Ts’eh, whom Paula Allen Gunn explains is “the matrix, the creative and life-

restoring power” and the “feminine principle of creation” (233). In looking for the cattle, Tayo

encounters this ocher-eyed female (Silko 177). They commence a sexual affair that is so

powerful and healing for Tayo that he rejoices in living and breathing (Silko 181). Silko

interjects a “Sunrise!” song of praise as though to celebrate with Tayo in this reaffirmation of

life, this awakening (182). Throughout the remainder of the novel, she uses a repetitious

association of the sunrise with wellness as Tayo and Ts’eh often rise before dawn (181). Later,

though they are physically apart, in dreaming of her, Tayo is awakened with “the first dim light”

and offers a prayer to the sunrise (Silko 215-16). Simply remembering the woman’s love is the

same as experiencing her love when Tayo returns to his Auntie’s house, and again, a rainy dawn
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accompanies his thoughts of her (Silko 218). Ts’eh is not simply a perfect lover for Tayo,

however. A visionary like Betonie, she warns Tayo of destructive forces that are moving to

pursue him. Also like Betonie, she clarifies that it is not the white men who are the true enemy,

but rather Emo and Tayo’s fellow Native American war veterans who mean to hunt him down

(Silko 232). After escaping the destructive ceremony at the mine shaft and completing his

healing ceremony, renewed and purified, Tayo goes to the Ku’oosh and other tribal elders to

share his story. Of all the stories he has lived in his journey to wholeness, it is his story of the

woman who peaks the elders’ interest: What color were her eyes? From which direction did she

come? Silko answers with a poem to show that the elders interpret Tayo’s encounter with Ts’eh

as a spiritual blessing awaiting them all (Silko 257). The love is not contained to Tayo, but

extends to his community, restoring him to their common humanity. Through Tayo, Silko holds

out hope for Native Americans who struggle to live in a contemporary world. Following the

death (at least for now) of the witchery, Silko’s sunrise poem ends the novel, giving both the last

and the first word to creation, to love.

Tayo’s story becomes a love offering to the sunrise of the next morning. By telling the

story Thought-Woman is thinking in Ceremony, Silko shares, not a typical novel’s narrative of

one thing occurring after another, but the arrangement of a ceremony. In experiencing Tayo’s

story through the combination of traditional oral myths with narrative prose in a presentation that

defies linear time, Silko creates a masterful novel that is greater than the sum of its parts. The

reader is brought into the ceremony and can consider the possibility of Tayo’s tale as a single

day, a mythic day, a real day.

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Works Cited

Allen, Paula Gunn. “The Feminine Landscape of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony.” Critical

Perspectives on Native American Fiction. Washington, DC: Three Continents P, 1993.

Bell, Robert C. “Circular Design in Ceremony.” Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony: A Casebook.

Ed. Allan Chavkin. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.

Brown, Alana Kathleen. “Pulling Silko’s Thread Through Time: An Exploration of Storytelling.”

American Indian Quarterly. 19 (1995): 171-79.

Burlingame, Lori. “Empowerment through ‘Retroactive Prophecy’ in D’Arcy McNickle’s

Runner in the Sun: A Story of Indian Maize, James Welch’s Fools Crow, and Leslie

Marmon Silko’s Ceremony.” American Indian Quarterly. 24.1 (2000): 1-18.

Coltelli, Laura. “Leslie Marmon Silko.” Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony: A Casebook. Ed.

Allan Chavkin. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.

Fleck, Richard F. Introduction. Critical Perspectives on Native American Fiction. Washington,

DC: Three Continents P, 1993.

Harmon, William, and Hugh Holman. A Handbook to Literature. 9th ed. Upper Saddle River, NJ:

Prentice Hall, 2003.

Jahner, Elaine. “Event Structure in Ceremony.” Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony: A Casebook.

Ed. Allan Chavkin. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.

Owens, Louis. Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. Norman, OK: U of

Oklahoma P, 1992.

Piper, Karen. “Police Zones: Territory and Identity in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony.”

American Indian Quarterly. 21 (1997): 483-97.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Penguin, 1977.

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Sol, Adam. “The Story as It’s Told.” American Indian Quarterly. 23.3-4 (1999): 24-62.

Weaver, Jace. “Leslie Marmon Silko.” Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony: A Casebook. Ed. Allan

Chavkin. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.