• MOMADAY’S GENRES
• AUTHORS FREQUENTLY STUDIED WITH MOMADAY
• LITERARY MOVEMENTS
• THEMES
• NOTES

ORAL NARRATIVE

In a conversation with Charles L. Woodard, responding to a question about writing and the oral tradition, Momaday stated that “there is a tendency when you’re talking about oral tradition to want to distinguish it as much as you can from written traditions, and of course the distinctions are real, but I think at some point the two traditions come very close together, and perhaps merge.” Indeed, given his reliance on characteristics of the oral tradition in his writing, oral narrative is possibly the single most important genre for Momaday. As ironic as this might seem for an artist of the written word, he maintains that the “oral tradition helps us to understand that words are more valuable than we have been led to believe. It demonstrates the importance of memory and the importance of listening carefully.”¹ Susan Berry Brill de Ramirez makes a similar point in a discussion of Momaday: “we cannot really draw strict and definitive lines between those literatures that are oral versus those that are textual, nor should we want to.”² Similarly, Arnold Kru-pat notes the inevitability of invoking the oral in American Indian literatures: “the texts of Native American literatures are not only theoretically but also in practice what we may call oral texts” (Krupat’s emphasis).³ As de Ramirez interprets it, “any approach to American Indian literatures must take into account their orality.”⁴

Perhaps the most important defining characteristic of an oral tradition is that stories transmitted aurally (for example, from parent or grandparent to child) are always only one generation from extinction. As Momaday has noted, “There’s always the very tenuous link between being and nonbeing in the oral tradition. If the word is lost, it is lost forever.”⁵ A second crucial characteristic of the oral narrative is that it is a verbal art, which means that it involves a performance, often imbued with spiritual or ritual importance, which is staged before an audience. The telling occurs at a specific time and is done by authorized storytellers in appropriate places. It is not necessarily the case that vibrant oral traditions exist only in nonliterate cultures. As a study of Momaday’s use of the genre demonstrates, an oral tradition survives, and in fact thrives, among highly literate Native American cultures. As Kathleen Manley argues, Momaday’s style in House Made of Dawn recalls an oral tradition. In Ben Benally’s account (a first-person narration in which he addresses his audience with the second-person pronoun, you), Momaday has Ben speak in various voices that give the reader a sense of different realities. Manley also points out that in The Names Momaday recalls an oral tradition by providing a multilevel (or hypertextual) context for his autobiographical text.⁶ As he tells stories about his family and includes photographs of family members, for example, he creates a context of family that invites and includes the reader.

According to H. David Brumble III in his American Indian Autobiography (1988), Momaday “will write autobiography after the fashion of an oral storyteller,"⁷ and the author himself has argued that The Way to Rainy Mountain relies heavily on oral tradition: “The voices in that book are very important.”⁸ In his 1970 essay “The Man Made of Words,” Momaday reveals that the two narrative voices following the mythical voice in each chapter serve “to validate the oral tradition to an extent that might not otherwise be possible. The commentaries are meant to provide a context in which the elements of oral tradition might transcend the categorical limits of prehistory, anonymity, and archaeology in the narrow sense.”⁹ The form of The Way to Rainy Mountain is in large part reliant on oral narrative (especially because, for the most part, each numbered chapter contains a written version of an orally transmitted story). According to Alan R. Velie, “The Way to Rainy Mountain is a testament to the power of the word, and to the Indian oral tradition.”¹⁰

Critics have also argued that elements of oral tradition are important to House Made of Dawn. Especially significant are the roles of Tosamah and Benally, who use their oral skills quite effectively.¹¹ Tosamah’s two sermons, of course, are drawn from an oral tradition. Benally recalls the traditional Navajo healing chants, but he also tells Abel how it will be when they are together again at Walatowa. Ben recounts what he told Abel as his friend left the city for home: “Look out for me, I said; look out each day and listen for me. And we were going together on horses to the hills. We were going to ride out in the first light to the hills. . . . We were going to be all alone, and we were going to get drunk and sing. We were going to sing about the way it always was. And it was going to be right and beautiful. It was going to be the last time” (189-190). Through Ben’s use of indirect quotation in this passage, Momaday includes the reader as audience much as Ben includes Abel. This inclusion echoes the way narratives in the oral tradition work on audiences.

Momaday’s reliance on and use of oral tradition is also central to his 1989 novel, The Ancient Child. The prologue—which sets the stage for the development of the plot and the dramatic conflict of the novel—retells the Kiowa legend of Tsoai (Rock-Tree, now called Devils Tower), a story handed down orally over generations. The account of the seven sisters and their brother who becomes the bear was presented earlier in The Way to Rainy Mountain, of course. Momaday’s use of the Billy the Kid episodes in the novel also draws on the oral-narrative tradition. He relates Grey’s” ‘memorial,’ which otherwise bore the title ‘The Strange and True Story of My Life with Billy the Kid’” (175). Through his narrative retelling, Momaday contributes to the legend of Billy the Kid. His later use of these episodes as a section of his 1992 collection, In the Presence of the Sun, suggests that the story is not finished. As in the oral tradition, the story needs to be told and retold in new contexts for new audiences and ultimately for new purposes. As Momaday once said in an interview, “I don’t want to repeat myself in a negative sense, that is, to say the same thing again, but I have no hesitation in taking something that I have written before and building upon it in another work.”¹²

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American Indian autobiography became very popular among non-Indian readers. Part of the interest no doubt owed something to European Americans’ desire to preserve in print what they saw as the vanishing cultures of the Native Americans and the vanishing “noble savages” themselves. This popularity resulted in part from widespread interest in native cultures among anthropologists and ethnographers. They were spread out across North America, investigating Indian cultures and languages, and as they studied various indigenous cultures, they recorded many life stories. Autobiography—including life stories transcribed by listeners—became an important genre. During this same era, Native Americans were learning to read and write English in ever-greater numbers and were thus able to write their own stories. Another factor encouraging the spate of American Indian autobiographies was the popularity of slave narratives that had swept onto the literary scene beginning in the mid nineteenth century.

Autobiography as understood in the Western world had been a genre foreign to most Native American cultures. According to Krupat and Brian Swann in the introduction to I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers (1987), the notion of an organized life story based on a unifying principle or interplay of events and demonstrating the subject’s internal growth certainly was not a part of the oral tradition of any native North American culture: “That form of writing generally known to the West as autobiography had no equivalent among the oral cultures of the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas.”¹³ Nonetheless, the ancient Native American art of storytelling does have autobiographical elements. As Kathleen Sands argues, “autobiography is a personal genre that examines in depth the motives, actions, attitudes, and qualities of an individual within the network of family and tribe,” and such examination is found among Native American cultures.“The American Indian autobiography centers on personal experience, but the subject, no matter how dominant within the culture, is a participant in his or her own family history and in the events of the tribe.”¹⁴ Still, “In traditional Native American culture,” writes William Bloodworth, “autobiography as a form of expression is limited mainly to coup stories, stories that explain an individual’s name, and narrative elements in oratory and prophecy.”¹⁵ Similarly, although he does not mention Momaday in his book For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American Autobiography (1985), Krupat notes that “Strictly speaking... Indian autobiography is a contradiction in terms. Indian autobiographies are collaborative efforts, jointly produced by some white who translates, transcribes, compiles, edits, interprets, polishes, and ultimately determines the form of the text and by an Indian who is its subject whose life becomes the content of the ‘autobiography.’” American Indian autobiography as Krupat understands it is an “original bicultural composite composition.”¹⁶ Momaday’s composition is indeed bicultural, maintains A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff, who writes that he “combines Wordsworthian literary tradition with American Indian oral traditions.”¹⁷

In the introduction to An Annotated Bibliography of American Indian and Eskimo Autobiographies (1981) Brumble writes that “hundreds of Indians in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries delivered themselves of narratives in modes to which they were unused, often including topics they regarded as taboo.” He observes that “Momaday is very much a part of Western culture,” yet “no Indian autobiographer before Momaday wrote with such a rich awareness of this Indian autobiographical literature.”¹⁸ Brumble argues that Momaday is a master at making the oral tradition appropriate for written autobiography; thus, much as Momaday combines the oral and written traditions, he also combines Western and Native American forms of autobiography.

AUTHORS FREQUENTLY STUDIED WITH MOMADAY

BLACK ELK

Both as autobiographers and as important storytellers for their respective tribes and eras, the Kiowa Momaday and the Lakota Sioux Black Elk (Hehaka Sapa) are eminently comparable. Through telling their stories to primarily non-Native audiences, both have become spokesmen not only for their tribes but also for Native Americans in general. Like Momaday, Black Elk was an artist as well as an able storyteller. According to Kenneth Lincoln, both artists “find their place in an ancestry, an eco-logical setting, and a set of cultural definitions that inform tribal behavior through time.”¹⁹ In a chapter titled “Word Senders: Black Elk and N. Scot Momaday,” Lincoln argues that as storytellers both Black Elk and Momaday have served as mediators between and as translators of European American and Native American worldviews. Momaday has identified the importance of Black Elk’s 1932 autobiography, Black Elk Speaks; he believes that the document “tells us of ourselves and of all humankind. I am interested in the universal elements of the narrative, first as an example of oral tradition, then as literature.”²⁰

Even though Black Elk was from a different tribe and era than Momaday, Lincoln finds that “the continuity of acculturating Plains Indian traditions stretches between them”; although they differ because they “represent old and new Indian ‘artistic’ voices,” both are “word senders.” Lincoln suggests that the autobiographies of both Momaday and Black Elk show a “reverence for the land, the elders, the traditions, and the spirits,” and Momaday’s poetry, with its evocation of a reality mixed with vision and shadow, its sure sense of propriety, and its articulation of loss, recalls the mood of Black Elk’s “world yonder.” As Lincoln describes it, an “unspoken poetry underlies Black Elk’s vision of the ‘real’ reality, a place unnamed, intangible, and out of reach here and now.” Momaday’s description of the Tai-me in The Way to Rainy Mountain echoes the familial tone achieved by Black Elk when he includes all of earth’s creatures, human and nonhuman, in his account of the creation. In addition to Momaday’s poetry and early autobiographical works (Lincoln does not mention The Names), House Made of Dawn also shares similarities with Black Elk Speaks. The final image of Abel singing silently, for example, “could well represent the moving oral traditions of Black Elk’s visionary plains people and Scott Momaday’s adaptive ‘way’ into modern literary forms.”²¹

Lincoln also compares the poetry of Momaday with Black Elk’s narrative. Despite a prevalent theme of darkness, Lincoln does identify a “visionary transience” in Momaday that is reminiscent of Black Elk’s own notion of a “native life-spirit” that promises regeneration. Despite occasional specific points of reference, the basis of Lincoln’s comparison of Momaday’s poetry and Black Elk’s narrative relies more on Lincoln’s subjective sense of underlying similarities than on specific identifiable passages: “An unspoken poetry underlies Black Elk’s vision of the ‘real’ reality, a place unnamed, intangible, and out of reach here and now. To name something is an act of possession, traveling the Black Road of this shifting world; to touch and fix anything spiritlessly is potentially to lose it, demean it, finally not to touch it all.”²²

In contrast to Lincoln, Bloodworth does not compare Momaday and Black Elk but rather Momaday and John G. Neihardt, the man who transcribed Black Elk Speaks. He argues that both writers produced life stories that are “genuine literary efforts.” The unifying link, Bloodworth suggests, is that both Momaday and Neihardt “attempt to remain true to the facts and the spirit of Indian culture,” and they both imagine and shape their respective storytellers in forms that are comprehensible primarily to a non-Indian audience. Despite these similarities with Neihardt, however, Bloodworth argues that Momaday differs significantly from Black Elk as Neihardt represents him . Unlike the Sioux elder, who, according Neihardt, lamented his failures and the broken circle of family, tribe, and culture, Momaday is “an unusually successful and well-assimilated Indian.”²³ Bloodworth does not account for the theme of loss that runs throughout The Way to Rainy Mountain, a theme that seems to parallel Neihardt’s interpretation of Black Elk’s own sense of loss.

Robert Berner argues that House Made of Dawn (as well as Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1977 novel Ceremony and James Welch’s 1974 novel Winter in the Blood) can be understood by applying Black Elk’s fundamental belief in a symbolic four-part movement through directions and seasons. According to Berner, all three novels “deal with a spiritual journey undertaken by a protagonist who begins in sterility and meaninglessness and passes through crises to achieve understanding.”²⁴ Finally, however, the most important thematic link between Momaday and Black Elk is that they have both offered important literary testaments to the enduring power of their visions and beliefs.

LESLIE MARMON SILKO

In his 1983 study American Indian Renaissance, Lincoln examines published American Indian literature from the previous two decades, suggesting, in essence, that the renaissance began with Indian writers of the 1960s, seminal among whom was Momaday. Inevitably, in Lincoln’s view, the works of important later American Indian writers must be compared with House Made of Dawn, the semi-autobiographical The Way to Rainy Mountain, and Momaday’s first poetry collection, Angle of Geese and Other Poems. Preeminent among these “later” writers, if later by only a few years, are Silko and Welch.

Like House Made of Dawn, Silko’s first novel, Ceremony, portrays a character who suffers a postwar trauma in a story that begins with his coming home to the reservation. An obvious point of comparison is the similarity between the protagonists, Abel and Tayo, two Indian veterans of World War II who feel displaced and confused when they return. Also comparable are the roles that family and ceremony play in both novels. Krupat deems Momaday “the presumptive groundbreaker or forefather” of subsequent American Indian literature, arguing, perhaps too severely, that Ceremony is “heavily dependent” on House Made of Dawn. He suggests that Silko’s Storyteller (1981), a collection of stories, poems, and photography, is “perhaps no more than a rerun of ... The Names.”²⁵ What Krupat does not note is that although Silko’s collection shares structural similarities with The Names, and although both books use photographs as a part of the storytelling, Storyteller includes poetry and short stories, neither of which are found in The Names. Because Silko’s novel includes freestanding poems and stories, it is not an autobiography in the way The Names is; it is rather an anthology.

In “Liminality and Myth in Native American Fiction: Ceremony and The Ancient Child” (1996) Karen Wallace argues that both novels follow the line of reasoning that marginalization from mainstream culture opens possibilities for seeing and creating: “By gaining competence in their tribal communities, the protagonists also acquire a renewed and secure sense of self that allows them to participate successfully in the dominant culture as well.” Their very marginalization offers a site of resistance through which they are “successful in incorporating these aspects of their tribal heritages to redefine and affirm who indians [sic] are without qualification.”²⁶ According to Wallace, both novels depict protagonists who are “psychically split between cultures” and must undergo a healing process that brings them back into a Native American context. This process ultimately comes across as an affirmation of the characters’ ability both to reenter a traditional world and assimilate the crucial elements of the “outside” world.

Actual points of comparison between Ceremony and The Ancient Child are many. In Silko’s novel Tayo turns to an old medicine man, Betonie, and later has a somewhat visionary encounter with a spirit woman, Ts’eh, who has mystical healing powers. In The Ancient Child Set travels with Grey, who, though young, has studied, been instructed in, and imbibed ancient Kiowa culture and medicine. Both novels have a somewhat mythic structure, and both novelists create (or reiterate) important legends: Silko presents Thought Woman or Spider Woman, for example, and Momaday shows Set encountering the bear legend. According to Wallace, the novels also deal with cultural “factors that necessitate acculturation” on the part of the protagonists because they realize, ultimately, that outside factors are not solely to blame for their hardships but that “failure comes finally from within.” Both Momaday and Silko, asserts Wallace, attempt “to resolve the conflicts of the mixed-blood by melding the traditions of native and Anglo America.”²⁷ In addition to portraying the problems associated with having mixed blood, Momaday and Silko reveal their “concern with alcohol abuse.” For Momaday and Silko, “alcohol emerges as an important part of the larger tragedy of Indian social and cultural fragmentation.” But in each case, Nicholas Warner argues, the authors affirm that their protagonists “transform bondage and illness into freedom and health.”²⁸

If the reintegration of an estranged male protagonist is a major theme in both Momaday’s and Silko’s novels, so is the way each author presents what Judith Antell calls the feminine principle. With reference to Paula Gunn, who first developed this concept, Antell writes that the feminine principle Alien, “acknowledges and supports the ancient power of Indian women in tribal life.” Antell argues that the alienated man in each novel is separated from women and that women convey culture: “Through women’s ritual, song, and story as well as through women’s material culture, tribal information is transmitted from one generation to another.”²⁹ These protagonists have lost their mothers through death or abandonment; they have no close relationships with other female relatives; and they have no healthy or sustained relationships with girlfriends or wives. Insofar as women keep the ritual formulas for wellness, connection with the female principle through women must precede any restoration of spiritual harmony.

Another important point of comparison comparison between Momaday and Silko is their literary relationship with and use of landscape. According to Robert M. Nelson, in both House Made of Dawn and Ceremony, the protagonists’ vision grows out of their sense of and commitment to place. In Ceremony the landscape, the geographical setting of the novel (Mount Taylor, Pa‘to’ch Butte, and other places), grounds the other two planes of Tayo’s healing, his personal experience and the story of the people. In House Made of Dawn, Nelson maintains, Abel must balance the sky medicine with the earth medicine in order to achieve his healing. His final acceptance of the earth medicine—embodied in culebra, the snake, as the sky medicine is embodied in the eagle—ultimately enables his recovery.³⁰

JAMES WELCH

After Silko, the Native American author most often compared with Momaday is Welch. Like Momaday, Welch graduated from a state university (the University of Montana in Welch’s case), did graduate work in English, and taught for a while. Like Momaday, he began his writing career with poetry, switched to prose, and eventually worked in several different genres: poetry, fiction, and history. Welch also gained national recognition during the early years of the American Indian renaissance, much as Momaday did for House Made of Dawn. Thematically Welch’s works have characteristics seen in Momaday’s as well. As a means of investigating his characters’ cultural identity, for example, he uses quest and twin motifs. Like Abel, in House Made of Dawn, Welch’s unnamed narrator in his first novel, Winter in the Blood, has a brother who dies young. Though not literally twins, such pairs recall the twin motifs in Indian legends.

In Winter in the Blood, Welch presents a young man who, like Abel in House Made of Dawn, has lost his father and brother and depends ultimately upon his maternal grandfather to discover his identity. As in the case of Abel, part of the journey for Welch’s unnamed narrator-protagonist includes excessive drinking, apparently meaningless sexual relation-ships with women he barely knows, and a feeling of alienation from his mother and other female relatives. Like Momaday, Welch investi-gates his tribal past, but rather than autobiography, Welch’s genre for this investigation is fiction. In the novel Fools Crow (1986) he re-creates the tribal life of a band of Blackfeet around 1870 and describes the impact of white immigration on his ancestors. Like Set in Momaday’s The Ancient Child, the title character of Welch’s The Indian Lawyer (1990) must balance his career in mainstream society with his personal and tribal past.

The scholarship comparing Momaday and Welch is similar to that comparing Momaday and Silko. Indeed, the three are often included in the same studies. An tell argues that, like Momaday and Silko, Welch presents characters who are alienated from the important female principle—mothers, other female relatives, and girlfriends or wives. Neither the narrator in Winter in the Blood nor Jim Loney in Welch’s The Death of Jim Loney (1979) is able to sustain a relationship with a girlfriend. The protagonists’ relation-ships with white women, Antell observes, “cannot ameliorate the ravages of estrangement from the feminine principle, which is tribally established and which informs all life.”³¹

Nelson also includes Welch in his discussion of landscape in Native American fiction. He argues that for Momaday, Silko, and Welch, landscape functions as a character and that it plays a role in the characters’ sense of well-being. Like Momaday, Welch centers his protagonists in a distinct landscape. As Nelson notes, “Put simply, Welch’s early novels, like those of Silko and Momaday, are designed to propose landscape as the source of cure for psychological and spiritual alienation.”³²

Velie also compares Momaday and Welch, suggesting that both House Made of Dawn and Winter in the Blood can be read as pro-test novels. Velie prefers, however, not to read them as such. In discussing the latter, he suggests that, unlike House Made of Dawn, which is not a humorous work, Winter in the Blood is a comic novel (which Velie defines simply as “a funny book”) in which Welch undercuts his protagonist’s dignity. According to Velie, then, Winter in the Blood differs importantly from Momaday’s much more serious first novel.³³

OTHER NOVELISTS

In addition to Native American authors, Momaday can be fruitfully compared with several of his favorite European and American authors. Momaday himself has cited Isak Dinesen as especially important to him. When she wrote about the African landscape, he says, “she created a place that probably doesn’t exist outside the pages of that book [Out of Africa]. And this may also be true of The Way to Rainy Mountain.”³⁴ In The Names Momaday quotes Dinesen to describe the exhilaration he felt on New Mexican mornings: “‘In the highlands you woke up in the morning and thought: here I am, where I ought to be’” (121).

Matthias Schubnell mentions several other authors whose styles and themes are similar to Momaday’s or who may have influenced him. Whether or not one can make a case for influence, several writers can be profitably compared with Momaday. In discussing The Names, for example, Schubnell mentions Albert Camus and Marcel Proust. More significant, perhaps, is William Faulkner, with whom Momaday shares a “belief that the past has a fateful bearing on the present.” Like Faulkner’s fiction, Momaday’s writings are grounded in place, and both authors work intimately with concepts of history and family tradition. With the Irish novelist James Joyce, Momaday shares a belief that language is not a reflection of reality but is reality itself. Especially noteworthy, argues Schubnell, is Momaday’s belief in the mythical implications of his own identity. Like the young Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), Momaday creates a character who is to some extent based on himself but also has mythic qualities. This is clearly evident in his emphasis on his having been named for Tsoai, Rock-Tree, in the context of the Kiowa transformation legend.³⁵

In the essay “Rainwitch Ritual” (1990) Polly Duryea argues that “Momaday is both a critic and a prophet of our time.”³⁶ She associates his writing with that of Willa Cather and D. H. Lawrence, comparing their similar use of the concept of the rainwitch—a woman with magical powers to bring about rainfall. Angela in House Made of Dawn possesses the power to make rain, and in this sense, Duryea argues, she recalls the protagonist of Lawrence’s “The Woman Who Rode Away” (1925). Grey in The Ancient Child has similar powers.

OTHER POETS

Although Momaday is best known and most studied for his prose, especially House Made of Dawn and The Way to Rainy Mountain, he has also produced a significant body of poetry. Some of his poems clearly reflect the influence of oral tradition and Navajo verse patterns. According to Schub-nell, Momaday’s poetry also has a place in “syllabic and postsymbolist” poetic tradition, sharing characteristics with the work of Paul Valery, Wallace Stevens, Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, and, of course, Yvor Winters, Momaday’s mentor at Stanford University. In Schubnell’s view, “Momaday shares Winters’s moral stance on literature,” and many of his poems actually “exemplify the postsymbolist method,” which involves “clarity of sensory perception coupled with abstract statement.” Like Valery, Stevens, and Tuckerman, Momaday addresses the question of death from a rationalist point of view. This rationalism is clearly evident in his early poem “Before an Old Painting of the Crucifixion” (1965). Like Stevens in his 1915 poem “Sunday Morning,” Momaday denies “the possibilities of transcendence and resurrection.”³⁷

Kenneth M. Roemer offers one of the few critical analyses of Momaday’s poetry other than Schubnell’s extended examination. Roemer compares Silko’s “Snow Elk” (1972) and Momaday’s “The Bear” (1961), pointing out the prevalence of a subcategory of contemporary Native American poetry that focuses on animals. He asserts that “The Bear”“is a dense Faulknerian reading experience,” noting that both Momaday’s bear and the one in Faulkner’s short story “The Bear” (1942) are scarred and have had their feet ruined by traps.³⁸ Both bears are gone without haste, without urgency. Roemer concludes that through its ambiguities and literary allusions, Momaday’s poem challenges stereo-types of Indian writers as children of nature.

There was relatively little poetry by American Indians published during the 1960s and early 1970s, when Momaday was most productive as a poet. Perhaps for this reason, he has not been much compared with later American Indian poets. Such scholarly comparisons are overdue. Certainly thematically, Momaday’s poems investigating the role of the landscape in his life can be fruitfully compared with the poetry of such Native American writers as Silko, Welch, Joy Harjo, Lucy Tapahonso, Simon Ortiz, Wendy Rose, and Ray A. Young Bear.

NATIVE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE

Perhaps the most significant literary movement with which Momaday has been grouped is that of the Native American renaissance. The publication of House Made of Dawn in 1968 and the Pulitzer Prize in fiction Momaday received for the novel the following year marked the beginning of national (and indeed an international) recognition of litera ture by Native Americans. It seems undeniable that Momaday’s early success paved the way for the many Native American writers whose works were published in the 1970s, perhaps most notably (because most successful) Silko, Welch, Ortiz, Louise Erdrich, and Gerald Vizenor.

Just what is meant by the notion of a Native American literary renaissance? Lincoln’s 1983 study Native American Renaissance serves as a critical focal point for the movement, and he argues that despite ties to Western influences, genres, and themes, “Grounded Indian literature is tribal: its fulcrum is a sense of relatedness.” Lincoln suggests that the literature of this renaissance “is a written renewal of oral traditions translated into Western literary forms.” It is regenerate: “transitional continuities emerging from the old.”³⁹ If Lincoln’s definition is accepted, Momaday clearly belongs to such a movement by virtue of his reliance on the techniques of oral narrative, his retelling of the old in new contexts and genres, and his use of traditional Western forms such as poetry, the novel, and autobiography.

The notion of a Native American literary renaissance inaugurated by House Made of Dawn has become so well established that in the 1990s Hartwig Isernhagen alluded to the idea in an interview question addressed to Momaday: “How—if you accept that House Made of Dawn stands at the beginning of a Native American renaissance—do you account for the seminal importance of the work?”⁴⁰ In Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel (1992) Louis Owens problema-tizes the Pulitzer committee’s wording in its announcement of the award, quoting the jurors’ words: the novel demonstrates “the arrival on the American literary scene of a matured, sophisticated literary artist from the original Americans.”⁴¹ Owens argues that the statement embodies colonial attitudes that continue to place the “original American” at the margin of an implied European American center. Nonetheless, Owens suggests that this recognition of Momaday’s first novel did indeed mark a seminal moment in American Indian literary history. Robert Warrior writes that the publication of House Made of Dawn (along with a few other books about American Indians, suchas Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee [1970]) “brought contemporary American Indian experience and political issues to widespread public attention.”⁴²

MODERNISM

One aspect of Momaday criticism, especially in regard to House Made of Dawn, is an ongoing investigation of whether he fits the modernist paradigm. Certainly, whichever side of the debate one comes down on, critics have acknowledged certain modernist characteristics in Momaday’s work. Although he ultimately argues for a different sort of sophistication in House Made of Dawn, Owens acknowledges that it “would seem ... to contain the requisite elements of a work assimilable into the modernist canon.”⁴³

Strictly speaking, literary modernism is confined to writings from between the two world wars, but many of the characteristics of the movement help to define post-World War II literature as well. Several of these characteristics reflect a general uneasiness on the part of writers with American society and politics. As a result of World War I, there was an apparent fragmentation of coherent reality, and because of the Depression there was a loss of faith in the infallibility of the capitalist economy. The urbanization of America and the loosening of sexual mores also affected the literature of the modernist era. To reflect this general uneasiness, modernist authors created discontinuous narratives, employed stream-of-consciousness narrative styles, and offered a variety of different voices and perspectives. Many characteristics prevalent in the works of noted modernist writers—such as T. S. Eliot, Faulkner, and Eugene O’Neill—are seen as late as the literature of the 1960s and show up as well in Momaday’s writings. The modernist period seems to have been characterized by solipsism and a lack of hope. For the modernist, the past was dead, God was dead, and people were alienated from their communities. It was an era characterized by individual perceptions, nihilism, and existentialism.

Modernist literature reflected the social and political climate of the period. The perceived incoherence, for example, is apparent in the juxtaposition of modern and classical allusions, combinations of languages, fragmentation, arbitrary form, and nonlinear narrative structure. In addition to a sense of fragmentation, modernist writers also depicted corrupt or impoverished urban settings and included previously taboo explicit sexual content. The protagonist in modernist works is often alienated and set apart by generational conflicts, violence, and a lack of respect for or participation in the American dream. Even though modernists often set their fiction in real (or at least realistic) cities or regions, because of the authors’ sense of fragmentation these places lack a coherent center or coherent space in which the protagonist can be at home, feel secure, or find a sense of purpose. This antirealist skepticism, as well as the use of a stream-of-consciousness style, reflects the characters’ sense of displacement and loss. Because the allusions and references in these works are often obscure and self-referential, many modernist texts force readers to generate meaning for themselves, and the endings are often ambiguous. This list of modernist characteristics almost seems a template to describe Momaday’s House Made of Dawn.

Unlike the modernists, many later, post-World War II writers moved beyond the cataloguing of alienation and fragmentation toward the development of a more tolerable fictional world. Although there remains a distrust in a unified voice or narrator, these later writers display a belief in the coherence of language. The speaker in Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” (1941), for example, takes the modernist position, arguing that

Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.⁴⁴

In contrast to Eliot’s speaker, Tosamah, the Priest of the Sun in House

Made of Dawn, says “’In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ It was the Truth, all right, but it was more than the Truth. The Truth was overgrown with fat, and the fat was God” (92). In the preface to In the Presence of the Sun Momaday also celebrates the word: “Words are names. To write a poem is to practice a naming ceremony. . . . And to confer a name is to confer being” (xix). For Momaday, then, words and names can be seen to retain or regain power, and they do “stay in place.”

Like the socialist fiction of the 1930s, the radical fiction of the 1960s depicted the struggle of minorities or working-class people to find liberation and social fulfillment. Beginning with works by the writers of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s, as well as later works by other minorities and women, writers protested against social inequalities and called for reform or even revolution. Out of this multiethnic literature came revisionist histories. They were told by the oppressed or disenfranchised rather than by the white, male writers who have traditionally been at the center of culture and politics. Because many writers of the 1960s and 1970s saw as part of their role the need to call for reform rather than merely to depict contemporary society, they moved away from some of the difficult structures and fragmentation of strict modernism. They began to write more- accessible literature, but because they recognized that their very message often opposed the rules of realism, they often relied on fragmentation, lyricism, and irony—characteristics that led away from accessibility.

Another important development beyond modernism in the postwar years was that the social and the political came to be seen as inter-twined. Whereas the modernist, in a strict interpretation of the movement, wrote from an ahistorical, enclosed frame of mind, many writers began to dispute the notion that the artist worked free from specific political or social concerns. According to Malcolm Bradbury, neorealism was a literature that spoke “as much to the sense of human exile and displacement as ... to the world of historical and social facts... . [I]t was a search for a vision that could relate an oppressed response to society and history to an awareness of individual loneliness, moral and transcendental hunger, and which in its quest for the reality of moral and existential existence often reached extremity or despair.”⁴⁵

It should be added that any such characterizations of a period or literary movement—as helpful as they may be in painting a picture of an era or of an author’s works—is necessarily reductive. In any close reading of Momaday’s texts, the reader will see that the parallels between them and representative modernist works begin to break down. Defining a literary movement is problematic in that it establishes or imposes a form or style and, of course, excludes what does not fit that form. If one is not careful, the narrative of the movement can become more important than the literary works themselves. When asked whether a writer should write for or against something, Momaday responded that “a writer has to have a mission. . . . He has to have an objective. He has to be writing for a pur-pose. In my case, I never did think of myself as writing for the purposes of reform, or I was never addressing myself to a particular group of people, and I was never writing against any specific thing.”⁴⁶

In “The Shattered Modernism of Momaday’s House Made of Dawn” (1996) Larry Landrum argues that scholarship concerning the novel has tended toward one of two kinds of assertions: the book is seen as either a modernist text in the European American tradition or as offering an authentic representation within the American Indian tradition. He argues that the “text’s strategy is not to infuse a modernist structure with an overlay of realism as most critics imply but to shatter the modernist display-case that represents cultural diversity without cultural substance.” According to Landrum, “the modernist signals and the Indian materials [are] discursively related,” and the text adapts a “wide range of cultural materials” while at the same time it retains a modernist structure and borrows from the modernist tradition of writers such as Eliot. In so doing, Landrum argues, the text achieves more than simply placing Native American culture in a modernist context. House Made of Dawn “evokes typical modernist practices only to craze the mirroring effects of their insularity.” That is, Momaday uses the conventions of modernism to call into question its assumptions. In this sense, according to Landrum, “the originality and significance of the text lies in its effort” to include Native American culture and portray elements of that culture as integral parts of the novel both artistically and thematically.⁴⁷ This argument suggests that Momaday’s portrayal of Indian culture helps both to define the structure of the novel and to clarify Abel’s process of healing.

In “N. Scott Momaday and the Use(s) of Modernism” (1997) Isern-hagen explores Momaday’s indebtedness to Winters, arguing that both are modernists, particularly because they affirm the need to judge, and that as artists they speak from positions of authority. Isernhagen suggests that Momaday “derives from the modernist tradition a view of language that he can use for a (re) construction of Indianness.” From Winters, Momaday derived “an abstract gesture of judging and a critical axiom that links poetic discourse with rational judgment.”⁴⁸ In a more postmodern critique, Kurt Spellmeyer posits that according to Momaday, words cannot have meaning until “they take on a power to explain the reader’s circumstances to himself.” Spellmeyer also maintains that for Momaday “words mean nothing outside the context of particular events,” and “the way events reveal themselves depends on the language we use.”⁴⁹

THEMES

In comparing prevalent themes in Momaday’s writing with those in the works of other writers, one sees significant overlap with discussions of genre and literary movement. Momaday’s novels share thematic similarities with those of Silko and Welch, as well as with those of other American Indian writers, such as D’Arcy McNickle. Themes associated with homecoming, searches for identity, and discovering or rediscovering the value of one’s native culture are all central to Momaday’s fiction and nonfiction. His development of these themes in some ways set the stage for other Native American writers to investigate similar issues. Perhaps the most important of these themes are Momaday’s insistence on his special relationship with the landscape, his privileging of the imagination, and his belief in the value of the word, both written and spoken, as it enables one to know one’s place in the world.

As has been pointed out by several critics and by Momaday him-self, the word is central to his sense of self and his writing. He begins his 1970 essay “The Man Made of Words” by insisting that “we are all made of words. . . . There is no way in which we can exist apart from the morality of a verbal dimension.” Thus, in response to his own question—

“What is an American Indian?”—he suggests that “an Indian is an idea which a given man has of himself. . . . And that idea, in order to be realized completely, has to be expressed.”⁵⁰

In order to explain what he means by this verbal dimension of a person’s existence, Momaday narrates a story about his experience upon finishing the writing of The Way to Rainy e Mountain. He recalls how he “had a sense of the magic of words”;: “Then it was that that ancient, one-eyed woman Ko-sahn stepped out of the language and stood before me on the page.” When he exclaims that he has imagined her and that she is not “really” in the room, she replies: “You imagine that I am here in this room, do you not? . . . You see, I have existence, whole being, in your imagination. It is but one kind of being, to be sure, but it is perhaps the best of all kinds.”⁵¹ With that proclamation, Ko-sahn, through Momaday, tells of the power and value of imagining, and the imagining comes about through language.

One can see this concept of the centrality of language (and of imagining and storytelling) in much of Momaday’s work. In The Way to Rainy Mountain, he states that the literal “way to Rainy Mountain is preeminently the history of an idea, man’s idea of himself, and it has old and essential being in language” (4). In House Made of Dawn Tosamah’s Sunday sermon is a telling of the way to Rainy Mountain (and the text became the introduction to The Way to Rainy Mountain). Again, the word is central: in reference to Devils Tower, for example, Tosamah says: “There are things in nature which engender an awful quiet in the heart of man” (131). Tosamah insists that man must account for this power: “He must never fail to explain such a thing to himself, or else he is estranged forever from the universe” (131). Another important role of the word in House Made of Dawn is seen in the way it is used “against” Abel at his trial for the murder of the albino: “Word by word by word these men were disposing of him in language, their language” (102).

In the epigraph to The Names, the very title of which suggests the crucial place of words and names in one’s identity, Momaday tells the reader that it was a storyteller who gave him his name, suggesting how he exists through language. His autobiography is “an act of the imagination... . This is one way to tell a story” (Momaday’s emphasis). Also crucial in regard to language and imagination is Momaday’s account of how his mother created her identity, how “she began to see herself as an Indian” (25), even though she was only one-eighth Cherokee. This incorporation of the word Indian into her sense of self was important in several ways; as Momaday suggests, it was a similar act of imagination through which he chose to see himself as Kiowa. His mother’s imaginative choice later enabled her to meet Momaday’s father. Thus, Momaday acknowledges a literal notion of coming into being through the power of his mother’s imagination and the power of the word.

The account of the centrality of language in Momaday’s life presented in In the Bear’s House shows a mature writer arguing a similar point to that made in The Names. Indeed, the book has a concept of the power of language at its center. Yahweh, the Creator, tells Urset that “you exist in your name and in the words that tell your story, as I exist in my name and in the story in which all other stories have origin and being” (18). It seems that, as far as Momaday is concerned, little has changed in the years between the writing of these two books.

In addition to his finding fundamental importance in a person’s relationship with language, Momaday insists that one’s self is intimately and reciprocally involved with the landscape. One’s being has everything to do with one’s relationship with the land. In the 1970 essay “An American Land Ethic” Momaday writes that “We Americans need ... to imagine who and what we are with respect to the earth and sky. I am talking about an act of the imagination essentially, and the concept of an American land ethic."⁵² In the 1976 essay “Native American Attitudes toward the Environment” he makes the connection between self and landscape more explicit: the American Indian is “someone who thinks of himself in a particular way and his idea comprehends his relationship to the physical world."⁵³ In The Way to Rainy Mountain Momaday makes a muchquoted statement about the land: “Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth” (52).

Readers can see this theme at work in several (perhaps all) of Momaday’s writings. One reading of House Made of Dawn, for instance, suggests that Abel’s healing ultimately depends on his coming to terms with his relationship with the earth, specifically with the snake medicine.⁵⁴ In her discussion of the concept of metalanguages as it relates to The Way to Rainy Mountain, Elaine Jahner articulates the importance of place and landscape for Momaday: the idea “belongs both to time and place; for where one is shapes a fundamental relationship between self and land that, in turn, leads to a particular way of formulating that relationship in language that corresponds to the matching of self and place."⁵⁵

In a sense, the whole of The Way to Rainy Mountain is about the Kiowa’s relationship with the land, beginning with the story of their crossing the prairies and coming to live in the shadow of Rainy Mountain, all of which parallels Momaday’s own life and quest. In The Names, too, landscape is of central importance. Momaday writes that at Jemez Pueblo, he was finally where he belonged. He elaborates on the importance of place when he ponders the expression “The events of one’s life take place. . . . Events do indeed take place; they have meaning in relation to the things around them. ... I existed in that landscape, and then my existence was indivisible with it. I placed my shadow there in the hills, my voice in the wind that ran there, in those old mornings and afternoons and evenings” (142; Momaday’s emphasis).

Though perhaps not as overtly as in House Made of Dawn, landscape is central to The Ancient Child. As Momaday told Woodard, “Most people cannot recover nature. . . . But this boy [Set] is an exception. He turns into a bear; that means he reconstructs that link with nature.”⁵⁶ Because Momaday believes that one’s identity depends on one’s relationship to where one is, it is fitting that a novel that begins with the question “Quienes?” (Who is it?) should have as its primary plot device a return to place: “In the clearing, he belonged. Everything there was familiar to him” (312). It is also significant that Set’s transformation, in which he becomes who he really is, takes place where the author himself was named—where, in a sense, he became who he imagines himself to be. The place is Tsoai, Rock-Tree (Devils Tower), and the man is named Tsoai-talee, Rock-Tree Boy. Place is thus at the center of Momaday’s sense of self and at the center of his life and fiction. By imaginatively combining that sense of self with an intense sense of place, Momaday has created who he is.

NOTES

1. Charles L. Woodard, Ancestral Voice: Conversations with N. Scott Momaday (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989) pp. 120-121.

2. Susan Berry Brill de Ramirez, Contemporary American Indian Literatures and the Oral Tradition (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999), p. 3.

3. Arnold Krupat, “Post-Structuralism and Oral Literature,” in Recovering the Word, edited by Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), p. 124.

4. de Ramirez, Contemporary American Indian Literatures and the Oral Tradition, p. 4.

5. Woodard, Ancestral Voice, p. 120.

6. Kathleen Manley, “Decreasing Distance: Contemporary Native American Texts, Hypertext, and the Concept of Audience,” Southern Folklore, 51, no. 2 (1994): 128. See also pp. 123-124.

7. H . David Brumble Ill, American Indian Autobiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 166.

8. Woodard, Ancestral Voice, p. 94.

9. N. Scott Momaday, “The Man Made of Words,” in Indian Voices, edited by Rupert Costo (San Francisco: Indian Historian Press, 1970), p. 59.

10. Alan R. Velie, Four American Indian Literary Masters: N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Gerald Vizenor (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982), p. 28.

11. See Manley, “Decreasing Distance,” pp. 123-124.

12. Hartwig Isernhagen, Momaday, Vizenor, Armstrong: Conversations on American Indian Writing (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), p. 65.

13. Swann and Krupat, introduction to I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers, edited by Swann and Krupat (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987), p. xi.

14. Kathleen Sands, “American Indian Autobiography,” in Studies in American Indian Literature: Critical Essays and Course Designs, edited by Paula Gunn Allen (New York: Modern Language Association, 1983), pp. 56, 57.

15. William Bloodworth, “Neihardt, Momaday, and the Art of Indian Autobiography,” in Where the West Begins: Essays on Middle Border and Siouxland Writing, in Honor of Herbert Krause, edited by Arthur R. Huseboe and William Geyer (Sioux Falls, S.D.: Center for Western Studies Press, 1978), p. 152.

16. Krupat, For Those Who Come After: A Study of Native American Autobiography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 30, 31.

17. A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff, American Indian Literatures: An Introduction, Bibliographic Review, and Selected Bibliography (New York: Modern Language Association, 1990), p. 60.

18. Brumble, An Annotated Bibliography of American Indian and Eskimo Autobiographies (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981), pp. 4, 5.

19. Kenneth Lincoln, Native American Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 107.

20. Momaday, “To Save a Sacred Vision,” in The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), pp. 22-23.

21. Lincoln, Native American Renaissance, pp. 83, 84, 95, 97, 101, 121.

22. Ibid., pp. 98, 101.

23. Bloodworth, “Neihardt, Momaday, and the Art of Indian Autobiography,” pp. 153, 156.

24. Robert Berner, “Trying to Be Round,” World Literature Today, 58 (Summer 1984): 342.

25. Krupat, The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), p. 177.

26. Karen Wallace, “Liminality and Myth in Native American Fiction: Ceremony and The Ancient Child,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal, 20, no. 4 (1996): 93.

27. Ibid., pp. 101, 104, 105.

28. Nicholas Warner, “Images of Drinking in ‘Woman Singing,’ Ceremony, and House Made of Dawn,” MELUS, 11 (Winter 1984): 27.

29. Judith Antell, “Momaday, Welch, and Silko: Expressing the Feminine Principle through Male Alienation,” American Indian Quarterly, 12 (Summer 1988): 213, 217.

30. Robert Nelson, Place and Vision: The Function of Landscape in Native American Fiction (New York: Peter Lang, 1993), p. 13.

31. Antell, “Momaday, Welch, and Silko,” p. 218.

32. Nelson, Place and Vision, p. 94.

33. Velie, Four American Indian Literary Masters, pp. 93-95.

34. Woodard, Ancestral Voice, p. 67.

35. Matthias Schubnell, N. Scott Momaday: The Cultural and Literary Background (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), pp. 173, 174-175.

36. Polly Duryea, “Rainwitch Ritual,” Journal of Ethnic Studies, 18 (Summer 1990): 72.

37. Schubnell , N. Scott Momaday, pp. 189-190, 202, 203, 211, 205.

38. Kenneth Roemer, “Bear and Elk: The Nature(s) of Contemporary Indian Poetry,” Journal of Ethnic Studies, 5, no. 2 (1977): 72, 74.

39. Lincoln, Native American Renaissance, p. 8.

40. Hartwig Isernhagen, “N. Scott Momaday and the Use(s) of Modernism,” in Aspects of Modernism: Studies in Honor of Max Nanny, edited by Andreas Fischer (Tubingen, Germany: Narr, 1997), p. 23.

41. Quoted in Louis Owens, Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992), p. 90.

42. Robert Warrior, Tribal Secrets: Recovering American Indian Intellectual Traditions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), p. 37.

43. Owens, Other Destinies, p. 91.

44. T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” in his The Complete Poems and Plays 1909-1950 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952), p. 121.

45. Malcolm Bradbury, “Neorealist Fiction,” in Columbia Literary History of the United States, edited by Emory Elliott and others (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 1139.

46. Lee Abbott, “An Interview with N. Scott Momaday,” in Conversations with N. Scott Momaday, edited by Schubnell (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), pp. 28-29.

47. Larry Landrum, “The Shattered Modernism of Momaday’s House Made of Dawn,” Modern Fiction Studies, 42, no. 4 (1996): 764, 780, 776, 781.

48. Isernhagen, “N. Scott Momaday and the Use(s) of Modernism,” p. 325.

49. Kurt Spellmeyer, “Too Little Care,” in Rhetoric in an Antifoundational World: Language, Culture, and Pedagogy , edited by Michael Bernard-Donals and Richard R. Glejzer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 257, 258.

50. Momaday, “The Man Made of Words,” p. 49.

51. Ibid., p. 51.

52. Momaday, “An American Land Ethic,” in The Man Made of Words, p. 47.

53. Momaday, “Native American Attitudes toward the Environment,” in Seeing with a Native Eye: Essays on Native American Religion, edited by Walter Holden Capps (New York: Harper & Row, 1976), p. 80.

54. See Nelson, Place and Vision, pp. 41-89.

55. Elaine Jahner, “Metalanguages,” in Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures, edited by Gerald Vizenor (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), p. 165.

56. Woodard , Ancestral Voice, p. 13.