Leslie Marmon Silko's "Storyteller" in New Perspectives ed. by Catherine Rainwater (review)

SINCE ITS INITIAL PUBLICATION IN 1981, Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller has perplexed and delighted scholars, critics, and casual readers alike with its hybrid poetry/prose construction and photographic juxtapositions that defy easy categorization within the confines of staid generic conventions. The recent publication of Catherine Rainwater's richly diverse edited volume Leslie Marmon Silko's "Storyteller" in New Perspectives speaks to this ongoing fascination and to the text's sustained ability to prod its readership into further analysis and more nuanced perspectives on Silko the author, her work, and her deft construction of Indigenous textualities during the past thirty-five years. In summarizing a good deal of scholarship on Storyteller and building upon it, Rainwater and the book's contributors have collectively produced an important text that scholars of Native American and Indigenous literatures will be reading and citing for years to come.

Entitled "New Walks on Old Trails," Rainwater's introductory essay provides the reader with a thorough overview of previous scholarship on Silko and Storyteller while cogently making the case that through her work Silko seeks "to imbue her works with the transformative energies that she came to know through oral storytelling in the Laguna Pueblo community where she grew up" (1). That is, the text takes shape around the author's "own declared intention to make the written text achieve many of the same performative ends as speech" (2), with the author "building her audience's repertoire of Silko-specific interpretive practices that conjoin author and audience in the shared creative process comprised of reading and writing" (3).

The nuanced approach implicit in cultivating these author-specific reading practices is in turn reflected in the wide array of topics covered by the volume's contributors, as these range from Linda Krumholz's demonstration of how storytelling in Storyteller provides a flexible epistemological model capable of adapting to the non-Indigenous world, to Ami M. Regier's insightful chapter on using Storyteller in an undergraduate literary theory course. Moreover, although each chapter capably stands on its own, each essay dialogues with the others in the articulation of a challenging, complex work that does justice to its object of analysis. For example, Susan Duston's essay, "Storytelling Science," notes how Native storytelling itself constitutes "a technology" (31), with Silko's volume itself participating in the articulation of Native scientific understandings of the world. This observation has interesting implications for Lee Schweninger's later contention in "Serious Business" that Storyteller seeks to establish a "place of visual sovereignty" that "results from taking control of the camera and the images one produces as a result of having that control" (57). Could one extend the notion of visual sovereignty to storytelling in general, particularly when one considers story telling a technology on par with the camera itself? What, then, would be the implications of our rereading in this light Nancy J. Peterson's "Storyteller as Tribalography," Elizabeth Archuleta's "Space, Place, and Violence in Storyteller," David L. Moore's "A Single Breath," or David Stirrup's "This Story Is Found," as each interacts with notions of storytelling, textuality, and space/time. Although most scholars may see the book as being aimed at specialists working in Native American and Indigenous literatures, this and other intersections among the volume's chapters demonstrate that the work, like Storyteller itself, has profound implications for an array of disciplines, including media studies, American literature, and literary theory.

In sum, Rainwater's volume weaves together the diverse directions of Silko scholarship into a unique and intellectually rewarding whole. The perspectives on Native textualities taken by many of its contributors place the book at the vanguard of a body of scholarship that is gaining prominence throughout the Western Hemisphere through the publication of other texts such as Miguel Rocha Vivas's Mingas de la palabra, which won the 2016 Premio Casa de las Américas. As scholars and critics continue to grapple with Storyteller and the multimodal textuality it...