Dreams of Fiery Stars: The Transformations of Native American Fiction

2. Imagining the Stories: Narrativity and Solidarity

Chapter Two Imagining the Stories: Narrativity and Solidarity Almost learned how to read from books that had been burned in a fire at the reservation library.The books were burned on the sides. He read the centers of the pages and imagined the stories.1 As we have seen in Chapter One, narrative management exploiting power may frustrate narrativity, the process by which a reader constructs a story based upon expectations and textual cues. Such experience, in turn, might generate in the reader an expanded repertoire of semiotic practices pertaining to texts and world. We have also seen how highly resistant narrative such as Momaday's House Made of Dawn might drive the reader's effort to decode the work beyond the margins of the text to extratextual references. Momaday's is a useful technique for transforming the actual reader as thoroughly as possible into a projected, biculturally informed ideal audience; certainly, Momadayhas announced his intention of "creating his listeners" on more than one occasion.2 However, the actual audience for House and for other ethnic literature probably consists of only a few who are likely to play a textually mandated reader-as-researcher role. Indeed, today's widened audience for Native American literature has partially resulted from deliberate efforts by authors to foster solidarity with a non-Indian audience without necessarily demanding extensive, extratextual detours. Imagining the Stories 37 Metapattern Expansion and Solidarity Achieving solidarity with an audience involves more than the initial deconstructive act of frustrating narrativity. Indeed, if "absence or disruption of cohesive devices [characteristic of resistant narrative ] are transparent signifiers of repudiation of social relations,"3 then a narration of resistance alone lacks the implied world-healing telos of American Indian "story." The reformative aim of resistant narrative depends for its ultimate fulfillment upon the reader's reinvestment in a community of semiotic agents, defined not as passive consumers of dissenting discourse but as responsible participants in storytelling as world-making.4 As my discussion of narrational power reveals, one (paradoxical) way of achieving solidarity with an audience is through powertactics , for "solidarity is an effect of power,"just as "power is an effect of solidarity."5 That is to say, as authors variouslydeconstructconventional narrative modes and their readers' interpretive practices, they simultaneously instate and foster alternatives to these modes and practices. When shared, these alternatives constitute solidarity bonds. (Solidarity becomes power when a group's production and reception agendas are widely enough ensconced within the dominant discourse to exert significant destabilizing force and to vie for dominance.) Revised social relations of the type that many Native American writers treat thematically in their texts are achievedprimarily through regenerative narrative strategies that produce different kinds of solidarity with the audience.6 Silko's Ceremony provides an interesting case in point regarding solidarity as an effect of managed narrative power. As we have seen in Chapter One, the structural dynamic of Silko's novel derives from encoded semiotic instability, a dynamic that is overdetermined at mimetic (or content) and semiosic (or metasignifying ) levels of the text. One syntagmatic chain of references that profoundly reinforces Silko's structural episteme and also fosters solidarity with a broad general audience involves Indian and nonIndian codifications of physical space. In response to these codes, the reader ideally undergoes both frustration of narrativity and induction into a "ceremony" of reclamation. Ultimately, readers are stimulated to change our way of living on the land by first recognizing and transforming our semiotic relationship to it.7 In Ceremony, an "Indian" relationship to the earth is encoded 38 Chapter 2 through a chain of accumulated associations with the color blue that define Native American conceptions of space. Extremelyimportant in the ritual process that Silko inscribes in her text are sandpaintings (or drypaintings) and chantways—ceremonial healing rites that invoke powers associated with colors.8 Blue appears most often in rituals concerned with healing disharmonious relationships with the earth —especially the land in its maternal aspects . In Ceremony, Tayo's relationship to nurturing forces in the land needs healing. Among his many problems, Tayo has offended Reed Woman by cursing the rain. To be cured, he must discover his proper role (of ritual storyteller) in the Laguna community and help make the land "green again."9 Betonie's healing ritual places Tayo in the middle of a ceremonial painting invokingthe powersof the Bear People. Embodying the forces which Tayo most needs to internalize, Pollen Boy...