House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday (review)

Reviews 69 also across cultures. The four represented here richly deserve their places on the title pages with the authors. John DeWitt McKee, New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology House Made of Dawn. By N. Scott Momaday. (New York: Harper and Row, 1966. 212 pages, $4.95.) In academe, where there is a growing tendency to employ literary works as casebooks for social protest or ethnic studies, House Made of Dawn may encounter a curious fate. Because it deals with an interesting variation of the old alienation-theme, namely, the Southwest Indians’ conflict with twentieth century America, Momaday’s novel may be valued as a social statement rather than as a substantial artistic achievement. The sociological bias, of course, is insidious insomuch as it tends to reduce the literary work to its thematic clichés: in this case, the Indian hero’s ruinous journies into the white man’s world, to war, to prison, to the monolithic city, Los Angeles, and his evident redemption in a return to the old ways; the inevitable “civilized” woman, Angela St. John, who discovers the primordial life-force in Indian ceremonials and in the wilderness; and the grandparents who are the last links to the old varieties. These are the commonplaces of the alienation-theme; but the fact is that the novel clearly transcends them. Through a remarkable synthesis of poetic mode and profound emotional and intellectual insight into the Indians’ perduring human status, Momaday’s novel becomes at last the very act it is dramatizing, an artistic act, a "creation-hymn.” Yet even where social consciousness is significant in the novel, Momaday is far from being simplistic or unilateral, as a didactic reading might require. On the contrary, his polarities—animism and the machine—comprehend very complex and intricate human values. For example, the white man’s world, as Benally the Navaho tells us, is not without its charm and joy, could one but learn how to join it; and alienation from his own Indian culture is a function of Abel’s struggle for affiliation. In fact, Momaday’s sophisticated understanding of the Indian world’s potential for evil produces one of the most intriguing themes of the book. House Made of Dawn is a mature and complex work, and therefore, if it must dwindle into a textbook of social protest, one might at least hope that its students will perceive not only its "sociology” and its “relevance” but also something of the art by which it rises above such narrow categories. John Z. Bennett, Colorado State University ...