Folklore, Literature, and Cultural Theory

Collected Essays

Cathy L. Preston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317942955
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1996. The need to write, particularly in pre-technological recording days, in order to preserve and to analyze, lies at the heart of folklore and yet to write means to change the medium in which much folk communication and art actually took and takes place. In Part I of the collection, the contributors address literary constructions of traditional and emergent cultures, those of Leslie Marmon Silko, Sandra Cisneros, Pat Mora, Carmen Tafolla, Julio Cortázar, Milan Kundera, Franz Kafka, Philip Roth, Thomas Hardy, and Dacia Maraini. The contributors to Part II of the collection offer readings of a variety of traditional, vernacular, and local performances.

Part I: The Literary

1

Politics and Indigenous Theory in Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Yellow Woman” and Sandra Cisneros’ “Woman Hollering Creek”

Alesia García

As with any generation

the oral tradition depends upon each person

listening and remembering a portion

and it is together—

all of us remembering what we have heard together—

that creates the whole story

the long story of people.

I remember only a small part.

But this is what I remember.

—Leslie Marmon Silko (1981)

In my writing as well as that of other Chicanas … there is the necessary phase of dealing with those ghosts and voices most urgently haunting us, day by day.

—Sandra Cisneros (1987)

One of the most important functions of Native American storytelling is its preservation of indigenous cultural traditions. In any given narrative or story, there is always a direct or implied reference to indigenous ancestors and beliefs, and as the storyteller weaves new stories with old, tribal histories and identities are reaffirmed while new traditions are created. Leslie Marmon Silko’s “Yellow Woman” (in Storyteller, 1981) and Sandra Cisneros’ “Woman Hollering Creek” (in Woman Hollering Creek, 1991) are two contemporary stories in which these writers recognize the importance of their indigenous heritage in relation to their thinking, writing, and identity as Native women in the 20th century. Preservation of Native American languages and stories, according to N. Scott Momaday, “represents the only chance … [one] has for survival” (1983:415). Maintaining native cultures and traditions, therefore, is a form of political as well as personal resistance to continuing oppression by an assimilationist dominant culture; Native American literature is a constant challenge to the threat of what Acoma poet Simon J. Ortiz calls “cultural ethnocide” (1987:192).

Historically, indigenous oral narratives collected by anthropologists and others have been considered “authentic” or “traditional” representations of native verbal art; however, until recently, transcriptions of these oral stories rarely acknowledged the continuing tradition of storytelling within the on-going performative contexts of these cultures. The aim of current scholars is to show that indigenous oral narratives resist closure and stasis, for each generation of storytellers continues to sing the songs and tell the stories; they incorporate new experiences, and thus continually recontextualize the stories. Referring specifically to performance of oral literature, folklorist Richard Bauman asserts that

The concept of emergence is necessary to the study of performance as a means toward comprehending the uniqueness of particular performances within the context of performance as a generalized cultural system in a community. The ethnographic construction of the structured, conventionalized performance system standardizes and homogenizes description, but all performances are not the same, and one wants to be able to appreciate the individuality of each, as well as the community-wide patterning of the overall domain. (1977:37; my emphasis)

“Emergence” in oral tradition has several implications. Bauman indicates that the contexts of oral performances are as diverse as cultures and languages themselves. And as cultures shift and change with time, so do the content and context of many traditional narratives. For example, one of the coyote trickster stories Leslie Marmon Silko tells depicts coyote as a male member of Laguna Pueblo at Hopi pretending to be a Medicine Man. This story has all the humor of “traditional” coyote stories, but through its characters and descriptions, it also shows how the contemporary Pueblo Indian community has been affected by social and historical changes within and around the culture, such as the infusion of popular culture, technology, and the cultural interchange with Mexicans and Mexican-Americans.

Anthropologist James Clifford’s theories illuminate the dynamism in Native American storytelling and also recognize a need for contextualizing indigenous oral literatures. In The Predicament of Culture, Clifford states that

Twentieth-century identities no longer presuppose continuous cultures or traditions. Everywhere individuals and groups improvise local performances from (re)collected pasts, drawing on foreign media, symbols, and languages. (1988:14)

Throughout the world indigenous populations have had to reckon with the forces of “progress” and “national” unification. The results have been both destructive and inventive. Many traditions, languages, cosmologies, and values are lost, some literally murdered; but much has simultaneously been invented and revived in complex oppositional contexts. If the victims of progress and empire are weak, they are seldom passive. (1988:16)

Clifford’s theories, echoing Momaday, imply that emergent Native traditions have allowed, through language, the assertion of political opposition to Western cultural hierarchies. Indigenous stories give voice to conquered Native cultures, and with each generation, particularly the current generation of contemporary Native writers, the voices gain prominence and, in many contexts, spark controversy. By “politics,” I am not referring to a specific political ideology, but the idea of resistance through language. As Ortiz suggests, the very existence of Native language and storytelling in this sense becomes political because it defies the idea of an homegeneous America or an “American” language and literature. Native American literature need not express an overt political statement or position to be counter-hegemonic and counter-discursive. Native American cultures, therefore, become powerfully resistant to the interpretive modes of Western-European literary discourses and theories.

Specifically resisting ethnographic authority and, by association, Western-European literary authority, Chicano anthropologist Renato Rosaldo argues that

a sea change in cultural studies has eroded once-dominant conceptions of truth and objectivity. The truth of objectivism—absolute, universal, and timeless—has lost its monopoly status. It now competes, on more nearly equal terms, with the truths of case studies that are embedded in local contexts, shaped by local interests, and colored by local perceptions. The agenda for social analysis has shifted to include not only eternal verities and lawlike generalizations but also political processes, social changes, and human differences. Such terms as objectivity, neutrality, and impartiality refer to subject positions once endowed with great institutional authority, but they are arguably neither more nor less valid than those of more engaged, yet equally perceptive, knowledgeable social actors. Social analysis must now grapple with the realization that its objects of analysis are also analyzing subjects who critically interrogate ethnographers—their writings, their ethics, and their politics. (1989:21)

Rosaldo argues for analyses of culture and literature through “subjective” rather than “objective” positions. Similar to Ortiz and, as will be discussed later, Silko, Rosaldo’s theory points to the necessity of seeking cultural meaning from within rather than imposing dominant ideologies onto Native cultures. The key point reverberating in Rosaldo’s theories as well as those of other scholars is that native cultures, particularly verbal art, are not simply something to be transcribed, catalogued, and archived, but are continually evolving and reasserting their difference.

In an essay, entitled “Song/Poetry and Language—Expression and Perception,” Ortiz describes Acoma Pueblo language as “perception[s] of experience as well as expression” (1983:401). He focuses on the relationship between language and experience, which, he suggests, emphasizes the importance of understanding Native American literature from a Native American perspective and within Native American historical and socio-political contexts. Ortiz describes Pueblo expression as

A song … made substantial by its context—that is its reality, both that which is there and what is brought by the song. The context in which the song is sung or that a prayer song makes possible is what makes a song substantial, gives it that quality of realness. The emotional, cultural, spiritual context in which we thrive—in that, the song is meaningful. The context has to do not only with your being physically present but it has to do also with the context of the mind, how receptive it is, and that usually means familiarity with the culture in which the song is sung. (1983:403; my emphasis)

The necessity of using a contextualized and indigenous approach to understanding Native American culture could not be more directly expressed. However, to argue that an indigenous theoretical approach should replace dominant theories, or that it is more valid, would simply result in shifting the hierarchy. Rather than replacing one ethnocentric theory for another, the key is to recognize how Native cultures have always had their own theories about language and storytelling already woven into their traditions. As scholars, we must not devalue these indigenous theories; neither should we erase the historical affects of colonization upon the traditions of indigenous cultures by continuing to privilege theories of the dominant culture that reduce our understanding of native cultures. The radical aspect of indigenous theory is that, unlike other theoretical frameworks, it cannot be easily categorized or defined; it is not static and unchanging. Like the Native oral texts it critiques, indigenous theory is itself emergent and must shift and change in different contexts.

Laguna Pueblo Culture and Indigenous Theory

As has been demonstrated here, Native American culture and language has been explored by many scholars, both Native and non-Native, but Leslie Marmon Silko perhaps best articulates a theory of storytelling based on oral tradition within the context of the Laguna Pueblo Indian community in New Mexico in her 1979 essay, “Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective.” Pueblo Indian theories, as Silko explains, focus on the dynamic process of oral literature whose structure demands interpretations that resist distorting Pueblo Indian cultural codes and contexts. Silko introduces an indigenous literary theory which is coterminous with the theories of many contemporary anthropologists, ethnographers, and folklorists who have rallied against “classic” modes of cultural and literary interpretations that misappropriate and decontextualize Native rituals and texts.

In her essay, Silko shows that Pueblo language and storytelling is emergent and appears in many forms. The stories all have distinct patterns. Pueblo language is

English in a nontraditional structure, a structure that follows patterns from the oral tradition. … 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. (1979:54)

Literary critic Linda L. Danielson has outlined how Silko has patterned her book, Storyteller (1981), to resist Western-European, linear narrative formats and has, instead, woven the book like a spider’s web with interconnected stories emerging from a center. Danielson points out that although the book has a cover, title page and prominently displays the author’s name, the

non-linear structure of the book provides the reader with the principle subtext. This structure, which may appear baffling and haphazard at first glance, makes sense when one looks hard at it, as one sometimes has to do in morning light to recognize a spider web. (1988:332)

Using such metaphors as “radiating spokes” (1988:333), “filament” (1988:333), “lateral connections” (1988:341), and “strand” (1988:343) to describe Silko’s narrative strategy, Danielson, theorizing from a Pueblo Indian perspective, deftly explains how Silko’s writing is an extension of Pueblo thought. As Silko has noted:

each version [of the story] is true and … correct and what matters is to have as many of the stories as possible and to have them together and to understand the emergence, keeping all the stories in mind at the same time. (Silko and Wright 1986:87)

Even as individual stories converge and diverge, Pueblo storytellers are conscious of a center, or the “original thought” myth of “Tseitsinako, Thought Woman” (Silko 1979:55); therefore, keeping the concept of original thought in mind, Pueblo storytellers weave their stories like Grandmother Spider.

Another important characteristic of Pueblo oral tradition is that the culture is linked to a specific geographic location: the individual pueblos in New Mexico. Silko has pointed out that

one of the … advantages that … [Pueblos] have enjoyed is that … [we] have always been able to stay with the land. The stories cannot be separated from geographical locations, from actual physical places within the land. [Pueblos] … were not relocated like so many Native American groups who were torn away from … [their] ancestral land. And the stories are so much a part of these places that it is almost impossible for future generations to lose the stories. (1979:69)

Laguna stories frequently mention landscapes and locations in and around their actual geographic setting. The stories, according to Silko, are like maps that teach generations about the history of their ancestral homeland. “So long as the human consciousness remains within the hills, canyons, cliffs, and the plants, clouds, and sky,” says Silko, “the term landscape as it has entered the English language, is misleading” (1986:84); therefore, Pueblo consciousness is synonymous with Pueblo landscape.

The Pueblo culture was originally an oral culture. Commenting on Pueblo orality, Silko refers to the “ancient Pueblo people” who

depended upon collective memory through successive generations to maintain and transmit an entire culture, a world view complete with proven strategies for survival. The oral narrative or “story,” became the medium in which the complex of Pueblo knowledge and belief was maintained. (1986:87)

Silko has shown, that even though Laguna Pueblo stories are often handed down through the generations in English as well as Laguna, it is more important that the stories are told rather than insisting on recreating stories in their original tribal language:

if you begin to look at the core of the importance of the language and how it fits in with the culture, it is the story and the feeling of the story which matters more that what language it’s told in. (1979:69)

Laguna Pueblos learn about who they are through the stories they tell; a sense of cultural identity and community is passed on. Story structures, the Pueblo origin myth, the idea of an ancestral homeland, and the continuity of the stories are all ideas embodied in the Pueblo theory of language and literature, and all of these elements of thought and language can be found in Yellow Woman stories. Many variations of the Yellow Woman myth have been recorded by anthropologists and ethnographers over the past century. In The Sacred Hoop, Laguna Pueblo writer Paula Gunn Allen states that

Yellow Woman stories are about all sorts of things—abduction, meeting with happy powerful spirits, birth of twins, getting power from the spirit worlds and returning it to the people, refusing to marry, weaving, grinding corn, getting water, outsmarting witches, eluding...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I: THE LITERARY
• PART II: THE TRADITIONAL, VERNACULAR, AND LOCAL
• Notes on Contributors