An Act of Attention: Event Structure in "Ceremony"

Abstract

After reading Leslie Silko's novel Ceremony, many readers know the novel possesses an energy that engages their sense of themselves as persons. That energy seems to elude discussion because the labeling required in any kind of analysis appears more than usually inadequate for describing the act of attention that is an essential part of the reader's experience. But then there are those like myself who sense that trying again and again to talk about the quality of attention evoked by the book can be an important part of developing more sensitive understanding not only of Leslie Silko's own work but of other Native American writers who might also require of readers a particular attention directed toward matters that their previous experience of novels may not have demanded. Perhaps one way of describing the magnetic field of attention is to say that the lodestone in this field is the experience of event1 rather than sequentially motivated action as the determinant of plot coherence; but that is too cryptic a statement to have much meaning without explanation. In this context the word has a specific meaning that is best described through looking at Silko's novel. Once event has been defined, we can contrast the nature of its structuring force with that of other, more commonly experienced ways of developing coherence within any novel. Since giving event structure priority over temporal structure seems to be a characteristic of art that is intimately related to an ongoing oral tradition, progress made toward understanding event may be progress toward understanding relationships between oral and written literatures. One of the pivotal events in Ceremony is that which describes the protagonist Tayo singing the sunrise song after his first encounter with the mysterious woman. If we examine that passage, we can identify the essential features of Silko's sense of event: