The Visual Elegance of Ts'its'tsi'nako and the Other Invisible Characters in "Ceremony"

Abstract

In his article Reader's Lessons in Ceremony, James Ruppert makes the observation about Leslie Silko's novel, [Ceremony] is not only a novel that presents a philosophical and cultural viewpoint, but a novel that teaches us how to read it and how to understand its special narrative structures (78). Later in the same article, while discussing the presence of formal constructions and their relationship to the absence of chapter breaks, he continues: This lack of expected breaking of the flow of the prose...discourages the reader from imposing a strict chronological order on the narrative, thus reinforcing the perception that the novel is a simultaneous, moment that circles out like the waves around a rock dropped in a quiet pond, rather than a linear progression of moments. (80) The understanding that Ceremony is circular rather than linear is easy to embrace given the evidence Ruppert presents in his article. However, Ruppert's circular-ring argument against a linear reading of ceremony still implies two-dimensionality; I would argue that the many stories and story-poems told by Silko's narrator and by the characters in the novel imply many more dimensions--of which only two (lack of organized chapter breaks and the unified moment) are explained by Ruppert. In fact, if one were to characterize the novel with visual imagery, the better image might be a collection of fragments from a number of seemingly unrelated objects. Using a more literary metaphor, one might describe the story as nearly coherent shards of stories mixed with fragments of color and light, fractured images, disjointed personalities, dismembered voices, and elements of incompatible realities segmented, then recombined in new juxtapositions; even so, this description only addresses the things in the story that are visible. It is arguable that there is even more happening in Ceremony beyond the visible; invisible characters seem to move through the text, carrying with them totems of goodwill and evil. These invisible characters and their roles in Ceremony are the ultimate purpose of this paper. Silko prefaces her novel with a brief story-poem told in stanzas. It is the story of Ts'its'tsi'nako, Thought Woman, the spider, namer and creator of all things in the universe. It ends with two stanzas that say Spider is thinking a story and the narrator is telling the story she is thinking. By implication, the narrator is saying that by telling the story she is creating a reality, an actual ceremony. The stanzas are an excellent, somewhat selfconscious, introduction into the novel, but they contain an interesting aberration. Silko's third stanza in the Thought-Woman story appears as: