Abstract
This study new-historically explores the dialectics of time and space in American Indian women’s writings to explain American Indians’ awareness of and attachment to their surrounding nature and its expression in the contemporary American Indian tribal life. With delimited focus on Louise Erdrich’s Tracks (1988) and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony(1977), this article analyzes American Indian approach to time and space reflecting Natives’ awareness of their surrounding place. Mythical stories of oral tradition inscribed in Tracks and Ceremonyrecreate American Indian timeless and macrocosmic realities. American Indian women writers have been selected owing to the matriarchal nature of American Indian social order wherein women have been the conscious carriers of their timeless oral tradition. The two selected novels of different settings express the cultural range of American Indian tribal belt from Canadian border (Tracks’ setting) to Mexican border (Ceremony’s setting). This range is evidence of the synchronic and diachronic integrations and distinctions of American Indian past, present and future.
Keywords : American Indians, macrocosmic space, microcosmic place, oral tradition, timelessness
Introduction
“[I]t makes no sense to separate literary texts from the social context around them because such texts are the product of complex social ‘exchanges’ or ‘negotiations”’ (Booker, 1996, p. 138). As writers think and write in a given society, their creative imagination is social, not personal – negotiations of creative imagination are social because they build up their conceptions in the presence of already constructed sources, materials and aspirations. American Indian literary texts, likewise, tell the socio-cultural embedment of American Indian contemporary societies that sustain the distinctness American Indian oral tradition in modern cultures. These literary texts show contemporary American Indian tribes’ awareness of their surrounding place that is timeless and macrocosmic in nature. These literary texts express that the macrocosmic places “are an intimate part of [American Indian] ordinary daily activities because they tell of the drama that gives meaning to the ordinary” (Jahner, 1983, p. 214). They reflect that “[t]he achronological time sense of tribal people results from tribal beliefs about the nature of reality, beliefs based on ceremonial understandings rather than on industrial, theological, or agricultural orderings” (Allen, 1986, p. 150) of Eurocentric idea of time. Hence, American Indian social order is ceremonial in contrast to the organized linear system that isolated man from his surroundings and from God whereas the cyclic motion of time allows man to flow in harmony with the rest of the universe. The awareness of ceremonial time is, therefore, based on the knowledge of the natural surroundings which, for Deloria (1973), an American Indian historian, itself is cyclic. The study focuses on the American Indian ceremonial societies set in Tracks andCeremony to figure out not only the American Indian attachment to their timeless and macrocosmic surrounds but also the concept of timelessness and macrocosm per se. Hence, to locate the oral tradition cultural concept of timelessness and macrocosmic places set in American Indian fiction, this article studies Native American textual retrieval of the oral traditional culture and its spiritual world surviving in the contemporary Euro-American material world.
Literature Review
American Indian literature and society, according to McMaster and Trafzer (2004), are based on the idea of cyclic/ceremonial time that makes them distinct from Eurocentric world that generally “emphasize[s] a sequential presentation of events or ideas” (p. 116). Joseph Epes Brown (as cited in Krech III, 2006) defines this ‘polarization’: the American Indian traditional world is “qualitative, sacred, and non-materialistic, and the modern scientific world of non-indigenous people, which, in contrast, is quantitative, secular, and materialistic” (p. 567). Brown’s description of the difference between Native American and non-native world is calculated. This calculated analysis not only makes the American Indian ceremonial world superior to the modern materialistic world but also explains that the nature of social or cultural issues of the two worlds is poles apart. However, Shepard Krech III (2006), an anthropologist, affirms the presence of both linear and cyclic time events in American Indian traditional world and perceives that the native tribes of America also fix their social and political affairs in a chronological sequence. This shows that there are some scholars who argue the dual dimensions of time – linear and cyclic/ceremonial – in American Indian culture. Deloria also, like Krech III, describes the dual nature of American Indian time sequence. According to him, a number of American Indian tribes, like the western approach, follow the linear trend of historiography. He exemplifies the Central American historiographical methods like ‘winter counts’, ‘calendar sticks’ and ‘Walum Olum’ practiced by North Dakota and Tohono O’odhams and Pimas of Arizona and Delaware that explained the chronological location of the numerous political proceedings. However, he does not believe in the duality: he accepts that there is a duality of time sequence, but, for him, this duality is singular in its nature. He argues that the linear mode of American Indian social order is interconnected with the ceremonial mode: the linear concept of time regarding American Indian storytelling cannot be understood without understanding the idea of ceremonial or cyclic time and without this concept of ceremonial/cyclic time sequence American Indian linear time presentation loses its worth (Deloria, 1973).
Paula Gunn Allen (1986), the American Indian theorist, argues that “[t]he basis of Indian time is ceremonial while the basis of time in the industrialized west is mechanical” (p. 150). Regarding the Eurocentric settings, for her, the idea of time is systematized through the beginning and ending of a particular thing, event and action. Defining the native viewpoint, she argues that man and nature actually communicate internally but is affected by external time. She argues that the linearity of any organized system is propagated by the Eurocentric idea of chronology that isolated men from his surroundings that itself is cyclic. This cyclic motion of time for the native people of America is important since it makes the man flow with the flowing actions and universe. This American Indian viewpoint of time is perceived as timeless. This oral traditional perspective of ceremonial-linear mode of time is the nature of American Indian history and literature, which also describes the history of its time and place, that is disregarded by the modern critics and historians (Deloria, 1973).
Robert H. Lowie does not give any worth to the oral traditional concept of time – whether linear or ceremonial – and considers it valueless. He argues the lesser capability of the primitive people of America to understand the concept of time, and criticizes the oral tradition’s beliefs in timeless and macrocosmic realities and whips critics for assigning “extraordinary importance … to trivial incidents” (Lowie, 1917, p. 164). However, Lowie ignores the ideology that John Leland, the English historian, calls “common voice” and “common fame” – the common belief of a particular community about a specific happening in the past, the standard of evaluating historic disposition of American Indian time and place. Leland (as cited in Woolf & Woolf, 2003) claims that one must not ignore “what people who had lived in an area all their lives agreed on, unless he had external evidence which contradicted or clarified” (p. 358). An individual is influenced by the tradition in which he is raised and that, ultimately, becomes his faith or religion. So, a responsive individual “may come eventually to see th[is civilized experience] as a kind of myth, essentially fictitious in that it does not portray the whole of life, but also undeniably impressive as a saga to live by” (West, 1960, p. 1).
Research Methodology
This qualitative analytical and descriptive research follows the theorization of new historicism that literature “cannot be considered apart from the society that produced it: a literary text is another form of social significance which is produced by the society and in return is active in reshaping the culture of that society” (Montrose, as cited in Doğan, 2005, p. 80). In his “Introduction” to Representing the English Renaissance Stephen Greenblatt (1988), the founder of new historicism, argues that a literary text is written in a cultural background; it is not an individual effort but a social practice with its ‘negotiations and contests’ (p. viii). He argues that a literary text not only defines the socially structured patterns but also reshapes those patterns in which it was produced. Thus, literature is a social production rather than the creation of an individual consciousness, and thus, can be understood within a ‘larger frame’ of historicity or social reality that is not “an indistinct background out of which [literature] emerges or into which it blends” (Forgacs, 1986, p. 167). A literary text is an explicit image of a society in which it was written, and one can know that society by the critical reding of that text. To follow the argument the study focuses on theTracks and Ceremony which were produced in the societies of oral tradition and thus reproduce those societies.
Dialectics of Time and Space in American Indian Women’s Writings
Literature, Stephen Greenblatt argues (1980), in all its forms, is the reflection of its contemporary social order and, therefore, becomes a significant knowledge of the past in which it was produced. Hence, the social and cultural truths of a society can be traced in its literature. The study, therefore, retrieves the oral tradition’s concept of time and place in American Indian societies from 1912 to 1954 set inTracks and Ceremony . The delimitation of these two novels serves to cover the cultural range of American territory as the settings of both the novels describe the nature of the American Indian tribal belt from the Canadian border to the Mexican border. This range shows the multi-ethnicity of American Indian tribal world (Coltelli, 1990). This cultural belt fromCeremony to Tracks is twofold – Native and Western – that shows on one hand the long trail of oral traditional beliefs and, on the other, the western influence on American Indian indigenous societies. The study, therefore, focuses on the dialectics of storytelling in Tracks and Ceremony to explore the concept of time and place in the oral tradition of American Indian ceremonial social order from Anishinaabe (Canadian border) to Pueblo (Mexican border).