IV.

To bring these reflections nearly to the present, I should like to offer some comments on Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller (1981) in relation to the questions of monologue and dialogue I have raised by reference to Bakhtin and to current anthropological theory.

Merely to consider Storyteller among Native American autobiographies might be thought to require some explanation, inasmuch as the book is a collection of stories, poems, and photographs as much as it is a narrative of its author's life. Of course a variety of claims have been made recently for the fictionality of autobiographies in general, the autobiography being recognized not only as the West's foremost genre oriented toward the expression of the self, but, too, its most deeply dialogic genre in which a conversation between historia and poesis, documentation and creation, let us say, is always in progress. And some of these claims might easily be instanced as providing justification for classifying Storyteller as an autobiography.

Indeed, to justify the book's classification as an autobiography in this way would not be mistaken; it would, however, be to treat it exclusively from a Western perspective, and so to fail to acknowledge that traditional Native American literary forms did not—and, in their contemporary manifestations usually do not—seem to be as concerned about keeping fic-

tion and fact or poetry and prose quite so distinct from one another as the West has been.

From the Western point of view, of course, to the extent that Silko's book is permissibly classified as an autobiography, it would seem to announce by its title, Storyteller, the familiar pattern in which one discovers who one is as an individual by discovering what one does socially, the pattern of identity in vocation. This is useful enough as a way to place Silko's text; still, it has been a very long time in the West since the vocational storyteller—different from the speaker of the word of God in this—has had a clear and conventional social role.^[17] In Pueblo culture, to be known as

[17] An important reference here, I think, is to Walter Benjamin whose beautiful "The Storyteller," wavers between secular-historicist and religious-timeless perspectives on this matter (as on so many others). Benjamin conceives of storytellers both in relation to artistic and artisanal practices and "the secular productive forces of history" (87) but also in relation to such things as "death": "Death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death. In other words, it is natural history to which his stories refer back" (94). Native American stories also straddle these two perspectives referring both to the immediate and concrete as well as to the remote and mythic. Compare Silko

Pueblo oral tradition necessarily embraced all levels of human experience. . . . Thus stories about the Creation and Emergence of human beings and animals into this World continue to be retold each year. . . . The "humma-hah" stories related events from the time long ago when human beings were still able to communicate with animals and other living things. But, beyond these two preceding categories, the Pueblo oral tradition knew no boundaries [. . . , so that] Accounts of the first Europeans in Pueblo country or of tragic encounters between Pueblo people and Apache raiders were no more and no less important than stories about the biggest mule deer ever taken or adulterous couples surprised in cornfields and chicken coops. (1986, 87)

Native American storytellers, predictably enough, can also see themselves vocationally, now in relation to their legendary similarity to their predecessors, now in relation to their inevitable historical difference from them. My focus on the social dimension of Native American storytelling is an attempt to see these two perspectives as integrated—but a study (for example) of Walter Benjamin and Native American narrative would help me (and others) with these matters.

a storyteller is to be known as one who participates in a traditionally sanctioned manner in sustaining the community; for a Native American writer to identify herself as a storyteller today is to express a desire to perform such a function. In the classic terms of Marcel Mauss, person, self, and role are here joined.

Silko dedicates her book "to the storytellers as far back as memory goes and to the telling which continues and through which they all live and we with them." Having called herself a storyteller, she thus places herself in a tradition of tellings, suggesting what will be the case, that the stories to follow, Silko's "own" stories, cannot strictly be her own; nor will we find in them what one typically looks for in post-Rousseauian, Western autobiography—or, as Bakhtin would add, in poetry—a uniquely personal voice. There is no single, distinctive, or authoritative voice in Silko's book nor any striving for such a voice (or style); to the contrary, Silko will take pains to indicate how even her own individual speech is the product of many voices.^[18]Storyteller is presented as a strongly polyphonic text, in which the author defines herself—finds her voice, tells her life, illustrates the capacities of her vocation—in relation to the voices of other storytellers Native and non-Native, tale tellers and book writers, and even to the voices of those who serve as the (by-no-means silent) audience for these stories.

It is Silko's biographical voice which commences Storyteller but not by speaking of her birth or the earliest recollections of childhood, as Western autobiography usually dictates. Rather,

[18] Cf. Silko, "Traditionally everyone, from the youngest child to the oldest person, was expected to listen and to be able to recall or tell a portion, if only a small detail, from a narrative account or story. Thus the remembering and retelling were a communal process" (1986, 87).

she begins by establishing the relation of "hundreds of photographs taken since the 1890s around Laguna" that she finds in "a tall Hopi basket" to "the stories as [she] remembers them" (1): visual stories, speaking pictures, here, as in the familiar Western understanding, will also provide a voice. And Silko's relation to every kind of story becomes the story of her life. (It is interesting to note, however, that there is no developmental or evolutionary dimension to the story of Silko as storyteller: unlike Western autobiographies of artists, that is, she makes no attempt to dramatize stages in the recognition or choice of an artistic vocation; certainly she does not explain the reasons, however retrospectively perceived, that may have led her to do what she does.)

Dennis Tedlock has made the important point that Zuni stories are fashioned in such a way as to include in their telling not just the story itself but a critique of or commentary on those stories, and Silko's autobiographical story will also permit a critical dimension, voices that comment on stories and storytellers—storytellers like her Aunt Susie, in Storyteller, who, when she told stories, had "certain phrases, certain distinctive words/she used in her telling" (7). Both Aunt Susie and Aunt Alice "would tell me stories they had told me before but with changes in details or descriptions. . . . There were even stories about the different versions of stories and how they imagined these different versions came to be" (227). Silko's own "versions" of stories she has heard from Simon Ortiz, the Acoma writer whom Silko acknowledges as the source of her prose tale, "Uncle Tony's Goat," and her verse tale, "Skeleton Fixer," also introduce "certain phrases" and "distinctive words" that make them identifiably her own—yet these and all the other stories are never presented as the final or definitive account: although they are intensely associated with

their different tellers, they remain available for other tellings.^[19] "What is realized in the novel," Bakhtin has written "is the process of coming to know one's own language as it is perceived in someone else's language . . ." (1981, 365), and so,

[19] And, indeed, there are other tellings, most noticeably those by Silko herself: many of the stories in Storyteller, that is, have appeared elsewhere, some of them in several places, but all seem to have slight variations. Of course, it may be that Silko is just trying to get the most mileage she can out of what she's done, a practice not unknown both to fiction writers and essay writers. Native and non-Native. But in the context of Native American storytelling, repetition of the "same" story on several different occasions is standard procedure, "originality" or noticeable innovation having no particular value. It should also be noted that the retellings of Silko's stories are not exact reprintings. For example, "The Man to Send Rain Clouds," as it appears in Kenneth Rosen's anthology of the same name and in Storyteller, have slight differences. In Rosen's anthology there are numbered sections of the story (one to four), while there are only space breaks in Storyteller (no numbers). In the first paragraph of the Rosen version, Levis are "light-blue" while in Storyteller they are "light blue"; "blue mountains were still deep in snow" (3) in Rosen while in Storyteller "blue mountains were still in snow" (182). If we turn to the story called "Uncle Tony's Goat" in both books, we find differences in the endings. In Rosen, the story ends this way:

Tony finished the cup of coffee. "He's probably in Quemado by now."

I thought his voice sounded strong and happy when he said this, and I looked at him again, standing there by the door, ready to go milk the nanny goats. He smiled at me.

"There wasn't ever a goat like that one," he said, "but if that's the way he's going to act, O.K. then. That damn goat got pissed off too easy anyway." (99–100)

The ending in Storyteller goes:

"He's probably in Quemado by now."

I looked at him again, standing there by the door, ready to go milk the nanny goats.

"There wasn't ever a goat like that one," he said, "but if that's the way he's going to act, O.K. then. That damn goat got pissed off too easy anyway.

He smiled at me and his voice was strong and happy when he said this. (18)

The differences in the first example may not amount to much, while those in the second might suggest a slight change in emphasis; a systematic study of the differences in Silko's retellings (something I have not attempted to do) might tell us something about her development as a writer—or might not be all that substantial. My point here is that Silko's retellings in writing, whether she is aware of this or not (and it is always possible that different versions come into existence as a result of the demands of different editors rather than as a result of Silko's own determinations), tend to parallel what we know of the oral retellings of traditional narrators.

too, to know one's own language as bound up with "someone else's language." Any story Silko herself tells, then, is always bound up with "someone else's language"; it is always a version, and the story as version stands in relation to the story as officially sanctioned myth as the novel stands to the national epic. Silko's stories are consistent with—to return to Bakhtin—attempts to liberate "cultural-semantic and emotional intentions from the hegemony of a single and unitary language," consistent with a "loss of feeling for language as myth, that is, as an absolute form of thought" (1981, 367).

Stories are transmitted by other storytellers, as Silko writes early in Storyteller,

by word of mouth
an entire history
an entire vision of the world
which depended upon memory
and retelling by subsequent generations.
. . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . .

. . .the oral tradition depends upon each person
listening and remembering a portion. (6–7)

But the awareness of and respect for the oral tradition, here, is not a kind of sentimental privileging of the old ways. Indeed, this first reference to the importance of cultural transmission by oral means comes in a lovely memorial to Aunt Susie who, Silko writes,

From the time that I can remember her
. . . worked on her kitchen table
with her books and papers spread over the oil cloth.
She wrote beautiful long hand script
but her eyesight was not good
and so she wrote very slowly.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . .
She had come to believe very much in books. (4)

It is Aunt Susie, the believer in books and in writing, who was of "the last generation here at Laguna,/that passed an entire culture by word of mouth." Silko's own writing can be seen as a kind of frontier on which two modes of cultural transmission meet when it is explicitly compared to oral telling by a neighbor. Finding Silko's "Laguna Coyote" poem in a library book, Nora remarks,

"We all enjoyed it so much,
but I was telling the children
the way my grandpa used to tell it
is longer."

To this critical voice, Silko responds,

"Yes, that's the trouble with writing . . .
You can't go on and on the way we do
when we tell stories around here.
People who aren't used to it get tired." (110)

This awareness of the audience is entirely typical for a Native storyteller who cannot go forward with a tale without the audience's response. As Silko writes,

The Laguna people
always begin their stories
with "humma-hah":
that means "long ago."
And the ones who are listening
say "aaaa-eh" [.] (38)

These are the stories, of course, of the oral tradition. Silko invokes the feel of "long ago" both in the verse format she frequently uses and in the prose pieces, although perhaps only those sections of the book set in verse attempt to evoke something of the actual feel of an oral telling.

It is interesting to note that there are two pieces in the book that echo the title, one in prose, the other set in loose verse. The first, "Storyteller," is an intense and powerful short story that takes place in Alaska. The storyteller of the title is the protagonist's grandfather, a rather less benign figure, it seems to me, than the old storytellers of Silko's biographical experience; nonetheless, the stories he tells are of the traditional "mythic" type. The second, "Storytelling," is a kind of mini-anthology of (I think) five short tales of women and their (quite historical, if fictional) sexual adventures. The "humma-hah" (in effect) of the first section goes,

You should understand
the way it was
back then,
because it is the same
even now. (94)
  [aaaa-eh]

The final section has its unnamed speaker conclude,

My husband
left
after he heard the story
and moved back in with his mother.
It was my fault and
I don't blame him either.
I could have told
the story
better than I did. (98)

In both these pieces ("Storyteller" and "Storytelling") we find a very different sense of verbal art from that expressed in the West in something like Auden's lines in the poem on the death of Yeats, where he writes that "poetry makes nothing happen." In deadly serious prose and in witty verse, Silko dramatizes her belief, in common with all Native people, that stories—both the mythic-traditional tales passed down among the people and the day-to-day narrations of events—do make things happen. The two pieces refer to very different kinds of stories which, in their capacity to produce material effects, are nonetheless the same.

Among other identifiable voices in Silko's texts are her own epistolary voice (to call it that) in letters she has written to Lawson F. Inada and James A. Wright, or the voices of Coyote and Buffalo, as well as of traditional figures like Whirlwind Man, Arrowboy, Spider Woman, and Yellow Woman—some of whom appear in modern day incarnations. In stories or letters or poems, in monologues or dialogues, the diction may vary—now more colloquial and/or regional, now more formal—or the tone—lyrical, humorous, meditative—yet always the effort is to make us hear the various languages that constitute Silko's world and so her sense of human agency, or her self . If we would say with

Bakhtin that "The primary stylistic project of the novel as a genre is to create images of languages" (1981, 366), or, with the retreat from an imperializing realistic mode in ethnography, say with Kevin Dwyer that anthropology "is a wager that destroys the notion of an isolated and independent self" (273), then Storyteller is a clear instance of novelized, of dialogic discourse.