dancing the page

8/6/2019 Dancing the Page

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Arlene A. Elder

"Dancing the Page": Orature inN. Scott Momaday's The WayTo Rainy MountainThe Dance

Dancing,He dreams, he dreams?The long wind glances, moveForever as amusic to themindThe gourds are flashes of the sun.He takes the inward, mincing stepsThat conjure old processions and returns.

(Momaday, The Gourd Dancer 35-36)"Some years ago Imade a pilgrimage into the heart of North America. I beganthe journey proper inwestern Montana. From there I traveled across the high plainsofWyoming into the Black Hills, then southward to the southern plains, to a ceme

tery at Rainy Mountain, inOklahoma. Itwas a journey made by my Kiowa ancestorslong before" (Momaday, The Man Made of Words 118; hereafter Words). The Way

To Rainy Mountain (1969), recreates this journey in amultigeneric narrative and isPulitzer Prize-winning author N. Scott Momaday's favorite of his books, especially,he says, for "the design, the physical design of the book" (Bonetti 139). It is aworkthat has intrigued many critics, particularly for its unusual tripartite narrative design.Iwould like to extend previous analyses of this structural pattern to argue that thework incorporates but moves beyond contemporary, theoretical, literary discussionsto illustrate not only its author's influence by modern, Western literature but, also, his

Arlene A. Elder, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Cincinnati,teaches and writes on African, Australia Aboriginal, and ethnic American literatures and oratures. She is amember of the MLA Executive Committee for the Division of African Literatures and Treasurer of

MELUS (Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States). In 1976-77, she wasa Senior Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Nairobi in Kenya. Her publications include The "Hindered Hand," Cultural Implications of Early African American Fiction and numerous articles, chapters,and encyclopedia entries.

NARRATIVE, Vol. 7, No. 3 (October 1999)Copyright 1999byThe Ohio StateUniversity


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Oral Narrative Traditions inThe Way toRainy Mountain 273

grounding in storytelling strategies from the performance of American Indianorature.One of the distinguishing qualities of orature is its combination of individualand communal composition and expression. As a matter of fact, folklorist Ruth

Finnegan judges the interplay of these two "aspects of composition and of delivery"one of themost intriguing features of orature: "It is not easy to tell, for instance, howfar the verse in any single instance is the product just of a performer reproducingwell-known and prescribed forms with little contribution of his own, and how far itcan also be put down to the arts of the creative poet; or how much one can attributeto the stimulation and participation of the audience or the emotion of the occasion itself" (107). The Way To Rainy Mountain is a deeply intertextual and interoral narrative that illustrates orature's dual composition and performance values despite itsbeing the designated product of its renowned author.The book's literary genesis isMomaday's The Journey ofTai-me, a collectionof Kiowa myths and legends, privately printed in Santa Barbara in 1967, and its oralorigin is in themythic, historical, and personal storytelling of the author's Kiowa ancestors. Momaday credits Journey with being "the archetype of the present volume"(RainyMountain, Acknowledgments; hereafter RM) and reveals himself as the compiler of thematerial in this collaborative book, that consists of stories told to him byKiowa elders, translated and added to by his father, Al Momaday, since Momadayhimself does not speak Kiowa (Wong 159-60). The Way To Rainy Mountain, evenmore essentially than its predecessor, imaginatively creates related, carefully-constructed mythic, historical, and personal worlds; develops an increasingly rich identity consciousness for its narrator; and, most closely linking it to the educativefunction of orature, leads to the aesthetic, historical, and philosophical understanding of the reader by teaching him/her how it should be entered and experienced.This interplay, as well as the book's multiple origins, exceeds M. M. Bakhtin'sunderstanding of the dialogic text, inwhich "Authorial speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres, the speech of characters aremerely those fundamental compositional unities with whose help heteroglossia can enter the novel" (263). Forinstance, in addition toAl Momaday's contribution as translator and narrator ofsome of the recounted myths and historical events, the author's father helps createthis multigeneric text even more directly by his son's incorporation of his series ofeleven paintings that illustrate the Kiowa myths and legends. While these paintingsserve many purposes beyond the decorative, one of theirmost important, if implicit,thematic functions is to demonstrate this written work's interpretation of the "unityof the arts," a performance value intrinsic to orature. The power of oral performances, as we know, is much more than linguistic; they depend on paralinguisticfeatures, such as tone and volume of voice, facial expressions and gestures, music,song, symbolic costuming, and dance. The paintings are necessary to themeaning ofThe Way To Rainy Mountain in the same way traditional face and body painting, sacred and secular masks, hand-held objects, and symbolic costuming are intrinsic toceremonial performances. Momaday, himself a visual artist who has exhibited in thiscountry and abroad since 1979 (Coltelli 90), considers drawing itself a form of storytelling: "writing is drawing, and so the image and the word cannot be divided"


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(Coltelli 96).1 AI Momaday also scripted the running title, "The Way To RainyMountain," that flows along the bottom of each page (Wong 160), always ending onthe right side with thewords, "TheWay," functioning as a signpost, manipulating thereader further along into the text and deeper into a consideration of the philosophicmeaning of such directive movement. Even the cover of the 1976 paperbound editionhelps tell the tale. It functions in a similar manner to the self-referential shield carried lifelong by the Plains warrior, in that "The shield bears a remarkable relationship to the individual towhom it belongs_In a real sense the Plains warrior is hisshield. It is his personal flag, as the realization of his vision and his name, the objectof his holiest quest, the tangible expression of his deepest being_The shield is involved in story. The shield is its own story.When the shield ismade visible itmeans:Here is the story. Enter into it and be created. The story tells of your real being" (Mo

maday, The Presence of the Sun 74). Momaday's cover presents three buffaloshields, anticipating the three narrative segments we find within; the shields appearon different sides of the cover page, just as the narratives do in the text, and are ofdifferent sizes; yet their essential connection is immediately obvious, since eachbears the same image of a buffalo skull and decorative and symbolic elements. Thetitle of the book runs at a diagonal, down to the right. Momaday also credits designerBruce Gentry with the striking physical design of the book, "which I had nothing todo with ... so that you can open it at any place and you have three voices on facingpages, each in its own type face, and I think you not only hear them as differentvoices, but you see them as different things on the page" (Bonetti 139). It is important for our understanding of Momaday's conception of his text as reinforcing aspects of performance that he emphasizes here its visual, that is pictorial, and auditoryqualities of even its linguistic segments. Poet IvorWinters, Momaday's friend andmentor at Stanford University, also can be seen as contributing to the conception andfinal form of the book. In a letter of April 21,1965, Winters urges his fellow poet, "Iwonder what would happen if you set yourself an exercise on a philosophical subjector a historical subject, to be done in a stanza somewhat like the crucifixion piece[Momaday's poem, "Before an Old Painting of the Crucifix"]. .. .Your father musthave had eyewitness stories from his grandparents. That sort of thing as seen personally and in the long view of history might be very moving" (qtd. in Schubnell 141).

Indeed, it is the book's tripartite linguistic structure, established in the first section and later subverted, that, inmy view, creates a dialogic performance experiencefor the reader and narrator, that has drawn the most consistent attention of critics,most of them noting the increasing interrelationship of the different voices present ineach section. This structure, of course, demonstrates Bakhtin's notion of polyphony,that is, that texts "ought not to give priority to one dominant voice, attitude or idea"(Dentith 46). While Bakhtin's writings are hallmarks of the extremely literary institution of modern Western theory, the Russian critic's ideas about narrative actually echoan older understanding from traditional orature thatMomaday replicates, that is theconnection of history, memory, and the imagination, and the philosophic and socialsignificance of both individual and collaborative expressions of these experiences.

Judging Rainy Mountain as an example of contemporary American Indian autobiography, one she terms, "internalized . . .multicultural collaboration" (155),


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Hertha Wong observes that its "tripartite structure reflects three narrative voices: themythical, the historical, and the personal, each accentuated by a different typeface"(160). In an interview with Camille Adkins, Momaday has labeled his non-mythicsections "historical commentaries and . . . autobiographical or personal commentaries," (Schubnell 221) and remarks elsewhere, "There are three voices in that book,and only one is directly personal. The others are historical and, what shall I say, original" (King 70). By "original," I assume he means these particular voices are those ofthe Kiowa ancestors who, through the centuries, repeated the stories that he learnsfrom the Elders and, with the help of his father, translates and transcribes. As a resultof Momaday's acceptance of, even reliance upon, collaboration and inter- and intratextuality and orality, he clearly illustrates Bakhtin's polyphonic text made up of anessential interplay and equality of narrative voices. It is important at this point to reiterate that "narrative" in the context of orature incorporates multigeneric artistic expressions, not language alone.The poignancy in the story of the Kiowa thatMomaday tells rests in their discovery of their culture through journeying and then loss of it as a result of contactwith Euro-American Western expansion: "The great adventure of the Kiowas was agoing forth into the heart of the continent.... Along theway they acquired horses,the religion of the Plains, a love and possession of the open land. Their nomadic soulwas set free. In alliance with the Comanches they held dominion in the southernPlains for a hundred years" (RM 4); "but the young Plains culture of the Kiowaswithered and died like grass that is burned in the prairie wind. There came a day likedestiny; in every direction, as far as the eye could see, carrion lay out in the land"(RM 3). Historical accounts tell us that the "carrion" were the buffalo, upon whichthe Plains Indians depended both culturally and for physical survival, slaughtered bythe U.S. Government as a means of subduing the Plains Indians. Momaday's Prologue reveals, "The buffalo was the animal representation of the sun, the essentialand sacrificial victim of the Sun Dance. When the wild herds were destroyed, so toowas the will of the Kiowa people; there was nothing to sustain them in spirit" (RM3). Nevertheless, asWilliam M. Clements observes, "the death of the holistic Kiowaculture in 1890 did not bring about the deaths of individual Kiowa. As long as Kiowamen andwomen who had been living in 1890, endured, they carried with them memories of theirway of life_Aho, Momaday's grandmother whose death inspired thepilgrimage which is recalled in [RainyMountain] retained the Kiowa lifeways in hermemory until the 1960s. For these Kiowa, the culture persisted as it had existed in1890, captured in their imaginations" (70).If one of themost fruitful ways to readRainy Mountain is as autobiography, it issignificant thatMomaday has returned here to the nonwestern, American Indian concept of telling one's life story by constructing an individual identity inextricably connected to the beliefs, memories, and experiences of his Kiowa ancestors andrelatives. While Iwould like to distinguish between Momaday, the author, and theunnamed, first-person narrator, who, like all such "heroes," is the product of selectivememories and, therefore, a fiction, I agree with Wong's assessment that "through thisunique polyvocal autobiographical narrative, Momaday constructs a communal self"(159). As a matter of fact, it isMomaday's deliberate heteroglossia, which asserts


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and illustrates his appreciation of traditional communal identity, that is replicated bythe performance structures of orature on his pages. Community here, moreover, includes the reader, in amanner essential for the educative purpose of his book. His inclusive techniques extend the ethical dimension appreciated by Bakhtin in thepolyvocal, dialogic novel, inwhich, he says, "the relationships between people areunderstood in amore profoundly sociological way than the abstractedly philosophical and ethical manner of 'Author and hero,' and the forms of consciousness which anauthor brings to bear are understood as being themselves historically formed" (13).To elucidate the development of Momaday's understanding of "forms of consciousness" and their reliance upon

an historical formation, Iwould like tomove foramoment to one of the repeating tropes in The Way To Rainy Mountain used to explore communal and personal identity construction, that of the conventional journeyof maturation, with its related images of confinement and freedom. As quoted earlier,

Momaday quickly establishes the journey motif that reflects Kiowa migration history. The activity of journeying leads the Kiowa to an awareness of their identity asnomadic yet grounded in an intrinsic relationship to a specific, open landscape: "TheKiowas reckoned their stature by the distance they could see, and they were bent andblind in thewilderness" (RM 7). This self-understanding seems entirely fitting for apeople whose origin tale, admittedly, like those of several other American Indiancommunities, is envisioned as a spontaneous movement into the world through aconstrained space ("They entered theworld through a hollow log"RM 7) and whosefirst names for themselves, Kwuda and Tepda, both of which mean "coming out,"(RM 16-17), identify them with the principal of mobility.

Immediately in the Prologue, the narrator's own journey to Rainy Mountain,where Momaday's grandmother, Aho, is buried, is superimposed upon that of hispeople's birth and migration story. As he has said, "There are on theway to RainyMountain many landmarks, many journeys in the one" (RM 4). Two intertwinedjourneys being traced are those of the semireliable narrator and of the much moreevolved author, the mixed-blood descendant (Kiowa, Cherokee, French) of a legendary grandfather, Mammedaty. Momaday sends his narrator in search of an identity that links him surely to his Kiowa ancestors and to the Southwestern landscapewhere they settled. His own "mestizo" existence compels him on his creative, imagined journey, just as it sent Momaday on his actual trip back to the site of his personal Kiowa history. He has called The Way To Rainy Mountain a "memoir" (King70) and accounts for his writing it in a 1986 interview with Louis Owens by observing that "mixed-bloods aremost naturally curious about their cultural identity" (65).2The narrator's growing identification with his ancestors leads him to empathize withwhat he perceives as the Kiowa need for space and the ability tomove through it:"Yellowstone, it seemed tome, was the top of theworld, a region of deep lakes anddark timber, canyons and waterfalls. But, beautiful as it is, one might have the senseof confinement there_There is a perfect freedom in themountains, but it belongsto the eagle and the elk, the badger and the bear" (RM 7). The expanses in the Southwest satisfied the Kiowa's spatial imagination, a consciousness that translates itselfautobiographically in The Way To Rainy Mountain into a conventional reassessmentof a childhood memory. When the narrator visits his grandmother's house where he


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had played as a boy, "I saw for the first time inmy life how small itwas," a psychicand personal confinement he evades by immediately beginning the journey into hishistorical and mythic past: "The next morning I awoke at dawn and went out on thedirt road to Rainy Mountain" (RM 12).In its original design, Momaday's tripartite narrative journey proceeds in stepsof culturally-related, but visually discrete, brief segments of text, since the paragraph, or "stanza," on the top of the left page contains Kiowa myth; that on the top ofthe right provides historical information about the Kiowa migration and settling inthe Southwest; and the one on the lower right informs us about Momaday's personalfamily and the narrator's reminiscences of it. In The Man Made of Words, he hascommented that "With the exception of epic matter and certain creation myths, stories in theAmerican Indian oral tradition are short. Concentration is a principal quality of their structure" (3). This pattern of short narratives follows an opening poem,"Headwaters," the Prologue, and the Introduction, and occurs in three main sectionsof diminishing length, "The Setting Out," "The Going On," and "The Closing In."Trickster that (as manipulative author) he is,Momaday establishes a quicklyapprehended and apparently inviolable, tripartite design for the body of his work.Significantly, for his recreation of orature's "unity of the arts," "The Setting Out" ispreceded by Al Momaday's drawing of a grasshopper, facing right, apparently readyto leap into the text. The linguistic design begins on page sixteen, left top, with theKiowa origin myth of emergence through a hollow log. This myth and the rest of theinformation about Kiowa cultural beginnings takes up approximately one-quarter ofthe page and is followed by a large, blank area, imposing a kind of honorific silenceon the voicing of the text and forcing the reader to conceptually, even physically, thatis, visually, step through this distance to the top of the right-hand page where we findhistorical information about the Kiowa valuing of difference and their related, sym

bolic custom of cutting their hair unevenly. There is a small space, indicating lesscognitive distance between this passage and the one following, presenting the narrator's personal reminiscence about "coming out upon the northern Great Plains in thelate spring" and, at first being aware only of the beautiful expanse of hills and plainsbut, after awhile, perceiving difference, the details of "herds and rivers and groves?and each of these [having] perfect being in terms of distance and of silence and ofage. Yes, I thought, now I see the earth as it really is; never again will I see things asI saw them yesterday or the day before" (17). From the solemnity of this last state

ment, the reader's mind and eye are drawn down once again to the running title alongthe page's bottom edge, that ends with the repeated words, "The Way," and on to thetop of page eighteen to experience this visual and conceptual pattern once again.To my knowledge, none of the other commentators on Momaday's style in The

Way To Rainy Mountain has analyzed his repeated use of blank space formuch of theleft hand page, after themythic section, of the first version of his patterning, and onthe right between the historical and autobiographical segments. Iwould argue thatthese spaces recreate on the printed page the silences intrinsic to oral storytelling. Inthe Introduction to The Man Made of Words, Momaday explains the importance ofthis paradoxical feature of orature: "Writing engenders in us certain attitudes towardlanguage_The result is thatwe have developed a kind of false security where Ian


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guage is concerned, andour

sensitivity to language has deteriorated. Andwe have

become in proportion insensitive to silence. Words are intrinsically powerful," hesays:

They are magical. By means of words can one bring about physicalchanges in the universe.... But one does not necessarily speak in order to beheard. It is sometimes enough that one places one's voice on the silence, for thatin itself is awhole and appropriate expression of the spirit. In the Native American oral tradition, expression, rather than communication is often first in importance_

In this sense, silence too is powerful. It is the dimension inwhich ordinaryand extraordinary events take their proper places. In the Indian world, aword isspoken or a song is sung not against, but within the silence. In the telling of astory, there are silences in which words are anticipated or held on to, heard toecho in the still depths of the imagination. In the oral tradition, silence is thesanctuary of sound. Words arewholly alive in the hold of silence; there they aresacred. (15,16)

Momaday's symbiotic of empty spaces in The Way To Rainy Mountain incorporatesthis power of silence in oral performance. The silent spaces slow the reader's pace,creating a "sanctuary of sound," where it is possible to "hold on to" the previouslyencountered information and visual design and to "anticipate" subsequent storiesand structures. In oral performances, such silences are essential, educative features.Speaking of his pedagogical practice, Momaday has revealed that: "Sometimes I askstudents in a class to close their eyes, put down anything they are holding, and quietly observe the darkness for two or three minutes before listening to a passage.

Hearing in this posture makes a difference" (Words 59).Momaday's original design of segments of myth, history, and personal memoryis consistently repeated until page thirty-one, in the right-hand section at the top,where he subtly substitutes a remembrance of his grandfather, Mammedaty, for themore general historical information usually present in that spot. The story begins,

"Mammedaty owned horses," and ends a few lines later: "Of all the tribes of thePlains, the Kiowas owned the greatest number of horses per person," making thegrandfather an appropriate representative of the Kiowa so that, hereafter, any new information about him will metonymically speak for Kiowa culture in general. Themetonym reinforces theAmerican Indian requirement of autobiography and biography's emphasis on the individual's relationship to his/her community. A more complete textual transformation occurs a few pages later (35), again at the right top, theestablished spot for historical information about the Kiowas, where now Momadayinserts, for the entire segment, the mythic account of the origin of the veneratedtalyi-da-i medicine bundles. We are being led to recognize that the mythic and thehistoric may be the same and indivisible, despite conventional and apparent divisions; if so, we are guided to this idea through Momaday's cognitive subversion bythis point of his original pattern, which visually remains the same. As KimberlyBlaeser rightly notes, thismovement raises questions essential forMomaday's philo


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sophical and cultural theme of unity and suggests his subtle strategy of educating hisreaders: "Can the personal be historical? Does personal experience include history?Ifmyth can be history and history is included in personal experience, can myth alsobe part of personal experience? ... Does it [the changing pattern] call into questionthe idea thatNative American culture must remain static to be authentic and offer instead a view of evolving myth?" (46).The structure of Momaday's story, then, follows the lead of oral performance,in that it is changing and indeterminate, and the very fluidity of this form is the "message." Bakhtin, of course, has recognized the same existence for some writing:"Form and content in discourse are one" (259). The relationship of such a symbiosisin The Way To Rainy Mountain, however, goes further in creating a kinetic dimension due to the overall pictorial appeal of the visually discrete textual segments thatmust be reached through the reader traversing the blank spaces of silence. Momaday's cognitive "shape switching" dynamically engages the reader and forces move

ment, just as dance steps in a ceremony would pull us into the action, recreating inour bodies the meaning of the ceremony being performed. Not only the reader'simagination, but our eye as well, have been trained by Momaday to expect a particularpattern of meaning; now, they must both "step" differently, not because the familiar segments of text or silence are in different places on the page than previously, butbecause the fragments of the story, while remaining in place visually, have beentransformed conceptually to lead the reader to understand the relationship of themythic, historical, and personal in a richer way, to allow a conceptual movement,that is, similar to an improvised dance step that doesn't entirely break the pattern but,nevertheless, varies it in some essential way.3 Paradoxically, because the lay-out ofthe page remains the same, although the information has shifted, the variation hereactually reinforces congruence. The Kiowas, we remember, value apparent difference. The reader's growing apprehension of themeaning of Momaday's subversionof his design allows us to enter the story in a creative way, accepting the author's invitation to understand his meaning by helping to shape it, just as a participant in atraditional performance would; in Blaeser's words, he makes "the reader co-creatorof the literary work" (39). Like the Kiowa ancestors and Elders, we, too, become collaborators inMomaday's meaning.

Momaday reestablishes his original pattern until pages forty and forty-one,where slightly above the middle of the page on the left side, he repeats one line froman account of a peyote experience of Mammedaty, previously offered in its regular,lower right-hand spot on page thirty-nine, and on the right he gives us a drawing of amystical creature, facing left, the direction now firmly identified semiotically withthemythic past. The drawing ends "The Starting Out" and is followed by an entirepage of blank space to be acknowledged and crossed before we begin "The GoingOn."

This middle section continues to complicate the narrative structure. On pageforty-six, like a tentative innovation in the dance, a step that modifies the design in aminimal way, the information on the left-hand side could be historical or could beimaginary. The oft-quoted story of the arrowmaker who shoots his enemy outside histipi because he cleverly discovers that theman hiding there is not Kiowa by speaking


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Kiowa to him emphasizes the significance of language in a primary oral culture andthe life-giving (in this instance, life-taking) power of words; whether this story islegendary or completely imaginary is unclear. Momaday has commented elsewhereon its purpose: "it is a story about story, about the efficacy of language and the powerof words.... It is about language, after all, and it is therefore part and parcel of itsown subject. Virtually, there is no difference between the telling and that which istold" (Words 9,10). This self-referentiality, of course, is one of the main concerns ofcontemporary literary theory; as Terry Eagleton notes, "every literary work, in theact of apparently describing some external reality, is secretly casting a sidewaysglance at its own processes of construction" (105). Kiowa oral concepts, in their ownemphasis on the educative purpose of such narrative self-awareness, however, anticipate and move beyond structuralist dogmas.

Page forty-seven follows Momaday's original pattern. Pages fifty and fifty-onerepeat the pictorial design presented earlier by again offering a line of previous text,then a picture by Al Momaday, but, this time, the combination does not end the section. Another tentative transformation occurs on page fifty-three, where the secondsection can be considered personal history only because the narrator inserts into it anexpression of his own desire to have seen in person Kotsatoah, a famous Kiowa warrior. With the pattern reverberating here, we again can see a variation that suggeststhe link of individual experience with communal history. On page fifty-eight, on theleft-hand side, the tale of why "Bad women are thrown away" is, it is true, a story accounting for the social customs of the community, but it does not seem to be mythic,rather, an account of a well-known event that happened early in the history of the

Kiowas, one also involving the power of language. There is no dating of this story ofthe blind man and his "bad" wife, as there is in the following section on the top of theright on page fifty-nine, concerning incidents of 1843 and 1851-52 inwhich certainwomen were severely punished for real or supposed infidelity. The personal historyfollowing presents Mammedaty's grandmother, part Mexican, with blue eyes, whoseassertion of nontraditional power illustrates a change in the culture: "She raised a lotof eyebrows, they say, for she would not play the part of aKiowa woman. From slavery she rose up to become a figure in the tribe. She owned a great herd of cattle, andshe could ride as well as any man." The tentative changes, the conjuring "mincingsteps," in conceptual structure in these sections can be seen as mirroring the slighthistorical alteration of the role of women in Kiowa society thatMomaday's grandmother effected.

"The Closing In," the lastmajor section in The Way To Rainy Mountain is prefigured on the left, page sixty-two, again, just above themiddle of the page, by therepeated line, "hewas transformed into a daring buffalo hunter," and across from thisline, on page sixty-three by a painting of an Indian on horseback, galloping to theleft, about to spear a buffalo. These images, both the painting and the line of text, affect us visually; they create a circular movement, linking themyth and history of theKiowa with the present-day narrator on his journey of remembrance and self-creation. Clearly, Al Momaday's paintings are not merely decorative, but are intrinsiccomponents of the story, indicating with a power and subtlety of their own the transformations suggested by the linguistic subversions of the original narrative pattern.


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On page seventy-one, right-hand side,the second section of text is not the cus

tomary information about the narrator's own experiences or his family's but is astatement of empathy with the legendary figure presented in the historical top section, who sacrificed one of his finest horses so that his family would be spared during a smallpox epidemic: "I think I know how much he loved that animal; I think Iknow what was going on in his mind." Then, on page seventy-two on the left-handside, the narrator sharply breaks the pattern again to tell of a supernatural experience

Mammedaty is said to have had on his way to Rainy Mountain. What is significantthematically and structurally here is that the personal family history is linked notonly with the mythic but that it has "danced" across the blank, silent space of thebook tomake that connection in the area conventionally reserved for themythic. Itlures the reader with it.Then, the top of right-hand page seventy-three shifts again,with more information about Mammedaty in the space where in the first pages ofThe Way To Rainy Mountain general Kiowa history appears. The traditional, personal history section following the brief space on this page, continues with Mammedaty but returns to a supernatural experience he once had and adds more examples ofhis visions, thus linking him with themythic figures: "Itmeant thatMammedaty hadgot possession of a powerful medicine."

Page seventy-six, left-hand side, continues to focus on Momaday's grandfather.Then, in the top right section, one hears the story of "Little Red," the Kiowa horse acaptive Pawnee boy stole from them in the winter of 1852-53; the second sectiontells of Mammedaty storing a box of bones of a horse he called "Little Red" that islater stolen. This tale, very obviously, links family history with the tribal and permitsthe narrator to align himself with both events: "There have been times when Ithought I understood how itwas that aman might be moved to preserve the bones ofa horse?and another to steal them away." Clearly, the emphasis here is on the narrator's felt relationship with both his grandfather, the legendary Pawnee boy, and evenwith themore contemporary thief of the bones, an empathetic move we have seenbefore in the segment originally reserved for family history and personal memoriesand one suggesting the narrator's increasing ability to adopt the experiences and attitudes of his ancestors.

Page eighty, left-hand side, again subverts the original design and offers a storyof Aho, the grandmother, inwhich she remembers amysterious occurrence that happened to her when she witnessed the Tai-me bundle fall with a terrible noise. Boththe sections on the right of page eighty-one recreate family history, one directly withreference to amedicine bundle, the other with the image of the heavy iron kettle sitting outside Aho's house, which Charles Nicholas sees as symbolizing the Tai-me(155). Momaday continues the family history on both page eighty-two and the righthand top of eighty-three, but the second "stanza" on eighty-three is a very personaland oft-quoted section of speculation that emphasizes the connection between landscape, imagination, and recollection, a tracing, really, of Momaday's method and intent throughout The Way To Rainy Mountain:

East of my grandmother's house the sun rises out of the plain. Once in his life aman ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe. He


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ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience, to look at itfrom asmany angles as he can, towonder about it, to dwell upon it.He ought toimagine that he touches itwith his hands at every season and listens to thesounds that aremade upon it.He ought to imagine the creatures there and all thefaintest motions of thewind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all thecolors of the dawn and dusk. (83)

Momaday gives most of his Epilogue that follows to the voice of the hundred-yearold Ko-sahn, a picture of whom appears in another of his memoirs, The Names(162), one of the last Kiowas to remember the Sun Dance. He closes his book, linguistically, with a poem about his narrator's destination, "Rainy Mountain Cemetery," just as he opened itwith "Headwaters," the verse that sits facing the Prologue.Hertha Wong perceptively recognizes a similar framing in the placement of thepainting illustrating the myth of the seven sisters who were borne into the heavensand became the stars of theBig Dipper (RM 8) and of that depicting the Leonide meteor shower (RM 87) that occurred on November 13,1833 and "seemed to image thesudden and violent disintegration of an old order" (RM 85). Wong notes, "As well aslinear progression, the illustrations provide an associational circularity" (167). Thiscyclic use of poems and paintings toframe his text can be viewed as another incorporation of oral narrative structures, this time, the formulas frequently beginning andending storytelling sessions. A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff notes that formulaic expressions are used during traditional performances "to open or close stories or to elicitaudience response" (4). Moreover, her examination inAmerican Indian Literaturesof genres of orature and their development over time reflects Momaday's own genretransitions in The Way To Rainy Mountain: "Stories are sometimes divided intothose that are true and those that are fictional, into the sacred and nonsacred, or intosome combination of these categories. Stories can include aspects of both the trueand the fictional or the sacred and the nonsacred. Further, some stories originallycategorized as sacred can subsequently be classified as nonsacred" (40). Indeterminacy and movement are intrinsic to orature, as is repetition.Because of Momaday's use of repetition to establish his original patterning, hisstanzas', or segments', generic classification as myth, history, or memoir is imprinted early in the reader's memory and expectations, just as Kiowa myth and history are in the consciousness and subconscious of the narrator. Momaday'ssubsequent subversions, then, with their emphasis on cultural and philosophical correspondences, dynamically involve the reader, not only intellectually but, because ofthe necessary silent spaces we must cross, engage us physically, with the power of

memory and imagination to recreate tradition. In The Implied Reader, Wolfgang Isersees a similar patterning in all texts; he discoverstwomain structural components within the text: first, a repertoire of familiar literary patterns and recurrent literary themes, together with allusions to familiar social and historical contexts; second, techniques or strategies used to setthe familiar against the unfamiliar....


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This defamiliarization with what the reader thought he recognized isbound to create a tension that will intensify his expectations as well as his distrust of those expectations. Similarly, we may be confronted by narrative techniques that establish links between things we find difficult to connect, so thatweare forced to reconsider data we at first held to be perfectly straightforward.(288,289)

This description perfectly fits Momaday's recreation of orature in The Way To RainyMountain. While his reader is programmed to expect a static pattern of informationin the succeeding linguistic segments, this stasis, like that of early twentieth-centurysocial and cultural expectations of "The Vanishing Indiana is disrupted. The multigeneric work, with its shifting transformations of meaning, paintings commentingon the information in the textual sections, and the typographically empty spaces ofsilence, reflection, and physical and cognitive transition disrupt the reader's expectations and reinforce Momaday's quest for personal and communal American Indianreinvigoration, despite their expected decline and disappearance, as a result of theirbeing cut off from their sacred traditions and history. "I believe that what mostthreatens theAmerican Indian is sacrilege, the theft of the sacred. . . .We, NativeAmericans in particular, but all of us, need to restore the sacred to our children. It isamatter of the greatest importance" (Words 76). He aids in this restoration for hisreader by drawing us actively into the text, teaching us how to read it and, over thecourse of its pages, teaching, aswell, the implications of this dynamic interaction.As mentioned earlier, the concept of journeying inThe Way To Rainy Mountainprovides the essential narrative movement for the "story" of the book, which, in turn,is inextricably interwoven with the narrator's acquisition of the knowledge of his ancestors, leading to his richer sense of self. G?rard Genette provides us with an extremely useful approach to understanding this method in his insistence that"Analysis of narrative discourse will be. . ., essentially, a study of the relationshipsbetween narrative and story, between narrative and narrating, and (to the extent that

theyare inscribed in the narrative discourse) between story and narrating" (29).What is interesting in this regard about Momaday's autobiographical and historicalrevelations inRainy Mountain is his use of shifting structures tomirror his narrator'smovement into not only a personal identification with his family's stories and Kiowa

myth and history but, also, to lead the reader to an understanding of the simultaneityof these apparently discrete elements. Momaday has observed that "The morality ofintolerance has become in the twentieth century amorality of pity" (69); "The contemporary white American iswilling to assume responsibility for the Indian?he is

willing to take on the burdens of oppressed peoples everywhere?but he is decidedlyunwilling to divest himself of the false assumptions which impede his good intentions" (Words 72). Just as there aremultiple sources for The Way To Rainy Mountainand many journeys recounted, there are, also, many audiences. The American Indiancommunity, as it would in a traditional ceremony, is being led to remember andrecreate its life-giving traditions; the general Euro-American audience is being educated in the realities of a culture it probably has experienced only stereotypically.


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The educative purposes of oratureare

implicit here. As theEpilogue states, "thegolden age of the Kiowas had been short-lived... .The culture would persist for awhile in decline, until about 1875, but then itwould be gone, and there wood be verylittle material evidence that it had ever been" (RM 85-86). The narrator goes on toemphasize the importance of memory and "the verbal tradition which transcends it"(RM 86) as recuperative strategies. Positing Momaday's vision against Joseph

Campbell's understanding of such a collapse of "traditional mythology and its displacement by creative mythology," Charles Nicholas sees The Way To Rainy Mountain expressing "the essential continuity between these two kinds of mythology,insisting that both are acts of the imagination" (150). In an attempt to account for theuniversal appeal of storytelling, J. Hillis Miller observes, "With fictions we investigate, perhaps invent, themeaning of human life" (69). This invention of reality occurs forMomaday in language, as he believes, "we are all made of words," languagebeing "the element inwhich we think and dream and act, inwhich we live our dailylives"; "an Indian is an idea which a given man has of himself.... And that idea, inorder to be realized completely, has to be expressed" (Wong 156). He would go farther, however: "The storyteller creates his audience_When the storyteller tells hislistener a story, he creates his listener, he creates a story, He creates himself in theprocess" (Givens 81).As Iser has stated, all texts are virtual, in that a literary work comes into existence through the dynamic agency of the reader and thewritten patterns the author

provides (274-75).4 Iser goes on to note that the memories evoked of the text are always modified by subsequent encounters with new patterns, in his terms, new "sentence correlatives" (278). To extend this idea, in The Way To Rainy Mountain,Momaday "teaches" the reader how to understand his text, actually, how to create itsmeaning, not on the level of "sentence correlatives" but, as we have seen, by shiftinglinguistic and pictorial correlatives, which function inmuch the same way:

[T]he more a text individualizes or confirms an expectation it has initiallyaroused, themore aware we become of its didactic purpose, so that at best wecan only accept or reject the thesis forced upon us. . . .But generally the sentence correlatives of literary texts do not develop in this rigid way, for the expectations they evoke tend to encroach on one another in such a manner thatthey are continually modified as one reads. . . .One might simplify by sayingthat each intentional sentence correlative opens up a particular horizon, whichismodified, if not completely changed, by succeeding sentences. While theseexpectations arouse interest inwhat is to come, the subsequent modification ofthem will also have a retrospective effect on what has already been read. (Iser278)Looking atMomaday's technique in The Way To Rainy Mountain as largely educative corresponds toWalter Ong's judgment that in "a primary oral culture, education consists in identification, participation, getting into the act" (16). "Getting intothe act" is precisely the result of the performance of orature, Iser's understanding of


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the dynamic between text and reader, and Momaday's guidance of the reader intoa

realization of the relationships among the various parts of his book. Both Momadayand Iser rely on the reader's memory to inform our imaginative encounter withchanges in the narrative: "The new background brings to light new aspects of whatwe had committed tomemory; conversely these, in turn, shed their light on the newbackground, thus arousing more complex anticipations. Thus, the reader, in establishing these interrelations between past, present and future, actually causes the textto reveal its potential multiplicity of connections" (Iser 278).

Momaday links himself to his storytelling predecessors, each of whom is "concerned to create himself and his audience in language" (Coltelli 93). This understanding of the storyteller's imaginative power is a recurrent issue for the writer:"When the storyteller tells his listener a story, he creates his listener, he creates astory. He creates himself in the process. It's an entirely creative process_The audience, in order to realize the experience to its fullest, must allow itself to be deter

mined by the storyteller" (Givens 81). Linking his written narrative to theindeterminacy of oral performance, he asserts in TheMan Made of Words, "The storyteller . . . creates the storytelling experience and himself and his audience in theprocess" (3).It is through this dynamic involvement of the reader in the story's meaning thatThe Way To Rainy Mountain ismost successful in recreating the power of orature,the function of orature in a written text.While language is, of course, an intrinsiccomponent of traditional oral performances, whether in the form of secular and sacred narratives, riddles, proverbs, or chants, the full experience of orature dependsupon the audience-participants' involvement in responses, dance, music, and song,similar to the reader's and narrator's "dancing" the page inMomaday's text to uniteseemingly discrete segments. As Ruth Finnegan observes, "without its oral realization and direct rendition by singer and speaker, an unwritten literary piece cannoteasily be said to have any continued or independent existence at all. In this respectthe parallel is less towritten literature than tomusic and dance" (2).

Momaday's American Indianversion of dialogism, then, is not only a conversa

tion with the reader through the different languages of his text?Bakhtin's primaryconcern?but, also, because of its recreation of the dynamics of oral performance, aguided cognitive and kinetic movement across his pages, creating a unity of organicnarratives and echoing silences. Bahktin's insistence "that the reader should sense anauthor's intention distinct from that of the narrator" (Dentith 55) is exemplified inThe Way To Rainy Mountain, where it is clear that the journeying narrator, like thereader, is being manipulated into knowledge already realized by the author. Finally,although Momaday terms his multi-generic text amemoir, The Way To Rainy Mountain transcends categorization. Inmy reading, itmost resembles orature in recreatingthe traditional "unity of the arts" and evoking a holistic response from narrator andreader alike that links it asmuch to visual art and performance as towriting. Momaday has said, "In a way, history for the Indian is an account in shorthand; it is animage, a pictograph. Generally speaking, Indian writing ought to reflect that conceptof history, I suppose_But finally, of course, writing... literature ... ought to de


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feat all expectations" (King 68). Like "Oral poetry," this text is a "kinetic ritual" thatengages us holistically: "The body dances and sings alive with themind.... A manof knowledge dances his wisdom" (Lincoln 29).The Way To Rainy Mountain replicates the creative visual and kinetic dynamism and purposes of orature even more surely than it illustrates what we understand as the polyvocality of written texts. It is, at the same time, itself a work ofvisual art, a design of themythic and cultural history of the Kiowa and of the narrator's family, linking the present semiotically and kinetically through time and spacewith the most ancient past and educating the narrator and the reader through theprocess of this journey.

ENDNOTES1. In this interview with Laura Coltelli, Momaday explains this formal connection inmore detail: "That

whole oral tradition which goes back probably to beyond the invention of the alphabet; the storytellerwas theman who was standing with a piece of charcoal in his hand making, placing, thewonderful images in his mind's eye on the wall of the cave, that's probably one of the origins of American literature.He has begun to tell a story, and he develops in the course of time that storytelling capacity in himselfto such awonderful degree thatwe have to recognize it as being somewhere in the line, in the evolutionof what we think of as American literature" (95).

2. Matthias Schubnell provides a detailed account of events leading up to the composition of both TheJourney of Tai-me and The Way To Rainy Mountain inChapter 5 of N. Scott Momaday: The Culturaland Literary Background (1985).

3. Interestingly, in a 1982 interview with Joseph Bruchac, Momaday relates his own sense of identitywith his participation as a dancer inKiowa ceremonies: "How can I not be an Indian? I'm amember ofthe Gourd Dance society in the Kiowa tribe" (107-108). To Camille Adkins, in 1993, he explains,"The Gourd Dance Society is a very old soldier society in the Kiowa tribe.... Iwas made a member

in 1969. We, the dancers, wear a certain regalia, and we dance. It's been a very good thing for me because it has been a kind of restoration" (222).4. Despite the validity of Iser's notion of virtual texts, we should remain sensitive to the essential differ

ences between oral storytelling, performance, and the "museumizing" consequences of writing. AsRuth Finnegan points out, the very content of an oral narrative:can be greatly affected by the presence and reactions of the audience. For one thing, the type of audience involved can affect the presentation of an oral piece_And direct references to the characteristics, behaviour, or fortunes of particular listeners can also be brought in with greateffectiveness in a subtle and flexible way not usually open towritten literature. Members of the audience too need not confine their participation to silent listening or amere acceptance of the chiefperformer's invitation to participate?they may also in some circumstances break into the performances with additions, queries, or even criticisms_As Plato put it long ago: 'It is the same with

written words [as with painting]. You would think they were speaking as if they were intelligent,but if you ask them about what they are saying and want to learn [more], they just go on sayingone and the same thing for ever.' [Phaedrus, 275 d.]... a further important characteristic of oralliterature: the significance of the actual occasion, which can directly affect the detailed contentand form of the piece being performed. Oral pieces are not composed in the study and later trans

mitted through the impersonal and detached medium of print, but tend to be directly involved inthe occasions of their actual utterance... a piece of oral literature tends to be affected by such factors as the general purpose and atmosphere of the gathering at which it is rendered, recentepisodes in the minds of performers and audience, or even the time of year and propinquity of the


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harvest. Many oral recitations arise in response to various social obligations which, in turn, are exploited by poet and narrator for his own purposes. (10-12)

WORKS CITEDAdkins, Camille. "Interview." In Conversations With N. Scott Momaday, edited by Matthias Schubnell,

216-34. Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1997.Bakhtin, M. M. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: The Univ. of Texas Press, 1981.Blaeser, Kimberly. uThe Way To Rainy Mountain: Momaday's Work inMotion.91 In Narrative Chance:

Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures, edited by Gerald Vizenor, 39-54.Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1989.

Bonetti, Kay. "Interview." In Conversations With N Scott Momaday, edited by Matthias Schubnell,130-47. Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1997.

Clements, William M. "Folk Historical Sense in Two Native American Authors," MELUS 12, no.l(Spring 1985): 79-88.

Coltelli, Laura. Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1990.Dentith, Simon. Bakhtinian Thought: An Introductory Reader. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983.Finnegan, Ruth. Oral Literature inAfrica. Nairobi: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970.Genette, G?rard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay inMethod. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1980.Givens, Bettye. "AMELUS Interview: N.Scott Momaday?A Slant of Light." MELUS 12, no.l (Spring

1985): 79-88.Iser, Wolfgang. The Implied Reader. Baltimore: John Hopkins Univ. Press, 1974.Jefferson, Ann and David Robey, eds. Modern Literary Theory. Second Edition. Totowa, NJ: Barnes &

Noble Books, 1986.King, Tom. "AMELUS Interview: N.Scott Momaday?Literature and the Native Writer." MELUS 10, no.

4 (1983): 66-72.Lincoln, Kenneth. "Native American Literatures." In Smoothing The Ground: Essays On Native Ameri

can Oral Literature, edited by Brian Swann, 3-38. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1983.Miller, J. Hillis. "Narrative." In Critical Terms for Literary Study. Second Edition. Edited by Frank

Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, 66-79. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1995.Momaday, N. Scott. The Presence of the Sun. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992.

-. The Gourd Dancer. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.-. The Man Made of Words. New York: St. Martin's Press,1997.-. The Names, A Memoir. Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 1976.-. The Way To Rainy Mountain. Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico Press, 1969.

Nicholas, Charles A. "The Way To Rainy Mountain: N. Scott Momaday's Hard Journey Back." SouthDakota Review 13, no.4 (1975): 149-58.

Ong, Walter J., SJ. "Literacy and Orality inOur Times." InOral and Traditional Literatures, edited byNorman Simms, 8-21. Hamilton, New Zealand: Outrigger Publishers, 1982.


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Owens, Louis. "Interview." In This isAbout Vision: Interviews with Southwestern Writers, edited by JohnF. Crawford, William Balassi, Annie O. Eysturoy, 61-69. Albuquerque: Univ. of New Mexico, 1990.

Ruoff, A. LaVonne Brown. American Indian Literatures. New York: Modern Language Association,1990.

Schubnell, Matthias. N Scott Momaday: The Cultural and Literary Background. Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1985.

Wong, Hertha Dawn. Sending My Heart Back Across the Years. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992.

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