By Catherine Rainwater
In goals of Fiery Stars, Catherine Rainwater examines the novels of writers comparable to Momaday, Linda Hogan, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, and Louise Erdrich and contends that the very act of writing narrative imposes constraints upon those authors which are international to local American culture. Their works volume to a holiday with -- and a metamorphosis of -- American Indian storytelling.The publication makes a speciality of the schedule of social and cultural regeneration encoded in modern local American narrative, and addresses key questions about how those works in achieving their brazenly acknowledged political and revisionary goals. Rainwater explores the ways that the writers create readers who comprehend the relationship among storytelling and private and social transformation; considers how modern local American narrative rewrites Western notions of house and time; examines the lifestyles of intertextual connections among local American works; and appears on the important position of local American literature in mainstream society this day.
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Example text
We cannot "read" other cultures or decode their texts without first, like Momaday's Father Olguin, learning new ways of seeing, new ideas and information, and new habits of interpretation. 41 That is to say, within one text, one set of rules for accessing meaning is extensively violated by, or brought into significant opposition with another, a conflict producing an interpretive, potentially instructive crisis in the reader. Though extratextual information about the Navajo-Pueblo world represented in the novel is ultimately required, the textual dynamic of Ceremony, more than that of House, accommodates the outsider reader.
For example, characters in Green Grass, Running Water watch slightly altered, home-video versions of John Wayne and Richard Widmark films that Coyote and his cohorts have "fixed" (266) to the Indians' advantage. Both Indian and non-Indian viewer-response to such doctored videos is based on the shock of directly perceiving the world as constructed according to the rules of the Other's game. "52 Indeed, King and Vizenor appear to share a conviction that trickster figures are, in general, a pan-tribal expression of Indian peoples' sophisticated awareness of the power of sign action.
Is ... thinking of a story . . / I'm telling you the story / she is thinking" (1). If the story told in Ceremony originates with Thought-Woman, then it originates in the mythico-spiritual dimension, despite its narrative concern with the temporal-historical particulars of Tayo's life. Therefore it is subject to interpretation according to logonomic rules pertaining to cosmological accounts, and the narrator is treated as a spirit being. However, the narrator, the "I" of the passage who speaks for Thought-Woman, is also the narrator of Ceremony (perhaps even Silko herself), who presumably inhabits the present, material world of which she speaks.