N. Scott Momaday's Native American Ideology in House Made of Dawn (1968): Stylolinguistic Analyses of Defamiliarization in Contemporary American Indian Literature PDF
Preview N. Scott Momaday's Native American Ideology in House Made of Dawn (1968): Stylolinguistic Analyses of Defamiliarization in Contemporary American Indian Literature
N. SCOTT MOMADAY'S NATIVE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY IN HOUSE MADE OF DAWN (1 5 ) Stylolinguistic Analyses of Defamiliarization in Contemporary American Indian Literature Guillermo Bartelt With a Foreword by John D. Battenburg The Edwin Mellen Press Lewiston•Queenston•Lampeter Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bartelt, Guillermo. N. Scott Momaday's Native American ideology in House made of dawn (1968) : stylolinguistic analyses of defamiliarization in contemporary American Indian literature / Guillermo Bartlet ; with a foreword by John D. Battenburg. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7734-1419-8 ISBN-10: 0-7734-1419-3 1. Momaday, N. Scott, 1934- House made of dawn. 2. American literature-- Indian authors--History and criticism. I. Battenburg, John D. II. Title. PS3563.047H633 2010 813'.54--dc22 2010044503 hors serie. A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library. Copyright CO 2010 Guillermo Bartlet All rights reserved. For information contact (cid:9) The Edwin Mellen Press The Edwin Mellen Press (cid:9) Box 450 Box 67 (cid:9) Lewiston, New York Queenston, Ontario (cid:9) USA 14092-0450 CANADA LOS 1L0 The Edwin Mellen Press, Ltd. Lampeter, Ceredigion, Wales UNITED KINGDOM SA48 8LT Printed in the United States of America For Monica, Irene, and Johnny, dancers of the Sacred Circle. Contents Page Foreword by John D. Battenburg Preface(cid:9) iv Acknowledgements(cid:9) vi Introduction: Stylolinguistic Criticism Chapter I. The Discourse of Geopiety(cid:9) 7 The Moral Landscape(cid:9) 7 Chronotopes(cid:9) 10 Semantic Roles(cid:9) 15 Chapter IL Hegemonic Registers(cid:9) 31 Intrusive Officialese(cid:9) 32 Heteroglossia and Science(cid:9) 45 Chapter III. Code-Switching(cid:9) 50 A Mysterious Lineage(cid:9) 51 The Pecos Descendants(cid:9) 54 Diglossia at Jemez(cid:9) 57 Francisco's Diglossia(cid:9) 60 Chapter IV. Indian English(cid:9) 68 The New Englishes(cid:9) 69 Consonant Cluster Simplification(cid:9) 72 Devoicing(cid:9) 74 Vowel Deletion and Shift (cid:9) 74 Plurals(cid:9) 76 Possessives(cid:9) 77 Affixes(cid:9) 77 Tense and Aspect (cid:9) 78 Focusing(cid:9) 82 Chapter V. Indian Silence(cid:9) 85 Politeness and Caution(cid:9) 86 Resistance and Overcoming(cid:9) 90 Establishing Solidarity(cid:9) 94 Distancing and Dignity(cid:9) 97 Concluding Remarks(cid:9) 101 Appendix 1(cid:9) 106 Appendix 2(cid:9) 107 Appendix 3(cid:9) 108 Notes(cid:9) 110 Works Cited(cid:9) 111 Index(cid:9) 123 Foreword It has often been noted that N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn was neither a literary nor a commercial success upon its publication in 1968, yet it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction within a year. While literary critics have increasingly grappled with and appreciated the lyrical, mythical, and cultural representations of the Native American experience within novels such as House Made of Dawn, a small number of linguists have also focused on writings by and about American Indians. Stylolinguistics continues to be suspect, particularly among American linguists. Part linguistics, part stylistics, and part literary analysis, stylolinguistic analysis is rooted in French structuralism, Russian formalism, and the Prague school. Mainstream card-carrying linguists often view any type of linguistic analysis of literature with misgivings. Most have not been trained in literature and are skeptical about using linguistics tools to analyze verbal arts forms. Chomsky has observed, for example, "Literature can heighten your imagination and insight and understanding, but it surely doesn't provide the evidence that you need to draw conclusions and substantiate conclusions." Guillermo Bartelt's stylolinguistic approaches to House Made of Dawn boldly employ linguistics to examine Momaday's narrative style. Bartelt's analysis is grounded in his ethnological experience with Native American discourse communities. Rather than a pseudo-application, his use of linguistic terminology and linguistic approaches lend themselves to a serious analysis of the written text. Bartell reveals that House Made of Dawn is as significant as any other form of language in providing insights into the structure and meaning of depictions of Indian life. Bartelt analyzes Momaday's decision to assign the land as the signifier of an active agent and demonstrates the way in which House Made of Dawn repeatedly includes descriptions of the landscape because they have the ability and power to shape people's lives. Bartelt also describes how atmospheric forces such as whirlwinds and the sun are used by Momaday to reveal human supernatural powers. Through examining the semantic role of various noun phrases throughout the text, Bartelt convincingly argues that the Southwest Indian worldview is fundamentally different to Western ideologies. Bartelt also examines Momaday's use of hegemonic registers and code-switching to show alienation and isolation of the protagonist, Abel. Use of the Spanish language, in fact, exposes the success achieved by the colonizing Spaniards centuries earlier in imposing their lingua franca on Indian communities speaking dissimilar indigenous languages. The treatment of Indian English and the discussion of representations of dialects by linguists and novelists certainly have wide applications extending beyond Momaday's novel. Bartelt probes Momaday's use of eye dialect in Indian English to mark differences from standard English in phonology, morphology, and syntax. Perhaps the most interesting analysis within Bartelt's work, however, is the investigation of Indian silence. Bartelt finds considerable evidence that silence is both meaningful and rule-governed ii with Native characters in the novel. The absence of verbal communication and differences in the length of pauses are features found in linguistic communities around the world and worthy of further exploration to reduce misunderstanding among speakers within multilingual settings. Bartelt's work is significant because it reveals how stylolinguistic approaches provide tools for those in creative writing, literary criticism, linguistics, anthropology, and cognitive psychology. This research also reveals Momaday's narrative skill by focusing on specific linguistic features of his retelling of a prodigal son's experience from the reservation, into the world, and back home again. Bartelt excels in providing insights into a Native American odyssey of discovery through analysis of literary representations of language and culture. Finally, such a study is important because it reminds us of the fragile sacred beauty that is at risk but can still exist in the American Indian experience. John D. Battenburg Professor of English California State Polytechnic University San Luis Obispo, California in Preface My study of American Indian English, which has shaped much, if not most, of my research interest in sociolinguistics over the past thirty years, grew out of my early teaching experiences with nonstandard English speakers (and writers) from Navajo and Apache reservations in Arizona. Initially intrigued by the phonological and syntactic assessments of nonstandard varieties among American Indians offered by such anthropological linguists as William Leap, I have focused over the years on issues of the same topic at the level of discourse. Furthermore, since much of my career as a linguist has been spent attached to English Departments, I have on occasion been required to teach courses in literature, especially American Indian literature. Ironically enough, it was during one of those reluctantly accepted course assignments that I became acquainted with Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn. As a sociolinguist conducting research in American Indian English, I was immediately struck by the seemingly genuine authenticity of his somewhat brief but very accurate depictions of this nonstandard English variety, given the limitations presented by standard English orthography. My curiosity having been piqued, I eventually wrote a phonological and morphological assessment of Momaday's literary version of American Indian English, which in turn led me to other stylolinguistic topics concerning the novel that have been brought together in this volume. It is not my intention to challenge any of the previous critical scholarship about this novel, much of which is iv
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