"The Only Cure I Know Is a Good Ceremony": Post-traumatic Reconstruction of Identity in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13136/2281-4582/2016.i7.619Abstract
The article deals with the representation of post-traumatic stress disorder in Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony (1977), and with the complex psychological and cultural procedures of identity reconstruction its protagonist, half-blood Tayo, must follow in order to find some sort of inner balancing. Tayo’s traumatic experience of war seems to schizophrenically split his identity, turning his “real” self into a Lacanian absence (the symptom of the “Real”), a void that denounces the source of the trauma (not the war in itself, which is mainly a metaphorical projection of Tayo’s inner conflict, but his being neither Indian nor white) by erasing it from Tayo’s consciousness and substituting it with a mythical plot that constructs him as a scapegoat-like figure responsible for the drought afflicting the Reservation. Both the novel and its main character at the end manage to reach some sort of coherence by accepting the unrepresentable Real and turning it upside down: they both finally reject the dream of a homogenous identity, and the trauma, no more something to be simply “cured,” is transformed into a source of self-definition, thanks to the equally polymorphic, hybrid, “broken” ceremonies Tayo is subject to in the novel.
References
Blumenthal, Susan. “Spotted Cattle and Deer: Spirit Guides and Symbols of Endurance and Healing in Ceremony.” American Indian Quarterly 14:4 (Fall 1990): 367-377.
Fink, Bruce: The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997.
Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis. London: Penguin 1994.
Patell, Cyrus R.K. “The Violence of Hybridity in Silko and Alexie.” Journal of American Studies of Turkey 6 (1997): 3-9.
Price, Rachael: “Transcending the Borderlands: Elements of the Anzalduan Mestiza Consciousness in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony.” Images, Imaginations, and Beyond: Proceedings of the Eighth Native American Symposium, November 4-6, 2009. Ed. Mark B. Spencer. Durant: Southeastern Oklahoma State University, 2010. 98-107.
Remp, Katelyn. “Using the Land to Heal: A Warrior’s Journey in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Novel Ceremony.” Eco Spirit 6:4 (2013). http://home.moravian.edu/public/relig/ecoSpirit/issues/Vol6No4.pdf Last visited ?
Žižek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2016 Valerio Massimo De Angelis
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Iperstoria is an Open Access journal.- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 BY-NC License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of their work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal. We require authors to inform us of any instances of re-publication.