House Made of Dawn (23 page)

Reflections

T
HE SETTING OF
House Made of Dawn
is the Indian country of the Southwest, specifically the cliff and canyon landscape of northwestern New Mexico, formed by volcanic action millions of years ago. It is a unique and beautiful landscape, vibrant with wind and rain, blessed always by the sun, and full of color. The Pueblo people say of this special world that it is the center of Creation.

It is also the setting of my boyhood. From the ages of twelve to seventeen, I lived on the back of a horse, exploring every corner of that beloved world. I came to know well the seasons, the wildlife, the heartbeat of the land—and, most of all, the people. They
belonged
to the land.

Both consciously and subconsciously, my writing has been deeply informed by the land with a sense of place. In some important way, place determines who and what we are. The land-person equation is essential to writing, to all of literature. Able, in
House Made of Dawn
, must exist in the cultural and physical context of Walatoa, just as Stephen Dedalus, say, must be fashioned in the mould of Dublin.

Abel's story is that of one man of one generation. It is otherwise a story of world war, of cultural conflict, and of psychic dislocation. And at last it is a story of the human condition. Looking back over the life of the novel to date, I dare to believe that the story is told with sympathy, honesty, and great good faith and will.

N. Scott Momaday

T
HE SPELL CAST
by N. Scott Momaday's groundbreaking first novel,
House Made of Dawn
, was almost immediate and has moved and influenced readers and other writers for more than forty years. The first work by a Native American to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction (1969), Momaday's debut performance is now viewed as an American classic; many critics consider it still the finest Native American novel. In addition, it paved the way for what has come to be seen as a Native American Renaissance. The critical and popular success of
House Made of Dawn
made possible the subsequent successes of such writers as Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch, and Sherman Alexie.

Momaday has said that he had the idea for his first novel “for a long time” and that Abel's story, descriptions of the Southwestern landscape, references to legend and ritual, and specific events in the novel had their origins in the author's own childhood experiences and observations while living on reservations in Arizona and New Mexico as well as in his father's often repeated stories.
House Made of Dawn
is one of those novels in which the telling of the story is as important as the story itself, and Momaday
clearly drew on a variety of models—from Kiowa storytellers and Navajo chanters to William Faulkner—to tell his story. Vernon Lattin, in
American Literature
, has pointed out that the novel is both “a return to the sacred art of storytelling and mythmaking that is part of Indian oral tradition” and a bid “to push the secular mode of modern fiction into the sacred mode, a faith and recognition in the power of the word.”

So from his father's stories, the stories of the people among whom he grew up, the sacred landscape of the Southwest, and his own observations of the conflict between the two cultures in which he moved, Momaday fashioned his novel. He has further stated that much of the life of Walatowa, Abel's home village, was based in great part on the life of Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico. A specific example is Abel's killing of the albino. In a 1991 interview with Loredana Nunzi, Momaday pointed out that “there is a strong strain of albinism at Jemez Pueblo and this is the pueblo that I used as the model for the book…. They are thought to have powers that most people do not have.” He elaborated further that Abel's knifing of the albino was based on an actual episode that occurred at Jemez. Momaday recalled that at the defendant's trial for shooting an albino at point-blank range, the defendant said that he shot his victim “because he threatened to turn himself into a snake and bite me, and so I shot him. You know, anybody would have done the same thing.” Momaday also points out that Abel
and his grandfather are convinced that Cruz is a witch and highlights the ritualistic nature of the stabbing.

Containing the specific incidents and characters modeled on life at Jemez are two overarching motifs. Identifying the first of these, Baine Kerr (in
Southwest Review
) has characterized the novel as “a creation myth—rife with fabulous imagery, ending with Abel's rebirth in the old ways at the old man's death—but an ironic one, suffused with violence and telling a story of culture loss.” That culture loss links the creation myth motif with the conflict between Native American and non-Native cultures, which Momaday has said was one of his “central concerns” in the novel. Of course, both the creation/rebirth motif and the conflict of cultures are focused in the person of Abel. A third important motif is the sacredness of the land and the traditional Indian perception of the sacred bond between the people and the land. The novel reflects Momaday's belief that “the whole world view of the Indian is predicated upon the principle of harmony in the universe. You can't tinker much with that; it has the look of an absolute.”

But the power of
House Made of Dawn
and the novel's place in the American canon are not dependent solely on Native American concerns and issues. Abel is certainly the lone, culturally divided outsider seeking his identity as a Native American in an Anglo society. He is also a typically American outcast, separated from and in conflict with not only himself but with his society—an important twentieth-century exemplar of one of American fiction's primary archetypes. That Abel is in conflict with two cultures only intensifies his story and his quest.

The impact of
House Made of Dawn
on Momaday himself, on readers, and on writers who followed him was considerable. The novel's publication and the Pulitzer Prize, Momaday has said, at first “did inhibit me in certain ways,” and he “found it very difficult to write after that for a long time.” At the same time, the novel's reception and fame, as well as the resulting income, “alleviated a lot of the problems that come with being a young professor.” Perhaps, most important,
House Made of Dawn
firmly established Momaday as a writer whose work would be taken seriously. “It cleared the way for my work,” he
has commented. “When I finally could get back to writing, I was free to do it.” The novel's impact in terms of clearing the way for other Native American writers has been noted. Additionally, he was the first Native American novelist not only to focus on the plight of the contemporary Native American but also to establish that plight as representing the cultural estrangement and social alienation characteristic of postwar American fiction in general. By so doing, he served as both model and motivator to scores of younger writers.

In 1989,
The Ancient Child
appeared and confirmed Momaday's status as one of our most important makers of fiction and as a guide to those elements of the past, of legend and landscape, and of the present that have the power to reconcile us to our best selves, regardless of cultural background. As Momaday has said of Abel, “He was showing signs… wasn't he, of making his way back into the traditional world at the end of the novel.” And as he writes of Abel in the novel's final paragraph, so he could write of himself:

THE WAY TO RAINY MOUNTAIN

First published in paperback by University of New Mexico Press in 1976,
The Way to Rainy Mountain
has sold more than 200,000 copies. This redesigned edition includes a new preface.

“The paperback edition of
The Way to Rainy Mountain
was first published twenty-five years ago. One should not be surprised, I suppose, that it has remained vital, and immediate, for that is the nature of story. And this is particularly true of the oral tradition, which exists in a dimension of timelessness. I was first told these stories by my father when I was a child. I do not know how long they had existed before I heard them. They seem to proceed from a place of origin as old as the earth.

“The stories in
The Way to Rainy Mountain
are told in three voices. The first voice is the voice of my father, the ancestral voice, and the voice of the Kiowa oral tradition. The second is the voice of historical commentary. And the third is that of personal reminiscence, my own voice. There is a turning and returning of myth, history, and memoir throughout, a narrative wheel that is as sacred as language itself” (N. Scott Momaday, from the new preface).

“Written with great dignity, the book has something about it of the timeless, of that long view down which the Kiowa look to their myth-shrouded beginnings.”

—
New York Times

THE ANCIENT CHILD

In his first novel since the Pulitzer Prize-winning
House Made of Dawn
, N. Scott Momaday shapes the ancient Kiowa myth of a boy who turned into a bear into a timeless American classic.
The Ancient Child
juxtaposes Indian lore and Wild West legend into a hypnotic, often lyrical contemporary novel—the story of Locke Setman, known as Set, a Native American raised far from the reservation by his adoptive father. Set feels a strange aching in his soul and, returning to tribal lands for the funeral of his grandmother, is drawn irresistibly to the fabled bear-boy. When he meets Grey, a beautiful young medicine woman with a visionary gift, his world is turned upside down. Here is a magical saga of one man's tormented search for his identity—a quintessential American novel, and a great one.

 

“A tour de force of clarity and brilliance.”

—
San Francisco Chronicle

THE MAN MADE OF WORDS
:
ESSAYS
,
STORIES
,
PASSAGES

In
The Man Made of Words
, Momaday chronicles his own pilgrimage as an author, retelling, through thirty-eight essays, allegorical stories, and autobiographical reminiscences, how he became one of the first recognized Native American writers of this century. By exploring such themes as land, language, and self-identity,
The Man Made of Words
fashions a definition of American literature as it has never been interpreted before.

 

“The dean of American Indian writers… Mr. Momaday constructs beautifully cadenced sentences and summons a colorful assortment of stories and states of mind from a lively imagination.”

—
New York Times Book Review