Time out of Mind: Time and Times in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony

This dissertation looks at Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel, Ceremony, through the lens of time. Besides her expressed interest in time as she stated in several interviews, the structure of the narrative, as well as the descriptions of Tayo’s epiphany of time and space, give grounds for this particular frame. However, it is also about the times and circumstances her characters would have lived through as members of a Pueblo community, residents within the state of New Mexico, and citizens of the United States. As such it bridges the research done on Laguna Pueblo by the anthropologists of the late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth century as well as the impact of the Marmon brothers and the Presbyterian church. Of further impact were the Pueblo land disputes with the federal government; the Albuquerque and Santa Fe Indian schools and assimilationist policies; and the Taos-Santa Fe anti-assimilationist efforts. Going beyond a typical ethnography, this study also focuses on Silko’s utilization of the Navajo Red Antway, Mountainway, and Great Star Chant; the traditional Laguna myths, including the origin myth and the connection to Chaco Canyon; the Aztec New Fire Ceremony and the theories of Newtonian, Einsteinian and quantum physics upon which Silko situated her interest in time. Each of these topics, with the exception of the Taos-Santa Fe cultural sphere, has either been alluded to in the dialogue between personae, made manifest in the actions and fates of the various family members, or employed, either overtly in passages connecting elements of the plot, or intimated through Silko’s descriptions of her characters and interactions among them.