Review: House Made of Dawn · 1:19am Aug 9th, 2014
House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday (1968)
I'm trying to read all some of the Pulitzer winners; this is one.
Momaday is a Kiowa, and this short book is very Native American. I don't know if a book could have been "Native American" before the homogenization of Native Americans thru movies, historical revisionism, pow-wow culture, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but today there is a Native American way, and even a Native American accent, which I've found everywhere from the Creek of Florida, to the Iroqouis of New York, to the Hopi in New Mexico.
The book is in four parts, and four is the number of wholeness to the Navajo (and perhaps to the Kiowa as well), just as three is to whites. More "Indian", though, is the reluctance to exclude or explain thing.
I remember trying to learn to make blowgun darts from an old Creek in Georgia. I told him the seed-fluff I was using for fins was too tangled, and he turned his back on me and started doing something. I was angry until I noticed he was making a tool to straighten them. He was trying to solve my problem; he just didn't want to explain in words.
Momaday uses lots of words, but in the Indian way, of observing and pointing things out, rather than the "white man" way, of categorizing and summarizing. By the end of the novel, I wanted some white man words.
Realist, modernist, and especially post-modernist writing assumes that there is something unsavory about authorial intent, and that the job of the novelist is to record what is there. Along those same lines, this book is not an instantiation or proof of a theme, but a gestalt, and so it moves in expanding circles, from Abel, to his father, to the white woman who fucks him, to the priest who doesn't realize he wants to fuck the woman, to the dead priest whose diary that priest reads.
But can a novel work simply by reporting lifelike events, and trusting there is something worthwhile in them? No. If so, we would live life, or perhaps read newspapers, instead of reading novels. The author must know, or at least sense, some themes.
Are these stories connected thematically? Most of the narrators want something from Abel, or from the Native Americans. Is that important? No commentator seems to think so, and I don't think so. Why are Father Olguin, Angela, and the other priest in the story? They have no narratively-significant connection to anything else in the story, yet take a third of the book. Possibly they are to illustrate other ways of failing to connect with others. The priest does not acknowledge his own desire and deliberately isolates himself; Angela desires Abel and has him sexually, yet fails completely to touch or understand him in the way that she wants to.
Many people say the story is about Abel's inability to connect with either the Kiowa or the city. But there is less than one paragraph in the entire book about Abel's difficulty going back to the reservation after prison. If the story were about Abel's alienation from his own people, it would have to have something in it about why Abel is alienated from his own people, but it doesn't. If it is supposed to make a general point about the Native American condition of alienation from modern society, it would have to make a better case for why Abel is alienated from the city than the fact that he killed somebody and so is hassled by parole officers and social workers. Most Native Americans haven't killed anybody lately.
This book would have made a good series of poems, or one good short story. But it isn't a novel, unless I'm missing the story.
Stylistically, it is equal parts exhilarating and infuriating. You're either going to love or hate this stuff:
In the early morning the land lay huge and sluggish, discernible only as a whole, with nothing in relief except its own sheer, brilliant margin as far away as the eye could see, and beyond that the nothingness of the sky. Silence lay like water on the land, and even the frenzy of the dogs below was feeble and a long time in finding the ear.
It's beautiful for one paragraph, but becomes a slog when this goes on for pages. Perhaps a fifth of the novel is description like this. When Momaday wants to show how a character feels, it's hardcore show-don't-tell:
Something there struck beneath the level of his weariness, struck and took hold in his hearing like the cry of a small creature--a field mouse or a young rabbit. Evening gives motion to the air, and the long blades of corn careen and collide, and there is always at dusk the rustling of leaves that settle into night. But was it that? All day his mind had wandered over the past, habitually, beyond control and even the least notion of control, but his thoughts had been by some slight strand of attention anchored to his work. The steady repetition of his backward steps — the flash of the hoe and the sure advance of the brown water after it – had been a small reality from which his mind must venture and return. But now, at the end of long exertion, his age and body let go of the mind, and he was suddenly conscious of some alien presence close at hand. And he knew as suddenly, too, that it had been there for a long time, not approaching, but impending for minutes, and even hours, upon the air and the growth and the land around. He held his breath and listened. His ears rang with weariness; beyond that there was nothing save the soft sound of water and wind and, somewhere among the farthest rows, the momentary scuffle of a quail; then the low whistle and blowing of the mares in the adjacent field, reminding him of the time. But there was something else; something apart from these, not quite absorbed into the ordinary silence: an excitement of breathing in the instance just past, all ways immediate, irrevocable even now that it had ceased to be. He peered into the dark rows of corn from which no sound had come, in which no presence was. There was only the deep black wall of stocks and leaves, vibrating slowly upon his tired vision like water. He was too old to be afraid. His acknowledgment of the unknown was nothing more than a dull, intrinsic sadness, a vague desire to weep, for evil had long since found him out and knew who he was. He set a blessing upon the corn and took up his hoe. He shuffled out between the rows, towards the dim light at the edge of the cornfield.
I've read that four times now and still don't know what it's trying to say. I think I'd have given up if I hadn't been stuck for five hours in an emergency room with nothing else to read.
Momaday has a poet's eye for fine descriptions, but sometimes he will describe the smoke curling from the houses before he has told us that there are houses. He throws up a barrage of details about the land without telling you where you are, and you'll have to read four paragraphs of similes about clouds and sunsets and hills before you realize you are in the same valley he has described three times already. And he has combined Faulkner's substitution of puzzles (scenes out of chronological order, with unidentified narrators) for depth with the affected ungrammaticality we'll see later in Cormac McCarthy. (A couple of the scenes cannot be attributed definitely to any character, and it's sometimes difficult to tell whether a scene break indicates a new narrator, but that may be a device to suggest continuity beyond the individual.)
The characters are described similarly to the scenery: with poetic detail, yet in a way that often leaves me with no clear picture. There are two entire pages describing Abel's fight to the death with the albino, which skillfully convey Abel's physical feelings; but very little to tell us who the albino is, what history they had between them, or why they fought, and so we learn little about Abel from this dramatic central scene.
I think the Pulitzer committee chose the book for political reasons, but I don't think they were wrong to do so. With great power comes great responsibility. This was the first well-known novel by a Native American; many others followed soon after. If you have the power to bring attention to the literary work of an entire race, then you ought to do that sometimes.
This review makes me want to read this book.
I've said this before, but damn it, I'll say it again: I would gladly pay for a collection of your reviews. I like many things in them, the chief of which is that you are unafraid of saying you didn't understand something. In the thick fog of obscurantism that settles over the whole field of literary criticism, this ability is damn near supernatural.
It also helps that you are a bloody genius, of course.
The first description I quite like. As a scene setter it's evocative and enticing. I especially like the sound that's slow to be heard. Perfectly put.
The second one is horrifying. Was it unedited? I mean it's not Joycean codes and ciphers that are meant to be decoded[1], it's clearly meant to say something in plain English and yet it is a confused muddy and muddled mess. I don't think it is art. I honestly think it wasn't edited properly.
[1] Open question: Has anyone read Joyce, especially Finnegans Wake, and can tell me what it is for?
EDITED: Because I am a dunce.
Don't.
Be.
So.
Wise.
I'll admit that it's not what I'd normally prefer to read, but the entire point of that rambling style of over-description is to evoke life. Take a moment to think back to the last time you were standing somewhere in a park or just outside that was absolutely beautiful.
(You're not actually gonna do that and just skip to my next sentence, aren't you?)
There's the easy way to describe that scene: Point out what it looked like and felt like and maybe what you were doing, all in sequence. But think about what it was actually like in the moment. You have dozens of senses firing off, telling you strange things in strange ways while errant thoughts swell profoundly for micro-seconds before a muse deflates it. Yeah, it tends to be taken a few steps further in some of these works, but all writing likes to go beyond the mundane.
(I'm not saying it's not terrible, I honestly don't think I've read enough of this style in general to make that call, but that is probably a few bits too much.)
This reminds me of something (in my native language) I had to read for literature class, back when I was a teenager.
I didn't find the second excerpt too confusing, truth be told; while it did sound strange, with an almost synesthesic quality, and was as wordy as purple prose without delving into obscure words, it wasn't altogether unpleasant. But while I was able to get a nice mental picture out of it, I had to, in a manner of speaking, drop to first gear in order to go through it; assembling the mental image was far more tiresome than usual, and if the rest of the book is like that it's a book I would prefer to not rush through.
2354952 I think you're responding to something different from what you quoted. How to describe something is what you're addressing. How to choose what to describe is what the bit you quoted is about.
Yeah, I totally did.
2355065
In that case, I'm just gonna skip past the debate to the part where I conclude that you're right and I'm wrong.
So the entire novel really is, basically, just another clumsy "things that happened to a character" not-story. Which is... boring enough that I refused to believe it was so simple.
I am now experiencing retrospective boredom.
I enjoy reading your reviews, Bad Horse, so thanks for taking the time to post.
Halfway through the second excerpt, I started thinking this exact same thing.
Can a novel written by a Native American, or any other minority for that matter, ever be read as anything other than a comparison between them and society at large?
2356090 I think all the novels I've read by Native Americans were explicitly about that subject. So, maybe, if they tried to write something that wasn't specifically about being Native American.
This is an exceedingly accurate depiction of an unusual feeling.
By the way, you talk like a person that's expecting to die soon. If you're planning on dying soon, I want to know about it
. We need to at least grab lunch or dinner sometime.
Whenever I read stuff like this I think, "I don't understand. What is the author trying to do?"
But of course the answer is that the author is trying to do what all authors try to do: take important things out of their minds and put them into words so that other people can put them into their own minds.
And the reason I don't understand is not (in this case) that the author is unskilled nor yet (I hope) that I am stupid. It is because the author's mind works very, very differently from mine. And not just on an abstract level--belief, politics, aesthetics--but on a very basic one as well: how we perceive reality, even to the five senses.
Consider the story of blue traffic lights in Japan: I don't know how true that is but how could a culture that saw no difference between blue and green comprehend, much less write:
At my beginning I believed, like you,
Something would come of all my green and blue. *
Is Momaday's obtuseness the result of his cultural difference, of his Native Americanness? I think Bad Horse is right to be skeptical, first because "Native American" embraces cultures as diverse as Norway and Greece are in the term "European," and second because, as he alludes, this could be the result of
spoofingwriting to the expectations of white editors, readers and prize committees ( The Education of Little Tree is particularly damning evidence that such can be done, and of how to do it).Me, I choose to believe it's due to the author's neurobiology, which is unique--just like everybody else's. We can posit gross causes (synesthesia's been mentioned) but I don't think that's necessary. Normal variations between one person and the next can make siblings more different than entire cultures.
So what is Momaday trying to do? He's trying to talk about what his mind finds beautiful, in a way his mind finds beautiful. My mind can understand that, at least. If it can't understand the rest, well, maybe the next guy's can.
* C.S. Lewis, "Late Summer"
2356323 Your interpretation seems largely plausible, but how do you distinguish between "zen" and "text generated by a Markov model of new-age texts"? Especially in the last [1] section above. Would you conclude differently if he had said "His recognition of the unknown was more than just a bright, intrinsic joy, or a vague desire to laugh; for virtue had long since found him out and knew who he was"?
2356564
Had I encountered that sentence in such a context, and not known you'd made it up simply by substituting antonyms for certain words, I would immediately think the author was evoking* Yeats:
My fiftieth year had come and gone,
I sat, a solitary man,
In a crowded London shop,
An open book and empty cup
On the marble table-top.
While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.
--Vacillation
In fact now I'm not sure that wasn't what Momaday was doing with this whole passage you've quoted.
* Not "invoking" him. That involves chalking a shamrock on the floor and reciting "Sailing to Byzantium" backward. **
** Kids, don't try this at home.
2356555
It's more complicated than "spoofing", because some aspects of Native American culture have been adopted from Hollywood and pop culture. They have believed our propaganda about them. If I had to paint pre-19th-century Native American culture with a single brush, I'd call it Nietzschian Buddhism. The Nietzschian part has been elided.
I took a class on Native American culture from a respected Iroquois elder, who liked to believe in the peaceful nature of his culture and their suppression by the white man... while ignoring the colonial "gunship diplomacy" of the Iroquois, being treated like a minor celebrity by the white media, and living on his acres of beautiful land in upstate New York that I heard (but don't know) he got for free for being born Indian. "Native American culture" keeps changing, but Native American literature has a strong nationalist streak that pretends there was one "true" version sometime in the past.
2356684
I'm using "spoof" here not only in the general sense of "to mock or parody," but also as it's used in signals intelligence, "to send out a false signal that the enemy takes for true."
In which case, making us believe that they'd internalized our propaganda would be spoofing. Not that I can prove that's true. But if it were, I couldn't.
shorpy.com/files/reisavonturen.jpg
"Think Nietzsche need new elider, kemosabe." ;-)
2356684
Did it ever strike you as odd that this myth is emphatically endorsed by both academic left-wingers and racist right-wingers?
Because it is and I can't account for that, except perhaps with an offhand line from a poem--maybe Stevie Smith's--that "romance in socialist thought can end up fascist."
2356770
I don't know what racist right-wingers say about Native Americans. Does Sherman Alexie count as an academic left-winger or a racist right-winger?
2356905
Here.
"I'M GETTING BLOODY SICK OF THIS! GIVE US SOME EASY ONES, BAMBI !"
2356564
I'm assuming you're asking one of these:
I think I know because I had some idea of what he was talking about after reading
and that didn't change after reading the rest.
I don't think I would have concluded differently if he used your sentence, but I would have pointed it out as an error. "Bright, intrinsic joy" is a passable confusion of that calm, and I've heard of people laughing over it, but "virtue had long since found him," which implies some kind of pride, doesn't line up. I still think I would have concluded the same thing because I expect people to make some mistakes when trying to recall how they felt long ago.
2357015 I think you may be onto something, but I can't reconcile zen and euphoria with
2357478
Euphoria isn't the right word if euphoria implies excitement. It's not giddy, but it feels just as... happy. I know "happy" and "vague sad desire to weep" sound contradictory, but I'm really struggling to find the right words, and both fit.
This is really the kind of thing I would spend a couple weeks describing in a thousand words. Let me clarify the whole passage first, then I'll try to explain myself concisely.
"Happy"/"euphoria" is what I think I'm calling the feeling of being relieved of an impossible and unwanted responsibility. (I say "I think" because I can't confirm that relief from responsibility is the cause.) At the same time, that feeling comes with the knowledge that you're giving up and accepting that you failed on something that should be, though it no longer is, important to you, hence the vague desire to weep. That, or the vague desire to weep is a remnant of feelings while stressed, though I don't think that is it.
I'm trying to explain this logically when I don't understand it logically. I don't know if I'm making things at all clearer.
2356555
I meant synesthesic in the way writers use it, not as the physical condition.
As a simple example, think of how in English fear is often associated with a smell (he could smell her fear, and similar constructions); the first time I found that in a text I was utterly baffled, because in my own culture that association does not exist.
The second excerpt seems to use something similar, associating a feeling with a sound just below the hearing threshold. I believe Japanese also has similar associations, though I could be wrong, given that my command of the Japanese language is equivalent to that of a small child.
For the rest, you've put into words what I thought of the differences better than I could. From reading both excerpts, with the almost Pratchett-esque choice of adjectives in the first one and the unusual associations of the second, the impression I get is that of someone that grew up using different, alien, metaphors when compared with someone that speaks English natively, and don't want to, or can't, avoid them now.
2357905 Well, you've helped me pay more careful attention & believe that the passage is carefully constructed. The real problem, I think, is that I can't figure out from context what it means, because there's very little context. The man doesn't come there from having done something or thought something, and doesn't go do something meaningful afterwards. The story jumps from viewpoint to viewpoint, and rarely comes back to continue what it had started. Individual characters have many scenes, but the scenes have years between them and only high-level, metaphoric or thematic connections to each other. I mean, they are connected, but not causally.