From Dissonance to Harmony with Nature: A Material Ecocritical Reading of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony

Abstract

Although much has been written about Silko's Ceremony, little attention has been paid to reading the novel from a material ecocritical perspective. This study employs material ecocritical theory to expound the representations of humans, flora and fauna in Silko’s Ceremony, and how these entities are agentic and capable of producing meanings, communicating with each other, and altering the course of events in the novel. Influenced by new materialisms and the work of two leading theorists, Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, who co-edited a book entitled, Material Ecocriticism (2014), this new wave of ecocriticism highlights the importance of reading matter in texts or/and reading a matter as a text. The study argues that, in Ceremony, all Tayo’s relationships with nature, including springs, landscapes, animals, and humans, in which he remembers his relationship with his belated uncle Josiah and his cousin Rocky, narrate an experience of a story that can be viewed as storied matter. The study concludes that everything in the world that is presented in the novel is interconnected, entangled, and enmeshed in a complex network of relations and one should respect and regard the environment because human destiny is intrinsically interrelated with the destiny of the world.