American Indian Culture and Research Journal

One important symptom of the disease that the ceremony of Ceremony is designed to cure is flawed vision, physiological as well as psychological. At the beginning of the novel, Tayo does indeed suffer from physiological eyestrain—sunlight hurts his eyes so much that he vomits, and we are told that “he had to keep moving so that the sinews connected behind his eyes did not slip loose and spin his eyes to the interior of his skull where the scenes [World War II flashbacks] waited for him.” This early in the novel Tayo is desperate for a vision of biomechanics that aligns with the felt reality of his condition. Tayo also suffers from flawed psychological vision, mainly as a result of being contaminated by certain preconceptions that he, like most Americans, has acquired from the social environment. Tayo’s doctor Betonie later tells him that the Ck’o’yo witchery has created these preconceptions and put them into circulation to blind Indians into believing that the land is a dead thing and that, to put it in mid-twentieth century terminology, White is Right. In one important sense, then, the measure of Tayo’s recovery is change, or improvement, in his vision—physiological and psychological, and vision in the sense of perception as well as in the sense of conception or ideation. As I and others have argued elsewhere, Silko works to align the prose narrative story of Tayo’s transformation with the poetic-looking body of traditional Laguna narrative embedded in the text and functioning as the novel’s formal and thematic backbone. Two of these embedded texts are particularly germane to the theme of transformed—and transforming—vision. One of these is the Kaupata story that functions as a prologue and preview of the Mount Taylor episode; the other is the brief Arrowboy fragment that serves the same function for the Jackpile Mine episode. These two backbone stories treat the phenomenon of vision rather differently, one picking up the possibilities of development of vision where the other leaves off; like two of Betonie’s colored mountains, they represent successive phases of the overall process of moving from lack or loss of vision to recovery of it. In the accompanying phases of the prose narrative, Tayo must understand, and then use, the modes of vision modeled in these two stories of departure and recovery in order to become the one who can tell the story of Our Mother’s return to the Fifth World and to the People who are her children.