Patterns of Orality in N. Scott Momaday's The Man Made of Words
This paper was written as an assignment for EN522, Dr. Eileen Meagher, University of Tennessee, May 19, 1998
For the last several weeks, a mockingbird has been determined to drive me from my home. I step out of the house or exit my car, and I hear him cackle angrily. Head cocked to one side, he observes me, furious, then dives headlong toward me, flying silently toward my face, only to veer a few feet before striking me, or, if my back is turned, swooping around my head and shoulders, a cacophonous litany of rustling wings and raucous chatter. From tree limb, to roof top, to telephone wire, he swoops and dives in his efforts to intimidate me and drive me from his roost.
Of course, this is not the way to start a serious analysis of an essay's structure. It lacks obvious direction, the abstracted and distanced control of academic discourse. In Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Walter J. Ong argues that the nature of academic discourse is a consequence of our interiorization of a print mentality, that oral cultures approach language in different, less linear ways. N. Scott Momaday's The Man Made of Words reflects the oral quality of Momaday's heritage, a heritage rooted in tradition and memory, in story and character, in the everyday struggle to hold on and understand.
In oral societies, communication is contextual and situational, a response to a human condition (rather than an abstracted or distanced commentary). The very first sentence of The Man Made of Words (following the prologue) places the writing in a context that extends outside the writing. It is "this morning" (162), Momaday begins, the morning following yesterday's question "What is an American Indian?" And it is clear that this "discussion" is a continuation of that question, which Momaday repeats, much the way a speaker would who, on the following morning, would remind his audience of the previous day's topic. Having established that he wants to discuss the "moral and verbal dimension" of life with regard to such things as "ecology and storytelling and the imagination," Momaday doesn't begin a protracted analysis. He tells a story.
Momaday's "story" illustrates several of the characteristics Ong identifies for oral narratives. It venerates the elderly, particularly in the character of Ko-sahn, the ancient Kiowa woman who was old, "a grown woman when [Momaday's] grandparents came into the world," and "folded over on herself" as if her body encapsulated time and memory. Ko-sahn relives the racial memory of the Kiowa migration (164 and 168), the birth of his grandparents (163), and the burial of his grandmother (165). She is "very old" and because she is old, she has "seen many things" (167). Ko-sahn is "living memory" (163).
Ko-sahn is also larger than life; she leaps from the page as Momaday invokes her name, an action reflecting the sense of power that oral cultures place in the act of naming (Ong 33) and an action which is echoed in the arrowmaker's story when he asks the silent intruder to speak his name (Momaday 171). Momaday's imagination of Ko-sahn is real because imagination expressed in words makes us human and explains our existence, a theme reiterated in the mythologizing of the 1833 meteor shower by the Kiowa (168-169).
The aim of the stories is empathetic and participatory (Ong 45-46). Repeatedly, Momaday refers to the need for connection to the landscape, to the "remembered earth" (Momaday 164), to the moral dimensions of language, and the relationship between "ecology, storytelling, and the imagination (162). Even the Wichita Mountains are "expressions of the larger landscape" growing out of the plain (165). Momaday argues that Americans have lost touch with the land, and he feels we need to "come to terms with the world around us--and . . . especially the physical world, not only as it is revealed to us immediately through our senses, but also as it is perceived more truly in the long turn of seasons and years," (166) "to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. . . . to imagine that [we touch] it with [our] hands at every season and [listen] to the sounds that are made upon it. . . . to imagine the creatures that are there and all the faintest motions in the wind. . . . to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk" (164-165).
The Man Made of Words also illustrates the non-linear nature of oral narratives. Momaday recounts his efforts to conclude "The Way to Rainy Mountain," but the story of his efforts is the outer layer of a series of stories all nested within each other, some retold from different perspectives, some that blend narrative voices, a woven tapestry of images that illustrates Walter Ong's characterization of oral narrative as "boxes within boxes created by thematic recurrences" (Ong 144). The stories about the writing of "The Way to Rainy Mountain," the words and songs of Ko-sahn, the Kiowa migration, the meteor shower of 1833, the death of Momaday's grandmother, and the arrowmaker weave in and out of each other, each retelling a "new angle of vision," a "slightly different point of view" (Momaday 168) that echoes the organizational pattern Momaday describes for "The Way to Rainy Mountain": mythical, historical, and immediate interspersed with commentary composed of documentary and reminiscence (170). Throughout The Man Made of Words the language reflects these shifts in patterns from straightforward accounts (c.f., the re-telling of the meteor shower, 168-169) to powerful descriptions in language that are both rhythmic (c.f., the story of the Sun Dance where Ko-sahn's sentences illustrate the simplicity and redundancy that Ong argues characterize oral recitations (Momaday 39-41)--"an old, old woman"; "something on her back"; "The old woman had a bag full of earth on her back"; "a certain kind of sandy earth"; etc.) and formal (Momaday's conversations with Ko-sahn's spirit, 164 and 167), to a stylized catechism reminiscent of the Socratic dialogues (the five questions and definitions, 167-168).
Finally, the poems which precede and follow the narrative portion of the text both introduce and emphasize the central themes. "portrait in february" illustrates the quest which Momaday himself takes from the modern world (a world of automobiles and modern farms) back to his historical and mythological past. "Headwaters" suggests the mystery of the coming of the Kiowa. "There is scant telling of the marsh--," the phrase scant telling, suggesting both the minimal forces at work in the still marsh and the absence of words. The waters which "rise against the roots" becomes the "archaic force" of language which the Kiowa bring with them emerging from the hollow log (164). And in "Rainy Mountain Cemetery," the "dark stone" marking Momaday's grandmother's grave (165) becomes emblematic of "The Way to Rainy Mountain," the recorded monument of the Kiowa legends which, until this moment, like the story of the arrowmaker, have survived "always but one generation removed from extinction" (171).
References
Momaday, N. Scott. The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages. New York: St. Martin's, 1997.
Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge, 1982.