Table Of ContentN. SCOTT MOMADAY'S
NATIVE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY
IN HOUSE MADE OF DAWN (1 5 )
Stylolinguistic Analyses of Defamiliarization
in Contemporary American Indian Literature
Guillermo Bartelt
With a Foreword by
John D. Battenburg
The Edwin Mellen Press
Lewiston•Queenston•Lampeter
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bartelt, Guillermo.
N. Scott Momaday's Native American ideology in House made of dawn
(1968) : stylolinguistic analyses of defamiliarization in contemporary American
Indian literature / Guillermo Bartlet ; with a foreword by John D. Battenburg.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7734-1419-8
ISBN-10: 0-7734-1419-3
1. Momaday, N. Scott, 1934- House made of dawn. 2. American literature--
Indian authors--History and criticism. I. Battenburg, John D. II. Title.
PS3563.047H633 2010
813'.54--dc22
2010044503
hors serie.
A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
Copyright CO 2010 Guillermo Bartlet
All rights reserved. For information contact
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The Edwin Mellen Press The Edwin Mellen Press
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Box 450 Box 67
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Lewiston, New York Queenston, Ontario
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USA 14092-0450 CANADA LOS 1L0
The Edwin Mellen Press, Ltd.
Lampeter, Ceredigion, Wales
UNITED KINGDOM SA48 8LT
Printed in the United States of America
For Monica, Irene, and Johnny,
dancers of the Sacred Circle.
Contents
Page
Foreword by John D. Battenburg
Preface(cid:9) iv
Acknowledgements(cid:9) vi
Introduction: Stylolinguistic Criticism
Chapter I. The Discourse of Geopiety(cid:9) 7
The Moral Landscape(cid:9) 7
Chronotopes(cid:9) 10
Semantic Roles(cid:9) 15
Chapter IL Hegemonic Registers(cid:9) 31
Intrusive Officialese(cid:9) 32
Heteroglossia and Science(cid:9) 45
Chapter III. Code-Switching(cid:9) 50
A Mysterious Lineage(cid:9) 51
The Pecos Descendants(cid:9) 54
Diglossia at Jemez(cid:9) 57
Francisco's Diglossia(cid:9) 60
Chapter IV. Indian English(cid:9) 68
The New Englishes(cid:9) 69
Consonant Cluster Simplification(cid:9) 72
Devoicing(cid:9) 74
Vowel Deletion and Shift (cid:9) 74
Plurals(cid:9) 76
Possessives(cid:9) 77
Affixes(cid:9) 77
Tense and Aspect (cid:9) 78
Focusing(cid:9) 82
Chapter V. Indian Silence(cid:9) 85
Politeness and Caution(cid:9) 86
Resistance and Overcoming(cid:9) 90
Establishing Solidarity(cid:9) 94
Distancing and Dignity(cid:9) 97
Concluding Remarks(cid:9) 101
Appendix 1(cid:9) 106
Appendix 2(cid:9) 107
Appendix 3(cid:9) 108
Notes(cid:9) 110
Works Cited(cid:9) 111
Index(cid:9) 123
Foreword
It has often been noted that N. Scott Momaday's
House Made of Dawn was neither a literary nor a
commercial success upon its publication in 1968, yet it won
the Pulitzer Prize for fiction within a year. While literary
critics have increasingly grappled with and appreciated the
lyrical, mythical, and cultural representations of the Native
American experience within novels such as House Made of
Dawn, a small number of linguists have also focused on
writings by and about American Indians.
Stylolinguistics continues to be suspect, particularly
among American linguists. Part linguistics, part stylistics,
and part literary analysis, stylolinguistic analysis is rooted in
French structuralism, Russian formalism, and the Prague
school. Mainstream card-carrying linguists often view any
type of linguistic analysis of literature with misgivings.
Most have not been trained in literature and are skeptical
about using linguistics tools to analyze verbal arts forms.
Chomsky has observed, for example, "Literature can
heighten your imagination and insight and understanding,
but it surely doesn't provide the evidence that you need to
draw conclusions and substantiate conclusions."
Guillermo Bartelt's stylolinguistic approaches to
House Made of Dawn boldly employ linguistics to examine
Momaday's narrative style. Bartelt's analysis is grounded in
his ethnological experience with Native American discourse
communities. Rather than a pseudo-application, his use of
linguistic terminology and linguistic approaches lend
themselves to a serious analysis of the written text. Bartell
reveals that House Made of Dawn is as significant as any
other form of language in providing insights into the
structure and meaning of depictions of Indian life.
Bartelt analyzes Momaday's decision to assign the
land as the signifier of an active agent and demonstrates the
way in which House Made of Dawn repeatedly includes
descriptions of the landscape because they have the ability
and power to shape people's lives. Bartelt also describes
how atmospheric forces such as whirlwinds and the sun are
used by Momaday to reveal human supernatural powers.
Through examining the semantic role of various noun
phrases throughout the text, Bartelt convincingly argues that
the Southwest Indian worldview is fundamentally different
to Western ideologies.
Bartelt also examines Momaday's use of hegemonic
registers and code-switching to show alienation and isolation
of the protagonist, Abel. Use of the Spanish language, in
fact, exposes the success achieved by the colonizing
Spaniards centuries earlier in imposing their lingua franca on
Indian communities speaking dissimilar indigenous
languages.
The treatment of Indian English and the discussion of
representations of dialects by linguists and novelists certainly
have wide applications extending beyond Momaday's novel.
Bartelt probes Momaday's use of eye dialect in Indian
English to mark differences from standard English in
phonology, morphology, and syntax. Perhaps the most
interesting analysis within Bartelt's work, however, is the
investigation of Indian silence. Bartelt finds considerable
evidence that silence is both meaningful and rule-governed
ii
with Native characters in the novel. The absence of verbal
communication and differences in the length of pauses are
features found in linguistic communities around the world
and worthy of further exploration to reduce
misunderstanding among speakers within multilingual
settings.
Bartelt's work is significant because it reveals how
stylolinguistic approaches provide tools for those in creative
writing, literary criticism, linguistics, anthropology, and
cognitive psychology. This research also reveals
Momaday's narrative skill by focusing on specific linguistic
features of his retelling of a prodigal son's experience from
the reservation, into the world, and back home again.
Bartelt excels in providing insights into a Native American
odyssey of discovery through analysis of literary
representations of language and culture. Finally, such a
study is important because it reminds us of the fragile sacred
beauty that is at risk but can still exist in the American
Indian experience.
John D. Battenburg
Professor of English
California State Polytechnic University
San Luis Obispo, California
in
Preface
My study of American Indian English, which has
shaped much, if not most, of my research interest in
sociolinguistics over the past thirty years, grew out of my
early teaching experiences with nonstandard English speakers
(and writers) from Navajo and Apache reservations in
Arizona. Initially intrigued by the phonological and syntactic
assessments of nonstandard varieties among American
Indians offered by such anthropological linguists as William
Leap, I have focused over the years on issues of the same
topic at the level of discourse. Furthermore, since much of
my career as a linguist has been spent attached to English
Departments, I have on occasion been required to teach
courses in literature, especially American Indian literature.
Ironically enough, it was during one of those reluctantly
accepted course assignments that I became acquainted with
Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn. As a sociolinguist
conducting research in American Indian English, I was
immediately struck by the seemingly genuine authenticity of
his somewhat brief but very accurate depictions of this
nonstandard English variety, given the limitations presented
by standard English orthography. My curiosity having been
piqued, I eventually wrote a phonological and morphological
assessment of Momaday's literary version of American
Indian English, which in turn led me to other stylolinguistic
topics concerning the novel that have been brought together
in this volume.
It is not my intention to challenge any of the previous
critical scholarship about this novel, much of which is
iv
