Leslie Marmon Silko's "Ceremony"

PART I: 1. This passage from Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony conveys the sense of evil as well as the sense of healing Tayo undergoes as he seeks to survive and grow in the cross-cultural crucible of American and Indian societies. The reference to "the dry skin

. . . still stuck to his body" (153) reminds the reader of the story told by the independent witch. In that story we learn that the evil witches wore "stinking animal skins, fur and feathers" (138). Earlier we read that "Witches crawl into the skins of dead animals" (131). The evil of the past, then, is upon Tayo, but it is not yet an ineradicable part of him. He is in danger of becoming bewitched, as we all are, white or Indian or other, by the evil in the world.

This is an important part of the meaning of this passage---that it is not merely the whites who are evil, just as it is not true that the Indians are all good. We know, by the time we read this passage, that tayo is not an evil man, and yet he is said to be encased in the dry skin which brings to mind the animal skins in which the witches cover themselves. The next lines, however, tell us that "the effects of the witchery of the evil thing began to leave his body" (153). Again, he lives in a world where evil dwells, where evil threatens to consume everyone and everything---unless he finds allies such as Betonie. Betonie is in the midst of healing tayo, but the healing is not finished. The message here, perhaps, is that the healing is never finished for any

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ll dreams of it as "home." 6. Don DeLillo, in the selected passage from Mao II, combines the clever and the profound aspects of the book as a whole. The book is a meditation on the differences between the active life of fighting injustice in the world (with violence as an extreme measure) and the passive life of the writer who lives and works alone in isolation from the world, with words on paper rather than with bullets and bombs. Just as it is difficult for this reader to take the novel seriously, so it is difficult to take this passage seriously. DeLillo is a writer who in this passage as well as in the book as a whole makes the reader think not of the characters or ideas presented, but of the author himself. DeLillo wants the reader to be dazzled by his wordplay, by the battle of ideas he has choreographed for us, and it is indeed a dazzling display. But it is wearying to be endlessly dazzled. We want not characters who embody ideas, the terrorist vs. the writer, the man of action vs. the thinker, but real beings---created on the page of course---about whom we care. It is not Bill to whom this passage refers, and it is not George who is making the statement. It is DeLillo making the statement to himself. However, because DeL

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