Hum (Jan 2007)
REMAPPING THE BOUNDARIES: THE NOVELISTIC LANDSCAPE OF LESLIE MARMON SILKO’S STORYTELLER
Abstract
The paper examines the generic hybridity in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller (1981) as a tool for synchronizing the private and the public history, emphasizing a synecdochic relationship between the individual and the communal, as well as the necessity of the Western readers’ conceptual reorientation for appreciating that relationship. Through its shift towards oral discourse, Silko’s novel stretches the horizon of the Western genre, challenging its narrative, authorial and receptional conventions, as well as its epistemology of space and time. Infusing a sense of collectivity into the traditional Western concept of personal narrative, Silko draws upon Laguna sacred history, delineating the importance of storytelling in shaping and preserving the communal identity. Transgressing the border between the fictional and the real, the secular and the mythic, Storyteller also conveys the power of storytelling to transcend material boundaries of the real and shape them at the same time. The analysis pays special attention to permutations, as a stylistic device that converges postmodern techniques with oral storytelling in order to exhibit the variability of the oral discourse and translate it into written form.
