ABSTRACT
In The Mind and Its Stories, Hogan presented evidence that a few narrative genres recur prominently across storytelling traditions, the most prominent being heroic, romantic, and sacrificial. In Understanding Nationalism, he extended this work, arguing that these genres play a key role in organizing peoples’ national identifications. In this chapter, Hogan explores the romantic and sacrificial sequences in Silko’s novel, Ceremony. The sacrificial sequences are more prominent, providing the work with its overall narrative arc and characterizing most of the mythic and folkloric interpolations. This is also the story structure that develops the most obvious thematic concerns in the novel, those bearing on tradition. Part of Silko’s specification of tradition involves delimiting a national in-group and a national out-group. This division is elaborated in the more limited romantic sequences in the novel. Silko’s use of heroic narrative (only touched on in this chapter) is insistently anti-heroic. In this regard, the novel is in many ways anti-nationalist. However, Silko develops the sacrificial and romantic structures in a way that demarcates a racialized in-group that at least appears to suggest a natural relation of social identity groups to particular cultural traditions and to particular geographical places—a virtual definition of nationalism.
