The past couple weeks have been spent doing a detailed reading of Ceremony, in which there has been little progress but much class discussion. Problems often arise because the class can’t decide on Leslie Marmon Silko’s intentions as we move through the book paragraph-by-paragraph. In one paragraph she implies that sunlight and the color yellow are indicative of life, and then we turn the page only to find the dying grass is turning yellow. Go figure. The process is brutally slow, and our class seems to get caught up on the most wonderfully pointless intricacies of the book which then leads to heated debate over whether Silko intentionally put every word in its place for a specific reason (I am admittedly not immune to this excessive examination of the text, unfortunately).
The forums and their corresponding essays shed light on the text in ways that I never imagined. While reading eighteen pages of grad student dissertation greatness wasn’t the most fun I’ve ever had, there was some great information about Silko’s culture and the interesting facets of Laguna culture that I otherwise would’ve remained ignorant of. The online interviews also provided pertinent information to our in-class analysis of the text. I can’t say that I feel completely prepared to annotate the rest of the novel, I look forward to attacking it head-on in order to see the acclaimed literary genius that Silko really is.
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