American Indian Culture and Research Journal

As Leslie Marmon Silko was preparing to publish her first novel, Ceremony (1977), she faced serious interventions from her editor at Viking Press, Richard Seaver. Most notably, in the final proofs sent to Silko before Ceremony went to press, Seaver had eliminated much of the author’s most challenging literary and cultural material, particularly her representations of the world-historical forces connected to her protagonist’s personal quest. Seaver’s battery of revisions suggested a discomfort with the globalizing aspirations of Silko’s novel and a preference for a more contained narrative of reservation life. According to Silko, Seaver was so committed to his changes that he “made ominous sounds about ‘not being able to support the book’ unless [she] gave in.”l Fortunately, Silko stood by her original manuscript, replying to her editor with a letter entitled “A Commentary on the Galleys,” in which she defended the “unconventional” elements of her novel as essential to her fictional and cultural vision. Although Silko succeeded in convincing Seaver to restore her text, it is important for scholars to consider her conflicts with her editor, as this episode offers a cautionary tale about the dangers Native American authors face from a literary establishment that seeks to shape their works into more familiar representations. In this essay I use previously unpublished archival evidence from Silko’s papers at the Beinecke Library to document her conflicts with Seaver, reconstructing the “horizon of expectations” against which the author had to struggle in order to realize her innovative vision. My reading of Ceremony refocuses critical attention on Silko’s global aims because most of her readers, like her editor, have tried to minimize the globalizing aspects of her work. Many scholars have employed structuralist paradigms for interpreting the text, reading the healing process in the novel as the realignment of intracultural vectors, such as a rebalancing of the power of the sun in the east with the power of the mountains in the north.