In every sense of the word, Leslie Marmon Silko’s
Almanac of the Dead is a big book. Its size is not only a question of length, though this frequently superficial manner of gauging a work’s
significance is not entirely irrelevant here, as this novel’s length provides a preliminary measure of its ambition and scope. Its cast of
characters ranges from the unassuming Pueblo gardener Sterling to the shamanistic Wilson Weazel Tail; from Lecha, the militant keeper of the almanac, to Menardo, the Mexican plutocrat; and from the
mafioso Sonny Blue to Angelita the revolutionary. Its range in genre is equally broad and includes a number of fascinating interconnections and transitions between
various narrative forms, among them American Indian mythology, Magical Realism, and futuristic ecofiction.
In addition, its geographical, historical, and metaphysical scope makes
The Almanac of the Dead both deep and broad, with all the difficulties of assimilation that such properties connote. Tucson, Arizona, may be the work’s epicenter, but its impact is conveyed throughout the Southwest, with shattering results. These results are borne largely by the novel’s characters, but they are also experienced by the land itself, or rather by the reader’s conventional sense of the land, since one of the more arresting features of
Almanac of the Dead is that it declines to observe the familiar boundaries that demarcate the Southwest and reverts to an overview of that terrain which conforms to the American Indian experience of it.
The most clear-cut instance of this reversion is that the border between the United States and Mexico is represented as a juridical fiction, the nature of which sharpens the awareness of the novel’s American Indian characters of the manner in which their homeland has been appropriated. This honed awareness makes events and characters in Mexico a telling and necessary illustration of various social signs and portents in the cultural landscape of Arizona. It also has an ironic counterpart in the disregard with which the novel’s numerous successful drug traffickers overlook the border. An additional feature of this reworking of ideas of homeland, property, territory, and native place is the novel’s multiple stories and plot lines, all implicated with one another in what is both a lucid and an almost dauntingly complicated field of ideological, spiritual, and materialistic forces.
From its modest, deceptively domestic origins in Lecha’s compound,
Almanac of the Dead proliferates into myriad narratives that intersect and overlap throughout the six major parts, and a large number of smaller ones, into which the
novel is divided. Impressive as the work is as a feat of literary architecture, it does place unfamiliar demands on the reader. Because the novel begins with Lecha, it seems reasonable to assume that she is going to be its core. Ultimately, she is, and what she comes to represent is an implementation of the novel’s vision. Just as important for the novel’s development, however, Lecha’s significance is overshadowed for long stretches by what seem to be minor characters whose presence seems to be marginal to the principal action. These characters appear in such large numbers and in such a variety of settings that it is a challenge to bear them all in mind, to recognize their relevance, and to be aware of the subtle ways in which Silko coordinates them.
Such a reading of this novel’s form and content relies on conventional expectations of fiction, in which specific hierarchies of significance are created and priorities of action are prescribed. Silko subverts these procedures by the populist, tribal, democratic organization of
Almanac of the Dead. This method of organization implicitly acknowledges that each of her characters not only possesses a certain type of power but also has the capacity to deploy that power in ways which will inevitably modify, influence, and redirect the courseof the overall momentum of events. It is not merely its frequently unnerving and violent narrative material that sustains
Almanac of the Dead as a comprehensive cultural critique. The manner in which the various intricate panels of its structure are interrelated is in itself a sophisticated realignment of some important ideological assumptions underlying civilization’s traditional narrative forms.
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