Changing Truths in Silko's "Ceremony"

The first two readings for this week’s class focus on man’s attempt at gaining truth. For millennia, man has tried to understand a fixed, universal truth that is objective to his existence. Robert L. Scott and Barry Brummett argue that there is no such truth.

In “On Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic,” Scott claims, “The assumption that has spanned the centuries from that dialogue in Athens to the one in Washington, D.C., is that men can possess truth” (10). The author goes on to disprove that assumption because no one has found one universal truth that spans from past to present to future; events are constantly in flux, and their truths always change. Scott has found that “truth is not prior and immutable but is contingent” (13). This idea can be applied in the moral sense. Scott gives the example of a man conflicted between his country and family. He has a duty to both, yet the two require different obligations from him. If he is committed to his country, he might feel that he must serve to protect it, taking a lower-paying job in the army and risking his life. However, if he commits himself to his family, then he should get a high-paying job that allows him to provide for his family while also spending time with them. He has a choice, and he must take action. In this instance, there is no right path he must take, no one truth by which he must abide. He must choose which direction he shall take and be responsible for the consequences. Similarly, a rhetor must decide which truths to argue and persuade audiences toward while taking on the consequences of his speech. He is held accountable for his decisions, so he will not abuse his power to find truth. As Scott says, “Man must consider truth not as something fixed and final but as something to be created moment by moment in the circumstances in which he finds himself and with which he must cope” (17). Human action is not fixed because truths are not fixed.

Brummett’s “Some Implications of ‘Process’ or ‘Intersubjectivity: Postmodern Rhetoric” builds off of Scott’s ideas. Brummett analyzes Newtonian mechanics and explains that its principles of reality as objective and reality as mechanical and causal have infiltrated our views on rhetoric when it is wrong to do so. The author tells readers that “mechanics in a ‘Modern Age’ based its epistemological hopes on the concept of a truth which was objective, absolute, and empirically verifiable as the reality to which it bore reference” (22). However, Brummett states that truth can never have these qualities by showing that the scientific thought that searches for this kind of truth only looks at similar parts of things rather than their whole entities, which can ignore the big picture and only focus on truths for which scientists are looking, and tries to sever the connection between observer and the observed. If there were no observer, nothing can be observed. Therefore, the latter goal cannot happen.

Brummett uses Polanyi’s ideas when he states that “knowledge can never be purely focal or restricted but must include some subsidiary awareness of the context of a thing. Yet a thing has an infinite context” (44). So, everything is connected. Brummett then goes on to state, “The scholar must study people with a subsidiary awareness of their contexts, and this means not only holism but also a study of the person as an individual rather than merely reducing him/her to his/her parts” (44). One of the goals of intersubjectivity is to understand the truths of each context for each individual.

These articles connect to Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel, Ceremony. In the novel, half-white, half-Laguna Tayo returns to his reservation after serving in World War II. He suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. His soul and body are sick, and he is forced to go to the hospital and use Western medicine. The doctors try to treat only parts of Tayo; they do not understand that his whole self must be treated and healed. They only believe in one universal truth: science and medicine can heal. However, this is not the case for Tayo. After meeting a powerful medicine man, Tayo understands that he must go through a long spiritual journey connecting to his Native American roots to heal. He needs a holistic approach to healing so that he can save himself and his people. He learns about contingent truths, truths that have changed over the years. The Laguna people do not know how to help the men returning from war because they have never participated in such grueling modern warfare before. With these new truths that Tayo learns, he can help his people and the veterans understand themselves and begin the healing process. Using his new knowledge, he convinces the elders that the changing times call for different truths, and they must take action to save their livelihoods.