Universität Bayreuth
“ Notes on Indian Country:
Native American Literature”
SS 2012
Claudia Deetjen

American Modernism and House Made of Dawn

Daniel Quitz
Matrikelnummer: 1164204
Englisch (5) / Geschichte (5), LA
Maximilianstrasse 16, 95444 Bayreuth
Tel.: 0176/ 73911615 danielquitz@t-online.de Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. Defining American Modernism

3. American Modernism in House Made of Dawn
3.1 Complex and Modern Urban Life
3.2 Alienation: The Portrait of a Lost Generation
3.3 The Stream of Consciousness
3.4 Other Features

4. Conclusion

5. Bibliography

Quitz 1

1. Introduction
When Navarre Scott Momaday first published his award-winning novel House Made of Dawn, literary critics celebrated the book as the Renaissance of Native American Literature. The novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1969, has influenced both readers and well-known Native American writers such as Leslie Marmon Silko or Sherman Alexie since its first publication. Moreover, it has certainly made the success of Native American Literature possible. This is one of the reasons why Momaday can be considered as the “dean of Native American writers“ (Hager 2).
House Made of Dawn is about Abel, a young Native American who returns home to Walatowa from World War II. There, he struggles to reintegrate into the tribal community as he is torn between two different worlds. On the one hand, it is the traditional environment of his pueblo where life depends very much on the rhythm of the seasons. On the other hand it is the world of a modern and industrialized America.
As one of the first Native American writers, Momaday combines both native and non-native features of storytelling in House Made of Dawn. Throughout the years, many fields of this complex and ambiguous novel have been interpreted by a remarkable number of critics. Some have been concerned with the role of oral tradition in House Made of Dawn, others have stressed the importance of Momaday´s biographical background for the novel.
This seminar paper wants to lay the focus on the coherence between the literary genre of American Modernism and House Made of Dawn. This implies that the purpose of the following paper is to examine some modernist features in the novel. Structured will the paper be as follows. At first, it gives a short definition of the term American Modernism as well as a list of features which are attributed to this cultural period. We will then continue to examine the features of American Modernism in House Made of Dawn. This will be the biggest and most essential part of the paper as we deal with both thematic and formal features by observing significant text passages in the novel. Therefore main part of this seminar paper is subdivided into four different subchapters. The first subchapter deals with the representation of Los Angeles and how some characters in House Made of Dawn find their way around the modern and complex urban life. Then, we want to focus on the so-called stream of consciousness technique as we examine the characters of Abel, Francisco and Ben Benally. As we will later in the seminar paper see, alienation is one of the essential features of American Modernism.

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Thus, the third subchapter deals with alienation in the novel. While those three subchapters will be approached in a more detailed way, the fourth subchapter will be elaborated much shorter. In this respect, the last subchapter briefly deals with other features of American Modernism in House Made of Dawn.
Although the purpose is to deal with various characters of the novel, it is necessary to limit them to the issue and to the length of the paper. This means that we have to draw up a shortlist which excludes some characters such as Tosamah. Especially in Tosamah´s case, it is not easy to ignore this character in the seminar paper, as even Momaday himself considers the Priest of the Sun as one of the most important figures in the novel. However, this character would have been more important if I had dealt with other themes, such as the role of oral tradition in House Made of Dawn.
At the end, the results of this seminar paper will be summarized in a conclusion.

2. Defining American Modernism
First of all it is hard to find one precise and exact definition of American Modernism as it has many different characteristics which are interpreted in various ways, depending on the perspective of the observer. In a broader sense, the term modernism means an entire tendency in literature and arts that started in the middle of the nineteenth century and lasted at least till the middle of the twentieth century (Lewis xvii).
In literature, the significance of modernism increased after the First World War. One of the aims of prominent writers such as T.S.Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound or Virginia Woolf has been to break away from traditional verse forms or narrative techniques. In his standard reference, Peter Childs points out that modernism “can be taken as a response by artists and writers to several things, including industrialisation, urban society, war, technological change and new philosophical ideas” (21). In this context, one has to be aware of the fact that America has shifted more and more from a agrarian to a urban nation since the beginning of the 20th century. According to Heinz Ickstadt, American Modernism was the “artistic equivalent of the social, economic, and technological processes of modernization, the symbolic expression of the experience of cultural modernity”(15).
In terms of modernist characteristics, one has to distinguish between thematic

Quitz 3 and formal features. Among the thematic features of American Modernism are the breakdown of social norms and cultural values, the individual in the face of an unmanageable future, disillusionment and alienation as the character often belongs to a lost generation, the rejection of history and substitution of a mythical past and the importance of the unconscious mind. Characteristical writing techniques or formal features of American Modernism are a discontinous narrative, the moving from one level of the narrative to another, the multiple narrative points of view and the use of the stream of consciousness technique. There could be mentioned much more thematic and formal features of American Modernism, but some of the above mentioned features are essential for the seminar paper as Momaday makes use of them in House Made of Dawn.

3. American Modernism in House Made of Dawn
3.1 Complex and Modern Urban Life
Navarre Scott Momaday describes the pueblo in Walatowa as a very traditional and spiritual place, where life is heavily influenced by the surrounding of nature with the change of seasons. The people “do not hanker after progress and have never changed their essential way of life”(Momaday 52), although being touched by white people ever since the first European settlers arrived in America. Los Angeles is portrayed in a striking contrast to the pueblo, as the city in California represents a modern and urbanized America. In this sense, the image of the city fits into the above mentioned progressive movement which increased the development of the city as an industrialized place significantly after the First World War.
To characterize the city as a dark and frightening place, Momaday uses several expressions in a very effective way. Right at the beginning of Chapter 2, he mentions a “two-story red-brick building”(79). In this “cold and dreary” place lives Tosamah ,the Priest of the Sun (Momaday 80). For Abel, the main character of the novel, Los Angeles is an alienating place where he has to walk through “dark alleys and streets” and where he has to hide from cars in the shadow (Momaday 110). However, the city is not only for Abel a dark and alienating place, but also for his friend Ben Benally and Milly. The “people all around” Milly and the “streets full of people”can be seen in two different ways (Momaday 107) . On the one hand it indicates that there is a lot of trouble and life going on, yet alongside with this excitement goes anonymity as Milly didn´t make any

Quitz 4 serious contact since she came to Los Angeles four years ago. Therefore one can say that she is somehow excluded by her environment, although being surrounded by so many people every day.
As Momaday uses the perspective of the first-person narrator, Ben Benally vividly describes his image of Los Angeles. It is “dark down there all the time, even at noon, and the lights are always on” with a “big crowd of people” who are “always yelling at you, but you can´t understand them (Momaday 124).” This alienating image is strenghtened as Benally continues to describe the city at night, when he and Abel wanted to walk home from a pub called Henry´s place. Not only is the city once more represented as “dark and empty” but also as shabby and run-down as “there´s always a lot of cans and broken glass and stuff lying around, and it smells pretty bad“ ( Momaday 152).
What Abel, Milly and Ben Benally have in common is the alienation they have to face in Los Angeles. All of the three characters are somehow connected by their experience of a dark and frightening city. Nevertheless, the three characters differ significantly in the way they deal with their situation in an environment, which none of them is comfortable in. While Ben and Milly try to make the best out of their situation, Abel is not able to cope with the life in the city. To describe the failure and the breaking of Abel´s character, Momaday uses the metaphor of the silversided fish, who “are among the most helpless creatures on the face of the earth“ (79).
One thematic feature, which Momaday uses for the representation of the city in the novel is the reflection of the complex and modern urban life, with the focus on social conflicts in urban areas. Alongside with that goes disillusionment and alienation, a motif which we have stated above. However, the focus on this part of the seminar paper was on the representation of the city. Therefore, we want to focus now more on the alienation of some of the major characters throughout the novel, with the question to what extent they belong to a lost generation. 3.2 Alienation: The Portrait of a Lost Generation
Back in 1997, Navarre Scott Momaday was interviewed by Joelle Rostkowski about House Made of Dawn. In this interview, Momaday himself described the novel as a portrait of a desperate and lost generation ( Rostkowski 147).
This part of the seminar paper will focus on alienation, one of the crucial attributes of

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American Modernism. Alongside with alienation, we can often observe in modernist novels that the characters are torn between two worlds. Besides having a look at the main protagonist, Abel, we want to observe the characters of Father Olguin, Angela Grace Martin St.John and Francisco in a brief outline.
Not only is Abel the main character of the novel, but he is also the one who can most easily be identified as a person belonging to a lost generation. The first time Abel feels alienated and displaced is when he has to leave his home in Walatowa for the Second World War.
It was time. He heard the horn and went out and closed the door. And suddenly he had the sense of being all alone, as if he were already miles and months away, gone long ago from the town and the valley and the hills, from everything he knew and had always known. He walked quickly and looked straight ahead, centered upon himself in the onset of loneliness and fear. He had never been in a motorcar before, and he sat by a window in the bus and felt the jar of the engine and the first hard motion of the wheels. (Momaday 21)
Having experienced the cruelty of WWII, he returns to the reservation as another man. He fails to reintegrate into the Indian society, as Abel is torn between two worlds. The feeling of alienation even in his own community grows more and more in Abel and he becomes a kind of an outsider within the tribe. “He walked swiftly through the dark streets of the town and all the dogs began to bark“ (Momaday 10). As Louis Owens points out, this feeling has been derived long before Abel had to leave for the war (97).
He did not know who his father was. His father was a Navajo, they said, or a Sia, or an Isleta, an outsider anyway, which made him and his mother and Vidal somehow foreign and strange. (Momaday 11)
Abel fails to refind his own identity as “he had tried to pray, to sing, to enter into the old rhythm of the tongue, but he was no longer attuned to it“ (Momaday 53). Matthias Schubnell argues that this alienation derives from Abel´s “lack of articulation” (134). Abel can´t combine the past and the future with the present, so in a sense he is not whole. Yet, the concept of wholeness is essential for the Navajo religion in order to find the own identity.
It therefore seems that the killing of the albino is a kind of revenge for Abel, who regards the white men as an enemy who has taken away his identity. As we have already mentioned in the previous chapter, to deal with the other world, that of a modern and urbanized Los Angeles is even more difficult for Abel. He gets more and more

Quitz 6 bewildered and alienated by the city, and when he returns to Walatowa for the second time his spirit seems to be broken. However, Abel tries to re-integrate into the community and Momaday leaves it open if Abel succeds as the novel closes with the dawn-running race.
Living in Los Angeles with her husband who is a doctor, Angela Grace Martin St.John arrives in Walatowa to recover from her health problems. Although Angela is fascinated by Abel, she can´t deal with her new environment as it bewilders and bores her. Besides that, and this is probably more important, she is alienated by her own body.
From the time she was a child and first saw her own blood, how it brimmed in a cut on the back of her hand, she had conceived a fear and disgust of her body which nothing could make her forget. She did not fear death, only the body´s implication in it. (Momaday 31)
As Louis Owens points out, Angela´s “physical and spiritual selves are alienated from one another” (105).
Father Olguin´s alienation becomes apparent when he drives to the town to look after an infant.
Suddenly the walls of the town rang out with laughter and enclosed him all around. He turned here and there into the streets, and the streets led only to an endless succession of steep earthen walls, and the walls were lined with people, innumerable and grotesque. (Momaday 65)
The priest feels alien in his environment as the people in the pueblo are in some sense foreign for him. This displacement even extends to the point that “Fear and revulsion jarred upon his brain” (Momaday 65).However, it seems that Father Olguin can overcome his alienation at the end of the novel through his faith. “In the only way possible, perhaps, he had come to terms with the town, and that, after all, had been his aim” (Momaday 170).
At a first glance, it seems that there is no need to associate the character of Francisco with alienation. Unlike Abel, Francisco “has no difficulty in bringing two worlds together into a vital, heterogenous unity”(Owens 103). This means that Francisco can easily combine characteristics of the white colonizers, such as language, with the culture of his own tribe. So Francisco can certainly be considered as a positive example of how to deal with two different worlds. Moreover, the old man is also resistent against alienation as he is able to deal with evil.

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But now, at the end of long exertion, his aged body let go of the mind and he was suddenly conscious of some alien presence close at hand... He was too old to be afraid. His acknowledgement of the unknown was nothing more than a dull, instrinsic sadness, a vague desire to weep, for evil had long since found him out and knew who he was. (Momaday 59)

3.3 The Stream of Consciousness
The stream of consciousness is a modernist feature, Momaday effectively uses in House Made of Dawn. This complex technique is not easy to define, as there are several approaches to it. One can say that the stream of consciousness is applied to mental processes and that it is an “approach to the presentation of psychological aspects of character in fiction“ (Humphrey 1). To precise this very general definition, we can say that the stream of consciousness technique is interested in the unconscious mind of a character. In House Made of Dawn this technique is displayed by the first-person stream of consciousness and the third-person stream of consciousness. While the first-person stream of consciousness emerges in passages narrated by Ben Benally and Milly, the third-person stream of consciousness appears with Abel and Francisco. The following text passage from the novel is one of the most striking examples for the use of the stream of consciousness technique.
He was afraid. He heard the sea breaking, saw shadowy shapes in the swirling fog, and he was afraid. He had always been afraid. Forever at the margin of his mind there was something to be afraid of, something to fear. He did not know what it was, but it was always there, real, immiment, unimaginable. (Momaday 102)
At this point, we can see that Abel is in a unconscious state of mind in which a unknown and unmentioned danger fills him with anxiety. The passage also reveals an uncertainty of both time and place. Abel´s confused mind is surrounded by shadows and the fog, which Momaday describes in this passage. Furthermore, his thoughts could be construed as a kind of daydream as Abel is asking for Milly in his vague state of mind.
Milly? Oh God, his hands hurt. There was a black hole in the fog, and for a moment the light above the loading dock receded and became a point, sharp and minute and far away; and then the swirling fog closed over it again and it drew close like the moon and began to throb. (Momaday 104)
Another example of the stream of consciousness technique can be seen in the war memories of Abel. In those confusing flashbacks, Abel keeps the cruel memories of his experience in the Second World War alive. Momaday gives the reader an insight into

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Abel´s consciousness of the war. Especially the image of the machine, which stands for a war tank, causes fear in Abel. According to Owens, the machine “rises up to represent everything that is threatening and alien in the non-Indian world surrounding Abel“ (100). The image of the machine is the only detailed war memory that Abel has in his mind. All other subjects, he can remember only vague and incomplete. “It was the recent past, the intervention of days and years without meaning, of awful calm and collision, time always immediate and confused, that he could not put together in his mind“ (Momaday 21). Despite the fact, that there are only two scenes in the novel where the image of the war occurs, those flashbacks have physical consequences on Abel insofar that he shows signs of a Post-traumatic Stress Disorder.
In the last chapter of the book, “The Dawn Runner”, the third-person stream of consciousness is used for the memories of Francisco.Unlike the memories of Abel, Francisco´s are clear and detailed. The old man vividly remembers some important moments in his life, such as the dawn-runner race. Most importantly, Francisco is reminiscent of the traditions and customs he passed on to his two grandsons Abel and Vidal. Thus, we can say that Francisco is at peace with the world and himself just before his death.
Whereas Momaday makes use of the third-person stream of consciousness for the characters of Abel and Francisco, the first-person stream of consciousness is utilized for Ben Benally. In some parts of the interior monologue, Benally remembers his childhood and the way his Navajo life was.
And you were little and right there in the center of everything, the sacred mountains, the snow- covered mountains and the hills, the gullies and the flats, the sundown and the night, everything – where you were little, where you were and had to be. (Momaday 138)
It can be said that Momaday uses the stream of consciousness to give an inside into the mental processes of Abel and some other characters in House Made of Dawn. Thereby, Momaday creates the effect that the reader gets a better comprehension of psychological aspects in the novel. 3.4 Other Features
As we have already discussed some of the major features of American Modernism in House Made of Dawn such as the representation of the city, the alienation

Quitz 9 of several characters who might be added to a lost generation and the importance of the unconscious mind, we now want to have a brief look on other modernist elements in the novel.
Flashbacks throughout the novel are an important part of another modernist feature, the non-chronological nature of the story. This lack of a traditional chronological narrative can be seen right from the beginning as the prologue is also the end of the novel. House Made of Dawn starts and closes with Abel as a dawn-runner. Besides that, we have also flashbacks from the childhood of Abel in many parts of the story.
Furthermore, Momaday provides multiple narrative perspectives for us with a number of different narrators. In some parts of the novel, such as in the description of nature and landscape, we have an omniscient narrator who seems to oberserve the setting from a certain distance. Then, there is the first-person narrator who is an active part of the setting and who tells the story through his eyes. Momaday uses the first-person narrator for the character of Ben Benally. Certainly the most common perspective in the novel is that of the third-person narrator. He appears throughout the novel in all characters except of Benally and Milly.

4. Conclusion
At the end of our analysis, it follows that Navarre Scott Momaday uses different features of American Modernism in House Made of Dawn. While the novel contains a variety of themes such as the role of oral tradition, the focus of this seminar paper has been on the modernist features. Therefore, we have ascertained that Momaday utilizes elements of American Modernism in his novel. Among the versatile spiritual elements such as the role of oral tradition in the novel and some autobiographical parts – as Momaday has lived many years in a Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico- such as the setting of the reservation, the founding father of Native American literature has linked his novel to American Modernism. After we have given a short definition of American Modernism, we have focussed on some of the integral components of this literary genre in House Made of Dawn. In this way, we noticed that the representation of the city, alienation and displacement as well as the stream of consciousness are among the most essential elements of American Modernism in House Made of Dawn. Other elements we have examined are the non-chronological order of the story or the multiple narrative

Quitz 10 point of view.
All in all, it can be argued that Momadays´s novel fits into the “modernist canon” (Owens 91) as we have alienated characters, the city as an expression of a modern and complex urban life as well as the stream of consciousness technique and other features such as a the lack of a traditional chronological order or multiple perspectives.

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5. Bibliography

Primary Source

Momaday, N. Scott.. House Made of Dawn. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2010. Print.

Secondary Sources

Childs, Peter. Modernism. New York: Routledge, 2008. Print.

Hager, Hal. “Meet N.Scott Momaday.” in: House Made of Dawn. N.Scott Momaday. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2010.

Humphrey, Robert. Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1954. Print.

Ickstadt, Heinz. “Deconstructing/ Reconstructing Order: The Faces of Transatlantic Modernism.” Transatlantic Modernism. Eds. Martin Klepper and Joseph C. Schöpp. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C.Winter, 2001. 15-31. Print.

Lewis, Pericles. The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Print.

Owens, Louis. Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1992. Print.

Rostkowski, Joelle. Looking Back: House Made of Dawn as the Portrait of a Lost Generation. Q,W,E,R,Z,Y 7 (1997): 145-150. Print.

Schubnell, Matthias. N Scott Momaday: The Cultural and Literary Background. Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985. Print.