SOURCE: "'The Telling Which Continues': Oral Tradition and the Written Word in Leslie Marmon Silko's 'Storyteller'," in The American Indian Quarterly, Vol. XII, No. 1, Winter, 1988, pp. 1-26.

In the following essay, Hirsch provides an in-depth examination of Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller, a collection of writings in several genres which, the critic suggests, constitutes a piece drawn from a vast, everregenerating Laguna Pueblo oral tradition.

"I was never tempted to go to those things . . . ," said Leslie Marmon Silko of the old BAE reports. ". . . I . . . don't have to because from the time I was little I heard quite a bit. I heard it in what would be passed now off as rumor or gossip. I could hear through all that. I could hear something else, that there was a kind of continuum. . . . "² That continuum provides both the structural and thematic basis of Storyteller. Comprised of personal reminiscences and narratives, retellings...