Neohelicon 30 (2003) 1, 173–186

ZOLTÁN ABÁDI-NAGY

THEORIZING COLLECTIVE IDENTITY

PRESENTATIONS OF VIRTUAL AND ACTUAL COLLECTIVES
IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FICTION

The essay rejects the idea that “collective identity” and “cultural identity” are necessarily
the same. Its aim is to preserve the usefulness of the former notion, by introducing “the in-
tegrative circle of collective identity” as a terminological toolbox. This diagrammatic for-
mula may help us find a common terminological language with which to handle the multi-
tude of concrete variations on the theme of the collective in literary works. The second
half of the paper demonstrates the theory in E. L. Doctorow’s World’s Fair and Leslie
Marmon Silko’s Ceremony by focusing on their representation of ceremony and ritual.
Although the textual analysis cannot take up all the implications of the model, it hopes to
propose a new and fruitful form of analysis.

I. THEORETICAL SHORTCUT

I.1. Self and Identity; Social, Cultural, and Collective Identity: Arguments for the Usefulness
of an Ambiguous Term

The definitional vicissitudes to which the ideas of “self” and “identity” have been sub-
jected in philosophy, psychology, social psychology, social and cultural anthropology
as well as in literary studies, are daunting. The collective aspect is not less confusing:
some theoreticians discourse on the social self or social identity (e.g., Henri Tajfel,
Bernard Williams), others on “cultural identity” (e.g., James Clifford, Homi Bhabha
[Location], Stuart Hall), or “collective personality” (e.g., Clifford Geertz), and some,
indeed, on collective identity (e.g., Jürgen Habermas, Anthony D. Smith, Terence
Cave). It is therefore expedient to take a short cut through the theoretical intricacies,
by positioning myself in relation to at least some of what is available in philosophy,
cultural criticism, and anthropology, without dragging the reader into a maze of ab-
stractions that would complicate rather than clarify the issue.
My idea of the “self” and “identity” is informed by theories that conceive of these
entities in terms of each other, one in relation to the other, even if one is absorbed into
the other as its function (e.g., Aronson, Wilson and Akert 145; Giddens 53; Holland
815; Taylor 34; Walzer 85; Hall 277; Fromm, Man 7, 50, 58). The parenthesized ex-
amples also show a wavering emphasis between the personal and the social-cultural
view of identity. These two aspects are probably two sides of the same coin, and it is a

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174 ZOLTÁN ABÁDI-NAGY

matter of situational, theoretical, etc. foregrounding whether the personal (see Nor-
man Holland’s “identity theme” – 814) or the social-cultural comes to the fore in a
given theory. Thus it makes sense to go along with those who distinguish individual-
ized personal identity from social or cultural identity or “individual character” and
“social character,” as Erich Fromm would say (Man 60); or, imply the multiplicity, as
Michael Walzer does (85-86), when he suggests the many ways in which the self di-
vides itself among its roles, some more personal, others more social, and, let us add,
all of them having both personal (psychological) and social or cultural sides to them.
As for social, cultural, and collective identity, sociologists and anthropologists of-
ten simply note the fact that the individual is simultaneously situated in culture and so-
ciety – and proceed from there (e.g., Bradley 24). However, in order to make “collec-
tive identity” a working concept, and to understand how it is construed, it needs to be
delimited from social and cultural identity.
“Social identity” both is and is not collective identity. It is, as far as the social in the
individual also partakes of what is both wider and narrower than the social and can be
termed “collective.” Yet it is not, because social identity, the human being’s social
identification, stands for the myriad details of our daily social transactions and inter-
actions a good number of which are devoid of any sense of any “collective.” More im-
portantly, while society is definitely a collective, and “social identification” does in-
deed incorporate our sense of belonging to that collective, “society” as an idea and as a
term lumps together countless collectives of different levels and sizes in whose case
(e.g., in the case of a business corporation), the term “social identification” is simply
not applicable when one means to discuss identification with that particular collective.
It does not even make sense to speak about “social identification” in referring to fam-
ily members’ identification or nonidentification with the family as a collective despite
the fact that the family is indeed “the psychological agent of society” (Fromm, Escape
315).
The “collective” is also different from the social because it brings into play aspects
and elements that can be termed “cultural” rather than “social.” The collective identity
of a business corporation, to stay with the above example, can be interpreted only in
terms of the traits of the culture with which it is shot through and through.
“Culture” is relevant for us in the present context in its broadest sense, and as a the-
oretical notion (irrespective of its concrete social/political/multicultural narrativiza-
tions). In the broadest sense “culture” refers to both material and nonmaterial culture
(DeFleur, D’Antonio and DeFleur 114), a determining influence (Dewey 18), an
“all-pervasive” totality (Rosaldo 25) that also includes phenomena that are not “com-
municative and significative relationships” (Eco 21, 22); of which (i.e., culture), post-
colonial and multicultural theories are telling us, any nation’s borders, any society,
can contain more than one – an aspect of “culture” that turns it into “a sort of theater”
or “a battleground,” “where various political and ideological causes engage one an-
other,” and “contend with one another” (Said XIII). In relation to culture in this broad
sense, politics and other domains and aspects of community functions and products
are culture’s various dimensions. Even “culture” in the everyday narrower sense – the
intellectual and the artistic realm – is simply another dimension (“those practices, like
THEORIZING COLLECTIVE IDENTITY 175

the arts of description, communication, and representation, that have relative auton-
omy from the economic, social, and political realms” [Said XII]). Consider that Bene-
dict Anderson discusses nationness and nationalism (nationality) as “cultural arti-
facts” in Imagined Communities (4), and Bhabha views nation as “a cultural space”
and “cultural compulsion” with “cultural temporality” (“Narrating the Nation” 1, 5);
Clifford Geertz reminds us that ethnicity is a “culture-bound notion” (8); John Hutch-
inson and Anthony D. Smith argue that the ethnie (ethnic community) is “a culturally
defined collectivity” (5). Smith has coined an apposite term that sums it all up: “col-
lective cultural identities” (castes, ethnic communities, nations).1
Does the culture-boundedness of collective identity mean that cultural identity is
the same as collective identity? On the basis of what has just been said about “culture”
as a broad and as a single-dimension concept: collective identity cannot be the same as
cultural identity in either of these senses. While collective identity in any given mani-
festation may be culture-bound to various degrees, the general culturalization of the
concept would throw matters into confusion. The only statement that can be safely
made is that culture is one (the most important) collective that the individual belongs
to, and cultural identity is one manifestation of collective identity (even though collec-
tive identity is merely one aspect of cultural identity). This way we can also avoid the
pitfall of the manipulatively racialized notion of “cultural identity,” of culture con-
structed as “a protective enclosure”; i.e., “the manufacture of rituals, ceremonies, and
traditions” in order to buttress European colonial authority as well as the nationalistic
discourse of post-colonial national states (Said XIV, 16). (The “tangled relations be-
tween cultural and racial identity” [Gordon and Newfield 385] have complicated the
discourse about cultural identity to the extent that the concept has assumed meanings
which are flatly negative. E.g., Finkielkraut 90, 82–83.)
It is collective identity positioned in the broadest cultural space, then, which is my
agenda. But this view of collective identity is incomplete without a reminder of
Habermas’s warning: while a collective’s sense of its identity is positioned in broad
cultural space, only “a certain segment of the culture and action system is important
for the identity of a collective – namely the taken-for-granted, consensual, basic val-
ues and institutions that enjoy a kind of fundamental validity in the group” (230). Let
me add that this is why collective identity, the individual’s collective identification, is
also less than his or her social identity, although society, similar to culture, is also a
collective; and social identity, similar to cultural identity, does comprise the sense of
the collective as one of its constitutive components. Collective identity is less to the
extent that it is merely ideological whereas we conceive of the social as, at least poten-
tially, existential (with a plethora of ideological elements included that are ideological
in a different sense).

1
Where I beg to differ is that he regards classes, regions, and gender groups as different category
– “interest groups” – communities that I view as also culturally defined in the broadest sense
(131).
176 ZOLTÁN ABÁDI-NAGY

I.2. The Integrative Circle of Collective Identity

My main contention is that “Collective identity” may be highly ambiguous, yet it is a

useful concept. The source of its ambiguity is that we are dealing with a stratified
term, whose semiotic field is at least fourfold. In order to make this stratification man-
ageable for critical discourse, and a useful tool to discuss presentations of collective
identity in contemporary American fiction, I will theorize it as four sectors of a circle
that I call “the integrative circle of collective identity.” (Far from wanting to level the
cultural playing field and tone down the cultural and aesthetic differences, the figure
below is meant to represent only one model, the integrative one. It is the opening
chapter in a longer work, so to say, introduced here in full awareness of agency, diver-
sity, and oppositeness, that will have to be developed later, in other essays.)

Firstly, the value aspect: “collective identity” can mean the set of culture traits, so-
cial traits, values, beliefs, myths, symbols, images that go into the collective’s
self-definition; we can call this collective self-concept. This is in fact the ideological
superstructure2 of the collective, the top sector of the integrative circle.

2
It stands to reason that the ideological superstructure of the collective may incorporate (beyond
the horizon of this essay’s immediate contexts), but is not at all identical with, Jung’s primordial
images and predispositions from the ancestral past. Nor is it a simple terminological variation on
Freud’s cultural super-ego, his “claim of the individual” versus “the cultural claim of the group”
idea (50). The collective’s self-concept will, again, incorporate – but is much broader than – the
ethical ideals and demands developed by the cultural super-ego; the whole problematic includes,
but also involves more than the necessary control of the id with civilization’s aggressive com-
mand(ment)s (Freud 106–109).
THEORIZING COLLECTIVE IDENTITY 177

Secondly, the indoctrinative or infusive aspect: similarly to internalized social and

cultural values (to some extent as part of these socializing processes), collective iden-
tity is also internalized collectivity in the individual. This process of collective input is
realized through indoctrination, and can be called collective indoctrination or collec-
tive conditioning. It is in fact internalizing collective identification. We need the word
“identification” here because “identity” is a “fixed thing” while “identification” is an
“on-going process” (Hall 287). This is the bottom sector of the integrative circle, with
its curve bending away from but also beginning to bend backwards towards the
superstructural sector at the top – in cases when the pattern is uninterrupted, con-
formistic.
Thirdly, the functional aspect, when indoctrination is completed and the condi-
tioned (conformist) individual embraces collective identity. This sector of the curve
swings back up to the superstructure sector that regulates the whole integrative model.
The third meaning of “collective identity”, then, is internalized, functional superstruc-
ture – no longer an abstract system, but the individual’s output as a result of the sys-
tem-indoctrinating input: identification as feedback behavior. This is not to say that
I am advocating social constructionist determinism. The complexity known as per-
sonal identity may lead to counter-identification or disidentification (in Michel
Pêcheux’s terms), and it may affect even consenting identification in highly individu-
alized ways – identification is “to assimilate conflictually” anyway (Bhabha, Location
137); nor can “agency as an ethical condition” be discounted (Jay 106). Thus, what
I call functional collective identity is – following Saussure – “speech” where “lan-
guage,” the abstract totality of the structure, a system that everybody may have clear
ideas about, but nobody ever actually “speaks” in its totality, is the ideological super-
structure in our case. Saussurean cultural anthropologist Marshall Sahlins would term
this “speech”: “event,” “the empirical form of system” (153).
Fourthly, although the three-partite integrative circle is now complete, its third
sector returns to the initiating superstructure-sector in a way that bespeaks the social
psychology of the manner in which the ideological superstructure operates, and un-
covers yet another, a fourth meaning to “collective identity.” This is the emotive as-
pect: a collective’s sense of itself as a collective, its sense of belongingness; i.e., a col-
lective’s (imagined) intersubjectivity. It is through this sense of collective intersub-
jectivity that the conformist individual is received into the community of the collec-
tive as a reward for internalizing identification and for functional (behaviorally mani-
fest) identification with the group. But the intersubjective fourth sector of the integra-
tive circle of collective identity does not stand alone as an independent curve on its
own: it runs parallel with and right under the top sector of ideological superstructure,
the collective’s self-concept system. What happens is that through this parallel curve
of the fourth sector – i.e., through partaking of the given community’s sense of be-
longingness or collective intersubjectivity (the collective’s sense of being a collec-
tive) – the individual’s identification reaffirms and reconfirms the value system, the
collective self-concept represented by the superstructural upper layer of the dou-
ble-curve top sector. The integrated individual feeds back and reaffirms the collec-
tive’s concept of itself.
178 ZOLTÁN ABÁDI-NAGY

We can sum it up by saying that the upper curve of the top double sector, the ab-
stract symbolic system of ideological superstructure can also be looked upon as the
cognitive or virtual collective. The parallel curve below it is the community-sense of
identifying individuals: the actual collective. The conformist pattern is an undisrupted
circle of the four aspects (sectors) with collective self-concept regulating the individ-
ual’s relation to the community through collective identification (collectivity is com-
municated to the individual through indoctrination); the individual’s collective identi-
fication serves as a positive feedback to the community, thereby nourishing the collec-
tive’s sense of intersubjectivity, which, in turn, is instrumental in reaffirming and fur-
ther confirming collective self-concept.3

II. PRESENTATIONS OF COLLECTIVE IDENTITY THROUGH CEREMONIES

AND SPECTACLES IN CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN FICTION

II.1. The Value of the Integrative Model: An Overview

Contemporary American fiction speaks much more to this stratification of the idea of
collective identity and to the communicative circle of collective identity than to any
definition of collective identity in terms of any singular essence (even, let me repeat, if
the model is still too simplified in its present form and calls for further development to
handle oppositeness and negativity between layers of collective identity, between col-
lectives, and so forth).
Owing to limitations of space, I will now apply the integrative model of collective
identity only to the presentations of collective self-concept and of the sense of collec-
tive identity; i.e., presentations of virtual and actual collectives in post-1945 Ameri-
can fiction as staged through ceremonies and spectacles.
Ceremonies, rituals, festivals, holidays, spectacles, and other public events that
share their characteristics are frequently-used devices to stage collective identity in
post-1945 American fiction because they are products of the very culture whose col-
lective identity they stage. In what follows I will simply refer to them – except when
talking about specific instances – as “ceremonies and spectacles” as a generic short-
hand to avoid awkward enumerations.
They provide the overarching narratives of collective identity (often identical with
the metanarrative of a sociohistorically contsructed collective) with clues for a dis-
connected individual or culture to be (re)discovered and (re)connected to – cultural
narratives in which everything is embedded, into which everything is integrated in the
fictional narrative of a novel. In such cases we are dealing with – again, some exam-

3
A note of acknowledgment: although Paul Ricoeur is discussing ideology in culture and not col-
lective identity in “Geertz,” Ricoeur’s ideology-related notions of the somewhat Althusserean
“superstructure” and “ideology as integration” – especially as they emerge in his discussion of
Erik Erikson and Clifford Geertz – were helpful in shaping two elements of my terminology (cf.
182–194).
THEORIZING COLLECTIVE IDENTITY 179

ples only – presentations of collectivity through its manifestations rooted in tradition

like ceremony in Silko’s Ceremony or the “Song of Solomon” in Morrison’s Song of
Solomon; through the way collectivity (e.g., the Chineseness of first-generation Chi-
nese-American immigrant mothers) is preserved (for the second-generation daugh-
ters, to enable them to discover their Chineseness), and the preserver-device – the cer-
emonial Joy Luck Club that this circle of friends cultivates – also becomes the writer’s
apropos for the presentation of collective identity in Tan’s The Joy Luck Club; or we
may be dealing with collectivity presented through an osmotic single event that trans-
forms itself into a social-cultural narrative and is in this way extended to serve as a
frame of reference as well as a generating and organizing principle for the discourse of
identity in the whole novel as is the case of the 1939 New York World’s Fair in
Doctorow’s World’s Fair. A sheer ironic variation on Doctorow’s extensive technique
is Barthelme’s The Dead Father, an intensive variation where the whole novel is one
single ceremony: a funeral.
Ceremonies and spectacles staging collective identity do not need to be omnipres-
ent cultural narratives. They can be details of the narrative texture, like locales, ob-
jects, or episodes that have some ceremonial function. They are, therefore, narrative
units that develop into “nuclei” or “cardinal functions” (Barthes 93). This time the il-
lustrations will all come from Bobbie Ann Mason. The battlefield of Shiloh is a his-
toric sight that Norma Jean and her husband visit, but also a family cultic place and
ironic frame of reference for a marriage in crisis in “Shiloh.” But the historic monu-
ment may be an actual monument, an object, like the Washington Vietnam Veterans
Memorial in In Country, where the Memorial turns out to be the necessary place of
pilgrimage (of therapeutic value from the point of view of collective self-concept and
intersubjectivity) for post-Vietnam America. The episodic narrative nucleus of the
veteran’s dance in that novel functionally snowballs into an index to Vietnam-deter-
mined fates and thereby a diagnosis of superstructural confusion that paralyses
Hopewell’s actual collective by almost totally frustrating intersubjectivity reflexes for
a long time.
The presentation of collective identity through ceremonies and spectacles can hap-
pen in direct or indirect ways. If direct, the ceremonies and spectacles are active
agents in shaping the narrative; the indirect technique is usually that of (symbolic)
framing and (mostly ironic) commentary. The “direct” category usually means cere-
monies and spectacles that require spiritual or even physical participation of the com-
munity or group, thus making the direct fictional mobilization of the theme of both the
virtual and the actual collective possible for the writer. Ceremony, Song of Solomon,
The Dead Father are among the purest examples. In indirect cases we are dealing with
ceremonies and spectacles whose seemingly remote (mostly associational) function
of staging collective identity is fulfilled through the collective associations they con-
jure up (like the Christmas holiday time-frame that ironically counterpoints the love-
less, de-collectivized world of Ellis’s Less Than Zero). In such cases the collective-
identity-dramatizing function of ceremonies and spectacles (such as a holiday in the
Ellis novel) is barely in sight on the proairetic-sequence level, as it is buried in the
symbolic or the hermeneutic code.
180 ZOLTÁN ABÁDI-NAGY

Introducing the integrative circle of collective identity as a loosely applied model

of orientation into our discourse on fictional presentations of collective identity makes
post-1945 American fiction display its remarkable diversity in this context.
Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 at once appears to stage – inside the framework of
its ironic ceremony of the auction – both the disappearance of a community-cohesive
virtual/actual collective and an epistemological quest. Alienated official America is
replaced with multiform surrogate communities and the quest, soon enough, turns out
to be an ontological quiz for the hidden virtual collective of an underground actual
collective (the Tristero). But Oedipa Maas, the individual released by the heat-death
of a superstructure, has to find out if that entropic superstructure can be replaced by an
alternative one before the question of reconditioning identification can be raised at all.
It is one of the many paradoxes that Oedipa both has to try her hardest just to find her-
self at a zero-position identification start-line and also has the suspicion that she is act-
ing under secret, manipulative indoctrination every step of her pre-reindoctrination
way (i.e., pre-Tristero-acceptance way – with the proviso that the Tristero is more than
a hallucination).
When examined in the light of the integrative model, Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle is
found to be an ironic anthropological-social psychological experiment of creating an
artificial ideological superstructure of half-truth/half-lie “fomas” meant to be glue for
artificial intersubjectivity: a fabricated virtual collective to hold a simulated actual
collective together. San Lorenzo is fabricated out of elements of morally (if not histor-
ically) failed ideological superstructures and is for that reason bound to fail, thereby
turning McCabe and Bokonon’s utopia into an apocalyptic dystopia. To translate this
into the novel’s absurdese: there is no cat’s cradle where there is no cat, no cradle.
What you have is: the many indoctrinating, superstructural ceremonies and rituals of
going through the motions, the chief ones constituting the ironic religion of Bo-
kononism, which is at the very center of this experiment. And, yes, there are a good
number of participating, half-participating but especially self-dramatizing characters,
some of them identifiers, others dis- and counter-identifiers, but almost all of them
falling into various interpretative communities that keep commenting on what is go-
ing on and relaying countless cross-cultural messages to Vonnegut’s attentive readers.
However, no theoretical model or distinction, no classification can prepare us for
the richness and complexity that we meet in the works themselves. Let us now take a
somewhat closer look at two novels, other than Lot 49 and Cat’s Cradle, novels that
stage collective identity through ceremonies and spectacles. I will briefly consider
techniques of such presentations with some hints towards the actual discourse (or nar-
rative) of collective identity realized through these techniques. (Detailed discussions
of these, especially of the discourse of collective identity, could fill separate papers on
their own.)
THEORIZING COLLECTIVE IDENTITY 181

II. 2. Techniques of Presentation: Ceremony As a Five-Interpretant Sign in E. L. Doctorow’s

World’s Fair

Doctorow’s World’s Fair is a growth novel that presents Jewish-American Edgar

Altschuler’s boyhood as far as 1939. The New York World’s Fair of that year is the
book’s holotrope. But it is also bigger than the historic fair that Edgar goes to see twice
at the end of the novel. Its aesthetic function extends the 1939 event into a
five-interpretant sign or an implied metaphor with five tenors if you like.4
The New York fair with its Commerce Circle, Plaza of Light, gigantic National
Cash Register, Democracity, Amusement Zone, and the rest is America in miniature
for the boy, with America’s past (Time Capsule) and future (Futurama). But it is the
present, the image of contemporary America that dominates: e.g., the General Electric
Building, the Radio Corporation of America Building, the diorama of New York, and
the “Typical American Boy” essay contest in terms of the New York World Fair and
the Depression; Roosevelt, New York, lynching in the South, Lindbergh, leftism,
unionism, American Nazism, college and pro-football in terms of life and politics in
the days of Edgar’s childhood. This is the America that is awaiting the nine-year old
boy at the end of the novel after the early years of personality socialization and multi-
ple culturalization (internalizing identification) that World’s Fair is about – an empir-
ically multicultural but still melting-pot America which wants Edgar to internalize an
American identity.
There is a second interpretant of the world’s fair, again through the implications of
the New York fair itself. Edgar feels that “everywhere at the World’s Fair the world
was reduced to tiny size” (254, emphasis added). The phrase, “world’s fair,” plainly
suggests, after all, that world’s fairs are competitive exhibitions of the world and not
just of the organizing country (in this case America). This associational level brings in
the world of the 1930s outside the United States: Hitler’s persecution of the Jews, the
war in Spain, the Depression, the “Hindenburg” (the zeppelin coming from Nazi Ger-
many), and so on.
Nonetheless, the ramifications of the world “reduced to tiny size” cut much deeper
in the novel than what is simply indicated by the name. The “world” in Doctorow’s
World’s Fair is further extended – third interpretant – also to signify the world in the
universal sense of the animate and inanimate environment that enwraps an individ-
ual’s life, incorporates the individual, the family, and society. In this sense the whole
novel is a world’s fair where the world is present in the family, the friends, the neigh-
borhoods, the school, and the streets that shape the little boy’s self in the thirties, all
the way to the actual 1939 World’s Fair which, through being the place and occasion
of his recognition of sexuality, is shown to be the adults’ world of experience whose
threshold he will have to cross.

4
“Interpretant” is Peirce's term for what the sign produces in the interpreter's mind. It is reintro-
duced in Eco’s A Theory of Semiotics (68–69).
182 ZOLTÁN ABÁDI-NAGY

This third interpretant of “world’s fair” includes a fourth. On the third level
Doctorow’s world’s-fair “ceremony” appears to function somewhat like “vanity fair”
does for Thackeray, even if not in exactly the same way and not with the same associa-
tions. This novel is the protagonist’s preparation for, and eventually first serious initi-
ation into the world’s (life’s) fair. But the individual’s life is also a (or rather, the)
world’s fair. That is to say, Edgar’s life is itself a fair for the world with the little boy
being the fresh merchandise that the extrinsic world – its virtual and actual collectives
– try to gain (make their own, pressure into identification) in many senses and in many
ways.
And here comes the fifth extension, the fifth interpretant: Doctorow’s novel can
also be read as the autonomous self’s visit to, and selective purchases at the world’s
fair (selective identification under various indoctrinating pressures). Edgar is the indi-
vidual who is not a buyer for everything the world exhibits for sale.
“World’s fair” is, then, both a controlling image of the novel whose culmination
point is the 1939 New York event and a fivefold interpretant, an extended metaphor
unfolding from the New York fair: 1) America as a fair, 2) the world of the thirties and
3) human life as a fair, as well as 4) the collective’s conditioning and 5) the individ-
ual’s (Edgar’s) identifying strategies. We may, therefore, look upon the foregrounded
ceremony (world’s fair) that Doctorow uses to stage collective identity as the exten-
sive use of a single-event ceremony.
Edgar’s odyssey of personality socialization and collective identification can be
understood in terms of the integrative circle of collective identity as the journey
through early indoctrination and conditioning; i.e., internalizing identification up to
the point beyond which functional identification begins – in the course of which his
soul can become the terrain on which multiple identities of ethnicity, neighborhood,
religion and class can clash in a single moment of crisis.5 In this context the New York
World’s Fair’s role is closest to that of an ideological superstructure or collective
self-concept, with phantom communities of “America,” and “the world” behind them:
somewhat confusing abstractions for the little boy.
Be that as it may, the foregrounded New York World’s Fair and all its interpretants
and thematic-symbolic emanations are not the only ceremonies in the Doctorow
novel. By the time Edgar visits the World’s Fair, he has met a heterogeneous array of
communities (family, neighborhood, school, immigrant, Jewish – and within that
East-European vs. German –, ethno-linguistic, ethno-religious, atheistic, antisemitic,
American Nazi, generational, gender); he has selectively internalized some of the col-
lective self-concepts of some of these; he has been offered models of identification by
life (the most crucial being the mother’s interdependent personality, the father’s coun-
ter-identifying free spirit and the brother’s disidentification); and his journey up to the
point of first visiting the Fair (i.e., through most of the novel) can be highlighted by
describing Edgar moving through ceremonies like these: the “tribal” “half-nude cere-
mony” of the packed public beach at Rockaway (63); the Jewish holidays with “some

5
When confronted by the two East Bronx boys with knives in chapter twenty-six.
THEORIZING COLLECTIVE IDENTITY 183

forced insistence behind them,” like the Passover in the home of Aunt Frances and
Uncle Ephraim (102); ceremonies of consumerism like Klein’s fall sale – “some sort
of frenzied mass rite” (118); the high-wire act of the clown at the circus that impressed
little Edgar into wanting to become a superman himself; also “ceremonies of my help-
lessness” (116) – the deindividuating experience of the mother dragging him to and
through the sale; radio-plays, movies, football games, and so on.

II. 3. Techniques of Presentation: Ceremony As Teleological, Epistemological,

and Self-Reflexive Identity in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony

We can talk about ceremony as teleology in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony since
the ceremony – medicine man old Betonie’s ceremony performed over half-breed
Laguna Tayo – is the telos, both center and end of the novel. But this is also teleologi-
cal identity: it stages the vicissitudes of collective identity. The medicine man’s cere-
mony itself becomes the story of the identity crisis that calls for its performance, of the
way it is administered, the way it takes effect and heals Tayo, saving him from going
over the edge of the precipice of insanity towards which the “destroyers” push him.
But while providing the teleological texture of the story, Betonie’s ceremony (his vi-
sion of stars, cattle, woman, and mountain) also spreads a complex mystico-lyrical
network of symbolic imagery over the book, all exponentially reflecting the central
concern of this person’s collective identification, and through him the American In-
dian’s confused sense of collective identity.
The ceremony’s most important function is as guidance through the maze of racial
prejudice, white aggression and trickery, hostile aggression (Emo and Pinkie) and al-
cohol-driven aggression (LeRoy) as well as the general Thanatos-drive of the Indians
(the self-destructive drive which is not inborn but caused by the white man). This is
especially true for a half-breed who is easily regarded as out-group by both Indians
and whites and even by some members of his own family for that matter. Thus
the healing process, the ceremony, becomes an epistemological journey for Tayo, a
journey of self-knowledge and a series of realizations concerning wise and unwise ra-
cial-cultural identifications including his own and those of other Indians’ in his envi-
ronment. The discourse of collective identity is organized by ceremony in the
epistemological realm of this Bildungsroman.
Ceremony’s identity-staging ceremony proves also self-reflexive, which is its
meta-aspect, Betonie-Silko’s concern with the nature of ceremony itself: with how
ceremonies have to change – “Otherwise we won’t make it. We won’t survive.” – be-
cause “only this growth keeps the ceremonies strong” (126). So ceremony is also one
of the main themes of the book. This is the self-reflexivity of ceremony as telos.6

6
Also in the Derridean sense: a center which is decentered in that one of the messages the novel
dramatizes is that it is wrong to think that “the ceremonies must be performed exactly as they
have always been done” (126).
184 ZOLTÁN ABÁDI-NAGY

When surveying the main techniques that weave a collective identity narrative
through the device of ceremony, we must be aware that the Navajo medicine man’s
foregrounded scalp ceremony is only one of several more ceremonies. Most impor-
tantly, in an oral culture a ceremony is a ritualistic oral performance – a story. This
oral culture’s life-world and history is an oral narrative (the story in which generations
have distilled it all). It can reverse this relation of story as life into life as story which is
why it is not stretching the limits of imagination for Betonie to say that the white man
is an invention of the Indian, since the white man is a story created by Indian witchery
(132). In this sense Silko’s novel, the story of Betonie’s ceremony, is itself a cere-
mony: Silko’s ceremony performed by a mixed-blood author (Silko is part Mexican
like Betonie, as Alan R. Velie reminds us – 114) through the story of half-breed Tayo
over both halves of the breed (i.e., Indian and white readers alike) in the hope that she
will cure both collectives of what turns both sides into both destroyers and self-de-
stroyers (trickery in the white man’s case and witchery in the Indian’s case). Cere-
mony itself is therefore a ceremony performed over us, a healing magic conjured up by
the primal power of the ceremonially pronounced word.
Both ceremonies (Betonie’s in the novel and Silko’s with the novel) are paralleled
with what we can interpret as two further ceremonies. One supports them on the myth-
ical level in the ceremony of the Buzzard purifying the town with the tobacco that Fly
and Hummingbird bring from the fourth world. The other one, framing the novel, is
the ceremony of praying for sunrise – to end darkness (the darkness of trickery and
witchery).
The degree of ceremony-concentration attained this way is intensified by diverse
ceremonies of good or evil in narrower senses of “ceremony,” often episodic or
evoked on a referential level only, like the “ceremony” of Harley, Emo, and the others
(the self-deceptive rituals of imagining reliving their war experience of belonging to
white America – a recollected experience of pseudo-intersubjectivity), “the ritual of
the deer” (52), old man Descheeny’s ceremonies, or the Gallup Ceremonial.
By way of summing up, we can say that a foregrounded ceremony and ceremonies
in various senses stage the problematic of collective identity and dominate the Silko
book’s proairetic code (develop its action sequences) and are the prime organizers of
the novel’s referential (cultural), symbolic, and hermeneutic codes. To use a musical
analogy, ceremony is melody, rhythm, harmony – all in one; i.e., the music itself and
its composition and orchestration in Silko’s Ceremony.
From the point of view of the integrative circle of collective identity, Ceremony is a
moving story about lost and restored collective intersubjectivity; about the confused
collective self-concept of a subjugated collective; about the destructive and self-de-
structive effect of both consent to and dissent from an alien hegemonic culture’s ideo-
logical superstructure for both the oppressor/colonizer and the oppressed/colonized;
about the variegated patterns of identification and counteridentification in the face of
superstructural conflict and coercion when caught between antagonistic cultures;
about a quest for a culturally deeper structure of an authentic self-concept and collec-
tive self-concept to oppose to destructive inauthenticity; and also about the need for
THEORIZING COLLECTIVE IDENTITY 185

transition and change of the virtual collective in internalization and feedback in order
for the actual collective to survive.
The white man’s destructive and self-destructive trickery is bad enough but the In-
dian’s evil witchery is no better. Therefore, the crucial statement of Silko’s Ceremony
becomes: “Nothing is that simple ... you don’t write off all the white people, just like
you don’t trust all the Indians” (128). This is one “(ex)tension,” one way the novel
“calls into question the security of bounded identity and place as represented both in
traditional Native American metaphysics and in the identity politics of presence in
Western metaphysics” (Meese 41). The freedom of the space of such “(ex)tensions,”
anticipates what is to come in contemporary American fiction some years later. This
freedom, gained by the double defeat dealt by both the hegemonic culture and the
rigid and narrow-minded ethnic minority, will fill the Esperanza of Sandra Cisneros’s
The House on Mango Street with the feeling of not wanting to belong: “I belong but do
not belong to” (110) – a feeling that can be interpreted as Cisneros’s refusal to make
the oppositeness of “otherness” the crucial statement of the book (Marek 173); the
same feeling gives Gloria Anzaldúa’s narrator the exhilarating sense of “freedom to
carve and chisel my own face” with “my own feminist architecture” in Border-
lands/La Frontera: “What I want is an accounting with all three cultures – white,
Mexican, Indian” (22). But these “(ex)tensions” of mine, from Silko to Cisneros and
Anzaldúa, while logically follow from Silko, also take us away from her, in directions
to which one would definitely have to devote new essays.

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