SOURCE: Langen, Toby C. S. “Storyteller as Hopi Basket.” SAIL: Studies in American Indian Literatures 5, no. 1 (spring 1993): 7-24.

In the following essay, Langen explores the organization and the interconnectedness of the pieces in Storyteller.

In creating Storyteller, Leslie Marmon Silko has employed a silent, tangible object used by one person at a time—a book—to effect that person's participation in an audible, intangible, communal art—storytelling.¹ Since part of her aim in this undertaking is to honor an oral tradition, she cannot allow her audience of solitaries simply to read, nor can she herself just write.

The solitude of the reader is mitigated by Silko's offering to us a multiplicity of storytellers, causing us to become a multiplicity of readers as we react to the voices speaking to us. The kind of assemblage we have here is not a collection or anthology; it is what is usually...