The Man Made of Words: Essays, Stories, Passages

by N. Scott Momaday

In The Man Made of Words Momaday chronicles his own pilgrimage as an author, retelling, through thirty-eight essays, allegorical stories, and autobiographical reminiscences, how he became one of the first recognized Native American writers of this century. By exploring such themes as land, language, and self-identity, The Man Made of Words fashions a definition of American literature as it has never been interpreted before.

Genres: Essays, Native American, Nonfiction, Literature, Indigenous, Language, Biography

224 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1997

About the author

N. Scott Momaday's baritone voice booms from any stage. The listener, whether at the United Nations in New York City or next to the radio at home, is transported through time, known as 'kairos"and space to Oklahoma near Carnegie, to the "sacred, red earth" of Momaday's tribe.

Born Feb. 27, 1934, Momaday's most famous book remains 1969's House Made of Dawn, the story of a Pueblo boy torn between the modern and traditional worlds, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize and was honored by his tribe. He is a member of the Kiowa Gourd Dance Society. He is also a Regents Professor of Humanities at the University of Arizona, and has published other novels, memoir, plays and poetry. He's been called the dean of American Indian writers, and he has influenced other contemporary Native American writers from Paula Gunn Allen to Louise Erdrich.

Momaday views his writings, published in various books over the years, as one continuous story. Influences on his writing include literature of America and Europe and the stories of the Kiowa and other tribal peoples.

"Native Americans have a unique identity," Momaday told Native Peoples Magazine in 1998. "It was acquired over many thousands of years, and it is the most valuable thing they have. It is their essence and it must not be lost."

Momaday founded The Buffalo Trust in the 1990s to keep the conversations about Native American traditions going. He especially wanted to give Native American children the chance to getting to know elders, and he wanted the elders to teach the children the little details of their lives that make them uniquely Native American. Once the Buffalo Trust arranged for Pueblo children to have lesson from their elders in washing their hair with yucca root as their ancestors did for as long as anyone can remember.

"In the oral tradition," Momaday has said, "stories are not told merely to entertain or instruct. They are told to be believed. Stories are realities lived and believed."

Reviews

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

Somewhere during the course of reading this book it struck me that words are the core of N. Scott Momaday's being. He might, in a Daoist sense, suggest that they are his being. He might even suggest that words might be all of our being. He extends this notion in a sentence that could have been written by the Daoist Chinese poet Li Po (Li Bai) "Existence itself is illusory; we inhabit a dream in the mind of God."

If he read what I just wrote, Scott Momaday might laugh and say, “Joseph, the wine you drank last night is still talking.” (Scott Momaday and I are not at all adverse to wine.)

This is a book in three parts. The first part is Momaday’s thoughts on storytelling and writing and the importance of stories. Momaday essays that "Stories ... are statements which concern the human condition. To the extent that the human condition involves moral considerations, stories have moral implications. ... In the oral tradition stories are told not merely to entertain or to instruct; they are told to be believed. Stories are not subject to the imposition of such questions as true or false, fact or fiction. Stories are realities lived and believed. They are true."

Momaday’s words make me think, they challenge my own narrow worldview, they take me outside of my worldview, and they help me appreciate the worldview of other people and other cultures. But, more than that, his writing makes me conscious of history and more aware that I am a product of my own history and places. I carry the past with me and I am part of a continuum. Perhaps more importantly, Momaday knows -- as did his Chinese intellectual forbearers -- that I am not the center of that history, I am a small part of it. He quotes Yvor Winters, his mentor and friend, "Unless we understand the history which produced us, we are determined by that history, we may be determined in any event, but the understanding gives us a chance."

Momaday is also, like Confucius, a transmitter of stories. Like Confucius, he transmits the wisdom of the sages who came before him, among other things, the wisdom of the Native American tradition. This incantation from the Iroquois serves to illustrate:

You have no right to trouble me,
Depart, I am becoming stronger;
You are now departing from me,
You who would devour me;
I am becoming stronger, stronger.
Mighty medicine is now within me,
You cannot now subdue me---
I am becoming stronger,
I am stronger, stronger, stronger.

Momaday has a clear spiritual dimension. This shows up in another part of the book which might be said to be a travelogue. Momaday takes us to sacred places. It is a given that many of those places are sacred to Native Americans, but we also go to Chartres and even Zagorsk, which he calls “the heart of Russian Orthodoxy.” The Trinity Monastery there inspires him and his recounting of how he was treated there makes the place real and Russian. His journey also takes him to St. Peters’ cathedral in Regensburg, Germany. His description of this place contrasts starkly with Trinity Monastery.

The final part of the book is, fittingly, stories. I’m not going to spoil the fun. But, I will say, I loved the stories especially the one called “An element of piety.” It is about his daughters, a black lab, a priest, a blessing and himself. The story is told in a style that is – for lack of better words – ‘tongue in cheek.’

As the book ended, Momaday took me back to my Daoist friends with this: "And now I wonder what does it mean that, after these years I should speak of the octopus? It may be that I saved its life, but I know very little about the life of an octopus, and I shall not presume to say what salvation is worth to either of us. Only, just now, as a strange loneliness, it occurs to me that this creature has for some years now, been of some small consequence in the life of my mind. And I wonder if, in the dark night of the sea, there, deep within its own sphere of instinct, the octopus dreams of me."

That passage sent me to find another passage from Chuang Tzu:

"Once Chuang Chou dreamt he was a butterfly flitting and fluttering around, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn't know he was Chuang Chou. Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Chuang Chou. But he didn't know if he was Chuang Chou who had
dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou." *

*Chuang Tzu: Basic Writings. Trans Burton Watson. P. 45

[SuZanne · Rating 5 out of 5]

Momaday's rich, poetic language captivated me and held me an enthralled prisoner for a week. Then, just before not quite finishing his book, I stopped. Why? I did not want this reading journey to end.

The book continues to resonate with me nearly daily. Momaday's reflections on land and connections between places where we are and who we are have struck deep within me. Momday, perhaps more than any writer, has this gift--to bring us closer to our place, wherever it is, and remind us how where we are is wrapped up with who we are in deep and meaningful ways. Thus, The Man Made of Worlds carried me back to my childhood roots in Montana and its horizon to horizon wide blue skies with giant white rolling clouds, the craggy towering snow-capped mountains, the verdant rough-wild hills where a plethora of fauna could greet me at almost any moment, the rapidly running crystal clear rivers, the placid dark evergreen-lined lakes; and the miles and miles of golden wheat fields. Land or place shapes us into who we are in ways written about by great poets like Wallace Stegner and Momaday and certainly few write as eloquently as Momaday.

Momadays words carry much reverence for physical place-to-person beingness. Magically, he is able to carry his reverence for his childhood landscapes into his adult life visits to Georgia O'Keefe's ranch and Gothic castles and cathedrals in Eastern Europe and beyond. His essays, stories and passages are grounded in the beauty of being in a place. Like prayers, he reveres the beauty-in-being in a place; hence, the title "A Man Made of Words," which could also be entitled "Being in Beauty" or "Being in Place," or simply "Being." Perhaps his own title of the last chapter "Dreaming in Place" is best. He immerses himself in a place, then Momaday uses his magic pen, like a prayer, to return us to the core of who we are, beings deeply connected to place.

In his essay "Graceful and At Ease" Momaday describes Isak Dinesen, author of Out of Africa, as having "entered so completely into the landscape of the place that it became at last the landscape of the spirit." This is where Momaday himself transports us in The Man Made of Words.

[Thomas Isern · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sorry to be done with this one; perhaps I'm not. Two themes pervade the work: language and place. Where I live. There are too many other things that demand my time today for me to give this review the attention it deserves. I'll come back another day.

[Rachel Cassandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

I only read the stories section of the book, but the stories, all three pages or less, were stunning. Momaday sees great things in tiny moments.

[Nancy Ann · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book is a collection of short pieces that are between or about or in addition to fiction, but not themselves fiction, the kind of book I always hope will illuminate the nuts and bolts of the writer. They were written over several decades in all kinds of times and places, and I was not surprised to find the reading a little lumpy. The middle section seemed to border on travel-writing, and although it never failed to be absorbing and insightful, it was sometimes difficult to hear the voice of the man made of words, the man who introduces himself with the very brief, very elegant story that opens the book. It is about a Kiowa arrowhead-maker, a story remembered from his father's many retellings. It would be a disservice to paraphrase -- by all means read it for yourself! It establishes key features of Momaday's understanding of what a writer is and does: a conviction that the possibilities of language are infinite and mysterious, and it is with them, in them, that we all build our respective worlds.

The storyteller's place within the context of language must include both a geographical and mythic frame of reference. Within that frame of reference is the freedom of infinite possibility. The place of infinite possibility is where the storyteller belongs (112).

He goes on to underscore the profound differences between cultures that rely on oral speech and those grounded on written documents, repeatedly alluding to the beauty and power of spoken, sung, chanted words and making readers aware of how easily they can be obscured, lost, forgotten. Momaday was a member of the Kiowa tribe; he appreciated the music of Kiowa speech and knew many words of the language, but was not fluent. Of course he was profoundly literate (Ph.D. in English literature at Stanford), and there is no going back, not to anything like "pure" orality, at least. But neither is there any sense of an unbridgeable gulf between "us" and "them". Rather he addresses readers who can "hear", in his written words, profound respect for the very different position of words and silences among primarily oral people, and for the critical importance of those words for any real comprehension of America and its people.

In one passage I found particularly memorable, he aligns himself with the emigrants:

One function of the American imagination is to reduce the American landscape to size, to fit that great expanse into the confinement of the emigrant mind. We photograph ourselves on the rim of Monument Valley or against the wall of the Tetons, and we become our own frame of reference. As long as we can transform the landscape to accommodate our fragile presence, we can be saved. As long as we can see ourselves on the picture plane, we cannot be lost (97).

It's as if he's cast himself as one of "them" for whom a snapshot suffices, although at the same time he's the writer of a text that insists on the irony of a flat, shiny, surface in relation to the forces and expanses of an often overwhelming American landscape.

One of the short pieces toward the end of the book, describing a return to Bighorn Medicine Circle in Wyoming, becomes an occasion for a reflection on sacred places and a meditation on something fundamentally human about experiencing them. Momaday first saw the monument when he was retracing the path of the Kiowas' migration from the Yellowstone area of Montana toward what is now Oklahoma, an event that occurred so long ago as to be unspecifiable among people whose history is told from one generation to the next. Although at this point he's become someone different from the earlier self who visited, he still finds the place and its effect on him profoundly mysterious. He goes with a friend, a native man. At first, they have some difficulty locating the right road. About the time they solve that problem, a stranger drives up in a battered old car. He turns out to be a quiet, studious-looking young man, a Swiss visitor, who is looking for the same monument. They go together, but look, listen and walk quietly, independently among the stones. When they are about to go their separate ways, the young visitor extracts a small camping stove, water, kettle, cups, tea and biscuits in his car and makes tea for all three. Momaday remarks on the unspoken desire for some ritual to mark an encounter with others in a sacred place, a desire felt by someone from another generation and another continent, as well as by those with more immediate connections. The three, he writes, whether they have any further contact or not, will always remember that place and one another.

[Lenora Good · Rating 5 out of 5]

My only "complaint" was there was an end to the book. No matter how slowly I read, how I parsed the pages, I still came to the end. The saving grace is, it's my book, and I can reread it as often as I want—though there will still be an end.

This is a wonderful compilation of essays and stories and passages from the Master. We learn about his childhood, the influence of his grandparents, of the environments in which he was raised. We learn some of the Kiowa mythologies. We who read this book are blessed by the words therein, and the art that goes along with them.

Momaday is a poet, who carries that sense of rhythm and beauty into his prose. He tells of the oral culture and the book culture, and their differences. "Books are to be read; they are to be consumed and digested; they are to be turned over in the mind; they are to be taken seriously." This book is flavorful, there are textures to be chewed and savored before swallowing; there are textures that are smooth and delicate as flan. A well-balanced meal for your brain.

If I were to be sent to a desert island and allowed only 5 books for the rest of my life, this would be one of those books.

[Mihiro Ogawa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having finished reading "The Man Made of Words" by N. Scott Momaday. It is not a novel but a collection of short essays. I am strongly impressed when I read how further the Amerian Indians' ancient mural arts or oral traditions exceed beyond their literary tradition of writing. They began telling their stories by drawing animals and sceneries in the ancient times even thousands of years before people invent the written letters. I was moved by how beautifuly the auther tells readers the stories of the Native Americans.

[Mike · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came to discover the voice of the Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday in the Ken Burns documentary "The West" and have made it my business to read as much of his writing as I can. The Man Made of Words is a collection of Momaday's observations on various aspects of Native American history, folklore and religious practices, homelands and holy places, and most of all, the power and depth of written and spoken language. It's a welcoming introduction to a world and history of thought that is never properly shared or recounted. Momaday is a brilliant prose stylist and an engaging storyteller.

[Barbara Brydges · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of award-winning Kiowa writers essays, reflections and stories. All beautifully written, but I enjoyed the first section most, essays which had to do with story, words, and place. As he says at the conclusion of an essay in which he reflects on the words of Jorge Luis Borges: “That is to say that Paradise is a library. It is also a prairie and a plain, it is a place of the imagination, the place of words in a state of grace.”

[Brian Washines · Rating 4 out of 5]

Spanning a writer's life, Momaday's The Man Made of Words takes a look at the changes made but also the immortal nature of language. The history of Indigenous people coupled with his travels, Momaday becomes one of Native American literature's figureheads of its 20th century Renaissance including James Welch and Leslie Marmon Silko.

[Tim Hill · Rating 4 out of 5]

Loved the first part. 2nd part a little dry. 3rd part unconnected one page stories although some repeated what was written in part one.
So a good read in the beginning. The last 2/3rds it's up to you.

[Emma Leigh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for school. I like the author I think he has good views but i wouldn’t read again.

[John Mattson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Momaday has a fascinating writing style that resembles the best poetry!

[Cassie]

Read the story the collection is named after for a class I'm currently taking to wrap up my associate's degree.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely writing

[Neal Hampton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hands down. Absolutely, Momaday at his very best.

[Michelle Boyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Man Made of Words is a wonderful collection of short stories and essays by Pulitzer Prize winner N. Scott Momaday. Much of this work discusses identity, both personal identity and group identities for American Indian peoples, while always suggesting that "We are what we imagine ourselves to be" (39). Place is deemed sacred throughout passages. Language is sacred not only for the Kiowa, but for Momaday himself, who crafts beautiful stories and carefully places words on the page to give their exact meaning. This collection means also to interpret and reinterpret what we call "American literature."

There are two passages that stand out to me. The first shows the sacredness of language, and how language shapes our histories and our stories. Momaday is discussing oral tradition here as well, showing the reader how at times stories may seem "imperfect" to the outsider listening in, but at the same time just how true, honest, and perfect a story can be if you know what is/is not a flaw in the story's wording.

When my father spoke to me of my grandfather, who died before I was born, he invariably slipped into the present tense. And this is a common things in my experience of the Indian world. For the Indian there is something like an extended present. Time as motion is an illusion; indeed, time itself is an illusion. In the deepest sense, according to the native perception, there is only the dimension of timelessness, and in that dimension all things happen. (53)

Yet the "Introduction" in Part III of this collection is amazing--truly brilliant, and delves into what makes a story and what story means for us all. Momaday writes:

To tell a story in the proper way, to hear a story told in the proper way--this is a very old and sacred business, and it is very good. At that moment when we are drawn into the element of language, we are as intensely alive as we can be; we create and we are created. That existence in the maze of words is our human condition. Because of language we are, among all the creatures in our world, the most dominant and the most isolated. Our dominance is supreme, and our isolation is profound. That equation is the very marrow of story. It is a story in itself. We have no being beyond our stories. Our stories explain us, justify us, sustain us, humble us, and forgive us. And sometimes they injure and destroy us. Make no mistake, we are at risk in the presence of words. Perhaps the greatest stories are those which disturb us, which shake us from our complacency, which threaten our well-being. It is better to enter into the danger of such a story than to keep safely away in a space where the imagination lies dormant. (169)

[Konrad · Rating 1 out of 5]

Do you derive pleasure from reading some iteration of "We are made of stories, language, words," of "Events happen in place," of "Take notice of landscape," in a queasy sincerity, skimmed off the surface of some supposed deep-well of spirituality, oh again and again and again? If that's your jam, you've found your raspberry. I, clearly, am not even in the kitchen.

[jeanette · Rating 5 out of 5]

Momaday's essay collection is so interesting and it is easy to read one or two essays. You don't even have to read them in order. My favorite essay is about the arrowmaker. I think anyone would like this book.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Autobiographical collection of stories that explore the connection between people and the land they inhabit.

[Kelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

A combination of Momaday's thoughts on language and storytelling (which are quite insightful) as well as a few stories and descriptions from his own travels throughout the world. Great read!