This document discusses the role of storytelling in addressing climate change denial. It argues that fiction can help bridge ideological divides and promote empathy in a way that scientific facts alone cannot. The document analyzes the novel Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko, in which the protagonist Tayo undergoes a Native American healing ritual involving storytelling that helps him reconnect to the natural world and overcome feelings of isolation. The ritual demonstrates how embracing a communal, holistic understanding of our interdependence with the environment can help address both social and ecological problems. More broadly, the document asserts that fiction allows readers to imagine other perspectives in a way that motivates understanding across boundaries, and this type of empathy is needed to overcome polarized debates on issues like climate

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Mariah Harrod
Professor B. Werner
ENS 430
2 March 2016
Fiction as Ceremony:
The Role of Storytelling in Climate Change Denial
Humans imbibe the opinions of those surrounding them (Hoffman 17). This is likely a
result of our mental inability to assess all available information, so we copy the conclusions of
others to save time and avoid social conflict. Problematically, this groupthink manifests in an
imminently threatening global issue: climate change. Professor and author Andrew J. Hoffman
observes that political party affiliation is the best indicator of belief in this phenomenon (10). No
nation apart from the United States hosts such fierce partisan opposition in accordance with the
existence, causation, and mitigation of climate change. Fellow author Elif Shafak would likely
agree with Hoffman’s diagnosis regarding climate change denial as fundamentally social. In her
recent TEDTalk, Shafak claims, “Community of the likeminded is one of the greatest dangers of
today’s globalized world.” She argues that fictional literature has the flexibility and power
necessary to push humans to empathize and unite across boundaries. “Stories cannot demolish
frontiers,” she tells the crowd, “but they can punch holes in our mental walls, and through those
holes we can take a glimpse of the other and perhaps like what we see.” In her eyes—and I
believe she is right—the solution to our seclusion is not didactic; only fiction can transport an
individual beyond themselves. This parallels Hoffman in his accusation that more science will
not convince dissenters; only a neutral, trustworthy message and messenger can do this. Fiction
becomes this neutral message as the ivory towers of science never could, bridging boundaries not
only between people but between individual and environment, as in Leslie Marmon Silko’s

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Ceremony. Like the aforementioned authors, Silko demonstrates that both environmental and
human dysfunction must be addressed socially: through storytelling. In this story within a story,
protagonist Tayo must perform a Native American ritual to regain his understanding of self in
relation to the grander scheme, and in this way readers ceremoniously rediscover their solidarity
with the remainder of the world—as we all must do if we hope to mitigate our global climate
impact.
At the beginning of this temporally disjunctive novel, readers find that Tayo is a Native
American veteran recently returned to the US after suffering the losses of his cousin and uncle.
Frequent bouts of crying, nausea, and a sense of invisibility portray Tayo’s feeling of vagrancy
as a person rejected by his mother, whites, and Native Americans. Observing that his depression
and violent instability went unresolved by doctors, Tayo’s grandmother introduces him to a
shaman, Betonie. The shaman believes that the cause of Tayo’s emotional instability is not
biological and accordingly cannot be mitigated with Western medicine. Instead, he prescribes
ceremony. By telling stories of witches, personified coyotes, and feral children, Betonie
embraces Tayo—seated in the center of a mandala—in animistic Native American history. “The
old man came forward then and cut Tayo across the top of his head… they guided his feet into
the bear footprints… ‘Following my footprints walk home… I have the dew/a sunray falls from
me/I was born from the mountain/I leave a path of wildflowers/A raindrop falls from me/I’m
walking home’” (Silko 132-133). While the Western doctors admonished Tayo against thinking
of his sickness in communal terms, Betonie reintroduced him into the universal narrative by
drawing metaphors between Tayo and his environment. This holistic reorientation (rather than an
isolation and mitigation of a single symptom) bridges the gap between this Native American
veteran and his true home, the universal overarching design. The vagrant returned home.

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“He cried the relief he felt at finally seeing the pattern, the way all the stories fit
together—the old stories, the war stories, their stories—to become the story that was still being
told. He was not crazy; he had never been crazy. He had only seen and heard the world as it
always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and time” (Silko 229).
Throughout the story, Tayo is unable to overcome his perception of identity loss and solastalgia
until Betonie reminds him of his connection to the remainder of the universe. Tayo feels pushed
to the margins of the story until the ritual of his ancestors allows him to contribute to the
narrative and to step back and evaluate life’s difficulties from a larger scale. Remoteness was his
sickness. Shafak warns, “If you want to destroy something in this life… all you must do is
surround it with thick walls.” An individual in isolation deprives themselves of balance just as
Tayo’s perceived separation led to his destabilization and just as polarized parties who make no
effort at engaged dialogue or consensus risk catastrophe. The former is the nature of the
contemporary American unable to step outside the hustle and bustle of daily life to evaluate their
long-term impacts on the remainder of the globe; the latter is the nature of climate change
disagreement.
On its surface, fiction seems counterproductive for teaching climate change—a
necessarily scientific pursuit. Fiction exists in the realm of human imagination, but it opens new
perspectives by motivating readers to invest their emotions in a character they may come to see
as reflecting their own values. Likely this is especially evident in first person narrative in which
the reader subconsciously reiterates that “I” am performing this ritual or dialogue. In the end, as
in a dream, we have not physically experienced any of these fictional events and yet are mentally
altered by them. What Tayo’s story tells us is that connecting ourselves to the remainder of the
world through metaphor, empathy, and connection is the only way to heal the cause of our

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environmental crisis. Healing the symptoms through technology or small-scale mitigation are not
only unsustainable; they reinforce the separation that humans feel from the remainder of
existence and will only perpetuate our stubborn attempts at domination. Fiction is a ceremony
which invites us to struggle and triumph alongside others through the semblance of a neutral
message and messenger. The solution to dissent is not expository; it is imaginary, and we must
imagine ourselves in other positions to break down those “thick walls” which prevent our
conception of a larger picture. Science specializes, but it can never broaden its scope to
extrapolate to an ultimate answer. That is the place of fiction which obeys no methodological
restraints to segregate one individual from another. In reference to an earthquake in Turkey, Elif
Shafak told her audience, “In the face of death and destruction, our mundane differences
evaporated and we all became one.” Let us take proactive measures and unite through dialogue
and compassion before catastrophe creates the imperative.
Bibliography
Hoffman, Andrew J. How Culture Shapes the Climate Change Debate. Palo Alto, US: Stanford
UP, 2015. Print.
Shafak, Elif. "The Politics of Fiction." YouTube. TEDTalks, 19 July 2010. Web. 28 Feb. 2016
Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York, NY: Penguin, 1986. Print.