B. Northrop Frye’s mythos theory
II. Bear-myth and Set’s transformation:
2.2.1 Bear-child myth: agon from conflict to discovery
The first thing that catches one’s attention is perhaps Momaday’s emphasis on the “child.” The book’s title contains the word “child”; it is emphasized from the beginning. The prologue presents the Kiowa myth of a child turning into bear; the central characters are images of the “child”: Set, the bear-boy child, Grey the nineteen-year-old child, and lastly Billy the Kid the outlaw child. Since the title is
“The Ancient Child,” rather than “The Ancient Bear,” I would like to focus on the significance of “child” in Set’s quest before I carry on to the “bear” myth.
In an essay titled “Sacred Images” from Momaday’s famous collection, The Man
Made of Words, Momaday considers children to have a special talent in acquiring the
fundamentals of art and language:I think, how fitting that a child should be the first in recorded history to see these paintings. In a real sense, these polychrome images are child’s play.
For the ancient images are intimately related to language, and language is child’s play. None of us can master language so well as a child. (129) On the same page, Momaday quotes Eilhard de Chardin saying that “what we really
discover is our own childhood, we discover ourselves because we observe the same
essential aspirations in the depths of our souls” (emphasis added, 129). Based on Momaday’s own words, I think it’s necessary to center first on the meaning of the child, discussing the role of discovery and rediscovery in Set’s quest, and at the same time pointing to the fourth phase— anagnorisis, or the discovery of the hero, in Frye’s framework.To start with what the “child” image represents in the novel, I turn to chapter 13, where the narrator introduces Set as an artist for the first time. Description of Set’s yearning for originality reveals the childlike attributes— inquisitiveness and a curiosity about the world around him: “to see and to paint with excitement, with a
child’s excitement, that is what brought him to life” (emphasis added, AC 37). From
that we can also infer something else the child represents: the most true, honest, and genuine insight of the soul: “The child says, ‘Here, see. This bird I have painted, it is what I have seen in my soul. Is it not a wonderful thing? Is this not a good way of seeing?’” Set is depicted in the novel an artist who“[strives] to see and [imagines]what he [sees] as truly as he [can] so that others [can] see as he [can], so that they [can]
see in a way they [have] not seen before” (AC 37). Therefore, as a painter Set is depicted as most inquisitive, endeavoring to see with a child’s excitement and expressing the most genuine feelings of his heart. However, in light of the fame and reputation that the world feeds him, Set is forced to sacrifice his passion for the world’s passion. “But it seems that no one [cares] …no one among his associates. He [wants] a child.” Deep down his heart exists the talent of a child, but this talent is submerged beneath his profession. The struggle, or conflict that he faces occurs as the stage, in Frye’s term is called agon: “[T]here was a commitment to be his own man.
And therefore he struggled. Now, at forty-four, he found himself in a difficult
situation” (AC 37). Set is torn between being himself and being what others expect of him. The result is that he is becoming “sick and tired.” Set misses how he once painted for art’s own sake, not the people in demand of his art:
He recalls and remembers the time in which he had painted for the sake of painting out of some wild exuberance of the spirit. He had been full of excitement, the excitement of learning, of experimenting, of feeling his ability and his accomplishment come close together. But he had committed his time and his work, virtually all of it, to his public. (AC 38)
Set’s sacrifice of himself to what the world expects of him leads to his sickness and gradually diminished vitality, to the point that he has become lifeless, ceased to grow.
Therefore, the child in this chapter signifies the genuine self, the self Set gradually
loses but whose existence he still strives to recover. “He would fulfill his obligations, to be sure; indeed, he would give the best that was in him; but he would first and last be true to himself. He would endeavor to save his soul” (AC 38). From the text we see the central reason Set begins to lose his self identity is his loss of the child’s
quality—the freshness and genuine insight of the soul in him.
Now let’s continue to the focal image and power of the bear in the novel. In addition to loss of the self, Set’s perception of himself is endangered by another force:
the mythic bear power. The Kiowa myth of seven sisters and the boy turning into a bear begins and ends the whole novel. Its relationship to imagination is clearly indicated in The Ancient Child in prologues and in stories told by Set’s father. As critic Louis Owens in Other Destinies observes Momaday’s use of the Kiowa myth, he mentions the feature of the narration of the myth appeared in the prologue and in the intervals has to do with a more thorough imagination. It is “within the reader’s consciousness throughout the novel by telling the story briefly at the novel’s beginning and then elaborating upon the story at intervals as the authorial narrator imagines it more completely” (123). The first interlude is “when an old Kiowa woman watches fearfully as eight children move away from camp toward the distant forest.”
Chapters after, in another mythic interval, “no one ever saw the sisters again[…] And when the stars came out and flickered on the black wash of the sky, the people were filled with wonder—and a kind of loneliness,” and between the two interludes, through Set’s memory his father tells the story of a strange boy who appears suddenly in a Piegan camp. Owens points out when Cate Setman tells the story, he “reimagines it, interpreting it and bringing it to life in the tradition of storytellers” (qtd. in Owens 123). According to critic Patricia Haseltine’s essay “Becoming Bear: Transposing the Animal Other in N. Scott Momaday and Joy Harjo,” she mentions the significance of the bear in relation to man. She remarks that “the bear has a position in the universe
just as man does; man can assimilate the alien bear (in) to himself, in his construction of an identity that now can stand in relation to other cultures, including that of bears.”
Haseltine further notes the concept of identity by pointing out “the bear is associated with Native American identity, to transcend the reservation captivity,” and “[through]
Momaday’s fictional use of the mythic bear-child as himself, he reinscribes the self to a new wilderness landscape” (57). The bear compels Set to return to his natural self rather than maintaining the civilized self in the city. Bear myth and bear image indicate a sense of wilderness. “The bear as both animal and mythic cosmic being, adheres to a natural order beyond man-made law” (Haseltine 93). Momaday thinks of the bear as a superior being for its power and beauty, while at the same time it obeys the natural laws of the universe. In this sense, the bear power plays an important role, allowing Set to transcend the struggle he faces between the two different worlds (his genuine self and the white world).
In short, in the first stage of agon according to Frye’s formula, Set faces his struggle out of two main sources: one is the loss of his genuine self, or the child quality; the other is the bear force that serves the wild and elemental Native vitality which will be later on granted to Set. In the following sections I will portray how Set goes through each of the stages in a typical quest of Frye’s framework.