Northrop Frye on Imagination

Robert D. Denham in his introduction of Northrop Frye on Culture and

Literature: A Collection of Review Essays states that “The keystone in Frye’s critical

theory is his doctrine of the imagination” (18). Denham remarks that “Frye’s

emphasis on the imagination aligns him with the source of their general principles in the human understanding or in the faculties of the mind and who use the word

“imagination” as their basic term for discussing art” (19). He goes on to elaborate the conception of imagination concerning the faculties of the mind: it is both a “creative and perceptive faculty” (19). According to Denham, in the lecture having his fullest discussion of the topic, “The Imaginative and the Imaginary,” presented to the American Psychiatric Association (1962), he equates imagination with the “creative force in mind” which is the center of my discussion in this chapter. This creative force of mind called imagination has produced “everything that we call culture and

civilization. It is the power of transforming a sub-human physical world into a world with a human shape and meaning,” with what I call the motto of Frye’s central viewpoint, would be “ Imagination creates reality,” which echoes to Momaday’s idea of “we are what we imagine” (103) . Frye’s concept of imagination serves a similar function, “it creates culture out of nature; it also produces literary language” (qtd. in Denham 19). There are three basic modes of perceiving the world, which are

categorized by Frye as world of memory, world of sight, and world of vision. (1) the egocentric perception of the unreal world of reflection and abstract ideas, which he calls the world of memory; (2) the ordinary perception of where we live in, called the world of sight; and (3) the imaginative perception of the world we desire and want to create, called the world of vision (qtd. in Denham 21). To understand Frye, it is his conviction that there are different kinds or levels of perception and that these depend on differing ways men can apprehend the relationships between subject and object. In the book The Educated Imagination ( hereafter EI), Frye also introduces these three attitudes of mind: the first is “the speculative or contemplative position of the mind”

(EI 18); the second is the more practical, process of “adapting to the environment, or rather of transforming the environment in the interests of one species”; the third and

highest level is “a vision or model in the mind to construct” (21). These three serve the basic assumption of Frye’s imagination theory.

As the title of Frye’s book reveals, the imagination must be educated; it must be developed. Then whose imagination can be best developed? According to what Denham points out, it is the artist who develops the perceptive power of the

imagination into a constructive one. The artist “catches and trains the objects of his vision: he can put human imagination into them, make them intelligible and

responsive” (qtd. in Denham 22). In other words, the artist is the most apt to move to the highest faculty of mind—the world of vision. Therefore, as how Denham puts it, only those who have the energy of imagination to train themselves to see clearly, to pass “through sight into vision,” possess imagination as a structural power (qtd. in Denham 22). The artist can educate himself to become a man with the highest faculty of mind, transforming what he sees of the memory, of sight, to visions. Based on such assumptions, in the following section I will analyze the three levels of mind in the visionary Grey’s process of development in The Ancient Child.

3.2.2 Vision and Imagination

In this section, I would like to apply Frye’s assumptions of imagination to explore Grey’s transformation quest in relation to imagination. With a careful reading of the text, I contend that Grey has gone through each of the three levels of mind: the level of consciousness and awareness, the level of social participation, and the level of imagination. The first level of consciousness can be seen in Grey’s awareness of her appearance—“she concluded in an instant that she was beautiful,” (AC 16) that’s the level of sight. Afterwards, Grey develops into the second level of consciousness, which is a more practical attitude of creating a human way of life in the world. In other words, it’s more in relation to culture. One example is that on perceiving the Kiowa and Navajo dolls in museums, Grey “looked hard at these dolls, trying to see

to their centers. She believed that they were somehow involved in her own being, that they were masks that stood for her in some profound, fated way…,”she reveals her identification as a mixed-culture child born of a Kiowa father and a Navajo mother;

“the two cultures came together in her easily, more or less. English was the language of her childhood home at Lukachukai, but “she hoarded bits of the Kiowa and Navajo languages as she could” (AC 17). Although the narrator describes her as “free of the strictures of civilizations,” on certain occasions she wears elaborately decorated traditional clothes like the moccasins and necklaces “in the fashion of one or the other doll” (AC 19). Another example describing this level of consciousness is Grey’s proclaiming herself “The Mayor of Bote, Oklahoma” (AC 28). However, the third and the most exuberant level of mind is, according to Frye, a level of a “vision or model in the mind to construct” (EI 21). What allowed Grey to move from the second to the third level of mind is perhaps her distinct ability to have visions: “Never had Grey to quest after visions” is a repeated phrase indicating her ability throughout the novel. I suggest that vision is the focal point in Grey’s transformation, and I will present textual evidence to illustrate this contention.

The first example I take note of is her relation to the centaur figure, which combines the concept of Native culture and faculty of imagination. As my previous chapter has noted, the half-human and half-horse figure also appears in Set’s painting.

Notwithstanding the figure serves as a symbol of transformation for both protagonists, its first appearance mentioned in the novel is by Grey’s perception:

[Grey] sighed and wiggled the toes of her bare brown feet and marveled at the bright, ephemeral horseman in the sky, moving into a massive, rolling thunderhead, wonderfully backlighted. The pale centaur moved evenly through a crystal canyon shimmering above the world’s rim. And just before it dissolved into the swirls and facets and fissures of light and

shadow, a long streak of the sun struck fire to the clean, curved wingspan of an eagle that soared in the blue aura of the handsome, black-hatted head.

(AC 12, emphases added)

Similar to Set, Grey also perceives the figure with “her mind’s eye,” (13) or

imagination with a different word. By vision Grey perceives the centaur in the sky, indicating the connection to heavenly creatures. Its movement in crossing the sky designates its transformation and motion, again following the Native concept. In book two when Grey wears a turtle-skull mask made herself, she nakedly rides her horse at night, and in a sense she has become one with the centaur:

Then she took off all her clothes, adjusted the mask before a mirror in the arbor, went outside, and, with only a bridge and a saddle blanket, mounted her stallion, Dog. She raised the lance above her head and struck her bare heels hard into Dog’s belly, and he bolted across the yard of the

Mottledmare house, beating his hooves into the grass, throwing up great clods of earth. And Grey emitted terrible sounds, war whoops, at the top of her lungs, and brandished her lance. (AC 199)

On the horse, Grey asserts her womanhood in front of three males in the community:

Milo Mottledmare; Worcester Meat, and Dwight Dicks. On her “holy mask,” Grey races out of the area in which she dwells and stuns the males with her Native centaur-like appearance and her “incredible manner”(AC33). She outlasts the males by the faculty of her imagination. The first person she encounters is Milo Mottedmare, Grey’s uncle, representing the authoritative male in the family; the second person is the “benign original” male (AC 33), Worcester Meat—Worcester “cringed when he saw her coming” then “a crackling laughter [rose] from his nearly toothless mouth”

(AC 199); the third male is representative of violence: Dwight Dicks, the man who raped her in book one. When he saw her on the horse, he was “dumbfounded and

stricken by her approach on the horse” (AC 200). I suggest this scene serves a crucial action, presenting three qualities of the individual self and collective culture, and foreshadows Grey’s later transformation in front of her people. The first is her sense of individuality and immanent wild spirit as a female within her tribal society; the second is that in becoming the centaur figure, she fulfills the transformation process from childhood to womanhood, and eventually to medicine woman; the third is that Grey confirms her own authoritative identity against the males in her village. When she asserts her identity as “the mayor of Bote, Oklahoma” she proclaims not only authority over herself but also a sense of belonging to land and her people. After crossing over the three native men, she returns to the spiritual female figure—the grandmother, and rests upon her grave, which may indicate her spiritual power comes from the elderly female figure:

At the cemetery the grandmother’s grave shone in the blue light. The grasses were silver-tipped, and the night had taken hold of the long, rolling plain. There seemed a deep silence. But the sound of the night was made of innumerable voices on the earth and in the far reaches of the universe. They were the voices of animals and birds and insects, of leaves rustling and water running, of the endless wind. And they were the voices of the dead.

(AC 202)

The second example illustrating that Grey’s extraordinary courage and strength arise from her power of imagination is back in book one: the scene in which she is raped by Dwight Dicks, entitled “She must serve her purpose” (AC 94). In reading this, at first I was confounded by the scene of romance turning into a violent scene of rape but then realized imagination is her source of strength. The love scene is in imagination, dreamed by the visionary Grey, while the violence is reality. Being in the state of trance, Grey imagines her lover Billy is “quiet, loving, considerable, gentle,

preeminently kind” to her (AC 95). Followed by the imaginary love scene is the rape committed by the drunkard Dwight, and “she wanted to die,” but since Grey has already gained strength from her wild imagination, she told herself “she must not faint, she had to hold on, to deal straightly with this emergency, horrible and violent and dehumanizing as it was” (AC 97). She isn’t just passively hurt by the “felony” Dwight committed (AC 98), but she “devised her plan” (AC 99) and resisted: she “had the baling wire already in her hands, and wound it around his wrists […] and had the tines to his throat” (AC 99), she tied up Dwight’s hands in wires like the handcuffs, and circumcised him, as in the ceremony of the Jewish tradition. This scene delineates how Grey’s strength and wit serve her purpose, fighting back against the male violence and “dehumanizing act” of the “despicable, vicious man” (AC 97).

The third example of her growth in vision and imagination can be detected in the narration of Grey’s gradual awareness of her role as a medicine woman. Being a dreamer, “her fantasies sustained her; she required them absolutely […] they expressed her spirit, her imagination.” Imagination appears in forms of dreams, fantasies and wonder, as the narrator goes on to describe, “[a]bove all, she had been born to dream […] Wonder and delight informed her whole being. To dream—that

was the center of life, hers anyway.” Dreaming is how Grey communicates with the

spirit of the dead Kope’mah, on informing and instilling the will of a medicine

woman. Dreaming intensifies and reaffirms her destiny to become a medicine woman.

“She had not decided to be a medicine woman. Such things are not decided, after all.

She was becoming a medicine woman because it was in her to do so; it was her purpose, her reason for being; she dreamed it” (emphasis added, 173). Moreover, dreaming becomes a link between her and her future husband Locke Setman. Through Grey’s dreams, Kope’mah passes down the power and destiny Grey accepts later on in her life, as helpmeet and guide to Set for the central purpose, to fulfill Set’s destiny as

the ultimate destiny of her people. In dreams she acquires the name Locke Setman as

“the name of the man who would require her strength and wisdom and spirit, whose consummate need would be her need” (AC 174). In the passage below Grey dreams both of the grandmother and Catlin Setman, Set’s physical father.

[Grey] spoke, too, over Catlin Setman’s grave. It was as a kind of intermediary that she thought of Catlin Setman. She had not known him, of course, but she had known him, dreamed him. His voice was of a different character from that of the grandmother’s in her dreams. His place in the story was strategic; he stood in crucial relation to the

grandmother and to the indefinite lines of ancestors on the one hand, and to his son, Locke Setman, on the other, who was to be important in her life.

Indeed, the beginning of this digression had been made; she had passed to Locke Setman the bear medicine. In the initial moment had been power and mystery and meaning; the proprieties had been observed, the giveaway had been accomplished, a marriage had been made. (emphases added, 174) Grey dreams of Catlin, Set’s physical father, despite of never knowing him. Her third level of faculty of mind serves as an intermediary to know Catlin—from her visionary dreams. She assures “his place in the story,” which is as the Kiowa ancestral line. In dreams Grey perceives her ultimate destiny as helping Set to rediscover his Kiowa identity and to complete the quest. Through exercising her vision Grey moves and develops to the highest form of imagination, at the same time rediscovers both hers and Set’s Native identity. In the next section I would like to shift the focus to the third

“child” figure in the novel—Billy the Kid.

3.2.3. Billy the Kid Legend

In addition to the two already discussed characters with the “child” figure, Billy the Kid is the third “child” in The Ancient Child. Billy reveals Momaday’s own

fascination with the historical white outlaw figure. According to Momaday, Billy reflects the author’s cultural duality. From Ancestral Voice, in a conversation with Charles L. Woodard, Momaday explains this feature. He describes himself as “being a traditional who also has many modern enthusiasms, he is clearly bicultural, and he seems comfortable with that.” He goes on to state that “one of the best examples of this cultural duality is his enthusiasm for the legend of Billy the Kid” (3, emphasis added). Billy the Kid is a symbol depicting such mixed cultural identity Momaday (as well as Grey) possesses. Momaday claims himself to be “the Indian looking into that story, and he is the white gunfighter looking out” (3, emphasis added). Although Billy is a white figure, Momaday views him from a Native perspective. Would such

juxtaposition confuse his readers? Perhaps it does, but with Momaday, it’s not

troublesome. As Woodard comments, Momaday’s clearly defined identity permits him to make such leaps without fear of seeming to contradict himself, similar to the

relationship Grey has with her identity in the book. In this section, I will carry on with the relationship between imagination and identity, focusing on the Billy the Kid legend, describing several symbols enhancing the identity Set and Grey will be ultimately achieving. As the author dramatizes the idea of being an Indian, he also

“dramatizes the great moral and ethical and environmental values of imagining that idea. As he continues that long process of imagining the Kiowa culture and values that are at the center of his being” (Woodard 3).

The Billy the Kid figure is achieved by Grey’s imagination in the earlier half of the novel. The very first scene of The Ancient Child presents the death of Billy, as imagined by Grey. The first chapter of book one begins with a poem after Billy’s first and only question, “¿Quién es?” (Who is it?) before he is shot to death by the sheriffs:

Well, where do you come from?

And where do you go?

Well, where do you come from, My Cotton Eye Joe?⁴ (AC 7).

This song opens the theme of identity search. The problem of lacking self-identity represented by Billy is the central question Set tries to answer in the earlier half of the novel. Critic Jason W. Stevens observes in “Bear, Outlaw, and Storyteller: American Frontier Mythology and Subjectivity of N. Scott Momaday” that the novel opens with the murder of Billy and closes with Set’s loss of human voice in the dimness of the wild. Both scenes bring to light the question of identity that haunts the novel. Stevens indicates the parallel between the two events: Billy’s assassination and the loss of Set’s voice at the end. Billy’s question is an allusion to the first line of Hamlet, and like the plan, both Billy’s and Set’s stories are dramas of lost and ambiguous origin, as Set’s name hints at the meaning of a bear, designating his origin as the

bear-wilderness; although Billy at times manifests traits of the bear, it is “a figure into which the outlaw cannot transform” (613). Stevens points out that Billy “[embodies]

resistance,” with the Euro-American ego that opposes the bear and ultimately seeks death (AC 187). As to the issue of self identity, Stevens contends that “in contrasts to Set, Billy has no name or locus, such as the Kiowa wilderness, for the missing part of himself, so he must turn inward, literally to the wounds he suffers, to seek his center.

His violent power provides him with legend but not self identity.” Moreover, he also points out that “in Grey’s imagination, Billy’s violence expresses renunciation instead of adventure. He becomes more conscious of his self identity and ultimately falls in love with death” (Stevens 618). Agreeing with this point, I will further elaborate on the death wish and symbol that Billy represents in the novel. In one of Grey’s

imaginative addresses to Billy, she writes: “[b]ut you know, Billy, there is sadness in        

4 "Cotton-Eyed Joe" is a popular American folk song known at various times throughout the United States and Canada, although today it is most commonly associated with the American South.

( Wikipedia)

me now, when I think about those times. There was so much hurt, so much death and dying. Death and hurt followed you like little quails” (AC 180). Grey writes of the

me now, when I think about those times. There was so much hurt, so much death and dying. Death and hurt followed you like little quails” (AC 180). Grey writes of the

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