神話的改寫: 恩史考特莫馬載<< 遠古之子>> 中的想像與認同

全文

(1)國立臺灣師範大學英語學系碩士論文 Master Thesis Graduate Institute of English National Taiwan Normal University. 神話的改寫: 恩‧史考特‧莫馬載《遠古之子》中的想像與認同 Re-creating the Myths: Imagination and Native Identity in N. Scott Momaday’s The Ancient Child. 指導教授: 梁一萍博士 Advisor: Dr. Iping Liang 研究生: 耿尚瑜 Student: Shang-yu Keng. 中華民國九十八年六月 June 200.

(2) Keng i. 中文摘要本論文探討神話在北美原住民身分認同中所扮演的重要角色，選用文本為恩‧史考特‧莫馬載的第二本小說《遠古之子》(1989)。小說中共有兩個主要的神話: 其一為今奧克拉荷馬州凱厄瓦族 (Kiowa)人變為熊的傳說，其二為美國西南部那瓦侯族 (Navajo)的變形女子 (the Changing Woman)。我認為莫馬載藉由想像力，不但改寫原住民部落的神話傳說，並且重新建構書中主人翁失落的身分認同。本論文說明神話改寫的目的有三：(一) 闡揚原住民重視生命之周而復始的世界觀；(二) 藉由改寫及重新想像傳統部落神話，增加原住民文化信仰的流傳及更新；(三) 在重寫神話的過程中，作者試圖處理原住民雙重身分中的混雜認同。本論文由四個章節組成。第一章介紹作者莫馬載，以及李維史陀 (Claude Lévi-Strauss) 與傅雷 (Northrop Frye) 的神話理論以作為論文的架構根基。第二章著眼於男主人翁洛克‧賽特蒙 (Locke Setman)，我運用傅雷的神話理論去探討賽特蒙從人變成熊的變身過程。第三章的焦點轉向女主人翁葛瑞 (Grey)，主要藉由美國西南部那瓦侯族 (Navajo) 神話中的變形女子原型，探討想像力在她的蛻變 (transformation) 過程中所扮演的角色，我認為葛瑞所扮演的角色不僅是賽特蒙的幫手，對他進行原住民傳統儀式的治療，更開啟了她自己從小孩變成巫師 (medicine woman)的蛻變旅程。我認為葛瑞的轉變與賽特蒙的變身極為相似，皆由四季循環呈現變形周而復始的過程。此外，本文也討論葛瑞對美國西部傳奇人物比利小子的迷戀，藉以說明原住民混雜的文化認同。第四章總結，重申文本中的三個孩童 (葛瑞、賽特蒙與比利小子) 如何融為一體，完成自我變身之旅，藉由三個神話傳說 (人變為熊、變形女子與比利小子)，使原住民的身分認同如同三股編織合成的繩子般堅韌。. 關鍵字：莫馬載、《遠古之子》、李維史陀、傅雷、神話理論、原住民身分認同、蛻變、想像力.

(3) Keng ii. Abstract This thesis explores the significance of mythology and its relationship to the imagination of Native American identities in N. Scott Momaday’s second novel, The Ancient Child (1989). I will discuss two primary symbols of mythology in the novel: the non-human figure of the Kiowa bear myth, and the post-human figure of the Changing Woman in the southwestern Navajo tribe. I propose that by imagination Momaday not only re-creates the mythology, but also transforms Native American identities in the novel. I contend that the purposes of Momaday’s re-creation of the mythology are threefold: first, it is relevant to Native worldviews, which highlights the cyclical nature of the universe. Secondly, by means of retelling and re-imagining the traditional mythology, Native cultural beliefs are passed down and revitalized. Lastly, through recreating the cultural mythology, the author aims to deal with the issue of mixed-blood heritage and the creation of hybrid Native identities. The thesis consists of four chapters. Chapter one introduces Momaday and the theories of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Northrop Frye for a general theoretical background. Chapter two focuses on the male protagonist, Locke Setman, and his reincarnation of the ancient Kiowa myth of a boy turning to a bear. I borrow Frye’s theory of mythology as the theoretical framework to explore Set’s quest of self. Chapter three shifts the focus to the female protagonist, Grey, and I investigate the role imagination plays in her transformation, especially with regard to the southwestern mythological archetype of the Changing Woman. By providing textual evidence, I aim to identify Grey not only as a helper to Set, conducting native ceremonies to heal him, but as a transformer who embarks on an adventure of her own to change from a child into a medicine woman. By venturing into Navajo mythology, I argue that Grey’s transformation follows the archetype of the Changing Woman..

(4) Keng iii. Moreover, it is composed of a cycle of the four seasons, which is similar in movement to Set’s quest. In addition, I take into consideration Grey’s obsession with Billy the Kid, the legendary figure of the American Wild West, and argue for the hybridized nature of Native identities. Chapter four establishes my conclusions and recapitulates the main points of the thesis. I restate how the three “children” figures in the novel converge, integrating into one. When the journey of self-transformation is completed through the integration of the three mythological figures, the Native identities are interwoven firmly into three strands of one rope.. Keywords: Momaday, The Ancient Child, Frye, Lévi-Strauss, mythology, native identities, transformation, imagination.

(5) Keng iv. Acknowledgements. For me, thesis writing was indeed a life-transforming process. I feel extremely grateful to have received help from my family, professors, and friends. Their support assisted and guided me through the journey, and will always be cherished deep down my heart. My foremost and sincerest appreciation goes to my advisor, Professor Iping Liang, whose seminar on Native American Literature introduced me to N. Scott Momaday’s novels, and kindled my interest in The Ancient Child. I am deeply inspired by her enthusiastic lectures and ardent discussions in the classroom, which have contributed immensely to my thesis. I’ve benefited greatly from her instruction, experiences, energy, humility, warmth and concerns she shows towards students. I am also much obliged to my committee members, Professor Mary Goodwin and Professor Yueh-chen Chang, for both of their insightful comments and suggestions illuminated my thoughts. I thank professor Goodwin for her enlightening advice and kind encouragement on my proposal and oral defense; professor Chang for her careful reading and critical comments that helped me in revising and correcting the writing. I’m very much indebted to my classmates and writing-partners who have accompanied and soothed me in the excruciating process of thesis-writing: Siying Chen, Wanlin Sheu, Catherine Hung, Chun-ting Chang, Jessica Zhao, Josephine Tang, Sandy Jung, and Jennifer Jian. My appreciation also extends to my friends for their constant support and prayers for me: Ashley Huang, Charlie Kuo, Iris Kuo, Jenny Tang, Joyce Liu, Judy Tseng, John Wu, Melissa Huang, and Tina Wu. Special thanks go to Bruce Tseng, Josh Hung, Lisa Yu, and Ryan Glassett, for their generosity to offer me timely help. They are gratefully acknowledged for their time and patience in reading and contributing in the final draft..

(6) Keng v. My wholehearted gratitude is devoted to my dear family. I dedicate this thesis to them for their immeasurable love. I thank my parents for providing me everything so that I can carry on the writing without worries. I thank my brother, Jefferson, for countless nights riding me to move out of the research rooms, and accompanied me to dine at my favorite noodle shop. Without their urging support and encouragement, I could not have completed the thesis. Last but not least, I would like to grant my most honorable praise to H.S., my lifelong best friend, who guided me along the path of my graduate years!.

(7) Keng vi. Table of Contents Chinese Abstract…………………………………………….……………………………….....i English Abstract……………………………………………………………………………......ii Acknowledgements………………………………………………………...………………….iv Table of Contents………………………………………………………………………….…..vi Chapter One............................................................................................................................... 1 1.1 N. Scott Momaday and Re-creating the Myths............................................................ 1 1.2 Mythic Imaginations in The Ancient Child.................................................................. 4 1.3 Native Identities and Imagination................................................................................ 6 1.4 Theoretical Overviews of Myth................................................................................... 8 A. Claude Lévi-Strauss and the basic structure of myth ................................................... 8 B. Northrop Frye’s mythos theory................................................................................... 10 1.5 Literary Review ......................................................................................................... 13 1.6 Organization of the Thesis......................................................................................... 15 Chapter Two ............................................................................................................................ 17 I. . Northrop Frye’s mythos theory and Momaday’s artistic design of The Ancient. Child: ............................................................................................................................... 18 2.1.1 Introduction to the archetypal myth........................................................................ 18 2.1.2 Three Phases of Literature: myth, romance, and realism ....................................... 19 2.1.3 Four mythos of comedy, romance, tragedy and irony and the stages of the quest . 21 2.1.4Momaday’s artistic design of the novel................................................................... 24 II. Bear-myth and Set’s transformation: .......................................................................... 29 2.2.1 Bear-child myth: agon from conflict to discovery ................................................. 30 2.2.2 pathos and sparagmos: self-discovery in arts and paintings .................................. 33 2.2.3 Anagnorisis: self-discovery in imagination............................................................ 40 Chapter Three .......................................................................................................................... 50 3.1.1 Mythology............................................................................................................... 53 .

(8) Keng vii. A. . Navajo Religion ..................................................................................................... 53 . B. . Paula Gunn Allen’s The Sacred Hoop and native mythology ............................... 54 . 3.1.2 Literature Review ................................................................................................... 57 3.1.3 Cycle of Four Seasons in the Navajo Myth of Changing Woman ......................... 60 A. . The Navajo Changing Woman............................................................................... 60 . B. . Grey’s Cycle of the four seasons and the Changing Woman................................. 62 . 3.2.1. Northrop Frye on Imagination ............................................................................... 65 A. Frye’s imagination theory........................................................................................... 65 3.2.2 Vision and Imagination........................................................................................... 67 3.2.3. Billy the Kid Legend ............................................................................................. 72 3.3. Emergence with the bear myth ................................................................................. 78 3.3.1Identification to the land.......................................................................................... 79 3.3.2 Renunciation ........................................................................................................... 82 3.3.3 Cultural duality....................................................................................................... 83 3.3.4 Emergence and Set’s transformation...................................................................... 85 Chapter Four............................................................................................................................ 88 Works Cited............................................................................................................................. 92 .

(9) Keng 1. Chapter One Introduction 1.1 N. Scott Momaday and Re-creating the Myths Noted for the publication of his first novel House Made of Dawn in 1968, which won him the 1969 Pulitzer Prize and brought him critical attention, N. Scott Momaday is “undoubtedly the best known American Indian writer world-wide” (Owens 24). After the publication of House Made of Dawn (1968) and The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969), Momaday became the most influential Native American writer in the late 1960’s and the early 1970’s. Moreover, House Made of Dawn marked the inauguration of the Native American Renaissance.1 According to scholar and author of Native American and Chicano/a Literature of the American Southwest, Christina M. Hebebrand observes that the important issues Momaday incorporated in his works include “alienation felt by tribal people due to the failed assimilation into the dominant U.S. society, and the search for a sense of identity in order to reflect the difficulties indigenous people face in the modern U.S. society” (24), which are the central motifs in both novels House Made of Dawn and The Ancient Child. My goal in this thesis is to delve into the issue of mythology as it relates to the imagination and creation of Native identities in the novel. I wish to demonstrate that by re-imagining the Native mythology, Momaday reformulates Native identities and heals the wounds of the losses of land, language, religion, and culture, which are the most crucial elements of Native cultural identities. I propose that Momaday’s purposes in re-creating the mythology are threefold: first and foremost, it is relevant to Native worldviews, which highlight the cyclical nature of life. As Hebebrand states, in                                                         1. The Native American Renaissance was a term originally coined by critic Kenneth Lincoln in his 1983 book of the same title. According to Lincoln, The Native American Renaissance targeted less than two decades of published Indian literature, is a written renewal of oral traditions translated into Western literary forms (8)..

(10) Keng 2. contrast to the Western linear notion of time, in which all events occur in a straight line with a clear beginning and end, in the native understanding of time, history is “looked upon as cyclical … events are thought—and expected—to repeat themselves” (11). In The Ancient Child, the bear myth is repeated from generation to generation, and reenacted by the male protagonist Set. By re-creating the myths, the native traditions and beliefs are passed down to the new generation to emerge again. Secondly, by means of retelling and re-imagining the traditional myths, Native spirituality and beliefs are not only passed down but revitalized through imagination. Lastly, I propose that through recreating cultural myths, Momaday aims to cope with dual heritage in establishing the hybrid Native identities. As Hebebrand comments on contemporary Native Americans of mixed bloods, descendents of more than one Indian tribe and Europeans, “because they are often marginalized as one group among the miscellaneous ethnic people that comprise the melting pot—the United States, the similar problem they are faced is to establish a sense of self by mediating among the various cultural, tribal, and spiritual factors that shape their identities” (4). Clifford E. Trafzer similarly depicts such hybrid nature in Native identities as multifaceted, suggesting it is “like a braid of hair,” which consists of three sources: “individual identity and community history are woven together with a philosophical system that gives meaning to the world. This braid is the tripartite link among our ancestors, our communities, and individuals”(233). Such philosophical system, I suggest, would be like the bear myth, which binds present individuals to their communities as well as to their ancestors. In this thesis I intend to explore how this philosophical system functions as a tripartite link that binds the three elements together and constitutes the sense of self-identity in The Ancient Child. The Kiowa myth of a boy turning into a bear penetrates The Ancient Child.

(11) Keng 3 2. (1989), Momaday’s semi-autobiographical novel that continues his personal vision. quest for the essential “bear nature” within himself (Frischkorn 23). Descended from Kiowa himself, the ancestral bear nature represented by the bear myth enables both the writer Momaday as well as his fictional character Locke Setman to come home to the Kiowa tribal culture. Set’s home-coming, however, is triggered by inner torture and agony. As critic Jason W. Stevens contends, the bear is “a buried part of Set that rises up against his Euro-American ego for betraying his Kiowa father’s memories and his Kiowa people’s experiences” (606). Such conflict between his own cultural heritage and the culture in which he is brought up results in the inner pain and loss. Such is the case with Set, the protagonist, who is the reincarnation of the boy from the Kiowa myth, the “ancient child” who becomes the bear. In going through the crisis of his lost identity and disorientation, Set begins to perceive himself as “the bear,” eventually transforming himself into his destiny, and he reconstructs the ancient Kiowa myth as his own story. An account of the plot is in order before we further our analysis of the text. Born to father Cate Setman and mother Catherine Locke, Set is orphaned when his mother dies in childbirth, and his father follows her seven years later in a car accident. Instead of living with his paternal Kiowa relatives, Set is sent to an orphanage, resulting in a state of alienation from his tribal community and ignorance of his tribal culture. He is later adopted by a retired philosophy professor and becomes a successful artist in the white art world in San Francisco. As a well-known artist in San-Francisco, Set becomes “sick and tired” (AC 38). His growing anxiety and feelings of disorientation are aggravated by the loss of home and self. On receiving a telegraph about the death of Kope’mah, his Kiowa grandmother Agabai’s close friend,                                                         2. The edition cited in the thesis is published by HarperCollins (1990). It is hereafter abbreviated as AC in the parenthetical documentation..

(12) Keng 4. Set is summoned back to his tribal home in Oklahoma, where he finds his father’s grave, learns about his Kiowa culture, and gains a sense of his Kiowa identity. He begins the journey of restoration and transformation as he’s given the medicine bundle and instructions from Kope’mah. Set gradually receives bear power and identifies with the Kiowa culture as a bear. 1.2 Mythic Imaginations in The Ancient Child Momaday has authored 13 books, including novels, poetry collections, literary criticism, and works on Native American culture. His first novel, House Made of Dawn won the Pulitzer Prize, but his favorites are The Ancient Child, his latest novel, because "it is a greater act of the imagination," and The Way to Rainy Mountain, because " it presents a good, accurate picture of Kiowa culture in its heyday." Mythic imagination of the bear first appears in Momaday’s multi-genre masterpiece The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) with a skillful integration of myths, legends, historical and personal commentaries. As Momaday explains, the process of writing the The Way to Rainy Mountain is part of a conscious effort to understand “the way in which myths, legends, and lore evolve into the mature condition of expression which we call ‘literature’” (58). The oral tradition develops into the written form by involving three distinct narrative voices: mythic tribal background, the historical commentaries, and personal reflections, which are interwoven into the lyrical and mythical narrative of The Way to Rainy Mountain. In The Ancient Child, readers cannot overlook the interrelated themes of Native identities and myth making. Momaday himself designates the significance of myth making in an interview about The Ancient Child, where he explains: I am very concerned to understand as much as I can about myth making. The novel that I’m working on now is really a construction of different myths. I’ve taken a Kiowa myth to begin with and am bringing it up to.

(13) Keng 5. modern times.…My main character, Set, is the reincarnation of a boy who figures in Kiowa mythology, a boy who turns into a bear. And I’m also working with Billy the Kid in the same novel. And there will be other elements like that, other mythic elements that will inform the story in one way or another. I regard what I’m doing as an inquiry into the nature of myth making. (qtd. in Owens 118; emphasis added) The two mythical figures mentioned here are the Kiowa bear and the Western outlaw Billy the Kid. Central to the bear myth is the male protagonist Set, who is the “reincarnation” of the bear-boy figure in the mythology. The motif of transformation is triggered by the myth of the Kiowa bear-boy, which serves as the archetypal myth in the novel and is repeated in the prologue in The Way to Rainy Mountain and in the front pages of The Ancient Child. The other significant figure is Billy the Kid, an outlaw out of history, whose death is reenacted by Grey in the first scene of the novel. Grey is a 19-year-old Navajo-Kiowa woman who fantasizes about Billy. She imagines Billy as her lover and constantly imagines herself in the historical time and place of Billy. The myth of Billy the Kid is undoubtedly about the American West, and Owens observes that the myth is “appropriated by Grey, [and] will be woven through the gradually revealed myth of the Kiowa bear-boy” (119). Most scholars are preoccupied with the issue of self-identity in Set’s journey, viewing Grey as the helper in Set’s transformation. In this thesis, as I probe into the issue of myth with respect to the female mythical figure The Navajo Changing Woman, I suggest that the heroine Grey launches into her own journey of self-transformation in developing her syncretic identity of Native American and Euroamerican cultures. Another feature I attempt to examine is the convergence of the three characters endowed with children’s characteristics. In addition to Billy the Kid, there are the Kiowa bear-boy Set, and the Navajo-Kiowa girl Grey. Grey, in Owens’ words,.

(14) Keng 6. “outgrows the American western myth of eternal youth and irresponsibility” (119). After all, she does not remain as a child figure throughout the whole novel, but matures and becomes a medicine woman, following the myth of the Navajo Changing Woman. It is she who becomes indispensable to the realization of Set’s identity in the Kiowa myth of bear-boy transformation. While Billy the Kid appears to be the only “childish” character, it is important to note that both Set and Grey are transformed and become characters endowed with mythical and even supernatural dimensions of power and perception. 1.3 Native Identities and Imagination As previously mentioned, the Native identities of indigenous people are multifaceted; Clifford E. Trafzer delineates them as “braids of hair” that consist of individual identity, community history, and a philosophical system of creation stories. These three strands are woven together as a “tripartite link among our ancestors, communities, and individuals” (233). This feature of native identities indicates the inseparable connection between communities and individuals, as Paula Gunn Allen points out in The Sacred Hoop that many Native American cultures seek to encourage an individual to merge his or her being “with that of the community and to know within oneself the communal knowledge of the tribe” (qtd. in Ruppert 28). In similar fashion, critic James Ruppert contends that “the community frequently requires that individuals and thus Native protagonists look at themselves to see how they fit in [the community]”(28). Based on Native world views of identity, critic James Ruppert further contends that there are “two evoked realities or stories: one outward-looking, immemorial, and static; one inward-looking, immediate, and active” (29). The “outward-looking” reality is perhaps the philosophical or mythological part of the native tradition, which blends into the personal or individual inward-looking identity. Ruppert then goes on to suggest these two forms of stories or “realities” can create.

(15) Keng 7. identity (29; emphasis added). Such identity is, again a fusion of two sources merged into one by creativity (or in another word, imagination). In delineating how imagination plays a significant role in forming Native identities, I will draw on Momaday’s significant conception of imagination. In his well known collection of essays The Man Made of Words, Momaday defines the Native American as “someone who thinks of himself, imagines himself in a particular way. By virtue of his experience, his idea of himself comprehends his relationship to the land” (39; emphases added). In this regard, the concept of Native identity is directly connected with one’s self-perception, which will be a focal point in explaining the protagonist’s loss of identity in The Ancient Child. Momaday says, “We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are” (qtd in Owens 5). According to critic Kenneth Lincoln, Momaday’s identity or “idea of himself” derives essentially from “religious and cultural views of the past … which emerge as aesthetic faith in the present” (95). Similarly, James Ruppert mentions in his book Mediation in Contemporary Native American Fiction that “a mythological story will often appear in contemporary Native American writing because it is an important cultural dimension in determining identity and place” and “myth and everyday reality are often fused and become a single source of knowledge” (26). Both critics underscore how the religious culture or mythological story could blend with reality (or, in a sense, identity) in the imaginative part of their literature. In the same fashion, Ruppert claims that “[m]yth is an accepted epistemological reality, and an aid to knowing oneself” (26). He further illustrates this point by saying “[the Native] identity is evoked by a mythic reality, a reality full of spiritual efficacy” (26). Based on such contention in Native identities and imagination, it is apt to employ a mythological methodology to serve as an overarching framework in investigating The.

(16) Keng 8. Ancient Child. In the next section I will begin with an overview of the theories of myth. 1.4 Theoretical Overviews of Myth A. Claude Lévi-Strauss and the basic structure of myth Claude Lévi-Strauss is a French anthropologist, best-known for his development of structural anthropology. Through a vast amount of field work, his team gathered over 265 myths from sixty-five American Indian tribes. The research and discussions are based on 174 myths, which are representative of ninety-two North or South American Indian tribes (Champagne 18). In Strauss’ definition, the stories or narratives that he analyzed are myths. To clarify, they are “more than a simple series of narrated events, a myth is a narrative invested with belief by a group of individuals and expressed in varying ways by other cultures” (Champagne 34). In this regard, the meaning of myth is eminently associated with culture and how the individual identity is tied to cultural perspective. Champagnes also states that “myth is a product of social milieu, a sociolinguistic formulation of a story common to many cultures” (34). Despite the fact that this view highlights the multiplicity of meanings in myth, Strauss’ structural perspective of myths interestingly concludes in one of the collections of lectures, Anthropology & Myth, that “all these myths were made use of the same code,” and this code of myths is “qualitative and intimately associated with concrete experience,” (39) and thus developed into certain logical rules. To develop the structural analysis of mythical thought, Strauss employs models of several types, between which there was always the possibility of movement, such as his observing the astronomical code, “wherein in the constellations, characterized by a slow periodicity (because seasonal),” he states that the code is “strongly structured in virtue of the contrast between ways of life and techno-economic.

(17) Keng 9. activities” (49) and points out “decisive transition appeared to occur at the level of the astronomical code and with the manifest difference from one to another understandable as a function of particular mythical content” (“The Origin of Table Manners” 49). Coming then to the myths, Strauss and his team had been specially concerned with “[revealing] the transformations undergone by the astronomical code common to all these myths in the passage from the southern to the northern hemisphere,” and concluded that their regularity proves “despite expected differences—and even, perhaps, because of them—we are dealing with very much the same myth (“The Naked Man, 1” 51). In this regard, Lévi-Strauss emphasizes that “the basic structure of myth is the same, but the contents can vary”; as Lévi-Strauss describes, some are like a kind of mini-myth which is very short and very condensed, but “has still the property of a myth in that we can observe it with different transformations” (Myth and Meaning 40; italics original). In short, mythology is dynamic. According to Lévi-Strauss, “the same mythical elements are combined over and over again, but they function in a closed system, which is in contradistinction with the open history of history” (40). Taking one of the myths he used in Myth and Meaning as an example, Strauss portrays a myth from western Canada about the skate “trying to master or dominate the south wind” and becoming successful in the attempt (21). Lévi-Strauss explicates how the myth can be examined from the viewpoint of exploring why certain objects, such as the wind, or the skate, are chosen in certain myths. He concludes that “while it is obviously wrong and impossible from an empirical point of view to see that a fish is able to fight a wind, a reader can at least understand why images borrowed from experience can be put to use. This is the originality of mythical thinking” (22; italics original). Such originality, which Strauss’ example offers as the essence of myth, represents the most substantial and fundamental archetypes of life, human or.

(18) Keng 10. nonhuman. By drawing on Lévi-Strauss, I argue that some similarity could be observed between his idea and Momaday’s revision of myth. Like Strauss, I also intend to grasp a overarching essence and delineate the similarity in two different cultures, in this case, the Native tribe and the West. In other words, there may exist an affinity between the myth of the skate Lévi-Strauss illustrated and the kind of myth that Momaday makes use of in The Ancient Child, such as the bear myth and Billy the Kid myth. I would like to conclude by restating the two essences or functions of myths that Strauss’ structural view provides: the first is “to revive a forgotten past, to apply it, like a grid, to the present in order to discover here a meaning where the two faces of history and structure coincide” (qtd. in Champagne36). This coincidence, Strauss further mentions, “is found in the ability of myths to bring together apparent contradictions of diachronic and synchronic orders, of the linear succession of historical events and the logical, nongeometrical associations of rituals to the meanings given to them by their practitioner” (36). In this regard, I propose that the myths in The Ancient Child serve the purpose of transcending from past to present. The second function of myth is related to its cultural aspect; in Strauss’ own words, he “believed it to be intellectually honest to describe the innate order, or disorder, of different myths or versions of myths as they existed cross-culturally,” (37) and he restates the purpose of myth, which is “to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a (real) contradiction” (37). From the cultural perspective, I attempt to view the myths as a link to overcome such contradiction between the Native (Kiowa bear myth) and white culture (Billy the Kid) that co-exist in The Ancient Child. B. Northrop Frye’s mythos theory Northrop Frye is ”one of the most important literary critics and theorists of the.

(19) Keng 11. twentieth century” (Balfour ix). Since the publication of Fearful Symmetry in 1947 and Anatomy of Criticism in1957, he has become “the foremost proponent of archetypal or myth criticism of literary texts” (ix). His myth criticism is noteworthy for its “breadth and pioneering use of larger images and archetypes.” According to Frye, his definition of myth always means, first and primarily, “mythos, and which is story, plot, or narrative” (Northrop Frye Myth and Metaphor 3). Frye’s definition of myth distinguishes story from history, and he suggests that myth is a narrative of literature that often has to do with “stories about a god, which is frequently employed in connection with rituals and ceremonies” (4-5). Frye’s source is Western literature canons, such as poetry of William Blake and the Bible. Nevertheless, his definition of myth has a close relation to Strauss’ definition, which also means stories or narratives (of that in the tribal cultures). Thus by definition, both Frye and Strauss’ myth derives from stories, whether they are Native or Western. In his introduction to Northrop Frye On Culture and Literature: a Collection of Review Essays, Robert D. Denham summarizes that Frye’s discussions on myth mainly focused on two opposing myths: “the myth of concern and the myth of freedom” (14). The myth of concern comprises things that a society is most concerned with, communal instead of individual values. Its function, according to Frye, is “to hold society together….For it, truth and reality are not directly connected with reasoning or evidence, but are socially established. What is true, for concern, is what society does and believes in response to authority, and a belief, so far as a belief is verbalized, is a statement of willingness to participate in a myth of concern (qtd. in Denham 14). Its root is in religion, politics, law, and literature; with its origin in oral or preliterate culture, it is “deeply attached to ritual, to coronations, weddings, funerals, parades, demonstrations, where something is publicly done that expresses an inner social identity “ (14). The other type of myth, the myth of freedom, according to.

(20) Keng 12. Frye, is “truth of correspondence” which has “a logical or impersonal evidence and verification,” and “originates in the mental habits which a writing culture, with its continuous prose and discontinuous verse forms, brings into society” (15). In a word, the myth of freedom is extended from the first form of myth and “becomes literary and imaginative” (qtd. in Northrop Frye On Culture and Literature, 15). I will later employ Frye’s theory of mythos and his use of imagination, here I will only give an over view of his framework on (1) mythos and (2) imagination. In Northrop Frye, Ian Balfour summarizes how Frye sees literature moving in a sequence of three phases: “myth, romance, and realism” (34). There are two fundamental movements of narrative, one cyclical, and the other dialectical, with the former moving “within the order of nature” (qtd. in Northrop Frye 34). The circular movement of Frye’s framework is the central motif in employing his theory of myths, which will be the focus of our discussion. According to Frye, there are four main types of mythical movement, with a “downward motion or the tragic movement”, and an “upward motion which is the comic movement”, from “threatening complications to a happy ending and a general assumption of post-dated innocence in which everyone lives happily ever after”(36). The four movements are also known as “romantic, tragic, comic, and satiric or ironic,” which also correspond with the literary genres. What interests me is how Frye assigns a season for each mythos, indicating their circular movement. Thus comedy is called “the mythos of spring, romance the mythos of summer, tragedy the mythos of autumn, and the ironic or satiric, the mythos of winter” (36). This theory of mythos has a close similarity to Grey’s circular movement, following the Navajo Changing Woman’s myth discussed in chapter three of this thesis. It fascinates me that the Western and Native patterns in myth bear such striking resemblance. In addition to Frye’s distinctive contributions to the theory and practice of.

(21) Keng 13. criticism in myth and archetype, some say the keystone in his critical theory is his doctrine of the imagination (Denham 18). Frye’s emphasis on the imagination is primarily a term for discussing art, and has developed general principles in human understanding or “in the faculties of the mind” (18). Frye understands the imagination as both a “creative and perceptive faculty,” His fullest discussion of the topic appears in a fellowship lecture, “The Imaginative and the Imaginary,” and here he equates the imagination with the “creative force in the mind.” He points out that imagination produces “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”(19). His motto that “imagination creates reality” corresponds to Momaday’s words on Native identity: “we are what we imagine.” Focusing on culture and art, Frye says: “it [imagination] creates culture out of nature; it produces literary language” (19). In this thesis I will I will borrow his notion of imagination for my analysis of The Ancient Child. In chapter three, by applying the three levels of mind Frye mentions in The Educated Imagination, I hope to contribute to the in-depth analysis of the female heroine Grey. 1.5 Literary Review In this section, I will give a summary of some major reviews of the works of Momaday, primarily those of House Made of Dawn and The Ancient Child. It is clear that most critics see the two novels as interrelated since the bear-boy myth is repeated in both texts. Louis Owens argues in Other Destinies that the opening passages of House Made of Dawn describe the landscape and present the image of Abel running, creating a “timeless, mythic background against which the other characters emerge” (93-94). Abel must learn to return to the stories, the mythos, and to connect with the cosmos. Likewise, in “Becoming Bear: Transposing the Animal Other in N. Scott Momaday and Joy Harjo,” Patricia Haseltine examines the issue of identity in Native.

(22) Keng 14. writings by focusing on the representation of the mythic bear. By reading Momaday and Harjo’s work together, Haseltine draws out various significances of transformation for Native American peoples and achieves a renewed recognition of bear-identity in Native writings. In addition, in “The Shadow of Tsoai: Autobiographical bear power in N. Scott Momaday’s The Ancient Child” Craig Frischkorn considers autobiography and intertextuality in assessing Momaday’s works. Like Owens and Haseltine, he acknowledges Momaday’s search for personal identity through myth and imagination. In the same fashion, Susan Roberson in “Translocation and Transformations Identity in N. Scott Momaday’s The Ancient Child,” states that self-identity is not individualistic, but a fusion of beings who roam the shadows of memory, history, and myth. Finally, Jason W. Stevens’ “Bear, Outlaw, and Storyteller: American Frontier Mythology and the Ethic Subjectivity of N. Scott Momaday” discusses the frontier mythology in the novel and argues that the Kiowa bear-boy myth serves as a return to the motif of wilderness, depicting how Momaday uses the frontier setting to fulfill the return to wilderness in the novel. It is evident that the predominant criticism of Momaday’s novels concerns his adaptation of the mythical background of his tribal cultures, mainly Navajo and Kiowa, especially the Navajo myth of the Changing Woman and the Kiowa myth of the bear-boy. Most critics also agree on the close relation between his tribal background and the sense of self identity that Momaday illustrates in his fictional works. Accordingly, I would like to reiterate the main idea of this thesis: that is, how Momaday revises his tribal mythology to reformulate a Native identity for himself, as well as the characters in his novels..

(23) Keng 15. 1.6 Organization of the Thesis In this thesis, I aim to investigate the significance of myth and its relationship to imagination in forming the Native identities in The Ancient Child. There are two primary myths I intend to deal with: the non-human figure in the Kiowa bear myth, and the figure of the Changing Woman in the Navajo mythology. I will also deal with the legendary American figure of Billy the Kid. The thesis consists of four chapters. The introduction provides an overview of Native American literature, introducing the significance of N. Scott Momaday, beginning with his publication of House Made of Dawn in 1968. I will look at Momaday’s essay “Man Made of Words” to explore the relationship between imagination and Native identities. I will give a general overview of the myth theories of Levi-Strauss and Frye to give a theoretical basis for the myth. In my chapter two, I will focus on the male protagonist Locke Setman in The Ancient Child, and his reincarnation as a boy turning to a bear, as in the ancient Kiowa myth. I will borrow the framework of Northrop Frye’s “Theory of Myths” in Anatomy of Criticism to explore Set’s adventure. Based on Frye’s framework of the romantic mythos, I propose that Set’s quest is a mythos of summer. The journey is completed in Tsoai, or “Devil’s Tower,” which is a marker of Kiowa tribal history and represents the mythical story of the bear-boy and his seven sisters. Set’s identity crisis, the splitting of self, is due to his orphanage and alienation from his paternal native place. On discovering his name-identity—Set’s name in Kiowa means bear—the bear inside him gradually awakens, and the identity crisis he faces caused not only his mental breakdown, but foreshadows his rebirth at the end. The mental death brings forth the latter spiritual rebirth as he eventually returns to his homeland. The Devil’s Tower, where the Kiowa bear myth originates, is essential in Set’s discovery of his native identity. The ancient myth begins to initiate his connection with the land, from which he has been separated..

(24) Keng 16. Chapter three shifts the focus to the female protagonist, Grey. I will investigate the role imagination plays in her transformation, especially her obsession with the legend of Billy the Kid, the American Wild West figure. Grey takes Set on a journey back to her mother’s home, Lukachukai, where Set is nourished by Navajo culture and tribal ceremonies. His bear identity becomes strong and prepares his ultimate transformation vision. By providing textual evidence, I aim to assert her role as not only a helper to Set, providing healing in conducting the native ceremony; she also embarks on an adventure of her own, maturing from a “child” to a medicine woman. By venturing into the Navajo myth of the Changing Woman figure, I propose that in contrast to Set’s quest as only a mythos of summer, Grey’s adventure is composed of the cycle of four seasons, like that of the Changing Woman, and at the same time reflects her Native heritage. In the end I will also illustrate the emergence of the three child figures: Set, Grey, and Grey’s imagination of Billy the Kid, the three are combined into one, like three strings of one rope, or as previously mentioned in Trafzer’s description of the native identities, the “braid of hair woven together,” the “tripartitie link among the ancestors, communities and individuals” (233). .

(25) Keng 17. Chapter Two Mythos of Summer: The Bear Myth Revisited In that lapse and hush the people let the summer go, mindful that the earth was going on from season to season, bearing them to a destiny. N. Scott Momaday, The Ancient Child (15). In this chapter I want to examine the quest of the male protagonist Locke Setman in The Ancient Child, centering on his reincarnation of the ancient Kiowa myth of a boy turning to a bear. By employing the framework of Northrop Frye’s “Theory of Myths” in Anatomy of Criticism, I intend to illustrate Set’s adventure as the romantic mythos. Based on Frye’s framework of the romantic mythos, Set’s quest can be seen as mythos of summer. This chapter is divided into two parts: the first part introduces Northrop Frye’s theory of myths, including the phases in the romantic mythos, and compares Frye’s framework to Momaday’s artistic design of The Ancient Child, and I aim to define Set’s quest, in Frye’s sense, as a romance quest. The second part focuses on the bear myth and explores the four forms of imagination in the novel—paintings, memories, dreams and visions, through which the quest of self-discovery is completed. My intent in the chapter is twofold: first, I will examine the views critics hold in analyzing the myth of Set’s transformation from man to bear, and while agreeing with the view most critics hold toward the bear myth—that is—acts as a motif of transformation in Native identity, I further argue that in rewriting the bear myth through different forms of imaginations, Momaday rediscovers Set’s loss of native identity in the quest of self in The Ancient Child; secondly, I intend to view Set’s journey as mythos of summer according to Frye’s framework, attempting to demonstrate Momaday’s revision of the Kiowa bear myth in The Ancient Child..

(26) Keng 18. I.. Northrop Frye’s mythos theory and Momaday’s artistic design of The Ancient Child:. 2.1.1 Introduction to the archetypal myth Anatomy of Criticism3 is Northrop Frye’s representative work in literary criticism, and it is “avowedly an attempt to consider literature as a whole in the light of principles formulated in Frye’s study of Blake” (Balfour 18).The third essay—“Theory of Myths” is commonly recognized as Frye’s central achievement. This essay is, according to Ian Balfour, “not only the longest of the book, [but] it is the one in which Frye’s erudition seems most productively applied” (33). One of its important tasks is to sketch the structures of literary imagery at the level of the archetype. To depict how literary imagery functions in relation to the archetype, Frye compares the literary principle to that in painting (and the visual arts). The overarching purpose in the third essay, according to Frye, is to “outline a few of the grammatical rudiments of literary expression” (Frye, Anatomy 133). To recognize these basic rudiments, Frye draws an analogy between literature and painting, which are both to “stand back” from the details of the literary text, and he suggests that “in the criticism of literature, too, we often have to stand back from the [text] to see its archetypal organization.” (qtd. in Balfour 34). I find similarity in such principle in Frye’s method of literary criticism and Momaday’s artistic design of The Ancient Child. The novel is divided into four books, with each book representing a segment: “Planes,” “Lines,” and “Shapes” to “Shadows,” such design is similar to the process of construction and gradual completion of an artwork in painting. Frye states that in literature, as in painting, the traditional emphasis in both practice and theory has been on verisimilitude, in his words are “representation,                                                         3. The edition cited in the thesis is published by Princeton (1957). It is hereafter abbreviated as Anatomy in the parenthetical documentation..

(27) Keng 19. lifelikeness,” or how closely it relates to real life. Frye’s example can be best illustrated in Charles Dickens’s novels, that the readers cannot resist the impulse to compare the stories with “life” (134). To depict the principles of the archetypal myth, Frye’s concept of literature has a close relation to that of painting, which are frequently described in terms of their analogues in plane geometry. Quoting his idea to depict how Frye’s concept of art can be compared to Momaday, I intend to illustrate how myths and paintings can illuminate each other: Geometrical shapes are analogous only to pictorial forms, not by any means identical with them; the real structural principles of painting are to be derived, not from an external analogy with something else, but from the internal analogy of the art itself. The structure principles of literature, similarly, are to be derived from archetypal and anagogic criticism, the only kinds that assume a larger context of literature as a whole. (Emphases added, Anatomy 135) From Frye’s observation, structural principles of literature are similar to those of art, like paintings. What I interpret in the comparison between literature and paintings is that the archetypal myth is to literature as geometry is to painting; I suggest the “internal analogy” of art derives from artist’s imagination. In The Ancient Child, the writer and painter Momaday makes use of images of myths and painting to present his storyline, and also how they are illuminated by each other. In this chapter I attempt to explore and provide textual evidence on how Frye’s principle of the “internal analogy”—myth and imagination, works for Momaday’s hero Set. 2.1.2 Three phases of literature: myth, romance, and realism In comparing realism to myth, Frye notes that “as realism is an art of implicit simile, myth is an art of implicit metaphorical identity,” and that “in myth we see the structural principles of literature isolated; in realism we see the same structural.

(28) Keng 20. principles fitting into a context of plausibility” (Anatomy136). Frye mentions the technique of displacement, which is what can be metaphorically identified in a myth, and can only be linked in romance by some form of simile: analogy, significant association, incidental accompanying imagery, and the like. He points out that the difference between myth and romance is that “in a myth we can have a sun-god or a tree-god; in a romance we may have a person who is significantly associated with the sun or trees” (137). In Set’s case, the quest is linked from romance to myth, since being the reincarnation of the bear boy, he is associated with the mythical bear, with the “implicit metaphorical identity” designated to him from the mythical story in the beginning. Frye also distinguishes myth from romance “by the hero’s power of action: in the myth proper he is divine, in the romance proper he is human” (Anatomy 188). From this perspective, Set’s “divine” or mythical part of himself is the bear, or the spiritual force that gradually awakens inside him. Frye notes that “the attributing of divinity to the chief characters of myth, however, tends to give myth a further distinction, of occupying a central canonical position,” and the reason for the greater profundity of canonical myth is because of “the greater degree of metaphorical identification” that is possible in myth (188). In this sense, Set’s possibility of metaphorical identification with the bear is what makes the bear myth profound and canonical, and also indicates the greater possibility Set is to be identified with the bear metaphorically. Frye then continues to state that literature is moving in a sequence of three phases: myth, romance, and realism. In fact, all of three are concerning the use of myth. The first phase, myth, has the foremost significance in relation to the archetypes: “the imagery of myth is the starting point for an understanding of literature because it is there that archetypes are most clearly spelled out.” According to Frye, the first category of myth is divided into two types: “gods or demons—one apocalyptic and.

(29) Keng 21. the other demonic” (Balfour 34); the second category is the “romantic,” which tends to suggest implicit mythical patterns in a world more closely associated with human experience; the third is the tendency of “realism,” which throws the emphasis on content and representation rather than on the shape of the story (Anatomy 140). In this part the use of myth moves from the demonic and continues to the romantic tradition of stylization, and Balfour also mentions that the three categories are later on reduced by Frye to two more general ones of “romance” and “realism” which is moved from the “analogy of innocence” to “analogy of experience,” in Blakean distinction (qtd. in Balfour 35). Borrowing this framework to analyze The Ancient Child, Set’s search for identity goes through each of the three phases: starting from the bear-boy myth, to the romantic quest, with the final completion of realism and back to myth again. The romantic phase continues with Set’s recognition of the bear myth but is ignorant of his Kiowa heritage. The stage of innocence is followed by the stage of experience, or the “realism” phase when he is guided by Grey to his home place, with the ultimate transformation to bear, which is back to myth again. In Frye’s sense, Set’s quest moves in a complete circle of the three stages. 2.1.3 Four mythos of comedy, romance, tragedy and irony and the stages of the quest Frye’s framework is perhaps the most well known for his formulation of the mythos of the four seasons. In the section of “Theory of Mythos,” Frye divides the mythos into four movements, which are termed “romantic,” “tragic,” “comic,” and “satiric or ironic” (Anatomy 162). To each mythos Frye assigns a season: comedy is the mythos of spring, romance the mythos of summer, tragedy the mythos of autumn, and the ironic or satiric, the mythos of winter. The alignment of myths with seasons suggests that their movement is cyclical, which corresponds to the core feature in Native worldview. I will continue with the Native concept in chapter three. For this.

(30) Keng 22. chapter I attempt to illustrate the plot concerning Set as the hero in The Ancient Child fits in the romance mythos—the mythos of summer. According to Frye, like other mythos, romance also has six isolable phases to explicate the individual protagonist. The first phase is “the myth of birth of the hero,” the morphology of which has been studied in detail of folklore. This myth is often associated with a flood, the regular symbol of the beginning and the end of a cycle (Anatomy 198). The significance of this myth is that the hero is of mysterious origin, and his true paternity is often concealed (199). This is the case with Set, who was orphaned at an early age. His real father Cate only appears in Set’s memory; we do not have any direct knowledge of Cate except through Set’s memory. The second phase features the “innocent youth of the hero,” for which the archetypes are Adam and Eve before the Fall. In the title of the novel The Ancient Child, the “Child” suggests the innocent youth which the protagonist is constantly yearning to return to. What I will focus in the chapter is the third phase of romance of the protagonist’s journey. It is the typical quest theme, and according to Anatomy, the complete form of the successful quest, has three stages: (1) perilous journey stage; (2) the crucial struggle; (3) the exaltation of the hero (187). Later on Frye adds another stage and becomes four aspects to the quest-myth (191): (1) agon or conflict itself; (2) pathos or death struggle; (3) sparagmos or absence, disappearance of hero in defeat; (4) anagnorisis, or discovery and recognition of the hero. The male protagonist Set in The Ancient Child fits in the third phase of a typical quest, and has gone through each of these stages: the perilous journey of self-doubt in his questioning his identity—the agon—which leads to Set’s identity crisis, when he goes through a mental breakdown, or the death struggle pathos; with the medicine woman Grey he recognizes the bear nature inside him, accepts his ultimate identity as bear-boy and becomes more spiritual; his discovery or anagnorisis stage is fulfilled at the end. In part two of this.

(31) Keng 23. chapter I will look into each aspect more closely in a detailed reading of the text. In the fourth phase of romance, the central theme is the maintenance of the integrity of the “innocent world against the assault of experience” (Anatomy 201). The fifth phase is like that of comedy. The corresponding phase in romance is reflective and idyllic, presenting a view of experience from the perspective of a higher world. The sixth phase of romance is marked, like its comic counterpart, by the disintegration of society into small groups or individuals, like the hermit or solitary. According to Frye, it’s the “penseroso phase” which “in comedy it shows the comic society breaking up into small units or individuals,” and” in romance it marks the end of a movement from active to contemplative adventure.” The image presented is “the old man in the tower, the lonely hermit absorbed in occult or magical studies.” In the last scene of the novel is Set’s transformation, his vision of “Tsoai, the rock tree” (AC 312), and the bear with whom he identifies, alone by himself only with the vision, like an occult; Frye notes that “a characteristic feature of this phase is the tale in quotation marks, where we have an opening setting with a small group of congenial people, and then the real story told by one of the member” (Anatomy 202). This “small group” of people is evident at nearly the end of the novel. Although not in quotations, the story ends with descendent of one of the members of the three “children” Grey, or Koi-ehm-toya’s by her Indian name. In the Epilogue, with the mythic narrative depicting Koi-ehm-toya’s great-great-grandson, who had “never seen Tsoai, but knew Tsoai himself” (AC 315). This narrative ends with a rather vision-like occult, both with Set and his descendent. To conclude this part with Frye’s own words, “the romance expresses more clearly the passage from struggle through a point of ritual death to a recognition scene” which is basically the formula we will discover in Set’s quest. According to Frye, the characters in such quest involving conflict “assumes two main characters, a.

(32) Keng 24. protagonist or hero, and an antagonist or enemy.” The enemy, Frye goes on, “may be an ordinary human being, but the nearer the romance is to myth, the more attributes of divinity will cling to the hero and the more the enemy will take on demonic mythical qualities.” If Set is seen as the protagonist, then the antagonist must be the threatening bear power in him, and mythic qualities are evident in both the hero and the enemy, since the novel is truly mythical. The conflict, Frye notes, that is “characterized by the cyclical movement of nature” (Anatomy 187). Whether represented by the male protagonist Set, or the female heroine Grey, cyclical movement serves as the most important feature defining Native identities in the novel. 2.1.4Momaday’s artistic design of the novel As noted earlier, in Frye’s method to recognize the rudiments of literature, it is necessary to “stand back” from the details of the literary text, and here Frye has recourse to an analogy with painting, for the more fundamental element of design (Balfour 33). It’s interesting how Frye’s analogy to painting is, in a way, parallel to Momaday’s artistic scheme for the division of the four sections in The Ancient Child. Just like that of paintings, Momaday develops the narrative equivalent to a graphic technique. Critic Katherine Rainwater, in her essay “Planes, Lines, Shapes, and Shadows: N. Scott Momaday’s Iconological Imagination,” illustrates the iconological technique Momaday employs in forming the self through imagination. Rainwater explores how the four books of the novel, which are titled “Planes,” “Lines,” “Shapes,” and “Shadows,” represent the process of a visual artist creating three-dimensionality and describing Set’s personal development as he is guided by images from an incomplete to a complete “idea of himself.” Moreover, “the graphic technique” of the book also suggests “epistemic sources of personal identity” (qtd. in Rainwater 388). As Momaday himself claims the Native identity, by writing, drawing and painting, Momaday (as well as Set) has invented himself as the bear in response.

(33) Keng 25. to an inner vision, an “idea” that he has about himself as an Indian (my emphasis). In The Ancient Child, this process of self-invention is similar to drawing and to producing a complete, fully dimensional narrative. As Rainwater observes, Momaday’s use of pictorial terms suggest narrative itself can be a source of identity. “Narrative, like images, materially embodies essence and shapes our sense of who we are” (389). Momaday has his own artistic design in forming the book as well as in achieving the sense of self-identity. Such an underlying theoretical basis, as critic Elaine Jahner argues, is implicit. By noting the meta-critical features of Momaday’s writing, she points out that Momaday “uses no language we deem theoretical; nevertheless, a realized theoretical stance is implicit” within his works (qtd. in Rainwater 376). Thus, Momaday’s theoretical stance is revealed in his fiction—identity is about self-invention as that in an artwork. Textual evidence of this contention will be offered in the second half of the chapter. Momaday’s literary theoretical stance shares similarity with his concepts in art. He often compares writing techniques to that of paintings. In fact, in an interview with Charles L. Woodard (titled Ancestral Voice) Momaday argues that “painting and drawing and writing are in some respects the same thing; at least in the sense that writing is incising, writing is a kind of drawing” (qtd. in Rainwater 378). Furthermore, writing and painting share another significant feature that “literature and art are a bridge to essence,” which he further explains that “art does not merely symbolically evoke an imaginary world that stands for or figures the real, but “an ineffable mystical realm” actually exists and that “art […] stands (and affords exchange) between material and spiritual worlds.” In this regard, art “bridges” different cultural worlds and reveals their common “essence” within the “one great and true story” (qtd. in Rainwater 379). This essence, or true story, is universal and cross-cultural. Momaday insists that “art as potentially immanent with truth, meaning, and order—intrinsic.

(34) Keng 26. properties of what he apparently believes to be an overall aesthetically perfect Creation. As such, works of art are also a means of personal and social guidance and transformation” (emphasis added, 381). Such universal intrinsic properties correspond to the inner vision of self identity that I aim to explore in The Ancient Child. On the issue of self identity in The Ancient Child, Rainwater reads Set’s transformation as “process of self-invention” and that “produces a complete, fully dimensional narrative, like that in a painting.” She goes on to illustrate this point: “As meta-commentary on the narrative process, Momaday’s designs on section titles in the novel are collectively a major clue to Momaday’s thinking not only about the self but also about narrative as an iconic, epistemic source of identity” (Rainwater 389). In other words, Set’s gradual completion of his identity in the novel parallels to the gradual completion of a painting. Since Set is a visual artist like Momaday, as his self identity develops, his paintings also transform. As Rainwater puts it, “because Set views his own life partly as a series of images to be brought into focus and studied, […] the four titles refer to his gradual acquisition of a complete, three-dimensional image or ‘idea of himself’” (qtd. in Rainwater 389). Images of Set as well as his paintings change, and altogether they transform to a more complete identity. In the last images in The Ancient Child, Rainwater remarks that they complete the final process of Momaday’s design: “The novel ends with [the scene of] Set’s final vision of ‘Tsoai, the rock tree,’ and the bear with whom he identifies.” His self-transformation is vividly sketched in more complete images: “He sees definitive ‘shapes and shadows’ where earlier in his quest he had seen (and drawn) only ‘lines’ and sketchy ‘impressions’ (Rainwater 389). Comparing with Momaday’s artistic philosophy in The Ancient Child, I return to Frye’s analogy to a visual artwork in Anatomy of Criticism. Frye employs the technique of artistic expression in depicting the archetype:.

(35) Keng 27. In looking at a picture, we may stand close to it and analyze the details of brush work and palette knife.[…] At a little distance back, the. design. comes into clearer view, and we study rather the content represented […] the further back we go, the more conscious we are of the organizing design. At a great distance from, say, a Madonna, we can see nothing but the archetype of the Madonna, a large centripetal blue mass with a contrasting point of interest at its center. (emphases added, 140) Here Frye mentions the way to see the archetype is to approach a picture from far to near, to “come close to it” at a “little distance back” so that the design or image “comes into clearer view.” Based on both Momaday and Frye’s theoretical principles stated previously above, I will now illustrate how the archetypal technique can be applied in “Planes,” (book one) of The Ancient Child. In addition to what Rainwater noted on Momaday’s pictorial terms implying the painting process is from flat to three-dimensional, narrative in book one “Planes” also displays scenes and images of the archetype. Frye illustrated this point by relating the way to see a picture: the audience “standing back” a distance from the text, grasping the vague figures of the images in a work of art, outlining the basic archetypes of the novel. Chapter one opens with the scene of Billy the Kid’s death. The gloomy, dark atmosphere permeates the chapter when the bullets pierced Billy’s heart. The background of the room is “dark” as the shots fired from the same gun (AC 7); “in the bare light the dead man lay,” and Paulita Maxwell “kept to the darkness” (AC 8), and the time and place of this scene, which we later discover is imagined by Grey, is July, 14th,1881 at Fort Sumner, New Mexico. In chapter two we encounter the bear-boy in the myth with his seven sisters, chasing them. He is transforming into the bear as “something other and irresistible and wild” is bursting in him. The background maintains the first chapter’s gloomy, cold, dusty and frightful atmosphere, with the title “somewhere the raven.

(36) Keng 28. calls” (AC 10). In chapter three the female protagonist Grey appears for the first time, and the very first words depicting her are “Never had Grey to quest after visions,” which repeatedly appear throughout the book, marking her as a dreamer with visions and a special talent of imagination. These three chapters already reveal the important archetypes including Billy the Kid (death figure), the bear boy (myth), Grey the youth and visionary. Other prominent figures also appear in book one are: the mythic bear, the centaur, and the tipis glowing in the wilderness, all of which signify a sense of Native identity. Book one roughly outlines the main characters’ features, illustrating the significant symbols in 25 chapters, some of which are only pages in length. The shortest chapter is even one paragraph long. In a paragraph demonstrating the principles of drawing techniques, Set’s art instructor teaches him the importance of plane in relation to creation: [B]egin with the fifth line, remember that. You have to be always aware of the boundaries of the plane, and you have to make use of them; they define your limits, and they enable you to determine scale, proportion, juxtaposition, depth, design, symmetry correctly. You see, you can make something, a line, a form, an image. But you have to proceed from what is already there—defined space, a plane. You can make something out of something, but you cannot make something out of nothing. (AC 55, emphases added) With his art teacher’s words, the significance of Momaday’s artistic design is once again stressed, that an artist must take notice of, or “be aware of the plane.” Not only should he take notice, but also to “make use of” it. Here I suggest the plane indicates “the archetype” of Frye’s literary terms. Moreover, the passage says that “you can make…an image” from plane. What is crucial for creation, is to “make something.” It.

(37) Keng 29. cannot be made “out of nothing” but must be made “out of something,” this “something” is on the basis of the plane, or the archetype. Does it imply the artists can create and construct his identity based on the archetype? In such a framework discussed above, Momaday’s design of the novel not only displays his artistic techniques as a painter, but he also foregrounds the close connection between the archetype and one’s self-identity. II. Bear-myth and Set’s transformation In this part, I would like to focus on the bear myth in the novel and its relation to Set’s transformation from man to bear. I will examine the bear power of Set’s self-identity from three perspectives: the first is an overview of the bear myth along with the “child” archetype, which is significant in Set’s quest; the second concerns the paintings Set creates, especially his self-portraits; the third focuses on the role of imagination in Set’s self-rediscovery through his memory, dreams and visions. Momaday and his fictional character Set are both painters. The central protagonist Set appears as a middle-aged man halfway through book one: “Locke Setman, called Set by all who knew him, had found the truest expression of his spirit in painting.” His art has earned him a good reputation at thirty-five. At the age of forty-something, he has risen to “the first rank of American artists, but he was in danger of losing his soul” (AC 36). Here Momaday foreshadows the identity crisis he faces later on in the novel, in his quest of self identity and transformation. Employing Frye’s framework of a typical quest mentioned in the previous part, Set’s quest includes four phases: (1) agon or conflict itself; (2) pathos or death struggle; (3) sparagmos or absence, the disappearance of the hero in defeat; (4) anagnorisis, or discovery and recognition of the hero. In this part of the chapter I argue that Set’s quest of self is completed and his transformation is fulfilled by means of activating the bear myth and discovering the “ancient child” within him..

神話的改寫: 恩 史考特 莫馬載<< 遠古之子>> 中的想像與認同

神話的改寫: 恩史考特莫馬載<< 遠古之子>> 中的想像與認同