The Ancient Child by N. Scott Momaday

What he saw, not once but recurrently, was a dark, impending shape on a dark field of the sky. It seemed very slowly to revolve and approach. At a certain distance it was seen to be a beast, massive and indefinite. It was disintegrated, distorted, changing. The head was twisted in a severe, unnatural attitude, as if the neck were broken. It described a terrible mutation and suffering, a pain so great so to have become desperation and rage, and profound helplessness. There were faint blue facets upon the grotesque head and limbs, elongated like the quick strokes of a brush. But these only intensified the darkness of the thing and gave to it the illusion of light within, of a deep, steady, central life. The sky beyond was murky and splotched with light, not points of clear bright light, but random forms like beads of amber in which were ancient and delicate debris. And closer, the eyes of the beast glinted and were pierced with dull opalescence, and the great misshapen mouth gaped and flamed. Set had the terrifying conviction that when the beast drew near to him, within reach, it would crack open with pain and all its shining, ulcerous insides, its raveled strings and organs, its slime and blood and bile would fall and splash upon him, and he would dissolve in the hot contamination of the beast and become in some extreme and unholy amalgamation one with the beast.

Locke Setman--Set--is a successful artist living in the Bay Area. He has a beautiful girlfriend, a thriving  career, a loving adoptive father. One day he gets a cryptic message from Oklahoma: his grandmother, from the Kiowa side of his family that he knows little about, is dying. He rushes to Oklahoma out of curiosity and compulsion, but he's too late. His grandmother, who he never had a chance to meet, is dead. But there is another woman there, a beautiful young medicine woman named Grey, who gives him the bundle of bear medicine that is his birthright. Returning, stymied, to California, his life begins to fall apart. He suffers a series of nervous breakdowns; he becomes violent. His artwork is better than it's ever been, but unsellable. He comes to understand that he must return to Oklahoma, to Grey, that a life that he thought he was severed from by the fact of his adoption. It's only this return by which he might rescue himself.

Momaday's House Made of Dawn is a book that means a lot to me. The first time I read it--in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico--I was captivated by its slipperiness, its difficult language and shifting genres, though it is only through teaching it and letting the book unfold as an experience over many readings that I feel like I understand it. I was reluctant, a little, to read Momaday's only other novel, The Ancient Child, because what if it wasn't as good? There is something a little more recognizably written and human about The Ancient Child, perhaps because it's a novel of the 80s and not the 60s, but it shares with House Made of Dawn the qualities that make it both a challenge and a joy. 

At bottom, there's a story I recognize: a Native American, alienated from his heritage and culture by the forces of political modernity, becomes whole by traveling to the place of his ancestors. That's the story of House Made of Dawn, too, though in both novels Momaday gives us protagonists who have multiple heritages, different tribes and European heritages overlaid into the same identity, so it's not a simple matter of tracing back one's blood. The central myths of the novel are about bears. There's the Kiowa story about the boy who was transformed into a bear and chased his sisters into the sky; his scratching of a great tree created what's now known as Devil's Tower and the sisters become the Pleiades. But there's another story, too, from the Piegan tradition, in which a little boy appears in the village out of nowhere, and then leaves. His appearance, we're told, is so strange and hard to understand that the villagers suppress the memory: it must have been a bear that visited them. The madness and despair that stalk Set are like the spirit of the bear that transforms the boy against his will--simple enough--but the Piegan story undermines the story of the bear, and suggests perhaps it is only a way of smoothing over a deeper and more troubling truth.

Then there's Grey, who flouts most literary expectations for "medicine women" by being beautiful and young. Grey's status as medicine woman is depicted as a kind of holy innocence; we are told over and over again that she "never had to quest for visions"; they simply come upon her. She's a skilled horse rider, who can snatch a match from the ground on horseback without falling, and in one pivotal scene she ties the hands of a man who tries to rape her with barbed wire and circumcises him. For the most part, Grey's visions bring her back to the Wild West, where she becomes the lover of Billy the Kid. This is so strange, but clearly important; Billy is a significant character in the story, and he exists in a kind of timeliness with Grey where he is able to converse with her about the famous circumstances of his own death. Grey is in love with him--are we supposed to read this as a suggestion that even Indigenous people can fall in love with the myths of the American West? I'm still wondering what it is that Billy is doing in this novel, but I love him here; I love the way the pieces refuse to fit neatly together. I do see that Set's return to Oklahoma means that Grey must learn to let Billy go; I see that she's not just a magical healer for Set (like, for example, the medicine woman Ts'eh in Ceremony) but someone who herself must find a way to live wholly.

One last thing that stuck out to me: Set is an artist. The novel's biggest flaw, I think, is that it has trouble conceptualizing Set's art, because it really isn't interested in it as art, but rather as a symbol for a way of seeing. The novel is separated into sections called "Lines," "Planes," and "Shapes," pointing toward the fleshing out of vision, of visual elements coming together into a whole. It seems to me that Set's art picks up some of the yearning to see that characters profess in House Made of Dawn; I was reminded of the white woman Angela wanting to see "beyond the mountain," which I read as a kind of modernist desire to see beyond the intervening stages of art, words, interpretation. What interests me and troubles me about The Ancient Child is the way it adds myth to the list; myth points to the deeper truth of what happens to Set and Grey, but it can never be real, it can never satisfy. The novel ends with Set, gone on a pilgrimage to Devil's Tower, encountering and becoming the bear, the real, at last.