THE MYTHOPOETICS OF IDENTITY IN N. SCOTT MOMADAY: THE BEAR-BOY MYTH FROM "THE WAY TO RAINY MOUNTAIN" TO "THE ANCIENT CHILD"

Аннотация

The concept of identity in the literature of indigenous peoples is inseparable from myth, which functions not merely as a record of the past but as an active model through which a protagonist — and, through him, the people as a whole — comes to recognise itself in the present. This paper traces the fate of a single Kiowa myth, the tale of a boy transformed into a bear, across two works by N. Scott Momaday written two decades apart: the ethnographic-lyrical collage The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) and the novel The Ancient Child (1989). It is argued that the transformation of one and the same mythic material from an ethnohistorical record into a full psychological plot reflects an evolution in Momaday's own artistic strategy of constructing identity, moving from documentation of oral tradition toward its authorial re-creation.