The Quest for Mythic Vision in Contemporary Native American and Chicano Fiction

A MERICAN LITERATURE has traditionally reflected what Annette C Kolodny calls America's oldest and most cherished fantasy: dream of the harmony between man and nature, dream repeatedly betrayed as the land is exploited.1 Seen in larger context, this pastoral vision forms part of the historical quest by Americans for unity, for wholeness, for sense of the sacred in secular existence. Though vision reflects the Romantic impulse in our literature, modern writers have tended to deny the validity of sacred or mythic vision. Therefore they create literature described by Bellow as a dark literature, literature of victimization, of old people sitting in ash cans waiting for the breath of life to depart.2 Yet in speaking of America's betrayal of the dream, one excludes the American people who betrayed neither the land nor the dream: the Native Americans and their brothers, the Chicanos, who have watched others intrude upon their land and their religious beliefs. Emerging in the last fifteen years, the fiction of the Native Americans and Chicanos reveals an intense desire to recapture and restate the sacred vision which physical conquest has not been able completely to destroy. This quest requires initially the rejection of Christianity, the conqueror's religion, and return to indigenous paganism. In its most complete form it recovers vision associated with world view found in all ancient people, view which offers to modern America mythic vision that has been lost,3 vision of the sanctity of all life, vision of the beauty and everlasting quality of the land, and sense of the unity of life and time that transcends the lineal, judgmental, and historical view accepted by Western Chris

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Literature · American Jewish Fiction Analysis · History · Latin American and Latino Studies

• The Golden Carp and Moby Dick

  Theresa M Kanoza, T Kanoza•MELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of…•1999

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