While Howard O’Hagan’s Tay John and John Marlyn’s Under the Ribs of Death differ vastly in their narrative structure, their cast, and their settings, both tell the coming of age stories of their protagonists as they attempt to contend with an existence between two worlds, yet belonging to neither. For Tay John and Sandor Hunyadi, this quest for belonging ends tragically, as both protagonists see the mythos of both their dual worlds fail to adequately explain their lives. Ultimately, the stories illustrate a failure of the modern man in interpreting mythos to explain the irreconcilable worlds of the modern era.
Tay John is born into the mythos of the Shuswap Native peoples, who believe that “a leader with yellow hair will one day come among them (11) “, and he is raised to fulfill that myth. As a boy, Tay John did “all of the things a boy must do (29)”, and when he came of age, he chose a location and went on a vision quest, “for in his choosing they hoped for a sign, and in his vision they hoped to see somewhat of the path beyond them (30)”. He even succeeds in leading the Shuswap for a time, taking them perhaps not to the coast to be reuninted Salish people as prophesized, but certainly away from the barren land where the Shuswap had been starving. Despite this, Tay John deserts his position as leader because he wishes to be married, and the leader of the Shuswap cannot be. As Tzylas puts it, “The woman of Tay John is the people. He is wedded to their sorrow. (47)” The Shuswaps literally interpret Tay John as their savior and leader, a god among men, which isolates Tay John from other members of the tribe in a place above and thus apart from it. In doing so, they leave no room for Tay John’s own personal desires for belonging in their world, thus causing Tay John to desert the tribe and a literal breakdown of their own mythos.
O’Hagan similarly critiques the interpretation of mythos in the world of the settlers through his portrayal of Father Rorty, who tries to bridge the gap between his faith and his desire for Ardith Aeriola by applying the Christ metaphor to himself, with disastrous results. Despite the differences between world of the settlers and the world of the Native peoples, the story of Father Rorty’s strongly parallels the story of Tay John’s desertion of his people, as the struggle to reconcile the world of spiritual with our own world of bodily desires is the same struggle that Tay John faces in trying to reconcile his desire for love and his duty to lead the Shuswap. The societal myths behind both stories also bear a strong resemblance to each other, as the god-leader creation myth of the Shuswap is analogous to Judeo-Christian myth of Moses—stripped to bare essentials, both myths tell the tale of a young man who is given a divine mission to lead his people to the promised land. In fact, as Tay John is the son of Red Rorty, Tay John and Father Rorty are even related by blood. Through this parallel, we can see Father Rorty as a surrogate for Tay John that explains the impossibility of him ever integrating into the world of the settlers by adopting its mythos, which has the same flaws as the myths of the Native peoples in explaining the no man’s land between the worlds of the spirit and the body wherein both Tay John and Father Rorty reside.
Crucially though, instead of the sympathy with which we might approach Tay John’s desertion of his people, Father Rorty’s plight is a kind of farce. There is vast ironic distance between Father Rorty’s ambitions of what he will accomplish through his aping of Christ—he believes that he will “[lift himself] higher than any man… except Christ Himself, has been lifted (166)”—and his death on the mountain, caused by accident and thus signifying nothing. However at the same time, we must remember that this account of Father Rorty is relayed to us by Jack Denham, who burns Father Rorty’s original letters and says vaguely of his retelling, “Some of the words, as I have repeated them, may be mine—the gist is his. (164)” O’Hagan takes care to introduce us to Jack Denham before he tells us his story in “Hearsay”, and it is possible that the irony of Father Rorty’s story is supplied by Denham himself, whose perspective on how best to “know the secret of Christ (166)” is called into question by the critic Robinson as being “shaped by his culture’s myth of knowing through antagonism and dominance”. For O’Hagan, myths fully understood are false or meaningless, but myths that lie beyond human comprehension are untouchable and pure. As Denham himself puts it, “to tell a story is to leave most of it untold… when you have finished, the story remains, something beyond your touch, resistant to your siege; unfathomable, like the heart of a mountain. You have the feeling that you have not reached the story itself, but merely assaulted the surrounding solitude. (167)” Indeed, much of the power and fascination in Tay John comes from the self-assured silence of its mythic titular character, who disappears into the blankness of a snowstorm into which we cannot follow.
Under the Ribs of Death has fewer clear-cut examples of myths as it is told from the perspective of its protagonist Sandor Hunyadi, who disdains storytelling as immaterial, but the novel itself places no less emphasis on the importance of interpreting myth. Sandor is a second generation Hungarian immigrant to Canada, which means that he lives between his parents’ world of Hungarian heritage and the Canadian world of predominantly English heritage, just as Tay John lives between his parents’ respective cultural worlds of Shuswap and settler. Unlike Tay John, however, Sandor’s Hungarian heritage is never accessible to him due to his own disdain for it and due to a language barrier he develops at an early age. This experience of cultural loss was common to the time in history which Sandor lived. The critic Thompson writes of this period on the Canadian prairie, “during the first generation of pioneering, there was often no one, or no time, to create fiction… Usually it was not until the second generation that poets and novelists appeared to tell the story of migration and settlement”. Without a set of myths to explain Hungarian immigrant life and to create a sense of community through shared values, Sandor lives a confused childhood in which he doesn’t understand why they must live in poverty or why he should not sell the use of his kaleidoscope to his own family members. It is important to remember that despite Sandor’s constant protestations of his “mean and dirty (84)” neighborhood, he has no place to belong within this Hungarian world even if he wanted it, among his parents who “when they had something to keep from him… spoke Hungarian (8)”.
Instead, Sandor throws himself with lonely desperation into the Canadian world and buys into its mythos with absolute faith. Not only does Sandor know that “the only people who count are the English (11)”, he reads Eric’s book and through Jack takes as gospel that these Englishmen on top of the world are “the great ones… were the doers, the men of wealth and power, the men who counted, whose words people listened to. And one only had to work hard and devote oneself whole-heartedly to the things they believed to become one of them. (137)”. Sandor never realizes how exploitative and abusive this sort of myth is to immigrants like himself, who could toil all their lives to happily further the profits of their great bosses, all the while hating themselves for an inextricable part of their own identity. He believes it, even as his years of apprenticeship are wasted when Mr. Nagy’s last act is to build a shrine to himself rather than to help Sandor in any way, and even when Brown, the infallible corporation whose name is “cut deep into the granite (275)” just as the great man in Eric’s book has his name emblazoned “above the doorway in bronze letters (134)”, dissolves with the financial collapse. Even in the last moments of the novel, Sandor believes that it is somehow his own fault that the Agency goes out of business, defending his own guilt in front of his family by questioning them, “No? Then whose fault is it? (189)”.
For modernist writers like Maryln and O’Hagan, the interpretation of myth is one of the most important and difficult tasks of finding one’s place in the modern world. Forgo a set of myths completely, as Sandor did with his Hungarian heritage, and you will lose the ability to comprehend a world in which you might have belonged. Believe a set of myths too completely, as is the case with the Shuswap peoples, Father Rorty, and Sandor in regards to the Canadian world, and your interpretation of it could blind you to the complexities of existence between in the modern era. Further, the modern world is comprised of many differing worlds and perspectives at once, leading to many contradictory myths we must accept at once. The temptation to assert any one myth as definitively true represents lack of empathy, arrogance, and myopia, and it will lead to ruin.