Month: November 2016

For this assignment I have chosen to focus specifically on one recurrent feature of King’s  Green Grass, Running Water, which I, while reading the novel, believed to be symbolic but for which no apparent explanation was provided in Jane Flick’s “Reading Notes for Green Grass, Running Water“.

There are numerous central characters in King’s novel, one of whom is Lionel Red Dog. Early in the narrative readers are introduced to Lionel’s sister, Latisha. Though slightly peripheral to the story, by comparison, Latisha is continually held up to Lionel as the accomplished foil to his own life’s failures. Indeed, as the proprietor of the famed Dead Dog Cafe (featured elsewhere in King’s works and on CBC Radio), Latisha certainly represents success- in all but one respect, that is. The reader learns that as s younger woman Latisha was married to a white American man named George Morningstar who, as Jane Flick notes, is meant to allude symbolically to General Custer (146). George continually refers to Latisha as “Country”, a strange nickname for which no explanation is ever given in the book.

The strangeness of this pet-name struck me immediately, especially in view of the fact that, as Flick’s “Reading Notes” demonstrates, King rarely passes up an opportunity to embed meaning and symbolism in the naming of his characters  in GGRW.

Though George first refers to Latisha as “Country” on page 133, I have chosen to focus on pages 371-381. At this point in the narrative, Latisha has arrived at the annual Sun Dance, where she is confronted unexpectedly by her ex husband. Latisha, standing with her back to George, is aware of his presence before she actually sees him, because he addresses her, once more, as “Country”.

“‘Hello, Country.’ Even before she turned, Latisha’s arms instinctively came up and she stepped back, setting a distance between herself and the man behind her. ‘Hello, George,’ she said” (King, 371-372).

Over the course of the following ten pages, George attempts to take advantage of Latisha and her community for his own private purposes and thus the significance of George’s nickname for Latisha takes on clarity in view of their exploitative relationship. As Gillian Roberts states in Parallel Encounters: Culture at the Canada-US Boarder, “[George]… seems to think that he owns [Latisha] and it is now his responsibility to ‘cultivate’ her. George wants to colonize her,” and, in this respect, George “surely seems like an explorer and conquerer” (115).

The colonial subtext to Latisha’s nickname is expanded upon by Andrews, Davidson, and Walton in Boarder Crossings: Thomas King’s Cultural Inversions. Here, reference is made to Britain’s long standing political fear of American colonial influence over Canada, and the conclusion asserted by these authors is that King’s novel “ironically suggests that the same kind of aggressive colonization that nineteenth-century Canadians feared from Americans was, in fact, being perpetrated by Canadian settlers treatment of Natives” (164).

Thus, my research illustrates that George’s odd habit of referring to Latisha as “Country” becomes intelligible in view of a post-colonial analysis. Seemingly a term of endearment,  Goerge uses this name to affect emotional and physically exploitation of Latisha. This tactic  is particularly evidenced over the course of pages 371-381 depicting the climactic confrontation between George and Latisha at the Sun Dance; at this point in the narrative it becomes most evident that George’s naming and treatment of Latisha functions as both the literal correlative and symbolic evocation of white settler’s territorial colonization of lands belonging to Aboriginal peoples.

Works Cited

Davidson, Arnold E., et al. Border Crossings: Thomas King’s Cultural Inversions. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Web.

Flick Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.” Canadian Literature 161/162 (1999). Web. March 18h 2016. Web.

King, Thomas. Green Grass, Running Water. Toronto: Harper Collins, 1993. Print.

Roberts, Gillian. “Strategic Parallels: Invoking the Boarder in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water and Drew Hayden Taylor’s In a World Created by a Drunken God.” Parallel Encounters: Culture at the Canada-US Border. Ed. Gillian Roberts and David Stirrup. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2013. Web.

In order to tell us the story of a stereo salesman, Lionel Red Deer (whose past mistakes continue to live on in his present), a high school teacher, Alberta Frank (who wants to have a child free of the hassle of wedlock—or even, apparently, the hassle of heterosex!), and a retired professor, Eli Stands Alone (who wants to stop a dam from flooding his homeland), King must go back to the beginning of creation.
Why do you think this is so?

In answering this question, it is useful to recall how, in response to his impatience at the circular progress of the narrative, coyote’s unnamed companion states simply, “it’s all the same story” (147).
In saying this, coyote’s companion is underlining the way in which all the stories told in King’s Green Grass, Running Water are fundamentally connected. Indeed, there is an echoing implication in this statement that ALL stories are in fact related; are variations upon a shared, universal narrative. I think this cyclic interconnectivity shared by all stories is a central theme in Green Grass, Running Water and, in seeking to develop this theme, King opts to tell the stories of Lionel, Alberta, Eli, and all the other endearing characters in his novel, with continual reference to the creation story about Woman, water, and the beginning of the world.
Cycles represent an important leitmotif in King’s novel. The story of the character known alternately as First Woman, Thought Woman, Old Woman, Falling Woman, and so forth, is a story about cycles, told in cycles. Woman’s story is delivered numerous times, retold again and again by various different characters – this represents a cycle. Within the story itself there are narrative patterns, such as the presence of water, or the problematic confrontation between Woman and Christianity, which resurface with every retelling – this represents another cycle.  Though the story about Woman is told by different people in different ways, it remains, fundamentally, the same story and it cannot be separated, either in its content or its formal characteristics, from the concept of cyclicism. By returning to and retelling this creation tale, King ensures that it’s central themes saturate the fabric of the novel as a whole, and colour the smaller constituent narratives. Thus, the creation story informs our understanding of Lionel, Eli, and Alberta’s own stories, by reminding insisting that we recognize an underlying structure of circularity, shared themes, and connection with the past. It is the prefiguration and recurrence of these themes in the creation tale which underscores their importance elsewhere in the novel.

Works Cited:

King, Thomas. Green Grass, Running Water. Toronto: Harper Collins, 1993. Print.

3 ] Frye writes:

A much more complicated cultural tension [more than two languages] arises from the impact of the sophisticated on the primitive, and vice a versa. The most dramatic example, and one I have given elsewhere, is that of Duncan Campbell Scott, working in the department of Indian Affairs in Ottawa. He writes of a starving squaw baiting a fish-hook with her own flesh, and he writes of the music of Dubussy and the poetry of Henry Vaughan. In English literature we have to go back to Anglo-Saxon times to encounter so incongruous a collision of cultures (Bush Garden 221).

It is interesting, and telling of literary criticism at the time, that while Frye lights on this duality in Scott’s work, or tension between “primitive and civilized” representations; however, the fact that Scott wrote poetry romanticizing the “vanishing Indians” and wrote policies aimed at the destruction of Indigenous culture and Indigenous people – as a distinct people, is never brought to light. In 1924, in his role as the most powerful bureaucrat in the department of Indian Affairs, Scott wrote:

The policy of the Dominion has always been to protect Indians, to guard their identity as a race and at the same time to apply methods, which will destroy that identity and lead eventually to their disappearance as a separate division of the population (In Chater, 23).

For this blog assignment, I would like you to explain why it is that Scott’s highly active role in the purposeful destruction of Indigenous people’s cultures is not relevant for Frye in his observations above? You will find your answers in Frye’s discussion on the problem of ‘historical bias’ (216) and in his theory of the forms of literature as closed systems (234 –5).

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In the closing chapter of Northrop Frye’s The Bush Garden; Essays on the Canadian Imagination a summation of themes central to Canadian literature is delivered. Frye places particular emphasis on his belief that is the fact that Canadian writing is often “literary” only incidentally, and it is, instead, an national awareness of history which we should associate more closely with the shaping of Canadian literature. He states:

“If no Canadian author pulls us away from the Canadian context toward the centre of literary experience itself, then at every point we remain aware of his social and historical setting… [Canadian literature] is more significantly studied as a part of Canadian life than as a part of an autonomous world of literature” (216).

Frye is of the opinion that the historical conditions of Canadian life, and a corresponding desire to depict those conditions, have proved to be one of the strongest influences upon the imagination of Canadian writers. He emphasizes that this central developmental connection, between the Canadian imagination and the Canadian relationship with the land, is inherently colonial, saying:

“like other forms of history… [cultural history] has its own themes of exploration, settlement, and development, but these themes relate to a social imagination that explores and settles and develops” (217).

Here, Frye seems to indicate a fundamentally mimetic quality in Canadian literature, in so far as the Canadian imagination and its literary expression has the capacity to figuratively mirror, in art, the romantic idealization and exploitative violations of physical colonization. It is this mimetic colonial quality, so central to Canadian literature, which renders the poetic hypocrisy of D.C. Scott irrelevant in the context of Frye’s conclusion.

From the broader perspective of a critical analysis of colonial violations within Canada it certainly is not irrelevant to note that Scott idealized and exploited the facets of a culture he simultaneously helped destroy. However, in this specific context of The Bush Garden‘s closing chapter Scott is referenced as a literary exemplar of the collision between colonial and First Nations peoples, his hypocrisy not simply as a beaurocrat but as an artist is a prefect illustration of the close connection between Canadian literature and the country’s colonial past. What Frye seeks to underscore at this specific juncture in his book is the way in which Scott’s poetry idealizes, exploits, and ultimately overwrites the reality of First Nations lived experience in much the same way as colonial settlements were built atop lands forcibly plundered and taken from the First Nations inhabitants.

Works Cited:

Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden; Essays on the Canadian Imagination. 2011 Toronto: Anansi. Print.