I decided to dive deeply into pp. 389-97 of Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water. Here we go!
P. 389: A concentrated allusion to the critical practices of Northrop Frye, and thence to Biblical hermeneutics (and beyond?). Dr. Hovaugh (whom we’ve identified both as Frye and Jehovah) sits “in his hotel room in a sea of maps and brochures and travel guides.” This is an enclosed “verbal universe” in which the interpreter occupies himself in the comparison of the immanent qualities of texts: “he consulted the book and then a map, the book and then a brochure, the book and then a travel guide.” It seems significant that Hovaugh’s textual world is dominated by tourist kitsch—tourism being a product of consumer capitalism and its colonial exploits.
The “star,” one of the signs Hovaugh plots onto his graph—Frye had a highly diagrammatic mind—recalls the story of Jesus’s nativity: the three magi, or “wise men,” followed a star westward to pay homage to the newborn Jesus, a story often taken to signify the allegiance of all nations and peoples. King offers a somewhat inverted story: Hovaugh himself is a white Christian “wise man” following the star of a rather different “virgin birth” (or, at least, conception)–Alberta’s pregnancy, which seems to be somehow caused by Coyote.
Hovaugh’s levels of meaning or interpretation (“literal, allegorical, tropological, anagogic”) refer to the different modes of meaning ascribed to the Bible by St. Thomas Aquinas and retooled in Frye’s rather ingenious “Theory of Symbols.” These categories attempt to account for the polysemy (or the presence of many possible meanings) in a word, image, or literary work, positing various planes of literal/historical and spiritual meaning. Hovaugh’s process of interpretation is a notably “self-assure[d]” and insular activity, contrasting with the “old Indians”’s collaborative action and narration.
“Tomorrow. . . . Tomorrow and tomorrow. . . . And tomorrow” cannot help but evoke Macbeth’s famous soliloquy in Act 5 Scene 5 of Shakespeare’s play (Frye was a legendary lecturer on Shakespeare and Eli Stands Alone wrote a book about him):
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time. (19-21.V.5)
Perhaps this suggests a degree of fatalism in Hovaugh’s projections—a desperate and futile attempt at security in a world whose outcomes cannot be singlehandedly controlled.
Finally, “Parliament Lake” links the point of crisis with the Canadian government and its often inequitable relationship with Indigenous people, of which the Grand Baleen Dam is an reminder. (Perhaps Hovaugh’s three circles have a Trinitarian resonance and the “purple marker” a hint of imperial pomp? Allusive overload!) The lake also reminds us of the novel’s uniting motif of water, which is underscored by the “sea of maps and brochures and travel guides.” The image of moving water subverts even Hovaugh’s verbal universe.
P. 390: Jane Flick notes that the West Edmonton Mall indicates Charlie’s materialistic concerns (151). The Mall is “the size of a small city” and is part amusement park, part retailer—all an enveloping consumerist market of experiences and commodities. The Mall may be an opposite pole in the novel’s Alberta, and it embodies a super-capitalist lifestyle. As a “three-bedroom condo” would suggest, this is potentially a family lifestyle.
Pp. 391-6: King’s dictum that “There are no truths . . . Only stories” is characteristic, but it also bears a hint of Nietzschean “perspectivism.” This may not be a deliberate move on King’s part.
As Flick points out, Glimmerglass is a beautiful lake in James Fenimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer. As with Thought Woman and Moby-Jane, Old Woman is better able to enter into conversation with the lake itself—a conventionally voiceless entity—than with the overdetermined and narrow-minded Western heroes.
Nathaniel Bumppo finishes the series of canonical heroes with native companions. He is ironically presented as “Post-Colonial Wilderness Guide and Outfitter,” maintaining the commercial overtones of the text-centred (post-)colonial enterprise that Hovaugh also represents (392). Bumppo continually dashes behind trees, probably referring to the clichés of frontier fiction to do with preternatural hunting and outdoorsmanship skills; echoing Sergeant Cereno’s handgun (and Hovaugh’s grandfather’s rifle), Bumppo carries a “really big rifle,” which has faint (but clearly violent) phallic quality when he aims to obliterate Old Woman with it (392).
Chingachgook, a Mohican chief, is Bumppo’s loyal friend. Unlike the other “native companions” in the previous three stories, Chingachgook actually appears in this telling. His name and presence, unlike Old Woman’s, are sanctioned by the authority of the “book” when the two are challenged by soldiers. Old Woman, like her predecessors, must assume a new identity, and, again like them, she faces incarceration (396).
Bumppo’s enumeration of parallel (but unequal) “gifts” resembles Robinson Crusoe’s listing of good and bad points (King 294-5). It also taps into a deep history of European thought aligning the “Indian” with the natural and corporeal and the “White” with the civilized, intellectual and spiritual.
(I am unsure about the recurring figure of “Old Coyote” and how he relates to the Coyote who converses with the narrator. Like Coyote, he travels between stories with ease. Well, I won’t try to pin him down; I’m willing to let him run around for the time being—and perhaps someone can help me come to terms with him!)
“Whites are particularly good killers,” says Bumppo to Old Woman, making particularly plain the violence inherent in the racial hierarchizing that his story supports (393). This rendition of his character is senselessly and casually homicidal, shooting creatures “just to get it out of my system” (394). For Bumppo’s death, King exploits a common cinematic trick in which a gun is discharged but not the expected one—the hero held at gunpoint is not killed but rescued. He neglects, however, the revelation of the other shooter. Coyote’s response—”Wait, wait! . . . Who shot Nasty Bumppo?”—stands in for the reader’s reaction. “Who cares?”, replies the narrator, subverting the narrative convention (395). Coyote generally acts especially like a surrogate reader in this passage, trying to puzzle out a “deep” meaning from the events that unfold before him. His later suggestions (“Maybe there was more than one gunman. . . . Maybe it was a conspiracy”) are downright funny, if vaguely unsettling; trying to find concrete answers in the text amounts to conspiracy theorizing like that surrounding the death of John F. Kennedy (395).
King also evokes the domain of politics and legislation in the list of “killer names.” Daniel Boone, Harry Truman and Arthur Watkins are, as Flick remarks, political figures known for destructive policies and decisions, either in war or in the treatment of Indigenous peoples (163). (Needless to say, they’re also all men, which Old Woman is not. This is a recurring misrecognition.) “Hawkeye” (the “Indian” name bestowed upon Bumppo) is presented as a killer name akin to these, the implication being that violence can be inherent to certain names and acts of naming (395). (On the other hand, the adoption of a name or persona can be empowering in some ways.) As the narrator makes clear, this is not a “good Indian name” but a “name for a white person who wants to be an Indian,” rather like the real-life “Grey Owl” (395). Stories like Bumppo’s can work to both create and appropriate a mythical “Indian-ness.” King is taking some stories back by way of names and characters, and recontextualizing them in ways that reveal their hidden affinities.
Works Cited
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Hello Connor, you’ve made some great connections; it was enjoyable reading through your analyses!
In particular, your choice of pages where he is consulting books, maps, and brochures reminded me of Susanne Moodie’s Roughing It, where she is mentioning the techniques the Canadian government used to encourage immigration to the New World: “Its salubrious climate, its fertile soil, commercial advantages, great water privileges, its proximity to the mother country, and last, not least, its almost total exemption from taxation […] were the theme of every tongue, and lauded beyond all praise. The general interest, once excited, was industriously kept alive by pamphlets, published by interested parties, which prominently set forth all the good to be derived from a settlement in the Backwoods of Canada” (Introduction). Though Sue Moodie and Dr. Houvagh do not interact, this reference to maps, books, travel guides shows some of the tools a colonizer may need to navigate the unknown.
I thoroughly enjoyed your comparison of Houvagh and Frye. This is one I struggled to navigate, but one that interested me when reading through the class notes and Flick’s reading guide.
One theme that I came across throughout my research was tyranny: captain Ahab in Moby Dick, and Benito Cerano both explore this. This is one of the first themes that also comes to mind for me when I think of Macbeth. Perhaps I once again stretch themes, however could King be drawing attention to the tyrannical nature of the colonizer?
The relationship between Coyote and Old Coyote was one that I found would be a challenge to tie down as well. Often, King would write “that Coyote”. This could be a stylization choice, but I have been wondering if the incorporation of “that” and the inclusion of Old Coyote might suggest that there are infinite Coyotes? Or perhaps, as Coyote is not restricted to time and space, Coyote is encountering past versions?
Thank you for the thoughts! Happy Wenesday 🙂
Thank you so much for stopping by and for your wonderful comment, Samantha. Your connection between Joe Hovaugh and Susanna Moodie is terrific–reading tourist literature right back to colonial propaganda!
The parallel between Hovaugh and Frye was a new one for me this term too (it went right over my head the first time or two I read the novel as Frye wasn’t really on the radar), and I’ve found it a very thought-provoking one! I’m glad you found my discussion useful.
You make a good point about the tyrannical allusions. Come to think of it, “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” enacts a kind of temporal colonization, monopolozing and fixing what the future might bring–leveling out its possibilities. That would also fit with the presentation of the Hebrew Bible’s Jehovah as an authoritarian ruler with a unilateral plan.
Thanks for reflecting with me on Coyote and Old Coyote! I thought I’d picked up somewhere that the use of “that” refers to a common Indigenous storytelling idiom. (Actually, it reminds me a bit of how the Old English “þat” works as both article and demonstrative.) I do think that is has some definite effects; saying “that god” suggests that it’s certainly not the only one, as you observe of “that Coyote.” Somewhere, the narrator says that the world is full of coyotes. It does put in question assumptions of uniqueness and evoke a world where time and space work differently (as you mentioned).
Happy Wednesday to you too!