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

“About.” West Edmonton Mall. https://www.wem.ca/info/about. Accessed 28 March, 2021.

Ajuha, Neel. “Colonialism.” Gender: Matter, edited by Stacey Malaimo, Macmillan, 2017, pp. 237-51. Ajuha, https://cpb-us-e1.wpmucdn.com/sites.ucsc.edu/dist/f/396/files/2014/11/Ahuja-Colonialism.pdf. Accessed 29 March 2021.

Baime, A.J. “Harry Truman and Hiroshima: Inside his Tense A-Bomb Vigil.” History.com, 11 October 11 2017, https://www.history.com/news/the-inside-story-of-harry-truman-and-hiroshima. Accessed 29 March 2021.

“Chingachgook.” Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Chingachgook. Accessed 29 March 2021.

Cooper, James Fenimore. The Deerslayer. Project Gutenberg, 26 January 2009, https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3285/3285-h/3285-h.htm. Accessed 29 March.

“Daniel Boone.” Historic Missourians, https://historicmissourians.shsmo.org/daniel-boone. Accessed 29 March 2021.

Denham, Robert. “Theory of Genres.” Northrop Frye and Critical Method, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1978. The Educated Imagination, https://macblog.mcmaster.ca/fryeblog/critical-method/theory-of-genres.html. Accessed 29 March 2021.

Flick, Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.” Canadian Literature 161/162, 1999, 140-70. CanLit, 20 January 2015, https://canlit.ca/article/reading-notes-for-thomas-kings-green-grass-running-water/. Accessed 12 March 2021.

Frye, Northrop. “SECOND ESSAY: Ethical Criticism: Theory of Symbols.” The Anatomy of Criticism, Princeton University Press, 1957. Blogspot, http://northropfrye-theanatomyofcriticism.blogspot.com/2009/02/second-essay-ethical-criticism-theory.html. Accessed 28 March 2021.

Grattan-Aiello, Carolyn. “Senator Arthur V. Watkins and the Termination of Utah’s Southern Paiute Indians.” Utah Historical Quarterly vol. 63, no. 3, 1995. ISSUU, https://issuu.com/utah10/docs/uhq_volume63_1995_number3/s/161824. Accessed 29 March 2021.

Halleman, Caroline. “The Five Biggest JFK Conspiracy Theories.” Town&Country, 26 October 2017, https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/politics/a13093037/jfk-assassination-conspiracy-theories/. Accessed 29 March 2021.

“How Northrop Frye’s ‘literary cosmos’ can help us reimagine life in 2021.” CBC, 8 March 2021, https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/how-northrop-frye-s-literary-cosmos-can-help-us-reimagine-life-in-2021-1.5586648. Accessed 29 March 2021.

Isbouts, Jean-Pierre. “Who Were the Three Kings in the Christmas Story?” National Geographic, 24 December 2018, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/three-kings-magi-epiphany. Accessed 29 March 2021.

King, Thomas. Green Grass Running Water. Harper Collins, 1993.

Lander, Devin, and Lauren Roberts. “Who Is the Real Natty Bumppo?” WAMCPodcasts, 30 July 2020, https://wamcpodcasts.org/podcast/who-is-the-real-natty-bumppo-a-new-york-minute-in-history/. Accessed 29 March 2021.

Marie, André. “The Four Senses of Scripture.” Catholicism.org, 11 December 2007, https://catholicism.org/the-four-senses-of-scripture.html. Accessed 28 March 2021.

“Nietzsche and the Impossibility of Truth.” New Learning Online, https://newlearningonline.com/new-learning/chapter-7/nietzsche-on-the-impossibility-of-truth. Accessed 28 March 2021.

Onyanga-Omara, Jane. “Grey Owl: Canada’s great conservationist and imposter.” BBC News, 19 December 2013, https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-sussex-24127514. Accessed 29 March 2021.

Palmater, Pam. “‘At every turn, Canada chooses the path of injustice toward Indigenous peoples.’” Macleans, 29 January 2021,  https://www.macleans.ca/opinion/at-every-turn-canada-chooses-the-path-of-injustice-toward-indigenous-peoples/. Accessed 29 March 2021.

Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. MyShakespeare, https://myshakespeare.com/macbeth/act-5-scene-5. Accessed 29 March 2021.

Tupy, Marian. “How Capitalism Brought Tourism to the Masses.” Fee, 15 January 2019, https://fee.org/articles/how-capitalism-brought-tourism-to-the-masses/. Accessed 29 March 2021.

White, Ellen. “Defining Biblical Hermeneutics.” Biblical Archaeology Society, 2 August 2020, https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/bible-interpretation/defining-biblical-hermeneutics/. Accessed 29 March 2021.

A tongue-in-cheek piece of Canadian mapping centering on Toronto (famously “the centre of the universe”), the one-time metropolitan home of Eli Stands Alone and, incidentally, the stomping grounds of Canadian critic Northrop Frye.

Hand in hand with the ferocious humour of Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water is, I would suggest, a deep concern for the sacred. What stories and words, the novel asks, are holy and binding? Which give proper coordinates allowing us to plot the courses of our lives?

King’s title begins this conversation by evoking a formula common to treaties between governments and First Nations (Flick 158); Portland’s character in The Mysterious Warrior also testifies to his love with the phrase “As long as the grass is green and the waters run” (208). This introduces the idea of mapping (as a performative, narrative act) on several different levels. First of all, treaties have to do with establishing terms and right and, often, agreeing on geographical borders. They involve a shared trust in the sacred fiction of the words used and the lines drawn. As the CanLit “Introduction to Nationalism” says, “The borders on contemporary maps resulted from long histories of negotiations and wars among nations and nation-states to control particular territories.” To give a King-esque paraphrase, every line of the map has a story—though not necessarily an equally good one, with the same depth of historical relation to the land. Physical maps institute and fix these stories in an abstract form–maps like Bill Bursum’s bluntly named “The Map,” an agglomeration of television screens showing North America. For Bursum, The Map satisfies a (none too subtle) fantasy of panoptical control: “It was like having the universe there on the wall, being able to see everything” (128). And Bursum associates this fantasy with experience of the sacred: “It’s like being in church. Or at the movies” (129). No wonder: his holy text is Niccolò Machievelli’s The Prince, from which he’s derived the gospel of advertising (128). This example (e.g. “A Western for the Map,” Bursum decides) most explicitly shows the correlation between mapping and narrating—especially in damaging ways (265).

The other way in which the title suggests a kind of mapping is by invoking the land itself. Environmental processes (the growth of grass, the flowing of water) represent not only steady, dependable rhythms of the world but also the guarantors of sincerity in human behaviour. In a sense, we are mapped by the land, and perhaps even in ways that might alleviate the kind of postmodern spatial alienation described by Frederic Jameson.

The four “old Indians” periodically wander the world fixing things like the Transformer characters of Salish mythology. The four story-women find their respective ways from the beginning of the world to Fort Marion. Characters like Alberta, Lionel, and (earlier) Eli gravitate toward their original home on the reserve, while Charlie and Portland follow a vector of motion between Blossom and Hollywood. Coyote and the narrative “I” occupy an uncertain, liminal space. And then there are the complexly interwoven temporal dimensions of the novel, with its frequent retrospects and its creation stories. All in all, it might be tempting to follow Dr. Joe Hovaugh’s lead and try to make diagrammatic sense of all this movement, to tie the novel’s fluid motions to a solid “pattern” (48).

This would seem, however, to miss the point, or to miss an opportunity. In a way, even Jane Flick’s useful reading notes can act to neutralize the overflowing and unmanageable allusiveness of Green Grass, Running Water—to compromise the experience of not knowing that Professor Paterson has pointed out as a crucial part of the novel. (As a collaborative product of discussion, however, these reading notes probably end up being something congenial to the ethos of Green Grass, Running Water.)

With this in mind, I will make one tentative suggestion about the orientation of King’s mappings in the novel. As Blanca Chester notices, the Sun Dance—which is surely somewhere near the social, emotional, and spatial heart of Green Grass, Running Water—is referred to but never directly represented (49). While the content of this sacred ceremony is absent (it must not be photographed or reproduced artificially, although Latisha feels that it is not an ineffable mystery like the Trinity), its form is present as a cyclical recurrence: “in the morning, when the sun came out of the east, it would begin again” (388). Similarly, Eli never tells Lionel the reason he came home; this is left as something it’s “best to figure . . . out for yourself” (422). This is to say that the novel centres not around something (e.g. a location or knowledge) fixed, stable or given but around open, fluid practices and understandings that unfold and are negotiated in time and in community. If, as Chester argues, King brings a multitude of stories into a dialogue in which they contextualize themselves and each other in perpetually shifting ways, then there may be no proper centre—just the water.

Works Cited

Chester, Blanca. “Green Grass Running Water: Theorizing the World of the Novel.” Canadian Literature 161/162, 1999, pp. 44-61. CanLit, 29 January 2015, https://canlit.ca/article/green-grass-running-water/. Accessed 18 March 2021.

Flick, Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.” Canadian Literature 161/162, 1999, 140-70. CanLit, 20 January 2015, https://canlit.ca/article/reading-notes-for-thomas-kings-green-grass-running-water/. Accessed 12 March 2021.

“Introduction to Nationalism.” CanLit Guides, 15 August 2013, http://canlitguides.ca/canlit-guides-editorial-team/introduction-to-nationalism/. Accessed 19 March 2021.

Jameson, Frederic. “Cognitive Mapping.” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 1988, pp. 347-60. Shifter Magazine, https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://shifter-magazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/jameson-cognitive-mapping.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwj8hLy0qL3vAhXRJzQIHUwGCVQQFjAKegQIHhAC&usg=AOvVaw3baGi6M46nndtfFAtcg1tQ. Accessed 19 March 2021.

King, Thomas. Green Grass Running Water. Harper Collins, 1993.

McMullan, Thomas. “What does the panopticon mean in an age of digital surveillance?” The Guardian, 23 July 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/23/panopticon-digital-surveillance-jeremy-bentham. Accessed 19 March 2021.

“Treaties and agreements.” Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada, 30 July 2020, https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1100100028574/1529354437231. Accessed 19 March 2021.

Verhoeff, Anna. “Performative Cartography.” Mobile Screens: The Visual Regime of Navigation, Amsterdam University Press, 2012, pp. 133-66. Jstor, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt46mtwb.10?seq=3#metadata_info_tab_contents. Accessed 19 March 2021.

Image Credit

@JeffreyLuscombe. “When Torontonians draw a map.” Twitter, 23 January 2020, 7:01 a.m., twitter.com/JeffreyLuscombe/status/1220361018427265027?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1220361018427265027%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.blogto.com%2Fcity%2F2020%2F01%2Fsomeone-just-drew-map-what-toronto-looks-centre-universe%2F.

Lee Maracle’s “Toward a National Literature” is stridently polemical, prescriptive, and programmatic; her tone is calculated to rouse and challenge. The complex of terms—literature, oratory, story, myth, criticism—she addresses with respect to nation is of the utmost interest to our project in ENGL 372.

Maracle’s dissatisfaction with Thomas King’s phrase “We are about story and nothing else” gestures toward the role she imagines for stories in recuperating and consolidating an Indigenous, national knowledge base (qtd. in Maracle 82). The power of King’s statement, of course, is its simplicity. Maracle’s concern, however, is that this pithy saying (like many such aphorisms, in which, it’s fair to say, King excels) runs the risk of being reductive and even diminishing: it may suggest a child-like exchange of anecdotes rather than a robust system of cultural knowledge. This knowledge, Maracle would insist, is vitally sustained and mediated by story but also exceeds it (89). (To be fair to King, he would probably agree with J. Edward Chamberlin on defining “story” more expansively than Maracle.) A national (Sto:lo) literature would be involved in the reclamation and redeployment of a primarily oral Indigenous knowledge whose transmission has been critically interrupted by colonialism but whose scope encompasses medicine, natural science, law—in short, every domain of knowledge represented (not to mention monopolized) by a Western episteme.

What does literature have to do with such a social, political, epistemological resurgence? This is the question posed by that difficult and complicated word “criticism.” Here we can, as Dr. Paterson has suggested, bring Maracle into conversation with Northrop Frye. It’s uncertain exactly what Maracle (or indeed anyone) is referring to when she uses the word “criticism,”—whether she is thinking of literary journalism, scholarship, review writing, or all of the above. Her description of its normative activities displays her oppositional stance toward “Euro-society”: “In Euro-society, literary criticism heightens the competition between writers and limits entry of new writers to preserve the original canon” (88). So, criticism as something evaluative and exclusive.

I believe that the idea and the history of literary criticism can actually help to make some common ground between Maracle and Frye, perhaps in ways that would change what both of them think criticism to be.

I’m in the midst of a seminar in the history of academic English criticism and can’t resist taking a short historical excursion. From its early days with the likes of Cambridge critic I.A. Richards (1893-1979), “modern” English literary criticism was centrally concerned with its social function and that of the literature it dealt with. (Maracle’s comment about the history of criticism back to Aristotle is surely an extraordinary and forceful one, but I think there is still value in not painting the European “critical tradition” (if there is such a thing) in such a broad single brushstroke (84).) In fact, Richards downplays the evaluative commitments Maracle seems to so distrust: “It is less important to like ‘good’ poetry and dislike ‘bad’, than to be able to use them both as a means of ordering our minds” (334). For all his faults, Richards is faithful to the instrumental moral and social efficacy of literary (and critical) experience; this seems not altogether different from Maracle’s desire for new stories “alter our direction or behaviour, clear old obstacles, and point us all in the direction of the good life” (a rather Aristotelian turn of phrase; 84). My main point here is a shared commitment to the social function of some kind of collective practice called “literary criticism.” Frye himself, in 1950, writes an article entitled “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.”

What social function does Maracle imagine for an Indigenous literary criticism? It seems to be a collaborative process of construction, of “adding rafters to the house” and “learn[ing] as an ensemble” (95). Perhaps most importantly, this process is predicated on an awareness of traditional ways of knowing, of studying the “old story,” understanding one’s (or a community’s) place in it, and assessing its potential for (social, national, subjective) transformation (85). As I understand it, criticism would be a matter of getting inside the old stories, becoming at home in their workings, and so allowing the creation of new myths from them for today.

As Dr. Paterson proposes, we can see a certain kinship between this imperative to write from within the culture and the critic who writes that “as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of storytelling, its mythical concepts, sun-gods and the like, become habits of metaphorical thought. In a fully mature literary tradition the writer enters into a structure of traditional stories and images” (234-5). Maracle, to my mind, actually supports the systematization or theorization of such “principles” for the purpose of Indigenous self-authorship. Both thinkers support the liberating energy of the mythic imagination: while Frye may imagine the liberation from ideological “social” “mythology” Maracle envisions liberation from colonial structures of power and knowledge (237).

Frye’s particular blindnesses and prejudices are not, in some cases, to be wondered at. His argument that “The forms of literature are autonomous” goes hand in hand with the ascendant (New Critical) aesthetic idealism of the moment (234). We are left with a question: is his position inextricably bound up with colonial power and privilege or does he still have something to offer us? Could dialogues between him and someone like Lee Maracle not still be productive? Perhaps there is no real place for Frye (or me, for that matter) in Maracle’s particular project—that would be something to be accepted and respected—but there may be such a place elsewhere.

Works Cited

Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination. Anansi, 2017.

Hanson, Erin. “Oral Traditions.” Indigenous Foundations, https://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/oral_traditions/. Accessed 12 March 2021.

—. “The Residential Schools System.” Indigenous Foundations, https://indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/the_residential_school_system/. Accessed 12 March 2021.

Maracle, Lee. “Toward a National Literature: ‘A Body of Writing’.” Across Cultures, Across Borders Canadian Aboriginal and Native American Literatures, edited by Paul Warren DePasquale, Renate Eigenbrod, Emma LaRocque, Broadview, 2010.

“New Criticism.” Britannica.com, https://www.britannica.com/art/New-Criticism. Accessed 12 March 2021.

Richards, I.A. Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment. Edited by John Constable, Routledge, 2001.

Westacott, Emrys. “What Does It Mean to Live the Good Life?” ThoughtCo, 26 February 2020, https://www.thoughtco.com/what-is-the-good-life-4038226. Accessed 12 March 2021.

The time for midterm evaluations is approaching, and I have included links below to what I believe are three of my most worthwhile blog posts of the term so far. I feel that, in these posts, I was able to draw on my own experience (and the stories I’ve contacted) in engaging personally with our readings and discussions. Articulating these thoughts in this form was both a pleasure and a challenge of rigorously spinning out my responses. I hope you enjoy reading through these selections.

Worlds of Words (Assignment 1:3)

More Stories: Home and Abroad (Assignment 2:3)

Enigmas and Laughter (Assignment 2:4)

7) Considering transformation as writing.

According to Keith Thor Carlson, the acts of transformation performed by central figures of Salish cosmogonies function as acts of writing, and thus of literacy. As I understand, these Transformer figures roamed the world in the distant past, “setting things straight” by changing features of the primordial earth into their permanent, proper forms. Carlson carries out a fascinating etymological discussion, drawing on the collective understandings embodied in language and its relationships; as he describes, the Transformer characters are referred to as Xe:xá:ls (apologies for my lack of certain diacritics and my ignorance of the relevant writing conventions) and their work of transformation as xá:ytem (46, 61). Both words share a common proto-Salish root, xá:l, which denotes not only transformation but also marking or inscription (61).

Such observations have the potential to change our common understandings not only about histories of literacy in contact zones but also about writing itself. Carlson finds it thought-provoking that Salish peoples use such a spiritually resonant native (not borrowed) word for a practice or knowledge usually associated with the arrival of European settlers. Like Harry Robinson’s story about the stolen paper and the accounts of literate indigenous prophets, this suggests a prior history of literacy (a first fourteen chapters, if you will) among Salish peoples. It’s not that literacy (and thus history) was absent before colonization but that native traditions of literacy were different from those of the newcomers—and so unrecognizable to them. This conclusion is well borne out by Courtney MacNeil’s comments, which we read earlier this term, on how oral and literate practices are inevitably intermixed in a culture.

I find especially poignant Carlson’s suggestion, quoted by Dr. Paterson, that “literacy is part of a broader genre of transformation stories” for the Salish peoples (61). This is not merely to say that transformation might fit into the category of literacy (significant though that is) but to propose that writing participates in a more expansive activity of transforming the world. The Salish Transformers, as I imagine, etched new and lasting meanings and forms on the face of reality—Transformers stories thus imply a powerful literacy in the enduring relationships between Salish peoples and their homelands (transformations being both written and readable). Our (and other) acts of writing, meanwhile, can represent comparable (if much more minor) transformative inscriptions.

It’s tempting to have some more recourse to etymology and consider the Old English wrītan, ancestor of our write, which means “to engrave, carve, inscribe”—a form of knowledge preservation that literally transforms its medium, penetrates it deeply (Anglo-Saxons too were initially “illiterate” by Roman standards, though they wrote with carved runes).

Perhaps it would be an appropriate revision to suggest that settler populations have historically displayed a certain illiteracy, one encapsulated in the mythology of the terra nullius, the empty land or blank page. The failure to recognize the presence of anything readable may be the most extreme act of illiteracy. Part of our task may become an awareness of alternative literacies, an awareness not geared toward decoding or explanation as toward mutual respect and acknowledgement.

Works Cited

“Writing Without Words: Alternative Literacies in Mesoamerica and the Andes.” Duke University Press, May 1994, https://www.dukeupress.edu/writing-without-words. Accessed 5 March 2021.

Carlson, Keith Thor. “Orality about Literacy: The ‘Black and White’ of Salish History.” Orality & Literacy: Reflections Across Disciplines, edited by Keith Thor Carlson, Kristina Fagna, and Natalia Khamemko-Frieson, University of Toronto Press, 2011, pp. 43-72.

MacNeil, Courtney. “Orality.” The Chicago School of Media Theory,  Uchicagoedublogs, 19 Feb. 2013, https://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/orality/. Accessed 19 January 2021.

Robinson, Harry. “Coyote Makes a Deal with the King Of England.” Living by Stories: a Journey of Landscape and Memory, edited by Wendy Wickwire, Talonbooks, 2005, pp. 64-85.

“Sxwōxwiyám Places.” SQ’ÉWLETS, 2016, http://digitalsqewlets.ca/sxwoxwiyam/sxwoxwiyam_names-noms-eng.php. Accessed 5 March 2021.

Thom, Bryan. “Coast Salish Transformer Stories: Kinship, Place, and Aboriginal Rights and Title in Canada.” web.uvic.ca, 1998, http://www.web.uvic.ca/~bthom1/Media/pdfs/ethnography/transform.htm. Accessed 5 March 2021.

1. Why does King create dichotomies for us to examine these two creation stories? . . . What is he trying to show us?

I’m dying to remind myself that the basis of Christian doctrine is rectitude and reward, crime and punishment, even though my partner has warned me that this is probably not a good idea. Tell a story, she told me. Don’t preach. Don’t try to sound profound. It’s unbecoming, and you do it poorly. Don’t show them your mind. Show them your imagination.

So am I such an ass as to disregard this good advice and suggest that the stories contained within the matrix of Christianity and the complex of nationalism are responsible for the social, political, and economic problems we face? Am I really arguing that the martial and hierarchical nature of Western religion and Western privilege has fostered stories that encourage egotism and self-interest? Am I suggesting that, if we hope to create a truly civil society, we must first burn all the flags and kill all the gods, because in such a world we could no longer tolerate such weapons of mass destruction?

No, I wouldn’t do that. (King 26-7)

And yet, Thomas King has already made these suggestions, in a somewhat disingenuous way (a rhetorician might call this apophasis), by invoking and discarding them. Nor does he discard them very definitively; he says that he “wouldn’t do that” as though he could well or would very much like to. Indeed, his casual rewriting of Genesis seems to support rather than detract from these disavowed claims.

I quote King at length here to exhibit my moments of greatest struggle with his text, and to acknowledge my instincts of dissent and defensiveness. I know that full-fledged Christian apologetics are not what is called for here. This is why I appreciate Dr. Paterson’s invitation to read beyond the dichotomies King seems to be setting up and consider why he might be doing so.

Although we haven’t reached the novel yet in our course of work for the term, I can’t help relating my thinking and feeling about this question to what King does in Green Grass, Running Water. When I read the book three years ago, I found it quite brilliant, provocative, clever, and on the whole enjoyable (and I mean this in a non-trivial way: the novel manages to be extremely fun, stimulating, affecting, and at times surprisingly inspiring). This reading—perhaps the intervening years of study have made me more prone and confident to question!—I find myself more troubled and challenged by what seems like an insistent belittling of Christian myth. In fact, the novel affects to collapse a Christian narrative into its Coyote-story (or Coyote-stories), more or less as a silly or aberrant offshoot (a rogue dream).

This strategy of collapse is no less surprising than the simplistic dichotomising he seems to carry out in The Truth About Stories; both suggest a basic dualism that seems quite far from the intellectual and ethical projects of J. Edward Chamberlin and even John Lutz. They are concerned with finding common ground between systems of story and the understandings they support, not with establishing moral hierarchies between them or writing them off as pernicious.

True, even their projects must involve some reduction and simplification. Upon reflection, I don’t think the complex of stories underpinning a single individual, much less a “society,” could really be entirely articulated and examined.

In that sense, it’s really rather peculiar that King should characterize the spiritual, mythical, narrative discourse(s) of Christianity as “monolog[ical]” (21). As though there were ever a supposed cultural monolith as drastically heterogeneous, fragmentary and debated! This reminds me of the German philosopher Odo Marquard in his thinking about “polymyths” and “monomyths” (88). For Marquard, the polymyth (analogous with polytheism) is harmless and therefore desirable; the multiple stories, gods, and powers keep each other in check so that no one of them has absolute sway. It’s the monomyth you have to look out for (93).

Yet Lutz and Wendy Wickwire help us to see that, practically speaking, we’re not dealing with a simple static dichotomy of monomyth vs polymyth but with fluid, changing, constantly renegotiated contact zones, meetings of horizons in which different (but perhaps not wholly incommensurable) stories meet. Values and outcomes are always somewhat complex and unclosed to begin with: as with the adoption of pre-Christian stories and practices into instantiations of the Christian mythos, or the mixture of Christian and courtly values in medieval romance, or indeed the European elements in post-contact stories of North-West coast Indigenous peoples. These cases are not to be dismissed (as post-contact stories were by anthropologists) for not fitting the type, but rather valued as ambiguous places of intersection displaying the extraordinary complexity of belief.

Ambiguous or, to use King’s word, enigmatic. These are areas of imperfect understanding and (as Chamberlin would point out) constant contradiction (115). Perhaps they carry the good news that we don’t have to be—can’t be—entirely consistent. Can only one story really be sacred and true?

There’s a story about a little girl who asks her mother where they came from. The mother replies, “God made us on the seventh day of creation.” The girl, still unsure, asks her father the same question. His answer—“We evolved from apes.” Now she’s more confused than ever. She goes back to her mother and says, “You told me that God made us and Dad said we evolved from apes. I don’t understand—which one’s true?” “They’re both true, honey,” her mother responds, “your father’s just talking about his side of the family.”

A resolution and no resolution at all. Chamberlin would have us see that we can and do believe in both, and that this isn’t just a result of muddled thinking. In fact, sometimes it can be the result of humour and irony. Lutz notes that Indigenous storytellers often use humour and irony to “challenge and reorder hierarchies of power” (13). Maybe what King is doing is using humour to point out the radical contingency of the stories we live by, the telling of them, and even the analytical models we use to discuss them. They didn’t need to be this way. And changing the telling or the valuation can have genuine transformative power. Laughter, which may be as close to a cultural universal as it gets, may be a potent means of finding common ground. At least, being able to laugh at ourselves may have a certain value.

Works Cited

Beard, Mary. “A history of laughter – from Cicero to The Simpsons.” The Guardian, 28 June 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jun/28/history-laughter-roman-jokes-mary-beard. Accessed 22 February 2021.

Chamberlin, Edward. If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground. Knopf, 2003.

King, Thomas. Green Grass, Running Water. Harper Collins, 1993.

—. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Anansi Press, 2003.

Lutz, John. “First Contact as Spiritual Performance.” Myth and Memory: Rethinking Stories of Indigenous-European Contact, edited by John Lutz, University of British Columbia Press, 2007, pp. 30-45.

—. Introduction. “Contact Over and Over Again.” Myth and Memory: Rethinking Stories of Indigenous- European Contact, edited by John Lutz, University of British Columbia Press, 2007, pp. 1-15.

Marquard, Odo. “In Praise of Polytheism.” Farewell to Matters of Principle : Philosophical Studies, Oxford University Press, 1989. ProQuest, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ubc/detail.action?docID=271453. Accessed 15 June 2020.

Marty, Martin E. “Fractured Christian World(s).” The University of Chicago Divinity School, 18 January 2016, https://divinity.uchicago.edu/sightings/articles/fractured-christian-worlds. Accessed 22 February 2021.

Wickwire, Wendy. Introduction. Living by Stories: a Journey of Landscape and Memory, compiled and edited by Wendy Wickwire, Talon Books, 2005, pp. 1-30.

Pilgrimage was long a reigning metaphor in Christian Europe for the state of the human soul. Where does home really reside?

It was a true pleasure reading my peers’ beautiful and eloquent reflections on home. Some dwelt on aspects of place: the sights, sounds, and scents, for example, that may often go unnoticed but end up making an important part of who we are. I suspect this is an especially familiar thread in Canadian stories of home (although not exclusive to them); we need only think of BC’s self-promotion as “Super, Natural British Columbia” to remember the extent to which a certain experience of land characterizes the image of a Canadian identity.

Other stories focused on home as a cognitive and/or social structure, a web of memories, activities, and relationships. A space of interaction between people.

Our accounts of home often hinged on narratives of travel. It is not surprising, maybe, that departures from and movements of the people we know and love, returns to the places we recognize, shape our experience of home. This is a factor of some individuality, as no two person’s histories of motion and travel are exactly the same. (I can say with the splendid Scottish writer Nan Shepherd that I’ve slept in the same bedroom for practically my entire life!) That being said, the same (or similar) conditions of mobility characteristic of contemporary society have surely had no small impact on how we live and think of home.

I think of John Clare (who lived some two hundred years ago) and his haunting words on relocation and desolation in “The Flitting”:

I’ve left my own old home of homes,

Green fields and every pleasant place;

The summer like a stranger comes,

I pause and hardly know her face.

I miss the hazel’s happy green,

The blue bell’s quiet hanging blooms,

Where envy’s sneer was never seen,

Where staring malice never comes. (1-8)

And this was for a move between the villages Helpston and Northborough in Cambridgeshire, which were all of (as I reckon) four or five kilometers apart. (Clare faced more traumatic dislocations in his life, and died in an asylum.) How has home changed its meaning? How does that meaning still change between cultures, between individuals?

One common (you could say “formal”) feature struck me especially: lyrical rhythms of repetition with recurring phrases like “Home is . . . ” or “I am home.” I think that this testifies on one level to the unclosedness of home as a concept, its in-built tendency to change over time and acquire new meanings. But that changeability involves a recurrence, something like the refrain of songs like “Galway Bay.” (That is a song my grandmother loves. My family is mainly Irish and Scottish in origin; both the Irish and the Scots have large diasporic communities and strong traditions of nostalgia.) Or Robert Burns’s “My Heart’s in the Highlands” and “Auld Lang Syne.” There is a sense of finding a home through these rehearsals and repetitions of loss and yearning—as John Keats locates a feeling of belonging in the embodied rhythms of a sleeping lover’s breath.

I think also that there’s a parallel with the atmospheric rhythms that punctuate our experience—like the seasons. To give one example: there has been ice in the Fraser near where I live these past few cold days. This is the first time we’ve seen so much freezing in years. Walking out onto the river a little ways, I remembered doing the same with my brother several years ago, when the ice was even thicker—an unforgettable experience. More than that, looking over the frozen expanse towards far wooded shores brought to consciousness an early childhood image of the Canadian North: tundra, frozen rivers, mountains, pine forests, a land of wolves and ravens. I don’t even know where this picture really came from. A movie? But this fantasy world, which doesn’t even truly exist, has been part of what “home” means to me. This fact came to me in a visionary instant.

Works Cited

“Ascent to greatness: the charmed afterlife of Nan Shepherd.” The Scotsman, 9 January 2017, https://www.scotsman.com/arts-and-culture/books/ascent-greatness-charmed-afterlife-nan-shepherd-1458734. Accessed 15 February 2021.

Clare, John. “The Flitting.” Poemhunter, 13 April 2010, https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-flitting/.

“John McDermott – Galway Bay.” Youtube, uploaded by LadyGreyCarolyn, 31 January 2014, https://youtu.be/EHkM51ywUZo.

Keats, John. “Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44468/bright-star-would-i-were-stedfast-as-thou-art. Accessed 15 February 2021.

Owen, Siobhàn. “Siobhàn Owen ~ Auld Lang Syne.” Youtube, uploaded by Siobhàn Owen, 27 December 2015, https://youtu.be/TRpdzmMH4f4.

Polwart, Karine. “Karine Polwart – My Heart’s in the Highlands (Robert Burns).” Youtube, uploaded by Петар Жутић, 23 February 2012, https://youtu.be/9HuHTkDw9Sw.

“Super, Natural BC – British Columbia Travel Information.” HelloBC, https://www.hellobc.com/. Accessed 15 February 2021.

Image Credit

Sassetta (Stefano di Giovanni). The Journey of the Magi. Ca. 1433-35. The Met Fifth Avenue, New York. The Met, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/437611. Accessed 15 February 2021.

  A sharp wind blew from the coastal mountains, whose peaks, textured with early snow, caught the salmon light of an autumn sun now hidden from view. The brisk air swept south across the broad brown expanse of the Fraser and whistled through the log palisade of Fort Langley National Historic Site. The four figures crouching in the damp earth in the fort’s south-east corner were not sheltered from the chill. They wore reflective vests and sifted through the soil with spades and trowels, spaced out at even intervals within a rectangular excavation area. No one spoke as they made use of the last of the light.

  Audible only to the one wielding it, a spade struck wood. Slowly and furtively, the digger cleared away the surrounding soil. When the others had moved off into the darkness, their work for the day complete, he lifted out of the earth a small oaken chest. He brushed it off with a feeling of awe. Then he brought it into the Big House, where they were collecting all their findings. Flicking on the lights, he carried the chest to table in the corner and set it down carefully. He checked it for fastenings and opened it.

  Inside was a large piece of vellum, folded many times over. After unfolding it, he adjusted his silver-rimmed glasses and brushed back his dark hair. Set on the vellum in dark ink were the unmistakable lines of British Columbia’s Pacific coast. On the left of the map islands were sketched in fine detail. On the right triangular shapes seemed to represent the Rocky Mountains.

  His eyes widened. Criss-crossing the map—especially its southern portion—was a network of faint lines, thin as hairs. But that wasn’t all. In certain places, underneath the gridwork, stranger forms asserted themselves, half erased: the slope of a valley, the hint of dwelling-place, and words—unfamiliar symbols whose sounds he did not know. They reminded him of names he had given to well-known trees in Tolkien’s Elvish—long, graceful, unique names. He took a picture of the map with his phone, replaced it in the chest (which he tucked into the corner), and moved to go.

  A tall, bald man intercepted him in the hall.

  “Hi, Dr. Perks.”

  “Any big finds today, Alex?”

  “No, nothing much today.”

  “Well, see you on Monday.”

  “Good night.”

  The dim parking lot was full of mouldering brown needles and brittle leaves. Alex got into his car and started on his way home.

  Fort Langley was hopping on a Friday night, the patios full, the main street roaring with passing cars and trucks. Anonymous faces and blank windshields. Young families who’d moved into the suburban new builds by the river.

  Soon Alex was driving through the fields. After ten minutes he turned onto a leafy side street and then pulled into a driveway in the gap of a tall hedge. A familiar skyline—silhouettes of poplar and maple. But unfamiliar shapes possessed his mind: half-hidden names and enigmatic lines of ink on vellum.

———-

  The next night around midnight Alex was driving back towards Fort Langley. He had strapped a light wooden ladder to the top of his car. Both hands on the wheel, he breathed slowly and deliberately.

  That day he had scrutinized the photo on his phone. He’d puzzled over the lines, and cross-referencing the image with Google Maps had left no doubt. It was bizarre—impossible, really. The map looked centuries old, but it showed today’s motorways: all the main roads and highways.

  No one else had seen it. Alex felt an ardent curiosity bordering on possessiveness. He didn’t think it right that this thing should fall into institutional hands.

  Alex drew his car up close to the east wall of the fort. He carried the ladder hurriedly to the palisade and steadied it. Forts. What would it be like to have one of your own up in the mountains, to live quietly among the endless forests? For now, the illicit pleasure of breaking into this relic would have to do. Alex balanced on the top of the wall and muscled the ladder silently to the other side, proud of his agility. Within five minutes, he had unlocked the Big House with his key, snatched the chest and its contents, returned, scaled the wall again. Then he was on the road home, in the car’s privacy.

———-

  He had told his family cheerily that he needed time and space to work this Sunday. He had passed a day of questions and wonder. Now the map was laid out on his desk, and he stood over it with a scalpel.

  The hidden forms, he knew, had not been erased but covered. If he could only uncover them . . .

  He approached the surface of the map tentatively with the edge of the blade. He began scraping with almost imperceptible pressure. There was a sound to getting it right, there in the quiet of the room before the picture window—a faint craking like the singing of a cricket. The map began to show itself.

  The dense gridwork gave way to long undulating lines. Railways? Alex kept at it doggedly. He couldn’t understand everything he was seeing: streams, dikes, ditches dug to drain the floodplains of the Fraser, footpaths, hills, rivers. Strangely, the map didn’t seem flatten as he scraped off minute layers; rather, in seemed to gain in depth. Was this a trick of the light?

  Suddenly, the area under his knife burst into colour: earthy pigments, the colours of fern, moss, clay, and dried grass. Alex almost gasped. He had forgotten the names and words for the moment, although these were more numerous than ever; he could not make sense of them now. He seemed to see to the hidden sources of rivers. He smiled. Through the window, the sun shone through leaves, and the wind carried voices of the family as they readied the canoe for a Sunday expedition.

Works Cited

“Fort Langley National Historic Site.” Parks Canada, https://www.pc.gc.ca/en/lhn-nhs/bc/langley. Accessed 10 February 2021.

“Urban Palimpsest.” The University of Kansas – The Commons, https://thecommons.ku.edu/urban-palimpsest. Accessed 10 February 2021.

Image Credit

Hardesty, H.H. “Map of British Columbia.” The Historical and Geographical Encyclopedia, New York, H.H. Hardesty and Company, 1883. Alabama Maps, http://alabamamaps.ua.edu/historicalmaps/canada/bc.html. Accessed 10 February 2021.

I was walking with my mom down the street near my home in rural Port Kells, BC. Looking to our left, we saw the quarter-acre or so of a neighbour’s garden that he’d recently ploughed–a stretch of dark, moist, furrowed earth. Not for the first time, we wondered what he would be growing there. “That reminds me,” I said, “that I have a great story to tell you.”

It’s a story about how evil entered the world. It had to do with Growing People.

(A puzzled look. “Growing People? Like in The Matrix?”)

Page, Connor. “Turned Earth.” 2021. JPEG.)

Growing People: farmers, gardeners, gatherers, groundskeepers. You know–people who grow.

In those days–

(“In those days,” she repeats with exaggerated solemnity, and we laugh at my overblown narration.)

In those days, they held a great fair, and people came from around the world bringing their finest produce. They all gathered under an enormous white pavilion, where all the specimens were laid out. Giant gourds. Prize apples. Genetically enhanced grain. That kind of thing.

(“Where did you read this?”)

There was music, and it was good fun. Everyone walked around, chatted, and marveled at the things on display. Judges made their rounds, jotting down notes about the most promising candidates. All the while everyone kept their eyes open for the one thing that would take the general prize: the hardiest, most delectable fruit or the most prolific and resilient seed . . .

The judges were about to give a decision, but just then a person stepped up onto the bandstand. This was the one person who’d entered the tent empty-handed. This individual wore a long coat and a large hat that completely covered the face. No one knew where this person came from or if this person was male or female.

This one had nothing to show but a story, and told it: a story of violence, slaughter, envy, and acquisition. By the end, everyone knew that this story–the most delicious fruit and the most prolific seed–had won the prize. “But,” they said, “this isn’t so wholesome; this isn’t so good. Take that story back. We want you to take that story back.”

But, of course, it was too late. For once a story is told it cannot be called back. Once told, it is loose in the world. So you have to be careful with the stories you tell. And you have to watch out for the stories you are told.

(“So this is a philosophical story?” “Yes, you could say that.”)

One of the wonderful things about Leslie Silko’s story on the coming of evil into the world–included in Thomas King’s The Truth About Stories (9-10)–is its ambiguity. In a way, it explains by explaining nothing. Who is this strange outsider among the witches? How did evil enter this person’s mind as a story? This story of origins works precisely by deferring any absolute origin, refusing to pinpoint anything too exactly (I’m even tempted to read “witch people” as “which people?”). So I think Silko’s story is quite critically conscious of the ways in which stories of origin can ideologically underpin exclusion and violence, even as it celebrates the tremendous power of storytelling. (We could keep these two strands in mind while reading this short and fascinating interview about creation stories. Such stories often boggle our minds and our logics because we still have to ask where the first “stuff” came from . . . )

My retelling is mainly a slavish, impoverished imitation, showing some doubt and hesitation as to the extent of our “retelling” prerogative. But it did make me think about some of the ways in which acts of storytelling are situated, rooted, in the world. You could say that an experience of place gave me a prompt (or an alibi) for weaving this story into the fabric of everyday experience. And the telling, whose dialogic quality I tried to hint at in my transcript above, was inextricably joined with our motion as we continued to walk–the corner we turned, the dips and rises of the road.

This sense of time and place seems strong in oral telling, though it may at times imbue our experiences of reading too. William Wordsworth has a phrase in the eleventh book of the The Prelude for such experiences of spatialized memory that articulate our own stories as well as the stories we might be telling: “spots of time” (258). By chance I just came across this oral reading of Wordsworth’s long, long autobiographical poem (linked on “spots of time”). I wonder what it, along with our own retellings, might tell us about the changes and the life of spoken and written stories . . .

Works Cited

King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Anansi Press, 2003.

Leeming, David, and Liane Hansen. “Exploring the World’s Creation Myths.” NPR, 13 November 2005, https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5010951. Accessed 3 February 2021.

Wilmer, Clive. “(11) Book Eleventh – Imagination, How Impaired and Restored.” University of Cambridge, 7 September 2011, https://sms.cam.ac.uk/media/1171068. Accessed 3 February 2021.

Wordsworth, William. The Prelude. Edited by Jonathan Wordsworth, Penguin, 1995.

Often a story is composed of many words. Sometimes a single word contains a multitude of stories. Looking back on the “Words of Welcome” with which I launched this blog, I can see that “welcome” is itself a word of many stories: narratives of travel, customs of hospitality, stories of home. A speech act theorist might say it has a definite illocutionary force, calling into being a network of material and affective relationships. Or you might say that “welcome” is a word of magic, one that alters the world.

In If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?, J. Edward Chamberlin reflects on the intersections and contradictions between word and world. This relationship, like that between reality and the imagination (and any number of binary pairs), is not one of antagonistic exclusion. On the contrary, Chamberlin’s “world of words” brings us closer to “the world we live in,” providing imaginative structures with which to articulate our relationships and experiences with and within that world (1). Although considered to a certain degree arbitrary, words are no less real, no less “true” than our everyday material reality. Indeed, Chamberlin would suggest, that very reality is the creative product of discourse, of stories.

Our investment in words—recognized as both meaningless and meaningful—exemplifies the ceremonies of belief, surprise, and wonder that Chamberlin considers central to the project of finding common ground between Us and Them. Chamberlin puts forward two ancient and magical examples of “the perversity and the power of language” (175): riddles and charms. In riddles, the grammars, logics, sounds and rhythms of language perform the acrobatics of meaning-making—the topography of language does a back bend to lend the topography of the world a new wonder and coherence. In charms, on the other hand, “the world gives” (180): dreams, imaginings, and songs shape the world, give us comfort in the midst of sorrow (even by means of it), grip us with a sense of broader community.

Recently, cognitive linguistics has allowed us to picture how language does not simply serve as a vehicle of communication but fundamentally underlies our most intimate experiences of thought and feeling. Metaphor—that tricky “hinge” of language’s strangeness (Chamberlin 162)—may be no mere poetic device but a crucial conceptual tool, one that allows us to imagine the immaterial but nonetheless real (love, value, sovereignty, progress, anger, understanding) in terms of the concrete and embodied (heat, movement, light, objects). (Here is a lecture from our very own UBC on the fascinating research being done in conceptual metaphor theory and embodiment.) What came first, the thought or the metaphor? The world or the story?

Where do we go when we enter the world of words? Everywhere and nowhere, Chamberlin might reply with his penchant for paradox. But words can also bring us to the most specific, localized, and intense contact with the world. Robert Macfarlane, for instance, has shown in the course of several books how language can be a technology of love and wonder. His 2015 book Landmarks (“a book about the power of language . . . to shape our sense of place”) collects hundreds of unique dialect words whose specificity bespeaks old and intimate knowledge of particular places, regions, and climates (1). And his books of poetry—The Lost Words (2017) and The Lost Spells (2020)—invoke words (like acorn and conker) that run the risk of disappearing if the contact with the non-human world that they both require and render possible ceases to be a part of our lives. (This is a “charming” video about The Lost Spells that suggests the entanglement of art/word/imagination and reality/world.)

I first came across The Lost Words when I was slightly lost myself. I was studying abroad in Edinburgh and had taken a long walk out of the city centre to the Royal Botanic Garden. Among the flowers was a white gallery house with The Lost Words exhibition inside: a series of paintings and acrostic verses lamenting the absences and conjuring the presences of both specific words and living things. I came home with the book, and I now feel that these verses are fine examples of the Chamberlinian charm, the potent overlapping of word and world.

Works Cited

Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground. Knopf, 2003.

Gibbs, Raymond. “Raymond Gibbs — Second of a Double Feature: Metaphor and Embodied Cognition.” The University of British Columbia, 25 October 2010, https://ikblc.ubc.ca/raymond-gibbs-second-of-a-double-feature-metaphor-and-embodied-cognition/.

Macfarlane, Robert. Landmarks. Penguin, 2015.

Macfarlane, Robert, and Jackie Morris. The Lost Spells. Penguin, 2020.

—. The Lost Words. Penguin, 2017.

“The Lost Spells by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris.” Youtube, uploaded by Waterstones, 5 October 2020, https://youtu.be/n_oma3YP5NU.