Answering question 5:

Green Grass, Running Water is King’s reckoning with orality and textuality. The novel is polemical, in its thematic examinations of colonialism, of Indigenous sovereignty and cultural identity, of Canadian literary theory in the Joe Hovaugh character as a figurative stand-in for Northrop Frye and a clashing of Indigeneity and the Western literary canon in the runaway elders. But I would also contend it is, in many ways, rather interfusional; and unlike Harry Robinson and his “Coyote Makes a Deal With King of England,” whose syntactic and narrative structure privileges performance over interiorized reading, King’s text is, in many ways, definitively textual. And yet it is also oral, particularly in its borrowing from, and thematic and structural dialogue with, the stories of Harry Robinson. 

Green Grass, Running Water‘s opening section is highly oral and echoic of Robinson: there is the sparse use of quotation marks for dialogue; there is the present tense perspective, a technique which, as noted in this Guardian article by noted literary journalist Richard Lea, has skyrocketed in popularity in recent prose fiction as a means of adding “intimacy” or “immediacy” to one’s storytelling; and there are Coyote and God, in dialogue and in opposition. Both narratives begin with water and the solitary Coyote, as well as with a past tense perspective which quickly gives way to a present immediacy: “In the beginning, there was nothing,” goes the opening words of Green Grass, Running Water, “just the water,” with the unnamed narrator noting that “Coyote was there, but Coyote was asleep” (King 1; emphasis added). To compare, Robinson writes that “for a long time, Coyote was there / on the water” (Robinson 64; emphasis added). Robinson and King employ the oratorial immediacy of the present tense to dissolve temporality and thus remove the Indigenous narrative from the sequential confines, the “sense of progress,” implied by what King notes as the common label of “post-colonial” literature as being bound to hegemonic structures of nationalism and settler-colonialist pedagogy (“Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial” 185). Robinson and King are decolonizing the myth of the Vanishing Indian, examined by scholar and author Mari Murdock as having been perpetuated by Edward Curtis in his production of a recipe of “myth-making” to forge “the reality in which the people…have disappeared” (138). 

Coyote’s position as a figurehead for oratory comes into greater prominence when his narrative converges with that of the four elder Indians and Lionel. Coyote’s voice and actions, even some of the world in the immediacy of his mention, remain in the present-tense, while those of the Indians, and the general narrative, remain in the past:

“You bet,” said Ishmael.

“I love parties,” says Coyote, and he dances even faster.

“Yes,” said the Lone Ranger. “We remember the last party.”

“That wasn’t my fault,” says Coyote just as the rain begins to fall. (King 274)

This examination of tense and King’s highly unusual melting-together of past and present temporalities in quick succession leads us to an understanding of Green Grass, Running Water as a liminal novel located between orality and literacy, voice and text. One particularly striking example of the book’s textuality, in comparison to such a work as “Coyote Makes a Deal With the King of England” that demands the spoken word, is the opening chapter’s visual presentation of God as GOD, in small capitals. Only after “that Dog Dream” demands immense Godhead does he become “that GOD” (King 2), alluding to the conventional small-capitals spelling of LORD in Biblical texts, a transliteration of the Hebrew “yhwh,” the Tetragrammaton considered too sacred for speech that was later altered to become Yahweh. When “that GOD” asks “what happened to my void?” and “where’s my darkness?,” we can begin to understand this character as the deity of the Old Testament, the Western creator, whose original name, as revered by the Hebrews, was quite literally unspoken: an anti-orality, the “ineffable name.” Robinson’s God is a far more elusive character through His distance and orality, in the constant reference to “God’s thought” (Robinson 66, 71) rather than his word, that famous notion of the authority of the Word of God. Through highlighting voice and belief over the colonialist authority of text, Robinson confronts Judeo-Christian values of print and scripture.

King is comedic in his examination of Christian mythmaking: “that’s the wrong story,” explains Ishmael, when Lone Ranger begins to speak the first words of Genesis. What is quoted here is the King James Bible, which many still regard, as seen in this Oxford Biblical Studies retrospective on its 400th anniversary, as a titan of literature, faithful to the original authors and sublime in its translation, and a major influence on the spread of the English language. King examines literacy further in the names of the elders, particularly Hawkeye, Ishmael, and Robinson Crusoe, titans of fiction in a centuries-long Western literary canon that has come under much scrutiny in recent years for its perceived problematics, but is nevertheless still considered “essential reading” – why? As Katy Waldman for Slate writes, these books “actually reflect the tainted history we have” (2016; emphasis added) – but what does it mean for literature to reflect?

There is more literacy to King’s book. As notes theorist Blanca Chester for Canadian Literature, King’s is a “highly contextualized and literary novel,” reworking orality into “high” literature (45). To understand this, look no further than the volume headings written in the Cherokee syllabary, that rendering of the Cherokee language into print by the illiterate Sequoyah, a linguistic event that National Geographic notes as a moment of “remarkable inventiveness” which allowed the Cherokee, through mass literacy and printing, to “preserve their language and cultural traditions and remain united with each other amid the encroachments of Euro-American society” (2019).

So King is calling attention to that specific loss of orality in the formation of written sounds, and perhaps problematizing the notion of literacy being the “saviour” by which Indigeneity can be preserved. What would King make of this National Geographic article, and its praising of the textual literalizing of Indigenous language?

Works Cited

“Bible Verses about the Word of God.” Daily Verses, https://dailyverses.net/the-word. Accessed 12 March 2021.

Chester, Blanca. “Green Grass, Running Water: Theorizing the World of the Novel.” Canadian Literature 161/162, 1999, pp. 44-61, https://canlit.ca/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/canlit161-162-GreenChester.pdf. Accessed 12 March 2021.

“Focus on King James.” Oxford Biblical Studies Online, https://global.oup.com/obso/focus/focus_on_king_james/. Accessed 12 March 2021.

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

–. Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial.” Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism, edited by Cynthia Sugars, Broadview press, 2004, pp. 183-190.

Lea, Richard. “Make it now: the rise of the present tense in fiction.” The Guardian, 21 Nov. 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/21/rise-of-the-present-tense-in-fiction-hilary-mantel. Accessed 11 March 2021.

Murdock, Mari. “Stepping Out of Photographs: Stopping the Myth of the Vanishing Native through Reclaiming Personhood in The Edward Curtis Project.” Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism, vol. 11, no. 1, 2018, pp. 135-142, https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1293&context=criterion. Accessed 12 March 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, Talon Books, 2005, pp. 46-63.

“Sequoyah and the Creation of the Cherokee Syllabary.” National Geographic, 13 Nov. 2019, https://www.nationalgeographic.org/article/sequoyah-and-creation-cherokee-syllabary/. Accessed 10 March 2021.

Waldman, Katy.” The Canon is Sexist, Racist, Colonialist, and Totally Gross. Yes, You Have to Read It Anyway.” Slate, 24 May 2016, https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/05/yale-students-want-to-remake-the-english-major-requirements-but-there-s-no-escaping-white-male-poets-in-the-canon.html. Accessed 11 March 2021.