- 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?
The challenging part of answering this question is narrowing it down. King himself says, by starting with Creation stories, he can “drag” oral Creation myth “through Christianity, through Western literature and Western history” (70). He wants to create a sort of breeding ground for the cultural intersections that are of particular interest to this class. My view is perhaps more facile. Near the novel’s outset, Norma shows a profoundly uninterested Lionel some carpet samples: she says, “You make a mistake with carpet, and you got to live with it for a long time” (King 7), a sentiment that echoes King’s Massey lecture (“once a story is told it can never be taken back”). Stories furnish us with the luxury of going back to crucial moments in time, the points where history diverges into things that happened and a mass of unrealized potential (ex. Lionel’s three mistakes, Dr. Hovaugh’s dates). The Transformer stories that are influential to Green Grass, Running Water’s technique and content can theorize potential alternative histories. Of course, if a catastrophe were resultant from an incalculable mix of agents and reagents, who is to say that one or two subtle reversals of outcome would not produce the same final result. The only way to be sure the course would change, would be to start from the beginning and do it right.
The novel’s temporality is fluid, not beholden to any strict chronology. Frequently, King presents the reader with sections of interwoven prose, juxtaposing a character’s present temporality and one of several years prior. The effect is to give the reader a greater understanding of motivations; we come to understand Alberta, Lionel, Latisha, Charlie, and Eli as (beyond complex characters) projections of their past mistakes, for better or for worse. Clearly, the past is not something King wants us to disregard. Often times it feels as though moments described in the narrative present are mere digressions, and the recollected scenes comprise the main narrative; the present is subordinate to the past.
Lionel’s similarities to Eli give him a window into his own potential future; he has the opportunity to see what he likes and dislikes about Eli and consciously emulate or deviate from his way of life. “Hope you took notes” says Norma to Lionel shortly after Eli’s death in the earthquake (King 421), but this is a message to all of us. Though we may not have Coyote’s ability to move through time like salmon through a river, we can learn from the lives of others.
Beyond this, thanks to help from Jane Flick’s compendium of allusions made in the novel, we see that King borrows names from all eras of human history- both fictional and not. These names bring baggage with them and once again allow the reader to see the resonance of an individual’s actions down through the generations. Clifford Sifton, for example, “a champion of the settlers who displaced the Native population” and Laurier’s Superintendent of Indian affairs (1896) interacts with the namesake of Elijah Harper, who helped block the 1990 Meech Lake Accord (Flick 150). Outcomes of events are the result of present agents bumping up against historical barriers, and by starting from the very outset of the world King is free to embody these historical barriers in characters who exist in the narrative present, like Sifton.
The novel ends with the potential of regeneration and new beginnings; Alberta is pregnant, the cabin is to be rebuilt. “Norma stuck her stick in the earth. ‘We’ll start here,’ she said. ‘So we can see the sun in the morning.’” (King 424). This stick in the dirt is the physical manifestation of one of those points in time that King is so obsessed with. This is a new beginning, and it seems as though all of the characters will do their best to ensure that this is a point the Four Indians will NOT have to revisit.
Flick, Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.” Canadian Literature 161/162 (Summer/Autumn 1990): 140-175. Web. 26 Jun. 2015.
Gzowski, Peter. “Peter Gzowski Interviews Thomas King on Green Grass, Running Water.” Canadian Literature 161/162 (Summer/Autumn 1990): 65-76. Web. 3 Jul. 2015.
King, Thomas. Green Grass Running Water. Toronto: Harper Collins, 1993. Print.
Hi Hayden. You make an interesting point in writing that “the present is subordinate to the past.” To follow this assertion entirely, however, would be to go beyond the childhoods of GGRW’s characters: it would be to go all the way back to the story of creation. The present of GGRW’s characters would thus be subordinate to that story–that beginning.
I’m curious as to why you think that Norma’s stick marks a “new beginning”. She is rebuilding Eli’s hut and plans to live in it like he did–this seems to me like a continuation of past resolve. Furthermore, she tells Lionel that it will be his turn to live in it after he dies, effectively turning it into a family tradition. I think then that rather than symbolizing a new beginning, the rebuilding symbolizes the past’s persistence and the characters’ resolve to keep its ideals alive.
I guess I meant that in terms of narrative space given, the present is almost subordinate to the past; King spends just as much if not more time exploring a character’s history as he does following their present. As for the stick, I saw the flood as a sort of slate-clearer; certainly damage results, but so does opportunity to correct the wrongs of the past. Lionel may end up living in the hut at some point, but unlike Eli, he won’t have to devote his existence to some drawn out litigation over property rights (or at least I hope he won’t). But you’re right, rebuilding the cabin is keeping the past alive, but I believe that this is merely the start of a new cycle of the medicine wheel. We certainly are not completely back at square one, but something new is beginning.