Blog 3-5

 

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 Truth About Stories

When we first encountered King in this class (The Truth About Stories) he challenged us to look deeply at the power that “story” has to frame our entire experience of reality. In the tale of the witches’ convention, which later became our storytelling assignment, we were explicitly told that “once a story is told it cannot be called back” (King 10). Soon after this he sets up the dichotomy of creation stories, juxtaposing the ‘Western’ biblical narrative of the Garden of Eden with an Indigenous story of a woman (Charm) falling from the sky (10-22) . In no ambiguous terms, King spells out the divergent worldviews that emerge from these two distinct versions of who and where we come from. The Garden narrative, with its dry, distanced approach and its inherent hierarchies, allows a perspective where profit and self -interest are encouraged above all else (27). Whereas Charm’s story fosters a world of cooperation between humans and all the different elements of the natural world (25). King goes even further by suggesting that some stories (or perhaps ways of sharing them) not only suggest a reality but also enforce that reality with the ruthless tactics of a totalitarian dictatorship. The Garden narrative, he argues, creates a closed circuit, a one street, where sacred and profane have been so clearly defined that no escape or alternative is possible.  If you believe in the sacred truth of Adam and Eve you cannot simultaneously hold Charm’s story in that same regard (25).

 

While there are obvious difficulties to King’s argument ( the contradiction of challenging  dichotomies  by setting up one and then depending on one ,narrow interpretation of the bible), the message is clear: Stories are powerful, they are agents of creation and destruction, and we become our stories.  Going further, I don’t think King’s choice of using the example of creation stories was in any way arbitrary. When you want to know the essence of something you have to go to its source and creation was literally the source of it all (for our reality, at least). By going to the source, I believe King, was trying to warn us that these stories run incredibly deep and spread a worldview like a heart pumping blood throughout a vascular system. Ultimately, though, King does not wish to see himself as a pedagogue teaching us right from wrong but as a storyteller engaging us in a conversation and so the essay (The Truth About Stories) can only point towards what the story (Green Grass and Running Water) will eventually deliver…. 

 

Don’t Show them your mind. Show them your imagination (King 26)

Lionel, Alberta, Eli, and even Charlie are characters that all inhabit a space between the two stories of creation. They are indigenous by birth, by blood, by heritage, by traditional stories but they are also all deeply immersed in the Western culture and its seductive, capitalist ethos that encroaches (literally and figuratively) upon the reservation of their childhood. I believe that King uses the story of these four individuals to help anchor our understanding of how the stories we tell literally play out in the lives we live. Since creation is the source, its telling and then retelling becomes the core metaphor by which we can observe transformation in the world of the novel and ,more generally, the interplay  between story and life, fact and fiction, and myth and reality. As Eden becomes subverted and distorted by Indigenous narratives, struggles of identity and meaning play out in the lives of the protagonists.  In their own way, each of the characters is struggling to find balance as they teeter between these different essential narratives, each worldview  pulling them in a different direction and perhaps towards a different creative source.

 

(T)he reader moves between the world of the novel and the world as experienced. (Chester 49)

On the theme of directions, King’s book is broken up into the four directions of the medicine wheel common to many Indigenous cultures which has also been associated with the four stages of the life cycle: Birth, Child, Adult , and  Elder. I want to suggest that King’s four central characters embody the evolving interplay (and sometimes direct conflict) of the different creation narratives as they play out through the four stages of the life cycle. Alberta is birth. She struggles to find a way to bring life into her disconnected and fragmented reality. She wants to be a mother but is wary of the corruption and loss of independence that marriage will bring about. It is only once she comes home to the Sundance, that pregnancy manifests and the movement towards rebirth can begin.  Lionel is the child, blocked in the stage of transformation. He is unable to break free from the shackles of his past and commit to an integrated positive direction for the future. Stories play out in his mind, but they cannot be actualized. As the western creation story shifts into dialogue with Indigenous ones, he is able to assert some independence from Buffalo Bill and assume control of his life. In the novel’s final image, he is surrounded by family and poised to support in the building process. Charlie, in my reading, is the adult. He has asserted his independence from Bill and has a successful job which provides him ultimate financial freedom. Yet conflict is found in the fact that his supposed independence is actually a trick, a sham. He is being used by the corporation that employs him and is then discarded when no longer of value. At the end, he is going on his own journey to learn from his father who, as the story is retold, becomes the Indian who led the charge to undoing John Wayne. Finally, we are left with Eli Stand Alone, the Elder. The one who completes and begins the cycle. While his death is where we end the story, his return home is where we begin (or is it the other way round?). We are never told why he decides to come home but somehow, we know it was because undoing the dam was also undoing the story and allowing the retelling to begin. Eli, the professor of western literature turned fearless defender of his Home, perhaps a bit of Thomas King himself, represents the beginning that is ever present in that which appears as the end of every story.

 

 

Links and Works Cited

 

Chester Blanca. “Green Grass Running Water: Theorizing the World of the Novel.” Canadian Literature 161-162. (1999). Web. March 7, 2019. 

Cooper, Rabbi David. “2364 The Mystical Garden Of Eden”, rabbidavidcooper.com, 2010. March 7, 2019.

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

Nelson, Norma. “A Life Story of an Indigenous Elder: Circling the Medicine Wheel’s Life Stages”. University of Manitoba, 2015 (unpublished). Web. March 7, 2019.

 

Image

Kilroy, Guy.”Sold Sign and House”. Flickr. 2014.  Web Image. March 7, 2019 (Open Source).