There are things we know and things we don’t know.  The unknown would appear to be the difficult part, but we are easily fooled – it is what we think we know that is most difficult, and most dangerous.  Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water is not concerned with knowing, but rather with how we come to know.  Yet in addressing how we come to know something, King’s story is very much concerned with what we do know – or rather, what we think we know as truth, and ultimately, what we can never truly know.

There is old fable about the fox and the hedgehog, summed-up by the Greek poet Archilochus who says “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”  This perhaps false (and certainly over-ascribed) dichotomy has been used by many to divide up the worlds thinkers and writers into two camps – those whose approach to life is driven by a singular and unwavering vision, who relate everything to that vision; and those whose approach to life is more pluralistic, who pursue many ideas and modes of thought that are often unrelated and even contradictory.  Most famous was Isaiah Berlin’s essay The Fox and the Hedgehog, in which he attempted to ‘discover’ Leo Tolstoy using this approach.  I mention this here not because I want to try to place King or his story into one of these camps (that would surely be folly!), but because it (and Berlin’s essay) is a good point of departure – asking ourselves what we know, and how what we know guides our lives and how we interact with it and those in it, is a good place to start.

Green Grass, Running Water unsettles what we assume we know, and provides a method for knowing what we don’t.  Fee and Flick call this crossing borders (131).  We begin in a place of knowledge, but here we know only what is within our borders.  We therefore also begin in a place of not-knowing.  In order to arrive at a place of knowing what is beyond our borders, we must of course cross a border, and hopefully many borders.  This can be difficult, and we need to be taught how.  This is (partly) the job of Coyote.

The main way we come to know something that is unknown, is to know that it is unknown; then we can turn our attention to learning that unknown, which we accomplish by listening to those who know.  This isn’t to suggest that the known/unknown are truths, or that we gain more knowledge when we know the unknown.  “There are no truths” (King, 326), just infinite things we don’t know yet – infinite because language, as collected into stories, has the ability to create multiple (read: infinite) realities (Chester, 58).

Coyote continually makes us aware of what we don’t know by unsettling what we do know.  He infuses himself (and by extension, indigenous stories and traditions) into the stories we tell ourselves we know so well – creation, the garden of eden, ‘cowboys and Indians’, Moby Dick, etc.  We are forced to confront the fact that we don’t know this story anymore.  We become aware of the border we have come up against.

In order to then understand the story, we must cross over that border between what we know and what others know.  Coyote is crossing borders through the entire story – entering and exiting different stories, sometimes interacting directly – on the Pequod, for example (King, 197) – and sometimes indirectly (in the Blossom narrative – dancing earthquakes and children into the story).  All of this is to say, he changes things, transforms them.  He creates a new reality, which is to say he creates (or is the impetus for) a new story (one with a Moby-Jane, for example; note that it’s not until Coyote alerts the crew that they see Moby-Jane).  Coyote shows us that to cross a border requires us to do something, to create something new.  We enter into a realm of someone else’s knowledge, and we cannot know exactly what they know, but we can create something new with what we bring and what they tell us.

Returning to the fox and the hedgehog, maybe we can say that King is a hedgehog who knows only how to know many things.

—

A thought on the “I that says.”

Chester tells us that in Green Grass, Running Water “the storyteller is engaging in a conversation with Coyote and with the reader” (58).  But Fee and Flick tell us that “there is no reader” of King’s story, except maybe for King himself (131).  In trying to reconcile these ideas, I wonder if the answer is in the invitation to read the story aloud.  Reading aloud, we can hear many of the allusions/references speaking back to us (e.g. Louis, Ray, Al / Louis Riel), but it does take some forcefulness on our part.  While reading the story, I would say “I says” with the same forcefulness, and I felt like I was telling the story.  So perhaps there’s no reader because the reader is the storyteller here.  King is inviting (tricking) the reader to tell the story.  This has a few implications.  One, it is always more effective to learn something when you teach it to someone else, and so to some extent we are actually healing ourselves.  Two, we are then invited to cross borders along with Coyote; and three, we are engaging in a conversation with Coyote directly.  Which means by reading the book, we have created something new.

Berlin, Isaiah.  The Fox and the Hedgehog.  New York: Simon and Shuster, 1970.

Chester, Blanca.  “Green Grass, Running Water: theorizing the world of the novel.”  Canadian Literature 161-162 (1999), 44-60.

Fee, Margery and Jane Flick.  “Coyote Pedagogy: knowing where the borders are in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water.”  Canadian Literature 161-162 (1999), 131-140.

King, Thomas.  Green Grass, Running Water.  Toronto: Harper Perennial, 1993.

Writing in the 1950s and 1960s, Northrop Frye, among other literary critics, was beginning to move away from a definition of “Canada” and “Canadian” on the terms of the past and of (culturally- or geo-politically-) colonial powers.  [This echoes, in substance more than impetus, Thomas King’s rejection of defining indigeneity in relation to pre-colonial, colonial and/or post-colonial – that is, in terms of (or on the terms of) contact, Europeans, colonialism, oppression etc. (King 2004)].  Frye and others sought to identify that which makes Canadians, as evidenced in literature and other cultural manifestations, distinct (CanLit Guides, 2013).  Using Frye’s own language, we may more accurately say that Frye himself was at the time a “maturing” Canadian writer in the 1950s and 1960s, engaged in the construction of a Canadian identity as opposed to the assertion of that identity, requiring consideration of self-conflict as opposed to external conflict (Frye, 233).

Mature literature, the kind that can serve to identify, define and reinforce culture, is for Frye an autonomous medium, closed to particular historical or social experience but guided by mythical structures within which those particularities may be given expression, or form (Frye, 233-234).  The literary critic seeks to mark off those areas of autonomy, free from time and place, to separate literature from the daily life (216), and hold them up, or implant them, as true forms of a culture, and by extension, of a people.  [The connections between Frye’s endeavour and the work of Salish Xá:ls should not go unnoticed].

It is for this reason that in discussing one of the defining tensions in Canadian literature – between the primitive and the civilized, as evidenced in the poetry of Duncan Campbell Scott – Frye is unmoved by and unconcerned with both the inherent contradictions between Scott’s romantic poetics and imperial policies, and the obvious destructiveness of those policies on Indigenous peoples in Canada.  For Frye, Scott could only situate his experiences, give them expression and form, in terms of his own prevailing literary traditions – in this case, in the absence of a mature mythical literary tradition, one based on history.  It is this tradition, as yet immature but nevertheless giving voice to a fledgling Canadian cultural identity, which is important to Frye – not the historical or social setting from which it came (and from which come those contradictions, conflicts and destructiveness).  Cutting literature off from its place and time, drawing impenetrable circles around culture and Canadian, is the epitome of Western approaches to knowledge and understanding, marking out a space that defines x almost exclusively in contradistinction to y.  He is looking inward to the self-conflict (we might conceive of the self as that which is inside the arbitrary circle), and ignores the external conflicts (between peoples) that are so destructive.

Frye’s endeavour is to define, by constructing.  This is an effort to control, and to control for, in the very scientific meaning of controlling for variables, those elements that can unsettle.  This is also destructive, as any border/boundary (say, that of a circle) necessarily breaks down the whole into smaller pieces, and cuts off that which is outside the circle from the inside.  But more so, the act of classifying, categorizing and naming – which the drawing of a circle around a particular space, and not around another space, accomplishes – is an important power dynamic [accessible through UBC library account].  To draw circles around Canadian, and to exclude external conflict, is to wield incredible power to erase important historical and social realities and considerations.

CanLit Guides.  “Nationalism, 1950s-1970s: cultural nationalism, the Massey Commission and thematic criticism.” Canadian Literature.  13 August 2013.  Web.  07 March 2014.

Clayton, Daniel.  “On the Colonial Genealogy of George Vancouver’s Chart of the North-West Coast of North America.”  Cultural Geographies. 2000, 7(4):371.

Frye, Northrup.  The Bush Garden: essays on the Canadian imagination.  Toronto: Anansi: 2011.

King, Thomas. “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial,” in Unhomely States: theorizing English-Canadian Post-colonialism. Mississauga, ON: Broadview, 2004. 183-186.

McAllister, Jamie.  “The Mark of Xá:ls.”  What’s the Story: Literature and Canada.  n.p., 21 February 2014.  Web.  07 March 2014.