{"id":81,"date":"2019-03-06T23:12:01","date_gmt":"2019-03-07T06:12:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/kevinhatch\/?p=81"},"modified":"2019-03-07T01:51:30","modified_gmt":"2019-03-07T08:51:30","slug":"hillofbeans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/kevinhatch\/2019\/03\/06\/hillofbeans\/","title":{"rendered":"A Mountain out of a Hill of Beans"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u2014or 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?<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

“It doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”
\n-Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart),\u00a0Casablanca<\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

Thomas King’s acclaimed Green Grass, Running Water<\/em> is an almost dizzyingly multi-layered story, unspooling numerous story threads, anchored by pop culture and sociopolitical benchmarks, all framed by an ongoing Indigenous Creation story – itself\u00a0<\/em>punctuated by\u00a0bantering commentary by Coyote (both “Old” and contemporary), a satirically huffy Judeo-Christian depiction of God, and an ambiguous narrator figure (arguably King himself, breaking the narrative ‘fourth wall’ and interjecting as storyteller). But, acting as a piece of core connective tissue through the narrative Russian Doll of interacting stories and audiences is a notion of paradigm resistance<\/strong> that permeates each level of the increasingly metatextual novel.<\/p>\n

On the surface, the disjunction between the characters and their array of conflicts and the grandiosity of King’s Creation narratives leads to the characters’ personal struggles feeling trite and unremarkable – comparatively not amounting to a hill of beans, in the\u00a0Casablanca<\/em> vernacular – in the face of the origin of life. However, what unifies all of the disparate story threads, is some notion of a frontier of resistance.\u00a0All of King’s characters are seen, at some point in the novel, taking a stand against ideological conventions.\u00a0Alberta’s steadfast decision to become a single mother leads to all manner of discrimination and scorn from friends, family, and especially the standardized medical system, depicted by King as almost incomprehensibly archaic (177). Eli, similarly, is depicted as softly countercultural radical by abandoning his stable but unfulfilling job as a university professor to occupy his childhood home in protest to it being torn down for the sake of a major dam, deflecting the political machinations of the government with gently obfuscating circular conversation about the weather (137). Even Lionel demonstrates a darkly comedic take on accidental resistance, when he is\u00a0arrested for accidentally being strong-armed into partaking in (and being arrested at) an “American Indian Movement<\/a>” protest in the United States (58-61) – an incident of sordid systemic discrimination that mars any trajectory in his later-life career.<\/p>\n

Even King’s style of constructing and sequencing dialogue is pointedly atypical – and deceptively political in and of itself. King constantly depicts\u00a0characters as having seemingly two simultaneous but seldom intersecting conversations, their concentric circles of communication occasionally wryly commenting on one another – but sometimes serving to avoid the conversation itself as a form of resistance.\u00a0Take, for example, this exchange between Eli and Cliff Sifton, a government representative tasked with convincing Eli to relinquish his family home for the sake of expanding a local dam:<\/p>\n

Sifton set his coffee cup on the railing. “You know, I always thought Indians were elegant speakers.”<\/em>
\n“Storm’s coming.”\u00a0<\/em>
\n“But all you ever say is no. I come by every day and read that thing those lawyers thought up about voluntarily extinguishing your right to this house and the land it sits on, and all you ever say is no.”<\/em>
\n“Be here by tonight.”\u00a0<\/em>
\n“I mean, no isn’t exactly elegant, is it?”\u00a0<\/em>
\n“Maybe get some hail, too.”
\n<\/em>(137).<\/p>\n

To King, Eli’s act of continuously, belligerently refusing to engage in the same conversation as Sifton is itself an active form of resistance – an act of, in the face of storied systemic discrimination, simply holding fast and consistently, peacefully, changing the subject. Apart from the obvious intertexts of Indigenous Canadians being uprooted from ancestral homes due to controversial and disputed land treaties (and acknowledging treaties is about the only time Eli and Sifton end up having the same conversation [138]), Eli’s pointed disruptions in the flow of Sifton’s attempting to steer the conversation back to hegemonic, colonial control prove microcosmic for King’s storytelling throughout\u00a0Green Grass, Running Water<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, it’s my take that the consistent intertexts of Creation story – and the meta-commentaries therein by Coyote, ‘God,’ and the Narrator – serve a similar narrative function to Eli’s taciturn changing of the subject. As discussed in previous blog entries<\/a>, one of King’s primary preoccupations is dismantling the cultural hegemony of the Christian Creation story of Genesis, in favour of positing and popularizing alternate Indigenous Creation stories. In\u00a0Green Grass, Running Water<\/em>, King purposefully inverts the cultural hierarchy of Judeo-Christian Creation stories with a twinkle in his eye, re-writing Noah as a lecherous boor (145), to the dominant in-text Creation story of Changing Woman (145), and\u00a0inverts “God” to “Dog” (an in-joke further amplified by both by the anchor setting of King’s “Dead Dog Caf\u00e9,” the alignment both comparing Christian ‘God’ to a consumable tourist trap and fast food substance, but also in that the \u2018Dog\u2019 in the eponymous cafe is a complete hoax…). In demonstrating the two Creation stories intertwining, King\u00a0further amplifies the theme of cultural decolonialization, demonstrating the fluidity and instability of spiritual paradigms as equally amorphous to others.<\/p>\n

But I think that King’s juxtaposition of Creation with the seemingly menial struggles of his contemporary characters additionally serves a second purpose: namely, to establish the psychic weight of centuries of microaggressions endured by all Indigenous Canadians in the face of consistent sociopolitical maneuvers designed to disempower and displace them, and functionally render them culturally extinct. By cross-cutting between his contemporary characters struggling to, in their own respective ways, resist the roadblocks of society (Alberta with her disinterested love triangle and systemically thwarted aspirations for childbirth; Eli and the dam; Lionel’s career aspirations constantly sucker-punched by a sordidly unwarranted criminal record from his accidental activism) and a retooled Creation myth similarly plagued by pesky, rude intrusions (namely, the Judeo-Christian figures), King crafts an overarching sense of tribulations and solidarity.<\/p>\n

\"Image
\nA Navaho depiction of Changing Woman<\/a> – without clear indication of breast size. King’s Noah would be crestfallen.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

By juxtaposing the Creation story’s Changing Woman’s journey from water to land in a canoe (badgered by sexual aggressor Noah) to Eli’s own troubles with (thankfully, less lusty) Noah surrogate Sifton, King seems to wryly imply the universality and timelessness of pesky, systemic obstacles to what should be a peaceful life – you can almost imagine King’s Narrator remarking ‘we had trouble keeping out of the water then, and we have trouble keeping out of the water now.’ Just as King’s contemporary characters each engage with stereotypical Western novels and films as a means of metaphorically contextualizing their own respective setbacks and discriminations, King’s juxtaposition of Creation myth and the stories of his contemporary characters serves to not only destabilize the Colonial dominance of the Christian Creation story – it equally speaks to the internalized narrative of Indigenous Canadians that irksome, endless systemic roadblocks and frustrations are, sadly, timelessly tantamount to existing as an Indigenous person, and unlikely to change any time soon.<\/p>\n

I have yet to finish\u00a0Green Grass, Running Water<\/em>, and thus to see how King entwines his respective storylines and threads – a conflation seeming inevitable due to the four escaped Indigenous inmates, seemingly hopping between the spiritual and worldly realms of narrative. Still, I welcome all thoughts: do you think King’s juxtaposition of Creation and contemporary stories serves as an act of satirical resistance, and a means of empathy to the incessant political and systemic obstacles towards Indigenous life? Or is King’s stew of stories a means of rendering the tribulations of the contemporary characters all the sillier and more inconsequential in the face of the grandiosity of Creation? Regardless, one thing is indisputable: King can go down in history as the first scholar musing on metatextual spirituality to make such prolific use of the word “poop” (145) – a worthwhile and laudable moment in criticism, if none else.<\/p>\n

-KH<\/p>\n


\n<\/em>WORKS CITED<\/span><\/p>\n

American Indian<\/a><\/em> Movement<\/a>.<\/em>Web. Accessed on March 5, 2019.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Casablanca<\/em>\u00a0(film). Dir. Michael Curtiz. Warner Bros, 1942.<\/p>\n

“Changing Woman (Rainbow, Silver, and Crystal) – Navaho Creation<\/a>.”\u00a0Pinterest<\/em>. Accessed on March 6, 2019.<\/p>\n

Hatch, Kevin. “You Say Potato, I Say Creation<\/a>.”\u00a0ENGL 470 99C Blog.\u00a0<\/em>Web. Accessed on March 6, 2019.<\/p>\n

King, Thomas.\u00a0Green Grass, Running Water<\/em>. Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 1993. Print.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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