Monthly Archives: November 2016

3:7 Hyperlinking GGRW

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I’ve chosen pages 251-260 for my hyperlinking journey. Come with me through the links.

Blossom Lodge (251): Jane Flick connects Blossom, Alberta, the location of the lodge, with a story of King’s that features it as well, One Good Story, That One, as well as with a 1947 W.O Mitchell novel, Who Has Seen the Wind? (147). Like King’s book, Mitchell’s is broken up into four parts (McClay). The first blossom that comes to mind is a cherry blossom, and with a usual 5 leaves, perhaps King’s suggestion with Blossom, Alberta is that the story will continue after this story has been told, an always-present fifth part. Flick recognizes “natural beauty and regeneration, as well as the smallness of the town” in the name which also relies on the real-world blossom (147).

The lodge then is a way to visit Blossom. Most characters pass through the lodge before interacting with other characters or the town. Dr Hovaugh, Alberta, Charlie and others all make a stay at Blossom. The place is “lodged” between characters and the town/reserve/damn.

C.B. Cologne (251): Flick offers the spanish name of Christopher Columbus “Cristóbal Colón” (153). She also observes the pun on the kind of perfume as well as similarity to the director’s name, Cecil B. Demille (153). In the story, C.B. is an Italian that played Indian leads in the Western films Charlie’s father often competed for.

C.B. Cologne then represents a sort of pervasive European odour throughout representations of Native Americans. Christopher Columbus being the originator, and the C.B. Cologne the Italian being the sort of apex of the appropriation of Native American culture as he seems more fitting for the roles than real Native Americans.

Polly Hantos (251): Flick sees the direct resemblance to “Pocohontas” in this figure’s name. She is a character that is “waiting in the shadows of the major studios, working as extras, fighting for bit parts in Westerns, playing Indians again and again and again” (182). The loose adaption of the “Pocohontas” name shows how the Western aesthetic cares little about the authenticity of the original culture, only the recreation of easily digestible forms. The fact that Charlie struggles to recognize the figure referred to on this page, first comparing them to Cologne and then to Hantos, suggests that the marginalization of these parts is so severe that gender doesn’t even determine them from one another.

Barry Zanos (252): Jane Flick compares this name to Giovanni da Verrazano, an Italian navigator and explorer who first sighted what is now New York (157). An interesting sonic quality of this name is also the possible “Bury Za Nose” or “Bury The Nose.” This could refer to Charlie’s father’s inability to get a role because of his nose and Barry Zanos position as a foil to him.

Sally Jo Weha (252): Consulting Flick first, this name resembles Sacajawea or “Bird Woman” or “Boat Woman,” a Shoshone woman “guide for Lewis and Clark” (157). As Charlie continues to search for the identity of the person he’s looking at he runs through the numerous characters that kept him and his father company in Hollywood. As a guide for two white men, Sacajawea represents another crossing point between Western and First Native culture that Charlie is attempting to navigate.

Johnny Cabot (252): Again Flick offers a useful reference to John Cabot or Giovanni Caboto the Italian who was credited with discovering “Canada and the mainland of North America” (157). It’s interesting that the showfolk that Charlie runs through are subtle references to European explorers, yet the Italian of the novel, C.B. Cologne refers to a spaniard while Cabot could have served nicely. I believe King is working with ambigious identities just as Charlie is working to resolve these identities. Charlie is exploring his past as he stares at the present incarnation of First Native past, one of the Four Indians.

Uncle Wally (252): Uncle Wally was a travelling salesman that appeared on Sesame Street from 1984 to 1992. He occassionally told “tall tales” and was one of the first adult believers of Big Bird’s Snuffleupagus (Muppet Wiki). Possibly a connection between children’s entertainment and the Four Indian’s “tall tales” or creation stories and their willingness to believe each other’s creation stories.

Uncle Wally may also refer to Wally Amos, founder of Famous Amos Chocalate Chip Cookies, which connects the offhand reference to Alberta’s father, “Amos” as well (King 255). Wally Amos’ cookie company eventually ran out out of business during the 80s. In this business figure light, Wally may represent Charlie’s disenfranchisement with corporate law as he feels out the hollowness of his relationships while returning to Blossom.

Amos (255): Amos was one of the Twelve Minor Prophets, figures present in Jewish, Christian, and Islamic holy text. A proponent of all men being equal under God, King’s naming of Amos as Alberta’s drunk father that left his family offers a negative realism to the religious figure’s belief. Amos the father represents the failure or absence of Amos the prophet’s teachings.

Duplessis (260): Maruice Duplessis served as premier of Quebec from 1936-39 and 1944-59. He’s often “referred to as le grande noirceur (the great darkness).” His actions contributed to the creation of “the first civil liberties groups in the country” (Canada’s Human Rights History). One such action was the transferring of orphans to psychiatric hospitals to secure more federal funding as it was more generous for hospitals rather than orphanages.

King chose a great villanous Canadian for the name of his foreboding, dam-building corporation. Along with the reference to the figure above, the name sounds like “duplicity,” a term easily attributed to government affairs with Natives and ceded or treatied land.

Work Cited:

“Amos, Wally 1937.” Contemporary Black Biography. Encyclopedia.com. 29 Nov. 2016

“Duplessis, Maurice 1890.” Canada’s Human Rights History. 29 Nov. 2016

Flick, Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass Running Water.” Canadian Literature  161-162. (1999). Web. Nov 15/2016.

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

McClay, Catherine. “Biocritical Essay.” The W.O. Mitchell Papers. 29 Nov. 2016

“Uncle Wally.” Muppet Wiki. 29 Nov. 2016.

3:5 Placing Four Indians

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Q: Narratives assume, in Blanca Chester’s words, “a common matrix of cultural knowledge.” The Four Old Indians are perhaps the best examples of characters that belong to a matrix of cultural knowledge, which excludes many non-First Nations. What were your first questions about and impressions of these characters? How have you come to understand their place in the novel.

I believe the Four Indians of Thomas King’s Green Grass Running Water exist as the mythological, literary, and cultural boundary between First Nations’ and Western people’s traditions. The four figures carry the names of well-known Western “heroes:” Hawkeye, referring to a white frontier hero who knew “Indian ways” that appeared in television, film, and novels; Lone Ranger, connecting the Indian to the popular western hero; Robinson Crusoe, the economical protagonist that “writes lists” of Daniel Defoe’s castaway novel, sometimes known as the first English novel; and Ishmael, the survivor of Melville’s Moby Dick who lives by “staying afloat on Queequg’s coffin” (King 293, Jane Flick 141-2). The characters Western names span the English literary tradition from Crusoe to Ishmael to Hawkeye to Lone Ranger, each offering a way to understand the Western protagonist.

These Western protagonist archetypes often come into conflict with the natives whether it be Crusoe “adopting” Friday as his servant, Ishmael coming to terms with and befriending the cannibal Queequg, Hawkeye mimicking “Indian ways,” or the Lone Ranger being a survivor of an Indian raid and by definition of his existence in opposition to them.  King dons his Four Indians with these rich literary backgrounds through the simple act of naming, demonstrating the power of preconceptions, a power he likely hopes to reign in with his book. What surprises the reader is the Four Indians’ resistance to any kind of identity, including their name.

“Ms. Jones said that the Indians are women” replies a confused Cereno when he hears Dr Hovaugh describe them as men (King 75). King creates resistance to identity through gender ambiguity in this simple example, but throughout the pages of GGRW the Four Indians are constantly in flux, appearing within movies, within narratives, and within the creation story narrative that seemingly exists within and without the “real world” narratives. The Four Indians weave the creation stories of GGRW while also being a physical part of the world they’re creating. Their physical presence is subject to physical constraints and its not. One is reminded of “Not ants, but ants” when thinking of the Four Indians as they escape the hospital, gender, and their own names (Chamberlin 133).

On the First Nations side we might find the Four Indians referring to the Four Indian Kings. These kings were Iroquois chieftains that visited London on request of Queen Anne and “even saw a Shakespearean play (MacBeth) at the Haymarket Theatre (Sypniewska para 3 ). These kings or chiefs held official power in their own communities and had celebrity power in Western England. They were painted by Jan Verelst and sent homewards with Christian missionaries and a new fort and chapel commissioned by the Queen.

The Four Indians exist at the limit of the divide between Western and First Nation culture, offering either side a way to perceive the other. King cleverly includes the reader on this perception opportunity with his literary naming and contortion of preconceptions. Sergeant Cereno, Dr Hovaugh, Lionel, and others all are exposed to the conundrum of the Four Indians as they cannot quite make sense of their identities, purposes, or relation to them respectively. While peering at the Four Indians the characters of GGRW must come to terms with themselves. The Four Indians gift Lionel with a leather jacket that fulfills his fantasy of looking “like John Wayne” (King 318). Like Lionel, King lulls his characters and readers into a false sense of cultural knowledge with his Four Indians and then reverts it with their perplexing identities and actions, offering his characters and readers a way to think about both cultures simultaneously.

Work Cited:

Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories?: Finding Common Ground.  Vintage Canada, 2004.

Flick, Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass Running Water.” Canadian Literature  161-162. (1999). Web. Nov 15/2016.

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

Sypniewska, Margaret Knight. “The Four Indian Kings.” Indigenous Americans Their Genealogy    History and Heraldry. Web. Nov 15/2016.

3:1 Frye’s Literary Blinders

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Question: For this blog assignment, I would like you to explain why it is that Scott’s highly active role in the purposeful destruction of Indigenous people’s cultures is not relevant for Frye in his observations above?

In The Bush Garden, Frye’s literary system helps us understand his overlooking of Scott’s actual dealings with the indigenous peoples of Canada’s culture: “The forms of literature are autonomous: they exist within literature itself, and cannot be derived from any experience outside literature” (234). Literature existed in and of itself for Northrop Frye, dividing cultural writing into the literary and non-literary. It is unsurprising that Frye references the works of Proust and Eliot as classics of literary experimentation because of their positions on the high-modernist pantheon, driven by the New Critics who championed the belief that the work of literature contained its art in itself and the conditions around its production were irrelevant (234). Even more telling is the ethnicity of Proust, French, and Eliot, English which tie in nicely with Daniel Coleman’s “White Civility.” Only speculating, I can already see how a filter could be built by Frye on the foundations of a Western literary tradition that appropriates mythologies (Greek & Roman) while simultaneously distancing itself from ideas of historical, social, and political conditions. Such ignorance of conditions, combined with implicit ethnic literary superiority, can explain Frye’s dismissal of Duncan Campbell Scott’s actual or “non-literary” dealings with First Nations people.

Frye reinforces the idea of appropriating mythologies himself: “We have been shown how the Indians began with a mythology which included all the main elements of our own. It was, of course, impossible for Canadians to establish any real continuity with it” (235). Canadians here, notably distinct from the Indians, cannot use the First Nations’ mythologies for the production of literature. Frye raises up a grammatical divide between Canadians and Indians and decides that the latter offered only impossibility “for” the former. Such impossibility defined Scott’s own interactions with First Nations people, noted by D.M.R. Bentley as his “repeated poetic engagement with Native cultures” haunted by “his fear of their potential to compromise and disrupt the culture of which he was a part and an exponent” (767). In the autonomous sphere of literature, the myths Scott appropriated for his own poetics allowed him creativity. But when the actual people who created these myths must be considered, Scott has to confront fear of losing his sense of civilization, his sense of White civility.

In the realm of literature, Frye has no quarrel with Scott engaging with the mythologies of the indigenous people as in a sealed form they were merely a part of the content, a part of the setting from which the writer draws experience (Frye 234). For Frye, good literature wasn’t about setting: “it would be an obvious fallacy to claim that the setting provided anything more than novelty” (234). Furthering the literary usefulness of Indians, Frye continues: “Indians, like the rest of the country, were seen as nineteenth-century literary conventions,” demonstrating how the self-sealed literary realm could, in a crude way, play with the Indians while never having to consider their real, non-literary presence (235).

Michael Asch uses the terms “imaginary” and “mythological” to comment on the same effect Frye observes in Canadian literature: “[Canada was] an imaginary world occupied before our arrival by mythological creatures who, though human in many respects, were not yet sufficiently advanced to have constituted political society” (33). Asch seeks to point out how such a perspective was dismissive, but I believe Scott’s literary representations, when confronted by his policy-making decisions, confirm the perspective as true. Canlit defines the ideology of White civility, the ideology behind Scott’s poetry as: “Settler-colonial” culture which is “built on justifying racism and colonialism while, at the same time, denying its existence and legacy.” Frye’s ignorance of Scott’s active destruction of indigenous culture can be seen as stemming from his isolated literary model where the indigenous people and their culture are merely “novelties” to be used for literary motives while their non-literary actualities are to be denied.

Frye’s conviction that there has never been a great piece of Canadian literature on the one hand is depressing as it shows how indigenous culture couldn’t even be used for literary greatness, yet on the other gives evidence that such appropriation “for” Canadians will never create great literature.

Work Cited:

Asch, Michael. “Canadian Sovereignty and Universal History.” Storied Communities: Narratives of Contact and Arrival in Constituting Politcal Community. Ed. Rebecca Johnson, and Jeremy       Webber Hester Lessard. Vancouver: U of British Columbia P, 2011. 29 – 39. Print.

Bentley, D. M. R. “Shadows In The Soul: Racial Haunting In The Poetry Of Duncan Campbell Scott.” University Of Toronto Quarterly: A Canadian Journal Of The Humanities 75.2 (2006): 752-770. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 16 Nov. 2016.

CanLit Guides. “Reading and Writing in Canada, A Classroom Guide to Nationalism.” Canadian Literature. Web. 16 Nov. 2016.

Frye, Northrop. The Bush Garden; Essays on the Canadian Imagination. 2011 Toronto: Anansi. Print.