Monthly Archives: March 2016

Pages 167 to 186 (1993 HarperCollins Edition, different page numbers than in assigned list)

WHAT ARE THE CONNECTIONS?

Part One:

This section opens up with Lionel, Norma and the four old Indians in Lionel’s car. This story is interjected with the story of Lionel inviting Alberta over to meet his family.

The first theme I noticed here that is interwoven into Alberta and Charlie’s stories in the following parts of this section, is the idea that Lionel needs help. The Four Indians decide they are going to help Lionel, because humans need help (167), and the best place to start is with his jacket. King uses language specifically about choices, mistakes, and getting off to a good or bad start in this section to connect the story of Lionel and the Indians with Lionel and Alberta in his parent’s home. Good ways to start include: changing the jacket, having dinner at Lionel’s mother’s house, and singing. Bad ways to start include: talking about work at the television store and Lionel’s absence from his parent’s lives. King uses this language of good versus bad starts to highlight what are seen as good and bad choices made by Lionel. Lionel is seen as rejecting his own family and culture. He doesn’t accept his father’s request for help around the house because he feels he needs to work and make money. This is another theme that King connects throughout Lionel, Alberta and Charlie’s stories in this section: the contrast between values of tradition, family and one’s own culture with a dominating western capitalist value of consumption and material wealth.

This part ends with Lionel at home, settling into the familiar routine of watching television in the dark: “Lionel squeezed past the Formica table, fumbled his way into the easy chair, and found the remote control without ever having to turn on the lights” (173). The way King describes this indicates a level of practice. As someone that is portrayed as not really being accomplished at anything, and struggling because of that, King can subtly point to the fact that Lionel is accomplished at this task of sitting down to watch t.v., and make us reflect on the problems with that and why that is so.

When Lionel thinks about the old Indians and their singing of Happy Birthday to him, he is filled with an ominous feeling, “as if something was coming apart, as if he had unknowingly made yet another mistake” (173). Perhaps King is trying to show the mistake is his inability to embrace his own culture, history, and elders. He is blinded by the ideal of making money, watching t.v., and wearing the gold jacket that represents western society’s glorification of consumption.

Part Two:

Now we find Alberta, just arriving in Blossom to visit Lionel for his birthday. This story is intercut with flashbacks of Alberta’s experience trying to get pregnant through artificial insemination.

In her motel room in Blossom, Alberta also contemplates how she can help Lionel; to start with, “He could use a new jacket” (177). The gold jacket, representative of European ideals and values, is seen again as something that is holding Lionel back, contributing to his helplessness.

Here television is again seen as a constant presence, background noise when Alberta gets into her room and immediately turns on the t.v. before flossing her teeth (176). She is forced to watch a Western, as nothing else is on, a theme that comes up again later in this section.

The process Alberta goes through to gain access to services of artificial insemination to highlight a disconnect in western medicine between patient and healer. Her conversations with the many characters of the medical profession involved with this process remind me of Lionel’s mixup with the hospital and his “heart problem” at the novel’s beginning. The name of Alberta’s gynecologist, Dr. Mary Takai, also might be an allusion to the cost of our medical system, as Takai, can be translated to mean ‘expensive’ in Japanese.

Alberta isn’t being heard by the medical community, what she wants doesn’t fit into the social norm. She isn’t being listened to. This is seen most obviously during her conversation here:

“And when you get the interview, make sure your husband comes with you. We can’t begin the interview process unless both the husband and the wife are here.”

“I’m not married.”

“A lot of people make that mistake.”

“I’m sure.”

“The women come and the men stay home.”

“I don’t have a husband.”

“And then we have to start all over again.”

The woman from the clinic is not listening to Alberta, not responding to what she says. She simply continues her dialogue.

Alberta’s part ends with a return to thinking about how to help Lionel. She then reflects on the differences between Charlie and Lionel, Charlie being “pushy and slick” while Lionel is “sincere and dull” (179), a theme that King brings back again with Charlie in the following pages.

Part Three:

This part follows Charlie, in Blossom to visit Alberta, interwoven with stories of his dad, and their move to Hollywood after Charlie’s mother’s death.

Like Alberta, Charlie also can’t find anything else on television but a Western. Here King is able to highlight the lack of diversity in western media, the lack of choice. The availability of only one channel, showing only a Western comes up in several characters’ worlds, exaggerating the strict lens through which the media controls what we watch, think, and like. We see another connection later to this idea, as well as the earlier portrayal of Lionel, when Charlie’s dad, after his wife died, “would sit in the chair and flip through the channels, never watching any program for very long. Except the Westerns” (181).

Charlie, like Alberta, also reflects on the differences between himself and Lionel. Charlie sees himself as “better, better, better” because he has a ‘better’ job, education, car, clothes, physical appearance, and bank account (182).

King’s placement of Charlie and his father in Hollywood, further highlights western society’s glorification of financial success and material wealth. The first character we are introduced to from that world is a man named C.B. Cologne, short for Crystal Ball Cologne, a manufactured perfume.

Other characters from this Hollywood world include: “Sally Jo Weyha, Frankie Drake, Polly Hantos, Sammy Hearne, Johnny Cabot, Henry Cortez . . . Barry Zannos . . . all waiting in the shadows of the major studios, working as extras, fighting for bit parts in Westerns, playing Indians again and again and again” (emphasis added, 182). Mary Flick provides notes on what these names most likely represent for King, connecting them all to historical European explorers. Using the names of historical heroes of colonial history to describe characters all trying to act as Indians in Hollywood, helps King point to the misrepresentation of indigenous culture. His discussion of the invisible Indian in “The truth about stories” is echoed here. We see it again when C.B. says to Charlie, “Nobody played an Indian like Portland. I mean, he is Indian, but that’s different. Just because you are an Indian doesn’t mean you can act like an Indian for the movies” (183).

Returning to Charlie in Blossom, contemplating the differences between himself and Lionel, we see a subtle connection between the two worlds when Charlie decides that Lionel is helpless, and that is why Alberta is interested in him. Could King be drawing a connection between Charlie’s dad acting as an Indian in Hollywood westerns, and Charlie thinking he needs to act helpless like Lionel to attract Alberta? Charlie’s idea that being successful and self-sufficient is “better, better, better” comes into question here. He concludes with the words, “Damn. Damn, damn, damn” instantly reconnecting us to the existence of the dam.

Some final points of interest:

• “Don’t need a stereo, honey,” Camelot said. “That RCA you gave us for Christmas still works real good” (168). This comment made by Lionel’s mother helps challenge the value of material consumption and waste as opposed to using what one has if it still works, not needing more than you have.

• Camelot’s “Hawaiian Curdle Surprise.” She revises the recipe, saying, ‘You’re supposed to use octopus for the stock, but where are you going to find octopus around here?” (170). This could be a comment on western consumption of international goods, ability to import anything and everything, not valuing local resources. International recipes are available to Lionel’s mother, still she chooses to use what she has, against what would be considered “normal”

• “Birthday?” said the Lone Ranger. “I guess we got to sing that song” (169): Even the happy birthday song is imported, foreign.
• “She had to go back to Calgary.” “Alberta?” (172): Play on words, Calgary, Alberta the place
• Red car in “small lake” (174): Foreshadowing cars floating towards the dam
• “You can’t always tell by looking,” he said. “How true it is,” said Alberta. “I could have been a corporate executive” (174): comment on judging people based on race and gender, status and education assumptions and expectations

Works Cited:

Flick, Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass Running Water.” Canadian Literature. 1999. Web. 30 March, 2016.

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

Vaux, Bert. “Crystal Ball Cologne.” Columbian Inventions 1996. Web. 30 March, 2016.

Vincent, Alice. “Happy Birthday song and its strange past.” The Telegraph. 9 Feb 2016. Web. 30 March, 2016.

1. Identify and discuss two of King’s “acts of narrative decolonization.”Please read the following quote to assist you with your answer.The lives of King’s characters are entangled in and informed by both the colonial legacy in the Americas and the narratives that enact and enable colonial domination. King begins to extricate his characters’ lives from the domination of the invader’s discourses by weaving their stories into both Native American oral traditions and into revisions of some of the most damaging narratives of domination and conquest: European American origin stories and national myths, canonical literary texts, and popular culture texts such as John Wayne films. These revisions are acts of narrative decolonization. James Cox. “All This Water Imagery Must Mean Something.”Canadian Literature 161-162 (1999). Web April 04/2013.

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I would like to focus on the stories involving Changing woman and Old Woman. When it comes to “some of the most damaging narratives of domination and conquest” these two characters take on particularly heavy-hitting aspects of European American origin stories.

Changing Woman and King’s revision of the Christian-European origin character of Noah and his ark:

First, King uses several elements of humor to begin this act of narrative decolonization.  He is prompting his audience to re-examine a story that has been told for centuries, by poking fun at it. King highlights elements of the story that are not normally included in its original form, like the acknowledgement that the boat would most likely have been covered in poop (King 144). We then meet Noah, a character traditionally revered as a hero of the Christian faith: “a little man with a filthy beard [who] jumps out of the poop at the front of the canoe” (King 145). The imagery King creates challenges the seriousness and respect I imagine is expected to be given to Noah within the Christian tradition.  King forces his audience to question how they’ve traditionally viewed Noah. This questioning can then lead to additional reflection on how we view the entire story he belongs to originally. King continues to shock his audience into re-thinking this European origin story with accusations of farting amongst the boat’s animals, Noah’s demand to see Changing Woman’s breasts, along with a hope that God remembered he likes big ones (145).

Next, King uses this same story to highlight differences between European and indigenous views on the appropriate way to interact with animals. Noah reprimands Changing Woman for talking to the ship’s animals, stating “This is a Christian ship. Animals don’t talk. We got rules.” (145). The topic of “Christian rules” is reiterated throughout Changing Woman’s interaction with Noah (King 148). King uses Coyote’s interpretation of these rules to help communicate what it might be like to be learning them from a position outside of the tradition within which they were created, taught and unquestionably followed. He does this while still using humor to derail the traditional mindset around such rules, like, for example, when Old Coyote explains that Noah’s first rule is “Thou Shalt Have Big Breasts” (King 147). The narrative around Christian rules continues in the story of Old Woman.

Old Woman and King’s revision of the Biblical story of Christ walking on water:

In Old Woman’s interaction with Young Man Walking on Water, (Jesus Christ with an “indian sounding” name as Jane Flick puts it (161)), King again tries to upset the traditional Christian-European idea of rules. Here he is more subtle, however, as he attempts to expose a very deep-rooted rule within European storytelling: that a story cannot be changed. He highlights this difference with one line spoken by Young Man Walking on Water. After Old Woman falls into what appears to be the story of Jesus Christ walking on water to save a boatload of his disciples, she finds him looking for the boat he is ‘supposed’ to save. Old Woman, spotting a boat, asks him if that is the one he is looking for. Young Man Walking on Water responds: “Not if you saw it first” (King 349). I interpret this as King’s way of communicating the assumption that elements within a European origin story cannot change. Within that tradition, stories accepted as fact leave no room for change. Change presents a need to re-evaluate which version is ‘true’ and can lead to doubt or uncertainty about the validity of the original story. By highlighting this inability to accept change, within a novel comprised of stories that are continually changing and being retold, King is able to expose one more difference between European and Indigenous narrative styles. With the awareness of this difference, we as readers move one step closer to being able to view each tradition on their own, to slip out from under the dominant legacy of colonial narratives.

King’s representation of women in his many acts of narrative decolonization is one topic I have not touched on. He provides so much to think about in regards to how women are portrayed in traditional European narratives and origin stories. However, I’m curious, what did you learn from how Changing Woman and Old Woman were treated by the familiar European literary characters they encountered?

Sierra Gale

Thoughts on Assignment 3:5

Works Cited:

Flick, Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass Running Water.” Canadian Literature 140-172. 1999. 04 April 2013. Web. 21 March 2016.

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

“Matthew 14:22 – 33 – Jesus Walks on the Water.” Holy Bible, New International Version. BibleGateway. 2011. Web. 21 March 2016.

Deem, Rich. “Who Was Noah?” Evidence for God. godandscience.org. 16 Dec. 2014. Web. 21 March 2016.

3 ] It is interesting, and telling of literary criticism at the time, that while Frye lights on this duality in Scott’s work, or tension between “primitive and civilized” representations; however, the fact that Scott wrote poetry romanticizing the “vanishing Indians” and wrote policies aimed at the destruction of Indigenous culture and Indigenous people – as a distinct people, is never brought to light. In 1924, in his role as the most powerful bureaucrat in the department of Indian Affairs, Scott wrote:

The policy of the Dominion has always been to protect Indians, to guard their identity as a race and at the same time to apply methods, which will destroy that identity and lead eventually to their disappearance as a separate division of the population (In Chater, 23).

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? You will find your answers in Frye’s discussion on the problem of ‘historical bias’ (216) and in his theory of the forms of literature as closed systems (234 –5).

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I find this question very difficult to answer, not because of a lack of content or understanding, but because of a feeling of discomfort and unwillingness to write the answer that I keep returning to. I must be missing something, and I hope I am, because all I can come up with is: in Frye’s mention of Duncan Campbell Scott, Scott’s role in the purposeful destruction of Indigenous people’s cultures is not relevant because to him, indigenous people’s cultures are outside of what he deems important elements of what forms the Canadian culture, history, and imagination.

Frye argues that Canada’s history, its speed of growth and lack of a rooted social imagination, inhibits Canadian writers’ ability to establish its own unique tradition of writing (Frye 221). He sees the Canadian awareness as lacking something, which lends to its inability to establish a concrete identity. In an attempt to define what is missing, he argues that it is not the question of “Who am I?” that is so difficult to answer, it is the question of “Where is here?” (Frye 222). This brings us back to the connection between land and stories. When I read this sentence of Frye’s  I excitedly wrote in my page margin, “if this is your land, where are your stories?” (Chamberlain Intro).  Frye alludes to our inability to answer this question with his discussion of the historical disconnect between Canadians (European settlers and their descendants, to Frye) and the land that they began to call home. He points to our inability to answer the question “Where is here?” as the prominent barrier to carving out a definable Canadian identity.

When it comes to Frye’s lack of commentary on the role of Duncan Campbell Scott, as our professor has already pointed out, one key aspect of his theory helps us understand how he views the role of indigenous culture in the formation of the Canadian literary mind. He argues that “the forms of literature are autonomous: they exist within literature itself, and cannot be derived from any experience outside literature” (Frye 234). So, what about orality? It would appear that for Frye, stories found in oral traditions have no influence on the form of literature adopted by a nation. However, he goes on to argue that “literature is conscious mythology: as society develops, its mythical stories become structural principles of storytelling” (Frye 234).  I interpret Frye’s argument as coming from a linear understanding of the progression of a society’s form of storytelling. Returning to the idea that the dominant western school of thought views societies as “progressing” from mythology in the form of oral traditions to the eventual discovery of the written word; Frye, in line with this mode of thinking, is perhaps arguing that the literary mind of most societies begins historically with a shared mythology that then “progresses” into a more structured, written form of storytelling unique to that society. For Frye, the problem with the Canadian literary mind is that it hasn’t gone through that progression. The Canadian history of European settlers and their descendants begins with their first steps on this land, plucked from overseas and dropped here without any mythical knowledge of the land’s history (233).

We can’t forget that Frye is a Canadian, formed by Canadian history and not outside the “Canadian literary mind” he is trying so adamantly to dissect. Perhaps for him, he doesn’t feel it is necessary to address the contradictory actions and writing of Duncan Campbell Scott in relation to indigenous peoples’ culture because their culture is outside of the Canadian literary mind he is interested in, and does not belong in his discussion. In the historical establishment of Canadian literature, he defines the role of indigenous peoples, their culture, mythology and land, as “nineteenth-century literary conventions” (Frye 235). I am reminded of King’s ‘imaginary Indian.’

Sierra Gale

Works Cited:

Chamberlin, Edward. If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground. Toronto:  AA. Knopf, 2003. Print.

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

Houston, James. “Inuit Myth and Legend.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. Feb. 07, 2006. Web. March 10, 2016.

Klymasz, Robert. “Folklore.” The Canadian Encyclopedia. Feb. 07, 2006. Web. March 10, 2016.

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

2] Read Susanna Moodie’s introduction to the third edition of Roughing it in the Bush, 1854. I use the Project Gutenburg website which has a ‘command F’ function that allows you to search the entire document by words or phrases. Moodie’s introduction is often read as a warning to would be emigrants as well as an explanation of why her family emigrated from Britain. See if you can find echoes of the stories discussed above: a gift from god, a second Garden of Eden, an empty/wasted land, the noble but vanishing Indian, and the magical map. By echoes I mean reading between the lines or explicitly within Moodie’s introduction. Discussing what you discover, use your examples as evidence to write a blog that explores what you think might have been Moodie’s level of awareness of the stories she carried with her. And accordingly, the stories that she “resurrects’ by her appearance in the Dead Dog CafŽ in Green Grass Running Water.

               Moodie begins her introduction by arguing that most of the time, “emigration is a matter of necessity, not of choice” and “may, indeed, generally be regarded as an act of severe duty.” This language contains echoes of the religious and nationalistic values held by many Europeans of her time, but it also gives us an idea of what kind of motivations were driving her and her fellow immigrants. One line in particular, which I find reminiscent of the stereotypical American love of independence (another tribally-embraced story), explains the “higher motive” driving European immigrants forward: “that love of independence which springs up spontaneously in the breasts of the high-souled children of a glorious land” (Moodie Intro). Her sense of religious duty, as well as her image of Canada as a free land to claim, become clearer with her discussion of Providence working to “reclaim the waste places of the earth, and make them subservient to the wants and happiness of its creatures” (Moodie Intro).  In an attempt to explain her and her fellow pioneers’ motivations, Moodie argues that “they go forth to make for themselves a new name and to find another country, to forget the past and to live in the future, to exult in the prospect of their children being free and the land of their adoption great” (Intro, emphasis added). Here we again see echoes of the ideal of a ‘second Eden’ as well as this land being empty and available to adopt.

How serious is she when she uses language like this? Is she intensely devout and patriotic, or is she playing to what she believes are the values of her audience? If she knew the stories she carried with her, and that these stories were shared by her audience, perhaps she capitalized on this, as a writer, to create a connection with her readers. If she was not aware of the stories she carried with her, and genuinely took ownership of the patriotic and religious language she was using, these stories that form her view of the world are intensely strong. They are coming from deep core values, values of faith and devotion that were necessary for survival in her circumstances. These stories are her, and her fellow pioneers’, tools and weapons necessary to “gird up the loins of the mind, and arm themselves with fortitude to meet and dare the heart-breaking conflict” (Moodie Intro).

Moving away from the stories that color Moodie’s writing, I want to touch on the idea that she sees Canada as a different future, a place where her children can live freer lives than they could back home. To live in the future is to live in an imaginary world, a world created by one’s own mind from stories heard and absorbed throughout the life, conditioning that creates our entire worldview from birth. Motivated by the desire to create a future for one’s children is a very powerful motivation, one that taps into our most basic instincts. When someone is put in a position of necessity, as Moodie finds herself, the imagination is a survival tool, and in her case, and I’m sure the case of many European immigrants to Canada,  the stories she carries with her are her lifeline, and to question them is suicide. We are all walking around, viewing our surroundings through filters that have been built into our minds since childhood. These filters are our stories, or maybe our assumptions, as King would say (183). In my experience, it is very difficult to first, identify our own assumptions and second, remove or change them. Whether or not Moodie knew the stories she carried with her isn’t the most pressing question, in my opinion, because they have been disseminated in her writing, told again and again.

What I want to know is: if you knew Moodie could identify and separate herself from the stories of national superiority and religious duty that we see throughout her writing, could you blame her for continuing to hold onto them given her circumstances?

I’m curious.

Sierra

Thoughts on Assignment 2:6

Works Cited:

Funk, Ken. “What is a Worldview?” Essay published by Associate professor at Oregon State University. 21 Mar. 2001. Web. 2 Mar. 2016.

King, Thomas. “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial.” Unhomely States: Theorizing English-Canadian Postcolonialism. Mississauga, ON: Broadview, 2004. 183- 190.

Moodie, Susanna. Roughing it in the Bush. Project Gutenburg, 18 January 2004. Web. 1 Mar. 2016.

Tsai, Robert. “Why Americans love to declare independence.” The Boston Globe. Boston Globe Media Partners, 29 June 2014. Web. 2 Mar. 2016.