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.