Question: In her article, “Green Grass, Running Water: Theorizing the World of the Novel,” Blanca Chester focuses on an analysis of Northrop Frye as Dr. Joe Hovaugh. She writes;
In Hovaugh’s carefully constructed world, meaning lies in circular and closed systems. Thus he draws a “deliberate circle around Parliament Lake.” He then draws another, and another (324). King’s narrator then describes Indian “gifts” and white “gifts” for us (327), defining each in a play on paradigmatic opposites (327). Real Indians don’t exist in this system. But in the novel Hovaugh’s organization of the world ultimately reveals itself as petrified and static. His is a world where circles are no longer cycles—where circles construct borders around knowledge. His world, unlike the world of the old Indians, exhibits a garrison mentality. 52
For this blog assignment, I would like you to find and describe other examples of Dr. Joe Hovaugh’s character that reflect aspects of Frye’s literary theories and ideas about the Canadian imagination – or, any element of Frye’s thought that you hear echoed in the pages of Green Grass Running Water.
At first glance, Dr. Hovaugh appears to be a character obsessed with nature, as he frequently sits “in his chair behind his desk and look[s] out at the wall and the trees and the flowers and the swans on the blue green pond in the garden” (16). However, plants and animals in their natural form are not actually what Hovaugh enjoys, but instead an ordering of nature, which places it within his control. While he obsesses over ordered and manicured nature, wild nature is something he cannot understand, which unsettles him, and which he attempts to disregard. When asked by Sergeant Cereno to detail his story, he says “In the beginning all his was land. Empty land” (95). This line demonstrates Hovaugh’s attachment to the myth of terra nullius and the doctrine of discovery though which colonists viewed land available for settlement so long as there were no Christians living on it, thus disregarding Indigenous presence through religious justification. This land was of course full of life—human, plant, and animal—but because it evades Hovaugh’s ideas of order and civilization, he disregards it. As Bianca Chester points out, Joe Hovaugh’s name is a play on the word Jehovah, signaling the Christian origin of his ideologies. Hovaugh is constantly attempting to categorize what he sees: “he plotted occurrences and probabilities and directions and deviations on a pad of graph paper, turning the chart as he went, literal, allegorical, topological, anagogic” (389). Despite this work he fails to make sense of the story’s action and he struggles with his loss of control of not only The Four Old Indians, but also of the nature around him: “things in Canada seemed slightly wild, more out of hand, disorderly, even chaotic. There was an openness to the sky and a wideness to the land that made him uncomfortable. . . And the Indians” (312). Chester’s work explains that Hovaugh’s character is based on the influential literary theorist Frye. As the world of Green Grass, Running Water defies Hovaugh, the writing of “King’s text self-consciously defies categorization in Frye’s terms” (Chester 50). The novel is cyclical not linear, repeatedly returning to its beginning and reworking the story, which both changes and remains the same. Thus, “the open ended and dialogic quality of the storytelling contrasts with the literary theory” of Northrop Frye (49).
Just as Dr. Hovaugh orders nature in his garden, he also works to control the environment of his office. He obsesses over his desk, which he calls “a rare example of colonial woodcraft” that has been “stripped, repaired, stained blonde” and reminds him “of a tree cut down to the stump” (16). Though this desk acts as a symbol of colonized nature, it is still outside of his control: we read both at the beginning and the end of the novel that “Dr. Hovaugh seemed to shrink behind the desk as though it were growing, slowly and imperceptibly enveloping the man” (16, 426). The desk, the tree it came from, and the story all remain outside of Hovaugh’s control. Feeling unsettled by his desk, which moves and changes beyond his perception, he wishes for a more predictable piece of furniture: “he could picture the desk he wanted–black slate and brass, thin and sleek, a desk with drawers that opened and closed regardless of the weather” (77). However, we never see his wooden desk replaced. Another aspect of decor we see Hovaugh discuss is carpeting, more specifically, green carpeting, or plastic grass: while admiring Sergeant Cereno’s jacket, he says he “couldn’t recall ever seeing one quite so green. It reminded him of outdoor carpet” (74). Hovaugh prefers clean, bright, and artificial life, finding it somehow greener and finer than actual nature. Even after the events of this novel, in which his aims of control and order are undone, he still seeks comfort in the decor of his office environment, rolling “his toes in the soft, deep-pile carpet” (425), and returning to his fantasy of a limited and measurable world.
Dr. Hovaugh is eventually undone by his underestimation of nature, and particularly of water. When asked to begin his story again for Sergeant Cereno, this time from the very beginning, he says, “In the beginning, there was nothing. There was just the water” (97). In this statement, Dr. Hovaugh equates water with nothingness. The stories told by The Four Old Indians also begin with water, but this water is important and not to be underestimated. At the end of the novel, Coyote tries to start the story with “nothing” just like Hovaugh, but is corrected by the story’s narrator: “No,” I says. “In the beginning there was just the water” (431), separating the presence of water from an idea of nothingness. Indeed, in King’s novel, water is an important agent of the plot: right from the start we see it rising under cars and taking them away from their owners, including Hovaugh. When he finds his car stolen, we see him in the rain “soaking wet now, standing between two cars, up to his ankles in water” (315). It is water which undoes Hovaugh in the text, including at the end, when his attempts to control the The Four Old Indians fail, and these women’s work at fixing up the world results in “the dam g[iving] way, and the water and the cars tumbl[ing] over the edge of the world” (414). The way which King’s novel presents water as something powerful and as an agent of change reminded me of the movement of environmental personhood which is bringing rights to parts of nature like rivers and other bodies of water. Green Grass, Running Water succeeds in breaking literary convention, while bringing history and politics into play and discussion. As Chester puts it, King’s work suggests that “one should read stories as theory and as aspects of social process, rather than as literary play alone” (58), allowing his book to be both story and reality.
Works Cited
Assembly of First Nations. “Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery.” Assembly of First Nations, Jan. 2018.
http://www.afn.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/18-01-22-Dismantling-the-Doctrine-of-Discovery-EN.pdf
Cheater, Dan. “I Am the River, and the River Is Me: Legal Personhood and Emerging Rights of Nature.” West Coast Environmental Law, 2018.
https://www.wcel.org/blog/i-am-river-and-river-me-legal-personhood-and-emerging-rights-nature
Chester, Blanca. “Green Grass, Running Water: Theorizing the World of the Novel.” Canadian Literature 161-162. (1999).
https://canlit.ca/article/green-grass-running-water/
King, Thomas. Green Grass, Running Water. HarperPerennial, 2010.