The New North

GGRW start “Dr. Joseph Hovaugh sat at his desk … [12] End: “What happened to the Trees …. Yes, said Robinson Crusoe ….” [18]

My assigned section interwove between multiple storylines, as much of the story does, and posed some interesting dichotomies between characters. I’ve gone through and analyzed the main and most important ones in order to draw connections that can lead to better understanding.

Dr. Joseph Hovaugh – As Flick notes, the name is a play on Jehovah. The parallel is between King’s character and God in the Bible. In the opening scene of my pages, he “seemed to shrink behind the desk as though it were growing, slowly and imperceptibly enveloping the man” (King 11). Before this the text reveals a parallelism between the two in Genesis 1:31 — “And God saw everything he had made and, behold, it was very good” — and page 10 — Dr. Hovaugh sat in his chair… and he was pleased.” The desk behind which he sits is taken from the physically created world, and, like God, the thing he made is the thing that eventually grows to both envelop him and push him away.

Alberta Frank – One of the many names with inference, the “frankness” of her character is represented in the character herself as well as the province her name mimics. This trait is shown in Alberta’s response to Mary’s question of what will happen if they don’t spell the names right on the test: “You probably won’t get exactly all the points.”

Lone Ranger – A fictional character from American history, the Lone Ranger was a cowboy who fought American outlaws. Political Blindspot claimed the fictional character to be based off a man named Bass Reeves, who lived a pretty crazy post-Civil War life. Many details of the Bass Reeves’ life are similar to that of the Lone Ranger: “a lawman hunting bad guys, accompanied by a Native American, riding on a white horse, and with a silver trademark.”

Hawkeye – A longstanding historic Native character and name, Hawkeye’s Canadian literary history goes back as far as 1826. In James Feminore Cooper’s novel The Last of the Mohicans, he is a “is a fearless warrior who carries a long rifle and wanders across the frontier.”

Robinson Crusoe – Based off the real-life shipwrecked mariner Alexander Selkirk, King’s Crusoe symbolizes the sense of survival within the story. “It is a beautiful sky, however,” reveals Crusoe’s ability to make the best of a situation, a survival-based necessity (13).

Ishmael – Ishmael is a character with biblical and literary implications. The name therefore brings implications from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, the story of Genesis in the Bible, and other creative adaptations.

Works Cited

Flick, Jane. “Reading Notes for Thomas King’s Green Grass Running Water.” Canadian Literature 161-162. (1999). Web. April 04/2013.

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

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—or 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?

King creates a cyclical theme the same way the theme itself was created. It is a creation paradox that has no end and no beginning and that plays with the structure of time from the beginning of the book to the end.

“But when that Coyote Dream thinks about being a dog, it gets everything mixed up. It gets everything backward.”

Both the structure of time and thought are put into question through Coyote’s introduction and opening story. As Ishmael notes, the Lone Ranger’s creation story from the book of Genesis in the Bible is “the wrong story… That story comes later.” To reveal what most readers would know as the “first story” as something different brings its truth to the forefront. In reality, even though the story of Genesis is about the beginning it stands to reason that the story itself was written after the event of creation occurred.

The purpose of this is to loosen the ties that the Bible’s creation story has and to provide dialogues the space they need to insert their comedic but thoughtful commentary. The entitlement of GOD juxtaposed against Alberta’s carelessness demands the evocation of different ideals from different readers. A Christian reader, for example, may find the scene disrespectful since it is her creation story that is being exploited and questioned. However — and this is where perspective and understanding’s territory reign — since Alberta’s creation story is different, it has no beginning or end, her attitude towards GOD, who she does not think acts like a god, mirrors the disrespect GOD shows her.

The reason King goes back to the beginning of creation is to allow space in the stories of Alberta, Lionel and Eli. Space, I think, is the defining word in regards to the question of why King does this. An interesting intersection between this model of space and a scientific one is Steinhardt’s “Cyclic Theory of the Universe” which states:

The cyclic model proposes that the big bang is a collision between branes that occurs at regular intervals; that each bang creates hot matter and radiation and triggers an epoch of expansion, cooling and structure formation; that there is an interbrane force responsible for drawing the branes together whose potential energy acts like dark energy when the branes are far apart; and that each cycle ends with the contraction of the extra dimension and a collision between branes – a new big bang – that initiates the next cycle.

Reading this introduction is much like Coyote’s conversation with “I” at the end of Green Grass, Running Water. It is the paradox that in the beginning there was both nothing and water, both an epoch of expansion and collision. Rather than an agreement on one answer for Coyote’s question of “where did all the water come from?” I think King proposes that it’s the “interbrane force responsible for drawing the branes together” that matters. The cyclic idea of creation is not so much about creation itself as the periods in between and it is only once we realize that there truly is no beginning or end that we can begin to appreciate the everything in between.