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Article Excerpt
After European explorers in the fifteenth and sixteenth century found the North American land mass--assuming it was India and naming the indigene people Indians--it became a mythic new world for the Europeans. The idea of the discovery of North America is an imaginative rather than a "found" place because European imperialism "shaped and determined the new world's cultural history." (1) Fiction writers track the western Canada's provincial development. Immigrants, with Eastern or Western European cultural values, settled in the late nineteenth century into new rural towns and urban communities. Robert Kroetsch defines prairie culture discourses containing multi-ethnic small town attitudes from the 1930s to 1970s in the Notikeewin Trilogy. He creates subjects whose cultural conceptions of the new west link their mythic perceptions and their verbal stories to the physical reality of the different prairie and mountainous landscapes. Rural stories set in a western Canadian fictional locality reinforce the emigrants' anxiety about their new culture and new environment. Helen Tiffin suggests the differences between the visions that these people kept and the expressed immigrant stories they tell reflect the "double vision characteristic of all post-colonial peoples--the tension between imported (and imposed) language and the realities of the surrounding environment" (Tiffin "Methodology" 29, in Turner 12).
This paper explores how the contraries of creation and destruction are represented by the subjects and narrators who argue over how oral speeches or tall tales dominate over written language in different ways in each of the three novels in the trilogy. These circumscribed prairie worlds include male subjects and narrators who express their knowledge, frustration, disappointment, or anger about the effects of nature, war, or community values on their lives. Nature and geography are controlling components in the design of these towns while the narrating subjects are buffeted by their idees fixes. The province of Alberta is the location of the seven imaginary rural prairie towns which forecast its people's cultural identity. (2) For "how a community imagines itself is linked to how it speaks and thinks about itself" (Turner 108). The trilogy includes: The Words of My Roaring (1966) set in the depression of the 1930s, The Studhorse Man (1969) dealing with the end of WW 11, and Gone Indian (1973) focusing on the 1960s and 1970s. Framed on the West by the Rockies and on the East by Saskatchewan, the prairie landscapes suffer from fierce winters, prairie droughts, and include buffalo jumps and badlands rich with skeletons, fossils, and hoodoos. There are seven fictitious rural towns "set along a fictitious 'Cree River'" which flows through the actual parklands near Edmonton, Alberta. Marking the boundaries are the towns of Coulee Hill where Studhorse takes place and seventy-two miles farther is Notikeewin where Words and Indian occur. Other fictional places are "Roundhead, St. Leo, Burkhardt, Wildfire Lake, and Elkart Pond"(Kizuk 57). Cultural happenings in and around them evoke "the prairie legacies of the Cree [Indians], the French missionary enterprise, the Canadian Pacific Railroad, Calvinist bible-thumping, and in Words the agrarian, anti-Eastern government of Bible Bill Aberhart" (Kizuk 57).
Prairie stories come out of the personalities of the subjects who confront different problems in each community. Kroetsch records and invents the west of Coulee Hill and Notikeewin, which he calls "a local pride" (William Carlos Williams). By emphasizing "fragmentation, intertextuality, and the parody of carnival" Kroetsch establishes a circus in motion creating subjects and narrators whose attitudes about culture and location differ in each decade (Kirtz 208). There is the drought and a riding election in 1935 in Words, followed by World War II in the 1940s in Studhorse, and then the increased tension between Canada and the United States in the 1970s in Indian. By interpreting the novels sequentially, and knowing that oral stories are the stuff of prairie talk and regional literature, I focus on how these people, with complex quest narratives, experience creativity and destruction, life and death in these small fictive towns.
Kroetsch emphasizes prairie speech and how the subjects orally listen and redefine their identities in these prairie towns impacted by local, national, and international events. To writers and his subjects, Kroetsch explains: "What we have to do in Canada is concentrate on hearing this voice that is within us and trust it " (interview with Donald Cameron 85, in Ball 1989 5). Because a large component of carnival includes the proverbial Phoenix that appears always to rise out of the ashes, the binaries of creativity and destruction control the subjects' and narrators' actions in the Notikeewin Trilogy (see Randall). The voiced expressions and speeches of the subjects or narrators on different political, religious, and social cultural issues explode with self-conscious actions.
Since, "Canadian writing is the writing down of place," Kroetsch's subjects do not question "who am I" but "where is here?" (1986 116). The tone of the subjects' voices is carnivalesque, which Kroetsch defines as "where things are happening and being talked about." In this respect, there is a "conjunction of two forces: a wildness of action shaped by ceremony or festival, and the doubled language that goes with it: a ritualized language and an abandoned language" (LV 37). The subjects become excited and inflated, and the tone of their voices exaggerates their actions. For, in these rural venues, "[E]veryone is an active participant, everyone communes in the carnival act. Carnival is not contemplated, it is, strictly speaking, not even played out; its participants live in it (Bakhtin 100 in LTW 97).
In these novels, the creative and destructive duality of these stories begins with a pair of idiosyncratic and competitive subjects in each novel. They recognize their connection to...
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