...denaturalizing the mother/father binary.

**********

When exploring how Thomas King's novels subvert the notion that the written word is discrete from its oral genesis, critics concern themselves almost exclusively with the author's allusions to Native oral tradition. While it is true that King's adaptations of Native orality do much to destabilize the primacy of writing as a European institutional practice, one consequence of this trend is that King's numerous references to Greek mythology tend to be treated as peripheral or supplementary to the projects attributed to his Native references. But given their complex historical relationship to oral communication, King's allusions to Greek culture are central to Truth and Bright Water's engagement with tensions between speaking and writing. Their mythological connection to family conflicts of epic proportions also makes them essential to understanding a related aspect of the text that rarely enjoys critical attention in King scholarship: gender identity. As a novel deeply concerned with family dynamics, Truth and Bright Water is specifically invested in play with the categories of "mother" and "father." Attending to the Greek dimensions of the novel allows us to see that it is, more than a disruption of the ascendancy of written language, an exploration of the ways in which the relationship between oral and written communication is entrenched in constructions of maternity and paternity.

Given King's tendency to write himself into his novels, it is not surprising that he incorporates elements of his Greek heritage into his fictional exploration of oral culture. Greek history is fraught with tensions between the spoken and the written. Socrates, who never wrote, is described--in writing, in Plato's Phaedrus, a dialogue--as deriding writing that is seductively certain rather than dialectical in nature. Like Native religions (and, to some extent, all religion), Greek mythology was produced and reproduced first through oral communication, but has been widely disseminated in pictorials and writing, particularly plays, which embody the union of written and spoken words. Psychoanalysis--the "talking cure"--appropriates the familial conflicts enacted in these myths and plays to shape theories of the family and the individual psyche. The first half of this essay unpacks the ways in which King's engagement with this long, complex (and, here, impossibly condensed) history aligns maternal/paternal conflicts with structural tensions between orality and writing. The second half explores how King suggests that the preservation of oral culture lies in a rejection of binary thinking that insists on the discreteness of categories like "oral" and "written" by denaturalizing the mother/father binary to which they are aligned.

As a good deal of criticism suggests, King often successfully collapses binary categories through his use of the border motif. Robin Ridington's extensive work on King examines a number of geographic and generic border crossings. Jennifer Andrews discusses the ways in which King straddles boundaries in order to deconstruct the basis of national difference. In Border Crossings: Thomas King's Cultural Inversions, Davidson, Walton, and Andrews map the ways in which King's demarcation of numerous "territories" emphasizes the malleability of boundaries (15). These analyses are all valuable insofar as they identify "how King's texts explore cross-cultural problems like Native rights and race relations, while incorporating critical Native issues within their narrative structures" (3). They do not, however, take into account how King's borders operate in terms of the relationship between gender and his preoccupation with oral tradition. Because Truth and Bright Water--a written text--alludes to oral narratives, it constitutes a counterinfluential border space in and of itself, one that brings together and mutually affects both the oral allusion and its literary framework. The conception of this tertiary space of mutually altered meaning between the oral and written was what first prompted me to question the relationship between these two seemingly discrete realms and familial origins--particularly parentage--in Truth and Bright Water. To what extent is King's novel about the productive relationship between orality and writing as the "parents" of the text, and to what extent do his Greek allusions provide insight into this relationship?

To embark upon answering these questions, I want to begin with the Shield River, the border between the towns of Truth and Bright Water, and an analogy for the generative powers of representation. Throughout the novel, these powers are caught up in struggles between maternity and paternity, which are in turn figured as threats towards oral culture. Although both Lum and Tecumseh struggle with their desires to free themselves from their father's dominance and reaffirm their connections with their mothers, in the end only Tecumseh seems to have achieved balance between his maternal and paternal connections. Lum's mother is still dead and his father still beats him. Frustrated and confused, Lum therefore breaks down, plunges into the Shield, and drowns. As Ridington points out, Lum, particularly insofar as he is in training for the Buffalo Run at Indian Days, references the Apache warrior/runner Geronimo ("Re-Creation" 228). Ridington also explains that the names Truth and Bright Water refer to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, an area known as Geronimo Springs (228). King plays on this name when his Geronimo figure literally springs into the Shield. For Ridington, the jump is liberating insofar as it returns the bones of lost Indian children to the "life-giving water of creation" ("Happy" 102). The Plains Indian shields possess similar generative powers: "A warrior paints his shield with designs representing his visionary encounters with supernatural helpers. Shields are icons that actualize the power of stories. Shields bring stories to life. The symbols on shields are intertribal and, like Plains sign language, facilitate communication across the divides of particular languages and traditions. When you view a shield, you recall the stories it represents. When you dream the design of a shield, you enter its stories directly" (90). As a reference to these shields, the river represents the power to breathe life...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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