In Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water, one of the many methods used to create a Native American narrative, rather than a Westernised one, is the radical re-versioning of Western-Christian mythology. In the sections of the novel which detail the various versions and revisions of the traditional western creation myth, King satirises and reinvents many of the cornerstone figures of Christianity, and at the same time muddles them with Native American creation myths, Western literature and popular culture, creating a new story of creation with no sense of time, space or tradition. Furthermore, his use of magical realism to blend this mythology with the everyday throughout the novel demystifies the creation stories, leaving the stories, and perhaps more importantly their protagonists, open to criticism from and comparison to a modern and quotidian point of view.
The book is structured as a series of interlinked ‘real life’ plots, interspersed by this new creation myth. The real and the magical are intrinsically intertwined, and often the surreal and real sections are linked by sharing the same words in the last lines of one section and the first lines of the next (e.g “Well, for one thing, what happened to them?’ / ‘What happened to the trees’” [pp. 21-2], “‘Have we made another mistake?’ / Lionel had made only three mistakes in his entire life” [pp. 29-30]). This magical realism further confuses the already muddled creation myth with the novel’s ‘real’ plot, which forces the reader to accept a view of the world where the divine or magical can, and does, affect every day life.
King imposes Native American mythology upon Christianity as Christian mythology was forced upon the Native Americans during the colonisation. The very beginning of the book serves to demonstrate how ridiculous, not to mention sacrilegious and insulting, this practise must have seemed to Native Americans by reversing the process. King chooses the holiest of holies, the all seeing Christian ‘God’, as his first point of attack, reducing this omniscient, omnipotent being to nothing more than a dream (thus refuting the traditional Christian notion of God as an all powerful being, apart from and above human experience), and further more a dream of a dog, traditionally an animal used in western cultures to represent an inferior being. By casting God as little more than a petulant, confused animal King immediately trivialises and insults the basis of all Christian belief in the same way that early Christian settlers in the Americas brushed aside belief systems as established, if not more so, than their own as primitive or ridiculous: “I am god, says that Dog Dream. ‘Isn’t that cute,’ says Coyote. ‘That Dog Dream is contrary. That Dog Dream has everything backward’”(p. 2). This could also be seen as a direct contradiction of Genesis, in which God gives man dominion over animals; within this revision of the creation myth it seems that an animal - Coyote - has dominion over God. Even an attempt to categorise Coyote as a God figure fails, as the nameless narrator affirms later in the book that “[t]his world is full of Coyotes” (p. 272).
The author similarly dispenses with other quintessential biblical figures. Noah is portrayed as a sex-starved misogynist, who follows a perverted set of Christian rules (amongst which, for example, is “Thou Shalt Have Big Breasts”[p. 147]). The Angel Gabriel (A. A. Gabriel) we see as a stereotypical politician figure, “a little short guy with a big briefcase” (p. 269), trying to coerce Thought Woman into signing a contract for the immaculate conception, but constantly revealing himself to be not who he seems. First he shows a business card which has two sides (on one “A. A. Gabriel, Canadian Security and Intelligence Service.” [p.269] on the other “A. A. Gabriel, Heavenly Host” [p. 270]), then instead of the contract he pulls out some papers containing the phrase “as long as the grass is green and the waters run” (p. 271), a phrase often used in contracts between settlers and natives when Canada was colonised – contracts that were frequently broken. This depiction of the Angel Gabriel as a sort of double-agent also serves as a metaphor for how religion has been used by colonisers for far more self-serving purposes than simply ‘enlightening’ Native Americans, and parodies modern political machinery and the deceptions that are made through manipulation of Native Americans and of the media: “No problem, says A. A. Gabriel. Sign this paper… We’re going to need a picture” (p. 271).
Even Jesus Christ himself is mockingly portrayed, in one of Kings several versions of the creation story, as “Young Man Walking on Water” (p. 350). Far from the kind, gentle, benevolent Christ of the Bible, this Christ is angry and self-important. He portrays his biblical qualities of omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence as more “Christian Rules… And the first rule that is no one can help me. The second rule is that no one can tell me anything. Third, no one is allowed to be in two places at once. Except me.” Coming from the mouth of an angry young man, instead of a mysticised messianic figure, these three cornerstones of Christian belief sound ridiculous, and the tone of their delivery is almost childish. After Old Woman saves the disciples on the boat, and Christ takes the credit, King also mocks another of Christianity’s failings: its inherent misogyny. When one of the men in the boat points out that it was Old Woman that saved them, and not Christ, Christ replies: “Nonsense…That other person is a woman.”
King further dilutes the importance of the Western creation myth by including several incongruous characters, all from books largely regarded as colonialist (the same characters as which First Woman, Thought Woman, Changing Woman and Old Woman disguise themselves, and as which these four women are present in the real world as the four escaped Indians). These characters are archetypal colonialists, and there are many examples of this (in fact, nearly everything these characters say is verging on cliché in its portrayal of colonialist ideals). One such striking example would be the dialogue between Thought Woman and Robinson Crusoe, which epitomises the colonialist destructively patronising ideology of bringing a superior style of life to inferior people: “as a civilised white man, it has been difficult not having someone of color around whom I could educate and protect”. King expounds this point in each of the sections relating to a character from Western fiction, the final of which is Nasty Bumppo. Here, King makes the point in the most blunt and obvious dialogue in the text, as Bumppo lists what he calls “Indian gifts” and “white gifts” (p. 393), and King continues:
“So, says Old Woman. Whites are superior, and Indians are inferior.Exactly right, says Nasty Bumppo. Any questions?‘Oops,’ says Coyote. ‘We have a problem.’‘Only if you’re an Indian,’ I says.” (p. 393)
Ultimately by juxtaposing Western and Native American mythologies, King deconstructs the Christian creation story, and shows us that through the eyes of a Native American, it is as primitive and ridiculous as Native American traditions seemed to the colonists that settled in Canada and tried to displace and ‘educate’ the American Indians who lived there. Instead, he reconstructs a world where everyone, and everything is fallible, and even the mythical characters who created the world are prone to mistakes – King’s characters even describe the great flood and Christ’s birth as mistakes, appropriating Christian biblical events into King’s invented muddle of Native and Christian mythology:
“‘The last time you fooled around like this,’ said Robinson Crusoe, ‘the world got very wet.’
‘And we had to start all over again,’ said Hawkeye […]
‘But I was helpful, too,’ says Coyote. ‘That woman who wanted a baby. Now, that was helpful.’
‘Helpful!’ said Robinson Crusoe. ‘You remember the last time you did that?’ […]
‘We haven’t straightened out that mess yet,’ said Hawkeye.” (p. 416)
King’s humour, though, throughout the novel, means that this de/reconstruction of mythologies is not as aggressive or destructive as it could be. This is a book of many messages, with an enormous number of possible interpretations, and there are certainly a few direct criticisms of the way that Western settlers treat Native Americans and their traditions. In some respects, though, by mixing and muddling the two mythologies to create a single mythology which is universally absurd, King is demonstrating the similarities, as well as the differences, between the two cultures. Not only does he mock the Christian creation myth, but by using this comic style, also the Native American one. He makes fun of Native American oral traditions with his constantly restarting narrative of the creation as much as the western written literary idiom with his depiction of Moby-Jane, the black lesbian whale, and his stereotyped and exaggerated literary figures. By creating a world in which all traditions and cultures are ridiculous, King demonstrates that it is impossible to impose a predetermined set of cultural signifiers onto another culture and another culture’s mythology, in either direction. Perhaps this is best summed up by Kings narrator, when Coyote interrupts with a series of suggestions for where Old Woman fell when she fell from the sky, trying to impose images from several different cultures into the narrator’s story. The narrator finally tells the Coyote to abandon this tactic of trying to make different cultures to conform to each other’s ideologies, and replies:
“‘Where do you get these things?’ I says.
‘I read a book,’ says Coyote.
‘Forget the book,’ I says. ‘We’ve got a story to tell.’” (p. 349)
No related posts.
Subversion / Reversion: The deconstruction and reconstruction of the Western cultural narrative through a Native American idiom in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water
In Thomas King’s Green Grass, Running Water, one of the many methods used to create a Native American narrative, rather than a Westernised one, is the radical re-versioning of Western-Christian mythology. In the sections of the novel which detail the various versions and revisions of the traditional western creation myth, King satirises and reinvents many of the cornerstone figures of Christianity, and at the same time muddles them with Native American creation myths, Western literature and popular culture, creating a new story of creation with no sense of time, space or tradition. Furthermore, his use of magical realism to blend this mythology with the everyday throughout the novel demystifies the creation stories, leaving the stories, and perhaps more importantly their protagonists, open to criticism from and comparison to a modern and quotidian point of view.
The book is structured as a series of interlinked ‘real life’ plots, interspersed by this new creation myth. The real and the magical are intrinsically intertwined, and often the surreal and real sections are linked by sharing the same words in the last lines of one section and the first lines of the next (e.g “Well, for one thing, what happened to them?’ / ‘What happened to the trees’” [pp. 21-2], “‘Have we made another mistake?’ / Lionel had made only three mistakes in his entire life” [pp. 29-30]). This magical realism further confuses the already muddled creation myth with the novel’s ‘real’ plot, which forces the reader to accept a view of the world where the divine or magical can, and does, affect every day life.
King imposes Native American mythology upon Christianity as Christian mythology was forced upon the Native Americans during the colonisation. The very beginning of the book serves to demonstrate how ridiculous, not to mention sacrilegious and insulting, this practise must have seemed to Native Americans by reversing the process. King chooses the holiest of holies, the all seeing Christian ‘God’, as his first point of attack, reducing this omniscient, omnipotent being to nothing more than a dream (thus refuting the traditional Christian notion of God as an all powerful being, apart from and above human experience), and further more a dream of a dog, traditionally an animal used in western cultures to represent an inferior being. By casting God as little more than a petulant, confused animal King immediately trivialises and insults the basis of all Christian belief in the same way that early Christian settlers in the Americas brushed aside belief systems as established, if not more so, than their own as primitive or ridiculous: “I am god, says that Dog Dream. ‘Isn’t that cute,’ says Coyote. ‘That Dog Dream is contrary. That Dog Dream has everything backward’”(p. 2). This could also be seen as a direct contradiction of Genesis, in which God gives man dominion over animals; within this revision of the creation myth it seems that an animal - Coyote - has dominion over God. Even an attempt to categorise Coyote as a God figure fails, as the nameless narrator affirms later in the book that “[t]his world is full of Coyotes” (p. 272).
The author similarly dispenses with other quintessential biblical figures. Noah is portrayed as a sex-starved misogynist, who follows a perverted set of Christian rules (amongst which, for example, is “Thou Shalt Have Big Breasts”[p. 147]). The Angel Gabriel (A. A. Gabriel) we see as a stereotypical politician figure, “a little short guy with a big briefcase” (p. 269), trying to coerce Thought Woman into signing a contract for the immaculate conception, but constantly revealing himself to be not who he seems. First he shows a business card which has two sides (on one “A. A. Gabriel, Canadian Security and Intelligence Service.” [p.269] on the other “A. A. Gabriel, Heavenly Host” [p. 270]), then instead of the contract he pulls out some papers containing the phrase “as long as the grass is green and the waters run” (p. 271), a phrase often used in contracts between settlers and natives when Canada was colonised – contracts that were frequently broken. This depiction of the Angel Gabriel as a sort of double-agent also serves as a metaphor for how religion has been used by colonisers for far more self-serving purposes than simply ‘enlightening’ Native Americans, and parodies modern political machinery and the deceptions that are made through manipulation of Native Americans and of the media: “No problem, says A. A. Gabriel. Sign this paper… We’re going to need a picture” (p. 271).
Even Jesus Christ himself is mockingly portrayed, in one of Kings several versions of the creation story, as “Young Man Walking on Water” (p. 350). Far from the kind, gentle, benevolent Christ of the Bible, this Christ is angry and self-important. He portrays his biblical qualities of omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence as more “Christian Rules… And the first rule that is no one can help me. The second rule is that no one can tell me anything. Third, no one is allowed to be in two places at once. Except me.” Coming from the mouth of an angry young man, instead of a mysticised messianic figure, these three cornerstones of Christian belief sound ridiculous, and the tone of their delivery is almost childish. After Old Woman saves the disciples on the boat, and Christ takes the credit, King also mocks another of Christianity’s failings: its inherent misogyny. When one of the men in the boat points out that it was Old Woman that saved them, and not Christ, Christ replies: “Nonsense…That other person is a woman.”
King further dilutes the importance of the Western creation myth by including several incongruous characters, all from books largely regarded as colonialist (the same characters as which First Woman, Thought Woman, Changing Woman and Old Woman disguise themselves, and as which these four women are present in the real world as the four escaped Indians). These characters are archetypal colonialists, and there are many examples of this (in fact, nearly everything these characters say is verging on cliché in its portrayal of colonialist ideals). One such striking example would be the dialogue between Thought Woman and Robinson Crusoe, which epitomises the colonialist destructively patronising ideology of bringing a superior style of life to inferior people: “as a civilised white man, it has been difficult not having someone of color around whom I could educate and protect”. King expounds this point in each of the sections relating to a character from Western fiction, the final of which is Nasty Bumppo. Here, King makes the point in the most blunt and obvious dialogue in the text, as Bumppo lists what he calls “Indian gifts” and “white gifts” (p. 393), and King continues:
“So, says Old Woman. Whites are superior, and Indians are inferior.Exactly right, says Nasty Bumppo. Any questions?‘Oops,’ says Coyote. ‘We have a problem.’‘Only if you’re an Indian,’ I says.” (p. 393)
Ultimately by juxtaposing Western and Native American mythologies, King deconstructs the Christian creation story, and shows us that through the eyes of a Native American, it is as primitive and ridiculous as Native American traditions seemed to the colonists that settled in Canada and tried to displace and ‘educate’ the American Indians who lived there. Instead, he reconstructs a world where everyone, and everything is fallible, and even the mythical characters who created the world are prone to mistakes – King’s characters even describe the great flood and Christ’s birth as mistakes, appropriating Christian biblical events into King’s invented muddle of Native and Christian mythology:
“‘The last time you fooled around like this,’ said Robinson Crusoe, ‘the world got very wet.’ ‘And we had to start all over again,’ said Hawkeye […] ‘But I was helpful, too,’ says Coyote. ‘That woman who wanted a baby. Now, that was helpful.’ ‘Helpful!’ said Robinson Crusoe. ‘You remember the last time you did that?’ […] ‘We haven’t straightened out that mess yet,’ said Hawkeye.” (p. 416)
King’s humour, though, throughout the novel, means that this de/reconstruction of mythologies is not as aggressive or destructive as it could be. This is a book of many messages, with an enormous number of possible interpretations, and there are certainly a few direct criticisms of the way that Western settlers treat Native Americans and their traditions. In some respects, though, by mixing and muddling the two mythologies to create a single mythology which is universally absurd, King is demonstrating the similarities, as well as the differences, between the two cultures. Not only does he mock the Christian creation myth, but by using this comic style, also the Native American one. He makes fun of Native American oral traditions with his constantly restarting narrative of the creation as much as the western written literary idiom with his depiction of Moby-Jane, the black lesbian whale, and his stereotyped and exaggerated literary figures. By creating a world in which all traditions and cultures are ridiculous, King demonstrates that it is impossible to impose a predetermined set of cultural signifiers onto another culture and another culture’s mythology, in either direction. Perhaps this is best summed up by Kings narrator, when Coyote interrupts with a series of suggestions for where Old Woman fell when she fell from the sky, trying to impose images from several different cultures into the narrator’s story. The narrator finally tells the Coyote to abandon this tactic of trying to make different cultures to conform to each other’s ideologies, and replies:
“‘Where do you get these things?’ I says. ‘I read a book,’ says Coyote. ‘Forget the book,’ I says. ‘We’ve got a story to tell.’” (p. 349)
No related posts.