by Margaret L. Clarke
History Department, University of Manitoba
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Penny van Toorn, Rudy Wiebe and the Historicity of the Word. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1995. pp. 256. ISBN 0-88864-265-2.
Popular western Canadian historians have long claimed Rudy Wiebe as one of their own. His novels, The Temptations of Big Bear, The Scorched Wood People, and The Mad Trapper, as well as the inclusion of his short stories in works such as Stories from Western Canada seemed to place his works firmly in that genre. The Temptations of Big Bear, about the 19th century Cree chief, The Scorched Wood People, about Riel and the Métis, have been seen as offering popular access to topics and voices from less privileged fields of history.
In Rudy Wiebe and the Historicity of the Word, Penny van Toom places these historical novels within the context of all his writings and then recontextualizes his oeuvre on the basis of his intellectual background as a Mennonite and an important voice in Canadian literature. In doing this, she reveals how all his work can be seen as a multi-dimensional battle with the demands of his belief system.
She leads the reader toward this realization, beginning with an introductory chapter, a bit daunting for those of us not academically grounded in literary studies, titled “The Politics of Narrative Practice.” In it she sets the stage by discussing the progression of his development of experimental narrative forms, linked with a consistency of thematic interest, character types and plot structure. She contends that within the variety of forms and subject matter he has chosen to write about, “the plots of Wiebe’s novels become variants of a single paradigm.” (1)
After using the first chapter to introduce the reader to some of the specialized vocabulary of literary analysis, and an introduction to her analysis of Wiebe’s work, she moves on to discuss six of his novels in more depth. As she does so, the reader begins to comprehend what the first chapter was discussing. With each new example of his careful technique, with each new outline of the same plot, she draws the reader into silent agreement. Rudy Wiebe does not write about Canada so much as he writes about issues of language and God. The clearest statement of this belief comes at the end of the book, during her comparison of him and Russian theorists. There she says “Wiebe acknowledges the historicity of truth as human beings can know it, but he also posits the existence of an absolute, authoritative Truth which exists irrespective of the state of human knowledge.” (202)
How then are Canadian historians to read him? Do we continue to privilege his works on the basis of their high content of material from original archival sources? Do we, as she says, read him as making an effort to recover “authentic ‘original’“ native voices? (116, referring to Big Bear) She discusses this question in the context of his use of an epigraph from the book of Acts at the beginning of The Temptations of Big Bear. She says
By publishing sections of the documented past in The Temptations of Big Bear, Wiebe releases a body of archival documents into new interpretive contexts in the open-ended present, where they may enter into dialogue with a diversity of readers ... In its thousands of copies, Wiebe’s novel disseminates the documented past into a wider public domain, ... where it may reach a more culturally diverse audience than that small band of scholars who usually act as official custodians of the past. The Temptations of Big Bear not only emphasizes the significance of the undocumented past, it also points to the gaps and silences manifest in the suppressed other-voicedness of the existing written records. Certain readings (voicings) have been precluded by the narrow range of contexts in which the documented past is traditionally interpreted. (113, 114)
(Recently, that small band of scholars have done work that is increasingly open-ended, i.e., Jennifer Brown’s work on George Nelson, which in its forward and appendices, surround the basic text with responses to it from various current native voices.)
After discussing the resulting multiplicity of voices and meanings that his use of documents releases, she comments:
Potentially, there could be as many interpretations of The Temptations of Big Bear as there are readers of the text, because meaning is generated through the dialogic engagement between voices inside and voices outside the text. These voices meet in the text and in the minds of readers. (115) [emphasis mine]
She goes on to remind us that Wiebe is not content to release meaning, but that
He wants to liberate the meaning of Big Bear’s life from the monologic Anglo-Canadian historical tradition, that is, from the meaning imposed on it by official history. Yet because this dialogization serves only as a stage in a process whereby Wiebe re-integrates Big Bear’s life into an alternative monologic order. Wiebe must deal with the question of misappropriation of wrong-reading of his own text (115) [emphasis mine]
Surely the use of the word ‘misappropriation’ in this context will strike many writers of native history as ironic, having faced the issue as voiced by the native communities. To those of us more interested in the many voices from the past than one modem author’s plot devices, this should operate as a clear warning. Wiebe is not operating as an historian.
There are other places where both van Toorn’s work and Wiebe’s falls apart from a lack of adequate historical background. She points out that during Big Bear’s trial, Wiebe uses Kitty McLean as a “reader ... listener-surrogate” (117), but because she is unaware, and perhaps Wiebe was too, of the real Kitty, she is misused to draw attention to Big Bear’s verbal utterances (118), as if she who grew up on the plains would not have understood his Cree as plainly as English. When Wiebe has her father requesting translation from his daughter, he seems to be signifying that she understood Big Bear, but even that is bizarre. Wouldn’t her father, someone who had spent his whole career in trade with the Cree, have picked up their language?
There is a similar problem with the discussion of The Scorched Wood People. She notes how Wiebe used the voice of Pierre Falcon “the historically real Métis bard,” (140) to frame the story as a dramatic monologue, but she is so concerned with Wiebe’s over-powering of Falcon’s voice with his own that she pays little attention to what the use of that real character was meant to say.
Three possibilities occurred to this reviewer. The historically real Falcon was more than a bard. He was Cuthbert Grant’s lieutenant and brother-in-law. Wiebe could have been trying to suggest the historical time depth of the Metis struggle, referring back to the events of 1815-1817. He could have meant it as a device to legitimate Riel by tying him to a longer struggle, or he may have meant to hint that Riel had a different path open to him, that of careful collaboration. This path was followed by Cuthbert Grant when he lead his people to Grantown [which became St. Francois Xavier].
van Toom does understand that Falcon was not of the same time and place as Riel. Born in 1793, Pierre Falcon was probably no longer alive during Riel’s time, although one of his contemporaries lived until just before the events in 1869. G. R. McKay, born in 1792, died 1877).
At the close of the chapter on The Scorched Wood People, she says
Yet through the posthumous, extra-historical voice of Falcon, Wiebe can imaginatively transcend the perpetual limitations of all who remain bound within the contingent historical world, where truth can only be discovered dialogically. Falcon’s post-historical omniscience, his view from beyond the grave, works rhetorically to de-historicize, and hence authorize, truths which Wiebe believes to be absolute and eternal. (162)
Again, she is pointing out how Wiebe is searching for “Eternal Truth” in his works. This historian concludes: Read Rudy Wiebe if you want to understand the Mennonite soul, if you want to confront your own belief system, if you want to think about the many voices in our lives. Do not read him to understand native history or to hear unencumbered native voices. Recent scholarship has given us many authentic sources for those other than Rudy Wiebe. It is time to take Rudy Wiebe down from the Canadian History shelf and ensconce him securely on the one labelled Canadian Literature—Post-Modern.
Page revised: 26 September 2012
