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The Constitution of Movement in Rudy Wiebe's Fiction

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The Constitution of Movement in Rudy Wiebe's Fiction The Constitution of Movement in Rudy Wiebe’s Fiction A Phenomenological Study of Three Mennonite Novels Malin E. Sigvardson Stockholm University © Malin E. Sigvardson, Stockholm 2006 ISBN 91-7155-317-7 Cover image: Popov Anatoli, Amur River Ice. Photograph. Courtesy of Intour-Khabarovsk Travel Company. Printed in Sweden by US–AB universitetsservice, Stockholm 2006 Distributor: Stockholm University Library Abstract Sigvardson, Malin E., 2006. The Constitution of Movement in Rudy Wiebe’s Fiction: A Phenomenological Study of Three Mennonite Novels. Pp. 162. Stockholm: ISBN: 91–7155–317–7. This study investigates movement as a phenomenon of constituting directed- ness in the Canadian writer Rudy Wiebe’s Mennonite novels. In Peace Shall Destroy Many (1962), The Blue Mountains of China (1970), and Sweeter Than All the World (2001), the phenomenon of movement is complexly at work as a decisive factor on numerous levels of constitution. Employing the concept of phenomenological directedness, the study elucidates phenomena central to the kinetic-kinaesthetic materiality of the three works. Focusing on textual nuances of kinaesthetic accentuation, the investigation highlights ways in which directedness shapes subjectivity rather than vice versa. Kinetic reality emerges as something torn between distance as a separating interval and distance as a remote intimacy manifesting an elision of the span between source-point and terminus. Such discrepancy shapes a sense of existential inconsecutiveness, in which an intriguing diminishment of feeling is a heightening of the affective life. This state of affairs is frequently aligned with faith as world-withdrawal. The wandering of persecuted believ- ers is a theological process that at any given time can reduce itself to an external, purely geographic enterprise, thus becoming a substitute for regeneration. Nevertheless, the phenomenon of perpetual travel has the capacity to produce an overarching bonding-affect at the constituting heart of a community whose kinetic life is inseparable from the movement of regeneration. Key words: Rudy Wiebe, movement, kinesis, kinaesthesia, directedness, phenome- nology, Christianity, Edmund Husserl, Canadian literature, Mennonites, faith, regeneration, eschatology, Peace Shall Destroy Many, The Blue Mountains of China, Sweeter Than All the World, work, migration, corporeality, immobilization, focalization, homelessness. In memory of my father Contents Abbreviations .................................................................................................ix Chapter 1. Introduction ................................................................................ 15 Chapter 2. Peace Shall Destroy Many......................................................... 39 2.1 Force...............................................................................................................39 2.2 Rupture ...........................................................................................................43 2.3 The Logos of Work..........................................................................................50 2.4 Mennonite Kinetosome ...................................................................................59 2.5 Elision .............................................................................................................62 Chapter 3. The Blue Mountains of China..................................................... 68 3.1 Pain.................................................................................................................68 3.2 Focal Magnification .........................................................................................78 3.3 Diminished Being ............................................................................................85 3.4 The Light of Incomprehension ........................................................................92 3.5 Reeling............................................................................................................94 Chapter 4. Sweeter Than All the World ....................................................... 98 4.1 Primary Movement..........................................................................................98 4.2 Corporeal Memory ........................................................................................104 4.3 Passing-on Work: Regenerative Knitting ......................................................107 4.4 Falling Home.................................................................................................118 4.5 Communal Participation................................................................................125 4.6 Earth .............................................................................................................127 Concluding Remarks.................................................................................. 132 Acknowledgements.................................................................................... 139 Bibliography ............................................................................................... 141 Index .......................................................................................................... 151 viii Abbreviations AO Walter Klassen, ed., Anabaptism in Outline BB Julia Kasdorf, The Body and the Book BMC Rudy Wiebe, The Blue Mountains of China CM Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations EF W. J. Keith, Epic Fiction EM Michel Henry, The Essence of Manifestation FEC Anthony C. Thiselton, The First Epistle to the Corinthians: A Commentary on the Greek Text GY Keith A. Mathison, Given For You HW Penny van Toorn, Rudy Wiebe and the Historicity of the Word Id:II Edmund Husserl, Ideas II Id:III Edmund Husserl, Ideas III IMH Cornelius J. Dyck, An Introduction to Mennonite History LAW Jane Hostetler Robinett, “Listening All the Way Home” MM Thieleman J. van Braght, comp., Martyrs Mirror PC Ervin Beck, “Postcolonial Complexity in the Writings of Rudy Wiebe” PDM Rudy Wiebe, Peace Shall Destroy Many PE Geerhardus Vos, The Pauline Eschatology PM Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement SAW Rudy Wiebe, Sweeter Than All the World SB Douglas Reimer, Surplus at the Border SEP Amy Kroeker, “Separation from the World” TIP Magdalene Redekop, “Translated into the Past” TS Edmund Husserl, Thing and Space VL W. J. Keith, ed., A Voice in the Land WB Edna Froese, To Write or to Belong WC T. W. Smyth, Rudy Wiebe as Novelist: Witness and Critic, Without Apology ix x Plate: Matthew Tiessen. Third Movement, 2004. Oil and Acrylic on Canvas, 91 x 122 cm. Artist’s Collection. © 2004 Matthew Tiessen. (p. 38) xi xii The very grammar of Inuktitut requires that you express all phenomena as either roughly equal in size—things are as broad as they are long, that is, areal, or as unequal—they are longer than they are broad, that is, linear. Two corollaries expand this linguistic structural understand- ing and further explain what I mean: first, an areal thing changes dimension and becomes linear when it moves; second, any area without easily observable limits (a field of ice, the sea, an expanse of tundra) is automatically classified as long and narrow, that is, as linear also. In order to live a human being must move . Therefore in order to live he/she must become a linear dimension in a linear space. Playing Dead And then they will move again into their continual travel. Gradually at first, then more steadily, like driftwood dis- covering a momentary current, hesitating into daily eddies of moss or crusted erratics but leaning more certainly down into motion along this contorted river, or this lakeshore; easily avoiding the noisy, devastated esker between Roundrock and Winter lakes and their connecting tributary streams. Seeking steadily north. From every direction more and more of them will drift together, thousands and tens of thousands drawn together by the lengthening light into the worn paths of their necessary journey, an immense dark river of life flowing north to the ocean, to the calving grounds where they know themselves to have been born. A Discovery of Strangers 13 14 Chapter 1. Introduction To concern oneself with Rudy Wiebe’s fiction is to concern oneself with movement. In Epic Fiction: The Art of Rudy Wiebe, W. J. Keith aptly asserts that what tends to linger after reading Wiebe is a sense of “movement.”1 Whether Wiebe writes about a Canadian or about a specifically Mennonite heritage,2 we find that the text’s spatial, temporal, and spiritual realities are kinetic. In Wiebe criticism, the two passages most frequently reiterated are infused by movement.3 Extracted from a well known interview, one of these gets quoted for its assumed capacity to establish Christian faith as Wiebe’s literary backdrop: “In Jeremiah’s images, [peace is] like a moving stream, irresistibly moving on, but, in relation to its environment, perfectly at rest.”4 The other frequently-quoted passage is commonly regarded as the writer’s commentary on his own narratological structure and purpose: To break into the space of the reader’s mind with the space of this western landscape and the people in it you must build a structure of fiction like an engineer builds a bridge or a skyscraper over and into space. A poem, a lyric, will not do. You must lay great black steel lines of fiction, break up that space with huge design and, like the fiction of the Russian steppes, build giant artefact.5 1 Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press, 1981, 43 (hereafter cited in text as EF). 2 Criticism has tended
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