Exploring Boundaries The North in Western Canadian Writing

JANNE KORKKA

N MY READING of Canadian prairie literature, there emerges a group of writers that I sometimes think of as a troublesome trio. The members I are perhaps the most prominent contemporary fiction writers in Western Canada: , , and Aritha van Herk. Such a label may seem slightly whimsical, but it reflects the strong ties to the western land that all three share and explore in their writing, and the fact that despite (or because of?) these ties, they have unanimously, though separately, set course for the North. My aim is to explore the treatment of place in their writing, par- ticularly the prominent position of the Canadian North, which has claimed an important position in several of the key texts by all three authors. The scope of this article, however, requires focusing attention on a limited portion of their work: location – particularly Western Canada – is a central theme in almost any text written by members of the trio, and also their engagement with the North spreads over a number of works. My main emphasis will be on their non-fiction, where all three directly discuss a shared interest in place – particularly the Canadian North – which has shaped their writing and whose influence is also visible in their representation of the West. Especially Kroetsch’s and van Herk’s writing is strongly marked by mapping the margins and boundaries of language use and narrative structure. Consequently, their essay-writing repeatedly returns to considerations of genre boundaries and demonstrations of how they are rendered fluid and sometimes almost non- existent. Thus it is logical that also the influences of two very distinct regions of Canada begin to intertwine in their work, even if originally they may have provided a very different incentive for writing. Although Wiebe seems to be most comfortable with the form of the novel, he joins the other two in giving priority to storytelling over genre-specific forms of narrative: both he and 336 JANNE KORKKA ½¾

Kroetsch have on more than one occasion approached one and the same story with tools provided by both fiction and essay.1 The trio’s shared enthusiasm about Western Canada becomes evident espe- cially in their fiction. For example, Wiebe has questioned established prairie history, particularly its representation of the First Nations, in the novels The Temptations of Big and The Scorched-Wood People (1977), as well as his most important short story, “Where Is the Voice Coming from?” (1971).2 Van Herk’s female protagonist in her first novel, Judith (1978), takes up a male enterprise, farming, in a male-dominated land. Kroetsch’s initial fame owed a lot to his early novels The Words of My Roaring (1966) and The Studhorse Man (1969), which addressed and often took apart images of tradi- tional, agrarian and realism in prairie literature. The later works of these writers have sometimes taken the reader around the world through both the plot and the map of literary influences, but it is striking to observe how consistently the key moments in these works may nevertheless take place on the Canadian prairies. Prime examples of this are Wiebe’s The Blue Moun-

1 In Wiebe’s case, the story of the nineteenth-century Cree chief Big Bear has inspired the novel The Temptations of Big Bear (1973) and the essays “On the Trail of Big Bear” and “Bear Spirit in a Strange Land (All That’s Left of Big Bear),” both in A Voice in the Land, ed. W.J. Keith (, Alberta: NeWest, 1981): which are discussions of the process of remaking Big Bear’s story. Another similar case is the manhunt for Albert Johnson in west- ern Arctic Canada in 1932. Johnson, an enigmatic figure whose real identity remains dis- puted to this day, became involved in a quarrel over traplines and wounded and killed Northwest Mounted Police officers before being killed by them. Johnson’s story is retold by Wiebe in the novel The Mad Trapper (1980), and in the 1973 short story “The Naming of Albert Johnson,” in River of Stone: Fictions and Memories (Toronto: Vintage, 1995): 74– 91. Wiebe also explores the mystery from a more contemporary point of view in the essay “On Being Motionless” (incorporated into Playing Dead) and its shorter version “On Refusing the Story” (in River of Stone, 303–20). Kroetsch has explored Johnson’s legend in “The Poem of Albert Johnson,” in The Stone Hammer Poems (Toronto: Oolichan, 1975), and in the essay collection A Likely Story (1995), which discusses both Johnson’s legend and Wiebe’s interest in it. 2 In the short story, Wiebe explores both the story of a young Cree man called Almighty Voice and an unnamed narrator’s struggle to tell that story on the basis of insufficient evidence. Almighty Voice was originally wanted for stealing a cow, later for killing RCMP officers. In the end, he was killed in a manhunt where also several of his pursuers died in 1897; his guilt for the original crime remains unclear. The narrator’s success lies in dis- covering that a story based on remaining evidence is distorted and cannot be imposed on the past or a well-informed understanding of the past. His observations move from the initial “The problem is to make the story” – Rudy Wiebe, “Where Is the Voice Coming from?” in The Angel of the Tar Sands and Other Stories (1971; Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1982): 78 – to “I am become element in what is happening at this very moment”; Wiebe, “Where Is the Voice Coming from?” 85 (emphasis in the original). The narrator’s observa- tions of his own struggle become exceptionally direct reflections of Wiebe’s approach to writing fiction as a process strongly embedded in history.