The Word for World Is Story: Syncretic Fantasy as Healing Ritual in Thomas King's Green Grass, Running Water

Arguably, at end of 20th century mimetic tradition increasingly fails to fulfil most conservative expectations of how we can understand nature of world.... It could be that late-century success of fantasy (and other genres of fantastic) is partly due to these circumstances; and that we listen to stories at fin de millennium in order to recuperate a sense that stories still exist. That we still can be told. --John Clute and Gary Westfahl, Story Every story brings imagination and reality together in moments of what we might as well call faith.... Stories make world more real, more rational, by bringing us closer to irrational mystery at its centre. --J. Edward Chamberlin The truth about stories is that that's all we are. --Thomas King, The Truth About Stories THOMAS KING'S GREEN GRASS, RUNNING WATER IS OFTEN CONCEIVED OF AS A type of resistance text, resisting Western paradigms and aesthetic structures through distinctively strategies such as use of mythic and oral storytelling structures. Structurally, novel encourages this sort of dualist reading by juxtaposing two distinct narrative streams within text: a realistic, linear story of contemporary Blackfoot characters in an identifiably real-world setting, and a series of four myths that initially appear unconnected to realm of everyday. While realistic narrative deals with conventional problems such as a love triangle, career choices, and family dynamics in Blackfoot community of Blossom, Alberta, four mythic sub-narratives present a series of creation stories, each of which satirizes various Western mythical stories, including both biblical tales (e.g., Fall, Flood, Virgin Birth, and Calming of Waters) and Western-canonical literary texts (e.g., Moby Dick, Robinson Crusoe, and James Fenimore Cooper's Westerns). These mythic, non-realistic sections overtly antagonistic towards their incorporated Western stories as when, for example, Judeo-Christian God is portrayed as a dyslexic and delusional dog (1-2). In congruence with this overtly satirical approach to Western myths, most critical treatments of novel address it as a particularly text expressing a particularly world-view (Andrews, Collins, Daxell, Gomez-vega, Korkka, Matchie and Larson, and Wyile). However, while such approaches have been invaluable in elaborating King's subversion of mainstream Western ideological and literary conventions, they also construct strong binary distinctions between and non-Native texts. texts, as posited by this binary, mythic, cyclical, communal, orally based, and expressive of particularly worldviews. Western texts, by contrast, realistic, linear, individualistic, primarily textual, and expressive of particularly Western worldviews. And although these approaches tend to be complimentary towards Native texts, they also in some senses reductive. In his Massey lectures entitled The Truth About Stories: A Narrative, King points out that although stories can be both wondrous and liberatory, they also have potential to control our lives (9) in restrictive and damaging ways. And if, as King suggests, the truth about stories is that that's all we are (Truth 2, 32, 62, 92, 122, 153), then we must take care in our selection of critical paradigms, since critical stories we tell very ones that will in turn tell us. As J. Edward Chamberlin points out, one of most persistent stories across cultures is recurring binary tale of the civilized and barbaric, Us and Them, Somebodies and Nobodies (10), and literary critics by no means immune to this tendency. With this caveat in mind, I want to retell literary-critical story of Green Grass, Running Water as fantasy, a genre which is neither nor not-Native but nonetheless remains compatible with narrative structures of King's text. …

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