Chapitre VI. L’hybridité générique

Vollmann refers to The Rifles as a book that “straddles the gap between fiction and documentary history” (409). The novel’s narrator is difficult to pin down, because of his polymorphous omnipresence and multiple narrative voices. This precludes any attempt to distinguish, within the narration, between fiction and anthropological, historical or travel discourse. This chapter, in conclusion to the other chapters of the book, aims to investigate the generic hybridization of The Rifles and the process of fragmentation of language and genres.The chapter builds on louri Lotman’s idea that in a literary text, by shifting from one system of expression to another, one genre to another, the writer creates “noise” that, paradoxically, is a constant source of information. This strategy plays on the relation between writer and reader, whose reading contract, in The Rifles, is blurred from the beginning and whose expectations are therefore unsettled. The chapter reads The Rifles together with three other texts, in order to examine Vollmann’s way of dealing with dislocation and displacement by employing generic displacement and transformation. Les derniers rois de Thulé (1955, 1989), by Jean Malaurie, is an anthropological narrative about his work with Greenland Inuit; Passage to Juneau (1999), the travel narrative in which Jonathan Raban retraces George Vancouver’s search for the Inside Passage in 1791; and A Discovery of Stangers (1994), a historical novel in which Rudy Wiebe retells John Frankin’s 1820-21 land expedition to the Polar Sea.The conclusion to the anthropological enquiry carried out in Les derniers rois de Thulé consists in denouncing and rejecting the destruction of the Inuit people. The Rifles adopts a similar stance, but conveys it by framing the narrative with testimonies, and by moving away from this form to fiction in the bulk of the text. Further, illustrations have a documentary function in Thulé, whereas they aim at subjective representation in The Rifles. Overall, while Malaurie in Thulé familiarizes himself with the world of the Inuit, one is left with a strong impression of alienation of the protagonist in The Rifles.Passage to Juneau provides a good counterpoint to The Rifles if considered as a travel narrative underlaid by a quest. Raban starts out aiming to examine the various meanings attributed to the Inside Passage over time, and ends up communing with a sea in which he finds a projection of his own tumultuous emotions, in a mix of predominantly Romantic, but also West-Coast Indian vision. By contrast, the quest of Vollmann’s avatars at the Pole is dominated by the painful awareness that their vision is limited by both scope and mortality.A Discovery of Strangers focuses on the story of Greenstockings and Hood during Franklin’s 1820-21 land expedition, a story which is retold in the chapter entitled “Akaicho’s Debt” in The Rifles. Both Wiebe and Vollmann rely on a defamiliarization process, but while the former aims at foregrounding the viewpoint of the Yellowknife Indians and women, the latter evokes the long-term shock caused by the expedition, through time shifts between the 19th and 20th centuries, and via Franklin/Subzero and Reepah’s affair.Altogether, generic hybridity in The Rifles contributes to leaving the reader with an impression of disorientation and repressed guilt, so that any form of reconciliation seems bound to remain a dream. But hybridity is also a source of disruptive “noise” which prevents ethnocentric reduplication by offering so many forms of opening to the Other, leading to a renewed form of Romantic lyricism that refuses closure.

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