Byzantium North: Some Contextual Notes for Rudy Wiebe's Collected Stories

Abstract: Arranged in nonchronological order, the half-century's stories in this collection, various in both style and substance, draw upon a number relevant contexts--literary, historical, personal. The threefold allusion made in the title one Rudy Wiebe's key stories, Sailing to Danzig, recalls W. B. Yeats's layered vision ancient the Irish Republic, and his own role as lyric poet. Thus Wiebe adopts a precedent for his collection's idealization indigenous North American culture, his own national identity, and his role as a storyteller who now envisions the unifying mystique an Inuit- and Canadian-Arctic North. Attentive readers this half-century's collection by Rudy Wiebe might be inclined to ask what Story these fifty-one stories are now telling, since the recurrence setting, character, and event suggests the possibility an evolved meta-narrative. Moreover, in the preface to the book Wiebe may seem to be referring to the subgertre called novel-in-stories. is obvious, he writes, numerous stories here are integral to many my longer fictions. (1) But though his third novel, The Blue Mountains China (1970), is in fact composed a familial group chronologically-ordered tales, his Collected Stories (2010)--multiethnic, stylistically-diverse, and topically-formatted as it is--makes pretense to straightforward novelistic discourse. Holistic readers this collection soon find that Complexity, thy name is Wiebe. A writer who pursues a wide variety cultural interests outside his scribal calling, Wiebe draws upon various contexts in his writing, including oral and written history, the experiences Russian Mennonite and Canadian indigenous peoples, literary analogs, his own life experience, novels, critical theory, political/social causes, and religious inquiries. In order to weigh the significance a few such contexts this paper begins by noting parallels between Wiebe's Sailing to (1986) and W. B. Yeats's Sailing to (1927). (2) It then assesses Collected Stories (2010) as an artifice, a giant artifact, and concludes by recognizing Wiebe's growing perception the Canadian North as a symbolic Byzantium. Along the way it may be that we will discover a growing visionary impulse in Collected Stories not generally associated with Wiebe's earlier short stories. WIEBE AND YEATS Ervin Beck has raised our consciousness a Wiebe-Yeats connection, not simply through Wiebe's Danzig play upon Yeats's Byzantium title but also by significant similarities between the postcolonial life-situations both writers. (3) Our primary attention, course, is focused upon the role created by Rudy Wiebe in Sailing to for his present-day narrative persona Adam Wiebe, whose seventeenth-century progenitor, Wybe Adam, was the Frisian hydraulic engineer hired to help protect that city against Swedish invasion in the Thirty Years War. (4) By alluding to Sailing to Byzantium, a major twentieth-century modernist text, Wiebe would have been observing resemblances between two literary personas, Yeats and Adam Wiebe, each an aging, careworn spiritual voyager who prays that sages standing in God's holy fire / As in the gold mosaic a wall will gather him into the artifice eternity. There a golden bird sings of what is past, or passing or to come. For Yeats, the song, the bird, and indeed the poem are artifices, or, in Wiebe's critical vocabulary, artifacts. (5) As Beck suggests, in his Danzig story Wiebe implicitly associates the Yeatsian bird's song with one sung by Adam Wiebe's parents, a song remembered from their earlier difficult lives in Russia. When the ethnically-rootless Adam once sought to learn more from them about his ancestral legacy, My mother and father ... could tell me only facts that explained nothing. The facts, Adam learned later, were the building materials used by Wybe Adam to create the harbor installations, including an earth-mover cable car, about which no one could explain [to Adam] what genius, what vision had once made them possible (176177). …

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