Creativity and Destruction: Robert Kroetsch's Notikeewin Trilogy

After European explorers in fifteenth and sixteenth century North American land mass--assuming it was India and naming indigene people Indians--it became mythic new world for Europeans. The idea of discovery of North America is an imaginative rather than found place because European imperialism shaped and determined new world's cultural history. (1) Fiction writers track western Canada's provincial development. Immigrants, with Eastern or Western European cultural values, settled in late nineteenth century into new rural towns and urban communities. Robert Kroetsch defines prairie culture discourses containing multi-ethnic small town attitudes from 1930s to 1970s in Notikeewin Trilogy. He creates subjects whose cultural conceptions of new west link their mythic perceptions and their verbal stories to physical reality of different prairie and mountainous landscapes. Rural stories in western Canadian fictional locality reinforce emigrants' anxiety about their new culture and new environment. Helen Tiffin suggests differences between visions that these people kept and expressed immigrant stories they tell reflect double vision characteristic of all post-colonial peoples--the tension between imported (and imposed) language and realities of surrounding environment (Tiffin Methodology 29, in Turner 12). This paper explores contraries of creation and destruction are represented by subjects and narrators who argue over oral speeches or tall tales dominate over written language in different ways in each of three novels in trilogy. These circumscribed prairie worlds include male subjects and narrators who express their knowledge, frustration, disappointment, or anger about effects of nature, war, or community values on their lives. Nature and geography are controlling components in design of these towns while narrating subjects are buffeted by their idees fixes. The province of Alberta is location of seven imaginary rural prairie towns which forecast its people's cultural identity. (2) For how community imagines is linked to it speaks and thinks about itself (Turner 108). The trilogy includes: The Words of My Roaring (1966) in depression of 1930s, The Studhorse Man (1969) dealing with end of WW 11, and Gone Indian (1973) focusing on 1960s and 1970s. Framed on West by Rockies and on East by Saskatchewan, prairie landscapes suffer from fierce winters, prairie droughts, and include buffalo jumps and badlands rich with skeletons, fossils, and hoodoos. There are seven fictitious rural towns set along fictitious 'Cree River' which flows through actual parklands near Edmonton, Alberta. Marking boundaries are towns of Coulee Hill where Studhorse takes place and seventy-two miles farther is Notikeewin where Words and Indian occur. Other fictional places are Roundhead, St. Leo, Burkhardt, Wildfire Lake, and Elkart Pond(Kizuk 57). Cultural happenings in and around them evoke the prairie legacies of Cree [Indians], French missionary enterprise, Canadian Pacific Railroad, Calvinist bible-thumping, and in Words agrarian, anti-Eastern government of Bible Bill Aberhart (Kizuk 57). Prairie stories come out of personalities of subjects who confront different problems in each community. Kroetsch records and invents west of Coulee Hill and Notikeewin, which he calls a local pride (William Carlos Williams). By emphasizing fragmentation, intertextuality, and parody of carnival Kroetsch establishes circus in motion creating subjects and narrators whose attitudes about culture and location differ in each decade (Kirtz 208). There is drought and riding election in 1935 in Words, followed by World War II in 1940s in Studhorse, and then increased tension between Canada and United States in 1970s in Indian. …

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