The Carpathians - University of British Columbia

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Kroetsch's paradigms are apt to a comparison of Gone Indian and The Carpathians. Where the Kroetsch novel privileges the "masculine" principles of motion, energy and the individual quest, including sexual conquest, Frame's Mattina pursues her antipodean quest through a largely static domesticity, rarely leaving Kowhai Street, undergoing even such dislocating experiences as the reading of Dinny's typescript and the trauma of the midnight rain within the walls of her temporary home. The people Mattina observes, the Kowhai Street residents sheltered in their homes, also seem static compared to the constant motion of Kroetsch's characters. The act of observation rarely transcends the fixed binaries of observer-observed, selfother, and it is tempting to interpret the failure that Frame's novel seems to imply as related to an absent element of the carnivalesque. In his essay "Carnival and Violence," Kroetsch borrows Bakhtin's notion of the carnivalesque to describe a liberating state of being located on the frontier, one in which normally fixed identities and hierarchical social roles are in a fluid state of becoming, of mutation, transformation and exchange. While the spirit of the carnivalesque is productive in Kroetsch's novel, it is absent from Frame's more pessimistic vision. And while Mattina's quest is an individual one, she is not the subject of The Carpathians in the way that Jeremy is of Gone Indian. The residents of Kowhai Street — a group that fails to achieve its potential as a community — are the narrative's main interest. Mattina is important primarily as a frame: as the observer and interpreter of the community, and as preserver of its story as memory. Ultimately, of course, even these framing roles are superceded by John Henry, the largest framer within the text, just as Jeremy as subject is controlled by Madham, and his subjectivity threatened by Madham's attempts to assert himself as subject. It is more important to the post-colonial visions of both Gone Indian and The Carpathians that their superceding narrative frame-narrators are American than it is that their central characters — the agent-explorers Jeremy and Mattina — are American. The explorers, despite their limitations, do strive for an open-minded and positive embracing of the requirements of place; they respond and adapt to their destinations rather than imposing themselves. Once the explorer has left the "centre" of neo-imperial power — New York — for the "margin" — Puamahara or Notikeewin — she or he becomes implicated in the place itself, in its stories and realities, just as Cook and Columbus did. But if the final mediating power — the
framer, Madham or John Henry — remains located at the centre, in a place with expansive global "cultural authority" (Said, 291), a gap of narrative control will be constructed that sustains the colonial tensions of speaking versus being spoken for. As long as this gap exists, there will be competing claims on authorship and authority. What power the "margin" has to tell its own stories will be overshadowed by a stronger interpretive power located elsewhere, just as the political authorization for Columbus and Cook's journeys remained at the centre. Kroetsch, by making Madham such an articulate spokesman for his own egotism and delusions, offers more hope for dismissing the centre's claims for authority than Frame does; her John Henry as [/r-narrator is so minimally presented as to be almost invisible. An important but uncomfortable post-colonial problematic emerges from these two novels: they deliberately compromise their own status as locally framed and authorized texts by deferring narrative authority in the text to an "other" located at the centre of global cultural imperialism. WORKS CITED Ash, Susan. "The Narrative Frame: Unleashing (Im)possibilities." Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada 5 (1991): 1-15. Birns, Nicholas. "Gravity Star and Memory Flower: Space, Time and Language in The Carpathians? Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada 5 (1991): 16-28. During, Simon. "Waiting for the Post: Some Relations Between Modernity, Colonization, and Writing." Ariel 20.4 (1989): 31-61. Rpt. in Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism. Ed. Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin. Calgary: U of Calgary P, 1990. 23-45. Frame, Janet. The Carpathians. 1988. London: Pandora, 1989. Henke, Suzette. "The Postmodern Frame: Metalepsis and Discursive Fragmentation in Janet Frame's The Carpathians!' Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada 5 (1991): 29-38. Kroetsch, Robert. "Carnival and Violence: A Meditation." Essays 111-22. Rpt. in Lovely Treachery 95-107. , and Diane Bessai. "Death is a Happy Ending: A Dialogue in Thirteen Parts." Figures in a Ground: Canadian Essays on Modern Literature Collected in Honour of Sheila Watson. Ed. Diane Bessai and David Jackel. Saskatoon: Western Producer Prairie, 1978. 206-15. . "The Fear of Women in Prairie Fiction: An Erotics of Space." Crossing Frontiers: Papers in American and Canadian Western Literature. Ed. Dick Harrison. Edmonton: U of Alberta P, 1979. 73-83. Rpt. in Essays 47-56. Rpt. in Lovely Treachery 73-83.
Page 1 and 2: 171
Page 3 and 4: Books in Review Dieter Riemenschnei
Page 5 and 6: Remembering 1993 I forgot Amnesia.
Page 7 and 8: This is one of the questions Cooper
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Page 11 and 12: Nichol's "The Martyrology" is anoth
Page 13 and 14: told in muted tones, as is, for exa
Page 15 and 16: A n n e Le D r e s s a y In my next
Page 17 and 18: multiple challenges to eurocentric
Page 19 and 20: One function of traditional myth, t
Page 21 and 22: learn their language. The first ind
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Page 29 and 30: ing "world" of l'Amérique—repres
Page 31 and 32: an extended parody of the Christ-my
Page 33 and 34: Gould, Eric. Mythical Intentions in
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Page 37 and 38: I could think it the mind's warm mi
Page 39 and 40: J o h n C l e m e n t B a l l Frami
Page 41 and 42: The town's names, Notikeewin and Pu
Page 43 and 44: I had tried [speaking], it would ha
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story defines the village as place,
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Farlotte's sense of self and of com
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Unable to reach into the future of
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In the Village ofViger shows that t
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New, W.H. Dreams of Speech and Viol
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an India at once familiar and unkno
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to transgress demarcated lines of t
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The appellation fits the smudged im
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Pennington and Duncan display in th
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and class, already mixed, are mixed
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Home Fires Kevin Irie Burning The D
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A Dance of All the isms Barry Calla
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Margaret Atwood, respected author a
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niques borrowed from, or inspired b
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around your house." Thus, Standjofs
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observable patterns in nature and i
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kind of book one can write after a
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tion of the cosmogony behind The Ma
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also a comprehensive index that is
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similar themes but in a much more g
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with equal equanimity and wit. The
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into Amy's point of view to spell i
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ground, and will no doubt re-offend
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tural anthropophagy of the West —
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gender formation, gender roles and
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himself travelled in Central and So
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tout récemment traduits en anglais
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the relevant footnote refers only t
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Mennonite background will find this
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very least have expected her to be
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Eco-Criticism D.M.R. Bentley The Ga
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us up daily at the point of your pr
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(north, wilderness) as one of the r
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mon murre still entangled in shards
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