Eating and Empire: An Anatomy
In the novel, the body moves to the fore of our attention, moves closer than in any other literary form. Typically, a novel has bulk and this bulk seems to transfer to the fictional world. Even the most attenuated fictional figures tend to engage our physical imagination. We attribute corporeal solidity to such abstract signs as the letters of the alphabet; we find character in characters. A clipped syllable implies a certain bodily manner. Dickens’s Pip is thin, an unshaped seedling; green in his innocence, he occupies the merest tip of the tongue. Sub-genres of popular fiction acknowledge the bodilyness of their narratives. Bodice-rippers are named metonymically: they address, or undress, the female body.S and F novels (shopping and fucking) are a notch more sophisticated than bodice-rippers, to the extent that they elaborate social and private acts and project active roles for women. Something there is in us that makes story, and story-making invests characters with body, if not bodies, even those novels in which the narrative insists that the characters are the flimsiest of inventions.
In his new novel, A Discovery of Strangers, Rudy Wiebe explores the imperatives of the flesh, particularly eating and elimination. Bodies, not bodices, are ripped and torn. The novel incorporates love and adventure and intrigue, mutiny and murder and suspense, including a duel motivated by sexual jealousy. The narrative concerns the meeting of the first John Franklin expedition with the Yellowknife Indians in 1820. Franklin wants to see the Stinking Water and the Everlasting Ice of the Arctic; his determination to map the Arctic coastline east from the mouth of the Coppermine River provides the motive for the other discoveries in the novel. The Yellowknife People refuse to let Franklin go forward unaccompanied. They warn him of disaster, but they will not have it said that they did not attempt to help these strangers.
The expedition itself provides the crucial backdrop for a far-reaching narrative, and much of the solidity of the novel derives from its historical base. At the human centre is a love triangle, with English naval officers George Back and Robert Hood competing for the affections of a beautiful young Yellowknife woman who is given the name Greenstockings. As the book’s title suggests, the principals eventually discover the strangeness of the Other, whether the Other be Yellowknife or Mohawk or Métis or Canadian or English, who seem to be strangest of all. The novel is a compendium, or better, an anatomy of strangenesses.
Wiebe begins with the defamiliarizing strangeness of allegory. His opening chapter, “The Animals in That Country,” concerns a caribou herd and a wolf pack, a surprising move for a tale packed with human interest. The phrase, that country, asserts the perpetual differences between us and the 19th-century time-place, and also establishes the literariness of the text. Wiebe is working with historical materials, but this is no ordinary history. The wolves and caribou play out their drama between the chapter-closing words, “the unrelenting land,” and the opening sentence, “The land is so long, and the people travelling in it so few, the curious animals barely notice them from one lifetime to the next.” This allegorical mode opens us to other strangeness. Just as the wolf eats the caribou and the caribou eats the plants, so too the novel incorporates earlier novels and poems. Those of us who have a policeman on the corner and a butcher down the street too easily forget, as Conrad and Wiebe would have it, the heart of darkness that includes or even defines Europe and all things European. In the Margaret Atwood poem from which Wiebe draws his chapter title, the animals of that country (read any European country) play against the animals of this country. Wiebe prompts us to see the human creature as an animal governed by needs of the flesh and the “unrelenting land.” He also obliquely alerts us to the potential horror of his narrative.
In the next section, an inter-chapter drawn from the journals of Robert Hood, Wiebe takes us swiftly into human society. If the opening chapter gives us a moral and natural frame of reference, the Hood excerpt gives us an historical and cultural frame. (His journals and that of the surgeon John Richardson provide an historical thread throughout the novel.) In this first inter-chapter we are taken to 18 July 1820 at Fort Chipewyan. All is not well. Only one of the four ordinary seamen will go farther north with the expedition; the other three fear the fatigue and famine which the expedition would surely encounter. Wiebe gives us Hood’s commentary on this tum of events: “Only John Hepburn remained with us as servant, consigned alone to the society of foreigners whose language he could not speak [that is, the Francophone Canadian voyageurs]; his constancy absolved his country from the disgrace attached to it by the others.” The English navy, like the society it represents and not unlike the wolf pack, is rigidly hierarchical, an imperial society, driven always to expand its domain. As Wiebe presents it, this imperialism is at once blind and laughable, proud and deadly.
Chapter two, “Into a Northern Blindness of Names,” addresses the blindness of the English and introduces us to the young woman whom they call Greenstockings. One dimension of imperialist venture is to rename the world in its own image, a kind of cultural incorporation which the English undertake relentlessly. This chapter also introduces Greenstockings’s mother Birdseye and her father Keskarrah. Birdseye suffers from an ulcer which is consuming her nose; she is being eaten from within, as it were, and turns to John Richardson for relief from the pain.
The pre-occupation with eating goes on. Starving voyageurs threaten mutiny, and bloodshed is prevented by the timely arrival of a fresh kill. After this episode, Hood notes sardonically that the Canadians never exercise reflection “unless they are hungry.” Eating motivates a huge outlay of energy among the expeditioners, and especially among the accommodating Yellowknives. In a monologue attributed to Midshipman Back we read some astonishing facts. The voyageurs require eight pounds of meat per day; the entire expeditionary group requires a ton of meat a week, “the equivalent of 20 dressed deer.” Yet this amounts only to a maintenance diet. To travel through the barren lands they must carry stores; the English, therefore, require 40 deer per week.
Later, early in the winter of 1821 on their return from the Everlasting Ice, the troupe splits up in an attempt to survive. They are on the verge of starvation, eating only boiled lichens, when these can be found. Hood is shot in the back of the head by the Iroquois voyageur, Michel, who then represents what happened as an accident. Richardson and Hepburn regard Michel’s story with great suspicion. They believe that Michel had in fact killed and eaten other men of their party. Three days after Hood’s death, Richardson shoots Michel through the head. I eat, therefore I am, says Empire. You eat, therefore you will be eaten, answers This Country.
Wiebe sets his love story in the stage preparatory to the journey North. He braids songs throughout this “domestic” part of the novel, and he invests Greenstockings with a quiet humour and a firm sense of her own powers, especially in the scenes in which she sits so Hood may draw her. The tenderness and humour of this domestic narrative highlights the horrors of the expedition. Wiebe plays with such ironies throughout. His sympathies clearly lie with the Yellowknives who, though hard-pressed to find their own living, treat the English with great compassion and generosity.
Wiebe engages us with the day to day, and often minute to minute, bodily lives of the characters. In the penultimate chapter, called “Eating Starvation,” Wiebe’s narrator, John Hepburn, speaks of the Hood murder and of “long pig.” “Ask any English tar and he’ll tell you. Give him a drink, and he’ll tell you more than you can stomach, ha-ha!”
The closing chapter takes on the allegorical character of the opening but, more importantly, it leaves the closing open. We meet Greenstockings and her child, fruit of this strange collision of cultures. When pressed to say whose child it is, Greenstockings answers fiercely, “Mine!”
In the 1850s, after Franklin’s ill-fated third expedition, word of cannibalism reached the British public. Charles Dickens was not amused. He took up the cudgels on behalf of white European civilization. He believed “every savage to be in his heart covetous, treacherous and cruel,” and cavalierly asserted that such an atrocity could not have happened among Englishmen. This strange response betrays the power the material carries. In A Discovery of Strangers, Wiebe has given us a compelling novel of but one episode relating to the Franklin adventure. We can hope that he will continue to explore the Northwest Passage and deliver more of his findings to us. ♦
Birk Sproxton, a writer and regular contributor to Border Crossings, lives in Red Deer, Alberta.
A Discovery of Strangers by Rudy Wiebe Toronto: Knopf Canada, 1994 Hardcover, 320 pp., $27.00