Müller, Anja: Sharon Pollok’s Walsh- An Exercise in Historiographic
Metafiction. In: Ahornblätter. Marburger Beiträge zur Kanada-Forschung.
11. Marburg 1998.(Schriften der Universitätsbibliothek Marburg ; 84)
http://archiv.ub.uni-marburg.de/sum/84/sum84-9.html
Anja I. Müller
Sharon Pollock’s Wals - An Exercise in Historiographic Metafiction
[1]
'Here in the East, we're always hearing the grand tales of Major Walsh...how
he's subdued the Sioux and Sitting Bull.'
Sharon Pollock, Walsh
History is a construct...Any point of entry is possible and all choices
are arbitrary.
Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride
The days of the grand tales, it seems, are finally over. Since, at the
latest, Jean-François Lyotard's declaration that the end of all
historical master-narratives is nigh ,
[2] we have abandoned the traditional view that history is an objective
totality of consecutive factual events. We still tell, write and read history,
but new parameters now define both our points of departure and our targets.
Thus Michel Foucault's redefinitions of historical methodology in terms
of archaeology and genealogy have furnished us with critical approaches
to history which resist the totalising [3]
mechanisms that characterised the accumulation and interpretation of
historical data in the past. Instead of the epic panorama of war and peace,
victories and conquests, decline and fall, we have come to accept - indeed
have come to expect - a history en detail, narrated from as many angles
as there are historical opinions and thus representing various, often contradictory
points of view. Instead of a reassuringly homogeneous historical vision
the picture transmitted today is a fundamentally fragmented mosaic of the
shards and shreds that make up history - 'the histories (in the plural)
of the losers as well as the winners, of the regional (and colonial) as
well as the centrist, of the unsung many as well as the much sung few,
and I might add, of women as well as men.' [4]
This statement is by the Canadian literary critic and theorist Linda
Hutcheon, whose work itself is a case in point. On one level her approach
is concerned with the changing idea of history and traces how, in the wake
of this change, history has recently reentered the field of fiction. Moreover,
the fact that she writes from the Canadian point of view - as well as
from a woman's - reminds us that she knows of and speaks for those whom
'History' tended to silence with ignorance. Her work thus represents one
side of the great divide that has opened up in the wake of critical historiogra-
phy, separating academics from countries which in the past contributed
to the writing of the historical master-narratives and those from the parts
of the world that featured in the grand tales mostly as the subdued and
colonised. While the former tend to interpret the 'revolt against history'
[5] as a provocation at best dismissed
as the naive but dangerous ejaculations of a radical minority, the latter
have more willingly latched on to the revisionist challenge uttered by
current theory. In the following I will use Hutcheon's critical grid in
order to look at the work of another Canadian - the playwright Sharon Pollock.
A dramatic rewriting of an historical event, Pollock's play Walsh [6]
is a revisionist critique which can be described with Hutcheon's term
'historiographic metafiction.' Despite certain structural and aesthetic
shortcomings, Walsh nevertheless exemplifies the subversive power of historiographic
metafiction. The weaknesses for which the play has been criticised are,
I want to suggest, actually its strengths.
Historiographic Metafiction
Much of Linda Hutcheon's work is concerned with the kind of contemporary
fiction which, for want of a better label, tends to be categorised as postmodernist.
Replacing this bashfully derogatory term with the more appreciative and
in my eyes more appropriate 'historiographic metafiction,' Hutcheon reduces
the vague and diffuse definition the term postmodernism entails to what
is only one, but one of the most popular [7]
varieties of fiction written under the postmodern condition. This writing
is fascinated by the way narrative, in particular historical narrative,
functions. Historiographic metafictions - such as Robert Coover's The Public
Burning, E.L. Doctorow's Book of Daniel or Ragtime, Salman Rushdie's Midnight's
Children or, in Canadian Literature, Timothy Findley's Famous Last Words
and The Temptations of Big Bear and The Scorched-Wood People by Rudy Wiebe
- play on the self-reflectivity (the metafictional nature, in other words)
of all writing and, by setting their narratives in specific historical
moments, transfer the playful attitude towards themselves onto the writing
of history. By self-consciously exploiting its own mechanisms, historiographic
metafiction thus questions its role as meaning-granting, interpretive
representation of the past. Although it appears to reinstate the totalising
practices of traditional history, often returning to the narrative perspective
of an apparently omniscient narrator/historian, historiographic metafiction
explores the very selectiveness that characterises historical narratives.
By choosing its themes from the grey areas and white spots left unresolved
in the official historical account and by bringing to the fore the testimonies
of hitherto neglected voices, historiographic metafiction emphasises that
'all past "events" are potential historical "facts",
but the ones that become facts are those that are chosen to be narrated.'
[8] Following this axiom, it reopens
the 'files' history seemed to have closed for good, in order to present
alternative readings of the past.
Sharon Pollock's Walsh deals with such a sensitive historical moment in
need of revision. In this respect the play represents the characteristic
trend in recent Canadian drama to 'directly explore the country's history.'
[9] Written in 1973, it recounts
the events following the Battle of the Little Big Horn in 1876 (aka the
Custer Massacre). Threatened by extinction in the United States, several
thousand American Sioux together with their chief Sitting Bull then fled
'across the line' into the country of the 'Great White Mother' (Queen Victoria),
Canada, claiming the aid promised them when they had fought on the side
of the English a century before. The play centres around the - internal
and external - conflicts fought by its title character, Major James A.
Walsh. A superintendent in the North West Mounted Police, the famous 'Mounties'
formed in 1873 by Prime Minister MacDonald as a police force in the Canadian
West, Walsh is torn between his sympathy with the plight of the American
Sioux (a sympathy which leads to a close friendship with Sitting Bull)
and loyalty (by oath) to Queen and country. In the end, however, he is
forced to comply with the demands made by his superiors and denies Sitting
Bull a sanctuary in Canada. What follows is the well-known denouement that
has made history: the return of the Sioux to America followed by the violent
death of Sitting Bull and his son nine years after their 'departure' from
Canada. In her play Pollock focuses on the emotional involvement and moral
and spiritual decline of Walsh, who cannot come to terms with his responsibility
in the fate of Sitting Bull.
Foregrounding emotional reactions of individual characters rather than
narrating, once again, the 'bare facts' of the history books, Walsh amends
the traditional representation of this event by unfolding new story-lines
and shedding light on characters who did not feature in the official account.
Using songs, letters private and official, documented evidence as well
as the numerous unsupported myths and legends that have evolved around
this particular historical moment (amongst them, not least 'the greatest
of Canadian myths, the Mounties, those glamorous red-coated heroes' [10]
), Pollock lets the 'unsung many' speak: with the voices of soldiers,
settler women, scouts, raw recruits - and the Indians - she creates a multi-perspective
historical chorus that breaks the fabric of a homogenised and closed historical
account at the same time that it exposes and subverts the mechanisms of
traditional history.
The truth which is not one
When, at the end of the play, Constable Clarence Underhill, a young
member of the Canadian police force and at first a naive and prejudiced
greenhorn, learns about the arrest of Sitting Bull, he screams in frustration
and despair at his American colleague Harry who brings the news, 'it's
not true!' Harry's reaction to this naive denial of the historical fact
is an aggressive 'was you there?' The passage is an inversion of the first
encounter between Harry and Clarence in act one. At stake then is the young
recruit's submission to official prejudices rather than the wishful scepticism
he displays later on in the play:
C: Hey, did you hear the talk over at the fort?
H: That talk's everywhere, Clarence.
C: Do you believe it?
H: Don't see why it couldn't be true.
C: Aren't you scared?
H: Now, why'd I be scared, Clarence?
C: We're gonna have ourselves an Injun War, just like the states, that's
why! The Sioux are headed north...An Injun War! I could get to kill the
man who killed Custer!
H: And who might that be?
C: Why, Sitting Bull, of course.
H: How'd you know it was him personally killed Custer?
C:Well...everybody says so! It was Sittin' Bull himself killed Custer at
the Little Big Horn - with his huntin' knife! (241)
Both passages, different as they are, encapsulate the dilemma of the historian.
Of course we were not there. Of course we make up history out of mere traces
left over from the past. And of course our interpretations, made across
a distance of time and space, are by definition marred by subjective misconceptions
and falsifications. In the case of Clarence this means that he succumbs
to the universal belief (which he misreads as the 'truth') in the inherent
malice and brutality of the Indians, epitomised in the myth of the murder
of General Custer at the hands of Sitting Bull. Yet by pointing out the
machinery of history's misinterpretations, historiographic metafiction
makes 'truth' an utterly questionable term. In this vein Pollock's play
perpetually evokes - and perpetually defers - truth.
Never actually showing the central events that are the immediate stimuli
for the dramatic tension, Pollock recreates again and again in Walsh the
archetypal historical situation. The significant Nez Percés incident
, [11] for instance, exists
only as percolated through the observations of Walsh and his men; the Indians
never appear on stage, their suffering is never present before our eyes.
The Nez Percés 'woman with the papoose on her back' (252) to whom
Walsh sends Clarence with his tunic, is invisible, made manifest in our
imagination only by his look. The strategy of 'telling not showing' here
is more than a mere question of dramatic economy: it evokes the distance
between historian and her/his object - a distance which is furthermore
emphasised in this scene by the faint, strange noises that create a near-fantastic
alienation effect. The howling of wolves, whinnying of ponies, the wind
and the rhythmical chants of the Indians add up to an emotive tableau that
transcends and so questions the factual.
This characteristic strategy of the play has in the past been criticised
as problematic from a dramatic point of view .
[12] Seen as a historical statement, however, this striking absence
of visual information mirrors our own ignorance of past events and the
subsequent ambiguity of historical 'truths.' Like Walsh's wife Mary, who
only knows about her husband's life through their correspondence and the
reports and bias of others, we, as receivers of historical information,
are biased by proxy. Like Clarence we rely on the potentially unreliable
'talk everywhere' (respectively the historian's allegedly trustworthy interpretation)
to form a picture of the past. Thus even Harry, who can say of himself
that he was present at the arrest of Sitting Bull, and who therefore might
be considered a trustworthy observer, is as unreliable an informer as anybody
else: the moment his news is related to others, it is marred by the (mis)conceptions
his own perspective forces onto the event. Each ostentatious reporting
situation in the play tests the characters - and our own - critical ability,
calling to our attention that the truth value of what we are being told
is potentially distorted and refracted by the perspective of those who
tell it.
This gives an ironic twist to Clarence's tearful report of the death of
Sitting Bull in the last scene. Having heard the story from some other
'messenger' (a rider from Standing Rock), Clarence's renewed re-telling,
in its turn, doubles the distance that already exists between him (and,
even more so, ourselves) and the figure and his fate: 'They shot him twice
and put the boots to him...and Little Crow says the soldiers dropped him
in a pit of lime, so's his people couldn't bury him proper' (270). This
distancing effect is even intensified by Louis's evocative description
of how 'da rider say he see his [Sitting Bull's] face bleed empty and death
come starin' in its place' (270). At work here is the same machinery that
mystifies American war heroes like Custer. The image of the Indian Chief
evoked in Louis's speech is totemic, almost unreal. The 'true' person escapes
our grasp; the fading image that remains is the mysterious icon that haunts
us on the photographs of the time .
[13] We are forced to ask ourselves if the Sitting Bull Clarence bemoans
can ever be known . [14]
Distant Voices
This distance between present and past is encapsulated already in the
conditions under which this play was written: a story about male friendship
and emotions in the nineteenth century, a story about the fate of the American
Indians written by a white author and, above all, a white woman. The questions
of perspective and distance the play asks 'pretextually,' before the first
act has even started, are epitomised in the touching encounter between
Walsh and his wife Mary in act two. Clearly set apart from each other on
stage, corresponding only through the letters they write/read, their separated
positions suggest a division beyond the physical. Their distinct geographical
positions reflect the differing points of view expressed by the tenor of
their letters. These letters, which on the surface may appear to complement
each other in a kind of dialogue, represent irreconcilable differences
of opinion.
M: Here in the East, we're always hearing grand tales of Major Walsh...how
he's subdued the Sioux and Sitting Bull.
W: The Sioux...Common sense, honesty and humanity.
M: The treachery.
W: Ah, Mary, we call our actions strategy or tactics, we call theirs treachery...My
God, if I could only show you what I see every day...The buffalo are gone,
vanished...like frost at dawn...one minute here, the next...nowhere. In
the fall, the Sioux were hungry. Now it's winter...and they starve.
M: After church supper, the choir sang.
W: Sickness, plain suffering kills them like flies. Most of their ponies
are dead...and their rotting carcasses are cut up for food...Yes, they're
starving and destitute, yet they endure. They share what little they have...and
they observe the law. Goddamnit, they'd be a credit to any community...(259).
The physical separation of husband and wife represents the chasm between
East and West, between the emotional changes imposed on Walsh (subsumed
in his characteristic self-description 'while I grow old in the West' )
[15] and the stasis of security which he associates with his family
(whom he remembers as on a faded photograph, 'suspended in amber'). But
this distinction is neither simple nor clear - tainted as it is by Walsh's
own alienating/-ed perspective. His image of his family is as much a misconception
as is Mary's notion of life in the West and the Indian character: she and
the children change, too, albeit only outwardly; and her life in the East
is as valuable and important as are Walsh's responsibilities in the West:
'Your little Mary's soon to be thirteen'; 'Cora's getting thin'; 'yesterday
I found another grey hair. You won't know me when you return' (259). Nor
are the territories a place 'where everything is happenin',' as Clarence,
at this moment reflecting on his own military 'career,' remarks self-critically
at the beginning of the second act. Instead of 'Wild Bill Hickock sittin'
on the biggest, blackest horse you ever saw!' (258), bored inertia and
routine trivia determine most of the days in Fort Walsh, interrupted only
by emotional dilemmas that are far from heroic. Mary's vision of the Indians'
'treason' is, like that of the settler woman Mrs Anderson, for whom the
Indians are mere uncivilised heathen, blurred by official prejudice. And
as she literally cannot, as Walsh would like her to, see what 'really'
is happening 'out here,' her opinion is bound to remain static.
It seems doubly frustrating to see a female author create women characters
of a hardly confident or powerful calibre. To dismiss Pollock's portrayal
of Mary as merely 'silly,' as one reviewer does ,
[16] is however too simple a reading of this character. Equally, although
Mary is in the play contrasted with Pretty Plume, Sitting Bull's wife and
stoic but present 'bearer of our children' (255), we should be wary of
simplifying oppositions of 'good' and 'bad'. Mary is a problematic character
not least because she could potentially represent a critical female voice
in a play that is otherwise predominantly 'male.' The way she is presented,
Mary reaffirms at first sight the absence and passivity of women in the
historical master narrative. On the other hand, and this is the point of
paradox where Pollock's image of women is interesting because blatantly
(and possibly intentionally) negative, Mary is active precisely because
of her passivity. She perpetuates prejudice in the same manner as Clarence's
mother, who exerts an ambivalent power over her son by handing down to
him an unreflected, unchallenged notion of masculine identity: 'Well...me
Mum, she said I was a man like my Dad...and I had to find my own place...Couldn't
sit in Glengary growin' potatoes and tendin' to her' (258). The women characters
in Walsh are as much embedded in the machinations of prejudice as the men
and equally involved in the historical strategies of reduction and simplification.
In her two-dimensionality, in her passivity, Mary thus epitomises the
historical vision of black and white which is typical not of women, but
of traditional history itself.
The Past as Narrative
The strategies of historiographic metafiction appear paradoxical at
first sight. Explicitly involved in the narrating of the past, historiographic
metafiction often relies on the totalising voice of an omniscient narrator/historian.
Yet in doing so it self-critically and - consciously reveals the mechanisms
whereby past events become history. The overt 'telling' of the historical
tale (termed 'narrativization' by Linda Hutcheon; 'emplotment' by Hayden
White) exposes history as a process, essentially fictional and essentially
ideological:
The narrativization of the past events is not hidden; the events no longer
seem to speak for themselves, but are shown to be consciously composed
into a narrative, whose constructed - not found - order is imposed upon
them, often overtly by the narrating figure .
[17]
Moreover, historiographic metafiction thereby places on a par two narrative
modes which formerly existed on absolutely separate planes. History, traditionally
seen as the trustworthy medium of facts, is really not so different from
the explicitly fictional modes of the novel or the short story .
[18] It too is an artifact. And like the narrative genres, which have
altered dramatically in the last decades, history is no longer told the
way it used to be. The moral posited by historiographic metafiction thus
ultimately disrupts traditional views and traditional securities: history
is neither absolute nor finite. Existing only because it is told by 'somebody'
it is always already re-told - by every potential narrator of the tale.
Pollock's play is paradoxical in this respect, too. Here the role of narrator
is taken over by the character Harry, an American wagon master who delivers
treaty goods for Canadian Indians into Fort Walsh - a figure that is a
link in more than this literal sense. Having, as he says somewhat obliquely
(we never learn the true reason), 'vacated the United States' (240), Harry
truly represents the wanderer between two worlds. He is able to see both
the American and the Canadian position without ever becoming part of either.
Consequently, he is detached from the emotional turmoil into which others
are thrown before his observant eyes, but his detachment renders him cynical
rather than objective. His task - transporting the seeds and farming utensils
into Fort Walsh whereby the Indians are meant to be eased into an agricultural
way of life - receives his philosophical indifference that spells disillusionment:
'And they ain't gonna do nothin' with 'em. The seed's gonna rot, the 'shares
gonna rust. And them goddam shovels is just gonna lie where they flung
'em' (241). Contrasted with Clarence, the young recruit of the same scene,
who according to stage directions is more 'plaintive' than heroic, Harry
is matter-of-fact and remains so throughout the play. His detachment at
times almost amounts to cruelty - for instance in a scene in act two when
Walsh, desperate and drunk after he has conceded to Colonel McLeod's suggestion
to oust the Sioux by starving them, makes a plea for Harry's comfort, pity
and help, only to receive a laconic (but terribly honest): 'Ain't nothing
I can do, Sir' (264).
This casual distance is in the play mirrored by another 'torn' character
- Louis, the half-breed scout who, although sympathising and identifying
with the Indians, ultimately cannot but close ranks with his white employers
and be carried along with the tide of events. Although he begs Walsh at
the end of act one to 'make the spring come for de Sioux' (256) - that
is, to secure their future in Canada by actively supporting them - his
influence on his superior and friend whose life he once saved is small.
Walsh, who justifies his actions lamely with his dependency on the 'honorable
men' in Ottawa and Washington, finally disperses Louis's hopes and, to
a certain extent, his respect and friendship. While Louis at the end of
act one still expresses contempt for Walsh's lack of moral stamina (the
last scene closes, very ominously, with him spitting at Walsh's feet),
his involvement and sense of responsibility is increasingly transformed
into silent accusation (looks between Walsh and him pass frequently and
poignantly) and resigned indifference. Clarence's growing empathy with
the Sioux and his despair when he is forced to understand that it is not
common sense and humanity that govern political action, for example, is
countered with characteristic rhetorical questions and monosyllabic comments,
pointing to a detached disillusionment that enables Louis to abstain from
precisely the involvement that causes Walsh's and Clarence's emotional
breakdown.
It is obvious that the ambivalent position of the two characters denies
them the kind of involvement we would wish them to show; their detachment
stems from a need for self-preservation and survival rather than from ignorance
or malignancy. And both are never only cynical observers trying to keep
out. The sense of frustration that overshadows both figures is finally
voiced most clearly by Harry: the song he sings when returning to Fort
Walsh after the arrest of Sitting Bull - having witnessed, as he says,
'the end of Sioux Nation' - has the refrain 'this blooming country's a
fraud, and I want to go home to my Maw' (268). It is the frauds of history
that Harry reveals again and again throughout the play.
Being both a cynical comment and the lament of someone unwillingly involved
in dramatic events, the song suggests Harry's split emotions and emphasises
his double-role in the play. For Harry is not only a character involved
in the dramatic action. He also, and perhaps more importantly, embodies
the 'narrativising' function of historiographic metafiction and enacts
its two-way critique 'toward the events being represented and toward the
act of narration itself.' [19] His
irony strikes both at himself as the narrator and at the tale he has to
tell. Weaving quotations and comments that are not his own into his lines,
Harry is the play's chorus, the dramatic moral authority - yet without
moral influence. From a subjective and very ironic viewpoint he recalls
the Battle of the Little Big Horn in his long speech after the prologue,
transforming the historical narrative into a breathtaking stand-up act.
His gloss renders the driest official sources absurd, the most trustworthy
statesmen hypocritical. He quotes verbatim from an American Government
document, only to expose its pompous and unctuous liberal-humanist tone
with dead-pan irony:
"The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians,
and their land and property shall never be taken from them without their
consent." [The Indians] had taken the government at its word - bein'
savages, they weren't too familiar with governments and all, so it was
an understandable mistake.(240)
His impersonation, in the same passage, of General Terry reacting to Custer's
death, reveals how inappropriate and hypocritical heroic lyricism can be
and shuns myths by hearsay: 'I hear tell, that when Terry looked on Custer's
dead body, he wept, and said, "The flower of the American Army is
gone"' (240, emphasis mine). Harry's speech is an 'ex-centric' discourse
(the term is Hutcheon's) which, by entering the official record, threatens
'the (illusory but comforting) security of the centered, totalizing, masterly
discourses of our culture.' [20]
His obscure biographical background only supports the deviance of this
ex-centricity.
But Harry's random quoting not only mocks the historical heroes and their
absurd play-acting (Pollock's portrait of General Terry calls for an almost
comic presentation of this character), it actually turns historical hierarchies
upside down. In quoting Custer, Terry, MacDonald only in passing, while
foregrounding his own subjective views (in an idiom that is far from 'proper'),
Harry relegates the great to the margins. Statements that once represented
'the' truth now amend a different historical map as mere footnotes; once
reliable 'facts' are now reduced to 'paratextual form' [21]
devoid of inherent meaning. With Harry, then, Pollock exemplifies what
Michel Foucault in The Archaeology of Knowledge calls 'the questioning
of the document' [22] and points
to Foucault's redefinition of the meaning of the term: 'The document is
not the fortunate tool of a history that is primarily and fundamentally
memory; history is one way in which a society recognizes and develops a
mass of documentation with which it is inextricably linked.' [23]
Thus the document, instead of representing a solid, a priori reality,
is merely the starting point for various critical interpretations of the
past from the vantage point of the present .
[24] It is a monument containing meaning on various layers of experience,
which are discovered by means of an archaeological process, an interpretive
erosion.
The fragility of documentary evidence runs like a thread through the play
and confirms this scepticism; 'letter' is a recurring term and the most
important medium, but its reliability is also constantly called into question.
In the first act Clarence insists on writing 'a last letter home' before
the Sioux come into the Fort as if to compose his own epitaph, as if to
'leave' something for posterity. This gesture confirms his belief in the
permanence of history (as well as his own historical permanence) and immediately
questions the reliability of such a document; the fears stimulating his
wish to write the letter to his mother reveal how much Clarence is steeped
in prejudice. Similarly, the fact that Walsh and Mary's marriage is based
on letters alone, raises the question to what extent documents can compensate
for lived experience - especially as Walsh's descriptions do not seem to
influence Mary's point of view but are merely juxtapositions of another
opinion. On the other hand, the letter expresses authority. A letter sent
by Walsh to a Canadian police officer is the basis on which Walsh is reprimanded
by his commanding officer McLeod and thus a sign of his dependency. When,
finally, Walsh ostentatiously tears apart another government letter, the
gesture speaks of his defiance at the same time that it marks the futility
of rebelliousness.
Revealing Power
'The past really did exist, but we can only know it today through its
textual traces, its often complex and indirect representations in the present:
documents, archives, but also photographs, paintings, architecture, films
and literature.' [25] The past,
then, is inherently diverse, a non-entity of experiences and points of
view. Stratified into 'numberless beginnings,' as Foucault has it ,
[26] and entries for interpretation, it loses its traditional homogenised
authority, becomes 'plural,' [27]
admits multiple readings. Sharon Pollock's Walsh, too, defies a final
and finite meaning. Although the play illuminates this particular event
of the past from various angles, the historical portrait assembled actually
is not necessarily comprehensive, let alone 'complete'. In the end the
diversity of historical experience in Pollock's play has frustrating rather
than enlightening implications.
This is suggested, not least, by the chronology-toppling prologue, which
shows Walsh as a man who has given up the struggle for justice, who has
succumbed to the image that is imposed on him and behaves accordingly.
We know from the start where the dramatic tension of the play will lead,
Walsh's doom is programmed and unavoidable: the alleged agent of history
is caught in a web of bureaucracy, prejudice and power which surpasses
even that of the military pecking order. McCutcheon summarises this hierarchy
neatly - but finally naively - in his dialogue with Clarence in the second
act: 'If you want to get on in the force, laddie, know your place. The
Major decrees the tying. I oversee the tying...and you tie' (267). What
McCutcheon overlooks in his emblematic description of the military is that
'the Major', too, decrees only up to a certain point. Walsh's belief in
his moral independence and self-determination, still expressed towards
his superior Colonel McLeod with aggressive self-confidence at the beginning
of act two, turns out to be yet another of the self-delusions he succumbs
to throughout the play: after a lengthy discussion with the Colonel, who
forces him to act in accordance with American interests and abandon the
Sioux, Walsh explodes:
Do you think McCutcheon hangs me up from some goddam wooden peg with all
my strings dangling? Is that what you think happens? Do you think I'm a
puppet? Manipulate me right and anything is possible...I'm a person. I
exist. I think and feel! And I will not allow you to do this to me! (262)
Walsh's tragedy is, of course, that 'this' is precisely what is going to
happen to him. In his naive self-confidence and human pride, Walsh here
reveals a despair that brings him strangely close to the other, more obvious
'victim,' Sitting Bull. Where a 'good clip on the side of the head' (269)
suffices to silence the Sioux Chief and to force him on the boat that takes
him to the military prison and his death ,
[28] Walsh falls prey to the more subtle pressures of his position.
No less dependent than his men, Walsh is trapped by McLeod's blackmail
when he refuses to deny the Sioux material support: 'If you find yourself
unable to do this, it is my sad duty to ask you for your resignation' (262).
Just like Harry and Louis, Walsh follows 'the strongest instinct': self-preservation
(263).
The end of the play confirms only the one, disillusioning truth established
with the prologue, thus contradicting Walsh's enlightened naivety. While
his questions like 'Why is everything so goddamn complex' and '...that
is the law! But where is the justice in it?' (265) reveal Walsh's unbelieving
despair as well as his critical awareness of his own role, they are also
ultimately rhetorical. In the end he is forced to face the fact that he
'is a puppet and the Sioux are pawns, and...there is no justice or even
sense to the policy he is obliged to carry out.' [29]
The military hierarchy that structures his life leaves no space for
common sense and criticism, not even for those who appear to be in charge
- Walsh shows himself to be aware of his embeddedness in the hierarchical
structures of the force, when he explains to Louis (by way of a justification
of his caution as regards the Sioux): 'You trust in me...and I trust in
those above me...Quite simple, eh?' (257). Although he distinguishes between
'Walsh the man' and 'Walsh the soldier,' in particular when he deals with
Sitting Bull, and thereby gains the Indian's trust and friendship, official
demands invade his personal integrity from all sides. 'White Forehead Chief'
is nearly always Major Walsh. Although he is unwilling to acknowledge this
fact, it is his red tunic that makes the man, not his emotions and character.
The power he identifies but will not admit infiltrates Walsh's every action;
where Harry quotes others mockingly, Walsh does so in earnest - as in the
first act, where he warns a Canadian Indian, Crow Eagle with grave formality:
'When the white man comes, the buffalo goes...And with it goes the life
you have known. You cannot stop this happening any more than you can stop
the sun or the moon' (245). By the time he realises how much he is remote-controlled,
it is already too late. He consciously repeats McLeod's military commonplaces
('The government's concern stops at the border.'; 'I see...larger issues
at stake.' (263)) but is unable to defuse them with irony. At the end of
the play Walsh ventriloquises the idiom of his superiors, adopting, for
example, General Terry's repetitive tag 'you follow me' and his exaggerated
paranoia of the East.
Pollock's play has in the past been lauded for making a particular historical
event both more interesting and more accessible. Yet by 'put[ting] living
flesh on the bare and dusty bones of history,' [30]
as she undoubtedly does, Pollock actually achieves a reverse effect.
When pared off once again, the added surface events reveal beneath the
narrative padding the skeletal structure of power. The plural perspectives
of Walsh ultimately achieve, via an apparently full and varied picture
of the past, a reduction of the historical richness to its very basis.
Every action, every event, however much it may involve the character emotionally
and intellectually, is part of the 'discourses' (M. Foucault) which, added
up, create a web of power in which everybody is entangled. 'Quiet, simple
and effective' (270), like John A. MacDonald's strategy to deprive the
Sioux of their main sustenance, by forcing the buffalo back south across
the line, the machinery of history works in the background and under the
surface, by means of invisible but nevertheless powerful strings.
This affects the characters' capacity to act. Each of the characters, notwithstanding
their principles, is a mere pawn, player and puppet on the historical stage.
The very notion of subjective agency is called into question and with it,
at least to a certain extent, notions of guilt, responsibility and development.
This equally affects and frustrates any desire from the side of the audience
for a satisfactory historical experience. What is at stake is also the
subject that always believed him/herself to be the omnipotent teller of
tales. History in Pollock's pessimistic play is no longer the 'privileged
shelter for the sovereignty of consciousness.' [31]
Hence I disagree with the recurrent critical emphasis on character
development, where in particular Walsh and Clarence are seen as mirroring
each other in their moral ascent and decline. It is true, Clarence, who
starts off in dangerous ignorance and prejudice, learns to question the
'justice' at work in Fort Walsh ('and as far as what's right goes...that
don't seem to come into it' (258)). He becomes a friend of the Sioux who
smuggles food into their camp, is introduced to the Indian philosophy and
shares a smoke with the Sioux Chief, whereas Walsh's humanity and principles
are destroyed a little more in each scene. Yet the attitudes the two characters
purport and sustain, be they intolerant or benevolent, are comparable in
that they are reciprocally prejudiced and clichéd. Walsh, in the
penultimate scene of the play, plans the opening of the railroad track
with a staged Indian attack that reveals how much he is entangled in the
jargon of prejudice ('Do we have twenty men we can rely on? Top notch fellows?';
'Tell the men to practice war whoops. I want good full-blooded Indian yells,
you hear?'; 'I want a good show.' (270)). Yet Clarence's benevolent idealism
is by no means a more objective attitude: 'He's [Sitting Bull's son] a
very smart little boy and I have a lot of hope for the Sioux when I talk
to him, sir.' (268). Bearing in mind how deeply Clarence was steeped in
the depths of prejudice before, we are forced to ask against which yardstick
he measures the much praised intellectual capacity of the Indians this
time. Disgust and fascination equally serve to contain 'the other' safely
in the cages of categorisation .
[32]
This must be considered in the staging of the play, too. Aesthetic
experience might easily turn into a lecture promoting political correctness
when characters are presented within a hierarchical opposition of good
and bad, black and white. When reviews of the play repeatedly applaud Sitting
Bull's performance as 'dignified, heroic and very, very human' and him
as 'a totemic figure, the bronze effigy of a legendary hero,' [33]
they ignore that these attributes are artifacts, versions of the 'Noble
Savage' made by the enlightened paternalists of the Western World. It is
impossible to know Sitting Bull, indeed to present him, without admitting
the contradictions that characterise the idol. Such an apparent contradiction
is suggested, for instance, in Sitting Bull's ironic self-assessment in
a conversation with Walsh: 'The Sioux are proud; we love position' (250).
Myths positive and negative dissolve in Pollock's historical relativism
- Walsh warns of the inverted reductionism of political correctness long
before the term entered our daily jargon.
"Conclusion"
Every new generation of historians reinterprets their role differently
to that of their predecessors. Today, rather than providing the world with
solutions and answers to the terrifying complexities of the past, the 'aim
of the historian [is] to demonstrate a history of error, duplicity, illusion,
and failure of meaning.' [34] A
potentially frustrating outcome for those who like to seek refuge from
the chaos of meaning in easy categories and structures. A terrorising notion
for those who believe in the neat separation of ages and epochs, who believe
that the present is 'safe' from the past. It is not - and history today
must come up with methods that acknowledge and reflect the links between
past, present and future rather than their seperateness. The aim of historiography
can no longer be to paint a static picture of a past securely detached
from the present. Instead, contemporary theory enables us to understand
the past as a dynamic process, both 'in' the past and as regards the present:
'the historian [is] less interested in telling a story than in explaining,
by the application of some current philosophical or social scientific theory,
how this tissue of mistakes took shape, established itself as an illusion
of an epoch, and then simply fell into disuse.' [35]
This deconstructionist simultaneity enriches our reality with the knowledge(s)
of the past and puts our notion of the present in perspective .
[36]
In his conversation with Sitting Bull during act one, Walsh reacts
to the Sioux's description of the end of Crazy Horse with an almost aggressive
'What's past is past!' (250). Pollock's play discloses the finality of
Walsh's statement as a historical fallacy. The past always continues to
influence the present. The ghost of Crazy Horse haunts Sitting Bull as
much as the memory of the Sioux Chief haunts the police officer. This vital
connection in Walsh comes to light when we consider that the play was written
at a time when Canada faced a comparable moral dilemma and helplessness
towards its powerful neighbour. The play about a Canadian attempting to
save a group of people from persecution by the United States allegorically
reflects upon the role of Canada as the bolt-hole for Americans drafted
for the Vietnam war. Discovering Canadian tolerance and humanity in events
almost one hundred years apart, Pollock establishes a line of tradition
that not only explains and justifies 20th-century action but actually calls
for it. Getting 'out of history' [37]
by bridging the gap between past and present, Pollock's historiographic
metafiction in Walsh incites a critical reflection on the realities
of today.
References
Conolly, W.: Canadian Drama and the Critics. Vancouver 1987.
Derrida, J.: Specters of Marx. The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning,
and the New International. New York; London 1995.
Foucault, M.: Madness and Civilization. A History of Insanity in the Age
of Reason. New York; London 1989 (1961).
Foucault, M.: The Archaeology of Knowledge. New York 1972.
Foucault, M.: Nietzsche, Genealogy, History. In: Bouchard D.F. (Ed.): Language,
Counter-memory, Practice. Oxford; New York 1977.
Hutcheon, L.: Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. London;
New York 1991 (1980).
Hutcheon, L.: The Politics of Postmodernism. London; New York 1989.
Hutcheon, L.: History and/as Intertext. In: Moss, J. (Ed.). Future Indicative.
Literary Theory and Canadian Literature. Ottawa 1987. pp. 169 - 184.
Kirkpatrick, D. L. (Ed.): Contemporary Dramatists. Chicago; London 1980
(4th ed.).
Lyotard, J.-F.: The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis
1984.
Rutherford, J.: A Place called Home: Identity and the Cultural Politics
of Difference. In: Rutherford, J. (Ed.): Identity. Community, Culture,
Difference. London 1990. pp. 9 - 27.
Wasserman, J. (Ed.): Modern Canadian Plays. Vol I. Vancouver 1993 (3rd
ed.). pp. 237 - 271.
White, H.: Getting out of History. In: Diacritics. 12. 1982. pp. 2 - 13.
White, H.: Historical Pluralism. In: Critical Inquiry. 12. 1986. pp. 480
- 493.
White, H.: Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore
1985.
Dr. Anja I. Müller, Universität Trier, Fachbereich II - Anglistik,
54286 Trier
e-mail: muellean@uni-trier.de
[1] Pollock's play has a particular significance for Marburg. It
was the last play produced by the 'University English Theatre Group Marburg,'
its final performance taking place at the Canada Literature Day at the
Philipps-Universität Marburg on June 28th, 1996.
[Zurück zum Text]
[2] In his The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, 1984.
[Zurück zum Text]
[3] Linda Hutcheon defines the term as follows: 'Whether it be in
historical or fictional representation, the familiar narrative form of
beginning, middle, and end implies a structuring process that imparts meaning
as well as order. The notion of this "end" suggests both teleology
and closure and, of course, both of these are concepts that have come under
considerable scrutiny in recent years, in philosophical and literary circles
alike. The view of narrative that so much current theory challenges is
not new, but it has been given a new designation: it is considered a mode
of "totalizing" representation' (Hutcheon, 1989, 62).
[Zurück zum Text]
[4] L. Hutcheon, 1989, 66.
[Zurück zum Text]
[5] The term is H. White's. Cf. his Tropics of Discourse, 1985.
[Zurück zum Text]
[6] S. Pollock, Walsh in: J. Wasserman (ed.). Modern Canadian Plays,
1993. All further references to the play are to this edition and will be
included in the text.
[Zurück zum Text]
[7] Cf. Hutcheon, 1991, xiv.
[Zurück zum Text]
[8] L. Hutcheon, 1986, 75.
[Zurück zum Text]
[9] Cf. Kirkpatrick, 1988, 435.
[Zurück zum Text]
[10] Review by M. Page in Conolly, 1987, 140.
[Zurück zum Text]
[11] The Nez Percés called upon the help of Sitting Bull
in 1877 when they tried to follow the Sioux into Canada. Walsh discouraged
Sitting Bull from aiding the Nez Percés, to the fatal end that a
huge number of Indians died; murdered in the attempt to cross the line.
[Zurück zum Text]
[12] See the review by A. Freedman in Conolly, 143.
[Zurück zum Text]
[13] Thus Pollock's description of Sitting Bull has a similar effect
as the portrayal of Big Bear in Rudy Wiebe's novel The Temptations of Big
Bear. L. Hutcheon writes about this novel: 'The Big Bear we come to know
is not really the Big Bear of actuality - for how can we know that today?
- but the Big Bear of history texts, newspaper accounts, letters, official
and unofficial reports, but also of imagination and legend...There was
a Big Bear - though we can only know him today from texts. The novel is
both an inscription and an invention of a world' (1987, 171).
[Zurück zum Text]
[14] Perspective, again. As impossible as it is to attribute a particular
narrative, or even 'generic' mode to one historical situation, there are
inherent and typical character traits in the persons of the past. H. White
writes: 'We are inclined to say that certain sets of historical events
are intrinsically tragic, or comic, or epic, or farcical in nature and
that, therefore, they will admit of one and only one mode of emplotment
for the truthful representation of their real meaning. But real events
are tragic or comic or epic or farcical only when viewed from the perspective
of the interests of specific agents or groups involved in them. Tragic,
comic, epic, and farcical are not categories descriptive of real events.
As applied to real events, such categories are at best interpretive, which
is to say, ways of imputing meaning to such events by emplotting them as
stories of a recognizable, but culturally specific, kind' (1986, 487).
[Zurück zum Text]
[15] Described by Walsh as the deserted otherness that, according
to J. Rutherford, is the cultural metaphor of difference, the territories
indeed embody the potential for subversion: 'in representing the margins
of our culture and the knowledge and values that underpin it, [the desert]
is also the place of their undoing' (1991, 10). Walsh's particular sensitivity
to the uncivilised space around him is a distinct and distinctly likable
character trait: '...but the solitude here, the emptiness of these Great
Plains, fills me with a sense of timelessness' (259). The battle Walsh
leads against the colonisers from the West is fought not least on and over
this territory of difference. The introduction of the railway finally marks
the end of this subversive space and Walsh's 'use' of the new means of
transport points to the abandonment of his own subversive potential.
[Zurück zum Text]
[16] Cf. review by A. Freedman in Conolly, 143.
[Zurück zum Text]
[17] Hutcheon, 1989, 66.
[Zurück zum Text]
[18] Cf. White, 1986, 487.
[Zurück zum Text]
[19] Hutcheon, 1989, 76
[Zurück zum Text]
[20] Hutcheon, 1989, 86.
[Zurück zum Text]
[21] Hutcheon, 1989, 86.
[Zurück zum Text]
[22] Foucault, 1972, 6.
[Zurück zum Text]
[23] Foucault, 1972, 7.
[Zurück zum Text]
[24] This means also, however, that we are granted the refraction
of events by our own perspective of the present. Without the notion of
a 'truth' of history, we shape the momentary truth of our interpretation
ourselves: '...the number of strategies available to the historian for
endowing events with meaning will be coterminous with the number of generic
story types available in the historian's own culture' (White, 1986, 488).
[Zurück zum Text]
[25] Hutcheon, 1986, 78.
[Zurück zum Text]
[26] Foucault, 1977, 145.
[Zurück zum Text]
[27] For an analysis of 'Historical Pluralism' see Hayden White's
essay with the same title.
[Zurück zum Text]
[28] A cynically apt means of transport. Cf. M. Foucault: 'Navigation
delivers man to the uncertainty of fate; on water, each of us is in the
hands of his own destiny; every embarkation is, potentially, the last'
(1989, 11).
[Zurück zum Text]
[29] Review by R.C. Nunn in Conolly, 1987. 143.
[Zurück zum Text]
[30] Review by J. Portman in Conolly, 1987, 136
[Zurück zum Text]
[31] Foucault, 1972, 12.
[Zurück zum Text]
[32] This categorisation is apparent also in those reviews which
(favourably) point our how in the play an 'Indian instinctive perception
of the world' is juxtaposed with 'white scientific knowledge' (Review by
M. Page in Conolly, 141). Such a juxtaposition takes place in Walsh in
act one, where the young recruit Clarence meets the scout Louis for the
first time. Louis tells Clarence, mysteriously: '"Take all da books,
da news dat da white man prints, take all dat Bible book, take all dose
things you learn from...lay dem on da prairie...and da sun...da rain,,,da
snow...pouf! You wanna learn, you study inside here...(He taps his head.)...and
here (He taps his chest.)...and how it is wit' you and me...(He indicates
the two of them.)...and how it is wit' you and all...(He indicates the
surroundings.) Travel 'round da Medicine Wheel. Den you know somethin'"
(243).' Louis's 'performance', however, has the effect of baffling rather
than enlightening Clarence, and should be acted with the appropriate amount
of irony towards both characters.
[Zurück zum Text]
[33] Review by H. Whittaker in Conolly, 139.
[Zurück zum Text]
[34] White, 1986, 490.
[Zurück zum Text]
[35] White, 1986, 490.
[Zurück zum Text]
[36] See J. Derrida's Specters of Marx, where he writes: 'No justice
- let us say no law and once again we are not speaking here of laws - seems
possible or thinkable without the principle of some responsibility, beyond
all living present, within that which disjoins the living present, before
the ghosts of those who are not yet born or already dead, be they victims
of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist,
sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, victims of the oppressions of
capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism. Without
this non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present, without that
which secretly unhinges it, without this responsibility and this respect
for justice concerning those who are not there, of those who are no longer
or who are not yet present and living, what sense would there be to ask
"where?" "where tomorrow?" "whither?"' (1995,
xix).
[Zurück zum Text]
[37] Cf. White's 1982 essay 'Getting out of History.'
[Zurück zum Text]