A WILDERNESS STATION

A Wilderness Station
by Alice Munro April 27, 1992 Subscribers can read this article in our online archive. (Others can pay for access.) ABSTRACT: A series of letters and one article (dated 1852-1969) about the settling of northern Canada, with Annie Herron at their center. The first letter, a reply to Simon Herron, gives the name of a marriageable girl from an orphanage, Annie McKillop. The next item (1907) is a recollection for a local newspaper by George Herron, Simon's younger brother, about their early days in Carstairs. Orphans at age 8 and 3, the two, 11 years later at Simon's behest, left Halton County to settle land in the north. Simon wanted no one's help; George became friends with the neighbors, the Teeces, and later married the daughter. Simon got Annie from Toronto in early 1852. While George and Simon were clearing the land, a tree fell on Simon and killed him. George and Annie buried him, and Annie left for nearby Walley. A letter (1852) from a local Carstairs minister tells James Mullen, a Clerk of the Peace in Walley, to expect Annie Herron, who, after the death of her husband, refused any offers of help and let her property deteriorate. Mullen writes back that Annie confessed to killing Simon with a rock, but he thinks she isn't strong enough and that she wants to live in the jail, because she has no where else to go. Annie writes to her friend Sadie that George killed Simon with an ax, because he always needled him, and that Annie left because she grew scared of George. The final long letter (1959) is from Mullen's granddaughter to the biographer of George Herron's grandson, Treece Herron, a Prime Minister of Canada. She writes about the afternoon she took "Old Annie," who lived with her family, to see George in June 1907. He was not well, Annie talked to him. The granddaughter talked to Treece.

Writing History / Writing Fiction

a virtual conference session
Essay by Reid Mitchell Imaginary Evidence: The Historical Fiction of Alice Munro
Despite history's origins in storytelling, narrative has not been the dominant mode in the history profession for quite some time. Academic historians, myself included, usually choose the article or the monograph to present their research, make their arguments, and persuade their readers. When historians do write narrative, they tend to write narrative in the manner of the 19th century. Literary modernism did not become part of the historian's baggage, and the only postmodernism to make its appearance has been not literary but theoretical and heavy-handed-an enemy, one might say, to history and literature alike. Furthermore, when some historians attempt to make their narrative lively, they depart from

historical method to badly clich'd fictional conventions, telling was what their subjects thought or what expressions flashed across their faces, or some other speculation that cannot be buttressed by evidence. Too much historical narrative reads like genre fiction. Yet the historical method, which begins with collecting fragmentary evidence, like an archaeologist his potsherds or the paleontologist his few bones of some great beast, does not have to smooth contradictions and ambiguity into conventional narrative. Like much 20th century fiction, it can instead leave much of the work to the readers, deny them the authorial voice, and ultimately leave the complete story unknown. Most historians prefer to leave the reconstructions and ambiguities to the footnotes and cloak their interpretations in authority. But the writer of historical fiction should see opportunity where the professors fear to tread. Writers such as Alice Munro have used the imprecision of history to create a literature of uncertainty, fiction in which the author refuses to reassure us that we know for sure what really happens. Of course, one can argue that that includes all fiction--even all "texts"--but surely some authors raise the question more purposefully than others. Alice Munro's "A Wilderness Station" is a particularly fine example of how imaginary evidence may be used. It is told entirely by "documents:" letters written in the 1850s, recollections in a 1907 newspaper, and a reminiscence written in 1959 by Christena Mullen in the form of a letter to "Mr. Leopold Henry, Department of History, Queen's University. The first letter is from the matron of an orphanage agreeing to ship Miss McKillop, one of their wards, out to the Canadian wilderness to be a bride for Simon Herron. The newspaper,article, written over fifty years later, is by Simon's younger brother George; among other things, it describes Simon's death in an accident. The next series of letters discuss Anne Herron, who's fled the wilderness station and gone to a nearby jail. She claims she murdered Simon Herron, but the conclusion is that grief has driven her insane. In a letter written to a friend, however, Anne explains that George murdered his older brother and the two of them conspired to cover it up. In the final letter, Christena Mullen describes a trip in her new Stanley Steamer when she took "Old Annie"--a "character" who worked as a seamstress for the family of the letter-writer-to visit George in 1907. Apparently having suffered a stroke. George "could not talk, except now and then a few words." "Too bad old Mr. Herron wasn't able to talk to you," I said to Old Annie. She said, "Well, I could talk to him."....I asked Old Annie if Mr. Herron could understand her when she talked to him, and she said, "Enough." I asked if she was glad about seeing him again and she said yes. "And glad for him to get to see me," she said, not without some gloating that probably referred to her dress and the vehicle. The story that emerges from these contradictory sources is almost biblical in intensity. The murder, the cover-up, the guilt that Anne suffers, the long years in which George perhaps remembers, perhaps forgets the murder, and the final confrontation between Anne and George when he could no longer defend himself, and when she knows her mere presence is enough to remind him of his guilt. This, the reader feels, is what "A Wilderness Station" is all about.

The story we are tempted to piece together from the sources--George murdered his harsh brother, Anne encouraged him to cover up his crime, but could not live with the guilt and accept it as hers, only to years later come and confront George--makes sense of the fragments, and, more importantly, is satisfying as a narrative. But there is no guarantee it is what happened. Perhaps Anne really did go insane. It's unlikely but barely possible that Anne really did kill her husband and George covered up for her. The reader feels impatient with Christena Mullen for not understanding the nature of Old Annie's visit to George, but perhaps it is the reader who is seeing more than is really there. This is not to say that as a reader I am not pretty much convinced of the "truth" of the "true" story. It is to say that Munro denies us conclusive evidence. Munro's "A Wilderness Station" is an example of how the historical method can be used to write literary fiction, modern fiction--what I am calling the literature of uncertainty. It is also to suggest that this method of assembling "historical" fragments can seem less arbitrary on the part of the author who wants to deny us certainty than some other modernistic techniques, because readers will not only think "this evidence is all we have"--even though the "evidence" is invented by the author--but will think of themselves as joining with the author in deciphering the evidence rather than as being tricked by the author. Nothing I say above is meant to suggest that historical fiction written conventionally cannot be more than genre fiction. Nor am I advocating that historians generally give up the monograph or the narrative. But historical fiction has a broader range than may customarily be granted it.

Persuasive Testimony in Alice Munros A Wilderness Station

Isla J. Duncan University College Chichester, West Sussex, England 1 IN HER ESSAY Toward A Feminist Narratology (1986), the Ameri- can academic Susan S. Lanser writes, in narrative there is no sin- gle voice ; voice impinges upon voice (Lanser 681). She illustrates narrative polyphony in her scrutiny of a nineteenthcentury letter purporting to be a young wifes self-effacing eulogy of her husband, and of the institution of marriage; a decoded subtext, however, yielded by a reading of the documents alternate lines, reveals a bitter attack on the mans deficiencies and an anguished lament for her situation. Lanser suggests that the letter is written for two readers, the censoring husband and an intimate female friend, and she argues that this double construction (Lanser 680) is a device frequently found in female-authored narratives that operate on two levels, the public and the private. 2 Lanser defines public narration as that which is addressed to a narratee external to the textual world, and who can be equated with a public readership (Lanser 684). Private narration, by contrast, is intended for a specifically designated narratee within the textual world. In the letter which is the subject of her scrutiny, Lanser discusses the salient differences between the public voice of the young bride, one which she describes as a discourse of the powerless (Lanser 680), and the voice of the subtext, which is assertive and direct.

3 Alice Munros short story A Wilderness Station (1994) is an epistolary narrative consisting of twelve letters, the first dated January 1852, the last July 1959, collected by an historian researching the life of a politician from Huron County, Ontario; each letter sheds light on the remarkable experiences of Annie Herron (McKillop), the central figure in the narrative. The story is constituted by the distinctive discourses of six characters, the writers of the various letters. Those written by characters other than Annie are identified by provenance and named addressee, and the reader understands that all letters reach their intended destination. All those emanating from Annie, however, do not reach their designated addressee, Sadie Johnstone, a character who inhabits the textual world but never materializes in it. The distinction between public and private narration may seem, initially, inappropriate in an analysis of fictive letters assembled for an extratextual audience, Munros contemporary reader. But there are certain features of Annie McKillops third letter that do clearly differentiate it from the other discourses in the epistolary narrative, and that encourage one to read the testimony as private narration. It is an unsolicited, confiding account to an absent friend, in which Annie relates events following the death of her husband, Simon Herron, and the changes in her circumstances that are occasioned by the death. It is unlike all the other letters in that it is not read by any character within the text. As Ildiko de Papp Carrington observes in her essay on Munros text,Annies letter never resurfaces intratextually. No-one ever seems to receive it, read it, or respond to it, except, of course, the extratextual readers of Open Secrets, and the New Yorker, where the story was originally published in April 1992 (Carrington, Double-Talking Devils 81). 4 The death of Annies husband, the kernel in the epistolary narrative, is based on an authentic incident in the lives of Munros ancestors on her fathers side. Several Munro scholars have referred to this historical detail in their work, citing the tragedy as one of many hardships endured by early pioneers in the Huron Tract. In his interview with the writer, Christopher E. Gittings discusses Munros ongoing interest in her fathers Laidlaw family history, an interest she has apparently developed into a non-fiction project. About this project, Munro confesses, Ive found it difficult keeping oneself within the bounds of fact instead of taking that fictional germ and doing something with it (qtd. in Scottish Ancestor 87). What Munro has done in A Wilderness Station, plainly, is use the fictional germ the young mans death in the woods to create a narrative that centres, predominantly, on female experience of a hard, punishing pioneer life. 5 This transformative reworking of the past brings to the fore the testimony of a female character whose voice is deliberately muted until midway through the narrative. Her story is first articulated by others, whose letters respond to specific inquiries and reach their destinations. As I suggested earlier, Annies three letters are clearly differentiated from the others because, firstly, they are unsolicited; secondly, they are not read by the intended narratee; thirdly, the function and purpose of all three are not proclaimed. The archival status of the third letter, in which Annie recounts the circumstances and consequences of her husbands death, is uncertain, for how (indeed, if ) the historian acquired it is not explained. The third letter is a contesting text which challenges the discourses of authority that, in the narrative configuration, precede it. The voices which the reader first hears are those legitimated by the state: they are represented by the matron of the state orphanage where Annie is procured, the patriarch of the family that is the subject of the historians

research, the Free Church minister who considers Annie to be a soul in his charge, and the Clerk of the Peace who grants the woman shelter in his jail. 6 Annie Herrons account invites the contemporary reader to reappraise various official versions of events in Huron Countys history, those which are sanctioned by the church, the legislature, the judiciary and the media. The reader of A Wilderness Station is encouraged, as Gittings asserts, to consider alternatives to the constricting mononarrative of a Scots-Calvinist based truth (34). Such a mononarrative enacts a patriarchal historiographic process (35) that marginalizes and threatens to obliterate Annie from its world. In this essay, I argue that Munro elevates the authority of her central characters testimony over other characters accounts. She does so by selecting particular narrative strategies of arrangement and transmission, and by creating an array of discourse styles that are reflective of ideologies current at the time. Many, or at least some, of the ideologies illustrated in letters written by characters other than Annie appear rebarbative. I believe that Munro sets out to make them so, thereby discrediting their accounts. I disagree with Ildiko de Papp Carrington when she maintains that Annies confession is problematic (Carrington 81), and that Annie delud[es] and torment[s] herself in the wilderness of her own mind (88). Annies third letter, containing her testimony, does not sound like the delusions of a crazy woman: the repeated insistence on the distinction between reality and fantasy, madness and sanity, suggests a clarity of purpose. The letter is addressed Finder Please Post, and ends on a declaration of trust in some unknown person with a sense of decency. The eventual recipient of the letter is none other than the extratextual reader. I argue that the contemporary reader should approach Annies testimony in much the same way that feminist academic Patrocinio Schweickart advocates in her essay, Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading (1986); s/he should treat the reading experience as an intersubjective encounter (Schweickart 623), in which the audience must connect with the female writer and with a larger community of women. In A Wilderness Station, Munro facilitates such an encounter, creating a female protagonist whose story compels and moves the modern reader. In Annies desperate appeals to her friend Sadie, and in Christena Mullens affectionate reminiscences, Munro alludes to a larger community, the potential of which is not realized in the text. 7 Ildiko de Papp Carrington vigorously discourages an empathetic response to Munros female protagonist, arguing that the character of Annie is portrayed as an outrageous, malicious liar and hoaxer (88) whose solipsism and confused perception (89) cause trouble for others. Elsewhere, Carrington is at pains to discourage feminist readings of Munros fiction: in her influential book on Munros work, Controlling the Uncontrollable (1989), she discusses what she believes to be the writers satire of feminists (Controlling 182), arguing that Munros emphasis on female humiliation does not make her a feminist injustice-collector (143, original emphasis). The epithet feminist is, perhaps, not always applied to Munros work, but her fiction has undoubtedly attracted feminist scholarship; for example, in the recently published collection, Critical Essays on Munro (1999), edited by Robert Thacker, three of the eleven pieces are avowedly feminist. Among book-length studies that one can accurately call feminist are Mothers and Clowns (1992) by Magdalene Redekop, and Dance of the Sexes: Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro (1990), by Beverly Rasporich. To affirm that Munros work is conducive to

feminist readings is neither fanciful nor tendentious. It is true, furthermore, that, consistently in the last two decades, Munro writes stories in which women break loose from their conventional roles, shake off their customary or expected passivity, as they do, memorably, in White Dump and Lichen (1986), and in Oranges and Apples, Wigtime, and Meneseteung (1990). 8 In A Wilderness Station, Munro creates a female protagonist who, in her waywardness and her eccentricity, adopts a conscious policy of resistance to male authority and violence (Howells 128). At the beginning of the epistolary narrative, Annie McKillops voice is muted, or articulated by various ventriloquists who claim the right to speak on her behalf. Eventually, however, she gets to tell her own story, and it is one that Munro encourages her reader to believe. 9 The letter that initiates the narrative is the earliest document in the archive that the reader imagines is collected by the historian, Leopold Henry. Dated 1852, it is written by the matron of the House of Industry where Annie McKillop was placed as an orphan. In this letter the matron responds to Simon Herrons request for her recommendation of any girl of marriageable age, a request which, it seems, is common, but is legitimated only by an endorsement from [a] minister (190). The churchs role in the procurement of young women for marriage is thus exposed early in the narrative. That the matron is complicit in the transactions between male pioneers and the church is confirmed by her assertion that she is happy to reply, and by the detailed information she conveys. In her comparative evaluation of two eighteen-year-old girls, Sadie Johnstone and Annie McKillop, who might suit Simon Herrons needs, the matron offers a glimpse of ideologies prevalent at the time: she stresses the legitimacy of their births, the respectability and Christian nature of their lineage. Extolling the virtues of the hardier, but not quite so comely Annie, the matron reassures Herron that the young womans dark complexion and eyes are no indication of mixed blood (191). In her advocacy, the matron both obviates and expresses the principal anxieties of the pioneers who settled in Ontario in the mid-nineteenth century; her letter adumbrates the Presbyterian narrative of moral and spiritual uniformity (Gittings 32) that subsequently issues from the Reverend Walter McBain, the minister who endorses Simon Herrons request. 10 Before his first letter, Munro places the Recollections of Mr George Herron, dated over a half-century later, a letter contributing to the fiftieth anniversary edition of the Carstairs Argus. This letter is an account of the Herron brothers experiences as young pioneers setting out, in 1851, to try [their] fortunes in the wilds of Huron and Bruce (191-92). In his account, the younger brother documents the hardships the men endure in their struggle to establish a settlement on the Crown land. For the purposes of my argument, I focus on three elements in George Herrons narrative, elements which are accorded some significance by Munro. Firstly, there is clear evidence of conflict between the brothers: there is more than one reference to Simons dismissal of his younger brothers opinions and wishes, and to acts of stubborn wilfulness that exacerbate the hardships they already endure. The second significant element is Georges account of why and how his brother sought a wife. In mitigation of what he acknowledges must seem a strange way to go about things, he explains that his brother had not the time or the money or the

inclination (195) for courting, and he cites the ministers endorsement of the transaction as moral justification. The ministers support extends far beyond merely endorsing the letter, as is clear from the revelation that McBain helped write the original request, and personally vouched for Simon Herron. The ministers patronage of the brothers is expressed in more fulsome terms in his own letters, which succeed George Herrons reminiscences. 11 A third significant aspect of these reminiscences is the younger brothers description of Simons death. The vagueness of detail and the lack of affect are, I believe, noteworthy. George writes,We were chopping down a tree where Simon wanted, and in some way, I cannot say how, a branch of it came crashing down where we didnt expect. We just heard the little branches cracking where it fell and looked up to see and it hit Simon on the head and killed him instantly. (195)One would not have to be the most perspicacious of readers to detect some weaknesses in the testimony. There is no hint of the inclement weather which might account for the sudden breaking and falling of a branch; the lack of any explanation for its crashing down where we didnt expect seems like evasion. The syndetic co-ordination in the final sentence is excessive. Overuse of the conjunction and is common in speech and in unsophisticated writing; in narrative fiction, it is reasonable to call it stylistically marked (Quirk et al 918). George Herrons letter exemplifies a high degree of coordination, as opposed to the subordination found in greater quantity in formal, carefully crafted prose. The last sentence in the above extract, then, may appear unremarkable, considering the general abundance of polysyndeton in his account. My contention is that, in this instance, the cumulative effect of the coordinated clauses makes his statement sound faltering, devoid of any causality or, for that matter, of logical sequencing. In George Herrons description, the branch has fallen before the two look up to see its flight downwards: We just heard the little branches cracking where it fell and looked up to see it (195). In addition, the younger brother exhibits no emotion whatsoever in his narration of Simon Herrons apparently instant death. Describing his efforts to drag back the body to the shanty through the snow, he emphasises the wearying (195) nature of the task, conveying an impression of self-centredness that is confirmed later in the account by the petulant complaint that he was left to chop and clear by [him]self (196). 12 In his letter to the Carstairs Argus, George mostly refers to the central character, Annie, in patronymic terms, as a wife (194), his [Simons] wife (196), my brothers wife (197). Only when he describes the burial of his brother does he use the womans forename. It is worth noting, too, that George confesses that he has forgotten Annies own name. Except at the outset, when he has to introduce Annie Herron, the minister uses the same relational terms of address. Alerting Mr. James Mullen, Clerk of the Peace in charge of Walley Gaol, to the possible arrival of Annie McKillop, he names her as a widow and one of my congregation (197). Annie is thus defined phallocentrically, in her relation to a dead man, and in relation to a cornerstone of patriarchy, the church. As he elaborates on Annies history, he employs several referents rather than use the womans forename: bride of the young man Simon Herron, Presbyterian female, young widow (198), child of the Free Church (199). The avoidance of the forename is made more prominent by the plethora of third-person pronouns in the ministers discussion of Annies circumstances. Lengthy paragraphs, each one consisting of several multiple sentences, are littered with subjective, objective, and genitive pronoun forms, but contain not one co-referent (198-99).

The refusal to name the woman reduces her individuality and sets her off at a distance from the narrator of the account. By contrast, the references to the Herron brothers as these two young lads (198) are familiar, even affectionate. 13 Munro creates a distinctive discourse style for the Free Church minister, one that is formal, distant, and rather stilted, as the following illustrates: It is a fault of mine that I am not well-equipped to talk to women. I have not the ease to win their trust (198). His aloofness with regard to women seems to prevent his showing much compassion for the character of Annie McKillop, whose value he estimates as a member of the Free Church, and therefore as a soul in [his] charge (199). 14 The reader learns more about Annie from the letters of James Mullen, with whom McBain corresponds. He is presented in a positive light, as a compassionate man, slow to censure, and willing to understand, as these statements of his suggest: As you may know, we have a very fine new Gaol here where the inmates are treated with all humanity and I am in perplexity about her [Annie] (202). The most significant aspect of Mullens first letter is the disclosure of a second version of events surrounding the death of Simon Herron. This version, in which Annie strikes her husband dead with a rock, is, it is reported, delivered by Annie on her arrival at Walley Gaol. The account is discounted by Mullen, for reasons that are well substantiated: he believes her physically incapable of the murder and doubts whether a convenient rock would be found in the snow. The doctor who later examines the woman shares this skepticism. 15 What particularly interests me in Mullens letters is the profusion of instances where Annie McKillops statements are mediated by others. Munro employs several kinds of speech presentation in order to demonstrate the ventriloquizing of her central characters voice. She is introduced in Mullens letter as the subject of the ministers correspondence, and her account of the death of Simon Herron is conveyed via a mixture of different representations of speech. There is evidence of Narrative Reports of Speech Acts in Mullens assertion that I got all the particulars I could (200), where the reader infers Annies responses to his questions. Indirect discourse is manifest in several reporting clauses such as she said and she says, which remind the reader that the central character is not yet the narrator of her own story, but is written of in the third person by others. Connections among the principal male narrators, Mullen, Herron and McBain, are consolidated by Mullens enclosed letter to George, in which he is asked for his opinion on Annies version of events. Various arbiters of legitimacy the Clerk of the Peace, the Free Church minister, Annies brother-inlaw, the doctor at Walley Gaol pass judgement on the worth of the protagonists testimony before it emerges in first-person form to the reader. Towards the end of Mullens second letter to McBain, Munro begins to prepare the reader for the textual entry of the main characters voice, using, firstly, free indirect, followed by free direct discourse. Mullen explains that the prison doctor had asked Annie, did she not fear hanging?; he recalls that she replied, no, for there is a reason you will not hang me (205). That Munro chooses to render part of the prison doctors dialogue with Annie via snatches of free direct and free indirect discourse is worthy of discussion: such representation is in keeping with the polyvocal density of the epistolary narrative; it also offers the reader a clearer envisaging of a character who has been obliquely shown. The

narratologist Michael Toolan believes that free indirect discourse (FID) often serves as a strategy of (usually temporary or discontinuous) alignment, in words, values and perspective, of the narrator with a character (Toolan 128). In Munros narrative, the FID ushers in the voice of the female protagonist, and suggests a degree of empathy between this central character and the narrator, James Mullen. As I observe above, the reader is encouraged to trust the judgement of the Clerk of the Peace, who is portrayed as a decent man. 16 Two brief letters written by Annie precede her account of the aftermath of Simon Herrons death. Each of these might persuade the reader to react favourably towards the protagonist. In her communication with Sadie Johnstone, her former companion in the House of Industry, Annie appears stoical, diligent, loyal and considerate. It is obvious, too, that she is no fool, for she correctly anticipates that her letters will be examined. 17 The protagonists full testimony is thus prefaced by these short, poignant pleas for some contact with her friend. Munros narrative configuration serves a dual function: it creates reader sympathy for Annie, and differentiates her accounts from the public narration of the other letter writers. Carrington asserts that these short notes furnish evidence of Annie McKillops caution and disingenuousness; she points to the date of the second brief letter, April Fools Day, regarding it as an ominous foreshadowing of a hoax, of concealing rather than revealing (Double-Talking 81). Instead of revelation, Carrington argues that the reader then encounters a problematic confession which results from Annies distorted perception (81). I disagree with Carringtons negative evaluation of the character of Annie McKillop, which, judging by qualities evinced in the first letters, is positively portrayed. I do not read her confession as at all problematic, and I shall argue that her view of events is presented as plausible. 18 As I have suggested, Munro takes pains to postpone the emergence of her central characters voice, prefacing it by various discourses of authority whose certainties the reader is expected to question. For example, does the contemporary reader accept that there was no order imposed on [Annies] days (199) after the departure of her brother-inlaw, George Herron? And what of the doctors assessment of Annies state of mind, as being unhinged by the sort of reading that is available to these females (205)? By conveying her protagonists words via others distorted perceptions, Munro casts doubt on their claim to speak for the young woman. Annies speech is mediated for long periods by ventriloquist characters, so that when her own words eventually break through, they seem especially clamorous. 19 The readers attention is swiftly caught by the technique of in medias res. Meaning in the midst of things, in medias res refers to the method of starting a narrative with an important situation or event (Prince 44). In the case of Annies letter, it is the witnessing of her husbands body being dragged towards the log shanty by his brother. There follows a vivid, meticulously detailed account of how Annie prepares Simon Herron for burial, during which she realizes that her husband has been murdered. Munro conveys this startling discovery in a sentence of unbroken monosyllables: And then I saw, I saw where

the axe had cut (209), the force of which is enhanced by the rhetorical scheme, anadiplosis, which amplifies the shock. 20 Whether George Herron killed his brother or not is a matter of considerable debate. The conflict between the brothers has been made known to the reader, who might accept that the younger man would eventually strike out at his unyielding, domineering older brother. Furthermore, George Herrons version of the incident in the woods is not convincing. The detail, candour, and assertiveness of Annies testimony are, for me, compelling and, in conjunction with the textual evidence discussed above, persuade me of the plausibility of her account. Munros love of minutiae in description is manifest in the mention of the one little piece of hair Annie cuts from her dead husbands head, the eyelet petticoat (209) used in her sewing of the makeshift shroud, and the tea from catnip leaves (210) she makes for George in her efforts to console him. The simple exhortations she issues are made starker because Munro renders them in staccato, predominantly monosyllabic utterances, the indentation of which creates the impression of a list, a mantra:You didnt mean to do it. It was in anger, you didnt mean what you were doing. I saw him other times what he would do to you. I saw he would knock you down for a little thing and you just get up and never say a word. The same he did to me. If you had not done it, some day he would have done it to you. Listen George. Listen to me. (210) Annies attempts to shake her brother-in-law from his apparent emotional torpor are futile. When she resorts to reading from the Bible, urging George to seek forgiveness for what he did, she reveals an understanding of the scriptures that Carrington argues is indicative of her ability to change her diction just as readily as she reverses her story (DoubleTalking 83). Rather than illustrating duplicitousness, Annies desperate ministrations can be interpreted as borne of compassion for a fellow victim. Annies desire to reassure and comfort George extends to her putting him to bed and trying to warm him, using heated cloths and the proximity of her own body. These resuscitative efforts can be read as acts of human kindness that one might perform for a person who is in shock or despair, as George Herron appears to be. 21 Carrington perceives this episode in a much more sinister light, arguing that Annies solicitous acts amount to predatory sexual advances on her fourteen-year-old brother-inlaw (84, original emphasis). She justifies this claim by pointing out the various references to heat in Annies account, both literal heat and the heat of sexual arousal, and to the fact that Annie pulls George to the marital bed (83), not, presumably, his own. The selfinflicted bruise on the back of Annies hand, Carrington speculates, may have been the result of the womans determination to prevent George, the auditor in the other bed, from hearing the sounds of intercourse (84). How then does the reader interpret the black and blue marks on Annies legs and arms? These are presumably the consequence of Simons

rough treatment, either in or out of the marital bed. Why is Georges youth of such concern to Carrington? In his letter, he describes himself as a husky lad (192), who has the physical and mental strength to set out as a pioneer in the Huron County wilderness he is hardly a vulnerable mite. 22 I cannot agree with Carringtons estimation of Annie as a female devil or Lilith (84) intent on seducing the younger brother and dismayed by his inertia. If I do, I dismiss the impressions I have formed during Munros characterization; I thereby discount the importance of reader empathy and my own affective responses. These persuade me to believe Annies version of events. The emotional denial of her brother-in-law, which Annie documents so meticulously, is suggested by his own terse description of Simons death; the futile solicitousness she engages in after his burial seems entirely sincere and believable in a character whose pathetic quest for her friend Sadie the reader already knows of. Annies third letter, her testimony, is, as Carrington points out, more articulate, and much more substantial than the terse notes she initially sends to her absent friend. But Annie composes this final letter after she has been able to reflect on past events, when she has spent some time in the comfort of the prison, having lived like an outcast in the wilderness. 23 Towards the conclusion of this letter, Munro inserts the sentence And I would like for that yelling to stop (Munro 218). This simple assertion is noteworthy. Its significance is heightened by its separation in a paragraph of its own, and its contiguousness to Annies childlike pleading for Sadie to come and visit her. I read the statement as a reference not to Annies troubling memories, her terriblest dreams (225), but to the wretched cries of Annies fellow inmate in the gaol, the insane female whom James Mullen wrote of, a rape victim whose screams resound sometimes for hours at a stretch (206). The effect of this cursory and seemingly random reference to the yelling is manifold: it serves to illustrate the densely cohesive nature of Munros rich narrative, and it enlivens her depiction of Ontario prison life in the mid-nineteenth century. I believe, furthermore, that it conveys a vestige of the suffering that Annie herself endured, hence her marked aversion, and, in so doing, it increases the readers sympathy for the central character. 24 Susan Lanser argues that the veracity of the coded letter examined in Toward a Feminist Narratology (1986) will rely, largely, on the readers warm-hearted response to the female victim, who is imprisoned in a loathsome marriage. Lanser observes that there are three readers of the womans letter: as well as the husband and the friend, there is, of course, the third, the extratextual reader, who brings to it particular kinds of knowledge and interpretative possibilities (Lanser 685, 688). I would add that s/he might bring, in addition, a particular understanding, and compassion, in the same way that s/he might to Annie McKillops account. 25 The final letter in Munros epistolary narrative ensures that, in the words of Coral Ann Howells, Annies life story has a happy ending (128). It is Mullens granddaughter, Christena, who provides the epilogue, wherein she affectionately recalls her memories of Annie, who lived on with the Mullen family as their seamstress. This last letter is structurally crucial, since it provides the justification for the letters that precede it, it furnishes the reader with yet another substantial piece of settler history, and it further

illuminates the remarkable character of Annie McKillop, whose imagination, eccentricity and candour are all illustrated in Christenas account. There is also ample evidence of Annies notorious storytelling, about, for example, a suitor driving up in a carriage or a baby born from a boil on a stomach. But these absurd inventions are surely told for dramatic import, and Munro is careful to incorporate in Christenas letter the many allusions to Annies competence, which counteracts her outrageousness: she pinpoints exactly where her former shanty stood, she designs beautiful gowns for her employers children, and she appears to make George Herron finally listen to her version. 26 The reader is not privy to what Annie says to George, but it is clear from Christena Mullens recollection that the old woman enjoys her narration. She would have told her story without interruption or contradiction, since George Herron had lost the power of speech. For Annie McKillop, telling her story is as desirable as writing it, as if to tell were in itself to resolve, to provide closure (Lanser 688). 27 The same desire for resolution persuades another Munro protagonist, Phemie in The Progress of Love (1986), to believe what appears to be a fallacious version of an incident in her mothers life. The narrators mother once burned money bequeathed by her father, an inheritance that would have relieved the familys dire poverty: she did so because she had hated him so much. Phemie grows up believing that her own father had not protested at his wifes profligacy, and had watched in silence as the notes burned on the stove. However, it is later revealed that events had not happened in this way, for her father had never known the money had been given to the family. Yet the narrator does not want to relinquish the false version; indeed, she confesses that she will go on believing it because it deserves to be the truth. It sustains the progress of love, and it affords her a comforting memory. Howells argues that Munro, in her blurring of the boundaries between knowledge and belief, has perfected the art of indeterminacy (92). 28 In his review of Open Secrets (1994), George Woodcock remarks, We end up never quite knowing who is telling lies about the death of Simon Herron (Woodcock 25). I maintain that the reader is persuaded to believe Annies account of events in her wilderness station, and I have argued that there are several reasons why the reader should accord status to Annies testimony, the principal one being because it seems so much the truth it is the truth

BADLANDS
HISTORY IN ROBERT KROETSCH'S BADLANDS
Arnold E. Davidson

God help us we are a people, raised not on love letters or lyric poems or even cries of rebellion or ectsasy or pain or regret, but rather old hoards of field notes. 1 If the field notes left to his daughter by William Dawe represent paleontologist's only love letter to his only descendent, that missive also looks two ways. It asserts a claim; it abrogates a relationship. In this latter sense the notes are really Dawe's threefold "dear John" letter: the husband writes to his wife; the father to his daughter; the scientist to the living world he left behind in his search for bones. Enjoying the pose of sacrificing savant, Dawe goes on writing. His daughter one of the narrators of Badlands, informs us near the end of her story that her father had "kept making field notes for the twenty years after his last trip into the field" (p. 269). Furthermore, the real field notes - that is, those written in the field - are neither complete nor honest. The events that occur during Dawe's journey down the Red Deer River and through the Alberta Badlands are transmogrified into evidence that either "documents" the life of that vanishing breed, the bone-hunter, or "demonstrates" the capability of that heroic leader, Dawe. Other entries are not events at all. Dawe can record, for example, his dream of his wife and her lover: "He invited you in swimming. You saw a snake in the water and panicked and, drowned" (p. 34).He here images his sense of his loss - as proved through her imagined fall (the real lover came before Dawe) while he, the imagined hero, is exiled by science from the garden of love. In these entries, too, he attempts to create the myth of himself. His field notes are all, in short, aimed at posterity. He does not entirely miss that mark. His legacy to his daughter not just the notes. It is also his covert insistence that he has become mythic - or, at least, historic - and the concomitantimplied demand that she should spend her days unravelling the tracks of his past, just as he has spent his days tracking giant reptiles long extinct. In the case of each quest, the result is a history distorted by the limited vision of the historian. William Dawe, an early twentieth-century trailer after the great nineteenth-century bonehunters, is not "deterred by a mere error in chronology" (p. 138). Although "born one generation too late," he still seeks, as did his forerunners, complete skeletons of huge dinosaurs - preferably a dinosaur hitherto undiscovered, a Daweosaurus of his very own. He is not at all interested in gaining an accurate picture of the total environment that existed during that dark prehistoric time to which he naively believes his search will carry him. Until the final pages oil the novel, Anna Dawe also looks for her own imagined dinosaur. She postulates a sometimes demonic, sometimes heroic, giant whoconceived her; who once came to her bed, kissed her breasts, and almost claimed the virginity that thirty years later she still has not shed; who once scolded her, but who mostly ignored her. Her revelation is that William Dawe has cast a scant shadow over her life precisely because he was a small man. Short and hunchbacked, William Dawe was stunted and twisted emotionally too. He was, for example, happier in the bowels of of a museum than in his own home. He evaded life at every turn by dedicating himself to uncovering death, unburying corpses. But his recapturing of things past through the sacrificing of present raises real questions about fathers and historians. What,Kroetsch asks in Badlands, ties the past to the present, the forefather to the descendent? Those questions are given further point by the fact that they never occur to Dawe. His quest, he is quite positive, is heroism of the highest order and the

conquering of time. All of which is to say that Badlands offers certain premises about the interplay of life and time. The best student of that complex process, Kroestch subtly suggests, is not the paleontologist, looking for an ossified past and ossifying his own present in dry bones and dusty field notes. Rather, the real historian is the novelist, the true myth-maker, whoknows that history, like life, must be fleshed out - and in - with marrow and red meat. The two epigraphs to the novel provide Kroetsch's first hint that he is concerned with the process of making - in both senses of the word - history. They also provide a perspective on time that counters the different, more simple view set forth in the "Chronology" which immediately follows the epigraphs. The first of these epigraphs, taken from the Nez Perce story of "Coyote and the Shadow People," seemingly sounds a warning to those who attempt to reach out too directly to the past. Coyote, overjoyed to have his resurrected wife come back to him, does not heed her warning and rushes to embrace her. The effect is disastrous. She returns, with his touch, to the realm of the dead, to "shadowland." As Joseph Campbell in The Hero With A Thousand Faces observes, the story is a common one and is best known to western readers in the Orpheus and Euridice version: The Greek myth of Orpheus and Euridice, and hundreds of analogous tales throughout the world, suggest . . . that in spite of the failure recorded, a possibility exists of a return of the lover with his lost love from beyond the terrible threshold. It is always some littJe fault, some slight yet critical svmptom of human frailty, that makes impossible the open interrelationship between the worlds; so that one is tempted to believe, almost, that if the small, marring accident could be avoided, all would be well.2 But of course the "small, marring accident" can never be avoided. So the wife of Coyote is a second time - and this time irrevocably - lost: "And just as he touched her body she vanished. She disappeared - returned to shadowland." We have here a metaphor for the novel. William Dawe finds his "Daweosaurus," yet that success is in several ways marred. It is first paid for, and thereby largely cancelled out, by the death of Tune, Dawe's surrgate son. That adolescent had once spent two weeks as a coal-miner, which, for Dawe, makes Tune a demolition expert. Engineered into taking charge of the explosives, Tune buries himself with the blast that uncovers the prize skeleton. "It was an unfortunate accident," Dawe writes in his notes, only to cross out the "unfortunate" and begin again. "No doubt the boy was. Careless. Didn't follow" (p. 241). With these disconnected fragments, Dawe, seeks to cover over the disaster. But he has touched the intangible in his endeavor to transcend time and his triumph is mocked by his failure. The dark underside of the skeleton of Daweosaurus must henceforth shadow forth his incapability as the leader of William Dawe Badlands Expedition. Neither can he live by or even retain the uncertain sign of his uncertain success. His last years are spent in a shadowland of uncatalogued bones. Much against his wishes, Daweosaurus is taken from Ontario and returned to Alberta. With the loss of his dinosaur - which, obviously, was not his - he goes to a self-inflicted death by drowning. The old man, burying himself in the waters that should be life-sustaining, finally inversely images the boy who was buried in

the death-preserving day, and thereby achieves the defeat that was implicit in his victory all along. The second epigraph, from a bp Nichol poem, "Martyrology," also implies the interpenetration of the temporal and the timeless. Of course, the very study of dead martyrs establishes a parodox regarding time and history. One examines the lives of martyrs to see how they died in order to live forever, in the Christian paradise and also - as the modem cynic would insist - in the earthly realm of hagiography. The three lines of the poem imply a similar paradox: this is a strange country desert flows around us death & breath makes us wary Altering in time, the landscape becomes the flowing desert, the river of life as well as the Heradetian river of time. We have here a double image of life and death: a desert and arid life-denying is also all-encompassing, flowing. Death and breath make us wary; possibly because death and breath are both more similar and more different than we mortals commonly imagine. So we construct our myths -as Campbell would insist - and our martyrologies - as Nichol suggests - to convince ourselves that, in rare moments, we can transcend time and reach beyond the "badlands" of disordered life to grasp the "shadowland" of structured eternity. To enter the order of history: that is, of course, what William Dawe desperately desires and what, in a sense, Anna Dawe also seeks as she looks, over fifty years later, for her namesake, Anna Yellowbird, the sole survivor of the 1916 Dawe Expedition down the Red Deer River. Anna, like her father, hopes to uncover a vanished past in order to redeem the futility of her own present. Like her father, she searches for a worthy progenitor, one who will justify both the search and the seeker: For in that summer of his glory my father became not only what he had always implicitly been, but what he explicitly wanted to be. After that he was a man without a history.... [He] went on, annually if not endlessly, collecting evidence of Cretacious and then Jurassic and then Triassic life; while he persisted as if he must one happy morning get back to the source itself, the root moment when the glory of reptiles, destined to dominate the world magnificently for one hundred million years, was focussed in one boy creature, one Adamseed burrowing in the green slime But it was left always with the mystery of his own first season. For in his summer of 1916, in the Badlands of the Red Deer River, discovering the Mesozoic era, with all of Europe filling its earth with the bones of its young - he removed himself from time. (Pp. 138-9) That parallel between the 1916 Badlands of western Canada and the very different contemporaneous wasteland of westem Europe brings us back to the novel's "chronology" and another perspective on time. Seven bare dates, ranging from Summer 1916 to Summer 1972, provide the parameters of the action and remind the reader that the Dawes' search for

a time beyond time takes place in time, in history. The Expedition begins in the Summer of 1916. While most of the young men of Ontario leave for the East and battle, the thirty-five year old Dawe (yet a virgin) marries and, in the fashion of the day, leaves his wife behind but to go West, to find bones, not to lend his own bones to the chaos of World War. In the wilderness of the Badlands, he meets the fifteen-year old Anna Yellowbird. She has been guided by a shaman to the strange hunchbacked man who, she believes, will lead her to the boneland, to the place where her husband - also sacrificed to civilization's answer to apocalypse - must, she feels, still reside. From this point the "Chronology" continues. Starting with October 1916, William Dawe returns annually to his wife's bed. In October 1926, he stays three days instead of the usual two, and in July 1927 she bears the daughter that is given Anna's name. In October 1942, when that daughter is the same age that the first Anna was in 1916 and while another war rages, "Dawe goes home to visit not his dying wife but his daughter." Twenty years later he dies and ten years after that the two Annas partly retrace Dawe's journey through the Badlands. Paleontology, mythology, martyrology, chronology: different ways of preserving the past, of marking time. But these different ways are not all equivalent. As earlier suggested, one of Kroetsch's objectives in Badlands is to contrast concepts of time. Particularly pertinent in this respect is Michael Sinnott, the photographer incongruously encountered in the middle of the Badlands, his Model T in the middle of the river on the remnants of a ford washed away in a recent flood. This self-appointed historian of the defunct does not distinguish the present from the past. "Everything is vanishing here," he insists, "every form of life," from Indians to homesteaders to "bone-hunters too" (p. 117). "Nothing vanishes. Everything goes on. Life goes on," Dawe immediately counters but not very convincingly. As Sinnott points out, Dawe's bones "are sometimes only mineral replacements of what the living bones were" (p. 128) and so bear the same relationship to reality as do Sinnott's negatives. Furthermore, as Sinnott's practice implies, the picture is made real by naming it. Thus his portrait of Dawe becomes definite when it is christened "The Charlatan Being Himself' (p. 128). The justice of that title and the invalidity of Dawe's belief that he "recovers" and gives life to the past are also proved at the end of the novel. The daughter recalls how her father, in the notes of his field books that he kept to the end of his life, rescued from time only "each day's tedium and trivia. Shutting out instead of letting in. Concealing" (p. 269). The other character who especially counters Dawe is Web. This key crewman on the boat that will sail millions of years down the river into the past as they pass from one geological formation to another, early insists, "There is no such thing as a past' (p. 4) and again, much later, "There was no past, never" (p. 235). But we question his strident denial when we learn of his actual past. The father had insisted on his son's independence. In a last gesture before making his way alone, Web went back to his father's shack, put a match to it, and "left again before he found out if his old man got out dead or alive, and then, his way lighted by the burning shack, headed down the road and kept going" (p. 4). In his own personal history, Web finds his reasons for denying history. Priapic Web, who is as obsessed with "bones" as Dawe is (the bawdy pun is Kroetsch's), is the man most given to, in Anna's term, the "mythologies of the flesh" (p. 94). So Web invents himself too. He turns his fiasco in the whorehouse "into magnificent success"; his

modest success with Anna Yellowbird in the rain into an X-rated exploit of an amorous Pecos Bill copulating as he rides a tomado. In brief, he dreams as dubiously as Dawe does. It is not then surprising that these opposites and brothers have a love-hate relationship and conduct a relentless war of wills. Nor is it surprising that, despite his denial of the past, Web carries out Dawe's desire to unearth the past when Dawe himself is incapacitated. Web even finds, accidentally, the Daweosaurus that will carry the other's name. That is part of the war and Web's way of affirming his imperfect vision against Dawe's different one. As Anna at one point notes, "my father, years later, could fly into a rage remembering Web's indifference about the past they were seeking together" (p. 162). And as a final salvo in the war of mythologies, when Web joined the army in the fall of 1916 and went overseas, he gave William Dawe's name as his only next of kin. Web's apparent death affirms and denies his present and his past. The would-be hero killed in a ridiculous war represents a Pyrrhic victory for both men. The three other voyagers are also defined more or less in terms of their relationship to their present and their past. There is, first, Claude McBride, a local resident who joins the expedition because he "wanted to make a few dollars, a summer's wages, then return to his homestead at Red Deer Crossing, to his wife, his four kids, the crop that was supposed to grow and ripen while he was away" (pp. 12-13). McBride has no real commitment to Dawe or to discovering dinosaurs. Still, he joins the expedition not just for money: "in his forties [he] was too old for this folly, and yet not old enough not to be tempted" (p. 17). But a few incidents early in the journey serve to convince him that he should be elsewhere. He falls overboard when they hit the first rapids and is found later riding, naked and stinking, in a floating pig trough. One close call with both death and a polecat is quite enough. It is better, he decides, to be skunked literally by nature than figuratively by the river of time. He prepares the boat for its future trials and, then, even though he is the only capable navigator - perhaps because he is the only capable navigator - he abandons ship. Or as Anna Dawe sees it: "In the Western yarn those men were trying to tell each other, he was the only one with the ability to become a hero, the wisdom not to. Home was a word he understood and heroes cannot afford that understanding" (p. 45). History had tended toward myth. McBride, however, rejects the proffered roles of historic witness or mythic hero in order to fulfill himself in the present comfort of his home. One can hardly blame him. Considering Dawe's ambiguous quest - more governed by "happenstance" than design - McBride raises a voice rarely heard in the novel, and affirms sanity and good sense. The fact that he chooses survival is underscored when we learn the fate of his replacement. The man who resists the temptation of the journey, "too old for this folly," is replaced by Tune, the adolescent boy found playing blues piano in a Drumheller whorehouse. Still too young to do anything in that establishment save play the piano, Tune is, nevertheless, old enough and romantic enough to believe that a foolish crew led by a hunchback is on a brave and important mission. Tune would also discover his future through Dawe's sally into the past. But his quest, under the tutelage of this guide, for his own mature, heroic self ends, as previously noted, with a tragic bang and Dawe's extended whimper. He is buried alive, under a mountain of clay. The whorehouse provided a more likely escape, and certainly a more pleasant one, from the dangers of the mine.

The final member of this unlikely crew is Grizzly, an inscrutable Oriental who can forget at will that he understands English; who prefers to speak only when not spoken to; and who, in many ways, is the backbone of the expedition. He is the cook, catching goldeyes out of the Red Deer River, feeding the others. But despite his essential function, he is generally unnoticed. The "man whose name they would not bother to learn" (p. 13) takes his nickname from an unclear story that he attempts to tell on the first night of the journey into the Badlands. It is a "jumbled tale" of a close encounter with a pie-eating grizzly bear that occurred somewhere near the source of the Red Deer River while Grizzly was the cook for a topographical survey crew. However garbled, his account provides the others -especially Web - with a vision of the cold mountain source of their "flatlands river." Grizzly, however, although he stays mostly on the boat, is the one least committed to the river. Unheeded by his companions, he helps Anna Yellowbird, builds her bone teepee, and shares it with her while they are all still pretending that a fifteen year old woman-child has not come along on their man's adventuxe. It is also Grizzly whom Anna, years later, remembers most fondly. "Little Grizzly, he wasn't like that Billy, crying out 'Mamma!' in the middle of it all" (p. 263). And later, "He never talked about it that old man with the pigtail. . . . Just did it" (p. 264). Those who lived badly, by the word, apparently "loved," when they went through the motions, much the same way. Anna's fond recollection of Grizzly as a lover provides a turning point in the novel. The younger Anna has just told of the almost incest that occurred when she was fifteen and then asks a climactic question: "What was he like?" (p. 263). Anna Dawe, searching for an enemy and a father, really finds a friend and a mother. Her question is deliberately misunderstood. Fully knowing which "he" is meant, the other Anna describes "Little Grizzly's" prowess. The daughter is thereby "saved" by the wrong history: In that instant [she] had brought me back, turned me around, somehow. She had let me say it, and beyond that, beyond even the saying, she had let me see that I had had nothing to fear. And maybe even nothing to regret.... And I was ready to laugh then. I was not laughing, but I was ready to laugh. Not the pained uneasy and nervous laughter of a lifetime of wondering, of trying to recover and then reshape and then relive a life that wasn't quite a life. I was ready for real laughter. (Pp. 263-64) It is at that point that the two women decide to abandon their journey through the Badlands which was to recapitulate the history and recapture the myth of the man who had touched them both. They will go instead to the mountains, to "the Badlands upside down" (p. 265) and "the high source of the river" (p. 264). "Let's do it for Web," the younger suggested, still tied to the past and in need of, if not a guide, at least an excuse. "Fuck Web," the other replies, "Let's do it for us" (p. 264). And they do. Sustained by beer and gin, they make their way up into the mountains to the Red Deer Lakes. That day's hike, a journey supposedly too far for two middle-aged women, is not "too far for two drunken women" (p. 265). Their perseverance is rewarded by the strange sight of a bear borne by a helicopter away from the garbage and the tourists, a "great, hunched, shaggy beast . . . about to be born into a new life" (p. 268). This sight finally prompts the laughter that Anna Dawe earlier only felt and provides the epiphany that ends her search.

Most obviously, the grizzy defecating through the sky, is highly ridiculous: He was running in the air, straight overhead, so comically human and male.... I held out my arms, my fists, to the galloping, flying bear; we laughed ourselves into a tear-glazed vision of the awakened old grizzly, lifted into the sun, his prick and testicles hung over us like a handful of dead-ripe berries. (Pp. 268-69) The many incongruities - the drunk, aged, bawdy Indian with her then equally inebriated, middle-aged, long prissy, virgin namesake; the flying, running bear, manlike, "his testicles following crazily after" (p. 268) as he makes his mad dash through the sky - bring the two women the release and relief of hysterical laughter. This dazed grizzly, perhaps a descendant of that other bear mythologized in Grizzly's jumbled tale, has other prototypes in the novel besides his possible ancestor. As a sexual animal, he is Grizzly. As a "hunched" ridiculous creature rushing through his improper element, he is Dawe. It is this last manifestation that both Annas recognize. The former mistress, laughing, flings the photographs that she has saved for fifty-six years at the bear's balls. The daughter then throws the final field book that she "had carried like a curse for ten years" after the photos and watches it too "fall into the lake where it too [like the photos and the man] might drown" (pp. 269-70). Each is finally free from the past that has held her prisoner. They walk out "by the light of the stars," and in the light of "those billions of years of light," they both realize the futility of their own recent search for the past and the silliness of Dawe's earlier more protracted quest: Anna looked at the stars and then at me, and she did not mention dinosaurs or men or their discipline or their courage or their goddamned honour or their goddamned fucking fame or their goddamned fucking death-fucking death. (p. 270) Breaking unspoken taboos with her litany of obscenities ("male" words), Anna Dawes also breaks from her proper past as a dutiful female. With those obscenities, she properly judges the father and so need no longer serve as a questing daughter. Anna Yellowbird, "who had never seen the ocean," more explicitly sums up the senselessness of a relentless search for the past: "Like pissing in the ocean." The women, arm in arm, walked down the mountain, singing. "We walked all the way out. And we did not once look back, not once, ever" (p. 270). On that note the novel ends. The invocation is to look ahead, to walk up mountains and down them, to sing, to join hands, to escape prisons of the past, the archeology of old lives, borrowed visions, stale dreams. One should "come to the end of words" in love, as Grizzly did, not to die dishonestly - "the fucking bastard had let me prepare the canoe" (p. 269) - as did Dawe. It is love, and sex, that transcends time, not the search for dry bones. So Grizzly or Web or Sinnott or one of a host of others, may have fathered Anna's first Billy. But "Billy" Dawe, judging by Anna's hysterical laughter when the question is put to her, did not. The man who desperately desired a male heir to carry on a dynasty and conquer time future as well as time past, fails here too. He fails similarly in other ways. He also loses Tune, his surrogate son, and Anna, his real daughter.

William Dawe, the would-be man of myth, is, for all his pretensions, finally shrunk down to his proper puny size. Anna Dawe, the woman who also tried to reach back in time, learns to look ahead. Governing these progressions is the novelist, the one character in Badlands who transcends chronology to achieve the cyclic vision hinted at in the epigraphs. Kroetsch moves forward and backward in time, speaks in many voices, gives us parallel histories, the truth of correspondences, fully human characters, and a setting rich in bones. Perhaps only in such a fiction do we have the real history and the living mythology of the vast and still largely empty Badlands.

The Bull Moose Alden Nowlan

Analysis of The Bull Moose

"The Bull Moose" by Alden Nowlan is a finely crafted poem which reminds us of how far man has strayed from Nature. Through a carefully constructed series of contrasted images, Nowlan laments, in true Romantic fashion, man's separation from Nature.

The strength of the old moose is impressive. On his death march, he nonetheless comes "lurching" and "stumbling" in ponderous and powerful strides to "the pole-fenced pasture''the edge of civilization. A crowd quickly gathers, a crowd of men and women, old and young - all notable for their insensitivity and lack of respect. They confuse the moose with one of their own domesticated animals, like the cattle or collie or gelded moose or ox, failing to see the nobility and ancient wisdom of this moose from "the purple mist of trees." The scene becomes obscene as men "pry open his jaws with bottles" and "pour beer down his throat." The symbolic crown of thistles hammers home the innocent suffering perpetrated by these giggling and snickering buffoons.

But this moose is no "shaggy and cuddlesome" doll. Living in freedom beyond the fences of civilization, this king of the spruce, cedar, and tamarack meets his degraded executioners with overwhelming power. The deep roar of this magnificently horned ancient "blood god" contrasts sharply with the puny and cowardly whine of the automobile horns.

Nowlan's sympathy for the moose and his disgust for mankind is forcefully expressed in a natural free verse. This poem calls us to rethink the arrogant self-righteousness we hold toward Nature. By fencing ourselves in, perhaps we shut ourselves away from those

qualities necessary to make us truly human.

Teachers Comments: This essays strives to be concise, i.e. it seeks to say as much as it can in as few words as possible. Brevity may be the soul of wit, but brevity in itself is nothing if the richness is missing. A concise essay seeks to produce this feeling of high-octane reading. The danger of too much conciseness is that a weak reader may not read closely enough to pick up all that is bieng said and implied.