A Revolutionary Failure Resurrected: Dialogical Appropriation in Rudy Wiebe's The Scorched-Wood People

'Grandfather, how long must one live before he can speak for the dead?'

'I am nearly old enough to sing for them,' I said.

The Scorched-Wood People, 36

Because, in The Scorched-Wood People, Rudy Wiebe writes – in English and as a Mennonite-Western-Canadian novelist – about francophone Manitoba Métis and their struggles to protect their territory and way of life from the national-consolidation projects of English-speaking Ontario and its Confederation partners, we are compelled to deal with the issue of appropriation. Wiebe's novel employs strategies that show its awareness of this problem. Its use of multiple layers of voice, in which most central characters 'speak for themselves,' while a partisan narrator, Pierre Falcon, speaks from beyond the grave, provides a version of what Charles Taylor describes as many voices engaged in a struggle for recognition and against misrecognition, essential in the creation and maintenance of identity (Taylor, 25). Avoiding a simple retelling of history 'as it truly happened,' Wiebe seeks a more just retelling, one that is aware of itself, of the ethical problems of representing the voice of the Other, and of the desperate need for such a representation. Wiebe eschews objective or fact-based accuracy for a method that declares itself in search of truth. He finds this method in what I call dialogical appropriation, an ethically necessary method of engaging history (as opposed to didactically laying it out) and the collective and individual identities that are its raw material. Such a retelling is more truthful for its refusal to declare itself true.

Dialogism and Rudy Wiebe

In Rudy Wiebe and the Historicity of the Word, Penny van Toorn applies Bakhtin's vocabulary to Wiebe's entire fictional opus.¹ She describes three stages through which Wiebe's protagonists pass as their initial monological vision of the world is shattered, then reasserted in a different and superior form. First, there is an 'expulsion from the monologic, "single simplicity" of an Eden'; second, there is a disorientation of this vision because of the invasion of multiple alien voices; finally, 'the world's many human voices and languages cohere into a single hierarchy, a new, effectively monoglossic linguistic order, presided over by the divine Word or Sign' (3–4). In The Scorched-Wood People, for example, Louis Riel's voyage from an idealistic student to an internally conflicted and sometimes reluctant rebel leader ends with the reassertion of his religious vision – the recitation of the Lord's Prayer as he is being executed (Scorched-Wood People, 346).

Marie Vautier, analysing the same text, comes to a different conclusion. The narrator, Falcon, becomes an agent of the text's self-reflexivity, which in turn 'allows a reflection on the question of community' (58–59). Biblical mythology, instead of being a force of cohesion, becomes a source of tension; the text finds itself caught between 'Falcon's straightforward use of the Catholic tradition in his myth-making and Wiebe's ironic revision of traditional interpretations of Canadian history' (78). In the end, 'the narrators' metafictional flaunting of themselves, their "texts," and their (hi)stories as constructs underlines the instability of all versions of past events and indicates the postmodern impossibility of imposing one definitive mythological system upon past or present worlds' (99). The difference between these two interpretations is a product of the critics' approaches. Van Toorn attempts to read through Wiebe's own eyes – that is, through a Christian, or more precisely, a Mennonite lens. Vautier concentrates on the role of a problematic narrator and the construction of a national text in a postcolonial and postmodern literary culture where absolutes are fleeting.

Since it is easier to deconstruct than to construct, the search for reconciliation between these approaches might lead to an identification of cracks in van Toorn's reading of ultimately transcendent monologism...