The Blind Man and the Loon: The Story of a Tale

5. The Art of the Tale [Contains Image Plates]

93 CHAPTER FIVE The Art of the Tale As noted earlier, the story of the Blind Man and the Loon is widely distributed across Greenland, Canada, and Alaska. Although the tale is just as well known among northern Indians as it is among Eskimos, it is primarily the Inuit or Eskimo subtype that has inspired a remarkable wealth of folk art, including sculptures, prints, sketches, and wall hangings. In chapter 4 I talked about the artistry of the language used to tell the tale through one of its many authentic oral performances, but here I want to explore the great wealth of other art forms inspired by the tale. Most of the folk art associated with the tale springs from eastern Canadian communities in the territory of Nunavut and the Nunavik region of northern Québec. This is the region associated with Regional Group B oral variants, the Canadian Eskimo oicotype (see chapter 1, map 1). Franz Boas (1888) identified them as the Central Eskimo, but today they are better known as the eastern Inuit, and their language is made up of several dialects of Inuktitut spread over a vast geographic area. The Visual Arts: Some History With a set of images, I want to look at how artists have dynamically interpreted specific scenes and themes in the narrative. The panoply of art coming out of the tale stands in a secondary, derivative position to the tale itself (i.e., the tale as oral performance and text) but offers THE ART OF THE TALE 94 additional ways of reading, hearing, or “seeing” it. In this respect the folk art is reminiscent of illuminated manuscripts from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The oldest written variants of the tale hearken back to Greenland in the 1820s, with many internal suggestions that it was developed in antiquity, but as far as art history is concerned, the oldest representations of the tale only go back to northern Canada in the late 1950s and early 1960s. A conspicuous exception to this pattern is the ink drawing included in Hinrich Rink’s redaction of the tale, published in Danish in 1866. Rink does not say who did the drawing but notes that some of his illustrations were designed and engraved on wood “by natives of Greenland.” Chief among these woodcut artists was Aron of Kangek (1822–1869), who contributed heavily to Rink’s first collection of tales, Kaladlit okalluktualliait : Kalâdlisut kablunâtudlo (1859), and to his ethnographic opus, Danish Greenland: Its People and Its Products (1877). The single sketch or woodcut associated with “The Blind Man Who Regained His Sight,” included in Rink’s Eskimoiske Eventyr og Sagn (1866) and its subsequent translation, Tales and Traditions of the Eskimo (1875), shows a small boy crawling out of a sod or stone house tunnel to see a ghostly figure standing above him (fig. 15). Presumably this faceless person, who appears to be standing on a polar bear hide, is his abusive mother, stepmother, or grandmother. The sketch artist, who might be Aron of Kangek, is not identified. Then too, we must mention the commercial art the story inspired in the William Toye and Elizabeth Cleaver (1977) volume, discussed briefly in chapter 2. A full-length essay about Cleaver’s fifteen illustrations recognizes The Loon’s Necklace as one of “the first full-colour picturebooks with identifiable Canadian themes and images” (Saltman and Edwards 2004). Even more insightful is Cleaver’s own autobiographical essay, “Idea to Image: The Journey of a Picture Book” (1984), where she traces the development of her book with Toye in considerable detail, from first drawings to the finished work. Excerpts from Cleaver’s diary (1984, 163) are instructive and show considerable thought and preparation: April 15, 1977: I start my research by going to the National Museum of Canada Library in Ottawa, where I discovered variants of the legend. Even though William Toye has done the retelling I will illustrate, I THE ART OF THE TALE 95 am interested in understanding how the characters are portrayed, and what incidents are important, in other versions. I collect visual material relating to Tsimshian artifacts that I may use in my pictures: totem poles, huts, articles of clothing. During my two-hour bus drive each way between Montreal and Ottawa, I work on an outline for the twenty-four-page picture book. April 19: I continue my picture research at McCord Museum...