Unruly Penelopes and the Ghosts: Narratives of English Canada

SEVEN: Confession as Antidote to Historical Truth in River Thieves

S E V E N Confession as Antidote to Historical Truth in River Thieves María Jesús Hernáez Lerena The advantage of conceiving of narrative as confession rather than as expression is that it allows us to see the pathos of the simultaneous pursuit and evasion of meaning in narrative. —Dennis A. Foster, Confession and Complicity in Narrative The novel River Thieves by Michael Crummey recreates the world of the nineteenth-century white settlers who met the last Beothuk in Newfoundland . Despite the sweeping historical plots the novel contains, the logic that glues the events depends more on the demands of domesticity upon the characters than on the larger pressures of historical circumstance . The settlers who were in contact with the last Beothuk, John Senior and John Peyton, wake up every day to a routine of checking traplines and organizing their labourers’ work in the Bay of Exploits, in Newfoundland’s Northern Peninsula. These male characters also have to organize their marital and sexual lives on the island. Their need for women and the obligation to keep their desires under the cover of social institutions are also pressing daily worries. Reimagining historical periods, events, and figures through an attention to the demands of domesticity makes epic and purposeful plot recede; characters’ lives acquire the quotidian and arbitrary rhythms of everyday life. In the domestic sphere, the idea of achieving great goals or returning life to equilibrium cannot be done within the bonds of an external plot nor 1 8 3 1 8 4 M a r í a J e s ú s H e r n á e z L e r e n a can it necessarily be bound by historical dates. Targets and achievements may remain distant, loose, or unacknowledged, overridden by the endless and necessary acts of family life performed for the sake of survival, comfort , and security. Little chores have to be done anew every day; a sense of finality or closure seems impossible to attain. The significance of the epic is diminished by staging characters in their most basic bodily needs and private moments, and River Thieves is full of embarrassing and shameful acts performed in the intimacy of the home. Besides this deflating aspect of adventure, we find another relevant narrative context that exceeds the constraints of domestic life and their subsequent “feminization” of history: confession. Confessional narrative, defined as a religious communicative model, emerges as a paradigm of understanding in this novel. River Thieves also includes court depositions; it is structured around private and public confessions, around layers and layers of listening and recounting of transgressions. In a religious context, confession is performed by two subjects, confessant and listener; in an institutional context, an individual has to certify his or her adherence to truth in public. In the omniscient narrative of River Thieves, what is said in the trials does not correspond to what is whispered in small chambers in the home, spaces that bear a close resemblance to the darkness of confessionals. The novel is built upon an exchange of narratives, narratives of innocence and guilt. This exchange, implicit in the activity of confession, partakes of at least two other important discursive contexts: testimony, that is, the bearing of witness to brutality, and journal writing, understood as a private record of events and emotions with personal significance. These three models of narrative communication—journal, confession, and testimony —are discourses that forcefully spring from the basic divide between the private and the public spheres and also from a sense of guilt or maladjustment . The predominance of private utterances over public discourse effects a shift of plot in River Thieves: adultery and abortion emerge as the true events, evil and sinful, which taint any effort of inquiry into historical circumstance. The fact that they remain undisclosed to society throughout the novel points to the epistemological dilemma of the narrative models invoked: transmission of knowledge may be hampered by lack of articulation , by self-interest, by an unwillingness to testify, or by the unauthoritative and vulnerable position of confessant and witness. In “Lament for a Notion: Loss and the Beothuk in Michael Crummey’s River Thieves,” Paul Chafe discussed the novel within the historical and cultural parameters of Newfoundland’s collective sense of loss and guilty conscience over the extinction of the Beothuk. Cynthia Sugars has also C o n f e s s i o n a s A n t i...