In 2002 when Rudy Wiebe is 68 and gets Canada its first Nobel Prize for Literature, The Blue Mountains of China will probably be hailed as the first major novel of his early maturity. That won't be quite right, since it has few of the orthodox properties of the novel, and has indeed a form unique to its own peculiar properties.

The Blue Mountains has been called a saga and a chronicle, both of them terms which imply an episodic narrative.¹ It is truly neither episodic nor a narrative, and can't be fitted into or even closely related to any existing category. Its form is unique, with some elements of the short story and some elements of the “whole-book” story sequence, together with an architectonic structure which offers no more than a minimal justification for its being presented to the struggling reader as a novel.² Its essential method is not the discursiveness of narrative nor even the unifying subjective vision of the ‘experimental’ novelist, but the symbolist associationism of the modernist writers of short fiction.³

In setting down that proposition I am uncomfortably conscious that I am running against most of the substantial critics of the book, including such scrupulous and well-equipped Mennonite insiders as Magdalene Falk Redekop. While disputing the exactly right reading of the final chapter among themselves, Redekop, Ina Ferris and David L. Jeffrey all see the author as moving in it out of the existential mode which is native to the novel form, and which prevails in the isolated incidents of the earlier chapters, and transferring the materials of the book to the transcendental mode which we might all along have expected given the author's Mennonite background.⁴ The final chapter, says Ina Ferris, is “insistently structured as a conclusion absorbing the whole novel.” It makes deductions. “Through the decisive shift in method Wiebe signifies the inability of his existential mode to resolve the questions he raises.”⁵ She sees this withdrawal from the existential strengths characteristic of the novel form as a weakening, an “attenuation”. Jeffrey sees it on the contrary as a strengthening, an assertion made through a voice which is “authoritative because it is really that of a whole communal history.”⁶ Redekop, approaching through the many different ‘voices’ in the book, sees it as a conclusion which first insists on a ‘vote’ for the prophet-figure, and then insists that we reconsider the vote and question the limitations of the language of prophecy.⁷ The book addresses itself to the metaphysics of human vision, and its critics assume that the conclusion must therefore wind up the search with some kind of vision.

All three critics, starting from the old premise that novels should not tell but show, implicitly assume that Wiebe “shows” his position through the range of incidents and “tells” it by ultimately directing us, in the final chapter, to the superior language of the prophet John Riemer. They differ over the single-mindedness of the telling—whether we vote for John Riemer against the materialists and sceptics who visit him in his roadside ditch and eat with him sitting on his cross, or whether the telling emerges from the historical pattern through which the reader has been escorted, up to the time of reevaluation in Canada's centenary year, 1967, where the book ends.

The Blue Mountains is a book which almost aggressively invites pattern-making. It lays heavy demands on its reader. It insists for instance that the Jakob Friesen of Chapter 2 is properly linked to the Friesens of Chapter 4, that Liesel Driediger of Chapter 5 is recognised as Elizabeth Cereno in Chapter 13, that Frieda Friesen of the four “witness” chapters is seen as the “Muttchi” of Paraguay in Chapter 13, that the man Franz Epp calls “Balzer” in Chapter 4 is the father of the man he is talking to, and so on—the network is far too intricate for a single reading of the book. The impulse to identify patterns in the process of tracing these complex dynastic and thematic linkages is inescapable. And each pattern alters the appearance of the final chapter and makes identification of what Wiebe is “telling” more difficult to pin down. There are the journey patterns, for instance, which develop the central image of the book and imply that the title of the last chapter, “On the Way”, indicates a short halt on the journey, for assessment and evaluation. There are the patterns of dynastic and religious survival. And there are the religious categories of victims, survivors and witnesses. Every pattern leaves some components out, and in doing so diminishes the pattern's value as a means of access to Wiebe's metaphysics.

Readers always prefer big books, however epic or episodic their structure, to end conclusively. It is in the nature of large artefacts to round themselves off neatly, and the bigger the artefact the more emphatic the sense of an ending has to be. By contrast modernist short fiction is the form in which the ending is characteristically curtailed, an opening out instead of a closing down. The reader of Blue Mountains is impelled by the sheer scale of the book to look for a conclusion, whether artistic or metaphysical. If it is seen in the modernist terms of short fiction, as a sequence or “whole book”, with its characteristic structures of association and open-ended implication, that pressure recedes. Since the impulse to look for a conclusion works in both artistic and metaphysical terms, it is worth looking at the book's artistic cohesion to see how that affects the metaphysics.

Wiebe himself has acknowledged that The Blue Mountains began as “individual stories that I didn't at first think had any necessary connection.” Some chapters were in fact first published separately, as short stories.

I simply got ideas for stories which, at the time, I had no sense were going to be of any particular pattern put together. I thought of a cycle, may be a series, of stories about the Mennonites wherever they might be.⁸

In its origins The Blue Mountains belongs in the main stream of the short story as it has developed so massively in this century in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, southern Africa and all the enclaves which have had no reason to feel themselves essentially metropolitan. The short story cycle evolved by Katherine Mansfield in her “Karori” stories, which were to have grown into a “novel”, the “whole-book” cycles of Naipaul's Miguel Street, Margaret Laurence's A Bird in the House, in Malcolm Lowry's Hear Us O Lord, and Alice Munro's Who Do You Think You Are? all have their affinities with Wiebe's original design for The Blue Mountains of China. That Wiebe developed the associative discontinuities of the “Karori” stories into a “saga”, or “Christian Odyssey” as W. J. Keith calls it, is a measure of his stature as an artist. Certainly he has written since on the epic scale. Both Big Bear and The Scorched-Wood People follow the “great black steel lines” of the uniform plains where scale ranges from the ant and the louse to the ruled horizon.⁹ The scale of The Blue Mountains demanded epic—“you decide to try to write the entire history of a people, scattered over 80 years of their life and scattered over four different continents.”¹⁰ But what had to end with hyperopia began with the myopia of David Epp and his louse in Chapter 9 of The Blue Mountains. The question which dangles is how complete, how perfected, is the shift from the story cycle to the epic with its conclusive ending.

Apart from the intricate dynastic links, which are to some extent fortuitous, the stories are tied into a sequence chiefly by two characters. Frieda Friesen's account “My Life: That's As It Was”, is a concise autobiography occupying four short chapters, 1, 3, 6 and 10. In the final chapter, 13, she is an absent figure, the Paraguay matriarch. By contrast her cousin Jakob Friesen IV is a shadowy figure, the vanished father, in Chapter 2. His fugitive time in Moscow and his capture are described at second hand by a Paraguayan exile in Chapter 4. He appears directly for the first time in Chapter 8, and is not really a major presence until the final chapter. Frieda Friesen's autobiography spans the full timescale of the book, from her birth in 1883 to the Canadian centenary year, 1967, when Jakob Friesen arrives in Canada from Russia, though she does not tell of her life directly after 1959, when she returned to Paraguay from a last visit to Canada. The record of Jakob Friesen's survival begins in 1929, with the return of his son from a six-week interrogation to find his family fled and himself left with a Jacob-and-Esau struggle for possession of the family farm, a struggle which ends in young Jakob's death. The final appearance of Jakob Friesen IV, confronting John Riemer in Chapter 13, brings his guilt over the abandonment of his son, and his solitariness, into direct contrast with the matriarchal community of Frieda and her Canadian children. These two symmetrical figures, the one gradually receding into an absent matriarch, the other growing as a guilty, childless father, are the survivors.

Between them are the victims, the sacrifices. Young Jakob Friesen of Chapter 2 is followed by Liesel Driediger and her ingénue account of crossing the equator on the way to Paraguay in Chapter 5, Anna Friesen and her marriage in Chapter 7, David Epp's self-sacrifice in Chapter 9, and “The Vietnam Call of Samuel U. Reimer”, Chapter 12. Any of these stories could stand alone as short fiction, and several of them have been published separately. They do have linkages with the continuing narratives, of course. Young Jakob Friesen is the son of the Jakob Friesen IV of Chapters 4, 8 and 13. Liesel Driediger returns as Elizabeth Cereno in Chapter 13. Anna Friesen is a Paraguayan daughter of Frieda Friesen. David Epp is linked with the Moscow community of Chapter 4 and the Paraguayan settlers. Samuel U. Riemer is the older brother of John Riemer and the son of the “Balzer” of Chapter 4. But they are all beads on the thread created by the survivors.

The other continuing thread in the book is John Riemer. His role is that of witness, beginning in Chapter 4 as, in Paraguay, he listens to Franz Epp's account of the Moscow escapes in 1929, when Jakob Friesen was captured and sent to a Siberian labour camp soon after the treks to Paraguay and Canada began. In Chapter 11, another which could be taken separately, he is in Paraguay where, with young David Epp, he meets an injured Ayeroa Indian. After his brother's “call” in the next chapter he appears carrying his cross in Alberta, during the conjunctions of the final chapter.

Thus the sequence of the twelve chapters which precede the final chapter runs as follows: 1. Frieda Friesen's account of her life in the 1890s; 2. Jakob Friesen V in the Ukraine in 1929; 3. Frieda Friesen and her marriage in 1903; 4. Franz Epp telling John Riemer about Moscow in 1929; 5. Liesel Driediger sailing to Paraguay in 1927; 6. Frieda Friesen in Paraguay through 1927 and the following years as the Mennonite settlements were established; 7. Anna Friesen in Paraguay in the 1930s; 8. Jakob Friesen IV in Siberia in 1932; 9. David Epp crossing the Chinese border in the 1930s; 10. Frieda Friesen's life up to 1959; 11. John Riemer with young David Epp in Paraguay in the 1960s; 12. Samuel Riemer in Manitoba a year or so later. In the final chapter, entitled “On the Way”, three of these characters, Liesel Driediger, Jakob Friesen IV and John Riemer, come together on an Alberta roadside. Other characters are mentioned—Frieda Friesen, Jakob Friesen V, Franz Epp, David Epp, the husband of Anna Friesen, and Samuel Riemer. A daughter of Frieda Friesen also appears, and other relations and relationships are explicitly identified.

None of the “bead” stories lacks connections with the other chapters. Even Chapter 12, the serio-comic call of Samuel Riemer to go as a peace missionary to Vietnam, is tied in not just by his kinship to John Riemer and the Mennonite communities but with John Riemer's encounters in Paraguay, and especially with the missionary efforts of young David Epp to work for the Paraguayan Indians. The self-sacrifice of the “victim” David Epp on the Chinese border is shown to have influenced his son, who in turn transmits his spiritual feeling through John Riemer to Samuel Riemer, as Samuel innocently reports to his psychiatrist. Anna Friesen's story in Chapter 7, which Wiebe himself has said could easily be singled out to be read on its own,¹¹ is an illumination of life in Paraguay under Frieda Friesen's matriarchy. Anna's husband is mentioned in Chapter 13 but not Anna herself, a reminder perhaps of the safe choice and the suppressed life she was impelled into by the conditions of the Paraguayan settlement.

These are all essentially fortuitous linkages. The kinship relations serve as reminders of the common source for all the experiences, and indicate that the reader is being shown a full range of reactions within the common frame of the Mennonite journeying, from the conservative implicities of Frieda to the materialistic suffering of Jakob Friesen, and from the dumb sacrifice of Anna Friesen to the quixotic sacrifice of David Epp or the articulate but complacent suffering of Elizabeth Cereno Driediger. But they are parallels and contrasts which do not really depend on a Mennonite identity for their strength. Their cohesion ought to be metaphysical. What the pattern-making process omits when it traces the structures of kinship through the book is the transcendental element.

The Blue Mountains is of course infused with biblical images as well as biblical language, and most of the metaphysics can be seen in the biblical substructure. Jacob and Esau in Chapter 2, the lilies of the field in Chapter 8, the Book of Samuel in Chapter 12, the underlying concept of life as a journey and the iconology of the cross in Chapter 13 as a critical intersection in place and time, all make their contributions to the patterns which Wiebe makes in connecting the human experiences of the Mennonites to their biblical archetypes. But the biblical underlay does not provide continuity. Each chapter makes use of biblical language in its own way, and some of the situations have biblical analogues. They are not linked, though, in the kind of continuity which a consistent concern with metaphysics and a proper preparation for a concluding chapter which resolves metaphysical issues would require. The true unity of The Blue Mountains is through the associations and thematic parallels and contrasts characteristic of the modernist short story.

If we look at the sequence of the chapters we can see major disjunctions, leaps back as well as forward in the chronology, and jumps across three continents, besides all the shifts of character. Apart from Frieda Friesen's four short chapters of autobiography no two of the twelve chapters which precede the conclusion centre on the same character. And yet the linkages, the inherent continuities, are much more substantial than mere genealogy and cultural background. The central Paraguay chapters, for instance, make a sequence of exact contrasts. Liesel Driediger's excited adventures on the ship change to Frieda's curtly grim account of the first years breaking and being broken by the land, which transposes into Anna Friesen's cramped life. The next chapters set Jakob Friesen's determination merely to survive in Siberia against David Epp's sacrifice, and move on to Frieda's account of her community's survival in Paraguay alongside the Russlander survivors from David Epp's trek. Chapters 11 and 12 develop parallels, linking the Epp sacrifice first with young David Epp's Indian work and Samuel Riemer's “call”, and finally with John Riemer's cross in Chapter 13. What develops through the book though is not a concentration of attention on any “call” but an acknowledgement of diversification. It is inherently the same record of diversification which is to be found in Peace Shall Destroy Many. The final chapter of The Blue Mountains does not so much draw the separate threads together as lay them alongside each other, as parallels, not a single focal and conclusive point.

The book is structured by this diversification. It begins in the first person with Frieda Friesen. Between her first two narratives about Manitoba a single third-person chapter, in the Ukraine, is interposed. Between her second and third there are two chapters, John Riemer hearing about the background to the Ukraine chapter and Liesel's sea-voyage. Between Frieda's third and fourth, both in Paraguay, there are three chapters, one in Paraguay and two in Siberia. Her narrative is increasingly separated by parallel narratives, first one, then two, then three. By the final chapter she is in the background as a piece of living history, appearing only through her dispersed Canadian descendants. Hers is an expanding shape, like the whole book. She exists in the final chapter as the matriarchal emblem of one kind of survival, the exact opposite of Jakob Friesen. Where he began shadowily as a materialistic patriarch, he is sharply present in the end as an impoverished solitary. She, dutiful and godly at the outset, ends settled, secure and unseen in her community, her children and grandchildren divergent representatives of the new materialism of the Willms business world. She and Friesen exactly counterbalance each other.

Parallels are notoriously patterns of perspective, by definition endless, like the great black steel lines of fiction which Wiebe described in 1972 in “Passage of Land”. So it is, I feel, with the associative parallels in The Blue Mountains of China. Jakob Friesen's belief in Chapter 13 that prayer helps “exactly nothing” is given depth both by the history of his own survival and by the association with his cousin Frieda's survival. John Riemer's cross-bearing act of witness gets its depth from his older brother's call to witness in the previous chapter. The depth, the perspective, becomes obvious chiefly in these associations, which are the characteristic method of the modernist short story from which the book grew. Such a pattern of associations inhibits any positive conclusion either for the narrative subject or for the underlying metaphysical questions about the Mennonite pilgrims' progress which the biblical undercurrents invoke. It is wrong to insist too strongly in our reading of the book on our sense of an ending. The final chapter is properly entitled “On the Way”, not “On ‘The Way’”.

Notes

1. Both terms are used by W. J. Keith, in the introduction to his New Canadian Library edition （No. 108） of The Blue Mountains （Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1975）.

2. The term “whole-book” is used by Kent Thompson, reviewing Margaret Laurence's A Bird in the House for The Fiddlehead 84 （1970）, pp. 108–11. I am grateful to Leslie Monkman for drawing this term to my attention.

3. See, for instance, Clare Hanson, “Katherine Mansfield and Symbolism: the ‘artist's method’ in Prelude”, JCL XVI （1981）, pp. 25–39.

4. Magdalene Falk Redekop, “Translated into the past: Language in The Blue Mountains of China”, in A Voice in the Land, Essays By and About Rudy Wiebe, ed. W. J. Keith, Edmonton: NeWest Press, 1981, pp. 97–123. Ina Ferris, “Religious Vision and Fictional Form: Rudy Wiebe's The Blue Mountains of China”, ibid. pp. 88–96. David L. Jeffrey, “A Search for Peace: Prophecy and Parable in the Fiction of Rudy Wiebe”, ibid. pp. 179–201.

5. Ina Ferris, op. cit. pp. 94–5.

6. David L. Jeffrey, op. cit. p. 192.

7. Redekop, op. cit. p. 115.

8. Interview with Robert Kroetsch and Shirley Neuman （1980）, A Voice in the Land, p. 228.

9. The phrase is from “Passage by Land”, Journal of Canadian Fiction III （1974）, p. 48. Patrick Holland developed the point in a paper, “‘Great Black Steel Lines of Fiction’: Culture, History and Myth in the Novels of Rudy Wiebe”, delivered at the fifth triennial ACLALS conference in Suva in January 1980. Wiebe made a further point about size and perspective for a resident of the plains in a seminar at the University of Reading in February 1980.

10. Interview with Margaret Reimer and Sue Steiner （1973）, A Voice in the Land, p. 128.

11. Interview with Robert Kroetsch and Shirley Neuman, op. cit.