William T. Vollmann

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Along the Stream of Time

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SOURCE: "Along the Stream of Time," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4673, October 23, 1992, p. 21.

[In the following review of Fathers and Crows, Korn concludes that, despite certain problems, "the narrative grips."]

[Fathers and Crows] is the second of William T. Vollmann's planned Seven Dreams, a sort of mythic history of North America. The first, The Ice-Shirt (1990), followed the voyages and feuds of the Norsemen, their encounters with Inuit and Amerindian beings, natural and supernatural, their conflicting greeds and dreams, ghosts and demons. Restricted to the comparatively narrow stage of Scandinavia, Greenland and Newfoundland, it weighed in at a laconic 400 pages. Now heavier still and hot on its trail, comes this massive second dream, focused on the second stage of the fatal impact: the arrival in Canada of the French traders who messed up the Indian economy and the Jesuits who messed up their minds. It is vast and rocky and criss-crossed by innumerable streams, like Québec itself.

The strong, circuitous and episodic tale comes with a heavy apparatus of indexes and glossaries, notes on sources and overly explicit acknowledgements: essential travel documents for a writer who regularly crosses the meandering boundary, until lately formidably walled, between history and mythopoeia.

The language, likewise, moves interestingly between contemporary colloquial, Hollywood historical, Middle High Tolkientalk, and a quirky and enjoyable poetry: never less than vigorous and inventive. Through the narrative web stalks the none-too-shadowy figure of the author ("William the Blind" is one of the more irritating kennings which stud the text), telling us whom he met in Québec City or Baffinland, and why he decided to write.

The French came for gold and stayed for furs, especially beaver; they created a demand for iron goods, and meddled in tribal warfare. This, traditionally, had provided a regular supply of subjects for burning and torture and ritual feasting. When Champlain, who is one of the major narrative voices, supported a Huron attack on the Iroquois, he was astonished and enraged that his allies refused to press home their advantage to the proper European conclusion: annihilation. The Huron, with the instinct for conservation of any successful hunting society, saw no point in running down the stocks.

They soon learned. Though the traders and the missionaries intrigued against one another, their combined assault subdued the tribes. For the first few seasons, the Jesuit strategy was to baptize only the dying, since they were in most urgent need; and, conveniently, could not backslide or create scandal to the Faith. The Huron deduced that the Christian religion was associated with death, probably causally, and the Jesuits were placated as powerful sorcerers. Meanwhile, the Dutch supplied the Iroquois federation with guns.

The British, Swedes and Basques stirred the pot. Traders poured in rum.

"It is the policy of the Society of Jesus that only good Christian converts should receive arms. Monsieur the Gouverneur is in accord with our opinion."

"Of course we do the same," laughed the Dutchman. "If our Maquaqs have more guns, it is because we have made more converts."

Though the heart of the story is the encounter of the Jesuits and the Hurons, and how, simply, they tortured one another according to their respective lights and skills, and the heart of that is in the ambiguous dealings between Père (later Saint) Jean de Brébeuf and the displaced and discultured Born Underwater, the bitter fruit of the rape of a Micmac wisewoman by a French lerrikin, Vollmann takes a circuitous route. Disarmingly (or not) he offers a delicate nudge to us on page 403: "Here it is page 403, my plot more or less in place, all destruction finally ready to happen and what about the poor Jesuits, sidelined again? You're their friend and this is their book!"

Despite nudges, the narrative grips. It is mainly a rendering of the Jesuit Relations, the annual company reports of the various overseas branches of that early multinational, but Vollmann has used his sources well. He is surprisingly convincing at transmitting how it felt to be a voyageur, to be drowning, to believe in Hell or the water monster, Gougou, to have a dream in a culture in which the dream lucidly dreamed is more of a privilege than ever Freud dreamed.

The prose is always energetic, often beautiful, crammed with ironies, insights, idiosyncrasies, iterations and irritants; at times operatic:

They went to the tree at the cliff's edge; yes, they ascended the yellow horizon of leaves until the world became brown with gables of rock on the hills, ledges and shelves and dark spaces of granite and sandstone making pitted walls up to the top where it was mossy and ferny and green and orange with soft hairy moss-locks growing down the broad trunks of trees whose bark was braided like rivers and rattlesnakes.

Sometimes the density of irritants is excessive, with indecipherable maps, scratchy little drawings, eccentric use of capitals and fancy typefaces, inconsistent renderings of exotic names after the manner of T. E. Lawrence and infuriating Gallicisms (redoubted, plupart, the Roy).

When Vollmann writes like an Indian, the results are sometimes even odder: "The wildness left his eyes, which had been the darkplaited suns of snakeskinhusks." But the Huron view of Parisians is more trenchantly expressed:

They were loud, anxious and shrill. They were not strong. They feared one another. Day and night they disputed, using words as ugly as their beards, but these insults they rarely avenged by striking or killing one another, for which he mocked them. For this reason the Black-Gowns thought him stupid and did not baptize him.

Painfully, deludedly, the French ascended the St Lawrence, looking for China or the gold of the Saguenay or ripe Indian souls or the "naked privities" of Indian women. (The phrase recurs obsessively, though the obsession is Champlain's not Vollmann's or the reader's). Fathers and Crows is as literally a roman-fleuve as it could be without having moist pages. By way of contents-list, there is a two-page "chart of the goals, straits and obstacles, to be found in the Stream of Time, keyed to the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius de Loyola", from River's Mouth (eddy of the three Sins) and on to the seventy-third rapid, which is simultaneously the Ascension of Christ, and Niagara.

Some of the allusions remain obscure: "where the stream of time becomes definitively fresh in its estuary, the sweetness of the water is guarded by many ingenious lilyflaps". Again and again, the imaginative recreation of Huron, Iroquois and the still more exotic Jesuit thought-patterns is interrupted by postmodern whimsy: "The way was long and laborious, and if I truly believed in representation I would be forced to describe for you every canoe-stroke, to mimic with the rippling swirls of these characters every change in the waters through which they passed, to let my prose shine like a star through the pallid pillars of the trees around their camp-fires"; but the drowning of Père Nicolas is a marvellous piece of imaginative writing, in no way vitiated (I tell myself) by the note that the underwater view comes from "a study by snorkel of the bottom of Grand Lake, Algonquin Park, Ontario".

At the book's end, there is a vision of the Huron Saint Kateri Tekakwitha walking along the Boulevard St Catherine in modern Montréal, and a riskier attempt to derive the discontents of modern Québec from the faults of the Founding Fathers: "She didn't try to become a Canadian! She try to be a French. In 1989 you don't have the choice. You must be Canadian here or you die."

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