Niels’s Saga: Colonial Narrative and Nordic Naturalism in Settlers of the Marsh

Abstract

NIELS’S SAGA: COLONIAL NARRATIVE AND NORDIC NATURALISM IN SETTLERS OF THE MARSH MAC FENWICK Queen’s University W h i l e it has been more than twenty years since Douglas Spettigue’s dis­ covery of Frederick Philip Grove’s real identity as Felix Paul Greve, some of the more puzzling aspects of this enigmatic man’s works remain unex­ plained. One such question is why this naturalistic writer gave his first Canadian novel an apparently anti-naturalistic happy ending — an ending that Thomas Saunders, echoing many critics, goes so far as to call “faulty” in his introduction to the 1965 New Canadian Library edition (xiii). There is reason to believe that this (seeming) discrepancy is, in fact, the result of the novel’s unique brand of naturalism, a naturalism influenced by Grove’s re-presentation and appropriation of the comic-tragic vision and (colonizing) narratological strategy of the Icelandic family sagas that Grove restaged in the New World that he loved. The concept of “writing back” to the imperial (European) centre has re­ ceived increasingly wide circulation, with numerous studies on books such as J.M. Coetzee’s Foe, Sam Selvon’s Moses Ascending, and the now canonically postcolonial Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys. Each of these books takes a European “classic” and recasts it in some new and potentially subversive manner. Coetzee rewrites Robinson Crusoe from Friday’s point of view, while Selvon parodically uses Defoe’s text (among others) to explore class and racial relations in 1970s London. Rhys’s novel, essentially a prequel to Jane Eyre, reclaims Rochester’s first wife from the imperial framework that had classified her as a “savage creole” by giving her both full voice and char­ acterization within her native Caribbean context. Each of these rewrites lives up to the combative promise of the phrase, “The empire writes back.” There was another approach, however, frequently adopted by an earlier generation of writers in the settler populations of the New World: appropriation or re-placement. This is the strategy that Grove seems to have adopted when, in Settlers of the Marsh, he appropriated to the Canadian West the family sagas of medieval Iceland. It is important to keep in mind that what Grove attempts in Settlers is not as simple or as linear as taking an older work as a source and updating English Stud ies in Ca n a d a , 23, 3, Sept. 1997 or restaging it in the present. When Shakespeare took the historical ac­ counts contained in Holinshed’s Chronicles and recast them as plays, he did so to explain English history to the English. Milton, in using Genesis as the source for Paradise Lost, retold a story that was already universally known and quite obviously applicable to his own society. What Grove does is to take a story that is not only temporally removed from his own context but also geographically and psychically distant in a way that Shakespeare’s his­ tory plays and Milton’s religious epics were not. Shakespeare’s retellings of English history were undertaken to uphold the Tudor claim to power, while Milton’s retelling of the Fall was an attempt to explain his own dissenting theology to a homogeneously Christian country. Both men used texts from and of their own traditions to change (or to support) the long-established historical and social norms of their society. In rehearsing— instead of merely retelling — the world of Icelandic saga, Grove attempted to restage an older tradition within an entirely new context. Shakespeare and Milton reinter­ preted their tradition for their societies; Grove wished to help create a new tradition within a new society. In appropriating Icelandic saga Grove set himself to work with a genre as ancient as it is rich. Within four hundred years of their ninth-century settle­ ment of Iceland, the inhabitants of that tiny island-nation had accumulated a vast repository of mytho-historical tales about the pioneering Norsemen who had colonized their land. Beginning in the twelfth century and peaking in the thirteenth, dozens of saga-writers committed these stories to manu­ script. Two kinds of saga were produced. One, named the Sturlunga sagas after the powerful...