Trusting the Quintuplet Senses: Time and Form in The Temptations of Big Bear

Abstract

T R U S T I N G T H E Q U I N T U P L E T S E N S E S : T I M E A N D F O R M I N T H E T E M P T A T I O N S O F B I G B E A R RO BERT L E C K E R M cGill University L n The Temptations of Big Bear we feel the tremendous impact made on Rudy Wiebe by confronting a historical culture at odds with contemporary life. His passionate attempt to recreate the meaning of another time merges with his overpowering desire to recreate the essence of another place. Wiebe’s method of finding history is frequently to use documentation which possesses the flavour of the moment. By reproducing actual transcripts, reports, letters, and diary entries he creates, in part, a “found novel” which is often episto­ lary in form. However, Wiebe only uses the documentary mode as a struc­ tural device in connection with the White Men who stand opposed to the Crees in this novel about a vanishing native lifestyle. The Indians’ point of view, on the other hand, is conveyed through an emphasis on timeless mythi­ cal structures and images of transcendental awareness. It is because the vision of eternal time with which the Indians are identified collapses that Big Bear is a tragedy, and Wiebe’s method of rendering that tragedy provides the novel with its formal coherence. To understand the conflict of temporal viewpoints which leads to Big Bear’s downfall we first have to examine Wiebe’s approach to the idea of recording history. He believes that historical fiction involves more than an objective faithfulness to the events and facts of time past. For Wiebe, tem­ poral awareness calls for vivified facts as well as vision, and his novel stands as the strongest expression of his sense that the telling of history can never be simply an impartial recounting, but must be a blend of documentary pre­ sentation and subjective creation as well. It is not surprising that given his intensely Christian upbringing Wiebe should refer to Teilhard de Chardin’s words about the difficulty of creating historical fiction: “We are continually inclined to isolate ourselves from the things and events which surround us . . . as though we were spectators, not elements, in what goes on.” 1 These are among the first lines Wiebe quotes in a story significantly entitled “ Where Is the Voice Coming From?” In that story, the narrator attempts to uncover objectively the facts connected with an Indian legend in much the E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C a n a d a , v iii, 3, September 1982 same way as Wiebe relentlessly pursued the historical documents connected with Big Bear’s life. Ultimately the narrator finds that despite the most rigid application of impersonal investigation, the elements of the story have now run me aground. If ever I could, I can no longer pretend to objective, omnipotent disinterestedness. I am no longer spectator of what has happened or what may happen: I am become element in what is happening at this very moment.2 Like this narrator, Wiebe moves away from a single rendition of any story: he becomes subjectively involved in the multi-faceted possibilities offered by the storytelling process. Wiebe’s own view of time, then, is in­ formed by two basic impulses: on the one hand, he is drawn toward empiri­ cal verification of the facts which are so vividly incorporated into his fiction; on the other hand, the same facts lead him into an imagined realm of spiritual history in which the rendering of time past becomes a function of the way Wiebe comes to participate subjectively in the story which emerges from the data he has collected. In “ On the Trail of Big Bear” — a docu­ ment which deals particularly with the historical research involved in creat­ ing Big Bear — Wiebe describes how, as a storyteller, he felt the need to explore history through the senses as well as through scientific forms of enquiry. He...