Discussion - Week Two - Fathers and Crows - Part I, p. 107 - 229

[Jim]

This discussion covers Part I, Kingdom Come, p. 107 – 229



To avoid spoilers, please restrict comments to p. 1 - 229

[Larou]

I'm a bit ahead of schedule (closing in on p. 400 at the moment) but I hope I'll manage not to stray too far. Also, as the narrator of Fathers and Crows points out somewhere, "there is no suspense in this book." Which I'm not sure is actually true - I for one am quite keen on finding out whether all the small brooks and rivulets will run into a single narrative stream at some stage...

What struck me most about this part, where finally the Jesuits make their appearance, is how Christianity seems to be the great changer - there certainly was conflict between Europeans and natives before, but I think there was some basic common ground - both Indians and Frenchmen understand greed and lust and on that foundation got along with each other somehow. But Christianity appears to be something the natives just cannot grasp, and in turn, from a Christian point of view the Indians and their culture must remain incomprehensible.

So I suppose we're finally going to see the culture clash whose absence we remarked on in our reading of The Ice-Shirt, even if the novel is not quite there yet and we'll need to travel a bit farther on that river. Interestingly though, the front lines seem to run between European traders and European churchmen for now - possibly another reference back to The Ice-Shirt, where it was internal conflict among the Norse that brought the ice to Greenland?

On that note, I'm becoming increasingly convinced, as much as the novels in the Seven Dreams sequenced can be read as standalone works, they really should be considered as parts of a single work, the web of references / shared themes and motifs / recurring structures is just too tightly woven.

[Jim]

Larou wrote: "What struck me most about this part, where finally the Jesuits make their appearance, is how Christianity seems to be the great changer - there certainly was conflict between Europeans and natives before, but I think there was some basic common ground - both Indians and Frenchmen understand greed and lust and on that foundation got along with each other somehow. But Christianity appears to be something the natives just cannot grasp, and in turn, from a Christian point of view the Indians and their culture must remain incomprehensible..."

Vollmann definitely begins the emphasize the line between native spiritual belief and the christian death cult of the Europeans. In The Ice-Shirt, even though the Icelanders were being converted to christianity, they still maintained some connection to nature via the bear-shirt, Odin, Yggdrasil, and so on. There was a sense that the Norse were a tribal people, but with better boats and weapons. Now, with the Jesuits and their petty intrigues at court, coupled with their condescending attitudes towards the natives, Vollmann is saying quite clearly that this is the beginning of the end for native culture in north America.

[Larou]

True, Vollmann does seem to make a very clear distinction between Jesuits and other Christians in that the Jesuits follow a relentless missionary drive. I'm not sure condescension is a distinguishing factor here, though, as it seems to me that this attitude is pretty much universal in the novel - held not just by the other Europeans towards the Indians, but also by the Indians towards the European and their weird ways. (And on a side note, another thing that is admirable about both Fathers and Crows and Ice-Shirt is how Vollmann leaves no doubt that the natives are victims of European aggression but still refrains from turning them into noble savages or idealizing them in any other way.)

I think what makes the Jesuits stand out is that while everybody else is out for their own advantage, they (at least from their perspective) mainly care about others and their immortal souls, while everybody else is egoistical, they are altruistical - the problem of course being their assumption that they know best what is good for others. And that then, seems to be the root of everything that went wrong with the relationship between Europeans and Indians - the European/Jesuit hybris to know what is best for the Indians, resulting in an attempt to make the natives conform to the image the Europeans have of them.

Would be nice if one could connect that back to the novel's imagery somehow - maybe a river that is not allowed to flow freely but is forced into a certain course? that would also fit in nicely with all the beaver dams that get mentioned so often (and beaver pelts are Canada's chief resourse for the French).

On the other hand, one could ask oneself just how selfless the Jesuits really are - is their urge to convert the natives not rather born from a desire of the priests to achieve martyrdom, and the Indians just a tool of getting there? That's probably something one should keep in mind for later in the novel.