Rudy Wiebe as novelist, witness and critic, without apology

• Main Author: Smyth, T. W.
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 1997
• Subjects: Arctic; Yellowknife; Indian; Labyrinth; Blue Mountains; Tundra
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1807/10704; http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp03/NQ28061.pdf

grantor: University of Toronto A typological reading of Rudy Wiebe's My Lovely Enemy and A Discovery of Strangers reveals an implicit witness to the Christ of the Incarnation and a sustained critique of both church and state. His method of indirection favours parabolic form in a promotion of meaning. The dissertation begins with an exploration of the influence of John Howard Yoder, as spokesperson for an Anabaptist theology that, while emphasizing discipleship over faith, is founded solidly on a Christocentric orthodoxy as articulated by the Swiss theologian Karl Barth. The complex internal dynamics of Wiebe's texts are examined in the light of the theoretical principles articulated by the Russian Mikhail Bakhtin. After a brief discussion of the complexity of typology, and its role in The Blue Mountains of China, the continuity of Wiebe's writing is explored in a typological reading of The Temptations of Big Bear, The Scorched-Wood People, and The Mad Trapper. My Lovely Enemy is understood as a complex intertextual labyrinth (reflecting a sustained Kroetschian playfulness) seemingly focussed on a contemporary banal affair. In an exploration of a Christian understanding of love, the parabolic witness of the prophet Hosea's unfailing forgiveness of the unfaithful Gomar to the promise of divine forgiveness of a wayward Israel becomes the hermeneutic clue to the Incarnation as the typological measure of Wiebe's text. A Discovery of Strangers, an imaginative retelling of the meeting of the Yellowknife Indians and the 1819-22 Franklin expedition on Canada's arctic tundra, founded on extensive use of the officers' journals and Dene Indian stories, explores western civilization's propensity to impose order on an inherently strange world and to reduce the other to the same. Wiebe's adaptation of the White documents leads to a metaphorization of the narrative. Through the parable of the Good Samaritan, the sacrifice of the incarnated Christ is revealed as intrinsic to a reading of this discovery of strangers. Ph.D.