Research Paper on "Red Dog Culture Exists in Every Gesture"

Research Paper 7 pages (2235 words) Sources: 2 Style: MLA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Red Dog

Culture exists in every gesture that an individual makes, and this is as true of fictional characters like those in Red Dog as it is of real people.

A postcolonial approach allows for an analysis of this text that examines the ways in which past power relationships (as evidenced in the relationships between the living and the dead) help reproduce cultural meaning.

Some areas of culture are more resistant to change than others.

These areas of culture provide the greatest opportunity for analysis of hegemonic influence.

One of these areas is funerary rites, thus requiring an especially close reading of how the dead and burial sites serve like strong magnets.

The characters simultaneously participate in the cultures of both the past and that of the present and come to know themselves through this balancing act.

A. The reader comes to trust or distrust the characters as a result of their skill at balancing past and present; that is, as a result of their skill at understanding the different cultural claims made on them.

B. By the end of the novel, readers have come to see the characters more as individuals than as agents of culture, a shift that demonstrates how readers, like all individuals, tend to extricate individuals from their cultural and social surroundings.

The Clear Depths of Culture

When we think of how a person or a fictional characterizes herself or himself we tend to think of what we might call demographic characteristics: Age, race, gender, ethnicity, perhaps religion. But there is another way to characterize an individual, which is by acknowledging and describing a character, which is by identifying the culture to which that individual belongs. Culture is an immeasurably important aspect of each person, a mark of identity that each one of us carries with us like an invisible cloak around us, keeping the chill of absolute individuality away. The characters of a book can be a pathway in to understand a total culture.

This model of culture creates a method and a perspective with which to analyze Red Dog, which is a work that begins in culture and ends in individuality. This path taken by the reader in the course of engaging in the story is the same one that we as readers take when we meet someone knew. Every voyage toward knowing someone else, whether that person be fictional or real, is a peregrination through the depths of culture to the shallows of individuality. This novel is an attempt to tell a story from two different levels at the same time.

One level is a top-down description of historical space. The characters pick their way across a "stone country where a bone cage could last a thousand years under the moon, its ribs a perch for Vesper sparrows, its skull a home for harvest mice." They are the product of such a time and place; they are subsumed by it. We as readers cannot imagine these characters existing in any other place, as speaking any other dialect.

The other dynamic at work in the story is the way in which the characters bubble up through the story, breaking through like seedlings through the dark wet earth. They remain rooted in the loam of the story, speaking lines that characters of their time and place should speak not to sound out of tune. Lane seems conflicted at various times as to whether he is trying to write a novel about Canada or about a group of Canadians. The former is the top-down dynamic of the novel, the latter is a bottom-up dynamic. This is not always a successful strategy: The result is more a crash than a graceful duel.

A highly effective overall strategy with which to view this novel is that of a postcolonial one. This is not the only theoretical perspective, of course, but it is the best one if the reader wishes to understand the ways in which power is constructed and deconstructed by the characters in the novel. That is it is the most useful theoretical model that one can use to understand what the author is trying to tell us about the ways in which power is created through the sharing of a work of art like a novel.

The author's language gives us a glimpse into a world in which there are a million small points of violence, a world that feels to the characters like "little pincushion cactus like upside-down spoons, pink flowers growing among their spines." it's a world of muted voices, of important things that are never heard clearly, in no small measure because the author has not said them clearly as he teeters between novel and ethnography. The novel is struck through with images of redness, many of them violent like a "flare of flames from the burning barrel beside the shed spilled comet tails into the sky." It is a world that is grey to its depths at times but also one through which scarlet runs like blood across dry ground, creating a momentary burst of fertility.

Postcolonialism is one of the varieties of postmodern theory, which means that it is based on the assumption that there is no single correct view of the world, that there is no single, authoritative truth. Truth, in this model, is something like the nacre that builds up inside of shells, one brittle, thin layer at a time until the inside of the shell is covered. The effect of such a slow layering, such a slow accumulation of translucent lenses over the world, is that the original shape and texture of the shell are gone. The only there that is still there (to transform Gertrude Stein into a postmodernist) is that each layer is the result of a different viewer.

Postcolonialism is a particular flavor of postmodernism that focuses on the nature of power relationships. Postcolonialism properly deals with the relationship of power in former colonies, the relationship between the formerly colonized and the former imperialist. The characters and setting are formally outside of this realm because the setting is one that has never been officially colonized. But colonies are created in any number of ways: Arguably all communities and even all families are the site of the processes of colonization.

Thus this analytical perspective in which different actors are assessed in terms of how they parse power relationships and see everything as a reflection of who holds the most power and who will be able to hold on to that power for the longest is pertinent because the characters and their place in the world is for all effects a colonized one with the relationships among people and between people and the place where they live playing out along the lines of the formerly colonized.

…the term postcolonialism -- according to a too-rigid etymology -- is frequently misunderstood as a temporal concept, meaning the time after colonialism has ceased, or the time following the politically determined Independence Day on which a country breaks away from its governance by another state. Not a naive teleological sequence which supersedes colonialism, postcolonialism is, rather, an engagement with and contestation of colonialism's discourses, power structures, and social hierarchies ... A theory of postcolonialism must, then, respond to more than the merely chronological construction of post-independence, and to more than just the discursive experience of imperialism. (Gilbert & Tompkins, 1996, p. 206)

The novel tells the interwoven stories of the members of the Stark family as they wander through the middle years of the last century in the middle ground of British Columbia, a place that is not known for much of anything at all but is a place that defines and underscores the loves and sorrows of the family. The novel focuses on two brothers, Tom and Eddy, who help to define each other through their love but also serve as a sort of colonized population.

The brothers' father, Elmer, who fills the role of the violent overlord, and their mother, who is colonized, can also be seen as analogues of the ways in which tired but still powerful power relationships hang on past the time when they were useful or valid. Their mother is Lillian, a lily of the field that is meant to be tended and loved and nurtured. but, of course, she is none of these things: She is wilted and beaten down, a bit of the land that has been overmastered by those who care only about the mastery.

An essential part of the story in terms of how this novel lends itself to a post-colonial analysis is that it takes the characters and the reader back to the American West in the years before the frontier officially closed, before most people began to question the moral surety of setters clearing a place for themselves in the West by slaughtering those who had found a home in the same place before them.

These relationships are, of course, metaphorical: These people are not truly bound to each… READ MORE

How to Reference "Red Dog Culture Exists in Every Gesture" Research Paper in a Bibliography

Related Research Papers:

Red Dog a Modern Application of Gothic Term Paper

Red Dog

A Modern Application of Gothic Themes: Towards a Post-Colonial Reading of Patrick Lane's Red Dog, Red Dog

Genre classification has been a persistent problem for literary critics ever… read more

Term Paper 6 pages (1796 words) Sources: 1+ Topic: Literature / Poetry

---

Communication Between Different Cultures Essay

Culture

Communication between Different Cultures

Everyone communicates with others all the time and no matter how well one thinks they understand other people, communication is hard. Culture is frequently at… read more

Essay 5 pages (1677 words) Sources: 5 Topic: Anthropology / Culture

---

Culture and Negotiations Globalization Research Paper

Culture & Negotiations

Globalization has brought many benefits and potential growth opportunities for companies around the world. Companies may now expand their reach to sell their products to countries on… read more

Research Paper 2 pages (734 words) Sources: 2 Topic: Anthropology / Culture

---

Red Azalea Term Paper

Red Azalea is the memoir of a Anchee Min, an American immigrant from China, about her life in the People's Republic of China during the Cultural Revolution. The book is… read more

Term Paper 5 pages (1490 words) Sources: 4 Style: MLA Topic: Literature / Poetry

---

Ideal Culture vs. Real Culture and Aspects of Ethnicity Essay

culture vs. real culture and aspects of ethnicity

Stereotypes function as a kind of 'shorthand' for understanding individuals of different cultures. Idealizing or essentializing a culture is a form of… read more

Essay 2 pages (617 words) Sources: 0 Topic: Anthropology / Culture

---

View 100+ more related papers  >>