Introduction
Rudy Wiebe’s short story Where is the voice coming from? Focuses on life events of indigenous people and early white settlers. Wiebe’s work explores the conflict between Almighty voice and the Mounted Police and questions the aspects of reality in traditional indigenous stories (1974). The author examines how events are turned into stories that do not necessarily reflect reality with accuracy. Wiebe’s work is widely acknowledged for the way in which the story creates narrative tension through the deployment of fact and fiction. The purpose of this paper is to conduct a literature review of three critical articles written about Wiebe’s piece. Constructing a literature review will help determine which critical text provides a more comprehensive approach to the topic and offers more information to the research.
Main body
The first critical piece, written by John Thieme, explores the theme of tension between the deployment of facts and fiction in Wiebe’s story through the prism of historical accuracy. Thieme suggests that history itself is overly influenced by Western perception, implying that there is a tendency in Western history to provide causal explanations of traditional myth-oriented history (1982). According to Thieme, Wiebe’s story supports the theory that there is no absolute history, and therefore, the author decides to “replace the historian with the fiction-writer” (1982, p. 179). The article suggests that creating a narrative tension between facts and fiction emphasizes the importance of narrative in history to represent social and moral concerns.
Utilization of a historical approach is a common strategy in the critique focused on Wiebe’s works. Penny van Toorn’s book focuses on historicity in Wiebe’s stories, the discussion of Where the voice is coming from is placed at the very end, emphasizing its importance for understanding Wiebe’s approach to history. According to van Toorn, the title of the story implies the unidentified roots of the history, which supports Thieme’s point on strong Western influence in constructing the historical timeline (1995).
Van Toorn perceives the contrast between facts and fiction in Wiebe’s work as “internal dialogicity” with the way the author questions the readers about the narrative voice’s provenance (1995, p. 196). Van Toorn’s critique of Wiebe’s work suggests that Weibe creates new worlds out of nothing rather than uncovering the truth in his works.
Finally, Milena Kaličanin’s critical article on the juxtaposition of facts and fiction presents a more modern approach to Wiebe’s work. According to Kaličanin (2017), the author creates narrative tension through the deployment of fact and fiction and by engaging the readers in putting together the pieces of the story as a puzzle. Moreover, it is emphasized that the final design of the puzzle “remains mysterious” while the narration acts as a driver for the reader’s conclusion and understanding of the story’s meaning (Kaličanin, 2017, p. 171). The article suggests that by gradually revealing the details of the conflict, the narration allows readers to search for the truth in both factual and fictional versions of the event.
Summary
Summarizing the results of the conducted literature review, the critical text that provides more insight into the topic of contrast between facts and fiction as a foundation for narrative tension is Kaličanin’s article. As Kaličanin’s article provides a deep examination of Wiebe’s work and the author’s creative process behind the narrative, it presents more value to the research topic. The other two articles by Thieme and van Toorn could also be used in the research. However, because the articles utilize a history-oriented approach, they lack details about the certain ways in which the author was able to build the tension between facts and fiction through narrative, which is covered in Kaličanin’s article.
References
Kaličanin, M. (2017). Fact versus fiction in Rudy Wiebe’s “Where is the voice coming from?” Neohelicon, 44, 169-176. Web.
Thieme, J. (1982). Scheherazade as historian: Rudy Wiebe’s “Where is the voice coming from?” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 17(1), 172-181. Web.
Van Toorn, P. (1995). Rudy Wiebe and the historicity of the word. University of Alberta Press.
Wiebe, R. H. (1974). Where is the voice coming from? McClelland and Stewart.