Making Believe

Questions About Mennonites and Art

Magdalene Redekop

• Publisher: University of Manitoba Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780887558580
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Making Believe responds to a remarkable flowering of art by Mennonites in Canada. After the publication of his first novel in 1962, Rudy Wiebe was the only identifiable Mennonite literary writer in the country. Beginning in the 1970s, the numbers grew rapidly and now include writers Patrick Friesen, Sandra Birdsell, Di Brandt, Sarah Klassen, Armin Wiebe, David Bergen, Miriam Toews, Carrie Snyder, Casey Plett, and many more. A similar renaissance is evident in the visual arts (including artists Gathie Falk, Wanda Koop, and Aganetha Dyck) and in music (including composers Randolph Peters, Carol Ann Weaver, and Stephanie Martin).

Confronted with an embarrassment of riches that resist survey, Magdalene Redekop opts for the use of case studies to raise questions about Mennonites and art. Part criticism, part memoir, Making Believe argues that there is no such thing as Mennonite art. At the same time, her close engagement with individual works of art paradoxically leads Redekop to identify a Mennonite sensibility at play in the space where artists from many cultures interact. Constant questioning and commitment to community are part of the Mennonite dissenting tradition. Although these values come up against the legacy of radical Anabaptist hostility to art, Redekop argues that the Early Modern roots of a contemporary crisis of representation are shared by all artists.

Making Believe posits a Spielraum or play space in which all artists are dissembling tricksters, but differences in how we play are inflected by where we come from. The close readings in this book insist on respect for difference at the same time as they invite readers to find common ground while making believe across cultures.

PART I:

REFRAMING OLD QUESTIONS

1.

MAKING BELIEVE

SPARKS FLYING IN THE SPIELRAUM

Sposz mutt zenne.

Play there must be.

On Believing, Not Believing, and Making Believe

Mary Louise Pratt coined the influential term “contact zone” to describe a place “where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other” (1991, 34). When a group constructs a collective identity in that zone, a line is drawn between insiders and outsiders, but that line is always up for grabs. This is a contested space of potential violence but also a place for potentially positive social interaction. In Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari argues that the main reason for the survival of the human species is the ability to cooperate as a result of believing in things that do not exist (2011; 2014). The book has been dismissed as reductive by some scholars, but the positive public response to it has been global, suggesting that Harari struck a chord. A similar emphasis on the power of making believe appears in Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Lies that Bind: Rethinking Identity, Creed, Country, Color, Class, Culture (2018). As I write these words, it is by no means certain that our species will continue to survive. It follows from the arguments made by Harari and Appiah that, if we are to do so, then we must learn to imagine together in more cooperative ways. I begin with the presupposition that the art made in contact zones provides an opportunity to study collective acts of making believe and learn from them. In saying this I am going back to the lessons I learned from Northrop Frye’s 1963 Massey Lectures, published as The Educated Imagination.

A major question to address is how the act of making art, which involves different materials and conventions, relates to the act of making believe, a more nebulous concept. My answer to that question develops out of the Low German proverb Sposz mutt zenne. Play there must be. In 1990, during his comments at the end of the first conference on Mennonite/s Writing in Canada, Robert Kroetsch said that he had observed anxieties about “the question of art as play” that seemed to “work against certain kinds of high seriousness” (Tiessen and Hinchcliffe 1992, 224). This tension remains within Mennonite culture, but the renaissance has happened because of how many Mennonites have been willing to play and be serious at the same time. Unlike the “high seriousness” of English theory and High German theology, the culture of Low German is intensely playful. Although play can be and is used for sinister purposes, it is a potentially liberating and humanizing force at the heart of culture.

Where the act of making and the act of believing come together is where I locate the concept of cultural poiesis. My use of the word goes back to the definitions adopted by both Plato and Aristotle that name poiesis as “any activity of making, as opposed to theoria (observing, theorizing) or praxis (acting, doing)” (Eldridge 1996, 7). As Richard Eldridge observes, “engaging in the activity of poiesis . . . is arguably central to the life of any human subject” (7). I would add that it is also central to how human subjects relate to each other. The questions laid out so clearly by Harari and Appiah are important for any person who sets out to make art. My reframing of the concept of belief here, however, is done in the hope of shedding light on the renaissance of art among Mennonites. My aim throughout this book is to show how art provides an alternative to the often circular and futile debates among scholars and in public discourse. I share the view expressed by Barbara Kingsolver (quoted in Neary 2009) that “the most interesting parts of human experience might be the sparks that come from that sort of chipping flint of cultures rubbing against each other.” The flowering of Mennonite art has happened not because of the imposition of a static set of beliefs or values and not because of a shared master narrative, but rather because of the dynamic forces liberated by artists daring to walk among the sparks. Mennonites are not set apart from other groups when they participate in cultural poiesis in contact zones. The so-called Mennonite miracle, in a sense, is not even Mennonite. It is rather the result of Mennonites interacting with other groups and individuals and with each other in the contact zone. As I have tried to show, however, Mennonites bring into this zone a particular history that results in confrontation with an acute form of the crisis of representation. A central achievement of the artists active in Manitoba during the 1980s was the creation of the category “secular Mennonite.” It would be foolish to conclude, however, that acts of making believe within Mennonite culture can therefore be separated from questions about religious belief.

I envision the contact zone where sparks fly as secular in the sense that it is not bound by any set of religious beliefs, but in doing so I do not set aside the relationship between art and religious experience. “Religious trance is trance,” as William James put it in The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (1916, 20). Although James noted the human tendency to intellectualize religious experience (458), his interest was in how belief works, not where it originates (19–20). A similar pragmatic emphasis is evident in the “Introduction” to the second volume of The Norton Anthology of World Religions. Series editor Jack Miles spells out the view that guided editorial decisions: “In common usage, religious and unreligious peoples are divided into ‘believers’ and ‘unbelievers.’ The editors have departed from this common usage, proceeding instead on the silent and admittedly modest premise that religion is as religion does” (Miles 2015, 7). After contemplating the questions posed in “stark and tragic terms” by so many of the religious texts, Miles concludes with an image of boys playing make believe and writes: “I confess that I experience a certain relief in thinking of play rather than explanation as quite plausibly the evolutionary taproot of religion” (49).

While reflecting on “what we do when we believe,” Michel de Certeau similarly moves the discussion away from ideas about dogma to ideas about play (1985, 192–202). All of these writers are, in varying ways, following the example of Johan Huizinga, a Dutch historian who long ago observed, in his seminal book Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, that “the distinction between belief and make believe breaks down” in the play of art (1970, 44). Since Huizinga is now seen as a founder of cultural history, I find it interesting to note that he was “a member of the Mennonite church until his death” (Van der Lem 1994, 210). Huizinga never identified as Mennonite in his writings, however, and he was not talking about ethnic identity when he expressed the view that the “quite simple question of what play really is . . . leads us deep into the problem of the nature and origin of religious concepts” (1970, 44).

By no means is Spiel or play an inherently benign concept. We know this intimately from living in what game designer Eric Zimmerman (2013) has termed a “ludic century.” Theorists who write about play nonetheless return repeatedly to the possibility that play can be redemptive in some way. De Certeau argues that belief “makes openings; it ‘permits’ play within a system of defined sites. It ‘authorizes’ a playing-space (Spielraum) to be produced. . . . It makes habitable” (1985, 141). I have already invoked this playing space in the previous chapter in the form of the “children’s house of make-believe” in Robert Frost’s “Directive” (1963). With the interpolated High German word Spielraum, de Certeau points implicitly to how important translation becomes when we play in this space in our pluralistic world. In Low German, the word would be shpälrüm, with rüm pronounced the way that Peter Sellers says it in The Return of the Pink Panther when Inspector Clouseau asks “Do you have a room?” De Certeau describes the “designated sites” of “making believe” as “makeshift” and as “made of fragments of world,” and he sees our many “ways of making” as part of “the very ancient art of making do” (1985, 142).

If there is one quality that connects all the art that I engage with in this book, then it might be a vision of community accompanied by a confrontation with the problems arising from the fact that any collective identity is achieved by means of exclusion of those who are not part of the group. This is the fly in the ointment. It is the trouble with Gemeinschaft (community) and with basing an aesthetic on it. That being the case, how then do we affirm and experience the joy of community in art without acting out an erasure of others? As a result of my study of how different artists deal with this dilemma, I have chosen to focus on the search for a “habitable” Spielraum—not a “true community” but one with porous boundaries. I see this as an alternative to a search for Lebensraum (living space or habitat), a word now primarily associated with Nazi Germany. The relation of German terms such as Volk and Gemeinschaft to Mennonite history is of a complexity far beyond the limits of this study. Even the brief history that I provided in the introduction, however, shows that these terms are related to the search for land, an organizing image for the histories of many groups. As is the case for many Christian groups, moreover, the facts of geography often blur into the metaphors of religious quest when Mennonite immigration stories are told. This tendency is reflected in the title of E.K. Francis’s 1955 book In Search of Utopia: The Mennonites of Manitoba, echoed in the title of Samuel Steiner’s 2015 book In Search of Promised Lands: A Religious History of Mennonites in Ontario.

Art authorizes a Spielraum, a playing space that makes possible the creation of communities that are interactive and open, multiple, and overlapping. Different kinds of art do this in different ways, but all are defined sites where we make believe together. As Harari (2011) points out, there is an obvious advantage in our ability to hold shared beliefs about things, sometimes large entities, and to act together “as if” they exist. Sapiens can band together in large numbers to achieve a common goal when they agree on a common myth or fiction. In As If: Idealization and Ideals, Appiah (2017) terms such collective beliefs “potent idealizations.” Both scholars view these as potentially dangerous. It is one thing to delight in the ability to believe “as many as six impossible things before breakfast,” as the queen does in Through the Looking Glass (Carroll 1960, 251). It is quite another for a group of sapiens to band together to agree on a Final Solution. Technology has compounded the problem. The temptation is to huddle inside digital bubbles of shared belief and call everything else fake news. The tendency is now so rampant that there is widespread consensus that questions about belief are urgent, which may account for the appeal of Harari’s book, which has been translated and published in over forty countries.

My thinking on these matters has changed over the years. During my time as an undergraduate, I read Eric Hoffer’s influential book The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (1951). The after-effects of the 1957 tent revival campaign had left me with a horror of being at the mercy of fanatics and Hoffer’s critique of “true believers” offered resistance to fundamentalist thinking. Sadly, it has turned out to be ineffectual against the delusional thinking that is now rampant on the continent. Motivated by his fear of communism, Hoffer championed a version of the libertarianism that now occupies the toxic heart of the American dream of individual liberty. Although many of Hoffer’s insights remain useful, I found more enduring ways of resisting fundamentalism in the literary texts I was studying. I was still working through those questions when I wrote my doctoral dissertation on James Hogg, the author of a novel about fanaticism entitled The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824).

I remember learning about arguments for and against the existence of God when I was an undergraduate and feeling that they had no...

Table of contents

• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• APOLOGIA
• INTRODUCTION: ON BEGINNINGS
• PART I: REFRAMING OLD QUESTIONS
• 1. MAKING BELIEVE: SPARKS FLYING IN THE SPIELRAUM
• 2. US AND THEM: REAL TOADS IN IMAGINARY GHETTOS
• INTERLUDE ONE: CLOWNING WITH LOW GERMAN
• 3. RESISTING NOSTALGIA: LITTLE SHTAHP ON THE PRAIRIE
• PART II: WITNESSING A NEW PHENOMENON
• 4. LOCATION, DISLOCATION: HARVESTING A LITERARY BUMPER CROP
• 5. MELOS AND LOGOS: TALKING ABOUT MUSIC
• INTERLUDE TWO: CLOWNING WITH MASKS
• 6. ICONOCLASH: REDECORATING THE SPIELRAUM
• CONCLUSION: ON ENDINGS
• PLATES
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX