The essay is an attempt in analysing Eden Robinson’s prose as a modern variant of the Sasquatch/Yeti myth (Lévi-Strauss) in order to specify the shifts of perspective (Viveiros de Castro) between culture and nature, human and nonhuman as a starting point of storytelling rooted in cultural tradition.
Paper long abstract
Born in British Columbia, a member of Haisla and Heiltsuk First Nations, Eden Robinson, the author of Monkey Beach, Son of a Trickster and the essay The Sasquatch at Home, consequently develops a vision of “modern storytelling” which would be partly rooted in traditional myths. One of such myths is that of the Sasquatch/ B’gwus presented in her work. As a part of broad corpus of different Yeti-like creature stories to be found almost anywhere, Robinson’s concept of Sasquatch manifests the same structural tendency to mediate relations between man and animal, science and common knowledge, culture and nature and between separated cultures. Robinson uses some typical traits of the creature, making it a kind of trickster, a go-between worlds, contexts and narrations. Using Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s theoretical concepts, it can be analysed how cosmological perspectives are shifted in Robinson’s narrative and how the “unusual encounters” with the being out of culture/nature strays becomes something more than transgression. Therefore, Sasquatch can be perceived not only as a mute monster, but also as a specific “logical device” (Claude Lévi-Strauss’s term). Creating the process of storytelling and actualizing our perspective on cultural tradition, Sasquatch sometimes even acts as a sentinel of a certain lore.