The Constitution of Movement in Rudy Wiebe's Fiction : A Phenomenological Study of Three Mennonite Novels

Abstract: This study investigates movement as a phenomenon of constituting directedness in the Canadian writer Rudy Wiebe’s Mennonite novels. In Peace Shall Destroy Many (1962), in The Blue Mountains of China (1970), and in Sweeter Than All the World (2001), the phenomenon of movement is complexly at work as a decisive factor on numerous levels of constitution. Employing the concept of phenomenological directedness, the study elucidates phenomena central to the kinetic-kinaesthetic materiality of the three works. Focusing on textual nuances of kinaesthetic accentuation, the investigation highlights ways in which directedness shapes subjectivity rather than vice versa. Kinetic reality emerges as something torn between distance as a separating interval and distance as a remote intimacy manifesting an elision of the span between source-point and terminus. Such discrepancy shapes a sense of existential inconsecutiveness, in which an intriguing diminishment of feeling is a heightening of the affective life. This state of affairs is frequently aligned with faith as world-withdrawal. The wandering of persecuted believers is a theological process that at any given time can reduce itself to an external, purely geographic enterprise, thus becoming a substitute for faith. Nevertheless, the phenomenon of perpetual travel has the capacity to produce an overarching bonding-affect at the constituting heart of a community whose kinetic life is inseparable from the movement of regeneration.