Bearers of Risk: Writing Masculinity in Contemporary English-Canadian Short Story Cycles 9780228012238

Citation preview

B e a r e rs of Ri sk

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BEARERS OF RISK Writing Masculinity in Contemporary English-Canadian Short Story Cycles

Neta Gordon

McGill-­Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

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©  McGill-Queen’s University Press 2022 ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN

978-0-2280-1073-9 (cloth) 978-0-2280-1166-8 (paper) 978-0-2280-1223-8 (eP DF ) 978-0-2280-1224-5 (eP UB)

Legal deposit second quarter 2022 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This publication has been made possible by grants from Brock University’s Humanities Research Institute and the BS IG Exchange Grant.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Bearers of risk: writing masculinity in contemporary English-Canadian short story cycles / Neta Gordon. Names: Gordon, Neta, 1971– author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20210364548 | Canadiana (ebook) 20210364688 | IS BN 9780228010739 (cloth) | I SB N 9780228011668 (paper) | I S BN 9780228012238 (eP DF ) | IS BN 9780228012245 (eP U B ) Subjects: LC S H: Short stories, Canadian—21st century—History and criticism. | L CS H: Canadian fiction—21st century—History and criticism. | L CS H: Masculinity in literature. | C SH : Short stories, Canadian (English)—21st century—History and criticism. | CSH: Canadian fiction (English)—20th century—History and criticism. Classification: L CC P S 8191.S5 G 67 2022 | DDC C 813/.0109092—dc23

This book was typeset by Marquis Interscript in 10.5/13 Sabon.

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This book is dedicated to my three perfect nieces: Sophie, Molly, and Emily

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix   1 Determining Borders: John Gould’s “Conversion” and the Frameworks for Analysis  3

S e ct i o n O n e   E x p e r im e n t i ng wi th Form  27   2 Failing and Falling Men: John Gould’s kilter: 55 fictions, the Microfiction, and False Heterogeneities  30   3 Tales of Discovery: Formal Constraints and the Desire for Originality in Paul Glennon’s The Dodecahedron 45   4 “The Perfect Shade of Visitor”: Stephen Marche’s Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, Literary Parody, and the Unmarked Anthologist 62

S e ct i o n T wo   N a r r at iv e s of Arri val  81   5 “The Toughest Kid in Hebrew School”: Suburbia and Whitening in David Bezmozgis’s Natasha and Other Stories  84   6 Contagion and Containment: Vincent Lam’s Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures and Expert Systems in the Cosmopolis  104   7 New Canadians: Anthony De Sa’s Barnacle Love, Ethnic Enclaves, and Civility  123

S e ct i o n T h r e e   N e g o t iat ing Space  145   8 The Wounded White Man: Bodies and/as Machines in Alexander MacLeod’s Light Lifting 148

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viii Contents

  9 In the Background: Labour and Local Economies in Michael Christie’s The Beggar’s Garden 166 10 “Don’t Write Cheques Your Body Can’t Cash”: D.W. Wilson’s Once Your Break a Knuckle, Rurality, and Authenticity  183

Conclusion: Risk Assessments  202



Appendix I: Short Story Collections and Awards  215



Appendix II: Tables of Contents  221

Notes 227 References 237 Index 253

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Acknowledgments

As always, I would like to thank my colleagues in the Department of English Language and Literature at Brock University for their ongoing brilliance, collegiality, support, and friendship. Also, thanks to everyone in the Faculty of Humanities Dean’s Office for welcoming me into the space and caring so much about the work of teaching, research, and service. Beyond Brock University, I’d like to thank the organizers and members of the Hook and Eye Research Hangout, who inspired me to restart my research program after it was derailed by the pandemic. I would especially like to thank my three research assistants on this project, Alyssa Beaupre, Lee Cadwallader, and Michael MacLeod, whose attention to detail and incredible work ethic kept me accountable and made my project better. The expert team at McGill-Queen’s University Press, including Mark Abley, Jonathan Crago, Alyssa Favreau, Paloma Friedman, Kathleen Fraser, Mia Renaud, Kathryn Simpson, and Elli Stylianou have been exceptional, responding with grace and precision to my every query. To the two anonymous readers of the manuscript: thank you for your thoughtful and provocative comments and questions. This project is supported by a grant from the Humanities Research Institute at Brock University, as well as by a BS I G Exchange Grant from Brock University’s Office of Research Services. I am proud to work at an institution so committed to supporting research of scholars in the Humanities. To my family, including my parents, siblings, siblings-in-law, nieces, and my darling Martin, Mina, and Sasha: you are everything.

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1 DETERMINING BORDERS John Gould’s “Conversion” and the Frameworks for Analysis

John Gould’s kilter: 55 fictions, which was short-listed in 2003 for the prestigious Scotiabank Giller Prize1 for Canadian fiction, includes the story “Conversion,” in which the narrator describes the occasion of being in an airplane for the “first time … since 9/11” (2003, 39). The explicitly post–9/11 context for this story invites attention to changed conceptions of home and elsewhere, travel and borders, and anxiety and safety. “Conversion” describes a flight between Montreal and New York City, during which the narrator, Michael – a fortysomething married man, father of one – converses with his row mate, Nina, a woman he describes as “twenty-fivish … scruffy, but confidently middle-class in the way she carried herself” (39). Upon inquiry, Nina explains to Michael that she is heading to New York to join a meditation group at Ground Zero: “there’ll be all these people from all different races and religions, including Muslims, all meditating right there, right where it happened. Starting to, like, heal that” (41–2). Shortly after Nina gives this explanation, the plane begins to experience severe turbulence, causing Nina to panic; in response, Michael tells Nina about Pascal’s Pensées, a book he has been pretending to read, trying to impress Nina with his seriousness (40). Pascal, Michael explains, famously argued that one is better off gambling that God exists, since one has nothing to lose if one is wrong; the story ends when Michael is “seized, suddenly, with the need to persuade this girl, convert her  – the need to seduce her into  believing what no one could possibly believe” (43). As with all the stories in kilter: 55 fictions, “Conversion” is a microfiction, a short short story. This formal constraint increases the difficulty of

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presenting what Alice Munro describes as “the complexity of things – the things within things” (2001), or what Allan H. Pasco suggests is “not a segment, a tattered fragment, but a world” (1991, 420). In “Conversion,” after the first bout of turbulence, Michael realizes he has spilled wine on himself: “The shirt was ruined, a great red continent swiftly forming on its ocean of white” (Gould 2003, 42). Like the “continent” of wine, this microfiction must “swiftly” establish its limits, though like the airplane flying between two cities, Gould’s ­kilter: 55 fictions – like the other short story cycles examined in Bearers of Risk – invites readers to make connections traversing borders. The invitation to find connections among the individual parts of the short story cycle is taken up by Gerald Lynch in The One and the Many: English-Canadian Short Story Cycles. In that study, Lynch argues that Canadian writers use the form to challenge “the totalizing impression of the traditional novel” (2001, 17), exploring the polyphony of voices in community in order to “find that elusive balance between the one and the many” (19). In Bearers of Risk, I examine nine twenty-first-century short story cycles written by Canadian men, many of which were recognized by major Canadian prizing juries. But it is not the goal of this study to provide a survey of all or even the most notable or celebrated Canadian short story cycles published in the first decade of the twenty-first century.2 Rather, I am interested in a point Lynch makes when he links the distinctive form of the short story cycle to the “willing[ness of Canadians] to sacrifice the gratifications of individualism for the securities of community” (19, emphasis added). I am especially concerned with exploring that point as it reverberates with post–9/11 discourses of insecurity and contemporary discourses of a so-called crisis in masculinity. In this introduction, I will discuss the short story and the short story cycle in Canadian literary history, as well as those aspects of masculinities studies most relevant to my analysis. Here, I seek a vocabulary to articulate my sense that the short story cycles under scrutiny in Bearers of Risk make use of the genre convention of multiple perspectives or a focus on community as a bit of a trick. A key argumentative focus for this study is that the play with heterogeneous voices in these texts ultimately gives way to affirming the importance of White, masculine perspectives on a changing world. As I will claim, the stories in these cycles often depict resistance to and a critique of post–9/11 globalization, exploring the challenges of maintaining a sense of economic and social stability. Thus, the portrayal of the cultural work of settlement activity

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is validated as a civil reaction to crises of insecurity, especially for White men. Here, the term “crisis” is used, as it often is in contemporary discourses on masculinity, as constitutive rather than descriptive, as the language of crisis strategically centres men. Even within a genre that, conventionally and according to Canadian literary history, prioritizes the heterogeneity of voice, the cycles examined in Bearers of Risk show a conspicuous, and what I will argue is a calculated limiting of perspective.

T h e C a n a d ia n S h o rt Story Cycle a n d   M a r g i nali ty Lynch argues in The One and the Many that, since at least the nineteenth century, “Canadian writers have demonstrated both a strong preference for and high accomplishment in this form,” whereby the short story cycle, Lynch asserts, is “distinctly and distinctively a Canadian genre” (4). On the one hand, the pronouncement seems bold, given the prevalence and success of the genre elsewhere, and given the prevalence and success of other genres in Canada. On the other hand, Lynch’s effort to make a special case for the short story cycle in Canadian literary history coheres with scholarship on the Canadian short story, much of which begins from the position that the value of the genre is not self-evident; rather, it must be rehearsed. One of the first post-centennial academic studies of the Canadian short story, a slim work by Clare MacCulloch, is titled The Neglected Genre (1973).3 More recently, in The Contemporary Canadian Short Story in English, Maria Löschnigg begins by asserting, like Lynch, that “the short story indeed holds a prominent position in Canada” (2014, 2); however, echoing MacCulloch, even forty years later, Löschnigg prefaces her review of scholarship on the genre by commenting that “the short story, in comparison to other literary genres, especially the novel, still remains a fairly neglected field” (3). Similarly diffident (or defensive) moves are made in other recent surveys: in his chapter on “Short Fiction,” included in The Cambridge Companion to Canadian Literature, Robert Thacker writes that the “Canadian short story has persisted,” even while the form is thought to be “exportable and commercialized … deprecated to the writing of longer narratives” (2004, 179). At the end of his chapter on “The Short Story” in part four of the more lengthy and detailed Cambridge History of Canadian Literature, W.H. New states that “the genre in the early twenty-first

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century clearly is not dying. Nor is it merely an ‘apprentice form’ for would-be novelists, as some commentators once averred” (2009, 400). Finally, in “The Canadian Short Story in English: Aesthetic Agency, Social Change, and the Shifting Canon” – contained in The Oxford Handbook of Canadian Literature – Alexander MacLeod, in language similar to that used by New, concludes by acknowledging the form’s liabilities while protesting its significance: “though it is objectively true that the commercial returns on short stories continue to lag far behind those of novels, in critical and scholarly terms, short fiction receives almost equivalent attention in Canadian academic journals and conferences, and almost no one in the fields of Canadian arts and letters would ever dare to characterize the writing of short fiction as a ‘minor’ developmental stage for the great novelist-in-training” (2016, 443–4). My goal here is not to assess the validity of claims that the Canadian short story is neglected, or persisting, or “not dying,” or not “minor.” Rather, I am interested in how the oddly anxious championing of the short story in Canada overlaps with the idea that the genre is well-suited to elevating multiple and/or peripheral perspectives. I focus on short story cycles written by men who, as I will argue, exploit the conceptual overlap between a marginalized genre and marginalized voices, doing so to reclaim a discursive centre. The apparent connection between the short story and outsider voices has been widely noted, at least since the publication Frank O’Connor’s The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story, which includes the oft-quoted argument that the short story highlights, not the “hero” or even anti-hero, as in a novel, but rather the voice of a “submerged population group,” the make-up of which shifts “from writer to writer, from generation to generation” (1962, 17). MacLeod’s survey in The Oxford Handbook picks up on O’Connor’s claim, “examin[ing] the ways that many Canadian short story writers have embraced their roles as cultural outsiders” (2016, 426). Likewise, in Double-Voicing the Canadian Short Story, Laurie Kruk states that “the twenty-first century has brought us to a time when, more than ever, individual voices clamour to be heard, and the short story … embodies diverse perspectives more powerfully and immediately than any other narrative form, including the novel” (2016, 3). My own project, in choosing to look at nine short story cycles by Canadian men, is to focus on how the position of the “cultural outsider,” or of “diverse perspectives,” or of the notion of a “submerged population group” is strategically and variously mobilized: through formal experimentation

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(in works by John Gould, Paul Glennon, and Stephen Marche), through a focus on immigrant narratives (in works by David Bezmozgis, Vincent Lam, and Anthony De Sa), and through thematically linking representations of space, labour, and identity (in works by Alexander MacLeod, Michael Christie, and D.W. Wilson). Thus, I am less interested in exploring what the twenty-first-century Canadian short story cycle is so much as I am in thinking through the implications of how the genre can be used, given the pattern in scholarly discourse to claim the short story cycle as especially suited to elevating voices that “clamour to be heard.” For example: one of the tendencies I explore is the handling of the debut short story cycle, and how that category of publication is indeed linked with the notion of an “apprentice form” (New 2009, 400). In the essay “The Short Story: The Long and the Short of It,” Mary Louise Pratt works to dispel the idea that genres can be defined by “a roster of essences” (1994, 111), suggesting that attempts to deny the systemic (and hierarchical) relationship between the short story and the novel almost always fail. (And, indeed, the failure of this denial is ironically evident even insofar as short story scholars can’t seem to help objecting to that hierarchy, as do Thacker, New, MacLeod, Löschnigg, and Kruk.) As Pratt puts it, “facts about the novel are necessary to explain facts about the short story, but the reverse is not so” (96). Thus, while New and MacLeod might reject the idea that short stories operate primarily as starting points for “would-be novelists” (New 2009, 400) or “the great novelist-in-training” (MacLeod 2016, 444), Pratt notes that – at the very least – “the short story has a reputation as a training or practice genre, for both apprentice writers and apprentice readers. And it is in fact widely used in this way, in schools for example” (1994, 97). Interestingly, Pratt’s assertion suggests a paradox whereby the short story (as a “training or practice genre”) is both less subject to and more amenable to risk: because the unit of creative production (or consumption) is relatively small, the writer (or reader) can lose less and try more. The short story cycle is thus pitched both as a less risky genre, suitable for encounters with new writers and for the training of new critical readers, and as a riskier genre in terms of the styles and subject matter it can encompass. In his comparisons of the short story to the novel in The Canadian Short Story, John Metcalf is firmly on the side of the short story, contending that it is the fault of “big house publishers, bleating media savants, agents and low-wattage academics, hacks, hucksters, and

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flacks, a nomenklatura that reliably confuses commercial success with value, [that] the short story remains a genre ‘not quite grown-up’” (2018, 2). For his own part, as evidenced by his “Century List” of noteworthy Canadian short stories and collections, Metcalf – while claiming to be opposed to any fixed system of assessment (203–4) – appears to most strongly value what he calls “the vital new” (205). As he argues: “All good writing is, to some extent, ‘experimental’” (170). Of the fifty collections included on Metcalf’s “Century List,” half are debuts and, at the end of The Canadian Short Story, Metcalf reiterates an implicit theme: that in progressing from short story writing to novel writing, writers have “squandered” their artistry (648). Of the nine cycles explored in Bearers of Risk, six are debuts, while the other three are explicitly formally experimental.4 My point here is not to make a case either way for the superiority of the short story in comparison to the novel, or to lament (or to deny) that writers of exciting debut short story collections often follow those up with novels. Rather, I am interested in the implications of coupling debut short story cycles with the idea of “the vital new,” especially when newness – and riskiness – is associated with elevating marginal voices. As I will discuss in detail below, I am most interested in the implications of these critical associations as they relate to a post–9/11 rhetorical field that marks White heteronormative men as at risk. In his 2018 iteration of the “Century List,” Metcalf does not differentiate between short story collections that are miscellanies (for example, “Best of” or “Selected Stories of” collections) and short story collections that are cycles, i.e., the type of unified short story collection Lynch refers to as “distinctly and distinctively a Canadian genre” (2001, 4). Following Lynch, I focus on short story cycles, again because of interest in the strategic use of the genre’s various conventions. At different points in this study, I will highlight certain of those conventions, exploring, for example, how particular formal features give a cycle of stories a sense of unity, or the significance of what Lynch calls the “return” story (28). Here, I would like to highlight a key thematic Lynch ascribes to the short story cycle in The One and the Many. In his introduction, Lynch reads Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912) as a paradigmatic Canadian short story cycle, noting how the cumulative effect of its interrelated parts “depicts provisional possibilities respecting the recuperation of community for its displaced former and current inhabitants and the tentative presence of a sense of self and identity that is intimately connected to place as

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home” (31). Lynch also points out, however, that the fragmentariness inherent in the genre of the short story cycle undermines any sense of “closure” (31), whereby the “recuperation of community” registers as desire rather than experience. In his discussion of early examples of Canadian short story cycles, Lynch draws attention to “the onslaught of modernity and metropolitanism,” which takes its toll on conceptions of identity, family, and community (29). As my examination will show, the context now impinging on the representation of self, home, and community is a global cultural economy, one that has reshaped the flows of capital, power, and knowledge. I will consider the post–9/11 decade as a period of insecurity, one in which concepts of self, home, and community become linked with an anxious desire for clarity of identity, with concerns about safety, and with the surveillance of allegiances and borders. Rocío Davis and Victoria Kuttainen, following Lynch, have also explored the Canadian short story cycle at length, while Löschnigg devotes the final section of her study to “New Developments within the Canadian Short Story Cycle.” Davis’s analysis of Asian American and Asian Canadian short story cycles highlights the way diasporic writers make use of the genre to work through “the reality of an insider/outsider point of view” (2001, 20). Similarly, Löschnigg suggests that paying attention to “narrative voice” in the short story cycle reveals how the genre “lends itself particularly well to creating polyphony and to establishing different centres of orientation” (2014, 256). Along with what she calls “Munrovian”5 patterns in Canadian short story cycles, Löschnigg is especially interested in migration narratives and how “distinctive generic features of the short story cycle make this hybrid narrative form an ideal vehicle for rendering the experience of migration, which often entails the communication of fractures and fragmented biographies and identities” (300). Both Davis and Löschnigg stress the short story cycle’s potential for what Kruk calls “double-voicing” (2016, 2), or the way “authors ‘talk back’ to a variety of authorized speakers, offering alternative visions through their double voices” (164). But whereas Davis and Löschnigg point out commonalities between short story cycles and immigrant narratives, Kuttainen’s Unsettling Stories: Settler Postcolonialism and the Short Story Composite considers how the genre connects to discussions about settlement, arguing that just as “the boundaries of the settler nation are by no means stable” (2010, 1), so too is the short story composite a “shifty” genre (7).6 Kuttainen contends that short story

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composites, especially those produced within a postcolonial space, often draw attention to “tenuous relations between past and present, story and history, cohesion and fragmentation” and so on (9–10); thus, critical reading requires that we “pay attention to how settlers position themselves in relation to Indigeneity, marginality, and ethnicity” (23). Kuttainen’s advice is central to my own project, as I explore the mobilization of the conventions of this shifty genre in service of leveraging post–9/11 discourse about a so-called crisis in Canadian masculinity as a justification for reclaiming space. As I will explore throughout this study, what is exemplary in these short story cycles is how the mobilization of a marginal genre in CanLit masks a kind of Canadian recuperative masculinity politics, which is often expressed via a figure I will refer to as the civil bearer of risk.

M as c u l in it y in Cri si s In the short story “Conversion,” Gould portrays Michael as a man in crisis: a man who worries about how his masculinity is read, especially by a woman like Nina. As the text makes clear, Michael is conscious of a continuum of available masculine performances, and since it is with a “bittersweet infusion of relief and regret” that he realizes that this much younger woman does not view him as sexually attractive (2003, 40), he aims for a performance of a serious man, “ma[king] sure to angle [the] book so my friend could appreciate the profundity of its font” (40). The self-conscious effort that goes into Michael’s performance reflects his uncertainty about how to establish his manhood, an uncertainty exacerbated by a general sense of unease borne out of the historical moment: as Michael muses, “Like many folks in the aftermath I’d felt the urge to ground myself, grab hold of faith, or allow myself to be grabbed by it” (41). As this study will explore, the post–9/11 condition of global unease is often, for better or worse, linked to the early twenty-first-century iteration of a crisis in masculinity, whereby – as Christopher J. Greig and Wayne J. Martino put it in their introduction to Canadian Men and Masculinities: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives – “today the changing nature of the postindustrial neoliberal capitalist economy, the increased movement of women into the labour force, the proliferation or visibilization of queer identities, and challenges to the traditional definition of marriage have all come together to incite anxieties over the status of men and masculinities” (2012, 5). As I will discuss throughout this project,

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while these texts sometimes connect “anxiety” to the increasingly globalized labour market or appropriately gendered roles within ­family structures, the worry over “status” is most often pitched as a generalized insecurity among men about where they belong, or about being perceived as ungrounded and unsure. It is not only the character of Michael but Gould’s narrative that emphasizes a desire to reassert not only a grounded sense of self, but also a grounded sense of masculine authority. Though the first reference to Nina refers to her as “twenty-fivish” (2003, 39), the narrative increasingly portrays her as a child: she gives Michael a “girlish smile” (40), she is his “little friend” (40), a “classy kid” (40–1), a “girl” (40), who answers Michael’s questions with a “child-like bob of the head” (41). When Nina reaches out for Michael’s hand after the turbulence, he is “reminded … of the first time [his daughter] got hold of [his] thumb” (42). Thus, it is chiefly in the self-consciously performative guise of a paternal figure that Michael finds it possible to establish an authoritative ground, despite knowing his own father to be “a far more reflective and devout individual than I’d ever ­pretended to be” (40). That said, the final section of “Conversion,” in which Michael is “seized … with the need to persuade this girl, convert her – the need to seduce her into believing” (43, emphasis added), reflects a confluence of mechanisms for masculine control that extend beyond or add complexity to the paternalistic attitude, whereby a patriarchal order of power is confirmed via appeals to rational authority, religious authority, and sexual authority. Finally, the last line of the story draws attention to a rhetorical field that may be produced alongside moments of insecurity. As the narrative s­uggests, Michael comes to regard Nina’s panic as an opportunity to assert control: “I prayed for the plane to buck again, to hit us even harder, and it did” (43). Greig and Martino point out that, while the notion of “masculinity in crisis” is promoted in popular discourse as a mere description of a state of affairs, the idea chiefly operates as a justification for “recuperative masculinity politics” seeking to restore traditional patriarchal forms of social and political control (2012, 4). The last line of Gould’s story shows Michael’s exploitation of the plane’s turbulence, of the anxiety it produces in Nina, and of the moment of insecurity – a moment that allows Michael to reposition himself as the authoritative centre. Masculinity studies is capacious, interdisciplinary, and dynamic. In her introduction to the 2005 edition of Masculinities, Raewyn Connell

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modestly acknowledges that, after its publication in 1995, the first edition of the text “had a role in creating an intellectual agenda and consolidating a field of study,” going on to assert that in the intervening decade “the field of knowledge has developed in highly interesting ways” (xiii).7 An exemplar of this “development” is Michael Flood’s The Men’s Bibliography, which is a searchable database comprising – as of 2018, the last time it was updated – “30,000 books and articles, sorted into over thirty major subject areas” (Flood 2018). Recent research on Canadian masculinities traverses such topics as masculinity and Canadian history (see Dummitt 2007, Gossage and Rutherdale 2018, Greig 2014, Vacante 2017); masculinity and sport culture, particularly hockey culture (see Abdel-Shehid 2005, Allain 2008, 2011, 2015, Boyle 2014, Cairnie, 2019, Fogel and Quinlan 2020, Johnson and Holman 2004, Young and White 2007); masculinity and Indigeneity (see Innes and Anderson 2015, Cannon 2019, LeBlanc 2015, McKegney 2014, Reeves and Stewart, 2017); masculinity and the Canadian military and law enforcement (see Hayes 2014, 2017, Moss 2001, Murray 2021, Taber 2015); masculinity and health (see Atkinson 2007, Kehler and Atkinson 2010, Thien and Del Casino Jr 2012, ), and so on. Further, the publication in 2012 of two anthologies – Canadian Perspectives on Men and Masculinities: An Interdisciplinary Reader (Laker) and Canadian Men and Masculinities: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (Greig and Martino) – both aimed at the postsecondary school market indicates the degree to which the study of Canadian masculinities has not only arrived, but has become institutionalized. Finally, with respect to research on masculinity in Canadian literature, key texts include Michael Buma’s Refereeing Identity: The Cultural Work of Canadian Hockey Novels (2012), Daniel Coleman’s Masculine Migrations: Reading the Postcolonial Male in New Canadian Narratives (1998), Paul Nonnekes’s Northern Love: An Exploration of Canadian Masculinity (2008), and Christine Ramsay’s collection of essays Making It Like a Man: Canadian Masculinities in Practice (2011). The sheer volume of approaches, topics, and concepts associated with masculinity studies thus necessitates an articulation of frameworks most relevant to Bearers of Risk, which are notions of crisis and White masculinity. In their introduction to Canadian Men and Masculinities, Greig and Martino highlight the relationship between “deep economic and social uncertainty brought on by the advent of globalization” and the resolve among “some cultural commentators, journalists, educators, and

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others to claim the existence of a ‘crisis in masculinity’” (2012, 1). The scare quotes around the phrase “crisis in masculinity” signals the ubiquity of this phrase in both scholarly and popular venues, where its use runs the gamut between anxious and/or outraged pronouncements about the “end of men” (see Garcia 2008, Hymowitz 2011, Nathanson and Young 2001, 2006, Rosin 2012, Sommers 2000) and attentive and/or skeptical explorations of how men come to be culturally figured as victims. In Studying Men and Masculinities, for example, David Buchbinder points out that “much of the rhetoric around the notion of a crisis in masculinity implies that this has been a unique moment, historically speaking; yet some investigation into the history of masculinity suggests that this may not be the case” (2013, 6–7). Buchbinder goes on to cite such older instances of crisis discourse as the public debates in seventeenth-century England about the problem of “the womanish man,” and concerns expressed in late nineteenthcentury Europe about the “softening” influence of civilization on men (6); to these might be added specifically Canadian examples, enumerated by Greig and Martino, such as post-Second World War fears that the centrality of overprotective mother figures within Canadian suburban culture might result in boys who were “sissies” (2012, 4). The point here is that the term crisis as it is deployed in discourse about masculinity is frequently more constitutive than it is descriptive. It is a rhetorical move that not only centres men but does so in relation to the concept of threat: men or masculinity are under threat and – often concurrently – men, whose masculinity is in crisis, now pose a threat. In this sense, discourse about masculinity in crisis differs greatly from discourse about, for example, the subjugation of women or members of the queer community, as no other popular form of discussion about the relationship between gender and power seems so closely associated with the language of warning and intimidation.8 In his introduction to Deconstructing Men and Masculinities, Canadian scholar Michael Atkinson surveys late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century crisis language – that is, language in scholarship about masculinity that constitutes the experiences of men in relation to crisis. The first course of argument, enumerated by the likes of Roger Horrocks (1994) and Susan Faludi (1999), contends that, owing to shifts in the social and economic standing of women in the 1970s and 1980s, men are increasingly unable to count on exclusive access to those social and economic arenas that, for thousands of years, were thought to be “essentially” masculine domains:

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“On an ideological level, attacks on the very social construction of masculinity … have created cultural chaos as men no longer know how to act in gender-appropriate ways” (Atkinson 2011, 5). A second course of Atkinson’s argument traces the progression of gender and sexual anxiety into more or less aggressive resistance, as “certain men refuse to acknowledge or embrace new masculinities in any way, and retrench into very traditional, self-essentializing, and hegemonic images and embodied performances” (5). An influential example of this type of argument, Atkinson points out, is found in Lionel Tiger’s The Decline of Males (1999), which “attributes the decline of family values, increased crime rates, and burgeoning social problems to the war against masculinity” (Atkinson 2011, 19). Finally, Atkinson makes note of the work of “Anti-crisis advocates,” who argue that “discourses about the masculinity crisis – which almost always focus on White men – tend to obfuscate the empirically measurable and statistically consistent trends that indicate contemporary men are collectively as powerful as men in any previous generation” (6). What emerges from Atkinson’s survey is the impression of a debate between those who believe that men are actually in crisis (by which is meant: men are losing cultural power) and those who don’t. Atkinson is clear, though, that the grounds for this debate are less relevant than the “perception” of crisis, or the way this moment’s particular iteration of crisis is defined (12), as men “who share ideal-typical constructions of the masculinity crisis seek to alleviate their crises via a range of physical cultural practices” (14). Bearers of Risk will likewise explore the perception of masculinity in crisis – or, more specifically, the deployment of crisis language as a rhetorical strategy – and how the focus on crisis relates to responses, both anxious and strategic, to the post– 9/11 period of global economic and cultural insecurity. Another approach to examining crisis language is Connell’s, surveyed in Masculinities, though she uses the phrase “crisis tendencies … [within] the gender order” (2005, 84), mapping those tendencies onto three categories of gender relations: power relations; production relations; and relations of cathexis, or desire (85). I will refer to crisis tendencies in production relations below, and in section 3 of Bearers of Risk. Here, I would like to consider more closely the relevance of power relations, as associated with Connell’s notion of the “reproductive arena” (71) and of relations of cathexis, in relation to Greig and Martino’s comment linking the current crisis in masculinity to the “proliferation or visibilization of queer identities” (2012, 5), as well

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as to Connell’s own delineation of “body-reflexive practice” (2005, 64). Connell notes that, owing to the “historic collapse of the legitimacy of patriarchal power,” crises in power relations often result in the development of “strategies of legitimation” (85). One key strategy – exemplified in Gould’s representation of Michael as paternal – entails asserting control over the reproductive arena, which Connell explains is not merely biological but a set of “social practices” related to “human reproduction” (71). While Connell, as a social scientist, tends to examine the reproductive arena alongside such issues as global public health policy or labour relations (see Connell 2006, 2012), in Bearers of Risk, I will explore such discursive strategies of asserting control over the reproductive arena as reaffirming patrilineal legacy, highlighting the role of men as breadwinners, and endorsing heteronormativity. Likewise, in examining the depiction of strategies of legitimation connected to crises within relations of cathexis or, “the [social] practices that shape and realize desire” (Connell 2005, 74), I am most concerned in Bearers of Risk with the effects of what Greig and Martino refer to as “visibilization,” or what Connell calls “the stabilization of lesbian and gay sexuality as a public alternative within the heterosexual order” (2005, 85, emphasis added). In other words, I will show that managing the threat of queer masculine identities (whether through violence, vilification, or erasure) is primarily associated with anxiety about the heteronormative masculine body under surveillance. Further, I will explore how concern about body-reflexive practice and the readability of the heteronormative masculine body is linked with scrutiny of the ethnically minoritized body or the working-­class body. Atkinson briefly notes the centrality of the concerns of White men in much of the discourse about masculinity in crisis, and research in this area is another important context for my project, as the texts I explore – including cycles by ethnically minoritized writers Bezmozgis, Lam, and De Sa – grapple with Whiteness as a marked identity. Sally Robinson notes in Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis that in the post-civil rights era, the White Western man finds himself, at once, newly visible and, apparently, under siege, as both his cultural normativity and privileged social status are questioned (2000, 4). Robinson’s use of the term “marked” thus has multiple valences, and her study of American middlebrow literature of the 1970s and 1980s also considers the meaning of the figure of the wounded White man in relation to a number of questions (many of which are relevant to Bearers of

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Risk): “Why is it that a crisis in white masculinity gets represented in corporeal terms? In what ways are pleasure and power made available through representations of white male bodies in crisis? What kind of power springs from narrative explorations of powerlessness?” (13, emphasis added). Here, Robinson, like Atkinson, considers crisis not as a potential fact to be debated, but as a strategic performance to be exploited. In his own work, Affirmative Reaction: New Formations of White Masculinity, Hamilton Carroll explores precisely those White masculine performances that seek to cast victimhood as social status, or – as he puts it – that “mobilize failure as a constitutive force for the reorientation of posthegemonic forms of white masculinist privilege” (2011, 2). Carroll scrutinizes, for example, post–9/11 representations of firemen that “transform … the white working-class man into ethnic subjects” (20), as well as the White, labouring men’s bodies featured on popular reality shows like American Chopper (20). As Carroll argues in his introduction, “White masculinity has responded to calls for both redistribution and recognition by citing itself as the most needy and the most worthy recipient of what it denies it already has” (10). Throughout Bearers of Risk, I am concerned with the various ways that a genre thought to be conventionally focused on multiple perspectives has been made use of to centre wounded, White, heteronormative men’s bodies. Both Robinson and Carroll focus their analysis on American cultural objects, linking the representations found therein to the context of twentieth- and twenty-first-century America (for example: Robinson cites the period following the election of Richard Nixon in 1968 as “the birth of the current crisis in white masculinity” [2000, 16], while Carroll prefaces his cultural analysis with a discussion of the post-Second World War American labour economy [2011, 3–5]). As Roger Hewitt points out in White Backlash and the Politics of Multiculturalism, however, the context for White masculinity in crisis language in Canada (and in Australia) differs from the context in the US (and in the UK) because of “state-sponsored multiculturalist responses to relationships between settled communities, new immigrants and ‘first nations’ in Canada and Australia” (2005, 133). Hewitt argues that the backlash against multiculturalism was “gentler” (134) in Canada than elsewhere, focused during the Mulroney years of the early 1990s on whether multicultural programming should be funded (135). Even the rise of the Reform Party in the late 1990s did not produce the same sort of anti-immigrant/racist rhetoric prevalent among populist movements elsewhere, partly because – as Hewitt

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points out – the Reform Party was often focused on “the imposition of bilingualism and encroaching ‘French’ power” (136). The major exception to the general refusal to engage in racist discourse among Reformers was “the consistent insensitivity and hostility to the interests of native Canadians” (sic, 137). A more precise term than Hewitt’s “gentler” is used by Daniel Coleman in White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada, which argues first that English Canadian Settler discourse establishes “Britishness” as Canada’s “fictive ethnicity” (2006, 7) and, second, that the borders that define belonging to the Canadian nation are policed via references to a British gentlemanly code of civility (9). Coleman then explains the effects of these two discursive mechanisms: “by representing himself as already indigenous, the [British] settler claims priority over newer immigrants and, by representing himself as already civilized, he claims superiority to Aboriginals and other nonWhites” (16). Crucially, Coleman’s argument explores the distinctive kinds of behaviour Canadian White men display to confirm or reaffirm their superior status, an idea that resonates with Kuttainen’s notion of the shifty position of the Settler voice in postcolonial short story composites (2010, 7). In Bearers of Risk, I explore how these nine short story cycles depict strategic performances of White masculine civility – for example, of paternalism, of objectivity, of duty – especially as such performances are associated with White men citing themselves as “the most needy and the most worthy recipient of what it denies it already has” (Carroll 2011, 10), or as the “individual voices [that] clamour to be heard” (Kruk 2016, 3). As the narrator of Gould’s “Conversion” shows, Michael positions his relationship to Nina in terms of need: “I was seized, suddenly, with the need to persuade this girl, convert her – the need to seduce her into believing what no one could possibly believe” (2003, 43, emphasis added). Michael “pray[s]” (43) for the moment of insecurity: for the type of moment in which he might reaffirm both his desire and his obligation to be the authoritative advocate of something like “belief,” specifically the belief that deferring to fixed, hierarchical structures of meaning is a good bet, a worthwhile risk.

P o s t – 9 / 1 1 Ins ecuri ty a n d t h e C iv il B e arer of Ri s k Of all the short stories in Gould’s kilter: 55 fictions, “Conversion” most explicitly cites the immediate post–9/11 period. Michael wonders which passenger will become his “neighbour” (2003, 39), and spends

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some time scanning the plane for suspicious persons, pleased that the “sole Arabic passenger [is] a woman … too frumpy to look like a fanatic” (40). He works in the field of insurance, an area of business in which the possible costs of risk are distributed among larger and larger groups; thinking ahead to his “annual Insurers’ convention,” Michael expects discussion of the global financial impact of the attack on the Twin Towers “to be extra harrowing” (41). Greig and Martino point out that, while crisis language and ensuing recuperative masculinity politics can be shown to be a historically persistent discourse (undermining any precise sense of “crisis” as something exceptional or urgent), it is helpful to pay attention to how “variations and rearticulations … [emerge] in response to specific economic, social, and political conditions” (2012, 4). Greig and Martino’s introduction, for example, is mainly concerned with the effects of “the post-industrial neoliberal capitalist economy,” which has “given rise to less secure forms of employment” (5). Some of the cycles I focus on explicitly take up the issue of changed labour conditions, especially the work of MacLeod, Christie, and Wilson. Also relevant is the notion of “deterritorialization,” as that term is defined by John Tomlinson in Globalization and Culture, which highlights how various features of globalization “weaken the ties of culture to place” (1999, 29). However, the “condition” that forms a broader, more conceptual, framework for analysis in Bearers of Risk, and which helps define the corpus of texts I have chosen to explore, is the post–9/11 condition of insecurity. It is a sense of economic, political, and – especially – social insecurity that, in Gould’s “Conversion,” motivates Michael’s “urge to ground [him]self” (2003, 41). In her introduction to Transatlantic Fictions of 9/11 and the War on Terror, entitled “Images of Terror, Narratives of (In)security,” Susana Araújo contends that the “outpouring of ‘9/11’ novels can be understood beyond the expressions of trauma, mourning, or outrage generated by this event” (2015, 1), thereby setting up her argument that “concepts of terror and security, usually presented as conflicting, should be, in fact, seen as contiguous” (5). Johannes Voelz also makes note of the contiguity of terror and security in The Poetics of Insecurity: American Fiction and the Uses of Threat, though Voelz’s focus is not the 9/11 novel or even works highlighting “terrorism, international conflict, or war” (2018, 4), but rather works from “the early republic to the present … [that show how] the concern with security allows us to explore, experience, make use of, and even take

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pleasure in insecurity” (2). In his introduction, Voelz works through the relationship, not only of fear to security, but also of security to possibility: “Security becomes a matter of concern when, first of all, there is a perception of a malevolent threat that creates a sense of insecurity. The threat may appear as imminent or removed, concrete or vague, but in any case it exists as a potential of a future that has yet to arrive” (8). Crucial to Voelz’s thinking is how the notion of a “potential of a future that has yet to arrive” produces cultural activity understood to be an outcome of fear, but which might also be comprehended in relation to desire: It is the uncertainty of the future that makes possible a second dimension of security: it consists in the belief that the threats looming in the uncertain future can be answered, that there are, in fact, alternative future courses. From this follows the ­emancipating potential of security’s concern with the potentially harmful uncertainty of the future. In finding a response to ­insecurity, the subject of security turns the uncertainty of the future to its own favor. Security promises that up to a certain point the uncertain future can be rationally designed and ­controlled. (11–12) The idea that insecurity can be approached as an “uncertain future … [to be] designed and controlled” is a key lens through which Bearers of Risk explores the strategic use of crisis language. For example, this lens clarifies the final moments of “Conversion,” which narrate Michael’s desire “for the plane to buck again, to hit us even harder” (2003, 43). Here, Gould’s text reflects the “emancipating potential” of insecurity, as the anxious man aims to assert paternalistic control by exploiting a young woman’s terror. The characterization of Michael as paternal – even, arguably, as kind – is significant, as this sort of characterization can be linked to Coleman’s conception of Canadian White civility and to a recurring figure in the short story cycles I explore: the civil bearer of risk. In theorizing representations of security and insecurity, both Araújo and Voelz focus primarily on American literary and cultural traditions. Araújo explores how motifs associated with captivity narratives – for example, the masculinist “rescue and revenge” plot (2015, 8) – are reaffirmed in 9/11 novels. Voelz explores what he calls a distinctive “grammar of agency” (2018, 12) associated with the American ideal

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of a “democratic post-rank social order” (19), in which “the individual becomes a risk-taker, or an entrepreneurial self” (18). Delineating the Canadian post–9/11 framework of insecurity is important to my project because the impact and meaning of the events of 9/11 in Canada is, of course, distinct from the impact and meaning of those events in the US, though perhaps somewhat less distinct than Canadians would like to believe. In September 11: Consequences for Canada, Kent Roach makes reference to the position of former Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Lloyd Axworthy, noting that “before September 11, Canada prided itself on a foreign policy that recognized that security involved more ‘than the absence of military threat’ and included ‘security against economic privation, an acceptable quality of life and a guarantee of human rights’” (2003, 198–9). Following 9/11, such positions were criticized, as when “the US promptly, but falsely, pointed an accusing finger at Canada for giving terrorists an ‘in’ due to allegedly ‘porous’ Canadian borders” (Rollings-Magnusson 2009, 21). Further, as argued by the contributing authors to AntiTerrorism: Security and Insecurity after 9/11, edited by Sandra Rollings-Magnusson, the fallout from 9/11 includes the deterioration of “basic human rights in Canada … as a result of the anti-terrorism policies chosen” (29), so as to “manage the flow of individuals across the Canadian border” (26), and increased surveillance (27). Though Canada remains much less dependent than the US on what Roach calls a “criminal justice paradigm of apprehending and punishing terrorists” (2003, 196), the early twenty-first-century consolidation of state power in Canada in the name of security is visible in such legislation as the Anti-Terrorism Acts of 2001 and 2015. Invoking a lyric from the Canadian national anthem, Roach suggests that Canadians must retain their distinctive focus on human security: “[both] the independent judiciary and groups in civil society should stand on guard to ensure that the erosion of liberty, privacy, and equality are not consequences of September 11” (202). But what sort of activity constitutes “standing on guard” in the face of insecurity? How does the distinctive activity of “standing on guard” manifest in the figure I refer to as the civil bearer of risk? To clarify my use of the phrase “civil bearer of risk,” and to explain the significance of locating this type of figure within these early twentyfirst-century Canadian short story cycles written by men, I will make use of the “Author Meets Critic Forum on Daniel Coleman’s White Civility: The Literary Project of English Canada,” published in the

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International Journal of Canadian Studies. As Susan Gingell and Jill Didur explain in their introduction to the forum, the choice to focus on Coleman’s 2006 study is linked to the “significance of the subject” and to the “disquiet” produced by Coleman’s methodology and certain of his arguments (2008, 183). Among the criticisms of White Civility is George Elliott Clarke’s interrogation of Coleman’s choice to focus on historical texts written by White authors, thus ignoring “the long history of resistant writing in the Canadian context” (Gingell and Didur 2008, 187). This criticism might easily be levelled at my own project, and I will reiterate my rationale to focus on these particular contemporary short story cycles below, and more fully in my conclusion when I examine the elevating of White men’s voices in Canadian literary prize culture between 2001 and 2011. The second and most sustained criticism of White Civility among the forum contributors focuses on the book’s final chapter, “Wry Civility,” especially Coleman’s suggestion in his study that: “The onus falls to cultural critics and scholars, therefore, to dismantle these narratives by means of a critical or wry civility which knows that civility itself has a contaminated, compromised history but which nonetheless affirms that its basic elements as formulated in Canada – peace, order, and good government – are worth having and maintaining” (2006, 239). As Gingell and Didur argue, Coleman’s continued attachment to the concept of civility and “its basic elements as formulated in Canada” persists in setting the terms of “peace, order, and good government” within a White, Eurocentric framework, thereby inviting “increased surveillance of racialized groups for criminal activity” (2008, 184). For example, in Margery Fee’s contribution to the forum, “White Civility and Aboriginal Law/Epistemology,” she explores how a widely circulated photograph associated with the so-called Oka Crisis was popularly read as showing the law-abiding, White soldier stoically resisting the criminal, Indigenous outlaw (2008, 201–4). Thus, as Clarke queries in his own response: “Why Civility?” (Clarke, quoted in Gingell and Didur 2008, 187). In “From Contented Civility to Contending Civilities: Alternatives to Canadian White Civility,” Coleman provides a response to this query. He explains his hesitancy to “abandon the concept altogether” (2008, 227), referencing the “post–9/11 world … [and the] way in which civility is under attack from at least two sides at once” (227). Not only is “violence and suppression at the borders of the civil sphere” (227–8) under increased scrutiny by anti-racism critics, but

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“civility is also under concerted attack these days from above, from the powers that be” (228). Coleman then inquires, “in an era of heightened racial panic such as the present, whether a complete dismissal or rejection of civility might not risk playing readily into the hands of the abusers?” (228, emphasis added). In many ways, Coleman’s notion of the risks for Canadians associated with the post–9/11 decade cohere with Roach’s directive to “stand on guard”; Roach’s words are aimed at “[both] the independent judiciary and groups in civil society,” while Coleman refers even more generally to “a populace that has become cynical and disinterested in the maintenance of basic civil protections” (229). While the goal of resisting, as Roach puts it, a post–9/11 “erosion of liberty, privacy, and equality” is laudable, the looseness of phrases such as “groups in civil society” or “a populace” suggests that the figure “standing on guard” is, potentially and perilously, an empty sign. In Bearers of Risk, my central argument is that a review of these texts reveals the mechanisms of early twenty-first-century, Canadian recuperative masculinity politics, which both describe and exalt the figure of the civil bearer of risk: the figure who will – like Michael in Gould’s “Conversion” – exploit the post–9/11 period of insecurity to reclaim his rightful role as arbiter of order, though that reclamation will be pitched as duty. Throughout this introduction, I have highlighted the character of Michael from Gould’s short story as an exemplar, and here too my work is indebted to Coleman’s White Civility, in which he delineates four “literary personifications for the Canadian nation” (2006, 6): “the loyal brother who continues to negotiate a nervous relationship with the United States, the enterprising Scottish orphan whose prudent, good character produces his economic success, the muscular Christian who [metes] out justice on behalf of oppressed people, and the maturing colonial son who demonstrates his independence from Britain and America by altruism towards his minority beneficiaries” (239). Coleman argues that these personifications “continue to have enormous influence in popular understandings of Canadian identity” (239), and indeed versions of these figures emerge in the short story cycles I examine. For example: the figure of the “loyal brother” is visible in the work of Glennon, in his intratextual juxtaposition of American and Canadian versions of the same character type, or in Bezmozgis’s short story “Choynski,” in which the Canadian protagonist visiting San Francisco negotiates being misrecognized by Americans. Many of the short story cycles I examine superficially seek a kind of secular

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uplift for those affected by colonialism and globalization, as in Marche’s exploration of the effects of British colonialism on inhabitants of the fictional island of Sanjania, or in MacLeod’s and Christie’s portrayals of labour upheaval and economic stratification in Windsor, Ontario and Vancouver, British Columbia. Finally, attention to the figure of the “maturing colonial son” is especially relevant for short story cycles providing an accumulating picture of one character’s development, as in works by Bezmozgis, Lam, De Sa, and Wilson. That said, the least resonant literary personification is “the enterprising Scottish orphan whose prudent, good character produces his economic success,” primarily because so many of the texts I explore highlight men who fail, for example the character of Fitzgerald in Lam’s cycle, who is introduced as a noble, brilliant, and sensitive aspiring medical student, and whose arc includes breaking into his ex-girlfriend’s apartment, getting fired from his job as an attending physician because he shows up to work drunk, and contracting sa rs . In fact, it is the persistent focus on men’s failure against the backdrop of a period of economic, political, and social insecurity that conditions the emergence of the civil bearer of risk, a figure defined by a number of characteristics. In the first place, the civil bearer of risk acknowledges his own personal failures and/or the position of men as being marked by or for failure, connecting such failures to post–9/11 Canadian anxieties about the “peace, order, and good government.” For example: in Gould’s kilter: 55 fictions, middle-class men, often presented as socially progressive and yet emasculated, worry about the problem of falling men, especially in relation to protecting a patrilineal legacy. Glennon’s The Dodecahedron, too, is concerned with men who feel that their ability to act heroically is compromised. While Fitzgerald is Lam’s avatar for the failed man in Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, Bezmozgis’s Natasha and Other Stories explores how Mark Berman’s desire for masculine strength masks anxiety about social weakness, while De Sa’s Barnacle Love despairs of the aggressive, retrograde, and old-world masculine identity of Manuel Rebelo. In MacLeod’s Light Lifting and Christie’s The Beggar’s Garden, the toll of an increasingly globalized economy is highlighted via images of men’s bodies in pain and/or existing on the social margins. Next, the civil bearer of risk comprehends the reassertion of masculine authority as a duty, perceiving the moment of insecurity as an exigency requiring action and even sacrifice. For example: in the

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elaborate paratext of Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, Marche elevates the role of the objective, authoritative surveyor, who can produce order out of postcolonial histories of violence and the ensuing eruptions of literatures. The works of Bezmozgis, Lam, and De Sa self-consciously respond to anxieties about foreign enemies and Eastern or old-world contagions by exploring fantasies in which the minoritized figure within the deterritorialized cosmopolis becomes Whitened, and thus capable of helping police the borders of the national imaginary. Wilson’s Once You Break a Knuckle portrays the choice of Will Crease to forgo a cosmopolitan, creative future in favour of taking up the position of rural cop so as to remain in a space that can be protected from progress. Importantly, and finally, the civil bearer of risk assumes his position of standing on guard in ways that are distinct from the “rescue and revenge” plots Araújo tracks, or even narratives in which “the individual becomes a risk-taker, or an entrepreneurial self” (Voelz 2018, 18). The Canadian civil bearer of risk is portrayed in these texts as dutiful, non-violent, and disinterested. His goals are not related to entrepreneurial personal benefit but are rather conservatively focussed on leading the way back to a sense of safety, continuance, and metaphysical health for the community, recalling Lynch’s argument that a key theme of Canadian short story cycles is “the recuperation of community for its displaced former and current inhabitants” (2001, 31). For example: the final story of MacLeod’s short story cycle depicts a White father figure, who is both literally injured and metaphorically wounded by the globalization of labour markets, limping down the centre of the highway in the direction of his home, as a slow line of cars, a “strange parade” (2010, 219), forms behind him. In Bearers of Risk, I argue that the multiple iterations of the civil bearer of risk in short story cycles by men in this decade reveals, at once, a distinctive rhetoric of Canadian post–9/11 recuperative masculinity politics and a blind spot in extant criticism of the Canadian short story. The reiterated concern that the genre is “neglected,” as if its status as “minor” in comparison to the novel must be forcefully denied and/or resisted, has at times lead to a type of converse error, whereby claims of critical or marketplace neglect is somehow evidence of the short story’s or the short story cycle’s special capacity to be “risky,” or to elevate marginalized voices. Here, I am not referring to scholarship exploring how minoritized writers have made use of the form of the short story cycle, for example Davis’s Transcultural Reinventions: Asian American and Asian Canadian Short-story Cycles

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or Löschnigg’s chapter on Canadian short story cycles and migration stories. Rather, I am referring to the type of rationalization evidenced in MacLeod’s “The Canadian Short Story in English: Aesthetic Agency, Social Change, and the Shifting Canon”: Though ideologies, literary fashions, regional identities, and real social and political conditions change continuously through two centuries of history, Canadian short-fiction writers working in English have often positioned themselves at the earliest cutting edges of these changes and, in many cases, their work has helped direct and focus those cultural discourses into the future. The question of genre classification may be consistently troubling, but it is also consistently important, and though I will not attempt to offer any easy explanation for why this has happened, it is simply true that the supposedly marginalized form of the short story has been consistently central to the major aesthetic and cultural shiftings of Canadian literature. (2016, 429–30, emphasis in the original) Importantly, MacLeod’s surveying argument is not only that the outsider status of the short story allows for formal or thematic experimentation, but that “Canadian short-fiction writers working in English have often positioned themselves at the earliest cutting edges of [social and political] changes,” whereby authors intentionally become bearers of risk, taking on the “marginalized form” so as to transform “cultural discourses.” As Coleman notes in his author forum response, “Denaturalizing what appeared to be natural in its own home remains necessary” (2008, 226, emphasis in original), particularly because “the realms of sanctioned ignorance that reinforce racial hierarchies have a staying power that makes them consistent and self-replicating” (227). In Bearers of Risk, my goal is to interrogate what I perceive to be the strategic use of the short story cycle in service of normalizing the “consistent and self-replicating” early twenty-first-century discourse of recuperative masculinity politics. The first three works I explore are linked by their experimentation with formal conventions: John Gould’s kilter: 55 fictions, published in 2003, is a cycle of microfictions; the stories in Paul Glennon’s The Dodecahedron, published in 2005, are interlinked according to an elaborate set of constraints; and Stephen Marche’s Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, published in 2007, presents

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stories as part of an anthology of literature of an invented country. All three short story cycles, lauded for their formal adventurousness, make use of this shifty genre to prioritize a risk-taking, legacy-seeking, authoritative Settler point of view. In my next section, I look at three short story cycles primarily set in Toronto and further unified by their use of recurring central characters: David Bezmozgis’s Natasha and Other Stories, published in 2004; Vincent Lam’s Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, published in 2005; and Anthony De Sa’s Barnacle Love, published in 2008. I will consider these cycles as narratives of “arrival,” in terms of how the debut text by a minoritized writer is marked, and how each cycle works through the twinned processes of coercive and strategic Whitening. My last section examines three works that make use of setting as their chief unifying feature: Light Lifting by Alexander MacLeod, published in 2010 and mostly set in Windsor, Ontario; Michael Christie’s The Beggar’s Garden, published in 2011 and set in Vancouver, bc; and Once You Break a Knuckle, by D.W. Wilson, also published in 2011 and mostly set in Invermere, bc. These cycles, while critiquing contemporary labour and economic conditions, centre the White, heteronormative, masculine, labouring body, figuring that body as both wounded and sacrificing, especially in service of reclaiming space and restoring community. I will argue that the genre of the short story cycle, linked in scholarship to notions of formal experimentation, the “vital new,” polyphony, “talking back,” outsider points of view, and the restoration of community, is variously mobilized against a context of post–9/11, Canadian insecurities about viable masculine identities. Thus, the short story cycles I examine in Bearers of Risk participate in a specific rhetorical field marking White heteronormative men both as at-risk and as civil bearers of risk.

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S e ct i o n O n e Experimenting with Form

Each of the three short story cycles examined in this section ­challenge basic genre conventions. In Forrest Ingram’s 1971 study, Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century, he identifies the central feature of the genre as its “double tendency of asserting the individuality of its components on the one hand and of highlighting, on the other, the bonds of unity which make the many into a single whole” (19). Following Ingram, scholars like Susan Garland Mann (1989), Robert Luscher (1989), and Gerald Lynch (2001) have focused on how such formal elements as ­character and setting succeed in establishing “the bond of unity” in a cycle and, indeed, character and setting are the unifying ­features of the cycles examined in sections 2 and 3, respectively. The texts I look at in this section not only disregard the conventional function of recurring characters or setting in a cycle, but also, arguably, fail one of Ingram’s key tests for a short story cycle, which is the “balance between the individuality of each of the stories and the necessities of the larger unit” (1971, 15, emphasis added). John Gould’s kilter: 55 fictions, a series of microfictions, gives the impression of disorder and fragmentation, flaunting the lack of ­unifying coherence of character or setting among the fifty-five ­stories; further, the superabundance of microfictions within the “larger unit” weakens the sense of each story’s “individuality” or completeness. Paul Glennon’s The Dodecahedron, a frame for frames makes use of intricate structural constraints on the intratextual ­connections among the twelve stories; thus the “necessities of the larger unit” undermine attempts to read each short story in the cycle independently. Likewise, in Stephen Marche’s Shining at the

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Bottom of the Sea, the elaborate frame of an anthology of short ­stories from an invented country makes it almost impossible to read the collected short stories on their own terms. My examination of these formally experimental cycles, however, is not meant to test whether each of these works ultimately live up to genre conventions, or even whether their failure to do so might serve to nudge genre definitions into new areas. Rather, I am interested in the relationship between formal experimentation, perceived as bold and risky, and another persistent scholarly argument, which is that short stories and short story cycles have the potential to elevate marginalized voices. As surveyed in the introduction to Bearers of Risk, various critics of the Canadian short story have asserted, in terms similar to Laurie Kruk in her recent study Double-Voicing the Canadian Short Story, that short stories succeed in “critiquing, questioning, or ironizing centripetal discourses of all kinds. By creating as focalizers a host of marginalized characters … the authors ‘talk back’ to a variety of authorized speakers, offering alternative visions through their double voices” (2016, 164). Likewise, Maria Löschnigg argues in The Contemporary Canadian Short Story in English, that the short story cycle “lends itself ­particularly well to creating polyphony and to establishing different centres of orientation” (2014, 256). And indeed, the matters of voice, “alternative visions,” and “different centres of orientation” appear fundamental to the experimental projects of Gould, Glennon, and Marche. The piling up of microfictions in kilter: 55 fictions gives voice to dozens of protagonists; the complex ­intratextuality in The Dodecahedron shows the contradictions and refractions among different versions of the same story; the “anthologized” short stories in Shining at the Bottom of the Sea play with postcolonial concepts of margin and centre. What I will argue in this section, however, is that for all their experimentation with form and seeming concern with the idea of “critiquing … centripetal discourses of all kinds,” the marginalized “voice” emerging from kilter: 55 fictions, The Dodecahedron, and Shining at the Bottom of the Sea is the voice of the White Western man, whose sense of self has become conspicuously unsettled in the post–9/11 decade. Throughout the three chapters, I consider this unsettled subject in relation to recent scholarship on globalization and the concept of “deterritorialization” (Tomlinson 1999, 29), as well as on the institutionalization of postcolonial theory; to

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scholarship on masculinity and perceptions of crises of “structural dislocation,” “role set ambiguity,” and “representation indictment” (Atkinson 2011, 12–14); as concerned with legitimizing a patriarchal “reproductive arena” (Connell 2005, 71); and as connected to Johannes Voelz’s arguments about cultural responses to post–9/11 insecurity, especially responses that foreground fantasies of a return to mastery and order. I will point out that, while these texts are marked by (and were lauded for) formal riskiness, they also ­thematize a response to insecurity via a number of repeating figures who become the knowing, civil bearers of risk: failing and redeemed father figures, adventurers, collectors, scholars, and colonizers all bent on restoring to the White Western man the status of an unmarked champion of security, order, objectivity, and settlement.

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2 FAILING AND FALLING MEN John Gould’s kilter: 55 fictions, the Microfiction, and False Heterogeneities

In their respective examinations of the significance of the short story collection’s shape, Robert M. Luscher and Gerald Lynch point out the tension between looseness and structure characterizing the genre. Luscher, who focuses on American short fiction, prefers the label short story sequence to identify the pre-eminent variety of the genre, as his focus is on the way interpretation is cumulative and how “unity derives from a perception of both successive ordering and recurrent patterns” (1989, 149). Lynch, who prefers the term short story cycle, is also keen to distinguish a particular type of collection in spatial terms, arguing that in order to subvert a totalizing vision that might be accumulated via sequence, cycles will “return to their origins, or their elusive centres, without ever quite closing the circle,” resulting in a spiral that is unified, paradoxically, because it remains “discontinuous” (2001, 32). Differences and preferences aside, both Luscher and Lynch use spatial terms to describe the important identifying feature of unity for the type of short story collection acknowledged to be more than a miscellany. Further, Luscher and Lynch list similar sorts of literary elements that might unify a collection: Luscher lists “setting, theme, motifs, characters, and narrators … which the reader should clearly perceive as developing in a sequential fashion” (1989, 164), while Lynch argues that the only “major” characteristics that can unify short story cycles are place and character (2001, 20). What is interesting to note here is that, while both Luscher and Lynch employ spatial metaphors to describe the idea that certain short story collections are unified, neither theorist is willing to allow that formal consistency among the parts might provide the whole collection with

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shape. For John Gould, however, the material feature of each story’s marked shortness ultimately provides a sense of unifying shape to kilter: 55 fictions, comprised of stories no more than three pages in length. In Gould’s cycle, shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the shortness of stories signifies not as an arbitrary stylistic choice, but as a necessary matrix for his overarching thematic exploration of  a community set adrift by the exigencies of the metaphysically unhinged moment. I begin by considering kilter: 55 fictions as a cycle of microfictions, whereby the repetition of the formal feature of “shortness” performs the work of unifying the heterogeneous stories.1 The apparent heterogeneity of setting and characters in Gould’s cycle, however, is not sustained, as the text chiefly elevates the perspective of the Western, middle-class man, whose new colonizing goal includes the civil consumption of and mastery of “exotic” knowledge systems. I argue that this new goal animates Gould’s version of a Settler figure, freshly anxious with his own sense of being unsettled, especially with respect to appropriate configurations of his masculinity. Thus the microfictions of kilter: 55 fictions operate as a kind of post-traumatic witness testimony, as Gould’s various narrators seek coherence in the piling up of knowledge fragments concerning loss. Gould’s middle-class men are represented as both emasculated and socially progressive, as both failing and interested fathers, and as both versions of the “falling men” of post–9/11 literary texts and civil bearers of risk in an insecure world, concerned only with the restoration of a steady, paternal masculine figure as bulwark against metaphysical chaos. The unifying force of form in kilter: 55 fictions is an important counterweight to the sense that the cycle is made up of disparate narratives having little in common with one another. Indeed, unlike the emblematic Canadian short story cycles Lynch surveys in The One and the Many – from Duncan Campbell Scott’s The Village of Viger (1896) to Alice Munro’s Who Do You Think You Are? (1977) – Gould’s work does not appear to provide a series of sketches of a single community or a series of glimpses at a character’s development (which, as Lynch argues, would usually be explored in relation to the context of a single community [2001, 21]). Most of the microfictions that comprise kilter: 55 fictions do not specify their temporal or geographical setting, and each story has its own cast of characters, sometimes named, sometimes not. However, the “community” represented in kilter: 55 fictions is perhaps less heterogeneous than it first appears.

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In terms of geographical setting, some stories are explicitly linked to Canada, often urban parts of Canada: both characters in “Feelers” are from “Toronto” (2003, 16); the characters in “Conversion” hail from Montreal (40); the urban couple in “In Translation” discuss a book about “French-Canadian art” (54). More importantly, though, even in stories that do not specify a geographical setting, a generalized setting of “The West” is implicit. In the story, “Female Drunken Immortal Fist,” the narrator considers how to soothe her baby, after having been given information by her local psychic advisor that, in his most recent past life, her son was a ship breaker in India (21). As the narrator notes, “The whole world sends its old wrecks there to be beached and busted up by hand,” and workers die from conditions unimaginable to those “we” experience (21, emphasis added). In “Biafra,” a woman’s self-destructive behaviour is influenced by the various, generalized stories she hears about the lives of children in non-Western parts of the world, from the “children starving to death in Biafra” (127) to “Nisha who lives in Nepal,” donations for whom will “make it less likely, we’re told, that Nisha will be sold into slavery” (129). Thus, despite the absence of a clear border around the community Gould examines, the seeming heterogeneity of voice that runs through kilter: 55 fictions is an illusion, as the metaphysical and social concerns explored in the cycle are considered only insofar as they relate to the perspective of a Western community. Further, it is not only the case that members of a Western (mostly Canadian) community appear as the central subjects of Gould’s stories; even in its periodic representation of Canada as an ethnically diverse space, kilter: 55 fictions affirms the popular national narrative of multicultural accommodation, or – as Janine Brodie puts it – the sort of “[story] that only the dominant group can tell” (2012, 93). While characters in various stories easily negotiate such “­multiethnic” experiences as practicing Hindu meditation (Gould 2003, 4) or eating Chinese takeout food (67) or burning Tibetan incense (135), they appear to do so from what can be gleaned as an unmarked, White, middle-class perspective. In a few stories, this perspective is identified, more or less explicitly: in “Civilized,” for example, the narrator describes her visits to the house where her former husband now lives with his new family, acknowledging that, on one occasion “I got your cleaning lady … Philippine, is she?” (107). The narrator goes on to suggest that it is a marker of being “civilized” that women of a certain class will “borrow one another’s

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cleaning ladies” (107), a remark indicating some level of awareness about unequal labour conditions. By the end of the story, however, the idea of “being civilized” is tied most fully to the emotional toll of divorce and remarriage, while the critique of Western culture’s dependence on cheap Eastern labour is abandoned. Even more explicit in terms of a marked perspective is the story “Do the Math,” describing the narrator’s response to images of mass slaughter in Rwanda, shown during a dinner party as a slide show. The narrator – another divorcé – acknowledges that as “a middle-aged, middle-class white man … [he has] never suffered anything more violent than a scuffle in a ticket queue” (175), and thus can hardly be expected to successfully “imagine the amount of brutality required to murder, by machete, eight hundred thousand people” (175). His response to the slide show is, in the first place, analytical, as he considers what sort of mathematical equation might help him quantify the proper “amount of brutality” (176) and, in the second place, vexed, as he admits to being “pretty goddamn angry right this minute … [about] having all this horrendous imagery thrust at me” (176–7). As in “Civilized,” the narrator’s struggle with private sentiments is set in an ironic contrast with the concerns of those whose lives are filled with, at best, economic uncertainty and, at worst, horror. Further, as is shown explicitly in two stories  – “Stump” and “Near-Death Experience” – the examination in kilter: 55 fictions of the complexity of the Settler identity is minimal and unsustained. In “Stump,” a father shopping with his daughter is flummoxed when a homeless man refers to him as “chief,” mentally refusing to answer any question his child might have about the historical reverberations of that designation (12). In “Near-Death Experience,” family members of an ailing woman play a tape-recorded prayer for her, which the son-in-law explains is “Cree, or maybe Chippewa, I forget. Anyway, it’s supposed to be very healing” (50). Though the woman’s daughter gently mocks her husband for thinking that someone of Scottish Presbyterian faith would understand a word of “Cree” or “Chippewa” (51), the histories of these two languages remains unexamined, as open for Western consumption as practicing Hindu meditation or eating Chinese takeout food or burning Tibetan incense. Throughout kilter: 55 fictions, any superficial authorial depiction of Western narcissism gives way to a thematic focus on various examples of emotional and spiritual crisis, represented in the text as the sort experienced by a middle-class, straight, Western, White populace.

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Gould’s focus on exploring the personal toll of Western emotional and spiritual crisis is tied to the temporal setting of kilter: 55 fictions. As with the geographical setting and set of characters portrayed, the temporal setting of these microfictions proves to be uniform, emphasizing late twentieth-century and post–9/11 Western angst. The temporal location is marked in several ways: in the first story, “Two Things Together,” the twenty-four-hour international news cycle has become television wallpaper (5); there are references in various stories to events such as 9/11 (“Conversion,” 39), a Columbine-type school shooting (“New Messages,” 112), and the Rwandan genocide (“Do the Math,” 175), as well as to a generalized post-Cold War setting in which the missiles are “much more dangerous … now that the other guys don’t give a shit” (“Provisions,” 144). In The One and the Many, Lynch argues that short story cycles such as Scott’s The Village of Viger and other turn-of-the-twentieth-century cycles respond to the “onslaught of metropolitan modernity” (2001, 23), or the way that “all traditional systems were coming under a destabilizing scrutiny” (23). The tension between fragmentation and unity in the short story cycle thus offers a way of thinking through modern conditions of alienation: what Anthony Giddens refers to in The Consequences of Modernity as “disembedding,” or “the ‘lifting out’ of social relations from local contexts of interaction” (1990, 21).2 In kilter: 55 fictions, the world Gould is interested in exploring is a “cosmos [set] off kilter” (2003, 8), in which the Western sense of self has been destabilized. In Globalization and Culture, John Tomlinson builds on Giddens’ discussion of modernity and alienation to explore the cultural effects of globalization. Tomlinson uses the term “deterritorialization” to describe a paradox whereby increased opportunities for travel, complex connections among people across space, and the ubiquity of transnational cultural exchange “weakens the ties of culture to place” (1999, 29). The proliferation of “non-places” in a globalized world – places such as shopping malls, hotel rooms, airports and airplanes, hospitals, banks, highways, and so on – contributes to what Tomlinson calls the “‘lived experience’ of global modernity” (113), characterized by an “ambivalence” (107), as the lack of opportunity for genuine local experience in day-to-day existence becomes normal or “mundane” (108). Later in his study, Tomlinson uses the term “reterritorialization” to mean “the drive … to re-establish a cultural ‘home’” (148) and to find ways of reasserting cultural specificity in a local space. In Tomlinson’s view, the impetus of reterritorialization will ideally

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transform localities into “glocalities” (199) or cosmopolitan spaces (200), though he acknowledges that cosmopolitanism is often defined by consumer-oriented activities “restricted” to those in the West affluent enough to experience what Ulf Hannerz calls “home plus” (Hannerz, quoted in Tomlinson, 201). In kilter: 55 fictions, the consumption of “multiethnic” experiences  – practicing Hindu meditation, eating Chinese takeout food, burning Tibetan incense, or playing a Cree (or Chippewa) recorded prayer – can be read as a Western form of creating glocalities through reterritorialization, or colonizing activity. Though only “Conversion,” discussed in the introduction to Bearers of Risk, directly refers to the events of 9/11, the thematic emphasis in kilter: 55 fictions on doubt and anxiousness coheres with the metaphysical concerns of much post–9/11 literature. As Richard Gray notes in his reflection on post–9/11 literature – “Open Doors, Closed Minds: American Prose Writing at a Time of Crisis” – the rendering of those events by even American writers tends to diverge from the type of response generally understood to proceed from trauma. The works he examines do posit a “yawning and possibly unbridgeable gap between before and after” (2009, 130), along with the acknowledgment that “everything has changed” (131). However, Gray argues that the trend in post–9/11 work differs from the terrible immediacy of witness literature, in that “it evades that trauma, it suppresses its urgency and disguises its difference by inserting it in a series of familiar tropes” (133), tropes that are ultimately concerned not with the political or the public, but with the personal. As Gray declares, “The crisis is, in every sense of the word, domesticated … all life here is personal; cataclysmic public events are measured purely and simply in terms of their impact on the emotional entanglements of their protagonists” (134). On the one hand, the form of kilter: 55 fictions appears to answer Gray’s criticism that a failure of the literary imagination has kept American writers from considering “a world that is liminal, a proliferating chain of borders, where familiar oppositions … are continually being challenged, dissolved, and reconfigured” (135). On the other hand, kilter: 55 fictions corresponds with Gray’s assessment of American post–9/11 literature in its focus on “emotional entanglements” and on the domestication of approaches to crisis. Susan Garland Mann argues that a core focus of the short story cycle is “the sense of isolation or fragmentation or indeterminacy” (1989, 11), and it is in this respect that Gould most explicitly explores “a world that is liminal.” The hyperbolic shortness of the microfictions

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gives rise to a continued sense that much in each narrative is left under erasure or ellipses, and many stories in the cycle highlight moments of miscommunication and emotional uncertainty. For example, in “In Translation,” a married couple’s relatively banal conversation about a book of feminist art criticism is “translated,” thus presenting each person’s thoughts (about sex, gender politics, and fear, but also about banalities, such as morning meetings). A later story, entitled “The Invention of Language,” picks up on the idea of a disconnect between what is said and what is meant, as a couple with a new baby discuss, in self-consciously complex theoretical terms, the so-called “tyranny of words” and the way language is gendered (2003, 119), leaving the man to feel a “sense of violation, helplessness – precise, yet inexpressible” (120). In addition to these thematic examinations of a breakdown in communication are stories that end with an explicit acknowledg­ ement that words have been left unsaid, as Gould makes advantageous use of the formal constraints of the microfiction. The story “Orange,” in which a young man sits in a bar, drinking and eavesdropping on a conversation two men are having about sex, ends when he calls a woman and tries (and fails) to tell her something important; the final line in the story is “Hang on … that’s not it” (151). The story that follows “Orange,” entitled “Magic,” focuses on a man who is coping with bouts of impotence; he dreams he has had sex with his wife and awakens to find that this is true. At the end of the story, though, as he begins to try to explain something to his wife, his thoughts remain unspoken and the final line in the story is “he still can’t say” (155). As per Gray’s argument, these various thematic examinations, sometimes playful and sometimes poignant, consider the gulf produced by the “unsayable” (2009, 132), and tend not to focus on geopolitical hostilities, but rather on the personal. As is clear from the examples noted above, the personal is most often portrayed in relation to issues of heteronormative desire, gender dynamics, and masculine anxiety. The issue of masculine anxiety emerges as the key theme in Gould’s cycle, and the accrual of so many stories exploring a variation of this theme corroborates a sense of trauma being answered. It is the experimental form of kilter: 55 fictions that is crucial here, as the piling up of microfictions evokes the form of post-traumatic narrative testimony, made up of fragments that accumulate and must be made sense of. Though it may be a stretch to identify the fall of the Twin Towers as the site of trauma, to be both excavated and reassembled in kilter: 55 fictions, the cycle does include two stories – “High” and “The Point

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of Dreaming” – that gesture towards the image and idea of “The Falling Man.” The designation “The Falling Man” refers, first, to the photograph of a man falling from the World Trade Center on the day of the attacks, which was taken by Richard Drew and published in many newspapers on September 12, 2001. In the years following 9/11, the image’s iconic status was confirmed via its symbolic centrality to such meditations on the events as Henry Singer’s 2006 documentary 9/11: The Falling Man and Don DeLillo’s 2007 novel Falling Man, as well as via the ubiquity of allegories of “falling” in American post–9/11 novels. As Elizabeth S. Anker notes, these novels are “persistently haunted by the ‘falling men’ of the World Trade Center suicides,” whereby falling is a metaphor for “male mid-life crisis,” “American ineptitude,” and/or “the disavowed truth of late imperial impotence and failure” (2011, 464). Thus, the falling man, though explicitly evocative of 9/11 as a turning point, is an emblem for a crisis of masculinity and the anxiety produced by that crisis. Unlike the characters experiencing mid-life crisis Anker references, the characters in Gould’s “High” are university students. In  the story, the narrator shares a joint with his roommate Adam and they discuss the fall of “the Adam” (2003, 81) after he ate fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. Adam proposes to the narrator that the vital issue at stake in the Biblical story is whether Adam fell or whether he jumped; relatedly, for the narrator, the issue at hand is the apparent suicide of a graduate student that has recently occurred, which leads him to pose questions to his roommate: “If you found me pancaked on the front steps of the library, would you assume I’d fallen or I’d jumped? Am I the kind of guy who falls off the top of a tall building or the kind of guy who jumps off the top of a tall building?” (82). The narrator’s questions implicitly recall the controversy surrounding the publication of Drew’s photograph, as well as televised images of other “jumpers.” In his article “The Falling Man,” Tom Junod suggests that images of those jumping out of the World Trade Centre before the towers fell “resisted redemption,” as if no one could accept the taboo idea of “mass suicide” (2004, 214–15). In Anker’s view, the pervasiveness of the “figural suicide” (2011, 470) in post–9/11 novels paradoxically “herald[s] a desire to transcend 9/11’s trauma” (471), whereby the taboo figure is ultimately displaced in narratives suffused with “historical denial” (467), or an unwillingness to interrogate cause. In “High,” the narrator likewise engages in historical denial, when – in a prolepsis – he admits that questions about his roommate’s death,

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which will occur two years from the moment of their heavily mediated (and medicated) conversation about interpreting a fall, will be asked, “but at the time who knew?” (2003, 82). As the story makes clear, this question is an evasion: Adam, the narrator admits, is a guy who inspires the nickname “Madam” (81), a guy with whom no one else wants to get high (83), and a guy who the narrator blithely rebuffs when he’s got a girl coming over (83). In other words, Adam represents a failure of hegemonic masculinity, which leads both to his fall and to the narrator’s unwillingness to comprehend or come to terms with the suicide. The story “High” fantasizes about a state of perfect knowledge. Adam wonders what sort of knowledge the Biblical Adam gains from his fall, concluding that it was simply “The knowledge that he’d fallen” (82). The narrator bathetically confirms this idea when he admits that the “images and insights” that occur to him when he is high “would be lost to me when I came down” (83). Thus, the idea of having come down is presented as a crisis of knowing that one is not-knowing, a crisis of comprehending the loss of one’s unmarked sense of being high. This focus on knowing/not-knowing is explored in the other falling man story, “The Point of Dreaming,” featuring the type of protagonist Anker tracks. Here, “male mid-life crisis” (Anker 2011, 464) is embodied by a middle-aged man who lusts after his nineteenyear-old neighbour, becoming distracted while up on his roof to fix his skylight by her “sleek, oil-slathered physique,” and thus falling to his death (Gould 2003, 159). As Anker suggests, the representation of such men in post–9/11 narratives largely exposes an anxiety about “ineptitude, or the disavowed truth of late imperial impotence and failure” (2011, 464). Like the “self-sabotaging” protagonists in novels like Jess Walter’s The Zero (2006) and DeLillo’s Falling Man, the narrator of Gould’s “The Point of Dreaming” acknowledges how falling from a height (metaphorically and literally) constitutes a failure in the performance of masculinity. For example, he frets less about the probability that his wife will confuse his accident for a suicide and more about having missed the opportunity to write a witty suicide note, one with a noteworthy “intellectual quotient” (2003, 158). Further, the narrator of “The Point of Dreaming” does not lament his stupidity (or clumsiness, or sin) so much as he regrets not being able to share with his wife the knowledge he has obtained as the result of his fall. This knowledge is represented as another version of the traumatic unsayable (“And now I can’t tell her” [159]), and yet in “The Point of Dreaming,” the nostalgic fantasy confirmed is that of a return to a

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mastery of knowledge, even – or perhaps especially – for the fallen man. Again, a key theme that emerges in this short story cycle is that men have become newly cognizant of their fallen status, and perceive their fallenness not as a result of but as a source for a historical moment of insecurity. Thus, the fantasy about the fallen man’s return to mastery operates in kilter: 55 fictions as a mechanism for coping with anxiety about masculine social roles via recuperative masculinity politics. In her assessment of American post–9/11 representations of father figures, Anker remarks that anxiety about America’s “fiscal, military, and geopolitical dominance … is displaced into a perceived menace to paternity (equating fatherhood with patria or homeland)” (2011, 464). Also relevant is Michael Atkinson’s argument that the perception of paternal/patriarchal irrelevance operates as “structural dislocation” and “role set ambiguity” for men in “crisis”: Almost uniformly, men who believe that masculinities are under attack within Canadian social institutions also argue that antimale cultural ideologies and political practices of equality have unfairly dislocated them from structural positions of power and authority … [further, men] are still expected to engage in the roles of husband or partner, father or caregiver, employee, and others, but with differently gendered performance expectations in mind. Given the diffuse social expectations for these men to behave in newly (and differently) masculine manners, they express frustration and confusion about how they should act normatively. (2011, 12–13) In kilter: 55 fictions, anxiety associated with “role set ambiguity” is apparent not only in the many stories that highlight romantic, marital, or homosocial relationships, but perhaps most significantly in stories about parents and children, mostly fathers and their children, who fail to communicate and, therefore, fail to confirm the relevance of a patriarchal reproductive arena. The first story in the cycle, “Two Things Together,” features a single father who laments his inability to comprehend his teenaged son’s interest in Hindu meditation, while “Stump,” the third story, describes a father’s unwillingness to face any questions his young daughter might have about the armless, homeless man they encounter while out on a shopping trip. A later story in the cycle, “The End of the Day,” presents

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a father who, after stepping away from his daughter’s bath time to answer a work-related phone call, returns to the bathroom to find his daughter now fully grown. These portrayals of the familial – i.e., portrayals that explicitly highlight moments of paternal crisis – are especially significant in terms of how Gould explores both the anxious fallen man and the fantasy of an obligation to return to mastery. Importantly, each father’s failure to communicate is figured as a crisis of paternal confidence. In “Two Things Together,” the narrator initially attempts to understand his son’s explanation of the Anahata Sabda, the divine sound that indicates transcendence, but fails: “I couldn’t think of anything else to ask him, so I asked him if he wanted a sandwich” (2003, 5). Even this attempt at fathering, however, is rejected, and the narrator is left feeling adrift in his own home, staring at the television. In “Stump,” the crisis of confidence is represented not by the failure to ask questions, but the failure to allow questions, as the narrator becomes increasingly aware of his inability to explain the existence of an abject figure to his daughter. This awareness manifests as authoritative retreat, as the narrator concludes the shopping expedition with the command, “Now home,” prompting his daughter to ask, “What did I do?” (13). The story “The End of the Day” reflects on the crisis of parental confidence that occurs later, after a child is grown and the myriad failures to communicate have resulted in an abyss. Though the narrator tries to express regret to his grown daughter for the “many things I could have done better,” his apology is both vague and hollow sounding (168–9). Further, as is clear from his daughter’s own childhood interpretation of narratives, characters don’t necessarily mean it when they say they are sorry; her response to her father’s recitation of a scene in The Wizard of Oz, in which Dorothy claims to be “very sorry, indeed” about causing the Witch to melt away, is to state flatly: “She isn’t really” (167). Thus, the threat to the familial that Gould represents is primarily the threat of paternal/ patriarchal irrelevance. Gould’s narrowing focus on anxious would-be patriarchs is also visible in various stories about impotence, emasculation, or reproductive unimportance. The stories “Vessel” and “Magic” confront the fear of emasculation within the reproductive arena and role set ambiguity, describing aging men who are no longer able to get an erection, both of whom are cared for by women who are “very understanding” (“Magic” 153). Various other stories present men who are more or less “frustrat[ed] and confus[ed] about how they should act normatively”

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(Atkinson 2011, 13): for example, Arthur in “The Invention of Language,” who is left with a “sickening, inarticulate rage” at the idea of being associated with the language of the patriarchy (2003, 120), or Danny in “Dark Beast,” who is unable to control his tears at the news his wife has had an affair, not only because he is upset but because he suffers from a “condition known as epiphora, or excessive tearing” (36). The point Gould seems to be making is that in a world of heightened awareness of women’s anger and/or desire, acceptable expressions of masculinity are at a kind of impasse, whereby a man like Arthur, who participates fully in the feminist critique of language, cannot find an appropriately readable articulation for his sense of “shame” (120), and a man like Danny, who is physically incapable of having a stereotypically masculine, stoic response to emotional pain, is not taken seriously because his “feminine” tears influence how his body is read. Thus, kilter: 55 fictions’ multiple iterations of masculinity in crisis prop up the implicit claims for a recuperative masculinity politics that will restore patriarchal standards, whereby the man who becomes aware of how his fallen status has contributed to metaphysical chaos consequently grasps his obligation to take up the mantle of the civil bearer of risk. As corollaries to the various representations of failed fathers and lovers, two stories in kilter: 55 fictions directly take up the issue of the responsibilities and obligations of men in relation to women’s reproductive choices. At one end of the spectrum, in the story “Feelers,” is Harlan, newly divorced, who meets Miriam at a resort where he has gone to recover. Unbeknownst to Harlan, Miriam’s interest in the relationship is purely biological; as she explains in her break-up letter to him, “I’m afraid that pill I popped every morning wasn’t the pill, as I let you assume … I wanted your height, and your intellect – a flair for the humanities to balance out my science … I swear to God I won’t come after you for child support. Please just forgive me if you can, and then forget us” (17–18). Miriam’s missive presumes that Harlan will have no interest in being a parent to his biological child and makes clear that she will not expect money, as if that were self-evidently Harlan’s most pressing concern. Similarly, in the story “Sunday Morning,” Paul, who has recently reconciled with the story’s narrator, raises the issue of a long-ago abortion the narrator had, and she is indignant. Because the story is focalized by the woman, and because, before the mention of abortion, the narrator is focused on a newspaper article about girls who are “recruited by pimps and drug pushers”

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(115), Paul’s own ground is made to seem unsettled – or to use Atkinson’s term, “dislocated” (2011, 13) – emphasized in the description of him “stagger[ing] out of the room” (Gould 2003, 117). Again, what Gould’s cycle presents is not community or the heterogeneity of voice, but rather a cumulative representation of the crisis of irrelevance within the patriarchal reproductive arena for the fallen Western man, which leads to retreat, and then to the consequences of retreat, which is the persistence of insecurity. Thus, perhaps the most significant fantasy of mastery offered in kilter: 55 fictions – one that exceeds even consumption of knowledge systems or middle-aged lust for youthful bodies – is the fantasy explored in “Brood.” The story is written as a series of mock-­pornographic scenarios, as the narrator successively imagines being approached for sex by his neighbour’s wife, his “secretary – whoops, executive assistant” (98), his therapist, and the lesbian who works as a cleaner in his office. What is distinctive about the narrator’s fantasy is that the women all desire to be impregnated; as his therapist points out to him, whereas “Up until now perversity has meant unreproductive sex, barren sex … nowadays … what could be kinkier, what could be crueler than to reproduce” (98–9). While the therapist links the desire to become pregnant to kink and even sadism, analysis of the story suggests that the fantasy to impregnate emerges as a response to a culture in which men are increasingly subject to structural dislocation and role set ambiguity, especially as related to patrilineal legacy. The story exemplifies Raewyn Connell’s argument that reproduction is not merely biological, but an “arena” of “social practices” (2005, 71), and that control over this arena is a feature of gendered power relations. Importantly, “Brood” also confirms Gould’s near total erasure of queer bodies within a short story cycle that gives the superficial impression of polyphony, but which is ultimately concerned with championing the concerns of anxious, heteronormative men. The mock-pornographic scenarios presented in “Brood” are only partially concerned with sexual desire or even sex, confirming that the heteronormative, patriarchal reproductive arena is affirmed through complex social practice. When the narrator’s neighbour’s wife approaches him, her pitch is that she doesn’t want her husband finding out that he is impotent, because “It’s so important to him to be, you know, a real man” (2003, 98); thus, the pregnant woman’s body verifies (falsely in this case) the masculine identity of her husband. In the narrator’s fantasy about his “secretary – whoops, executive assistant,”

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outrage at politically correct, feminist challenges to language use is countered with the daydream of her whisper, “He’ll bear your name” (98), while his fantasy about impregnating the femme half of a lesbian couple also includes his crucial contributions to their naming process (99). In this fantasy of breeding and naming, Gould presents the symbolic desire for the fallen man to reclaim and colonize the reproductive arena, which has shifted and become unreadable. The lesbian couple in “Brood” are just the second set of queer characters in kilter: 55 fictions and, of course, they only exist within the fantasy of a heteronormative man seeking to reaffirm his relevance. The only other queer character in the short story cycle appears – or rather doesn’t appear – in “Leather,” a story about a woman meditating on the death of her gay brother, who has been killed, perhaps murdered, by gunshot (8).3 While on the surface it appears that “Leather” and “Brood” highlight queer identities, queer bodies are erased, mediated, respectively, via memory or via a heteronormative man’s fantasy about impregnation, naming, and being perceived by the lesbian couple as “the right man for the job” (99). While Atkinson briefly suggests that responses to structural dislocation and role set ambiguity run the gamut of “anomie” to “nihilism” (2011, 15), the response Gould presents most explicitly in “Brood” is, arguably, a more subtle or civil response. In exploring the fantasy of women who wish to find “the right man,” to become impregnated, and to have their babies named, the force of colonizing activity within the reproductive arena is articulated, not as a result of masculine violence, but of feminine desire. Heteronormative recuperative masculinity politics is pitched – not as angry or retrograde – but as a “job”; as a civil and dutiful response to a plea by women to be mastered and have patrilineal order restored. My analysis of John Gould’s 2003 short story cycle shows how his experimentation with the microfiction serves to mask the homogeneity of perspective that runs throughout the fifty-five short stories. Thus, even while the cycle considers an increasingly globalized marketplace for Westerners to go about consuming goods and ideas, any anxiety about deterritorialization, or lack of local experience produced by that marketplace, is countered through reaffirming the activity of colonialist mastery over non-Western offerings. Further, the cycle’s thematic focus on the pursuit of mastery is related to concerns with how the post–9/11 falling and failing man has become subject to what Elizabeth Anker calls a “perceived menace to paternity” (2011, 464), and what Michael Atkinson calls “structural dislocation” and “role

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set ambiguity” (2011, 13). As I have argued, throughout Gould’s experimental text, the formal constraints of the microfiction correspond to representations of men whose response to anxieties about not-knowing or about legacy is to mark the impasse in acceptable expressions of masculinity, either through retreat and not-saying, or through a civil, shifty fantasy of colonization within the reproductive arena. Close analysis of this “risky” short story cycle illuminates what it means to take up the mantle of a civil bearer of risk, whereby a key idea in kilter: 55 fictions is that the masculine Settler figure is decidedly not a product of retrograde anger or conservatism. Rather, the civil bearer of risk responds empathetically, generously, and responsibly to his realization that the diminishment of patriarchal systems has produced metaphysical chaos. The desire for control – of self, of family, of knowledge – is represented as dutiful; as “standing on guard” for the good of the community; as becoming “the right man for the job.” In the next short story cycle I examine – Paul Glennon’s The Dodecahedron, or A Frame for Frames (2006) – the formal experimentation with the genre and with constraints is even more pronounced, while many of the themes advanced in kilter: 55 fictions are echoed, for example the focus on the desire for mastery and on securing a paternal legacy. In Glennon’s cycle, as I will explore, the civil bearer of risk is associated with masculine intellectualism, exceptionalism, and self-actualization.

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3 TALES OF DISCOVERY Formal Constraints and the Desire for Originality in Paul Glennon’s The Dodecahedron

Like kilter: 55 fictions, shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize in 2003, the shortlisting of Paul Glennon’s The Dodecahedron, or A Frame for Frames for the 2006 Governor General’s (g g ) Literary Award for English Fiction was a bit of a surprise. The book  – Glennon’s second – was put out by the small press Porcupine’s Quill and, as an article by Paul Gessell in the Ottawa Citizen notes, the selection committee for the award “tilted toward books written by low-profile authors and published by small presses” (2006, para. 6). Also notable were the number of short story collections shortlisted for the gg Award and the Giller Prize in 2006: along with Glennon’s short story cycle, Bill Gaston’s Gargoyles, published by the House of Anansi, was shortlisted for the gg Award, while the Giller Prize short list included Vincent Lam’s Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, published by Doubleday, and Carol Windley’s Home Schooling, ­published by Cormorant Books. As Glennon pointed out, his nomination resulted from the fortuitous collision of the tendency for smaller presses to gamble on more experimental literature and the willingness of shortlisting committees to consider short story collections as comparable to novels in their potential for scope and merit (Gessell 2006). That said, perhaps because of the book’s experimental nature and the relatively small market share of Porcupine’s Quill, Glennon’s cycle was reviewed in just four venues, with a review in the Toronto Star appearing only after the publication of the g g Award short list (by contrast, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, a more traditional short story cycle, published by a large, multinational press, was reviewed in nine major Canadian venues prior to its shortlisting, with several

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reviews in international venues appearing after Lam’s book won the Giller Prize). The consensus among reviewers of The Dodecahedron is that the book is remarkable chiefly because it is so ambitious and experimental, making use as it does of a complex geometric structuring principle and substantial intratextuality. Glennon explains in his afterword that the goal in The Dodecahedron was to work against the sequential and/or cyclic forms of the short story collection, or those that Robert Luscher and Gerald Lynch denote as characteristic. Instead, Glennon claims to use the geometry of the dodecahedron – a twelve-sided shape – to produce a unified hypertext, a “book in which any one of the stories could be taken as the starting point or the endpoint in the collection” (2005, 219). My reading of The Dodecahedron as an experimental short story cycle begins with an analysis of its reception, i.e., of the four reviews it garnered. Notable in these evaluations is the almost total focus on the book’s complex form, with very little commentary given over to the significance of its content. Such reviews, as I will argue, posit the cycle’s rigour and intelligence as appropriately masculine, though they do so without examining, for example, Glennon’s thematizing of father-son relationships and of marriage, his narratives about the discovery of land and ownership, or his consideration of how writing circulates. In my own discussion of the book’s form, I focus especially on how the paratexts of The Dodecahedron work to control the reader’s engagement with various parts of the text. Further, control in Glennon’s text is not simply a matter of form but of theme: as I argue, the structuring of the stories in The Dodecahedron, while read in reviews as intellectually playful, connects to the cycle’s focus on such colonizing and stereotypically masculine-coded activities as mapping, naming, and ordering. Thus Glennon’s several repeated representations of collecting and questing for authority reflect, first, the highly mediated nature of any apparent critique of global, imperialist activity and Indigenous displacement and, second, the major concern with the anxiousness of men who feel they have lost their place, and who will reclaim it via a performance of masculine exceptionalism. The very element that Glennon’s reviewers respond to – i.e., the text’s formal, intellectual rigour and sense of risk – is implicitly thematized in The Dodecahedron, as the displaced Western man works to manage insecurity and control the response to narrative so as to reaffirm his rightful role as a civil Settler.

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The focus for reviews of The Dodecahedron is similar, drawing attention to a quality of the short story cycle especially valued by John Metcalf in The Canadian Short Story, referred to by Metcalf as “the vital new” (2018, 205).1 All reviewers – Michael Greenstein, reviewing for Books in Canada; Stewart Cole, reviewing for Quill and Quire; Michael Redhill, reviewing for the Globe and Mail; and Philip Marchand, reviewing for the Toronto Star – emphasize the text’s formal innovations and constraints. While Greenstein chiefly makes note of the way The Dodecahedron uses “two major characteristics of postmodernism – self-referentiality and physical textuality” (2006, 5), Cole, Redhill, and Marchand all begin their reviews by describing the Oulipian constraints Glennon employs, which the author delineates in his afterword.2 Thus, the first issue for reviewers of The Dodecahedron is its discernable and complex form, referred to ­variously as the result of “vivid intelligence and … precision” (Cole 2005, para. 3), as “the product of a highly rigorous mind” (Redhill 2006, para.  9), as “appeal[ing] to the postmodern mind”  (Greenstein 2006, 5), and as “elaborately structured” (Marchand 2006, para. 13). The second move for reviewers is to consider whether the text is more than an exercise in intelligence (and it is significant that Marchand approaches this consideration in relation to Glennon’s employment “in the software business” [2006, para. 6], as if trying to parse among different kinds of intelligence is part of his reflection; Greenstein, too, makes note of Glennon’s “other” profession). Greenstein’s review is ultimately unflattering: he sums up by stating, “For those who ­prefer traditional content to postmodern experimentation, The Dodecahedron will not be to their taste” (2006, 5). Marchand is equivocal: though mindful of the cycle’s shortlisting for a gg Award and asserting that “the stories [Glennon] tells are important enough” (2006, para. 7), he concludes that “the more ­significant [various] repetitions and references become, the less realitybased the whole project feels” (para. 18). For both Cole and Redhill, the cycle succeeds because, for Cole, it “never ceases to be about people” (2005, para. 4) and, for Redhill, the “experience is at once intellectual and visceral” (2006, para. 16). Finally, reviewers attend, in a limited way, to the issue of the book’s content and themes, with Cole drawing attention to the treatment of “the diversity of our obsessions” (2005, para. 4), Greenstein providing a series of mini-plot summaries for several ­stories, Redhill highlighting the theme of “the …

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obsession with text itself, and its unreliability” (2006, para. 9), and Marchand identifying the book’s twin themes as “lying and the ­specialized form of lying known as fiction” (2006, para. 16). In surveying the four reviews of The Dodecahedron, I want to note, first, that the weight given to Glennon’s “intelligence” coheres with hegemonic masculinity, which – as Raewyn Connell notes – is “culturally linked to both authority and rationality, key themes in the legitimation of patriarchy” (2005, 90). Second, the emphasis on the construction of Glennon’s text – which is referred to by reviewers as “a collection or a novel of linked stories” (Cole 2005, para. 1), a “novel” made up of “stories [most of which] would stand easily on their own” (Redhill 2006, para. 14), a text made up of “interrelated sections” or “stories” (Greenstein 2006, 5), and a “book” (Marchand 2006, para. 1) – generates questions about generic status and the extent to which The Dodecahedron works as a cycle of short stories, or as something else. Third, the degree to which the reviewers, especially Cole, Redhill, and Marchand, contend with the text’s form results in reviews that are thin in terms of the discussion of content or theme, or what it is about the book that raises it to the level of, as Redhill puts it, “art” (2006, para. 9). Though there is mention of repetitions, obsessions, textuality, and unreliability, as well as Cole’s assertion that the text is “about people,” reviewers appear less inclined to comment on content, for example the repetition of father-son plots, the repeating references to the topics of undiscovered land and early transatlantic exploration and commerce, the reflection on issues of originality, rarity, and ownership, the representation of marriage and bigamy or – alternately – of homosocial realms of activity, or the consideration of how writing is produced and how it circulates. Though book reviews are necessarily limited in their scope for analysis, this initial response to The Dodecahedron sheds light on which textual elements are deemed or normalized as visible, perhaps especially for men writers (and reviewers) of experimental fiction, and which elements remain – to use Sally Robinson’s term – “unmarked” (2000, 3). My goal in this reading is to mark Glennon’s portrayals of various protagonist men, and to explore how the central, underlying anxiety about lacking an original voice is transformed into a fantasy about masculine intellectual exceptionalism. The issue of The Dodecahedron and genre is, of course, crucial to its inclusion in this project and, though reviewers are vague on this point, Glennon is not. The text alludes to various foundational

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collections of framed “tales,” including: Boccaccio’s The Decameron, if only insofar as The Dodecahedron also makes use of a mathematical structure; Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, referred to in the various instances when characters pass the time by telling each other stories; and The Thousand and One Nights, explicitly referenced in such stories as “The Plot to Hide America,” which features a book called 1001 American Nights, and “The American Shahrazad.” Further, Glennon specifically cites his interest in rethinking the traditional short  story cycle in his afterword: “When I began to write The Dodecahedron, or A Frame for Frames, I was thinking very much about the geometry of short story collections. Many modern short story collections have a larger structure that provides continuity and makes them read like novels. They are conceived as whole books and have a unity beyond a simple miscellany of tales … Frequently these collections have a cyclical geometry, where ideas introduced in early stories are resolved or recast in the final story” (2005, 219). Glennon then goes on to explain the dodecahedral “shape” of his own book, in which “any one of the stories could be taken as the starting point or the endpoint of the collection, in which each was capable of exerting that conclusive judgment usually the sole prerogative of the final chapter” (219). Glennon also notes “the order in which the stories unfold is somewhat arbitrary. Any one could have been the first story, but once that choice was made their sequence was governed by a predetermined [geometric] pattern” (220). As I will explain further below, I read The Dodecahedron as a short story cycle, especially because of its striking use of the convention of the return story to reaffirm a central theme, whereby a man imagines and rationalizes his way into the position of the civil Settler who stands on guard for order. In her introduction to a recent issue of Short Fiction in Theory and Practice focusing on the short story cycle, Elke D’hoker discusses various analytical strategies, including those emerging from the Italian and French-Canadian tradition, drawing attention, especially, to the difference between “formalist” (2013, 152) and “reader-­ oriented” (155) approaches. In her explanation of the work of René Audet, for example, D’hoker points out both Audet’s rejection of formalist attempts to discover a cycle’s inherent unity (156) and his argument that a cycle is “constituted by textual parts and links, which form a non-hierarchic network in which the sequence of reading and ­exploring … is left for the reader to decide” (Audet, quoted in D’hoker, 156). This description of the short story cycle as a type

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of “hypertext” (156) seems especially relevant for Glennon’s text, though I would argue that even in this “non-hierarchic network” the issue of readerly agency is constrained insofar as the main “transaction” spaces in the book – i.e., those parts of the book that direct the reader’s reading – are spaces that encourage a hyperbolic intratextuality (though this is perhaps also the case for something like a digital hypertext, in which the hyperlinks are equivalent to “transaction” spaces). As Gerard Genette explains in his study Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, a book’s various paratexts include all those elements, including book covers, epigraphs, prefaces, and what Genette refers to as “postfaces” or afterwords, that constitute a border of the book, a “zone between text and off-text” (1997, 2). Genette argues that paratexts are not neutral but operate “not only [as a zone] of transition but also of transaction” (2, emphasis in original), whereby the author and/or publisher and/or editor guide the reader’s approach to a text. The paratexts for The Dodecahedron are various and complex, from the multiple-part title given on the front cover (“The Dodecahedron, or A Frame for Frames: A Novel of Sorts”), to the sticker affixed to later copies of the text indicating its status as a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, to the contents list, in which the seventh title is “Kepler’s Orbit: Chapter I,” to the author’s afterword, in which Glennon explains the book’s structure and his own writerly constraints. Both the paratexts that precede Glennon’s text, especially the title and the contents list, and Glennon’s afterword encourage a reading of The Dodecahedron that pays attention to its complex structure. In the afterword, Glennon explains that each story in his text will make explicit intratextual reference to other “adjacent” stories, and that it is “these references to and from adjacent stories [that] provide the shifting perspectives of [the] book” (205, 220). On the one hand, there is much in the book that emboldens readers to consider, to whatever extent seems feasible, The Dodecahedron’s “textual parts and links” (Audet in D’hoker 2013, 156); on the other hand, the various paratexts suggest that readerly exploration, in particular the marking of intratextuality, is powerfully controlled, which has the effect of confirming rather than dismantling the sense of an overriding cyclic structure. I draw attention to the matter of readerly agency versus writerly control in The Dodecahedron not primarily because of its relevance to current discussions among critics of the short story cycle about genre characteristics, but more so because of how ideas of agency versus control are thematized in Glennon’s text and are connected

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to the text’s representation of masculine anxiety/exceptionalism, of ­globalization/colonization, and of risk/insecurity. Both in his afterword and in various self-referential textual moments, Glennon affirms a wish to challenge the type of control that “exert[s] a conclusive judgement” (2005, 219); for example, in “Some Clippings for My Article” – a story made up of articles from assorted magazines and journals – a narrator describes the limitations of a “writing” machine that is “unable to find an appropriate conclusion” to a text (174). That said, the hyperbolic intratextuality of The Dodecahedron seems less neatly connected with notions of agency if one pays attention, not simply to the frequency and structure of references and repetitions in the cycle, but to the subject matter that is repeated. Though the complex geometric structure of The Dodecahedron might encourage the type of reading in evidence in the book’s reviews – reading that is intellectual, playful, and hypertextual – the book is very much about how things are put in their place. While the marked shortness of the stories in kilter: 55 fictions reinforces that cycle’s exploration of Western culture’s sense of drift and fragmentation, the structuring of the stories in The Dodecahedron connects to the cycle’s examination of mapping, naming, collecting, anatomizing, and ordering. In this sense, though Glennon does not use 9/11 as an explicit term of reference, his cycle conceptually recalls Johannes Voelz’s argument that periods of insecurity accelerate the desire for an “uncertain future [that] can be rationally designed and controlled” (2018, 12). As much as the text  is a complex puzzle that both reflects and appeals to intelligence, it is also a rehearsal of fantasies about patriarchal control. Control is associated with colonizing and collection, with treating women as prizes, and with combating the mutual failures in relationships between fathers and sons – in particular, the failure of the Canadian “son” to achieve a sense of authority – thereby affirming masculine exceptionalism, or the idea that men are uniquely suited to or driven toward heroic or original self-actualization. In the final story of The Dodecahedron, entitled “Plagiarism,” disparate characters are gathered together in an airport lounge, all apparently stranded owing to various airline delays. Like Chaucer’s pilgrims, they are encouraged to tell stories to pass the time. The airport lounge is an example of what Marc Augé would call a “non-place,” a space in the globalized world that is devoid of connection to locality (Augé in Tomlinson 1999, 109). In another allusion to The Canterbury Tales, a few of the storytellers gathered are referred to as pilgrims (on their

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way to witness an eclipse); there is also a honeymooning couple, two engineers, a relief pilot, an author figure, and two missionaries who are, the narrator explains, “heading off to the interior” (Glennon 2005, 193) of an unnamed island. The collision, especially, of pilgrims and missionaries in this deterritorialized space recalls Paul Jay’s assertion in Global Matters: The Transnational Turn in Literary Studies that the process of globalization “is dated as beginning in at least the sixteenth century and covering a time span that includes the long histories of imperialism, colonization, decolonization, and postcolonialism” (2010, 3). Indeed, in this last story, the second pilgrim tells a brief tale that is intratextually related to several stories in The Dodecahedron, which is the story of the undiscovered, perfect city. The first story, “In My Father’s Library,” includes a description of a book called The Land beyond the Western Sea, which tells of a “land [that] is a great [church] secret,” and which includes maps of “big areas of white space … marked with bones” and “islands [that] seemed only to have cannibals, horrible man-eating tigers, or serpents covered with feathers” (Glennon 2005, 15–16). The second story, called “The Plot to Hide America,” picks up on the idea of a “secret” land, as a journalist explores a conspiracy theory that the Catholic Church kept the existence of America a secret for hundreds of years, “hoard[ing] it, us[ing] it to finance their wars and their intrigues” (35). In “The American Shahrazad,” the third story in the cycle, the narrator’s study of “early American-European trade patterns” (49) is augmented by his interest in a legend that, in the sixteenth century, a Cornish man became stranded on the North American continent, was taken captive, and told stories to the tribe to keep himself alive before finally returning to Cornwall, though not before influencing the tribe’s mythology and language. In “The Polygamist,” a later story, the narrator dupes his Canadian wife – one of several – with his tale that he is a spy investigating the “so-called pre-Cartier file [that] allegedly showed that [the French] had been [in Canada] two hundred years before the discovery of Canada by Cartier … [and that] the Algonkian and Montagnais tribes had signed treaties that made them French citizens” (140). Finally, in “The Last Story,” which is the penultimate story in The Dodecahedron, an as-yet unbottled genie laments that he likely remains free only because he is not a very good story, not like one of the great, wily narratives, such as “the story of the undiscovered or concealed country” (189–90).

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As both the second pilgrim of “Plagiarism” and the genie of “The Last Story” point out, the idea of “the undiscovered or concealed country” has the status of a grand adventure story, able to capture the imaginations of writers, boys, conspiracy theorists, and gullible wives. In “The Plot to Hide America,” Glennon explores the importance of modal differences in storytelling, especially in terms of the way mode is connected to notions of truth versus fiction. “The Plot to Hide America” begins with a summary of three different “news stories,” stories that the narrator – a journalist – discovers are all connected to the tale of the Vatican’s alleged use of America as a “private empire” (35): “In 1982, during the closing days of the Argentine Junta’s power, thirty-two labourers on a Rio de la Plata archaeological dig are ‘disappeared.’ In 1971 a popular Massachusetts parish priest, Father Martin Malone, leaves his parish for a California retreat; he is found six months later in a San Francisco flophouse, dead from a heroin overdose. In 1998 Jojo Villeneuve, a St Petersburg, Florida, trailer park resident, uses the advance on her first novel, 1001 American Nights, to purchase a monumental ­concrete-and-glass summer house overlooking Acapulco Bay” (31). As the scare quotes around the euphemism “disappeared” indicate, the narrator of “The Plot to Hide America” comprehends how language can be manipulated. In his follow-up discussion with Malone’s sister, he tries to square what he took to be the priest’s paranoid ravings about Vatican cover-ups with her report that her brother had tried to publish his findings, but that the press – called “Illuminatus Press” – had “[taken] liberties with Malone’s text, sensationalized it, added wild conjectures that he had never made, and removed long explanatory sections” (41). As another publisher explains to the narrator, Illuminatus Press is an outfit specifically designed to discredit “the anti-Americanists” by making their research sound too fantastical to be true. As it turns out, Jojo Villeneuve’s blockbuster novel – a captivity narrative about a shipwrecked girl, the plot of which echoes the legend of the captured Cornish man – is a drastic rewrite of her grandfather’s diary about “a tribe of Welsh-speaking Indians, who proved that the Welsh had discovered America” (46), which had been slated for publication with Illuminatus Press. Thus, an important theme that Glennon explores in The Dodecahedron is the way narratives of imperialist expansion and global commerce are associated with the modal category of romance, constructed to

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produce a sense of thrill and adventure among readers, and which make central the figure of the canny, self-reliant hero. At first read, the repeated emphasis in The Dodecahedron on how narratives of discovery serve the imperialist or colonialist perspective appears to be an indictment of that perspective. Several stories in the short story cycle, including the “Tenebrian Chronicles,” “The Collector,” and “Why Are There No Penguins?” discuss transatlantic trade (both historical and contemporary) and the search for the Northwest Passage, suggesting that Glennon wishes to confront the consequences of the way fanciful narratives of discovery and individual heroics have real economic and cultural bases and consequences. The “Tenebrian Chronicles,” a report on the writing produced by an eighth-century monastery located on a northern islet near Greenland makes note of early “Norse Trade Traffic” (65), while “Why Are There No Penguins?” – the journal of an increasingly delusional man, who is starving to death on a North Atlantic ice floe – recounts the persistent desire in the late nineteenth century to navigate the Northwest Passage and “discover” the North Pole (94–5). These references to historical transatlantic movement and trade serve as bookends to the story “The Collector,” whose narrator is a wealthy businessman associated with the offshore oil industry (81). The trio of stories rehearse the idea that global circumnavigation, exploration, and ­commerce are centuries-old practices, linking such practices with the aspiration to lay claim to the “undiscovered.” The narrator of “The Collector” asserts that when, as a child, he found his first message in a bottle on the beach of Fogo Island in northern Newfoundland – a message comprised of the ravings of a Finnish man stranded on an ice floe – he realized he would “have to be rich” in order to feed his new mania for messages in bottles (81). The desire to expand his collection, he explains, “instilled in me the ideal moral conditions to achieve what I wanted, the imperial mindset of all collectors, the belief that they deserve to have more” (81). Like the cosmopolitan consumers of global experiences and knowledge-systems depicted in kilter: 55 fictions, the adventurers and collectors in The Dodecahedron strive for global mastery and accumulation, and their activity is animated by a confidence in their own due. Glennon even includes a few references to the matter of how Indigenous populations are damaged by capitalist and colonialist practice, though these references are rarely straightforward. In “The American Shahrazad,” the narrator explains that, as described in

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George Newton’s captivity narrative, Newton attempted to convince the chief of the tribe who captured him that he should be released, on  the grounds that he might then continue sowing lies among the tribe’s enemies, especially those enemies from “the other side of the ocean” (57). Such enemies, Newton warns, “were horrible fiends driven by hatred and greed … If the foreigners ever crossed the uncrossable sea and came to the chief’s lands, they would surely destroy them” (57). This ironic description of “fiendish” foreign invaders encroaching on Indigenous land, however, works poorly as postcolonial critique because Glennon’s construction is so highly mediated. The narrator admits that much in Newton’s captivity narrative is purposefully outlandish (50), and this particular story is outright fabrication, told only as a means to secure Newton’s release from a tribe of what he believes are cannibals (58). As with the story of the undiscovered or concealed country, the mediated, clearly “fictional” story of an Indigenous tribe destroyed by foreign invaders is linked to other versions of the story, related in modes more aligned with the idea of truth telling. In the story “Kepler’s Orbit: Chapter I,” a narrative describing a political operative’s attempts to fool his interrogators, the operative spins a fabricated story about his “group,” who “[support] the creation of an autonomous indigenous state in the Chiapas region of Mexico and northern part of Guatemala” (114) and the reclamation of the area from the control of the Catholic Church. Though this narrative is, like Newton’s, a fabrication deployed as means to an end, the use of the mode of the political thriller in “Kepler’s Orbit: Chapter I” shifts the story into a more grounded exploration of the relationship between imperial forces and Indigenous resistance. Likewise, in “The Polygamist,” the narrator’s final (and failed) marriage proposal is made after he adopts the persona of a former mining engineer in Peru, now repulsed by the way “mining wrecked habitats and played havoc with traditional aboriginal ways of life” (146). Again, though the narrator admittedly adopts a false persona here – as he is no more a mining engineer than he is a spy – he builds his story out of facts after researching “articles about the gold mining industry in Peru” (147). In these instances, Glennon’s short story cycle portrays the inverse sides to the imperialist or colonialist narratives of discovery, which are narratives of environmental destruction and Indigenous displacement. However, Glennon’s indictment does not ultimately succeed as an interrogation of the Settler identity, as is most clearly indicated by the cycle’s thematic emphasis on the mediation of story and interplay of

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truth and fiction. As Victoria Kuttainen explains in Unsettling Stories: Settler Postcolonialism and the Short Story Composite, “The settler subject … becomes the paradigmatic split subject and the quintessential revisionist historian, who is constantly shifting his relation to himself, to the past, and to others, in order to inhabit the authentic with some authority” (2010, 7–8). What is especially notable in Glennon’s various linked stories is the relationship between teller and listener, whereby, with the exception of Jojo Villeneuve, author of the blockbuster romance novel, the tellers of tales of discovery and/or displacement are Western men, while the consumers of such tales are children (particularly boys), primitive “natives,” and women – including, presumably, the target readership of Villeneuve’s 1001 American Nights. Kuttainen argues that, in reading short story composites emerging from Settler nations, it is crucial to “pay attention to how settlers position themselves in relation to Indigeneity, marginality, and ethnicity in their shifting and sometimes shifty stories” (23, emphasis in original). For example, for the narrator of “The American Shahrazad,” the interest in George Newton is mostly a consequence of his grandfather’s claim that they are related to Newton and that he himself is a historian of “early American-European trade patterns” (2005, 49). The matter of the Nunca tribe, their history, their language, their culture, and their fate is always secondary to the matter of Newton’s adventures as a “captive” and, even more so, the matter of the narrator’s own desire to take ownership of the story. As the narrator explains, he sympathizes with the “desire to stand out, to be exceptional” (62, emphasis added), concluding that the veracity of Newton’s captivity narrative matters less than its function as “a story I can tell my children as if it might be true, and they can decide for themselves what they want to believe” (63). Similarly, the polygamist’s interest in the devastation wrought by the mining industry in Peru is almost nil, as he only adopts his activist persona in order to attract Sophie, commenting that it was “gratifying to know that I still had other selves to draw on and develop” (146). In other words, as he explains throughout his narrative, the polygamist consistently strives to explore himself, to find a kind of self-actualization that is paradoxically borne of constant role-playing. Thus, though the topic of Indigenous rights is raised in The Dodecahedron, the shifty narrators Glennon makes most striking use of are men struggling to occupy and control their own narrative of (self-)discovery. They are versions of

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the civil bearer of risk, who use their facility with storytelling to rationalize for themselves a sense of personal and social vanguard. As it happens, Sophie turns down the polygamist’s marriage proposal, ruining his bid for a fifth wife. The narrator of the story concludes that Sophie’s rejection of marriage is “not just a loss … [but] a defeat, a victory for someone else” (149). Glennon here gestures toward the anxiousness of men who have lost their sense of place, an idea emphasized when the polygamist notes “For the first time I feel that I was the plot point, someone else’s challenge” (149). The polygamist’s self-analysis here is relevant to the larger depiction of masculine anxiety throughout the cycle, as Glennon’s various narrators and protagonists struggle with their desire for originality and control, often figured as seeking control over a narrative. While Gould’s short story cycle responds to the perceived crisis in masculinity by addressing concepts like structural dislocation and role set ambiguity, the stories in The Dodecahedron focus on what Michael Atkinson refers to as “representation indictment,” or the idea that current popular representations of masculinity figure men as “loutish, primitively essential, victimizing to women, and culturally passé” (2011, 14). In Glennon’s short story cycle, such indictments are countered with examinations of masculine intellectualism, exceptionalism, and self-actualization. Thus, embedded in The Dodecahedron is a rich thematic exploration of precisely those qualities (intellectual rigour and originality) the four reviewers of the cycle draw attention to in their assessments, though the reviews did not broach the matters of masculine identity, struggle, anxiousness, invention, and radical self-fashioning. Glennon thematizes the masculine desire for originality via stories about machine literature, or literature that is produced by the deliberate or random rearranging of fixed variables. In the story “Tenebrian Chronicles,” the narrator compares the often visionary writings produced by members of the isolated monastery with the apocryphal history of St Murdo’s Abbey, members of which built “a mechanical device … [to] more perfectly describe God” (2005, 68); in “The Parlour Game,” the alternating narrations of a woman and a man reveal a strange courtship based on specific rules, whereby the two meet up at parties and adopt a series of character personas, with each trying to recognize the other despite various disguises; in “Some Clippings for My Article,” several versions of writing machines are described, from a computer that, after ten years of being fed data, has begun to

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“hallucinate” (172), to the fake writing machine used in a hoax involving Jonathan Swift (176), to an imagined difference machine created by Charles Babbage’s granddaughter Boedicia, which works to construct different kinds of stories by “using characters as the seed variables” (177). Also significant in terms of the cycle’s exploration of originality are the multiple references to forgery and plagiarism, from the thriving trade in false books described in “The Plot to Hide America” (31–2), to the forged messages in bottles that so frustrate the narrator in “The Collector,” to Kepler’s trick of feeding his interrogators a story “ripped … right out of a book” (119), to the central plot of “Plagiarism,” the final story, which hinges on an author’s practice of gathering groups of strangers together, inviting them to tell stories about themselves, and then using those stories in his work (215–16). While these explorations of machine literature, forgery, and plagiarism tend to self-reflexively indicate Glennon’s dedication to the Oulipian principle of writing within or against constraints, they  also connect to a more complex thematic exploration of ­originality and anxious representations of masculinity, whereby the ­representation of the desire to be original is a claim for the rightness of masculine exceptionalism. Finally, even more so than in its representations of machine literature or forgery, The Dodecahedron takes on the matter of the anxious desire to perform exceptional masculinity in its complex treatment of father-son relationships, the persistent representation of which makes a cyclical reading most relevant, notwithstanding Glennon’s claims. The first story, “In My Father’s Library,” recounts a tale of a young boy who, in attempting to discover why his father is missing and why investigators continue to visit his home, decides to read and eat the pages of five books that his father keeps in a special cabinet. Though the books are complex and often esoteric, the boy explains, “Someday they will make sense to me and I will understand what they meant to my father” (20). When, at the conclusion of the story, the boy and his mother are finally taken from the house and the library is ransacked, the boy thinks “I will understand it all one day and I will have my revenge” (29). As the genie notes in “The Last Story,” the story of “the son avenging a wronged father … [is] a good yarn, bound to rouse the blood” (190) and, indeed, the short story cycle provides several versions of this yarn. In “Why Are There No Penguins?” the man trapped on the ice floe pretends that his son is with him, though he knows he is at home and trusts that the boy will figure out how to

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chart the ice floe’s route and thereby initiate a rescue: “the boy will know which cabinet to check. The boy will know which charts, which journals conceal the crucial clues” (102). The story “Kepler’s Orbit: Chapter I” appears to directly parallel “In My Father’s Library,” though the story is inverted, told from the father’s perspective; though Kepler feels guilty about having mentioned his son to his interrogators, he learns from the captain that “[the boy] has destroyed the books” (126) and, at the conclusion of the story, vows to make up for his own betrayal of his son (127). In “The Collector,” Glennon depicts a complex mentor-protégé relationship, a variation of the father-son plot that is also an exploration of tales of cowardly or heroic men. Finally, most significantly in terms of the way The Dodecahedron operates as a short story cycle, the final story “Plagiarism” – the return story according to Gerald Lynch’s definition – includes a short narrative in which a grown man talks about trying (and failing) to live up to his father’s expectations. As the second engineer explains, as a child he would try to please his father, a celebrated poet and artist, by writing his own poems and then, as a teenager, by writing a “novel of some two hundred thousand words, a story full of kidnappings, mistaken identities, messages in code and elaborate revenge” (215). After receiving scant praise from his father, the man decides to pursue a scientific course of study. “The Second Engineer’s Tale” – the penultimate tale in “Plagiarism,” followed by “The Author’s Tale,” in which the ruse to gather the ­storytellers together is explained – invites a Freudian analysis, something that the author figure/narrator points out (215). Further, this tale provokes the kind of retrospective reading that Lynch argues is essential to return stories, stories that are often defined by their portrayal of nostalgia for a lost sense of home (Lynch 2001, 29). In The Dodecahedron, the type of nostalgia most apparent in the return story is for lost opportunities to act with greatness, especially greatness associated with the performance of masculine exceptionalism. Glennon’s exploration of the masculine desire, indeed, the masculine entitlement to be exceptional is crucial to the fourth pilgrim’s tale, also from “Plagiarism.” In this tale, which offers a retrospective variation on “The Polygamist,” the fourth pilgrim explains that he is a fraud. As a child, the man explains: “I had big dreams … I always thought I’d be something – a hockey star, or an actor or an inventor or something … It’s easy to think like that when you live in a small town in northern Ontario, when you’re the captain of all the school

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teams and the only one in your graduating class to go to university” (212). After flunking out of university in Montreal, however, the man returns to his hometown in northern Ontario, marries his high school girlfriend, who, like the Canadian wife in “The Polygamist,” is named Stephanie. The man continues to work at his high school summer job as a forest fire lookout, all the while telling Stephanie he works for the government and allowing her to believe that he is “a spy or something, and that when I went away I was on some secret mission” (213). He later ends his marriage with another lie, leaving a note in which he (falsely) admits to having three other wives (213). “The Second Engineer’s Tale” and “The Fourth Pilgrim’s Tale” return to The Dodecahedron’s several and varied versions of narratives concerning a man’s dream of greatness, of intellectual prowess, and of performing acts that are global in their reach. In other words, the stories articulate the combination of entitlement and worry that underpins the fantasy of appropriate performances of masculine control and inventiveness, especially in a post–9/11 world characterized by global geopolitical and cultural insecurity. Moreover, “The Fourth Pilgrim’s Tale” deals with a particularly Canadian anxiety about the potential for the Canadian man to make his mark, to imaginatively write over the act of merely observing the land with a narrative of standing on guard; of securing the nation through powerful and secret surveillance. This tale shows that, in lieu of actual settlement activity, the anxious man can participate in symbolic settlement activity in the form of working to control an exceptional narrative: crucially, his “confession” to his wife about being a polygamist allows the fourth pilgrim to play another masculine role, that of a “villain” (213). Instead of telling his wife the truth about his humble career, he once again forces her into the role of the gullible listener. Thus, his selfrecriminations of being “stupid” and “pathetic” (213) operate chiefly as a marker of the “paradigmatic split [Settler] subject” (Kuttainen 2010, 7), who consistently repositions himself so as to inhabit two roles at once, the colonizer and the marginalized. Ironically, in constructing a narrative of his own weakness, his own failure to be more than a “sad little man” (Glennon 2005, 213), “The Fourth Pilgrim” produces the conditions to justify his own narrative of discovery: the “first thing” the man does after coercing his wife to “[kick him] out” is to “book [a] trip to almost exactly the other side of the earth. I figured I should start doing things” (213). Importantly, the fourth pilgrim’s rhetorical pitch is reminiscent of the one used by the civil

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bearers of risk in Gould’s short story cycle, as this serial liar – like other serial liars in Glennon’s short story cycle – rationalizes his selfactualizing activity as simply a dutiful response to women’s desire. The phrase “doing things,” here, is a usefully vague description inhering with a general theme in The Dodecahedron: vindicating the performance of masculine exceptionalism, no matter the toll. Thus, the fundamental risk taken up by Glennon’s marginalized men is the risk of self-actualization: the risk of taking up a masculine destiny of adventurousness, originality, and mastery. As with my exploration of kilter: 55 fictions, my analysis of Glennon’s short story cycle attends to how his formal experimentation advances a response to a sense of anxiousness among men, this time an anxiousness primarily associated with the dearth of opportunities to stake out original territory. Thus, the structural complexity of the text, admired so much by reviewers that it overrides their attention to subject matter, is an echo of theme, as Glennon attempts to discover a new way to write a short story cycle (and, in making this attempt, he ironically displays his nostalgia for genre traditions of the very sort that would undermine originality). The experimental form of The Dodecahedron – together with a scholarly consensus that marks the entirety of this genre as inherently risky – both masks and affirms the text’s elevation of a strikingly narrow set of protagonists. Also, like Gould’s short story cycle, an important context for Glennon’s exploration of anxiety about “representational indictment” (Atkinson 2011, 14) is the perception that men have no settled place in an increasingly globalized world, as is most apparent in The Dodecahedron’s multiple fantasies about the undiscovered land and the ways in which men can imagine themselves into a new, heroic identity. Glennon’s version of a civil bearer of risk is the man who takes up what he comes to understand as an obligation to put things in order: to discover, name, collect, invent, convince, seduce, and even abandon, all in the name of proper masculine self-actualization. In the third chapter of this section of Bearers of Risk focused on formal experimentation, I explore Stephen Marche’s Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, a short story cycle that further advances the fantasy of the undiscovered land, tackling even more directly the histories of colonialism and postcolonialism, including the history of postcolonial scholarly criticism, so as to elevate the figure of the unmarked, objective, masculine observer.

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4 “THE PERFECT SHADE OF VISITOR” Stephen Marche’s Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, Literary Parody, and the Unmarked Anthologist

In The Dodecahedron, Paul Glennon returns again and again to the topic of machine generated literature as a way to reflect upon the Oulipian task he sets for himself in writing his cycle while adhering to various constraints. In December 2017, Stephen Marche went a step further, using an algorithm to write the science fiction short story, “Twinkle Twinkle: Algostory 1.” Marche prefaces the story with an explanation of how the algorithm was programmed and, throughout the hypertext, links to notes about the topic modelling rules used in the story’s creation. For example: as described in his preface, Marche worked with researchers Adam Hammond and Julian Brooke, who “created a web-based interface through which their algorithm, called SciFiQ, could tell me, on the textual equivalent of the atomic level, how closely every single detail of my writing matched the details in my 50 favorite works” (2017, para. 3); in one of his explanatory note links, Marche explains: “The algorithm distinguishes between the ‘literariness’ and ‘colloquialness’ of any given word, and I had to strike the right balance between the two kinds. My number of literary words was apparently too high, so I had to go through the story replacing words like scarlet with words like red” (n9). Not all of the paratextual material attached to the story is explanatory: some of it is critical, as when Marche notes that, according to the algorithm, a relatively low percentage of dialogue may be spoken by a woman character (leading him to comment, “I need to start reading better science fiction” [n7]), and some of it is clearly

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metacritical, as in the final section of the webpage, where Marche provides two reviews of “Twinkle Twinkle” by notable fiction editors, both of whom dislike the story. The review comments, which remark that the text “doesn’t sound writerly” and that there “isn’t quite enough character development or narrative movement to sustain my interest as a reader” (paras. 88–9), are akin to a punchline, an arch response to questions posed by Marche in his preface: “Where’s the technology that can make me better at my job? Where’s the computational system that will optimize my prose? … Can an algorithm help me write a better story?” (para. 2). What emerges in reading/ reading about “Twinkle Twinkle” is that the story itself is less interesting than the way it is framed. Likewise, Stephen Marche’s 2007 publication Shining at the Bottom of the Sea is a text that is both thematically and theoretically concerned with the issue of framing. My examination of Marche’s formal experiments in Shining at the Bottom of the Sea begins with a consideration of genre and how the text might be associated with short story cycles of so-called minor literatures. In his invention of both Sanjania and the short stories emerging from that fictional space, Marche explores the institutionalization of the postcolonial as a scholarly category; as I will argue, Marche makes use of a standard conception of postcolonial literature development, of the sort mapped in the foundational critical text, The Empire Writes Back, in order to critique how this standard has become little more than a well-rehearsed set of scholarly platitudes. When, in his guise as the (false) anthology’s editor, he asserts, “The fiction here should above all be read as fiction, and not as anthropological data” (2007, 33), Marche’s tone is ironic. In this way, Shining at the Bottom of the Sea appears to correspond with critiques of the institutionalization of postcolonial theory, which object to totalizing articulations that flatten out specific regional histories. That said, even this meta­ criticism does not change that the primary creative act in Shining at the Bottom of the Sea is the invention of an undiscovered country, as Marche returns to a popular imperialist and masculine-coded mode that maps the geography of adventure. In his fantasy of colonization, Marche prioritizes such themes as the idea of the endlessly discoverable frontier of the interior, the absolute erasure of Indigeneity, and the privileged vision of the outsider, whose unmarked surveying and organizing of land, history, and literature is the site not merely of obligation or even purpose, but of truth. Thus, Marche’s short story cycle is, arguably, the most hyperbolic example explored in Bearers

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of Risk of the impetus to manage anxiety and a sense of post–9/11 insecurity via the fantasy of absolute intellectual, masculine control. In another link to Paul Glennon’s The Dodecahedron, Marche’s Shining at the Bottom of the Sea is somewhat difficult to classify, in terms of genre.1 Most of the review excerpts and blurbs collected on pages 1–3 of the 2008 Penguin Canada paperback edition of the text refer to Shining at the Bottom of the Sea as a “novel,” though the excerpt from Bookpage acknowledges that it is “Not really a novel, not really a collection of stories”; the excerpt from Quill and Quire is more precise, quoting that Marche is “using the model of the anthology” (Marche 2007, 1–3). On the one hand – referring back to the ways short story cycles (or sequences or composites) have been defined by Forrest L. Ingram (1971), Susan Garland Mann (1989), Robert Luscher (1989), Gerald Lynch (2001), Victoria Kuttainen (2010), or Elke D’hoker (2013) – it is perhaps too much of a stretch to include Shining at the Bottom of the Sea within even the roomiest definition of the category. As the Quill and Quire review excerpt notes, the genre Marche most explicitly seeks to mimic is the literary anthology. This point is also made in a review published in the New York Times, in which Christopher R. Beha asserts, “This literary anthology from Marche’s imaginary island – complete with editor’s introduction, biographical notes, criticism and more than a dozen short stories in many different styles – may be the most exciting mash-up of literary genres since David Mitchell’s ‘Cloud Atlas’” (2007, para. 1). However, as Alex Good remarks in the Quill and Quire review (2007), in a section not excerpted as a paratextual blurb, “Entering into the premise, one is struck by how limited a selection is being presented. No plays, poetry, or excerpts from novels are included. What we get is a chronological sampling of short fiction” (2007, para. 2). In his guise as the editor of the anthology, “Marche”2 suggests that the choice to focus on short fiction is both personal and arbitrary, as “theatre is beyond question the dominant literary form in Sanjania” (2007, 25) and as he is uninterested in the poetry written by “British writers living in the Sanjan Colony during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (31). Within the context of Marche’s literary experiment, then, it is the grouping together of short stories that provides the best window into the development of a national literature and a so-called minor literature, a point also insisted upon in much of the scholarship on short story cycles. The idea of the minor, as well as the marginal, has long been important to scholarship on the short story and the short story cycle. In his

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oft-cited introduction to The Lonely Voice, Frank O’Connor makes the case that while “the short story has never had a hero … it has instead a submerged population group” (1962, 18), and that “in the short story is this sense of outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society” (19). As explained by Viorica Pâtea in her introduction to Short Story Theories: A Twenty-First-Century Perspective, O’Connor’s book was among the “first to attribute subversive powers to the genre,” and his ideas were picked up by various genre critics, including Mary Louise Pratt, who “links the short story with regional, gender, and political marginalization,” and Clare Hanson, who argues that the short story has the “capacity of expressing the repressed knowledge of a dominant culture” (Pâtea 2012, 7). As surveyed in the introduction to Bearers of Risk, Alexander MacLeod and Laurie Kruk both argue that the short story, as it is associated with Canadian literary history, is especially suited to elevating marginal voices. Further, Adrian Hunter argues in The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English that the short story is “disproportionately represented in literatures of colonial and postcolonial cultures … [as] in the ruptured condition of colonial and postcolonial societies, the form speaks directly to and about those whose sense of self, region, state or nation is insecure” (2007, 138). Such is the guiding principle of scholarly works on short story cycles like James Nagel’s The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle: The Ethnic Resonance of the Genre, Gerald Lynch’s The One and the Many: English-Canadian Short Story Cycles, and Rocío Davis’s Transcultural Reinventions: Asian American and Asian Canadian Short-Story Cycles, in which Davis argues that “The ethnic short-story cycle may thus be considered the formal materialization of the trope of multiplicity as the ethnic condition is presented via a form that vacillates between two genres” (2001, 19). Moving forward to comment on the era of explicit globalization, Paul March-Russell suggests in The Short Story: An Introduction that “dislocation, rather than locality, has become the dominant trait of the short story” (2009, 148). Importantly, and consistently, critics establish a link between the short story and/or short story cycles as a minor or marginal genre and the minoritized or marginalized voices that become apparent or find space in these types of texts. Marche’s own play with this common critical position is complicated, primarily because the voices that emerge in Shining at the Bottom of the Sea are not authentically minor nor marginal, especially in the sense that Hunter or Davis describe. However, before discussing the implications of Marche’s narrative and formal experiment,

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especially in relation to, once again, the perspective of the White, Western man in the post–9/11 decade, it is important to consider how ideas of the minor and marginal are explicitly thematized in this artificial anthology. After the real paratextextual elements (that is, the elements of the book that Gerard Genette suggests are the “zone between text and off-text” [1997, 2]), Marche introduces the first of several false paratextual elements, which is a foreword by Leonard King, who – according to the (also false) biographical notes section – is one of the leading authors of Sanjania, “frequently nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature” (2007, 249). King’s recognizable name on the anthology, therefore, works to guarantee its merit, and throughout this foreword, Marche plays with the idea of the recognizable so that Sanjania can be inferred as a postcolonial space. While it does not often explicitly refer to the history of Sanjania, King’s foreword provides a number of clues regarding its postcolonial status (and, indeed, the whole of Shining at the Bottom of the Sea encourages the sort of paranoid reading often associated with postmodern detective stories, as suggested by the text’s multiple references to Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories). For example: King refers to his “exile” as a writer living in such major European cities as Rome, Paris, and London (11); he recalls a friend of his “dreaming beautiful dreams about the future of his country” (12) before being “beaten to death” (12); he mentions “political reality” and a publication ban on an apparently controversial short story (12); he refers to Sanjania as a “tortured, complex country” (13). In these hints, King’s foreword provides the outline of a place that exists away from the European centre and that has a recent history of state violence. Further, when he introduces and lends credence to the work of “Marche,” editor of the anthology, King refers to him as “the perfect shade of visitor to give us ‘the photograph from the outer,’ as Kitteredge-Mann puts it” (13). Here, Marche (via King) adds complexity to the false paratext, referring to the words of another Sanjanian writer who is featured in the anthology in both a story and an interview, although neither of these excerpts contains the phrase “the photograph from the outer,” a quotation from a work by Octavia Kitteredge-Mann that (falsely) exists beyond the confines of “Marche’s” anthology. Even more interesting, given that Kitteredge-Mann, like King, is an exile, a Sanjanian living away from the country, it is the figure of “Marche” – the “perfect shade of visitor” – who can help others see the country clearly. The phrase “perfect shade of visitor” is deliberately imprecise, as Marche

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almost always approaches the deeply racist history of colonialism obliquely – not, however, to ignore that history, but to suggest that it is a history now so recognizable that it need not be articulated clearly or with precision. When “Marche” in his preface to Shining at the Bottom of the Sea claims of Sanjanian literature that “You have never read anything like it” (17), the irony is doubled: first, the statement is an artful reference to Marche’s role as the sole inventor of all the voices in the cycle and, second, the phrase is a trick, as every short story – every (falsely) unique representation of voice – is supposed to remind readers of what they already know about postcolonial literature. As with the experimental cycles of Gould and Glennon, the final goal of Marche’s foray into “the vital new” (Metcalf 2018, 205) is to reassert a sense of a stable, civil vantage point for objectively comprehending chaos: the vantage point of the White Settler man. In an essay included in Home-Work: Postcolonialism, Pedagogy, and Canadian Literature, Arun P. Mukherjee acknowledges that, in the twenty-first century, the “postcolonial is now safely ensconced in the academy and does not give the establishment any bad dreams … Postcolonialism, then, is an academic discourse, or jargon, that I do not fully control but must negotiate with” (2004, 192). While Mukherjee, along with other contributors to Home-work, considers what it means to work with postcolonial literature and theory as a “brand name” (191), Marche’s Shining at the Bottom of the Sea presents a fictional country and its exemplary literature referencing the very academic discourse cited by Mukherjee. Arguably, in another twist to the problem of the text’s genre, Marche’s creation is not recognizably a cycle of short stories (or a novel or an anthology) because it is really a book of metacriticism or metatheory that seeks to experiment with certain principles of postcolonial theory. Though to a less obvious and programmatic extent than “Twinkle Twinkle,” Shining at the Bottom of the Sea makes use of procedures associated with topic modelling. It reiterates basic semantic structures that might be gleaned from a survey of criticism about postcolonial literature, playing with the idea of writing back to the canon of English literature, with the concept of the centre versus the periphery, and with the question of  whether so-called postcolonial literature should be read as history or for pleasure. As my use of the phrase writing back indicates, I read the nowcanonical 1989 publication The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures as a key source for Marche’s topic

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modelling. In their introduction, Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin outline a number of points that have become part of the academic discourse or “jargon” associated with postcolonial literature: the authors begin by discussing the function of English literature as a “colonial form of imperialism,” setting up the binary centre/periphery to describe relations between English literature and the way “those from the periphery [are encouraged] to immerse themselves in an imported culture” (1989, 3–4). Next, Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin outline the “stages” of development for English literature on the periphery, starting with literature produced by the colonizing “literate elite,” moving to English literature “produced ‘under imperial license’ by ‘natives’ or ‘outcasts,’” and, finally, the “development of independent literatures … [that adopt] language and writing for new and distinctive usages” (5–6). The writers go on to introduce and briefly discuss the concepts of “hegemony,” “language,” and “place and displacement,” arguing, in sum, that postcolonial writers seek to challenge “the formal and historically limited constraints of genre, and the oppressive political and cultural assertion of metropolitan dominance, of centre over margin” (6–11). The introduction ends by briefly pointing out the links between postcolonial and postmodern theory and literary practice, suggesting that postcolonial writing is well-suited to revealing “false notions of ‘the universal’” and that “marginality thus [becomes] an unprecedented source of creative energy” (11–12). The totalizing picture outlined in The Empire Writes Back has been criticized by many, including Mukherjee, who argues in Postcolonial: My Living that the scenario presented by Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin (as well as by institutionalized versions of postcolonial and post­ modern studies) remains almost entirely Eurocentric. Mukherjee instead asserts, “our cultural productions are created in response to our own needs and we have many more needs than constantly to ‘parody’ the imperialists” (1998, 222). The canonical and popular influence of The Empire Writes Back, however, is visible in Marche’s Shining at the Bottom of the Sea. For example: the chronological arrangement of the anthology recalls the idea of the developmental stages of postcolonial literature, although “Marche” notes in his preface that he has omitted the early work of British writers living in what was then the Sanjan Colony (2007, 31). Thus, the first section, entitled “The Pamphlets and Early Fictioneers,” includes stories from “native” writers working “under imperial license” (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 1989, 5), reflected in allusions to British texts and genres, as in Julian

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Back’s Holmesian story, “Professor Saintfrancis and the Diamants of the End of the World,” as well as in stories that generally affirm the British imperialist project, like Camden Mahone’s “Pigeon Blackhat” – a story about the Christian redemption of a poor Sanjanian covedweller, who falls into a life of sin in the city of Port Hope – and Arcadio Cole’s “Von Lettow-Vorbeck, Africa’s White Lion” – a story about a Sanjanian soldier fighting in East Africa during the Great War, who encounters the feared German general Von Lettow-Vorbeck. “Marche’s” next section – called “Upheavals and Independence” – traces the progress of what Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin would deem “the appropriation of language and writing for new and distinctive usages” (6). As “Marche” notes in his preface, many of the stories from this period can be described as “‘coded’ fictions” (2007, 27), meaning fictions that use elaborate metaphors and other allegorical figures to mask their revolutionary intent (as one of the [false] critical essays included in the final section of Shining at the Bottom of the Sea explains, “political writing hid in plain sight. Writers like Lewis, Starkey, and Malleson3 resorted to ciphers cached inside seemingly benign romances, whose solutions would then be passed around by word of mouth” [227–8]). As (false) critic Arcadio Skelton goes on to explain, the story “An Old Man Mourns for His Blind Daughter” by Morley Straights contains many “coded” references that criticize the violence associated with Caesar Little’s revolution for Sanjanian “independence” (228).4 Other stories in this section mimic the exemplary modernist short stories that are associated in short story criticism with the category of “minor” literature. “Sufferance Row,” by Blessed Shirley, written in the “clean” style (26), deemphasizes plot in favour of dialogue that leaves the matter of two unlikely suitors’ desire unspoken, and includes a classic Joycean epiphanic moment, when Miranda – still waiting for the return of her husband who was lost at sea eight years previous – realizes that she has made enough soup for two: “She always made too much” (110). “The Master’s Dog,” by Augustus P. Jenkins, which in subject matter and style recalls the work of Chinua Achebe, tells the story of Fortitude Jonson, servant to the Worthingtons, a British colonialist couple on the brink of a messy divorce. In the story, Fortitude, after an absence of more than a year, travels to his home village with Mrs Worthington so that she can confront her errant husband; once back home, Fortitude learns that his former fiancée has married his best friend. At the end of the story, Fortitude is attacked by and forced to kill Mrs Worthington’s dog,

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who was originally trained as a police dog and is described by Mr Worthington as “one of those brutish black-killers” (121). The last section of short stories “Marche” includes, entitled “Exile and Return,” does not fit neatly into a category delineated in The Empire Writes Back, but rather makes use of a postcolonial category often associated with Canadian literary studies, which is the category of diasporic writing. Mridula Nath Chakraborty points out in “Nostalgic Narratives and the Otherness Industry” that in Canadian literary studies programs, the transition from “canonical” postcolonial writers to racially minoritized Canadian writers shows that attempts to manage matters of “diversity” and “multiculturalism” (2003, 130) in the academy generally end up reconfirming the “local ethnic subject as minority” (132). Likewise, Lily Cho suggests in “Diasporic Citizenship: Contradictions and Possibilities for Canadian Literature” that the label “immigrant” is distinct from the label “diasporic subject”: “Chicago, Bombay, and Spain are not equivalent spaces of departure. Not all elsewheres are equal. The differences cannot be collapsed between the multiple-passport carrying transnational subject and the diasporic subject whose agonized relationship to home engenders a perpetual sense of not quite having left and not quite having arrived” (2007, 99). It is this sense of an “agonized relationship to home” that emerges in the “Exile and Return” selections, as Marche imagines the diasporic subject, not only as someone adrift, but as marked by the violence of his or her home on the margins. In “Men,” by Charity Gurton – who is described in the biographical notes section as “teach[ing] creative writing at Bard College in Annandale-onHudson, New York” (2007, 247) – the narrator uses a pronounced “cove” dialect to relate the story of Marvy, his wife Mags, and the “mi’wife” Goody Swallow, who Marvy has sex with, though always “He saying, ‘You moniker is Magdalene, honey sweetness, me honey Maggy, give’m a dose’” (156–7). Later, in “Marche’s” section of “Criticism,” an essay by Octavia Dickens provides analysis of how Gurton’s work “can only be comprehended within a communicative model of language grounded in adequate conceptualizations of creole as migrant experience” (233). Another example in Shining at the Bottom of the Sea of linking short story with criticism is the magic realist story “A Wedding in Restitution” by Cato Dekkerman (who lives in Santa Monica, California [247]), and two reviews of the film adaptation of the story included in the “Criticism” section. The first review, published in the Sanjanian newspaper The Trumpet savages

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the film, calling it “saccharine committed to celluloid” and lamenting “the latest proof of our sickening cultural myopia” (236). The second review, published in the New York Times, enthuses about the film’s surprising charm: “What could be more miraculous than a strange little story from an island no one has heard of moving the hearts of people all over the world?” (238–9). In these and many other metacritical moments in Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, Marche both displays his facility with the language of scholarly criticism and shows an awareness of the academic and popular circulation of the postcolonial as a brand. Like Mukherjee and Chakraborty, then, Marche appears to be criticizing the flattening out of distinct regional histories by institutions that ultimately seek to make non-European voices manageable (and marketable). Also, in this sense, Shining at the Bottom of the Sea may be read in dialogue with Who Sings the Nation-State? by Judith Butler and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, in particular with the concept of “critical regionalism”: as Spivak explains, critical regionalism considers economic and political relationships that both transcend the nation-state and reject the globalization of capital. It seeks to contest the emptying out of grassroots transnational social activities – especially, for Spivak, those associated with feminism – under the guise of globalization. As she notes, “Our global social movements have been taken away from us. We are ‘helped’ at every turn” (2007, 93). In the previous chapter, I argued that Glennon’s portrayal of Indigenous displacement fails as critique, because such portrayals operate as highly mediated story elements within narratives prioritizing masculine exceptionalism and self-actualization. Likewise, Marche’s topic modelling – his post­ modern play with the standardization of key principles associated with the postcolonial – is troubling in that it too rests on a fantasy of colonization. This fantasy is most visible in the metacritical but also thematic inversion in Shining at the Bottom of the Sea of a crucial trope in Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin’s analytical scheme, which is the binary centre/periphery. In “The Master’s Dog,” the narrator draws attention to the thematic importance of Fortitude’s hometown village of Jacks, unusual because of its location among the “Tols, that rough scrabble of hills central to the Sanjanian interior” (113); Fortitude is proud to call Jacks his hometown, while his countrymen “almost absolutely coastal by nature, were amazed that he had never learned to swim, and possessed no strong feelings about the construction or maintenance of vessels”

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(118). The image of the interior home village is contrasted in the short story with Port Hope, the coastal capital city of Sanjania to which Mrs Worthington insists her husband return; as she remarks, “I cannot be expected to travel the circuits of power alone anymore … You will come with me to Port Hope, Cecil, and you will be British again” (126). As Mrs Worthington’s words make clear, the “circuits of power” are those associated with the British Empire, also evident in a scene in which Lucrece – Fortitude’s former fiancée – teaches geography in the village classroom, using “an enormous pink and grey map of the world” (122), on which the pink represents the vast scope of the empire. In this story, which critiques British colonialism both in its representation of Mr Worthington’s indolence and emasculation and in the symbolic violence of Loki, the police dog, the hierarchical binary of centre/periphery is depicted as unstable: the children of Jacks, the village in the interior, have only the barest, superficial comprehension of the meaning of the British Empire. For example, not a single student in Lucrece’s class, not even a student named Georgina, can answer the question: “Who is our King?” (123). Likewise, Lucrece has pursued her own desires rather than waiting for Fortitude to return from the coast, and the villagers have made a hole in the fence surrounding the Worthington estate in an “infinitesimal encroachment, the stakes pushed aside little by little, the wires pressed down, the bushes spread apart, a process undoubtedly begun by boys, continued by women, and finished by men” (117). As details in “Marche’s” anthology indicate, the destabilization of the centre/periphery binary in “The Master’s Dog” was read as politically radical: after its publication in the journal the Abyssinian, the offices of the journal were “shut down” (27). Further, as the biographical notes remark, the author of “The Master’s Dog,” Augustus P. Jenkins was himself a political figure, “Charged with sedition … [and dying] from tuberculosis in prison” (249). Other examples of the inverted binary in Shining at the Bottom of the Sea include the short story “Flotsam and Jetsam,” by Caesar Hill, an author who, according to “Marche’s” preface “renounced his [Sanjanian] citizenship in 1972 for political reasons” (29). In this short story, Marche again explores the idea of a postcolonial literature “writing back” via its allusions to British literature, this time through the character Remus, a bookseller in London, England and a Sanjanian exile whose pet theory is that when Shakespeare was young, he spent time on Sanjan Island, as evidenced by references in The Tempest. Remus’s argument that “Sanjan was the wellspring of the Bard, just

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as of our own uniquely rich heritage” (150) disrupts the typical developmental chronology associated with the centre/periphery binary, as does his assertion that “Miranda’s description of braveness and newness is of Europe, not of Sanjan Island, or Sanjania as we must now call it” (152). Finally, in an interview with Octavia Kitteredge-Mann published in the journal Japan Folders – which concludes the anthology’s “Criticism” section – the inverted centre/periphery is most clearly articulated. Answering a question about the relationship between islands (like Sanjania) and frontiers, Kitteredge-Mann states: ok m: I find it interesting that you should choose that word. “Frontier.” Because there are no frontiers anymore. Nobody believes in outer space. There is no frontier in America anymore, either, which is interesting. Sanjania was once on the frontier. I will say one thing, there is one feature of the island, everyone stays on the borders, on the sea. Very few people live in the mountains in the centre. And so the mountains are the frontier. jf: So the frontier is interior. ok m: Exactly. jf: And this is a feature of Sanjanian literature? ok m: I think perhaps it is not only Sanjania that has the limit inside. I think it is also perhaps Japan. I think it is also any decent novel or story. The interior is infinite, you know. The ­frontier, we have seen, it ends. Where is the centre? Where is the core? That will go on forever. jf: Do you feel this applies to you personally? ok m: I am my own country. (242–3) This exchange proves to be a kind of return, although the connection to Gerald Lynch’s notion of the return story is admittedly complicated (as is also the case with versions of the return story in kilter: fictions and The Dodecahedron). Still, the exchange as it is included in the “Criticism” section has already been quoted in “Marche’s” Preface (30), reflecting the persistence of Marche’s doubled and somewhat contradictory objectives, first, to engage in metacriticism of the institutionalization of the postcolonial via topic modelling and, second, to create his own country. Thus, an analysis of Shining at the Bottom of the Sea must now circle back to Marche, the figure behind the invention of Sanjania and this “exciting mash-up of literary genres” (Beha 2007, para. 1). Many

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of the review excerpts included on pages 1–3 of the paperback edition of the text foreground Marche’s inventiveness and sense of risk, referring to Shining at the Bottom of the Sea as “refreshingly different,” as “reinvent[ing] narrative,” as “ingenious,” and as “brave” (2007). However, as shown even by the allusions in the cycle to canonical texts such as Shakespeare’s The Tempest (in “Sufferance Row” and “Flotsam and Jetsam”) and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (in Marcel Henri’s “The Man Friday’s Review of Robinson Crusoe”), Marche is aware that his “reinvention” makes use of literary tropes with long histories. Richard Phillips argues in Mapping Men & Empire: A Geography of Adventure that within the “malleable spaces [of terra incognita], writers and readers of adventure stories dream of the world(s) they might find, the adventures they might have, the kinds of men and women they might become” (1997, 3). More specifically, Phillips argues that most of the canonical English-language adventure stories imagine a “cultural space in which imperial geographies and imperial masculinities [are] conceived” (12), whereby “In the liminal geography of adventure, the hero encounters a topsy-turvy reflection of home, in which constructions of home and away are temporarily disrupted, before being reinscribed or reordered, in either case reconstituted” (13). In Marche’s version of a geography of adventure, the “hero” who “dreams of the world(s) [he] might find” is the author/inventor engaging in a type of masculine colonization, a role very much in keeping with a tradition in Canadian literature of treating the space of nation as something to be made up. For example, as Graham Huggan argues in Territorial Disputes: Maps and Mapping Strategies in Contemporary Canadian and Australian Fiction, in the “second half of the twentieth century, an increasing number of writers from Canada and Australia … [transformed] the map topos, which came to feature less as the abstract representation of an external environment than as a structural … metaphor for the creative act” (1994, 46). Though Huggan here focuses most explicitly on the work of Canadian poets Earle Birney and James Reaney, the twentieth-century Canadian poem most relevant to Marche’s cycle is A.M. Klein’s 1948 poem “Portrait of the Poet as Landscape,” which, in the final stanza, describes the work of the poet thus: Meanwhile, he makes of his status as zero a rich garland, a halo of his anonymity,

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and lives alone, and in his secret shines like phosphorous. At the bottom of the sea. (1997, lines 160–4) The “secret” held by this “anonymous” poet, who has become one with his imagined geography of adventure, is that he is “the nth Adam” (line 135), creator and namer of a new world. Or, in the words of Octavia Kitteredge-Mann, “I am my own country.” As a cycle of stories, then, Shining at the Bottom of the Sea works to mark the borders of a space that, like the spaces that concern many of Glennon’s narrators, is an undiscovered country. Further, in a link back to Gould’s short story cycle, Marche’s marking of space is designed to celebrate the mastery of exotic knowledge. From the opening section of the preface, Sanjania is represented as both realistic and as a conglomerate of references to the invented countries of past adventure literature, existing as both a fully formed country and a space with “otherworldly climates which were sometimes paradisiacal, sometimes demoniacal, always one extreme or the other” (Marche 2007, 16). In keeping with a popular trope in the adventure genre, “Marche” presents his “discovery” of Sanjania as beginning in boyhood, when he found “among the collection of books in my family’s basement, a fat anthology of Commonwealth literature, which I speedily devoured” (16). Also crucial, though, is the idea that Sanjania is still relatively undiscovered; though “Marche” laments that he finds it “so distressing that Sanjanian writing is virtually unknown in Europe and America,” he presents his efforts to reveal Sanjania in the self-righteous terms of the missionary: “I believe that by shining an honest ray of light onto the life of the Sanjanian story in all its variety – high and low, theoretical and earthy, idealistic and cynical, old and new – the usual oversimplifications and prejudices will fall away” (17). Thus, “Marche” claims his role as an “honest,” objective surveyor, a role that functions, Huggan points out, as an “indispensable [agent] of the colonizing process” (37). “Marche’s” words are directed at other would-be adventurers, promising them: “You have never read anything like it. Here indeed is a secret compartment of the sea” (17). The point here, as with other geographies of adventure, is to appeal to the fantasies of those who wish to explore the “malleable spaces … [for] writers and readers of adventure stories [to] dream of the world(s) they might find” (Phillips 1997, 3). Even the inversion of centre/periphery – which promotes the interior as the new frontier – works as another fantasy of an endlessly discoverable space,5

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especially within a patriarchal tradition that posits the rational (masculine) self as central. In this context, it is also important to note that in Marche’s version of a “malleable space,” there is no Indigenous population to be dealt with. As Phillips remarks, at least since the publication of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in 1719, the imperial literature of adventure has sought to manage the issue of Indigenous populations, especially during “the nineteenth century when the story took its place among the foundational myths of British culture” (22): “To Crusoe, names bring the island and its native inhabitant into existence … the island and Friday become terms in Crusoe’s world view, settings and characters in a colonial encounter, defined from the perspective of the colonist” (33). In their surveys of the postcolonial Gothic in Canadian literature, Justin D. Edwards (in Gothic Canada: Reading the Spectre of a National Literature) and Cynthia Sugars and Gerry Turcotte (in their introduction to Unsettled Remains: Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic) assert that many Canadian Settler works are haunted by “an aura of unresolved and unbroachable ‘guilt,’ as though the colonial/historical foundations of the nation have not been thoroughly assimilated” (Sugars and Turcotte 2009, ix). Given the increasing popular discourse, at least since the publication in 1996 of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People, on the matter of examining and redressing Canadian state violence towards Indigenous peoples, as reflected for example in the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement of 2006 and the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2008, the degree to which Marche’s postcolonial parody erases the Indigenous figure is striking and ruthless. As “Marche” notes in a footnote to his preface, the only evidence of the cultural output of the Indigenous inhabitants of Sanjania are a series of petroglyphs in a cave. The footnote continues: “The records of the Spanish raiders show that, between 1520 and 1532, the entire population, 17,521 men, women, and children, were taken from Saint John Island as slaves. All perished in the new-world mines in what must be the most complete genocide in history. Not one word of their language, not even their name for themselves, survives” (Marche 2007, 32, n16). The positing of “the most complete genocide in history” fulfills a longstanding myth in Canadian Settler literature of the dying Indian, ensuring once and for all against the spectral presence of undying/ uncanny Indigeneity. In his own guise as Robinson Crusoe, Marche

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goes a step further than naming the native according to his own worldview: in Marche’s merciless colonizing fantasy, “not even their name for themselves, survives.” Finally, Marche’s engagement with Settler tropes must be considered in his choice to write a short story cycle as an anthology of minor literature; for, as March-Russell notes in considering the relationship between the circulation of short stories and anthologies, “Their composition is necessarily linked to the so-called canons of English literature, meaning both the landmarks of prose fiction and the mental maps by which readers make sense of literary history” (2009, 56). MarchRussell’s phrase “mental maps” is especially useful in considering the meaning of how the selections in Shining at the Bottom of the Sea are organized: the short stories progress from archaic and strange to poetic and sophisticated, confirming a familiar scheme of a maturing national literature. Also, many of the short stories emphasize the skill of decoding and a similar sort of intratextual diagramming at the crux of Glennon’s project, thus appealing to the readership’s intelligence and ability to “master” the entirety of the short story cycle as a complex formal object. It is also important to consider the section of stories that departs from the standard development of postcolonial literature, at least as Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin would have it: the most mature short stories collected in Shining at the Bottom of the Sea are the works of the country’s exiles, those whose status as belonging/not belonging gives them special insight into, as the narrator of Trinity Hopp’s “Under the Skin” puts it, that which is “Written too deep under the skin to be read” (Marche 2007, 165). And, most importantly with respect to how Shining at the Bottom of the Sea advances the fantasy of civil, masculine colonization, the distinction of special insight granted to the figure of the exile in the “anthology” echoes the way “Marche” is characterized in Leonard King’s foreword as “the perfect shade of visitor” to give us ‘the photograph from the outer,’ as Kitteredge-Mann puts it” (13). Though Shining at the Bottom of the Sea operates as a critique of the institutionalization of the postcolonial as an academic discourse, it ultimately marks the outsider, the observer, the surveyor, as the one with special knowledge. The unmarked, objective observer is Marche’s version of the civil bearer of risk, though this version of the figure is perhaps less obviously delineated compared with iterations in kilter: 55 fictions and The Dodecahedron, especially in terms of how desire for masculine self-actualization and authority emerges from an

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anxiousness about failure. Arguably, though, the anxiousness of Marche’s version of the civil bearer of risk is harder to identify because, as a character, he is hiding in plain sight: while both Gould’s and Glennon’s short story cycles feature a variety of men working through their own sense of “structural dislocation,” “role set ambiguity,” and “representational indictment” (Atkinson 2011, 12–14), Marche’s Shining at the Bottom of the Sea features, chiefly, “Marche.” While this character’s penchant for surveying and organizing from an objective standpoint is clear, “Marche’s” (false) project of putting together an anthology of Sanjanian short stories must ultimately be read against the book’s primary metacritical gambit, which is that the institutionalization of the postcolonial is a symptom of how the study of literature has become overly politicized, caught up in trends, diluted by theory, and otherwise degraded. The scholarship “Marche” engages in is not the pursuit of original research, but rather the type of busy work associated with an academic discipline that has lost its way. Thus, “Marche” too is a kind of unsettled failure, linked to the men in kilter: 55 fictions who fantasize about patrilineal legacy and to Glennon’s anxious sons who seek their own chance at adventure. As I have argued, a key intertext to Marche’s Shining at the Bottom of the Sea is A.M. Klein’s “Portrait of the Poet as Landscape,” in particular the notion that the poet “makes of his status as zero a rich garland, / a halo of his anonymity” (1997, lines 161–2). In Klein’s poem, the poet retreats into a purer creation that does not concern itself with being recognized by a fallen, apathetic, modern world, cherishing his position as the unmarked artist. In Marche’s text, the position of surveyor is taken up by “Marche,” so that Shining at the Bottom of the Sea’s criticism of the entrenchment of postcolonial studies in the academy proceeds even as Marche – the unmarked artist – engages in one of the oldest Settler fantasies in the book (or, rather, in many books): to discover a “new” land and become the “nth Adam taking a green inventory / in world but scarcely uttered” (lines 134–5). Like the speaker in Klein’s poem, the three authors surveyed in this section of Bearers of Risk labour “To find a new function for the déclassé craft / archaic like the fletcher’s; to make a new thing” (lines 152–3). In Gould’s kilter: 55 fictions, the “new thing” is a short story cycle that utilizes the constraint of narrative shortness as a unifying formal feature, inviting the reader to find design among the overabundance. Glennon’s articulates his desire to write a “new thing,” seeking to challenge the convention of the cyclical structure of the

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short story collection; for The Dodecahedron, he devises so complicated a set of formal constraints that reviews of this text read it, almost exclusively, as an intellectual puzzle and postmodern, metafictional experiment. Also admired for its experimental qualities, Marche’s Shining at the Bottom of the Sea is even more radical in its play with genre, ­presenting the short story cycle as an anthology of short stories from an imaginary country. Whereas Glennon’s text may be thought of as metafictional, frequently drawing attention to the nature of authorship, Marche’s cycle is, arguably, metacritical, as the stories contained within “Marche’s” anthology appear to have been reverse-engineered from institutional readings of postcolonial and diasporic literatures. Beyond the issue of formal experimentation, the three short story cycles examined in this section are linked by their elevation of a very particular kind of focalizer: the figure of the civil bearer of risk. In kilter: 55 fictions, the abundance of stories, together with the profusion of references to global goods and exotic experiences, implies a heterogeneity of perspective. A closer inventory of the stories, however, reveals Gould’s primary focus on the point of view of the White, Western (often Canadian), urban, heteronormative, middle-class man, whose sense of his own social status has been knocked off kilter in a post–9/11 world. Thus, Gould’s unmarking of this perspective via form is strategic, presenting as it does masculine anxiety about falling/ failing and the patriarchal goal of establishing legacy as legitimate, normative, and universal. Similarly, the play with Oulipian constraints and metafictional winking in The Dodecahedron serves as a distraction from Glennon’s repetition of stories about the Western discovery of new lands, about appropriately masculine activities such as invention, collection, and control, and about proper inheritances of sons from their fathers. Finally, in Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, Marche makes a claim for the objective surveyor as the site of truth, as when Leonard King (Sanjanian expat, serial Nobel Prize nominee, participant in and survivor of violence associated with anti-colonialist protest) names “Marche” as the “perfect shade of visitor” (Marche 2007, 13) to trace a country’s literary development. Thus, via formal experimentation, the cycles explored here respond to the dilemma of masculinity in crisis by re-establishing the perspective of the White, heteronormative man as objective, dutiful, and authoritative. In the next section of Bearers of Risk, I will look at short story cycles by three authors who cannot straightforwardly adopt this normative perspective: in Natasha and Other Stories, Bloodletting & Miraculous

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Cures, and Barnacle Love, authors David Bezmozgis, Vincent Lam, and Anthony De Sa, respectively, devise alternate strategies for responding to post–9/11 forces of global insecurity and changing conceptions of masculinity, strategies more suited to cycles focused on the marked and minoritized figure of the immigrant to Canada.

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S e ct i o n T wo Narratives of Arrival

This section focuses on short story cycles in which the chief unifying characteristic is a recurring character or recurring set of characters, making these three cycles much more formally conventional than those explored in section 1 of Bearers of Risk. In The One and the Many: English-Canadian Short Story Cycles, Lynch refers to “character” – along with place – as one of two genre features that unify Canadian short story cycles (2001, 20), an idea refined in studies by Rocío Davis and Maria Löschnigg. In Transcultural Reinventions: Asian American and Asian Canadian Short-Story Cycles, Davis argues that short story cycles written by ethnically minoritized North American writers make strategic use of the genre characteristic of an “accumulative” approach to character ­development, whereby the “act of amalgamation required for the understanding of the short-story cycle mirrors that needed for the consolidation of the ethnic subjectivity portrayed” (2001, 22). Though not exclusively focused on short story cycles by minoritized Canadian writers, Löschnigg’s chapter on the genre, from The Contemporary Canadian Short Story in English: Continuity and Change, highlights the way character development in cycles occurs via “glimpses of significant moments in the lives of the ­protagonists … The meaning of the incidents which are recalled by the n ­ arrator and around which the stories are built often lies in the fact that ­they signify processes of transition and transformation with regard to the protagonist” (2014, 258–9). A key focus in this ­section is the matter of the complex constituting of the minoritized ­subjectivity, especially in such moments of “transition and transformation,” when the central protagonist(s) of the short story cycle

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understand themselves as more or less willing participants in Canada’s multicultural ideal. In David Bezmozgis’s Natasha and Other Stories (2004), the recurring protagonist Mark Berman comes to understand how Whiteness can be mobilized, even as he meditates on the matters of Jewish exile, diasporic movement, and belonging. Vincent Lam’s Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures (2006) plays with what Davis calls the “insider/outsider point of view” (2001, 20), both in ­representations of racially minoritized characters Chen, Sri, and Ming, and via an almost hyperbolic version of the wounded White man, Fitz. In Barnacle Love (2008), Anthony De Sa also explores the elasticity of Whiteness in his representation of Manuel and Antonio Rebelo as, respectively, failing and successful new Canadians. Another characteristic that links Natasha and Other Stories, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, and Barnacle Love is that they were all debut publications. As I note in my introduction, the ­scholarly position on the implications of debut short stories or short story collections is somewhat muddled, though generally insistent on defending the value of the genre(s): W.H. New, among others, claims that the short story is not “merely an ‘apprentice form’ for would-be novelists, as some commentators once averred” (2009, 400), while, John Metcalf argues that, in following the demands of the market and abandoning the short story collection for the novel, Canadian writers have “squandered” their artistry (2018, 648). What emerges from these and other scholarly comments is the idea that the “debut short story collection” – as a category within what Alexander MacLeod refers to as the “cultural ­infrastructure … dedicated to the development of Canadian short fiction” (2016, 442) – is not neutral, and in this section of Bearers of Risk, I will consider the strategic meaning of the debut short story cycle in relation to each text’s portrayal of immigrant arrival. Throughout my analysis of how these texts represent a negotiation with the Canadian multicultural ideal, I will work with Melina Baum Singer’s argument that “the process of whitening … is at the heart of managing difference” (2012, 114–15), as well as with Daniel Coleman’s discussion of the figure of the New Canadian and of White civility. I consider the matter of how the immigrant or minoritized perspective arrives within the Canadian imaginary, especially against the context of a post–9/11 concern with policing borders for recognizable foreign enemies (Bezmozgis), Eastern

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contagion (Lam), or old-world, primitive values (De Sa). And, ­examining counter-narratives to their thematizing of arrival, I will note how Bezmozgis, Lam, and De Sa variously depict a fantasy in which the minoritized figure can disappear into the deterritorialized, cosmopolitan space of Toronto and thereby become unmarked. Finally, this section will focus on how the fraught process of arrival is exacerbated when the ethnically minoritized figure tries (and sometimes fails) to comprehend the codes of White civility, especially as those codes inhere with complex codes of heteronormative masculinity. Thus, I am interested in Bezmozgis’s various representations throughout Natasha and Other Stories of masculine strength and of fighting; in Lam’s serial juxtapositions of Fitz and Chen in terms of how these figures represent wounded White ­masculinity and minority incivility; and in De Sa’s portrayal of Antonio’s rejection of his father’s old-world masculinity, which is ultimately a form of conservative, recuperative masculinity politics. Importantly, notwithstanding the genre convention of an accumulative approach to character in these types of short story cycles, ­character development in Natasha and Other Stories, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, and Barnacle Love is not straightforward, undermined by the competing objectives for the minoritized subject of self-actualization and disappearance. In these cycles, the figure of the civil bearer of risk is ambivalent, primarily because the sacrificial activity that would allow the failing man to assume an authoritative Settler identity is a surrender to the fickle codes of White civility, or the suppressing of readable ethnic difference. It is this ambivalence that forms the context of anxiety over masculine self-fashioning, for example in Bezmozgis’s exploration of the impossibility of ­emulating the tough Jew, in Lam’s ironic portrayals of racialized doctors as heroes, and in De Sa’s depiction of conflict between oldworld masculinities and new-world conservatism.

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5 “THE TOUGHEST KID IN HEBREW SCHOOL” Suburbia and Whitening in David Bezmozgis’s Natasha and Other Stories

In the story “An Animal to the Memory,” included in David Bezmozgis’s 2004 short story cycle Natasha and Other Stories, the narrator explicates the matter of his complex Jewish Russian immigrant identity with a story about non-kosher meat. Mark Berman, who is the narrator for every story, explains: “Because of dietary laws, the [Hebrew] school prohibited bringing meat for lunch. Other students brought peanut butter or tuna fish but I – and most of the other Russians  – would invariably arrive at school with smoked Hungarian salami, Polish bologna, roast turkey. Our mothers couldn’t comprehend why anyone would choose to eat peanuts in a country that didn’t know what it meant to have a shortage of smoked meat” (70). The use of the non-kosher sandwich as a metonym for Mark’s identity is interesting because of the contrast between the notion of a multiple identity and the laws of kashrut, the principles of which separate food into that which can or cannot be eaten, or which foods can or cannot be eaten together, as in the case of the restriction against combining dairy with meat. As Mary Douglas notes in Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, with regards to ritual food restrictions and other systems of marking impurity: “If we abstract pathogenicity and hygiene from our notion of dirt, we are left with the old definition of dirt as matter out of place … Dirt, then, is never a unique, isolated event. Where there is dirt there is a system” (1978, 36). Bezmozgis’s cycle confronts the difficulty of negotiating how notions of identity are linked with

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classification and separation. Also interesting, especially with respect to this cycle’s representation of masculinity, is the context for Mark’s account of his eating habits, which is the story of his consistent fighting at school. As Mark notes, “I’d gotten into a fight with two eighth graders … [who] stopped by my table and asked me how I liked my pork sandwich” (2004, 70); a month after this incident, he gives another student a concussion, resulting in a two-day suspension (70). Though his parents are furious with him, Mark brags to the other Russian boys who live on his street, who respond “Congratulations, you’re the toughest kid in Hebrew school” (71). Mark’s crafting of a desired identity is constrained by intersecting hierarchical systems of ethnicity, gender codes, and national status. As I will argue, Bezmozgis’s debut short story cycle is variously related to the concept of arrival. Arrival is relevant, first, in terms of the circulation of this cycle, as the publicity associated with Bezmozgis’s debut worked to generate excitement about him as a new Canadian writer. Also, in terms of content, the interlocking series of stories – which act as a kind of fragmentary, accumulative bildungsroman about Mark – shares features with other short story cycles dealing with the travails of immigrant communities, and the difficulties associated with arrival and belonging in Canada.1 Natasha and Other Stories not only represents Jews living in the diaspora, but as living in the non-places of suburbia, thus drawing attention to the complex, self-effacing process of belonging through disappearance. Further, the representation of the global trafficking of women’s bodies and of the image of the tough Jew shows the relationship between settlement activity and gendered violence. As I will suggest, Bezmozgis’s depiction of the immigrant Jew reflects a desire to control the settlement narrative against the influence of coercive Whitening within Canadian culture, as even the immigrant who arrives is constantly made aware that his insider status is at risk within the borders of civility. In the end, Natasha and Other Stories functions as a fantasy about the necessity of belonging, at all costs, including the cost of becoming racially or ethnically unmarked. As Elke D’hoker notes in “The Short story cycle: Broadening the perspective,” one of the ways the genre has been defined is in relation to a national tradition. She cites the scholarship of J. Gerald Kennedy and James Nagel, both of whom explore how the form unites disparate voices, thus mirroring the cultural makeup of the United States (D’hoker 2013, 153). In The Contemporary American Short Story

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Cycle: The Ethnic Resonance of Genre, Nagel argues “that writers from a wide variety of ethnic groups have used the form for the depiction of the central conflicts of characters from their own race or nationality. As ‘American’ narratives, these stories often involve the process of immigration, acculturation, language acquisition, assimilation, [and] identity formation” (2001, 15). In his conclusion to The One and the Many: English-Canadian Short Story Cycles, Gerald Lynch similarly argues that the genre might “serve writers from the diverse groups that continue to make Canadian communities” (2001, 188), citing an article by Rocío G. Davis on the relationship between the “trope of doubleness” and “a form that itself vacillates between two genres” (Davis, “Negotiating,” quoted in Lynch 2001, 188–9). In Transcultural Reinventions: Asian American and Asian Canadian Short-story Cycles, Davis expands on these ideas, arguing that “the dynamics of the shortstory cycle make it appropriate for the quest for a definition of the cultural pluralism that incorporates immigrant legacies while adapting to the practices of the culture in which these works are created” (2001, 10). For example, Davis notes, “Asian American and Asian Canadian writers, conscious perhaps of a multiple literary inheritance or, at least, the reality of an insider/outsider point of view, tend to contemplate how binary categories of cultural classification have worked in the production of knowledge and counter-knowledge within the framework of literary and cultural studies” (20). More recently, Maria Löschnigg has reaffirmed Davis’s argument, stating that “the constantly shifting point of view of the experiencing I … is fruitfully exploited in these first-person cycles for the rendering of questions of ethnicity and otherness” (2014, 298). In other words, “ethnic” or “immigrant” or “diverse” writers make use of formal opportunities and generic instabilities especially available in or relevant to the short story cycle not only to portray scenes of “immigration,” “assimilation,” “identity formation” (Nagel 2001, 15), and so on, but also to self-reference an awareness of how certain voices are marked as outside a settled national imaginary. Further, the association made between writing short stories and “apprentice” work (see Pratt 1994, 97) coheres with how a short story cycle might act as a means for the immigrant writer to arrive on the national literary scene via a risky genre (and “risky,” here, refers to the paradox whereby the reading public can take a risk on a new author via a marginalized, risky genre, precisely because the stakes for success are lower). For example: Rohinton Mistry’s debut short story cycle

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Tales from Firozsha Baag, published in 1987, was followed up by his award-winning novel Such a Long Journey, published in 1991; Neil Bissoondath’s debut collection Digging up Mountains, published in 1985, was followed up by several novels, including The Worlds within Her, published in 1999 and nominated for a Governor General’s Literary Award for English Fiction; André Alexis’s Despair, and Other Stories of Ottawa, published in 1994, was followed up by his awardwinning novel Childhood, published in 1997. Likewise, Bezmozgis’s Natasha and Other Stories, published in 2004 and itself awarded numerous prizes, has been followed up by the novels The Free World, published in 2011, and The Betrayers, published in 2014, both of which were nominated for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.2 For Bezmozgis, the narrative of arrival was further supported by the publication, prior to the release of his cycle, of three stories in American magazines (“Tapka” in the New Yorker, “Roman Berman, Massage Therapist,” in Harper’s, and “The Second Strongest Man,” in Zoetrope). As Nicholas Dinka notes in his review of Natasha and Other Stories, published in Quill and Quire, “Last May, David Bezmozgis published his first stories in  Harper’s  and  the New Yorker – ipso facto, he is now the next big thing in Canadian fiction” (2004, para. 1). The buzz and accolades surrounding the publication of the short story cycle, however, did not proceed without criticism: Dinka suggests, for example, that as much as the text makes “elegant” use of “careworn devices[s]” (paras. 7–8), Natasha and Other Stories is constructed so as to best exploit the narrative of arrival. He writes, “the author is willing to mine his immigrant background for the cultural details – in this case, the Russian nicknames, the traditional apple cake recipes, the ancient religious rituals – that publishers find so alluring these days” (para. 5). Evan Gillespie, in a review entitled “Premature Deification,” is even more disparaging: Which came first, the New Yorker’s publication of a new author’s early story, or the widespread conviction that the author is ­destined to be the next great writer of his era/age group/ethnic group/nationality? That is to say, does the superstar make the hype, or does the hype make the superstar? In the case of David Bezmozgis, the question is, for the most part, being avoided because everyone is talking about the hype, but no one is saying much about the writer’s work. While one could argue that this is evidence of reputation trumping substance, the real problem is

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that, when it comes to literary output, there’s just not much to talk about. (2004, para. 1) When he gets down to reviewing the cycle, Gillespie is mostly unmoved, asserting that “the bulk of Natasha, while skillfully – sometimes even beautifully – written, is hardly newsworthy” (para. 4). However, when Gillespie links Bezmozgis’s success to “the current Western infatuation with immigrant fiction” (para. 4), his critique echoes the backhanded compliment Mark receives from the kids on his street: “‘Congratulations, you’re the toughest kid in Hebrew school’” (Bezmozgis 2004, 71). Further, the use of terms like “careworn devices” and “hardly newsworthy” by Dinka and Gillespie, respectively, seem to challenge rhetorical attempts to link Natasha and Other stories with John Metcalf’s notion of “the vital new” (2018, 205). Finally, as is suggested by the plainly gendered title of Gillespie’s review, which links Bezmozgis’s hype to a failure of masculinity, themes of difference and settlement are linked with an examination of what it is that makes the Soviet Jewish Canadian immigrant man. Though Davis’s research is focused on Asian North American writers, the concept of “a multiple literary inheritance,” not to mention an “insider/outside point of view,” is relevant to the discussion of diasporic Jewish writers. In Third Solitudes: Tradition and Discontinuity in Jewish-Canadian Literature, Michael Greenstein argues that “much Jewish-Canadian fiction deals with the quests of anti-heroes, orphans, adolescents, and immigrants for their parents, their homeland, and a meaningful tradition” (1989, 7). More recently, though, Melina Baum Singer has argued that “Jews and expressions of Jewishness have been de-linked from the category [of diaspora studies]” (2012, 99), owing to an increased academic focus on the work of explicitly racialized members of postcolonial communities (Baum Singer 2012, 105). As Baum Singer notes, “religious differences have been downplayed in the redrawing of the construction of Canadian nativism” (105), whereby Jewishness is subsumed within what Dionne Brand refers to as an “elastic” notion of Whiteness (Brand in Baum Singer 2012, 104). Baum Singer argues that though Whiteness may be a mutable category, the “process of whitening … [is] not a benign process but one that is at the heart of managing difference” (114–15). Likewise, Natasha and Other Stories is often focused on how difference and cultural identity vanishes into a deterritorialized, suburban, and Whitened space, a space that is constructed

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to repudiate the possibility of localized specificity whereby, as John Tomlinson notes, the “condition of deterritorialization … replaces real localities with ‘non-places’” (1999, 108). In Bezmozgis’s version of a shifty settlement narrative, Mark must negotiate the Whiteness inherent to the suburban cultural geography in order to simulate a sense of belonging. A chief goal of Greenstein’s study is to trace links among Canada’s various Jewish writers who, as he argues, wish to explore their place within an extensive Jewish literary tradition that is filled with “blurred genealogical lines” (1989, 198). Much as the speaker in A.M. Klein’s “Autobiographical” is echoed in Mordecai Richler’s versions of those figures who “emerge from Montreal’s ghetto to stalk through the Diaspora” (Greenstein 1989, 60), Bezmozgis’s Mark is another “wanderer” (203) whose travels reflect the legacy of the diasporic figure. In her essay, “David Bezmozgis – Muscles, Minyan and Menorah: Judaism in Natasha and Other Stories,” Bettina Hofmann points out that, in the story “Natasha,” Mark “programmatically enumerates the writers he has chosen as his literary models” (2006, 101). Hofmann notes that Mark attests to giving up John Irving and Mordecai Richler in favour of “Camus, Heraclitus, Catullus, and Kafka” (Bezmozgis in Hofmann 2006, 101), in particular “replac[ing] Richler with a different kind of Jewish author, Kafka, who is known for representing modern man” (101). It is not surprising that Hofmann downplays the mention of Richler, as she – like Derek Parker Royal, author of “Cyrillic Cycles: Uses of Composite Narrative in the Russian Émigré Fiction of Ellen Litman and David Bezmozgis” – wants to declare Bezmozgis as an American writer, arguing that “Natasha itself lays claim to its Americanness in choosing California as one setting, which functions as an extension of, rather in opposition to, the main setting of Toronto” (102). Hofmann here vastly overstates her case, as the few scenes in the story “Choynski” that are set in San Francisco are clearly meant to register as “travel,” in contrast to the representations of suburban Toronto as a strangely deterritorialized home. Also, Richler is the only Canadian writer Bezmozgis cites throughout the cycle and the reference to him is especially relevant, first, in terms of the way Bezmozgis examines the effects of wandering in the non-places of suburban Toronto and, second, as I will discuss later, in terms of how Bezmozgis, following Richler, explores the post–1967 figure of the “tough Jew” (Nobel 2010, 93). Both Richler and Bezmozgis approach the issue of immigration and  globalization in their representation of space, though their

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representations of deterritorialization are inverted. Greenstein asserts that Richler’s novels “originate in Montreal’s ghetto” (1989, 159), though protagonists like Duddy Kravitz, Jake Hersh, and Joshua Shapiro leave this space to explore other territories, from New York, to Hollywood, to parts of Europe. In Richler’s 1969 short story cycle, The Street, Montreal itself is the retrospective focus; as the narrator of the first story, “Going Home Again,” explains, for most of the immigrant parents who inhabit the “self-contained world made up of five streets” (7), the goal is to make sure that their children will “study hard and make good. To get out” (12). “Going Home Again” would be an almost textbook version of what Lynch calls a return story, except that here the depiction of return to a space associated with the past does not conclude but initiates the retrospective cycle. As Richler’s narrator notes in this opening story, “To come home in 1968 was to discover that [home] wasn’t where I had left it – it had been bulldozed away” (11). The subsequent stories in The Street go on to depict what the narrator calls “a hairier, more earthy Montreal” (9), the space that existed before “the drift to the suburbs had begun” (7). As Richler’s narrator notes, the space of his childhood has been replaced by a cosmopolitan Montreal, a “metropolis” that wants to compete with Paris as “the world’s largest French-speaking city” (9); conversely, Bezmozgis’s cycle is from the outset located in the suburbs of Toronto. In the story, “The Street,” Richler’s narrator emphasizes the specificity of the “self-contained world” of the Montreal ghetto: “each street between Main and Park Avenue represented subtle differences in income. No two cold-water flats were alike and no two stores were the same either” (23). Bezmozgis’s cycle likewise acknowledges distinguishing marks of income: in the story “Roman Berman, Massage Therapist,” Mark explains, “Between our apartment and a fully detached house loomed the intermediate town house and the semi­detached house” (2004, 31). That said, notwithstanding the opening references in Bezmozgis’s first story, “Tapka,” to the sights and smells of the Bathurst and Finch area of Toronto, the spaces described throughout Natasha and Other Stories are a series of non-places: apartment buildings, plazas, and suburban neighbourhoods. Thus, the world that Mark is required to negotiate during his coming-of-age is a space designed to encourage the safety and Canadian multicultural ideal of becoming normative and unmarked. In “Tapka,” the narrator notes that, upon arrival in Canada, his parents – “Baltic aristocrats” – choose an apartment building that is

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“one respectable block away from the Russian swarm” (3); as the ensuing depictions of the family’s efforts at learning English show, the goal for the Bermans is to perform their belonging in Canada. The Bermans’ efforts to belong are contrasted with the failures of the Nahumovskys, a childless immigrant couple who come to depend on the Bermans, but who are unable to make much headway with their language learning. In the falling action of the story, Rita Nahumovsky laments the injury that her dog, Tapka, has sustained after being hit by a car, blaming Mark for the accident and angrily rejecting Roman Berman’s suggestion that she get a new dog: “A new one? What do you mean a new one? I don’t want a new one. Why don’t you get yourself a new son? A new little liar? How about that? New. Everything we have now is new” (17). The significance of Rita’s plaint is twofold, in that it registers the immigrant’s unhappiness and her refusal to adopt a doubled point of view, while at the same time drawing attention to the symbolic meaning of the immigrant son, whose purpose it will be to “make good” and “get out,” apparently by whatever means are necessary. The final scene of “Tapka” emphasizes the ambivalent quality of the immigrant son’s position, as young Mark realizes that he has metaphorically “killed” Rita’s tenuous hold on her past life and, consequently, “will never be forgiven” (18). In this first story, Bezmozgis indicates an implicit violence in the narrative of Whitening, belonging, and settlement. However, unlike the narrator of Richler’s “Going Home Again,” who has escaped the ghetto of five streets, traveling back to Montreal “from dowdy London, via decaying New York” (1969, 7), Mark’s journey throughout Natasha and Other Stories traverses a series of spaces built to look as if they had no history. In “Roman Berman, Massage Therapist,” Mark’s father attempts to start his own business, renting a “one-room office at the Sunnybrook Plaza, where we bought our groceries and I got my hair cut” (2004, 22). Likewise, in “The Second Strongest Man,” Mark displays an awareness of how the space he negotiates with his family remains indistinct: “I felt the tour guide’s responsibility to show Sergei [a close family acquaintance from Russia] something interesting. At the northern edge of the city, home to Russian immigrants, brown apartment buildings, and aging strip malls, there wasn’t much to show” (53). Even the B’nai Brith–subsidized apartment building featured in “Minyan,” administered to provide a locus of community for elderly Jewish people, is a space without specificity. In contrast to the inhabitants, each of whom seems to have

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a personal traumatic history, involving either Stalin or Hitler (133), the on-site synagogue, which is “one room … divided into two sections by a flimsy latticework partition” (132), appears temporary, while the apartments look much the same as any other set of apartments in suburban Toronto. Mark’s comment on his grandfather’s new living space is that “The new apartment was slightly smaller than the old. The brown sofa had been sold and replaced with a blue one” (134). This prosaic description of the conditions of living contrasts with words spoken at the funeral of Itzik, one of the synagogue’s regular participants: “the rabbi added that with the passing of Itzik the world lost another piece of the old Jewish life” (141). Along with the series of apartment buildings depicted in Natasha and Other Stories, in the title story, Bezmozgis examines the space of the basement in a suburban dwelling. In the opening of “Natasha,” the narrator Mark notes: “When I was sixteen I was high most of the time. That year my parents bought a new house at the edge of Toronto’s sprawl. A few miles north were cows; south the city. I spent most of my time in basements. The suburbs offered nothing and so I lived a subterranean life. At home, separated from my parents by door and stairs, I smoked hash, watched television, read, and masturbated. In other basements I smoked, watched television, and refined my style with girls” (81). One the one hand, the move into a new house “at the edge of Toronto’s sprawl” might be read as a type of settlement activity, as the Bermans solidify their sense of belonging by inhabiting new territory. On the other hand, the delineation of a suburban neighbourhood as a non-place, a space that “offer[s] nothing,” contrasts with a trope explored by Sarah Phillips Casteel in her essay “Jews among the Indians: The Fantasy of Indigenization in Mordecai Richler’s and Michael Chabon’s Northern Narratives.” As Casteel points out, the “motif of ‘going native,’ while usually associated with the dominant Settler society, features prominently – and often problematically – in contemporary Jewish reimaginings of North American settlement narratives” (2009, 778). Casteel explains that the “Jewish desire for territorial belonging is explored with reference to the indigene” (779), as the culturally marginalized Jew seeks to perform a sense of authenticity. However, in the deterritorialized, suburban space that Bezmozgis explores throughout his cycle, the “doubled position of the Jew as both New World Settler and marginalized Other” (Casteel 2009, 806) is doubly erased, or made “subterranean.” Mark’s coming-of-age narrative in “Natasha” is less concerned with the search for authenticity

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than it is focused on navigating homogeneity: the sameness of suburban basements, in which teenagers experience the heterogeneity of the globalized world only via matching televisions shows. However, as is suggested throughout the cycle, negotiating and taking up space, even deterritorialized space, requires violence to and of the cultural outsider, in the form of coercive Whitening and in the acceptance of violent settlement activity. The deterritorialized status of the suburban space is emphasized with the introduction of the twinned narratives of Zina and Natasha and their globally trafficked bodies, and of the character Rufus, a drug dealer whose business model involves maintaining a house in the suburbs so that “for his customers, a visit to their dealer felt just like coming home” (2004, 90). The stories of Zina and Natasha, mother and daughter, both deal with the idea of the woman’s body as commodity. Zina is “recommended” to the Bermans as a suitable wife for Mark’s uncle Fima (81), and her initial visit to Canada is treated as an examination period during which the family appraises her value, ultimately agreeing that “there were positives and negatives” (83). As it happens, the appraisal of Zina’s value as a bride for Fima appears to be an overestimation, as she ends up costing Fima a great deal, not only in terms of a new apartment and trips to Niagara-on-the-Lake and Quebec City, but also in “long-distance bills to Moscow” (95). Zina’s trafficked body proves unsuitable, the marriage comes to an end, and “as far as the family was concerned, once my uncle severed his relationship to Zina, she and Natasha ceased to exist” (106). The status of Zina as a mail-order bride is camouflaged by the characterization of Zina as manipulative, domineering, and unappreciative of her intended role in the family; for example, Zina makes it clear that she dislikes frequent visits from Fima’s parents (94) and is, throughout the story, depicted as an enemy of her daughter. However, Zina’s story mirrors that of her daughter, though the trafficking of Natasha’s younger body is depicted in more overt terms, thus confirming Bezmozgis’s interest in examining the morally ambiguous standing of spaces dedicated to reproducing sameness and masking the flow of money and goods through a globalized market. Bezmozgis’s story, “Natasha,” depicts both the circulation of Natasha’s body and – as the eponymous title suggests – the circulation of the story of her body’s circulation. Most obviously, Natasha reveals that images of her sexualized body have been recorded and circulated, worldwide. As she explains to Mark, when she “was twelve a friend of

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hers told her about a man who paid ten dollars for some pictures of her” (95); soon, Natasha too is involved in the Russian pornography industry, “making pornographic movies for Western businessmen” (96). Significantly, Natasha’s explanations of her experiences are not treated as remarkable. In Natasha’s mind, she is less of a “whore” than her own mother, because Zina “sold herself to Natasha’s father for nothing” (97), while in Mark’s mind, Natasha’s stories are “information [he carries] around like a prize. It was my connection to a larger darker world” (97). Both banal and titillating, the narrative of Natasha’s role as a commodity in the global child porn industry, and Mark’s conception of that narrative as “a prize,” rehearses the various ways that both Zina and Natasha are treated both as objects and as ideas. Though Mark spends weeks listening to Natasha’s stories and having sex with her, when she runs away from Zina, declaring her intention to go to Florida and look up a businessman she met during the filming of the pornographic films, he allows her to leave, giving her some money and “watch[ing] her drag her suitcase down our street” (105). While the Bermans quickly go through the rhetorical motions of eradicating Zina and Natasha from their family compact, Natasha finds some sort of haven at Rufus’s home. It is also Rufus who finally undercuts Mark’s mostly self-interested attitude toward and treatment of Natasha, scolding “Come on, Berman, she’s a fucking kid. How is she supposed to get to Florida? She barely speaks English. Either she’s here or she’s on the street” (109). Thus, Rufus rejects Mark’s stance in relation to Natasha’s story, especially Mark’s credulous commitment to the idea that Natasha might go to Florida and that the businessman will “give [her] a job” (105). Rufus’s admonishment destabilizes both Mark’s apparent (or strategic) naiveté and, more importantly, the way he covets her story. That said, Rufus’s assertion that “she’s here or she’s on the street” cannot be read as evidence of benign intentions: Rufus is also a businessman, one who uses the suburban home as cover for his own illegal activities. The image of Natasha in Rufus’s backyard, “carrying a tray with a pitcher of water in multicolored plastic glasses” (108), depicts her body in a new role: that of the suburban homemaker serving guests. This role, however, is as false as the masonry and plaster Doric columns Rufus is installing in his backyard (109). Natasha’s body and her story, signified by the way the “stoners liked more than anything to hear Natasha say fuck off in her crisp Moscow accent” (98), has simply been added to Rufus’s idea of

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“property value” (101). Ironically, when Mark is banished from Rufus’s house, ostensibly because he makes Natasha uncomfortable, Bezmozgis’s narrative indicates that Mark’s most egregious, most naive mistake is not his failure to acknowledge Natasha’s suffering, but rather his failure to capitalize on that suffering within a willing market for exoticized women’s bodies. In this story, Mark fails to understand and make use of the codes of White, heteronormative civility that Rufus has mobilized. As much as Natasha and Other Stories considers how deterritorialized space masks various types of gendered violence, the cycle also considers the way cultural difference disappears (or, rather, can be strategically “disappeared”). When, at the end of “Natasha,” Mark claims to emerge from his subterranean life, he is no more visible than his cousin, as he too exists within and blends into a Whitened space. In the next story, “Choynski,” Mark is presented as a researcher tracking down whatever evidence might exist about a late-nineteenthcentury Jewish boxer named Joe Choynski, “known as the greatest heavyweight never to win a title by the handful of people who still remembered [him]” (114). This story – juxtaposing Mark’s research activities in San Francisco with scenes of him hearing his family’s reports about his dying grandmother – explores the familiar theme of death’s consequences and the role of those who are left to deal with a life’s traces. Mark seeks out information on a boxer who few recall; he weeps when he realizes that he has lost his grandmother’s dentures; he pledges to a fellow sportswriter, who is dying, to keep a life’s worth of sports memorabilia away from an evangelical Christian son who will not appreciate its value. When Mark asserts to Charley, the old sports writer, that he’d “run out of places to look for Choynski and didn’t like to think that [he’d] never find him” (116), the assertion is also an admission of anxiety about his own identity, both in terms of knowing himself and wondering whether he will leave a “mark”; at the side of his grandmother’s grave, his search for her lost dentures in the snow operates as a metaphor for this theme, as Mark digs “first with purpose, then with panic” (126). Thus, the story ends by exploring the paradox of Whiteness as a flexible category, as the minoritized subject must negotiate the relative advantages and disadvantages of the unmarked body. In “Choynski,” Bezmozgis reprises the paradoxes of cultural Whitening within a post–9/11, globalized space. Mark draws attention to distinctive features of this world when, after taking calls on his cell

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phone and booking airplane tickets, he notes that “with technology, it was possible to never miss a funeral” (124). More significantly, in the non-place of a hospital where he goes after witnessing Charley have a massive stroke, Mark experiences an instance of individual deterritorialization, as the specificities of his own cultural identity are rendered invisible. Mark, who has taken on the responsibility of tracking down Charley’s son, finally meets Jim at the hospital and waits with him near the “snack and coffee machines” (121). Jim, who identifies himself as one of the Promise Keepers, immediately begins asking Mark about his relationship with Christ, telling him a story about a son and father who rebuild their relationship through regular visits to church. Mark says: “as I listen[ed] to the story I tried to anticipate the ending. I had heard something similar from one of my Hebrew school teachers” (122). In other words, Mark’s White (Eastern European) body can “pass” as Christian, a factor in keeping with current trends in diasporic studies, Baum Singer argues, which focus on the movement of bodies that cannot be read as White. Baum Singer contends that “mainstream culture coercively encourages the removal of racialized signs of identity from the social realm, signs that remain ghostly in the poetic realm” (2012, 115), an idea visible in the highly symbolic final image of the story, in which Mark digs through the white snow for his grandmother’s lost teeth. Perhaps coincidentally, Bezmozgis’s story “Choynski” can read in comparison to the most widely anthologized story from Richler’s The Street, “The Summer My Grandmother Was Supposed to Die.” Both feature dying grandmothers (although, in the Richler story, the narrator’s grandmother lives for seven years after the initial diagnosis); both include references to the protagonist’s fascination with Jewish sports heroes (for Mark, the boxer Joe Choynski, and for Jake Hersh, the minor league baseball player Kermin Kitman); and both draw attention, more or less explicitly, to the issue of Jewish masculine selffashioning. In her essay “Heroic Imaginings: Judaism, Masculinity, and Compensation in Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, St Urbain’s Horseman, and Solomon Gursky Was Here,” Robin Nobel points out that “as Richler’s protagonists fall further from the mark of ideal manliness, their fantasies about a paragon of masculinity become more vivid, ever-present, and all-consuming” (2010, 90), also noting that “Duddy, Jake, and Moses are contemporaries to the founding of the state of Israel, its remarkable success as a military power, and the change in the perception of Jewish men that these events

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brought about” (91). As Nobel argues, the presence of “tough Jews” (93) in Richler’s work allows him to explore the complexities of excessive hero worship and its relationship to an emasculating failure to act (101). In Bezmozgis’s cycle, the examination of masculine insecurity is focused on the paradoxical tension between individual physical strength and social weakness, as Bezmozgis explores the contradictions inherent within codes of White civility and their relationship to violence. The characters in Natasha and Other Stories exist in the post–Six Day War world, one in which the figure of “the new Jewish soldier and man is able to redeem Jewish history” (Nobel 2010, 93); however, as noted in the story “An Animal to the Memory,” the emigration story of the Bermans involves a decision not to go to Israel on account of the “150 million angry Arabs” (2004, 67). The Bermans’ choice to immigrate to North America rather than Israel thus, in part, represents the refusal to take up the role of “the new Jewish soldier,” as Bezmozgis examines what it means to live in the diaspora, where the goal of “redeem[ing] Jewish history” is complicated by having “trouble identifying the enemy” (67). This “trouble” is exacerbated post–9/11, as increased anxiety about the porousness of national borders and ensuing pressures to surveil the allegiances of minoritized subjects undermines straightforward narratives of immigrant arrival and belonging. From the first story in the short story cycle, the problem of the immigrant’s arrival is addressed via explorations of Mark’s desire to perform individual strength and the way this desire is thwarted by the necessity that the minoritized immigrant accept social weakness as part of his performance of civil belonging. As explained in “Tapka,” six-year-old Mark and his cousin Jana are tasked with walking their neighbour’s dog; when in the ravine near their apartment building, they play fetch with the dog: “We threw Clonchik [a toy clown] and said ‘Tapka get Clonchik.’ Tapka always got Clonchik” (8). On the fateful day of the dog’s accident, Mark is annoyed with his cousin for walking out of the ravine with the dog’s leash, leading him to throw Clonchik toward Jana, “put[ting] everything in my six-year-old arm behind the throw” (11). After the dog is hit by a car and the children are about to be driven to a veterinary clinic, Jana “remembered something. I motioned for the woman to stop the car and scrambled out. Above the atonal chorus of car horns I heard: ‘Mark, get Clonchik.’ I ran and got Clonchik” (13). This scene – the only point in the story in which the narrator’s name is identified – signals the way Mark’s individual strength, such as it

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is at any given time, does not signify as power; Mark is as much subject to orders and everyday exigencies as the dog. A similar point is made in the next story, “Roman Berman, Massage Therapist.” When the Bermans are invited to dine with the Kornblums, a wealthy Canadian Jewish family, they assume (wrongly) that Dr Kornblum intends to recommend patients to Roman’s fledgling massage therapy business. Instead, they find themselves subject to the patronizing gaze of Jews who have, as Richler might put it, already “made good and gotten out,” but who periodically still wish to make a spectacle of the history of Jewish suffering. The main object of the dinner appears to be having the Bermans and another newly arrived family rehearse their experiences as Soviet Jews, and Mark’s mother is somewhat embarrassed to admit that, unlike the other family, the Bermans had not been barred from emigrating. After the dinner, Mark finds his father in the bathroom, giving a massage to Mrs Kornblum as she “lean[s] forward on the bathroom counter in her bra” (34). Though Mrs Kornblum marvels to Mark about Roman’s “magic” hands, Roman feels the shame of his subjugated position; as he plaintively asks his son, “Tell me, what am I supposed to do?” (35). When, at the end of the evening, the Bermans are making their leave, Mrs Kornblum gives them back a homemade apple cake they brought, explaining “Even though they sometimes took the kids to McDonald’s, they kept kosher at home” (36). Bettina Hofmann argues that the return of the cake is a hostile gesture, as Mrs Kornblum “offends a Jewish precept which demands that one honor one’s guests and not insult one’s neighbors” (2006, 109). However, as the reference to “McDonald’s” shows, the Kornblums’ attachment to Jewish precepts is whimsical at best, as they too are influenced by their diasporic, unsettled existence. At worst, the Kornblums’ insinuating subjugation of the Bermans operates as another version of coercive Whitening or violent enforcing of White civility, the codes of which provide context for the choice to “sometimes [take] the kids to McDonald’s” and “[keep] kosher at home.” Within the multicultural Canadian ideal, even the Kornblums remain vulnerable to social surveillance. In “An Animal to the Memory,” Bezmozgis once again raises the issue of the contingent “tough Jew” identity, especially how that identity operates in a deterritorialized, diasporic space in which “identifying the enemy” is not straightforward. As Mark explains, after moving from the apartment to a semidetached house in a new neighbourhood, his goal is to cultivate a “hoodlum persona. At

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school, I kept to myself, glowered in the hallways, and, with the right kind of provocation, punched people in the face” (2004, 70). At times, Mark’s “hoodlum persona” overlaps with the redemptive figure of the “tough Jew,” as when he pretends to defend friendless Solly Birnbaum from another student’s taunts. However, as Mark makes clear when he admits “I had never defended him before but I seized my chance” (69), his fundamental motivation is to pick a fight at every opportunity. The difficulty with Mark’s persona is that he is unsure how to “identify the enemy” within a diasporic space: as is evidenced in the description of the smoked meat sandwiches he and his fellow Russian Jewish immigrants bring to their Hebrew school in suburban Toronto, categories of identities and purposes are difficult to comprehend. Later, in “Choynski,” the representation of Mark indicates that, despite growing out of his “hoodlum persona,” the desire to project a sense of identity via toughness persists. After reading over Jim’s list of biblical verses about having a personal relationship with Christ, Mark remembers a favourite prayer he learned at Hebrew school: “The Lord is with me, I do not fear – what can man do to me? The Lord is with me among my helpers, I will see the downfall of my enemies … They surrounded me, they encompassed me, but in the Name of the Lord I will cut them down” (125). As Mark affirms, “It was a fighter’s prayer” (125). The persistent thematic focus on physical strength and fighting is also related to Raewyn Connell’s notion of body-reflexive practice, as Bezmozgis depicts efforts by the ethnically minoritized subject to legitimize a heteronormative masculine identity. As Connell argues, “bodily performances are called into being by [social] structures” (2004, 54), and her use of the term “performance” here reflects, at once, the physical capacities, experiences, and readability of bodies.3 Likewise, for Mark, picking fights is a test of bodily strength and/or tolerance for pain, as well as a chance to be seen as a “hoodlum.” Connell further points out that: “Some bodies are more than recalcitrant, they disrupt and subvert the social arrangements into which they are invited. Homosexual desire, as Guy Hocquenghem argued, is not the product of a different kind of body. But it is a bodily fact, and one that disrupts hegemonic masculinity” (58). At various points in Natasha and Other Stories, the threat of the homosexual body to performances of hegemonic masculinity is raised, most often in relation to anxiousness about the surveillance of minoritized Jewish bodies. In “Tapka” and “Animal to the Memory,” for example, characters

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such as Mark, his cousin Jana, and classmates at their Hebrew School toss around homophobic slurs, as Bezmozgis represents the casual cruelty of children seeking to assert their own normativity by deeming other bodies as abject. More pointedly, in “The Second Strongest Man,” Bezmozgis embeds a flashback to a scene in Latvia, in which Roman Berman, along with the Jewish weightlifters he has been training, endure the alternating homophobic and anti-Semitic taunts of Soviet soldiers, resolving that “humiliation was better than a beating and a police inquiry” (2004, 43). This story is suffused with references to the surveillance of bodies, whether by the kg b or by judges in a weightlifting competition, as Bezmozgis elaborates on the dangers of being subject to the power dynamics of social scrutiny. Thus, a key theme in the cycle examines how the ethnically minoritized subject tries to evade such scrutiny via an outsize performance of hegemonic, heteronormative masculinity. Despite his intense need to articulate a redemptive masculine Jewish identity through toughness, however, the culturally Whitened space Mark inhabits leaves him feeling helpless. As noted above, the final image in “Choynski” depicts Mark weeping, digging weakly in the snow. In “An Animal to the Memory,” Mark is also shown weeping, this time in response to Rabbi Gurvitch’s shaming of Mark for his act of attacking another student on Holocaust Memorial Day. Importantly, Bezmozgis links Mark’s breakdown both to a sudden awareness of his bogus “hoodlum persona” and to his sense of unsettlement. When Gurvitch takes hold of his shoulder, Mark realizes that although he “consider[s] [him]self a tough little bastard,” he is still simply a child (76–7); further, when Gurvitch releases Mark, he is overwhelmed with a sense of instability: “I was standing in the middle of the hallway, shaking. I wanted to sit down on the floor, or lean against a wall, something” (77). Apparently, according to Gurvitch, this sense of shame and unsettlement, this sense of the impossibility of finding a proper space, even in a post-Six Day War world, even in Canada, is that which constitutes “what it is to be a Jew” (77). According to Baum Singer, the “contemporary Jewish diasporic difference [is] a process marked by the erasures of cultural displacement necessitated by white civility, a process situated within a larger colonial ideological structure, and haunted by the immeasurable losses that are a part of the process of becoming visible (becoming Canadian) itself” (2012, 117, emphasis in original). In this scene from “An Animal to the Memory,” Bezmozgis suggests that, despite a desire to cultivate an alternate Jewish masculine

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identity or to participate in a narrative of arrival, the persisting failure to be recognized as appropriately Canadian, and/or as civil, is “what it is to be a Jew.” Thus, it is not surprising that the final story of the cycle, “Minyan,” returns to the issue of apartments, community, and masculinity, as Bezmozgis considers a fantasy of settlement – settlement that is not dependent on visibility or redemption. The rising action of “Minyan” is focused on the need to find Mark’s grandfather a new apartment following the death of his wife, and on the byzantine system of subsidized housing in Toronto, though, as Mark notes, “No doubt an apartment existed, and waited, like America, to be discovered” (2004, 130). Mark’s grandfather finally manages to get a space in the B’nai Brith building owing primarily to his commitment to attending the building’s synagogue, which “was no longer drawing a minyan for Friday night and Saturday morning services” (131). The story then turns to the matter of Herschel and Itzik, two widowers that share an apartment, a space that is highly sought after following Itzik’s death. Both Hofmann and Royal argue that the final story is focused on the importance of community, drawing attention to the final words of the story, in which Zalman, who runs the apartment’s synagogue, declares his loyalty to the continuation of Jewish religious principles: “My concern is ten Jewish men. If you want ten Jewish saints, good luck … Homosexuals, murderers, liars, and thieves – I take them all. Without them we would never have a minyan” (147). Hofmann notes that the short story cycle’s depiction of Mark’s increasing identification with the culture of Jews is of a piece with Zalman’s “eager[ness] to fulfil the obligations of Jewish law” (2006, 104), while Royal suggests that “Minyan” traces “Mark’s (ironic) assimilation into the Jewish community” (2012, 246). Both critics assert that nostalgia motivates Mark, each quoting his words, “I came [to synagogue] because I was drawn by the nostalgia for old Jews” (2004, 134). In these senses, “Minyan” functions as a type of return story, lamenting the loss of older touchstones, as when the rabbi at Itzik’s funeral laments “los[ing] another piece of the old Jewish life” (141). However, as I’ve argued, in a post–9/11 space of insecurity, nostalgia is linked with futureoriented activity associated with mastery, order, and settlement. Thus, Mark’s nostalgia notwithstanding, “Minyan” also draws attention to the debasement and plotting of would-be Settlers; to those who, for a crack at a subsidized apartment, will readily imply that Herschel and Itzik are homosexuals, will suggest that such activity is

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disgusting, and will bribe Zalman with alcohol, money, and false promises about regular synagogue attendance (143–4). As Mark notes, the issue of a minyan, of the need for ten Jewish men, is “a serious problem” (132), not only because of the forces of modernity, but also because of changing notions of masculinity. Herschel describes his dear friend Itzik as a “real Odessa character, right out of the pages of Babel” (139). At Itzik’s funeral, however, Itzik’s own son thanks Mark for his attendance, but also confirms his rejection of his father’s law and cruelty: “For him nothing was forbidden. That was my father, you understand? He raised his fist to his face. He was like this, Itzik’s son said. He drove his fist into a snowbank” (143). Thus, the anxiety about the disappearance of a diasporic cultural community is once again linked to the complexity of how to read performances of Jewish masculine identity: as abject, as committed to being counted within a minyan, as violent. The characterization of the “serious problem” of forming a minyan, together with the depiction of insincere Jews searching and scheming for apartments, ready to impugn Herschel and Itzik in the process, undermines the straightforward nostalgia Hofmann and Royal perceive. It is also possible to read the community that Zalman imagines as an angry fantasy of settlement, whereby diasporic men conjure up ways to fight for and take possession of space, by whatever means are necessary. In the representation of Zalman, and throughout the cycle, Bezmozgis considers the implications of rejecting the process of cultural Whitening and of having oneself counted as a Jew, which is that settlement will likely be temporary, fraught, and, potentially, morally suspect. For the ethnically minoritized writer negotiating the Canadian national imaginary, the course of arrival can only be completed if the writer is willing to disappear into the codes of heteronormative White civility. Thus, in Bezmozgis’s short story cycle, the emergence of the civil bearer of risk is stalled, primarily because self-actualizing as this figure puts the minoritized, immigrant subject at risk of vanishing. Mark Berman’s incessant desire to project a certain kind of masculinity, one associated with being “a tough little bastard” (77) and “a fighter” (125), is at odds with the demands of a culture of surveillance that views the immigrant as a potential threat. Thus, Mark’s choices are to accede to a process of coercive Whitening, sacrificing his identity and giving in to the effects of settlement, or to remain just outside the borders of the national imaginary, never quite arriving, remaining positioned, at best, as “the toughest kid in Hebrew school” (71).

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In Natasha and Other Stories, Bezmozgis self-consciously adopts the insider/outsider perspective of the immigrant writer, exploring how the complexity of Jewish settlement is linked with the problem of “identifying the enemy.” In each story, Mark is shown to be torn between a desire to assert his arrival and a desire to disappear into the coerciveness and relative ease of movement promised by Whiteness, heteronormativity, and deterritorialized homogeneity. As is made clear when the Bermans visit the Kornblums, or when Mark is being reprimanded by Rabbi Gurvitch, or when Zalman declares his guiding principles, to assert one’s arrival as a Jew is to become a metonym for a history of suffering, for the persistence of shame and guilt and difference, and for a determination to fight for space, no matter the moral implications of asserting kinship with “murderers, liars, and thieves.” Thus, as a settlement narrative, Natasha and Other Stories displays both ambivalence and longing, as if the non-place of the suburbs is merely the latest iteration of a temporary space of not-quite-belonging. Next, I consider Vincent Lam’s Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures (2006), another debut short story cycle both circulated and celebrated as a narrative of arrival. In Lam’s stories, the visibly racialized immigrant characters are set in contrast to a representation of the wounded White man in crisis, as Lam adopts the insider/outsider perspective to explore the concept of benign multiculturalism within the contexts of the cosmopolis and the non-place of the hospital.

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6 CONTAGION AND CONTAINMENT Vincent Lam’s Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures and Expert Systems in the Cosmopolis

The fifth story in Vincent Lam’s award-winning short story cycle, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, published in 2006, is a complex inversion of a narrative of arrival, one in which the narrator, Chen, never clarifies how he and his family reached Toronto. Instead, “A  Long Migration” focuses on, as Chen puts it, “sorting through [the] histories” of his paternal grandfather Percival – or Yeh Yeh, as he is known – during “the period preceding his anticipated death” (103). Chen, having completed a year of medical school in Toronto, has come to Yeh Yeh’s retirement community in Brisbane, Australia to act as the family’s medical scout. As in Bezmozgis’s story “Choynski,” a chief concern in this story about awaiting death is the matter of communicating with far-flung family members, whereby Chen will “pronounce his [grandfather’s] impending death, and this would set in motion a flurry of rushed phone calls to travel agents” (103–4). As Mark points out in “Choynski,” “with technology, it was possible to never miss a funeral” (Bezmozgis 2004, 124). The representation of global connectivity in “A Long Migration” is set alongside other tropes of the contemporary Canadian immigrant narrative, including: the representation of cultural collisions, particularly in the representation of both Eastern and Western medical practices and in the summary of Yeh Yeh’s convoluted relationships with his several wives; the  increasing pervasiveness of deterritorialized spaces, such as retirement communities and hospitals; and a thematic focus on the protagonist’s desire for a sense of belonging. As noted above, h ­ owever, “A Long Migration” remains almost silent on the matter of Chen’s own migration story, suggesting only that his grandmother and father

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left Vietnam and somehow ended up in Toronto. In Lam’s story, the migration narrative is equated with a kind of murky symbolism, as evidenced by the image towards the end of the story of the narrator standing on a beach in Brisbane, “watch[ing] the humpback whales migrating north” (2006, 116). Such dependence on symbolism rather than specifics coheres with the way Lam’s cycle operates less as a bildungsroman – like Natasha and Other Stories – and more as the story of an interconnected community in cosmopolitan Toronto. Beginning with a discussion of the way Lam’s short story cycle considers the issue of coercive Whitening within the cosmopolitan and deterritorialized spaces of urban health care facilities, I continue to explore how a minoritized Canadian author might show awareness of his inside/outside community position. Lam is interested in exploring the vanishing point of civility for racialized bodies, even those bodies that move fluidly within globalized expert systems. Through an examination of the cycle’s representation of borders, contagion, and containment, its focus on Fitzgerald as a White man in crisis, and on Chen as the heroic and yet flawed physician, I will consider Lam’s version of a shifty settlement narrative, as the racialized physician/ writer tries to belong to his community, and is ultimately forced to consider the value of disappearance. Throughout the cycle, Lam acknowledges the inherent violence of coercive Whitening, as the racialized characters, especially Sri and Chen, negotiate their precarious position within the national imaginary. As noted, the publication of Natasha and Other Stories provoked commentary on Bezmozgis’s own narrative of arrival, with critics Nicholas Dinka and Evan Gillespie remarking somewhat disparagingly on the “hype” attending the author (Gillespie 2004, para.1). Such commentary, however, pales in comparison to the veritable scandal surrounding not only the publication of Lam’s Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures (which came out a year after Bezmozgis’s book), but also that this debut work was awarded the Scotiabank Giller Prize. In Transnational Canadas: Anglo-Canadian Literature and Globalization, Kit Dobson surveys the scandal, linking the matter with his own interest in “the anxieties that surround ethnically and racially marked and marketed writing” (2009, 159). As Dobson explains, soon after the prize was announced, Stephen Henighan wrote an article for Geist magazine alleging that the competition was “fixed” and that the Giller phenomenon was simply “an attempt to lionize a new generation of writers in order to carry out the cultural projects of the earlier

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generation” (Dobson 2009, 159).1 After surveying both Henighan’s critique and the ensuing response (both approving and disapproving), Dobson suggests that, while Henighan’s accusations of a rigged Giller competition are surely “over-the-top” (164), the surprising enthusiasm for Lam’s short story cycle by industry critics, the reading public, and the Giller prizing committee may be linked to the text’s representation of a benign multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism. As he argues, “What Lam’s doctors know … are cosmopolitan values and Western medicine” (164), whereby “One is welcome to be different within a global city like Lam’s Toronto, but only as long as those differences continue to make themselves recognizable and understood … The cosmopolitan order may be tolerant, but it is not necessarily inclusive or accepting” (165). In other words, though the narrative centrality of characters like Chen, Ming, and Sri suggests an acknowledgment of the racially and ethnically diverse populace of Toronto, the values such characters are ultimately aligned with affirms the influence of coercive Whitening, especially as that Whitening is associated with the deterritorialized, expert arena of Western medicine. The procedure of coercive Whitening and its relationship to what Dobson refers to as the “ideals of cosmopolitanism” (164) are portrayed in Lam’s story “Take All of Murphy,” a story about medical students’ experiences during a course in anatomy and dissection. The story is thematically focused on cultural practices concerning the dead and the matter of dignity; as the course instructor, a Dr Harrison, intones to students Chen, Ming, and Sri during the first class: “This fine cadaver is your first patient. Dignity and decorum are crucial. You must be mindful of this gift you are given, and treat your patient nobly” (2006, 33–4). Dr Harrison’s avowals about dignity, however, are undercut by the instructor’s capricious insistence that students use pages of their anatomy textbook to make origami figures, such as the “swans [that were] hung over the cadavers with twine” (44). Likewise, Dean Cortina, who is visited by both Chen and Sri when they are undergoing difficulties in the course, uses these occasions to reminisce about her own experiences in medical school, simultaneously insisting on professionalism and ignoring her students (48). Despite the poor modelling of the instructors, however, Sri takes the brief lesson on dignity to heart, wanting to choose a name for their assigned cadaver that is “dignified but comfortable” (40). The eventual choice of the name Murphy draws attention to how the practice of cultural accommodation is defamiliarized in this story, suggesting that, like

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Bezmozgis, Lam is aware of the way he is positioned in CanLit circles as an ethnically minoritized writer. The story is mostly set in the hyperbolically Whitened non-place of a dissection classroom, where all students are required to wear white lab coats; the coats are “the same size, even though wearers were of varying build” (31). While the three medical students in the story are of Chinese-Vietnamese (Chen), Chinese (Ming), and South Asian (Sri) descent, the cadaver is White, Canadian (as evidenced by his Royal Canadian Air Force tattoos), Christian (as evidenced by a tattoo that references the New Testament passage Mark 16), and is given an Irish sounding name. Thus, it is the three racially marked characters who engage in the procedure of reading and then literally dissecting the normative Canadian specimen. Lam self-reflexively acknowledges the story’s inversion of the White gaze when, at the request of Sri, Chen paraphrases the story in Mark 16, describing to Sri the image of Jesus’s empty tomb and his appearance to Mary Magdalene. In response, Sri asserts: “It’s good stuff” (52), encouraging the consideration of this Christian story as if it were a new, unfamiliar element of Canada’s diverse culture. The main conflict in the story occurs between Sri and Ming. While Sri insists on treating Murphy with respect, for example, trying to find a way to dissect his arm without cutting through his tattoos – or, as Sri refers to them, “his symbols” (43) – Ming persists in loudly reminding her dissection partners that the cadaver is just a corpse (40). Importantly, with respect to the issue of coercive Whitening and cosmopolitanism, Sri’s insistence on “respect[ing] a man’s symbols” never manifests as an imposition. When Ming challenges Sri’s wish to safeguard the tattoos, pointing out “Don’t your people burn the corpses anyhow,” Sri responds: “He’s not my people” (43). While Sri here embodies a model of cosmopolitan tolerance and accommodation, the respect he insists upon is a respect for, as Dobson might put it, the “values” of “Western medicine.” Importantly, the space of the dissection classroom is set up solely to affirm Western medicine, not Hindu cultural practice: no corpses will ever be burned in this space (and, as it happens, when Sri’s death and funeral are described several stories later, in “Contact Tracing,” the narrative indicates that he will be buried, not cremated [286]). The representation of Ming’s refusal to accommodate or respect specific cultural symbols is likewise rhetorically complex. Lam sets up Ming as a cautionary figure in this inverted tale, whereby her absolute fidelity to the ideal of homogeneity and her unwillingness to tolerate

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difference, depicted most strongly in her unwillingness to cut around Murphy’s tattoos, operates as an object lesson in the stakes of the multicultural ideal. Though Chen suggests to Sri that Ming merely has “a tough exterior” (39), and that she just “follows the book” (46), the narrative’s representation of Ming is much more damning. Ming persists in making dehumanizing jokes about the cadaver (37), she misplaces the left side of the cadaver’s head, eventually leaving it in a bag with some of the intestine (49), and she bullies and mocks Sri (43). In one scene, the narrative describes how “the bowel tore. A line of shit squirted onto Ming’s coat … She wiped it off, leaving a mark, finished tracing the mesenteric circulation, and laughed when she threw the coat into the garbage” (40–1). Here, Ming is emphatically shown to exist on the vanishing point of civility, whereby her excessive coldness and intolerance of difference – her eagerness to pick out a new lab coat and make it fit – is not enough to erase the way she is marked as abject, as outside a circle of tolerance and belonging. Further, the complexity of Ming’s disruptiveness is connected to her status as a woman, as hinted at in “Take All of Murphy” in the scene where she handily dissects the cadaver’s penis (48). What is important to note is that the conflict between Sri and Ming about cultural respect is a self-reflexive fantasy, as both characters (not to mention the conciliatory Chen) remain Other despite the story’s defamiliarizing tricks. In the story’s most poignant image, Sri – the most willing of these racially marked students to participate in a performance of coerced tolerance – stands naked in a bathroom stall, convincing Chen that he is “fine” (39).2 Thus, while it may be true that Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures represents a comforting affirmation of benign multiculturalism, which perhaps explains its conspicuous success in the CanLit market, Lam depicts the ideal of cosmopolitanism from a position of self-awareness about what is at stake for a racially marked writer. Like Natasha and Other Stories, Lam’s Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures draws attention to “personal and ethnic self-knowledge and development” (Davis 2001, 22–3). Also similar to Bezmozgis’s text, the fantasy of belonging that is readable in Lam’s cycle operates as a shifty narrative of settlement (Kuttainen 2010, 23), which is all the more complex for a writer who is both inside and outside the Canadian imaginary, and who wants to make space for himself. As I will discuss, this subjective ambiguity is observable in the cycle’s representation of the hospital space as a site of contagion, of containment, and as backdrop to the performance of

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expertise. Lam’s insider/outsider perspective is shown in the ongoing narrative of Fitzgerald, an exemplary and ironic portrayal of the wounded White man in crisis, as well as in the cycle’s return story – “Before Light” – which, like “A Long Migration,” focuses on Chen and completes the cycle’s exploration of the flawed physician and limits of White civility. In her study Contagious: Cultures, Carriers and the Outbreak Narrative, Priscilla Wald traces the outlines of what she calls the “paradigmatic story” of the “outbreak narrative,” the internal paradoxes of which are the same paradoxes inherent to discussions about cultural globalization: “As epidemiologists trace the routes of the microbes, they catalog the spaces and interactions of global modernity. Microbes, spaces, and interactions blend together as they animate the landscape and motivate the plot of the outbreak narrative: a contradictory but compelling story of the perils of human interdependence and the triumph of human connection and cooperation, scientific authority and the evolutionary advantages of the microbe, ecological balance and impending disaster” (2008, 2). In her discussion of the “appeal and persistence of the outbreak narrative” (3), Wald enumerates many contradictory tropes. For example, Wald examines the way “patient zero” narratives tend to cast individuals emerging from “primitive” or “primordial” spaces as a threat to modern populations (7–8), and also tend to construct the plot of “emerging” contagion as if microbes only ever move in one direction (34). Wald also notes the way ostensibly objective, scientific analyses of microbial movements are freighted with value judgments, whereby “communicable disease offers records of desire, of violence, of sexual commerce” (38). Finally, Wald considers how the outbreak narrative “register[s] the anxieties of globalization”: Outbreak narratives actually make the act of imagining the ­community a central (rather than obscured) feature of its ­preservation. As communicable diseases depict global connections, and the ecological perspective of the germ theories stresses communal transformation, the conspicuously imagined community is certainly in danger of dissolution. Yet, from its fragility – its ­tenuousness – it also derives power, reminding its citizens that the community, and all of the benefits it confers on them, is ­contingent on their acts of imagining, just as the literal health of the nation depends on their obeying the regulations set in place by medical authorities.3 (53, emphasis in original)

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Though only “Contact Tracing,” the penultimate story in Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, is explicitly devoted to the subject of outbreak, Lam’s cycle is often concerned with the twinned issues of metaphorical contagion and containment within medical spaces, as shown in the representation of time in “Code Clock,” in the blurring of binaries in “Eli,” and then in the representation of quarantine in “Contact Tracing.” In these stories, Lam deals with the complex codes associated with surveilling disruptive bodies, as well as with protecting the health of national systems. The stories “Code Clock,” “Eli,” and “Contact Tracing” all depict Fitzgerald – the fourth protagonist of Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, known as Fitz – in the act of navigating the hospital space, first as a resident, then as an attending physician, and finally as a patient. In “Code Clock,” Lam considers as oppositional the way the body communicates, and the way Western medical culture works to contain the body’s communications. In the story, Fitz and his attending physician, who is named Nigel, respond to a “code blue,” a term used in hospitals to indicate that a patient requires immediate medical attention, usually in the form of artificial resuscitation; in his capacity as a resident physician, Fitz runs the code – i.e., directs the attempt to resuscitate the patient – as part of his medical training. On their way to the patient’s room, Nigel advises Fitz to refrain from rushing, noting “My rule is when you come into a code, your heart can’t be faster than the clock” (2006, 90). The tension between body and clock runs throughout the story, thematizing the idea that, whereas apparently objective demarcations of time can be made to lie, the body always tells the truth. As a definitive marker of modernity, the clock stands for organized, mechanized, and institutionalized reality, a reality in which individual experiences are disembedded and collated within what Anthony Giddens refers to as “expert systems” that rely on “trust” (1990, 28–9). In The Consequences of Modernity, Giddens argues that in an increasingly globalized world “no one can completely opt out of the abstract systems involved in modern institutions” (84). In other words, one of the main conditions of modernity is that expert systems affect almost every aspect of daily life, whereby any real option of exercising (or not exercising) trust is usually foreclosed: while you might be able to choose one company over another to pave your driveway, it is much more difficult to completely opt out from driving on paved roads.

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Lam overtly engages with the matter of medical practice as a trusted expert system in the moment in “Code Clock” when a nurse makes a notation on a medical chart. After arriving at the patient’s room, Nigel repeatedly asks how long it has been since the patient was last checked in on; eventually, the nurse – who identifies herself as Sharon – arrives on the scene to announce that “[she] saw him ten minutes before Maria [a different nurse] called the code” (2006, 92). Before making this announcement, however, Sharon has picked up the patient’s chart “to make an entry,” and then – in the presence of Nigel, Fitz, and Maria – she “writes the time, ten minutes ago, into her notes” (92). Though the story makes clear that this notation in the chart is a falsification, the time marker of “ten minutes” stands, whereby the interval spent on the attempt to resuscitate before a time of death is “called” follows from this indiscriminate, artificial point (92, 99). In contrast to the story’s depiction of how the marking of time can be fabricated are portrayals of the way the body’s messages are real: Maria’s real exhaustion after executing compressions can be read in the “streak of sweat down her back” (98); Fitz’s commitment to running the code properly is interrupted by his real need to urinate, as the “pressure on his bladder [becomes] insistent and angry” (99); even  the realness of death can be diagnosed by the non-expert Mr Singh, a patient in the next bed, who originally reports to Maria that his roommate “seemed quiet” (91). An important corollary to this set of contradictions is the way the marking of time is associated with the hierarchical system of the hospital as an exemplary expert space. While it is Sharon who falsifies the chart, her willingness to do so occurs within the context of complex power relations, as shown by the discussion between Maria and Nigel before Sharon arrives. Maria’s responses to Nigel’s questions about when the patient was last checked are defensive, prompting Nigel to emphasize, “I’m not saying anything’s wrong … I just need to know how long” (91). While the attending physician’s “need to know” might be interpreted as a necessary element of a legitimate attempt to resuscitate, the ensuing characterization of Nigel suggests that the “need to know” is primarily related to constructing a narrative of medical procedure that will be confirmed by the trusted expert’s signature. Nigel makes clear throughout the story that he is operating in a supervisory role. Along with advising Fitz about how quickly one should move in response to a code blue, he asserts his supervisory position

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in more or less subtle ways: though Nigel suggests that Fitz “run the code” (90), he continues to comment on Fitz’s performance throughout the episode, from questioning Fitz’s ability to insert an endotracheal tube, to criticizing the length of time this procedure takes, to scoffing at one of Fitz’s treatment suggestions. As I explore further below, this short story represents a part of an ongoing narrative of Fitz’s emasculation, the fragments of which accumulate as the cycle progresses. Further, Nigel’s gibe, “This isn’t practice, Fitz” (98), is complicated. As evidenced by Nigel’s final line in the story, in which he confirms knowing that the patient was clearly already deceased when they arrived, Fitz’s procedural efforts do constitute nothing more than “practice,” as no amount of medical treatment would have made a difference. That said, as a medical resident, Fitz is required to “practice” his skills, and the relatively low stakes of the situation might be considered an ideal circumstance for training. Nigel’s attitude, therefore, must be read within the context of his self-conscious performance of expertise: though Nigel (along with everyone else in the room, including Mr Singh) can read the patient’s body as dead, acts of medical treatment must be accomplished – as if those acts were genuine, and not “practice,” and as if the time marker of “ten minutes without vital signs” were truthful, and not a falsification – so that a time of death can be officially “called,” and so that an explanatory medical note can be written and signed by the medical experts (100). Throughout Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, the healthcare system is continually, though sometimes ironically, reaffirmed as an expert system and it is this sort of complicated reaffirmation that likewise buttresses such expert systems as state-regulated multiculturalism and persistent settlement activity (including national literary prize culture). Lam, a racialized author, self-consciously raises the idea that it is the body, not systems, which ultimately tells the truth. One of the subtle violences of coercive Whitening is that belonging is conferred in accordance with how a body is read, and this surveillance of bodies is integral to the tolerating system of multiculturalism. The training in expert containment of system narratives depicted in “Code Clock” forms the context for Fitz’s behaviour in “Eli,” a story that, while not an outbreak narrative, explicitly takes up the issue of contagion. While “Code Clock” explores hierarchical systems of “trust” (Giddens 1990, 29) that exist in an institutional medical space, “Eli” explores a collision of systems in that space, as Fitz is asked by two police officers to attend to a man who is under arrest but in need

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of medical treatment. In his own narrative voice, Fitz muses, “Cops and robbers and doctors. It’s a game where mostly everyone can be happy if we all play nice” (2006, 167). As the reworking of the phrase “cops and robbers” indicates, Lam’s goals in this story are both to consider the ethical deficiencies of cops and doctors and to defamiliarize various binary oppositions, for example: “private” versus “public” (165); “quiet” versus “screaming, struggling, calm-down-or-we-tieyou-down” (165); good versus “bad” (167); “docile” versus “difficult” (167); sane versus “psychotic” (172); “restrain[ed]” versus “resisting” (176); and “innocence” versus infection (183). The initial power struggle between Fitz and the officers emerges, not because Fitz is genuinely concerned that Eli has been injured by the police or has been subject to illegal forms of coercion, but because the officers persist in their attempts to control the official narrative, and will not cede Fitz absolute authority within his own space of expertise: “Cops. They want to get seen first. Put them at the front of the line but then they won’t talk” (170). When Fitz decides to hijack the officers’ version of the narrative, suggesting that Eli might be psychotic and therefore in need of additional medical treatment (172), he is alert to the strategic value of invoking the “tragic” plot of “mental illness” (173), thus showing Lam’s thematic focus on the way expert narratives – medical, law enforcement, or juridical – can be manipulated. This usurping of narrative, however, is only temporary, as Fitz’s anger about being bitten by Eli outweighs his desire to perform his authority for the police. In his depiction of the bite, Lam invokes the language of value-driven fear that Wald argues pervades the conventional outbreak narrative: “The human bite is the dirtiest, the most foul, and destined for infection. Worse than dogs or cats, because the human mouth is full of filth” (Lam 2006, 180). Though the term “filth” here is meant to denote potentially contagious microbes, it also connotes certain kinds of language: violent, profane, and damaging. After being bitten, Fitz abandons his interest in Eli’s mental health, telling him “You’re going with the police now”; when Eli tries to assert his need for a psychiatric evaluation, Fitz’s response is “Never heard you say it” (181). While Eli persists in using filthy language in his interactions with both the officers and Fitz, it is ultimately Fitz’s language, as well as his refusal to acknowledge Eli’s claim, that results in Eli’s release from hospital into the custody of two probably corrupt police officers. Further, Fitz’s fear of the bite – his fear of the “evil of blood,” which can “distort motive and action, and … propagate its own dark,

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spreading reach” (181) – leads to his corroboration of the police officers’ suspect expert narrative: as Fitz tells one of the officers, “there’s a lot of bruising that you may not have noticed yet. Multiple bruises consistent with accidental injury. That’s what I’m writing in the chart” (185). Thus, through his own manipulation of narrative, including a narrative that is written on the patient’s body, Fitz upholds the idea that “the conspicuously imagined community is certainly in danger of dissolution” (Wald 2008, 53), as it takes the work of multiple individuals working across multiple systems to create and contain a narrative of social danger or of civil social progression. In “Contact Tracing,” Fitz again appears, this time as a patient suffering from sars, a form of virulent respiratory disease that, according to the World Health Organization (who), infected over 8000 people worldwide in 2002–03, including 251 people in Canada. Of those 251 cases, 109 – or 43 per cent of those infected – were health care workers; as a result of being infected during the second wave of sars to hit Toronto, three health care workers – two nurses and one doctor – died of the disease (National 2003, 20). Though the story includes direct quotations from w h o statements, the events recounted in “Contact Tracing” are fictional, and it is Lam’s use of conventions of the outbreak narrative that show his thematization of the “conspicuously imagined community.” As per Wald, Lam begins his story by highlighting the relationship between the disease and globalization. After quoting from who statements about the “First known case of atypical pneumonia [which] occurs in Foshan City, Guangdong Province, China” (Lam 2006, 269), the story describes Fitz, who has been placed in quarantine in a Toronto hospital; in notes ostensibly written by a Dr Zenkie to Chen, Fitz’s infection is traced to a patient “whom Dr Fitzgerald transported from Shenzhen, China, to Vancouver, Canada” (273). Importantly, globalization is linked in “Contact Tracing” to the way “Microbes tell the often hidden story of who has been where and when, and of what they did there” (Wald 2008, 37). Though sa rs is not a sexually transmitted communicable disease, Lam links the circumstances of Fitz’s illness to his unsettled existence as a travelling physician assistant, and to his alcoholism. Though Fitz believes “he had kept the alcohol just below the surface – a quick shot in the back of the plane, one or maybe two with a meal, a glass of comfort before sleeping in the hotel rooms that looked the same all over the world” (2006, 275), Chen recalls the day when “Fitz had arrived for a shift with the sweet smell on his breath, his speech slurred,

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and was asked to leave and stop seeing patients” (288). The connected issues of what Wald refers to as the “emerging” (2008, 34) outbreak narrative and the “literal health of the nation” (53) appear in the story’s juxtaposition of the “‘panic’ attitude” in China, “where people are emptying pharmaceutical stocks of any medicine they think may protect them” (Lam quoting wh o documents, 2006, 270) and the sophistication of Fitz’s “respiratory isolation room” (270), as well as in the figure of Chen. After initially treating Fitz, Chen also develops sars ; when Fitz suffers respiratory failure, Chen breaks through a glass partition between their isolation rooms to intubate him. The characterization of Fitz and Chen in “Contact Tracing” is complex for a few reasons, indicating Lam’s focus on expert personas and the shifty protagonists of settlement narratives. Lam’s take on the Toronto’s sars outbreak is a fictionalized account, and it is in his departures from recorded events that his thematic concerns are realized. The main action of “Contact Tracing” is set during the first wave of Toronto’s s a r s outbreak, which occurred between March and April of 2003; during this period, as noted in Michael G. Tyshenko’s study sa rs Unmasked: Risk Communication of Pandemics and Influenza in Canada, outbreaks at both Scarborough Grace Hospital and Sunnybrook Hospital affected patients, visitors, hospital staff, and healthcare workers though, during the first outbreak, no healthcare workers died from the disease (2010, 30). Though “Contact Tracing” makes note of the source of Fitz’s infection – the fairly anonymous “patient whom Dr Fitzgerald transported from Shenzhen, China” – Lam’s portrayal of patients with the disease in the short story is mostly confined to three doctors: Fitzgerald, who, by the story’s end, is “reported to be in critical condition” (2006, 305); Chen, who recovers; and Dr Zenkie, who reportedly “succumb[s] to sars ” on 25 March 2003 (299). Alongside his portrayal of these doctors, Lam depicts Dolores, a nurse and single mother who is assigned to the sars unit following a union-approved lottery (281). As Tyshenko’s study enumerates, nurses frequently felt disempowered and ignored during the sars outbreaks, even while they were being overworked and put at risk (2010, 176–7). “Contact Tracing” draws upon many of the chronicled difficulties nurses faced during the sars outbreak, including how the outbreak affects Dolores’s home life: after being asked to remove her children from daycare, she finds a babysitter and “explain[s] to the kids that they shouldn’t tell anyone that Mommy was a nurse” (2006, 294). The portrayal of Dolores’s personal

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suffering reaches its apex when, after feeling feverish, she leaves the lineup for work before anyone can check her temperature, fearing the possibility of quarantine and its effect on her children even more than the illness: “who would pick up the kids from the sitter and bring them home if she couldn’t?” (302). Importantly, however, Lam depicts Dolores’s suffering as psychological and personal, not physical and not tied to a narrative of sacrifice: in “Contact Tracing,” only doctors become ill, as Lam continues to explore the notion that doctors are “human.” To this end, not only does Fitz muse about how his title confers “his best and last and only piece of clothing which, despite its flaws, could hardly be discarded” (271), but he and Chen spend their time in adjacent isolation rooms chatting on the phone, sharing quirky anecdotes about various doctors, including personal stories that explicitly highlight their own flaws. Chen describes his decision to put off informing family members about their mother’s death for several hours, just so that he can get some sleep during his night shift (289), while Fitz admits to watching silently from a park bench as a woman calls for help and then tries to perform cpr on a homeless man (290–1). The story’s unambiguous portrayal of the flawed physician operates in tension with the final scene, when Chen not only “saves” Fitz, but sacrifices his own safety for the good of the community; as he reports to a news station, “In a critical situation, it takes too long to put on the sars gear, and people die in the delay, but I’ve already got sars , so I don’t need the protection” (305). The heroic image of Chen – the racialized doctor – breaking through a barrier to save a White man from the protocols that will kill him is highly evocative. In this “super” human moment, the ChineseVietnamese doctor pushes back against the East to West outbreak narrative established in popular accounts of the disease’s spread, while at the same time reconfirming the medical man as a voice of expertise and authority. In this penultimate story of Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, Lam justifies his fantasy of settlement, belonging, and benign ­multiculturalism, as the racialized man becomes the saviour of the nation, helping to maintain the borders of containment. The story “Contact Tracing” is also notable as an end point to Fitz’s narrative in this short story cycle. Before considering the return story in Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, which focuses on Chen, it is worth considering the arc of Fitz’s story, especially with respect to the idea of White manhood in crisis. As Sally Robinson explains in Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis, a key convention of narratives that

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explore the way White men experience their own fear of a loss of cultural power is a focus on the wounded White man’s body, which, as Robinson argues, paradoxically does the “work of recentering white masculinity by decentering it” (2000, 12, emphasis in the original). In other words, at the very cultural juncture when previously marginalized voices are starting to be heard, the representation of the weakened White man’s body confirms in new ways the old idea that we really need to pay attention to White men, in this case because White men are suffering. The narrative arc concerning Fitz is complicated, primarily because the portrayal of the wounded White man is provided by a racialized author who, in the short story “Take All of Murphy,” defamiliarizes the representation of Whiteness via inversion. In the case of Lam’s representation of Fitz as a wounded White man, the main rhetorical device for defamiliarization is hyperbole. Fitz is introduced in the first story of Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, “How to Get into Medical School, Part I,” described as “pure and noble” in his attitude toward studying medicine, but not “strategic” (2006, 10) in his classes and exams. Therefore, unlike Ming (and presumably Chen and Sri, the two other racialized characters in the cycle), Fitz does not get into medical school on his first attempt. The third story of the cycle, “How to Get into Medical School, Part II,” focalizes Fitz’s distress when Ming ends their relationship, as he refuses to accept her repeated rejection of him and eventually breaks into her apartment only to be confronted with the reality that Ming is romantically involved with Chen (83). The issue of Fitz’s alcoholism can also be traced back to his interactions with Ming: in “How to Get into Medical School, Part I,” Fitz reacts to Ming’s early assertions that they should not date by drinking, enjoying the various emotional stages that arise with each successive pint, including “feeling sorry for himself,” “anger,” and “careless release” (7–8). In “Contact Tracing,” Fitz’s hyperbolically wounded status is displayed via the focus on his illness and in the commentary on his alcoholism and loss of his job as an attending physician. Importantly, Lam connects Fitz’s woundedness to his persisting fixation on Ming (a woman he dated for less than a year, several years previous). In Fitz’s mind, it is Ming’s cruelty, selfishness, and unfeminine behaviour – symbolized by the lack of maternal care she shows in Fitz’s alcohol and sa rs fever-induced nightmare (276–7) – that leads to his illness and probable death. In her study, Robinson examines various “middlebrow” texts written by White American men, including authors John Updike, Michael

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Crichton, Philip Roth, John Irving, Stephen King, James Dickey, and Pat Conroy, arguing that “The defensiveness of the middlebrow as a cultural sphere is parallel with the defensiveness of white men on social and political fronts” (2000, 15). Robinson goes on: “Like the marginalized or minoritized subject who is first marked by the dominant culture, and then appropriates that marking for her own purposes, the so-called average American – straight, white, male, middle-class – also experiences a mark imposed on him by others and then learns to restage this identity as marked” (16). What is curious about the staging of the narrative of the White man in crisis in Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures is, first, Lam’s status as a “racially marked and marketed” writer (Dobson 2009, 159) and, second, the status of the cycle within a Canadian prize culture dedicated to, as Gillian Roberts argues, “[selling] the nation back to itself” (2011, 16). One might read the twinned narratives of Fitz and Chen as a subtle usurpation plot, in which Fitz’s downfall is juxtaposed with Chen’s ascendency: the wounded White man succumbs to illness, while the racially marked man triumphs in his profession, gets the girl, and engages in flashy, self-sacrificing heroic activity that is rhetorically connected to safeguarding the nation. If the timeline were somewhat different, one might even be tempted to consider Chen’s triumph over Fitz as a crafty retort to Henighan’s grievances about the unfairness of a national prizing culture that favours “the new multicultural establishment” (2006, 61). As Davis argues, however, racially marked, immigrant writers are often “conscious [of] … the reality of an insider/outsider point of view” (2001, 20), a consciousness Lam shows in a section of “How to Get into Medical School, Part II.” After Fitz breaks into Ming’s apartment, using a key he “suspect[s] that she had forgotten about” (2006, 79), he overhears a phone message left by Chen and then imagines the following scene: fitz g e r a l d (while grabbing c he n in a headlock): Ming promised to marry me. c hen : So you’re the loser who keeps hounding her. Get a life! c hen , who is secretly a kung fu master as well as a brilliant medical student, suddenly breaks the headlock, flips ­f itz g e r a l d on his back, and pins him to the ground with his legs while he calls the police using a tiny and very fashionable cellphone. With a quick flip of his knee, ch e n knocks

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fitz ge r a l d unconscious. f i t z g e ral d wakes up in prison, in a cell with three smiling, burly men. (83–4) The representation in this scene of Chen as the White man’s fantasy version of a stereotypical Asian, associated with the mysteries of both martial arts and advanced technology, shows Lam’s cognizance of his own position(ing) as a racially marked man, even within a tolerant Western cosmopolis. Even as he “flips” the White man on his back, he does so to perpetuate Western, masculine tropes, from protecting a woman’s honour and subjecting the erring man to the “punishment” of homosexual rape to having his extra-juridical violence confirmed by the system of law and order. In this sense, Lam’s own shifty settlement narrative of immigrant arrival is connected to an understanding of how authority must be rhetorically managed according to the rules of White civility. Also, arguably, the relative complexity and completeness of Fitz’s character arc, in comparison to the character arcs of Ming, Sri, and even Chen, shows an ironic awareness on the part of the minoritized writer that the wounded White man must be narratively centred.4 In the cycle’s return story, “Before Light,” Lam once again takes up a subject raised in “How to Get into Medical School, Part I,” which is a doctor’s motivations. While in the opening story of the cycle Ming and Fitz eagerly agree with one another that they “wanted medicine for the right reasons … service, humanity, giving” (10), in this final story Chen complains to Ming: “I hate my job, Ming. I despise it. I have to get out of this. I can’t do this forever” (307). Ming gently chastises her husband, suggesting that he really only despises working the night shift and that, “In general, you sort of like your job” (307). That said, the representation of Chen’s behaviour throughout this final story clashes with any claims towards “service, humanity, giving”: in his final story, Lam reaffirms in extravagant terms the cycle’s fundamental gambit, which is that the insider’s account of the expert system of healthcare can be trusted because he presents individual doctors as personally flawed. Further, even more so than in “Take All of Murphy,” Lam considers the racialized body in relation to the limits of uncivil behaviour. On the way to the hospital, Chen takes pleasure in blaring his horn, driving his Mercedes Benz c l k 430 too fast, and trying to get ahead of a man in a pickup truck, after thinking to h ­ imself, without irony, “Small man, big car. Custom chrome bumper. Loser” (310). During his shift, Chen behaves in ways that are alternately rude,

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ambivalent, sloppy, petty, and even unprofessional: for example, when a patient who has needlessly come to the emergency ward for treatment of her hiccups (which Chen cures) asks him to look at her ­psoriasis, he takes pleasure – a “wormy little righteousness” (323) – not only in scorning her complaint that he will not treat her rash, but also in describing the interaction in “the most complete and verbose note I have written all night” (323). Later, toward the end of his shift, when challenged by another doctor about the choice to refer a patient for further treatment for cellulitis, Chen “loudly” explains, in disparaging detail, that the patient is morbidly obese; that the patient’s “legs, instead of being tubular, are more like two globular structures,” and that “If I give him oral antibiotics, the tablets will become lost in his elephantine digestive tract” (333) and so on. In this confrontation, Chen also tries to dominate his colleague physically, “lean[ing] forward and hop[ing] that he will tilt backwards so far that the chair will fall over” (333). Finally, the short story represents Chen as not only uncivil, but also a potential danger to the community as, during his drive home from his shift, he can barely stay awake. The representation of Chen’s incivility reflects the distinctive space of the Western cosmopolis, a space that provides the possibility for the racialized man to exist as unmarked. Within such deterritorialized spaces as the freeway or emergency ward, identity is differently readable, whereby Chen is identified with his sporty, expensive, German vehicle and as the site of medical expertise. Thus, the refusal by Chen to uphold the tenets of White civility in this return story can be read in two ways. Chen’s uncivil behaviour is, at once, a staunch rejection of the idea that the body is the final site of truth and a tricky confirmation of the ideals of benign multiculturalism, as Lam rehearses a fantasy of settlement through disappearance into the cosmopolis. Chen need not worry about seeking accommodation within this deterritorialized space: in the true cosmopolis, anyone can be personally obnoxious. On the other hand, the final images of the “Before Light,” once again show Lam’s ambivalent insider/outsider position, especially with respect to settlement through disappearance. After his night shift, Chen has trouble getting home, almost falling asleep on the freeway, slapping himself and screaming nonsense words in order to stay awake (334–6); back at his condo, he has a moment of euphoria at the notion that everything is “all of an identical essence” and then blacks out (337). Upon waking, he cannot allow himself to speak: “If I talk, it may allow things to spill from me. It could set in motion a vertiginous

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unbalance, a confusion leading to madness, or a hunger that may cause me to eat until I burst and die. If only I do not speak, I will be fine” (337). While Chen’s ascendance within the realm of the medical system has afforded him a certain kind of belonging, especially against the contexts of the Canadian cosmopolis and the ideal of benign multiculturalism, the return story in Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures emphasizes the precariousness of his position, and – by extension – the position of a racialized writer of CanLit, who must also consider the extent to which, “If only I do not speak, I will be fine.” In this arguably metafictional moment, which recalls the earlier description of the human mouth as “full of filth” (180), Lam highlights the violence of coercive Whitening. In order to belong, the racialized figure must accept the codes that control his ability to speak straightforwardly about his experience, knowing that to call attention to his own body is, potentially, to be seen as a threat – as a foreign contagion within the borders of the national imaginary. In Natasha and Other Stories, Bezmozgis’s exploration of the ­non-places of the suburbs is linked to concerns about the effects of coercive Whitening, whereby the Jew must commit himself to remaining marked in order to maintain a sense of ethnic community. In Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, Lam considers the way modern, expert, globalized systems are associated with the ideal of truly deterritorialized belonging, but which hide the stakes of belonging for the racialized figure who can only, paradoxically, belong through disappearance. Lam strategically makes use of his insider/outsider position, not only to defamiliarize normative Western narratives and explore at arm’s length the trope of the wounded White man, but also to consider the position of the racialized immigrant Canadian who has achieved success, but whose success will always be judged against the vanishing point of White civility and tolerance (and, in this sense, Lam’s short story cycle may be said to anticipate Stephen Henighan’s outraged response in Geist, in which Henighan goes so far as to disparage Lam’s legitimacy as a minority writer).5 Lam’s explorations of the twinned themes of contagion and containment reflect anxieties in the post–9/11 decade associated with guarding the borders of the Canadian national imaginary, especially against sneaky foreign incursion into the cosmopolis, whereby the cycle offers up the central, accumulating characterization of Fitz as the White man in crisis as if to compensate for the portrayal of multiple racialized medical professionals. In the final part of this section of Bearers of Risk, I consider

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Anthony De Sa’s Barnacle Love (2008), another debut cycle by a minoritized writer taking up such issues as Whitening, civility, and arrival. While much of Bezmozgis’s cycle is set in the suburbs of Toronto and Lam’s within institutional spaces associated with medical practice in the cosmopolis, De Sa’s short story cycle focuses on an ethnic enclave existing in the heart of the city.

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7 NEW CANADIANS Anthony De Sa’s Barnacle Love, Ethnic Enclaves, and Civility

In the story “Shoeshine Boy,” which is in part two of Anthony De Sa’s 2008 cycle Barnacle Love, the protagonist – Antonio Rebelo, a boy of nearly twelve – considers the borders between his own neighbourhood and cosmopolitan Toronto. As he explains, the streets comprising Toronto’s Portuguese enclave  – “Palmerston, Markham, and Euclid Avenue” – are a dull caricature version of “back home” (147): “Our backyards were contradictions, with their neat rows of beans and tomatoes and kale propped up by a mishmash of weathered dowels, old hockey sticks, and scraps of quarter-round. Nothing was ever thrown out” (147). For Antonio and his friends, exploring beyond the enclave represents “escape” (146) both literally and in terms of claiming a White, middle-class Western identity: “We wanted our mothers to buy peanut butter, Swanson t v dinners, and macaroni and cheese … We wanted our fathers to wear shirts and ties to work” (146–7). Crucially, “Shoeshine Boy” also presents the desire to escape as potentially dangerous, as the story highlights the response of the community to the news that Emanuel Jaques, a twelve-year-old boy of Portuguese descent, has “disappeared into what many consider the cesspool of the city, Yonge Street” (155). In the final scenes of “Shoeshine Boy,” once it has been established that Jaques has been murdered, Antonio describes his parents “fear and anger … [and] relief” (158) after he returns from an extended bike ride into the city, as well as his recognition that the borders of the enclave have undergone a change, have become tighter. As with Bezmozgis’s Natasha and Other Stories and Lam’s Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, De Sa’s Barnacle Love describes the process of existing within Toronto’s

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cosmopolis as a struggle between monitoring the borders of ethnic difference and giving in to the complicated ideal of disappearance into Whiteness. I will start by linking De Sa’s Barnacle Love to the circulation of Bezmozgis’s and Lam’s cycles as another arrival text, pointing out how De Sa’s own debut short story cycle takes a somewhat structurally awkward approach to what was, in 2008, a highly marketable genre. Reaching back into Canadian literary critical history a bit further, I will also link De Sa’s text to a trend Daniel Coleman refers to in his 1998 study Masculine Migrations as “New Canadian” narratives, paying attention to the relevance of De Sa’s use of critical race and postcolonial studies in stories about immigrants from the Azores region of Portugal. My goal here is to explore how De Sa tries to appeal to expectations of Canadian literary markets in crafting the right kind of immigration stories. Manuel, the father figure in Barnacle Love, is ultimately represented as a failed immigrant, in part because of his old-world patriarchal values and in part because he fails to pass as a normative Canadian, despite both his perceived Whiteness and his outsize performances of patriotism. In the second part of the cycle, and especially in the return story, Antonio emerges as a more suitable New Canadian, primarily because he has learned to successfully negotiate the nuanced terms of White civility and to make a strategic performance of his own status as a wounded, White man. Though the publication of Barnacle Love, together with the shortlisting of the book for the 2008 Scotiabank Giller Prize, recalls the complicated positioning of Bezmozgis’s and Lam’s publications, De Sa’s cycle did not generate the same degree of discussion, either about De Sa as “the next big thing in Canadian fiction” (Dinka 2004, para. 1) or about the scandal of yet another Toronto-centric, benignly multicultural, industry-supported debut book finding favour with the Giller Prize jury. As it happens, unlike Bezmozgis, whose stories were published in the New Yorker, Harper’s, and Zoetrope, De Sa published stories eventually collected in Barnacle Love in such Canadian literary journals as Dalhousie Review, paperplates magazine, and Descant; also, the 2008 Scotiabank Giller Prize was awarded to Joseph Boyden’s second novel Through Black Spruce, at the time to no one’s apparent surprise or indignation.1 Still, the marketing and reviewing of Barnacle Love made explicit comparisons to other short story cycles about immigrants and/or Toronto. For example: Matthew Fox begins his review for Quill and Quire by asserting that “The latest trend to grip

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Canadian publishing – immigrant literature – has been both refreshing and an inevitability … From David Bezmozgis’s Natasha to Vincent Lam’s Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, this trend has also kept the literary focus on the spot where most writers and most immigrants happen to live: Toronto” (2008, para. 1). Likewise, J.C. Peters’ review, published in Canadian Literature, notes that “De Sa’s Canada in Barnacle Love is multicultural Toronto. Like Rohinton Mistry, Madeleine Thien, and David Bezmozgis before him, De Sa explores what it means to pursue the Canadian dream: finding new hope and pride in a new place and leaving the oppressions of homeland far across the sea” (2009, 155). Even the blurb about the book on the Penguin Random House Canada webpage enthuses, “Like Wayson Choy and David Bezmozgis before him, Anthony De Sa captures, in stories brimming with life, the innocent dreams and bitter disappointments of the immigrant experience” (Penguin Random House Canada n.d., para. 1). That De Sa’s book became linked with, as Fox puts it, “the latest trend to grip Canadian publishing” certainly paid off in terms of sales: as noted on BookNet Canada (2008), following the announcement of the Scotiabank Giller Prize shortlist, “Barnacle Love, the debut short story collection by Anthony De Sa … saw a sales bump of 350%” (BookNet Canada 2008, para. 2). In his essay “The Homeless Patriot: Anthony De Sa and the Paradoxes of Immigration,” Albert Braz points out that De Sa, “with only one book to his credit … has managed to achieve what so many other Portuguese-Canadian authors have failed to do; he has entered his country’s literary mainstream” (2011, 63). Among the reviews of Barnacle Love, which are not quite as plentiful or favourable as those for Natasha and Other Stories or Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, Fox’s assessment is particularly tepid. Importantly, though, he concludes by faulting those in the bookmaking industry for the cycle’s shortcomings, stating, “No doubt there is talent here, but more nurturing and editing would have allowed the book to have resonated for much longer than the duration of a publishing trend” (2008, para. 5). My object here is not to agree or disagree with Fox’s appraisal, but to draw attention to how the marketing of Barnacle Love – as a debut short story cycle about the immigrant experience in Toronto – may be problematically overdetermined, and thus worthy of scrutiny, especially in relation to the book’s status as an arrival text. For example, Fox’s reference to “nurturing and editing” calls to mind a central difficulty with De Sa’s short

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story cycle, which is the difficulty of genre: while it is the case that four of the short stories collected in Barnacle Love were previously published elsewhere, as short stories, the text as a whole is not easily identifiable as a short story cycle. Separated into two parts – “Terra Nova” and “Caged Birds Sing” – the book includes five externally narrated stories that are focalized through Manuel Rebelo, an immigrant to Canada from Portugal’s Azores region, and five internally narrated stories, focalized through Antonio, who is Manuel’s son, born and raised in Toronto. While these sorts of structuring principles and shifts in focalization are perfectly in keeping with the category of the short story cycle, other elements of the text, in particular the prevalence of intratextuality and a lack of what Forrest Ingram might call the “individuality” (1971, 19) of each story, or what Susan Lohafer would call “the perception of storyness” (1994, 302), gives the impression that Barnacle Love is a fragmentary novel. For example: in the last scene of the first story, “Of God and Cod,” a young woman called Pepsi thanks God for sending her Manuel, after her father saves the young man from drowning (2008, 28). In the first paragraph of the second story, “Reason to Blame,” the narrative describes Pepsi’s initial care for Manuel after this ordeal (29), as if the two sections were linked like chapters in a novel and not readable or portable as discrete short stories.2 That said, one might argue that De Sa makes use of the tension between unity and fragments thought to be inherent to the short story cycle in order to reaffirm the volatility of the “New Canadian” ­narrative. In Masculine Migrations: Reading the Postcolonial Male in “New Canadian” Narratives, Daniel Coleman refers to the time in 1980s and 1990s when there was a “groundswell of publications by writers of diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds whose emergence … coincided with the establishment of Canada’s policy of official multiculturalism” (1998, 12). Though Coleman’s work in Masculine Migrations focuses on writers who in more or less complex ways are identified with the “uneven genealogies of postcolonial migration” (17), his point that discourse on multiculturalism shapes the institutions of CanLit is relevant for an analysis of De Sa’s text, even insofar as mid-twentieth-century emigration from the Azores relates both to poor economic and political conditions back home and to the fact that “Canada was promoting such immigration in order to meet its need for agricultural and railway workers” (Teixeira and Da Rosa 2009, 6).3 Perhaps even more significantly, De Sa makes use of critical

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race and postcolonial theory to conceptually locate Azorean immigrants. Each of the two sections of Barnacle Love includes an epigraph: the epigraph to “Terra Nova” is a well-known quotation from James Baldwin’s 1964 monograph Nothing Personal, while the epigraph to “Caged Birds Sing” is an even better-known quotation from Maya Angelou’s 1983 poem, “Caged Bird.” In an essay titled “Personal Reflection: The Need to Look Back,” De Sa quotes Salman Rushdie’s Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981–89, so as to conceptually ground his discussion of his own family’s complex relationship to the idea of home (2011, 255).4 As various critics have pointed out, however, the functions of multicultural discourse in Canada and CanLit are fraught. At one end of the spectrum, critics like E.D. Blodgett in Five Part Invention: A History of Literary History in Canada reference the anxiety of “abandon[ing] any pretense of order [in defining a literary history] beyond what multiculturalism dictates” (2003, 300), whereby the “excesses of multiculturalism can lead to a hegemony of the future” (302).5 At the other end, critics discuss the homogenizing force of “official” discourse: in his essay in Trans.Can. Lit: Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature, Rinaldo Walcott points out that for “more than thirty years … official multiculturalism in Canada has been critiqued by scholars on the Left … [for] its failure to produce a liberatory citizenry and its success at managing difference, especially racial difference” (2007, 20). Walcott’s use of the term “success” in his discussion of the force of multiculturalism discourse is suggestive, and not only in relation to his argument that literary narratives of multiculturalism become opportunities for national self-congratulation, or what Pauline Wakeham might call “the latest stage in the country’s supposedly long-standing tradition as a just and tolerant society” (2012, 210). “Success” here can also be understood in market terms, and in another essay from Trans.Can.Lit, Ashok Mathur considers the relationship between market logic and the circulation of multicultural narratives: “The literary publishing industry … is most interested in creating a reading public that will bring it maximum revenue. To do this, the industry must manufacture not just a particular kind of taste, but a great equalizing taste” (2007, 149). While De Sa’s focus on an immigrant family from the Azores in Portugal does not fit neatly within the historical or political rubric of the postcolonial, Manuel is cast by De Sa as a “New Canadian.” This figure’s characteristics sometimes evoke the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century wave of European

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immigrants who arrived in Canada by ship and took the railways West. At other times, Manuel is portrayed as a mid-twentieth-century immigrant responding to global economic shifts, whose arrival narrative involves negotiations with official state systems and documents. De Sa’s choice to muddy the issue of Manuel’s immigration narrative, often casting it in the register of the gothic, allows him to sidestep post–9/11 concerns about the porousness of national borders. Likewise, the choice to follow a market trend and write the arrival narrative as a debut short story cycle is in keeping with the way Barnacle Love tries to appeal to the “great equalizing taste” for a certain kind of immigrant and settlement narrative, one that marks Canada as a space for refining the unsophisticated dreams of outsiders. In his critical essay on Barnacle Love, Braz argues that De Sa “exoticizes the Portuguese community” (2011, 70), linking the idea of the exotic especially with the representation of rural life in Lomba da Maia, the parish Manuel grows up in and which is featured in the “Terra Nova” section of the cycle. On the one hand, it is not difficult to link the basic features of Manuel’s experiences in Lomba da Maia, as well as his arrival in Canada, which first occurs as part of his employment with the famous Portuguese White Fleet who fish off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, to the historical record and/or De Sa’s own biography. As noted in Susan Goulart Costa’s study Azores: Nine Islands, One History, the settlement history and rules about land ownership within that region of Portugal produced a “profoundly rural” (2008, 281) and stagnant economy, based primarily on cattle farming; Costa writes that, in the twentieth century, “given the limited land available in an archipelago where there were few alternatives to agriculture and many needing to work, immigration became the only possibility for those who dreamed of a better life” (281). This contextual grounding is visible, for example, in De Sa’s representation of Manuel’s mother’s wish that he cement his family’s position by marrying a woman who is “the heiress to forty head of cattle” (2008, 103), as well as in Manuel’s words to his mother that “I knew if I stayed in our town, on our stifling island, I’d be consumed by what it was you hoped and dreamed for me” (30–1). Further, as evidenced by the citation in his acknowledgments (215), De Sa’s representation of Manuel in Newfoundland is indebted to the essays on the White Fleet contained in The Portuguese in Canada: From Sea to City, edited by Carlos Teixeira and Victor M.P. Da Rosa. In particular, De Sa makes liberal use of Peter Collins’ essay “Remembering the Portuguese,”

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which includes an explanation of saudade, defined by Collins as “a longing, a homesickness, a nostalgia for something lost” (2009, 77)6 and by the narrator of “Of God and Cod” as “a longing for something so indefinite as to be indefinable” (De Sa, 2008, 4), as well as a description of Portuguese fisherman buying cheap sneakers (Collins 2009, 79, De Sa 2008, 17) and playing soccer barefoot (Collins 2009, 79, De Sa 2008, 20–1). Finally, as De Sa makes clear in his “Personal Reflection,” the representation of Lomba da Maia in “Terra Nova” is, in part, based on his own family lore (2011, 252–3). Then again, the register of the stories in the “Terra Nova” section is highly melodramatic, arguably gothic in the use of image and symbol, as well as in the unmoored sense of temporality. For example: “Made of Me” and “Barnacle Love,” the fourth and fifth stories in the section, are primarily set in Lomba da Maia, which in itself is somewhat unusual for an immigrant story: Manuel has already arrived in the new world, quite symbolically fished out of the ocean after his dory is wrecked. He has already been saved by a Newfoundland man and his daughter, who, for her own part, considers Manuel a gift from God (2008, 26–8). His status in Canada is murky, as he “does not have the security of official papers” (54), but he has instructions for how to leave Newfoundland via “a train that will take him to a place many of them go, Montreal or Toronto” (68). Yet, the opening scene of “Made of Me” portrays the Rebelo siblings (now all living in Toronto) debating whose duty it is to return home, on account of the looming death of the family matriarch, Maria Theresa da Conceição Rebelo. Without explanation as to the process by which Manuel might have gained official papers, this story mentions in passing that the Rebelos all have passports, making the choice to travel back to Portugal a straightforward, though expensive, matter involving only a visit to a travel agent (75).7 Even more complex in terms of the temporal structure of Barnacle Love – which is, like Natasha and Other Stories and Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, for the most part sequential – the main action of the title story, “Barnacle Love,” is set before “Made of Me,” and, through the device of a framed tale, depicts yet another (or a previous) return Manuel makes to Lomba da Maia, this time to find himself a Portuguese wife. Though De Sa’s “Personal Reflection” confirms that Manuel’s return to Lomba da Maia for a marriage is rooted in autobiography and that “Like many before him, my father returned to Portugal to marry someone with a shared cultural understanding” (253), the placement of “Barnacle Love” as the final story

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in the “Terra Nova” section is narratively disruptive. In the last paragraph of “Barnacle Love,” which describes the wedding of Manuel to Georgina, Georgina bends her head and whispers to Manuel’s mother, “He’s dead to you … As God is my witness, you will never see your son again. He’s dead to you” (115). The power of this curse, however, is largely diminished by the fact that, in the previous story, “Made of Me,” De Sa depicts Manuel, Georgina, as well as their two children, Terezinha and Antonio, in Lomba da Maia, at Maria’s deathbed. Maria even has the opportunity to pronounce to Antonio, “Você veio de mim,” translated as “You are made of me” (87). Thus, De Sa subordinates the meaning making function of sequence, especially important to the short story cycle that features a repeating protagonist, to the meaning making function of gothic symbolism in this family drama, as is also made clear via some fantastical imagery. In “Made of Me,” for example, De Sa describes the strapping of Maria Theresa da Conceição Rebelo to a chair so that she can be carried to mass, passing neighbours who “[bow] their heads” (85); this scene recalls the parade of the statue of Nossa Senhora do Fátima depicted in “Fado,” a story set in St John’s, which ends with the toppling of the statue to symbolize Manuel’s rejection of the Catholic Church (70). In “Made of Me,” the parading of Maria, whose head lolls and whose “eyelids barely open” (85), is a grotesque repetition, as, like the church, Maria is consistently associated with power and cruelty. Her death in “Made of Me,” is likewise grotesque and bathetic: one morning, the family is awakened by Maria’s shrieking and find her “dragg[ing] her body up against a wall as she pointed in hysterics to a shriveled red balloon that had settled on top of her chamber pot” (88). Maria has mistaken the balloon, which belongs to Antonio and which the boy has carried with him since arriving in Portugal, for her own stomach and dies with a final “gasp of odorous air exhaled” (88). The point here, and elsewhere in “Made of Me,” is to represent life in rural Lomba da Maia as hopelessly backward, whereby the town’s most feared and revered personage is ignorant, superstitious, and hyperbolically foul. Finally, as is clear from the short story’s original title, De Sa constructs “Made of Me” as an extended comparison between Antonio’s attitude towards his grandmother and towards fish.8 Before the trip back to Portugal, the narrative includes a scene in which the Rebelo siblings recount an instance of their mother’s harshness, while at the same time Antonio watches his father scale and gut fish. Antonio is clearly distressed by the sight, asserting to Manuel that the

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still-twitching fish “want their guts back” (74). In the final scene of “Made of Me,” Antonio expresses concern about the lack of holes in his grandmother’s coffin, and then states, “Fish need air to breathe too” (95). The metaphor here is difficult to parse, and not only because, strictly speaking, Antonio is incorrect: fish don’t need air to breathe. What De Sa appears to be getting at is the idea that the dead have agency, or at least they have needs; it is those who are living who seek to deny the dead their guts and their breath. Within the context of the “Terra Nova” section’s use of gothic tropes, this representation of the unquiet dead is comprehensible. In this half of the cycle, De Sa works through the way the Rebelo family is haunted by old customs and old violences, of the sort that might be considered common symbolic obstacles within a gothic New Canadian narrative. That said, unlike some of the texts explored in Coleman’s Masculine Migrations (for example Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family and Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey) or in Justin D. Edwards’ study Gothic Canada: Reading the Spectre of a National Literature (for example Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night), De Sa’s use of the gothic is not sustained in the stories that make up Barnacle Love. Once the focalizing voice shifts to Antonio in the “Caged Birds Sing” section, the register of the stories also shifts, for the most part to realism, though – as I will argue below – traces of repressed anxiety related to the Settler identity remain. In “Canadian Gothic and the Work of Ghosting in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Fall on Your Knees,” Atef Laouyene comments that “Hybrid and imagined though it is, Canadian national identity still feeds upon the chimera of an originary, mythopoeic idea of the nation, yet what that chimera usually spawns is an uncanny, spectral otherness that keeps returning and haunting the nation at large” (2009, 137). With an exotic, multicultural, New Canadian narrative, then, one might seek out how anxieties associated with the immigrant identity manifest as hauntings (and in this sense the genre of the short story cycle might prove especially pertinent, given formal opportunities to work with gaps, repetitions, and returns). In Barnacle Love, De Sa’s play with genre and structure work to bury the gothic by shifting the focus of the immigrant narrative onto Antonio, who is born in Canada (which, again, sidesteps the issue of how the immigrant penetrates the national border). The traces of the gothic in the “Caged Birds Sing” section of Barnacle Love connect to the representation of coercive Whiteness and proper Canadian masculinities. Thus, De Sa’s move to

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the register of realism is not only an appeal to the “great equalizing taste” of the market (Mathur 2007, 149), but also evidence of what Kuttainen might call a shifty narrative, whereby “the settler subject … becomes the paradigmatic split subject and the quintessential revisionist historian, who is constantly shifting his relation to himself, to the past, and to others, in order to inhabit the authentic with some authority” (2010, 7–8). To some extent, the stories in Barnacle Love focalized through Antonio parallel the first few stories in Bezmozgis’s Natasha and Other Stories: Antonio, like Mark, is a child protagonist acutely aware of his own cultural hybridity, even within the cosmopolis of Toronto. Like Mark, Antonio has a fraught relationship to his own cultural and religious heritage, which is exemplified by a complex relationship to his parents, especially his father. In “Roman Berman, Massage Therapist,” Mark points out his relative expertise with the English language, compared to his parents; when the family works together to come up with an advertisement for Roman’s massage therapy business, it is Mark, aged nine, who is “given the pen and assigned the responsibility of translating and transcribing my parents’ concept for the flyer” (2004, 26). In De Sa’s “Urban Angel,” Antonio begins by reporting his father’s demand that the family all “speak English” (2008, 119), though this demand is shown to be ironic. Whereas Manuel continually speaks in broken sentences and uses a rudimentary vocabulary, Antonio, born in Canada, is fluent. For example: Antonio has subtle enough knowledge of English to know that his repeated use of the word “diarrhea” to explain why he is late for catechism class is both technically suitable and totally insolent (129). There is also, however, an important distinction between the two versions of the father/son dyad: while in the stories “Roman Berman, Massage Therapist” and “The Second Strongest Man,” Mark and Roman are represented as allies, the first paragraph of “Urban Angel” depicts Antonio’s attitude toward his father as complicated: “He was so certain of his chosen land that I couldn’t help but love him. I just wished he would use a word other than beautiful, which he pronounced bootiful” (119). As analysis of the stories in the “Caged Birds Sing” section shows, the ambivalence expressed by Antonio here only deepens, as Antonio oscillates between compassion for his father and contempt. This struggle is associated with Antonio’s increasing identification with the ideals of White civility, as well as with the post–9/11 iteration of White men in crisis, in which the wounded White man calls attention to himself as a figure in need of attention and care.

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For the most part, Antonio’s compassion for his father is represented as a twinned matter of custom and necessity, as the family romance predominant in the “Terra Nova” section is bathetically echoed, with the failed patriarch Manuel replacing the cruel but dominant matriarch Maria Theresa da Conceição Rebelo. In story after story, Antonio responds to his father’s various failures dutifully, thus accepting the responsibilities of the family son. The story “Urban Angel” focuses on Manuel’s failures to be a traditional breadwinner: he is fired from his job as a cleaner at St Michael’s Hospital, and fails at various other financial ventures, which include purchasing a truck, having “Manuel and Sons Haulage Co.” stencilled on its side, and then expecting employment to materialize. Antonio, comprehending his duty to perform a familial role, seems to realize that asking to ride in the back of his father’s truck during the Santo Cristo parade will mitigate Manuel’s shame. Even more explicitly, in “Senhor Canada,” after having spent a mortifying Canada Day witnessing his father sit, half dressed, on their porch and get progressively more drunk, all the while listening to a recording of “Oh Canada” that plays on repeat, Antonio watches in anguish from inside the house as his own schoolmates taunt Manuel. However, when Manuel falls down the porch stairs, Antonio rushes to help him, “dragg[ing] him step by step into our house” (176). Finally, in “Pounding Their Shadows,” the story immediately following “Senhor Canada,” Antonio is responsible both for getting his father to a medical facility and for making the case for his return home. By this point in the “Caged Birds Sing” section of Barnacle Love, Manuel “hadn’t worked in nine months. He had lost his licence for driving drunk” (190). He has also had a physical altercation with his daughter Terri, after repeatedly accusing her of being a whore, and is suffering severe alcohol withdrawal after Georgina finally gets rid of Manuel’s supply of homemade wine. The final image of “Pounding Their Shadows,” however, is the metaphorical whirligig that includes the figures of a “girl [who] … spun in a cartwheel,” a “fisherman [who] reeled in his line of fish” and a “boy [who] sat on his bike and pedalled with determination” (194). With this image, De Sa makes clear the importance of maintaining the patriarchal family compact, thus setting the stage for a reinvention of the role of the immigrant’s son as Settler. Coleman suggests that the emphasis on the family compact in the New Canadian narrative is fundamental, as migration inevitably produces changes to family structures and familiar gender roles. Making use of the work of Rivka Eisikovits and Martin Wolins, Coleman asserts that the role of the father is most at risk of

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destabilization because of migration: “‘this is so because he derives status in the family from his occupational and social role in the larger community’ and migration usually means forfeiting these authorizing roles” (Coleman 1998, 5). Adapting to new circumstances has the potential to be beneficial, as “Cut off from the support of their extended families back home, these families have to become selfreliant, a process requiring a more egalitarian division of labour between the parents” (5). It is possible, then, to read Antonio’s recognition of his duty towards his father not as a repetition of the cruel family romance sited in Lomba da Maia, but as a “migration” towards a new conception of family ties, one that overturns outdated conceptions of the patriarchal position. However, I would argue that De Sa’s persistent exploration of the grounds for Antonio’s struggle with his duty – that is, the multiple depictions of Manuel’s various failures and of Antonio’s contempt – are more closely connected to the forces of coercive Whiteness and heteronormativity than to the ideal of exploring new masculinities. In his afterword to Masculine Migrations, Coleman summarizes his discussion of a variety of novels, arguing that “In each case, the conservative nature of established cultural patterns and social structures threaten to contain whatever potential there may be for masculine change or innovation” (160–1). Coleman’s point forms the context for my analysis of the ways De Sa presents Antonio as different from his father, whereby Barnacle Love’s critique of oldworld masculinity, exemplified by Manuel, is contrasted with Antonio’s desire to emulate White civility and heteronormativity, thus enacting a new kind of conservatism or a recuperative masculinity politics in keeping with post–9/11 insecurities. Manuel’s failed masculinity is a persistent theme in Barnacle Love, especially in part two of the cycle, though it is in the story “Made of Me” that the gender dynamics of the Rebelo family are first introduced, focalized from Manuel’s perspective. In the scene describing the gutting of fish, Manuel is at once delighted by his son’s “joy as the boy picked some scales from Manuel’s stubble and hair,” and also concerned that “his son was too meek, too full of mother’s milk to live out his promise” (2008, 73). There is an irony to Manuel’s fear, as he is presented throughout the “Terra Nova” stories as emotionally dominated by his own mother. Indeed, as much as Barnacle Love appears to critique certain repugnant aspects of Manuel’s masculine persona – his tendency to communicate through anger, his unwillingness to let his wife earn money, his violence – the text also depicts powerful women as a problem. In “Made of Me,” not only is Maria

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Theresa da Conceição Rebelo criticized (and symbolically punished for her overbearing cruelty), but Manuel’s daughter Terezinha is introduced as another unruly woman. While he worries his son might be too gentle, Manuel “saw his daughter’s spirit as a bent nail, something that needed to be hammered straight before it could be used” (76). Thus, De Sa’s critique of a particular iteration of masculinity, embodied by Manuel, is often presented obliquely: it must be deduced by understanding the focalizing voice of Manuel as structural irony, while, in later stories, it must be inferred via attention to Terezinha, a mediating, secondary character, or via periodic representations of the threatened heteronormative body. Even Antonio’s anger and disgust are presented as complicated by a sense of filial duty. Importantly, Manuel’s problematic masculinity is connected to the old world and comes to operate as a sign that he is simply a failed immigrant, never quite attuned to or fluent in the performance of White civility. De Sa’s use of Terezinha, or Terri, as she later refers to herself, as a device to critique the figure of Manuel is most fully developed in “Pounding Their Shadows,” in scenes that reveal the slippage between failing masculine and immigrant identities. As stories like “Shoeshine Boy” and, especially, “Senhor Canada” show, the Rebelos have put up with Manuel’s excessive drinking and the behaviour it produces for years, and “Pounding the Shadows” shows Georgina’s desperation to resolve the problem within the confines of their own community. These actions are a logical conclusion to the attitude Georgina expresses in “Urban Angel,” when she tells Antonio, “What happens in this house, stays in this house” (120), and aligns with the general depiction of the Portuguese community in Toronto as a version of “back home” (147). On a night when Terri finally chooses to counter Manuel’s drunken rantings, which include referring to his daughter as a “fuckersh [puta]” (183), she tells him: “And it’s not fuckersh. There’s no shhh in that fucken word. You’ve been in Canada all these years and – ” “I Canadian!” I could imagine him puffing out his chest and pounding it hard. “You’re a fucken pork chop! That’s what they call us dad … pork chops!” (184) As Emanuel da Silva explains, “pork chop” is a “derogatory term for the Portuguese in Canada” (2015, 202), though a figure like Manuel would likely not be aware of this. Da Silva contends in “Humor

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(re)positioning ethnolinguistic ideologies: ‘You tink is funny?’” that generational tensions within Toronto’s Portuguese community are revealed through language use, whereby the younger generation challenges the social dominance of their elders by performing “their own English linguistic capital” (207). Importantly, Terri’s correction of her father’s pronunciation recalls Antonio’s own childhood wish that Manuel not pronounce the word beautiful as “bootiful” (2008, 119), as both children wish to disappear into what Da Silva refers to as a “de-­ethnicized Canadian culture” (2015, 190). In “Pounding the Shadows,” Terri’s rebuke of her father’s linguistic failures precedes a physical altercation between father and daughter, as De Sa presents Manuel’s failure to assimilate linguistically as of a piece with his drunken, misogynist rage. De Sa’s persistent focus on Manuel’s language failures as the key sign of his failure as an immigrant is worth examining in relation to Melinda Baum Singer’s conception of coercive Whiteness. As noted in the discussion of Bezmozgis’s short story cycle, Whiteness itself is a flexible category and, as Baum Singer points out, the “process of whitening … [is] not a benign process but one that is at the heart of managing difference” (2012, 114–15).9 Like Mark, who disappears into the homogeneity of his suburban milieu and who can pass as a non-Jew, Manuel is not immediately identifiable as existing in tension with the boundaries of normative Canadian civil society. From the opening story of Barnacle Love, De Sa makes clear that a key component of Manuel’s identity is that he looks White, with “his thick stubborn mound of blond hair, and the round angelic features of his face”; these features are even compared to the “blunt noses, darker skin, and almost black, shrimp-like eyes that adorned his siblings” (2008, 5). While his mother’s preference for Manuel’s features is presented as further evidence of Maria’s maliciousness, the importance of Manuel’s physical features is noted elsewhere in the cycle: he is referred to as “boneco,” or doll by his fellow Portuguese fishermen (“Of God and Cod,” 13); he is recognizable to the Portuguese agent charged with finding and deporting the missing Manuel (“Fado,” 64); he is admired by the nuns at St Michael’s hospital (“Urban Angel,” 120). Most significantly, he is misrecognized as a normative White Canadian by a political canvasser, one who happens to approach the Rebelo household during Manuel’s peculiar Canada Day ritual that serves as the main action of the story “Senhor Canada.” The canvasser begins his visit by congratulating Manuel: “You’re a fine Canadian to

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honour your country this way” (165). He follows up this recognition of Manuel’s belonging with some vague, boiler-plate criticism of the Liberal government, and is subsequently chased away from the house by an enraged Manuel: “‘I come from Portugal twenty-three-agoyears.’ His thick accent was made thicker by his drunken slur. ‘I come to Canada with no cash-money – my feet is my shoes! My hands, they hard … Trudeau is the man. He promise to make things easy for bring my family over here’” (165). The point in this story is not to elevate or celebrate the New Canadian, but rather to demonstrate the way Manuel fails to belong. De Sa’s choice to focalize Antonio’s reaction to the snowballing abjectness of his father, every moment of which occurs in tension with a surreal representation of the patriotic immigrant to Canada, indicates that a body itself cannot operate as a guarantee of Whiteness and White civility, even a body – such as Mark’s or Manuel’s – that can pass. Whereas Bezmozgis’s short story cycle registers ambivalence about the implications of a Jew passing as White, De Sa’s critique of old-world masculinities ultimately condemns the immigrant who fails to pass as a normative Canadian, even – perhaps especially – the immigrant who devotes the entirety of Canada Day to an outsize performance of his patriotism. A successful negotiation of the nuances and borders of a national culture requires fluency, and success is closely tied to sacrificing one’s ethnic difference to the coerciveness of Whiteness. De Sa’s exploration of heteronormativity is, like Bezmozgis’s, connected to the complex social surveillance of ethnically minoritized bodies, though – strictly speaking – De Sa does not depict queer bodies or identities, even under erasure, as in Gould’s “Leather” and “Brood”, or as maligned, as in various stories in Natasha and Other Stories. Rather, Barnacle Love includes iterations of the sexual abuse of boys, including Padre Carlos’s abuse of Manuel, depicted in “Fado” (65–6), the exploitation of Antonio’s friend Ricky by the men in Senhor Jerome’s Pool Hall, as represented in “Urban Angel” (129–31), and the story of the abuse and murder of Emanuel Jaques that forms a backdrop to “Shoeshine Boy.” Notwithstanding the absence of homosexual desire in the short story cycle, however, De Sa’s anguished focus on the sexual abuse of boys by men is thematically linked to anxiousness about both masculinity and the visibility of a minoritized community. For example, in “Fado,” De Sa juxtaposes flashbacks of Manuel’s childhood trauma with scenes of him reflecting on the aimless existence of the undocumented immigrant, observing the public

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spectacles of the Portuguese community in Newfoundland,10 and trying to evade capture by a Portuguese lawman. Even more pointed are the twinned narratives in “Shoeshine Boy,” whereby Antonio’s awareness of the mounting horror and fear within his community produced by news reports of Jaques’s disappearance is set against his “embarrass[ment]” about the continuation of “a matança” (148), the annual ritual killing of a pig. Antonio is especially outraged when, as part of this ritual, his uncle “rammed the pig’s tail in my mouth,” and his father tells him “You is man now” (156). To punish his community for this grotesque bodily assault, Antonio takes a long bike ride through the city, knowing that, in light of confirmation of Jaques’s death, his absence will be especially terrifying. De Sa thus provides context for Antonio’s cumulative embrace of civil Whiteness, as the insularity and difference of the Portuguese ethnic community is continually tied to a critique of retrograde masculinities, which are not only presented as failures of cultural fluency, but also conceptually linked to the abuse of boys. The final story of Barnacle Love is “Mr Wong Presents Jesus,” and De Sa’s work here to refer back to previous stories in the cycle coheres with Gerald Lynch’s conception of the return story, and is even more definitive as such than “Minyan” in Natasha and Other Stories or “Before Light” in Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures. For example: this final story, which describes a somewhat awkward Christmas Eve dinner the family has at a Chinese restaurant in Niagara Falls, refers back to Manuel’s time with the White Fleet (205, “Of God and Cod”); to the advice he receives from another Portuguese immigrant during his time in St John’s (205, “Fado”); to the time the family “went to Portugal to bury my grandmother” (195, “Made of Me”); and, at various points in the story, to Manuel’s past struggles with alcoholism. As the character Mr Wong suggests to Antonio, the symbolism associated with Christmas reflects “the cycle of birth and death” (202), and De Sa repeatedly works with this idea: while during dinner, Manuel recalls almost drowning and being “saved” from the water (205–6), and the story ends with an image of him walking out onto the frozen ice of the Niagara River (214). Also included in “Mr Wong Presents Jesus” are references to the layers of history associated with Niagara Falls, as well as to the mythical history of the Canadian Settler. During the pre-dinner visit to the Falls, Antonio recalls “a story from a school trip … [about] an Indian woman” who paddles in her canoe towards the Falls, but is redeemed from death by “the gods or something” and

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turned into a rainbow (200). Here, De Sa depicts Antonio’s total lack of regard for Haudenosaunee narratives, out of which this story emerges. This crass diminution of specific Indigenous histories is only amplified by the narrator’s subsequent mention of the Clifton Hill “souvenir places that sold pencil sharpeners in the shape of the Maid of the Mist and little Indian dolls with fur-trimmed parkas rimming dark-skinned faces” (211). Also thematically important are the stories contained in the “collage of old newspapers” that serves as wallpaper in the restaurant, telling of “Niagara Falls stunts and daredevils … men crossing the Falls on a tightrope … or various concoctions of boats and barrels and the happy faces of heroes, the ones who had made it over safely” (202). Even the Chinese restaurant is a site of temporal layering, as Antonio can see that it “had once been a kind of fifties diner … [though the new] owners had tried to infuse the place with Chinese touches” (200). The reinvented Chinese restaurant is a central metaphor in the return story, a way for De Sa to consider the Canadian mythologies of settlement that haunt Antonio. However, while the hard work and “smart” (204) behaviour of Chinese immigrants is recounted by Manuel, whose pronouncements have by this point in the cycle been made to seem untrustworthy and pathetic, Antonio contemplates mythic images of the Canadian Settler, which he ties to stories of his father: “the early black-and-white pictures he had of himself, posing outside Toronto’s city hall in a tailored suit and dark overcoat and fedora … Or with his plaid shirts and pleated trousers in the middle of Canada’s wilderness, his foot on top of a bear he had shot dead near the rails in Kenora. Or so he said” (196). Despite Antonio’s apparent skepticism about his father’s tall tales, “Mr Wong Presents Jesus” largely endorses notions of risk and adventure as appropriate renditions of mythic Canadian settlement activity, in keeping with the same spirit infusing the daredevils hurtling over the falls in order to make names for themselves. Manuel’s character failures notwithstanding, he has embodied for Antonio the potential to be an emblematic Settler immigrant, and Antonio is presented in the story as being anxious about having an opportunity to live up to and be the civil bearer of that myth. Manuel’s fortune cookie reads, “One cannot lose something they never had” (209), and here Barnacle Love seems to absolve Manuel for his inability to belong, to realize the dream of being “shaped” by Canada (205). This absolution re-emerges even more forcefully in the final redemptive image of Manuel on the ice, returning

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to the water to complete his sacrificial cycle. More worrisome is  Antonio’s fortune: “Things are lost when not used” (207). Apparently, Antonio has the potential to be an authentic New Canadian, but is in danger of squandering his opportunity to refine his father’s unsophisticated notion of what it means to be a Canadian man. As he complains to his father, “did you ever think how hard it was for me? How hard it still is to try and live a dream you never claimed?” (208). Thus, Antonio adopts the identity of the wounded, White man, citing himself as especially worthy of care because his outsize need to “live a dream” has not been met. Antonio here recalls the fourth pilgrim from Paul Glennon’s return story “Plagiarism,” working to justify his right to a personal narrative of discovery. Coleman notes in Masculine Migrations that a common trope in New Canadian narratives is for second-generation Canadians to fall back into old-world patterns, as “the conservative nature of established cultural patterns and social structures threaten to contain whatever potential there may be for masculine change or innovation” (1998, 160–1). In Barnacle Love, a similar process of suppression seems to obtain, despite the persistence of De Sa’s critique of Manuel’s expressions of masculinity throughout the cycle. In the return story, Antonio is shown as working his way towards a method of “living a dream,” a dream of settlement. The story’s metaphors and symbolism suggest that the method should be tied to ideas of risk and sacrifice and, in Antonio’s case, such notions are also tied to the effects of coercive Whitening and a conservative reassertion of the patriarchal prerogative. The cultural and linguistic fluency Antonio shows in “Urban Angel” is fully realized, as De Sa presents him as a burgeoning artist figure, a more nuanced type of adventurer, whose skill exceeds what his father can value or even comprehend: “Even though my teachers told him I was special, had a real gift, he always snorted his anger in the same way” (2008, 196). Further, whereas his parents, especially his mother, are presented in the final story as hopelessly parochial and unworldly, Antonio is entirely comfortable within the layered space of the Chinese restaurant. Importantly, though, Antonio’s willingness to eat Chinese food is paired with an equally apparent willingness to reduce Chinese culture to a series of bigoted stereotypes, much like his devaluing of Haudenosaunee narratives; when the Chinese waiter first speaks to him, Antonio’s first response is “I almost expected him to finish off with Little Grasshopper” (201). Thus, Antonio, the more advanced “New Canadian,” is presented by De Sa

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as taking up a position of normative, civil Whiteness, policing the borders of unmarked versus marked ethnicity. This ability and willingness to surveil Otherness emerges as a key feature of benign multiculturalism and a key characteristic of the civil bearer of risk. Thus, De Sa’s repeated critique in several stories in Barnacle Love of the more damaging aspects of Manuel’s masculine identity seem to dissipate in “Mr Wong Presents Jesus,” not only because Manuel is symbolically absolved, but because both Georgina and Terri are represented in disparaging terms. Georgina is presented as an enabler for Manuel, not stoic but rather weak. She is also an explicit purveyor of narrow-minded bigotry: while Manuel can enthuse “These Chinese, they is smart people” (204), Georgina refuses to eat her food because of her long-held belief that the Chinese eat cats (204–5). Even more complex is the representation of Terri who, in earlier stories like “Made of Me” and “Pounding the Shadows,” is presented as bravely rejecting oppressive gender norms. Here, she is simply coarse and culturally unsophisticated in a slightly different way than her mother; while Terri doesn’t believe Chinese noodles are actually cat guts, she spends most of the dinner rudely complaining about the canaries chirping from a cage. While De Sa highlights Terri’s linguistic fluency in “Pounding the Shadows,” in the return story, her comprehension skills are presented as lacking: Terri apparently doesn’t understand her fortune, “A closed mouth gathers no feet” (207), which works as an ironic critique of her unruliness. Finally, her rejection of patriarchal norms seems to have been replaced by a dependence on her fiancé Luis to save her from her family (209). It is not Terri who will refine the dreams of the generation before her: it is Antonio. Antonio is the New Canadian, ultimately presented as a sacrificial figure, a version of the porcelain baby Jesus gifted to him by the Chinese waiter (202), which Antonio holds aloft as Manuel steps out onto the ice (214). Ultimately, Antonio forgives his father’s trespasses, while embracing a calculated, sacrificial disappearance into civil, knowing Whiteness. In the end, De Sa’s short story cycle suggests that deploying a strategy of ethnic unmarking will afford the masculine would-be adventurer with the opportunity to master insecurity and control the future. The multiple convergences of the three works examined in this section of Bearers of Risk offer important opportunities to compare, for example, how certain short story cycles are unified by the continued presence of a protagonist or central cast of characters; how urban and suburban Toronto is figured in the contemporary short story cycle,

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especially with respect to the portrayal of ethnic difference; and how a debut short story cycle is marketed as a CanLit narrative of arrival. Arrival, here, is dual concept, associated in the first place with the generally accepted idea that the short story is, as Mary Louise Pratt asserts, a “training or practice genre … relative to the novel. That is, it is only because there are two prose fiction genres, one short and one long, that one is singled out as a training ground, and it is because there is a hierarchical relation between the two that the novel can be viewed as the goal of training” (1994, 97). Though the short story cycle is a gathering together of short pieces to produce something approaching the length of a novel, the oft-noted status of Natasha and Other Stories, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, and Barnacle Love as debuts – as practice – is not only highlighted in the marketing of the texts, but in the career trajectories of the three authors, each of whom followed up their debut cycle with a novel: Bezmozgis’s The Free World, which is also focused on a family of emigrating Soviet Jews, was published in 2011; Lam’s The Headmaster’s Wager, which builds on the story of “A Long Migration,” was published in 2012; and De Sa’s Kicking the Sky, an expansion of the story “Shoeshine Boy,” was published in 2013. Importantly, the focus for the three novels are subjects like immigration, a search for home, ethnic minoritization, hybrid identities, and so on, thus drawing attention to how Bezmozgis, Lam, and De Sa remain focused not only on the idea of arrival as practice, but on arrival as positioning, presenting their narrative output as inextricably bound to a marked identity. What I have argued in this section of Bearers of Risk is that what Rocío Davis calls “the insider/outsider point of view” (2001, 20) of the minoritized writer is self-consciously articulated, as shown, for example in the wry comment to Mark Berman that he is “the toughest kid in Hebrew school” (2004, 71); or in the defamiliarizing tricks in Lam’s “Take All of Murphy,” in which one South Asian and two Chinese medical students dissect a White body and try to come to terms with that body’s odd cultural symbols; or in the critical representation of Manuel’s hyperbolic performance of patriotism in De Sa’s “Senhor Canada.” This self-consciousness is all the more pointed in light of the way the publication and successes of Natasha and Other Stories, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, and Barnacle Love produced more or less ­vitriolic responses from reviewers and commentators carping about the focus on an “immigrant background … that publishers find so alluring these days” (Dinka 2005, para. 5), or “the new multicultural

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establishment” (Henighan 2006, 61), or “The latest trend to grip Canadian publishing – immigrant literature” (Fox 2008, para. 1). The varied representations of Toronto, as an expanding city edged by suburban non-places, as a cosmopolis into which the minoritized body can disappear, and as a complex negotiation between ethnic enclaves and a Whitened space of civility, is linked with queries into the way masculine bodies are read, for example, as tough, as abject, as civil or uncivil, as diseased, as heteronormative, as heroic, as redeemed, or as a problem. Often, the issue of the way a masculine body is read is connected in these texts with the notion of Whitening as potentially coercive and/or with multiculturalism as ideally benign. Thus, while the short story cycles by Gould, Glennon, and Marche depict adventuring, colonizing, and settlement desires as normative expressions of White masculinity, Bezmozgis, Lam, and De Sa tend to show more ambivalence about adopting the Settler identity. This ambivalence is shown, for example, in the portrayal of misrecognition, as when Mark’s body is not read as Jewish; of disappearance, as when Chen speeds down the highway in his Mercedes Benz cl k 430; and of second-generation conservatism, as when Antonio transcends the ignorance of his parents only to adopt the casual racism of Settler Canadians. In the next section of Bearers of Risk, I explore cycles in which setting – suburban, urban, and rural – is the primary unifying feature, and in which the matter of bodies is most often linked with exploring changing conceptions of masculine labour in an increasingly globalized world.

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S e ct i o n T hr e e Negotiating Space

The formal feature setting is often identified as a unifying feature of short story cycles, though the critical tendency is to consider place or region as a static background. In his conclusion to Representative Short Story Cycles of the Twentieth Century, Forrest Ingram asserts that “setting or locale (usually treated symbolically) serves as a dominant unifying backdrop to the thematic actions of each story” (1971, 200), while Susan Garland Mann argues that in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, setting “is used to emphasize the theme of isolation” (1989, 53). In the Canadian context, Gerald Lynch states that setting is a crucial feature of the Canadian short story cycle, though even here the importance of setting is linked to the way “place plays an essential role in the formation of character” (2001, 21). The key here is that setting is a secondary generic ­feature or “backdrop”: setting is conceived primarily as symbolic, as the comforting and/or stagnating home base that characters inhabit, chafe against, leave, lament, recall, or return to. Indeed, the portrayals of Windsor, Ontario in Alexander MacLeod’s Light Lifting, Vancouver, British Columbia in Michael Christie’s The Beggar’s Garden, and Invermere, British Columbia in D.W. Wilson’s Once You Break a Knuckle can be read according to this convention: in MacLeod’s cycle, Windsor represents tenuous borders; Christie’s Vancouver is a false paradise; Wilson’s Invermere is a trap. To challenge the notion of setting as a static, mostly symbolic background, scholars in the fields of postcolonial studies, Settler studies, and globalization studies have urged that critical attention be paid to how the meaning of setting as home becomes “settled,” and that place be understood in relation to histories, including the

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histories of colonization, nation-building, and global economic ­production. As Victoria Kuttainen puts it, “Settlement is thought of as history, often limited to pioneering times, and this implies a developmental phase that has been surmounted … Despite popular perceptions that settlement is a thing of the past, theorists have long understood settlement as [a] complex process with significant and lasting cultural implications” (2010, 8). For this reason, Kuttainen contends, the production of what she refers to as short story composites in invader-Settler nations such as Canada must consider that this genre has the potential to offer “shifting and sometimes shifty stories” (23, emphasis in original). In my discussions of these three cycles, I will draw attention to which bodies in these spaces are made visible and how the centering of those bodies relates to early twenty-first-century White recuperative masculinity politics, whereby the strategic use of the so-called marginal genre of the short story cycle enables a focus on White men as marginalized ­subjects. For each text, I will provide a short history of invader-­ settlement activity in the area, describing how each short story cycle reimagines a settlement narrative: in Light Lifting, the historical status of Windsor as an important area for trade along the Canadian-US border emerges in MacLeod’s lament for the ­dissolution of community identity, especially as that identity is linked to changes in the North American automotive industry; in The Beggar’s Garden, Christie explores the condition of single men in Vancouver, a demographic connected both to settlement history, when the region was primarily associated with resource extraction, as well as to contemporary discourse about specific at-risk groups in a globalized space; in Once You Break a Knuckle, Wilson’s ­representation of Invermere, also linked to a settlement history organized around resource extraction, works through competing myths associated with Canada’s rural spaces, whereby such spaces evoke the ideal of wilderness alongside notions of appropriate, authentic gender roles. This section will focus on the representation of White men’s labouring and/or injured bodies, exploring both the hegemonic ideal of proper masculinity, and how specific kinds of at-risk, White, labouring bodies are constituted, made readable, and rhetorically centred. My discussion of anxieties associated with proper ­masculinity draws on Michael Atkinson’s discussion of “role set ambiguity” among men, and the instability associated with “Being

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left alone to construct one’s own individual (gender) identity and the severing of traditional sources of social power and status” (2011, 41). Also relevant to my discussion of the representation of bodies are Raewyn Connell’s notions of the “reproductive arena” (2005, 71) and “body-reflexive practice” (61), along with Hamilton Carroll’s discussion of how labour is marked as either “trenchantly masculine” or “feminine and bourgeois” (2011, 87). MacLeod’s cycle explores how men’s bodies are broken down by certain kinds of labour, but also how men – even progressive men – are trained for homosocial violence. In The Beggar’s Garden, Christie depicts physical work as redemptive, especially in comparison with the intangible types of labour associated with a globalized economy and late capitalist consumerism. Wilson’s focus on the links between certain kinds of labour and performances of rural masculinity posits the injured man’s body as a kind of sacrifice. Thus, Light Lifting, The Beggar’s Garden, and Once You Break a Knuckle include the most straightforward iterations of the civil bearer of risk, whereby the dutiful activity of standing on guard and reclaiming space is enacted by White, wounded, men’s bodies.

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8 THE WOUNDED WHITE MAN Bodies and/as Machines in Alexander MacLeod’s Light Lifting

In “Miracle Mile,” the first story of Alexander MacLeod’s 2010 short story cycle, Light Lifting, the narrator, a competitive middle-distance runner, explains that, as teenagers, he and his running club colleague Burner would “race the freight trains through the old Michigan central railway tunnel” (17). This retrospective section of the story gestures towards several motifs in Light Lifting. First, the image of the train tunnel built underneath the Detroit River to connect the United States and Canada indicates the common setting that unifies the cycle: Windsor, Ontario, as MacLeod explores, is a place defined by its status as a border town and bellwether of an increasingly globalized corporate economy. Second, in the description of a night when Burner is almost hit by a train as it comes through the tunnel, the narrative points to the cycle’s recurring examination of the complex relationship between body and machine, as well as to the idea that masculine reaction to crisis “wasn’t fear but something more like rage” (22). Third, the narrator’s admission that running through the tunnels “wasn’t really racing at all,” but “was more about just trying to stay ahead” (19) resonates with both the story’s and the cycle’s emphasis on the issue of timing. In “Miracle Mile,” the narrator muses on the runner’s obsession with the miniscule differences in race times, while also coming to terms with the devastation of his own racing year, noting “It’s timing. Everything is timing. I was down when I needed to be up” (15). Likewise, many of the stories in Light Lifting focus on causes, often those related to both globalization and the body’s failure, which come to determine one’s options.

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I begin by drawing attention to overlapping critical discussion of the rhetoric of nostalgia by scholars in masculinity and globalization studies, noting how MacLeod’s focus on Windsor connects to analyses of the increasing insecurity of certain employment structures, structures that have been associated with ideals of manliness. After surveying Windsor’s status as both a border town and a central hub for Ontario’s automotive industry, I discuss MacLeod’s thematic explorations of risk, especially the idea of the man’s labouring body at risk. Here, I work with the concept of body-reflexive practice to discuss how emblematically masculine bodies are brought into being by social constructions of labour. MacLeod’s critique of the disabling effects – both literal and metaphorical – of globalized industry, however, is countered by various representations in the short story cycle that link violence to masculinity, some going so far as to posit violence as inevitable, especially in moments of stress or insecurity. As I will argue, the notion of the inevitability of violence for men suffuses even MacLeod’s depiction of “good kids” and of the civil, progressive Canadian man. Thus, despite Light Lifting’s critique of the effects of risk as they are associated with patterns of men’s labour, the remedy MacLeod appears to suggest is a return to a traditional reproductive arena, and the centring and redemption of wounded masculinity. In their chapter entitled “Canadian Manhood(s),” included in Canadian Men and Masculinities: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, Christopher J. Greig and Susan Holloway explore how contemporary popular discourse engages the “debate in Canada over the fate and fitness of English-Canadian manhood” (2012, 119), providing abundant evidence from newspapers, magazines, and massmarket non-fiction books of the increasingly dominant opinion that Canadian men are in a state of crisis, a crisis defined primarily as one of emasculation or “weakening” (120). As Greig and Holloway suggest, this position, which very often blames feminism for the “widespread erosion of manliness in Canadian men” (120), is profoundly nostalgic: “Taken together, these texts express a deep discontentment with modern manhood and are designed to reinvigorate our ‘depleted’ manhood by providing men with a clear path back to a traditional robust manliness” (121, emphasis in original). In Studying Men and Masculinities, David Buchbinder suggests that the rhetorical deployment of nostalgia is common to champions of so-called “traditional manliness,” though the “path back” is often hazily conceived: “By

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creating a picture of the past that lacks nuance, [purveyors of this rhetoric] are able to mythicize that past and so render it universal, applicable to all cultures in all places and at all times. Simultaneously, they are able to invoke a moment when things changed, and not necessarily for the better. Historical accuracy and detail would … dull the edge of this strategy, whose principal objective is to identify women as the cause of men’s problems” (2013, 12). Buchbinder’s delineation of these argumentative moves – i.e., mythicizing the past, invoking the moment of change, ignoring specific historical conditions, and reducing complex social relations into a basic narrative of us versus them – coheres with how nostalgia emerges in examinations of the globalized economy, as well as with post–9/11 rhetoric about making use of the moment of insecurity to impose a return to “tradition.” Building on Roland Robertson’s discussion in Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture of contemporary forms of “willful nostalgia” (1992, 147), Elena Oliete-Aldea argues that “The magnitude of the 21st-century crash in the economy” resulted in cultural texts “hark[ing] back to past times where socio-economic relations, if not perfect, were, at least, better defined” (2010, 348–9). As with Buchbinder’s analysis of the inconsistencies in how nostalgia is invoked in arguments about manliness, the defense of previous forms of socioeconomic relations “lacks nuance.” For example, as Oliete-Aldea’s analysis of the nostalgic impulses in Oliver Stone’s Money Never Sleeps shows, the narrative of us versus them pits a new, democratic, interconnected community – an idealized “commons” (Oliete-Aldea 2010, 363) – against the global capitalist, a personification of ruthless, decentered greed and power (362–3). That said, the democratic community is conceived as a re-emerging version of the “safety and stability in human relationships,” the foremost metaphor for which is the “traditional family unit based on love ties” (360). Thus, the bulwark against post–9/11 systemic economic changes wrought by increasingly occluded and decentered forces is a mythical idea of the situated, “traditional” family. Likewise, in Greig and Holloway’s analysis of how “the global restructuring of capitalism” has affected “construction, manufacturing, and automotive industries … causing industrialbased cities such as Windsor, Ontario, to struggle with one of the higher unemployment rates in Canada” (2012, 127), they point out that such conditions have produced popular narratives lamenting the loss of appropriate venues for masculine expression. As employment opportunities shift, from industrial jobs to professional and service

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sector jobs, and as the labour force becomes more diverse, the cause of a crisis in manhood is attributed to attacks on traditional gender roles rather than to massive changes in the twenty-first-century economy (128–9). Throughout Light Lifting, MacLeod invokes the idea of temporal breakpoints via which “now” is marked as different from “before.” In “Miracle Mile,” the narrator points out the difference between the “now” of his race day and “that time, before the planes flew into the World Trade Center, [when] there weren’t any real border guards or customs officers or police posted on the rail tunnel” (2010, 18). The rest of the cycle, while seldom directly focusing on the issue of border crossing or national security, draws attention to urban and suburban change. “Light Lifting,” a story about a crew of bricklayers who build driveways, is set during a busy period of suburban development in Windsor. As the narrator muses, “the driveways we were building were going onto houses that hadn’t even been sold yet” (89), and in particular the narrator mentions Southwood Lakes, a development project that began in the late 1990s, and which included the creation of man-made lakes and “a big brown wall that went all the way around … [the neighbourhood] to keep out the noise from the highway” (MacLeod 2010, 88). The shifting nature of Windsor’s settlement is also noted in “The Loop,” a story about an adolescent boy who makes deliveries for an independent pharmacist, as well as in “Good Kids,” a story about the interactions between four brothers and their one-time neighbour, a boy whose mother rents the house across the street. In “The Loop,” the narrator notes that the pharmacy he worked for “isn’t even there anymore,” as, like other independent stores, Musgrave’s pharmacy was “stuck at the end of things … [as it] was during that period when the whole city wanted to go in a new direction, directly away from us” (143). Likewise, the final section of “Good Kids,” which, like “Light Lifting” and “The Loop,” is set during the boom years in Windsor, recounts the difficulty of selling an urban home in what the real estate agent calls “a ‘mixed neighbourhood,’” since “nowadays most young families wanted to raise their kids in a quieter type of place, somewhere with a nice backyard and maybe a deck” (190), that is, somewhere like Southwood Lakes. Many of MacLeod’s portrayals of temporal setting represent a kind of intermediate period, when urban living gives way to suburban living, when independent businesses give way to corporations like Shoppers Drug Mart (MacLeod 2010, 143), and when growth and

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the desire to “‘re-vitalize’ everything” (143) leads to the proliferation of deterritorialized non-places: suburban “ghost town[s]” (89), corporate stores, and highways. The final story in Light Lifting – a return story entitled “The Number Three” – confirms that the same forces that drive Windsor’s developmental shifts in the boom years leave many in the community vulnerable to post–9/11 swings in globalized financial and manufacturing sectors. On the one hand, the narrator of “The Number Three” recalls how so many benefitted from the decision in 1983 to build the minivan “here,” a choice of such magnitude that the narrator thinks of it in terms of “the question of origins” (197). On the other hand, he recalls the devastating effects of the global recession of 2008: “The Big Three going down. For real this time” (207). As attention to MacLeod’s portrayal of urban and suburban development and settlement shows, an important consequence of an increasingly globalized, corporate production system is a cycle of risk and outcomes, one that leaves those in the community exposed to market forces far beyond their control. The area surrounding the Detroit River, a narrow waterway that allows passage through the Great Lakes system, has, since the midsixteenth century, been an important site of transnational commerce, military action, security measures, and settlement. Over the centuries, the river was used by European fur traders, who traded with members of the Wyandot (also called Huron) nation and, later, with the powerful Six Nations (also called the Iroquois Confederacy); the river was a site of military strategy and struggle, as British, French, and American forces sought to control the area, and was also an anchor for European settlement, as plots of land along the banks were granted to British loyalists and urban centres of commerce developed. From about the middle of the nineteenth century on, the river became a site of enormous industrial growth and trade between Canada and the United States. In Light Lifting, this complex settlement history is alluded to mostly insofar as the issue of international commerce is thematized, and as the auto industry is shown to represent Windsor’s connection to the global economy. As noted by Dimitry Anastakis in Auto Pact: Creating a Borderless North American Auto Industry, while Canadianowned motor car companies failed to be profitable in the early twentieth century, by 1904 Ford Motors had built a plant in Windsor, because it was “directly across the river from Detroit” (2005, 17–18). The next major expansion of the Canadian auto industry came in 1965, followed in 1989 by the Canada-United States Free Trade

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Agreement, as well as the 1993 North American Free Trade Agreement (177–9), agreements that gave the Canadian auto industry more potential to enter global markets, but also made it more vulnerable to shifts in the industry, marketplace, and financial sector. In Negotiating Risk, Seeking Security, Eroding Solidarity: Life and Work on the Border, Holly Gibbs, Belinda Leach, and Charlotte A.B. Yates argue that, in general, the “intensification of competition associated with neoliberalism and globalization” have produced a culture within the auto industry that is marked by “heightened experiences of risk and insecurity” (2012, 52), whereby “Canadian … autoworkers [are] explicitly aware of their dependence upon multinational corporations for their jobs and livelihoods” (53). Gibbs, Leach, and Yates note that in Windsor, the historical centrality of the auto industry has resulted in relatively higher wages and, consequently, increased exposure “to competition from other locales where production costs are lower” (42). Though the focus in Negotiating Risk on risk and insecurity emerges out of interviews with workers in the auto sector, these terms are also thematically relevant to MacLeod’s short story cycle. Light Lifting extrapolates from its cumulative sketch of a particular time and space to consider risk and insecurity as concepts, and as features of a moment of crisis that leaves characters, mostly men, searching for a path back. In this cycle, the response to labour and gender insecurity produces an imagined future that is a return to a traditional, reproductive arena, one in which men can count on their position as central and prioritized. MacLeod’s stories thematize the necessity for men, wounded by change, to become civil bearers of risk and guide the process of restoring community. As much as Light Lifting makes use of the history and situation of Windsor as context – especially in the return story “The Number Three,” which is specifically focused on the experiences of an auto industry worker – the thematizing of risk versus security is also tied to representations of the body, especially how a man’s body operates as both a machine and a training ground for violence. Importantly, MacLeod frequently draws attention to the staggering vulnerability of bodies: in “Miracle Mile,” the narrator is unable to transcend the season-ending reality of his “messed-up Achilles” (12), while the fragility of Burner’s body is contrasted with the speed and power of the freight train (20–1); in “Wonder about Parents,” the symbiotic relationship between humans and lice is juxtaposed with examinations of sexuality, reproduction, and the illness of an infant; in “Adult

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Beginner I,” the threat of drowning is explored; in “Light Lifting,” ­bodies are broken down by various means, including by sunburn, by manual labour, and by violence; in “The Loop,” the risk of riding a bicycle in an urban environment is considered alongside images of ailing and disabled bodies; even in “Good Kids,” a story about childhood interactions among boys, the narrator explains that, for him and his brothers, the vulnerability of testicles is of persistent import: “we believed that if [a ball] ever got fired straight into a guy’s nuts, then that person would die. It became one of our most reliable standby threats – ‘I swear, I’ll fire this fucking thing right into your fucking nuts if you don’t fucking shut up’” (174). Finally, in “The Number Three,” the narrator, reflecting on the death of his wife and son in a car accident, considers the complex relationship between his work in an automotive plant and the potentially dangerous machines that are produced. MacLeod’s representation of bodies at risk, at work, and compared with machines coheres with many of Raewyn Connell’s assertions about masculine bodies and what she refers to in Masculinities as “body-reflexive practice” (2005, 61). Connell argues that the bifurcation in studies of masculinity – between a focus on biology, whereby “men’s bodies are the bearers of a natural masculinity” (46), and on social constructions of gender, whereby “the body is a field on which social determination runs riot” (50) – can be addressed by considering “the activity, literally the agency, of bodies in social processes” (60, emphasis in original). In other words, Connell calls upon critics to examine not what masculinity “is” or where it comes from, but how it is practiced: how bodies are called upon to perform gendered roles, how bodies are transformed via social processes (for example via particular forms of labour, or play, or violence), and how bodies respond to or resist such social conditioning. In her lead up to the discussion of the “circuit” of body-reflexive practice (62), or the way bodies act and are acted upon within social processes, Connell mentions the masculine working-class labouring body in the manufacturing or construction sector, an example I will consider further because of its relevance to MacLeod’s text. The conventional masculine working-class labouring body is, in the first place, called into being by a number of overlapping social ideas: that physical strength is masculine, that appropriate performances of masculinity are indicative of men’s superior capacities to women, and that physical labour, as a performance of appropriate masculinity, has a certain kind of social value. This social value is often linked with the

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notion of “identity,” which is supposed to compensate for deficiencies of economic or political power in determining what constitutes hegemonic masculinity and what Connell calls “the patriarchal dividend” (79); in other words, being able to physically perform a masculine identity is considered a cultural “dividend,” even by men who have little economic or political power. Further, the masculine working-class labouring body, in its performance of a certain kind of identity through labour, is not only shaped in various indelible, physical ways; it also – as a consequence of this shaping – becomes readable, a field for “social determination” (50). Thus, the body’s consistent experience of enacting a certain kind of labour reinforces hegemonic conceptions of what working-class masculinity “looks like,” and leads the workingclass man to be bound by those conceptions – to be bound by the way his body is read. Connell then goes on to argue that “the constitution of masculinity through bodily performance means that gender is vulnerable when the performance cannot be sustained” (54). She points out that “industrial labour under the regime of profit uses up the workers’ bodies, through fatigue, injury and mechanical wear and tear” (55). In other words, if hegemonic masculinity is reflexively tied to the way a body is read, the used-up labourer may be especially vulnerable to a sense of identity failure. In various stories in Light Lifting, MacLeod portrays the sort of wear and tear associated with such bodies, thereby exploring the toll of certain conceptions of labour and masculinity. The double bind for working-class labouring men plays out in popular Canadian discussions of the crisis of manhood that essentialize men’s social roles. In delineating the concept of the reproductive arena, Connell notes that this arena is affirmed, not through biology, but through social practice, whereby attitudes towards gender are used to “configur[e] … internal division[s] of labour and systems of control,” as well as to determine “policymaking, practical routines, and ways of mobilizing pleasure and consent” (73). Greig and Holloway argue that, though the “rise of neoliberal capitalism has … had profound impact on the lives of working-class women and men” (2012, 126, emphasis in original), the popular response to changes in the manufacturing sector takes for granted that “men are the primary breadwinners in North American families” (127, emphasis in original). Despite the fact that “women bear a disproportionate burden of the problems caused by neoliberal globalization” (124), the shrinking and/ or diversification of the manufacturing sector is lamented because working class men “have lost a key source of their identity” (128).

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Gibbs, Leach, and Yates confirm this narrative in their analysis of the particular conditions in Windsor: on the one hand, Windsor has a notably “low rate of participation” of women in the auto sector, “likely a side effect of the high wages and benefits paid in the automotive industry in Windsor” (2012, 42). Further, in response to changing conditions, “men … [are] better able to minimize risk and income and employment insecurity, as they usually had skills – including informally acquired skills – that could be deployed to earn money, and often had wider employment networks on which to draw” (68). On the other hand, Gibbs, Leach, and Yates report that the “generalized climate of insecurity fostered within auto parts workplaces was layered with expressions of racism and sexism” (70). Thus, despite clear links between global economic trends and changes to local employment conditions, Greig and Holloway note that the loss for men is attributed to the diversification of the labour pool and to “feminization,” resulting in calls to “restore the traditional gender order by reinstalling a traditional version of manhood” (2012, 130). Though MacLeod’s short story cycle does not explicitly critique the rise of feminism and is sometimes focused on the role of the progressive man, its portrayal of the vulnerability of men’s bodies and of body-reflexive practice often depends on narrow conceptions of what constitutes heteronormative masculine identity, ultimately suggesting that men should bear the risk of resisting the onslaught of globalization and thereby reestablish their role as protectors of a patriarchal reproductive arena. Two stories in Light Lifting – “Light Lifting” and “The Loop” – are thematically focused on the issue of body-reflexive practice, or on how social processes, particularly the social process of physical labour, creates and compels the masculine body. Early on in the story “Light Lifting,” the narrator gives a warning about applying sunscreen before working with bricks, as the grease in the sunscreen softens the fingers: “When you wreck your hands they never come back the same way. I got my fingers so bloody and infected once that when they finally healed over again I could still see little chunks of stone trapped under my skin” (2010, 79). This image of the body that is literally changed, or “wrecked,” by physical labour is reiterated throughout the story, and implicitly compared to how the landscape is transformed via suburban development. The narrator draws attention to the toll of “light lifting,” or the repetitive moving of relatively manageable weights, on the summer students, almost none of whom last on the job: “One minute they’d be loud and laughing and tossing the brick

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around like it was nothing and then, all of a sudden, that little grinding pain would wind up and get a hold of them … It was like they got old all at once” (86). While the summer students usually quit after a morning of such labour, the regular guys on the crew do not have that option. As the narrator explains, “Our company worked guys who couldn’t get any other kind of work” (83), for example J.C., whose past is written on his body: “When he took off his shirt, he looked like the worst sort of criminal: the kind in the prison movies who do hundreds of push-ups and sit-ups in their cells” (81). Suggestively, this crew of “desperate” characters (83) is shown working at the site of “the new subdivisions” (88), including one that features man-made lakes. As the narrator comments, “One week it was grass, the next week it was water … They put a filter system in there, like a swimming pool, so that the lake didn’t get all swampy. Southwood was supposed to be a nice place to live” (89). The “niceness” of the new subdivision is shown to be artificial, a luxury also associated with the summer students who can take or leave menial, physical work. For the working-class man, bodily changes are presented as embedded, compared to the bricks in a driveway; their bodies are “hard to move … once you got settled” (90–1). Even J.C., who tells anyone who will listen that he has been converted, that he is “the proof that you can change,” and that he wears “the skin of a different man” (82), is not only confined to working for an exploitive company but is also compelled to perform according to the expectations his body raises. In the final scene of “Light Lifting,” the foreman of the crew picks a fight with a group of city workers and, while the narrative suggests that the foreman is simply acting out of a gratuitous “meanness” (93), the crew immediately rushes to join the violence he has provoked. For J.C., the narrator explains, “it was like [he] just flicked a switch in his head and he was back to being the kind of guy he looked like” (94). In this simile, MacLeod works with the idea that a body’s range of activity is to some extent tied to or compelled by how that body is socially determined or read. Thus, the vulnerabilities experienced by the working-class man, together with the physical changes wrought on the body by certain kinds of labour, threaten to make outbreaks of violence an inevitable outcome of social training, a mechanical expression of “being” a certain “kind of guy.” The story “The Loop” also takes up the issue of how men’s bodies are broken down and trapped by certain kinds of labour, in this case focusing on men working in the auto manufacturing sector. As the

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narrator points out, the customers of the pharmacy he delivers for consist primarily of a “special harem of shut-ins and old women who had outlived their husbands … [and] lonely single guys who’d been injured at the plants and were off on long-term disability” (144). Even more so than in “Light Lifting,” this story highlights what Connell refers to as the way “industrial labour under the regime of profit uses up the workers’ bodies.” As the narrator explains, “most of the guys had been wrecked by those steady, grinding jobs they used to have at the plants before everything got ergonomic and automated … Those kinds of injuries came from working on the line. They showed up in people who’d been holding the same pneumatic gun for too long, tightening the same eight nuts on a million half-built minivans as they floated by, one every 44 seconds, like a string of hollowed out metal skeletons, maybe” (145). Ironically, the narrator’s note that these bodies are wrecked “before” the plants become more “automated” stealthily draws attention to a period when the labouring body becomes obsolete. Likewise, the simile that compares the minivan to a body – one with a “hollowed out metal skeleton” – suggests that it is the machine that is living, even as the masculine labouring body is ground down. The issue of the increasing obsolescence of this type of body is also picked up in the narrator’s comment that the men he delivers to “just wanted to go back again”; without their work, “those guys pulled all the way back and faded out of the normal world” (146). Though this narrative refers specifically to men on long-term disability, the image of the man without work is that of a man without a “normal” or readable masculine identity. The narrator’s meditation on the lives of these men concludes with an observation that, despite how “some of those guys looked like they came straight out of the Hells Angels or the Desperados,” their masculine bodies operate only to disguise emasculation: “sometimes when I came by to drop off their medications, they’d be completely wrapped up in some mid-afternoon episode of General Hospital or pretending not to cry over the latest crisis on One Life to Live” (147). Part of the goal of Light Lifting is to make visible those bodies that have become invisible in the community, especially in comparison to the heightened visibility of the machines those bodies have produced: as the narrator of “The Number Three” notes, when he walks through his city, “the Caravan follows him everywhere. Parked along the curb and sleeping in driveways and overnight lots, idling at the McDonald’s pick-up window and blinking in the left-turn lane” (211). By contrasting the ubiquity of the products

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of corporate capitalism with the hidden lives of labourers, MacLeod’s text, like the other short story cycles explored in this section of Bearers of Risk, offers a critique of the toll of a globalized economy. This critique, however, remains couched in a lament for the loss of masculine identity and, in many of the stories in Light Lifting, representations of both the vulnerability and the feats of men’s bodies are coupled with representations of violence as an expression of rage. In “Miracle Mile,” for example, Burner’s running, his “wild, chased-bythe-train-sprint” (39), is celebrated as a kind of embodied miracle; as Burner states, “‘I decided to go in the end and everything else just happened’” (41). This celebration of body (and of timing), however, is followed up by a disturbing final scene. As Burner and the narrator embark on a post-race jog through a suburban neighbourhood, a non-place filled with “anonymous sidewalks” and a “maze of minivans and garbage cans,” a group of children ride by them on bikes. One of the children, a “girl on a My Little Pony bike,” teases the runners, riding past and yelling “I’m faster than you are” (43). Burner’s response to the girl’s teasing is to chase after her and her cohorts. The story ends with the image of Burner, an adult competitive runner, about to violently attack the group of children. What is most striking about the narrator’s description of this turn of events is not the horror of Burner’s “hand … already there, reaching out for the thin strands of her hair” (44), but the suggestion that Burner’s response is somehow inevitable. Though the narrator advises Burner to ignore the teasing, he notes “it was too late. His face was tightening up and that angry stare was coming back into his eyes” (43). It is the same anger, earlier in the story, that is present when Burner beats the train (22) and when he wins the race (39), indicating that both Burner’s speed and his tendency towards violence emanate from the same source, which is the trained or reflexively constituted masculine body, especially when such a body is functioning at its physical peak. The particularly gendered nature of Burner’s violent response to teasing is underlined, not only because he is driven to chase down a little girl who has dared to suggest that she is “faster,” but also because one of the boys in the group insults Burner’s masculinity, scoffing that Burner is wearing “tights” (43). Finally, an important prolepsis contained in the story – i.e., the brief mention of “that now infamous kick which won him the national title in the 1,500 metres” (39) – suggests that there is absolutely no consequence in terms of his career for this violent episode. As long as Burner’s body is proved to be drug-free and therefore “natural” (41),

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its reflexive actions, in terms of athleticism and in terms of violence, are acceptable. The twinned idea of violence among men as inevitable and acceptable is repeated throughout the short story cycle. As noted above, the story “Light Lifting” ends with a violent brawl, which is represented as both mechanical and somehow obligatory: the narrator asserts, “It was like we were all in this game and everybody knew the rules and everybody needed to be partnered up” (94). The reference to a “game” and “rules” suggests that violent masculine behaviour is socially determined, though the image of J.C., who is suddenly “back to being the kind of guy he looked like” (94), indicates the importance of bodyreflexive practice. The men “know the rules” of violence precisely because of how their bodies are shaped by certain kinds of social processes, including employment that is defined by menial labour, precarity, and exploitation. Thus, it is significant that the foreman of a crew of “desperate” men picks a fight with a crew of city workers, whose employment conditions involve less risk. Again, the gendered nature of this eruption of violence is highlighted: the foreman refers to the city workers as “a bunch of pussies” (94), and the narrator is knocked out of the fight when one of the city workers “jammed his knee up as hard as he could right square between my legs” (95). Later in the short story cycle, the story “Good Kids” presents another fight, this time between two boys. As the narrator notes, the relationship between he and his three younger brothers and Reggie, the boy whose mother rents the house across the street, is filled with tension. The brothers resent Reggie because he has charmed his way into their parents’ good graces, and James, the youngest brother, particularly objects to his constant companionship at school: “Other kids started to tease him about Reggie, asking if Reggie was James’s new girlfriend” (181).1 One day, when Reggie refuses to accept James’s request that he leave them all alone, James attacks him. The portrayal of James’s attack on Reggie follows an earlier scene in which the ­narrator describes an episode when he “punched [his brother] Chris in the face as hard as I could” (177). Their mother’s response is to tell the boys “how this wasn’t funny anymore” (177), and to send them both off to school. At school, the principal is only concerned when he thinks that Chris has been hit by someone other than the narrator, and is visibly relieved to find out that this is not the case; as the narrator notes, “there must have been some kind of grade-school handbook that said violence was absolutely forbidden, but knocking out

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your sibling was still allowed” (178). Important in this lead-up to the fight between James and Reggie is the idea that violence among boys is not only tolerable if it occurs within a proper context, but that it is expected: as the school principal puts it, “everybody wants to kill their brother once in a while” (178). When the attack on Reggie is over, the focus for all the boys is to hide any traces of the violence that has occurred. Reggie instructs James to use water from a rain puddle to wash his face and hands: “You just got to get your face and hands looking all right. For the rest you can just say you wiped out somewhere” (184–5). The idea here is that these boys are learning how to manage violence, understood as an inevitable social practice, and that those at school are complicit in ignoring signs of violence among boys if it is more expedient to do so. Also important is that this story about managing violence is a story about good kids. The tension between seemingly inevitable displays of violence and moments of goodness confirms MacLeod’s text as one lamenting the loss of traditional gender roles and engaging in the fantasy of managing insecurity via a return to the reproductive arena of the patriarchal family unit. Two stories in particular – “Wonder about Parents” and the return story, “The Number Three” – display a subtle version of recuperative masculinity politics; that is, of the desire to find a “path back” (Greig and Holloway 2012, 121). On the surface, “Wonder about Parents” seems to signal a challenge to traditional notions of gender. In this achronological, episodic story, important moments from a couple’s relationship and early experiences with having a child are set against scenes in which the family, now older and including two children, contend with a bout of lice. The narrator is generally characterized as a purveyor of what Michael Atkinson would call “innovat[ive]” (2011, 15) masculinity, by which he means the “play with socially alternative masculinities … [in service of performing] pastiche hegemony and cleverly reaffirm[ing] old/traditional sources of masculine power” (105). In his discussion of the “pastiche” identity of the “ubersexual man,” Atkinson describes men who share “a commonly held belief in their need to adopt the guise of the modern man, while resurrecting and reinventing the traditional man” (119). Not only does the narrator of “Wonder about Parents” do his part in dealing with the lice issue, he is, throughout the story, compared with less innovative men: when he first spends the night with his future spouse, the two are faced with the sound of another man banging on her door, shouting her name, alternating between apologies and threats

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of violence (2010, 49–50); later, during a difficult drive from Montreal to Windsor, with a sick baby in tow, the narrator takes the infant into a men’s washroom to change her, dealing as best he can with her diarrhea as “Lines of men waiting for the urinals [watch] me” (54); in a scene set during the H1N1 flu outbreak of 2009, the narrator, accused by another man of allowing his children to “cut” into the lineup for vaccines, is portrayed as even-tempered and reasonable in comparison to the other father who refers to the narrator as a “little faggot” (61). Complicating this portrayal of innovative manhood are episodes implying the narrator is simply emasculated. A later episode in the story recounts the couple’s difficulties in conceiving, comparing the eroticism of their early sex life with “sav[ing] yourself for when you are needed” according to ovulation calendars, and performing diligently when required (62–3). Even more explicit is a scene in a hospital waiting room, where the couple waits to hear the results of tests on their infant, whose condition has deteriorated after the arrival in Windsor. When the narrator inquires, after hours of waiting, if they may return home, a doctor, who has newly arrived on the scene, pronounces, “This child is seriously ill and she needs to be admitted to this hospital right away … That is where she needs to be, sir. Not going home with you. We know what she needs. You, sir, you are the person who does not fully understand the situation” (70). The overwhelming impression given in “Wonder about Parents” is that embodying innovative or progressive manhood is enormously labour intensive, so much so that the narrator’s first impulse after completing the exhausting drive to Windsor is to take a “night off” after his wife and ailing infant have gone to sleep. The night off consists of drinking in a bar with his brothers, discussing in detail the topic of the “best nickname in the history of the [Detroit] Pistons” (65). The structural importance of this scene, which immediately precedes and is notably longer than the scene set in the hospital waiting room, confirms the sense that, unlike brick laying or working in a manufacturing plant, the labour involved in performing innovative manhood is not reflexive, in that it does not produce an embodied sense of masculinity, or a masculine identity that can be easily read. In the final image of the story, the narrator, spending the night in hospital with his wife, as they both watch over their ailing infant, compares the light on the incubator to “the reflection of ancient fire in a cave” (76), thus confirming a wish to return to the apparent simplicity of the “ancient” family unit, as well as to become socially readable as the protector of this unit.

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In the “The Number Three,” the final story of Light Lifting, MacLeod again depicts the desire of a man, another father, to find the path back to a sense of control over his social identity.2 And while this story contains what is arguably MacLeod’s most explicit critique of the way globalization affects insecure working-class men, the conclusion of the story (and cycle) posits the civil bearer of risk as an emerging safeguard. MacLeod’s “The Number Three” concerns the protagonist’s journey on foot toward the scene of a car accident that occurred a year prior, and the description of this journey is interspersed with scenes recounting the protagonist’s history as a g m employee and family man. After describing both the accident itself – in which the protagonist’s own driver error caused the collision, and in which the failure of some of the vehicle’s airbags to deploy contributed to the death of his wife and son – the narrator notes the protagonist’s ensuing decision to “really walk away, to move exclusively under his own power. Walk and never drive again” (209).3 As the narrator of “The Number Three” makes clear, throughout the 1980s and 90s the automotive industry functioned as the chief economic and social driver of Windsor; when the protagonist lands a full-time union job at the factory, the position allows him to feel secure enough in his role as the family provider to have another child, his son. In describing the moment many years later when the protagonist decides to accept a buyout from his contract, the narrator refers to how global systems undermine the stability of the masculine working-class subject position: “Never going to be like it was before. Peak oil. Calculations that depended on the shifting value of a Mexican peso. Rising interest rates. The Environmental Protection Agency. Californian emission targets. Household debt levels. Burning wells in the Middle East. Security for a pipeline in Nigeria. Drilling in the arctic. What the average person in India does in their spare time. They said it all mattered” (207). Thus, it might be argued that the protagonist’s decision to “walk away” represents a type of resistance to the industry’s determination of his gender role. In walking away, however, the protagonist shows a reinvigorated sense of masculinity, one that may reject neoliberal principles but nevertheless explicitly mourns patriarchal notions of order. It is striking, for example, how the narrator imposes his will on his grown daughter, whose adult life is portrayed in general terms (she is reported to be at university, though there is no reference to what she might be studying). After having fallen asleep for a spell at the site of the crash,

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the protagonist finally begins the long trek home, exhausted, dehydrated, and stumbling along the highway’s shoulder. When his daughter locates him, she expresses both exasperation and fear for her father, before trying to get him into her car so that she can drive him home. The protagonist’s refusal to enter the vehicle becomes “The still moment of confrontation” between father and daughter, who takes a moment to reproach him: “This doesn’t change anything … You know that, right? This won’t change what you did” (218–19). Eventually, however, the protagonist’s daughter accedes to his will, driving slowly behind him with her hazards on as he “walks on the shoulder, then on the side, then in the middle of the lane” (219). The final image describes the protagonist slowing down traffic as he walks the highway, “A string of red taillights extend[ing] back into the darkness [as] the whole strange parade inches forward” (219). The phrase “strange parade” is a civil literalization of the fantasy of finding “a path back to traditional robust manliness” (Greig and Holloway 2012, 121) and there are resonances in this image to both military processions and something like Terry Fox’s cross-Canada Marathon of Hope. While the word “strange,” as well as the protagonist’s wounded body, may appear to counteract reading this “parade” as a celebratory moment, the scene is powerfully connected with (especially) Canadian images of sacrifice. Significantly, the sacrificial figure is a wounded White man whose radical desires have prevailed, acceded to by his daughter (who lost her mother and her brother), and borne by the passengers in the cars behind him, all of whom are forced to slow down and follow his lead. The protagonist’s body is literally centred as he walks “on the shoulder, then on the side, then in the middle of the lane,” so that this wounded body is no longer hidden within the community of Windsor, but rather commands attention, even – or perhaps especially – because his behaviour is risky, and his body is the potential sacrifice. And, indeed, the wounded, White man’s walk back to his home does not “change what [he] did,” as relates to his keen participation in a labour market that both favours men’s bodies and puts them at risk, but is rather an exercise in managing insecurity by slowing down progress. MacLeod’s cumulative portrayal of Windsor at a transitional moment, at the end of the boom years for the automotive industry in Canada, at a time when everything “was down when [it] needed to be up” (15), is largely sympathetic to those affected by the globalization of economic risk. However, though stories like “Wonder about

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Parents” and “Good Kids” are ostensibly about families, MacLeod is mostly concerned with boys and men and how a changing labour market presents a challenge to the iteration of masculine identity in which certain types of bodies have become “stuck … like a brick” (40–1). Further, Light Lifting’s sympathetic portrayals of insecure men, as well as its critiques of corporate capitalism, often culminate in the suggestion that while innovative manhood is tedious and not socially readable, rage and ensuing violence are inevitable outcomes of body-reflexive training, training that even the good kids and men in MacLeod’s stories do little to resist. Thus, inherent in this depiction of globalization and risk is both a warning and a promise: that threatened men will turn out to be a threat, or – like the protagonist of “The Number Three” – that they will find ways to re-centre themselves, if necessary via stubborn, public displays of their willingness to bear risk on behalf of finding a way back to a sense of tradition and order. In The Beggar’s Garden (2011), the focus on the social and psychological importance of the physical labour of men continues, as Michael Christie explores the lives of more “forgotten” men, this time in the urban environment of Vancouver.

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9 IN THE BACKGROUND Labour and Local Economies in Michael Christie’s The Beggar’s Garden

Included in Michael Christie’s 2011 The Beggar’s Garden is a story called “The Extra,” which, even more so than the eponymous final story, stages some of the social and economic contradictions that pervade the short story cycle. The first-person narrator – who is never named  – matter-of-factly explains how he manages to live semi-­ independently in downtown Vancouver, despite his “brain being disabled” (120). In exchange for sharing his disability cheque with his friend Rick, the narrator depends on Rick to organize their lives, acquire and cook food, and decide when they need to visit WorkPower to earn some cash doing what Rick calls “shit work” (121). The rising action of “The Extra” depicts the narrator and Rick getting work as extras on a movie set, a gig Rick is excited about but which the narrator finds confusing and boring, though he appreciates the food trucks, marvelling at how much food he is allowed to eat (129). The narrator eats so much during his week of waiting on set that, when it comes time to film the scene including the extras, he finds it difficult to pretend to be one of the “hungry, starving people” (131). The irony of the narrator’s difficulty in pretending to be hungry is that he has at various points in his marginal existence experienced hunger, and the hand-to-mouth nature of the narrator’s life is set in opposition to  the costly, extravagant world of film production. When the narrator and Rick first get their jobs as extras, Rick explains the term: “they were the people in movies who stood around in the background and made everything seem more real just by being there” (125). In The Beggar’s Garden, Christie repeatedly focuses on those “background” figures in Vancouver: the scavengers, the junkies, the

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developmentally disabled, the delusional and schizophrenic, the homeless, and the luckless. In my exploration of Christie’s short story cycle, I first consider his use of Vancouver as a unifying setting for the stories, working through the settlement history of this place and, especially, the significance of Christie’s choice to make especially visible the lives of solitary, disadvantaged men. Via this focus, the stories in The Beggar’s Garden critique Vancouver as a nexus point for a globalized knowledge economy, one in which labour has become intangible. In contrast, the consistent physical labour of the poor, the homeless, and the addicted is commended as appropriately masculine and as leading to men’s righteous reclamation of space, whereas representations of women in the cycle tend to portray their disappearance. Finally, I consider the function of intratextual references among the stories, arguing that here Christie extols as a response to insecurity a hyperbolically local, frontier economy, while at the same time drawing attention to the value of paranoid readings seeking to rewrite histories of marginalization. Thus, men at risk become symbolic vessels of special knowledge, especially knowledge about how to reclaim a sense of home. As with the other two short story cycles surveyed in section 3 of Bearers of Risk, a chief unifying feature of Christie’s book is setting. Several stories in The Beggar’s Garden specifically make note of Vancouver, focusing on the overlapping contradictions of its growth: in “Discard,” Earl – who travels to Vancouver to find his now homeless grandson – considers the city to be “about as permanent as a card table set up for a Friday-night game” (40); the junkie narrator of “Goodbye Porkpie Hat,” gives no reason for being in the city, except that he “moved [there], like everybody else” (71); in “King Me,” Saul, a life-long inhabitant of the mental health facility Riverview Hospital comments on the city’s growth, “mazes of houses coiling up the river’s banks all the way to the seam of the horizon” (197); and in “The Beggar’s Garden,” Sam muses on the disparity between “a glimmering city of glass by the sea, at the foot of an Olympian rack of mountains” and the “tortured, unsettled dominion” of the Downtown Eastside (234–5). A key theme running through The Beggar’s Garden is that an increasingly globalized economy produces class inequities, rampant urban development, and a loss of local and community identity, and though this theme emerges in relation to settlement histories, those histories are not made explicit. Victoria Kuttainen argues that “Settlers are difficult subjects because they have an anxious colonial history;

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because they have a continued tense relationship to the Indigenous peoples who have been colonized by their settlement; and because their desires for authenticity are often bound up in concealed bids for cultural authority” (2010, 7). In other words, the invader-Settler works to manage their anxiety regarding colonization by performing a kind of manufactured Indigeneity and, as Kuttainen points out, it is often via attempts to assert marginality, either with respect to the imperial centre or in collusion with other markers of cultural or social marginality, that the invader-Settler performs authenticity and authority (23). As much as The Beggar’s Garden wishes to critique how the forces of globalization have made Vancouver increasingly unlivable for some of its inhabitants, the “extras” in this text often prove to be recently disenfranchised White men who seek to reclaim their sense of authority and belonging to place. In “The Queen of Cans and Jars,” the fourth story in the short story cycle, Bernice, owner of a tidy thrift store in the middle of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, reflects on the deterioration of the neighbourhood, an area that once boasted the Woodward’s Department Store where Bernice sold shoes: “Woodward’s finally declared bankruptcy in 1993, and with it died the last reason for decent people to come down to this neighbourhood, once the teeming commercial hub of the city … Over the years, through her thrift-store window, she’d watched the crippled loggers, hobos and drunks – battered leftovers of the city’s industrial heritage – joined by the heroin junkies, who were joined by the crack addicts and then by those suffering every other variant of destitution” (2011, 85). A close inquiry into this section of “The Queen of Cans and Jars” reveals a rich economic and social history. The mention of Woodward’s Department Store, which first opened in 1903 (Davis 2011, 51), recalls the status of Vancouver in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as a boomtown, in particular after the Canadian Pacific Railway chose “Granville” (renamed Vancouver) for its terminus in 1884 (Davis 2011, 16). Prior to this period of extensive settlement, the area was home to Musqueam, Kwantlen, and Tsawwassen peoples (Harris 1992, 39), though by the end of the nineteenth century, “Native power over the Lower Mainland and, to a considerable extent, earlier Native lifeworlds had collapsed” (Harris 1992, 68). Robert A.J. McDonald goes on to explain in Making Vancouver: Class, Status and Social Boundaries, 1863–1913 that the primary benefactors of urban growth – i.e., those who became the urban social elite of Vancouver, more likely to shop at a place like

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Woodward’s – were “White men of British heritage whose skills provided them with employment security, solid wages, and the ability to develop a sense of community with fellow workers off the job” (1996, 233). This social elite held power over “wage earners who were less skilled, less settled, and often not part of the ethnic and racial majority … [and] most of whom were men without families in Vancouver” (233). As Trevor Barnes discusses in “Vancouver, the Province, and the Pacific Rim,” during the 1960s and 1970s, the period in which Bernice held her job at Woodward’s, the economy of British Columbia was dominated by resource extraction, with Vancouver operating as a site of “distribution and control” (Barnes et al. 1992, 180). By the 1980s, Vancouver was already a deeply globalized city and economy, as both capital and people moved back and forth across the Pacific Ocean. The changing make-up of Vancouver in this period was attended by massive changes in the labour market, as service-­producing industries grew, goods-producing industries contracted, and disparities between high-paid professionals and low-paid service workers increased. The “crippled loggers, hobos and drunks” Bernice watches from her thrift-shop window are those men who lost their jobs – who became unsettled – when the mills and manufacturing plants become mechanized, and when the city turned into an “international financial centre” and a “knowledge-based” economy (Barnes et al. 1992, 187). This history of settlement and unsettlement, traces of which can be found in Christie’s description of Vancouver as “as permanent as a card table” (2011, 40), and of the Downtown Eastside as a “tortured, unsettled dominion” (235), reveals both the thematic core and the blind spots of the short story cycle’s concern with “extras.” First, the history of Vancouver’s goods-producing economy, which since the early days of British settlement depended on the labour of single men, men who McDonald asserts remained “outside the mainstream of civic discourse” (1996, 236), forms a crucial background against which many characters in The Beggar’s Garden stand in relief. Though characters such as Kyle, the homeless man featured in “Discard,” the crack addict who narrates “Goodbye Porkpie Hat,” and the narrator and Rick in “The Extra” are clearly too young to be explicitly connected to the city’s industrial history (not to mention, in the case of Kyle, the crack addict, and Rick, have only recently arrived in Vancouver), they join an established community of single, disenfranchised men, a community exemplified by Isaac, an older homeless man featured in “The Beggar’s Garden” who, after being severely injured at a logging camp,

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finds himself in 1970s Vancouver with “no savings or family or inclination to find a job” (2011, 244). Even those men in The Beggar’s Garden who are not homeless can be metaphorically included in this “outside the mainstream” group: Saul, from “King Me,” has been confined to the Riverview Hospital since he was a young man; Finch, a fourteen-year-old car thief featured in “The Quiet,” lives with his older brother following the violent death of their father; and Sam, the protagonist of “The Beggar’s Garden,” is shown living in his own shed following the departure of his wife and daughter. This cumulative picture of solitary men who have an unstable relationship to place is not only connected to Vancouver’s economic ­history, but to current demographics: as shown in a 2013 report Downtown Eastside: Local Area Profile, the “concentration of males in the Downtown Eastside is strikingly different from other areas of Vancouver,” with a ratio of men to woman of 60:40 (City of Vancouver 6). However, while many of the men living in the Downtown Eastside are part of vulnerable populations the report mentions, including “Single Room Occupancy (s ro ) Tenants,” “Homeless People,” “People Affected by Mental Illness,” and “Drug Users” (89–91), the findings of the report reveal what may be thought of as blind spots in Christie’s portrayal. The first five vulnerable populations noted in the report are: “Women,” “Children and Youth,” “Seniors,” “Aboriginal People,” and “New Immigrants” (84–7). Though the study notes that there is a much higher percentage of men s ro tenants and homeless people, “women in the Downtown Eastside may face multiple barriers such as precarious housing, addiction and/or involvement in the sex trade, and are particularly vulnerable to violence and exploitation” (85). Also, the report notes that “even given a higher population in the Downtown Eastside, Aboriginal people are routinely over­represented in vulnerable groups” (87). My point here is not to suggest that the focus in The Beggar’s Garden on disadvantaged men, not one of whom can be identified as Indigenous, is in some way inappropriate. Rather, the point is to draw attention to how a focus on a particular demographic works to advance a distinct narrative about how place is settled, how narratives of settlement depend on conferring authority, and how a certain model of behaviour (in this case appropriate masculine behaviour) can be championed as a justification for claims to occupy space. In The Beggar’s Garden, the disadvantaged or unsettled White man is made visible and deemed valuable, particularly via a focus on his labour.

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These men – the homeless, the junkies, the developmentally disabled and so on – are consistently described in relation to their ability and desire to do meaningful, masculine-coded work: as the narrator of “The Extra” asserts, while being a movie extra is boring “shit work,” he is happy to engage in physical labour (2011, 128). Christie’s representations of men reflects an attitude toward the relationship among masculinity, physical labour, and embeddedness, one that reasonably draws upon a long history of settlement activity in Vancouver, and yet one that ensures that the portrayal of disadvantaged or unsettled men comes at the expense of making visible other groups. More significantly, and in keeping with the logic of “difficult subjects” Kuttainen describes, even as The Beggar’s Garden operates as a critique of class inequities produced by a globalized economy, the at-risk status of the disadvantaged and unsettled men in Christie’s text becomes a validation for thematizing the colonization of place and the portrayal of recuperative masculinity politics. The critique of globalization in The Beggar’s Garden is seamlessly linked with a critique of how disparities of wealth encourage waste and absurd levels of consumption among those who, in benefitting from a certain kind of economy, simply have too much stuff. Stories in the cycle openly scoff at the propensity among those in the middleclass to buy things that they don’t need: Dan, the protagonist of “An Ideal Companion,” decides on a whim to adopt an Andalusian wolfhound, and is surprised when the dog – a hunting dog – starts to destroy items in his condo, including his dvd/tv remote control, his “Corbusier sofa,” and his “expensive computer chair” (147–8). Sam, from “The Beggar’s Garden,” only begins to use the “freeze-dried meals they’d purchased for a kayaking expedition in the Yukon that had never got booked” when he moves into his shed (228). Other stories in the short story cycle take up the issue of consumption by exploring the kinds of things that get thrown out or given away: in “Discard,” Earl tracks his homeless grandson’s efforts to scavenge items out of dumpsters, “mostly for condos and apartment buildings” (41–2), while in “The Queen of Cans and Jars,” Bernice is bewildered by donations to her thrift store that are “brand new” or “valuable,” including “unopened specialty appliances,” “futuristic basketball shoes,” and “always plenty of new dishes and kitchenware still stickered with prices of magnitudes that never failed to astonish her” (88–9). The critique of conspicuous consumption and waste, however, is not a critique of the idea of personal property or ownership: in “Emergency

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Contact,” the protagonist Maya, a lonely woman convinced that she is in the midst of a budding romance with the paramedic who once attended her, packs a special bag for a trip to the hospital, because, as she puts it: “I spent some time in hospital as a kid and know the ­comfort of having your own stuff” (10). Bernice, who is regularly confronted with people unloading unwanted things, has amassed a large collection of odds and ends, including “wide-eyed dolls, ceramic candy dishes, commemorative platters” and so on (90); for Bernice, the collection is “evidence that not everything was used up and wasted … a reminder that people made things and those things could be, if properly cared for, kept” (90). While Maya and Bernice make a case for how personal belongings, especially those that are cared for, produce a sense of comfort and stability, other characters, usually men, stress the relationship between ownership and a more external, objective notion of value. In “Discard,” for example, Earl’s grandson Kyle, who doesn’t recognize Earl, chides the older man for coming near a particular dumpster, asserting: “This is one of my bins, don’t you know that?” (51). Kyle spends his days combing through waste in order to find items that can “be sold or stashed for later” (42). In its representations of the various attitudes towards belongings, especially in terms of the way belongings are associated with labour, The Beggar’s Garden works through conceptions of identity and authority organized along the lines of class and gender. As Michael Atkinson suggests in Deconstructing Men and Masculinities, one of the “conditions” of late capitalism is that “identity” is performed in “highly personalized, transitory, and consumeristic manners” (2011, 37), and that this condition produces a sense of “ontological instability” (40). In his summary of the links among crisis language, masculinity, and late modernity, Atkinson asserts: “Being left alone to construct one’s own individual (gender) identity and the severing of traditional sources of social power and status is what men in crisis fear” (41). Within his short story cycle, Christie highlights two men who participate in a globalized, consumer-oriented culture, and thus suffer from ontological instability: Dan, the protagonist from “An Ideal Companion,” and Sam, the protagonist from “The Beggar’s Garden.” These middle-class men embraced the innovative masculinities associated with late capitalism and the idea that identity can be “personalized,” and are now disappointed. Dan is a website designer, whose job involves “coding, linking, cropping and resizing” (2011, 139), and whose clients include a “local organic deli for dogs” (139) and a

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“fitness boot camp franchise” (150). Even Dan realizes the shortcomings of his role in the knowledge economy, musing “His job never bored him more than when he was asked to describe it to others” (156). These shortcomings are especially visible because the story immediately preceding “An Ideal Companion” is “The Extra,” a story about a man who is often hungry, who must engage in physical labour in order “to eat” (123), but who “like[s] WorkPower because every time it’s different” (121). Further, though the narrator in “The Extra” lives in an unfinished basement of a house, a room with “no toilet or sink” (119), he considers the space he shares with Rick to be home. Dan, however, is disappointed with his condo: when he purchased it, he thought that he, like “hundreds of other young professionals,” had “bought into a building and a lifestyle that would be like no other before it” (150–1). Instead, Dan’s life in the non-place of the condo is lonely: as he tells the security guard who comes to kick him and his dog out of the otherwise empty exercise room, “This place, it hasn’t really worked out for me” (169). Similarly, in “The Beggar’s Garden,” Sam’s ambivalence towards a house that “had always felt much too large,” and which seems “tomblike, monolithic” from the vantage point of his shed (228), is matched by the ambivalence he feels for his job as the “director in the fraud department of a major bank” (231). Like Dan, Sam primarily interacts with a computer, “oversee[ing] and ever-updat[ing] a byzantine formula through which each transaction was run” (232), and admits to feeling “guilty and fraudulent to be in receipt of such a generous salary” (241). In “The Beggar’s Garden,” the intangibility of Sam’s labour and his disembeddedness is juxtaposed with Isaac’s work ethic and paradoxical sense of belonging: when Sam suggests Isaac take a few days off begging while he goes to visit his estranged wife in Calgary, Isaac demurs, asserting “I’m not sure I’m in need of too much free time to chew on” (250). Further, Isaac insists to Sam that, despite his marginal existence as a beggar, he feels rooted, telling Sam, “I got a whole bunch of interest in this place” (248). Finally, it is Isaac’s physical labour that resurrects the garden behind Sam’s house, an act of resettlement and taming of nature that inspires Sam to reclaim his own home (261). The imagery used in the final paragraph of “The Beggar’s Garden” underscores the correlations often made in this short story cycle among the embodiedness of subsistence labour, the way certain kinds of labour/behaviour are coded as traditionally masculine, and the right of settlement. As Sam sits in his revitalized garden, the

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sounds produced by a breeze “reminded Sam of rough hands passing over soft skin”; moments later, Sam “climbed the three steps [up to his house], took a little jump, and drove his brown loafer into the centre of his front door” (261). Here, as per standard tropes of the colonial narrative, not only is nature feminized, but the claiming of space is accomplished by force.1 The emphasis on a masculine claiming of home in the return story picks up on similar explorations of this theme in such stories as “Discard” and “King Me.” In “Discard,” the second story in The Beggar’s Garden, Earl arrives in Vancouver in search of his grandson, whose image he has glimpsed in a news story about the city’s homeless population (32–3). Earl recalls the difficult time he and his wife had raising Kyle, who as a child was first abandoned by his father Dennis, and then by his mother, Sarah. While Tuuli, Earl’s wife, expresses concern over Kyle’s increasingly unmanageable behaviour following these losses, Earl is convinced that “He’ll settle down when he’s working age” (36). Earl’s belief in the healing power of labour leads him to insist that Kyle take an active role in disposing of Dennis’s belongings at the dump: ignoring Kyle’s tears, Earl tells him “You can work, or you can walk” (46). On the one hand, the story appears to critique Earl’s stubborn reliance on clichés about masculinity and physical labour: immediately following their trip to the dump, Kyle again acts out by throwing a lawn dart into the air. The partial blinding of Kyle as a result of this event fills Earl with guilt, though he continues to try to control Kyle’s behaviour via “severity and rigidity” (52), in “ways that would repulse him today” (53). On the other hand, the thematization of physical labour, masculinity, and settlement in “Discard” ultimately suggests that Earl’s philosophy of work is correct: physical labour is a stabilizing, reflexive force in masculine identity formation. After tracking Kyle’s activities in Vancouver over several days, Earl comes to the heartening conclusion that “work was the only way to describe what [Kyle] was doing, whether he was getting paid for it or not” (42). The imagery Christie uses to describe Kyle’s type of labour – which “seemed to belong to another time … Earl thought of pharaohs, forced marches, treks across deadened earth in search of new beginnings” (42) – is both hyperbolically nostalgic, and consistent with the invader-Settler mythos linking the risk-taking of the pioneer with the right to claim space. Further, as with the portrayal of Isaac, Kyle’s immersion in physical labour gives him the capacity to lead other men to redemption. In the final

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scene of the story, Kyle heals Earl’s literal and figurative wounds, not only applying some sort of antibiotic cream to an injury Earl has suffered falling into a dumpster, but also encouraging Earl to help him in his own labours, allowing Earl to “[offer] up all of the little strength he has left” (54). In “King Me,” even the delusional Saul can articulate connections among labour, a sense of place, and the redemption of community. As the narrative makes clear, “chores” give Saul the “pleasurable feeling of competence” (184), as does sitting in the movie set apartment he finds in a closed wing of the hospital (200). Though Saul’s self-fashioning as “King Saul Plinth-Columbo, Eminent Fingerpainter, Majestic Vestibule” is clearly a product of mental illness, his desire to find a place for himself and for others, and to preside over those who are “maligned,” “ruined,” and otherwise deemed “unfit for community” (210) is a critique of a world in which old ideals about identity-formation and belonging have been suppressed. Like Isaac and Kyle, Saul offers an alternative mode of masculine self-­actualization to the fraudulent, consumer-oriented avenues associated with late modernity, which includes a right to space and a right to authority. In a significant contrast to the representation of men who with apparent righteousness assert their authority over space, The Beggar’s Garden features many women characters in the act of retreating. In the first story of the cycle, “Emergency Contact,” Maya initially appears to be taking control of her desire for belonging, albeit via unusual means. Like Saul, Maya has a long-standing relationship with the non-place of a hospital, having had an extended stay in hospital as a child, during which time she was cared for by nurses while her own family was absent (16–17). Her affection for the hospital, which leads her to compare being “in hospital” to being “in love” (10, emphasis in original), is comprehensible insofar as she is disconnected from any other community: when asked by a triage nurse to name her emergency contact, Maya admits to herself, “I had nobody” (15). However, whereas figures like Isaac, Kyle, and Saul find modes of action/labour that generate a sense of belonging and of taking up space, Maya’s plan to attract notice is to try to stop herself from breathing (25). The end of her story is filled with imagery associated with disappearance, as Maya senses how the possibility of being loved “wavered, diminished and was turned away” (27). Maya’s attempted disappearing act is repeated in the story of Bernice. Though Bernice is a woman who has held a job since she graduated from high school, and who responds to her husband’s desertion by opening up a shop,

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by the end of “The Queen of Cans and Jars,” she is emotionally defeated by her sense of loneliness and decides to move away from the city, leaving behind her collection and metaphorically making way for “the young people who would live in the new apartments” to be built on the site of the demolished Woodward’s building (118). Even more problematically, the diffuse narratives of two women – Anna, who shows up in a few stories, including “The Queen of Cans and Jars,” “The Extra,” and “The Beggar’s Garden,” and Ada Plinth, who is specifically named in “King Me” – rely on the idea that masculine self-actualization involves the struggle against a woman. Anna, Sam’s estranged wife, is only named in “The Beggar’s Garden,” in which she is characterized as somewhat flighty, leaving her job as a casting director to return to her wealthy family in Calgary, taking their daughter with her. The oft-times sympathetic portrait of Anna in this story as a long-suffering receiver of Sam’s criticisms is undermined if the reader recalls her other appearances in the short story cycle, for example as the impatient “tall, stately woman” who forces her daughter, “an unsteady, moon-faced girl in a princess dress,” to hand over her old clothes to Bernice (87), or as the “tall pretty lady” working on the movie set in “The Extra,” who the narrator is forbidden from approaching (132). The cumulative effect of these minor scenes in the cycle is to make Anna an even more thorough exemplar of late capitalist inauthenticity than Dan or Sam, though in contrast to the representation of her estranged husband, Christie does not portray her redemption narrative. Whereas Sam reclaims his home, Anna abandons her job and retreats to her father’s “rustic log mansion at the heart of a rolling plot of ranchland” (240) Another disappearing woman in The Beggar’s Garden is Ada Plinth. Over the course of the narrative of “King Me,” Saul periodically muses on his connection to “an unmentionable woman whom he’d long ago scoured from his memory” (180), though after cleansing his body of whatever drugs kept his delusions under control, Saul recalls his belief that a woman he’d never spoken to was “reaching out for him in methods beyond words” (200). In response to what he believed to be her “messages” that she wanted to “have her life derailed, disrupted” (200), Saul pushed her through a window of an electronics shop, an act for which he was eventually incarcerated (201). Saul’s conviction that “he’d done nothing evil, or horrible, or unforgiveable” and that “It had been Ada’s wish they’d been caught” (202) is, of course, called into question because of his unreliability. However, the narrative also

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tends to treat Ada as cipher: even her name – Ada Plinth (or: “add a foundation”) – plays on a central image in “King Me,” which is the “stacked, regal magnificence” (187) of a kinged piece in checkers. Further, Isaac, who can be identified as Saul’s younger brother, refers to Saul’s assault on Ada in “The Beggar’s Garden” in a highly mediated way, further disappearing her from the story of her own assault: Saul “[d]id something terrible to a woman was what people said” (251).2 While Saul’s narrative may be the clearest example in these short story cycles of the direct link between a crisis in masculinity and violence against women, Saul’s core belief that he was responding to a woman’s desire recalls Gould’s “Brood,” in which a man fantasizes that various women have asked him to impregnate them, or the way Bezmozgis portrays Mark’s relationship to Natasha, victim of a child pornography operation, as one of passive acquiescence to her sexual proclivities. As should also be clear from the examples of references to Anna and Ada, an additional literary feature that unifies the stories in The Beggar’s Garden is Christie’s use of intratextual links, as his short  story cycle exists somewhere on the continuum between Paul Glennon’s Oulipian experimentations with intratexts in The Dodecahedron and Gerald Lynch’s point that all proper short story cycles encourage acts of “clear-sightedly” rereading and “remembering” (2001, 30). The links among stories in The Beggar’s Garden are not nearly as complex as those developed in Glennon’s cycle. Whereas the formal constraints associated with intratextuality made use of in The Dodecahedron are, to a large extent, the text’s most notable (and, as I argue, most noted) feature, perceiving the links in The Beggar’s Garden is not compulsory in terms of reading for the treatment of place or for the unifying thematic explorations of identity, labour, and settlement. However, Lynch’s suggestion that intratextual references in a short story cycle should encourage one to “read clear-sightedly” seems insufficient to describe the type of meaning-making activity encouraged in The Beggar’s Garden. Rather, the process of reading for the links in Christie’s text recalls a section in “Discard,” in which Earl describes watching his grandson Kyle “find” useful objects that Earl strategically deposits: “The first thing Earl left was a rain poncho … He left it poking from a grocery bag beside one of the dumpsters, and the next rainy day he was pleased to see Kyle wrapped in it. He remembered Easter egg hunts, hiding foiled eggs in the garden and tool shed for Kyle to find, ruddy joy in the kid’s face as he tore around the yard like a crazed detective” (2011, 42). Examples of the

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“Easter eggs” Christie “hides” among the main action of each short story include the figures of Anna and of Ada Plinth, whose diffuse narratives are described above, often in relation to Sam, Isaac, and Saul. Also, the character Kyle, whose background and status is developed in “Discard,” is referred to briefly in “Emergency Contact,” as the “red-bearded man … picking through [a] dumpster” (8), while the thrift store that Bernice runs, described in detail in “The Queen of Cans and Jars,” is mentioned in both “Discard” (42) and “The Extra” (126). Some secondary characters – for example Ginny in “An Ideal Companion,” whose dog befriends Dan’s dog and with whom Dan shares a single, awkward kiss – is recognizable as the “cheery nurse with a lip problem” from “Emergency Contact” (19), while Karla, an ex-volunteer at the thrift shop, who had a child in foster care and whose funeral Bernice attends in “Queen of Cans and Jars” (95), is the same woman the fourteen-year-old narrator of “The Quiet” picks up at a gas station, subsequently agreeing to drive her to Merritt to see her kid (224). Even the figure of J. Robert Oppenheimer, who the narrator of “Goodbye Porkpie Hat” fantasizes he is conversing with during an evening spent purchasing and smoking a vast amount of crack cocaine, is potentially readable as the mythical “fella” Isaac describes in “The Beggar’s Garden,” who “got hit by a police car and made himself a whole bunch of money … So he steps out the hospital and figures he’ll have the biggest party anybody ever seen. He gets himself a nice suit and goes and buys all the drugs he can get his hands on” (236). The function of Christie’s use of such Easter eggs throughout his short story cycle seems twofold. In the first place, the links among stories make visible the links among people within this intricate community, especially with respect to Vancouver’s hidden economies and its “extras.” The hub of activity represented by Bernice’s store, through which goods found by someone like Kyle might be received by someone like Karla and then sold to someone like the narrator of “The Extra,” is an economy taken seriously by Christie, as is the economy involving drug sellers and users, or even involving thieves. As noted above, Christie often treats the labour connected to these hidden economies as more meaningful than the labour associated with the financial sector or the types of goods and services markets set up for ridicule in “An Ideal Companion.” This is the economy of Vancouver as Canada’s urban frontier, a place of opportunity for a new sort of cultural insider whose specialized local knowledge counters the effects

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of globalization. It is an economy structured around needs, not wants, to manage both the material effects and the anxieties about identity and belonging associated with late capitalism. Second: the Easter Eggs scattered throughout The Beggar’s Garden recall the description of Kyle as a “crazed detective,” an exemplary figure Christie explores in his depiction of characters like Maya in “Emergency Contact,” the narrators of “Goodbye Porkpie Hat” and of “The Extra,” and, especially, Saul in “King Me,” whose personal hero is television detective Columbo and who regularly claims to be able to see through the veil of his existence at Riverview Hospital to perceive a vast state-sanctioned conspiracy against him. These marginalized figures are, via a persistent use of structural irony, constructed in ways that invite more or less gentle criticism. Maya’s conviction regarding a certain paramedic’s affection for her is depicted as delusional: she interprets his comment that her “nightgown was an interesting colour” to mean “he liked it very much, because people love to be interested” (3). By the story’s end, the love connection Maya has spent several days concocting is proved imaginary, as the paramedic, who she has tracked to the hospital while faking symptoms of suicidal ideation, fails to recognize her or agree to go out for coffee with her (25). Similarly, the convictions of the narrators of “Goodbye Porkpie Hat” and of “The Extra” cannot be taken at face value, as the reader is invited to interpret the crack addict’s oddly psychedelic story about Oppenheimer as a sign of his increasingly unmanageable condition, and to read the narrator’s trust in Rick as a tragic. Finally, notwithstanding Christie’s dedication to exploring the focalizing voice of Saul in “King Me,” so that not only the letters Saul writes but also the third-person narrative provides his point of view, the story maintains Saul’s status as an immanently violent, almost certainly schizophrenic, psychiatric patient, whose life in Riverview Hospital is compulsory and a result of his physical assault of Ada Plinth. That said, the worldviews of these marginalized figures are not entirely dismissed; in fact, these figures are often presented as truthtellers, whereby their paranoid or incorrect readings of social situations reveal (and reject) a world that has oppressed them. For example: the climactic scene in “Emergency Contact” occurs when Maya is asked by the admitting nurse for the phone number of a person to call should a medical emergency arise. Maya admits to herself, “I had nobody – who would give a hoot if I died, I mean” (15), finally asking the nurse, “Can mine be 911?” (16). It is Maya’s loneliness, her life

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history of being essentially abandoned by her family, even as a child, and her dependence on a social institution like the universal emergency number that forms the context for Maya’s delusional reading of the paramedic’s statement about her nightgown. Further, at some level, Maya is self-aware about the flexibility of “reading”: in her description of greeting cards containing pre-printed messages, she is especially keen on their potential for flexible denotation, noting, “If someone hates what a card says … then you can just say: Sorry! I picked the card at random! Or if they really did like it … then you say: I spent hours reading cards until I found the perfect one just for you!” (11). Both “Goodbye Porkpie Hat” and “The Extra” also draw attention to complex reading situations that emerge on the social margins: in “Goodbye Porkpie Hat,” the vision of Oppenheimer seems to emerge, in part, from the narrator’s fascination with a science textbook he finds in a dumpster (55), but also in response to a beating he receives (59). In “The Extra,” the narrator depends on others to read and interpret letters he receives from the social welfare office, as when Rick skims a letter the narrator receives, and asserts, “It’s fine … doesn’t mean anything” (136), thus confirming the absurdity of a social service system communicating with persons known to have difficulties with literacy via the mail. The short story cycle’s exploration of flexible or failed reading reaches its apex in “King Me,” the only story other than “Emergency Contact” focused on interactions with Vancouver’s health care system. At the beginning of the story, Saul suspects that the new orderly, Luis, is an assassin, possibly in league with Saul’s psychiatrist (183); later, due to a run of luck at the bingo table, Saul comes to a “new conclusion that Luis was not an Assassin at all but an ally” (206), a “bingo emancipator a co-conspirator a guardian angel of some kind” (207). And yet, even while Christie explores Saul’s mounting paranoid readings of his environment, he draws attention to how interlocking systems, including the juridical and healthcare systems, depend on opaque vocabularies: “patients became clients, the Isolation Room became the Quiet Room, and the whole world became a community” (197). Further, the story explores the correlation between justification for Saul’s incarceration in Riverview Hospital (that he “posed a threat to the community” [197]), and Saul’s goal in trying to bring about what he calls “the Electrifying Conclusion” (212), which is to bring together a new community: “The maligned, the ruined, the shot to shit, the perennially confused, the monstrous slack-jawed head-bangers,

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the unfit for community, the grotesque drooling legions with blown fuses in their eyes, they were his subjects. King Saul saw them for what they were: a people ripe with untapped greatness. And if he, their Sovereign, didn’t care for them, who would?” (210, emphasis added). In all of Christie’s representations of “extras” in The Beggar’s Garden, the issue of care is central, linking Christie’s ironic representation of Saul’s truth-telling to the figure of the civil bearer of risk. Yet, in taking seriously the paranoid readings of a figure like Saul, who rationalizes both his violent attack of Ada Plinth and destroying the property of Tina, a fellow patient, Christie again makes visible a very particular category of the marginalized. The central project of The Beggar’s Garden is to centre the discourse of Vancouver’s at-risk populace, including those whose voices have been deemed untrustworthy. However, Christie’s cumulative depiction of this network of voices is conspicuously narrowed as the cycle progresses. Though the cycle opens with a story featuring a woman narrator, by the book’s end, women’s voices are diminished: the only other story in the cycle focalized by a woman is the fourth story, “The Queen of Cans and Jars,” and – as explored above – both “Emergency Contact” and “The Queen of Cans and Jars” conclude by representing a woman’s attempt at disappearance. Likewise, Anna retreats to her father’s house, Ada Plinth is reduced to a hazy, indirect story, and even Ginny – Dan’s failed love interest in “An Ideal Companion” – is left out of the conclusion to that story.3 In comparison, the cycle becomes increasingly focused on oppositional portraits of men, for example the juxtaposition of the tragic, at-risk narrator of “The Extra,” who relishes physical labour and has a naïve savant’s view on the excesses of Vancouver’s film industry, with Dan in “Ideal Companion,” whose identity is defined, not by his work, but by his stuff, and who is portrayed as emasculated and insecure. These juxtapositions reach their apex in the return story, “The Beggar’s Garden,” in which Isaac is not only depicted as an at-risk savant, but also as a redeemer, resurrecting both Sam’s garden and sense of self. Thus, Christie’s iteration of the civil bearer of risk is allegorical: men like the narrator of “The Extra,” Kyle, Saul, and Isaac are sacrificial figures who can bear the risk of truth-telling because they are already at-risk.4 Further, the truth that these figures seem to share, while implicitly critical of late capitalism, globalization, and bureaucracy, is also conservatively focused on recuperating a narrowly delineated version of proper masculinity, one linked to physical labour, insider economies, and the right to claim space.

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While MacLeod’s Light Lifting portrays the boom-and-bust effects of a globalized auto industry on the suburban space of Windsor, Christie’s The Beggar’s Garden considers globalization’s effects on an increasing number of urban dwellers pushed to the absolute margins of existence, as the gap between economic stability and precarity becomes a chasm. His focus on disadvantaged single men in Vancouver, while cohering with the city’s settlement history, seems to suggest that these figures are most deserving of the type of redemption that comes from belonging, because of how disadvantaged single men find ways to work. The types of work that are deemed worthwhile and redemptive in this cycle are local transactions and physical labour, as in the type of labour Kyle pursues as he reclaims goods from condo dumpsters and hauls those goods around the city, to be reused or traded among his Downtown Eastside compatriots. Redemption can also come in the form of seeing through the inauthenticity produced by globalization and emphasizing the need for community care, though the care a figure like Saul appears interested in meting out seems a lot like power, while the community is one in which the needs and desires of men are prioritized and women disappear. In the final part of this section of Bearers of Risk, I consider the representation of community in a rural context, as men’s bodies and the type of work associated with those bodies is also central to D.W. Wilson’s 2011 short story cycle, Once You Break a Knuckle.

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10 “DON’T WRITE CHEQUES YOUR BODY CAN’T CASH” D.W. Wilson’s Once You Break a Knuckle, Rurality, and Authenticity

In 2013, as part of the Festival de Cannes, a short, independently produced film entitled “Floodplain” premiered. A 2012 article by Steve Jessel, published in the Invermere Valley Echo, leaves the impression that the film – which went on to win awards for cinematography at the  2014 Short Circuit Short Film Festival and at the 2014 Nickel Independent Film Festival – is based on D.W. Wilson’s short story “The Dead Roads,” which won the 2011 bbc National Short Story Award and is included in Wilson’s 2011 short story cycle, Once You Break a Knuckle (para. 2). Rather, Wilson published a short story entitled “Floodplain” in Prospect magazine, which is no doubt the source for Daniel Hogg’s screenplay adaptation; the story “The Dead Roads” is more of a sequel. In the film, “Floodplain,” the characters Duncan and Vic are shown riding a homemade raft discussing Vic’s imminent departure for university. In “The Dead Roads,” Vic is already partway through her degree and, while visiting home, she, Duncan, and their friend Animal Brooks take a road trip into Alberta. The main continuity between “Floodplain” and “The Dead Roads,” besides the two main characters and their status as being from Invermere, a small town located in the East Kootenay region in British Columbia, is Duncan’s love for Vic and his abiding worry that he will lose her to another man. The main discontinuity between the film version of “Floodplain” and “The Dead Roads” is the setting. As noted on the Indiegogo fundraising page for “Floodplain,” the film is “Set on a raft on a spectacular body of water against the Rocky Mountain vista”

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(Hogg and Lutter 2013, para. 3), and indeed it is no surprise that the film garnered recognition for cinematography, as the  images of Widgeon Marsh in Vancouver where the film appears to be shot are stunning and are meant to echo the natural beauty of  Invermere. Conversely, “The Dead Roads” is primarily set on the way to a northwestern campsite in Alberta, where mountain beetles have left the trees as “grey, chewed-out shells … Not a living tree in sight” (2011, 178). While “Floodplain” emphasizes youthful longing and gorgeous scenery, “The Dead Roads,” like the rest of the short story cycle Once You Break a Knuckle, is conspicuously focused on various types of stagnation and ugliness. My analysis of Wilson’s short story cycle will start with a discussion of the rural setting, comparing settlement history and data associated with Invermere, bc, and the East Kootenay region with the notion of an “imagined geography” (Cairns 2013, 624). My discussion of setting will consider how the small town is represented in this cycle as both a trap and a retreat, as Wilson portrays stagnation as limiting, but also as a type of protection against progress. Wilson’s challenge to traditional symbols, like the house and the car, together with the short story cycle’s tendency to undermine a clear sense of temporal development, reflect an anxiety about cultural progress. Finally, I will examine the various father-son dyads that appear in Once You Break a Knuckle, especially the relationship of John and Will Crease. Here, I will focus on the competing fantasies of the idealized masculine body and of men’s broken bodies, and how these fantasies are associated with notions of appropriate masculine labour and of rurality as a space of belonging. As is true not only for the works discussed in section 2 of Bearers of Risk (by Bezmozgis, Lam, and De Sa), but also for MacLeod’s Light Lifting and Christie’s The Beggar’s Garden, the place described in Wilson’s debut short story cycle is both thematically significant and, to some extent, based on personal familiarity. The author description on the inside cover of Once You Break a Knuckle notes that “D.W. Wilson was born and raised in the small towns of the Kootenay Valley,” and reviewers frequently point out the importance of this place in the stories. Kyle Minor is exemplary in his review of the book for the New York Times, noting that the book “finds its center in the Kootenay Valley, the rugged southeastern tip of British Columbia where the Purcell Mountains meet the Canadian Rockies, a wild country where fires occasionally burn all of the interior … Wilson’s people respond by controlling what they can. They are forever building

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shelters, armoring themselves with Carhartt outerwear and steel-toed boots, fortifying themselves with Kokanee beer and judo and, most of all, work” (2014, paras. 2–3). Jim Bartley, reviewing for the Globe and Mail, notes the cycle’s autobiographical foundations: “Born and raised in b c ’s Kootenay Valley, D.W. Wilson now lives in England … ‘Write what you know,’ the old-school saw to aspiring authors, has taken knocks over the years, but Wilson does a stunning job of resurrecting its prescriptive force. His fractious Kootenay town of Invermere rings with authenticity” (2011, para. 1). However, just as Lam’s standing as a professional insider complicates his thematizing of the trustworthiness of doctors and trust in expert systems, Wilson’s highlighting of “authenticity” is not a given, but a matter to query. The proposition that Wilson’s representation of Invermere is, above all, authentic, is worth examining alongside the settlement history left out of Once You Break a Knuckle. According to Brett McGillivray’s Geography of British Columbia: People and Landscapes in Transition, the Kootenay Region is the ancestral home to several nations, including “the Kootenai to the east, the Okanagan to the west, and the Shuswap Nation to the north” (2000, 13). To this day, the Shuswap Indian Band live on reserve territory just north of Invermere, while the Akisqnuk First Nation is a three-hundred-member community living about ten kilometres south of Invermere. As is the case for much of b c , the settlement history of the Kootenays parallels histories of resource extraction, first with respect to mineral mining and later to forestry. Importantly, the current borders of b c , including the eastern border that encompasses East Kootenay, were established in order to deal with an influx of American miners. As Jean Barman notes in The West beyond the West: A History of British Columbia, the British parliamentary decision to create the colony of British Columbia was, in part, precipitated by the worry that “gold miners would provide a useful precedent for the United States to annex remaining British territory west of the Rocky Mountains” (2007, 72). Later in the nineteenth century, the Canadian Pacific Railway worked with the Canadian government to support mines and smelters in the Kootenay Region, which resulted in a tenfold increase in population, though, as Barman notes, even during this period, the region remained “a company province, [with] the Canadian Pacific Railway replacing the Hudson’s Bay Company” (135). With the development of the pulp industry in the twentieth century, the Kootenay region economy continued to be directed from elsewhere,

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often via multinational corporations, a state of affairs that sometimes resulted in the creation of “ghost towns,” or settlements that were abandoned when a mine or mill was deemed unprofitable (McGillivray 2000, 202). In 1965, the Instant Towns Act attempted to combat the problem of the so-called company town with a pathway towards municipal self-government in rural areas. However, unlike urban centres such as Toronto or Vancouver, towns in the Kootenay Valley have had relatively slow development: as McGillivray notes, “the Kootenay region remains dependent on resource development and export. Mining and forestry are vital to the economic well-being of the region. Tourism has offered some diversification, as the region has many hot springs and lakes, and opportunities abound for skiing, hiking, and sight­ seeing” (2000, 14). For Invermere in particular, McGillivray’s point about resource development runs somewhat counter to data in the 2006 census showing that, in the town with a population of about 3,000 and a labour force of about 1,700, the top three industries are construction (12.2 per cent of the labour force), retail trade (11.3 per cent), and accommodation and food services (11 per cent); by comparison, agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting, and mining and oil and gas extraction employ 2 per cent and 1.5 per cent of the Invermere labour force, respectively. Finally, in keeping with the settlement history of most of the bc Interior, the vast majority of Invermere residents identify as their ethnic origin “English,” “Canadian,” “Scottish,” or another Northern or Western European nation; 4 per cent of the population identify as Aboriginal and 2 per cent of the population identify as visible minorities (Statistics Canada, 2007).1 The name “Invermere” itself is based on Scottish terms for “out of the mouth” and “lake,” and the town was so named in the early twentieth century with the aim of attracting British Settlers. According to its 2011 Integrated Community Sustainability Plan (icsp), called “Imagine Invermere,” a major focus of the current municipal government is environmental sustainability (Centre for Sustainability, Whistler 2011, 9). Working alongside this history and these data points are two important, somewhat competing myths of Canadian rurality, surveyed by Kate Cairns in her article, “Youth, Dirt, and the Spatialization of Subjectivity: An Intersectional Approach to White Rural Imaginaries.” Cairns considers the “much-discussed trope” of nature and rural identities in relation to Canada’s complex settlement history:

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Narratives of rurality perform a critical role within Canadian mythologies (Shields 1991). Despite the fact that less than onefifth of the country resides in rural municipalities (Mitchell 2005: 468), Canadians are consistently reminded that they remain a ­citizenry in close contact with nature (Baldwin et al. 2011). From Group of Seven paintings to Mountain Equipment Co-op advertisements (Van der Kloet 2009), a range of cultural texts locate the nation within a vast Canadian wilderness (Grace 2002). This imagined geography erases violent histories of ­colonization through spatial stories of empty land peacefully ­settled by rugged European settlers (Furniss 1999; Lawrence 2002) and sustains the racial coding of rurality as a space of whiteness (Razack 2002). Contrasting the idealized rural of Canada’s colonial history, much current media and policy ­discourse represents rural communities as “backward,” targeting these seemingly anachronistic spaces as barriers to Canada’s ­progressive future (Corbett 2006). (2013, 624) In other words, the existence of Canadian rural spaces is useful to the Canadian imaginary because they continue to make possible the stories we tell ourselves about our special relationship to nature, even in the face of almost ubiquitous urban realities. At the same time, the inhabitants of rural spaces can be safely ignored when it comes to the stories we tell ourselves about Canadian civil society, as so-called backward social positions are attributed to a regressive minority. In contrast to what town council members who developed the “Imagine Invermere” icsp hope to communicate, what connects both of these myths is the idea that rurality is associated with a past time, which is both preserved as a type of comforting sketch and dismissed as no longer truly relevant. Importantly, notwithstanding the way Wilson’s representation of Invermere is read by reviewers as authentic, the contradictions associated with these myths of Canadian rurality emerge in his short story cycle. In Once You Break a Knuckle, the details of the settlement history of Invermere are barely mentioned, visible only in some references to sawmills, to a lesser extent mines, and in one reference to where there was once a “ferry port” on the river (2011, 40). In a speculative story called “The Millworker,” set some time during the 2030s (that is, “almost five decades” beyond “the eighties” [195]), Mitch Cooper, a

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recurring character in the cycle, refers to Invermere’s remaining mill, which “was about the only mill in all bc that hadn’t gone fully auto – valley stubbornness, valley fascination with relics” (194). Beyond this allusion to a “fascination with relics,” though, Wilson’s short story cycle rarely comments on Invermere’s real past; instead, the “imagined geography” (Cairns 2013, 624) associated with Canadian rurality is of crucial thematic importance, incorporating various features. As it is described in Once You Break a Knuckle, Invermere is foremost a space on the margins of culture and expectations, this according to Will Crease, the narrator of the first story “The Elasticity of Bone,” who describes his father’s career as a “constable for life” and his serial postings “in small towns on the fringes of b c ” (2011, 4). In other stories, Wilson figures Invermere and the East Kootenay region as places that one must leave, either to make money – usually in Alberta – or to escape the deadening features of rural life. In “The Mathematics of Friedrich Gauss,” for example, the narrator acknowledges his wife’s desire to take a vacation away from Invermere, as “It’s a chance for her to remember that the world exists somewhere else” (54). Later in the story, it becomes clear that this “vacation” is actually permanent, but, again, the narrator seems to accept his wife’s desire to take their son away, “away from the drudgery he’ll suffer as a boy in a small town, from the hockey louts he’ll fall in with and the mill job he’ll get locked into and the girl he’ll drug with Rohypnol” (67). As is clear from this proleptic deliberation, Invermere is often figured as a potential trap, a notion that is clarified in cycle’s final story, “Once You Break a Knuckle”: in this story, which is narrated by Mitch Cooper, plans to leave Invermere are thwarted, as characters are “claimed by the mill, or by our own dads’ careers, or by girls. That’s the small-town curse” (220). Connected to the cursed status of the rural space are Wilson’s explorations of Invermere’s insularity, its tediousness, and its stagnation. In the second story, “The Persistence,” the narrator describes Ray’s return to the region (specifically, to the community of Windermere), which he appears to have left mostly out of anger and embarrassment about a failed relationship. Ray is nervous about his return because “The Kootenay Valley stunk of gossip” (17). The plot arc of “The Persistence” focuses on a burgeoning connection between Ray and Kelly, a woman who is part of the construction team he finds work with; even in this situation, though, Ray realizes that “she probably knew his history. Everybody knew his fucking history” (26). Thus,

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when Ray leaves a party with Kelly, but then fails to maintain an erection during sex, his key source of disquiet is less the failure of his body and more the way not having sex with Kelly will be read by his peers. When Kelly suggests not only that he stay the night in her apartment but that he “go to work on Monday and tell them everything they need to hear” (43), Ray experiences welcome respite, as Kelly gives him permission to perform a new “fucking history.” However, in contrast to this relatively early representation of the possibility of hoodwinking the small-town gossips for a chance at personal renewal, the short story cycle’s subtle tracing of various erotic triangles confirms the idea of the curse of Invermere. In “The Millworker,” Mitch has coffee with his brother Paul, who – in response to Mitch’s brief comment about his own marital unhappiness – offers “Me and Vic. Well” (203). This obscure remark not only seems to suggest the repetition of experiences the brothers undergo, but also marks the temporal endpoint of both Paul’s and Vic’s narrative arcs as they can be tracked in various stories. Paul is first introduced in “The Persistence” as Ray’s apprentice, the young guy who gets stuck with jobs like loading the truck and holding spools of wire for other electricians (21–2). He is next mentioned in the story “Reception,” as a member of the Cooper family (82), who are friends and neighbours of John and Will Crease. While the friendship of Mitch Cooper and Will Crease is explored in “Don’t Touch the Ground,” the character Vic is introduced in “The Dead Roads” as the off-and-on romantic partner of Duncan, a character mentioned in two earlier stories, “The Mathematics of Friedrich Gauss” (62) and “Accelerant” (170). Finally, in the last story, “Once You Break a Knuckle,” John Crease reports to Mitch Cooper that Duncan has attempted suicide but was saved by “a girl named Vic Crane” (235).2 Importantly, “Once You Break a Knuckle” is set about twenty years before “The Millworker,” introducing a sense of temporal dislocation into these already fragmented and unfinished character narratives. Unlike the Easter Eggs scattered throughout Christie’s The Beggar’s Garden, which I argue invite a kind of triumphant paranoid reading that perceives hidden truths, the intratextual links among stories in Once You Break a Knuckle are part of Wilson’s deadening and dislocating portrait of the small town as a trap. In Minor’s review of Once You Break a Knuckle, quoted above, he asserts that the inhabitants of Wilson’s small-town world insulate themselves against the chaos of a harsh physical environment with

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“most of all, work.” Below I will explore Wilson’s representation of labour in relation to the depiction of working-class bodies and masculinity, but here I want to consider how Wilson links certain kinds of work with, paradoxically, both stagnation and disquiet. While not all the jobs mentioned in the cycle are labourer positions – John Crease, for example, is a police officer, Larry Cooper is a naturalist, and the narrator of “The Mathematics of Friedrich Gauss” is a teacher – the text seems filled with electricians and mechanics and construction site supervisors, as well as a millworker (Mitch Cooper) and a miner (Connor, from “Valley Echo”).3 In its frequent focus on those working in construction, from Ray and his crew in “The Persistence,” through Biff Crane in “Big Bitchin’ Cow,” to Paul Cooper in “The Millworker,” Wilson’s short story cycle is somewhat different than MacLeod’s “Light Lifting” in its representation of the labourer, as Wilson leaves mostly unexplored the relationship between the working class and those for whom they work. Whereas MacLeod explicitly examines the gap in worldview between the guys who build suburban driveways and those who live in suburban neighbourhoods, Wilson barely mentions other sorts of lives, for example the lives of potential buyers of the condo or subdivision projects Ray works on or Paul runs, or the lives of car owners in the region who might actually have need of a mechanic. Importantly, the homes that characters are shown building or renovating are rarely depicted in completion, except for Mitch Cooper’s home, though even this image is complicated by the cycle’s dislocating arrangement of stories. In “Once You Break a Knuckle,” the final story, Mitch is newly married and building a family home; he admits, “I’d be a liar if I said it didn’t make me proud, that house. Just seeing it gave me a tingle in my chest, in that spot right above the gut. Three thousand square feet, a good size for a family” (230–1). However, given the penultimate story in the cycle, “The Millworker,” Mitch’s words here must be read as ironic. In “The Millworker,” set about twenty-five years after “Once You Break a Knuckle,” Mitch’s marriage is filled with tension, his son Luke despises him because of that tension, he loathes his job, and the final image shows him sitting in his truck unwilling to enter the house he built, “listen[ing] to rock songs from his youth and star[ing] at those two dark windows” (210). In Once You Break a Knuckle, staying in the small town does not produce belonging, but rather an incessant and paradoxical sense of stagnation and dislocation, which is arguably a discernable trace of the region’s history with ghost towns.

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In similar fashion to how the symbol of the house is undermined in Once You Break a Knuckle, the image of the car – so often a symbol associated with freedom, movement, and autonomy – becomes a metaphor for stagnation and a lack of progress. The question of who might need to hire a mechanic in East Kootenay is unusually complicated, considering how many characters in this region of small towns and districts seem able to rebuild classic cars, which are the primary relics of note in the cycle. Along with comprehending the erotic triangles described over the course of various stories, Once You Break a Knuckle invites the reader to follow the ownership status of certain vehicles. For example: in “Sediment,” the narrator describes the summer before grade twelve, during which time his friend Bellows buys a broken-down cobalt blue ’67 Camaro from someone in Edgewater; by July, Bellows has the car running and “We cruised around in that beater-on-the-rise” (49). Towards the end of the narrative, we learn that Bellows has died in Afghanistan, likely due to the explosion of an Improvised Explosive Device (51). Several stories later, in “The Dead Roads,” the cobalt blue ’67 Camaro shows up again, this time driven by Animal Brooks (174). By the time Animal, Duncan, and Vic take their road trip to Alberta in 2002, the year “The Dead Roads” is set, Animal has had the car long enough for Duncan to have “got a girl pregnant … in Animal’s backseat” (175). Here again Wilson’s cycle – intentionally or unintentionally – makes a muddle of time, as the earlier story “Sediment” would need to be set after “The Dead Roads” for the reference to the war in Afghanistan to make sense.4 Similarly, the narrative arc of a 1953 Rocket 88 is both difficult to follow and temporally unmoored. The car is first mentioned in “Reception,” and narrator Will Crease notes that it belongs to Mitch Cooper; “Reception” is arguably set around winter 2004, when Will is in his “graduating year” of high school and after his father John has returned from working as part of Canada’s peacekeeping mission in Kosovo (68).5 In “Reception,” Will notes that Larry Cooper – Mitch’s father – “purchased [the car] from some hick twenty years earlier … [and with] the patience a birdwatcher, he teased that car from ratbag to beauty” (70). Later in Once You Break a Knuckle, in the cycle’s longest story, “Valley Echo,” the Rocket 88 makes two significant appearances: first, it is driven by “Jack’s wife” (119), a woman Connor has sex with after the mother of his child leaves them to go on a bender in Las Vegas. Fifteen years later, it becomes a project that Winch, Connor’s son, works on in Miss Hawk’s machine tech class; Miss

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Hawk, the erstwhile wife of Jack, explains to Winch that the car “belonged to her ex, a welder who took off with a girl half his age” (137). Eventually, in another example of Valley insularity and the traffic in women, Winch too has sex with Miss Hawk. The notion that Larry purchased the car “twenty years” before the events of presented in “Reception” doesn’t really make sense, given that “Valley Echo” seems to be set over the course of the early ’80s to late ’90s. Still, the key issue Wilson draws attention to in the figures of the ’67 Camaro and the Rocket 88 are that cars in Invermere do not leave the region; rather the become projects for men and are circulated among different small-town inhabitants, in the same way that women like Vic Crane and Miss Hawk are circulated. Here again, especially in the extended metaphor of the echo, Wilson represents Invermere as a ghost town, replete with revenants and relics. As is clear from analysis of the representation of erotic triangles and the changing ownership of vintage cars, the arrangement of stories in Wilson’s cycle stymies attempts to read for a conventional developmental structure, which is also the case for representations of fatherson relationships (in this sense, Once You Break a Knuckle recalls De Sa’s Barnacle Love, another cycle focused on the father-son dyad, in which some stories seem temporally out of order). While I have argued that most of the short story cycles explored in Bearers of Risk make use of a return story to, as Gerald Lynch puts it, “return to … origins … without ever quite closing the circle” (2001, 32), Wilson’s ironic play with echoes in Once You Break a Knuckle indicates an especially pronounced anxiety about the concept of progress, an anxiety specifically tied to his focus on rural geographies and rural masculine identities, especially in the immediate post–9/11 period. Wilson’s cycle is deeply concerned with what constitutes and is recognized as a masculine body, and how such a body is reflexively brought into being via masculine labour. Though the stories in Once You Break a Knuckle are filled with representations of backward rural behaviour, apparently inviting criticism, the central notion of the small-town-as-trap is not straightforwardly challenged. Instead, Wilson’s stories suggest that not only is the small town an imagined geography that is itself stuck, it is also a space that must be protected from progress. The very insularity and tendency towards stagnation that disheartens characters like Ray and Mitch, and that is central to the myths that locate rural life in the past, are what makes the small town a space in which retrograde conceptions of authentic masculinity

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and masculine authority can be reaffirmed and resettled. Thus, Minor’s point that the activity insulating the characters in Once You Break a Knuckle is work must be considered in relation to Wilson’s conception of what counts as “real” work and, by extension, as a “real” workingclass body. Analysis of Wilson’s short story cycle, like those by Bezmozgis, MacLeod, and Christie, benefits from Raewyn Connell’s theorization of “body-reflexive practice” (2005, 61), or the idea that physical bodies are persistently comprehended and brought into being in relation to social expectations associated with gender, class, and ethnicity. Also relevant is Hamilton Carroll’s scholarship on post–9/11 pop culture trends centering White, working class men’s bodies, which he examines in Affirmative Reaction: New Formations of White Masculinity. Carroll’s chapter on the reality television show American Chopper works through concepts that also seem to ground Once You Break a Knuckle, especially with respect to the notion of authentic work. Writing in 2011, the same year Once You Break a Knuckle was published, Carroll argues that “Americans have of late (and perhaps again) developed an infatuation with blue-collar labor” (2011, 77), going on to suggest that this “infatuation” is visible in the rise in popularity of “reality-based automotive programs” (78), including American Chopper. In this “masculine family melodrama” (79), conflict between father (Senior) and son (Paulie) organizes each episode’s plot: Senior’s role is to represent “the mythic figure of the outlaw biker and the sentimentalized figure of the blue-collar laborer” (84), while Paulie is “an artist” (87). Thus, as Carroll argues, in addition to mythologizing the blue-collar worker’s potential for upward mobility and linking American blue-collar identity with patriotism, American Chopper dramatizes contemporary social anxieties about appropriate work for American men (87). On the one hand, Senior’s labour as a motorcycle mechanic is “tangible,” “quantifiable,” and therefore “trenchantly masculine,” while Paulie’s labour as a designer is often “intangible” and “unquantifiable,” and therefore “feminine and bourgeois” (87). It is this opposition between physical and abstract labour that Wilson explores in his development of the father-son dyad John and Will Crease, whose evolving relationship is represented in several stories in the cycle, including the opening and concluding short stories. Finally, as Thomas Dunk points out in “Provincialism, Rurality and Canadian Masculinity,” within the specifically Canadian national imaginary, authentic blue-collar work is associated with the “much-discussed

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trope” of the “struggle or interaction with nature” and the rural: “The significant role natural resource extraction historically played in the Canadian economy lends a materialist logic to the hegemony of rural masculinities in depictions of what it means to be Canadian” (2016, 35). In The Beggar’s Garden, the labour of those serving Vancouver’s knowledge economy is depicted as artificial, especially in comparison to the labour of a figure like Isaac. Similarly, Wilson’s men are projected as real men, because of how their work, as associated with a rural imagined geography, has had a material (or tangible or quantifiable) impact, not just on the land, but on their bodies. The relationship between John and his son Will Crease is one example of various complicated father-son dyads portrayed in Once You Break a Knuckle; others include Connor and Winch in “Valley Echo,” Larry and Mitch (and then Mitch and Luke), the father and son in “The Mathematics of Friedrich Gauss,” and Biff Crane and his son in “Big Bitchin’ Cow.” One common thematic feature of these ­iterations is a concern with sons who supplant their fathers: in “The Elasticity of Bone,” the first story, Will tries (and fails) to beat his father in a judo contest (2011, 15); in the final section of “Valley Echo,” Winch physically assaults his father and then takes his place in Emily Hawk’s bed (166); in “The Millworker,” Luke, despite having been picked up by Mitch after a night in the drunk tank, feels authorized to express his “disappoint[ment]” in his father’s disloyal behaviour (209), and at the end of this story, the son returns to the home while the father is left outside. Also, some of Wilson’s father-son relationships are presented in inverse terms to the immigrant father-son relationships explored by Bezmozgis and De Sa: whereas both Mike Berman (in Natasha and Other Stories) and Antonio Rebelo (in Barnacle Love) are depicted as becoming more settled in Canada than were their fathers, an abiding desire for John Crease is that his son escape rurality, become more mobile, and avoid “throw[ing] his life away” (235). Even more pointedly and poignantly, the father in “The Mathematics of Friedrich Gauss” seems to accept his wife’s decision to take their son and leave Invermere in order to protect the boy’s future. That said, some fathers in Wilson’s short story cycle are keen that their sons remain in the region, either as repetitions or upgrades. The story “Big Bitchin’ Cow,” begins with the image of Biff driving over the ice to find his grown son – who has taken off in anger at his wife’s infidelity – and his plan amounts to reaching out “to pat his son on the knee” (93). As Biff drives, he recalls various life moments, the final

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one a narrative of Biff being kicked by his brother’s cow Princess, and then dragged to safety by his son, who was then thirteen years old: the end of the story recalls the image of the boy as he “reached across the seat and patted Biff on the knee” (103). Even more significant is the relationship of Larry and Mitch Cooper: in “Once You Break a Knuckle,” Mitch notes that his dad was “a bird watcher, a Parks naturalist, university educated” (221). In other words, Larry has the kind of job that takes seriously Canada’s supposedly distinctive attitude towards wilderness spaces, though, as is noted sporadically throughout the cycle, the Cooper family is held in contempt by “the locals” (84). As a young teenager, Mitch is described as a budding “woodsman” (110), but this type of specialized knowledge is not considered advantageous in relation to Mitch’s future; according to Mitch, even his father wants his sons to “land jobs you could have an arm-wrestle with” (222). The range of father-son relationships explored in Once You Break a Knuckle recalls not only the realistic short story cycles explored in section 2 of Bearers of Risk, but, perhaps more so, Paul Glennon’s refracted father-son narratives in The Dodecahedron. As I argued in chapter 3, Glennon’s iterations of fathers and sons who, variously, fail to live up to one another’s expectations, reflect a concern with a loss of opportunities for men, especially sons, to take part in a grand adventure, a defining tale of discovery and settlement. For the character of the Fourth Pilgrim, one  of the storytellers featured in “Plagiarism,” which is The Dodecahedron’s final story, the anxiety produced by a failure to live an adventurous life is remedied via acts of controlling narratives. In Wilson’s text, however, the men of Invermere – both fathers and sons – seem less concerned with opportunities to act with greatness and more concerned with preserving the ability to embody real or appropriate masculinity. Thus, the civil bearer of risk emerging in Once You Break a Knuckle, like those in Light Lifting and The Beggar’s Garden, is a figure who stymies cultural progress, preserves order, and reclaims space, showing the toll of his risks to protect the future on his perpetually injured, labouring, sacrificing body. Thus, the richly metaphorical phrase, “land jobs you could have an arm-wrestle with,” reveals two concurrently explored fantasies associated with real or appropriately masculine labour explored in Once You Break a Knuckle: the fantasy of the ideal masculine body and the fantasy of men’s injured bodies. Even more so than the confounding play with temporal markers in Wilson’s short story cycle, his use of

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hyperreal imagery to describe, in particular, John Crease’s performance of identity and body undercuts the typical reviewers’ reading of this text as an exploration of authenticity. In “The Elasticity of Bone,” John Crease is described by his son in fairly hyperbolic terms: “He stood a head taller than me and a shoulder wider. His fists were named ‘Six Months in the Hospital’ and ‘Instant Death,’ and he referred to himself as the Kid of Granite, though the last was a bit of humour most people didn’t quite get. He wore jeans and a sweatshirt with a picture of two bears in bandanas gnawing human bones. The caption read: Don’t Write Cheques Your Body Can’t Cash” (1). This description recalls Dunk’s point that “The rural … is intrinsic to many images of masculinity and rural masculinity is intrinsic to dominant ideas and images of ‘Canadianness’” (2016, 35). In the revision of Superman’s descriptor, the Man of Steel, and the Canadian spelling of the word “cheques,” Wilson seems eager to explore the distinctiveness of a Canadian rural masculinity. Even John’s job as an rc m p officer coheres with Dunk’s point that Canadian rural men “tend to be hardworking, peaceful, respectful-of-authority, team players” (36). Beyond the emphasis on John’s Canadianness, or perhaps attending this emphasis, what is notable in this and other descriptions of John’s performance of identity is an almost comical reiteration of clichés. In every story featuring John as a character, the narrative makes note of his t-shirts, each of which features a caption winking at conventional codes of aggressive, competitive, unfeeling masculinity: “Pain Is Only Weakness Leaving the Body” (2011, 6); “You Can Run, but You Can Also Scream” (69); “If You Can’t Run with the Big Dogs, Go Sit in the Food Bowl” (74); “I Sleep with a Pillow under My Gun” (78); “I Will Kick Your Ass and Get away With It” (213). In moments such as these, Wilson shows an almost metafictional awareness that his exploration of Canadian, rural masculinity is really an ironic exploration of what sorts of performances are comprehended as authentic. This explicit play with the concept of performance is also visible in the representation of John Crease’s body. Despite story events recounted over the course of the short story cycle, including John getting shot in Kosovo (15), recovering from the wound, which is so painful he is unable to go tobogganing (88), and getting shot at by Duncan (227), John Crease is persistently described as weighing “two hundred and twenty pounds” (14, 73, 214). Arguably, in all these descriptions, the overriding point is to show how a figure like John Crease is comprehended as an ideal by focalizers like Mitch or Will,

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though even in this sense John Crease is characterized as a cliché: he is unchanging, more imagined than seen. However, in an inversion of the Cooper father-son dyad, in which the university-educated naturalist wants his son to find a job “you could have an arm-wrestle with,” John Crease is dismayed by the idea that his son also wants to be a cop; rather, he supports his son’s interest in creative writing and wants him to pursue a Master’s degree (224). Will balks at the idea of being a writer because, as he tells Mitch, “It’s not real. What my dad does. That’s real” (221). At first glance, Wilson seems to be working through the same binary logic Carroll identifies in his analysis of Senior and Paulie on American Chopper: Senior’s work as a mechanic and John Crease’s work as an rc mp officer is tangible and masculine, while both Paulie and Will engage in work that is artistic, intangible, “unreal,” and therefore not masculine. Will’s desire to be a cop like his father can therefore be read as an expression of what Carroll calls “revanchism” (2011, 180), or the reaffirmation of something lost. That said, as is clear from the portrayal of John Crease as, somehow, simply a collection of idealizations and clichés, Wilson remains unconvinced about the efficacy or authenticity of the conventional rural masculine performance. This skepticism is also reflected in the admission that “On the West Coast [at university], Will played like the king of the wild frontier, swore to wear his ballcap even if he someday won a big award” (2011, 219). As Will/Wilson seem to understand, authenticity is simply a kind of marketing.6 Paradoxically, Wilson’s consideration of idealized rural bodies – which are, somehow, not real – proceeds alongside the short story cycle’s recurring attention to broken rural bodies. In “The Elasticity of Bone,” Will reflects on the sight of his father’s “uneven knuckles,” recalling “Once you break a knuckle, he has told me, you will break it again” (5). The subject of broken knuckles, together with the subjects of inevitability and of time’s progress, are returned to most comprehensively in “Once You Break a Knuckle,” which, as already noted, is an especially complicated return story, if only because it is preceded in the book by “The Millworker,” set about twenty-five years later. The structural irony embedded into “Once You Break a Knuckle” once again reveals the cycle’s working through of an anxiety about the notion of cultural progress, as well as its depiction of the small town as, simultaneously, a trap and a refuge. As in “The Elasticity of Bone,” the focus of “Once You Break a Knuckle” is the alternately combative and loving relationship between father and son. While in the first story,

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Will contends with both his desire (and failure) to best his father in physical competition and his apprehension about his father’s work in Kosovo, the later story emphasizes John’s concern about Will’s future and that, even several years later, the father is still able to physically overwhelm the son. As Mitch notes as he watches the two men engage in a tug-of-war contest involving a pulley mechanism, what looks like an evenly matched contest of bodies (and wills) ends when “Will’s old man yelled out – a guttural, barbaric sound, a sound like you’d make to benchpress a car – and heaved like I never knew a man could heave. Will flew straight into the air. He really flew. It was like something out of a Shakespeare play” (239). The outcome of this moment is that two of Will’s fingers become lodged in the pulley and the question emerges as to whether John’s goal here is to use his physical superiority to force the issue of Will’s future: a young man with a maimed hand may not be able to join the rcmp, but he can still pursue an ma in creative writing. By the end of the story, Mitch has both imagined and rejected possible futures in which Will stays in Invermere to become a cop, as if Will’s now broken body has proved his incompatibility with a certain kind of labour. However, as has already been argued, the prolepses in “Once You Break a Knuckle” can only be read as ironic, as all of Mitch’s fantasies – even the ones he rejects – prove false. Though Will does indeed stay in Invermere, marry Ash Cooper, and join the Force, the friendship between Mitch and Will does not “[last] to the end of days” (244); rather, in “The Millworker,” when Mitch picks up his son Luke at the rcmp detachment, Mitch describes the moment when Constable Crease “seemed to tighten his jaw in that way a man does to shrug off bitter memories” (208). Thus, Wilson self-consciously points out the snag in John Crease’s plan to injure his son, and thereby force the issue of Will’s future/ escape: as the stories in Once You Break a Knuckle show, men’s broken bodies are at home in a rural space (or, in keeping with Canadian mythologies about rurality, the rural space is the proper home for men’s broken bodies). If one is to read Wilson’s short story cycle, especially its ironic use of the return story, as an example of settlement and revanchism, it is one in which reclaiming territory is associated with highlighting the injured body, turning masculine aggressiveness into a kind of vulnerability. After all, it is the repeating behaviour of men like John and Will Crease that produces their almost constant state of being injured: “Once you break a knuckle … you will break it again.” In this shifty way, Wilson’s short story cycle makes the case

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that men’s broken bodies – like the bodies of the father in MacLeod’s “The Number Three” or of Isaac in Christie’s “The Beggar’s Garden” – deserve to have their sense of belonging to place centred and kept safe. In Wilson’s cycle, the civil bearer of risk clearly links to Canadian mythologies of standing on guard for peace, order, and good government: after all, John and Will Crease are police officers. However, these figures are not only associated with protecting their communities, but also represent a set of ideals – a set of clichés – that require safeguarding, as those ideals and clichés are understood as markers of authentic Canadian masculinity: injured, sacrificing, and yet hyperbolically unchanging. As much as characters in Once You Break a Knuckle comprehend their rural environment as backward, stagnant, riddled with gossip, the trafficking of woman, and old cars, the small town is concurrently held up as a space that must remain stubborn, a bulwark against an uncertain, insecure future. While this section of Bearers of Risk is organized around an exploration of short story cycles that make use of setting as the primary unifying feature, comparative analysis of Light Lifting, The Beggar’s Garden, and Once You Break a Knuckle reveals the elevation in all three texts of the image of the wounded, White man. To repeat: Sally Robinson argues that these figures, often depicted in American post1960s, middlebrow texts by men, “spring from, but obscure, the marking of white masculinity as a category. What this means is that representations of wounded white male bodies signal a crisis elsewhere” (2000, 8–9). Versions of this figure are readable in the short story cycles explored in sections 1 and 2 of this study, for example the failing/falling men portrayed in several stories in John Gould’s kilter: 55 fictions or the character Fitzgerald in Vincent Lam’s Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, a cycle concerned with borders, contagion, and containment. In their focus on men literally and figuratively hurt by globalization, modernity, and body-reflexive practices, MacLeod, Christie, and Wilson are not straightforwardly regressive. MacLeod, while often representing violence as a product of masculine social training is also interested in the rise of what Michael Atkinson calls innovative manhood, or the performance of progressive social roles. In “Wonder about Parents,” the narrator works through the labour associated with domesticity and, especially, childcare, ironically acknowledging the work involved in being a father by representing the stakes of taking a night off. Even the symbolic hero in “The Number Three” is sympathetic insofar as he has been

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shaped and wounded by the implicitly patriarchal forces of the auto industry. Christie’s focus on a specific class of marginalized figures in Vancouver, though perhaps narrow, is nonetheless clearly interested in taking seriously the pragmatics of what it means to be homeless, or a junkie, or a thief, or incarcerated in a mental health facility. By focusing on the labour of such individuals, on their participation within a complex local economy that resists corporate capitalism, Christie challenges the idea that such communities are a problem to be solved. Finally, though reviewers commended Once You Break a Knuckle for its authenticity, analysis of its representation of masculinity, not just as performance, but as a set of clichés, reveals Wilson’s self-reflexivity about the way rural men’s bodies come into being and are called upon to represent stability within the national imaginary. However, the extensive and complex treatment of masculine labour and bodies in the work of MacLeod, Christie, and Wilson arguably raises the image of the wounded, White man to the level of symbol, an allegorical civil bearer of risk. While the short story cycles in section 2 of Bearers of Risk explored how ethnic immigrants weigh the process and potential for disappearance within the cosmopolis, the short story cycles examined in section 3 are focused on making certain bodies more visible. In MacLeod’s return story, “The Number Three,” the protagonist has been literally and figuratively wounded by the globalized automotive industry, which initially provided him with a sense of identity and security, but then exposed him to risk and made him disposable. Though the protagonist’s injury is here associated with a car accident rather than cancer, the image of him walking along the centre of the highway, followed by a “strange parade” (2010, 219) of vehicles, recalls the iconic Canadian image of Terry Fox’s Marathon of Hope, transmuting a story that is in part a critique of a man’s stubbornness and guilt into one of masculine heroism. Similarly, the character Isaac in Christie’s “The Beggar’s Garden” acts as a kind of symbolic mirror for Sam, whose injuries are not physical but emotional and related to his life as a “fraudulent” (2011, 241) man. Conversely, the injuries to Isaac’s body, due to an accident suffered when he was a logger for the b c forestry industry and the toll of his life as a beggar, are physical and therefore real; unlike Sam, Isaac has a natural sense of belonging to place, an idea expressed metaphorically when he resurrects Sam’s garden. In Once You Break a Knuckle, the hyperbolically stable body of John Crease – rcm p officer, Canadian peacekeeper, no-nonsense father – is also perpetually wounded; it is

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a body that belongs within the imagined geography of the rural, stuck in a past in which men found meaning doing the tangible, quantifiable work of settlement. In raising these types of bodies to the level of symbol, MacLeod, Christie, and Wilson provide an allegorical framework for managing post–9/11 insecurity, whereby the sacrificing White man’s body will provide redemption, leadership, and a path back to a sense of order.

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RISK ASSESSMENTS

In the introduction to Bearers of Risk, I noted my intention to consider the implications of a scholarly tradition linking the genres of the short story and short story cycle to notions of risk, especially as that tradition collides with a post–9/11 rhetorical field marking White men as culturally marginalized. “Risk,” as it pertains to these genres, is alluded to in three overlapping senses: (1) the short story and short story cycle are genres in which authors can take risks; (2) the short story and short story cycle are training genres, allowing both publishers and readers to take risks on writers; and (3) the short story and short story cycle has been a space in which marginal voices are elevated. So, for example, John Metcalf in The Canadian Short Story relishes how “a new talent and a new sensibility arrives to challenge ‘traditional forms’ with ‘clever tricks’” (2018, 205); Alexander MacLeod, in his contribution to The Oxford Handbook to Canadian Literature, acknowledges the multifaceted “cultural infrastructure … dedicated to the development of Canadian short fiction,” whereby even larger commercial presses are “now slightly more willing to take a chance on short fiction” (2016, 442–3); and Laurie Kruk in Double-Voicing the Canadian Short Story suggests that strategies of “double-voicing” bring about “critiquing, questioning, or ironizing centripetal discourses of all kinds. By creating as focalizers a host of marginalized characters … the authors ‘talk back’ to a variety of authorized speakers, offering alternative visions through their double voices” (2016, 164). In Bearers of Risk, the short story cycles I chose to explore are ones that I think exploit some or all of these ideas and were often lauded or rewarded for risk-taking by reviewers and/or prizing juries.

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Thus, also relevant to a consideration of risk-taking are MacLeod’s assertions about the esteeming of short stories in Canada, which he connects to a complex, supportive “cultural infrastructure,” including the “literary prize culture” (2016, 443): “During a period in which the Booker Prize and the International i m pac Dublin Literary Award and many other internationally juried competitions refuse to even consider short-fiction collections for their highest honours, in Canada, short-story collections regularly make it to at least the short list for most of the major awards, and collections regularly receive national reviews in major newspapers and widespread media attention” (443). While Bearers of Risk is not conceived primarily as a study of genre definitions and classifications, or as an exercise in ranking, it is useful to consider how the subject of prizing short story collections inheres with my argument about what the short story cycle can do, both in terms of representing voices as at-risk and in terms of how, in the post–9/11 decade, the genre was made use of to explore Canadian masculinity-at-risk and Canadian White men as civil bearers of risk. Appendix I of this study surveys the results of Canadian literary prize competitions between 2001 and 2011, focusing on short story collections.1 Category I lists the collections awarded, shortlisted, or longlisted for four national book prizes, prizes for which short story collections are  considered  in the same category as novels (the Commonwealth Writers’ Prizes; the Governor General’s Literary Award – English Fiction; the Scotiabank Giller Prize; the Writers’ Trust Fiction Award). Category II lists the winners of the Danuta Gleed Literary Award for a debut short story collection and of the ReLit Award for Short Fiction, which focuses on works published by independent presses. Appendix I aligns with my corpus for this study, as seven of the nine short story cycles I explore in Bearers of Risk show up on these lists.2 More importantly, analysis of appendix I reveals a counterpoint to the critical position that short stories are linked with risk-taking, especially with respect to claims about elevating marginal voices. Of the national book prizes awarded to short story collections between 2001 and 2011 (category I), four were for books written by men and six were for books written by women, though a closer look at this list shows that four of the six prizes given to collections by women were won by Alice Munro (Hateship, Friendship, Loveship, Courtship, Marriage won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in 2002, while Runaway, published in 2004, won three national book prizes).

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A similar pattern is visible in the shortlists: of the works on national book prize short lists (not counting those that won), nine are collections by men, twelve are collections by women, and four of the collections by women are by Munro. In terms of ethnicity, the lists show even more homogeneity: of the winning and shortlisted collections, only one – Vincent Lam’s Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures (2006) – is written by a racialized author, and three – The Scent of a Lie, by Paolo Da Costa (2003), Natasha and Other Stories, by David Bezmozgis (2004), and Barnacle Love, by Anthony De Sa (2008) – are written by a member of an ethnically minoritized community; in addition, Pasha Malla’s The Withdrawal Method (2008) was longlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. A survey of the short story collections in category II, which lists the winners of Danuta Gleed Literary Award and the ReLit Award between 2001 and 2011, shows similar patterns, though arguably more homogeneity: of eleven debut collections that won the Danuta Gleed in this period, six are by men and five are by women; eight are by White writers, two – Malla’s The Withdrawal Method and Ian Williams’s Not Anyone’s Anything (2011) – are by racialized writers, and one – Bezmozgis’s Natasha and Other Stories – is by an ethnically minoritized writer. Of the eleven collections published by independent presses that won the ReLit Short Fiction Award in this period, nine are by men and two are by women; all eleven are written by White writers.3 Also relevant as a counterpoint to scholarship equating short stories with risk is an analysis of which collections elevated within Canadian literary prize culture in this decade are risky in other ways, for example in terms of publishers and/or readers being encouraged to “take a chance” on new forms or new voices. Certainly, literary prize culture as it is associated with short story collections is, to some extent, systemically dedicated to new voices, as the Danuta Gleed and one of the categories of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize focus on debut collections and first books, respectively. Also, between 2001 and 2011, eleven debut collections were shortlisted for, longlisted for, or won the Governor General’s Literary Award – English Fiction, the Scotiabank Giller Prize, or Writers’ Trust Fiction Award. That said, among all of the collections listed in category I of appendix I, only two – John Gould’s kilter: 55 fictions (2003) and Paul Glennon’s The Dodecahedron, or a frame for frames (2006) – explicitly experiment with the formal conventions of the short story cycle, and a few more contain short stories that are stylistically or modally distinct from

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realism or naturalism, including works by Bill Gaston (2002, 2006), Pasha Malla (2008), and Zsuzsi Gartner (2011). Unsurprisingly, given the mandates of the Danuta Gleed and the ReLit awards, a survey of the works listed in category II reveals additional challenges to formally traditional, modally realist and naturalist short story collections. For example, Lee Henderson, in The Broken Record Technique (2002), tinkers with form, including a novella length piece in his collection, and Williams’s Not Anyone’s Anything makes use of formal constraints associated with mathematics and music; several winners of the ReLit depart from realism and naturalism, including Gaston (2002), Tony Burgess (2003, 2010), Barry Webster (2005), Lisa Foad (2009), and Stuart Ross (2009).4 In a 2005 essay published in the Danforth Review, journal editor Michael Bryson examines the thirty short story collections longlisted for the 2004 ReLit Award, inquiring what the list might reveal about “the state of the short story in Canada” (2005, para. 1). Bryson prefaces his analysis by drawing attention to various commentators on Canadian literature, most of whom lament the lack of experimentation by Canadian writers; for example, writer and editor Peter Darbyshire asserts that there “seem to be very few writers in Canada who are interested in rewriting the parameters of fiction” (para. 31). Bryson’s survey does reveal a writerly preference for realism, especially among women authors, though he also suggests that many complaints levelled by commentators are “hyperbole, not criticism” (para. 73). Bryson wonders if the prevalence of men’s voices among commentators is “why the dominant area (realism), the [category] dominated by women writers, came under most consistent complaint?” (para. 68). Bryson’s point – that criticism fails when it slides into “personal grievances” (para. 74) – is a helpful touchpoint in considering exactly which voices are deemed new, risky, or worthy of scrutiny, as well as which voices are deemed “apolitical” in the sense that their work is said to be judged primarily on artistic merit. In “Metcalf in the Moment,” a review essay of John Metcalf’s The Canadian Short Story, Alex Good registers his own complaint against the state of Canadian literature. In the first part of his essay, Good describes Metcalf’s study, focusing especially on Metcalf’s “aesthetic orientation” and his “disinterest in the ideas presented in fictional works” (2019, para. 3). In the second, longer part of the essay, Good takes up Metcalf’s position on “aesthetics” versus “ideas” in order to evaluate such publications as The Best American Short Stories, 2018, edited by Roxane

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Gay (2018), The Best Canadian Stories, 2018, edited by Russell Smith (2018), Refuse: CanLit in Ruins, edited by Hannah McGregor, Julie Rak, and Erin Wunker (2018), Sarah Henstra’s The Red Word (2018), and Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black (2018), concluding with an assertion that might easily be deemed “hyperbole, not criticism”: “At no time in the past twenty years (the time I’ve been reviewing) have I felt the aesthetic qualities of good writing to be less relevant to either commercial or critical success than they are today. Put simply, good writing no longer matters very much” (para. 49).5  My point here is that – like all other terms associated with a literary quality – the concept of risk is not neutral, but is connected to how the circulation and elevation of particular texts does cultural work, including the kind of cultural work that deems certain texts to be “rewriting the parameters of fiction,” or to have “the aesthetic qualities of good writing,” while other texts are “political,” or not “about art.” The survey of literary prize culture between 2001 and 2011, as it is associated with short story collections, reveals a fairly stable picture: a small majority of prized and shortlisted books are written by men; the majority of prized and shortlisted books written by women are either by Alice Munro or are Munrovian in mode6; and almost all the winning and shortlisted writers are White. Thus, as I’ve argued throughout Bearers of Risk, notwithstanding being associated with overlapping notions of risk (formal, market-related, or thematic) the short story cycles under scrutiny here do the cultural work of restaging White, masculine, settlement activity in the post–9/11 decade of insecurity via a focus on a figure I have referred to as the civil bearer of risk. The civil bearer of risk is a man who has failed – primarily in the domestic sphere or in the labour market – but who comes to comprehend his own vulnerable position as linked to a post–9/11 condition of insecurity, not only insofar as economic, political, and social forces have produced his failure, but also in terms of how he has failed to keep his community safe and functional. Thus, the civil bearer of risk engages in what he believes to be the dutiful activity of defending the future from increased chaos by reasserting patriarchal privileges, by taking up the position of the objective arbiter of cultural progress, and by reaffirming the right to claim and protect space. In her 2016 study on the contemporary Canadian short story, Laurie Kruk scrutinizes literary techniques associated with what she calls “double-voicing”: “The vital question, ‘Who speaks?’ or how the vision conveyed by the voice of the story, is explored through

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thematics of focalizations. Choice of focalization shapes the literary mode, or style, of the story, including ‘double-voicing’ created, most commonly, by means of the tropes of irony, satire, or parody. And at the discursive or linguistic level, ‘double-voicing’ appears in terms of the dialogizing of language itself by means of hybrid construction, code-switching or register shifts, self-reflexivity, intertextuality, and wordplay of all kinds” (163). Kruk argues that a common object for the various strategies of double-voicing is the “critiquing, questioning, or ironizing centripetal discourses of all kinds” (164), and her critical vocabulary proves a helpful frame for a final review of the short story cycles I have examined, especially as they exploit this oft-repeated scholarly position on the links between marginal genres and marginalized voices. Certainly, the persistent focus on changing labour conditions and the increasing porousness of cultural borders is, in works like kilter: 55 fictions, Barnacle Love, Light Lifting, and The Beggar’s Garden, pitched as a critique of post–9/11 globalization and the kinds of forces to be resisted by individuals and local communities, like the community of beggars, scavengers, and junkies in Christie’s cycle. Also, works like The Dodecahedron, Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, and Once You Break a Knuckle make use of double-voiced modes and language tricks, often in service of “critiquing, questioning, or ironizing centripetal discourses of all kinds”: in Glennon’s short story cycle, the parodic play with the ­political thriller, for example, highlights the complex power relations in father-son dyads; Marche’s sustained parody of a literary anthology critiques the ascendance of hackneyed postcolonial discourse within the academy; Lam’s representation of racialized characters ­dissecting the White body reveals an ironic self-reflexivity about the positioning of minoritized writers in the Canadian literary imaginary; and Wilson’s hyperbolically unchanging depictions of John Crease show his interest in exploring the fantasy of a stable body in a world marked by shifting notions of masculinity. However, as my study has shown, the deployment of the “thematics of focalization” in these short story cycles reveals what Victoria Kuttainen calls a certain “shiftiness”: “at various times when constituencies within the settler nation have felt anxious or under threat, the short story composite has come out of the trunk and been renewed for various culturally expedient purposes, particularly when settlers need to claim marginal alliances, renounce their cultural capital or their dominance, or when they seek new affiliative relations” (2010,

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354). Kruk notes the import of the “thematics of focalization,” which highlights the questions “who voices the story, and why?” (2016, 4), and which encompasses considerations of both “voice and vision” (7). Reflecting on the nine cycles I have examined, I perceive a conspicuous narrowing of voice and vision, even in texts that, at first glance, appear to depict multiple perspectives. In kilter: 55 fictions, for example, the use of the microfiction initially suggests a heterogeneity of focalization, as Gould explores post–9/11 metaphysical angst. Closer inspection, however, reveals the priority given to the voice of Western, urban, middle-class men, and to their expressions of anxiety about normative masculine roles and paternal legacy. In Barnacle Love, the shift in focalization from Manuel Rebelo to his son Antonio reflects an increasingly conservative reaffirmation of the model Canadian immigrant, whose progressive, new-world values are exhibited through adopting a more civil performance of Whiteness and masculine authority. In The Beggar’s Garden, Christie explores through narration the point of view of various socially marginalized “extras,” yet this focus tends to centre White men who have lost their sense of privileged status and who seek to reclaim that status through resettlement. Further, the ideal vision focalized in several texts explored in Bearers of Risk is the outlook of an apparently unmarked observer who, for example, in The Dodecahedron reveals an elaborate geometric structure of storytelling, thereby masking to some extent the piling up of stories about colonial discovery, obsessive collection, and the masculine desire for originality. The editor persona “Marche,” introduced in Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, proclaims his intention merely to gather together material written by Sanjanians, allowing Marche to fulfill the invisible role of inventor of a fictional country. Even in Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, the minoritized focalizer attempts to recede into such non-places as the urban hospital, the freeway, and the condo. Importantly, the Settler’s response to feeling “anxious or under threat” is to try to reclaim a sense of normativity through disappearance, though this disappearance masks the elevating of a highly restricted set of concerns; thus, a common literary technique in these cycles is focalization that tries to disguise the privileging of certain voices through unmarking. The notion of privileging certain voices is also relevant to my periodic examination of the circulation of these texts within the Canadian market, thus recalling Kit Dobson’s identification in the introduction to Producing Canadian Literature of the “economic capital and

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cultural capital” in Canada of the “literary bestseller” (Dobson & Kamboureli 2013, 3). Importantly, the category of the literary bestseller resonates with Kuttainen’s argument that the shifty Settler will periodically “renounce their cultural capital or their dominance, or … seek new affiliative relations.” Thus, my interest in the genre of the short story cycle is often less concerned with exploring what Mary Louise Pratt refers to as “a roster of essences” (1994, 111), and more focused on how certain texts are received and valued. As my analysis of certain reviews shows, the complex production of many of these texts helped to advance the narrative of risk-taking, whereby through an affiliation with a risky, minor genre, short story cycles that centre wounded, White masculinity are read as formally adventurous or thematically bold. Conversely, as some of the responses to Natasha and Other Stories, Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, and Barnacle Love reveal, cycles that centre the ambivalent perspective of the immigrant voice are subject to skepticism or derision, usually in service of policing the borders of the national imaginary and thwarting the immigrant’s sense of truly belonging. Thus, in section 1 of this study, which focused on formally experimental short story cycles, I looked at reviews of Glennon’s The Dodecahedron and of Marche’s Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, drawing attention to emphases on the intellectual rigour of Glennon’s text and on the inventiveness of Marche’s mimicry of various styles of writing. As in Gould’s kilter: 55 fictions, Glennon’s and Marche’s experimentations initially give the appearance of a heterogeneity of voice, as picked up by reviewers commending, for example, Glennon’s portrayal of “the diversity of our obsessions” (Cole 2005, para. 4) or Marche’s construction of “the most exciting mash-up of literary genres since David Mitchell’s ‘Cloud Atlas’” (Beha 2007, para. 1). Similar to the semblance of multiple perspectives in kilter: 55 fictions – which, like Glennon’s cycle, was shortlisted for a major Canadian literary prize – “diversity” and play with “literary genres” is, in The Dodecahedron and Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, a veneer, whereby reviewers laud only the “exciting” impersonation of heterogeneity, while mostly ignoring the thematizing of colonial activity. In section 2, I examined an almost mirror image of the infrastructure’s response to the formal experimentations of Gould, Glennon, and Marche in the begrudging or even hostile responses to debut cycles by immigrant writers Bezmozgis, Lam, and De Sa. Reviews of both Natasha and Other Stories and Barnacle Love insinuate that the

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writers may have benefitted from unwarranted critical attention and admiration because their books fit into a marketplace “hype” (Gillespie 2004, para. 1) or “trend” (Fox 2008, para. 1). Even more pointed is Stephen Henighan’s denunciation of Lam as the CanLit establishment’s safely multicultural “teddy bear” (2006, 62). The policing of the borders of belonging here is rhetorically complex, reflecting both the persistent linking in the Canadian national imaginary of benign multiculturalism with the triumph of White civility, as well as the anxious position of the Settler seeking to perform legitimacy via claims to the centre. Finally, in section 3 of Bearers of Risk, I considered as ironic the disconnect between reviews of D.W. Wilson’s Once You Break a Knuckle emphasizing its “authenticity” (Bartley 2011, para. 1) and the cycle’s self-reflexive exploration of clichés of rurality. Wilson’s fictional avatar – Will Crease – “[swears] to wear his ball cap even if he someday won a big award, if he ever got famous, but Ash [his girlfriend] had no time for it, the façade” (219). In the author photos of Wilson taken around the time of the publication of Once You Break a Knuckle, for example the photos supplied by Getty Images, Wilson is almost always wearing a ball cap, thus signalling his cognizance of the complex, rhetorical work involved in belonging to CanLit. Finally, the matter of privileging certain voices is also relevant to my thinking through the issue of the circulation of scholarly criticism.7 True story: in early 2018, after more than a decade thinking through this project and with many thousands of words written, I was sitting around a dinner table with a few CanLit colleagues, admitting that I was thinking about packing it in, picking apart the M S for some article-length chunks, and finding something else to write about. The context for these contemplations was the (then) current state of CanLit, now archived in Refuse: CanLit in Ruins. In their introduction to this essay collection, McGregor, Rak, and Wunker provide a wideranging overview of “CanLit [as] both the industry and the field of academic study, and their uneven and sometimes unpredictable sites of conflict and contradiction” (2018, 17), going on to recap those “sites” especially visible in 2016–18 due to a multiplying of provocative events: the open letter written by the ubcaccountable group and the response to that letter from, especially, Indigenous and feminist critics; the publication in a p t n National News of Jorge Barrera’s “Author Joseph Boyden’s Shape-Shifting Indigenous Identity”; the “Appropriation Prize” debacle; Rinaldo Walcott’s declaration that he was “quitting CanLit” because it “refuses to take seriously that Black

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literary expression and thus Black life is foundational to it”; and the public discussion of complaints about abuse filed against professors in Concordia University’s Creative Writing program (23–7). In the wake of this series of what McGregor, Rak, and Wunker later refer to as “rupture events” (31), I found it difficult to want to continue with the project of Bearers of Risk, which centres the voices of (mostly) White men, and thus confirms Walcott’s reproof about which voices in CanLit (the industry and the field) get taken seriously.8 One of the essays included in Refuse: CanLit in Ruins is Lorraine York’s “How Do We Get out of Here? An Atwood Scholar Signing off,” in which York reflects not only on how the events of 2016–18 caused many “early-career writers, especially writers of colour” (2018, 133) to reconsider their formerly admiring (or even neutral) a­ ssessment of Margaret Atwood, but also on her own particular “investment” in the way Atwood is centred in CanLit: “I built a successful career, one I’ve received promotions, and prizes, and honours for, on the basis of work that was partly devoted to the study of Margaret Atwood’s writing and her literary celebrity” (134). York ends her piece by working through the question, “How do I get out of here?” (136), by which I think she means how does one refuse to benefit anymore from the Settler dividend? Here, I am repurposing Raewyn Connell’s notion of the “patriarchal dividend,” which she explains is “the advantage men in general gain from the overall subordination of women” (2005, 79). The Settler dividend might be thought of as the advantage Settler Canadians in general gain from the overall subordination of Indigenous peoples. Or, to use Kuttainen’s terms, how does a contributor to a field of study acknowledge their own shiftiness in the settling of that field? In the first place, “getting out” means “signing off,” whereby York commits to a “disaffiliation from Atwood’s actions of recent years”; in the second place, York considers that “The best I can do is to use the measure of academic celebrity I possess to make clear where I stand, and with whom” (136, emphasis added). It is this commitment to the idea of “making clear” that, at least conceptually, helps me to find a way back to the value of this project. As Sally Robinson notes at the end of her introduction to Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis: “I am, of course, fully aware that my analysis of the marking of white masculinity in the post-liberationist era contributes to, and exacerbates the effects of, that marking … in further marking white masculinity, Marked Men inevitably adds fuel to the fire, further entrenching an image of a damaged white masculinity and thus

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providing another alibi for the performance of its wounds” (2000, 20). Robinson’s project, however, of rejecting White masculinity as normative, as a “disembodied, unmarked, abstract personhood” (21), is its own kind of essential refusal, one that recalls Daniel Coleman’s comments in “From Contented Civility to Contending Civilities: Alternatives to Canadian White Civility”: “Denaturalizing what [appears] to be natural in its own home remains necessary” (2008, 226, emphasis in original). In my chapter on Lam’s Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, I made use of Priscilla Wald’s analysis of the conventions of “outbreak narratives” (2008, 3), including her argument that, typically, “microbial traffic” is only problematic when microbes move in a particular direction: “An infection may be endemic to an impoverished area, but it emerges when it appears – or threatens to appear – in a metropolitan center of the North” (34, emphasis in original). Also significant is that a crucial plot element of the outbreak narrative is the activity of tracking the disease’s movement, often across borders, as experts work “against time” (39) to find a cure or a way to halt transmission. Wald’s observations about the plotting of outbreak narratives as uni­ directional, as fundamentally structured around tracking, and as a threat to Western national imaginaries is helpfully analogous to rhetoric about perceived threats to the normative (natural, at home) Settler/ masculine perspective, whereby such threats are tracked, criticized in more or less urgent terms for their unsettling politics, and linked to the imminent undermining of institutions. For example, E.D. Blodgett worries about how “the excesses of multiculturalism [in Canadian literary studies] can lead to a hegemony of the future” (2003, 302), while Alex Good despairs that “instead of close reading and textual analysis, the critic engages in a political and moral evaluation of the author’s ideas and point of view” (2019, para. 42) and that “good writing no longer matters very much. Or, if you rather: CanLit isn’t about art” (para. 49). In her own contribution to Refuse: CanLit in Ruins, “Stars upon Thars: The Sneetches and Other CanLit Stories,” Tanis MacDonald makes visible the structuring principles of this type of “plot,” pointing out how much of the discourse associated with u b c a ccountable Open Letter promoted the idea of a “star class” (2018, 64) in CanLit, members of which have a “marked social and cultural investment in conserving a capitalist status quo” (68). As MacDonald notes, debate about the letter was portrayed in the Canadian media as a class war between “high status” signatories

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and an outbreak of resistance from a “sweating and striving serfdom of students and profs” (63).9 Importantly, this plot depends on tracking a very particular kind of speech, speech that is linked with an encroaching, “sweating and striving” politics that will transform the status quo, as if political speech is a type of contagion that moves in only one direction: “good writing” once mattered, while “the future” is threatened. I conclude by quoting a remarkably candid description of the status quo from Kai Cheng Thom’s “refuse: a trans girl writer’s story,” also included in Refuse: it’s hard for me to care about reforming “CanLit” about making it a “safer space” for “diverse and marginalized voices” because for fuck’s sake the whole thing is a settler colonial project that is designed to gobble up anything that it deems powerful or precious. (2018, lines 86–94) According to Thom’s terms, the short story cycles I explore in Bearers of Risk are dedicated to preserving a status quo associated with the Settler colonial project, whereby the strategic use of this marginal genre is simply an example of how something “powerful and precious” is “gobble[d] up” by clever, vanguard White men and a concomitant CanLit marketplace infrastructure. My goal in this study is to refuse the structuring principles in CanLit criticism that lead to a failure to read recuperative masculinity politics as cultural work – as emergent – or that allow the figure of civil bearer of risk to appear uncritically “at home,” or natural. The thematization of finding a pathway back to what once was, or of making visible the special vulnerabilities of a narrowly conceived set of victims of globalization, should not be comprehended as benignly nostalgic (as if nostalgia was simply sentimental and descriptive as opposed to calculated and constitutive). Rather, it is necessary to remain attuned to how moments of political, economic, and social insecurity can be filled up by strategic narratives that fantasize about the restoration of a “safer space.”

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A p p e n di x I

SHORT STORY COLLECTIONS AND AWARDS

A list of short story collections awarded, shortlisted, and/or longlisted for prizes, 2001–11. The goal here is not to claim that these publications are the most worthy of scholarly attention, but rather to point out which ones were selected by jurists and which, consequently, may have received wider national readership.

C at e g o ry I : National prizes for Canadian fiction, in which short story collections are considered in the same category as novels (Commonwealth Writers Prizes, Governor General’s Literary Award – English Fiction; Scotiabank Giller Prize; Writers’ Trust Fiction Award) Note: Debut publications in category I are marked with an asterisk. 2001 Munro, Alice. Hateship, Friendship, Loveship, Courtship, Marriage (Writers’ Trust Fiction Award, shortlist). 2002 Gaston, Bill. Mount Appetite (Scotiabank Giller Prize, shortlist). Munro, Alice. Hateship, Friendship, Loveship, Courtship, Marriage (Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Best Book, Canada and the Caribbean, winner).

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Appendix I

Moore, Lisa. Open (Scotiabank Giller Prize, shortlist). Sawai, Gloria. A Song for Nettie Johnson (Governor General’s Literary Award, winner).* 2003 Baker, Jacqueline. A Hard Witching and Other Stories (Writers’ Trust Fiction Award, shortlist).* Da Costa, Paulo. The Scent of a Lie (Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Best First Book, Canada and the Caribbean, winner).* Gould, John. kilter: 55 fictions (Scotiabank Giller Prize, shortlist). McCormack, Judith. The Rule of Last Clear Chance (Writers’ Trust Fiction Award, shortlist).* Patterson, Kevin. Country of Cold (Writers’ Trust Fiction Award, winner). 2004 Bezmozgis, David. Natasha and Other Stories (Governor General’s Literary Award, shortlist).*  Munro, Alice. Runaway (Governor General’s Literary Award, shortlist; Scotiabank Giller Prize, winner; Writers’ Trust Fiction Award, winner). 2005 Bezmozgis, David. Natasha and Other Stories (Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Best First Book, Canada and the Caribbean, winner).* Gill, Charlotte. Ladykiller (Governor General’s Literary Award, shortlist).* Munro, Alice. Runaway (Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Best Book, Canada and the Caribbean, winner). 2006 Adderson, Caroline. Pleased to Meet You (Scotiabank Giller Prize, longlist). Gaston, Bill. Gargoyles (Governor General’s Literary Award, shortlist).

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Short Story Collections and Awards

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Glennon, Paul. The Dodecahedron, or a frame for frames (Governor General’s Literary Award, shortlist). Lam, Vincent. Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures (Scotiabank Giller Prize, winner).* Wangersky, Russell. The Hour of Bad Decisions (Scotiabank Giller Prize, longlist).* Windley, Carol. Home Schooling (Scotiabank Giller Prize, shortlist). 2007 English, Sharon. Zero Gravity (Scotiabank Giller Prize, longlist). 2008 De Sa, Anthony. Barnacle Love (Scotiabank Giller Prize, shortlist).* Malla, Pasha. The Withdrawal Method (Scotiabank Giller Prize, longlist).* 2009 Munro, Alice. Too Much Happiness (Governor General’s Literary Award, shortlist; Writers’ Trust Fiction Award, shortlist). Willis, Deborah. Vanishing and Other Stories (Governor General’s Literary Award, shortlist).* 2010 MacLeod, Alexander. Light Lifting (Scotiabank Giller Prize, shortlist).* Selecky, Sarah. This Cake is for the Party (Scotiabank Giller Prize, shortlist).* 2011 Best, Katrina. Bird Eat Bird (Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, Best First Book, Canada and the Caribbean, winner).* Blaise, Clark. The Meagre Tarmac (Scotiabank Giller Prize, longlist; Writers’ Trust Fiction Award, shortlist). Christie, Michael. The Beggar’s Garden (Scotiabank Giller Prize, longlist; Writers’ Trust Fiction Award, shortlist).*

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Appendix I

Gartner, Zsuzsi. Better Living through Plastic Explosives (Scotiabank Giller Prize, shortlist).

C at e g o ry I I National prizes given exclusively for Canadian short story collections (Danuta Gleed Literary Award for Debut Short Fiction; ReLit Award for Short Fiction) 2001 Jarman, Mark Anthony. 19 Knives (ReLit Award for Short Fiction). Sawai, Gloria. A Song for Nettie Johnson (Danuta Gleed Literary Award). 2002 Gaston, Bill. Mount Appetite (ReLit Award for Short Fiction). Henderson, Lee. The Broken Record Technique (Danuta Gleed Literary Award). 2003 Baker, Jacqueline. A Hard Witching and Other Stories (Danuta Gleed Literary Award). Johnston, Sean. A Day Does Not Go By (ReLit Award for Short Fiction). 2004 Bezmozgis, David. Natasha and Other Stories (Danuta Gleed Literary Award). Burgess, Tony. Fiction for Lovers (ReLit Award for Short Fiction). 2005 Gill, Charlotte. Ladykiller (Danuta Gleed Literary Award). Grainger, James. The Long Slide (ReLit Award for Short Fiction).

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2006 Sellyn, Nathan. Indigenous Beasts (Danuta Gleed Literary Award). Webster, Barry. The Sound of All Flesh (ReLit Award for Short Fiction). 2007 Gaston, Bill. Gargoyles (ReLit Award for Short Fiction). Hood, Andrew. Pardon Our Monsters (Danuta Gleed Literary Award). 2008 Malla, Pasha. The Withdrawal Method (Danuta Gleed Literary Award). Rees, Roberta. Long after Fathers (ReLit Award for Short Fiction). 2009 Foad, Lisa. The Night is a Mouth (ReLit Award for Short Fiction). Roberts, Sarah. Wax Boats (Danuta Gleed Literary Award). 2010 Livingston, Billie. Greedy Little Eyes (Danuta Gleed Literary Award). Ross, Stuart. Buying Cigarettes for the Dog (ReLit Award for Short Fiction). 2011 Burgess, Tony. Ravenna Gets (ReLit Award for Short Fiction). Williams, Ian. Not Anyone’s Anything (Danuta Gleed Literary Award).

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A p p e n d ix I I

TABLES OF CONTENTS

kilter: 55 fictions , by John Gould ( W in n ip e g : T u r n s to ne Press, 2003) Two Things Together Leather Stump Feelers Female Drunken Immortal Fist Avalanche Shroud Dear Ann Dark Beast Conversion Method Near-Death Experience In Translation Acrobat Zeroes Someone Painted Sweet Chariot Takeout Cotton Ya Ya Ya Conviction High Password Magdalene

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221

Crunch Brood Vessel Time and Space Civilized New Messages Sunday Morning The Invention of Language Beyond Stillness Neither Nor Biafra Rose-Breasted Grosbeak Affirmation Dust Proof Provisions Suite Orange Magic The Point of Dreaming The Perfection of the Moment Licorice The End of the Day Kansas Do the Math Prisoner All Mysteries What You’re Ready For Sea Peeks Raising the Sparks The End of the World New Story

natasha and other stories , b y D av id B e zmozgi s ( T o ro n to : H a r p e r Perenni al, 2004) Tapka Roman Berman, Massage Therapist The Second Strongest Man

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Appendix II

An Animal to the Memory Natasha Choynski Minyan

bloodletting & miraculous cures , b y V in c e n t Lam ( T o ro n to, A n c h o r Canada, 2005) How to Get into Medical School, Part I Take All of Murphy How to Get into Medical School, Part II Code Clock A Long Migration Winston Eli Afterwards An Insistent Tide Night Flight Contact Tracing Before Light g lossa ry o f t e r ms

the dodecahedron, or a frame for frames , b y P au l G l ennon ( E r in , o n : P o rc u p in e’s Qui ll, 2005) In My Father’s Library The Plot to Hide America The American Shahrazad Tenebrian Chronicles The Collector Why Are There No Penguins? Kepler’s Orbit: Chapter 1 The Polygamist The Parlour Game Some Clippings for My Article The Last Story Plagiarism au thor’s a f t e rwor d

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shining at the bottom of the sea , b y S t e p h e n Marche ( T o ro n to : V ik in g Canada, 2007) for ewo r d b y l e ona r d k i ng pr efac e b y st e p h e n ma rc he the pamp hl e t s a nd e a r ly f i ct i o n e e rs F.R. Fisher, “The Destruction of Marlyebone, The Private King” Camden Mahone, “Pigeon Blackhat” Julian Back, “Professor Saintfrancis and the Diamants of the End of the World” Arcadio Cole, “Von Lettow-Vorbeck, Africa’s White Lion” George Jankin Lee, “An Interlude at the Opera” u pheava l s a nd i nd e p e nd e nc e Blessed Shirley, “Sufferance Row” Elizabeth Rushton, “Two Stories about the Abandon Tree” Augustus P. Jenkins, “The Master’s Dog” Cornelia Tristanos, “The Christbird” Ira Rushton, “Ultimate Testament” Leonard King, “To Be Read at the Hour of Independence” Morley Straights, “An Old Man Mourns for His Blind Daughter” Caesar Hill, “Flotsam and Jetsam” ex ile a nd r e t ur n Charity Gurton, “Men” Trinity Hopps, “Under the Skin” Leonard King, “Histories of Aenea by Various Things” Cato Dekkerman, “A Wedding in Restitution” Marcel Henri, “The Man Friday’s Review of Robinson Crusoe” Octavia Kitteredge-Mann, “The End of the Beach” c r itic ism Ernest Hemingway, “Letter to John Dos Passos” Sherlock Cole, “On the Motif of the Shipwreck as History” Blessed Shirley, “Why It Is Imperative to Pay Close Attention to Detail” Richard Williams, “Comparative Biographies of Elizabeth and Ira Rushton” Arcadio Skelton, “A Note on a Code in Morley Straights” Octavia Dickens, “Language in Charity Gurton’s Men and Other Stories” “Two Reviews of A Wedding in Restitution”

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Appendix II

“An Interview with Octavia Kitteredge-Mann” b iog r a p h i c a l no t e s ac k n owl e d ge me nt s

barnacle love , b y Anthony De Sa ( T o ro n to : A n c h o r C anada, 2008) pa rt i t e r r a nova Of God and Cod Reason to Blame Fado Made of Me Barnacle Love pa rt ii c age d b i r ds si ng Urban Angel Shoeshine Boy Senhor Canada Pounding Their Shadows Mr Wong Presents Jesus

light lifting , b y A l e x ander MacLeod ( E m e ry v il l e , o n : B ib li oasi s , 2010) Miracle Mile Wonder About Parents Light Lifting Adult Beginner I The Loop Good Kids The Number Three

the beggar’s garden , b y Mi chael Chri s ti e ( T o ro n to : H a r p e r C o l l i ns Canada, 2011) Emergency Contact Discard Goodbye Porkpie Hat The Queen of Cans and Jars The Extra An Ideal Companion

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225

King Me The Beggar’s Garden

once you break a knuckle , by D.W. Wi lson ( T o ro n to : H a m is h Hami lton, 2011) The Elasticity of Bone The Persistence Sediment The Mathematics of Friedrich Gauss Reception Big Bitchin’ Cow Don’t Touch the Ground Valley Echo Accelerant The Dead Roads The Millworker Once You Break a Knuckle

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Notes

C ha p t e r O n e   1 Until 2005, this prize was referred to only as the “Giller Prize”; however, for consistency, I will refer to it throughout this study as the Scotiabank Giller Prize.   2 In Appendix I, I list Canadian short story collections that were longlisted for, shortlisted for, and/or awarded various national prizes, enumerating more comprehensively the most celebrated examples of this genre in the first decade of the twenty-first century.   3 MacCulloch’s concern as it pertains specifically to the Canadian short story echoes commentary by any number of international scholars focused on the genre, who lament the paucity of scholarship on the short story, especially as compared with the novel. See, for example, Charles E. May’s “Why Short Stories Are Essential and Why They Are Seldom Read” (2004) or Viorica Pâtea’s introduction to Short Story Theories: A Twenty-FirstCentury Perspective (2012).   4 In Appendix I, I identity which short story collections shortlisted for and/or awarded national prizes between 2001 and 2011 are debut ­publications (14/29, or about 50 per cent).   5 Löschnigg explains that the term “Munrovian” refers to “monovocal homodiegetic short story cycles as a special form” (2014, 257); of the short story cycles examined in Bearers of Risk, only Bezmozgis’s Natasha and Other Stories fits this description, and Löschnigg herself notes that “All seven stories in this collection are presented more or less ­chronologically by the same first-person narrator” (289–90).   6 Kuttainen explains that, although she works with scholarship associated with the short story cycle, she prefers the term short story composite,

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Notes to pages 12–47

because “composite” encompasses collections that are “cyclical or ­sequentially linear; proleptic, incremental, and accumulative” (2010, 20).   7 While the author name associated with Masculinities is R.W. Connell, I will use Connell’s preferred name Raewyn Connell when ­referencing this text.   8 On the slippage in Men’s Rights Activist ( mr a ) discourse between ­articulating a sense of threat and making threats, see for example Debbie Ging’s “Alphas, Betas, and Incels” (2017) and Emma A. Jane’s “Systemic Misogyny Exposed” (2018).

C ha p t e r T wo   1 For an extended consideration of the form of kilter: 55 fictions, see Gordon, “Shortness as Shape in John Gould’s kilter: 55 fictions,” ­published in the Journal of the Short Story in English (2010).   2 Paul March-Russell further argues in The Short Story: An Introduction that “while, on the one hand, the short story cycle has been used ­successfully to create a sense of regional identity, on the other hand, it has been an effective tool in describing the modern city where social ties are looser, kinship systems less structured and personal identity more alienated” (2009, 109).   3 Significantly, the woman catalogues for the detective assigned to the case the various ways her brother made “enemies” (9) by defying the heteronormative, patriarchal reproductive arena: “he did abortions … he assisted at a whole bunch of suicides … He was gay. He was promiscuous” (9–10). The conclusion of the story – like the fantasy in “Brood” ­concerning the lesbian couple – affirms heteronormativity, as the detective ends his ­interview with the woman about the violent killing of her gay brother by asking her out on a date.

C h a p t e r T h re e   1 Metcalf – the senior editor at Porcupine’s Quill until 2005 – includes Glennon’s first book, How Do you Sleep? (2000) on his Century List (2018, 373–5).   2 As Glennon explains, “Each story must refer to or be referred to by each of the five stories adjacent to it … Any face of the dodecahedron may be taken as a starting point from which to evaluate the adjacent sides” (220).

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Notes to pages 64–99

229

c ha p t e r f o u r   1 For an extended consideration of the relationship between genre and ­pedagogy in Shining at the Bottom of the Sea, see Gordon, “Portability and Pedagogy: The bounded short stories in Stephen Marche’s Shining at the Bottom of the Sea,” published in Short Fiction in Theory & Practice (2014).   2 In order to distinguish between Marche as the author of Shining at the Bottom of the Sea and Marche as a character in the text who is delineated as the editor of an anthology of Sanjanian literature, I will enclose the name in quotation marks when referring to the character (i.e., “Marche”).   3 Though their names are mentioned in this essay by Arcadio Skelton, there is no work by Lewis, Starkey or Malleson collected in Shining at the Bottom of the Sea.   4 Marche’s representation of Morley Straights likely alludes to Canadian author Morley Callaghan, another writer whose work challenged social and political hypocrisies sometimes via allegorical allusions to Christian scripture.   5 It seems fitting that one of Marche’s current projects focuses on science ­fiction which, as Phillips points out, is the genre that took up the new geographies of adventure once all the apparently empty spaces of this planet were mapped by Western imperialists.

c ha p t e r f i ve   1 As Löschnigg notes, Michelle Gadpaille sorted literature focused on migration into the categories of “narratives of origin” and “narratives of arrival,” “the latter [type characterized] by a discourse of decoding” (2014, 282).   2 In 2019, Bezmozgis published a new short story collection, entitled Immigrant City. The seven stories included in this collection do not share a common protagonist, and Toronto is the setting of only five of the seven stories. Interestingly, though, it is often possible to read individual stories from Immigrant City as intertextual returns to Natasha and Other Stories. Most unambiguously, the stories “Childhood” and “Roman’s Song” can be read this way, as they feature Mark Berman and Roman Berman, respectively, as protagonists.   3 In my chapter on Alexander MacLeod’s Light Lifting, I explain in more detail Connell’s concept of body-reflexive practice as this concept relates to the performance of men’s working-class bodies.

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Notes to pages 106–21

chapter six   1 As I explore further in my conclusion, it is notable that Lam’s book is the only short story cycle by a racialized Canadian to be awarded a major national literary prize for prose fiction (novels or short story collections) between 2001–11, especially given the scholarly axiom linking the genre to elevating marginalized voices. In this same period, the following novels by racialized Canadian writers were awarded literary prizes of this type: The Polished Hoe, by Austin Clarke (2002, winner of the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize); The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, by M.G. Vassanji (2003, winner of the Giller); Three Day Road, by Joseph Boyden (2005, winner of the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize); Divisadero, by Michael Ondaatje (2007, winner of the Governor General’s Literary Award for English Fiction); Through Black Spruce, by Joseph Boyden (2008, winner of the Giller); The Book of Negroes, by Lawrence Hill (2008, winner of Writers’ Trust and Commonwealth); and Half-Blood Blues, by Esi Edugyan (2011, winner of the Giller). At least since 2016, when Jorge Barrera’s “Author Joseph Boyden’s shape-shifting Indigenous identity” was published in aptn National News, Boyden’s racialized identity has been called into question.   2 The image of Sri as abject, naked in the bathroom stall, recalls the figure of Sarosh from Rohinton Mistry’s Tales from Firozsha Baag, as examined in Ajay Heble’s 1993 essay, “‘A Foreign Presence in the Stall’: Towards a Poetics of Hybridity in Rohinton Mistry’s Migration Stories.”   3 Wald’s analysis of the grammar of outbreak narratives is, of course, ­relevant to discourse associated with the c ov id-19 pandemic, but I will leave it to others to explore those dynamics.   4 In the 2010 television adaptation of Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures, written by Jason Sherman, the narrative arc concerning Fitz, Chen, and Ming is significantly altered in ways that, arguably, further centre Fitz and entirely remove the self-reflexiveness of Lam’s portrayal. For example, in the final episode of the series, “Complications,” Ming gives birth to a child conceived through artificial insemination (with Fitz as the donor). Both Chen and Fitz are present at the birth, as Sherman’s adaptation engages in a fantasy recalling John Gould’s short story “Brood,” in which the White man reclaims his legacy in the reproductive arena via impregnation of another man’s wife, in this case a racialized man.   5 Towards the end of his article “Kingmakers,” Henighan passes judgement on which bodies should be acknowledged as genuinely “multicultural”: He compares Lam to “previous ‘multicultural’ Giller winners Vassanji,

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Notes to pages 124–9

231

Rohinton Mistry, and Austin Clarke – all of them relative loners, none of them born or raised in Canada, none of them able to boast an exemplary interracial marriage such as that between Lam and his Anglo-Greekdescended wife” (2006, 62).

c h a p t e r s e ve n   1 As noted in the introduction to Refuse: CanLit in Ruins, Jorge Barrera’s 2016 article “Author Joseph Boyden’s Shape-shifting Indigenous identity,” published in aptn News, destabilized Joseph Boyden’s positioning in CanLit: “The article questioned Boyden’s claims to Indigenous ancestry and the ways in which he has profited from representing a culture that may or may not be his” (2018, 25).   2 In “Portability and Pedagogy: The bounded stories of Stephen Marche’s Shining at the Bottom of the Sea,” published in Short Fiction in Theory and Practice, I explain my notion of a short story’s “portability, by which I mean its propensity to move among various circumtextual situations (e.g., the magazine, the collection, the miscellany, the anthology, the course pack)” (2014, 165).   3 In their essay on the history of Portuguese immigration patterns, Carlos Teixeira and Victor M.P. Da Rosa note that “from the early 1950s to the present, 60 per cent to 70 per cent of Portuguese living in Canada have come from the Azores, particularly from the island of São Miguel” (2009, 7), which is the island that Manuel (and De Sa’s own father) emigrate from.   4 Here, De Sa appears to be showing his indebtedness to Peter Collins’ essay, “Remembering the Portuguese,” first collected in The Portuguese in Canada: from Sea to City (2000). As I point out later in this chapter, many details in De Sa’s description of Portuguese fisherman in Newfoundland reiterate details from Collins’ essay, and the Rushdie quotation in De Sa’s “Personal Reflection” is exactly the same quotation used by Collins.   5 Arguably, it is this anxiety about the “excesses of multiculturalism” in CanLit that underpins Marche’s critique of the institutionalization of postcolonial studies.   6 Citations to Collins’s essay reference the 2009 edition of Teixeira and Da Rosa’s collection, entitled The Portuguese in Canada: Diasporic Challenges and Adjustment; the first edition of the collection, which includes Collins’s essay and is subtitled From Sea to City, was published in 2000.   7 Interestingly, this is the fourth story mentioned in this section of Bearers of Risk structured around the imminent death of a parent/grandparent,

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also including Richler’s “The Summer My Grandmother was Supposed to Die,” Bezmozgis’s “Choynski,” and Lam’s “A Long Migration.” Further, the ­version of “Made of Me” published in paperplates in 2007, titled “My Grandmother was a Fish,” is narrated by Antonio, making it another death-of-a-grandparent story.   8 The short story title, “My Grandmother Was a Fish,” also alludes to William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, in which Vardaman – in coming to terms with his mother Addie’s death – asserts, “my mother is a fish” (1930, 102).   9 Relatedly, the key argument in Da Silva’s article is that “in-group” humor can be used to challenge the process of “homogenizing ideologies and structures of the traditional nation-state” (2015, 208). 10 Significantly, De Sa returns to the issue of public spectacle in “Urban Angel,” as the parade honouring Nossa Senhora de Fátima in “Fado” (61–3) is echoed in the parade for the Festo do Senhor Santo Cristo (138).

chapter eight   1 As in Bezmozgis’s short story cycle, the representation of children resorting to homophobic language is connected to the desire to perform hegemonic masculinity. Whereas this desire is linked in “Tapka” and “An Animal to the Memory” to anxiety about the gender identity of an ethnically ­minoritized body, in “Good Kids,” MacLeod explores the intersection of gender and class identities. Reggie’s precarious class position produces ­tension within the narrator’s family, as when the narrator is punished for expressing frustration that his parents regularly – and charitably – invite Reggie over for dinner (2010, 180–1).   2 A longer analysis of this short story is central to my article “White Masculinity and Civility in Contemporary Canadian Short Stories,” ­published in Men and Masculinities 17, no. 2 (2014).   3 Interestingly, the phrase “walk away” has echoes within right-wing and reactionary masculinity movements, from the ethno-nationalist “exit” movements to the anti-feminist “men going their own way” web subculture.

chapter nine   1 A more detailed discussion of “The Beggar’s Garden” and its function as a return story can be found in my article “White Masculinity and Civility in

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Contemporary Canadian Short Stories: The Fantasy of Reterritorialization and Return,” in Men and Masculinities.   2 In his representation of disappearing women, Christie does not in any way draw attention to the issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada.   3 Also noteworthy is that in the final scene of “An Ideal Companion,” Dan looks on approvingly as his dog, Buddy, has sex with Ginny’s dog, Josephine, who Ginny has asked Dan to care for while she is away.   4 The allegorical nature of some of Christie’s characters is amplified via clear allusions to Biblical versions of Isaac and Saul. The characters of Dan and Sam are more ambiguously linked to Biblical types, as Dan might be read as the head of the Tribe of Dan (one of whose members is Samson, famously emasculated by his deceiving wife) or as Daniel, the eschatological prophet. Sam might be linked to Samson or Samuel, another prophet, known for ensuring the rise of King Saul and King David.

c ha p t e r t e n   1 In comparison, the 2006 Census Data for British Columbia as a whole shows that 5 per cent of the population identifies as Aboriginal and 25 per cent of the population identifies as visible minorities (Statistics Canada, 2007).   2 In “Big Bitchin’ Cow,” the sixth story in the cycle, a character named Biff Crane focalizes the narrative about driving across the ice to find his adult son, who has disappeared after a family dispute. Though Vic and Biff share the same last name, there is no indication in “Big Bitchin’ Cow” that Vic is Biff’s relative.   3 Notwithstanding data showing that over 20 per cent of the Invermere labour force works in retail trade or accommodation and food services, this type of activity – especially as it might be associated with the thriving tourist industry in East Kootenay – is almost entirely absent from Wilson’s imagined geography.   4 Canada sent its first troops to Afghanistan in 2002, and most of the Canadian casualties associated with that war occurred between 2006 and 2011.   5 Wilson does not identify the year in which the events of “Reception” take place, but – given the 2009 setting of “Once You Break a Knuckle” (212) when Will is finishing his ba – 2004 makes sense as a temporal marker. That said, “The Dead Roads” is set in 2002, and – in that story – Vic

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Crane is already partway through her university degree, again undermining a sense of a consistent timeline.   6 Will’s performance as “king of the wild frontier” seems akin to Wilson’s performance of his authorial identity: in the photograph of Wilson that accompanies Kyle Minor’s review of Once You Break a Knuckle, Wilson is wearing a ball cap (2014). Wilson’s ball cap is also a subject of discussion in Rosemary Westwood’s profile of the author, published in the Globe and Mail after Wilson won the bbc National Short Story Award: “In the 28-degree sun of a late September heat wave, the author, who publishes as D.W. Wilson, is wearing corduroy trousers the shade of tree moss and a plaid shirt. His hair is a bit scruffy; light stubble covers his chin. His agent, or ‘the boss,’ made him leave the ball cap at home” (2011, para. 1). More recently, though, Wilson has changed his Twitter handle from @RedneckAbroad to @DadliestWarrior.

c onc l usio n   1 The data used to create Appendix I, upon which much of the analysis in this conclusion depends, was collected and organized by Lee Cadwallader, my excellent research assistant.   2 Of the two works that are not on these lists – Marche’s Shining at the Bottom of the Sea and Wilson’s Once You Break a Knuckle – the first is included because of its formal experimentation and the second because Wilson’s winning of the 2011 bbc National Story Award for “The Dead Roads” is often mentioned in reviews of the cycle.   3 Analysis of the way novels were shortlisted and prized in this period shows similar patterns. Between the years of 2001 and 2011, for example, there were forty-eight novels shortlisted for the Governor General’s Literary Award – English Fiction, twenty-three (48 per cent) of which were by women and ten (21 per cent) of which were by racially minoritized writers (including Joseph Boyden, whose self-proclaimed Indigenous ­identity has since been called into question). Similarly, of the forty-eight novels shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the forty-seven novels shortlisted for the Writers’ Trust Fiction Award, twenty-one (44 per cent) and nineteen (40 per cent), respectively, were by women and twelve (25 per cent) and seven (15 per cent), respectively, were by racially minoritized writers (including Boyden). Perhaps surprisingly, given its emphasis on independent presses, the list of works shortlisted for the ReLit Award for Novels between 2001 and 2011 is the most homogenous: of those sixty-three novels, seventeen (25 per cent) were by women and one

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(